Stellaris - 4X/Grand Strategy Hybrid from Paradox

[Max_the_Immortal]

My empire has expanded and matured a fair bit. I’ve decided to try to take on a fallen empire. The Bavi Shard is a small military isolationist empire confined to two ringworlds (one of which is mostly broken). This is largely an excuse to “use up” my obsolete ships; I don’t want to keep upgrading all those destroyers and cruisers I built, and I may as well put them to good use rather than simply disbanding them. I massed my old fleet (by old I mean the battleships are equipped with particle lances rather than the newer tachyon lances and focused arc emitters) along their borders. 514 command points, with a total strength of about 64k.

I had these ships divided into four smaller fleets so some could respond to Bavi incursions. It turns out that wasn’t very helpful. They did briefly send some ships into my territory, but they recalled them to try to repel my assault. A massive space battle has raged in the Eternal Bastion system, above the skies of a ruined ringworld, for the better part of a year. My four old fleets have been whittled down to about 25k strength. They’ve given at least as well as they’ve gotten, though. New Bavi reinforcements have joined the fray, so I’ve deployed my shiny new state of the art battleships to the front. They’ll arrive in a few weeks.

In other news, the synthetics in my empire are starting to get uppity. I haven’t build very many of them, but I also haven’t given them any rights, either. I’ve colonized a tomb work I intent to populate with synths just to see if that helps that particular storyline along.

[Grey]

Stellaris Dev Diary #33 - The Maiden Voyage

Goes into plans for the next few months, developer views on mid-game, maps, and all sorts of things. Looks like they plan to support Stellaris in the usual Paradox manner.

[Pleonast]

@Max_the_Immortal

Does anyone know where to alter the maximum amount of war demands? I can’t find it, even though I suspect that it’s right under my nose.

I don’t know off the top of my head, but I’ll poke around when I get a chance. It might be hard-coded, though. War score maxxing out at 100 seems to be very baked-into their engine.

[Grey]

EU4’s war score mechanic topped out at 100% but persistent high levels (for the losing side) tended to drive unhappiness through the roof, killing productivity and hiking rebellion risk. I haven’t played through far enough to run into a similar situation in Stellaris but I can see where the hooks could go if they aren’t there now.

[Max_the_Immortal]

I’ve noticed that in choosing my society’s ethos, I completely missed out on the techs for buildings that improve happiness. Individualists, pacifists, xenophobes, and even militarists can eventually get buildings that increase happiness. My people are collectivists and fanatic materialists. Everything’s amazing, but nobody’s happy.

[Max_the_Immortal]

My first game started totally lagging out. Probably because I was playing with a very large galaxy. I started a new game with a medium galaxy. I’m also trying a few different things. I’m using wormhole FTL, and it’s pretty spiffy. I’m also going spiritual/militarist/xenophobe, in large part because I wanted some of those happiness-boosting buildings to appear. Also, an issue with fanatic materialists is that they have a very low chance of ever getting the Psionic Theory tech to become available (they pretty much have to recruit a leader with that specialty). This is important because it’s the start of a four-tech chain that culminates in the Psi Jump Drive tech; I felt like I was locked out of researching it. Although I guess that having wormhole-based FTL can eventually lead to regular jump drives, so it’s a bit redundant. Still, either should be so much better than warp. I want to try it out.

It’s been interesting so far. I have two types of neighbors: Purifying zealots (the kind that gives -1000 to relations), and friendly birds. Seriously, there are three or four avian pro-democracy pro-federation types close to my empire. I’m at war with one of the zealot races. They use hyperspace, so it’s kind of fun to try to outflank them. I’m building lots of corvettes, but I plan to switch to battleships in due time.

[Johnny_Bravo]

After a lot of false starts (I fell into a trap of restarting over and over again to get a “good” opening hand), I finally forced myself to accept my lot. The Straight Dope Intergalactic Cartel (“For a Doper Galaxy”) started pretty strong, but a bunch of space molluscs hedged us out to the west and north, the edge of the map was to the east, and we ended up with a dead zone of space to the south that cut off exploration in that direction.

Luckily, the space molluscs were also a bunch of jerks. After secretly building a flotilla of destroyers, Supreme Doper Cecilia Zotti declared war. We had two war goals - the first was to outright annex the planet to the northwest that was blocking our expansion. The other was demanding full vassalage of the space mollusc empire.

Things went well. Despite the game telling me that we had equivalent fleets, they were unable to put up any kind of a fight. The only problem is that the newly formed Mollusc Liberation Front is increasingly difficult to deal with, especially on the annexed planet. They keep blowing up buildings. The vassal state isn’t causing direct problems, but I made the mistake of clicking the “integrate into society” button a few times when there was no good reason to right after the war and flushed a few hundred influence down the drain. Oy. Either way, I’m not sure how I’m going to keep them from eventually rising up and demanding independence again.

