Paradox Grand Strat meets Sci-Fi 4X; Boners Explode

Grazyn · Post by **Grazyn** » Sat May 21, 2016 9:17 am #178341

Bottom post of the previous page:

Yeah that's the race I'm using for my fanatic collectivist mushrooms

Incomptinence · Sat May 21, 2016 9:28 am

Well shit gonna need to change theme then if you are popping up at the game.

Grazyn · Post by **Grazyn** » Sat May 21, 2016 9:38 am #178344

nah I'm using them in single. Can't make it tonight. I just wish they applied the mushroom infestation overlay to other species as well

Incomptinence · Sat May 21, 2016 9:47 am

Well I might be a noodle instead eh. Good to have options.

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Sat May 21, 2016 3:33 pm #178388

If you guys are playing today I can totally join in!

It's a long weekend, too, so if it spills over to Sunday and Monday I should be good.

dezzmont · Post by **dezzmont** » Sat May 21, 2016 4:27 pm #178397

I am down to give it a go.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Sat May 21, 2016 5:47 pm #178434

People want another bigass multiplayer game tonight? Fresh start again?

We want to do the FRIENDERATION of cooperation vs AI's, no AI's pvp mania, or just a regular ol' game?

Skorvold · Post by **Skorvold** » Sat May 21, 2016 6:01 pm #178441

I'm gonna have to bail.

starmute · Post by **starmute** » Sat May 21, 2016 8:10 pm #178471

T MINUS 30 TO LAUNCH

Also I can't stop playing this damn game. I love that just when I'm about to feel like I've conquered it all, the late game catches up.

starmute · Post by **starmute** » Sat May 21, 2016 8:12 pm #178472

An0n3 wrote:People want another bigass multiplayer game tonight? Fresh start again?

We want to do the FRIENDERATION of cooperation vs AI's, no AI's pvp mania, or just a regular ol' game?

Regular game. We all know your FURFRIENDERATION is up to no good. Though we should have some advanced AI starts. Considering how you were steam rolling them last round.

Derpu · Post by **Derpu** » Sat May 21, 2016 8:14 pm #178474

And I still don't know what to play. Do you guys roleplay your ethics, or...?

ColonicAcid · Post by **ColonicAcid** » Sat May 21, 2016 8:23 pm #178476

rollll call.

srifenbyxp · Post by **srifenbyxp** » Sat May 21, 2016 8:25 pm #178477

ColonicAcid · Post by **ColonicAcid** » Sat May 21, 2016 8:29 pm #178478

teamspeak.

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Sat May 21, 2016 8:33 pm #178480

Also add me http://steamcommunity.com/id/icaruswong/

Derpu · Post by **Derpu** » Sat May 21, 2016 8:36 pm #178481

I'm up. Where and how?

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198021776748/
I guess.

ColonicAcid · Post by **ColonicAcid** » Sat May 21, 2016 8:40 pm #178483

were waiting for anyone to finish his payday 2 game, get in here meanwhile:

109.169.56.53:11247

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Sun May 22, 2016 4:16 am #178545

Fucking AI-Controlled player empires, man.

>Alliance with Tedward and Dezz
>Vassalize the shit out of one of our neighbors
>We break off for dinner
>Come back, my empire decided to leave the alliance, but now I can't get back in because their AI won't let me
>Don't want to attack weakened Colonic's empire while he was away
>Colonic-bot joins my former alliance, now a federation
>Get invaded from all sides by members of the federation, 5v1

I will make no more promises about not invading your empire after you've left.

Incomptinence · Sun May 22, 2016 4:19 am

Man the midgame really slows to a crawl.

That and my beloved anomalies are all gone fuck why isn't this shit on a per player bases at least the ones that don't boost tile output. MUH ARTIFACTS!

Man east boys was huge so many vassals even I had one!

starmute · Post by **starmute** » Sun May 22, 2016 4:25 am #178551

I got wrecked early game. Damn those fallen empires.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Sun May 22, 2016 4:26 am #178552

East Syde Boiz vassalized everyone on the east end of the universe. Pretty ridiculous.

RIP Ikky. RIP Mute. Gone but not forgotten. Actually neither of you are gone, you're both still in the game, just lost some ground.

