oh man, someone on the subreddit invented a Space-Skaven build that sounds super fun to play
The rat potrait
Subterranian start
Trait: Rapid Breeder, Non adaptive, Noxious, Industrous, Weak
Civic: Authoritan, Xenophobe, Materialist
Relentless Industrialist, Mutagenic Spa (this one could be switched out for whatever you want, or Barbaric Despoiler if you don't want to waste an Ascension slot on Nihilistic Acquisition)
You start out weak but are able to colonize literally anything since Noxious+Cave Dweller from Subterrainian means 80% habitability on everything, including the Tomb World that Relentless Industrialist will turn your worlds into. Skaven don't care, Skaven will keep over-exploiting planets. Beeline for Nihilistic Acquistion Ascension. When it is opportune (neighbor in a war/just finished a war), claim a random system and declare war. Ignore that system, run your fleet to the enemy planet and use raiding stance to take pop. You are not trying to win this war, you are trying to White Peace since you don't care about the claim, just the pop, so if the situation look risky, just leave. I use a fleet of Corvette for this since they are very fast, just popping in to steal pop and then running away back inside my territory behind a bastion if the enemy force comes near me.
Set alien pop to livestock and transfer evenly to your cities. The alien pop will provide you with food and aren't really affected by being on Tomb Worlds because they are Livestocks and their happiness don't really matter, as well as not taking up slots for farming, while your Skaven happiness will shoot way up because now they have non-Noxious pop living with them. With mineral uncapped from Subterrainian, the farming slot you save by having livestock can go into either Mineral or Alloy, both uncapped, so every planet you get your hands on can be exploited to the max.
Aim for Bio ascension, nerve staple and delicious your slave, make your main species into two sub-species so you can have a Skaven with the Vat Grown trait and set all your cloning vat to that sub-species. Your population explodes in order to fill all those planets you grabbed with your 80% habitability everywhere.
I'm surprised it took until now for them to finally put a cap on reductions. If it were me designing a game, that would have gone in the moment the game started to include any mechanic that reduces costs. Don't know if 90% is the right number or if it should be lower. It really starts to break the game; especially, multiplayer games, when someone can avoid having any costs.
I mean, they have different settings to make the game work for people if they don't want to think too hard on their empire managing. Heck, if you leave iron man off, that leaves the console open to give yourself free resources and other shit.
Is it really an undermine at this point if it's a stellar empire?
For better or worse Stellaris is a multiplayer game. So when they design stuff with the idea of there being some level of resources being spent, it does really break things in multiplayer. At that point, any fixes they do to balance multiplayer are going to be fixes that end up present in solo play. Putting a cap on resources is the least disruptive solution, since again, the game is designed around the idea that you have to pay resources to maintain your empire.
Also I see no point in leaving a system broken because of solo play. When players have three options to get around having to manage resources. You have the console you can use to give your resources, give your leaders and species more traits than they would otherwise have. You can also find or make mods that remove the upkeep or let you get back to zero resource upkeep. Those first two options are perfectly viable, even if you want AI to be challenging somehow. If you don't care about the AI being challenging, there is also the new civilian mode, which I believe gives you bonus resources, which is an excellent option if you want to play empire builder.
I don't think it's fair or reasonable to expect this to go the other way around. If resources are intended to spend at some level on upkeep. I do not think it's fair to tell multiplayer communities and solo players that want to play within the design intent, that they need to either mode or forgo making certain choices, so that they stay within the design intent. That's bad game design and I'm willing to bet a majority of players do what to play the game within the constraints of intended design,,
Should Paradox add a new game mode that is pure empire building, but has AI empires present so you can get federations, vassals or have to play around still managing influence and resources to claim stuff before other empires or have to still go to ware? Absolutely because there are a number of players that do like that and they would lose nothing by spending some resources catering to that. Hell, would probably net them enough additional purchases to justify the use of those resources. Pretty much, it would be an option to turn off having the AI declare war on you, and maybe even each other. Have pre-FTL civilizations be unable to advance to FTL ones without the player advancing them there. Possible even give the player more resource output as a bonus.
I certainly get not wanting to spawn a game where you're the only normal empire and spamming the console to give your resources to claim everything before some pre-FTL doesn't become an FTL one or finding a mod that makes an empire building mode possible. I totally get it, I've played some games where the entire point was to empire build. I also get that some of that has to do with how tedious warfare in the game currently is; especially, when you start getting into wars where there are multiple empires involved because that is where warfare in this game becomes a god damn slog; especially, on larger maps.
I think the quote you're responding to was just about space skavens not being so underground anymore. Some kind of....over....mine...d, instead, perhaps?
Not to familiar with the lore for Skavens. Perhaps if they are the underground type, overmine would probably work best. Please tell me they use the lithoid ship set because that sounds like it would be the right theme. A underground type civilization opts to travel around in rocks that have been repurposed into ships.
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
Skaven are the underground boogeymen in warhammer that live in a giant subterranean tunnel complex under the entire continent and come up to the surface to engage in mischief (re horribleness) and are one of the terrors of digging or exploring underground.
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Not to familiar with the lore for Skavens. Perhaps if they are the underground type, overmine would probably work best. Please tell me they use the lithoid ship set because that sounds like it would be the right theme. A underground type civilization opts to travel around in rocks that have been repurposed into ships.
Ah good, skaven don't exist of course. Please ignore any rumors to the contrary
In space, "under" is not so much a direction as a state of mind.
I've not gotten far enough to play around with the cloaking stuff just yet, but apparently it is very possible to "pearl harbor" yourself; i.e, someone on reddit was talking about putting all of their resources into building a big old fleet of cloaky frigates, moving them into enemy territory, declaring war and immediately decloaking and blowing up their fleet. And then losing the subsequent war because they didn't have the resources to hold everything they'd taken once the target's allies showed up.
Well max primitive/pre-sapient setting on 1x habitable planets did get me lots of primitives for my exploration protocol rogue servitor, that has a remnant origin. So that was great, the down side is that it's really showing that I'll need a new computer because the pop calculation really are to a point that it's bogging my computer down.
I will say rogue servitor with the new civic is pretty rough. They might need to revisit it. I know there are a few things I could have done better in hindsight. A big one was dumping a bunch of consumer goods on the market as a monthly trade at the cap before the price starts shifting down and that would have allowed for the purchase of more minerals to get mining stations up and running. Also possible more alloys, but I did noticed that the price started ticking up at 4 alloys a month. So I don't know if they adjusted the minimum caps or if something is bugged there. Still pretty sure it would have been only slightly better.
