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Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

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i wish they were more "interactive", like making explicit requests, doing something by themselves, stuff like this. stuff like ck2 in space.
 

Inf0mercial

Augur
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Jan 28, 2014
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Habitats are probably the best thing ever, built 6 in 2 systems filled them with all solar always 10 power ea, like 140 each habitat.

Churning out power that can be traded to merchant for minerals no more having to fuck around trading with neighbours who all hate me because I actually expand.

Here's a question are you guys using cruisers? I find myself skipping straight from destroyers to battleships. Cruisers are too expensive and by the time you can afford a lot of them you have level 6 space ports and battleships.
 

BelisariuS.F

Augur
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Mar 23, 2010
Messages
388
They had no production or wide spread intelligence base to work from.

It's easy for someone to invent a little steam engine, it's another thing when most entrepreneurs weren't educated and there wasn't much of a "republic of letters" going on.

It's easy for someone to invent a little steam engine. It's another thing to widely adopt it when it isn't needed.

Stuff is invented and adopted to use it, not to boast that we are smart because we invented something, and they are stupid because they didn't. What gets invented and adopted does not depend on what we can do, but on what we need.
Why humanity had been flying to the moon several decades ago, and now we don't? Because we forgot how? No. Because then it was needed for the purposes of the Cold War. Now humanity doesn't think that it's needed so we don't do it (and spend the limited money on other purposes).
The same was with the steam engine in Greece. So what that someone invented it, while it wasn't really needed, because there was a cheap slave labour widely available. And if you add to that the disruption it would do to the slave-based economy and society (when suddenly slaves have nothing to do), then it's understandable why there was no wide interest in developing and adopting this technology.
 

thesheeep

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Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
My god, the beginning of this game is incredibly good for a game of that kind.
No wonder some people just play it and restart when it is over :lol:
I wasn't that sucked into a game for a while.
 

exe

Augur
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Greece also didn't have the metalurgy required to make proper steam engines. It's like calling 20/21st century humans dumb because they know what fusion is but aren't making fusion reactors.
 

IDtenT

Menace to sobriety!
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Divinity: Original Sin
Lots of small but crucial changes here and there. Planetary Capitals now produce Energy and the new Unity resource instead of Food and Minerals, and also Food is now an Empire-wide resource (that caps at 200 and starts dropping if you have a general food shortage) instead of being counted individually for each planet, so theoretically you could even build all your farms on a single planet and feed your entire empire that way.
You can increase the food stockpile from 200.
 

Hellion

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True, though this increase affects your planet population growth I think. But the option is there.

I am also under the impression that they STILL haven't fixed the Precursors questline, which keeps bugging 9 out of 10 times and cannot be completed.
 
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Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
They said they did... But I still have 3/6 so far
Can we see somewhere how much exactly the Growth is influenced by the excess food? I know it DOES influence it... but by how much?
 
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Habitats are probably the best thing ever, built 6 in 2 systems filled them with all solar always 10 power ea, like 140 each habitat.

Churning out power that can be traded to merchant for minerals no more having to fuck around trading with neighbours who all hate me because I actually expand.

Here's a question are you guys using cruisers? I find myself skipping straight from destroyers to battleships. Cruisers are too expensive and by the time you can afford a lot of them you have level 6 space ports and battleships.

Habitats seem useless since by the time you get them (need battleships + useless as fuck fortresses which only unlock after battleships). By that time I have infinite energy surplus anyway and research efficiency will only tick up a bit considering that the more pops and worlds will increase research costs a bit. Though if you are going for repeatable techs then I bet it will pay off, but those aren't needed to beat the AI. I would spam them out if I could get them early but you really can't. And all of the other megaprojects are crappy as hell. Can't even repair damaged ringworlds lol.

How are you getting battleships so early? I never get Battleships until around 2280-2300 at which point I can almost take down FEs.

As for ship types, smaller tends to be better in the cost/usefullness ratio with the exception that Destroyers eventually become useless (their weak evasion is countered by almost every weapon's tracking and their weak armor is also pierced by almost everything), and that armor dominates vs. foes without piercing (i.e. Corvettes with level 1 shields and Mass Drivers will ruin the non-armored FEs at incredible efficiency but get their shit pushed in vs. a Battleship with 90% armor reduction). Battleship's other advantage is the x-weapons but they tend to be a bad idea anyway unless you are in a 1v1 battleship vs. battleship faceoff at max range. Cruisers > Battleships for their M-weapons (which are generally better once you pierce armor thanks to tracking) and for having more aggregate shielding to distribute damage. Also since fleets move at the speed of their slowest ship there's a big advantage to using exclusively smaller ships.


