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Found a pulsar early on that was ominously pulsing more and more frequently. Notification said something would happen in 40 years. Cool, I've never gotten or heard of this event. I'll deal with it when it goes off. Of course I forget about it, expand past it so it ends up in the heart of my empire and generally get on with my life. 53 years into the game a god drat star sized blue death jellyfish appears in the middle of my empire. I rush to my local curators (who are penguins, incidentally) and ask for all the information they can give me. Short version: "Lol, you're hosed. It's basically a natural disaster you have no hope of fighting against." Unfortunately this natural disaster is making a b-line for my homeworld. Size 25 Gaia world and my only planet thanks to that civic. All my eggs are in that basket. It destroys outposts, literally cutting a path through my empire. It actually started next to another empire, went for the border, and then turned back to get my homeworld... leaving a trail of "unclaimed" systems I had to panic about, lest my neighbor settle past all my well planned choke points. Of course all these concerns might be for naught. The horrible beast appears in the hyperlane point right next to my homeworld. My fleet was fighting pirates and hasn't made it back in time. There's a 2k starport, but my homeworld is between the creature and the star. The thing slowly turns. With slow undulations of its planet sized tentacles it drifts obliquely through my home system to another hyperlane point next to the one it came in from. Every system this thing entered was utterly destroyed except for my home planet. Having never seen one of these things I had no idea how it was supposed to act so it was pretty tense. The creature ended up carving a swath of destruction through my annoying isolationist neighbor next, so that was fun. It's still out there somewhere. Every now and then I see another empire get suddenly bisected and I know my old friend is out there eating starbases. My neighbors never really repaired the damage done to their empire, and decades later the uninhabited swathes of destruction are havens for pirates that have been raiding me, instead of the empire that surrounds them. General thoughts on 2.0: Jesus it takes a long time to move fleets around. I managed to pinch off the only access to the tip of an outer spiral of the galaxy. Dozens of stars all to myself. Well, now my unity/tech costs are through the roof and I've only half settled it, so pirates keep appearing on the frontier. I can't fortify because I'm constantly (slowly) expanding, so I need to keep sending my fleet out there, and if I need to bring it back for any reason (like a giant blue jellyfish crisis) it takes as much as a year to even get out of the outer arm and back into the main body of my empire. I feel like sublight speed is just as, if not more important than hyperdrives now in terms of getting your fleet to get anywhere in a reasonable time. This is probably a neat change, overall, as I can see it leading to more reasons to split your fleet and it's a natural penalty for sprawling empires vs small focused ones. But it takes some getting used to! Eiba fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Feb 23, 2018 |
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Feb 23, 2018 06:56
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Possibly related to new unrest mechanics- I made a rival to my democratic materialists to play against. A good old divine empire with the exact opposite ethics to mine. They didn't spawn close enough to me to be a good in game rival, but they did have a really neat story anyway. A few decades after I met this divine empire I was greeted by a democratic crusader with the same portrait and a suspiciously similar name. Turns out they had a successful slave revolt, but unlike past one's I saw where some outlying province just gets reconquered, this time it was their home world that had revolted. And what's more when the Divine Emperor tried to retake his home... he failed! They had to sign a white peace and the two countries survived as separate entities. It took me a while to figure it out but I think what happened is that the rebels inherited a pretty beefy star fortress, and the rest of the empire wasn't developed enough to build up a fleet that could retake it. That makes for a pretty cool narrative! A brutal god-emperor rules over a planet of slaves. FTL is discovered and many resources are devoted to expanding and exploiting the stars, but eventually things boil over on the home planet, and with an opportunistic strike a slave rebellion manages to seize the Emperor's own fortress-palace and things culminate in an incredibly asymmetrical but evenly matched battle between the imperial fleet and the free republic's fortress. Thank you, Stellaris, for just procedurally generating a really compelling premise like that. Pylons posted:It definitely is. I neglected my sublight engines and my fleet still takes forever and a day to get anywhere.
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Feb 23, 2018 07:26
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Soup du Jour posted:Wiz I just encountered my first empire, they’re neighbors, and they are the exactly the same color as me. For the love of god Today I learned how to modify saves.
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Feb 23, 2018 08:00
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I finally explored the wormhole in the middle of my empire and horrors! It lead right to the heart of a powerful fanatic purifier empire on the other side of the galaxy! Alright, what a great story, let's get this going, this is what wormholes are for! Except... I can't declare them rivals for some reason even though we have equivalent power. Nor can I make claims on them. They've done nothing to acknowledge me. I don't think the game actually knows we're neighbors. God drat it, I just wanted to play DS9, why does this of all features have to be kinda broken.
