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Stellaris |OT| Imperium Universalis

Going to finish my game before trying the patch.

My method of war, vassal, war vassal, war, vassal isn't going to fly next time around lol.
 
They say it's impossible to manage all of your planets without sectors but I am doing quite fine by biting the bullet and ignoring making sectors. The option should be there for players to disable it and remove the colony cap.
 
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So we've been working with a user "Shaggo" on the Trek mod team who's managed to get the above in...
 
So we've been working with a user "Shaggo" on the Trek mod team who's managed to get the above in...

Those models are amazing. If I can help you in any way, let me know. I'm a writer (if you want someone for events and blurbs) and a violinist - while I can't record my violin, if there's someone composing music, I can give feedback on that.
 
They say it's impossible to manage all of your planets without sectors but I am doing quite fine by biting the bullet and ignoring making sectors. The option should be there for players to disable it and remove the colony cap.

It's definitely not impossible, but it would be very tedious. I think I have something like 60-70 planets at this point. The thing that's annoying is that even though I have a billion planets, you can't easily access all of the stations, so building fleets quickly is a nightmare. They need to let you set rally points and then just select the stations from a list and build the ships and have them auto-rally at a destination.

Last night I declared war all on my lonesome against an alliance. It was very frustrating for a few reasons. First of all, the combat is bugged so bad that I had two separate 15k fleets literally sit there and not attack while they got destroyed. Secondly, even though my empire is like 3x the combined size of all of the alliance members combined I'm capped at 1k vessels in my fleets. Since I essentially have unlimited resources it was basically throw a full 1000 ships at them, kill enough of their stuff and then rebuild my fleets fast enough that whatever is left over doesn't have time to take significant portions of my territory, then repeat the process. I poured about 80k worth of fleets into one battle, but about 30k of them glitched out and the battle was basically a massive wipe so I just reloaded a save. I just don't get why fleet size is capped at 1000. I guess I have to join an existing alliance, wait until I'm leader, then declare war and wipe out that alliance, then turn on my own alliance or something.
 
It's definitely not impossible, but it would be very tedious. I think I have something like 60-70 planets at this point. The thing that's annoying is that even though I have a billion planets, you can't easily access all of the stations, so building fleets quickly is a nightmare. They need to let you set rally points and then just select the stations from a list and build the ships and have them auto-rally at a destination.

I'm legitimately baffled that this isn't in the game already.
 
Ok. Started an insane ironman game with high AI agressiveness.

I start next to a millitarist fanatic collectivist.

Three decades after game start: he goes to war with me and takes all my planets in the war.

Note to self: If an empire rivals you with high agressiveness on that means "I'm going to burn your planets to the ground in 3 years."
 
It's definitely not impossible, but it would be very tedious. I think I have something like 60-70 planets at this point. The thing that's annoying is that even though I have a billion planets, you can't easily access all of the stations, so building fleets quickly is a nightmare. They need to let you set rally points and then just select the stations from a list and build the ships and have them auto-rally at a destination.

Even better, there should be some option for sectors to give them fleet requests, like, "build me 20 destroyer" and then they would fly to your home system once the request is fulfilled.


Sir Fragula, I love those models, man. The Defiant is beautiful.


Aw, hell. They nerfed theocratic republics -___________________________________-
 
They say it's impossible to manage all of your planets without sectors but I am doing quite fine by biting the bullet and ignoring making sectors. The option should be there for players to disable it and remove the colony cap.

I don't mind the idea of sectors, but the five planet cap before kicking in with penalties seems extremely restrictive, especially since I get into the swing of making rapid waves of expansion and having to hope the AI is going to do what I want with the last wave at the rate I want them to (they typically don't).
 
Man, as much as I'm digging this game, the combat is really bumming me out. Just really tedious and uninspired. Manages to waste my time and my laptops already limited computing power.

I mean... It's cool and all that I can create a disco in space with all those different coloured lasers and stuff, but is it really necessary to render all 90 ships in my fleet in real time when all the actual action is happening between two lines playing tug of war?

PKgOEoo.png

Just look at that hot, sizzling action.
 
Man, as much as I'm digging this game, the combat is really bumming me out. Just really tedious and uninspired. Manages to waste my time and my laptops already limited computing power.

I mean... It's cool and all that I can create a disco in space with all those different coloured lasers and stuff, but is it really necessary to render all 90 ships in my fleet in real time when all the actual action is happening between two lines playing tug of war?

PKgOEoo.png

Just look at that hot, sizzling action.

