/civ4xg/ Endless, Stellaris, Civilization, and 4X

build a cluster of space forts and lure them into it

19.99 plus tip

A desperate attempt by ES2 fags to prove they are still relevant
pro tip: they're not.

May not look like much, but this is a great start. I was able to finish the Cybrex chain and it was in my borders, so I have that to look forward to. Was able to cut off some assholes to the south, although he is allied with others to the east. Not a big deal though, as I have a friendly machine race next to me for backup (I am also machines).

Huh, it's actually the correct skin color.

I don't understand.
My fleets stomp all over them.
I've taken their home planet.
Why are they allowed to just refuse vasselization?
How do I actually win this game?

Is this still not fixed?

git gud.
under new rules you need to blitz your enemies as fast as you can and capture all the claims

Good news the fucked off on their own after only destroying a few systesm. Sadly they have 26k on defense so I can't purge them with holy flame.

It's my first game
What should I be claiming? I'm only getting 4 influence per month and claims cost like 200.

Time to wake somebody up.

If you really want to vasselise them, you need to war in a different manner than you would if you just want to claim their systems.
To achieve vasselisation you have to accomplish the war goal rather than just get a very favourable status quo peace (in a normal "Claims" war these two are near identical). To avoid status quo peace you need to fight conservatively: don't let them ever push back or ever kill lots of your ships, basically. It's easier to achieve the bigger your fleet is relative to theirs.

If it's your first game, piece of advice: only claim systems with planets in (plus the necessary lane systems that allow ypu to access them). In the current meta, owning empty space is actually bad for you because it nukes your science and unity outputs.

I didn't lose a single ship in that entire war
I mean, they were at 100 exhaustion while I was at like 10, I just spend the rest of it bombing their homeworld, they still refused to accept the goal. What else can I do after I take their homeworld? Does taking every planet in sight actually help?

And.. if you don't mind, what mechanism makes empty space bad for science and unity? Haven't spotted anything like that yet

>And.. if you don't mind, what mechanism makes empty space bad for science and unity?
Planets and systems increase science costs
>Haven't spotted anything like that yet
It's not something you will notice unless you are looking for it.

Don't give him shit advice like that, if he has massive holes in the middle of his empire that aren't claimed he's going to have pirate fleets spawning at higher strengths than anything he has every other month.

You think a retard that only cares about min maxing science and unity will take anything else in to consideration?

Just ignore pirates, your inability to defend and other empires having more resources than you on top of the cheating the AI already does bro.

Sure, although there's no guarantee when the next game would be. I only ran this second simulation because people liked the first, but I don't want to do this every single thread until it becomes cancer.

So, it might be a month or two until the next simulation, maybe a year if I forget. I don't want there to be too much of a good thing, or anything like that.

hated spiderfag once talked about a horatio theme park, and mentioned horatio sauce
it became a meme because the faggot went mad whenever someone mentioned it

Is there a way to play Vodyani without having to deal with managing an army of leechers?

> pirates
> problem
They're, what, 4k tops? Who cares, just keep a couple of 5k corvette only rapid response fleets amidst your swiss cheese.
Pirates are Literally Nothing.

>Does taking every planet in sight actually help?
Take every planet, occupy every system it all drives your warscore up.

>>wanting to cross Horatio Avenue to go through Horatio Street, pass through Horatio Park, see Horatio Dock in the distance, with Horatio Sea, before walking down to Horatio Beach, stopping by a small shop to get Horatio Fries covered in Horatio Sauce

followed immediately by
>covered in Horatio Sauce

t. Wiz

What's the point of pirate communication in the Vaulter expansion? They're too expensive to use early against other empires, and by mid-game pirates won't do shit against an empire.

Put leech modules on non-leecher ships.

I don't know man, pirates in general is such a retarded concept, or at least the way it's implemented in Stellaris.

Pirates don't fucking attack entire systems and destroy refineries. It's just so fucking stupid. Pirates just want to impose on an economy by attacking merchants and staying out of the red zone long enough so that they don't have privateers after them. That's like pirates in the golden age of piracy running into Jamestown and destroying it, when pilfering ships coming in and out of it offers a stable income.

