Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[Norfleet]

If so it seems you should never have a starbase in the same system as a planet if you can avoid it, since it would be better to collect its trade from afar, from a starbase six jumps closer to the homeworld, and skip a bunch of piracy along the way.

You should pretty much never have a starbase in a system generating trade if it can be avoided, period, as starbases with trade hubs will teleport that trade to the starbase piracy-free. If you put a starbase in a system collected by trade hubs already, that starbase overrides the trade hub and collects for itself, which creates piracy shipping it out anywhere. Additionally, no system with a starbase actually IN it can have any piracy, so a chain of level 1 starbases in along a route will also provide complete protection no matter what.

 

[Storyfag]

Only barely. Pops generally consume between 1 and 2 amenities and they produce 2. Entertainers produce 10 amenities on top of 2 unity (2/3rds the unity of a dedicated culture worker job).

Hmmpf. Building holo-theaters always seemed like a waste. Perhaps I should reconsider, and scrap a ton of whatever you call the clerk buildings.

 

[chuft]

If so it seems you should never have a starbase in the same system as a planet if you can avoid it, since it would be better to collect its trade from afar, from a starbase six jumps closer to the homeworld, and skip a bunch of piracy along the way.

You should pretty much never have a starbase in a system generating trade if it can be avoided, period, as starbases with trade hubs will teleport that trade to the starbase piracy-free. If you put a starbase in a system collected by trade hubs already, that starbase overrides the trade hub and collects for itself, which creates piracy shipping it out anywhere.

Ok, that’s what I suspected, but it directly contradicts what Average Manatee said about which starbase takes precedence...

 

[Brotherman Bill]

I remember the "only white humans" mod was removed. Is it back again in some shape or form?

 

[Olinser]

If so it seems you should never have a starbase in the same system as a planet if you can avoid it, since it would be better to collect its trade from afar, from a starbase six jumps closer to the homeworld, and skip a bunch of piracy along the way.

You should pretty much never have a starbase in a system generating trade if it can be avoided, period, as starbases with trade hubs will teleport that trade to the starbase piracy-free. If you put a starbase in a system collected by trade hubs already, that starbase overrides the trade hub and collects for itself, which creates piracy shipping it out anywhere.

Ok, that’s what I suspected, but it directly contradicts what Average Manatee said about which starbase takes precedence...

He is incorrect. Starbases automatically collect trade in their system, there is no way to switch this to another starbase, your initial assessment was correct, the ideal outcome for trade and piracy is to have hub collection points 6 jumps away, and a line of unbroken starbases leading back to your homeworld. Well actually the ideal is gateway back to homeworld, but that's endgame.

Hangar bays only work for the early game, as you get to the mid and late game you simply cannot control the amount of piracy without either patrolling fleets, or building starbase chains.

Clerks themselves are, in general, crap jobs and almost anything is better, HOWEVER, they can be useful for low district planets like 10-16 planets, they provide the most jobs per slot in the game - 1 Commerce Megaplex provides 11 jobs and only takes a single upgrade, so they let you get more out of low district planets than you otherwise might be able to.

Personally what I do is I set up Refinery planets on 10-16 size planets for exotic gas/mote production to sustain alloy/research planets to get the extra bonus, then use Commerce Megaplexes to get to 80 for the final building upgrade, and use 17+ planets as my research/alloy planets because it takes a lot more housing districts to sustain a full research/alloy planet maxed out.

But if you can afford it you want pretty much anything other than clerks.

 

[chuft]

But don’t you get clerk jobs for free with urban districts which you need to build anyway?

Do you just disable them? What about amenities.

 

[Average Manatee]

He is incorrect. Starbases automatically collect trade in their system, there is no way to switch this to another starbase, your initial assessment was correct, the ideal outcome for trade and piracy is to have hub collection points 6 jumps away, and a line of unbroken starbases leading back to your homeworld. Well actually the ideal is gateway back to homeworld, but that's endgame.

