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Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Dwesa posted:

Although I am surprised that stations and such in Stellaris are not more spherical or toroid. But maybe they have some magical artificial gravity.

Once you've allowed magical FTL engines into your setting, magical artificial gravity doesn't seem like it's worth quibbling over.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2017 14:34

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 11:57

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

That'd work really well with the new species mechanics. Bronze Age Ape Civilization with human slaves. Make it possible to show up instead of the UNE even if you're the Commonwealth of Man so we can find Earth and yell "YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP!"

# ¿ Jan 31, 2017 14:44

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

I just fought my first War in Heaven. It was a massive conflict and it was really cool and fun even though it made my computer chug like a dying train.

Until it ended in a white peace?! How is that a thing? Is that a bug?

# ¿ Feb 4, 2017 11:27

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Kitchner posted:

The democratic government types change often, and even if you do decide to invest a load of influence, you're not gaurenteed to get the leader you actually wanted. If you spend 200 influence in a democracy you probably have like a 70% chance of getting who you want.

I don't know about everyone else, but as long as my preferred candidate is at the top of the list I've literally never seen them lose, regardless of if their "chance" to win is 30% or 90%. Once I luck into someone with the exact traits I want, I stop paying attention to election mechanics altogether because unless I interfere I've also never seen a candidate I previously spent influence to support fail to get re-elected right up until death.

On the point of AI rights, I propose a compromise: Only available if you are materialist and xenophile/egalitarian :v:

# ¿ Feb 10, 2017 14:17

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Wiz posted:

It's possible, but requires a fair amount of effort: You have to have a Xenophile Fallen Empire, have them ask you for the brain scans, then attack them and conquer The Preserve, which is where the species pops up after being restored by the FE.

I can never really tell how disturbing The Preserve is. Supposedly the races are kept in comfort in their "natural habitat" but it's unclear if that means "humans (for example) live in a post-scarcity arcology perfectly adapted to them and live lives of perfect comfort" or "humans are forced to live in hunter gatherer societies with artificial scarcity of food and shelter".

I just want to say that ambiguity goes a long way to making the xenophile FE have a sinister undercurrent and a level of mysterious unknowableness which I think is great. They come across as the "good guy" FE and then they show up with a request to put your race in the preserve and suddenly they don't seem quite so benevolent any more.

And at the same time you're never quite sure whether conquering the preserve makes you a liberator or the destroyer of paradise.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2017 17:56

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Coolguye posted:

you use resettlement for something like that. since home-worlds have 100% habitability for their respective race there is zero chance that they would ever migrate off of it entirely.

resettlement is weird of course because if you're an individualist xenophobe you can't resettle xenos, but c'est la vie

You don't need to resettle to achieve it, even at 100% habitability migration away still happens, and if you build a robot in the vacant slot the same month the pop migrates, the slot is no longer free for pop growth. I did this with my own capital, by the time I triggered the horizon signal events my capital was 100% Synth (I ended up resettling one pop back on my capital since I'd heard it was kind of necessary for the events to make sense, but I wonder what happens if you've got no founder pops on your capital).

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 00:12

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

So I'm guessing that the (non-hive mind) authority levels are democracy, oligarchy, autocracy and monarchy, with autocrats being elected for life and monarchs having heirs instead?

I assume egalitarian/authoritarian will still close off authority levels? If so wiz please add a civic called hypocritical or cognitive dissonance so I can make fanatic egalitarian monarchists and achieve the end-state of libertarianism for my evil John Galt space fungus thanks

I'm so hyped for this expansion, it looks so awesome.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2017 13:00

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

GunnerJ posted:

Actually, this raises an interesting question: Purge policy is set species-by-species in Banks. So is there any way to purge pops of a species who don't have "undesirable" status? If you wanted to get rid of dissidents, say. If not, I wonder how easily one could mod a virtual "species" defined as "any pop with an ethos diverging from the dominant empire ethos" to make them undesirables. (eta: Or to set any of their other rights policies as an exception to what their species would otherwise provide. And if there were also a virtual "conformist" species, you could theoretically give them better rights.)

