Stellaris Cracking Open the Alien Box Red Green Blue

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• #1

I found this great anomaly and to my big surprise they've changed the three possible rewards. Red gives 5% less housing used, blue gives 10% army damage and +10 years to your leaders and the green gives 5% habitability. In your opinion based upon your preferred play style, which one of these unique features would you prefer?

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• #3

The army damage is attached to the lifespan buff, so it's just icing on the cake.

There are three main approaches when making a decision like this:

Min/Max - whether countering a weakness like non-adapatable or fleeting or further promoting a strength like communal, what's best is a matter of what traits you already have and long term planning. If this approach is taken, Habitability or Housing usage is going to have the best overall effect in most situations as this can translate to hundreds if not thousands of monthly income in the late game through lesser upkeeps and what have you.

Situational - a brief extension of the above as min/max all depends on the species traits, but this is more referring to your current position. If you have a bunch of small planets in your starting area including a 16/17 home world, red may be your man. If there is a lack of your preferred world type, in particular if you play like myself and turn off guaranteed planets, green is the way to go.

Theme - the overall trump......if you feel your species should have one of these like a bug race with social pheromones or a reptile race with regen, that's always the "best" choice!!

Edit: noticed an unfinished sentence

Last edited: May 24, 2019

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• #12

It mostly doesn't matter for me because I play broad xenophile empires, so the effect will be fairly dilute (since it only gets the main species).
Housing is *probably* most applicable in most cases - my armies and leaders are mixed so I won't see as much effect from that as a more single-species empire would; habitability *literally* doesn't matter once I've got a couple of species going; and even housing is marginal, but it's at least always partially relevant.

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• #14

I had a case for the habitability in a recent game. Was going for synthetic ascension from the start of the game so had built my species with enduring meaning leader lifespan was not an issue. The housing option would not matter either because it would disappear before housing becomes an issue. However the habitability actually came early enough to matter as I only had two planets of my climate preference by the time we became cyborgs so it actually stayed relevant all the way to the synthetic ascension.

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• #16

Keep the box until after ascension and apply it then. Housing reduction applies to synthetics just fine, much like the Int bonus from the Worm.

Now I feel stupid... assumed that it wouldn't apply to machines because the description implies a biological nature.

Clearly the housing bonus is the stronger option in all scenarios then.

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• #20

It's very easy to gene-mod it so your POPs fit the climate of their world. You also only have to do it once for a climate type since after that you can just colonize new worlds using a sub-species that's already fit the the target planet climate.

Since I very rarely end up colonizing one of each climate type, it's not like I have to do the modding process eight times either. Usually a few times is enough.

That's why I usually go with the housing trait option.

To be honest, even with a one species run, I'm usually happy enough with a wet, a dry, and a hot version of the species.
Going all out to have nine different climate preferences never seems worth it.

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Source: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/cracking-open-the-alien-box.1135204/

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