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Rogue AI Goddess
May 10, 2012

I enjoy the sight of humans on their knees.
That was a joke... unless..?

appropriatemetaphor posted:

I just want to conquer everyone and give them utopian living standards :(
Take it one step further and give them mandatory pampering.

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Bohemian Nights
Jul 14, 2006

When I wake up,
I look into the mirror
I can see a clearer, vision
I should start living today
Clapping Larry

Yvonmukluk posted:

I briefly installed mods - I've uninstalled them now (had to delete a custom empire to and all the saves with them) since I heard it broke achievements.


You only get achivements if you do ironman mode, so if that isn't your cup of tea you can go hog wild with mods. But tbh I think for a first time player, non-modded stellaris is just fine, atleast until you get a grasp of the basics and find out for yourself what you feel is missing from the game.

Also I think you've picked a great time! It's not like you've played the current incarnation of the game to death, so there's lots of fun to be had until the patch drops.

Bloodly
Nov 3, 2008

Not as strong as you'd expect.

Yvonmukluk posted:

I guess I might have picked a bad (or good) time to get into Stellaris with this impending patch.

Is there a 'Stellaris for dummies' guide?

I briefly installed mods - I've uninstalled them now (had to delete a custom empire to and all the saves with them) since I heard it broke achievements.

What are the specific pros & cons for lasers/railguns/missiles?

I should probably just use hyperdrive as my starting FTL choice in preparation for the changes, right?

Missiles: Extreme range, extreme accuracy, only weapon that can be stopped from inflicting damage entirely via Point Defence/Fighters shooting them down. It's not impossible to work around(There are specialised missiles to help with this) but it's something to remember. Required to unlock Torpedoes, a specialised mount with ultra-heavy payload in terms of damage(Though again, only if it doesn't get shot down).

Mass Drivers: relatively poor base accuracy, all variants have anti shield properties, Medium/Large mounts have anti-armour. All-around choice.

Lasers: Anti-Armour, penalty vs shields. Plasma takes the anti-armour even further and generally is preferred over Lasers.

Generally, ship design calls for a mix of plasma and kinetics for the sake of helping the targeting of your ships. The weapons tend to switch around based on what the best damage is at that time. So to make sure something goes down, you want a weapon to strip the shields, and something to kill the hull/armour.

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

Bloodly posted:

Missiles: Extreme range, extreme accuracy, only weapon that can be stopped from inflicting damage entirely via Point Defence/Fighters shooting them down. It's not impossible to work around(There are specialised missiles to help with this) but it's something to remember. Required to unlock Torpedoes, a specialised mount with ultra-heavy payload in terms of damage(Though again, only if it doesn't get shot down).

Aren't torpedo's PD proof? It may have been a mod I was using if not, but I was under the impression that that was their big advantage over missiles.

Bloodly
Nov 3, 2008

Not as strong as you'd expect.
Normal torpedoes can be shot down, but have decent HP. Energy Torpedoes are an instant-hit weapon, like a laser or mass driver.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

GunnerJ posted:

Hot take: the Egalitarian/Authoritarian ethos split is fine and mostly coherent except that "Authoritarian" should be called "Elitist" because that's how it functions but at least it's not the nonsense mishmash of its predecessor where "Collectivism" meant monarchies and slavery.

See I genuinely think that makes a lot of sense because both of those are, again, society-focused, erm, societies... As opposed to individual focused societies. The difference is whether your society sees people as cogs in the societal machine and the society itself as being the important thing, or whether it sees society as being a thing to serve individuals who then reshape that society with their individual brilliance.

It was a really interesting way of doing ethics and I'm sad it's gone.

Though I guess not everyone cares very much about creating neat space societies in this alien genocide simulator.

GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?
Not agreeing that "collectivism as monarchy and slavery" makes any sense doesn't mean not caring about making neat space societies.

Bloodly
Nov 3, 2008

Not as strong as you'd expect.
That's true of most 4x or grand strategy. The internals, for as many fancy words as there might be or policies you might enact, aren't something to contend with except as a means to help with the war effort for the purpose of either painting the map or keeping your map from being painted by someone else. Because war's the exciting stuff, right?

