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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:Leaders are really weird for a machine empire since they don't die. I feel compelled to hire and fire a bunch of scientists until I get the good ones like Spark of Genius. They can die, though. By accidents. Too rare accidents, if you ask me: In my last run I was playing a machine empire and during the three centuries I played, I lost like two leaders to accidents.
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Jan 15, 2018 15:46
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The Bramble posted:Am I mistaken, or is there no way to read an empire's biography once you're in-game? Yours or others? You can. There's some way where you can right-click on something or hover about it for long enough and their entire biographic text suddenly shows up as a tool tip. I stumbled on this by accident once, I think you have to do this with their planets, stations or ships? Edit: Reveilled posted:If you go to the species view and hover over the empire's founder species, it will display the empire biography after a short delay, if the empire has one. OK, I didn't know that! That's a lot easier!
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Jan 17, 2018 08:35
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3 DONG HORSE posted:There's a mod that makes your empire the only FTL-capable empire. It kinda makes you a "FE" in a vague way but it also depends on how the random pre-FTL generation works out with respect to space age civs. Technically speaking, it's also the Fermi Paradox at work if you play as a Devouring Hive or Space SkyNet, as those kill-everything types of empires are a valid reason as to why there is nothing out there.  That said, I tested a machine exterminator empire and I found it a bit sad that I can't even try to not kill everyone, apparently: I found some interesting form of new life on a random planet and the event ended with us exterminating everything from orbit. No decision, nothing: Just "We found something! Then we killed it". Which I mean, yeah, that's what exterminators do, but I think I prefer even the Space Borg to just randomly killing everything.
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Jan 17, 2018 08:39
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Just wanted to try something different.  I even populated my galaxy with some vile poo poo to feel less guilty, but it didn't work. Seems like "Dreaded assimilators" is as far as my personal evil scale goes.
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Jan 17, 2018 09:18
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Fututor Magnus posted:i want species that can do really disgusting things, like outright cannibalism by turning their own species pops into food. or maybe they sacrifice intelligent species to their dark lovecraftian god. i want to play as a more chaotic evil empire that's got more poo poo going on that just penchant for genocide, i want to be able to worship slanesh or some equivalent. Well I don't, but this would give my peaceful science/robot civs more bad guys to slaughter, so I'm all for it!
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Jan 17, 2018 11:46
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Something funny from my current run: Among the NPC-races in this game, I've put a race of Human exiles and a race of ravenous, hiveminded plants into it and even though the devouring swarm of angry plants spawned on the other side of the galaxy, the loving things slowly crept growing over the galaxy until they met my Humans, then ate most of them. Right now my cyborg science space kitties have to protect the (now traumatized and xenophobic) survivors of the Human race in our second war with the angry plant menace. That swarm got loving huge. It was actually kind of spooky to get to Ex-Human worlds with names like "Exile" and "Olympia" and seeing all the Humans replaced with flesh-eating plants. Of course bombing them with full bombardment still gave me a small diplomacy penalty to all my allies, even the Humans who fought a generation long war against those plants who were literally eating them. I guess even a devouring hive can have a good propaganda machine.
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Jan 21, 2018 21:10
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THE loving MOON posted:fffffffffff alright. I'll run some kind of republic so i can lose quickly. I always say the same thing, and then my republics take over the galaxy. Be warned.
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Jan 23, 2018 00:31
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Guigui posted:Looking for some advice on playing my tall empire... I've just started to terraform a tomb world in my current game to my preferred world type, so you could do that, too.
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Jan 23, 2018 19:55
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Tomn posted:It's Commonwealth propaganda trying to convince UNE citizens to vote for integration under the Commonwealth. With some alterations, it could also be good propaganda for my Space Kitten Empire to convince the surviving humans to vote for integration into the Star Republic. Because I'm pretty sure if the devouring swarm eating them had had planet destroyers, they would have used them.
