10 Best Civics in Stellaris, Ranked (2024)

Stellaris, developed by Paradox Interactive, is a grand strategy space age empire builder that tasks the player with customizing not only their curious species' looks, but their culture too. After determining the kind of government mentality your culture will have, then, you turn your attention to their civics. These choices can give large or small benefits depending on your choices and how everything synergizes together.

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They will also drastically change how you must play. More military-focused civics, for instance, mean you must engage in war with others you encounter, whereas ones that value peace and prosperity will penalize you for such efforts. There are dozens of civics, and it's for the player to decide which fit their playstyle the best. Here are some of the greatest options available.

10 Ascetic

When you're a hive-mind empire, you don't have the same concerns as you would with an individualist empire. You have no citizens to keep happy, only drones to maintain. While this seems at first to have no downsides, you'll soon find that hive-minds don't have the same infrastructure to support amenities.

Amenities are directly responsible for the stability of your planets as a hive-mind, and lacking them reduces all of a planet's production. Ascetic mitigates your needs by reducing amenity usage across your empire. The small five percent boost to habitability is a bonus, further reducing the stress on your drones. As hive-mind civics go, Ascetic is always a good choice, but it's important to bear its disadvantages in mind too.

9 Reanimators

The best defense is an eternal one. When you take the Reanimators civic, you are creating a society led by necromancers, where your soldiers rise from death to continue defending you empire for eternity. This trait, while ghoulish, is very handy indeed in protracted warfare in Stellaris.

If you're fighting multiple wars at once, there are a lot of fronts you need to defend. Naturally, you can't block them all without losing ships, so eventually your colonies will come under attack. When an army dies on a world with necromancers, whether its friend or foe, it has a one-in-three chance to return as an undead army to defend you. This means your colonies can take a very long to fall. More importantly, they delay enemy fleets from moving on to new targets, as a result of Stellaris' AI. If your empire is more peaceful, however, this bonus will matter little.

8 Rapid Replicator

Almost as important as technology, your population count determines your ability to produce and refine resources. A low population count can make expansion difficult, as you simply lack the bodies to fill the roles you need. If you're a machine empire, you can combat a unit shortage right from the start with Rapid Replicators.

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The only thing you need to be wary of is upkeep costs. As a machine species, your citizens consume minerals and power instead of food. This problem actually corrects itself, since your newly-made citizens are ready to provide resources: you just have to make the jobs for them. While there is no other specific benefit, you can increase production and research by simply having more hands at work.

7 Criminal Heritage

Criminal Heritage mega corporation empires are some of the best empires for using subterfuge and strategy. Instead of relying on commerce and trade like most megacorps, they can establish their criminal branch offices with any faction they're at peace with. Doing so not only grants the criminal enterprise more funds, it's also very disruptive for your enemies.

With Criminal Heritage, the facilities you establish on other planets have the additional effect of raising crime. A planet overwhelmed with crime has its stability ruined; sometimes so much so that the planet declares independence and revolts. You can sit back with plausible deniability as your siphon funds and security from your enemies, all without firing a shot.

6 Agrarian Idyll

After colonizing a new planet, you usually face some troublesome development issues. Setting up resource acquisition usually costs you housing space, but with Agrarian Idyll, your farming districts, mining districts, and generator districts all grant you that extra housing. The cost is that your cities have fewer houses.

The trade-off is significant, but well worth it. You need to set up production districts in order for your planets to support themselves, and with this housing buff, you don't really need to build cities as often. Your farmers also produce amenities which keep your population happy, freeing up more building room for other things you need. This one civic converts a lot of your building strategies, making them far more efficient.

5 Exterminator Civics

There are a total of five total civics that turn Stellaris into a sci-fi horror game where you play as the monsters. Those civics are Fanatical Purifiers, Devouring Swarm, Terravore, Determined Exterminators, and Driven Assimilators. All of these have different flavor text, different availability, and slightly varying methods, but all have one goal in mind: the total extermination of all other empires.

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These exterminator-type civics give your empire some extremely strong buffs for warfare and development. The cost is that you cannot engage in any diplomacy whatsoever, except with factions of the same species. Everyone is your enemy and a united galaxy can be hard to defeat, but when you choose to be the aggressor you get some nice tools to use.

4 Distinguished Admiralty

If you're looking to have an empire renowned for its starship fleets, Distinguished Admiralty is for you. This civic requires your empire to be militaristic to a degree, building on that with some buffs that are useful throughout your game. It's a good pick when you want some warfare in your gameplay, but don't want to forgo diplomacy entirely.

The admirals that lead your war fleets start off two levels higher than normal, translating to better unit performance in battle and handy skills for the admirals themselves. Their level cap also increases by one. Your ships also receive a flat upgrade to shoot 10 percent faster than other ships, and your fleets have more capacity as well. At every stage of the game, you can field more and better, more effective spaceships with this civic.

3 Meritocracy

Meritocracy is great for all empires. Its effects are very simple: your leaders increase their level cap by one, and your specialist citizens increase their output by 10 percent. While it's a small buff, it will make a larger difference in the late game.

Starting off, you'll be focused more on acquiring raw resources (since you need to process them). During that time, your specialists are adding a few more special resources for your pool, which means an extra ship or two if you need it. Late game, when you have foundry worlds set up and you're pumping out ships, empires without this exact civic will be at a disadvantage against your level of production.

2 Technocracy

Technology is key to galactic victory in Stellaris. The more advanced you are, the more ways you can manipulate galactic politics, through diplomacy or warfare, in your favor. The Technocracy start gives you a substantial edge at the beginning of a game.

With a technocratic society, your choice of research increases, and your chances at rare tech with it. Your researchers themselves are also more specialized, since they are five times more likely to acquire traits associated with a school of research. Your heads of state are also all scientists, so your rulers boost your research speed further. In a game dominated by tech, Technocracy keeps you ahead.

1 Masterful Crafters

Master Crafters gives a useful boost to your empire by making your production buildings more versatile. It replaces artisans, which produce consumer goods, with artificial, which do the same at a better rate and also produce trade value. Higher trade value is an enormous boon on all your planets, since it not only increases your energy credits but also other resources of your choosing.

Masterful Crafters also influences how quickly you unlock building slots on your planets, since industrial districts contribute more room. Best of all, this civic isn't locked behind any chosen ethics, as long as you're not playing a gestalt empire. With it being so widely available, and its benefits so strong, it's a good pick for any and every empire.

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