Advantages:

• Powerful Fleet
  
• Powerful Army
  
• Excellent border expansion
  
• Decent way to gain extra unity
  
• Relatively easy faction management
  
• Great Influence gain
  
• Engaging gameplay through most of the game stages

Drawbacks:

• Lack of diplomacy means the threat of war is constantly present
  
• Very punishing to newcomers
  
• High learning curve
  
• Easy to get overwhelmed by rivals and lose
  
• The lack of enclaves requires a solid, balanced economy
  
• The ability to sometimes make sacrifices for the greater future

In order to get a balanced and a challenging experience out of a FP playthrough I recommend the following settings:


In general, the more empires you add, the harder the game becomes, especially early, as its very easy to find oneself fighting a defense treaty of 3-4 empires at the same time.

However too few empires greatly diminish the challenge. Ironman should be disabled if not feeling comfortable with.
In a matter of fact, I highly discourge playing on ironman if you just started playing FP.

In addition, bigger galaxies means that awakened empires and end game crisis will be more powerful, therefore a medium galaxy is a good setting to start if your new to FP.

I highly recommend Hyperlanes only game as it greatly increase the strategic value of any game, and makes waging wars more tactical as well.

I always recommend setting AI aggressiveness to high, even on normal difficulty, as it makes the game that more engaging as AI factions interact a lot more not only with you, but with each other as well, it results in a much more engaging and interesing gameplay.

In this section i will talk about empire customization and useful traits and civics for a FP empire.


Traits:

• Rapid Breeders (+10% Growth Speed)
  
  Since patch 1.5, pop growth became much slower, as a FP, you will be required to expand rather quickly and grab territory, whether to chock off your neighbors, expand your economy, boosting naval capacity or all togather. Filling out planets as fast as possible is important. Therefore Rapid Breeders provides big value from the start of the game to the end and it costs only 1 point.
  
  
• Industrial (+15% Mineral Income)
  
  A good mineral income is cruical to keep expanding your fleets, planet/border expansion and building infastructure, its even more important as FP because you do not have access to the trade enclave to allow to exchange energy for minerals or vice versa, in addition to this, peace is non-existant so you will be required to keep building your fleet either to deter your opponents from attacking you or defend your systems during a war, while also expanding your borders, and as such Industrial is a huge help with those tasks.
  One thing to remember is that this trait works only on tiles worked by pops, it doesn't affect space mining stations mineral production.
  
  
• Conservationist (-20% Consumer goods Cost)
  
  Another trait that ties directly to your mineral income, every pop in your empire requires 'consumer goods' to maintain good happiness, which is payed in minerals, at the early stages of the game, this cost is barely noticeable due to your low starting populaton, but as the game progresses and you expand and increase your empire population, the costs will start to show themselves.
  This trait has a much bigger impact the bigger your empire population becomes and can lead to some very big savings on mineral income the longer the game goes.
  
  
• Strong (+20% Army Damage, +5% Mineral Income)
  
  This trait has 3, very useful advantages for a FP empire.
  First, is the army damage, defending your planets from enemy invasions is extremely important as FP, at any stage in the game, this further increase your defensive army strength and makes them harder to take down.
  Second, more mineral income, which is self explanatory.
  Third, having the Strong trait in your empire increase the ethic attractiveness towards the militarist faction (which is good, because your going to be at war most of the time) and reduces the chance for some of the annoying factions to pop up, this results in a better influence gain.
  
  
  
• Adaptive (+10% Habitability)
  
  Habitability translates directly into growth speed on any planet which you don't have 100% base habitability to begin with (Gaia and Ring worlds), this means faster pop growth and faster expansion, which is a good thing.
  However, this trait might lose its value once terraforming is unlocked and the habitability research projects have been completed.

Negative Traits:

• Repugnant (-25 Opinion towards other empires)
  
  Pretty much a free negative point for a FP without any negative consequences, because everyone hates you anyway.
  
  
• Sedentary (-50% Migration speed, +25% Resettlement Cost)
  
  Migration speed has barely, if at all, effect at filling planets faster, more so it should be disabled in the early game, in contrast, resettlement is very useful, however because FP generally tend to swim in influence gains, this increased cost is barely noticeable.

