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Having played the crisis twice I think the cruisers are a disappointing trap. Better off using menacing corvettes and destroyers mixed in with alloy fleets w battleships/titans. This way your alloy goes into the things with considerably more staying power while using more disposable minerals on the more likely to die side. Cruisers just aren't much better than destroyers and pack a not great mix of equipment on their chassis. Cheap crisis fleets have an easy emergency assembly factor tho so you may still get some use from the cruisers. Generally I just avoid using cruisers since I think they are too unspecialized to spend fleet power on compared to a volley of x weapons and a bunch of kinetic and neutron batteries Sloober fucked around with this message at 03:50 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 03:45
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 21:20 |
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Been a while since I've had a frantic game like this one. I'm a fanatic spiritualist and authoritarian crisis empire, necroid. I've held off on the last crisis tech so I can finish trying for a few achievements - 100% intel level, maybe even become emperor, get sanctions up all the way so I can denounce an innocent empire. Basically, drawing things out. I was the largest empire by far, owning all but two of the L-gates and taking up the entire outer galaxy from 9 o'clock all the way around to six o'clock. Fanatical xenophobe geckos took up the remaining outer arm, and a peaceful federation took up the coreward arms I realized the endgame crisis year is coming up, so I start refitting all my ships for the Unbidden; I'd picked them at startup since I hadn't seen them in a while. The geckos also want to be the crisis and had been at war with the other four's federation for years, trading systems back and forth. It didn't look like they'd ruin my cheev attempt (I need all 5 to survive a bit longer), so I just kept out and stayed friendly with everyone (even the geckos liked me). My massive transportation network was being utilized by both sides and entire clusters were taken, liberated, and retaken. I started wondering when status quo would get forced. Then a galactic storm hit and rendered my Unbidden-counter fleets defenseless as their shields were now useless. The xenophobic geckos meanwhile finished the crisis tech and six kinds of poo poo hit the fan. The galactic community, me included, were now in a total war against the geckos. The geckos had been at a high tide mark at that moment, so nearly all of the southern territory of the federation fell immediately to them. The gecko reinforcement fleets caught in my backwater systems immediately flipped the outposts, turning my empire into a checkerboard of red. And I was caught flatfooted with fleets outfitted with 100% shields to fight the Unbidden that were now stripped of those shields by the galactic storm, which also crippled sublight speed. I didn't have time to refit my ships, so I sent out my glass cannons to try to keep things from spinning completely out of control. I spent a couple years stomping out the fires in my backfield, rescued the federation, and took the Gecko system with their doomsday device, just on time for the storm to finally end. We've nearly bottled the geckos back up to their core constellations when a massive subspace surge announced the imminent arrival of the Unbidden. I took that opportunity to exit for the night.
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May 4, 2021 04:43
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How long does it take to steal pops via nihilistic acquisition raiding? Playing my very first spiritualist slavers and I’ve never hosed with the shroud much though I have an idea what it does in the endgame (the cycle right?). I guess I’ll go nihilistic acquisition then transcendence with whatever I find useful along the way. I always get the tech one first. E: lol story above is good mst4k fucked around with this message at 04:57 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 04:54
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Yes. You are absolutely correct. Do exactly that.
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May 4, 2021 04:54
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The rate of acquisition is basically the same rate of when a pop dies, and when you're first bombarding the planet they take longer to "die" and get stolen. I'm sure you could set your bombardment to indiscriminate to do more damage quickly then swap over to raiding.
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May 4, 2021 04:56
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Make sure the default species rights is set to slavers and not purge (as xenophobes have), else you'll just silently not abduct pops and never know why.
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May 4, 2021 05:04
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I hoovered up ~240 pops to a single planet from the Spiritualist Awakened Empire and then glassed their home system and distributed them around the empire (assimilating pops don't take influence to resettle!) for bringing into the Hive Mind. I also decided Crisis cruisers suck. Had loads of attrition from the corvette fleets, thought to try cruisers. They're worth maybe 60% fleet strength as compared to the corvettes. Bleh.
