My suggestion would be to use the glavius AI mod and set harder conditions for the game. You can make the crisis earlier and much stronger. Basically set yourself up for defeat and see how well you can hold on.
I do admit though that I’ve had the same problem as it’s hard to know ahead of time what will make a challenging game without being crushingly difficult in a boring way. Mostly I’ve been playing railway empires but even there I tend to reach a point fairly early where I want to start a new map.
It’s been a while since I’ve played, waiting for the new version to do the usual “bedding in” process, but isn’t there a scaling difficulty slider that was added a while back. I think it was designed to ramp up AI bonuses when the player was doing too well and vice-versa.
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Found this from the forum.
Scaling difficulty is meant to start at 0% resource bonus for AI (I believe the same as Ensign) and scale up over time until whatever date you have set as the end-game star date. I can’t confirm, but I’ve read (from people digging in the game files) that it scales up linearly, and its maximum is very similar to Commodore difficulty, which I think is about +50% resource bonus. So basically, if you set end-game to 2400, the AI will get an extra 1% resource bonus every 4 years for the first 200 years of the game.
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Observing this from the outside, I would venture that the problem with Stellaris is that unlike other Paradox games, you’re not surrounded by tons of bigger, more established fish. So the expansion part is fun, just like most 4Xs, but then you’re dealing with the inability of other AIs to compete with you on even terms, just like every other 4X, and you dominate very easily. In order to get the Paradox effect, they have to artificially cause an AI to somehow become a threat to you late in the game, and I doubt that’s going to be sufficient or satisfying.
Yeah I think that is part of it for sure. There are “Fallen Empires” that are incredibly powerful when they awaken, but that’s pretty late and they are usually not a factor until they do. There are also “advanced starts” but they are maybe a little too powerful if you start right next to them and not powerful enough just a little later on, once you outgrow them.
It would be interesting if fallen empires were more like a continuum. So there would be grades of decadence inversely related to how advanced the empire is. So you could have a range from starting empires with just one planet, starting tech and no decadence and 3 or 4 steps up to the current fallen empires will end-game tech and high levels of decadence. As the young empires become more of a threat, the various competitors start to wake up and throw around their weight, but not on a binary way, just gradually reducing decadence levels and increasing engagement levels with the rest of galactic society.
That would make the galaxy more populated and established without running over the starting player right at the beginning. It would also be a kind of automatic difficulty adjustment, since the faster you developed, the more quickly you would be perceived as a threat and the faster the established empires would throw off their decadence.
Dealing with growing decadence in your own empire would also be an interesting challenge.
Originally Stellaris was pitched as involving a lot of internal conflict - the difficulty was, at least partly, to come from holding together a large, unwieldy sci-fi empire.
This clearly did not pan out. You can see the vestigial features if you look though.
This could have been quite fascinating. Essentially like CK2 with vassals that hate each other and you need to stop them from destroying the whole empire. That would have been a much better transition after the first exploration phase.
Saying your game was a snooze and playing on the default settings is like complaining that a baby can’t beat you at armwrestling. In Stellaris, for whatever reason, they designed the default settings too low for anyone with any strategy game experience. Well below. I’d recommend trying this as a starting point:
Turn AI to aggressive.
Allow multiple advanced AI starts.
Turn difficulty to at least Commodore.
Bump the End Game start date down to 2350.
Increase Crisis strength to 3x.
Don’t reduce Unity/Tech costs. The game does not compensate Fallen Empires or the Crisis for a change to these settings in any way, so lowering it below 1X will trivialize the endgame completely.
Do not enable “scaling difficulty”. While it sounds like “scaling difficulty” might improve the AI, it actually nerfs it into oblivion. Say the AI is supposed to get a 20% bonus to production, on scaling it starts them at 0% and by the End Game date it will be 20%. Without scaling enabled, they just get the 20% from the start when it actually matters the most.
If you snored through the normal settings (who can blame you), try those. Also, if the Crisis seems overwhelming at first glance, realize they slow down their expansion as they grow and you’ll have time to build many waves against them when they barely reinforce.
I wish I could understand how the game is “easy”, but I’ve just kind of gotten how the economy works through the molasses.
PDX is getting a bit hard to love… I really like the idea of the game as it currently is, but it needs a lot of polish.
It’s got 3 of the 4, right? It has exploitation of resources, expansion to acquire resources, and extermination of your enemies of choice.
