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Wiz posted:Expansion, Supremacy, Prosperity, Exploration? Harmony if you also want to be nice to the pops you're not exterminating? Supremacy is outright about conquering so I don't see how that wouldn't fit into a kill everyone playstyle. Oh, have the supremacy traditions been tweeted yet? I left it off my list so it definitely slipped my mind. If that about conquering then consider my point withdrawn.
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Feb 8, 2017 23:18
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Roland Jones posted:Supremacy's coming tomorrow, but it seems like it works as an rear end in a top hat Tradition. Sounds like I jumped the gun a bit then, I sort of forgot about the original stuff because it looked like it's changed a bit since then. Sounds like kill everyone is a Supremacy, Expansion, Harmony sort of deal.
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Feb 9, 2017 00:00
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Sentient AI isn't even a dangerous technology. The dangerous tech is Self-aware AI. Which sort of implies the sentient AI aren't actually self aware. Though I think someone pointed out before Paradox is using the concept of sentience and self awareness slightly incorrectly. Edit: oh no it was the other way around, self awareness comes before sentience and sentient AI is a dangerous tech. Kitchner fucked around with this message at 10:02 on Feb 9, 2017 |
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Feb 9, 2017 09:59
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Wiz posted:Eating plantoids is canonically vegan in Stellaris. You've gone mad with (creative) power
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Feb 9, 2017 18:12
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Also this dev diary was dope as poo poo. I'm going to be buying this bad rear end DLC the moment it comes out.
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Feb 9, 2017 18:13
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Not if I buy it first.
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Feb 9, 2017 18:22
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canepazzo posted:https://twitter.com/dmoregard/status/829745856689610753 Yesssssss
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Feb 9, 2017 19:15
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Rakthar posted:This is really weird to me, like honestly. I can't tell the joke if it's a joke. Wiz is the Game Director for Stellaris. This is like posting about Game of Thrones and GRRM piping up and saying "Canonically speaking, Daenyrs is hotter than the sand snake with the nice tits". You know this isn't actually true, but you can hardly argue with the author can you?
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Feb 9, 2017 20:15
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Wiz posted:Okay, let me phrase your question for you properly: Is there in fact mechanics for determining whether the consumption of a particular alien race is or is not vegan in the next Stellaris update? I mean, if there isn't an event about it included now, like some sort of vegan civil war, I will be pretty disappointed.
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Feb 9, 2017 20:16
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Wiz posted:Soft locking tends to make everything feel very samey. I think people actually like hard locks a lot more than they think they do because they create clear, distinct choices and playstyles. People praise the different FTL styles in SotS but they would never have worked as well if any race could choose any FTL rather it coming along with their other advantages and disadvantages. I honestly feel this is a trap a lot of game designers fall into. The best example I ever experienced myself was with a MUD game based on the Discomworld series by Terry Pratchett. You could teach yourself literally any of the like 50-100 skills in the game, it would be inefficient but you could do it. What's more is other players could teach you skills which was more efficient. There were no skill restrictions, and no skill caps, only certain abilities were class specific. So as a thief class you could learn the theft.person skill or whatever and learn "snatch" and "steal" but also "filch" which uniquely allowed you to steal worn items and steal during combat. However, a wizard could also learn snatch and steal and with enough effort the only way you would be a better thief as a thief class was you could steal in combat and steal worn items. Non wizards could cast spells using scrolls, and could cast divine powers using casting rods. So my thief literally had the ability to telephone across the map without having to speak to a wizard or priest. What it basically all meant was that, fundamentally, there was no reason to ever play a character beyond your first one, because you can become such a Swiss army knife what's the point? Skyrim and the elder scrolls games in general suffer from this as well I think because you can be head of the mages guild, Thieves guild, warriors guild, etc etc in one playthrough and just be good at everything.
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Feb 10, 2017 00:29
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Wiz posted:No, you can still make robots as non materialist, so long as you're not spiritualist. One of my minor niggles actually is that currently the system for AI laws goes: - AI is an abomination, ban it all - AI is OK if it serves man - AI are people too - Robots can be leaders Thing is though if you read the description for robots, they have no AI or personality. They are just human/alien shaped machines which respond to commands. Droids have a personality according to the description, so I could see why a society would ban Droids if they hate AI even if the druids aren't true AI in the way they are still just heavily programmed. I guess you could always argue they are that scared of AI that they are concerned any robot could develop self awareness, but the description of robots always made me think that they are basically just a step above the robot arms in car factories.
