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Pretty sure you can creep on their planets if you have them surveyed and it tells you how pops are. Also I beat fleet power 1.1M with around 600k by jumping in behind and shooting the battle cruisers and Titans in the butt
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# ? May 18, 2017 13:29 |
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# ? May 30, 2024 13:11 |
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Main Paineframe posted:Has there ever been a 4X-style game with an espionage system that was fun and good? I know the rock-paper-scissors ship combat kind of begs for it, but that's because it's fundamentally a really bad system and Stellaris' particular quirks make it even worse. Endless Legend has really fun espionage imo.
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# ? May 18, 2017 13:31 |
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Main Paineframe posted:Has there ever been a 4X-style game with an espionage system that was fun and good? I know the rock-paper-scissors ship combat kind of begs for it, but that's because it's fundamentally a really bad system and Stellaris' particular quirks make it even worse. Star Wars Rebellion. Planets have constant fow, characters & ships are in hyperspace for extended periods of time, and can only be attacked when on/in orbit above a planet, so ETAs are extremely important. An extensive part of your arsenal is sending characters on sabotage missions to take out enemy defenses ahead of an invasion or destroying orbital shipyards to stall/stop enemy star destroyer production. Because of the constant FOW the information you have very quickly becomes outdated, luckily, planets that have loyalists to your cause will often volunteer intel and successful espionage missions will provide information the target planet and a random other enemy planet, so you're never quite in the dark about enemy fortified planets.
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# ? May 18, 2017 13:52 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:quick question: did they ever fix the mod achievement notification?
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# ? May 18, 2017 14:47 |
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Help This is a Xenophobic Empier with residence, I don't understand What is considered charismatic about them? Edit: Why is the being part of a faction?
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# ? May 18, 2017 14:54 |
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SkySteak posted:
I'm looking at the screenshot and back to your questions, and I can't understand what you want to know. Is the problem that you're playing as a hive mind and you got democratic elections? Or did you make a Xenophobic empire with democracy, in which case everything is completely normal? Please clarifiy.
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# ? May 18, 2017 15:12 |
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Libluini posted:I'm looking at the screenshot and back to your questions, and I can't understand what you want to know. Is the problem that you're playing as a hive mind and you got democratic elections? Or did you make a Xenophobic empire with democracy, in which case everything is completely normal?
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# ? May 18, 2017 15:15 |
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Libluini posted:I'm looking at the screenshot and back to your questions, and I can't understand what you want to know. Is the problem that you're playing as a hive mind and you got democratic elections? Or did you make a Xenophobic empire with democracy, in which case everything is completely normal? I am confused as to why a Xenophobic Democracy only has a single alien Admiral as an election candidate while none of my other Governors, Scientists or Admirals (who are all my base species) are not potential candidates.
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# ? May 18, 2017 15:18 |
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The queen has a man date.
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# ? May 18, 2017 15:32 |
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It looks like Wiz has grown sick of us and is bowing out (of dev diaries) for the rest of the month. But maybe they'll come back with something new and interesting when they come back? I suspect whatever is broken in 1.6.1 will remain that way for the next couple of weeks though. And given the time of year I doubt well see anything major until autum even if they do announce the next expansion.
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# ? May 18, 2017 15:33 |
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So how broken is 1.6.1? I'm kind of feeling like another game but I'm also wondering if I want to deal with it.
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# ? May 18, 2017 15:43 |
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SkySteak posted:I am confused as to why a Xenophobic Democracy only has a single alien Admiral as an election candidate while none of my other Governors, Scientists or Admirals (who are all my base species) are not potential candidates.
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# ? May 18, 2017 15:46 |
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Tons of stuff is super broken and I'd stay away until they release a real patch. The hot fix made wars happen again but faction attractions and faction happiness are still totally broken plus a ton of other little things. They want to test some new multplayer system now which seems to be their main focus
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# ? May 18, 2017 15:50 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:So how broken is 1.6.1? I'm kind of feeling like another game but I'm also wondering if I want to deal with it. It's fixed the glaring errors from 1.6 but has done nothing with the longstanding issues that patch failed to tackle, like missiles being a waste of time and there being no fleet designer. It's certainly worth playing, though, rather than hanging on for 1.6.2.
