Depending on what you have. Can't remember which expansions grant which perks.
If I were going tall, I'd definitely consider going fanatical materialist for technocracy, since you're best bet of not getting eaten is to tech rush. I would avoid life-seeded, if you want to colonize beyond your homeworld and do so without habitats. They did a few changes recently, where it's really not worth colonize planets if the habitability is below a certain threshold (can't recall what it is off the top of my head) since the malus modifier on those pops will do a number on your resources. That same patch did help it make life seeded a bit more viable, by having it so that habitats were an unlock instead of a perk, but IMO it's a waste of civic slot; especially, if you want to have colonies beyond the homeworld that aren't habitats. Depending on how min/max you are, both syncretic evolution and mechanist can be worthwhile civics to consider. Downside is you're locked into them for the whole game and they are more of head start advantage right now, but both can be really handy if you luck out. Syncretic evolution essentially gives you a free slave species and extra pops. So you can tailor your primary species to be great at specialist stuff, while the secondary one is good at getting raw resources. Mechanists also gives free pops, but you get access to droid pops from the get go. Like Syncretic evolution, this allows for the option to tailor your biological species to specialize in something, while the droids are specialized in something else. Granted, it's been a few months since I last played and I do believe they might have done one minor patch, so they might have given some of the starter civics something to last beyond "this be a head start civic).
If you have megacorp, those are great for going tall. It's just that megacorps get different civics. They still have ethics. I always go with the civic that lets me use energy instead of alloys for my colony ships. After that, I think most of the civics are kind of meh, with some that are just garbage.
Tall empires do want to consider megastructure perk and ecumenopolis perk. Both are amazing for any empire, but they tend to be help tall empires out a ton by plastering over some of the weak points.
Thanks for all the help! Follow up question, is it feasible to build tall somehow and focus on a small empire or will that get me fucked? I’m starting a new game and I found the sprawl of my last one a bit exhausting.
If you have Utopia, you can build Habitats, which let you to essentially build additonal colonizable planets, and eventually Ringworlds (though some might consider built-from-scratch Ringworlds something that shows up too late to matter in most games, at least without some sort of ruined Megastructure you can claim to increase the odds for Mega-Engineering and then repair to qualify for the nessisary Acension Perk.) They both have unique districts: Habitats have a "planet" size of 6, but there is an Ascension Perk that raises it to 8, and the choice of districts is a residential, trade and entertainment district, plus either a mining, generator or research district if the body they're orbiting has a mineral, EC or science node, though they have no way to grow their own food other than spending building slots on Hydroponics. Ringworlds, on other hand, have residential, farming, trade/CG, and research. *Technically,* their size is 5, but each district is worth 10 of a normal district (so that farming district has 20 housing with 20 farmer jobs) though the non-residential districts take rare resources to build and maintain. If you have the Cybrex as your precursors, their homeworld is a ruined ringworld which I *think* you can eventually repair even with no DLC... at the very least, Ringworlds are a thing that exist even in the vanilla game.
There is also the Inward Perfection civic, which has you give up aggressive warfare and nearly all forms of diplomacy for some amazing buffs. Despite the "can't be removed" nature of IP, it *can* be disabled by no longer being Pacifist or Xenophobe, though you can never reclaim the civic. Classic is to go Fantic Pacifist and also pick up Agrarian Idyll, getting further production bonuses from the extra amenities your farms make, but civics that add or change ruler pops are also pretty nice. The two IP games I had the most fun with (both of which required Utopia) was a Materialist IP that reached Syth Ascension (becoming a race of robots and was building multiple Megastructures before anyone else had Battleships, and a spiritualist one where I went Psionic Ascension... without spoiling too much, there is a possible event chain with Psi Ascension that can completely overhaul your government ethics and civics... and the last time I tried, it was capable of even removing permanent civics like Inward Perfection, under conditions that, shall we say, give a very appropriate mandate to start conquering the galaxy.
Does anyone have any good guides on how to put together planets? I'm hemorrhaging resources and I can't figure out where or how to fix it, but I'm pretty sure bad planet builds are the issue.
It's helpful to think of your economy as existing in basically three 'tiers':
The first is basic resources - food, energy, and minerals. This comes mostly from unskilled labor jobs provided by planetary districts. You want enough food and energy to maintain a positive monthly balance, and then enough minerals to do your basic construction while still 'powering' the upper tiers of your economy.
The middle tier is where you refine minerals into a form that is usable for things other than building planetary districts and mining platforms: Primarily, you split them between Alloys and Consumer Goods, with some remainder converted into motes, gases, and crystals as necessary. Consumer goods are the fuel for your civilian economy (some are spent just on pop maintenance, but the majority get refined into the third tier of resources) and you want enough to maintain a positive balance, and Alloys are your military spending and you want as much as you can support - in the long run the main 'loop' of growing your economy is gathering more minerals to make more alloys to build ships (and megastructures).
The third tier is basically where you refine Consumer Goods into intangible advanced resources - primarily Research and Unity. Again, you want as much as you can afford based on your Consumer Goods production, although Unity is usually hard-limited by the fact that each planet can only support a fairly fixed number of Unity-generating jobs.
If you're having trouble balancing your economy, the most common reason is that you've overbalanced that resource pyramid and built more tier 2 and 3 jobs than your basic resource pool can support - you probably gotta scale back your science or alloy production until you've got more minerals to power that stuff with.
As mentioned, planet specialization and the Consumer Benefits trade policy can help with this (mostly by increasing basic resource outputs and reducing Consumer Goods maintenance costs).
