I found out and enjoyed this powerful combo. I shared this (modified) on the Stellaris subreddit. I have not been playing NCAA Football or painting too many minis so here you go.

Stellaris is a 4x game published by Paradox Interactive. Paradox creates vast sandbox games often created in a historical context with fans that say “I would like to have more war crimes for historical accuracy.” Unlike many other times in life the desire for more war crimes in a game for historical accuracy does not indicate that they are a real life fascist. Stellaris changes the subject of your imperial designs from “China” or “Prussia” or “Reforming the Roman Empire” to “Bird People” or “Turtle People” or “Robots that are Reforming the Roman Empire”.

Stellaris has recently destroyed all of the balance built into its third revision for a new economic and population system. The main selling point of the system was to reduce endgame lag. In the most recent developer diary #385 the devs noted “Ironically, improving AI tends to consume any benefits we carved out through performance improvements. “ This publisher delivers the finest eurojank games and I continue to support them without reservation. The writing and vibes of the game are immaculate and it is much easier to hate on the space radish people for committing war crimes compared to americans or japanese in the real world.

This new version of the game is not balanced and the AI is complete crap. Even playing sub optimally I’ve had to bump up the difficulty to even get some sort of game pressure. However, I keep coming back because these changes represent the refresh of the game that forces you out of your old combos and looking for the new most broken builds. One build I discovered was the complete combination of the tradition Unyielding with the perk Eternal Vigilance. For most empires I play this is a go-to combo for the first tradition/accession combo because of the insane ability to build a level one spaceport, add a gun battery, and get that cost paid back within 6 months.

• Waiting to do it makes it more difficult to manage the spike from all the new defense platforms. In earlier games of 4.0 I had been taking unyielding after supremacy and my ascension tradition and running into some energy/alloy issues.
• Putting starbases that self generate defense platforms on your colonies keeps them safe voidworms, asteroids, and other random problems.
• Nothing stops you from downgrading the starbase after you’ve upgraded it and gotten the free defense platforms. This is great if you’re going wide and continuing to expand your empire creating lots of difficult fights between your core sectors and the claims you made early. For tall empires you can pump resources into getting a stronger unity/science advantage.

It is extremely hard to justify taking supremacy as your first “combat” tradition if you’re assuming you get 1919 in free alloys (9 platforms * 241 per platform) = 2169 – (200 for the starport + 50 for the gun battery) assuming you built your first starbases before you unlocked fortress doctrine.

This is something that is 100% going to get debuffed again but until it is you have to ride it like you own it. Unless they program the AI to go hard into this pick (something they should consider) or make espionage better at disabling starbases (maybe give a decision for 5 years allowing you or the AI to “shut down” a starbase once the operation has been completed) I don’t see the counterplay that beats this in the early game.

When I originally posted this on reddit there were some people who pointed out that at higher difficulty levels this combo didn’t work well leading me to think it could be a trap at lower difficulties. Another conclusion is that I just like playing people that mind their own business and I”m not trying to genocide my neighbors early and often. Maybe this is something I should look to change.