Stellaris - 2300-2310 more things
Jul. 16th, 2018 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI don't know why I have the urge to write this up so thoroughly. How many people are still reading?
New colonies
I expanded a bit too quickly to start with, and took some time to catch up with myself. But about now I said, it would be worth having another world or two. It's a significant step, so I said to myself "...and go!" before I pushed the button :)
That builds a ship from one of your planets, which then drives to a new planet and establishes a colony there. In theory you have a choice of species, except that my morlocks won't leave their home world, so only my original Duckbills will go to a new world.
I do have one bonus from, um, one of my starting empire bonuses, that I can send out *private* colony ships that cost energy instead of minerals. And by now, I'm doing well on energy but still need minerals to expand... everything. So I'm not usually limited in building ships (even though by now the mineral cost wouldn't be a big hurdle anyway).
Exciting to have a whole new (big) world. And my various habitability perks make most worlds very attractive.
Also, a few of my pops migrated to the new world! They hadn't ever done that before even when I thought the new world was better than the other ones, I'm not sure if I'd forgotten a setting or got a perk more recently or something else. But now I'm pleased, because it builds up a new world faster and the old world was mostly full so the pop can be replaced by population growth quickly.
The migration is marked with an icon of the pop carrying a classic folded-bag-on-a-stick bindle over their shoulder!
No-one has yet migrated INTO my empire, despite me having some attractive worlds. Hopefully they will eventually.
Some pacifist pops emigrated away when the war happened, but hopefully now the war's over pacifism will take over again.
And after a long fallow period when my science was growing too slowly, I got a rush of "clear blocking terrain to open new tiles on planets for building" techs, which let me expand my existing planets better too.
Those two new planets brought me up to my new max core planets of seven. The base is three, but I got +2 for being pacifist, and +2 for something else, so I went quite a long time without having too many.
Like many things, it's a "soft" cap, but this soft cap is quite hard -- you lose 30% energy and 30% influence, which is quite a lot, so you can't usually bull through it.
After that, you need to delegate some planets to a sector, part of your empire, but under AI control.
Consolidation
As previously mentioned, I need to integrate the new fungus planets into my empire, probably by delegating them to a sector (or maybe delegating my already-developed worlds to a sector where there's not much to do, and hand-managing the newer larger worlds).
There's a few systems I want to make sure to absorb[1]. The one with the ringworld! One with a gateway and maybe another with a wormhole. Any pirate-friendly dead-ends. One or two off to the east side of the galactic spiral to treat with empires there more easily.
[1] I'm not sure what word to use for "add a new system to my empire by building an outpost station in it". "Claim", "conquer" etc all mean something else.
After the war, I got an isolationist faction. Ok, maybe I have too many factions :) I was quite happy with the first few, the pacifists, the faith, and the egalitarians. The military faction were understandable, what with three decade long wars in 100 years. But now it's getting out of hand :)
But I think I can just accept I won't get any benefit from some of them, I can still enjoy the diversity. Even though a more game-y tactic might be to have fewer factions I can actually please simultaneously :)
The game often has a mid-game crisis where, once the empires have mostly reached some sort of status quo in the second century, something big-ish happens to shake things up. But I think that's only in the expansions, not the base game? So I have a century to expand slowly and build my science and economy, before an end game crisis eats the entire galaxy :)
Misc
One of the fallen empire's fleet is called "punitive response flotilla" yes ok fallen empire I can take a hint ok I can't.
Save scumming the war a couple of times showed me which random events came up fairly repeatably and which didn't. I'm glad I didn't reload too often or the temptation to keep re-rolling the die would be a lot greater. (Also, it's useful for game design decide if random events should be predetermined so they always happen the same way in the same game as much as possible, or be as random as possible so if you play out a saved game twice you can't rely on the prior knowledge much.)
