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Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Yami Fenrir posted:

The real pro move is to be Authoritarian, get bonus influence not ruined by idiot pops, and still have a super happy faction because that faction is like, automatically happy.

Yeah I am a bit disappointed that authoritarian is so much stronger than egalitarian. Extra influence that doesn't care about factions or faction happiness, stratified economy, and slaver guilds with indentured servitude are just too much for an egalitarian empire to compete with. Sure you can take technocracy as an egalitarian but so can the authoritarian slaver guild empire. The egalitarian can take meritocracy, but so can the authoritarian once they get a third civic slot, and indentured servitude specialists are better than meritocracy ones anyway.

I want egalitarians to have access to something that can match the power of slaver guilds and stratified economy. I'm just not sure what it could be. Until then, back to my oligarchic technocracy with slaver guilds empire that adds meritocracy for the third slot super early due to the crazy tech rush.

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Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Baronjutter posted:

You could do a ton of that with simple modding, but I think to make it really work you'd need to do a bit more. I think there'd need to be a sort of education/skills system for pops. I think pops shouldn't really have a demotion time as if your fancy research job goes away you'll go work in the fields so you can still eat as soon as the money runs out. But the opposite should not be true, it should actually take a long time for low-skill workers to become a researcher for example. This would open up an education mechanic that I think would add a ton of the game.

A wide labour-intensive empire would not be doing massive investments in public education. If they wanted to start building tall they'd need to first do a massive education investment, which would make their pops more expensive, which would cause some serious issues with their big wide peasant based economy. An educated high skill workforce would be a long term investment, something you plan for rather than flip on a dime. Nothing stops you from setting education policies to educate everyone, so that farmers or miner could quickly go up and fill a skilled-worker job, it just means your basic workforce is going to be more expensive to maintain. Higher level buildings would have education have more of an impact as well. Like for example on a level 1 basic farm education wouldn't give any bonus, so you can have a vast peasant workforce or slaves. But for a level 2 farm, now it expect at least an education level of "1" to work, and every level above provides a minor bonus. As the levels go up so do the minimum education level and bonus for being above it.

So you'd have a tall empire that does massive investments in education for all, where even farmers basically have a doctorate in automated farm management which would make each pop incredibly productive but also incredibly expensive to maintain their education and consumer needs. Or you'd have a fat wide empire with an education policy to only invest in the ruling class and minimum to no education for the working class. Racist empires could then of course have education policies per species. Perhaps you don't have outright slavery, but by denying blorgs a higher education they'll never be able to hold higher class jobs, limiting their political power.

Education its self would just be a stat from like 0-10 or something that would slowly tick up until it reached the target level based on your education spending for that class/species. Now if say a middle-tier job opened up and the highest educated free worker has too low of an education they could fill that slot, but they would suffer a large productivity penalty until that population was brought up to the new education standards of that class. The specifics don't matter that much, the main thrust is to make it so you can't just flip a rural peasant economy to high-tech in a year by upgrading all your poo poo. You'd need to actually invest in your people, which would be a long term investment that would end up really defining your economic plans and policies.

Although this could be done in a simpler manner as others have pointed out, this really reminds me of the education/specialization system from Sid Meier's Colonization. As a DOS era game the calculations behind the system couldn't have been all that complex.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Yami Fenrir posted:

Yeah I'm fairly sure it's more this than a literal afterlife.

Going by the Zroni plotline the Shroud is a weird "the mind makes it real place" that works both ways somehow, as the Shroud denizens influenced the Zroni to influence the Shroud :confused:

I've always thought of the shroud as 40k's warp but with a different name and just enough changes to avoid a lawsuit.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Just saw this in the 3.0.1 patch notes:

The Indentured Servitude slavery type no longer applies Slavery based production modifiers if the pop is working in a Specialist job. Other slavery based modifiers such as reduced Housing and Amenity usage continue to apply.

So maybe slaver guilds won't be literally the only civic worth taking along with technocracy now. Also looking through the 3.0 patch notes the following really stood out to me:

The Machine Intelligence Authority now grants +1 monthly Pop Assembly

From what I can tell pop growth is still going to be king with pops being lower in number due to overall lower growth rates but individually more powerful to make up for it. So maybe machine empires will be good or even OP again?

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Touchdown Boy posted:

You are right, but at least my ideas could be converted instead of started from scratch. its no big deal though and it will give me a chance to see all the stuff they changed.



