f13.net

http://www.stellarisgame.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxTT258PmNc

Pausable RTS combat, Paradox-style events, 32 player multiplayer support. Looks like a better GalCiv, if that's not insulting Paradox here...

On Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/app/281990/)

Looks cool I guess a long overdue new engine.

I like that it will have elements from all other Paradox grand strategy series'.

No such luck

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/clarifications.876380/ (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/clarifications.876380/)
"1.This is a Clausewitz game. The newest version of our homegrown engine – the one powering Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV – is the backbone of Stellaris."

New 4x space game by Paradox.  EU4 mixed with CK2 in a procedurally generated galaxy.  Who else has it preordered?

Already a thread for this; http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=24984.0

I've got it pre-ordered. I've sunk enough time into CK2, the EU series (probably 2500+ hours across the EU series alone) and the various other EU-ish games to think the game warrants a pre-order. Likely the only game this year I pre-order.

bump for merge

Sorry about that!  I looked for a thread, but apparently not closely enough.  I wish the game was turn based, but I can deal with pause and give orders.

I generally prefer turn based to real time, but the Paradox formula works well enough for me. I do have some concerns for the game, but I'm hoping they're not huge issues. Biggest worry is the AI; the pre-release stream they've had hasn't exactly been indicative of even remotely challenging AI, and their previous games aren't exactly known for it.

That said, there's a lot about the game I'm really looking forward to seeing their take on; especially the early, mid-game and late game crises which might make the game far more interesting, particularly late game. I wager I'll end up modding the game to make them more likely to occur (and more likely to have more than one trigger per game). I can already tell I'll be modding the tech speed heavily -- but I end up doing that in any 4x I play (it is always way, way too quick for my tastes).

I prefer interesting over challenging, personally.

This could be good for Paradox to not be bound to historical maps and balance issues. One thing the AI was particularly bad at was measuring terrain modifiers and sending armies into battles against terrible river and mountain modifiers when you had reinforce armies nearby. I haven't played EUIV recently but I think they are only now beginning to make progress on AI ability to move troops properly with sea transports.

Since it's the same engine, being free from these terrain restrictions that it always struggled so much with might be a nice boost for the AI, so a refreshing change for longtime players who are way to familiar with its logic and pattern behaviours.

First impression is definitely positive, I find it somewhat more "newbie-friendly" compared to the other recent Paradox's "grand strategy" titles.

And dat soundtrack, wow. Now let me just add Mass Effect's galaxy map theme and I'm in heaven.

First impression: Got to bed at an unholy time despite having shit to do at work today. It's good.

25% off at GMG SPACE25

thanks for the heads-up.  :grin:

There's already a 40K mod.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRDPPbJPIGs

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=681481647

First thing I did was turn off the music. I just run my classic playlist in the background and it's a lot better imo. Soundtrack is way too new-agey and repetitive for me.

Game is cool, first impression is same as my original post; feels like a much better galciv. Stuff like hiring the ship captains and governors makes a huge difference in the feel, though I've only scratched the surface. Meant to play a few minutes and ended up playing a couple hours, so that's a good sign.

I had a look at GMG for the offer on this and it is insisting on me putting in my address. I'm sorry, but the reason I use paypal is because I don't want to give my address. They say they support paypal but they still want my address. Not going to happen.

I am really interested to know how it plays out in multiplayer. I don't plan to koin random games but I'd love to play it with friends. Any opinion or link to other opinions?

Bought it just before I read about the GMG offer, but I think this will be well worth the full price I paid.

Looking forward to the DLCs to fill out the holes it still has like the lack of victory conditions. And of course I'll take all the events I can get. Those are really fun and excellently written.

Yeah, haven't had the time to put in round 2 yet, but even just starting out and making first contact with a benevolent race it said they were almost impossible to provoke. Then my science ship failed an anomaly roll and found them in a mating ritual, which enraged them and they promptly destroyed my ship. Guess they're not into exhibition!

Peeping Major Tom?

This thing just scratches an itch for me. Can't stop myself from playing it even with the bugs it has and the missing/hidden information that seem to be inherent to Paradox releases. I love how they balance research speed around population size (the more pop you have the harder research gets, so small empires will almost as a rule be technologically superior to bigger ones).

When your first scientist hits 5 stars and can finally research that relic you found a while back...hey where did she go? No scientist in science vessel? Look on tab, 'Ruling from Earth'...oh man, didn't pay attention to candidate's names. She won the presidency from teh depths of space!

So, I researched the Physics lab and the Engineering Facility, but now they don't appear in the "build" tab of any planet surface tile. I'm obviously missing something here: what am I doing wrong?  :oh_i_see:

Upgrade a basic science lab.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/cant-build-engineering-facility-i-after-research.927059/

Damn. Thanks  :grin:

I learned that one with my first colony, or, "How do I get a Planetary Administration"? (Upgrade the colony ship tile)

Looooving this game, but I'm going to have to find a way to put together a navy pretty quick. Got lucky with two relic ships (96 str) from anomalies, but one got smoked in an encounter with the cloud dudes. My best ship is 28 str and there are a number of hostiles cutting off my science ships... and a pirate fleet that decided to start wrecking my undefended stations. They got one station and had the outpost in the system down to 1% before the cavalry showed up to save the day at the last possible second.

This game is awesome.  It will be fucking amazing after they've had a few DLC rounds with it.

I had promised myself I was going to do all sorts of things this weekend.  Instead of I just played this game.


So many fun events and Easter eggs.  For instance, I found the Arakkis system, complete with colonizable desert planet.  Terra forming station has just been constructed in orbit to make it rain.  Fuck you Fremen.

Then, playing as the other Human faction (early colonist who got sent off on a wormhole across the galaxy and trapped, founding their own empire), I stumbled across Earth.  Unfortunately, in a rehash of Battlestar galactica (the original), it was somehow still at present days technology level.  So I decide to benevolently bring them into the fold, by secretly killing off all the world leaders and replacing them with clones.  Things get off to a rough start, however, when one of my agents attempts to take over a major nation but fucks up and causes a lot of death (farewell agent Trump).  The leader of the nation that almost got coup'd blames it on Russia 'a rival nation', and everybody goes to defcon 4.  Only through extreme efforts of my science officers and agents who have already taken over other nations leaders am I able to head off global destruction with UN agreements (thanks Agent Merkel).

Things proceed ok from there, until my top god damned agent on the planet falls in love with an Earth girl and defects.  He sends a message telling us to piss off and we'll never find him.  He then proceeds to start assassinating various agents over the years, setting back the plot decades.  Further more, he starts trying to make our plot known to the media.  Luckily, since he's also human and can't really prove anything, this accurate summary of whats really happening only gets picked up by the likes of Art Bell, and he remains ignored long enough for me to finally replace all the major leaders.  Who then all happily sign a treaty of global annexation into the Commonwealth of Man when my emissary lands in his flying saucer.

If the mod community on this takes off, there shall be some god tier fun to be had.   :awesome_for_real:

It broke Paradox's sales records, so there will definitely be good support for it.

This sounds like great fun. Then I remember trying to play CK2, and I don't push the purchase button on Steam.

It's not like CK2.

What's a Fallen Empire? I'm a bit puzzled because I've got one on my borders and it's really strong and they don't like me but they also haven't expanded one bit since the game started, and don't seem to be threatening any of the neighbors.

This is the closest to the fun I remember having with MOO--it feels the most like that. One thing I really like is that it has actual chokepoints as well--you can actually make strategic decisions about which systems you've got to grab and hold.

I've bought a few Paradox game and could never penetrate the interface. Longest I played was EU...2? 3? As the Iroqouis, until Europe showed up.

This game is NOT a typical hyper-dense Paradox game. I'm guessing it lacks layers of the older franchises, too; but that's a good sacrifice for the playability imo. Especially if it gets added over time, which I feel it will.

As far as Fallen Empires, not sure. I've encountered a few things I'm dying to look up, but I want to play my entire first run with no reloads, no reference.

Fallen Empire are the remnants of old galactic superpowers that could easily wipe you out without a second glace, but don't expand their territory. Each of them has one trigger issue, but if that isn't triggered they sit idly at home and do nothing. The two I know of are "Don't settle any planets near us or we will fuck you up" and "If you settle on one of these super colonizable planets we decided are holy sites, we will fuck you up".

This game is really great, and comparing to normal Paradox games (which I never could get into because I'm too old to make a master thesis on a single game) its really really approachable.

My biggest gripe with it is it's missing a lot of simple, quality-of-life interface features.  Weirdly, some of these are things common to other Paradox games (even at launch).  Like, the ability to select what alerts will cause popups, what will just cause a little icon at the top, and what will actually pause the game.  In every other Paradox game I've played, there's an entire menu dedicated to letting you select exactly how each event will announce itself to you, but not so this one and it's irritating me because a lot of things I want the game to auto-pause for it doesn't.  Other little interface gripes are things like, why is there not a screen I can go to that lists every planet I have the technology to colonize, and lets me organize them by total possible tiles, total available tiles, and things like total energy/minerals/research of each type?  They do tend to slowly, over the patches, address interface issues, like when they finally listened to Arumba and made EUIV fleets auto-merge if they're on the same trade node, so I imagine eventually, some of my interface gripes will be dealt with.

Other than that, it's great if a little thin, but it's not like EU4 was much more robust at launch.  It'll have things filled in over time.  And like I told a friend recently - release is the best time to get into a Paradox game because it's pretty bare-bones, so you can get used to the framework before it gets too complicated.

I made the slight error of expanding right next to one on my last playthrough, I had battleships, was surrounded by vassals and am feeling pretty comfortable.
Suddenly they start sending me messages of how I have to bow down to my alien overlords, but the Commonwealth of Man don't swing that way, so I say: "Take a hike old man, there's a new sheriff in town".
Apparently though when the game says 'overwhelmingly more powerful', it means it; they turn up with a single armada of battlecruisers that says 24k and a few months later my glorious empire is no more  :uhrr:.

Loving the overall atmosphere of the game as well and it mostly looks like a great framework for some heavy modding/patching.
I might have to put it down for a while though, lest I burnout before all the good stuff is added.

Are the most glaring bugs fixed yet? mainly the non working sector stuff i guess.

What sector stuff isn't working?

Basic UI like movement is bugging me.  The UX is not good.  The game design is good and approachable, but they need another UX pass or a SkyUI like mod.

The early game is just hyper, hyper addicting. Normally what people describe happening next is that "the shine comes off" but it's really more like "you make a Sector, and then the wheels fuckin' fall off and the bus explodes into flames"

....how so?

I think the sector stuff is brilliant, and solved a lot of the problems these games have.  Which is that when you get a giant empire, it becomes a massive pain in the ass to micromanage everything.  Once I figured out the sectors, I got addicted to creating and setting up new ones and populating them.  Gives the late game a lot of depth while solving the micro managing problem.

Sectors should be good. At the moment they are just an incredible way to say "I trust the computer to vomit buildings almost at random throughout my empire and just generally have no clue what the hell it is doing"

also there's a bug which causes energy vamp and prevents me from fielding any fleets.

Is the AI any good at managing sectors?  I haven't gotten to huge empire sizes yet.

The AI is absolutely atrocious at it. Every time I have gotten to Sectordom, the AI has shortly thereafter utterly brutalized my resource management.

AI doesn't really seem to follow instructions, yeah. I'm not sure what it does if you tell it to prioritize military, for example. It doesn't build ships or defense stations or anything that would be militarily useful. Since you can't micromanage Sectors even if you wanted to, this is kind of a problem.

I got to the point that's a pretty classic 4X experience--you're kicking ass locally but at some point the guy you've been bullying joins an alliance and you weren't really ready for it. If you're moving around with warp drive and you come up against an equivalent civ that can move a lot faster, you're in big trouble even if your death stack beats their death stack. Would be nice if there was some way to interdict movement past frontier systems? Maybe there is and I haven't gotten to it with the tech trees.

For Fallen Empires there's a few basic ways to ensure they don't come over and kill you;

1) Don't border the Fanatic Isolationist Fallen Empires. If your borders are touching you're in trouble. Generally I leave a couple systems between myself and them, just to be safe as borders grow over time.
2) The Fallen Empires that protect holy worlds (named Gaia worlds) will try to kill you for settling them. There's a planet modifier you can see on the Surface view of those planets that will indicate it is a holy world; however, it is only visible if you've surveyed the planet.
3) Another kind abhors slavery, and if you're close to them you may want to forego using slavery completely (and really, despite the nice bonuses to food and mineral production on planets I don't find slavery to be worth it, especially with sectors being garbage, but at least the slave revolt faction is, basically, turned off and there's no worry about them revolting).
4) If all else fails, and you're close to a Fallen Empire, get an Embassy going with them and watch your relations with them closely. They will almost never attack you if you keep them above -75 opinion, even if you're guilty of one of the above.

As for why sectors are bad.. it's fairly simple; the AI is garbage. Even with proper use of the two checkmarks in sector management (ignore/honour tile bonuses and whether or not they can replace buildings) you can run into issues. I've had sectors with the options for not respecting tile bonuses and not allowed to replace buildings... replace several buildings (usually with more food, which is dumb when they are pop-capped and already have excess food!). Also, their specializations are fairly worthless (military just builds defence stations in sector space, industrial spams out mineral buildings across the planet, economic the same for energy, and research does the same with labs -- there's no 'balanced' setting, either).

Then there's the issue with strategic resources (they can only use strategic resources within the sector's control, and cannot use strategic resources from empire or other sectors) which can result in having to replace certain buildings before you turn them over to sector control; or pay the influence cost to remove and re-add them to the sector to do it manually.

