After completing the previous game, i've been recently starting a new one in a completely different context (higher difficulty level, extreme xenophobic empire instead of extreme xenophile, slightly bigger galaxy map)
I quickly expanded with colonization and star bases (of course limited by the ressources) and made the mistake to wanting to expand without a care of consolidating said new acquired ressources in each new system (as my goal was to keep ressource for the next starbases and making more ships).
Looks like doing this i underestimated the (lack of) logistic of my empire and ran my budget down a lot (having to constanly sell minerals to get some cash to afford to keep some consumer goods for everyone as a lot were getting negative months) , this also led to many times the productivity/research malus slowing things down even more.
This triggered the population apparently .. and led most of my colonies into getting some level of instability, things were getting rather bad, even killing (instead of observing) all the primitives populations from each world we fetched wasn't enough to make them smile again, damn.
That was probably not helped by the fact my empire reached the border of an ultra-xenophile AI that decided to declare war nearly immediately on us while i was far from ready about having a good enough fleet, instead of losing any system i acquired (when i noticed several enemy fleets with 3 times my best fleet firepower), i decided to simply admit defeat and get some time into vassalization, hoping this would buy me enough time to backstab the xenos with as much guns as i could.
People were mad about this, i could understand that being ultra-xenophobe and being vassal of a xeno empire is not an ideal situation, and so they called out the emperor for a fight, the guy was 79 years old by the way, the plan i guess was to get him killed for the people amusement and replace him with someone hopefully more competent
yeah, you just don't frack with the emperor, even being old he will still kick your sorry whining bottom.
Anyways, all was good, except that the budget was getting worse and worse , as effort to restabilize things with consolidating systems and colonies ressource wasn't enough (and so much dissent also gave a lot of production malus) that unstability reached critical mass and the throneworld revolted, with a lot of colonies teaming up with those bastards.
My empire simply got fracked over with a big empire getting birthed in the middle of it
ok,the good thing (at least i thought) was that there was no treasury, the ressources were at an all time low, and there was no way they could be a threat before a long while, so let's send my fleet to destroy the 2 star bases that are now part of the traitors empire, this way they will never get an opportunity to build ships before i am ready to launch a counter attack to take back what's mine.
... only to notice that Stellaris revolt mechanic will automatically spawn ,out of nothing, for the traitors a full fleet (yeah 2 times the firepower my fleets had) of the best ship type you researched with the best possible weapons you had researches, regardless of how much time it would have taken anyone to build it, or regardless that there's no way they could afford it in the condition they were (every ressources in the red, and some in negative).
sigh, that's going to be even more of a trainwreck than i thought