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

[Ricotez]

Bottom post of the previous page:

I really really really think they should've released it under Early Access. I mean, it's Paradox Interactive, we're used to it, and we know from past experience that they will fix everything eventually and it'll become a truly great game, but they could at least admit that the first month of the game is essentially a large scale bug test.

[Grazyn]

Clarke beta out

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/in ... ts.937741/

[Fistofbrick]

So the AI Uprising is fairly underwhelming.

>Rebellion happens
>Get told I'm next in line for death
>2k fleet and 7k fleet appear at one of my edge colonies that's still being set up
>Nuke it off the map, my assault fleet finally finishes upgrading and goes to slap their shit
>No new attacks for a while
>My robot pops uprise
>"OH SHI- Wait what"
>Grand total of 3 pops rise up, immediately get their shit slapped by my organics because Resilient
>This happens

Spoiler:

[Timbrewolf]

Fanatic Xenophobe
* Rivalries now provide 50% more Influence

Xenophobe
* Rivalries now provide 25% more Influence

That's a nice buff

Fanatic Individualist
* Pops are now more unhappy in collectivist empires
* No longer have increased ethics divergence

Individualist
* Pops are now more unhappy in collectivist empires
* No longer have increased ethics divergence

That's a nice buff

Fanatic Pacifist
* Pops are now more unhappy in militarist empires
* No longer increases Food output, but rather reduces growth needed for a new Pop by 30%

Pacifist
* Pops are now more unhappy in militarist empires
* No longer increases Food output, but rather reduces growth needed for a new Pop by 15%

1463951985171.jpg (38.64 KiB) Viewed 16150 times

[Ikarrus]

That's a big patch.

Every one of the balance changes sound good to me, especially the changes to ethos. There's an actual reason to take Xenophobe now. Not sure if it's enough.

>Military maintenance cost was supposed to be -25% discount instead of +75% extra.

Well that explains why each of my stations cost me 20 energy per month.

[Ricotez]

Fanatic Pacifist
* Pops are now more unhappy in militarist empires
* No longer increases Food output, but rather reduces growth needed for a new Pop by 30%

Pacifist
* Pops are now more unhappy in militarist empires
* No longer increases Food output, but rather reduces growth needed for a new Pop by 15%

the yiff collective spreads even faster now?

[Ikarrus]

>Uplift a pre-sentient mammalian race of hairy primates
>They become humans

Neat

[Timbrewolf]

the yiff collective spreads even faster now?

...and gets more embassies
...and cheaper alliances

They just got handed more of the things they leverage to win games. It's like P-dox wants to take the knot.

[Ricotez]

[Ikarrus]

Kek, people are saying that the patch does indeed make the AI fight against AI insurrections.... but that also includes the insurrecting AI, who purges their own pops.

This is the kind of bug I'd expect to come out of coderbus.

http://imgur.com/a/S4nvh

[Zellion]

multi-lane drifting?!

[Incomptinence]

We're all beta aliens now.

I still think militarist is amazing after losing the rivalry shiz.

Still acts like its own spiritualist scale in war, innate troop bonus, unique building gives you even more happiness and troop bonuses. The entire scale probably has the biggest number of techs under postitive modifier to pop up and they are all shit that militarists want like every weapon in the game and the best troops. All their governments are economically amazing for a war machine too.

[Zilenan91]

I think they broke ethics divergence massively, pops seem to just randomly gain and lose ethics

[Ikarrus]

Are you sure? It seems to me that people are just finding divergence to be a lot more sensitive than they had anticipated.

[Zilenan91]

Also here's how the math for the research changes go, every planet gives +10% rather than +0% research required for tech and pops now give +1% rather than +2%

In the end this makes it so that big empires are now able to research MUCH easier so long as all their planets have more than 10 tiles/pops on them which is relatively easy to do, so expanding is actually a good thing if you want to tech up.

Edit : Though this also means that you want to grow your planets immediately and heavily nerfs rapid colonization since it means your research will be nuked. Will cause colonization to be much less appealing and make it so that tall empires are something you should do rather than wide.\

I only hope they make space mining stations actually worth a damn past the early game.

