You should be able to build more than one generator district. If you mean the generator building, that might be restricted.

When you hover over the credits, what does it say they are going to?

I can build the multiple districts, but only a single generator building, and I seem to recall I couldn't upgrade it more then once.

As for where its going, a bunch of places, but the majority (4k energy credits) were going to the maxed out space stations with gravity well generators around my Empire.

I had, perhaps about 1/10th of the 2k sandbox galaxy taken over, with about 60 total planets (including cloud cities).

That's why I kinda was wondering if I'm missing something major, because from what I saw in my game, you'd just have to leave major sections of your empire unguarded, as the energy costs of the space stations/upgrades were just too much to fully take over the galaxy.

Are you over the station limit?

From what I recall, yeah, I think I had around 30ish for the max total, but I had 60ish stations total.

However, as I said, It seems like there's a severe cap on the total size of an empire, or you have Massive fleets constantly, one or two, there is no middle ground.

Is there a possibility that the Empire just doesn't have the passives to support a larger station presence like that?

I can't think of any empire that needs that many stations, which, sounds like the issue. I can consult with some of the individuals that are frequent and well-informed players of the mod.

Originally posted by Sapherno11:

From what I recall, yeah, I think I had around 30ish for the max total, but I had 60ish stations total.

However, as I said, It seems like there's a severe cap on the total size of an empire, or you have Massive fleets constantly, one or two, there is no middle ground.

Is there a possibility that the Empire just doesn't have the passives to support a larger station presence like that?

Hey fella. I know I'm a bit late on this, but going over station maximum will DRASTICALLY increase the station upkeeps, resulting n things like your 4k energy deficit.

You're generally better off only putting stations on key points of interest, such as important systems (Shipyard systems, capital, important production zones you can't afford to lose/get damaged) and chokepoints.

Generally you want to make sure that your empire controls any given chokepoint going into a constellation.

IE, instead of having two systems that the enemy can attack from multiple hyperlanes, you control the pinch so they can only attack one system, even if it's from multiple lanes.

This is pretty much a core standard rule for any game of stellaris, be it vanilla, modded, or total conversion like this.

Yes this results in you leaving some systems relatively undefended, but with clever station placement and a couple 'trade protection' stations dotted around, you can actually completely prevent piracy as well.

And if you guard your borders with fully upgraded chokepoint stations (And you can have backup chokepoints as well in case the primary ones are breached), then you generally don't even need to go anywhere near your station cap.

Energy is a little more difficult to get in this mod, the quantity of technician jobs for most planets is somewhat less than that of miners or farmers, generally to counteract that I make some or all of my ecumenopoli chock full of energy districts, you get 2 technician jobs for each district and you also get +10% technician output once you get the tech for it which can set you up with 20+ technicians per ecumenopoli that I can consistantly get to produce at 250~% of the base output(About 20 credits per technician)

I had to stop using my computer because of repair issues, but basically, I ended up needing as many stations as I did, because I was Constantly being attacked by other empires surrounding me, and they would ALWAYS travel to any point there was a hole in the space stations to assault the empire, OR unless my ships were stationed literally at the entry point of every system, They would choose to just ignore my ships completely, and fly to an undefended system.

It got to the point I was constantly having to micromanage everything to prevent attacks, which got very tedious, and as a result, I just stopped playing the mod entirely, as the ONLY way I found to counter the nonstop aggression was to create stations with gravity well generators.

Of course, the massive energy drain to STOP those invasions rendered that pointless too. I'll probably look into mods either increasing energy gain, or increasing station caps.

Originally posted by Sapherno11:

I had to stop using my computer because of repair issues, but basically, I ended up needing as many stations as I did, because I was Constantly being attacked by other empires surrounding me, and they would ALWAYS travel to any point there was a hole in the space stations to assault the empire, OR unless my ships were stationed literally at the entry point of every system, They would choose to just ignore my ships completely, and fly to an undefended system.

It got to the point I was constantly having to micromanage everything to prevent attacks, which got very tedious, and as a result, I just stopped playing the mod entirely, as the ONLY way I found to counter the nonstop aggression was to create stations with gravity well generators.

Of course, the massive energy drain to STOP those invasions rendered that pointless too. I'll probably look into mods either increasing energy gain, or increasing station caps.

The point of the build plan I mentioned to you is to prevent 'holes'. Make sure you have researched the gravity well techs, so they can't jump past your stations, and then make sure all border systems have stations. Simple.

Then I don't understand how your plan differed from what I attempted to do.

The issue is, with the gravity well generators, the energy drain was WAY too high to actually stop enemies from entering the Empire, or Required a massive fleet presence scattered across my entire empire. I Controlled every choke point going into my empire, each single point blocked at least 3 different lanes into the empire, and I only had stations AT those chokepoints.

However, my Empire still had almost 60 different stations (I think) and I controlled 30% of the galaxy at that point.

It got to the point the tech in the game could not sustain that playstyle. Hence my issue.

this is partly a paradox thing, where the technician job is the lowest priority, you need to make sure you havent built too many high priority jobs on your credits planets

That...could very well be it, as I've yet to figure out how to lower job priorities. I never thought to check what the priorities were on those techs, so that coulda been it.

pops naturally gravitate to the middle (silver jobs) you need a minimum of those kind of jobs on planets dedicated to credits/energy

Another thing is to try not to build structures w/ jobs that you don't have the pops available for. This does two things.

1: If your have more jobs than pops, you're actually contributing to lag. The endgame lag isn't due to more pops, it's due to more empty jobs. Every empty job individually checks every pop on the planet for employment status and employment tier. So if you have 300 pops and 3 empty jobs, that's 900 job checks.

2: As Warcomissar mentioned, pops will automatically be promoted to the next highest tier of job. Now the thing is that energy production, mineral production, and food production, are all in the lowest tier of job. So whenever you build alloy production or weapons/gas/components production for ships, if you don't have unemployed pops ready to take the jobs, they'll leave from Technicial, Farmer, and Miner to the higher tier jobs.


In short, don't build new jobs until you have at least 1 unemployed ready to take part in it.

Going over fleet cap or station cap or admin cap can sink your economy. The upkeep cost increases exponentially. I have had great success myself building choke point fortresses around my empire.
A few tips.
First as already stated, chose systems where enemies have to go through. Hence why it's called a choke point.
Second and CRITICAL, as you expand and conquer more choke points and build fortresses, DISBAND interior fortresses that are no longer on the front lines.
Third, fight wars of conquest in only one direction at a time. Make sure the territory you will gain ends with a choke point. Fortify that choke point and disband the now redundant one that used to be your front lines.

I face the same problem as you do when I aggressively expand in all directions. I carefully plan my offensives to mitigate the need for fortresses every few systems.