/civ4xg/ - Strategy/4X General

Do yields from 'utopian living standards' balance out with the added mineral cost?

should I go and kick the shit out of these condescending bird cunts? Upon discovery they immediately closed borders but still tried to survey my systems. I'm also the only person they've met, somehow.

Fucked if I'm going to effortpost and then leave it to languish in the old bread.

>173746790 #
>Yeah these massive new government and ethics changes are only lategame stuff

The faction system is:
A) currently horribly bugged, a'la permanent permanent opinion maluses on embracing, and government ethos attraction simply not operating at all
B) even if it wasn't bugged, it's bad design: pop ethics now do literally nothing but serve as a signpost for 'this goy may join this faction in future'. Why have two systems where one will do, either eliminate pop ethics entirely or return faction effects into ethos effects
not to mention the shitload of changes between 1.0 and 1.5
C) speaking of bad design: why tie leaders to factions if there's no real interactivity between the two. Again, bad design, as with much of Stellaris it feels like they were going for the illusion of depth rather than actual depth

As with many things in Stellaris, there's the outline of a good idea in here somewhere (if this gave rise to CK2 style politics where you desperately try to assassinate your own leaders as they forment civil war). But the barebones, buggy implementation renders it at best a marginal improvement over its predecessor. Yet too many people defend it because they see it through rose-tinted spectacles regarding what it COULD be if done right, not what it IS when it's done wrong.

This is my point: the 'improvements' exist, but they are vastly less improving than you would expect of a "continuous development" game like Stellaris that *supposedly* has a dedicated team committed to continual patching and balance, in contrast to the fire-and-forget vidya from when I were a wee bairn.

> Should I foit
Uh. Yes? You'z a faggot or sumfin?

1-5 stellaris
6-0 get some backstory for my dnd character going

>Hey I haven't played in a year did they take out blockades or change the mechanics?
Yes, blockades no longer add warscore but occupying the wargoal planets adds more.

Do it lad

alright I'm going in, just a shame I can currently only reach 2 of his systems. Never done war yet, don't know how feasible these goals are. It should be easy though... right?

So how the hell do I win? All their planets are occupied and their fleets are destroyed. Is this a bug or am I missing something?

>B) even if it wasn't bugged, it's bad design: pop ethics now do literally nothing but serve as a signpost for 'this goy may join this faction in future'. Why have two systems where one will do, either eliminate pop ethics entirely or return faction effects into ethos effects

I agree but personally I would prefer if each ethic could have multiple factions, it's pretty ridiculous to assume that every single xenophobe or militarist would join the same political party and all want the exact same thing in an empire of billions or trillions of people. Alternatively, make ethics empire level only, determining the bonuses and flavor your empire get, and pops now only have factions and drastically increase the number of possible factions ( though maybe limit the number of factions that can spawn in an empire in one game so you're not dealing with dozens of factions each time ) and each faction would have different demands and prefer different combinations of ethics.

Did you work over their allies?

Will colonising this planet piss of the military isolationist fallen empire in blue?

I got it once.

Yep, literally every planet in that alliance is occupied.

Why can't I move here?

Welp, then white peace for what you got and get the hell out of there. Also make sure they arent back capping your planets

[BREAKS NON-AGGRESSION PACT]

If you conquer 2 worlds it should be cake. Bring 5-10 stack drop troops and a construction ship to build forward wormholes.

>50K fleet power
Why do you care if the FE gets pissed?

...

I can't even white peace, this is the War in Heaven so I'm not in charge of the negotiating. They can't be backcapping because they have no ships left and no way to make more. Seems like a pretty major oversight.

I think there's too many factions already, personally. Or at least, faction attraction isn't strong enough that one of them snowballs.

I guess my basic problem is that after 500 hours this game is too easy for me and I want to be challenged. CK2 never (well, rarely) becomes like this because the bigger and stronger you get against external enemies, the more unstable you get against internal enemies. I say that the faction system has the outline of a good idea in it if you were always teetering on the brink of one faction getting big and civil war exploding, but in my experience this just doesn't happen in Stellaris; faction control is trivial in part because having a minimum of eight of them means your internal dissidents are pulling in eight different directions rather than one.

But I agree with you in principle that SOMETHING should change in order to make the system exciting.

This shit is driving me up the wall, seriously. I've tried reloading to before I finished the special project as well as reloading when he's sinking into the black hole to no avail.

