Stellaris' late game makes me miss Distant Worlds:
Hundreds of fleets operating independently of one another? You got it!
Don't mind the World Annihilator Projects. They're just advanced civilian mining systems. You know how marketing gets with those bleeding edge technologies, eh?
My game seems to be building towards an exciting climax of some kind for sure, I'm just not sure that its one I can win. My former enemies the Bunstar Axis are gone; absorbed by the ever-expanding blob that is the Og-Nollox Mediators awakened empire. They gave me the "join or die" spiel and I rejected them, not realising that this would remove the possibility of ever becoming their vassal peacefully and building up my forces... crap. Well I've got a save there if I do end up regretting this decision anyway. They haven't actually declared war on me yet, but they're "Belligerent" and likely to do so any time now. Thankfully I was able to take on a Fallen Empire and steal some of their delicious tech, so I'm in a pretty good place technologically, and I know that my fleet composition can go toe-to-doe with an FE and actually win assuming even fleet strength.
For those playing at home, you have to build your fleet specifically to fight FEs if you want a hope of winning. They rely heavily on fighters so it doesn't hurt to bring a fuckton of flak and point defenses and as @finnith says, corvettes and battleships are key. The battleships bring the big guns and armor needed to not die immediately, and the corvettes are fast enough to mostly avoid their big guns. Cruisers just melt so I think I'm going to stop bothering with them entirely, Destroyers I pack them full of flak and point defences to deal with the fighter swarms.
But that was against a fallen empire, I've never actually taken on an awakened empire before, and I've seen the strength of their fleets first-hand. They have multiple 100k fleets and I'm sitting at just under 60k. I'm allied with everyone left who matters, but I doubt any of them are going to help in any significant way. I think my best strategy is going to be guerrilla warfare; split my fleet up and blockade as many planets as I can at once in the hopes that I can force a white peace, and gang up on any splinter fleets that I can actually take on. I'm close to researching Jump Drives which will make this sort of sneaky bastardry a lot easier, I'm just a little concerned about the fact that the tech is labelled "Dangerous"...
On another note, I finally figured out the sector AI. It turns out its not actually completely brain-dead, it just doesn't work anything like you'd expect. The key point is that the sector AI can build one thing and one thing only at a time and the game doesn't make this clear anywhere. This means that if its upgrading a spaceport on planet A, it will completely ignore the fact that planet B is undeveloped and starving to death. But once you know this is how it works then you can take steps to manage it. I.e, you want your sectors to be small and numerous for maximum efficiency, and you want planets to be as developed as possible before you hand them over to the AI because they're not going to grow a whole lot afterwards. I've had some success with putting newly colonised planets I'm too lazy to develop myself into single-system sectors, just make sure space construction and military station construction is turned off!
I think it depends on what metric you use for late game.
I personally consider late game to be when I have battleships, my ship designs start stagnating with tier 5 techs, and my wars of conquest are bounded not by the logistics of maintaining a war effort and instead by the 10 year armistice forced upon me between offensives. However this stage of the game is still a far cry from defeating a fallen empire or crushing a galactic catastrophe single handed.
I honestly don't get cruisers, the high resource cost vs lack of survivability is really strange, especially given the fact that they are positioned at the front. At least Corvettes are easily replaceable.
This game and games like it (Distant Worlds) seem to bring out the best in me. I always end up making a multi-racial democratic empire with no slavery and universal voting and leadership rights. I mean yeah I'm pretty aggressive about starting offensive wars, but someone has to bring democracy to those backward bird people.
I've got what I think are two advanced start despotic empires in the North of the galaxy who are slowly vassalizing or just fucking up all the empires around them. I've got a federation with another democracy in the far south and we've been taking worlds from our spiritualist and despotic neighbors for a while. My population is exploding though so I think soon I'll be the top dog and able to take out whoever I want. It'll be a nice epic war once my federation and those two empires have gobbled up everyone else.
My current ironman game is getting tense. I've stayed small on worlds with a massive tech advantage. Now two fallen empires have awoken and are preparing to slug it out. Fleet is ~50k.
One really good thing is that except for the FE's everyone is forced to use hyperlanes but despite being fanatic materialist I randomly got a psi-focus on a scientist early on. So my empire is genetically modified psychic cute mushrooms and androids living in harmony.
