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Game play notes 11
Mercantile gives bonuses to farming. Nah I'm joshing ya it provides bonus to trade value. There are a handful actually and it took me a bit to pick on this one. Its perks are:
Clerks give an additional trade value.
Commercial zones, as well as commercial segments on ringworlds and trade districts in habitats, will provide 1 merchant job on top of the clerks.
A change in your trade policy to give reduced credits per trade value in exchange for consumer goods or unity. This is actually really useful to have, especially early on to get you some extra consumer goods without needing to dedicate pops to factories.
A +10% to trade value
-10% on market fees, letting you buy for less and sell for more.
Finishing gives an extra +10% tot trade value for +20% total.
Prosperity is a damn good tradition that provides all kinds of bonuses for large empires, such as:
-10% upkeep on district and building upkeep
-10% to building and district build cost and +25% build speed
+5% specialist output
+1 clerk job to the various districts that provides clerk jobs (not buildings like the commercial zone)
+1 housing from all dedicated housing districts.
Finishing it off gives +5% resources from jobs and +5 stability, which also contributes to more output from jobs. Its really good!
These ascension perks should be self explanatory and honestly, now that I know I can do repeatable research to get more I wont need to really strategize what I pick, but I am pointing this one out as being especially useful now as whenever I take over a planet I get 100 out of the 200 influence needed to move all my pops off the planet.
Let me tell you, I've been trying ever since I met them to get these guys to federate. I get all my favors and constantly send them trade deals like filling them up with food an alloys to finally get enough goodwill to get that +1 to acceptance. It feels good finally getting it. I was about ready to write in how a mock war happened.
Likewise I've been trying forever to get these jackasses to open a trade deal. While the majority of the jobs provided by megacorp buildings are clerks, hey its a job. Their commercial forum does provide a merchant job however, if you don't have the tradition to provide one. A few of the other buildings will also have a different job, like a mercenary building that gives a soldier job.
As for what the megacorp gets, just for having the building on our colonies (even if none of your clerk jobs are taken) they get some kind of resource out of it. Pretty much they get a building for generating research, food, minerals, credits, unity, alloys, consumer goods and naval capacity. Its not exactly a lot either, but seeing how we got over 50 colonies and suddenly plopping down 50 buildings that generate 6 research each starts to really add up, and they don't need their own pops to work the building.
Total War casus bellis are the best, simply because it removes the whole spending influence to claim systems thing. And when empires start getting 30+ sectors to their name you really don't want to bother with claiming it all. There are a few different types of total war CBs, usually they're related to being a genocidal empire. The colossus is how you get it without being such an empire. Though it can also be used against you, every other empire gets the "contain threat" CB on you which is also a total war CB. So be careful with how you use your power, eh?
The biggest advantage is being able to immediately start moving pops over once you take over the system. So even if you are fighting someone you most likely wont prevail over, hey you can least completely empty out their planets!
This attack moon is actually from an event, and its also hostile to the Cooperative, so that sector was basically useless for them! It was funny near the end where their fleets would spawn back into that sector and instantly gets mulched.
Oh yeah, thats another big perk to total war CBs: If you flip the sector that means your opponent's fleets can't reappear in them to reflip them back like in a traditional war!
I.... did not think it was possible for allies to join a ground war. I didn't think it was possible for an AI to even be able to do it! I appreciate it though, this fight was rally close before the slimes jumped in.
Behold, lagging behind: The Titan class ship! Titans ships are bigass ships that make battleships look like cruisers. They get access to the perdition beam that will one shot anything cruiser and below, and can rightly fuck up battleships if they manage to hit in the higher damage range (5k-10k) damage. They also get to have more armor than a battleship and even get a aura on them that effects enemy or friendly (in the same fleet that is) ships.
Sounds good right? Well, there are a few issues. First, they're really slow. Even compared to battleships, don't expect a fleet with a titan to go anywhere fast. Then there is the fact that they take so god damn long to build that if it gets destroyed, its gonna be a good year or two before you get a replacement out. Finally you are limited to how many titans you can have at once.
Which is where the federation fleet comes in! Federation fleets get their own limits on ship type. The naval capacity of the federation is based on a percentage of every empire's fleet capacity, in this case its taking 10% of everyone's fleet capacity. As a Hegemony president however we do not lose out on our own fleet capacity, we contribute without spending it. This can be increased to 30% of each member's capacity. Other empires can build ships for the federation and whoever is the president will get ownership, with ownership changing as presidents change. I do believe you do not pay any upkeep for federation ships by the way. Outside of construction costs its a free fleet under your command.
A sad limitation of this game's combat engine: Despite looking like a gigantic fuckoff beam was shot out and presumably would melt anything in its path, no this only hits 1 ship. You can start to see why I keep hundreds of corvettes flying around, every hit going to a corvette isn't a hit going after a battleship. Would rather have 10k hit a corvette and waste 9.6k of that damage than have it hit a battleship and possibly one shot it.
At this point in the game, this is really unneeded as we are hitting repeatables. As in ,I've researched everything. But hey! Why not! This building gives +150 society research in exchange for energy credits. Ideally what is supposed to be progression in this game is first you get your planets going, then you start specializing them, then you start using megaengineering to get structures to do things like generate research or materials that you need since your growth has effectively stopped.