Not sure what I could do for traits, the bots had mass-produced, efficient processors, repurposed hardware (pretty much free trait points for machines) and high-bandwidth (again, pretty much free points). Maybe I should have got with something other than efficient-processors, but that would have been a huge boost for one or two resources, when I kind of need a boost to almost everything. Traits for the trophies were traditional (only resource boost trait for biotrophies), docile (probably should have gone with something else maybe, but likely would have been meager as well), adaptive (more latitude for getting trophies on worlds where I really want a boost in resources), repugnant (free trait points since they'll never produce amenities anyways) and slow learners (free trait points, since they'll never be leaders). I didn't go with rapid breeders because usually what we get from regular pop growth is enough for a rogue servitor and that means also having to shift more pops to making sure amenities are adequate and possible to ensure the trophies don't starve, that also means more technicians to keep those things running.
Also lots of micro and the devs could fix some of that, by making it so that you can queue up things besides auto build and auto exploration, any other action will get cancelled the moment you jump. Also auto build has the annoying feature where you have to cancel it before jumping, otherwise your construction ship gets stuck on trying to auto build when it can't.
I know some were saying that archaeotech research facility will bankrupt your economy, but that really wasn't an issue for me. I had plenty of energy to keep it up and running and it probably was a major boon for letting me not fall behind on research, since with the civic you don't have the scientific method already researched. So will be interesting to see if the eager exploration civics are one way to make remnant really good. Downside was the hit to pops and the need for maintenance has really hampered my ability to get research and alloy production ramped up.
Another area where this civic probably needs some help, is that two envoys isn't enough for a civic that really encourages you to go out and successfully initiate first contact. You get a decent chunk of unity for that. So one way to offset the negatives, is once you lock down your borders and have finished up your current round of first contacts, is to jump a ship out until you find another alien empire or spaceborne "fauna." Stop once you have all your envoys occupied and then continue. This does make the GC kind of suck because once that gets going, you lose this source of unity. Also means this civic gets better on larger maps, since it'll be longer until the GC forms. The influence is nice, but the unity is even better. Granted last one only got me a little over 600 unity, so not sure if it's a set amount or scales in any ways, I might actually need more unity production (so maybe rapid breeders would have been a good option, assuming the unity gain scales with unity output). Also observation posts give you three unity, so it scales with primitives available for observation.
The new primitive stuff has been interesting, what little of it I've seen. When with aggressive observation for quicker insights and more society research and might have to scale that back on two worlds because the primitives are wising up. Both had cases where something went wrong and the research subjects didn't react well to the sensors. The first time I went for the one time society research boost option because it was the first time and a bronze age, over getting 80% blue lasers or eating a malus to society research (it wasn't clear if it was too that observation post or all society research). Second time I went for the blue laser option because it was 100% research (so free tech) and that world hit the organic singularity in the stone age and I can't help but feel it's going to turn into a devouring swarm. Oh, did I forget to mention that option vaporizes a pop. I'm not entirely sure that the organic singularity should be happening in the stone age, given that I'm not sure stone age peeps would grasp that some random ass mollusks could be used to create a computer, but whatever. As far as I can tell, the pops aren't hiveminded yet, which seems a bit odd.
Middle of the pack in year 2031, despite not really having a fleet. Way behind where I want to be on science, since I wasn't able to get my first research lab up and running until like the end of the 2010s. The Archeaotech Research Facility was a huge godsend here, since that a huge chunk of research. Slowly getting more colonies and observation posts. I'll probably hit a point where I hit critical mass and things start lining up. Still ago a number of systems to claim, that I've managed to block off from my neighbors. Not as compact as I'd like, but can't really pass up systems with colonizable worlds or that have primitives. Already research two insights and have one more envoy, even though the insights were particularly great. One was for better insults and the other is for extra damage against rivals. For the record I researched them because I wanted the additional envoy and over concerns that we might only be allowed to have one insight sticking around to be researched (this may or may not be a bug) because I noticed that when I was suppose to get my second insight research option, it didn't show up in my available tech options.
Not to familiar with the lore for Skavens. Perhaps if they are the underground type, overmine would probably work best. Please tell me they use the lithoid ship set because that sounds like it would be the right theme. A underground type civilization opts to travel around in rocks that have been repurposed into ships.
An Ork Rok is the most feared form of Ork spacecraft. A Rok was once an asteroid that has been hollowed out by Ork Mekboyz and then outfitted with Ork-made gunz, plasma engines, targeting systems and whatever other large, powerful weapons the Orks can get their green hands on.
Roks possess no Warp-Drives and so are incapable of Warp travel, instead drifting from star system to star system as the solar winds dictate.
It is common for Ork WAAAGHs! that are large enough to possess Roks to use these massive spacecraft as one-way reentry vehicles, positioning them to slam down onto the surface of a world the Orks intended to invade.
Played around with fear of the dark and payback. Also finally tried Imperial Fiefdom.
-Paybay is probably the hardest of the three. The hit to pops hurts and the blockers you have to clear out makes it sting even more. Like broken shackles and the eager explorer civics, any civic that boosts science output, like technocracy, or any traits that boost research, are going to be huge. This is also one where you're probably better off selecting a dry world and going with a trait that boosts energy output to get rid of the blockers quickly. Like eager explorers and stargazer, the incubator trait can be pretty huge at minimizing the impact of having less pops.
I'd also say it hurts that you have to build and hire a scientist. So that is going to slow down your exploration and depending on where MSI spawns, that could be a problem.
Finally, I'll say that you should avoid having the game give you a random system type spawn. You want something that has your home world within range of your system's starbase, to make the debt collectors easier to deal with because they spawn right on top of your homeworld. It's annoying and you'll definitely want to invest in a fleet.
-I couldn't get far with imperial fiefdom, even though that's from the last major expansion. It's just not fun, given how much the influence tax on expanding costs. I guess you could go with a build that gets discounted starbases so that you don't get pissed off because the game spawns you guaranteed habitable worlds next to your overlord. It's just not a particularly fun origin because of how painful it is to expand.
-Fear of the Dark is a weird origin. It can be incredibly easy to play or incredibly hard to play based both on your play style, how things spawn and build. If you tend to conquer your first neighbor and don't mind slowing things down for some free cloaking tech, it's actually going to be an easier build to play. You have a shot at getting a total war that can let you get a fair bit of free expansion. On the other hand, if you don't want to piss off all your xeno neighbors, it can be a much harder origin because those break away shits are insane and they'll do things to piss off your neighbors, at least during the early point. Not to mention, you might not find value in the cloaking techs they offer because you either have to slow other thing way down or spend influence, that you may or may not have to get those tech cards to research.