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# ? May 18, 2017 15:50 |
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Yeah, there is still enough broken stuff in 1.6.1 that I've gone back to taking a break from the game. My last game ended with a big chunk of my population angry at 'xeno slaves' due to having robots. I am hoping 1.7 makes things more playable. Currently messing with perfecting bases in the new Factorio patch instead of Stellarising. Filthy Monkey fucked around with this message at 16:17 on May 18, 2017 |
# ? May 18, 2017 16:02 |
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Splicer posted:Double check what the game thinks your base species is in the species screen My founder race is the same as it was at the start, with full citizenship and military service. On the upside, this should make for a pretty interesting story of how a member of the Scourge became democratically elected!
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# ? May 18, 2017 16:03 |
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Can we tell whether achievements work or not with mods yet? And is the psychic bug fixed? I walked away from my last play through after my main race became disgusting lizard men.
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# ? May 18, 2017 16:26 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:So how broken is 1.6.1? I'm kind of feeling like another game but I'm also wondering if I want to deal with it. It's much the same as before. I just found out that killing all the Scourge ships and getting the "end of the Scourge" event doesn't stop ongoing purges on planets that were previously conquered, and that there's nothing you can do about it. I think this has been that way since 1.0.
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# ? May 18, 2017 16:27 |
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The Scourge still purge? I thought they did a big long siege and then infested the planet.
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# ? May 18, 2017 17:19 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:So how broken is 1.6.1? I'm kind of feeling like another game but I'm also wondering if I want to deal with it. There are annoying things that warrant fixing, like the aforementioned syth slavery issue, but nothing that should put you off from playing unless you spend so much time kvetching over the game that every little bug becomes a sign that Paradox should have killed themselves rather than let the game come to fruition like this.
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# ? May 18, 2017 17:23 |
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SkySteak posted:On the upside, this should make for a pretty interesting story of how a member of the Scourge became democratically elected!
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# ? May 18, 2017 17:29 |
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So if I picked up Stellaris in that good Humble Bundle deal what are the things a new player absolutely needs to know about the game?
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# ? May 18, 2017 19:16 |
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Shugojin posted:The Scourge still purge? I thought they did a big long siege and then infested the planet. Nope. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/1-6-1-b38e-cant-stop-prethoryn-purge.1021049/
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# ? May 18, 2017 19:34 |
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Trast posted:So if I picked up Stellaris in that good Humble Bundle deal what are the things a new player absolutely needs to know about the game? Early game importance is on building economy. You can quickly spend all your minerals and then be a little slow in developing after that. Focus on mineral asteroids, then energy asteroids. If you unlock the prosperity tree you'll save 30 minerals per station (very good). If you find a lot energy stations then unlocking private colony ships lets you make colonizers with energy, or if you don't find much energy the other option is -15% ship cost. Upgrades to planetary buildings aren't worth it till later for the most (ie mining base level 2), the exception is power. Maintenance costs go up but the output usually isn't proportional. Early game tech to ships tends to cost more proportionally than the improvement to effectiveness. Going over fleet cap increases maintenance costs, but they're so low early on you can pretty safely go over if you need to. If you look at the tradition perks for which path you kind of want to do (psionics, cyborgs, gene modding), ask in the thread and we can tell you what techs you want to look for and other things to get those faster. Pirate show up sometime after you start building stuff outside your home system, so building a few extra corvettes and assigning an admiral can help you be ready to take care of that. If you're playing a hive mind pirates don't spawn. Corvettes can also be useful to scout systems to avoid losing science ships.
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# ? May 18, 2017 20:09 |
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I heard that it's basically never worth upgrading ship combat tech since it makes your ships have just drastically less bang for buck. Is that still true?
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# ? May 18, 2017 20:17 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:So how broken is 1.6.1? I'm kind of feeling like another game but I'm also wondering if I want to deal with it. Pacifism attraction is still way too high. I had to modify the 'pacifism fix' mod to lower the attraction from (base 2.0) 1.5 to 0.25 to make things not so drat crazy. edit : come to think of it I should do the same thing for egalitarian to make authoritarianism not so bad.
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# ? May 18, 2017 20:17 |
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Main Paineframe posted:Has there ever been a 4X-style game with an espionage system that was fun and good? I know the rock-paper-scissors ship combat kind of begs for it, but that's because it's fundamentally a really bad system and Stellaris' particular quirks make it even worse. The problem is that almost every instance of strategy game espionage focuses on sabotage rather than intelligence gathering. Micromanaging agents and poo poo so you can hurt your enemies in really inconsequential ways is garbage but figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of your enemy is a pretty fundamental piece of strategy that should be a no-brainer.
