if it follows the Crusader Kings 2 DLC pattern, over the next 10 years there will be 10 $10-$15 gameplay content DLCs, and countless $2-$5 cosmetic DLCs of race portraits and architecture and ship styles and new music
I'm probably going to be all over those; image packs will probably have a bigger impact here than in a game set entirely on Earth, anyway. I'm down for tossing a couple bucks at them for additional Weird Critters.
0
Olivawgood name, isn't it?the foot of mt fujiRegistered Userregular
It also seems like the "terror bombing" diplomacy modifier happens to pacifistic species first, then others
How important is it to research purple cards when they pop up? Should you always choose one if the option comes up or should you opt for what's (arguably) more important?
Anybody else who's played a bunch of this game (I'm around 60 hours) have a favorite min/max build? I'm trying to see if I can take on the harder difficulties while I wait for updates.
The best I've come up with so far is a Pacifist, Fanatic Spiritualist Moral Democracy with Industrious, Thrifty, Weak, and Sedentary.
Starting pops get +10% happiness from Fanatic Spiritualist and +10% happiness from the Moral Democracy government type, and an additional +10% for being on the capital world, so they're Joyful and produce +20% of everything. (Pacifist is just chosen to enable Moral Democracy as an option.) Being Spiritualist also enables the discovery of Void Clouds to end up giving your entire empire an additional +5% happiness. Industrious and Thrifty mean an additional +15% energy and minerals, and Weak and Sedentary seem to be the easiest negative traits to shrug off.
The most important phase of any 4X is the very beginning, and starting off with this build you're looking at +35% energy and minerals, which can get your snowball going quickly, especially if your starting planet has an extra mineral tile or two. I haven't been able to come up with anything more efficient than this, but I'm curious if anyone else has?
(also please note that yes I have played more fun and theme-y empires too!)
0
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
edited May 2016
If I wanted to choose everything based purely on min maxing,
Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
edited May 2016
So I'm pretty far down the tech tree. Had a big starport way back around some backwater colony upgraded all the way. I get a bunch of xenophobe fanatics declare war on me and choose that system to just wormhole into, right in the back of my empire.
Right where three brand new untested battleships sat. The fourth one literally comes out of the shipyards firing its laser turrets at the incoming fleet of destroyers and corvettes.
They were physically outnumbered about ten to one but my four ships were far more powerful. Each volley blew an enemy ship up. It was amazing to watch these four ships destroy an entire fleet. One captain got a battlefield commission to admiral during the battle and I put him in command of the fleet right away.
So I'm pretty far down the tech tree. Had a big starport way back around some backwater colony upgraded all the way. I get a bunch of xenophobe fanatics declare war on me and choose that system to just wormhole into, right in the back of my empire.
Right where three brand new untested battleships sat. The fourth one literally comes out of the shipyards firing its laser turrets at the incoming fleet of destroyers and corvettes.
They were physically outnumbered about ten to one but my four ships were far more powerful. Each volley blew an enemy ship up. It was amazing to watch these four ships destroy an entire fleet. One captain got a battlefield commission to admiral during the battle and I put him in command of the fleet right away.
EDIT: Potentially swap Individualist for... I dunno, something else, and go Despotic Hegemony instead.
I think the science traits are a bit deceptive, since traits only apply to the output that each pop actually produces. While I'm all about getting the first few basic science labs up and running within a few years on my home planet, I'm always going to prioritize mineral networks and the power plants to support them, so frequently I'll just have one or maybe two pops working science in the first decade of a new game. So even +20% science, to throw out a number, might only be +20% of 1, 2, and 1 science output.
So much of your eventual science output comes from stellar research stations rather than on-planet pops that I'm less and less enamored with the actual effectiveness of traits like Intelligent.
EDIT: Potentially swap Individualist for... I dunno, something else, and go Despotic Hegemony instead.
I think the science traits are a bit deceptive, since traits only apply to the output that each pop actually produces. While I'm all about getting the first few basic science labs up and running within a few years on my home planet, I'm always going to prioritize mineral networks and the power plants to support them, so frequently I'll just have one or maybe two pops working science in the first decade of a new game. So even +20% science, to throw out a number, might only be +20% of 1, 2, and 1 science output.
So much of your eventual science output comes from stellar research stations rather than on-planet pops that I'm less and less enamored with the actual effectiveness of traits like Intelligent.
I've found that stacking planets with specific types of research is the way to take advantage of those traits
so it takes a bit before you see full dividends with Intelligent, but well worth it IMO
Miss me? Find me on:
Twitch (I stream most days of the week) Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
(2) Been playing another human game the last little bit after my last few down-in-flames fiascos, and managed to closely avoid this one joining them so far. I bolted for genetic engineering techs as soon as I saw them because uplifting, and started using it on colonial populations - drop some humans on a marginal world, gengineer them so the local environment's their preference, use them as a seed for other colonies, etc.
