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Stellaris |OT| Imperium Universalis

Thanks for the tips and advice. I had specific ships designed around point defense but I probably didn't make enough of them to counter the massive amounts of fighters/bombers they had. For other people's reference here are the summaries about each FE type's combat focus they gave on the wiki:

Keepers of Knowledge:
Double Fighter/Bomber capacity on Battlecruisers
Strong Anti-Shield and Anti-Armor ability, with relevant focus on Anti-Shield

Holy Guardians:
Very high amount of tracking, making Evasion unfeasible.
Limited Anti-Shield ability. High Missile Reliance.
Precog Computers and Psi Jumpdrives for all ships, but no other Psionic technology.

Militant Isolationists:
They replaced 1 Shield Recharger with a Afterburner, even on ships not intended for melee
All Medium Slot weapons are Flak Artillery. While giving superior Point Defense, this makes them weaker vs small ships.
Afterburners and Cruiser Combat computers means they will get into close range quickly.
Their Shield/Armor ratio is skewed towards Armor.

Enigmatic Observers:
All Ships are equipped with defensive Computer and a very long range weapon. Staying on this distance as well will avoid a large part of their firepower.
They are weaker vs armor, but stronger vs shields.
 
Just pulling out some changes that caught my eye from the patch notes.

* Replaced Growth Time modifier effect with Growth Speed and rebalanced related values

Really curious to see what this actually does given my earlier excess food confusion. Are they just rewording the language or actually changing how the mechanic works?

* Added the ability to drain sector resource stockpiles, giving you 75% of their stockpiled resources at the cost of 100 influence. The cost is reduced to 25 influence during defensive wars
* You can now set taxes for Energy Credits and Minerals on sectors separately

Wow, this is a huge change that I think will finally encourage people not to just use one giant mega-sector. Previously it didn't matter how big your sector was because all you cared about was the income/taxes it was generating since the stockpile was always inaccessible. Now you'll actually want multiple sectors in order to have multiple stockpiles that you can tap for resources.

* Charismatic and Repugnant now only impact opinion of other empires (+25/-25 respectively) rather than affecting happiness

Interesting change, Repugnant always seemed like a free negative trait to me so I think it makes sense.

* Planetary Survey Corps now gives 1/10th of monthly research (min of 3) instead of 1/3rd

Yeah, this tradition was utterly ridiculous before, glad to see it reduced to something more reasonable.

* Sensor techs now increase planet sensor range instead of survey speed
* Automated Survey Protocols now provides +50% ship survey speed (up from +15%)

I like this change but I really wish they would change the wording of it to something like "Deep Space Sensor Range". Planet sensor range makes you think it just detects planets when the primary benefit is in detecting enemy fleets.

* Boosted the damage output, shield hit points and hull points of military stations and frontier outposts substantially

I don't like patch notes that say generic stuff like this instead of providing the actual values. Hide the full details it in a spoiler button or something, otherwise I just have to wait until someone data mines the information.

* Faction Issues have been remixed, with multiple new and re-tuned demands

Hopefully this addresses the issue of having factions that don't actually have any conflicts with one another. I'd like to see more difficult political decision-making where I can only satisfy one faction or the other.

* Removed influence cost from Fleet Academy spaceport module

I kind of liked that the influence cost prevented you from just building one on every spaceport. You had to really think about what space-sports and systems would be your best ship-building locations. Now you'll just spam it everywhere.

* Each tradition group adopted now adds +10% to tradition adoption cost

Haha, yeah I was waiting for this one. You could get so much value from just hitting all the tradition starter bonuses and not actually progressing down the trees. Now you actually have to weigh the costs of picking up that starter bonus for supremacy/harmony/expansion.

* Pops will now only voluntarily migrate away from planets that are heavily crowded

This was so annoying before, glad to see it go.

* Sectors will no longer settle planets that would anger a Fallen Empire that is superior to their own empire

Good to know that next time my sector leader won't doom my empire to complete annihilation.
 
* It is now possible for Fanatic Xenophobe Spiritualists to be Fanatic Purifiers
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4hoOMTq.jpg
 
I think the growth thing is just a wording change to make it more obvious it's a buff. Instead of saying "Growth Time -10%", it will now say "Growth Speed +10%" which is more obvious and understandable as a good thing.
 
I am so, so ready for the Devouring Swarm civic.

