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

is this objectively the best race in ES2? Seems like they're powerful in all regards and get the ball rolling way easier than others.

and really, is industry the only thing that matters in ES2? Like, why would you ever want a ton of food as opposed to a ton of industry? Or any other resource?

They're the only one I enjoying playing so yes

Does a surplus of food even matter? Does it do anything at all?
I'd say that's the reason why the Unfallen are kinda shit, they're all about just growing a bunch of shit while the hummies are all about the industry and the jews are all about jewing. Growing up a population is nice and all, but it's not so useful when you have a glacial colonization rate and make fuckshittons of food anyway.

Increases manpower replenishment

I think excess food is converted into Manpower, which is a crucial resource at times. But funny enough, UE has so much influence that you can just praise the fuck out of every minor civ you find, and getting them on good terms gives you manpower and other benefits anyway.

And growing your population quicker probably doesn't matter when industry can just help you build food-based system improvements faster.

Last time I played the Unfallen that was a horrid fucking disadvantage, though. I was making 1k+ manpower per turn of a total 12k capacity, but I wanted to wipe off all those disgusting fucking cravers off some of my conquered worlds. The only way to do that is either decolonization (which randomly doesn't work sometimes for no goddamn reason) or chaingang them away (for which you oh-so-usefully need to have remaining manpower capacity.) So I had to alternate between infantry and tanks in the military screen for ten fucking minutes just to get a single pop of craver off one world.

Eugenics in ES2 fucking when?

Civilization Revolutions

How is the Vox patch for Civ 5?

Actually, this happened in one of my last playthroughs as UE. I killed off the cravers but a ton of their population is still sitting around. Does Chaingang even let you choose which population dies? How do I get all the cravers to fuck off so they don't deplete the planets they're on?

This really fucked me up because I conquered all 10 of their systems, and their population was all over, there wasn't even the option to just try to send them all off to one planet or anything. Also, they were mixed in with tons of other pops, so I didn't want to evacuate a lot of them.

Is there any Civ 5 mod that removes happiness?

Can't you ship all the bugs to a given planet and then, I dunno, sell it?

Yeah, because manpower is so incredibly useful to a race of pacifists. Pass.

>Does Chaingang even let you choose which population dies?
No, and it's fucky as all hell, but you can kind of control it (unless you are unfallen and have pop growth out the fucking ass). The pop that's supposed to grown next is generally the one that gets chain gang'd. You'll see it on the growth bar, it'll have a -1 in 1 turn.

I also did one thing - convert to system level 2, send the fuckers off to another planet. Doesn't matter if it'll have space for all of them, as long as it has space for three when you send 'em. The ship will just wait outside the system until space becomes available - and the ship will just disappear if you decolonize it right afterwards.
Of course, that'd be great if you could decolonize any system. You can't decolonize some for some nebulous fucking reason. It'd be great if you got any indication anywhere or if ES2 had a wiki worth shit.

I just wish you could turn excess food into something more useful. Use it to boost trade goods or increase trade stats for the system, hell, sell it off to other systems or civs, fucking anything but just manpower.

Well in my case as UE, there were just far too many. I would have to sort and send off cravers to like 4-5 different systems, and then evacuate off all those systems. Even worse, the mechanic to send off pops only works 3 at a time, and i guess you can't send them off to a planet that's already full? I dunno, it's a weird and annoying mechanic.

I skip over almost every food related tech in the tree for every campaign. They really need to think of more ways it can benefit you. Races like Riftborn don't even need it, they just produce their population.

Also what's the point of being a pacifist race in this game? What's the point of the Unfallen? To just sit there through the whole game and do nothing? How do you win? Are you trying to just colonize half the galaxy? But in that case you'd eventually have to fight somebody. Are you supposed to go for economic by allying with everyone and making trade deals? I don't really get their point.

I felt the same way about the Roving Clans in EL. They can't even declare war. It's a mystery to me how anyone could do anything with that race. Same with Unfallen, I don't get what you're supposed to do. In my games with AI, the Unfallen are almost ALWAYS the first to die, and if they don't, they just sit around and do absolutely nothing, eventually just becoming a useless small blob on the map that spams you with messages about how nice you are.

