|
Nightgull posted:Anyone know the MTTH for the Great Khan? Google is telling me 100 years but it’s a random reddit post so who knows. I’m waiting on them to take a big chunk out of one of the massive exterminators, assimilators, or purifiers who occupy the south, east, and west respectively. This is the first time I’ve seen the genocidal empires do well, especially in a game with so many empires - 21 on the biggest size galaxy. Scary poo poo My take is that you want to have two different type of fleets. The first type is just as many corvettes as you can get evenly split between triple autocannons and missile boats with plasma. They are your fast response forces and are at their most deadly when you can camp them at a jump point entrance so that when a more balanced fleet jumps into the sector they can just tear them apart. The second type is more balanced with pd destroyers who solely exist to eat poo poo and die so that your capital ships, cruisers and up can unload on the enemy. Especially when you get titans these fleets are great for capping sectors as they titan weapon can hit outposts/stations the moment it enters a system. You generally want an even split between the two with a slight preference to the corvette spam and make sure to do your best to keep an eye out for enemy fleets so that way you can focus your multiple fleets into one point to counter a more organized resistance.
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2018 23:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 10:03 |
|
|
binge crotching posted:100 year MTTH, but it will happen much slower if there is more than one marauder faction. It'll also happen faster once more than 50 years have passed from the mid-game timer. Thanks, unfortunately I don't have access to any marauders (which is why I'd like them to pop off, lmao). Another question: Why can't I rival these guys? Pretty sure I only have two rivals (is there any way to check other than opening each empire's diplomacy screen?), we share a border (but aren't neighbors for some reason), and I can declare war on them. They're in a federation, do I have to rival the fed leader instead? I can't figure it out. The border.  The neighbor map mode.  As a bonium: the most traits I've seen on a leader. This is vanilla, the last trait is from the shroud, and I don't remember where he got maniacal. 
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2018 23:58
|
|
|
Xerxes17 posted:It's rather sad how easy it is to failure cascade. I could have weathered the storm if I had of just ignored the ransomeers event, because that wouldn't have tanked my economy and I would have been able to defend that fortress system, maybe. Autocannon talk: Being a militarist or having a scientist with the 'Propulsion' specialty will increase you chances at the tech draw. I think the 3rd pirate spawn should come with autocannons as well, letting your salvage force the card to be around. That said, they're really not the be-all end-all of early fights. Those tend to come down to fleet size much more so than tech. Having the ransomeers event tank your economy says to me that you were in a rough place already, and there are a lot of reasons that could be. Most likely is slow expansion, or burning a lot of minerals on questionable early buys. Having an enemy attack you opportunistically often indicates that you're not keeping up in fleet size, which again is probably a function of being slow to start your economy. However Fanatic purifiers get +33% naval cap (+6 ships early on) and +33% fire rate, and if they're militarist and you're not they're getting a fire rate bonus there too (10% per level). That gives them a decent fleet power edge over even a full 20 corvettes, but also makes them more likely to attack you because of the fleet power difference if your fleet is below 20. You don't exactly need your border station to be stuffed with defense sats (stupid expensive early game), but you'll need your full 20 ships ready to jump in. They'll probably not attack you if you're at fleet cap though, which can give you time to dig for the actual techs that will give you a fighting chance: +naval cap (+30) and +fleet cap (+20) in society research.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 00:00
|
|
Libluini posted:Interesting, because my interpretation (based mostly on what we learn in Echopraxia), is completely incompatible with yours. So obviously have to disagree! Negative. Meet me behind The Book Barn after school, nerd!
|
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 00:26
|
|
|
Milkfred E. Moore posted:Feudal Civic civs could maybe have something like cheaper colony ships but they're guaranteed to have different ethics and start as an independent vassal or something. Man I could've sworn at one point there was the ability to make a cheaper, privately sponsored colony ship but the people that came from it had random ethics. Am I thinking of a completely different game, or some mod that's been lost to time?
