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Dirk the Average posted:Thinking about it, there are only two games that I use an extensive mod list (10+ mods, as opposed to something like Old World Blues for HoI4) for: Rimworld and Stellaris. 100% agreed. I like what Stellaris attempts to do but like, nearly every aspect needs an overhaul or at least big chances/additions. It's nuts.
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Oct 15, 2020 16:11
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Looks like a big patch next week, looking forward to seeing if they do anything about weird pop growth and the need for resettlement.
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Oct 15, 2020 17:09
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Gort posted:Looks like a big patch next week, looking forward to seeing if they do anything about weird pop growth and the need for resettlement. The odd thing is that the Greater Than Ourselves edict actually fixes a lot of the resettlement issues. It's just that it's locked behind a galactic community resolution rather than being something that you can just use, especially given that it's just a quality of life thing and the cost of resettlement is trivial once you're in the midgame and resettlement becomes something important to do.
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Oct 15, 2020 17:43
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The growth penalties to new colonies and preferred species should have never been a thing imo. Luckily mods axe that but still. The vast majority of the mods I use are bandaid fixes to lovely game mechanics and the rest are actually adding content. Same applies to Greater than Ourselves, I actually modded that to be a baseline edict because gating it behind the incredibly slow senate is horseshit.
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Oct 15, 2020 17:45
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Stellaris is the Skyrim of 4x/strategy games. The base game is at best okay, but generally bland and broken. However, modded Skyrim and Stellaris are fantastic and unique experiences (but still broken).
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Oct 15, 2020 21:04
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To be honest there aren't even all that many games that can meaningfully support dozens of simultaneus mods, being a good platform for mods is an achievement in its own right. Off the top of my head there's - Elder Scrolls 3/4/5 - KSP - FO3/FONV - KOTOR - Rimworld - Stardew Valley - X2/X3/X4 - Minecraft - Spore - Starbound - No Mans Sky - Baldurs Gate - CK2 - TW:WH (1 or 2) - OpenTTD - Garrys Mod - Stellaris - The Sims 2/3/4 - SimCity 4 (and some modern derivatives) And that's all that I can think of. There's a lot more that use a few mods at a time, but not very many that benefit from a lot of mods at once. To be fair a number of those pack many modifications into one (too many to list, but e.g Mount and Blade and Civilization 4). e: Spore and NMS might be stretching it a bit, even. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 02:38
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Private Speech posted:To be honest there aren't even all that many games that can meaningfully support dozens of simultaneus mods, being a good platform for mods is an achievement in its own right. Kenshi, a world where "give everyone crabs" is a viable strategy to win battles. ToME4 which is (somehow) Angband minus the dumb tolkien fluff. silentsnack fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 03:15
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silentsnack posted:Kenshi, a world where "give everyone crabs" is a viable strategy to win battles. Why just look at the time...  Is there a crustacean mod?
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Oct 16, 2020 04:31
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So I started playing this again after a 1 year break, and wow a lot has changed! My first new game was rolling fine but I neglected my fleet, and when some idiot AI opened the L-Cluster the Gray Tempest kicked my rear end (30k vs 3k  ), after it crushed the 4 neighbouring empires. I actually managed to to establish a refugee colony at the far end of my empire, but this one was eventually overrun as well. Of course, only when my last planet was being glassed did the galactic council start voting on the emergency that was the Tempest  Oh well, makes for a fun story.As I am completely out of the loop, is there any beginners guide updated for the game as of late? Also, what are the recommended mods that are not too wacky? Thanks !
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Oct 16, 2020 11:33
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You probably wouldn't go far wrong with this mod list: 1. Tiny outliner v2 2. Tiny fleets 3. ~Glavius's Ultimate AI 4. Automatic Pop Migration Top two make the UI better, third one makes the AI better (which doesn't necessarily make the game harder, as your allies will also be better) and the fourth one makes the late game a lot less of a slog. Gort fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 11:56
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Gort posted:You probably wouldn't go far wrong with this mod list: Thank you! I've wanted to start diving into mods but still want somewhat of a vanilla experience.
