For one thing, when creating your own single-minded swarm, you can get a refund on some trait points by picking a negative trait that gives you -5% happiness… even though hive minds don’t use happiness.

For example, you can now play as a hive mind species that doesn’t use happiness, doesn’t start factions, and is ruled by an immortal consciousness that can be everywhere at once. There are a few other features that give this same impression.

A parallel realm accessible by a conclave of psychics. My favorite of these I’ve come across so far is The Shroud. Part of the appeal is specialization and distinguishing your civilization further, so it seems odd that everyone is going to eventually end up with all the traditions, and it somewhat cheapens the choice you have to make between them initially. But in order to unlock those last few perk slots, I had to spend points on the Diplomatic Tradition tree, which had nothing even remotely useful for genocidal insects shunning friendship and spreading terror through the stars. Here’s one that lets me spread my broods to new worlds faster. Here’s one that lets me kill people better. When I was playing a race of killer bugs that quite literally ate everyone they met, I was pretty excited to complete the first few. One other issue with ascension is that you have to progress through all seven of the Tradition trees to unlock all the perk slots. And while Unity can feel like one too many extra currencies to juggle in a game that already has minerals, energy, food, influence, three types of science, and strategic resources, the perks it provides are an effective way to guide your playstyle through the early and mid game, building towards some exciting, new toys in the late game. There’s nothing stopping you besides earning enough Unity. If you want to genetically modify your species to have 400 babies, you can do that. If you want to build a giant Dyson sphere around a sun to steal all of its energy and make any planets that depended on it freeze to death, you can do that. If you want to upload your entire population into robot bodies, you can do that.

The perks in these trees each provide big, thematic bonuses when fully completed, as well as granting you an Ascension Perk, which is where things get really crazy. Using a new resource called Unity, empires can progress down Civ 5-style Tradition trees. The flashier, more attention-grabbing new features don’t slack either.

Download stellaris utopia