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Ghost Leviathan posted:The kinda thing that could be done in a few ways though, the usual sci-fi plot would be closer to Under One Throne or whatever it's called. Ah you're right. That'd be pretty cool for sure!
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Mar 29, 2024 16:37
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Libluini posted:My first thought was "isn't this just Rogue Servitors?" but if you want to literally have only your ruler be the robot, at least that's something that was doable for a long time, just not from the start: All Democratic and Oligarchic societies can elect/appoint robotic leaders, if you get them from events or, if you're materialistic, from your own robots eventually. It probably would be too similar to rogue servitors, just with a hell of a lot less mandatory pampering and more dystopian autocracy
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Mar 29, 2024 18:45
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This conversation has added "syncretic evolution slaver robots" to the list of empires I wanna try in this DLC.
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Mar 29, 2024 18:50
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Firebert posted:It probably would be too similar to rogue servitors, just with a hell of a lot less mandatory pampering and more dystopian autocracy
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Mar 29, 2024 19:46
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Montu just released an hour long video ranking species traits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x5oy2BKi94 Naturally a few of my favorites were classified as F tier. 
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Mar 29, 2024 19:51
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I love these Montu videos. I usually mix one of the A or S tier traits with some traits that I like for flavor.
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Mar 29, 2024 21:23
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FurtherReading posted:This conversation has added "syncretic evolution slaver robots" to the list of empires I wanna try in this DLC. I wonder if you can get all the way to the machines from The Matrix with some weird combo of Syncretic Evolution, Grid Amalgamation purge, and Virtual ascension.
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Mar 29, 2024 21:32
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I haven't played Stellaris since the pre-leader rework, maybe even going on a year and a half now. I am excited to get back in with this DLC, the amount of updates this game gets is incredible. New patch and machine empire love looks like it is going to own bones.
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Mar 30, 2024 11:41
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I haven't put a big stab into stellaris in a while so I decided to fight restartitis to actually see the end game screen for the first time in forever. I'm not technically finished but the only thing left is wiping out the last awakened empire and potentially l-gate stuff (I didn't have an l-gate in my territory until the end of my last session and nobody else has opened it somehow). This is with all expansions. Early game is very solid now, I really enjoyed it. The stuff that increases system quality on survey is still dumb as hell (both the anomaly find chance boosters and the new quality boosting traits) but everything else about the new leader stuff is really good for early game. There's a few new planet modifiers which I'm very happy about including some more engineering boosters. I'm really liking the research changes, especially removing the "research to boost research" stuff. A- Mid-game is also very good. All the ways to panic-hire fleets really benefits my (bad) playstyle. Again really enjoying the research changes. Slowed research also weirdly makes the galactic session length and truce stuff feel faster since I'm not being bombarded with research popups every few seconds. B+ Late game: Fine. Too many pops kills performance and there's the usual 4x issue of too much stuff to do. Yes that's what world crackers are for but I'd really love some kind of option to consolidate multi-planet systems into one "planet" like they did with habs, or a way to click a generic nothing planet and convert it into a deposit that spits out the appropriate whatever (world crackers again I know I like playing the good guy OK?). I use automation a lot and it works really well for the most part but I was playing ecologists and I just couldn't trust it to fully manage my rangers properly. First annoyance at the research speed and it's not the speed, it's the lack of direction. I wanted megastructures earlier and just couldn't roll it and the prereqs. I like that there's more options to grab specific techs and the research focus leader skills are... better... but I'd love a more