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BenRGamer posted:I just had the Enigmatic Observers ask for a pop of my Hive Mind species. This happened to me, too, but centuries later when I worked my way over to their Preserve, my pop was happily sitting there as alive as it ever was. Chalk it up to magic FE tech, I guess.
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Apr 16, 2017 20:52
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Decrepus posted:Is it possible to play with a tiny empire? I have 3 systems and am really happy with them but honestly don't feel like building more colonies. Is there any way around the tiny fleet cap and influence (for frontier posts). I strangled my neighbor to death and made them a vassal but I can't compete with anyone else's fleets. Wide is still going to wreck tall, but you can swing way above your weight with energy-focused habitats. For a tall build, the fleet cap is a funny joke, not an actual limitation to keep.
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Apr 16, 2017 20:54
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Decrepus posted:Is it possible to play with a tiny empire? I have 3 systems and am really happy with them but honestly don't feel like building more colonies. Is there any way around the tiny fleet cap and influence (for frontier posts). I strangled my neighbor to death and made them a vassal but I can't compete with anyone else's fleets. You can get around the fleet cap with taking the domination perk that gives you 20% of your vassal's fleet cap as your own or by producing so much energy that you don't have to worry about the fleet cap. There's also the expansion perk which reduces outpost upkeep and adopting the tradition itself makes it cost less in influence for frontier outposts. Your biggest limitation is probably the minerals you can get from your systems because you can build habitats for energy while there's little you can do with minerals other than subjugating everyone.
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Apr 16, 2017 20:56
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Decrepus posted:Is it possible to play with a tiny empire? I have 3 systems and am really happy with them but honestly don't feel like building more colonies. Is there any way around the tiny fleet cap and influence (for frontier posts). I strangled my neighbor to death and made them a vassal but I can't compete with anyone else's fleets. There's an ascension perk that gives you +200 fleet cap, and since a tall empire doesn't need Mastery of Nature it's an easy pick. The challenge is having enough minerals to actually arm such a fleet. The massive tech and unity advantage (you do have a massive tech and unity advantage, right?) will give you high-level mines and great production bonuses, and you will save a lot of money on not building up new planets, but it's still going to be your defining bottleneck. Make the best of every tile you have, use frontier outposts to grab resource-rich systems, trade research agreements for mineral subsidies, cozy up to a Fallen Empire for the occasional gift, use droid / robot for mining... it all helps.
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Apr 16, 2017 21:03
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My sector having 15K in energy while my empire is in the midst of an interstellar war that's draining my coffers is dumb bullshit. Just murdered the Unbidden with my 140K battleship fleet. Arc Emitters are cool and good. So is having jump drives in a hyperlane game. The best part was my fleet single-handedly destroying the entire invasion and then some 1.2K corvette fleet getting credit for the killing blow. Nobody likes me anyway so gently caress em, the galaxy is going to burn.
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Apr 16, 2017 21:16
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Fellblade posted:I was using reasonably basic tech this time, I didn't built many specific science buildings above the basic level so didn't get much research, mainly focused on generating enough minerals to stay at fleet cap. I was using T2 guns and thrusters but still T1 other things, I have no perspective of if that's good or bad. Your downfall was definitely in neglecting science too much here. You don't have to stay bleeding-edge if you're keeping yourself up at fleet cap, numbers count for a lot, but your ships were probably getting melted before half of them could even get a single shot fired. However, most of your other stuff looks okay at a glance, and remember that better technology will ultimately increase your other stuff too, by giving you better power plants and suchlike. You're probably not very far from a very good balance for regular play, actually, just get a little more science going a bit earlier. Remember also that you can use science ships to scan battle debris, which can give you pretty nice chunks of tech at times. e; question of my own, what the hell does the Philosopher King civic do? I don't even see ruler skill level most of the time, does it have effects big enough to compete with some of these others? Ms Adequate fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Apr 16, 2017 |
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Apr 16, 2017 21:36
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So I know someone asked earlier about the viability of having a three system empire, but did Paradox largely keep to their word about making building tall more viable in this expansion than it was previously? Are those habitats you can build for people to live on worthwhile, and do they come at a technological point early enough in the game where you can be building them up while other empires are still expanding in the traditionally wide way?