Hangar bays only work for the early game, as you get to the mid and late game you simply cannot control the amount of piracy without either patrolling fleets, or building starbase chains.

Guess I never noticed, since if you don't run clerks you never need to patrol anything anyway. 2 or so hanger bay starbases and your whole empire is covered. I think natural trade production is .1 per pop so 6 hangers can cover 600 pops.

But don’t you get clerk jobs for free with urban districts which you need to build anyway?

Do you just disable them? What about amenities.

Disable. Only enable temporarily to suck up unemployment before building something to put the pops on real jobs.

In theory Clerks are theoretically OK in the super late game since normally producing Amenities and CGs requires minerals, while Clerks can produce both out of thin air (thereby saving minerals for alloys), but in practice you'll reach the CPU-death end of the galaxy long before.

 

[chuft]

I've heard people saying the AI empires don't use the galactic market. How can you tell? Is there a way to see their resources?

 

[thesheeep]

I've heard people saying the AI empires don't use the galactic market. How can you tell? Is there a way to see their resources?

You can tell from fluctuations in the market if AI uses it.
Before the galactic market opens, only you will influence market prices (which you can see changing as you buy/sell stuff). Once the galactic market opens, you'll constantly see the numbers increasing/decreasing even if you trade nothing - pretty sure that's a sign of the AI being active there.

 

[Olinser]

Yeah the AI does use it - I remember some people in older versions crashing the entire Galactic Market accidentally.

Meanwhile, on my Fourth Rome Grand Admiral Glavius game... just gloriously conquered a more advanced civilization of Xenophobic Isolationists.
After my early conquest, I got pretty boxed in by AIs going into space or people guaranteeded. My prospective targets were:

- Some losers I beat once and then spent like a century surviving off guarantees. Promptly conquered by me the moment all the guarantees drooped.

- A wormhole into the Super-Ultra-Overpowered Machine Empire that dominates the galactic North and has managed to surpass the Fallen Empires since 2300 or so. ABSOLUTELY NOT, because I like living. I actually had to drop an alliance with the guys bellow because I was pretty sure these robots were coming to murder me if I didn't.

- A super-advanced Megacorp. Like, "Superior to Fallen Empires since 2330 or so" powerful. Also, NO because these guys are my bros forevah and they built a lot of corporate stuff on my planets.

- The Eastern Civilization which ins't as strong as the top two but still damn strong and has its federation.

- Xenophobic Pacifist Spiritual Isolationists who were way more advanced than me until I bridged the gap a bit

I lucked out because the Xenophobic Isolationists ended up with a Machine Rebellion in their own territory. So they spent like years bashing themselves against their own robots while I bridged the tech gap and built a giant battleship fleet.

Wow these guys had some phat lewt. Their ships were superior to mine in most aspects, in our battles I barely saw them lose ships while they pretty much nuked my fleets out somehow (Torpedoes? Lances?). I pretty much swarmed them with inferior battleships.

They had habitats, an Ecumenopolis and even a partially-built Dyson Sphere, not to mention their wrecks are FULL of shiny tech like Titans, Giga Cannons and shit.

I'm kind of regreting getting the Ecumenopolis ascension perk, because this already makes two Ecumenopolis I have so far (their old capital and Fen Habbanis. Seems like its better for me to just go and conquer their Ecumenopolei and such. Its pretty much why I avoided Voidborne even through I really want Megastructures bad.

Are Jump Drives worth it? I got the tech but didn't use it.




By the way... does the game just hide Admin Capacity research or what? I have this space-empire that owns a nice big chunk of galactic real-state but I have like 400% penalties for most things because of all the land I took. I remember getting AC research all the time in previous games.

There are only 2 early techs for Admin Capacity and they only give +20 each.

After that there is nothing until you get to the repeatable endgame techs and there is a repeatable +15 cap.

Which is really stupid. There should be a building or Starbase module that increases Admin cap.

 

[Delterius]

There should be a building or Starbase module that increases Admin cap.

Admin Cap is super soft. You are supposed to specialize a couple of tech worlds to make for it. Unless yer Megacorp.