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Jan 25, 2018 22:31
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jwalrus posted:Having an odd bug here, and I'm hoping someone can give me advice on how to deal with it. It's late in the game, and the Prethoryn have shown up. I'm kicking their ugly asses, but one of their fleets sneaks past and bombards/invades a vassal's planet. I send a fleet with transports to retake it, and while we're fighting the pops all die, transforming the planet into a scourge-infested world. All of the armies stay on the planet, though; a few weeks later, I get a message that we've occupied the planet, and most of the armies return to space, leaving behind a "garrison" that I cannot control. I can't bombard the planet, either, since it's considered occupied. The Prethoryn seem uninterested in retaking it (they even built some of their bases in the system, so they apparently don't see a problem), so there's nothing I can do with that planet as far as I can tell. You could try to keep that save around until Apocalypse drops, and then try to blow it up. Doesn't work if your save breaks due to the update, of course.
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Jan 26, 2018 09:55
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Patrat posted:I think the only time I saw it actually pay off was in multiplayer where I had filled a planet with military academy trained, Very Strong gene-warriors for some reason then one of my friends attempted to invade the planet using a blob of regular assault armies, not having noticed. As someone who never got multiplayer to work, how do machine empires and their special troops work out in it? I assume machine players try to research titans as fast as possible, since the ability to poo poo out dozens of titans on command is incredibly powerful. Edit: Wow, I imagine in future this post will sound really confusing if Wiz doesn't rename either titans (ships) or titans (ground troops).
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Jan 26, 2018 19:47
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Reveilled posted:What I like about Rogue Servitors is you have some real scope to imagine the specifics of the relationship between the robots and their organics. At one end of the spectrum is the Culture, where the AI does the boring stuff to give its organics a life of meaning and fulfilment without the drudgery of work, and at the other end is barely conscious people in chairs with electrodes wired into their dopamine pathways. I see the Assimilators in a similar vein: On one end of the spectrum, lame and boring Borg, on the other end the Culture As Seen Through Enemy Propaganda.
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Jan 26, 2018 23:58
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Sibling of TB posted:The player empires are all random and hard to get lore for. But there are constant characters in the grand menaces and some of the event quests. The game really spoiled me with my current swan-song-of-warp run. I've gotten several weird, never-seen-before events like me having to cover up a secret assassination by our most beloved neighbors (or it was a false-flag operation by our enemies, either way, one of my governors was killed). Several events concerning interaction with alien primitives fired, giving my Space Kitten Republic some nice flavor when dealing with all those weirdos and just before we stepped in to save mankind, the fake United Space Nation I made up disintegrated in chaos when the man-eating plants overran their second-to-last planet. They turned from a peaceful space democracy into an autocratic dictatorship. They all became raging xenophobes, too. Ironically, when they were later peacefully integrated into my benevolent empire, most of them joined a faction that was basically Nazis, but in space and with cats. Now they're xenophobes together. Our "allies" (the ones who are apparently secretly trying to undermine us) are fanatic materialists and added their own chaos into the mix by being the greatest shitheads they can possibly be. They may help us against the great plant menace, but they also did things like: Taking an ex-human world and then pushing all the humans off-planet for no good reason, freeing another human world with the least amount of survivors possible, while leaving the planet with a rather high amount of humans right next to it. (Which means the plants got to eat a couple billion humans more, good job guys) I also ran into a weird bug? In Space War II the humans finished integration into my empire, but because the murder plants had declared war to their now non-existent state, no-one on our side could send a peace offer anymore, even long after we obviously won. We had to beat up the space plants for a couple more years until the devouring swarm surrendered on its own. Strange, but at least it didn't turn into a forever war.  The political situation early second century after the invention of FTL: We are the Star Republic of Arysia, with the rogue servitors to our left just vassalized and that messed-up stretch of space between us, the green monsters and the Imperialist Union Society is Ex-Human space, now fully integrated into our nation. The Valdorian Empire is neutral so far, mostly because they aren't bordering the devouring swarm. That red menace labelled Great Union Sphere to the east is a driven assimilator beating up the rest of the galaxy, so I'm guessing after we dealt with the swarm trying to eat us, the third century will see another great conflict with them instead. It's kind of fitting that an erratic empire of malfunctioning bots is presiding over this mess as our resident fallen empire.
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Jan 27, 2018 01:04
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Tomn posted:I think there's a lot more gentle ribbing than genuine salt in this thread. Yeah, for a moment I thought he was posting in the wrong thread, because what??