Regardless of how you play, one advantage this does bring is that FTL colony is going to produce trade value. So you do get some extra resources for that ranging from either pure energy or being a mix of energy and/or unity and CGs. Mind you, it's not a ton, but it's not nothing either. You do also get leaders that have some levels and even if you let them go, it can still be pretty useful early game or if someone croaks at an inopportune time. Downside with those leaders is that once you pick an ascension path, they start to be less valuable. Granted, maybe they get the psionic trait, but I have my doubt based on what I've seen from the game I've played and comments others have made. I know for a fact that they do not like bio ascension. I guess the fleet they build in your home system could be semi-useful.
What really hurts is the limitation on leaders. It's not too hard to pick traditions and civics to make the research option thing less of an issue; especially, once you start to tech up and can research the stuff to let you get some more alternatives. Leaders, it gets harder to expand that pool and you do notice it at times.
Still working on this origin, I opted not to kill everyone. So trying to play things out until I hit the end of the story chain and see how bonkers my empire can be with the payout, as galactic emperor. I will say this one is more interesting than Knights of the Toxic God because there is a reasonable level of choices you can make. I feel like Knights of the Toxic God has a very flawed setup. That once you understand the rewards for finishing it, there is really on one choice to be made because it's both that good and I'm pretty sure the other one can break your economy until you fix things.
One of the major Custodian features planned for the 3.8 ‘Gemini’ update is the addition of two cooperative gameplay modes. Up to five players will be able to control the same empire and work together to play the game as a team.
I'm excited by this, even if my current computer means that I can't really do co-op or multiplayer. I have a hunch that this opens the game up better for streamers to make good content with it, on top of the goals that the devs have stated.
I have a couple of friends who are intimidated by the depth of the game from the perspective of newbies. The co-op patch would be great for helping show them the ropes.
If you want an empire building only RTS I wholeheartedly recommend Offworld Trading Company. A purely economic RTS with take-that mechanics and a real time market that fluctuates with player behavior.
So current thoughts on the state of the game, by just focus on areas where there are issues.
Two issues that bog the game down and make it unplayable at times.
-The pop system: probably still the biggest issue. It's not just the source of the most lag, but also has created a scenario where some features in the game are drowned out by just how dominant pops are. I do have to wonder if the devs could further abstract things down to make pops a little more in line with other resources and further cut down the lag.
-Warfare. It's not as bad as the pop system, but my god does it get really tedious during the end game. Also tons of shit in the current system that makes no god damn sense. Declare war on someone in a federation or an overlord and you can get fun shit like: Completely occupying them, but being unable to end the war because you have occupy everyone else if you want to achieve a war goal beyond gaining a few systems. Have another empire or alliance declare war on them and be unable to end the war because you occupy 99% of they systems and that of their allies, but the new alliance occupies 1% of their territory. Be a megacorp and have to close all your branch offices before you can declare war on someone. Can only impose one war goal on one empire. Only one empire on each side gets to declare war goals. There are other things, but yeah, I've had wars in this game that have made me nuke a campaign because I just don't want to deal with it.
From this point we get into issues that don't make you nuke a game in frustration.
-Vassals are OP and way to present. This is somewhat getting fixed in the next patch because they are going to make the AI less willing to agree to being diplomatically vassalized. I'd also argue that shared burdens, feudal society and franchising shouldn't let people get unlimited vassals and that we really should have a vassal cap (I'll leave it to the devs if that should be a hard cap or just a punishing soft cap). Also incline to agree with others that vassals shouldn't be a clever way to completely bypass sprawl, nor should people get able to use vassal taxes to get ahold of the bonus resources that higher difficulty AI get.
-Federations need buffing. First issue is that if I want to develop a potential ally, I'm better off making them a vassal. Federations really should allow us to get federation holdings and build hyper relays and gateways in the territory of fellow federation members. I'd be fine if the federation holdings ate a malus, if you empire has vassals and vassals being ineligible for anyone but their overlord being able to build hyper relays and gateways in them. Honestly, if it were me. I'd probably redesign both the diplomacy and domination trees to be mutual exclusive from each other, with the former being the federation tree that let's you get the most out of federations and the domination tree be all about getting the most out of your vassals.
-Species traits and special projects to modify species. First, I hate the special project to modify species because it's so fucking tedious. Second the granular nature of species traits pretty much ensures you get a setup where you have all the traits that are worth using and then all the traits you only use if you're rping or don't know better. It's really bad design. I'd like to see more traits have pros and cons to picking them. I'd argue Lithoid and Aquatic are well designed. You have to take trade offs when you pick them that aren't granular because they are in the traits themselves.
I'd also argue that subspecies are problematic both for actually being a source of lag because the AI will create a ton and then when the game will have to do calculations on which one to grow once a new pop is generate on a world with multiple species. It also has the other issue where you are encouraged to try and tailor species to maximize output on a colony by colony level. I know it's heresy, but I do think the game might be better if served if we couldn't make subspecies or there was a hard limit on how many we could make. It would let multispecies empires retain an advantage over single species empires and would also add more value to terraforming. Also would be nice to not always feel like I should go psionic, so that I can avoid the species modification projects and being annoyed when the game decides to generate on of my defunct templates as a new pop. Finally, might mean that xenocompatibility would be a usable trait without having to massively redesign it.
-The leader system. I hate how they mostly stat sticks and I can speak from experience but the tedious scientist shuffle to get the most out of their research bonuses can add up quite a bit by year twenty. Same deal with governors, but instead of research it's savings on minerals, energy and time. I'd like to see leaders made more interesting and less tedious. I'm aware there are some civics and origins that would have to get some tweaks, but this is one I know is on the radar for the devs.
The devs are aware of the pop issue, but their "solution" was to patch in a severe pop growth dropoff after your empire hit a certain pop threshold, simply to make it harder to hit really laggy points. This can lead to a lot of pretty empty planets for large empires. It has been a player complaint for a while now.
I was here when the last pop change was done. Honestly, I think it was a good change because it does actually better reflect how real population growth works.
It partly fell through in some areas because they didn't quite adequately address the whole issue of pops being far greater than anything else, which really hoses the concept of having choices, anytime it's "get more pops" or "get something else." Also makes most things that cost pops a real nonstarter, if the game plan is to get positioned in a better spot. I want to say the racket waste processing building is like the only such thing that has an initial cost of pops that is worth taking because of how insanely good that building is. Plus, it's a one time cost to be able to get one of those on any world you need them on.
