Right, so you're most likely left wondering, gee, Ensign to Grand Admiral, I'm quite skilled at RTS games, turn-based games, the whole tactical and strategic shebang, I regularly bully my dyslexic mate at chess and feel quite competent at any game I play because I just am that competent, for god's sake, you probably can 1 shot anyone in Dark Souls with Dark Magic just because you're that good. Now, you may think I'm monologuing, but truth be told? You're going to extract more out of this autistic entry than you will out of difficulty for this game.

Pick Ensign. The easiest difficulty.

Why? Because that means the AI and you are on equal footing - The AI doesn't improve with difficulty, only, it will recieve patchwork dressing courtesy of our glorious Paradox overlords to pretend like the AI is that competent. Plot twist, It isn't that good.

Setting it to Ensign means neither you nor the AI get buffs. Oh, wait, the AI still gets buffs, because if it didn't, the AI would internally combust and be unable to function because it keeps building haphazard pre-coded buildings which can't adapt to a change in the game. That means the AI doesn't work. At all. Without buffs, it would just die. Now, if you've played Hearts of Iron 4, you'd know that the AI endlessly attacks your lines when you set them up just right. In Stellaris, you know that the rest of the game (excluding the crisis, but if you're lucky I'll remember to write that later) is finished when you build a strategic fortified station, box your enemy (and likely only enemy because you've expanded too quickly for the Ai to be able to match you without cheats) in with random enemy anomalies which it is unable to kill or otherwise counteract, meaning that they just don't go into those zones. Use them to your hearts content. For some reason, once you take their capital city, they cease being able to build ships effectively, meaning your 20k fleet stack is now fighting random 4k stacks that it instantly destroys with minimal resistance.

AKA, Win 1 war, and unless you're braindead you've won the game. No, not the war. The game.

Now what strategy should you employ Empire-wise to win?

Well, if you really want to be part of the cool kids gang, because apparently everyone picks Xenophile when playing Stellaris for some reason, pick Xenophobe. It's really in this year. Pick Fanatic purifier if you don't want to bother with diplomacy, AKA dealing with annoying people who can't manage anything and aren't worthy of your attention. Pick the Tomb World civic, also, because Every single planet you Exterminatus you can colonise for 100% habitability. Also, pick a random world, name it Graia, and make it a Forge World. For additional flavour, make a Fortress World called Cadia and exclusively recruit from there, and make sure that it falls before your guard did. Oh, sorry, I went off topic, I was teaching you how to have fun in Stellaris, not to win it.

So, ships? Well, through my whatever hours of this game, I discovered that in the current patch, all the AI builds (that is, non-fallen empires and crises) is point defense. AKA, at least in the early game, just throw whatever guns onto your gunboats, and spam corvettes until you can start making ships for flavour. Purely flavour. Corvettes are just too damn speedy.

Torpedoes are devastating against most things once you discover if the AI builds point defence or not anymore. In that event, just spam torpedoes for corvettes split with normal corvettes. After you've won any war, congratulations. Again, you've won the game.

Now what ascension perks? Well, literally anything - Synthetic is boring, because you're so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ edgy you want Westworld to be real. Now, join the cool kids and ultra edgelords, and go down the Psionic path. Then eventually, re-name your empire the Imperium of Man and blame your temporary crippling lack of anything on Heretics. Keep killing the Xenos and purifying your populace. Colonising a low habitability planet might cause your species to bug out and give you two of the same species traits, like Very Strong and Strong. Re-name these Adeptus Astartes, and voila, with psionics you have the Grey Knights. Enjoy! (Or the Blood Ravens which are infinitely superior.)

The great khan might pop up, just either submit if you're too weak or just wait him out, either works, he'll die and nothing will happen in the galaxy at all except a couple of weak empires to gobble if you can be arsed, I couldn't.

Also, Alloys are king. Sell alloys to get minerals to make more alloys. Stockpile everything via alloys. Alloys will make you invi... Oh, you're already invincible, the AI can't stop you.

Given up yet? I nearly did. The only reason I played this game to that point was for achievements. I lost one war - ONE WAR - Which I immediately recovered from, and never lost a single war again. Because the AI died, like it usually does. That was against a supposedly hard to beat federation because of the sheer ship count.

Ecunemopoli are overpowered. They just print out so many alloy jobs that you can't fill the roles. If you did, you'd break the already broken game.

Don't bother with habitats until you're rich enough to just build random things, in which, they're decent for research, that's it.

Uhm.. it's 1:47am, you still here? haven't refunded yet? Oh, yes, the Crisis. Their 90k stacks on normal settings would be a threat if i didn't print out 300k stacks of ships because both fallen empires in my game died killing themselves over nothing - AKA a 10 year War of the Heavens, more like, War of the Local Tesco Isle. You could set it all higher, but why would you? That's just more twiddling around, it expands as slow as everything else, and you'll just be lagging to make more stronger research and such. Ugh. I don't even want to detail it. Everything in this game is just either delaying the inevitable seams appearing in the AI or a hard enemy like the crisis.