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Feb 10, 2017 10:06
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Wiz posted:I feel like we just had a discussion about realism arguments when it comes to game mechanics. Probably just my imagination. Hey, I'm all for the argument of "its not really realistic, but it needs to be done otherwise the game is poo poo" which is why I said my point was a bugbear rather than something which actually bothered me. I think realistically at the end of the day the majority of players know that sometimes game play (TRIGGER WARNING) trumps realism. I think deep down even the guys arguing for pages about collectivist vs individualist knew that.
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Feb 10, 2017 10:16
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Daktari posted:I've found that governments with a high frequency on election is a really good way of getting influence. Are dictators missing out on this, or do they have a similar method for easy influence? It's essentially a trade off. At the one end you have autocratcies, where you have no control (apart from military dictatorships) over who your leader is, but you get them for a long time and they can build something cool one per life time. So if you get a Emperor who boosts research by 10% you're laughing, one who decreases naval cap or just not as useful? Not so much. However, you spend no influence on the government either. So it's sort of influence neutral. In the middle you get oligarchical governments where the change is more often than an autocratcy, but still quite long term. On top of that you actually can definitively select who your next leader will be for 200 influence. This sounds like best of both worlds in terms of function, but because they don't get mandates and it costs 200 influence to select a leader, it means you either let it be random (so not really better than an autocracy, and you can't build cool poo poo) or you spend influence actively managing who your leader is, making it an influence sink. The democratic government types change often, and even if you do decide to invest a load of influence, you're not gaurenteed to get the leader you actually wanted. If you spend 200 influence in a democracy you probably have like a 70% chance of getting who you want. The plus side to this is that: a) the mandates generate influence, meaning you can trade off accepting random leaders to generate more influence b) its not totally out of your hands who the leader is, and the leader isn't leader for long anyway c) early game before you have enough leaders to run in the election it actually adds some for you free of charge. Later on in the game this is less likely to happen as you'll have loads of governors etc. All in all I think the three distinct types are quite well balanced.
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Feb 10, 2017 12:35
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Darkrenown posted:Rude. I mean if you can bioengineer the bodies anyway, you're essentially implying the meat is only tasty if you actually had to kill someone to eat it. If Paradox has a staff psychologist you should probably book a visit just to be on the safe side. Does CKII have cannibalism yet? I feel as if it does.
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Feb 11, 2017 14:27
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Wiz posted:It's possible, but requires a fair amount of effort: You have to have a Xenophile Fallen Empire, have them ask you for the brain scans, then attack them and conquer The Preserve, which is where the species pops up after being restored by the FE. Knowing that there's only one meal of that kind in the galaxy probably does improve the taste to be fair.
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Feb 11, 2017 21:34
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OwlFancier posted:I mean if I was going to be armchair political philosopher I would say that egalitarian isn't entirely the opposite of authoritarian whereas individualist/collectivist seemed pretty easy for me to get. The original idea was Heriarchical society vs Egalitarian society, which makes far more sense in my view. The idea that society has a hierarchy whether it be a caste system or feudal lords, vs the idea all people are born equal. One of the reasons it's Authoritarian though is all the names end in -ian and authoritarian is the closest they could get.
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Feb 12, 2017 03:06
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nopantsjack posted:So if Egalitarian is replacing Collectivist do they love slaves? Or is Egalitarian replacing Individualist or whatever? Collectivist will be Authoritarian and Individualist will be Egalitarian, but it's likely all to be changing anyway. It does make me wonder what my Not The Imperium of Man race should be. Presently they are Xenophobe-Spiritualist- Militarist, but the only reason I pick militarist is to get full bombardment, but with Armageddon bombardment being part of Supremacy I guess it's going to be Authoritarian-Xenophobe-Spiritualist which does make more sense to me. While the Imperium does have a huge army and navy etc, plenty of the Imperium isn't directly related to the military.
