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Stellaris |OT| Imperium Universalis

Mod: Make Space Great Again

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The Prethoryns sure know how to party... how do you get them to go away? I've been slaughtering their fleets and keeping their worlds on lockdown.

It's bugged, you can't currently defeat the Prethoryn. There's a mod that fixes it, but using it will stop you from getting achievements.
 
This game might be more addictive to me than even Civilization. It needs some kind of warning label.

I think one of the reasons is that it's RTwP, so there's less downtime than in Civ and with the fastest speed almost everything seems to always be just be in reach. At least that's what I'm telling myself.
 
As soon as I get 6 planets should I instantly begin with sector control? If so then what's the best way to go about it? Should I be sectoring my worst planet with no regard to where it's positioned?
 
As soon as I get 6 planets should I instantly begin with sector control? If so then what's the best way to go about it? Should I be sectoring my worst planet with no regard to where it's positioned?
IMHO, it makes most sense to sector the most developed one. The AI is pretty good at simply upgrading existing structures, and also filling in a few as required. It's not as good at colonizing from scratch in my experience.
 
As soon as I get 6 planets should I instantly begin with sector control? If so then what's the best way to go about it? Should I be sectoring my worst planet with no regard to where it's positioned?

There is a penalty from going over your core planet limit, but assuming that your economy is robust, then you can easily postpone sectoring for a bit while you prepare a planet to be sectored.

Personally, I created my sector in the direction that I was planning on expanding my empire, selecting one of the worse border-planets for this purpose (worse in terms of resources, not development), so that I could easily expand the sector going forward, without having to create a bunch of different sectors (needing more leaders) or adding a ton of systems to the sector to connect the planets.

After 20 or so hours, most of the planets in my core are still those I started out colonizing, so that everything is located in close proximity.
 
speaking of sectors, is there any decent way to actually use the spaceports and build ships from colonies you've sectored away? I've declared war on one of the other major alliances/federations in the galaxy and I'd kill for a more intuitive build queue/order thing. At the moment I'm relying on the F2 menu to get me to my colonised planets, but it's starting to be a pain with the amount of sectors/colonies I have now.
 
Anyone else think that energy is kinda useless? I always find myself lacking minerals, but I always have too much energy. I hope they look at the balance between the 2 resources.

Quitethe opposite. Lots and lots of minerals, hardly any energy or influence D:
 
Quitethe opposite. Lots and lots of minerals, hardly any energy or influence D:
Yeah, I've literally traded 10s of thousands of minerals for energy.

speaking of sectors, is there any decent way to actually use the spaceports and build ships from colonies you've sectored away? I've declared war on one of the other major alliances/federations in the galaxy and I'd kill for a more intuitive build queue/order thing. At the moment I'm relying on the F2 menu to get me to my colonised planets, but it's starting to be a pain with the amount of sectors/colonies I have now.
Agreed. Unless I'm also missing something they need to improve on that.

Something like a sector build queue and rally point with production automatically distributed to spaceports.
 
An enemy decided to make a puzzle for me, they split up into three separate civ's with names so similar I didn't know who exactly I was at war against. And that dot in the middle was a frontier outpost from another society which blocked me from attacking the other planets that I wanted. I just declared war against them as well but was hell of a confusing thing.

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And the end result is even more confusing.
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Ucchedavāda;203699298 said:
Also, remember to build space-ports in your sectors, since the AI does not do that but doing so will increases your fleet cap. If you furthermore add the solar panel module, the space-port will pay for itself (maintenance is 3 power and the solar panels generate 3 power).

AI did build space ports in sectors I gave them control over, don't think they upgrade them though.
 
speaking of sectors, is there any decent way to actually use the spaceports and build ships from colonies you've sectored away? I've declared war on one of the other major alliances/federations in the galaxy and I'd kill for a more intuitive build queue/order thing. At the moment I'm relying on the F2 menu to get me to my colonised planets, but it's starting to be a pain with the amount of sectors/colonies I have now.

There is no way to do that at the moment. I hope they'll incorporate an easier way to raise ships, both military and colonial. That's basically all you do in the mid-game, and right now it's not very functional.

