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So, I got this game recently and played a practice game, then on my second game I got this: I'm guessing this map isn't actually playable with that start and 1.5 colonization distance. In the one star system I can reach there are two ice planets, quality 10% and 22%. My race lives in the desert  .
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Jul 23, 2014 18:34
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Familiar Foreigner posted:So, I got this game recently and played a practice game, then on my second game I got this: No you just have to tech up to the better warpdrives ASAP. Think of your homeworld as a hidden fortress!
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Jul 23, 2014 18:40
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nutranurse posted:No you just have to tech up to the better warpdrives ASAP. Think of your homeworld as a hidden fortress! I think the issue is that he set the max colonization distance to 1.5 sectors, so he literally can't expand anywhere except those ice planets. Yeah that's a pretty awful start, you could research Ice Planet Colonization but that's going to take a good while. I'd probably just restart. :I
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Jul 23, 2014 18:42
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It's your second game, go easy on yourself and just restart. I think I'd restart even if I got that now.MagnumOpus posted:Different races have different sensitivities to your empire Reputation. Phone posting so I can't check if Quammeno are particularly sensitive right now, but my anecdotal experience is that Quammeno seem to splinter often in games where I've not played them. That's something to keep in mind, I had no idea. Do you have a link with information about this kind of stuff?
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Jul 23, 2014 18:50
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Yeah, I'll just restart it, looking around the map that is the only star that has access to only one other star, so just really really bad luck.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:52
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:I think the issue is that he set the max colonization distance to 1.5 sectors, so he literally can't expand anywhere except those ice planets. Troop ships. You can't colonize outside of the colonization range, but as soon as you find an independent world you can invade it. From there, there may be colonizable planets in range for you to snap up. Failing that... more invading independent planets! It's undeniably a terrible start, but is still absolutely playable.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:02
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Fair enough, I'll keep the save around and try it when I know the game better. Having a passive race that is sensitive to reputation will not make it easier though.
Autoexec.bat fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 19:06
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:I think the issue is that he set the max colonization distance to 1.5 sectors, so he literally can't expand anywhere except those ice planets. Then go full conquest and take some nearby colonies with your self-designed gently caress-off ships. 
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Jul 23, 2014 19:06
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Ulsoro posted:Troop ships. You can't colonize outside of the colonization range, but as soon as you find an independent world you can invade it. From there, there may be colonizable planets in range for you to snap up. Failing that... more invading independent planets! Oh duh, I totally forgot about that as an option. Good call.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:22
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Is there any way to keep your income in the black later in the game? It gets annoying having to manually hire troops for invasions because the AI refuses to recruit anything while you're in the red. Same with recommending/building planetary improvements. It's annoying when you have a couple million credits just lying around but you have to go through and build/hire things one by one because the AI doesn't feel up to it.
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Jul 23, 2014 20:15
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Ulsoro posted:Troop ships. You can't colonize outside of the colonization range, but as soon as you find an independent world you can invade it. From there, there may be colonizable planets in range for you to snap up. Failing that... more invading independent planets! Seconding troop ships here. Invading for early colonies is the way to go. I've tried both ways, multiple times each, and this wins hands down. The negative standings hit is temporary and can be reversed by killing pirates. This also helps prevent additional pirate income because you'll be able to kill their planet bases and prevent them from rebuilding. NatasDog posted:Is there any way to keep your income in the black later in the game? It gets annoying having to manually hire troops for invasions because the AI refuses to recruit anything while you're in the red. Same with recommending/building planetary improvements. It's annoying when you have a couple million credits just lying around but you have to go through and build/hire things one by one because the AI doesn't feel up to it. The Bazaar wonder on your home world. It's usually the third wonder I get- (Shipyard -> High Tech Research Wonder -> Bazaar). Depending on your race, you might swap out the early pop growth wonder on your homeworld for Bazaar (and then build Bazaar after). Also- not letting AI buy fleets is a good way to stay in the black. The AI tends to design/build way too many ships that aren't as good as more compact fleets of player designed (more powerful) ships. Omniblivion fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 20:35
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Man, I love tech trading sometimes. I have a game right now where I'm Ackdarian, and on good terms with Mortalens, Kiadians, Ugnari, Quameno and Zenox. I've already got the Mortalen's fancy manoeuvring thrusters, and I have such a commanding tech lead over the Ugnari and Kiadians that I'll have their special ECM and Targeting Systems just as soon as they research them. Currently debating whether I really want the Quameno Reactors or Zenox shields; I already have NovaCore reactors and have all the prerequisites for Meridian Shields, so I don't really need it. I guess it would be nice to have the efficient Quameno reactors for the civilian fleet.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:00