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Apr 16, 2017 21:41
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:So I know someone asked earlier about the viability of having a three system empire, but did Paradox largely keep to their word about making building tall more viable in this expansion than it was previously? Are those habitats you can build for people to live on worthwhile, and do they come at a technological point early enough in the game where you can be building them up while other empires are still expanding in the traditionally wide way? By the time you can build habitats, every worthwhile planet in the galaxy will be taken. And they're only useful for energy or tech, can't build ships from them.
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Apr 16, 2017 21:44
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Battleships loaded up with kinetic artillery and giga cannons on top of the massive fire rate bonuses available, set to retreat as soon as other weapons enter range is also pretty strong. Cut through 3 times my weight of Unbidden and their portal because all their battleships were dead before matter disintegrators entered range. Load up on enough shields to keep you from taking any major early damage and you can have the 2-3 replacement ships done by the time you're ready to go again. Mazz fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Apr 16, 2017 |
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Apr 16, 2017 21:44
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:So I know someone asked earlier about the viability of having a three system empire, but did Paradox largely keep to their word about making building tall more viable in this expansion than it was previously? Are those habitats you can build for people to live on worthwhile, and do they come at a technological point early enough in the game where you can be building them up while other empires are still expanding in the traditionally wide way? Tall is definitely more viable, thanks to Traditions and Ascension Perks, and all the megastructures etc. are very much superb, but the general consensus is that they come very much too late to make a difference.
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Apr 16, 2017 21:44
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I feel like the "Meritocracy" and "Aristocratic Elite" civics should be mutually exclusive. "Aristocratic Elite" should also be available to dictatorial governments. "Idealistic Foundation" shouldn't be limited to egalitarians. Who's to tell me what ideals my government was founded on? "Corporate Dominion" also shouldn't be limited to egalitarians. (I mean, what the gently caress? That doesn't make any sense.)
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Apr 16, 2017 21:44
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Also the flavor text for the "conservationist" trait really should be changed. "Members of this species believe that resources must be conserved and recycled" Species traits aren't about what that species "believes". That's what ethics and civics are for. Traits are supposed to represent an individual race's hard-wired physiology.
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Apr 16, 2017 21:51
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:So I know someone asked earlier about the viability of having a three system empire, but did Paradox largely keep to their word about making building tall more viable in this expansion than it was previously? Are those habitats you can build for people to live on worthwhile, and do they come at a technological point early enough in the game where you can be building them up while other empires are still expanding in the traditionally wide way? Not even close. By the time you've got the tech, ascension perk, and resources to really build habitats the game's already been decided. They're not QUITE the vanity project that megastructures are, but they're up there.
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Apr 16, 2017 21:51
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Palleon posted:By the time you can build habitats, every worthwhile planet in the galaxy will be taken. And they're only useful for energy or tech, can't build ships from them. I think ultimately the concept of habitats being megastructures needs to be reevaluated. Sure, we're talking about a big-freaking station, but... A) We're not really talking the same conceptual level as a ring world or dyson sphere. B) We're not really talking about as nearly a far-fetched technological achievement as being high up in the tech tree suggests. C) The window of opportunity to use habitats to meaningfully affect the balance of power in the galaxy is narrow, and even then only really provided by abusing Planetary Survey Corps. I mean, sure, it's entirely possible (and has been) posited that these a huge stations like Star Trek with anti-gravity and highest end internal structures and all manner of tech craziness, but they could just as easily conceptually be something like Eros and Ceres from The Expanse. And I think the argument has been made ITT that it'd serve the game better if it was.
