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There are a couple mods that allow you to start with 0 other AI-controlled empires in the galaxy. If the exploration and border-painting are the parts that get your gears running, or if you want to try out some new mods or whatever without an rear end in a top hat Fanatic Purifier knocking on your door, there are options.
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Jan 21, 2017 04:06
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Rakthar posted:A really awesome thing in Sword of the Stars is when the AI starts sending cloaked cruisers that ruin your planets with bio plagues and if you don't have the ability to see cloaked, welp. Goddamn space dolphins. Also, SotS (the original; we don't talk about the sequel) is an amazing game and any 4X space game could do worse than look to it for inspiration. ChrisBTY posted:As somebody who never played a game beyond the 'expand until you bump into everybody else's borders' part of the game I have to ask: Paradox games aren't generally mean to be "won" in the same manner as, say, Starcraft or Civilization. In fact, in EU4 and CK2 all you can do is run out the clock; even conquering the entire world doesn't give a "you win" screen. Zurai fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Jan 23, 2017 |
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Jan 23, 2017 21:21
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Alphamod does it for sure. It gives every blocker an adjacency bonus, and a lot of buildings which can only be built next to specific tile blockers (geothermal plants for volcanos, forest preserves for jungles, etc).
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Jan 24, 2017 04:11
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The only thing that bothers me with AlphaMod is the proliferation of useless "strategic resources" which only exist to give you 8 different kind of farms which are all worse than the base game hydroponic farms. I wish I could get everything from AlphaMod except the water/ice/biomass/actinides/natural fuel resources and buildings.
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Jan 26, 2017 06:12
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Archonex posted:There's not that many strategic resources that don't offer a direct bonus, really. Yes, there are. Almost none of the couple dozen resources Alphamod adds provide a bonus directly. They're almost exclusively used as pre-requisites for buildings, which is a pain because sector AI is poo poo at that stuff. quote:The resources that have no direct bonus actually do serve a purpose later on in the game. Once you start teching to the mid to late game a fair number of them can be used to either min-max the resource output on a planet via special end of building chain bonuses or unlock some really powerful buildings or techs via converting them over into a super powerful strategic resource that usually requires refining earlier tier resources. I've completed the entire tech tree in Alphamod. At no point did I feel that any of the resources I listed justified their existence. quote:That being said the natural fuel sourcer and natural fuel factory could be safely tossed. It's a junk item which only has the "benefit" that it's the only building in the game that gives you both energy and minerals, albeit at a lower rate. It costs a strategic resource that's invaluable later on to get microfission cores (Which give collossal bonuses if you can afford to build the cold fusion plants that grant htem.) and generally aren't as good as just speccing directly into either a mine or power plant. The fission/fusion plants produce minerals and energy, actually. Natural fuel does ... nothing that I've determined. Water does nothing interesting. Biomass does nothing interesting. Ice and Actinides only act as fuel for the fission/fusion plants.
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Jan 26, 2017 06:32
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I'm aware of everything you mentioned. Where we're differing is the point where I said "they don't justify their existence". Very little of what you mentioned is actually very impressive to me. Oh boy, a building that generates 12 energy. That's good, don't get me wrong, but it's not interesting. It's just slightly higher numbers for increased pain-in-the-rear end-ness. That's what most of AlphaMod's strategic resource stuff adds. Take Frontier Provisioners, for example. They require water and energy, make an infinitesimal amount of food and generate nutrient bars (a strategic resource that does nothing by itself, IIRC). You can use those nutrient bars to make pointless station modules or to make Frontier Towns in colonies; Frontier Towns are pretty good (and upgrade into some really cool poo poo) but can only be built on ... planets that already have a Frontier Provisioner anyway. Biomass can be used to make freeze-dried ultra-dense biomass, sure, and those can be used to essentially transport food from one planet to another. That's a really terrible solution to the problem of transferring food from one planet to another which has already been solved better by other mods. Food is by far the least useful resource in the game, so making an entire supply chain to provide food where just the colony hub and one farm can do the same job seems pretty much completely pointless to me. I already run complete 25 tile planets with just the hub and one farm in the base game, I don't see a need for a complex supply chain to do the same in Alphamod. That's the thing: it adds a fuckton of utterly pointless complexity. It also adds some fun complexity, even within its strategic resource system (microfission cores, for example, can be used in a few different very powerful buildings/station modules, but you can only make one per planet so you have to be a bit picky with using them). I wish I could get rid of the first without losing the second. Since that isn't an option, I grudgingly trudge through the first to have the second. EDIT: Also, seriously, just loving call it water (or H2O, that's fine too). "Dihydrogen Monoxide" as a strategic resource just makes it sound like you have your head up your own rear end. EDIT2: Again, I like Alphamod overall. The only part I dislike is what I regard as complexity for complexity's sake with the strategic resources. They could drop half the resources and the mod would be 100% improved. Zurai fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Jan 26, 2017 |
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Jan 26, 2017 07:30
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Empires aren't going to squabble over water, ice, natural fuels, biomass, or actinides, since those are all extremely plentiful and can be generated on-planet and by mining stations (except Biomass for the latter). My empires tend to have literally dozens of water, ice, and fuels, and that's without specifically building resource generators for them. I didn't mention worm spice because that's one I don't object to. I also didn't mention marks of caste, hivemind implants, intelligence, the warrior house resources, etc. Those I'm cool with (although the hivemind buildings should be limited to the hivemind government IMO because they're way too good for general use).
