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Improbable Lobster posted:Maybe just something like "AI Governence". I can't really think of a lot of media where robots/ai are the dominant government without being Skynet or the Matrix so I can't think of any neat references to make. Banks' The Culture and Asher's The Polity both work this way.
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Mar 6, 2018 15:54
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:One day ascension perks will be cool and interesting. Until then, +4 starbases. I feel like they should be far more transformational, and far less commonplace, than they currently are. It should be a huge deal when you pick one. I don't like how many of the perks are really just feats of engineering, or relatively weak bonuses to cap or research. An ascension perk should be a defining attribute of the species, something that transforms it into something unique. Maybe something so unique that only one species can get each one.
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Mar 6, 2018 15:57
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hobbesmaster posted:Why +4 instead of say +8?
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Mar 6, 2018 15:57
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:I feel like they should be far more transformational, and far less commonplace, than they currently are. It should be a huge deal when you pick one. I don't like how many of the perks are really just feats of engineering, or relatively weak bonuses to cap or research. Agreed, but I don't mind stacking whacky ones so you can have your psyonic genemodded cyborgs that build space elevators. Also stop gating all the cool megastructures behind five ascension picks.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:02
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Admiral Joeslop posted:
More species submissions! A couple fill in some of the ethics gaps, but not all. pastebin: https://pastebin.com/gSmKdfiD                   Thanks for putting this together, you are awesome.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:03
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:I feel like they should be far more transformational, and far less commonplace, than they currently are. It should be a huge deal when you pick one. I don't like how many of the perks are really just feats of engineering, or relatively weak bonuses to cap or research. Agreed. Right now I spend a lot of my campaigns sitting on ascension perks waiting for mega-engineering or titans or some other tech so I can get something interesting rather than a flat bonus since it can take a few decades to get an ascension perk if you are a big enough empire.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:05
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GotLag posted:The Machines Coexist mod is neat but has several annoying bugs (blank entries in the species rights menu, your organics start out as undesirables, genetic techs are broken and don't drop). So I'm remaking it from scratch. I’d really like a citizenship policy called “benign neglect” which makes organic pops produce nothing and disables their happiness, like pre-sapients, but I was never able to work out of that was possible. on the off chance you work out how to do it while building this mod, please let me know!
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Mar 6, 2018 16:13
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:I feel like they should be far more transformational, and far less commonplace, than they currently are. It should be a huge deal when you pick one. I don't like how many of the perks are really just feats of engineering, or relatively weak bonuses to cap or research. Voidborne is fine, it's not about building habitats, it's about how your species as a whole is actively enthusiastic with moving en masse to live on tiny artificial planets. World crackers are about how your species is actually OK with committing possibly the worst war crime imaginable... other species could build them, but don't, because what the gently caress is wrong with you. Galactic Wonders require a people that think huge, empire-crippling dickwaving boondoggles are actually a good idea. Those ascensions aren't about whether you can, it's about whether you will.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:16
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Aethernet posted:Reducing Executive Vigour down to 50% was necessary, as it was way too good especially if you picked up Droning Optimisations early. Still a good perk though. By comparison, +4 starbases looks a bit weak, except for REALLY tall empires. I'm of the opposite mind, tall empires have plenty of static sources of +starbases, and with less territory you'll have less border systems. A wide empire is more likely to have more border systems and also needs more fleets since you can't reinforce as easily, and they'll be slower to unlock those extra ones. Agreed that executive vigour is still amazing. Before I could run all of them all the time, now it'll just be most of them all the time. I did find that a build of 'inward perfection'+'agrarian ideal' followed by taking adaptability as your first tradition is really strong. You start with a large bonus to unity gain, and as soon as you finish off adaptability your farms produce minerals, food, and unity. This lets you build food tiles on every food or mineral tile with minimal mineral loss, and you get double bonus from your capital building bonus. With 4 planets growing pops I was still at something like +2 progress/month.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:21
