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Good OP, I was half way through writing a new one and real life poo poo got in the way, glad someone else picked it up. In other news, Banks is still going to be cool as poo poo. Feel free to add this to the OP as it will answer lots of questions: What is the state of the game? People keep asking "Is this game good yet?". The long answer is that it's definitely a fun game, and if you're a huge sci fi nerd and like other Paradox games, this is definitely something to put on your wish list. The core game is fun, though still really being developed to find a solid direction and feel (yes I know it's released already but that's not how things are done in Sweden), and there are enough mods to keep yourself amused playing it for a long time. Like a fine wine, this game will continue to improve as long as the devs keep churning out good patches and DLC, and the promising total conversion mods don't become vapourware and get finished being fleshed out. However, in this post-Trump world we have very little time to read long answers (as we are all watching Twitter to signal the start of WW3) and thus I have produced a handy chart you can refer to for the short answer below: * Star Citizen in Chris Robert's Coke Addled Brain * Best Empire Space Game of Our Generation * You Better Just Be Reading This Post While Stellaris Downloads * On Sale, Off Sales, Just Buy It * A Fun Game, Featuring: Some Issues <------ CURRENT STATE OF THE GAME * Meh, OK I Guess * I Wish I Got It On Steam Sale * I Wish I Refunded It * Star Citizen in Reality Kitchner fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Jan 20, 2017 |
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Jan 20, 2017 16:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:So what's 1.5 bringing? Sexy Back. Also traditions that your empire unlocks by generating influence which further customise your empire, changes to the way pops organise themselves and how factions work, overhaul of how you can classify aliens in your empire letting you be as discriminatory or as egalitarian as you what and several stages in between. Plus UI improvements, AI improvements, bug fixes, and other stuff I assume. In the paid DLC you can also eat other aliens instead of merely just killing them, and your empire can gain "Ascenion perks" by completing tradition trees.
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Jan 20, 2017 17:33
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Chomp8645 posted:God forbid a Games thread not have the correct lame pun/tired meme in it's title. I mean I was going to go for "Stellaris: Feed Your Urge to Purge" but I don't think anyone wants anything other than a title that is interesting and might make people click on it.
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Jan 20, 2017 18:57
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Bloodly posted:That means nothing till we know what that means. For all we know they'll just be a modifier to Spaceports, which are already these vast construtions that can take giant farms, specialised shipyards, mind-control lasers, massive defensive batteries, and so on(Yet still get popped instantly vs mid-late game stuff). Don't get over-hyped. I suspect it will be more than that if there's an entire dev diary about it, i mean you just explained it in like two sentences.
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Jan 20, 2017 22:08
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I just think the problem with the ground combat right now is that a) it's a pain to micromanage, which could be solved with an 'army builder' but b) there's no meaningful choice, because once an invasion starts you don't usually have the time to send reinforcements or build more stuff on the planet. Like if you go to Warhammer 40K lore as an example, it's a universe with epic scale fleet battles and epic scale land battles (literally), where even in a universe where a cruiser on it's own could, with enough time, wipe all life from a planet, the ground troops are really important and cool. This is because there are very few instances where a planet is just totally captured in the space of like a month, and if that does happen it's usually some sort of surprise attack and the counter attack is a grinding war of attrition. The fleet part is then important because you need to protect your reinforcements or prevent enemy reinforcements. Imagine there's a battle for a planet going on and it's like 10 times longer than it takes now. Your fleet has dropped off the armies so what does it do? Does it just sit there in orbit doing nothing just in case the enemy comes with reinforcements? or do you move onto the next planet? Likewise doe the enemy attempt to break through and drop reinforcements? Maybe it should be possible for your troop transports to make a break for the planet even while being attacked, with your fleet causing enough damage/trouble that while some transports die others get through and land. If I actually felt there was a full scale war underway on the surface, buildings being destroyed, armies slowly being ground down and both sides hoping they get some reinforcements to break the deadlock, I would care more about armies. I mean i know it sounds boring if like every planet bordering your neighbour has a ground war going on, but that also means you need to divert resources and protect reinforcements on that border with your navy. All the coolest 40K stories are the big massive battles for key worlds where both sides have naval skirmishes constantly and manage to break through with supplies and reinforcements to fuel the ongoing war on the planet. I think if Stellaris can capture the feeling hat you're really fuelling a massive war by making sure they get supplies etc then that would be a start.
