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The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Baronjutter posted:

The ethos system is so close to good, it's great at making a bunch of types of empires but has some huge missing types.

Currently it's really easy to make all sorts of space monarchies from god-kings to benevolent enlightened monarches.
It's really easy to make a corporate dystopia oligarchy, with caste-system that's going to perfectly model a society with a huge class divide between the mega-rich and their wage-slaves.
All sorts of generic dictatorships are easy to model too.
Typical capitalist/liberal democracy and social-democracy have their bases covered more or less.

What's missing is any sort of communal system. Both the terrifying hive-mind sort of communal society due mostly to genetics, or the utopian democratic-communism style due to economics/government. I don't know if we just need a few more government types or some sort of "social values" pick or something. Just wanna have a space society without class and with democratic ownership and control of production man.

The utopian direct-democracy style does exist as one of the government forms - it goes from a basic Swiss style "everyone votes regularly on issues" to the upgraded "everyone has a brain implant that lets them vote in real time".

I feel like a real hive mind type thing would need to be more than just another ethic/form of government, though, since it wouldn't really fit with the core game's setup of pops having their own ethics and (limited) autonomy. Hive minds would probably make for a good focus for an expansion down the line.

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The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Kitchner posted:

*land war stuff*

Yeah I think this is a lot of why the general army stuff seems like a pain - land wars feel like such a minor thing that it doesn't really seem to matter if you take psi troops or xeno troops or any of the attachments. If wars over a planet's surface were a larger scale thing (not necessarily something the player needs to micromanage themselves, just something that is in general more substantial) it might feel more important.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Wiz posted:

Yeah, that's another issue with it, planets fill up quickly and are full forever.

I know this post is from like 20 pages ago, but I was catching up on the thread and this reminded me of something I found weird with the game ever since release - why don't pops die of old age? It would add a natural churning of pops to your planets (so you'd see more diversity in species even one your oldest planets), and it would make the various age traits more meaningful, since they would apply to all pops rather than just leaders. It might be annoying to lose production in a tile when a pop dies, sure, but maybe the game could handle that by having new pops grow outside the planetary grid, and if someone dies while they're still growing, they will move to that tile to replace them (if they finish growing before anyone dies, they'd just occupy a new tile).

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Yes I understand that pops don't literally mean "one guy", but population demographics change over time and using species lifespan to represent that makes perfect sense.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Jeb Bush 2012 posted:

It makes absolutely no sense for your population to suddenly fall because a hundred million people all died of old age at the same time.

It's an abstraction. They aren't literally all dying at the same time just like they aren't literally all working in one giant factory.

I suppose what you could do is have it so that when a new pop is "born", it can occasionally replace an existing pop rather than occupying a new tile. I feel like this still wouldn't really capture the difference that longer/shorter lifespans would have on planetary populations. Long lived species with high birth rates would naturally overtake shorter lived ones with low birth rates.

Hell this would be a legitimately interesting problem to have to deal with, especially with the new population control mechanics in 1.5 - what happens if a naturally more resilient species starts to supplant your "native" population?

Psychotic Weasel posted:

Why not just allow species to slwoly cross breed and create new species? Watch in real time as you new half horse/half stegosaurus race comes onto the scene. After 200-300 years of gameplay you'll have a whole galaxy full of nightmares running around.

How would that work in real life? Who knows but it sure would tie in nicely to any future eugenics DLC Wiz has planned.

Hybrids would be cool too but I'm not really sure how it would work with the overall population laws added in 1.5 - they would end up being kind of pointless if you have so many different species variations in your empire that every single pop is effectively its own species.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
The frost giants, having reclaimed Midgard during Ragnarok.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

GunnerJ posted:

At least you're living up to your user name.

This does remind me of the fact that it's a little weird that you can just arbitrarily genetically modify any pops in your empire, but moving them from one planet to another is an authoritarian-only policy.

I dunno, it's kind of like gentrification vs. forced relocation. They're both about making "undesirables" go somewhere else, but the former is less immediately visible and thus easier for a more "moderate" government to get away with. Especially if you imagine genetic modification as something you can do by slipping mutagen into the water supply or something.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Wiz posted:

Those robot portraits are really awesome, Dog Kisser. Hoping to get some proper mod support in for them in the not distant future.