Hey here is something we've had access to for a while and I just didn't realize what it did! The hyperlane anchor structure will let you claim a wild space sector like a regular space sector. Here is a little tip: Build a wild space fortress BEFORE you build the anchor. If you build the anchor first you can't build the fortress. This will let you have both a fortress and your space station on defense in the sector. Throw on an extra large weapon on both stations and then hangars so they will fight together as soon as something hostile jumps in.
I have no idea why this event fire as late as it did, in all of my other games that had this event it would fire off within the first decade or two 
But hey, at least this meant most of the specimens were in my sector and that there was no hostile jackass locking me off from the sector.
Qrava is a Superhabitable world which is a kind of rare world that you cannot terraform. You can't terraform into one, you can't terraform out of one. Coral worlds are actually the same. For being a superhabitable planet it gets +10% food and minerals from jobs, as well as +2 max districts for mining and agriculture. Pop growth speed goes up by 5% too. Building and district costs go up by 10% though
This planet has rich, dense mineral deposits due to it's high gravity and it has ideal growing conditions making it's mines and farms more effective.
Also its a big planet, usually 25 is the upper limit of how big a planet can get. I have seen 30, not sure if that is the absolute cap though. Bigger planets can have more districts on them, by the by.
Now this is something new for me, I have never seen a world like this before. This world has the Permanent Night modifier which gives +20% society research from jobs
There is no such thing as daylight on this planet, and the local lifeforms have evolved accordingly
This right here is why the gigastructure mod rules. After some time, alloys and credits we can turn pretty much any celestial body into a workable planet. Yes, we can colonize everything as an actual planet and not just as habitats. Hell, you can then build orbital habitats over these new planets!
So I picked the third option just cause I like seeing a bunch of traits on our pops. But then this made an entire new entry in the species list for each and every single solitary species in our sector. Including the ones waiting to be assimilated, which meant I had to go through like 8 different species and set them all to assimilation and then find every assimilated version of the ones with the extra perk to set them back to residence and this is with an ungodly laggy species menu that takes 10 seconds to register a click.
Then my power went out, clearly that option is cursed.
Whats with this universe producing randy foxgirls
This is a neat series of events to keep your construction ships doing stuff after you claimed all your sectors and built all your stations and are waiting between megastructures to build. After which you do get to get more use out of your ships with the bureau finding the occasional mineral deposit on some random celestial body in your sectors.
As you go down the event chain on the collider you get a few rare techs and the building will even start to have extra jobs added to it. Once you upgrade it you can build another collider elsewhere and it will retain those increased jobs. Not sure if this is intentional, there are other buildings with an upgraded form that you can't build the first stage elsewhere once you upgrade
Welcome to the succzone folks. One of these is currently generating 212 energy credits, 22 motes and 24 exotic gas. In a few decades the gas planet will turn into a barren planet and I assume from there we can terraform it.
Asteroid artillery are hilarious and I love them, though I tend to forget they exist. Those orange square icons are called photon sol, they provide a hefty amount of armor (Neutronium armor: 870. Photon sol: 4500!) and funnily enough gives some evasion. This asteroid has 1.5 evasion. The downside is that those photon slots are extremely energy hungry, a large requires 620 power . The small versions takes up 155 power and I wont be able to throw these on a corvette unless I gut every other part on one. Even the first tier is too power hungry to throw on a corvette. Hell, our artillery battle ships wont be able to fit the lowest tier on, but the carrier battleships can fit one on, only because it has minimal armaments.
Anyways, asteroid artillery. Beyond what we can do in the ship designer to equip it, we can then access an upgrade menu for each one that lets us spend a point and some alloys to upgrade it. Upgrade points are researched, and there is a "bulwark" tradition tree that gives more points. There are repeatables though so its possible to get a whole lot of points. You can upgrade:
Hull, which increases hull and armor by 30% a level
Payloads, which increase weapons damage by 20% a level
Coolant, which increases fire rate by 20% a level
Sensors, which increases weapons range by 25% a level
Targeting, which increases tracking by 30% a level
Regenerative hull which increases the daily hull and armor regen by 1.5% a level. You know, with 10 points in this that'll be restoring 15% of the hull and armor per game day. For this that would be 9k hull and 11.4k armor. That can undo several artillery battleship's worth of damage in a day.
And I can fit 11 more in this sector 
So hey thanks to DoubleNegative to letting me know about this, I really did not know how the EHOF worked. This lets you access sectors outside of the galaxy and might be unlimited in how many sectors it can provide. These sectors act like any other sector, in that you can get anomalies and dig sites once again. Though there are some unique sectors that can only be found in these out galaxy sectors. Which will be good now that stuff is getting locked down and event chains are drying up, lets me talk about something that isn't "and then I waited 50 years for megastructures to be built"
Also for the events in this sector, I am aware that the log just cuts off midsentence with a bunch of ellipses. The mod page does not mention any specific UI mod needed that makes these fully readable. I tried looking in the files but events don't seem to be stored plaintext.