Some screenshots pre and post beta patch 2.0.2.
Before applying 2.0.2-beta
After applying 2.0.2-beta
Not a catastrophe. I just realised that the Curators’ Research Agreement isn’t factored in the Budget tab. Also, most interestingly, all the bonuses I had from the traditions I had adopted (Prosperity, Discovery) now are properly reported.
I like the direction the game is going, and I already liked it well enough at launch. Still, I’m having trouble getting back into it. The changes are mostly welcome (e.g., I like the star lanes), but they don’t seem that radical to me. Things just seem a bit slower. But I’ll stick with it, see if it grabs me.
I’m enjoying it quite a bit, but it might be because I can only play in smallish chunks. I can’t seem to avoid over-extending. The urge to claim space just to block people off is too strong.
This is me as well. “Ohh, look at that choke point, it’s just 3 systems away! Gobble gobble gobble”. Not doing wonders for my unity and research. :)
In the very early game, I’m finding it bad even for my mineral and energy production. If I’m really racing for a location, I’m plunking down the outposts but don’t have the spare minerals to exploit every space resource or keep up with development opportunities on my planets (wanting to build robots alongside pop growth makes this harder). I wanted to have more influence this play though and it’s made the mineral and energy situation very tight at the start. Not really in terms of income, but in terms of so many areas crying out for investment.
I think the rapid claiming is pretty much done for the time being though. I can more leisurely grab the territories behind. I just have to prevent any of my new neighbors from grabbing the territories I planted my flag on.
Me as well. I was scrambling to close off entry points for the fanatical purifier next to me, and even paid the extra cost to stick a station in a system not adjacent to one I owned.
This is interesting to me. You want the strategic position of having a choke point, but do you want to rush towards the day where they can declare war on you? As long as they can’t attack, the fanatic purifier bonuses are kind of a dead letter, right? So hopefully you can build up your economy faster, and secure alliances before they can attack. On the other hand, holding the choke point is really nice.
My intent was to cut them off from expanding into the space near me, and allow me to then grab those systems, and build up.
As marked on the map, I have 3 civilizations around me that hate me with a passion and have since 1st contact. So not a friendly corner of the galaxy.
I booted the game up largely because of this thread…and I’m enjoying it.
5 hrs over 3 days, around other things that needed doing, quite fun. I haven’t played Into the Breach yet either…
in my firsdt game I was struggling to remember what everything was, and had surplus energy, a mineral deficit, excess influence and not alot of space, and then got destroyed by an AI. Default Human civilization. I also didn’t figure out what pops do on planets.
In my second, current game, I looked more closely at what the traits do, and picked the ones that give extra minerals, and chose shorter lifespans to get them.
I have an excess of minerals, and I dumped my unity points into one of the trees, name eludes me, that gave me a limit of 10 of 11 world to directly control, instead of the default 5.
The problem is my scientists keep dying early, and I haven’t had anyone make it to lvl 5 yet to research the good projects.
I also, oddly, have yet to find any aliens, other than epsilon and delta hostiles.
I’m managing my planets much better, and there are no idle workers etc.
Now I need to figure out how to build a science base. I think that’s different to a research station, right?
Science labs are a building constructed on planet tiles, research stations are built via construction ships.
There’s some science thing I’m supposed to build to research a warp gate I found…
Might be a building or module on a star base. I know you can build a black hole observatory in those systems, maybe it’s something similar?
Starbase makes sense.
How do I build that?
Click on the Outpost that your constructor built to claim the system, then click the Upgrade button. Be aware that you’re limited in the number of starbases you can have, though! You can see the cap along the top of the screen and can be raised through tech, traditions, and size of your empire.
Yeah it doesn’t seem like you have room to hold back. Overall your empire actually seems pretty compact!
Good luck surviving.
To level up my scientists that are not assigned I build science ships and have the idle characters assigned to the “assist research” task above my planets. This task gives them experience. There’s a Discovery tradition which increases unity output depending on the level of the scientists doing assist research which is handy later on.
Also, there’s tech in the Society tree and a tradition under Harmony that increases their life span. I’ve ended up with 120 year old level six scientists that way.
New dev diary on the post-apocalypse
Stuff they have wanted to do for a while:
Stuff they’ve recently added that they want to do:
The first point of the new set gives me hope that the days of the tile system are numbered.
All those sound great. I think it looks pretty clear their next expansion is going to be about diplomacy, trade, and politics like has been speculated. I’m pretty excited for that, because Utopia made huge strides in making your race creation choices feel distinct and impactful while Apocalypse has solved my major complaints about how warfare was conducted.
Not to throw Henrik Fåhraeus under the bus because he’s done some great design in the past, but I wish Wiz had been at the helm of Stellaris from the get-go. He’s had to make some tough choices (removing warp and wormhole, which they’re still getting review-bombed over) and put in a lot of work in correcting some design mistakes, but I think the project has been on a nice upward trajectory ever since he took the helm.
I also love the new difficulty settings, especially the one I’ve been clamoring for forever in 4X games: scaling difficulty.
The problem I have with very high difficulty settings in a game like Civilization is that once the bonuses get to a certain point, it really narrows your options at the beginning of the game. You’re never going to get that Wonder built because the AI is going to get the requisite tech much earlier and have a huge production bonus. You’re also going to need a build stacks of archers to deal with the hordes of troops coming your way. Where I really want the difficulty to spike if the mid and late game, where humans usually start to really pull ahead.
The only game I can recall that used scaling difficulty was the Fall From Heaven mod in Civ4. I’ve been pining for it to show up in other games ever since.