This game seems fairly popular so let's get a thread going for it.
Stellaris is a 4X empire-building game in a space setting from Paradox, known previously for their notoriously dense and historically accurate grand strategy games set in historical periods of Europe. To describe the game in terms of other things, Stellaris is like Crusader Kings and Master of Orion had a baby and then watched a lot of great sci-fi shows together as the baby grew up, and also the baby was much more streamlined and accessible and better tutorialized than its dad, Crusader Kings... this analogy is getting away from me but you get the point.
Here's a giant bomb quicklook of it for more detail on what the game actually plays like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LmX5TElLns
I don't have this game yet because money's tight but I'm super into it, so post tales of space politics adventures for my enjoyment.
Also there's multiplayer!
@Dubh is trying to organize some! But similarly to Civ 5 multiplayer it takes a pretty significant amount of time coordination so
here's a spreadsheet Dubh made for people to cross-reference when they are available for a hypothetical multiplayer game!
Posts
Now i'm playing the prefab militarist humans.
Steam
The only other empire I've seen so far is my immediate neighbors, the Otaga Hegemony, a race of materialist warlike mushrooms bent on being a real pain in my ass.
I brought this to life for you!
You also receive less opportunities for weapon research and I don't wanna get stomped by Space Prussia
Well not really but ive been thinking about this all day
I wish I had more time to play it but it's real neat
This game seems great so far
Also getting a kick out of the fact that I found this large complex system called Sol, where the third planet featured a bunch of pre-spaceflight nation states in a global war between two blocs and just on the verge of developing atomics...
stellaris mods are real
http://www.stellariswiki.com/Ethos
Space pirates sound like they would be at least militarist. The way the ethos selection works is each ethos axis has 2 levels in each direction or neutral, and you get enough points to get either one level towards one of the ends of each axis, or one axis to level 2 and one axis to level 1 with the last axis at neutral. Also you can just not spend all the ethos points if you'd rather not use them all.
It's not actually a hugely significant penalty.
As for pirates, I'm thinking Fanatic Individualist, Materialist, and I dunno maybe Military Republic?
Edit: Actually I guess it'd have to be Direct Democracy
Ethos selection is one step and that leads to the actual possible government choices (like direct democracy versus indirect democracy versus some kind of monarchy, etc).
A straight-up True Scotsman style anarchic society would probably be one of the advanced government types, which makes sense because that kind of society would take some work to build.
stellaris would feel empty if you tried to mod it with mass effect's universe
there's not enough of it
I guess if you're a civilization of romantic noble pirates as opposed to dirty cutthroat asshole pirates
Who says you have to only play with Mass Effect stuff
that's just what I assumed you meant when you said mass effect mod pack
like someone's gonna do a full star trek mod pack and it's gonna be real as shit, or a star wars eu one
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
Guess you could also do Fanatic Materialist, Militarist
That also opens up some other government options like Military Dictatorship, which allows you to have larger navies. Also you can build larger ships.
But then actually it's the super science ethos?
Like, fortunately both the greedy and the scientific advancement concepts behind it fit my empire thematically, but it's still weird for applying it to some other concepts
Then found 3 gaia worlds right outside my starting sector.
lmao
Can't be a proper Paradox game without that one...