Stellaris: a second Astral Planes has hit the game

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Stellaris: a second Astral Planes has hit the game

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Had the Spectral Wraith spawn 3 jumps from my homeworld. Past games I'd seen it, the wraith had bugged out and never left the initial pulsar system. Maybe this was because I actively searched through all the surveyed pulsars to find one with the countdown, and flag that system as 'restricted' more as a reminder for myself than to keep my fleets from trying to pathfind through, like is necessary with marauder territory. This time I didn't get to find out because I remembered it was going to appear 1/1/2275 so it germinated right on top of a Star Fortress with 6x Hangar Bays and a few more swarms of tier-2 fighters via defense platforms (all platforms got destroyed), plus half of my fleet of severely outdated corvettes (of which ~80% got wiped) but the station barely took any damage.

And that's only like the third cheesiest thing I've done this run... after abusing Barbaric Despoilers' ability to abduct almost the entire population of an empire while subjugating them, so I get workforce up front without any conquest happiness penalty, and annexing the territory takes very little time/influence later.

Speaking of influence, what better way to farm it is there than enlightening primitives?

Answer: enlightening a singular primitive who is probably terrified and confused as hell over being the only one left after the decade of UFO raids.

Also if an AI has their policy to hunt pre-sapients for food, somehow they also automatically put said pre-sapient pops on the slave market so you can buy them and then uplift them yourself. That's proooobably a bug since you normally can't relocate them at all. Either way it's cool. Permanently happy proles for me. To keep as livestock. On a 'Delicious Titans' Resort World, because minmaxing xenophobia is a nonstop horrorshow of atrocities.

Still gonna try and find out if you can get the 'purge all xenos' achievement by mechanically ascending and assimilating everyone instead.

e: oh right, on the subject of exploits I found a funny one that lets you build multiple Dyson Spheres/etc. The issue is that if you own a partially or fully constructed Sphere you can't create a new construction site, but if you create the construction site and abandon the starbase, you no longer own it. This also lets you build as many megastructures as you want simultaneously, because transferring ownership or abandonment doesn't stop their construction progress. Also you need not to own the structure when the "construction step completed" event happens or you can't create another site of that type ever, even if it gets legitimately conquered. I wanna spam strategic centers and see what happens when I scrap my entire fleet and defeat the endgame crisis using nothing but citadels with like 50 ion cannons each.

silentsnack fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Apr 18, 2020

# ¿ Apr 18, 2020 11:33

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 07:24

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Bofast posted:

So, if I understand you correctly, you
- start a megastructure site,
- abandon the system before construction finishes,
- replace the abandoned outpost,
- start the next phase of construction,
- abandon the system again before construction finishes,
- retake the system once this phase is done,
- repeat until you can retake a finished megastructure?

Yep. That lets you run several of them in parallel. It may require constant humiliation wars to generate influence for repeatedly scrapping and rebuilding starbases if you want to cheese it to the limit.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2020 13:49

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Serephina posted:

It's almost like we could use some sort of... migration... mechanic?

It would help if the migration system was less braindead about having pops move (and stay) on inhospitable planets.

hmm yes needlessly burning extra resources to live in a desert with 15% habitability... what is this, an Arizona joke?

# ¿ Apr 20, 2020 03:23

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Captain Invictus posted:

I want the option to switch to fanatical purifier midgame so I can explicitly eradicate the rest of the galaxy who stonewalled all my efforts to stop the scourge for like 80 goddamn years and ninja'd a bunch of my systems that got taken in the initial scourge push

Sounds like someone needs to research all the red technologies and keep synth butlers on every planet. Could even just give some away, especially if said planets are of no strategic value.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2020 06:15

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Captain Invictus posted:

I'm guessing that's to kick off AI rebellions? too late, basically all the other empires have had their own already. in every game I've played recently, really, all the non-cybernetic empires inevitably get torn apart by an AI rebellion at some point, guess they just really don't want to give robots rights, ever.

makes scooping up huge swathes of territory super easy if they create a determined exterminator or driven assimilators though.

