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Lately I've been rolling fleets of Corvettes, Frigates, and Cruisers, specifically. Corvettes with 2x autocannons & 1 missile, Frigates with a Missile & Torpedo, Cruisers all in on Missiles & Torpedos. Corvettes to soak return fire while the other ships mop up. It's gimmicky but pulling an Itano Circus is just so drat satisfying.
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May 15, 2023 21:16
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| # ? May 27, 2024 01:20 |
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Boy, I sure do love having a Criminal Syndicate as neighbors. Nothing quite like having to send my fleets in every 15 years or so because they refuse to learn their goddamn lesson and think that this time I'll let them get away with opening crime buildings on my planets and tanking my economy. Especially since I'm now approaching the mid-game, so I've got less influence income to claim their planets with, because this is clearly never going to stop until they're wiped out. Also, planetary capital buildings auto-spawning defense armies has sorta rendered the ability for planets to surrender to bombardment pointless, hasn't it? It's still quicker and easier to land troops, I don't have the years per planet required to bomb every last defender to death. I'm at war, my fleets need to be in motion. Insurrectionist posted:lol, I wasn't planning to look at the designer until I unlocked some new ships but I guess I will now Turning off "auto-best" and doing the most brain-dead simple builds of splitting everything half and half between kinetics/lasers and shields/armor will send your fleet power scores skyrocketing.
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May 15, 2023 21:17
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Much like piracy, there are mods to disable criminal syndicates. Personally I give them a good old-fashioned genociding because they were asking for it.
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May 15, 2023 21:31
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CapnAndy posted:Boy, I sure do love having a Criminal Syndicate as neighbors. Nothing quite like having to send my fleets in every 15 years or so because they refuse to learn their goddamn lesson and think that this time I'll let them get away with opening crime buildings on my planets and tanking my economy. Especially since I'm now approaching the mid-game, so I've got less influence income to claim their planets with, because this is clearly never going to stop until they're wiped out.
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May 15, 2023 21:41
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CapnAndy posted:Never never never let the AI build your ships. It has no loving idea what it's doing and never has. This is basically what I do. If there is an odd number of slots I add extra an armor/hull modules and extra lasers/plasma for the weapons. At game start though I do 1 flak battery / 2 red lasers, since the flak battery does almost as much damage as the tier 3 railgun, and gives a tiny bit of point defense as well. I usually pick up mining lasers early on as well, so do flak/mining lasers for early tier 3 damage with minimal research.
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May 15, 2023 21:57
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Horace Kinch posted:Much like piracy, there are mods to disable criminal syndicates. Personally I give them a good old-fashioned genociding because they were asking for it. Yeah I just mod them out. They are a pain in the rear end and you can't do anything to fix them short of claiming/conquering them in some way or exterminating them. They aren't terribly fun to play as either. If you're going for a megacorp play, you probably want to be buds with as many nations as possible to maximize your branch offices and with the perpetual influence shortage you'll be under until you get yourself to be galactic custodian. It's punishing to lose offices cause someone built a police station. The only time you'd ever want a criminal megacorp around is if you are playing oppressive autocracy. Nuclearmonkee fucked around with this message at 22:04 on May 15, 2023 |
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May 15, 2023 21:59
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Nuclearmonkee posted:The only time you'd ever want a criminal megacorp around is if you are playing oppressive autocracy. I'm not exaggerating, they literally crashed my entire economy after first contact. They put up a crimes station on my homeworld in the very early game, not only did everyone gently caress off to do crimes but it left me without a single farmer in the entire game, all my incomes went to negative and I hit food bankruptcy. So, no. They die for that. It's just gonna take me forever, since most of my influence is going to research/commerce/migration pacts with the nice empires.
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May 15, 2023 22:04
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CapnAndy posted:Even then, gently caress 'em. If you're willing to put up with putting off your other conquests for a bit, one option is to switch your war mode to liberation wars. You can disband criminal syndicates in a single war with that since they have to adopt your government type. Not perfect but maybe less aggrivation than five or six wars to grind a syndicate down.
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May 15, 2023 22:54
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So Agrarian Idyll + Anglers is delicious with the new leader stuff, don't even need to ever build any districts outside of farming... and maybe 1 forge world for alloys that you are not simply buying with your infinite food money
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May 15, 2023 23:07
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Reveilled posted:If you're willing to put up with putting off your other conquests for a bit, one option is to switch your war mode to liberation wars. You can disband criminal syndicates in a single war with that since they have to adopt your government type. Not perfect but maybe less aggrivation than five or six wars to grind a syndicate down.
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May 15, 2023 23:34
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AtomikKrab posted:So
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May 15, 2023 23:47
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Yeah you'll want catalytic processing to make food into alloys. It's actually playable without feeling terrible with the new councilor that makes it not as poo poo.
