Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[baturinsky]

How do you deal with minorities breeding out of control? I have uplifted six proles, next time I know they occupy the quarter of empire.

 

[Average Manatee]

How do you deal with minorities breeding out of control? I have uplifted six proles, next time I know they occupy the quarter of empire.

Your options are either total breeding controls for minorities or becoming Sweden.

 

[thesheeep]

Did any of the changes in 2.2 make slavery worthwhile?

Before that patch, slavery seemed pretty worthless to me. Yeah, you need to pay less upkeep for consumer goods, but those costs were so small anyway that it didn't make up for having to waste pops, edicts, etc. on keeping unrest low.

 

[Preben]

How do you deal with minorities breeding out of control? I have uplifted six proles, next time I know they occupy the quarter of empire.

Population control works, unless you are a fanatic xenophile I believe (still possible for just xenophiles). It pisses off your alien-hugging faction though.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

you couldn't just "slave & rave", you had to start with a genetically engineered slave race and then let the minerals flow. having a couple house xenegros on site helped.
now? i have no idea ._.

 

[Average Manatee]

Problem with slaves is that even if you are a fanatic xenophobe who purely grows aliens to eat them, you can't control the ratio of aliens:humans. The Sweden mechanic still applies, they'll overrun your empire in time. So essentially there's not much use in the long term specializing different species.

Slavery still seems good because the CGs are significantly less and you get global production boosts based on stability, and stability for slave races weights the leader's happiness much more than the slave's.

 

[not an artichoke]

Actually, you can control the ratio albeit at a cost.

You can prioritize which pop is allowed to grow on each planet. That specific species or subspecies will be the only one allowed to grow, but at a 20% reduced rate.

This requires a lot of micromanagement in larger empires. A good solution might be a quota system in which you specify how many of each pop you'd like to end up with.

 

[Space Satan]

Despoilers' most powerful advantage is a tradition swap.

 

[baturinsky]

Jackpot

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

What settings do you guys use so that the game doesn't start lagging after 75 years?

 

[baturinsky]

Smaller galaxy sizes

 

[thesheeep]

What settings do you guys use so that the game doesn't start lagging after 75 years?

I'd say don't run it on a toaster, but the game gets laggy even on a SSD with a good CPU & great graphics card, so... yeah, if you really want that speed, baturinsky 's choice is the only real one available afaik.

But honestly, that is par for the course for Paradox games like that. I don't think I'm able to run any of their games at the highest speed reliably once the galaxy/world is filled and lots of stuff is going on.
Even if set to the highest speed, it just resort to running at a medium/fast speed.

 

[Space Satan]

Stellaris have a serious problem with Gateways. It seem they are the source of massive stuttering

 

[Average Manatee]

Its definitely wrapgates that is doing something. Performance is kind of bearable when the universe is completely filled up and I see it all, but by 2275 or so when the gates are unlocked performance falls off a cliff overnight.

 

[Preben]

I am not a programmer, but is it really that difficult to well implement a feature such as gateways? How many possible calculations could they add to the pile and why it's even an issue in a world of computers capable of conducting millions of cycles per second?

 

[Delterius]

RIP New World Order. Megacorps can't have Syncretic Evolution.

Isn't that moddable ?

Probably, but I like to make do with the way things are in a game as much as possible. So at the moment the New World Order is lead by a plutocratic Shadow Council.

Plus, I read somewhere that they are planning for an entirely new 'Origin' slot complete with new origin stories. So its bound to happen eventually.

 

[Average Manatee]

I am not a programmer, but is it really that difficult to well implement a feature such as gateways? How many possible calculations could they add to the pile and why it's even an issue in a world of computers capable of conducting millions of cycles per second?

Figuring out pathing in a graph and caching it to make further lookups easy is 2nd or 3rd year compsci. Complete ineptitude is the only explanation. Same reason why the UI lags on certain screens even though they are functionally identical to an Excel spreadsheet with only a few dozen rows/columns

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

What settings do you guys use so that the game doesn't start lagging after 75 years?

Lower the amount of habitable worlds in the galaxy and/or galaxy size.

Btw, this makes the game much more enjoyable in general. Otherwise you will be overwhelmed with micromanagement in the mid/late game.

 

[Delterius]

If I can't be a reptiloid, I shall be a devil.

D&D, anyone?

 

[Trithne]

How so?

Barbaric Despoilers swaps Diplomacy for Adaptability, which is vastly better, especially for the BD playstyle. Diplomacy might be worthwhile in the distant future of the AI using the Market and Federations not being absolute ass, but for now it's trash.

If I can't be a reptiloid, I shall be a devil.

D&D, anyone?

Subversive Cult is nowhere near as good as I want it to be. All it gets you is standard Crime Syndicate, plus the church building, except you can't really leverage the church building to convert pops to spiritualist because it doesn't add crime, leaving you vulnerable to getting kicked off the planet unless it's your third or fourth building.

Personally I think Enforcers are just too effective, -25 each is huge. Thinking of making a mod to drop them to -10, -15 with Police State to make that Civic better.

 

[Average Manatee]

How so?