There's no life to your people or government. You can want to create utopia, but having everyone euphoric is....20% production. No events, no one wanting to visit, no intergalactic achievement awards, no acknowledgement at all.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad buff, it's just empty. I know numbers go up and go up better is often the point, but it also takes away from 'making Utopia'. I mean, they made Slavery have weirdness and factions, and runaway slaves and stuff. Be nice and...nothing.

Bloodly fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Dec 12, 2017

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

GunnerJ posted:

Not agreeing that "collectivism as monarchy and slavery" makes any sense doesn't mean not caring about making neat space societies.

I'm not being passive aggressive I mean seriously I don't really expect a large portion of the playerbase are hugely into just sitting around playing space sim-society or whatever whereas I am quite happy doing that, it's why I like playing pacifist/xenophile countries. But as a result there's probably not going to be a large focus on internal societal development as a game of tradeoffs, balancing, and potential failure states. The game is quite externally focused rather than internally, which is fine, it's picking a scope and sticking to it, but I enjoy it when mods expand the internal elements, such as the rebellion mod that adds more galactopolitical elements that influence your national stability such as pressure from neighbouring countries in various ways.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Dec 12, 2017

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

GunnerJ posted:

Hot take: the Egalitarian/Authoritarian ethos split is fine and mostly coherent except that "Authoritarian" should be called "Elitist" because that's how it functions but at least it's not the nonsense mishmash of its predecessor where "Collectivism" meant monarchies and slavery.
This makes a lot of sense. Elitism encompasses authoritarianism + libertarianism + a bunch more, and more directly opposes egalitarianism.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

It runs into difficulty if you want to play an actual philosopher king, though. As in, heavy centralized authority but with the fundamental intent of creating a utopian society. Which is a thing that comes up a lot given that the player assumes the role of a sometimes literally immortal head of state.

Authoritarian doesn't work because you aren't running slaves or a stratified society, and egalitarian doesn't work because they hate centralized power so no nondemocratic governments and no central control of pop allocations, and if you pick neither you can't have utopian living standards.

Weirdly I guess the best way to do that would be to pick pacifist/xenophobe and go for inward perfection.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Dec 12, 2017

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

I like whatever ethics mod makes a bunch of new civics that are locked based on a handful of thematic civics. You choose a vague set of ethics, an election type, and then an overarching civic like "stalinist horrorscape," or "space sweden," and those unlock the rest of the civics appropriate for what kind of country you're going for. So, your collectivist authoritarian state could still be a very pleasant place to live.

e: Here we are

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1100284147

turn off the TV fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Dec 12, 2017

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

OwlFancier posted:

It runs into difficulty if you want to play an actual philosopher king, though. As in, heavy centralized authority but with the fundamental intent of creating a utopian society. Which is a thing that comes up a lot given that the player assumes the role of a sometimes literally immortal head of state.
"Benevolent dictatorship" civic. Requires fanatic authoritarianism + dictatorship/monarchy. Disallows slavery, +10% pop happiness, allows utopian living standards, some other benefit to make it worth a civic.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Splicer posted:

"Benevolent dictatorship" civic. Requires fanatic authoritarianism + dictatorship/monarchy. Disallows slavery, +10% pop happiness, allows utopian living standards, some other benefit to make it worth a civic.

I feel like making civics for all the government archetypes is going to be a bit awkward honestly. I'd prefer it if they were a bit more organically constructed. Alphamod does this to a degree by letting you set a whole bunch of social policies governing education, ownership, pay, tax, that sort of thing to build de-facto government styles, and it used to (maybe still does) allow different buildings depending on your governmental picks, and it does it well enough that I feel like it bangs into the ethics system a bit and the ethics system feels weirdly clunky by comparison.

Ethics more just set the general cultural background of your empire, are you a bunch of nerds, do you like fighting stuff, that sort of thing, but government is a bit separated in that your ethics have some effect on what policies you can set, but a lot of them are quite freely available and you can, for the most part, pick any sort of government you want with exceptions such as spiritualists can't ban religion and materialists can't have a single state religion. Egalitarians can't do slavery, that sort of thing, but anyone can set varying degrees of property ownership, union regulation, education provision, tax rates etc, and it works mostly to drain your energy output in exchange for benefits to other areas of production as well as having some effect on what building paths you can use.

