I think I’ve finally broken that for the most part (most likely until the next thing comes along).
Think of them as aspirational purchases, Mike!
Well this all sounds very exciting, but I’ll wait and see on the patch before I go purchasing Lithoids and Federations.
But I’m excited at the prospect of playing Stellaris again. Though I kind of agree with the sentiment that maybe they should be developing Stellaris 2 right now and just kind of rebuild the thing from the ground up.
Patch notes, also that patch with the further AI improvements will be available on a beta branch at release. The producer explains why (having to schedule QA resources and provide a RC build far in advance).
I have no idea what you’re talking about, these are the real patch notes: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/fhk2wk/patch_26_verne_notes_what_they_actually_mean/
Anyone fired it up with Federations?
Not yet, but I’ll probably be firing it up after work today.
I would love to hear your impressions. I haven’t played in over a year. I’m into a HOI 4 game right now and don’t think I have the mental energy to switch gears. But reports about the diplomacy system would be nice to read.
I’m interested in hearing about performance, and AI, and any other base upgrades. Unfortunately my gaming rig is not where we’re riding this out, is it’s mostly reading and whatever my work laptop can handle.
OMG, my dumb-ass accidentally bought an extra key for the new expansion Federations. Any chance a kind soul on here would like to buy it from me? Please message me if so. I hope this isn’t breaking a rule here.
-sold, and thank you
Ha ha, you guys are playing Stellaris?
I look forward to reading Federations impressions. I can’t help but get a little excited every time Stellaris gets a big update. “Could this be the one…?” I ask myself.
-Tom
I have 200+ hours in the game and even I feel this way, because while I’ve enjoyed it a fair bit at various points in its development I’m still waiting for it to turn into the best version of itself. Fingers crossed that this latest patch and DLC move it in that direction.
Also, I was just thinking “I haven’t seen Tom post anything in awhile, hope he’s OK” so, you know, good to “see” you.
I did a quick test with “advanced_galaxy” on my fairly dated hardware and it performed noticeably much better. It doesn’t create realistic planet development, but it looked good enough to know it’s faster.
Regardless of issues, it’s still a pretty fun story simulator. A better game would be nice, but I still have a good time with it. Maybe this will be the one.
Hey, it eventually worked out for Cubs fans didn’t it?
I think that’s a sports reference, because the word “cubs” is capitalized.
-Tom
I’m so proud of you Tom! Not only correct, but my team even :)
Only got to play a little last night, maybe 10 or 11 years in. The Shoulders of Giants origin provides another thing to pursue at the start but I still don’t know if it is going to lead to interesting places. Though I guess I could cash in these minor artifacts for a lot of energy.
That’s the one I picked as well! I only had an hour or so to play last night, so didn’t get a chance to dive in yet.
One thing I read on the boards that makes me wonder is the changes to sprawl and how it interacts with research and unity.
In the first version of Stellaris, penalties to research grew fast enough with empire size that you basically didn’t expect a large empire to research any faster - it was more about what fraction of your society is dedicated to research.
Then this system got wrapped up in the sprawl mechanics, where penalties kicked in above a fairly small empire size. So research speed grew linearly up to a certain empire size but really big empires still were scaled back.
But people don’t like to see red numbers so now you can counteract sprawl penalties by building administration builds and admin jobs. Which means for a nominal fee, larger empires can remove their research penalties…
This moves it more to traditional 4x territory. I don’t know. Not a good change IMO. What’s more scary is the possibility that this change was not intentional.