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With my 5th game wrapping up, so far my endgame crises have been: Praethorian Scourge Sleepers Awake Sleepers Awake Sleepers Awake Sleepers Awake It hasn't always been me that conquers one of the stagnant ascendancies (which is what I assume triggers it.) This time around a (non-awakened) stagnant ascendancy declared war on my tributary for some reason. This stagnant ascendancy was holed up in one ring world system with all his super-turrets bunched together. "Won"  What were the devouring swarm buffs? The only other relevant empire is a devouring swarm hivemind. Me as a fanatic purifier I'm happy to have someone else that isn't part of the big galactic all inclusive defense-pact (now federation.) We've been taking turns fighting the cowards of the galaxy and bringing them down a notch (and obviously not taking any prisoners.) I have to deal with the awakened ascendancy now which very unfortunately for me is based on one of my min-max conqueror species.
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Sep 28, 2017 12:13
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Could be fun to force in 10 different flavors of devouring swarm, fanatic purifiers, determined exterminators and assimiltars into a galaxy and watch the crazy free for all.
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Sep 28, 2017 12:44
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Eej posted:Remember how in Civ 4: BTS you basically could never reach the growth cap on any city in the end game because every single country in the world would just mash Poison Water Supply on cooldown OldMold posted:Feels like Espionage would work well within the current framework of the game - make it centered around a new "Clandestine Agent" leader type and send them on missions to destabilize defensive pacts, foment ethics divergence, get border worlds to declare independence, finance vassal uprisings, cause heartburn with an empire's factions, etc... The game has faction led game mechanics and empire governance switching, covertly funding an empire's faction to destabilise them or push them to a more friendly ethic would fit right in. If as a player you suddenly find your pops are getting mysteriously materialist you already have a bunch of ways to deal with it, from suppressing factions to mind control lasers to just rolling with it and deciding you like robots now. Refugees are a thing, set up an underground railroad to increase the flow for more grateful pops. Release rogue code to increase the odds of a machine uprising. Add some unique story chains that can only be triggered by enemy spy action. Cool stuff that gives you stuff to react to, not just "you're slightly worse now".
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Sep 28, 2017 12:58
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tooterfish posted:It's sold as grand strategy. Point taken but I still think in practice it's more 4x than grand stratgey unless massive sweeping changes are made to not just diplomacy but also how the game is played. There's still a win condition, that's very 4X, and when you are the only empire left in the galaxy, nothing happens, you just carry on existing. That is also very 4X. For me to really see it as a grand stratgey game there needs to be more diplomacy but also the idea you can "win" the game needs to be dropped and the galaxy should go through cycles of empires rising and falling. I know that's the intention for the game, but it's not there yet.
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Sep 28, 2017 13:25
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I know it's a 4x, I agree with you! My point isn't that it is grand strategy, it's that it was sold to us as grand strategy... so it'd be nice if it actually attempted to deliver on that.
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Sep 28, 2017 13:38
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has anyone made any interesting empires of their own that they'd like to share? i'd like to play against some empires with more interesting backstories than the ones generated by the game.
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Sep 28, 2017 13:47
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Fututor Magnus posted:i think every paradox grand strategy should have voiced advisors. paradox added voiced advisors in the stellaris because they were copying 4Xes but i'd like voiced advisors in games like eu4 or hoi4, and also different voiced advisors according to your country. so germany in hoi4 will have a nazi general voice advisor, who will call you fuhrer, and make you really feel like younm are giving him orders and such. you can also feel like you're stalin, the american advisor will call you mr. president, and so many more things for that sweet, sweet immersion. i doubt it's a big deal for paradox to hire some lovely voice actors to speak their lines in their own language and really immerse you into roleplaying as your particular country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVz_eDUTjAI
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Sep 28, 2017 13:57
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Brilliantly, the Materialist voice sounds exactly like the worst sort of whiny tech sperg.
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Sep 28, 2017 14:11
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Aethernet posted:Brilliantly, the Materialist voice sounds exactly like the worst sort of whiny tech sperg. I love how similar the authoritarian advisor sounds to the Vaygr Emperor from Homeworld. I'm using that voice even if I'm not playing authoritarian.
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Sep 28, 2017 14:24
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Fututor Magnus posted:has anyone made any interesting empires of their own that they'd like to share? i'd like to play against some empires with more interesting backstories than the ones generated by the game. If you want some fun ones to intersperse in your games, I can upload my updated list.
