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There will probably be a sale on the older expansions when they release Megacorp, and they're always on sale during Steam sales. Also, Stellaris has a lot fewer really critical expansions than, say, EU4. You don't really need Leviathans (it's nice to have, but not really important), same for Synthetic Dawn (unless your friend just HAS to play as a machine empire) and Distant Stars (again, it's nice to have but it's mostly just more of the same rather than new ways to play the game). I would say only Utopia and Apocalypse are really "must have" DLCs. And there are probably some people who would argue against Apocalypse.
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Nov 14, 2018 18:07
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Sure, but a brand new player isn't going to be tired of the existing anomalies and events. For someone who had been playing for a while they helped a lot, but as a new player that extra variety is going to go completely unnoticed.
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Nov 14, 2018 18:34
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I'm hoping for a stellar Christmas but not holding my breath for it.
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Nov 14, 2018 19:25
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I don't believe Colossi can target suns currently and I don't know if that side of things is exposed to scripts. Also, while we're on the subject of Colossi, let me just state now that it's super irritating that you can't use a colossus against a faction which is hostile to you but which isn't in a declared war against you. I made the mistake of installing a mod which added a fallen empire to the L Gate possibilities lists, but said fallen empire acts like a marauder empire/crisis and its ringworld home system has between 16k and 35k power in troops on the ring sections so it's basically not invadable. I'd like to just sterilize the ring since I have total control of space but the game won't let me because I'm not at war with them. Zurai fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Nov 19, 2018 |
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Nov 19, 2018 18:41
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They're basically a pre-awakened FE. You can initiate diplomacy but there are just a couple of fluff options, stop talking, or bend the knee. I haven't tried doing the latter then seeing if I can declare an independence war because I can't be bothered. I'll link the mod but it'll have to wait til I get home from work. It's a submod of a bigger set of mods that expand fallen empires. I'm probably gonna drop the whole set because all it seems to do is give them bigger numbers, not make them more interesting, but I haven't had a chance to fully explore everything yet.
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Nov 19, 2018 21:26
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It does, but the special super fortresses they get give them 60 defensive armies, and they auto-spawn fleets in their home system (with a ton of HP) every few years, so progress is glacially slow in bombarding them to death. Also I'm playing fanatic pacifists so I'm limited to selective bombardment which doesn't help. The mod is The Zenith of Fallen Empires: Sins of the Fallen Empires (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1481972266). Reading through the full feature document, it's clearly intended as a mega-Crisis for a full galaxy with multiple FEs which will awaken and band together to help (or at least "help", depending on FE) defeat the L-Gate FE. Not really my cuppa, but maybe someone else will enjoy it.
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Nov 19, 2018 23:34
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I haven't had a lot of chance to mess with the other aspects of the Zenith of Fallen Empires mod so I can't say much about it other than what I've seen so far seems to be just bigger numbers. But again, I've only played one game (and not a standard game either) with the mods on.
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Nov 20, 2018 04:02
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Clarste posted:I'm glad that your fanatic pacifist empire is wondering how to conquer a Fallen Empire without compromising on their ideals. I tried to seal them away in their nice ringworld for all eternity, but the game wouldn't let me. Fanatic pacifist doesn't mean you don't maintain a fleet or protect yourself from an empire out to crush the entire galaxy under its heel, otherwise it wouldn't be a playable ethic because it'd be literally unplayable. Fanatic pacifist just means that you don't start the fights and you don't cause any more damage than is necessary, ever. In this case unfortunately my in-universe choices are 1) die, 2) bend the knee (and I'm playing as a fledgling Awakened Empire using other aspects of the ZoFE mod family so that just won't do), or 3) destroy them. 4) seal them away forever was denied to me by game mechanics, which started this whole sidethread. If I could enforce a peace in any way other than conquest, I would. That is literally the only option the game gives me at this point: total victory, or defeat. I don't get to just close the L-Gates back up again, I don't get to Pacify their worlds, and I don't get to do anything to cause peace other than to surrender, which as an Awakened Empire cripples me and isn't really an answer anyway. My goal isn't conquest, it's survival. Zurai fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Nov 20, 2018 |
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Nov 20, 2018 05:38
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Corbeau posted:It's just another case of Stellaris struggling from it's initial split identity as a 4X Grand Strategy game. A 4X demands equal starts as a staple of the genre, putting players on equal or at least very similar ground so that player strategy becomes the primary determinant in outcomes. The Grand Strategy formula, on the other hand, has been much more about emergent narrative and adaptation - making unequal starts a huge benefit! I suspect we'll eventually see more optional variation along these lines since Wiz & Co. have been (rightly) steadily bringing game mechanics back towards the Paradox Grand Strategy formula that's been so successful for them. There've just been way, way bigger fish to fry. As cool as release Stellaris was, that initial attempt at making a 4X has saddled the team with a huge redesign burden. Yeah, optional variation in starting parameters is definitely the kind of thing I expect to see more of as time goes on. Also, it's possible to for mods to create pre-generated galaxies, as the Star Trek, Star Wars, and Warhammer 40k mods have shown. I just don't think anyone has done a good treatment of pre-generated galaxy mod which isn't tied to an existing IP.
