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Yea I've done that exact mistake before. RIP Lumaris ally, you where just being a peaceful banker when your human ally went full bipolar on you for no reason whatsoever =[
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Nov 29, 2017 07:35
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:i'm currently dealing with a pirate infestation in a galaxy where no-one appears to have done squat about them AlternateAccount posted:1> Attempt to fight the pirates near your starting planet, but get repeatedly raped. These are design flaws that I know will not be addressed since it takes too much effort, but what reallllly grinds my gears are trivial bugs that are highly visible yet still not squashed. Like having the +3 speed no-resource ship module not obsoleting itself when the +5 one comes online, and constantly clicking it by mistake. Or having neutral factions that you own constantly spamming you with notifications that you own them, and having assimilation quests that when completed don't do anything, but you can start another one if you want! Basically poo poo that should have been ironed out if not by release, then within a few patches after release as the player base notices it, is still there when it's like such a small fix. Argh.
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Nov 30, 2017 01:18
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To be fair that's a minor quibble, it's a good mechanic to force ppl to commit to where the hero is instead of spamming reassignments. That there are slightly unrealistic mechanics in a 4X should not be a surprise to anyone.tips posted:The thing that bugs me is that they couldn't decide whether they wanted Civ 4 or 5 style expansion penalties, so they just added both.
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Nov 30, 2017 03:07
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You don't need a notepad, just un-assign him and the game will prompt you when he's ready to be used again. It's a video game with an anti-tedium mechanic to prevent sperglords from spending an extra 30 minutes trying to micro where each hero could be placed optimally. You want 'reasons'? It's explicitly stated ingame that heroes have a huge retinue behind them that makes them unwieldy. It's 2017, just put the hero in a scout, system, or deathfleet and stop trying to make your life a micro hell. If you have to wait 10 turns, it's because you just assigned him this very turn. Think about that.
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Nov 30, 2017 15:09
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Is it a faction quest? If not, ignore it. edit: oh, is it one of those popups that say "X just happened! <<ok>>"? Just purge the pop via the roundabout ways mentioned above
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Dec 7, 2017 05:14
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Yea, that quest sounds like it's there to help you regain diversity. Oh well.
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Dec 7, 2017 05:34
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Xik posted:I like the riftborn, their construct pop and time wizardry flavor/gimmick is cool. I haven't played since pre-weapon revamp, but their mid-game ships also aren't particularly strong either, so you have to be careful. AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:This game is loving horseshit with its complete and utter lack of explanation of things
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Dec 10, 2017 11:55
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Pretty clearly applies to local system only. edit: Wow that description is totally misleading then Serephina fucked around with this message at 11:36 on Dec 19, 2017 |
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Dec 19, 2017 00:55
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Krinkle posted:Is there a point to using armor and ballistic weapons? I'm honestly wondering why they're in the game at all? Either you use shields, which regenerate to full every turn, and missiles/lasers, which let you attack from the longest range, and survive every single battle at full health, or use ballistics and armor and die, now or later. Quick answer: Always max shields, use energy or optionally mix in some missiles. Longer: Any given defense type requires more than a single module to be effective. For shields, it takes about ~3-4 for the absorption rate to get high enough to guarantee that the shields will all get used up before your hull dies to other stuff. Once you get there, anything additional is just raw effective hp on the ship (not a bad thing!) For Plating, it has this fun positive feedback, where the more plating you have, the more phsical dmg is ignored totally, resulting in huge effective hp gains. Ideally, shields provide a flat +hp bonus while plating scales exponentially. For the bigger hulls, this can be a factor of 10-ish in effective hp. But that doesn't loving matter because who the gently caress uses 100% missiles/kinetics?? So you look at worse-case scenarios. Where, as mentioned before, with enough shields you can eat a moderate amount of physical dmg, but no amount of plating will save you from lasers. Plating is a huuuge gamble that your opponent is heavily/exclusively physical, with a massive payoff. Or you can just get shields, which work okish v missiles. Oh, and regenerate after the fight. I think kinetics are supposed to be some sort of support module in a metagame that currently doesn't exist, where they hard counter missles and strike craft. But bomber fleets are non-existent, and even if they did they don't out-dps traditional weapons enough to be worth it. So meh. Take shields, and guns that work at range. The end.
