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Even without any Shroud shenanigans, you get the Psionic trait, which gives the best leader bonuses. You also get the best jump drive and an equivalent alternative to Sapient AI. Then you get the Shroud on top, which gives a chance to unlock the above techs super early, as well as the best shields or a random level 5 ship component. Plus a chance to make a leader immortal and double their Psionic bonuses, or form a Covenant for a permanent empire-wide bonus. The repeatable bonuses are pretty solid, and would be crazy OP if they weren't totally random, but the real meat is all the one-time events granting permanent benefits.
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May 9, 2020 21:06
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:Also, to the goon who was inspired to try the Life-Seeded refugee center, I'm glad I could give you the idea. Yes, thanks for that -- it's been fun! I had a slightly delayed start waiting for wars/migration treaties to happen, but once I started getting diverse pops it was easy to catch up. Getting Horizon Signal also helped -- now I have my old capital the Gaia world refugee centre, as well as my new capital mutant-filled abomination against nature, with more colonies in one system than the rest of my territory put together (I think I'm playing on a tiny galaxy). Are envoys new with the latest patch? Envoys allowed me to completely pacify my weird robot/hive neighbours in the early game, so I could focus on the religious fascists on the other side. Then I used envoys, favours and gifts to wangle my way into this great pacifist/xenophile federation. Now we're the strongest collective power in the galaxy (short of FEs), and it's a steady march of war deccing the fascists to change their ideology to my pacifist/xenophile/egalitarian, then have them join the federation a few years later, rinse repeat.
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May 9, 2020 21:41
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Yes, thanks for that -- it's been fun! They will welcome us as liberators!
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May 9, 2020 21:53
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Grandpa Palpatine posted:I haven't figured out if they actually lose the modules or if it's a display issue? It seems to lower their fleet power so I don't think its just a display issue.
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May 9, 2020 22:27
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:Even without any Shroud shenanigans, you get the Psionic trait, which gives the best leader bonuses. You also get the best jump drive and an equivalent alternative to Sapient AI. The psionic leader bonuses are better, but often overstated. They get the best bonuses to scientists, but it is only +5% research speed over synthetic/erudite. The governor stability bonus is the best. The admiral bonus is more complex, it will depend on fleet composition. Generals are irrelevant, though the psionic bonus is probably the worst. The Synthetic ruler trait is usually better than the others, even the chosen one variant. The advantage of psionic leader traits over synthetic leader traits becomes greater if you also have brain slug host to go with it I think (I believe these stack, though I don't have the relevant DLC). I feel the real advantage of the psionic ascension is that it can come online much faster, with the caveat that bonuses are gated by the random number generator. Bio ascension takes time to genemod species. Synthetic evolution comes with expensive projects. Psionic ascension is comparatively quick to pull off *if* you don't have problems getting the prerequisites. The extra techs are nice. The instrument of desire covenant is good, composer of strands and whispers in the void are ok, eater of worlds is bad.
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May 9, 2020 22:57
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The strength of bio ascension isn't really the gene modding options (though they are very good obvi), it's cloning vats. +33% pop growth in exchange for a building slot, it's loving boss.
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May 9, 2020 23:03
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Psi Jump Drives are extremely good Being able to nerve staple your filthy xenos slaves is a close second place
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May 9, 2020 23:03
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I never saw the point of nerve stapling slaves. By the time the option for advanced genetics comes about, genmodding thousands of slaves is prohibitively expensive, especially since they do their job just fine and dandy while sitting at 0% happiness. Someone sell me on it?
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May 9, 2020 23:48
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I'm torn about whether this upcoming patch will be a buff or a nerf to the voidborn start. With there being cheaper habitats available it will make expanding as a voidborn significantly easier than it was. However access to habitats for everyone being earlier will make that start less unique. Fully expanding out your habitats will also be a more involved affair for the voidborn start as well.
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May 10, 2020 00:02
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Serephina posted:I never saw the point of nerve stapling slaves. By the time the option for advanced genetics comes about, genmodding thousands of slaves is prohibitively expensive, especially since they do their job just fine and dandy while sitting at 0% happiness. You get to roleplay as Yang's Hive
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May 10, 2020 00:02
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I know, right! Except back then it was a glorious loving big red button you got to mash when the drones rioted, and everyone gasps in horror about how dare you? Well, I mean, the button is right there! It's presented alongside the city unrest notification popup. Who could resist? But instead for Stellaris it solves zero goddamn problems, cost a bajillion bucks and a century to implement, and nobody even hates you for it?! Like what's even the point then, man.