As far as building tall, it's viable with the right map conditions but usually not as outright powerful as playing wide for the classic strategy game reason that the most basic possible resource is physical space for you to collect other resources in. Tall strategies usually want to be research-focused, and the big limitation you're going to be trying to cope with in the early and mid-game compared to a wide strategy is population growth (because growth is fundamentally multiplied by the number of colonized planets you have), so immigration is usually a big deal for them - you're probably gonna want to be friendly, secure immigration treaties, and try to maintain enough immigration pull that you can siphon the growth of other empires into your own. The Xeno-Compatibility and Arcology Project perks and the Free Haven civic help immensely with this.
If I were looking to set up a fairly straightforward 'tall' race I'd consider something like: Fanatic Materialist+Xenophile ethics, Life Seeded and either Free Haven or Technocracy civics, with race traits something like Rapid Breeders+Nonadaptive+Intelligent, angling for Xenocompatibility and Arcology Project as perks two and three. If you're struggling to get tall to work and don't want the hassle of playing wide, you can always tweak map generation - playing on a smaller map or with fewer habitable planets will generally make tall strategies relatively stronger so you can get a handle on how tall works without getting crushed by an AI with four times the planets as you.
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
edited October 2019
I have a yet-untested suspicion that machinist lithoids might be a pretty good Tall mono-species option. You'd need to find at least one good mineral planet, but from there, it's off to the races.
Auralynx on
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
So, if anyone is interested in a Lithoids MP game feel free to join this old, largely unused PA Stellaris discord channel
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
+1
AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
Hopefully if we try again we won't get quite so much separation and inconvenience. Apart from the authoritarian monarchist bloc @EvmaAlsar and I formed I remember it doing a great job of putting AI roadblocks between everyone when we gave Megacorps a shot.
Has anyone noticed anything weird with ethics/factions since the patch? I'm 170 years in and there are only 4 factions in my empire. I have no Pacifist faction despite never having a war for the first 60 years, no spiritualist faction dispite having psi theory, Numanistic Shrines on almost every planet and the relic that makes your Spiritual attraction skyrocket, and only got a Materialist faction after unlocking synths and giving them full rights, even though I had robots in my empire almost from the beginning, something that prior to Lithoids pretty much insured a materialist faction within a couple decades.
It's like there is no ethic drift in my empire, at least until a faction has formed due to an influx of new people.
Foefaller on
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
Has anyone noticed anything weird with ethics/factions since the patch? I'm 170 years in and there are only 4 factions in my empire. I have no Pacifist faction despite never having a war for the first 60 years, no spiritualist faction dispite having psi theory, Numanistic Shrines on almost every planet and the relic that makes your Spiritual attraction skyrocket, and only got a Materialist faction after unlocking synths and giving them full rights, even though I had robots in my empire almost from the beginning, something that prior to Lithoids pretty much insured a materialist faction within a couple decades.
I had Xenophiles turn up immediately after signing a migration treaty in my one Lithoids game. Nothing too weird that I spotted. That's a long time to go with only 4, though.
I really appreciated all the well thought out help posts on this, thanks guys. This game is kind of a minefield of guides that end with [Update] As of patch 2.1 this information is outdated as the game is now set in space
I have a yet-untested suspicion that machinist lithoids might be a pretty good Tall mono-species option. You'd need to find at least one good mineral planet, but from there, it's off to the races.
Lithoids are designed such that they really, really want to be wide - they get a massive +50% habitability, so they can colonize every habitable planet in their space, and they eat a pop growth penalty, which needs to be offset by the extra growth you get from being on more planets.
Trying to go tall with them negates their major advantage but keeps and amplifies their drawback.
The Lithoid build I'm currently having success with is Fanatic Xenophobe/Authoritarian with Mining Guilds/Slaver Guilds/Aristocratic Elite (Meritocracy might actually be better as a third civic - haven't tried it yet) on an Industrious/Repugnant race (again, I'm currently running Very Strong in the name of maximizing mineral production, but Rapid Breeders is probably better), starting with Expansion traditions and grabbing Interstellar Dominion as the first perk.
What this does is:
1)Stack starbase influence cost reductions. These stack additively, so the -40% from Fan Xenophobe, the -20% from Interstellar Dominion, and the -10% from the Expansion tree mean you're able to snag new systems for 22 influence a pop (down to 11 influence if you can also pick up an expansionist leader). Since influence is the main limiting factor on new territory acquisition, this lets you expand out very rapidly and fill a bunch of space, in which you can colonize every available planet and start trying to outgrow the opposition.
2)Offset the pop growth penalty. Pop growth modifiers stack additively as well, which means that since you're eating a -25% growth penalty for playing Lithoids pop growth bonuses are relatively more valuable than they are for standard races (where they're already incredibly important). You don't want to get your growth from immigration, because other races eat food and part of the whole point of playing lithoids is that you can ignore food production, so you want those flat growth bonuses and Fan Xenophobe comes with a big one (plus the various growth benefits of the Expansion tree).
3)Maximize mineral production - you get a ton of stacking mineral bonuses here, because minerals and energy are the only basic resources you have to care about so getting good at them has even more value than it does for standard races. You're taking basically every multiplier available on the already-increased base production from Mining Guilds, including using Aristocratic Elite to easily maintain high stability so you get a flat bonus on the production of all resources.
From there you mostly use your large population base and extremely efficient mineral production to build as many Alloy Foundries as you can and start cranking out fleets with which to flatten your neighbors and take all their planets, too.
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
edited October 2019
The pop growth malus is why I suggested Machinists. Starting w/ robot production immediately lets your rocks and / or robots colonize only the most-suitable planets, keeping your district count smaller than just going wide.