Governments:

In general, I highly recommend NOT to pick Imperial or Dictatorial. The main reason is the inability to replace leaders when needed and lack of any meaningful boost. You can have a frustrating occasion of getting stuck with a leader with the -30% naval capacity trait that can screw your game pretty badly, also imperial increase the ethic attraction towards the Authoritarian faction, which can be very problematic to keep them happy.

Democratic and Oligarchic governments are both good options. Democratic gives you a LOT of influence and Oligarchic can give you a selection of different leaders with different bonuses to choose from. Both are flexible in letting you choosing your desired leader and avoid bad ones, which is important as sometimes you will want a leader that focuses on war benefits, and sometimes one that focus on economy, depending on your current situation.



Civics:

• Fanatic Purifiers (+33% ship fire rate, +33% Army damage, Xeno pops are instantly purged and grant unity, unable to use diplomacy, access to the Armageddon bombardment).
  
  will be your first civic (obviously), this leaves you with 2 civics slots (you unlock the 3rd one with tech during the game).
  
  
• Parliamentary System (+50% influence gain from factions)
  
  It will provide A LOT of influence income and in turn will let you go crazy with frontier outpost expansion and use edicts frequently to boost your economy, however it is only available to democratic governments.
  
  
• Efficient Bureaucracy (+2 core system)
  
  An excellent perk that really helps in the early game with fast expansion without waiting for the 'Expansion' Tree finishing bonus, whats more, the extra core planets allows you to cede more planets from wars and increase the efficiency of wiping empires from the galaxy.
  Its real value comes from the early game, but later on it should be switched to other, more useful civics.
  This is my favourite civic and the go-to civic to open the game with (As 2nd civic).
  
  
• Citizen Service (+15% naval capacity)
  
  It is very important to keep the edge and fleet power over your rivals and minimize damage to the economy when going over-cap with fleet capacity (and you will go over-cap as FP).
  can only be picked with the militarist ethos.
  
  
• Distinguished Admirals (+8% ship fire rate)
  
  Because making you fleets even more powerful is never a wrong choice, can only be picked with the militarist ethos.
  
  
• Mining guilds (+10% Mineral income)
  
  A great boost to economy and mineral production, great choice but is better to pick later in the game as the 3rd civic. As it scales better when already owning several planets with solid mineral production set up, when combined with the Industrial and Strong trait, it results in some incredible mineral income gains, mining guilds only affect tiles worked by pops.

Finally, here is an example of a FP empire:

This section will explain more about the most suitable traditions and ascensions perk for a FP empire, although any empire can benefit greatly from this information.


Traditions Trees, from best to worst for a FP empire:

• Expansion
  
  All the expansion perks are very good to get as early as possible, they help with planet growth, pop growth and frontier outpost maintenace, the finishing bonus is extremely good for expanding.
  
  
• Prosperity
  
  Prosperity comes very close to expansion, however it has very strong perks that should be taken as early as possible (Private colony ships), and the reduction cost to mining stations by adapting it is probably the best perk you can get, as it grealty helps with mineral income struggles in the early game.
  
  
• Supremacy
  
  Nothing much to say here, great tree for improving the navy and army performance, but not as important as the previous two, supremacy has great adaption bonus though, in the form of extra border expansion.
  
  
• Harmony
  
  Decent "utility tree" that provides good boost to economy with happiness, prolongs your leaders life and its finishing bonus is very handy in the mid-late game to save on mineral expanses.
  
  
• Domination
  
  Not very useful, as you won't keep your vassals for long, although the perk which increases governor level and reduce its recruitment cost is nice.
  
  
• Discovery
  
  Useless, even more after it got nerfed, the entire tree provides nothing useful in particular except its finishing bonus.
  
  
• Diplomacy
  
  Completely useless for a FP empire, with the exception of the +10% habitability perk.

Ascension Perks:

There are a lot of viable ascensions perks throughout all the stages of the game, however i am going to name the ones which are the most important to grab early.

• Intersellar Dominion
  
  Very solid perk that gives you more territory, which translates into more resources and more expansion, while at the same time denies territory from your neighbors.
  
  
• World Shaper
  
  Game changing ascension perk for FP and covers up their biggest weakness: inability to colonize every planet type.
  This gives you the tools to terraform any planet to your prefered ones, which tremendously help with expansion.
  As FP you are going to terraform a lot.
  