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Dec 20, 2017 03:35
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toasterwarrior posted:I'm assuming these massive swarms of small Craver ships stacked with missiles are rolling my Imperial medium stacks because no amount of flak can overcome the sheer amount of missiles being thrown at me. I guess mixed fleet compositions are good now? At least for countering this? Read my above post. If his armies are literally 100% missiles you can retrofit your ships quickly (but expensively) to hard counter them. I don't know the exact mechanics, but flak guns have diminishing returns iirc in terms of missile defense? That's word-of-mouth, however. In either case you're still letting them spend most of the fight (as the AI will pick a long-range tactic) at a distance, before half your fleet dies and you get close enough to fire back. I'd recommend getting energy guns (maaaaaybe one flak slot), the best plating you can, and the simple turtle tactics. You'll be firing back during all phases of combat instead of just the final 1/3. Also: are you fleets nominally comparable? He might have out-teched you. Look at the combined atk/def scores of the fleets. Playing smart only gets you so far against raw force. Krinkle posted:My alliance got me into a war, cravers take my planet, alliance member takes it back, I ask for it, they tell me, literally, "go swivel" #2: Allying with the trees should be fine, they won't steal your system if you're ALLIES. Also check the nebula bonus, it might be your alliance's name instead of just him. Unless you're maybe at peace? Cuz gently caress being peace with the trees, they steal your poo poo. Either ally asap or burn them to the ground. #3: It's diplomatic pressure. Check the bar during the negotiation screen, near the top. Or during the multi-species overview you can see it in the wedges. You get pressure for being bigger generally, but more specifically stuff like pushing (and winning) on their borders with influence, bigger fleets, etc. It can change a max of +/-10 per turn, and once it gets high enough one guy can make demands off of the other, and the bar resets and it starts all over. edit: the 'Bureaucratic obstacles' trade option lets you (hostilely) throw influence at them to get diplo pressure.
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Dec 21, 2017 00:27
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Endless Legend's on sale now, including all the DLC for about 25USD. Excellent game and totally worth getting if you where on the fence before. After binging/burning out on ES2, I decided to see if I was just being bitter, and went back to replay both Stellaris and EL. I've not played Stellaris since launch, where I did two playthroughs, and put the game down in disgust. I remember thinking a lot of things where broken like combat, and they've been aggresively patching it since, so sure, let's try it out again! But despite having 2 whole playthroughs under my belt, and having a great time customizing a slaver faction, when the starting screen came up I just stared blankly at the solar system for a while and had no idea wtf to do. Turned on full-baby tutorials, before I found everything again. Played for a few hours, then put it down uninterested. My first impression? ES2 has a loving fabulous UI compared to trying to find crap in Stellaris. In Es2 there are systems, there are ships that look different, and when you click on them you get pretty screens with no clutter so you know what to click on to start building things. Telling your fleet to go somewhere is a right click, and the command buttons at the bottom left are clearly visible if you need them. In Stellaris; planets, fleets, starbases, and constructor ships are all identical when zoomed out. Commands are given to ships with a right-click context menu. After selecting the planet, you have to click a few sub-tabs to find the two different ground and space build queues. In Stellaris, early game is waiting around for minerals to come in until you're allowed to build something. Meanwhile, go explore. But you don't really explore, you just have a science ship auto-queue its way around scanning planets for tiny tiny resource nodes you're too poor to make use of. Upon finally finding the goddamn galaxy-level zoom button (why isn't it a smooth zoom out?!) I could see the entire galaxy and all starlanes. So much for the mysterious unknown. Compared to ES2 (and a lot of other games!), where you start building colony buildings/ships on turn1 and never stop, and