Make piracy a social/corruption issue, almost like unrest/happiness meter. How much you are willing to dedicate or finance the policing in particular systems to smash corruption. Make it expensive almost like financing a fleet, or using fiscal policy edicts for security patrols. Pirates should either be bases outside your territory that negatively reduces your mineral/credits output unless you do something about it and attack the base, or a corruption issue that happens the more you ignore the policing of a system which is remedied by adding patrol hangers in your starbases. If you want to make "pirate attacks" a thing, make it so that if you ignore corruption to such an extent, piracy eventually grows into a crime syndicate and invades one your systems to carve it's own territory. Could be the start of explaining Marauder factions.

Gotta appreciate small things like this.

Why are Ravenous Swarms hostile toward Machine Empires.

So when are they going to sort out all the other inconsistencies for Gestalt Consciousness events?

Their planets probably have food on them.

Things I want from Stellaris:

Authoritarian to not be 'lol slavers' and have some sort of other benefit
Slaves to not be complete ass
A tradition that supports slavery
To find the Sol system every game so I can uplift humans and gene mod them to be useful

Last time I found the system Sol III managed to eradicate itself with nukes.

It would be so easy just to rebrand that as a rival queen/entity event.

Is there any real difference between hive mind and psionic authoritarian?

Seems like something my drones would do.

So I found a holy gaia world and im well aware if I colonize it ill get butt fucked but is it ok if I merely build an outpost around the star? Will they get upset if I planet crack it?

>Will they get upset if I planet crack it?
No, they'll thank you for releasing the worldspirit from its terrestrial bonds.

They'll either give you energy and credits, psionic research, or even a free Titan.

If memory serves but dont quote me on this if you force the UN humans to spawn they will always be Sol.

I built an outpost and its been 5 years with no titans up the ass guess its ok. Im gonna planet crack it late game.

Honestly would it be so hard to write this up as "units malfunctioned and burned down some fields scaring the shit out of the primitives" or something?

>every possible combination of ship modules, including but not limited to:
Carrier destroyer prow
100% small mount battleship sections
XL spinal mount on battleship center w/ large
Carrier cruiser prow
etc
>make PD small mounts again
>make Flak medium mounts
>make missiles and swarmers medium and large mounts
>make torpedoes large mounts
>replace energy launchers will large lances

y/n?

See, that's the point. None of these things happens.

Revising my Templar faction with new and updated mods.
What other civics should I add? Using unlimited points for both because fuck having dull civilizations with a meager two unique and distinct traits.

adad

where the bling lords at?

>Meanwhile in DW.
>Can pay off pirates, can pay for protection from others, can pay pirates to attack others, can pay for pirates to smuggle goods out of other empires into yours, can buy star charts from pirates.
>Pirates only have a few bases from which they operate, they don't just spawn everywhere all the time.
>Pirates sometimes manage to capture planets and become bigger threats.
Shame Stellaris doesn't have a civilian sector at all.
I guess there's the Automated Trade mod that adds a single trader factions, which ships flying to and from all settled planets. I can't wait for it to be integrated into the game through a Piracy DLC, just like they did every interesting feature they've ever added.

Dead

Got the prethoryn down to their last two systems, but I'm having trouble finishing them off because their planets can't be made barren or invaded. Did anyone here run into this bug?

>Did anyone here run into this bug
Yes, on the release day. Good to know it's still there. I think reloading had a chance of fixing it.

>when abandoned terraforming changes your 25 tile potato to gaia world

Pirates attack entire systems and destroy refineries because you need to build corvettes and have them everywhere to protect your nation and can't have any uncolonized space around ever.

That's all they're for. They're not interested in having it more interesting than that because they just serve the role they need.

Might make a point to collect inconsistencies like these and post them on the forums

So what's the consensus on the current Stellaris?

I last played it in 1.6.0 but it seems 2.0 changed a shitton of stuff.

Is it better? Is it worse? Is it more fun?

Worse.
Unfun.
Boring.
Slow.

The few good mechanics or ideas they had are piled under metric ton of of bugs and shit.

Don't expect anyone here to give you a favorable view on Stellaris ever. I liked the new update personally because they made it how I used to play it before I knew what the fuck I was doing. I think it's good but obviously could use improvement. Still better than 1.9.

the fuck is going on in this war?

I got all my wargoals, have occupied 2 of his planets.Yet the warscore is EQUAL?

I'm on the 2.02 beta btw

I just got it for the sale with the new expansion and I feel like the game is good at places but plagued with questionable design decisions and a lot of bad, terrible minutia.