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Oct 16, 2020 12:08
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Yeah, those mods don't add or really mess with any of the game content. Regarding starting strategies, they're pretty varied depending on exactly who you're playing and what origin you selected. Robots on a ring world are pretty different to a Tree of Life hive mind. The ring world is a powerful start, but organics with the prosperous unification origin is probably the most "standard", so you should probably start with that one. Some early targets most empires should be trying to hit: 1. Build all the resource and research stations in your home system 2. Clear the blockers on your homeworld that give immediate benefits - there's one on most homeworlds that gives you a free pop, which is valuable 3. Research and build robot assembly plants on all planets (keep in mind these early robots can only be miners and farmers, but you can sell food for energy so it's no big deal to have lots of excess food) 4. Find and colonise all your starting habitable planets - usually there are two habitable planets within three jumps of your home system 5. Get four science vessels with scientists 6. Fill any additional building slots your homeworld gains with alloy foundries - alloys are strength in the early game 7. Get your new colonies to 10 pops ASAP so they stop taking growth penalties 8. Build two "anchorage" starbases (starbase with two anchorage modules, adds 8 to your naval cap) for a total naval cap of 36, fill this naval cap with corvettes, half with lasers, half with mass drivers Medium-term, you want to look at getting some specialised planets - an office planet, a factory planet for consumer goods, and then as many research and alloy planets as you can afford. Add extra office planets and factory planets as needed, and make sure to manually set the planet specialisations on your planets. Building order for my planets tends to be robot assembly plant -> one of whatever the planet is specialised to make (EG: consumer goods factory, alloy foundry, office complex etc) -> holo theatre -> fill rest of slots with whatever the planet is specialised to make Gort fucked around with this message at 12:49 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 12:11
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Alright, thanks for the feedback so far! Didn't know about growth penalty for new colonies, explains why my colonizing was so slow As for robots, strangely enough I never saw the option to build a robot assembly plant during my game (I was the bog standard UNE), also no robot technology whatsoever... Did I miss something? Planet specialization: any tips on how to choose one, depending on the planet? Any type of district I should favour? I was generally trying to keep everything more or less balanced. Also, are the other buildings (prison, luxury residence, gene clinic, malls...) good for anything? Lastly, regarding ship combat: is the OP still applicable? Also, I think the ship designer was having a bug, since when I turned automated designs off I couldn't save any changes to my customized builds... Is that possible?
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Oct 16, 2020 14:32
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Chikimiki posted:As for robots, strangely enough I never saw the option to build a robot assembly plant during my game (I was the bog standard UNE), also no robot technology whatsoever... Did I miss something? Sounds like you just didn't get lucky with the tech system yet. The first robot tech is called "Robotic Workers" and can only be researched if you've researched "Powered Exoskeletons". You're more likely to be able to pick "Robotic Workers" if you have materialist or fanatic materialist ethics, and if your engineering researcher is an "Industry expert". If you run the "Robotic Workers Outlawed" policy you won't see it, and you'll be less likely to see it if you have spiritualist or fanatic spiritualist ethics. (if you wanna know how I know this, check this link out) Most likely you just have to wait and keep researching stuff, it'll pop up fairly early in most games. quote:Planet specialization: any tips on how to choose one, depending on the planet? Any type of district I should favour? I was generally trying to keep everything more or less balanced. Also, are the other buildings (prison, luxury residence, gene clinic, malls...) good for anything? If a place has a ton of district slots of one type but not many of the others it's worth making it a farm/mining/generator planet, if it has a ton of districts you might want to make it a rural planet. For your office/factory/alloy/research worlds you generally want ones with a low number of districts for their size. In general with districts you can never have too much energy or minerals, but you probably shouldn't make more food than you need. The exception is if you need to employ basic robots somewhere just to stop them being unemployed and you already filled all your mining slots, then farms are perfectly acceptable. The "other" buildings are generally quite niche in their use. Residences are good if you have no district slots to build city districts, but need housing. In the early game, however, building slots are a premium resource and district slots are not, so residences are not particularly useful. Police buildings are the kind of thing you build if you have crime on a world, but don't bother with them unless you do. Opinion is divided on gene clinics, but I consider them a waste of a building slot - you get faster population growth, which is normally a good thing, but the amount of growth you get is so low that they take a very long time to "pay for themselves". I think you're better off with a research lab or alloy plant or whatever the planet's meant to be producing instead. Malls give you lots of clerk jobs which are fine if you just want to keep unemployment down, but pretty much any other job is better outside of very specialised (read - "megacorp in a trade league federation stacking every trade bonus you can think of) types of empire. quote:Lastly, regarding ship combat: is the OP still applicable? Also, I think the ship designer was having a bug, since when I turned automated designs off I couldn't save any changes to my customized builds... Is that possible? I'd actually say the OP overcomplicates things. As a new player, just build as many of the largest ship you can (so corvettes until you get destroyers, destroyers until you get cruisers, then battleships from then on) and fill half of their gun slots with things that kill shields, and the other half with things that kill armour. If you get a gun that also has hull damage bonuses, prioritise that. Fill half the defensive slots with armour, and the other half with shields, replacing shields with armour if you run out of power. Put afterburners in the utility slots, and use the best reactor, sensors and computers you've got. Don't bother with missiles or point defense. Not sure what you were seeing with the ship designer, but if you turn off automated designs you should be able to make a new design for a corvette, save it, then delete the original design and upgrade your ships to use the new design.
