This is a serious question, because all I know about this game, I learned from watching these streams: Can they invite those mercenaries into the Federation? They seem like they have a pretty good fleet (even if they don’t use it to its full extent).
I am pretty sure they can’t given the mechanical function they serve. I think I’ve tried this before. But it would be tight if they could.
I’m sure the option isn’t even there, when you contact them your only option is to pay them to raid someone I think. It’d be better if the Striven SE grew to such a degree that their fleets could take em on though 
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You should think of building some trading focused stations, that way you won’t have to be spending influence on capacity overloads, and will have more credits to support a larger fleet.
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It’s theoretically possible later in the game if a very specific set of circumstances happen but for most purposes it’s not possible, and doing so would likely require beating them in a war first anyway.
It’s also worth noting that the easiest way to support a bigger fleet on their own is to specialize their starbases more than they have been. Current meta stellaris starbases are always 1 of 4 things (and really only usually 3)
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Trading hubs, which can only be in systems with inhabited planets. Every module slot is filled with trading hubs and the first building is an offworld trading company, other building slots are a deep space black site for the unity and past that kind of irrelevant so chuck a silo on there or something to store more stuff or hydroponics for free food.
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Anchorages, which have nothing but anchorage modules and a naval logistics office to boost their effectiveness. Since you need a lot of them and they don’t do a lot on their own most people stick them into black holes or systems where they can build a curator think tank or art college so their building slots are less useless.
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Shipyards, 6 shipyard modules +fleet academy +crew quarters + optional titan/colossus assembly yards. You don’t need many of these since you can build 6 ships at a time.
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Bastions - Every module slot is filled with weapons and every building is things to boost weapons, always with a defense grid supercomputer if you have it unlocked. great in theory, in practice though they’re bad for the same reason turtling in an RTS is bad. You could have spent all those minerals and maintenance costs on making a much larger fleet that lets you expand instead of being useless as soon as you make an aggressive incursion. Plus all the other starbase types let you build defense platforms anyway so they pack a similar punch while also giving other bonuses.
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Been posting my impressions of the stream in this thread.
Had so much fun watching this! Kudos, Austin, Rob, and Danielle!
Loving the stream, y’all. Listening to the crew role play has made me start to engage more fully with the games I’m playing. I went back to CK2, Stellaris, Wasteland 2, and XCOM:WotC to make distinct characters and make more interesting choices, and I have to say: I haven’t felt this entertained by my games in a long time.
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Really enjoying this series.
There is a surprising lack of “multiple people play grand strategy” streams.
Often, if people are roleplaying or streaming grand strategy anything, it’s multiplayer, with folk divided up to different factions/nations.
I think my favorite aspect of this stream is the moral questions the crew are encountering, and how it intersects with current politics.
There is a recent article by the Atlantic, where the author, Sigal Samuel interviewed moral philosophers whether there was an ethical way to act in Syria.
What exactly was the moral course of action?
Most of them describe what they would believe would make for a just war policy.
- You need to have a just cause.
I think the crew and audience are pretty unanimous on removing slavery as a just cause.
How far should the Striven go?
Should they install independent anti-slavery governments, or directing take on the former slaves as new citizens, granting them their utopian policies, “fully funded food, housing, income, & education,” that an independent new government might neither afford or implement.
- the intervention has to achieve more good than harm.
This is a tricky question with regard to the mechanics of the Stellaris. Everything is abstracted.
You could look at policies, the living conditions of species in the nation, and at the happiness of the population units to get a general idea though.
You could argue that forcing an anti slavery change in the government of a nation, would move generations of slaves and pops to happier lives and living conditions.
The harm would be potential loss of life by military action, and the general unhappiness and unrest of installing a new government. In less dramatic affairs, there’s diplomatic harm to the Striven. Other nations view military actions poorly, and mechanically it raises “threat”.
3.A rightful intervention must also have a reasonable chance of success.
As Austin, and Rob have pointed out. The Striven want to proceed without their own citizens becoming slaves. They neighbor marauding slavers, that further complicates the success of military intervention. Will the Striven be successful if it’s military ignores the slavers stealing Striven Citizens, due to war exhaustion from entangling with a foreign power.
Currently, it seems like the Marauders host fleets that can’t be challenged, but the fleet tech will soon catch up, & it will become a real consideration.
4. The intervener has to have the right intentions.
it’s possible for a leader to do the right thing for the wrong reason. But if he’s not imbued with virtuous intentions, he may get one action right and yet be likely to get the next several actions terribly wrong.
Are the intentions of the crew to entertain an audience with a challenging military scenario?
Is the intention of the Striven, mostly to land grab neighboring hostile nations?
I think the intention to remove slavery is legitimate, but it might be something for the Striven to keep in mind as they progress.
I’m interested in seeing how this Stellaris campaign shakes out!
Thanks for putting time out to share it with us!
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just caught up with the latest stream
The aliens that look like floating bagpipes ARE super adorable.
I’d vote for committing to ending slavery in the galaxy. If the game offers no other options than warfare, than so be it. The space penis mushrooms to the right seem to be the best target right now. Bribe the mauraders to raid them and declare ideological war at the same time.
The whole being genetically pre disposed to loving owning slaves thing is weird and a stumbling block to the entire premise of this playthrough. If there’s a tech workaround in the game, use it.
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This is why I love Waypoint streams so much. I love watching collaborative playthroughs of otherwise single player games, especially where there’s lots of thinking involved.
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Stellaris has been a really good game for both discussing strategy among the crew and moral conundrums that their particular situation has set up. The friction that’s brought out is quite good, Rob not wanting sentient robots, Danielle advocating peace in all situations, Austin trying to control it all in a productive direction, it’s all very compelling.
