/civ4xg/ - Strategy/4X General

I think I'm gonna try out 25%, 2 arm or 4 arm spiral?

It's evolution, baby!

Depends on the size. If less than Med just 2, otherwise 4.

Civ 6 has felt like a very straight forward 4x game to me. Every victory will be a stomp using victory or science, while losses will be from early war destroying me.

I'm looking for a 4x game where I can feel like different games are varied and take actual effort. Is Stellaris any different?

Pretty much every 4x is always a one sided stomp
You can instantly win or lose based on your start, such is the nature of the 4x

Stellaris flows like your traditional 4x.

At each stage of the game, watch the big guys, and keep out of their way. Eventually you are the big guy, but it isn't really over until the late game crisis hits, and you deal with the awakened empire(s).

What's the "late game crisis"?

Not to my experience, no. You spend the early game on a legitimate high of discovery, maybe stomping out a baddie or building around a fallen empire but once you beat the biggest baddie once, it's just a slog until you trigger the end event. Which usually comes down to one battle and then that's it.

It's one of the most uneven games in that 90% of your time from the midgame on is spent waiting for shit to finish building, for influence to build back up, for protectorates to be integrated or for non-aggression pacts to run out (so you can into a war that was decided 10 years earlier).

...prey...

Three flavors, Evil Warp Daemons, Tyranids, or AI rebellion.

To add, it's more "fun" as a conduit for RP'ing because as a game it is utterly mediocre. Which isn't so bad but after 3 or 4 games you've seen everything it has to offer apart from some hard to trigger situations, at least until the next patch comes out.

How's the Utopia meta shaping up?

We have no numbers on anything so it's not easy to say.
For example, if they go with the first suggested calibration and have Dysons produce 250 a month they'll be absolute shot and no-one will ever build them, whereas if they give 1000 a month like the outraged Pdox forum peiple demanded, Dysons will actually be good.

Overall it looks like the Ascentions in general are bad - there's no indication they're planning to fix the bullshit genemodding UI so it will still be like driving hot pokers into your own eyes regardless of how many good traits they give you.

Personally I think Voidborne is shaping up to be the win button just for the habitats. When you can put 12 science / energy pops on *every* shitty ball of rock in your territory, that'll like quintouple your population and get you up to Superconductivity XX and Mineral Extraction XX in no time.
You don't need a big empire when every mineral you mine is worth 10.

What's Voidborn?

Mod it and have all three.

reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/5t48ww/speculationstream_tooltips_banks_v15_ascension/

You can now pick what are analogous to National Ideas from EUIV: customise your spess nation down a particular path after you acquire enough Turquoise Mana.

Voidborne is a supposedly minor branch of the Megastructure-Builders idea tree that allows you to build orbital habitats around barren / frozen / gas / otherwise useless places that previously have only been mining station fodder.

Fuuuck me that's useful.

> EXPANSION
Absolute horseshit except for the very early game if you're colony-rushing. Every point you've put into this is going to be completely useless to you after about 2250.
> DOMINATION
The improvements to subject integration make it an absolute requirement for Pacifists, but if you're not a Pacifist you would never have any vassals so useless otherwise
> PROSPERITY
The bottleneck for mid/lategame success in Stellaris is having enough money to take your fleet out of dock, so TWO upkeep reducing traditions mean this is immediatly GOAT, everyone else fuck off
> HARMONY
Since happier pops harvest more energy, the happiness boost is great. Depending on how unrest and consumer goods affect your budget in 1.5 the buffs to both of those might put this on par with Prosperity
> SUPREMACY
The only thing useful in here is the reduction in Cede Planet cost, but desu -25% just takes you from 4 systems per war to 5. Late wars are still gonna be shit-slogs.
> DIPLOMACY
Literally nothing in here is remotely useful
> EXPLORATION
Since anomalies remain the only part of the game that's actually fun I would be very tempted to take anything that gives me 15% more of them, but this is more a commentary on how boring Stellaris is than on how functionally useful the tradition is

TL;DR: Prosperity / Harmony crushes, unsurprisingly the Swedes have lionized gommunism.

What is your favorite government type or playstyle in stellaris? I was going to do a spiritualist/collectivist run but the penalty to research just seemed too hard of a hit for me to justify.

I just like to semi-RP it.
If I ever lose a war (or even win a big war) or have any generally 'big' shit happen to me I pretend there's been a revolution, and I change government form and playstyle.

For example, in my current game my relatively peaceful Star Empire got thralled by an AE, so I changed to an Ordered Stratocracy, renamed myself as the Enslaved Helots, and set about being the angry attack dogs to my glorious magitek masters.

So yeah....how in the fuck is this thing gravitationally affected by the other two stars?

For the record talking about the White Dwarf star. That's an Orbital period of 2 MILLION YEARS!! What?

There's no penalty to research, what are you talking about?

Has anyone tried the new Stellaris mod that actually adds new Religions, or the one that actually makes Federations interesting?
V-Mods Religions BETA and Stellar Council: Federation Elections and Laws, respectively.

