Stellaris - Tactical and Economic Warfare (Winning without fighting) 

My Stellaris games usually go like this: - *goes all out tech in early game* - *gets massive score lead* - *gets steamrolled because he has no fleet*

>winning without fighting Whole video is about fighting.

this isnt tactical warfare its strategic. Tactical would be "on the battlefield". Strategic is "the entire war/front in full picture, including economic/societal concerns"

"winning without fighting" proceeds to fight the entire video

Sure it matters whose got the biggest stick. Matters a lot more whose swinging it.

Watching the dev clash with ASpec was incredibly entertaining

Suprisingly there is a good reason for going purifier now; having your own internal market that cant be pricebombed by others... Damn now I want internal market into an optional decision available to all xenophobes, giving them the ability to choose between trusting xenos markets or no.... :D

Aspec The art of needing ages to explain something. Still great tactic though

Did you just make a video gloating about how you corvette spamed the familly??

Reminds me of the pre 2.0 days and warp drives/wormholes. I used to keep a small fleet of corvettes to raid the enemy energy mines and only the energy mines. It was a lot of micro but the end result is worth it.

"When the Ruhr Valley stopped, all of Germany came to a stop"

Always love these discussions, new tactics and ways to play.

As a former intel analyst in the USAF tactical warfare typically means short term ad hoc time critical, where strategic is long term warfare like economic or strategic missiles. Good video!

For a mad dictator, your thought process is quite calm.

I must say, I expected something else from this video... But there was still tons of useful info in it ! THX

One thing I've done in the past is during a war while your holding systems the enemy owns, is to scrap/destroy all mining and research stations in the systems you don't have claimed especially strategic resources, so when the war ends and those systems return to the owner they will not be getting any resources from them and will have to spend more time and resources to rebuild those stations. Unless the empire is incredibly wide this probably wont completely cripple their economy post-war but it will keep them busy and lacking resources for quite a while. One downside this could have is that the empire won't have to continue paying the upkeep cost for the stations and might have an excess energy credit production if they weren't relying on energy mining stations, however only destroying energy mining stations alone could harm their economy in the short term if they were relying on them to offset/pay for most of the other station upkeep costs.

I just make friends with everyone and let them fight it out while providing resource to everyone. I’m the enabler that helps everyone.

Wow, this has been the earliest I've ever been for a aspec vid

if you know where there traderoutes run you can also go and take a system which has a lot of tradevalue running through if you can`t get to the capital.

Thank you Aspec! This is fun to do!

Would love to hear more of your analysis on the dev game's tactics

1:44 subtitles on

fighting an enemy on a tactical level means fighting and reacting on or near the actual battlefield (the induvidual squadrons/ships decisions in actual combat), this is not actually possible in Stellaris seeing as the tactical decisions happens automatically and is controlled by the AI when two fleets engage in combat, the operational level is your decision as a player to engage the enemy in that system or with this or that type of fleet based on the number of hostile ships or the quality of said ships, the strategic level is your decision to attack a certain system based on its production, its value to the enemy war-effort or its strategic position as a system junction. The type of warfare you are talking about is strategic, Im making a decision to avoid confrontation with your forces to strike at you where you are the weakest, your logistics and your production and at the same time destroying your ability to obtain resources by controlling the market. Fighting a war like this in any paradox game is very hard to pull off but its scary when seen in action.

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. -sun tzu

suming up the video in 2 min : if you can counter the enemy fleet , if your enemy needs a resource higher the market price of sed resource ( personely don't recomend it ), if your enemy's fleet is bigger just go around it with yours + enought transport to take planets.

this has been my strategy since i first got the game. not that many corvettes but have always considered that as well.

Makes video to show off own intelligence and game knowledge >>> makes claims on the wrong empire.

Nice Vid. I am currently playing as a Mercantile Oligarchy to have a large sprawling trade empire. My goal is to get commercial pacts with every possible group and make them all economically dependent on me. This warfare style is very suited to my empire.

My favorite tactic is the pop bomb. Requires you to have vandalized and integrated an empire already, but once you do, you resettle all unwanted pops to a single planet on the borders of you future war target. Then you give em the system. A single over populated planet wrecks havoc on just about any empire, bonus points if the planet is undeveloped or demolished to outpost state. I used this in my last playthrough to cripple the economic powerhouse empire of a rival alliance. Good times

"The Contingency which isn't really causing any problems" OOF! This Crisis got off-screened! XD

I often do this tactics with super carriers from the mod NSC2, works like a charm

Defensive armies would of helped more than defensive stations. It would slow your invasions significantly and possibly long enough for a relief force to come help.

So Smart, that's make feel that's more intersting type of playing

This has completely changed my outlook on war.