Your remaining hull points vs enemy remaining hull points. Ships are rendered because range and positioning matter. Closest ship to enemy fleet will be first to die, for example. It's too bad you can't change fleet formations (to my knowledge)
 
Went on a bit of a binge an did about 10 colony ships in the last hour, uplifted my first race too, took all of 3 months lol.

Just biding a little bit before spanking a few other AIs.

Your remaining hull points vs enemy remaining hull points. Ships are rendered because range and positioning matter. Closest ship to enemy fleet will be first to die, for example. It's too bad you can't change fleet formations (to my knowledge)

Indeed, Ideally you set formation so that no one ship is at more risk and so that more can open fire at once.
 
Your remaining hull points vs enemy remaining hull points. Ships are rendered because range and positioning matter. Closest ship to enemy fleet will be first to die, for example. It's too bad you can't change fleet formations (to my knowledge)
I understand what the hull points are all about. And while you have a point about range and positioning, there are other ways to do that without needlessly taxing my GPU.

My point is that once two fleets engage one another you literally lose all agency over the battle, other than the retreat button. They fly at each other in a straight line, often just ending up in a jumbled mess of lasers and missiles while you're watching the actual battle happen in a seperate menu. There is nothing for you to do at that moment other than watching the hull point bars go back and forth and pressing the retreat button if things don't go your way. You're literally watching battles auto-complete in real time. It's tedious as fuck for no reason.

Either give me a legitemate real-time battle system or make a turn based game. Now, at least as far as combat is concerned, you get a mix of both with none of the benefits or convenience of either.
 
I don't know what they're doing combat-wise under the hood but, yeah, obviously they could get almost exactly as good of a result for gameplay purposes without trying to do things like compute ranges between individual ships, so actually modeling the positions of individual ships doesn't seem like a great use of resources except for making battles pretty.
 
liking the beta patch a lot so far

just being able to click on the planet indicator from the galaxy map is an amazing quality of life tool. Zooming into a system just to check planet size or selecting a sector spaceport is really awful.
 
So i bought this game 2 days ago, i played it for hours and liked it a lot. However, i realized that for some reason i didn't unlock any achievement even though i did what i had to do (colonizing a planet, upgrading capital to Imperial Complex, etc...). Do any of you know why is that?
 
So i bought this game 2 days ago, i played it for hours and liked it a lot. However, i realized that for some reason i didn't unlock any achievement even though i did what i had to do (colonizing a planet, upgrading capital to Imperial Complex, etc...). Do any of you know why is that?

You have to play on Ironman for achievements.
 
Yeah, I'm liking the beta patch too outside a couple of minor problems. For some reason, fleet names for enemy empires(and not NPCs, weirdly enough) are so messed up that I can't see their fleet strength.

So i bought this game 2 days ago, i played it for hours and liked it a lot. However, i realized that for some reason i didn't unlock any achievement even though i did what i had to do (colonizing a planet, upgrading capital to Imperial Complex, etc...). Do any of you know why is that?

You don't get achievements in paradox games if you don't play on ironman.
 
I understand what the hull points are all about. And while you have a point about range and positioning, there are other ways to do that without needlessly taxing my GPU.

My point is that once two fleets engage one another you literally lose all agency over the battle, other than the retreat button. They fly at each other in a straight line, often just ending up in a jumbled mess of lasers and missiles while you're watching the actual battle happen in a seperate menu. There is nothing for you to do at that moment other than watching the hull point bars go back and forth and pressing the retreat button if things don't go your way. You're literally watching battles auto-complete in real time. It's tedious as fuck for no reason.

Either give me a legitemate real-time battle system or make a turn based game. Now, at least as far as combat is concerned, you get a mix of both with none of the benefits or convenience of either.
What you are looking for is not going to happen. This is how battles work in Paradox games. You prepare them and move units in place. After that, you wait and see if your strategy works out.
 
What you are looking for is not going to happen. This is how battles work in Paradox games. You prepare them and move units in place. After that, you wait and see if your strategy works out.

Right, but since the game isn't letting you control the ships there's no reason to render out the battle. They do it because people want to see it and it's what they expect from a space empire game, but I can understand why some people would want an option to turn off rendered space battles (especially now that the improved status report screen means you don't need to watch the battle to understand what happened). Especially in the late game, where 100k+ stacks fight each other and the fps drops to single digits.

However, you can just zoom out to galaxy view and avoid this whole issue, unless I'm misunderstanding something.
 
What you are looking for is not going to happen. This is how battles work in Paradox games. You prepare them and move units in place. After that, you wait and see if your strategy works out.

I'm not too famliar with other Paradox' grand strategies, so I didn't know that that's just the way they do things. I guess I expected something more along the lines of Sins of a Solar Empire due to the setting.

