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Synthbuttrange posted:I meant more in the way of 'oh god great we're going to have to read more sextorture poo poo I hate myself gently caress gently caress gently caress' and first person pedophile thoughts bluh and third book characterization heel turns. You mean fake pedophile thoughts, since it turns out basically everyone in those books has fake memories implanted. It's not to everyone's taste though, that's right. So if you have problems with reading about psychological problems, you should probably skip Rifters, too. Really, if you just want some mainstream SF, read only Blindsight and pretend all other books by Watts don't exist. 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Jul 6, 2018 |
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Jul 6, 2018 11:03
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Read Alastair Reynolds. His penchant for having something gross and biological in many of his stories (or change voices a little when talking about astronomy) is absolutely nothing next to that, and his stories are pretty darn good. 
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Jul 6, 2018 11:06
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Anticheese posted:Read Alastair Reynolds. His penchant for having something gross and biological in many of his stories (or change voices a little when talking about astronomy) is absolutely nothing next to that, and his stories are pretty darn good. Yeah, Alastair Reynolds is good. He also hasn't, too my knowledge, tainted his books by writing obnoxious essays and putting them into the back of his novels (I'm looking at you, Echopraxia.).
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Jul 6, 2018 11:10
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Read Surface Detail, in which Iain M. Banks goes loving ultra dark with his descriptions of varying levels of Hell.
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Jul 6, 2018 11:13
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Communist Bear posted:Read Surface Detail, in which Iain M. Banks goes loving ultra dark with his descriptions of varying levels of Hell. Potential book spoiler joke: Suffering-as-a-service! 
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Jul 6, 2018 11:17
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Synthbuttrange posted:Blindsight and Echopraxia are great but DEAR GOD DO NOT READ RIFTERS if you value your sanity. Pssh, Rifters is great. It's definitely darker and weirder than Blindsight and its sequel, but Rifters has a lot of cool stuff in it (but it definitely also has a lot of heavier stuff in it).
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Jul 6, 2018 12:24
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After stomping the galaxy on the defaults and with vanilla Stellaris with a federation win. I bought some DLC's and threw myself into an iron-man game with two difficulty levels higher. With a custom human race. Things start amazing, two of my scientists have spark of genius, my governor has intellectual, I've got mining guilds and I know how to expand properly this time. I've got a nice little cluster to myself that has, count 'em, 3 goddamn continental worlds. I colonize all of them quickly. Not only that I've got many systems with resources and I'm getting all kinds of goodies from exploring. Sweet! Then my nearest neighbour is fanatical purifiers. gently caress. well i can bottle them up with a single system that I can make into a fortress, no big deal... But then there's a caretaker FE that I meet, and proceeds to force some injections on my population that causes -20% happiness. gently caress. Then I get the ransomeers event, and decide to go after it with my main fleet, which tanks my economy. Double gently caress. Then around this point the purifiers attack me and just blow through my defense system like it wasn't even there. Despite having UV lasers, missiles and lvl2 KE guns, and even destroyers, they have Oh and during all this my leaders are dropping like flies because of those injections gave everyone -20 years of life. They then proceed to roll through and while I fight them to the point I could have gotten a white space, only loosing that defense system. But after marshaling my forces, and having won a few space engagements I decided to gamble on taking that system back before going for the peace talks. I get pre-empted and my fleet, my dreams and my empire melt before my eyes. It's rather sad how easy it is to failure cascade. I could have weathered the storm if I had of just ignored the ransomeers event, because that wouldn't have tanked my economy and I would have been able to defend that fortress system, maybe. Ah well, I'll start this again, but on captain difficulty I think. It is rather annoying however that I know I want to get AC's asap, but it's just completely luck of the draw for getting techs as far as i can tell?
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Jul 6, 2018 12:25
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Feudal Civic civs could maybe have something like cheaper colony ships but they're guaranteed to have different ethics and start as an independent vassal or something.Libluini posted:Rifters is easy mode for reading Watts, it's Echopraxia I would warn against if you value your sanity. It's not that it is bad, it will make you think, it will force you to engage with it. And if you disagree with Watt's ideas, it will be utterly painful and miserable to read. But it's good. Blindsight's definitely his best. I had to read Echopraxia twice to really 'get it' but it's also a solid read (and it also spells out a particularly devilish twist in Blindsight that very few people seemed to pick up on). I've always been fascinated by how easy his stuff is to read despite the subject matter, the content and his 'preachyness'.
