Super Weapons from a guy half a day in. (Spoilers)

[LHG100]

Hey everybody, I've been playing Stellaris past two days and I've been fiddling around with a bunch of stuff. I've seen and read that superweapons'll probably be a thing later on, and it got me thinking about them. A lot of us want our planet-popping death star analogues, and I was reading about the Jump Drives in-game when it mentioned that it (Super paraphrased) effectively 'shreds the space time continuum until the ship is where it wants to be'

Now, I dunno about you, but that gave me a pretty decent idea for at least one type of superweapon. You could have a big mobile station-ship or something that basically uses a big, re-purposed jump drive as a weapon against large targets and even planets. I mean, if it can 'shred' stuff until you've jumped a few hundred light years, surely 'shredding' a planet is also possible? I think it'd be a pretty good balance to at least that specific superweapon type too. It'd obviously use a ton of energy and metaphorically open a hole straight to space-hell, so the Unbidden would have a really high chance to come in. Of course, just like with regular jump drives, it should be balanced in the sense that while it isn't guaranteed it should still be a strategic choice every time you use the Planet Shredder.

I'd personally love to ask myself, every time I blow up a heavily fortified enemy fortress planet or what-have-you, "Now, is this worth summoning a billion space demons for?".

And, this is nitpicky, but every planet popper should have a bit of an 'area of effect'... I hate it how in some other space games you could blow up a planet and the defense ships and satellites could still be 'orbiting' it.

So, what are your guys' thoughts? I think that's a pretty decent way to go in at least the 'death star expy' department.

 

[Mythgaard]

Funnily enough one of the ultimate space warfare weapons is just a massive ball of iron and a delivery method. Wipe out whole solar systems. Of course the systems would be uninhabitable from the resulting novas, supernovas and hypernovas. Ultimate scorched earth tactics I guess.

Killing a star is rather terrifyingly straightforward.

 

[Kranki]

That's a myth. Dumping tiny amounts of iron into a star won't do anything. "Tiny" compared to the star that is. There's nothing straightforward about gathering and moving an iron sphere the size of the Earth, and that's still several orders of magnitude smaller than the trace amount of iron that is already in the sun.

 

[John the Gamer]

You can always drop the iron sphere on a planet and wipe out all life on the surface.