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Sep 28, 2017 14:28
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turn off the TV posted:I love how similar the authoritarian advisor sounds to the Vaygr Emperor from Homeworld. I'm using that voice even if I'm not playing authoritarian. I started with an a fanatic authoritarian-spiritualist feudal empire, and really loved the authoritarian voice. Then I inadvertently swapped to fanatic spiritualist with The Old Gods, and it's taken everything in my power to not embrace my authoritarian faction, mostly just to get the advisor voice back. Spiritual voice is ok, it's just not the characterization I had in mind for my caste-system loving, rival-vassalizing Chthulu overlords. Next time I might lock the voice at startup, but I do like the idea of it drifting.
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Sep 28, 2017 14:33
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LogisticEarth posted:I started with an a fanatic authoritarian-spiritualist feudal empire, and really loved the authoritarian voice. Then I inadvertently swapped to fanatic spiritualist with The Old Gods, and it's taken everything in my power to not embrace my authoritarian faction, mostly just to get the advisor voice back. Click your symbol, and then advisor on the bottom.
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Sep 28, 2017 14:38
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Sanctum posted:With my 5th game wrapping up, so far my endgame crises have been: Fallen Empires waking up isn't an endgame crisis.
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Sep 28, 2017 14:50
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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[quote="“turn off the TV”" post="“476848391”"] I love how similar the authoritarian advisor sounds to the Vaygr Emperor from Homeworld. I’m using that voice even if I’m not playing authoritarian. [/quote] That's a strange spelling of xenophile. "We took animals and made them people!" "They're fighting! Stop fighting!"
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Sep 28, 2017 15:54
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how do the cyborgs that driven assimilators use fare on machine worlds? not too well i'd imagine, right?
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Sep 28, 2017 16:01
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Demiurge4 posted:Could be fun to force in 10 different flavors of devouring swarm, fanatic purifiers, determined exterminators and assimiltars into a galaxy and watch the crazy free for all. I force-spawn a fanatic purifier, a regular hivemind, a devouring swarm, and one of each type of machine empire in my games. I like having the guaranteed conflict. e: I play on a small map with 8 AI empires, so that's 6 of them right there. The 7th and 8th are whatever random stuff appears. binge crotching fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 16:10
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Soup du Journey posted:how do the cyborgs that driven assimilators use fare on machine worlds? not too well i'd imagine, right? Given they don't use food, they might actually be coded to stand a chance. I'll give my Shreks a playthrough and find out sometime.
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Sep 28, 2017 16:27
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The only advisor voice that's missing is a smooth talking space capitalist for the "space wal-mart" empires I seem to make every other game
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Sep 28, 2017 16:41
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I'm loving the Xenophobe voice. I like believing that my race of Fanatical Purifier fungus blobs, when they deign to speak, speak like an extra-snotty David Warner. We could probably use separate voices for Hippie Spiritualist and Dogmatic Spiritualist though. And agreed that Corporate Materialist would be a great addition.
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Sep 28, 2017 16:56
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The authoritarian guy sounds like Jemaine Clement doing an evil voice.
