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Stellaris |OT| Imperium Universalis
- Thread starter More_Badass
- Start date
Yeah Waldetoft (@composerandreas) composed 5 new songs including a new main menu theme.
One Foul Note
Member
Well, first new thing I stumble onto is this pirate colony with a bloody 7k army patrolling it. It's pretty wild.
Some of the new one really got even more similar to the vibe that Space Rangers 2 OST had, so really Waldetoft is really a wonderful composer
LurkerPrime
Member
So I've decided to go full militaristic xenophobe to see how far warmongering can get me. Turns out I started beside a fanatic xenophobe with an advanced start; just great.
And just as they're peacefully expanding beside my border (taking a system on the edge of my territory)
DAMMIT
This is going to be a rough one.
And just as they're peacefully expanding beside my border (taking a system on the edge of my territory)
pirates boop my exploration fleet. Then they ask if I want to become a protectorate.
DAMMIT
This is going to be a rough one.
super-famicom
Member
Just got home from work, time for Stellaris now!
LurkerPrime
Member
If you haven't played Heinlein yet, the biggest change to adapt to right off the bat is how much stronger roving fleets are. Gone are the days of a dozen corvettes dominating the known galaxy.
Had to disable 90% of my appearance mods in order to get it working, but it's been fun so far. They murdered hyperspace travel by taking away the in gravity-well warp, though.
Yep.
Yep.
Ship mods will probably be fine. Biggest changes are to weapons really.
Surprisingly enough, they and most of my portrait mods were fucked.
What broke?
I've not had a chance to look my standalones due to travel, but the rest of the New Horizons team are only talking about weapons as being broken.
I hear there are some new flags that technology entries can accept now which look like a great opportunity...
Not useless. Just not "pwn everything".
GrandHarrier
Member
They are what they should have always been; disposable fodder attack craft. I've been building mixed fleets and most battles the Corvettes soak up most of my losses and I just rebuild them. The fact that they will auto travel to the fleet to reinforce is a fucking godsend too.
super-famicom
Member
I played a few hours last night. There are quite a few pirate bases in nearby systems but no enclaves at all. Since I'm a Fanatic Materialist/Collectivist, I am rushing tech like mad and everyone around me is far far behind. I had. An event where I found this AI sphere in the Gargantua black hole and helped it with research, so now I have a sentient AI giving me 5% research speed.
But with an 1100 navy (destroyers and corvettes) I couldn't beat a 695 pirate fleet and its 152 base. Took me too attempts to finally beat one. I was running UV lasers and point defense. Maybe kinetics would have been better. A second pirate fleet also proved daunting, but I had just formed a federation and my ally took care of them for me before I had fully recovered.
But with an 1100 navy (destroyers and corvettes) I couldn't beat a 695 pirate fleet and its 152 base. Took me too attempts to finally beat one. I was running UV lasers and point defense. Maybe kinetics would have been better. A second pirate fleet also proved daunting, but I had just formed a federation and my ally took care of them for me before I had fully recovered.
Well, I started with all my 50 mods(mostly appearance related) on except for the beautiful battles one because of how the game changes how that works now anyway. When the game started breaking everytime I'd click on the ship appearance option in the civ maker, I started turning off ship mods one by one till they were all gone. I know for sure the custom race: The Pallid(which added both portraits and ships) mod was broken because it was the last one I turned off when it started breaking. After posting last night I tried looking into which mods specifically didn't work or work, and I didn't get through the whole list but your ship appearance mod, the ones that add in star wars ships, and the ones that add in minor faction(pirates, fallen empire) ships seems to work(or at least not cause it to crash immediately). Several others do not.
Pretty much every Mass Effect portrait mod broke the appearance section in a not game crashing way: only the mass effect portraits would appear in their race slot and all other portraits were unselectable.
Also worth noting that most appearance mods seem to make the new "cuties" portraits disappear for some weird reason even if they otherwise work.
So I just bought this game, and learning the ins and outs.
Is there anyway I can just automate science ships so they do surveys with minimal input from me? I kinda find it annoying having to split my attention between building up my empire, fleets and managing science ships.
Is there anyway I can just automate science ships so they do surveys with minimal input from me? I kinda find it annoying having to split my attention between building up my empire, fleets and managing science ships.
There's a tech for that now. Note the grayed out button on your science ships. Personally I just queue up a bunch of destinations.
Lister
Banned
As mentioned above, just queue up system scans by holding shift. The only time you need to fiddle is when/if they run into hostiles.
So I usually open up by having my military ships in passive mode and having them check out all nearby systems. this way I know which systems to avoid because of hostiles, and I know which ones to focus on for expansion when I do start sending out my science ships.