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Thank you for the informative response!
And also trying to build sentient robots despite Rob’s protests, because robots are cool 
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I stop by only to say I enjoy this series a lot, and to agree that “group playing Grand Strategy” should be more of a thing than it is. (I also reinstalled Stellaris because of this!)
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They need to bump up their food storage to maximum so that they can store up to 5000 units of food. It’s a policy that costs nothing. They just need to move the pip from minimum to maximum. It will definitely help with paying off those pesky maurauders.
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I figured since we have a lot of people who aren’t familiar with stellaris watching this, and they decided to go diplomacy over supremacy that we’re due for a big effort post explaining federations (and also why most players avoid them).
When a federation is founded the nation that formed it is declared federation president for 10 years, after which it rotates to the next member that has at least 10% of the total number of colonized planets in the federation. There are ways to exploit this requirement I’ll get to later. The federation president has exclusive control over the construction and operation of the federation navy. Forming or joining federation also dissolves any defensive or non-aggression pacts a nation has, as federations have their own diplomacy.
Federations cost 1 influence a month from each member to maintain and act as a global defensive pact between federation members, if a federation member is attacked all members will declare war in response. Each empire loses 20% of their maximum naval capacity which is added to the federation naval cap.
The federation navy is a single fleet that does not have a command limit other than the federation naval cap, pays no maintenance costs, and is designed through a special ship builder interface that lets you use any technology any federation member has researched. Only the current federation president can build ships for the federation fleet but they are not destroyed when the presidency rotates.
All federation diplomacy is carried out by voting as federations do not have the same diplomacy options. Federations cannot form defensive pacts with non-federation states, they can however offer federation association status which is a non-aggression pact which extends to the entire federation if a majority of the members vote yes to the proposal. Adding an AI empire to a federation requires that they have a positive acceptance modifier with every single empire already in the federation, which is why the khessam wouldn’t join. Nations can also be thrown out of a federation if every other nation votes unanimously to do so.
Last but not least, any aggressive federation war has to be agreed upon unanimously by all federation members. This is the real sticking point most players have with them as having the AI effectively in control of your foreign policy just isn’t fun and it can make it extremely hard to declare wars if the federation members have varying war policies (Michael Bird Jordans vs Space llamas for instance). To add to this, if the AI proposes a war and you vote no, you get a stacking opinion penalty with that nation every time you do this. This becomes a problem fast because the AI will almost always re-propose the war the second it is allowed to, effectively either forcing you into the war or stacking the negative opinion modifier high enough they either leave or try and have you thrown out of the federation.
Because of the war policy thing, most people either do not use federations or use them like you would a pre-2.0 domination tree build before they nerfed all the overlord bonuses. Since presidents must have at least 10% of total colonized planets, you can expand to over 10 planets then release 1 planet as a rump-state vassal. Then if you form a federation with that vassal you are effectively president for life, trading 1 influence a month and the ability to defensive pact for not having to pay maintenance costs on 20% of your navy which is a big deal. The war issue is also much less of a big deal in this case because the vassal would have identical ethics to you and so will likely vote yes on all your proposals.
Also Austin, why the hate for unity buildings? They’re dope as are all planet uniques.
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In the beginning, the idea was to be the best version of humanity but I feel like we have kind of gone away from that a bit? It’s not going to war with slavers that’s the problem because I would hope the best of humanity would do just that but Austin will casually abandon planets or make plans to abandon planets if its beneficial to him.
It definitely seems the case that the abstraction of the game having an effect on moral choices.
Though, the best version of humanity might be hard to roleplay.
In this case, there doesn’t seem to be much of a choice on whether to abandon a planet or not to slavers that sport a fleet well beyond what you are capable of deterring.
You can send a fleet, but you would just be increasing the level of casualties for no benefit. I’m sure there would be much more hand wringing, but I imagine the hypothetical best of us, wouldn’t throw good soldiers lives away away for a hopeless battle. They’d focus on evacuation and mustering forces for the future chance of preventing another disaster, I think.
Though, I’d understand “the best of humanity” might mean different things to different people.
What would the best of humanity do, when constrained to the hard mechanics of stellaris?
(Assuming you are talking about the marauding space slavers attacking planets)
I do think you are rightt on the roleplaying front.
Some of the righteous ideals stated from the start of the campaign haven’t been seriously roleplayed when faced with in game conflicts. I think they are more focused on honest reactions to a “game”, than spicing it up too much.
Very easy to just treat conflicts in a grand strategy style game, as numbers.
“That’s a bummer things didn’t go the right way”,
might be the extent of the honest feelings of the streamers.
Yeah, as Virgil says, the way war plays out means that while I could send a fleet of 2K to fight that raiding party of 10k, all that will do is lose that entire fleet. Big fleets just stomp out small ones like that. Also: It’s become clear that the mechanical cost of those raiders isn’t all that bad: they just stomp in, take one or two population units, and leave. (Which is why we’re not abandoning those planets per say. We haven’t lost a planet yet, just a couple of population units here or there).
TFW Austin says losing a few million of his people (if that’s where we’ve landed on the abstraction of what constitutes a “pop”) to slaver raids “isn’t all that bad.”
I don’t necessarily agree with @Jonny_Anonymous because I know there’s technically nothing you can do against said raider fleets at this stage in the game, but let’s not kid ourselves here. Those assholes snatched good Striven citizens and sold them into a life of servitude and I think we need to make them pay. This is the kind of thing he’s saying I think. Mechanically speaking losing 2 pops isn’t the end of the world, but in the RP sense, losing 2 million people to slavers should be a major cause for alarm.
