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Pirate Radar posted:Cybernetics: once I can cyborg up my councilors, is there a downside to shoving them full of every upgrade that might help even a little? 500 money seems cheap for a stat point or two. I generally don't use the loyalty monitor, it gives -5 to loyalty but you can always see if they've been turned. Other than that, go nuts until the third tier when you might want to skip the forebrain stimulator thing, it boosts loyalty by 3 but gives -2 to command and science. +3 to all stats for a total of ~20k a councilor is very worth it.
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Apr 11, 2024 14:14
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Yeah, the loyalty monitor is kind of useless since if you have two people with the Inspire mission then everyone will eventually reach 25 Loyalty which means they're almost impossible to turn. Cybernetics are great and you should use them.
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Apr 11, 2024 14:50
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Bremen posted:How's China in your game? In my game it got jacked up to a massive 7-something inequality and has had multiple coups, making it mostly useless. I suspect the AI doesn't have a good handle on the new priorities system, but that makes sense considering it's on the validation branch and has changes every few days; it seems smart to wait until the system is finalized before tuning the AI for it. Because its Servants, they're wrecking it. I've already taken out 2 Alien Structures. They've filled out the priority pips on everything but Econ and Spoils, which are 0 pips and I think 3 pips across 2 CPs respectively. The AI can still wreck a country and then bring the people back together (I have no real understanding of the Cohesion system, I just fill up Knowledge and if I need more then Unity). They got into it late, after getting and likely ruining India (which has since been grabbed up by the Academy, I think) so the Servants went right into conversion for AA China it looks like. So I'm (Initiative) fighting on Earth against Protectorate and Servants while a nearly wiped out HF (like 144 of 350 CP, but everyone's getting large gaps now that the EU is fully combined) and Resistance are dealing with stuff in space. And the AI has made some half-way decent ship designs, though they are all massively over fueled. With the same techs, I'm running 57 kps Escorts around the system at no more than like 3000 tons total while they're putting that much propellant on their designs and not getting much better range. The costs of side armor, I guess; they're running 2 to 5 armor on light and medium ships. Pirate Radar posted:Cybernetics: once I can cyborg up my councilors, is there a downside to shoving them full of every upgrade that might help even a little? 500 money seems cheap for a stat point or two. The only cybernetic upgrade I don't do is Loyalty Monitor, but everything else gets shoved into their heads. I don't see the point to loving with Loyalty when it gets involved in so little. Every other chip can be a massive help, while LM is the only one with a negative modifier. CoffeeQaddaffi fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Apr 11, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 14:56
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I'm just starting to learn this game. The Academy sounds neat, but the game seems to stress that it's a difficult playthrough. How bad is it? I know that you lose a ton of public opinion pretty early in the game, is that the hard part or is there more to it?
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Apr 11, 2024 19:02
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Maybe I'm derping but is there a meaningful difference between long campaign and an accelerated game?
chainchompz fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Apr 11, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 19:10
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Cool Dad posted:I'm just starting to learn this game. The Academy sounds neat, but the game seems to stress that it's a difficult playthrough. How bad is it? I know that you lose a ton of public opinion pretty early in the game, is that the hard part or is there more to it? Losing the public opinion and half your CPs early in the game is the first hurdle, the second is a bit later. All (I think) factions get a project to establish their goals after accomplishing their initial objectives that increases their control cap a bunch and gives them a real nice unique org. I believe for everyone else this project costs 5k RP, but the Academy's costs 25k and will slow you down a lot while you research it. The flavor text for it even mentions it taking a long time and much of the Academy's supporters fleeing the organization during that time. I think that's the only other disadvantage the academy had, though I could be wrong. But yeah, the game is absolutely not kidding about an Academy playthrough being much harder than the others.
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Apr 11, 2024 19:11
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Cool Dad posted:I'm just starting to learn this game. The Academy sounds neat, but the game seems to stress that it's a difficult playthrough. How bad is it? I know that you lose a ton of public opinion pretty early in the game, is that the hard part or is there more to it? The Academy effectively has to do both the pro-alien and anti-alien plots simultaneously in order to achieve their objectives - so they, for example, have to both establish peaceful diplomatic contact with the aliens like the Protectorate and Servants do, and assassinate an alien operative to examine its corpse like most of the other factions do. It is, I think, the best and most interesting faction plot, but it's also definitely more difficult than the others. Note that difficulty is relative here, though - even the 'Easy' Servants playthrough is still going to take you 100+ hours and require multiple restarts, so when the bar is set so high anyway, the Academy can't really get that much worse.
