Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[Puke Face]

Whats the point of conquering a planet thats uninhabitable?

Fufufu~ Using biological weapons to remove unwanted enemy colonials doesn't necessarily make a planet uninhabitable but there's plenty of reasons to ruin worlds if it is in your best interest. Let's say that the planet is worthless to your species but you want to push back against an enemy expansion close to your territory. Sometimes using a planet buster against an enemy species' homeworld might be a much better alternative than trying to subjugate the population if you have a two front war going on and can't afford to integrate them but need to remove them as a threat. Or how about scorched earth tactics to slow down an enemy invasion?

Anyways this looks like it's going to be another bland super generic game that everyone forgets all about a few weeks after release, the lack of distinct pre-made species was a big warning sign and everything I've read after that seems to only confirm it.

 

[coldcrow]

daaaaaamn =_= one of the most satisfying moment in moo3 was when during a late game war you wouldn't care to conquer planets anymore, to not strain your economy, and outright killed every single living soul with a single bombardment.
it looks like something which could be modded away/modified in the future, but still...

Didn't you glass every planet in sight?

PS: Anyways, this really reinforces my disgust in modern games - lack of negative options. No burning bridges, no scorched lands, no extermination of species, no gene terminators, no technocracies repressing and culling people - no only fucking positive modifiers and shit. It's like they really don't want to connect to reality at any cost.

 

[Trash]

I just want to hang orbital lasers around every one of my planets to keep my own population cowering in fear. Yeah, I did totally steal that from Neal Asher.

Anyway, that's exactly what turns me off from this last dev post. It's all too clean and positive. If you fill an ancient universe with mysteries and unknown horrors then you should also embrace a little of that horror in your game. Alpha Centauri for instance did add a darker side to the 4x genre and became more memorable because of it. Partly because it adds options to the game that I'd never thought about in a 4. I mean, stapling an unruly populace? Rising the sea level and drown your coastal enemies? Crack the planet open through a mega nuke? Talk about options. And let's not forget how all the tech descriptions give off a vague feeling of horror.

Somehow Pdox seem hell bent to keep all of that out of their games though. Shame.

 

[Spectacle]

Disappointing. There goes my hope of playing as a race of locusts that scour planet after planet barren and lifeless for its resources. Or my dream to play as the Evil K'nettergek Empire which genocides all those filhty aliens it encounters. And wargoals? Perhaps the wargoal of the Drang Collective is to wipe out your puny empire. No wiping out planetary populations? Viral bombs, orbital strikes and dropping big rocks down the gravity well should do that. Again, what a shame and how utterly boring not to include stuff like this.

This game lost a lot of its potential here for me.

Mods will fix it... I hope..

 

[Beastro]

Disappointing. There goes my hope of playing as a race of locusts that scour planet after planet barren and lifeless for its resources. Or my dream to play as the Evil K'nettergek Empire which genocides all those filhty aliens it encounters. And wargoals? Perhaps the wargoal of the Drang Collective is to wipe out your puny empire. No wiping out planetary populations? Viral bombs, orbital strikes and dropping big rocks down the gravity well should do that. Again, what a shame and how utterly boring not to include stuff like this.

This game lost a lot of its potential here for me.

Mods will fix it... I hope..

Depends given Paradox's issues with things like Genocide and asking modders not to add things like into previous games.

Whats the point of conquering a planet thats uninhabitable?

Also with sufficiently advanced technology its also trivial to create countermeasures to such a bombardment. Like mobile rebel base, easy to hide with all the explosions and boiling going on. Resistance could be really motivated and last ages then.

To clean a planet of filth and recolonize in a way perfectly suited to humans. If it can't allow Earth lift, nothing should be living there in the first place, of course~

Actually it's a habit I picked up from Birth of the Federation where revolts in conquered planets were common and you couldn't really stop them from randomly rejoining their original faction. On top of that conquering worlds damaged the infrastructure so badly it was less of a hassle in the long run to wipe them clean and recolonize with your own people, which made for tedious, yet hilarious situations like the Federation going on genocide bouts in between recovering morale from all the slaughter being done.

Besides that, I don't like games where different races can mutually inhabit the same world because they're so alike they're pretty much just Star Trek "funny forehead" aliens. I'd rather had different ones so apart they need different atmosphere to survive and the only bonus of ruling over aliens worlds is that they're able to make more use of them than your own race, even fully terraformed, like allowing aliens to colonize Venus under our banner because we're just not going to be able to make it Earth-like without a massive effort.

 

[Beastro]

They did. They did say that some species behaved differently, big question is whether you can actually play them. how many DLCS you'll have to buy to play them.

 

[Mr. Pink]

Paradox trying to compromise between "realism" and "fun gameplay" and somehow end up achieving neither.