Pull some pages from IRL. External empires should start promoting your most hated internal factions just to fuck with you.

What FTL tech do you have?
(The usual reason you wouldn't be able to move there is that Fallen Empires - of which that is almost certainly one - have closed borders 99% of the time, but it looks lile you already have some ships there so idk)

>87 pop faction at 15% happiness.

It pisses me the flip flap off, I was trying to go for a super spiritualist psionic empire and the first faction I get is a materialist science one and all my pops become materialist. suppression appears to do fucking nothing.

> FE at 5.5 million fleet strength
Mods were a mistake

Active combat locks out FTL access.
It doesn't have to make sense.

Best game details settings?

Can someone blease resbond to my question here, can I safely colonise this place?

The problem is that factions feel meaningless because they're led by essentially faceless drones in a sea of faceless pops.
In CK2 you interacted with people. Imperial authority is supposed to be hereditary and yet there's no family tree, no CK2 style incest simulation.

They need to inject more CK2 into the game otherwise it'll continue to be shit.

What difficulty is best to play civ v on?

1 above the default

King is hard enough to be fun while AI boosting enough to keep them in the game. Just move up a difficulty once you start curbstomping the current one.

Well since you're stuffed full of mods to get a 5.5mil enemy empire, how do you expect anyone else to know if these mods have also tweaked their aggression settings?

If you were playing vanilla and that were a normal Fanatic Xenophobe fallen empire, then yes, colonising that planet would probably get them to DoW you.

None of my mods effect FE ai, otherwise I wouldnt have asked.
>colonising that planet would probably get them to DoW you.
okay, thanks

save scum and try you fucking sperg

>I think there's too many factions already, personally
There's only 9, one for each ethos with Xenophobe having two, and that underlines the fundamental problem, factions are basically the same as ethic, except sometimes pops with the same ethics as your government are still pissed with you because your chosen government system or policies doesn't match their specific demands. Currently there no real reason to have ethics and faction be separate.

>I guess my basic problem is that after 500 hours this game is too easy for me and I want to be challenged.

I get that too, and I think my method helps solve both problems. Make it so that pops have choice between a large number of factions so that even your ostensibly ethically loyal pops might start getting unhappy, but limit the total number of factions that can possibly exist in the empire at any one point so you don't have to deal with 1000 factions as once. Make it so that factions can disappear after being becoming unpopular enough for long enough to be replaced by a different faction from other ethics or a different brand of faction from the same ethic, and alo maybe make it so that factions who's demands remain unmet increase in unrest over time, rather than a flat minus. Finally make unrest harder to deal with, currently you can just fill planets with armies and never worry about rebellion. I think all of that will go a long way to making internal politics matter.

Is there a better feel than dismantling a frontier station and your borders not shrinking due to it?

Would you?

Doing that but with a Gaia World stolen from a Fallen Empire.

I endorse this post.

No physical interface.

If I infiltrate a pre-space age civ, does that give me their planet and its population? I kinda want these weea-shrooms

Yes.
It's "replacing" the governments with lizardmen and having them sign over sovereignty to you.

Democracy or Oligarchy?

A lot of the problems with factions not being damaging enough I think would be helped if pop growth / migration were tweaked.

The basic problem is that it feels like planets fill up too fast. In my current game I declared a species as Undesirable, set purge to displacement only, and they just sat there because every planet (in my 1.25x habitable worlds) galaxy is already full in 2300.

As it stands at the moment having a low population is basically no disadvantage at all because growth is so fast and amply supplemented by migrants. Expelling undesirables carries basically no downsides as they are replaced with happy citizens nearly immediatly.

How does this tie into factions? Unhappy pops should gtfo asap, leaving your worlds as economically depressed ghost towns that take centuries to recover. Whereas what happens now is that in the rare cases where they CAN gtfo, they are immediatly replaced, probably improving your economy with a happier replacement, and if they can't gtfo all that happens is they give you an un-noticable -50% production to one tile and unrest that can be trivially countered with one defensive army.

Disposable pops drag so many other mechanics down into the muck with them.

I mean, from a "Swedes are cucks" perspective it's kinda refreshing when physically removing subversive elements from your nation (by exile or the gas chamber) is legitimately the best solution to internal political problems, but from a gameplay perspective I feel the disposability of pops kinda kills the "hard choices" meme.

