It's making me want old natural border growth more and more. Having to plant a flag over every single system was already tedious to the point of making the new system almost seem like a failed experiment. The frustration only was magnified by the massive penalties to unity from growing, and the constant tedium of constant pirate incursions if you didn't.
It's an easy fix too. Make it so that you also control any empty systems to which you have more neighbouring starbases/outposts than anyone else
You can build sparse to control lots of territory with few bases and build dense along a border to secure borders and maybe push into enemy territory
I assumed that was how it was going to work, with the overlapped systems between equidistant stations creating contested territory.
Increased energy upkeep of all Starbase sizes by +1. Outposts now cost 1 energy maintenance
Oh dear god they're really trying to constrain things in the game.
...I'm scared to load up my save tonight... I am pretty sure my energy is going to suddenly go negative per month.
I mean part of me is grateful they are putting an energy cost to expanding across the stars. It gives the impression of an intended rate to expand. I've had games where I was going too fast (and shallow / lacking defenses) and games where I was going too slow. It also gives planets more value, and makes expansion have more consideration with hyperlane routes (chokepoints and such).
Am I wrong in thinking that at one point, you could colonize a planet with a robot pop? I have a ton of planets non-habitable for my core race, but they would be fine to just land a bunch of robots on and mine the shit out of everything.
I guess the way it is, I'd have to get the habitability up high enough to at least get one pop on there to administrate then just build the fuck out of robots.
I've definitely done it.
I think the option only comes up if you have existing robots on the planet you want to colonize from though?
This is correct. I think you may also need to have at least the second class of robots (droids or synthetics) for them to be able to colonize.
That sounds right. It's been a bit since my adventure with "Well, that's a Tomb World, but it's in a really important spot and it is size 25... let's make some robots." Pretty sure it's droids?
Geez, those patch notes. Guess i'll be going back to not playing until they fix the changes they've made once they release it for real.
The only other game where I stop playing because I don't want the torture out of knowing what's coming but hasn't arrived yet was World of Warcraft (usually expansions, sometimes balance patches).
Stellaris though is my goddamn hell for this. I play for a week then wait a month, and so on.
The one thing missing from the outpost system is a "develop this system" order for Constructors. I usually want you to just drop the outpost and build all the stations and I don't care much about the order, so just get on with it, right? Aside from that, and the Unity gains being multiplicative instead of additive (ouch) I'm not sure why people are so hostile to it.
Also: the War Exhaustion penalties are laughable, in addition to War Exhaustion being utterly neutered in the first place. It's just back to the Forever Wars that they explicitly were trying to prevent, only worse because now you can just sit on someone after you've beaten them and they won't get any influence or unity. So, hooray?
Garthor on
0
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
The one thing missing from the outpost system is a "develop this system" order for Constructors. I usually want you to just drop the outpost and build all the stations and I don't care much about the order, so just get on with it, right? Aside from that, and the Unity gains being multiplicative instead of additive (ouch) I'm not sure why people are so hostile to it.
Also: the War Exhaustion penalties are laughable, in addition to War Exhaustion being utterly neutered in the first place. It's just back to the Forever Wars that they explicitly were trying to prevent, only worse because now you can just sit on someone after you've beaten them and they won't get any influence or unity. So, hooray?
Yeah, if your power disparity is wide enough to where you can just sit on them forever and eat the attrition, then you should finish the war and enforce your demands anyway. If not, the AI is going to keep plinking up your WE until you don't want to deal with the penalties, either.
The one thing missing from the outpost system is a "develop this system" order for Constructors. I usually want you to just drop the outpost and build all the stations and I don't care much about the order, so just get on with it, right? Aside from that, and the Unity gains being multiplicative instead of additive (ouch) I'm not sure why people are so hostile to it.
Also: the War Exhaustion penalties are laughable, in addition to War Exhaustion being utterly neutered in the first place. It's just back to the Forever Wars that they explicitly were trying to prevent, only worse because now you can just sit on someone after you've beaten them and they won't get any influence or unity. So, hooray?
You get war fatigued too though.
Not if you're winning. The passive tick rate is, what, 1% per month or something? So you can slam them with 5-8 years of zero influence, unity, and -20% happiness (ha) after you've won.
