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Alternately, pare back the degree to which the Spiritualist ethos is just a proxy for religiosity. At its core the ethos seems intended to be more about a very fundamental metaphysical stance (i.e., reality is not just material) but this presents as varying degrees of religious dogmatism. But I could easily see an Egalitarian/Spiritualist/Xenophile empire that has no single official church, and is instead radically ecumenical. They would like other Spiritualists for agreeing that there's more to the universe than meets the eye, but would probably not like a theocracy very much.
GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 23:08
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Yeah I'd love to see religion and ideology expanded on a bit more, have them things to fight over, to spread by diplomacy or sword. We've got this apparently important ethos system but it ultimately just boils down to being forced to set some policies a certain way to chase after influence and little else. I want to see some democratic crusaders actually go on some democratic crusades, I want to see theocracies spreading their specific named customizable religion. I want to see pacifists spreading a dangerous peaceful philosophy through soft power, terrifying local warmongers. I want to see materialists going to war to liberate enslaved synths. Stuff like that, wars over more than just painting the map your colour. I don't care about conquering the galaxy, I just want to spread my ideology/ethos.
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Apr 17, 2018 23:15
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You could probably refluff the axis to be empiricist vs. holistic, which seems like it would allow for the primary current mechanic of spiritualism (unity bonuses and Newtypes) while causing less anguish to people who went to lovely fundamentalist churches. Could strands of militant atheism be modeled as religious?  More seriously if there was some kind of ideological package that could handily cover "religions" as well.
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Apr 17, 2018 23:24
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I kinda would like to see some mechanics pulled separate from each other along those lines too. Spirituality is currently intimately connected to being religious which is pretty connected to psionics. But why not a machine religion? Why not materialist psychics minus the spirituality attraction (see Terran Ghosts in Starcraft).
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Apr 17, 2018 23:24
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GorfZaplen posted:There need to be religion mechanics, it makes no sense that spiritualist empires like each other simply for being religious. That's not how it works! Spiritualism actually measures how much your empire likes crystals and auras and the like
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Apr 17, 2018 23:30
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Improbable Lobster posted:Spiritualism actually measures how much your empire likes crystals and auras and the like Is there a mod that adds a room background with just like healing minerals and dreamcatchers and maybe a brightly colored poster of dolphins in the sea?
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Apr 17, 2018 23:34
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Background music all like Yanni
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Apr 17, 2018 23:35
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Improbable Lobster posted:Spiritualism actually measures how much your empire likes crystals and auras and the like This explains why the spiritualists like each other, more bros to charge their crystals with
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Apr 17, 2018 23:39
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I wish spiritualist was just a total trap option that filled your research options with tons of useless dead-end techs like crystal healing and theological study and the whole psionics branch did absolutely nothing but all the events and notifications are written from the perspective of the spiritualist culture so it always sounds like the big discovery that's going to change everything and prove the shroud is real is juuuust around the corner.
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Apr 17, 2018 23:41
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Baronjutter posted:I wish spiritualist was just a total trap option that filled your research options with tons of useless dead-end techs like crystal healing and theological study and the whole psionics branch did absolutely nothing but all the events and notifications are written from the perspective of the spiritualist culture so it always sounds like the big discovery that's going to change everything and prove the shroud is real is juuuust around the corner. But you still get to End The Cycle, of course
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Apr 17, 2018 23:47
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Baronjutter posted:I wish spiritualist was just a total trap option that filled your research options with tons of useless dead-end techs like crystal healing and theological study and the whole psionics branch did absolutely nothing but all the events and notifications are written from the perspective of the spiritualist culture so it always sounds like the big discovery that's going to change everything and prove the shroud is real is juuuust around the corner. I'd love to invest countless manhours into researching homeopathy and reiki for my galactic empire.
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Apr 17, 2018 23:55
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For people wanting more consistency and storyline to the AI empires in the game, check out ACEP https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=925031358 It adds 35 custom empires that will always spawn (randomly and up to the number of AI empires you specify at game start) and they cover all possible AI behavior profiles and government types. The cool thing about it are the first contact events, where after initial contact a dialogue box opens up where the different empires can be asked questions about their history, society, and intentions. They also have a 'last contact' event, where they send a final message to you after they are destroyed. It's well written, which is a must for me with mods (I don't care how cool the mechanic is, if the associated text and writing is bad I, personally, can't look past it). I will warn, though, that the empires have a more humorous bent than a serious or hard sci-fi one. Its good for a couple playthroughs until you've seen it all, at the very least!