Yeah, I've literally traded 10s of thousands of minerals for energy.

Agreed. Unless I'm also missing something they need to improve on that.

Something like a sector build queue and rally point with production automatically distributed to spaceports.

That sounds like the right way to do it, and the queue would prioritise spaceports with the appropriate modules first.
 
So an alien somehow was elected consul of my fanatically xenophobic human republic, even though aliens have no leadership or voting rights. The only alien species so far come from me invading Stone Age and Bronze Age planets. I notice alien species living under you adopt my species' names too. Wonder if this is intended.
 
Some stuff I hope they introduce/add/fix in further updates/DLC:

1. Massive capital ships.
2. More tactical/visually striking space battles (ships just currently swarm into giant clusters)
3. Some kind of alternative to sectoring planets.
4. Advanced faction colour options that aren't mods.
5. Cities/civilizations that can be colonized inside giant asteroids you find in the systems currently.
6. More advanced diplomacy options like those that you can find in Paradoxes other games.
7. More than 2 victory conditions.

Essentially more depth than just shoot-bang your neighbours with brute force to victory.
 
Wonder if the slave rebellions will be brought back in a smaller patch before the big patch scheduled for later in the month? I remember them saying they turned it off just for release because it wasn't balanced.

This game might be more addictive to me than even Civilization. It needs some kind of warning label.

I think one of the reasons is that it's RTwP, so there's less downtime than in Civ and with the fastest speed almost everything seems to always be just be in reach. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

Yeah I've been playing non-stop. I can't wait for them to do the espionage and diplomacy DLC expansions (or maybe the base of it will come in a patch and extended with expansions) since those two aspects keep me glued to their grand strategies the most. The random generation of races and government types/ethos really changes the way your galaxy plays out too which I find refreshing, I've had very different games due to this. Also the circular galaxy type creates a really interesting games when a lot of empires are aggressive, very difficult to expand due to formation of galaxy, lots of border tension. I also much prefer RTwP because in traditional 4x games the turns because so tedious near the end game.

Also just 2-3 weeks away they are releasing their WW2 strategy Hearts of Iron: IV, I'm going to be sucked into that as well, feels like I've been waiting forever for it.

This year is actually great for strategy games of multiple forms, Stellaris, Hearts of Iron: IV, XCOM 2, Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, the upcoming Total War: Warhammer, Civilization 6, hopefully Cossacks 3. There are also much more smaller indies like Oriental Empires which is about ancient China.
 
This game might be more addictive to me than even Civilization. It needs some kind of warning label.

I think one of the reasons is that it's RTwP, so there's less downtime than in Civ and with the fastest speed almost everything seems to always be just be in reach. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

I just wanted to write similar post.
This game is crack! Like holy hell, i should have stop playing my session like over 2h ago.
My first game started to be boring and i thought, maybe grand strategy is not for me, because i enjoyed early game a lot, but mid game seems sluggish and boring. So i started new one on Ironman as a very aggressive race with different engine (had warp, now hyperdrive) and god dammit, i couldnt stop playing. I had to force myself to turn it off.
Just one more research, just one more ship, just one more survey...
 
So, after 300 years, there's finaly one AI who declared war on me!

It was of course a fallen empire. That was... a bit underwhelming. Sure, I lost half of my fleet, but I still destroyed them. Only thing that made it a bit difficult was their FTL method, they have a special one right? Hunting their fleet down was hard.

Anyway, after I take possession of my first ring planer... a second fallen empire declares war on me. Again, with half my fleet destroyed, I'm thinking I may get destroyed... but nope, thanks to my vassals I manage do destroy half their fleet before suing for peace for two planets. After the truce expires, I'll gobble them up, and they'll be only one fallen empire left in my galaxy. With that, I think I'll just steamrol all the other empires to get to the victory. I should have played in ironman for the achievements, as I never "cheated" to get back in time.
 
The Prethoryns sure know how to party... how do you get them to go away? I've been slaughtering their fleets and keeping their worlds on lockdown.

