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[Telgin]

It is a little surprising that you don't get anything back from disbanding ships.  You could bypass your alloy storage limits in theory by building lots of ships to later disband, but it would be pretty wasteful of alloys if you didn't get all of them back and very wasteful of upkeep regardless, so I'm guessing it's just something they just never implemented instead of a balance issue.  It would at least be nice if there was a way to decommission ships at a shipyard for part of the resources back, since you can essentially do that with extra steps by redesigning ships.

At least we're not back in the days of naked corvettes, but I suspect there are probably still people who run competitive multiplayer games by stripping their starting ships to get alloys up front, or decommission them to save on upkeep for some number of years.

[Rolan7]

That's a neat trick with stripping the corvettes.  Sometimes you even get an upgrade rebate with auto-build, like if it switches to shields instead of armor.

It's not usually important to retire corvettes.  They remain somewhat competitive throughout the game, particularly one pure-corvette fleet with maximal speed to get places fast.  They mostly suffer from taking scratch damage/losses even when they win.  I tend to keep a good portion in every fleet, with the picket module for PD, to guard against enemy fighters/missiles and maybe screen from my capital ships from some shots.  They engage quick and they dodge a lot.

[MrRoboto75]

Day 0 corvette stripping has been a thing for a while.

The new tech, I hear, is to put your starting scientist leaders into your first science vessels instead of hiring new ones to save unity.

[Robsoie]

Maybe it's because i'm not yet very experienced in the game, but i found that my biggest ressource management difficulty in the first century is not unity but alloy (as it's needed for nearly everything, including ship making) , especially hard when you're in an early war with an empire that is at least fielding fleets of equal strength as yours and you need to rebuild your losses . 
Fortunately there's still the marketplace to buy more.

I often read that instead of having mixed fleet, you should always go with the strongest ship type you have, except with destroyers, that aren't that much better than corvettes. While apparently in early versions of Stellaris each ship had a very defined role and werent made obsolete by bigger types.

[Telgin]

The main issues with mixed fleets are that the fleet has to travel at the speed of the slowest ship, and because battleships are generally just better than cruisers because of their survivability.  That means that if you stick corvettes in a fleet with battleships they move slower than independent fleets would, meaning you can't get the corvettes around as fast as you otherwise might.  Regarding survivability, battleships have better chances of surviving hits and retreating instead of just being destroyed, which makes cruisers obsolete as soon as battleship tech is researched.

Destroyers have similar issues to corvettes in that you're better off keeping them out of mixed fleets with battleships, but I think some people do still stick them in battleship fleets for PD.  I've never really tried it and instead just put a few carrier battleships in my fleets to act as PD, but I don't actually know which is better.  The carriers' strike craft probably do something dumb instead of acting as PD like you'd expect.

All of that said, torpedo corvettes remain viable until the endgame, so people tend to either go for monofleets of corvettes or battleships.  I'm on the battleship side of the spectrum since I just balk at the idea of tossing corvettes at things knowing some will be destroyed, but there's a good case made for using corvettes from a tactical PoV.

Economically, I tend to struggle with consumer goods forever since I like to play Life Seeded.  Until 3.0 it was a huge struggle to balance consumer goods and alloys, but with industrial districts it's a lot less of a headache.

[Robsoie]

For me it's past the first century that i start to struggle with consumer goods, mostly because lots of usefull buildings requires some of it as upkeep , but improved version of those buildings (that past the first century you should have available a lot) have an even higher consumer goods upkeep.
Great way to cripple your economy if you don't pay attention as i often got myself into, upgrading every buildings when available without checking their upkeep increase

[Telgin]

That definitely happens too, and in older versions it could be particularly bad if you built ringworlds with research districts, which would quickly fill up with researchers that ate up consumer goods like crazy.  These days, ecumenopoleis and ringworlds suck because they never get filled up due to the pop growth changes, so it's not so bad.  You can still do it with tech worlds if you upgrade a bunch of labs at once though, and the gas upkeep can surprise you too.

I really like the Master Crafters civic they added, since it helps a lot with Life Seeded empires by increasing CG production.  If you play Life Seeded you're mostly guaranteed to have 0% habitability everywhere but your homeworld until around midgame when you can get World Shaper or other perks that let you mitigate habitability problems, and I tend to have major issues until then.  Then once I do get those, I'm suddenly running huge surpluses of CG that hold me over until late game.  Running Life Seeded egalitarians who try to run Utopian Abundance from the beginning is a hilarious CG struggle, but I've done it a time or two.

If you're running xenophiles it's not so bad since you can get immigrants from other empires that have better habitability.

[Robsoie]

Commonwealth of Man is a Fanatic Militarist and (not fanatic) Xenophobe empire /check
Got the ruler at some point to be celebrated as a deity /check
Surrounded by really filthy xenos /check
Can have part or all the population genetically modified /check
Policies and species rights allow to purge the aliens, the heretics  /check

So Stellaris can be wh40k sometime

[Rolan7]

Not to mention you can unlock humanity's latent psychic power, weaponizing it, and peering into the "shroud" to meet with 4.5 entities you might recognize~

[Robsoie]

Haven't yet ran into this event, but with the many additions of both More Event Mod and Dynamic Political Events , there are already so many that i guess rare events will have a harder time to get a spot.

