Any game is better than GalCiv *ducks*
Ehem, retreat button has a 25% chance to damage your (damaged) ships to 1% of their HP.. so if you use it a lot you will lose a lot ;P It's important to always have 2 fleets, never clump everything in 1 fleet. 2 Fleets occupy half the space in battle, meaning for a time twice the ranged firepower compared to 1 big fleet)
P.S..: Don't believe firepower readout, balance fleets properly, I use a 30/20/10/5 approach (Corvettes, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battleships) ^^ and most importantly, don't put strike-craft on your ship, they are totally bugged sadly.
Important to have corvettes upfront, they don't do much dmg so put point defense on em since missiles will target them first, but what they do is draw fire and evade (tachyon lance) shots ,p) shots that would otherwise go for your ships that do actual damage. And likely 1 hit kill them in late game.
And finally... to my greatest sadness I noticed that
# Race profile images are actual bone-IK things, meaning the sprites are animated via bones and keyframes, no way to edit that, I don't have Maya ~.~
# Many things hardcoded ~.~
Btw, at this point I am actually playing my "own" mod for Stellaris.. put building construction times (except for UNIQUES) to 45 days, put debris research time to 30 days, put leader limit to 24 (before it was 12) and reduced leader cost by 50%, increased ALL resource buildings yield increases, level 1 = 2, level 2 = 4.. no more +1 improvements. Increased weapon ranges by a good 15 for each weapon (except the ones already at long range) made ships move faster, but act slower in combat, increase all HP by 2, increased colony fortress level by 3, increased all cooldowns flat by 100%, decreased all sector creation costs to 1 influence, and increased the core sector limit to 20, research increases in steps of 5 (should you wish). Also since I am playing an Alien hive, put minimum age for leaders to 1
Also changed some weapon effects.. made plasma explosions way bigger, made missile explosions bigger... made ship explosions bigger ;P Now combat doesn't look like a spreadsheet collapses on a graphics designer (still believe Paradox does flat out not HAVE a (effect) graphics designer btw..) the effects in this game are abhorrently ugly, many effects actually have a 4x4 pixel sprite.. yeah, 4x4 pixels. Did no one ever tell paradox that SCALING effects is way more costly in shaders than rendering a full-sized effect ?
Oh well ;p (The above changes all apply for AI as well of course, I am not cheating, I am making the game go faster) last change that I still can't find is food.. I want food to be global.. but I don't really understand how to have pop consume food from a global pool..