I feel like what @Janster was getting at is that it’s a full-fledged strategy game with a lot of depth, not “just” a wargame. Not that I’m trying to speak for him or anything.
I thought I had heard HoI4 referred to as a “Strategy Wargame” before. [shrug]
And big thanks to @MisterMourning for those recommended start options. I felt my first few games were too easy and I’m hoping these will improve things.
If it seems a bit difficult at start it’s because the AI ramps military pretty aggressively early, but once you get a sense of the timing milestones you need to hit to avert war while maintaining optimal economic efficiency, it all becomes a bit rote (though still infinitely more interesting in the tile matching game).
Those settings should provide you with an extremely threatening end-game crisis. So much so that if it spawns on you through RNG, it is possible to fall hopelessly behind. But I kind of like the idea that I can lose, personally. Otherwise it’s just SimCity in space.
Last two games:
The earlier was on tiny galaxy, 1 fallen, 1 khan, difficulty I think commodore. Had the midgame crisis date set to 2275 and endgame to 2375. It was around 2300 when the Khan appeared and started his crusade. I was surrounding him completely. His every fleet were stronger than mine and sent 3 of them right away. Instant submission. The “normal” AI is just too stupid. When a Khan’s single fleet is stronger than everything together plus it’s strongest station, it still lets the Khan ravage it’s empire and reduce to a bunch of systems before submitting. And when the Khan was assassinated, I just took over everything slowly. Then I got to 2400 and no end game crisis anywhere, not even the fallen empire awakening. I know it’s just the earliest possible date, but 25 years late is a bit…
Latest game, small galaxy, 2 fallen, 1 khan, difficulty I think commodore. Midgame crisis set to 2275, endgame to 2350. Khan appears around 2300 again (late), but now it was some distance away so I had time to prepare. Destroyed the Khan led fleet. Then about 10 more fleets 1-2 at a time, then managed to catch the second Khan led fleet. Crisis over. He could capture only half of another empire and it was over. Fastforward to around 2375 and one of the fallen empires awakened. Some 10 years later a popup shows that the awakened fallen vassalized the non-awakened one. No war in heavens, no war declaration, nothing. I’m now somewhere between 2395 and 2400 and still nothing else.
Internal conflicts: The biggest conflict I can get into is having too many unemployed pops… Factions? Laughable. I never cared about the whims of the factions since Apocalypse, not even once. OK, not true, I tried to in the first game, then realized that it’s not worth it. Even on a freshly conquered planet where I’m actually eating up all the old pops, they are not generating enough instability to have an actual effect on me. The biggest so far was with the assimilator drones, where the freshly conquered pops need to be assimilated first and during that time they are regarded as unemployed.
After every expansion I feel the game is better than before. But looking at the current state I just can’t decide whether I got too good compared to the AI, or the game was so bad when it came out (and I very much enjoyed it at that time too).
I have a problem. My trade route is going through a system that has hostiles. I have googled this and there are two solutions I have found.
Set the system to restricted. Everything I find on this says to go to the system and there is supposed to be some button near the system name that you can check or uncheck. I have no such button. On one side is the empire button, on the other is the go to galaxy map. If I click on the name itself, I just can rename the system. There is no option to restrict the system I can find.
Go to a space station and change the trade route path. I have no idea how to do this. I can see trade routes from the trade route overlays, but I can’t change their path. Clicking on space stations does not reveal any kind of trade route management that I can see.
It’s an image, it’s not very clear what it is, but it’s there.
It’s not obvious either. With the trades visible, click a station (which should have a blue outline) and then left click another blue station (in range) - I was expecting a right-click. It may not allow you to path around your issue if it’s the shortest path to that station.
Is there a screenshot of this image somewhere? I have looked and I can’t see anything that looks out of place or might be a clickable. Perhaps I am in some mode that is hiding this button? I know after my re-install on a new computer it took me a while to figure out how to show all the sector resources in the galaxy map.
Ugh, I can’t do it right now, but I can try later. In the system view of foreign systems, on the left side of the bottom bar you have the claim button, then the faction button, and then the avoid button, all before the system name.
Hmm. I do not have any of those buttons except the faction one. Maybe its different because somehow I managed to claim the system by placing a space station in it, and then after the fact, a bunch of monsters spawned in the system. Do these buttons show up systems you own?
