There are a like one or two empire start chains that can greatly increase the chance of getting a specific crisis. One of those is for the unbidden. Otherwise, yeah, eyeballs tend to be like cockroaches and you'll often get an infestation of them more often than not.
Other things to be mindful of.
-There is a rare chance of getting a war in heaven crisis, where two fallen empires awaken and go to war with each other. This not considered the end game crisis can pop right before the end game crises pops. I know some of them will straight up ignore the crisis because they are narrow minded assholes.
-Khan is considered a mid game crisis. I think through either mods or playing with the slider, you can get it to pop during a war in heaven and during an end game crisis (you know if you want everything to go to shit in the galaxy all at once).
-There is something called the L-Gates, you need the distant stars dlc, but one potential outcome if you open the L-Gate has it's own unofficial end game crisis. This is another you can get rolling with everything else that will pop. Fun fact, this is the most common outcome with the L-Gate and no one can win the game when it's ongoing.
-Psionics also has a means to start a crisis that doesn't count as the end game crisis. I won't disclose more, since some probably don't want the spoiler.
I'm wondering when they'll take a page from surviving mars and include the means to pop certain end game crisis.
I don't think the Scourge crisis is very well designed tbh. Like right now I'm pretty sure I could beat it, but it's just going to take a really long time of gradually wearing them down and then waiting for my fleets to repair. That's not a ton of fun.
I don't think the Scourge crisis is very well designed tbh. Like right now I'm pretty sure I could beat it, but it's just going to take a really long time of gradually wearing them down and then waiting for my fleets to repair. That's not a ton of fun.
The Scourge has always appeared too close to me for me to be able to survive anything.
Ugh, I'm stuck in that mood where I want to play more Stellaris but just want to wait for the next DLC to drop first.
The biggest issue with the end-game crises has always been the AI's inability to rally against them in a satisfying manner.
If it just feels like you're the one grinding them down all on your own, they become an insurmountable chore. If it's you on your front making a dive for the heart of it while the other empires are slowly gaining or losing ground on their own sides of the galaxy, it really fits much better.
The War in Heaven crisis is straight up broken right now. It results in 2-3 sides (the 2 FEs and Neutrals), and it won't end until every planet belonging to two of the factions is conquered by the third. And I don't mean just the FE planets. Every planet for every empire. I had to give up a game because, even though I could have won eventually, I actually had no desire to either spend all that time doing it, or actually managing the entire galaxy after I did. Since then I limit my games to 1 FE.
Honestly, the tendency for Late game Stellaris to degenerate into fleet balls slapping each other is part of why I stopped playing.
My go-to stratergy was having fleets of Corvettes, and fleets of battleships with the odd Titan in them. The Corvettes had a mix of plasma and autocannons and would jump in first, tangling fleets up and soaking fire. Then the battleships landed in system, and they were specced for artillery/long range with XL bow cannons and the ilk. (Like literally, the AI's mixed fleets cannot deal with with this approach - they'll get stuck trying to fight the corvettes, at which point they will be ripped apart by the artillery fire. the only real threat was having a fleet jump in ontop of the battleships, and that was easy enough to avoid with scouting, or even rescue thanks to Corvette fleets being absolute monsters in close quarters)
Because of some of the bizarre and unexplained systems in teh game (Fleets can only move as slow as their slowest members when travelling, etc) it was the best strategy i found. And at that point, i could just beat anything in the game, and i dunno - turning up the numerical bonuses the ai gets has never felt "Fun" to me. I wan the enemy ai to well, have personalities - it dosent have to be optimal, it just has to create engaging situations. There's the bones of that in the different personalities, but frankly against a human player all of that seems to blend into mush.
The War in Heaven crisis is straight up broken right now. It results in 2-3 sides (the 2 FEs and Neutrals), and it won't end until every planet belonging to two of the factions is conquered by the third. And I don't mean just the FE planets. Every planet for every empire. I had to give up a game because, even though I could have won eventually, I actually had no desire to either spend all that time doing it, or actually managing the entire galaxy after I did. Since then I limit my games to 1 FE.
Ah Stellaris, a game that I love, but also a game that is one patch/DLC/expansion away from greatness (or in some cases just basic functionality).
I think it's pretty great now up to the endgame. It's a shame because a lot of the fun technologies (terraforming! gene modification! giant ships! megastructures!) are late game but the late game itself is pretty weak. I finally beat the scourge on my second game but it was just a slog of constantly pushing them back and fighting system to system.