it takes a few small hops to find neighbors. The research options are much better also, a bunch of 5% bullshit vs "you can now build this new, totally unique, building". So! Yea, Stellaris seems written with spergy players in mind who enjoy spreadsheets, with a terrible UI and starting-out 'game' experience. I got more fun out of the pre-game faction generator. Next up was Endless Legend. Fond memories of the game, but I always felt it came down to snowballing and eating the AI who's hopelessly outmatched. Took the difficulty up a few notches, picked the Ardent Mages which I was warned was a dull faction, and jumped in. First thing I noticed is how goddamn pretty everything is. After the blackness of space this was welcome. GUI was great, knew where everything was, but I was probably strongly biased since I'd been playing ES2 the week before. Still light years ahead of stellaris, ugh. Founded city, queued a few things up, and got exploring. Was immediately floored by how populated everything is. The terrain is dense, and there's a goodie hut or minor faction every few tiles. Exploration around the city was busy, with many choices to be made as I can't hit everything. A flood of mini quests came in, which was also nice, with most of them giving rewards I recognized as solid, from experience on what to beeline. Ardent Mages have a pitifully weak gimmick that I crippled myself trying to maximize, and in the end I just ate the neighbors before my terrible roleplaying tech choices killed me. EL still holds up as a great game with a lot of polish, with possibly weak elements in how strong & easy conquest is, and the AI's odd inability to scale into lategame and unwillingness to make multiple large armies. Difficulty settings might help this? If ES2's expansions bring it to this level, everyone will be gushing and a lot of money will be made.
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Dec 24, 2017 04:34
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Mate, in ES2 people haven't even figured out how to not be at war, what trade is, and even how to spend money without super advanced tech researches. Accusing them of being lazy for not mapping a galaxy of 30 stars is just the beginning!
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Dec 24, 2017 08:41
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ES2 brings back the battle cards, but they no longer do that R/P/S nonsense and they're just minor buffs and a way to pick which range you engage at. A step abstracted again. The systems are robust, but like all Endless games there's no bloody manual. ES2 is very very pretty and slick and borrows the EL quest system, but probably not a great buy pre-expansions if those where your complaints about the predecessors.
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Dec 25, 2017 08:16
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Cultists are generally regarded as quite fun, and once you understand their unique conversion mechanic, quite straightforward and gratifying to play. The most "OP" in the objective sense of multiplayer is universally agreed as the Vaulters. Someone who's played competitive could enlighten us, but I suspect it has something to do with teleporting armies. Amongst the other huge grab bag of solid bonuses.
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Dec 27, 2017 08:00
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Regarding non-fatal combat, I think there's maybe half a dozen video games in the history of all video games that feature historically accurate army-level defeat mechanics. Perhaps. If it's your foible, fine, but just realize there's like 500 other abstractions which are far more jarring, ie literally anything to do with cities. For the Endless X games, there is a retreat button in the pre-combat screen, if you have an "action point" left. Every unit only has one action point, and it's expended by being an aggressor in combat, or retreating. Retreating costs 60% of a unit's maxhp, so in order to route an army that doesn't want to fight you, you will need to hit it with two stacks (separately, de-select them in the precomat reinforcements screen), once to force the retreat, the second time to kill/route them. Or just hit them with the same stack multiple turns until they don't have the 60% hp left to run. Obviously, as the aggresor you don't have the option to retreat as you spent your action initiating the attack. Armies that are besieging also cannot retreat, for gameplay exploit reasons. edit: Civ5 has one-unit-per tile. Civ4 had doomstacks.