 

[Average Manatee]

Admin cap is basically 100% irrelevant strategically and should be ignored.

 

[Olinser]

Admin cap is basically 100% irrelevant strategically and should be ignored.

It's not irrelevant. It means you that unless they have strategic value or allow colonization a huge amount of systems should be ignored and never taken because they're worthless. ESPECIALLY systems with just research in them.

 

[Average Manatee]

Admin Cap very mildly retards your research. If you expand to be bigger than anyone you will easily out tech them, just slightly less than without admin cap. If you spend 5s considering whether a system is "worth" taking you've already spent more effort than it was worth.

In general tech is pretty weak in Stellaris to begin with, it's almost all about alloys and ship cap.

 

[Delterius]

Admin cap is basically 100% irrelevant strategically and should be ignored.

It's not irrelevant. It means you that unless they have strategic value or allow colonization a huge amount of systems should be ignored and never taken because they're worthless. ESPECIALLY systems with just research in them.

You do get one starbase for every 10 systems tho.

 

[chuft]

Empires come and go, but pirates remain, in empty space, like ticks hanging on tall grass for years waiting for something to walk by.

 

[thesheeep]

Update about how upcoming ST: New Horizons will change vanilla district/building system:

https://stnhblog.wordpress.com/2019/04/05/dev-diary-8-the-new-districts/
https://stnhblog.wordpress.com/2019/04/07/dev-diary-8-1-planetary-specialization/
https://stnhblog.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/dev-diary-8-2-the-six-new-districts/

Basically, districts provide bonuses to production as well as housing. But no more jobs. Districts require upkeep (as otherwise those bonuses to production could get too extreme, I figure).
There will be six district types, partially specialized per planet (some planet may have a district type other planets don't have).
Only buildings provide jobs (just more of them, I guess).
Research will improve districts as well as maximum number of districts (otherwise influenced by planet resources), instead of just unlocking potential building upgrades.

I kinda like that. In the current systems, both districts and buildings are pretty similar in what they do (providing jobs and sometimes housing), to the point where buildings just seem to be more specialized districts.
In the proposed system, there's a clear distinction between them, also making specialization much easier. Supposedly, that should also make it easier for the AI to decide what to build.

So far, New Horizons has always been very similar to vanilla (just with more flavor to it), I like that they are trying something new.

 

[Olinser]

So they are acknowledging that their entire district system is shit and nobody likes it, after 5 patches of dicking around with it.

And STILL refusing to allow us to set actual job priorities.

 

[Delterius]

So they are acknowledging that their entire district system is shit and nobody likes it, after 5 patches of dicking around with it.

And STILL refusing to allow us to set actual job priorities.

dats a mod fam

moar info https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/ST_NewHorizons

 

[ThisNameIsFree]

He is incorrect. Starbases automatically collect trade in their system, there is no way to switch this to another starbase, your initial assessment was correct, the ideal outcome for trade and piracy is to have hub collection points 6 jumps away, and a line of unbroken starbases leading back to your homeworld. Well actually the ideal is gateway back to homeworld, but that's endgame.

Hangar bays only work for the early game, as you get to the mid and late game you simply cannot control the amount of piracy without either patrolling fleets, or building starbase chains.

Guess I never noticed, since if you don't run clerks you never need to patrol anything anyway. 2 or so hanger bay starbases and your whole empire is covered. I think natural trade production is .1 per pop so 6 hangers can cover 600 pops.

But don’t you get clerk jobs for free with urban districts which you need to build anyway?

Do you just disable them? What about amenities.

Disable. Only enable temporarily to suck up unemployment before building something to put the pops on real jobs.

In theory Clerks are theoretically OK in the super late game since normally producing Amenities and CGs requires minerals, while Clerks can produce both out of thin air (thereby saving minerals for alloys), but in practice you'll reach the CPU-death end of the galaxy long before.

