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4.18 is now the default stable branch. The big changes were: -lots of new regions on the world map. -Priorities and Direct Investment cost are affected by the size of population. -Direct Investment now takes more investment and Ops, but less cash, at least for smaller countries. You can directly convert Influence into Funding. -There are some MC adjustments (platforms/outposts now take 2 MC instead of 1, Automated outposts only cost 1, mines cost nothing until you have a certain number, Research Universities take 2). -Greenhouse gases are now caused passively each month by all countries; a Sustainability score was added to represent how "dirty" the economy of a nation is. Welfare increases sustainability until it reaches 10 (zero emissions), at which point Welfare starts removing GHG from the environment instead. -Councilor turns eventually go from once a week, to twice a week, to once every three weeks, and eventually cap at once a month. Mission effects and councilor XP scale with the time invested. -Regional defenses are now much more dangerous and difficult to overcome. Quick conquests are no longer common unless you have a very large miltech advantage and a numerical advantage to boot. -Weapons projects were condensed, so you don't have to research each mount and type individually. -Ships now gain Officers as a form of XP--15 types, 3 ranks, each with their own type of bonus. - ECM was buffed, but an ECCM module was added to compensate. The aliens make use of both. -There is a new "overpenetration" mechanic, where shots can enter and exit through the hull without causing internal damage. -Particle weapons are reworked--they are effective at disabling ship systems, but don't do much damage on their own. Range is much improved. -The aliens eventually unlock T3 modules which make them extremely deadly in the late game. And lots else besides.
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Apr 14, 2024 18:54
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If you're on Steam and want to finish a .3 game, you can roll back to .3.138 and finish it before jumping to .4.18 since .4 breaks saves on account of the regions added.
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Apr 14, 2024 19:47
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colonizing a comet seems like a terrible idea, but perfect for the ays
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Apr 14, 2024 20:10
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 gently caress no
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Apr 14, 2024 22:47
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Just noticed that in the 4.x beta Ukraines lone army keeps respawning but it's Build Army investment number doesn't change. This last time it respawned the moment I destroyed it. I guess that's one way to make Russia throw troops there endlessly...
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Apr 14, 2024 23:10
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chin up everything sucks posted:Just noticed that in the 4.x beta Ukraines lone army keeps respawning but it's Build Army investment number doesn't change. This last time it respawned the moment I destroyed it. I guess that's one way to make Russia throw troops there endlessly... I had that happen once, but after I killed it again it didn't respawn. I wondered what was up with that.
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Apr 14, 2024 23:35
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when an army dies a % of its build cost gets refunded to its owning nation. if the nation has almost completed another army this can result in the army instantly respawning. in some cases like getting a whole stack nuked, multiple armies can end up instantly respawning. i'm not totally sure what controls the % that gets returned, i think it might depend on factors like nuclear hardening and relative tech levels.
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Apr 15, 2024 00:51
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There was a fun bug in 0.3x when the fast campaign was introduced. The price of armies was reduced but the amount of refund was not. So killing armies would spawn even more.
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Apr 15, 2024 01:01
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They would have to be refunding 100%, because they go from 20/60 build army (before destruction) to 20/60 build army (after destruction and new army spawned).
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Apr 15, 2024 01:03
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Happy Litterbox posted:There was a fun bug in 0.3x when the fast campaign was introduced. The price of armies was reduced but the amount of refund was not. So killing armies would spawn even more. did they fix this at any point before 0.4 cause im in the middle of a game on the last 0.3 patch
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Apr 15, 2024 02:12
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Was thinking, wouldn't it be cool if planets, once they reached some research/population/infrastructure threshold they become nation-states like ones on earth.? It would give a purpose for agents off of earth at least besides the narrative implications.