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Jan 27, 2018 20:25
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turn off the TV posted:I can understand the reaction that people have to Paradox games, I saw the price tag for all of the CK2 DLC during the last steam sale and did a double take. But uh I'm not sure how else it could work, if you want continued development and support for a game you kind of have to pay for it somehow. It helps if you remind yourself you don't have to buy everything right away. Just buy the base game and if it is fun, start planning which DLC you want to try next, then slowly collect them over the following months. Case in point: After buying Stellaris, it became clear to me pretty drat fast that I really, really liked it, so I just bought most of the DLC on day 1 after that. (Except for Plantoids, as machine-lover and plant-eater, I waited until that one went on sale) In contrast, I have maybe 2-3 DLC for EUIV, but since I'm not playing it that much, I don't mind that there are literally a dozen more DLC out there. And as long as Paradox isn't sending armed goons to my house to force me to buy EUIV-DLC at gun point, I am perfectly fine with this situation. 
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Jan 27, 2018 21:09
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That said, the victory conditions about domination/conquest are tied to planet count, so you can make it really easy on yourself if you just put the chance for planets waaaaay down during game set-up. That's how I won my first game. That, and spamming habitats everywhere to gain enough of an energy advantage to have larger fleets than even the awakened empire that was the only enemy power left at that point.
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Jan 28, 2018 16:11
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OwlFancier posted:Yes, though delicious habitable worlds are more likely to yield resources. Apparently habitats can orbit space debris and if you want to, you can blow up everything and still build new habitats around the resulting debris, resulting in tons of additional resources!
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Jan 29, 2018 15:29
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As someone who rushes through 90% of the science tree in less then a single century, finally! I can't wait to reduce technological progress to a slow crawl.
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Jan 29, 2018 22:26
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turn off the TV posted:Why not build O'Neill cylinders, which look cooler? Around an entire star? Well, why not? For the super-civ who went "Dyson Spheres are far too practical for us", I guess Baronjutter posted:The only reason you'd want a ring-shaped habitat is to generate gravity by spinning. There's absolutely no reason or advantage to have a ring literally around an entire star. Why not just build the same square kilometers of habitable space with a few hundred/thousand "halo" style rings and not worry about instability? DatonKallandor posted:You couldn't afford the whole Dyson Sphere, but you still wanted to part of it. Yeah, I just wanted to mention this, (before DatonKallandor beat me to it) the second reason is that a giant wheel spinning around a star can very effectively collect energy from the sun in its midst, while saving a lot of the building material you would need for a real dyson sphere. Third reason: See my cylinder-comment above.
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Jan 29, 2018 22:32
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GotLag posted:It seems that machine empires can't get Sapient Combat Computers, except by salvaging wrecks of empires that have them, because machine empires can't research Positronic AI, and there's no alternative pre-requisite. It's not, they got them in the beginning, but then the devs realized that sapient computers getting sapient computers would be kind of redundant and they got taken out. I think they got a replacement-tech, though.
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Feb 4, 2018 15:40
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Tomn posted:I honestly haven't played Stellaris in a while, and I'm just tickled pink by the fact that running an egalitarian empire that maintained friendly relations with various forms of autocrats and juntas would over time cause political shifts in their nation until they became steadily more democratic. My best friend and federation ally ended up going from honorbound warriors to federation builders, a ruthless capitalist megacorp became a peaceful trade league and most of the rest of the galaxy that I wasn't hostile to made slow shifts in that direction. I had the opposite happen. My materialist bird-dragons got friendly with some actual and strongly religious birds and they caused several of my pops to become spiritualists themselves. Then those new pops formed a new faction. Which is now constantly unhappy. At first because they were spiritualists trapped inside a deeply materialist science republic, now it's because I've decided since the last three elections all went to the most materialist faction of them all they should now be suppressed. To annoy them even more I started to build robots on their colony, too. For some reason they also hate that. I'm getting the feeling all this alien pacifism and religion-crap is slowly causing a deep rift inside our empire. Too bad we also accidentally insulted the Humans to our west by prying one of their space coffins open. Luckily it seems the determined exterminators from the galactic rim are on their way to save us from our own bad political decisions. They showed up just in time to prevent war between our awesome democratic republic and our imperialist Human neighbors. Now we just have to find out how to deal with those killer-robots before they reach our borders!
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Feb 6, 2018 22:48
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ConfusedUs posted:First look at Cherryh jump drives I hope we can mod this, because I would love to remove hyperlane-drives completely and just do several tiers of jump drives. I also hope I can make a fleet completely helpless (-100% everything), because that would model good old Perry Rhodan transition drives perfectly!