[Zilenan91]

Also can I say how good a reference the Ministry of Benevolence is? Because it's fucking great with how I play collectivists.

Edit: Also I'm gonna write the FUCK out of my Grizznar lore.

[Timbrewolf]

Seems more like a research nerf to me.

Now colonizing tiny planets fucks you up a lot more than it used to. Take the example of a 12 tile planet.

When first colonized it now gives you an instant +11% research hike. (planet + first pop)
Previously it would've only been 2% to start. (first pop)

Over time as it grows to max capacity you wind up with +22% hike in the new system (planet + 12 pops)
Previously it would've been +24% (12 pops)

The two +X% graphs intersect at 10 pops, so until the planet has grown to 10 pops the new system is screwing you over, then after 10 pops you're better off than before.

This is further compounded by the scarcity of research plots on most planets, since in the new system the planet itself is a lot more important when it comes to your research. You will discover planets and look at them and see that, unless you just ignore tile bonuses and redevelop, it will always be a net research loss to colonize. Previously it was just based on pops, so you didn't have these dead weight planets. The burden of your research increases was empire-wide. I think this gives players an incentive to ignore more colonizable planets, especially smaller ones, and makes research costs a weird staircase of stepped-increases rather than a gradually curve towards higher expenses as your empire's pop grows.

I only hope they make space mining stations actually worth a damn past the early game.

Space mining stations are always good unless they're 1's. One-time 90 minerals and one energy maintenance for 2+ minerals a month is a solid trade. If you roll a leader that gives you one of the discounts to that cost (brings it down to like 67 or something) you slam stations on EVERYTHING. Compare that to what you have to spend improving planets, feeding pops, keeping pops happy, etc. Some of the building upgrades are actually pretty shit and should only be done when you're swimming in minerals and don't have time to spend them all as they come in. Improving a mining facility on a planet to produce one more mineral a month at a cost of 90 resources is a garbage trade. On the plus side it has the protection of the planet that it's on, while a mining outpost can just get bombed easily during a war. On the down-side the mining outpost will never complain about ethics divergence or have some other random event happens that causes it to shutdown for a bit.

During defensive wars I've noticed that typically my outposts are SAFER than my planets because nobody sieges or bothers to stop and destroy all my outposts, but they always go right for the core systems and as soon as the bombs start dropping all that production gets shut off

tl;dr mining outposts are fucking great what are you smoking?

[Zilenan91]

12 pop planets are really shitty though and you don't want to colonize them. I never did in the first place since it was never worth the effort of sectoring that shit later to make way for better core planets. So for me this is really just a buff to my playstyle.

So yeah this really incentivizes tall empires with very well upgraded infrastructure.

[Timbrewolf]

You eventually want to colonize the shit out of everything. Even a 12 pop planet can produce a lot of valuable resources for your empire. I've taken barren little 8 pop rocks and turned them into massed research planets with a single farm and the capital supporting all the pops. Throw an observatory on the spaceport overhead and kick back. Even just six tiles and no bonuses can crank out 33 total research points (before empire mods) with level 3 facilities installed. Previously that was at a research increase of only +16%. Not so much worse now, only costs you +18%

Considering you start the game with only a total of 15, I think a research unit increase of +200% at an increase cost of only +18% is pretty fuckin' good.

[Ricotez]

Remember that this is a beta. Things might still change before the patch comes out proper.

[Ikarrus]

>But it's just a beta guys

I think the only changes we can expect by the time it gets out of beta are hotfixes like the one to suicidal machine consciousnesses and spaceport notification spam. Any further changes will have to wait until the next content patch

I think given their record thus far I probably won't be opting into any betas, seeing how I like to run Ironman mode and I'd hate for some fatal bug to fuck everything up. I mean, it still can regardless, but the most flagrant ones can be fixed before they're out.

