/civ4xg/ - Civilization, Stellaris and 4X Games General

YNAEMP Edition

>Stellaris OP
pastebin.com/qsTFCyvh

>Stellaris Mod Archive
mega.nz/#F!hpBCSbCC!vZNs1Qhip_UJQPSSdoZjUg

>What is stellaris?
A 4x game developed by paradox development studios.

>Stellaris Steam Group
steamcommunity.com/groups/vgstellaris

>/civ4xg/ OP:
pastebin.com/P5XCTQx9

>Some mods for Civilization V
pastebin.com/5ANRmRur

>More info on Civ VI:
pcgamer.com/civilization-6-everything-you-need-to-know/
ign.com/articles/2016/05/11/three-ways-sid-meiers-civilization-6-radically-reinvents-itself-city-building-science-and-diplomacy
gamespot.com/articles/civilization-6-revealed-brings-major-changes/1100-6439691/
well-of-souls.com/civ/index.html

Old Thread:

Are there mods for SMAX? Which are the best ones?

can the ai move and shoot in civ6?

or is that still too hard to do for firaxis?:^)

>be chilling out in my empire
>suddenly warmongers declare war on me
>defend my empire and my world by capturing their cities and wiping them out
>somehow I'M the bad guy

>defend my empire and my world by capturing their cities and wiping them out
>and wiping them out
>somehow I'M the bad guy

Yeah dumbass, it's called genocide.

Think of it like this: if somebody kicks you in the shins, strangling them to death for it will cause people to be wary of you.

turboSMAC

What is the perfect balance of basic resources in 4x games?

Just money and materials or production like Civ and Stellaris?
Extremely long list of very specific materials like gold, copper, specific gases such as in Distant worlds?

What's a good in between?

Gold, Stone,Wood, meat.

I'd say 4 ressources is okay.
A "normal" ressources that is always needed to create units (food), a basic building ressources needed for low-tier buildings and basic military units (wood), advanced ressource that is fairly rare but can be used for all advanced stuff (gold), and an advanced building ressource only used for defense/wonders (stone) is the best balance in my opinion.

Games with only one ressources like 8-bits army are usually shit and shallow, games with two ressources are more about balancing ressources, games with 3-4 ressources allow interesting strategies.

I think the least you can do is go with production that decreases time like in civ, aow, mom, and presumably others.

Gold is good, but not necessary for upkeep of units.
Civ2 had gold for building upkeep, and had no upkeep for units. Units siphoned production from their home city depending on government.
1 shield for every unit over 3 if you were Monarchy/Communism/Despotism. Over 10 if you were Fundamentalist.
Every unit if you were Rebuplic/Democracy.

AoW had production, gold upkeep and a gold cost of producing the unit. I think that works, but at least 1-2 didn't have a lot of infrastructure or economic build up of cities.

Production "Resource"+Gold+Strategic Resource is fine.
But I think I'd prefer Production+Gold+Strategic+Material X+Material Y+etc.

>Extremely long list of very specific materials like gold, copper, specific gases such as in Distant worlds?
This.

>Civ2 had gold for building upkeep, and had no upkeep for units. Units siphoned production from their home city depending on government.

This seems cool as shit.

Why can't this be the current civ model? It also prevents you from just cranking out a million units in a single capital city, while still giving interesting alternatives for tall/small empires (small empires can produce more units but their cities will be devastated during, meanwhile tall cities can have a few units but will still chug along)

It's a pain in the dick to have per-city maintenance and it doesn't model modern armies very well. A modern nation-state's army isn't really supported by a dozen cities, it's sort of supported by one or two cities (which themselves are usually just a civilian sprawl attached to a military base in some capacity) with the rest of the cities sending material / manpower.

It's also not really accurate for pre-modern warfare, since even though military units were supported by cities, they also sort of supported themselves through looting.

>Bought Stellaris last night
>Created my own Transhuman Nation
>Playing until 13:00 today, no sleep, no breakfast
>Tried to liberate my closest neighbouring system
>Similar fleet size, but engaging their spaceport first was a terrible idea
>Lost fleet during several retreats and the enemy kept spawning ships at a ludicrous rate
>Had to evacuate with a colony ship and a handful of civilian ships beyond the frontier of my other neighbour (almost 90% similar to me, except being a molluscoid)
>The enemy liberated my homeworlds and they are allied together
>Now I'm rebuilding and perhaps raising another pre-space civilization to help me

I love this game, despite of the bugs

I wish I could have fighted till my homeworlds were destroyed. Better fighting one enemy than two.