I've become increasingly efficient at my purification of the galaxy. A robot pop is built in the same time that it takes to purge a world. Queue up a robot, wait a month for good measure, then issue the purge order and tuck the world away in a sector. Finally issue a land of opportunity planetary edict once the robot is done.
I decided to restart my "digital ascension" themed game now that sectors are actually capable of building their own robots. The results have been... lacking. The basic idea is to purge all of my original population and replace them with synths, making perfectly efficient planets regardless of climate. This works fine for my privately controlled planets, but the sectors seem to be even worse than I remember. They almost completely refuse to build new robot pops despite floating thousands of minerals and energy, and utterly fail at even building structures when I provide the pops for them.
Really disappointing, but not that surprising I suppose.
Stellaris' late game makes me miss Distant Worlds:
Hundreds of fleets operating independently of one another? You got it!
Don't mind the World Annihilator Projects. They're just advanced civilian mining systems. You know how marketing gets with those bleeding edge technologies, eh?
What are all those fleets up to?
Do you give them missions and just let them each do their thing?
I made a game! Hotline Maui. Requires mouse and keyboard.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Stellaris' late game makes me miss Distant Worlds:
Hundreds of fleets operating independently of one another? You got it!
Don't mind the World Annihilator Projects. They're just advanced civilian mining systems. You know how marketing gets with those bleeding edge technologies, eh?
What are all those fleets up to?
Do you give them missions and just let them each do their thing?
Distant Worlds has a neat AI behind it. Essentially, I allowed it to control the majority of my empire while keeping a couple fleets and stations busy with my personal projects. I would assign orders regarding particular goals, and the AI would suggest and conduct operations I approved of or didn't much care to manage.
Some were engaged in planetary conquest, some were capturing mining stations, some were pirate hunting. If there was something that needed killing, they were probably on their way.
You can see in that first screenshot that my empire, Blue, in the galactic south was heavily engaged in civilian trade with northern states. I was busy getting a supply chain going for work on the Desolation Moon I declared war on North Green to secure. A few of those fleets are AI controlled, off to commit assorted atrocities upon them.
North Green's hated foes, the East Brown, turned out to be good allies for me. Between us, we butchered both South Green and Cyan. Cyan, in particular, had it coming. Orbital bombardment was too good for them.
Shortly after the elimination of a few trillion South Green and Cyan sentients, several of my own planets rebelled. I ordered the separatist worlds annihilated, as there was plainly something in those biospheres that encouraged stupidity.
It is a game where you can feel free to live the life of your favorite Star Wars hero: managing super weapons, listening posts and private armies behind the scenes between campaigns of terror.
Stellaris' late game makes me miss Distant Worlds:
Hundreds of fleets operating independently of one another? You got it!
Don't mind the World Annihilator Projects. They're just advanced civilian mining systems. You know how marketing gets with those bleeding edge technologies, eh?
What are all those fleets up to?
Do you give them missions and just let them each do their thing?
Distant Worlds has a neat AI behind it. Essentially, I allowed it to control the majority of my empire while keeping a couple fleets and stations busy with my personal projects. I would assign orders regarding particular goals, and the ai would happily conduct operations I approved of or didn't much care to manage.
It is a game where you can feel free to live the life of your favorite Star Wars hero : managing super weapons, listening posts and private armies behind the scenes between campaigns of terror.
Tbh, that sounds more like living the life of your favorite villains from the Rogue Squadron books.
I was thinking more along the lines of Warlord Zsinj, Admiral Daala, and Ice heart. They struck me more as the super weapon of the week sort of villain.
Thrawn was a higher class of character. Although truth be told, my favorite imperial officer was Gilad Pelleaon.
Cruisers are the backbone of my current fleets. A relatively simple design stacking medium turrets with gamma lasers and enough armor for 80% damage reduction makes them pretty hardy. Although they're also regening health at a rate of 8% per month.
I like watching them swarm forward while my battleships and destroyers hang back with supporting fire.
I did just finish researching shield capacitors and enigmatic deflectors, so I'm going to try experimenting with those as well. Although I'm hesitant in an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" sort of way.
