stellaris science ship assist research

Stellaris: What to Know About Exploring the Galaxy With Science Ships

Stellaris' galaxies are ripe with mystery, dangers and treasure to be uncovered, and science ships play a key role in an Empire's growth.

While colony worlds, starbases and military fleets are important for any Empire to survive and thrive in Stellaris , it's the science ships that make that growth possible. They are the only ships capable of traveling to unknown star systems and essentially act as scouts to let Empires know what's out there. They're also capable of uncovering valuable relics that can offer powerful boons to your Empire. For that reason, they are key to gaining a head start early in a session and should be handled carefully.

All Empires start off with one science ship that can begin exploring neighboring systems. At the start of any game, players must race to discover as much territory as possible, and the best way to do this is by building at least two more science ships and recruiting scientist leaders to command them. Each science ship costs 100 alloy to build at a shipyard, but the cost and upkeep of all leaders will increase as your Empire grows.

Related: How to Get a Size 55 Planet in Stellaris

Even if there's nothing new in the galaxy to explore for a time, science ships can be used for completing any anomalies or dig site left from before. They can also assist a colony world's research, increasing the output of physics, society and engineering research points for new tech.

When an anomaly is found , players will get an alert at the top of their screen. Clicking on this will bring up a screen that has the option to direct a scientist to research the anomaly immediately. The scientist will return to their current assignment once they've finished investigating the anomaly. Sometimes, an anomaly might be a much higher level than the scientist's, meaning it could take years in-game to complete. In these cases, players should either leave the anomaly for later or reassign a higher-level scientist to research it.

Choosing which scientists command the ships can play a crucial role in surveying systems. When recruiting a new scientist to command a ship, it's best to choose those with traits that directly assists in surveying or completing anomalies. Those with an expertise in certain fields should be saved for researching new technologies. Like with any other leader class, the scientist's skill level determines how fast they can survey a system or complete anomalies, special projects or dig sites. When leaders level up, they may gain new traits that further enhances their abilities, so don't worry if there are no candidates currently available with the desired traits.

Related: Stellaris Vs. Endless Space 2: Which Sci-Fi Grand Strategy Game Is Better?

There are also multiple ways to enhance every science ship's capabilities. For example, researching defensive upgrades such as better armor, shields and hyperdrives will increase their speed and survival chances. Additionally, the Discovery  Tradition Trees  helps with exploring early on, as it can decrease the amount of time it takes to survey a planet, complete anomalies or increase the chance of a science ship successfully disengaging when attacked.

While science ships can come across hundreds of potential systems ripe for expansion, they'll sometimes stumble across systems that hostile space creatures call home. From Ancient mining Drones to the colossal Guardian Creatures , your science ships will be at risk of being destroyed.

When clicking on a science ship, players have the option of having said ship on a passive or evasive stance. Passive will have the ship operate as normal even in the presence of a hostile space entity, while evasive will have the ship attempt to escape the system as soon as possible. While systems with Guardians should be avoided at all costs, those with lesser space entities can safely traverse through by manually commanding the ship while staying out of range of the creatures until reaching the next hyperlane.

Related: Stellaris: Five Tips for Surviving in Multiplayer

Inevitably, your science ships will discover alien Empires in first contact scenarios that can either be peaceful,or lead to immediate conflict. With the fog of war added in a past update, it'll be difficult to gain enough info on Empires and the territory they control or the size of their fleet power. A good way to learn early on is by having a science ship explore as much of their territory as possible.

Depending on the Empire encountered, this can mean a huge risk for your science ship and scientist as they could be attacked and have no way of defending themselves. Surveying as many systems as possible is most important as a way of finding and researching the anomalies before rival science ships can. Otherwise, surveying a system again is unlikely to reveal any new anomalies.

While not equipped with any weapons, science ships can play a useful role in interstellar warfare . Once space battles are over, debris from enemy ships can sometimes be researched as a special project, which can unlock research into new technologies or provide research points if the technologies are already known to your Empire. Scanning debris does have a time limit, so you should command your science ship to go to the battle site as soon as a safe opportunity presents itself. This is especially useful when thrust into a war against stronger Empires, providing an opportunity to use their own advanced weapons against them.

Keep Reading: Which Stellaris DLC Is Worth Buying?

Originally posted by Vovarush : No, you designate scientists as planetary governors instead

Originally posted by pauloandrade224 : so at some point just disband science ships now?

Originally posted by Isaac_Clark : Originally posted by pauloandrade224 : so at some point just disband science ships now?

Originally posted by Grayhorse : I am not exactly a fan of this change. I know assist was kinda redundant, but it still was useful to an extent. Not sure why they made this change.