Paradox game are on sale this weekend. Which one is better, the original warlock or warlock 2 ? They both cost the same price but warlock 2 have a lot of negative review.

Stopped caring about warlock after I saw the first video of it.
First I heard something about "spiritual successor to master of magic", but then it just looked like magic fantasy civ5.

how does this work? i have higher tourism but on deity don't know if this effects it, do i just hope the celts pick freedom or switch now?

disadvantages of picking ideology first...

Anyone know how Anomalies function?

Are they all generated at the start and then you have a chance to discover them?

Do they spawn if you just roll well enough with your scientist while surveying?

Higher tourism doesn't matter.

What matters is your tourism/culture modifer versus theirs.

So if you are both Exotic to eachother.
There's no change.
If they are Exotic to you, and you are Unknown to them.
Then you suffer.

I assume they've had Tourism push at you for longer and only recently got #2 in tourism?


I don't remember the cut offs, maybe 10% for exotic?

So when you've accumulated(over all turns that you have been in contact with them) Tourism equal to 10% of their accumulated(over all turns period) culture, then you'll be Exotic with them.

So essentially it's YourTourism/TheirCulture vs TheirTourism/YourCulture, but stratified.

It look like civ with better combat, with the few video I saw I think it's spending 6€ to try it. Look like the second one have a lot of balance issue so I'll try the first one I think.

Would you consider it unethical to colonize the moon of a pre ftl species?
Unethical to even colonizing their system?

Did anyone here try polaris sector?

planet in their system no, moon maybe, depends how far along they are. If they have left orbit, then moon: yes.

Well, I wouldn't say that colonizing any land that isn't already claimed by that species is really unethical
But something like an FTL ayy colonizing Eris would definitely be a bit of a concern to us
Likewise, ayys mining the asteroid belt would also be fairly alarming, and colonizing our Moon would be enough to start a war, though I'd imagine we'd make our own claims to various parts of the solar system long before it even gets to that point anyway

The Erresëa Assembly needs to expand
Purple = My Territory
White = Unclaimed Space with habitable planets, but they're too far away, at best like 800-900 influence to colonize.

I have 3 species.
Continental, Ocean and Arid.
I don't have mutants yet so I could land with my main species on a Tropical, Arctic or Desert world and get new species with that habitat.
Or just mod them when they land but that's not as fun.

Orange is risky since there's a xenophobic fallen empire up there.
Would be nice to terraform those to arid mining worlds.
My Arid Species are uplifted proles.

theres already a first almost EXPANSION for stellaris coming, any idea when release?

If you are talking about Stellaris, your scientific leader can increase the chance of discovery if he has the proper perk.

...

My phylosophy is observing ancient civilizations, perhaps industrial too, and raising atomic age and modern civilizations. They already have their moral values given their history.

Doesn't really answer the question.

Yeah, but that's the closest to answer it. You can't see the anomalies but that's the only way to increase the chances of discovery.

Personally my view is that a races home system is really the only thing they're entitled to by right. Everything else is, essentially, up for grabs. There's only two ways you can go about colonising a sentient species home system ethically (short of full on invasion Caveman vs Lasers style)

>1 Guardian Angel
Generally only ethical (in my opinion, not from a mechanic stance) for any civilization at the pre-industrial stage. The rest of the system is yours for all intents and purposes. You do not intend to uplift this race, be it adverse ethics or a non-intervention belief, the resources/colony is simply a trade-off for you ensuring this young race continues its development without the risk of falling prey to the myriad dangers of cosmic fate or power hungry empires.

> Beneficent Older Brother
Really only viable if they share values not diametrically opposed to your own.

Colonise the system and establish mining posts as permissible. Uplift the race to join you on the galactic stage. Once trust has built up enough you gift the system to them.

If the colony is by this point major (14+ tiles or something) perhaps an alternative recompense is to transfer them another system.
How would we feel if we discovered such operations have been going on undetected since we split the atom?

