Well done.

I have found the game to easy so keep restarting. Playing now on extreme, chaos and I give all AI's tech level 1 while I start on pre-warp. So should help them expand faster. Also use very rare independent colonies and rare colonizable worlds. Makes it much harder to expand.

It is very random.

I played a game where I spawned in the center of the galaxy, I had 19 Pirate factions within 20 years, 6-7 very early on. I made the mistake of trying to pay them all off. But then I couldn't grow my economy enough to build ships to take them out.

I was playing on extreme and ...

Yeap same happened to me. I just scrapped them to clear the back log.

I have found on the harder levels you really need to do the first two hyperdrive techs first up, then move into other areas depending on your plan and situation. You need this to get your exploration ships out to claim systems prior to the AI boxing you in. This will at least allow your to expand to ...

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stellaris fanbous convenientlu forget theu just remade the entire game like 5 timesfor being so bad. changing free space to lanes, changing building grid adjacencu bonus, adding pops and jobs which tanked performance, and it took 5 uears of posting before theu even did anuthing to fix ...