The other issue is, that I'd argue they probably are assigning somethings to be done as discrete pop calculations, that they might actually be able to abstract done into simpler calculations. Seems like faction approval and pop happiness a things they could probably take away from the individual pop calculations and make it far simpler equations. Sure it might be slightly off, but the game really isn't being well served if you get super accurate reflections of the happiness for all pops, when it's just bogging down game performance over something that probably doesn't need to be super accurate.
It doen't seem to be a story, expansion or species pack, instead adding what appears to be a massive boost to the leaders system.
The galactic council is vast and full of personality! Add Galactic Paragons to your empires and experience a new level of character and story as great leaders rise to positions of power and follow your lead to the stars. With exclusive additions to the all-new Council mechanic, leaders who you can shape to amplify the vision for your empire, new civics, and much more, Galactic Paragons will shape the future in ways the galaxy has never seen before.
Features of Galactic Paragons include*:
NEW COUNCIL MECHANICS
Assign leaders to vital positions and set agendas to steer your empire as you see fit. In Galactic Paragons, find dozens of unique council roles based on your civics and government types, and unlock additional positions as your empire evolves!
NEW DYNAMIC LEADERS
Recruit, improve, and follow the leaders of your empire through the ages! You may shape them by picking their traits, selecting their veteran class, and guide them towards their destiny, up until they retire - or perish!
MEET GALACTIC HEROES
Attract paragons of renown to your council: unique leaders with their own art, events, and stories may join your empire and bring their own benefits to your government. Or, discover four Legendary Paragons with intricate event chains and unique mechanics!
NEW TRADITIONS, CIVICS, AND MORE
A new “Under One Rule” Origin that tells the tale of the leader who founded your empire
Eight new Civics focused on leadership, from immortalizing the personalities of leaders past in digital archives to heavily optimized council selection via corporate charter
12 new Veteran Classes
Hundreds of new Leader Traits
Two new Tradition Trees, giving players new edicts and improved leaders
New ships, art, and story content
*Some features may require content sold separately
The new portraits and ship art make this feel like a replacement for a species pack, which would be a bummer since I feel like we need a Luminoids expansion before I'd feel like they got all the really important species tropes in the game. Luminoids would be energy/Light beings that primarily subsist on energy, complimenting standard organics and lithoids.
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DaimarA Million Feet Tall of AwesomeRegistered Userregular
The new portraits and ship art make this feel like a replacement for a species pack, which would be a bummer since I feel like we need a Luminoids expansion before I'd feel like they got all the really important species tropes in the game. Luminoids would be energy/Light beings that primarily subsist on energy, complimenting standard organics and lithoids.
Guess that would mean there are also dark beings who primarily subsist on the light beings.
The new portraits and ship art make this feel like a replacement for a species pack, which would be a bummer since I feel like we need a Luminoids expansion before I'd feel like they got all the really important species tropes in the game. Luminoids would be energy/Light beings that primarily subsist on energy, complimenting standard organics and lithoids.
Guess that would mean there are also dark beings who primarily subsist on the light beings.
They're already in the game, we just can't perceive them.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
Isn't one of the crisis that trope?
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Nice to see that leaders are getting a rework. Based on what they realized so far, it looks like the RNG is being cut down, leaders are being given plenty of flavor and we get to a set of traits to choose from when a leader gets enough exp to get a new one.
Also looks like mandates might be going, which is good since they are pretty poor design. "Hey, do X, when X might not be a good use of your resources." I say this because they are reworking how agendas work. Will be interesting to see how much of the leader system rework ends up being in the base game.
leaders and internal politics overhaul it looks like
Dev stated in the thread that the dlc does not cover internal politics rework. So it's not happening, unless they have a surprise for the custodian update where that's happening. It's a shame really because new leader stuff would be a prime time to do the internal politics rework. Guess we'll have to hope for that to be in the next DLC.
I mostly play Hive Minds, so I don't think this one'll be particularly relevant to me.
I would be incredibly surprised if this didn't benefit gestalt empires at all. Given that gestalt leaders work the same as normal empire leaders for everything except the rule.
All that said, I do wonder if we should expect a bit of a short drought in Stellaris content after this DLC gets released. It has been pointed out that the Arctic team played a big part in this DLC and that studio is being shutdown. This of course has people worried about the quality of the up coming DLC.
So gestalts get their own thing. Where a normal or megacorp empire starts out with 3 council positions and can increase the size by an additional three seats, if they have the DLC, which will be influenced by civics. A gestalt gets a ruler and 4 nodes of consciousness. I feel the details on it are a bit to vague. Do they start out with just the ruler and two nodes without the dlc and can expand to 5 or is that truly fixed and is it tied to the DLC? As for why they get one less, one perk is that anything on their equivalent of the council is immortal.
They've hinted that the council will work differently for democracies, given that they'll experience more turnover.
They've also reworked the governor slot. We have standard planetary governor, where their traits and level impact the planet they govern. We also have sector governors, where only their level impacts planets in the sector, but only if those planets lack a governor.
Plus, the three research focus leader slots are gone. Instead you rely on both your ruler and head of research to influence bonuses to research. So for anything election based; especially, democracies, it's going to be less annoying if a scientist gets elected, since that means your empire's research won't get disrupted. You might still get annoyed, if they were your main archeologist or primary anomaly researcher or specialized to really help out with production a world they were assisting research with.
Also all leaders will get at least 5 traits if they can level up enough, with anyone that has the DLC getting up to 10. Bit unclear if those can be increased by getting lucky with event traits. RNG isn't completely gone because we get a pool of traits to choose from when they level up and of course there are event traits, but it's going to be far less dominant than it is now. Not to mention leaders will be more powerful because we'll have less of them and we're also getting sort of a soft leader cap. They claim that this system is better suited for tall empires who can easily stay in the the confines of their leader cap, where wide is going to likely not be able to. Will be interesting if the meta ends up being that tall empires do invest more into having power leaders, while wide empires invest less on placing power on the ability of their leaders. Could be interesting.
I'm annoyed that they haven't explained negative traits to well. Can we get rid of those? Do they come at the expense of having positive traits?
We also get to choice agendas, seems to be implied that it is for all empires. There is the build up time and then we reap some massive benefits for 10 years.
Finally, we get to design our ruler at game start. Wish they had specified if it was during empire creation or literally at game start. So that's really nice. Wondering if we also get to pick the first traits of our other leaders, which is probably going to be our starting governor (unless they are doing away with that and having it be your ruler) and first scientist if we have a research ship, two if someone has one of the eager explorer civics. Granted, they could go the route they went with starbases where starting leaders that aren't rules have a cookie cutter build. I imagine that will be less awful to deal with than the starbase thing, where you almost always delete the starter starbase building because it costs more than it saves in energy. Anyways, at least for the scientist, most empires are going to want a trait geared towards exploration. You get an handful that might want their first scientist to have something for archeology.