Barbaric Despoilers swaps Diplomacy for Adaptability, which is vastly better, especially for the BD playstyle. Diplomacy might be worthwhile in the distant future of the AI using the Market and Federations not being absolute ass, but for now it's trash.

Yeah, housing benefits are golden. The city districts are generally bad to build, you want as many energy/mineral/food districts built as possible else your specialists run out of material to work with, but they only provide 2 housing for 2 workers under most empires.

BD is absolutely broken. # of pops basically correlates 1:1 with empire strength. Normal empires have to conquer capitals to amass power quickly, which takes tons of influence to do. The genocidal empires avoid the influence cost but are forced to purge and regrow from scratch. BD just gets all the pops they want, every war. Sure, they lose the base growth from having more worlds, but they can always come back at any time to get the pops that grew since the last time. Apparently one of the precursor empires can lead to a fully working Ecumenpolis which is basically an I-win button if you populate it.

Course, it's still probably not as broken as the Assimilator robot empires, who get the CB of genocidal empires except they assimilate all pops into the borg. While also growing pops and building pops at incredible speed.

Subversive Cult is nowhere near as good as I want it to be. All it gets you is standard Crime Syndicate, plus the church building, except you can't really leverage the church building to convert pops to spiritualist because it doesn't add crime, leaving you vulnerable to getting kicked off the planet unless it's your third or fourth building.

Personally I think Enforcers are just too effective, -25 each is huge. Thinking of making a mod to drop them to -10, -15 with Police State to make that Civic better.

Apparently the Beta artificially forces the AI to avoid policing hard to make the Crime Syndicates workable. What exactly are the conditions for being kicked out, is there a minimum crime threshold at which you are safe?

Megacorps in particular seem to be best when played with a lot of advanced AI starts and higher difficulty, since you need to leech off population and economies.

 

[Trithne]

Apparently the Beta artificially forces the AI to avoid policing hard to make the Crime Syndicates workable. What exactly are the conditions for being kicked out, is there a minimum crime threshold at which you are safe?

Anything above 0% - They also made a change in the beta branch where crime has to be at 0% for a year before the branch office can be forcibly shut down, instead of a day. Because Paradox.

 

[baturinsky]

Yeah, housing benefits are golden. The city districts are generally bad to build, you want as many energy/mineral/food districts built as possible else your specialists run out of material to work with, but they only provide 2 housing for 2 workers under most empires.

I'm not quite sure about it. Energy and customer goods can be produced basically out of thin air by trade. Food you do not need much, especially if you us a lot of droids. Minerals, though, you'll need for a lot of things, but you can make a ton of it per district in 2.2, so you can have a lot of spares for cities.

 

[Space Satan]

So far.
The good:

• you can no longer afford to rebuild your massive fleet from scratch in one run, alloys are precious and hard to produce en masse. Before if I had awesome mineral income I could lose any number of ships - I can rebuild the in no time from supershipyards anyway. Not now
• Tall plays are possible
• Economy is looking nice as it need to be balanced. Make a mistake and you are short on consumer goods or alloys or minerals.
• Planet management are clearlly better. Much less useless micromanagement, it is possible to specialize planets etc.

The bad:

• unoptimized shit, gateways kill game performance and still no fix for it.
• AI is almost unable to cope with new mechanics and balance his alloy production, which in turn means he have trouble with ship rebuilding
• almost all new mechanics are in dire need of tweaks and balancing
• Piracy is bland.

 

[Average Manatee]

I'm not quite sure about it. Energy and customer goods can be produced basically out of thin air by trade. Food you do not need much, especially if you us a lot of droids. Minerals, though, you'll need for a lot of things, but you can make a ton of it per district in 2.2, so you can have a lot of spares for cities.

Trade isn't really efficient, clerks are the worst producing job. Energy is really needed if/when you build a major fleet (granted you don't need any to fight the AI right now, but crises or FEs will cost a lot). Minerals get sucked up for CGs to power every normal planet running dozens of 8-slot research labs and the ecumenopolis running a few hundred metallurgists. Food gets literally eaten if you do the 1000 food decision (which effectively buys a pop, only a bit more expensive than buying a robot but food is worth less than minerals to begin with) along with the growth policy.

Basically you cap out districts with around 30-40 pops on a planet but your consumption just keeps going higher. When you reach 80-120 pops per planet most of those are getting shoveled into those 8-size research labs which take both CGs and rare resources (also produced from minerals) to create. You reach the point where even with 100% of your planets building 100% of their mineral districts you still run a negative monthly balance of minerals and just buy constantly from the market and sell back the alloys for a profit.

Though with that said you might be able to entirely forgo base resource mining and strictly produce advanced goods like alloy. I'm not sure if that's feasible or if there a bottom cap to how low the market price can go. The good news is that all of those bonuses your metallurgists get improve their output but don't increase their input, so it's making them more efficient. A well-ordered ecumenopolis can get over +100% alloy production, literally producing more than 1 alloy for every mineral it takes in. I'll mess around to see if its workable, maybe turning all planets into ecumenopolis is the end game.