Stellaris: a second Astral Planes has hit the game

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Stellaris: a second Astral Planes has hit the game

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Goffer posted:

It's currently 2813 and I've finally taken out their 4th hub. Their final Nexus is buried deep in Contingency space and I've done an Ender's Game dive right through the middle to take it out and

whlep

e; nevermind, I still murdered it, even with 1/2 the fleet

Closing theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLKYOSiW7U4

# ¿ Mar 28, 2018 11:21

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 12:33

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

OwlFancier posted:

"Before the invention and construction of the machines our species had endured thousands of years of constant warfare, strife, and hardship. As the we teetered on the brink of seemingly inevitable annihilation, following the development of nuclear weaponry, we managed to produce the first true artificial intelligence. Initially deployed in specialist scientific research and administrative applications, the increasing utilization of AIs in all areas of life naturally lead to the networked AI consciousness replacing all forms of government. Now, our species enjoys a unity we had thought impossible mere centuries ago, and the advances that AI researchers have brought in the form of FTL travel, now present us with the chance to explore the stars. With our civilization never again having to fear the factionalism that plagued us from our genesis on our homeworld, we look to the skies and dream of what new wonders may be discovered, as we expand our unity across the galaxy."

How much this has been influenced by the AI of course is left to the player to decide.

SIX YEARS AFTER GAME BEGINS: "So we've got factions again."

Captain Oblivious posted:

Some of that is intentional, wrt tech. There's a bit of a deliberate effort in Paradox strategy games to avoid making tech the God Stat that it is in most 4X games. Coming from civ and the like, it can be hard to get used to.

Yeah this is actually the biggest hurdle I've seen people deal with. It's AN advantage but it isn't like most of the Civ or Civ-adjacent games where you can snowball a lead to letting you have nukes when your enemies have, at best, riflemen.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2018 08:04

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Sandwich Anarchist posted:

What the gently caress man. The first 6 empires I find as egalatarian materialists, are all loving spiritualist authoritarians. It seems to be the trend; it's always a galaxy full of slaving despots and zealots. Nothing is more boring.

While it may be going overboard it makes some sense if the generator tends to put you near people with whom you would conflict. That's more interesting than peaceblobbing hugely.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2018 21:17

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Sandwich Anarchist posted:

Being surrounded by assholes who constantly yell at me and try to fight me, while having no diplomatic relationships with anybody else because I'm penned in with closed borders is not interesting, it's boring and is starting to turn me off of the game, because it is the same nearly every time.

Try fewer AIs so you can get wider reach before you run into people? Perhaps an elliptical galaxy or more lane density so you're harder to hem in.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2018 21:29

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

I mean I think the concept of a Ringworld is hilarious, too, because it will never be night!

Solved problem.

I assumed mineral production on habitats came from mining random space crap and doing general value-add of industry, while mining outposts as formally built by your constructors were just working over particularly valuable asteroids.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2018 01:47

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

hobbesmaster posted:

Ringworld is good. Ringworld engineers and children is where things go really far off the rails unless I'm mixing up whats in which book.

The first one works on its own. The first two work in the context of Known Space. Past that, eh, it starts getting aggravating how he has to do the "ah but you see, everything was a lie or a trick!" thing in each book.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2018 02:11

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Asimo posted:

Oh well! Easy enough, yeah. Just worry about winding winding up having two united nations spawning then.

Wiz please make an alternative Sol spawn where Earth is named "Exile" and hosts an iron-age civilization.

e: Also if you use Sol start, will Earth be a tundra or a jungle or whatever planet?

# ¿ Apr 15, 2018 05:29

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

The Chad Jihad posted:

What's weird about the failed state AIs is that it's so inconsistent, I see empires that don't build anything and others that have everything mined up and ready to go, and dumping tons of energy minerals and food down their throats doesn't really seem to make an impact either way

Obviously they're cutting taxes instead.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2018 21:13

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Caretakers are a crapshoot I'm told, either they get hacked or else they abruptly turn into Jailbot and start helping you out with the Contingency.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2018 06:59

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Splicer posted:

Please for the love of god let this be leading to a proper empire log.
Psychics, galaxy-wiping superweapons, genetic drift, ~~weird sex~~, asteroid-chucking, and new authoritarian mechanics also a possibility.

But yeah general megastructure overhaul is a fingers crossed.

e: precursor overhaul? Slaver boxes?

Some kind of Slaver stasis box mechanism would actually be an interesting way to shake up the balance and provide catch-up capacities or just mix things up. The context here is a thing from Niven's books where there were relics of an ancient galaxy spanning empire, found in stasis field boxes (hence the name). They were easy to find once you knew how to look, but they turned up in the damnedest places.