They said they did... But I still have 3/6 so far
Can we see somewhere how much exactly the Growth is influenced by the excess food? I know it DOES influence it... but by how much?

I'm pretty sure it's the same as before (1 food = + .1 growth rate), but spread across your empire. So if you have 100 worlds growing pops with 100 excess food, it's the same as having 1 world growing pops with 1 excess food. Early game you can get some really high growth rates with low # of planets and a large surplus but it usually evens out to about a +0.05 to +0.15 growth rate once sectors dominate your average. Dunno if you can get insane growth rates if you conquer and convert an alien race to food while at one planet.
 
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Grif

Learned
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True, though this increase affects your planet population growth I think. But the option is there.

I am also under the impression that they STILL haven't fixed the Precursors questline, which keeps bugging 9 out of 10 times and cannot be completed.

It was fixed in 1.4. I remember completing it a few times, and they added mechanics/events to give you the missing artifacts if you missed them. Definitely easier than it was in 1.0.

It's broken in 1.5 again though. My current game has me sitting at 3/6.

Also, what the fuck are battleships used for? FE ships blow them out with their XL mounts, and you certainly don't need them to beat other AI empires.
 

Grif

Learned
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Messages
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It works in 1.5 for me. Had 4 artifacts from anomalies and then recovered last 2 on my planets.

I just got the event (to get one more artifact), so I guess they might have just raised the MTTH instead or I was supremely unlucky.
 
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Also, what the fuck are battleships used for? FE ships blow them out with their XL mounts, and you certainly don't need them to beat other AI empires.

As I said, hard counters anything lacking lots of armor piercing. As a rule of thumb I'd say that if less than half the enemy's weapons pierce armor at >50%, Battleships that stack to 90% damage reduction will fuck shit up incredibly well. But you need to ONLY use battleships, otherwise the enemy will just destroy everything else first (since the Battleships hang back) and you aren't utilizing the Battleship's tankiness if you are replacing all those lesser ships every battle. Also make sure to use M-class weapons so you can hit things.

Eventually with some repeating techs Cruisers can stack 90% armor too which makes them reign supreme as you have a (fairly) evasive ship that can evade lots of XL/L weapons and shrug off most S/M weaponry while having the best shielding, best complement of M weapons and best computer type.
 

Mortmal

Arcane
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Messages
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Habitats are probably the best thing ever, built 6 in 2 systems filled them with all solar always 10 power ea, like 140 each habitat.

Churning out power that can be traded to merchant for minerals no more having to fuck around trading with neighbours who all hate me because I actually expand.

Here's a question are you guys using cruisers? I find myself skipping straight from destroyers to battleships. Cruisers are too expensive and by the time you can afford a lot of them you have level 6 space ports and battleships.

Habitats seem useless since by the time you get them (need battleships + useless as fuck fortresses which only unlock after battleships). By that time I have infinite energy surplus anyway and research efficiency will only tick up a bit considering that the more pops and worlds will increase research costs a bit. Though if you are going for repeatable techs then I bet it will pay off, but those aren't needed to beat the AI. I would spam them out if I could get them early but you really can't. And all of the other megaprojects are crappy as hell. Can't even repair damaged ringworlds lol.

How are you getting battleships so early? I never get Battleships until around 2280-2300 at which point I can almost take down FEs.

As for ship types, smaller tends to be better in the cost/usefullness ratio with the exception that Destroyers eventually become useless (their weak evasion is countered by almost every weapon's tracking and their weak armor is also pierced by almost everything), and that armor dominates vs. foes without piercing (i.e. Corvettes with level 1 shields and Mass Drivers will ruin the non-armored FEs at incredible efficiency but get their shit pushed in vs. a Battleship with 90% armor reduction). Battleship's other advantage is the x-weapons but they tend to be a bad idea anyway unless you are in a 1v1 battleship vs. battleship faceoff at max range. Cruisers > Battleships for their M-weapons (which are generally better once you pierce armor thanks to tracking) and for having more aggregate shielding to distribute damage. Also since fleets move at the speed of their slowest ship there's a big advantage to using exclusively smaller ships.


They said they did... But I still have 3/6 so far
Can we see somewhere how much exactly the Growth is influenced by the excess food? I know it DOES influence it... but by how much?

I'm pretty sure it's the same as before (1 food = + .1 growth rate), but spread across your empire. So if you have 100 worlds growing pops with 100 excess food, it's the same as having 1 world growing pops with 1 excess food. Early game you can get some really high growth rates with low # of planets and a large surplus but it usually evens out to about a +0.05 to +0.15 growth rate once sectors dominate your average. Dunno if you can get insane growth rates if you conquer and convert an alien race to food while at one planet.