  
• Machine/Biological/Psionic Specialization
  
  Depends on what ethos you picked for your FP, the masteries provide very good bonuses across the board, from fleet bonuses to economy and expansion.
  
  
• Machine/Biological/Psionic Mastery
  
  The 2nd perk at each category that unlocks all bonuses from each specialization, very important to pick as soon as possible once you picked the previous specialization perk.

With all the background material covered, its time to jump into the game.

The early game is probably the hardest and most demanding part while playing an FP, its where most players fail or lose their playthrough, since a lot of things can go wrong and snowball into big problems.
The early game period is usually the first 100 years, and 'ends' at around 2300.

There are several topics to discuss in early game, they will be listed below and discussed in detail:

• Expansion and Economy
  
• Exploration
  
• Fleet Management

Expansion & Economy

Expansion is everything; it increases your borders range, it allows you to build more mining stations and it increases your empire population by colonizing new planets, which in turn boosts your economy.
It also increases your naval capacity.
All of those are extremely important for a FP empire because rapid growth and staying on par, or even better, ahead of your opponents is crucial to survive the early game.
This means you should prioritize on building mining stations, colonize suitable planets, and extend your borders.
FP has excellent border expansion which allows you to reach a lot of systems and exploit their minerals and energy.
For this purpose i highly recommend adopting Economy as your first tree, which provides a hefty -33% reduction to mining station construction cost, and after that picking the Private Colony ships.

Private colony ships is an amazing tool for the early game as it allows you to save on minerals and instead pay energy to build colony ships.
This is huge because minerals are so scarce in the early game, they are needed for almost everything: Tile Buildings construction, space port construction, ship consturction mining & research stations construction.
Energy, on the other hand, has barely any uses except clearing tile blockers and terraforming.
So usually it just piles up in the early game.
Private colony ships saves you precious minerals and allows you to put this energy into good use and expand faster.

After Private colony ships perk has been taken, you can jump into the expansion tree.

Good economy is a direct result of a good expansion, however i will also add a word about the importance of research in the early game.
Research in the early game is not your top priority, it has little effect to matter and it comes at the expense of your mineral and energy production, and as such you should save your little mineral income to build orbital mining stations in every system first, expand your fleet and build space ports.
Do not build research stations untill all the previous goals are completed.

Colonizing in the early game is much easier if the 'Efficient Bureaucracy' civic has been picked, later on after finishing the expansion tree, another +2 core systems bonus is awarded, this allows you to grow fast without throwing systems into sectors (as this cuts into your income).


Frontier outposts are very good when playing as FP. Because of the amazing border expansion you get, they can cover a lot of star systems and can net you a lot of resources. Good spots for frontier outposts are clustered star systems, try looking for them and scanning them first with your science ships. If you find a nice cluster with a good chunk of minerals and energy, don't hesitate and queue up your construction ship.

An easy way to look for good frontier locations is looking for the 'triangle', which are 3 nearby systems that form a triangle between them.

Here is an example of a good spot for a frontier outpost, notice the 'triangle':



Sometimes your starting area will be poor with minerals, in that case its better to find a good location for a frontier outpost instead of trying to gather enough resources for a colony ship. Maintaining frontier outposts gets much easier with the expansion tradition tree perk which reduce their upkeep and influence costs.


Exploration

Exploration can kill you as a FP empire if your not careful, simple as that.
Why?
Becuase there are no friends to discover in the galaxy, only enemies.
The fewer the amount of empires that are aware of your existance, the bigger your chances of survival are through the early game.

This doesn't mean you should sit in your home system, but instead explore places that can provide strategic value to you, in the form of a good colonizable system or a good place for a frontier outpost, in a reasonable vicinity to your home system.

Although sometimes the encounter with a bordering neighbor is inevitable, do your best to not find any friends for him to gang up on you.

There is no point exploring the other quarter of the galaxy if you aren't going to use it anyway.
It's important to NOT discover new empires whenever possible at the early game.
As those increases the chances of empires to form a defensive treaty and declare war on you.
Remember, the less people know about the existance of your little genocidal empire and the atrocities you commit in your neighborhood, the better.