Sectors are a good idea, just badly done. Half-finished, basically (much like certain other aspects of the game -- namely, the UI and quality of life mechanics, which are actually my biggest issues with the game).

In time, I'm hoping the address the UI and QoL mechanics the most; especially the latter, as the game is missing a number of very simple features that already exist in other games from Paradox (that use the exact same engine). Things like renamed fleets not keeping their unique name with merging of fleets, a ledger of sorts for better sorting and management of your holdings (much less comparing varying galactic powers).

And dear god, the shipyard problem. Give a planet to a sector and now to select the shipyard (which you still fully control) you have to go into the system view for that planet, and click the shipyard -- and you don't get to see their building progression in the outliner once they're within a sector's space, which is even more annoying. Spread that out over 20+ systems under sector management and you'll want to set someone on fire.

On the whole, however; I love the game. It has already replaced EUIV as my go-to game for playing and I imagine it'll only get better given their track record with EUIV and CK2. It just could have used another month or so in development on the minor things (and certain bug fixes; strike craft being next-to-useless, one of the end-game crisis' being broken and game-breaking). Do wish the game was harder, however. The AI empires are extremely passive (and tend to have nearly un-ending wars between each other that destroys the economy of both and renders them helpless) and alliances can be nearly useless (allied ships will simply 'join up' with your fleets and not do anything on their own -- almost without exception, meaning they tend to leave their own space un-defended, even if they are the defender in the war and their planets are the wargoals).

I don't think I've seen it mentioned but there are already a huge number of mods out on the steam workshop that you can mix and match to fix a lot of various problems. Stuff like bigger/different galaxy, more empire colors/emblems, more traits, new starting systems(ringworld is cool), gameplay tweaks, graphical tweaks, straight up cheats, etc. I usually just sort by most subscribed and go from there. Sadly, I haven't seen anything that helps the AI much at all.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/281990/workshop/

The game is a disgrace - Paradox has only learnt that they can release broken games and then supply $AU120 of DLC to fix it.  

Is there any other new 4X space game that's come out since GalCiv II? Distant Universe was a game better played watching it play itself. Was the latest MOO any good?

Huh, I hadn't noticed the issues with sectors.  I pretty much just set them up and let them run themselves without really checking in (to busy colonizing other worlds and expanding cores, so I can make more sectors).  The credits and minerals just kept on rolling in, so I assumed everything was great.   :awesome_for_real:  UI hasn’t really given me any issues, except for a few QOL features that don’t really hamper my enjoyment (being able to bring up a list of colonizable worlds on demand would be nice).  I didn’t notice how hard it is to build starships in sectors either, since even when I have a huge empire, I still build all of my ships on my home planet, heh.

Though does anybody know if there is a penalty for having to many colonized planets in one sector?  Or does that only apply to your core worlds?

While I’ll agree that the UI could be improved a bit, and from the sounds of it they obviously need to fix some bugs and the AI, that’s pretty damn extreme.  Right now, in its current form, I’m ranking this as about the best 4x space game I’ve ever played.  And it can get fixed/made better fairly easily.  Excited to see where it goes down the road once they start rolling out DLC.

You can put as many planets as you like in a sector, as far as I can tell. They just need some kind of adjacency to be added. Arguably you almost want to build a sector to include only inhabited planets and keep the planets with mining and research stations under your direct control, but sometimes that's impossible to pull off.

One reason I'm happy to buy a Paradox game over many others is that they really have a reliable workflow of making long-term changes to games. Sometimes that screws the game up (some of the later CK2 expansions) but they do tweak stuff in a useful way. So looking at what they're working on right away and what they plan to do later, I'm very encouraged. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-33-the-maiden-voyage.932668

The only worthwhile setting for sectors is 75% output, high energy focus. Energy is the lifeblood of the game, everything else is just window dressing. Energy is used for everything. Energy powers every building or orbital station that collects any other resource besides more energy. Energy is spent to maintain your navy month to month.

The only time another resource has ever mattered to me is early game, when you want minerals to push out the earliest developments and some extra corvettes to deal with pirates and various flavors of space herp. After that point you will be running a garrulous surplus of minerals. So you start with mineral stations, but then you quickly start converting all your excess production capacity / initial construction and expansion to energy, energy, energy. You want the highest energy surpluses you can have, because it tells you exactly how much military power you can have.

Yep, even as a slow newb, I've just hit the point (about 65 years in) where it tips from "needing minerals desperately just to build/improve and having excess energy to the point of not building energy improvements because I'm at the storage cap" to "Hmm, better check the minerals cap and how did I get -13 energy in one turn?"

I did /just/ build a fleet. Spend the early years just exploring and avoiding red things.

I dig the way you can imagine stories. That science vessel officer who was elected president? I put her in charge of societal research when she lost the next election, as her 'retirement', figuring her time in office gave her experience with that line of research (ingame, she was just a 5 star researcher, no other bonuses). Then, in her 70s, she's elected president again (I'm assuming because I finished her mandate but not the following presidents), because she's long-lived.

To fill her role, I got lucky with a junior scientist with a love for one of the society research tracks (I forget which) and also with an ace science vessel officer. So in my roleplay version it's her two students from the research institute.

I'm going to miss Anna when she dies. I've already lost a couple characters I grew attached to, and the computer researcher who was in her 80s but advanced society by leaps and bounds with her computer innovations was the worst so far.

Or you could bitch about UI stuff. Different strokes.

Micromanage it is then, for now.

The game is fun, although it sometimes fucks you in brilliant ways:
You need a 5 star Scientist for some local research. Luckily, you have 4 of those, but they are far away and all die on the way there because they were in their 80s.  :why_so_serious:

CK2 and then EUIV were where they first started really going bananas with this current DLC model adding all kinds of new mechanic expansions onto games, seemingly freestyle. Basically thinking of areas that would be cool to improve then figuring out some way to do it, but often blowing out vanilla balance because they didn't seem to be well tested or their idea wasn't so great in practice as it was on the drawing board.

I am hoping with this next generation, Stellaris + HOI IV, they have planned out their expansions (both aesthetic content and mechanical upgrades) for the long term and have a more methodical approach to them.

Or gets elected president en route to the research site :)

Besides Sunset Empire what CK2 DLC was bad?

Just started playing. is there any way to reduce the UI clutter? The "badges" used to denote planets, systems and ships take up such a lot of screen real estate that I can't really see what's going on even though I just have the starting items.

I would think that the main complaint people had with the DLC was that it changed the gameplay and how that was balanced every time. I for one really liked (except for Sunset Invasion of course) the DLCs for changing the game since I played it a lot and felt that the sometimes drastic changes kept my interest far better.

I do hope Paradox keeps up with their previous DLC style where their content seems to be heavily affected by player opinions and mods instead of just sticking to a (pre-launch) strictly planned DLC schedule and content.

I thought the DLC where they added affairs and suchlike was badly implemented--rather than it being an addition of a new kind of gameplay into the established mix it was dialed up to 11 and overwhelmed the game. I also really didn't like the one that empowered councils a lot more, for the same reason.

This has become an 'oh shit it's after 2am, tomorrow is going to suck' kind of game.  :uhrr:

To add to Khaldun, I also didn't really like the old gods. It was a good idea but in practice raiding required a lot of tedious micromanagement and was also AI abuse, but then you could get super rich doing it, which was imbalanced. Then the adventurer and claimant insta-spawn super armies were very frustrating.

This, and I also entered a team that is going to translate the whole thing in italian (we should get an "official" endorsement by Paradox soon)  :awesome_for_real:

That's really neat!

Out of curiosity, how did you get so good at English?  As somebody who's traveled a lot of the world at this point, I'm always interested in how people learn other languages so well.  Also because I'm the single worst person in the world at learning other languages.

I was picking up Spanish pretty well, but the utter lack of usage in my daily life means it went away quickly.

Thanks for the undeserved "so good"  :heart:

And...well, thanks to computer games, really, and my father who has always been a gamer himself since the early '80s, so he often played together with his son, translating everything that was going on the screen :D.

As Falconeer can undoubtedly confirm, italian translation of games was basically nonexistent throughout the whole '80s. It started to gain steam with Lucasfilm adventure games (especially from Monkey Island and onward, with Maniac Mansion, Indy 3 and Zak as earlier exceptions).
I learnt a LOT of words and a bit of syntax quite in advance, some years before actually starting in school (and, compared to a lot of italian children, I was lucky to begin studying english quite early, 3rd grade, uncommon over here in the '80s).

And hey, it was frustrating, because, among other genres, I happened to LOVE Sierra and Magnetic Scrolls games (or, rather, the pretty pictures, animated or not, on the screen :P).... As a child who was in the process of perfecting his OWN native language (luckily, I always liked to read), imagine how frustrating it was not being able to understand what was happening on screen, or what secrets and incredible stories those manuals (The Pawn, Guild of Thieves) could contain.

Then, when I started surfing the net in late '94 (earlier than the paleolithic age here in Italy when it comes to the Net :P), I started reading forums, went into IRC chats, so I started learning a bit of "everyday" english, idioms and so on.
Infact, I've always been a tourist, never stopped in a foreign country for an extended period of time (yeah, sometimes I travel alone, but again, just as a tourist), so I never really picked up all the nuances "on the field".
---------------
For example, three years ago I ran the NYC marathon together with my girlfriend: I must say that it took me a day or so to really start getting confident with my spoken skills: watch TV Shows or 24/7 news channels is one thing; another is trying to understand what an overweight NYC metro employee in Penn Station is mumbling from behind a glass at 7.15am with an ever increasing queue behind you while at the same time you're trying not to sound like a complete idiot  :P

I really like this game... but the AI is just so bad  :ye_gods:
Add in the fact that the difficulty setting is just more resources and bonuses for the AI and stupid things like insane_ai mod of -50 to diplomacy stuff like alliances and I'm almost ready to wait/hope that patches will make it more competent before playing another game.  :oh_i_see:

I found this in Eurogamer article comments, is this really possible? If yes, it would be hilarious and quite awesome.

Pretty sure you can go to war to demand one of their vassals.  So if their neighbor was one of their vassals, then yep.  It could also be a bug that forced an unrelated empire to become the writer's vassal, but I don't think so (haven't heard anything about such a bug so far).  Seems more likely he didn't realize that the 'neighbor' was actually one of their vassals to start with.

Yeah, I had one of my neighbors do that to me, my war aim was to make them my vassal for being dumb fucks.

I doubled my vassals with that war.

One thing that seems to be a bug is that if you're in an alliance, when you go to war, you can demand a war goal for your ally as well as yourself. But when the enemy surrenders, it typically gives only you *all* the war goals. It's up to you to transfer the systems that you demanded for your ally to your ally.

Because of this, I've discovered somewhat inadvertently that the AI actually is wary of being gifted a system that's a long ways away from their borders (as it should be, given how the game works).

After the initial shiny it does start to become mechanical. I recommend if people are interested simply waiting a couple months (or until it's on sale) to grab this title just so you can play it some-what bug free and enjoy it wholeheartedly. The main reason really is the end game. The AI is not that great when managing huge empires through sectors and a lot of the end game events (which are meant to be the "big boss" of the playthrough) are bugged to the point of making it un-fun. Assuming they stay on track it will take 2 - 3 months of bugfixing to get the game up to scratch, so anytime after that it will become a must-buy.

Or play 20-50 years, restart and choose different ethos/traits/government like I have non-stop to try and get the best start possible  :grin: :grin: :grin:

Newbie tips for first games!

Like most Paradox games, your first game/s can be a little daunting. So many options with most of them being terrible, I tend to find myself wanting to make good choices even when I have no idea about the systems involved or how they'll affect my late game choices. So here is a ready-to-go list of good, general choices to help get you going so you can play the game and eventually make a unique race that fits your playstyle perfectly.

Traits: Talented, Enduring and Sedentary. This is my grab-all usefulness traits, as while there are heaps of traits that increase stuff like mining, energy, research ect, they only apply to the tiles your race works on your planet, nothing else. So I choose traits that will increase my leaders abilities, Enduring means they almost live twice as song, and Talented starts them at level 2 instead of 1(which when combo'd with Indirect Democracy/Democratic Utopia, Selected Lineages and Capacity Boosters you'll have all your leaders starting at max level all the time (another reason sectors are broken, sector governors never gain xp)). Sedentary's negatives only affect populations you deliberately move, if you have the free migration policy anyway this is a free trait. I use this set-up for almost all my games.

Government: Plutocratic Oligarchy. You will always need more minerals and energy, and while these bonuses only affect planets, they'll be a small boost to everything as opposed to some of the other governments that are for specific playstyles (something that you'll be able to choose after your first game, but choosing something like Despotic Empire without very specific choices in other areas will net you a very, very bad time. I also like the Agendas your leaders can choose when they get newly elected every 40 - 50 years that give an empire wide buff in their area of expertise which you can only get from the Oligarchy type governments. The buildings/military stuff you get from Autocracies are niche at best and a waste of time at worst and the Democracy Mandates are almost impossible to fulfill.

Ethos: Fanatic Materialist, Xenophile. Materialists get large bonuses to research and technology, which as you can imagine is very important. If your enemies have Nuclear Missiles and you have Antimatter missiles, well, you can imagine who is going to win. Materialists also have some great government choices, so after playing the Plutocratic Oligarchy awhile and want to try something new, Materialist opens up some nice options. Xenophile is a controversial choice right now, but they do give very helpful bonuses to relations and happiness if you have multi-racial planets (or if you build droid or synthetic populations, they also give this bonus). They also get an event early on that gives them an empire wide research bonus, something that combos well with Materialist.

