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Yeah all the Stellaris end game crises are things to destroy utterly, they don't like stick around as a political force.
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Oct 16, 2018 19:00
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GunnerJ posted:Yeah all the Stellaris end game crises are things to destroy utterly, they don't like stick around as a political force. This is why, as badly implemented and buggy as they are, I really enjoy the Khan events. You never know how it's going to play out or how it's going to fall apart but they actually shake things up. Just make their drat events fire properly and fix their AI up a bit and the exploit of becoming their vassal and following their fleet with a construction ship and gaining 99% of their conquests...
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Oct 16, 2018 19:13
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Ham Sandwiches posted:It's really weird how the Aztec Invasion / weird CK2 mods with skeletons do a better job of presenting the idea of a sudden upheaval with a completely different force, in a game set in 1100 ad where you marry a horse and cut off your face, than in a space game where it's carte blanche Some end game stuff that isn't just an invasion would be pretty cool.
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Oct 16, 2018 19:38
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Nevets posted:Some end game stuff that isn't just an invasion would be pretty cool.
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Oct 16, 2018 19:40
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I just want more galaxy-shaking events in general. And, instead of tied to a date, I'd like them to be tied to things like research, economy, population, or fleet strength. It's fine if they trigger on the average (or median) strength of multiple empires in those values, too. The L-Gate is a great example, and I actually liked that someone could open it too early before that got patched out. However, I'd like to see these events scaled to the strength of the galaxy rather than having hard-set numbers. That way something like releasing the nanite swarms too early isn't an instant death sentence for multiple empires. Or a hypothetical space plague that kills 50 pops doesn't wipe out every small empire while barely touching big ones. And so on. It's totally fine if empires in a particular situation are hit very hard, but those should be exceptions rather than the rule. It's also fine if some events are "worse" than others for certain empires. But the goal of the events should be to shake things up, not end empires on their own.
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Oct 16, 2018 19:47
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Strudel Man posted:Both of these seem to boil down to "there is an obviously correct thing to do, and you will suffer when the AI fails to do it." This also true of the current Crisis, you realize. "Extragalactic biological scourge consuming the neighboring empire? Eh, I'll just kick back and wait for them to eat me too.  "
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Oct 16, 2018 19:59
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Vengarr posted:This also true of the current Crisis, you realize. "Extragalactic biological scourge consuming the neighboring empire? Eh, I'll just kick back and wait for them to eat me too.
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Oct 16, 2018 20:11
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Baronjutter posted:This is why, as badly implemented and buggy as they are, I really enjoy the Khan events. You never know how it's going to play out or how it's going to fall apart but they actually shake things up. Just make their drat events fire properly and fix their AI up a bit and the exploit of becoming their vassal and following their fleet with a construction ship and gaining 99% of their conquests...
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Oct 16, 2018 20:31
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end game crisis are, well, endgame. theyre meant to provide a last thing to fight for someone dominating the galaxy, or shake up a galaxy a player is treading water in. Either way after them you are pretty much done; the game's out of content.
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Oct 16, 2018 20:31
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The end game crisis also just make it clear the entire be all and end all of the game and the purpose of a space civilization is strictly geared towards supporting a huge fleet. It doesn't matter you playstyle, there's only one valid goal to be working towards: the biggest fleet. You're well into repeatable minor bonus techs by the time a crisis happens so tech doesn't really matter for fighting them, you've run out of +fleet capacity techs generations ago so the only way to field a bigger fleet is through controlling lots of space and space stations. Static defenses still barely scale in the game and have arbitrary caps to make sure they're never actually useful, so you can't do that. There's no real meaningful special projects that might give a research focused empire an alternate solution to a crisis. It always comes down to brute force, who can pump out the most minerals, energy, and fleet points to support the biggest fleet. Imagine if that little "tall" empire in the corner hit upon the secret weakness of the contingency's AI, or developed a bio-weapon against the scourge, or a remote project to severely slow down the dimensional portal's rate of spawning new unbidden. Imagine if there were special construction projects that involve building X number of expensive buildings or space stations to project some sort of field that would dampen the psionic link controlling the scourge or disrupt contingency communications or weaken the extradimensional energies of the unbidden. There's so much more interesting stuff the game could do to give any other goal than "big fleet" to the game.
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Oct 16, 2018 20:40
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Baronjutter posted:There's so much more interesting stuff the game could do to give any other goal than "big fleet" to the game.
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Oct 16, 2018 21:16
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ConfusedUs posted:I just want more galaxy-shaking events in general. And, instead of tied to a date, I'd like them to be tied to things like research, economy, population, or fleet strength.