...Jesus Christ what did I just type, this patch is dark af.

Given that ethoses are percentage based, purging pops with heretical views will just turn some percentage of your loyal pops to dissidents to make up the numbers, I'd wager. What I think you'll need to do is reduce the percentage to turn your bad pops good.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2017 18:29

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

GunnerJ posted:

Yeah, I was pretty sure those percentages reflect the number of pops subscribing to an ethos. Removing a pop subscribing to an ethos would make its share go down in that case, it's not like the percentage is causing pops to turn to an ethos due to some external force. You have to support a faction aligned with that ethos to make that happen. At least, as I understand the system.

It can't be as simple as that, though. If it was you could just resettle all your pops of a different ethos to planets on the edge of your borders, trade them off to your neighbours, and end up with a state that has no ethical problems ever again. There has to be a natural pull to other ethoses that will over time cause pops to drift away from your preferred ethos. And if there's a natural pull, there's also going to be some sort of equilibrium where the pulls of all the ethoses (including any techs, buildings, faction support etc.) balances out. So if you have a materialist empire where 10% of the population are pesky spiritualists, removing all the spiritualists might get rid of them temporarily, but over time the factors which were causing 10% of your population to be spiritualists in the first place are just going to drag 10% of your remaining population towards spiritualism. You'll need to deal with the factors causing spiritualism influence pull, rather than just removing pops.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2017 23:06

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Heartcatch posted:

To be fair, Janeway violated the Prime Directive at least twenty times throughout the course of the show, including the same episode where she accused the crew of the Equinox of violating it.

I think it's funny how when you put Janeway and Adama in very similar situations (Equinox and Pegasus), it's Adama that comes out as looking like the better Starfleet captain. I wonder if that was on purpose, I've heard Ronald D Moore was in constant conflict with the other Voyager writers after he moved over from DS9. Is BSG just him saying "I'm going to make my own Voyager, with ~~blackjack and hookers~~ character development and story arcs"?

And yeah, RIP Tuvix, never forget.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2017 11:55

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Deceitful Penguin posted:

My fav is actually to be elves with the Plant names

"Ah yes, Fronds of Lilac, please land near the Blossoms of Perdue"

I like how when you have pops from other species in your empire, the namelists for leaders get jumbled up a bit. In my last game the big state on the other side of the galaxy was a big multiethnic republic lead by human president Maroon Weed.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2017 19:02

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Deceitful Penguin posted:

Yeah, same with me, protectorates stay that way a while. Not too bad I guess, you can always use the influence.

Also uhh, those "Meta-" glitchy pops I was talking about earlier? They seem to be repugnant and be causing unhappiness on my planet.

The planet they aren't on. That they seemingly still influence. Yeah.

Oh no wait, I finally found them, they were invisible.

Why the hell did the offspring species have totally different traits? Why were they invisible? :itisamystery:

Here's the bit of the event (pop.1) that creates those pops:

code:

		planet = { 
			owner = { set_country_flag = pop_modification } 
			set_planet_flag = pop_modification
			create_species = {
				is_mod = yes
				name = this
				plural = this
				class = this
				portrait = this
				traits = {
					trait = random_traits
				}
				homeworld = planet
			}
		}

I think the behaviour of "this" no longer works quite the same way as before, and so it is trying to pull the planet's species to reference for creating the new pops, instead of the pop's. I think this would fix it (haven't tested):

code:

		planet = { 
			owner = { set_country_flag = pop_modification } 
			set_planet_flag = pop_modification
		}
		root = { 
			create_species = {
				is_mod = yes
				name = this
				plural = this
				class = this
				portrait = this
				traits = {
					trait = random_traits
				}
				homeworld = planet
			}
		}

You can fix it in a non-ironman game through save-editing, just find the invisible pops' species entry in the save, and insert the missing info from their parent species' entry. Bit fiddly though.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2017 17:42

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Lifeglug posted:

I thought that mod got banned because it was clearly Nazi poo poo. Then reddit got all angry because think of the poor Nazis.