Yeah if you haven't touched the game in a year I would just dump whatever you have and start from scratch. There have been so many changes and additions that old species from 2.6 or whatever aren't going to play like they used to in 3.0. Hell I would wager that most player rolled species from 2.8 won't play the same in 3.0.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Touchdown Boy posted:

Seems like we have an hour or more to wait for the update still. Was hoping to hop right in now Im done work for the day. Oh well, I guess I could eat first...

Release is at 4:00pm UTC. Convert to your preferred time zone as needed.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Splicer posted:

I tried psionics twice and each time I did I got three bad end rolls in a row and said gently caress it and stopped throwing money into the hurt me machine. My game experience is that there are no positive shroud results, only bad ones. "Yeah but the odds of..." no that doesn't work, you either don't have the good and bad results on the same roll or you build in an odds fiddler or you end up with a nonzero number of players consistently spending resources on worse than nothing.

Yeah that's always been my main issue with psi ascension. Its really hard to actually get the good results and even when you do finally get them they are objectively worse than the stuff that the other two paths didn't need to roll a ton of dice to get and have been benefiting from for a long time already.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

Were they ever not OP?

They have had slower per planet pop growth for a while now as materialists build robots while also growing normal pops. Yeah they can colonize everything, but unless they find a ton of places to set up shop they will be out popped by a materialist empire making robots and normal pops at the same time. Add in terraforming/synth ascension and the materialist empire can colonize everything they see too.

And technocracy/slaver guilds are just so stupid powerful with robot empires having no answer for them.

All of this changes (I hope) in 3.0.1.

Antillie fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Apr 15, 2021

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Don't forget the assimilation living standard. Convert all your newly conquered subjects to one nice template that can live anywhere and gets all your leader (who can now spend literally forever at max level) synth eco bonuses for free automatically. No special projects required.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Yami Fenrir posted:

Protip: turn xeno compatability off. Always.

I wanted to try a xeno compatibility run just to see if the extra pop growth is worth something now that pops are more of a scarce resource and pop growth bonuses should in theory be more powerful than ever. But then I came to my senses.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Yami Fenrir posted:

I have the opposite problem, i always research jump drive (too good to skip imo) and end up getting the unbidde like 70% of the time. When what i really want is the contigency.

The crisis selection process has been changed. From 3.0:

quote:

Added game setup option to pick which End-Game Crisis you get.
It is now possible for the endgame crisis to happen in the first 50 years of the endgame in certain circumstances. These are:
* * No living fallen empires / awakened fallen empires;
* * War in Heaven not happening, concluded, or started 15 years ago;
* * A country has researched jump drives or psi jump drives (only the Unbidden can happen in the first 50 years in this case)
Nuked old script to randomize which crisis shows up. Now it is simply purely a random choice that is random (with the chance of any crisis happening increasing the more years pass in the endgame).

Then in 3.0.1:

quote:

Lowered chance of Unbidden spawning as they can spawn early, so were appearing a lot more often than other crises

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Yami Fenrir posted:

I am aware but thank you anyway.

I'll probably just set the crisis i want at the start from now on.

Edit: quote is not edit whoooops

I still want an option to allow two or even three crisis's to fire in the same game, with another option to allow/disallow a new crisis to fire while another one is still going on. I want it to be possible for the Necrons, Tyranids, and the forces of Chaos to all be making the galaxy dead interesting all at once.

Antillie fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Apr 15, 2021

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

:psyduck: How are they still figuring out having the crises show up?!?

Yeah I have no idea. Here is how I would do it:

monthly_crisis_chance_percent = 0 + (months_since_endgame_date / 2)

And then just make the selection of which crisis to spawn totally random. Easy. You could then make a slider in the game setup options to change that "2" to something else, thus allowing the player to make the crisis take, on average, more or less time to show up once the endgame date had been reached. And of course include the option to pick which crisis spawns in and maybe even an option to just pick the date it fires for people who dislike rng.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Gort posted:

No, they're not as good at giving you research as academic privilege. Academic privilege gives you both happier scientists and a research output bonus to those scientists.

Happier scientists seems pretty worthless. Happiness in general is a pretty weak mechanic. Going with stratified economy may not make your scientists more productive but needing a whole lot less consumer goods empire wide will allow you to have a bunch more scientists by virtue of needing fewer pops and buildings devoted to said consumer goods.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

bob dobbs is dead posted:

10% research output bonus is equivalent to an ascension slot tho

Yeah, and that's good. But having 12-13% more scientists is better. And then there is the synergy with slavery, the extra influence in the early game (when its most important) because you are authoritarian, worker happiness being basically meaningless making getting more stability from happiness easier, and the fact that you can shift between research and alloys as needed.