I tried Fanatic Militarist Very Strong rocks and was just rolling over the AI's planets with brute invasion capability quite quickly while only bothering to live on about half the available planets in my little slice of space. I think most of the AI civs actually controlled more systems.
Has anyone noticed anything weird with ethics/factions since the patch? I'm 170 years in and there are only 4 factions in my empire. I have no Pacifist faction despite never having a war for the first 60 years, no spiritualist faction dispite having psi theory, Numanistic Shrines on almost every planet and the relic that makes your Spiritual attraction skyrocket, and only got a Materialist faction after unlocking synths and giving them full rights, even though I had robots in my empire almost from the beginning, something that prior to Lithoids pretty much insured a materialist faction within a couple decades.
I had Xenophiles turn up immediately after signing a migration treaty in my one Lithoids game. Nothing too weird that I spotted. That's a long time to go with only 4, though.
So did I, but I wonder if that had more to do with getting Xenophile pops to migrate (no idea how a new pops' ethics are chosen post 2.2) than any ethics drift.
The lack of a Materialist faction until citizen synths is in gravity defying territory though. It only takes five pops of the same ethic for there to be a chance of a faction forming, and it defies sanity that with robots on several planets and a research agreement with a Materialist empire I didn't get 5 materialist pops at the same time for nearly 170 years.
The pop growth malus is why I suggested Machinists. Starting w/ robot production immediately lets your rocks and / or robots colonize only the most-suitable planets, keeping your district count smaller than just going wide.
I tried Fanatic Militarist Very Strong rocks and was just rolling over the AI's planets with brute invasion capability quite quickly while only bothering to live on about half the available planets in my little slice of space. I think most of the AI civs actually controlled more systems.
Economy-wise our gameplan was pretty similar.
Right, but my point is if you're using Machinist to get early Robots/Droids and using them to make sure you can colonize only the best planets without caring much about habitability, you can do that with a regular non-Lithoid race and the only actionable difference is that you don't have to eat the pop growth penalty lithoids get. Even the ability to eat minerals instead of food doesn't end up mattering very much because a bunch of your pops are going to be robots that just eat energy either way. You can definitely do it, but it's unlikely to be better than doing the same thing using standard food-eating organics.
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
The pop growth malus is why I suggested Machinists. Starting w/ robot production immediately lets your rocks and / or robots colonize only the most-suitable planets, keeping your district count smaller than just going wide.
I tried Fanatic Militarist Very Strong rocks and was just rolling over the AI's planets with brute invasion capability quite quickly while only bothering to live on about half the available planets in my little slice of space. I think most of the AI civs actually controlled more systems.
Economy-wise our gameplan was pretty similar.
Right, but my point is if you're using Machinist to get early Robots/Droids and using them to make sure you can colonize only the best planets without caring much about habitability, you can do that with a regular non-Lithoid race and the only actionable difference is that you don't have to eat the pop growth penalty lithoids get. Even the ability to eat minerals instead of food doesn't end up mattering very much because a bunch of your pops are going to be robots that just eat energy either way. You can definitely do it, but it's unlikely to be better than doing the same thing using standard food-eating organics.
I see your point - the lithoid habitability bonus is real helpful for certain - but making the robots into dedicated specialists in something your rocks aren't good at seems viable to me. You may turn out to be right!
Xenophile migration-magnets might be a viable build as well, come to think of it.
I decided to kick off my militaristic campaign by invading a couple of primitive worlds and let me tell you they are being extremely pissy about it.
Simply ungrateful.
You'd think those primitives would be happy to being introduced to soap or basic medicine or learning that they don't need to eat every third baby to make crops grow.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
They'll also thank you for preventing them from nuking themselves in to oblivion because one of their world leaders is petty shit weasel.
Sounds unnervingly familiar.
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
I got the rogue scientist chain at one of my observation posts in that Lithoid game and I gotta say it's a little bit bigger a leap to defensible when you're a floating crystal monster instructing a bunch of molluscs in civilized behavior out of the alleged kindness of your heart and wrongness of my policy.
Playing this for the first time, I kind of want to restart with no opposing empires. Am I missing much by doing so? It seems like there are still enemies to fight, and even races that can be uplifted.
I'm doing this right now, I call it a Precursor run - max primitives, just marauders and one fallen empire. Explore the galaxy, build all my modded megastructures, etc. I have some event mods that in this game had me raided by a extra-galactic precursor faction every few years, with its own story chain on opening a gate to their one system. They had a tough defense but I built an Attack Moon and that about took care of that.
One thing I'm not super clear on is the blue districts. They create clerk jobs, which create trade, but I also need them for housing I guess? What's the ratio of blue districts to others that I need to keep? If I have a planet with a lot of blues, can/should I do fully blue planets?
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
One thing I'm not super clear on is the blue districts. They create clerk jobs, which create trade, but I also need them for housing I guess? What's the ratio of blue districts to others that I need to keep? If I have a planet with a lot of blues, can/should I do fully blue planets?
Depends on the planet's intended purposes.
Energy and mineral worlds, well, build mostly just those districts. Most tier 2 production (consumer goods / alloys) planets probably want some mining districts in the early going so you're offsetting the later cost of your trinkets / military-industrial complex.
If you're planning to fill most of the building slots with things that produce large numbers of jobs but no housing (research and unity buildings), that's usually when you want a lot of city districts. The clerk jobs are usually more or less incidental.
I think I'm not specialising my planets enough. It seems like I should be having dedicated tier 1 planets full of my volunteer unpaid work forces and maybe like, some cops, with other planets filled with tier two buildings and plenty of housing.
I'm having real issues keeping public order high on my volunteer unpaid workforce worlds, even when I keep crime under control.