If you do this, it would be really cool if you set it up so that the synthetic portrait used by robots could be dynamic based on the species (by general type and maybe even the option to match up to specific choices, in case someone wants to make a fully custom race with their own synth model). It would be cool to see robots in the galaxy that don't all look exactly the same - especially with the upcoming expansion adding the ability to become robotic.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
So I've had some random thoughts on planetary invasion/land combat.

Right now it basically works like sieges in other Paradox games - you deploy your troops and if you have enough then after a bit of time you capture the planet. I think this is kind of boring and not very representative of an epic, planet-wide conflict.

Instead, I think it would be more interesting if planetary invasions were a more drawn out-affair - not something that requires constant babysitting but something that's more complex than just "drop troop pods -> wait". The basic idea would be that instead of conquering the planet all at once, troops would occupy it tile by tile, starting with a randomly chosen landing zone and spreading out from there. When a tile is occupied by an attacker, the tile output is sent to the attacking empire instead of the defender. Each occupied tile requires some troops to garrison it, meaning that it might be possible to end up without enough troops to occupy the whole planet. This is fine though, because even partial occupation would give some warscore, and there could be a notification if you've got a stalemate on a planet so you'd know to send more troop transports.

Some other thoughts based on this concept:
-Control of space around the planet would be very important - if the defenders get space superiority, the attackers wouldn't be able to heal any damage done to them (representing being cut off from reinforcements), allowing the defenders to take slowly take back the planet through attrition. Defenders would never take attrition since they can be assumed to be recruiting from the planetary population, but they wouldn't be able to expand their army unless they can get offworld reinforcements from troop transports (thus taking back the planet might be very slow if they were beaten down to just a light garrison).
-Planetary tiles could have terrain types, where different troops could perform better, encouraging a mixed army composition. Manual control of land invasions would be way too much micromanagement though, so armies should just attack/defend with the best troops they have for that particular terrain type.
-Rebellions could use the same system - instead of just taking a planet automatically they'd spawn with a bunch of troops and occupy as much territory as they can, recruiting more over time at a rate based on the strength of the rebelling faction, so they don't just end up stuck partially occupying the planet forever.
-Empires could set an occupation policy, with harsher ones getting more resources from occupied tiles while gentler ones require fewer troops to garrison occupied tiles.

The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Mar 27, 2017

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

LogisticEarth posted:

Re: Fortresses & Doomstacks: I think the real solution is to break up the doomstacks, either with some kind of leadership limit, or a hard cap on fleet size.

The doomstack combat just kinda sucks. As many others have said, wars boil down to 1-2 battles, then it's all done with. Before we start monkeying with fortresses/stations to compete, I'd say start with breaking up the stacks.

Star Ruler 2 has an interesting system for limiting fleet sizes - the ship design in that game is a lot more freeform than Stellaris, but part of it would include having to outfit your capital ships with supply modules. When ships enter combat, they consume supply from those modules, and when supplies run out they do drastically reduced damage (supplies refilled automatically over time - although much quicker in friendly space). So a big fleet with few supply ships would hit hard, but burn out quickly, while having more supply would mean that your fleets would have more sustainability. Capital ships were expensive to maintain, so you wouldn't want to just build a ton of them, but you also wouldn't want to build a cap ship that was all supply modules because you'd be giving up a ton of firepower to do it. It created a nice organic system for capping fleets to reasonable sizes but also being flexible enough not to feel like an arbitrary limit.

I'm not sure how well that would translate to Stellaris exactly, but there could be a similar idea of fleets in combat consuming some kind of local resource supplied by other ships or stations or whatever, so building too much of a doom blob just means that they'll get one volley off then have to retreat to rearm.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Grizzwold posted:

Re: Fleets and junk, I think maybe a planning system like HoI4 would be decent . You have fleets you put your ships in and then you say "Ok, you guys patrol here", or "Hold the front here", or "Take these systems" or something and then it kind of automates a lot of the busywork? I dunno, I'm just throwing ideas at the wall on an internet forum while waiting for Utopia to release.

This is what Distant Worlds does. Or is supposed to do. As far as I can tell it doesn't actually work.

Giving broad strokes orders to fleets would be nice though.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Azuth0667 posted:

The best part of DW is watching all those little ships flying everywhere because of the split between private/government assets. It makes the system feel alive and the space you own actually cool and useful.

