2.8 fossil here, how much ai sucks now? do they still go bankrupt by themself 20 years into campaign, and other questions i should ask after long break.

>>2409588
guess it's even worse now,
but on the other hand they're still actively working on the code and succeeding
which is in itself remarkable

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>play on Commodore
>AI have worse technology, fewer starbases, fewer planets, much fewer pops than me
>their planets are also unoptimized messes
>they somehow still have bigger economy and more ships than me
Fuck this bullshit, I don't even dare go into Admiral now

>>2409858
>they're still actively working on the code and succeeding
Their performance gains weren't due to software improvements but rather just scaling down all progression numbers, fleet caps, etc., and as a result, reducing fleet sizes, which was apparently one of the big performance bottlenecks. They haven't improved their code, they just reduced the amount of content the code needs to process.

Question

Have the last updates bricked all the previous mods? I wanna know whether I should rush to get in one last playthrough before the next mod breaks everything or if it's too late and I should just wait for nomads.

>>2410455
>Have the last updates bricked all the previous mods?
of course, too many vital mechanics have been changed and improved

>>2410303
>performance gains weren't due to software improvements
very much this,
the 4.3 update especially fixed lots of code graves
my game boot-up went from literally 5mins to a half

>>2410529
>very much NOT this,
dammit

>>2410529
>improved
I wouldn't use that word to describe the changes.
>>2410216
Anon...just specialize your planets a bit and use your starbases as anchorages.A single fortress + an alloy world can give you enough fleet power and ships to easily surpass the AI.

>>2410216
Try grand admiral with midgame scaling.
AI starts with no benefits but gain hax midgame, but at that point you should be giga swole anyways.
Make sure you gain as many pops as possible (slaves, robots, cloning, etc) and optimize your planets.
Pops are key to the game, pops=resources, pops=power, pops=life.

>>2411736
>Try grand admiral with midgame scaling.
Scaling fucks over the AI even harder since the tech cost increases from difficulty do not scale. So they will end up with GA tech costs but will spend the entire early game without their normal buffs. You can disable the adjusted tech cost, but at that point you may as well play on normal GA due to how easy the game gets.

>>2412582
Scaling difficulty is bugged? Lmao

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>>colossus isn't the most important tech in the game

>>2412961
Just build more armies or bomb them.

>>2412961
Make fuckloads of warplings, clone soldiers, gene-troopers, Xenomorphs or robot soldiers.
Throw them at the enemy in numbers never before seen.
If you're playing Evolutionary Predators you can stack so many soldier bonuses, to get exploding soldiers that wipe enemy units on death AND respawn themselves along with massive damage resist, damage bonuses, and more.
Give them a commander which increases retreat-rate for armies, so instead of dying they go into the reserves where they still do damage at a reduced rate.

>>2413374
>>2413384
Brother, I had the time to research four full techs until I rolled the colossus one, research that, build the yard for it, build it and deploy it while the ~1.5M combined fleet on armageddon settings barely made a dent.

>>2413510
bombardment damage is per ship...

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>>2413516
Not quite. There's a softcap of 200 shipsize per fleet with diminishing returns over that so in the current year you're best off having a metric fuckton of small frigate fleets bombing them. The weapons or lack of weapons on them are completely irrelevant.

>>2413546
>siege puters
that's new, but having a shit ton of small ships was always the meta for bombing, it was just never super relevant until recently

>>2413570
To be fair between mercs and regular bombing surrenders on non gestalts it's usually enough. But goddamn that bug FE gave me an ulcer to exterminate. Madlads kept outbuilding bombed out armies and they already had so many on site that the UI counter broke.

>>2413510
I have an army 25K+ and I haven't even got colossus yet. Armies are amazingly cheap and easy to spam lmao.

>>2412582
Just turn tech difficulty slider to 0 but make tech a bit more costly to start with.

>bigger ships are worse at bombing planets
Paradox really likes their nonsensical design choices

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>>2414285
w..what?
pls explain

>>2414347
Bombardment is better with lots of little ships, than a few big fuckoff battleships.

>>2414352
Is it the Torpedo bonus again, or just numbers in general?
Wiki just mentions fleet strength.

>>2414347
Planets or armies on them don't actually take damage from fleets bombing them. They take damage from the selected bombing stance. So, when a shield generator says less damage received or that siege computer or worm spores say increase bombing damage that's actually just a multiplier for army_damage or planet_damage from the stance not on those autocannons or whatever on the actual ships. Combined shipsize, so not actual fleet strength or shipsize, with diminishing returns above 200, increases devastation ticking up and devastation has scripted effects based on thresholds and bombing stance. For example:
>dev => 25% start ticking down armies at 0.5 (of bombing stance base) rate
>dev =>50% start ticking down armies at 0.7 (of bombing stance base) and roll each tick for a building being damaged
>dev =>75% start ticking down armies at 1.0 (of bombing stance base) and roll each tick for a building being damaged or pop affected if = bombing stance allows it
>dev =100% start ticking down armies at 2.0 (of bombing stance base) and roll each tick for a building or pop being damaged with advantage

That's the general gist of it but again, just build world crackers or use mercs and save yourself the effort.

>>2414399
Can't believe all of the shit they have reworked, but this is still the same. It never made sense that your weapons have no effect on bombardment.

>>2414666
I mean devastation got reworked at one point, the fleet multiplier got capped per planet size so that's where you'll see someone saying bring 100 and someone 200, they're both right depending on planetsize 10 or 15, and some new toys and armies with special effects got added, but yeah, it's mostly the same deal since launch. Game's desperately calling for stellaris 2 but honestly I'm afraid they'll make the same mess out of it they did with say EU.