[Zilenan91]

Paradox added Fanatical Befrienders to the base game, they only show up if you have the Blorg mod or a Blorg knockoff

I also started up a new game as the Grizznar today after writing some shiny new lore for them. It's been going good so far, I'm running a hyperlane only game and I have this huge empty section of the galaxy all to myself. Some of my accomplishments so far is wiping out an entire race of primitives to the south of my empire who were in the early space age and leaving their buildings behind to eventually crumble to dust as the last and only memories of their species. I renamed their now-empty planet to The Example. I also invaded another primitive species to my north in the vacant section from earlier, they were fanatic collectivists so I just invaded them, enacted policies to get them to my ethics, and then once one of them diverged to my ethics I purged the majority of the race and only let the ones who thought the correct way live. Once a few new generations of them grew up I purged the oldest ones who could still remember my armies invading their worlds as drones filled the skies and the bodies of their soldiers clogged the streets. What's fucking sweet about them is that they're venerable and Strong, so their armies will do ridiculous damage and their leaders will last into the 200+ years, they have no genetic downsides. I plan on eventually replacing all my armies with theirs but I've had better uses for my minerals. I also colonized a gaia planet really early on that was unknowingly right outside the border of a Fallen Empire but it's honestly not a very good planet, and in the last two years I've colonized the two arid planets near my homeworld, one of which gets a bonus to minerals, and the other of which was size 25 so that was fucking sweet. The other AI nations are horrified by my genocide but fuck them I got destroyers, my tech is insane and niggas ain't got shit. I'll probably kill their entire species later.

[Timbrewolf]

I'm curious what a proper lorefag RP game would look like between /tg/ players, for a change.

[Grazyn]

>arrpee

btw is it normal that if I'm collectivist and enslave every food/mineral pop on my homeplanet at the beginning, I get a whopping -33% happiness on non-slaves and only -7% on slaves?

[Incomptinence]

Well if you want arpee you need a theme first so I don't show up as my race of larval babymen who can lift a ton.

[Steelpoint]

If you wanted a more RP oriented game you would have a easier time basing it off of a already existing medium/show/whatever.

[Ikarrus]

As expected, a patch for the patch has been released for the beta

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/in ... t-21273855

- Fixed a bug where assigning ethics to newly generated pops would cause incorrect ethics divergence.
- Custom ruler and heir titles will now be properly saved and loaded.
- Fixed armies being stuck on planets
- Planets recaptured from the AI empire will no longer randomly become Tundra worlds
- Fixed the AI empire having highly self-destructive ideas about AI legality
- Colonizeable tooltip in galaxy map lists reason for unable to colonize in delayed

Lots of people are reporting crashes with this new beta, so I would advise Opting out of the beta for now. Expect a patch for the patch's patch soon.

I honestly thought the rogue AI turning planets into Tundras were a feature, as they had ruined the planet by abusing it and it's resources. It actually fit pretty well with a random event I had earleir where I ended up turning on a bunch of rogue robots that forcefully terraformed one of my colonies after killing everyone. You know what, they probably shared the same code. It made for some pretty cool forshadowing, though.

[Grazyn]

The scourge tuns occupied planets into lifeless barren husks, so I thought the tundra thing was a feature too

[Wyzack]

An RP game would be breddy cuul. I have some science based xenophile bug people who are all about gettin dat sweet xenotech, would probably run them.

[Zilenan91]

The game is broken but funny in a lot of really cool ways. You can't see military power on fleets that aren't your own currently, it just shows the display code for military power so it was pretty scary during a war I had with the Gorf a few years ago. I fought one of their fleets who had slightly less numbers than mine did so I wasn't sure who would come out on top, I ended up taking minimal losses and completely destroying theirs. On my Grizznar save I got stomped by a Military Isolationist FE for my borders getting too big and then I got picked apart by the other AI, so I rolled around as some Orassians who were the same in every way outside of being foxes and having decadent rather than solitary. I've also learned that decadent is overpowered since you'll always have slaves to get extra minerals and food so the -10% production it gives to you when you don't have them is never a thing and it's literally just free trait points.

Really early on I discovered a really promising race of bug people named the Crixulax who had some of the same ethics and traits I did, and after conquering them I had them around on a planet for what must've been 30 or 40 years with like 30% negative ethics divergence to get them to believe in my ethics. Nothing ever happened so I purged them. I found it pretty ironic that just after I purged them, there was a 1 progress growing pop of them with my ethics. Ended up having to purge the growing pop since it would never grow past that. Oh well, it's Orassian land now, and a very good mineral system at that too.

