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chaosapiant posted:I always feel that a ship designer can/should be as complex as you can make it, but not be required to win a game. At least not until the higher difficulty levels. Stellaris meanwhile shouldn't be asking you to drill down further than per section at most, and it's actively hurt by trying to accommodate higher granularity.
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Oct 31, 2023 13:56
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V for Vegas posted:Did anyone ever make anything out of the Star Ruler 2 code they made open source? Yes ! . Check out the discord link there too, it's quite active even for setting up multiplayer games. 
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Oct 31, 2023 16:26
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Polikarpov posted:Following the historical pattern of upgrading your second or third generation dreadnoughts in the 1930s works really well in Rule The Waves. You can usually save enough tonnage from installing new machinery to do the whole package - modern fire control, improved main gun elevation, better torpedo protection and an actual AAA suite. Yeah I tend towards lots of refits in RTW3. I've heard some players say never refit and always just build new hulls but I honestly don't get how they do that and also keep a reasonably sized battle line in place and also not go bankrupt. A new battleship takes like 3.5 years to complete if you include the design study time and costs millions a month to build. Meanwhile I can take pretty much any capital ship hull from the 20s through the 40s, slap in a new engine, upgrade the guns, radar, AA, whatever, and it's good to go in 12 months at the absolute most, or 3 months if it's just the fire control or a few superstructure things. Sure there's cases where you absolutely need to build new things, like larger fleet carriers (especially once jets come along) and once the missile age rolls around things shift to lighter ships with a ton of missiles but, you can stretch most battleships with 14+ inch guns loooong time.
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Nov 1, 2023 03:10
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My least favorite ship builder was from the last gal civ I played, GalCiv2. There was extensive cosmetic customization but the functional design was quite underwhelming, in large part due to the abstraction of combat to the strategic layer instead of tactical combat. Why bother? I’m not going to feel any particular attachment to a ship class when combat happens at that level.
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Nov 1, 2023 03:29
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Polikarpov posted:RTW mostly stays within historical limits, IMO. You can always change propulsion machinery out but it's expensive and takes a long time. Fire Control can be replaced relatively quickly, only a couple months is usually required. Took me a moment to work out that I wasn't just mis-remembering the naval combat in Rome Total War.
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Nov 1, 2023 05:58
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Speaking of ship builders, what was that space 4x with the insanely modular/atomic architecture, where planets and space stations were the same base class as ships and had the same rules, so if you really wanted you could build a ridiculous endgame ship capable of doing 99,999 damage and slagging planets? Was that one of the star rulers?
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Nov 3, 2023 08:14
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Omi no Kami posted:Speaking of ship builders, what was that space 4x with the insanely modular/atomic architecture, where planets and space stations were the same base class as ships and had the same rules, so if you really wanted you could build a ridiculous endgame ship capable of doing 99,999 damage and slagging planets? Was that one of the star rulers? Yeah that was Star Ruler 2, I forget if 1 allowed that too, and you didn't need to stop at planets, stars, and if the map had one, the supermassive black hole at the center could all be destroyed with increasingly devastating results.
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Nov 3, 2023 08:35
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Ardryn posted:Yeah that was Star Ruler 2, I forget if 1 allowed that too, and you didn't need to stop at planets, stars, and if the map had one, the supermassive black hole at the center could all be destroyed with increasingly devastating results. That was more Star Ruler 1 than 2, actually, especially the planets using the same rules as ships.
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Nov 3, 2023 15:56
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How good is Star Ruler 2 now? The last 4X game I played was Stellaris, and I got bored of it after a few months. Didn't like the combat system. The last 4x's I got a lot of longevity out of were Space Empires IV/V and MoO2.
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Nov 3, 2023 16:30
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Star ruler 2 is kind of amazing IMO. It makes the best of the blend between RTS and 4X. Like the political mechanics are genuinely great and probably actually work better in the sort of game Star Ruler is rather than a more classic 4X. Though as usual, the AI is solidly mediocre and can't efficiently handle a lot of the more esoteric racial mechanics that are available. There's a lot of options to boost difficulty, but metering those to get appropriate challenge can be difficult.
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Nov 4, 2023 02:12
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Can’t remember if I’ve asked this before, but is there a good goon-run LP of Emperor of the Fading Suns anywhere?
