@Scotten No worries if you do! I’m overwhelmed with my little newb empire. :)
My favorite new feature so far is the awesome first-contact procedure! It’s the most fun I’ve had establishing diplomatic relations in any 4X game.
I’m unsure how to manage my planets. My new colony has a blocker suggesting I might want to upgrade my colony structure or something like that, but I don’t see how to do that. Likewise, my capital has a blocker that says either build more cities or upgrade my Planetary Administration – which I couldn’t readily find in the wiki. Planetary economy is a little overwhelming too, what with all those icons without tooltips, but I’m actually having fun figuring it out.
I also have trouble keeping straight which ship is researching which anomaly. I think this is because I repeatedly told my science ships to come back to research anomalies later. Once you do that, that ship captain is in charge of that research project until she’s manually replaced, it seems. Not a big deal, but I seem to be missing some easy UI trick for just telling a ship to go research a nearby anomaly that’s already been visited by another ship.
Three years ago I recall bumping up against starbase limits, but now it seems I’m only limited if I build “upgraded” starbases. It seems I can expand my empire as I like, although I’m on the verge of exceeding the soft cap on growth (sprawl). But I suppose sooner or later I’ll want defenses or trade hubs or such on starbases?
Anyway, great fun. I played all evening – hours and hours, utterly absorbed. The early game of Stellaris was always fun, but the new diplomatic and economic features have made it even better. As with most 4X’s, I’m guessing the endgame is still the weakest point, but I can live with that.
Blockers can be removed via the Decisions button on a planet, assuming you have the tech. When you colonize a planet, it starts with a single building. This building can be upgraded when you have 10 population and I believe it grants an extra building slot. You also get an extra building slot for each City District you build (blue colored district, far left. Districts are shown above your building slots).
I think at some point in the way past, I cribbed game settings from some site & when I reinstalled it last month - those settings came down. I also think they were not good settings in terms of when these crises would all develop.
Knowing these jerks were coming for me, I built up my fleet as much as I could. Their fleets are WAY too powerful. Their 2 smaller ones each have the firepower of my entire navy, one of them caught a groups of my fleets (with a 3:1 superiority) and blasted my ships to bits.
I guess it’s time to restart with an easier setup.
Ok, I’ve had this game for a while now but never touched it, and it seemed to be pretty well panned here. You all are going to make me want to give it a shot sometime soon.
I think it still has some major design flaws, including the huge missed opportunity of making internal politics actually matter, but the game has gotten a lot better after having a low point in year 1-2.
There is a shockingly addictive gameplay loop in there, even if it’s obvious how it could have been made better. And the developers investment in AI and balance has really ramped up in the last 6-12 months. If it was a 2/5 at launch, it’s more like a 3.5 now - which is pretty good in 4X.
I think the robot thing is a robot uprising in one of the civilizations, the AI loves building robots and keeping them slaves. So there is a chance of rebellion. If you allied/defense pact you will be at war.
I think the War in Heaven requires Fallen empires have opposite civics/ethics but i am not sure. If you can win a battle you can research their their tech and get a big boost.
For starting i would recommend just 1 fallen empire. you can also choose what alien empires appear in the game by right-clicking on the race in the setup (also banning them) to make the game more friendly or challenging
Thanks for the tips on colony management! I’ll give those suggestions a try.
I agree that the game is much improved since launch, or least since I last played it 3 years ago. Some improvements could still be improved upon, though. E.g., much as I love the new first-contact procedure, it seems my diplomats don’t have any traits at all, unlike scientists, say. It would be nice to have another layer of decisions to make when assigning envoys. Or maybe I’m missing their traits, or maybe they appear later?
Back at it. Yesterday’s session really got its hooks into me.
I don’t think the haters are wrong, I just think it’s a different kind of 4X. The game shines when you just have a blast doing cool sci-fi stuff. Do you want to build armies out of robots and xenomorphs one game and clones and psi-soldiers the next? Put big guns on some ships and fighters in the others? Chase down artifacts across the galaxy?
The problem is that it doesn’t really matter that much what your army or fleet comp is, or if you get this artifact vs the other–it’s kind of marginal compared to the power differences between empires based on the basic 4x stuff like population and number of quality planets. So you have to enjoy it for its own sake.
Contrast this with Old World, where all the parts of the system are really well thought out and put together. That game was (rightfully) loved on this forum (and by me, as well).
Robot uprisings can happen if the empire doesn’t grant AI pops full citizens’ rights and has yet to take the synthetic ascension perk. There can be some variation and random chance in the event chains that lead to the uprising, but those two are the core issues.
This is a great summary of the shortcomings - no matter how much you customize your empire, the same strategy will work, so every game feels close to identical, as does every opponent/ally. The changes they’ve made have helped this somewhat, but there is still a lot of low hanging fruit here (I think).
The Contingency is the robot end-game and i think they eventually spawn 4 different locations. You might want to look at your ‘end-game’ slider in the setup to move it later if you want more time to build or lower the strength of them.
I like Amazing Space Battles because it slows down combat and gives me more of a chance to decipher what is going on and maybe send reinforcements if they’re not too far away. I wouldn’t call it a must have, though, it’s more of a cosmetic thing.