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Sep 28, 2017 17:03
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Militarist is completely unhinged and ridiculous so I naturally selected militarist. The Brave Little Toaster Gone Bad empire successfully cleansed the galaxy before a crisis could even fire. Lack of a cleanse wargoal made it a little tricky since I was getting huge batches of systems that I had to shove into sectors to avoid bankruptcy. Turning off "allow sector to robot" and the fast extermination speed made it pretty smooth though. Just kept a few planets around along the route to make into repair points. Once I got jump drives it only took a little while to subdue enough of the galaxy to hit the 40% planet win condition by shoving everyone into a sector and letting them colonize. VERY MUCH LOOKING FORWARD TO WAR PATCH THOUGH. The troop micro is the worst  The galaxy did do a pretty good job of forming one giant coalition to try to resist by the time I had half of it though, which was neat. Normally they just die piecemeal. A good story pack though I don't think I'm going to play another exterminatus style empire until war is less painful. Nuclearmonkee fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 17:05
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Guys, I really hate to disappoint you but there's a slight issue with your plan: 
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 17:55
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Found out the hard way corvettes don't really counter battleships and cruisers anymore. So an enemy nation invades me with three other guys, one of their fleets gets trapped by one of my space fortresses set up to basically to destroy everything smaller than a cruiser. It end up killing everything except the battleships, so I have a fleet of nothing but corvette and destroyers in reserve meant for killing reinforcements and space stations, so I send them, they had 1.5x the fleet power of the remaining battleship so I thought it would be an easy fight. Yeah, no. Not only did my fleet lose, I only killed one battleships in the attempt. Short there after my empire got carved three ways and it was game over for me. I don't know what works and what doesn't when it comes to fleet combat anymore. Back Hack fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 18:00
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OwlFancier posted:Guys, I really hate to disappoint you but there's a slight issue with your plan: What happens when a devouring swarm conquers machine pops? Do they get minerals / energy instead of food? I just did the reverse in my exterminator game, conquered one of my old hive races. Turns out hive mind pops, since they have no happiness, don't mind getting slowly rendered into gasoline, so no unrest! I had just gotten Waste Processing from the Domination focus too, so instant +12 energy a pop, over a thousand energy a month increase in my income. 
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Sep 28, 2017 18:07
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How do i get rid of the ghost signal? From looking around it looks like there should be some kind of project but it hasn't spawned. Literally everyone in my empire is a robot so i have -400 energy and -750 minerals
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Sep 28, 2017 18:15
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Pocky In My Pocket posted:How do i get rid of the ghost signal? From looking around it looks like there should be some kind of project but it hasn't spawned. Literally everyone in my empire is a robot so i have -400 energy and -750 minerals Start a new game with the 1.8.1 beta because it shouldn't fire for machine empires anymore.
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Sep 28, 2017 18:17
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So the fact that the patch pushed endgame crises to 200 rather than 150 years is great. Unfortunately I already invested several days in a pre-patch playthrough and I need to deal with the contingency at exactly the 150 year mark. The first planet appeared right in the middle of my rival, and I laughed. The next three appeared in my empire, one of them in the same system as one of my most important mineral planets. The biggest fleet I can manage is about 130K. Is this just the end of my game? I can beat a single 100k fleet of theirs with huge losses, but they're slowly dismantling my industrial base, so it's not like I'll be able to do that forever, and I have no idea how to take on their 200k fleets. A neighboring robotic fallen empire woke up to help, but it's just sitting there. How can I get it to do something? This crisis might have been fun to deal with in 50 years, but as it stands it seems like an arbitrary game over for me. This is the first time I've played long enough to even get to an endgame crisis too.
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Sep 28, 2017 18:19
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Back Hack posted:Found out the hard way corvettes don't really counter battleships and cruisers anymore. So an enemy nation invades me with three other guys, one of their fleets gets trapped by one of my space fortresses set up to basically to destroy everything smaller than a cruiser. It end up killing everything except the battleships, so I have a fleet of nothing but corvette and destroyers in reserve meant for killing reinforcements and space stations, so I send them, they had 1.5x the fleet power of the remaining battleship so I thought it would be an easy fight. Yeah, no. Not only did my fleet lose, I only killed one battleships in the attempt. Honestly I've played like 30-40 games at this point now and even though people talked up cruisers/corvettes forever I have never lost a late game scenario where I 100% went battleship. 3:1 kinetics monstrosity/arc emitter-carrier deck with flak. Armor up to where diminishing returns gets brutal, shields after that, but stick with shield caps since the regen is pretty strong. This setup just murders anything at equal value I've faced, often lopsided, and actually has a working backup plan in that you can retreat from a battle right around when medium size weapons get in range should you run into poo poo you aren't beating outright. If you fight something really high in evasion, pretty much just another player psyker empire, you switch to all arc emitters since evasion literally doesn't work against 100% tracking. Configure 5-6 space ports for battleship construction and put an Admiral governor type in that place and they build as fast as cruisers do now. Put all your planets in 1 sector and late game for 100 influence you can dump 30-40k minerals onto yourself every couple years. I'm not at home or I'd add a screenshot of 100 battleships beating 1600 evasion corvettes me and another goon test ran in a wrapping up MP game. I lost a grand total of 1 battleship. In crazy competitive MP games this probably doesn't work because there's a long wind up time to consider but I think that would apply to like 2% of the people in this thread. Mazz fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 18:23
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What's the best fortress design to tank and hold the enemy for as long as possible until your fleet arrives?