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Dec 27, 2017 23:32
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Spanish Matlock posted:Also districts generate happiness once you upgrade them to level 2, which you do by surrounding them with at least four districts. So you want to factor that into your city building, build your city into triangles, like so: Note that this isn't the only way. A slightly different way is in a line 2 hexes wide. code:edit: Blooming Brilliant posted:From the few guides I've read, and attempting it out in single player, Vaulters can get a really strong early game lead that can snowball out of control. They can jump to Second Age before turn 20 pretty easily (thanks to their starting science bonuses), which means that can get level 2 empire edicts (or whatever they're called, haven't played in a while), from there it really sets you up for the rest of the game. Serephina fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Dec 27, 2017 |
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Dec 27, 2017 23:43
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Getting wiped with numerical superiority sounds like you've made the same mistake my friend did: Do you know that units can be upgraded and retrofitted, and their starting equipment obsoletes very fast? Click the fist icon at the top left and play with unit designs & gear loadouts, and then on the map you can select your army and a retrofit option is available if you're in friendly territory. My mate got around not knowing about the gear system by just building Titans, heh.
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Dec 28, 2017 01:05
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No idea mate! But relocating into better provinces seems nice. Probably abuse that when you find a place with 5 clustered anomalies.
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Dec 29, 2017 01:11
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Lichtenstein posted:Privateers kill cities TODAY I LEARNED SOMETHING (holy poo poo, this solves so many warmonger issues I can't even describe it)
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Dec 29, 2017 02:54
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In order of importance, in my humble opinion: You don't get many choices for your first city. I split the stack into singletons, hero and two units, send them out in 3 directions to see what the settler can find. Unlike Civ5, it's unlikely that you'll find an AMAZING spot more than a single settler-move away, and it's not as if you can scout that far yet anyways. So I generally settle turn1 after scouting. Priorities: I feel you really don't get a choice on your biome. For non BL/Forgotten, just take what it gives you, as above. Anomalies: are great, settle where you can rapidly expand into them with districts. Normally, each tile gives 3 FIDS, with anomalies giving variable amounts from +4 FIDS, or maybe +10 happiness. Rivers: Are amazing, but need forethought. They give a flat +1 FIDS (food, iirc) to the tile, but there are multiple improvements that key off of them, with an era1 tech for +2dust, and more (industry?) later on. Basically I just use the tooltip to give me the highest combined FIDS, with keeping an eye for further expansion into anomalies using the line pattern. If given the choice (unlikely), Industry is the normally most important by far. edit: the RNG can be really harsh/generous with your initial province. I once had a Cultists game where I had FIVE anomalies after placing my first district. They really should have tightened that up.
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Dec 30, 2017 01:18
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Staltran posted:The starting region always has only one village This thread is full of gold today, how cow. TIL.
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Dec 30, 2017 11:25
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You need 100% ownership to issue a Salt the Earth command. Ownership goes up 8% per turn after city capture, so you have to suck it up and wait a while. It was just mentioned above that the Teir4 tech privateers will auto-raze cities upon capture. I have no idea about pearl growth, I suspect they get higher in-place. They spawn at bigger numbers while sitting on resource nodes, but it's not worth leaving them alone to 'farm' as usually a single fast unit can gobble them all up in a single summer. And the AI is good at capping them, so it's risky to leave them out.
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Jan 4, 2018 10:31
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All this cultist talk made me fire up the game and try a harder difficulty with them. After a half dozen failed starts, I'm not really sure if I know how to get them off the ground on Impossibly difficulty. Inevitably, a neighbor shows up with teir2 gear and multiple 6-stacks and starts wrecking all converted villages, when I'm still in barely into Age2. The setup period just isn't long enough before I have to go full unit production and try and fight the endless stacks. Or I could not try to defend the converts, but then why the hell am I playing Cultists? Dropping it back down to Serious difficulty everything is too-easy again. Hrm. Maybe I should try a different race for Impossible, hiding behind my own territory (since the AI doesn't want to actually declare war, they just like being dicks in neutral ground) until I can get a stack that's superior and can win fights w/o trading. Sorry for the garbage post, just decompressing after getting stomped a lot.
