Stellaris – Quick Guide to Sovereign Guardianship

Sovereign Guardianship Tips

Sovereign Guardianship (and it’s civics) encourage you to stack as many pops in a small area as possible.

See if you actually analyze the Empire Size malus and bonuses, and actually look at the numbers for empire size before and after this civics modifiers, some things look very interesting.

• Colonies go from 10 Empire Size to 20 (ouch).
• Branch Offices go from 2 to 4.
• Systems go from 1 to 2.5 (unlike Colonies, this increase can’t get mitigated at all).

However

Pops go from 1 per to 0.5 per! (this can stack up to -100% which makes your pops contribute nothing to Empire Size).

Districts go from 0.5 to 0.25 (this is basically nothing).

This is of course before going into any of the other bonuses, which is the frosting on top of the cake of these crazy benefits. I don’t think I can overstate how strong these buffs are for empire size. Let’s take a Colony with 40 pops and 10 districts on it.

That colony goes from 55 (10 + 40 + 5) to 42.5 (20 + 20 + 2.5). How about an Ecumenopolis? One World (+20), 250 pops (+125), 25 Districts (+6.25), for a total of 151.25 empire size compared to a similar Ecumenopolis which would be 272.5 Empire Size instead!

So, there’s two ways to play this build. The first is the tall way that’s fairly intended, get a small area with good chokepoints, and cram as much stuff in your planets as possible.

The second way is to go ultra wide, relying on the fact that after 20 pops your planets equalize in empire size and then begin to count a lot less.

Particular builds may require more writing but the TL:DR is that the real feature of this civic is the empire size modifiers, and abusing that is the best way to go.

Click to enlarge…

If you’re playing tall, your influence stockpile is going to be almost always at max due to a lack of border expansion. It might fall once you start building orbital rings or go heavy into GALCOM, but with Sovereign Guardianship you should be able to convert 3 Monthly Influence into +10% Monthly Unity.

This combined with generally low Empire Sprawl numbers means you should be able to blitz through Traditions, get Technologies somewhat faster, and be able to go HARD into Planetary Ascension. Last one in particular lowers Empire Sprawl from Planets even more, making everything else easier.