The best way to play Stellaris is to imagine the possibilities when you’re selecting things in the empire creator. It’s by far my favorite part of the game and the closest one can get to rolling up characters in a an RPG. In this series I’m going to be looking at different empires I’ve played that all have two things in common:

• They all use the Ocean Paradise

Using Ocean Paradise as an Origin

So you start with a big planet? A good big planet? It’s a great planet with a bonus to pop growth speed, resources from jobs, and happiness/stability. Additionally, you’re in a nebula and that looks cool the entire game. The Nebula Refinery is a nice little starbase resource building that adds minerals and exotic gases. Depending on what the current patch of the game you’re playing the additional gases from the nebula refinery are extremely helpful to “meh”. It’s impossible to change your starting system since you’re always picking a size 30 ocean world with a bunch of frozen worlds and ice asteroids.

Unless you take a really weird civic like Planetscapers you’re also completely free from any sprawl, industrial waste, or other blockers in your empire. Now, there is a big downside in that you’re not getting any other guaranteed worlds. Normally you’re getting two additional planes within a few jumps of your system. This lets you have a capital world, an alloy world, and a research world and get your pops growing fairly quickly. Not with Ocean Paradise and it can be a long time before you settle a second planet.

Using Jellyfish People as the Portrait

They honestly look perfect. They have a nice little mushroom cap, a bunch of tentacles, and cool little hands. You’ve got your red one on the left, the blue one, the green one, and the purple on right. For me, the Jellyfish people are the pinnacle of art in Stellaris. I don’t like the more recent art packages that just seem…. boring.

Another great aspect of using the Jellyfish people are two of the name lists Aquatic 2 is the best name set in the game full of pirate fun. Other empires run when Big Esmeralda is in charge of the empire.

Aquatic 4 is also a standout with a great set of Victorian sounding twee names.

Mechanically all of the Jellyfish people with the Ocean Paradise origin are aquatic. This is a great perk that increases your worker output, decreases your housing use, and increases your habitability on ocean worlds. These are all good things for the cost of 2 upgrade points. Recently they’ve added permeable skin for aquatic portraits that reduces your habitability on non-wet worlds by 20%. There is no reason to not take this trait if you’re doing an ocean paradise run.

Common Play Themes

The point of this series is going to be showing all of the flexible ways I play, and like to play the Ocean Paradise/Jellyfish people combo. The biggest issue is that you can’t play as machines with this origin. That cuts out a lot of empire types.

The second biggest issue is that despite the flexibility you’re almost always going to need to take adaptability as one of your first traditions. Being stuck on the RNG train waiting for the ability to terraform worlds into ocean planets sucks and I’m willing to take a tradition that only has 3 impacts that I really care about (lower housing and additional max districts for non-artificial planets). I typically want my second council agenda to be “conquer nature” to start the process of unlocking terraforming so any habitable planets nearby are able to be transformed.

Even if I started with 2 normal ocean planets nearby I would still take this path because researching terraforming gases allows you to unlock one of the most flavorful Ascension Perks in the game. Even better, this perk only requires one other perk so you can take it in the dreaded second ascension perk slot.

As you can see above Hydrocentric does four things. First, it reduces the cost to terraform a planet into an ocean. This isn’t just “regular” planets but also applies to tomb worlds, barren planets, and volcanic worlds. Second, it lets you increase the size of your planets (like your big size 30 capital planet) by three at the cost of some influence and energy. THIS IS GREAT as basically every single planet you get is 3 sizes bigger. Next, your Aquatic trait is increased so you get more worker output, more housing, and increased habitability. Finally, you get a special weapon that terraforms planets to ocean worlds and removes the non-aquatic pops for you. Cracking fallen empires is perfect.

So long and thanks for all the fish

Stellaris is always changing the balance and how different empires interact and function. I don’t think that Jellyfish people on the Ocean Paradise are ever going to be a “meta” pick but I’ll be playing the long after the nerf hammer hits them hard.

I’ve been wanting to come up with an easy way to share my content and get into good habits and sharing all of the different and weird Stellaris jellyfish people empires is one of them. Over the next few weeks look for me to start talking about other mechanics through the lens of the Jellyfish people.