Then it's time for plan B: if you didn't already defeat (or permanently prevent) your own rebellion, mod your robots to add the Domestic Protocols perk to raise the chance of generating determined exterminators. Then deliberately provoke a rebellion and choose to switch to the machine empire, and uninstall some nerds.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2020 14:57

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

ShadowHawk posted:

It's the bonkers settings for the economic plans.

These are the AI's goals for what it needs early game:
code:
	focus = {
		energy = 10
		minerals = 30
		alloys = 50
		food = 10
		consumer_goods = 20
	}
That's right, the AI will try to get +50 alloy income before it exceeds +10 energy income.

It's almost like the AI players aren't really tuned/optimized to provide a serious challenge. Like how they never bother with specializing planets to maximize the benefit of planet designations, so every colony ends up with a random mix of mismatched buildings. Or how they respond to orbital bombardment by... spending all its minerals to build city districts? (Because devastation temporarily reduces housing, I guess??)

Sometimes they will get creative when searching for ways to shoot themselves in the dysphemism, like this cheater:

Servitors aren't allowed to have Resource Consolidation origin but this one did anyway, when coupled with the conspicuous problem of machine empires never resettling organics or allowing migration, they still only have their original 5 bio-trophies even a century into the game.

On a different note, it looks like when you create a pop modification template (can't be a preexisting template) and finish the special project, the game applies the default species rights even if that species is normally not eligible for it. Like here I'm assimilating hivemind drones into synthetics even though I cannot manually assign them any right other than extermination:

Except it snaps back to undesirables if I click on the entry in the species list. That's what makes me pretty sure there's a bug, but it isn't readily evident what is broken vs what was intentional.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2020 08:24

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

QuarkJets posted:

lol gently caress that, this game owns despite any bugs

Yeah, for some of us it's more fun to explore weird ways to break games than it is to try to play normally. So the state of the game being permanently stuck in Maximum Bugfest isn't necessarily a bad thing. Though it is understandably easy to mistake critical comments with cynical/sarcastic tone as expressing dislike of a thing. :sparkles:

It helps if they're absurd and/or insanely obvious "how did that ever get through QA?" bugs like the fact that the AI apparently never uses the Transplant Tree of Life action on conquered planets, so the more territory they take the worse they handicap themselves.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2020 11:51

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Captain Invictus posted:

stellaris's UI is Very Helpful

# ¿ Apr 23, 2020 01:21

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

what the heck

I've never had 1000 naval capacity, who is that even for? Are you taking on three Awakened Empires at the same time or have crisis strength set to like 500%?

Yes.

You know the War in Heaven where you're given the choice of siding with Awakened Empire A or Awakened Empire B, joining the Federation of Non-Aligned Chumps, or you can try to stay out of it and inevitably get dunked on by whoever wins? I took the unlisted fifth option: fight literally everyone.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2020 02:25

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Captain Invictus posted:

Everything cranked to max, yes

Currently have almost the entire galaxy against me(because I'm trying to vassalize my neighbor and they're in a federation with most of the rest of the galaxy) and also I'm dealing with the scourge while that's going on

Scourge fleets are half a million for the standard fleets, with the occasional 1mil fleet. Most regular empire fleets at this point are 90k-180k.

Protip: terminal egress is the most vital chokepoint in the entire game, reinforce a Starbase there to the max and station multiple powerful fleets so that you can ambush everything that tries to fast travel through it since every L gate teleport has to pass through there

Also you can build a standard gateway directly on top of the L-gate in Terminal Egress. Then make fleet bases / shipyards in all the other L-gate systems, so you can react quickly when poo poo does happen. Because that cuts the travel time from station to L-gate to gateway network down to like 2 days, vs more like 20 if they have to travel to the edge of the system in order to reach the gate.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2020 02:39

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Captain Invictus posted:

Right, yes, yes. I personally set a gateway a tiny bit away from the lgate so fleets have to spend some time in TE which gives my fleets time to latch onto them if they're hostile.

Which enemies are allowed to use your gateways? If you own TE and have the "FTL Inhibitors" tech (sometimes it's better not to research this, because it means enemies will try to path through your systems and brainlessly suicide into a big citadel) and they're hostile then their only options are to attack your starbase or to jump out using the same L-gate.