My opponents are using lasers of various types, but I suppose they aren't using larger weapon mounts that would give them more armor pen. Some bombers gave a secondary fleet that was lacking in point defense pause when it engaged a fleet twice its size, but most of the fleet hung on until the cavalry arrived.
I'm not sure what the meta is these days. It may not be as good in a singular battle, but I like fielding cruisers since my ships are a bit more likely to survive bloodied instead of dead, so I can repair them instead of replacing them outright. In the late game they regen on their own and greatly ease logistics of the massive campaigns of conquest needed to capture 3 worlds.
Cruisers can work pretty well in place of battleships up until you get XL weapons, I think. Early on they've got about half the survivability and damage of a battleship at about half the cost, which is a perfectly fine tradeoff for most situations especially since when you first get battleships you've probably got some cruiser assembly yards cutting the cost for cruisers but no equivalent for battleships.
But eventually battleships do seem to outstrip cruisers - in my current game I'm more or less at the end of the tech tree and my battleships are doing like 250% the damage of my cruisers with like four times the survivability and at only like 170% the cost. At that point cruisers do start to seem a little homeless - battleships do pretty much all the same stuff, but better. The only role cruisers can really fill that battleships can't is as a torpedo boat (cruiser hulls can mount 3 torpedo slots, battleships can't mount any) but the AI's love of point defense makes torpedo strategies rough and even if I were on the torpedo plan I'm not sure I'd regularly want to use 3-torpedo cruisers when I can spend the same amount of resources to field 4 corvettes with a torpedo each. The ship segment system is neat but it seems like adding some more customization options to it would make it easier to design ships with more specific roles; for one thing, it'd be nice to be able to select some segments that trade weapon slots for extra utility slots or vice versa, and/or be able to better customize weapon slot sizes - a torpedo cruiser also ends up with at least 4 small guns; if you could trade those 4 small mounts for 2 medium mounts and outfit a cruiser with 3 torpedoes and 3 flak artillery, there'd be a much clearer reason to field torpedo cruisers instead of torpedo corvettes.
I also wish reverse engineering an advanced tech would backfill and give you the downranked versions of those techs. I'm not really interested in spending 50k research to research Mega Cannons when I already have the Tier 2 version from FE wreckage and it's annoying to have all that stuff clogging my research options. I've also got tier 1 and 2 disruptors sitting half-researched from wreckage with no reason to ever finish them because I've already got tier 3 disruptors.
Late game my fleet is mostly Battlecruisers with the Gigacannons + whatever, a bunch of destroyers for PD and a smattering of corvettes to clean up anything the Gigacannons can't immediately pulverise. N.B There is very little that Gigacannons can't pulverise.
In my current game my galaxy had 2 fallen empires, then 6 "powers" (including me) that were all in a federation and then a whole bunch of tiny inferior empires. Any time the smaller guys looked like they might grow they got vassalized or decimated by the federation. And then one of the fallen empires woke up and immediately attacked a federation member which dragged me in too. We were hopelessly out-teched/gunned at this point and inevitably we lost in short order. Shortly afterwards I got a message from the awoken empire with options to accept or decline but it wasn't entirely obvious to me what the question was (in fact this seems to be a problem with a lot of the requests I get from aliens) and I decided to accept because I really didn't want them as an enemy while my fleet was rebuilding. So now I'm a vassal to them which is not what I expected. Anyway it actually seems quite nice because it doesn't seem to stop me doing anything I wasn't doing already (it just said I can't purge or slave populations) but I no longer get pulled into wars that aren't of my own choosing and I'll be defended by far the most powerful empire in the galaxy if I get attacked. On the other hand this awoken empire is slowly swallowing up the space surrounding it and I'm worried they will become completely unstoppable (if they're not already). The Unbidden recently appeared right in the middle of their empire and I possibly made the mistake of sacrificing my fleet (again) to close the portal almost immediately when perhaps I should have let them duke it out for a bit (I did get some juicy tech out of it though).