A system more like that I think would be quite nice especially if it came with more technologies to tie in. Also it'd be nice if factions didn't always want the same thing, like egalitarians shouldn't automatically want free movement, because that's tangential to the notion of equality and basically means that you can't run a non-shithole country and also have such a thing as "you aren't allowed to get back on the colony ship and abandon it three months after I put you there because the planet's too cold."

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Dec 12, 2017

Constantly LARPing
Aug 30, 2006

OwlFancier posted:

It runs into difficulty if you want to play an actual philosopher king, though. As in, heavy centralized authority but with the fundamental intent of creating a utopian society. Which is a thing that comes up a lot given that the player assumes the role of a sometimes literally immortal head of state.

Authoritarian doesn't work because you aren't running slaves or a stratified society, and egalitarian doesn't work because they hate centralized power so no nondemocratic governments and no central control of pop allocations, and if you pick neither you can't have utopian living standards.

Weirdly I guess the best way to do that would be to pick pacifist/xenophobe and go for inward perfection.

Authoritarian means you can run slavery, not that you have too. I had a pretty fun game as an alt-history Soviet Union that won the Cold War. It was fanatic materialist and authoritarian, which is a fairly good approximation of the Soviets imo. I relocated pops, suppressed dissent and other authoritarian things but used social welfare living standards and didn't run slavery. I guess it's kind of gimping yourself since you're not utilizing a potential bonus, but a lot of civics don't make much since if you're power gaming.

Basically Stellaris doesn't model economies very deeply and you only control distribution via living standards policies. If you want to differentiate between your socialist utopias and libertarian hellscapes (or vice versa if your politics are inclined) that's where you're going to do it.

gizmojumpjet
Feb 21, 2006

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.
Grimey Drawer
I got war declared against me and I took over one of the aggressor's planets but my civilization of 6 foot tall hiveminded cockroaches isn't allowed to eat or purge the people on the planet since I forgot to add any war demands and I think that's kind of bullshit. I can't even destroy any of their buildings while I'm occupying the planet.

I'm all about death camps, 8 o'clock, day one but noooooooooooo.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

OwlFancier posted:

I feel like making civics for all the government archetypes is going to be a bit awkward honestly.
I 100% agree and was getting D&D Feat flashbacks after I posted it. A better solution would be to decouple Utopian Living from Egalitarian (but increase their cost reduction for it or something to compensate), and give Authoritarian some kind of boost for free pops. If free pops also got a bonus then taking Authoritarian wouldn't mean you'd lose out by not slaving, but if you were planning to slave then you'd still want to to take Authoritarian.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Constantly LARPing posted:

Authoritarian means you can run slavery, not that you have too. I had a pretty fun game as an alt-history Soviet Union that won the Cold War. It was fanatic materialist and authoritarian, which is a fairly good approximation of the Soviets imo. I relocated pops, suppressed dissent and other authoritarian things but used social welfare living standards and didn't run slavery. I guess it's kind of gimping yourself since you're not utilizing a potential bonus, but a lot of civics don't make much since if you're power gaming.

Basically Stellaris doesn't model economies very deeply and you only control distribution via living standards policies. If you want to differentiate between your socialist utopias and libertarian hellscapes (or vice versa if your politics are inclined) that's where you're going to do it.

Picking authoritarian in that instance is actively counterproductive though because authoritarians are difficult to please if you don't run slavery, so you'll get no benefit from it and worse influnce income from having the faction.

Mostly my complaint is that it's just really weird the stuff you can and can't run together and the effects that factions have on gameplay by always requiring the same things. If you want influence income from a lot of them you're quite limited in how you play the game. It doesn't make a great deal of sense because the restrictions aren't even balance related a lot of the time, like free movement is a benefit most of the time and high living standards are a tradeoff, so it's just... weird when you get the combined effects of the archetypes defined by factions and ethics policy limitations. It makes your countries feel kind of incoherent if you don't basically pick fanatic <something> and second ethos that happens to work well with it and run it according to one of the factions.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Dec 12, 2017

MShadowy
Sep 30, 2013

dammit eyes don't work that way!