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Feb 24, 2018 02:54
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Tomn posted:I'm genuinely curious - I watched the Orcs vs Elves stream before and both times the event popped the civilians died. My civilians died as well, and every time I've run into the event in discussions the civilians died. So I said I'd rescue them, but then the situation log said our current plan was to attack before the Ransomeers could make their demands... I had seen the chain fail badly in the same stream as you, so I figured i would wait until the demands were made and just pay them. Who cares about pirates I just want my people back. Well, fifty years passed after that. I legit forgot all about them until I sent a construction ship to claim the system they'd set up in. The pirates hastily scrambled their fleet, not expecting company so soon (again a full half a century after the abduction), but my massive fleet just vaporized everything... when it got there. Travel times are severe, so it took about another year of letting them sit there before I got to the station. And then I saved them. They got to the lifeboats just fine. I forget what the reward was but there was an ominous message about there possibly being a larger pirate fleet out there but everyone was pretty much okay. So take that incredibly weird data point into consideration, but that's one way it went off successfully. Maybe it was the fact that I gave the pirates so much time after activating them- give the civilians time to get to the lifeboats. Or maybe it's just random. I don't know. You can just blow them up and have it work out though. I just wish the pirates made some demands so I could have ended the event peacefully.
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Feb 24, 2018 11:33
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I started next to fanatic purifiers, oh no! Except they got boxed in and are tiny and weak. Time to deal with them. The only CB I have against them is "End Threat (Containment)". Uh, what is that and how does it work? I know it's a free CB against people who have free CBs on everyone else... but what's the actual goal of such a war? Will I be taking all their planets and territory? What will change if the war ends in a status quo? I can't actually find this explained anywhere. I know how purification wars work, but not the other way around. Also, where did the functionality of the old liberate wargoal go? I loved breaking off little democratic chunks of massive evil empires. And "Impose Ideology" can only be taken against rivals? And rivals have to be neighbors? I'm in the middle of a federation. I don't border my enemies. I love the new CB system, but it feels like it needs more CBs to play with. Node posted:I'm new to this game and was told to wait for this patch before playing it. It sounds like there are a lot of issues. Will I get too confused at stuff that might be broken, and should wait for another patch instead?
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Feb 25, 2018 03:46
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Baronjutter posted:In terms of how the game scales, systems are going to hit you way more than planets. It's horrible but habitats count fully as a planet for tech scaling, but even after spamming my empire with 12 of them (compared to my 5 planets) it's resulted in a fairly small actual penalty compared to the about 90% from my systems. I think "Tall" is still an option but it would need to be more about density, few claimed systems and a poo poo ton of habs? My first game was with the Gaia world civic where I claimed a bunch of territory just because I could. I ended up with nearly 50 systems and more than doubled tech and unity costs. I thought with one planet I was going "tall" but instead I was going wide with a weak industrial base. My tech was slow as heck but my unity perks were coming in pretty regularly until I started building habitats and tanked that too. Second game I used the same setup but I stayed small, about 12 systems, and I also avoided habitats until my third ascension perk. It felt really effective. I was very easily on top of tech, and since there are so many techs that raise your fleet cap I had no trouble keeping my fleet quite a bit bigger than most of my rivals without even going over the cap or having to build up a bunch of anchorages. Minerals were the only thing I was worried about, but in practice they were a non issue after I got droids, colonized a second planet and covered it in automated factories. When habitats came they felt like they were a drain to unity but a slight net positive to science. Or they were until I actually invested heavily in artisan troupe stuff and started installing fancy unity buildings in my habitats. My favorite thing about habitats that you probably won't care that much about unless you're doing a Gaia world start: you can build trading hubs anywhere with them. I ended up actually spreading out my habitats rather than clustering them all in my home system like usual, prioritizing black holes. You can't build any energy buildings in a habitat around a black hole, but who cares when the starbase itself is so lucrative. Other choice locations would probably include nebulae, artisan and curator stations, and old now-irrelevant chokepoint fortresses that you don't want to turn into a shipyard or anchorage. Starbases have a bunch of military applications, but the only one that really materially helps your empire is a trading hub, so it's nice to be able to get more of those. When I finally play an empire that can actually colonize it's probably going to feel like such a relief that I can spam trading hubs with my spare star ports and minerals. Tomn posted:Egalitarians can focus on making people happy for major influence gains, and authoritarians get a flat boost to influence gain. I'm not sure if it changed in 2.0, but democracies used to be able to farm pretty silly amounts of influence via mandates. It worked out though because expanding turned out to be kind of a trap since I wasn't settling any planets. I don't think it was ever documented that democracies get unity for mandates now. I remember asking right before it came out if there were any changes to democracies and no one mentioned it. It's a good change. I don't feel like I'm drowning in excess resources like when they gave influence, it's just a nice little bonus to your unity progression.
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Feb 25, 2018 11:57
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Only being able to "Impose Ideology" on a rival is bullshit. First case: My enemy was on the far side of a federation member. I needed to kill 6k worth of void clouds and spend about 800 influence to settle a black hole between them so I could declare them my rival and liberate their slaves. That was silly. Second case: The great khan rose up, ate my fanatical purifier neighbor from the inside (which was cool and terrifying), but after battering himself on my fortifications for a while, he croaked and left a bunch of successor states on my doorstep. Great, I'll go in and replace the diadochi one by one with nice democratic leaders. You can't rival someone whose power is inferior compared to yours. I'm too powerful to impose my ideology on these fuckers. This is incredibly frustrating! I have a neat tidy little empire and I don't want to have to straight up conquer these people.