But honestly with all of the changes in 3.0.1 meta discussions are going to be fairly pointless for a while until people work out what the new optimal choices are.

Antillie fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Apr 15, 2021

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Jack Trades posted:

Is there a mod that makes random generated empire names less stupid and more memorable? Alternatively a mod that lets you rename AI empires mid-match?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1314848686

Its at least a reasonable fix. If only by drowning out the dumb random empires with interesting ones. No way to rename empires mid match as far as I know though.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Ghislaine of YOSPOS posted:

Why are they making pop growth work backwards? it should be much faster to grow a pop on a crowded planet, not less.

RP reason: The same sort of thing happens in real life with developed countries.

Real reason: It allows the game to run faster.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Halborn posted:

Whaaat so apparently now I can't build both alloy and consumer goods factories on one planet?

You don't need them. Both jobs are done by the new industrial district. Buildings now exist to make research, unity, and amenities.

Also, first impression; clearing tile blockers ASAP is now super important even if you don't need the district slots as it increases the planets "carrying capacity" which in turn increases population growth. Since the clearing of most blockers is locked behind society research this adds some importance to what was easily the least important tech branch. It also makes tech rushing that much more powerful than it already was.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

scaterry posted:

You get ten times the research from anomalies, it's actually worthwhile now!

Does anyone know what causes doubled pop growth on certain planets? Is it just home planets?

It seems to be from traditional percentage based pop growth modifiers stacking multiplicatively with flat base growth rate bonuses from carrying capacity.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

So any time I wasn't just screwing around I would always run fanatic materialist/authoritarian/oligarchy with technocracy/slaver guilds and meritocracy as the 3rd civic pick and go synthetic ascension. This was more or less the non total war meta build in 2.8.

But now that specialists outnumber workers 2 to 1 and with slaver guilds being fixed so as to not be stupidly op I think the new meta (Assuming we set aside the total war civics.) might be fanatic materialist/egalitarian/oligarchy with technocracy/meritocracy and functional architecture as the 3rd civic. Synthetic ascension still rules the late game with conquest and assimilation being the only really viable way to grow past a certain point.

My thinking is that with the population breakdown now being roughly 10% rulers, 60% specialists, and 30% workers stratified economy just isn't nearly as good as it once was vs decent conditions and the +5% specialist output from egalitarian is now much better than it once was while the +5% worker output from authoritarian is much less powerful. On top of that slaver guilds now only increases the output of workers, who are a minority to begin with, making its output bonus very minor. The bonus to housing, consumer goods, and amenities usage is nice but I don't think it can compete with meritocracy since slaver guilds will only apply to 40% of your pops while meritocracy applies to all specialists, who are both more than 40% of your pops and also your most important pop group.

Authoritarian still gives +0.5 influence which is very good but with factions now popping up the moment you make first contact with literally anything egalitarian's influence bonus now kicks in much sooner which narrows the gap by quite a bit and might even eliminate it in a reasonable amount of time depending on how soon you get the living state.

So, yeah... authoritarian/slaver guilds out and egalitarian/meritocracy in. But everyone still ends up as robots.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Hm, I hadn't considered Nilistic Aquisition. But yeah that makes total sense. So that would make fanatic materialist/authoritarian/oligarchy with technocracy/meritocracy/functional architectures with Nilistic Aquisition to steal pops as much as possible a strong build. Then synth ascend to assimilate all those newly acquired pops. You're more or less the borg without being a driven assimilator.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

KirbyKhan posted:

I have optimized this game to run sub-optimally with less input from me.

I have spent a silly amount of time working on exactly this. I think the most powerful non total war build is going to be void dwellers/fanatic materialist/authoritarian/oligarchy with technocracy/meritocracy/functional architecture with nihilistic acquisition, void born, and synth ascension. But this requires managing the void dweller start properly and constantly raiding other empires for pops. A very active play style that requires constant player input and planning.

A less powerful but far more easy going build is prosperous unification/fanatic materialist/egalitarian/oligarchy with technocracy/meritocracy/functional architecture with synth ascension. You need to setup pop farm habitats and manage the economy but you aren't having to go to war constantly to grow your population.

