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Maybe they just mean democracy in the "US reporting" sense, where it tracks directly with "agrees with US foreign policy"? Effects on research are caused by visa refusals and sanctions on those with low values.
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May 12, 2024 12:18
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Atopian posted:Maybe they just mean democracy in the "US reporting" sense, where it tracks directly with "agrees with US foreign policy"? If it was, you'd think usa would start at democracy 10
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May 12, 2024 12:45
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Keisari posted:If it was, you'd think usa would start at democracy 10 I dunno, they have a lot of protests against US foreign policy...
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May 12, 2024 13:31
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genericnick posted:They should just rename democracy to legitimacy or whatever. Sort of - there were originally two opposed ethics, individualism and collectivism where individualism was associated with democracy and capitalism and collectivism was associated with communism and authoritarianism. As you might expect this went down like a lead balloon and it was eventually replaced with just egalitarianism and authoritarianism.
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May 12, 2024 14:25
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OTOH they did nail the idea that the US is on a downward spiral unless you fix the inequality problem.
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May 13, 2024 01:54
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Even a 10.0 “Full Democracy” is actually being run by a secret council of conspirators. From what I’ve gathered on the Discord, government score came about because the dev realized he could synthesize the number from a bunch of real-world grading systems for human rights. How those scores correspond to your ability to fight aliens was not so thought out. It’s already been revised a few times.
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May 13, 2024 02:16
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Ah, that explains it. The real-world grading system, I mean. Anything I might have to say about those systems better belongs in D&D or CSPAM, but at least it's a simple and reasonable explanation for how the devs decided it.
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May 13, 2024 04:14
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I think the devs' decisions to use regression to decide a lot of the numbers, such as pop growth etc. is a pretty good strategy, and using real world statistics to hand out scores sorts out a lot of bias from the developers. (And outsources it to the makers of these outside indicators) Mind you, it's impossible to make a simulation game without bias, and probably any game as well. No matter what fancy algorithms you write, eventually you have to just "give" the simulation some basic variables to start from. I recall Will Wright commented on this a lot but can't find a snappy quote now. I think avoiding "[$self.nation] STRONK!!" level of bias is indeed mandatory. However, it is a fool's errand to strive for some vaunted unbiased game.
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May 13, 2024 06:58
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After a weird run in which I got maskirovka early enough to get good use out of it, I am now close enough to the turnaround point I can taste it. Tolerating alien agents stalking the earth on their filthy appendages, endless surveillance missions when hate was too high to do anything about it, but now I'm maybe a year out from getting coil guns and phasers. I have a bunch of habs set up with enough command centres that I have the spare MC and space resources to start simultaneous upgrades to rings everywhere and build a solid fleet for each planet in the inner system. It is very much going to be that Simpsons .gif where the Russian ambassador pushes a button to release tanks from everywhere. Aliens got played! Yeah! (In before: oh no I went to total war and got squashed)
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May 13, 2024 11:34
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In my current game, I have control of US, Canada, and Kazakhistan and am working on getting into space. I've been having my persuasion councilors go take control of small countries long enough to put them on solid development priorities, then abandon them. I figure later on I can come back and pick them up, and since unity is part of my development package they'll stay pretty sympathetic to my cause. Does this cause any trouble other than having to abandon them again every six months when control comes back, and is there something better to do during this phase of the game?
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May 13, 2024 21:52
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:In my current game, I have control of US, Canada, and Kazakhistan and am working on getting into space. I've been having my persuasion councilors go take control of small countries long enough to put them on solid development priorities, then abandon them. I figure later on I can come back and pick them up, and since unity is part of my development package they'll stay pretty sympathetic to my cause. Does this cause any trouble other than having to abandon them again every six months when control comes back, and is there something better to do during this phase of the game? It doesn’t cause trouble. But the “is there something better to do” question depends on the year and what you are doing instead already. Generally you want to start building orbital infrastructure, mines on Luna/Mars/the Belt by 2026ish, 2027 or 2028 at the absolute latest, and your objectives for earth transition over the next couple years from “get me boost” to “get me Mission Control and research”. Then you build research campuses, nanofactories/orbital hospitals to get income, and earth transitions into producing money to support your orbital stuff. Then you surrender to the aliens.
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May 13, 2024 22:25
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Velius posted:It doesn’t cause trouble. But the “is there something better to do” question depends on the year and what you are doing instead already. Generally you want to start building orbital infrastructure, mines on Luna/Mars/the Belt by 2026ish, 2027 or 2028 at the absolute latest, and your objectives for earth transition over the next couple years from “get me boost” to “get me Mission Control and research”. Then you build research campuses, nanofactories/orbital hospitals to get income, and earth transitions into producing money to support your orbital stuff. Oh, it's the end of 2024 and I've already got one base claimed on Luna and two claimed on Mars (the Luna one doesn't have great resources, so I'll probably develop Mars first). I haven't built mines yet since I've used my boost for claiming spots, but that's coming. No one else has claimed on Mars yet so I think I'm reasonably ahead in the space race.