A generation or so after I start doing that I get an event popup about some of the pops augmenting themselves to the point where they no longer consider themselves humans. I look at one of my colonies, see half the pops are calling themselves posthumans with a different set of physical traits and an "alien overlords" penalty on their happiness.
A couple years further down the road there's talk of tensions between the humans and the posthumans, which breaks out into violence a couple of times, trashing one of each group's pops in the process. At the point where I'm at something that looks like a minor civil war's breaking out on the planet - and both groups' cultural traits switched over to fanatic xenophobe/militarist.
Kind of neat watching a tech breakthrough decades in the past snowball to the point where it's indelibly stamped unforseen effects on the entire culture of one of my major colonies. One of my biggest worlds is not only a hotbed of violent ethnic tensions, but the pops who say "screw this place" and emigrate are going to be bringing aspects of it elsewhere because of how changed they are by the whole thing.
Horrific trainwreck factor aside, the procedural stories that get hourked out in the course of gameplay - like in any Paradox game, really - are kind of great.
I angered the Titans and now have to figure out how to take my planet back from three of them with basically default armies. And I cant bombard the defenses so my armies deal 90% reduced damage.
Then again Im a xenophobic spiritual collectivist so it fits that Im forced to throw ill equipped True Believer against alien monstrosities of my own creation.
The current game I'm doing playing as Space Assholes (militant xenophobic/collectivist despotic empire) is going pretty good. I started right in between four other empires and naturally they all hated me immediately. Managed to keep them from attacking by keeping my fleet strength up, plus it helped that none of them liked each other much either.
Once I had enough ships I steamroll into one, force them to liberate two of their three planets, then vassalize those. I do the same with another and then a third. I don't particularly want their planets since none of them are habitable to my people, but the fourth is promising so I'll probably take their planets, enslave the populations then move my people onto them. Purging is a last resort but we'll see if I need the space.
Also once the treaties with the three I liberated planets from expire I'll roll in and vassalize them too.
Keep everyone split up and unhappy with their internal situations so they don't go after me. I've still only got four planets after all.
So I was doing really well, with my fleet of about 11k strength, when a fallen empire randomly decided it wanted me dead. I was like, "I'm probably strong enough to defend myself".
Yeah, it sent three fleets of about 25k strength at me in 2300 even. Is there any conceivable way to have even half that much army strength by then? The other AIs in my federation were all about the same as I was, fleet wise, and this fallen empire just decided to completely demolish all of us, for reasons???
0
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
Fallen Empires are a cool idea that I think negatively affects the game
Does this game let you surrender in war and I just can't find it? If it doesn't then that is something it desperately needs.
I had my own run in with a Fallen Empire yesterday. Colonized a planet too close to their border and they got mad at me. At first I was even kinda happy because I won a bunch of space battles and got to research the debris. Got all the cool tech from that. Tachyon beams and everything. But then all my fleets were gone and a bunch of planets were occupied. War score was at -60% and then they just stopped doing anything. At that point I would have been happy to surrender and give up the two planets they demanded instead of dragging it out for forever.
It's pretty easy to not piss off a FE if you know about them far enough in advance to not accidentally do one of the things they hate.
It's much harder (if not impossible) to keep your allies from pissing them off and getting dragged into a war you can't win.
Tofystedeth on
+1
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
It's pretty easy to not piss off a FE if you know about them far enough in advance to not accidentally do one of the things they hate.
It's much harder (if not impossible) to keep your allies from pissing them off and getting dragged into a war you can't win.
Except when you discover a militant isolationist and whoops apparently you're already too close and now they want you to abandon most of your worlds
I'm starting to think that pacifism and hyperlanes are not a winning combination. I had the good fortune to spawn into a galaxy with literally zero xenophobes or militarists and I already had to go to war with and vassalize a small empire because their border expanded one pixel and my entire fleet got trapped in the middle of nowhere. And now I'm about to do it again because my best colonies got cut off by a new settlement.
Switch: SW-2431-2728-9604 || 3DS: 0817-4948-1650
0
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
The game doesn't really support pacifism as a long term strategy, currently
I don't go for any kind of major modifiers for my race beyond sciencing faster. I make a beeline for Drones all the way up to Synths and end up having about 3/4 of my empire population as Synths by late game, because Synths are the best.
I don't go for any kind of major modifiers for my race beyond sciencing faster. I make a beeline for Drones all the way up to Synths and end up having about 3/4 of my empire population as Synths by late game, because Synths are the best.
How are people handling sectors? Is it better to direct new colonies yourself and hand them off once they're developed, or hold onto the biggest worlds forever and sector colonies very early (gifting minerals for infrastructure)?