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May 10, 2020 00:08
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Nitrousoxide posted:I'm torn about whether this upcoming patch will be a buff or a nerf to the voidborn start. With there being cheaper habitats available it will make expanding as a voidborn significantly easier than it was. However access to habitats for everyone being earlier will make that start less unique. Fully expanding out your habitats will also be a more involved affair for the voidborn start as well. I just wish that with Voidborne existing, that it were easier to keep the voidborne pops in space and the ground based pops on the ground. Though what I actually wish is that populations would automatically genemod/machine mod themselves based on their environment and job over time, so that pops who were researchers would genemod themselves intelligence, soliders strong, etc. Could be a neat thing for gene clinic to increase the speed at which the automatic genemodding takes place, with different levels of government interference in the process based on policy/ethics (authoritarians mandating the process and also mandating bad genetic traits, xenophiles modding faster, etc.). It'd be neat for habitability to allow for modding in voidborne preference lategame, and for pops to customize themselves to their current planet as well. Essentially genetic traits would really only be unique up until genemodding becomes widespread, at which point people start using it to their advantage on a societal scale. In an authoritarian empire, that would look something like the government mandating that all miners get reinforced skulls, filtering lungs, etc., where in an egalitarian empire you'd have people choosing a career and genemodding themselves to get an advantage so that the population of people who are miners slowly genemods themselves over the course of years to the point where that mining pop is predominantly made up of people who have chosen to modify themselves to be better miners. This would absolutely require an overhaul of the way species are displayed in the outliner though, but that's not really a bad thing considering what already happens to xenophiles lategame. It'd also help out that half-blah ascension perk by letting pops actually use those extra points without needing to run 20-30 separate genemodding projects. It'd really help that ascension path in general; it's already fiddly as all get out to make the changes that you want to make, and you can't restrict which species grow the way you can restrict which robots are assembled without getting a penalty. Having your whole society start embracing that change on their own to use their points and get better at their jobs would be a nice buff. The path could also unlock better and stronger mutations to make up for the lack of the psionic/cybernetic/synthetic traits.
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May 10, 2020 00:30
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I noticed my Ecumenopoli non-residential arcologies aren't providing housing since I started using the planetary districts mod. Is that by design? Because I hate it.
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May 10, 2020 00:40
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Yes that’s part of the mod. I don’t agree with it but there’s a lot unbalanced in that mod. (Hi unlimited university districts )
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May 10, 2020 00:41
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Serephina posted:I never saw the point of nerve stapling slaves. By the time the option for advanced genetics comes about, genmodding thousands of slaves is prohibitively expensive, especially since they do their job just fine and dandy while sitting at 0% happiness. For slaves? It gives a production bonus on top of functionally locking their happiness at 50% so there are no drawbacks for giving them chattel slavery (+resources) and the worst living conditions (0 goods use) so mod a few of each species and enable population controls on the non-stapled variants. But really it's more useful in xenophile+egalitarian empires so you can get some of the benefits of slavery (without actually enabling slavery policy) while still getting all the benefits of being in a dystopian centrist hugbox federation.