I get what you're saying but I've tried to ambush enemies by positioning multiple fleets directly on top of the L-gate, but if they're just pathing to another black hole they instantly jump out, before the game even registers that they should be in combat.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2020 03:20

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Captain Invictus posted:

I really don't understand war resolution sometimes. I've conquered every single system in every enemy or federated enemy's territory, conquered I believe every single planet as well, and still it says -170 to achieve war goals because of "demanding uncontrolled systems". I've got every system I want under control as well as everything else they own, but they refuse to give in. Is this a bug or what? They can't even spawn fleets because I own everything.

Demanding surrender also conquers everything your allies (and all vassals!) had claimed as well, and as far as I can tell the only way to check which ones those are is to attempt to claim systems from the main war target's diplomacy page, which filters the claim UI/list to show all parties on their side of the war, then look for systems flagged as forbidden to claim because your allies are already claiming them.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2020 02:07

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Captain Invictus posted:

I have no allies, I've turned on the galaxy for super loving up the response to the scourge, so my leaders have decreed that the rest of the empires are too incompetent to control their own territory. I, as the one who almost singlehandedly stopped the scourge, is the only one smart enough to lead their populations.

Is there a really quick way to see what enemy planets I haven't conquered yet? It doesn't seem to show enemy planets or habitats on the galaxy map when I have control of the starbase, and I'm not going to go system to system scanning for habitats and poo poo.

Look at the icon next to the system name that shows you've occupied the system. If it isn't menacing with spikes(?), and/or when you hover over it says "partially occupied" instead of "fully occupied", then you've still got some stomping to do.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2020 02:32

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

PittTheElder posted:

Yeah Impose Ideology is a good CB. You can carve off a little guy that can often be vassalized later, or rolled into a federation, and they'll have the same ethics as you obviously.

The other move is to "upgrade" your ships to not have guns on them, leaving you with a very small fleet power. Your neighbours that hate you will declare war on you, and once you're in that defensive war you're free to make all the claims you want.

If you combine that trick with the following dumb gimmick you can troll nearly anyone into declaring war on you, as long as there isn't currently a treaty prohibiting them from doing so (and as long as they aren't omnicidal and/or fanatic pacifists)

Just repeatedly offer insanely good trade deals like "I gift you all my alloys+crystals per month, forever" and then have the deal cancel immediately because you don't have the resources. Which pisses them off with an opinion modifier up to -200 and can stack as many times as you feel like clicking through the cumbersome UI.

This also works if you just want to lower your relations enough to insult and declare rivals early-game without having to assign envoys (such as if you're using isolationist diplomacy policy)

It's even more pointless than anything else you can do to break the game, but it also brings to mind the old Looney Tunes gags where the chump invariably falls for the same prank 5 times in a row. Though if you do this in multiplayer you're required to spam the Space Jam theme song.

# ¿ May 3, 2020 00:53

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Captain Invictus posted:

anyone know? I'd rather not submit if it breaks the mechanics of how a fanatical purifier works, especially since they're spiritualist snails. but if I can submit temporarily and then rebel shortly after, I'll totally do that. otherwise they'll just steamroll through all my systems insanely fast based on the few minutes I let them enter my territory, they took 5 systems within a month and were angling for more.

I decided to go for early as possible crisis, normally I'm relatively ready for a crisis but this time it's high strength + earliest possible so I've only just started in on the repeatable techs and have nowhere near enough fleet power to face off against multiple half million fleets.

on an unrelated note, I feel like the tech tree could use some finagling to even out the spread of upgrades. like maybe make repeatable techs intermittent between steps up in weapon upgrades, like from rank 4 to rank 5 lasers you'd need to finish 3 of each of the energy weapon repeatables to get access to the next step. that would sound more "realistic" to me, that you were improving the previous level of weaponry and eventually found a stronger type. as is, in my current game for example, I went from rank 2 coilguns through rank 5 because I happened to get lucky on the research card draw and just beelined to the highest rank. I'm not sure what triggers the availability of each weapon level, if anything, if it's tied to ship type tech research, or starbase upgrade research, or anything else.