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Oct 16, 2020 14:56
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as far as i know my combat tips that are in the OP still apply except the part about the artillery range bug, which was fixed a long time ago, and maybe my use of strike craft picket cruisers as both strike craft and PD have changed a lot. the most important thing is still the swarm. you want to stock each fleet with at least half of its fleet power as corvettes to avoid a swarm rout, as corvettes still do the lion's share of the work defensively. their high evasion is key for their role and you will lose a lot of ships if you stack too many big ships without covering them with corvettes. at the same time, corvettes just can't put out the damage to assault high-end starbases or other big targets in a timely fashion so you do want big ships. i could see where it would seem overcomplicated to analyze the mechanics given that 95% of battles end up with you just smushing your dudes into the other guy's dudes, and the battles are so chaotic visually that it's very hard to actually see the fleet positions in action...but they really do make a big difference when a fleet with no swarm fights a fleet with a swarm. don't be like the AI and roam around with top-heavy stacks or your shiny battleships will be very dead, very fast Jazerus fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 15:22
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Nah, a battleship swarm with lots of neutron launchers and spinal mounts does just fine against pretty much everything in my experience. If you're intending to play multiplayer against humans who will build to counter your fleet then fine, get into the nitty-gritty, but for a new player going against normal-difficulty AI then a simple base of "the biggest ships you can get with a balance between anti-shield and anti-armour guns, and a balance between shields and armour for defenses" is simple and effective. And the AI doesn't build "top heavy stacks", the AI builds ships by mashing its face into the ship designer, their fleets are a mess while my fleets are one glorious design repeated infinitely, as god intended
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Oct 16, 2020 15:38
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Gort posted:Sounds like you just didn't get lucky with the tech system yet. The first robot tech is called "Robotic Workers" and can only be researched if you've researched "Powered Exoskeletons". You're more likely to be able to pick "Robotic Workers" if you have materialist or fanatic materialist ethics, and if your engineering researcher is an "Industry expert". If you run the "Robotic Workers Outlawed" policy you won't see it, and you'll be less likely to see it if you have spiritualist or fanatic spiritualist ethics. (if you wanna know how I know this, check this link out) Ooooh I never bothered with exoskeletons  The bonus seemed quite low to me, and I never had any trouble gathering minerals.quote:If a place has a ton of district slots of one type but not many of the others it's worth making it a farm/mining/generator planet, if it has a ton of districts you might want to make it a rural planet. For your office/factory/alloy/research worlds you generally want ones with a low number of districts for their size. Ok, thanks! Any tips on planets with lots of city districts? I think the city planet is DLC only, right? Also, thanks a lot for the combat tips! I'll try to make it work in my next playthrough 
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Oct 16, 2020 15:43
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Get the Carrying Capacity mod. It removes the colonization growth penalty.
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Oct 16, 2020 15:49
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In the early game the crystal plating seem to be a pretty solid choice, if you got a crystal income. Gives more HP on corvettes then shield or armor does up to like tier 4, and in the early game the AI is most likely not using anything that has a +hull damage weapon. And you can save on alloys! Later on though I go all in on armor because the AI tends to go half and half on +shield or armor damage and going all in on one means that half their weapons are useless. And in going all in on armor saves power.