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Nov 26, 2018 20:16
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On the other hand, Space CK2 would lend itself to an amazing Battletech mod (to be fair, regular CK2 would as well, the map just presents a much bigger problem).
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Nov 26, 2018 20:52
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Black Griffon posted:Also, CK2 doesn't have tyranids, extradimensional invaders, nanomachines or a contingency AI. To be fair, it does have extra-map invaders in the form of the Sunset Invasion.
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Nov 26, 2018 21:21
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There should definitely be a bigger reason to actually control the space around a planet. As-is, bombardment is awful. You can chip away at a planet for literal decades to minimal effect. In anything approaching reality, control of space would mean that any forces on the ground would be restricted to purely guerilla warfare because it's really not that hard to aim a railgun slug at any obvious massing of troops for massive damage to the army with relatively minimal damage to the environment or infrastructure at large. I understand that they want ground combat to have meaning, but right now the meaning is "it exists". I know that a revamp of ground combat is something Wiz is planning to get to, and I have full faith that the Stellaris team will revitalize it well, but yeah in vanilla there's just no reason to even try to bombard planets.
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Nov 26, 2018 21:39
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Conspiratiorist posted:Ground combat should just go the way of tiles - it's an artifact of when they initially conceived the game as a Grand Strategy + MoO hybrid. No, ground combat has value and should stick around, it just needs to be significantly better than what we have now. The majority of sci-fi movies or stories involve significant ground combat at some point except for Star Trek, which is intentionally pacifistic anyway. It's too important to the overall genre to discard even if it's somewhat unrealistic in principle.
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Nov 26, 2018 22:33
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turn off the TV posted:I'm deeply concerned about this statement. It's true though? Trek, as envisioned by Gene Roddenberry, was pretty pacifist. Not in the "no weapons, just flowers" hippy sense, but by canon the Federation for most of its existence barely had a standing navy and the majority of its fleet were science and exploration vessels. They were supposed to use diplomacy whenever possible and protect life. One of Roddenberry's express intents was to show what the future could become if we ended all the infighting on Earth. It has become more warlike in the time since the original series/TNG, but at the origin it's very much about the value of peace. Conspiratiorist posted:Given the focus of the rest of the game, there is just no good way to implement it that isn't a glorified progress bar. Sure there is. Like was said earlier in the thread, forcing fleets to be more than dedicated space combat vessels opens up a ton of room on the ground as well as in space. There are all kinds of ways to improve the ground combat layer to something worth having. Zurai fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Nov 26, 2018 |
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Nov 26, 2018 22:43
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turn off the TV posted:I guess that if you don't count the series where the Federation fights a large scale war involving ground combat then they don't have ground combat at all. Personally I think that's weird but okay. Which series involves large scale ground combat with armies facing off against armies? I'm not being confrontational, I genuinely did not know that there was any serious ground combat in Trek. There's away teams and defending Deep Space 9, but those are much smaller than the scope of ground combat in Stellaris.
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Nov 26, 2018 22:51
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turn off the TV posted:Kirk fighting the Gorn is probably one of the most famous depictions of ground warfare in all of science fiction and it's in TOS. That's not warfare in the sense that we're talking about re: Stellaris, though. That's more of an event than anything. (To be fair, the referenced Star Wars scene is out of Stellaris's scope too unless we eventually get marine boarding parties)
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Nov 26, 2018 23:18
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dialhforhero posted:Hi I just bought this game after looking at it for a couple of years now. Took the paradox plunge with HoI4 and EU4 as well. What expansions are worth their weight/price? IMO the only absolute must-have expansion for Stellaris for a new player is Utopia, although some of its features are being released for free with the next major patch on December 6th. Leviathans and Distant Stars are good for once you've explored the possibilities of the base game and are looking for some new stuff to flesh out the midgame, Synthetic Dawn is completely skippable unless you want to play the Geth or Borg or similar machine hive mind-ish races, and Apocalypse is very good but not really "must have". EDIT: Also it should be noted that there's likely to be a big sale on the current DLCs when MegaCorp releases on the 6th, and they'll probably be on deep discount in the Steam Holiday Sale as well.