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# ? May 18, 2017 20:49 |
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Mzbundifund posted:I heard that it's basically never worth upgrading ship combat tech since it makes your ships have just drastically less bang for buck. Is that still true? Some people follow that, it sort of depends on what your limiting factors are. If you're just spamming corvettes it might be true, but once you're building battleships and poo poo it is usually worth it because of the cost in time to replace them. Also later on going over the fleet cap can be a really big hit, so improving tech allows for more fleet power even if you're maybe spending more minerals to get it. I've personally never had an issue against hard AI when keeping my fleet tech up to date, so it isn't a huge deal. Also people poo poo on missiles all the time but until mid game they work just fine, and by that time you can shift away if the other side is fielding a bunch of point defense. Late game they might be perfectly fine against some enemy setups as well, I haven't done a ton of checking with it.
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# ? May 18, 2017 20:52 |
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Trast posted:So if I picked up Stellaris in that good Humble Bundle deal what are the things a new player absolutely needs to know about the game? Don't colonise too fast, it'll tank your science and unity if you colonise planets faster than you can afford to build them up. Colonise your juiciest nearby planet when you think you can afford it, but otherwise if you see some planets you want to dibs dump a frontier outpost into the system instead. You an declare Rivals in the Diplomacy screen. You need to do this to maintain your influence. e: Hovering over pretty much any number will give you a pretty decent breakdown of what's affecting it and why.
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# ? May 18, 2017 21:06 |
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ZypherIM posted:
Missiles are bad because of a fundamental fuckup they made in how they work. If a ship fires a missile and itself gets destroyed, the missile de-spawns. What this means is that the enemy can destroy your ships with lasers or guns and take no damage from the ship they destroyed. It makes missile fleets way less effective than they should be.
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# ? May 18, 2017 21:09 |
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Gobblecoque posted:The problem is that almost every instance of strategy game espionage focuses on sabotage rather than intelligence gathering. Micromanaging agents and poo poo so you can hurt your enemies in really inconsequential ways is garbage but figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of your enemy is a pretty fundamental piece of strategy that should be a no-brainer. I think that the real problem with it is that unless you restrict it to human players only, it has to be deeply limited for it to be meaningful. Otherwise it's either a mandatory minigame or a constant annoyance. For example, being able to scope out another empire's ship designs and then redesign your ships to counter them sounds good in a vacuum, but it's really only a good system in a single-player game: if that other empire can do the same thing to you, then the "rock-paper-scissors" system breaks down almost completely.
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# ? May 18, 2017 21:31 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:Missiles are bad because of a fundamental fuckup they made in how they work. If a ship fires a missile and itself gets destroyed, the missile de-spawns. What this means is that the enemy can destroy your ships with lasers or guns and take no damage from the ship they destroyed. It makes missile fleets way less effective than they should be. I know there are a bunch of weird poo poo about how missiles work and I'm pretty sure people aren't really right. In reality I've done early wars on hard with missiles and been successful. I've also kept missile focus until into battleship techs and had success as well. Against other players maybe they're not up to snuff, but against the AI and especially on normal they work fine.
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# ? May 18, 2017 21:46 |
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ZypherIM posted:Early game importance is on building economy. You can quickly spend all your minerals and then be a little slow in developing after that. Focus on mineral asteroids, then energy asteroids. If you unlock the prosperity tree you'll save 30 minerals per station (very good). If you find a lot energy stations then unlocking private colony ships lets you make colonizers with energy, or if you don't find much energy the other option is -15% ship cost. You mention paths like psionics, cyborgs, gene modding. Can you go more in depth on that stuff. I'm start to get down things like building up my economy and basic research but I haven't really run into those higher end plans yet.
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# ? May 18, 2017 22:04 |
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Those paths are not a thing you'll see if you only bought the Humble copy, that stuff is all from the Utopia dlc, though you can do some minor gene modding without it. vvv If you already like the game, the dlc only improves it. If you don't like the game, it won't change your mind. Mondian fucked around with this message at 22:27 on May 18, 2017 |
# ? May 18, 2017 22:19 |
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So when you fill out a tradition tree you get an ascension slot unlock. There are 8, in the bottom right. If you click on one of the locked slots it'll pop up a list of the perks and the requirements. There are quite a few options, though they won't all unlock at once. There are 3 exclusive branches I mentioned, the rest are basically always available. Each branch is 2 perks, and available at your 2nd and 4th unlock, but also require certain techs to open. The robotics line lets you upgrade your people to cyborgs giving a pretty much across-the-board increase, and eventually you'll be able to upload everyone into synths, which has benefits (and some drawbacks, like spiritualists hating you for the whole idea). The psionics line gives you some different style bonuses from robotics, and the second perk unlocks an ability that gives you access to random bonuses (like empire-wide buffs, or a special big ship, etc) but can also fail. The genetics line gives you additional trait points, and at the second one has special traits. This lets you do stuff like customize each planet's population to be super good at stuff, but you'll also have enough points to basically buy off any negative traits you took at the start, and grab extra stuff (so you might mod a research planet to have +all research, +1 branch research along with other goodies). edit: Mondian has a good point, I didn't consider that the bundle might not include the expansion. Personally I think it is well worth it if you play the base game and somewhat enjoy yourself.