This is worse than the time I was playing as a successfully reconquista’d Spain in EUIV and managed to diplomatically unite with England, causing all that Catholic/Protestant fuss. Turns out Dopers and Space Escargot do not like one another.

[Grey]

That’s it! I’m starting over (again) as the Straight Dope Lighthouse Society and we’ll be libertarian intelligent squids.

[Boozahol_Squid_P.I]

@Grey

That’s it! I’m starting over (again) as the Straight Dope Lighthouse Society and we’ll be libertarian intelligent squids.

You called?

[Pleonast]

They’ve released the third hot-fix. And are intending a beta of the first real patch about a week from now. They’re definitely burning a lot of dev time on this.

@Pleonast

@Max_the_Immortal

Does anyone know where to alter the maximum amount of war demands? I can’t find it, even though I suspect that it’s right under my nose.

I don’t know off the top of my head, but I’ll poke around when I get a chance. It might be hard-coded, though. War score maxxing out at 100 seems to be very baked-into their engine.

After poking around, it seems the 100% max war-score is hard-coded. So there’s no direct way to change it with a mod.

However, I think it’s possible to rescale many other war-score values. For example, demands for planets could be 1/10th of the vanilla values, while winning battles and capturing territory could also be 1/10th of the vanilla values. So it’d be fair, just on a different scale.

That part is straight-forward enough. Just do a search in the common folder for “score”. The tricky part is if any events or other mechanics depend on war score, and if it’s hard-coded or accessible to modding. I don’t know.

[mlees]

@Pleonast

That part is straight-forward enough. Just do a search in the common folder for “score”. The tricky part is if any events or other mechanics depend on war score, and if it’s hard-coded or accessible to modding. I don’t know.

I think population happiness gets affected by war score.

I got DoW’ed by a much larger (in terms of reported population and fleet size) empire, and the war score started out at -54%. An event then triggered, giving me some static buff/debuff for “losing a defensive war”. I don’t recall what the modifiers actually were… I was busy scrambling my fleet around, reacting to the enemy raids popping up.

I had a single 4k fleet, and the enemy was raiding with two or three 2k fleets. (I was regular warp tech, they were hyperspace.) I managed to pin one enemy fleet down (it went deeper into a system to whack one of my planetary space stations), and I managed to kill enough ships to trigger the enemy to bug out [sic]. The war score went to near zero (don’t know why it was such a big jump), and the game triggered an event to remove the “losing the war” modifier.

[Pleonast]

The beta of the first big patch (codename Clarke) is available now.

[Kinthalis]

Gonna jump in a new game. Incidentally, I picked up a new 21:9 monitor… and holy cow, strategy games like this one really shine.

[Der_Trihs]

@mlees

I got DoW’ed by a much larger (in terms of reported population and fleet size) empire, and the war score started out at -54%. An event then triggered, giving me some static buff/debuff for “losing a defensive war”.

That might be because of how your budget policy is set; some governments use different war economy settings by default (but you can change them in the policy tab).

[AndrewL]

I’ve been running into some really annoying surprises in my games.

First game, I was playing as charming xenophile mushroom people. All of my neighbors liked me, except for this one asshole empire next door. I was invited to join an alliance with multiple other races, the furthest being halfway around the galaxy. Meanwhile, my asshole neighbor joined an alliance with several other like-minded empires off in the distance.

Eventually, war broke out. I don’t know who started it or over what, I just know that we were suddenly at war. I assembled a war fleet and with the help of some allies stomped by asshole neighbor flat. Destroyed all his ships, stations, and shipyards, and blockaded his planets. Along with the fighting elsewhere this got the war score high enough to end the war. Cool.

Peace happened. Then, very soon after, war broke out again. This time I know it was due to someone else in the enemy alliance declaring war against one of my allies. I got a notification that I needed to fill out the “war demands” screen, but then when I tried to do so it told me that I couldn’t set demands because I wasn’t the primary defended in the war. Ok then, why did I even get the notification in the first place? So I reassembled my war fleet and went to stomp my neighbor flat again. Problem was, he had barely started rebuilding after the last war, so there wasn’t much for me to destroy. The only thing I could do to get the war score up was to blockade his planets. Which pissed everyone off, since there’s no option to blockade planets without bombarding them, and bombarding planets (even on the lightest bombardment setting) causes diplomatic penalties and citizen unhappiness. Eventually my own planets started revolting due to unhappy citizens, and yet I couldn’t get the war score high enough to end the war. I think this mechanic is badly broken, especially in wars between alliances.

Started a new game. This time as repugnant, adaptable, materialist spiders. Custom start with a large galaxy and low number of civilizations. I wanted to spend a long time exploring and colonizing. I grabbed every tech and bonus I could get for boosting habitability so I could try to colonize as many worlds as possible.