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May 4, 2021 05:18
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Bloody Pom posted:At this point you've practically become the Culture. He lists Doomsday as F-tier, but honestly it seems like a really great way to start games even if you're organic; the extra minerals and alloy production is perfect for early rushing, giving you an early snowball advantage. You pay a price for this later of course, but it seems just good? By which I mean my current game is an organic militarist empire with Doomsday origin on Grand Admiral and it seems to be going really well He's complaining about having to spam industrial districts instead of alloy foundries. Okay? This is not a problem, you actually still really need that minimum amount of CG production and will still be running a deficit. Obviously the bonuses are still way better if you're a machine empire, though, so Organic Doomsday isn't A-tier but it certainly isn't F-tier, either QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 05:22 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 05:18
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HelloSailorSign posted:I hoovered up ~240 pops to a single planet from the Spiritualist Awakened Empire and then glassed their home system and distributed them around the empire (assimilating pops don't take influence to resettle!) for bringing into the Hive Mind. *Slaves in general* don't take influence to resettle, in addition to cheaper out of the gate. For next time.
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May 4, 2021 05:25
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I'm actually dealing with a bit of bad (or maybe good?) luck right now, I'm Barbaric Despoilers and the first empire I raided was Mechanist and my fleet happened to only kidnap my opponent's robots. I guess this is fine, it just doesn't feel like the Mad Max empire that I had been planning to create. "Ah-har matey! Send out the raiding parties! Capture their grain threshers and mining equipment!"
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May 4, 2021 05:27
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QuarkJets posted:He lists Doomsday as F-tier, but honestly it seems like a really great way to start games even if you're organic; the extra minerals and alloy production is perfect for early rushing, giving you an early snowball advantage. You pay a price for this later of course, but it seems just good? By which I mean my current game is an organic militarist empire with Doomsday origin on Grand Admiral and it seems to be going really well The problem with Doomsday for organics is that the penalities completely outweigh the bonuses you get, iirc.
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May 4, 2021 05:32
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Yeah, like, you lose a planet, you lose any pops still left on the planet, and you have to spend a bunch of influence and/or energy credits to move pops off the planet, and it happens very early on when all of those things are at their most premium. Some early minerals, energy, and alloys does not make up for that.
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May 4, 2021 05:56
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I haven't tried Doomsday but I can see why losing about half of your alloy production would cripple a start that is "go all in on alloy production to archer rush an adjacent civ or you lose".
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May 4, 2021 05:58
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Doesn't doomsday disable your guaranteed hab planets? I can see how that would make it very bad for organics but fine for machines.
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May 4, 2021 07:36
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I watched the video, and it's weird that he's so negative about gateway start? It's not super strong but the tiny fleet it spawns is smaller than the old initial pirate harassment used to be, and smaller than a single pirate spawn. It's a fine middling vanilla start.
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May 4, 2021 07:44
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What do you do when you're invading an empire's homeworld, and they have a dozen defense troops, which have better stats than your troops? I'm not an empire that can bombard indiscriminately, I think, and I figure I would need something like 36 assault troops led by a general to beat them.
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May 4, 2021 08:35
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My suggestion is to either bombard or use 36 assault troops led by a general. There's no trick to it.
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May 4, 2021 08:43
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That or get better troop types. Although honestly you should just make more units, it's generally fairly easy to stay above what the AI has.
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May 4, 2021 08:51
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So what do you use cruisers for now? I still remember the plasma meta, but all games I played recentish went straight from corvette and destroyer fleets to artillery battleships with a few picket destroyers thrown in. Cruisers just seem to die a lot.
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May 4, 2021 09:31
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Node posted:What do you do when you're invading an empire's homeworld, and they have a dozen defense troops, which have better stats than your troops? I'm not an empire that can bombard indiscriminately, I think, and I figure I would need something like 36 assault troops led by a general to beat them. I'll just queue a half dozen or so armies for each planet once in a while, then grab them all and consolidate them. Rinse and repeat as needed.
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May 4, 2021 09:34
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Cease to Hope posted:I watched the video, and it's weird that he's so negative about gateway start? It's not super strong but the tiny fleet it spawns is smaller than the old initial pirate harassment used to be, and smaller than a single pirate spawn. It's a fine middling vanilla start. Yeah I don't think he has actually played most of the starts and is just giving impressions based on what he's read, maybe from reddit posts? The fleet from the gateway start is not a real hazard He also seems to think that Void Dwellers need to go Democracy for the +50% automatic resettlement chance, but... wouldn't you just build a transit hub in each system where you have habitats for 100% automatic resettlement? Am I missing something?