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May 10, 2020 01:21
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Serephina posted:I never saw the point of nerve stapling slaves. By the time the option for advanced genetics comes about, genmodding thousands of slaves is prohibitively expensive, especially since they do their job just fine and dandy while sitting at 0% happiness. Oh on the contrary, gene modding is very cheap by that point of the game; society research points are always the first ones to go into repeatable techs in my games, and gene modding cost is pretty low per pop. Plus it gives the same benefits as Very Strong (+5% worker output) with the added benefit of guaranteeing that the species will never again pollute your Scientist pool. And while chattel slaves will happily work at 0% happiness they are still reducing the planet's stability by some amount, so nerve stapling eliminates that penalty. Nitrousoxide posted:I'm torn about whether this upcoming patch will be a buff or a nerf to the voidborn start. With there being cheaper habitats available it will make expanding as a voidborn significantly easier than it was. However access to habitats for everyone being earlier will make that start less unique. Fully expanding out your habitats will also be a more involved affair for the voidborn start as well. The voidborne start is powerful because of the massive production bonus your pops get and because you start the game with almost triple pop growth. Still an OP start for sure Dirk the Average posted:I just wish that with Voidborne existing, that it were easier to keep the voidborne pops in space and the ground based pops on the ground. Turn off migration
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May 10, 2020 01:22
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I hadn't used the cybrex warforge since they changed it, thinking it still did the old thing, and my current game noticed it's now a flat 10000 minerals +150 influence = 5000 alloys every 900 days. This is...insane, especially as a fanatical purifier. I started a new game with the same exact rules as my prior one but with the AI mod enabled, and this thing is so absurdly powerful especially early game but also late game. First time I used it was when my corvettes cost about 100-120 each, so just pumping out an instant full fleet of 40ish vettes every 900 days is crazy. The early endgame crisis hasn't shown up yet and I've eradicated all but 3 of the enemy empires(and the fallen empires of course), taken over the L cluster, and have 30 bastion citadels ensuring even if someone tries a sneak attack, they have to chew through multiple 35k fortresses before hitting anything of value. It's honestly ridiculously overpowered even now. Just poof, instant four battleships every 900 days. And I just got the unity ambitions so now I can easily afford most of the other influence edicts alongside the warforge. AND you get warforms and +5% alloy production too!
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May 10, 2020 07:17
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it's nice that it's useful for meatbags now but it sucks that it isn't as grossly overpowered for machines anymore, and gives other empires the ultimate machine gestalt army but even better (well except Cybrex Warforms use alloys instead of being one of the few late game mineral dumps). meanwhile the Zroni relic still loses a huge amount of utility for non-Psionics
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May 10, 2020 08:14
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can you disable the L-Gates without disabling the entire DLC? the last two games have spawned without gateways at all besides them, and the L-Gates opening kinda completely change the dynamic of the game, forcing you to focus on the systems with L-Gates rather than the actual strategic locations in your empire's layout.
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May 10, 2020 10:01
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I am incredibly disappointed. I open palm smashed the End of the Cycle button when the option presented itself earlier tonight. And after 50 very long in-game years, my cute little psychic butterflies disappeared and all that was left were horrible monsters from the Shroud that... proceeded to idly wander back and forth not really content to do anything of importance. I decided to console over to them and directed the first one I could grab at the nearest border station. So this monstrosity from beyond time and space, an unofficial 4th endgame crisis level monster come a half century early, walked right up to that token outpost with its cute little 5.3k fleet strength and... disappeared. It didn't die. It disappeared outright. Though this does answer a question that I had from a few days ago, when I opened the Galactic Core and unleashed a "Wraith" which proceeded to tear a scar through the nearest empire until it just stopped out of nowhere and ceased existing. 
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May 10, 2020 13:34
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DoubleNegative posted:I am incredibly disappointed. I open palm smashed the End of the Cycle button when the option presented itself earlier tonight. And after 50 very long in-game years, my cute little psychic butterflies disappeared and all that was left were horrible monsters from the Shroud that... proceeded to idly wander back and forth not really content to do anything of importance. Considering that the galactic core is part of a mod, this is probably related to some mod screwing things up.
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May 10, 2020 13:37
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I started up a new game with some super spiritualist inward perfectionists, intending to roll starts until I got the Zrnoi precursors because I realized I don't have that achievement. I get the first two archaeological sites completed, but the game then spawns a 3rd and 4th well outside of my territory, and I can't reach them before other empires gobble them up and now it says they've fully excavated the sites. Will the game eventually spawn me more sites to finish the precursor chain, or am I hosed?
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May 10, 2020 17:50
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Every time I sponsor a festival of worlds the artisan troupe pockets my cash and gives me the cold shoulder. Every single game I'm forced to get a refund by way of destroying their stations. Just do your drat space circus without conning me!
