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Aethernet posted:Switching to lances makes the Contingency much, much easier to hard counter, which I thought they were moving away from in 1.8 - for end game crises at least. Contingency is really horrible to deal with if you havent conquered a big chunk of the map to have the resources for a fleet that can take out the core worlds, given how fast they regenerate and nasty their ships are. I couldnt really take on the big xenophobes bracketing me except defensively so its taken hours just to get the tech advantage to get the seige going. Really dont want to restart after how long its taken to get here though so im literally hammering build buttons in fast forward and watching youtubes of actual fun
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Oct 5, 2017 16:58
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Wiz, is the 1.8.2 patch going to be released as a beta patch on steam as well before main release? I saw it going through your QA but I wasn't sure if you were doing like the 1.8.1 patch.
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Oct 5, 2017 16:58
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Aethernet posted:Switching to lances makes the Contingency much, much easier to hard counter, which I thought they were moving away from in 1.8 - for end game crises at least.
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Oct 5, 2017 17:21
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Strike craft seem pretty decent late game now though?
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Oct 5, 2017 17:28
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Wiz posted:Do you have a save of that? I'd really like it if so. Uploaded it on your forums in the 1.8.1 thread https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/dev-team-1-8-1-opt-in-beta-patch-released-checksum-8a3f.1046742/page-20#post-23366849 Thanks for taking a look! I've really been enjoying Synthetic Dawn.
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Oct 5, 2017 17:29
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hobbesmaster posted:Strike craft seem pretty decent late game now though? Do they move faster? I usually have a few fighters because they are excellent PD and mulch corvettes. They still felt like they move slow as gently caress and didn't accomplish much sides slapping missiles/enemy strike craft down/corvette vanguard that closes too fast before the battle was well underway Like I cant imagine making a bomber.
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Oct 5, 2017 17:32
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Surprise Giraffe posted:Contingency is really horrible to deal with if you havent conquered a big chunk of the map to have the resources for a fleet that can take out the core worlds, given how fast they regenerate and nasty their ships are. I couldnt really take on the big xenophobes bracketing me except defensively so its taken hours just to get the tech advantage to get the seige going. Really dont want to restart after how long its taken to get here though so im literally hammering build buttons in fast forward and watching youtubes of actual fun Curious what other people get for mid/late game turn speed. 170 years into my game on a medium galaxy and I'm at like... 18-20 seconds a month, which is starting to feel unplayable slow.  Started at about 4-5 seconds a month, midgame was like ~15ish.
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Oct 5, 2017 17:35
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Talkie Toaster posted:Yeah- evasion corvettes with small autocannons to deal with the awful high-dodge seekers will be worth their weight in gold. I think maybe they're supposed to be countered by missiles and bombers (as Prethoryn are energy and Unbidden are kinetic) but since those are still no good lategame vs normal empires people won't have the tech or fleet for it. With the crisis min date moved to 2400 I can't imagine "not having the tech" being much of an issue.
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Oct 5, 2017 17:36
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Robots is unfortunately an unviable race with the current tech tree randomness :/ I've got an empire larger than everyone else, every non mineral tile dedicated to power, and haven't gotten the option to research tech 3 power, and just can't generate enough power even keep anything going or support a fleet of more than 2k, and just got declared and invaded by a 13k fleet. Is it possible to give selection bias to what the robots get chosen for their possible researches to the one thing that actually matters for them, power generation? All my stations have solar panels and every mining station is built, but still a monthly gain of neg 40.
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Oct 5, 2017 17:41
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The one time I tried a bomber/missiles combo on the Contingency the bombers did piss all, just fly around not firing. I haven't tried them again. Aethernet fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Oct 5, 2017 17:42
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Aethernet posted:The one time I tried a bomber/missiles combo on the Contingency the bombers did piss all, just fly around not firing. Arc emitters seem to be a must. Tried swarmer missiles but not regular ones, those any good? Tracking isnt much different I suppose. Hadnt realised the game actually changes speed. That explains a lot
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Oct 5, 2017 17:49
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Surprise Giraffe posted:Arc emitters seem to be a must. Tried swarmer missiles but not regular ones, those any good? Tracking isnt much different I suppose. The new swarm missiles move extremely fast and seem to own but I haven't checked numbers or anything. Some AI I was murdering killed some stuff with them though.