It's at least possible to go tall in ES2 with trade companies. You can very easily get an economic victory that way.
And it's not like the world of ES2 is all that active anyway. Nobody declares wars on eachother, and if they do, they don't really go that far anyway. It's got all that exploration and story and shit, but they kinda forgot to make any special inter-race interactions. I want political scandals. I want corruption. I want big fuckups that end up affecting multiple races at once - the only event that really affects the entire galaxy is the entire Academy line of events, which is kinda nice.

I think trade companies are overpowered and that economic victories are far too easy. I've talked about it with others in the general before and apparently most people play with economy victory off. Even AI Lumeris if left alone can win a slow 450 turn game by turn 200 with economy victory if YOU specifically don't go try to stop them.

However, in most of my games, I somehow always fucking spawn right next to the cravers, so I'm always having some early game fighting and surviving. But after that, you're mostly right, not much happens. I agree with you. I think the AI don't declare war on each other enough. I've seen it a couple times, Horatio and Lumeris almost wipe each other out. But that was just one game. Usually they declare war on me only. And even then, it's easy to get them out of it, and sometimes they're not properly equipped to fight, you just blow up their 2 big stacks and then you sit at war with no activity for 30 turns.

I think teh game has definitely improved recently, where I thought it wasn't even playable a few months ago. I just can't really think of what exactly they need to do to spice it up. Like you said, there's not enough reason to interact. I am not interacting with other races unless I'm killing them.

Synthetic Dawn when fampai

Hopefully never.

I love that there aren't going to be unique ships just because. How fucking lazy are these assholes.

just play without the expansions

It just needs interratial interactions that aren't just war and peace. Diplomacy is lacking in particular, which is kind of sad seeing how technically complex the ES2 AI is. Hell, you can directly hook up to the ES2 game engine in a browser and look at all the AI cores and how they work in real time. They're just a bit too passive in general, and don't have much option outside of that.

Vodyani player here
What is this 'food' you speak of?

Spider player here.
What's food? I just guzzle cum.

There are late game techs in the left and I think right trees that convert surplus food into industry at a pretty substantial rate
They're 5th ring though so it may be too little too late unless you beeline for it

Guess I'm beelining every game, then.

What the shitfuck is with the "overpopulation" penalty anyway? You have absolutely no control over that unless you explicitly go out of your way to microtune the food output of every single one of your colonies. You can't even do any population control, so what the fuck is the point?

this was my, the UE players, original point. I don't think anyone gives a fuck about food. It has barely any use outside of manpower, which is usually not a big deal for me anyway. The advantages for having a larger population than someone else isn't great, especially since they have these overpopulated penalties anyway, why WOULD I want to have a lot of food? I just don't get it.

I mean on the one hand it's certainly frustrating from a player perspective, but on the other in some aspects it's sort of intended to be that way. It adds to the sense that it ain't always easy being a galactic ruler I guess. Like when you conquer craver planets it's like 'alright super, free system' but now you've got a bunch of craver pop that you have to deal with.
I guess it would be nice to at least have the option to go full dictator and genocide civilian populations, but it adds some layer of challenge and counterbalance that you can't for whatever reason and have to find other solutions that won't make your people think you're space hitler.

Or something like that, anyway. Probably overthinking it

> I love that there aren't going to be unique ships just because.
Far be it for me to defend a Swede, but there kinda are going to be unique ships.
Robot players get the robot ship models, which *technically* aren't new models since they've been in the game since 1.0 for the AI Rebellion, but in practice they are new models because no-one's ever seen the AI Rebellion apart from a few spergs like myself who go far, far, far out of our way to trigger it.

>I AM MANY THINGS

I HAVE BEEN MANY THINGS

I HAVE BEEN INSIDE MANY THINGS

So what are the hints that Auriga is one of the lost?

Fuck, the endless universe has so much neat lore, I'd love to run a pnp campaign in the setting

Awwwwww yea gimme all dat delicious technology

I wrote over 2000 words of background for a dumb Aurora game with several nations, how do I actually play through it all without giving up right after having designed ships now? Send help.
I always feel like the actual game gets in the way, that's so wrong.