Prior to the big 2.0 rework, instead of the current system of hyperlanes connecting nearby systems (but not all of them) in the equivalent of a road network, each empire started with one of three different FTL techs: hyperlanes; jumps (jump to star proportional to straight-line distance regardless of layout of hyperlanes or anything else); or wormholes (each system connects to random systems all over the map).
That was really great flavour that each empire was *really different* and ended up colonising systems in a completely different pattern.
But it didn't really work for war, because geography made little sense when everyone travelled in a completely different way, so there was no notion of import systems, or of fortifying frontiers, etc, there was just "have one giant fleet, hit opposing fleet with it".
So they switched to hyperlanes by default, with the others as something that could come up sometimes but wasn't any empire's primary locomotion.
But I wonder if there'd be some compromise, maybe everyone uses hyperlanes, but some systems have wormholes available right from the start, connecting random different parts on the map, so the topology is more wacky and less flat. So you're more likely to encounter different empires in different ways, and not just "these ones are near me and these ones aren't".
Also, liv started playing stellaris (she has a lot of experience playing civ), and I'm really excited to see how her empire goes. We both really love the duckbill pacifists, but she chose quite a different race to experience a different sort of game and I'm really excited to see how it turns out. I realised how many little things with the interface had bothered me and how nice it was to be able to share that with someone else. And the excitement of finding unexpected space things!
New colonies
I expanded a bit too quickly to start with, and took some time to catch up with myself. But about now I said, it would be worth having another world or two. It's a significant step, so I said to myself "...and go!" before I pushed the button :)
That builds a ship from one of your planets, which then drives to a new planet and establishes a colony there. In theory you have a choice of species, except that my morlocks won't leave their home world, so only my original Duckbills will go to a new world.
I do have one bonus from, um, one of my starting empire bonuses, that I can send out *private* colony ships that cost energy instead of minerals. And by now, I'm doing well on energy but still need minerals to expand... everything. So I'm not usually limited in building ships (even though by now the mineral cost wouldn't be a big hurdle anyway).
Exciting to have a whole new (big) world. And my various habitability perks make most worlds very attractive.
Also, a few of my pops migrated to the new world! They hadn't ever done that before even when I thought the new world was better than the other ones, I'm not sure if I'd forgotten a setting or got a perk more recently or something else. But now I'm pleased, because it builds up a new world faster and the old world was mostly full so the pop can be replaced by population growth quickly.
The migration is marked with an icon of the pop carrying a classic folded-bag-on-a-stick bindle over their shoulder!
No-one has yet migrated INTO my empire, despite me having some attractive worlds. Hopefully they will eventually.
Some pacifist pops emigrated away when the war happened, but hopefully now the war's over pacifism will take over again.
And after a long fallow period when my science was growing too slowly, I got a rush of "clear blocking terrain to open new tiles on planets for building" techs, which let me expand my existing planets better too.
Those two new planets brought me up to my new max core planets of seven. The base is three, but I got +2 for being pacifist, and +2 for something else, so I went quite a long time without having too many.
Like many things, it's a "soft" cap, but this soft cap is quite hard -- you lose 30% energy and 30% influence, which is quite a lot, so you can't usually bull through it.
After that, you need to delegate some planets to a sector, part of your empire, but under AI control.
Consolidation
As previously mentioned, I need to integrate the new fungus planets into my empire, probably by delegating them to a sector (or maybe delegating my already-developed worlds to a sector where there's not much to do, and hand-managing the newer larger worlds).
There's a few systems I want to make sure to absorb[1]. The one with the ringworld! One with a gateway and maybe another with a wormhole. Any pirate-friendly dead-ends. One or two off to the east side of the galactic spiral to treat with empires there more easily.
[1] I'm not sure what word to use for "add a new system to my empire by building an outpost station in it". "Claim", "conquer" etc all mean something else.