Hippo_PRIME
Member
So I think I encountered a weird bug last night. Went to bombard an AI controlled world, mopped up their fleets no problem. Landed my armies, occupied the planet, all was good. Fleet strength of around 2k (fairly early game). The AI sends in Transport Fleets and engages my fleet. The Transport Fleets are literally 24, not 24k but 24. Fight starts, I don't even stay to watch. Fight ends, but soon, I realize my fleet is rapidly losing ships. In a panic, focus back to my fleet and there are what appear to be little torpedoes/missiles that were originally fired by the Transport Fleets still hitting my ships.
There were no other Transports around, my fleet wasn't in combat, but these little missiles wouldn't stop spawning and party quickly, my 2k fleet was down to 300. Anyone else see anything like this?
There were no other Transports around, my fleet wasn't in combat, but these little missiles wouldn't stop spawning and party quickly, my 2k fleet was down to 300. Anyone else see anything like this?
Use destroyers as the backbone of your army, not corvettes. The latter only useful as auxiliary and disposable unit since they literally melt against anything. I converted 10 of my corvettes into 5 destroyers and my fleet performed much better.
EDIT:
I can defeat Ether Dragon just fine with my 25k fleet, but Stellar Devourer is a whole different level, holy shit.
Lister
Banned
I have the same issue with the plantoid name set. I tried verifying cache and removing all mods. No go. Haven't seen the issue anywhere else though.
LurkerPrime
Member
Pretty sure the string names are just bugs. They'll probably get hotfixed in a bit.
Like, I've seen a handful, mostly plantoid- or opinion-related.
(Edit: I should note: I haven't used any mods.)
Like, I've seen a handful, mostly plantoid- or opinion-related.
(Edit: I should note: I haven't used any mods.)
Probably one of your mods. I had that problem after putting in a namelist mod.
Making a quality of life option a research tech is ridiculously stupid. What were they thinking?
TheVoidDragon
Member
Early-game you don't really need to automate it, it makes sense to have it something you get mid-game when surveying becomes a problem due to how many systems/how big your empire is.
How would you feel about queuing commands being a researchable tech? Maybe you start with a queue of 1 and gradually expand it up to like 10 by midgame? Sound reasonable?
TheVoidDragon
Member
That's not really the same situation. Queuing commands is something that's just to make things more convenient; it's a quality of life addition to make something in the game a bit simpler without having a direct impact on that thing. Surveying systems though is part of the actual gameplay. If you just had the ability to automate it immediately you'd pretty much be making surveying entirely forgettable from the players perspective right away. Mid game when it becomes very difficult to do because of the huge amount of systems and the size of your empire (and therefore distances science ships have to go are pretty big) it's something that becomes more feasible to allow. Actually choosing survey locations becomes less important later on in a way, it becomes more just "survey everything because we can".
Besides, you can already queue up several systems to survey which does a similar thing to automating it, can't you?
LurkerPrime
Member
Why would you want to automate it to begin with? It would stumble into a pirate lair or somesuch in no time and be destroyed, in my experience.
It does strike me as weird that exploration automation is a tech. I don't find it downright offensive or anything, but it just seems incongruous with the rest of the game; or at least, my expectations for such a game.
It does strike me as weird that exploration automation is a tech. I don't find it downright offensive or anything, but it just seems incongruous with the rest of the game; or at least, my expectations for such a game.
It's literally the same thing. Having to queue up a bunch of systems every so often is a huge pain, especially because you have to redo it if they meet any hostiles. Calling bullshit busywork actual gameplay does encapsulate the current state of Stellaris' gameplay pretty well though, it is entirely forgettable.
Here's my argument why Paradox decided to keep such quality of life improvement as a mid game feature.
During early game, you ain't doing much. You only have one system, one planet, and limited resources. Every research even if you lucky enough to get three streaks of genius need 2 years to complete. What do you do then in the meantime? Only staring at the screen with choosing which tile in you capital planet that needs to be cleared while try keeping just enough resources for your fist colony ship.
Manual exploration is a part of gameplay flow in early game to make it less boringfest. While you can queue your exploration path right of the bat, it at least still need more of your input than just single button click. It what makes you occupied with the game besides planning the expansion of your empire, and dealing with anomaly events.
As your empire grew, you got more things that can occupy your attention. Dealing with other empire, exterminating hostile fleets, building improvement of your colonies, and of course choosing the right next tech to be researched. With most of your time used for empire managing, exploration tend to be forgotten when they need to be done manually. At this point though, depending on your playstyle you might want to continue or just focusing yourself on empire managing. Automatic exploration play it big part here if you're keen to continue exploring the galaxy.