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Nov 26, 2018 23:30
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It's nice to see that they're incorporating Guilli's Planet Modifiers into the base game, even if unofficially. That's the one single must-have mod, IMO. Planets have needed the individuality for a long time.
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Nov 28, 2018 15:22
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There's a Mass Effect Soundtrack mod which adds all the Mass Effect music to the game. It fits pretty well IMO.
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Nov 28, 2018 16:42
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I would rather troop transports be a ship section with dedicated troop modules, so that we can have big fat harmless troop transports that carry a massive army (battleship with all troop transport sections), a small quick troop transport that doesn't carry many troops but can get there really fast (corvette transport), as well as having the ability to have armed transports so you can opt to not escort them, etc etc.
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Nov 28, 2018 16:48
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I don't like that. Too Spreadsheet Simulator and it entirely cuts out the concept of different types of ground troops, which again is pretty staple to the genre. You can't simulate the Battle for Hoth without being able to have a few gigantic, expensive AT ATs advancing on a bunch of militia units supported by some outdated retrofitted airspeeders, which are defending a planetary shield generator and some surface to orbit guns. Stellaris doesn't support all of that natively but it does via mods. That's way more compelling to me than "some numbers go up then they go down and you capture the planet". If I wanted pure fleet vs fleet action I'd be playing Sword of the Stars instead.
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Nov 28, 2018 17:08
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OwlFancier posted:Armies only do one thing and that's fight other armies on the odd occasion you need to take over a planet. You can say exactly the same thing about navies in the current version of the game (in Le Guin they will also suppress pirates, so that's two things they do), so I guess they should be removed too.
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Nov 28, 2018 17:15
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OwlFancier posted:No you can't, at all. The whole game interface is based around using space ships. Space ships are a major part of the entire strategic layer and you use them to do just about everything in the game that isn't economic development. How do you use your battleship to develop a planet? How do you use it to explore anomalies? How do you use it to claim a neutral system? Your navy is, in the current version, used exclusively to defeat the opponent's navy and fixed defenses. That's it. It doesn't serve any other mechanical purpose. Ground units actually serve two purposes already: they are used to defeat the opponent's ground forces, and they suppress and defend against rebellions.
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Nov 28, 2018 18:07
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:You can play a whole game of stellaris without building a single army. Thats certainly not true for spaceships. It is actually possible to play a whole game of Stellaris without building any military ships, although you have to set the scenario specifically to support it. That said, I wasn't making any claims to the contrary. I was just pointing out that "Ground troops only fight other ground troops so they should be removed" is a dumb argument because only having one function doesn't mean the function isn't important or potentially interesting.
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Nov 28, 2018 18:11
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OwlFancier posted:What would be lost if you removed armies and simply replaced it with a bombardment time to capture a planet? Complete loss of ability to simulate, emulate, and re-create hundreds of different science fiction universes and stories. It would also be supremely boring and make it so that literally the only thing that matters is having the biggest fleet, since as soon as you defeat the enemy fleet you take their planets.
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Nov 28, 2018 18:13
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OwlFancier posted:You just have a big pile of N+1 assault armies False. Strobe posted:"I find this mechanic tedious and boring and don't want to interact with it" Also this.
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Nov 28, 2018 18:21
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OwlFancier posted:The enemy isn't going to have some narratively interesting force disposition and neither are you unless you deliberately try to do it for some insane reason. And even if you do it's not going to work because the enemy's just gonna stack a bunch of poo poo onto a planet. False again. As an example from a game I finished just a little while back and was talking about in thread, I was experimenting with the Sins of a Fallen Empire mod and had to conquer what amounted to a super end game crisis ringworld with tons of troops. However, after examining the properties of their troops, I found that they did massive amounts of morale damage but relatively nominal amounts of regular damage, so I specifically built my army out of units that were immune to morale damage. I was able to successfully invade their worlds with relative troop "strength" parity because I designed my army composition to counter theirs. This is something which actually happened in a real game of Stellaris. And, again, just because you don't enjoy it doesn't mean it should be removed from the game for everyone.
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Nov 28, 2018 18:33
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My point isn't that ground combat in Stellaris as it currently exists is good and can continue with no changes. That's dumb. Ground combat is not good right now. However, it should be improved rather than removed. There are tons of ways to improve it to solve the complaints you make without removing it entirely.