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May 16, 2023 00:15
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Nuclearmonkee posted:Yeah you'll want catalytic processing to make food into alloys. Third civic slot
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May 16, 2023 02:11
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Nuclearmonkee posted:They aren't terribly fun to play as either. If you're going for a megacorp play, you probably want to be buds with as many nations as possible to maximize your branch offices criminal branch offices aren't for income,(though it gets silly if you grab somewhere with great trade value) it's there to antagonize people / everyone. you provoke empires into wars they're ill-equipped for and land yourself a bunch of new, miserable subsidiaries by kicking their teeth in then robbing them blind in taxes focus on trade value yourself and just hire every mercenary and marauder on the map, buy a quick fleet from the salvagers, instead of making your own fleets so the weakling you're antagonizing thinks they have the upper hand until you day 1 have bought every hired gun on the map playing criminal syndicates can absolutely be hilarious
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May 16, 2023 08:09
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Pretty sure if you're playing a criminal syndicate you're absolutely supposed to be making it everyone's problem.
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May 16, 2023 09:01
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I tried a Criminal Megacorp in multiplayer once and it resulted in me going to the top of everybody's shitlist real quick. I have never been annihilated faster.
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May 16, 2023 13:07
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Criminal Megacorp's concept is very close to my favorite 4X faction, The Umbral Choir from Endless Space 2, but it's extremely undercooked.
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May 16, 2023 13:42
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Jack Trades posted:Criminal Megacorp's concept is very close to my favorite 4X faction, The Umbral Choir from Endless Space 2, but it's extremely undercooked. It would make a lot more sense if they appeared more or less as a “legitimate” megacorp and did legit megacorp stuff as a front for their illicit activities. Of course, it’s kind of weird how squeaky clean non-criminal megacorps are too! You really think they would keep all the financial fraud and indentured servitude to their own worlds?
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May 16, 2023 14:31
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I think the stem of the problem with criminal megacorps is that if they're not around crime just won't be a thing in your empire. Either crime is truly non-existent in your empire due to good living standards, or you build one enforcer building and that sufficies in near 100% of cases. In the rare case late game where you end up with massive overcrowding on a planet, you get the event and click the "increase unemployment benefits", and the problem goes away.s. Which means when a criminal megacorp comes along and starts loving up your planets, it feels very aggravating because now you have to go out of your way to deal with their bullshit. Whereas, if the default game experience had a certain amount of corruption and crime baked in and made it very hard to drop crime below a certain threshold, any criminal enterprise could be siphoning out your lost crime wealth without it being a big deal. States looking to reduce crime to zero would still come into conflict with crime syndicates (but possibly only mid-late game when their crime reduction capacity begins to really ramp up), while other states could sign treaties with crime syndicates that prevents them pushing crime too high, or gives them a cut of the crime income (giving them an alternative way to access some fraction of that lost income). This would also work as a replacement for the pirate mechanics everyone hates! If you also had a similar mechanism for the civilian economy you could do regular corporations too, regular megacorps take more from the civilian economy than the criminal, crime syndicates more from the criminal economy than the civil, but deals with both are win-win for the receiving state by allowing you to siphon some of it into state coffers.
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May 16, 2023 15:36
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So the Habinte apparently will copy your ship designs and spawn a bunch of huge fleets if you go to war with them, holy moly.
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May 16, 2023 16:11
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I have never once in my life turned off auto design on the ships. Are y’all exaggerating or is it really that huge of a deal? I guess I should watch a YouTube video to see how it works.
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May 16, 2023 16:48
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zelah posted:I have never once in my life turned off auto design on the ships. Are y’all exaggerating or is it really that huge of a deal? I guess I should watch a YouTube video to see how it works. It's not game breaking against AI or anything but it makes some boneheaded decisions that can cut your effective power like crazy. Take a look at some of your auto best around the mid game and wonder why the gently caress it's still using super situational weapons that went obsolete hours ago
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May 16, 2023 16:51
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Take it from me, I was definitely struggling maintaining any sort of military presence to the point where I was getting steamrolled in about every game on Cadet difficulty, but just going in and doing like 1 or 2 half-a-brain-cell designs per each ship class in the ship designer and checking "Auto Upgrade" will get you so much further
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May 16, 2023 16:59
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zelah posted:I have never once in my life turned off auto design on the ships. Are y’all exaggerating or is it really that huge of a deal? I guess I should watch a YouTube video to see how it works. Designing a basic ship in each class and hitting 'auto-upgrade' is going to give you a more effective fleet pretty much 100 percent of the time, save you a bunch of alloys from the unnecessary weapon swaps that auto-design loves, and prevents designs where you have three weapon slots on a ship and one of them is trying to burn through shields, another bypasses shields and hits armor, and the third one bypasses shields and armor. pants on head-assed ship design
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May 16, 2023 17:00
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[Ship design room room] Me: [chanting] energy siphon, energy siphon Other scientists: energy siphon, ENERGY SIPHON High Emperor: [pounding her scepter] ENERGY SIPHON! ENERGY SIPHON! ENERGY SIPHON!
