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

Post by **Armhulen** » Sat Apr 15, 2017 7:00 am #280951

Bottom post of the previous page:

DrPillzRedux wrote:Is that an actual mod?

I can upload it if you want\

I was also playing around with the idea of replacing robot pop with borgs

DrPillzRedux · Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:26 am

Yes upload it now

DemonFiren · Post by **DemonFiren** » Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:38 am #280974

>there's exactly one species of qt lizzer
>there's like fifty qt mollusks
severe disgust

Ricotez · Post by **Ricotez** » Sat Apr 15, 2017 11:21 am #280988

Armhulen wrote:What would you respond with?
Spoiler:
this joke took so long to set up for only a small chuckle

4: Harmbaton.

Post by **Armhulen** » Sat Apr 15, 2017 1:35 pm #280998

I'll totally upload the mod but just as a warning, It sucks right now. I gotta get a lot more sprites, they're all greyshits! Dirty white male greyshits.

Ricotez · Post by **Ricotez** » Sat Apr 15, 2017 1:48 pm #281001

Psionic Ascension has a lot of cool stuff that can happen. One of my scientists (who already served a term as Hegemon but went back to being a scientist) ascended and became immortal, and my psionic council went completely insane from exposure to the infinite probability space of the future.

Can't wait to seal the deal and doom the galaxy.

Post by **Armhulen** » Sat Apr 15, 2017 1:55 pm #281004

Ricotez wrote:Psionic Ascension has a lot of cool stuff that can happen. One of my scientists (who already served a term as Hegemon but went back to being a scientist) ascended and became immortal, and my psionic council went completely insane from exposure to the infinite probability space of the future.

Can't wait to seal the deal and doom the galaxy.

LESS STORYTELLING, MORE ENDING OF THE CYCLE.

Ricotez · Post by **Ricotez** » Sat Apr 15, 2017 3:36 pm #281025

I'm doing my best, but I got a 10 year cooldown on the Shroud because my psionic councillors are no more than fancy lawn ornaments now.

XSI · Post by **XSI** » Sat Apr 15, 2017 6:53 pm #281084

Wrote a review for this thing. I am not impressed

Sunk-Cost Fallacy
Reasoning that further investment is warranted on the fact that the resources already invested will be lost otherwise, not taking into consideration the overall losses involved in the further investment.

In short, wait 3-4 years and for a sale

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/7656 ... ed/281990/
http://tocopinion.blogspot.nl/2017/04/s ... eview.html

Spoiler:

Stellaris is an early alpha game that is to be finished in DLC. If you buy it now, you get to enjoy all the placeholder mechanics that they will ask you money for to replace with something resembling an actually thought out game. And even then it will be half-assed and with minimum effort because you're already invested (See also the Sunk Cost Fallacy). You'll have to buy it or be stuck with an unfinished version that isn't really good at anything.

And it's that version I will review here. Stellaris attempts to merge Grand Strategy games and 4X games, managing to take only the worst of both worlds in a nice looking jacket to hide the lack of things to do. To begin, the early game plays much like a 4X game. You explore, you look for places to expand and colonize, and you work on your planets. After everything is mostly claimed and you've met a fair amount of alien empires the grand strategy game is supposed to take over, but it never does. This leaves you with a rather poorly done 4X game that has no real mid or late game. Once you've finished exploring, you build up a military until it's bigger than your neighbour and throw it at them until you have no more neighbours.

To begin with the good things about it, it looks pretty decent, as screenshots will show you. And the events have decent flavour to them, and a few stories that actually made me want to follow up on them only to be disappointed when it results in an anticlimactic "+500 energy credits" for finishing the entire storyline. Many events and anomalies imply you'll be able to do great things once you end up with highly advanced technology, but you never do, and the simple events and anomalies start repeating before you're even done with one game. Most of these storylines and events do not seem to matter whatsoever, with all of them being self-contained minor effects that do not interact with anything outside of them.

Nearly everything in the game is, I would hope, a placeholder mechanic- Technology ends in the mid game and you research repeatable technologies that give you a slight numbers bonus, military matters are simple with no debt to them whatsoever, species are all interchangeable except for a few fringe cases, diplomacy doesn't really exist, just like many options to control your empire don't seem to exist and there is no real grand strategy part of this. It offers you three ways to travel the stars with FTL technology, yet two of these are completely useless.