Yeah it would be cool if Stellaris had something like that, although given how the economy and resources work, it wouldn't really be the same as DW. Maybe migrating pops could actually travel through space in private transports instead of just teleporting to the new planet after a delay?

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Wiz posted:

I feel like Barronjutter's relationship with Stellaris could best be described as 'Tsundere'.

Don't you mean "militant isolationist?"

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Demiurge4 posted:

I mean, I'm fully onboard switching Stellaris to full Victoria POP mechanics and just dumping your populations into a few classes and calling it a day. Remove tile management and instead give planets a development index and a few slots for great works that will radically alter the planets outputs.

Examples of great works could be orbital shipyards, galactic breadbasket, (reduces max pop, consumes more slots) AI Cores etc. Robots would be a way to free up your populations to do more useful tasks like research and culture but if you aren't prepared for all that free labor then your pops might become restless and lazy.

Victoria style pops are kind of what I wanted from the beginning when they first announced the game was going to be using pops without really explaining what that meant. Although to be honest if the numbers are anywhere near "realistic" then the idea of "manpower" would be pretty laughable, since you're going to have billions of people per-planet and even if you consider fleet sizes being abstractions, the smallest empires are still going to have way more people than they would ever need to fight a war.

The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Apr 2, 2017

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:

I'm just starting out playing this game, and I'm bout to throw it in the trash. I'm at 2215.3.20, I'm playing some pacifist techno parrots just fuckin around, found a neighbor and established diplomatic channels. I haven't been neglecting my military as far as I can tell, my fleet isn't maxed out but it's got a military score of a few hundred and I'm on equivalent footing with the neighbor I found. Then the next neighbor I find is a bunch of military isolationists who instantly declare war on me. Their fleet shows up and it has a military strength of around 80000. What the gently caress am I supposed to do with this? I'd happily surrender, be humiliated, and let them blow up the frontier outpost they're upset about but no they just land troops on my home planet immediately.

Like, why is this a thing that can happen? Is there some way I'm supposed to be able to recover from that? Is there some trick to making them not murder my species on sight?

As mentioned above, you found a fallen empire and it's unfortunately one of the ones that makes for an annoying neighbour. There's a few plus sides to be aware of though:

-The way the wargoal system works, no empire can ever take more than what they demanded initial war declaration. They might destroy your entire fleet and occupy every one of your planets, but if the only wargoal they picked was "humiliate" that's all they're going to be able to demand from you. Thus it's usually a good idea to just surrender immediately in cases like this where you know you're going to lose, to avoid having too much damage done to your infrastructure/fleet which might leave you vulnerable to an opportunistic neighbour.

-Militant isolationists like the one you ran into basically don't care about anything except other empires getting too close. As wargoals all they'll ever demand is cleansing planets they deem too close to their space (and humiliation which is annoying but pretty harmless). Since fallen empires never expand, this just means that so long as you avoid settling near them, they'll leave you alone forever.

-Besides not expanding, fallen empires also never build ships. So they start off with a massively powerful fleet but you can actually chip them down over time with a much weaker force - even destroying a single ship during a war is a loss they'll never recover from. Granted, the tech difference means that can be hard to do, but it gets easier as time goes on.

The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Jun 6, 2017

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Yeah but that's why you set up defensive pacts and get some other jerk to do it for you.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

JuniperCake posted:

Not always. If there are any systems that are just barely in your borders nearby, getting rid of an outpost adjacent will probably cause you to lose it even if there is a colony in the same system as the outpost you are getting rid of. Stuff like number of pops, number of colonies and number of outposts also effects your border strength. The more you have, the more each colony/outpost extends your borders.

Yeah I lost access to terraforming gases by removing an outpost that was near a colony I'd just planted - if the stuff along your borders is just a couple mining or research stations you it's probably better value to get the influence from destroying the station but be wary of strategic resources right on the edges.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

TGLT posted:

It's also really the only use for them past the early/mid-game. They could really do with another pass to make them worthwhile as actual military installations. It's a tough balancing act though since if they're too strong then there just won't be wars.

They probably need to be integrated into the fleet cap system and balanced around that or something.

