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I wouldn't say it is good if you are expecting your usual strategy game. It's rough, has a huge learning cliff, it will happily allow you to make a mistake you won't realize until 2 or 3 years later. But as far as hard sci-fi there's simply nothing else like this.
Also, while development is slow it is getting better and better.
Huh, didn't notice fusion drives being that much more expensive, though i certainly had them by the time i've encountered 100+ ships alien fleets last game but no this time.
The fuckers just blown my main fleet away with two missile salvos from 8 or something battleships from max range and started destroying my low Earth orbit bases with 12 CP administration towers just when i partitioned China and almost finished taking over Servants control points. The strange balance where i'm only able to bring 10 ships at a time with the rest are staying in reserve, while aliens bring 40? at a time didn't help.
I guess the mid game is already over(its 2040 or something), probably should have let the old councilors die instead of rushing the second +10 years lifespan tech. The next fleet will have coilguns + uv arc lasers instead of railguns + green arc lasers at least.
for a short while it feels so, then you start to get pissed off at all its shortcomings and cheatings and limits and ask yourself why did you like it in the first place.
for a short while it feels so, then you start to get pissed off at all its shortcomings and cheatings and limits and ask yourself why did you like it in the first place.
Its alright. I think though once you find the min-max meta the game gets a tad too easy. You just have to keep your threat levels down and destroy the competing factions and you can snowball pretty easily. The AI is getting better though with each version, it seems to do a much better job at space expansion now so it feels more like a race than it used to.
You have to convert China away from communism/authoritarianism in order to hold is stronger, you also need to up cohesion. Then have your agents spam fortify on the branches and make sure you're always the majority faction in popularity. But ultimately none of this matters, in the early game Boost is the most important thing, once you have boost, invest into your space eco as this will be the main source of your economy, just don't expand too quickly as Threat generation is a big problem. Yes Earth nations can be handy for MC - but a well run space eco can dwarf them.
Only reason I'd worry about China would be if I was going the early unification techs for them. Same for Russia and Same for the EU. But its not incredibly worthwhile as once Space Eco is up and running you'll tend to ignore Earth a lot, it doesn't provide nearly as much as your space eco does.
You have to convert China away from communism/authoritarianism in order to hold is stronger, you also need to up cohesion. Then have your agents spam fortify on the branches and make sure you're always the majority faction in popularity. But ultimately none of this matters, in the early game Boost is the most important thing, once you have boost, invest into your space eco as this will be the main source of your economy, just don't expand too quickly as Threat generation is a big problem. Yes Earth nations can be handy for MC - but a well run space eco can dwarf them.
Only reason I'd worry about China would be if I was going the early unification techs for them. Same for Russia and Same for the EU. But its not incredibly worthwhile as once Space Eco is up and running you'll tend to ignore Earth a lot, it doesn't provide nearly as much as your space eco does.
Where'd you get research then? T2 research campuses are crap now and require 1 MC for 80 research so you'd need a great fleet able do defend Earth & Moon in order to spam them and get some reasonable amount of research which is kinda late game.
Like say 30 MC for research campuses, and another 30 for mining & LEO labs and you're used up all MC allowed by aliens with two -25% hate techs without triggering them for the same amount of research EU or US provides.
Maybe its more efficient with T3 ones but thats pretty late game.
Where'd you get research then? T2 research campuses are crap now and require 1 MC for 80 research so you'd need a great fleet able do defend Earth & Moon in order to spam them and get some reasonable amount of research which is kinda late game.
Like say 30 MC for research campuses, and another 30 for mining & LEO labs and you're used up all MC allowed by aliens with two -25% hate techs without triggering them for the same amount of research EU or US provides.
My strategy is most likely overly reliant on the strong USA start. I doubt it'd scale well with EU/Russia, and China would be extremely difficult to get early on.
You rush Canada and Mexico. I then usually prioritize Kazakhstan for the additional boost. Those are my early plays usually. EU unification is a stretch, normally the AI factions have it fairly fortified. I usually try to have agents who are good with turtling and also good with coups, Coups are insanely OP if you can pull them off - its likely why people are losing China because it has a higher than normal risk of Coup due to its communism. But if you got someone chaining fortify the AI can't stop you, I've never seen them manage to do it in the early game, late game when their agents are more leveled sure but early on fortify chaining is enough to ensure you don't get booted out of your core territory.
You can also try your best to have good relations with factions who share similar goals. Trading with them can help reduce the number of plates you need to spin.
Try to avoid over extending yourself unless you intentionally want to lose countries. You can only hold and protect so much.
If you're able to chain coup on the AI countries over and over, it decimates them. So get yourself someone good with that, you don't want to take the country over necessarily, you just want to keep the AI busy. What ever annoying thing the AI can do to you, you can do it back to them as well.
You have to convert China away from communism/authoritarianism in order to hold is stronger, you also need to up cohesion. Then have your agents spam fortify on the branches and make sure you're always the majority faction in popularity. But ultimately none of this matters, in the early game Boost is the most important thing, once you have boost, invest into your space eco as this will be the main source of your economy, just don't expand too quickly as Threat generation is a big problem. Yes Earth nations can be handy for MC - but a well run space eco can dwarf them.
Only reason I'd worry about China would be if I was going the early unification techs for them. Same for Russia and Same for the EU. But its not incredibly worthwhile as once Space Eco is up and running you'll tend to ignore Earth a lot, it doesn't provide nearly as much as your space eco does.