Those no-diplomacy civics are so cool conceptually, the same way Hive Minds themselves are. It's really clever to flip the game's systems on their head by actually making things more straightforward. I wonder what they'll think up with future expansions--I have to imagine a trade-focused empire a la the Ferengi will be a thing at some point.


Also this:
###################
# Balance
###################
* Humans are now Adaptive, Nomadic and Wasteful instead of Quick Learners and Nomadic
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is depressingly accurate.
 
Jeebus spent my lunch time reading the patch notes.

I'm liking everything I see, with the exception of removing the influence cost of the Fleet Academy as mentioned.
 
This will be such a huge QoL change just by itself:
* Removed weapons from Mining and Research stations
* Unarmed ships and stations will no longer engage each other in combat under any circumstances
Click to expand...

It was so tiring to see "science vessel under attack" and find out they were duelling a mining station.
 
Uh...

Properly completing the Enigmatic Fortress event chain now yields a random Enigmatic technology rather than all of them
Click to expand...
? Why? Most of the techs from that are only marginally useful, if you don't get the power generator or tier 6 shields, you've wasted your time.


That being said:

* AI now devotes more resources to building up a force of assault armies before declaring war[
* Created define for army military power mult when calculating if AI should land armies
Click to expand...

Fucking finally
 
Steel said:
? Why? Most of the techs from that are only marginally useful, if you don't get the power generator or tier 6 shields, you've wasted your time.
Click to expand...

I think it's because it's like 5 techs from the one event chain that isn't even dangerous to begin with. Compare to like ether dragon or dimensional horror in terms of risk/reward. If you spawn near a dimensional horror you're guaranteed to lose the ship that found the system.
 
The Unbidden nonsense is still the most unfun thing I had in a game in a long time. I always forget to turn that shit off...

Edit: well I just beat them for the first time. Alone. I used the DMG perk though.
 
I tried a syncretic evolution game. I eventually got things on track, but it pretty much murders your initial population growth(both species grow at half rate) and for some weird reason the secondary species never seems to migrate while the OG species migrate left and right. Ended up with nothing but the idiotic secondary species on my homeworld very quickly. The civic is worse than worthless, it actively hurts you. Bad execution of a cool concept.

ThoseDeafMutes said:
I think it's because it's like 5 techs from the one event chain that isn't even dangerous to begin with. Compare to like ether dragon or dimensional horror in terms of risk/reward. If you spawn near a dimensional horror you're guaranteed to lose the ship that found the system.
Click to expand...

I guess, but if you get the aura that can't be equipped to anything anymore or a decoder or encoder, then you just wasted your time. While on the other hand, if the dragon is killed in a system you own, you immediately get a super-admiral and eventually a free 23kish fleet and/or tier 6 armor. Dimensional horror does need better rewards on the other hand. It's kinda trash for how tough it is.
 
Steel said:
I tried a syncretic evolution game. I eventually got things on track, but it pretty much murders your initial population growth(both species grow at half rate) and for some weird reason the secondary species never seems to migrate while the OG species migrate left and right. Ended up with nothing but the idiotic secondary species on my homeworld very quickly. The civic is worse than worthless, it actively hurts you. Bad execution of a cool concept.
Click to expand...

You need to look into your empires individual species rights. It might depend on your starting ethics, but as a default it sets your secondary species as caste system slaves with no migration rights. However, you can turn them into full citizens with migration if you want to (although you probably can't do this if you reduce their race to 100% slavery, unsure about that though). You can also stop their growth if you want your primary species to grow at the normal rate along with setting their living conditions and military service and things that I can't remember right now.
 
When will they fix the ai. Even war hammer total war has the ai rally to fight the chaos invasions.

In this game the ai sits and does nothing while they get rolled by unbidden. In my current game a guardian fe woke up. Too bad it's boxed in to two planets and can't expand as an awoken fe completely surrounds it lol.
 
Is Stellaris' ship creation as fully customizable as, say, GalCiv II? I lost dozens of hours just making ship designs in that, and I'm wondering of Stellaris allows me that much freedom in shipbuilding.
 
Kageshinzo said:
Is Stellaris' ship creation as fully customizable as, say, GalCiv II? I lost dozens of hours just making ship designs in that, and I'm wondering of Stellaris allows me that much freedom in shipbuilding.
Click to expand...

No, not really. You're just slotting in components and switching out sections, you can't do anything really nuts like Gal Civ. It's closer to Sword of the Stars, albeit less involved.
 
