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prometheusbound2 posted:Master of Orion gets a lot of praise for its "elegant" design but frankly I think its boring and dull. Stellaris mods point the way to a better system. Guilli's Planet Modifiers differentiates planets in a way that makes them interesting and makes specialization more viable. EUTAB adds buildings based on empire design that break outside the dull production chains. I want to check out Dynamic Districts, it sounds pretty interesting. You're not wrong - MoO has very little differentiating planets. It's also very much a relic of its time with memory/CPU constraints that reflect that. The overarching emphasis though is that you are the emperor/president/leader/etc. of the empire, and you shouldn't need to deal with the day to day bullshit of where an individual worker on an individual planet works. If you tell your people that this planet should specialize in agriculture or minerals or research or whatever, then the AI should be able to reasonably build a planet that can do that thing. The core issue is that the AI in Stellaris cannot currently do that well, which means that players outperform the AI by extremely large margins, even in situations where the AI receives major bonuses from difficulty level. It's more or less just a matter of time before a player eclipses the AI players so totally and completely that the galactic council is really just one empire deciding everything by virtue of its diplo weight being more than the rest of the galaxy combined. At least with MoO, the AI is extremely challenging on the highest difficulty level, and is capable of out-teching the player, out-producing the player, and generally being very much capable of stomping the player's poo poo in, with players being forced to turtle behind defensive positions and leverage diplomacy/espionage as much as possible to try to snag some advantages here or there before they can open up and start snowballing. Amusingly, the biggest thing holding the AI back in MoO is ship design, and the limited number of design slots afforded to all players. Players build better ships by virtue of specializing them to the situation more effectively than the AI can, and that's the main advantage a player can leverage over the AI to win. When I look at a 4X game like this, I feel like the economy needs to be both automated and subject to strategic decisions. I should be able to direct my empire to develop planets in a certain way, and then go do something else with my time until I decide to go back and tell my planets to develop in a different direction because of something that changed on the strategic level (I found a fanatic purifier next door, or a tempting target and I just hit new weapons tech, or there's no nearby threat and I want to focus harder on tech, etc.). The choice between wanting more mineral or energy output is a useful choice - energy is flexible in that it can buy other resources and is needed for upkeep, but minerals are the basic building blocks of planets/alloys. I want both, and managing that ratio is something that's useful for me to take care of on the strategic level. And yes, different planets should offer opportunities to specialize. If I suddenly find a new planet that would be the best research world ever, then I might slowly start drawing down my existing research world(s) and tooling them up to something that their planet might do better, or to shore up something like an alloy deficit.
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Aug 5, 2020 17:03
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alex314 posted:Some land combat questions: No. No. Just build a ton of them; armies are basically pointless busywork and are a pretty terrible mechanic. You can ignore pretty much everything other than than the army strength number and be fine. Get more army strength than they have (you can see the numbers). More is usually better, and bring a general. All you really have to watch for is the upkeep. Different bombardment stances do different things - if you look at the tooltip for each stance (you can change stances by clicking on them), they say what they do. You can change which stances are available in your policy menu, and some are restricted by ethics, especially pacifism.
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Aug 9, 2020 08:43
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Libluini posted:True. And yeah, many of the techs in the sociology-tree absolutely do not belong there. I guess the problem is that the engineering-tree is already overloaded with poo poo, and the devs basically took every flimsy excuse they could think of to cram techs into other trees. And so we end with this dumb situation where engineers have to study sociology before they're allowed to remove a glacier. As it is, physics is a criminally short tree with the fewest repeatables. Engineering is absurdly bloated and has something like triple the repeatable techs as physics does. Sociology has a decent number of techs, but many of them don't matter because they're poo poo like army damage. There's also some weird things where there are 3 special resources, 3 tech trees, and each special resource is aligned with a tech tree, but then exotic gases is in engineering for some reason. There's a lot of work that could be done on the tech tree to improve it and make the trees of a similar length with similar numbers of useful repeatable technologies.