The one thing missing from the outpost system is a "develop this system" order for Constructors. I usually want you to just drop the outpost and build all the stations and I don't care much about the order, so just get on with it, right? Aside from that, and the Unity gains being multiplicative instead of additive (ouch) I'm not sure why people are so hostile to it.
Also: the War Exhaustion penalties are laughable, in addition to War Exhaustion being utterly neutered in the first place. It's just back to the Forever Wars that they explicitly were trying to prevent, only worse because now you can just sit on someone after you've beaten them and they won't get any influence or unity. So, hooray?
You get war fatigued too though.
Not if you're winning. The passive tick rate is, what, 1% per month or something? So you can slam them with 5-8 years of zero influence, unity, and -20% happiness (ha) after you've won.
if you're strong enough that the main timer on a war is your passive war exhaustion, you're strong enough to eliminate your enemy's empire outright.
The one thing missing from the outpost system is a "develop this system" order for Constructors. I usually want you to just drop the outpost and build all the stations and I don't care much about the order, so just get on with it, right? Aside from that, and the Unity gains being multiplicative instead of additive (ouch) I'm not sure why people are so hostile to it.
Also: the War Exhaustion penalties are laughable, in addition to War Exhaustion being utterly neutered in the first place. It's just back to the Forever Wars that they explicitly were trying to prevent, only worse because now you can just sit on someone after you've beaten them and they won't get any influence or unity. So, hooray?
You get war fatigued too though.
Not if you're winning. The passive tick rate is, what, 1% per month or something? So you can slam them with 5-8 years of zero influence, unity, and -20% happiness (ha) after you've won.
if you're strong enough that the main timer on a war is your passive war exhaustion, you're strong enough to eliminate your enemy's empire outright.
Yes, in a long forever-war that they intended to remove because it was shitty and boring and stupid, because it was all that ever happened. But now it's back.
Yeah, if your power disparity is wide enough to where you can just sit on them forever and eat the attrition, then you should finish the war and enforce your demands anyway. If not, the AI is going to keep plinking up your WE until you don't want to deal with the penalties, either.
You could, in theory, execute a lightning raid on a forward guard, put a little ding in their WE, then pull back behind your impregnable fortress. Any empire who couldn't crack your chokepoint without greater losses would bleed out from attrition before you did.
I like the concepts involved, but they're implememted all wrong. If your fleet is at port, why are you eating attrition?
If you can rebuild 10% of your fleet a month with resources to spare, why does losing that much cost you 20% permanently?
WE and attrition are good concepts, but they need to be realigned and consider other dynamics. Losing ships (lives/resources) is attrition. The popularity of a campaign causes war exhaustion, and can be mitigated by perception of success.
WE should measure the opinion of the day, while attrition measures the accumulated loss. And an unfeeling robot who lost 40% of its fleet capacity should only "care" if they can't be trivially replaced.
But even just using the existing measures, there is room for improvement. The current system seems like a race when it should be a tug-of-war.
It would make more sense if WE fluctuated up and down based on performance, while contributing a percentage of the current value to attrition at regular intervals.
Length of campaign could be a steadily rising reference value that success (holding/denying claims) and failures (material / defensive claim losses) would contribute to.
You wouldn't have forever wars, but you'd be able to rally from a set back instead of crawling inside a bottle because a squad of space marines gleefully gave their lives for their god emperor. (PS: Gene soldiers have a super high WE cost.)
Well, my fleets won the fights in the eventual confrontation, but the corvette swarms made quick work out of my defense stations. I lost more minerals in defense platforms that didn't put up a fight than my actual fleet losses. But you can't win a war with 2 fleets against 7 fleets. We ended up trading systems
So what does this mean for our new weekly game? Are we gonna continue despite the BS or are we gonna have to shelve it until all the patches are ironed out, because im threading the energy line as it is with my robits. I dont start dumping heavy into energy until i know where my borders are because until then, minerals are where its at to fund the resource gathering and the initial "fuck off this is mine" fleet
if they're gonna make outposts cost energy they really have to improve the average resources in systems in a little bit.
Better yet, give them a single "tier 0" module slot so you can eventually choose between a mitigating solar panel or something of similarly limited utility like +1 to physics or sensors, or one of the shittier defense platform utilities.
It's weird that outposts don't do anything. It wasn't as weird when they were temporary deep-space outposts, but now they're second only to space ships in terms of the fundamental requirements of a space empire. They should do something.