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Nov 28, 2018 18:35
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OwlFancier posted:Or you could have just bombed them some more and dropped some more assault armies on them. If you're in a position where you've got time to build and ship armies across the galaxy you've clearly already won. Nope. Only 2 armies on each section were vulnerable to bombardment and they had something like 5,000 HP each. I would have needed like 100k strength of normal assault armies to conquer the planets because every day ~30 of them would have been morale-killed.
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Nov 28, 2018 18:36
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Gobblecoque posted:I would be surprised if they straight up removed ground combat entirely, but it will probably at some point it'll probably get reworked to some unrecognizable form as they did with FTL travel and planet management. And I look forward to that. This I definitely agree with. I know Wiz has said in the past that he knows the current ground combat is not great and it's on his list of things to look into when the time comes. Given how willing the team is to go back to the drawing board and come up with a better way of doing things that aren't working, I expect the improved ground combat will be very different from the way it is now, and significantly better (not that that's a high bar to clear).
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Nov 28, 2018 18:48
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Baronjutter posted:Personally I've never liked that war doesn't really feel costly in Stellaris, you never have a "lost generation" or a sense of massive casualties. I'd like to see bombardment a lot faster and more deadly to both pops and infrastructure, and also a V2 style manpower system using soldier jobs. Every soldier job adds X troop power to your army pool, you spend this pool during the siege/bombardment of a planet to attack and occupy planets. Significant losses would actually start killing off your pops. A particularly grueling war could see a noticeable chunk of your population lost. You could have a army screen/policies too where you can fine-tune your abstracted armies. Do you have deep manpower pools and want to zerg rush the enemy with cheap disposable troops? Do you want a super-professional mostly mechanized army to minimize your pop losses? Is your military geared more towards the total destruction of the enemy with collateral damage ignored, or more of a humane occupying force? Your choices would influence the cost and abilities of the troops you "buy" to invade a planet. New technologies could unlock new invasion options and tactics as well. Think something a little like the invasion screen for Gal Civ 2. Bombard the planet to poo poo before invading it to make it easier on your troops but as the cost of the near total destruction of infrastructure and huge civilian losses? Spend a ton of energy on a propaganda campaign to weaken the resolve of the defenders and perhaps even bribe some key officials? Send in commando units to start a slow guerilla war to weaken the enemy before a larger scale invasion? Those to me are interesting memorable options that tell a story and define the character of your empire. Yes, as long as armies are more than just a single number this sounds great. And IMO it would work just fine with some of the proposals to add troop transport sections/modules to ships; you could assign armies to a fleet in the fleet management interface and they would fill up available transport space, and if ships with troops aboard blow up you lose those troops and suffer the consequences, up to and including losing whole pops as you describe. I do think that there should be some element of actually transporting troops to the destination planet because that opens up the possibilities of forcing the opponent to respect supply lines and combat patrols or to make the sacrifice of efficiency and arm their transports. Those are interesting decisions if approached well, IMO.
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Nov 28, 2018 19:33
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Gyshall posted:85 replies to the Stellaris thread, must have been an excellent wiztweet... To be fair, there was an excellent wiztweet (or stellaristeamtweet, anyway, I don't know if it was Wiz who tweeted it). We just got distracted from there.
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Nov 28, 2018 19:43
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:@Zurai: Using a mod as your argument why ground forces should be kept as mechanic is so I didn't use it as an argument, I used a modded game as an example. Like, what, I can't use any examples because I play exclusively with modded games? I didn't say it was something which happened in a core game, I explicitly said it was modded, it's not like I was being misleading. I also wasn't arguing for ground forces to be kept as-is (and that game would be a terrible argument for it anyway because my initial post about that game was to complain that I couldn't just nuke the planets from orbit to skip the ground combat). I was simply using an example to refute OwlFancier's argument that all that can be done is "build 50 assault armies and have them follow your fleet around".
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Nov 28, 2018 20:23
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. Like... I dont disagree with you but dont argue it should stay "because I did something fun with a mod".
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Staltran posted:So there was an obvious counter, and all you had to do was build it (probably involving dozens of clicks), gather it, and assault? I.e. a bunch of tedious micro with almost zero thought involved? Exciting! You can poo poo on it all you like, but it was an example of something which was supposed to not exist.  I didn't say the mod did a good job of making ground combat more interesting (the mod had nothing to do with ground combat), it was just an example of the fact that it is possible with the current version of the game to make ground combat more complex than just "throw a stack of basic assault armies at it". Not much more, but still more.And, again, you can say the exact same thing about navies in the current version. You can either overwhelm them with superior numbers of generically designed ships or you can look at your opponents' ship designs and create specialized ships designed to counter their strengths and exploit their weaknesses.
