But if you upgrade them beforehand, or make ad-hoc sectors... uhm...
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Stellaris |OT| Imperium Universalis
- Thread starter More_Badass
- Start date
But if you upgrade them beforehand, or make ad-hoc sectors... uhm...
I wasn't saying it was perfect, just that it isn't broken.
Wyndstryker
Member
Enemy made the first move into my borders, so I decided to blob up and strike the heart immediately. Needed to save that system due to it's importance as one of my main staging grounds. I got the numbers advantage, 300+ ships. A hell lot of corvettes and destroyers. The battleships and cruisers are gun/missile boats.
As of this post, I've knocked about 8k from their fleets while losing only 3k. Battle is going well.
edit 2:
I'm crushing them.
edit 3:
Fleet is victorious at 21k. Only lost a bit more than half my force against the following: 21k, 18k, 17k, 17k, 16k...which is a total of 89k. So the total engagement was 53k vs 89k. Got to love corvette/destroyer spam/screen with cruisers/battleships on missileboat setups.
My sectors have actually been quite good to me. I have them set to re-develop and mostly focusing science these days and they turn out quite a bit of it. Perhaps they aren't as efficient as my core worlds, but they're doing the job.
...
What size maps are people playing on? I tend to go huge because, well, the galaxy is huge and I want lots of aliens but perhaps this is why the endgame is so much of the actual game for me--too much really as I liked upgrading my empire and don't like just sitting on huge incomes and invading and incorporating my neighbors one-by-one as much?
...
Also what are peoples' fleets like? I'm going 6-12-16-32 atm on my main armada (25k), less on my 18k armadas ; found it really useful to have destroyers/corvettes around even if they get destroyed a lot. Thinking of upgrading my main armada to 48 naval points in each category (so 6 more destroyers and 12 more corvettes).
And, how good are fighters/bombers? Their damage numbers are huge but their range is said to be 8 so I'm not really clear on if they are pulling their weight and I have half my cruisers/battleships as carriers and half not.
...
What size maps are people playing on? I tend to go huge because, well, the galaxy is huge and I want lots of aliens but perhaps this is why the endgame is so much of the actual game for me--too much really as I liked upgrading my empire and don't like just sitting on huge incomes and invading and incorporating my neighbors one-by-one as much?
...
Also what are peoples' fleets like? I'm going 6-12-16-32 atm on my main armada (25k), less on my 18k armadas ; found it really useful to have destroyers/corvettes around even if they get destroyed a lot. Thinking of upgrading my main armada to 48 naval points in each category (so 6 more destroyers and 12 more corvettes).
And, how good are fighters/bombers? Their damage numbers are huge but their range is said to be 8 so I'm not really clear on if they are pulling their weight and I have half my cruisers/battleships as carriers and half not.
Wyndstryker
Member
My admiral that was used in that engagement is literally godtier hax now. Learned Trickster and Gale-Speed during the fight.
+25% evasion. Cautious, Trickster and Gale-Speed.
edit:
Damn, my destroyers and battleships took the full brunt. Didn't have many battleships so going from 12 to 1 is notable. Destroyers though went from 109 to 36. Still toasty at 110 corvettes. Cruisers didn't go down that much, still got 20.
+25% evasion. Cautious, Trickster and Gale-Speed.
edit:
Damn, my destroyers and battleships took the full brunt. Didn't have many battleships so going from 12 to 1 is notable. Destroyers though went from 109 to 36. Still toasty at 110 corvettes. Cruisers didn't go down that much, still got 20.
AbortedWalrusFetus
Member
My fleet consists entirely of Corvettes with 60% evasion, shields, point defense, and energy weapons.
I always start with just corvettes, but I always change to including all types just because I don't like cheesing it like that.
Research in this game is interesting and it's not very clear to me how to do it quickly, at least assuming that you're not abusing free frontier outposts. What follows are disorganized thoughts about research.
So there's been some talk about how getting too big can be counterproductive because tech costs scale with population, but this isn't really right long-term as long as your tech generation more-or-less scales with population too. Tech cost growth isn't exponential; it's just an additive 2% per pop over 10, so with tech production that also scales with population you'll always research faster with more pops (although it asymptotes such that at 80 pop you're already at 2/3 of the infinite pop tech rate). Late game you just want to be expanding and working as many labs as possible. I expect that it makes sense to colonize a size 9 world and just fill it with labs and enough energy to be self-sustaining.