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Splicer posted:Voidborne is fine, it's not about building habitats, it's about how your species as a whole is actively enthusiastic with moving en masse to live on tiny artificial planets. World crackers are about how your species is actually OK with committing possibly the worst war crime imaginable... other species could build them, but don't, because what the gently caress is wrong with you. Galactic Wonders require a people that think huge, empire-crippling dickwaving boondoggles are actually a good idea. Those ascensions aren't about whether you can, it's about whether you will. Habitats are good in that you can actually make some use of them. They only cost 10k, and they do their job of being energy or science hubs tolerably well. I managed to make a colossus about six months before I won the game, but never got to go to war with it. The other actual "Empire changing" ascension perks might as well just be flavor text for all you can scrounge together the billion minerals to build one of the wonders or the ring world.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:23
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:Agreed, but I don't mind stacking whacky ones so you can have your psyonic genemodded cyborgs that build space elevators. Also stop gating all the cool megastructures behind five ascension picks. I would like to see cyborg supersoldiers and psychics engineered to the pinnacle of their species' potential for flavor reasons, but also because the prospect of organizing all the ascension paths apart under one banner using the current vassal mechanics makes smoke come out of my ears. Yet the challenge calls to me.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:24
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Not seeing anything in the new notes about fixing the range modifier or strike craft. Disappointing. Taear posted:Did you apply the patch partway through a game? I didn't apply the 2.0.2 patch partway through the game, I started with it, but it was still very strange. There was no Great Khan at all in my game. He just never showed up, no message, nothing. Then we reached 2430 or so and two FEs woke up, and I thought we were about to have a War in Heaven, but then instead the federation that formed in response to my massive threat went and dunked on the Xenophobe FE, reducing it to a rump state. I was extremely bored at this point so I conquered the Xenophile FE myself, along with the still-fallen Materialist FE (I'd long ago conquered the Spiritualist FE because they got pissy that one of my vassals colonized a holy world, and I think this is what triggered the awakening in the first place). Either way, the War in Heaven never happened and all four normal FEs are gone now. The Machine one is still around fighting the Contingency. drilldo squirt posted:Anyone else having huge trouble with the contingency? I can kill their expansion fleets well enough but I can't get enough naval capacity to actually kill any of the fleets guarding the cpu planets. I tried getting my federation to help but they wont follow me into any of the actual systems. I've had a lot of luck with battleship-heavy fleets stacked with all bypass weapons against FEs/AEs/the Contingency. I go X/LLMM/MM slots and use Arc Emitters, Cloud Lightning (if available), and Disruptors. A corvette swarm fleet to screen and you should take minimal losses too. My experience is that if you get a couple of 200/200 battleship fleets with this setup you should crush the Contingency hard enough in the opening salvo to not have much trouble cleaning up. Against the Contingency in particular you should use a shield-heavy setup because the majority of their weapons are plasma/tachyon, use Reactor Boosters if you need to.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:24
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A big empire can use trade hubs for hella credits on all inhabited worlds so they might be stretched for shipyards and border defense. 4 is pretty slim though
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Mar 6, 2018 16:31
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Splicer posted:+8 in the early game is massive. +4 in the late game is not much. That's why it worked when it was reduced influence cost (scaling) + 2 stations (fixed). Should be something like increase your starbase cap by +X and increase pop contribution to starbase cap by 50%. +80 fleet cap in the early game is also "massive"
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Mar 6, 2018 16:33
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Started yet another game and for the first time ever the space Mongols woke up and are blobbing hard. They only took one vassal and are just straight up destroying other empires. Is this normal?
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Mar 6, 2018 16:34
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Doesn't it also give you +command cap too? But yea, getting that means you instantly don't need +cap slots on your starbases, and can probably go from 1 fleet to 2 fleets as soon as you have minerals to build it.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:35
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Baronjutter posted:Started yet another game and for the first time ever the space Mongols woke up and are blobbing hard. They only took one vassal and are just straight up destroying other empires. Is this normal? Based on the game I played where the space mongols worked correctly, yeah, that sounds about right. They were just eating everything up until the Great Khan died in an event and the empire reformed.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:36
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Spanish Matlock posted:Habitats are good in that you can actually make some use of them. They only cost 10k, and they do their job of being energy or science hubs tolerably well. I managed to make a colossus about six months before I won the game, but never got to go to war with it. The other actual "Empire changing" ascension perks might as well just be flavor text for all you can scrounge together the billion minerals to build one of the wonders or the ring world. A lot of this isn't a problem with the perks themselves, it's the pacing of the game. Like a few people were saying earlier, a lot of mid to late game stuff takes forever to do and there's a lot of artificial limitations. By the time you've built a science hub, for example, you've probably already researched 90% of the unique techs in the game. Why bother? Some stuff needs to be sped up so that it becomes relevant as more than a victory lap. That said, the actual "Ascension" ascension perks are very good and I would like to see more stuff like that. Maybe every completed tree gives you one of the boring perks plus you get a little progress on your chosen ascension path? Like instead of going from 0 to full cyborgs you gradually move up, starting with wearable tech and then level up implants, and the last few ascensions are gradually improving robot bodies.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:36