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Apr 17, 2018 23:58
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The generically spiritualist empire should have some kind of hidden luck modifier though, so your techs do almost nothing but somehow you end up on top of most situations just because all dice rolls end up in your favor mysteriously.
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Apr 18, 2018 00:14
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Are there any Stellaris-like games that just focus on a single (or a couple) star systems? Like the The Expanse The Game is what I'm thinking. Planetary Annihilation sorta does that but more 4x and less rts.
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Apr 18, 2018 00:24
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appropriatemetaphor posted:Are there any Stellaris-like games that just focus on a single (or a couple) star systems? Like the The Expanse The Game is what I'm thinking. This isn't really a game I'd recommend since it's old as gently caress and you probably won't enjoy it, although I love it, but Reunion is like that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP_ia3nbUzM You have I think 7 star systems with planets to colonize, it's basically linear and has an ending, but it's still a sim game with resource trading and advisors and stuff. It's really hard and you're basically required to develop your colonies in the most efficient way possible to be able to fight enemies with your fleets. It's pretty unique.
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Apr 18, 2018 00:50
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PittTheElder posted:Could just be a different in style. If I get to 2400 or whatever the default endgame year is now, and I only have 15 planets, that means things are already seriously wrong. Ah, it seems the details I provided were confusing, let me rephrase in a less specific format. In general, it seems nice to have +20% resource yields from your tiles, at any point in the game, as economy seems to be a major component of power projection in Stellaris 2.0 I guess there's a playstyle that transcends resource constraints in this resource constrained game, which is pretty cool. For them the above doesn't apply.
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Apr 18, 2018 00:52
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Black Pants posted:I kinda would like to see some mechanics pulled separate from each other along those lines too. Spirituality is currently intimately connected to being religious which is pretty connected to psionics. But why not a machine religion? Why not materialist psychics minus the spirituality attraction (see Terran Ghosts in Starcraft). It's actually a kind of interesting idea. I don't think it reflects our reality, or even a particularly coherent conception of reality, but it's an interesting idea to try to wrap your head around, just for the sake of seeing alternate points of view. And it is presented as true in the context of the Stellaris universe. There are psychics. Materialists must at some point be forced to believe in the existence of the Shroud. But a being with an analytical mindset will never be able to measure or tap into that power. I could view it as making GBS threads on my worldview (as a philosophical materialist) in a very specific and deliberate way, but honestly I think it's kind of neat. I find it more interesting to deal with a bizarre and incomprehensible universe than for spirituality to be conceived of as something like this: Baronjutter posted:I wish spiritualist was just a total trap option that filled your research options with tons of useless dead-end techs like crystal healing and theological study and the whole psionics branch did absolutely nothing but all the events and notifications are written from the perspective of the spiritualist culture so it always sounds like the big discovery that's going to change everything and prove the shroud is real is juuuust around the corner. That said, if I were trying to figure out what to do with spiritualism in this game, I'd give it society/influence/unity/happiness related bonuses, rather than having it reveal a material truth of the universe that ironically the materialists never could discover. Edit: If they need special gameplay, not just general bonuses, give them an actual religion. A shared belief system as a trait that they could use to unify their own population, spread to other civilizations to increase relations, or use as a special kind of CB to impose on others. Eiba fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 01:19
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Nessus posted:Could strands of militant atheism be modeled as religious?
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Apr 18, 2018 01:21
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The idea of a technological singularity is very obviously a religious idea. There's absolutely no rational basis for that belief.
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Apr 18, 2018 01:23
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Eiba posted:And it is presented as true in the context of the Stellaris universe. There are psychics. Materialists must at some point be forced to believe in the existence of the Shroud. But a being with an analytical mindset will never be able to measure or tap into that power. Alternately, a Materialist will just Clarke's Law that poo poo away reflexively.
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Apr 18, 2018 01:26
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The thing about Machine Worlds is that as long as you have the spare energy (you probably do starting at like mid game) there's negligible downside to spending it. Sure it takes a while but... you suffer no penalty other than having spent the credits. that you'll probably make back pretty soon.The only current penalty for terraforming an inhabited planet literally does not apply to machine intelligences. Same goes for Hive Minds and Gaia Worlds, although it's only a 10% bonus for them.
