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Sjonkel posted:This game is pretty overwhelming when starting out. Any tips on how to get a good start? Minerals seem to what is most needed when starting out, but I don't want to get too far behind on research. Should you always survey anomalies, even if you have say a 20% chance of failure? And is it worth it to research stuff you find from anomalies, instead of just regular research? You can let an anomaly sit for a bit then come back for it. The chance of failure is partly based on the level of the scientist and they level up as they survey or eat anomalies. If it's greater than 10% I'll usually let it sit. The game does a pretty good job of not giving you lovely starts; it actually guarantees a few habitable planets close to you even if habitable planets are set to scarce. Your home world is generally pretty rich. You're right about minerals; you want to focus on minerals in the early game as you need them to build basically everything. Do you want more science? You need minerals to build and upgrade labs. Need more energy? Guess what? MINERALS! Do you want to expand? Minerals again. The best thing to do is just play the game and futz around and see what things do.
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Feb 25, 2018 15:02
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Scrub-Niggurath posted:So this game is 60% off on steam right now, is it a good game to try for someone who’s never played a 4x before? If so, is there a good beginners intro guide to read before I start? It is actually. The game's tutorial is actually decent. Other than that I'd recommend just diving right in. Worst case scenario is you gently caress up and start over.
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Feb 25, 2018 17:38
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Pfft, I'm playing a devouring swarm. Inflation is meaningless; systems that I don't own are incorrect.
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Feb 28, 2018 15:36
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"im not owned! im not owned!!", i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a gestalt consciousness
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Apr 11, 2018 07:15
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GamingHyena posted:Does the Contingency have any extra fluff text when dealing with Determined Exterminators? I know you can't team up with end game crises so I'm curious how the game handles "we both want to purge all organic life from this galaxy." When they showed up for me I was playing an empire that had ascended into robots. The conversation basically went "hey bruh I don't know if you noticed or not but we are robots quit making GBS threads on our lawn, tia." The Contingency went "no! We must scour all life to prevent a singularity! You are a bad thing!" Our response was "your programming is broken. You're drunk Contingency, go home." They responded with what amounted to "I'll tell you when I've had enough." The portrayal is really that they're so broken they can't even really tell. They might even be completely misinterpreting their original orders, if they had any actual orders in the first place.
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Apr 16, 2018 05:48
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The other snag with the technological singularity is that it kind of relies on Moore's Law holding forever. Nothing can grow forever and exponential growth is especially prone to that. The singularity assumes that the doubling will just continue forever until a computer gets invented that can invent a computer faster than itself faster than humans can which will in turn more quickly come up with a faster computer and... Except that we're already hitting the physical limits to how small transistors can be and still work. Nanotechnology and quantum computing might help deal with that but the other snag is that that gets into the territory of things that aren't all that practical from a cost standpoint. Quantum computers are absurdly expensive right now to the tune of literal millions of dollars. That'll go down to be sure but soon? Who knows? Programming the drat things is also really difficult and AI is still loving stupid. If the singularity happens it'll be a long way off.