After the war, I got an isolationist faction. Ok, maybe I have too many factions :) I was quite happy with the first few, the pacifists, the faith, and the egalitarians. The military faction were understandable, what with three decade long wars in 100 years. But now it's getting out of hand :)
But I think I can just accept I won't get any benefit from some of them, I can still enjoy the diversity. Even though a more game-y tactic might be to have fewer factions I can actually please simultaneously :)
The game often has a mid-game crisis where, once the empires have mostly reached some sort of status quo in the second century, something big-ish happens to shake things up. But I think that's only in the expansions, not the base game? So I have a century to expand slowly and build my science and economy, before an end game crisis eats the entire galaxy :)
Misc
One of the fallen empire's fleet is called "punitive response flotilla" yes ok fallen empire I can take a hint ok I can't.
Save scumming the war a couple of times showed me which random events came up fairly repeatably and which didn't. I'm glad I didn't reload too often or the temptation to keep re-rolling the die would be a lot greater. (Also, it's useful for game design decide if random events should be predetermined so they always happen the same way in the same game as much as possible, or be as random as possible so if you play out a saved game twice you can't rely on the prior knowledge much.)
Prior to the big 2.0 rework, instead of the current system of hyperlanes connecting nearby systems (but not all of them) in the equivalent of a road network, each empire started with one of three different FTL techs: hyperlanes; jumps (jump to star proportional to straight-line distance regardless of layout of hyperlanes or anything else); or wormholes (each system connects to random systems all over the map).
That was really great flavour that each empire was *really different* and ended up colonising systems in a completely different pattern.
But it didn't really work for war, because geography made little sense when everyone travelled in a completely different way, so there was no notion of import systems, or of fortifying frontiers, etc, there was just "have one giant fleet, hit opposing fleet with it".
So they switched to hyperlanes by default, with the others as something that could come up sometimes but wasn't any empire's primary locomotion.
But I wonder if there'd be some compromise, maybe everyone uses hyperlanes, but some systems have wormholes available right from the start, connecting random different parts on the map, so the topology is more wacky and less flat. So you're more likely to encounter different empires in different ways, and not just "these ones are near me and these ones aren't".
Also, liv started playing stellaris (she has a lot of experience playing civ), and I'm really excited to see how her empire goes. We both really love the duckbill pacifists, but she chose quite a different race to experience a different sort of game and I'm really excited to see how it turns out. I realised how many little things with the interface had bothered me and how nice it was to be able to share that with someone else. And the excitement of finding unexpected space things!
no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 08:32 pm (UTC)I'm still reading. Stellaris is in the frustrating place with other later Pdox games like CK2; it sounds fascinating, but it's Steam-only so I won't buy it (and it's too much of a moving target to yarr...). Hence it's interesting to read about it; I hope at some point in the future they'll decide it's done and send it to GOG as a complete package with all the DLC, as has happened with other games.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 09:49 pm (UTC)Ah, I see. Yeah, hope so.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-17 10:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-17 10:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-17 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-17 08:48 pm (UTC)I suspect all that this changes is the identity of the server it wants to authenticate itself with, though...
no subject
Date: 2018-07-18 01:06 am (UTC)It does (inasmuch as it authenticates with anything, Pdox still being DRM-free) but now the server doesn't belong to a spooky near-monopoly...
no subject
Date: 2018-07-18 01:07 am (UTC)Huh, that's new (I remember back when Pdox stuff was going retroactively Steam-only), thanks.
Presumably like any Pdox game it doesn't insist on authenticating against anything.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 09:01 pm (UTC)On the hyperlane/wormhole point, I've got to a stage where people are just discovering how to use wormholes which is creating exactly that sort of wacky topology - as I found out to my cost when I voted to allow my federation ally to go war on someone I thought I had no border with, only to have two 3k fleets pop out from a wormhole just outside my borders on the other side of my empire. Even without wormholes, I'm directly adjacent to five other 'normal' empires plus a Fallen Empire and a group of Marauders, which compares well to basic Civ, so having wormholes (and later gateways) progressively add some more neighbours partway through seems quite good. I think it might get a bit overwhelming if they were all there from the start.