So devs have stated in patch notes that co-op should be considered experimental for this patch and likely next patch. I know that isn't ideal, but they are stating they do want this to work and to a degree, I suspect some issues with it are going to need live testing. Given that we have several variables and they probably want to make sure that they can limit most of the unresolved issues with it down to things they can't reasonable be expected to work around. The two big categories of unreasonable expectations are people having shitty computers and ISPs being dicks.
As for the new DLC. I'd need to see what all is in the base game. I'm agree with the assessment that if you play enough non gestalt empires and don't mind some active leader management, then this is probably a must buy piece of content. If you hate managing leaders, paragons might not be the DLC for you, until they tweak the game start options to make leader management less pronounced. If you're gestalt main, and that's like all you play, this is probably content you'll want pass up on; especially, if all the node stuff is in the base game because gestalts got shafted.
Ultimately, while I agree with the game design idea of making it so that people aren't forced to buy multiple DLCs to get to a feature. We've hit a point where the Paradox really should consider folding Utopia and Synthetic Dawn into the base purchase. With Utopia being month older than 6 years and Synthetic Dawn being half a year younger than Utopia, I have doubts that Paradox is going to lose much or any money making such a move. If anything it probably stands to make them more money because once Gestalts are baseline things that people can get, that opens to the door to add more gestalt content to the game and probably means a ton of gestalt mains are going to have reason to buy new DLCs and gives the custodian team the option to make some non-gestalt heavy DLCs that gestalt mains usually skip, into something they'd might want to have for a change.
I always felt like gestalts were intentionally simpler ways to play. Like they have less content to them on purpose.
Hiveminds take away a lot of the inte-empire politics stuff, while machine intelligences do that while also removing food as a necessary resource and making your leaders not age so you replace them less.
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
edited May 2023
If I'm not mistaken, Stellaris usually does a sale on older DLCs when they release a new one. So I'm trying to get a sense of what's most "worth it" since the Federations release. I've started to get back into the game and I'm thinking maybe I'll by Galactic Paragons along with a few older items. In my head, it's a) one $20 expac, b) 1-2 race packs, and c) Galactic Paragons.
So I'm curious with those limitations, what's most worth it's between
- Nemesis
- Overlord
And I don't have First Contact either, if that's something I should consider.
If I were to get the bundle it would be ~ $85, which... maybe, but I think it's a little more than I'd like to spend right now, and it also has some stuff I don't care about.
Edit: well nevermind, they just dropped some deep discounts on a bunch of the species packs as well as Nemesis, so I think those are my go-tos.
Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
they really just need to do a DLC expansion pass subscription like they have for some of their other games, so you just pay $5 or so and get full access to everything for a month.
because outside of a Humble Bundle, there's no way I can afford all that DLC (I just have base game and the first two DLCs)
Posts
Subterranian start
Trait: Rapid Breeder, Non adaptive, Noxious, Industrous, Weak
Civic: Authoritan, Xenophobe, Materialist
Relentless Industrialist, Mutagenic Spa (this one could be switched out for whatever you want, or Barbaric Despoiler if you don't want to waste an Ascension slot on Nihilistic Acquisition)
You start out weak but are able to colonize literally anything since Noxious+Cave Dweller from Subterrainian means 80% habitability on everything, including the Tomb World that Relentless Industrialist will turn your worlds into. Skaven don't care, Skaven will keep over-exploiting planets. Beeline for Nihilistic Acquistion Ascension. When it is opportune (neighbor in a war/just finished a war), claim a random system and declare war. Ignore that system, run your fleet to the enemy planet and use raiding stance to take pop. You are not trying to win this war, you are trying to White Peace since you don't care about the claim, just the pop, so if the situation look risky, just leave. I use a fleet of Corvette for this since they are very fast, just popping in to steal pop and then running away back inside my territory behind a bastion if the enemy force comes near me.
Set alien pop to livestock and transfer evenly to your cities. The alien pop will provide you with food and aren't really affected by being on Tomb Worlds because they are Livestocks and their happiness don't really matter, as well as not taking up slots for farming, while your Skaven happiness will shoot way up because now they have non-Noxious pop living with them. With mineral uncapped from Subterrainian, the farming slot you save by having livestock can go into either Mineral or Alloy, both uncapped, so every planet you get your hands on can be exploited to the max.
Aim for Bio ascension, nerve staple and delicious your slave, make your main species into two sub-species so you can have a Skaven with the Vat Grown trait and set all your cloning vat to that sub-species. Your population explodes in order to fill all those planets you grabbed with your 80% habitability everywhere.
I mean, they have different settings to make the game work for people if they don't want to think too hard on their empire managing. Heck, if you leave iron man off, that leaves the console open to give yourself free resources and other shit.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
https://us.v-cdn.net/5018289/uploads/editor/pv/u6ds3idr69fw.png
will admit I got super lucky with planet spawns
They gon' get undermined.
Just your regular modded playthrough.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
For better or worse Stellaris is a multiplayer game. So when they design stuff with the idea of there being some level of resources being spent, it does really break things in multiplayer. At that point, any fixes they do to balance multiplayer are going to be fixes that end up present in solo play. Putting a cap on resources is the least disruptive solution, since again, the game is designed around the idea that you have to pay resources to maintain your empire.
Also I see no point in leaving a system broken because of solo play. When players have three options to get around having to manage resources. You have the console you can use to give your resources, give your leaders and species more traits than they would otherwise have. You can also find or make mods that remove the upkeep or let you get back to zero resource upkeep. Those first two options are perfectly viable, even if you want AI to be challenging somehow. If you don't care about the AI being challenging, there is also the new civilian mode, which I believe gives you bonus resources, which is an excellent option if you want to play empire builder.
I don't think it's fair or reasonable to expect this to go the other way around. If resources are intended to spend at some level on upkeep. I do not think it's fair to tell multiplayer communities and solo players that want to play within the design intent, that they need to either mode or forgo making certain choices, so that they stay within the design intent. That's bad game design and I'm willing to bet a majority of players do what to play the game within the constraints of intended design,,
Should Paradox add a new game mode that is pure empire building, but has AI empires present so you can get federations, vassals or have to play around still managing influence and resources to claim stuff before other empires or have to still go to ware? Absolutely because there are a number of players that do like that and they would lose nothing by spending some resources catering to that. Hell, would probably net them enough additional purchases to justify the use of those resources. Pretty much, it would be an option to turn off having the AI declare war on you, and maybe even each other. Have pre-FTL civilizations be unable to advance to FTL ones without the player advancing them there. Possible even give the player more resource output as a bonus.
