In this guide I’ll explain what liberation wars are and how to do them, and the kinds of cool things you can do with them.
Guide to Liberation Wars
All credit goes to Chaos24Gaming!
How liberation wars work and what they can be used for
Not sure if anyone has written anything about this, but here goes:
In your policies tab you can see “war philosophy”. Under that tab, there are three stances to pick from: Unrestricted wars, Defensive wars, and Liberation wars. I’m going to quickly explain why liberation wars are really cool, and why you should try them out. Federations are really cool, and being in one with a lot of AI empires is fun for people who enjoy roleplaying or setting scenes, or for people who want to unify the entire galaxy as a post-endgame goal. The problem is, you can’t control all too well what AI empires think of you, or most of all, what AI empires think of each other. Using liberation wars, you can make this a lot easier.
If you’re at the point where you really don’t want to conquer anymore territory or steal from any enemies, consider changing your war philosophy. Once you have, you now get the “Ideology” Casus Belli on any AI empire with different ideals than yours. You’ve probably seen this Casus Belli when an AI empire declared war, but it’s not all too obvious how to get it. This is a really cool feature, because now you can declare war on anyone who has a different government from you, and when you win the war against them, the nation you fought against gets your empires ideals (fanatic Materialist and Xenophile for example), and they also get a very good relationship status with you and your allies who fought the war with you. It’s at the blue level, which usually is very hard to achieve even with your long-time federation members. They will have a good enough relationship with you and will most likely be liked enough by your federation members to get association status, but also to even be invited into your federation.
If you don’t really like the whole federation part of this, what this war philosophy also causes is that the person you won the war against will never attack you again in the foreseeable future. If that also doesn’t interest you, the empire you conquered will also most likely find you enough of an ally to ask you to become your protectorate. They might even agree to becoming your tributary without any cause for war.
I used this method in a couple of my recent games to establish a high reputation with my neighbors who weren’t in my federation, and It really helped in causing peace for a long time, unless I declared war. Try it out if it sounds like something for you, it’s really fun and can lead to some fun situations.
I have not tried it yet, but it sounds interesting. Thank you!
You should also mention that you can use this to set up friendly satellite states between you and enemies. For example you can conquer only part of the enemy empire and select the middle option when peace ing which will turn only the states you have captured into a new empire with your ethics. This is useful for roleplaying or for creating a smaller buffer state
Sounds great! I quickly stopped bothering with federations once I realized that the game loves to spawn about 90% of all empires in the galaxies with incompatible ideologies. Your approach might actually convince me to give it another try.
In my very first game, I’m playing the UNE (Fanatic Egalitarian Xenophiles), and my first two neighbors (plus another empire on the other side of the galaxy) were all Fanatic Egalitarians (plus Militarist, Xenophobe, and Materialist respectively). It’s 2299 and we’re all one great big happy federation covering more than half the galaxy.
I’m starting to realize that I was fantastically lucky.
I really like this method of conquering the galaxy, because it kinda boring and tedious to just outright control everything, its more fun to force everyone to like you and then get them into a federation and then they fight your wars for you.
on my first nemesis ironman i am playing super tall voidborne federaion builders and this was the only way i could get the criminal syndicate and the very last imperial holdouts to join up.
Conquered the galaxy but I only control about 15-20 systems with a handful of planets and upgraded habitats. Mix of tributaries and allies making up the Empire.
Liberation wars are an excellent addition to the game.