Fun Shoe
Honestly I feel like the factions could probably use more variance; they always seem to be the same. I'd like to see, for example, militant xenophiles out to aggressively integrate more aliens into your empire or isolationist militarists or the like, stuff that changes what they want somewhat, make things a bit less predictable.

Trivia
Feb 8, 2006

I'm an obtuse man,
so I'll try to be oblique.
Frankly what I'd like to see in a 4x game is eventual phasing out of mechanics as you progress into the game (and the introduction to new ones). Once the benefit of micro-ing a given mechanic becomes marginal, I'd like to see a new meta spring up.

This is a thing that I think holds back a lot of strategy / survival games in general. In a lot of survival games, the beginning is great, as you need to perform a juggling act of all your needs: food, shelter, safety, tech. Once those have become solved problems they become perpetual chores.

A great example I feel is the Civ series starting with V. The introduction of non-automatic trade routes is a great mechanic early game, where everything matters marginally in massive ways. A single trade route can more than double your gold input, as well as up to a 50% boost in tech rate. However, by mid-game they stop mattering so much, and you just repeat the same route ad nauseum. The game should really automate trade routes at the at point, and introduce a new engaging mechanic that becomes a race during that era, or somehow gives you a new marginal boost that matters quite a bit going forward.

In Stellaris I feel that ethics attraction and factions are a good candidate for mid to late game phasing out. Early game it seems like political capital would be pretty important, but as you expand your empire to encompass dozens of other worlds, power would be automatically consolidated and you could worry about something else instead. Instead of worrying about individual pops and their ethics, you could worry about controlling your governors instead, or somesuch.

Obviously it's not an easy problem to solve.

Eiba
Jul 26, 2007


OwlFancier posted:

Though I guess not everyone cares very much about creating neat space societies in this alien genocide simulator.
I'm not sure this was the best way to word this. But I get what you're feeling. There's a neat kinda government that isn't supported by the current ethics. The thing is, there were neat governments that weren't supported by the previous ethics.

Making neat space societies is what this game is about to me, but the kind of society I wanted to make was cooperative, non-heirarchical, and humanist (for lack of a better term). The old ethics system shat on that ideal way harder than the new ethics system messes with your personal utopia.

And honestly even the old system doesn't support your ideals. How would a philosopher king giving (benevolent) orders that must be obeyed be at all "individualist"? The concentration of power in a strong central government fundamentally reduces the agency of all the other individuals in that society. An absolute philosopher king would essentially eliminate "individualism" for everyone else, no matter how nice and benevolent the king was.

Authoritarianism in the current system models your ideals better.

The issue is no one likes slavery. It's a pretty strong indicator of a not-good society to our sensibilities. Whatever you link slavery too is going to be seen as the "evil" choice. And linking it to absolute rulers makes way more sense than linking it to equality. Linking slavery and equality was insane and way more of a political statement than the current system.

OwlFancier posted:

Picking authoritarian in that instance is actively counterproductive though because authoritarians are difficult to please if you don't run slavery, so you'll get no benefit from it and worse influnce income from having the faction.

Mostly my complaint is that it's just really weird the stuff you can and can't run together and the effects that factions have on gameplay by always requiring the same things. If you want influence income from a lot of them you're quite limited in how you play the game. It doesn't make a great deal of sense because the restrictions aren't even balance related a lot of the time, like free movement is a benefit most of the time and high living standards are a tradeoff, so it's just... weird when you get the combined effects of the archetypes defined by factions and ethics policy limitations. It makes your countries feel kind of incoherent if you don't basically pick fanatic <something> and second ethos that happens to work well with it and run it according to one of the factions.
I'd agree with this though. The need to placate factions and the specific desires that those factions have are pretty limiting and sometimes arbitrary.

It might be nice if there were a few flavors that each faction came in for each ethic. Like isolationist xenophobe vs bloodthirsty xenophobe. There could be hierarchy authoritarianism emphasizing slavery and order authoritarianism which would be more benevolent. Self-denying egalitarianism emphasizing working for society and individualistic egalitarianism that emphasizes society working to support everyone equally.

