Octopus Overlords

Lassr wrote:

Sepiche wrote:

Lassr wrote: There were some good mods to eliminate this but with all the changes the mods were not updated and would no longer work. I had hoped they had incorporated something in the game to turn these events off. What you described is the main reason I have not played this in a while.

You're talking about the crisis events? You can turn them off in game setup as of patch 1.3.

Excellent! May play this again since I just finished a game of Civ VI

of course, I miss the MODS because you could turn the crisis back on. I would have done that in my last game if I could. Crisis is always irritating because it comes when I cannot defend against it.

Experienced (briefly) my first crisis. Of course they popped out in my territory. Then proceed to nuke half-dozen or so of my planets. I was working on building up a fleet to try and stop them... then got notified that I lost. Apparently nuking my planets was enough to give another player the 40% needed to win. That's crap. That rule needs to be disabled as soon as the crisis happens... and then for a period of time afterwards. I'm assuming the crisis will always happen in/near your territory?

TheMix wrote:Experienced (briefly) my first crisis. Of course they popped out in my territory. Then proceed to nuke half-dozen or so of my planets. I was working on building up a fleet to try and stop them... then got notified that I lost. Apparently nuking my planets was enough to give another player the 40% needed to win. That's crap. That rule needs to be disabled as soon as the crisis happens... and then for a period of time afterwards. I'm assuming the crisis will always happen in/near your territory?

I had a game where it happened in another territory. The problem is that race was wiped out and replaced with the Scourge, then they moved on to my territory and their fleets were HUGE, so game over.

Lassr wrote:So my civilization survived and flourished so I guess that would be a win.

The most realistic and anticlimactic victory.

Just FYI from the forums, apparently Governing Ethics Attraction does absolutely nothing due to a bug. Which sort of sucks as I had built several civs based on ethics attraction. It does explain why my near +60% ethics attraction race had a ton of factions (which I found to be very odd).

Lassr wrote:Just "finished" a game where I had no conflicts other than pirates and space monsters.

I say "finished" as in, there was nothing left to do. I could not start wars because everyone was in a federation of some sort and the game just kept going and going...

So my civilization survived and flourished so I guess that would be a win.

So break from your federation and start attacking!!!!!

LordMortis wrote:

Lassr wrote:Just "finished" a game where I had no conflicts other than pirates and space monsters.

I say "finished" as in, there was nothing left to do. I could not start wars because everyone was in a federation of some sort and the game just kept going and going...

So my civilization survived and flourished so I guess that would be a win.

So break from your federation and start attacking!!!!!

I thought about it, but it would have been suicide. Guess I could go out in a blaze of gory...(pun intended because I would have been gored. My 110K fleet against several 100K fleets)

baelthazar wrote:Just FYI from the forums, apparently Governing Ethics Attraction does absolutely nothing due to a bug. Which sort of sucks as I had built several civs based on ethics attraction. It does explain why my near +60% ethics attraction race had a ton of factions (which I found to be very odd).

Just noticed this myself. First faction popped up early, and my dictator is a member? Wierd.

By the way Distant Worlds is on sale in the Humble Bumble today. A much better game than Stellaris my opinion of course.

Lorini wrote:By the way Distant Worlds is on sale in the Humble Bumble today. A much better game than Stellaris my opinion of course.

I like Stellaris, even if it's seriously flawed and I wait for patches to make the game they insinuated it would be. What sets Distant Worlds apart? You've caught my interest.

LordMortis wrote:

Lorini wrote:By the way Distant Worlds is on sale in the Humble Bumble today. A much better game than Stellaris my opinion of course.

I like Stellaris, even if it's seriously flawed and I wait for patches to make the game they insinuated it would be. What sets Distant Worlds apart? You've caught my interest.

