Multiplayer, for one. I also play at slower speeds if I’m fighting a multi-front war or things are otherwise really hectic.
Like MisterMourning said, go to the beta branch where the performance bus is reportedly fixed.
I always play at normal speed. Takes forever sure, but I enjoy watching things do their thing. I do bump it up as needed, but mostly at normal. Been forever since I played this game though. Sounds like it’s a good spot to try again.
Thanks for the heads up, this is noticeably better. I’m glad my race of brainslug controlled hyper-capitalist turkeys is free to continue saturating the market once more.
A plumbus in every home!
Yes I thought about multiplayer for the game speed thing, even included it in my original post. Alas that appears to be the latest victim of my “Contemporary Habits Aggrandising Ostensibly Trivial and Insignificant Changes” posting techniques.
Out of interest does this get chosen at the start of the game or does it break out into a tug of war mid-game between the followers of the One True Speed and sluggish malcontents? Though that was easily amongst my favourite meta-scuffles back when I used to play Total Annihilation at LAN parties.
The Mac version is also noticeably slower at Fastest than running it on Windows with the same save.
Fleet composition question, do folks split their smaller ships into separate fleets from their big ships? Was reading this online, apparently the whole fleet will close to the shortest engagement range of the ships in the fleet, so battleships and titans won’t sit back firing at long range?
I’m running the official patch (7.2) and it is not running slowly like 7.1
One month in 2321 with 600 systems takes 13 seconds. My CPU is 8 years old.
If I were going to really seriously powergame the hell out of Stellaris, that’s one of the things I would do. As of right now, I prefer to just roll around with top-heavy mixed fleets that I can generally trust to act independently and handle all threats rather than having death balls of battleships and rapid response fleets of corvettes.
Wondering if I’m running into a bug. I have a planet with a shit ton of unemployed. I think it started when there was a pacifist uprising or something going on, but I have a ton of specialists unemployed. They will demote to workers, but the counter says -893907 (the number keeps going further into negative territory) for the time until they demote. At this point well over half the planet is in this state.
Sound like the timer is bugged, but is the process. You could always expel excess population?
Found the problem:
Went from 56 down to 6 immediately, with the 6 coming from the cave cleaner jobs I’d just dropped.
Started a new game as space parrots with the lost colony origin. Found the ancestors and they are spiritual seekers, so I guess it is true that the bird is in fact the word.
Had the Khan running rampant for a bit in this game until I killed her and took her throne. There is a new Khanate, but they are friendly towards me, I guess because I got the new boss promoted.
Hah, after heading in the last 30 years or so with about a 20k point lead on the fallen empires. One of them woke up. It must have been due the increase in fleet size due to a driven assimilator machine uprising in one of our federation members. While being amazing diplomats, scientists, and engineers my birds apparently are terrible at reading the fine print of legal documents. In signing a galactic peace treaty in one fell swoop we went from a 20k lead to being 20k behind, due to leaving our federation which included everyone left minus the 2 fallen empires, and a machine intelligence and the fallen empire gaining 35k points due to me being a subject empire.
Right after that the Unbidden arrived. I mostly dealt with them, though the awakened empire had a fleet cluster chasing them on the other side of the galaxy when they went through a worm hole. They didn’t finish them off though so after I cleaned up the portal and the fleets in my area I had to head over there and finish off the rest. The second Fallen Empire woke up at this time to be Guardian of the Galaxy, but the threat was defeated before they were able to do anything.
Down to 10 years until the end of the game, and I can’t get them to let me free, so I decide to declare war. I was wondering if they would lose the score points from me being a subject, but only if I win the war I guess. So ends the Confederated Helvan States.
I seemed to do a bit better this game with building up, but I still feel like I’m not expanding enough early game. I was able to grab some choke points and close off some sections to be developed later. i had the strongest economy at the end, but it was fragile. Anything disrupting my trade route would send my energy income crashing. Between killing off the Khan and vassalizing their people and killing off the unbidden it was a pretty fun game. I wonder if I would have made it to 2500 in the lead if we didn’t sign that damn treaty.
What size galaxy do people like to play? Usually I do huge, but that game was a medium galaxy.
The game I finished earlier today was on Medium with 0.75x habitable planets. I thought it was a pretty good balance. I did also turn down the hyperlane frequency which might’ve been a mistake as the map got a bit chokepoint-heavy, but that suited me just fine for now.
I’ve usually put it on large/huge but also end up regretting it one way or the other. It makes no difference to the early game, really, but I feel it drags out the boring bits toward the end for little real gain. Medium seems to work a lot better, overall, and not just in terms of performance.
