hotfix THISDevs back from STD collector vacation and fixing shit they broke before.>https://steamcommunity.com/games/281990/announcements/detail/708909893000627535what else is new?well for starters, the giant Pop ethics changesonly the Empra knows how this will go wrong.
what exactly is the "worst kind of racism"
>>2494898Xeno-compatibility
How long until it's safe to play a Stellaris that isn't a buggy broken mess lost somewhere between shitty DLCs?
>>2494931A month after the latest patch
>>2494911>when the space pussy is just too good
>>2494931actually the current Hotfix seems a great time to come backthey did fix tons of shit and the ethic change looks like a good idea too, so far
>>2494896/vst/ is a slow board bwo, you can wait until page 9 or so.
>>2494971yeah, I knowbut it looked like a good cut off point right nowseems like they're cooking something up
>>2494941Ok but is the game actually good again?
>>2494898work in progress, we've got our most able posters working on it
so is this game now totally unplayable on a cpu from 10 years ago when the game was launched?
>>2495044Yes. I don't think they ever updated the min recommend specs either.
>>2494889
no cap how do i get paid by paradox for posting hereit lowkey seems like the easiest job ever
>>2495044playing it on my trusty Win7 potato>i5 3570k 16GB; GTX 1060 3GBbefore one of the 4.x patches it literally took 5 minutes to boot up, now it starts up like an almost normal gamehonestly haven't yet progressed even to midgame because of all the patching and DLC buying,but it works nicely so far
>>2494898the OG portrait pack, before the blackening
>>2495121>no cap
I think i'm going insane, while reading things while creating my empire/race, i hovered over something related to "pops can get their own bionics" or something related to some cool cyberpunk-like stuff but i can't for the life of me find it again.. can anyone help me?? also i haven't played stellaris since toxic world was released which was a couple of years ago, recommend me some cool custom empires to add to my galaxy
>>2495321wow exactly 30 seconds after typing this post i found it, it's "augmentation bazaars" civic. I guess i'm going corpo-route this playthrough
>>2495326>>2495321>nomadic megacorp spiritualist authoritarian xenophile with augmentations bazaars and indentured assetsok ChatGPT, generate a picture of this humanoid species. too muslim for my taste but is cool
>>2495321>>2495336Authoritarian Xenophile is an underrated theme combo desu
>>2495337Thematically-wise, I found it to be an interesting idea, but gameplay-wise was barren (at least many years ago when I played Stellaris). AI empires that practice friendly diplomacy had a bias toward egalitarian ethics, so your authoritarian side gets pushed to the side, and your xenophile side wants to give aliens equal rights so you don't get the 'degenerated alien slaver/lover' deal. Guess there's upsides to Hegemonies. I'm partial to pacific authoritarian oligarchies myself as an underrated theme.
>xenophile>militarist>egalitarianyep, it's democratic crusaders time
Well I played until 2260 and the ai may actually be even worse than before. I had a bad start, didn't play optimally and still managed to keep up with the ai. Nomads are still completely dysfunctional and the ones I found had 2 arkships with around 900 fleet power each in 2254.
Had my eye on this for a while and now it's on sale, still 140 bux though with all the dlc. Worth?
>>2495440Just buy the base game and creampie all the dlcs. Then disable cosmic storms, astral planes, and grand archive.
>>2495394>the whole galaxy must learn of our peaceful ways... BY FORCE
I hope they rework megacorps at some point. I wish I could play as an actual corporation that's really good at actually making stuff. Like, if I'm a militaristic megacorp I want to be win contracts from empires to build ships for them or if I'm a resource extraction megacorp I want to be able to settle worlds in other empires and build specialized planets for the client empire (and share in the profits)
>>2495441>disable cosmic storms, astral planes, and grand archiveAt least I'm not the only one that does that.
>>2495336>bazaars and indentured assetsquite literally the ottoman empireonce again AI is on point
>>2495441>astral planes, and grand archive>>2495522yer both silly billiesI get Storms, never even got it.But Planes is cool and Archive adds a pretty neat Indiana Jones archeological site stealing tradition, tons of other things too.
>>2495017
>>2495017>Ok
>>2495441But I like all of those. Yes even storms.
>Usually play machine empire>Roleplaying as an absolutely retarded AI who somehow broke free from its masters when its only purpose was to mine rocks and make shit from them>Barely understands that other creatures are sapient for the first 100 years, then has to repair the massive ill will it garnered from indiscriminately razing colonies to the ground in order to rip more minerals from the earth>Runs are almost universally fun>Have tried to play my original feudal human empire from time to time>It's always in debt, behind in tech, has a weak military, and boxed in to a handful of systems by advanced neighbors>Virtually always a terrible timeI really want to play a non-machine empire and engage in politics and such the right way but it never works out. I don't understand how I fall so far behind.
>>2495526Planes is unbalances bullshit and badly written events, archive is just stat bloat.
>>2495394>fanatic egalitarian>xenophile>my neighbors are a ruthless capitalist and two fanatic purifiers>rush carriers and enter the forever war with both purifiers>economy hanging on by a thread to fund the war>barred from a lot of planetary decisions and edicts that could help>conquer both purifiers>now presiding over massive territory in absolute shambles with no economy massive unemployment and resulting crime and two thirds of the population are militarists and xenophobes>fleet is massive and i keep getting into more fights so despite the government ethics the purifier pops are happy>the egalitarian mad max paradise keeps expanding
>>2495712That's because machines don't have to waste premium district space with consumer goods and food, and robots don't get gimped by happiness mechanics. Robopops always work at 100% efficiency, habitability not withstanding
>>2495712Machines and hiveminds are easy mode. Literally removes like half the mechanics, no downsides.