Weapons: Missiles. Whilst general consensus is that Lasers are the way to go late game, choosing missiles to start with eases up your Physics research since it's in Engineering instead, spreading out your options so not all of your Physics is only spent on upgrading your fleets.

Transport: Hyperlanes. Warp is just flat out terrible, and while they say it's for new players, Hyperlanes is just as easy to learn and a lot faster. Wormhole is the best by far, but without learning how to manage resources first and the nitty-gritty of the game, Hyperlanes is an easy fire-and-forget style of transport for your first game.

I like torpedoes. My newbie tip is have fun and enjoy messing around with stuff. Don't sweat the minmax stuff!  :grin:

My Ace science vessel explorer turned president turned researcher turned 2 term president is once again out at the fringe of the empire exploring systems at the age of 98. I figure she can die in the depths of space doing what she loved as a kid.

If she doesn't get elected president again...

Another little foible about sector space: if you are using any sort of special resource on any planet, that resource has to be mined in that sector. Otherwise the buildings just stop working.
Apparently there is 0 trade between sector and core or any other sector, I thought free trade would be somewhat more popular in the future.

There are only two happiness levels you need to concern yourself with, 35+ and 90+. Under 35 and you start getting the really bad penalties, 90 or higher and you start getting the really good benefits. The penalties/benefits at sub-50 and 80 are significantly less important, and 50-75 is a deadzone. So if you bother with happiness, go all in. Keeping everything at 90 will net you +20% to most resource and research production. Unless you terraform or only colonize homeworld type planets, you'll be limited more by habitability than by +happiness modifiers.

I haven't found many ways to boost habitability without terraforming, which is too expensive and time consuming and needs to be done before colonizing.

+10 adaptive trait
+5 x2 for two social researches
+5 frontier clinic
+5(and 10 happiness) paradise dome(pacifists)

This will let you hit 90 happiness on tier 2 worlds.

Thanks for introducing me to another time sink guys!!  :-P

Yep, one of those hey let me let me check the map and figure out my short term strategy aaaaaand it's three AM...

That and the major irritant currently to my hyper militaristic and xenophobic nation is a race of hyper militaristic and xenophobic fungi, for Lovecraft's sake. I've got blobs of quivering bath tub mold calling *me* ugly.

:facepalm:

I have found it is far easier/faster to genetically modify your race to fit the planet than to modify the planet to fit your race.  Takes less time and material (strategic resources).  It isn't an early game option, but neither is terraforming.  If you luck out and end up with a Gaia world you can modify to any preference and if you leave 1 point unspent you can modify again later.

Also, fun trick, uplift the cockroach.  They'll live anywhere (Tomb world preference) and are natural scientists. 

I missed the first Unbidden event, galaxy was too big and someone else handled it without even seeing what it was.  When playing on a small ring galaxy I had to do it myself, though it did clear out my neighbor allowing me to fill in behind him and take all his planets without fighting for them.

Not sure I really see the point of vassals yet, whenever the locals gain space flight and introduce themselves I just find an excuse to curb-stomp them and restore the even tone of my territory map. 

Also, throwing your frontier outposts into their own sector means you don't have to pay support (influence) for them.  The sector resource bit only happens when you transfer a pre-built dependency, the sector doesn't do it to itself as far as I can tell.  Just encourages you to keep all the best toys to yourself on the planets you control directly.

Longevity is probably one of the strongest traits, since you end up not having to purchase as many leaders (and those who you do have spend more time at higher skill levels).  Habitability is also strong, since you can colonize more widely from the start and put your neighbors under pressure faster.

The point of vassals WAS that you could vassalize an entire empire all at once for a single extremely cheap warcost. Then, its fleet would follow yours around like a puppy and fight alongside you.

Oooooo  :drill:

Okay bug or some feature I don't understand?

My non-aggression agreement wound down with a neighboring nation. I immediately relaunched the diplomacy popup and set up a new agreement (with good terms, the other side rather likes me), I close the popup, then my new allies declare war on me. WTF? Well, I'm thinking the war declaration was technically before I got notice that they agreed to my terms, but looking at the listing shows the non-aggression pact in place. Then I see that they are technically attacking my vassal, not me. Okay then, maybe that's the thing. They won't attack me directly, but they have a beef with my vassal and I'm just drawn in.

Fine. I don't really like my vassal -- they can blow them to hell for a while then I'll just cede the territory.

Then they launch a massive strike against my capital planet. All the while with a favorable diplomacy rating toward me, and showing the non-aggression pact.

I really don't trust them anymore.

The most annoying bug I've seen so far was when I was at war with some minor empire. I didn't declare war however (these insects are beneath my notice), one of my pitiful allies did, no doubt expecting my glorious fleet to bring them victory ... which of course it does; I decimate our enemy.
However they're also at war with another alliance completely unrelated to us, they settle peace with them and give them a bunch of planets my ally also demanded.
I've garrisoned every one of their remaining planets and our war score is at 100%, but apparently since they no longer own the planets my ally wanted they won't even consider peace.

I hope someone mods in deathstars soon so I can just erase planets that dare resist the peace I bring.

Apart from that I can only echo the slog the game becomes after about 100 yrs. An issue most of these games have, but a few more interesting/big events would help, maybe some more interesting branching techs to specialize my fleets.
Also: happiness is OP.

Paradox has been pretty explicit that the mid-to-late game being without interesting events except for the arrival of the Big Bads is what they shipped without and what their first major content patching will try to put back in, after they work some on sector management AI. I really want stuff for my science ship to do besides hoover up debris after every battle, which stops being worth it unless you're fighting the Big Bads or you managed to death stack down some neighbors whose tech is slightly better than yours.

She was up for election, but died at the ripe old age of 104. Got so much utility out of that one character!

Is there a patch on the way?  Sectors seriously fuck up my shit.

It's like putting Robert Mugabe in charge of a group of planets.

Beta patch is up and available right now.  If you have it on steam, right click the game, select properties, select the beta tab, and opt in for the 1.1 beta patch.  In this patch, amongst other things, they claim to have significantly improved the AI.  It should be officially released before to long.

Was playing a game to test it out, but just before I got to the point where I had enough planets to start building sectors, I managed to piss off a near by galactic empire that currently destroying my puny human forces.   :awesome_for_real:

I wish there was some way to set custom difficulty as I don't like the diplomacy penalty for playing on insane whereas other bonuses to AI controlled races seem fine so far.  :oh_i_see:

Installed, thanks!

 :grin:

(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/276220767327242694/6FFA67644523674BAF3F4453A9988E05E28F29DC/)

Your empire is doomed to explode.

Sorry, forgot the link! (it's actually a workshop mod):

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=681993365

It would be even greater if you could research struts and then "even more struts" as part of the Kerbal tech tree.

This increasingly feels broken for combat.  I've seen 52k of ships (mix of all) defeated by 7k of massed enemy corvettes.  Advice?

Build corvettes.

Of approximately the same tech level?

Yup same tech level and yes using same attack type (e.g. kinetic) with corvettes does work.

However, there is still a weird bug I've encountered 5-6 times.  All my damage just stops.  A station will just sit there while my fleet attacks uselessly, doing no damage at all.  Restarting the games seems to fix it.

I've also seen a couple of false starts and CTD's.  Great game.  Hopefully it will grow and get even more polish.

I'm playing this and having fun but the surface manangement thing just puzzles the hell out of me.  Are you supposed to farm pop in tiles with food and then move them to the tiles with the tech stuff?   Does pop ever spontaneously start on empty, non-blocking tiles or do you have to build something there first?

Pop grows based on how much surplus food you have on that world, and you can choose where it spawns by dragging the ghost humanoid with the progress bar to a new tile.  Having improved empty tiles has no effect on growth rate, pops will default to growing onto the highest overall yield tile unless you move them.  People grow in serial, only one at a time, though synthetics and organics can each have one pop growing on the same planet simultaneously.  Pop cannot grow if you don't have an empty tile for it to start growing on.  I haven't played in quite a while, but I recall about 6 food surplus approaching the limit of useful growth increases.

edit: sp

you build nothing but corvettes until you can build fleets of battleships wielding particle lances, bombers, and point defense, with each fourth ship carrying a module

best balance i've seen so far is two bomber bays, three particle lances, and four PD's

My problem these days is that Everytime I have an itch to play a 4x I an watch someone like quill18 play this game and the itch is gone.

I feel sad.

Sunless Sea’s Former Lead Now Writing For Stellaris. (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/08/15/stellaris-sunless-sea-failbetter/)

I really liked the writing on Sunless Sea and this seems like a perfect way to make the mid game of Stellaris more interesting.

Wow, that's good news!  I really look forward to seeing what the game will look like after an expansion or two.

They are also trying to "fix" the fleet design with Heinlein (according to the Dev Diary (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-41-heinlein-patch-part-2.962953/)).

Like most Paradox games it seems to be getting significantly better and better (for the most parts) with each major patch. Hopefully they will keep it up for at least a few years to come like they did/are doing with CK2.

Another dev diary (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-43-the-fallen.965642/) promising some interesting things to come in the future. I have to say that the idea of playing it all "Babylon 5" once "The War in Heaven" triggers sounds like something I've always wanted to try.  :grin:

This patch will be what the game should have been at release. Here's hoping it turns out good in November!

Arg, I really want to start playing this again, but want to hold myself off till this next patch.  Once I start, I burn myself out on it playing over 100 hours.  Don't want to do that before the new goodies.  Hurry the damn patch!

I should have bought this instead of Hearts of Iron IV, I am going to be waiting a year for that to be playable. AI completely broken.

Replaying Babylon 5 in Stellaris? Yes, please. Better sooner than later.  :awesome_for_real:

I gotta say I enjoyed HOI4 more.  Sure the AI is terrible, but Stellaris was basically an empty box with a note that said "game to be inserted later."  The best thing to do is to play CK2 for a couple more years, by which time HOI4 & Stellaris should be very good games.

Three editions of this on Steam but I don't see the differences.

I think I still need to wait and play this later.

For everyone seeing this on sale: for sure wait until next year. Like all their games they'll patch in the fun and the sales will push it under 50%. It is worth peoples time however!

Stellaris: Leviathan Story Pack  (https://www.paradoxplaza.com/stellaris-leviathan-story-pack) has an announcement trailer and is being released around the same time as 1.3 patch (sometime this Autumn).
If Alexis Kennedy has actually written a significant amount of content for that then it might be a (close to the) release day purchase for me.

Heinlein patch and Leviathan DLC on the 20th of October. (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/the-leviathans-awaken-on-october-20th-along-with-free-heinlein-patch.973250/)  :grin:

(https://media2.giphy.com/media/8fen5LSZcHQ5O/200_s.gif)

Ya that sounds good. bring it.

My favorite line from the patch notes:


I always took that as a feature.....

Yeah, is that really a bug?

Playing post-patch and with Leviathans. There's a nice new quest in the beginning though it (so far) has a puzzling point beyond which I can't go. Gameplay is still basically what it was but I do see some improvements in the AI, you can control sector governors betters, etc.   I just got to a point in the game where the Fallen Empires have abruptly changed their behavior, all at the same time, and everybody got a weird transmission. So it'll be interesting to see what happens next--particularly because of couple of the regular empires (including mine) are now approaching parity with them (they're "superior" to some of the dominant non-Fallen Empires.)  I still think there's a point where the science ships don't seem to have much to do, which is frustrating and really needs further attention. Though maybe that will change shortly with whatever's about to happen.

I really need to get back and give this another go. Will have to wait for the shiny to wear off of Civ6 though.

I think there have been a lot of good tweaks but the game still needs some flavor to make it to the next stage of things. I wish some of the events and enemy factions had a bit of the personality of CK2. I did notice that my scientists, governors and admirals are picking up traits more often when they level. Some of the negative ones aren't as fun/interesting in gameplay terms as they should be.

They definitely need to keep working on something for science ships to do after the initial rush of exploration/anomaly research. There need to be midgame/late game quest chains like the earlier ones.

Enjoying my first game of this now that I got over my initial laziness/learning curve.

Can you terraform a planet once colonized?

Wierd that there isn't a viewable tech tree.

You can terraform post-colonization.. but it'll kill/piss off the people there, for obvious reasons.

Tech is somewhat random, hence no tree, but it's fairly straight-forward.

So do I design my own ships or just let it auto design? And does it upgrade automatically with new tech?  It's addictive but fuck the UI blows and I'm not liking the randomness of tech.

You can design your own ships--the system is a bit more constrained now--you are basically designing torpedo ships, picket defense ships, battleships with big hanger bays, etc rather than a single optimal type. I'm not sure they've really fixed it, though--I don't feel there's a strong strategic match between ship design and actual conflict most of the time. I just saw one example in my current long game where having a very strong presence of anti-shield ships in my fleet helped me in a distinctive way in going up against a very shield-centered design that one of my late-game opponents favored. For this to really work, the AI empires would need to have strong preferences/obsessions in design that you could counter or to have a tech tree that's very faction-distinctive, and that doesn't mostly seem to be the case--every empire I've seen uses a pretty equal mix of the leading-edge technologies they have access to. Most conflicts, esp. late-game conflicts, come down to having the biggest zerg fleet.