Then there's this other gameplay mechanic that might be a hinder if automatic exploration available from the start: FTL. There are 3 different FTL in this game and each will affect on how you build your empire. During early game you might want to explore radially so you have bigger potential room for expansion. In my case as I'm using warp drives as FTL method, automatic exploration wouldn't be much different since my exploration would ended up being radial and I still can control where I want to expand by placing wormhole station. But what happened if you use hyperdrive? What could happened if your science ship just exploring down straight a narrow path instead of opening as much as possible room that surrounding your growing empire? The same could be said to warp dive FTL as well. While I don't know how automatic exploration would behave to warp drive and hyperdrive FTL, I believe it become a consideration why Paradox decides to make automatic exploration a mid game feature rather than general quality of life improvement.
During early game, you ain't doing much. You only have one system, one planet, and limited resources. Every research even if you lucky enough to get three streaks of genius need 2 years to complete. What do you do then in the meantime? Only staring at the screen with choosing which tile in you capital planet that needs to be cleared while try keeping just enough resources for your fist colony ship.
Manual exploration is a part of gameplay flow in early game to make it less boringfest. While you can queue your exploration path right of the bat, it at least still need more of your input than just single button click. It what makes you occupied with the game besides planning the expansion of your empire, and dealing with anomaly events.
As your empire grew, you got more things that can occupy your attention. Dealing with other empire, exterminating hostile fleets, building improvement of your colonies, and of course choosing the right next tech to be researched. With most of your time used for empire managing, exploration tend to be forgotten when they need to be done manually. At this point though, depending on your playstyle you might want to continue or just focusing yourself on empire managing. Automatic exploration play it big part here if you're keen to continue exploring the galaxy.
Then there's this other gameplay mechanic that might be a hinder if automatic exploration available from the start: FTL. There are 3 different FTL in this game and each will affect on how you build your empire. During early game you might want to explore radially so you have bigger potential room for expansion. In my case as I'm using warp drives as FTL method, automatic exploration wouldn't be much different since my exploration would ended up being radial and I still can control where I want to expand by placing wormhole station. But what happened if you use hyperdrive? What could happened if your science ship just exploring down straight a narrow path instead of opening as much as possible room that surrounding your growing empire? The same could be said to warp dive FTL as well. While I don't know how automatic exploration would behave to warp drive and hyperdrive FTL, I believe it become a consideration why Paradox decides to make automatic exploration a mid game feature rather than general quality of life improvement.
Lister
Banned
I'm on Season 2. What a trip down memory lane.
yeah that fix thanks
So, the War in Heaven started and I'm staying neutral. Everyone else got drafted in though, including the Empire I was slicing territory from. Though they're only a satellite and their overlords are on the other side of the FE they're warring with. I wonder how stupid it would be to start a fight over planet or two...
Yiiiiis.
Just had the Despair Squid and Psirens. Red Dwarf and Blackadder were my background TV for years. Wore those tapes down, all recorded from UK Gold when they had marathon nights.
LurkerPrime
Member
So, it's been 70 years and I've only encountered one other empire (which I was able to conquer after a five year war). This has let me freely expand into a quarter of the galaxy with little-to-no resistance; the largest problem so far has been privateer fleets. I'm also having some difficulty adapting to such rapid expansion, with whole sectors of low-pop planets and conquered alien slaves that I'm forced to set aside so I can guide more promising planets into something worthwhile.
Biggest problem right now is how bonkers the sector AI is. They don't seem to do much with their resources, just kind of sitting there existing. And if I grant them the ability to do more, like enslave pops... they free all of my alien slaves. I just don't get it. I feel like I must be missing something with them.
Other notes from more playtime: playing a xenophobe empire has made me realise that the new xenophobe benefit of expanded borders feels amazing--it was the perfect change. And fleet comp/exploration continues to feel really good, battles in particular feel a great deal more tactical than before, especially since research costs have been juggled around so much.
Also... I inadvertently found the best ship name ever:
Biggest problem right now is how bonkers the sector AI is. They don't seem to do much with their resources, just kind of sitting there existing. And if I grant them the ability to do more, like enslave pops... they free all of my alien slaves. I just don't get it. I feel like I must be missing something with them.
Other notes from more playtime: playing a xenophobe empire has made me realise that the new xenophobe benefit of expanded borders feels amazing--it was the perfect change. And fleet comp/exploration continues to feel really good, battles in particular feel a great deal more tactical than before, especially since research costs have been juggled around so much.
Also... I inadvertently found the best ship name ever:
sogood
To be fair, we've also started noticing some weirdness following Heinlein.
We're using a static map, but for some reason our empires now spawn but not with the names we gave them. Very frustrating.
John Dunbar
correct about everything
does the queue still break when your science ship encounters an enemy?
John Dunbar
correct about everything
absolutely baffling game design right there.