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Apr 11, 2024 19:16
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Servants and Academy are, imo, tied for the most interesting stories. Academy itself isn't that bad if you understand the early 'gotcha' which playing another faction will make you be aware of anyways and know how to build a research base. I'd personally suggest Servants as a first run as it teaches you all the mechanics while also giving you a very powerful ally to fall back on if you mess up.
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Apr 11, 2024 21:54
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There’s also a hidden disadvantage to the Academy. If you ever do turn councillor or other missions you’ll see a “ideology” modifier. The same applies to your faction for them. Notably the academy does not have inherent resistance to alien enthrall operations, so you have the lowest resistance to that (tied with Protectorate, I think).
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Apr 11, 2024 22:06
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Ideology is considered on two axes: Alien sympathy and attitude towards humanity (idealistic or cynical). This affects inter-faction relations obviously, but also the effect public opinion differences have on your cohesion. I.E if you control a nation as the Servants, and public opinion supports the Protectorate, that doesn’t hurt cohesion nearly as much as if they support Humanity First. Fun fact: Project Exodus is more idealistic and more anti-alien than the Resistance.
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Apr 11, 2024 22:23
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Is there any reason to play resistance if you’ve already beaten the game as Humanity First? I noticed resistance gives you a little more info about the aliens and their motives whereas HF just wants to know enough to destroy them. I don’t think the plot differs that much outside that.
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Apr 11, 2024 23:02
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Kraftwerk posted:Is there any reason to play resistance if you’ve already beaten the game as Humanity First? That's kinda the theme of all the factions. Since each approaches the problem from slightly different angles, you tend to learn different pieces of the alien lore. No one group has the whole picture, but each piece is relatively small and potentially easy to miss in the amount of things that are the same.
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Apr 11, 2024 23:08
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The Academy not only has that one ludicrously expensive tech to set their goal, but they also need to research almost all the milestone victories of the other factions. So you are spending a lot of research. They also have a ludicrous difficult to achieve victory condition. They need to almost completely wipe out the alien fleets while at the same time control more of earth than the pro alien factions do. The latter requires a ton of CP. Think it got better in 0.4x but in 0.2x you needed to dedicate your second slot to only management research to not go over the cap constantly. A thing that is new in 0.4 is that the academy can now engage in trade with the aliens to gift them something to burn off hate (and get antimatter really really early). Being able to do that will make your campaign a lot easier. You need to find those very well hidden alien agents though. I can also second the AI building decent designs. Had one turn over to me and decided to send it on a suicide mission, I was very surprised when it emerged victorious.
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Apr 11, 2024 23:16
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It's really thematic that setting the Academy's goals is so hard because they're literally trying to be Star Trek on a planet that was falling apart before Aliens started mind controlling everyone. Having it take a long time to reach a compromise between a bunch of idealists while skirting the line between resistance and cooperation makes sense to be impossible compared to the meeting where Hans Castille turns to a bunch of rogue Patton-style generals and mercenaries around a table like "kill em all? Kill em all? All good? OK good go make me better guns."
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Apr 11, 2024 23:25
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Yeah the Academy are distinguished from the Resistance - who they otherwise have very similar goals to - in that the Academy has a clear ideological vision for what 'after the war' should look like, coherent long-term political goals they are working towards, while the Resistance explicitly does not have any and does not want any, being single-mindedly focused on winning the war. It's very funny that the people trying to chart the middle path and who are initially portrayed as spineless indecisive centrists are, when you start seriously getting into their plot, actually insanely ambitious radicals, whose plan upon discovering that the world does not actually conform to their idealistic utopian vision is to make it conform at gunpoint. It's pretty great, and it makes complete sense that it would be more difficult than anyone else's, because they have to not only fight for their goals but also hammer out what the hell those goals even are. It is honestly a pretty good depiction of the process of guerrilla warfare, from how political movements turn into revolutionary organizations all the way to the final transition from guerrilla war to conventional war. That it's led by the most unexpected people in the cast, and that they very much did not intend or expect to be here, makes it even better.