I know that taking the Shrines of the Old Gods event option to shift +spiritualist does break FP but breaking FP changes a lot of things in hilarious ways. Such as enabling the survey anomalies that "discover" (create) pre-sapients. So explore until you find some. (Or buy some off the slave market because bug.) Because if you have non-fanatic xenophobia and pre-sapients that aren't being hunted/exterminated, you'll get an event that lets you switch to fanatic xenophobia. As long as your other ethic is militarist or spiritualist you're back to purging again.

Also having broken FP lets you release sectors as vassals, except that having an invalid civic causes them to get the "despicable neutrals" AI personality which seems to be a nonfunctional placeholder? Also breaking FP changes your tradition trees so that you gain the Diplomacy one and get the ability to form federations. You can even be in a federation when you reactivate FP and it doesn't immediately force you to leave the federation, though everyone else will want to leave because -2000 relations.

As for the tech weirdness... Did you kill the Scavenger Bot? Because studying it directly gives the tech for 2 random tier-5 components but doesn't give the tier-3/4 versions BUT if your ship designs are set to auto-upgrade they won't actually upgrade to 5 until you've researched 4.

silentsnack fucked around with this message at 00:45 on May 4, 2020

# ¿ May 4, 2020 00:42

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Captain Invictus posted:

I did kill the scavenger bot, yeah.

as for the tradition tree change from adaptation to diplomacy, it INCREDIBLY hosed me up because I had 30-some-odd planets and it bulldozed a building on almost every single one(since the fanatical purifier diplomancy replacement gives you a free building slot on every planet I.E. "adds" +5 pop value on each planet in terms of open building slots), and since buildings auto-sort for some stupid loving reason the one on the tail end is almost always a galactic stock exchange or ministry of production, so almost all of those blew up and sent my empire trade value and resource production into the loving ground. I mentioned earlier I had -2000 energy a month for a while, it also completely cratered my consumer goods production. god what a pigshit stupid design.

it would also be nice if I could tier up which jobs I want to prioritize rather than "THIS ONE!!!!" and then not be able to specify anything beyond that, like I need 3 enforcer jobs active at all times on my ecumenopolis because obviously, but specifying that makes my consumer goods workers split up across the half dozen other things available on there like alloy production or entertainers.

Oof yea hadn't seen that post.

You can prioritize a job and then manually disable some slots, but I've noticed that having jobs prioritized makes the game noticeably laggy when doing anything in the planet UI. And the AI always prioritizes a bunch of jobs at each tier even when all of their planets are at capacity anyway.

Fun thing: the AI also always uses the "stop robot assembly" planet decision instead of dhut down robot factories or disable all roboticist/replicator jobs. Because for whatever reason they would rather rely on slow-rear end population growth rather than resettling in order to keep producing the resource that produces all the other resources. Because if you don't want robots, why the gently caress would you waste resources to keep the robot factory running and employ pops to sit there and not build robots. This is the kind of dumb poo poo you'd expect from Eve Online or something.

# ¿ May 4, 2020 03:12

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Drone_Fragger posted:

My empire is being slowly crushed and annexed by hegemonic imperialists, mainly as I don�t have the space to actively expand my empire and production into. Then I started the worm chain. Do I embrace the worm and use my newfound tomb worlds to crush these filthy imperials?

Note that the final event in the Worm chain turns all solid (non ecumenopolis, non gas giant/etc) planets in your capital system into tomb worlds, even if they were un-terraformable barren or molten worlds. So if you move your capital to a system with a lot of uninhabitable junk planets you can create a lot of potential colonies.

And somehow the event script ignores the normal rules for deciding what features habitable planets get because it doesn't seem to add 'low gravity' to size-6 moons. And it's the only way I've discovered to get size-30 planets.

# ¿ May 4, 2020 21:54

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

PittTheElder posted:

Speaking of the Worm, is it a really a choice of having all of the pops on your homeworld switch ethics or purging them all? As a non-militarist it's not so bad having a bunch of people go militarist (cause you'll usually have a Mil faction anyway), but having an entire world go pacifist as a Militarist is rough.

