Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

It has to be ridiculous for the game to work. On Stellaris timescale you could colonize the whole galaxy in 100 years or so if you were alone. If you wanted to be realistic then every time you started a new game there would be a 99.9% chance of a text box popping up informing you: "Another civilization developed FTL a million years ago, colonized the universe and won before your civilization developed pointy sticks. You are now a zoo exhibit". The only way to avoid this is some kind of contrived isolationist empires like Fallen Empires are. That said Distant Worlds does have options for much more advanced starts than others.

The only way I can see the game working as you describe would be if Paradox went back to the drawing board and made a Dune/Crusader Kings in Space-type game, where empires were highly decentralized and prone to breakaways.

 

Is not balance, it just require MASSIVE maps.

 

None. I'm just saying that put it in there for a reason that wasn't based on "welfare", but rather, multiplayer game balancing. You, obviously, are not going to play the game in multiplayer, so don't need this feature. But the truth is, Civ has such features, too, in that they cut up the map into zones for starting in, grade them, and then give you the shittiest one in single player.

 

tip for keeping large galaxies manageable and with less late-game slowdown: set habitable worlds to 25% on world gen.

I did this on my most recent game. Keeps fleet sizes from ballooning out of control early on and, frankly, it makes the game more fun. I like having to actually fight to expand my empire. Worlds feel like something valuable and wars aren't bogged down as much by the warscore mechanic.

 

Civ V maybe. Not prior to that. There were algorithms to ensure a minimum viability to start locations and add bonuses until a start location was found, and that's not a bad option to have available as a toggle.

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Pretty sure IV also had a 'balanced' option. Note: option. I believe it essentially guarantees a food resource in your starting spawn fat X and at least copper/iron some tiles away. Also, there's a few balanced map algorithms for MP enthusiasts. But by far and large, Civ IV didn't go out of its way to cater for the MP crowd.

 

who cares for balanced starts? earth maps are the only decent way to play any civ.

 

On the contrary, Civ IV was tested extensively for multi-player and included a number of features like Pitboss to really encourage multiplayer.

To this day, there are active Civ IV multiplayer communities on Civ Fanatics, Realms Beyond, and probably others. "Catering" to multiplayer doesn't mean the single player aspects of the game will be bad. In fact, if you design the game for humans to play it and then once the game is designed (or at least the main features are in) write the AI to imitate the best players you'll have a great single player experience. Soren Johnson went to great lengths to get detailed feedback from a lot of veteran Civ players during development and closed betas which I think is reflected in the relatively good balance of Civ IV.

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Civ 4 isn't a great example of MP because its very, very easy to run away with the game by reaching certain techs ahead of other players. Pretty much all Paradox games are designed to hard limit tech runaways, which is better for MP but less fun for SP. Ironically Civ 5 sort of tried to do the same in one of their expansions (increasing tech cost with number of cities) and it really screwed things up as the best strat was to go for a max of 4-6 cities and just chew through techs like candy.

Of course, there's also SMAC on the other end of the spectrum, which is insanely imbalanced in MP but still kind of makes up for it in the roleplaying experience. CK2 is also in a similar mindset.

 

I disagree. Well, of course you're right looking at the game as-is, but I think the key would be to have civilizations to go through a lifecycle consisting of several phases. As you moved from one phase to another, things that used to be key and incredibly important would lose any significance, and thus a civ at that level would only compete with other civs at the same level.
For comparison, look at the phases we as human have gone through on earth. There were eras in which resources crucial to modern society like oil or rare earths were mostly unknown curiosities. There were eras when having a gargantuan army of millions and millions in the field was the way of the great powers. There were eras in which having colonies of oppressed people someplace in the world were considered a sign of greatness. And chances are there will be ages to come in which what our present society yearns for will seem just as petty and backwards as what the people of the stone age considered all-important looks to us today. This is what a epic space 4x should convey.

And I think Stellaris is capable of depicting something like that in principle - however Paradox has taken quite a few design decisions that are at odds with such an approach, and thus it's highly unlikely it'll ever be a thing in vanilla Stellaris. In a mod, maybe - but it'd be a herculean effort.

 

And non-FTL flight (which means lots of years).

 

There's movement backwards too. I think it took until the Napoleonic Wars for European armies to reach the size of roman armies? I remember reading the biggest pre-Levee european army was a French army of around 170k soldiers, and the French King had to pretty much travel the entire country asking for help in the war. After that, the French Revolution brought in massed armies. Of course, you can't ignore the fact these societies were sub-industrial (I heard the term "industrious" used) and they were materially superior to their forebears, pretty much the stage before industrial revolution.

Meanwhile the romans (both western and eastern) had huge hundred-thousand man armies with far inferior tech.

 

The romans were a superpower and only had significant troop numbers across their entire (huge) realm, And for an empire that size, the few hundred thousand men isn't that big a number. Significant, yes, but ... it's the roman empire.

Also, I think the chinese hat pretty significant armies in the millions basically at all times.
My point, however, was aimed at how modern armies are far, FAR smaller. Chances are they'd prove insufficient should there ever be a real war - if we scraped together all armies from europe we'd still be hard pressed to match russia or china. Now, just how efficient those armies are is another question alltogether, but let's hope such conflict will never arise and thus we'll never find out who'd come out on top.