universal system. C+ End game: God so slow. My CPU is dying. Double speed paradoxically (lol) runs faster than max speed. Broken quest chains I didn't notice earlier now causing major issues. Should still manage to actually finish... maybe. C- Misc stuff: I still hate clerks and everything about trade management is an unfun chore. The market is still stupid. I like how leaders can do two things at once and really liking the government options in general. It's dumb how having e.g. "Senior Science Director" doesn't work for getting rid of the no "Head of Research" position issue, and so on, and the negative traits are half-baked at best but overall it's great. Loving how armies are mostly optional now. Ship design is still way too granular but the slower research means I have to dip in way Iess often. You can't make me care about placing individual shields and armour. I wish the archeotech weapons weren't balanced around (max tier -1), but loading my titans up with relic defenses is very fun (though still too granular). I actually really liked the rifts. I think the problem is they tried to do too much with them. The actual sites are great, the writing is excellent and there's some great callbacks and references in there, including one in particular that really made me genuinely happy. I like how the Astral Actions unlock and I love being able to double relic, a really solid addition. I don't need entire buttons to speed build a hypernetwork gate or get yet another physics boost or a ship speed increase and I absolutely don't need the game dragging at me for bit pressing them every decade. Seriously did you have a button quota I r something. Overall I give the current state of the game a respectable B-. Probably drop the - for a plain B to recognise effort to improve. Splicer fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Mar 30, 2024 |
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Mar 30, 2024 15:50
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Cracked open a new Stellaris game after a long time The empire to my north with Overwhelming fleet power utterly hates me and declares war every 10-20 years, crushing my fleets and grinding away my planets and fortified systems one by one, and since I'm a Fanatic Purifier I'm on my own for dealing with it Fine, poo poo happens. I just turned the other direction and expanded south faster than the northern empire could conquer, while catching up in tech via debris scanning, and finally managed to build up to the point where I figured I'd be able to barely hold them off Except now some kind of event or something has given the northern empire a Dimensional Fleet that has more fleet power than probably all the rest of their fleets combined Glad to see Stellaris event scaling is still just as hosed as it ever was
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Mar 30, 2024 19:38
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I am sorely in need for playing some Stellaris and I wanted to do something with the Sovereign Guardianship civic since I did enjoy seeing how absolutely jacked I could make my groundpounders. Is the Civic any fun because I liked the idea but I wasn't sure I'd like it to the point of paying £15 on Steam for a DLC that's currently rated Very Negative
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Mar 30, 2024 21:36
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Vizuyos posted:Cracked open a new Stellaris game after a long time
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Mar 30, 2024 21:59
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A bit late to the discussion, but the Stellaris Evolved mod lets you play as an AI-run society, where the empire and regular leaders are normal organics but the ruler and council are a machine intelligence. So it's definitely possible to do in-engine.
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Mar 30, 2024 22:40
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ilkhan posted:Individualist machines with syncretic evolution? Or gestalt with RS. RS makes me think of Wall-E. Rogue Servitors have been compared to WALL-E before, among other things. Kinda funny that the original ending for Terminator Salvation was apparently basically that, with Skynet's HQ turning out to have humans kept in idyllic luxury and Terminators mowing lawns. (That movie really went through the wringer in development) I think they eventually realised that machine empires being limited to gestalts was pretty arbitrary and limiting, given how many iconic sci-fi robot civilizations are individualistic. Even ones like the Culture are more individual intelligences with broad remits. Would be nice to have Rogue Servitors whose organic subjects still contribute some, at least with research. Like how some living standards have unemployed pops still contribute research, presumably using their free time to experiment and work on personal projects. (Which is a recorded phenomenon in real life!)