Zellion · Post by **Zellion** » Sun May 22, 2016 4:46 pm #178669

This game is great. I didn't think I would be having so much fun with it. Fanatic materialist xenophile master race

starmute · Post by **starmute** » Sun May 22, 2016 8:41 pm #178726

I love it. I'm not that good. I love it though.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Sun May 22, 2016 8:52 pm #178730

Materialists bonuses to research really don't do much until mid/late game. I'm beginning to rethink them vs. Spiritualist.

At best materialist is a +10% research output (NOT RESEARCH SPEED), which is nice to have but only comes into play when you've already got a fair amount of research output. It doesn't help you rush anything early game.

Spiritualist gives at best a +10% happiness to all pops with that ethos, which is AMAZING. I think I've said enough on why happy pops are so powerful.

Materialist DOES give you access to the Despotic Hegemony government type, which seems to be their best pick. Now you get a +5% base increase to research SPEED, and a bonus to survey speed which will help a lot in getting out there faster in the early game. Depending on your drive type this can be really good (go further faster, see more of the universe before your opponent does) or neat but not top-tier (can't afford to throw down so many warp stations early game limits the power of faster surveys with wormhole drive)

Spiritualist has a bit of a sneaky pick here for governance I don't think I've seen anyone use: Divine Mandate. This gives you a +50% slavery tolerance empire wide. Combine with just one level in Collectivist or Xenophobe and you have 100% tolerance for enslaving other races (maybe your own, too) while still having one more ethos point to throw at something like Militarist for more bonuses to goin' to war. Even if you don't pick those ethos, your +5/+10% happiness on your loyal pops + 50% more tolerance for slavery means your guys at least shouldn't all up and go on strike and burn your cities down if you start slaving.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Sun May 22, 2016 8:57 pm #178732

I think we're finding out slavery is really not that great of a strategy vs. straight-up conquering and slowly converting them to your way of life. You do get immediate stability on the planets you take over, and you have the potential to use slave armies down the road, which are fuckin' GREAT.

It takes a ton of micromanagement to do right, though, as you'll want to export slaves off of a planet when taking it and import some of your own loyalists prettymuch immediately to replace anyone who was working research facilities.

If done right you do end up ahead (especially if you're playing as a Despotic Empire for the increased outputs) but there's still the unknown risk of Slave Rebellions we haven't had to deal with yet, as well as the extra political stumbling block of other races not liking you for keeping other races enslaved.

vs.

Playing a warm fuzzy happy race that just wants to bring you closer for hugs. Smashing all of someone's shit and then immediately after a war replacing it and adding some happiness structures can lead to a completely satisfied and integrated empire in under a year. Just having charismatic pops allows you to import your own loyalist faction onto a planet and suddenly everyone is happier. Your own pops become happiness generators for aliums. It's fucking great.

I'm kinda repeating myself but this is why happiness is so great, having it for your own empire and giving it to others allows you to blatantly mistreat everyone without any repercussions. It means when I conquer another empire I just slam a football stadium down on each planet, sector them off, and then immediately move on to conquering the next guy. They will grumble for a bit, I will see some factions form and demand liberation, but in a few months they wont give a fuck anymore and will just go back to happily producing resources for me. Meanwhile I've gobbled up three more of their neighbors. More so than any other approach I've found that happiness is the key to just rushing the entire table and snowballing out of control.

Derpu · Post by **Derpu** » Sun May 22, 2016 9:06 pm #178733

But why? I understand spiritualists get a little worse events early game than other factions but, this does not seem reasonable to me at all.

starmute · Post by **starmute** » Sun May 22, 2016 9:12 pm #178738

Direct democracy can go with anything. You can pick it with almost any Ethos. You must be a spiritalist to go theocratic.

starmute · Post by **starmute** » Sun May 22, 2016 9:14 pm #178739

An0n3 wrote:warm fuzzy happy race

NO MORE NO MOREEEEEEE

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Sun May 22, 2016 9:15 pm #178740

Direct Democracy is like a fall-back government type in this game nobody should ever use.
It's objectively the worst because everyone, no matter what, can use it.

starmute wrote:
An0n3 wrote:warm fuzzy happy race
NO MORE NO MOREEEEEEE

ACCEPT THE MIGRATION REQUEST

Incomptinence · Sun May 22, 2016 9:37 pm

Probably the best thing about materialist compared to spiritualist is if you can make the materialists happy they perform better overall in their field but eh.

anon3 wrote:ACCEPT THE MIGRATION REQUEST

B-but you rejected mine!

