Stellaris players aren’t at all happy with the AI habitat spam that plagues their games and have rallied yet again, begging Paradox to address the grand strategy game’s long-running issue.
Introduced with the title’s Utopia expansion, habitats act as a tool that enables playing tall. In a sense, they behave like planets you can construct yourself, provided you have enough resources.
Stellaris AI Habitat Spam
But as much as tools enabling different playstyles are always welcome, the AI’s tendency to build lots of habitats has been creating a series of problems for players, ranging from deteriorating performance to forcing them into repeatedly waging long wars.
“I f** hate habitats I really do. Watch my performance slowly drop from a cliff and having to endure 60-years long wars just because the AI can’t stop spamming goddamned fortress habitats in nonsensical systems,” Reddit user Palbane343 wrote in a thread that’s received a good amount of attention from the game’s community.
“I wouldn’t be so mad if they knew how to identify chokepoints, but still, there really should be an option to just turn them off maybe in exchange of (sic!) setting up the difficulty a little bit.”
User Black-Sam-Bellamy chimed in by noting that “there’s no downside (from the AI point of view) to having as many habitats as possible. They generate more pops, and as we all know, pops are king. AI doesn’t care about lag or micromanaging.”
Stellaris’ late-game performance has been an issue developer Paradox has wrestled with since launch. Its sci-fi grand strategy game can host several players whose empires inevitably grow alongside various other more or less neutral parties. Simulating everything naturally takes a toll on players’ hardware.
Having the AI build habitats without abandon adds more entities to the galaxy map. Worse yet, since they behave like planets, this means that players have a limited set of tools to deal with them. They can bombard or assault each individual habitat or use the Colossus ship to destroy them. Both approaches can get very heavy on micromanagement and take a lot of time, especially when you’re dealing with an AI opponent with lots of territory.
One proposed solution is to introduce an option to disable habitats, likely when setting up a new game of Stellaris, thus completely removing the possibility of the AI spamming them.
Others would like to see the amount that can be built limited and potentially tied to starbases. But while Stellaris AI habitat spam is aggravating for quite a few players, others think the problem lies elsewhere.
“Rather than make the AI play suboptimally, they should add more mid/late game influence sinks. Once you get to a certain point in the game, you run out of stuff to spend influence on if you’re not making lots of claims,” user LudaireWah wrote.
“You end up capped on influence, and habitats are the only spammable influence sink, so that’s the place to spend it. I feel like that’s an important step to take before adding a setting to disable them. There’s plenty of alternatives to Xeno-compatibility; there aren’t any useful spammable influence sinks for peaceful empires.”
Modders have already attempted to address Stellaris’ AI habitat spam by either limiting or removing them.
This, however, remains an imperfect solution. Not only do mods need to be updated regularly, but they also render you unable to earn Steam achievements, which is too high a price for some players.
Whether or not Paradox will hear and act on these players’ pleas remains to be seen. We’ve reached out for comment and will update if we hear back.
If you don’t mind missing out on an achievement or two and want to get serious revenge on the AI for causing you so much habitat-related hurt, these console commands should prove handy.
Keep updated on the latest PC Gaming news by following GameWatcher on Twitter, checking out our videos on YouTube, and giving us a like on Facebook. We may also include links to affiliate stores, which gives us a small commission if you purchase anything via them. Thank you.