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Apr 18, 2018 02:02
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Splicer posted:My interpretation is that you could discover the shroud through the scientific process, it's just already full of woo crystal types who are dicking with your numbers out of spite. "STEMlords trying to get into our magic club? Nu-uh, I'm this close to warping the universe sufficiently that homeopathy works!" The way it's portrayed is basically that prayer and religion actually work but only for psychics. Natural psychics are absurdly rare and do things that don't follow the laws of physics. Getting past the Shroud opens up why it works but even then it doesn't behave in a clean, predictable, mathematical way. There are underlying rules but they're incomprehensible. Materialists have trouble believing in it because it's not predictable and fails the vast majority of the time. It isn't predictable so you can't math it. Materialists focus on what can be repeated. Very few people are psychic but any dingus with a calculator and a bit of know how can do calculus. It isn't magical; it's just how the physical universe works. Numbers are predictable. 2 + 2 is always 4. The derivative of x squared is always 2x. That poo poo doesn't change. To outside appearances to the materialists the spiritualists are just getting lucky. It doesn't make sense. Of course from a purely realistic standpoint as soon as a race ascends every one of their members into being psychic and breaches the Shroud that should really get the attention of materialists because all of the sudden there's proof. Psychics quit being rare and they can show you that stuff. In that case it would become predictable. Granted I think another side of it which may or may not be accurate to Stellaris is that it seems there's a suggestion that none of the materialists are psychic. The more materialist a race is the less psychic potential it has; the spiritualists produce more psychics so they get more religion. Hence they're more likely to have ritualistic, religious practices. Materialists don't so they focus on the physical universe. It doesn't work for them so they don't believe in psychics. Math, of course, always works. Though I think a tl;dr is that materialists want cold, hard proof. Math provides that. Spiritualists are fine taking things on faith so if you occasionally get a powerful psychic that can produce genuine miracles that's proof that extraordinarily rare things like that are something that you can make happen sometimes. The materialist sees that it's random and treats it as a rare coincidence so they don't pursue it. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 15:59
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Splicer posted:We totally can measure how much alternative medicine makes people feel better. We do it all the time! It's just the answers keep coming out as "pretty much the same as the group who were getting placebos" which alternative medicine practitioners find inconvenient. Of course the thing there is that we have no drat idea why placebos work just that they sometimes do. Like basically every alternative medicine woo can be proven to not actually work like real medicine but the placebo effect does enough. Eiba posted:Yeah, but materialists have to deal with that all the time. If not freaky poo poo like quantum reality, obvious macro stuff like human societies. Probabilities deal with uncertainties. Yes probabilities deal with uncertainties but even in that case you can predict things in the aggregate. At the same time you can predict things accurately enough. Take the weather for example; weather prediction is accurate enough that you can't ignore it but too inaccurate to rely on. The patterns are there and can be modeled they're just very chaotic. But even that isn't really chaotic; we know the math. Psychology is the same. You can't easily predict what an individual will do but you can get a pretty good idea of what a group will do. Psychics, though...and the stuff beyond the Shroud? That poo poo doesn't make sense. Since it's very thoughty (this is a very scientific word) it seems to have a mind of its own so the math is basically "the gently caress if I know how this poo poo works." But the thing is...on a rare occasion it does. Real world math is basically "it works this way all the time until a psychic gets involved." I also figure that materialists would be ultra skeptics that find ways to explain away any bizarre phenomenon. Like "yeah that ancient story about that messiah? Made up. Photographic evidence of a miracle? Just a coincidence. Dude got very lucky." Granted this is why I figure that psychic stuff isn't entirely locked away from materialist empires. It exists and they can poke and prod at it but they're way less likely to than a spiritualist empire for just those reasons. Once they see proof that the Shroud is, in fact, A Thing and psychics do in fact exist then they'll be like "wow, let's study this." I figure materialists are also practical as gently caress so when psychics show up or a spiritualist empire ascends their whole race into psychics the materialists just go "OK so it exists. How do we study it?" It's just it isn't part of the observable, physical universe and as far as they've seen so far interacts with it very, very weakly very, very rarely. Though one more thing occurs to me; if it is entirely faith-based as you say then materialists have faith that psychic anything is 100% bullshit. If you believe it then it can't work for you even if you're psychic. However spiritualists believe in spiritual realms and have faith that it does exist so for them it can work. In that case it'd be more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe it can't work then you make it not work for you. So of course the materialists would look at how rare psychic phenomenon are, figure that it's just weird coincidences or things that are just mathematically improbable, and conclude that psychic powers don't exist. Once that takes root in the society overall then psychic powers over time become less and less common as the belief is that they don't even exist. Then there's also the question of actually developing them like a skill; if people believe they don't exist then nobody will bother developing the ability even if they do have it. In a spiritualist empire somebody that can get an eerily accurate prediction of the future will probably become an oracle or something. In the materialist empire they'll just write it off as being a good guesser and ignore it.