I've been playing with 4 opposing Empires for a nice mix, but I see now why having higher numbers would be a lot of fun, because it would force you to work with less territory. Controlling half of the galaxy in the late game is, again, kind of a slog.
I think it's pretty great now up to the endgame. It's a shame because a lot of the fun technologies (terraforming! gene modification! giant ships! megastructures!) are late game but the late game itself is pretty weak. I finally beat the scourge on my second game but it was just a slog of constantly pushing them back and fighting system to system.
I've been playing with 4 opposing Empires for a nice mix, but I see now why having higher numbers would be a lot of fun, because it would force you to work with less territory. Controlling half of the galaxy in the late game is, again, kind of a slog.
They've been working a bit to bring some of the good stuff at the end to show up sooner; Used to be Habitats and all Megastructures required Ascension Perks. Now all but three of the Megastructures come up as research.
Random tech tree hampers it a bit though. It *is* possible, for example, to pick an Ascension Path for your second perk without banking the slot or deliberately not keeping up on unity, but it takes knowing factors influence the prerequisite tech's chances of appearing, and even then some luck.
I think it's pretty great now up to the endgame. It's a shame because a lot of the fun technologies (terraforming! gene modification! giant ships! megastructures!) are late game but the late game itself is pretty weak. I finally beat the scourge on my second game but it was just a slog of constantly pushing them back and fighting system to system.
I've been playing with 4 opposing Empires for a nice mix, but I see now why having higher numbers would be a lot of fun, because it would force you to work with less territory. Controlling half of the galaxy in the late game is, again, kind of a slog.
I've played with maps so large (possibly modded, I forget) that it actually allowed for there to be essentially 2-3 different games running at the same time - I could claim dominance over my sector, but other powers got to become big dogs in their quarters of the galaxy. Unfortunately, late game code does not handle huge populations kindly when it comes to processing times.
Yeah, I have a pretty beefy computer and and it’s chugging real good at the end game.
I haven't played at beyond a Medium sized galaxy for a while just for the sake of performance. Maybe I should try a Large one and see how my upgrades handle it.
From people on the official forums doing deep dives into the code, you can apparently limit late game slow down by not having empty jobs. It seems that the jobs will regularily check the pops rather than the other way around? So an empty job spot will check every single pop in your empire to see if it's eligible to fill it every tick.
(Bit of a backwards way to code that to me, but I'm not a programmer, so eh.)
Which means if you keep a reasonable margin of unemployment and only build as you need to, never letting jobs stay empty for long, it should run much better. Can't do anything about AI empires, but the player empire tends to be the biggest anyway.
Someone earlier this week actually figured out the mystery of what has been causing late-game slowdown.
And I know, you're thinking "duh, it's pops" but it isn't: They've proven this with a save that had 185k pops and a fraction of the slowdown you would normally see.
What it is, is Open Jobs. Apparently when there is an open job the game *constantly* checks to see if there is a pop available, and does it in a very intensive way, but if there are no open jobs on a planet, it barely bothers checking pops and jobs at all. It's faster in the beginning of the game not because there are fewer pops, but because there are so few open jobs, both because of the low number of colonized planets and because the player and the AI have to build their buildings/districts "just in time" to make sure there aren't too many open jobs in critical resources. By the late game however, when you have the "buffer" of dozens of clerks jobs, you start queuing several buildings/districts at once to reduce micro, and the AI in its own way does the same thing, causing dozens of planets to each check on what are likely hundreds of jobs on a daily basis to see if this is the day there is a pop to fill them.
I guess what this means is the ideal way to play is with a single planet and lots of fleets, ready to wipe out all the other empires before they get big enough to start slowing the game down.
Yeah, I have a pretty beefy computer and and it’s chugging real good at the end game.
I haven't played at beyond a Medium sized galaxy for a while just for the sake of performance. Maybe I should try a Large one and see how my upgrades handle it.
I have a pretty beefy machine (built last year) and even then on a large map it'll start moving like molasses in the lategame.
I guess what this means is the ideal way to play is with a single planet and lots of fleets, ready to wipe out all the other empires before they get big enough to start slowing the game down.
The jobs system continues to be the fix that no one was asking for.
I don't know how the old system worked, but I'd definitely say that when running an empire that uses a lot of unpaid labour it required a lot of micro and I ended up with a lot of specialist level jobs going unfilled.
I don't know how the old system worked, but I'd definitely say that when running an empire that uses a lot of unpaid labour it required a lot of micro and I ended up with a lot of specialist level jobs going unfilled.