Even later than that some northerly neighbours got aggressive on me and declared war, they crushed my fleet and killed my admiral, but I'd done enough damage to make it so they couldn't take down my space stations without massive losses. Ended up rebuilding my early game corvette armada, hiring a new admiral with the aggressive trait (+10% fire rate), crushing their fleet, blowing up a bunch of their mining and space stations, then suing for white peace. I could've sued for white peace without blowing up their mining stations but I wanted to neuter their resource gain. 10 years of technological advancement later I had a much better and more numerous military than they did so I utterly crushed them and exterminated their entire race because they had diverged to be utterly opposed to me ethically and nothing I would've done would've changed their ethics. I also grabbed the Betharian stone they had in their territory and it's a nice little reactor on my capitol. I like to think the ghosts of trillions of dead pacifists haunt its turbines.

Something that happened very recently was me taking off the Hisshi squid people to the East. They'd attempted to ally with the Gorf Confederay, another squid empire to the northeast and south of them but I smashed both of their fleets at once and took over the Hisshi, they're a productive sector in my empire now after I purged one of their horrendously shitty colonies, and I hope to release them all from slavery once they've forgotten my drones and armies of slaves clogging the streets with corpses and scrap. I also greatly enjoyed how their two main planets had two Betharian stone deposits in them, which was what caused me to invade them in the first place. My capital is like a museum for Betharian stone, I have 6 Betharian power plants on it and it's producing 100+ energy credits a month. I like to think my race considers Betharian Stone as a sign of class or worships it, since we've killed trillions in order to obtain it, and the capitol is practically swimming in the stuff. Come to think of it the Gorf had some nice Betharian deposits within their space...

In the future I hope to continue advancing my technology and to continue subjugating races, however the AI appears to have created a 4 empire strong Federation to oppose me, which will be problematic since that's a lot of ships to deal with. It will be no matter though, because soon I will have battleships, and my cruisers (which never got a default module created for some reason) have just entered into production, so my fleets will balloon with strength in order to crush my enemies and ensure Orassian dominance.

[Zilenan91]

Also I know this will never happen, but if Stellaris could do the Master of Orion thing and make there be a galactic news station that comments on what happens in the game that would be so fucking cool. Even if it was just a text blurb scrolling across part of the screen, it would be amazing. During my battles with the Gorf Confederacy I could imagine Orassian news stations playing clips of the carnage of our armadas clashing in space, or my armies of slaves invading Hisshi worlds as glorious conquests with invitations for common Orassians to enlist in the military to fight the good fight for their empire. In my mind it was like those journalists who flew to Iraq when the US invaded it and this was that but in space.

[Zilenan91]

Oh also Paradox changed how evasion and accuracy works in Clarke. For every point of evasion you have, that's minus points on your accuracy. So if you have a weapon that has 80% accuracy and you have 25% evasion you'll only hit 55% of the time, it's accuracy - evasion now. Corvettes officially dumpstered.

[Incomptinence]

The way accuracy used to work was glitched and everything had 100% accuracy once they upgraded their sensors. Its why large mount ballistics seemed decent in my tests.

I think current consensus is (accuracy-evasion)/accuracy is the formula. So military stations got even worse I guess.

The other half of the equation crystal forged plate is still untouched and counters to the other defenses are adamant tough. So basically hope you start near some pulsars. Oh also shields don't regen in combat without capacitors despite stats saying they do, oh also one of the dreadnought modules makes top tier shields get a 25% health penalty meaning they have less health than potentially early game plate. Don't worry though the pro shields module boosts regen, which you need to sacrifice another slot to capacitors to get working oh and more generators too. Paradox math.

[Timbrewolf]

Yeah, I think I stated it before but fantatic collectivists should always take decadent for a free trait point.
At the start of your game just immediately enslave on of your random homeworld pops.

[Grazyn]

Too bad the -10% penalty is on every resource, even those that are negatively affected by slavery like energy and research

[ColonicAcid]

No, don't enslave all.