Forget modding a bunch of new ethics in, has anyone modded new factions in for the existing ethics?

GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?

OwlFancier posted:

I'm not being passive aggressive I mean seriously I don't really expect a large portion of the playerbase are hugely into just sitting around playing space sim-society or whatever whereas I am quite happy doing that, it's why I like playing pacifist/xenophile countries. But as a result there's probably not going to be a large focus on internal societal development as a game of tradeoffs, balancing, and potential failure states. The game is quite externally focused rather than internally, which is fine, it's picking a scope and sticking to it, but I enjoy it when mods expand the internal elements, such as the rebellion mod that adds more galactopolitical elements that influence your national stability such as pressure from neighbouring countries in various ways.

Oh, OK.

For what it's worth I'd like more internal focus in the game tbh.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

I'm fine with an ethos system that's really abstract and leaves most up to your imagination, but then you have the faction system with their lists of hyper-specific demands. What we need are more factions/selectable factions or a system of building our own, or factions that generate their demands a little more dynamically.

It's like either keep it abstract and let me imagine, or have it detailed but let me customize the hell out of it. Instead it feels like we get the worst of both worlds.

Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Dec 12, 2017

GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?
https://twitter.com/StellarisGame/status/940662551339298819

<anticipation intensifies>

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Eiba posted:

I'm not sure this was the best way to word this. But I get what you're feeling. There's a neat kinda government that isn't supported by the current ethics. The thing is, there were neat governments that weren't supported by the previous ethics.

Making neat space societies is what this game is about to me, but the kind of society I wanted to make was cooperative, non-heirarchical, and humanist (for lack of a better term). The old ethics system shat on that ideal way harder than the new ethics system messes with your personal utopia.

And honestly even the old system doesn't support your ideals. How would a philosopher king giving (benevolent) orders that must be obeyed be at all "individualist"? The concentration of power in a strong central government fundamentally reduces the agency of all the other individuals in that society. An absolute philosopher king would essentially eliminate "individualism" for everyone else, no matter how nice and benevolent the king was.

Authoritarianism in the current system models your ideals better.

The issue is no one likes slavery. It's a pretty strong indicator of a not-good society to our sensibilities. Whatever you link slavery too is going to be seen as the "evil" choice. And linking it to absolute rulers makes way more sense than linking it to equality. Linking slavery and equality was insane and way more of a political statement than the current system.

It isn't, philosopher king I would characterize as collectivist, because it's very focused on societal good, it set out to construct a society in which its members are happy but always subservient to that society and, ultimately, its king which is in turn a functionary to the system. Which fits with the rest of the collectivist options. That society first, collective before individual approach to life.

That's why I liked it cos neither collectivist nor individualist are necessarily good, Collectivist has its perks and can create a strong social safety net out of a desire to create a stable society but might equally be utterly lacking in concern for individual people. Individualist might give you really good individual rights but at the same time would be a big component of the megacorporate cyberpunk hell future.

They felt a lot more balanced I suppose and interesting than authoritarian/egalitarian which is far more clear cut "maximum space dickhead" vs "all the nice stuff but without any sort of coherent practical underpinning because we tried to jam maximum individual rights and also maximum collective welfare extremes into the same ethics." It feels like someone took the complaint of slavery being mixed in with other ethics and made that its own ethic and then stuck all the other stuff into egalitarianism and it doesn't really make a lot of sense.

If I was setting out the two now, I'd perhaps make utopian living standards open to anyone, add a new standard similar to academic privilege (same cost) called "job creators" (:v:) which makes the pops a fair bit better at generating energy but makes pops working other types of tiles and also any with non-utopian living standards unhappier and give that to individualist.

Collectivists get a series of focus edicts which let them spend influence to focus their economy towards different outputs, including unity at the cost of influence and maluses to their other outputs. You can activate multiple at once if you have the influence and don't mind eating the costs. Reflects centralization of the economy/government and makes influence important and powerful for collectivists.