Some other random thoughts:
- It's interesting how a relatively minor difference in original ethics (egalitarian spiritualist rather than pacifist spiritualist) changes the tone of the empire and diplomacy. I think I've found it easier to form great relationships with militarists as long as we're ganging up together against evil slavers (though my best relationships are with other egalitarians).
- I've also had the same trouble maintaining military parity. The basic trade-off - militarists/xenophobes get bigger fleets; egalitarians/pacifists get federations - seems to work really well (and realistically).
- I love that other empires actually pay attention to your diplomacy. Like the way you said a rival backed off once you were in a federation, or the way the 'Honourbound Warriors' near me always pile into the slavers once I've blunted the edge of their fleet.
- War works amazingly better than it used to in game-play terms. Not just because of hyperlanes, but because of the retreat/disengage mechanism, which means you can actually fight multiple battles back and forth rather than it all being decided in one go.
- I also have too many factions. And envy you for completing the menagerie quest!
- I wonder if the reason you're not getting external migrants is habitability? I was having the same problem, but as soon as I colonised a Gaia world I got lots - after checking it turned out my migration treaty partners just had a different planet preference.
Will write up the next iteration of mine soon. I'm in the 2290s, so not too far behind.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-16 10:19 pm (UTC)It sounds like in many ways you progressed further than me, even if in not quite so long.
Yeah, despite many bits that are clunky, the diplomacy and war mechanics do make it feel more like a real world political situation with stakes and observers and so on, not just a pile of combatants.
"And envy you for completing the menagerie quest!"
Oh, cool! I guess I was fairly lucky that it *was* possible -- the first several were within my borders or of a neighbouring friendly empire, one was in unclaimed space I could reach, two were in a mostly-friendly empire I could reach, provided I found a way to sneak past the funguses[1] and drive half way round the galaxy, and the last one was in the empire who previously hated me but turned around at the last minute. So I mostly focussed on the last one, but it could have been a lot worse. Most of the empires have open borders now, and the one that had the last planet was fairly small.
[1] Between them and a fallen empire, they blocked off the only starlanes for anticlockwise expansion.
"I wonder if the reason you're not getting external migrants is habitability?"
I think something like that. But I did have a gaia world, and a world that suited the species of one of my allies better than several of their existing worlds.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-17 08:57 pm (UTC)Broadly speaking, though, these are the things which affect migration:
Pop happiness on the planet they're on and the target planet (habitability is included in here since the habitability % is applied to the pop's happiness).
Crowding levels (ie, number of free tiles) on the planet they're on and the target planet.
Whether they'd be citizens of the planet they're migrating to.
If there's already members of that species on the target planet.
How far away the target planet is.
(Yes, still reading; you write way too much for me to comment because I've got no idea what to comment on).
no subject
Date: 2018-07-17 09:12 pm (UTC)Yes, it feels I'm about ten years of development further on, though I'm playing with the expansions so that may shift the pace a bit. On the other hand, I invested massively in Unity largely for role-playing reasons which made some things trickier earlier on but now seems to be paying off in some really big Empire-wide benefits (I've just completed my fourth tradition tree).
"Two were in a mostly-friendly empire I could reach, provided I found a way to sneak past the funguses[1] and drive half way round the galaxy."
You did a lot better than me at sneaking! I only wised up to the possibilities after reading about your exploits. :-)
no subject
Date: 2018-07-18 09:30 am (UTC)Of course, I hopefully got a big jump in everything by taking over four extra planets.
"You did a lot better than me at sneaking!"
Thank you! I hadn't thought about it in detail, I may have been too eager to look for "clever" answers. But I guess, it may have been the only way to build my territory close to the foxes enough to get them into a federation which wasn't absolutely necessary but was definitely a positive.
By far the easiest way was in the truce after a war, you can just pass through their borders however you like without having to carefully skirt their systems avoiding the starbases. And now their friendly and I'm close to resarching science ship jump drives, I may have got it anyway. But getting it to work was satisfying, especially after I messed it up a bit in an earlier war.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-17 09:17 am (UTC)