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Jan 22, 2017 03:37
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Wiz posted:
I'm sure the pirates were tweaked to make sure the debris contains the first tech of shields, point defence, and armour, three key early game technologies, which means by killing them and scanning the debris you don't have to do what I did for the entire early game once and there there shouting "Where are my loving shields?!"
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Jan 22, 2017 13:52
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Pretty funny to see people complaining about the ship designer, one of the bits of the game that, while not perfect, certainly isn't bad. To be totally honest I've stopped using it, because I just auto design everything now. This is because I've found its much easier to bring more ships than to squeeze an extra 10% out of the same number of ships by having an optimal design. The fact that people are complaining about a totally optional feature which, if they choose not to use makes no odds to them, particularly against the AI, is bizarre.
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Jan 22, 2017 17:02
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oddium posted:if i went to someone's house and they told me i had to make furniture out of milk crates if i wanted to sit down, but it's okay because they have something that makes milk-crate couches automatically like yeah i guess i could sit on the milk crate couch and be cool while other people are making impromptu chairs and tables. but i would still ask them why not just get a real couch at that point I think you've been playing minecraft instead of Stellaris and now you're simply confused. It's the only reason I can think of why you think this is any way comparable to the ship designer.
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Jan 22, 2017 20:17
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Larry Parrish posted:I gotta say the ship designer kind of pisses me off, just because the auto-complete will do really silly things like slap tier 1 disruptors on your ship even if you have T5 railguns that do more shield damage than disruptors do, even after the bonus calculation, on top of higher range, accuracy, and rate of fire. So then I have to manually make every ship how I want it pretty much every time I get a new tech or start a war. When was the last time you used the designer? I can't say I've ever noticed it doing this. I usually go for rail guns as my starting choice and sometimes it will use like mostly railgins and a plasma cannon that is like 1 level below but if I'm on level 1 plasma cannon and level 4 railgun it will be all railguns The ship roles thing is interesting because it feels inspired by EVE: Online (a game I sadly know too well) and falls into similar traps as they do. Everyone gets that there's a sort of rock, paper, scissors going on in terms of what you bring, but some middle roles become obsolete (a lot of people don't bother with cruisers) and the classes that aren't feel a bit pigeon holed. The main problem I have with the ship roles at the moment is it actually counter intuitively removes the need for thought about your fleet composition, because once you wrap your head around the idea you actually need a mixture of all ships, you just build mixed fleets. Personally I just build in a ratio of 1:2:4:8 of Battleship, Cruiser, Destroyer, Corvette. Since this also means that you're spending 8 naval cap on each type you end up with a balanced fleet in terms of naval cap, mineral cost needed and even time. This combined with the fact that for 90% of the game I just use the auto creator because I see no point in trying to tweak my fleet for every war (which means researching multiple weapon types to the same or similar level) when I can just increase my naval cap and bring more ships by colonising and, eventually, terraforming my space. Kitchner fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Jan 23, 2017 |
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Jan 23, 2017 09:36
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Roland Jones posted:So, I don't know where this originated from (maybe I just missed it?), but while reading the dev diary thread someone mentioned refugees colonizing available inhabitable worlds as well as fleeing to open empires, and I'm wondering if that's actually a thing that can happen, because if so, that's pretty neat. A new... "Empire" doesn't seem right but "faction" already has a specific term in this game, springing up mid-game, formed from people fleeing tyranny elsewhere, seems like a very good addition to me. Particularly because I like playing good guys, so allying with these groups to protect them and take down their former oppressors is a thing I'd love to pull off in-game. Well it was mentioned in the dev diary refugees may even colonise uncolonised planets, so if we assume this means "if there is no empire to flee to they flee to a habitable planet" then there's only two option really. Either they only colonise planets already within borders, in which case they are part of that empire, or they can colonise a planet totally seperate from an empire in which case it would make sense to be their own entity. I suspect it's the former though.
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Jan 23, 2017 11:16
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Splicer posted:Third option: Space Snails colonize a planet in your borders and form a new (empire/side/whatever) messing up your pretty colours and you either deal, vasselize, or murder. That's the equivalent of a load of refugees turning up in like 1800s America, setting up a new town just outside of New York, and then declaring independence. What I'm saying is if this is a thing that can happen, they are asking to be murdered.
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Jan 23, 2017 12:36
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Party Plane Jones posted:Are the dudes in that orbital even human at this point? They'd be soaking up some gigantic amounts of radiation that close. They are protected by Future Tech, which is the Sci fi equivalent of "a wizard did it".