There's a lot of other stuff about combat that still doesn't really make sense. Even the maximally strong fortress bases and planetary defenses are ridiculously weak and never represent a deterrent to an enemy that has roughly equal technology and empire size. I've never seen a planet where I think, "Whoa, better back off, I'll lose too many ships attacking it because of the defenses". The only deterrent is if the enemy forces have a larger navy than I do and their navy is able to get across the galaxy quickly, which keeps you from sneaking in and grabbing a system while they're busy somewhere else. The AI will always drop what it's doing and come a-running if you attack one of their planets. I haven't tried zerging them with six or seven planetary attacks at the same time, that might work in terms of quickly changing the tide of battle even against an opponent with a larger navy. Or sending a diversionary siege force to their home planet while you send the main zerg fleet to systems closer to your borders.

Haven't played since the last patch, but:

Tachyon Lances give range advantage and that lets you mow through superior numbers so long as you manage to avoid a point blank engagement.  6:1 fleet power disadvantage is not really a problem when you have range and space.  That said, it helps to have some ablative protection in the form of defensive corvettes, but they always get ripped so you are constantly replacing them when you bother with ablative protection.  So, absolutely design your own ships.  Also, they do not auto-upgrade.  The Auto designs will be lowest tier tech - don't build them.  Also, upgrade your utility ships too to make your science etc. ships faster and a little tougher.

Fortresses can be a deterrent when you deploy them like the end-game events do.  Central jump point lure defensive base surrounded with long range bases that debuff rate of fire, have mines, etc.  By the time you are picking fights with fallen empires you can deploy 4 bases and stop/kill their fleets (with losses) - basically reduces the number of independent kill fleets you need to simultaneously maintain.  If you have a choke-point they AI keeps coming through you can skip the central lure and bunker on the star to take advantage of range. 

Fortress lure (solo, or if you expect an overwhelming breakthrough) should be placed on the opposite side perimeter of the solar system, with the jump station near the planet on the other side.  This buys you maximum time to catch the enemy fleet in system where they can't just escape without emergency jump (or better, have to fight through all the stations in system so they get tied down even longer).  This is more important when you are fighting with jump-drive enemies.

Yeah, all end game tech.  I often have Tachyon Lances before I develop station based Mass Driver Module, though, so it can be accelerated by focus.  Also, if you have a fallen empire neighbor you can pick a fight early and if you get a kill and can research the wreckage you'll get the tech card much much earlier.  That's a bit risky, and really unnecessary in most game configurations as you can just plow ahead without such a risky accelerator. 

Oh, and on the tech 'cards,' if you want a new hand to draw from research the fastest option to get a new set quickly rather than plugging ahead on a big tech that will be useful later but not that interesting now.  Except for a few (Psi/Jump Drive, for instance) you eventually/effectively get all the techs so the draw mechanism just perturbs the path through each game to the same destination. 

Bought all the recent EU IV  DLC and have been playing it after leaving it alone for a year or two. A nice reminder how well these Paradox games age with regular patching and content updates. The interface is nicer and new DLC mechanics add twists to the game. The AI has been even improved where it can, and in other ways the mechanics were tweaked to help it out (with minimal outright cheating, stuff like changing strait blocking rules to help Ottomans).

1.19 patch that's now in beta will also change fort mechanics. I still need to get Rights of Man and I'm hoping it's on a small sale when Christmas hits (though it's so new that it might be too early)

I like Rights of Man. The ruler personalities are neat, they add a nice touch of Crusader Kings to EU where a big complaint has always been that it's a bit sterile and lacking this RP aspect. When your ruler has certain positive traits and decision events come up you can get extra (usually better) options like in CK2. Haven't really noticed anything for negative traits asides from penalties. I've been playing Venice though so this is a bit more limited with 4 year terms for rulers.


Haven't tried the great power stuff yet, haven't gotten that big, but the new vassal management is great. The Coptic stuff looks interesting, maybe I'll try Ethiopia play after (though the 1.19 Scandanavia focus could also make a Norway colonial game a bit more interesting).

First major expansion for this just released.
It adds a bunch of fancy end-game stuff like dyson spheres and ringworlds, which I haven't touched yet as I've only spent a few hours with it so far, but the real meat of it is the civics overhaul.
At first glance it all looks good;
They fleshed out the faction system (allowing you to use uprising factions in your empire instead of just suppressing them for instance).
Made the government system feel a lot more organic, something that evolves with your empire.

I had to turn off close to a dozen mods to fire it up, so there's a lot I'm suddenly missing, but overall I'm once again impressed by their ongoing support and development of a great game.

This has completely supplanted Civ as my go-to 'strategy relaxer' now.

The biggest problem with Stellaris (as well as all the other variants) is that there is no end game win/loss objectives. It's the thing that makes civ work, regardless of any other problem each iteration might have. You can actually win or lose a game in a single playthrough, and this forces a tension or challenge.

I find that to be the weakest part of most of these type of games, Civ included; I hardly 'finish' a third of the Civ games I play(ed) as well. Mostly because almost invariably there is a point loooong before any official victory condition is met that you've effectively neutered the AI into complete impotence. I don't think I've ever seen a strategy game where the AI effectively reacts to the player's godlike superiority or his nearing a win condition, I guess it would annoy some people that the AI would be able to trip them up at the last hurdle.
That's why I enjoy these games more for the little goals I set myself and stories that develop along the way. Stellaris is great at that (so is Civ, but the last installment just annoys me in too many ways and Firaxis haven't been nearly as good at tweaking their game post-launch this time imo).
Don't get me wrong, I like a match to remain interesting for more than a few hours and at launch stellaris was very bare beyond the first 2-3 hrs (depending on your speed), but they've added a lot of mid- and endgame events and there is an enormous amount of decent mods out there adding content as well.

TL;DR: Civ's clear victory conditions don't matter as much, when it's too annoying/boring to spend hours to reach them.
Alternative TL;DR: It's about the journey man, not the destination, ya dig?

I kind of like what the Total War series was doing, in STW2 and RTW2 (not sure if TW Warhammer does it) once you reach a certain level of size it triggers a map-wide mega war that actually has potential to throw the player a curveball. The player is thrown off from his steady methodical expansion off of exploiting AI stupidy by a large chaotic moment with lots of force in play. It's a bit forced as a mechanic but at the end of the day it does reliably produce some endgame tension for the player to deal with.

Total War Warhammer definitely does that - it sends a giant Chaos horde from the north to crush your junk.

cough FFH2 cough

 :why_so_serious: :drillf: :oh_i_see: :awesome_for_real:

One of countless reasons it was an amazing game was that events affected the Armeggedon Clock. Once pushed too high by the evil races, the four horsemen show up and wreak havoc across the map. And even that benefits one of the civs for most of the endgame (until it destroys them, too...but they aren't penalized by the hell terrain that spreads during armageddon).

Only Civs I've played to completion are the FFH2 games I've played.

I'm going to guess that this patch breaks all saves, again? Really, it's kinda like we get a whole new game every patch...

That's okay with me, really. I'm in agreement with Spiff in that I can't remember the last time I actually got to the end of one of these types of games. Once I get well established in the mid game, I've "won" as far as I'm concerned. The long slog to bring the whole world/galaxy/universe under my absolute control just doesn't interest me -- it's the beginning game that brings the fun.

Yes, it breaks previous saves.

So far I like it, but for me it's really about whether the second half of a typical game is more interesting--I already liked the first two Xs but it let me down in the last two.

Diplomacy seems better; alien cultures make a bit more sense in their behavior and preferences because of the ideologies.

There is still a kind of frustrating slowdown right before the endgame where you're waiting for the last few planet improvement techs, waiting for more Unity points, waiting to be just strong enough to brawl with a Fallen Empire or your 2-3 rivals, etc. What I still think they need also is a midgame Science Ship scavenger hunt. As it is, if you didn't get the hunt-for-animals quest and that sort of thing done before borders started closing, they become endgame quests. I would love a science ship tech that let them stealth behind closed borders, with some element of risk. Or a midgame reveal like archaeology in Civ V.

Not sure if anyone else is still playing this but Star Trek: New Horizons (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=688086068) is an awesome total conversion mod that I'd highly recommend to try out and it's gotten to a point where it's relatively complete and bug-free.  :grin:

Nice!  I hadn't heard of that, may give it a go.  Just started playing this again recently, downloading the two expansions.  I've enjoyed playing as a hostile robot race that destroyed its makers (earth, and yes, its Skynet) and has set about the galaxy to eradicate all organic life.  Ton of fun stories and role-playing in this game.  It's everything I wanted Endless Space to be (which it wasn't) and more.

I still play it. For now it has over-taken EUIV as my main Paradox game. I mainly just play my own personal mod for it, though. I have looked at the Star Trek mod before, but I generally don't go in for them.

Stellaris Dev Diary #92: FTL Rework and Galactic Terrain (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-92-ftl-rework-and-galactic-terrain.1052958/)

Not sure I like idea of limiting it to hyperlanes as it makes bottlenecks a huge part of the gameplay.  :oh_i_see:

I don't have the game but I watch the game quite a bit. I think it makes sense from a strategic point of view.

I play the game, a lot, and the decision to change these core aspects of gameplay are fantastic and have been much needed. The Warp and Wormhole FTL styles have been strangling the game since release. Between the FTL and Starbase changes (and others coming, from what's been hinted at) the changes will go together pretty well. Sucks for those that play/prefer Warp style travel, but long run it is a much needed change for the game that should help them add a number of things that have been lacking, but couldn't because of how the three FTL approaches had to be handled.

The changes so far seem to have really pissed off a small fragment of the playerbase, but the majority seem to be supportive. I like that they had the balls to do this, because it was required for any of the really major issues to be resolved in a way that didn't just fuck over another aspect of gameplay.

Limiting it to hyperlanes does break things like the Star Trek mod but they should get around it unless the changes are so hardcoded that it is impossible (probably not since it's just easier to disable the old alternatives).

I think it's a great change. 4X games don't work really well unless there are choke points that form naturally in the "terrain" of the game--those drive a lot of the strategy.

I think this is going to work out largely as they suggest.  I just knocked off the last achievements in the current game and when it came to my final 10 I switched from my preferred wormhole FTL to Hyperlane-only for the galaxy.  From my experience it will do much of what they propose, but syncing FTL types is always going to be annoying so there is still a lot of work to be done (have fun chasing down that Wraith limited to hyperlanes).

Static wormholes, Jumpgates, Stargates are sci-fi staples and I look forward to their introduction here.

The long cooldown on future JumpDrives is probably going to continue to give them trouble, probably in one of these two ways:

• I jump in a construction ship build something annoying in your backfield (like a jumpgate perhaps).
• I jump in a small fleet and set "Federation Rally" on it, then the AI goes bonkers or just cheats to rally there.

The first one might actually be cool, but might also lead to a wall of static defenses cutting their wall of static defenses off from the rest of their territory, which is silly.

Hyperlane bottlenecks will make unavoidable the doomstack problems latent in the game.  I was up against an fallen empire recently that awoke after our first skirmish (oops, built too close to the xenophobes) and came at me with a single fleet at over 1M power and a slight technology advantage, if I had to face it head on through a chokepoint I would have lost badly.  As it was, even though it was faster and had jump drives, I could still split forces and clear out starbases / win invasions while it chased the other fleet around their territory - taking advantage of their own FTL interdictors to make space to avoid the fleet.  After subsequent wars I ground down the fleet capacity and got over them, but had they bunkered behind that fleet I'd have had no viable attack vector for my 100k fleet.  Anyway, hope they improve the AI with this change because otherwise this improvement in strategic play will just put more pressure on existing weak points in fleet combat.

I started setting all of my games to hyper lane only for everybody long ago, so I obviously welcome this change.

I've done the same and then went a step further; I modded my games to ensure everyone(thing) is hyper lane and stays that way. It always bothered me when setting it to hyper lane that FEs and Crisis forces not using hyper lanes and then propagating a different FTL type throughout the galaxy (same with the dimensional horror). So, I swapped them all to using the hyper lane engine. I keep the dimensional horror the same so I can kill it and tech jump drives to unlock one of the crisis types (I've also modded it so that all three crises can trigger in the same game) and then simply don't use the jump drive.

So far I'm really looking forward to the changes, and we're months out. It will be interesting to see how they tackle the doomstack issue, but so far I'm really liking (and agree with) the changes made so far to better the game and lay the ground work for getting rid of the doomstack issue.

There are very few things in the game that I wouldn't trade for an antidote to doomstacking since it really hurts the game. Hopefully they'll come up with some form of combat width (like in HOI or EU) limit to counter it.

Space Attrition!

 :awesome_for_real:

But seriously, they probably need something like that.  It's how they (mostly) effectively deal with doom stacking in he EU games.

Attrition is.. interesting. Could easily be done wrong,, given how much trouble they've had with it in EU 4 (they ended up capping it there because the AI couldn't handle it).

The removal of warscore is far more interesting, though; and quite possibly the biggest change yet in the coming patch.

Watched the Stellaris Design Corner on twitch from last week (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/187037760) and it showed some of the stuff in development (like the new way expanding is handled) and it's going to change the game drastically and personally I'm excited to see how it turns out.  :grin:

edit:new dev diary is also out: #93: War, Peace and Claims (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-93-war-peace-and-claims.1054054/)

As a viewer, watching some one take over territory in a war is the most boring aspect of the game.

Attrition has long been a problem for Paradox.

In EU4 IIRC the AI was exempted from attrition, at least on the naval side? Last I played it didn't even exist in CK2 they felt like they could get away with chucking because war was simplified and not the total focus of that game. Maybe they've improved the AI handling of it since then, they couldn't really dodge it for HOI4.

some kind of logistic cap will be necessary, and a harder one  (logistical limits) is better for the AI to handle over a softer one like attrition concepts.