The authoritarian raiders can setup pop farm habs too, but the egalitarians can still outright conquer and assimilate. So I feel that while the authoritarian setup will be more powerful the egalitarian setup will be easier to manage.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Kaal posted:

Ah man really? It was always boring but at least it was decent. A ten year buff to one planet is useless.

Yeah but the 4 pops and 2 districts are nice. Its not a bad origin but its not amazing like it used to be.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

Wouldnt the Origin to start on a relic world or whatever it is that has decent habitability for everything work too?

Probably, but the void dwellers start got a bunch of direct and indirect buffs. Its now in a better state than it was in 2.8, and it was already pretty good. Not the least of which is that stealing pops gets you around the habitat preference in addition to being the best way to get pops in general from the mid game on.

Antillie fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Apr 20, 2021

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Kaal posted:

Yeah that's all very true. Prosperous Unification was an average origin - it was a decent but limited buff, and it wasn't the sort of thing that could be easily leveraged during empire creation.

I think its not that it was amazing on its own, it was just amazing compared to most of the other origins. I mean sure ring world was incredible and void dwellers was good, but everything else that wasn't prosperous unification was either annoying/exploity to use or just bad. I guess remnants was ok, but it didn't really pay off until later, prosperous unification helped from day 1, when the snowball was just starting off.

Antillie fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Apr 20, 2021

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Kaal posted:

Scion, Shoulders of Giants, Hegemon, Remnants, Doomsday, and Tree of Life are certainly more competitive than Prosperous Unification, though they're less flexible. The others are largely focused on role-playing, or are intentionally difficult.

Scion was super rng, sometimes op, sometimes not, but generally banned in MP, Shoulders of Giants payed off too late and with too little, Hegemon and Doomsday were good but annoying/exploity, Tree of Life was bad, it took far too long to get the 4 missing pops, Remnants, like I said, was ok. I mean its debatable I guess but outside of ringworld and void dwellers being just better than everything else Prosperous Unification was just as good, better than, or close enough to, any other option that wasn't either annoying or generally banned in MP for being cheesy.

Things are different now of course. And I am glad that PU got a nerf. It was a bit too easy to use.

Antillie fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Apr 20, 2021

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

yikes! posted:

I love having an unemployed specialist pop every time i upgrade the colony building at 10 pops. I know I can fix it (if I catch it in time) by closing all ruler jobs and re-opening them but it's so annoying and has been around forever. Why the hell hasn't it been fixed already.

What? How do you fix this? Just disable the ruler jobs for a day or two and then turn them back on? This bug has been happening to me for ages. I've had to resort to mods that massively reduce demotion time to keep the little red unemployment icon from driving me mad.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

QuarkJets posted:

Same, I never ever see an unemployed ruler after upgrading my colony ship at 10 pops. I play with no mods, could be a weird mod interaction? Googling around, some people on reddit are reporting that the Civics and Ethics Alternatives mod can cause this

I've never even heard of those mods. But then again I am not much of a mod user. I have some graphical enhancement mods, tiny outlier v2, and a reduced demotion time mod. I guess I can do a game with them all turned off and find out.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

bob dobbs is dead posted:

but blood is tasty

e: ok this was a funny thread to mispost in

This actually fits with devouring swarm and livestock slavery. So its not really out of place.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

So from what I can tell there is a bug with species rights and synthetic ascension. Basically if you synthetically ascend and then apply a species template to your new robot race it forcibly turns on migration controls and there is no way to turn them off. So once you go synth ascension you have to choose between the automatic resettlement mechanic and your species trait points. I've filed a bug report on the Paradox forms about this but until/if they fix it I have made a tiny mod that fixes the issue. Technically I didn't have to allow machine empires to also use "No Migration Controls" as well but, why the hell not.

I thought I would post this in case anyone else has run into this issue and was as annoyed by it as I was.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Aethernet posted:

I absolutely agree that having clerks and bureaucrats is silly. Removing clerks and giving bureaucrats +trade to represent them furnishing dachas would be great.

This is a great idea.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Serephina posted:

For the sake of flogging this horse, the 1.25% bonus is actually a reduction of a negative bonus, ie reducing an additive penalty. Which makes it stronger than the number seems. Also it reduces pop upkeeps, which can be calculated as a flat number (typically something like .5 CG and 1 amenity for 40 pops, iirc).

I think a good rule of thumb would be "After you have an upgraded holotheatre1, but need more amenities, build a gene clinic rather than the 2nd holo or using clerks"

1methotrexate, according to Firefox's autocorrect.