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Apr 12, 2024 00:01
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Mister Bates posted:It's very funny that the people trying to chart the middle path and who are initially portrayed as spineless indecisive centrists are, when you start seriously getting into their plot, actually insanely ambitious radicals, whose plan upon discovering that the world does not actually conform to their idealistic utopian vision is to make it conform at gunpoint. They're definitely one of the more ideologically consistent which is compelling. Only Servants, and maybe PE are nearly as close as staying on their stated course.
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Apr 12, 2024 03:42
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Yeah, the Academy was my first victory back when it released into early access on Steam and it was extremely cool. It's really capped off by the ending, which is behind these spoilers so don't click if you want to experience it yourself. It is insanely cool to send a negotiating team, the Hydra you've captured and convinced you actually want to make peace as equals, and leverage in the form of a giant antimatter bomb through the wormhole to open ceasefire talks. Those nerds go HARD. You're gonna do a lot of conquering towards the end of the game, though. Just had a two part throwdown in space, the first and second battles over Triton, that remind me why I love it even with its occasional jank. The aliens had kept falling back from me as I sent fleets to clear their bases, which resulted in about 180k fleet power split between Triton and their main base at Quaoar on the opposite side of the solar system. Part 1 involved a ~90 ship fleet of mine facing off against 250+ alien ships and a full battle station. I figured it would be hard but my capital ships would see me through. So of course I start with only frigates and monitors deployed. I have to veer off immediately to stay out of range of the station, and then corral my reinforcements as they appeared from seemingly random angles before shooting my way out at 4 g's of acceleration. I came out ahead in the battle, preserving almost all my capital ships, but the Ayys still had nearly 200 ships left and facilities to repair the ones I'd been mission killed. The fight took 4 hours in-game time and about 1 in real time. After a long period of repairs, part 2 saw my 67 remaining ships do what I'd meant to do in the first place, coast in at 50 meters a second in Great Wall formation and swat the aliens. That fight took three hours in-game and another hour in real time, and I walked out having outright destroyed 109 ships, crippled another 40ish, and eliminated the station for ~30 of my own lost. I had enough salvage afterwards that I could build two titans with hybrid armor. There's gonna be a third battle over Triton, a little less than half the alien ships, but it's gonna be like the third Punic war - a walkover against a completely depleted foe. Extremely fun stuff. Cannot wait to enslave the entire world using pherocytes so they all have to buy my products. e: Oh, and I only just realized in the last week that you can essentially build fleet oilers by sticking thousands of tons of propellant on a gunship and classifying it as a transport. These things are essentially fuel tanks with an engine strapped to them. They'll let you travel to the outer planets in a reasonable timeframe without having to give each individual warship hundreds of delta-v, and not have to either wait for a station with a supply dump to get built/send ahead a colony ship and hope the undefended station doesn't get stomped. It won't end up in a fight if you have more ships than can be put in the fight at once, and even if it does start in the fight it starts off well behind your battle line so you can have it turn tail and run until it can disengage. And with thousands of delta-v + 4 gs of acceleration, nothing will catch a fleet oiler. Now if they could only grog it up some more and require me to have other types of replenishment vehicles, I wanna build the TI version of the Ice Cream Ship the US Navy had in WW2. habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Apr 12, 2024 |
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Apr 12, 2024 04:08
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My brutal difficulty/early 0.4x war game is in 2029 now, and I have some observations and advice for folks. A lot of it’s probably basic for those with multiple wins but it’s helping me prioritize and plan too. 1. Getting aliens off earth and keeping them off as fast as possible makes things so much easier. No aliens means no enthralling, no free servant resources and no alien nation. If you keep them from making contact with the servants I think you can keep them from flying around too, so they only move around on foot which makes tracking and eliminating even easier. This is hard to do though! Ideally you can keep track of how many UFOs land, but the best option is if you can get marines to an alien undefended mine and take it you’ll get locations and info on all alien operatives. They always go to ground but if you’ve kept