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Oct 5, 2017 17:51
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Wiz posted:They're OK with sub-variants of the same species. Do you just mean that they won't be purged, or has the purifier faction been changed to not mind it either? I think they used to take a happiness hit if you had more than one subspecies, and the only way to get it back to 60% for the influence was to kill a Leviathan.
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Oct 5, 2017 17:58
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Jesus christ these star spawn things can turn a loving mining station into a 2.7k strength glass cannon. You can't lose a single ship in combat to them because they immediately turn it into a more powerful version of their ships, which can itself turn ships into more enemy ships. If you don't fight every battle with zero losses you die. Oh also they put a lasting debuff on your fleets that cuts their power in half...  Oh also they regenerate 5000 shields a day. So anything that doesn't ignore shields is functionally useless against them. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Oct 5, 2017 18:02
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Magil Zeal posted:With the crisis min date moved to 2400 I can't imagine "not having the tech" being much of an issue. At 150 I at least stand a chance at seeing them if I am slow. At 200 it is never going to happen. Filthy Monkey fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Oct 5, 2017 18:06
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Staltran posted:Do you just mean that they won't be purged, or has the purifier faction been changed to not mind it either? I think they used to take a happiness hit if you had more than one subspecies, and the only way to get it back to 60% for the influence was to kill a Leviathan. The faction will be a little bit miffed, but it's manageable.
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Oct 5, 2017 18:19
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Surprise Giraffe posted:Contingency is really horrible to deal with if you havent conquered a big chunk of the map to have the resources for a fleet that can take out the core worlds, given how fast they regenerate and nasty their ships are. Or maybe the vacuity of the midgame is actually the biggest drag, but anyway it's up there.
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Oct 5, 2017 18:40
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Strudel Man posted:Every crisis plus awakened empires is like that. It's the biggest drag in the game right now - if you're not controlling half the galaxy when the end threats come, they will destroy you with no meaningful ability to resist. My last game played to conclusion I was an Inwards Perfection empire controlling perhaps 15 systems in total in a Huge galaxy. My galaxy fought back the Unbidden (I helped, but I didn't have anywhere near the majority of ship kills or anything). So no, that's not true at all. The Contingency is currently a bit strong compared to the other crises, which is why we're toning them down in 1.8.2. EDIT: I mean, yeah, if you're individually not strong enough and you also refuse to cooperate with everyone else, there's a fair chance you'll die but that's kind of... working as designed. Wiz fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Oct 5, 2017 18:44
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It is a bit annoying when a threat just spawns in your empire and you're turbofucked whether the galaxy rallies or not. Because there really isn't anything you can do about it. Personally I'd prefer it if galactic threats were a bit more spread out, and had to concentrate themselves before becoming a threat, meaning they would gravitate towards uninhabited sections of the galaxy and weak empires. Like if the prethoryans show up, they show up much more spread out and you get more advance warning, especially if you have sensor coverage far out at the galactic edge, and a fleet should be able to mop them up easily enough. If they encounter too much resistance they change their approach vector. Or the unbidden would trickle ships through lots of rifts and you'd be generally fine unless you let a critical mass build up and they build a stabilizer on the other side at which point they start coming through a lot faster. But this should only happen if they find uninhabited space or a stupid AI empire.
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Oct 5, 2017 18:49
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OwlFancier posted:It is a bit annoying when a threat just spawns in your empire and you're turbofucked whether the galaxy rallies or not. Because there really isn't anything you can do about it. Do you just quit once they take a system or two from you, or do you actually stay and fight? Because you'll usually get a *lot* of help if you're the main person in the firing line once they start spreading out. Sure, you'll probably lose part of your empire, but that's not the same as game over. I think the problem is players thinking the game is lost because they lose one fleet or one system to the crisis more than anything else.