Sorry, what did i mention already? the Prethoryn? Literally Tyranids. They just munch, so how do you kill them?

Munch them back.

That's it. Point defense, they have high armour but no shields to my memory so plasma as you should already be using because you don't need to strategise very much to beat the first fleet of every AI, to ensure your dominance. Don't use the fighters, they're still as useless as ever.

Unbidden?
Uh. I've never had the unbidden. No, seriously, it's all RNG, and I've had to use a mod to see what they look like, or look it up on the Wiki. And of course, I'm an impulsive modder, so they were ridiculously easy for me despite apparently being one of the harder ones to deal with. I think they have shields? and if you use warp tech they pop up? So, uh, go full UNSC and use your MAC Guns (Ballistic weaponry) to blow them up. Congratulations.

Now the contingency, I had once, on one of my former determined exterminator games. Those were fun. A machine fallen empire has the chance of going into overdrive (AKA Ascended Empire) or going berserk and trying to murder you. Fun times. I got the former, so it was, you guessed it, easy. Actually, I really enjoyed the Contingency. After basically taskforcing the Prethoryn and easily containing them, the events surrounding the contingency were spooky, synths that could blend in, difficult to counter, resources required, and they had some nice colouring that wasn't wormy I am the Swarm nonsense. I can't remember what the Contingency had because apparently I just dealt with them that easy. I mean, they're computers, tech and armour probably, right? So shields, anything should do well against them. Congratulations. Also, synths are clearly evil now. Don't use them until you end up using them.

End of the Cycle? Triggered if you're an idiot or just a masochist when breaching the shroud as a psionic. Nukes your empire, and it's a crisis all on its own. Literally, what do you expect me to say? If you've hit it, you know what happens, and that you should just worship either the worm ( What was will be or Slaneesh. Yes, Slaneesh. Khorne kills you, Tzeentch just buggers with your empire. AKA, covenant with the Desire one. Naturally. God knows I'd strike it with the one true Chaos God, the Great-Horned Rat, yes-yes! (or Malal but he got retconned.)

Yes, I'm breaking into Warhammer analogies. But you're either literally Hitler or just the God-Emperor of Mankind in most playthroughs. Heresy is like a tree.
As said about the Great Khan, unless you're unlucky, just ignore them, they have big boats that will annoy you. But that's all their ships are comprised of. A few terrible boats and that one big boi boat. A carrack? is that what it's called? Eh, regardless, bigger than your titans and battleships so have fun.

It is in my opinion that diplomacy remains useless still, except for non-aggression pacts. Research pacts only work when the AI has better research capabilities than you do. They never do. You can out-research them with ease.
Around 30 years into the game, you'll notice that every AI is overwhelming fleet power to you. It's because the AI is too dumb to consider not building their navy to the maximum force limit to conserve energy or minerals, or alloys at the start. You can build to them at any point, and with ease to counter them. If they declare war on you, congratulations! You can probably easily beat them.

Federations are useless. Why centralise your federation when you can just eat them, eat their planets, and use their resources for your own purposes?

However, I love the galactic community. It really is the United Nations in space, where you can write angry letters at the Fallen Empires for being a bunch of stingy old gits.

Want a good game? go play Total War: Warhammer 1 and 2. Or play Chess. It's pretty good for your soul. Want a good space game? If you haven't tried Star Wars: Empire at War, that was pretty damn good back in its day, and its still got a good modding community. Or go play Hearts of Iron 4, Senor Trostky is now a thing. Or, you know, just read a book, I'd recommend the Game of Thrones series, because I can guarantee that the Winds of Winter will be out before Paradox successfully make the AI in Stellaris functional. Or Homage to Catalonia, or the Ciaphas Cain series in the Warhammer universe, On War by Carl von Clausewitz, or, you know, watch the latest Brexit news. I just bought HP Lovecraft's complete collection, I'm going to better myself than play this anymore.

Only kidding, it's time for Determined Exterminators. At least, for 2 hours until I get bored.

Actually, considering that Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 is coming out heralded by Paradox? Buy this game. Buy it. Our glorious overlords deserve every penny of that pound. Heck, go buy Man the Guns, worship them, worship EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, I wanted a sequel, and they delivered. Now, if the AI is good in VTMB2, they have no excuses for Stellaris, especially after I bought MegaCorp and it was such a buggy mess.

I'm now 25, I've changed, I've done a lawful evil paladin in a dnd campaign, and I reject most of the cringe I've provided in this guide.

Most of it.

but I did cook at points.