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Jan 26, 2017 07:45
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Yeah, +20% production of every resource sure is useless.
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Feb 5, 2017 22:30
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You can produce 80 corvettes exactly as fast as you can produce 10 battleships (Corvettes take 1/8th the time of a Battleship), except you'll have results from the Corvette production 420 days before the Battleships pop out of the yards.
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Feb 6, 2017 22:59
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GlyphGryph posted:Corvs die quick. which means that you lose dps quick and they need to be replaced more often and their shields go down quicker and living metals have a smaller benefit. They also tend to take more damage due to lower armor so their defenses need to be compared too In addition to what's mentioned above, Corvettes have the best cost-per-torpedo ratio in the game. You can pack 8 untargetable high-damage torpedoes into the same fleet capacity as one battleship and for much less cost. Admittedly, this is made better by mods which actually give you control over your fleet tactics so that torpedo boats don't charge into point blank range and get eaten up by flak cannons or autocannons, but they're still very cost-efficient for their punch.
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Feb 6, 2017 23:19
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Splitting fleets is godawful, and yeah menu scrolling in general is pretty bad.
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Feb 7, 2017 00:07
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Sentient doesn't mean what most people use the word to mean. Sentient just means it responds to the senses. Sapient is the ability to think and reason. A Sentient AI would be able to respond to inputs in a non-deterministic way, but wouldn't truly be self-aware and able to reason through abstract principles.
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Feb 9, 2017 10:08
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Squiggle posted:It's like Shadowrun. The more cybernetic you become, the less able you are to tap into....whatever shaman use. I'd agree with that except that in Shadowrun you can have a literal Math-O-Mancer who uses a Cerebral Co-Processor (CPU embedded in the brain) to help cast your spells and other cyber/bioware I forget the names of to help reduce/deal with the cost of casting spells. That's not to say anything other than that Shadowrun is a drat cool setting, though.
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Feb 10, 2017 01:39
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Talk about biases and preconceived notions.
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Feb 10, 2017 02:05
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Yeah, scientists totally ignore aliens. SETI is a figment of my imagination, after all.
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Feb 10, 2017 02:26
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Rakthar posted:Feels kinda reductionist. In EU4 there is no cost to diplomatic deals and it creates a tangle of alliances, guarantees, and pretty cool gameplay. Not true. You have Diplomatic Relations slots in EU4, and if you go over it costs monarch points.
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Feb 13, 2017 21:35
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Nuclearmonkee posted:Not being able to exchange minerals<>energy in the midgame because you didn't scout some merchant guys is a big deal. It's very easy to pump energy income to insane levels and just convert it to minerals as needed to fuel a war machine at a much higher rate than someone without access to minerals<>energy. In the midgame you can easily scout the entire map with a wormhole empire. You just can't queue up an exploration of the entire map the instant the game starts.
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Feb 15, 2017 18:23
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GlyphGryph posted:If they are in, hive minds are going to be factions rather than empire level stuff. Calling it now. Why do you keep saying "if"? We already know Hive Minds are in. This week's dev diary is on Hive Minds (as we've known since last week's Dev Diary). They don't write Dev Diaries about features that aren't actually features.