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Nov 4, 2023 04:13
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Bremen posted:That was more Star Ruler 1 than 2, actually, especially the planets using the same rules as ships. Naw star ruler 2 did the same thing Basically the size of the ship basically determined everything, and the scale increased everything including subsystems. If you could afford it, you could build it. At sufficient scales ships were literally the size of planets if not stars. And weapons scaled accordingly, including in damage and range. I think 2 didn't let you fire outside of a system though, where 1 you could easily make an artillery platform that could snipe from across the galaxy if you wanted to. Both games have the concept of stat killers, which are just weapons big enough to damage planets and stars. And the game made it so killing a star caused a supernova like explosion, destroying all planets in the system (and other player structures and ships) The black hole in the center is more special, killing it starts a chain reaction of supernovas that spread from the center and will typically kill everything in that galaxy. As such it's extremely hard to destroy, but sufficient size and power will do so. Doing so was one reason you would do a multiple galaxy map.
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Nov 7, 2023 23:09
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chaosapiant posted:Can’t remember if I’ve asked this before, but is there a Nope. Nothing turned up by a search here or on the LP Archive. Last it came up was June, and it wasn't at the top of their list. If it does ever end up happening, though, you can expect any Libluini to be good. Libluini posted:So, Emperor of the Fading Suns was less than 4 bucks on GOG, so I bought it. No promises, though! Even with three of my planned games being a bust because of emulation not working properly, there are still two in line before it can have its day in the sun.
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Nov 7, 2023 23:24
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UCS Hellmaker posted:Naw star ruler 2 did the same thing I've never played this game, but I am instantly in love with the idea of "black hole as end-game boss"
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Nov 8, 2023 00:58
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Star Ruler 2 is great, highly recommend it to anyone itching for a different kind of space 4x Another noteworthy feature that people haven't brought up is that fleets often number in the hundreds to thousands so whenever you do throw down with someone (and you will) it's always a massive lightshow
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Nov 8, 2023 01:19
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What happened was criminal tbh, they could get no press at all, and even trying to give it to big reviewers was met with crickets. A big reason that the studio went under was because they never got any press to even review it and boost it, and since it was a small studio doing 4x they needed something. No marketing budget at all either because they didn't have the funds. The head dev is a goon, and was very active in games talking about it and sharing stuff during development. Explained and talked about game decisions and plans, and would be open on explaining the reasoning for what they planned. After release he was open on how they were struggling because of the lack of reviews or expose in game sites. Then how the expansion was going to be it, they were putting the last of the energy into it and then shuttering once it was stable. I think at this point even buying the games on steam basically makes them nothing, hence why they don't have any specials. It's a big reason they released the source code of 2, with music being the only thing they couldn't due to copyright.
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Nov 8, 2023 02:16
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chaosapiant posted:Can’t remember if I’ve asked this before, but is there a good goon-run LP of Emperor of the Fading Suns anywhere? There was an LP of it, but it's so old by now that I expect most of the images to have long since broken.
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Nov 8, 2023 03:45
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Libluini posted:
I too remember scatter pack shuttles from Star Fleet Battles
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Nov 8, 2023 21:28
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Libluini posted:For me, ship designers can't be complex enough. I can spend endless amounts of times designing weird drone carriers in SEV and then see how well they fare in the real world. The incoming missile decoy system in Aurora might be a bridge to far for me.... Until I bang my head against it enough that it clicks.
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Nov 9, 2023 01:17
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Ardryn posted:There was an LP of it, but it's so old by now that I expect most of the images to have long since broken. Apparently I have it bookmarked. The images appear to be there still. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2705713
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Nov 9, 2023 01:26
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My guess is that they were lost and then recovered when the surprise waffleimages recovery happened.
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Nov 9, 2023 01:34
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IceMole posted:Apparently I have it bookmarked. The images appear to be there still. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2705713 Reading just the OP it seems like it’s referencing a bunch of screenshot images that aren’t there, alas.
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Nov 9, 2023 13:23
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Telsa Cola posted:The incoming missile decoy system in Aurora might be a bridge to far for me.... My main problem with Aurora is that the UI keeps tripping me up when I'm trying to set up alien races. Often I suddenly realize that it's long after midnight and all I did was fiddling around with planetary atmospheric compositions and there's now no time left to do anything else And most of the time lost is due to the UI being so opaque
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Nov 9, 2023 13:35
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Splicer posted:DW2 (haven't played DWU) crams so much stuff under the heading of "ship" that it makes sense to allow the player a lot of granularity. Slamming mining modules onto a ship for a blitz mine vs a high storage station for a steady pull are actual decisions with returns matching their effort. Desynched is a game all about building bespoke units (and also allows saving blueprints between games). Is DW2 any good now? I looked at it but it looks like a QOL and graphical upgrade to 1 with the races getting sold back in DLC. Compared to the modding scene for DW1 it seems hard to compete.