I certainly get not wanting to spawn a game where you're the only normal empire and spamming the console to give your resources to claim everything before some pre-FTL doesn't become an FTL one or finding a mod that makes an empire building mode possible. I totally get it, I've played some games where the entire point was to empire build. I also get that some of that has to do with how tedious warfare in the game currently is; especially, when you start getting into wars where there are multiple empires involved because that is where warfare in this game becomes a god damn slog; especially, on larger maps.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Not to familiar with the lore for Skavens. Perhaps if they are the underground type, overmine would probably work best. Please tell me they use the lithoid ship set because that sounds like it would be the right theme. A underground type civilization opts to travel around in rocks that have been repurposed into ships.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Ah good, skaven don't exist of course. Please ignore any rumors to the contrary
I've not gotten far enough to play around with the cloaking stuff just yet, but apparently it is very possible to "pearl harbor" yourself; i.e, someone on reddit was talking about putting all of their resources into building a big old fleet of cloaky frigates, moving them into enemy territory, declaring war and immediately decloaking and blowing up their fleet. And then losing the subsequent war because they didn't have the resources to hold everything they'd taken once the target's allies showed up.
I will say rogue servitor with the new civic is pretty rough. They might need to revisit it. I know there are a few things I could have done better in hindsight. A big one was dumping a bunch of consumer goods on the market as a monthly trade at the cap before the price starts shifting down and that would have allowed for the purchase of more minerals to get mining stations up and running. Also possible more alloys, but I did noticed that the price started ticking up at 4 alloys a month. So I don't know if they adjusted the minimum caps or if something is bugged there. Still pretty sure it would have been only slightly better.
Not sure what I could do for traits, the bots had mass-produced, efficient processors, repurposed hardware (pretty much free trait points for machines) and high-bandwidth (again, pretty much free points). Maybe I should have got with something other than efficient-processors, but that would have been a huge boost for one or two resources, when I kind of need a boost to almost everything. Traits for the trophies were traditional (only resource boost trait for biotrophies), docile (probably should have gone with something else maybe, but likely would have been meager as well), adaptive (more latitude for getting trophies on worlds where I really want a boost in resources), repugnant (free trait points since they'll never produce amenities anyways) and slow learners (free trait points, since they'll never be leaders). I didn't go with rapid breeders because usually what we get from regular pop growth is enough for a rogue servitor and that means also having to shift more pops to making sure amenities are adequate and possible to ensure the trophies don't starve, that also means more technicians to keep those things running.
Also lots of micro and the devs could fix some of that, by making it so that you can queue up things besides auto build and auto exploration, any other action will get cancelled the moment you jump. Also auto build has the annoying feature where you have to cancel it before jumping, otherwise your construction ship gets stuck on trying to auto build when it can't.
I know some were saying that archaeotech research facility will bankrupt your economy, but that really wasn't an issue for me. I had plenty of energy to keep it up and running and it probably was a major boon for letting me not fall behind on research, since with the civic you don't have the scientific method already researched. So will be interesting to see if the eager exploration civics are one way to make remnant really good. Downside was the hit to pops and the need for maintenance has really hampered my ability to get research and alloy production ramped up.
Another area where this civic probably needs some help, is that two envoys isn't enough for a civic that really encourages you to go out and successfully initiate first contact. You get a decent chunk of unity for that. So one way to offset the negatives, is once you lock down your borders and have finished up your current round of first contacts, is to jump a ship out until you find another alien empire or spaceborne "fauna." Stop once you have all your envoys occupied and then continue. This does make the GC kind of suck because once that gets going, you lose this source of unity. Also means this civic gets better on larger maps, since it'll be longer until the GC forms. The influence is nice, but the unity is even better. Granted last one only got me a little over 600 unity, so not sure if it's a set amount or scales in any ways, I might actually need more unity production (so maybe rapid breeders would have been a good option, assuming the unity gain scales with unity output). Also observation posts give you three unity, so it scales with primitives available for observation.
The new primitive stuff has been interesting, what little of it I've seen. When with aggressive observation for quicker insights and more society research and might have to scale that back on two worlds because the primitives are wising up. Both had cases where something went wrong and the research subjects didn't react well to the sensors. The first time I went for the one time society research boost option because it was the first time and a bronze age, over getting 80% blue lasers or eating a malus to society research (it wasn't clear if it was too that observation post or all society research). Second time I went for the blue laser option because it was 100% research (so free tech) and that world hit the organic singularity in the stone age and I can't help but feel it's going to turn into a devouring swarm. Oh, did I forget to mention that option vaporizes a pop. I'm not entirely sure that the organic singularity should be happening in the stone age, given that I'm not sure stone age peeps would grasp that some random ass mollusks could be used to create a computer, but whatever. As far as I can tell, the pops aren't hiveminded yet, which seems a bit odd.
Middle of the pack in year 2031, despite not really having a fleet. Way behind where I want to be on science, since I wasn't able to get my first research lab up and running until like the end of the 2010s. The Archeaotech Research Facility was a huge godsend here, since that a huge chunk of research. Slowly getting more colonies and observation posts. I'll probably hit a point where I hit critical mass and things start lining up. Still ago a number of systems to claim, that I've managed to block off from my neighbors. Not as compact as I'd like, but can't really pass up systems with colonizable worlds or that have primitives. Already research two insights and have one more envoy, even though the insights were particularly great. One was for better insults and the other is for extra damage against rivals. For the record I researched them because I wanted the additional envoy and over concerns that we might only be allowed to have one insight sticking around to be researched (this may or may not be a bug) because I noticed that when I was suppose to get my second insight research option, it didn't show up in my available tech options.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Rok
-Paybay is probably the hardest of the three. The hit to pops hurts and the blockers you have to clear out makes it sting even more. Like broken shackles and the eager explorer civics, any civic that boosts science output, like technocracy, or any traits that boost research, are going to be huge. This is also one where you're probably better off selecting a dry world and going with a trait that boosts energy output to get rid of the blockers quickly. Like eager explorers and stargazer, the incubator trait can be pretty huge at minimizing the impact of having less pops.
I'd also say it hurts that you have to build and hire a scientist. So that is going to slow down your exploration and depending on where MSI spawns, that could be a problem.
Finally, I'll say that you should avoid having the game give you a random system type spawn. You want something that has your home world within range of your system's starbase, to make the debt collectors easier to deal with because they spawn right on top of your homeworld. It's annoying and you'll definitely want to invest in a fleet.
