A Stellaris player decided to create a space USA – and immediately ran into a galactic Soviet Union

The random number generator in grand strategy games usually works quietly in the background, scattering stars and neighbors across the galaxy without any particular agenda. But sometimes it produces a layout that makes you wonder if the game secretly read your history textbooks.

That's exactly what happened in Stellaris, where a player started as a custom-built United States empire and found the Soviet Union sitting right next door as the very first neighbor. Not somewhere across the galaxy on the far end of a spiral arm, but literally next door, a couple hyperlanes away. Out of hundreds of systems in the galaxy, the game picked the most predictable possible opponent for the first handshake.

The mechanic behind this is simpler than it sounds. In Stellaris, the empire editor lets players save custom factions and flag them for forced spawning, which means the game has to slot them into the galaxy during generation. The player did force the Soviets to appear, on top of adding a bunch of themed mods for name lists and emblems, including the Americana namelist and Emblemata Americana II. But the choice of neighboring system and the order of first contact were entirely up to the algorithm.

Cultural memory kicked in right away. The first thing people brought up was Premier Cherdenko from Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, played by Tim Curry, and his famous line about escaping to the one place capitalism hasn't ruined yet:

I'm escaping to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism... space!

Fallout logic showed up next. The suggestion to grab ancient Cybrex warforms, rename them "Liberty Prime brigades," and drop them on Soviet worlds sounds absurd right up until you remember that in Stellaris you can actually rename assault armies by hand, and the Colossus Project ascension perk turns an ideological argument into literal planetary annihilation. Someone pointed out there'd be no proxy wars here, you gotta fight like real empires.

A reference to For All Mankind, the Apple TV+ show about a space race that never ended, got a laugh too, complete with a joke about spoilers for season 138. Somebody also brought up that somewhere else in this galaxy, Space North Korea had already invaded Space South Korea, and the Space Vietnamese were busy with their own civil war.

The galaxy is huge, yet somehow the neighbors are always the same.