You can also resettle pops or move your capital before that event happens, so it only infects like one dude while a bunch of nonsentient droids collectively shrug... but if you go into it with foreknowledge the real choice is either never researching the 'messenger' project (since it isn't required and the rewards suck) or assigning the project/department to a scientist you don't want and choosing the option to execute them.

# ¿ May 5, 2020 16:51

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

HelloSailorSign posted:

I figured the idiocy was partly by design and partly bad design and bugs, given that the Khanate collapsed into a giant despicable neutral empire and several rebel empires and other breakaways have had a blank name.

"The Meko'Nass Empire has started integrating the , they will be independent no more" or some poo poo.

Well comrades it seems we've forgotten what species we are. In an entirely different way than we had intended. What now?

# ¿ May 5, 2020 19:39

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

PittTheElder posted:

Not to mention, Paradox in particular has had some really toxic people harassing the devs on the forums back when they used to post there regularly. There's been a couple times when the hammer has come down and the Community Managers have had to explain that the devs will not be posting at all for the next little while.

Paradox's titles have gotten a lot more popular in the last 5 years or so, and while that's obviously great for the company overall, the forums community over there really seems to have taken a dive in terms of quality.

...so you're saying "paradox has an internet forum" then?

# ¿ May 8, 2020 07:18

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Drone_Fragger posted:

despite it's flaws stellaris is still probably one of the better 4x's available right now.

also: re my plan to embrace the worm, I had to cancel it. apparently relic worlds will not be turned into tomb worlds, and unless you have at least one of the worlds turn into a tomb world,. you won't get any tomb world specific pops. So I'd end up with like 15 tomb worlds and nothing to put on them.

Saying that though, even as I type this, I remember I captured some slaves from a hive mined species I had to get rid of (too many border stations to defend) who are the roachoid species you can get from one of the sol spawns.

So maybe I will be embracing the worm after all, after elevating roachoids to be another citizen race.

You know you can move your capital to a different planet (that is one of the 9 basic planet types) before constructing Omega?

# ¿ May 8, 2020 13:39

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Schadenboner posted:

What event chains give Psionic Theory and are they gated to require having Spiritualist (or at least non-Mechanist)?

Having fanatic/spiritualist ethic increases the chances of drawing psionic theory.

Having materialist ethic greatly reduces the chance, and to get it at all your society researcher must have Expertise:Psionics. (assuming the wiki is to be believed)

If you are mechanist that means you had to pick materialist ethic when setting up your empire... so find yourself a pscientist.

silentsnack fucked around with this message at 16:41 on May 8, 2020

# ¿ May 8, 2020 16:37

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Schadenboner posted:

I want to try a Fanatic Purifier (Militarist) play-through because Warrior Culture is really nice, but the Psionic techs are super useful. I know that not having Spiritualist kills the draw odds so I was wondering if maybe there's a way to use events to do an end-run around that but I guess not.

Oh. There is one event that can speed up the process, "the Doorway" happens once per game and can add a 'dimensional portal' feature to a colonized planet. If you do the special project to investigate the portal one of the possible outcomes is "oh my god it's full of brainfuck". If you get that version and you're spiritualist you can pray at the crazyhole, which adds psionic theory as a permanent research option.

Which is less helpful because you have to be spiritualist and the event chain can only happen once per game and it's rare so requires colonizing a lot of planets to get it and even then there's only a 33% chance of getting this particular outcome.

Or you can apparently get it from the zroni precursors which is a really good event chain if you want to do psionic ascension and crap otherwise.

silentsnack fucked around with this message at 17:04 on May 8, 2020

# ¿ May 8, 2020 16:59

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Serephina posted:

I never saw the point of nerve stapling slaves. By the time the option for advanced genetics comes about, genmodding thousands of slaves is prohibitively expensive, especially since they do their job just fine and dandy while sitting at 0% happiness.

Someone sell me on it?

For slaves?

It gives a production bonus on top of functionally locking their happiness at 50% so there are no drawbacks for giving them chattel slavery (+resources) and the worst living conditions (0 goods use) so mod a few of each species and enable population controls on the non-stapled variants.

But really it's more useful in xenophile+egalitarian empires so you can get some of the benefits of slavery (without actually enabling slavery policy) while still getting all the benefits of being in a dystopian centrist hugbox federation.