I feel like I'm punished for playing the way I want (big multicultural empire), and that I have to micromanage everything because the sectors / vassals all are idiots.

Seriously, was it intentional that my vassals can't feed their own pops even with food subsidies, evict their own pops, and that my sectors spam Fortresses everywhere?

authoritarian/pacifist/slave guilds is busted tho

It's not Wargoals, it's War Exhaustion.

You haven't won any significant battles, and once you take a planet it doesn't count for occupation. So basically as far as the game is concerned, it's just been equal attrition for time passage.

You can almost press your war goals though, so it shouldn't be too long.

>SPQR in spess
you deserve it desu
Try winning a battle and then come back

Balanced for multiplayer

>fortress spam

yeah this is intentional, the AI can't into FTL inhibitor choke points so it just spams them everywhere.

Does anyone know when the Stellaris 2.0x patch is meant to go from beta to live? I'm waiting on it to do so before I play my first game.

I'm especially pissed off because I tried to make a vassal on a border province for a buncha territory I took from a Ravenous Swarm. I'm a friendly Xenophile Empire, and what does my vassal do?

Landgrabs and evicts almost all the aliens I had relocated to start filling up the planets' population. Puts the remaining alien in slavery. Has all of 3 pops and isn't producing food. Completely let one colony die.

I don't know why this happened. And then I tried to do Enigmatic Fortress and it was broken, and hyperlanes are so slow and my empire is so clunkily shaped...

It's hard to play the good parts of this game between all the tedious and frustrating parts.

Because being a supreme psychic space god-emperor so popular and worshipped that literally species from all over the galaxy are tripping over themselves migrating into my planets to become part of my empire is really fun.

"Evasive maneuver initiated"
Ah, yes, the famed evasive maneuver where you just fly into your enemy and hope your retardation puzzles them long enough that you have the time to escape.

How the fuck did they break this? I noticed that civvy ships will always try to run for the system they just came from, rather than going to the nearest hyperlane that's away from the threat, or just running to the border of the system if they can't get to the hyperlane.

But that'd be asking too much of Wiz.

The problem with Stellaris v1.etc was that it was fresh and exciting the first couple of times, but once you learned how to play and had seen all the events it turned out to have the depth of a puddle. A chief complaint was the shallowness of warfare: all wars basically boiled down to smashing your fleet into their fleet once and that was it, competition over, now all that's left is tedious micro.

v2.0 was an attempt to address this warfare problem in particular. And while I'd say that it does succeed a bit in making warfare less one-dimensional, it's replaced "brainless fleet clashes followed by micro" with "micro raiding followed by micro raiding". It's not really made the process more fun. It's just made it boring and repetetive in a different way.

And then there's the fact that since release there's been literally no work done on the skeletal diplomacy/trading/espionage/generally-anything-to-do-with-peacetime mechanics. Most Paradox games that are ~2 years months old have meaty expansions, new balanced playstyles, and full suites of new game mechanics under their belts compared to the release version, whereas Stellaris just seems to be going in circles. Nothing substantial has been added since v1.0. The biggest additions are just unbalanced, dead-end meme mechanics that never see play outside of RP runs.

>tfw you just want the game to be good so you can have fun
I don't want to hate Wiz or Paradox.
I want to give them my money.
Why can't they just make good games?

>2207
>Built 4 outposts.
>Now have to wait 25 months between each new outpost.
How do I make more influence? There's no faction yet.
I can't even grab yet that one system with +14 minerals total.

pretty sure there's buildings and shit that let you do it. Also some forms of government have different objectives that get you influence

> tfw fire up Stellaris for the first time
>no clue how to play
>all that exploration
>all those star systems to visit
>the events
>holy shit a new alien threat FUCKFUCK
>need to research it up to defend our system
>a fucking planet with primitive lifeforms to observe
>holy shit this is the best
>space worm
>OUT OF A BLACKHOLE?
>spooky signals

>3rd playthrough
>realize none of it really has any impact besides +X minerals or fluff
>just rush everything
I really wish there was a game like the first hour of stellaris during your 1st / 2nd play-through that focused on exploration and narrative. Then again it wouldn't really be 4x at that point.

Just think of how much better Stellaris would be if they got a dozen intern dorks from a college, actual nerds, not diversity hires, and told them to think up as many events and event chains as possible.
Just add and create so much that you're likely to see a given event maybe once every two or three galaxies, if you alone survey the entire thing.