I think you can safely sector early and not lose much in the way of efficiency
but they're gonna be on their own in terms of resources
If I get a planet that's especially large or has a rad bonus, I'll only sector it after I've built what I wanted
playing an empire with better mineral/energy gathering makes this all easier, of course
either way, it expedites the early game since you're spending less time dinking around with planets
Miss me? Find me on:
Twitch (I stream most days of the week) Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
How are people handling sectors? Is it better to direct new colonies yourself and hand them off once they're developed, or hold onto the biggest worlds forever and sector colonies very early (gifting minerals for infrastructure)?
I directly control colonies, and sector-off developed worlds as new colonies take their place.
For instance, if I want to grab a world near a growing empire to establish my borders better I put one of my developed worlds into a sector and send in the colony ships. This gives me more control of how the colony develops and lets me optimize the race and building placement.
How are people handling sectors? Is it better to direct new colonies yourself and hand them off once they're developed, or hold onto the biggest worlds forever and sector colonies very early (gifting minerals for infrastructure)?
I directly control colonies, and sector-off developed worlds as new colonies take their place.
For instance, if I want to grab a world near a growing empire to establish my borders better I put one of my developed worlds into a sector and send in the colony ships. This gives me more control of how the colony develops and lets me optimize the race and building placement.
This is what I've been doing, but I'm not sure if it's correct. Because I mostly just sit on them for years waiting for population growth while I miss out on income that could be pumped into more colonies.
How are people handling sectors? Is it better to direct new colonies yourself and hand them off once they're developed, or hold onto the biggest worlds forever and sector colonies very early (gifting minerals for infrastructure)?
I tend to keep a core of developed worlds and dump new colonies into sectors. I don't mind building up colonies manually in the early game, but by mid game I'm over it and happy to let the AI do it. Even if it's not that great at it.
Most of my current games I rarely get to colonize more than the 7-9 max core worlds the empire I play as can hold. I usually run into other empires before I can get more than that. I've been mostly vassalizing people so I don't usually go further than that til I unlock all of the colony tech and by then all my existing planets are fully developed so I just sector off a handful close together and leave it at that.
I honestly dunno how I'd ever find more than 7 or so planets to colonize most games before I run into the AIs bordering my area.
I must have gotten super lucky, because I had a disgusting amount of uncontested space to expand into.
The randomness in this game is pretty dumb, sometimes. Not just in starting positions and available space, but also in the quality of the systems you find. I just started a multiplayer game with a friend, and found a total of 10 points of minerals in two empty planet spaces and two mining stations in my home systems. Then the first new system I explored within my borders had a total of 14 points of research, including three spaces with 4 science each, and colonizable planets were everywhere.
The game before that I had a total of 1 mineral point in my home system, and nothing but low resource, uninhabitable systems as far as the eye could see.
Posts
3 hours?
oh my sweet summer child
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
which i almost might be tempted to actually buy?
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Happy Wartime Republic
Fanatic Spiritualist (+10% Happiness), Militarist (+5% Wartime Happiness), Military Republic (+5%/+10% Wartime Happiness)
Start shit with your neighbors to keep your population happy
The best I've come up with so far is a Pacifist, Fanatic Spiritualist Moral Democracy with Industrious, Thrifty, Weak, and Sedentary.
Starting pops get +10% happiness from Fanatic Spiritualist and +10% happiness from the Moral Democracy government type, and an additional +10% for being on the capital world, so they're Joyful and produce +20% of everything. (Pacifist is just chosen to enable Moral Democracy as an option.) Being Spiritualist also enables the discovery of Void Clouds to end up giving your entire empire an additional +5% happiness. Industrious and Thrifty mean an additional +15% energy and minerals, and Weak and Sedentary seem to be the easiest negative traits to shrug off.
The most important phase of any 4X is the very beginning, and starting off with this build you're looking at +35% energy and minerals, which can get your snowball going quickly, especially if your starting planet has an extra mineral tile or two. I haven't been able to come up with anything more efficient than this, but I'm curious if anyone else has?
(also please note that yes I have played more fun and theme-y empires too!)
It'd be Fanatic Materialist, Individualist, Science Directorate, Intelligent, Gifted Engineers, Sedentary probably
EDIT: Potentially swap Individualist for... I dunno, something else, and go Despotic Hegemony instead.
Right where three brand new untested battleships sat. The fourth one literally comes out of the shipyards firing its laser turrets at the incoming fleet of destroyers and corvettes.
They were physically outnumbered about ten to one but my four ships were far more powerful. Each volley blew an enemy ship up. It was amazing to watch these four ships destroy an entire fleet. One captain got a battlefield commission to admiral during the battle and I put him in command of the fleet right away.
that's some Homeworld shit right there
I think the science traits are a bit deceptive, since traits only apply to the output that each pop actually produces. While I'm all about getting the first few basic science labs up and running within a few years on my home planet, I'm always going to prioritize mineral networks and the power plants to support them, so frequently I'll just have one or maybe two pops working science in the first decade of a new game. So even +20% science, to throw out a number, might only be +20% of 1, 2, and 1 science output.