# ¿ May 10, 2020 01:21

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

pmchem posted:

how do I see the specific war objectives of my federation allies?

I am helping in a war someone else wanted to start and have laid waste to all enemy fleets and systems, enemy exhaustion is 100%, but I can't figure out why we can't end this stupid war. my allies just goof around and I don't know what they want to do to end the war. it's a "conquer" war.'

this is so annoying

If you mouse over the "demand surrender" button it shows what systems+planets each of your allies would gain assuming all claims are enforced. Assuming they're only claiming up to 5(?) each.

Failing that, open diplomacy dialogue with one of the opposing empires and select "make claims" which just brings up the map claims overlay but more importantly during a war this also applies a filter so it only shows claim options for empires that are allied with the selected empire. Look for systems that you are prohibited from claiming because those are the ones your allies have claimed. (marked with an X)

PittTheElder posted:

As far as I know there is no way to do this in a non-irritating way.

# ¿ May 12, 2020 04:24

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Oh yeah something else fun about how broken the claim feature is... if your ally/vassal empire triggers an AI rebellion they don't automatically/freely claim the systems the AI empire inherited, as they would if the systems were lost due to a conquest/total war.

And even though you don't need to claim systems during a total war, you can still make claims as long as the enemy isn't a DeterminedExterminator/FanaticPurifier/etc and as long as none of your allies have claimed the system yet. Doing so will let you just steal territory from your friends, assuming you capture the systems faster (and avoid pushing their borders into AI territory, because total war ownership is stupid)

# ¿ May 12, 2020 04:55

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Deuce posted:

That wouldn't show on base influence, and no other robot nations exist anyway.

Eventually the base influence change went away. I have no idea why.

Did you by any chance lose a war or yield to a fallen empire's demand, which can inflict the 'humiliated' modifier?

# ¿ May 14, 2020 00:22

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Aethernet posted:

Decided to try a Fan Mat Lithoid Void Dweller race in which my glorious space rocks would refuse to touch the filthy ground and exclusively use robots for planetary mining. Some notes:

- This was on GA and I abused envoys to make everyone like me, obviating the vulnerability present in doing a silly gimmick run. Diplo Corps is brokenly good, partly because envoys are brokenly good.

- Robots don't really synergise well with Voidborne as they need alloys and alloys are at a premium. However, because I am incapable of not expanding, I blew all my influence on expanding and grabbing planets rather than building new habitats. So it didn't really matter.

- Although Lithoids don't need food and thus dodge having to have a food habitat, the combination of their slow growth rate plus the voidborne slow growth rate is painful, especially now there are fewer options to compensate for it.

- Despite the above, I was part of the biggest Federation and was rolling everyone else until performance got too painful around 2325.

You're supposed to use superweapons for planet mining

# ¿ May 15, 2020 09:29

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Staltran posted:

I think you still need to vote no instead of abstaining to stop a war going through with unanimous war declaration. Could you have somehow disabled the vote notification?

There are some notifications that the player is not allowed to disable, and while I'd like to say I can't imagine that list would not include "choose to start/prevent a war that will probably lead to your ally accepting a status-quo peace that results in you losing several valuable systems"... ahaha no, I've seen too many ridiculous oversight bugs to give paradox the benefit of the doubt.

# ¿ May 17, 2020 00:40

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

ulmont posted:

Time to smash that �release vassal� button or similar...

Something fun to do is claim a system adjacent to the Militant Isolationists, then immediately transfer ownership to someone else before the "get off my borders" event fires at the end of the month.

# ¿ May 17, 2020 21:03

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Skeletome posted:

After about 150 hours I've finally completed my first single player game (I usually play multiplayer). Xenophillic megacorp was fun, but pretty chill.

Looking to go for the opposite with devouring swarm, does anyone have any tips? I'm imagining habitability is going to become a big pain. I'm about 15 years in, already taken an empire, and my EC balance is already shooting down haha.

For minmaxing in general you should disable Land Appropriation policy because pops are a valuable resource and you don't want to displace them when there are better uses...