In EU 4 they aren't exempt from attrition. It has, however, been capped for the AI. First at 10%, then 5%. Initially they dealth with full attrition numbers are would get destroyed. AI for it is a lot better than it used to be, but remains poor (like all game AI). Navally they were exempt from attrition for a good while. Not sure if they still are, but I think so. There was at least some period of time when they weren't. But the EU 4 AI gets a lot of naval cheats (attrition, no terra incognita or fow, although the last two have some coding limits on how they can exploit the cheat).

Anyways, looks like the attrition in Stellaris isn't the same mechanic; it merely acts as the new form of war score; the more 'attrition' you suffer (gained from ship and troop losses in battles, planets and starbases occupied, war goals, etc.) the more likely the AI is to concede defeat. The claims system they are putting in should, finally, allow for wars that aren't all or nothing, though and even can offer a 'status quo' peace deal, where all sides involved merely keep what they've gained/lost in the war.

So far so good with it. Still need to see the other mechanics they're implementing targeting the deathstack issue, though. I know fleets now have a fleet cap on the number of ships they can have (boosted by tech, admirals, admiral level, traditions) but that alone won't cut it, and Wiz has said as much.

Sigh.. This is the game I keep coming back to after every patch, play to about the midway point, and quit. I'll have a fairly stable "empire," then I'll usually fight one big war with a neighbor (and usually win), then just never log back in again.

It's more me than the game though. Maybe I just don't really want to rule the galaxy -- I'm happy just being one of the nice countries getting along with its neighbors, and I do like the early exploration mode. But once the galaxy fills up with cranky aliens I just don't find it fun anymore...

 :heartbreak:

That's a decent criticism.  The first half of the game where you are constantly finding new crazy space events and story lines is excellent.  They frankly could cut out all the other stuff and refine that portion, and have an excellent game (Basically, Star Trek).  The second half of the game is very different in feeling, and not as engaging (but still fun for me, if a bit tedious at times).

As with most Paradox games though, it always helps if you can get into the mood to role play your country/Empire (CK2 is obviously the biggest example of that, but it applies to all others).  I recently had a blast playing Skynet off a version of earth where the machines killed off humanity, and then moved aggressively to the stars to wipe out all civilization because it was the only way to logically keep from being attacked by organics.  Getting fully into character in how you interact and make decisions with the AI helps a ton with the empire building portion of the game.   :awesome_for_real:   Similarly played through an EUIV campaign as a super merchant/expansionist Japan, that ended up colonizing the western half of North America and most of Mexico (now named Udon).

It really does need a second set of events in the 'winning' phase, though. The endgame event isn't really developed that well in that sense.

Dev Diary on doomstacks. (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-96-doomstacks-and-ship-design.1058152/) Seems they are really trying to solve it at least partially.

This is why I shrug off the criticisms about Paradox and their DLC strategy.  Once a game goes live, they are constantly developing and refining it to a crazy extent.  They do this via the money they make from DLC, and I've put more time into paradox games than probably everything else combined in my life at this point.  Granted, half the time they break the game and then have to rush to patch in fixes, but eventually they get it all right.    :awesome_for_real:

Only blight in the modern era is HoI4.  There are a ton of great ideas in a game with AI that makes the whole thing unplayable and/or unfun.

I've been playing a bit HOI4 recently and it's been polished up a fair amount since release which was a complete mess but it's a bit of a strange beast because the devs have a very difficult job balancing off historical WW2 events which were absolutely bonkers like the pre-war diplomatic bluff moves Hitler did  (then they give the player the choice to reject the historical option) or the way they completely beat France in a month. I started a UK game which was pretty much over by the 1st year of the war because my dozen BEF divisions came over to reinforce the French and we for the most part held up the Germans in Belgium, that means basically game over for the German AI so you have to make  rules for yourself like not help the French to make the game more of a contest. AI could still use some fixes like building better tank divisions, more anti-tank stuff, more fighters and better deployment, etc which I am sure will come. I feel like HOI4 was basically done as a multiplayer game though, for WW2 grognards (a lot of them in the Paradox office). Most of the UI stuff patched in is really to make life easier for multiplayer people who can't pause the game. Paradox won't come and say it because it could cost them single player sales but this is really a multiplayer game. Still fun to play occasionally but can't get your expectations too high for single player.

CK2 is 5 years old and it just released its latest DLC which I was happy to buy (though some of the features should have been in the free update instead). As to Stellaris it seems they are really trying to improve it with massive changes if need be.

Now if they only announced Rome 2 or Victoria 3...  :why_so_serious:

I'm waiting on the next DLC before starting my next HOI4 game since I want to try playing Germany with overthrowing nazis (and restoring the Kaiser). I also want to check out the Japan-China(s) additions that are in the DLC (either as Manchukuo or warlords)

@Speedy

Yeah, the whole games a mess.  Several of the games I play, Germany gets overrun by the soviets in 1939.  Or just other stupid shit shit.  There is so much there, but it's all wasted on terrible AI.  I really want to like it, but they can't seem to make it worthwhile for me to do so!
Oh God, Victoria is the franchise I have the most nerd love over and want them to perfect so much.  They always sort of fuck it up (though I've had a lot of fun with the two previous Victoria games).  But fucking christ, if they ever made one that worked, I may actually flee from the world of the living and play it in my basement until Trump destroys the world in a totally avoidable nuclear holocaust. 

Oh yeah forgot to mention, that Star Trek New Horizons conversion for Stellaris is really good at least in the early game. Haven't really gotten past that yet.

Stellaris Dev Diary #100 - Titans and Planet Destroyers (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-100-titans-and-planet-destroyers.1064560/)

So Titan class ships and planet destroyers are coming in the next dlc for Stellaris (along with the 2.0 that's going to release at the same time).  :awesome_for_real: :grin:

(http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/03/03c9eea2b33c4a4ed7fe66043b20ec36feb81b528a7bd9852fb2f2a730940e87.jpg)

I did a reasonably fun playthrough recently as the synthetic exterminator race. It did get grindy and dull near the end, but not for a long time. But this is where the endgame tech trees need a bit of work--each type of goal/species should get an Omega tech that's really hard to research--say that it takes not just exclusive attention from all three scientists but a mini-quest by multiple science ships (so that the opponents have a chance to potentially stop the science ships and slow it down, a bit like when you know an opponent in Civ is building the spaceship) that will make the endgame goal easier to realize. So maybe the synthetic exterminators can research a universal plague that kills all intelligent organisms, the slavers a device that creates mental compulsions to serve them all across the galaxy, and so on.

I watched a let's play on YouTube on the new robot race. After early and mid games it was dull. Taking over planets is dull tedium to watch and play.

Yeah. The thing that made it especially tedious is that you have to leave a lot of troops in occupation because you're certain to have a revolt (understandably, given that the local population has nothing to lose by trying it). So you end up managing really huge numbers of armies rather than two or three large ones. I would prefer if you could do something quicker after a certain tech or point in the game, maybe at the cost of being continuously at war with all organics, or something like that.

Stellaris Apocalypse release date announced as Feb 22 (2.0 update should also be released at the same time).
This will be the first Paradox dlc in a while that I'm really looking forward to getting the day it's released.

story trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW3YB2ptGws)

For anyone interested in giving this a whirl, Humble Bundle currently has a Paradox bundle going.  For the low minimum buy-in price of 12 dollars you can score Stellaris +7 other Paradox games.

https://www.humblebundle.com/games/paradox-bundle-2018

I've been trying to like this game for awhile but there are too many systems that I just don't like/give a fuck about.  Examples;

Leader aging and dying, especially science, as it leaves you without a way to do the higher experience science missions. 

Sectors.  Fucking sectors suck.  I don't even know what the concept is, they seem like all downside and no upside.  Yeah, it would be great that I didn't have to manage those planets that I can no longer (easily) see, except it seems like the minute I make a sector all the inhabitants get very unhappy, which STILL IS something that is my responsibility.  I mean seriously, what the fuck.

I just want to create massive space armadas and smash shit.  Way too much bullshit that I just don't care about.

The aging rulers thing seems like a weak import of CK2 mechanics--they need to do something more with it. The way you get desperate to hold on to a great ruler in CK2, that kind of thing. It's occasionally an interesting mechanic in game-challenge terms when we're talking about scientists dying JUST when they're ready to do a tough mission or something--it's what makes the research that extend leader-lives worth it. Really the leaders need to have way more distinct personalities and/or bonuses/issues. I almost never have to pay attention to factions in my empire or anything of that sort, it's irrelevant to 99% of the gameplay.

Sectors annoy the hell out of me also. I grant you that I do not want to control 30+ systems manually, but having to put things into sectors just feels annoying. It's like inventory management. Everything I conquer that I have to sector feels like a waste, since the AI will do dumb shit with it in an inefficient way.

No dammit, I was hoping that you would tell me I was doing it wrong and that I should stop being a cry baby.   :cry:

This is a game where you have to workshop mod out of the bits that get in your way. Both of those are very easy to fix.

I actually like the sector concept.  The point is building an empire means having an an increasingly inefficient bureaucracy that has a harder time managing resources, and also creates more localized identities that can lead to separatism.  I actually wish they'd expand it a bit more.  The big problem I feel with CK2 and EU4 is that ones you build a big empire, the game gets easy.  They need to make them so that, while it gets easier in certain aspects (generating men, money, and hard power), the game gets harder as managing such a thing is really difficult and your empire tries its damnedest to break apart at all times.  Even if flawed, the sector concept is the first time I've seen them actually consider this in their games.

If sectors were more like an ambitious dynastic rival in CK2 that could be interesting--if you had to keep an eye on them that way. Just doesn't seem like that's the way it is for now--I just create a sector to handle growth and ignore it, mostly. Sometimes I shuffle stuff around so I can hand-manage newer systems or colonies to get them to grow quickly or optimally.

Yeah, I guess I should say I like the concept, but they need to flesh it out more.

2.0 'Cherryh' patch notes (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-105-2-0-cherryh-patch-notes.1069794/) are out (unusually a week before the actual patch hits). A lot of changes and the dlc that's coming is the first one for Stellaris that I'll be buying at release instead of waiting for a few patches.

edit:obligatory "What They Actually Mean" reddit post  (https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/7xr6td/patch_20_cherryh_notes_what_they_actually_mean/)

My first impressions of the big update are that they've made expansion much more intuitive, and the balance between star bases and colonies more sensible.

But there are a bunch of bugs especially wrt wars. Admirals keep going awol, war exhaustion keeps being built up by the ai winning imaginary battles.

Don't know if intentional, but it really seems like a 4x game set in EVE online now.

I was wondering what was happening with the admirals.

Though it seems to me also that leaders now survive their ships being blown up, which is interesting.

I gather the specific problem is that if the admiral's ship is significantly damaged, it will attempt to disengage, and at that point the admiral stops providing bonuses and is removed from fleet command.

He doesn't get put back in charge even if he rejoins the formation either during or after the battle.

I've been able to swap missing admirals into other fleets, but not their original fleet.  There seems to be some kind of memory about what used to be in the fleet, so if you cycle out ships rather than form a new fleet you get all sorts of fractional indicators for various ship sizes and the fleet number lights up red (indicating the fleet isn't at full strength?).  My guess is that it remembers the Admiral's ship has been disabled within this fleet and cannot be put back into that fleet.

I hit a game where food crashed mysteriously, and the non-stop pirate spawning at the borders is a bit annoying.  It seems the new ship combat favors number of guns even more than before, probably because you can't get enough big ships in a fleet to mow down smaller ships before they get into range.  I don't think it is just a retargeting/overkill issue but I haven't built my first titan yet so don't know if it flips back at the end.

The pacing of the pirate spawning is super-annoying. It forces you to relentlessly build outposts.

The fleets-are-red bug is also super-annoying.

I am sometimes seeing a weird bug where I can't travel on enemy hyperlanes that are right there--where the game absolutely forces a long 'run-around' route.

I wonder if there are good combinations of small screening fleets of corvettes--torp boats or something--and fast destroyers, with long-range capital ships hovering back in separate fleets. That will take some experimenting.

I do like the changes overall. You have to be way more strategic about building choke points, and you can meaningfully adopt a defensive strategy. Diplomatic AI is much better in connection to governing ethics, particularly--I'm seeing 'natural' coalitions and federations forming early and holding pretty tight in ways that make sense. You really don't want a weak federation partner with an aggressive neighbor that's made claims already on them.

Might not be a bug, if a planet has a fortress I think it can prohibit you from using hyperlanes other than the one you entered the system on. Actually a good thing imo, makes it so you can't just rush for the capital and cripple the enemy's shipyards.

Split specialized fleets seems to be the way to go.
I'm liking most of the changes, but turned off all mods for my first game and goddamn I forgot how much they add, it's really half a game without it.

Yeah, it's not when there are fortresses, because you can see those on the map. It's just when there are outposts, which have no extra capabilities besides influence (I think)?

The computer behavior upgrades to ships seems to solve this. In the same fleet you can set your large slot config ships to "artillery" and they hang way back and blast away, design some medium slot destroyers and give them the "battle line" behaviour and they stay at medium range. Then there's a couple of options for destroyers/corvettes between "swarm" and "picket". Swarm seems to be for corvettes that go rush in with evasion stacked up, while picket for ones that go for missiles and fighters but aggressively. For a destroyer you could put a large gun bow and then a flak rear and have it set to artillery to hang out with battleships as an extra screen (not sure how effective that would be), or just some medium guns + flak and then at battle line range so they do a bit of both.

For pirate spawn seems like they really want people to split fleets up a bit more. Along with the hard cap, a soft way to reduce doom stacking. Even early game though it doesn't take a lot of ships stationed around to kill pirates quickly.

