Stellaris - shorter update

[jack]

The music is just so appropriate for this game, all uplifting swells of exploration.

OK, ten ships flying in formation firing lasers looks even more impressive.

It's strange to think about this from the Duckbills point of view. From the home planet in less than fifty years, there's been the discovery of FTL, alien life, settling several new worlds, intelligent alien life, non-hostile intelligent life, although the only aliens they've actually MET have been a few Napoleon ships and some subterranean religious refugees on one world.

And from someone crewing a science ship, it has been quite startrek-like. Sometimes, "go over there and survey those twenty systems" for ten years. Sometimes, "quick, stellarpolitics means, stop being in that system, fly many years to this other system, then back again". Sometimes, "oh hey, we discovered gas giant aliens, can you ferry them to this other gas giant? And this OTHER gas giant? And, hey, you won't believe this, but..."

And there's been a war for years and years, including a brief famine, because I reckoned we could liberate the fungusoids, and didn't built up farm capacity quick enough before it fell to zero :(

Schlock Mercenary

I don't imagine this would work, but it was my immediate thought, could there be a Schlock Mercenary skin?

How would it work? You'd need to start off with jumpgates. I think those can jump anywhere, so they'd need to be wormholes not hyperlanes? Or maybe, gateways, those actually fit better even though they're late game tech in normal stellaris? Or maybe, to facilitate the political reality, there are hyperlanes connecting nearby systems, but sufficiently sparse that you can have little empires but need the gates to travel any significant distance?

And somehow, there needs to be a fallen-empire like civilisation for the gatekeepers, who you need the good opinion of to use the gates?

And you can invent jump drives (teraports), but that spawns angry dark matter entities in space.

You somehow need to have lots of little empires, but still empty space, and maybe have more missions from friendly empires, paying you to fight pirates etc, rather than exploration?

You might even be able to do the "oops, galaxy destroyed, use time travel reset" thing, with an all-devouring phenomenon spawned in the centre of the galaxy, and play "can you (a) find the one wormgate which lets you travel back in time and (b) get enough of the galaxy to cooperate or swear fealty to power it?"

Comments

[ilanin]

Stellaris can do most of those things, though not necessarily at the same time. Your jumpgates sound like pre-2.0 wormhole drives, which were removed from the game (along with the point-to-point warp drive that did not need hyperlanes) because trying to make interesting terrain features and relevant fixed defences is impossible when people can just go around. But if you want to see what it was like, then you can try playing version 1.9 by using the Steam betas tab. As far as I know there's no actual way to have them exist in 2.x though. You could do something with Gateways, as you say - you'd have all the Gateway systems owned by your Gatekeepers race, and then you're fine with using them unless they close their borders to you. Probably the fanatic xenophile fallen empire type of government is best for this.

I don't know if there's an on_jump action for an event to spawn angry dark matter entities, but in case you've not got there yet, suffisit to say there's a reason Stellaris calls jump drive a "dangerous" technology.

It's perfectly straightforward to create a galaxy-destroying monstrosity with the event modder; in fact, the game already contains one, but the event that spawns it is probably a bit too cataclsymic for your purposes.

[edrith.co.uk]

They don't have wormholes and warp drives any more? Gosh. I've just gone and looked at the 2.0 update and it seems like a substantively different game (and almost all of them seem hugely positive, removing flaws even at the expense of what had seemed like very cool concepts that didn't quite work, such as the different types of FTL).

More generally, I'm enormously enjoying this serious of posts. I played a few games of Stellaris back in 2016 and enjoyed the opening 1/3 of each game tremendously for all the reasons you've described. Reading your narrative (and seeing the updates) makes me think I might have to go back and play some more.

[edrith.co.uk]

"series of posts", not "serious of posts". Sorry.

[jack]

Thank you!

I am only part way through my first game, so I can't speak with a lot of authority, but you can probably tell I enjoyed it so far :)

I don't know what it was like before, but judging from the forums, lots of people were very annoyed it changed, and it took a little while for the balance to settle down after 2.0, but playing for the first time, most of the things that had changed seemed to work fairly well.

I think "cool ideas that didn't quite work in the game" sounds right, like the different sorts of FTL: that's an amazing premise, but when everyone deals with three different sorts of geography, it does sort of mean everywhere might as well be anywhere.