Tip for genocidal empires in particular: purging diminishes the population at a flat rate regardless of habitability, traits, or pop count. So they'll die at a rate proportional to the number of planets with ongoing purges. If you just go by the civic's description that shouldn't be an issue because you supposedly just want to kill people, except that you gain resources from purge jobs and not from pops dying. So it's counterintuitive but you want to keep your undesirables around for as long as possible, which means resettling them onto to a minimal number of planets.

Purge jobs are affected by generic "+x% [resource] from jobs" modifiers (and edicts and empire-wide effects) so if you stack bonuses on a world specialized for those outputs then initially it's a waste of energy to resettle, but fairly quickly you'll get enough additional resources during the extended pop lifetime as to pay off the cost, and then some.

Their output is also affected by low-habitability penalty so if you're using this strategy you'll benefit greatly from having something that is universally habitable like gaia/ring/ecu/relic/habitat, which you might want to factor into your empire origin/species traits.

Also it sounds completely loving insane, which is the best reason.

# ¿ May 19, 2020 21:08

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

benzine posted:

Haven't heard of Kerberos in a long time but remember the drama of sots 2, what a shame.

Still, what is the best space 4x game for the thread, excluding Stellaris?

Mine, Distant Worlds

For me it's the Star Ruler series not because they're especially good but because they let you do especially weird pointless scifi bullshit at nonsensical scales.

SR is AFAIK the only game where you can build an unarmed fighter-class ship too big to fit inside a solar system, sandbag forever by using planetary-thruster engines to send all of your planets into intergalactic space where nobody can find them, then when your fighter runs out of fuel and loses life support its millions of crew slowly die off until the reactor explodes and destroys the entire galaxy.

SR2 is slightly saner except if you make an empire of resource-conserving robots with the 'fling' transportation method (build an accelerator beacon that lets you FTL any owned ship/structure/object as long as you can afford the FTL-energy cost to accelerate it, bigger things/longer distances cost more...) and find one particular type of resource that makes FTL travel cost no energy, you can invade enemy territory by launching ringworlds at them and then diplomatically annexing their homeworld while they struggle to kill off your defense satellites. After only colonizing like 9(?) planets other than the ones you turn into rings.

silentsnack fucked around with this message at 22:39 on May 22, 2020

# ¿ May 22, 2020 22:36

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Libluini posted:

Coincidentally, this means that future space battle are probably over after the first shot: Either you hit, or the enemy knows you're there and starts evading madly. A ship pulling off space stealth would melt you down before you can even start thinking about evading.

Or alternatively, "constantly changing course" turns out to not mean anything in space, as only ships with a hypothetical reactionless drive would be able to alter course strong enough to evade. With good enough computers and with physics preventing too rough course alterations, a battery of space lasers would still have good chances to hit.

Incoming missiles would have a lot better chance at evading energy beams, as they can maneuver a lot harder than a massive space ship with squishy people on them.

Anyway, considering the reaction times that needs to be involved in any kind of real space battle, chances are it will come down to the computers on side A trying to predict when best to alter course to evade shots, and the computers on side B trying to predict which new course the enemy ships will follow in the near future. And whoever has the best computers wins.

Assuming everyone is aware of the same issues, wouldn't space battles be less of an issue than space wars which would be decided by the side with more/stealthier and better decentralized space colonies/infrastructure/etc so their species doesn't go extinct the first time their homeworld gets WMD'd?

So in the crudest approach the first thing to do upon detecting an alien civilization is fire a doomsday missile/etc at every potentially inhabited planet you can find, while dispatching scouts to look for more (or even flood the universe with autonomous exploration probes/weapons that just endlessly search for anything to target, even if their creators no longer exist) and then maybe start thinking/discussing whether coexistence is an option.

# ¿ May 24, 2020 22:17

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Sillybones posted:

Also, where are their random ships coming from? They just blink into existence in their home sector.

When you defeat a fleet (or rather, either when the AI/player decides to retreat or is forced to retreat since all ships are disengaged/destroyed) they emergency-FTL and go MIA for some number of weeks/months, (depending on how far they are from friendly territory?) I haven't really been able to work out exactly how it decides where they return, but it looks like they try to go for the nearest(?) friendly system (but it tries to prefer one with an upgraded starbase) or if none are available they appear at the capital(??).