Fleet Management

The third thing you will be doing in the early game is building your fleet.
As mentioned before, good mineral production is not only important for expanding, but it's also required to keep expanding up your fleet.
As a rule of thumb your objective is to try to maximize your naval capacity as much as possible.
This serves two goals.
The first is the bigger your fleet is, the higher the deterrent factor it will be when an AI empire considers if to declare war on you or not.
The second one is if they do declare war on you, than the bigger fleet you have, the bigger are the chances to defend your borders, this is quite obvious.
In between building minings stations, do try to squeeze a corvette or two to reinforce your fleet.
Also, remember that you need at least 4-5 corvettes at the first few years to defend against pirates.
Your Engineering research projects should focus on upgrading your spaceports and unlocking new ship types.

In some games you will happen upon a peaceful start, where you can expand to your hearts desire without any conflict or strife, or any pesky neighbors.


In other cases (the majority of them), all hell will break loose on you very quickly.


This brings us to the subject of wars.

The best way to understand and fight a war is to adopt and work by the following fundamentals,
Each will be discussed and explained in detail:

• Always make sure your Fleet Strength is 'Equivalent' to your neighbors
  
• Always fight next to spaceports
  
• Do not lose your main fleet at any cost
  
• Build defensive armies on every planet

Defensive Wars:

A common balance of power between your fleet and the AI fleet on a 'hard' difficulty game:

Defensive wars are wars where an AI empire has declared war on you, in this case, you are the defender and they are the aggressor.

In the early game, especially in higher difficulties, you will face overwhelming odds and getting declared by 2-3 empires at the same time (as seen in the picture above) is very common. The way to see war coming as FP is very simple: When two neighbors or more, sign a defensive treaty between them, you can be sure that the declaration of war is soon to follow.
There is a very easy way to know if your prepared to fight them, or if you are going to have a really bad time:
Make sure that your Fleet Strength and your neighbors are always 'equivalent', as long as it is, you stand a good chance to beat them back with a little help by your best 'friends' in the early game. If its 'Superior'....then you better start pumping those corvettes REAL fast.
Those 'friends' mentioned above are spaceports, make sure every planet has a spaceport! Spaceports are EXTREMELY important in the early game, as they can hold an entire force of corvettes by themselves and stop early aggression attempts dead on their tracks. ALWAYS fight near space ports, and when the enemy fleet approaches it, make sure your fleet is behind the spaceport, so it will get the majority of the fire and not your fleet. This will maximize casualties on the enemy fleet and minimize yours.
Sometimes, its better to push to 20% warscore and immediately force white peace. The AI mostly expands fast, but doesn't have the minerals to build spaceports around each planet. Look for those planets and capture them during early wars, capturing even one will almost always push you above 20% warscore. If you lack the weapons and means to assault enemy spaceports, then don't, its better to take those 10 years to breath and build up rather then losing a majority of your fleet for nothing.
Rebuilding fleets in the early game is difficult and can really screw up your expansion and economy.
Never fight an equal fleet head on in the early game, remember the Retreat button and fight only in favorable engagements. Losing your fleet can cause to catastrophic snowballing as you can get even more declaration of wars by other empires that now see an opportunity for an easy grab.
Sometimes you will get attacked in two places at the same time and cannot defend, no matter what, as you only have one fleet. This is where defensive armies come into the picture. Yes, yes, its THOSE armies that nobody even bother building or remembering that they even exist. Defensive armies are VERY important to prevent planet capture even when the enemy fleet took your spaceport down. Don't forget that the FP bonuses to army damage also apply to defensive armies, that makes them very powerful and hard to take down.
Also make sure to add attachments to them! Stopping an invasion force will cripple the enemy momentum and give you a nice chance to counterattack enemy systems while the enemy fleet is sitting aimlessy at the orbit of your planet.

Offensive Wars & Early Aggression

Generally speaking, going to war isn't a good thing, it forces you to invest minerals into building more ships and armies, away from expansion and economy building, overall war isn't healty for your economy.
One doesn't simply go to war without reason, more so in the early game.
You need to consider a worthy goal or objective to accomplish in order to make the best of it.

Here are some notable reason to declare a war:

• Eliminating a bordering empire threat
  
• Eliminating a bordering rival that has the potential to form a defensive treaty with another nearby empire against you
  
• Expanding your borders
  
• Crippling a growing, nearby empire that may pose danger in the near-future

Its very easy to overwhelm lone empires as FP, and as such its important to look for those opportunities to cripple your neighbors before they get the chance to expand or find allies.