Am I wrong in thinking that at one point, you could colonize a planet with a robot pop? I have a ton of planets non-habitable for my core race, but they would be fine to just land a bunch of robots on and mine the shit out of everything.
I guess the way it is, I'd have to get the habitability up high enough to at least get one pop on there to administrate then just build the fuck out of robots.
As has been stated, you need droids to establish colonies with your mechanical friends. However, IIRC, you should be able to maintain and grow a colony with robots. I think that you can resettle the flesh and blood colonist off of the world once you have robot on site to keep the lights on.
I also repeat my wish for a habitat building that provides FTL inhibition, as well as the ability to throw a planetary shield on it.
... It just occurred to me, does a habitat count as an inhabited world as far as the requirements for the trading outpost module on a station are concerned?
I also repeat my wish for a habitat building that provides FTL inhibition, as well as the ability to throw a planetary shield on it.
... It just occurred to me, does a habitat count as an inhabited world as far as the requirements for the trading outpost module on a station are concerned?
In the beta patch they've just added a Fortress-lite building to habitats, the "Security Zone", which specifically doesn't have FTL inhibitor capability or bombardment resistance, so it seems like its a deliberate balance decision to make habitats less defensible than planets.
I'm debating whether to try and continue my current empire with the beta patch or start a new one, there's too much good stuff in there for me to pass it up. I'm just worried that the +1 energy per outpost will instantly bankrupt me if I try to use my current save.
The expansion tradition only decreases starbase cost now, instead of adding +2 to your starbase cap. That's getting weaker and weaker to Supremacy.
Yeah, that's... I'm not a fan. Expanding your territory by nature tends to expose your space. I needed those extra starbases to secure my borders way more than upkeep reduction...
E: also, Christ is that ever not going to be enough to offset that ludicrous amount of energy per outpost.
* Galactic Ambition tradition granting +2 starbase capacity was too attractive, and now only gives -20% starbase upkeep.
...
* Starbase upkeep has been increased to make the Galactic Ambition tradition more broadly useful.
oh fuck you
Liberties may have been taken with the verbiage, but I think I captured the intent.
Alright. I'm scrapping this play through. This AI is just repeatedly corvette swarming me and even with all my point defense cannot stop these missiles. No matter how many I kill he just rebuilds and cycles through 6 fleets across my empire
I feel like if they really wanted to slow down expansion, the answer would be to just increase the influence cost of outposts, since that's kind of the reason it costs influence in the first place.
I feel like if they really wanted to slow down expansion, the answer would be to just increase the influence cost of outposts, since that's kind of the reason it costs influence in the first place.
I think the intent is to add a property tax as a soft limiter, rather than put a tighter cap on expansion altogether.
You have a lot of agency over energy production, so your capacity to hold territory can be increased through tech, trade, or shrewd planning; while the less flexible influence is reserved for acquiring it through exploration, diplomacy, or war. It has a nice kind of symmetry.
It also creates a possibly interesting risk/reward dynamic where you have to balance the breadth of your territory against your income liquidity, and therefore your flexibility and the fleet you can marshall to defend it.
So I don't hate the idea outright, it definitely adds a strategy vector; whether it is actually produces more varied, interesting gameplay remains to be seen.
(Like hitting them in the Betharian stones and watching the lights go out)
I feel like if they really wanted to slow down expansion, the answer would be to just increase the influence cost of outposts, since that's kind of the reason it costs influence in the first place.
Likely reason for not going this route is that if you just keep piling on that one cost it makes the things that mitigate that cost disproportionately powerful. Fanatic Xenophobe (-40% influence cost for outposts, -20% influence cost for claims) is already crazy good right now - increasing outpost influence costs would just make it better to the point that there'd be no reason to play anything else.
I feel like if they really wanted to slow down expansion, the answer would be to just increase the influence cost of outposts, since that's kind of the reason it costs influence in the first place.
Likely reason for not going this route is that if you just keep piling on that one cost it makes the things that mitigate that cost disproportionately powerful. Fanatic Xenophobe (-40% influence cost for outposts, -20% influence cost for claims) is already crazy good right now - increasing outpost influence costs would just make it better to the point that there'd be no reason to play anything else.
Yeah, meanwhile most people seem to end up with an abundance of spare energy by the mid-game. Presumably they wanted to kill two birds with one stone, I'm just worried that it could slow the early game to a crawl. It might also make Corporate Dominion a tad OP.
