Question: Is this a good game to play coop? I play Civ6 with a friend where we team up against the deity level AI and we're looking for 4x alternatives that accommodate that kinda play. We tried AoW: Planetfall and while the combat is good, it pausing the game for everyone else completely while someone is fighting is just about a deal breaker.
My gaming group has tried a couple times to run Stellaris and it works fairly well with minimal pausing. Our main reason for removing it from the rotation of games is that we can only meet for a couple hours a week and the game keeps getting updating and breaking our save before we can get to the end game.
Question: Is this a good game to play coop? I play Civ6 with a friend where we team up against the deity level AI and we're looking for 4x alternatives that accommodate that kinda play. We tried AoW: Planetfall and while the combat is good, it pausing the game for everyone else completely while someone is fighting is just about a deal breaker.
My gaming group has tried a couple times to run Stellaris and it works fairly well with minimal pausing. Our main reason for removing it from the rotation of games is that we can only meet for a couple hours a week and the game keeps getting updating and breaking our save before we can get to the end game.
What do you usually play as an alternative then? I'd like to look into any recommendations but I have a feeling 4X Coop is pretty niche.
15 new Aquatic Portraits
1 aquatic-themed Robotic Portrait
Water themed Ship Set
Here Be Dragons Origin
Ocean Paradise Origin
Anglers Civic
Hydrocentric Ascension Perk
Aquatic Species Trait
Aquatic Advisor, inspired by high seas adventure fiction
4 Aquatic Name Lists
Some notable things
-Aquatic species trait is not attached to the portraits, so you can have land dolphins or sea lizards. I hope they roll this out for Plantoids and Lithoids, personally. It's also a zero point trait.
-Here there be dragons Origin has a semi-benevolant Ether Drake hanging around your home system.
-Aquatic Species Trait + Anglers Civic + Ocean Paradise Origin + Hydrocentic Ascension perk sounds like extremely powerful synergy in a way that other species packs have avoided.
In Endless/Humankind, you can produce it via some logically thematic structures and policies. In Stellaris, you produce Unity but have to perform all sorts of voodoo to slowly generate Influence.
In a choice between disbanding most of my military just so I can make some Rivals with Pathetic militaries to generate the influence to make a claim (or make a megastructure), or simply ending my run and saying I won, I'm considering choosing the latter.
In Endless/Humankind, you can produce it via some logically thematic structures and policies. In Stellaris, you produce Unity but have to perform all sorts of voodoo to slowly generate Influence.
In a choice between disbanding most of my military just so I can make some Rivals with Pathetic militaries to generate the influence to make a claim (or make a megastructure), or simply ending my run and saying I won, I'm considering choosing the latter.
How are you running low on influence? Do you have a million alliances and pacts?
Gaining 4-5 a month can keep both the conquest and megastructure engines humming along
In Endless/Humankind, you can produce it via some logically thematic structures and policies. In Stellaris, you produce Unity but have to perform all sorts of voodoo to slowly generate Influence.
In a choice between disbanding most of my military just so I can make some Rivals with Pathetic militaries to generate the influence to make a claim (or make a megastructure), or simply ending my run and saying I won, I'm considering choosing the latter.
How are you running low on influence? Do you have a million alliances and pacts?
Gaining 4-5 a month can keep both the conquest and megastructure engines humming along
About a few hours of posting that, the Heart of the Cards decided to spit out the tech that converts Unity into powerful Edicts. I turned on the Unity-to-Influence edict and put the trolling factions in their place.
Killing all my diplomatic contracts got my yield up to, say, 2 per month. But I think it was because I never used the Embrace Faction ability, because I had only two happy egalitarian factions with a bunch of pissed off fascists.
Realistically they've gotta be starting to run out of new species/race packs to make for Stellaris.
And still no organic race/ship pack :x
Ships I'll give you, but you may be shocked to hear that most of the existing race options are already organic.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
I'm guessing for the same reasons that many us do, right? As the system is currently designed it's really unrewarding and you're just better off not bothering. I'm hoping if we every get proper internal factions, they nuke the faction system.