Isn't there a pretty substantial penalty to jumping until it recharges the jump drive? During which point your fleets can be annihalated if properly engaged? I mean yea this works here but if they had a home defense fleet or even if their home systems were slightly more fortified you've halved your damage output and your speed not including the economic strain of massing a sufficient army to completly overwhelm planetary defenders along with multiple fleets.

Ok but what to do at the first 20 years when there is no jumpdrive but a neighbour that hates me? Trying hit and run behind the lines with corvettes too?

Nihalistic Aquisition is good for this, or BarBars. Since Pops are so important, raid pops. I tend to play tall. One of my fav runs was BarBars going into Synth Ascension. Raid, Grab, Assimilate. Especially specialized worlds, like Ecus or Generator planets. Havent done it with Gestalts, tho.

are you gonna do a play through of the latest update? i am having troubles with almost everything, mainly consumer goods and empire sprawl.

is the jump drive still in the latest version of the game? currently in the endgame crisis and i didnt know of the possibility to jump anywhere else than what the hyperlane dictates (except for wormholes, gateways and that conceptual drive my science ships have that makes the MIA for years). I could imagine tha ability to jump basically anywhere on the map got cut out for balancing reasons...

This was beautiful

Smart tactics, i will employ some of these to my own game and see where it leads.

I have already won a couple of games with flexible fleets.Never thought about the use of Corvetteswarms.And the use of the jumpdrive like that is an interesting tactic aginst other Empires.I only used it against the rapid response to endgame crisis where time is at the essence.I can actually not really remember a game where there had been any conventional enemys left when I had eqipped my fleets with jump drives.But well all in all that is a very smart strategy to counter enemys with stronger fleets.

The whole time I was thinking “okay, I get it. Cool.” But I got real excited when you trashed the galactic market!!!

Trying this with an ally. Im using my fleets, and decoyrvettes, to destroy their mining and research stations and starbases & defenses, while my ally bombards planets, and my troop ships follow tgem around and invade accordingly. We have captured 5 20+Tile planets so far. But the enemy still has several more. It's only a matter of time before tgeir economt collapses. When that happens, will their main fleet be immobilized?

I'll sound like a contrarian here, but oh, well. I like much of your stuff, Aspec, and you generally have an insightful play style. When you say economic warfare, however, that's not technically what this is: during WW1, the Brits blockaded the German ports in an effort to strangle their economic capacity and overall strategic ability to wage war; here, you're more directly attacking enemy positions, which is not the same as what the Brits did in WW1. Yes, you're still chipping away at their economy (which I do myself and is very effective), but you're not so much conducting economic warfare. Not your fault, either: Stellaris doesn't allow for this type of indirect conflict management. Making and breaking alliances, on the other hand, is present and quite effective at ending conflicts before they really start.

I’m confused which guns and technology counter other technology... can someone tell me where to find a video or website or tell me in the comments? Thx

This is exactly the type of warfare I subscribe to.

I always wanted to have a close look onto the savegame. Where to download it?

I wish the market was more strategic tho instead of infinite amounts of everything selling and buying

Is there anyway to "uplift" a vassal/federation ally's economy so that they're more useful in warfare? After taking them to war to subjugate or impose ideology they just don't seem to come back. I've tried the feudal societies civ, research agreements, as well as gifting various resources with mixed results. My original strategy was to keep my core empire just under the sprawl cap and create buffer states.

Aspec just a side question. How did the " whitout fighting " got in the title ?

They should make you into a legendary/ironman event admiral, which has a chance to proc on the creation of an endgame crisis and has a chance to die/despawn upon loading the save.

This will be useful for my no attacks run. I will not harm a SINGLE BEING

Thank you for this. Now what I'm thinking about now is how to counter this strategy. Is it a counter PD Corvette fleet?

ive noticed you seem to like lower lane density in your videos. do you usually play this way or does it make it easier for these types of videos?

All my stellaris games end up with me out-gunned, out-numbered and making a masterful display or guerrilla warfare. XD

just started playing stellaris a couple days ago. boy do I have a long ways to go lol.

Where can I find how to gain more influence? I can't seem to get more than 4 And before you used to be able to spam energy and minerap buildings and have a world just energy and mins ect now Im not sure you can?

All hail Trevor!

Aspec if we do not have jump drive technology, how can we pull the strategy off?

Hi Sir What do you think about idea to make technologies in game trade on market for very hight price ?

I'm yet to try a "no-jumpdrive" challenge playthrough, maybe it will even make something else spawn than the unbidden^^ what I often do with the amount of different fronts that I have is Cruiser-commandos to saturate all the fronts and go for maximum occupation even against superior stations. I use the jump drive almost exclusively in defense. Oh and branch office heavy, tall megacorps might actually counter this issue of tall empires... hmm

hmm.. in the end it sounds easily... but how do u defend this kind of warfare ? for the crash on the Alloays someone could argue that u can re-shape your planets to produce more Alloys instead of Strategic ressourses. how would u defend against it if u face such strategy against yourself? it has to be countermeasures against it.