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Sep 28, 2017 18:28
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Eiba posted:So the fact that the patch pushed endgame crises to 200 rather than 150 years is great. Fight defensively and wait for the rest of the galaxy to pitch in? You might get another Awakened Empire helping out if there's Xenophiles or Materialists around, too. Make sure to set your fleet to take point on so others can attach to it. Seems odd that the Machine FE isn't moving. Is this on 1.8.1?
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Sep 28, 2017 18:29
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turn off the TV posted:I love how similar the authoritarian advisor sounds to the Vaygr Emperor from Homeworld. I'm using that voice even if I'm not playing authoritarian. I love giving marauding killbots the Pacifist voice. "Pacifism module failing. Beginning count-to-ten protocol. Ten. Nine. It isn't working, abort, abort!" The Egalitarian one is pretty great too since it's constantly talking about how difficult Freedom is. I just wish the voices took the difference between a Hive Mind and an AI into account. They've got custom voice lines if you're an AI, but normal Hive Minds get the AI voice lines too. I just want a Hive Mind that is an "I" not a "We"
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Sep 28, 2017 18:29
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Baronjutter posted:What's the best fortress design to tank and hold the enemy for as long as possible until your fleet arrives? I like to ring a system with long-range (artillery/bombers) fortresses without FTL magnets and put a single sacrificial station in the middle *with* a magnet. That setup can trap even large fleets for months, and provide support fire once your fleet arrives.
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Sep 28, 2017 18:30
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Wiz posted:I like to ring a system with long-range (artillery/bombers) fortresses without FTL magnets and put a single sacrificial station in the middle *with* a snare. That setup can trap even large fleets for months, and provide support fire once your fleet arrives. But you nerfed the death flower into the ground with ridiculously large exclusion zones?
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Sep 28, 2017 18:32
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Wiz posted:I like to ring a system with long-range (artillery/bombers) fortresses without FTL magnets and put a single sacrificial station in the middle *with* a magnet. That setup can trap even large fleets for months, and provide support fire once your fleet arrives. Ah I thought when you expanded the minimum distance forts can be apart it was to counter this "flower" design and the new maximum distance ensures they're totally out of range of each other. Will give that a try. But for the station in the middle, any tricks to min-max its staying power? Should it be jammed full of PD or fighters and tons of armor?
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Sep 28, 2017 18:33
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hobbesmaster posted:But you nerfed the death flower into the ground with ridiculously large exclusion zones? On the other hand, fortresses have like 10x the health they used to have and are pretty drat cheap. Static defenses are less about killing fleets and more about delaying them and/or supporting your defensive fleet.
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Sep 28, 2017 18:33
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Baronjutter posted:Ah I thought when you expanded the minimum distance forts can be apart it was to counter this "flower" design and the new maximum distance ensures they're totally out of range of each other. Will give that a try. All your fortresses won't be able to fire at once, but 2-3 of them will, and they will take a long time to bring them down. Really depends who you're fighting and what weapons they have. Always put the hull strength boosters in aux if you have them, though.
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Sep 28, 2017 18:35
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[quote="“Wiz”" post="“476855779”"] All your fortresses won’t be able to fire at once, but 2-3 of them will, and they will take a long time to bring them down. Really depends who you’re fighting and what weapons they have. Always put the hull strength boosters in aux if you have them, though. [/quote] Any chance of making the 5% one guaranteed in some way and the 10% one remaining special loot? It's weird to go entire games and not have a type of accessory slot equipment.
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Sep 28, 2017 18:36
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hobbesmaster posted:Any chance of making the 5% one guaranteed in some way and the 10% one remaining special loot? It's weird to go entire games and not have a type of accessory slot equipment. You will always get the lesser one if you take down crystalline entities and scan their debris.
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Sep 28, 2017 18:38
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Baronjutter posted:Ah I thought when you expanded the minimum distance forts can be apart it was to counter this "flower" design and the new maximum distance ensures they're totally out of range of each other. Will give that a try. Put one weapon in it, as many shields as possible, and armor to bring it up to max reduction percentage.
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Sep 28, 2017 18:38
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Right but you don't always spawn close to crystalline entities. It's not like the space whales.
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Sep 28, 2017 18:38
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