One thing I'm not super clear on is the blue districts. They create clerk jobs, which create trade, but I also need them for housing I guess? What's the ratio of blue districts to others that I need to keep? If I have a planet with a lot of blues, can/should I do fully blue planets?
My system is generally:
Do I have more than 1 open job, or more than 2 open housing spots? Don't build anything.
Do I have < 2 open jobs, and <5 open housing spots? Build housing.
Do I have > 4 open housing spots, and open/upgradable building spots? Build buildings.
Else, build districts as needed.
I don't know how interested you are in mods, but one I use is District Overhaul, which gives each planet type different kinds of districts, some of them fairly unique, which helps guide you towards specializing planets in different ways. Doesn't work well with running games though (planets will be missing some special tile types).
I think I'm not specialising my planets enough. It seems like I should be having dedicated tier 1 planets full of my volunteer unpaid work forces and maybe like, some cops, with other planets filled with tier two buildings and plenty of housing.
I'm having real issues keeping public order high on my volunteer unpaid workforce worlds, even when I keep crime under control.
Yeah, "volunteer unpaid workforce" will always cause problems with crime and stability. However, they have very low political power, i.e. their opinions are weighed very little compared to paid workers, specialists, and especially rulers when figuring out what the planet's stability is. Having some more of those on the planet might help, even if it's just a couple. You should also eventually unlock a building that will make their voice matter even less. Otherwise it's boosting amenities and potentially their living conditions to make them feel better about their volunteer work, though that obviously means more upkeep for people who are supposed to be unpaid.
I think I'm not specialising my planets enough. It seems like I should be having dedicated tier 1 planets full of my volunteer unpaid work forces and maybe like, some cops, with other planets filled with tier two buildings and plenty of housing.
I'm having real issues keeping public order high on my volunteer unpaid workforce worlds, even when I keep crime under control.
There are a lot of weird little fiddly bits that go into determining stability; I'll try to give a rundown (spoilered because long) with some summary advice at the end.
Stability is determined primarily by approval rating. Approval rating, in turn, is the average happiness of the pops on the planet, weighted by Political Power.
For happiness, a pop's baseline happiness is determined by their faction - a pop in a faction has happiness equal to the happiness of their faction, so you can make your pops happier in one of three ways:
1)adopting policies that the prominent factions in your empire like. You can see what they like/hate from the factions tab. That said, one of the most common problems for authoritarian empires is that having slaves increases your pops' attraction to egalitarian ethics, who hate everything authoritarians like and are difficult for authoritarian empires to keep happy. Which leads to:
2)try to shift your pops' ethics so they join factions that like your government and leave the ones that hate it. There are a bunch of ways to do this; anything that increases governing ethics attraction will make them slowly drift towards your empire's ethics (spiritualists get some permanent bonuses here, as do psychic races, authoritarians and xenophobes both get some edicts and relic actions, etc). For the specific problem of egalitarians popping up in a slave-owning empire, the Decadent race trait dramatically reduces a pop's odds of becoming egalitarian, so adding that to your primary race can help. You can also directly promote or suppress factions with influence. (It's worth noting that slaves cannot join factions, and as a result will have a base happiness of 50% - modified by the considerable negative penalties that come from being enslaved)
3)increase amenities. Negative amenities sharply cut happiness; excess amenities less-sharply give bonus happiness up to +20% (Your planet, by default, needs 5 Amenities+1 per pop [slaves only need .75 each], multiplied by whatever habitability penalty the planet has. The max happiness bonus comes from having double the amenities needed.) Easiest ways to boost amenities are housing buildings and Entertainer jobs (which come primarily from Holo-Theatre buildings); you also get some amenities from Clerk jobs and most Ruler-class jobs, and depending on your population situation you can sometimes get amenities by converting your slaves from Chattel Slavery to Domestic Servitude, which will cause any unemployed slaves to work as Amenity-increasing Servants. You can also pick up a few direct happiness bonuses (the easiest one to access is the Nutritional Plenitude policy under the Policies tab, which increases your pops' food consumption in exchange for bonus pop growth and happiness) but most happiness bonuses got rolled into the amenities system.
From happiness, the game calculates planetary Approval Rating by taking the average happiness of all the pops on your planet and weighting them based on their Political Power. This is one of the other big ways a slave-owning empire maintains order: You can keep Approval (and thus Stability) high even with a large number of unhappy slaves by having happy rulers and setting living standards that give the rulers large Political Power multipliers. Your main tools for adjusting political power are Living Standards, under Species Rights, and the Slave Processing Center building, which reduces the political power of slaves directly. Generally the Living Standard you want for your ruler species is Stratified Economy, although if you're Materialist, Academic Privilege is similar but carries a science bonus. For slave species, you'll usually want crappy living standards so they don't cost maintenance but if you're having stability problems setting their living standard to Decent Conditions/Social Welfare can make them happy enough to stop causing trouble (just be careful not to set your rulers to Social Welfare - it has a much smaller Political Power bonus for the upper crust). Once you've got the right living standards (and a Processing Center), you can drag Approval upwards just by generating more Ruler jobs; there aren't a TON of ways to do that, but upgrading your capital building will do it, as will building a Galactic Stock Exchange on the planet (or Noble Estates if you have the Aristocratic Elite civic, or a Bureaucratic Complex if you have the Byzantine Bureaucracy civic).