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Mar 31, 2024 02:29
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In the two games I've played since the tech-rebalance (at least played as far as the end-game) I've gotten the Prethoryn twice now, because with the tech rebalance I don't think any empire has gotten anywhere near the "forbidden" techs yet, so we draw the swarm by default. Interesting change of pace since, before the rebalance I'd never actually seen them before. EDIT: Actually, I vaguely recall moving the end-game date up a bit for a multiplayer game I was hosting, so maybe that's what's going on. EDIT2: Prethoryn are too loving easy, tho. Comte de Saint-Germain fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Mar 31, 2024 |
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Mar 31, 2024 09:02
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AtomikKrab posted:I wonder if pop upkeep reduction would be useful there as well. And then basically compacting all of your civilization into ringworlds and ecus. Actually, let's math this out. Assuming your homeworld doesn't count as a "colony" for the purposes of Virtual's colony-based penalty and that all planets have the same number of pops/jobs (they don't, but we're simplifying here) 1 Planet: 150% bonus. This one planet generates two and a half planets worth of resources. 2 Planets: 125% bonus. Two planets worth of pops generates four and a half planets worth of resources. 3 Planets: 100% bonus. Each planet produces double its worth for 6 planets worth of resources. 4 Planets: 75% bonus. Each planet generates 3/4 of a planet worth of extra, giving us 7 planets worth of resources. 5 Planets: 50% bonus. Half a planet extra per planet puts us at 7 and a half planets worth of resources. An increase, but not by much. 6 Planets: 25% bonus. Each planet generates 1/4 of a planet worth of extra resources, leaving us at... still 7 and a half. Uh oh. 7 Planets: No bonus. We flatly generate 7 planets worth of resources. Our productivity has gone down. 8 Planets: 25% penalty. 1/4 of a planet is taken off of all our planets, taking us down to 6 planets worth of resources. 9 Planets: 50% penalty. We're now at 4 and a half planets worth of resources. 10 Planets: 75% penalty. Congratulations, we're back where we started: 2 and a half planets worth of resources. The good news is our penalty is now capped, so every additional planet we take at this point is pure positive, aside from the mounting increase to our pops' energy credit upkeep. The downside is that at 1/4 of a planet worth of production per planet, we'd need more than 30 planets to beat our previous cap of 7 and a half planets worth of production. Virtual is very much the Tall playstyle. (Assuming I'm not just really bad at math anyway )
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Mar 31, 2024 20:47
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Shadowlyger posted:Actually, let's math this out. The math checks out, but it does assume the sum of all other output modifiers is zero. Since you're likely going to have at least some bonus to everything, the optimum number of planets should be slightly higher. ...but note that you only get penalized for your planets. You can still have a lot of vassals without penalty. And if sectors you release stay virtual, which seems fairly likely, that seems pretty powerful.
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Mar 31, 2024 21:16
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Staltran posted:The math checks out, but it does assume the sum of all other output modifiers is zero. Since you're likely going to have at least some bonus to everything, the optimum number of planets should be slightly higher. The fun part is that the higher your Virtual bonus is, the less valuable other bonuses are (Cause adding another 20% when you've already got a 125% bonus ain't that much) but become dramatically more valuable as your Virtual bonus decreases. You'd basically be free to take as many planets as you want if you can cobble together a +75% bonus to everything from other sources, but does the game even contain that many +everything bonuses without mods? And yeah going Tall means "All the vassals". Can Gestalts release vassals though? I believe this particular Ascension type is Machine only, so would you need to be non-gestalt to do that?
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Mar 31, 2024 22:08
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Machine only or individualistic only? Don't think I saw if individualistic machines will have trade or they will have the solar panels for stations? ilkhan fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Mar 31, 2024 |
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Mar 31, 2024 22:22