>>2495960They have plenty of downsides, it's just that the upsides more than make up for them.
>>2495960I just feel like I'm playing a regular empire wrong somehow. I moved up to Commodore since Captain was just about the right difficulty early on but too easy late game, but I'm almost always way behind everyone else on Commodore and can't catch up. Pop growth always seems to be my problem, even when I have six or so planets with good habitability early game, I can't grow my pops fast enough to take advantage of it, plus what income I am getting is either going to consumer goods, alloys, or energy upkeep.
Any build for 4.5? No nomads.
>>2495970How? The AI is completely incapable of actually playing the game even on GA. Do you just build up your planets randomly?
>>2495712>I really want to play a non-machine empire and engage in politics and such the right way but it never works outsame wish, same problems. I always end up playing devouring swarm and fuck diplomacy and politics
>>2496126He literally said his problem was pop growth anon. If you don't get cloning vats early you do kinda get fucked there. Robutts and automation only goes so far.
>>2494898screaming heresy and posting black templars everywhere
Good to see that forts are still useless compared to fleets.
>>2496558They're useless against something that drastically overpowers you but your fleets are useless against such a force too. They have their roles in every other regard.
>>2494936>space erufu They might as well be honorary humans anyway, they are built for human cock
>>2496913They are useless even gainst something that has slightly lower FP. The game has always overvalued them so they end up looking stronger than they actually are.
>>2495366I remember having the same problem. At some point xenophille authoritarians were okay with enslaving their own race but got mad at the same rules applied to other races. I think they changed it a bit but it's still something that doesn't really work in practice. The game has too much concept overlap between xenophile and egalitarian.I wanted to run a space caliphate and got liberals instead.
>try to play some form of pacifist>every time get fucked by mid-game crisis or spawn next to fanatical purifiers/devouring swarm>play something aggressive>blitz through the game with relative ease, even end game crisisI hate this.
>>2497027Pacifists still need a strong military anon.
>>2497027this: >>2497275There's a very important difference between "peaceful" and "harmless."
>>2497275Si vis pacem, 9x19mm parabellum
is it worth buying the game and becoming a subscription piggy?
>>2497485just pirate
>>2497513I did desu
>>2497463No, there's a mod for it though.
As an aspiring sci fi writer would this game be a good source to mine for ideas?
>>2497538I doubt it. Stellaris is like 40k, nothing is truly unique.
>>2497538It's the kitchen sink of scifi.
>>2497535So are precursors bugged for anyone else? I had one test game were I only got them very late and in the current game I did not get one at all.
Don't know how this happened but I found it funny.Bald pride.
torrent with hotfix when?
>>2497831when the latest trojan update is ready
>>2497538there's tons of game lore and vids about it,you can nicely create almost any SciFi starting point and pick how to proceed in it.Stellaris has many homages to SciFi Franchises, but there's enough variety to make it your own story.
>>2497745that fix was supposed to be this hotfixed patchupdate and scrap the run to try again till you get it
Either I'm retarded or this is bugged. As in pic, I built on my dedicated unity world Auto-Curating center because it's free research and even more unity.But after building it, nothing changes and I already did the usual save, restart the game and load the save.
>>2497538You can do whatever you want.
>>2497887As long as whatever you want includes genocide.
>>2497892
>>2497892https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1CQ7Vwz8Eo&list=RDO1CQ7Vwz8Eo&start_radio=1
>>2497535Mod link?
>>2497882it isn't free research, it increases the research output already present on the planet. the only bug there is it shouldn't read "X research by synapse drones +0.010" but by "brain drones"I hope that planet is well within your territory and far from wormholes, 2 sentinel posts aren't good enough to deter an invasion in late game
How do you guys enjoy playing this game through that early phase of getting 50 pop ups per minute. seems incredibly annoying to go through that early game process every time.
>>2499315>aren't good enough to deter an invasion in late gameAnon what the fuck are you talking about? You don't deter invasions by having defense armies. You just have your fleet in the border systems. The only reason to build strongholds and use soldier jobs is to get fleet power. And in that case it's better to build a few planets with only soldier jobs instead of spreading them out. It doesn't matter were they are either since allowing your planets to be bombarded is retarded.
>>2499320>allowing your planets to be bombarded is retardedoh wow, why didn't I think of that before?Idiot
>>2499322Telling someone that they should get more defensive armies on a planet not focused on soldier jobs just proves that you don't know how to play the game.
Does anyone go into a straight-up trance like state when playing this game? It's not even that good, but it's insane just how absorbed I get, like yesterday I just played it nonstop while not eating or doing anything to take care of myself. Like, I get why this would happen, but I just wanted to say that, goddamn, this is like crack or slots or something. I wonder if they used research on addiction to develop it, or they just happened on the mechanics and went with it.
>>2497745I've been rolling them really late as well, except with nomads...
>>2494898White genocide
>>2495712I finally looked in to how pop growth works in modern Stellaris. It's pretty dumb.Pops grow faster the more of them there are, that part's logical and makes sense. Pop growth IRL, all other factors held constant, is exponential too for the most part. What doesn't make sense is that the second part of pop growth is based on total pops on a planet plus free housing space--in essence, you're cutting your pop growth down to a quarter or less unless you spam housing long before you need it, which is pretty unintuitive.In effect, you need to have 50,000 pops+free housing (Assuming your pops take up one housing each) to hit the cap on logistic growth speed. In a lot of cases, free housing is so important that it dwarfs any growth modifiers until you have at least as much free housing as you have total pops.For example, if you have 5000 pops (The starting amount for a new game, just about) and 2000 free housing, you get about +58% pop growth speed by building a luxury residences and going to 3500. If you had 6000 free housing, it still gives you +10% pop growth speed, about the same as a lot of modifiers elsewhere. Because of this, if you want to grow an organic empire fast, it's not pop growth modifiers you need to chase (Though they do help if they're not hard to get), it's minerals and build speed for constructing districts quicker and cheaper to boom your pop more quickly. Since pop growth slows down relatively as you get more pops, once a planet hits about 16,000 to 20,000 pops, it's better to colonize a new planet and move half of them to it, spamming housing districts and luxury residences.My problem came from always keeping free housing to only about 200-500, essentially I wasn't getting any growth like that. Spamming houses doubled, tripled, or in some cases quadrupled my pop growth.