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May 16, 2023 17:13
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I have seen the Khan get absolutely smoked by energy Siphons when the flagship entered the Tiyanki Breeding Grounds and started blasting. I know this because the Throne was awarded to the space whales.
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May 16, 2023 20:30
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Horace Kinch posted:I have seen the Khan get absolutely smoked by energy Siphons when the flagship entered the Tiyanki Breeding Grounds and started blasting. I know this because the Throne was awarded to the space whales. That's incredible.
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May 16, 2023 21:04
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Horace Kinch posted:I have seen the Khan get absolutely smoked by energy Siphons when the flagship entered the Tiyanki Breeding Grounds and started blasting. I know this because the Throne was awarded to the space whales. Best game.
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May 17, 2023 15:05
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Have the patched out most of the new dlc bugs?
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May 17, 2023 16:03
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Seems pretty good to me, I think most of my bugs at this point are UI Overhaul Dynamic still ironing out issues with some of the new leader stuff
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May 17, 2023 16:27
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Montu has a new video out ranking expansions and what you might want to get next. I think I agree with basically everything except the species packs since a lot of the joy from those comes down to how you like the portraits, or just if you want more portraits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahrMhGR0Me8 
Anno fucked around with this message at 19:41 on May 17, 2023 |
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May 17, 2023 19:36
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Imo this expansion gives a greater incentive to play Lithoids since they get innate +lifespan. If you lean into levelcap and negative trait reduction you get a ton of value from your leaders.
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May 17, 2023 22:49
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Horace Kinch posted:Imo this expansion gives a greater incentive to play Lithoids since they get innate +lifespan. If you lean into levelcap and negative trait reduction you get a ton of value from your leaders. Finally, a use for my nigh-immortal lithoid necrophages. Sure, it meant that I didn't need to swap out my scientists 90% of the time over an entire game, but also...that was pretty much all they did, really.
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May 18, 2023 15:15
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Lithoid Progenitor Hives are pretty sweet right now -- the Hive Mind empire bonus zeroes out the pop growth penalty and the Growth Node cancels out the pop assembly penalty at around level 8, which you'll have by around 2230 no problem at all. Their habitability bonus means you can spam onto whatever planets you want to start seeding pop factories, and the leader focus of Progenitors is crazy strong with all the shiny perks you can stack. Fishing for decent governors or scientists isn't much of a chore when you've got the Progenitor passive xp gain and can stack >+100% leader xp gain with very little effort. I booted one up to mess around with and I've also spawned into the goofiest start I've seen in a while  Blue circles are Fallen Empires, Red is a Marauder, Green are Leviathans - Ether Drake, Scavenger, and Dimensional Horror. Also got Wenkwort, the Rubricator and Helito in there. Good times.
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May 18, 2023 17:29
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Also, the most important thing, I love the Lithoid announcer. Rockin' new tech till I die 
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May 18, 2023 17:36
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Fleet orders keep breaking as soon as anything happens. Had a fleet follow another fleet and as soon as they got into combat it decided to just sit there and do nothing. That's not very helpful. Is there a way to reduce the amount of pinging going on on the map at all times? A starbase did something, pings for 10 seconds. A science ship found something, pings for 10 seconds. A planet did something, pings for 10 seconds. It's kinda annoying. Especially when multiple things are all pinging at the same time. It seems like if you as much as put the cursor a pixel on to a notification it resets the timer as well.
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May 18, 2023 18:28
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For Under One Rule, what do you reckon is a strong build for a civ going super hard on the leader bonuses? Is it even viable to do that?
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May 18, 2023 19:33
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Natural 20 posted:For Under One Rule, what do you reckon is a strong build for a civ going super hard on the leader bonuses? If you mean upgrading Luminary, going on conquest wars seems to work well so militarist with claim reductions or straight up purifier might work well.
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May 18, 2023 19:37
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Yami Fenrir posted:If you mean upgrading Luminary, going on conquest wars seems to work well so militarist with claim reductions or straight up purifier might work well. Yeah, that might be smart. I had an idea for going technocracy and then using the luminary's ability to upgrade leader output to just force out huge amounts of science from your technocrat leaders.
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May 18, 2023 19:43
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| # ? May 27, 2024 01:20 |
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Natural 20 posted:Yeah, that might be smart. I had an idea for going technocracy and then using the luminary's ability to upgrade leader output to just force out huge amounts of science from your technocrat leaders. As far as I can tell the easiest upgrade paths are gaining systems and planets during the first 40 years, as well as defensive pacts, winning wars, joining a fed and gaining defensive pacts. After that winning wars and such still seems to trigger upgrades.
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May 18, 2023 21:04
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