On other subject, probably got the most disapointing Crisis so far because i played with enabling 1 Fallen Empire in my map and wow it made the Crisis a non-event.

around  2400 the Fallen Empire decide to wake up as we had reached the triggers. It offered me to join them as subjects but even when i declined they did nothing more, just had their recently spawned out of thin air huge fleets floating around a couple of its systems.

2410 finally the Crisis happened, it was the "Unbidden" one. This time the crisis happened in a different empire (last time it was directly in mine) so i felt much less urgency.

Problem :  i noticed that the AI despite the 3.3 improvement is really crap at dealing with Crisis. As it's the 2nd time i got to this point and the AI still does not fight back, it's unfortunately not a fluke but a deficiency of the game AI.
 
While in a normal war the 3.3 AI not only can now put up a fight but has its AI allies even trying to support and fight back, when it's a Crisis it's like the AI does not even notice it's there, the empire that got invaded was simply letting itself get destroyed progressively (didn't noticed any of its fleet moving to defend his own worlds), none of the AI allies was doing anything (it was in a Federation with another AI empire).

Now that is for the normal AI, i witnessed that the fallen empire AI is very different as it's like its fleets were actually triggered by the arrival of the Crisis, i observed that all the Fallen AI fleets were immediately making a beeline to the Crisis center and were annihilating any Unbidden ships on their way. 

The balance seems also be thrown off, as at that point the Fallen Empire "simple" fleets were noticably stronger than the Unbidden ones, and i even saw a "merged" fleet of the Fallen Empire that had fire power near to 3 times ! the fire power of the strongest Unbidden fleet. 
Strongest Unbidden fleet that would have needed all my fleets (and probably a couple of allies) to match in firepower at that point.

I had to use my fleets jump drive (and wait the 200 days to get the fleets back at full power) to get ahead of the Fallen Empire so i was be able to at least destroy 2 Unbidden "minor" fleets before the Fallen Empire destroyed them all by just sneezing, so i could at least improve my final score.

At least the Unbidden relic is fun, ability to jump all other the small galaxy instead of only 1/3 of it and being faster on the starlanes is cool.
Too bad without DLC the Federation system is so stripped down that any ridiculously small empire can veto any declaration of war because changing the voting system is DLC-only
But wow, playing with Fallen Empires enabled makes really Crisis a joke, will not enable one on my next game.

[Telgin]

I think this behavior is because of the fleet strengths.  The AI is generally smart enough to not throw fleets at enemy fleets it can't beat, and while it does gang up with multiple fleets where it can, I don't think it does this consistently and especially when dealing with the crisis.  So, the normal empires just wait to be killed instead of allying with each other to send large numbers of smaller fleets to counter a crisis fleet, where fallen empires have strong enough fleets that they will fight normally.

Were you on standard crisis settings?  I've seen this too, where on normal settings the fallen empires can mostly handle the crisis themselves.  If you crank the crisis strength up much this is no longer true though, and it'll inevitably fall to the player to save the galaxy or die trying.

I'll find out soon if I get the Unbidden again myself.  I suspect the problem is still there where you're almost guaranteed to get them 50 years early if you research jump drives, but don't have but one data point so far.  Supposedly they adjusted the numbers in 3.3 to make that less likely but we'll see.

[Egan_BW]

Commonwealth of Man is a Fanatic Militarist and (not fanatic) Xenophobe empire /check
Got the ruler at some point to be celebrated as a deity /check
Surrounded by really filthy xenos /check
Can have part or all the population genetically modified /check
Policies and species rights allow to purge the aliens, the heretics  /check

So Stellaris can be wh40k sometime

in order to be whaok the game would have to let you be a fanatic militarist fanatic xenophobe fanatic authoritarian fanatic spiritualist fanatic materialist empire.

[Robsoie]

Problem with fanatic xenophobe is that unlike in wh40k you're getting a start in which everyone is wanting to kill you and will then declare war on you, while in wh40k , everyone wants to kill each other and will wage war with each other, not only you

Hmm, i wonder if creating many fanatic xenophobe species for the AI could lead into a more "there's only war" type of game then.

I think this behavior is because of the fleet strengths.  The AI is generally smart enough to not throw fleets at enemy fleets it can't beat, and while it does gang up with multiple fleets where it can, I don't think it does this consistently and especially when dealing with the crisis.  So, the normal empires just wait to be killed instead of allying with each other to send large numbers of smaller fleets to counter a crisis fleet, where fallen empires have strong enough fleets that they will fight normally.

Were you on standard crisis settings?  I've seen this too, where on normal settings the fallen empires can mostly handle the crisis themselves.  If you crank the crisis strength up much this is no longer true though, and it'll inevitably fall to the player to save the galaxy or die trying..

I was on easy difficulty, so that may explain why the fallen empire is the only one actually trying when there's a crisis as i noticed on that game i was way ahead in term of fleet power (probably time to up the difficulty as i am starting to get used to the system) despite a couple of empires were as big as mine (and one was ahead in economy while the other was ahead in researches).
Too bad the AI can't do joint operations with its allies, unless it's "yet another dlc" like many stripped down features in paradox games.

[LoSboccacc]

in order to be whaok the game would have to let you be a fanatic militarist fanatic xenophobe fanatic authoritarian fanatic spiritualist fanatic materialist empire.

wouldn't say imperium is materialist. maybe 30k imperium, but that one is not spiritualist. fanatic xenophobe / spiritual seems close enough, with the authoritarian angle coming more from policies and government style.

[Egan_BW]

Admech are pretty materialist spiritualist, in aesthetic at least.