Looks you ran into the sadly common bug with that crisis, same thing happened to me, theres a mod in the steam workshop that'll sort it out

so corvettes are totally op in this game? when i stopped playing today, just for fun i saved and then declared war on a fallen empire to see how my doomstack would fare against them. to my surprise, i pretty much wrecked them given how much greater they were numberwise: they were still "overwhelming" in all categories, and my fleet was only about 21k in total. i had like 80 corvettes, and they are insane. i managed to wipe two of their stacks and only lost to the third, and they were left with 6 battlecruisers, 5 of which were almost dead. i think they had one more stack left, but if i had had like 50% more corvettes i think i could have schooled them.

with corvettes' evasion combined with the rapid damage they inflict (i used mainly torpedos and quantum missiles, so they never miss), i am not sure how anything in the game can counter a swarm of them. other than rpg purposes, not sure why i should even bother with the bigger ships. my destroyers were wrecked in the fist encounter. and don't think the cruisers and battleships did much except maybe tank a bit of damage.

Battleships with lances are better (the min/max post on reddit had a big calculation error), battleships with swarm missiles will also make shit of a corvette fleet. I will say though that nothing in between corvettes and battleships seem worth it.

I had them in my fleet fighting the Unbidden. Just one of each aura. The time and cost of battleships don't make them worth having more than one, I think.

I would strongly disagree, from the mid-game on I only built battleships (because I could afford the cost and if you spread them across lots of stations the time isnt too bad).
 
Here are some thoughts after a number of hours in:

I like the anomaly system, it's the best system in the game. But it mostly disappears after the early game. I think adding additional anomalies that can appear after the initial wave would be great. Maybe make them wandering, or have a random station find something on the planet they're mining/researching.

Black Holes are kinda lackluster. You shouldn't be able to build a station in orbit of it! It'll be cool if it causes anything that enter the system to be pulled towards the center, and if too close, lost. Also, maybe make it so that you need some special anomaly from a black hole to unlock singularity stuff, which would be the strongest stuff in the game.

If you're not playing militaristic it there is basically nothing to do. Diplomacy is weak, there are not enough internal issues to take care of, and even what there is is rare and not impactful. I had a separatist faction in my latest game that did nothing other than blowing up random buildings occasionally.

I would like more stuff to do with the random non-sentient aliens that wander around. More events, more stuff in general.

All in all, it's a good base, but I want more stuff.
 
Is this good for a complete beginner to the genre? It looks so cool and I love sci-fi games. Just wondering if it feels overwhelming.
 
Is this good for a complete beginner to the genre? It looks so cool and I love sci-fi games. Just wondering if it feels overwhelming.

It will absolutely feel overwhelming for the first little bit, but it's probably the smoothest introduction to the Paradox genre of games they've made to date.
 
Oh another thing. I find it weird that your starting system is not built up at all. Are we to believe we got FTL travel without doing anything in our home system? At least start it surveyed or something.
 
If you're not playing militaristic it there is basically nothing to do. Diplomacy is weak, there are not enough internal issues to take care of, and even what there is is rare and not impactful. I had a separatist faction in my latest game that did nothing other than blowing up random buildings occasionally.

I would like more stuff to do with the random non-sentient aliens that wander around. More events, more stuff in general.

All in all, it's a good base, but I want more stuff.

yup. I'm probably going to drop it after this weekend and come back in a year's time or more expansion packs, whatever comes first. I had a lot of fun, but it's just not solid enough for a non-military guy right now.
 
Is this good for a complete beginner to the genre? It looks so cool and I love sci-fi games. Just wondering if it feels overwhelming.

I've never gotten into a Paradox game before, but most things just make sense if you've played 4X games before. Plus, the tutorial works pretty well, though I would advice you to also explore the menus, since the tutorial doesn't guide you to every section of the interface, but sometimes expect that you go there yourself.


So, after 300 years, there's finaly one AI who declared war on me!

It was of course a fallen empire. That was... a bit underwhelming. Sure, I lost half of my fleet, but I still destroyed them. Only thing that made it a bit difficult was their FTL method, they have a special one right? Hunting their fleet down was hard.