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Oct 5, 2017 18:51
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Wiz posted:Do you just quit once they take a system or two from you, or do you actually stay and fight? Because you'll usually get a *lot* of help if you're the main person in the firing line once they start spreading out. Sure, you'll probably lose part of your empire, but that's not the same as game over. Generally the couple of times I've been the spawn point of an invasion I get functionally hosed pretty quickly. Like yes I might technically be able to eke out the game as a rump state but I'm basically back a hundred years behind everyone else and by the time I get back to competitiveness, it's going to be at the point where there's not a lot of the game left to play. The game isn't as fun if you're already nearing the end of the tech tree and you're just conquering worlds, it's much better when you're progressing tech, unlocking traditions and developing your space at the same time as engaging with other empires. Even if people pitched in meaningfully I've still lost pretty vital parts of the empire. Maybe if you're spanning a quarter of the galaxy by that point it's not a huge problem but the unbidden last time basically decimated the heart of my empire and the prethoryans equally outnumbered me so much that I couldn't rebuild fast enough to do anything. Hell a lot of the time it's not like I can do anything to begin with because no part of the threat is small enough for my fleet to attack it. You basically need to be a serious heavyweight or get other people to die a bunch before you, in order to be able to be anything but a speedbump for a lot of the threats. Partly it's kind of an issue with fleets being so slow to rebuild, once you lose if the enemy still has fleets they can hamstring you pretty effectively because you need either a very large empire or a period of peace to rebuild. And that works better in a normal fight because you can give away planets or take losses and secure a truce enough to rebuild or get some allies to gang up on your enemy, but threats don't really take breaks like that. Fights snowball so quickly in the game that the diplomatic limitations to warfare are a fairly essential element, and a good one that I enjoy with conventional empire warfare, but obviously they don't really come into play for galactic threats, so I feel like they would be more fun if pro-active management by any individual empire was enough to at least get them out of their space. It ties them into the diplomacy game too because maybe there's a big, but not very proactive empire nearby who won't let you in to their space to control the threat, so you have to wonder whether it's better to war with them just so you can clear out the threat before it gets too big, or whether that's more dangerous than trusting them to deal with it. Threats should be interactable with by empires without huge fleets, the galactic war being the culmination of lots and lots of small fights rather than throwing huge fleets at even huger fleets of enemies. I'm reminded a lot of Rimworld actually because one of my gripes with that game is that it scales its difficulty by just making bigger and bigger armies come to kill you, and one of my most desired features is a very similar thing, where it instead sends multiple small armies at you and you can thin them out by engaging them before they join up, being as the game needs to give you a lot of enemies to be difficult but it has the same thing as threats in stellaris where once you lose, you lose hard and recouping afterwards can be virtually impossible without the enemy giving you some breathing room. I think I would enjoy a threat that aimed to split its fleets into much smaller armies, and spread them out across many many systems, only bringing just enough to conquer whatever is in the system. So if they're wanting to conquer an empire with 20k fleet power, they would bring maybe, 25k fleet power to bear on that empire, and send the rest somewhere else. That way that empire still gets to have a good fight, and contribute to the whole war, but it's in their weight class. And then you have the whole diplomatic element stemming from that, because allies might also be under attack and unable to spare fleets to help. Maybe that's the intent but at the moment it seems like crises just poo poo out huge doomfleets and you have to just hurl everything in the galaxy at them to kill it. Which is certainly threatening but not, perhaps, the most engaging for any individual actor in the event? Especially not if they get picked as the origin point. Crises don't really scale well with individual empires and while that might be realistic I don't find it enormously enjoyable gameplay wise. And even less so when a galaxy's worth of danger gets dumped in your face. It's still the RNG deciding to gently caress you and you specifically which isn't my favorite thing in the world. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Oct 5, 2017 19:10
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Wiz posted:Do you just quit once they take a system or two from you, or do you actually stay and fight? Because you'll usually get a *lot* of help if you're the main person in the firing line once they start spreading out. Sure, you'll probably lose part of your empire, but that's not the same as game over. Easy federation win! Really there needs to be some sort of not a federation alliance military alliance because while the galaxy may rally to fight off the scourge that doesn't mean they don't still dislike each other. Also what are the odds of the crises counting as a defensive war?
