Planning a healthy economy and investing in your empire’s future is critical to establishing galactic dominion.
That said, the economic systems in Stellaris leave a lot to be desired. You don’t have much political control over the “rules” of production and trade, and industry development is reduced to picking which buildings to construct.
Over the years, many modders have contributed toward making Stellaris’ economy more realistic, immersive, and enjoyable.
Check out these fun & engaging economy-related mods that are all worth a try.
Playing a “tall” empire instead of expanding your borders can be a challenge considering the base planets and habitats in Stellaris only have room for ten buildings.
If you don’t care much about balance and just want to get the most out of your planets, the 36 Building Slots mod is a great way to do it.
You’ll still have to unlock them normally by building residential districts and clearing blockers – but it can be a lifesaver for Pacifist empires who have difficulty seizing territories.
Immersive Economy is a young mod still in its early stages of development. Still, it looks very promising, and what it already offers will make your economy a lot more nuanced.
As you know, Stellaris lets you choose between a Civilian, Militarized, and Mixed Economy, offering different bonuses and setbacks.
Civilian is suitable for consumer goods to keep your pops happy, and Militarized gives you more alloys so you can build a bigger navy.
This mod changes these policies so Civilian Economy grants faster planetary build speed while Militarized Economy allows you to build ships more quickly.
If you want to go from producing consumer goods to alloys, you’ll have to manually restructure your industry and replace one type of building for the other. It’s more challenging and much more realistic.
Running out of any resource in Stellaris is definitely cause for concern, but if you manage to overcome the initial hit, it doesn’t get any worse.
The penalties for resource deficits are the same regardless of whether you just ran out of materials or have been accumulating debt for years.
This is grossly unrealistic, not to mention inconvenient when you just got distracted for a moment and briefly ran out of resources.
You owe one energy credit? Enjoy watching your empire collapse.
Reasonable Reductions addresses the situation by making these debuffs scale linearly with the % of a given resource you’re consuming in excess. If you’re consuming 10% more energy than you produce, you get 10% debuffs to mineral production, and so on.
The world economy is the battlefield of large corporations who fight for market control and profits with prices and connections rather than violence.
Interstellar Incorporated makes the galactic economy a lot more like this by allowing your citizens to start their own corporations dealing in security, research, mining, etc.
These corporations are beholden to your empire, and though they’ll always seek personal gain, they’ll share some of these profits with you.
In addition, these corporations will create their own military, construction, and research ships – and set out into the stars to find and exploit any unclaimed resources.
Have you noticed how, as the game goes on, it seems to take longer and longer for the system to process each player’s actions?
Well not anymore!
Production Revolution completely solves this issue by turning all of your available citizens into a “manpower” resource rather than forcing you to manually manage them.
This way, neither you nor the AI have to worry about the details.
This streamlines the economy, and it’s definitely worth trying, especially on low-end machines.
Famous American inventor Benjamin Franklin once said that “in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
There are definitely some exceptions to the “death” rule in Stellaris – but there’s no reason why a galactic community would be free of taxes.
Building all those mega-structures isn’t free, you know?
The Galactic Imperial Tax mod gives you access to new galactic community resolutions to levy taxes for those critical galactic infrastructure projects – but only once you’ve been crowned Galactic Emperor.
Many people complain that the economy in Stellaris is a bit too abstract and hard to understand. In addition, it seems like these spacefaring civilizations forgot to modernize their industry.
Rise of Cosmic Industry aims to overhaul the game’s economic systems by developing six fronts:
Orbital Infrastructure
Factory Automation
Space Exploitation
Fallen Empire Buildings
Cargo Ships
Realistic Development
Among these, my favorites are Orbital Infrastructure – which adds a realistic system to construct more buildings per planet – and Factory Automation, which is pretty self-explanatory.
This is a very simplified overlook of the mod’s features, so definitely try it out for yourself and see what you think.
Nelson Chitty is a Venezuelan expat living in Argentina. He’s a writer and translator passionate about history and foreign cultures. His ideal weekend is spent between leisurely playing games of Civilization VI and looking for the next seinen anime to marathon.
