Stellaris - Miscellanary

"Thuurgla Disseminute", "Gleggrot Disseminute", the names of these Fungus' navy fleets are very very them. As are some of the others. Including the pirates! :)

Pets

I found some alien pets! Alas they were on one of the fungus' core worlds, and for whatever reason the fungus' concentrated more on building warships than petting pets. I only found them when I flew through their home system in the post-war truce and conducted a little informal surveillance.

Liv immediately asked me to save them, but I had to admit, I was already trying as hard as I could to rescue the normal funguses from their own government, but it wasn't possible to speed up the processes without another war and maybe even planetary bombardment.

AI personalities

The characteristics of an empire (and I think, their ruler, and maybe a couple of other things) determine in their 'personality' according to a complex algorithm. Like, empires who are spiritualist and also militaristic usually get the "honourable warriors" personality. Many empires get the "hegemonic militaristic" which just means they want to conquer things. Etc.

Some are fairly specific, like the "assimilate everyone in the galaxy" and the "eat everyone in the galaxy" empires.

I think the personality is deterministically determined by those values. And the effects of the personality are mostly or completely determined by various modifiers like "chance of declaring war" and "positive/negative modifier to their opinion if you have a border with them" etc.

So it's a bit fiddly, but I quite like the concept, that you can (hopefully) just play by understanding that you can probably trade with the "spiritual seekers" especially if you're spiritualist yourself, you may or may not be able to form pacts with the hegemonic militarists depending on their political situation, and you might as well give up on some of the xenophobic personalities who mostly hate everyone.

But that because it's all run by an algorithm, it's all exposed to modders who can tweak it in various ways. And "never" is expressed as "modifier by -1000" so if there's some overwhelming pressure the other way, that might still happen.

Opinion, Trust, etc

It took me a while to get an idea how this works and I'm still not sure. There's a few relevant values, opinion, trust, and attitude, and I think a couple more under the hood.

Trust represents a relationship built up over time. Any ongoing diplomacy (trade deals, guaranteeing their independence, non-aggression pact, defensive pact, alliance, federation, etc) provides both a small monthly increase in trust, and a maximum value of trust, higher for more significant relationships. If you don't have an ongoing relationship it slowly decays to 0 again.

Opinion represents an instantaneous snapshot, which comprises (a) trust (b) various relevant modifiers, like sharing politics and philosophy gives a boost, xenophiles/xenophobes have a flat bonus/penalty to their opinion of everyone, etc. And (c) various short term effects, like breaking a treaty or making a favourable trade deal gives an instantaneous bonus/penalty to trust which slowly expires over some number of months.

So the general process of diplomacy where possible is, find empires who have at least somewhat positive base opinion of you. Build up trust by making a trade deal of guaranteeing their independence. Then combine increased trust and if necessary a temporary boost to opinion (say, a one-sided trade deal to just give them a temporary bribe), enough for them to accept a more significant diplomatic overture, which will hopefully have a higher trust cap etc.

This can see-saw back and forth based on various things -- if you're far away, diplomacy is more difficult, if your mutual border is too long, there's a penalty for needing to police it, if there's another empire mutually threatening, that's a positive to various pacts, etc.

There's also an "attitude": "wary", "cordial", "friendly", etc. This is partly due to opinion (and trust?) and partly due to relative empire strengths and to AI personality (?). I'm not sure if that's mostly just due to opinion and trust and obvious overall modifiers, or if there's a extra determinants behind the scenes.

Lots of diplomatic options have a default "no", so it can be a bit of a hurdle to get anyone to agree. You need to max out trust, but then you're left with some negatives if your empires are incompatible. And some empires will just never like you unless you're overwhelming in military force because you're naturally incompatible.

And as people helpfully clarified on the previous post, once you've got a bad diplomatic situation with someone, i.e. their opinion of you spiralled downward and they declared you a rival (or declared war or proclaimed a claim to some of your systems), it is nigh impossible to increase their opinion again because those all provide an ongoing negative modifier. You just have to hope an extra-dimensional threat spawns nearby :)

Stellaris - wishlist

Lots of the things I wished were possible turned out to actually be possible but it just hadn't immediately been obvious what the interface was.