Realistically they've gotta be starting to run out of new species/race packs to make for Stellaris.
And still no organic race/ship pack :x
Ships I'll give you, but you may be shocked to hear that most of the existing race options are already organic.
Yes, I understand sarcasm.
But I want a pack that lets me properly play as something like the Tyranids.
A completely biological path the way there’s a completely synthetic skin path thanks to Synthetic Dawn.
You can cobble it together with what’s there and the or that unlocks the Prethoryn ships set but you’re still firing mechanical missiles out of those ships and living in fabricated structures and making metal ring worlds.
-Loki- on
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It'd be nice, but if I had to guess I would not bet on gas giant based happening since it suddenly makes all those previously uncolonizable gas giants have a much larger gameplay impact.
Tyranids are already a thing mechanically, as devouring swarm empires+one of the crisises. If you just mean biohorror portraits and ship and city art though, yeah agreed they should add those.
I've been playing with the Production Revolution mod lately, which converts most pops into pure stats (leaving behind about 10 per planet to tie into pop-based systems like factions/genemodding/resettling etc). I tried playing a very large map and still got killed by fleet lag, but on a more modest one it actually seems to succeed at making the game playable again at large sizes - I'm currently at something like 280 'official' pops with a pop equivalent of 3k or so, and the game's still playable.
It really helps a lot, not just because of less lag, but because it makes endgame stuff actually useful again. I got the L Cluster with its ten or so terraformable worlds, which normally is pointless these days because by time you get them, the pop scaling curve means they'd take a thousand years to become productive. I'm currently overpowered to the point of not really needing them, but I could colonize them and get them running if I wanted.
The system does have a few oddities, though. I'm currently playing as a Rogue Servitor with its bio-trophy organics, but I'm pretty sure once organic pops get converted into stats they're as effective at working jobs as the robots. It's also possible for species you only get a handful of (such as by immigration or refugees) to entirely disappear into the stats and become unavailable for stuff like resettling.
I'd really like for Stellaris to take a look at implementing a system of their own along these lines. The current pop situation just seems untenable to me, either the endgame gets crippled by lag or it becomes crippled by being unable to produce pops to do stuff with, either way the endgame just isn't very enjoyable these days.
I'm guessing for the same reasons that many us do, right? As the system is currently designed it's really unrewarding and you're just better off not bothering. I'm hoping if we every get proper internal factions, they nuke the faction system.
Pretty much, there's zero penalty for making them unhappy (aside from relatively minor influence loss), little benefit from trying to please them and completely not worth sacrificing macro goals to do it. Once they spawn I'll see if there are any policies they care about that I don't, shift those if any exist and then never check them again
The one benefit of the system is that it seems like over time it shifts a lot of empires in my games towards Xenophilic, which means less likely to start shit with me.
Haven't quite done a game yet. I already see a few hotfixes we are likely to get down the line though.
-People are reporting that game will make you eat the negatives for aquatics on habitats and I kind of doubt that was intended.
-Watched Stefan Anon play a game with the dragon origin and let's say that highlights that the devs really need to do something with liquid metal because it's super easy to get a game where you have zero access to it because the AI gets the few anomalies that will spawn the nodes and never actually do the research or put in on the market. Wasn't an issue till this origin dropped and has a spot where you kind of want that resource.
I'm also betting that Anglers is going to need work because it's just bad, which is a shame. Essentially, pearl divers be such crap pretty much kills the advantages you get from Anglers and it shows that the devs didn't consider how their game works. I mean, maybe in late game it can be made to work if you have pops to spare but it's a nonremovable civic you have to get at the start and it's not pop efficient or really district efficient at the time of the game where pops and minerals are going to be your big limiter. Also your anglers really aren't efficient enough to handle having the workforce halved. Waiting for a list on what all modifies pearl diver output. If it gets bonuses from what boosts farmers, which seems doubtful, it's less awful but that doesn't help the early game. I guess an upside in that scenario would be that you don't need to burn two building slots buildings to boost CGs. If it's the stuff that benefits artificers and artisans, it's still behind. It's going to be bad if doesn't get an equivalent number of boosts; especially, if Stefan's poking is still accurate and you only get one Angler from hydroponics buildings instead of two.