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Jan 23, 2017 15:16
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ProfessorCirno posted:Skipping cruisers just seems insane to me. They're amazing. Combine plasma throwers with kinetic artillery and you will murder just about everything. Because they run in an brawl they have high attrition rates, whereas your battleships sit at the back pounding everything with long range guns, and they aren't cheap and easy to replace like corvettes are. If cruisers were a bit more survivable then maybe.
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Jan 23, 2017 17:42
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Wiz posted:Xenomorphs as a 'gently caress my own population, nobody's getting off this planet alive' trap card is a neat idea. Just on a side point to the "xenomorphs as armies doesn't make sense" bit it's worth noting Weyland Yutani were desperate to experiment on them to turn them into an army of perfect killing machines, so I've always viewed the tech as "Weyland Yutani, but successful". It would be cool though if xenomorph armies in sufficient numbers could basically trigger some sort of rebellion where they just eat all the handlers and then everything on the planet. More stuff that is a "risky technology" is always cool. On a slightly different note Wiz, you guys originally said ages ago in something (can't remember what) that the vague intention was to add another end game crisis in every DLC expansion, is that still the case? I appreciate leviathans was more of a story based DLC and most of it was focused on a massive free patch, but it would be cool to see some more end game crisis.
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Jan 23, 2017 21:36
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It's entirely possible it was purely in my head in some sort of stellaris fever dream, but either way was just curious. I appreciate there's a huge long list of things to develop. I'm pretty psyched for Banks though, so I'm putting off playing Stellaris because I know the patch will make it such a better game I just sit there thinking "Man the new version of this is going to be so much better".
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Jan 23, 2017 21:43
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You know what? Until someone mentioned it here I hadn't even considered how the tile clearing makes the planet useful but also more bland St the same time. When I think of cool sci-fi planets, I don't think of flat perfectly sculpted terrain, I think of places with groovy things going on surface wise. Maybe it should be "build on top of" rather than "remove". The art effort involved is probably too much now but having artwork that then fitted on top top of the terrain would be pretty cool. So when there's an open field it changes to an open field with a big old mining drill in it, but when it's a volcano it's some sort of mining complex built around the edge of the volcano or whatever. Something for mods/Stellaris 2 I guess.
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Jan 24, 2017 10:09
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The one thing I would say is since you can't destroy habitats, they definetly shouldn't have in built space ports as otherwise they are just going to be the ultimate space port of invincibility that will be abused to poo poo. Also, have you considered adding "Destroy Space Habitat" as a war goal? I mean "cleanse planet" already exists so game mechanic wise it is a worse option (as you're essentially losing a chance to cleanse and replace the pops there) but its cool from a roleplaying perspective to not have filthy xenophobic habitats in your new space. Edit: maybe have it instead of cleansing for a planet? I mean if you're like "OK dudes please line up to be exterminated" I think it would be pretty cool if the engineers running the place basically self destruct the whole thing to stop you from using it since they are going to die anyway. This has a sort of historical precedence with the Germans sinking their own ships after WW1 and the British blowing up the French navy after France surrendered. Kitchner fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Jan 26, 2017 |
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Jan 26, 2017 15:47
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Chalks posted:That seems like a good idea. I assume that as the owner of a habitat you will have the option to destroy it yourself though? I think the habitat counts as a planet, and since there's no way to abandon your own planet without purging everyone I don't think it would be necessary.
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Jan 26, 2017 15:52
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Rumda posted:I'm guessing terraformable planets don't found as uninhabitable. No. Uninhabitable means planets that do not even get the red planet symbol in the galaxy map. Gas giants, barren planets etc
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Jan 26, 2017 17:23
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Wiz posted:Why else would I make Paradox games for a living. The mad pussy you guys must get
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Jan 26, 2017 20:08
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Wiz posted:Mostly they don't care, because it doesn't really affect sales much and you get about the same amount of poo poo from customers regardless of how good or bad your AI is. I think it's just different experiences. In Civ it always felt like the other Civs were just different types of players all playing the same board game. When you play CKII, EUIV, or Stellaris, you feel if someone is nice or a dick it's because they, in the game, is nice or a dick. Some of the people you meet are basically only there to be nice and die to a bad guy.