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Feb 20, 2017 21:00
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RabidWeasel posted:I hope that there's a different hive mind 'type' for each authority setting. Like, a democratic hive mind would be some kind of 'subconscious consensus' thing going on, monarchy would be your classic 'queen alien with mindless drones' situation, etc. Well, since there's a very hive mind looking icon on the authority selection section, that seems unlikely.
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Feb 20, 2017 21:52
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Bholder posted:Yes, but purging is not instant and you'll apparently get the option to give pops the hivemind trait, basically assimilating them. I don't think that's what was said. Unless I'm mis-remembering (entirely possible), you're able to add the hivemind trait to your own species with the gene-engineer ascendancy. I don't think anyone ever made the claim that you could incorporate other species into your hive-mind.
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Feb 23, 2017 01:10
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Like I said, I might be mis-remembering or mis-interpreting, and of course I'm much too lazy to hunt it down before making declarations.
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Feb 23, 2017 01:21
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Civvies figure it out because they're set to "Evasive" posture. Military ships default to Passive, and Passive and Aggressive don't avoid known threats on their path. That said, known Leviathans should probably automatically be avoided by everything if possible.
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Feb 23, 2017 19:08
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uber_stoat posted:bless ya'll. just thinking about how huge this exp. is gonna be and then thinking about what this game is gonna look like 2-3 years from now... it's gonna be the amazing all-encompassing sci-fi sim that my little child brain imagined back when I first played Master of Orion. keep up the good work. Yeah. Not to put too much weight of expectation behind it, but if Stellaris continues to get expansions of this apparent quality, it may be the last game I ever need to buy (not that that will stop me). This is why I wasn't too worried when the game was a little flat at launch.
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Feb 23, 2017 21:37
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I think that varies a bit from person to person. I have over 1000 hours on EU4 and exactly 0 minutes of that was in Multiplayer, and the same was true for Civilization 4 (I actually might have over 2000 hours of Civ4). Multiplayer is more often a deterrent than an attraction to me.
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Feb 27, 2017 03:57
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You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that the presence of multiplayer in a game repels me, except for those games where they throw in a single player mode just to say they have one, just that multiplayer itself holds actually-zero attraction for me in the vast majority of games (and especially in strategy games).
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Feb 27, 2017 04:12
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"Super-Human". Custom race, or is that from the Cybernetic Ascension path?
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Feb 27, 2017 18:58
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I think my issue with the Synthetic and Biological Ascension paths -- as currently revealed, with the understanding that there are events and such that go along with them which we haven't seen -- don't really offer much that's new. Biological at least expands bio-engineering options, but Synthetic just gets an easier way to do something which is already possible for zero Ascension Perks (turning all your pops into synthetics). Spending two perks on reduced micromanagement is just completely un-interesting to me. They don't even get new portraits (currently)! That's not to say I'm not excited to buy Utopia. The expansion as a whole looks amazing and I want it yesterday. I just doubt I'll really play with the Synthetic path.
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Mar 4, 2017 21:37
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Yeah, me neither. 
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Mar 8, 2017 16:46
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GunnerJ posted:Something I've wanted: more uplifting species. I've been able to do it, like, once. Well, do I have a mod for you then!
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Mar 17, 2017 03:07
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Baronjutter posted:Don't make me make seperate pops with a mineral extraction bonus, a farming bonus, a an engineering bonus and so on, just stack them. A pop is only ever using one of those bonuses at a time This part is actually not true.
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Mar 24, 2017 04:16
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ulmont posted:Only for the capital and certain undeveloped tiles, unless there's something I'm forgetting. Research labs all generate multiple types of research and he specifically mentioned engineering bonuses.
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Mar 24, 2017 04:26
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Baronjutter posted:What is combat width in space? What's the bottleneck or restriction? Command & Control limitations make the most sense. Either direct (C&C computers which, fluff-wise, are what are used to link ships together for coordinated firing and point defense) or indirect (limitations based on the skill of the admiral leading the fleet; it makes sense that 1000 ships are much harder to manage in a fight than 10).