So much of your eventual science output comes from stellar research stations rather than on-planet pops that I'm less and less enamored with the actual effectiveness of traits like Intelligent.
I've found that stacking planets with specific types of research is the way to take advantage of those traits
so it takes a bit before you see full dividends with Intelligent, but well worth it IMO
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
(2) Been playing another human game the last little bit after my last few down-in-flames fiascos, and managed to closely avoid this one joining them so far. I bolted for genetic engineering techs as soon as I saw them because uplifting, and started using it on colonial populations - drop some humans on a marginal world, gengineer them so the local environment's their preference, use them as a seed for other colonies, etc.
A generation or so after I start doing that I get an event popup about some of the pops augmenting themselves to the point where they no longer consider themselves humans. I look at one of my colonies, see half the pops are calling themselves posthumans with a different set of physical traits and an "alien overlords" penalty on their happiness.
A couple years further down the road there's talk of tensions between the humans and the posthumans, which breaks out into violence a couple of times, trashing one of each group's pops in the process. At the point where I'm at something that looks like a minor civil war's breaking out on the planet - and both groups' cultural traits switched over to fanatic xenophobe/militarist.
Kind of neat watching a tech breakthrough decades in the past snowball to the point where it's indelibly stamped unforseen effects on the entire culture of one of my major colonies. One of my biggest worlds is not only a hotbed of violent ethnic tensions, but the pops who say "screw this place" and emigrate are going to be bringing aspects of it elsewhere because of how changed they are by the whole thing.
Horrific trainwreck factor aside, the procedural stories that get hourked out in the course of gameplay - like in any Paradox game, really - are kind of great.
Then again Im a xenophobic spiritual collectivist so it fits that Im forced to throw ill equipped True Believer against alien monstrosities of my own creation.
Once I had enough ships I steamroll into one, force them to liberate two of their three planets, then vassalize those. I do the same with another and then a third. I don't particularly want their planets since none of them are habitable to my people, but the fourth is promising so I'll probably take their planets, enslave the populations then move my people onto them. Purging is a last resort but we'll see if I need the space.
Also once the treaties with the three I liberated planets from expire I'll roll in and vassalize them too.
Keep everyone split up and unhappy with their internal situations so they don't go after me. I've still only got four planets after all.
Yeah, it sent three fleets of about 25k strength at me in 2300 even. Is there any conceivable way to have even half that much army strength by then? The other AIs in my federation were all about the same as I was, fleet wise, and this fallen empire just decided to completely demolish all of us, for reasons???
I had my own run in with a Fallen Empire yesterday. Colonized a planet too close to their border and they got mad at me. At first I was even kinda happy because I won a bunch of space battles and got to research the debris. Got all the cool tech from that. Tachyon beams and everything. But then all my fleets were gone and a bunch of planets were occupied. War score was at -60% and then they just stopped doing anything. At that point I would have been happy to surrender and give up the two planets they demanded instead of dragging it out for forever.
It's much harder (if not impossible) to keep your allies from pissing them off and getting dragged into a war you can't win.
Except when you discover a militant isolationist and whoops apparently you're already too close and now they want you to abandon most of your worlds
Get back to the Institute, Sean.
but they're gonna be on their own in terms of resources
If I get a planet that's especially large or has a rad bonus, I'll only sector it after I've built what I wanted
playing an empire with better mineral/energy gathering makes this all easier, of course
either way, it expedites the early game since you're spending less time dinking around with planets
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
I directly control colonies, and sector-off developed worlds as new colonies take their place.
For instance, if I want to grab a world near a growing empire to establish my borders better I put one of my developed worlds into a sector and send in the colony ships. This gives me more control of how the colony develops and lets me optimize the race and building placement.
because I frikkin' love fighters
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
I tend to keep a core of developed worlds and dump new colonies into sectors. I don't mind building up colonies manually in the early game, but by mid game I'm over it and happy to let the AI do it. Even if it's not that great at it.
I honestly dunno how I'd ever find more than 7 or so planets to colonize most games before I run into the AIs bordering my area.
The randomness in this game is pretty dumb, sometimes. Not just in starting positions and available space, but also in the quality of the systems you find. I just started a multiplayer game with a friend, and found a total of 10 points of minerals in two empty planet spaces and two mining stations in my home systems. Then the first new system I explored within my borders had a total of 14 points of research, including three spaces with 4 science each, and colonizable planets were everywhere.
The game before that I had a total of 1 mineral point in my home system, and nothing but low resource, uninhabitable systems as far as the eye could see.