This seems like a bad way to think about the early game, though, where a huge share of your tech is coming from special projects, which I assume don't scale with population. The "go find all these animals" quest line gives you something like 1000 society research, which has the effect of doubling your tech rate for an amount of time inversely proportional to your tech rate. So at least for society tech, which you tend to find a lot of, we're talking something approaching 50% of your total research coming from these flat rewards for at least about the first 5 years of the game.
And in the early game your tech rate does not scale with population since you're mostly coasting on your 5/5/5 base income plus maybe some stations. Of course if you build and work a single science lab early on you're increasing your tech rate by 10-20% just from that.
This says to me that you may want to stay small until you can consume all of the flat research. I'd been focusing on building food in early colonies but I may let them develop much more slowly and maybe even have the second or third pop work a science lab.
So there's been some talk about how getting too big can be counterproductive because tech costs scale with population, but this isn't really right long-term as long as your tech generation more-or-less scales with population too. Tech cost growth isn't exponential; it's just an additive 2% per pop over 10, so with tech production that also scales with population you'll always research faster with more pops (although it asymptotes such that at 80 pop you're already at 2/3 of the infinite pop tech rate). Late game you just want to be expanding and working as many labs as possible. I expect that it makes sense to colonize a size 9 world and just fill it with labs and enough energy to be self-sustaining.
This seems like a bad way to think about the early game, though, where a huge share of your tech is coming from special projects, which I assume don't scale with population. The "go find all these animals" quest line gives you something like 1000 society research, which has the effect of doubling your tech rate for an amount of time inversely proportional to your tech rate. So at least for society tech, which you tend to find a lot of, we're talking something approaching 50% of your total research coming from these flat rewards for at least about the first 5 years of the game.
And in the early game your tech rate does not scale with population since you're mostly coasting on your 5/5/5 base income plus maybe some stations. Of course if you build and work a single science lab early on you're increasing your tech rate by 10-20% just from that.
This says to me that you may want to stay small until you can consume all of the flat research. I'd been focusing on building food in early colonies but I may let them develop much more slowly and maybe even have the second or third pop work a science lab.
AbortedWalrusFetus
Member
Yeah, I get the sentiment, but I've been in two wars total in over 150 years in this game and it was against neighboring empires that were inferior rated anyway, so it didn't effect much outcomes in the game at this point. Only reason I even fought them is they were obstructing my access to other parts of the galaxy and wouldn't open borders for me. If I do decide to actually take war seriously I'll probably mix it up for the challenge.
Wyndstryker
Member
60% evasion corvettes.
25% evasion admiral.
Hmm....
25% evasion admiral.
Hmm....
Yes, that would be an invulnerable fleet.
Liljagare
Banned
Have they fixed them? The 8 range affected their travel range too, so, basically a shotgun if you use them.
Read that you can text edit their ranges though.
The way evasion works makes corvettes OP, actually. Personally though, at the beginning(especially in insane matches) I keep my corvettes for a bit so I don't get wrecked, then build a second fleet entirely of battleships and cruisers and a third fleet entirely out of aura battleships and add destroyers and a handful of cruisers to my corvette fleet. Basically, a light fleet, a heavy fleet, and a support fleet.
What I do in war is find my enemies' biggest fleet with my light fleet, then send in the support and heavy fleets. The heavy fleet moves in slowly while taking advantage of their advanced range while the support fleet doesn't even have to engage to activate its aura. After I take the point off of them I split the support fleet in two while sending my light fleet to harass with one aura fleet following and my heavy fleet to bombard planets with an aura fleet making sure that they don't get interrupted by stray fleets.
It works well enough.
Agreed. I feel like shopping around for a balance mod till they fix it themselves.
Edit:
You know, I wonder if Battleships would work better if you force them to have the slowest engine.
