Yeah that’s something I should commit to as well. I usually don’t reload on a setback, but even the possibility of doing it can make me reckless.
Welll, this is new to me, I was wondering where the habitable planets are, and trust me, they look scarce after I run my ships through my neighbourhood in search of them, but bugger me, they are still there, but this time, you may have to use your science ships to find them…
Its not obvious anymore, case in point, Sirius near me, had a habitable for ages, but I didn’t see it, so I colonized something further away that was identified by my warships, that was way costlier.
Huh. I have habitable planets set to show on the galaxy map, and the warship scouts seemed to reveal all of them, though if they haven’t been surveyed they look mostly grey. Are you saying you just didn’t notice the planet there, or it definitely didn’t show up to a warship, or was there a special survey event?
Given the scarcity of starting habitable planets, I felt I had to snipe one of my neighbors starting ocean worlds. I’m sure he will be fine with that. Well, I’m fanatic materialist and he’s fanatic spiritualist so we weren’t going to get along anyway.
Hmmm well it did pop up yet I’m sure my ships had visited it before, and that survey ship was at it there for a while, but maybe I just missed it? There is really really few habitable worlds and I set it to 125 percent .
Sendt fra min iPhone
I did an non-clustered start in a huge galaxy. It’s pretty cool because you can definitely explore quite a bit before you run into anyone else.
Well, at least before you run into another civ. Right out of the gate, I sent my small fleet of 3 corvettes on a quick scouting mission to a nearby black hole, and there was a (spoiler) dimensional horror that basically sucked them in and killed them. You know it’s really, really, really scary when they have a skull for fleet strength. (/end spoiler)
I found it best to do scouting with a single corvette at once. Basically starting corvettes are dead if they end up fighting most things anyway, whether there are one or three of them.
Fewer habitable planets is an improvement, but unfortunately one of the few. The expansion planner has design flaws that make it almost as cumbersome as searching the galaxy map for a specific compatible pop. Past the mid-game there still is nothing to do but war war war. The faction and mandate system remain limited, when they should be what dominates this game. Hopefully 1.4 or 1.5 takes the game closer in that direction!
I use all three but I should split them up to cover more ground, now you mention it. If you set their stance to Evasive, they’ll run away from any system with a hostile in it.
I found an instance of this when a science ship found an ocean world in a system I had thought empty. The catch? There was an industrial-age civilization on it. So the galaxy-view only shows planets that can be colonized.
I’m playing a hyperdrive-only game, so I just want them to pop in to the system and move on to the next one, so I don’t use Evasive. Generally they aren’t at risk unless the pop in right on top of an enemy. I even took Evasive off my colony and science ship when I need to push them through a system with alien life.
Anybody else getting CTD since the patch and Leviathans DLC. I can’t play the game, I even unsubscribed all modes and verified all files. This is getting frustrating, fortunately I have other game I can play.
Edit: Deleted all the local files and uninstalled the game. Then reinstalled and it appears to be working fine for now.
So my first game ended when I got stomped by my neighbor. I had 5 planets to his 3, and I was at my fleet cap, and I was defending a space port with a couple of defensive stations. He rolled in with a fleet that was double my fleet cap, and slightly higher tech and wrecked everything. My two protectorates that I’d boosted to the space age decided that since they now had bigger fleets than my nothing, they hated me.
I was pretty surprised that he came in with such a strong fleet. The game had been warning me recently that he had a superior fleet, but I couldn’t believe it, as I thought I would have a higher natural fleet cap due to more planets and space ports, plus I would be defending a fortified position (hyperspace only, I had grabbed the choke point into my territory).
It turns out that on “hard”, the AI gets a 50% bonus to energy, minerals, research and fleet cap. With how the game punishes rapid expansion with slower tech progression, and without access to tactical trickery, a hostile neighbor with these bonuses seems like they would be hard to beat in the early game, since it seems to take so long to get people diplomatically on your side.
There are some wonky balance choices in the early game too. Missiles, for instance, don’t seem at all bothered by evasion. Since PD can’t be mounted on corvettes, missiles utterly dominate the early game (though drop-off rapidly in effectiveness once PD on Destroyers hit the field).
The forum seems to be a bit split on the effectiveness of early missiles. On paper they are good, but there is a bad tendency to overkill. I was using antimatter missiles in the combat above, against my enemy’s blue lasers, and he didn’t have point defense (only a couple of destroyers and no PD to be found). Still, I got wrecked pretty quickly. I might have been able to keep it closer if I could have kept my fleet next to my station, instead of chasing after his fleet and getting defeated in detail.
I’ve been trying to mix my weapons up. I build corvettes with lasers and plasma throwers in one variant and corvettes with missiles/torpedos in the other. One problem that I have had though is that the corvettes seem to be hard wired to charge and they seem to be leaving the point defense umbrella of my destroyers. Corvette casualties are high.
I think the AI might also be getting intel on what my weapons/defensive techs are. I’ve never fought a big battle with my advanced ai neighbor who has been bullying everybody around him but from the brief glimpse I got of his ships in battle when we were both picking at the corpse of a small space nation, he was built perfectly to counter my advanced lvl 3 missiles that I had built pretty early. He had pd everywhere. Maybe it was just a coincidence.
This game really needs some espionage options so I can scout out my neighbors tech and fleet compositions.
Still having a blast though.
Curious; I found the opposite (with my fleet of blue lasers getting wrecked by missiles). Perhaps my opponent had very advanced missile tech? The overkill I don’t think matters much for the small (< 1k) fleet that I was using.
Maybe missiles are only weak when the “IS_PLAYER” flag is checked?
My experience with missiles is they suck when im using them and they anhilate me when the AI uses them (until i got PD that is). I had a far better game when i was using railguns.
Ouch, that explains a lot. I don’t mind the energy, minerals and research one, but fleet cap is too much.
I can’t seem to edit save games anymore, they show up corrupt, have an mp game I want to up the difficulty of, to make us sweat a bit more.
I think Paradox started compressing save games little ways back. Not sure if there’s still an option for compression in-game.