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May 13, 2024 22:56
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Luna always has poo poo resources, it only exists to bootstrap your way to Mars. In Perun's campaigns on youtube he would actually sell his Luna bases to the other factions later on to free up MC for better locations
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May 13, 2024 22:58
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Is there any reason I shouldn't be merging smaller countries into bigger ones? It feels wrong sometimes.
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May 13, 2024 23:08
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Kraftwerk posted:Is there any reason I shouldn't be merging smaller countries into bigger ones? It feels wrong sometimes. This is a huge consequence of reworking currently. Merging countries makes maintaining ownership easier but the amount of of investment points decreases. For example, Canada, Mexico, and the US can easily have 14 control points and a control point cap hit of 400+. Merging them you get 6 control points and a cp hit of 240 or less. But the total amount of production will go down, and for things that don’t scale by size like boost or MC you have a net loss in production efficiency.
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May 13, 2024 23:34
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A question for anyone who has done / seen the results of code-diving: Do the aliens have to pay for new councilors? If so, how much / what resource? I ask because this game for the first half I made it my mission to kill as many alien councilors as I could, keeping them to a minimum on Earth, assassinating at first then having two fleets of crappy copperhead escorts to pincer movement their crazy-fast inbound transport ships. I traded a *lot* of habs for this. Lots of space resources, lots of micro to rebuild, but never had total war or total space collapse. But now that I've started going more on the offensive, I find that the aliens are... disappointing. Could just be random chance, but I'm wondering whether my focus on their councilors cost them resort that they would otherwise have used to develop? Hmm. Could it be their transport ships? I guess something that can pull 3G from Pluto to Earth can't be cheap? Atopian fucked around with this message at 00:39 on May 14, 2024 |
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May 14, 2024 00:37
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Yaoi Gagarin posted:Luna always has poo poo resources, it only exists to bootstrap your way to Mars. In Perun's campaigns on youtube he would actually sell his Luna bases to the other factions later on to free up MC for better locations The one caveat is that the moon can have a decent amount of fissiles compared to other early options (and until you've expanded to Jupiter, really)
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May 14, 2024 02:26
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habeasdorkus posted:The one caveat is that the moon can have a decent amount of fissiles compared to other early options (and until you've expanded to Jupiter, really) My current Luna has a 27 fissile site, but it’s an accelerated game so that’d be 13.5 standard. Still really good. Also a 25 noble site. Both with 25 base metals. It’s by far the best Luna I’ve seen. It CAN be good but usually isn’t worth much once you get mars.
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May 14, 2024 02:29
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Yeah I've had some insane spawns for Fissles on Luna, often enough to want to hang onto it. I'm starting what I'm hoping will be a successful "from the ashes" run - unfortunately in my last run I didn't get hold of the nuclear nations to take out their stockpiles early enough - I had just taken control of China when the aliens touched down and even after disbanding all stockpiles and armies, the aliens they kept throwing themselves at it like lemmings for almost a decade before I spat the dummy. So restarting. EDIT:  
Rougey fucked around with this message at 04:32 on May 14, 2024 |
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May 14, 2024 03:53
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What the heck Shackleton. About the aliens being disappointing in space the alien ai seems to sometimes just get stuck shuffling assets around without achieving anything. Take a look at what it's doing and if it's behaving weird make a big report of the game discord, they will usually dive in and figure out what's gone wrong and often provide a fix.
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May 14, 2024 04:42
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I've had higher from Luna (24 in one run, but I've head of as high as 30+). The last game I was doing I had 14 from Mare Tranquillitatis and that was more enough until I started pumping out supercolliders at Mercury.
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May 14, 2024 04:54
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Saros posted:What the heck Shackleton. I'll take a careful look, see if anything like that is going on. Re: mining resources, I think I'm cursed. I've lost three games, possibly on my way to victory in a fourth, and aside from the first one, none of the inner planets or Luna have had significant fissiles. No nukes for me!
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May 14, 2024 09:12
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Keisari posted:I think the devs' decisions to use regression to decide a lot of the numbers, such as pop growth etc. is a pretty good strategy, and using real world statistics to hand out scores sorts out a lot of bias from the developers. (And outsources it to the makers of these outside indicators) I think I found it: Will Wright talking to Game Developer posted:Well any simulation is a set of assumptions. So there is bias in any simulation, depending on how you look at it. A lot of people thought when they played SimCity we were really biased to mass transit. It's interesting. One of the fun things is that a model like that gives you something to reflect against. In fact, when people start arguing with the model, that's when I think it's been successful.