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Non-gestalt machines function in all ways like organic empires except their pops are assembled rather than grown, and of course they can't take psionic or bio ascension and have to pick from Modularity, Nanotechnology or Virtuality. So presumably they have trade. Actually, let's math this out even further. What's Virtual look like with a 10% bonus to all job output on top of it? 1P: 160% bonus. 2.6 planets of output. 2P: 135% bonus. 4.7 planets of output. 3P: 110% bonus. 6.3 planets of output. 4P: 85% bonus. 7.4 planets of output. 5P: 60% bonus. 8 planets of output. 6P: 35% bonus. 8.1 planets of output. 7P: 10% bonus. 7.7 planets of output. 8P: 15% penalty. 6.8 planets of output 9P: 40% penalty. 5.4 planets of output. 10P: 65% penalty. 3.5 planets of output. Break even: 24+ planets Uh oh, we're losing productivity at 7 planets again. Let's crank this up to a 25% empire-wide bonus. Surely that'll buy us at least one more planet? 1P: 175% bonus. 2.75 planets of output. 2P: 150% bonus. 5 planets of output. 3P: 125% bonus. 6.75 planets of output. 4P: 100% bonus. 8 planets of output. 5P: 75% bonus. 8.75 planets of output. 6P: 50% bonus. 9 planets of output. 7P: 25% bonus: 8.75 planets of output. 8P: No bonus. 8 planets of output. 9P: 25% penalty. 6.75 planets of output. 10P: 50% penalty. 5 planets of output. Break even: 18+ planets. It doesn't! Let's get insane, crank our empire-wide bonus up to 50%! 1P: 200% bonus. 3 planets of output. 2P: 175% bonus. 5.5 planets of output. 3P: 150% bonus. 7.5 planets of output. 4P: 125% bonus. 9 planets of output. 5P: 100% bonus. 10 planets of output. 6P: 75% bonus. 10.5 planets of output. 7P: 50% bonus. 10.5 planets of output. 8P: 25% bonus. 10 planets of output. 9P: No bonus. 9 planets of output. 10P: 25% penalty. 7.5 planets of output. Break even: 14+ planets. Holy poo poo. Uh, I think we're hard stuck at 6 planets here unless you can get an unreasonably high empire-wide/species-wide bonus, or simply control a shitload of planets before taking Virtuality. Shadowlyger fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Mar 31, 2024 |
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Mar 31, 2024 23:28
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Might as well go for the general case. The total output of n planets as virtual is n*(2.75-0.25*n+B)V for n<=10, where B is the bonus to job output and V is the output of a single planet with no buffs. Then d/dn(n*(2.75-0.25*n+B)V)=(-0.5n+2.75+B)V, and the total output has a global maximum at n=5.5+2B. Except you can't have a non-integer amount of planets, of course. Also this still assumes planets are uniform, that all resources have the same bonuses, and probably some other stuff that doesn't come to mind. (Like that the net output of a planet is positive) Also doesn't consider the pop upkeep at all, or the possibility of having one or more of the planets as a vassal, etc.
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Apr 1, 2024 00:17
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I think the obvious answer here is to the use the Gigastructural Engineering mod and settle on a single Birch World.
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Apr 1, 2024 01:00
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Birch World and Frame World are of course going to be hilarious with Virtual, although there will probably be some effect on them to stop you from being too overpowered.
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Apr 1, 2024 02:00
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I'm still used to having a paper planet to raise admin cap and haven't gotten my head around managing empire size yet. I've looked a bunch online to figure out what a good target of unity/science for a given size is but I see a lot of vague answers when people ask. I'm trying in particular to gage if I'm doing a terravore campaign well - here's how things look in a game where midgame starts at 2250:  I'm feeling like I'm eating too many planets at once and that's pushing size up too far for my current science and unity. That being said, my science world is full and I'm wondering if I should settle one or two more worlds to pump it and my unity up, especially as I'm about to go to war and need to figure out if I should hold the systems I take or release them to manage size. Is there like a rough consensus on what is considered a good income to be at various stages of the game, depending on empire size of course?
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Apr 1, 2024 03:14
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Makes some sense too, if you restructure your civilization around something that requires extremely advanced infrastructure, it's gonna be a pain in the rear end to keep it up in more than one place.
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Apr 1, 2024 03:16
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FurtherReading posted:I'm still used to having a paper planet to raise admin cap and haven't gotten my head around managing empire size yet. I've looked a bunch online to figure out what a good target of unity/science for a given size is but I see a lot of vague answers when people ask. I don't think there's a real consensus yet. The patch hasn't been out that long, and technologies that let you upgrade your science buildings and refine the exotic gases you need to power them take longer to get to anyway. If you're playing a terravore, the main metric you should be judging your empire against is if you think you can consume your neighbors or not. Even if the planets you're consuming push your empire size up, they're generating free alloys, minerals, or pops every year, all of which will feed your war machine more than more science or unity at that point in the game. Imo just eat as many planets as you can, turn them into ships and armies to eat your neighbors, and just keep doing that until you win. I had an unmodded terravore game on this patch at year 2405 where I had like 20k science from a filled up ring world and it still took years to research a level 2 repeatable tech, the difficulty scaling for tech is really annoying and I'm turning it off in future play throughs.