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May 10, 2020 22:31
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How are u posted:I started up a new game with some super spiritualist inward perfectionists, intending to roll starts until I got the Zrnoi precursors because I realized I don't have that achievement. I get the first two archaeological sites completed, but the game then spawns a 3rd and 4th well outside of my territory, and I can't reach them before other empires gobble them up and now it says they've fully excavated the sites. It should, yeah. Though it can still sometimes put the final system or whatever in another empires system
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May 10, 2020 22:38
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DoubleNegative posted:I am incredibly disappointed. I open palm smashed the End of the Cycle button when the option presented itself earlier tonight. And after 50 very long in-game years, my cute little psychic butterflies disappeared and all that was left were horrible monsters from the Shroud that... proceeded to idly wander back and forth not really content to do anything of importance. Congrats on getting End of the Cycle the only time you'll ever see it though! 
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May 11, 2020 01:26
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Has anyone here actually defeated End of the Cycle? I've read posts on reddit where people claim to have done so. They usually fall back to the L-cluster because apparently the destroyer can't go there. Sounds like an oversight from the developers.
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May 11, 2020 02:32
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Won my first game. I usually get bored in the midgame and never see the crisis so I cranked the midgame and endgame start years back a fat chunk and finally got to see some of the endgame. Had a pretty interesting game where I made friends with the scary as gently caress hivemind next door so nobody else liked me until midgame when I started to out-tech the Admiral AI. So my question is this: is scaling difficulty broken or something? Everyone was piss weak by the endgame except the fallen empires who hadn't awakened (the one that did was stronger than the other AIs but weaker than the unawakened empires). The early game was somewhat challenging but not ridiculous but the endgame was not worthy of the highest difficulty at all. I had 200k strength fleets and most of the other empires managed 10k. Still had fun, but the game consistently fails to make wartime be a necessary counterpart to peacetime and to have each phase lend to the others. It's no EU4, but I suppose that's unfair: EU4 is the best strategy game I've ever played. Resting Lich Face fucked around with this message at 07:40 on May 11, 2020 |
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May 11, 2020 07:34
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I encountered a really bizarre bug in a multiplayer game I did with some old friends today. It basically went like this: Player A and Player B are in a federation together. Player C declares war on Player A with an Impose Ideology war goal, drawing in Player B as well because of the federation. Shortly after the start of the war, a Great Khan awakens right next to Player A, and he quickly surrenders to the Khan. This removes him from the federation and the war, but Player B is still at war with Player A, and now has control of the war buttons because he's the sole person left on that side of the war. Player B is a hive mind, and surrenders the war because he doesn't think it will do anything since the target of the Impose Ideology goal is no longer in the war. However, what ends up happening is that Player B changes from a hive mind to a normal empire and gains the ethics, civics, etc. of player C... and every single one of his pops starts getting purged because they've been cut off from their hive mind, effectively eliminating him from the game completely. So some weird interaction between a player being removed from a federation in the middle of a war which normally can't happen causing an impose ideology war goal to be applied to a hive mind empire which also normally can't happen. Thanks Paradox! 
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May 11, 2020 08:08
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Resting Lich Face posted:Won my first game. I usually get bored in the midgame and never see the crisis so I cranked the midgame and endgame start years back a fat chunk and finally got to see some of the endgame. Had a pretty interesting game where I made friends with the scary as gently caress hivemind next door so nobody else liked me until midgame when I started to out-tech the Admiral AI. then they picked a fight with a fallen empire and I just did the exact thing to them in reverse while they got their poo poo wrecked by the FE. but try putting in the glavius AI mod and see if that improves the difficulty for you, it made my current game quite a bit more interesting than usual. Still no sign of the early crisis, I'm mopping up the awakened xenophobes now and there's been nary a peep from any endgame crisis outside of that.
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May 11, 2020 08:17
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Does Starnet/Glavius AI do anything to make Vassal/Federation AI less awful? It seems like once an empire is on your side or an underling their AI goes right down the shitter.
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May 11, 2020 08:20
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And Tyler Too! posted:Does Starnet/Glavius AI do anything to make Vassal/Federation AI less awful? It seems like once an empire is on your side or an underling their AI goes right down the shitter. I haven't really played the recent patches without Starnet, but I haven't had that issue. Federation allies are fine except for their incredibly stupid voting logic. Vassals are kind of unproductive, but I think that's less down to AI than the fact that an empire getting vassalized is usually already in an awful position and can't recover.