I've seen a few ideas that could work. Making pearl diver a free job, in the sense that you get three jobs from your agricultural districts. That would at least mean you likely either rely on trade to cover the missing CGs or go with catalytic converters to burn all the excess food off. This also a setup that could make mastercrafters worth taking with it because I feel that civic only really works if you get all benefits (people seriously underestimate how good artificers are and as baller as the extra building slots are on industrial worlds, I don't feel it's quite enough for builds that don't need jobs producing CGs. Another route could be to let aquatics trait boost CGs output from pearl divers, which I admit isn't much and to also have it boost trade value from at least both anglers and pearl divers (would probably be better if it TV from all jobs).
I'm getting the impression that Anglers suffers the same issue we see with leader lifespan stuff. The devs are too far up their butts to admit that design isn't good and stubbornly stick with the belief that they are much better than truly are and it ends up hurting stuff that could be pretty cool, if it was so under powered.
Posts
remind me of the qax from baxter's xelee sequence
each qax was basically a collection of sentient convection cells in a swamp
so literally living turbulence
space faring too
I hope there'll be some Colossus that can instantly terraform a planet into the species' Home Planet type.
That's awesome.
Hopefully there's a portrait that's just a shark. In space.
*Happy campers* should come visit for *dancing*
My gaming group has tried a couple times to run Stellaris and it works fairly well with minimal pausing. Our main reason for removing it from the rotation of games is that we can only meet for a couple hours a week and the game keeps getting updating and breaking our save before we can get to the end game.
What do you usually play as an alternative then? I'd like to look into any recommendations but I have a feeling 4X Coop is pretty niche.
Lots of tasty info on the upcoming Aquatics pack.
Some notable things
-Aquatic species trait is not attached to the portraits, so you can have land dolphins or sea lizards. I hope they roll this out for Plantoids and Lithoids, personally. It's also a zero point trait.
-Here there be dragons Origin has a semi-benevolant Ether Drake hanging around your home system.
-Aquatic Species Trait + Anglers Civic + Ocean Paradise Origin + Hydrocentic Ascension perk sounds like extremely powerful synergy in a way that other species packs have avoided.
In Endless/Humankind, you can produce it via some logically thematic structures and policies. In Stellaris, you produce Unity but have to perform all sorts of voodoo to slowly generate Influence.
In a choice between disbanding most of my military just so I can make some Rivals with Pathetic militaries to generate the influence to make a claim (or make a megastructure), or simply ending my run and saying I won, I'm considering choosing the latter.
My latest start actually ended up a system beside the Sol system. With the humans still in the Iron Age.
Of course, this is the one time I play Fanatical Purifiers.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
How are you running low on influence? Do you have a million alliances and pacts?
Gaining 4-5 a month can keep both the conquest and megastructure engines humming along
About a few hours of posting that, the Heart of the Cards decided to spit out the tech that converts Unity into powerful Edicts. I turned on the Unity-to-Influence edict and put the trolling factions in their place.
Killing all my diplomatic contracts got my yield up to, say, 2 per month. But I think it was because I never used the Embrace Faction ability, because I had only two happy egalitarian factions with a bunch of pissed off fascists.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
And make warfare more than rock-paper-scissors.
And give you the ability to make supernations out of certain federations—ST: New Horizons has been doing that for years.
I want a lot.
And still no organic race/ship pack :x
I would have guessed they'd do a race pack for light/energy based lifeforms by now. (Photoids?)
Ships I'll give you, but you may be shocked to hear that most of the existing race options are already organic.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
I'm guessing for the same reasons that many us do, right? As the system is currently designed it's really unrewarding and you're just better off not bothering. I'm hoping if we every get proper internal factions, they nuke the faction system.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Yes, I understand sarcasm.
But I want a pack that lets me properly play as something like the Tyranids.