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Feb 26, 2018 23:16
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A fallen empire just tasked me with stopping the atrocities of a determined exterminator. I wish I could, friendly fallen empire! But my only CB is "containment"! And they own half the galaxy so with the current war exhaustion system I don't think I'll be stopping them anytime soon. I really miss the good guy war goals. "Change Ideology" is a fantastic CB but "stop atrocities" and actually liberating portions of an empire, for when a war to the death isn't an option, would be great to bring back. Though now that I think about it... I'm nearing the end of the end of the unity tree and it's only 2380. I can keep up with science by spamming habitats if I need to. Maybe I should just go on a massive conquering spree against all the evil in the galaxy.
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Feb 27, 2018 04:10
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Baronjutter posted:How do you get into force ideology wars? Is it only for pacifists? Seems like something that should be open to egalitarians too. Would love to see more ideology based CB's in general. Let dictatorships with caste system get upset at egalitarian rabble and force them to abandon their dangerous experiment with democracy. Let materialists forcefully teach spiritualists that they don't need holotemples to feel *euphoric*, let egalitarians fight wars to stop purges and slavery and bring the light of democracy to their neighbours. Also note, potential federation members are really touchy about your current war policy. Including the people you liberate. So if you're not a pacifist, just an egalitarian, you'll liberate someone, they'll have unrestricted wars by default and not want to join your federation. What I ended up doing was starting unrestricted, getting an ally who respected that as my first federation member, switched to liberation 10 years later and started messing up my rivals and installing democracy, and then blatantly cheating by tag switching to my more militant original ally and getting them to send the invitation to my federation. The more legit way would be to wait 10 years so you can freely change your war policy immediately after your liberation war, and then basically have to wait 20 years before you can liberate anyone else. Also note that a liberation war for you is a claim war for your allies that still allow claims, so your newly liberated ally is always going to have a chunk taken out of it by any of your federation members that border it. In short, liberation wars are messed up and half broken for non-pacifists, but it's technically doable!
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Mar 1, 2018 20:31
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Magil Zeal posted:Frankly I think they're still broken for pacifists, all the new stuff related to rivalies and tying casus belli to them is, imo, a mess. You're still left with the issue of not being able to liberate people if you get too powerful which is absolute bullshit. Edit: Baronjutter posted:The current rival system is not great right now either because so many features and factions trigger based on rivals, but in most games I've played I've had absolutely no possible rival options. I know they're trying to keep wars and diplomacy more "local" but they need to take into account vassals and other federation members for who is a "neighbour" and maybe toss the minimum power balance levels to become a rival. I'm fine with the rival system itself. I just have no idea why liberation is tied to rivalry. That doesn't make any sense at all to me in any situation. Eiba fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 20:38
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Baronjutter posted:If they control the system they control the gate, and can then use their own gates to move to the newly captured gate. Or at least that's how it was explained in their intended mechanics. Basically gateways are totally safe during a war and potentially a good way to retake occupied territory, rather than being any sort of liability in any circumstance. Wormholes are just freakishly long hyperlanes, and that's really cool and good. Though it didn't register I was a neighbor through one the one time that happened for me.
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Mar 1, 2018 23:16
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Dongattack posted:Whats the "Total War (Colossus)" wargoal? It was made available when i unlocked the colossus. In practice it seems to be the real point of the colossus perk. The colossi themselves aren't super useful, even if they're fun, but their introduction marks the start of endgame wars to the death. In theory.
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Mar 2, 2018 02:49
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After I put my butterfly people's brains in robot bodies, a bunch of repugnant porcupine refugees flooded into a planet I just settled. They were being hosed up but a great khan, but they were fanatic purifiers so while I'm typically sympathetic to refugees, I wasn't so happy to get these bloodthirsty xenophobic ones. And what's more the plannet the flooded was supposed to be a mineral base as my butterflies could only live on their gaia home world and habitats. Well, I guess as robots they could live anywhere, but out of habit (and a science specialization) I kept them mainly in habitats, and filled my mining worlds with synths. But now the world was filled with porcupines. Kind of frustrated until I find the "assimilate" citizenship option. That's... kind of creepy, but I'm egalitarian and it's still allowed so surely it's not as hosed up as I'm imagining, right? Well, after a few years they're all my primary species. That is kind of hosed up. I assumed they'd become robot versions of their own species, but nope. They were assimilated. Feeling kind of bad, and still needing minerals on that planet, I mod all the memebers of my species living on that planet, who all used to be porcupines, into their own form of (mining specialized) robots. Surely this will make everyone happy. Unfortunately now my leader and half my scientists, who have been around since I started the game, are porcupine-style mining bots. The leader modification system might need another look taken at it.
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Mar 4, 2018 04:18
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Karanas posted:So what are people's opinion about the gaia start and is there any tips on how to do well with it? Going robots I was worried about science and energy so also went voidborne as fast as possible. If you do remember to build habitats in otherwise uninhabited systems if you've got spare starbases because trading hubs are a non-trivial source of energy themselves. Also consider black holes/nebulas for their special buildings. Science from habitats, energy from starbases (and habitats as needed), and minerals from robot planets can get you pretty far. The obvious alternate strategy that I think would be pretty effective would be to conquer your neighbor as soon as possible and use their race to settle everywhere. If you play well you should easily be able to beat your neighbor in an early war, at the very least to grab a colony to settle with. Maybe consider barbaric despoilers if you want to just steal pops, though you'll have to be quick before your home world fills up. Slow breeder might be an advantage there, especially as your guys aren't going to be setting any other planets for a long time.