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Apr 1, 2024 03:48
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Angrymantium posted:I don't think there's a real consensus yet. The patch hasn't been out that long, and technologies that let you upgrade your science buildings and refine the exotic gases you need to power them take longer to get to anyway. If you're playing a terravore, the main metric you should be judging your empire against is if you think you can consume your neighbors or not. Even if the planets you're consuming push your empire size up, they're generating free alloys, minerals, or pops every year, all of which will feed your war machine more than more science or unity at that point in the game. Imo just eat as many planets as you can, turn them into ships and armies to eat your neighbors, and just keep doing that until you win. Ah okay, that helps a lot - my fleets are superior and overwhelming to my neighbours right now so I'm very comfortable in my military strength.
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Apr 1, 2024 03:58
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FurtherReading posted:Ah okay, that helps a lot - my fleets are superior and overwhelming to my neighbours right now so I'm very comfortable in my military strength. Yeah just keep eating and conquering then. Assuming you're eating most of the worlds you're conquering, they won't be around forever so any addition to your empire size from planets is only temporary anyway. Since science is a lot weaker than it used to be, enemy empires have a tech advantage on you doesn't mean much if you can drown them in numbers. You or your enemies getting ships that can field strike craft will be a major inflection point though. Also worth mentioning that while unity important, your biggest timing is going to be whenever you can take the Become The Crisis ascension perk, which you should if you're a Terravore. You can likely start enjoying the benefits of it before the galactic community declares you a crisis, and if you really push you can fracture the galaxy to the point that the community never fully forms. This is actually easier to do in the current patch than it used to be, again because everyone's tech is slower and even AI empires can't compete with the alloys you get from planet eating.
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Apr 1, 2024 04:07
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This is the farthest I've gotten with my crisis run in a really long time, so I have a question the wiki is unclear on. If I research crisis level IV this doesn't trigger the immediate galactic wardec, this only happens after I research level V? Or does it immediately trigger when he crisis meter hits V? It's been a while since I did this, but I remember being caught off-guard by the final crisis level last time, but I don't remember why.
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Apr 1, 2024 10:46
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Shadowlyger posted:Non-gestalt machines function in all ways like organic empires except their pops are assembled rather than grown, and of course they can't take psionic or bio ascension and have to pick from Modularity, Nanotechnology or Virtuality. So presumably they have trade. 5% from synthetic thought patterns 30% from the +10% per capital level techs 15% from 75+ stability There's some edge cases not affected by stability or the capital levels but we're also ignoring a whole bunch of opt-in or non-garaunteed boosts like the prosperity traditions. More importantly we're also ignoring the rakeloads of job- or planet-specific boosts. If you have highly specialised worlds and your mineral worlds are running at +100% to miners then MineWorld1's support pops "only" running at baseline isn't going to have a huge impact on your average. If we pretend all planets are instantly profitable and are all created equal then the breakeven point where going up would make things no better is: (275 + y - 25n)n = (275 + y - 25(n + 1))*n+1 Where n = current number of planets (including your homeworld) and y = average pop job bonus. Which factors to: 275n + yn - 25n^2 = 275n + yn - 25n^2 - 25n + 275 + y - 25n - 25 0 = -50n + 250 + y n = 5 + y/50 So 6 at 50 (lower than your 6+homeworld, you forgot these would be dragging down your homeworld productivity as well), 7 at 100, 8 at 150 etc. The big exception is going to be research. You can get +65% passive miner improvements just from non-repeatable techs and can easily hit +200% or more from buildings, planet designations, leaders, the aforementioned all-pop boosts and so on. But since the tech rework even research's planet booster building is just a 5% boost. Taking a second energy/mining/factory/whatever planet as an 8th planet might be a late-game no-brainer from an overall economy point of view but it'll knock a net 10% off your research output. And then there's sprawl... Also all planets are not created equal, so if you have four ringworld segments and a normal planet that normal planet's drag effect is going to be disproportionately large. So extreme theory crafting: grab your best two freebies early and build whatever works. Since you have near infinite housing you'll only be building city blocks for slot unlocks, and there's no point investing opportunity costs or real costs in chasing +XX%, so there's no real downside to mixing and matching districts. Every world a capital world, except your capital world which is going to be pure research. Then grab only truly exceptional worlds, and spin off or even abandon one of your initial colonies if there's more than a handful of exceptionals in reach. Then blitz megastructures, grab ecus or galactic wonders, make a half dozen godlike worlds to live on, then release everything else as regional shards to cut down on lag and rename your leader to DarkZarq[Void_Slayahs]@SEArm1 Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:20 on Apr 1, 2024 |
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Apr 1, 2024 13:14
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Shadowlyger posted:The fun part is that the higher your Virtual bonus is, the less valuable other bonuses are (Cause adding another 20% when you've already got a 125% bonus ain't that much) but become dramatically more valuable as your Virtual bonus decreases. The last time I played machine hivemind, I had no problems releasing vassals, so that gate remains open.