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Aug 9, 2020 09:30
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Gort posted:An "army builder" interface similar to the fleet building interface would make the entire land combat subsystem tolerable. MoO makes ground combat interesting. All pops are armies, so sending an invasion force means sacrificing working citizens in your empire. You can spend production to create pops though, so it's not uncommon lategame to create 50+ pops in one turn on a developed planet. Bombardment becomes an interesting choice too - you can pretty easily blow a colony up to the point where all that remains is a barren rock that you can colonize yourself. However, taking an enemy planet over that has factories built on it lets you steal random technology from the invaded empire. Because invasions are a commitment of actual working population, it makes for an interesting choice where invasions involve significant sacrifice, but also significant reward in a planet that still has infrastructure and some techs (which, reminder, you don't get access to every tech in the game, so sometimes your gaps in technology are significant). Ground combat itself is just a dice roll per army though, modified by technology, defender advantage, and species (Bulrathi gain a bonus here, but it's basically irrelevant because they're almost always behind in tech, and you can just blow them up instead if you don't want to bother).
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Aug 10, 2020 00:44
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Libluini posted:And I hate this so much. It's one of the major reasons I could never get into the old MO-games. Fair, it's not the best system, but it is a system that makes the player make interesting decisions with interesting tradeoffs. There are situations where a costly ground sneak attack can secure an important technology that can turn the tide of a war. Ground combat either needs to be an important strategic consideration, or an afterthought to the naval game where it's a delaying action that slows down your conquest of an enemy and gives them time to rally and counterattack you.
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Aug 10, 2020 01:14
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Libluini posted:As has been said, it's not a bug, just too many goddamn blockers. Just clear them until the number of districts dip positive. And remember that you can get rid of blockers while colonizing!
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Aug 11, 2020 00:20
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Lightning Knight posted:No, it does not. Yeah, I could really do without all of the different types of factory. There's no way in hell the AI is smart enough to play around building the fuel, different weaponry, alloys, consumer goods, etc. It has a hard enough time with the base game where it's just alloys and consumer goods. The Star Wars mod also feel weirdly slow. Could just be the way the fleets move, but everything feels much slower paced. Also, one odd thing about it - isn't technology in Star Wars fairly static? Sure, there are some new ship designs here and there, but generally speaking, technology has been explored pretty thoroughly, and there's not really any major breakthroughs that revolutionize everything. Certainly nothing on the order of a Stellaris playthrough where you go from non-sapient robots to sentient AI in a matter of 50 years or so (and maybe convert your entire population into robots in another 20 years or so after that).
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Aug 24, 2020 10:55
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I like to use half carrier battleships and half artillery battleships, with all models having the X gun prow. The opening salvo tends to devastate enemy fleets pretty hard, with the artillery weapons doing a lot of work after that. The carriers provide PD and extra damage here and there.
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Aug 28, 2020 16:55
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It's probably also worth noting that with the way repeatable techs work, I find that energy weapons are almost always better than kinetic weapons because not only do I finish the Physics tree out long before the Engineering tree, the Physics tree has only three combat options as opposed to the 7 combat repeatables in the engineering tree, which means that my energy repeatables are almost always stronger than my kinetic repeatables. Since I like to use strike craft, I tend to focus on energy/shields in physics and armor/strike craft in engineering.
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Aug 28, 2020 20:21
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DoctorTristan posted:Thanks. I haven’t actually tried out the non-Psi ascensions yet - I considered giving bio ascension a go this playthrough but then rolled psionic theory very early on, so Bio ascension is just stupidly powerful. It unlocks cloning vats, which are a building that gives 33% pop growth with no jobs. It also unlocks better species traits, like fertile, which gives 30% pop growth and 10% housing reduction, as well as a few other strong population traits. Basically, if you want more pops more faster, bio ascension is for you. It's probably the strongest of the three, although definitely the least interesting. Synth ascension is interesting in that you get all of the best bits of being a robot, like the ability to colonize everywhere regardless of habitability, and all of the best bits of being organic, like being able to use amenity producing jobs and not being stuck with maintenance drones. You also get to convert all of the species in your empire into one synth species, which simplifies population management immensely. Amusingly, as much as your leaders become "immortal," in my experience the leaders of synths end up dead more often from random events than the leaders in a genetic ascension due to how leader lifespan increases dramatically over time with technology.