-I couldn't get far with imperial fiefdom, even though that's from the last major expansion. It's just not fun, given how much the influence tax on expanding costs. I guess you could go with a build that gets discounted starbases so that you don't get pissed off because the game spawns you guaranteed habitable worlds next to your overlord. It's just not a particularly fun origin because of how painful it is to expand.
-Fear of the Dark is a weird origin. It can be incredibly easy to play or incredibly hard to play based both on your play style, how things spawn and build. If you tend to conquer your first neighbor and don't mind slowing things down for some free cloaking tech, it's actually going to be an easier build to play. You have a shot at getting a total war that can let you get a fair bit of free expansion. On the other hand, if you don't want to piss off all your xeno neighbors, it can be a much harder origin because those break away shits are insane and they'll do things to piss off your neighbors, at least during the early point. Not to mention, you might not find value in the cloaking techs they offer because you either have to slow other thing way down or spend influence, that you may or may not have to get those tech cards to research.
Regardless of how you play, one advantage this does bring is that FTL colony is going to produce trade value. So you do get some extra resources for that ranging from either pure energy or being a mix of energy and/or unity and CGs. Mind you, it's not a ton, but it's not nothing either. You do also get leaders that have some levels and even if you let them go, it can still be pretty useful early game or if someone croaks at an inopportune time. Downside with those leaders is that once you pick an ascension path, they start to be less valuable. Granted, maybe they get the psionic trait, but I have my doubt based on what I've seen from the game I've played and comments others have made. I know for a fact that they do not like bio ascension. I guess the fleet they build in your home system could be semi-useful.
What really hurts is the limitation on leaders. It's not too hard to pick traditions and civics to make the research option thing less of an issue; especially, once you start to tech up and can research the stuff to let you get some more alternatives. Leaders, it gets harder to expand that pool and you do notice it at times.
Still working on this origin, I opted not to kill everyone. So trying to play things out until I hit the end of the story chain and see how bonkers my empire can be with the payout, as galactic emperor. I will say this one is more interesting than Knights of the Toxic God because there is a reasonable level of choices you can make. I feel like Knights of the Toxic God has a very flawed setup. That once you understand the rewards for finishing it, there is really on one choice to be made because it's both that good and I'm pretty sure the other one can break your economy until you fix things.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellaris-dev-diary-293-introducing-coop.1577064/
I'm excited by this, even if my current computer means that I can't really do co-op or multiplayer. I have a hunch that this opens the game up better for streamers to make good content with it, on top of the goals that the devs have stated.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Steam profile - Twitch - YouTube
Switch: SM-6352-8553-6516
A board game version would be Clans of Caledonia.
Two issues that bog the game down and make it unplayable at times.
-The pop system: probably still the biggest issue. It's not just the source of the most lag, but also has created a scenario where some features in the game are drowned out by just how dominant pops are. I do have to wonder if the devs could further abstract things down to make pops a little more in line with other resources and further cut down the lag.
-Warfare. It's not as bad as the pop system, but my god does it get really tedious during the end game. Also tons of shit in the current system that makes no god damn sense. Declare war on someone in a federation or an overlord and you can get fun shit like: Completely occupying them, but being unable to end the war because you have occupy everyone else if you want to achieve a war goal beyond gaining a few systems. Have another empire or alliance declare war on them and be unable to end the war because you occupy 99% of they systems and that of their allies, but the new alliance occupies 1% of their territory. Be a megacorp and have to close all your branch offices before you can declare war on someone. Can only impose one war goal on one empire. Only one empire on each side gets to declare war goals. There are other things, but yeah, I've had wars in this game that have made me nuke a campaign because I just don't want to deal with it.
From this point we get into issues that don't make you nuke a game in frustration.
-Vassals are OP and way to present. This is somewhat getting fixed in the next patch because they are going to make the AI less willing to agree to being diplomatically vassalized. I'd also argue that shared burdens, feudal society and franchising shouldn't let people get unlimited vassals and that we really should have a vassal cap (I'll leave it to the devs if that should be a hard cap or just a punishing soft cap). Also incline to agree with others that vassals shouldn't be a clever way to completely bypass sprawl, nor should people get able to use vassal taxes to get ahold of the bonus resources that higher difficulty AI get.
-Federations need buffing. First issue is that if I want to develop a potential ally, I'm better off making them a vassal. Federations really should allow us to get federation holdings and build hyper relays and gateways in the territory of fellow federation members. I'd be fine if the federation holdings ate a malus, if you empire has vassals and vassals being ineligible for anyone but their overlord being able to build hyper relays and gateways in them. Honestly, if it were me. I'd probably redesign both the diplomacy and domination trees to be mutual exclusive from each other, with the former being the federation tree that let's you get the most out of federations and the domination tree be all about getting the most out of your vassals.
-Species traits and special projects to modify species. First, I hate the special project to modify species because it's so fucking tedious. Second the granular nature of species traits pretty much ensures you get a setup where you have all the traits that are worth using and then all the traits you only use if you're rping or don't know better. It's really bad design. I'd like to see more traits have pros and cons to picking them. I'd argue Lithoid and Aquatic are well designed. You have to take trade offs when you pick them that aren't granular because they are in the traits themselves.
I'd also argue that subspecies are problematic both for actually being a source of lag because the AI will create a ton and then when the game will have to do calculations on which one to grow once a new pop is generate on a world with multiple species. It also has the other issue where you are encouraged to try and tailor species to maximize output on a colony by colony level. I know it's heresy, but I do think the game might be better if served if we couldn't make subspecies or there was a hard limit on how many we could make. It would let multispecies empires retain an advantage over single species empires and would also add more value to terraforming. Also would be nice to not always feel like I should go psionic, so that I can avoid the species modification projects and being annoyed when the game decides to generate on of my defunct templates as a new pop. Finally, might mean that xenocompatibility would be a usable trait without having to massively redesign it.
-The leader system. I hate how they mostly stat sticks and I can speak from experience but the tedious scientist shuffle to get the most out of their research bonuses can add up quite a bit by year twenty. Same deal with governors, but instead of research it's savings on minerals, energy and time. I'd like to see leaders made more interesting and less tedious. I'm aware there are some civics and origins that would have to get some tweaks, but this is one I know is on the radar for the devs.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
It partly fell through in some areas because they didn't quite adequately address the whole issue of pops being far greater than anything else, which really hoses the concept of having choices, anytime it's "get more pops" or "get something else." Also makes most things that cost pops a real nonstarter, if the game plan is to get positioned in a better spot. I want to say the racket waste processing building is like the only such thing that has an initial cost of pops that is worth taking because of how insanely good that building is. Plus, it's a one time cost to be able to get one of those on any world you need them on.