Interesting. This makes sense of my experience. My early corvettes died so easily so I gave them up, thinking that the fighter and bomber squadrons were their replacement as light craft, docked on the more durable heavy fleet. Then I encountered a corvette horde in war and my battleships and cruisers couldn't put a dent in them. I thought there were just too many small fast targets and took that to heart, reintroducing destroyers and corvettes to my fleet to screen my larger ships and chase the enemy corvettes. But what you all are saying is that the heavy fleet is only really good for its auras and against other heavy ships, while the corvette hordes are strong against everything?
Yeah this is how I feel even after being made aware of the above. It is also an aesthetic thing. I like battleships and carriers and what not.
Sad. I have my carrier ships set up to support at range and my non-carriers set up as more aggressive ships. Seems I should pretty much have that reversed.
macfoshizzle
Member
Ok, just got this game and watched some youtube vids to learn. Are there other guides out there for tips for starting out? I'm starting as humans.
UcchedavÄda
Member
Just jump in head first and don't worry too much about playing optimally.
The game starts out pretty simple, and the tutorial does a decent job of explaining everything along the way, so hopefully you wont feel overwhelmed. And if you have played space 4X games before, then almost everything will feel pretty familiar.
macfoshizzle
Member
Ucchedavāda;204209218 said:
So apparently Influence points are hard to come by. I've been assigning each of my ships a recruit and now I don't have enough Influence points to create outpost to expand. And wow, space pirates are so annoying. killed off my whole system!
UcchedavÄda
Member
You can see your running gain / loss of resources on the top of the screen (power, minerals, and influence), and you'll notice that influence is gained at a rather low rate. If you hover over the respective icons, the tool-tip will tell you running incomes / losses of a given resource, but unless you put edicts in place, then you shouldn't have anything that costs influence over time that early in the game. So you be able to build up enough for an outpost simply by increasing the speed of the game and just waiting a little bit.
Also, you don't need to assign each ship a leader, that's complete overkill and won't scale for the fleet sizes you'll be working with later in the game. For now, you can just make a single fleet (there is a button to join ships when you select multiples, or you can just press 'g'), and then you just need one leader to start off with, or no leader if you'd rather save the influence.
As for pirates, they kinda keeled over in my game. I think I just built a couple of basic ships and that was that, so I can't really offer much advice there. Build more ships?
UcchedavÄda
Member
I only ran out of it once, and that was mainly because I had recently built several outposts and then most of my leaders died ..
John Dunbar
correct about everything
tried my first ironman game on hard.
it went well until it didn't.
it went well until it didn't.
You know what this game needs? Actual religion mechanics, where you can spread your religion and then call mass crusades on materialistic heretics. Would actually make for some interesting events, perhaps some civs share relgions right off the bat that were created by precursor civs.
I tried a hard game once and I immediately went back to normal difficulty since there is a litteral -50 hard relations modifier with some nations which I don't like.
UcchedavÄda
Member
You get a -50 relationship modifier in 'hard' mode? That seems a bit lazy, and would make just about any alliance impossible, based on my experience. Luckily I decided to play fanatical purifiers in the hard game I just started, so it won't make much of a difference.
Yes. That would be cool. Values diplomacy in general needs to be improved.
Ucchedavāda;204219889 said:
No, it doesn't make alliances impossible. Been playing my last couple games on insane, got invited to alliances in both, and in the game I'm currently playing I was invited by people I don't even have embassies with. The thing is, the AI seems to desperately look for people to join in an alliance after they lose a war, and if you're nearby and have a mutual rival, they'll beg you to join anyway.
What I like about insane is, most computers keep up with or even surpass you in it(they cheat, of course), so that fanatical purifier on your border becomes much, much more threatening. That being said, I wish they'd declare war more often. They seem to only do it when you're preoccupied with another war so they can stab you in the back.
You can create a fleet designed just for clearing systems for your science ships. You will get free admirals whenever they kill a decent amount or make sure your fleet never dies when at war. I gained a few that way in the early game.
LurkerPrime
Member
Religion mechanics wouldn't really make sense to me. There's already a materialistic vs. spiritual clash via ethoses. Plus the spiritualist ethos itself performs all of the functions religion would allow for, including spread (since it increases happiness, which will reduce the chance of that pop diverging).