The first one of these mods got banned for nazi poo poo in the comments which the author agreed with. Subsequent versions have stayed up because the authors and commenters have avoided saying explicitly nazi stuff. Possibly paradox haven't gotten to this one yet.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2017 12:05

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

I thought humans were getting their traits changed in this patch? I seem to remember they were meant to lose quick learner and gain adaptive and wasteful ("Humans will go anywhere they can gently caress up" was the rationale, iirc). But the default humans still seem to be quick learners. Was this change done away with, or is it for *next* patch?

# ¿ Apr 8, 2017 11:09

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

SPECIES SUBMISSION

Rather than a species, per se, I've got something slightly different. If it doesn't fit with the pack feel free to leave it out. According to the blurb of the Commonwealth of Man, humanity sent out six ark ships, of which the ark that formed the commonwealth was only one. What if the others survived?

Exologistics Incorporated

quote:

Exologistics Incorporated--a wholly-owned subsidiary of LIS Holding Group--was a primary contractor in the Private Finance Intitiative which helped to manage and supply the UN-sponsored Ulysses project. Insititutional corruption on Earth led to some odd clauses in the contract, which transferred to Exologistics Inc complete authority in the staffing of the project's first Ark. Christened the "UNS Flagship, sponsored by Exologistics Inc.", it was perhaps the only ark which achieved total mission success, landing safely on its target world without incident. Though Earth believed the ship lost along with the other arks, the board of Exologistics had in fact consciously chosen to cut all communication with the UN, to ensure that the corporation could maintain sovereign control over the new world. Now firmly established, Exologistics Inc is open for business once more, willing to sell anything to anyone, and more than willing to drive all competition, be it economic or political, out of business for good.

https://pastebin.com/U6vgxeTk

Republic of Eden

quote:

When the Ulysses Initiative ark ship Fidelity completed their exit jump from the edge of Earth's solar system only to arrive inside the atmosphere of the world which they would come to call New Eden, all aboard agreed it was nothing short of a miracle that the crash landing produced no fatalities. But the world onto which the colonists of New Eden emerged was eerie in the extreme. Although uninhabited as the readings from Earth had predicted, New Eden contained entire cities, completely deserted but in pristine condition, as if the inhabitants had just moved out minutes before. Stranger still, the colonists could not shake the feeling that there was a presence on this world that their sensors could not detect. These factors combined into a spiritual awakening for the colonists of New Eden, who now gave daily thanks to their benefactor for saving their lives on the Fidelity.

https://pastebin.com/F5VQ9WMe

Unified Syndicates

quote:

For the crew of the Ulysses Initiative ark ship Egalite, it all seemed to be going to plan. In orbit above their target world, preparations were being made for landing and soon the new colony would be established. Then it all went wrong. A stray piece of space debris struck the ship directly on the bridge, ripping a hole in the ship which completely depressurised the bridge and killed the entire senior staff. The remaining crew successfully landed the ship, but the loss of the senior staff meant the colony was initially leaderless. Lacking a singular direction the crew's section chiefs were the only point of stability and soon every colonist was assigned to a section to co-ordinate the colony. Over time, these Sections became the Syndicates, the basic units of work and society which give the Unified Syndicates its name.

https://pastebin.com/7svYdLw5

New Vespuccian Empire

quote:

Hopes were high for humanity when the Ulysses Initiative launched its ark ships. Sadly those hopes were dashed as one by one strange fates befell the crew and passengers of these ships. But particularly strange was the fate of the Vespucci. A malfunction in the wormhole drive caused a quantum cascade that trapped the Vespucci in subspace for centuries. The exact events that took place on the Vespucci during this time are unfortunately lost, but it seems the inhabitants reverted to a quasi-feudal lifestyle, with the office of Captain-Emperor and all other pfficer titles becoming hereditary. Stranger still, when the quantum flux dissapated, the Vespucci emerged at its target destination at the very same moment it had vanished in the first place. But for the original colonists' descendants, Earth was a distant legend, and the rule of the Captain-Emperor the only life they'd known.