The other issue is, that I'd argue they probably are assigning somethings to be done as discrete pop calculations, that they might actually be able to abstract done into simpler calculations. Seems like faction approval and pop happiness a things they could probably take away from the individual pop calculations and make it far simpler equations. Sure it might be slightly off, but the game really isn't being well served if you get super accurate reflections of the happiness for all pops, when it's just bogging down game performance over something that probably doesn't need to be super accurate.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2380030/Stellaris_Galactic_Paragons/
It doen't seem to be a story, expansion or species pack, instead adding what appears to be a massive boost to the leaders system.
EDIT: Dev Diary
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellaris-dev-diary-296-announcing-galactic-paragons.1578898/
I mostly play Hive Minds, so I don't think this one'll be particularly relevant to me.
Guess that would mean there are also dark beings who primarily subsist on the light beings.
They're already in the game, we just can't perceive them.
Yeah, but as playable.
Though that reminds me we still don't have bioships yet either.
Also looks like mandates might be going, which is good since they are pretty poor design. "Hey, do X, when X might not be a good use of your resources." I say this because they are reworking how agendas work. Will be interesting to see how much of the leader system rework ends up being in the base game.
Dev stated in the thread that the dlc does not cover internal politics rework. So it's not happening, unless they have a surprise for the custodian update where that's happening. It's a shame really because new leader stuff would be a prime time to do the internal politics rework. Guess we'll have to hope for that to be in the next DLC.
I would be incredibly surprised if this didn't benefit gestalt empires at all. Given that gestalt leaders work the same as normal empire leaders for everything except the rule.
All that said, I do wonder if we should expect a bit of a short drought in Stellaris content after this DLC gets released. It has been pointed out that the Arctic team played a big part in this DLC and that studio is being shutdown. This of course has people worried about the quality of the up coming DLC.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
So gestalts get their own thing. Where a normal or megacorp empire starts out with 3 council positions and can increase the size by an additional three seats, if they have the DLC, which will be influenced by civics. A gestalt gets a ruler and 4 nodes of consciousness. I feel the details on it are a bit to vague. Do they start out with just the ruler and two nodes without the dlc and can expand to 5 or is that truly fixed and is it tied to the DLC? As for why they get one less, one perk is that anything on their equivalent of the council is immortal.
They've hinted that the council will work differently for democracies, given that they'll experience more turnover.
They've also reworked the governor slot. We have standard planetary governor, where their traits and level impact the planet they govern. We also have sector governors, where only their level impacts planets in the sector, but only if those planets lack a governor.
Plus, the three research focus leader slots are gone. Instead you rely on both your ruler and head of research to influence bonuses to research. So for anything election based; especially, democracies, it's going to be less annoying if a scientist gets elected, since that means your empire's research won't get disrupted. You might still get annoyed, if they were your main archeologist or primary anomaly researcher or specialized to really help out with production a world they were assisting research with.
Also all leaders will get at least 5 traits if they can level up enough, with anyone that has the DLC getting up to 10. Bit unclear if those can be increased by getting lucky with event traits. RNG isn't completely gone because we get a pool of traits to choose from when they level up and of course there are event traits, but it's going to be far less dominant than it is now. Not to mention leaders will be more powerful because we'll have less of them and we're also getting sort of a soft leader cap. They claim that this system is better suited for tall empires who can easily stay in the the confines of their leader cap, where wide is going to likely not be able to. Will be interesting if the meta ends up being that tall empires do invest more into having power leaders, while wide empires invest less on placing power on the ability of their leaders. Could be interesting.
I'm annoyed that they haven't explained negative traits to well. Can we get rid of those? Do they come at the expense of having positive traits?
We also get to choice agendas, seems to be implied that it is for all empires. There is the build up time and then we reap some massive benefits for 10 years.
Finally, we get to design our ruler at game start. Wish they had specified if it was during empire creation or literally at game start. So that's really nice. Wondering if we also get to pick the first traits of our other leaders, which is probably going to be our starting governor (unless they are doing away with that and having it be your ruler) and first scientist if we have a research ship, two if someone has one of the eager explorer civics. Granted, they could go the route they went with starbases where starting leaders that aren't rules have a cookie cutter build. I imagine that will be less awful to deal with than the starbase thing, where you almost always delete the starter starbase building because it costs more than it saves in energy. Anyways, at least for the scientist, most empires are going to want a trait geared towards exploration. You get an handful that might want their first scientist to have something for archeology.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
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As for the new DLC. I'd need to see what all is in the base game. I'm agree with the assessment that if you play enough non gestalt empires and don't mind some active leader management, then this is probably a must buy piece of content. If you hate managing leaders, paragons might not be the DLC for you, until they tweak the game start options to make leader management less pronounced. If you're gestalt main, and that's like all you play, this is probably content you'll want pass up on; especially, if all the node stuff is in the base game because gestalts got shafted.
Ultimately, while I agree with the game design idea of making it so that people aren't forced to buy multiple DLCs to get to a feature. We've hit a point where the Paradox really should consider folding Utopia and Synthetic Dawn into the base purchase. With Utopia being month older than 6 years and Synthetic Dawn being half a year younger than Utopia, I have doubts that Paradox is going to lose much or any money making such a move. If anything it probably stands to make them more money because once Gestalts are baseline things that people can get, that opens to the door to add more gestalt content to the game and probably means a ton of gestalt mains are going to have reason to buy new DLCs and gives the custodian team the option to make some non-gestalt heavy DLCs that gestalt mains usually skip, into something they'd might want to have for a change.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Hiveminds take away a lot of the inte-empire politics stuff, while machine intelligences do that while also removing food as a necessary resource and making your leaders not age so you replace them less.
So I'm curious with those limitations, what's most worth it's between
- Nemesis
- Overlord
Species Packs:
- Humanoids
- Plantoids
- Lithoids
- Necroids
- Aquaitics
- Toxoids
And I don't have First Contact either, if that's something I should consider.
If I were to get the bundle it would be ~ $85, which... maybe, but I think it's a little more than I'd like to spend right now, and it also has some stuff I don't care about.
Edit: well nevermind, they just dropped some deep discounts on a bunch of the species packs as well as Nemesis, so I think those are my go-tos.
because outside of a Humble Bundle, there's no way I can afford all that DLC (I just have base game and the first two DLCs)
I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to try and get into Stellaris in this day and age.