 

Roman Empire population wasn't that much bigger than 18th and 19th century countries. Napoleonic France was fairly comparable in population and raised fairly comparable armies. Though certainly the Roman Army was more dispersed, since the time period was characterized by basically everyone being at war by default until one side had been subjugated and paid tribute.

And no, modern armies aren't smaller. Standing armies during peacetime are roughly comparable to armies raised during the height of many medieval and ancient wars on a per capita basis. If WW3 broke out all countries would immediately re-introduce conscription and you'd see army sizes go up by a factor of 10 or so. Keep in mind that before the industrial revolution the number of people tied up in subsistence farming was 90-95%, with 5-10% doing everything else.

That's nice and all, but power in Stellaris comes from land and pops. Doesn't matter if you are mining unobtainium and the primitives are mining sharp sticks, you still want to kill the primitives to mine your unobtanium. To do as you say would require entirely separate game modes for each eras, something like Spore.

 

Finally had an encounter with The Swarm.

Thought it was going to be a real challenge at first. They had spawned near a fallen empire, so that helped, but they were more than holding their own and had me vastly outnumbered with ships that somehow could make mincemeat out of my most powerful vessels. I thought this was going to be a long, bloody war when...

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...I bombarded their unguarded world and somewhere around 800k+ of ships all died instantly.

 

Even before their peak the romans were casually throwing ridiculous troop numbers around. One of their biggest, if not the biggest strength, was having huge armies with deep manpower reserves. Defeating a roman army just meant they would send another one later.

Do bear in mind there was a huge die-off during Late Antiquity. I think Europe lost like, 50% population?

 

several times, every time the plague stroke.

 

Still on phase 1 of repairing this broken ringworld.



The entire thing was completely trashed. I went and spent 6000+ energy credits for each of the 12 segments, only to realize that I still need to spend more and research yet another a rare tech before I can use this thing.

Looks pretty though.


As a side note, I conquered one of the fallen empires near me - an islolationist empire that had early on wiped several of my planets out and assassinated my leader for the high crime of letting my borders cross some invisible line that meant I was too close to them. There was plenty of space between us. What a bunch of assholes. They only had 50k of ships and surrendered easy enough.

Anyway, I had to conquer them in order to expand and beef up my military because another, far stronger empire has awakened...just a bit...



Lambchop, is that over 1M of ships?

Yes, Other Lambchop, and I can barely muster 300k right now. Also consider that the balance mod I am using halves the valuation of ship power from vanilla.

 

awakened empires are retarded, they build 4x the speed for a part of the cost and suffer nothing for going over the fleet limit. they awaken when another player reaches 60-80k and suddenly they go to 500k.
the only way to prevent them is to know beforehand where they are, focus on building and sustaining an invincible fleet and attacking them before they awaken, or you're done for. if they spawn on the other side of the galaxy and awaken before you can kill them it's game over.
and i can't find a working mod which disables them at all,

 

Seriously? I've never fought one (aside from one that awaked as I was invading it) but I just assumed they'd be able to build their more OP buildings and abuse their repeatable tech advantage.

 

This one likes me so far. They are the kind of awakened empire that hates weak civs and since I have one of the largest militaries in the galaxy, they are leaving me alone.

Actually, it may be that they are just dumb because they are leaving everyone alone. They could conquer the entire galaxy with a force that size, but there they sit, doing nothing.

Not that I want them to do something, mind you. I just fended off the Swarm and 3 FREAKING WAVES OF UNBIDDEN (seriously, how many are there???) almost singlehandedly. (Which made me totally pissed off when one of the fallen empires declared themselves leader of the new "galaxy defense force", btw.) Oh, and I have an AI Rebelion brewing. Yeah...

 

Almost done with the ringworld. Turns out there's another round of purchases and techs I need to research in order to actually have a livable environment. 288,000 energy credits are required in total, I think. That's 3 rounds of terraforming purchases (not to mention about 10000 days of construction time, and waiting while researching techs that each total over 100k research points.)

If this weren't a galaxy with a limited number of planets, I'd say it wasn't worth it. But being that it should give me about 12 gaia worlds in a single system - meaning that all of them can be under my control and none of that sector nonsense, yeah, it's totally worth it.

 

you must be mistaking, they don't awaken during war.

in all my several games there's never been such thing as "awaken empire leaving alone anybody". they start attacking the nearest enemies, they win because they can't be stopped having x5-x6 the fleet power of the strongest empire, they conquer, because of techs their conquered planets won't ever rebel, they keep conquering and expanding until you die. it was game over since the awakening happened.
in theory you could forfeit your freedom and surrender before being attacked, but it's exactly like a game over because the awakened empire will keep expanding until all the galaxy has been conquered.

 

Hmm, it's possible one empire awakened while I was invading another fallen empire. Wasn't really paying attention, I had conquered most of the galaxy and took all 4 of the FEs out within the span of a decade.

 

How did you manage to get more than one end-game crisis? It looks like you've triggered all three, which should basically be almost impossible? IIRC.