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May 14, 2024 14:11
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Warmachine posted:I think I found it: Yep! Something like this!
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May 14, 2024 15:25
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Yeah it should really be stressed that while Luna can be okay it shouldn't be relied on for your long-term every-game strategy because: At least there was one semi-decent site to kickstart Mars and the Asteroids.
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May 14, 2024 17:04
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Yeah, you generally want one or two bases on Luna before going to Mars to cut down the colony expenses greatly.
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May 14, 2024 17:34
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So I'm still trying to do a "From the Ashes" run, but just got Python Missiles and had upgraded my Solid Core destroyers (the soul purpose of which was to win a fleet battle using vipers to unlock exotics; a job done circa 2032), so I figured "what the hell". Well, five Destroyer with ten mounts between them with a grand total of 200 missiles (magazines equipped) went up against the Assault Carrier and while the PD shredded close to 90% of the missiles in the last 10% one got through and...  I was going to roll back the save and let them invade Tanzania, but the pinata dropped nearly 20 exotics, and the aliens only destroyed four of my tier 3 LEO stations... so I figured "gently caress it". Now I'm eyeballing a cheap python Monitor setup with the expectation that it will shred the Aliens occupation fleet come "Phoenix Day" and keep my Dreads for mop up.
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May 15, 2024 11:30
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Missile fleets in packs of ten are surprisingly efficient. You lose all of them in bigger encounters but they are almost guaranteed to either kill a dreadnought by oversaturating their PD or take out five to eight smaller ships. The better missiles also make it very easy to confirm if you got a kill. Speaking of a From the Ashes run, how does one deal with money and influence in that one? Influence stations cost money, money stations cost boost and boost is not available.
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May 15, 2024 12:30
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Happy Litterbox posted:Speaking of a From the Ashes run, how does one deal with money and influence in that one? Influence stations cost money, money stations cost boost and boost is not available. I've united North America and am giving The Aliens landed in Laos and have begun their game by bullying the Protectorate for some reason, taking South Korea and Half of Japan, and now a state of war between the Protectorate and the Aliens... so I've done a stacks on and have been mass assassinating protectorate councillors and have wiped out all their fleets in orbit (with those same five "throwaway" destroyers). They are in the negative for boost and hydrogen (with no stockpiles) and are haemorrhaging money, so I'm going to hunt down a few of their mining outposts keeping them (barely) in the black on volatiles and nuke them from orbit The Servants have China, so I'm expecting the Aliens to take over SEA (mostly held by Academy and Initiative) before going at India, (under the control of Humanity First), which should get them most of the way to their goal. Here is to hoping they don't cock it up again. EDIT: Happy Litterbox posted:Missile fleets in packs of ten are surprisingly efficient. You lose all of them in bigger encounters but they are almost guaranteed to either kill a dreadnought by oversaturating their PD or take out five to eight smaller ships. Oh I've always been a fan of Missile Monitors packed to the gills with magazines full of Vipers, but last I played was over a year ago when the only nuclear option in space was torpedos (which I always felt were too slow to be useful) - Python Missiles are new to me and just seeing the loving screen light up when one hit that carrier and see nothing left is one of the coolest moment I've had in this game. Rougey fucked around with this message at 13:05 on May 15, 2024 |
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May 15, 2024 12:58
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Happy Litterbox posted:Speaking of a From the Ashes run, how does one deal with money and influence in that one? Influence stations cost money, money stations cost boost and boost is not available. Nanofactories and the upgrade make money if you have the metal. You'll need a lot of metal to support a real industrial machine, but it's not like there's a shortage of it if you're not worried about staying under a MC cap. And in an ashes situation, I'm guessing you're not.
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May 15, 2024 13:13
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Making enough money to support endgame space stuff means doing one of the following: Funding Spoils Nanofactories Hospitals/Tourism Antimatter selling There really aren’t any other scalable incomes you can rely on. If you’ve gone fully space based you can still do tourism/hospitals in theory but getting enough boost will be very challenging. Influence comes from Media center hab modules.
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May 15, 2024 14:16
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Funnily enough, I also just started an Ashes run. I'm specifically not hurting the servants or aliens in North America, and going full on dyson swam at Mercury/Venus in preparation to having no earthly assets. I'm worried about the servants actually getting their act together to win. Are you all deliberately helping them?
