I want to be space Donald Trump.
Before the world is set ablaze, let’s take a look at the 12th development diary from the Stellaris team; this one is all Policies and Edicts.
Policies and Edicts are kinds of like your laws and decisions in other Paradox “Grand Strategy Games”. Use them to flesh out your Empire as you harvest the flesh of humans and non-humans alike. I want to be space, Trump.
The initial decisions about your species’ Ethics are extremely important in determining the future Policies and Edicts that your civilization will have access to.
First we need to look at Policies: pretty much your galactic laws. These policies will usually be empire wide and will remain active until changed by the player or from an angry faction in your midst. These policies can change how you interact with other species, both intelligent and pre-sentient, as well as how you manipulate resources, migration, slavery, and voting rights; but you can’t make these changes on a whim. It takes the time to push through different forms of legislation, and more importantly you need to make sure that your PoPs (populations) agree with your changes. Each PoP will have their own ethics (pro-slavery, anti-slavery, xenophobic, etc…)
Still, I want to be space, Trump.
Wanting to be the space Don, I will have some interesting choices ahead of me. Doomdark explains the implications of your ethical choices on policies–
Say that you are playing as a Xenophobic empire. This will prevent you from passively studying any pre-FTL civilizations you might find, or sharing your technology with them; you can only study them aggressively (abducting and experimenting on them) or invade them outright! In a similar vein, Pacifist empires are not allowed to orbitally bombard planets in support of their ground forces, for fear of killing civilians.
Space Trump combs his hair in agreeance…
Finally, we need to talk about Edicts. These are both Empire and Planetary wide and have a wide range of effects on your game. In the picture above we see an edict for “Information Quarantine”, something that my Space Caesar Trumpeter would adore. Anyways, edicts will have a credit/energy consumption attached to their usage — in conjunction with their temporary or one-off nature, Edicts will have a large amount of risk/reward attached to them.
So, are you as excited to play as your “favorite” political figurehead in Stellaris as I am? Check back next week as we look at the next dev diary about pre-FTL civilizations.