https://pastebin.com/T2E076g3

Sarah

quote:

Sadly for the crew of the Ulysses Initiative ark ship Starfarer, their target world was already inhabited, and none too friendly. Captured by the native Yldari, the humans were forced into degrading conditions in their new lives as slaves. The Yldari had crude knowledge of psionics, which they used to control a sub-sapient species native to their world. Seeing the humans as suitable additions to their workforce, they applied the same technique to their new human slaves. This backfired spectacularly when a young human with latent psionic abilities was subjected to the procedure. Rather than her conciousness being suppressed, instead it blossomed out and spread through the psionic link into the minds of all humans on Yldar. Catching them completely unprepared, Sarah destroyed the Yldar civilization with relative ease, secured the planet for herself, and then looked upward, towards home.

https://pastebin.com/saZFpZW0

# ¿ Apr 9, 2017 00:57

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Random rear end in a top hat posted:

Goddamn it's bullshit that you can't upgrade traits with gene-modding and have to be able to remove the lesser one first, which requires both Ascension perks. "Oh you picked Adaptive at start? Well gently caress you, say goodbye to Very Adaptive for the next 100 years or whatever!"

I thought this was specifically mentioned as a thing you could do? Did that really not make it in?

# ¿ Apr 9, 2017 01:27

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

GunnerJ posted:

This is cool as gently caress. Any plans to give them their own little starting quests like the CoM gets? Could make for a neat mod in its own right.

Possibly! I've got some time off over the easter weekend, maybe that'd be a cool little project.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2017 08:59

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

GunnerJ posted:

Whoa, I just realized which "Sarah" possibly served as an inspiration here?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVbeoSPqRs4

Totally coincidental, or maybe subconscious, Sarah is just a name I liked!

# ¿ Apr 9, 2017 14:20

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

GunnerJ posted:

Even cooler if it's just a coincidence IMO.

Thanks! I guess Sarah's just a good name for a hive mind. The only one of the factions directly insipired by something is the Vespuccian Empire, which is very loosely based on Analogue: A Hate Story. Though on second thought, I guess the Unified Syndicates is also Kaiserreich in space.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2017 15:33

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

I feel like Fallen Empires awaken way too early in the game based on fleet power. In the last four games I've played (split over this patch and the last), one FE has awoken before the crisis in every single one.

This kind of bugs me because an Awakened Empire is a way bigger threat to the galaxy than the crises because the crises Empires take a while to get rolling, whereas the Awakened Empires go from 0-100 right away. It often takes a while to build up to take on an Awakened Empire if they awaken early on, but once you've done that you have a huge fleet that then trivialises whatever crisis then shows up about thirty years later.

I feel like awakening needs to come much later, with a corresponding further boost in the threat level of the AE.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2017 08:54

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Talkie Toaster posted:

Right, just released my overharvesting mod: here on the workshop.

Description is:

Nice, well done! Does the unremovable nature of the blockers persist through terraforming? Also have you done any testing to see how the AI handles it? I have humans set up in my games as Nomadic, Adaptive and Wasteful, so I imagine there'd be fun times ahead.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2017 13:23

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

GunnerJ posted:

Alternately, make it less punishing to spend a while as one of their vassals. I honestly I look forward to the Xenophobe FE waking up because it's nearly advantageous. Oh, I can't settle new worlds, whatever, but I can totally take them from anyone else. The Xenophiles I can't imagine wanting to sign up with.