Well, stealth in space is pretty much nonexistent
So unless they somehow have a way of doing that, which might not be entirely unreasonable given that they're assumed to have FTL technomagic anyway, there's no way we wouldn't know that the solar system's already crawling with ayys
And even with technomagic radiation cloaking shit, there's still no way they could touch the Moon or Mars without us knowing

>Well, stealth in space is pretty much nonexistent
Small probes hidden behind meteors.

Meteor showers are ayynvasions.

Well, a typical meteor shower, probably not
But the Chelyabinsk meteor could be a possibility

Though, now that I think about it, it would probably be pretty difficult to detect any satayylites that are in low Solar orbit, as long as there aren't too many of them

Which tech gives you Teldar Plant?

Cool

If I've never played either before, should I try out Sword of the Stars II or Complete?

2 seems to be regarded as utter shit for some reason, although I've never tried it myself. The first is very good though.

I know it's regarded that way, but I was under the impression that it got better after launch.

THE FIRST

Complete.

2's just broken in ways that are not engaging; poor UI, bad economy, AI that bankrupts itself, gamecrashing bugs forever. It actually almost sort of got better before the expansion and then it just fell down the gutter.

It does have a shiny engine and I almost wish there was just a standalone for the battles, but as a package I can't recommend it.

Is there a way to edit Cruisers and Battleships speeds in Stellaris' ini file or a mod? they move too slow for my liking

yes

t. hardworking Eywa-fearing moondweller

Well you can establish a base there. Just don't genocide the natives and take their place.

Why not? What's the point of being an Empire if you can't be a dick?

is 'Thea: The Awakening' any good? or at least worth a pirate?

You'd think it was fair play for an empire to arrive in our solar system and genocide us?

It's fun.

Given how we're still not colonizing Mars, yeah. We could've already started that, and instead we're fighting each others in the name of some imaginary friend.

We got robots on Mars, we called dibs first.

We ain't got farms. I don't think we even have a space station working since they closed Mir.

And I heard we get more and more space debris orbiting the planet. We'll end up being unable to throw anything in orbit at this rate.

Literally who cares tier
Someone who came from outside the solar system with conquest equipment has a technological gap of incomprehensible levels they may as well be gods

The ISS is still working.

Oh dear god, not the retarded Ancient Alien theory again.
I watched that shit once, I felt like I broke three ribs laughing.

It's worth to pay full price for it. Pirate the game (the demo is the early access version) if you want, but buy it afterwards if you like it. Thanks to the semi-random elements (only two unlocked starting Deities, re-generated map every start, tons of events) you won't be bored. It recently got a massive free (!) DLC.

>Ancient Alien
What are you on about what is this theory? I'm saying that anyone who can come from outside our own solar system with the intention of conquest and an 'empire' capable of interstellar government is so far beyond our capabilities that they're effectively divine
Like look at this shit. This is a single terrestrial phenomenon and all of the world's nukes combined can't defeat it over the course of its lifetime. If its power were actually applied like a bomb it could sweep France clean and the Earth generates a bunch of these things every year just by basking in the sun and spinning slowly.
They could shatter the planet outright if they felt like it.

It's not a theory, it's a TV show masquerading as a documentary.

I think it's called Alien Theories in the US, but we call it Ancient Alien in my country because of some retarded reason.
Kinda like "The Purge" was renamed "American Nightmare".

Well, I'd say it'd be comparable to the tech gap between European settlers and the various indigenous peoples they displaced
The difference between a situation with FTL ayys and us being that we recognize the significance of their tech and would be scrambling to get ahold of their shit and reverse engineering it, so unless they made an active effort to prevent that, we wouldn't stay a non-FTL species for very long

/stellaris/common/ship_sizes/00_ship_sizes

This is probably reverted back every update so I recommend looking into creating a mod for your own stuff.

No you really don't get it. They could just shoot one of the smaller ships at us in interstellar travel mode and the planet is gone. Just GONE.