Stability then starts at 50%, and is increased or decreased by 3% for every 5% Approval Rating is above/below 50%. (IE, a 70% approval rating gives +12 stability, for 62%.). It can then be modified by Housing; there's no bonus for extra housing, but negative housing penalizes stability based on the proportion that is missing (IE, having -2 housing on a 10 pop world gives a much bigger stability penalty than the same -2 housing on a 100 pop world. The exact penalty is 40%*(missing housing/total required housing), so that 10 pop world would have an 8% stability penalty while the 100 pop world would have a .8% penalty.)
From there flat Stability bonuses get applied, which can sometimes be the easiest way to boost stability. Easy examples here are: Harmony tree finisher (+5% Stability on all planets), Psi Corps building from psionic ascension (+5% stability), Deep Space Black Site starbase building (+5% stability), having a psychic governor (+5% stability on all planets in sector), or the Police State or Aristocratic Elite civics (Police State gives a flat 5% stability, Aristocratic Elite gives your capital buildings a Noble job that comes with 5 stability and access to the building I mentioned earlier which gives a second Noble job).
It's a complicated system! In terms of simple summary advice, I'd say the Aristocratic Elite civic is the biggest Stability cure-all (You end up with a flat +10 stability on every planet with an Estate, the extra ruler job from the Estate will drag planetary Approval upward for an increase in base Stability as well, and the other thing Nobles generate is Amenities, which will also help boost the planet's happiness) but requires the largest up-front investment since it eats a Civic slot. Other than that, complete the Harmony tradition tree for +5 Stability and a reduction in Amenity consumption, make sure each planet has positive housing and enough amenities, and if you want to be a more benevolent overlord consider switching your slavery type to Domestic Servitude (which reduces the resource production of your slaves slightly in exchange for making them happier and letting you use them to generate Amenities) and/or improving their living standards (which increases their happiness in exchange for also increasing their consumer goods maintenance). Also consider building a Black Site in orbit over any planet that has a starbase, and be aware that one of the indirect perks of the Psionic ascension path is increased stability even though it doesn't explain that on the Ascension tooltip (psionic rulers increase governing ethics attraction, psionic governors increase stability, and the psi corps building increases stability and sharply curbs crime)
Did they ever fix that issue where the AI couldn't forgot how to play the game partway through? It was annoying suddenly steamrolling everyone forever.
Did they ever fix that issue where the AI couldn't forgot how to play the game partway through? It was annoying suddenly steamrolling everyone forever.
It's still a pretty janky build. I expected better from Paradox but it seems clear they diverted people to CK3 and we're getting the B-team... Who seem to have a lot of good ideas but no urgency about balance / bugfixes.
You can disable the endgame crises at the start of a new game if you want to just play the game and slowly conquer everybody without worrying about that bullshit popping up.
Red technologies increase the liklihood of other crisis. There's another crisis that will result from galactic jump drive usage, and a third that happens if you have advance synths or high synth populations in the galaxy.
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
New dev diary, focusing on the different types of federations.
While I love the fact that they're continuing to support and improve the game, it does put me in a weird position where I feel like starting a game, but then also feel like I should put it off until the next update so that I can play with those changes (then forget, move on to something else until the cycle repeats)
Red technologies increase the liklihood of other crisis. There's another crisis that will result from galactic jump drive usage, and a third that happens if you have advance synths or high synth populations in the galaxy.
Isn't the Contingency the effective default because of the techs people tend to research?
In all the time I've owned the game (read: "since release day") I've gotten the Unbidden a couple of times and the Contingency dozens; I've never gotten the Scourge. It's weird.
Posts
If I were going tall, I'd definitely consider going fanatical materialist for technocracy, since you're best bet of not getting eaten is to tech rush. I would avoid life-seeded, if you want to colonize beyond your homeworld and do so without habitats. They did a few changes recently, where it's really not worth colonize planets if the habitability is below a certain threshold (can't recall what it is off the top of my head) since the malus modifier on those pops will do a number on your resources. That same patch did help it make life seeded a bit more viable, by having it so that habitats were an unlock instead of a perk, but IMO it's a waste of civic slot; especially, if you want to have colonies beyond the homeworld that aren't habitats. Depending on how min/max you are, both syncretic evolution and mechanist can be worthwhile civics to consider. Downside is you're locked into them for the whole game and they are more of head start advantage right now, but both can be really handy if you luck out. Syncretic evolution essentially gives you a free slave species and extra pops. So you can tailor your primary species to be great at specialist stuff, while the secondary one is good at getting raw resources. Mechanists also gives free pops, but you get access to droid pops from the get go. Like Syncretic evolution, this allows for the option to tailor your biological species to specialize in something, while the droids are specialized in something else. Granted, it's been a few months since I last played and I do believe they might have done one minor patch, so they might have given some of the starter civics something to last beyond "this be a head start civic).
If you have megacorp, those are great for going tall. It's just that megacorps get different civics. They still have ethics. I always go with the civic that lets me use energy instead of alloys for my colony ships. After that, I think most of the civics are kind of meh, with some that are just garbage.
Tall empires do want to consider megastructure perk and ecumenopolis perk. Both are amazing for any empire, but they tend to be help tall empires out a ton by plastering over some of the weak points.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
If you have Utopia, you can build Habitats, which let you to essentially build additonal colonizable planets, and eventually Ringworlds (though some might consider built-from-scratch Ringworlds something that shows up too late to matter in most games, at least without some sort of ruined Megastructure you can claim to increase the odds for Mega-Engineering and then repair to qualify for the nessisary Acension Perk.) They both have unique districts: Habitats have a "planet" size of 6, but there is an Ascension Perk that raises it to 8, and the choice of districts is a residential, trade and entertainment district, plus either a mining, generator or research district if the body they're orbiting has a mineral, EC or science node, though they have no way to grow their own food other than spending building slots on Hydroponics. Ringworlds, on other hand, have residential, farming, trade/CG, and research. *Technically,* their size is 5, but each district is worth 10 of a normal district (so that farming district has 20 housing with 20 farmer jobs) though the non-residential districts take rare resources to build and maintain. If you have the Cybrex as your precursors, their homeworld is a ruined ringworld which I *think* you can eventually repair even with no DLC... at the very least, Ringworlds are a thing that exist even in the vanilla game.