Casus belli is a stupid idea because the real world doesn't work like that. Governments will declare war for no reason at all. The idea of having to have some kind of claim in order to remove alium from premises is sickening because 'clay' doesn't even exist in interstellar space.

This is less like 'foundation' and more like 'star trek'.

Actually, Star Trek is better than this, since at least in the star trek universe, funny forehead aliens are justified.

 

[Beastro]

Casus belli is a stupid idea because the real world doesn't work like that. Governments will declare war for no reason at all. The idea of having to have some kind of claim in order to remove alium from premises is sickening because 'clay' doesn't even exist in interstellar space.

Except things like that do exist. They may be flimsy excuses, but something about human nature requires some sort of legitimacy to exist for someone to act in such a way. Game of Thrones antics either never happen in history or are insanely rare and looked on as shameful abnormalities unless the legitimacy game is played to its fullest to cover them up.

Look at the antics Far Eastern nations are going to spending money building up little pieces of rock barely sticking out of the ocean in order to justify laying claim large swathes of the Pacific. Look at Russia's aim to reclaim it's historical sphere of influence instead of just deciding on a whim to that an entirely different section of the planet should suddenly now be under their hegemony. Look at historical claimants to thrones and how extremely rare it was for some peasant rebel to suddenly become king, because even if they overthrew the previous one, they still weren't of legitimate blood and station and it was a violation of nature all could agree on for him to assume the throne, while someone of even distant royal blood is perfectly fine in doing so, so long as they're strong enough to. All would be laughed and mocked for having no basis to do those things, an yet something about how we think makes it seem justifiable, even if we find it stupid, to act in those ways if they have a form of legitimate reason to do so.

The problem is we're dealing with human nature being one playstyle of many in a game like this, where if the aliens are alien and not just funny looking window dressing that use human reasoning, will have their own quirks and wage war and politics by completely different means.

Alluding back to a previous post, I'd want to see an "animal" race that has no culture or anything and just roves around attacking anyone because they're incapable of things like diplomacy since it's simply not how they think. To negotiate with them is as silly and futile as telling a squirrel to stop eating the food you leave out for birds.

 

[Matalarata]

modern games

Fortunately we still have Dominions 4

Spoiler

when we manage to start games

Unfortunately, MP only .

I'd kill for a SP game with a similar depth of lore and mechanics. I was sincerely interested in this but it all sounds so familiar. It feels like they're trying to port too many traits from their historical strategy games into this. I had hoped diplomacy could be totally ignored, just for the sake of playing as the Grand Menace slowly devoiding the space of all life (as they know it).

There's this particular vibe well crafted 4X/Grand strategy can transmit, when you exploit the mechanics in a way that feels just right, in a morally neutral way. Like brokering science as Zakharov or spamming your human hive as Yang in Alpha Centaury. Or Fall From Heaven, where each civ had such unique and flavourful mechanics, unleash the hordes of the Infernals, save the world as the Mercurials or cover your continent in ancient forests as the Ljosalfar and say fuck you! while the world rots and you win a science/altar victory. Dominions would be another great example, if SP didn't suck donkey dongs.
This is strictly different from any kind of larping, the great thing about those games is how the efficiency of such mechanics, from a pure powerplayer perspective, pushes you in a direction that just feels right.

 

[kris]

Anyways this looks like it's going to be another bland super generic game that everyone forgets all about a few weeks after release, the lack of distinct pre-made species was a big warning sign and everything I've read after that seems to only confirm it.

For me the real interest in most 4x games is the exploration part and seemingly that part seems to be focused on and well thought out. I will likely play 1/3 to 2/3 (likely former) of the game until i quit and start a new one.
And that despite the fact that space 4x is the easiest games to provide late game challenge by Reavers/tyranids/Zerg invading from nowhere. Or dormant super tech race awakened.

 

[kris]

I just want to hang orbital lasers around every one of my planets to keep my own population cowering in fear.

Is tacticular Cancer still alive? If someone asked I could take on a preview build and make a writeup about this game.

 

[Norfleet]

Governments will declare war for no reason at all.

No, they really don't, though. In order to declare a war, they have to have some kind of reason to do so, to justify it to the world, and more importantly, their own people. Whether they do it because they want their clay back, or because they need lebensraum, there's some kind of reason to justify WHY WE'RE ATTACKING THESE GUYS. Otherwise, people will just think you are insane, and your people feel less inclined to die for you if you can't come up with some kind of reason why you want to get them killed. When a pretense for a war is especially flimsy, people get upset about it. The international community considers you a menace, or your own people lack the motivation to die for your interests.

In this regard, the Paradox system has kinda fallen flat, in that, any CB is considered equally acceptable by anyone. Whereas "FOR THE HORDE!!!" might be a perfectly valid reason for your own people that they will accept without complaint, everyone else might think you are a menace.