The AI, in all ways, is completely incapable. Diplomatically it doesn't do anything of real note, often remaining passive until a certain value just happens to rise by coincidence and triggers it to do something. Militarily it doesn't do anything- It makes ships that are poorly planned and optimized by just putting on whatever seems like the latest technology, even if it's terrible. It develops its lands randomly, completely ignoring any sort of planning or goals it may be able to do, and in general feels much less like it's trying to emulate an opponent and more like they just hooked up an RNG to the controls.

The military and combat stuff is, in one word, bad. While there is a minimum of customization to try to counter your opponent, in the end everything comes down to who just has the bigger stack. The entire military game is essentially a dick measuring content. If yours is bigger then you win, take your opponent's stuff and move on to measure against the next guy. There is no strategy, no tactics, and no maneuvering. You do not even get to control what your ships do and do not engage. Planetary invasions are a joke- You leave some ships above the place and then bring in a big stack of armies to wipe out the defenders. It's more of a formality at that point, because you have the bigger naval dick from the earlier measuring contest so it's not like you can't just wait a few years to bring in more armies

As mentioned earlier, technology is a joke past the early game, but even at the early game you will find a large amount of completely useless technologies that will never be even a little bit useful. You get a choice of a few randomly selected technologies to research, and while I like the idea of it, all it really means is that you're going to just research the cheapest technology of the set until something actually useful comes up.

Most of Stellaris is set up to be pretty and to pretend it has depth, but if you look even a little bit at it you will find that most of it is empty and flat. Past the initial experience of the early game and expanding there is nothing to do except waiting or continued dick measuring competition with your neighbours, and then moving on to measure against the next guy.

Is it worth getting? Maybe if you can get it really cheap on sale. Maybe in a few years when they've finished it.
At release, I'd have called Stellaris a technically playable tech demo. At the least with the latest DLC(Utopia) it is now a barely playable early alpha game. So hey, there's some progress here.
Shame it's going to take another 200€ of DLC and several years for it to be finished

DrPillzRedux · Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:05 pm

You can already get it heavily discounted on cdkeys. I got it and all the DLC for $40. The mods available already make this great.

Vanilla lacks a lot though.

Ricotez · Post by **Ricotez** » Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:33 pm #281136

how many more times are you going to link that review

XSI · Post by **XSI** » Sat Apr 15, 2017 10:41 pm #281160

Thats a different one. First one was for the DLC

But yeah, feels half-assed and like they just decided that they'll finish it later. For more money

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Sat Apr 15, 2017 11:23 pm #281190

Got my shit so pushed in by an awakened empire that I'm probably going to go play something else for a while now

lntigracy · Post by **lntigracy** » Sun Apr 16, 2017 12:53 am #281234

There's apparently no warning or progress bar for when you're a vassal and your lord empire is absorbing you.

Lost to it with no idea why until I googled it.

Wyzack · Post by **Wyzack** » Sun Apr 16, 2017 1:15 am #281244

Game is full of little things that fucking make no sense and piss me off, but I'm still having fun with it

XSI · Post by **XSI** » Sun Apr 16, 2017 2:04 am #281257

lntigracy wrote:There's apparently no warning or progress bar for when you're a vassal and your lord empire is absorbing you.

Lost to it with no idea why until I googled it.

They really just did not think about many cases, the game is still pretty bare-bones
Don't get me wrong, it's still fun. But if you go off the intended path of psionics ascendancy+being space overlord defender of the entire universe against whatever threat wakes up, you're going to just run into things that don't work. And even then you'll run into plenty that make no sense.

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Sun Apr 16, 2017 2:57 am #281271

It feels like you really have to play militaristic or get squashed by either a crisis or an awakened ascendancy. If you don't invest heavily into your navy then you just kind of get rolled over, because since the AI just sucks at dealing with those it's solely up to you.

XSI · Post by **XSI** » Sun Apr 16, 2017 3:40 am #281283

Pretty much, except you can't avoid it because if you ignore a crisis, it will either kill you and all your planets, or it will forcefully vassalize you. Which is also pretty bad
At least you can somewhat ignore France/Ottomans/all those things by just being a bit further away from them and not pissing them off

Also I literally just now had an argument about how Stellaris needs more non-fighting content and I was told I was stupid because it already has more than other Paradox things.
It really doesn't.

ColonicAcid · Sun Apr 16, 2017 10:18 am

You're trying to imply that Paradox would mix the game mechanics for each specific game into all the other games (They won't. Ever,)

The way paradox operates is that every game has a similar feel and look and the same combat system, but there is one major point the game is set around. CK2 is around a family. It's not about a kingdom as some people incorrectly think. You can lose nearly all your titles and still keep playing. The game doesn't end because you stopped being the king of France.