There is also the Inward Perfection civic, which has you give up aggressive warfare and nearly all forms of diplomacy for some amazing buffs. Despite the "can't be removed" nature of IP, it *can* be disabled by no longer being Pacifist or Xenophobe, though you can never reclaim the civic. Classic is to go Fantic Pacifist and also pick up Agrarian Idyll, getting further production bonuses from the extra amenities your farms make, but civics that add or change ruler pops are also pretty nice. The two IP games I had the most fun with (both of which required Utopia) was a Materialist IP that reached Syth Ascension (becoming a race of robots and was building multiple Megastructures before anyone else had Battleships, and a spiritualist one where I went Psionic Ascension... without spoiling too much, there is a possible event chain with Psi Ascension that can completely overhaul your government ethics and civics... and the last time I tried, it was capable of even removing permanent civics like Inward Perfection, under conditions that, shall we say, give a very appropriate mandate to start conquering the galaxy.
Sometimes I goof around with federations and waging wars of liberation
It's helpful to think of your economy as existing in basically three 'tiers':
The first is basic resources - food, energy, and minerals. This comes mostly from unskilled labor jobs provided by planetary districts. You want enough food and energy to maintain a positive monthly balance, and then enough minerals to do your basic construction while still 'powering' the upper tiers of your economy.
The middle tier is where you refine minerals into a form that is usable for things other than building planetary districts and mining platforms: Primarily, you split them between Alloys and Consumer Goods, with some remainder converted into motes, gases, and crystals as necessary. Consumer goods are the fuel for your civilian economy (some are spent just on pop maintenance, but the majority get refined into the third tier of resources) and you want enough to maintain a positive balance, and Alloys are your military spending and you want as much as you can support - in the long run the main 'loop' of growing your economy is gathering more minerals to make more alloys to build ships (and megastructures).
The third tier is basically where you refine Consumer Goods into intangible advanced resources - primarily Research and Unity. Again, you want as much as you can afford based on your Consumer Goods production, although Unity is usually hard-limited by the fact that each planet can only support a fairly fixed number of Unity-generating jobs.
If you're having trouble balancing your economy, the most common reason is that you've overbalanced that resource pyramid and built more tier 2 and 3 jobs than your basic resource pool can support - you probably gotta scale back your science or alloy production until you've got more minerals to power that stuff with.
As mentioned, planet specialization and the Consumer Benefits trade policy can help with this (mostly by increasing basic resource outputs and reducing Consumer Goods maintenance costs).
As far as building tall, it's viable with the right map conditions but usually not as outright powerful as playing wide for the classic strategy game reason that the most basic possible resource is physical space for you to collect other resources in. Tall strategies usually want to be research-focused, and the big limitation you're going to be trying to cope with in the early and mid-game compared to a wide strategy is population growth (because growth is fundamentally multiplied by the number of colonized planets you have), so immigration is usually a big deal for them - you're probably gonna want to be friendly, secure immigration treaties, and try to maintain enough immigration pull that you can siphon the growth of other empires into your own. The Xeno-Compatibility and Arcology Project perks and the Free Haven civic help immensely with this.
If I were looking to set up a fairly straightforward 'tall' race I'd consider something like: Fanatic Materialist+Xenophile ethics, Life Seeded and either Free Haven or Technocracy civics, with race traits something like Rapid Breeders+Nonadaptive+Intelligent, angling for Xenocompatibility and Arcology Project as perks two and three. If you're struggling to get tall to work and don't want the hassle of playing wide, you can always tweak map generation - playing on a smaller map or with fewer habitable planets will generally make tall strategies relatively stronger so you can get a handle on how tall works without getting crushed by an AI with four times the planets as you.
https://discord.gg/qksjmH3
Hopefully if we try again we won't get quite so much separation and inconvenience. Apart from the authoritarian monarchist bloc @EvmaAlsar and I formed I remember it doing a great job of putting AI roadblocks between everyone when we gave Megacorps a shot.
It's like there is no ethic drift in my empire, at least until a faction has formed due to an influx of new people.
I had Xenophiles turn up immediately after signing a migration treaty in my one Lithoids game. Nothing too weird that I spotted. That's a long time to go with only 4, though.
Lithoids are designed such that they really, really want to be wide - they get a massive +50% habitability, so they can colonize every habitable planet in their space, and they eat a pop growth penalty, which needs to be offset by the extra growth you get from being on more planets.
Trying to go tall with them negates their major advantage but keeps and amplifies their drawback.
The Lithoid build I'm currently having success with is Fanatic Xenophobe/Authoritarian with Mining Guilds/Slaver Guilds/Aristocratic Elite (Meritocracy might actually be better as a third civic - haven't tried it yet) on an Industrious/Repugnant race (again, I'm currently running Very Strong in the name of maximizing mineral production, but Rapid Breeders is probably better), starting with Expansion traditions and grabbing Interstellar Dominion as the first perk.
What this does is:
1)Stack starbase influence cost reductions. These stack additively, so the -40% from Fan Xenophobe, the -20% from Interstellar Dominion, and the -10% from the Expansion tree mean you're able to snag new systems for 22 influence a pop (down to 11 influence if you can also pick up an expansionist leader). Since influence is the main limiting factor on new territory acquisition, this lets you expand out very rapidly and fill a bunch of space, in which you can colonize every available planet and start trying to outgrow the opposition.
