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Macichne Leainig posted:I dunno what I am doing wrong but I can't seem to maintain any naval power at all. Just had a planet revolt and it spawned a single fleet that yet again dwarfed the military power of my strongest single fleet, which was upgraded to its max strength, consisted primarily of destroyers at this point and had an admiral with boosts to military power as well. I had filled out the Supremacy tradition, my species was militaristic. What is "max strength" in this case? What fleet power do your fleets have? How many do you have? How much naval capacity do you have, and how much are you using? Have you fallen behind in techs? What year is it, even? I will, however, as a safe bet, say that you're overthinking this, especially on a low difficulty setting. Fleet composition is not that hard, but very easy to overthink. Follow these extremely simple steps. 1. Turn off auto-design. Despite how insanely easy what I'm about to tell you to do is, the AI fucks it up every time. It cannot be trusted to design your ships. 2. Ship design is easy. Split your weapons 50/50 between kinetic and energy (the rail guns and lasers, respectively). Ignore all the fancier options. You don't need them. If you have an odd number of weapon slots available, give the extra one to kinetic. Split your defense 50/50 too, between shields and armor. If you have an odd number of defense slots, which will only happen on Corvettes, give it to armor. In the auxiliary slots, Corvettes and Destroyers get Afterburners. Cruisers and Battleships get Automatic Fire Control. Battleships get something else defensive of your choice. Regenerating Hulls are a fine choice. When you're done designing your ship, make sure auto-update is checked -- that tells the game to automatically update your designs every time you research an upgrade to an installed component, assuming the ships have enough power to sustain them and, if applicable, you know how to gather the rare resource required. From now on, when you get a new relevant tech, you'll know because all your fleets will immediately show an arrow icon that means they can be upgraded. Upgrade them immediately unless you're currently at war and they're off fighting. Hit the Save button to save your design. 3. Fleet design is easy. Use the Fleet Management tab. You'll see each fleet you've got and from this window, you can modify their compositions and plan new ones, and the tab will tell you how much it'll cost to get all your fleets up to the strength you just determined, and if you've got the naval cap to support it when you do. You'll start the game with a fleet cap of 20 and only Corvettes available, so fill each fleet with 20 Corvettes. When you unlock Destroyers, they come with +10 to fleet cap, so immediately go to each fleet and add as many Destroyers as you've got room for. That's 5 in this case, so now you've got fleets of 20/5. As you build up fleet cap and unlock new ship types, build towards this composition: 20 corvettes/15 Destroyers/10 Cruisers/5 Battleships. Ignore Frigates. You don't need them. As you continue to gain fleet cap, move towards 20/15/15/10, and from there keep adding Battleships, and you can drop the Corvette count down to 15. Each fleet gets a Titan when you can swing it. 4. Fleets need home bases. Have you noticed that you can set the home base for each fleet? Do so. Every fleet should have a starbase they call home. The base build for a fleet home starbase is two Shipyards and a Crew Quarters. Your upgrade path on these starbases should be one more Shipyard, then switch to Anchorage for the final three main slots, with the further utility buildings being Fleet Academy, Naval Logistics Office, and Titan Assembly Yard. The Shipyards are so the fleets can be reinforced/upgraded without moving, and the Crew Quarters keeps your upkeep costs down during peacetime. These starbases should be placed strategically (hint: on or near borders you expect to become hostile, so that they don't have far to travel when the shooting starts). Fleets have a convenient Return button, which sends them back to their homebase once the shooting has stopped. There you go, that's it. To be clear, what I've outlined is not the most effective build -- it is the easiest. Fleets designed this way will win if their fleet power is higher than the opposing fleet 99 times out of 100, and this strategy will easily take you through at least the first half of the difficulties. More than enough time to get comfortable with the mechanics.
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Mar 21, 2023 03:28
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Kris xK posted:Habitats. Lots and lots of habitats. Habs on planets with bonus resources get bonus districts for the respective resource. All food is made on starbases. That’s just the same thing as having normal planet availability except now you’ve made Voidborne mandatory tho. What’s the point?
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Mar 21, 2023 04:31
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My solution is getting bored by 2350. I haven’t fought a crisis since 2018
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Mar 21, 2023 07:25
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Cat Army 
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Played a few decades as a Payback empire. All I can say is gently caress MSI. The first main event made me laugh at the sheer audacity of those fuckers.
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Mar 21, 2023 10:18
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How varied are the new primitive observation events?
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Mar 21, 2023 10:32
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Macichne Leainig posted:I dunno what I am doing wrong but I can't seem to maintain any naval power at all. Just had a planet revolt and it spawned a single fleet that yet again dwarfed the military power of my strongest single fleet, which was upgraded to its max strength, consisted primarily of destroyers at this point and had an admiral with boosts to military power as well. I had filled out the Supremacy tradition, my species was militaristic. Revolts are loving awful since they always pull a huge fleet out of nowhere. You really want to do whatever you can to prevent unrest getting to the point that you lose a system.