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Feb 12, 2017 14:38
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LordMune posted:wtf Got to agree with this wtf here, fishbowl helmets on parrots is amazing.
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Feb 13, 2017 15:24
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OwlFancier posted:What the hell other kind of helmet is a parrot going to wear? Exactly, their beak would get in the way of anything else.
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Feb 13, 2017 15:44
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Darth Windu posted:That reminds me, I got alien pets on my homeworld? How does that work They arrived on Space Driftwood
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Feb 13, 2017 16:49
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Wiz posted:EU4 has a fixed number of countries and there's lots of them. It is a very different game from Stellaris in some ways. Saying that something works in EU4 and therefore it absolutely will work in Stellaris just isn't true. If diplomacy didn't affect your ability to run your empire, you are essentially taking nearly all cost out of that cost vs benefit analysis. It becomes a no brainer for everyone to defensive pact with everyone else that they don't plan on fighting. It would become nearly impossible to wage offensive wars unless we intentionally made the AI really bad at abusing this system. I can't believe we are 60 pages in to the second thread and Wiz still has to explain you can't just go "CKII/EUIV in space" and have it work. For what it's worth, if you assume you're roughly the same size as all your friends and rivals, two defensive pacts basically makes you untouchable. Whereas having England and Spain and Portugal allied against France in the first 5 minutes of EUIV is still a bit of a toss up. If that doesn't demonstrate why you can't copy and paste one system to the next I'm not sure what does. My own bugbear with diplomacy is just the fact that it's a bit binary due to my playstyles. I tend to go full purge the alien (in which case diplomacy isn't a thing which is OK) or you go full star trek and try and form a huge federation and then curb stomp everyone. I've never really seen an appealing playstyle that's sort of inbetween. If you're looking at diplomacy through a lense of "kill people or stop people killing you" though, it works fine and is balanced fine. Kitchner fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Feb 13, 2017 |
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Feb 13, 2017 22:01
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Rakthar posted:I just want to loving play with the diplomacy and make all kinds of treaties with my alien friends while calling other aliens ugly. I mean you can do that now. Really when you boil EUIV diplomacy right down, it comes down to trying to boost their opinion of you high enough through various means (let's face it we all know what to do too: Royal marriage, influence opinion, offer military access, send gift, and declare the same rivals) to become your ally. Then what you do is do that to everyone who is aligned politically to you (e.g. England goes for Austria, Spain, Portugal if possible) and then use your mega alliance to curb stomp the opposing mega alliance. Well in Stellaris you do the same. You try and get them to like you (1 way research agreement, guarantee Independence, send gift of minerals/energy whatever you have more of, wait until they like you then migration treaty, NAP, Defensive Pact, invite to federation), then you invite them and others aligned with you (based on AI personalities and ethos) to join a federation, and then you run around curb stomping people, which in turn generates threat which creates a big federation against you. The biggest issue with that in my opinion is the same one EUIV suffers from sometimes: If there's a really bad alliance (federation) in your game which blocks your ambitions, you can't do much to break it up. Since Stellaris means no temporary coalitions against fanatical purifiers or whatever, it means a miscalculation early on buggers up your game and stalls it. The other annoying thing is that federations can't merge. Like you have 5 federation builders. Two on your left make a federation, the two on your right make a federation. You get invited to both. There's no way to bring all of them together despite the fact they like each other. In EUIV you just have alliances with them all, meaning you can lead that group to war, whereas if you're in a federation you're in, and if you're out you're out. The reality is though that diplomacy isn't "done" yet, Banks is a huge patch addressing a LOT of mid and late game issues with the game, fleshing out internal politics and adding end game goals to match the end game crisises in terms of awesomeness. These are all issues with diplomacy I noted, but honestly I'm really looking forward to banks and if diplomacy gets even half the overhaul internal politics has had I'll be happy as I really don't feel diplomacy is "bad" it's just a bit easy.
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Feb 13, 2017 22:14
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Wiz posted:Pacifist should be about maximizing the utility of your systems, building tall, you know... peaceful development. I mean, to continue the poo poo comparisons, that's like saying "well there's no point having the Aztecs as a playable race in EUIV as they just get murder zoned". I like the fact other empires are pacifist empires, and it does present opportunities for challenges and roleplaying.