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Nov 9, 2023 14:06
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Checked out Star Ruler 2 based on goons raving, despite vaguely remembering not liking the first game and hell yeah it owns, a fresh little Sword of the Stars x Kohan x Sins of the Solar Empire. It's a shame the wiki is down, as it takes some more figuring out, so I'll ask about one thing where I know I'm missing something: what's the benefit of Nylli's mothership/habitat system? It introduces a little more micro and a centralized bottleneck expansion, you lose all planetary construction but what's the upside? I suppose the flipside of mothership micro is that you can go more stop-go with colonization, barging into a system and quickly dumping however much population is needed to set up a new production chain. I vaguely understand that the no pressure cap is probably the big part of some nice centralized setups, but I don't really get how that's supposed to work. Please give me Nylli tips, I like spaceborne races thematically and their FTL drive is incredibly baller.
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Nov 9, 2023 18:45
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Huh, I totally forgot that I Beta-tested Star Ruler 2. I still have it in my Steam-library. It's a bit late, but I should probably drop down those 8 bucks for the DLC and finally try it again.
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Nov 9, 2023 20:07
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Lichtenstein posted:Checked out Star Ruler 2 based on goons raving, despite vaguely remembering not liking the first game and hell yeah it owns, a fresh little Sword of the Stars x Kohan x Sins of the Solar Empire. Nylli can colonize faster at the start of the game, but hit a hump where they slow down until they get more motherships online. No pressure cap is fantastic for worlds that are physically small but otherwise valuable, it abstracts out some otherwise difficult concerns and plays into another strength of theirs: they can colonize nearly instantly if need be. Although you start with a size 1000 mothership, i believe the size minimum is actually 500 and has no impact on population growth: so, lol. Keep that in mind for secondary mothership designs. Also keep in mind you can make them quite speedy! They don't need to be slow. Also keep in mind that Fission reactors are much cheaper than Fusion. A neat trick with motherships is that if you give them both tractor beams AND mining beams, they can simply drag around ore asteroids while mining them. If you unlock the ore-based hull for ships it reduces the cost of producing those by 50%. Since your construction facilities are mobile this also means you can barge into a system, take it over, and throw up monster defense platforms very quickly (the labor cost for defense platforms scales with the distance to the world building them). The habitats themselves are a double edged sword. Although it means that your population is directly vulnerable to enemy fleets (and thus ironically the nomad faction is quite vulnerable to raiding on your small worlds), it also means that your larger planets are extremely well defended against enemy fleets as long as you keep your research up: a size 20+ world has a lot of habitat HP and firepower, even if its not garrisoned by support ships! I like to use the wormhole projector with the mothership race and RP as peacekeepers from Farscape. I forget if thats their default FTL...
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Nov 9, 2023 20:28
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Archonex posted:Is DW2 any good now? I looked at it but it looks like a QOL and graphical upgrade to 1 with the races getting sold back in DLC. Compared to the modding scene for DW1 it seems hard to compete.
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Nov 11, 2023 22:02
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DW2 has a bunch of much-appreciated core improvements over DW1 that are more than just graphical upgrades. And the scale has been upped by an order of magnitude or so which is awesome for combat. It also unfortunately has a bad early game that keeps dragging the whole thing down, which is frustrating. -'dark age' starts mirror the same starts in DW1, except the scale and speeds and research setup make sublight exploration pointless; you'll have early warp drives before you can get to more than the local moon/gas giant. -if you try to take the non-dark age early start, you actually progress *slower* because you don't get the freebie tech locations -research now effectively scales linearly with # of tech locations and planets, meaning area controlled = research capability, meaning DW2 fell face first into one of the 4x design traps that DW1 managed to avoid -'evil' governments are incredibly crippled at the start of the game. it's possible to do a start with an evil government and be unable to afford more than your starport's maintenance costs. (the devs don't seem to understand the problem, judging by adding a free armored unit to evil gov starts to try to buff them. yay, more maint) -relatedly pop growth is the god stat, also kicking evil governments in the balls. DW1 also had this problem (tho not as bad), but increasing pop growth with excess spending in DW2 means evil govs get a *double* kick in the balls. -because its impossible to stop pirate raids early on and because raids kill off incredible amounts of population for some reason (thereby tanking your budget), it is always the correct choice to pay off early pirates (lame!) TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Nov 12, 2023 |
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Nov 12, 2023 03:07
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:DW2 has a bunch of much-appreciated core improvements over DW1 that are more than just graphical upgrades. And the scale has been upped by an order of magnitude or so which is awesome for combat. Hmm, maybe I should give DW2 another try. I'm a big fan of the first one, did not like the second when I last tried it years ago.