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Aug 30, 2020 17:14
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Though I got the Psi jump drive on my very first shroud interaction, so not complaining
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You can also turn habitats into super mineral, super energy, or super research deposits that also grow population for you (if you build them on a deposit, they get a district related to that deposit). There's also some potential in making fortress habitats in chokepoints; the enemy will have to take out your station and either invade or bombard the habitat(s) to get past that system, which can be pretty powerful in certain situations.
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Sep 1, 2020 23:49
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PittTheElder posted:
Well, it's playing exactly like a player would treat their federation allies, so in that respect it's doing a fantastic job!
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Sep 18, 2020 04:17
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gently caress yeah AI
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Soylent Pudding posted:It would be a cool mod to start in the Sol system with post climate change Earth as a toxic world and a small human colony on Mars (capitol: Elonopolis) I think the planetary diversity habitats module has an origin like this? I might be confusing things though - I know you definitely start with a habitat on mars, but I'm not sure if earth is ruined. Starborn and Dyson Swarm both have origins where your main world (which can be earth) is hosed by climate change so your species went into space instead, but it's not a habitat on mars.
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Sep 18, 2020 17:58
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Lightning Knight posted:If you aren’t parking battleships over an enemy planet and glassing half the real estate before you land then smh. Not like their buildings will be useful. So just make their planets into Thrall Worlds and turn the population into delicious nerve-stapled livestock.
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Sep 23, 2020 21:25
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Jazerus posted:not to mention that a third of all normal empire runs can just disable the very possibility of crime by building a single minority report headquarters on each planet. have a planet that's fallen into the deepest pits of scum and villainy? just throw two telepathic dudes at it and everybody's instantaneously a model citizen To be fair, if you have 50 pops on a planet, that's one in 25 people who are telepathically scanning you at all times to see if you're going to commit crimes. It's a pretty oppressive police state at that point.
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Sep 26, 2020 15:58
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Yami Fenrir posted:Aren't the guarantee truces one-sided, though? This is my experience as well - if you have all of the systems within two jumps of your border colonized, they will not take over your space.
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Sep 28, 2020 06:11
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Kaal posted:Okay that's totally doable. Play as a Fanatic Xenophile empire so that you'll make allies easily and you'll have a fun time being Starfleet. Until you spawn in next to two inward perfection empires, with the next empires past them being a devouring swarm and a driven exterminator.
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Sep 28, 2020 16:05
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Splicer posted:Informal poll: Which would be your preferred end to resettlement hell: D) Change the mechanics such that we don't have pops. Make population less granular, designate planet outputs that are desired, and then have the planets manage their growth to hit a certain target. Add in the ability to build a few select buildings that make major changes (stuff like the buildings that provide +% output, or buildings modeled off of corporate embassies). The strategy then becomes how you allocate your planets and provide them with specific modifiers. This has the advantage that the AI could actually, you know, use this system and be competitive, since it's designed from the ground up to be automated.
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Oct 1, 2020 17:16
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Nilbop posted:Another beginner question here; what do I do to get rid of specialist and leader unemployment? They've started to pop up and building more districts doesn't seem to affect them. Do I need to tear down some buildings to build something special for them? Jobs are classified into different tiers of employment. Your basic districts provide worker jobs, things like miners, farmers, technicians, clerks, etc. Specialist jobs are typically provided by buildings, such as alloy production, research, admin cap, etc. There are some ways to get these jobs as districts - research districts on habitats are one example, and the foundry district on an Ecumenopolis is another example. Ruler jobs are provided by capitals and a few select buildings (Noble Estates is the only one that comes to mind right now). Pops take time to demote from ruler/specialist to worker. There are ways to speed this up, such as the Shared Burdens civic, and I think at least one tradition. Eventually you'll get the ability to upgrade your basic buildings so that they provide more jobs (generally 2, then 5, then 8 jobs/building) at the cost of strategic resources. For now though, don't worry too much about it. Build buildings as you can support them, with a priority towards research and alloys in most situations. Your unemployed specialist/ruler pops will demote on their own over time and sort themselves out.