>apart from a few spergs like myself
Was just going to say, I've never seen it, I did not know they had unique ships.

you don't need a mod for that

To every person his/her own way to enjoy the game, you know.

Back in high school, I knew a guy who loved reading game manuals and making plans. He would write down castles for Stronghold, stations for Startopia, and I bet he creamed himself on Supreme Commander.
Yet he barely even played games. He just enjoyed the possibilities more than the actualy game. I called him the "backseat player".

Starting a Stellaris game with all other empires advanced starts, either fanatic xenophobes, devouring swarms or fallen empires. How else can I make the galaxy brutal?

Tap your fingers together, play with a laptop touchpad, with the screen reversed, and have your little sister reading Twilight aloud, while leaving garbage bags in the sun so that it stinks.
NIGHTMARE MODE

Don't you mean "Wiz working on a story update" mode?
Well, you'd need add a few niggers raping his relatives to make it accurate.

I only have a big sister, is that ok?

Then replace Twilight with Fifty Shade of Grey.

I would rather have my sister read Twilight aloud than listen to her talking about her SJW nonsense

I greatly enjoy actually playing Aurora too, but only when I'm playing a single nation. If I make up several, the game dies as soon as I designed ships and SM'd in the first ships.
I've got like like 20 copies of the database with a different game set up in with several nations (and I always autistically arrange flags, ship icons, colors, commander names, themes, ship classifications, etc.), and as many where I actually played the game and sometimes went real far in years (and TN years, not conventional), but with one nation only.

I want a hard sci-fi colony manager/4x where you play as Joseph Goebbels shortly after embarking in 1945 on the dark side of the Moon, building great subsurface cities and preparing for when you ultimately re-emerge in the year 2018.

>No big sister to furiously masturbate to during puberty

I feel like i missed out.

I can't say I understand that, sorry, but sounds to me you want to create an universe.

I played a Broken Lord in a homebrew campaign one of my friends ran once.

Didn't they release an endless tabletop game?

You know what ruins 4x for me? The lack of discovery, exploration, and the unknown.

Take a game of Civ 5. Game starts, and you already know how many players there are and have a general idea of what the map is. Even on random, if you're even a little deligent with scouting you'll have most of the map and every Civ's capital uncovered within the first 50 turns or so.
There's no surprises. Once you meet the 8th civ, you know for a fact that that's it. There's not going to be another continent across the sea or beyond those mountains with another half-dozen fully functional Civs. There's never any big mass of map marked "here there be dragons" or anything like that. It wasn't until very recently, historically speaking, that we knew for a fact what the world looked like and where shit was, yet in 4x we figure it out in the BC years.
So you can't send an exhibition to India and stumble upon the Americas. You can't explore the Dark Continent and all it's mysteries and kingdoms. You can't lead the armies of Macadon out into the unknown, because there isn't any unknown. It really breaks the games for me.

Are there any 4x that deal with this problem? How would you even go about that?

An Iron Sky 4x? I would play it

It sounds like all these problems can be solved by playing the same game with a larger map and more civs.

Also, play older Civ games. It's not uncommon at all to discover another continent around the year 1500, because the map generation produces realistic continent-based worlds.

Play on bigger maps.

Good, improves the game. Calling it a complete overhaul is overselling it, though. Mechanically it's pretty much the same game, besides the different CS interaction and happiness.

If you've poked around on the customization wiki, you've probably heard of all that stuff JFD's made. Colonies and mercenaries and piety and prestige and so on. Well none of that's it Vox. Sorry.

Wtf dude, I only did that like twenty times

Bigger maps solve nothing. You still figure things out about the world way to quickly.

Try vox, 43 civs.

Dunno, don't play pangaea.
I had games of varying degrees of exploration, ranging from can't explore much due to early war, to finding everyone before being able to found WC.

I guess.
Another problem is that designing all these ships' a bit draining on its own, and then doing it several times in a row makes it worse.

Tell me more
Did they now?

>new dlc about robots by Martin "Kill All White Males" Anward

So presumably they aren't really doing anything with the awful boring combat that's like 75% of the gameplay?