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Apr 16, 2017 21:52
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Any sort of dominion should probably be authoritarian at least not-elegetarian Also the mod to make habitats happen early is good and you should grab it if you want to build tall
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Apr 16, 2017 21:55
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VirtualStranger posted:"Corporate Dominion" also shouldn't be limited to egalitarians. (I mean, what the gently caress? That doesn't make any sense.) I think the idea is that if the society doesn't even pretend that you too can be the head of a major corporation then it's not really a corporate dominion. It's just a feudal autocracy where the rulers are called shareholders.
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Apr 16, 2017 22:14
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:Maybe unlocking traditions instead of perks, with increasing costs for each level? For example killing fleet power, invading planets, winning wars, trade deals, surveying systems, researching anomalies, discovering techs, all of these could become targets for players who select specific traditions. My favourite perks are the ones that reward you for doing what you're already doing. Colonisation Fever, The Pursuit of Profit, Protection Racket, and The Great Game are all good examples, along with pretty much the entire Diplomacy tree. The Diplomacy tree in general is pretty much my gold standard of a good tradition, which ironically means I tend to take it quite late because I'm too busy cramming in that Prosperity, Science, and Expansion tree stuff.
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Apr 16, 2017 22:15
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Still not seeing achievements on ironman, even with 1.5.1. Is my namelist mod the culprit? It just adds a custom namelist, that's all ... it says the game should still be eligible for achievements but it isn't 
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Apr 16, 2017 22:19
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i just had 5 of my presidents die in one year. stop electing people who are 100+ years old!! gently caress!!!
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Apr 16, 2017 22:41
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Mazz posted:Battleships loaded up with kinetic artillery and giga cannons on top of the massive fire rate bonuses available, set to retreat as soon as other weapons enter range is also pretty strong. Cut through 3 times my weight of Unbidden and their portal because all their battleships were dead before matter disintegrators entered range. How do you set it to retreat?
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Apr 16, 2017 22:43
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Living metal goes a long way towards making battleships worth building imo once you get it it is a game changer because your battleships all repair automatically for free and playing cat and mouse sniper with a trickster admirable and winning through attrition becomes doable.
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Apr 16, 2017 22:47
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:How do you set it to retreat? In the battle details while watching, a retreat button is there, it starts grayed out but it only takes like 10-15 seconds to get active. Basically as soon as you start taking real damage click it. If you are set up correctly, that first few seconds where your 50k+ Fleet is machine gunning kinetic artillery you should cut like 15-30k off easy by sheer volume of fire. Basically the strategy revolves around hitting hard immediately at contact and not actually getting to that fray part corvettes and cruisers do well in. It's not specifically a better strategy than cruiser/balanced, just that built right (like 60%+ fire rate) I've seen it do some real crazy poo poo like kill 100k worth of enemies before they really had a chance to shoot back. It's more touchy at a huge disadvantage like a massed awakened empire fleet w/ titans and 300 escorts but than again so is any fleet makeup facing a huge number of those. Mazz fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Apr 16, 2017 |
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Apr 16, 2017 23:03
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are devblogs a thing that happens regularly or something that they put out whenever?
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Apr 16, 2017 23:05
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LordAbaddon posted:are devblogs a thing that happens regularly or something that they put out whenever? Usually every Thursday.
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Apr 16, 2017 23:10
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alcaras posted:Still not seeing achievements on ironman, even with 1.5.1.
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Apr 16, 2017 23:18
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 Why, Admiral Aurle Tarthan, did you decide it was a good idea to stop shooting the unbidden dimensional portal and instead train your guns on the two giant fleets that warped in?
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Apr 16, 2017 23:28
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GlyphGryph posted:Living metal goes a long way towards making battleships worth building imo Yeah, battleships with Regenerating Hull Tissue, Crystal Forged Plating, and a fair amount of armor can tank a LOT of damage, even moreso with living metal. Anyway, my current Commonwealth of Man game was going swimmingly, I just ate the only FE on the map, and was turning my sites on the only real remaining challenger:  Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves. Of course, you will note that the goddamn Unbidden spawned and have proceeded to gut my final foe for me. 