Coming back in, this game is even more of a confusing and unplayable mess.

Personally, I'm loving the 2.0 experience. Vastly superior to what was going on before. A few of the bugs are exceedingly annoying (anything involving harvesting pops is broken, as one example), but I haven't run into any show-stoppers. I did whip up a mod to alter the way war exhaustion works (slowed it down, added a cap to the passive build up), and another to condense the perks a little (mainly the mega structure perks). 2.0 has let me out-right remove the majority of the modifications I had adopted.

As for the pirates; I have had zero issue with them. Once you adapt to having multiple fleets they become irrelevent (and can even be beneficial as experience sources for your fleets; or they will be when the upgrade wiping out experience bug is fixed). So long as you don't snake out your territory early on they shouldn't be an issue, as a regular out-post with 3-5 corvettes will easily handle them for the first few decades (and you can add up to 3 defensive platforms to regular out-posts if need be, and can afford the upkeep). Later on in the game, when the pirates actually start scaling into something notable you should have your borders locked down into choke-points, or with fortified starbases there, which in addition to the fleet in the area should continue to make them a minor hassle.

I have not experienced the admiral or pathing bugs. Only serious bug/design issue (aside from the aforementioned) that I've been annoyed by is the pirate faction blowing up everything in their way to get to their purchases target, which is idiotic.

Still, this is actually a comparatively bug free expansion for Paradox, especially considering the scope of changes, and the performance increases late game are amazing. I've also found the game much more easily managed and found it easy to adapt to the changes, but then I kept a pretty close eye on the dev diaries.

Ok, I'm NOW enjoying it once I figured out what the almighty fuck.

Also, these patch notes must be the funniest thing I've read in a while :

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/7xr6td/patch_20_cherryh_notes_what_they_actually_mean/

Gold.

Might have to reinstall.

Pretty accurate too.

So, I've been playing the shit out of this :

It's much better now than I remember.  It's made a lot of changes that are actually good and help it be a better game. 

However, it has one of the same problems it had then which is the later on game becomes a bullshit micromanagement hell.  Not only is there still not really a good way to manage your Empire (don't talk to me about fucking Sectors, just Don't) but some of the more obvious shit is still wrong.  I shouldn't be put in a position whereby I upgrade the Mineral Factory from type 2 to type 3 and then find I have to click on every single fucking factory I've ever built to upgrade them.  Fuuuuuck you.

Also, the fleets are better, but it's odd that it expects you to use and be good with multiple fleets while not allowing you the fleet points to actually have very many of them until much, much later technologically.

Also, the Contingency event is utter fucking bullshit.  I had 4 fallen empires that I was tip-toeing around and those metal Cuisinart fuckers just fucking ate them all.  It was brutal.  When they destroy multiple fleets of 602k, what the fuck am I supposed to do with my two fleets of 25k each ?  Fuck off with that.  The agreed tactic for that one is 'suicide the planet' but you can't even get close.

There's a shitton of improvement, but the biggest gripes are still there and, frankly, I truly take offence at the amount of DLC that you have to buy if you want the new shit.  Just make the new content an aggregate please ;  let people buy individual ones if they want, but also have a 'nice big pack' that I can just GET if I want, with a view of what the fuck it is I'm getting.

Anyway.

If you are playing now I'd recommend using the 2.02 beta patch (which you can enable from the steam client) since it addresses some of the problems with 2.01.

I've got the base game but haven't installed it yet. What DLC do I absolutely need and what can I ignore?

I've got pretty much fuck all at the moment and it's a good base game.

I want the robots.  I want the megastructures.  I want the Psionics.   I have no idea if I get them.  I don't think so.

Yeah you won't have some of the cool stuff they added but a lot of that would be optional RP/style focuses that you'd go for on subsequent playthroughs.

With the base game you could have a playthrough doing something like take the generic human good guy and unite the galaxy in a federation. You'd also have access to stuff like the star trek total conversion

Buy the DLC.  Buy all of the DLC.  It adds a lot.

Been playing the ever living fuck out of this.  Micromanagement is an issue, but other than that, ton of fun.  Some of the random even quest lines are awesome.

The Worm who loves us. It will always love us, and thus it always has.

Yes, there are some really good event chains in the game. Wish there were more.

I'm continuing to enjoy 2.0 a lot. I haven't upgraded to the beta patch (and won't), in part because my personal mods fix some of the issues it addresses well enough for now and there's a couple 'eh' changes in the beta patch and some interesting issues with late game that need to be addressed.

I've seen a bunch of people say the beta version has a few too many bugs to recommend it. Really looking forwatd to the changes though.

Some of the DLC came bundled into the latest free part of the update, but the DLC has so far been really good.

This War stuff is utter bullshit.

Invaded all his planets.  Controlled them all.  Captured almost all of his colonies.  Waiting for the final capture.

Ding, War Exhaustion, here's a peace you have to accept and because you didn't have enough for Claims, you get a Mars Bar as a reward.  Well Done Commander.

Fuck me.

Same happened to me last night twice, I'm surprised there isn't any late game counters to it. Second time it happened I was steam rolling a neighbor with a colossus and for some reason it wouldn't let me enter his home world. Couldn't find any reason why it was locked to me so thought maybe I had to control all the other systems before I could nuke it then it booted me out of the war. Frustrating part is as soon as it does they usually make alliances with half the universe making the next war a gank fest.

If there's a wee U on the map, they have that FTL inhibitor which totally FUCKS with you.

Sometimes my ships had to go all the way around 19 planets to get to a system right next to them and every time they had the inhibitor.  Don't know if it's MEANT to do that, but fairly sure that's what it was...

That's what I thought at first was happening as a few systems before hand were forcing me all the way around. Thinking on it now though I think it must not be good enough controlling just the station, I'm thinking you have to invade the planet also since  the three systems leading into the homeworld were inhabited and if I remember right weren't giving  me the instant control from having the colossus that the non inhabited systems were. 

Lol, I just completed that whole event chain.  I made a race of elves (Xenophobic Fanatical Materialists who have the Venerable trait) with the gene-seeded start (Felt appropriate).  Got that chain near the beginning.  Going the psyonic route, and trying to contact not-slaanesh to make fun lore happen.  Then I finally completed the worm chain.
One of my admirals just tapped into the void and got turned into an immortal psyonic god emperor.  That on top of the worm event, man, my race is going to be pretty fucked up by the end.  Just built a colossus.  Time to come out of my well fortified hermit kingdom and destroy the galaxy.

Yeah any planet with a stronghold+ building has a FTL inhibitor.

Yeah, you have to blow up the stronghold. It's actually clever incentive to build one of them--in the game before this patch, I don't think I ever bothered building whatever that building used to be, the one that gave the troops produced there some negligible bonus.

War Exhaustion means you have to get cracking fast in a war you start and offer a settlement as soon as you have something accomplished. It's also something that lets you turtle up and fight a defensive war more easily. I think it could use some tweaks. Are there any Ascension perks or tech trees that let you extend it or ignore it? Do any species just ignore it? (You'd think that the synthetics who are out to sterilize the galaxy could care less about war exhaustion, for example.)

I was wondering where those inhibitors on my planets were coming from, I missed that in the descriptions. I was just building them for the unity.

The beta patch slows exhaustion and instead of forcing you to accept a truce, 100% just sets influence and unity growth to zero, and reduces happiness everywhere.

Annnd The Contingency attacked my new game and this time I was ready and none of the hellspawn worlds appeared in my quadrant, so I thought I was smug.

I took my fleet and attacked and wrecked one of their fleets, so I thought I was smug.

Then I got my shit pushed in by two more of their murder machines and now I'm back to being defensive.  Also, the Fallen Empire that is supposed to protect us charged bravely and, frankly, it was The Charge of the Light Brigade.

Those Death Borg are STUPID powerful.

I've been playing a lot of this since 2.0.0 but now I'm going to switch to HOI4 once the new DLC for that is released on Thursday (at least until Stellaris gets a patch or two).

I'm loving like 90% of the expansion, loads of changes that just flat out make it a better game, unfortunately the wargoal system is completely borked.
If the other empire is near your strength at the start of war and you're just looking to claim some neighboring systems? Fine, otherwise: forget about it.
I suppose I could start rummaging through the code to try and write a mod that fixes the low scores for occupation/threat/relative navy power, but I'm a lazy bastard so I'll just check back in a week or 2 in the hope someone else modded or Paradox patched it.

I'm also hoping someone mods the heck out of the claim system, lot of options there, but as is it's fairly inconsequential.

And if you're kinda new'ish to the game and want to throw some special sauce on: the Synthetic Dawn and Utopia DLC are good, but the juiciest extras are in the mods.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1311725711 (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1311725711) --> Greatly expanded tradition tree, I wouldn't play without it.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1121692237 (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1121692237) --> More interesting Mega-structures (Dyson Spheres are sooo 22nd century)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683230077 (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683230077) --> More Ship types, slightly improved AI. Not quite the must-have it once was since Apocalypse, but still adds some depth to fleet building I like.

Those are the 3 mods I check first after each update.

Let me know if the game is fixed.  Last time I tried playing, the game was still pretty much unplayable due to the worst AI paradox has ever put into a game.

The AI is pretty good now, I think? It is pretty aggressive and challenging, generally.

All I know is that literally, every fucking game, the soviets would be in Berlin by 1940 and other completely retarded shit collapsing your entire game world every time.

Aren't two of the DLC's just, well, new ship designs and race pics?

Humanoid and Plantoid species packs are just what the name says and not worth the price really (you can get mods for that if you want). Leviathan and Synthetic Dawn are storypacks which add flavor to the game (including stuff like being able to play as robots) while Apocalypse and Utopia are the "expansions".

Yeah, sorry, in my head DLC means Expansions, because who buys s the random portrait packs for any of these?  But anyways, yes, I consider Leviathan, Synthetic Dawn, Apocalypse, and Utopia a must for this game.

Man, I left for Bangkok right after my psyonic elven space Nazi nation took galactic contender and started a war with a fallen empire, just as my main admiral overthrew the government and became an immortal void god emperor.  I want to see how it plays ouuuuuut!

Fallen Empires are total pussies.

I think this is the first time I’ve been able to hold my own against one.  They have always been overpower in all previous games.

Prethoryn Scourge is survivable so long as it doesn't core you out in the first wave, but bugged such that you can never complete it.  Loads of things are bugged awaiting the next patch, and I've found late-game performance to have degraded (admittedly my rig is getting long in the tooth so it is probably a quirk of my particular system). 

I've been trying to restore my 100% achievements here and I've had trouble with Fallen Empires punking the empires I need to use the shield planet weapon on before I can get to them and other empires just disappearing periodically.  Also, they aren't using Titans so I'm having trouble picking a fight with one to get the Titan v Titan win.  A lot of potential here, but be ready for some Dwarf Fortress level fun from time to time.  Will be much better in a few weeks for those who can wait.

A good read on 2.0 ships: Ship Equipment & Load Outs - Patch 2.0.2 (WIP) (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=911980839)

(at least I found it pretty enlightening on how things have changed with the Cherryl update)

So, had contingency spawn in my game for the first time.  I had already destroyed two fallen empires, just conquered 75% of one of the largest empires in the game, and had just built a massive fleet to go take out the third (and awakened) fallen empire, then they appeared.  I also was very confident.

Poor fleet.  And 200 year old level 10 Admiral.

If it helps, I have now beaten them and it's hilarious how QUICKLY all the remaining Empires just declare war on each other and start trying to eat away at the Galaxy.

But I am the Powerhouse in the Universe now because I defeated my nearest Contingency FIRST and then watched it eat away at everyone else.  So I'm going to rule.  It's only a matter of time now.

The Contingency ARE beatable.  But you need to bide your time, research up as fast as you can and have a fleet of Specced up 120k at least before you even THINK about challenging them.

If they spawn inside your empire at spawn time, you're done.  Done.

Switched over to the beta patch, things are much smoother/faster now especially fleet combat.

Neighboring Marauders spawned a great khan, they ate my Life Seeded empire because we only had one planet.  I managed to steal a neighbor's planet and build a robot before my capital was destroyed, but things look grim (they were determined exterminators, they won't be pleased with this turn of events... and the planet was empty).    I don't think the hired marauders scale with the game stages, they are way too strong early (10k fleet when you've got 60 fleet cap) and ignorable later as they can't even threaten your Citadel.

The patch build does have a problem with fallen empires eating Fanatical Purifiers and Determined Exterminators, etc.  Makes it hard to get the shield colossus achievement.  I might have to play a determined exterminator just to shield my own planet.  I also noticed some government types keep falling apart, either fragmenting or dissolving entirely.  It'll be a while until everything works properly, but it is still fun in the meantime.

I think depending on the power of your galaxy, it changes.  For instance, by the time they spawned, I had already researched every tech in the game and was only doing those long slow incremental tech ups.  I could field two fleets of over 100k each, giving me usually about 220k fire power in a given battle.  Each spawn is running around with multiple fleets of 200k deathbots.  I managed to take out one or two of their 50K fleets, but even when evenly matched, they wiped me out and only fell to about 100k from 200k.  I've been spamming shit and wearing them down, but suddenly they've built multiple new 200k fleets......