Distant Worlds has a living civilian economy and approaches things from a very "if you want to design individual ships to set their exact thrust to mass ration you can." DW has Victoria 2 levels of complexity in the economy, with multiple resources that can be mined and acquired without your guidance by the civilian economy or can be fostered and mined as part of your own public imperial ambitions. Further, the universe is huge, and you have a wide variety of strategies open to you (although cultural dominance is less of a factor than in other similar games). You even have tourism and immigration and migration that is largely out of your hands (although you can build tourist destinations such as a resort overlooking a neutron star).

This all sounds overwhelming and, at first (like Victoria 2), it is. But you can literally automate almost every aspect of the game (in fact, most of it is automated by default, even ship design). When you finally get into it, DW is the deepest 4X game that, for the most part, works as designed (unlike Victoria 2 and, occasionally, Stellaris).

That all said, it is hampered by a few things. The game is attractive, but not overly so (and not as attractive as Stellaris). For me the text is FAR too small and a tad blurry, particularly on larger monitors. Like many Matrix-published games, there is not a great way to scale the UI for a variety of resolutions (I never understood this, but I am not a coder/graphics artist). The game also does not have the same sort of story telling capabilities as Stellaris - the races are clearly sets of modifiers and diplomacy is extremely boring (IMHO) as just a list of proposals that are basically buttons that flip a switch if sentiment is high enough (will they accept my trade agreement? - ok - click button - done). It does have a cool universe to explore, but not as many events and such (there are some, however). Pirates are also a bit PITA from the get go. Lastly, DW can occasionally feel like you are watching the game play than actually playing the game. For instance, I have won major wars and not been totally sure how - I told my fleet were (generally) to attack (i.e. this region) and ordered up some ships to be built and the automated AI did all the work. Come back later, and I have subjugated a race of evil spiders. The space battles were fun to watch, but I was very hands off.

I maintain that Stellaris is not solely a 4X game - it is a RPG in a 4X shell. I have almost as much fun designing races as I do playing them, and when I play them I try to follow my civilization's design. I have never seen another game that does race design so well and allows you to play the characteristics of your race (I love the different policies that alter how you treat other races and your own citizens, the level of depth in that system is impressive). If Stellaris did not have so many bugs, added a lot more interesting events, and created a system for trade and espionage (a 4X game made by the people who do Victoria and EU4 without a mercantile system is SO strange), then I think it would pass Distant Worlds for me. That all said, I have played Stellaris FAR more hours than Distant Worlds, largely due to the ease of the UI and accessibility.

baelthazar wrote:

LordMortis wrote:

Lorini wrote:By the way Distant Worlds is on sale in the Humble Bumble today. A much better game than Stellaris my opinion of course.

I like Stellaris, even if it's seriously flawed and I wait for patches to make the game they insinuated it would be. What sets Distant Worlds apart? You've caught my interest.

Distant Worlds has a living civilian economy and approaches things from a very "if you want to design individual ships to set their exact thrust to mass ration you can." DW has Victoria 2 levels of complexity in the economy, with multiple resources that can be mined and acquired without your guidance by the civilian economy or can be fostered and mined as part of your own public imperial ambitions. Further, the universe is huge, and you have a wide variety of strategies open to you (although cultural dominance is less of a factor than in other similar games). You even have tourism and immigration and migration that is largely out of your hands (although you can build tourist destinations such as a resort overlooking a neutron star).

This all sounds overwhelming and, at first (like Victoria 2), it is. But you can literally automate almost every aspect of the game (in fact, most of it is automated by default, even ship design). When you finally get into it, DW is the deepest 4X game that, for the most part, works as designed (unlike Victoria 2 and, occasionally, Stellaris).

That all said, it is hampered by a few things. The game is attractive, but not overly so (and not as attractive as Stellaris). For me the text is FAR too small and a tad blurry, particularly on larger monitors. Like many Matrix-published games, there is not a great way to scale the UI for a variety of resolutions (I never understood this, but I am not a coder/graphics artist). The game also does not have the same sort of story telling capabilities as Stellaris - the races are clearly sets of modifiers and diplomacy is extremely boring (IMHO) as just a list of proposals that are basically buttons that flip a switch if sentiment is high enough (will they accept my trade agreement? - ok - click button - done). It does have a cool universe to explore, but not as many events and such (there are some, however). Pirates are also a bit PITA from the get go. Lastly, DW can occasionally feel like you are watching the game play than actually playing the game. For instance, I have won major wars and not been totally sure how - I told my fleet were (generally) to attack (i.e. this region) and ordered up some ships to be built and the automated AI did all the work. Come back later, and I have subjugated a race of evil spiders. The space battles were fun to watch, but I was very hands off.