I'm trying to decide what ethics to go with for my next playthrough. I'm going to try the Life Seeded start with a race of science penguins, so they're definitely going to be fanatic materialist, I just can't quite decide on the other ethic. Pacifist is boring and I almost always go Egalitarian so I'd like to try either Authoritarian or Xenophobe. My head-cannon is that they're not actually evil, just kind of haughty and superior in their own penguiny way.
It takes a while to turn a profit, sure, but I've definitely gone longer than 100 months (9 years and change?) without a serious war. Particularly if I've made nice with the neighbors. It's not always gonna be the right move, but I'm glad I know about the concept. Pay for the hulls up front; buy guns later. Hell, with the right tech and some recon, it'd be the perfect opportunity to tune your weapons to the enemy composition.
Also, it cost me 3k to unmothball the fleet. Not sure getting plus 30 a month was worth it
Seems like a good option for post war, or any expansion, where you can invest that +30 into new infrastructure to cover the eventual upgrade.
And you could handwave some portion of that bill as what was going to be paid for a routine tech upgrade anyway, if the legislature is really busting your chops about it.
I think i'm finally figuring out how this game works, sort of. I still need to learn how to make a good fleet, but nobody has wanted to crush my moral democracy butterflies yet.
Once, we were small. Once we looked up at the at the skies of Kudahome, and asked: What next?
No, we are mighty. We broke the war in heaven, integrating the once fallen empires into our own. When the contingency awoke, we shattered its hubs and wiped it's core from the galaxy. We slew the Ether drake, the Stellarite Devourer and the Spectral Wraith. We helped the Infinity machine create a new universe. We have mastery over genetics - Not merely of the nine Kuda guilds, but of all races in our empire. Not a one of our people is denied access to this bounty. Our planets are becoming increasingly connected, a network of gateways being spread across our empire.
We are the Kudan Stellar Guild, and we have come in peace.
(At this point, i think this run is done with. There's literally not much else to do, except maybe kick over every other empire)
Posts
...I'm scared to load up my save tonight... I am pretty sure my energy is going to suddenly go negative per month.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I assumed that was how it was going to work, with the overlapped systems between equidistant stations creating contested territory.
It's opt-in, your joules are safe.
For now
Also the AI can't just infinitely grow.
@MagicPrime
You need droids before you can build robot-crewed colony ships.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Stellaris though is my goddamn hell for this. I play for a week then wait a month, and so on.
Also: the War Exhaustion penalties are laughable, in addition to War Exhaustion being utterly neutered in the first place. It's just back to the Forever Wars that they explicitly were trying to prevent, only worse because now you can just sit on someone after you've beaten them and they won't get any influence or unity. So, hooray?
Not if you're winning. The passive tick rate is, what, 1% per month or something? So you can slam them with 5-8 years of zero influence, unity, and -20% happiness (ha) after you've won.
the old problem with long wars was where you needed to capture like every system to enforce your demands.
if you're strong enough that the main timer on a war is your passive war exhaustion, you're strong enough to eliminate your enemy's empire outright.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Yes, in a long forever-war that they intended to remove because it was shitty and boring and stupid, because it was all that ever happened. But now it's back.
You could, in theory, execute a lightning raid on a forward guard, put a little ding in their WE, then pull back behind your impregnable fortress. Any empire who couldn't crack your chokepoint without greater losses would bleed out from attrition before you did.
I like the concepts involved, but they're implememted all wrong. If your fleet is at port, why are you eating attrition?
If you can rebuild 10% of your fleet a month with resources to spare, why does losing that much cost you 20% permanently?
WE and attrition are good concepts, but they need to be realigned and consider other dynamics. Losing ships (lives/resources) is attrition. The popularity of a campaign causes war exhaustion, and can be mitigated by perception of success.
WE should measure the opinion of the day, while attrition measures the accumulated loss. And an unfeeling robot who lost 40% of its fleet capacity should only "care" if they can't be trivially replaced.
But even just using the existing measures, there is room for improvement. The current system seems like a race when it should be a tug-of-war.
It would make more sense if WE fluctuated up and down based on performance, while contributing a percentage of the current value to attrition at regular intervals.
Length of campaign could be a steadily rising reference value that success (holding/denying claims) and failures (material / defensive claim losses) would contribute to.