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Feb 13, 2017 22:37
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Wiz posted:Oh sure, but we actually did make playing the Aztecs viable, you know. It's also not quite a great comparison when you're talking one country out of hundreds rather than one ethic choice out of eight. As I said though, I like Pacifist and I have no plans of doing anything to it other than putting more work into making it fun to play. I have to say you guys have avoided the trap the HoI team have fallen into with DLC too. The way I see HoI4 is the game wasn't where it should have been, and while there was a sort of inital patch with some things, the first real work done on the game was the DLC which then sold the ability to play as the British empire countries in a more interesting way and added the blitz button which should have been default. If I actually cared about the game other than it being an occasional distraction, I'd be annoyed I HAD to buy a DLC to enjoy the game to the full extent as one of the original "big" countries (AKA Britain and it's empire). Whereas I look at Stellaris and I could genuinely say that if you didn't buy any of the DLC the game would be far better after Banks without ever having to buy the DLC BUT buying the DLC does make the game more awesome, and hence everyone should get it. Azimov and Banks really feel like you guys acknowledging the game wasn't as good as you wanted in many areas, and the free patches are really working on the stuff that should have been better, while the DLC adds on the extra stuff that isn't needed to play the game as described but is cool enriching stuff. That said, I'm still not paying for plants. Sneak new portraits into bigger DLC and bump the price up a bit and I'll probably never notice.
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Feb 13, 2017 22:47
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GotLag posted:
While researching space travel for Stellaris to develop Lore and tech names, they came across an old cold war declassified paper about sending animals into space. So you had the monkey and the dog which are well known, but there was a parrot too in order to test whether it could fly in zero G. If you dig around a bit more and find a photograph of it, the parrot is wearing a goldfish bowl style helmet. They talked about it in an interview when discussing how difficult it is to make aliens look alien, and instead you rely on looking at animals we already have and altering them.
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Feb 14, 2017 10:18
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GotLag posted:Hey my parrots are still wearing the space suits, but the helmet is a new, deployable version. I'm sure if you look at some of the online archives about the US space programme you'll find the pictures I was on about. The Paradox guys found them by accident!
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Feb 14, 2017 16:03
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Not really sure how you can have a space Olympics without some races being always likely to lose or win certain events. Like a Blorg will never beat a human at the 100m sprint. On top of that the theory goes that sport is just a distillation of war, so while human sports are running fast and throwing spears, alien sports may be "100m osmosis" or "Long distance needle shooting" or "synchronised stench gland evacuation". Imagine participating in what you thought was a race only to be disqualified for not having an appendage you've never heard of
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Feb 14, 2017 18:56
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Honky Dong Country posted:Or some rolling blob getting disqualified for blasting a competitor's face with a toxic fart from some unholy xenos stink-gland in the middle of the race. Yeah but not every alien species is going to get what an American is, so they won't have their own.
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Feb 14, 2017 19:02
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Yeah, the blorg may luse the 100M sprint, but the human loses at Ribbon Undulating and Tentacle Wrestling Its widely agreed the origin of the Olympics is in skills you would use at war: running fast, running far (marathon of course carried news of a battle for miles twice in a day), throwing poo poo as far as you can (spears, heavy balls, hammers), archery, unarmed combat (wrestling). In all of these events people at the Olympics compete against other people based on the flag pinned to their chest. The winners get glory and the losers don't. Basically just war in a nutshell
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Feb 14, 2017 19:35
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Unless of course you're going to make the classic Zaltzman Sr. Argument which is "Ah, but what if war is just a distillation of sport?"