Yeah best bet would have been to sit back for a bit and let the FE duke it out with the unbidden, swoop in and steal their tech where possible, then overthrow the FE later. The way the tech research works is that each bit of debris analyzed contributes a certain % towards the goal, so if you get enough of the debris collected, you don't even have to spend your own time doing real research on it. Depending on how violent the fighting is, you could be caught up to them in less than a year. At that point it's just a matter of examining their fleets, building one that hard counters theirs and then bein' all
You have no diplomatic options other than to declare war on your overlord.
Thanks. Not sure how good or bad that will prove to be.
Another question: Do AI empires tech up everything or do they stop at a certain point or not research certain thing. For example would they research and use the material disrupters tech that you get from the Unbidden? I'm basically wondering if it's possible to ultimately get a tech advantage over the awoken empire and other AI or if eventually we'll all be at the same level?
You have no diplomatic options other than to declare war on your overlord.
Which is something they really need to work on,I think.
It's the very definition of a vassal. You get to keep your lands but are completely subservient to your overlord on every other matter.
It's just that in CKII you could end up controlling the whole empire yourself if you know what you are doing. I'm guess people were kinda hoping you could do something similar (or at least have a non-violent way of severing ties with your overlord)
+1
Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
So, I just got the base game and was wondering if any of the DLC was worth getting? I know with CKII and EUIV there was a lot of cosmetic DLC that didn't matter, but some essential gameplay DLC. I'm guessing the Leviathan Story DLC is a must-get? I saw on reddit that it makes the game harder for new players though?
So, I just got the base game and was wondering if any of the DLC was worth getting? I know with CKII and EUIV there was a lot of cosmetic DLC that didn't matter, but some essential gameplay DLC. I'm guessing the Leviathan Story DLC is a must-get? I saw on reddit that it makes the game harder for new players though?
I wouldn't say that. I mean, you might have especially shitty luck and one of the systems close to you has the Stellarite Devourer who comes along and makes what might have been your best mineral or science world practically uninhabitable, but the thing that has really made the mid-later game harder, Awakened Fallen Empires, was part of the patch, not the DLC. DLC just make those Awakened Empires go all Vorlons and Shadows on each other, which IMO makes them actually easier to deal with if you know what you are doing.
Ok this being vassal thing is proving annoying. I can't even attack abandoned stations or help out against my overlords targets (and by help out I mean take his enemies planets before he can so he doesn't continue to grow stronger!). I'm just building my fleet and researching and waiting for the 2 awoken empires so that I don't have to face my overlords 10 or so 70k+ fleets (I can muster about 100k total). What's kind of funny is that my species is by far the most populous in the galaxy because my overlord seems to use my species for colonization - I wish I could foster a rebellion and get them all to suddenly switch to my side. I'd probably win the game almost instantly just on territory occupied.
How difficult is it to integrate vassals? I have 6 protectorates I uplifted that together control like 1/3 of the habitable planets in the galaxy and I want to integrate them as soon as they turn into vassals.
I can set up like -40 ethics divergence so no problem turning them into proper peaceful xenophile spiritualists.
I also just learned you can not terraform an already colonized world... time to research more stuff I guess.
Do monarchy parks and theocratic tombs stay after you switch to other government forms?
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
Posts
Hundreds of fleets operating independently of one another? You got it!
Don't mind the World Annihilator Projects. They're just advanced civilian mining systems. You know how marketing gets with those bleeding edge technologies, eh?
For those playing at home, you have to build your fleet specifically to fight FEs if you want a hope of winning. They rely heavily on fighters so it doesn't hurt to bring a fuckton of flak and point defenses and as @finnith says, corvettes and battleships are key. The battleships bring the big guns and armor needed to not die immediately, and the corvettes are fast enough to mostly avoid their big guns. Cruisers just melt so I think I'm going to stop bothering with them entirely, Destroyers I pack them full of flak and point defences to deal with the fighter swarms.
But that was against a fallen empire, I've never actually taken on an awakened empire before, and I've seen the strength of their fleets first-hand. They have multiple 100k fleets and I'm sitting at just under 60k. I'm allied with everyone left who matters, but I doubt any of them are going to help in any significant way. I think my best strategy is going to be guerrilla warfare; split my fleet up and blockade as many planets as I can at once in the hopes that I can force a white peace, and gang up on any splinter fleets that I can actually take on. I'm close to researching Jump Drives which will make this sort of sneaky bastardry a lot easier, I'm just a little concerned about the fact that the tech is labelled "Dangerous"...