Stations should probably be given a massive defensive buff (lots more hull points) while keeping the same amount of attack power. The way I imagine them, they shouldn't really be powerful enough to take down a fleet on their own, but they should have enough staying power to stall a fleet while you move your own in to intercept them. The issue now is that they get annihilated almost instantly by a mid-game fleet and so are basically more of a speed bump than a real fortress.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Wow, awakened empires don't gently caress around. I'm at the point in the game now where I rolled over a neighbouring stagnant empire fairly easily so I figured "hey, let's take on this other one as well, how much harder could they be?"

Turns out that perhaps waiting until the War in Heaven had started was not the best time to declare war. Fortunately I'm in a federation with most of the galaxy because apparently barely anybody submitted to the dominion of either of the awakened empires (although one of my vassals, that I was in the middle of integrating, did, which switched them to be a vassal of the awakened empire which was kind of BS and seems like a bug) but even then I'm not sure how effective we're going to be. I mean my plan for this run was to get the End of the Cycle event and let that run its course anyway (just to see what happens). That may now end up being my primary strategy.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

Is there a way to actually set engagement tactics beyond just "all battleships are artillery, everything else is point-blank range"? There's a load of real expensive technologies like torpedos and stuff in there that seem mostly fuckin' useless when every battle is just all your ships kamikaze charging the whatever it is at top speed

Not in the base game, but there is a mod that lets you give ships custom AI behaviour by giving them different combat computer modules: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=790455347

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

misguided rage posted:

You used to be able to put any combat computer on any ship, ie. bombardment or rushing in or whatever. Did those just not do anything?

They gave different stat bonuses but the actual AI governing the ship behaviour didn't change.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
If I have a game with warp modes restricted to only one of the three types, does that also disable jump drives from appearing later?

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Vasler posted:

Maybe that's my issue with wormholes - I haven't built enough stations.

I'll build more!

The main thing to be aware of with wormholes is that each station can only service one fleet at a time, and the larger a fleet is, the longer it takes. So it's a good idea to build redundant stations if you're going to be moving multiple fleets around at once. The other thing to be aware of is that moves can only be to a system with a station, or from a system with a station. So if you want to move a fleet over even one system, if there's no wormhole station present in either the fleet's current system or their destination, it will take them two jumps to do it. This is why it's also a good idea to have stations in every system where you have a colony - so if you need to rush a fleet to their defense, you can travel directly there rather than having to take the long route.

I personally like wormholes the best - they charge up about as quickly as warp but don't have the cooldown time after arriving, and they don't have the hyperlane issue of potentially getting blocked in (technically you can get blocked in with wormholes if you have neighbours that won't let you build stations in their territory and are too big to just jump right over, but wormhole stations have a pretty long range, especially once you upgrade them with tech, so it's less likely).

The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Jun 15, 2017

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Can you not just release the tributary and leave them to fend for themselves? Sounds like they're more trouble than they're worth.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
I'm having some weird bugs with robots and I'm not sure if this is a new thing or not since I only started playing again recently. For one thing, I can't find the button to disassemble them - I remember it just being on the pop info where the "purge" button used to be, but since that's gone I don't know how to individually remove robots anymore.

Also, the egalitarian faction has a huge happiness penalty for "species-wide slavery" when robotics laws are set to servitude. This makes sense for synths, but they also get the penalty for pre-sentient robots which I'm pretty sure is a bug.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Syrnn posted:

That IS damnably odd. Your incredibly handsome race seems to have a 48% attraction cap on Spiritualists, so the actual number of them can't be that far behind, while pacifism caps at 7% but they make up half of your politically active pops. It's pretty much 1:1 pacifist where you SHOULD have Spiritualists. Honestly if you didn't make an Ethics shift at any point in that game, I'd chalk it up as a bug. I mean, it's possible that if your governing Ethics includes (Fanatic) Pacifism, that all your +Governing Ethics Attraction is just RNGing towards them like mad, but that seems incredibly wrong. Like I said in my monster :words: post above, I'm fairly new to Stellaris, so I really can't say for sure, but I've never seen anything of the like. I hope someone who knows better can answer or that it works out for you in the long run. :ohdear:

There are a few requirements before certain factions can form beyond just having the ethic present in the population. A simple one is that say for the Xenophile faction, you need to have met another alien race. For spiritualist, you also need to have met another race (I'm not sure why) AND have one of the following:
-Robotic Workers Technology
-Surveyed a Gaia or Tomb world
-Subdermal Stimulation Technology
-Ascension Perk Flesh is Weak

You'll notice that none of those are very "spritualist" except for the Gaia/Tomb world one, so if you haven't found one of them yet, you might not see the faction appear for a while. I think the main rationale is that as a conservative faction, they form in OPPOSITION to those developments (except for the surveying one).