2)Offset the pop growth penalty. Pop growth modifiers stack additively as well, which means that since you're eating a -25% growth penalty for playing Lithoids pop growth bonuses are relatively more valuable than they are for standard races (where they're already incredibly important). You don't want to get your growth from immigration, because other races eat food and part of the whole point of playing lithoids is that you can ignore food production, so you want those flat growth bonuses and Fan Xenophobe comes with a big one (plus the various growth benefits of the Expansion tree).
3)Maximize mineral production - you get a ton of stacking mineral bonuses here, because minerals and energy are the only basic resources you have to care about so getting good at them has even more value than it does for standard races. You're taking basically every multiplier available on the already-increased base production from Mining Guilds, including using Aristocratic Elite to easily maintain high stability so you get a flat bonus on the production of all resources.
From there you mostly use your large population base and extremely efficient mineral production to build as many Alloy Foundries as you can and start cranking out fleets with which to flatten your neighbors and take all their planets, too.
I tried Fanatic Militarist Very Strong rocks and was just rolling over the AI's planets with brute invasion capability quite quickly while only bothering to live on about half the available planets in my little slice of space. I think most of the AI civs actually controlled more systems.
Economy-wise our gameplan was pretty similar.
So did I, but I wonder if that had more to do with getting Xenophile pops to migrate (no idea how a new pops' ethics are chosen post 2.2) than any ethics drift.
The lack of a Materialist faction until citizen synths is in gravity defying territory though. It only takes five pops of the same ethic for there to be a chance of a faction forming, and it defies sanity that with robots on several planets and a research agreement with a Materialist empire I didn't get 5 materialist pops at the same time for nearly 170 years.
Right, but my point is if you're using Machinist to get early Robots/Droids and using them to make sure you can colonize only the best planets without caring much about habitability, you can do that with a regular non-Lithoid race and the only actionable difference is that you don't have to eat the pop growth penalty lithoids get. Even the ability to eat minerals instead of food doesn't end up mattering very much because a bunch of your pops are going to be robots that just eat energy either way. You can definitely do it, but it's unlikely to be better than doing the same thing using standard food-eating organics.
I see your point - the lithoid habitability bonus is real helpful for certain - but making the robots into dedicated specialists in something your rocks aren't good at seems viable to me. You may turn out to be right!
Xenophile migration-magnets might be a viable build as well, come to think of it.
Have you tried opening a McDonald's franchise in their capitol?
Simply ungrateful.
You'd think those primitives would be happy to being introduced to soap or basic medicine or learning that they don't need to eat every third baby to make crops grow.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Sounds unnervingly familiar.
I'm doing this right now, I call it a Precursor run - max primitives, just marauders and one fallen empire. Explore the galaxy, build all my modded megastructures, etc. I have some event mods that in this game had me raided by a extra-galactic precursor faction every few years, with its own story chain on opening a gate to their one system. They had a tough defense but I built an Attack Moon and that about took care of that.
Depends on the planet's intended purposes.
Energy and mineral worlds, well, build mostly just those districts. Most tier 2 production (consumer goods / alloys) planets probably want some mining districts in the early going so you're offsetting the later cost of your trinkets / military-industrial complex.
If you're planning to fill most of the building slots with things that produce large numbers of jobs but no housing (research and unity buildings), that's usually when you want a lot of city districts. The clerk jobs are usually more or less incidental.
I'm having real issues keeping public order high on my volunteer unpaid workforce worlds, even when I keep crime under control.
My system is generally:
Do I have more than 1 open job, or more than 2 open housing spots? Don't build anything.
Do I have < 2 open jobs, and <5 open housing spots? Build housing.
Do I have > 4 open housing spots, and open/upgradable building spots? Build buildings.
Else, build districts as needed.
I don't know how interested you are in mods, but one I use is District Overhaul, which gives each planet type different kinds of districts, some of them fairly unique, which helps guide you towards specializing planets in different ways. Doesn't work well with running games though (planets will be missing some special tile types).
Yeah, "volunteer unpaid workforce" will always cause problems with crime and stability. However, they have very low political power, i.e. their opinions are weighed very little compared to paid workers, specialists, and especially rulers when figuring out what the planet's stability is. Having some more of those on the planet might help, even if it's just a couple. You should also eventually unlock a building that will make their voice matter even less. Otherwise it's boosting amenities and potentially their living conditions to make them feel better about their volunteer work, though that obviously means more upkeep for people who are supposed to be unpaid.
There are a lot of weird little fiddly bits that go into determining stability; I'll try to give a rundown (spoilered because long) with some summary advice at the end.