I wrapped up my MegaCorp playthrough, which ended on a whimper. The dimensional invaders arrived but bugged out and never left the starting system. They did however keep spawning and stacked up to well over a million in fleet power. Fortunately I had a federation fleet which registered over 500k just on its own. Seems like allowing your federation allies to contribute ships can give you a fleet that goes waaaaaay over the 230ish pip limit you hit with your own fleets. I think it got up to 600 pips, which was kinda crazy. Not sure if this was a bug or a feature.
AI seems better at managing its fleets these days and assembles doomstacks and manoeuvres them with at least some skill now. There was an organic hive mind in my game that was getting unmanageable toward the end game, without the federal fleet plus the fact that they still never seem to jump drive, I may well have lost that one.
Diplomacy still sucks though. The UI for the council is poor, way too much going on in too small a space. Little things grate. For example, repeals in the vote queue not having tooltips to see the effect of the policy they’re trying to remove. Plus it didn’t really ever seem to add up to much. I guess its possible that a law passes that sees you constantly in violation but the only one that ever really applied to me was dipping below 50% fleet power and that was generally quick/easy for me to resolve.
I like the envoy stuff but it’s a bit shallow - your envoys are totally faceless to the point I have to wonder why the game bothers telling you when they die of old age. They’re replaced automatically anyway, and have no perks.
Away from the council, unless I’m missing something I still can’t see any way to coordinate with AI federation members during wars which makes them somewhat useless. They always seem overly passive/defensive until I’m way into enemy territory with most of the enemy fleet burning in the void behind me.
I do really like the new origin options for empires, gives 'em all even more flavour. They’re totally imbalanced and, hence, a lot of fun. I’ve not explored this too much, though I enjoyed being able to start my new empire of hedonistic sexbots on a ring world named CircleJerk.
All hail the Dildonic Rampagers, and their sublimely wobbly attachments.
Is the favor stuff new to Federations? That was interesting trying to use that to influence Galactic Community votes. It seems like the endgame crises snowball if not dealt with right away. Luckily I dealt with the trans dimensional guys right away and get the warlock relic. The game before had the ai uprising thing. They weren’t near me, but I got the GC to issue a focus on them. The one nearest to me ended up with 2 1m stacks, but they weren’t attacking as much as I would’ve thought. They could have walked over everyone probably with just those 2 stacks.
I agree on the envoy stuff. It wasn’t really anything more than a number to limit how many relations you are improving/harming (including gc and federation).
Yeah, the AI was scaring me with its fleets when the Khan got loose. I didn’t have anything in the route they would take into my empire, so I had a crash construction program trying to get that chokepoint up to a star fortress, and rushed my fleets up there. They were initially focusing on my ancestors though, and would only venture near my border with their large fleet when I would conduct a raid. Eventually the majority of their forces were away from me, and I was able to attack. Luckily one of the fleets still around was the fleet with the Khan, and after defeating her once, I killed her in a second engagement.
Overall that game was fairly peaceful. There were some slaving despots that our federation took on and wiped out, and one hegemonic empire that we beat into submission as well. The hive mind joined our federation, and the machine intelligence mostly kept to itself.
With combat I wish that they seemed to actually stick to their roles more. Everything seems to turn into a giant furball. It would be great if the artillery or line ships would sit back a bit.
Don’t mix fleet sizes, make sure your ships have the right orders, artillery and carriers hang back fine if done right
Are you saying don’t mix ship types, like having corvettes in a fleet with Battleships?
I think what Janster is saying is what you want to do is to not mix combat roles - keep all your ‘carrier behaviour’ ships in one fleet and ships that fight close up in another. Doesn’t matter if you’re mixing corvettes with cruisers if they’re all set to swarm/picket. It sometimes seems to work, but this has always been a notably weak area in Stellaris. Even with this approach you’ll still see your ‘melee’ fleets rushing through a whole bunch of enemy fleets to shoot something at the back of the system for no apparent reason. You may have marginally better results if you hold off jumping your carrier/artillery fleets in for a few days until everything’s globbed up in the middle of the system.
I’ve largely given up optimizing fleets in this manner, however. You’re right in that no matter what I do it always just ends up feeling like a meaningless furball. Considering how big a part of the game this is I’m surprised it hasn’t changed at all since launch.
About the only useful advice here is to refit your fleets depending on who you’re fighting and what’s happening in the galaxy. One of the factors in my success against the hive mind I mentioned before is that I had a galaxy storm show up that stripped shields in some 50% of systems. Seeing my chance I ditched all shields in favour of armour/crystal plating and declared war. Had to be careful about where I picked my fights but it worked.