I'd personally be interested in the addition of a "history trait," to give different species even more flavour. More than just species traits, this would be a cultural trait that displays how they've developed up to their discovery of FTL. Say they have advanced robotics, or a touch of psionics, or something like that which has influenced their development up to this point. The bonuses would be small, but would help to shape the civilization over the course of the game--so the robotics one would, for example, be more inclined to finding robotics techs, and would start with a few robot pops on their home planet.
There's probably better, more trope-y things to actually use, but I'm just spitballing here. I just think it'd be great to get a slightly better grip on the civilizations players design, so we can "sculpt" their development in the game proper. Of course, there would have to be a bunch available to make this work well.
Man, I really can't wait for expansions to Stellaris. It feels like there's limitless potential here.
I was thinking more Crusader Kings 2/medieval 2 total war style religion with some pope politics and crusades against infidels kinda thing. Maybe have a war goal be to "convert" an empire. I agree that Ethos are pretty strong already, but there's so much more that can be done with them to create mid-game events between other empires rather than external endgame threats.
And I'd like that history thing too. Having an empire that starts with robot pops would be pretty interesting.
doubleplusgood
Member
I like this idea. Being able to pick sort of key historic moments in a species' history. Some RPGs use the whole answer questions to build your backstory thing, not sure that would be an exact fit for Stellaris, but something along those lines might work?
Huge annoyance with the ethos system: one of the main ways your own ethoses (ethoi?) matter is in constraining your policy options, but this is not at all transparent. It's easy enough to tell if you can't pick a policy, but you really have no clue if your dudes will become unhappy because you've picked an option, and if they do become unhappy too bad because you're locked in for 10 years.
Edit: At least the wiki's got this. http://www.stellariswiki.com/Policies
The other really nice and not-at-all-transparent thing that the wiki's got are the chances to find various techs and the way that researcher specialties modify those. Notably, Computing makes you a lot more likely to find useful Physics techs, up to 12.5x more likely to find Sentient AI and Sentient Combat Simulations. Voidcraft makes you 6x more likely to find the rare tech for Observatories. In Society the main weird thing going on is that Psionics specialization and to a lesser extent Maniacal help you get the various psionic techs, and also you really want to be spiritualist (and if you're materialist you /need/ to have the Psionics specialization). Engineering mostly doesn't care except for some small pacifist/militarist differences in the likelihood of military techs. Maniacal and Spark of Genius both tend to make you a little more likely to find rarer techs.
Edit: At least the wiki's got this. http://www.stellariswiki.com/Policies
The other really nice and not-at-all-transparent thing that the wiki's got are the chances to find various techs and the way that researcher specialties modify those. Notably, Computing makes you a lot more likely to find useful Physics techs, up to 12.5x more likely to find Sentient AI and Sentient Combat Simulations. Voidcraft makes you 6x more likely to find the rare tech for Observatories. In Society the main weird thing going on is that Psionics specialization and to a lesser extent Maniacal help you get the various psionic techs, and also you really want to be spiritualist (and if you're materialist you /need/ to have the Psionics specialization). Engineering mostly doesn't care except for some small pacifist/militarist differences in the likelihood of military techs. Maniacal and Spark of Genius both tend to make you a little more likely to find rarer techs.
UcchedavÄda
Member
And in some cases the effects are surprising to say the least. At one point my xenophile pops had a negative happiness effect due to my allowing xenos as leaders, exactly the opposite of what I would have expected. But loading up my game I can no longer find that debuff, which suggests that it was either temporary or a bug. In any case, I am confused, and would appreciate more information on the policy screen as well.
TheLostBigBoss
Banned
Uhhh, so I have my Leadership to Primary Species Only as well as voting rights
and my xenophobic civilization just elected an alien race to be the leader from the previous war.
and my xenophobic civilization just elected an alien race to be the leader from the previous war.
Sounds like a faction became pretty powerful.
TheLostBigBoss
Banned
Huh, I didn't think aliens were primary citizens/species.
Wyndstryker
Member
Oh gosh, my main fleet blob drains so much energy once it's on the move that there's no way I can keep them active for extended periods of time without edicts.