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 03:50
|
|
|
Black Pants posted:Man I could've sworn at one point there was the ability to make a cheaper, privately sponsored colony ship but the people that came from it had random ethics. Am I thinking of a completely different game, or some mod that's been lost to time? Used to be a tech you could get that would allow you to buy colony ships with energy, yeah. It was flavored as a private company building it. It wasn’t any cheaper however.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 03:58
|
|
|
Black Pants posted:Man I could've sworn at one point there was the ability to make a cheaper, privately sponsored colony ship but the people that came from it had random ethics. Am I thinking of a completely different game, or some mod that's been lost to time? That used to be part of the money unity tree where you could use energy instead of minerals to buy colony ships.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 03:58
|
|
|
It still exists, though. It's just been rolled into the Corporate Dominion civic.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 04:03
|
|
|
Nightgull posted:Used to be a tech you could get that would allow you to buy colony ships with energy, yeah. It was flavored as a private company building it. It wasn’t any cheaper however. Energy is way easier to get than minerals, it's so much cheaper.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 04:07
|
|
|
Black Pants posted:Man I could've sworn at one point there was the ability to make a cheaper, privately sponsored colony ship but the people that came from it had random ethics. Am I thinking of a completely different game, or some mod that's been lost to time? You need to take the corporate dominion civic. That requires you to have an oligarchic government and not xenophobic. It also gives you +1 energy to trade hub, and you start with the tech that lets you build the starbase thing that gives +2 energy per trade hub. It is honestly a really strong civic, since it gives you decent amount of bonus energy and being able to use energy for colonies instead of minerals is pretty amazing early game.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 04:50
|
|
|
wiegieman posted:Energy is way easier to get than minerals, it's so much cheaper. Eh, I wouldn't call it easier to get, just easier to end up with a surplus of since there's less stuff that needs it. I'll often end up in an energy crunch around mid game because I'd been running single digit energy income from focusing mineral production so hard and suddenly I need to expand the fleets or whatever to send it negative.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 05:33
|
|
|
Energy feels weird to me. The amount of minerals I have is the important part with that, but for energy the amount I have is meaningless, only keeping the income above my spending on upkeep is important. Unless I gently caress up and go over on upkeep the amount of energy I have goes up forever and is rarely ever spent on anything.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 05:45
|
|
|
Curators, artists, traders, edicts? It takes me a while before I feel like I’m fine on energy.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 06:31
|
|
|
Black Pants posted:Energy feels weird to me. The amount of minerals I have is the important part with that, but for energy the amount I have is meaningless, only keeping the income above my spending on upkeep is important. Unless I gently caress up and go over on upkeep the amount of energy I have goes up forever and is rarely ever spent on anything. Really? You should be spending 3000 energy every ten years per curator, artisan, and trade good. Not to mention the shroud if you’re psionic. Obviously you aren’t going to be spending it as liberally as minerals but there are plenty of important things to spend it on like terraforming, activating gateways, paying marauders. I find im never really comfortable with my energy income outside of the early game until I’ve got a solid 100 or so before capacity boost.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 06:35
|
|
|
I have had a long history of only discovering curators really late, or only finding out about them as they died to a genocidal race, heh. But considering how often I tend to get +power storage research vs +mineral storage research, I tend to have upwards of 50k energy stored before I get past 20k minerals, and unless I just go terraform every planet around me I don't really have use for a whole lot of it before making megastructures.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 08:01
|
|
|
wiegieman posted:Energy is way easier to get than minerals, it's so much cheaper. isndl posted:Eh, I wouldn't call it easier to get, just easier to end up with a surplus of since there's less stuff that needs it. I'll often end up in an energy crunch around mid game because I'd been running single digit energy income from focusing mineral production so hard and suddenly I need to expand the fleets or whatever to send it negative. I wanted to say that you're technically correct, but then I thought "hey all stars grant energy, while not all stars grant minerals" along with "you're more likely to have colonized worlds for trading hubs than a nebula for a mining station". So energy is sort of technically easier to get. Then you consider that in the early game nothing is pressing for energy usage, while everything is competing for minerals, so trading 300 energy for starting a colony instead of minerals is pretty big. Also the civic gives you more energy from trade hubs. So early game spending energy instead of minerals lets you grow faster, and mid game your trading hubs are producing more energy helping with that crunch. Also if you get a super energy start and very limited minerals you suffer far less by being able to leverage that energy in more ways.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 09:48
|
|
|
I miss being able to straight up buy minerals for energy and vice versa too. That helped out a lot.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 10:04
|
|
|
Black Pants posted:I miss being able to straight up buy minerals for energy and vice versa too. That helped out a lot. It was, however, totally imbalanced and a right faff.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 10:12