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Oct 5, 2020 17:44
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You can also demand vassalization/tribute and then if/when they decline, you can declare ware to forcefully vassalize/tribute them. It's not as directly beneficial to you, but if you're already stupidly strong, it makes it less of a pain since you can gobble up whole empires at a time without spending influence (and you can eventually integrate vassals anyway).
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Oct 5, 2020 19:18
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I started tossing afterburners everywhere in my ship designs. There's a point where your fleet strength is already absolutely absurd, and so making sure your ships actually show up to the fight is the most important thing.
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Oct 5, 2020 20:08
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Leal posted:I got about 15ish mods installed. Think I'm gonna call this run done though, I've hegemonized 3/4ths of the galaxy but uh... I can't loving do anything else cause these assholes in the federation keep voting no when I try to attack the awaked fallen empire. Hell some other faction has some sectors in my area and I figured I'd take it all to make everything even and I can't do that cause someone in the federation gave association status to that faction. And I can't loving boot them cause THAT needs to be voted on! Check the federation laws. If your federation is at a high enough level, then you can probably pass a law to make it so that only the federation president decides when war is declared (as well as basically force yourself to always be president).
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Oct 7, 2020 16:32
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Yami Fenrir posted:Funnily enough, if you think about it this is just a way worse version of the stuff that hivemind mod (Forgotten queens or something) adds. The parasitic embryo civic from that mod is hilarious, but also has some unfortunate diplomatic penalties. Since it works by purging pops, and you get one of your pops for every pop you purge, you get a massive, massive genocide diplomatic penalty with everyone in the galaxy as soon as you start sacrificing pops. It is super fun though, and the new tribute type is really effective at letting you grow stupidly quickly, especially in conjunction with the civic that lets your drones automatically resettle around the empire automatically.
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Oct 9, 2020 19:55
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Thinking about it, there are only two games that I use an extensive mod list (10+ mods, as opposed to something like Old World Blues for HoI4) for: Rimworld and Stellaris. Rimworld is a perfectly competent base game, and the mods that I put in are mostly just to add neat new stuff like androids, bees, new wildlife, genetic experimentation, space ships, etc. The mods are much less about fixing things, and while there are a few quality of life mods, most of them are focused on adding content. Stellaris, on the other hand, is, well, lacking in vanilla. The AI is pretty dire and needs mods to fix it, pop management and building management is a pain in the rear end and mods help with fixing those, the UI is also pretty dire and mods help with making it work when you have more than a dozen planets, etc. And then when it comes to content, again the base game is lacking. Planets feel a bit lifeless, habitats aren't particularly interesting, there aren't many megastructures to build and they only show up near the end of the game, and just in general things feel stale. That all being said, I have put a LOT of time into Stellaris - steam says 800 hours. Stellaris with mods is something that I enjoy, clearly. I've only played it vanilla 2-3 times, and it was an exercise in tedium and frustration to constantly play whack-a-mole with building buildings on planets and shuttling pops around. Some of that still exists even with mods (my kingdom for a way to apply a template to a world or set up a build order for each planet so that I can specify what I want to have happen and never check it again - planet designations even with mods don't pull this off properly). Maybe it's just perspective - I got into adding mods in Rimworld because I wanted to add more stuff on top of the base game that sounded cool. I got into adding mods into Stellaris because I wanted to fix things with the base game that were tedious.
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Oct 15, 2020 16:09
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Gort posted:Looks like a big patch next week, looking forward to seeing if they do anything about weird pop growth and the need for resettlement. The odd thing is that the Greater Than Ourselves edict actually fixes a lot of the resettlement issues. It's just that it's locked behind a galactic community resolution rather than being something that you can just use, especially given that it's just a quality of life thing and the cost of resettlement is trivial once you're in the midgame and resettlement becomes something important to do.