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Sun May 22, 2016 10:00 pm #178758

Different meme race.

ColonicAcid · Sun May 22, 2016 10:13 pm

DECLINE ALL MIGRATION REQUESTS

DO NOT RESPOND TO MIGRATION REQUESTS

REPORT ALL MIGRATION REQUESTS.

dezzmont · Post by **dezzmont** » Sun May 22, 2016 11:29 pm #178788

Spritualist is good. A bonus to how happy your race is can be read as a bonus to habitability, and all of the spiritualist governments are rather good, encouraging a stronger early game through as well as extending how long you can take advantage of early game efficiency.

I still think materialists are better though. They have some of the best events in the game, some ridiculous government options, and a better long term bonus. Spiritualists suffer greatly due to how ethics divergence currently works, as its important to maintain across the empire, while materialists essentially don't care, because the bonus from materialism only matters for a few of your pops. As the game goes on more and more of your research income is going to be from your populations, where as the spiritualist boosts become less and less relevant.

Also, spiritualists are locked out of robots, which are an extremely useful early game tech that allow you to rapidly bootstrap your empire both due to increased mineral gain and the increased rate at which you can toss down planetary administrations, both of which dramatically speed up colony development and allow you to transfer your colony to a sector sooner.

The core bonus helps out a lot if you plan to be agressive though, as it allows you to incorporate aliens and hold them in core planets for longer before distributing planets to sectors. It also helps out a lot if you colonize a lot of big planets early and can't realistically get them set up before you are ready to sectorize them to colonize more. It also combos crazy well with being a individualist, as individualist governments can sprawl out super huge super easily, though I think that materialist-individualist combos better.

The only ethic that is currently so broken as to be non-functional is xenophobic. The way its set up directly punishes you in every way, you literally don't gain anything from being xenophobic as it doesn't even properly make alien slaves acceptable to your population, they still get unhappy.

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Sun May 22, 2016 11:36 pm #178789

Playing my first single player game still, and I finished a questline for Spiritualists and it gave me the option to upgrade one Spiritualist ethos to a Fanatic Spiritualist

Fucking awesome, right?

Unfortunately the game bugged out when I selected the option, I didn't get the reward, and the quest is just sitting at the top of the situation log with 3/3 completion status. Wonderfucking full

Also the Warscore system is bizarre. I have a pretty expansionistic empire, but when an enemy federation declared war on me I struggled a bit to deal with their guerrila tactics to slowly whittle away my spaceports and mining stations.

Each station they took counted as a "Space battle victory" and gave them +2 warscore each. For every one of my many mining stations.

I get my shit together and wreck their fleets and occupy half their planets. What are they worth? +5 to +8 each.

So even though they don't have a fleet anymore, and they can barely produce anything because of occupation, my warscore is at -70% because of how fucked the points are awarded.

Well... the bright side is that since this war is never going to end I can go full Autocracy on my people and have that permanent -30% build cost and time due to war economy.

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Sun May 22, 2016 11:37 pm #178790

Also Hyperlanes are really fucking annoying to deal with. It sucks being restricted by artificial boundaries, and I'm getting pretty sick of the guerrilla-enabling wormhole stations.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Sun May 22, 2016 11:51 pm #178793

Yep. I actually like that about the way the warscore works since it gives you an incentive to split your fleet up into a bunch of different attack missions and give them a bunch of different targets of opportunity.

One giant space battle between all your forces doesn't often reward either side with much in the way of points, whereas a bunch of tactical strikes against targets like wormhole stations, mining stations, research stations, and other things nobody typically defends can send your score skyrocketing to completion very quickly.

This is why I wish warscore could be forced on other players as well as the AI. You should have the option of refusing demands less than your score (it's a threat, cede this much now before I fuck your shit up even more than these goals and still claim them) but anything either side accumulates the points for they should be able to cash out and immediately end the war no matter what the defender or belligerents want.

starmute · Post by **starmute** » Mon May 23, 2016 12:46 am #178810

The game will be patched soon enough. Enjoy the corvette spam for now : D

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Mon May 23, 2016 12:58 am #178815

As much as I would want to split my navy up for defense purposes, this fleet that's harrassing me is a 12k federation deathblob, when the total of my navy is only 8k

I only managed to take them out by waiting until they got split up and took them out one by one. I plan to build FTL-inhibitors in my important stations next time so I have more time to respond with my fleet. That, and launching my own campaigns against their worlds simultaneously.