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Jan 6, 2018 05:37
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Did ancient armies, after suffering a decisive defeat and being decimated, typically regroup and fight immediately after? If not, then remove the unit off of the map, it's no longer relevant, the Romans are sieging your poo poo it's game over. Actually, I just decided to do a quick check: wikipedia posted:Casualties were slight compared to later battles, amounting to anywhere between 5 and 15% for the winning and losing sides respectively,[6] but the slain often included the most prominent citizens and generals who led from the front. Thus, the whole war could be decided by a single field battle; victory was enforced by ransoming the fallen back to the defeated, called the 'Custom of the Dead Greeks'. So basically, units where obliterated after losing a fight, even if the individual soldiers lived. It sounds like we have people (or maybe just a single person) in this thread romanticizing a type of combat that never existed, and are asking for a game that doesn't fit the medium (4X games, both board- and video-). The good news is that you can create your very own game, stuff like Cogmind throws everything you knew about a genre out the window and writes their own rules. Offbeat stuff is cool, and some of the best ideas/games come from labours of love.
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Jan 7, 2018 00:15
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Yea, EL also has huge issues of the game being over after you eat your second neighbor, but you still have to trundle your army across the map to eat three more capitals. The doomstack gaining levels as it goes just makes things more comically one-sided; I've had lvl7 units rolling over lvl3-4 AI units on Serious difficulty. The power differential for leveling units is really understated in EL.
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Jan 7, 2018 00:33
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He's using a custom faction, so presumably he's bought some +FIDS traits. Custom factions are not balanced in the slightest, so he's basically cheating, if there ever was a way. His 'necessary' start has 41 FIDS (30+ before faction traits is more sane), so he's defo save scumming. Acutally, yea, here it is: -Food Efficient (to get growth without dedicating population) -Industry Efficient -Landscapist (to further improve anomalies, which are generally near your starting location) and why not, -Cellulose Mutation (for cheap districts) -Endless Excavation (to make ruins into better tiles) Well no loving poo poo he gets 40+ FIDS. I'd take his advice with a huge grain of salt, since it basically boils down to "Do the science faction trick of Teir2 for the first empire plan", but also with food and industry faction's perks.
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Jan 9, 2018 09:37
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Garrosining is mandatory for anyone that has a Governor; they gain xp/turn as leading an army, but nothing for building poo poo. ES2 fixed that. Otherwise, I only build garrisons when I'm expecting front-line fights that they'll participate in. In both cases I create a new unit called "cannon fodder" who's stripped naked, and I can retrofit them into a real unit if I have to.
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Jan 9, 2018 11:22
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I... am so very wrong about that, but sure I was right. And glad I'm wrong actually, that's been annoying me for so long.
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Jan 9, 2018 12:06
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While we're on the topic, what's the formula for dust buyout? And does it benefit from the empire plans' -industry% for units/buildings?
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Jan 9, 2018 12:37
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I think you've mis-read the wiki, the retrofit is (.75*industry)^1.1, ie the 25% reduction is before the exponent, not after. So yea, retrofit always! I also always thought it was a linear buyout, guess that explains a lot. But yea how dumb is it that we have to check a wiki for this instead of it being explained literally ANYWHERE ingame (or in-manual. Manuals! lol) edit: Reading more, things might change again if you have/are Wind Walkers. I wonder how those bonus' stack. Serephina fucked around with this message at 12:03 on Jan 10, 2018 |
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Jan 10, 2018 11:56
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Buy them on the market. The AI will only trade if it has an excessive surplus (and only a fraction of what they have), so basically you have to put some pops on dust and buy out the market. It's enough for quest-related things, but for mass-equipping armies you just might have to miss out. edit: Ooh! If you research endless mechanisms (tier4? tech) all the ruins come back up, and they can spit out 15ish strategics randomly. It's kind of a stretch, but a lot of ruin rewards scale strongly with era progress.