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Nov 28, 2018 20:39
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Torrannor posted:For something semi-related, I've tried a number of additional trait mods for Stellaris, but none have really been worth it. And I realized why, because most traits are just boring. +5% unity is boring, +10% energy is boring, -X% ethics attraction is boring. Enduring or fleeting are better because they at least have a real effect on the only individual characters in the game, but otherwise traits are just meh. And most trait mods have things like +X% high energy physics research or some other lame poo poo like that. Very similar to the vanilla traits, only with different combinations or adding percentage bonuses/penalties to similar values. I'm at work so I can't tell you exactly which mod, but there's at least one mod out there which gives some expensive traits (4-7 points IIRC) which give massive bonuses to specific things and then also allow leaders to spawn with species-trait-specific leader traits. quote:Most government policy slots are equally boring. Cool stuff like Life Seeded is so much better than -10% build cost. There's a mod for this too, which gives a bunch of "start of game only" civics which change your starting circumstances and/or enable unique event chains. I'll try to remember to come back and link the mods once I get home this afternoon.
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Nov 29, 2018 16:52
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Thinking about it, it makes no sense whatsoever for it to be a planet-based modifier rather than a pop-based one. What, these newly-Enlightened bronze age primitives suddenly get over their culture shock when you ship them off to another planet?
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Nov 29, 2018 21:56
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Torrannor posted:Thanks, that would be really appreciated. I guess I'll dive into the workshop later today as well, perhaps I can find the mods you talked about So the trait mod I was thinking of is Xenology: Traits Expansion Reborn. It adds a bunch of species traits and the expensive traits give a chance for your leaders to spawn with special leader traits. It also increases the number of traits that leaders are guaranteed to have because mods can never do just one thing. For additional at-start-only civics, there is Origins Civics, Taskforce Xeno: Alien Invasion Civic, and on the more all-pervasive end, Cultural Overhaul Ethics-Civics-Traditions. Origins Civics is just what it says on the tin, Taskforce Xeno is an XCom-inspired origin civic with some extras all revolving around that central idea, and Cultural Overhaul adds a whole ton of stuff beyond just the civics it adds.
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Nov 29, 2018 23:39
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I'm hard up enough for it to be next Thursday already that I tried watching Arumba's stream at work, but it looks like he hasn't played Stellaris in like two years and he's completely forgotten everything that's the same and remembers everything that has changed so it was miserable to watch.
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Nov 30, 2018 20:53
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Magil Zeal posted:Still not sure whether a monument or alloy foundry is better as the first building, but I'm pretty sure I want one of those two. It seems to me that a second Alloy Foundry is going to be the right choice the majority of the time (exceptions are when you have a couple deposits of alloys within your first few explored systems). Alloys are the fuel of your expansion militarily (ships take alloys to build), explorationly (so do science ships), and economically (so do constructors, outposts, and colony ships). Unity is good, but it's not going to pay off as quickly as a second foundry is (again, unless you start off with some nice space-based alloys nearby). Baronjutter posted:I mean this wasn't some serious high stakes competitive game but still it felt like half the players had never gotten into a war in stellaris before. I think that the majority of the players aren't super experienced at the game. They may all work at Paradox, but they aren't all on the Stellaris dev team. Even if they were experienced players, we don't know how much of a chance they had to really experience the massive economy changes in the new version. Don't get me wrong, they were totally warned and defnitely under-built their fleets, but I don't think it's safe to assume that most of them have more than light familiarity with the game. Remember, this is the very first Stellaris Dev Clash; the EU4 dev clashes are much more competitive in part because they've been doing them from pretty much the start and most of the players are very experienced with EU4. I imagine as we see more Stellaris Dev Clashes, we'll see them get much more competitive. Crazycryodude posted:So is there anything that's actually built out of raw minerals in 2.2, or is it all alloys? Ships need alloys, outposts need alloys, do mining stations? What about megastructures? Alloys and Consumer Goods are both manufactured using minerals, of course. As for actual permanent constructions, I know that most planetary buildings are and that mining and research stations are; I haven't seen anyone attempt to build a megastructure yet but I'm assuming those are either a mix of minerals and alloys or pure alloys (and rare materials). Zurai fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 02:07
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I'm siding with Baronjutter on this one. If planets with a robofactory just produce robot pops endlessly unless you manually turn them off, that's going to be a pain in the rear end.
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Dec 2, 2018 22:53
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