For overall ethics buffs, individualists get cheaper leaders and more leader slots, collectivist leaders cost more but they get the base number of slots. Individualists get say, +20% influence from factions but their faction has tricky demands like not passing edicts which influence the economy and having to run the job creators living standard as well as free movement for pops, stuff like that, so individualists get quite a bit of influence for use on expansion and non-economic things but they're quite beholden to their factions and whims of their population. Having to use things like migration incentives to populate worlds. They also have a malus to governing ethics attraction to make faction management even harder esp. when you're using it with things like private colony ships cos you make lots of energy, they also could get some edicts which let you rush production/pop growth on colonies in exchange for influence/energy credits, thus reflecting your focus on capital reserves and private investment to prop up your economy, your faction will get grumpy though if you keep using them because they don't like being told what to do.

Collectivists on the other hand get governing ethics attraction bonuses and reduced resettlement costs which means they benefit from having a few strong factions and keeping them happy, their faction likes good mineral surplus as a sign of strong industry and using focus edicts but dislikes using the job creators standard and keeping a big energy surplus, they want you to spend when you have resources to strengthen the empire.

Slavery would be entirely open for anybody, and tolerance/benefits for it would entirely depend on whether you pick civics for it, situationally it fits with really any of the ethics options, the only thing perhaps you would not be able to do is have xeno slaves as a xenophile if your own dudes aren't also enslaved, xenophobe works the other way.

I think that would give you two interesting ethics which oppose each other quite well but which also mesh nicely with other ethics, individualist/militarist gives you bands of disorganized warrior clans, collectivist/militarist gives you a coherent martial empire. Collectivist/spiritualist would probably work really well for obvious reasons but individualist would let you create a kind of multi-faith philosopher civilization that would rake in the influence especially if you went parliamentary.

Much preferable I think to the one note authoritarian and overloaded egalitarian ethics currently. Lots more different build options that are a bit distinct from the other ethics.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Dec 12, 2017

Nicodemus Dumps
Jan 9, 2006

Just chillin' in the sink

I just realized Stellaris isn't a 4x game, it's a highly advanced internet argument engine.

Futuresight
Oct 11, 2012

IT'S ALL TURNED TO SHIT!

Trivia posted:

Frankly what I'd like to see in a 4x game is eventual phasing out of mechanics as you progress into the game (and the introduction to new ones). Once the benefit of micro-ing a given mechanic becomes marginal, I'd like to see a new meta spring up.

This is a thing that I think holds back a lot of strategy / survival games in general. In a lot of survival games, the beginning is great, as you need to perform a juggling act of all your needs: food, shelter, safety, tech. Once those have become solved problems they become perpetual chores.

A great example I feel is the Civ series starting with V. The introduction of non-automatic trade routes is a great mechanic early game, where everything matters marginally in massive ways. A single trade route can more than double your gold input, as well as up to a 50% boost in tech rate. However, by mid-game they stop mattering so much, and you just repeat the same route ad nauseum. The game should really automate trade routes at the at point, and introduce a new engaging mechanic that becomes a race during that era, or somehow gives you a new marginal boost that matters quite a bit going forward.

In Stellaris I feel that ethics attraction and factions are a good candidate for mid to late game phasing out. Early game it seems like political capital would be pretty important, but as you expand your empire to encompass dozens of other worlds, power would be automatically consolidated and you could worry about something else instead. Instead of worrying about individual pops and their ethics, you could worry about controlling your governors instead, or somesuch.

Obviously it's not an easy problem to solve.

I feel like they tried this with the sectors. I definitely agree with what you're saying here though. Especially with buildings. It makes some sense that I choose what to build on the single planet we have but once we're spanning dozens of systems it feels dumb that anybody asks me if we should build a mine at this specific location.

Aethernet
Jan 28, 2009

This is the Captain...

Our glorious political masters have, in their wisdom, decided to form an alliance with a rag-tag bunch of freedom fighters right when the Federation has us at a tactical disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in the Feds firing on our vessels...

Damn you Huxley!