It'd be too much to ask for events with unique and deep mechanics to them, aside from a few major (and rare) events, but it sure would be nice if I didn't get Shadowplay three times an arm.

That's the thing. Just have some nerds write a few stories. Give them the tools to add lots of events with minor impact to the game. I know I mentioned fluff, but I wouldn't mind some nicely written ones that have a huge pool as you said. Seeing the same shit over and over again being circled around each game get boring. I get that the game isn't really about that, but it feels like they missed the point with every single feature. If they just invested a bit more time into one area, be it combat, diplomacy or story it would of been great. Now everything is just average or below average.

>Authoritarian/Fanatic Authoritarian give .5/1 influence
>Gestalts get 1 influence
>Expansion/Purity traditions give -10% starbase influence cost
>Synchronicity traditions give 1 influence
>Interstellar Dominion Ascendancy gives -20% starbase influence cost
>Rivalries give .5 influence each for up to three at the cost of being a meanie
>Leaders can give 1 influence

Go Fanatic Authoritarian or Gestalt, get the starbase influence cost reductions from traditions and the ascendancy - no you don't need 100% edict duration as your first one - and snag some rivalries. Enjoy expanding like a motherfucker, falling behind on tech for a few decades, then catching up and then some once you've backfilled research stations.

>tfw i can boot up SMAC and get all those old feelings back again

god bless you Brian Reynolds. I'm glad the universe spared us this moment.

You can claim their systems and conquer as usual. The in one of the planets, you can "create vassal". Then in the diplomacy view of the new vassal, use "transfer system" in the trade window, and give them whatever you think they deserve.

Are celestial empires still as horrifically bad as they were after changes to agrarian idyll, or did they fix it?

>If they just invested a bit more time into one area, be it combat, diplomacy or story it would of been great. Now everything is just average or below average.
This is my biggest gripe with Stellaris. It's unfocused.

Is it a 4x? Is it a GSG? No one at paradox certainly knows.
Is it supposed to be balanced? Is it for RP? Paradox wants it to be balanced, but they keep adding RP memes.
Is it supposed to be combat orientated? Can you play the game nearly totally peacefully, successfully? The former is shallow and dull, and the latter is only technically possible.
Is game about exploring the great unknown, or building up a massive and glorious society? The former doesn't have enough content to be enjoyable past the first three games, and the latter is just a glorified cookie clicker.

The game literally tries to do everything, while being the most generic sci-fi possible (which isn't intrinsically bad) that includes everything, but not a single thing in the game is a fun, fleshed out core that can stand on its own.

There are some fun but secondary parts of the game, a lot of mediocre parts, a good few bad parts, and the entire game just ends up being bland and thoughtless.

Which is sad, because I pretty much no-lifed the game 16 hours a day for the first week after it came out, and I had an absolute blast.

Really wish there were more meaningful Anomaly event. Most are one offs, scripted chain events, or just random planet modifiers.

You're right. Really untapped potential there.

How do you mean? Like branching events?

I don't mind events being simple, I mind there being so few of them. I wouldn't care if they had a dozen +3 physics events so long as each and every one had unique fluff.

If I have to go through a half dozen galaxies to see Shadowplay a second time, then there's enough events.

Would you guys like Stellaris more if Horatio was in it? Be honest.

HORATIO!!!! XDDD

Fuck off.

More events sound great so long as they don't take too much of your attention.
Depending on what's going on or if you're in a MP session you might not be able to properly focus on "deep" events.

>muh MP
Senpai, they'd just be fluff. Read them if you want, press okay if you don't.

Horatio can be in stellaris if you wish it hard enough to be so.

What is it?

If only her ass were as big as her forehead.

I said multiplayer as an example why did you take it as my main reason?
And if they're fluff then fine but I thought people meant as in shit like the Enigmatic Fortress where you'd need to actually read the event and choose options.

>tfw have the exact same feelings
I just want a good space game. Either make it a proper 4x, GSG or exploration game. Don't need everything in one. None of my itches were scratched with Stellaris, it just made me want other things more that do not exist. Have such a weird love/hate relationship with this game. It shows that if it was split up into 2-4 parts and each part got worked on hard and were separate games, in the same genre, it would be absolutely mindblowing.