The old system was more abstracted. You had a tile system for the planet where you put down buildings, and a population system where people filled the jobs in those buildings.
The problem was that the AI couldn't play it. So, the player would have a finely tuned empire by midgame while the AI (and your independent system governors) would just never develop anything.
Someone earlier this week actually figured out the mystery of what has been causing late-game slowdown.
And I know, you're thinking "duh, it's pops" but it isn't: They've proven this with a save that had 185k pops and a fraction of the slowdown you would normally see.
What it is, is Open Jobs. Apparently when there is an open job the game *constantly* checks to see if there is a pop available, and does it in a very intensive way, but if there are no open jobs on a planet, it barely bothers checking pops and jobs at all. It's faster in the beginning of the game not because there are fewer pops, but because there are so few open jobs, both because of the low number of colonized planets and because the player and the AI have to build their buildings/districts "just in time" to make sure there aren't too many open jobs in critical resources. By the late game however, when you have the "buffer" of dozens of clerks jobs, you start queuing several buildings/districts at once to reduce micro, and the AI in its own way does the same thing, causing dozens of planets to each check on what are likely hundreds of jobs on a daily basis to see if this is the day there is a pop to fill them.
Honestly, if that's what's causing the horrific slowdown late game, I'd take the earlier system. I don't get the impression that AI are workforce managing geniuses now, and running from +100 to -100 resource income on a month to month basis without building anything or deliberately accruing more expenses gets annoying after a hundred years.
I sort of like the "flavor" added by all the different job "types" now, but it's not as though you couldn't accomplish this with tiles either.
It's probably harder than it sounds (as it always is), but couldn't they move away from a daily check of open jobs vs. checking against things/events that change employment availability? Or at least reduce the frequency?
e: ok the latter would likely be undesirable as it would result in temp unemployment that makes for bad design (unresponsiveness).
Someone earlier this week actually figured out the mystery of what has been causing late-game slowdown.
And I know, you're thinking "duh, it's pops" but it isn't: They've proven this with a save that had 185k pops and a fraction of the slowdown you would normally see.
What it is, is Open Jobs. Apparently when there is an open job the game *constantly* checks to see if there is a pop available, and does it in a very intensive way, but if there are no open jobs on a planet, it barely bothers checking pops and jobs at all. It's faster in the beginning of the game not because there are fewer pops, but because there are so few open jobs, both because of the low number of colonized planets and because the player and the AI have to build their buildings/districts "just in time" to make sure there aren't too many open jobs in critical resources. By the late game however, when you have the "buffer" of dozens of clerks jobs, you start queuing several buildings/districts at once to reduce micro, and the AI in its own way does the same thing, causing dozens of planets to each check on what are likely hundreds of jobs on a daily basis to see if this is the day there is a pop to fill them.
Honestly, if that's what's causing the horrific slowdown late game, I'd take the earlier system. I don't get the impression that AI are workforce managing geniuses now, and running from +100 to -100 resource income on a month to month basis without building anything or deliberately accruing more expenses gets annoying after a hundred years.
I sort of like the "flavor" added by all the different job "types" now, but it's not as though you couldn't accomplish this with tiles either.
The +/- 100 thing I think comes from a combination of being required to maintain minimum stockpiles of a resource, but is prevented from using the Galactic Market to fix it as often as it could (probably to keep prices from crashing/skyrocketing) so their only recourse is mass layoffs to save on a resource. I'm guessing it's saving, I've observed this behavior a lot via Megacorp branch offices, and it's always a specialist job that gets sacked en mass. Normally artisans, which makes since because the AI always uses wealth generation for their trade policy and therefore likely always need more CG than they have the rare crystals for.
If I'm right, then "just" going back to tiles and keeping everything else wouldn't change that.
It's also not why the AI has so many free jobs to slow down the game, or at least the only reason. Rather it seems to be that the AI tends to use new building slots as soon at it's available and they've allocated the minerals for it, and doesn't seem to check if there is anyone that can work whatever job said building creates (at least beyond "Will this cause an economic death spiral because there is noone at the mines?") So you get a lot of "empty" buildings with dozens of available jobs with noone to fill them.
If it's slowdown that needs fixing, then all that really needs to happen is reducing job checks to be monthly/only occur on a pop change, tweak the AI to not build so far ahead of itself, and probably rework unemployed specialists/rulers to not refuse to work. I know I've seen at least one person talking about a mod that address these things.