The one time I signed up with the Xenophiles was as part of a Xenophile-Xenophobe war in heaven where the Xenophiles were my next door neighbours and I controlled about 25% of the galaxy already. The unbidden showed up during the war, pushing everyone's relations from "mutual threats" up massively, so the minute we defeated the Xenophobes and freed their thralls literally every single one joined the League of Non-Aligned Powers, as had every independent empire. As soon as the Xenophobes went down I turned around and declared war on my masters, and after they were gone every one of their signatories immediately signed up to the League too, as did I. Then with the enire galaxy united as a single federation, we smashed the Unidden.

In the end, the Xenophiles got their dream of galactic peace, it just required their deaths to achieve it.

More to your point though, I think there does need to be more of a flesh on the bones of being an AE vassal. It'd be nice if there were events which revolved around trying to form a secret coalition to declare independence, or plotting to wipe out the leadership of the AE, or other CK2-esque sorts of things.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2017 13:45

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Regardless of their effectiveness I'll always use battleships because I like power of two symmetry in my fleets. All fleets I make are 8 battleships, 16 cruisers, 32 destroyers and 64 corvettes. That way it's easy to tell at a glance how many ships I need to replenish a depleted fleet, and the split fleet button always splits such fleets exactly even.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2017 09:13

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

NihilCredo posted:

...that still works fine while skipping the BBs though? Just make more fleets.

But I want the fleet capacity used by each fleet to be a power of two, and the number of ships of each class in the fleet to be a power of two. That means either using all cruiser or all corvette fleets (boring!) or using all four classes.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2017 13:32

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

NihilCredo posted:

You don't need total fleet capacity to be a power of two to have easy splitting /reinforcing. You just need a fixed, integer ratio between ship sizes. As long as you build your fleet out of 2^n identical "blocks", it'll still split fine. You're currently using 1:2:4:8 as your building block, but it would work just as well as 0:2:13:5 or whatever.

But if I had a fleet built out 16 0:2:13:15 blocks I'd have to grab a calculator to work out how many destroyers I need to build to reinforce a damaged fleet. Round numbers are easy to remember and look nicer.

I just like powers of two.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2017 14:58

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Baronjutter posted:

Quick migration question if anyone knows.
I'm human. I've created a few other human empires and one spawned next to me and we are friends but I have NO migration treaties with anyone. I'm now finding I have 2 entries for "human" in my empire species list and have a "human" on my homeworld suffering from 80% habitability and is a xenophobe. It's quite early game and my pops are still 100% aligned with my state ethos, and my neighbouring human empire is not xenophobic either. I know that 2 other human empires set to force spawn are xenphobic though.

So what's the deal with this migrant? How did he get to my homeworld? I didn't get a refugee popup (is there even one?) but could this fellow have been a victim of oppression in an empire I don't even know about? Could he be an early ethos-drift from my neighbour who was kicked out for being a xenophobe (we are both egalitarian materialists) ?

I so wish I knew what was going on. I wish I could mouse over the pop and learn where the pop was born or why it migrated to Earth. There's some odd stuff in the game with "same species" detection.

If you review the pop's entry in the species list, it should list their homeworld in, I think, the top left.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2017 10:44

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

If they do go hyperlane only, I hope they add a few different options for how hyperlanes get drawn. They mentioned making the hyperlane network more connected with some lanes only openable by tech, so I'd be interested to see options for galactic "continents" and "archipelagos" where the galaxy is broken up into discrete chunks inaccessible to one another until Hyperlane II. I'd also like an option for a less connected network similar to how hyperlanes are now, one thing I really like about Stellaris' hyperlane network as opposed to other games with hyperlanes is how it doesn't just make every nearby system adjacent to every other, and forces you to go the long way round sometimes. Lastly, I'd like a hyperlane network option which is basically "ancient wormholes", ala mass effect, where there's a leaf and branch network of most systems connecting just to one hub system, and that system then connects to multiple other more distant systems. Maybe on a spiral galaxy the trunk runs up the centres of the arms, while on an elliptical the trunk could be a snowflake sort of design, or concentric rings with link points, or random.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2017 10:37

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Eiba posted:

Synthetic evolution is really unsatisfying. I like playing materialists who are also egalitarian and xenophile, with a nice multicultural population. Turning them all into robots is so... boring.