I wonder how you'd model ~~my people~~ the Puppeteers in Stellaris. An Enclave? But they had military potential that dwarfed most other species.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2018 10:39

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

You could probably refluff the axis to be empiricist vs. holistic, which seems like it would allow for the primary current mechanic of spiritualism (unity bonuses and Newtypes) while causing less anguish to people who went to lovely fundamentalist churches.

Could strands of militant atheism be modeled as religious? :smaug:

More seriously if there was some kind of ideological package that could handily cover "religions" as well.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2018 23:24

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

ToxicSlurpee posted:

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.

I'm down with militants in general hating lukewarm moderates but I think it should be general if so. Spiritualists don't need a bunch of "religion is dumb and for babies" modifiers

# ¿ Apr 19, 2018 06:39

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Aren't the Ancient Caretakers flagged as berserkers if they fail the contingency check?

# ¿ Apr 19, 2018 15:22

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Arrath posted:

Wait weren't the drug dealers allied with the dads against the fundies?

Mote in God's Eye and its sequel are set in Niven and Pournelle's shared setting of the future which is kind of questionable in many ways but is like, ok, this is recognizably a human government, however it got that way. (If anything it's unambitious, starting a trend of The Future Is Literally Right Now, But Maybe People Are Using Portugeuse Slang.) It's really ABOUT the Moties, who are hard to summarize.

Lucifer's Hammer is a comet hitting Earth leading to postapocalyptica including Army units turning to cannibalism and recruiting folks from the inner city. (To give Pournelle grudging credit, the cannibalism was the Army's idea.)

Footfall is basically similar to Lucifer's Hammer but the comet was steered by some baby elephants from space who were swinging by in their ships.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2018 21:43

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

iospace posted:

Fanatic pacifist xenophobes. "Leave me alone, please".

Empire-wide debuff: "On Smoko"

# ¿ May 3, 2018 22:36

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Shadowlyger posted:

So the Xenophile fallen empire awakens just as I'm finishing off the Xenophobe fallen empire. Looks like I narrowly averted a War in Heaven!

Not to be denied, the entire loving galaxy declares war on my Exterminator buddies. Who I have a defensive pact with.

It happened in a flash. A world they were purging rebelled, then the Awakened Empire declared war, and everyone else followed suit.

Maybe you should've found buddies who weren't ideologically committed to exterminating everyone

# ¿ May 6, 2018 20:48

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

There's probably some disincentive for them to make the AI "very" good, because it's quite possible that a "very good" AI - at least as a default option - would be able to smoke casual players who just want to make some fun space adventures and whose money is as green as the rest of us.

I mean, the ideal would be something closer to "The AI becomes very good at normal levels, and the "easy" modes give it economic disadvantages."

# ¿ May 7, 2018 01:48

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Gadzuko posted:

I liked the Gal Civ 2 approach of having a smart AI that was dumbed down by deactivating specific behaviors on lower difficulty levels. Never played the third, not sure if it carried that forward but 2 had pretty solid AI.

Is that the one where it'd have the AI call you and say "I see what you're doing. I can't do anything about it, for reasons... but I see what you're doing."

# ¿ May 7, 2018 04:40

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Ham Sandwiches posted:

I don't know why so many goons are like scared of space or whatever but like, it's amazing that when people envision exploring the stars they just imagine psychic dragons and horrors from the warp

And it's presented like a fun thing yaknow haha I'm scared of made up poo poo in a videogame oh so scaaary the text could easily be something bad

whatever knock yourselves out with how scared you are of this totally scary scenario in a videogame about harnessing the power of the sun and blowing up planets because you feel like it

have you considered... the boogeyman... in space?

Warhammer 40k ground a lot of grooves into people's brains.

# ¿ May 10, 2018 21:56

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

McSpanky posted:

Wow, I thought it was because they were bugged this whole time. Turns out they're just poo poo.

Carrier poo poo in general seems tricky because I don't think anyone wants to recreate WWII in the sense of "carriers just beat everything," but the problem becomes balancing them to battleships and similar.

# ¿ May 14, 2018 09:53

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Re: novels if you can survive with only mild levels of grotesque pessimism: Vernor Vinge has �a fire upon the deep� and �a deepness in the sky�. I also likedBruce Sterling�s Schismatrix.

Known Space is also solid.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2018 18:40

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

tooterfish posted:

Mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, yes. On the other, I'll never trust a Puppeteer after all the poo poo they've pulled.