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# ? May 18, 2017 22:23 |
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Main Paineframe posted:I think that the real problem with it is that unless you restrict it to human players only, it has to be deeply limited for it to be meaningful. Otherwise it's either a mandatory minigame or a constant annoyance. For example, being able to scope out another empire's ship designs and then redesign your ships to counter them sounds good in a vacuum, but it's really only a good system in a single-player game: if that other empire can do the same thing to you, then the "rock-paper-scissors" system breaks down almost completely. The thing is that there isn't really much of a rock-paper-scissors system in the game anyway and what little there is is rendered pretty meaningless by the fact that you usually don't know what the enemy is using anyway until you're already fighting and that like 99% of the time wars are just a matter of which side has the bigger fleet. Personally I don't really care much about it with regards to the game's bad ship design system; I'd be more interesting in using it to figure out stuff like how big the enemy fleet is, which spaceports are their centers of fleet production, whether they have the energy reserves or income to fight a long war or minerals to rebuild if they take losses, and where their research has been invested. The fleet power, capacity, and tech strength indicators in the game don't really give you a good idea of where empires are in comparison to each other (I'm sure most of us have at some point encountered the situation where an empire with equivalent fleet strength actually has a fleet twice as large as yours).
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# ? May 18, 2017 22:29 |
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Yeah it's like rock paper scissors except scissors are hard-countered by just holding your thumb out and everyone does that so scissors are useless and also everyone gets to hold out 50 hands so you're good just picking about 50/50 rock and paper and even then rock is objectively slightly better so go 60/20 unless you specifically know your opponent's hand but you usually never will so uhhh just go rock all the time.
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# ? May 18, 2017 22:32 |
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There are three basic Stellaris fleet comps. There's vette spam. It's cheap and you need zero tech to do it, and they eat up fleets that rely on L/XL weapons. The downside is that every fight, easy or hard, results in casualties you'll need to replace. This is especially annoying when you're stomping starports and stations. There's AEGIS cruisers and vettes. Cruisers with all S/M sized guns (and ideally Flak) can beat their weight in pure vettes, and cruisers' deeper health pools mean they win fights based on attrition. However, they get clowned by the next fleet. There's artillery/screen fleets, using vettes/cruisers to pin the enemy for destroyers and battleships with L/XL weapons to wreck them at long range. (A lot of people argue that all destroyers is more efficient. XL weapons are so bad that I can't really disagree.) If you're super serious about this, you can split the screeners and artillery into separate fleets that move together but engage in two waves. The upside is that this wrecks spaceports and any fleets with cruisers very efficiently, and you can emergency jump the snipers out of a badly chosen fight. The downside is that those snipers can't kill corvettes, getting dropped on at zero range will end you, the micromanagement involved in building and maneuvering fleets, and the higher tech requirements. It's rock paper scissors of a sort, but the AI can always be counted on to choose mixed compositions, the third choice, and both rock and paper work the same way with mostly the same downsides.
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# ? May 18, 2017 22:54 |
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Note on the XL weapons: arc emitters have perfect accuracy and can shred the gently caress out of corvette based evasion fleets, so you have a pretty solid refit option if you're facing some guy going pure corvettes.
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# ? May 18, 2017 23:02 |
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# ? May 30, 2024 13:11 |
Cease to Hope posted:There's artillery/screen fleets, using vettes/cruisers to pin the enemy for destroyers and battleships with L/XL weapons to wreck them at long range. (A lot of people argue that all destroyers is more efficient. XL weapons are so bad that I can't really disagree.) Battleships have a lot more EHP and you get 5 large slots instead of 4 per 8 fleet power. Destroyers are still quite acceptable but once you have solid armor tech battleships will wreck destroyers in an artillery off.
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# ? May 18, 2017 23:03 |