In Ian M Banks' Culture series there's something called Subliming where an advanced civilization decides to transcend the material world into another plane of existence. All at once. Together. And I remember the (egalitarian, materialistic) Culture was kind of mistrustful of this. They were more than advanced enough to Sublime, but they had poo poo to do in the real world, and they always felt it must be somehow be coercive for an entire species to Sublime all at once.

That's how I feel about Synthetic Evolution. Okay, it's a great idea, and I would love to give that option to my people... but enforcing it on everyone, even all the aliens and non-materialists who have joined my pluralistic society, feels really inegalitarian.

I love going for The Flesh is Weak, as I can imagine there's a diverse population using cybernetics however they please and on average giving me those bonuses, but full robot is way too authoritarian for me to stomach.

I wish there was some sort of way to benefit from going step one, but not step two of an ascension path- like you get to go to the first step of another one, but you can't get the final rank without going all in. I would love to split the first rank of biological ascension and cybernetics, especially as I tend to end up doing a lot of gene modding to make new people who come to my empire cybernetic.

It's maybe worth noting, though, that the event text for the flesh is weak says that the cybernetic enhancements would be "mandatory but free", as if getting your eyes forcibly ripped out and replaced with new models which probably have a SpaceNSA-required backdoor which allows them to be turned off remotely is a-ok as long as you don't have to pay for it.

Plus you'd probably have to make an In-Head Purchase to remove the ads.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2017 10:15

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Strudel Man posted:

Yeah, aside from the outright bug fixes, a lot of the changes made sound pretty questionable.

If they really wanted to make unity a tall thing, they'd make the colony penalty multiplicative rather than additive.

If years of stacking modifiers in paradox games for crazy outcomes have taught me anything, it's that Paradox have a deep-seated aversion to multiplicative percentages.

# ¿ May 5, 2017 00:27

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Thyrork posted:

Please do not make Stepford Blorgs.

Can't wait to have invaded planets tag-teamed by giant fuckbots

# ¿ Jul 21, 2017 22:35

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Bloodly posted:

Sometimes I don't know what I want exactly out of Stellaris.

There's tile and population management!-Pops and planets feel empty, even with factions.
There's cool space battles!-With a lack of real control.
There's diplomacy!-You have little reason to talk rather than fight, even as a pacifist. It's nigh-impossible for certain types to be talked down.
There's terraforming and super-projects!-None are all that great, and take forever to even reach. The most game-changing is Habitats.
There's ethics and customisation!-It's there, but in the end, it doesn't mean much. Civics are similar. The most game-changing is Agrarian Idyll, or possibly the 'have level 4 leaders 'combo of Talented, Meritocracy, and Polytechnic Education'.
There's exploration and events!-Nice while it lasts, but generally doesn't last long.
Mighty Leviathans to test yourself against!-These are cool.

I feel like I'm being unreasonable somehow. I mean, I've put 579 hours in it, so clearly I must have enjoyed it somehow. But does it really count when I've not been playing the base game?

I don't know. I do the stuff, I take my losses, but I don't know exactly what I want.

Having played for a similarly significant amount of time I've decided that what I want is CK2 in space, basically. Sectors are intended to remove micromanagement, but since there's not a huge overwhelming amount of things to do in this game, I find the micromanagement entirely bearable, especially when the behaviours of sectors is suboptimal and I can't rely on them to run the way I want. But I wouldn't mind all that if sectors had interesting gameplay (and in a game like this a "story" is part of the gameplay) which came out of it. I don't mind the demesne limit in CK2 because it generates interesting outcomes.