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Oct 16, 2018 21:33
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Baronjutter posted:Imagine if that little "tall" empire in the corner hit upon the secret weakness of the contingency's AI, or developed a bio-weapon against the scourge, or a remote project to severely slow down the dimensional portal's rate of spawning new unbidden. Imagine if there were special construction projects that involve building X number of expensive buildings or space stations to project some sort of field that would dampen the psionic link controlling the scourge or disrupt contingency communications or weaken the extradimensional energies of the unbidden. In practice, alternative resolutions are generally going to favor bigger empires *even more* - they are much more able to afford them, and can do it at the same time as having a big fleet. I also do not really see whats inherently more interesting about building some expensive structures. Especially if its totally anticlimactic. The scourge are here, i'm fighting them.....Oh, the big empire across the galaxy built the anti-scourge station and they all died. Ok. Research projects are basically going to be idiot buttons. Press the button so you don't suck against the crisis or you are an idiot. Again not intrinsically more interesting. The primary virtue would be making crisis fleets much stronger in their initial expansion phase, as noone will have had a chance to research their weaknesses. This will only work if a research oriented empire had a qualitative advantage that let them conduct such an action instead of a quantitative advantage (as now). Narrative quest solutions to crisis fleets are also problematic, primarily because they are totally player oriented. You pretty much have to exclude the AI from doing them, and it leads to a situation where players are the only ones who can do anything. And once you know the 'right' way to do the quest, well.... you just do that. Ultimately I can't see it as being satisfying. To have heroic solutions the game kinda needs a heroic framework in place to begin with. The closest it has is science ships. TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Oct 16, 2018 |
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Oct 16, 2018 23:36
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:Narrative quest solutions to crisis fleets are also problematic, primarily because they are totally player oriented. You pretty much have to exclude the AI from doing them, and it leads to a situation where players are the only ones who can do anything. And once you know the 'right' way to do the quest, well.... you just do that. Ultimately I can't see it as being satisfying.
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Oct 16, 2018 23:50
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So what you’re saying is that we need alternate methods of projecting power/heroism, and fleets of science ships are one way to do it. Sign me the gently caress up
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Oct 17, 2018 00:00
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:In practice, alternative resolutions are generally going to favor bigger empires *even more* - they are much more able to afford them, and can do it at the same time as having a big fleet. I also do not really see whats inherently more interesting about building some expensive structures. Especially if its totally anticlimactic. The scourge are here, i'm fighting them.....Oh, the big empire across the galaxy built the anti-scourge station and they all died. Ok. One thing that might be cool is expensive buildings that could influence the direction a crisis tries to advance in. Some way to be like "hey swarm, go attack those guys over there I hate". It doesn't solve the problem at all, but it would allow the established empires to play for time or just try and use them as a weapon against their enemies. Then at least it would be interactive, and not just some interchangeable evil.
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Oct 17, 2018 00:12
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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If you guys don't like the narrative consequence of the endgame crises just... don't do them*? Play against the clock and see if you can win a Federation victory before 2450, or if you want a challenge move the crises date up or drop the crisis strength down to minimum so you can safely non-interact with it. * this is specifically directed against the complaint that the crises force the meaning of civilization toward military force.
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Oct 17, 2018 00:15
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Strobe posted:If you guys don't like the narrative consequence of the endgame crises just... don't do them*? Play against the clock and see if you can win a Federation victory before 2450, or if you want a challenge move the crises date up or drop the crisis strength down to minimum so you can safely non-interact with it. Yeah but what if they were better
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Oct 17, 2018 00:20
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PittTheElder posted:One thing that might be cool is expensive buildings that could influence the direction a crisis tries to advance in. Some way to be like "hey swarm, go attack those guys over there I hate". It doesn't solve the problem at all, but it would allow the established empires to play for time or just try and use them as a weapon against their enemies. Then at least it would be interactive, and not just some interchangeable evil. Splicer fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Oct 17, 2018 |
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Oct 17, 2018 00:22
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I've had the complaint that all the endgame crises are just big dumb blobs of random spawns for ages now. You could do so much better, the war in heaven, frankly, is far better than any of the engame crises because it 1: has context from the beginning, you know they're there and you know they're dangerous. 2. it ties into all the other systems because AEs are empires, they function like them, there are multiple approaches to them other than just them killing you. 3. this allows them to actually affect the state of the game rather than just killing everyone if you don't kill them fast enough. The only way another crisis can affect the game is by ending it if you don't end them, an AE can do far more than that. Even if you're going to drop a big blob of something on people you can do better than it being just a big blob of enemy ships, you could do terrain changes or sociological changes.
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Oct 17, 2018 00:40
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I've got 430 hours in this game and I've still never seen the Contingency.