Populace for clerks jobs not a problem at all. I mean you have whole galaxy of slaves. Then i play slave empire - i just use hw + all planets in range 6 (starbase trade gathering distance) as core worlds with trade and convert all planets in outside range to slave thrall worlds. No other starbases except shipyards and maybe defensive on choke points. No piracy problem + plenty of slaves to resettle for clerk jobs then needed.

 

[Space Satan]

DD Archaeology

Spoiler

Hello everyone!

Today we’re back with yet another dev diary, which will build upon some of the things we revealed last week. Last week we outlined some information about Minor Relics, and how they can be useful. We didn’t mention specifically how they are usually found, but luckily that is something you’ll learn today!

Archaeology
In the next DLC you will be able to experience some new content related to uncovering and excavating archaeological sites. Sites can be discovered in multiple ways, be it either on survey, generated at game start, or perhaps generated by an event.

Sites that lie inside your borders can be excavated by a Scientist, and will consist of several different chapters. A site can have 1-6 chapters, in addition to an introduction/prologue. Each chapter will have its own narrative and a reward, and has to be unlocked before it becomes visible.

Excavation in progress. Spoiler-blurred text.

A chapter will be unlocked whenever the Scientist excavating the site gets a successful result at the end of an Excavation Phase – mechanically this works very similar to how sieges work in EU4. As the Scientist goes through phases, it will roll a dice and add modifiers to the result. The final result will then either do nothing, add clues, or make a breakthrough to the next chapter.

Game mechanics details:

Chapter completed. Spoiler-blurred text.
A neat feature of this new system is that you can click previous chapters to go back and read what happened.

At the end of each Excavation Phase, it is also possible that the Scientist triggers a random event, which will inject some unpredictability and create opportunities for emergent storytelling.

Everything is fine.

Archaeology chapters commonly reward the player with minor artifacts – but it can also be resources, research points or other more unique rewards.

Design intentions
Archaeology becomes a way for us to express narrative in a more evolving and controlled manner, and every site it also tied to a location on the map. All of these things together should make it more enjoyable to experience the content, since we hope it becomes easier to build a mental model of what is happening where. In general I believe that having narrative tied to things you can see on the map makes for a better experience. It’s not uncommon for me to forget where on the map a previous event occurred, and that is something I’d like to improve over time. I really like archaeology because it lands well between mechanics and narrative.

------------

We hope you could dig today’s dev diary, and next week we’ll be back with something old that is new.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

conflicted. it doesn't look like it adds much, and if they have to pick stuff from eu i wish they went with the political events. give me a hundred events that are going to severely shake my empire and i'll dish a full 20 neuros for that.

revolts! i want revolts, crime, balance whatsitsname and habitabiity to be BRUTAL! CRUSHING! i need to drown rebellions in blood. let me have a use for soldiers and enforcers pops. let me think twice before dropping a colony on each and every piece of rock i meet. treat "dangerous wildlife" tiles as the eu angry spear chuckers who attack while you grow your colony, and keep doing it until you remove the tile. let them eat people, ruin buildings, force me to move more troops there for safety. let anything have any effect at all other than being just flavour most of the times. not even the sky would be the limit in stellaris, yet we must rely on only 3-4 good modders for anything of quality.

 

[chuft]

Is Paradox going to fix this problem of “put migration controls on a species, forget about it, look down and see mutant varieties of this species all over your empire with migration controls turned off” because it is driving me nuts.

 

[Delterius]

be me, fanatic xenophile nwo with codominant humans and reptilians who genetically modify foreign species to die from time to time

 

[chuft]

I mean, it just happened to me with an uplifted primitive species so I KNOW they don’t have some empire perk or tech to modify themselves genetically. Maybe they migrated outside my empire to someone else, who modified them into four more subspecies, and they migrated back? Hard to believe it could happen that quickly though.

In any case you should be able to set a master flag to ban all and sundry varieties of said species that covers all variants and mutations, past, present and future, named and unnamed, specified or otherwise, without let or hindrance, from now and henceforth, by any ways and means necessary, in perpetuity.