I'm finding the Khan's to be a cake-walk (same with, well, everything else, honestly, including the crisis events), but I've got the min/max down pretty good. I generally play Large 4 arm spiral galaxies with 4 Fallen Empires, 1 Marauder group and 22 AI empires (any more and I find not all 4 Fallen Empires spawn every game -- as they are added last and are only added if the galaxy creation deems there to be enough room for their space), 1.5x crisis strength and 1.5x tech/unity costs, 0.5x habitable planets. Generally by the end of the first century I have two fleets at around ~80-100k each and am eating my first Fallen Empire. By the time the mid-game crisis can hit (Khan) I've devoured that first Fallen Empire, consolidated my space properly (expanded to all good choke-points beyond my initial choke-point groups from the initial expansion phase early game) and am finally starting to colonize planets more frequently (I rarely go above 5 colonized planets until this phase; only exceptions are large Gaia planets, what I took from the Fallen Empire, and any bonus ring world systems I've come across such as Sanctuary, Cybrex or ruined ring world systems) and have generally got my Science Nexus, Dyson Sphere done and the Sentry Array in progress and am looking at grabbing the perk for Ring Worlds, as well as having 3-4 fleets of ~100-110k power each.

By the time the end game crisis hits? I've continued to develop my space (rarely going outside it; mainly just for the sporadic war to keep any factions happy), am happily plugging away at the repeatable techs as my only options, have 5-6 fleets of ~120-130k power each and am laughing at the poor Awakened Fallen Empires that want me to sign their stupid treaties. Like I'm afraid of them; I could squish them with ease, but I refuse to expand further before the end game crisis hits.

My last game went like that and two Contingency Hubs spawned in my empire; one in a system where I had a size 24 gaia planet (which sucked; the planet immediately became their property!). But, since I had Gateways set up decently well I was able to concentrate my fleets, knocked out one Hub while the other chewed away at the other side of my empire before smacking it down as well. Had to rebuild my fleets drastically after clearing each Hub, but when you're rolling in ~2k minerals per month, even with your 5-6 fleets capped out.. it doesn't really take long or hurt much. Then, as the other two Hubs at away at the rest of the galaxy I began to declare war again. Didn't conquer anything; just declare war, walk in with my planet destroyer and smirk as planets went bye-bye.

The game is actually fairly simple to min.max once you get the initial start up going as you can snow-ball really easily. My next game after I get back from vacation will likely have me bumping up the Crisis strength to 2x and start adding in Advanced Empire starts and use the new Scaling difficulty setting.

Game declared me Domination Winner.  Didn't know that was a thing.

I'm continuing a little bit because more aliens require to be liquidated.

Not sure what I'm going to start over as now, but I've certainly got the hang of the base game;  learned a LOT about how it all works now.

If you haven't gone mental/void accession, that's a pretty fun path.  I enjoy the many different options you have in this game.  Rapidly spreading killer robots, ageless beings who hold up in a narrow area and tech up (did that with my venerable space elfs born of a gaia world), peaceful trading cyborgs, ect.  The eveolution path seems to have gotten shafted though.  You get to control all the perks of your race and genetically modify yourself as you see fit, which is great for role playing gatica or space nazi's.  But you don't really get any other grand events.  Other paths give you all sorts of crazy cool events that can happen...

Evolution also gets all types of nasty if you're an alien lover.  I was keeping track of shittons of different variants by the end and I didn't really want to.

Ah, luckily I went space nazi on my evolution playthough and made the xenophobes.   :why_so_serious:

2.0.2 patch is out and pretty much every niggle I had with 2.0 has gobe away.

Most obviously war exhaustion is fairer and various bugs have been fixed.

Cool, new game time.

New Rome era game announced. Take my money, Paradox!

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/go-from-brick-to-marble-in-paradox’s-imperator-rome.1098908/ (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/go-from-brick-to-marble-in-paradox’s-imperator-rome.1098908/)

Sounds like a mix of Victoria pops+economy and CK2 RPGish elements but maybe more faction driven than individual driven?

Slightly less interesting but thread relevant: Stellaris: Distant Stars  (https://www.paradoxplaza.com/stellaris-distant-stars/STST01DSK0000020-MASTER.html)is out in 3 days (on the 22nd). While it's a story pack it does overhaul the exploration system so even the basic game might be worth another playhtru.

edit: Niven update (2.1.0) is now live (changelog (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/dev-team-niven-update-2-1-0-released-checksum-01a9.1099864/))

I have to say that Paradox are really the masters at making games more and more interesting as time goes on. I love a lot of these small but crucial changes and the new content they involve.

Based on a quick test game I really like how exploring anomalies and strategic resources have been changed. As for the actual story pack content didn't run into the "big stories" yet.

Oh god, been wanting something like this for a long time, and I just finished the History of Rome podcast a month ago.  CK2 crossed with either EU or Victoria would be amazeballs.  My body is ready!

So, my current game I managed to trigger the Horizon Signal/Worm in Waiting series. Now I am trying to decide if I should play it out or restart with the new Exploration stuff.

--Dave

Did the worm in waiting ever get fixed? Last few play throughs it wouldn't complete.

I'm probably not going to be able to complete it anyway, because the Messenger spawned in another empire, who blew it up and then closed their borders to me.

--Dave

the messanger I think is just a sidequest of it, with the result the option to change your race's traits. The main quest is to do the research options and eventually build that empire unique building in your capital to summon it. Did it a few weeks ago and it worked.

That's the part that would never fire for me but it's been more then a few weeks since I played since battletech launched. I'll have to try again with the new expantion and see if it clears.

The more I play this game - especially with the newest expansion - the more I realize that what I most like about Stellaris/Master of Orion et al. is the space exploration aspect of it and the quest lines and anomalies and not the combat aspect.

Yeah, I'm with you there. In fact, I find the combat aspect to be actually tedious. Usually the time I "take a break" is right after some protracted massive battle. They just don't seem fun to me.

Dev Diary up.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/imperator-development-diary-1-28th-of-may-2018.1101600/

Seems like a lot more provinces than even CK2. That kind of detail is nice, and ideally it will make the game more challenging with expansion slower, although it seems to me that AI generally has more trouble with more options like that.

I need some help.  Played this a fair amount at release and a bit later. Got the new DLC's.  BIG problem: "no habitable planets that meet your species criteria" or something.  Basically, there are no habitable planets near my starting planet.  I've now tried 3 times over several hours, changing a lot of traits and civics.  There's nothing.  And each time I get quite far, like half way across a large (? 800) map.  No habitable planets at all.  I know I can earn adaptability skills and terraforming, but those are farther in the game.  Previous games I was able to find something more than "0%" for most planets.  It's now 0% on every single one I discover

The only non-default change I made was the galaxy size to Large (800).  Even then I would expect to find something. I did have "Life-Seeded" as a trait but I got rid of it and restarted twice.  I don't understand why every planet would still be 0%.  Any ideas?

You didn't pick post-apocalyptic to replace life-seeded?

Survey a bunch of systems and then look to see if any of the "red" (unsuitable) planets are close to the climate you chose and try to find out if you have any other penalties to habitability from your traits if that's the case. If there  just aren't that many planets you might want to look into increasing the number of habitable planets from the game settings.

That's a new one on me. BTW, "Assimilation" is a completely busted OP race choice: Live anywhere (100% habitability, regardless of planet type), have both buildable and breedable pops (which need no food, so higher planet productivity), near-immortal leaders, and when you take over a planet everyone on it fairly quickly gets 'assimilated' which means they can also live anywhere and will never rebel. Throw in some warbot tech or a Collossus with the nano-goo assimilation weapon, and you're pretty much unstoppable.

Oh, and your race-specific buildings produce both Unity and Bio research.

--Dave

Basically with Gaia planet you get a great homeworld but skip traditional early game colonization. It's a way for people to do "build tall" strategies, and maybe synchronizes with certain other special race type games. And if you go through the appropriate terraforming and ascension perks you turn them to Gaia planets later (requires lots of energy), or you can expand by building those space megastructures.

Thanks for the tip!!

 :awesome_for_real:

Kinda serious. Was looking for a way to play through and be less combat oriented.

Okay, MahrinSkel was right, and for the first time ever I'm near or at the end game. I've curbstomped every other Empire, including the Fallen Ones, and assimilated every intelligence it would let me, including the pre-tech primitive races. I've scanned every planet, and own most of the star systems in the galaxy. I'm just starting building megastructures -- habitats and gateways. I passed all the "victory" conditions long ago.

So the question is is there anything else? Any reason to keep playing? It seems there should be end game events yet to happen, yet everything has been quiet for years in-game.

I don't want a spoilery list of exactly what to expect, only just to know if this is it or I need to advance time some more to trigger something else.

Continuing on depends on how far into the game you are, year-wise, to be honest. If it is fairly early still you could have a long wait until the Interesting stuff could kick up. What year it might start also depends on the game setting options you picked at the beginning; did you leave them at default? Trying to be vague for spoilery reasons. 

Thanks for the reply. My game machine is off right now but I think I remember it being 2440 or somewhere near. I'm at near default, but I did change the galaxy shape.

Sp endgame stuff is year related? Okay I can just put it in fast forward mode and wait on it...

Couldn't find a better picture with a quick search but:
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DgzQG-VXkAE4TMw.jpg)

it depend's on the end-game start year you set up when you started the game (you can check it by trying to start a new game as it should offer the same settings you had for the previous game)

How it works is at certain year dates (default can vary depending on galaxy size, shape is irrelevant) the end-game events will start to become possible to fire; the further past that date the more and more likely they are to fire. When they do fire you will get an event notification that stuff is about to change. There are several possible end-game events (which are mutually exclusive). So yeah, you can just wait. Eventually one will trigger.

If you have control of most of the galaxy and didn't bump the difficulty scaling of the event it is quite possible that it won't pose a challenge for you, depending on how well you're prepped for it, but most people find it... interesting the first few times, especially if the game difficulty was bumped up or the end-game strength modifier was increased.

Looks like with playing the *very* overpowered Homologs I just rolled over the whole galaxy in such short time I've got a bit of a wait ahead of me for the endgame. That's fine. I'll just let it run on while doing other chores or surfing the web or something.

Thanks guys.

Planetary Rework (dev diaries 121 (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-121-planetary-rework-part-1-of-4.1115043/), 122 (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-122-planetary-rework-part-2-of-4.1115992/),  123 (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-123-planetary-rework-part-3-of-4.1116917/) and 124 (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-124-planetary-rework-part-4-of-4.1117775/)) that's coming in 2.2 seems interesting and I for one am looking forward to another playthru (or 3) once it gets released (unless it coincides with CK2's Holy Fury DLC release in which case Stellaris will have to wait for its turn).

edit:added link to Planetary Rework part 3
edit2: added link to part 4

That looks intricate--but if it makes politics and some of the bio/social tech tracks more important, I am all for it. I think it will put a premium on playing smaller galaxies, though.

Stellaris Dev Diary #131 - MegaCorporations (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-131-megacorporations.1125380/)

I'm really looking forward to the LeGuin update and the MegaCorp DLC (though the release date is still TBA). Can't wait to

December 6th! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHqZa8X7XZs)
Yikes! With this, CK2 DLC out just last week and POE 3.5 on Dec 8th there's so much for me to play at once (especially compared to the lack of any new games that could interest me).

Well, tiles are gone...  I’m suddenly very confused by the planetary surface screen, and am still not sure how trade works.  I started a new game yesterday but didn’t have the mental fortitude to completely relearn everything and decided I’d come back to it later.

I'm actually a few hours into this for the first time ever.  I imagine this is old hat for most people, but losing my entire fleet to some random planet-sized alien in less than a second was pretty hilarious.

If you enjoyed that your in for lots of fun when the end game events start firing.  :awesome_for_real:

The planetary interface is now confusing as hell. That was one part of the game that I didn't think was particularly broken. Sigh.

It's not that bad once you get used to it. I actually kind of like the changes when it comes to the mechanics (but when it comes to the UI...) Another nice thing about 2.2 is the way pirates and trade is now handled .

I'm a big fan of almost all the changes.

Loathed the tile system.

I don't find the game that hard to re-learn, but I'm a hard-core Paradox gamer, so I'm pretty used to their janky UI setups.

I figured I'd wait a week or two and start a new game after the inevitable fix-the-patch patch...

Looking for a game to try. Is this worth buying if you liked Sword of the Stars and similar. Or is it totally on another level of complecity or not really like that at all?

They're both 4xs but they emphasize very different things.  Stellaris is much heavier on empire management than Sword of the Stars is.  It is very much a grand strategy game.  It also has less of an emphasis on combat.  If you're looking for Sword of the Stars' tactical space combat you're not going to find that here at all.

But if you're looking for a 4x with a practically endless amount of variety and tons of mods to liven things up once you lose interest with the base game, it fits the bill.  It's a game I come back to once a year and it always feels fresh because there are so many different strategies to explore and dlc releases are usually worth using and reasonably priced.  Especially when on sale.

This is a game where strategies that involve making alliances rather than invading people really are viable as a long term thing. Which is a bit unusual, and nice.

Its also the only game from anywhere close to this type of gameplay that can actually function well in multiplayer. It doesn't lag or fuck up people can drop in and take over AI empires etc.

Now it ends up being a lot like risk where people can get feelings hurt something fierce and back in vanilla/release multiplayer was exposing a lot of issues but at least it was both possible and painless to execute. No other 4X or grand strategy i've tried can say that.

Soooo....This mod came out:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1593301672

The "HP DeskJet 2630 Wireless All-in-One Printer" has become sentient. And they can't wait to exterminate us all, one paper jam at a time.

https://www.pcgamer.com/stellaris-printer-mod/

Ok, I am getting into the latest. I kind of see why people are irritated--there's something complicatedly buggy about the mid-game now--game slows down really dramatically after the Great Khan crisis and I'm hearing from some people that the Fallen Empires and Endgame factions don't even launch. But on the whole I like the latest changes.

