When building an empire, how you spend your civic points is one of the most important decisions you will ever make.
What civics you choose will determine your play style, the way your empire does things, and how other empires treat you.
Recommended Read: How to Use Hyper Relays in Stellaris
This guide will teach you everything you need to know about spending the finite amount of civic points you receive.
Civics points get spent at certain points in the game in Stellaris. This takes place either within empire creation or by reforming your government. You have two civic points to spend, but research can improve this to three.
Table of Contents
- What is a Civic Point
- How to Spend Civic Points During Empire Creation in Stellaris
- How to Spend Civic Points By Reforming Government
- The Best Civics to Select For Your Empire in Stellaris
What is a Civic Point
Civic points are a pool of points you spend on civics for your empire. Civics are a collection of laws, policies, and values that dictate what life within your empire is like.
What civics you have access to depends on many factors: your ethics, your government authority, origin, and species type.
For example, a spiritualist empire may have civics which elevate the priesthood, while a materialist empire may have civics which promote scientific advancement over religious pursuit.
Civics provide bonuses to your empire, can change the core gameplay experience, and change the way you interact with other empires.
It would be nice to select all the best civics in the game and enjoy all the perks they provide, alas you only have a limited amount of civic points to spend. This means you must take care when you choose your civics.
At the beginning of the game, while you are making your empire, you receive two civic points to spend. You can unlock a third civic point by unlocking a special technology.
Galactic Administration is the name of the tech that gives you your third civic point. With a government reform, it will allow you to play with three civic selections rather than only two.
How to Spend Civic Points During Empire Creation in Stellaris
The first way you will spend your civic points is when you create your empire. The menu screen where you select your civics is the Government & Ethics tab.
This menu is the most important screen during empire creation. Here you set your empire’s ethics and their government authority. These decisions can have long-reaching consequences in a play-through.
Before you start selecting civics, there are a few things I would recommend first. The first piece of advice is that you save this screen until last. Select all species traits, origin, home world, etc.
Selecting all these options first helps to make civic selection easier. As your other decisions will unlock or ban certain choices.
Next, and this is the best advice you will ever receive about playing Stellaris, is to read all civic tooltips before you select them.
Reading is power because it will teach you how the game works without having to come to these awesome guides.
With those points covered, you are ready to start spending those civic points. The far right section of the Government & Ethics menu is where you purchase your civics.
It says civics at the top and also displays how many picks you have left. Any civics you have selected will always show at the top of the menu for easy reference.
To spend the civic point, all you have to do is navigate to the civic you want and left-click. If you change your mind or accidentally select the wrong civic, clicking the highlighted civic at the top of the menu will deselect it.
How to Spend Civic Points By Reforming Government
For a myriad of reasons, you may decide the civics you selected are not cutting it. Or maybe they are cutting it, but you unlocked your third civic point to spend and are eager to put it to use.
For both of these scenarios, you will need to know how to reform your government. This allows you to change ethics, spend unspent points, and change government authority.
Reforming your government is not free. Whatever change you make, regardless of whether it is a minor change or monumental shift, it will always be the same price.
That price is ten unity per empire size. Let’s say an empire is reforming, and they have an empire size of 1198. The cost of reforming that empire will be 11980 unity.
You can’t go around changing your empire whenever you feel like it, either. A government reform can only take place once every 20 in-game years.
To start a government reform, you will need to open your empire menu in-game. You do this by clicking your empire emblem on the top left-hand corner of the screen.
On the menu itself, a large well-labelled button will say “Reform Government.” Clicking this will open a menu similar to the one at empire creation.
This menu works the same way as empire creation too, so there is nothing new to learn. Well, there is one thing.
On the right-hand side of the reform government section, you will notice the government authority logos. Clicking any of these will enact an authority change, as well as a civic change.
Select the civics you want, and deselect the undesired civics.
When you are happy with the changes you have made, click the reform button at the bottom. The cost is also displayed, and when paid for, the change takes immediate effect.
The Best Civics to Select For Your Empire in Stellaris
This is a question that comes up a lot whenever a discussion about civics starts. This is a huge beast to tackle and is way beyond the scope of this guide.
Here on Gamer Empire, we have tackled that big question with my guide on what are the best civics in Stellaris. I recommend taking the time to read that guide, as well as this one.
If you don’t want to read that long guide, I have can provide some sound advice that will help a lot. This advice should apply to most empire types.
- There are good civics and bad civics. Read the civic tool tips carefully to be sure what it does.
- Aim for civics that provide research bonuses, improve resource output, increase ship damage, and increase pop growth.
- Avoid civics that improve leader experience again, affect empire size, or increase edict size. These bonuses are notorious for being weak.
- Only select a genocidal empire civic if you are adamant that killing everyone is all you want to do in this play-through. These civics are permanent and are immune from a government reform.
- If you want a civic, but it is greyed out and can’t be selected, read the tooltip and find out why. Make the changes, if you can, and select the civic.
This is everything you need to know about how to spend civic points in Stellaris.
If you have any suggestions or questions about this guide, please let us know in the comments section below. As always, have fun spending your civic points in Stellaris.