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Mar 6, 2018 03:30
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Playing rogue servitors. A plague hit one of my planets. Apparently a vanilla event I haven't seen before. Alright let's see how this plays out! I want to help my organics get through this! First pop to die from the plague is a robotic drone. Oookay. I guess it's a computer virus. That's worrying. So eventually a cloth tent is set up where infected pops can go to get cured? That's a weird way to distribute an antivirus program. But okay, I send my only surviving robot pop there, and it's cured! Hooray, plague over! Right? Turns out this plague infected my organic buddies too, as they begin to drop dead randomly. What a strange plague. Okay, I'll send them to this canvas tent... except they're biotrophies and can't "work" buildings, including that canvas tent I guess, so I can't drag them there. I'm beginning to think this plague event shouldn't fire for rogue servitors. But even if it went off the way it was supposed to... manually moving each pop on a planet onto a random building one by one or they die? That is absurdly micro-intensive for no reason. Most events in this game are cool and fun, but the plague event is garbage.
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Mar 14, 2018 20:33
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I've never liked the way difficulty works in Civ, where the AI just gets massive bonuses, but thinking about it that's because there are a ton of gameplay features in Civ where getting to something first is important. Mainly wonders and religions. Playing at higher difficulties is basically resigning yourself to not using those features. But Stellaris doesn't have anything like that. I've been playing a number of games where I neglect my military until my first war, and it's pretty hard, but the rest of the game is a cakewalk. It's still fun. Roleplay goals and outside developments keep the game interesting, but I think I might actually be down for a game where I don't constantly have a natural advantage. And there's nothing I'm arbitrarily not allowed to have! ... Except that sweet sweet influence from my materialist faction for leading tech. I might miss that, but until there are more interesting politics I think I'll probably just be playing Rogue Servitor forever.
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Mar 17, 2018 03:46
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I like crowded galaxies, but I also like playing with fallen empires. I wish there was a setting to guarantee your chosen number of fallen empires and marauders and then squeeze all the dozens of civilizations I've chosen around them, rather than not spawning fallen empires if you have too many normal civilizations. It's also incredibly frustrating that you have no way of telling there are no fallen empires until you've basically explored the galaxy, which might take hours and hours of gameplay.
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Mar 20, 2018 17:47
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Jazerus posted:
Seriously, gently caress those guys, not because they're assholes- that's fine, they keep to themselves- but because neutral zones are currently bullshit pirate havens. A xenophobe FE neighbor means pirates forever and I hate it. They should really exude an anti-pirate zone into their neighboring systems. If they get pissed at you for neighboring them, why don't they get even more pissed at the pirates?
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Mar 20, 2018 18:00
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type observe into the console, then tag 0 to become the player empire again
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Baronjutter posted:It seems force-spawned empires are ignored when the game spawns random empires in terms of portraits. I've got 10 empires on my map and 3 of them are doubles. I think it happens a lot more often with premade races though. I've seen that a bunch of times, as I like to have a couple premade races in an otherwise random galaxy, and that gives me duplicates often enough that I've learned how to actually edit savegames to fix it. Though even just giving up on premade races won't fix anything as you can always run into a duplicate of the species you're actually playing as. I really wish there was a robust check to prevent duplicates. They're incredibly annoying. Would a mod be able to affect that?
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Mar 20, 2018 21:48
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Patch Notes posted:* When ordering a ship to move to a system, the ship will now automatically enter orbit of the star instead of just idling near it I'm not actually all that bothered by 200 influence habitats. I played a couple games with different styles, and I found I was just rolling in influence in the game where I purposely stayed small. You can easily get too much influence for edicts to use it all up, and if you're not claiming/settling new systems, there's not much to do with it. Habitats seem like they're being positioned as an alternative to expanding laterally, which is fine. I think the idea is that you won't have enough influence to claim or settle new systems if you go hard for habitats, and if you're using your influence for anything else habitats will be too expensive.
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Mar 26, 2018 21:04
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Since when do you not need to vote to invite people into your federation? Some precocious little erudite explorer worms that were being munched on by fanatical purifier geckos asked me to be part of their federation. I'm playing Rogue Servitor as usual, with the goal of maybe actually conquering the galaxy this time, so I wasn't planing on doing too much with federations, but these guys were so sweet, I figured I'd let them run their own affairs and be my federation buddies. Well not too long after there's another group of harmless little scientists and a vote comes up to let them in the federation and I figure they're fine too... except shortly after that the new guys invite someone else into the federation and I have no input on that decision. Those new people invite someone else unilaterally, who invite someone else and so on, until the next thing I know this federation has cascaded around the galaxy and now my evangelizing zealot neighbor who I hated and was going to put in time out is now part of my federation. The galaxy is now a mess, half the empires are part of this federation, with no semblance of common ideology or common threat. It's a really unsatisfying way to end the game. I just got to the midgame, and now I'm in a position where all I've got to do is wait until the endgame crisis, because my federation basically controls the galaxy.