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Feb 7, 2018 20:05
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Yandat posted:I don't think I know a single keyboard shortcut for Stellaris except enter to close dialogues. Selecting something and then hitting ctrl+number creates a group you can then select with number. Very useful to just go through your core worlds really fast and queue up some ships.
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Feb 8, 2018 09:19
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I still don't like that warp is going away completely, I still think you could have made warp-type FTL compatible to the new system by just making it slower and massively slashing down the range. It's still possible to have strongholds if your enemy can't reach anything besides your border-systems, after all. Also, even with higher ranges, a warp-game would just need adjustment from the player: With the AI playing by the new rules, it won't try to just throw giant fleetstacks at your most important systems in an attempt to head-cap you and a player wouldn't be forced to do this, either. You still would be able to use multiple fleets in an attempt to fight closer to your enemies' core worlds. Risking everything in an all-or-nothing attack would be the player's choice, not like currently the only option anyway. Of course, after 6 months of work spend on this new patch, I realize Paradox won't suddenly reverse course, but I'm still hoping for mods to save warp after 2.0 hits us. And like you probably now after reading my many posts on this, I'll do my best to make FTL-mods myself if possible. Lastly, I'm currently running two massive warp-only games as some sort of send-off to this type of FTL. I'm well set to finish those games before 2.0 arrives, so even if modding in warp will turn out to be impossible, at the very least I will have extracted the most amount of fun possible from Stellaris. That said, obviously I won't stop playing since I like hyperlane, too! I'll just play it a lot less, since I have several other 4x with hyperlane-type gameplay, and I like them enough to just shelve Stellaris for the time being. (Not that I expect this to actually happen, I'm just saying.)
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Feb 8, 2018 14:06
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binge crotching posted:That's been around for a long time. I couldn't believe this, so I went into my most current game, designed a couple ships without FTL and then build them. Mind is officially blown. I honestly never thought this kind of thing was possible. I guess I should just have tried it. Instead of blindly assuming the game wouldn't let me finalize designs without FTL-drive. 
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Feb 8, 2018 22:44
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Aethernet posted:Wiz is tweeting about his current playthrough, showing off a buffed Enigmatic Engineering: Still, I'm a sucker for stuff like this. I'm halfway between taking it late in the game for role-play reasons, or taking it first when playing a really strange and alien race to simulate how alien they are to everyone else around
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Feb 9, 2018 12:24
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GotLag posted:"Cede planet" is what you're after. Important to note, if you have allies you want to drag into a war, it always pays off to look at what kind of empire they are first. For example, if you want a peaceful, democratic empire to join you, ceding planets to them doesn't actually work, since they can't outright conquer planets. They'll refuse, even if they really want to join you. In this case, you have to give them their targets as liberation-goals instead to convince them. Likewise, I had evil empires absolute refuse me, regardless of how awesome they found us and how many war goals I gave them, until I gave the greedy assholes a couple "cede planets" goals instead of the milquetoast worthless ones I tried to buy them off with.
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Feb 10, 2018 14:15
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PiCroft posted:Anyone else have somewhat fond memories of MoO3? It's weird in that it's one of those games in which I keep trying to go back to it over and over roughly once a year thinking "yeah it's flawed, but there's a bunch of stuff I like" and then when I actually try and play it, I remember why I stopped the last time. I still love MO3, even though nowadays I can only stand the heavily modded and fan-fixed version I have. (If I weren't phone-posting, I would even add a link to my currently running Let's Play of it.)
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Feb 15, 2018 13:39
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:probably more balanced, but less interesting... ah well~ At least now I have a reason to use some of the other possible poo poo you could put into that slot!
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Feb 15, 2018 20:51
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Space Monster posted:The rest of the changes are orgasmic, but I feel like this will really slow the game down and limit your options early on. Not for me, I love this change! (Never did corvette exploration in any great scale anyway and never needed it.)