Bought Endless Space for a dollar a month or so ago and now got Stellaris and 6 other games for 10.80. Feels good, can't wait to purge the galaxy with my robot friendos, even if I'm probably gonna get crushed.
 
One Foul Note said:
You need to look into your empires individual species rights. It might depend on your starting ethics, but as a default it sets your secondary species as caste system slaves with no migration rights. However, you can turn them into full citizens with migration if you want to (although you probably can't do this if you reduce their race to 100% slavery, unsure about that though). You can also stop their growth if you want your primary species to grow at the normal rate along with setting their living conditions and military service and things that I can't remember right now.
Click to expand...

No, I changed the rights right away, they were full citizens from the start. I was playing an egalitarian race, so they weren't even slaves in the first place, just had worse living conditions.
 
Creating empires is worth the humble monthly price itself, I wish the character spaces for the bios were longer though. I tried to copy and paste 277 word bio from MS Word and it only fit like half of it :/
 
Psychoward said:
Creating empires is worth the humble monthly price itself, I wish the character spaces for the bios were longer though. I tried to copy and paste 277 word bio from MS Word and it only fit like half of it :/
Click to expand...

AFAIK those (or whole empires?) are just .txt files somewhere, you could try pasting them there. Might break the UI ingame though.
 
So this is a v specific question but: Austin Walker (of Waypoint) talked on podcasts a couple of times about gerrymandering a species or something?? But now that I'm deep into this game I have no idea what the heck he was talking about. Anybody know?

Possibly related, I don't really understand what tools are at my disposal re: factions. I have two opposed factions and I want to suppress one but I don't know how to do it / if it's even possible. I did the thing in the Faction screen where I spent some monthly Influence to push them down, but a year later as far as I could tell it just made them mad. Can I just straight wipe out a Faction? I considered enabling forced migrations and shipping all the members to some backwater planet and then liberating it, but the UI for finding all members of a faction seems bad.
 
Steel said:
No, I changed the rights right away, they were full citizens from the start. I was playing an egalitarian race, so they weren't even slaves in the first place, just had worse living conditions.
Click to expand...

Hmmmm, first have to ask two questions that might be a little patronising so I apologise in advance, but have to make sure we are covering all our bases. Firstly are you certain you have changed the correct races rights? It is possible to change your default rights template without actually changing any rights of species in your empire, you need to click on the species in question and then click 'set rights'. Secondly, have you ensured that migration is on? Being a full citizen doesn't inherently give your species full migration rights (I don't think it is even a requirement, only that your species are not slaves or undesirables), you need to scroll down the list of rights and turn it on separately.

If both those are true and the secondary race still aren't migrating after a while I'm afraid I am out of ideas. I did a test game and was able to get both my races migrating with a syncretic startup, so perhaps you have a mod interfering with the game or something went wrong with the Utopia download,
 
Brakke said:
So this is a v specific question but: Austin Walker (of Waypoint) talked on podcasts a couple of times about gerrymandering a species or something?? But now that I'm deep into this game I have no idea what the heck he was talking about. Anybody know?

Possibly related, I don't really understand what tools are at my disposal re: factions. I have two opposed factions and I want to suppress one but I don't know how to do it / if it's even possible. I did the thing in the Faction screen where I spent some monthly Influence to push them down, but a year later as far as I could tell it just made them mad. Can I just straight wipe out a Faction? I considered enabling forced migrations and shipping all the members to some backwater planet and then liberating it, but the UI for finding all members of a faction seems bad.
Click to expand...

re: gerrymandering. This story is from the Stellaris Quick Look around launch:
Austin conquered an empire and put their populance under a single sector; they quickly rumbled for independance. The solution was to gerrymander his sectors, padding out the separatist sector with content pops and dividing the malcontent pops within several different (content) sectors; the result was, the separatists no longer had the collective power to challenge the stability of Austin's empire, as they had no allies within their new sector borders and could no longer agitate for change. This is how gerrymandering works in real life--weakening a group's political influence by dividing them between several different voting areas.

Stellaris is the first game I've ever heard of to fully simulate gerrymandering and its insidiousness.

So, re: factions, Stellaris gives you several options to control problematic pops. There's the authoritarian way, ranging from population control (either purging or restricting reproduction of dissident pops) or outright restriction of rights (slavery, forced migration), vs. the egalitarian way (gerrymandering or straight-up satisfying their demands). I haven't dealt with factions much so I may be overlooking some stuff.

