The glorious Birdian Galactic Empire is born today.

Here is our home system, a glorious trinary chock-full of resources and glorious birds.

We’re not exploiting it fully at the moment, and so I order my construction ship to build the missing science stations and such. Meanwhile, we send our science ship out to survey a neighboring star system, and get started on advancing our glorious science.

The way research works in Stellaris is that you get to pick a research goal from the list of technologies you have all the prerequisites for. So I might have, for instance, Blue Lasers available now and then not have them available the next time around. So while I think researching combat capabilities now is a waste, I can’t just ignore all combat research until I find other potential enemies because I can never be sure when they’ll next be in the list. Still, at this stage I think focusing on growth technologies is a valid decision.

And so the early game goes: I eventually build a second science ship to conduct surveys more quickly, I send my construction ship around to develop infrastructure and expand our frontiers… and I encounter fun little stories and events as I progress through those initial, lonely stages.

Those events aren’t hugely game-changing so far (although as this session comes to a close I get the opportunity to reactivate an ancient alien shipyard, which I hope will give me something cooler than engineering research.)

But then… after a large investment in resource, the Birdian successfully land a colony ship on another world!

This is an auspicious time for our birds. Here’s our Empire as it stands now.

Admittedly, we still have a long way to go to colonize the enitre galaxy, but I think we have a solid base to get started. Our economy can easily sustain a growing colony, I’ve turned the corner on mineral production so now the bottleneck on expansion is Construction Ship time, not production… things are looking up