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Oct 16, 2020 15:55
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Gort posted:Nah, a battleship swarm with lots of neutron launchers and spinal mounts does just fine against pretty much everything in my experience. If you're intending to play multiplayer against humans who will build to counter your fleet then fine, get into the nitty-gritty, but for a new player going against normal-difficulty AI then a simple base of "the biggest ships you can get with a balance between anti-shield and anti-armour guns, and a balance between shields and armour for defenses" is simple and effective. hmmmmmm idk i wouldn't want to set those battleships against a bunch of corvettes with battleship backup. the AI doesn't build as top-heavy as it used to but it still doesn't have a big enough swarm most of the time, which is why your battleships work well enough; however, have you tried mixing corvettes in and actually seen the difference? your battleships will be basically invulnerable with good swarm cover. the AI's ship equipment, which is bizarrely random, has very little to do with their fleet composition, which is what "top-heavy" refers to. the AI in the year after launch was REALLY bad about this; they're much better now, but they still like battleships and cruisers just a little too much. as a new player you want your fleets to be very alloy-efficient (i.e. ships that won't die) because your economy will be somewhat worse than an experienced player's. i don't agree with "just build big ships because it's simple" when adding a swarm is a matter of a few extra clicks that will make it far easier to keep your fleet out fighting for a more extended period of time. you don't need to get into the nitty-gritty to understand that you want ships with very high evasion to be the ones that the enemy shoots at.
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Oct 16, 2020 15:56
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Jazerus posted:hmmmmmm I don't think we can really settle this without running some kind of test arena (which is way more effort than I care to go to) but this conversation's pretty excessive in the context of a player who hasn't researched powered exoskeletons yet
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Oct 16, 2020 16:11
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I use a mixed fleet. Corvettes - Swarms of these to tie up the enemy, abuse their evasion and low cost. Destroyers - Make excellent picket ships, their point defense capabilities will completely neutralize missiles & strike craft. Cruisers - Battleships - Need no explanation. Titans - Duh Juggernaut - Sucks. Don't bother.
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Oct 16, 2020 16:12
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The Jugg is good for that +40% range mod. Lets your spinal-mount battleships vapourise the enemy long before they get into range.
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Oct 16, 2020 16:15
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i just build a swarm of long range battleships + titans + jugg and destroy everything before it gets in range to shoot. doesn't work well against a player opponent that'll counter it with a corvette only swarm, but against AI it's the least annoying by a mile because i almost never have to replace losses
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Oct 16, 2020 16:16
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The Jugg is so drat slow I find it impractical to use in combat unless the Crisis/Khan/Grey Tempest is right on my doorstep.
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Oct 16, 2020 16:19
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that's what jump drives, wormholes, and your network of gates are for
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Oct 16, 2020 16:20
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Yes but the AI is very dumb and rarely builds gates, it can maneuver through *my* space just fine because I put gates everywhere, I can't say the same for the rest of the galaxy. Jumps have a 200-day cooldown and a 50% damage penalty during said cooldown. The Jugg sucks. If it were faster it wouldn't. It literally needs to move faster and its problems go away.
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Oct 16, 2020 16:35
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I generally only build battleships, I wind up with two designs. 1 is the X mount tachyon lance with artillery, the other is as many hangars as I can cram on it. I usually go for 2 artillery ships to 1 carrier. The fighters and PD of the carriers seems to more than adequately handle any small ships thrown at it, and I can have a few medium and small guns on those carriers boosted by auxiliary fire controls (or enigmatic decoders) such that they have a good hit rate against small ships. Otherwise when I've used cruisers or corvette support, I'm always having to replace those ships. Battleships in the same fights just seem to get lost less, but fighting in a black hole system or over a comms jammer sucks.
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Oct 16, 2020 16:47
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So basically corvettes are just ablative armor for the bigger ships in this game Edit: started a new game as a hive mind. So far the biggest differences I've noticed is that they use more food and minerals, and no consumer goods which is one less worry. Also, amenities really weight on the stability. Is there anything else that changes a lot as a hive?
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Oct 16, 2020 17:29
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Chikimiki posted:So basically corvettes are just ablative armor for the bigger ships in this game it's far quicker to reinforce a fleet that lost a dozen corvettes than it is to reinforce a fleet that lost a battleship or two
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Oct 16, 2020 18:35
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Chikimiki posted:So basically corvettes are just ablative armor for the bigger ships in this game More or less. If you're building a missile/torpedo/strike craft focused navy Corvettes really pull their own weight, and Cruisers are actually kind of useful since they can mount 3 missile slots.
