Unrelated: Am I competely dense or is there no meaningful way to foment discord? I'd love to be able to rile up factions in an enemy civilization and capitalize on civil instability. I get that not everything can be Crusader Kings II but it would be great if more things were.
Not without mods, as far as I know. That
may change in the next update since they're adding a new stability number to planets which was directly mentioned as leading to revolts and rebellions if it got too low, but we don't know if it'll be possible to influence other empires' planets' stability. I'm going to
guess probably not, at least for now. Maybe later when they release a diplomacy / espionage expansion it'll be possible. There's a small chance though, since crime plays into it and may spill across empire borders, but I kind of doubt it.
Anyway, I had a chance to play some more last night and managed to get Galactic Wonders by about 2340 and had a completed Science Nexus running by about 2348. From what I gather this was actually not really all that much of an accomplishment and I've seen people talk about having one by 2300, but it does feel nice to see repeatable techs during the midgame. I feel like I could probably have gotten it 20 years sooner if I hadn't played life-seeded though, due to the dearth of unity that kept me from getting the needed ascension perks. Maybe I should have played taller, but I'm pretty sure the mineral and science gain from the systems I took is worth the +80% or so to tradition costs I accrued that way. Honestly, I probably should have just skipped droid colonizing nearby world for minerals, since that had a much bigger impact on unity
and research for comparatively little gain.
Life-seeded coupled with some of my choices is going to make this a very interesting late game, and I'm very worried about my economy. I'm pulling in about 300 minerals per month without edicts, but my energy is actually about -10 per month without edicts. The problem with
that is that my navy is also tiny at about 80 ship size units and 10K fleet power. If I can barely afford this fleet, I don't know what I'm going to do when the crisis hits, especially since I cranked the difficulty up to 2x crisis strength. Penetration battleships with Galactic Defender will probably work, I guess. More immediately, the khan showed up last night right as I had to go to bed, and I'm reasonably sure the khanate fleets will be enough to crush my navy if they get close enough...