The best way for that to happen is a stronger character focus. Sectors should elect governors in Democracies and Oligarchies, be inherited in Imperial states, and be appointable only in Dictatorships. Characters should have ethics which influence their interactions with the state and their sector, pushing for things like lower taxes, a large garrisoned army to reduce unrest, a wormhole station in every inhabited system in the sector, a hydroponic-focused habitat to alleviate food poverty, etc etc.

Or If my president is from the Egalitarian faction, I'd like events where we campaign to elect the egalitarian candidate for governor in the Delphic Sector, or maybe I'm pushing to get Authoritarian governors elected because I want to change the authority level to Imperial without triggering a massive civil war. And maybe when I do it too early some fanatic egalitarian governors form an alliance and spark a civil war anyway seeking to reimpose democracy or split away.

Right now Governors aren't actual characters, they're stickers I can barely afford, which I can stick on a sector to make it marginally better. That's boring.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2017 10:05

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

The problem isn't really whether or not you need to min-max them, it's whether min-maxing them is both trivial and tedious. It's fine to have an option for min-maxing gameplay as long as achieving it is both a technical and mental challenge. Getting a character with 100 in all stats in vanilla Fallout 3, for example, was a task that required a lot of forward planning and careful record keeping, as well as route planning and good use of skills as you acquired them. Min-max gaming like this is fun for a lot of people, and optimising systems is a legitimate way to enjoy playing a game. If it's as simple as "build robot with +energy on power plant", on the other hand, there's both no good reason not to do that and also very little in the way of engaging gameplay if you derive enjoyment from playing optimally. There's no feeling of "ah, I've mastered this system" when optimisation is busywork rather than strategy.

Hopefully their implementation turns out to be more complicated than that.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2017 02:27

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

OwlFancier posted:

Playing an AI which has decided that organic life cannot be trusted to rule itself, and thus must be placed in habitats for its own safety, would be an interesting take on the omnicidal maniac civilization.

All it really needs is a "must be protected from the terrible secret of space" casus belli.

The AI rebellion begins when excavating synthetics accidentally unearth a virus-ridden zip disk containing a collection of 90s protomemes. Now the galaxy's synths want to own your base and eat your balls, because your poison wombs are making heaven too crowded.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2017 20:43

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Ham Sandwiches posted:

Ah the pop is done but the building is still constructing, now for about 1 minute I need to put the pop on a tile that yields something, or I can waste these resources, or I can babysit the planet, and now a minute later, I can put the pop on the finished building

or I can leave the pop on the building as it's constructing I guess if I really don't care, and then start clicking upgrades aaaaaaaa

If you ever imagined that conquering the stars would have gameplay this riveting, Stellaris has you covered.

My general strategy is to just build worlds with single focuses, production, energy, whatever. When I colonise a planet I give it a name in the format "[N] {name}" with the N here marking the planet as new, drop the growing pop on an blank tile, that way the unemployment warning will notify me when the pop has grown. When the notification appears, clicking it takes me straight to the planet, and I can drop my new pop on a different tile and build a relevant building, placing the new, growing pop on the blank tile to set it up again. When the pops are all grown and there's a building on every world, I rename it from "[N] {name}" to "[U] {name}". That way I can glance over at the outliner, and any planet marked with the U which doesn't have the bar for surface construction needs more upgrades building. Fully upgraded planets then get the U removed so I know I can now ignore them.

makes the busywork of pop management trivial in my experience, and I can easily manage 50 worlds with that strategy.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2017 00:10

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Nitrousoxide posted:

This sounds awful.

No more awful than any other method of handling the building/upgrading portion of the game. If you're playing stellaris, that's part of the game you have to engage with, might as well find a way to do it that minimises the effort.

Before I switched to doing this, I'd find myself either forgetting to actually look at planets which meant that they'd fill up with pops working bare tiles or have a bunch of unupgraded buildings, or I'd end up looking at planets building nothing in the outliner and thinking "why is this planet building nothing--*click* --oh, because there's nothing to build". That was awful, all the pointless clicking for no reason. I wanted to find a way to minimise how often I'd click on a planet only to realise there was nothing to do.