I got a bit frustrated with sending science ships to research research projects before I realised that if you selected the science ship, you could right-click the orange box to order the ship to do the research (or shift-right-click to queue the research to do as soon as the ship completes its current order).

Probably at least one of the following are also already possible and I just don't know how.

I wish, if you'd previously visited a system, information like "number of potentially habitable planets and climate" or "number of celestial bodies" or "roughly what was on a settled planet" were available as "what you last saw" even if not in real time.

I wish the map showed you not just total resources, but showed the largest clump so you can prioritise building mining stations that gain 3 or more resources.

There's an alert that says when pirates settle in a system, can I please have a list of where that's happened? Usually it's obvious because I have eyes on a giant fleet coming towards me, but sometimes I want to make sure I know where all the original nests were and that I've got them all.

In fact, just a list of all the pop-ups and alerts I've dismissed would be good.

I wish it was easier to edit the action queue for a ship. (I was pleased to discover if you give a ship a new order, it cancels the pending actions but not the current action. IIRC "stop" cancels everything, and "shift-click" adds a new action at the end of a queue.)

It'd also be nice to be able to tell a ship "go here, wait till I have enough minerals, then build", but I understand why that's not as easy.

I wish it was easier to build a ship and designate it for a particular fleet. You can use the fleet "reinforce" option, but then I don't think you don't get to specify which ship is built or where.

These are all annoying but fairly small, since they're still developing, I think it's likely they will fix these eventually. I just felt better for writing it out :)

Stellaris - Assorted observations from last session 229x

Before

It'd been a little while since I played, I felt like I'd done all the immediate things and was less excited by all the building up I needed to do next. But (spoilers) quite a lot happened!

I've been playing for almost a century, so mid-game crises could start happening. That feels about right, the empires have mostly abutted up against each other, so we're shaping up for a lot of "sticking in one place building up resources and research, with inconclusive border skirmishing" for a century if that didn't happen.

Although I always feel hungry to *control* my situation so I always feel like I'm denied my slow consolidation :)

During

Oh dear, one of my scientists found one of the anomalies indicative of the long-dead Irassians, possibly enough to be able to triangulate a location for their homeworld. However, she died half way through the research! Old age, not DUE to the research. I hired a fresh-faced replacement, but she had to start over.

Ooh! During the various worries about ground combat in the last war I hired a general. Now there's not been any ground combat since, he's mostly just idled his time away playing dice with my mothballed armies. But he ran for chairman and had a really nice platform (basically, a flat resource bonus to I can't remember, one of energy or minerals, which was most useful to me at that time), and won.

You may remember the morlock refugees, who fled to the surface of the utopian-but-so-utopian-the-atmosphere-has-hallucinogens Gaia planet from religious persecution. There was only enough of them to run one building, but they specialised in physics so it was useful. But they also supplied an army -- an unusually strong one. And now one became a prominent scientist and got promoted to run one of my main research branches -- my empire is finally getting integrated. (Although no-one's immigrated in from another empire yet.)

Woah, holy fuck, I zoomed in on a space battle between slightly more advanced ships and that was dramatic. Lasers and such everywhere.

Now I've a little slack in resource production, I'm tweaking what I've built on planets. Is it worth deliberately specialising to have an "energy planet" and a "mineral planet" as opposed to just building everything anywhere?

The starbase or two I captured from the funguses had an ftl anchor (that stops fleets from flying through the system without engaging the starbase). But apparently that doesn't mean I can dismantle it and learn how it works? :)

Bonus wishlist

I wish it wasn't so important "whether the direct route between hyperlanes leads directly through the middle of the system or not". I feel like, a heavily armed starbase in a system should present a *moderate* obstacle to ships just flying straight through, not basically none (if the starbase has no long range weapons and a human micromanages the ships' route to fly round the edge of the system) or make ftl inhibitors basically unnecessary (if the direct route passes through the middle of the system, any ships passing through just fly a direct line and engage the starbase anyway whether they need to or not).

Stellaris 229x, Part I

Pirates

My first priority, alongside building up my resource income again, was to get rid of the pirates who'd had a bit too much of a free hand while I'd been pursuing Fungus War II.