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Splicer posted:The base ascensions should be a lot more consolidated and should all have a cool thing. The fleet cap one should give a unique ship. The science ones should mess with scientist traits, or just combine EE and the +10% one. The starbase one should give your bases an extra building slot or whatever. I kind of like that interpretation, but I think of it from a gameplay perspective. Specifically what ThatBasqueGuy said about "gating all the cool megastructures behind five ascension perks". The whole point of having limited choices is to provide a meaningful consequence that ultimately makes the gameplay more enjoyable. I would argue that the current perk system does that in a relatively uneven fashion. Compare the significant gameplay experience associated with the Transcendence perk with anemic choices like Interstellar Dominion or Technological Ascendancy. I look at something like Enigmatic Engineering. Right now it's a +2 sensor range bonus and a prohibition on reverse engineering. Imagine instead of it was both of those things, but also made it so that Empires had no way of knowing your technology level, couldn't trade with you, and no way of knowing your fleet strength. Imagine instead if you were the ones in that situation. Or Galactic Contender. Imagine if, instead of a simple bonus against Awakened Empires, it instead gave you access to unique technology that you previously had to reverse engineer. Maybe with a side effect of having your ship style changed into the Awakened style as you discovered more "Awakened" technologies. Defender of the Galaxy could be similar; rather than a fixed bonus to endgame empires it gave you access to unique technologies or narrative events that you had to research and develop that would serve as a useful tool against whatever endgame crisis pops up. Maybe when The Unbidden show up another external entity shows up to help you, but only because you've dedicated your entire Empire to protecting the galaxy. Other perks have limited utility because of how the game itself is currently functioning. A perfect example is Synthetic Age; currently there's no reason to take that perk because by the time it's available you've already gamed the system or run out of traits. Perhaps if Synthetic Age eliminated the limit on how many traits you could take it would be far more useful. Or if the traits were re-done so that there were some traits that cost far more points but had massive benefits.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:37
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I’m having a surprising amount of fun doing a life-seeded inward perfection run. I rushed habitats, got some living metal in my borders. It’s an interesting decision choosing between building infrastructure and building defenses. A bit moot now that I have world shaped and can turn all these planets into gaia worlds.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:40
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ZypherIM posted:Doesn't it also give you +command cap too? But yea, getting that means you instantly don't need +cap slots on your starbases, and can probably go from 1 fleet to 2 fleets as soon as you have minerals to build it. Now I do agree that its a bit harder to balance starbases because unlike fleets they can actually generate resources instead of strictly be a drain. 4 plus doubling starbase cap from population or something along those lines indeed might be the best way to handle it.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:42
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On an unrelated note I would really love it if the game did something a bit more intelligent when I have multiple research opportunities from the same tree. For example if I have the 2nd and 3rd options in a kinetic energy tree, I think the game should automatically remove the upper option and instead increase the progress from the lower one.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:43
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Spanish Matlock posted:Habitats are good in that you can actually make some use of them. They only cost 10k, and they do their job of being energy or science hubs tolerably well. I managed to make a colossus about six months before I won the game, but never got to go to war with it. The other actual "Empire changing" ascension perks might as well just be flavor text for all you can scrounge together the billion minerals to build one of the wonders or the ring world. Megaengineering and the requirements for master builders would be pushed down a tier with completion of the projects requiring the zero point energy/battleships/star fortress technologies.
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Mar 6, 2018 16:44
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If nothing else roll Machine Age into World Shapers, ffs
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Mar 6, 2018 16:45
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Transforming to gaia should not give the "ongoing terraforming" penalty or at least not take so loving long. Once you factor in the cost of the terraforming, the time while suffering -20%, it's going to need a lot of time to pay off that investment.
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Mar 6, 2018 17:03
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What constitutes "early, mid, and late game", as far as time played or tech levels goes?
