Stellaris’ Nomads expansion finally lets me live out my Battlestar Galactica fantasies, though its Wayline system could definitely use some work

I’ve always loved starting a new Stellaris campaign. There’s a special magic for me surrounding those initial years, as you explore the systems surrounding your home planet, discover anomalies, and just generally see the shape of the galaxy around you. Maybe your fleets run into a mysterious alien species, an abandoned mega structure, or a black hole that starts whispering to you.

For me, it’s the most exciting time, before the sheer scale of the game overwhelms your ability to really focus on any individual solar system. I’ve always struggled with that aspect of Stellaris, balancing my desire to explore the universe with the demands of claiming territory and planets, chokepointing swathes of the galaxy against the equally hungry factions out there in the black on all sides.

So I’ve long wondered what it’d be like to play as a faction with no territory. Stellaris’ Nomads expansion is pretty successful in that regard, giving you an Arkship for your spacefaring race (though sadly with just one visual variant), and a bunch of extremely fun origins to choose from. I picked and played through The Sacred Path, which saw my race of Arthropoid pilgrims tracking down sacred sites across the galaxy. But the Forever Cruise, which sees you pick a crew and a passenger race, also sounds very good.

You start off fixing your Arkship, but once that’s done, you can go pretty much anywhere. Arkships are essentially a colony, shipyard, and battle fleet rolled into one, and they can ignore closed borders, meaning you carry what you need with you to explore. The main drawback with nomadic factions, I found, is the Waystation. Rather than holding territory, nomadic races build outposts that can harvest and stockpile resources.

When they’re full, though, they need to be picked up by a logistics ship and delivered to your Arkship. So, theoretically, you can go wherever you want, but you’ll make it increasingly difficult for your ships to ferry resources to you. There is an alternative, and that’s harvesting resources with your Arkship directly from planets. The price is that planetary mining stations produce 75% fewer resources for a while, and the faction who owns the system really doesn’t like it, so you’ll want to pick unclaimed systems that don’t have Waystations in them.

Yes, this does become increasingly difficult as the galaxy gets painted. The best way to survive as nomads seems to be to befriend a faction and agree a Wayline treaty with them so you can build inside their territory. Factions offer contracts to nomadic races, including remote research, transporting sightseers, or scanning systems, all of which are an incredibly easy way to acquire influence so you can construct more Waylines or form treaties.

Your nomadic faction also has a new resource combining Energy Credits and Minerals which is called Operational Reserves, but honestly, I’m really not sure why this was created because it’s confusing as hell. Your reserve level (low, medium, high) confers various benefits or detriments to your Arkships. You can also choose the speed at which you consume your reserves to add further bonuses, but it doesn’t really give you a proper breakdown so it’s often hard to keep balanced.

For the most part, though, I had a lot of fun piloting my Arkship across the galaxy and slowly upgrading it into an unstoppable juggernaut, but the phrase “We’re running out of sky” couldn’t help but come to mind. As spheres of influence expand, it feels like you’re almost obligated to befriend and support a faction, especially as completing contracts is so lucrative.

I do, however, really like the post-Nomads Stellaris galaxy. It’s fun running into other nomadic factions and there are some great extra additions, too, whether it’s new OST like Manduul Haan by Batzorig Vaanchig (which has a lovely bit of Mongolian throat singing you can listen to further up), or events like the Champion’s Forge Live.

This TV station Arkship broadcasts a special free-for-all you can enter your fleets into, giving you a chance to square off against the rest of the galaxy to potentially win the grand prize, though sadly I didn’t make the cut. Still, its additions like this that make Stellaris’s galaxy so fun, and Nomads definitely contributes to that, even if playing as a nomadic faction isn’t 100% what it should be right now.

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