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Jan 11, 2018 05:06
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onesixtwo posted:Well, made a new game, turn 5 I cannot invade Horatio despite the ‘Righteous Fury’ law being active. That is a really lovely bug, and completely explains why the Vodyani AI is absolutely brain dead 10/10 times. Completely broken law mechanics are awful to uncover. Next Vodyani game I’m going to just have to focus Military laws and ignore religion beyond the +essence law. Boooooo. Good luck with that, Voydani pop bias has it so that every point towards military gives a point towards religion too. You WILL be religious, even more so if you warmonger. (I suppose its *possible* to get a military junta in, it it's require using the esoteric vote-swapping mechanics. Something about pushing industry hard and having the votes swap into military? Who knows, who cares)
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Jan 18, 2018 00:46
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It's funny, naval combat and pillage are two things I studiously avoid; the first because I feel it's shoe-horned in, lacks synergy with existing gameplay, and totally irrelevant unless you force a map scenario where you HAVE to care; and the second because I feel that my hero/army always has something better to be doing.
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Jan 19, 2018 10:42
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Looks like the Endless games dont run on Linux? The games' pages on Steam only show Windows and Mac OS but I figure it cant hurt to check if anyone knows otherwise/I'm missing something? Most don't, no. But they all work flawlessly in Wine (3.0 is out!!).
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Jan 26, 2018 05:20
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That's what I don't get about the riftborn, is quite quickly the production needs of new pops become exorbitant, even with shipping them around to optimize things. Often it's just easier to let the minor race eat all that delicious food the rift make (but can't eat!) and basically have the minor race populate your entire empire.
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Jan 31, 2018 10:45
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Don't the quests start on turn2 always? Just wait one turn before leaving. Edit: Another thing I don't get! Why the hell would anyone put up with Voydani siphoning? It's basically an act of war (or worse, an atrocity), every minor civ should immedeatly rise up and fight back the second you try it. With Broken Lords, at least they where aristocrats eating the peasants who can't leave, but there's nothing like that for Voydani. It'd make more sense if you had to do some sort of "Religious conversion" so the system is indoctrinated into believing it's all ok. But then that mechanic's kinda too much like the Culstists, hrmm. Serephina fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Feb 1, 2018 |
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Feb 1, 2018 02:08
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Terraforming is often very much NOT worth it (imo). Exceptions exist in order to get rid of horrendous happiness malus' on large size planets (this usually means taking one step towards terran/temperate), but generally the huge industry cost is better put to something else, doubly so if you had to go out of your way to research the drat thing. Actually turning hell-world-systems into utopias is more crazily expensive than it first seems, as you usually have to take 2-3 terraforms to get there. It's so out there that it's past sandbox play and strait into poo poo-that-needs-an-achievement-for-this.
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Feb 4, 2018 14:39
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Confirmation Bias, or maybe just plain bad luck. I've had plenty of Unfallen neighbors, which are super toxic since you need to murder them asap else they'll take your worlds all peace-like. Like, not even beat them back with fleets, but out-and-out extermination, which is why they're so farking annoying. Gimmie a warmongering nation any day over them.
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Feb 6, 2018 13:32
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The cultists starting unit is a support unit, they have intentionally poo poo Age1 military. They're still fun to play as, you just need to find something, literally anything else and make a lot of it. I personally find that the AI usually isn't belligerent [discluding Necrophages] unless you're aggressively running around stealing their Pearls (xpack), pillaging (xpack), or otherwise antagonizing them. ... Actually, I have no idea how you're pissing them off in base game, good work I guess? The AI definitely has a military issue where it: A; doesn't use high enough level units, usually because it's not keeping the starting doomstack gaining xp, but rather building lot of stuff and leaving it lying around as lvl2. And B; vastly underestimates how nasty your stack is. This is related to the first point. It DOES seem to love researching every exotic weapons&armour tech, and does a good job keeping them updated, so there's that. My only tip would be to keep increasing the difficulty; eventually the AI gets such silly production bonus' that it can just throw out a fully kitted stack every few turns (and being aggresive with them), denying you the chance to tech ahead and making the unkillable doomstack of veterans.
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Feb 10, 2018 17:26
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You guys are really missing out what it's like to have a squad of ultra-veterans, who are like lvl7 in Era5, rolling over lvl4 opposition units. They're each small gods, probably able to take entire stacks by themselves. The game really doesn't emphasis how much difference xp makes
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Feb 25, 2018 01:59
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