Playing Stellaris
>Make my transport fleet follow my battleship fleet because it's annoying as fuck having to babysit them every single time when a system is cleared and it would be faster to just have them following the fleet for immediate landing after they bombard the shit out of the target.
>Everything going well, now I just have to worry about telling the fleets where to go
>Suddenly the transport fleet warps BEFORE the battleship fleet despite being set to FOLLOW them.
>Get obliterated at the destination while the fleet they were supposedly following arrives

This game is fucking garbage. You need to babysit every little detail of everything you do, the AI is trash and can't do anything. No wonder the game is so easy considering the AI is so bad at it.

What's the point?

>Playing Stellaris

The point is that they could also rebuild the planet if they felt like it. Even without brute force they could drop a 3km asteroid on us and cause nigh-extinction then come in a clean up the mess, the Earth will recover.

Well, that'd really depend on what method of FTL travel they use
Most likely they'd use some sort of physics loophole that doesn't require them to actually travel at superluminal speeds, ie, wormholes or something like an Alcubierre drive or some other crazy quantum shitstorm

What do they look like?

...

Whatever method they use, as long as they're traveling at a good fraction of the speed of light (15+ %, maybe), an asteroid-sized ship could easily obliterate the planet.
Man I fucking hate interstellar sci-fi wars if we want power why don't we just be fantasy

geez, no wonder they're fanatical pacifists.

>Originally tundra inhabitants
There's not much difference between what a tundra world and a nuclear winter world would be like besides radiation (which goes away quickly).

I think they adopted my ethics since they're the exact same.

If they're exploiting a loophole, I'd doubt they'd bother even accelerating the craft at any fraction of lightspeed, since it'd probably still be just as difficult for them to do that as it is for us

The whole argument's probably null anyways, as FTL is probably impossible and most space-faring species will likely end up uploading themselves into a VR simulation and living out the rest of their lives in a giant server before their sun starts shitting itself and melts said server
Which will probably be our fate as well

>He is a fanatic pacifist

Sounds comfy as fuck
Maybe we'll just have shit like backups of the server on every planet and robots that basically spread the servers like a cancer to other planets so they can be backups forever
Also fuck thermodynamics, lossless cycle where are you?

>uploading themselves into a VR simulation
Not this shit again. This is as impossible and retarded as FTL travel and will never happen.

It's not theoretically impossible (and neither is FTL actually given some theoretical material). As long as you have a set of programs capable of modifying itself and this set of programs is able to more or less be standalone in its perception and self-modification you have a human mind, unless what you're saying is that there exists a soul or something in which case you just have to trap the soul/

>This is as impossible and retarded as FTL travel and will never happen.
It's basically what VR is right now though. Just add the all five senses and disable movement of the actual body. The simulated world can run on whatever.

>As long as you have a set of programs capable of modifying itself
We have tried this and so far it just doesn't work.
>this set of programs is able to more or less be standalone in its perception and self-modification
>more or less
No
> you have a human mind
No
>unless what you're saying is that there exists a soul or something in which case you just have to trap the soul/
I don't really believe in the concept of a soul but if there was one by its own nature it would be impossible to "trap".

Now let's assume for a moment all this stuff worked: you'd just be killing yourself and uploading a copy of your brain to the VR. Or living on while your copy lives in the VR. What's the point? You'd still live outside of it and die.

I don't even know what kind of leaders I want anymore.

Last election I saved an admiral, an of course he was elected.
Maybe another Admiral(Aggresive?) and another governor(Architect or Book nerd).

>It's basically what VR is right now though.
>Wearing glasses and playing games on a controller is basically the same as living in a simulated world.
Dude.

>We have tried this and so far it just doesn't work.
We've tried to devise some form of tactic to beat the Carthaginian navy and it just doesn't work
t. Roman, First Punic War

>No
>No
Well okay.

>you'd just be killing yourself and uploading a copy of your brain to the VR. Or living on while your copy lives in the VR. What's the point? You'd still live outside of it and die.
You could argue that the person I was three seconds ago died. This discussion leaves the realm of science and enters the realm of philosophy and the question of "Who am I", which is something else entirely.

I am not saying it'll work right now and I'm not saying it'll ever work but your main objection comes down to 'we haven't gotten it to work so far' (there is literally nothing about the nature of information that disallows this) and a philosophical problem of who the 'self' really is, you can't say 'impossible'.