On another note, I finally figured out the sector AI. It turns out its not actually completely brain-dead, it just doesn't work anything like you'd expect. The key point is that the sector AI can build one thing and one thing only at a time and the game doesn't make this clear anywhere. This means that if its upgrading a spaceport on planet A, it will completely ignore the fact that planet B is undeveloped and starving to death. But once you know this is how it works then you can take steps to manage it. I.e, you want your sectors to be small and numerous for maximum efficiency, and you want planets to be as developed as possible before you hand them over to the AI because they're not going to grow a whole lot afterwards. I've had some success with putting newly colonised planets I'm too lazy to develop myself into single-system sectors, just make sure space construction and military station construction is turned off!
I personally consider late game to be when I have battleships, my ship designs start stagnating with tier 5 techs, and my wars of conquest are bounded not by the logistics of maintaining a war effort and instead by the 10 year armistice forced upon me between offensives. However this stage of the game is still a far cry from defeating a fallen empire or crushing a galactic catastrophe single handed.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Steam: CavilatRest
I've got what I think are two advanced start despotic empires in the North of the galaxy who are slowly vassalizing or just fucking up all the empires around them. I've got a federation with another democracy in the far south and we've been taking worlds from our spiritualist and despotic neighbors for a while. My population is exploding though so I think soon I'll be the top dog and able to take out whoever I want. It'll be a nice epic war once my federation and those two empires have gobbled up everyone else.
Our bests seem to diverge somewhere along the line. But that's okay, it takes all sorts.
One really good thing is that except for the FE's everyone is forced to use hyperlanes but despite being fanatic materialist I randomly got a psi-focus on a scientist early on. So my empire is genetically modified psychic cute mushrooms and androids living in harmony.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Really disappointing, but not that surprising I suppose.
battleships do seem a bit pointless now
they are good at blowing up battleships and space stations, I guess?
What are all those fleets up to?
Do you give them missions and just let them each do their thing?
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Distant Worlds has a neat AI behind it. Essentially, I allowed it to control the majority of my empire while keeping a couple fleets and stations busy with my personal projects. I would assign orders regarding particular goals, and the AI would suggest and conduct operations I approved of or didn't much care to manage.
Some were engaged in planetary conquest, some were capturing mining stations, some were pirate hunting. If there was something that needed killing, they were probably on their way.
You can see in that first screenshot that my empire, Blue, in the galactic south was heavily engaged in civilian trade with northern states. I was busy getting a supply chain going for work on the Desolation Moon I declared war on North Green to secure. A few of those fleets are AI controlled, off to commit assorted atrocities upon them.
North Green's hated foes, the East Brown, turned out to be good allies for me. Between us, we butchered both South Green and Cyan. Cyan, in particular, had it coming. Orbital bombardment was too good for them.
Shortly after the elimination of a few trillion South Green and Cyan sentients, several of my own planets rebelled. I ordered the separatist worlds annihilated, as there was plainly something in those biospheres that encouraged stupidity.
It is a game where you can feel free to live the life of your favorite Star Wars hero: managing super weapons, listening posts and private armies behind the scenes between campaigns of terror.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Thrawn was a higher class of character. Although truth be told, my favorite imperial officer was Gilad Pelleaon.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Still a blast.
I like watching them swarm forward while my battleships and destroyers hang back with supporting fire.
I did just finish researching shield capacitors and enigmatic deflectors, so I'm going to try experimenting with those as well. Although I'm hesitant in an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" sort of way.
My opponents are using lasers of various types, but I suppose they aren't using larger weapon mounts that would give them more armor pen. Some bombers gave a secondary fleet that was lacking in point defense pause when it engaged a fleet twice its size, but most of the fleet hung on until the cavalry arrived.