I maintain that Stellaris is not solely a 4X game - it is a RPG in a 4X shell. I have almost as much fun designing races as I do playing them, and when I play them I try to follow my civilization's design. I have never seen another game that does race design so well and allows you to play the characteristics of your race (I love the different policies that alter how you treat other races and your own citizens, the level of depth in that system is impressive). If Stellaris did not have so many bugs, added a lot more interesting events, and created a system for trade and espionage (a 4X game made by the people who do Victoria and EU4 without a mercantile system is SO strange), then I think it would pass Distant Worlds for me. That all said, I have played Stellaris FAR more hours than Distant Worlds, largely due to the ease of the UI and accessibility.

This is a great comparison.

For me, I've always thought Distant Worlds is on paper nearly the 4x space game I've always wanted to play. I've put many hours into it, yet looking back I can't really recall what was good or bad about it. It's just bland. I'm not even talking about the graphics which I can live with. There's just something off about the game.

Stellaris, which I've only played since the Utopia DLC release, is sort of the opposite. It just misses in many ways things I'd like to see. It's easy. Yet I've been playing it nearly exclusively since I bought it because it's fun. I keep starting over, I've modded the hell out of it and now I play the stories I want. And I think that's what sets it apart, similar to what baelthazar said. Distant Worlds is the perfect numbers simulator. Stellaris is a better story telling game.

baelthazar wrote:I maintain that Stellaris is not solely a 4X game - it is a RPG in a 4X shell.

Heh, that was the advertisement that got me to be an early buyer and where I consider the game deeply flawed. It really sounded like a space opera narrative in a 4x shell and the kernels for this are definitely in the game but it doesn't really deliver on any of that for me. I had such high hopes because of dynasty nature of the Crusader Kings game(s). Still, if past performance is indicative... this game has a ton of changes and DLC coming over the years and I may get a complex narrative of space opera in a strategic (not) TBS yet.

Note I haven't gotten back to Stallaris since about the time the Plantiods were released (Heinlein?) but I keep meaning to which is why I keep popping back in this thread.

LM, I would suggest going back in with Utopia. They have really improved some of the social management stuff - the different policies (which you can now set based on race, so - for example - you can conquer a race of brutes and force them to be your soldiers while you deny the race of fragile plant scientists you conquered any access to the military). The ascendancy perks are also fun and allow you to customize your races further as you go along (sort of like EU4's idea groups). They also made factions a WHOLE lot better and now you can tell, at a glance, why certain people in your empire are happy-unhappy. The only problem with the faction system is, as I said, you are supposed to be able to bonuses to converting people to your racial ideologies with certain paths, buildings, and ideologies (i.e. spiritual), but this is apparently bugged ATM.

So for $12 in the next monthly humble bundle, I was thinking of getting the base game. Without any DLC, is it going to be worth it to do so or do I really need the DLC to enjoy the game?

Zenn7 wrote:So for $12 in the next monthly humble bundle, I was thinking of getting the base game. Without any DLC, is it going to be worth it to do so or do I really need the DLC to enjoy the game?

I think the game is a lot of fun and I have no paid DLC. Pretty easily worth 12 bucks.