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Jan 26, 2017 22:18
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Wiz posted:I've basically completely recoded the sector AI in 1.5 to prevent unnecessary resource accumulation, and the new tooltip I added shows you exactly what they are planning to do with the resources they have. On a less AI nerd note, it seems like 1.5 brings in a load of options for happiness boosting stuff, have you guys been trying to make max happiness a decent stratgey again? I know on release a max happiness stratgey was quite powerful but after tweaks to some things it seems to be secondary to things like "being collectivist with -ED tech" and "being individualist" It could just be there's a way to make it work really well in the current game and I'm just not seeing mind you
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Jan 27, 2017 10:03
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GotLag posted:Is there any clue as to roughly when to expect 1.5? I've just bought this game and it's a bit daunting as I don't know where to start, and I'm wondering if I should wait for 1.5 as it sounds like it will change a lot. I reckon April myself.
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Jan 27, 2017 13:13
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Psychotic Weasel posted:I find that even at 100% there are often times where parts of the galaxy seem devoid of habitable planets or are just full of grabage planets that aren't really worth settling on. This often leads to huge areas where you're not able to exploit anything because there's no way to extend ypur influence through it, so it just sits unused. Yeah this is my issue, that due to borders and a lack of planets and the cost of using outposts, at 100% you end up with empty space sometimes. I usually play on 125%, but I think the number of planets on release was twice as much, so it's still way less now then Stellaris 1.0
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Jan 27, 2017 15:22
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Wiz posted:Pfft. We haven't even gotten to the *really* cool poo poo yet. + Added Sweden as playable nation
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Jan 27, 2017 19:58
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GlyphGryph posted:You can pick negative traits to start with... Delicious is obviously something that should be inherent to your species. Also, it would obviously be a negative trait. This depends on whether you can be cannibals or not.
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Jan 28, 2017 18:07
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Sigh, why are my spiritual militarists not allowed to purge or enslave people. Because spiritualist militaristic which means you're a fanatic of one of them and less so of the other. Meaning you're a race of warriors who have religion form a big part of your life, or youre a race of monks who also train in warfare a lot. If you wanted to be an Imperium of Man style race from 40K, best combo is Spiritualist, Militarist, Xenophobe but even then the Imperium in 40k has no qualms about human slavery so you could say Spiritualist, Collectivist, Xenophobe, but then you can't access full bombardment and some of the militaristic tech like combat arenas. Ultimately the limitation to 3 points is mainly for game play reasons, so you need to play around it.
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Jan 29, 2017 13:43
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GotLag posted:The impression one gets of the Imperium is that it is fanatical in all things it does. Is it possible to be fanatical in multiple disciplines through mods? Yeah there's a bunch of mods that do that sort of stuff, it's "easy" to change (as in for people who know how to mod it's easy, I know nothing). I contributed to the Warhammer 40K mod on there, mostly as an ideas/design guy because I knew nothing about coding, but I kept pushing them to realise actually you can already represent most of the 40K races with minor tweaks. Like the Imperium is like a Fanatic Collectivist, Fanatic Xenophobic, Fanatic Spiritualist, Militaristic empire, with humans having Quick Learning and Nomadic. Then each of the Space Marine chapters would be a vassal with one planet, who are Fanatic Spiritualist, Fanatic Militarist, Fanatic Xenophobes with Strong, Enduring, and Talented (not sure how to make Space Marines "worse" to play as than the Imperium , but easily tweaked). The Adeptus Mechanicus would also be a vassal, with forge worlds dotted around that produce poo poo tons of minerals. Then you just tweak their diplomacy so they basically all like each other to varying degrees and that's the Imperium. The Tau would be like Fanatic Collectivist, Fanatic Materialists, the Eldar would be Fallen Empires. The base system is actually quite flexible with a few tweaks. Problem was I think the dude running it had a hard time saying no to people and then the moment actual work needed to be done no one was interested. The art conversion pack that exists now was my idea, saying get something out on day 1, even if it's just "We made all the races and used all the artwork" and it'll be THE 40K mod. I don't think it's compatible with the latest version though.
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Jan 29, 2017 18:35
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Humans in 40K are genetically modified to be less psionic and less divergent by the Emperor, so ya shoulda added that. I mean without getting into a huge argument about 40K lore in the Stellaris thread, I have my own Imperium custom race was when I want to run around killing aliens, and I used to have enduring and conformist, but then I realised humans aren't genetically inclined to be conformists, it's the Imperial society that brainwashes and controlling them. I don't think I've ever read the Emperor mutated the entire human race, considering that plenty of the humans that formed the Imperium were lost colonies from well before the Emperor was in charge of humanity.
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Jan 30, 2017 02:30
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Dwesa posted:Yes, please. Future Tech did it.