At first this was ok -- there was a fairly weak fleet I took care of immediately with my existing strength.

Then I spent some time building up a stronger fleet to be able to take on the stronger pirate fleets head on (which sort of a minimum to be a serious force against my neighbours).

And then a lot of panic happened. Another fleet, either the original one I'd just defeated repaired, or another one spawned from the same base, appeared heading for my homeworld.

I rushed my fleet over there, but spaceflight doesn't really do "rush". And built some more ships near there too. And I wasn't in time to stop them fly past, but they aimed for one of my systems down a dead end.

Fortunately I'd only rebuilt a small part of the mining stations there. The pirates fortunately don't seem to try to attack my planets, and if they attack my starbases they self-repair, but they totally destroy all the mining/research stations they fly past.

However, I *was* able to assemble a decent fleet on my home starbase and ambush them as they flew home. It was a bit touch and go -- my fleet was disabled when they still had a couple of ships left, but they then flew into one of my reinforcements and minor starbases on the way out. Problem solved, kapow.

Unfortunately, during the same time, I detached a couple of laggardly ships to deal with the *other* pirate base. One that sadly spawned right next to a primitive world I was trying to establish an orbital watch on[1] and destroyed that a few times in the inter-war period.

[1] Apparently talking to them is MORE unethical than secretly spying on them, who knew?

The bases are fairly ramshackle, so that was ok, but as soon as it was destroyed, another base spawned from the ashes! Along with another, larger fleet that totally stomped my few ships and started flying for the frontier end of my empire near the front of the fungus war.

Then as soon as the first battle was complete, I needed to heal all my ships, build reinforcements, and fly them all *back* again to try to head off the pirates.

I ended up with two major fleets and a variety of stragglers absorbed into one or the other. One was there in time but not strong enough to take on the pirates by themselves. But they blocked their approach at a starbase and fought valiantly, and incredibly fortunately, the other fleet arrived just in the nick of time before the battle was over and handily wiped out the remnants.

And then I *was* able to divert the healthy part of the fleet to mop up the pirate bases. I sent enough that if another fleet spawned I wouldn't just lose. Which leaves me with little defences, but just *having* the ships puts off the AI empires from attacking quite a bit.

That took quite a while because it meant flying the long way round twice, but while I was doing other stuff, they did get there eventually.

Territory

I'd made some bold territorial grabs to claim systems up against other empires to keep the systems between for my future expansion, and to claim any particularly interesting systems near my borders.

That left me with an original blob near my home world and a few adjacent systems with habitable planets. A small blob with my Gaia world about half way between that and the following. A forward base up against the funguses, along with an adjacent system or two for additional buffer and good resources, plus the three tasty systems I claimed in the war.

Also, two further single-system buffers up against the Romulizards who used to like me but changed their mind when they found that out.

And a blob in the middle, just about contiguous with my home systems where there were several interesting systems including a world with a pre-space civilisation. Particularly badly, that ended up with one unclaimed system in the middle completely surrounded, which is apparently a super-double piracy lure.

Whereas the single-system forward bases, while very expensive in influence to build and increasing the risk of pirate spawns, are themselves fairly pirate-proof, as they usually just have a starbase and no mining stations.

The first territorial expansion I made after the war was to build a forward base up near the Fox Tapir Theocracy, which staked a few more systems for my future expansion but more importantly increased my diplomatic options with them in several ways.

But after that, I filled in my earlier patchwork mess a lot, claiming the systems inbetween a few gaps, which even though (unlike the AI) I still had several separate blobs, reduced the piracy risk quite a bit once the bigger blobs were more self-contained and less swiss cheese.

At the same time, I made an effort to claim several systems with interesting things I'd wanted to claim earlier but hadn't got round to. Rare resources. A wormhole gateway (I'm hoping that gives me a chance to research the tech necessary to traverse it.)

And most notably, a ruined ringworld!

Only about 8 times bigger than a planet, rather than 3 million, but still very attractive if it could be repaired. The first fallen empire, the one who I haven't really interacted with at all, had two systems, the something of something, and a neighbouring system was named the same way. I hadn't even thought to look, but apparently their systems have ringworlds in, and so does this one!

