SOTS just didn’t have invasion. Surrender or orbital bombardment only.
Must be SOTS 2 I’m remembering then. Was sure they had an assault shuttle module option.
SotS had boarding pods for taking over ships. There were also assault shuttles that killed population and infrastructure on the planet. The Zuul also had raiding pods that could steal population from planets as slaves. These Zuul pods also left behind baby Zuul that could start an infestation that could eventually take over the planet if there were enough of them.
Edit: You could probably change the assault shuttles to allow for planetary takeover. However, mixing ground-assault ships with fleet ships would still potentially be tricky since the ground-assault ships would be more vulnerable in a fleet battle. You could easily end up with a situation where you could in theory build low-fuss hybrid ships but high-micro-management specialized ships would beat them every time.
New dev diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/dev-diary-91-starbases.1052064/
They are completely changing a hell of a lot in just this DD, and they still have a lot of DDs to go.
So far everything in the DD sounds great. The possibility of fewer but stronger central building nodes, the tug of war between different specialization roles for the starbases, and all that sounds excellent.
And a confirmation that a FTL rework is coming, details next week! Yes!
With the control of systems being based on capturing and occupying Starbases along with an associated rework of the Wargoal system, I wonder if this is indication that planetary invasions are going the way of the Dodo.
My personal favorite technique; the bio missiles that converted the planet
I forgot about those.
In game lore, was that considered dropping the love bomb or the funk bomb?
Heh.
SotS didn’t really model populations: every planet you owned was populated with your species. So the lore about the conversion was that it magically genetically modified all the sentients into your species, magically changed their allegiance and also magically terraformed the planet into whatever your species preferred.
So, how about that Stellaris DD? Most of the griping seems to have be about having to build an outpost in every system.
There’s a mod that does a lot of this already called Improved Border System. It adds a bit more micro to the expansion mechanism, but it does actually improve the game a good bit. The only thing I don’t like about the DD is that we’re probably talking Q1 2018 before we get to see the update.
For my favorite species? (the ridiculously overpowered Morrigi) The Love Bomb :)
New dev diary up regarding FTL changes. Some hate in the comments, but the plans look good to me.
Not true! Certainly in later expansions, different civilian populations could come from different species. (Imperial populations were restricted to your own race). The assimilation missiles converted allegiance, though I don’t believe it was modeled anywhere beyond an initial dice roll and a defection if successful.
Civilian populations basically were bystanders, and lived under whoever controlled the planet. Very rarely you’d take over a planet with surviving civilians, but most of the time they would die during the bombardment stages. Left without Imperial population, they’d go independent.
So to summarize we have hyperlanes from the start, naturally-occurring wormholes that require tech to stabilize, abandoned instantaneous gateway networks and the possibility to build new gateways later. Jump drives that are like hyperlane drives, but can jump in a radius as a special move. Oh, and each hyperlane has a specific emergence point in a system, so you actually have to travel in-system to get to the next point. Warp is totally gone and existing wormhole stations only survive in the form of natural wormholes and gateways.
Sounds awesome to me. I tend to play hyper-only games, and the possibility of them catering more to this and building additional systems (e.g. FTL sensors) around this is great.
Ah I’d forgotten about that. Still, I think the conversion missiles changed the imperial population and terraformed the planet to the imperial standard.
I believe that’s correct. There’s a reasonably good wiki with mechanical details; here is the page for assimilation bio missiles.
While I enjoyed toying around with wormhole movement, I think hyperlanes make for better gameplay so I’m all for this. Haven’t played in quite a while but when this update drops I might finally jump back in again.
This seems excellent. Stellaris added multiple FTL methods but with none of the aspects to it that made them so clever in SoTS: teleportation required a gate network, warp-drives were much slower than hyperlanes, and FTL drives were cleverly balanced and thematically handled.
I haven’t touched Stellaris in a long time, despite receiving Unity for free due to Paradox’s sales snafu. I’m hoping they can still salvage the game; I’m more hopeful than I have been, but there remains a long, long way to go.
I’m thinking that this next update will make warfare a lot more satisfying. It also has the potential to extend the exploration aspect of the game a lot further, as sections of the map will be off-limits until you get wormhole stabilization or the ability repair ancient gateways (or jump drives I guess). They explicitly want to have some interesting things in those sections. Also you can have monsters and other threats guarding critical nodes in the regular hyperlane network.
They’ve promised to deal with doomstacks in this update as well. So my remaining complaint would be depth of diplomacy and the sort of tediousness of the economic micro. The last bit is fairly ignorable now as you can throw most systems into sectors and still reach into the sector and build what you want (and drain resources from sectors if you need them).
So yeah, I think this next update will be pretty awesome. Frankly, I’d be playing Stellaris right now if I actually had time.
Edit: The only thing I want in addition is to only show hyperlanes from systems were you have had sensor coverage at some point. Seeing the whole network at the start is just wrong.
Edit2: I am hoping that the need to transit in-system between hyperlanes slows down FTL a fair bit, even if they’ve boosted in-system speed.
Yep, I would love an entire fog of war at the start, the entire map not just the hyperlanes. Having to explore and expand properly, seeing the hyperlanes and systems appear only as you visit them would be great. It’s too easy at the moment to make a rush for chokepoints in the hyperlane network.