I don't agree, China is so large that a regular coup is almost impossible unless you allow unrest to get out of control. Maybe you are being victim of alien "space magic"? That can kick you out of any country very fast if you allowed the aliens gather too much intel on planet earth.
Alien agents will perform abductions, but most importantly those alien surveyors ships in earth's orbit are performing hundreds of abductions on roughly half the planet's land provinces each mission turn, if you let them do their thing aliens will have massive bonuses to "enthral elites" mission and aliens will simply steal your CPs all the time. It's mandatory to fight the alien ships in orbit to keep them from surveying, better face alien retaliations if need be than having all the USA or China stolen from you in 2030+ helplessly.
There's three ways to force yourself inside big countries:
Public Campaign with Control CP while it's neutral.
Crackdown + Purge when enemy faction is over CP cap and CP is unprotected.
If Unrest resting point is high you can raise unrest to 10, or high and then coup.
1: You need around 20 persuasion to have a realistic chance, CPs in neighbours help as does Public Opinion of course.
2: You can provoke some very serious CP deficit by detaining enemy councillors, if said councillors happen to be the guys who can do "Defend Interest" and you time things right you can make Crackdown 20 points less difficult, if on top of all that you order your double agent to resign to cause an even greater CP deficit, impossible numbers suddenly become very feasible. This is the only non situational way to get into any country no matter how large, it will only fail if the faction is very below its CP cap, at which point the faction itself is probably already screwed. But id does require preparation months in advance of Protect Interests expiring date.
3: If done via rising unrest to 10 it has the added advantage of not incurring any relations penalty with the target faction.
Yes you can get back a few stolen CPs, but if the abduction alien bonus is too large they will steal your CPs faster than you can get them back and then it's most likely game over unless you moved your economy to space, which isn't as effective as it used to be with the nerfs to Research Campuses.
Going back to drives: 600K Research cost, is accumulated research cost to final drives, not the cost of any single tech. The problem is before there were decent mid game fusion drives you could unlock for 200k or so, this doesn't seam to be the case any more. Hence the need of something to bridge the gap, I've found Burner from Vapor Core fission tech is pretty good, and not too expensive. But I am beggining to regret having gone into Therawat Vapor Core Fission reactors. The drives you can unlock are powerful but have lack lustre exh. velocity. So you can't really move large things well anyway and the drives and reactor cost aroun 50K-70K accumulated reasearch. Next time I am going to give Therawat Vapor Core Fission reactors a hard pass, and start with fussion earlier. But I already unlocked Lodestar which I supose will let me move Battleships even if it costs a fortune in water in refuels.
Intercepted a few not so large alien fleets of about 3 battleships + 20 smaller ships with my 7 arc uv lancers with 2 arc laser PD and 7 t2 siege coil gun dreadnoughts with 4 arc laser PD while they were going to their new extreme earth orbit station so now they are afraid and stayed away for the last 5 years. Still lost a few ships to initial missile salvo from 3 battleships + some monitors so the full battleship fleet would have still blown me away most likely.
The siege coil gun is great at overcoming PD, i think it was added after 0.1 version? Even managed to kill said alien base with 4 battle stations while losing one ship's engine.
Also popped 5 assault carriers and got 35 exotics from them.
Now thinking about finally spamming some research campuses, the T3 ones give 200 research for 2 MC.
A shame that all the bigger high tech weapons like UV phasers and advanced coil and plasma require a lot of exotics, won't be able to afford an upgrade without another assault carrier fleet coming in, all the rest of the alien ships drop next to nothing.
A shame that all the bigger high tech weapons like UV phasers and advanced coil and plasma require a lot of exotics, won't be able to afford an upgrade without another assault carrier fleet coming in, all the rest of the alien ships drop next to nothing.
It used to be like 0.3 exotics or something per gun, which isn't that much. Iirc you can also buy exotics from earth with money, but the cost is pretty extreme.
The siege coil gun is great at overcoming PD, i think it was added after 0.1 version? Even managed to kill said alien base with 4 battle stations while losing one ship's engine.
Interesting. All I remember from first version was that alien defences had longer range with their PD than the highest range coilgun the player could research (higher than any non-missile weapon in fact), which made attacking stations the hardest thing in the game...
Finally built a t3 research base. I guess its kinda worth it when you have a lot of unused resources.
Perhaps grabbing first fusion tech for fusion reactors, coil guns and green? arc lasers for defense against the aliens then researching these t3 universities + t2\t3 nano-factories for easy Mercury money could be a viable strategy.
Built a shipyard in extreme Jupiter orbit to destroy the alien mining bases on the moons, of which they have like 30. The same heavy siege coiler + 4 pd dreadnoughts and UV arc laser lancers managed to wipe a 40 ship alien fleet that attacked it while it was being built, though i was lucky they picked the convoy formation which was probably the worst possible one they could pick.
A shame that all the bigger high tech weapons like UV phasers and advanced coil and plasma require a lot of exotics, won't be able to afford an upgrade without another assault carrier fleet coming in, all the rest of the alien ships drop next to nothing.
It used to be like 0.3 exotics or something per gun, which isn't that much. Iirc you can also buy exotics from earth with money, but the cost is pretty extreme.
Now its 3.6 for the heaviest UV phaser cannon, t3 regular spinal coilgun is 0.8 - kinda affordable, t3 siege spinal coil gun is 8, t3 heavy plasma battery - 2.4.
The strange balance where i'm only able to bring 10 ships at a time with the rest are staying in reserve, while aliens bring 40? at a time didn't help.