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Omniblivion posted:The Bazaar wonder on your home world. It's usually the third wonder I get- (Shipyard -> High Tech Research Wonder -> Bazaar). Depending on your race, you might swap out the early pop growth wonder on your homeworld for Bazaar (and then build Bazaar after). I have the Bazaar and every other wonder at this point in the game, I got really lucky with the nearby systems and their planet makeup and have capitalized on it pretty hard. I've been buying my fleets, but I've probably been a bit heavy handed with the defense fleets I build. I've been using 5 ship fleets on sector defense in every colonized system to keep pirates at bay, and I have to say I've got the safest space in the galaxy. I have a pair of 25 ship attack fleets strategically placed near the edges of my empire as well but the entire outlay is somewhere around 200 ships, mainly frigates/escorts/destroyers with around half as many cruisers/carriers/capitals. Troop maintenance is actually most of my maintenance cost iirc. I have the AI garrison level set to low, but despite that it still wants to keep something like 8 or 10 units garrisoned at any colony bigger than a couple billion people. I keep planetary defense shields and bunkers on any planet with more than a billion people, but only have the armor/academies on two of my biggest planets to churn out troops. That said, I haven't built any regional capitals yet and I'm up to something like 25 systems with 3 distinct clusters separated from my homeworld. Maybe corruption is biting into my tax collection and I just haven't paid enough attention. NatasDog fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 21:02
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I recommend setting troops to manual. Youll save a lot of money when you dont have the AI making large forces to garrison your peaceful, secure core worlds.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:14
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A defence fleet per system is probably overdoing it too. Once you get as much military power as you have, you can wipe out all the local pirate bases, and then their attacks drop off significantly. Outside my home system, I'm at one defence fleet of 4 ships per 3-4 systems, distance allowing. Instead, I just let my space ports and even mining stations defend themselves. My build-everywhere space port gets in the realm of 100-200 firepower and 1000-2000 shields. Mining bases get less. Mostly the pirates just throw ships at my planets one at a time, and they get destroyed continually, while the major fleets hunt their bases. Troops are just a big mass on the troop transport fleet, and I use that to wipe out any pirate bases on new colonies.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:42
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Agean90 posted:I recommend setting troops to manual. Youll save a lot of money when you dont have the AI making large forces to garrison your peaceful, secure core worlds. I completely forgot about mentioning that. Never, ever, have troops on automated. Always manually order troops. I almost never have troops at any base except if I'm at war (or I'm going to war). If pirates raid, oh well- I send a few troop ships over to that system with troops trained at my capital and drop them off to clean up. That way, you can centralize troop production and keep costs down, and you can train and re-use advanced troops that are veteran skill level (preferably with troop generals).
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Jul 23, 2014 22:26
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Well I won the Boskara game by wiping out the Ancient Guardians and putting a regional capital there to boost my GDP sky-high. Turns out signing a Mutual Defense Pact with the Shakturi counts as joining them, story-wise, as I got an achievement: "If you can't beat them..." Allying the Shakturi is a bit game-breaking, though. If you join the Guardians, they give you a fleet and that's it. If you join the Shakturi, you can trade for all the techs. You'll need to part with a lot of mining stations, but you can get the entire tech tree from them.
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Jul 24, 2014 01:47
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I tend to overkill my stations. 2 hangers, 2-4 boarding pods, 1000+ shields, 20 or so layers of armor, ion cannons, hyper deny module. I like using fighters for stations because of the range of the fighters. Get ship scanners and suddenly you are snagging up pirate smugglers at all your mining stations and starports.
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Jul 24, 2014 04:11
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nimby posted:Allying the Shakturi is a bit game-breaking, though. If you join the Guardians, they give you a fleet and that's it. If you join the Shakturi, you can trade for all the techs. You'll need to part with a lot of mining stations, but you can get the entire tech tree from them. You can do this with the Ancient Guardians as well, actually.
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Jul 24, 2014 06:29
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winterwerefox posted:I tend to overkill my stations. 2 hangers, 2-4 boarding pods, 1000+ shields, 20 or so layers of armor, ion cannons, hyper deny module. I like using fighters for stations because of the range of the fighters. Get ship scanners and suddenly you are snagging up pirate smugglers at all your mining stations and starports. Yeah, I do this with all my private stations at the very least. It's just too funny to see some pirate raider come sailing in and get immediately wiped out. In my current game I've effectively destroyed all the pirates, they all have less than 10 military ships left. But I don't know where the remnants are based, stupid pirates need to know when to quit. Or some Legendary Pirates should appear. Or the Shakturi. Just something. As it stands I'm just collecting all the race specific techs to be hilarious. Soon I shall build ships superior in every way to these recovered relics! Speaking of relics, having 3-4 Construction Ships doing nothing but repair wrecked ships and then retiring said ships does wonders for your tech.