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Apr 16, 2017 23:28
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:So I'm hearing a lot about how cruisers are better than battleships because spinal mounts suck? Can someone explain that to me? They do less damage then a pair of L-slot weapons would and are horribly inaccurate. Their only advantage is slightly longer range. Battleships are only really good against other battleships. They can't hit anything smaller than themselves, and there are weapons that (quite stupidly) will one-shot them no matter how you build them. Believe me, I would love nothing more than to have a fleet of battleships loaded with spinal mounts and heavy artillery, but it's just not a good idea.
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Apr 17, 2017 00:14
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Decrepus posted:Is it possible to play with a tiny empire? I have 3 systems and am really happy with them but honestly don't feel like building more colonies. Is there any way around the tiny fleet cap and influence (for frontier posts). I strangled my neighbor to death and made them a vassal but I can't compete with anyone else's fleets. Take spiritualist/pacifist/egalitarian. You're not going to be fighting offensive wars if you're aiming to go small and pacifist gives you two extra systems to play with right off the bat without handing over to inefficient sectors. It also gives you access to agrarian idyll +20% unity pacifist unity production (I would also take the +15% unity civic as well) which will skyrocket your unity production and let you quickly pick harmony, which will further boost your unity and happiness and give you defensive war buffs. Use your spiritualist ethics divergence to build strong factions and reap influence rewards while pushing as hard as possible down unity traditions. Go for psionic ascension and voidborne/megastructures, this will let you expand your power without claiming territory. Build habitats to churn out immense amounts of power, try to get another race into your empire too and gene mod them into being thrifty (if you can get a primitive with Earthbound that's even better, that stacks more +energy and will also make them decent soldiers. Once all your dudes are psychic then you can put your energy income into the shroud for bonuses. You may wish to drop pacifism at this point to really start pushing people, but your massive resource bonuses should let you buy lots of stuff off of other empires and punch well above your weight on the defensive. If you pick the diplomacy tradition you can also start building federations and alliances to expand your influence without growing your borders too. If you can churn out unity fast enough, and you should be good at this with spiritualist/pacifist/agrarian civic because you will have access to lots of unity buildings (patronize an artist troupe if you can, the culture ministry is super good) and few planets to run your costs up, you should be able to get megastructures surprisingly early, which may make them more viable than you might think, especially if you can buy minerals off people with your absurd energy income from habitats. If you can form defensive pacts with people and they get you into a war, use it as an excuse to steal technology, or launch some liberation wars on people. Few planets will limit your research output though habitats are good at it, you may want to steal as much as you can get. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Apr 17, 2017 |
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Apr 17, 2017 00:23
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Arc emitters are great though, since they're actually really good against small ships, while still being quite decent against big ships because of the 100% armor penetration. And kinetic artillery can hit cruisers just fine. And sure, Titans and some Leviathans can one-shot them, but FEs/Awakened Empires don't have many Titans. And tbh I've never actually bothered to kill a Leviathan, there generally isn't any pressing need to do so. I've done fine so far with late game fleets that are like 75% battleships by naval capacity. e: Also I'd much rather have a Tachyon lance than a pair of large plasma cannons, since lances are more accurate and do more damage. Tachyon lances do lose to Kinetic artillery on raw dps but kinetic artillery has +shield damage and lances -shield damage, so Tachyon lances focus fire and kinetic artillery doesn't. Giga cannons are more accurate than kinetic artillery and have more armor penetration, so they're probably worthwhile too. If my early morning calculations are correct, Giga Cannons beat if kinetic artillery in dps if the target has more than 45% evasion, assuming you're hitting shields or they have negligible armor. So they're better against corvettes, and the armor pen probably makes them better against battleships too. Overall I'd use XL weapons if I have them researched already, but probably wouldn't bother researching giga cannons unless I have nothing better to do, and would only research Tachyon lances if I don't have Arc emitters. OwlFancier posted:Take spiritualist/pacifist/egalitarian. You're not going to be fighting offensive wars if you're aiming to go small and pacifist gives you two extra systems to play with right off the bat without handing over to inefficient sectors. He doesn't want to go up to 5 systems though. Staltran fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Apr 17, 2017 |
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Apr 17, 2017 00:27
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Staltran posted:He doesn't want to go up to 5 systems though. Eh, I would say not taking five if you can afford five core systems is a bit silly and you need pacifist for the agrarian civic so you're going to have that anyway.