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May 4, 2021 09:52
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QuarkJets posted:Yeah I don't think he has actually played most of the starts and is just giving impressions based on what he's read, maybe from reddit posts? The fleet from the gateway start is not a real hazard IIRC he said that transit hubs are bugged for habitats atm. Also I don't think he said void dwellers need to go democracy. Pretty sure he listed imperial as an alternative.
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May 4, 2021 09:58
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Node posted:What do you do when you're invading an empire's homeworld, and they have a dozen defense troops, which have better stats than your troops? I'm not an empire that can bombard indiscriminately, I think, and I figure I would need something like 36 assault troops led by a general to beat them. this sounds like a job for the colossus project
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May 4, 2021 10:45
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Phosphine posted:Doesn't doomsday disable your guaranteed hab planets? I can see how that would make it very bad for organics but fine for machines. I think one of the main points why Doomstay is better for robots is that the doomsday phases also lower the planet habitability significantly. For biologicals this means lost production (or just staying in balance with the bonuses). But metalheads do not care about habitability so they only get the bonuses.
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May 4, 2021 10:52
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QuarkJets posted:Yeah I don't think he has actually played most of the starts and is just giving impressions based on what he's read, maybe from reddit posts? The fleet from the gateway start is not a real hazard In addition to the bug(?), Void Dwellers want Hydroponics early on. Transit Hubs come at an opportunity cost, and as long as you're going Meritocracy anyway, it's more of a loss than just going Democracy.
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May 4, 2021 11:24
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Phosphine posted:Doesn't doomsday disable your guaranteed hab planets? I can see how that would make it very bad for organics but fine for machines. If you don't manage to get a handy nearby planet you can adapt by getting habitability gene modding or terraforming or even rushing habitats, all of which are RNG gated. Once you have some form of planet(s) to move to then a transit hub will give you massive savings on your evacuation, also RNG gated. Having a robot factory is basically free pops due to all the alloys, and you can use them to supplant your population during evacuation without losing production. You can leave pre-robomodding ones behind if you need the energy which will drop your empire penalty leading to faster repopulation. Again, RNG gated. Due to your weird pop on low hab to total pops ratio this is a task good use case for gene clinics. Again, RNG gated. It's basically RNG the origin. e: And you might be looking at this thinking hey, with so many options at least you'll probably roll one of them! But they're all differently useful in different scenarios. Going habitability modification and/or terraforming is real good if you find a bunch of low hab planets. If you find a gaia world then gene clinics are way less useful, and if you find a bunch of 80%s they'll be good but not amazing. If you find nothing it's habs habs habs. And this doesn't cover finding yourself next to an aggressive or easily consumable empire. The only relatively universal ones are robots and transit hubs, and the utility of either is hugely dependent on when you get them. Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:52 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 11:30
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Cease to Hope posted:In addition to the bug(?), Void Dwellers want Hydroponics early on. Transit Hubs come at an opportunity cost, and as long as you're going Meritocracy anyway, it's more of a loss than just going Democracy. I think with the current version, anyone who doesn't have like 4+ nebula spots wants hydroponics. 30-50 food is a hefty chunk letting those people go do something more useful.
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May 4, 2021 11:41
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Splicer posted:Having a robot factory is basically free pops due to all the alloys, and you can use them to supplant your population during evacuation without losing production. You can leave pre-robomodding ones behind if you need the energy which will drop your empire penalty leading to faster repopulation. Again, RNG gated. You're not going to reach a noticeable amount of growth reduction before your planet blows up I don't think.
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May 4, 2021 11:43
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Cease to Hope posted:You're not going to reach a noticeable amount of growth reduction before your planet blows up I don't think. Splicer fucked around with this message at 12:02 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 11:54
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Another clusterfuck I had in my perfect storm megacrisis is that decades ago I decided to curry favor with the federation and my egalitarian 3rd place faction (over authoritarians by a wide margin due to the empires I ate) by switching my default species rights around and banning slavery, plus other policy updates around social stratification that were against galactic law (I wasn't in the GC for a huge part of the game because I was going for the achievement related to not forming the GC and then leaving a federation, which I did). So right before the geckos became the crisis and that Total War started, I had just switched everything back so I could start resettling pops cheap due to megastructures sucking up all my influence. The problem is as a necroid and a slaver there's an assimilation rights policy, and the default autoselected Purge for a few months before I caught it, plus tons of pops also suddenly not working at all. I still can't easily get assimilation=>slavery to work without manually setting every species individually. How is that supposed to work? Starting that war with a vulnerable fleet slowed and exposed by a storm, invaders sprinkled well behind my borders, and massively negative income across the board was probably the biggest sudden endgame reversal I'd ever had.