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Mar 30, 2018 01:34
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Jazerus posted:leave the federation because it's betrayed your ideals and go on a rampage Those poor worm guys though. They'll feel so betrayed. And then they'll feel really nice when I let them out to play in their bio paradises! Truga posted:you only need 51% votes in a federation to do something, so unless you're playing multiplayer with someone, your vote doesn't matter much past 1 ally
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Mar 30, 2018 03:55
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So I complained last week about a game where there was a federation cascade. A rogue servitor planning on caring for the whole galaxy, I joined some federation builder worm guys and let in a kindly scientist race and they just loved everyone so invited everyone that wanted into our federation, including slaving despots and evangelizing zealots that bordered me. I was almost ready to just give that game up, but decided to keep playing. Turns out it was one of the most fun games I've ever played. First my federation got embroiled in a war on the far side of the galaxy against a pretty sizable empire of Determined Exterminator robots. Turns out most of the people who joined the federation (including the initial nice scientist guys) were actually just terrified of these killer robots. So the cascade makes more sense. There were also some fanatical purifier geckos closer to home, but they were merely on par with their neighbors, and ended up getting entirely surrounded by this new federation, so I figured they weren't a big deal, but both those threats were probably motivating factors for nations of extremely different ideology to get together. Heck, we eventually invited the rump of a democratic crusader, even though only two other nations were democratic (the federation worms and the scientists). And that democratic crusader rump was the core of our problems. While we were engaged in a war against the death robots of the outer rim, the race of psychic authoritarian trees, which was the largest empire outside of the federation by far, declared war in an attempt to wipe out the democrats. Most of the federation forces were committed to the death robot wars, so I figured, since I was only a third of the galaxy away, I'd send half my fleet to help out the democrats, because I thought it'd be funny for some rogue servitors to save radical democratists who hated the concept of a machine run society. I figured the remaining half of my fleet, plus my nice choke points and massive space fortresses, would be enough to keep out my potentially problematic neighbors- the fairly small fanatical purifier geckos and a neutral hive mind. That was when the great khan, who was entirely surrounded by the neutral hive mind woke up. The hive mind shortly bent the knee-analog to the new khan, who eventually ended up sending massive fleets against my fortresses that I could barely beat, with huge losses, with my remaining home fleet. I had to withdraw and abandon the democrats to their fate. And then the purifier geckos in the middle of my federation, and neighboring me, declared war. And pretty much all of the federations fleets were still committed to the death robots across the galaxy. I was sure the game was going to be a boring one with a federation controlling half the galaxy, but as it turns out, catastrophe can cascade just like the federation did initially. Desperately clawing my way out of that clusterfuck was great fun. And I did manage it, eventually. Though we lost the democratic crusaders to the psychic trees. And then we invited the psychic trees into the federation, god loving dammit this is why I nearly quit in the first place. Come on, we hate those guys! They're literally the only other power in the galaxy, why are we putting them in our federation? Yeah, the death robots still exist as a power, but they're not a huge threat anymore... Geeze. I told the trees they should just, uh, leaf! Or leave. Or whatever. They were dumb. (I sent them an insult.) And then they left the federation It was really gratifying. I plan on trying to piss off the slavers and zealots in the federation, to see if they'll leave too, but they might be more in love with the other federation members by now. If I can't get them to leave... I guess I'll have to leave myself, and fight all my former friends. For their own good. They won't have to worry about anything. I'll take care of them all.
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Apr 5, 2018 01:50
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GotLag posted:Since you seem to know your poo poo with regard to event modding, is there an event that fires when an empire is wiped out, where I could inject some code to wipe out all their claims? GotLag posted:I used my colossus as an excuse to conquer Empire A (for rear end in a top hat), and now their former neighbour, Empire B hates me. Because when I took possession of Empire A's planets I apparently also inherited their claims (and opinion modifiers) on Empire B. Even though I can't see (or revoke) the claims! GotLag posted:"Our claims on them" That modifier means they have claims on your systems, presumably because they claimed Empire A's planets at some point, or else Empire A originally took those planets from Empire B. Inheriting another empire's claims would be insane, but even then you always have the option of dropping your claims if you "manage claims" on someone. If you didn't see any claims, that's because you didn't have any. Edit: The claims system is a good start, but it's currently really wonky and opaque. And it's really messed up that you can't claim fanatic purifiers territory, as that leads to some hardcore border gore when a federation eats them up. As it turns out the first person to take a fanatic purifier's system gets 10 claims to that system, since they owned it at some point, you you can't even let the FP retake their territory and then take it for yourself to neaten things up. Whoever's fleet happened to get to a system first has it... unless you want to make 11 claims on your ally, let the FP retake the system, and then take it back. Which I did once because I couldn't stand the gore. Claims should always be allowed, regardless of if claims wars are possible. Eiba fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Apr 7, 2018 |
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Apr 7, 2018 18:42
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Fun fact: If you have a colossus, and use a non-total war CB, such as subjugation to make them your vassal because you want them out of the way but you don't want to sort through all their planets right now, they can select their CB as "stop threat" against you... which turns the whole thing into a total war. So you can't occupy their territory- you automatically take it. You can't ever achieve your war goal because you haven't occupied anything. You can get around this by scrapping your death star before you declare war. I guess I should just be straight up conquering everyone now that I can. I'm deep into repeatable techs and have been taking the unity ambitions, so a ton of star systems won't really bog me down anymore. But I really don't want to deal with all that.