This is the first time I have made it to end game, and the journey was a lot of fun. But I got myself into a bit of a pickle. I was doing well, nothing to fear from my neighbors military, advancing down the tech trees very nicely, half a dozen vassals or protectorates. But then, (not sure of I somehow triggered it) one of the ancient races in decline became an awakened race. At the time when it happened, they had some 180k fleet power, to my 50k, so clearly I couldn't straight up resist them. but then they offered to be my protectorate, because they sort of liked me. So I said yes, not realizing the full impact.
I started paying them 25%, but also they took all my vassals as their own. And then they started upgrading fleets, declaring war on the other races, and generally being a pain in the ass, which I was completely safe from.

Fast forward a while, I have several repaired or completed megastructures, dozens of habitats, I personally defeated the end game trial, but I can't win the game. I am a vassal. I've got about 200k in fleets (had some issues with that end game trial, dontchaknow), have even been to war with and completely defeated another ancient race, but still I am not independent. The awakened race now has a main fleet of 680k strength, I despair that even if i devoted everything to ship building full time, its a race for fleet strength that I cannot win. Because they are still expanding, every few years declaring war on a neighbor and taking a chunk.

I'm not sure how I can get myself out of this one.

Not played this one so may be a stupid question....can you not ask them to attack other people? Like have them attack other really powerful races and wear themselves down? Then turn on them?

Fleet strength isn't a perfect representation of actual strength. It's possible you might be stronger than you think.

I was going to say that if you can see the other ships you can figure out what they are wielding and design a counter, but they are Awakened and I don't think you can actually see their equipment.

In that case, I'd say build the best fleet you can, wait for them to attack another awakened/fallen empire and stab them in the back. If it doesn't work, at least you can go out in a blaze of glory. In a thousand generations when your species rises up in rebellion, yours will be the name of the hero they scream as they die in glorious revolution!

I did beat one Fallen empire when they split their fleet. I was able to defeat it in pieces by sacrificing smaller fleets to hold off the other fleets while my main fleet did battle with one of theirs. I'd like to say it was a brilliant strategy, but it was an accident. I didn't know they had multiple fleets until my reinforcement fleet smacked into a second stack on its way to kill me. Still, it worked and I have used it since to some positive results.

If they don't split their fleet, it doesn't work very well though.

I was unable to demand independance, it was always -50, no modifiers. My only option was war! (or give up the game)

I tried for a while to outproduce the Awakened Empire, but after a awhile it became clear it was a losing proposition. I worked up to 400k, by then the Empire had 880k. Since I have the galactic sentry, I could see everything (not ship components sadly) and it was clear that the computer was just getting ships with no regard for income or naval capacity. Not just the fallen empire, but the other vassals as well. How does an inferior species with 1 planet and an income of less than 50 mineral per month put together a fleet of battleships?

I made 4 attack fleets, with accompanied troop ships and packed them at the far edge, poised to attack some of the ancillary planets the Empire had grabbed during its expansion. The rest of my main fleet, about 300k, with a huge pile of troopships was waiting at the edge of the Empire space, 1 jump away from their home ring.
Declared war, with my only demand being indepandance, and immediately moved my smaller attacks fleets in, attacking 4 different systems at once. The Empire left its entire fleet in a single stack of doom, and raced off to cross the entire galaxy, chasing after one of my attackers. As soon as it got close, I jumped my main fleet into the Empires home ringworld. The Empire fleet in entirety turned back and raced for home. I took down all the structures, but sadly was unable to invade one of the sections before the Empire fleet closed in. I jumped out, apparently out of sensor range, because the Empire fleet turned around headed back across the galaxy, going after one of my smaller fleets again. Well seeing that, it became trivial to jump in and out with my main fleet, causing that massive 880k stack to race back and forth, never catching anybody. Obviously I exploited a weakness in AI tactics, but I think that makes up for the AI cheating on resources.
Continued to juggle the ships until I had conquered enough ancillary planets to match the warscore, receive my independence, and win based on me owning about 60% of habitable worlds.


Hooray! Myself the hivemind has conquered the galaxy.

The stacks of doom are a known problem.

But it's more fun to think of it as a brilliant strategic victory. Congrats!

Upcoming DLC Synthetic Dawn lets you start as the machines.