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Oct 5, 2017 19:12
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Wiz posted:So no, that's not true at all. At fleet cap, with all the normal techs that mattered, I had about 90k in fleet power, while they were running around with 360k, slowly increasing as they built more 1.6k destroyers. I couldn't work directly together with the other pair, since they still kinda hated me and wouldn't let me in their territory, but working together indirectly as much as possible three quarters of the galaxy got smashed. I found it a discouraging experience, as it felt as there was no reasonable way I/we could have won. Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Oct 5, 2017 19:12
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Wiz posted:Do you just quit once they take a system or two from you, or do you actually stay and fight? Because you'll usually get a *lot* of help if you're the main person in the firing line once they start spreading out. Sure, you'll probably lose part of your empire, but that's not the same as game over. For me, if the threat spawns in my part of the galaxy, it's one of two scenarios. 1) I'm already big enough to fight them on my own, so I do so ASAP to avoid as many losses as possible and the AI doesn't have to lift a finger, or 2) I'm too small to beat them on my own, which probably means I'm bordered by some powerful rivals and have been unable to expand, so as soon as I lose my fleet and a chunk of my planets it doesn't matter whether the threat wins or loses, I'm going to get eaten by somebody. In my experience, if you can't deal with the threat by the time it spawns you're already in a super vulnerable position. Likely outmatched by multiple AI opponents even without the threat, having the middle of your empire wrecked and your fleet destroyed is a killing blow.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:14
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I will say that I find awakened empries to work better than the other crises because they have alternatives, like yes I will sign the treaty if I can't fight you, I will sign and then build up strength for the opportunity to stab you in the back. That gives me an option and a goal. I can handle that and it's interesting. It changes the playing field dramatically, but it doesn't take me out of the competition in any meaningful way, it just changes the nature of the contest.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:15
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This all just goes to show that those of you who voted to improve warfare instead of diplomacy are wrong. 
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Oct 5, 2017 19:16
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Yeah I've tried the "go down with a fight" play quite a few times. Some 400k of crisis fleets drop on me, my 100k fleet is no match and no amount of tricky hit and run works and even if I had a defense pact or two, they're useless and an extra 20-30k of fleet doesn't help. They gobble me up while my nasty neighbours laugh. Totally hopeless situation every time.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:17
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah I've tried the "go down with a fight" play quite a few times. Some 400k of crisis fleets drop on me, my 100k fleet is no match and no amount of tricky hit and run works and even if I had a defense pact or two, they're useless and an extra 20-30k of fleet doesn't help. They gobble me up while my nasty neighbours laugh. Totally hopeless situation every time. That's the other thing, threats are so out of scale with the rest of the galaxy that defensive pacts are kind of irrelevant, because a defensive pact only needs to be enough to deter nearby threats, not galactic scale threats. An entente is only a slightly larger speedbump.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:19
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You can turn down the crises difficulty now so uh
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Oct 5, 2017 19:21
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turn off the TV posted:You can turn down the crises difficulty now so uh The late -game crisis that dropped in a mature advanced galaxy was set to .5 strength and deposited about 480k worth of fleets on the first wave alone when the combined fleets of the galaxy was probably in the 200-300 range, if they some how all death balled up and worked together, and that was just the first wave. Doing .25 crsis strength now but haven't managed to get far enough into a game to see. That's the problem, you need to play for hours and hours to see if the crisis is balanced or not and then it's either a huge hopeless fight or a disappointing cake walk.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:24
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Looking at my current game for example: I'm Reach of Light.  The guys west of me hate me, but the guys north of me are friendly. I've had a brief war with the combine to the west but overall I'm in relative peace since I secured a defensive pact with my northern neighbor, I'm planning to intervene with the prime erasers to the west, though the combine are actually guaranteed by one of my friendly neighbours so I am stuck in cold war with them for the forseeable future.  This is a nice game because I actually have a lot of tension from borders with my neighbours but because I got in good with the guys north of me, I can maintain peace with trust caps. However they might federate up soon, which would cool our relations a bit and I'm faced with the possibility of invasion, so I'm trying to get friends elsewhere to offset that. All of this delicate balance is completely overruled if the unbidden or prethoryan appear however because none of it matters, none of these guys have enough combined firepower to fight them, unless the prime erasers or the big isolationist blob up in the northeast get involved, the entire context for the game is hosed. Now if one of the FEs wakes up, that's more interesting, because they will slowly convert us all over to being signatories, and frankly if the xenophiles wake up, I'm signing up ASAP, because I like them. This will change the balance of power but they're going to have to go off crusading against the erasers or the isolationists at some point, and then the rest of us, having probably a good bit of fleet power still intact, might have a chance against them. turn off the TV posted:You can turn down the crises difficulty now so uh The problem is that it's a galactic crisis, and it's never going to be balanced around any empire so long as that's true and it operates on deathball rules. Either you tone it down enough to gimp it if it happens anywhere not close to you, or you have it high enough that it still fucks whoever it lands on. Hence why I'm suggesting spreading them out a bit.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:29