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Mar 21, 2023 11:37
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Nemo2342 posted:Revolts are loving awful since they always pull a huge fleet out of nowhere. You really want to do whatever you can to prevent unrest getting to the point that you lose a system. Move in pops that are happy, move out pops that do not. Make crime go away. Build occupation armies. If I'm missing something tell me, because revolts *suck*.
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Mar 21, 2023 14:12
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Made another mod that basically force the AI to enact pop controls/discourage and robot production if over 5 unemployed while removing it when below 5, mainly since every single AI colony is full of unemployed pops late game and it makes it so annoying to take over them. I was kinda surprised it didn't check for that already lol
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Mar 21, 2023 14:19
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Captain Oblivious posted:That’s just the same thing as having normal planet availability except now you’ve made Voidborne mandatory tho. I dunno what that guy's problem is. I play on x0.25 habitables all the time, never build habitats, and resource crunch is just... not an issue? Your incomes are lower, sure, but so are all your costs? You have a quarter as many pops to upkeep? Space resources are also unaffected by the setting, so you're actually losing a smaller proportion of income than you think. Maybe it's different on higher difficulties idk
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Mar 21, 2023 14:47
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Captain Oblivious posted:That’s just the same thing as having normal planet availability except now you’ve made Voidborne mandatory tho. Well, not actually that many habitats (6), because the point is late game performance. To that end, I also use a mod to limit the number of habitats.
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Mar 21, 2023 15:47
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Nemo2342 posted:Revolts are loving awful since they always pull a huge fleet out of nowhere. You really want to do whatever you can to prevent unrest getting to the point that you lose a system. I really don't know what else I could have done for this planet. It was a pre-FTL civilization that grew up into FTL, but naturally the AI managed planet was terrible and when I gained control of it, it was down like -18 amenities, horrible unemployment, crime, etc. I got the amenities back up into the positive, the crime back down, the stability was like 30% (up from 6%) and still improving when the revolt popped 
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Mar 21, 2023 15:59
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Macichne Leainig posted:I really don't know what else I could have done for this planet. It was a pre-FTL civilization that grew up into FTL, but naturally the AI managed planet was terrible and when I gained control of it, it was down like -18 amenities, horrible unemployment, crime, etc. Did you pop martial law?
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Mar 21, 2023 16:04
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Yami Fenrir posted:Did you pop martial law? That's the decision pane in the planet management screen right? I think so? Maybe not, now that I think about it. Next time would it be easier just cede the planet to the civilization and bombard them later, or do they still end up spawning their fleet? Maybe ceding it would be better for not immediately going into a war I was not anticipating. Still clearly in the "managing expectations" stage of the game, don't mind me, heh. Macichne Leainig fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 16:05
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Macichne Leainig posted:That's the decision pane in the planet management screen right? I think so? Maybe not, now that I think about it. It's the sledgehammer tool for stability. Each soldier gives you a chunk of stability, but it also reduces resources. It's great to buy time to fix the problems on the planet.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:16
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Okay cool. Also shoutout to the good naval tips at the tip of the page. One of these days I'll have a moderate level of success 
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Mar 21, 2023 16:18
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Another option is to resettle some of the population to other planets and put some of your own there. Can't rebel if they are no longer on the planet!
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Mar 21, 2023 17:03
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MSI declared war on one of my vassals, who knows what the poor 4 system bastards did to piss them off when I've been dilligently calling them up every 5 years to use my super-effective insults. Stupid plan, though -- I've nearly pulled level with them all by myself and not only am I in a massive federation, I've rejiggered the laws so I'm the federation's eternal president, so I had the massive federation fleet already on the border closest to MSI. And since it's a defensive war, everyone got pulled in. I've now got fleets one jump away from their homeworld, being held back only by a planetary FTL inhibitor in that system, so we're currently bombing that planet from orbit until the inhibitor turns off, and then we can finally put hostile ships in MSI's homeworld. See how they like it. Anyway, that's how I learned that Broken Shackles empires get a rather massive buff if MSI declares war on them, representing the understandable response that no way are we gonna let the slaving bastards come back and make us their victims again.
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Mar 21, 2023 17:30
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Was running some observer games to make sure the change to AI weight for planet pop controls was fine and urgh now it's bothering me how garbage it is at managing slaves. Low stability planets with uneomployed slaves and open ruler slots galore. Though I suspect that will take longer to solve if even possible :\ edit: Look at this poo poo  Gonna start with trying to allow the AI to even use martial law atleast lol. Noir89 fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 18:50
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730 hours later I am finally seeing the Horizon Signal for the first time and on Ironman no less. I am the Knights of the Toxic God tho so there will be no falling for these fey enchantments! Slay the pretender god!