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May 11, 2020 10:08
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Guildencrantz posted:I haven't really played the recent patches without Starnet, but I haven't had that issue. Federation allies are fine except for their incredibly stupid voting logic. Vassals are kind of unproductive, but I think that's less down to AI than the fact that an empire getting vassalized is usually already in an awful position and can't recover. AI vassals don't get the AI cheating bonuses.
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May 11, 2020 10:24
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Demiurge4 posted:AI vassals don't get the AI cheating bonuses. lmao what the gently caress, so they're basically 75% down on any other AI in the game?
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May 11, 2020 10:32
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Demiurge4 posted:AI vassals don't get the AI cheating bonuses. Splicer fucked around with this message at 10:35 on May 11, 2020 |
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May 11, 2020 10:32
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Like I can see the logic: you don't want the player empire getting access to those bonuses by having AI vassals and then siphoning off their monies. Solution: Vassals and protectorates keep the AI bonuses, but the amount they give to their overlords is reduced by the AI bonus again on the way back to you. So they might be making 100 surplus minerals a month from their cheated, +50% income, you get 25 of that, and then it's reduced by that 50% at that point. That way the AI empires aren't hosed when they become your vassal but aren't also giving you mad cash from their bonuses.
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May 11, 2020 10:36
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Somehow it amuses me that you destroy their economy by signing a deal with them.
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May 11, 2020 10:52
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Grandpa Palpatine posted:Has anyone here actually defeated End of the Cycle? I've read posts on reddit where people claim to have done so. They usually fall back to the L-cluster because apparently the destroyer can't go there. Sounds like an oversight from the developers. I've triggered it once, and was watching it putter around. It got into fights with the AI and was slowly losing health. It eventually stopped moving in a random AI's system right by the border of my original empire. I checked in on it a couple times and noticed it lost a sliver of health every few years. Last time I saw it it was still at ninety-something, and I forgot about it for a while because I had to deal with constant forever wars against the AI. When next I wanted to check it out, it was just... gone. I don't know if the AI killed it or it was bugged out, but it was nowhere to be found in the galaxy. I'm assuming the AI killed it, in which case the challenge isn't actually that it's the toughest monster in the game; it's that you're in a race to get a big enough fleet to fight it against a galaxy with a massive head start that is also trying to kill you. If it just bugged out of existence, who the gently caress knows.
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May 11, 2020 11:00
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Splicer posted:This breaks down to two problems. They don't get the cheat bonuses so it's a raw AI logic empire. More importantly it means they /stop/ getting the AI bonuses, so as soon as they bow the knee they lose half their income across the board, which they'd built their economy around the assumption of. Even a previously functioning AI will immediately hit economic collapse. Maybe it should tick down over the course of 10 years, like how scaling difficulty ticks up
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May 11, 2020 12:20
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Resting Lich Face posted:So my question is this: is scaling difficulty broken or something? Everyone was piss weak by the endgame except the fallen empires who hadn't awakened (the one that did was stronger than the other AIs but weaker than the unawakened empires). The early game was somewhat challenging but not ridiculous but the endgame was not worthy of the highest difficulty at all. I had 200k strength fleets and most of the other empires managed 10k. Scaling difficulty works, but it doesn't go far enough. Starting on Ensign and ending up on Grand Admiral sounds good at first, but the problem is that in 4X games, early-game strength leads to extreme late-game strength, and early-game weakness leads to extreme late-game weakness, and the bonuses an AI gets on Grand Admiral aren't enough to make up for that. What's needed is a way to set a starting difficulty and an ending difficulty, and preferably an interval on when to increase the difficulty, so you could say, "Start the AI on Commodore, and increase the difficulty by one step every twenty-five years until you hit Grand Admiral", for example. The other issue, directly related to your fleet strength example, is that the AI isn't upgrading its starbases properly, on any difficulty level. So the main way to get fleet cap (anchorage starbases with 6 anchorages and a naval logistics office) is lost to them. As a result, they field tiny fleets.
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May 11, 2020 12:44
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how do I see the specific war objectives of my federation allies? I am helping in a war someone else wanted to start and have laid waste to all enemy fleets and systems, enemy exhaustion is 100%, but I can't figure out why we can't end this stupid war. my allies just goof around and I don't know what they want to do to end the war. it's a "conquer" war.' this is so annoying
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May 11, 2020 12:47
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