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Apr 9, 2018 06:06
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So I'm having another go at vassalizing my neighbor who's in a massive federation. Last time it became a total war because I had a planet-shielder, and then the federation was at war for like fifty years so I couldn't demand vassalization. In the meantime I got a couple other vassals out of some smaller federations in the galaxy, so I know how these things are supposed to go down now. Except after I declared war I found there was a -6000 for unoccupied poo poo I had to overcome. This is weird, because I don't have a single claim on anyone in the federation. And I did this deal a couple times before, so I know I don't need to occupy anything specific for a vassalization war. Turns out one of my lovely vassals was the remnant of an empire that the federation I was fighting mostly conquered ages ago. This means it had claims on like a hundred systems. What's more, my lovely vassal has claims on half of the good empire I want to vassalize. There is no way for me to win this war, except to conquer half the galaxy for my lovely vassal, and in the process cripple the vassal I actually wanted to keep around because they were cool guys. I'm really beginning to think the game just wants me to bust out the planet killer again and forget all this indirect rule nonsense. I'm going to have to load up a game from before the war to tag switch to my vassals and renounce all their claims if I want to subjugate this one guy. Edit: Oh god drat it, I cheated to make my vassals renounce all their claims... but they started making claims again after the war started. Why am I obliged to conquer things on behalf of my vassals when I'm using an entirely unrelated war goal? I've got to check system by system to figure out what my vassals claims even are. I thought vassals might be more be a more straightforward way than a federation of controlling large areas, but there are definitely some awkward kinks with them too. Eiba fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Apr 10, 2018 |
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Apr 10, 2018 06:44
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So I've been running around with a fleet of 2/3rds torpedo corvettes 1/3 autocannon corvettes, and they've been serving me well all game, right up until I had to deal with a huge federation fleet where every single one of their ships was bristling with point defense. Seems like they caught on to my game. What do I do now? Are non-torpedo corvettes viable? Should I build a more conventional mixed fleet? I actually have a couple of conventional fleets, but they're way less powerful (in terms of fleet power) than my missile corvette swarms.
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Apr 12, 2018 19:16
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:These types of Corvettes do not synchronize well at all because the Autocannons get a boost to shield damage while the Torps bypass the shields. If you are running Torps I would run 100% Torp+Disruptor (both bypass shields) OR, my preferred 'Vette fit, 1x Autocannon 2x Plasma. You can also get away with Lasers and Mass Drivers. I noticed this was losing effectiveness when the autocanons were getting stuck chewing through enemy armor. Took me a while to figure out that this was because so many missiles were getting shot down that I couldn't take out enemy armor at a good speed any more. My experiences with disruptors is that they're poo poo and do next to no damage. I was running them for a while with the idea that I'd just ignore shields, but the ripper autocannons end up tearing through the shields and then the hull so fast that it's more than worth it to have them around over disruptors. That said, autocannon + plasma corvettes do sound like a good alternative, considering the PD I'm facing. Arrath posted:Gunship vettes with Autocannons and Plasma cannons then Battleships with massed Proton Launchers work great for me. I mean, I do it. I have a mixed fleet in addition to a couple corvette fleets, but it's mainly for defense and getting a subspace snare titan into position to finish off enemy fleets more reliably. My mixed fleet actually had all autocannon corvettes to take down the shields for the proton heavy other ships. Or that was the idea, my mixed fleet has never been that effective. I actually just realized destroyers are pretty fast too. For some reason I thought their one afterburner slot hurt them more than it did, but they're 311 at maximum tech. I wonder if I could make an effective corvette/destroyer fleet. Get some neutron launchers on the destroyers. The other thing I don't get is fleet power. 8 corvettes, torpedo or strike, are about 10k fleet power for me now. But a decked out battleship is only 2k by itself. My full mixed fleets are running around with 89k fleet power while my full corvette fleets have 115k... should I just be ignoring that number? If there's a 100k enemy fleet is my mixed fleet really outclassed while my corvettes will be fine?