Anyway, after I take possession of my first ring planer... a second fallen empire declares war on me. Again, with half my fleet destroyed, I'm thinking I may get destroyed... but nope, thanks to my vassals I manage do destroy half their fleet before suing for peace for two planets. After the truce expires, I'll gobble them up, and they'll be only one fallen empire left in my galaxy. With that, I think I'll just steamrol all the other empires to get to the victory. I should have played in ironman for the achievements, as I never "cheated" to get back in time.

Yep, the AI is way too passive.
I have yet to have anyone declare war on me, and have only been invaded due to pre-scripted events (AI rebellion).

Earlier in my game, I decided to invade my northern neighbor, since they had Blorg-alike primitives on a planet, but had done nothing to bring them to space (surely something that counts as a crime against all sentient beings). The war started off going well, with me bring down several systems. There was very little resistance, so my fleet was split into several battle-groups. This went well until a couple of them hit their homeworld, where it turned out that 90% of their military power was focused. Their fleet in turn chewed through my fleet. and attempting to bring in backup just resulted in that getting chewed up as well, so I tried to cut my losses and got the hell out of there, and sued for peace. I didn't even offer the AI anything, but they still accepted. All this despite the AI being a fanatical militant empire, that hated my guts, whom I had declared war on, and who had just destroyed more than half my fleet.

This allowed me to build up my fleet to an even greater size, and eventually stream-roll their empire. They don't even exist as an empire any more, after being integrated, simply because the AI did nothing to press the advantage they had. They could easily have demanded quite a lot from me, and there was little I could have done to stop them at that point.

Apparently you can tweak some variables in the 'defines' which makes the AI a lot more aggressive, but it also causes some other problems:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/4j3ciu/the_ai_is_little_bit_more_assertive_after_ive/


Rowan Kaiser was spot on, despite all the attempts at discrediting him and his review.
 
Battleships with lances are better (the min/max post on reddit had a big calculation error), battleships with swarm missiles will also make shit of a corvette fleet. I will say though that nothing in between corvettes and battleships seem worth it.
Yeah, I wanted to post something similar. Corvettes and Battleships are clearly worth it, everything in between seems very situational to me for now.
 
Weirdly enough I don't seem to have any problems with sectors.
In my experience they do exactly what I want them to do and ease the burden of clicking through all my planets to upgrade to the newest tech.
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Yes! My refund for Rebel Galaxy is done. (I thought I was going to love it, but the combat and travel was so borrrrrrrrring. Why can't someone just make a Firefly game where you have to mange your ship and include survival aspects as well as legit salvage mechanics???)

$43 in my bank account, time to dive in
 
Honestly the people who lament sectors are looking at it from the wrong angle.
The issue is that there should be a way to get better AI for sectors, either by default or by having skilled governors managing less planets.

Yeah, I wanted to post something similar. Corvettes and Battleships are clearly worth it, everything in between seems very situational to me for now.


I'm trying to model something up, but there's big unanswered questions that need to get through:
- Do hitscan weapons alpha-waste? (eg. will enough guns target the same ship with noticeably more firepower than needed?)
- Do missiles?
- Can missiles miss?
- What's the reliability of PD?
- Can Lances \ other special weapons hit more than one ship?
- Can computers be reliably exploited to make certain ships 'tank' the majority of the enemy fleet damage?

Endless Space MP combat was great because it was simple, and practically a rock-paper-scissors. Gave a very, very big role to simply having intel on the enemy fleet. I think efficient design space in Stellaris is going to be limited, so intel will likely be useful.

I really hope they don't actually balance the ship combat. When everything is balanced, intel is worthless.
There should be a weapon type optimal against every shipclass, plus a specific counter - A custom built counterfleet should win 4:1, but being able to build heterogenous fleets should come at a great efficiency loss, because you can't have all combat tech and still be efficient.
On that note, tech tiers bonuses are too small - i think they're 15\30\45%?
 
been dicking around trying to find an optimal early game start. I think contrary to what the tutorial tells you, you should immediately build a second science ship and send your first ship in a wide of a loop as possible, and only survey colonizable planets, because in the default start the AI spawns so close to you it's in your best interests to immediately see what territory you can take. And if you can cut off the expansion path for a nearby civ your empire might be able to break out into "open" space, which allows a lot of expansion. Surveying nearby systems at the start doesn't really help much because they'll end up being your territory anyways, plus you don't have the minerals to build stations and the exp for the scientists isn't a massive deal.