No word on the release date yet, but it will also accompany a free patch that will balance weapons, habitable planets, and terraforming among other things.

Synthetic Dawn and the latest patch will be out on September 21st.

...

Stellaris .. 60% off .. 22 hours remain .. $15.99

I’m sorry I have to post this here and maybe I am a bit late, but Distant Worlds is a hot fucking mess mainly due to it’s terrible interface and some very questionable design choices. I also really didn’t like the art style or retro graphics, but being a huge fan of Space Empires that is something I can live with if the game itself is solid. I’ve tried every single release in the DW series and I honestly believe they got worse as they went along. I would STRONGLY recommend anyone try the game out first to see if they like it before they buy it outright. I keep hearing there is a great game in there somewhere, but have yet to find it. Lots of people enjoy these games, I just don’t happen to be one of them even though space 4X is one of my favorite genres.

That's a shame. Distant Worlds is on the list of must try 4x games that I so far have just not picked up. It was for sale at a good price this summer but I didn't even blink because I was not prepared to take on the learning curve at the time.

Your mention of space empires sort of makes sense since that game was also a "hot mess" imo, having more moving parts than was good for it.

As average as the new moo is, it's somewhat focused in terms of gameplay. There's not a lot of room to stray from the standard 4x path.

I get that a giant sandbox is exactly what some people look for in a 4x game, and that lack of focus is what makes games like Space Empires IV really great for them. I like something with a little tighter gameplay. It's why I drifted away from Stellaris after quite a few hours. Opening gameplay was fun and "designed" but later gameplay was a little drifty with lots of "ok, what now?" Questions that I never could answer well.

I should clarify that grand Strategy is not my forte. I liked Stellaris and I'm kinda waiting for it to be more fully fleshed out as fans of the company and their other games promised it would. Yes, I understood that could take years.

War protocols initiated.

GreenGoo wrote:That's a shame. Distant Worlds is on the list of must try 4x games that I so far have just not picked up. It was for sale at a good price this summer but I didn't even blink because I was not prepared to take on the learning curve at the time.

....

I think DW is a fine 4X game. Maybe watch some gameplay on Youtube and see if you like what you see.

Lots of people love DW, I just don’t happen to be one of them. I want to make clear that in no way am I telling people not to buy it or bashing the game itself, just please try it it before you spend the money. Everything I stated about the UI and design is just my opinion, nothing more. I personally did not the game, but there are lots of people who do so YMMV.

Good thing this thread is about Stellaris, then.

That being said, I think I'm going to pass on the latest expansion for now. Maybe if I get the 'grand space strategy opera' itch again a few years down the line, I'll pick up a bunch of the expansions. And then promptly get lost in all the features.

I'd love to see them successfully address the doomstack issue, but no other game has actually addressed it meaningfully so it's a pretty tall order. It'd also be nice if they fixed all the buggy-ass event scripting.

In a generic sense (like, outside of specific games), doomstacks are dealt with by avoidance. Enemy splits their fleet up? Defeat in detail. Enemy keeps fleet together? Avoid stack, eat edges of empire. To stay mobile/agile, split your fleet up.

It has been too long since I've played Stellaris to know if that's an option, but that's the general approach to concentrated strength.

Heh, too bad the AI players don't know that, and instead come at you one ship at a time, just like back in Command & Conquer. The original.

Avoidance is definitely an option from the player side. Well, last time I played.

Sometimes though, a Fallen Empire declares war on you early on and then you're screwed.

Yep, and even late game if a doom stack heads right to your core worlds and eats them, sniping from around the edges isn't going to help.

I feel like I'm hosed here. But all my starts are like this. What am I doing wrong and is this a recoverable position? Playing on Normal difficulty. [tigimg][/tigimg]

No, not much you can do there that I can see. That's honestly far and away the biggest drawback to hyperlanes, and the reason I don't use them a lot in games with mixed FTL... while they are tactically superior to the other forms of FTL, they come at a potentially huge strategic cost.