You could probably find a mod that removes space fluff, if you don't want to deal with it. My experience playing around with different maps is that tiny & small galaxy size are probably going to give you the quickest games. Medium isn't too bad. It's large and huge that can become massive slogs. I also want to say that as far as speed goes, the three largest map sizes tend to start to slow down around the same time. So for performance considerations, the three largest sizes are pretty much the same performance.
I'll suggest though that probably one of the easier ways to improve performance is limit the guaranteed habitable world to one and probably drop the number of habitable planets that spawn to the low side of things. Also turn down primitive civilization count. Pops are the biggest contributor to lag and IMO, a galaxy shitting out tons of habitable worlds isn't all that interesting to play in really. Only reason to even have a ton of primitive civilizations is because you want to either play alien invader or asshole aliens playing god with the primitives (this may or may not result in you getting stuck with the xenophobic or fanatical purifier upstarts that need to be smacked down).
From the paradox forum post Gnosis made about vacant jobs causing all the lag rather than the pops themselves:
Stellaris Immortal is a mod which drastically reduces buildings/districts/jobs/pops and increases pop scale, among other things (practically everything requiring alloys to build, adding pollution to planets) Still a work in progress but the author has updated it just this morning and seems to still be hard at work, I'm going to try a new game with it and report back, but Gnosis suggests that playing with this mod and keeping your empire vacant job-free, it'd be viable to play huge galaxy maps.
Caveat from the mod page:
WARNINGS
- This mod is not compatible with anything except interface mods.
- Gestalt empires are not yet playable with this mod.
- Primitives and fallen empires are not yet working properly either.
- Updates to this mod will almost certainly break your saves. We will update irregularly to minimize this, but it might happen. Keep an eye out for an update schedule that we'll hopefully put up so you aren't surprised.
- Trade collection and protection range is currently 0 on starbases. This is a temporary situation until the final design is implemented.
EDIT: Looks like they're rolling out another update for that mod today!
The next update will be on:
Friday, November 8th before 2:00pm CST.
Will it break saves? Yes
Features
- Plantoids will have their own special mechanics like Lithoids.
- Plantoids don't have a food upkeep, but they take a 40% habitability penalty everywhere but their homeworld.
- Farmers and Custodians with hydroponics farms produce habitability and pop growth instead of food.
- Four new plantoid traits.
- Two new advanced traits. One is only for lithoids and plantoids.
- All planets get a modifier based on the stars they orbit that impacts their habitability and food growth. The combination of planet type and sun will affect how ideal that world is.
- New planet modifiers added and modifier generation tweaked.
- Terraforming generates ecology and weather effects. It also debuffs the world temporarily.
- Terraforming tech unlocks geoengineering decisions to reduce and remove certain planet modifiers.
- New blockers that harm the environment when removed.
- New techs that improve custodian jobs. Maintenance buildings moved to these techs.
- Hive Minds partially implemented. Way more coming for them.
- Performance increases from job calculations.
- Improved and optimized pop migration.
- More AI improvements, including increased aggressiveness.
- Many tweaks and bugfixes, including fixes for the gaia blocker world.
I also noticed that the AI stops building fleets at a certain point in the game. If I have a pitched battle and wipe out an empire's whole fleet in the mid game, they never rebuild it. I'm guessing this is partly due to them not being able to effectively put together infrastructure.
I also noticed that the AI stops building fleets at a certain point in the game. If I have a pitched battle and wipe out an empire's whole fleet in the mid game, they never rebuild it. I'm guessing this is partly due to them not being able to effectively put together infrastructure.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that goes back to the resource base and, well, not cheating. Because with my own (probably inferior) gameplay style, pretty much every war is a long one and the AI seems to have no problem replacing fleet after fleet after fleet (though unwisely, they don't tend to hold them back and merge them, though I guess that let's them be more flexible) up to a point.
I prefer that over the AI spontaneously generating fleet stacks, as you'll sometimes see in Total War games. Economics and industry are a warfront as well. It's just too bad the AI isn't good at managing them after a certain point (and I haven't seen much improvement after so many system revisions).
It must be incredibly difficult to design an AI for this kind of complex game. It seems even harder than other Paradox games because Stellaris has so much latitude to expand and make choices and develop, and how well you do that determines the effectiveness of your empire
Games like ck2 instead tend to have established powers with more constricted choices for development (though the diplomacy is, so far, much deeper and more meaningful in those games).
Are there any comparable 4x games with actually strong AI?
Posts
https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Crisis
Other things to be mindful of.
-There is a rare chance of getting a war in heaven crisis, where two fallen empires awaken and go to war with each other. This not considered the end game crisis can pop right before the end game crises pops. I know some of them will straight up ignore the crisis because they are narrow minded assholes.