Having looked in to it a bit more now I can see why they developed the combat system the way they have. I still think it's a waste that, in case of Stellaris, they developed systems around it that come so close to tradional RTS mechanics only for them to stop right before the point it matters most.

But I guess that's pretty a subjective opinion. The rest of the game is still very enjoyable imo.

Right, but since the game isn't letting you control the ships there's no reason to render out the battle. They do it because people want to see it and it's what they expect from a space empire game, but I can understand why some people would want an option to turn off rendered space battles (especially now that the improved status report screen means you don't need to watch the battle to understand what happened). Especially in the late game, where 100k+ stacks fight each other and the fps drops to single digits.

However, you can just zoom out to galaxy view and avoid this whole issue, unless I'm misunderstanding something.

Also this. You can't just stay in galaxy view entirely though, you do have to keep an eye on incoming backup from time to time.
 
You can do some very basic "formation strategy" with the ship logic modules, I'd assumed. But yes, it would be nice to give you choices between different formations. When I construct my armies in a game like this I do it with some sort of deployment stratagem in mind and I guess I always just assumed units played their roles and that is why my armies won beyond just being technologically superior a lot of the time. I guess being able to see your battles unfold in Stellaris kind of ruins that illusion somewhat :P.

Even if it was just formation commands like "hold your line and shoot missiles" or "harry the big ships and retreat repeatedly," it would be a cool addition in my mind. I guess the counter concern is that these battles are happening while you are supposed to be managing everything else still including other battles so it could undermine the 'grand strategy' aspect if these things were extremely important. I guess something like the fleet stance option for battles and a more in depth ship AI system would be the best we could hope for (?!).
 
Yeah, I don't think people understand how tedious that sort of micromanagement can be, or how introducing "tactical combat" might affect other parts of the game since every other mechanic would need to balance around it. Total War games never really had particularly great things to do off the battlefield and I don't think Civ 5 really gained much from introducing tile combat. The thing is that Stellaris really needs some more meat since it's not as heavy on intrigue or maneuvering as other paradox games, but I don't think adding more battle control or planet micromanagement is the right direction to go with that.

Making fleet commanders matter more would be the most interesting thing, I think. Sort of like how CK2 does it with battle actions or generals having affinities for certain kinds of units or tactics, and making it advantageous to have multiple fleets/admirals in the same battle instead of immediately blobbing up.
 
I love reading about all of the games and the different stories everyone has made.

Wish there was a demo to give it a try as I don't know if I'd be able to play this. I've bought CK2 and Hearts of Iron but they are really hard for me to get into and I end up feeling overwhelmed and stop playing.

I really want to play a space game and now that No Man's Sky has been delayed to August I have some money to spend. I keep trying to get into Beyond Earth but I just can't. I love Civ games but B.E just isn't as much fun.
 
I love reading about all of the games and the different stories everyone has made.

Wish there was a demo to give it a try as I don't know if I'd be able to play this. I've bought CK2 and Hearts of Iron but they are really hard for me to get into and I end up feeling overwhelmed and stop playing.

I really want to play a space game and now that No Man's Sky has been delayed to August I have some money to spend. I keep trying to get into Beyond Earth but I just can't. I love Civ games but B.E just isn't as much fun.

BE sucks. Stellaris is easy to get into if you know Civ and the 4X games. Give it a try - it is not that much different than MoO and so on. The new MoO is also ok - but pretty simplistic.
HoI, CK and so on are also to hard to get into for me.
 
How demanding is the game?

Can it be played on a Macbook Air?

Will it crawl on bigger Empires? I can't be kept down.

I have an intel 6700 and nvidia 970. I will drop below 30 fps when I have gigantic fleets merging into one area. One great thing though, zooming out to the galaxy map help bring the fps back to 60 since it stops drawing anything graphically. You should be ok, unless you really want to watch the ship battles in the late game.
 
Wish there was a demo to give it a try as I don't know if I'd be able to play this. I've bought CK2 and Hearts of Iron but they are really hard for me to get into and I end up feeling overwhelmed and stop playing.

You could always refund it after two hours if you are not enjoying it, although two hours isn't a huge amount of time to really test out a large scale strategy game. What I would recommend is giving one of the streams a go, perhaps the Paradox Blorg one, watching an episode or two will give you an idea about how the early game works out and if you can get your head around it then you can give the full game a spin (and refunding if necessary.) I would say just personally of course I can't get into CK and EU, they are too overwhelming for me, but I understand Stellaris perfectly. So it is a more accessible game for sure.
 
So I've played Stellaris for about 10 hours now, and I've sort of come to the realisation that "oh, I should actually be taking the initiative here." I've sort of just been noodling about, colonising, doing lots of research but not actually invading anywhere, despite my fanatic militarism.
 