When one or more of those goals are met, you have a good reason to go to war.

FP empires are the best empires when it comes to early war aggression. Especially when dealing with lone empires. The main challenge though is to overcome enemy spaceports. The best ways to deal with spaceports as early as possible are:

• Researching the mining drone laser tech.
  This is done by scouting the galaxy for mining drones, destroying them and salvaging their debris. Mining lasers are EXTREMELY potent at melting down spaceports. They are pretty common so one should encounter them in the majority of the cases
  
  
• Destroyers, provide great firepower vs spaceports.
  
  
• Early plasma weapons, sometimes you will get lucky and will get the plasma tech really early, this will pave the road to an easy domination very quickly.

When going into an offensive war early in the game, you have several options for the war goals:

• Vassalize
  
• Conquering planets

Vassalizing is very important early on, because empires are small and the war goal cost to vassalize them is relatively low, whats more, by vassalizing an empire you take it out of the picture and eliminate a threat, allowing you to focus your efforts somewhere else, at any point you can integrate them and then purge them when you feel like they served their purpose in life.
Conquering their planets will put a big strain on your economy as it can push your core planets over the cap, so mass-conquering systems early isn't healthy for your economy. Also, you can always choose when to integrate you vassals and purge them from the galaxy.

When vassalization isn't possible, you should target their highest pop planets in order to cripple the empire, taking those planets, like their capital and purging them, will greatly set back that empire and will allow you to start snowballing on them on the following wars, also more pops to purge = more unity gained.
If you have no plans to colonize their planets and just planing to purge their population, manually destroy their structures as you pay upkeep from your coffers as long as they are up.

Finally, you can choose to expand into captured worlds (if they are the same prefered systems as yours) by resetling one of your existing pops into the planet.
Make sure you do so before the planet is completely purged as this will de-colonize it and will destroy all existing tile building on it.

When purging its best to set purging to 'processing' as the boost to food income allows you to fill planets faster and boost your expansion potential. However if you want to just remove a specie as fast as possible, select extermination.

If you have been playing your cards in the right order, by vassalizing your rivals or eliminating them while securing your borders and expanding, you should arrive at the mid game as a growing power.

Mid game is usually relatively short, and lasts about 50 years (2300-2350). This is generally where the tables slowly start to turn. By now you should be a force to be reckoned with, and your neighbors are either vassalized or reduced to rubble that pose no threat to you.

By this time, other empires have probably found you and you have a big picture on the galaxy and major super powers and set your first goals for galaxy extermination domination.

Your goal in the mid game is pretty much to tie loose ends by integrating your vassals and purging them, clear your borders, expanding and targeting empires that are no part of federation/lone wolves.

Unlike the early game, the mid game is generally a lot more open and therefore il give general direction to what you should do, however, with regards to war, remember to follow the 4 fundemnetals we discussed in the early game!

• Continue expanding and growing your fleets, same 4 fundamentals apply (especially make sure that empires fleet power are within the 'equivalent' threshold) .
  
  
• Terraform planets - at this point you will start running out of habitable planets to colonize, this is where terraforming and world shaper comes into the picture.
  
  
• Look for opportunities to pounce on lonely empires without any defensive pacts for easy land grab and to eliminate potential threats.
  
  
• Search and hunt for leviathans.

Sometimes as you peacefully expand and purge your neighbors, an enemy empire that isn't even close to you will declare war on you out of the blue, to make it worse, its fleet is far superior to your and you didn't even expected them to interact with you and caught you by surprise.
What do you do?

There are several ways to deal with such a scenerio:

Picking them one by one

In a lot of cases the AI will split hes fleets and try to conquer several planets at the same time. This is exactly your chance to pick them off one by one, as their fleets will either be similiar or inferior to yours.
Intercept them on their way to your planets and take them one by one, if needed repair your fleet and reinforce it in between space battles.
If you kept on building defensive armies, they should buy you plenty of time and stop enemy invasions on other planets while your fleet is being repaired and reinforced.