There's suppose to be a general combat rebalance when the patch drops, I wouldn't hold out hope of it making combat greatly more interesting though, it's main purpose is to cut down on naked corvette spam and maybe make missiles not complete shit.

>EL "units with remaining moves" button is still bugged
that makes me angry

Play Snow Daze, by CypressZeta.

>I have to pay even more money to get content I was promised at the very beginning

>thinking that changing the numbers associated with corvettes and missiles is 'content'

>how do you stop the player from metagaming
easy, stop playing games

"Functional Game" is content I was promised

You mean more wacky fanatic purifier variants right??

>you can't genocide Cravers in Endless Space 2
Shit game

>when you defeat a faction as Horatio it doesn't respawn the faction as another Horatio faction
shit game indeed

You heard the boss! More memes!

Civ 4 had a terra like map mode. These maps were generated with the "old world" being a continent situated arround the width axis of the world. The "new world" would be a continent situated along the length axis of the world with a narrow stip of land linking to bigger landmasses. There also are some carribean like islands and some bigger islands in an archipelago near the "old world" in the generated map. All civs start on the "old world" continent. I don't know if civ 5 or 6 have this map setting.

I mostly played on this map setting. It is a shame though that the ai rarely releases it's colonial possessions as a new countries and can't into invasions. It is possible to move your capital to the new world and release your old world possesions as a colony.

> You know what ruins 4x for me? The lack of discovery, exploration, and the unknown.

This is why I continue to rage that the inclusion of buildable megastructures in Stellaris was an egregious mistake.

EVEN IF they were mechanically great (and they're not, they're a mechanical shitshow), they're thematically atrocious because they were supposed to be this amazing galactic wonder that's a fantastic boon to discover and that entire civilizations fight and die over in thousand-year wars to possess the crown jewel of the Sagittarius Arm.

And what is it now? "Who cares; wait a couple of hours game-time, I'll build my own"

In general I agree with you though, there desperately needs to be interesting things to discover in Stellaris. The Leviathans were a step in the right direction in this regard, as "living wonders" to discover and potentially confer great boons.

How so? I sometimes play with a friend who claims to not have any dlc and it still has that happiness bullshit on. Which would that be?
>leading to cafe
This captcha is up to something

Somebody tell the real Wiz to fix the damn hyperspace FTL. A speed buff is long due.

It used to be faster, and then he nerfed it because warp and wormhole fags REEEEEEEE'd about it.

haha did you say more flavour text for the new wacky fanatical purifier variants

I agree with this completely. Mega stuctures destroys the lore of fallen empires. They were supposed to be these ancient highly advanced empirese that slowly faded away. But now you can develop the same tech levels just over a century after you develop FTL.

Campaigns should be prolonged in stellaris like the pre FTL mod and have more levels of development of FTL tech with each new level promting a short boom in expansion. So the beginning is a period of slow expansion without meeting any other races. Followed up by possible civil wars depending on how you handle this expansion (kinda like LOGH with the war between earth and her colonies). These wars and their outcome could then have a great influence on how your country is run and what kind of bonusses it has other then the pre selected traits. Maybe there should be more traditions which will atomatically be taken if you choose to go down a certain path and exclude the ones that are the opposite of what you are doing.

>These wars and their outcome could then have a great influence on how your country is run and what kind of bonusses it has other then the pre selected traits.

I agree with this - the nature of your spacefaring civilization should be determined by what you actually find in space.

At the moment it's determined by entirely arbitrary civics, ethics, and traditions choices that anybody can pick at any time for any reason.

Come on, it's a sci-fi game - whether or not I become Masters Of The Psychic Plane should depend on whether or not I discover and set up a habitat orbiting the Eye of Terror, NOT because I picked Spiritualist Ethos in 2200.

This is why Horizon Signal: good; Ascensions: bad.

By not posting in the wrong thread.

Ded

page 10

Cutest apples ever.

Will it be time to make a new thread?

Page 6, there's still hope. Do your part by posting meme empires!

Why make another Japanese civilization?

>tried to be smart in SupCom
>charged early with my UCB
>got killed midgame
>half my building exploded before I could give them to my allies
I'm happy RTS players are chill, otherwise I wouldn't have survived.

...

>funguys
>not shyguys