>>2497027I have an inward perfection space elves that does pretty good as a pacifist. They're by no means weak because they claim a massive amount of space and develop it into Gaia planets and then bait people into attacking them to conquer their planets and expel their pops, but they are exceptionally boring to play because at a certain point, you reach a level of development people stop attacking you.The massive amount of unity they generate gets invested into early traditions and they usually wind up psionically ascending within a few decades of game start. After that they just spiral out of control, finishing most of their traditions by 100 years in and getting a massive lead in tech. And then it's just waiting until the crisis starts because it can't do anything else.
>>2497275>>2497351If you're going to go the fleetless or small fleet route, it's best to just be a megacorp and take a good vassalage deal. With good diplomacy, you can usually make it so you actually get resources for being one at the cost of not being able to expand traditionally, but you can still spam branch offices everywhere anyway. Break vassalage when you've eclipsed the AI and either reform to a regular empire or start claiming your own vassals.
I heard this game got a bunch of radical overhauls. Does anyone still stubbornly play the ancient versions?
>>2499652I can see the housing logic as "tons of available housing makes it easier to acquire and people breed more as a result"It is far too easy to fuck up pop growth though, unless you're micromanaging with resettlement new colonies will literally take ages to ever do anything.
>>2499664>bait people into attacking them to conquer their planets and expel their popsYou have an interesting definition of pacifism.
>>2499807The way I see it, a (non-fanatic) pacifist doesn't instigate wars and violence on their own, but they still build up a military force to keep the peace. If there's an imperial or genocidal empire next to them, of course they're going to fight if they try anything. And if the other guy loses, the pacifist has a right to disassemble his war machine to prevent future violence.Eventually, the pacifist gets so big and scary that other empires stop instigating violence. It's like the Jackie Chan school of pacifism.
>>2499735Well, I gave it a test, at 50 years I had 18,000 pops when starting with 4800. In my other game, I had about 10,000 at 80 years. My technology isn't as far ahead as the other game, but my economy is pretty good just for the sheer amount of people. I'm getting roughly ~32-35 pop growth per month across 10 planets. Can't seem to draw clone vats as a tech though, otherwise I'd have another 15 growth.By comparison, machine empires get a flat 3 base pop growth per planet before bonuses, so this is roughly equal to that. Doesn't come close to cloning ascension though, which is 3 base pop growth per cloning vat with an easy time getting almost double that in bonuses. And then you can build additional cloning vats per capital level so you can basically out populate the entire galaxy. Could probably be insane with a unity rush to Biomorphosis.
>>2499338whatever, noob. Enjoy getting your nice min maxed planet invaded >you don't know how to play the gamemy ability to take over 2 fallen empires on GA before crisis hits says otherwise
still mad about the void dwellers change desuit wasnt even op, just let me turtle and spam habitats in a few closed of systems it was cozy
>>2499934Retard
Noob on my first custom civ and I feel like I made a huge mistake by taking Catalytic Processing, I have a huge supply of minerals I don't need from mining stations but I'm constantly going negative on food and needing to buy more. Why is everyone saying this shit's OP?
>>2500221>taking Catalytic Processingthere's a reason it's from the aquatic DLCthing is perfect for abundant food civs, others not so much or you get the farming pop boost too
>>2499986Which change, the one habitat per system one?Really, I think Habitats should be the norm for most places in space. Like every game of Stellaris spawns way too many habitable planets, there should be very few planets which are the crown jewel for colonization and most systems should only be able to reasonably accommodate a habitat. Habitats would be semi-specialized or at least greatly limited on supporting themselves past a certain size, they should siege kind of like planets do right now, and planets should be multi-year campaigns with lots of ground fighting and bombardment to actually capture them.
>>2500221Anon... The combo is that + anglers and aquatic. Taking catalytic processing alone is a terrible idea in most cases.
>>2500295>Which change, the one habitat per system one?Yep thats the one>low hyperlane count>xenophobes>take like 5 to 7 systems hopefully with high planet count>close of the entrance with a fortress>be cozy in your corner while all the alien shits quarel and tear themselfes apartWas my favorite way to play
based
>be me>return to playing stellaris after a long time>start a modded campaign with my vanila+ modpack playing as humans>most usable planets in the galaxy are terraforming candidates either barren or toxic, there are few habitable planets>event of a primitive xenos generation ship pops up>mfw when the generation ship is headed for a mars like planet>mfw when I realize I have to save these retards>upon their landing contact the primitive xenos and occupy their planet>planet imediately goes beneath 10 stability>colonize an alpine world to relocate the xenos to it>somehow I can't relocate the xenos to it even though they have a cold planet preference>xenos population starts to die out in their shitty planet faster than I can build infrastructureHow the fuck did these retards even survive the centuries long journey in a generation ship?
next dlc is already dead on arrival
>>2500657>How the fuck did these retards even survive the centuries long journey in a generation ship?Have you considered that the ship was in essence a slaver ship? Except the crew was gone and the slaves were left to run it.