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Mar 22, 2023 04:41
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Okay I'm dropping in for the first time in a few years. I'm sorry for doing this, and I swear I searched 20+ pages back: what mods are considered must-haves? I have Guilli's Planet Modifiers. Is there a consensus best mod for the AI? Possibly something that makes it less very bad?
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Mar 22, 2023 05:22
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Richard D James posted:Okay I'm dropping in for the first time in a few years. I'm sorry for doing this, and I swear I searched 20+ pages back: what mods are considered must-haves? I have Guilli's Planet Modifiers. Is there a consensus best mod for the AI? Possibly something that makes it less very bad? You really don’t need AI mods these days. They long since addressed that issue. If you haven’t checked in in a few years that’d be why this is news Feel free to pick up Guilli’s but if anything these days people put the AI on scaling difficulty because otherwise you need to hyper optimize the early game to not get squished.
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Mar 22, 2023 05:29
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Necromancing multiple gargantuan space creatures really tanks your food income. Having 300k fleet power from 2 space dragons, a matriarch, and a void spawn however is really helpful when the Fallen Holy Empire calls me up saying MSI is doing bad things with AI while I'm a Broken Shackles origin. I've otherwise got ~70k of fleet power from normal fleets. And MSI is a vassal of the 2nd most powerful empire, who is also in the only federation in the game (which occupies just over half of the galaxy). I occupy a third, the rest are smaller empires that are undergoing various anti-vassalage events when the overlord lost their fleets to the Khan. This might be rough.
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Mar 22, 2023 05:58
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Richard D James posted:Okay I'm dropping in for the first time in a few years. I'm sorry for doing this, and I swear I searched 20+ pages back: what mods are considered must-haves? I have Guilli's Planet Modifiers. Is there a consensus best mod for the AI? Possibly something that makes it less very bad? AI is a lot better these days, Admiral and especially Grand Admiral will keep pace with most decent players. If you find the AI starting with too much fleet power at those difficulties, consider turning on the AI-scaling (a feature added since you last played which will change how quickly the AI will receive its cheat benefits). Not only does the AI keep pace militarily now, but their worlds aren't as complete garbage as they used to be (still more dedicated refinery worlds than I would personally use, but w/e). As an aside, the new Ancient Refinery building should probably be nerfed somehow.
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Mar 22, 2023 06:10
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The random midgame crisis just started Loud but Deadly and jesus loving christ that is an awful mod. Truly garbage writing and in the midgame spawns a million+ strength fleet with a Total War CB, plus constantly spawns dozens of 30,000+ fleets all around the galaxy. Can't remove it without wrecking the save, had to faff around switching to each new country as they spawned to kill it. How on earth did it get a 4 star rating on the Workshop?
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Mar 22, 2023 15:04
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ilkhan posted:This. Revolts suck.
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Mar 22, 2023 15:47
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Macichne Leainig posted:I dunno what I am doing wrong but I can't seem to maintain any naval power at all. Just had a planet revolt and it spawned a single fleet that yet again dwarfed the military power of my strongest single fleet, which was upgraded to its max strength, consisted primarily of destroyers at this point and had an admiral with boosts to military power as well. I had filled out the Supremacy tradition, my species was militaristic. So I've always had a problem with Stellaris. A couple of times I've played aggressive empires and managed to grind from the get go to military supremacy to the point where I'm throwing around hundreds of thousands of fleet strength and consuming empires. Most of the time that I'm anything else that's not directly military focused I find myself falling behind tremendously and having a fleet at fleet cap that gets rolled by 2-3x as much strength in ships by one neighbor empire in my first war. I finally figured out what I was missing. Anchorages. I just started building an anchorage station in the early game and it put me up in fleet cap to the point where I was competetive the whole game through with any given empire type. It's so stupid and simple. I was literally thinking "Well I'm at fleet cap, I should be competetive" when you start with the ability to raise fleet cap from day 1.