A completely biological path the way there’s a completely synthetic skin path thanks to Synthetic Dawn.
You can cobble it together with what’s there and the or that unlocks the Prethoryn ships set but you’re still firing mechanical missiles out of those ships and living in fabricated structures and making metal ring worlds.
Energy based and "Basically Tyranids" are the last two obvious ones I can think of.
And a species that is gas giant based.
Would be nice if that species could interact with those guys.
EDIT: Whoops, that was supposed to be an edit. Sorry for the double post.
It really helps a lot, not just because of less lag, but because it makes endgame stuff actually useful again. I got the L Cluster with its ten or so terraformable worlds, which normally is pointless these days because by time you get them, the pop scaling curve means they'd take a thousand years to become productive. I'm currently overpowered to the point of not really needing them, but I could colonize them and get them running if I wanted.
The system does have a few oddities, though. I'm currently playing as a Rogue Servitor with its bio-trophy organics, but I'm pretty sure once organic pops get converted into stats they're as effective at working jobs as the robots. It's also possible for species you only get a handful of (such as by immigration or refugees) to entirely disappear into the stats and become unavailable for stuff like resettling.
I'd really like for Stellaris to take a look at implementing a system of their own along these lines. The current pop situation just seems untenable to me, either the endgame gets crippled by lag or it becomes crippled by being unable to produce pops to do stuff with, either way the endgame just isn't very enjoyable these days.
Pretty much, there's zero penalty for making them unhappy (aside from relatively minor influence loss), little benefit from trying to please them and completely not worth sacrificing macro goals to do it. Once they spawn I'll see if there are any policies they care about that I don't, shift those if any exist and then never check them again
Probably the best trailer they've put out in ages.
-People are reporting that game will make you eat the negatives for aquatics on habitats and I kind of doubt that was intended.
-Watched Stefan Anon play a game with the dragon origin and let's say that highlights that the devs really need to do something with liquid metal because it's super easy to get a game where you have zero access to it because the AI gets the few anomalies that will spawn the nodes and never actually do the research or put in on the market. Wasn't an issue till this origin dropped and has a spot where you kind of want that resource.
I'm also betting that Anglers is going to need work because it's just bad, which is a shame. Essentially, pearl divers be such crap pretty much kills the advantages you get from Anglers and it shows that the devs didn't consider how their game works. I mean, maybe in late game it can be made to work if you have pops to spare but it's a nonremovable civic you have to get at the start and it's not pop efficient or really district efficient at the time of the game where pops and minerals are going to be your big limiter. Also your anglers really aren't efficient enough to handle having the workforce halved. Waiting for a list on what all modifies pearl diver output. If it gets bonuses from what boosts farmers, which seems doubtful, it's less awful but that doesn't help the early game. I guess an upside in that scenario would be that you don't need to burn two building slots buildings to boost CGs. If it's the stuff that benefits artificers and artisans, it's still behind. It's going to be bad if doesn't get an equivalent number of boosts; especially, if Stefan's poking is still accurate and you only get one Angler from hydroponics buildings instead of two.
I've seen a few ideas that could work. Making pearl diver a free job, in the sense that you get three jobs from your agricultural districts. That would at least mean you likely either rely on trade to cover the missing CGs or go with catalytic converters to burn all the excess food off. This also a setup that could make mastercrafters worth taking with it because I feel that civic only really works if you get all benefits (people seriously underestimate how good artificers are and as baller as the extra building slots are on industrial worlds, I don't feel it's quite enough for builds that don't need jobs producing CGs. Another route could be to let aquatics trait boost CGs output from pearl divers, which I admit isn't much and to also have it boost trade value from at least both anglers and pearl divers (would probably be better if it TV from all jobs).
I'm getting the impression that Anglers suffers the same issue we see with leader lifespan stuff. The devs are too far up their butts to admit that design isn't good and stubbornly stick with the belief that they are much better than truly are and it ends up hurting stuff that could be pretty cool, if it was so under powered.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Or would they sing nothing but?
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]