Fanatic purifiers kind of suck tbqh, you can be just as big of a cunt as a normal authoritarian or xenophobe empire, while also having a few options to play nice. You can kill all the aliens after you've made some alliances and put yourself in a position where you're untouchable

What do you think the tentacles are for?

>No Spiritualist-Democratic Government Ethos

The Democratic Crusaders hate Holy Tribunals, which I guess makes roleplay sense.

Just have to genetically integrate a few flesh species into the hivemind to fix that problem.

Having serious trouble doing well in Utopia, for some reason. I haven't been able to get a good foothold in the early game, and by the late game there's just too much of the enemy for me to seriously pose any opposition, making my late-game contributions to the extragalactic threats/AI rebellions/stodgy old man shitflingings, pretty much negligible.

Thing is, I'm not really sure what I'm doing wrong compared to pre-expansion. I'm doing the same things I would to expand ASAP, but the techs and planet distributions keep fucking me. Is there a new strat to expand fast, or am I just stupid/unlucky/both?

Build tall and conquer baby empires to secure an edge.

For a lot of people its not knowing when to expand. usually you wait for colonization then build a colony ship instantly.

Most important thing early game is getting your economy up. I adivse forgoing the expansion traits and go straight for energy and mineral traits

I'll integrate my dick in you're butt senpai

After mining your initial borders, Rush Frontier Outposts. The Fastest way to boost your economy is to grab more areas to mine. Cheapest way to do that is to outpost.

Ignore research installations until you have at least +20/month minerals.

Use outposts to isolate your neighbors to keep them weak. They will probably colonize, so make sure you are at least keeping pace with the colonization game.

Well, I guess spess elves game is rip. No way around this war score bug that I can find, and since the War in Heaven is stuck I can't declare war on the Peacekeepers to get away from them - so I can't declare war on anyone else either.

>Trying to force the Tall meme even harder.

They reduced the default number of planets and increased the AI's mid / lategame aggression and added consumer goods, which leaves you more susceptible to shit from the RNG in the early game and puts you under more pressure (both military and minerals) in the midgame.

So while there's not really much different you can do expansion-wise, the metagame is to exploit the OP traditions (specifically Planetary Survey Corps) in order to gain an advantage over the AI. When he's too lo-tech to dare attack you, you can get away with a smaller (but higher quality) fleet and THEN put more resources into expansion.

Basically just take Planetary Survey Corps and then everything else takes care of itself and you can continue as normal.

What mods are those? The visuals and traits I mean.

okay, so 2 fallen empires just woke up near me. Will i get my shit pushed in if i dont pick to be their subject? Im a leader of a federation with a okay ally to help me out.

>They reduced the default number of planets
They really feel too sparse now. I've seen maybe four planets with my biome type in a century. It makes it stupidly difficult to claim needed resources.

I fucking hate the tall meme and wish tall players would get it through their thick shell-like skulls that the game is too boring and the political situation too stable already; encouraging turtling makes a bad situation worse, not better.

What I want is a game where being groß is the winning strategy but *staying* groß is nontrivial.

tall =/= turtling.

> He doesn't go on a tall warfront forcing his slave vassals to fight all his wars

Yeah, you gotta pick one and lovingly sandwich his dick between your... tributes in exchange for protection.

Getting angrily spitroasted by both is not a survivable position.

That's not tall. There's barely any difference between that and how sectors work.

One of my games nobody but factions who seriously opposed my ethics formed, in my next game nobody but those who loved my ethics formed.

???

I didn't even focus on government ethics attraction in the second game, so I really don't understand the system right now.

>Spectra Colors
>Either Flags : 'Emblems & Backgrounds' or 'Backgrounds: Big PixeL'
>Synthetic Portrait Pack
>Diverse Rooms.
And others that I used in my other empires.

It is in Stellaris.
Because there's no non-military-expansionist ways to interact with the rest of the galaxy.

Give me an espionage expansion where you can forment rebellions in your enemies, then maybe tall=/=turtle.

Oh and the Traits are
>Extended Traits
>Proxima: Traits

Not the guy you are replying to, but it is. Tall doesn't mean you don't wage war. It means you expand your empire upwards instead of outwards. Yes user, even your favorite playstyle is still very possible with a tall build over a wide one

>listen to eve online music while playing stellaris
wew it's like I'm leading empires in nullsec

>strange factory on planet that gives +3 mineral/energy
>later in an event it blows up
>new flavour text - "we can only choose to salvage the energy or minerals"
>choose minerals
>the factory just sits there damaged, I repair it and it goes back to being +3 mineral/energy

It works like a freaking charm, guys.