The war's lasted 20 years so far, and I'm slowly gaining ground, largely due to my ridiculous 200/mo mineral production and 40% military production discounts.

Incomptinence · Mon May 23, 2016 7:43 am

How about next game we STEP IT UP a speed step and hmmm here's a mod to allow all the crises to happen in the same game.

Oh and anon's all advanced start AIs idea but um maybe not max numbers.

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Mon May 23, 2016 8:53 am #178985

It was a painful 50-year learning experience, but I've found that after the AI's initial invasion, they're really dumb in a war. After a while the AI fleets got smaller and smaller until they were never more than 2k each, and they're not coordinated whatsoever. By the end, it was only the Jol-Nar who was actually sending anything at me. I built a circle of fortresses around my border systems and put a 2k fleet in each of them. Teching up my Hyperspace engines made hyperlanes almost bearable, too. Then I raised a 4k forward fleet to pretty much stomp on the Jol-Nar's allies to my south until I vassalized both the Commonwealth and Sovereignty. Now everyone on the west side is on good terms with me.

After not even a brief moment of reprieve the Barony of Letnev declared war on me, and he leads a Federation with the neighbouring Star Combine, which is a far more formidable fleet than the last federation that challenged me. I think I should be fine though, so long as the Clan of Saar to the southeast doesn't also decide to declare war on me (He and I are rivals). Unlike the last war, this time my enemies have multiple wars going on with other people. Going to try a similar strategy and tank their initial wave with fortresses and fleets before counterattacking. Hopefully this war won't take as long as the last.

Derpu · Post by **Derpu** » Mon May 23, 2016 12:13 pm #179027

starmute wrote:Direct democracy can go with anything. You can pick it with almost any Ethos. You must be a spiritalist to go theocratic.

You're wrong. Direct Democracy is a materialist-only government. Indirect Democracy, however, can go with anything.
Right now, there's no reason to ever pick it, though.

DemonFiren · Post by **DemonFiren** » Mon May 23, 2016 4:24 pm #179116

>MUH FREEDOMS not a reason

Found the commie.

Derpu · Post by **Derpu** » Mon May 23, 2016 4:30 pm #179117

Shit, we've been had! Into the collectivist bunker!

srifenbyxp · Post by **srifenbyxp** » Mon May 23, 2016 5:45 pm #179133

How did the dick girl coalition fair once I left? I was in the top right section of the map far away from everybody with the exception of being next to some warm fuzzy love fagget. I had a bad start and could had planted 7 planets if it wasn't for a ancient civ and a fallen empires holy site.

Also please for the love of god make the default speed Fast or even better fastest, normal speed is way to dam slow.

ONLY NORMIES PLAY ON NORMAL SPEED ANON, AND YOUR STARTING TO LOOK LIKE A NORMIE TO ME

dezzmont · Post by **dezzmont** » Mon May 23, 2016 6:11 pm #179140

Fastest is too fast. You would want to cruise at fast once people get set up with their initial empire, and normal for times where precision is needed.

The alternative is people pausing every 5 seconds.

THE MIGHTY GALVATRON · Mon May 23, 2016 6:54 pm

Fastest is the speed I normally play at, I'll go to slower speeds if I'm busy customizing ships. But it wouldn't be ideal to play multiplayer at fastest, you'd have to blaze through reading events and managing multiple fleet battles would get overwhelming for some.

Xhagi · Post by **Xhagi** » Mon May 23, 2016 8:52 pm #179202

This fucking game sometimes man.

Derpu · Post by **Derpu** » Mon May 23, 2016 9:08 pm #179207

hyperlanes 4 fgt

ColonicAcid · Post by **ColonicAcid** » Mon May 23, 2016 9:44 pm #179233

warp drive or warp this dick into ur ass

ThanatosRa · Post by **ThanatosRa** » Mon May 23, 2016 9:57 pm #179246

Wormholes are hard to get used to, but I like them.

ColonicAcid · Mon May 23, 2016 10:03 pm

people who use wormholes also drive whilst under the influence and have sex with close relations

go green go warp drive