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Mar 6, 2018 17:09
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Splicer posted:+8 in the early game is massive. +4 in the late game is not much. That's why it worked when it was reduced influence cost (scaling) + 2 stations (fixed). Should be something like increase your starbase cap by +X and increase pop contribution to starbase cap by 50%. Early game boosts to starbase numbers seems like a good way to energy bankrupt I like the pop cap contribution idea though, then it can be mixed in for naval cap too Autism Sneaks posted:If nothing else roll Machine Age into World Shapers, ffs Yeah, this, and also ring of life in with the wonders. Rings are good/fun but i'm not sold on the research base or dyson sphere,
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Mar 6, 2018 17:12
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Did the 2.02 beta notes say anything about the War in Heaven? Literally the entire galaxy has been at war for 15 years and lost probably about 1 million fleet power combined, and I just cyborged the entire capital of one Fallen Empire, but the highest war exhaustion anyone's reached is 13%. This feels much more like a real crisis, and is cool and good.Staltran posted:I've never actually used a colossus before, do you get the genocide diplomacy penalties? Neutron sweeping enemy planets would be quite useful if not, assuming you haven't already done enough genocide to make everyone hate you. You piss off the target enough to never be friends, and you take a big hit with their allies. Xenophiles and Pacifists also hate most Colossus attacks, and presumably spiritualists hate the robot ones and vice versa. Baronjutter posted:Started yet another game and for the first time ever the space Mongols woke up and are blobbing hard. They only took one vassal and are just straight up destroying other empires. Is this normal? Yeah, that's what they're supposed to do. You can hold them off if you've got a large enough fleet, and theoretically hunt down the Khan's fleet to shoot it down (which he has a chance of surviving), but they're deliberately overtuned for the point of the game they show up.
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Mar 6, 2018 17:23
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:Yeah, that's what they're supposed to do. You can hold them off if you've got a large enough fleet, and theoretically hunt down the Khan's fleet to shoot it down (which he has a chance of surviving), but they're deliberately overtuned for the point of the game they show up. The khan can also be replaced by another khan. He popped up in the marauders just a few systems south of my empire and ran over the gimpy hostiles i had cordoned off (All their planets sucked and were small so i didn't feel like bothering), but went after my allies so i sent my two big fleets down to kill him off. I killed one khan, and another took over, killed him, and then a 3rd did and the khanate become a regular AI empire after that.
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Mar 6, 2018 17:27
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Sloober posted:Early game boosts to starbase numbers seems like a good way to energy bankrupt The Dyson Sphere is pretty cool because it lets you run Resource Replicators in huge numbers and get tons of minerals.
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Mar 6, 2018 17:30
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Magil Zeal posted:The Dyson Sphere is pretty cool because it lets you run Resource Replicators in huge numbers and get tons of minerals. if you have the minerals to put a dyson sphere together do you need replicators (i'm building every megastructure in my current game just to say i did)
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Mar 6, 2018 17:32
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Sloober posted:if you have the minerals to put a dyson sphere together I mean that kind goes for all the megastructures, yeah.
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Mar 6, 2018 17:36
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Magil Zeal posted:The Dyson Sphere is pretty cool because it lets you run Resource Replicators in huge numbers and get tons of minerals. I have two spheres (one repaired, one built) in my current megacorp game. It's like 2380. And I have built a good 4 gateways too. I have like four planets that are exclusively Resource Replicators and unity buildings.
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Mar 6, 2018 17:37
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Looks like the latest beta patch notes say they've fixed the unity costs on system/planet bugs.
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Mar 6, 2018 17:38
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Sloober posted:Early game boosts to starbase numbers seems like a good way to energy bankrupt Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Mar 6, 2018 |
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Mar 6, 2018 17:40
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Anyone know why I can't use Gateways? I built an extensive Gateway network only to discover that they don't work! I built most of these myself, except the one on Olimar which I conquered from an enemy empire before I had the ability to build my own, and there are a few system names on this list I don't recognize and assume they're in other empires.
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Mar 6, 2018 17:40
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There's been several bug reports on the pdx forums of that same issue, current theory is that it's because you never got the "you have discovered a gate" event chain
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Mar 6, 2018 17:44
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Magil Zeal posted:I mean that kind goes for all the megastructures, yeah. Eh, the ring is pretty well priced at 110k for 100 tiles imo, and in smaller bursts of 20k to get there vs the 5 stages of 50k from the sphere. I'm making something like 900m/month now and none of it is hard, but that just means i'm past the point of caring about what i get out of it. Like in theory i like megastructures a lot, it's a fun concept, but it's basically just dickwaving due to the costs involved. Which is OK if i guess that's what they want them to be. I think ascension perks badly need some kind of passover on them though.
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Mar 6, 2018 18:02
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Ring seems p good by that analysis - it's basically a mega-habitat with a similar cost-per-tile, only it comes with tile resources and gets to build normal structures so it's good for more than just a science factory.
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Mar 6, 2018 18:08
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It struck me that Ascension picks should each have a pool of cool random events tied to them. Like how in EUIV taking financial can trigger inflation reduction events and such. They could also unlock unique anomalies or new choices for existing ones.
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Mar 6, 2018 18:14
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