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Jul 24, 2014 07:35
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My latest save refuses to load, so I started yet another new game. This time I'm the Dhayut, trying a superaggressive conquest game. Within a few minutes of starting I found an independent Sluken colony and launched my first invasion. 130K troops annihilated the 28K natives. Then the planet flipped to my control and all my troops disappeared. Is this kind of thing normal for invasions?
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Jul 24, 2014 07:46
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Eschatos posted:My latest save refuses to load, so I started yet another new game. This time I'm the Dhayut, trying a superaggressive conquest game. Within a few minutes of starting I found an independent Sluken colony and launched my first invasion. 130K troops annihilated the 28K natives. Then the planet flipped to my control and all my troops disappeared. Is this kind of thing normal for invasions?
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Jul 24, 2014 12:11
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Phlegmish posted:You can do this with the Ancient Guardians as well, actually.  Whelp,guess I made it harder on myself then, previous game.
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Jul 24, 2014 12:40
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Less Fat Luke posted:The troop transports will automatically pick up your units once the planet is yours if they're still in orbit - I think it's a bug. I basically drop the troops and immediately move the transports to the star or a nearby planet. I'd already ordered the transports back to my capital, and they have no troops on them.
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Jul 24, 2014 16:31
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Eschatos posted:I'd already ordered the transports back to my capital, and they have no troops on them. Weird, no idea then.
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Jul 24, 2014 18:25
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Just to follow up on my budget woes from earlier, I turned off troop automation and went through to get rid of the 6-9 garrisoned units in every colony and my budget deficit is now halved. I did keep any stray infantry and left 2 planetary defense units at every colony, but I guess I'll scrap at least the PD units since those bitches are expensive. I figure I'll let my transports and defense fleets pick up any extra infantry lying around in my colonies, and then just use the 3 forge worlds I have to crank out armor/infantry/special forces units going forward when I plan invasions. I can't believe how horribly overstuffed the AI made my colonies even with Garrison set to low. At that level I was expecting 2-5 units at worst, not 6 to 9. Whatever, just one more aspect of the game's automation that just isn't capable of doing its job. I hope when they do DW2 they allow people to set more specific thresholds for the different AI control aspects, especially in the ship design department. There's no reason the AI should skip the medical/recreation upgrade on the small and medium spaceports, for example; and I'm far too lazy to micromanage them by hand.
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Jul 24, 2014 19:12
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Less Fat Luke posted:Weird, no idea then. Likely sucked into a spacetime anomaly that deposited them in a David Weber novel, where their incredibly advanced technology will be used to free a benighted people on some distant world that has, by amazing coincidence developed to a stage almost indistinguishable from 17th, 18th, or 19th century Europe, and/or any primitive civilization that was around during the colonial period. Rest assured, though you may never see them again, they'll do your empire proud. :cryingflintlockmusketinfrontofanHonorHarringtonNovel:
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Jul 24, 2014 19:53
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TheCosmicMuffet posted:Likely sucked into a spacetime anomaly that deposited them in a David Weber novel, where their incredibly advanced technology will be used to free a benighted people on some distant world that has, by amazing coincidence developed to a stage almost indistinguishable from 17th, 18th, or 19th century Europe, and/or any primitive civilization that was around during the colonial period. I'm sure my terrifying spidermen will do their utmost to advance democracy and reason among their
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Jul 25, 2014 03:03
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So I took some advice from this thread, and built my passenger ships just as huge as possible. But what wound up happening is that my high pop core world, with some 55% tax rate and the colony income wonder, suddenly depopulated, presumably people fleeing the taxes? I was at war at the time, so it may also have been War Exhaustion, but I'm Way Of The Ancients government, so I wouldn't expect that. Now I'm stuck lightly taxing my 6 core worlds with 4B pop, rather than heavily taxing my home world and it's 18B. 
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Jul 25, 2014 19:21
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So I recently got back into this game thanks to Grey Hunter's LP of it (and this thread) and I'm looking at the Extended mod. I'm not really interested in having more races. I'm pleased with the number that are currently in the game, but I am interested in shaking things up a bit. The whole "insects/reptiles=bad mammals/amphibians=good" is not very interesting to me. Does Extended help with this?
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Jul 25, 2014 20:37
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Travic posted:So I recently got back into this game thanks to Grey Hunter's LP of it (and this thread) and I'm looking at the Extended mod. I'm not really interested in having more races. I'm pleased with the number that are currently in the game, but I am interested in shaking things up a bit. The whole "insects/reptiles=bad mammals/amphibians=good" is not very interesting to me. Does Extended help with this? I've played with the Extended mod a bunch, the new races feel really reasonable and fun other than the water-squid race. That race is only supposed to be played by the AI as another super-race, though. Unfortunately most of the reptiles and bugs are still super aggressive and evil.