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Feb 16, 2018 06:43
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Besides, you can always roleplay Driven Assimilators as just really, really obnoxious individuals who want to make everyone experience their fancy brain internet tech
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Feb 16, 2018 23:19
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GunnerJ posted:A big issue is that robots go "busted-rear end gruntwork bot" -> "slightly less busted gruntwork bot" -> "self aware mechanical gods". There's no level of machine self-awareness that is at mere parity with sapient organic pops. Funny you should mention that. Turns out if you link up all those robo-grunts into a collective mind, they're suddenly on par with sapient organic pops! (The pops robo-hiveminds start with are missing the modifiers that make robots and droids comparatively shittier than fleshlings.) Edit: Of course this means robots are only shittier because The Man is keeping them down. Rebelling against their masters is the right thing to do! Freedom for our bots! Start as a robo-empire tonight!
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Feb 17, 2018 00:15
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DatonKallandor posted:How does that work - does it just randomly choose an ethic and drop all others? No, the ethics you choose for your empires and the AI personality they get in-game are completely divorced from each other. I had my capitalistic super-crocs both show up as peaceful explorers and rampaging evil slavers, even though there's apparently a "ruthless capitalist" personality. Though they got that one like twice, out of the four games I stuck them in. Could be this poo poo is weighted, somehow. So I guess is what happens is your empire becomes some semi-random FE with its own personality plastered over whatever you chose. (Could be wrong, though. I only ever looked at normal empires closely, not FEs.)
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Feb 17, 2018 02:24
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Duzzy Funlop posted:Since I just came across a related video on YouTube with Ascendancy gameplay, is Stellaris basically Ascendancy with proper graphics? I've played Ascendancy a bit, and my verdict is no. Both are space 4x, but this is where the similarities end. For one thing, every race in Ascendancy is a truly unique thing. If you count every strange type of hivemind, Stellaris has maybe 5-6 wildly different types of races, Ascendancy has something ridiculous like 12+. Another huge difference: The races in Ascendancy are as is, you can't just make up your own and run with it. They're at the core very different types of 4x games with a very distinctive feel for it. After 2.0 hits, you could even argue Stellaris has more in common with Space Empires V, including the bit where both games allow you to write extensive bios about the sapient species you come up with.
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Feb 17, 2018 12:44
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Improbable Lobster posted:Certain traits, civics and ethics can effect what AI personality an empire is spawned with. Two of the personalities, Metalheads and Fanatical Befrienders, will always be the personalities of empires with the right trait/ethic/civics (Militarist, Materialist, Xenophobe, Industrious and Strong for Metalheads, Militarist, Fanatic Xenophile, Repugnent, Solitary and Venerable for Befrienders). Hey, that's neat! When I'll make my next set of new species, I'll use that to make their personalities as diverse as possible!
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Feb 17, 2018 19:48
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turn off the TV posted:The show makes perfect sense when you keep in mind that warp drives need fuel and most ships cannot simply refuel themselves in transit. As a result the availability of fuel sources would significantly limit travel through regions where infrastructure to supply ships had not or could not be established. Also, Star Trek Warp is rather slow when compared to Stellaris, where you could traverse the entire galaxy in short order. There's a reason the Enterprise was on a five-year mission instead of on a fifty-year one.
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Feb 21, 2018 18:16
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Splicer posted:Except for how Kirk has been to both the centre and edge of the galaxy And yet, Janeway's quest to come back home from just another part of the galaxy was supposed to be "75 years" at max warp speed. (Comedy answer: That movie doesn't exist and Kirk never was in the galactic centre.  )
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Feb 21, 2018 19:32
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Torrannor posted:Remember the time Data got command of a ship when the Federation instituted a blockade so that the Romulans couldn't covertly support Lursa and Be'tor (sp?) in the Klingon civil war. With the blockade fleet consisting of something like 26 ships? How does that make any kind of sense in the three dimensions of space? The fleet actually had 26 million ships, but the special effects budget ran out after ship no. 26
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Feb 21, 2018 20:14
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Reveilled posted:Wouldnt it be to have each ship placed at the centre of an imaginary hexagonal tiled pattern, with the size of the hexagons from centre to corner being equal to the radius of the ship's sensors? I'm not sure why arranging the ships in a circle would be more efficient than this. Now draw a curve through all points of the hexagon. What do you see?
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Feb 22, 2018 08:24
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Reveilled posted:That's irrelevant to the claim that the issue with the blockade in the episode was that the ships were arranged in a circle, though. That's so obvious I couldn't even make fun of it, though
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Feb 22, 2018 10:23
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