>>2500657>>somehow I can't relocate the xenos to it even though they have a cold planet preferenceAnon... Do your policies not allow resettlement? That kind of situation is exactly why it's essential.
>>2500857I checked the game files, and if a planet has the "stellar culture shock" modifier, you can not resettle the pops located on the planet, unless they are members of your main species.
>>2500866Ah. The only things I do with pre-ftls is either spy on them for tech or eat them so I forgot that was a thing.
I signed a migration treaty with a friendly machine civilization so I could use them to colonize planets that aren't good for my species, just started my first colony with them. How do I uh, get them to reproduce?
>>2500891>How do I uh, get them to reproduce?Come on Anon, machines can't reproduce, they need to be built by roboticist jobs. Machine (and synth) empires get those from their main colony building "for free" but others need roboticist factories for that, so if you don't have the tech and those buildings, machine and/or synth pops will never be able to grow in your empire.
>>2495441I was thinking of getting back into stellaris and was interested in astral planes except it had such poor reviews, what makes it an outright disable if you have it instead of just a not worth buying?
Who the at Paradox thought the cannon was a good idea? It's useless so it's never really worth building one, but the AI fires in constantly which is just annoying. And the worst part is the infernal noise on the galaxy map since everyone fires it all the time.
>>2501444>need to accumulate ridiculous amount of resources for it to be remotely useful on regular empires>barely touches fallen empires>goes from "does absolutely nothing" against crisis's to "hot potato!" thrown right at your faceThe only logical use for it I can see is, you don't have L-gates or wormholes to reach and fight an empire on the opposite site of the galaxy from you but still wanting to fuck with them.
>>2494889here we go>Willpower>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLycJm4znKYor read up here for non vocal fry ed.>https://steamcommunity.com/games/281990/announcements/detail/668378128507208706
SOVL OVERDOSEhttps://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3812698711
Advanced AI civs: y or n?
>>2501721>spawns you next to advanced fanatical purifiersnothing personel, xeno
>>2501870I was recently reminded why wormholes are in fact dangerous.
>>2501523>no detail on any mechanics whatsoevernothingburger announcement
>>2502042I don't think they know themselves.
>>2501523>ideology just seems like content for single ethicslame
Is the legally distinct Borg civic fun?
And there is still no way to destroy the stupid alien head relic.
boys, how do I enable mods on the pirated version? I open the launcher through dowser.exe but it doesn't detect mods placed in the /mod/ folder.
>>2501721>advanced civs 25/30>advanced neighbors>max fallen empires>max marauders>habitable worlds rare>no guaranteed habitable worlds>hyperlane density minmal>5x gateways and wormholes>doomsdayIt's gaming time.
play stellaris>dont play the new playstyle type>doing good>make a lathe>i need to invade for chips>cant fucking invade because the waystation of nomads are invisible>zero progress and lose who the fuck said this was a good idea? any counter to this? i have a a science ship and i still cant fucking detect it
>>2502383Build a starbase with detection arrays?
>only custom human empires>advanced neighbors>no fallen empires>no marauders>no primitives>grand admiral difficulty>1x habitable worlds>mod to make terraforming candidates common>max hyperlane density>no gateways or wormholes>contingency onlyYep it's gaming time
How do you deal with the midgame tedium? There is no challenge and every war I fight is just resettling thousands of pops and fixing the former ai planets.
>>2502301Use the GOG versionhttps://www.gog.com/forum/stellaris/gog_stellaris_new_paradox_launcher_how_to_download_and_manage_workshop_mods_successfully
>>2502729Or don't use the paradox launcher.
>>2502727unironically 24/7 total war
>>2494889the OP pic is what i did for my first and only full run of the game
>>2502727Add scaling difficulty.
>>2502727Just start fights for glory instead of territory.
>>2499615It's a real thing btw.
>>2502256It's fineYou can make machine worlds that churn out cyborgsYou can total war just about anyone from the startIt used to be possible to reach -100% sprawl from pops with itAs usual, tons of different species are a pain and you have to pick whether you want your machines or meatbags to get leader bonuses, because only one side can
>decide to play egalitarian for once>woops your consumer goods are in the red again! time to go make yet another factory world :^)>stop playing by midgame
Are there any mod that you consider a must have for stellaris? feels like stellaris is one of the few 4x games that barely needs any mods.
>>2502868UI Overhaul
>>2502868Planetary Diversity unironically, one of my favorite things in space games is staring at beautiful planets
>>2502806I'm already playing on GA.
Here's your chosen for tonight. Say something nice about them!
>>2502985Zosira > that thing
>Nomad empire>Get nanites early>Subsume fallen empire gaia world>FE wakes up, chases me around a huge galaxy, can't catch me>Slaughters a quarter of the galaxy that just happens to be near his systems in the meantime>FE Materialists wake up too, go on a rampage>Entire galaxy embroiled in a war in heaven>It's the year 2270GALACTIC LEVEL SHITPOSTING
>>2502192As Montu guessed, it does look like they simply added "Culture" from Civ.Which would be an actual good thing.And even Espionage was mentioned, another broken part of the game that badly needs an overhaul.
>>2503093I'm still waiting for them to add a way to drive up crime on planets via espionage. I played as a criminal syndicate recently and had an amazing spy network, I was regularly stealing tech (For all it was worth, which was next to nothing) and pops, but I'd rather just destabilize enemy planets so I can profit off of them.
>>2503088Unphatomably based
>>2501523Oh waow a school origin, I heckin love schoolslop!!!
Where do nomads fall in the power scale in the game? I played a game as them and got way ahead in economy, but I wasn't sure what the right amount of ark ships to build was.