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Jul 6, 2018 12:29
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Communist Bear posted:Yup I did, but Milkfred is right. By the time you get to a stable state in which you could feasibly split off vassals, the Galaxy is already too busy. I've never done it but my understanding is that feudal vassals can do well if they are given an injection of resources to get them started. I think they'd particularly shine at filling up arms of space that you've blocked off from other empires, while allowing you to focus on other things to spend your influence on.
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Jul 6, 2018 12:37
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:
Yeah, if you just want to read one I'd also go with Blindsight. (Can you spoiler the twist? I read both and don't really remember anything of the sort?)
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Jul 6, 2018 12:37
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I'm guessing its Humans are dumb and hosed
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Jul 6, 2018 12:41
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Synthbuttrange posted:I'm guessing its Humans are dumb and hosed I'm not even talking about the book.
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Jul 6, 2018 12:44
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DrSunshine posted:Can anyone recommend some books that have a similar feel to Stellaris's world? Like, the general themes of "cyclical decay of galactic civilizations", the cosmic horror themes found in the End of the Cycle, the Horizon Signal, some of the spooky space-opera stuff like the Shroud and Unbidden. I've read Dan Simmons's Hyperion series, and Asimov's Foundation. Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov - def has the feel of a galaxy spaning empire, and years of evolution of that empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series
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Jul 6, 2018 12:54
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Anticheese posted:Everyone cooing about Coruscant, and not a single person pumped for Trantor? One of the earlier releases was even called Asimov, and I don't see a Star Wars writer in the release names. 1.3 Zahn or we riot Also re: bookchat, somewhat related but what other music fits in with the Stellaris soundtrack? I've already added the beyond Earth soundtrack to my game.
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Jul 6, 2018 13:11
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genericnick posted:Yeah, if you just want to read one I'd also go with Blindsight. (Can you spoiler the twist? I read both and don't really remember anything of the sort?) Synthbuttrange posted:I'm guessing its Humans are dumb and hosed It's not that. Big Blindsight spoilers, less so Echopraxia spoilers. We are not reading Siri's perspective in Blindsight. We are reading the perspective of something Rorsharch made that thinks it is Siri. It's very, very hidden in Blindsight (the key is 'Imagine you are Siri Keeton' and a few other things) but Echopraxia has one of the characters flat out tell another that just because something that sounds like Siri is coming back towards Earth doesn't mean it is Siri.
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Jul 6, 2018 13:20
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CoolHandMat posted:Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov - def has the feel of a galaxy spaning empire, and years of evolution of that empire. It's darker, but so does Mike Resnick's "Birthright: The Book of Man".
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Jul 6, 2018 13:39
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Gyshall posted:1.3 Zahn or we riot That is clearly Holy Terra not Coruscant in that teaser. 1.3 Abnett.
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Jul 6, 2018 14:22
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CoolHandMat posted:Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov - def has the feel of a galaxy spaning empire, and years of evolution of that empire. Dude, I wrote right at the end that I've already read that one! Haha. I have read one Culture book, Excession (I'm interested in the AI characters) I started reading Player of Games, but only got about a third of the way in. I guess it didn't really catch me.
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Jul 6, 2018 14:44
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sorry i cant read good the Star Carrier series is pretty cool if you like war themed background. More realistic space battles and aliens then most books.
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Jul 6, 2018 14:54
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:It's not that. Interesting, because my interpretation (based mostly on what we learn in Echopraxia), is completely incompatible with yours. So obviously have to disagree! That bit from Echopraxia you mention is a red herring, since it is actually totally irrelevant what comes back with Siri, since the aliens are already there and have won: Blindsight hints heavily that the information the vampires needed to rise up against mankind was sent by the Scramblers. The Scramblers want to destroy consciousness and at the end of Echopraxia, they have succeeded. Siri however, always had trouble connecting with other humans thanks to his brain operation during his childhood: What is going on here is even made more explicit if you read Watt's essay about mind and consciousness, where he even describes some of the brain diseases he uses in Blindsight and Echopraxia to make a point. What happens at the End of Blindsight is that Siri, thanks to the influence of the AI-captain of the Perseus, is starting to feel a bit more human, in spite of his debilitation. Also a lot of the story revolves around Rohrschach not existing. It's just the Scramblers pretending to understand and sending random bits back. That's the whole point of Blindsight: Communication with aliens turns out to be impossible. Your theory is therefore sadly completely wrong.