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Mar 29, 2017 22:54
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Poil posted:Combat width does make some sense. Ships need room to maneuver, haven't you seen the typical sci fi battle with capital ships crashing into each other because they were way too close? Yeah, while space is unimaginably huge, you actually have to be really close to engage with non-missile weapons (missiles can have on-board targeting computers so they're able to operate at better ranges). Unless you have instantaneous communications and sensors, you really do have to be very close, relatively to speaking, to hit what you're aiming at even with a laser that travels at the speed of light. Rakthar posted:Ways the game currently limits fleet size: Combat Width (or an equivalent mechanic) doesn't prevent you from doing this, so I'm not sure what you're going on about really. What Combat Width does mean, however, is that you're not punished for *not* doing a Doomstack.
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Mar 29, 2017 23:48
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The range of ships and fleets in game during combat is ludicrously exaggerated to be practical unless all weapons travel several times the speed of light.
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Rakthar posted:Put it another way, Stellaris already penalizes the empire with the bigger fleet 4 ways to make sure they don't just roll over their neighbors (without getting into warscore and the peace system) compared to a typical 4x, what do we gain by adding a fifth? I'm not sure doing so will make space combat suddenly fun. Well, since the first four just plain do not work and the only actually valid way to play is to doomstack, yes, I think it needs to go farther. quote:Why do fleets retreat from combat? I know, Paradox, but why? If I catch your smaller fleet can I not wreck it? That's how it works in other 4x games. I don't know what 4Xs you've been playing but all the ones I play allow for retreats. quote:Again, why are doomstacks and having an effective fleet that projects force bad? False Dichotomy. You can have effective fleets which project force without having them be doomstacks. In fact, I'd argue that it would be much better from a force projection standpoint if you could afford to spread your fleets out instead of keeping them all together. With the latter, you can only ever engage one target at a time. With the former, you're actually able to fight across one or more fronts instead of a single battle at a time. Unfortunately the game mechanics just do not really support that if you're fighting anyone who actually stands any chance at all against you. Fortunately, Wiz knows that combat has a lot of problems and I'm sure he'll fix it. Zurai fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Mar 30, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 23:59
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ulmont posted:Because as I see it either There are definitely more possibilities than "bigger empire wins" vs "pure random".
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Mar 30, 2017 00:56
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ulmont posted:And yet you named zero of them, as did the next person to make this comment... You also provided zero evidence for your assertions. You don't get to cry "no data!" when you don't provide any yourself. But sure, I'll humor you. (C) Win despite having smaller fleets and smaller economic base because of clever tactical play and ship design choices.
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Mar 30, 2017 02:40
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:but none of these games come down to a single battle, and in all of them where you move your units and what you do with them makes a big difference to the progress of a war This exactly, and it was this I was referring to when I mentioned tactics, not tactical battles like MOO2 or SotS. This is an element which is mostly lacking from Stellaris, and it's very much to the game's detriment. Strudel Man posted:Even if we grant it as a factor, too, it seems like if both players act intelligently it would reduce down to one of the previous two choices. We'll get back to that when you develop an AI which is as intelligent as the player. Zurai fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Mar 30, 2017 |
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Mar 30, 2017 06:22
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One of the reasons I prefer Hyperlane Only games of Stellaris is that it actually gives the defender an advantage, at least theoretically. The defender has all the internal hyper routes, meaning theoretically shorter reinforcement times, and the attacker likely only has one or two entry points into your territory.
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Mar 30, 2017 06:27
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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. The Cheshire Cat posted: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? Azuth0667 posted:Like I said earlier the coolest part is all the little ships and it would be awesome if that came to stellaris. Well, here's the mod for you then. It's developed by the Improved Space Battles team but it's a standalone mod and all it does is add civilian traffic inside your systems and between them. It's purely for flavor, there's no effects if they get blown up and in fact so far as I know the AI won't attack them. Bloody Pom posted:Stellaris probably also has considerably more processing/memory overhead than DW, adding a bunch of civilian ships milling about could potentially tank performance for a lot of people. There is a warning in the mod about performance drops but I haven't really noticed anything egregious. Stellaris tends to slow down in the mid to late game anyway.
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Mar 30, 2017 23:29
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Dongattack posted:Um, my first game was fine, but i decided to tweak my race a bit and restarted. Now any game i start or load i'm treated to a grey start view and i cannot go into galaxy map mode or do anything. No mods enabled and verified cache. Anyone else? Double check that you don't have any mods enabled. I crashed out of my first game and when I went to log back in, the game had auto-enabled a good dozen mods that I'm 100% certain I didn't have enabled the first time.
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Apr 6, 2017 21:14
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