The EU series' niche feature is more difficult to understand, its more about simple trade, early exploration, colonisation and religious reformation/conflict. Since the world by then had stopped being about feudal families and more about absolute state power, if you lose your country you lose your game.

Victoria 2 is all about trade. It's the only games where your populations demands goods that you have to build. Trade in the EU series is simple. It flows one way and usually always to Europe. China doesn't benefit as much from colonising America as European countries do because all the trade nodes flow from America to Europe, not to Asia. Victoria does not have this, each country has X population, and each population demands Y to survive. If you give them this, they will have enough money left over to buy some luxury goods, this forces factories of those luxury goods to be made, and the population becomes gentrified. Rinse and repeat until you have the big fat cats of capitalism.

Hearts of Iron is about total war and a tactical simulator.

Stellaris will never have any of the special features of the other games because that is not how Paradox operates. They want to keep each game to their own niche, they don't want to homogenize the games because why the hell would they? They're making cash over fist, they have one of the most loyal fanbases ever, there is a very large amount of people that have every paradox game, have every DLC and will buy every DLC that is released. I am one of those people bar I haven't paid for HoI4 because I don't want a casualised version of HoI3. Making one big game that would incorporate all the time periods, all the features and all the niche shit would make them like 4x less money and would, knowing paradox, completely destroy people's CPUs.

Anonmare · Post by **Anonmare** » Sun Apr 16, 2017 1:39 pm #281370

I'd like it if federations worked like the HRE where you could further integrate the various empires at the expense of their autonomy and make it so you can become the permanent president of the federation until, finally, they fully integrate and become a single empire formed from its member states
I'd also like a more indepth espionage system where you could steal technology, sabotage ships, blow up a spaceport, assassinate leaders or damage relations between two powers.

I also think there should be a prestige system but I'm not sure how best to implement it. You should definitely be awarded prestige depending on how wide and tall your empire is, your war successes, megastructures built, defeating Fallen/Awakened Empires and defeating Crisis enemies.

ColonicAcid · Post by **ColonicAcid** » Sun Apr 16, 2017 5:08 pm #281406

The base mechanics of all the Paradox games are simple tbh. You have provinces, you have armies.

If two armies meet in a province, a battle commences. Dice are rolled, damage is done. Certain games have land modifiers, river crossings etc. The loser goes back to a predestined point in the map. The winner stays on course. ALL paradox developed games share this in common, thats their binding feature.

Another point that's shared is as you get later and later into the game a defeat has more and more chance to be catastrophic. You lose a battle in CK2 when you're an empire vs another Empire late in the game and you're more than likely done, this is compounded if the enemy empire is a different religion. You lose a battle in EU and your army is completely shattered well damn I guess you lose half of your empire as well since there is zero conceivable way you're going to build an Army fast enough to defeat their doomstack. Same shit in Victoria 2, except later in the game you lose a world war and well that's 100% your game over. Stellaris you can not "lose" the game but you can be left with so little and literally no room to expand that the game just becomes a slog fest of hoping the enemy doesn't declare war on your measly one or two planets.

lntigracy · Post by **lntigracy** » Sun Apr 16, 2017 7:21 pm #281448

Anonmare wrote:I'd like it if federations worked like the HRE where you could further integrate the various empires at the expense of their autonomy and make it so you can become the permanent president of the federation until, finally, they fully integrate and become a single empire formed from its member states

Vassalisation works that way, you can absorb them.

If you're a vassal and being absorbed you get absolutely no warning.

ColonicAcid · Post by **ColonicAcid** » Sun Apr 16, 2017 7:38 pm #281457

Tbh I feel as if that is the best way to do it.

It's a kinda authenticity you know. Your overlord has a time limit before he can start annexation, that's your "safe" time to do shit without any worry. Anything past that and it's kinda your fault for not getting out of the vassal situation.

The Koreans had no clue that the Japanese were going to take over their government until it was far too late.

ColonicAcid · Post by **ColonicAcid** » Sun Apr 16, 2017 7:41 pm #281460

You do though.

It's the cooldown from the nation annexing you and being able to assimilate you. I think it's something like 10 years. That's your warning.

XSI · Post by **XSI** » Sun Apr 16, 2017 7:50 pm #281461

Which it doesn't tell you about either. You will need to keep track of that yourself

Also HoI 4 is terrible

Drynwyn · Post by **Drynwyn** » Mon Apr 17, 2017 1:15 pm #281738

I recently performed a Legitimate Acquisition of this game.

It's fun! After a few false starts and frustrations, anyway.