Habitat is not worth, and i could say most of the technology is not worth spending time on. I tried two different approachs, a tech heavy empire min maxing traits, staying on purpose on a few worlds to minimize the tech penalty , that's how you get battleships early, but neighboring huge IA empire got to the same equivalent tech . With that empire i struggled all the time and by the end was outclassed both in tech and naval capacity, clearly not worth it.Quality over quantity doesnt work .

Second approach is colonizing and invading as much and fast possible, i tried the new hivemind governement first . I made them highly adaptive , else they are not viable, they need to be able to land on every world . So you have no unrest , but you kill every populationson the conquered planets , better have fast breeders and nomad traits to boost that. It's one of the most efficient way to play the game, the only drawback is killing the populations, it give you plenty of food, but other empires will hate you especially for the genocidal part. If unlucky you could trigger a fallen empire or a coalition early.
The hive mind is cool but i tried the same thing with a slaver empire , its maybe even better, you limit unrest by garnison armies,you dont waste time killing and replacing pops as you get fully functional planets from the begining. You can now specialize slaves: Conquer a militaristic empire early with strong trait ? Make them battle thralls and use them for your army. You get ton of bonus to get more minerals from slaves, edicts and techs.You can quickly gather a huge fleet of outdated ships you can replace with ease and smash everything. Its considerably easier to not bother with tech, if its comes good, but your old ships are plenty good enough.
 
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I'm pretty sure there is absolutely zero reason to play Hive Minds rather than Fanatical Purifiers. Either way everyone hates you and you are forced to eat everyone, but Fanatical Purifiers get insane bonuses to weapon fire rate and a shit ton more influence from factions and (potential) democratic government.

And yeah, I agree that there is basically no reason to go for quality/tech over quantity. Which is why guaranteed Private Colony Ships so early is so powerful. I go Unity building -> Prosperity (build mining stations now) -> Private Colony (spam colonies) -> Expansion (will be done before first colony finishes). And Extremely Adaptive is OP as hell for letting you colonize everything.

Also fun trick: Reach for the Stars gives huge reductions on influence for Frontier outposts (dunno the distance-price formula but it's more than a 50% price reduction it seems). It's really good for getting access through a neighbor if you are a non-xenophobe, plopping down a Frontier outpost and immediately colonizing and removing the Frontier outpost. One colony that would have cost me 500 influence cost only 180 doing this and I immediately got about a dozen more colonies at 30 influence apiece since they were grouped together in an empty region of space.

One thing I haven't tried is doing the discovery tree and getting Planetary Survey Corps. It looks like it might be really OP but man the rest of the tree is horrifically bad.
 
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Hellion

Arcane
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Feb 5, 2013
Messages
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Recovered 5 precursor artifacts so far in the 4th game I've started in v1.5, I get multiple event notifications that "a precursor artifact was discovered in one of our planets in system X" but nothing actually pops out in those systems, no anomalies or any other surveyable points of interest. This did not happen in v1.4.
 

Mortmal

Arcane
Joined
Jun 15, 2009
Messages
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I'm pretty sure there is absolutely zero reason to play Hive Minds rather than Fanatical Purifiers. Either way everyone hates you and you are forced to eat everyone, but Fanatical Purifiers get insane bonuses to weapon fire rate and a shit ton more influence from factions and (potential) democratic government.

And yeah, I agree that there is basically no reason to go for quality/tech over quantity. Which is why guaranteed Private Colony Ships so early is so powerful. I go Unity building -> Prosperity (build mining stations now) -> Private Colony (spam colonies) -> Expansion (will be done before first colony finishes). And Extremely Adaptive is OP as hell for letting you colonize everything.

Also fun trick: Reach for the Stars gives huge reductions on influence for Frontier outposts (dunno the distance-price formula but it's more than a 50% price reduction it seems). It's really good for getting access through a neighbor if you are a non-xenophobe, plopping down a Frontier outpost and immediately colonizing and removing the Frontier outpost. One colony that would have cost me 500 influence cost only 180 doing this and I immediately got about a dozen more colonies at 30 influence apiece since they were grouped together in an empty region of space.

One thing I haven't tried is doing the discovery tree and getting Planetary Survey Corps. It looks like it might be really OP but man the rest of the tree is horrifically bad.

Havent even thought of the private colony ship... Using that at the very beggining its extremely OP indeed. I see no reason either to use an hivemeind instead of fanatical purifier, you can even give them better traits, no need of extreme adaptability when you have huge borders and influence gains.Unless i am missing something i see absolutely no reason to use the hivemind, even the massive food input does not seems to translate into huge population boost.
 

Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
What I've also noticed that I like is that wars between AIs are much more decisive now. I mean big empires literally swallow the smaller ones after wars, they don't just switch a couple of systems around.
 
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i also witnessed some empires vanishing into thin air, probably cleansed or (maybe due to some mod) bombarded to oblivion, which not only changes the grography but also makes having large borders more useful.
 
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Havent even thought of the private colony ship... Using that at the very beggining its extremely OP indeed. I see no reason either to use an hivemeind instead of fanatical purifier, you can even give them better traits, no need of extreme adaptability when you have huge borders and influence gains.Unless i am missing something i see absolutely no reason to use the hivemind, even the massive food input does not seems to translate into huge population boost.

Private colony ships are so good you could probably spam colony ships while bumrushing AIs by throwing the minerals into corvettes.

You want extreme adaptability just because it lets you colonize more things (which also saves a ton of influence by not needing to colonize in longer jumps). +20% to habitability also translates into -20% time to grow pops. It's the best trait in the game by far. Influence is always great to stockpile, early game dump it into the edict that gives -25% build cost so you can stack (-15% ethics + -15% traditions + -25% edict) = a decade of -55% cost for all that expensive shit you need to build to keep your economy growing.

Also Fanatical Purifier eats people too. Both play almost identically except that Fanatical Purifiers can stack +61% fire rate (make sure to use factions to change to fanatical militarist) and get a shit ton more influence.

On the use of food, it looks like each consumed pop gives you 600 food each, and it looks like it takes +20 food for a single pop to grow at double speed for a month. Normal pops require 25 (100% hab world 1st pop) to 60ish (large pop or medium with low hab) of growth to grow, which equates to 500-1200 excess food to grow a pop. And in the early game at low pop sizes it's closer to the 500, which means eaten food translates into new pops at close to 1:1 efficiency. Of course building excess food yourself is still a bad idea, 300ish energy spent on colonizing a new world gives you +1 pop growth permanently and a new pop & building immediately (2 new pops with the tradition).
 
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Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Can you elaborate as in why the Private colony ships are so good? I never really got their use to be honest :M
 

Hellion

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They cost Energy points instead of Minerals, with the drawback of the colonists having "potentially" different ethics compared to your Empire's "official" ones.

Having the ability to produce them in the early stages of the game in Utopia+1.5 allows you to spend the 350+ Minerals per Colony Ship you would normally use for your early colonial expansions into other stuff, like building a fleet of Corvettes super-early.
 
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350 minerals for a normal ship, 175 energy for a private colony ship.

Keep in mind that energy buildings produce 3 energy while mineral buildings produce 2 minerals and cost 1 energy. So if you have 4 buildings you can either have 4 energy buildings = 12 energy gain or 3 mineral/1 energy buildings = 6 mineral gain, so effectively energy is worth half as much as minerals and the Private Colony Ship is 1/4th the price of the normal ones. Imagine it as if the tradition gave you -75% cost to all colony ships.

Also note that in 1.5 colony capitals start with a +energy building. Throw that building down on a +1 or 2 energy square and you're getting a great instant return. And its nice to have something to spend energy on, otherwise you either run a constant excess that is wasted or are running short and crash. This way you have more levers to balance out your resources depending on the situation and what you find in terms of mining stations.

And as for rushing to get more colonies in general, it's beneficial because A. colonies have base pop growth and food surplus is very poor at improving base pop growth, B. Colonies grow significantly slower the more pops they have, C. lower level structures are much more efficient in terms of how quickly they pay off, and D. Border expansion for more stations.

They cost Energy points instead of Minerals, with the drawback of the colonists having "potentially" different ethics compared to your Empire's "official" ones.

I'm honestly not sure how this works anymore. Since pops don't have the same kind of ethics as before, they just have a faction, and you can't select the faction with normal colony ships, I think it's just a random race you get. And if you use the Expansion Planner screen to build the Private Colony Ship you can select the race to send, dunno if that's an exploit or it still chooses randomly.
 
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Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Holy shit, I didn't think about that! It's probably because I always bumped into them mid-game and they didn't really matter at that point so much. But early game spending only energy? That's awesome indeed! Cool stuff!
 
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Yeah. When it was a tech it sucked. Since teching is hurt a lot by REXing you either had to not expand and hope you drew the tech (if you didn't you were screwed) or expand and then when you do draw the tech spend forever researching it, then shift gears economically to have an energy surplus.
 

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