Unless you're playing with a mods, Spiritualist doesn't give you a research penalty.

Speaking of which, do we still not have a way to steal technology from other empires?
It'll probably be saved for the espionage DLC.

You can always invade empires for their ship tech.

Searching, space-junk for useful doodads it's alright, but you should be able to to send your science ships to recently conquered alien planets to reverse engineer through events the alien technologies you haven't researched yourself in a similar manner to space derby.

Now that I think about it, I'd be interesting if you could instead send your construction ships to recycle the remains of ships for a fraction of their build cost for minerals in case you're at war against a empire with lower technology or you're simply short on resources.

>federations

what mod gives you that icon with the "-5%" on the lower right corner and what is it for?

That is a war tracker...

did you win

Have you never been to war before?
That thing's been in vanilla since release

Its only an out numbering of 10k of course he won the AI is a stupid as rocks in Shitllarass.

well, that explains it, most I've done is invade primitive worlds, been playing mostly as a waifu empire simulator so just bobbling around the galaxy

>Authoritarian/Fanatic Spiritualist.
>Complete the Horizon Signal event, allowing unlimited colonization.
>Pierce the Shroud and make deals with the denizens that reside there.

I pity you materialists. Becoming Synths is going to be so boring in comparison.

not that battle but the war
Niggas warred my when i was working on economy and had a fleet of 8-9k

They took planets 1by1 like in the pic, which i took back once they left, intercepted their reinforcements, while mass producing battleships and cruisers, and with a vassal absorbtion finishing i raped them with a 30k fleet.

Now i literally own half the galaxy and my biggest concern is that my border is way too close to a militarist FE.
At which relation ship score do they fuck you up?

Its ot even 100 years in, and had 6 advanced start niggas.

Not the weeb but with how fucking awful the war mechanics in Stellaris are, i almost NEVER go to war. Seriously, war is worse than peace in this 4X game.

What's your strategy?
Also what ethics and traits do you have?

I found that making wargoal planets worth x2.5 more in warscore (isntead of fucking x1.25), and setting the minimum occupied planet warscore worth 7.5 (instead of 5) makes them MUCH more tolerable without making them instawins after 1 planet.
Get yourself an army big enough that it can concuer planets withuout it being bombed first, and you further reduce the pain of hopping 10 planets to get 2 in the end.

These bonuses also apply to AI as well, so they can blindside you and actually have a slimmer of hope at winning before you can destroy them as usual.

No combat itself is boring. Watch your two blobs kill each other.....yay......Use the most OP combo to instawin. Doomstack your opponents to death because why the fuck not?

This time i had individualist+f.materialist, with corporation goverment to help with energy, and had intelligent,conformist as the main traits, but i usually do the same thing with all other setups:

At the start colonize everything with barely a fleet to kill off pirates and only building mining stations, not research ones. Keep the 4 closest planets incl. capital for ship production, give the rest (along with all systems and stations) to sector with science focus and max taxation. Set up the shipyard planets for mass production while conitnuing colonizing, grabbing territories and making mining stations.

Before my non-advanced neighbors get too big for a single complete conquest (either vassaling or cedeing all planets) i start mass producing ships and shipyards for nav.capacity, war them and if their fleet is too stong try to backdoor them into a peace.
After ~2-3 empire falls, usually the local bigguy wars me but now i have at least 1 vassal and a shitton of mineral income so i can keep zerging the fuck into submission, at which point i have a big enough standing fleet to war whatever neighbor remains and not in a pact.

In the end i now have a MASSIVE territory advantage (with shit-tier planets), and a nice fleet for cleaning up stray ayys, so i can focus on domestic development and colonizing whatever planets remain withing my borders, until the rest of the galaxy grows back its balls and wars me, and thats where we started.

IT snowballs so hard usually that games end with me taking out a FE before it awakens, research jumpdrives (sometimes both psi and normal), then slap the unbidden back before it even leaves its portal system

Im going to add to this.
Stellaris is a PDX game. Is suffers from the usual things that make PDX games good, meh or bad. Combat is un-involved beyond have bigger numbers and MAYBE set up a choke point on the mountains somewhere. Every single game i've played by PDX that was not named Hearts of Iron (by far their best game BTW) is like this. the only reason to play modern PDX games is the stuff you do outside of combat. CK2 has family politics, incest, and hilarious stories to tell, EU (all of them) is garbage, and Vicky is an economy sim cleverly disguised as a GSG. Stellaris is literally EU in space right now, except it doesn't even have a third of the features EU4 did at launch.

Stellaris needed like 2 more years of development to be good at launch.

Thank you for the insight. I'll have to give that a shot in my next playthrough

the big bottleneck in aurora is disk access
get an ssd, or ramdisk the database file

How i RAMDISK? i ain't making a free game cost me $200.

Also does it allow you to get farther for real or does it just delay the inevitable Civilian Apocalypse?