And on that note, the whole pop/faction/ethos system gives Stellaris such a huge edge over traditional 4X, it makes me wonder how they'll ever compete; it makes them seem bland in comparison.
 
Having spent way too much of my life in PoliGAF, I can't wait to gerrymander the shit out of my empire now that you guys have explained it.
 
One Foul Note said:
Hmmmm, first have to ask two questions that might be a little patronising so I apologise in advance, but have to make sure we are covering all our bases. Firstly are you certain you have changed the correct races rights? It is possible to change your default rights template without actually changing any rights of species in your empire, you need to click on the species in question and then click 'set rights'. Secondly, have you ensured that migration is on? Being a full citizen doesn't inherently give your species full migration rights (I don't think it is even a requirement, only that your species are not slaves or undesirables), you need to scroll down the list of rights and turn it on separately.

If both those are true and the secondary race still aren't migrating after a while I'm afraid I am out of ideas. I did a test game and was able to get both my races migrating with a syncretic startup, so perhaps you have a mod interfering with the game or something went wrong with the Utopia download,
Click to expand...

Already played that particular game to end game. I am sure, I was getting the egalitarian faction happiness buff for equal rights and free movement. I actually colonized other planets and the syncretic race was happy to migrate when they were on other planets. It really only majorly hurt me in the start-mid-game where I was getting half growth speed on my captial and my best research labs were manned by a species that had a debuff to research, moved capitals later and everything worked out. Ironically, pretty deep into endgame I saw a couple move off, replaced them with synths as soon as they left.

Thinking about it, the only way to do a syncretic species without it being an anchor on growth is to go slavery.
 
Welp, had about half the geographic galaxy as my Empire or Vassals and then The Unbidden showed up. I saw one fleet at about 50k, so sent up my own 60k+ fleet to fight it. Won, staying at about 50k, and then all of a sudden they had 3 more 50k fleets just devouring the Empire they started by. Fought off one of those and then went to reinforce / repair my main fleet, by which time Unbidden had an anchor post and again like 3 or 4 big fleets.

Vassal system seems kinda broken here. Since you can't declare war on the Unbidden, there's no way to try and coordinate your vassals? So like a third of the pops I have under my influence are simply ignoring this existential threat... I started panicking and bought my way into associations status with a moderate Federation, but there's no clear way to try and rally or coordinate with them, either. So I just gotta kinda wait quietly for the Unbidden to devour the two Empires between their spawn and me? And just never have a hope of outpacing their fleet production? Looking like an ignominious end for this campaign.

While all this was going on, the fallen Human Empire woke up and started devouring its neighbor. I saw them deploy several strong fleets into the Empire, wipe the Empire's fleet, and siege its planets... but they don't appear to have brought along any armies. So they have the Empire by the throat but don't seem interested in actually killing it. If that happened to me, I'd just -- what, have to quit? At least the Unbidden seem to have the decency to devour planets so I'll get to a game over screen.

I'll play this through but then probably be done with Stellaris for a while. Love a lot of the ideas here but I just don't think it's coherent. I don't have any of the DLCs, but none of their descriptions indicate that they address any of the frustrations I've had.

LurkerPrime said:
re: gerrymandering. This story is from the Stellaris Quick Look around launch:
Austin conquered an empire and put their populance under a single sector; they quickly rumbled for independance. The solution was to gerrymander his sectors, padding out the separatist sector with content pops and dividing the malcontent pops within several different (content) sectors; the result was, the separatists no longer had the collective power to challenge the stability of Austin's empire, as they had no allies within their new sector borders and could no longer agitate for change. This is how gerrymandering works in real life--weakening a group's political influence by dividing them between several different voting areas.

Stellaris is the first game I've ever heard of to fully simulate gerrymandering and its insidiousness.

So, re: factions, Stellaris gives you several options to control problematic pops. There's the authoritarian way, ranging from population control (either purging or restricting reproduction of dissident pops) or outright restriction of rights (slavery, forced migration), vs. the egalitarian way (gerrymandering or straight-up satisfying their demands). I haven't dealt with factions much so I may be overlooking some stuff.

And on that note, the whole pop/faction/ethos system gives Stellaris such a huge edge over traditional 4X, it makes me wonder how they'll ever compete; it makes them seem bland in comparison.
Click to expand...

