You do know that as kill bots any population you capture gets turned into energy generators? The process of purging makes a lot of energy but as the population dies off your energy income can plummet. So I am not surprised when you take territory that your income fluctuates.
If your crime is 100%, you should be taking a big hit to stability on those planets (and hence production) which will contribute to your economic fluctuations. You probably need police drones to keep the captured population under control. I think high crime and low stability also generate bad planetary events for normal empires but maybe they didn’t include those for machine empires. Also just undocking your fleets will take an energy hit.
I also recommend playing with Glavius’ AI mod and/or higher difficulty settings. You might also want to play a regular organic empire if you are bored as there tend to be more things to think about (faction happiness, consumer goods, trade, diplomacy). Playing as killbots is a very stripped-down game that IMO tends to get boring once you survive your first conquest.
Just check what the captured population on one of your worlds is producing. I think you are right that for DE’s they generate unity but their main output is energy.
Though if crime is high on the planet (due to all the pops running around trying not to get purged) purging might not be progressing very well, effecting your energy.
Generally the tooltips will tell you why any quantity in the game is what it is. So if you look at a captured pop, and see it’s producing X energy, you can hover over that to see why.
Thanks, Ill check it out. I do not recall seeing any such tool tips on the population tab (they are labeled as undesirables). Maybe I didn’t hover long enough for the tip to show up. As far as the energy income, are you saying there is a tool tip within the tool tip? For example, it may say x energy is being produced from jobs, but there is nothing like energy being produced from the furnaces that the undesirables put into.
Also, my planet layout is a mess. Before I was so afraid of going much over that administrative cap, I was being very conservative with my colonies. Right now I am like 4x my cap. They really need a better system. Anway, I figured out that a bunch of bio reactors on one planet is a bad idea. They do not require workers, so you have a large planet with no jobs. They are best spread out on other worlds who have more jobs than workers.
The UI isn’t great, but if you drill down into the population and actually click on one of the ‘undesirable’ pops, there is an info window that shows all the details about that pop, including what they are producing. If you hover over one of the resources it says what is affecting that (e.g. base, +10% for blah, etc).
Also, the whole undesirable category should be showing energy as one of the things it produces, but I don’t know if it has details at that level. I haven’t actually played a killbot in a while, so maybe I am wrong about energy production, but that would be a pretty big change.
I think the only problem is that calling is a ‘cap’ makes people think you are supposed to stay under it (or at least near it). Maybe admin efficiency?
Some marauder horde just popped out of a wormhole in the area I was conquering and started kicking butt. Their fleets were many times stronger than my own, so I had to abandon my gains, retreat to a choke point system and start building up my star base.
I had the same issue with a trading company in two separate games.
The first game I made the mistake of over-expanding and using a surplus of resources to upgrade a bunch of buildings all at once, which killed my supply chain.
The second game was more confusing. I was running a small, carefully managed empire. I wanted to basically have just a few planets and small amount of territory that was heavily fortified. I was running in the black just fine, and then I created a Federation as a neighbor, and boom, energy and alloys both dropped into the negative. I kind of balanced that, but realized too late that my focus on starbases and defense platforms had killed my alloy income to an unrecoverable state, and because of my small empire I had no method reversing that trend without completely stripping my defenses (I had already scrapped my fleet at this point).
Oh man, I don’t know if I can disagree with this comment more. Civ has always had one primary interesting decision, which is rushing to settle the best plots. After that, it devolves into sling-shoting your research along pretty much the same paths to get the same wonders.
Stellaris, in my opinion, does a good job making you choose. You still have the territory grab, but you need to figure out where to build starbases, and what types of modules those limited starbases should have (that choice has been expanded with the positive introduction of trade). You don’t have a set research path, and the economy is far more challenging to balance. You also have to tread around fallen empires and emergencies… and some of the event paths won’t be afraid to make drastic changes to your empire - such as rewriting your genetic traits or turning all your planets to tomb worlds.
Civ - which was my favorite series until Civ6 - is a fun race to beat the CPU players to specific milestones - but the path to get there is largely the same.