I'm not sure what the meta is these days. It may not be as good in a singular battle, but I like fielding cruisers since my ships are a bit more likely to survive bloodied instead of dead, so I can repair them instead of replacing them outright. In the late game they regen on their own and greatly ease logistics of the massive campaigns of conquest needed to capture 3 worlds.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
But eventually battleships do seem to outstrip cruisers - in my current game I'm more or less at the end of the tech tree and my battleships are doing like 250% the damage of my cruisers with like four times the survivability and at only like 170% the cost. At that point cruisers do start to seem a little homeless - battleships do pretty much all the same stuff, but better. The only role cruisers can really fill that battleships can't is as a torpedo boat (cruiser hulls can mount 3 torpedo slots, battleships can't mount any) but the AI's love of point defense makes torpedo strategies rough and even if I were on the torpedo plan I'm not sure I'd regularly want to use 3-torpedo cruisers when I can spend the same amount of resources to field 4 corvettes with a torpedo each. The ship segment system is neat but it seems like adding some more customization options to it would make it easier to design ships with more specific roles; for one thing, it'd be nice to be able to select some segments that trade weapon slots for extra utility slots or vice versa, and/or be able to better customize weapon slot sizes - a torpedo cruiser also ends up with at least 4 small guns; if you could trade those 4 small mounts for 2 medium mounts and outfit a cruiser with 3 torpedoes and 3 flak artillery, there'd be a much clearer reason to field torpedo cruisers instead of torpedo corvettes.
I also wish reverse engineering an advanced tech would backfill and give you the downranked versions of those techs. I'm not really interested in spending 50k research to research Mega Cannons when I already have the Tier 2 version from FE wreckage and it's annoying to have all that stuff clogging my research options. I've also got tier 1 and 2 disruptors sitting half-researched from wreckage with no reason to ever finish them because I've already got tier 3 disruptors.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
This is a big problem.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
that's pretty impressive in the vacuum of space
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
In my current game my galaxy had 2 fallen empires, then 6 "powers" (including me) that were all in a federation and then a whole bunch of tiny inferior empires. Any time the smaller guys looked like they might grow they got vassalized or decimated by the federation. And then one of the fallen empires woke up and immediately attacked a federation member which dragged me in too. We were hopelessly out-teched/gunned at this point and inevitably we lost in short order. Shortly afterwards I got a message from the awoken empire with options to accept or decline but it wasn't entirely obvious to me what the question was (in fact this seems to be a problem with a lot of the requests I get from aliens) and I decided to accept because I really didn't want them as an enemy while my fleet was rebuilding. So now I'm a vassal to them which is not what I expected. Anyway it actually seems quite nice because it doesn't seem to stop me doing anything I wasn't doing already (it just said I can't purge or slave populations) but I no longer get pulled into wars that aren't of my own choosing and I'll be defended by far the most powerful empire in the galaxy if I get attacked. On the other hand this awoken empire is slowly swallowing up the space surrounding it and I'm worried they will become completely unstoppable (if they're not already). The Unbidden recently appeared right in the middle of their empire and I possibly made the mistake of sacrificing my fleet (again) to close the portal almost immediately when perhaps I should have let them duke it out for a bit (I did get some juicy tech out of it though).
They're just so loud they break the laws of physics.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
Thanks. Not sure how good or bad that will prove to be.
Another question: Do AI empires tech up everything or do they stop at a certain point or not research certain thing. For example would they research and use the material disrupters tech that you get from the Unbidden? I'm basically wondering if it's possible to ultimately get a tech advantage over the awoken empire and other AI or if eventually we'll all be at the same level?
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
It's the very definition of a vassal. You get to keep your lands but are completely subservient to your overlord on every other matter.
It's just that in CKII you could end up controlling the whole empire yourself if you know what you are doing. I'm guess people were kinda hoping you could do something similar (or at least have a non-violent way of severing ties with your overlord)
I wouldn't say that. I mean, you might have especially shitty luck and one of the systems close to you has the Stellarite Devourer who comes along and makes what might have been your best mineral or science world practically uninhabitable, but the thing that has really made the mid-later game harder, Awakened Fallen Empires, was part of the patch, not the DLC. DLC just make those Awakened Empires go all Vorlons and Shadows on each other, which IMO makes them actually easier to deal with if you know what you are doing.
I can set up like -40 ethics divergence so no problem turning them into proper peaceful xenophile spiritualists.
I also just learned you can not terraform an already colonized world... time to research more stuff I guess.
Do monarchy parks and theocratic tombs stay after you switch to other government forms?