-Khan is considered a mid game crisis. I think through either mods or playing with the slider, you can get it to pop during a war in heaven and during an end game crisis (you know if you want everything to go to shit in the galaxy all at once).
-There is something called the L-Gates, you need the distant stars dlc, but one potential outcome if you open the L-Gate has it's own unofficial end game crisis. This is another you can get rolling with everything else that will pop. Fun fact, this is the most common outcome with the L-Gate and no one can win the game when it's ongoing.
-Psionics also has a means to start a crisis that doesn't count as the end game crisis. I won't disclose more, since some probably don't want the spoiler.
I'm wondering when they'll take a page from surviving mars and include the means to pop certain end game crisis.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
The Scourge has always appeared too close to me for me to be able to survive anything.
Ugh, I'm stuck in that mood where I want to play more Stellaris but just want to wait for the next DLC to drop first.
Gamertag: PrimusD | Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
If it just feels like you're the one grinding them down all on your own, they become an insurmountable chore. If it's you on your front making a dive for the heart of it while the other empires are slowly gaining or losing ground on their own sides of the galaxy, it really fits much better.
Agreeed.
Honestly, the tendency for Late game Stellaris to degenerate into fleet balls slapping each other is part of why I stopped playing.
My go-to stratergy was having fleets of Corvettes, and fleets of battleships with the odd Titan in them. The Corvettes had a mix of plasma and autocannons and would jump in first, tangling fleets up and soaking fire. Then the battleships landed in system, and they were specced for artillery/long range with XL bow cannons and the ilk. (Like literally, the AI's mixed fleets cannot deal with with this approach - they'll get stuck trying to fight the corvettes, at which point they will be ripped apart by the artillery fire. the only real threat was having a fleet jump in ontop of the battleships, and that was easy enough to avoid with scouting, or even rescue thanks to Corvette fleets being absolute monsters in close quarters)
Because of some of the bizarre and unexplained systems in teh game (Fleets can only move as slow as their slowest members when travelling, etc) it was the best strategy i found. And at that point, i could just beat anything in the game, and i dunno - turning up the numerical bonuses the ai gets has never felt "Fun" to me. I wan the enemy ai to well, have personalities - it dosent have to be optimal, it just has to create engaging situations. There's the bones of that in the different personalities, but frankly against a human player all of that seems to blend into mush.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
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Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Ah Stellaris, a game that I love, but also a game that is one patch/DLC/expansion away from greatness (or in some cases just basic functionality).
Steam: CavilatRest
I've been playing with 4 opposing Empires for a nice mix, but I see now why having higher numbers would be a lot of fun, because it would force you to work with less territory. Controlling half of the galaxy in the late game is, again, kind of a slog.
They've been working a bit to bring some of the good stuff at the end to show up sooner; Used to be Habitats and all Megastructures required Ascension Perks. Now all but three of the Megastructures come up as research.
Random tech tree hampers it a bit though. It *is* possible, for example, to pick an Ascension Path for your second perk without banking the slot or deliberately not keeping up on unity, but it takes knowing factors influence the prerequisite tech's chances of appearing, and even then some luck.
I've played with maps so large (possibly modded, I forget) that it actually allowed for there to be essentially 2-3 different games running at the same time - I could claim dominance over my sector, but other powers got to become big dogs in their quarters of the galaxy. Unfortunately, late game code does not handle huge populations kindly when it comes to processing times.
I haven't played at beyond a Medium sized galaxy for a while just for the sake of performance. Maybe I should try a Large one and see how my upgrades handle it.
Gamertag: PrimusD | Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
(Bit of a backwards way to code that to me, but I'm not a programmer, so eh.)
Which means if you keep a reasonable margin of unemployment and only build as you need to, never letting jobs stay empty for long, it should run much better. Can't do anything about AI empires, but the player empire tends to be the biggest anyway.
And I know, you're thinking "duh, it's pops" but it isn't: They've proven this with a save that had 185k pops and a fraction of the slowdown you would normally see.
What it is, is Open Jobs. Apparently when there is an open job the game *constantly* checks to see if there is a pop available, and does it in a very intensive way, but if there are no open jobs on a planet, it barely bothers checking pops and jobs at all. It's faster in the beginning of the game not because there are fewer pops, but because there are so few open jobs, both because of the low number of colonized planets and because the player and the AI have to build their buildings/districts "just in time" to make sure there aren't too many open jobs in critical resources. By the late game however, when you have the "buffer" of dozens of clerks jobs, you start queuing several buildings/districts at once to reduce micro, and the AI in its own way does the same thing, causing dozens of planets to each check on what are likely hundreds of jobs on a daily basis to see if this is the day there is a pop to fill them.