Also, although in this case he didn't have any slaves, I also want to point out that it's not enough to just have 5 pops with the ethic present in your empire for a faction to form; they have to also be eligible to join a faction (so slaves don't count, nor do nerve stapled pops). So you might have 100 egalitarian slaves but there's less than 5 egalitarian non-slave pops in your empire, the faction won't appear.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Syrnn posted:

Oh hey guys, check it out! The Sol system! What the, an anomaly on the third planet in the system? :thunk:
Hmmm...

HMMM..!

Oh. :smith:


BTW, you should uplift those roaches. That tomb world preference trait means they can basically live anywhere.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Jenny Angel posted:

I'm 15 years or so into my first single-player game, and am having a very hard time judging if I've hosed up or not with my development. Are there any rules of thumb I should be keeping in mind in terms of milestones for mineral income, colonizing worlds, fleet strength, etc.? I think I'm at like high 30's mineral income, 3 worlds, and a little over 600 fleet power

Also, I'm guessing it's a fool's errand to start any offensive wars before my naval capacity is high enough that I can put together a fleet capable of overpowering a 1.4k spaceport?

For the former, you don't need to worry about timeline too much. The game is fairly forgiving do you don't really need to feel pressured to keep up a schedule of constant expansion. The main pitfalls to watch for are less about raw output and more about getting boxed in by colonization from other empires.

For the latter, yeah, the main reason that exists is to prevent someone from just launching a day 1 campaign to wipe out their neighbours. Spaceports never really get any stronger but they are strong enough to defend against the earliest fleets you'll be able to support.

The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Jun 27, 2017

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

I'm looking at getting Stellaris for the first time, is Utopia a good expansion that's worth spending money on?

It kind of depends on whether you end up liking the base game. It's not a radical departure, it kind of just adds more stuff.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

TGLT posted:

I think this is largely dancing around the core issue of the planet mode, that you're never really making a choice when building anything. At most you're maybe pre-deciding to entirely specialize a planet, but for the most part it's just "does this tile have a bonus? Is it better than any planet bonuses? Cool thing goes here now."

It would be neat from a flavor perspective if you built on top of tile blockers instead of just demolishing them, but that wouldn't really resolve that core issue of there being such obviously optimal solutions. Although I guess I don't really know a better solution so whatever.

Yeah - I think it would have been more interesting if planet construction was a bit more of a hands-off thing. Star Ruler 2 has an interesting way of handling it - the civilian population will build basic structures like population centers or resource production modules (there's a specific logic to how they build resource production stuff that I'm not going to bother going into here but it's the type of thing where it's technically hands off but very easily influenced by the player), so for random backwater planets you don't care about, they will essentially handle their own needs. The thing is, you can also manually construct buildings, which costs you resources to do but player-built stuff generally performs some special function (like producing a resource that is otherwise not present on the planet) or is more space efficient than the default stuff (there's a 4-tile "megacity" structure you can build that can house the equivalent of 6 tiles worth of civilian living areas). So you only really need to dabble in manual construction either when you want to do something unusual with a planet, or you want to build "tall" with the planet and pack more into it than would otherwise fit.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Bold Robot posted:

Is the bolded part a good thing? Are federations actually good now?

Not really, but they are one of the ways to win now (there's a federation victory condition where you win if you are in a federation that controls at least 75% of the galaxy or something around that).

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Yeah to be honest I don't think to many people do care about the victory conditions, but they are there and federations didn't count originally so I brought it up just because that's a change that might make them more attractive.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Pocky In My Pocket posted:

I also hope for more megastructers or something equivalent but assimilation has been my #1v desire since i got this game

Yeah the lack of assimilation was really an issue with the Utopia update - having a synthetic ascension based empire had this weird behaviour where anyone that was in your empire at the moment you triggered it would be converted into a synth, but anyone that joined your empire later could never become a synth and that just didn't seem like it made any sense - why was the technology a one-shot thing?