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Jan 30, 2017 14:02
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Wiz posted:Maybe a post-apocalypse alternative to cockroaches? What would be the giant animal that's taken over though? Giant frog people who constantly argue and fight wars about what "winning" truly means.
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Jan 31, 2017 15:10
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Weirdly knowing the next patch is so awesome has lead to me not playing the game, as I know I will sulk the entire time thinking "Wiz is fixing this soon. It would be much better then".
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Jan 31, 2017 18:08
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Gimmick Account posted:Danke~ He considered it. DENIED. You have to play through 10,000 years before they are terraformable again. Speaking of that sort of thing, one of my minor bugbears is that event where you can try and terraform an unstable planet for 100 energy with a 50% success rate and when you fail it says you cant try again for 100 years, but 100 years later you can't try again 
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Feb 6, 2017 18:50
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Roland Jones posted:The final Diplomacy reveal is up, and it's a Xenophile's dream: That building is already available to Xenophiles, it's just moving it from unique tech to tradition tree.
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Feb 7, 2017 09:48
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LordMune posted:Scrolling sucks way less in 1.5! I hope this is how the patch notes read.
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Feb 7, 2017 09:49
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Drone_Fragger posted:And it's still also not worth building because who cares about migration attraction. Unless youre a Xenophile empire (which gets the building to begin with) with a good happiness build which basically drags everyone onto your planets and then benefits from the happiness bonus.
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Feb 7, 2017 12:48
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Daktari posted:So I'm pretty new at this, but playing on hard and sort of know how this works; Weirdly starting near those guys can sometimes be good because you rival them and so do empires on the opposite side of them and you become best buds. 1K plus a space station is enough to defeat their fleet potentially if they attack your planet and your fleet at the same time. Your best bet is to keep building your fleet to the max limit though
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Feb 8, 2017 19:55
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So which of the traditions is the "I want to kill and purge everyone" tradition? I appreciate the purity one was basically genocidal maniacs only, but it's a very popular game style and it doesn't really seem supported by any of these.
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Feb 8, 2017 20:26
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Wiz posted:None, we wanted to make the traditions less ethics-specific. There is something else coming for this but we're not ready to talk about it yet. I mean if any game devs have earnt my trust its you guys, but I guess i'm not talking about ethics specifically, more about game play styles and types of empires you can play. If we look at the tradition groups so far, you have: - Exploration, which is exploring and science, but the flavour text around it and the bonuses all sort of imply a sort of techy and science driven society - Diplomacy, which is trying to be nice to everyone and form federations etc - Domination, which is about subjugating other empires and making them serve you - Harmony, which is about making everyone get along - Expansion, which is about grabbing loads of land (and I missing one? I can't remember) Diplomacy and domination seem to me to be basically two sides of the same playstyle. Both are about grabbing hold of other empires and using them to bolster yourself and your goals, but one is as equals and the other is as their overlords. Exploration and expansion seem to mesh well too, being a sort of frontier world settling and research type of poo poo like the Federation. Harmony seems to be about making everyone get along with each other. But where are all the arsehole traditions? Where is the "I'm going to brainwash my population to be drooling idiots for the most part so they never rise up"? It may be because I've only seen all the traditions individually but it all reads as various shades of nice, with the exception of domination. Edit: Realised I was missing prosperity, but that doesn't seem particularly evil either. I just like playing the bad guys ok? Kitchner fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Feb 8, 2017 |
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Feb 8, 2017 22:02
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Wiz posted:I mean seriously, we have five different modes of genocide in Utopia. I think we have the evil bit covered even without a Tradition for it. Please don't get me wrong, I totally appreciate and admire you commitment to genocide simulation, but traditions are something everyone is going to have to adopt (or I guess don't adopt them and deliberately cripple yourself?) and I guess I'm not even so much as looking at numbers and specific effects but more how it's all written. It seems every race ever will adopt at least two tradition trees, and if you're a "kill everyone but me" kind of play through, what do you pick? Expansion for sure. Domination and diplomacy are out. You pick Harmony but Harmony is a bit nice sounding. Then you call it a day I guess? Maybe exploration. None of them seem to gel particularly well with the play style other than expansion and maybe harmony. I'll be honest if you asked me to pin point it down I think I'd struggle, it's just the feel it gives off. Even if I dump all the roleplay stuff off to one side and I say "Right, I'm playing a game where I'm going to kill everyone" it's only really Expansion that jumps out at me, maybe Harmony for the bonuses.
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Feb 8, 2017 23:02
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