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Oct 17, 2018 02:37
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I've never seen a mid or end game crisis at all at 350 hours. Should be getting one in my current game soon.
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Oct 17, 2018 02:44
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Mid- and end game crises are cool and all, personally I think the game would become a lot more interesting if civil wars and good old fashioned rebellions and revolutions happened from time to time and actually coudl succeed in tearing a space empire apart, and even more important have this be something that can actually be fun and engaging for the player as well and not just something that happens to the AI. Another thing that could happen is ideological dissidents in your empire scooting off to colonize a planet on their own and set up their own society. A civil war mechanic that ties into the existing (and hopefully expanded) faction mechanics could be a neat way to do it, where factions can ally with each other and different characters, pops and planets support different factions, all of which working to provide some dividing lines for a potential civil war or secession. Speaking of characters, I kind of wish they'd go away from the way it currently is where characters all start at level 1 and have a trait or two and then level up as they do stuff, and instead have characters be of varying levels of ability with the potential for getting more skilled over time, but mostly they are as they are, getting a very good character would therefore give an empire a real edge. It's probably too much to dream up but something like a (maybe) simplified version of the character system they are building in Imperator (or the one in EU:Rome) would be interesting for Stellaris. Where you don't really buy characters, you have a pool of them from which you can assign various leaders, but by holding position they become influential, and may become ambitious and wealthy enough to become a threat if they have or develop certain traits and get a good powerbase. Also of course with characters having relationships with each other that'd influence perhaps what factions they are attracted to, for Stellaris a pared down version where characters can have "enemies" and "allies" would perhaps be best, where they would seek to work together with their allies as regards factions and civil wars and such and work against their enemies. Ham Sandwiches posted:Would stellaris even work if you tried to go the balkanized start route like 30 small empires and combat starts really early Honestly I kind of think war in Stellaris would be more interesting if you started out with all the ship classes and went straight into the thing with fleets of corvettes, destroyers and cruisers, with perhaps only battleships (and of course world killers and other kinds of superweapons) unlocking later. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Oct 17, 2018 |
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Oct 17, 2018 02:56
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Would stellaris even work if you tried to go the balkanized start route like 30 small empires and combat starts really early I imagine that would bog down to complete poo poo in the endgame and yet 8 empires just doesn't seem like enough to have meaningful variations or power blocks. I'd be interested in a Stellaris mod or start variant where there's say 50ish tags to deal with instead of the current ~12 that typically decline over the course of a game.
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Oct 17, 2018 02:59
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Ham Sandwiches posted:Would stellaris even work if you tried to go the balkanized start route like 30 small empires and combat starts really early It actually works really well. Always crank AI empires to max in the starting settings.
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Oct 17, 2018 03:09
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Space plague crisis could be cool, really. Do some repeating techs to contribute to finding a cure, start locking down your borders as the plague is spreading (this would be more impactful in 2.2 when it hits your trade efficiency), when a planet is infected do you try to control the spread with armies or just hit with the planet cracker? Do you try to land grab from the now empty plague zone at the risk of infecting your empire? How will the robot empires react in this scenario?Ham Sandwiches posted:Would stellaris even work if you tried to go the balkanized start route like 30 small empires and combat starts really early I don't know about your games but late game balkanization is a regular thing in mine, empires start crumbling to ethics divergence all the time. That plus ideology wars. The AI also likes uplifting primitives so cranking up the primitives slider results in more border gore as well, at least until the AI has time to integrate them.
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Oct 17, 2018 03:33
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Huge galaxy, 30 empires, grand/normal admiral (non-scaling), high aggressiveness, max primitives, 5 fallen empires. So much backstabbing and war that by the time endgame rolls around you're down to a handful of conquerors and a large federation or two while everyone stares at each other with massive fleets. And 5x Crisis 
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Oct 17, 2018 03:42
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Rynoto posted:Huge galaxy, 30 empires, grand/normal admiral (non-scaling), high aggressiveness, max primitives, 5 fallen empires. So much backstabbing and war that by the time endgame rolls around you're down to a handful of conquerors and a large federation or two while everyone stares at each other with massive fleets. I'm pretty goddamn jealous that you can run a huge galaxy on your computer. I used to do giant maps in Civ4 and it was always so much fun seeing how things would shake out in the end.
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Oct 17, 2018 04:18
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Rynoto posted:Huge galaxy, 30 empires, grand/normal admiral (non-scaling), high aggressiveness, max primitives, 5 fallen empires. So much backstabbing and war that by the time endgame rolls around you're down to a handful of conquerors and a large federation or two while everyone stares at each other with massive fleets. I think I'll try these settings out my next game. Curious to see how bad the slowdown is once I hit mid-game. Axetrain fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Oct 17, 2018 |
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Oct 17, 2018 05:02
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I have an old as gently caress cpu and it slows to a crawl by the time end-game crisis comes about. One thing that probably helps though is I tend to play with ,5 or ,25 habitable planets so there's a lot less processor work on tiles needed.