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May 4, 2021 12:26
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Duodecimal posted:Another clusterfuck I had in my perfect storm megacrisis is that decades ago I decided to curry favor with the federation and my egalitarian 3rd place faction (over authoritarians by a wide margin due to the empires I ate) by switching my default species rights around and banning slavery, plus other policy updates around social stratification that were against galactic law (I wasn't in the GC for a huge part of the game because I was going for the achievement related to not forming the GC and then leaving a federation, which I did). Do you want to auto-purge new species into new necrophages, or auto-enslave them? Either way, you can set this up in the Default Species Rights menu from the upper-right corner of the Species screen
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May 4, 2021 13:22
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I wanted to autoassimilate them so they'd be psychic, which takes up the only default setting available. I guess I can just not necrosimmilate them but then I'm not sure what the point of necroids are.
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May 4, 2021 14:01
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Trying out a robbit game as Determined Exterminators to try and force myself to do better with the economy, and it's the research system that handicapped me this time. Went all in on a research homeworld asap, focusing the other couple of 20+ planets I found to alloys, dedicating anything smaller as resource feeders from energy and mining. Seemed like a good plan, got up to 500ish research remarkably fast, nice big alloy number. I didn't see the first research lab upgrade for going on 50 years, which absolutely bottlenecked my research snowball. Unreal.
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May 4, 2021 14:12
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Wilekat posted:Trying out a robbit game as Determined Exterminators to try and force myself to do better with the economy, and it's the research system that handicapped me this time. Also you can't even research the tier 2 lab until you have researched a rare gases tech or have access to the Galactic Market. Similarly you can't research the +alloys and +cg passive booster until you research the tier 2 alloys and cg buildings. Completely ignoring the question of who exactly is speed researching the tier 2 cg building in 3.0.x, you can't research the cg building without access to rare crystals. The booster /does not consume rare crystals/. Again, nothing tells you this. Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:32 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 14:44
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Splicer posted:Also you can't even research the tier 2 lab until you have researched a rare gases tech or have access to the Galactic Market. This may have been what got me, though I *think* I got the gas tech pretty early, because I was aware of the upkeep requirement. Seeing as we're on this vein, are there any other obvious roadblocks that have requirements you might otherwise pass over?
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May 4, 2021 16:00
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Sometimes the tech card draws just gently caress you over, the most recent determined exterminators game i did not get robomodding to show up until like 2275 or something ridiculous. just never came up (i did have the required tech, i think exo-skeletons or whatever the +5% mineral output is), so i had my default robots for decades and then a huge project to mod them for the first time (i am lazy and go for a generic robot that is non-specialized). i usually opt to take ones that gives research alternatives whenever they pop up just to give me another shot of a draw i'm looking for. i would suggest that if you want to try to mitigate the fickleness of the system
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May 4, 2021 16:24
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Wilekat posted:This may have been what got me, though I *think* I got the gas tech pretty early, because I was aware of the upkeep requirement. Nothing as egregious. Megastructures are gated behind the last level of starbases, the crappy level that adds one building slot and no modules. Also they require battleships and the last ship reactor tech but that's more priorities than a skip over. Half the game is gated behind colonial centralization which I think habitat start has no reason to take until they grab a planet? Also you can't get droids without it and you can't get synths without galactic administration. e: And the exoskeletons thing obviously. Again if these were all clearly laid out and visible in game somewhere it would solve some of my complaints but unless you wiki it you can't tell if you're missing something or just having had luck. e: oh! Plasma and disruptors are gated behind blue lasers. Splicer fucked around with this message at 16:44 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 16:35
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yeah the fact they don't tell you if tech is a pre-req for things is very annoying. you could even just list it in the tech description for the card.
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May 4, 2021 16:43
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Or even list what something is a prereq for on the prereq!
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May 4, 2021 16:44
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When the Scourge eats the Galactic Custodian's last system and I click the confirmation box, my game crashes. Crashed. Reloaded. Crashed. I do believe this save is toast!
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May 4, 2021 16:52
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