them from flying you can surveillance to find them. This also has extra benefits in that you won’t need to rush enthrall resistance. If you’re doing this you’ll need to keep a standing fleet over your infrastructure, but you should probably do that anyway. One related thing is the biggest gently caress you in the game right now (mild spoilers for mid game). If you let aliens land carriers and setup the AA they trigger some “many aliens” flag and for the rest of the game get infinite earth size recruitment as long as it exists. If they land, and don’t setup the AA, but servants build alien facilities, they get infinite recruitment from facilities. And endgame aliens are a colossal pain in the rear end to get rid of, because they will defend interest one another and work in pairs, not to mention being 25 in everything. If you can avoid letting this happen do everything you can to keep assault carriers from landing and servants from building facilities by infiltrating them. If you play a turtle game like I did the first few times I ignored alien bases until they were all bristling with battlestations. But they start small just like your stuff does. Grid drive equipped escorts with marines can take out alien mines in the belt, and their unarmed early habs. Doing that both makes the aliens waste resources on retaliation and delays their own growth. But you need to be ready for those retaliations yourself. 2. Right now the US by far the best opener. Get the US, run knowledge to fix cohesion, then prioritize what you want. If you’re playing aggressive early, you may not even care about the US armies, because you’re going to be killing carriers in orbit. What you do need are boost early, and all the MC you can get later. Ignore Econ, welfare, etc. once you have the US, EU is ideal for MC. In 2029 my US makes like 30 MC, my EU 120. Mid game if you play it right you transition from earth centric research to space centric, with earth just providing MC and credit income. 3. Organizations. Advice in 0.3x said to run +knowledge orgs. I wouldn’t. I’d prioritize getting a single counselor to high ESP, one to high Investigation, one or two to high per and maybe one to high command. If you’re killing aliens xenoflora should not be a problem, and you’re taking earth orbit for bombardment anyway later. Prioritize research orgs, boost, and MC construction, they’re small bonuses and small amounts of research but it adds up. Otherwise, admin to get hostile takeover to get admin even faster, and once you’re at 25 for everyone specialize as above. Once you have a space economy starting start getting +mining yield whenever it comes up. Your space infrastructure is limited by MC, Boost, and space resources. Earth can only produce the former, not the latter. 4. Early you’re going to be badly limited by volatiles and water, until you get space agriculture. Mars and Ceres are ideal for this. Right now in 0.4X mines cost nothing MC wise, and settlements are 3 Mc vs 2 for outposts. You’ll want to get settlements all over mars/ceres for water/volatile income, plus whatever other good resources are available (135 Hertha, and a few other asteroids almost always have good noble income and aliens prioritize them. Beat them there if you can! You can go to Intel -> “Solar System” to filter bodies by potential income, and they’ll be on top for noble income) Later key structures like research campuses, operations centers, hospitals and nanofactories all burn significant amounts of water/volatiles in upkeep and construction costs, so you’ll need to mix in farms at a high rate in your orbitals and settlements to keep up. This is painful and will make you wish for rings/colonies, for which all these facilities are much more efficient. 5. When you transition to space it’s going to cost a ton of MC, obviously. If you can do so, building ships to defend is much better than relying on layered defenses. The latter take significant upkeep and slots on your stations better used for more useful facilities. I just successfully defended Earth from three near simultaneous assault carriers with two fleets of 6 of 7 escorts each fielding 2 x Artemis torpedoes and 2 magazines, with grid drives, but having drives with actual thrust (Burner/Pharos is a good early option, just keep DV to sub-20 to avoid running out of water) is a better choice to actually make intercepts. Monitors are the next level, with 4xmissiles. Build these as cheaply as possible, they don’t need side or rear armor, and only token front armor. Nothing needs DV for planetary defense, but when you go belt hunting use grid and only 60-100 dV. 6. Prioritize low earth orbit for the various modules that provide interface benefits. Administration node/tower/complex are essential for expanding your territory on earth, and obviously the various science centers to get maximum bonuses are good. But remember you’ll want shipyards in low orbit too to keep your ships up in that key orbit. Stick hospitals in high orbit, the boost costs don’t change, and you need these to support your space infrastructure. Orbitals with 3 x hospitals, 3 x farms, and the rest solar panels provide 150 or so credit income a month with no upkeep besides