I like that it's a citizenship option though, so you can still have an open xenophilic synth empire without converting all your pops to robots if you like, want them to have individual rights or whatever (you know, hippie poo poo). Or if you have a specific warrior caste race or something (since I think strong/very strong aliens make more effective armies than synths), you can leave them untouched.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Nevets posted:

Agreeing to be vassalized is a last resort type of thing. You give up almost all of your autonomy, in the hope that you can buildup your fleet enough to one day declare independence and fight off your former overlord. The diplomatic fuckery you got hit with is probably a bug though. Vassals shouldn't be guaranteeing anything, and should always side with their overlord when they have conflicting treaties.

My guess is what happened is that the overlord liberated the planets TO THE VASSAL (Awakened empires rarely take war goals for themselves for some reason). So rather than inheriting the FE's government type and ethics, they inherited from Nosfereefer's empire. Since they were liberated under him, he was the one guaranteeing them.

Not that this does him any good because as a vassal he couldn't just vassalize them, so he was just stuck with a useless treaty that hosed him over.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Yeah to be honest it's pretty easy to just ignore the victory conditions and decide for yourself when you're done. Just treat it like any other Paradox game.

*edit* I agree that having more avenues to pursue than military expansion would be a benefit to the game though.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

Mzbundifund posted:

I think this reveals the real unsatisfying part of the "cultural" victory idea. It's how uninteractive it is. You can be in a knock-down drag-out war with Persia for control of your continent but because Venice accrued enough culturebucks on some other continent neither of you have ever seen then suddenly you just lose, full stop. It's like you and Venice were in a speed run competition playing parallel but totally unrelated games, not active competitors in a global power struggle.

You can turn the cultural victory condition off, but usually that just makes a lot of civilizations objectively worse than others, which is kind of the problem with playing xenophiles right now. They just don't have the tools to interact.

Yeah this is the reason why they totally revamped the cultural victory mechanics in the Brave New World Expansion in civ 5 to make it about dominating every other civ with your tourism output rather than just sitting alone on an island somewhere painting and singing until you ascended to a higher plane of existence. There was no reason to interact with other empires at all when going for cultural victories before, and even peaceful expansion was a bad idea because after about 3-5 cities, the cost of cultural bonuses scaled faster than the extra culture your new cities might produce.

I think for a game like Stellaris though, the development focus should be less on making mechanics that lead to more competition between empires, and more on just mechanics that create interesting gameplay. This CAN include mechanics designed to create competition between empires, but it could also be things like developing the internal management of your empire (like say making pops more complex) or by making cooperation between empires as interesting as competition (say by expanding on federations). A purely competitive focus works for games where the goal is to "win", but Stellaris is more of a sandbox, so like any sandbox the focus should be more about just giving players different toys to play with.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

turn off the TV posted:

There's a mod dealing with federations that does things like introducing elections, election laws, federal level policies and edicts, etc. It's pretty nifty.

At the very least I think it would be cool if federations could set laws that all members would have to follow. Maybe associates as well, which would make federation association status more interesting - it would mean that you're bound by their laws but don't get a vote on them, so ultimately its to your detriment to just stay an associate forever for the relationship boosts (association status could also be a way for more aggressive federations to project their influence - you can't force someone to join in a war goal since that's silly, but maybe "force association" could be one). Things like mandatory settings for the empire laws (like AI legality and so on, and maybe citizenship policies for federation member species), as well as more general federation-wide laws (like the ones added by the mod you mentioned). Sort of similar to the various UN laws you can set in the later Civilization games, except that each federation would essentially be its own separate UN.

I'm hoping federations are one of the things that gets expanded on at some point - they seem like an interesting stub system but there's really not much to them right now.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Yeah Distant Worlds is the only game I've ever seen that uses all the windows default ui elements.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe

turn off the TV posted:

Distant Worlds doesn't have poo poo on Aurora, which from a casual glance could be confused with an electronic medical record interface.

Aurora is a whole other category. Distant Worlds is comparable to pre-CK2 Paradox games in terms of jankiness. Not super user-friendly, but you can figure it out for yourself if you bash your head against it for a while. Aurora is more like the space 4X version of Dwarf Fortress.

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The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Yeah I think the idea is that both have good tracking systems, but missiles fly in predictable patterns while fighters can maneuver. Thus a single highly accurate projectile can intercept the former but still might miss the latter.

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