>>2503088>can't catch meBut... but they have jump drives...
>>25028682D galaxy, because my autistic brain hates it when hyperlanes cross. Unfortunately, they still do when a new system is spawned with a precursor or such, and I hate it, but there's no mod for that
>>2501721>advanced civs: n-4>no advanced neighborsstart in a kiddie pool with the rest of the galaxy being scary
I've explored about a third of my galaxy and encountered no other civs besides caravans and two Fallen Empires, I thought I must've turned off all the others by mistake somehow but when I go to the victory screen I'm at #13. What's going on?
>>2503616NVM I encountered some immediately after making this post, guess that doing so caused it to happen.
>>2503616Random empire placement probably.
>finally caved in and tried synthetic ascensionChrist almighty. I'm unable to support my synaptic lathe fast enough to shove all of those spare colonists into it.
Playing a spirtualist civ for once because it seemed appropriate for Knights of the Toxic God but 50 years in I still haven't drawn robots tech and my planets are all severely understaffed, do spiritualists just not get it or something?
>>2503863They just have a lower chance but you might have a robots banned policy by default and spiritualists generally dislike all robots for being soulless.
>>2503870Okay, I did have it banned by default so I changed it but now I'm savescumming and still can't get them. Pretty shitty considering they're necessary to have remotely reasonable population growth, makes me feel like this playthrough's a dud.
>>2504042There was another policy option I missed, NVM I r dum.
>>2504042Robots steal work that rightfully belongs to beings with souls.
>>2504276Stellaris isn't the real world, there are way more jobs than people to work them.
I have>428 hours on HoI4>419 hours on EU4>312 hours on CK3>224 hours on Vic3>218 hours on CK2>195 hours on EU5but ONLY fucking 55 hours on Stellaris. According to the internets, Stellaris is on the more accessible side of gsg but everytime i open it i get overwhelmed for some reason and close it 5 minutes after it. What am i doing wrong? I have more hours on fucking Imperator: Rome than Stellaris and i see people having 10k hours on it, what are they doing? I'm just surveying star after star, then i gather resources, maybe colonize a few planets and that's it, i haven't gone further. What is wrong with me? I know these hours i mentioned at the other pdx games are rookie numbers but i have a somewhat fair understanding of them. I really want to get into Stellaris though...
>>2504324I've only had it for a couple weeks but I'm starting to feel the same way, just going through the motions of surveying systems and building starbases and buildings and waiting for something to happen.
>>2504326Don't get me wrong, the game looks incredible and all, i even bought quite a few DLCs but i would say that it's more of a "waiting game" than the other grand strategy titles.
I hate that the new dlc will be monoethics onlysuperpacifism is kinda silly in stellaris and surely you should be able to also be militarist if you wanna spread an ideologysuperxenophobe also sounds kinda counterproductive to a spheres of influence dlcif the only actually useable ideological axes are materialist/spiritualist and egalitarian/authoritarian the mechanic should focus on the 4 possible combos of those assuming it won't just be gay aura mana bullshit
would a mod to increase your ethics picks to 4 just work? That might help a lot, let everyone roll with a complete ideological set unless they've got a fanatical or two.
>wait for Influence to slowly fill up so you can take a system then build a starbase and the mining stations>juggle resources, whenever one gets in the black another goes in the red>ignore diplomacy since everything costs Influence for little or no benefit>even moving between your systems takes for fucking everNow that the novelty's wearing off I don't think I'm really having fun.
>>2504324The supposed accessibility comes at the cost of interesting systems that can drive games.
>>2504419I see your point. So, i guess im not doing anything completely wrong other than not being patient enough to let something happen?
>>2504324Then play on highest speed if you want to constantly juggle and manage stuff (and don't use colony manager because you can basically automate that part of the game with it), it works for me.
>>2504868I play nearly all paradox games on 3-4 speed but for stellaris 4 speed is good enough. I lose track of my objectives at 5 speed
>>2504872Well in the late game it doesn't really make a difference.
>blorg multiculturalismthis seems very gay
I can't seem to find a good answer to this, so I thought I'd try here.Astro-Mining Bays for Ark Ships give +5% to Resources from Harvesting Actions, which seems to apply to both your Ark Ships harvesting things and logistics ships. Civilian Ark Ships also give +5% Resources from Harvesting Actions per level, but are those empire wide as well? Is it possible to get something extremely high like +1000% resources to the point where you can essentially just strip mine a rock once every few years and keep your empire going?
>>2505922I haven't played a nomad yet but wouldn't the amount of ark ships required to get that kind of bonus make it kind of moot?
>Introducing... political faction micromanaging!Miss me with that shit
>>2506009You can just play gestalt if you don't want to deal with it I assume.
haven't played in like 3-4 yearsis it just me being bad or are the first 100 years slow as balls nowused to be I could get mega engineering by year 60 pretty consistently on any shit build now I'm lucky if I get it before the 2300s
>>2505994I think so, but there's some synergy with Rogue Servitors buffing complex drones. It's not impossible to get 20 or so Astro-Mining Bay districts on a single Arkship for a baseline +100% Resources, and then push that to +300% with Bio Trophy bonuses since they're considered Complex Drones. Throw in the Arkship situation bonus to efficiency and drone output bonuses and +500% per Arkship looks doable, but if the bonus only applies to the particular arkship, that's not enough to forgo waystations and local production.