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Apr 12, 2018 21:49
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Black Pants posted:I kinda would like to see some mechanics pulled separate from each other along those lines too. Spirituality is currently intimately connected to being religious which is pretty connected to psionics. But why not a machine religion? Why not materialist psychics minus the spirituality attraction (see Terran Ghosts in Starcraft). It's actually a kind of interesting idea. I don't think it reflects our reality, or even a particularly coherent conception of reality, but it's an interesting idea to try to wrap your head around, just for the sake of seeing alternate points of view. And it is presented as true in the context of the Stellaris universe. There are psychics. Materialists must at some point be forced to believe in the existence of the Shroud. But a being with an analytical mindset will never be able to measure or tap into that power. I could view it as making GBS threads on my worldview (as a philosophical materialist) in a very specific and deliberate way, but honestly I think it's kind of neat. I find it more interesting to deal with a bizarre and incomprehensible universe than for spirituality to be conceived of as something like this: Baronjutter posted:I wish spiritualist was just a total trap option that filled your research options with tons of useless dead-end techs like crystal healing and theological study and the whole psionics branch did absolutely nothing but all the events and notifications are written from the perspective of the spiritualist culture so it always sounds like the big discovery that's going to change everything and prove the shroud is real is juuuust around the corner. That said, if I were trying to figure out what to do with spiritualism in this game, I'd give it society/influence/unity/happiness related bonuses, rather than having it reveal a material truth of the universe that ironically the materialists never could discover. Edit: If they need special gameplay, not just general bonuses, give them an actual religion. A shared belief system as a trait that they could use to unify their own population, spread to other civilizations to increase relations, or use as a special kind of CB to impose on others. Eiba fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 01:19
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The way it's portrayed is basically that prayer and religion actually work but only for psychics. Natural psychics are absurdly rare and do things that don't follow the laws of physics. Getting past the Shroud opens up why it works but even then it doesn't behave in a clean, predictable, mathematical way. There are underlying rules but they're incomprehensible. These physics are rooted in psychology? That's really loving weird, but not incomprehensible. Not unstudiable. Splicer posted:No more troubling than "If you look real close at the components of atoms it turns out they kind of don't entirely exist". The materialist/scientific response to that would be "OK, what counts as "will", how do we measure it, who has it, who doesn't, why, can we reproduce it artificially, and how can weaponise it and/or use it to make porn". It's got to be a spiteful force that behaves differently depending on intent, and if the intent is to study and define it, it doesn't work. It would only work if you have faith and a "pure" (non-materialistic) motive. Though I guess if that were the case you could defeat a psionic empire by engaging them in elaborate scientific experiments designed to look like battles, which would keep all the psionic abilities from working.
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Apr 19, 2018 01:51
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Tomn posted:Yeah, I was a bit surprised that the next DLC wasn't diplomacy-featured, but then I noticed that the DLC is mostly featuring new events and anomalies and such, i.e. stuff that can be done by anyone with just enough scripting knowledge to parse Paradox's event system, and more importantly writing chops. It's basically letting the art team raise extra funds while the programmers work on core systems, it just seems weird because the artists are mostly writers this time instead of graphic designers. I don't get why there's any negativity about this announcement. I mean, I get why there's some preexisting negativity, sure. But it's not like they were going to announce a story pack to refine the sector AI. And unlike Synthetic Dawn, the last story pack, this doesn't seem like it's adding new game rules and systems, which means the people who actually tweak AI have more time to get all that in order without things shifting about dramatically. A story pack that's just a whole shitton of new anomalies is probably the best announcement they could make if you're concerned about the game being unpolished and getting bloated. A possible slip by Wiz in the stream- they showed off L Gates, which are a special kind of gateway and they're being billed as one of the major features in the update, and he was being coy about what might be behind the gateway. And then later on when listing features he said "L Clusters and L Gates". If there are like... Magellanic Cloud style mini galaxies behind the L Gates, that would be incredible.
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Apr 23, 2018 17:15
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:Is it weird for someone to say that they don't like how something is being promoted because it makes them feel like the developer isn't focusing on things that have been bugging that person for awhile?
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Apr 24, 2018 06:35
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I'm incredibly in to L-Gates, especially with the promise that they'll have weird and different poo poo in them to overcome, possibly endgame crisis levels of catastrophe. Presumably once someone breaks into an L-Gate, the rest will activate, letting the horrors out all over the galaxy. Or they'll be come easier to activate, allowing a goldrush if it's a cluster full of treasure. But my ideal implementation is to have proper Magellanic clouds, a couple dozen stars each, which are guaranteed to have at least two or three wormholes in them, linking to different parts of the main galaxy. Straightforward early-mid game island geography would be really compelling! Endgame "holy poo poo" clusters are fantastic, but I want more.
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Apr 26, 2018 22:35
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VirtualStranger posted:These are so incredibly wrong it's hilarious. The tile system makes every planet feel like a bland, empty container that you "fill up" with pops and then forget about. Tiles... kind of maybe if you squint are somewhat reminiscent of maps. Like, you could imagine you landed in the southern hemisphere and early on started a new settlement in the far north when you first pop grows and you put it on another tile. There's a geographical vibe there that can be subconsciously pleasing. It can give the feeling of a world being settled and developed. But give it any sort of thought at all and all that disappears and it's just filling a crate with blocks. I'd love it if there were like little procedurally generated continents, and you could see population density increasing over time. That'd be an incredibly fun bit of aesthetic flavor. But that's not what we have and it's not what we're losing. Gameplay wise getting rid of tiles is such a good idea, but I do understand why a planet without a map feels less satisfying than a planet with even a vague representation of people living in actual places.
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May 20, 2018 01:54
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Kaal posted:And I bet your Opinion of them improved, didn't it? It's weird as heck that there's no gift dialog though. Just "how does this deal sound?" when the "deal" is a pretty substantial gift with no strings attached.