I get the feeling that putting your early influence into free thought and society research to get colonization tech as quickly as possible might be the best route, but I don't know what sort of numbers prove or disprove that.
 
Help! I bought this on the day it came out, I love civilization and GalCiv, but for some reason this game terrifies me: I got to the point where the game proper started and froze, overwhelmed.. I need help knowing what to focus on for the first couple hours, any pointers?
 
Honestly the people who lament sectors are looking at it from the wrong angle.
The issue is that there should be a way to get better AI for sectors, either by default or by having skilled governors managing less planets.

I'm mostly OK with sectors, except that you have to jump through hoops in the rare cases that you'd want / need to give specific orders (rather than just pay an influence penalty, you have to remove the planet from a sector, do your thing, and then re-add it), the AI being dumb about managing them, various interface issues, that I think 5 core planets as a start is too low for games that defaults to 600 systems, and some other misc stuff. I don't want to have to micromanage all planets anyway, but the current system could be a lot better.


Seeing a lot of really impressive blobs here... how do people feel about the anti-blobbing features, e.g. factions and rebellions?
I've never had problems with factions. I have several, mainly resulting from the vassalization of several other empires, but none of them have ever gotten any support, which may just be a bug.
 
I like sectors fine but there are a few pretty annoying issues with them:

* Frontier outpost exploit.
* Sectors need to allow you to resettle pops into/out of them. Resettlement is kind of a key mechanic for, say, a Divine Mandate empire -- the main way I assimilate conquered pops is to enslave them all and swap the ones doing white-collar jobs for enslaved pops in the homeworlds that I can emancipate -- but not being able to do it with sectors makes the whole process really dumb. It doesn't feel like an interesting mechanic to have to save up a bunch of influence, swap a planet out of a sector, do some resettlement, swap it back to avoid economic issues, it just feels like a broken design.
* Sectors need to understand slaves and robots better and avoid assigning them to jobs they're bad at.
* There really needs to be some reason to have more than one sector besides geographic difficulties. Otherwise as you blob up everybody's going to just end up with one huge sector and five homeworlds.
 
Add to that:

- You should be able to directly control Observation Posts.
- You should be able to build outposts and outpost modules directly from the sector menu
- Alternatively, you should be able to prioritize spaceports and certain modules like Solar Network
- Once they add "smart building" so you can queue up some units and it'll build where available, you should be able to set up other modules like Fleet Academy and Shipyards.
- For the last two, I think we need some kind of "sector menu" that works like the Planet menu and queuing build orders for it builds the thing wherever available, you can also customize more stuff, the current UI setup is just too limiting
- Maybe a type of sector called "Factory Sector" so you can control where your things are being built, or just box selection
- I like the way EU4 does this. You can make a template, say 10 infantry and 2 cannons, then tell it to build it in any province, it'll use all the nearest provinces to build your template to the best of its abilities.

I usually keep my initial planets and sector everything else. I confess it's more out of sympathy for my "first empire" rather than any min-maxing. I don't pay much attention to what the AI is doing, as long as my numbers are going up.
 
Tried to get some DLC for EU4/CK2 on the Paradox store but I forgot about my bank's payment authorization system and let it time out. Now I can't buy anything from there anymore because it says my payment was refused. Fuck.
 
Just picked it up and getting used to it, though I seem to have a really slow start.

Any suggestions for a good starting empire in terms of traits? Do any of the pre-made ones work well?
 
Battleships with lances are better (the min/max post on reddit had a big calculation error), battleships with swarm missiles will also make shit of a corvette fleet. I will say though that nothing in between corvettes and battleships seem worth it.

What's the new meta?
 
How come I have a planet where the citizens have a max happiness of 15%? It says it's tied to planet habitability. But that is 95%....
 
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