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Apr 17, 2017 00:32
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This is by far the best "Unity Rush" build: (The species traits aren't important, those can be whatever you want) VirtualStranger fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Apr 17, 2017 |
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Apr 17, 2017 00:34
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Kitchner posted:Snail fleet? Oh god, I'm playing a snail race and I'm totally gonna do the golden ratio for my fleets.
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Apr 17, 2017 00:36
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Staltran posted:Arc emitters are great though, since they're actually really good against small ships, while still being quite decent against big ships because of the 100% armor penetration. And kinetic artillery can hit cruisers just fine. And sure, Titans and some Leviathans can one-shot them, but FEs/Awakened Empires don't have many Titans. And tbh I've never actually bothered to kill a Leviathan, there generally isn't any pressing need to do so. I've done fine so far with late game fleets that are like 75% battleships by naval capacity. The Ancient Fortress is always worth doing for the reward. And now in Utopia the Dimension Horror is one way to get the Jump Drive. Other than that I agree the other Levithan's are kinda meh.
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Apr 17, 2017 00:36
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VirtualStranger posted:"Corporate Dominion" also shouldn't be limited to egalitarians. (I mean, what the gently caress? That doesn't make any sense.) I believe the devs have said it was a bug--a hold over from individualist that they forgot to fix, pretty much.
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Apr 17, 2017 00:43
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nessin posted:The Ancient Fortress is always worth doing for the reward. And now in Utopia the Dimension Horror is one way to get the Jump Drive. Other than that I agree the other Levithan's are kinda meh. Didn't know that about the Dimensional horror, and I've only seen the Enigmatic fortress once, and that's in a mp game with RL friends that hasn't finished yet. I do agree the rewards on that one are worth it and intend to kill it once we continue that game (I don't think either of the other human players are in a position to beat me to it, pretty sure one of them can't even reach it). Speaking of that game, getting Zero Point from the Infinity Machine (going straight from fission to zero point, too) and then drawing Jump Drives for physics research immediately after that in 2256 was nice. Staltran fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Apr 17, 2017 |
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Apr 17, 2017 00:44
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VirtualStranger posted:This is by far the best "Unity Rush" build: Honestly, Materialist might be better on that path (and it's what I went with on my first game)--yeah, you have to build robots if you go that ascension path, but if you're intent on staying small... that's not so much of a problem.
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Apr 17, 2017 00:47
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Spiritualist gets a unique +unity building, which is a really big increase. Pretty sure that govt setup is the max unity hose, though there are plenty that are fairly close.
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Apr 17, 2017 01:08
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Spiritualists get access to the temple chain which gives you a whole extra building that generates unity. I believe it also gives a % unity buff to the planet when upgraded. Inward perfection is certainly also powerful for the +30% unity, but I find that the 20% happiness from utopian living standards will go a long way to giving you +20% everything income, and egalitarian demands are also easy to meet which gives you more influence income and more base happiness for pops, I don't know about xenophobe but I know militarism and authoritarianism are actually very awkward to meet because they require you to keep being a dick and running a suboptimal society. I don't imagine xenophobe is very easy if you want to do diplomacy which you definitely should as a small empire. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Apr 17, 2017 |
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Apr 17, 2017 01:09
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Yeah Holotemples are great, +4 Unity per planet. And plus ten on the Capital world.
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Apr 17, 2017 01:14
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