They'll show up in occupied systems if someone else controls every starbase that empire nominally owns. So you can shut down their shipyards and still be stuck playing whack-a-mole as their corvettes keep reappearing at like 3% hull, looking for a place to repair. But if you take literally every system they own and then leave a small fleet to camp their home system, then eventually you can grind their navy down to zero.

silentsnack fucked around with this message at 14:49 on May 25, 2020

# ¿ May 25, 2020 14:46

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

Gotta say I'm super not a fan of the new take on sprawl. Whats the drat point of adding a mechanic to penalize large empires and then adding another mechanic which counters it for a penalty of jobs? I'm sure it's been said before. Just whining.

The point of sprawl is to generate negative feedback. Both in being such an annoying pointless busywork tax feature that it becomes That One Feature, and in putting a damper on the tendency for wargames to turn into a predictable cascade of "win fight" == "get more resources" == "win more" ...and repeat until bored or you run out of map to recolor and/or doodads to hoard.

# ¿ May 25, 2020 19:10

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Splicer posted:

Yes, but that worked fine before when it was just "You big? Everything's harder DWI". Now it's this weird math game where sometimes it's worth throwing down a bureaucracy building and sometimes it's not, and a big empire can research like a small empire if they fill habitats with pencil pushers which eventually is basically free to do.

Yeah, it worked and that's why (some) players hated it. So it got changed.

Now the hard limit was removed, turning the whole mess into a meaningless waste of time and (some) players hate it.

# ¿ May 25, 2020 22:04

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Libluini posted:

Only in perfect universe where all intelligent species happen to reach space at roughly the same time. Otherwise, you'd be risking annoying a species that got to space a million years earlier and just squishes you for being amoral bastards.

To make this more thread-relevant, in Stellaris there is a precursor who got wiped out because they went maximum aggression on their first encounter, causing the aliens to defend themselves against what they saw as an amoral invader, bent on genocide. In this case, it turned out the aliens were better at certain technologies (the precursors never developed FTL) and so could strike back with horrifyingly effective force.

In what language does the descriptor "crude" imply great insight and forethought? :v:

# ¿ May 26, 2020 19:20

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Captain Invictus posted:

is the numistic shrine supposed to only let you have one per empire(or possibly per purchase from the caravan), and is bugged to let you have one per planet/habitat, or is it supposed to be that way? the way it's worded when you get it sounds like one per empire, and honestly it seems a bit ludicrously powerful as a one per planet building. two merchants and two unity jobs and no upkeep besides the priest upkeep itself for a single building slot is super good. plus it builds ridiculously fast compared to any other building.

It's the equivalent of the Waste Reprocessing Center that gestalt empires get, so I'd think it would be much more of a standard infrastructure type of thing instead of a wonder.

# ¿ May 29, 2020 04:04

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

QuarkJets posted:

They already do, ships will go around inhibitors if they can.

Yeah that means fleets are pathfinding as if the system is not navigable, so unless there is no other target (in which case they attack the nearest FTL jammer) they won't enter a system that has a jammer. I think Sillybones meant that fleets should try to take a direct route, even if it requires plowing headfirst into heavily defended chokepoint systems. That way you don't have to guard from all directions because they decided to take a 5 year scenic trip to hit your undefended backline. Also that would let you queue orders to capture systems, instead of having to issue a new order each time you reach a jammer.

# ¿ May 30, 2020 07:17

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 07:24

silentsnack: Mar 19, 2009; Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

Affi posted:

Can you bypass systems and can enemies bypass yours? Does it give any penalties if your fleet is cut off?

Why upgrade starbases if you can bypass them?

My hypothetical was a case of no other mechanical changes, just the ability to order fleets to path through inhibitors. Mainly to make it less of a hassle to invade, though maybe also to make AI fleets more likely to suicide into defended chokepoints.

Which would be kinda cool on the offensive if your fleet can just steamroll through upgraded starbases, but utterly falls apart once you remember that planets can get inhibitors too.

# ¿ May 30, 2020 10:01

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Stellaris: a second Astral Planes has hit the game

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