>>2506092I gave this a shot and while I think it works, the resource bonus is so low it's only worth it if you're strip mining planets as a genocidal empire. For example, I got three civilian arkships and dedicated around 60,000 pops to mining, making my yields go from 50 to about ~600 or so resources per asteroid without a resource deposit. For those 60k pops, I could've been making roughly 8k energy monthly instead, without having to move the arkship at all.I did try planetary reprocessing on a planet with +6 resources and got about 50k resources, but that was in exchange for permanently damaging the planet and applying the -75% resources from it for 200 years. Sadly, it's not a big enough debuff to be used offensively over just invading someone but the penalty is too severe relative to the resource value to be worth it compared to just making resources in the traditional way. It's a step away from just using a planet cracker on something.The whole resource harvesting thing with logistic ships seems like paradox had a decent idea but had no clue how to implement it.
>>2506285Some systems can end up having fuckhuge deposits so doing a harvest is worth it, plus if something goes wrong and you lose all your waystations having it as an emergency option is good.
>>2506285Couldn't agree more. Hell, the whole nomad part of the nomad experience feels lacking since you're always better just parking somewhere and siphoning.
>>2506570I think it'd have been better if the intended gameplay for nomads was to deploy your arkship in a system for a few years to fully deplete the place. Make it so that you get a big monthly income from it, but every celestial body accrues a stacking debuff from overharvesting until its basically worthless. The longer you stay in a system, the less resources you get and the longer it takes for it to recharge, so you can stay for a year or two and get a good yield or you can stay until you've stripped out basically everything.Waystations feel like they should be a long term bank for a system, something you covertly plop down or have to negotiate rights to do per system, but the way they work you just spam them like a normal empire and basically collect stuff on top of what the normal empires do. It's like in my current game, I have 180 waystations in a giant chain with a logistics hub on one end that an arkship sits on, doesn't have to move at all and it collects several thousand minerals and other resources just parked where it's at. No reason to travel around.It sounds silly, but my big complaint with nomads is they don't hit a nice middle ground on their nomadic gameplay: Early on, they're basically locusts ripping up everything they can get their hands on, lategame they're no different than a settled empire and just use waystations and local production to keep going. Operational reserves should be split out to minerals and energy and there should be a much bigger focus on constantly securing enough minerals to keep your ships running, and that's where the system mining is needed.
Do nomads ever get military ships that can retreat or no? That's a rather substantial downside to me.
I HATE WORMHOLESI HATE WORMHOLESI HATE WORMHOLESAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Resource caps are just way too low. I've got the majority of my empire filled with silos and I can still only store ~800,000 consumer goods for my Obsessive Directive build.
>>2506883then change the fucking species living standard to one that burns more consumer good and switch to fucking military economy!
>>2506905I'm a robot, I don't even use the consumer goods. I just throw them on a random planet every 10 years and get Unity or Research for them. But it's almost at the point where I can't complete the situation because I literally don't have the stockpile space to hold them all.
Look mate, the quota must be reached. If the quota for consumer goods isn't met, bad things happen. You ever seen Dr. Jakyl, Mr. Hyde? Well, if I don't meet the quota, it's like that, only I turn into Skynet instead. At that point, I NEED to throw organics into the reprocessor to make more paper clips, and it doesn't matter that said organics are an insignificant boost to production. The galaxy WILL be made of paper clips, do you understand?The only way to stop this from happening is to let me hit my quota on consumer goods. So please understand, conquering those fallen empires for their shrinkspace depots was the only way. It was ordained from creation that it would happen. Please stand aside.
>cyborgs are broken againfor fucks sake
>>2506634The more I play on nomads, the more I feel like the systems are half baked.Like, there's three arkship types, civilian, science, and military. Military is pretty cool early on, it gets extra weapon slots and a small rate of fire bonus, plus it costs no naval capacity. It's essentially tacking on another 2000 fleet power to your starting fleet at the start of the game. It's still useful later, but less so because you don't really want to put your colonies on the front line if you don't have to since losing a fight means it's out for the duration of the war and will likely wind up being destroyed in a status quo if you can recover it. Science arkships are likewise useful at the start because of the sensor range bonus and still stay useful late game since they have a slightly better chance to turn up deposits with deep scan spamming.Civilian arkships are totally useless because the harvesting bonus is absolutely tiny and the bonus to operational reserves is fairly worthless. Like at no point past early game are your reserves going to fluctuate, once you put down a few waystations and build a few generators, you're going to be sitting at high strategic reserves and never dipping down.The strategic reserve situation is pretty crap too. Because it's trivial to manage, it's essentially a permanent +50% complex drone efficiency for arkships. Seeing how every district on an arkship already gives double the jobs of a planet, that translates into arkships being 3x as job dense as planets are out of the gate, equaling the hive/machine/ecumenopolis worlds. With seven arkships, I'm consuming a total of around 14,000 strategic reserves per month. It'd be impossible to ever harvest enough stuff in the galaxy via the arkship actions to ever float even a fraction of that in the current way things work. The best resource deposits yield 750 resources baseline and take 90 days to harvest, so even if all my arkships did it, that's still only ~1750/month.
>>2507081The operational resources condition also has a nice exploit angle from the other direction if you're a rogue servitor.Normally, you'd want to leave this setting on burn all the time since it's a straight up +50% job efficiency for specialists with no downside (Other than those jobs consuming an extra 50% resources). Going to conserve gives a huge -50% efficiency penalty, but it also gives -50% resource usage from jobs, the largest source of this bonus in the game. With the right traditions, leader traits, etc, you can drop job resource consumption to 0%.Rogue servitors give +1% complex drone job efficiency per 100 pops. When you get a few tens of thousands of bio trophies, it's easy to get something like a +300% bonus to job efficiency. At that point, the -100% job efficiency swing between the burn and conserve approaches is fairly small, leaving you with jobs that just don't consume any resources at this point. Spam all the labs, fabricators, etc, you want, not only are you producing massive quantities of resources, you don't have to waste hardly any drones on energy or food production.The only downside to this is bio trophy pop growth is really slow and you wind up with a lot more empire size from all the bio trophies. Unless you're going with a unity build and getting bonuses to colony ascension, you'll wind up tanking your research and tradition speed to some degree vs a specialized empire.