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Oct 15, 2020 17:43
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Automated Posting posted:Is there anyone else using the Traditions+ mod in here that can let me know if the Finisher Effects on their tradition trees are working? Because mine don't seem to be, but I've got no clue if it's a conflict on my end or a problem with the mod. Discovery's finisher was always bugged for me. The admin cap increase definitely worked though.
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Oct 22, 2020 03:46
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And Tyler Too! posted:Casus Belli is a dumb concept in any game. Here's how it should work. I like the idea of Casus Belli - some societies give enough representation to their citizens that wantonly declaring war can lead to civil unrest and issues at home. If, however, you find some pretext before you declare war, then people are usually less upset by it. The empires that can always declare war (fanatic purifiers, devouring swarm, etc.) have steep diplomatic penalties with other empires. And then, of course, you can build yourself a goddamn death star and declare war on the galaxy at a whim.
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Oct 28, 2020 12:37
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Eimi posted:Well having popped into the game because of space vampires after basically not playing since launch, and I have to say how the necroid stuff works is not all there yet. I know it's not exactly meant to be space vampires, but only a +80 lifespan instead of just being immortal like robots right off the bat is a shame. As well given you have penalties to being workers on your main species, you would think the House of Elevation would let you control what % of a pop gets to ascend or not, but unless I'm missing something drastic the only way to do that is via you micromanaging it. Which is incredibly annoying and I wish I had more granular control over it, as well motivation to spread my starting secondary species instead of just letting them die out and using whoever and whatever. Ironically, +80 years is actually generally better than true immortality. The reason is that robots just have a % chance to break down, and you can't really modify that. Biological leaders have a 0% chance to die so long as they are under their age limit, and your age limit goes up pretty quickly after a certain point. By the time you're ~120-140 years into the game (right around when your first leaders would start dying with no techs), you should have plenty of lifespan increasing techs that will prevent that from happening.
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Oct 31, 2020 23:43
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Eimi posted:Ah, well that's something. So like what would be the max you could get someone living with that as a base? Cell Revitalization is a repeatable tech in Society that increases leader lifespan by +5 years per time researched. So as long as you can research that tech once every 5 years (which is very, very doable), your leaders can live indefinitely. Apparently one of the other lifespan techs comes from a mod that I use, but there is one base game tech that increases lifespan by +10 years. So if you can hit repeatable society techs in ~130 years or so, then you can keep your leaders around forever.
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Nov 1, 2020 03:33
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You can eat (livestock) lithoids for minerals though, which is hilarious. Building an empire where you have thrall worlds full of sentient rocks that you harvest and thrall worlds full of sentient organics that you eat can be surprisingly effective. Horrifying, yes, profitable, also yes. Especially if you go all in on gene modding them...
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Nov 1, 2020 21:43
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Yami Fenrir posted:Also, technically, you get more anomalies out of ignoring anomalies for a bit. I really wish I could send some science ships to some sort of off-map location where they can survey random anomalies out in space (sort of like the Enterprise) and generate events and random bits of science and things here and there. They just feel so redundant after the early-mid game when you research all anomalies in your territory and then set them to assist research somewhere and forget about them.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:43
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For more detail, the Unbidden will show up more regularly the more people use jump drives, and the Contingency will show up more regularly if people are using synths. There's no guarantee though.
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Nov 5, 2020 23:19
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Poil posted:Just get the mod which allows multiple crisis. How bad could it possibly be? Really laggy, unfortunately. And the crises don't have great AI, so they kind of just don't do much. I thought it would be a massive clusterfuck that would end the galaxy, and that was true, but only because I quit out of frustration at the lag.
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Nov 6, 2020 00:52
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And Tyler Too! posted:Maybe I'm mistaken but didn't this update make it so other empires can't snipe zroni/baol digsites? Because I'm seeing them appear everywhere except my own drat borders. It's intended behavior that the digsites will spawn outside your borders in many cases, but the idea is that supposedly now the AI is unable to see the digsite, so if you conquer the system, you can progress the precursor.