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Apr 15, 2024 02:14
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Suspect A posted:Was thinking, wouldn't it be cool if planets, once they reached some research/population/infrastructure threshold they become nation-states like ones on earth.? It would give a purpose for agents off of earth at least besides the narrative implications. That sounds like a nightmare to manage. As it is, you can use councilors to try to take control of space infrastructure, though it's a different mission and I think most people don't bother when you can use marines. Also if you manage to get the population of a planet really high you can start using hospitals and stuff in orbit.
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Apr 15, 2024 02:22
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Last time I played the strategy for the early game was to max Mission Control in each region before combining them into a larger state. Is that still the way to go?
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Apr 15, 2024 04:11
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Phrosphor posted:Last time I played the strategy for the early game was to max Mission Control in each region before combining them into a larger state. Is that still the way to go? For mission control, yes, it's still more efficient in smaller nations. The patch that just dropped, among many other changes, normalizes priority spending on economy, knowledge, and welfare to scale with population, so big/mega nations no longer have an advantage there - in theory 3 nations separate will do those things exactly as efficiently as the three unified into one nation, which wasn't true before. Unifying nations will still be efficient for councilor actions (and Advise is *much* more powerful now) and can save on CP, though. Overall this means that improving a nation is slower than it used to be, because most people used big nations for it. From what I've seen this means industrialized democracies have a big advantage - you can turn China into a research powerhouse or Brazil into a big economy, but it now takes long enough that in the meantime the US or the EU will have pumped out massive amounts of more immediately useful stuff. Building up nations is more of a flex than optimal gameplay. On the plus side, since big (in population) nations are now less powerful, it's now more feasible to skip a meganation and collect a number of smaller but advanced nations like Japan, Australia, South Korea, or Canada that were mostly things you'd grab on the side of your meganation before. The new meta isn't set in stone, but I suspect instead of USA, EU, or China as the ideal starts we're now looking at USA, EU, or a collection of 3-4 CP advanced nations as the three best starts.
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Apr 15, 2024 05:16
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Kinda unrealistic that China wouldn't be the most important country to get control of in this scenario
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Apr 15, 2024 05:31
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Bremen posted:For mission control, yes, it's still more efficient in smaller nations. The patch that just dropped, among many other changes, normalizes priority spending on economy, knowledge, and welfare to scale with population, so big/mega nations no longer have an advantage there - in theory 3 nations separate will do those things exactly as efficiently as the three unified into one nation, which wasn't true before. Unifying nations will still be efficient for councilor actions (and Advise is *much* more powerful now) and can save on CP, though. Oh sweet, my dream of taking Australia to the stars might actually happen. Whats the name of the Japan + Aus + Pacific nation state that can form (aus might not be properly part of it)
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Apr 15, 2024 05:36
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I think that the pacific defense league can only form in reaction to China declaring its own mega nation. Aus can form Republic of the Southern Cross, and I think Indonesia/Malaysia can absorb it.
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Apr 15, 2024 06:43
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Well, I stopped the first two assault carriers at the cost of making the little purple guys real mad at me, but the third got through. It gives me the choice of assaulting the landed UFO but even my 25-command councilor with max ops spending can only get a 3% chance on that mission—is it meant to be a real Hail Mary play? The alternative seems to be fighting through the landed armies once they spawn plus the servant China they landed on (ensuring that my alien aggression level will stay firmly in the red) or just pressing the delete button on the armies as soon as they pop up and tanking the Servant retaliation. Then doing that again in a year when assault carrier #4 arrives…
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Apr 15, 2024 10:56
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Pirate Radar posted:Well, I stopped the first two assault carriers at the cost of making the little purple guys real mad at me, but the third got through. It gives me the choice of assaulting the landed UFO but even my 25-command councilor with max ops spending can only get a 3% chance on that mission—is it meant to be a real Hail Mary play? The alternative seems to be fighting through the landed armies once they spawn plus the servant China they landed on (ensuring that my alien aggression level will stay firmly in the red) or just pressing the delete button on the armies as soon as they pop up and tanking the Servant retaliation. Then doing that again in a year when assault carrier #4 arrives… Yeah. The aliens landing in servant China is kind of a worst case scenario unfortunately. If you can engage the ships with armies immediately you have a decent shot at fighting them off since they start weak then immediately heal a few days later. Your alien hate for fighting off the invasion force is actually lower than for killing the carriers in orbit. But attacking once they form the AA is still bad.