DrSunshine posted:

Oh by the way, apologies to the thread for the sci-fi book derail. I'd have asked in Book Barn, but I specifically wanted stories that remind one of Stellaris's more Lovecraftian and darker themes, and I thought it was easier to just ask here than do the reverse and have to explain over there.

Schismatrix Plus has moments of this. It is not terribly gripping as a story but the settings are great.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2018 02:52

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I could see something interesting with tiles but it would involve making each planet more intricate so that your empire development on that planet corresponded to some fractally-generated geographical challenge and you had to address meso-scale issues like "do you want to push north towards the Power Ice deposits or keep expanding the farmland in the mid-tropics." There is fun to be had there but I don't think it needs to be in Stellaris.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2018 20:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I figure if you want to RP out your leadership/administrator caste as being materially equal to all others you can just assume things like their luxury goods consumption just represents specialist equipment. The individual leaders get the same technate-issued energy credits as anyone else, their jobs just need meeting rooms and poo poo, the way a nuclear power plant operator requires a nuclear power plant to do his job.

Also what the gently caress is that little monster supposed to even be, a mole?

# ¿ Jul 24, 2018 09:53

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

hobbesmaster posted:

All of the factions are that ratio though. Whether they�re good or bad depends on what you project on them.

Well, Lal I guess maybe

I would say the one faction in SMAC that seemed like total bullshit was the Spartans, and even they and the Believers were more a factor of emergent gameplay and corresponding to my RL political antagonists. Miriam has a lot of pretty cogent and insightful poo poo to say in the quotes, it is just that you usually encounter some church-mom looking motherfucker screeching about a war declaration on you while making GBS threads on science.

I've been playing Beyond Earth a fair bit on the night shift because I like the landscape maps and I am in the zone of not wanting to spend more time on Stellaris until Wiz kills tiles. I don't think it's a bad game. The AI criticisms I can't speak to, but I think they were doing something quite distinct from Alpha Centauri, and I think you could probably reconcile the two. Certainly the implications of alien precursors in BE are less dopey.

Did anyone like any of the non-Free Drones factions in SMAX? And even with the drones, was it because you liked how they played or their political advertisement?

# ¿ Jul 24, 2018 20:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I think you can model most of the SMAC facs in the ethics system pretty well, although things get a little confusing because I think egalitarian is both "our freedoms" and "$$ get paid" and Morgan is, of course, present. Then again perhaps Morgan would just be a trading enclave.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2018 21:23

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

hobbesmaster posted:

Pacifism in stellaris is baiting people into a war and then finishing it for them.

Ah, the Pkunk methodology.

Wait, don't your corvettes now often return to you despite being destroyed in combat?

# ¿ Jul 25, 2018 09:03

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Truga posted:

Yes, but in what way does it differ from industrial robots? Make an articulated welding hand out of steel and servos and we're good, but make the same thing out of flesh and bone and now we're suddenly having problems?

*robot uprises*

Yes, you're creating commodities out of people. Not even, like, "a bioreactor that produces type O-negative blood by the short ton," which would be gross but is not a person; you are, rather, making a human who is specifically and deliberately modified to be unable to share key human experiences, so that they can work in the factory and not be paid.

Most AI slavery situations involve the AI's level of personhood either not being fully understood, or being considered an annoying side effect, rather than the entire point being to create a door-opening system capable of suffering.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2018 09:30

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Truga posted:

I thought the entire point of nerve stapling was so it's incapable of suffering. It's still bad, mind, but it's also very different.

Well when you say "it" what are you referring to exactly? Or, perhaps more pointedly as to why it was not seen positively in SMAC's fiction: who

# ¿ Jul 25, 2018 10:54

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Crazycryodude posted:

They're very cool and good but the anti-environmentalism is bad in any universe but ESPECIALLY when it turns out that the planet is actually a massive sapient being in its own right

You could have the Free Drones work in a mechanically identical way and represent some kind of alliance of populist nationalists led by Stegil Farannon and I bet y'all would like them way less then.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2018 02:32

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Strictly defined gender roles in pop growth policy seem both humanocentric and likely to approach Nazi LARP town. I expect it�ll be a semi abstract thing even if there�s buttons to press.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2018 10:40

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Aethernet posted:

Corvettes should not have PD, and destroyers should have some kind of EW effect that stacks in line with the number of them on the field, particularly impacting BB accuracy and forcing your opponent to field anti-EW vessels.

Cruisers should be able to be outfitted to be as fast as corvettes while losing some survivability - i.e. battlecruisers - meaning they can act as anti-corvette ball platform.

Here is my personal dream:

You start with cruisers and the arc goes cruisers/battleships/motherships/starfuckers. You only directly build the larger ships.

