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[Teneb]

When powergaming: I tend to go expansion for the core worlds and free pop followed by discovery for the skill level. Exception is for hive minds where you want to rush colony ships ASAP because they are just outright OP for them.

When roleplaying: It depends a lot on how I styled the civilization, so I can't give you a solid answer on that.

[IcyTea31]

Speaking of balanced systems, what ethics and civics do people prefer? I've been trying out materialism, xenophilia, and egalitarianism so I can get additional Unity (via Beacon of Liberty) but still declare unrestricted wars.

Not to judge, but unrestricted wars probably mean you'd want to annex planets, which is terrible for Unity gain. I'd swap out materialism for pacifism and play the migration game for that strategy. Or just go pacifist-spiritualist-xenophobe with Inner Perfection and Agrarian Idyll if I want truly massive Unity gains at the cost of everything else.

Liberation wars can be used for 'conquest' anyway with a bit of trickery. Tributaries are quite a lot like sectors, and while vassalizing and integrating takes a long time, you get to skip the part where the pops are unhappy for being conquered.

[Zangi]

Tyrant/Military
Kinda like a militaristic isolationist wannabe precursor who is friendly to aliums, but they are all gonna be second class citizens at best.

Close all the borders to any aliums by default.
While also screwing around with/uplifting primitives.  I'm at the part where I can start wars over primitive planets, cause I'm the precursor.  My job, not yours.

Also, I've learned how to mod.  Huzzah.  So many primitives everywhere.
Using the alphamod stuff and a ton of other things that seem to fit with it.
Government and ethics mod is awesome, but it is super screwy with ethics weight.  Plus, not a lot of compatibility out there yet.

[Trekkin]

Not to judge, but unrestricted wars probably mean you'd want to annex planets, which is terrible for Unity gain. I'd swap out materialism for pacifism and play the migration game for that strategy. Or just go pacifist-spiritualist-xenophobe with Inner Perfection and Agrarian Idyll if I want truly massive Unity gains at the cost of everything else.

Liberation wars can be used for 'conquest' anyway with a bit of trickery. Tributaries are quite a lot like sectors, and while vassalizing and integrating takes a long time, you get to skip the part where the pops are unhappy for being conquered.

Oh, normally I do go for liberation wars for just that reason; I usually only resort to unrestricted wars in the late game, when I've got all the technologies and traditions and ascension perks I really want and just need more planets to reach the win condition. Pacifism, I've found, makes an already long slog even longer when some newly created empires refuse vassalization. Then, too, integration costs a lot of Influence, although that's more of a mid-game concern when Influence is limiting my ability to go colonize some great big swath of planets that a new member species or technology has just made habitable. I suppose the more optimal strategy might be to start pacifist and embrace militarism midway through, though.

I've done the Inner Perfection/Agrarian Idyll unity-at-all-costs build before, and I found that having to deal with both the xenophobe diplomacy penalty and the pacifism happiness penalty from wars was just not worth the extra Unity.

[Loud Whispers]

Mostly because of the limitations of biochemistry, really. There are some things that it's simply not efficient for life as we know it to eat, either because they don't have much internal chemical potential energy or because their metabolites interact with hydrocarbons in ways that would eventually be fatal. You could try to get around the problem by completely reinventing biochemistry around some other set of elements, but at some point the distinction between self-replicating machines and life gets fuzzy anyway.

Given the biological path's focus on the genetic engineering of intelligent species, I'd like to see a late-game crisis for biological empires in which all the POPs start modifying themselves in increasingly extreme and unstable ways and end up falling victim to bad interactions between their many mutations and the whole empire turns into Bioshock. It would seem more in line with the LEGO-style sci-fi genetics tropes that Stellaris seems to be trying to evoke.

If machinists get to create galaxynet terminator uprising, psionics get to create the eye of terror, would the biological focus producing the blob be all that appropriate?
Look at it this way, in canon of the game's lore, the various galaxies the player plays in all had precursor species. The federation species is torn apart by pirates and galactic warrior nomads, with their interconnected empire of trade collapsing and countless planets starving to death resulting in the extinction of the empire (fleets of warrior nomads not implemented, trade in stellaris is more akin to individual barter than a galactic economy, it is impossible to starve anything to death). The cybrex AI tries wiping out all galactic life, then come to for whatever reason allow themselves to be exterminated by the surviving biologicals (likely owing to being materialists discovering they're in a spiritualist universe). The spiritualist precursor realizes they're in a video game and commit super mass suicide (which can be done in game with the shroud end game stuff). Thus there leaves that one precursor which got wiped out by a galactic pandemic - so would it not make more sense to have a CKII style pandemic mode, spread by the free movement of galactic pathogens and higher habitability, with an end-game crisis-tier adaptive virus triggered by some dickheads with genetic ascendancy creating an unstoppable pathogen. Could be super plague that wipes out planets (I'm thinking with infection being boosted by border friction, planet size, habitability, migration treaties, federation and so on), could be zombies (please no), could be a fourth crisis faction of a biological hive mind virus that augments and assimilates all the pops it infects - with mechanics that would make it a cross between two of the current crisis factions. Make it a dead space sorta deal where in addition to prethoryn style invasion fleets, one has to deal with dead spaceesque merchant and science vessels full of dead bodies drifting into planetary orbit
All in all though, thinking about it, I like the idea of a genetic crisis more than I'd want to see it in game. At least, not without better migration, planetary land warfare and some existing disease mechanics

[IcyTea31]

The problem with a genetic crisis is that it would have to be something the ascendant empire couldn't trivially fix by itself. When genes are lego blocks to you, creating a vaccine for Super AIDS isn't all that difficult. It would also have to be something that makes sense for all ethe; an authoritarian militarist empire handles genemodding differently from an egalitarian pacifist one, I'd say.