You wouldn't have forever wars, but you'd be able to rally from a set back instead of crawling inside a bottle because a squad of space marines gleefully gave their lives for their god emperor. (PS: Gene soldiers have a super high WE cost.)
Rip my 101% evasion corvettes.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Better yet, give them a single "tier 0" module slot so you can eventually choose between a mitigating solar panel or something of similarly limited utility like +1 to physics or sensors, or one of the shittier defense platform utilities.
It's weird that outposts don't do anything. It wasn't as weird when they were temporary deep-space outposts, but now they're second only to space ships in terms of the fundamental requirements of a space empire. They should do something.
Especially if we have to pay for them.
I'd also accept the outpost doubling as a mining outpost for the star.
As has been stated, you need droids to establish colonies with your mechanical friends. However, IIRC, you should be able to maintain and grow a colony with robots. I think that you can resettle the flesh and blood colonist off of the world once you have robot on site to keep the lights on.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
... It just occurred to me, does a habitat count as an inhabited world as far as the requirements for the trading outpost module on a station are concerned?
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
In the beta patch they've just added a Fortress-lite building to habitats, the "Security Zone", which specifically doesn't have FTL inhibitor capability or bombardment resistance, so it seems like its a deliberate balance decision to make habitats less defensible than planets.
I'm debating whether to try and continue my current empire with the beta patch or start a new one, there's too much good stuff in there for me to pass it up. I'm just worried that the +1 energy per outpost will instantly bankrupt me if I try to use my current save.
Pffft.
You got me.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
To be fair, Arc Emitters are the answer to a lot of problems.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
I think the intent is to add a property tax as a soft limiter, rather than put a tighter cap on expansion altogether.
You have a lot of agency over energy production, so your capacity to hold territory can be increased through tech, trade, or shrewd planning; while the less flexible influence is reserved for acquiring it through exploration, diplomacy, or war. It has a nice kind of symmetry.
It also creates a possibly interesting risk/reward dynamic where you have to balance the breadth of your territory against your income liquidity, and therefore your flexibility and the fleet you can marshall to defend it.
So I don't hate the idea outright, it definitely adds a strategy vector; whether it is actually produces more varied, interesting gameplay remains to be seen.
(Like hitting them in the Betharian stones and watching the lights go out)
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Likely reason for not going this route is that if you just keep piling on that one cost it makes the things that mitigate that cost disproportionately powerful. Fanatic Xenophobe (-40% influence cost for outposts, -20% influence cost for claims) is already crazy good right now - increasing outpost influence costs would just make it better to the point that there'd be no reason to play anything else.
Yeah, meanwhile most people seem to end up with an abundance of spare energy by the mid-game. Presumably they wanted to kill two birds with one stone, I'm just worried that it could slow the early game to a crawl. It might also make Corporate Dominion a tad OP.
I'm trying to decide what ethics to go with for my next playthrough. I'm going to try the Life Seeded start with a race of science penguins, so they're definitely going to be fanatic materialist, I just can't quite decide on the other ethic. Pacifist is boring and I almost always go Egalitarian so I'd like to try either Authoritarian or Xenophobe. My head-cannon is that they're not actually evil, just kind of haughty and superior in their own penguiny way.
Depends on if you left it mothballed for more than 100 months, I guess.
Personally I tend not to have a lot of windows where I go more than ~8 years without a war in the late game, though
Seems like a good option for post war, or any expansion, where you can invest that +30 into new infrastructure to cover the eventual upgrade.
And you could handwave some portion of that bill as what was going to be paid for a routine tech upgrade anyway, if the legislature is really busting your chops about it.
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
https://clips.twitch.tv/CrowdedSpoopyDadCoolCat
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
No, we are mighty. We broke the war in heaven, integrating the once fallen empires into our own. When the contingency awoke, we shattered its hubs and wiped it's core from the galaxy. We slew the Ether drake, the Stellarite Devourer and the Spectral Wraith. We helped the Infinity machine create a new universe. We have mastery over genetics - Not merely of the nine Kuda guilds, but of all races in our empire. Not a one of our people is denied access to this bounty. Our planets are becoming increasingly connected, a network of gateways being spread across our empire.
We are the Kudan Stellar Guild, and we have come in peace.
(At this point, i think this run is done with. There's literally not much else to do, except maybe kick over every other empire)
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891