the boost needs. Same with bigger shipyards, or nanofactories if you use those. Relying on nanofactories for money is irritating because they stop doing that whenever you actually build anything in that system. There’s mods to remove this which I’d recommend because it’s a stupid mechanic. Otherwise if you can get mercury and have good metal income, it’s ideal for research campuses. I’ve found that building for Mission Control orbitals is very inefficient, since you can fit at most 5 operation centers and 5 farms per orbital, which nets you 2 MC at significant credit cost. It’s much better to build MC on earth. All this matters because if you can start throwing up research campus orbitals you’ll rapidly go exponential on research. Each orbital in mercury is going to be 300 research, albeit for 8 MC used. Then when you go rings it goes up farther and faster as everything gets more efficient. 7. Plan your global tech order more than I have. And don’t let the AI waste too much time here. The wrong techs can leave you significantly behind. Key objectives include: Carbon Nanotubes, which influences the chance to get vital grid drives for early game ships. Missiles, because you’re not killing aliens without them early. Militarization of space, for marines to attack early alien habs, since missiles can’t bombard unless nuclear which are later tech. Advanced chemical rocketry, for a bunch of boost techs. Solid core fission, for nuclear freighters to reduce boost cost and time to start mining Mars. Missions to Moon, Mars, and Asteroids, then Inner Planets before Jupiter most of the time. I went Jupiter first and regret it, because I can’t leverage it the way I could Mercury. Gas core fission, for Pharos drive for early high thrust fission Space agriculture, for hydroponics and to reduce your volatile/water demands Space Research for level two science buildings for earth orbit Administration Algorithms, for administration towers to let you increase earth holdings from your presumed LEO domination. And work on researching tracking alien movements so you can eliminate them early. I’ve ignored railguns, lasers, and particle beams entirely so far. They’re not scoring kills on alien ships until maybe Green Arc Lasers, and I have more important priorities. So far in 2029 after two or three years of total war, I have yet to fight at one of my own habs, and by default your ground defenses will have infrared lasers it looks like, with enough combat power to deter bombardments early. Velius fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Apr 12, 2024 |
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Apr 12, 2024 16:51
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You can still turtle if you want but ughhh it is not worth it. You will have to grind out the aliens over the course of multiple decades if you let them get established. Fleets of 200+ ships are not uncommon.
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Apr 12, 2024 19:35
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It was a good time in an earlier version of the game when the aliens could suffer the asteroid impact event on their starter base and completely cripple their economy for the entire game.
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Apr 12, 2024 19:38
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Vengarr posted:You can still turtle if you want but ughhh it is not worth it. You will have to grind out the aliens over the course of multiple decades if you let them get established. Fleets of 200+ ships are not uncommon. Took me until 2094 to finish my Initiative game, which I finally polished off about 30 minutes ago. So many alien fleets to chase down. Wish I had been more proactive in the 2030s, could have easily shaved off several decades.
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Apr 12, 2024 19:39
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Do aliens cap out on new bases pretty quick? It seems like in the early game I get a bunch of notifications of new alien bases but after awhile that stops. I'm in 2033 and not really ready to venture too far into the system or take out alien bases, my best drive is burner and I'm still trying to keep my alien hate low. Admittedly I haven't really been focusing on optimal play or meta strategies.
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Apr 12, 2024 21:40
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Vengarr posted:You can still turtle if you want but ughhh it is not worth it. You will have to grind out the aliens over the course of multiple decades if you let them get established. Fleets of 200+ ships are not uncommon. My biggest wish is that the other factions were at least mildly competent, especially servants and protectorate, so that the aliens didn't have to be so strong. Like, thematically and from a gameplay perspective, it's actually really fun to have a strong earth-based faction to fight against but if you do let them then yeah it's just a slog. Basically just want more sneaky-sneaky alien shenanigans with most of the fighting being against your rival humans for both ground and space instead of rarely seeing other factions with space fleets ever.
