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[Descan]

Spiritualist FEs no longer care about tomb worlds; they won't war on you for colonizing them.

Don't know about spiritualist pops tho; i didn't even realize the pops ever DID care about tomb world colonization.

[forsaken1111]

Only the spiritualist faction of your pops will care about colonizing tomb worlds, which was awkward after I embraced the worm in that one event chain.

[Aoi]

Does anybody have a recommended primer on how to successfully wage wars of conquest? Picked this up in the Humble Monthly and I just haven't been able to get anywhere with this, despite a few diplomatic victories.

So far, I've mostly been blobbing up a large fleet, picking on a nearby neighbor, demanding them to cede a few planets to me, then I march in, bombard it to bits, drop a land army to occupy it, repeat until they surrender. But, this just doesn't feel right.

[Hanzoku]

That's pretty much the gist of it. The only advanced tactic I've ever used is to split off a 3-5k power subfleet and go on a tour of the enemy systems and blow up all their spaceports, which cuts their reinforcements down to a trickle and kills their ability to produce more cruisers and battleships for upwards of a year.

[Culise]

I once did something a little similar but much more cheesy with an Awakened Empire that was a bit too powerful for me to take and a bit too angry at me to wait: waved my main fleet near them until they decided to give chase with their doomstack, then ran it around in circles just outside the periphery of their territory while a smaller secondary fleet took down their spaceports and fixed defense stations before escorting troops in to conquer their ringworlds and planets.  Whenever my main fleet lost the attention of their doomstack, the two switched places, with the secondary fleet chasing its tail and the primary fleet bombarding their worlds.  That's rather abusive of a deficiency in the AI (specifically, that it's not smart enough to split a fleet once merged) and it also doesn't work quite as well when they have multiple separate doomstacks, so I don't know if it's a tactic you want to use, but it's there.  Otherwise, the big-ol'-deathball is the traditional tactic of choice, with secondary forces only used to take out spaceports and targets of opportunity once you know where the enemy deathball is. 

EDIT:
Also, diplomatically, ceding planets tends to build threat quickly.  Having high threat means that empires around you will band together in defensive agreements or, if it pushes their mutual relations high enough, even federate in a desperate attempt to rein you in.  As such, at a certain point once you've contacted many or most of the empires in the galaxy, it can become preferable to force your war targets to actually liberate worlds instead of ceding them.  As long as you're already large and powerful enough, it's trivial to convince newly-released nations to become your vassals for eventual diplo-annexation, and as said released nations share your ethos, they will do the initial spadework on passing those ethos on to their constituent POPs without forcing you to deal with the unrest and other nitty-gritty of a conquest combined with ethos-mismatch. 

[Cthulhu]

If there is I haven't seen it.  Warfare generally isn't very fun I've found, and being very aggressive limits the other ways you can interact with other races.

It's also like most 4x games where early on you'll struggle but you hit a critical mass eventually at which point nothing in the game can do shit to you, but that applies to everything really.

[Paul]

In one game on hard I had a advanced start neighbor​ attack me early on with a much stronger fleet, like 5x. He used wormholes, so I split my fleet up into a bunch of tiny fleets and went after the wormhole stations. With wormholes he was way too quick for me to go after the spaceports early on and pursued and killed a few of the groups, but I managed to take out all of his wormhole stations and construction ships and stranded the fleet in a system away from any planets. Then I brought all the groups back together except a few Corvettes to monitor for construction ships and systematically hit all the spaceports and then conquered all the planets. Meanwhile the fleet, which was 10x the size of mine after losses from taking out the spaceports, is just stuck in a system. I took most of their planets and didn't leave them with enough income or capacity to maintain it and they couldn't attack me due to truce, so they just had to disband most of their fleet.

[Egan_BW]

Heh, it would be cool if when a big fleet gets trapped in a system they start their own little independent colony. Would make for interesting stories.

[Teneb]

Well, apparently Paradox decided that having your ships continue their exploration after interruption by a hostile ship was a Very Bad Thing^TM.

Latest game, no mods, using hyperdrives, every time my fucking science ship runs into an alien, they cancel their whole fucking queue. It's plain stupid.

Really? Because I saw the opposite several times in my current game. They just bail out of the system and keep going down the queue. It only cancels if they can't reach the next destination without going through the dangerous system.

[Dunamisdeos]

I also have seen my ships continue their queue.

Also, I avoid revolts my stationing lots of defensive troops on each planet.

[GiglameshDespair]

There's a setting that determines whether your science ships run or continue surveying in systems with hostiles.

[forsaken1111]

So I tested this out last night and the queues are indeed wiped. This was a feature added a few patches ago where they would retain their orders, so they must have messed something up in the whole 1.7.2 fiasco where they patched and reverted that patch and then patched again

[ZeroGravitas]

Unsurprising. Paradox has never had good version control.

[Hanzoku]

Sooo, ended up in a War in the Heavens, and forced into serving one of the two awakened powers. Luckily it's the fanatic xenophile one, so they're fairly bro-tier as far as ancient abusive precursors go, but they have a 600k power doomfleet, and my empire was surrounding them when they awakened, so when they said to join, I sort of had to say 'sure thing!'

The other awakened power is the militaristic asshole one, but luckily they're way off in the galactic south, so the chance I'll run into their doomstack anytime soon is... small. I hope the bro ancients go and cripple their stack, but we'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, the most powerful non-precursor faction (ranked behind the two awakened, ahead of the two fallen empires) formed the league of non-aligned nations. They're right next to the southern abusive precursors, so I wish them all the best. Of course, four of the five nations around me go and join the league, so I'm having to run around playing whack a mole with their fleets. I won't be contributing much against the enemy awakened coalition, but I should get some pretty good warscore on the war with the League.

Luckily for me, I'm something like #6 on the power ranking, so I can split my fleet and fight (and win) on multiple fronts, but all the ongoing combat makes the game lag something fierce.

[Cruxador]

That sounds amazing. It's a shame that war and combat aren't really good enough to fully utilize that situation and it'll be laggy and tedious instead.