|
|
|
It'd be neat if the enclaves actually did stuff with all that energy and/or minerals you're shoving at them. Building additional enclaves, maybe asking you for help clearing out (star located in a jerk enemy's empire) as it's of scientific or artistic interest or full of xuragel.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 11:11
|
|
|
ZypherIM posted:I wanted to say that you're technically correct, but then I thought "hey all stars grant energy, while not all stars grant minerals" along with "you're more likely to have colonized worlds for trading hubs than a nebula for a mining station". So energy is sort of technically easier to get. Then you consider that in the early game nothing is pressing for energy usage, while everything is competing for minerals, so trading 300 energy for starting a colony instead of minerals is pretty big. Also the civic gives you more energy from trade hubs. Every star gives energy but on average you have maybe two to three mineral deposits per system. The upkeep of those combined with that of outposts and research stations means I'm usually hitting a point where I have to avoid building mineral stations because I don't have the energy to spare yet. Picking up leaders for 200 a pop adds up (I run something like four or five survey ships simultaneously if there's enough space to do so, plus an admiral), keeping a reserve to pay for event bonuses, colony maintenance, it all adds up fast. Trading hubs are good but in my experience mostly cover building maintenance for the planet and not even that if you're colonizing multi planet systems. Honestly, I simply don't colonize much at all in the early to mid game, the time to breaking even on the investment is too long. Maybe one or two planets if there's juicy 20+ tile planets available, but otherwise my entire economy is geared towards racing to claim choke points.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 11:34
|
|
|
Thanks for the reply guys, I've already rolled my Captain Ironman game, with the same faction as I had made before. "The Polity" based on the books by Neal Asher, which is a series I can recommend reading. I decided to go with Egalitarian, Militarist and Materialist, with Wasteful, mechanist and mining guilds.  The current state of things. In this game I started off with a hive mind to my south, egalitarian fanatical militarists to my north, and the exterminators to my east. This time I was a lot more careful with my economy and much more measured with my expansion. The only time things got dicey was when I bought some cruisers for a cool 2000 energy. More on that later. To the south, my expansion was immediately blocked off by the hive mind, but that wasn't a problem as I had much better options in the other directions. Also once I discovered the exterminators, I was quite happy to have them be a buffer for me. Likewise for the Commonwealth to the north, blocking my access to the "badlands" to the north east, which is full of mining drones. So the game went fairly smoothly until the exterminators finally flipped out on the hive mind, which I carefully watched for a few months. But once they collapsed against them, I mobilized and sent my on fleet to intercept the exterminators and to push them back. At this point I had AC corvettes, missile corvettes, destroyers, and most importantly, 5 gently caress off cruisers which wrecked everything they fought against.  These boys ain't nothing to gently caress with. So after I joined the fight, I pushed them back to their home-world, neatly bisecting their empire in two. Unfortunately, my total fleet cap meant that I could only really afford to have the one big killer fleet so in that triangle of systems I have, I was mostly doing running battles to get their war exhaustion up and to buy time until I could get ground armies in place to take the two planets they had. After taking both, I decided to go for a white peace and build up for the next go around. I also gave the systems I had taken back to the hive mind to keep them on side. In the western point of the triangle, it is a pulsar system and a chokepoint. I decided that I didn't want to dedicate a fleet for that system, so I've instead built up a starhold with 2x guns, 2x missiles, listening post and comms jammer with 9 defense platforms with maxed armor and a good mix of PD, small UV lasers, medium UV lasers and anti-matter missiles. Total strength of this fortress is 4.7k. Going by the fact that I've only seen destroyers and frigates from the XTR's, I don't think they should have any problems. I've also now got access to building cruisers. My truce has just finished against the XTR's, so I'm going to clear them out now and then I'll launch a limited war against the birds to my north to open the the badlands and to linkup the core systems with the space I'll take from the robbits.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 13:12
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Re: novels if you can survive with only mild levels of grotesque pessimism: Vernor Vinge has “a fire upon the deep” and “a deepness in the sky”. I also likedBruce Sterling’s Schismatrix. Hmm, I've never really gelled with Bruce Sterling's writing style somehow. Just couldn't get into him. Wasn't Vernor Vinge the guy who invented the term "technological singularity"? Might check that out! Also, I want all the grotesque pessimism. Embrace the Worm. The only novel I've ever read about a civilization embracing the worm inevitably was Asimov's Nightfall, though.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 15:00
|
|
|
DrSunshine read The Mote in God's Eye.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 15:18
|
|
|
Splicer posted:DrSunshine read The Mote in God's Eye. Do this, and the sequel.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 17:31
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Known Space is also solid.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 20:33
|
|
|
Oh by the way, apologies to the thread for the sci-fi book derail. I'd have asked in Book Barn, but I specifically wanted stories that remind one of Stellaris's more Lovecraftian and darker themes, and I thought it was easier to just ask here than do the reverse and have to explain over there. 