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Apr 12, 2024 22:01
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So having gotten into a massive hellwar between Eurasia/the EU on one hand and China/the Alien Administration on the other, I can report that the AI WILL in fact use nukes anywhere on their territory if they're desperate enough, not just their capital, and will happily nuke their capital into a glowing ball if you keep feeding your armies in. It seems a bit inconsistent though - at one point China nuked my armies everywhere in China except, y'know, Beijing, which was getting sieged down while the other armies were just transiting. Sorta worked out for me though - I only got and unified the EU late, with a bunch of important European nations controlled by the Resistance and Humanity First so I ended up with way more armies than I really needed. Feeding the troops I didn't really need into the grinder in exchange for instantly making the Servants far and away the most atrocious faction seemed like a decent trade, and it unburdens my economy of having to pay for them. Sure, I COULD just disband the armies but this way I get to watch the Servants burn down their own economy and reputation at the same time. On that note, Earth-based space defenses seem a bit weirdly inconsistent. If you try to bombard in a region protected by defenses your ships will get absolutely shredded, but targeting the defenses directly deletes them in seconds and lets you get on with blasting away whatever you wanted to rain sky fire on. The only use I can see for them is maybe convincing the AI not to get froggy, but I feel like if the AI is hucking nukes at your country or have orbital control of Earth you might have bigger problems. Rynoto posted:My biggest wish is that the other factions were at least mildly competent, especially servants and protectorate, so that the aliens didn't have to be so strong. Like, thematically and from a gameplay perspective, it's actually really fun to have a strong earth-based faction to fight against but if you do let them then yeah it's just a slog. There's a really weird dynamic in the game right now where half the techs in the game are completely useless because the only serious threat are the aliens who laugh off your puny infrared lasers and whatnot. The other human factions actually posing an issue could go a long ways to making a lot of the early game tech relevant. Tomn fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Apr 12, 2024 |
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Apr 12, 2024 22:32
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My next game is going to be Servants on Brutal, just to see if the AI humans can actually cause me trouble. Gonna wait a few months for that since I just finished as the Initiative.
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Apr 13, 2024 03:38
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One suspects the aliens get sufficient boosts on brutal to trivialize the run. Aliens on brutal are nasty, so far the other factions on brutal are the same as usual.
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Apr 13, 2024 04:20
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My understanding is that it's set for the Aliens to scale up much more slowly on Brutal when you're the Servants, so they can't assist you that quickly.
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Apr 13, 2024 04:26
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habeasdorkus posted:My understanding is that it's set for the Aliens to scale up much more slowly on Brutal when you're the Servants, so they can't assist you that quickly. It's basically the inverse, the aliens will play as if on cinematic.
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Apr 13, 2024 07:29
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How is the space battle autoresolve, by the way? Getting up to where I’m going to get into fights on my current slow file (assuming I can solve my volatile and radiation shortages) and wondering if I can trust the autoresolve button or if I have to learn how ship combat works
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Apr 13, 2024 09:24
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the servants took china help??? help?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?1
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Apr 13, 2024 16:26
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Stairmaster posted:the servants took china help??? help?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?1 It's probably the Alien's helping them. China is a tough nut to crack without Enthrall missions. There might not be a ton you can do in the short or especially medium run once they get settled in, but if you want to try: A) Start saving up Influence. You're gonna need a lot of it. Money, too, but I never found money that hard to come by in the early game. 1) You'll want to control as many of their neighbors as you can for the bonuses that gives you to success on crackdown, purge, and public opinion missions. You can see them on the map, but for reference those are Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, India, the Himalayan States, Russia, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Kyrgzstan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and North Korea. I dunno if Afghanistan counts if the road project linking Kabul and Urumqi hasn't been completed. 2) Get as much public opinion on your side in China as possible, IIRC each 10% support for you is a +1 bonus to success and each 10% for the Servants is a -1 malus against you. This will probably cost a lot of money, given the size of China and the flat -3 censorship malus. 3) Once you've got a bunch of the population on your side and control over a bunch of the neighboring countries, Crackdown the security apparatus control point. Make sure you target that first, it protects all the other control points. And remember that even as low as a 5% chance to succeed on a crackdown is probably going to work in under a year (24 chances) so with a large stockpile of Influence you can set your best investigative councilor on it spending 32 or 64 a turn for months on end. 4) Purge the poo poo out of the Security Apparatus control point and defend interests the very next turn. 5) Crackdown/Purge your way through all the other control points, culminating with the executive. If the Aliens are helping the Servants you may have to flip some several times, but as long as you still have one CP in China the whole process is much, much easier. 