I go from +30 energy to -60 energy the moment they undock.
edit:
Didn't want to make a new post. But I think this is probably a galaxy clearing playthrough with just how well things are going. Still clearing out unbidden space, and there are basically 4 or 5 federations in the galaxy. 4 of them are at war with each other resulting in a 4 way brawl. Best part is that they all pass through unbidden space where i got ships operating and I get to see their fleet stacks for good intel.
I go from +30 energy to -60 energy the moment they undock.
edit:
Didn't want to make a new post. But I think this is probably a galaxy clearing playthrough with just how well things are going. Still clearing out unbidden space, and there are basically 4 or 5 federations in the galaxy. 4 of them are at war with each other resulting in a 4 way brawl. Best part is that they all pass through unbidden space where i got ships operating and I get to see their fleet stacks for good intel.
jackissocool
Member
Can I get two alliances to merge somehow?
irfaanator
Banned
what does putting a ship in orbit around a planet do? I just found out today that I can put research ships in orbit around planets
It lowers their maintenance.
GrandHarrier
Member
Or even a system similar to CK or EU where you can't just run an army of all cavalry without a penalty.
John Dunbar
correct about everything
if you have unlocked the assist research tech they will increase a planet's science output. otherwise it just lowers maintenance (if it's a planet with a spaceport).
irfaanator
Banned
LurkerPrime
Member
I imagine Stellaris will eventually change up combat to be more CK2-esque, requiring leaders and varied forces to truly succeed. It kinda does with armament/defense composition, but largely it hasn't been a factor from what I've seen (still midgame). I think they've got the general feel of it locked down--it's better than CK2 was pre-retinue/leader stuff.
If they ever added some small additional effects to the ethoses, a distinction between two spiritualists would be interesting. Although they might like eachother regardless because they're the peoples that "get it" in regards to divine beings. Mostly because I imagine non-spiritualists as having trivialised or abolished religion entirely, but maybe that's just me.
I never thought of multiple choices, but that'd be cool too. I just like the thought of shaping them a bit more before and during a playthrough.
Gotchaye's post pointed out a lot of stuff that Stellaris is already doing in regards to shaping the development, so maybe UI difficiencies are making it seem worse/more uncontrollable than it is currently.
Oh, you raise a good point about inter-religious conflicts.
If they ever added some small additional effects to the ethoses, a distinction between two spiritualists would be interesting. Although they might like eachother regardless because they're the peoples that "get it" in regards to divine beings. Mostly because I imagine non-spiritualists as having trivialised or abolished religion entirely, but maybe that's just me.
I never thought of multiple choices, but that'd be cool too. I just like the thought of shaping them a bit more before and during a playthrough.
Gotchaye's post pointed out a lot of stuff that Stellaris is already doing in regards to shaping the development, so maybe UI difficiencies are making it seem worse/more uncontrollable than it is currently.
doubleplusgood
Member
Huh.. Now I see I might have to revise one of my policy choices....
On an unrelated note. I learned the other day that if you are allied with another empire (or have military access I would assume). Then if that ally has any planets with primitives on it, you can just go there with ground troops and take the planet for your self. The guy I'm playing my multiplayer campagin did this with me and the observation post I had there went up in smoke and suddenly we were sharing the system.
Not being able to maintain the fleet at war is fine do long as you're running a surplus the rest of the time. Just enact an edict during war if you need it, or trade minerals.
Baron von Loathsome
Member
I'm finally starting my game. Any particular recommendations for starting weapons and FTL methods for a new player?
Missiles and Warp are solid starters. Missiles are strong, but countered by point-defense - something that is not really there in the early game and Warp is super flexible. You can get stuck pretty bad with Hyperlanes.
They really need to make separate peace a thing in this game. My federation started a war against another and thanks to my fleet we were winning, then the federation leader got into a war with a fricking Fallen Empire, getting his fleets wrecked in the process. The problem is that they were the war leader for that other war as well and since his fleet was crushed, the enemy AI is like "well, we're not going to surrender" and apparently the ally AI doesn't want to peace out.The result? I've been in that war with 75% positive warscore for about 80 years now, I'm getting seriously annoyed by the hit-and-run tactics of that other Federation who's constantly destroying my space stations and because I'm not the war leader I can't actually get out of the war..
If this was EU4 I would've ended the war decades ago.
If this was EU4 I would've ended the war decades ago.