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Nov 6, 2020 16:47
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And Tyler Too! posted:I hate this so much, its spawning in territory I'm trying to buddy up to Too late in this game, but it can be worth delaying the Zroni/Grunur dig sites until after you've secured your early borders. If you and your neighbors have no unclaimed systems around, then they should spawn in your borders.
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Nov 8, 2020 05:47
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Noir89 posted:Any gameplay altering mod I tried just felt like it added nedless complications, and I never found the resettlement micro that annoying to deal with. In the lategame you just spam a few ringworlds/ecus and move pops en mass to those anyway. It's not hard, just tedious. You want as many planets/habitats as possible because more colonies = more pops, since growth is more or less static per colony. On the other hand, the vanilla AI is incredibly, impossibly stupid (especially maintenance drones), and completely unable to deal with managing a planet anywhere in the same realm as optimal, and there are downsides to prebuilding infrastructure since you have to pay maintenance costs. So the optimal way to play ends up very tedious as you settle as much as possible, get as many planets as you can, and carefully micromanage them or their population to make sure you're getting the most out of each pop. Add to that that the resettlement screen is less than ideal, to say the least. There are mods that allow Greater Than Ourselves to be enacted early, and/or mods that let you automatically resettle population. Both are fantastic. Improved AI mods are also great, and the best part about them is that the AI starts to kind of be able to maybe compete on its own by building planets in a somewhat sensible way. Carrying capacity is also nice since while you do want more planets, growth is no longer static per planet and you can do some interesting things to grow faster.
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Nov 11, 2020 16:06
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Splicer posted:Eh, 5 is a good number. It's a single city district. I'd be annoyed if I lost pop growth because I was waiting on a blocker to clear before I built some housing. What would be great is if < threshold overcrowding was a yellow icon and it only turned red when it exceeded it. It would be nice if overcrowding didn't halt growth, but instead converted all pop growth on the planet to emigrating pops that boost pop growth on all eligible planets. We're talking about populations in the billions - having a few hundred million members moving off planet doesn't exactly seem all that odd.
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Nov 13, 2020 20:55
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FuzzySlippers posted:Civ6 suffers from this too. It is so crazy there is still no city or worker automation at all. Though even Civ doesn't lock automated explorers behind a tech. To Civ6's credit, builder charges and builders doing work instantly combined with the fact that their cost increases with each one you build makes using them an interesting decision. Outside of the first few years, building mines in Stellaris is no longer a choice, as you'll just build all of them that you can. Claiming systems, on the other hand, is much more interesting.
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Nov 17, 2020 04:15
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FuzzySlippers posted:They are a very interesting decision early or on small maps, but later it just feels like busy work. Like my cities are bitching about amenities oops looks like I forgot to repair those pillaged resources after my conquest or build the ones the computer ignored. Compared to Stellaris it'd make a lot more sense to have a later age DoT workers or whatever who would auto repair poo poo and auto build anything helpful. Yeah, that's fair. A lot of that should be automated, especially in the late game.
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Nov 17, 2020 16:23
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It's funny to me because MoO pretty much solved the issue a long, long time ago, and SotS did something similar. In MoO, you set sliders to allocate production. Base production scales from 0.5BC to 2.0BC based on tech, and pops can command a certain number of factories based on tech (2 to begin with, many more later). Each factory that is staffed produces 1BC. Setting sliders to allocate production in different areas, including producing more factories, means that the actual calculations for how planets do things and how pops produce things is pretty much trivial compared to any simulation that models each pop individually. And honestly, when you get right down to it, what I really want to do is allocate a % of each planet to different tasks (analogous to districts), and then specialize them a bit further (analogous to limited building slots that provide special modifiers). From there I don't really care at all what each individual pop does, just that my stuff is being operated to produce resources for me. This would mean overhauling the genetic system a bit, but that's probably not a bad thing.
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Nov 19, 2020 22:08
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