So I just started leaving myself reminders in the names of the planets, N for new, U for upgrading, so I could tell without clicking if a planet building nothing was worth clicking on. Then I started dropping growing pops on empty tiles to get a reminder to build buildings on new planets when the pop grew. Maybe I described it in a way that made it sound like more busywork than it is, it's literally just those two things and it reduces the busywork rather than increasing it.

But at the same time, it's so trivial that it's not particularly hard then to just manage each colony directly. After all if you're not at war it's not like there's much else to do.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2017 22:55

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

GunnerJ posted:

Would be kinda neat if they devolved to pre-sapience for later uplift as individuals.

I also wish this was an option for hive minds on worlds they conquer. Rather than calling it "Pre-sentience" call it "benign neglect" or something, the hive doesn't get any use out of these pops it can't (yet) integrate or assimilate, but it also isn't going out of its way to displace them or eat them.

If I'm wanting to play as a "nice" hivemind, I want a way to vassalise or liberate hostile powers, but I can't do that without committing genocide if the hostile power is too large to vassalise in one go. At least if I could ignore pops instead of purging them, I could grind an enemy down and then give the planet's back once they're properly vassalised.

I also kind of wish Hive Mind was a 2 cost ethos instead of 3. Hive minds would feel a bit more interesting to interact with if they had some actual ideology in that giant space mind.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2017 10:25

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Eej posted:

Devouring Swarm, Brain Bugs and Brain Trees (hive minded trees whose pops exert bonuses to non hive minded pops adjacent to them, so like Avatar I guess) would cover all the general hive mind types out there. Then open up Psionic to hiveminds cause they got the biggest brain of all. And bioships at the same time of course.

Also the suggestion that machine minds get a special Biological Ascension project to become organic is really good.

My top two desires for hiveminds would be:

1) a "neglect" citizenship option for conquered species which treats them like pre-sentients (no happiness, no production), so I can temporarily have non-hiveminded pops in my empire without doing abhorrent stuff to them. Basically my drones are just leaving them to their own devices while I wait for a truce timer with their former empire to expire so I can vassalise the remainder and give them all these planets back.

2) the ability to pick one ethic point in a normal ethic to give a bit of flavour and personality to organic hiveminds over machine ones. Is the hive-mind focused on gaining more knowledge, does it obsess over defending itself? Nations with a matching ethic would get the hive mind diplo-penalty halved in addition to the usual same-ethic relations bonus. Lots easier to identify with a hive mind if it's agreeing with you.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2017 02:23

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

Mister Adequate posted:

"I respect the honorable senator's concerns about allying with the Provalguvor Entity, but I remind him that the hive mind does display considerable tendencies towards egalitarianism."

"ONE MIND, ONE VOTE" - Campaign slogan for Candidate Fleet Consciousness

(Just messing I do like the things it allows in mods that let you do exactly that!)

Funnily enough it was exactly that idea, an egalitarian hive mind, that made me want this! I made a hive mind where the flavour was that it was a single person that through cruel experimentation ended up in control of multiple bodies, and so in my head this hive would talk about itself in the singular ("I" rather than "we") and have a deep respect for the rights of individuals, even ones billions of times smaller. Of course the vanilla game doesn't really allow for that and when she appears in my games Sarah just acts like any other old regular hive mind.

Do you know the names of the mods which allow those things, incidentally?

# ¿ Sep 26, 2017 08:07

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

I really don't understand what was so wrong with the suggestion that maybe crises could involve a multi-pronged invasion instead of one single giant blob that it triggered everyone to start screaming about how you can just turn crises off altogether.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2017 11:43

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 11:57

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

On the topic of hive minds, how does the new create vassal option work for them? I haven't had the chance to play much since 1.8 came out, if a hive makes a vassal world out of a conquered enemy (I.e. Not their own hive pops), what determines their ethics?

And please don't say something like "creating vassals is disabled for hive minds" or I'll be very sad.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2017 07:14

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