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Mar 22, 2023 15:55
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Spanish Matlock posted:So I've always had a problem with Stellaris. A couple of times I've played aggressive empires and managed to grind from the get go to military supremacy to the point where I'm throwing around hundreds of thousands of fleet strength and consuming empires. e: soldier buildings also boost cap. Splicer fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Mar 22, 2023 |
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Mar 22, 2023 15:59
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My big issue was that I had multiple fleets at maximum cap (70 at the time i believe), but even my best fleet with a decently leveled admiral wouldn't match against the revolting planet's fleet that they just spawned. I already abandoned that save so I dunno how many ships they had  Yeah I was using the auto ship designs though, and I can already clearly see a numerical power boost when taking the prior advice about ship designs
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Mar 22, 2023 16:15
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I'll say this for Broken Shackles -- it likes to surprise you. I got a buff for winning my war with MSI, then when my GC resolution to ban organic slave trade came up and got defeated, I got a rather massive debuff, because my people were hugely pissed off that the galaxy voted to keep slaves. I also got a custom dialogue when I let a slaver empire pledge themselves as my vassals, noting that my people weren't entirely thrilled about that, but politics is politics so they'd let me do it. (Side note: is there a way to influence your vassals to adopt your ethics? I don't see any espionage actions or vassal agreements or holdings that'd do it.) I think my annoyance with the origin might be because I expected it to be one thing, but it's clearly something else. What I thought I was getting was guys who were very concerned with finding their lost kin, reclaiming their homeworlds, and making MSI pay for their crimes, but this is actually the John Brown origin. gently caress slavery and if you use it, we're coming for you. In other news, getting the Yuht as your precursors is pretty goddamn neat.  Who needs a Sentry Array? Macichne Leainig posted:Yeah I was using the auto ship designs though, and I can already clearly see a numerical power boost when taking the prior advice about ship designs
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Mar 22, 2023 16:59
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Bruh this most recent game spawned me up against a hive mind that wanted to subjugate me almost immediately I tried to keep them happy by sending them tributes and using envoys to maintain relations, but it wasn't enough I am on the easiest difficulty game please I am begging you to give me a chance here
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Mar 22, 2023 17:31
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Splicer posted:Suck as in try to avoid letting this happen or suck as in bad game mechanic? Situations have made them a much better mechanic but from a gently caress around and find out perspective you don't want them to happen. Mechanic wise they are still a pain in the rear end to stop once they get rolling, but not impossible.
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Mar 22, 2023 17:34
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Macichne Leainig posted:Bruh this most recent game spawned me up against a hive mind that wanted to subjugate me almost immediately Subjugate as in make you a vassal, or as in eating your planets? Being a vassal is honestly a pretty good deal, especially one of the specialized types that get neat bonuses. If you meant they wanted to attack you then yeah, that sucks. Sometimes you do just spawn in a terrible situation and that game is a wash.
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Mar 22, 2023 17:54
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ConfusedUs posted:Played a few decades as a Payback empire. The worst part is, having played almost 100 years, as far as I can tell the debt collectors just keep coming, and they keep getting stronger - but as of 2275 they were still a joke Does anybody know how many times the flagship gets upgraded if you go that route?
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Mar 22, 2023 18:22
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Macichne Leainig posted:Bruh this most recent game spawned me up against a hive mind that wanted to subjugate me almost immediately
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Mar 22, 2023 18:24
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Nail Rat posted:The worst part is, having played almost 100 years, as far as I can tell the debt collectors just keep coming, and they keep getting stronger - but as of 2275 they were still a joke I think they came 4 times, but I chose the habitat option, so not sure what the differences are for the flagship option. They had a fleet of 15k, so a complete joke by their last visit.
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Mar 22, 2023 18:35
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ilkhan posted:Suck as in you really really don't want them to happen.
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Mar 22, 2023 18:53
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CapnAndy posted:That's it, upload your save game, I want to see what you're doing. Easier than asking you half a billion questions. Yeah, I'd like to see too how the hell this keeps happening to that poster. Especially since I'm a dumbass who can barely play at Captain. Seeing someone falter several difficulty steps below mine shouldn't really happen. Especially with the insane bonuses to everything. I can understand getting bored with the game, or getting steamrolled immediately, but this agonizing, slow death seems highly unlikely. And "a hivemind"? That's not even a really helpful description, as standard hiveminds are astonishingly friendly. Hiveminds who aren't just eat you, they don't want to vassalize you. (Which I guess "subjugating" means in this context.) So what is going on here?
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Mar 22, 2023 19:37
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Libluini posted:So what is going on here? But I really want to see this latest save game. You just shouldn't be losing every single game due to military lack on the lowest difficulty, there's something fundamental going on.
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Mar 22, 2023 19:53
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CapnAndy posted:That's it, upload your save game, I want to see what you're doing. Easier than asking you half a billion questions. Oh there's no question there's a skill issue here. Frankly I am probably overreacting to events going on in my games too. Don't get me wrong I'm not like, quitting the game or anything, it's still fun as is
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Mar 22, 2023 19:56
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Macichne Leainig posted:Oh there's no question there's a skill issue here. Frankly I am probably overreacting to events going on in my games too. Let's try a test: Play Ascendancy. It's available for free if you search for it. Ascendancy's AI is famous for being braindead. Play a game on easy. If that still doesn't go well, maybe space 4x games are not for you?
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Mar 22, 2023 19:59
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