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 21:34
|
|
|
There are two books I will recommend at any opportunity, The Mote in God's Eye and Day of the Triffids. Never apologise for giving me the opportunity to do so.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2018 22:25
|
|
|
Okay so I found Prophet's Retreat in 2222. I haven't found the associated FE yet, am I going to get shitfucked by a 150k fleet if I colonize it? Am I cool to put an outpost in the system and hang on to it? Red to NW is Xenophobic Fanatic Militarists (lol yay), far N is galactic core. 
goatsestretchgoals fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Jul 8, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 00:48
|
|
|
goatsestretchgoals posted:Okay so I found Prophet's World in 2222. I haven't found the associated FE yet, am I going to get shitfucked by a 150k fleet if I colonize it? Am I cool to put an outpost in the system and hang on to it? If you find a Holy World gaia planet and colonise it (it's fine to just own the system) a spiritualist FE somewhere WILL gently caress you up, yes.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 00:54
|
|
|
Black Pants posted:If you find a Holy World gaia planet and colonise it (it's fine to just own the system) a spiritualist FE somewhere WILL gently caress you up, yes. Thanks much, Google/Reddit was unclear on what happens if you hadn't found the associated FE yet. E: I'm probably still hosed this game because of the assholes in red, but at least it will be in single thousands of digit fleets.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 00:57
|
|
|
goatsestretchgoals posted:Thanks much, Google/Reddit was unclear on what happens if you hadn't found the associated FE yet. They spawn vaguely nearby a spiritualist FE, but due to starlane generation mechanics (and sometimes weird bugs) they can sometimes be pretty far away from their associated FE, far enough that you won't discover them for a while. But they're still linked to it.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 02:36
|
|
|
Black Pants posted:They spawn vaguely nearby a spiritualist FE, but due to starlane generation mechanics (and sometimes weird bugs) they can sometimes be pretty far away from their associated FE, far enough that you won't discover them for a while. But they're still linked to it. Yep, grey-blue to my NE is the FE:  Foldora in the oddly uncolonized area between myself and the red assholes is the Prophet's World. Is the AI stupid enough to colonize that world?
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 02:43
|
|
|
tooterfish posted:Mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, yes. On the other, I'll never trust a Puppeteer after all the poo poo they've pulled.  DrSunshine posted:Oh by the way, apologies to the thread for the sci-fi book derail. I'd have asked in Book Barn, but I specifically wanted stories that remind one of Stellaris's more Lovecraftian and darker themes, and I thought it was easier to just ask here than do the reverse and have to explain over there.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 02:52
|
|
|
goatsestretchgoals posted:Okay so I found Prophet's Retreat in 2222. I haven't found the associated FE yet, am I going to get shitfucked by a 150k fleet if I colonize it? Am I cool to put an outpost in the system and hang on to it? They just pretend to like those so called holy worlds so they would be quite grateful if you gave them a reason to stop caring about it by using a planet cracker on them. In all seriousness don't do this as it is a horrible idea.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 02:58
|
|
|
goatsestretchgoals posted:Foldora in the oddly uncolonized area between myself and the red assholes is the Prophet's World. Is the AI stupid enough to colonize that world? They can be, and it's hilarious when it happens. So yes, let them have that system. It's sad that AI won't claim systems next to an isolationist FE unless they are strong enough to beat the FE. Also it's annoying when you border one because they mean you'll always have unclaimed systems generating pirates. Black Pants fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Jul 8, 2018 |
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 03:08
|
|
|
Hunt11 posted:They just pretend to like those so called holy worlds so they would be quite grateful if you gave them a reason to stop caring about it by using a planet cracker on them. In all seriousness don't do this as it is a horrible idea. Do it, then smash their fleet, invade their worlds, and forcibly transcend them to machine godhood.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 05:55
|
|
|
Last game I accidentaly put a HW system into a sector. Sectors were set to colonize...wiegieman posted:Do it, then smash their fleet, invade their worlds, and forcibly transcend them to machine godhood. Also this.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 06:34
|
|
|
Okay, ten out of ten games I get the contingency as end game crisis. So very tired of it. I really want to continue playing ironman games, so modding is out of the question, right? Would save scumming work? At what point will the end game crisis be decided? Can I reload when I get the first end game pop up and eventually get a different one or is that decided way earlier?
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 08:23
|
|
|
Tarquinn posted:Okay, ten out of ten games I get the contingency as end game crisis. So very tired of it. ironman is still functional, you just don't get achievements anymore
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 08:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 10:03 |
|
|
Jazerus posted:ironman is still functional, you just don't get achievements anymore Okay, good. Thanks. Kind of like getting the occasional achievement, though. Hmm.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2018 08:35
|
|