This sort of thing only really works if you have jump drives though. That or a back door route into their space. If you didn't have jump drives you would have just needed to push through the bottle neck where their main fleet is. Back before 2.0 when they made hyperlanes the only FTL system I use to use these sort of strategies a lot. Hypergates or warp drive behind enemy lines and capture a few planets then run from their slow moving fleet. Back when everyone else was whiny about Stacks of Doom I was laughing at the fools as I run circles around their stacks which they no longer could afford to maintain. After all a stack of doom can't be in two places at once and I'd have my fleet hitting to locations of theirs. The common argument I'd hear against this was "Yeah but your leaving your planets defenseless." To which I would respond, "One that's what defense armies are for. And Two I got two fleets to their one and thus can capture twice as many systems for every one I lose." In stellaris wars maybe fought in space but they are won on the ground. And if you have more troops than they enemy and can get them into position you win the war. Space battles are just for clearing the path for those troops.

Can’t wait till the CE edition will be this far!!!

And then your enemy has lots of insanely powerful defensive armies, augmented with plenty of defensive assault armies... XD

Wouldn't Battleships outfitted with smaller weapons be able to deal with corvette swarms?

Wow this makes a very good sci-fi. Out world is attacked by stronger aliens. One genius commander is sending a special force to take over their homeworld discreetly to win the war.

I just realized that the market I had used so far kept adjusting the prices because other empires kept buying and selling too. So, that was a shared market all along?! The possibilities! And here I thought that was my personal market or something. :D

I want to ask this because I don't know if anyone else has had this issue, but does it seem like Admirals always seem to die before they get to high ranks? Because I don't know why but I almost never have an Admiral over level two after the last update even with the trait. Just wondering.

You noticed my comments....yay! Here come the advanced strats~! Show us the magic Aspec!

Can be resumed by "Go for the Throat"

Seizing the means of production... how very communist of you haha

I think that the game situation given in the video was a bad decision. I think it would be much clearer to show the effect of this strategy in the early game against a bigger empire than in the end game when everyone has spare energy and spare alloys.

There are oranges skull and crossbones bones surrounding my capital but they’re not marked as hostile. I play on PS4 is that helps

Does the market inflation tactic work on ai?

A huge fleet that could take over any fallen empire *vs* literally just going around it

i want to see that war from the families perspective

What is the top teck set up for the best evation [your thought of wepon] befor you get fallen empire teck and end game tecks?

What are ways to find out the capabilities of the enemy military and economy?

thrawn would be proud

wait how the hell do you get a jump drive? i only get the quest to try it out with a survey ship a bunch of times but nothing comes up after that.

Is there a way for you to show us how to use these strategies on console? I feel the developers did well in the base model of the game when it came to console, but i notice that you can’t see exactly what the enemy has outfitted their ships with, or any of their resources etc. It makes the game trickier and i bet there are other console players that will think the same thing

War. War never changes

nice strategy but does it really work? usually ais in strategy games don’t give a damn about any resources or building times or any of this. usually they are coded differently for balancing reasons... i have never played a strategy game where destroying the ais economy really matterd. if this works it would be a first. :) and kudos to the creators!

A part of me feelz like people say "armies are not good and you shouldn't build them untill you need them" is something people say so they can catch others unprepared to deal with this exact tactic.

Every game barring one that I've played, no matter how big my fleet is, the ai just teams up to have enough to beat me, no matter what approach I take

I swear you were using EVE online terminology for a bit there

How the hell do you get your influence income so high?

Roses are red Violets are blue I stole all your trade worlds And your foundry worlds too ;)

There was a game that ame out in 1999-2000, Imperium Galactica 2. It was unbeatable in conventional way coz AI was a huge cheater. Almost all campains that ive played, no metter the strategem, i was allways dwarfed by invading fleet. This strategy was the only one that i could use against them. Invaders had like 300% racial bonus to production +150-250 planetary bonus vs mine max 250% on particular planets. Ended up building shitload of ground forces and loaded them into stealthy crusers specifically outfitted for ground support. Had three fleets - one huge one as distraction, second for moping up ground forces of captured planets and one for culling reinforcments. They ended up with no planets, no ground forces and one huge usless space fleet.

I know this is old but still. I prefer this as well. There's nothing better than bankrupting friends through there own massive armies.

Okay mister Sun Tzu junior

What mod are those ships in the thumbnail from

can u win with trading major?

I always use your preset in gigga structures.

Wow, I'm clearly still very shit at this game.

Maginot Line intensifies

Aspec’s “How to wage Galactic War”

Would you also show a counter to this strategy?