I booted it up long enough to look at the new planetary changes, realized I'm going to have to work through a tutorial to figure it out, and went and played something else.

This is not to say that the changes are not for the best in the long run, but that I hate to admit it but I sometimes also fall into the crowd that, once something is learned, doesn't want to have to relearn old tricks.

That and I figure that waiting for the patch to fix the patch is always a good idea before diving back into another run.

I did have a really fun time this time with the Great Khans, who were right on the border of my empire. One of the big space monsters--the Scavenger--was in the middle of a hyperspace spoke-wheel. The AI--or as I prefer to think about it, the brutish anger of the Great Khan--meant that it would send its mega-fleets through the space monster system to try to get at my constantly-moving alpha fleet, which was only half the strength of most of the Khan fleets. They'd get killed off by the monster; repeat as necessary. Took a while though.

This (https://xenonion.com/home/2019/1/7/galactic-time-appears-to-be-slowing-down-may-freeze-completely) has been my experience when playing Stellaris as of late which has made me unwilling to play much past the mid-game crisis (khan) in my criminal corp play-thru.  :oh_i_see:

TIL that there is an Onionesque news site devoted to Stellaris.

Thanks.

It's pretty much right on, though. I finished a game today that just absolutely crawled after the mid-game crisis. I did see an Awakened Empire at the end but jesus I don't know how I endured that long with the game running at that speed.

I think there's some mechanics that are making it worse. They need to do something other than allow discontented systems to secede from their home empires--at mid-game and beyond there's a zillion of these one-system mini-empires, all of them pinging you to make deals. The AI overbuilds construction and science fleets it doesn't need and each one of those little empires does that, so there's tons of ships in motion across the map. The AI is also terrible at building armies and invading, so lots of big wars between AI powers are inconclusive because of that. That and more--I really suspect streamlining some of the mechanics will help with the crawl. It's unplayable past mid-game as it stands.

Honestly, I just want the ability to conquer territory without the acquiring the populated planets.  I keep accidentally acquiring new territory because my allies take systems for me and now I have a bunch of extra planets ballooning my admin cap.  Tried bombarding them but apparently I can't take a planet below 10 population.

If you're in a Federation, you can give systems you don't want away to your allies and vassals. I've been doing that a decent amount, works pretty well.

I think I should be able to just vassalize the planets directly, but I can't do a damn thing right now because I'm caught in a foreverwar between the two fallen empires.  I managed to completely wipe out the Prethoryns in the middle of it and neither side is over 40% war attrition yet after like 30 years.

Yeah, that often happens--the AI has a habit of declaring wars where neither side can reach the other one because their forces would have to go through territories that they don't have permission to enter, and the AI never seems to think of declaring war on those empires just to gain access to its main target, even if the empire in the way is a minor nuisance in relative terms. So then they just sit there and stare at each other and tick the attrition down one slow percentage at a time. That's been an issue from the beginning--they should really find a way to fix it. Might be as simple as a check: "Can I reach the enemy that I want to attack? If no, no war."

I also wish that the game could do a check on a war's progress that would allow for quick mercy surrenders. If I demand vassalization for a small empire on my borders that has no alliances of any kind, doesn't have an ideology that is completely antithetical to mine, and is Pathetic relative to me, I shouldn't have to occupy every single planet and defeat every single fleet before they give in and agreed to vassalage. Sure, yes, there are kinds of enemies that should fight to the last, and some of them do--exterminators won't knuckle under no matter what, as should be the case. But if it's a kind of empire that can vassalize, and it's a foregone conclusion that I'm going to win, don't make me curb stomp them down to the last drop.

At the least, though, I always feel less like an Evil Overlord if I'm playing a xenophile or other relatively benevolent type and I vassalize a pathetic empire nearby because the AI usually is so awful at governing--in the new setup,  three-quarters of their buildings will be police headquarters and prisons and commercial buildings. (Kind of like America, actually...)

Getting to the enemy territory isn't a problem since the entire galaxy chose sides.  I either have passage or can conquer my way through, except I don't want to keep ballooning my empire.  I suppose I've already effectively beaten the game, but I would kind of like to finish the war and disburse the winnings to my allies.

This is on sale on steam for a Tenner right now.

Now available on  consoles  (https://console.stellaris.com/?utm_source=program-disp-trigger&utm_medium=display&utm_content=banner&utm_campaign=stel_stco_20190301_awa_pro_cawe_rel)

I truly cannot imagine trying to play this on a console.

I can imagine that somehow the game has been made worse and will be made even worser because its on consoles. what the actual fuck.  :uhrr:  :oh_i_see:

I was surprised to see it as well. So who's taking one for the team and trying this out?

I read a review or two about this, because the idea is intriguing. The biggest complaints were not the controls or interface, which they seemed to feel were somewhat decent. Rather, the fact that this is a baseline Stellaris experience and is missing so many of the things they learned and implemented that improved the game post-release. I might throw $20 at it some point, but the general review consensus was if you can play on PC, do that, not this.

Screw consoles, I just wanna know when it's coming to mobile. Everybody knows that's where the real money is!

 :grin:

Do you guys not have phones? Yea you guys all have phones right?

(https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61uJzsRIKCL._SY550_.jpg)

New story pack announced: Ancient Relics (trailer) (https://youtu.be/ZSgM0kLs33g)

link to dev diaries: https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Developer_diaries#Ancient_Relics (https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Developer_diaries#Ancient_Relics)

Seems interesting enough to me to warrant a playthru or two once it gets released.

They'll have my money for anything with this now. It's incredibly balanced now--challenging, not impossible; it stays pretty interesting into the late game; different aliens play in quite notably different ways.

Yep.  Every one of their games has a mechanic/theme its built around, and this is the first one that is actual story.  All sorts of the economic and military management we love from the past, but this one is just endlessly replayable with how easy it is for them to add story events in, let alone the racial role play.

Every update draws me back for at least one playthrough, I have to admit.

So here's my cash Paradox, you win again.

Started a new game.  Literally don't know how to play anymore.

Same here and I have absolutely no clue what's going on. Oh well I'll figure it out eventually.

I'm going to get some instructional video going, I think.

I can see that there's a lot of stuff added for the trade expansion (No clue how it works) and I simply have zero idea what's going on with my planetary situation ;  pops, zones, all that shit ;  no clue.

As you say, it'll be fun figuring it out.

Got this for $10 and just started. So far I like it.

Yeah Ironwood, I had to relearn how to do everything also after the last major overhaul.  Watching videos is probably the best way to bring you up to speed, but after that if you still have questions on some points, feel free to post here.  Sure one of us can answer for you.

I watched one video and then I played several games getting better each time as I slowly learned how all the resources fed off each other.

The Wiki is also good to get up to speed.  Haven't had much of a chance to dive into it since FrostPunk was on sale, I got it and it put hooks in me DEEP.

But I'll get there.

Once you get into the swing of it, the changes are very smooth. They're frankly way better than the systems they had before.

Any of the add-ons that are on Steam sale right now worth getting? They all seem to have medicare reviews though many of the complaints are price related so it's hard to tell which ones actually have decent content.

I got them all and started a new game.

I'm not really noticing much difference.  Sure, Ravagers and big beasts are a thing now, but....so what ?

I may change my mind when I get my DeathStar and Ringworld.

I don’t even know what they all do, but I keep throwing money at them. I think the story packs are widely considered good, beyond that I’m not really sure.

I'm sure they are, but it's the double edged sword of 'Story pack AND big patch.'

Mostly the patch is the meat and the story is just dessert.  Some folks don't wanna pay for dessert and some folks are already full from the meat.

Goddammit, I have crushed your fleet, invaded all your planets and even destroyed all your science and engineering vessels.

I would consider my War Goals Met YOU FUCKERS SO GIVE UP YOUR EMPIRE.

So annoying.

I got Utopia, Distant Stars, and Leviathans based on these two pages:

https://www.strategygamer.com/articles/stellaris-dlc-buying-guide/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/bdp5qx/which_dlc_should_i_get_first/

This is free all week.

Good luck finishing a game in that time.

I like all the DLC for this game except the stuff that's purely cosmetic.

Free update this week that fixes some issues with Federations and adds some new gameplay.

Started playing this again after not touching it for over a year or more (before planet tile & rare resource changes) and it's coming along nicely, lots of flavour and polish. Less frustrating to play than HOI4 although you can see it's quite a bit simpler (hyperlanes & blob fleets vs fronts and complicated combined arms forces) so that's partially to be expected. Still game usually kicks my ass admiral difficulty and still feels fun so I'm enjoying it.

I often play a pacifist expansionist race where.... not much happens. Is it normal for the game with archeology etc. to only happen much later in game?

I play tall and tend to tech rush with 3-5 planets, though I'll grab as much space as possible to try and find the rare strategic resources and an L gate.  All the excitement is in the expansion phase, usually, and it's probably super boring but I find it really relaxing as well.  Most of the action happens in the expansion phase, and then things settle in once borders are defined.

select cluster empire starts in the game setup and you will get more early action. If it's random it's very possible to have nobody else near you so not much going on for a while.

Started another game just because I didn't feel like starting other games. I feel like this game is in such a good groove now as a 4x. About the only thing I want to have is a bit more of the CK2/CK3 flavor--some weirder shit from particular rulers and civilizations that creates memorable narrative hooks I haven't seen before.

I realised the xbox game pass edition didn't have much in the way of DLC, so I bought this on steam...

Trying to work out how to destroy an awakened empire is my challenge now. I'm not sure It's a solvable problem though. And I don't think I'm going to get any other end game events? So restart with the DLC time...

Well, if you don't survive the awakened empire, yeah, you won't get to the end game crisis. But actually if you can hold the awakened empire off, the awakened empire will usually turn its attention to the endgame crisis and may even be a useful shield against it/ally.

If you're having a real hard time, there's an ascension perk that increases the damage you do to fallen/awakened empires and another for the endgame.  Probably not optimal, but can save your ass in a pinch.

How are you guys playing? Aggressive, turtle, coop federation? All my games seem to be the same with the same drip of content. Still very slow for me and I'm not sure how to make it fun.

I play coop federation most of the time, occasionally the psycho machine or flesh empires because that's fun too.

I like to turtle and play tall on low difficulty, I tend to enjoy teching up and dominating in the endgame.  Mix up ascension paths each playthrough.  I don't tend to like aggressive playstyles, but driven assimilators and devouring swarms do seem interesting.

Turns out everything just happened super late. I cleared out the awakened empire and then destroyed the crisis in about five seconds. So, pretty anti-climactic. I realised all I needed to do was take the upkeep hit and build way over the fleet limit.

There is too much micro management in the ship building and planet management for me, especially late game. But as long as I kept growing I hit the storage limit on all resources.

Paradox definitely did not solve one of the most age old problems of empire building explore and conquer games with Stellaris. In the end, you almost always just curb-stomp the end game content or the end game content curb-stomps you. There is little in between, and once you learn the game systems you are never going to be the one getting stomped.

That said, the beginning and middle game is interesting enough to bring me back every once in a while to try another faction.

The fact that I often get space merchants before I have a first contact is still irritating though.

I like to play *extremely* wide, with cheats on :why_so_serious:

Is there any 4X game that has actually solved the endgame problem?

If you have a victory condition that says "your victory is inevitable" too early, players feel cheated. If you have an endgame problem that is radically unscaled to your climbing of the 4X pyramid, you feel cheated and annoyed--especially if it says "everything you have done until now doesn't matter, now the gameplay is completely different and you're back to being a novice/starter". There's probably a version of that which we'd all feel worked--drifting over into a new Zone in the Vernor Vinge sense, or working the Zone boundaries, etc. But Stellaris doesn't really have that--the Fallen/Awakened Empires and the Endgame factions are just supersized versions of what has gone before. But that's what all 4xs do, that I can remember. Maybe Fall From Heaven for Civ IV and maybe Alpha Centauri are the only 4X games I can think of that thought about the endgame in a way that wasn't just "more of the same only with more more more units".

I find the planet management and ship design stuff not great early game too.

And the micro late game is mostly because of bloat in techs and buildings. Scale exacerbates it but isn't the main issue for me.

I don't think these games have to be like a funnel necessarily. You can choose points to obselete stuff and scale the decisions space back to meaningful things, if you want. They just rarely do.

:Love_Letters:

AC is actually the tbs I've played the most this year. I do need to set up FFH2 again. I know it's kind of a running joke at this point, but there's a reason for it. It was a phenomenal experience, one of the very few times where the genre felt transcended and made vanilla civ just painfully vanilla.

edit - and now I realize that modmod dev has continued and is still active on Ashes of Erebus... :D

I think the thing for AC that was so right about the endgame is that they recognized that there was a sort of "phase change" needed where the nature of the gameplay and the goals shifted as you got into it so that you were not interminably stuck in the last X of 4X. Stellaris should actually embrace something similar--the endgame crisis should be something really different than "wow look at all those fucking ships ok I need to grind them down" etc.--they should almost consider a different map or interface for the endgame crisis where it is is sum-totalling your outputs without you having to micromanage fleets and planets (e.g., it takes a snapshot of where you're at in the endgame and uses that to generate a simpler endgame map of some kind). I dunno. It would be a nice challenge for them to fiddle with in a future expansion.

New xpack and game is on Steam for $8 if you have friends who don't have it or w/e.

The game only requires host in MP to have dlc so even tho its Paradox and their infinity dlc model its not too too bad. Highly recommend as the best MP 4X or 4X adjacent game I've ever tried and also these days one of the only RTS that I've enjoyed in ages since that last DoW was so panned I never even installed it.