I love reading about all of the games and the different stories everyone has made.

Wish there was a demo to give it a try as I don't know if I'd be able to play this. I've bought CK2 and Hearts of Iron but they are really hard for me to get into and I end up feeling overwhelmed and stop playing.

I really want to play a space game and now that No Man's Sky has been delayed to August I have some money to spend. I keep trying to get into Beyond Earth but I just can't. I love Civ games but B.E just isn't as much fun.

Both CK and HoI series can be overwhelming, but Stellaris is very accessible compared to those two games. If you can understand CiV games, you shouldn't have a problem with this. Also, like someone else said, on Steam you can return a game up to two hours of playtime.

Personally, I just watched Quill's Let's Play and after that I was comfortable with the game and the basics.
 
I'm stuck in a situation where my alliance has 100% war score but is not declaring victory? Anyone else had this?

edit: Just used console to make the enemy empire surrender, didn't seem to be any other way to do it.
 
So I've played Stellaris for about 10 hours now, and I've sort of come to the realisation that "oh, I should actually be taking the initiative here." I've sort of just been noodling about, colonising, doing lots of research but not actually invading anywhere, despite my fanatic militarism.

Building a bunch of colonies is pretty much a necessity, along with setting up outposts to fill in gaps until your borders expand enough to not need them. One of my games focused on building a bunch of colony ships as soon as I learned the tech, which in turn allowed me to learn the techs for colonizing different types of planets. My empire grew so fast, that I engulfed the other empires nearby and used migration access on the engulfed empire's people to colonize the planets that had low habitability for my race, in turn, caused my borders to grow even larger. Pretty much has a snowball effect on everything when you maximize colonizing.
 
Would anyone else really like to be able to see the actual queue of buildings and change the order. There are times when I'll queue up like 10 jobs and then realise I want number 9 to be first lol.

Also let me take minerals and credits OUT of sectors. 2 of mine have like 4k sitting there.
 
Would anyone else really like to be able to see the actual queue of buildings and change the order. There are times when I'll queue up like 10 jobs and then realise I want number 9 to be first lol.

Also let me take minerals and credits OUT of sectors. 2 of mine have like 4k sitting there.

Hell Yes!
 
If I wanted to buy and play this, is the beta patch solid enough to use right off the bat? Or should I just wait a week until it's pushed to everybody?
 
If I wanted to buy and play this, is the beta patch solid enough to use right off the bat? Or should I just wait a week until it's pushed to everybody?

Been pretty solid for me. There was an update to the beta that caused issues, but it was pulled, in fact it never affected me. It'll probably be fixed and put back on early next week.
 
So does anyone have new strategies for the patch? My favorite play-through so far was the species of tentacle monsters organized into a technocracy, that routinely subjugated other races and used their planets for research purposes.


Also let me take minerals and credits OUT of sectors. 2 of mine have like 4k sitting there.

I think that this would be a really cool mechanic if it was tied with the happiness and government tactics that are already in the game.

Say for a republic, or some form of democracy, just taking materials from a sector could be viewed as an act of tyranny and cause a happiness dip. Like taking tribute in CK2. Whereas with a despotic government, maybe a monarchy, or any other collectivist government it would be considered "for the greater good".
 
So last night I had my first war along side another race. Man it actually felt like we were playing together against the enemy it was great. Haven't had that kind of feeling in this kinda game before.
 
I love reading about all of the games and the different stories everyone has made.

Wish there was a demo to give it a try as I don't know if I'd be able to play this. I've bought CK2 and Hearts of Iron but they are really hard for me to get into and I end up feeling overwhelmed and stop playing.

I really want to play a space game and now that No Man's Sky has been delayed to August I have some money to spend. I keep trying to get into Beyond Earth but I just can't. I love Civ games but B.E just isn't as much fun.

In in the same situation. I really enjoy space games and what i've seen of this looks pretty good, but i'm not sure if it'll be too complicated or not. The closest thing i've really played would be Civ, i tried to play some EU and CK2 a while ago but i had absolutely no idea what was going on.
 
In in the same situation. I really enjoy space games and what i've seen of this looks pretty good, but i'm not sure if it'll be too complicated or not. The closest thing i've really played would be Civ, i tried to play some EU and CK2 a while ago but i had absolutely no idea what was going on.

I've only played a very limited amount (thanks Roboleon!), but my impression is that this is by far the simplest Paradox title. There's more interface stuff going on than Civ 5, and probably more systems, but to be honest most of the systems have a pretty simple optimum you learn quite quickly, and from that point Stellaris has much less depth and strategic interaction than Civ 5.
 
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