Not only can you get cut off from sections of the galaxy, you are slower to explore with it, and in the worst case you could be at war with an enemy who can attack you, but who you can't reach to attack back.

If I really want to play with hyperlanes I usually just restart until I get a reasonable starting location.

You'll be happy to know that the next major patch will have sweeping changes to FTL as well as updates to the map generation to make those changes more fun:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/in ... n.1052958/

The single biggest design issue we have had to tackle in the Stellaris team since release is the asymmetrical FTL. While it's a cool and interesting idea on paper, the honest truth is that the feature just does not fit well into the game in practice, and blocks numerous improvements on a myriad of other features such as warfare and exploration, as well as solutions to fundamental design problems like the weakness of static defenses. After a lot of debate among the designers, we finally decided that if we were ever going to be able to tackle these issues and turn Stellaris into a game with truly engrossing and interesting warfare, we would have to bite the bullet and take a controversial decision: Consolidating FTL from the current three types down into a primarily hyperlane-based game, with more advanced forms of FTL unlocked through technology.

The hyperlanes make this tough. It'll be interesting when they are the only FTL drive available after the next patch.

The only way out I see is to skirt The ZRC to the their north, either colonizing or with a frontier station. Than quickly grabbing that triangle to the northwest of the ZRC. That would open you up to a fairly large section of stars, assuming there isn't another empire there.

You'd have to be quick and probably go to war early with the ZRC, while holding off that northern empire, either with a fleet or alliances. If the southern empire is nice, could keep them friends and go to war quickly with the northern empire instead.

Second option, if the two empires are fallen, you could try to go tall. This would mean very few colonies and rushing tech as quickly as you can. With two fallen empires on your borders you'd be almost immune from attack, but the first century or two would probably be pretty boring. The tall option would work even if they aren't fallen, assuming you can keep them as friends or allies.

So which FTL is better then? Yeah I can see that the hyperlanes are an issue, wonder why they are choosing them? Thanks guys!!!

Just decided my Klingon game was unwinnable. The Orion and the Romulans created a Federation and attacked. I can take the stacks of Orion patrol frigates, but not a real Romulan fleet, too. It was a good day to die.

Lorini wrote: ↑Thu Nov 16, 2017 2:50 pm So which FTL is better then? Yeah I can see that the hyperlanes are an issue, wonder why they are choosing them? Thanks guys!!!

Warpdrives is probably the safest. You just don't have to think about it for the most part, but it is a little slower. Warpgates are good, but take a little micro management to build out your warp network, and the gates are vulnerable to attack. It's also hell to try to force a hyperlane fleet to battle with warpgates.

Here's the reasons they give for hyperlanes:

Why Hyperlanes?
When discussing this, we essentially boiled down the consolidation into three possibilities: Hyperlanes only, Warp-only, and Warp+Hyperlanes. Wormhole is simply too different a FTL type to ever really work with the others, and not intuitive enough to work as the sole starting FTL for everyone playing the game. Keeping both Warp and Hyperlanes would be an improvement, but would still keep many of the issues we currently have in regards to user experience and fleet coordination. Warp-only was considered as an alternative, but ultimately Hyperlanes won out because of the possibilities it opens up for galactic geography, static defenses and enhancements to exploration.

Here are the some of the possibilities that consolidation of FTL into Hyperlanes creates for Stellaris:
- Unified distance, sensor and border systems that make sense for everyone (for example, cost of claiming a system not being based on euclidean distance but rather the actual distance for ships to travel there)
- Galactic 'geography', systems that are strategically and tactically important due to location and 'terrain' (more on this below) rather than just resources
- More possibilities for galaxy generation and exploration (for example, entire regions of space accessible only through a wormhole or a single guarded hyperlane, containing special locations and events to discover)
- Better performance through caching and unified code (Wormhole FTL in particular is a massive resource hog in the late game)
- Warfare with a distinct sense of 'theatres', advancing/retreating fronts and border skirmishes (more on this in future dev diaries)

Thanks Sepiche. Let's hope they do a good job at addressing the border issues.