>jack an iv into your arm or something
>include all five sense for simulation
>play forevermore

A person's mind is contained in your brain. Your brain is not just "information". Your brain is made up of tens of thousands of different types of chemical compounds interacting in extremely complex ways. That is your mind. It's not just a matrix of on-off switches, it's more complex than that. The human mind is not some indefinite mass of magic that you can just rewrite into code and upload into some server, its very foundation is completely different from the structure of digital information.
>Philosophy
Quite irrelevant in this discussion. Philosophy won't suddenly loophole your self into being some intangible thing. Your brain is what makes up your self. You can't separate "brain" from "self". And the "self" gets mutilated just like any other body part when you damage the brain. Kill your brain and you kill your self. There's no "soul" there you can extract, compile into code and upload to some magical server made up of stuff that doesn't exist.

>We've tried to devise some form of tactic to beat the Carthaginian navy and it just doesn't work
If what you're trying to say is "just because we don't know if it works now doesn't mean we won't find a solution later", it's not that simple. Here we're dealing with the very limits of physics, biology and information theory. You can't just bruteforce these.

>jack an iv into your arm or something
>magic
>play forevermore
You are dumb and you've got no idea what you're talking about.

>Your brain is made up of tens of thousands of different types of chemical compounds interacting in extremely complex ways. That is your mind. It's not just a matrix of on-off switches, it's more complex than that.
Irrelevant, because the matrix of on-off switches is meant to be the ultimate reduction of information, not the actual form of it. We can reduce almost all other physical phenomenon to this matrix (to a set of (complex) equations and then to a grid of on-off), the brain is not special here.

>Quite irrelevant in this discussion.
Oh it is though, because this concerns the fundamental nature of consciousness. That being said it's 3AM, I haven't slept for almost 48 hours at this point and I'm getting hit with exhaustion all at once. Goodbye.

>the brain is not special here
Hardly a problem of being special or not. It's a problem of scale and scope. Let's ignore for a moment the limitations of physics and we get your magical computer with infinite storage space, infinite lifespan and infinite processing power. Now MAYBE we would be able to sort of simulate a brain if we understood brains perfectly. However, how in the fuck do you "scan" your brain in order to reproduce it in the computer, in an instant, all at once? I can't even begin to imagine any way this could be accomplished with any present or future technology we have thought of. Even FTL seems easier to do than this because lol quantum physics that we still don't fully understand.

>Oh it is though, because this concerns the fundamental nature of consciousness.
Mind is brain. Brain is matter. Your mind is matter. There that didn't take a lengthy metaphysics bullshit rant.

>Attila at -559 gold per turn
What is wrong with civ 5 ai?

...

Is there a mod or cheat that lets me unlock a specific technology? I'd like to make battleship right off the bat but have nothing but small weapons and see how long that lasts me before the AI catches up in tech.

§ = opens console

I don't know one that unlocks a specific technology.
Only one that unlocks all technologies.

research_technologies

You could use that.
Put Instant_build on, build 1 battleship with your basic weapons, and then use research_technologies to get rid of your techs I think.

Or do you want to be able to build more battleships?

I just want the battleship tech unlocked and nothing else, I just wanna play as the Colonials from Galactica and build big, expensive ships. Usually when I unlock them in a regular game its become stale and boring.

I kind of like the way Stellaris does it. Energy and Minerals, plus a long list of specific materials for special buildings. Shogun 2 did it like this too.

Can't find any console command for that I'm afraid.


Best way to do it legit would be Intelligent+Natural Engineers I think, Engineering Research Grants, beeline engineering labs and only build those and then beeline battleships.

Funny enough those are the exact traits I gave my custom empire. I guess I'll fiddle around with the .ini file and see what happens.

How do you get culture that is even close to the AI? I'm always vastly behind in culture even when getting all 3 guilds early

>How do you get culture that is even close to the AI?
wide

>Take all the Research bonuses I can
>Fanatic Materalist, intelligent, natural engineers, ect.
>Tech up as hard as I can
>Focus on generating as much research
>Check my neighbor that has none of those
>Equivalent tech

FIDS
I
D
S

>DESTRUCTIVE ANAL
Is that a mod or just an unfortunate shortening?

>DESTRUCTIVE ANAL
Hahaha what?

No pagan xeno has any right to deny god's chosen people their promised celestial bodies!