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Apr 18, 2018 01:28
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Shibawanko posted:The generically spiritualist empire should have some kind of hidden luck modifier though, so your techs do almost nothing but somehow you end up on top of most situations just because all dice rolls end up in your favor mysteriously. Master of Orion 2 had a straight-up 'lucky' trait. Prevented (for the most part) bad events, attempted to keep the Antarans off your back, tried to give you good events. Thing is, that would have to extend to Anomalies, which are already a serious income source and the point of Discovery. Maybe a Discovery replacement? Hmm. And better combat rolls could honestly do a lot under Stellaris's combat. Even 5% extra dodge/hit/tracking could actually have a large knock-on effect with certain weapons or enough other tech backing it up. Spiritualists already get the better odds on Improbable Ceramics and extra +Happy temporarily from Void Clouds and Grand Design. Hmm. Bloodly fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 01:36
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darthbob88 posted:On the one hand, the entire point of atheism is materialism, that there is no higher divine power and religion is wrong. On the other hand, there's a reason people refer to the Singularity as Nerd Rapture. Shibawanko posted:The idea of a technological singularity is very obviously a religious idea. There's absolutely no rational basis for that belief. Infinite computing power requires infinite electrical power, not to mention infinite heat dissipation, and the depressing fact is that no one's ever going to solve world hunger because who would waste that kind of effort on poor people? I'm confident in stating that in the future, we'll have devices that are a little bit smaller and faster and have a bit more memory, for a slightly lower price. Batteries will still suck, because batteries are never good enough.
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Apr 18, 2018 01:36
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It also always bugs me when people take the kardashev scale seriously, like it's a definite prediction of the future instead of just a vague hypothesis about energy use. Some people sound like they think there's a straight line of development from Elon Musk bullshit right up to a dyson sphere like a tech tree in a videogame. Scifi games and fiction tends to portray beings in terms of "civilizations" a lot, like whole planetary governments who organized their entire society based on some agreed upon, rational principle of maximum utility based on a set of values. That's not how societies actually work and I kind of like the factions in Stellaris since that somewhat avoids that cliche.
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Apr 18, 2018 01:55
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The other snag with the technological singularity is that it kind of relies on Moore's Law holding forever. Nothing can grow forever and exponential growth is especially prone to that. The singularity assumes that the doubling will just continue forever until a computer gets invented that can invent a computer faster than itself faster than humans can which will in turn more quickly come up with a faster computer and... Except that we're already hitting the physical limits to how small transistors can be and still work. Nanotechnology and quantum computing might help deal with that but the other snag is that that gets into the territory of things that aren't all that practical from a cost standpoint. Quantum computers are absurdly expensive right now to the tune of literal millions of dollars. That'll go down to be sure but soon? Who knows? Programming the drat things is also really difficult and AI is still loving stupid. If the singularity happens it'll be a long way off.
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Apr 18, 2018 02:02
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Moore's Law was an observation of current trends and wasn't intended to be a predictor.
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Apr 18, 2018 02:05
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^^ Stating we won't have a certain technological progression or technology ever is just as absurd as stating we will for sure. AI was search trees and chess programs and chat bots for a long time and then suddenly we've got self-training neural nets. Tech never progresses at a pace we can predict and that's probably the only predictable thing about it. We thought aether was clever until it wasn't and that gravity clearly transmits itself instantly over any distance until it didn't.appropriatemetaphor posted:Are there any Stellaris-like games that just focus on a single (or a couple) star systems? Like the The Expanse The Game is what I'm thinking. Sins of a Solar Empire is similar to smaller scale Stellaris. You can also play Aurora on a small scale and still have ten times as much details as you'd ever need. DatonKallandor fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 02:09
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Baronjutter posted:I like how moo3 D:
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Apr 18, 2018 02:14
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I’ve run into a problem with wars. Around 2400, I had several protectorates and was friends with all the galaxy, except for one big jerk who was also my neighbor. I decided to put the universe into one big happy fun ball by invading him before the endgame crisis. Hmm, which war goal? I didn’t really want his territory or resources. I wanted his obedience. Vassal! So away to war I go, invading planets and crushing fleets. I eventually vassalize him, mission accomplished. But now my other formerly friendly neighbor and a federation that loved me, well, they both REALLY HATE me. The jerk that I just vassalized had a bunch of claims on them, I guess? What’s the best way to handle a jerk neighbor like that? I don’t want anything other than him to be replaced by a subservient and non-threatening neighbor. I don’t want to micromanage his systems or personally deal with unrest. I’d prefer not to genocide. I want to stay friends with the other empires I’m already friendly with. Is there any good option?