Grimey Drawer
In The Republic, philosopher kings were explicitly at the head of a caste system. Game models the Platonic ideal quite well tbh.

winterwerefox
Apr 23, 2010

The next movie better not make me shave anything :(

I just had an idea. When pops are migrating, cue up a small civilian ship object to fly from where it is migrating from, to where its migrating too. As far as being an object, it lacks 'physics' so to speak, having no way for other ships to interact with it to try and save calculation on 'is this a target' You get larger civ fleets the more pops are fleeing the world. a Displacement might see 10-12 ships leaving in waves toward where they are leaving to.

canepazzo
May 29, 2006



winterwerefox posted:

I just had an idea. When pops are migrating, cue up a small civilian ship object to fly from where it is migrating from, to where its migrating too. As far as being an object, it lacks 'physics' so to speak, having no way for other ships to interact with it to try and save calculation on 'is this a target' You get larger civ fleets the more pops are fleeing the world. a Displacement might see 10-12 ships leaving in waves toward where they are leaving to.

Distant Worlds does this and it owns. You even can build tourist stations around galactic wonders (black holes etc.) and civilian ships ferry tourists to and from. And it owns.

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010
The larger problem is that there isn't really much in this game to model "good", nor does government type really matter that much. I mean, let's be honest - how many different unique types of slavery and genocide are implemented in game? Meanwhile, being a utopian space paradise is mostly just a matter of bumping some sliders, disabling your ability to forcibly resettle, and accepting that a fair chunk of your population will never actually be happy because they'll all join factions that hate you no matter what you do.

winterwerefox
Apr 23, 2010

The next movie better not make me shave anything :(

canepazzo posted:

Distant Worlds does this and it owns. You even can build tourist stations around galactic wonders (black holes etc.) and civilian ships ferry tourists to and from. And it owns.

What I liked to do in Distant worlds with regards to Civ vs Military ships was split the military off into a different fuel type from Civilian. and leave civ ships using old, outdated stuff. I loved that that game modeled all that. did not love that it was a micromanagement nightmare or it was playing itself.

Hunt11
Jul 24, 2013

Grimey Drawer
So finally got a good start and am right now planning for my first proper war. Any advice for how to approach it or is it just as simple as building as many ships as you possibly can, smashing apart anything the enemy may have and then purging or enslaving anything unlucky enough to survive?

Sindai
Jan 24, 2007
i want to achieve immortality through not dying

Main Paineframe posted:

The larger problem is that there isn't really much in this game to model "good", nor does government type really matter that much. I mean, let's be honest - how many different unique types of slavery and genocide are implemented in game? Meanwhile, being a utopian space paradise is mostly just a matter of bumping some sliders, disabling your ability to forcibly resettle, and accepting that a fair chunk of your population will never actually be happy because they'll all join factions that hate you no matter what you do.
And people say Stellaris isn't realistic.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

Hunt11 posted:

So finally got a good start and am right now planning for my first proper war. Any advice for how to approach it or is it just as simple as building as many ships as you possibly can, smashing apart anything the enemy may have and then purging or enslaving anything unlucky enough to survive?

It can be more complicated if you want it to be, but this is basically what I do. Cleanse Wargoal Best Wargoal.

Magil Zeal
Nov 24, 2008

Main Paineframe posted:

The larger problem is that there isn't really much in this game to model "good", nor does government type really matter that much. I mean, let's be honest - how many different unique types of slavery and genocide are implemented in game? Meanwhile, being a utopian space paradise is mostly just a matter of bumping some sliders, disabling your ability to forcibly resettle, and accepting that a fair chunk of your population will never actually be happy because they'll all join factions that hate you no matter what you do.

Unless you put them in organic paradise domes. Then they're pretty much always happy! And no factions.

Hunt11
Jul 24, 2013

Grimey Drawer
When building a ship, is there a way to see what the individual options do without just dragging them in and out of slots?

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

Hunt11 posted:

When building a ship, is there a way to see what the individual options do without just dragging them in and out of slots?

Mouseover the size/slot markings for the part (different sizes have different stats).

ugh whatever jeez
Mar 19, 2009

Buglord
Hey, I finally picked this up since it was on sale and I have newbie question. Do I need to micromanage ship builds or can I just mostly trust that auto-upgrade/auto-best feature?

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SniperWoreConverse
Mar 20, 2010



Gun Saliva
Is there a way to donate existing ships to the federation fleet, or do they have to be built that way from scratch?

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