Not to try and restart the debate but I always take the flesh is weak as my second ascension perk so my two guaranteed habitables jump straight to 100% hab super early. By the time any other planets I have found and colonized start approaching 40+ pops I seem to either have another +20% hab from techs or full synth ascension.

Your numbers and the reasoning behind them make perfect sense though. Its probably just me and tendency to play Technocracy/Meritocracy paired with Intelligent and Natural Engineers.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

SettingSun posted:

Anyone have good tips on the endgame? I can roll through the whole game being a cool mega empire and the other empires couldn't hold a candle to anyone I play, but then the crisis rolls up and I get trashed. Is it fleet composition? Do I just need to Make More sooner? I tend to use the auto generated ship designs. It's becoming a bit of a trial to utterly destroy the galaxy as Determined Exterminators only to have the fallen empire wake up and do to me what I've been doing to everyone else. Just let me Be the Crisis in peace!

I can't really comment on your tech/fleet/eco without more info but on a good run I will be fielding ~400k combined fleet power and stomping fallen empires by 2350. As far as fleet comp goes fit as follows:

If fighting the Tyranids Prethoryn Scourge: Fit armor and energy weapons with some strike craft mixed in. Shields and kinetic weaponry are crap against them.

If fighting the Forces of Chaos Unbidden: Fit shields and disruptors/cloud lightning/arc emitters. Strike craft also work well. Anything that ignores shields will gently caress these guys up. Kinetic weapons are ok but don't bother running normal energy weapons.

If fighting the Necrons Contingency: Fit shields. Disruptors/cloud lightning/arc emitters work ok but so does a well balanced offense of energy and kinetic as these guys use rather balanced defenses.

If fighting a fallen empire: Fit a balance of shields and armor paired with disruptors/cloud lightning/arc emitters. These guys have crazy shields and armor but weak hulls. Mixing in some strike craft is also a good idea.

Antillie fucked around with this message at 19:19 on May 3, 2021

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Bofast posted:

You can get Cloning Vats as a lithoid by going into the biological ascension perks, but Paradox decided it should cost food even for non-food using lithoids :(

This sounds like it would mesh reasonably well with the tree of life origin. I need to try this.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

And Tyler Too! posted:

Strongly recommend making a Matter Decompressor as the crisis, near-infinite minerals!

I prefer to pair the Matter Decompressor with a couple of ecumenopolis forge worlds to turn *all* of those minerals to alloys to feed a mega shipyard. A hoard of cruisers is no match for an equally large hoard of battleships.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

QuarkJets posted:

Is it? I guess I don't pay attention to the actual number usually, since that's the one planet that you don't have to colonize

e: Your nearby worlds of the same type are 80% though, right?

Yes but you can get them to 100% as well with your second ascension perk if you take the flesh is weak.

Antillie fucked around with this message at 23:07 on May 3, 2021

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

genericnick posted:

So what do you use cruisers for now? I still remember the plasma meta, but all games I played recentish went straight from corvette and destroyer fleets to artillery battleships with a few picket destroyers thrown in. Cruisers just seem to die a lot.

Hangar cruisers with the carrier combat computer work really well. They will wreck everything until battleships come along. I usually go through three phases with my fleet comp:

Phase 1: Early game, all corvettes. Autocannons, plasma throwers, and swarm combat computers.
Phase 2: Mid game, all cruisers. Guided bow with missiles, hangar core, M slot rear, and carrier combat computers.
Phase 3: Late game, all battleships all the time. Most of them are XL front with L core and rear. A few are XL front with carrier core and L rear. (3 to 1 ratio or so) All of them run artillery combat computers.

Basically strike craft tear apart anything smaller than a battleship and L mounts tear apart anything larger than a destroyer. So yeah, cruisers do get boned, but outfitted as carriers with super long engagement range they do quite well until battleships show up.

Antillie fucked around with this message at 21:09 on May 4, 2021

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

Sedisp posted:

Rock hard pops

This person has won the thread.

Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

bitterandtwisted posted:

I was going down the path of Become the Crisis when a regular crisis triggered. Can I still complete that path?

Yes. The normal crisis and the "someone became the crisis" are totally separate things. You can even have more than one empire become the crisis at the same time and be fighting over who gets to blow up the stars and end the universe.

Antillie fucked around with this message at 13:49 on May 5, 2021

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Antillie
Mar 14, 2015

GunnerJ posted:

Also, it'd be nice to be able to make an empire hate another one than yours.

Nemesis introduced a spy operation that lets you do this. I'm not sure its really all that useful.

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