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Nov 12, 2023 15:18
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DW2 is being a whole bunch of pirate's bitch for the first couple hours of the game. And then when you can beat them you sometimes don't bother cus what you're paying them now isn't a noticable part of your budget and they might even be making you actually valuable offers or trying to sign a regular pact where you don't have to pay them cus they're getting afraid of your strength. I dunno it's weird and it feels weird.
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Nov 12, 2023 16:58
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If you have boarding modules in DW2, you can fight the pirates and steal their ships and then use their ships to fight other pirates. Still usually not worth it since maintenance on the ships to fight the pirates is usually more expensive than paying the pirates off.
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Nov 12, 2023 17:46
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Orange Devil posted:DW2 is being a whole bunch of pirate's bitch for the first couple hours of the game. And then when you can beat them you sometimes don't bother cus what you're paying them now isn't a noticable part of your budget and they might even be making you actually valuable offers or trying to sign a regular pact where you don't have to pay them cus they're getting afraid of your strength. "Pirates" is kind of a misnomer in DW2. They're more like those hostile, spacefaring tribes that were never thrown back into a pre-space society, so of course they have a leg up to every player slowly crawling back into space. And of course you eventually bypass their societies, as they are space barbarians, stuck in their ancient ways while the player empires are changing fast. "Raiding Nomads" would be a better name for what pirates are in DW2, imho
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Nov 12, 2023 18:12
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Libluini posted:"Raiding Nomads" would be a better name for what pirates are in DW2, imho 100% DW2 is really good at capturing the feel of a space empire that runs itself...but the fact that so much can be automated (or maybe it's that it starts out automated?) almost makes it feel more like an idle game where you just have to nudge things every once in awhile.
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Nov 12, 2023 18:42
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Best way to play either DW game is full manual mode, pre-warp. Then learn how to manage every aspect of your empire while slowly automating some things as needed. Once you’ve claimed a few systems and have a commercial economy going, it plays a lot like Dwarf Fortress. No other 4x that I’ve played has that feel and it’s awesome.
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Nov 12, 2023 20:15
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UCS Hellmaker posted:What happened was criminal tbh, they could get no press at all, and even trying to give it to big reviewers was met with crickets. A big reason that the studio went under was because they never got any press to even review it and boost it, and since it was a small studio doing 4x they needed something. No marketing budget at all either because they didn't have the funds. Star Ruler fell into the common trap for games created by genre enthusiasts and frontloaded maximalist customisation. It meant that any reviewer or just a new player trying it out on spec was left completely bewildered with the options and no good feedback on what the right things to pick were, so people would just give up and not review and not pass it on by word of mouth. It's a shame, but I've seen the same thing happen about a dozen time (and about half of that is Arcen Studios alone).
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Nov 12, 2023 20:51
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Are there any current-ish 4xes that are essentially PBEM? Doesn't have to be literally going over email, I mean any game where the players can take their turns whenever they want and a host/central server will generate the turn once everyone's turned in instead of all the players needing to be online and playing at the same time.
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Nov 14, 2023 22:56
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Valatar posted:Are there any current-ish 4xes that are essentially PBEM? Doesn't have to be literally going over email, I mean any game where the players can take their turns whenever they want and a host/central server will generate the turn once everyone's turned in instead of all the players needing to be online and playing at the same time. Old World can do asynchronous cloud games. It's cool because you have a shared synchronous game session and then just fluidly swap to PBEM mode.
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Nov 14, 2023 23:03
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Shadow Empire has PBEM, Dominion 6 is coming out soon...
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Nov 14, 2023 23:07
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civ4 remastered for better online support WHEN firaxis i tried setting up a pitboss server for a non-vanilla version of civ4 and it was like a whole loving cs project
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