I think what happened is, the map generator reduces their territory a bit so it doesn't completely block off anti-clockwise expansion through the galaxy. It nearly does already, and if they'd has both systems, I think there would have been only a single connection between clockwise and anticlockwise of them. But didn't remove the ringworld.

Building ringworlds is one of the expansion packs; I'm not sure if repairing one is possible without that or not.

Stellaris 229x, Part II

Federation

Building territory closer to the Theocratic Molluscfoxes suddenly made them that much more receptive to several of my diplomatic overtures. I don't know if I could have achieved the same by pumping their opinion with temporary advantageous trade deals or not.

Including the one I was most excited about, forming a federation!

That might or might not be sensible. It can make it harder to reach a winning condition if the other empires aren't interested in expanding enough. But it just sooooooo fit the concept of my species I just had to do it.

Just joining a federation was really cute. Now all of our combined territory went gold, not just mine. And their ships went from yellow neutral to blue allied. And I can see most of their territory. And they have a much greater positive opinion of me!

Apparently being next to them also let me have more reasons to declare war on them if I wanted, but I didn't.

Unfortunately, the twitchy friendly other-spiritualist-empire who had *originally* been explicitly federation builders, still weren't positive enough to join the federation. I wasn't sure if I'd need to repeat the moving-my-borders-closer trick.

Fortunately, a couple of years later, the Tardigrade-Foxes offered them membership and they accepted! They were a fair bit stronger than either of us at that point, so having both other empires on board made me feel a lot more secure. Even together we don't out-threaten the other major empires, but hopefully we're comparable enough the previously-friendly now-hostile Romulizards will not dare declare war on me.

Anyway, WOOO! GO US! WE FORMED A FEDERATION!

The Legion Eagles, who were especially xenophobic even by the standards of the other militaristic empires (but not as bad as the Banthurian Reavers who look harmless but want to kill everyone) then wanted to join with associate status. Then they resigned. Then they came crawling back. I'm not sure what was going on with them. I hope they make up their mind.

That also helps a little with one specific mission. My scientists particularly wanted to study specimens of fauna from six specific worlds round the galaxy. They were all incredibly dangerous, *obviously*. But not so dangerous they threatened a whole space ship. I was lucky half of them were in my borders, and the others could be reached from fairly friendly empires who had open borders to me. But one was in the Parroteagles' territory.

Previously that was unreachable as they really didn't like me (or anyone, other than stronger empires they could get something from). But when the Flatworm Lizards' resentment of my controlling any territory that they wanted outweighed their mild tolerance of me and they started a rivalry with me, that suddenly made the Death Parrots -- already in somewhat dire straights between two stronger empires -- like me a lot more.

So the good news is, whether they join the federation or not (and I'm not sure I want them as a full member, I don't trust them, whereas the other two and I seem to have more aligned interests), I can access their borders to complete this fauna research mission. The bad news is, they're completely blocked off on both sides by empires who won't let me through. Oh well, eventually there'll be a war, and if not, I'll eventually outpace everyone with research somehow.

The Furry Klingons now quite like me -- mostly because I'm closer, I think. Unfortunately, they have a long border with the Theocratic Foxes and they've rivalled each other, so I don't know if I can talk them into a federation. But at least they're not blocking *my* ships any more. Fingers crossed for more productive diplomacy in future.

Irassian Homeworld!

Also, I finally found enough relics to locate the Irassian homeworld. That came with a giant bonanza of resources (3k unity, after scaling for my current overhead, 2k minerals, and 500 physics research), and a system with several great resource deposits in.

A bit later in the game that might not be as overwhelming, but right now it's very very welcome :)

And science ships don't spend much resources researching that sort of thing -- just a lot of time. So it was probably good I pursued it, even if my main motivation was interest.

I'm not sure if there's anything more to discover or if that's the end of the story.

ETA: I discovered the Irassian homeworld right near my core worlds. Apparently some people have it spawn on the other side of the map. I'm not sure if they changed it to be more generous or if I was just pretty lucky.