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Apr 15, 2024 11:17
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Pirate Radar posted:Well, I stopped the first two assault carriers at the cost of making the little purple guys real mad at me, but the third got through. It gives me the choice of assaulting the landed UFO but even my 25-command councilor with max ops spending can only get a 3% chance on that mission—is it meant to be a real Hail Mary play? The alternative seems to be fighting through the landed armies once they spawn plus the servant China they landed on (ensuring that my alien aggression level will stay firmly in the red) or just pressing the delete button on the armies as soon as they pop up and tanking the Servant retaliation. Then doing that again in a year when assault carrier #4 arrives… Its an extremely hard mission. You can get it up to 'might actually happen' - like >10%, wow - if you get some techs that grant you bonuses to assault alien asset missions, as well as Maximum Effort and similar techs to increase your max spending. However, this will get counterbalanced by Alien Defenses bonuses which can accrue from alien-controlled territory or xenoforming.
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Apr 15, 2024 12:51
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I once got super lucky on a 3% chance and prevented a landing in a Servants-controlled Russia lmao
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Apr 15, 2024 13:04
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Velius posted:Yeah. The aliens landing in servant China is kind of a worst case scenario unfortunately. If you can engage the ships with armies immediately you have a decent shot at fighting them off since they start weak then immediately heal a few days later. Your alien hate for fighting off the invasion force is actually lower than for killing the carriers in orbit. But attacking once they form the AA is still bad. I figured as much, but I kept having "get the Servants out of China" on my to-do list and not getting around to it. I'll try fighting the invasion and if it doesn't work, I've been taking a save at the beginning of each year and can rewind to a salvageable position. Ed: can’t imagine not making yearly saves tbh, I find it really hard to tell if I’m in a good position or not. Pirate Radar fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Apr 15, 2024 |
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Apr 15, 2024 13:06
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The AA getting China is really bad but it isn’t game-losing. It does give them nukes which becomes extremely annoying to deal with. In my game where they did this I ended up unresting the AA out of China, but it took forever and it would have been far better to just keep them out to start. That said, in 0.4x getting someone out of China SUCKS. You basically need to extra purge/crackdown research, huge propaganda, and lots of influence.
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Apr 15, 2024 13:59
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Stairmaster posted:Kinda unrealistic that China wouldn't be the most important country to get control of in this scenario I mean, in the very long term China can still become the biggest thing around, but now that it's not growing 5x faster due to its size it'll probably take 10-20 years to really reach that point, and handicapping yourself that much in the early game hurts. And if you spend a year building boost or MC that's a year you're not working on other priorities. Honestly I think that's fairly realistic - if aliens showed up today you'd care about what countries can do now, not what they can do in the future. The US's big advantage is they already have most of the stuff you want - boost, a good military, great GDP and decent government/knowledge, so you can use the priorities on Boost/MC/Military spending without handicapping yourself (well, you will have to spend some on getting the country stablized). Plus probably the #1 thing you want from Earth nations is research and government score is a big part of that formula, and China's government score is nearly rock bottom and it'll take forever to democratize. The old trick of using the project to have Taiwan take it over to use Taiwan's democracy score is probably meta now, just don't let China's government find out about that.
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Apr 15, 2024 16:13
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What are some considerations to make if you want to survive going loud early in the game? Any priority techs/developments? A lot of the old turtle strategies and beelines for fusion techs seem to be nerfed to keep the game hard.