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Oct 16, 2020 18:46
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Gort posted:2. Clear the blockers on your homeworld that give immediate benefits - there's one on most homeworlds that gives you a free pop, which is valuable as a corrolary to this, i'll suggest that if you can afford it (usually through market micromanagement, which you'll learn in time ), try to time it so you can queue a new building or district on your planet just before the sprawling slums blocker is cleared, and move that up ahead of clearing on the queue. that way, you get the pop as soon as the construction finishes, with none of the unemployment 
Fur20 fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 18:55
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I'll throw my hat in vouching for Battleship spam vs the AI. Suffering attrition losses during one-sided victories is annoying, dealing with reinforcements getting disjuncted and forming their own fleets is nightmarish, and the AI mixes its ships in such an average way that a pure BShip fleet will always outperform the AI equivelent in fleet numbers. Then there's the whole 'BShips bring the most fleet power per CP and per alloy'*, and when you combine that with the above point, things are kinda straightforward. You could create the most perfect artisan hand-crafted fleet composition, needing to be tweaked after every fight, but that's a lot of effort for very questionable gains. Similarly, while torpedoes/etc look cool, they can only play into the AI accidentally creating counter-fleets (we all know how much they love to shove PD on everything, etc). A balanced kinetics/energy/hull/shields will always do what it says on the tin, and sticking to the main tech branches has strategic benefits of not cluttering your tech lotteries while also building towards lategame L and X slots. There's a time and a place for hyperspecialized fleets (multiplayer, fallen empires & crises), but for banging around vs the normal empire AIs, I agree completely with Gort. **Someone actually did some tests a while ago. For 2.2, a standard X/L/M slotted BShip fleet will beat everything for alloy cost, except a ball of pure 'vettes. The AI does not build pure 'vettes...
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Oct 16, 2020 21:43
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Yeah, corvettes aren't bad (the only bad ship type is destroyers), but you need a LOT of them to meaningfully threaten a battleship fleet. Now that strike craft are viable screening tools, even that may not work anymore.
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Oct 16, 2020 22:00
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oh, have they changed strike craft since i started playing in june? they were really broken then, and not in the good way. can you replace a corvette picket with a dozen carriers or smth
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Oct 16, 2020 22:13
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The White Dragon posted:oh, have they changed strike craft since i started playing in june? they were really broken then, and not in the good way. can you replace a corvette picket with a dozen carriers or smth They got pretty massively buffed a while back. I haven't used them extensively but I've had good luck mixing a couple of carriers in with an artillery fleet.
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Oct 16, 2020 22:46
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Waiting for a sale before I pick anything up (too pricey for me atm) how did federations pan out? Can you go full order 66?
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Oct 16, 2020 23:17
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Jabarto posted:They got pretty massively buffed a while back. I haven't used them extensively but I've had good luck mixing a couple of carriers in with an artillery fleet. Hangar/PD battleships seem to be particularly suited for Fallen Empire (particularly Spiritualist) and Scourge fights, as the fighters are just constantly going after enemy fighters and missiles while they can actually take a few hits and not immediately die/ewarp out. Thrasophius posted:Waiting for a sale before I pick anything up (too pricey for me atm) how did federations pan out? Can you go full order 66? You can and then nobody in the Federation cares. - get some favors - ensure you're >50% of the Federation's diplomatic weight - use favors to pass diplomatic weight voting type - make every decision - decide to give the Strongest empire leadership for life (i.e. you) until someone else surpasses them - your allies never surpass you - allies don't give a gently caress - rule the federation and have a no upkeep 600 death ball fleet at your command
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Oct 16, 2020 23:43
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-Install a mod that halves the amount of time it takes the senate to vote on poo poo and halves the recess.
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Oct 17, 2020 01:39
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The White Dragon posted:oh, have they changed strike craft since i started playing in june? they were really broken then, and not in the good way. can you replace a corvette picket with a dozen carriers or smth Light carrier cruisers are actually pretty great and work well when escorting battleships. I tend to build small fleets of gunship corvettes / picket destroyers to act as a quick reaction force, and then large fleets of carrier cruisers / artillery battleships.
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Oct 17, 2020 03:54
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