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Jul 6, 2018 15:02
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Xerxes17 posted:After stomping the galaxy on the defaults and with vanilla Stellaris with a federation win. I bought some DLC's and threw myself into an iron-man game with two difficulty levels higher. With a custom human race. You really have to cap platforms in defensive forts bordering purifiers, their fleet offensive bonuses are usually powerful enough on their own to overcome early game bastions otherwise, and keep your fleet handy nearby that's also a lovely inoculation roll, i've only seen the bad result once out of the dozen+ times i've let them do it. And yes techs are luck of the draw, with some influence based on the specialties of the research head. Materials/voidcraft etc.
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Jul 6, 2018 15:12
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:It's not that. I didn't get that sense at all. "Imagine you are Siri Keeton" I read as a play on the main theme. Consciousness as a bug.
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Jul 6, 2018 15:14
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Peter Watts' short story "The Things" is pretty good tbh.
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Jul 6, 2018 15:17
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To get back on topic a bit, the newest version still has some wonky parts, even if it is really good! The wonky things in my most current playthrough: 1. The precursor-event firing 50 years into the game, then getting stuck after 3 artifacts collected. It's now nearly 40 years since the last precursor-related event. Soon a full century will have passed without the precursor-events finishing. Probably Karma, since precursor-events were something I never really had problems with, even in the worst of times. Now that they work for everyone else, they've started to break for me! Yay? 2. The space religion event actually put its systems really close together and in sensible reach. Yay! But then the zoo collection event randomly teleports two of the critters halfway across the galaxy again. Boo! Luckily this time into a friendly empire, so I could eventually finish the event, too. Just took me 20 years to slowly let my science ship wander over there. The science ship teleportation tech of course only showed up after my ship arrives there anyway.  3. Something is still strange with migration: While it definitely works, sometimes I get weird results like people migrating towards a 55% planet overgrown with flesh-eating plants, while the shiny new terraformed 85% planet gets ignored. I'm guessing what happened here is that whatever calculates migration behind the veil didn't get the memo about the terraformation happening, and is still basing migration attraction on that new colony being a 25% shithole. 
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Jul 6, 2018 15:42
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CoolHandMat posted:Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov - def has the feel of a galaxy spaning empire, and years of evolution of that empire. Foundation series is about the human FE.
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Jul 6, 2018 15:51
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DrSunshine posted:Dude, I wrote right at the end that I've already read that one! Haha. The Player of Games isn't a great Culture book. Try Use of Weapons instead, it's a bit more action paced and has one of the best characters in the series.
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Jul 6, 2018 15:51
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Something I've just noticed about the Eternal Vigilence perk that gives you +5 defence platforms: it also applies to outposts, meaning you can have 7 plats on anything close to the frontier and add even more attrition.
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Jul 6, 2018 16:50
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Aethernet posted:Something I've just noticed about the Eternal Vigilence perk that gives you +5 defence platforms: it also applies to outposts, meaning you can have 7 plats on anything close to the frontier and add even more attrition. i dont think that's really worth it for anything but pirate countering platforms w/o a base get toasted with minimal casualties Libluini posted:To get back on topic a bit, the newest version still has some wonky parts, even if it is really good! The wonky things in my most current playthrough: The exterminator game i started last night ended up with cybrex for me, and within 10 years of the first anomaly in 2230 or so i had found all of the artifacts and located the home system
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Jul 6, 2018 16:59
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Sloober posted:The exterminator game i started last night ended up with cybrex for me, and within 10 years of the first anomaly in 2230 or so i had found all of the artifacts and located the home system Yeah, that's how it normally goes for me. Looks like my luck finally ran out. Also gently caress, there are still people migrating to the planet of deadly murder plants, while my precious new terraforming wonder has to homegrow pops. What is wrong with those fox people? Looks like I should have called my empire DeviantArt, considering how many of our furry citizens are into vore 
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Jul 6, 2018 17:10
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Libluini posted:Yeah, that's how it normally goes for me. Looks like my luck finally ran out. Cheap real estate?
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Jul 6, 2018 17:14
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DrSunshine posted:Can anyone recommend some books that have a similar feel to Stellaris's world? Like, the general themes of "cyclical decay of galactic civilizations", the cosmic horror themes found in the End of the Cycle, the Horizon Signal, some of the spooky space-opera stuff like the Shroud and Unbidden. I've read Dan Simmons's Hyperion series, and Asimov's Foundation. 'Children of Time' by Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of my favourite books ever and is basically 'what happens when Uplifting goes wrong'. Half the book is spent following the development of a civilization of jumping spiders in a surprisingly relatable way.
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Jul 6, 2018 17:26
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Aethernet posted:Something I've just noticed about the Eternal Vigilence perk that gives you +5 defence platforms: it also applies to outposts, meaning you can have 7 plats on anything close to the frontier and add even more attrition. If outposts could be something like Battleships it might help, but it seems like defense sucks all the way around.