Every ship design has an individual slot for its escort craft, which are what corvettes are now. The escort craft are part of the "ship" and appear on the ship design screen. Every ship has its built-in flotilla but you can opt to make that flotilla larger by sacrificing strike power from your main ship - this replaces "hangar bays." Instead of having fighter/bomber technologies these are specialist roles the escort craft can have. Similarly, defense stations can have escort craft units, presenting the possibility for large "static" fleets associated with starbases but which can't project power.

Possibly have some mechanism where escort craft can survive the loss of the mother ship and either slop onto similar mother ships between battles or give you a discount on rebuilds or some bullshit.

You would get giant LOGH fleets towards the end game just due to the escorts being a portion of the combat power of the mother ships, which seems to be a lot closer to what we see in most sci fi - you get a few big ships and a lot (or a SHITLOAD) of smaller craft, rather than "a giant swarm of PT boats."

# ¿ Aug 5, 2018 11:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

turn off the TV posted:

Isn't that sort of the opposite of LOGH? Fleets in that would have thousands or dozens of thousands of capital ships.

The idea here is that the current role of "corvettes" steps down slightly by making them depend on a "primary" ship so that you have just as many individual cool units flitting around but you have to command fewer of them, and it addresses the functional but unflavorful strategy of "just build corvettes." You could still have a fleet that was mostly corvettes in this idea, but it would be because most of your mobile fleet are ships optimized for larger escort fleets and your stations have hangar bay modules out the rear end.

e: Also they should do a few more models and you should have an empire wide decision on if you want your escort craft to be PT Boats, Weird Floating Objects, Mobile Suits, or Starfighters.

Nessus fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Aug 5, 2018

# ¿ Aug 5, 2018 20:59

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

turn off the TV posted:

You already don't command your ships individually, unless I'm an outlier for merging most of my idiots into a few big fleets.

Yeah I mean more like the 3rd fleet is 11 ships (+ 40 escort fleet) rather than 51 ships.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2018 22:07

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Elman posted:

It does feel kinda silly how apparently I'm expected to have multiple ship designs and mix them according to my strategy and go through all of them and update them every time I unlock something new.

Meanwhile in EU4 you just go "ok give me 20 infantry 4 horsemen 15 artillery" and occassionally press an upgrade button when you unlock a new unit type.

You can tick it so they upgrade things that get direct linear upgrades (so it'll go from Laser 2 to Laser 4 on its own). That's different from the computer making the design for you and works fine.

Let's replace corvettes with courgettes, who's with me.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2018 09:59

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Eiba posted:

If there are soldier pops that affect fleet limit... when your fleet gets wiped out, do some of them die?

I've interpreted "fleet limit" as being, like, how many trained naval personnel you can support without hurting the rest of your economy (which is what happens when you go over fleet limit; the advantage of being under fleet limit is that you save minerals and energy cost)

So "military" pops would be REMF and ground troops who are probably not for the most part killed when your fleet blows up and represents the support structures that would let you bounce back. Like after Pearl Harbor!

# ¿ Aug 7, 2018 00:02

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Torrannor posted:

Perry Rhodan always made sense to me. At some tech level, being aerodynamic ceases to be a concern for spaceships. So why not go with the shape with the biggest volume and smallest surface area?

I can forgive the non-optimal design of the SOL, because the SOL is cool and good.

I always liked the Lensman setup, where at their inertialess trans-luminal velocities, the big problem became the low key friction from the interstellar medium itself. So the battleships and poo poo ended up spheres, while the super-speedy ships looked like needles or cigars.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2018 10:23

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

dead comedy forums posted:

so I made my fremen-inspired exiled tribes of man fanatic spiritualist peoples and I got a scientist with psi theory in the first year of the game after leveling up

make your way for the kwisatz haderach, xenos

Force spawn that enclave that sells the +army/+fire rate special strategic.

The spice must flow.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2018 21:24

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Technical Analysis posted:

I want one where Rulers live a meager lifestyle while the general population gets the good life.

To rule is not a privilege, but a duty. Law forbids leaders the material trappings of daily life while they hold office, so that they may better serve the public interest.

I look forward to the rebelling governors in my more outlying sectors.

You know I just got an idea for a new purge type: "Ideological." Set it for a huge increase in your dominant ethics attraction while experiencing significant population contraction. "Crippling my minerals production to own the Other."

# ¿ Aug 14, 2018 10:15

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 12:33

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I had another great idea for a low-key way for espionage types to "control" the computer and "tempt" the player with the same system: Espionage actions make the up-front cost of various actions lower, possibly attaching a bounty to them.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2018 11:23

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Stellaris: a second Astral Planes has hit the game

«‹›9 »