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May 28, 2018 17:52
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Wiz posted:There is in fact special gift dialogue (I just tested it and it works fine). Are you sure that they used the standard dialog when gifting? Eltoasto posted:Looks like a nerf to torp corvette fleets. My biggest issue with the system as it is now is that... war specialization isn't really my thing. It's not super compelling to me. Battleships and space carriers are cool, but the overall systems are not what I'm into. It's fine that they're there and that they're important, the game shouldn't cater to my own particular preferences, but all this means I basically just go by fleet power when designing my fleet, assuming bigger numbers are better. If I make a fleet full of torpedo corvettes its number is twice as big as a balanced fleet or one organized around capital ships. Just aesthetically, I think it'd be fun to make a capital ship focused fleet, but the game makes fun of me by giving me a small fleet power number when I do that. I'm beginning to see that maybe torpedo corvettes have inflated numbers, but I'm kind of at a loss for how I should be judging my fleets.
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May 29, 2018 19:47
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OwlFancier posted:Fighters I believe used to provide PD but I don't know if they still do. If they do then it must be substantially more efficacious than their ability to destroy other craft. I'm pretty sure something was intercepting my torpedoes because I was using anti-armor torpedos and autocannons and the autocannons did about as much damage to the armor as the torpedoes, which was pretty hosed up. It told me how many missiles were intercepted, but not how many I fired so the number had no context for me. The hit percentage seemed to be okay. I must have missed the stats for the enemy fighters as I don't remember any info on them at all now that I think about it. Gay Horney posted:Doesn't spamming corvettes result in more ships lost resulting in higher WE? I kept winning fights with torpedo corvette spam because everyone says it's the best but I lose a lot of ships. Winning much cleaner with battleships and cruisers and stuff. Maybe I should have had more point defense or something In a sensible world I guess you'd have a corvette fleet of raiders to occupy territory, but big ships would help in big battles
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May 29, 2018 20:12
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A bit late to the wormhole discussion, but I wanted to say that they are incredibly cool and good and I always crank them up because of the weird neat wildcard they add to the galactic geography. The tech to actually use them comes near the end of the early game, when you've probably already met your neighbors and depending on how crowded things are you might have even run out of room to expand. There's a good chance the political situation will have stabilized. Maybe you gave your dangerous neighbor a bloody nose, maybe you don't have anyone you feel the need to rough up right next to you. And then you explore the wormhole that's been in the core of your empire the whole time. All of a sudden you've got a new neighbor. With any luck they're some sort of hostile constant-warfare species because a) that's terrifying and b) they've probably got a lot of neighbors that hate them you can ally with. That happened to me in a nearly perfect game. I was a rogue servitor (as always) but this time with a twist. I was taking care of a race called "sprouts" using the cutie fungoid portrait (because that's adorable), but I also added a devouring swarm empire also using the name "sprouts" and that portrait, with the idea that the species "deviant" trait made them fundamentally modify themselves. I imagined the devouring swarm was the product of a group of dissidents upset at the growing dependence on machines, who genetically modified themselves to be more in sync with each other, but something horrible happened while they were tinkering with their own genome. The idea being this all happened on some sort of generation ship that eventually fell into a wormhole... Where I found them terrorizing the other half of the galaxy centuries later. So there I was, a race of benevolent robots facing the terrifyingly violent product of their earlier mistakes. A massive fleet pours through the wormhole bent on devouring their passive cousins out from under the empathetic machines that care for them. It was an unexpected and fierce war, but eventually the Sprout Horde was pushed back through the wormhole, and with a number of alliances formed with the Horde's neighbors, they were eventually pacified. Which is when I learned something fantastic that I hadn't even planned- if you have a race with the same name and same portrait, they count as subspecies of each other. Even if one's a hive mind. That means you can convert one into the other by applying the appropriate "template" even if one is a hive mind. Any other hive mind races wither and die when taken over by a rogue servitor- a sad fate for all involved. But not this time! I was able to fix the genetic damage the rogue Sprouts had done to themselves, turning them back into their original form, to live long happy lives in their organic sanctuaries. tl;dr: Wormholes are awesome and one of the few potential avenues for relevant new discoveries and big political shifts in the mid game.
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May 31, 2018 01:04
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Toadsmash posted:I hate this war exhaust design so, so much. Having to white peace out of a war I'm winning with zilch for losses feels lovely and arbitrary. It's the game yelling "HEY rear end in a top hat! STOP WINNING!" at you by bonking you over the head with a random number instead of throwing a scary monster at you. You don't gain war exhaustion from winning, just from losses and slowly over time. It's not a "stop winning" mechanic at all. It's saying that you should have won faster or with fewer losses. Even if you're somehow not taking losses, your populace is sick of having been at war for over a decade without anything to show from it (you haven't forced the enemy to surrender yet). It's totally doable to utterly subjugate someone with enough force. If you couldn't manage it maybe you should have picked a war goal more within your reach. At least that's my understanding of how it's supposed to work and how it's worked for me. It's quite possible something's loving up somewhere if that's not your experience.
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Jun 10, 2018 05:47
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