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Jul 25, 2014 20:46
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PittTheElder posted:So I took some advice from this thread, and built my passenger ships just as huge as possible. But what wound up happening is that my high pop core world, with some 55% tax rate and the colony income wonder, suddenly depopulated, presumably people fleeing the taxes? I was at war at the time, so it may also have been War Exhaustion, but I'm Way Of The Ancients government, so I wouldn't expect that. Now I'm stuck lightly taxing my 6 core worlds with 4B pop, rather than heavily taxing my home world and it's 18B. How big are we talking? I usually go for 100mil capacity in the early game and ramp up to maybe 250m. Suddenly depopulating your homeworld is a bad idea but then again, you have insane growth potential right there with multiple world that can quickly be brought to max pop if you're willing to eat a deficit for a decade.
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Jul 25, 2014 21:25
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I literally have no idea.  I just took the advice of someone in this thread and added Passenger Compartments until the ship hit max size. If memory serves it's 35 Massive Passenger Compartments, so that many. According to some random post on the Matrix Games forums, a Massive compartment holds 3600k people, so 126 million per ship I guess.
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Jul 25, 2014 21:40
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AuxPriest posted:I've played with the Extended mod a bunch, the new races feel really reasonable and fun other than the water-squid race. That race is only supposed to be played by the AI as another super-race, though. Well poo poo. I miss not knowing at a glance what a race is going to do. As much as I love Distant Worlds I know the mammals and amphibians will leave me alone and the insects and reptiles will try and make a move. Mrrshan? Bulrathi? Arceans? One game they'd be all over me smelling weakness the next they'd be my closest allies because I was a bad enough dude to win their loyalty.
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Jul 25, 2014 23:45
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winterwerefox posted:I tend to overkill my stations. 2 hangers, 2-4 boarding pods, 1000+ shields, 20 or so layers of armor, ion cannons, hyper deny module. I like using fighters for stations because of the range of the fighters. Get ship scanners and suddenly you are snagging up pirate smugglers at all your mining stations and starports.
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Jul 26, 2014 05:28
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Extended adds a human subspecies with the creative name of XHuman. Dumb, but their purpose is to break up the Humanoid Alliances you see in game. They and normal humans hate each other with a passion. I had a game where the Caleph saw I had a weak military, and jumped on me for it, only to be beaten back by my stations. They then begged off war, leading to us becoming defense pack allies. And yes, ship scanners let you detect that pirates smugglers are docking  You get a little pop up message saying they are doing so.
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Jul 26, 2014 05:54
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Okay what influences how much stock of fuel a space port keeps? People have said that you don't need cargo bays since it's shared with the planet, but I'm always building new ships and I can squeeze out only a couple in a row before the next ones are completely empty. Then they slow-boat to the nearest gas mining station. Should I just build a poo poo-ton of cargo holds on each port? Also I was playing an evil human empire, bombarding and enslaving everyone... and in the middle of a large battle my biggest fleet (>10K firepower) decided I was just too evil and joined the enemy. I didn't realize that could happen! Glad there's a downside to glassing so many planets.
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Jul 26, 2014 16:59
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It might be a bit tedious, but check the fuel stock of all of your planets and see how they look. If all of your planets are fairly low on stock, you simply need a lot more production capacity. If only one planet is low on stock and it's kind of on the outskirts of your empire, you probably want to ensure you have some production closer to it since it's likely a transportation issue. You should also double check to make sure your gas miners are optimized, make sure you've got 2 gas miners on your gas miner design. If you take a look at some of your casion mines and see that they are full on cargo, you'll want to add some more capacity to them. There's been some talk on how to optimize your freighters as well, researching gigantic cargo holds is of course super useful, I'm not sure though if it's best to just max out their size whenever possible or not though. Lastly, there's a really gamey (and probably unintended) method you can use. You can take a normal ship, slap gas extractors, cargo bays, and docking bays on it. For some reason a ship can't refuel itself with a gas extractor, but it can refuel other ships. Weird.
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Jul 26, 2014 18:42
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When do your ships decide to use their boarding modules to assault? Do I have to manually tell them? Also, In the ship designer, What do the different types of image scales do? Do they just cosmetically change the size of your ships? Or is there a benefit/downside? I'm gussing absolute scales images based off the actual size of the ship? (I find it really odd that absolute isn't the default, I sometimes see really small looking cruisers, or very large frigates)
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Jul 26, 2014 19:31
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I'm really annoyed by the ship design system. I have no idea how to make designs (well I know how but they'd be complete abortions). So now I have to set ship design to automatic, and every time anything new is researched I have to accept the advisor suggestion to refit all ships that benefit from it. If I don't, the auto-designer seems to not update the designs at all, and I have to manually do poo poo that make me want to pull my hair out, like manually choosing a new design and ordering ships to retrofit one by one. Please tell me I am completely missing something and there is a button that makes the most up-to-date design of a ship class and I can press a button so that all ships of that class go and retrofit? 
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Jul 26, 2014 21:12
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