You can still work it with decadent anyway. Enslave only your people working both on food and minerals, everyone else is free else you take huge penalties to your resources.

It's alot more than 10% I'm pretty sure for slaving pops working on energy and research, so dont do that shit.

[Zilenan91]

Yeah just enslave the dude on your administration building. Slavery gives bonuses to food and minerals, so just always enslave the guys working those for ez +20% start of the game mineral income. Decadent is also insane because it's supposed to be a downside but if you're a fanatic collectivist you always have slaves and it's literally a free trait point.

Running slavery without having fanatic collectivism, or normal collectivism and divine mandate, is a terrible idea by the way. You take a -7% happiness hit to all of your pops and if you ever emancipate a pop they take an even huger happiness hit which might cause rebellions.

[dezzmont]

Depending on your setup you can start with over 100 happiness pretty easily at which case slavery becomes attractive.

Its also good if it won't knock you down a category, or to bootstrap colonies and eat the unhappiness penalty after you get the pops out.

[Zilenan91]

Ho fuck

[ColonicAcid]

whalecum to ring worlds

[Zilenan91]

I killed all the shit there after losing most of that one fleet and sending in another with battleships. After that I invaded one of the planets with native people who had the same ethics as mine, and avoided invading the other three due to the nearby federation being quite cross with me.

Also I've decided to stop playing on that save since things just aren't fun anymore. The only thing left in the game is smashing my head into the brick wall known as a Federation, going to my west and smashing into another empire, then after that a fucking massive empire that I really don't want to mess with, and from there keep doing that until I win.

I don't want to do that though, that's boring, so it's done.

[Ikarrus]

Lategame now, aggressive expansionism to vassalize the entire galaxy with my now Fallen Empire-equivalent empire.

But then the Patriarch keeled over at the relatively tender age of 160 (They usually live past 180) and an election was called with 21 eligible leaders.



Seems suspicious.

Also the game keeps eating my armies. When peace is called while your armies are still on an enemy planet that wasn't ceded to you or vassalized, they're stuck on the planet. Seemingly forever, although I don't know if landing on it in the future will let you recover them. Lost 16 Gene warriors on Ultia's shelter. Same thing happened on Graftch. You can see them on my outliner; I just can't do anything with them.

[Zilenan91]

Can't you delete them from your outliner? Also use clones, they're way more cost-effective than gene warriors who cost a shitton.

[Ikarrus]

>Occupy enemy planets marked for liberation
>Machine consciousness rebels in all the occupied planets
>War ends prematurely because all my war demands are now invalid

This is not the liberation I was talking about.

Can't you delete them from your outliner? Also use clones, they're way more cost-effective than gene warriors who cost a shitton.

How do you delete things from your outliner?

[Zilenan91]

Select them in the outliner and delete your armies on the planet

[Ikarrus]

Select them in the outliner and delete your armies on the planet

This is all I get




The planet invasion alert is also bugged out and never pops out for me except when I load a saved game. It tells me the armies that are actually missing are involved in some permanent combat. Even if I do invade and occupy the planet again, they don't show up. Only thing I haven't tried is colonizing them.

My armies on Graftch actually went missing after I purged all the pops on the planet while they were still on it.

[Zilenan91]

Oh yeah I've seen this bug before. You gotta colonize it and then you can put them in space. Had it happen to my clone armies on Ixxar V as we were fighting the Gorf.

[Skorvold]

I conquered a whole empire consisting of three planets and got three factions as a result. Fucking sucks, usually I just get one faction out of the deal. Funny thing is, as soon as I conquered them one of their race was elected consul.

[Zilenan91]

Yeah that's why I like collectivism. You can enslave them and they won't ever revolt.

[Timbrewolf]

Fanatic Materialist + Intelligent + Natural Engineers = +35% output on the tech that contains all your weapons and armor.

Something to think about if you want to CRUSH KILL DESTROY the universe.

[dezzmont]

Factions aren't a huge deal if you know what you are doing, they are a very short term problem that only becomes dangerous if you mismanage influence or have no way to boost happiness.