Huh. I've been a conqueror and never once had anyone "rumble for independence". I even have a sector I named "The Conquered" that consists of like three different species I beat to my East. I guess I've always given new species Citizenship and at least moderate living standards immediately. But I haven't seen sector-ing ever have any kind of political implications; factions and migrations cross sector boundaries just fine. Do these things only matter under a Democracy? I'm an Oligarchy.

ALSO! I believe Austin but totally redrawing sector lines sounds like it would cost an *obscene* amount of Influence, at 25 each time you want to remove a system from a sector...

Is there even enough granularity to manage factions by the pop level though? Don't I have to set slavery / purge on a species level?

I guess the faction thing has just never really had a clear impact, which is weird. I kept a couple natural-ally factions happy for the Influence gain, but the natural-dissenters just kind of make a couple pops unhappy and lower my output a little, without causing any real problems.
 
The faction system has been changed since launch so independence movements like that don't seem to appear anymore. The AI is terrible at fighting the endgame crisis though. I wish they fixed that.
 
Whoops, I should have mentioned that. Austin's story is from launch, pre-Utopia. (And yeah it would've cost a lot of influence.)

Utopia overhauled factions, though I'm not clear on the pre-Utopia and post-Utopia differences. The perils of playing Hive Minds, lol.
 
lol shit. I *did* manage to push back the Unbidden anchors. Right before I made my assault on their main gate thing, the Humans declare war on me from the other flank.

Welp. Don't have the patience for the long death at Overwhelming Human hands, I think. Maybe I'll kill the Unbidden just to see what that means, then quit the campaign.
 
spiritfox said:
The faction system has been changed since launch so independence movements like that don't seem to appear anymore. The AI is terrible at fighting the endgame crisis though. I wish they fixed that.
Click to expand...

Yeah, they really need to get on that. Last time I fought the Unbidden, one of the Fallen Empires woke up with the 'Guardians of the Galaxy' event, so they were primed to specifically fight the Unbidden. So I joined up with them so we could battle them together. What did they do? I had to fight the Unbidden off on my own and only after I had pretty much destroyed them (they had one fleet left), the FE came in to 'save the day'.

Well, fuck you too.

Brakke said:
And just never have a hope of outpacing their fleet production?
Click to expand...
The thing with the Unbidden is that they don't have a fleet production. Every X-amount of years a new 50-60K fleet spawns at the Dimensional Portal. Pretty much the only tactic for beating the Unbidden should be based on rushing the Portal as quickly as possible. Do not stop to repair, once you have their fleets down, go to the Portal and destroy it ASAP.
 
spiritfox said:
The faction system has been changed since launch so independence movements like that don't seem to appear anymore. The AI is terrible at fighting the endgame crisis though. I wish they fixed that.
Click to expand...

Just an FYI, but pop factions are now incredibly flexible in terms of modding. Going to see some really cool stuff here soon.
 
CloudWolf said:
Yeah, they really need to get on that. Last time I fought the Unbidden, one of the Fallen Empires woke up with the 'Guardians of the Galaxy' event, so they were primed to specifically fight the Unbidden. So I joined up with them so we could battle them together. What did they do? I had to fight the Unbidden off on my own and only after I had pretty much destroyed them (they had one fleet left), the FE came in to 'save the day'.

Well, fuck you too.
.
Click to expand...

Had a guardians of the galaxy fallen empire pop up. They let the unbidden go for a few years then crushed them with a 500k fleet. I didn't join them, but I also couldn't make it across the galaxy to help them due to border restrictions anyway.
 
Steel said:
Had a guardians of the galaxy fallen empire pop up. They let the unbidden go for a few years then crushed them with a 500k fleet. I didn't join them, but I also couldn't make it across the galaxy to help them due to border restrictions anyway.
Click to expand...

For some reason the Unbidden pretty much always show up inside my borders, so waiting a while until the FE comes in to save the day isn't really an option.
 
superdeluxe said:
Has anyone done this? https://youtu.be/8ZxBQlgXZ-Q

It's called pop bombing, you create bad races that you give away and they start taking over the other empire race
Click to expand...

I can't say I have ever thought of doing that. Must admit I am not entirely convinced it would be a very effective strategy in the long run given how much you have to handicap your own empire to preform it. However, I gotta salute the trolly nature of it and would certainly respect anyone who got it to lead them to victory.
 
There should be a free DLC put up soon along with 1.6 that contains new portraits according to Wiz. Happy first birthday Stellaris!
 
According to the steam news entry, the new portraits are the 'creatures of the void' pack which was the pre-order bonus plus 3 totally new portraits.
 
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