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Apr 15, 2024 16:20
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Kraftwerk posted:What are some considerations to make if you want to survive going loud early in the game? I talked a bit about this above. You’re going to need missiles to engage aliens early. Artemis or copperheads are the go to I think; at least Artemis worked fine for me. If you want to realistically engage alien colony ships you’ll need grid or ion to have the deltaV early. Unfortunately you’ll need marines to actually assault their habs, as missiles can’t bombard. I didn’t use rails so can’t say if they’d work. Good early drives are burner or Pharos for system defense. They’re only really suitable for escorts or monitors, maybe destroyers if you push it. Grid preferably for early offensive actions. I’ve found that running escorts works, but they’re very vulnerable to ecm which dilutes salvo weight. Haven’t tried targeting computers to see how much it helps. Decide early if you’re going to go Jupiter early or focus on the inner system. I find I haven’t done anything useful with my Callisto base. Which makes it a waste versus purging the inner solar system. But I could definitely do better and purge them from Jupiter next time…
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Apr 15, 2024 16:40
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Velius posted:I talked a bit about this above. You’re going to need missiles to engage aliens early. Artemis or copperheads are the go to I think; at least Artemis worked fine for me. If you want to realistically engage alien colony ships you’ll need grid or ion to have the deltaV early. Unfortunately you’ll need marines to actually assault their habs, as missiles can’t bombard. I didn’t use rails so can’t say if they’d work. Is it still possible to grab the inner solar system and lock it down before anyone else does? I know that was doable in earlier versions of the game.
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Apr 15, 2024 17:02
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Velius posted:I talked a bit about this above. You’re going to need missiles to engage aliens early. Artemis or copperheads are the go to I think; at least Artemis worked fine for me. If you want to realistically engage alien colony ships you’ll need grid or ion to have the deltaV early. Unfortunately you’ll need marines to actually assault their habs, as missiles can’t bombard. I didn’t use rails so can’t say if they’d work. Do note that the aliens seem to have learned to dodge missiles. I used an early Artemis torpedo escort strategy and when I was fighting against an alien destroyer I launch missiles at long range only for it to immediately make a 90 degree burn and pull out of the intercept cone. It's not that the missiles can't out accelerate the target (Artemis have 4.9g acceleration) but that they can run out of delta-v attempting to course correct. I ended up having to having the escorts accelerate and get relatively close before launching, which worked but meant I took losses even against a single ship. There's a new torpedo on the advanced missile warfare branch, the Poseidon, with a massive amount of delta-v, and I understand it will basically never miss. But that takes a lot more RP than the early generation missiles/torps. Kraftwerk posted:Is it still possible to grab the inner solar system and lock it down before anyone else does? I know that was doable in earlier versions of the game. If you have enough boost and MC by the time mission to Mars triggers, I don't see why not. Mercury seems to open up later in the game now, or at least it did in my game. Also most of the AI factions will end up pushing things with the aliens and getting some of their habs destroyed, so if you get a popup that an alien fleet arrived at Mars you can always stop to watch it and if it blows up another faction's base you can claim the site. That's the main way I ended up expanding my mining operations :P
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Apr 15, 2024 17:14
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Kraftwerk posted:Is it still possible to grab the inner solar system and lock it down before anyone else does? I know that was doable in earlier versions of the game. If you mean mining every site on mars before anyone else, it’s technically possible but not very feasible. You’re now limited by number of mines, not number of celestial bodies so it’s a much more difficult thing to grab every site and still have mines for useful belt spots etc before hitting increasing MC cost. I would say it’s more important to get good income for all resources and grab the good belt noble spots and let the other factions get mediocre sites.
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Apr 15, 2024 17:16
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I have played this game for hundreds of hours and the newest version is the first time I have seen: - NPC human factions seriously attempt to fight the aliens - the aliens mount serious attacks on the NPC factions' space infrastructure Now, the humans got completely rinsed in those encounters without seeming to do any damage at all, and the retaliation fleet systematically wiped LEO of all Resistance, HF, and Exodus infrastructure one right after the other, but it did at least occur, which is nice. The Resistance even took out an alien structure and seems to be actively targeting xenoflora. It still feels just a bit too much like your chosen faction is the only one seriously standing up to the aliens, but it is starting to feel more and more like the other human factions are at least present, and that there is now activity in the war that doesn't necessarily directly involve you.