>Believed*.

Sorry, I was typing in a hurry, I guess.

>Yes user, even your favorite playstyle is still very possible with a tall build over a wide one
Not in Stellaris.
Without the resource income of a wide empire you can't afford either the minerals or the tech costs of habitat spam, which defeats the design objective because habitat spam was SUPPOSED to be the thing you do when you can't go wide.
Once again, Stellaris devs failed to understand their own game. The fact that they never playtest these things to find out if it actually does what it's supposed to is really starting to get old.

>One habitat produces 160+ power
>Only takes 3 to get 400+ power
>costs like 10x more to get a Dyson sphere
Paradox what the hell are you doing

>dangerous planet with frequent asteroid impacts

Time to send in the synthetics, surely they won't mind r-right?

>It means you expand your empire upwards instead of outwards
Vassals are part of your empire. Learn the definition of empire.

"Dude roleplay lmao, why are you doing cost-benefit mathematics in a fun space opera game, nerd?"
-t. Paradox

>Without the resource income of a wide empire

I've got plenty of resource income with my 3 planets and a few tributaries. My tech and unity rush means my economy is miles ahead of everyone else, as is my fleet.

>When you can't go wide

It's a thing you can choose from the start of the game. Tall isn't a fail safe to keep you relevant when you get boxed in. Its its own thing entirely.

>no option to control the number of pre-ftl species in the galaxy
>no way to start the game as one of a handful of races who reached space age in a young galaxy still filled with life
>you cant effectively be a fallen empire as a different game starts when the numerous younger races finally reach the stars
For a game based around RPing autism they really limit your scope in what you can do

...

I guess the argument could be
>But thats 3 habitats which means 12x3 pop and 3 planets fucking up research and unity
But then to that I would say
>ITS THE FUCKING END OF THE GAME AND I STILL DONT HAVE MEGASTRUCTURES

Megastructures should be an early game tech, not a late game one. They should be something like a wonder, that drains the living fuck out of your resources for ages but once you complete it provides a huge bonus. There is no risk/reward to megastructures at the moment, they are basically irrelevant except for the sensor dish.

>One of my games nobody but factions who seriously opposed my ethics formed, in my next game nobody but those who loved my ethics formed.
That really shouldn't happen since factions are based on ethics and you starting pops are all from the two or three ethics you picked, so the faction that form should reflect that. Why you might get a majority faction that disagrees with you ethics is because ethics divergence works different now. Conditions of pops are the primary driver of ethics change, pops who are slaves or live near slaves become egalitarians, pops that live near aliens become xenophiles, going to war make pops militarist, being at peace for a long time makes them pacifist, etc.

Basically if you get factions that hate you it's probably something that going on with you empire that's causing it, but it could also be that faction attraction is broken right now.

>I've got plenty of resource income with my 3 planets and a few tributaries. My tech and unity rush means my economy is miles ahead of everyone else, as is my fleet.
Well it's a shame that habitats cost minerals and not unity then, isn't it?

>It's a thing you can choose from the start of the game. Tall isn't a fail safe to keep you relevant when you get boxed in. Its its own thing entirely.
No, the devs literally wrote in the dev diaries that it's supposed to be something you do when you get boxed in and locked out of tall.
If it's not doing what it was designed to do, then it is a piece of failed game design.

Guess you missed the part where I said my economy is fine

Authoritarians aren't that good but I love being able to slap bitchy pops in chains, though it's kind of a pain having to micro them into farming or mining since you can only use caste slavery on your own species now.

>Guess you missed the part where I said my economy is fine
Unless it's "fine" enough to be well on your way to habitats on every celestial body in your territory and megastructures busily underway, then habitats and megastructures are not fulfiling the role for which they were devised.

I feel we're talking at cross purposes. I'm not trying to say that tall play is impossible or impractical. I'm trying to say that tall play is boring and noninteractive, and the fixes (habitats / megastructures) designed to make it less boring and noninteractive turn out not to be relevant to tall play because they're too resource intensive.

More "Paradox are shit designers" than "You are a shit player".