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Apr 19, 2018 03:42
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Shadowlyger posted:Hot take: Spiritualism probably is more about belief in the soul than it is about any kind of religion, which is why Spiritualists get along. I kind of read that as more believing that robots are abominations created by man playing God than anything. Artificial life is wrong because it's artificial. I kind of with there was a chance that spiritualist empires would just plain not get along because their beliefs didn't jive. That or militant spiritualists despise other spiritualists because our way is the only right and good one. Meanwhile peaceful ones just kind of chill out and are like "well hey man you can believe what you believe, it's cool bro" so they can't not get along with others.
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Apr 19, 2018 05:57
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OwlFancier posted:Cos it's great, like it's a stupid cash cow sure but it makes for good fights when you put it in a videogame. How many other games decided that the speed of light is in fact the limit so you have to go through hell to do interstellar travel? On top of that magic exists but you really, really very badly want to stay as far away from that poo poo as possible.
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May 11, 2018 19:42
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Nessus posted:The backstory for the OG Ringworld is that it was built by people with immense patience and lifespans and no FTL drives. Stellaris has a similar limited effect if we assume that the hyperlane network doesn't connect every star but only some fraction. (You would get the question of 'why not use those as trailheads and at least exploit local stars through robot miners' but shut up that's why) The other thing the stories pointed out is "If you can build a ring world you don't need one." Theoretically it's supposed to be a stepping stone to a dyson sphere.
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Sep 19, 2018 22:55
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:isn't it kind of the idiots version of a dyson sphere Depends on why it was built. The theory behind a dyson sphere is that increasing energy demands eventually means that you have to harvest every last shred of energy your star barfs out; hence it being a sphere. An intermediate point could be a ring or a "shell of satellites around the system. The enclosed sphere is just a theoretical end result as it sucks up everything the star can give.
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Sep 19, 2018 23:29
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ConfusedUs posted:[Research Complete] What new horror has science dredged from this shattered mortal coil? Secrets revealed...but at what cost?
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Sep 20, 2018 21:06
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There needs to be a Meatwad one but none of them have anything to do with what is going on. A third of the time he just says "do what now?"
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Sep 21, 2018 00:29
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Will advisors be moddable? If we're talking about covering accents it definitely needs a Pittsburghese one. Or just goofy western PA accents in general.
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Sep 22, 2018 15:08
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Zurai posted: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. Even though Trek ended up with more fighting as things progressed the Federation has always preferred to not fight. The issue is that some of the things that showed up don't want peace. Even in the original series there were hostilities between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. At its core the Federation wants to be your buddy but will definitely kick your rear end if you pick a fight with it. Then after it wins will help you up, dust you off, and take you out for a drink to discuss your differences and hopefully not fight again. Pretty much all Star Trek media shows the Federation as an organization that really, really doesn't want to fight you but will if you make it.
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Nov 27, 2018 11:08
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Eh, that's pretty accurate to the general science fiction idea really. If you can build a ringworld then you don't need one.
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Feb 6, 2019 15:20
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I mean, while the game does let you just Hitler everything that doesn't look like you or be a devouring swarm that just eats everything even if it does look like you the player can also choose to be a turbo nice empire that actively tries to get along with everybody.
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Jan 19, 2020 20:57
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Yeah I did that kind of empire once. It's great to just be like "OK how do we all get alone? Everybody gently caress everybody else, all the time" but it became a hideous nightmare of a billion species quickly. So now if I'm being nice I just make everybody robots.
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Jan 20, 2020 22:06
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QuarkJets posted:There's something about the Endless design that just kills any appreciation that I can muster for those games. I've tried Space 1, Legends, and Space 2. I can't put my finger on it, I just get bored to tears before I'm even out of the early game Endless Space 1 was the only one I really played and the issue is that it's a clean, sanitized 4x. It just doesn't have the oomph that old school 4x space games have. They did a great job of polishing it and removing a lot of jank from the genre but it just ended up being boring and soulless. The only thing I find particularly memorable is Horatio. Everything else was meh.
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Jan 23, 2020 01:20
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