Anonmare · Post by **Anonmare** » Mon Apr 17, 2017 8:55 pm #281919

I've found a properly managed biologically ascended empire is the most effective when compared to the other two ascensions.

Biological Ascension allows you to min-max a species to ridiculous degree. Like starting off with Syncretic Evolution to have Proles and then re-sequencing them to create a Very Strong, Industrious, Nerve-stapled slave race that have 45% base mineral output, are unaffected by happiness and will never rebel (add in techs, slavery, slave processing, mineral processing and stimulant diet you could have 100% bonus mineral production). They could also double-up as a warrior caste for your Gene Warrior armies and be the best at damage dealing.

You could also have a leader caste that's been boosted to be max levelled at everything and live ~300 years, a science/economic caste that's had their happiness boosted for extra productivity or a livestock caste that grows food extremely well and is okay with being eaten.

Also as a side note, you can add negative traits to get extra points and remove pre-existing positive ones to get points back. You don't need your leaders to be good learners if they already excel at everything and nor do your slave races need to live particular long or be pleasant to be around either

DemonFiren · Post by **DemonFiren** » Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:01 pm #281920

This is literally the only Anonmeme post in recent memory that made me genuinely happy without even trace amounts of Schadenfreude.

XSI · Post by **XSI** » Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:21 pm #281927

That is correct. You can indeed gene mod everything into specialisation that far surpasses what you can get from robutts
But that's a lot of micromanagement, and you will need to disable migration entirely or they'll migrate into bad jobs. Your miner race can and will migrate into science labs, and your weak leader race can and will go into mines if they're left to it.
Sector AI will also mess it up

And you don't need to go biology ascension either, you can do most of that just fine with just the usual tech for it. Bio ascension does make it a lot better, especially if you plan on modifying a lot of races. That speed bonus for modifying genetics sure helps a bit, but the amount of points is not that amazing unless you're going to stack all the bonusses on one race. Which to be fair, is a pretty good idea and will actually give you a pretty good lead compared to a non-ascended empire
And with how easy food is to get at high tech levels, it's likely to be better than robotic as well

ColonicAcid · Mon Apr 17, 2017 10:03 pm

yeah nah.

synthetics are actually busted.

like 100%, and as soon as you turn all your race into synthetics its game over man.

Anonmare · Post by **Anonmare** » Mon Apr 17, 2017 10:04 pm #281966

Synths are decent at everything but Authoritarian bio can excel.

Psi is the weakest but has the most fun mechanics I think

ThanatosRa · Post by **ThanatosRa** » Mon Apr 17, 2017 10:12 pm #281975

am I a bad person for wanting ape sprites so I can play Empire of the Apes.

XSI · Post by **XSI** » Mon Apr 17, 2017 10:25 pm #281983

Anonmare wrote:Synths are decent at everything but Authoritarian bio can excel.

Psi is the weakest but has the most fun mechanics I think

This basically
Synths are nice and all but they're not as great at things as a specialized modded race or a super-race you've made with genetics stuff. Besides that you can just build the things if you wanted to have synths, so I've yet to find a reason to become them aside from roleplaying
Psionics is neat, doesn't give the same kind of bonuses (Though those avatars are very nice) but it's actually worked out and has fluff/flavour to it that makes it worth playing.

The reason I find bio-ascendancy to be meh earlier was simple. I can't be arsed to micromanage everything to make it work, I like it when I don't need to. And aside from the genetics modifying you can do with it, you don't really gain anything out of it as far as I know

ColonicAcid · Tue Apr 18, 2017 12:18 am

yall pussy asses cant HANDLE THE FUTURE OF THE UNIVERSE...

lay down on your assess and accept your new silicon based life forms you fffFUCSK

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Tue Apr 18, 2017 11:52 pm #282440

I've found that the game is a lot more balanced when you don't crank up the number of AIs and leave them at the default value. There's actually room to grow now instead of being constantly at war.

Also, the AI is laughably awful at managing unrest. They probably don't manage it at all. Without fail I've seen slaver AIs with Syncretic Evolution lose their homeworld (and only their homeworld) to their "servile" species.

And I find that ethics attraction is a BAD thing to have. It's not hard to please factions, or keep your pops happy. But keeping your attraction low keeps your empire's ethics more flexible so you can switch between them a lot more easily.

srifenbyxp · Post by **srifenbyxp** » Wed Apr 19, 2017 8:43 pm #282855

Anyone with the Utopia DLC want to do multiplayer this weekend. Last round felt like a city building simulator, I wants me some warh. SO - Saturday morning mayhaps? (EASTERN STANDARD TIME)

Although the settings will be this er:

~Assuming the turn out will be like 6 people~

Map Size Med- This gives us breathing room and we can actually wave dicks at each other rather than our AI counter parts.