>one 10000 blob in that entire empire
stellaris was a mistake

what's the point of having non-interactive battles if you can't use fleets as units? and have to have a single boring death blob at all times

google it, there's various softwares that will do it

>googled it
>Found forum posts saying it doesn't improve performance due to the fact that Aurora 4x cannot use Multicore CPUs much like DF cannot use them meaning slowdown is inevitable.

>FML

then it's time to get a dual core skylake and overclock the shit out of it

>Rebuild computer to play Aurora better and other games worse.

Ummmm what?

I was being facetious

but there actually are a good number of poorly coded games that would benefit from a build like that

Aurora isn't poorly coded. Is uses the ancient technologies of the late 90s/early 00s. This was a different age, far before the advent of multicore processors.

But yes will agree with you there friend. The same as stuff like Rimworld is a more modernized DF, i wish i could find a game with Aurora's autistic levels of masturbatory awesome without the flaws of the ancient technologies.

even for that time it is poorly coded. relational databases are a big no-no for games due to atrocious perf

I'm making empires to trigger different AI personalities.

I can't even install it properly

Just get the Wrapper from the Aurora Forum. aurora2 pentarch org/index.php?topic=5663.0
Re add periods.

git gud

Stellaris has no real variety in play. It's really only fun if you can play with other people. Single player gets dull pretty fast.

Oh you do that too? I make a lot of empires that I never intend to play myself but force them to spawn in my games cause I like having them for flavor.

Did the Straya patch make Civ Vl better?

> Stellaris has no real variety in play
This is true.
In fairness to Paraducks they somewhat admit this, and the various Ascenstions in Utopia is supposed to mitigate it.

>the various Ascenstions in Utopia is supposed to mitigate it.
They just give you more to do before you eventually have to declare war on the rest of the galaxy in order to win. Cause there's nothing else to do.

Im starting to think my game is desperately trying to spawn an NPR at this point, all of these earth-like worlds and such. Also is the Invaders killed everything here a type of system that can spawn, because i recognize that named shipwreck, is one of the Precursor Missile Boats from Cannae.

I assumed "Ascension" perks implied there exists technological ascension victories in Utopia?
Why are they spilling all this ink talking about how you can play tall now if you actually can't because victory remains only the preserve of the hyper-wide?

To be honest they should just do what every other Paradox game does and take out victory conditions altogether, letting you judge for yourself when you've accomplished whatever you wanted to do with a given playthrough.

Cause the devs believe only conquest victories are actually fun so they won't let you win any other way.

Well, they managed to dev every OTHER Paradox game without having exactly 1 victory and it's military.
'Cos they all had 0.
Idk why they shat the bed once they got to SPACE

"Cuz is supposed to be 4x gaiz." is the bullshit they spew, but its not 4x. At all.

I do that.
My metalheads are modded robot portrait aliens though.

youtube.com/watch?v=kNIO4mugiM8

And yet, Stellaris is not accepted in /gsg/

>fresh spacerace gives me lip for warring then annexing them

Nigga, i just integrated you into the greatest empire in the galaxy with a constant mandatory festival going on, state approved drugs, and all the tech sluts you might want.
Just ignore that big lasers overhead with the "mind control laser" label on it.

...

if in a single war i liberate multiple planets from diferent empires, do they form a single neew empire or a bunch of small ones?

small ones. One for each empire you liberate from.

Everything that gets liberated in one war goes into one empire

Tell me /civ4xg/, where should i send my exploration fleet next? Im reaching the limits my engines can go away from Terra in the Alkumar direction, and that Nebulae presents a stone wall to me, because i need to redesign my explorers to get through it. But IDK where to go from here.

Shit forgot pic.

Map would be helpful

Delgor and Valkha are the obvious choices, they neighbor Sol so they should be give top priority

>Im reaching the limits my engines
why not build a tanker and then make some deposits on system bodies along the way just like the food caches of south pole explorers

I have no idea if i want to go for Jump Gates everywhere or make ALL of my civilian shipping Jump Capable. I dont neccessarliy like the idea of random joe NPR being able to jump clean across my empire, but those engines are fucking expensive, especially for the Freighters and terraformers.

I am considering investing my resources into making a new super colony/hub system out of Kliean however. A world near totally suited to my species right from generation was too amazing, im still shocked it was not an NPR.

Aurora is simply coded like arse for any time period.

Well to be fair it IS a one man project. It's not like he was a full time pro game dev back in 2003-4 ish.

I'm not making a judgement, I'm simply laying out the facts. Steve is simply a shitty programmer, even if he uses C# it may not be better because damn if I can't write something even in assembly that runs like shit.

sooo which one?

steve doing some work

Is there a way for me to sort out this dropdown box? The numbers of TGs in here is starting to get on my nerves.

Those FE's are fucking retarded in Stellaris. They are one of the biggest reasons why I quit the game.

Has there been a patch since Heinlein? I don't see any info about a new patch, only about that new paid DLC that won't address any of the issues with the core game.

>not liking Stellaris
Remove yourself.

>colonized Mercury
Nice job.