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Apr 15, 2024 17:24
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Still playing on .3 since gently caress restarting now that I'm getting fusion ships online, but one thing I'm curious about - how much use are people getting out of the smaller hulls? I've mostly gone with missile monitors in the early game and eventually battleships and above solely, since my reasoning was that the main advantage of light ships is potentially being able to flank enemy craft but the aliens are so nimble and your early drives so crap that there's no point trying to out-dance the aliens and it's better to rely on either as much disposable firepower as you can assemble or a heavy wall of armored firepower. Am I missing a trick by not doing more with lighter craft?
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Apr 15, 2024 17:27
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Tomn posted:Still playing on .3 since gently caress restarting now that I'm getting fusion ships online, but one thing I'm curious about - how much use are people getting out of the smaller hulls? I've mostly gone with missile monitors in the early game and eventually battleships and above solely, since my reasoning was that the main advantage of light ships is potentially being able to flank enemy craft but the aliens are so nimble and your early drives so crap that there's no point trying to out-dance the aliens and it's better to rely on either as much disposable firepower as you can assemble or a heavy wall of armored firepower. Am I missing a trick by not doing more with lighter craft? Smaller ships are kind of nice because early on even a battleship tends to go down after a few hits, so 4 escorts with even light armor tend to be more survivable than one battleship. Plus if you're using a low thrust drive like the burner, escorts will have much better acceleration than a larger ship. But once you're facing fleet to fleet combat instead of just going after a few ships, missile escorts just won't cut it. At that point you pretty much need heavy overlapping point defense coverage to survive (plus enough armor to resist plasma), which in my experience means the larger number of mounts on battleships and above in a close formation. Also as you get better tech, the more powerful engines will work better with heavier ships and you'll want the extra utility slots for all the modules you research.
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Apr 15, 2024 17:36
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Light ships retain some very limited utility into the late game as a way to deploy platform kits in order to quickly set up footholds in places, and cheap troop transports to steal lightly-defended habs from human factions, but actual combat fleets in the mid to late game are going to consist mostly of the biggest thing you can field and as many of them as you can pump out. This game has inherited a problem from the newer XCOM games that its team cut their teeth on, which is that the most interesting challenges and decisions, and the most tactical and strategic variety, are frontloaded in the early game, and it all kind of smooths out into a single optimal path the further you get into the game. There's a vast array of options and sidegrades but very little reason to actually use them, and so many things you can technically do with the space combat that you'll never actually do. Like, you could, in theory, use a screen of small nimble cheap ships as point defense escorts for your heavy hitters, but you can also just cram point defense weapons onto the big ships while retaining plenty of offensive firepower, so there's no reason to. The new particle beam weapons, which specialize in disabling enemy ship systems, could also potentially provide a specialist niche for small ships - charge ahead of the formation, disabling enemy ECM and targeting computers, then retreating to let the big guns lay into them - but you could also just spend that MC on more battleships that can bring more guns to bear. A viable strategy right now is to build no ships for most of the game, shitloads of cheap missile escorts to hold off army carriers when they start sending those, and then jump straight from escorts to building nothing but battleships when you're ready to take the offensive. In a hypothetical alternate version of the game in which there are no aliens, or a hypothetical future version of the game where the other human factions are more proactive and represent actual competition in space, small ships might have more utility in the late game, but as-is your main threat is the aliens and fights with them are pretty all-or-nothing. You've either got a powerful enough fleet to beat them or you don't, and if you don't then they are probably escaping the battle more or less unscathed, so you need to bring your absolute best to every fight.