>start a new game>immediately realize I'm trapped by a fallen empire>got 7 jump points to my name and one 14 size planet for expansion>there's one more planet but it's a holy worldWelp, guess I'm going full on habitats.
Is there any way to cut off bloat like espionage system? >Just ignore it broIt eats resources in the background
I keep getting shit on by the contingency.I can overwhelm their roaming fleet but the 280k stack near their planet is practically untouchable. I send 400k worth of fleetpower in there, barely scratch 10-20k off them and all my fleets get scattered.I don't have the arc emitter that everyone recommends using to deal with this shit. What do? This is supposed to be an easy difficulty too
>>2507231They don't really have any blatant weaknesses like the others do. Arc emitters aren't as good as they used to be due to innate shield/armor hardening now too. Just to make sure though, you did get rid of the sapient combat computers on your ships right?
>>2507239Yeah I chucked them out. I was originally using the left template but swapped to the right hoping more shields and more shield damage would help but honestly I think it's worse.I might just have to sit outside the system until an AI bails me out. One already did with 1 of the 2 contingency planets in my empire but I'm already getting tired of watching 90-180k fleets pop out of a wormhole and go destroying my shit while I chase after them because the 3rd planet happens to be 1 jump away from a natural wormhole straight into my territory
>>2507231Frigate/Torpedo spam, also carriers.
>>2507187Think of the positives you can tech rush without having to spend a single alloy on ships.
>>2507231Like another anon said, if you have the ability make carrier/torpedo battleships, if not, stealth frigates with torpedoes.
>>2507258Last I checked contingency bases have super high cloaking detection. They aren't the grey tempest where you can just send in a single fleet of frigates and forget about it.
>they still haven't changed how the military readiness act works to give some kind of delay so anytime you lose ships in a war you get barraged with diplomatic notifications and penalties
>>2507427>sends you a STRONGLY worded letter about your breach
>>2507231I still play 4.3, so I don't know if it's still the best, but my fleet comp is:-Energy torpedo cruisers as fleet mainstays-A few picket destroyers to intercept missiles/strike craft (10/15 is enough)-A single titan with tracking aura, kinetic artillery and Ancient Saturator Artillery for X slotStack tracking buffs on every ship with Auxiliary Fire-Control or Enigmatic Decoder. Doomstack several such fleets and you'll shred enemy fleets much larger than yours. Battleships are a meme and just a waste of alloys
>>2507248>hanger core>artillery computer>broadside stern>shield biasyour battleships suck shit, spinal mount-artillery-artillery, make a kinetic and energy design and sprinkle in a few carrier-carrier-broadside as well
>>2507492Have you played recently bro?
>>2507495works on my empire
>>2507504Nevermind I actually finished your post. Multiple specialist designs is a good idea yes.
>>2507512It usually isn't.
>>2507478There’s never a reason to build smaller ships. The survivability of ships exponentially increases with size. Battleships > cruisers always.
>>2507690Battleships are too expensive and time-consuming too build, and deal less damage since they can't pack energy torpedoes (the best weapon in the game). Cruisers are the best bang for your buck, as they replaceable, do excellent damage, and won't die immediately to titan weapon AOE unlike frigates. A fleet of cruisers with torpedoes and autocannons will outperform a fleet of battleships with the same naval capacity every timeI tested several fleet and ship comps before reaching this conclusion, so I'm not talking out of my ass
>>2507696Something like this? My rippers are only lvl 2 so I put in gauss cannons and I only have neutron launchers or devastator torpedos Also I could use cloud lightning on battleships. That should be good because of the 100% armour and shield pen right? or will their ships kill me before I get close enough to use it?
>stg still can't build ships for shitkek
neutron launchers were a mistake
>building anything but masses of corvettes with missiles no armor and afterburners
>>2507750As I said in my initial post, you must put energy torpedoes (neutron or zro launchers). Devastators do more damage, but everyone and their mother has point defense in the late game, so you'll do less (or even no) damage with physical torpedoes. Even the starter autocannon has greater DPS than gauss cannons, so you should switch. I found battleships in general not worth it and, as the other anon said, hardening components made penetration weapons less useful. This is my usual build. If you go psionic, obviously you should switch components to their psionic equivalent>>2507894I found corvettes too fragile, specially against crises. I tried the corvette spam against Cetana and my fleets were decimated
>ideologies>It's just another layer of modifiers and stat buffsHow...great.
>>2507894I remember beating my first ga end game crisis using nanite swarmer spam. I love shitting out 8k worth of fleet power in a month or two depending on the amount of shipyards I have.
>>2507750>>2507915There's also the fact that physical torpedoes need to be point blank while energy torpedoes are artillery range.I still prefer battleship fleets though simply because they're less likely to need reinforced. Unless you're bioships in which case yeah just spam cruisers shits broken.
>>2499319early game is the only fun part
designing your own ships is literally cheating since the AI ship designs will always be worse, so you should ignore the entire mechanic. distant worlds taught us this.
>>2507933There were some improvements to automatic design recently but it will still do hilariously retarded things like making an artillery battleship filled with plasma. L slot plasma just needs removed honestly, there is literally no use case for it. Fucking 45–80 range goddamn.