Guerrilla warfare

When this doesn't happen and there is just one big doomstack, your other option is to try force white peace by 'guerrilla' warfare. The core to this tactic is a strong planetary defensive force to stop enemy invasion at your planets. When the enemy invasion fleets fails, the enemy fleet in orbit will sit there, waiting for another invasion fleet to come. This is your chance to go and back stab their systems before they can respond. The scenario continues as the enemy fleets now flies back to hes captured capitol, but with lack of any invasion troops he can't reclaim it. Meanwhile you continue to capture enemy planets until you can force a white peace. This gives you a whole 10 years of breathing room to pull yourself together and prepare for the next war. Guerrilla warfare is so strong that you can sometimes win wars without losing one ship
This strategy will be explained in detail in a dedicated section at the end of this guide.

Surrender

Sometimes everything falls apart and you will have no way to win, either vs stronger AI empires or an awakened empire. Losing few planets but keeping your fleet intact instead of suiciding it is not a game over.

Losing isn't fun, but sometimes its neccessary to surrender for the long run, as FP you will sometimes find yourself with the shortest stick and there is nothing much to do about it.
Sometimes surrendering is the best way to take a breather, rebuild and try again.
In my example, the Xenophiles AE declared war on me the moment they awakened and overpowered my 90k fleet with their 320k ones, i didn't want to lose my fleet so I had to give up 6 planets to sign a surrender treaty, but i prevented the destruction of my fleet and i regained those planets 20 years later when they were busy fighting the other empires, during that time i reinforced my defensive armies, increased my fleet and used the oppetunity to declare war on them when they were busy fighting another empire.
At the end of the day i got my 6 planets, togather with all their home systems and wiped them from the annals of history.

Also...
No, starting a new game isn't a solution, part of the challenge is to accept losses and carry on, things don't always play as we want them to, it what makes the inevitable triumph that much more sweet,

As the mid game approaches twilight, you should be a growing super power and probably now started your quest to cleanse the galaxy and prepare for the endgame crisis and awakened empires.

If you havn't done it yet, you should do your best to Hunt down leviathans before the end game game crisis arrives.

Because FP has no access to enclaves, you don't know the location of leviathans on the galaxy map.
Those can be a very powerful addition to the empire, namely the drake, dreadnought and the enigmatic fortress.
The dreadnought and the Drake are incredibly powerful with the bonuses provided by FP.
The enigmatic fortress tech is a big boon as well.
Try to do so before the end game crisis arrives, as most of the time they take them away.

There isn't much to say about the late game that differs from the mid game when it comes to dealing with AI empires. You continue to dominate the galaxy and wipe civilizations from existence, while expanding and growing your fleet.

The hardest part is behind you and you should be one of the dominant, if not the most dominant power in the galaxy.

The end game is signaled by the arrival of the end game crisis and the awakening of fallen empires.


End game Crisis

I will give some tips about dealing with the unbidden here, for the Scourge and Awakened empires you can find more information and methods to deal with their fleets in my other guide.

The biggest thing about them is to decrease the chance for them to spawn inside your borders, as this can lead to serious problems.
To do so, make sure you do not research jump drive until they actually spawn (or the other crisis, the scourge does), even if you have the tech available.
Empires that research jump drives have a much greater chance for the unbidden to come visit them instead.
Which is very good for you. Because why bother with the horrible grind of conquering a 25-star system empire when the unbidden can happily do that job for you and clean all those big empires really nicely just for you.
When they finally reach your borders, you should have a mighty fleet ready to greet them.
The rule of thumb is to equip ALL your fleet with kinetic weapons and after you are satisfied with the unbidden progression at wiping the more annoying empires, just go for their anchors and end them. If they pose a problem, there is always the 'Defenders of the galaxy' ascension perks to help out with them.

Awakened Empires

Dealing with awakened empires is a whole story by itself. However, its important to strike at them before they get out of control. As general rule of thumb, a well equipped fleet with at least half the size of an awakened empire one has a good chance at beating it down, as long as you jump on top of them and engage at point blank. FP are very powerful at the late game and can dominate AE fleets very easily. More information on ship loadouts and strategy against them can be found on my other guide

Let me start with a picture describing the following scenerio:


In short, an angry fallen empire awakens next to your borders, declares war on you and sends its mightly fleet at your doorstep.
Your fleet has no hope to beat their main armada.

What do you do?


This is the perfect situation to employ gurilla warfare.