 

[oldmanpaco]

There goes my hope of playing as a race of locusts that scour planet after planet barren and lifeless for its resources.

Well some asshole with a macbook would have probably stopped you anyway. Also a black guy was there.

 

[GarfunkeL]

I don't know where this idea that governments declare war without a reason come from. Even Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union always had some flimsy excuse for their invasions. Nazis claimed that Poles had crossed their border and thus the invasion was purely defensive. Commies invaded Afghanistan with the pretext that the local Communist Party invited them in to help stabilize the country - of course after manufacturing the coup of the said Communist Party in the first place.

 

[hello friend]

There is no reason that should be the case with space aliens, or human-alien relations, unless these relations were rock solid and well established.

 

[Beastro]

I don't know where this idea that governments declare war without a reason come from. Even Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union always had some flimsy excuse for their invasions. Nazis claimed that Poles had crossed their border and thus the invasion was purely defensive. Commies invaded Afghanistan with the pretext that the local Communist Party invited them in to help stabilize the country - of course after manufacturing the coup of the said Communist Party in the first place.

Yup, even declarations of "right of conquest" are usually made after a pretext is brought up. The plan for outright annexation by that right is made after the start of the war, after the target has "ask for it" and invited such a punishment.

Whatever it is about us, we demand reasons for things like wars and they're rarely purely aggressive, never "I'm invading you because I feel like having more land, lol".

There is no reason that should be the case with space aliens, or human-alien relations, unless these relations were rock solid and well established.

And that's why I feel Paradox is out of their element here, used to making human-centric games and will, from habit, not know to put more work into making aliens think alien and operate under different pretexts when it comes to war.

There's room for all sorts of alien reasoning, like a Klingon type race that values honesty and naked aggression and so has no need for CBs, and in fact, loathes races who use them, like Mankind, the most for simply making excuses to go to war and are despicable for it.

Another could be a Borg type race that looks on everything, and everyone, as a resource, and after laying claim to a word that is best suited for a certain type of race, gets a CB on it to go harvest victims to assimilate them and colonize the planet: They find a Earth-like world, place a claim, then discover Mankind and so are able to declare war to scour colonies for x amount of humans they need to colonize said planet and have enough to sustain a breeding population.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

The thing about not being able to depopulate a Planet entirely is a bummer. I had a plan for carving a big domain, then creating a huge sphere of scorched planets around it so I could build in peace and occasionally send a raiding party to scorch and burn more planets.

I agree that the way diplomacy works so far is silly. I think a Claims-based system makes more sense later on in the game, maybe even leading to Vicky-style late game diplomacy with Great Wars that turn into huge Galactic Wars where you get some Star Wars/Horus Heresy level shit with huge starfleets made of ridiculously huge ships go around fighting battles composed of ridiculous numbers of ridiculously fuckhueg starships fighting everywhere in the galaxy with planet and star-killing weapons.

You would think that it'd be rather easy to depopulate a planet. Just trash it sufficiently that it can no longer support life unassisted, then fail to provide the assistance to anything that managed to live. You'd think that even a Cleve wouldn't survive if I smash an asteroid into the planet, boiling the oceans and turning the crust into magma. For a civilization capable of travelling between stars, smashing rocks into planets is trivial if you're prepared to be patient about it. I mean, it doesn't really matter if the rock gets here now or a few years later, does it? Details...

Not quite...

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Rocks_Are_Not_Free!

 

[GarfunkeL]

I understand why they went this way - it's after all easier for them to lift mechanics from their earlier games than to make everything from scratch and the CB system will probably prevent massive early-game conquest sprees. Will have to see how it pans out. But it absolutely cannot be one-size-fits-all approach. Though it'll most likely be that at launch and then ten DLCs down the line we'll have "unique" and "alien" features on game mechanics.

 

[Kaldurenik]

Mods will fix it... Maybe :/

 

[Destroid]

It's funny I don't clearly recall which games supported exterminatus, but I get the feeling most space 4x do. More than a few even have planet destroyers like MoO2 and Rebellion.

 

[Lone Wolf]

SE3/4 did, for sure.

In fact, placing ships in orbit of an enemy world defaulted to a bombardment action.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

One thing I loved in SEIV was how I could protect my planets with star bases, sattelites, Weapon Plataforms, etc.

Enviado de meu SM-G3502T usando Tapatalk

 

[tindrli]

and i love everything in SEIV

 

[oscar]

I got a feeling Paradox will wuss out it, though the EUs never stopped you from wiping out natives at no provocation.

 

[Norfleet]

Whatever it is about us, we demand reasons for things like wars and they're rarely purely aggressive, never "I'm invading you because I feel like having more land, lol".

That's the kind of CB that only really flies if you are a horde of orcs.

I wonder if we'll actually get to be a horde of orcs as one of the options. Declare War: Reason: WAAAAGH!