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Wiz posted:Do you just quit once they take a system or two from you, or do you actually stay and fight? Because you'll usually get a *lot* of help if you're the main person in the firing line once they start spreading out. Sure, you'll probably lose part of your empire, but that's not the same as game over. It's a huge "what the gently caress did I do to deserve this?" moment when two of them spawn in your empire and the third on your border, and you lose planets before you can do anything about it. Both of the machine worlds in my empire spawned in systems with 20+ tile core worlds that were just gone instantly. But then things started coming together, I just barely managed to lock down one of the worlds and was eventually invited into a federation, and after a few decades of frustrating stalemate I managed to start turning things around. I wouldn't have thought I could make it when these absurd things just arbitrarily hosed me so hard, but I managed it. That said, even with my eventual triumph, I'm not sure if it was a good or bad experience on balance.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:32
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Crises are supposed to be a threat. You're supposed to be able to lose to them. If that idea doesn't appeal, turn them off? Also, saying they 'dump 480k on you' kind of ignores the fact that they split their fleets, and use a fair amount of that power to guard their own systems. It's not like you just get half a million crisis fleet power in your home system all of a sudden unless you're on a very high crisis strength setting.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:46
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Wiz posted:Crises are supposed to be a threat. You're supposed to be able to lose to them. If that idea doesn't appeal, turn them off? A crisis on the other side of the galaxy and one starting in your own territory are completely different gameplay experiences though.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:47
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Sometimes losing is fun. Dwarf fortress handled this well that stories of loss are often the most interesting ones, but all add to a ongoing map/world. I think losing in stellaris would be fun if you could some how fast forward 500 years and start again on the same map, finding the ashes of the old.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:49
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I think a crisis can be a threat without the level of its threat being tied almost entirely to where the RNG decides to place them. A galactic scale threat can involve galactic scale fighting, not just very large fleet power numbers fighting in a comparatively small number of systems. If half the galaxy declared war on the other half, that would be a galactic level threat, but it would be a very different and, I think, more interesting experience to a spot in the galaxy being designated as the gently caress zone and sending out fleets of sufficient power as to be only meaningfully distinguishable from space-tarrasques to the most powerful of empires. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Oct 5, 2017 19:51
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Wiz posted:Do you just quit once they take a system or two from you, or do you actually stay and fight? Because you'll usually get a *lot* of help if you're the main person in the firing line once they start spreading out. Sure, you'll probably lose part of your empire, but that's not the same as game over. You can't blame players for doing this if the AI doesn't tell them that they are riding to rescue and provides no form of communication about where exactly they're sending their fleets to enable a degree of teamwork. Only F/AEs do this to any limited extent, and not exactly pro-actively.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:51
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Baronjutter posted:Sometimes losing is fun. Dwarf fortress handled this well that stories of loss are often the most interesting ones, but all add to a ongoing map/world. I think losing in stellaris would be fun if you could some how fast forward 500 years and start again on the same map, finding the ashes of the old. That's one of my ideas for the future, actually. Not sure if it'll ever happen, but it would be really cool to be able to 'fast forward' once done, find your old empire as a Fallen Empire, etc. I also think it might help players deal with losing to a crisis if there was some special events related to it, like being ceded territory somewhere safe in the galaxy, or building an ark to flee to another galaxy, or otherwise some kind of special rewards for being on the frontline. For those who seem to want crises to always be a manageable threat and never lose anything to them, I think you should just turn them off, though.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:52
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Aethernet posted:You can't blame players for doing this if the AI doesn't tell them that they are riding to rescue and provides no form of communication about where exactly they're sending their fleets to enable a degree of teamwork. Only F/AEs do this to any limited extent, and not exactly pro-actively. I mean, most of the time they will send their fleets to follow yours, which isn't exactly subtle. But yeah, more communication on this would probably be good.
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Oct 5, 2017 19:52
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Will the end of the cycle destroy habitats?
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Oct 5, 2017 19:53
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