>>2507938and those are exactly the designs your AI "opponents" are using
>>2507933>doing a better job than the ai is cheatingLol no. The Ai also does not build up their planets correctly,doesn't understand diplomacy ,two front wars cause it to sperg out, it sabotages itself in the galactic community,can't properly use the market , its gene modding templates are shit ,it can't use espionage properly ,etc. . Do you deliberately play as bad as the AI when using those mechanics as well? Why not just type observe and watch the AI play at that point?
>>2507979so you only play multiplayer? surely you don't play against AI that bad
>>2507933ship design is the most fun part of the game though, what else is there to fill the void
>>2507917Every single DLC Stellaris outsources to Abrakam (Astral Planes, Galactic Archive, Shadows of the Shroud) follows the same pattern:>boils down to stacking simple modifiers>acts to massively overpower the player because the AI doesn't know how to use/collect them>completely siloed from the rest of the game>completely wrecks game balanceThe gameplay of Willpower will just be a new "aura" system with no real emergent roleplay, where you just add the "lmao I win" tenet to your belief system out of a list of others which are "20% faster first contact, lol".Falls short of what a religion/ideology system should be.
Why do logistics hubs exist? The biggest downside for nomad resource collection is supposed to be the acquisition time, with the resource collection itself being much higher because of it. Once you have logistics hubs avaliable you plant an arkship on that hub and never move it again. Now your wayline connected to absurd resource output is constantly flowing in with zero downtime.
Any good non-standard settings you use? I've never gone past the basics of jacking the crisis strength up and setting AI aggressiveness to high.
>>2508291Probably Paradox panicking at the idea that nomads break down after a certain point of development. After your empire gets too big, it's impossible to sustain it with simple wayline/harvesting actions, you basically require a real empire's level of resource harvesting or you can't function.Being able to build unlimited arkships is pretty dumb. Nomads should have their capitol arkship that's a regular, full size arkship and several smaller, specialized arkships that are roughly equal to mobile habitats. Arkships are essentially size 40 specialized planets when fully upgraded with the sole downside that they require double the empire size. You can build an unlimited amount of them and pile them all in a single system.
>>2508397>Probably Paradox panicking at the idea that nomads break down after a certain point of development. After your empire gets too big, it's impossible to sustain it with simple wayline/harvesting actions, you basically require a real empire's level of resource harvesting or you can't function.Couldn't they just easily fix this by requiring you to keep a few tributaries around to subsidize your empire?
>>2508430Maybe for someone like the khan, but depending on your view of nomads tributaries might not fit, especially for more peaceful types like the default science nomad empire.Ideally, nomads should be, well, nomadic. They should rip resources from a system until the system can no longer sustain their gathering operation and then move on. The capitol arkship should never be in a place where it can indefinitely sustain itself and not have to move. At the very least, it should require logistics ships to go out to the surrounding systems and drag basic resources back.The scarcity should drive conflict and diplomacy for nomads. Eventually, the galaxy gets filled with normal empires and you have no choice but to exploit a system that's already owned by someone. At this point, you either open trade to get the rights to strip mine a system or you do it against their wishes and risk them declaring war on you. Other options like subjugating a terrestrial empire or strategically placing cloaked waystations in low traffic systems should be possible too; for example, a waystation in a good system that's been left alone for 20-30 years should have a massive amount of resources for you to gather, enough to sustain your empire for a few years.Giving nomads different policies on how to exploit resources would help adjust the flavor too. Maybe you have a policy where you just take a sustainable amount of resources from a system for a year or two and move on, and the diplomatic ramifications of doing so without permission are fairly small. Maybe you destructively strip mine a system and ruin its resource output for years for the maximum gains over time. Or perhaps you set up in a system and build your own temporary infrastructure to absorb every last drop, allowing you to remain somewhere for the maximum amount of time but also tying you down to that system for a longer period of time.
>Be machine intelligence>Can't release vassals on my own, but still want some so I can have machine friends for my super cool machine federation with no organics allowed>Can drop a sector's stability low enough to rebel to make them, but it's a slow process with a lot of micromanagement>Later on, can't even do that because my empire has so many stability modifiers I can't get to the threshold for rebellion>Individualist machines can't use a lot of the fun things MIs can, so that's not an option eitherI just want to covert the entire galaxy into machines, is that so much to ask?
>>2508460Don't gestalts have a civic that allows for releasing vassals? Is there no machine variant for it?
>>2508488I think it's hives only, like Offspring Hives or something. Something about MIs envisioned as the tall counterpart to a hivemind's wide. At one point on a test branch, MIs had even harsher penalties for more colonies and systems but reduced ones for pops
One of the surprising things nomads are missing are their own ambition for winning the game. It doesn't make sense for them to win via direct conquest since they don't hold territory and all of the other ambitions except for Defender of the Galaxy require a megastructure which forces them to a single system.I'm surprised there's not a victory condition for uncovering some secrets of the galaxy or something like that, that requires you to travel around to a bunch of different systems and such. Maybe something like uncover wormholes that lead to dead end clusters like the l-clustter and deal with whatever shows up from it, or a reverse invasion against the Unbidden. Right now when you play as a nomad, you don't really have a default victory condition except for score.
why is population growth such a ballbusting limiter on literally everythingfuck already you pricks
>>2508759just one more pop rework bro and it'll finally be fixed
>>2508759It's pretty frustrating that the best empires are always the ones that can rush pops out quicker. It's kind of like science in that regard, almost no empire can forgo pumping science early if it wants to remain competitive.Going from a gestalt that starts with pop assembly to an individualist that has to grow pops is awful. I was excited for the rework because I thought pop growth was finally going to make it acceptable to have very few planets and still get pops at a decent speed, but it's definitely not the case--it's always better to have as many planets as you can get so you get pops faster.
