Nice!
Thanks for the info on those mods. I’ll check 'em out. I’m not sure I want a tiny outliner, though. The font is already borderline too small for me.
I seem to be in last place in my game, which is maybe understandable given how rusty I am. I’m playing as the diplomatic humans, so everyone likes me notwithstanding my weakness, but I dunno how long it will last – or how I can possibly win, lol.
So resources are always empire-wide, yes? I ask because some early colonies have all sorts of deficits, but my empire is running a surplus of those things.
Tempted to try the Star Trek mod. :)
Yeah, resources are shared empire-wide.
Thanks.
So I’ve been playing for two or three straight evenings and I’m only at year 2253! Is that typical? I pause all the time to respond to every notification – construction complete, survey complete, etc. I do feel I’m well into the midgame. I’ve met about a dozen races, and I’m now in 4th place.
With the default settings the midgame events can start at 2300 and endgame at 2400.
When was the new first contact stuff added? The last time I fired up the game was Federations, and I don’t remember that. I am 50 now though, so I could just be getting old and forgetful.
In all the games I have played, I have never seen a robot uprising. I have wanted to see this in action, also because I tend to play machine races. I also up the end game crisis to max, because even then, its fairly weak. I have never seen anything significant happen because of it. I may see a few alien systems get lost for a while, but then they just get them back.
It always starts out slow (pausing for everything, like you said) but then I get less patient and just let it run while I’m doing stuff. (Though I don’t think I’ve ever paused for “survey complete”–at least not for individual surveys. When my science ships go idle, sure, but often I queue up lots of systems to keep them busy for a while.)
This one has had me on the fence. If I were to buy it does the current vanilla version resolve enough of the mid-game issues to make the investment of time worth it?
One of the Steam reviewers I follow praises the state of game as of 2019.
I think you’ll certainly get your money’s worth picking up the base game at one of the record discounts.
Edit: I think the review you linked is a little too gushing and complimentary of the depth vs other 4X. Stellaris has many mechanics to tinker with but none you really have to tinker with.
Another forum post described it as a clicker style game in a gorgeous 4X facade. I think that is pretty accurate - it allows for very mindless gameplay, even if it pretends to have meaningful choice (and is improving slowly in that direction). But it is still fun, especially at a bargain.
I agree with what @AK_Icebear said, but it makes me wonder–have any of us played at a really steep difficulty? I know I haven’t. But I assume it would just be very large AI bonuses and big ol’ crises that spawn huge fleets out of the void.
I picked up the base game to try out the ST: New Horizons mod (as Klingons!). I understand some of the DLCs add some things (like Ferengi and a couple of other races being megacorps, some other playable race and so forth), but it sounds like I can easily get away with the base game for now and I’m kind of cuckoo for overhaul puffs at the moment (also trying out Third Age Divide and Conquer, an LotR overhaul for Medieval 2 that’s still under active development!).
For me it helped when I started seeing Stellaris as a sci-fi roleplaying strategy game. Crusader Kings plays best (IMO) when you’re roleplaying your characters as opposed to just min/maxing and Stellaris is similar, it’s just roleplaying a race/culture/civ instead of individual kings and dukes.
It can fun to play as a pacifist xenophobe, a militant democratic crusader, a robot caretaker, a coalition-building diplomatic looking to defend the galaxy, or a televangelist megacorp trying to spread their influence and get as filthy rich as possible. I find the game is more fun for me when I come up with an idea and see how it plays out. I’m less concerned with beating the hardest difficulty in the most ruthlessly efficient way possible, which is how I usually play strategy games and how I used to approach this one. I don’t think Stellaris is great for that, although it can certainly be played that way.
Stellaris isn’t my favorite PDS game but I do feel it’s come a long way and it’s something I’ve been able to have fun with.
Since my last game settings seemed to suck (middle finger to you synth bastards and the fallen empire jerkheads!), can any of you share the ones you’re using or have used? Do you prefer to push the endgame/victory years out?
I’ll try to remember to check my settings when I get home. A lot depends on what kind of game you’re looking for. Are you in the mood for a “race against the clock” kind of game? If so, move those Mid/Late crises sliders to the left, which sounds like it might be what you have currently. Or at least the mid/late crises are very close together. If you’re looking to explore game mechanics, brawl with your neighbors, and get a better handle on things, the more you’ll want to move them to the right as you won’t have as much time pressure.
If you’re wanting a more warlike game, I would toggle AI Aggressiveness on. Would not recommend that if you’re looking for a more peaceful/cooperative game where you want to focus on stopping the various crises or just be a builder. Advanced Civs give the AI a head start as they have initial stuff like mining stations and a nearby habitable world or two colonized, it can be nice for a potential early game challenge so that also depends on what you’re looking for.
The AI doesn’t receive any bonuses up to Ensign, after that it’s +25% resources per difficulty (Captain, Commodore, etc.) along with a few other bonuses.
Those settings are really relevant to your personal skill level and how hard you want the Crisis to be. If it doesn’t have a chance of wiping out the galaxy you may as well just disable it imo, but I realize other people play games for their own reasons with their own likes and dislikes.
If your last game had the crisis firing at 2400 and it completely wiped you out, you can either reduce it’s strength or have it fire later. But you can have the entire game wrapped up by 2300 if you are playing a total war faction (Purifiers, Devouring Swarms, Assimilators, Killbots), and in that case twiddling your thumbs for 100 years waiting for the crisis to spawn and be defeated instantly is a little underwhelming.
Just adjust it as your skill level improves.
The thing I’ve found with the higher Stellaris difficulty levels is they’re really hard to survive the first 50 years or so because everyone else is strong enough to steamroll you on whim, and then by 2270 you’ve snowballed past everyone and all the AIs are at “pathetic.” What I’d love is a way to fine-tune the scaling difficulty option so the AIs start around Commodore and then get escalating bonuses from there.
The scaling difficulty is an excellent idea; but yeah, it would be nice to be able to find tune it more.
I’m playing on Ensign, and I’ve never had any difficulty with resources. Would a higher difficulty level make it harder for me to amass Energy, Minerals, Alloys, etc.?
I just wish I could roll Stellaris back to 1.8x or whatever, before the planet retooling. It worked perfectly fine before that.
They do have rollback branches. It doesn’t go back that far, I take it?