6) Have a party with your friends in the CCP who avoided all the purges on restoring China's sovereignty from the Alien lovers. The good thing is that the Servants won't really turn China into any more of a powerhouse than it already is, and they start off with a limited nuclear stockpile compared to the US and Russia. If they hand parts of it over to the Alien Administration (or let it get annexed wholesale) the Ayys will run it into the ground. If you're gonna leave them China, make sure to regularly send councilors to trim the xenofauna so you don't end up with a bajillion Megafauna spawning. Unless you're Initiative, in which case let all the Megafauna spawn, you'll just mind control them later. If you're gonna leave it for the late game, research the End of China social tech and the raise unrest techs and you'll be able to balkanize it to hell and back into Guandong, Fujian, Lianggong, Hunan, Tibet, etc. Or if you're feeling up to it you can take over Taiwan, and then conquer it using the Reconquest of China faction mission. IMO China going to the Servants or Aliens is less of a problem to me than Russia or the US, simply because they have so many fewer nukes to throw around and if they take it before it's developed into a high income economy it's not as productive as the US or unified EU. habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Apr 13, 2024 |
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Apr 13, 2024 17:07
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Keisari posted:It's basically the inverse, the aliens will play as if on cinematic. Yeah, that's what I thought. I'll be interested to see if the other factions can provide a real challenge. Pirate Radar posted:How is the space battle autoresolve, by the way? Getting up to where I’m going to get into fights on my current slow file (assuming I can solve my volatile and radiation shortages) and wondering if I can trust the autoresolve button or if I have to learn how ship combat works If you're on one of the .4 versions it works pretty well so long as you've got a major advantage. You'll take more damage and lose more ships than you would have if you were doing it yourself, but if you've got 4 dreadnoughts and 20 other ships versus a destroyer and 5 corvettes it's gonna work every time. The space combat UI in .4 is also better than I remember from .3. You can click and drag to select multiple ships to give orders at once, use Shift and Control to add/remove ships from the group, and give orders like "match velocity" and "set intercept course." Changing the plane on which you're flying is still a pain in the rear end, though. I pretty much always used either triple chevron or great Wall as my starting formation since I never got proficient at holding q or e to direct a ship to transit on the z axis.
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Apr 13, 2024 17:14
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Just had my first serious battle against an alien battlestation and...well, ran straight into a brick wall. I use heavily armored battleships and battlecruisers with green phaser main guns and coilgun batteries for secondaries, and these were extremely effective at clearing away the fleet that was guarding the battlestation. But once I started in on the battlestation itself what I assume are plasma guns (they seem to be projectiles but can't be intercepted like mag cannons can) opened up on me and started peeling my armor open like an orange. My ships are long-range vessels designed for fuel efficiency and don't have remotely the agility to dodge, assuming I can wrestle my way through the combat movement interface. Are there any real options to crack these things other than "drown them in bodies" (which requires resources I don't actually have yet) or "just get plasma yourself"? Currently I'm thinking with my current resources and tech level I'd be best off sending my raiding vessels into alien territory to bait their fleets into fights before returning back to base to try and attrit the aliens down and build up my exotics stockpile, instead of either trying and failing to kill their resource bases or just sitting and letting the aliens build bigger and bigger while I tech up. Alternatively, I noticed I had the option to assault habs on the asteroid even without taking down their defenses, albeit with a 0% chance of success - is it viable to just roll in with a massive force of marines to Klendathu the mines and ignore the battlestations, or do you still need to bombard the battlestations down before marine landings are possible?
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Apr 13, 2024 17:54
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You can ignore the station and assault the mine directly, though it will let the aliens rebuild the mine much faster. Alternatively, large phaser cannons on ships with heavy front armor (Adamantine, preferably) will cut through battle stations like a hot knife through butter (in 4.0). Siege Coilers will do the job in 3.0 or 4.0, but you will take more casualties from their plasma guns while you wait for the shells to reach their destination.
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Apr 13, 2024 18:16
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Siege Coilers on Lancers with a metric fuckton of front facing armor (like, 100+), along with enough other projectile weapons in the fleet to allow the Siege Coiler shots to sneak past the point defense on the alien battlestations worked very well for me. They also work very well for bombardment, so while they're not very useful against alien ships due to their comparatively limited ammo and slow rate of fire they have a niche in cracking static defenses. I think if you have coilguns you should have seige coilers, but only Titans and Lancers have a big enough prow slot for them. e: and what Vengarr said, you can absolutely bombard their surface facilities without taking out the station but things will get rebuilt much faster and it leaves a place for the repair and refueling of their fleets.