For happiness, a pop's baseline happiness is determined by their faction - a pop in a faction has happiness equal to the happiness of their faction, so you can make your pops happier in one of three ways:
1)adopting policies that the prominent factions in your empire like. You can see what they like/hate from the factions tab. That said, one of the most common problems for authoritarian empires is that having slaves increases your pops' attraction to egalitarian ethics, who hate everything authoritarians like and are difficult for authoritarian empires to keep happy. Which leads to:
2)try to shift your pops' ethics so they join factions that like your government and leave the ones that hate it. There are a bunch of ways to do this; anything that increases governing ethics attraction will make them slowly drift towards your empire's ethics (spiritualists get some permanent bonuses here, as do psychic races, authoritarians and xenophobes both get some edicts and relic actions, etc). For the specific problem of egalitarians popping up in a slave-owning empire, the Decadent race trait dramatically reduces a pop's odds of becoming egalitarian, so adding that to your primary race can help. You can also directly promote or suppress factions with influence. (It's worth noting that slaves cannot join factions, and as a result will have a base happiness of 50% - modified by the considerable negative penalties that come from being enslaved)
3)increase amenities. Negative amenities sharply cut happiness; excess amenities less-sharply give bonus happiness up to +20% (Your planet, by default, needs 5 Amenities+1 per pop [slaves only need .75 each], multiplied by whatever habitability penalty the planet has. The max happiness bonus comes from having double the amenities needed.) Easiest ways to boost amenities are housing buildings and Entertainer jobs (which come primarily from Holo-Theatre buildings); you also get some amenities from Clerk jobs and most Ruler-class jobs, and depending on your population situation you can sometimes get amenities by converting your slaves from Chattel Slavery to Domestic Servitude, which will cause any unemployed slaves to work as Amenity-increasing Servants. You can also pick up a few direct happiness bonuses (the easiest one to access is the Nutritional Plenitude policy under the Policies tab, which increases your pops' food consumption in exchange for bonus pop growth and happiness) but most happiness bonuses got rolled into the amenities system.
From happiness, the game calculates planetary Approval Rating by taking the average happiness of all the pops on your planet and weighting them based on their Political Power. This is one of the other big ways a slave-owning empire maintains order: You can keep Approval (and thus Stability) high even with a large number of unhappy slaves by having happy rulers and setting living standards that give the rulers large Political Power multipliers. Your main tools for adjusting political power are Living Standards, under Species Rights, and the Slave Processing Center building, which reduces the political power of slaves directly. Generally the Living Standard you want for your ruler species is Stratified Economy, although if you're Materialist, Academic Privilege is similar but carries a science bonus. For slave species, you'll usually want crappy living standards so they don't cost maintenance but if you're having stability problems setting their living standard to Decent Conditions/Social Welfare can make them happy enough to stop causing trouble (just be careful not to set your rulers to Social Welfare - it has a much smaller Political Power bonus for the upper crust). Once you've got the right living standards (and a Processing Center), you can drag Approval upwards just by generating more Ruler jobs; there aren't a TON of ways to do that, but upgrading your capital building will do it, as will building a Galactic Stock Exchange on the planet (or Noble Estates if you have the Aristocratic Elite civic, or a Bureaucratic Complex if you have the Byzantine Bureaucracy civic).
Stability then starts at 50%, and is increased or decreased by 3% for every 5% Approval Rating is above/below 50%. (IE, a 70% approval rating gives +12 stability, for 62%.). It can then be modified by Housing; there's no bonus for extra housing, but negative housing penalizes stability based on the proportion that is missing (IE, having -2 housing on a 10 pop world gives a much bigger stability penalty than the same -2 housing on a 100 pop world. The exact penalty is 40%*(missing housing/total required housing), so that 10 pop world would have an 8% stability penalty while the 100 pop world would have a .8% penalty.)
From there flat Stability bonuses get applied, which can sometimes be the easiest way to boost stability. Easy examples here are: Harmony tree finisher (+5% Stability on all planets), Psi Corps building from psionic ascension (+5% stability), Deep Space Black Site starbase building (+5% stability), having a psychic governor (+5% stability on all planets in sector), or the Police State or Aristocratic Elite civics (Police State gives a flat 5% stability, Aristocratic Elite gives your capital buildings a Noble job that comes with 5 stability and access to the building I mentioned earlier which gives a second Noble job).
It's a complicated system! In terms of simple summary advice, I'd say the Aristocratic Elite civic is the biggest Stability cure-all (You end up with a flat +10 stability on every planet with an Estate, the extra ruler job from the Estate will drag planetary Approval upward for an increase in base Stability as well, and the other thing Nobles generate is Amenities, which will also help boost the planet's happiness) but requires the largest up-front investment since it eats a Civic slot. Other than that, complete the Harmony tradition tree for +5 Stability and a reduction in Amenity consumption, make sure each planet has positive housing and enough amenities, and if you want to be a more benevolent overlord consider switching your slavery type to Domestic Servitude (which reduces the resource production of your slaves slightly in exchange for making them happier and letting you use them to generate Amenities) and/or improving their living standards (which increases their happiness in exchange for also increasing their consumer goods maintenance). Also consider building a Black Site in orbit over any planet that has a starbase, and be aware that one of the indirect perks of the Psionic ascension path is increased stability even though it doesn't explain that on the Ascension tooltip (psionic rulers increase governing ethics attraction, psionic governors increase stability, and the psi corps building increases stability and sharply curbs crime)
New dev diary, focusing on the different types of federations.
It's still a pretty janky build. I expected better from Paradox but it seems clear they diverted people to CK3 and we're getting the B-team... Who seem to have a lot of good ideas but no urgency about balance / bugfixes.
You can disable the endgame crises at the start of a new game if you want to just play the game and slowly conquer everybody without worrying about that bullshit popping up.
Gamertag: PrimusD | Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Red technologies increase the liklihood of other crisis. There's another crisis that will result from galactic jump drive usage, and a third that happens if you have advance synths or high synth populations in the galaxy.
While I love the fact that they're continuing to support and improve the game, it does put me in a weird position where I feel like starting a game, but then also feel like I should put it off until the next update so that I can play with those changes (then forget, move on to something else until the cycle repeats)
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Isn't the Contingency the effective default because of the techs people tend to research?
In all the time I've owned the game (read: "since release day") I've gotten the Unbidden a couple of times and the Contingency dozens; I've never gotten the Scourge. It's weird.
Gamertag: PrimusD | Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar