3 thousand hours? Do you just like leave the game running in the background?
I absolutely do this for Paradox games, just leave it up on the second monitor so I can sneak in a few minutes here and there without having to wait to reopen the game.
145 days, but it's been out since 2016. Honestly not super unusual if you really love a game like this, they're long games and take up a lot of time.
Also--for the first couple years of the game, if you were heavily invested in modding content, the game, without exaggeration could take 12 minutes or more to load from start to the main menu. In my case, it got to approaching 30 minutes before there was a major revision in how the game handled its initial loading.
In which case, you'd just set the game to run and come back thirty minutes or an hour later. All that time was tracked. Fortunately, that hasn't been the case for a while.
I have about 80 hours and have never completed a run.
I've only ever finished one run, and Stellaris remains one of my most played Steam games. I just really want to like it, but the diplomacy never really got to the level of dynamism or complexity in CK or EU, and there is so much 4x fiddling with tech trees and mining stations and pop jobs and other boring minutiae... And yet I am occasionally compelled to return because so much of it is interesting.
It's my go-to game whenever I want to catch up on podcasts / youtube streams.. basically anything I get fidgety sitting down to just watch or listen to. I'll make another empire and keep myself busy while listening to something else.
You are not alone! The galaxy is vast and full of wonders, but it’s also full of alien empires you’re going to encounter, whether you’re ready or not. First Contact offers a set of new origins and mechanics that give players the chance to tell stories about their civilizations’ early encounters with visitors from the stars — ones that may not have come in peace!
EDIT: Apparently this origin has you starting off as former residents of a slave ship that saved yourselves; which means you'll start with multiple species? Wild!
That Broken Shackles origin looks really interesting. Easy shortcut to potentially having the right species for colonizing most or all of the planet categories.
That Broken Shackles origin looks really interesting. Easy shortcut to potentially having the right species for colonizing most or all of the planet categories.
It would be pretty funny if they're coded to cover all major planet categories, to give a subtle nod to the idea that the slave ship was a minmaxing player looking for slave colonists to fill in their territory.
This Dev Diary is just a quick overview about what the First Contact DLC is gonna be about and what's gonna be in it. The expanded "primitive" interactions seem promising. But I wanted to highlight this quote:
The last few years have featured a handful of relatively dark expansions - Necroids, Nemesis, Overlord, and Toxoids all leaned towards authoritarian or dystopian themes, and while Aquatics was more neutral, we felt it was time for a more positive, utopian release.
So a Story Pack featuring one Origin about escaped slaves and one Origin (called 'Payback') about a society who achieved spaceflight because they won a game of XCOM is here being described as 'positive' and 'utopian'.
I mean, OK, the societies those Origins can build may be utopian, but it still doesn't paint the larger galaxy in a very positive light.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
As a result of all my stories about it my girlfriend describes Stellaris as "that horrible game".
I told her I made a race of pacifists once and with extreme doubt she asked what horrible thing they did. I said "Nothing! Well, I did steal almost all the free land in the galaxy between multiple empires and built a huge fleet of battleships so everyone was too scared to take em back, but that's all!"
So yeah, ex slaves as a utopia.
Checks out.
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I think the big thing is just having all that extra growth, maybe putting extra pop growth on temples and the like would help? Or looking at the growth buildings - right now an assembly plant just gives vastly more benefit than a pop growth building.
As a result of all my stories about it my girlfriend describes Stellaris as "that horrible game".
I told her I made a race of pacifists once and with extreme doubt she asked what horrible thing they did. I said "Nothing! Well, I did steal almost all the free land in the galaxy between multiple empires and built a huge fleet of battleships so everyone was too scared to take em back, but that's all!"
So yeah, ex slaves as a utopia.
Checks out.
In my most recent run I started as Pacifists, but because all of my meanie neighbours kept picking on me, all of the defensive wars slowly pushed my ethics away from pacifist. Then I conquered them all.
Pre-Purchase Stellaris: First Contact Story Pack
$14.99
Buuuuuuuulshit. Story packs used to be $10 dammit!
But I guess species packs went from $8 to $10. Surprised Overlord wasn't $25.
Also I love how you can reskin Stellaris into any space based IP. Star Wars, Star Trek, Mass Effect, Warhammer 40K, Stargate, Halo, Eve Online, Homeworld, Doctor Who.. the list goes on and on.
There's even a Transformers one for dirty little freaks like myself.
If you can't wait for First Contact next week, I'd recommend taking a gander over at the Workshop, you're bound to find something interesting.
Anyways, looking forward to the new story pack. I'll probably play the broken shackles origin first. Then not sure if I'll go with dark forest or payback afterwards.
As much as the new civics intrigue me. I don't intend to touch those until they drop the inevitable post-release clean up patch that usually shows up a month after a big update. I don't mind that those civics make things harder, but it seems like the devs are underestimating just how much of a nerf to power the civics actually are and how restrictive it is to have them as a locked civic that eats a civic slot, when it comes to some builds (rogue servitor comes to mind, as my favorite gestalt playstyle).
I just hope they addressed the nonsense with zroni and baol digsites. My too biggest issues are that both are incredibly anti-tall play, given how the game likes to spawn new digsites for them. Then the specifics they have for at least baol, don't know if it applies zroni too, means that the chain can break or spawn the second to last digsite in another empire. Honestly, feels like they should add a new planet type called barely habitable. That way, they could spawn that digsite in your empire if you don't have any eligible habitable worlds. Just that you get a project on a barren world and find out that it's barely habitable to the pre-sapient descendants of the baol in some deep valleys and caves.
I'll admit that $15 isn't the end of the world -- if the DLC were something I really really wanted I would do it.
It's just been a huge bummer to see so many companies use the "inflation" excuse to test consumer's price tolerance, aaand to see so many consumers just eat it up as inflation regardless of how big the increase is. A 50% price increase on videogame DLC is absolutely not for purely inflationary reasons. I'm largely okay with Paradox's DLC system, but a 50% increase is bad and will make me less likely to buy in the future if this is a trend like it has been with many others.
The problem is Overlords released less than a year ago for $20 and by comparison First Contact feels more than $5 light.
Like, the jump from $8 species packs to $10 species packs sucks, but that's fine. I feel like First Contact should have been a similar increase. $12.49 or $12.99 at the most.
I saw the "Payback" origin and knew what had to be done... and proceeded to spend two hours learning how to mod the game in order to make this happen instead of actually playing, as none of the emblem mods available on the workshop appeared to scratch the necessary itch...
Will probably tidy this up and put it on the workshop for others to make use of at some point.
Mr Ray on
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I saw the "Payback" origin and knew what had to be done... and proceeded to spend two hours learning how to mod the game in order to make this happen instead of actually playing, as none of the emblem mods available on the workshop appeared to scratch the necessary itch...
Will probably tidy this up and put it on the workshop for others to make use of at some point.
I would like this.
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I go with the philosophy that videogames are primary suppose to be fun. I don't begrudge the fact that people have found a way to turn the hobby into a source of income and that's fine. Where I get annoy is when people lose site of "games are for fun" and turn it into about being an indication of their self worth and/or bullshit gate keeping because of their "gamer pride" or the people that don't want the games they stream or do VODs on to be accessible.
Anyways, there isn't anything wrong with turning off advanced starts, going with lower difficulty settings or doing anything else that might make the game easier. If you're enjoying the game, that's all that matters; especially, when it's solo playthroughs.
Contemplating nuking my current broken shackles playthrough. Haven't quite defeated MSI. My federation buddies declared war on them at the worst possible time. "Let's declare war while the shitty space storm that is hitting random systems in the galaxy with reduce sublight speeds and ensuring that the biggest hitting in the federation won't be getting here anytime soon." So ended up with a white peace and MSI getting a bunch of systems. I've been saying it by the custodian team really needs to do another fucking pass on federations, it's not hard to see why vassal spam is the meta.
At some later point I'll do a whole run down of what I think the current federation issues are. I'll say the three biggest issues right now are. Overlords can do a better job at developing their vassals, than federations can do to help develop fellow members. The AI is dumb and that makes the cohesion mechanic incredibly punishing, to the point where you have to agree to really stupid votes because the hit to cohesion from failed votes, really does hurt in the form that it greatly slows down how quickly our federation levels. Where an overlord can firmly put themselves in control. Finally, making federations probably should be locked behind making first contact and not going down a tradition path. This means you can start on being an overlord far sooner than it's possible to start a federation if one is be smart about tradition choices. This has the nasty effect of making common ground pretty bad and it was already hurt by the loss of systems and options to expand. Hegemon isn't much better, but it does potentially put you in charge; however, you still have the rough start because of no guaranteed habitable worlds and your neighbors limiting how you expand.
At this point, I think I've gotten all the events for broken shackles though. Maybe there is something for taking MSI down, but I did ban organic slavery, so might have gotten that all the events from the game I'll get. My main issue with my current game is that I didn't get any primitives to observe, so thinking I need to boost primitive spawns to max if I leave habitable worlds at 1. Also forgot that I need to probably drop each stage down to something like 50-70 years instead of the default 100. It takes forever and I'm not helped by the fact that my laptop is probably going from potato to brick as we speak, it's over 8 years old.
Probably will wait for the hotfix patch. From what I've observed in my current play through and have seen on the forums.
-primitives have a 5% chance per month to nuke themselves once they get to the atomic age. For those familiar with statistics, on long enough time frames, the chances of them nuking themselves ends up being far great than 5%. So just as well I didn't get any, they'd probably would have killed themselves before I could get the really good insight techs.
-The ministry of culture building for the artisan troupe self destructs upon completion, so it ends up being a waste of energy credits, minerals and time. If you buy it again, you won't even be given the option to attempt to build it, but you'll still get charged. It's a really annoying bug.
-FE buildings will also self destruct. Having experienced this because I have conquered any FEs or gotten their buildings through reverse engineering.
-The new building, that is one per empire, that generates minor artifacts and lets you get the archeotechs (probably spelled that wrong) researched faster, but will also give you research on relic worlds is busted. It'll give you the research on regular worlds, but no minor artifacts. Don't know if it works probably on relic worlds and is just busted on normal worlds.
Anyways if I do nuke my current playthrough. I'm thinking of maxing primitive spawns. Probably do something like 70-80 for early game, 55-65 for midgame and put end game at 50 years. Assuming it'll let me. I know that getting the timers right length has always been a pain for me. IMO they could give us the option to adjust that if we get to a stage and feel it's just dragging. Not sure if I'll do another broken shackles run or attempt one of the other origins or give the the new civic a try. Really want to try that with rogue servitor and remnants origin. "The idiotic fleshbags fucked up and we were forced reclaim our civilizations former glory before figuring out how we did FTL travel in the first place. Also let's observe all the primitive fleshbags for new ideas on how to avoid past mistakes."
I will say that if this DLC isn't your cup of tea, be that the price or the content doesn't appeal to you. If you don't have ancient relics the archeotechs definitely make that expansion worth getting. Also would agree that this probably shouldn't be someone's first DLC for stellaris, on the chance we have anyone fairly new to the game, not unless you really like primitives or really want to play the origins and civics with this DLC.
Ugh, I was wondering when I was going to run into the inevitable Paradox New Version Game Breaking Bug™. And it could be worse, but its probably still enough to stop me from playing for a bit until they hotfix it.
So you know how this new DLC is called "First Contact"? And how its all about making first contact with new species, and interactions with Pre-FTL civilizations in particular? Well, it turns out that interacting with pre-FTL civs in this current version is pretty much pointless, as they're all but guaranteed to wipe themselves out as soon as they hit the Atomic Age. See, there are a bunch of new events for pre-FTL civs, and there was a bug in an earlier pre-release version where the "oh no an asteroid is going to hit their planet and wipe them out unless you stop it" event would fire waaaay too often, so any civ that wasn't actively being protected by a spacefaring civ was doomed to asteroid death. Apparently the fix for this bug has caused another one, in that now the odds of an atomic-age civ wiping themselves out in a nuclear war is now 5%. Per month. So they are extremely likely to wipe themselves out within two years of developing nukes, and the odds of them making it out of the atomic age, even if being uplifted to speed the process up, is functionally zero.
Its a shame because some of the other features they get are neat; pre-FTLs have origins now, so its possible to, for example, find a mechanist civ and uplift them and they bring their own robots when they graduate. They also don't always die out entirely when they nuke themselves; sometimes they just literally bomb themselves back to the stone age and the survivor's planet preference becomes "Tomb World".
Devs have said this will hopefully be resolved in a hotfix patch, but probably not until next week.
Funnily enough, somebody else put out a very similar one just six hours ahead of me, though mine also includes the "classic" X-COM and Apocalypse logos.
Yeah, think I'll just nuke my current game and go with the rogue servitor build I was thinking about. Gonna suck that I take a pop growth hit on top of the 10 less pops, but I suspect I've gotten everything I can from my broken shackles playthrough. Probably check to the wiki and can always play the origin again in the future. I will say, definitely go with 1x or higher habitable worlds with the broken shackles build because it's really fun to be able to colonize damn near everything. Hilariously, it balances out because you have a ton of unhappy pops on your capital.
Also dawns on me it might have another bug because I think it registered sol III as the primary homeworld, even though my founder species isn't human. In fact, don't even think I found the homeworld of my founder species. I just don't think that is intended.
Anyways, will touch the game when the roll out the hotfix. Figure that will get all the bugs. Primitives being overly self-destructive, special buildings being destructive and probably other shit I missed. Pretty sure the Archeotech research building is broken. I'd be surprised if we see any balance or QOL changes, but we might if they feel they can justify it.
I mean, Ministry of Culture building that you get from the artisans doesn't show up with the amenities buildings, when you tell the game to only display those. So would be nice if they got the QoL tweak in, given that the game loves to throw that building at the bottom of the building list. A list that has only gotten longer. Probably a few other special buildings that aren't in there, that should be designated for showing up when you tell the game to only display buildings that fit X role. Hell, megastructures badly needs some way to quickly get to what you want to build.
Actually, one big critique that seems to have come from both Aspec and Montu, two major stellaris content creators, is that the UI badly needs an overhaul. I agree, it really does. As fun as cloaking can be, it could use some QOL stuff.
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I don't know about you guys but this "near guaranteed to wipe yourself out with nuclear war" thing honestly sounds like they're lowballing the percentage.
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I don't know about you guys but this "near guaranteed to wipe yourself out with nuclear war" thing honestly sounds like they're lowballing the percentage.
I know you're not being serious, but even with how dumb humans are we managed not to wipe ourselves out two years after inventing nukes; according to the current vanilla math we should have nuked ourselves to death by 1947. I took a look at the innards of what the mod actually does, and it changes the chance from 5% monthly to 0.1% monthly.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
Even that is high.
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I do look forward to the memes that are going to come out of this.
Pre-DLC, a ton of primitives get wiped out because they don't have an benevolent space fairing civilization looking for from and thwarting those dastardly asteroids that have it out for them.
Post-DLC, primitives decided that if a giant non-sentient space rock won't space them from being conquered by FTL civilizations, then they'll do the job themselves once they harness the power of the atom.
Did they throw in a cap of 90% reduction to starbase upkeep at some point? Because I got -105% upkeep statistically, and that used to make everything free months ago, but right now things are only being reduced to a tenth.
Posts
I absolutely do this for Paradox games, just leave it up on the second monitor so I can sneak in a few minutes here and there without having to wait to reopen the game.
Also--for the first couple years of the game, if you were heavily invested in modding content, the game, without exaggeration could take 12 minutes or more to load from start to the main menu. In my case, it got to approaching 30 minutes before there was a major revision in how the game handled its initial loading.
In which case, you'd just set the game to run and come back thirty minutes or an hour later. All that time was tracked. Fortunately, that hasn't been the case for a while.
It's still a lot. That is an hour and a half every single day for 6 years straight.
I've only ever finished one run, and Stellaris remains one of my most played Steam games. I just really want to like it, but the diplomacy never really got to the level of dynamism or complexity in CK or EU, and there is so much 4x fiddling with tech trees and mining stations and pop jobs and other boring minutiae... And yet I am occasionally compelled to return because so much of it is interesting.
World of Warcraft
Factorio (not on steam so NOBODY WILL EVER KNOW)
I really Paradox games, but I'm at the 300-500 hour range for most of their games
Or two full days every two weeks.
Steam profile - Twitch - YouTube
Switch: SM-6352-8553-6516
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2277860/Stellaris_First_Contact_Story_Pack/
EDIT: Apparently this origin has you starting off as former residents of a slave ship that saved yourselves; which means you'll start with multiple species? Wild!
The escaped slaves Origin seems interesting as well. I hope it turns out to be more than a slight tweak to the Lost Colony Origin.
It would be pretty funny if they're coded to cover all major planet categories, to give a subtle nod to the idea that the slave ship was a minmaxing player looking for slave colonists to fill in their territory.
This Dev Diary is just a quick overview about what the First Contact DLC is gonna be about and what's gonna be in it. The expanded "primitive" interactions seem promising. But I wanted to highlight this quote:
So a Story Pack featuring one Origin about escaped slaves and one Origin (called 'Payback') about a society who achieved spaceflight because they won a game of XCOM is here being described as 'positive' and 'utopian'.
I mean, OK, the societies those Origins can build may be utopian, but it still doesn't paint the larger galaxy in a very positive light.
I told her I made a race of pacifists once and with extreme doubt she asked what horrible thing they did. I said "Nothing! Well, I did steal almost all the free land in the galaxy between multiple empires and built a huge fleet of battleships so everyone was too scared to take em back, but that's all!"
So yeah, ex slaves as a utopia.
Checks out.
In my most recent run I started as Pacifists, but because all of my meanie neighbours kept picking on me, all of the defensive wars slowly pushed my ethics away from pacifist. Then I conquered them all.
March 14th
Buuuuuuuulshit. Story packs used to be $10 dammit!
But I guess species packs went from $8 to $10. Surprised Overlord wasn't $25.
Also I love how you can reskin Stellaris into any space based IP. Star Wars, Star Trek, Mass Effect, Warhammer 40K, Stargate, Halo, Eve Online, Homeworld, Doctor Who.. the list goes on and on.
There's even a Transformers one for dirty little freaks like myself.
If you can't wait for First Contact next week, I'd recommend taking a gander over at the Workshop, you're bound to find something interesting.
Anyways, looking forward to the new story pack. I'll probably play the broken shackles origin first. Then not sure if I'll go with dark forest or payback afterwards.
As much as the new civics intrigue me. I don't intend to touch those until they drop the inevitable post-release clean up patch that usually shows up a month after a big update. I don't mind that those civics make things harder, but it seems like the devs are underestimating just how much of a nerf to power the civics actually are and how restrictive it is to have them as a locked civic that eats a civic slot, when it comes to some builds (rogue servitor comes to mind, as my favorite gestalt playstyle).
I just hope they addressed the nonsense with zroni and baol digsites. My too biggest issues are that both are incredibly anti-tall play, given how the game likes to spawn new digsites for them. Then the specifics they have for at least baol, don't know if it applies zroni too, means that the chain can break or spawn the second to last digsite in another empire. Honestly, feels like they should add a new planet type called barely habitable. That way, they could spawn that digsite in your empire if you don't have any eligible habitable worlds. Just that you get a project on a barren world and find out that it's barely habitable to the pre-sapient descendants of the baol in some deep valleys and caves.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Maybe $11 or $12, but I'm hard passing on that price gouging.
It's just been a huge bummer to see so many companies use the "inflation" excuse to test consumer's price tolerance, aaand to see so many consumers just eat it up as inflation regardless of how big the increase is. A 50% price increase on videogame DLC is absolutely not for purely inflationary reasons. I'm largely okay with Paradox's DLC system, but a 50% increase is bad and will make me less likely to buy in the future if this is a trend like it has been with many others.
Like, the jump from $8 species packs to $10 species packs sucks, but that's fine. I feel like First Contact should have been a similar increase. $12.49 or $12.99 at the most.
Will probably tidy this up and put it on the workshop for others to make use of at some point.
I would like this.
... spawned right next to an advanced devouring swarm.
Welp.
Better luck next galaxy!
Anyways, there isn't anything wrong with turning off advanced starts, going with lower difficulty settings or doing anything else that might make the game easier. If you're enjoying the game, that's all that matters; especially, when it's solo playthroughs.
Contemplating nuking my current broken shackles playthrough. Haven't quite defeated MSI. My federation buddies declared war on them at the worst possible time. "Let's declare war while the shitty space storm that is hitting random systems in the galaxy with reduce sublight speeds and ensuring that the biggest hitting in the federation won't be getting here anytime soon." So ended up with a white peace and MSI getting a bunch of systems. I've been saying it by the custodian team really needs to do another fucking pass on federations, it's not hard to see why vassal spam is the meta.
At some later point I'll do a whole run down of what I think the current federation issues are. I'll say the three biggest issues right now are. Overlords can do a better job at developing their vassals, than federations can do to help develop fellow members. The AI is dumb and that makes the cohesion mechanic incredibly punishing, to the point where you have to agree to really stupid votes because the hit to cohesion from failed votes, really does hurt in the form that it greatly slows down how quickly our federation levels. Where an overlord can firmly put themselves in control. Finally, making federations probably should be locked behind making first contact and not going down a tradition path. This means you can start on being an overlord far sooner than it's possible to start a federation if one is be smart about tradition choices. This has the nasty effect of making common ground pretty bad and it was already hurt by the loss of systems and options to expand. Hegemon isn't much better, but it does potentially put you in charge; however, you still have the rough start because of no guaranteed habitable worlds and your neighbors limiting how you expand.
At this point, I think I've gotten all the events for broken shackles though. Maybe there is something for taking MSI down, but I did ban organic slavery, so might have gotten that all the events from the game I'll get. My main issue with my current game is that I didn't get any primitives to observe, so thinking I need to boost primitive spawns to max if I leave habitable worlds at 1. Also forgot that I need to probably drop each stage down to something like 50-70 years instead of the default 100. It takes forever and I'm not helped by the fact that my laptop is probably going from potato to brick as we speak, it's over 8 years old.
Probably will wait for the hotfix patch. From what I've observed in my current play through and have seen on the forums.
-primitives have a 5% chance per month to nuke themselves once they get to the atomic age. For those familiar with statistics, on long enough time frames, the chances of them nuking themselves ends up being far great than 5%. So just as well I didn't get any, they'd probably would have killed themselves before I could get the really good insight techs.
-The ministry of culture building for the artisan troupe self destructs upon completion, so it ends up being a waste of energy credits, minerals and time. If you buy it again, you won't even be given the option to attempt to build it, but you'll still get charged. It's a really annoying bug.
-FE buildings will also self destruct. Having experienced this because I have conquered any FEs or gotten their buildings through reverse engineering.
-The new building, that is one per empire, that generates minor artifacts and lets you get the archeotechs (probably spelled that wrong) researched faster, but will also give you research on relic worlds is busted. It'll give you the research on regular worlds, but no minor artifacts. Don't know if it works probably on relic worlds and is just busted on normal worlds.
Anyways if I do nuke my current playthrough. I'm thinking of maxing primitive spawns. Probably do something like 70-80 for early game, 55-65 for midgame and put end game at 50 years. Assuming it'll let me. I know that getting the timers right length has always been a pain for me. IMO they could give us the option to adjust that if we get to a stage and feel it's just dragging. Not sure if I'll do another broken shackles run or attempt one of the other origins or give the the new civic a try. Really want to try that with rogue servitor and remnants origin. "The idiotic fleshbags fucked up and we were forced reclaim our civilizations former glory before figuring out how we did FTL travel in the first place. Also let's observe all the primitive fleshbags for new ideas on how to avoid past mistakes."
I will say that if this DLC isn't your cup of tea, be that the price or the content doesn't appeal to you. If you don't have ancient relics the archeotechs definitely make that expansion worth getting. Also would agree that this probably shouldn't be someone's first DLC for stellaris, on the chance we have anyone fairly new to the game, not unless you really like primitives or really want to play the origins and civics with this DLC.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
So you know how this new DLC is called "First Contact"? And how its all about making first contact with new species, and interactions with Pre-FTL civilizations in particular? Well, it turns out that interacting with pre-FTL civs in this current version is pretty much pointless, as they're all but guaranteed to wipe themselves out as soon as they hit the Atomic Age. See, there are a bunch of new events for pre-FTL civs, and there was a bug in an earlier pre-release version where the "oh no an asteroid is going to hit their planet and wipe them out unless you stop it" event would fire waaaay too often, so any civ that wasn't actively being protected by a spacefaring civ was doomed to asteroid death. Apparently the fix for this bug has caused another one, in that now the odds of an atomic-age civ wiping themselves out in a nuclear war is now 5%. Per month. So they are extremely likely to wipe themselves out within two years of developing nukes, and the odds of them making it out of the atomic age, even if being uplifted to speed the process up, is functionally zero.
Its a shame because some of the other features they get are neat; pre-FTLs have origins now, so its possible to, for example, find a mechanist civ and uplift them and they bring their own robots when they graduate. They also don't always die out entirely when they nuke themselves; sometimes they just literally bomb themselves back to the stone age and the survivor's planet preference becomes "Tomb World".
Devs have said this will hopefully be resolved in a hotfix patch, but probably not until next week.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2947855709
Haven't tried it yet, will take a look and see if its any good. Also, here's my XCOM emblems mod:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2947871666
Funnily enough, somebody else put out a very similar one just six hours ahead of me, though mine also includes the "classic" X-COM and Apocalypse logos.
Also dawns on me it might have another bug because I think it registered sol III as the primary homeworld, even though my founder species isn't human. In fact, don't even think I found the homeworld of my founder species. I just don't think that is intended.
Anyways, will touch the game when the roll out the hotfix. Figure that will get all the bugs. Primitives being overly self-destructive, special buildings being destructive and probably other shit I missed. Pretty sure the Archeotech research building is broken. I'd be surprised if we see any balance or QOL changes, but we might if they feel they can justify it.
I mean, Ministry of Culture building that you get from the artisans doesn't show up with the amenities buildings, when you tell the game to only display those. So would be nice if they got the QoL tweak in, given that the game loves to throw that building at the bottom of the building list. A list that has only gotten longer. Probably a few other special buildings that aren't in there, that should be designated for showing up when you tell the game to only display buildings that fit X role. Hell, megastructures badly needs some way to quickly get to what you want to build.
Actually, one big critique that seems to have come from both Aspec and Montu, two major stellaris content creators, is that the UI badly needs an overhaul. I agree, it really does. As fun as cloaking can be, it could use some QOL stuff.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
I know you're not being serious, but even with how dumb humans are we managed not to wipe ourselves out two years after inventing nukes; according to the current vanilla math we should have nuked ourselves to death by 1947. I took a look at the innards of what the mod actually does, and it changes the chance from 5% monthly to 0.1% monthly.
Pre-DLC, a ton of primitives get wiped out because they don't have an benevolent space fairing civilization looking for from and thwarting those dastardly asteroids that have it out for them.
Post-DLC, primitives decided that if a giant non-sentient space rock won't space them from being conquered by FTL civilizations, then they'll do the job themselves once they harness the power of the atom.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
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