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May 15, 2024 15:39
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Xenoborg posted:Funnily enough, I also just started an Ashes run. I'm specifically not hurting the servants or aliens in North America, and going full on dyson swam at Mercury/Venus in preparation to having no earthly assets. I'm worried about the servants actually getting their act together to win. Are you all deliberately helping them? On Brutal, at least, the Servants will eventually sweep over everyone even if you're not actively doing anything. I would say though that you shouldn't immediately abandon earth - going early USA and forcing research into all the T2 space stuff will make everything much easier as you turn mars into a superfortress.
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May 15, 2024 15:48
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Rynoto posted:On Brutal, at least, the Servants will eventually sweep over everyone even if you're not actively doing anything. I would say though that you shouldn't immediately abandon earth - going early USA and forcing research into all the T2 space stuff will make everything much easier as you turn mars into a superfortress. Is there a database or wiki somewhere that shows some nice base, space platform and spaceship configurations? I'd love to get some ideas on different things I can do to plan ahead. Right now in my game I've been rapidly expanding T-2 bases all over Mars with most of them having marine barracks and layered defense arrays. I'm planning on going to Mercury soon (I've been gating the research until I have the MC and ships to secure my holdings). Once on Mercury I intend to build Skunkworks, research campuses and other details in an effort to shore up my tech progress. Are there any benefits to having space platforms outside of LEO? I'm not sure if there's much point to them given that I mostly use the LEO ones for the interface bonuses. I build shipyard platforms in orbit around areas I want to defend for local defence fleets (missile monitors and dedicated PD ships). Beyond that I planned to place automated supply depot platforms in the belt in order to allow for my fleets to invade the Jovian sector. Am I missing anything? Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 16:31 on May 15, 2024 |
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May 15, 2024 16:24
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Kraftwerk posted:Is there a database or wiki somewhere that shows some nice base, space platform and spaceship configurations? I'd love to get some ideas on different things I can do to plan ahead. There's arguments to be made for your Earth orbit shipyards to be in one of the higher orbits since its less delta to leave orbit from them, and if you do this you need docks/supply on some of your LEO stations so they can refuel and go back to their perch.
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May 15, 2024 16:46
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CoffeeQaddaffi posted:There's arguments to be made for your Earth orbit shipyards to be in one of the higher orbits since its less delta to leave orbit from them, and if you do this you need docks/supply on some of your LEO stations so they can refuel and go back to their perch. Especially early when you have low thrust drives building in one of the Earth-Moon or Earth-Sun Lagrange points will let you have an easier intercept or interplanetary transfer trajectory. Note that the Earth-Sun L-2 point doesn’t get sunlight for obvious reasons. Building in L-3 Lagrange points (I think? The one opposite the smaller body) can also give easier refuel/stopover for intercepts and transfers. So Earth-Sun L-3 is opposite earths orbit. I think the Jupiter-Sol L-3 is probably more useful for how huge the outer solar system is though.
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May 15, 2024 17:19
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It's not just lower delta. Low thrust drives like Grid/VASIMR have to do long spiraling orbits out of LEO. They can get to destinations significantly faster if you're in a high enough orbit.
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May 15, 2024 17:50
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So I've been playing around a bit with different tactics, saving/loading to see how they compare, and from what I can tell, direct investment often isn't a great idea. At the start of the game it's common to pick a couple of countries to loot. CP are scarce, so you can't usually have too many, but that's fine - it gives you much more money than you need. The temptation is, once it gets above 50k/100k/whatever, to invest it into some country or other. But, by the midgame, two things will happen: First, you will be heavily limited on MC you can actually use without the aliens blowing your stuff up, so being able to skip using hab space to build cash generators like hotels etc is useful. To do this you need cash reserves. Second, your spoils countries eventually run dry (inequality so high that cohesion hits 0, so unrest hits max), while suitable countries you didn't mess up with spoils frequently get messed up by others, leaving few options. Direct investment can be good if you need something specific (finish off an army/navy/space defence) or if you want to boost a country's economy that starts off very low, but otherwise it seems useful to save a truly ridiculous pile of cash, then slowly deplete it through the midgame, trying to get yourself into a position where you can fight the aliens directly before you run out, because once you're fighting, MC total doesn't matter and you can build any cash generators you want.
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May 19, 2024 11:22
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If you have armies suppressing unrest you can keep spoiling indefinitely. You can also run spoil + welfare to counteract the inequality. I’m currently setting up to run spoils in PAC and African Union to the maximum and am building toward 20+ armies in the US to use for guaranteeing compliance.
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May 19, 2024 13:45
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Velius posted:If you have armies suppressing unrest you can keep spoiling indefinitely. You can also run spoil + welfare to counteract the inequality. I’m currently setting up to run spoils in PAC and African Union to the maximum and am building toward 20+ armies in the US to use for guaranteeing compliance. Money really isn't such an important resource that you should hamstring yourself supporting a massive army in an important research nation for the sake of spoils imo joe biden hire me
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