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Apr 18, 2018 02:19
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wiegieman posted:I'm confident in stating that in the future, we'll have devices that are a little bit smaller and faster and have a bit more memory, for a slightly lower price. Batteries will still suck, because batteries are never good enough. When fiber & wireless networks become ubiquitous all heavy computing functions can be offloaded from local devices and processed at datacenters running near-absolute zero cooling. It's not infinite computing power, but you don't need infinite computing power to create Skynet or Hal9000 or Deep Thought. Those absurdly expensive quantum computers won't be so unaffordable if every cell phone user spends $1000 to get a $10 shiny screen with a $1 radio and a $3 microprocessor, and the other $986 goes to pay for 0.0001% of the computing cycles of a million dollar server in Utah.
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Apr 18, 2018 02:20
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DatonKallandor posted:^^ Stating we won't have a certain technological progression or technology ever is just as absurd as stating we will for sure. AI was search trees and chess programs and chat bots for a long time and then suddenly we've got self-training neural nets. Neural Nets are extremely dumb. Not as an idea, when they actually work they're rad, but they're only really good at a small subset of tasks. Nevets posted:When fiber & wireless networks become ubiquitous 
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Apr 18, 2018 02:23
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Nevets from 1988 posted:When personal computers become ubiquitous Nevets from 1998 posted:When broadband networks become ubiquitous Nevets from 2008 posted:When HD video streaming becomes ubiquitous
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Apr 18, 2018 02:40
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None of those are actually ubiquitous if you look for even a second outside of major north american and european cities
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Apr 18, 2018 02:42
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Fanpatched and modded MoO3 is a genuinely great 4x. It needed a lot more time in the oven but most of it's design ideas are rock solid and just needed some more refinement (the planetary management system, the fleet design and task forces, the ground combat, their version of space UN, etc.).
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Apr 18, 2018 02:43
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Improbable Lobster posted:None of those are actually ubiquitous if you look for even a second outside of major north american and european cities I've never lived in a major city in my life, (or even a mid-sized one) but I've had DSL capable of streaming 720p for at least 10 years. I'll grant you this is a bit hyperbolic outside 1st world countries, but realistically nobody expects Skynet to form on a server in Mongolia.
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Apr 18, 2018 02:51
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A bit late to the chat but while I generally like the current ethos and think they make sense, I never liked materialism/spiritualism. As others noted above, they describe what I think are pretty interesting philosophical outlooks but Stellaris just boils it all down to "do you hate robots y/n?" Like, I don't think any other faction gets as upset about anything as spiritualists do if you don't go full-on Fanatic Purifier towards them. The very thinly veiled theocratic implications of pretty much everything else to do with spiritualism is a secondary concern to me.
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Apr 18, 2018 03:08
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Improbable Lobster posted:Neural Nets are extremely dumb. Not as an idea, when they actually work they're rad, but they're only really good at a small subset of tasks. They are fairly entertaining though. Watching a neural network trained to play a game is interesting to me, just because of the way they are completely unlike normal players. The decision-making process intrigues me.
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Apr 18, 2018 03:34
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holy poo poo I had stellaris crash on me. 600 hours and 2 crashes is a pretty good record. It's so much better than the old days when it was normal for a hoi2 or vicky run to just have some date you'd crash at no matter what.
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Apr 18, 2018 03:42
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I had the Scourge show up in a game, and even with that ascension perk that increases damage done to them, they are a hell of a slog to deal with. I sent up 3 60k fleets, which is my fleet cap, all of them decked out with lots of armor and plasma weaponry. I was able to take out a few of their 80k fleets, but attrition eventually won out and I had to bail. What hurts in dealing with them is they far enough away from me that it takes a long time to get ships there, and I don't have time to get a station going before one of their 90k fleets shows up and chases me off. Is there a good trick to dealing with them? Or should I just stay back and let others handle it, since they are eating their territory and not mine.
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Apr 18, 2018 04:19
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Nevets posted:I've never lived in a major city in my life, (or even a mid-sized one) but I've had DSL capable of streaming 720p for at least 10 years. I'll grant you this is a bit hyperbolic outside 1st world countries, but realistically nobody expects Skynet to form on a server in Mongolia. Well, there's a reason the Nerd Rapture is mostly believed in by really, really white skinnyfat guys from the Bay who drink soylent instead of eating real food. Besides, I'm worried about what the assholes who own robots will do with them, not what the robots will do when they try and fail to overthrow humanity.
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Apr 18, 2018 04:42
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