Just FYI, as a Corp in a Federation, you automatically get commerce agreements with all members. However, you do lose a portion of that to Federation tax (10% or thereabouts). If you already had trade with the empires you federated with, you’ll see a drop in income.
That makes sense. Like I said upthread, I didn’t watch many videos or read many details about the changes (just high level stuff) - so learning as I go.
I think people need to be very very cautious about upgrading their production buildings to use rare materials. If you run out of materials, you lose that production, which can cause a ripple effect and bring down your empire. You have to ensure that you have a sufficient supply of those rares no matter what happens.
IMO, it’s not even that helpful to upgrade those buildings until decently far into the game. All you are doing is saving building slots (it doesn’t improve the effectiveness of the people working those jobs). But producing the rares costs building slots (and jobs). I haven’t been able to play too far into the game, but I think I would delay mass-upgrading buildings until I was starting to get very tight on building slots and until after my production of rares was well established.
I was going to post just this. It’s a soft cap where diminishing returns kicks in and you maybe have to think a little more about what systems to grab, but unless you’re a corporation it’s not something you should strive to stay under. That’s especially true for the aggressive empires like Purifiers and Devouring Swarms. It slows the inevitable snowballing, but expansion is going to supply you with more minerals, alloys, and other resources.
That’s one of the potential mid-game crises that can fire. If you can kill the Khan in battle, the horde will usually fall apart. Much easier said than done if you’re seriously outgunned, though. :) Good luck!
I can’t say that I like a random event to be the thing that caused the bulk of the challenge. I did hit a speed bump vs the AI, but I recovered and was taking their territory. Then to just have all those ships pop out of a nearby worm hole and start laying waste feels a little cheap.
I guess if you play the game more, then you know it’s coming. Still, I never really liked random disasters in my strategy games.
Stellaris is …OK. It seems better than it was when I first played it. Where are the interesting buildings. Wonders in Civ is one of the best features. It feels great when you land the ones you want. In Stellaris I get… +3 jobs. +15% to production.
I’d also like for them to make it a bit easier to keep track of enemy ship abilities to better plan your fleet.
I’m not giving up on the game. I think in many more updates they may make it something better.
This is a midgame crisis, so it doesn’t have to be the end. If you end up over-run, I think you can surrender to the Khan and become a vassal. Some time later the Khan will die, the empire will be thrown into chaos and you will be free. Or maybe the Khan dies sooner than later or you start a war for independence.
For me, the asymmetrical nature of the mid and late game crisis is what makes stellaris great.
The early game is fun, but once you’ve stopped expanding (or are mindlessly plopping outposts down in broad unsettled areas), the game can start to drag… but then the next think you know there is a horde or probe ripping through the galaxy… or you are facing off against a huge fortress or space dragon. Then later, you get caught between two warring fallen empires, and you try to manage that to set you up for the final confrontation. I just think that sort of interaction adds so much more interest instead of just steamrolling the galaxy.
How does this start? Not that I have played many games very long, but fallen empires just seem to sit there not doing anything. I certainly do not provoke them, does the AI do this?
War in Heaven doesn’t happen unless you have Leviathans DLC. Even if you do, it’s somewhat unlikely to occur. Naturally in the course of a game a Fallen Empire will usually Awaken (this is based on your end-game start date, the default number of 2400 is too high if you aren’t a beginner, imo), though the year it will happen is randomized to a fair extent.
All Fallen Empires have only 1 ethic (spiritualist/materialist, xenophile/xenophobe, and 1 machine empire) and if the opposite ethic FE awakens the war in heaven starts and the galaxy divides into three factions. Some races will submit to the awakened empires and join their faction, while some will form a 3rd faction, the League of Non-Aligned Powers.
Sadly I know all this because the achievement to win the war in heaven as the leader of the non-aligned powers is one of the more irritating ones to get.
Edited to add: If a second FE does not awaken within 10 years to the day of the first awakening, no further FE’s will awaken to begin the war in heaven.