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Oct 17, 2018 05:13
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My two endgame crisis ideas: 1. The Galactic Cold War - This triggers when 60% or more of a galaxy is occupied by empires with a common ethic but no single empire is massively more powerful than all others. With victory achieved for the forces of [ethic], suddenly the finer points of [ethic] don’t seem so trivial as before. Sure, everyone agrees beings have a soul, but is that soul a part of the shroud, or a distinct entity? Sure, everyone agrees all people are equal, but does that mean they’re entitled to equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? All factions of the dominant ethic split in two and empires led by opposing factions now utterly detest each other, even more than empires of other ethics. Intent being to break up situations where the galaxy becomes a massive love in and encourage a big galactic war eventually. 2. Viva la Revolution - Where one empire is massively more powerful than all others, the schism happens inside the massive empire. The empire chooses a faction, and then has to deal with a civil war inside its borders. Regardless of outcome, the losing faction flees the empire, and gradually other empires beyond the big empire’s borders start having to deal with revolutions spread by the big empire’s malcontents. Severity dependent on how big empire dealt with its own crisis. If a critical mass of empires are overthrown, they all team up to try to take down the big empire.
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Oct 17, 2018 08:00
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Agreed with those. Genuinely I think the game could be so much more interesting and crises so much better if they just gave the political status quo a boot. You don't need massive deathstacks of monsters to make a threat, you've ample things in the galaxy to do that, and there's a lot you could do by just making AIs more likely to work together, and more aggressive. Stellaris spends most of its time at peace, so simply changing that by changing the AI priorities and allegiances could make for some really interesting situations which retain context from the game so far.
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Oct 17, 2018 08:07
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I have seen one endgame crisis. This was back when they could bug out and just cluster in one system. On an unrelated note, I'm enjoying the variety in Real Space, but the vanilla non-conflicting version has a few... issues.  (I've also seen habitable planets completely inside the shell of a star)
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Oct 17, 2018 08:32
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Dareon posted:I have seen one endgame crisis. (He's got a hat!  )
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Oct 17, 2018 08:45
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PittTheElder posted:It actually works really well. Always crank AI empires to max in the starting settings. Yeah I used to always prefer fewer players until turned that setting to max on a whim. It made diplomacy a lot more fun (more empires means more potential friends as well as enemies), and if you play on a spiral map there's enough effective distance between empires to keep things from getting too crowded too quickly.
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Oct 17, 2018 09:02
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Dareon posted:On an unrelated note, I'm enjoying the variety in Real Space, but the vanilla non-conflicting version has a few... issues. Oh that's why some people call it a Halo. 
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Oct 17, 2018 09:07
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Reveilled posted:My two endgame crisis ideas: Of course, you could make it something that the AI automatically accepts but which is presented to the player as a choice...
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Oct 17, 2018 09:31
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The key to luring the player into making big bad decisions is to make them the cumulative result of a series of small decisions, each of which was reasonable and indeed beneficial when viewed in isolation. e: the very important caveat is that these decisions must have clearly led to the result, but it seemed worth it at the time. Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:02 on Oct 17, 2018 |
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Oct 17, 2018 10:13
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Nevets posted:Some end game stuff that isn't just an invasion would be pretty cool. I demand time crisis and still feel like you could have time techs make sense in this game once I have created enough time crystals for my temporal workshops I will be able to build tomorrows' work today! there's no possible way this could ever go bad under any circumstance! All these extra weird component orders we've been receiving from ourselves in the future are good and not an indication something bad is going to happen. We've already used this tech to put together a whole battleship in like a week by banking blorg-hours and components over a couple years, so these vaguely ominous indiscernible parts orders from the year 9999 are nbd. We'll go ahead and build them and just put them in the vault until it's time to deliver them. Yes we've also been getting orders from year 9 but this is an obvious glitch in the system and we can't send things backwards anyway so I guess we can just also build those and leave them in the time vault. It's good practice for the technicians and helps figure out what's going on. Also I wish there was a chance to find Sol III with titanic life and reptilian presapients. Hopefully that'll happen with Sexy Planets DLC
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Oct 17, 2018 10:14
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SniperWoreConverse posted:Also I wish there was a chance to find Sol III with titanic life and reptilian presapients. Hopefully that'll happen with Sexy Planets DLC There is?
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Oct 17, 2018 11:08
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