[Greiger]

Which is fine. Every system needs some sort of downside.

Speaking of balanced systems, what ethics and civics do people prefer? I've been trying out materialism, xenophilia, and egalitarianism so I can get additional Unity (via Beacon of Liberty) but still declare unrestricted wars.

Military: I am uncomfortable without a powerful defensive military.
Materialist: I dislike most religion.  Not choosing to be against spiritualism just seems wrong to me. And I like the science boost it gives.
Egalitarian: Everyone is equal, like my materialist choice slavery seems abhorrent to me, so I choose the opposite.

I could probably drop materialist, and egalitarian, since they are really only chosen due to distaste of the alternative, but I had one game where materialist got me bionics.  I dislike robots, but I love bionics.  And it just so happened that my biggest rival had gotten psionics just a year after.  That was kinda cool, and made for good story headcanon.

I haven't tried others very much, outside of a few very short lived games.  In my own experience my setup tends to result in my games ending up with huge fleets of high tech ships just sitting around eating energy credits until the nearest spiritualist empire makes the mistake of declaring war again, because I refuse to so much as give them the time of day, they get their butt handed to them, I liberate a few worlds, integrate them if they seem useful, and continue with my live and let live mentality until someone gets uppity again.

Basically a really annoyed but lazy bionic lion that eats the Jehovah's witnesses that come to the door.

[Teneb]

I never really understand the appeal of only playing nations that reflect your ideology. Same deal for rpgs and other games with character customizations and modelling them after yourself. Seems like a waste of an opportunity.

[Descan]

One of my best runs was Fanatic Purifier spiritualists that turned Synth. (took some faction finagling, you can't research Synths if you're spiritualist)

needless to say that was Ideologically Impure but it was fun to murder everyone in the name of Robo Space Jesus

[Mephansteras]

I never really understand the appeal of only playing nations that reflect your ideology. Same deal for rpgs and other games with character customizations and modelling them after yourself. Seems like a waste of an opportunity.

I agree. It's a great place to start, since it is easier to learn systems when you're free to focus on those and not role-playing questions, but it seems like a waste of potential if you do that all the time.

[Cruxador]

I liked the idea of wormhole initially, but dropped it due to the massive amount of time it takes to move big fleets.
Did that get changed in some patch or other, then? 

Given the biological path's focus on the genetic engineering of intelligent species, I'd like to see a late-game crisis for biological empires in which all the POPs start modifying themselves in increasingly extreme and unstable ways and end up falling victim to bad interactions between their many mutations and the whole empire turns into Bioshock. It would seem more in line with the LEGO-style sci-fi genetics tropes that Stellaris seems to be trying to evoke.

I'd think eclipse phase would fit better. But meat only, not robots and cybernetics. Because apparently transhumanism must be a single-agent affair due to balance.

[Teneb]

Well, my current game just got weird. I am playing as a xenophobe, authoritarian spiritualist oligarchy that has the slaver guilds and syncretic evolution civics. So you can guess where this is going. I spawn near about eight primitives. Unfortunately, infiltration now requires the basic biomodding tech, so I just skipped colonizing and started invading until I got to my core cap. Due to various reasons (habitability, mainly) I had to set all but the syncretic evolution species to caste system (my main species gets full citizenship). End quick overview of the Holy Nautil Empire.

Right next to me spawns the Lyrite Galactic Technocracy, xenophobe fanatic materialists. So you can guess tensions happened (they actually attacked me and lost). Outwards through the spiral arm is the Havoll Interplanetary Republic, who are egalitarian fanatic materalists, so they hate me. They've also buddied up with the Lyrites and forged a defensive pact. In the next arm, I meet two powers. One is a xenophile fallen empire that really likes me for some reason. The other? Xenophobe fanatic spiritualists, the K'Taknor Holy Nation. They immediately NAP me. Soon after, they offer a defensive pact, which I accept. But that's not weird. What is weird is that they just offered me a federation offer. The first federation at all in this game, in fact. Just them and me.

So far there are exactly two non-FE xenophiles and a single pacifist (not a xenophile either).

[Spehss _]

So my first leader of my fox people oligarchy died. They elect a new leader. About a decade later, the next leader dies. New election.

Guess the second leader they elected was already getting old. Made me chuckle.

[Culise]

So my first leader of my fox people oligarchy died. They elect a new leader. About a decade later, the next leader dies. New election.

Guess the second leader they elected was already getting old. Made me chuckle.

Yeah, it can be amusing.  With the way your first wave of leaders all arrives at once at the start of the game, you can easily end up with a Soviet-style gerontocratic wave of deaths a few decades in, give or take a decade or two for racial longevity traits, where they keep dying and electing new old folks. 

[Sirus]

I wish I knew why your first leader just disappears into the ether if he or she doesn't get re-elected.