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Auto "Assist Research" for science ships

• Thread starter Aepdneds
• Start date Mar 3, 2022

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• Mar 3, 2022
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It is tedious to assign a science vessel to every research colony, especially if you have to reassign them due to dying science leaders or due to an enemy fleet in one of your systems. So it would be nice if you could just click a button and the ship is flying to the next planet.  

Lt. General

As it happens I thought about that in my (still) 3.2 game yesterday, when I decided to use my surplus alloys and energy to send out 50+ science ships to assist research planets all at once: that was a rather tedious process! That said, in 3.3 leaders are going to be much more rare, so I'm not sure it's still required to streamline this process - not that it couldn't be improved, but i think there are more pressing matters. There is one thing I've noticed though: the game doesn't seem to keep track of whether a planet already has a science ship assigned for assistance. I'm pretty sure that in an earlier version I could not send a science ship to assist a planet when another one was already on its way to do the same. But no longer! Can we have this behaviour back, please?  

Assisting research isn't the only task that could do with some improvement. Colonizing planets and other tasks where you have to zoom into the solar system in order to select the specific planet that it affects are equally as tedious when doing them en masse. The core problem here is that you can't do it from the galaxy view like you can with surveying sectors and building stations/outposts, resulting in more clicks then needed. Making a feature that can target different planets from galaxy view would benefit a significant amount of existing mechanics.  

Field Marshal

Deshiba said: Assisting research isn't the only task that could do with some improvement. Colonizing planets and other tasks where you have to zoom into the solar system in order to select the specific planet that it affects are equally as tedious when doing them en masse. Click to expand...

HFY said: You can also set Assist Research from the galaxy map, just click on the ship (in the outliner or on the map), click the Assist Research command button on the ship's interface, and then click the target colony in the outliner. It's not a great UX but it does work for those tasks. Click to expand...

Franton said: That is hardly better than using the galaxy map and zooming into the individual system, because the outliner doesn't show which planets already have an assist! This is a problem when you have multiple science ships, because you have to switch focus from the science ship list to a planet, and therefore you lose the internal state of the selection tracker that lets you pick one science ship after another. With the galaxy map method you have an extra click or two per ship, but you can work through multiple science ships more easily: when you have multiple idle science ships (e. g. at the Mega Shipyard), you can click on the top one, find a planet to send it to without losing focus, and then you click on the list again and you will get the next idle ship into focus without having to dig through the list again. Click to expand...

HFY said: You can click the planet in the Outliner and check if it has a ship assigned, that's visible in the planet modifiers. Click to expand...

Critical Ethics

Be neat if you could shift-click the assist research button and your ship would path to the unassisted planet with the highest science output.  

• Mar 4, 2022

Just realized that I posted this in the wrong sub.. Could a mod move this thread to the suggestion sub?  

Aepdneds said: Just realized that I posted this in the wrong sub.. Could a mod move this thread to the suggestion sub? Click to expand...

Agreed, it's really annoying to do this. Just having a nice button toggle would solve it nicely.  

HFY said: You can colonize from the Galaxy map -- click on the planet icon in the galaxy view and you should get a window with a "Colonize" button. Click to expand...

Deshiba said: That's not what I meant. You can't build a colony ship and then colonize a planet from galaxy view with that same ship. In effect this means I can't make 10 colony ships and then use them once I've expanded into the space I need them to go. You could only do it from galaxy view after the system is claimed/the habitat is built, loosing time waiting for the ship to be constructed. With that either you inefficiently colonize from galaxy view, or you micro the process by pre building and zooming in to solar view. It's a small annoyance and/or inefficiency that could be solved by a smarter interface for targeting specific planets from the galaxy view. Colonizing and Assisting Research are just 2 examples of which tasks could use that system. Another could be Dig Sites when there are multiple in 1 system, or anomalies when there are multiple in 1 system. There's probably even more that could benfit from having such a system. And having more tasks that use it increase the likelihood of it being created. Click to expand...

Critical Ethics said: Be neat if you could shift-click the assist research button and your ship would path to the unassisted planet with the highest science output. Click to expand...

• Mar 5, 2022

HFY said: You can also set Assist Research from the galaxy map, just click on the ship (in the outliner or on the map), click the Assist Research command button on the ship's interface, and then click the target colony in the outliner. Click to expand...

Ryika said: I'd honestly go yet a step further and cut the requirement for a Science Ship completely. Just make it so any unassigned Scientist automatically gets linked to one of your high-research worlds (prioritizing the highest level scientists for the highest yield worlds), applies the Assist Research modifier, and allows the scientist to gain experience from it. That would literally cut out all of the micromanagement, while keeping the mechanics and goals of the system intact. Click to expand...