AI size For every 3 human players 1 AI will be in play

Anonmare · Post by **Anonmare** » Fri Apr 28, 2017 5:18 pm #286293

Latest patch will be adding a chance to come across derelict megastructures and researching the technology to repair them. Utopia only of course, though non-Utopia owners can still repair Ringworlds.

It's also cheaper and quicker to repair a megastructure than it is to build one from scratch.

Post by **Armhulen** » Fri Apr 28, 2017 8:54 pm #286423

I'm going to have to buy utopia, aren't I

Grazyn · Post by **Grazyn** » Fri Apr 28, 2017 8:57 pm #286426

Don't
Shit's still buggy af

XSI · Post by **XSI** » Fri Apr 28, 2017 9:11 pm #286440

It was a shitty early tech demo before and now it's an early alpha

Just wait for a sale or you're getting scammed

K-64 · Post by **K-64** » Sat Apr 29, 2017 3:14 pm #286692

It's quicker to just say it's a Paradox game.

DemonFiren · Post by **DemonFiren** » Sat Apr 29, 2017 3:18 pm #286693

so i guess boners are done exploding

Grazyn · Post by **Grazyn** » Sat Apr 29, 2017 4:18 pm #286715

DemonFiren wrote:so i guess boners are done exploding

It's cuddle time but she's cold and distant

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Thu May 04, 2017 5:11 pm #288468

Massive bugfix patch dropping this tuesday

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/in ... 2.1019086/

It seems like they're alternating between big DLC content updates and bugfix updates. Which is nice.

Grazyn · Post by **Grazyn** » Thu May 04, 2017 5:30 pm #288471

Still no fix for neverending war in Heaven due to frozen warscore

Post by **lumipharon** » Thu May 04, 2017 10:19 pm #288594

That terraforming and world shaper change is nice.

Getting gaia world terraforming and shit is utterly useless since you can't terraform your own planets, and some games terra forming just won't appear until late game if you're unlucky.

Also has anyone successfully (and productively) constructed mega structures before very late game? Even when I tried to 'rush' mega structures, it takes so god awful long, and such a rediculous amount of resources, that even with the mod that lets you build multiple megastructures at the same time I still only finished my ring world extremely late game (basically all non repeatable tech done, only 1 ascension perk left to unlock), and the sentry array and dyson sphere still weren't done.

Like, they're cool to have and wave your space dick around, but fuck are they utterly impractical.

Grazyn · Post by **Grazyn** » Thu May 04, 2017 10:30 pm #288596

I found it easier to just conquer a ring world from a fallen empire, by the time you have the resources you should also have a fleet big enough to vanquish anything. Habitats are the only superstructure worth something in the mid-game, they can give you tons of energy if you fill them with powerplants and put a genemodded pop with the energy bonus trait on top

ThanatosRa · Post by **ThanatosRa** » Thu May 04, 2017 10:31 pm #288598

Either way hell yes on terraforming inhabited worlds.

Post by **lumipharon** » Thu May 04, 2017 11:10 pm #288623

Oh yeah, habitats are neat, but the big ones are all just gay babies in the vanilla game - even if you're full on pacifist, the 200k+ minerals and SIXTY PLUS YEARS it takes to build any of them would be better used for more dakka, unless you're going out of your way to drag out the game.

XSI · Post by **XSI** » Thu May 04, 2017 11:38 pm #288649

They're not viable if you want to do anything effectively, no

They're nice ideas, but they come way too late and have nearly no impact. Even the sentry array which I previously called the only good one aside from the habitats, is kinda useless because it's basically just like building repeatable tech of planet sensor range. Which you should already have at very high levels at that point. I suppose it does mean you can spend that research on something else that's more useful though

Dick waving is nice, but it's expensive and time consuming dick waving with nothing to show for it

Incomptinence · Fri May 05, 2017 1:23 am

First up the only one mega at a time thing is bullshit. Lemme assign a scientist and governor team or something to work each site to represent "expertise" but if I am sitting on enough minerals don't tell me I lack bloody material.

Probably needs to be ring world specific buildings or buffs to make them worth it like habitats. Fallen empire structures was what made their ring worlds absolute killer.

As for dyson spheres and shit I always thought the the numbers were way too low. Like more profitable to fill an empty system with similar task habitats low.

All in all it should be like tapping an awakened empire's income because this is meant to be how we become on par with them economically.