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Feb 14, 2017 19:36
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StrixNebulosa posted:You don't even need the Star Trek mod to play as Starfleet. Make a bunch of humans, make them peace-loving and so on, and voila. Warpdrives are already in the game, and you can form a federation and go be peace-loving...or not. The star trek mod is actually really good. Or more accurately, it has the start of something really good. So far I've played as the Federation and see that you basically act out the entire plot of Enterprise (ITS BEEN A LOOOONG ROAD, GETTING FROM THERE TO HERE) and that's sort of cool. If you fail to stop the xindi mega weapon earth gets destroyed, the bad xindi rule their planet, and the Federation becomes the Human Remanant. There's even an event with the parallel universe poo poo but I think it's just a cool event and doesn't lead anywhere. I've heard you can form the Federation and merge all the races under your control as a single empire, but I've yet to see that happen. If you play as the Romulans every 4 years or so you tell the Tal Shiar to focus on certain activities harming your chosen opponent. You also get Romulans and Remans using the latter as slaves. If you play as the Dominion you have the founders and the vorta, the latter having traits to show they are genetically altered to be loyal and poo poo. You can also "build" jemhadar pops to get access to jem hadar group troops. I think the Klingons have some sort of unique mechanic too, but haven't played as them yet. If the guys working on it continue the way they have been in a year it will probably be the best star trek stratgey game ever made.
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Feb 16, 2017 01:25
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GotLag posted:Do I get any warscore benefit from hanging around, blockading an enemy planet for a long time? Or is it just a fixed amount of warscore for having a blockade present on a given planet? Fixed amount for blockading the planet.
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Feb 16, 2017 12:31
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Worth noting left into the screenshots like the tease he is, Wiz has shown there's a new "ethics" type in edition to the 8 that already exist. Since it looks like a honeycomb and the next dev diary will mention hive minds I suspect it's that specifically hive minds don't have ethics of their own, because if youre playing a race of insects that are all drones controlled by a queen, why would they have opinions of their own?
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Feb 16, 2017 13:34
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GunnerJ posted:That one I interpreted as being somehow based on sector independence, because iirc pop-ups for sector alerts also use that honeycomb pattern. That's a good point actually, it makes sense to have Independence as a ethics attraction in its own right
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Feb 16, 2017 14:16
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Gimmick Account posted:'Unity' points should be called 'Legacy' points, in my opinion! Seems to fit what they are better. It's called unity because you get more things from it the more united your empire is, which translates to how small your empire is. A huge empire would create a bigger legacy, but the whole point of the system is to provide more boosts to small empires. So sorry dude, but legacy is a bad name, as it implies small empires build more of a legacy than large ones, which isn't true.
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Feb 18, 2017 11:25
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I honestly think this is shaping up to be not only the best Paradox DLC of all time, but the best DLC in any game of all time.
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Feb 20, 2017 15:43
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3 DONG HORSE posted:I honestly can't remember an expansion for any game with this many fixes and new gameplay options. All for supposedly 20* bucks? What a steal! Yeah exactly. There are some games that have "must have" DLC, Civ V was like that. Without Gods and Kings and Brave New World the game was kind of poo poo. However this new patch fixes a lot of vanilla stuff that I would consider "the core game" and then offers a ton of cool stuff that is genuinely new content etc. Its a weird model but I think by offering this stuff as half free and half cool expansion stuff, I actually don't mind paying for the expansion even though half the mechanics are free. The big worry of course is Wiz has now set the bar too high, and we will all become petulant man children if the next patch doesn't revolutionise whatever the next priority is (I'm going to guess diplomacy and war).
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Feb 21, 2017 01:36
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Fintilgin posted:I always pictured a Paradox VR game as looking like the XCOM command center: Introversion software, the guys who made Prison Architect but more importantly DEFCON, had an intern who made half of a observer mode in VR for DEFCON and then one of their dudes finished it off. You can only watch games, not play them, but the whole thing is a doctor strangeglove type military command bunker, with a big wall map and a floating globe like that. When the nukes start flying you can see the nukes trail high over the planet and stuff. Looks cool as poo poo.
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Feb 21, 2017 03:36
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Mr. Fix It posted:https://twitter.com/Martin_Anward/status/834010318418358272 Yessss I honestly haven't looked forward to something this much since I was waiting for Stellaris to be released.
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Feb 21, 2017 14:03
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 22:28 |
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Shaman Ooglaboogla posted:Too bad you need to be a fanatic xenophobe to be a fanatical purifier. I want to purge the xenos because God tells me to, but there aren't enough slots. You can start as fanatic Xenophobe spiritualist and shift towards militarist. Im assuming that won't then remove the government type.
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Feb 22, 2017 13:18
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