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Apr 13, 2024 18:18
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Stairmaster posted:the servants took china help??? help?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?1 That seems like it's always happening in the current version. Nobody being able to crack China until a lonely alien strolls into Beijing and takes over for the Servants. I would say let them have it. You can always take it back by force when they handed it to the alien nation. At that point you might even have the CP for that. China is also very easy to rebuild at that point, provided you can get rid of all the Xenoform the servants left behind.
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Apr 13, 2024 19:14
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habeasdorkus posted:Siege Coilers on Lancers with a metric fuckton of front facing armor (like, 100+) Jesus, I thought I might have been a bit overzealous with armor with 40 armor. I'll have to see if my current drives can actually support that much armor and still move at a reasonable pace for a reasonable price. Don't think I remember seeing siege coilers before, but I admit my eyes might have glazed over a bit looking at the massive list of potential weapons - besides, I tended not to look much at heavy projectile weapons specifically because of what you said, where I doubted their effectiveness against fast-dodging aliens. Thanks!
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Apr 13, 2024 19:35
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nvm: they declared war on syria which wasn't allied with the eu sad lol
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Apr 13, 2024 19:35
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Tomn posted:Jesus, I thought I might have been a bit overzealous with armor with 40 armor. I'll have to see if my current drives can actually support that much armor and still move at a reasonable pace for a reasonable price. Don't think I remember seeing siege coilers before, but I admit my eyes might have glazed over a bit looking at the massive list of potential weapons - besides, I tended not to look much at heavy projectile weapons specifically because of what you said, where I doubted their effectiveness against fast-dodging aliens. Thanks! Nose and Tail armor is a lot lighter than the armor along the sides, especially for big ships that have a lot of length to cover. Since you're basically pointing them at a stationary object you can skimp on the rear and side armor. But you're right, size four magnetic weapons basically can't hit anything smaller than a battlecruiser except at very close range. habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Apr 13, 2024 |
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Apr 13, 2024 19:50
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The AI always had difficulty breaking into China before but it seems almost impossible for them now, which means that either the player ends up in control of it or the Aliens inevitably give it to the Servants eventually. I grabbed it early in my current Academy playthrough by getting a National Hero councilor from China, pumping their persuasion, and then spamming 25% chance Control Nation rolls every turn until one worked, and haven't had a single worry about it ever since. I didn't actually have the CP capacity to take all of it without abandoning the rest of the world, but I just deliberately left the Executive point uncontrolled for a few years, since my iron hold on everything else ensured no one would be able to take it. Eventually went ahead and absorbed it when the time came to start expanding. The AI definitely seems to be less rear end at the Earth game, they don't immediately run anything they control into the ground within months like they used to, but a human player will still pull extremely far ahead of them pretty quickly and then pretty much stay there. They're getting incrementally better - the AI actually builds decent ship designs that could potentially pose a threat now, not that they ever seem to use them, and the other human factions are extremely aggressive about snapping up prime mining sites if you don't get to them quickly. They're all very willing to run both CP deficits and MC deficits, though, and that overextension makes dealing with them pretty trivial if they are ever in your way for whatever reason. One of the big problems remains that the other human factions simply aren't ever in your way in a meaningful sense, at least not past the very early game. The Servants remain something of a threat but that's only because they're more or less an extension of the alien faction and get a bunch of benefits from them. The rest of them are, after the first few years, reduced to minor annoyances, incapable of doing much of anything except occasionally briefly inconveniencing you. There's very little point in building up a space fleet or defenses for your stations until you're ready to declare war on the aliens, because even hostile human factions almost never seem to come after you in space, and the massive CP deficits the AI tends to run means there's rarely much threat of them muscling in on your turf on Earth either. In this playthrough I've had multiple nations that I controlled, set priorities on, and then immediately abandoned to save CP (nations I was planning on absorbing later, or that I wanted to pump Welfare on to get an early start on climate change mitigation), which the AI has let sit there, with all points cracked down on, for years, because no one else has the CP to take them from me. The game is still steadily moving in the right direction but isn't quite there yet.
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Apr 14, 2024 18:27
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