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Apr 15, 2024 18:11
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Personally the most compelling thing about this game for me is twofold: the huge pseudorealistic tech tree full of cool concepts, and the progression from current age into an interplanetary empire where you can have a space colony orbiting any outer planet moon of your choosing and more. The aliens kind of get in the way of that but that's just the kind of game this is.
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Apr 15, 2024 18:23
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SettingSun posted:Personally the most compelling thing about this game for me is twofold: the huge pseudorealistic tech tree full of cool concepts, and the progression from current age into an interplanetary empire where you can have a space colony orbiting any outer planet moon of your choosing and more. Yeah I agree. That's a big part of the appeal for me as well. This idea that you can take 2022 dumpster hellworld and remake it into some kind of futuristic utopia (America spending on social programs etc) as you drive humanity into an interstellar future from behind the scenes. All the while you are also solving issues with alternative energy, propulsion, material science etc and finding ways to stop/reverse climate change.
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Apr 15, 2024 18:36
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This game is probably the closest we're ever going to get to a sequel to Fate of the World, and it's just casually thrown in there along with like 2-3 other entire games worth of content Also much like Fate of the World, the systems are opaque and kind of a mess, and the simulation is designed with some very obvious and very specific Ideology and doesn't always make sense if you do not agree with all of the devs' core assumptions about how the world works, but the same could be said of every game that tries to do geopolitical simulation Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Apr 15, 2024 |
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Apr 15, 2024 19:08
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I guess I misunderstood something, or something weird is happening? Instead of taking possession of China when it landed the assault carrier just took one region and turned that into the AA. It went to war with Myanmar and added that in but now it’s just chilling and I haven’t had to go to war. I can use the time to keep building up armies and researching better ships, I guess.
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Apr 15, 2024 19:47
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Pirate Radar posted:I guess I misunderstood something, or something weird is happening? Instead of taking possession of China when it landed the assault carrier just took one region and turned that into the AA. It went to war with Myanmar and added that in but now it’s just chilling and I haven’t had to go to war. I can use the time to keep building up armies and researching better ships, I guess. That’s kind of intended behavior. The Servants are allied with the AA, so it won’t attack them directly, and eventually when they research their storyline tech they’ll start turning nations over to them whole cloth. This is your chance to try and eliminate it if you can before the get the Chinese nukes though! Also get the servants out of China asap.
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Apr 15, 2024 19:53
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Velius posted:That’s kind of intended behavior. The Servants are allied with the AA, so it won’t attack them directly, and eventually when they research their storyline tech they’ll start turning nations over to them whole cloth. This is your chance to try and eliminate it if you can before the get the Chinese nukes though! Also get the servants out of China asap. Oh is that it... time to load back an earlier save and actually go to war, I guess.
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Apr 15, 2024 20:19
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Bremen posted:I mean, in the very long term China can still become the biggest thing around, but now that it's not growing 5x faster due to its size it'll probably take 10-20 years to really reach that point, and handicapping yourself that much in the early game hurts. And if you spend a year building boost or MC that's a year you're not working on other priorities. Honestly I think that's fairly realistic - if aliens showed up today you'd care about what countries can do now, not what they can do in the future. The US's big advantage is they already have most of the stuff you want - boost, a good military, great GDP and decent government/knowledge, so you can use the priorities on Boost/MC/Military spending without handicapping yourself (well, you will have to spend some on getting the country stablized). The USA is balanced by being on a major downward spiral in the start of the game. You have to get in ASAP and start turning things around, or it will explode like the Death Star. China is almost impossible to break into in the first few years of the game, but they are extremely stable and have a lot of potential. Priorities now scale with population, but returns have -always- scaled with population. Late-game PAC can have 2 billion people or more. USNA never cracks 500 million. (This is why there is no option to fold South America into the USA. If you could add all their population in, the USNA really would be unstoppable.) The EU is somewhere in-between. I’ve never formed it because the AI likes to turn Europe into a thunderdome of purges and crackdowns.
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Apr 15, 2024 21:37
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