I am not convinced fleet size is capped for bombardment.
I lobbed like 20 class 1 behemoths over a planet and the destruction grew absurdly fast on any planet regardless of size.
As in I could've thrown my entire millions of fleet power on top of the planet and it would be slow, but these cute little fellas destroyed the planet ten times faster.

>>2414847
Behemoths are special in that they have a unique bombing stance with a massive damage multiplier, and they auto create ground armies with high collateral damage.

>>2416003
Oh that'd explain it.
It's great to mass produce heaps of the little bastards and just beeline them to capitals of empires.

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What the FUCK is this empire?
Vanilla.

>>2416583
Fauna which spawn in via voidlures are given a special faction. This causes hilarious issues like Tiyanki randomly killing each other, Cutholoids and Amoebas ganging up on voidworms, etc.
Somehow it looks like they took over a station.

>>2416589
>arkships are auto upgraded like stations
Why?

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If you added the ability to create/remove hyperlanes, how would you balance it? It feels freeing to create chokepoints via the Hyperlane Master mod, but 100 influence feels too cheap.

>>2416669
I would immediately do whatever edit is needed to disable that feature. Sounds like absolute cancer if the AI can do it and it's not something I feel I could use either.

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>>>2416461
>there is any better game than stellaris? I love the idea of make an galactic empire but feel like maybe there is better games than stellearis
there's no other game that "simulates" epic space empire gameplay like Stellaris.

Other games like Endless Space 2 should be on par, but somehow they all fall short.

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I haven't finished dealing with Cetana and now it's a 3.2m fleet + multiple 400k fleets from Unbidden. Shit's fucked.

>>2416780
Unfuck your ship design then. They suck against shields and kinetics.

>>2416669
That defeats the whole point of having hyperlanes.

What's everyone's go-to Bio-ascension path? After the path switched things around, I guess Mutation-Purity-Mutation and then selecting Purity gets the best buffs.

>Bio-ascension path
ewww

>>2416800
Cuckbot or Psytroon?

>>2416933
>Psytroon
actually just got that damn thing
wonder if it works well with my current Shattered Ring Groot-Hive

>>2416933
Neither. I finish all my GA games before I bother rolling for that shit.

>>2417690
Yeah but you would be stuck with hyperlanes without any of the benefits. They will never bring back the old starting FTL types.
>>2417701
You finish before the midgame?

>>2417710
Pretty much. Rush tech, unify everything, including FE and marauder systems, by roughly 2350 and wait for the crisis while stacking appropriate repeatable techs if you feel like it. Not even blowing smoke up my ass here, with some of the specific powercreep added it's not even that hard to do anymore.

>>2417720
I tend to get my ascension around 2275 and that's without any of egalitarian bullshit to rush unity.

>fanatic pacifists can still declare war via galactic community
Ah, so that's how they're intended to be played... Doesn't solve getting cucked out of territory early on, unless you deliberately keep your fleets weak to goad the AI to attack first

>>2417710
Don't jump drives and sniping gateway/wormhole/L-gate systems to move the rest of your fleets in already supersede hyperlanes, anyways?

>>2417720
Have you tried playing the game without using objectively broken builds?

>>2416689
Somebody should kick it up a notch and make a game where you manage an empire that spans across multiple galaxies

>>2418031
You make it sound like it's not the same result from the same gameplay loop whatever you play

>>2417720
2350 is after the midgame.

> deep space citadel
> constructed exclusively within gravity well
Are they retarded?

>>2418302
The definition of "deep space" varies, but it generally means "beyond the earth-moon system", so the fact that you can build them anywhere in the system except in immediate proximity to celestial bodies is perfectly accurate.

>>2418451
Huh, the more you know. Thanks anon.

meat ships, flying meat, thinking meat, shooting meat, with meat engines!

dumb meat

>That one time an anon had a massive hissyfit over fauna/bioships because he has no imagination or understanding of science fiction
That was a fun time

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>>2418847
To be fair bioships are niche even in wider sci-fi.

>>2418849
>Scorpius-posting
Based, based beyond belief.
Single best sci fi 'villain' ever.

>>2418850
>farscape
>tng
>bsg
>b5
>andromeda
>stg
We sure feasted, once.

>>2418854
To think we've had a dead sci-fi genre for over 20 fucking years.

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>>2418859
I prefer not to.

>>2418850
So you'll join me for pizza and margarita shooters?

>>2418873
Absolutely!

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>>2418859
>had a dead sci-fi genre
what chu mean HAD, nigguh

it better stay dead until all these jew faggets and women get thrown out of the fucking genre

So is anyone exited for the next barely play tested mess?

>>2419823
I'm just waiting for that update that lets us reorganize the Archive (how the FUCK was that not a base feature) and then I'm not updating for like six months or something because there's no way that "moving planets" won't be a radioactive dirty bomb of bugs on launch.

>>2419823
I've hated it since it was announced. Just fucking up mods for no good reason.

I doubt the ai even understands how to play nomads. It's barely capable of playing with normal planets.

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>>2419823
nope
I finally got my last two missing DLCs (Shroud&Biogenesis) to complete the advanced Ascensions.
Done with their experiments, unless they look really convincing.

I pirated all the dlcs and what in the actual fuck are these cosmic storms man. They seem to do nothing but debuff my planets.

>>2420803
Yeah don't use it and Astral Planes.

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>>2420803
Whilst they can be annoying early-game, if you build into using them the storms can be massively abused as the devs forgot to nerf their output modifiers when reworking the economy. Otherwise just turn them way down or off at galaxy gen.

>>2419823
I'm excited to pirate it

>>2420876
>and Astral Planes
moron
these two are hardly the same
Storms is just to be annoying as shit,
while Planes is actual fucking content

>>2420803
You WILL burn holes in your planets' ozones

>>2420803
What this nig >>2420953 said. They're extremely busted for both eco and combat.