Missiles, their relationship to point defense, and their DPS is totally screwed up. From reddit:
[quote]There was a thread on here within the last week or two that got into the fact that missiles and passive defense and the like just don’t work intuitively. They messed with settings on them and things like increasing the travel speed of the missile, which should make them more effective because it would mean less time for the passive defense to shoot them down, would sometimes result in more missiles being shot down. That’s just one example of the insanity that is the mess called the missile system. I would avoid them.
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Haven’t played the game much since vanilla release, figured now was a good time to really dig in. It’s very obvious to me there’s been significant work on the game, I’m having quite a bit more fun with it now than I did before (not that I hated it before or anything, it just felt like it needed more stuff to do).
One of the things that’s engaged my interest a lot more is the work they’ve done on the Ethics, they just seem a lot more interesting now. I’m roleplaying a race of benevolent plant people (Fanatic Pacifist / Xenophile). I didn’t feel like those traits gave you much to work with in the vanilla release, but I find them quite powerful now. I can easily get along with my neighbors, as long as they aren’t warlike xenophobes, and as such I’ve been able to quickly form defensive pacts and eventually a Federation.
There was one extremely hostile neighbor and he started gobbling up planets. Forming the defensive pacts made him look elsewhere, but once one of my AI allies took the helm of the Federation, he launched a war of liberation. Five races, each individually not a match for the aggressor race, was able to smash his fleet and siege his worlds. We forced him to release several planets, which we then established defensive pacts with and eventually diplomatically vassalized them. The kid who couldn’t play nice with his neighbors is now reduced to a single desert planet.
Things were peaceful for a decade or two where I focused on building up my economy, but that period is coming to an end as I just spotted a giant space squid emerge from a pulsar that’s in the fringes of my territory. I believe this is one of the Leviathans from the similarly named content pack, and he’s causing me some serious issues. He wiped out a few space stations and wrecked the fledgling economy of a primitive race I had uplifted. My fleet eventually tracked him down and engaged, but I was quickly forced into retreat when I lost half my cruisers in the initial salvos.
That’s all I had time for tonight, so I’m going to have to figure out how to deal with him tomorrow. The game isn’t radically reworked from vanilla release or anything, but I’m definitely more engaged than I ever was in 1.0.
I’ve put in about 10 hours the last 2 days. Right now I have 3 fallen empires in my neighborhood. I really like the ability to research debris fields from battles. I’ve ended up with a couple techs that way from the war with my neighbor. After the white peace they didn’t close the borders immediately so my science vessels rushed around to grab up everything they could.
Apparently what happens is that when you edit the missiles so they go much faster than normal, the update cycle of the game isn’t fast enough for their simple tracking mechanism. So the missiles tend to slightly miss their target and sharp turn to get the hit. The time when they are doing the sharp turn is when they get hit more by PD. Basically, editing values outside the tested range can break the game in unexpected ways.
Overall, the main mechanical problem with missiles is the overkill. The game doesn’t seem to do an accounting of how many missiles are already aimed at a particular target, so especially in the case of corvettes, a lot of firepower gets wasted (much less of a problem when there are few or one target, like a space station). This problem was exacerbated when they increased weapons range but didn’t increase missile speed, so there can now be multiple salvos in space all aimed at the same corvette.
Something started happening in my new game that didn’t happen for me pre-patch. My leaders started having a chance of getting negative attributes. My starting governor, upon leveling to 3, developed a drug addiction that took 20 years off his lifespan. A few years later, the captain of my secondary science vessel developed a superiority complex that reduced his exp gain by 15%.
For some reason that tiny little extra flavor gave me a better appreciation for there game. Add to that the interactions with these new races that aren’t really races and it just makes the mid-game feel like there is more going on.
That’s been my overall impression as well. In 1.0, once I hit the point where I’d colonized my worlds and borders were all touching, I had kind of a “Now what?” feel. I don’t get that anymore, but I don’t think I can put it down to any one thing. More like a bunch of individual improvements have come together to make the game more engaging.
Certainly improved. I find war (which is the main way of interacting with… well, anything) still lacking - I’ve had a lot of trouble coordinating any sort of war with allies. And colony development seems empty of interesting choices - I often just hand off planets to sectors once colonized, because there are very few real choices to make in developing a colony, and I have to hand them off anyway.
Yeah, I agree colony dev is lacking “interesting decisions”. Thankfully, the Sector AI finally seems (small anecdotal sample size, so take it with a grain of salt) competent, so that’s a huge plus if it holds up.
I wonder if Civ6 could provide some inspiration in that regard. That game has some major flaws and problems, but I absolutely love the way city development interacts with the map. Maybe space stations could be an analog to districts, and make the actual terrain tiles more interesting.
The other thing that’s needed is better fortification UI. Right now it’s impossible to fortify a line of star systems, even given unlimited funds, because you can’t feasibly find each one and click upgrade on it.
I’ll stop now. I could rant for days on issues with Stellaris.
Just curious, how many science vessels do people usually start out exploring with? I’ve been doing 3, but I’m not sure that is sufficient on an elliptical map.
3 is usually what I do. The issue there is you’re basically hitting the leader limit if you’re putting governors on all your planets, and you have an admiral in charge of your fleet. Plus, you need 3 scientists for each research field.
I’ve been doing 2. Exploring is nice early on to figure out the stuff near the homeworld that will eventually be part of your territory. Once the borders with neighbors firm up it’s fairly irrelevant. The stuff in enemy space will have already been explored so no juicy anomaly chances, and map trading with the AI will fill in the rest of the galaxy fairly easily in the later game. In the mid/late game I just have my science ships sitting around doing assisted research to kill time, and then darting out when I need to research debris or fully map some newly conquered systems.
I’m shocked that, at least as far as I can tell, there’s no way to tell from the galaxy view which systems have Starports. Seems particularly surprising since you can tell very clearly where your defensive stations are.
How is the Alexis Kennedy storyline fitted into Stellaris? Is it something you select when you start a game, or a separate game mode? Or do you have to wait for it to show up as one of the storylines?
Still? You have got to be kidding. I can’t imagine that’s something people haven’t complained about. Not knowing where you can build, or what kinds of ships you can build, or what bonuses you have for certain ships? Surely they’ve added some map indicator for that stuff.
Maybe I play weird, but Starbases get built in every system. A few are dedicated shipyards but the rest are providing economic benefit and all-important fleet cap.
EDIT: @tomchick, I believe the Horizon Signal is a storyline that happens in-game. There’s no game setup option or mode for it.