Before we go into details on the strategy itself, one must understand how wars are decided in Stellaris.

Wars in Stellaris are decided by gainning or losing warscore against your opponent.
You gain warscore by defeating enemy fleets and successfully invading and holding enemy planets.

It doesn't matter who got a bigger fleet when it comes to warscore, if you can somehow capture the enemy systems and gain enough warscore, you win the war or at the very least, force white peace.

Capturing planets is the main method to gain warscore during wars.

To capture a planet, a fleet must enter orbit and eliminate the planet defenses.
Then, ground armies must land and capture the planet.
Without ground armies, it is impossible to take control of a planet.

How does Gurilla warfare work

The idea behind the strategy is to avoid clashing into the enemy superior fleet, but instead, flying right into hes territory and capturing hes planets, while at the same time stopping the enemy fleet from from capturing yours.

Lets split the strategy into several stages:

• Building Defensive armies in your planets
  Defensive armies are cruical to stop enemy invasion attempts while your making mess in hes backyard, its important to build as much defensive armies as possible on a planet and attach upgrades to them.
  The planets that should be defended are those close to the enemy empire and are likley to be targeted first.
  In the picture above, you can see my garrisoned force.
  
  
• Intercepting the enemy troop transports
  This is the hardest part to pull.
  When the enemy fleet moves around the galaxy map, it is accompanied by a troop invasion force thatt follows it.
  However, they do not travel togather, the troop transports follow the main fleet with a delay between jumps, for example:
  
  We have three systems, A B and C.
  The enemy fleet and the troop transports are now on planet C and their destination is System A.
  They must jump through planet B to reach system A.
  
  So the enemy fleet jumps to planet B, the troop transports following the main fleet, prepare to jump to planet B as well, as they are set to follow their main fleet.
  Note that jumping takes 15 days and is not instantaneous.
  In the meantime, the main fleet prepares to jump to system A.
  Just as the main fleet performs the jump to system A (from system B), the transports reach System B, at this point the main fleet is already at system A. notice the delay? they never arrive togather.
  This short period of time, is where you can catch their troop transports while they are in the middle of jumping to the next system without the protection of the main fleet.
  Its tricky, and takes practice, but when this is done, the hardest part is behind you.

Overview of the situation:

• Split your fleet into two forces, each force should be accompanied with its own force of troop transports
  
  
  
• Use one fleet to distract the incoming enemy fleet, whiile capturing planets with the other one.
  
  With both fleets, each accompanied by troop transports, you enter the enemy territory.
  What happens at this stage is that the enemy fleet is now set to hunt down your invasion fleets.
  However, because its only 1 big doom stack, it cannot chase two seperate fleets at the same time.
  
  Your goal is to use one fleet to play 'goose chase' with the main enemy fleet, while the other fleet captures enemy planets.
  
  Also, avoid using battleships!
  Battleships are bad choice at this strategy becuase they slow the entire fleet down.
  If the enemy fleet jumps to a system with one of your fleets, you must attempt to run away and warp to another system.
  Since the AI and AE uses battleships and titans, their fleets are very slow, and as a result can be very easy to out maneuver and out run.
  
  While one fleet distracting the main armada, the other fleet captures planets.
  
  
  
  When targeting enemy planets for capture, focus those that are poorly defended, generally by a space port, you should avoid targeting systems with fortresses such as the AE home system.
  
  
• Force a victory or a white peace
  
  If you have done everything correctly, you should now have enough warscore to either force a white peace, or outright win the war and grab some systems.
  In my case, i captured one of the AE home systems.
  
  
  
  
  Gurilla warfare is an effective strategy that takes practice to master but is very efficient to pull yourself out of impossible situations.

Thank you for reading this guide.

FP gameplay is a great way to enjoy another side of Stellaris and get more out of the game.

If you ever wanted to play FP but were not successful at it, then I hope this guide will help you out and give you some new tools and insight on FP mechanics and gameplay.

I do want to emphasize, that the best teacher for playing a FP, and pretty much anything, is experience.

I have no doubt that even after reading this guide, you might struggle in your first games, and might lose some games or decide to re-start, but persistence is key, and understanding where to improve, and what tools to use will lead you to the path of victory, even if its a bumpy one at first.


If you have questions, feedback, anything you would like to know please feel free to write in the comments.


Happy purging!