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Jul 6, 2018 17:29
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hobbesmaster posted:Cheap real estate? Looks like prices just skyrocketed on monster plant planet, a third wave of colonists has suddenly arrived on my terraformed world. Now monster world is rightfully ignored. But now that problem has solved itself, other real estate related troubles are showing up (spoilered, in case someone wants to see this event chain for themselves): My scientists found a tiny protomolecule-like thing on a random asteroid and it gave me the options to just get a research bonus on that rock, or to take a sample. The next step was my scientists prodding the thing in a lab, being amazed at how it suddenly started growing. I was curious, so I ordered the research to continue. Third step, now the thing was some kind of giant fungus, slowly overgrowing the entire lab with its spores. Since I was xenophile, I had two options: Filling all empty tiles on my capital with new fungoid pops, or searching for a new home for them. Since my capital was full at the time, I send my scientists out to unload the mess on some unsuspecting shithole. Last step: The super-fungus was thrown out of the airlock on one of the best still unclaimed planets just beyond my northwestern border. There it grew even faster and split up into an entire people of fungus folk. They even duplicated our FTL-technology and founded their own little new empire! And they love us, even though they are authoritarian, slavering despots! Man, do I feel lucky now that I didn't put those weirdos on the same planet as us, xenophile or not, I fully expect that there is another hidden event ending with us all enslaved to the fungus guys. Good: I got new friends! Bad: I lost a potential future colony! Also now I have to rush to claim some more systems next to them, just so they don't snatch up tons of strategic resources I got from earlier anomalies. Because I somehow suspect the peace between slavers and space peaceniks won't be for long. Space politics! It's mad.
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Jul 6, 2018 18:32
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Re: novels if you can survive with only mild levels of grotesque pessimism: Vernor Vinge has “a fire upon the deep” and “a deepness in the sky”. I also likedBruce Sterling’s Schismatrix. Known Space is also solid.
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Jul 6, 2018 18:40
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im in my third game hitting the 2400 mark and these enemy fleets are getting in the 100k+ range. im thinking its time to get better at the makeup of my fleets. Are there any guides to using the ship fleet builder? im not really finding it easy to use, and all of these auto upgrade boxes / failure to upgrages are starting to become a pain.
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Jul 6, 2018 21:03
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Anyone know the MTTH for the Great Khan? Google is telling me 100 years but it’s a random reddit post so who knows. I’m waiting on them to take a big chunk out of one of the massive exterminators, assimilators, or purifiers who occupy the south, east, and west respectively. This is the first time I’ve seen the genocidal empires do well, especially in a game with so many empires - 21 on the biggest size galaxy. Scary poo poo
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Jul 6, 2018 21:19
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genericnick posted:Read Rifters and don't value your sanity. Don't read Peter Watts if you value your time, unless you actually believe humanity is a mistake and we deserve a fiery, trumpy extinction soon (if you actually believe this, be the change you want).
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Jul 6, 2018 21:39
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Take it to the book barn nerds!!!!
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Jul 6, 2018 22:57
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CoolHandMat posted:im in my third game hitting the 2400 mark and these enemy fleets are getting in the 100k+ range. im thinking its time to get better at the makeup of my fleets. Are there any guides to using the ship fleet builder? im not really finding it easy to use, and all of these auto upgrade boxes / failure to upgrages are starting to become a pain. Just build all Cruisers, with some Kinetic Artillery and the rest Plasma. Even out on shields and armor. Add afterburners, Regenerative Hull tissue if you don't have Living Metal. They're fast, versatile, and sustainable. Especially since the AI tends to build generalist there's no much point to specializing your fleets; if you're going to fight only one guy and you can see his ship designs, then go nuts I guess, but it's usually not worth it.
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Jul 6, 2018 23:45
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Nightgull posted:Anyone know the MTTH for the Great Khan? Google is telling me 100 years but it’s a random reddit post so who knows. I’m waiting on them to take a big chunk out of one of the massive exterminators, assimilators, or purifiers who occupy the south, east, and west respectively. This is the first time I’ve seen the genocidal empires do well, especially in a game with so many empires - 21 on the biggest size galaxy. Scary poo poo code:In addition, there is a ~2% chance to trigger it every time a marauder station is destroyed, so if there is more than one marauder faction you should kill all but one. Worst case you make it more likely that the normal event fires, and best case you kick it off immediately.
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Jul 6, 2018 23:47
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