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Apr 1, 2024 14:28
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Comte de Saint-Germain posted:This is the farthest I've gotten with my crisis run in a really long time, so I have a question the wiki is unclear on. Crisis level IV will not auto trigger the galactic war declaration on you, but researching Crisis level V *will* trigger it as soon as your meter fills up. If you stop at researching level four and your meter goes past level five, you will not automatically trigger the galactic war declaration against you. However, if there is a strong enough galactic federation, they may declare you the galactic crisis at any point during your crisis run, so it's still possible to be forced to fight everyone else in the galaxy if they both think you're a threat and are weak enough to put down. At that point you might as well research level V and start blowing up their stars anyway because there's no coming back from that once you're declared the crisis.
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Apr 1, 2024 22:04
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It is technically possible to repeal the Crisis declaration in the galactic senate, although the odds of that happening without player input are slim to none. Once you're Crisis V of course there's no going back.
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Apr 1, 2024 22:45
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In my current terravore game the xenophile fallen empire keeps dressing me down for all the purging I'm doing. My options are to ignore it or apologise. Apologising gives me a penalty to happiness, diplomatic power and influence gain - basically no downside. So I keep just apologising and continuing my massacres.
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Apr 2, 2024 03:21
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FurtherReading posted:In my current terravore game the xenophile fallen empire keeps dressing me down for all the purging I'm doing. My options are to ignore it or apologise. Apologising gives me a penalty to happiness, diplomatic power and influence gain - basically no downside. So I keep just apologising and continuing my massacres. Just like the real world!
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Apr 2, 2024 03:22
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“Friends of the Galactic Council, the Flesheater Star Mandate has investigated our own actions and determined there was no wrongdoing!”
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Apr 2, 2024 03:23
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FurtherReading posted:In my current terravore game the xenophile fallen empire keeps dressing me down for all the purging I'm doing. My options are to ignore it or apologise. Apologising gives me a penalty to happiness, diplomatic power and influence gain - basically no downside. So I keep just apologising and continuing my massacres. Just a bunch of rock monsters making puppy dog eyes at the fallen empire every time they turn around and see you're still eating planets.
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Apr 2, 2024 03:23
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Started up a catalytic/trawling megacorp and my starting economy is +123 energy and +51 consumer goods. This feels like a lot. -6 minerals
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Apr 2, 2024 03:35
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Splicer posted:I dunno if there's an event for it but that's also the end tier ability for doing a bunch of rifts. Should have rifted faster! I did a bunch of rifts and unlocked all the rift actions, and it turns out that particular ability is locked behind having the Psionic tech
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Apr 2, 2024 06:54
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Vizuyos posted:I did a bunch of rifts and unlocked all the rift actions, and it turns out that particular ability is locked behind having the Psionic tech
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Apr 2, 2024 14:38
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