I discovered that when there are few developed civilizations, you come across a lot of pre-FTL civilizations instead. I’ve been building observation posts, and when I find one with ethics compatible with mine, enlightening them and then eventually integrating them into my empire. Annoyingly, the inhabitants of the integrated planets all have the “recently conquered” happiness penalty. Recently conquered? They’d still be living in mud huts if it wasn’t for me, you think they’d show some gratitude.

Strangely, most of the races I’ve enlightened and given FTL technology are using wormholes. I’m not using wormhole-based FTL. Where did they get that technology? Even more strangely, once I fully integrate them, the ships turned out by their factories use the same conventional warp drive I’m using, leaving a scattering of useless wormhole-based ships from the time they were first enlightened and not yet fully integrated.

I integrated one race that prefers arctic worlds. My own race prefers desert worlds, and I was thinking that after I fully integrated them I’d be able to build colony ships for that race and use them to colonize some nice arctic worlds I wanted. Annoyingly, even after building a colony ship on an arctic world crewed by arctic-preferring creatures I still can’t colonize arctic worlds, because I don’t have the appropriate technology researched.

And that’s when I learned that the rate of technological development is partially controlled by how many worlds you have. The more your total galactic population, the slower research goes. Which means that those 50 or so colonies I created on desert, arid, and tropical worlds across the galaxy are the reason my scientists are dying of old age before they can develop new technologies. Why is this game mechanic even in place?

[SenorBeef]

If there wasn’t an expansion penalty for research, the fastest expanding empire would run away with the game every time. It would make any strategy other than balls to the wall expansion unviable.

[smiling_bandit]

I finally broke down and got this.

It’s a game where you can play The Galactic Empire (well… a very early one), or the Federation, or the Imperium of Man, or pretty much anything else you can imagine. That part is great. There’s countless options to try, although some of them don’t change much. The science model feels cluttered. They should just cut the “science inflation” effect from population, but not allow players to spam labs everywhere. Labs and institutes and so forth should be rare and meaningful.

There’s a number of flaws and minor issues which collectively hinder the game, though.

[nightshadea]

ill wait til the platinum ed comes out that way its mostly fixed

[Der_Trihs]

@AndrewL

And that’s when I learned that the rate of technological development is partially controlled by how many worlds you have. The more your total galactic population, the slower research goes. Which means that those 50 or so colonies I created on desert, arid, and tropical worlds across the galaxy are the reason my scientists are dying of old age before they can develop new technologies. Why is this game mechanic even in place?

In order to keep large empires from completely technologically outpacing small ones.

It’s also partly how many planets you have, and what your population is.

Technology costs now increase by +10% per owned planet (up from +0%) and by +1% per Pop (down from +2%)

[Pleonast]

@AndrewL

I discovered that when there are few developed civilizations, you come across a lot of pre-FTL civilizations instead. I’ve been building observation posts, and when I find one with ethics compatible with mine, enlightening them and then eventually integrating them into my empire. Annoyingly, the inhabitants of the integrated planets all have the “recently conquered” happiness penalty. Recently conquered? They’d still be living in mud huts if it wasn’t for me, you think they’d show some gratitude.

The devs have stated that’s a bug. The fix is in the pipeline.

@AndrewL

I integrated one race that prefers arctic worlds. My own race prefers desert worlds, and I was thinking that after I fully integrated them I’d be able to build colony ships for that race and use them to colonize some nice arctic worlds I wanted. Annoyingly, even after building a colony ship on an arctic world crewed by arctic-preferring creatures I still can’t colonize arctic worlds, because I don’t have the appropriate technology researched.

Yeah, that surprised me too. They need to up the chance of getting the card for that technology once there’s a species in your empire that is adapted for that climate.

@smiling_bandit

I finally broke down and got this.

It’s a game where you can play The Galactic Empire (well… a very early one), or the Federation, or the Imperium of Man, or pretty much anything else you can imagine. That part is great. There’s countless options to try, although some of them don’t change much. The science model feels cluttered. They should just cut the “science inflation” effect from population, but not allow players to spam labs everywhere. Labs and institutes and so forth should be rare and meaningful.

There’s a number of flaws and minor issues which collectively hinder the game, though.

No doubt.

The game is stable now, but there’s a lot of tweaking they need to do. I’m having fun playing, but I can see many places they need to fill out the game. Diplomacy is really lacking at the moment, coming from CK and EU.

@nightshadea

ill wait til the platinum ed comes out that way its mostly fixed

You’ll be waiting a long time. Paradox doesn’t do “editions”. They release a base game, and then have regular updates. They’re never boxed together. The best you can do is wait for a sale, which they have every so often, and get discounts on whatever DLCs (or base games) you want.

And “mostly fixed”, for Paradox only lasts until the next DLC is released. Then you’ll get a whole new mess of balance bugs. They always fix their games, but the release-to-bug-fix-to-release-again cycle is a roller coaster.