I have a pretty beefy machine (built last year) and even then on a large map it'll start moving like molasses in the lategame.
The jobs system continues to be the fix that no one was asking for.
Steam: CavilatRest
The old system was more abstracted. You had a tile system for the planet where you put down buildings, and a population system where people filled the jobs in those buildings.
The problem was that the AI couldn't play it. So, the player would have a finely tuned empire by midgame while the AI (and your independent system governors) would just never develop anything.
Honestly, if that's what's causing the horrific slowdown late game, I'd take the earlier system. I don't get the impression that AI are workforce managing geniuses now, and running from +100 to -100 resource income on a month to month basis without building anything or deliberately accruing more expenses gets annoying after a hundred years.
I sort of like the "flavor" added by all the different job "types" now, but it's not as though you couldn't accomplish this with tiles either.
e: ok the latter would likely be undesirable as it would result in temp unemployment that makes for bad design (unresponsiveness).
Steam: CavilatRest
The +/- 100 thing I think comes from a combination of being required to maintain minimum stockpiles of a resource, but is prevented from using the Galactic Market to fix it as often as it could (probably to keep prices from crashing/skyrocketing) so their only recourse is mass layoffs to save on a resource. I'm guessing it's saving, I've observed this behavior a lot via Megacorp branch offices, and it's always a specialist job that gets sacked en mass. Normally artisans, which makes since because the AI always uses wealth generation for their trade policy and therefore likely always need more CG than they have the rare crystals for.
If I'm right, then "just" going back to tiles and keeping everything else wouldn't change that.
It's also not why the AI has so many free jobs to slow down the game, or at least the only reason. Rather it seems to be that the AI tends to use new building slots as soon at it's available and they've allocated the minerals for it, and doesn't seem to check if there is anyone that can work whatever job said building creates (at least beyond "Will this cause an economic death spiral because there is noone at the mines?") So you get a lot of "empty" buildings with dozens of available jobs with noone to fill them.
If it's slowdown that needs fixing, then all that really needs to happen is reducing job checks to be monthly/only occur on a pop change, tweak the AI to not build so far ahead of itself, and probably rework unemployed specialists/rulers to not refuse to work. I know I've seen at least one person talking about a mod that address these things.
Going through these details is the most excited I've been for an update yet.
Super fun game, time for a break from it though I think.
I'll suggest though that probably one of the easier ways to improve performance is limit the guaranteed habitable world to one and probably drop the number of habitable planets that spawn to the low side of things. Also turn down primitive civilization count. Pops are the biggest contributor to lag and IMO, a galaxy shitting out tons of habitable worlds isn't all that interesting to play in really. Only reason to even have a ton of primitive civilizations is because you want to either play alien invader or asshole aliens playing god with the primitives (this may or may not result in you getting stuck with the xenophobic or fanatical purifier upstarts that need to be smacked down).
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Stellaris Immortal is a mod which drastically reduces buildings/districts/jobs/pops and increases pop scale, among other things (practically everything requiring alloys to build, adding pollution to planets) Still a work in progress but the author has updated it just this morning and seems to still be hard at work, I'm going to try a new game with it and report back, but Gnosis suggests that playing with this mod and keeping your empire vacant job-free, it'd be viable to play huge galaxy maps.
Caveat from the mod page:
EDIT: Looks like they're rolling out another update for that mod today!
Steam profile - Twitch - YouTube
Switch: SM-6352-8553-6516
afaik it's always been a thing in galaxy generation
Steam profile - Twitch - YouTube
Switch: SM-6352-8553-6516
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that goes back to the resource base and, well, not cheating. Because with my own (probably inferior) gameplay style, pretty much every war is a long one and the AI seems to have no problem replacing fleet after fleet after fleet (though unwisely, they don't tend to hold them back and merge them, though I guess that let's them be more flexible) up to a point.
I prefer that over the AI spontaneously generating fleet stacks, as you'll sometimes see in Total War games. Economics and industry are a warfront as well. It's just too bad the AI isn't good at managing them after a certain point (and I haven't seen much improvement after so many system revisions).
Games like ck2 instead tend to have established powers with more constricted choices for development (though the diplomacy is, so far, much deeper and more meaningful in those games).
Are there any comparable 4x games with actually strong AI?