Higher difficulty doesn’t make it harder to get resources, other than it puts a lot of pressure on you to grow your fleets very quickly, which requires a lot of resources.
Thanks. Yeah, I was able to get away with a skeleton fleet for the first couple decades. Only now am I building a bunch of cruisers, with a fleet cap now of 72.
@Kolbex How’s the Star Trek mod?
I have only just installed it and haven’t had a chance to fire it up yet, but I will let you know! It definitely gets rave user reviews and 5 years ago (whew!) Fraser Brown on RPS called it “the best Star Trek game,” so I have high hopes.
There used to be a great mod called Dynamic Difficulty that scaled (and randomized) the bonus that AI get based on their relative rank compared to the player. Wish PDX would roll that into the base game.
It does, all the way to 1.0.3. You do have to get a code from the forum for really old versions, for GDPR reasons.
1.9 should be better than 1.8, BTW.
I’m not sure if this is what @AK_Icebear is referring to, but there is still a Dynamic Difficulty mod, updated for version 3.2 (the current live version) of Stellaris. Steam Workshop::Dynamic Difficulty - Ultimate Customization
There’s also a variant on that mod here: Steam Workshop::Dynamic Difficulty : More Modifiers
Me, I’m off to download the Star Trek mod and give it a spin!
It looks awesome but I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing at all.
Stellaris probably has the longest gap of any 4X game between “realizing you’ve won” and “the game acknowledging that you’ve won”. This is a problem with every 4X game but with Stellaris the amount of micromanagement you need to do skyrockets, the frequency of interesting decisions falls, and the literal speed of the game plunges.
I wish the crisis was triggered by some logic that keeps the board interesting instead of being (largely) chosen by the player before the game even starts.
Stellaris 2 needs an AI director.
I tried the Trek mod too. It looks great, and the Federation UI mod adds to the experience. But I found myself missing the default lore, not to mention starways, which are omitted from Trek. I’ll play more with the mod, but for now I’m back to my normal game. I’m only at 2265 in that game, and I still find it interesting, but I suppose that’s because I’m too newbish to outpace the AI.
Is the default story the same every game? Are there things I can do to enhance replayability?
I have heard that the AI is a lot better lately. At least it lasts longer before it falls into economic traps.
No, it goes back to 2.1.x or thereabouts. The pre-planet economy rework is gone. It used to be available to console players for a lot longer just because the console versions were so far behind.
This is on sale during the Lunar Sale at green man gaming. The standard edition is $8.20 and the Galaxy Edition is $10.25, both 79% off. Am I correct that the Galaxy Edition doesn’t offer anything but cosmetic stuff or is the AI improved over the standard edition?
Wait, there’s a Stellaris novel?
I decided to add UI Overhaul Dynamic + Tiny Outliner v2 to my Stellaris and it crashes the game every time in every condition. I guess I’ll go back to the UI Overhaul 1080p :(
Thanks for your reply. I meant the precursor artifacts I had to uncover. In my game, they related to a pandemic. I found it interesting. It sounds like there are different precursor storylines?
I do like the idea of creating a custom race. I’ll try that. Thanks for the examples!
I think I’ll bump up the difficulty for my next game. Maybe try one of those scaling difficulties. I’m steadily rising in the victory screen and I haven’t fired a shot. Then again, I did choose the UN of earth, with lots of diplomacy buffs.
If you agree with something other related to the GDPR that they aren’t updating old versions for, use beta password oldstellaris and older versions will appear.
There’s about 6, as far as I recall.
Scaling difficulty actually makes the game decidedly easier because the AI buffs start at 0% and gradually increase as the game goes on up to the maximum amount allowed for their difficulty.
Non-scaling they just get the full buffs the entire time. I’d say that scaling Grand Admiral is easier than non-scaling Commodore.
edit: Because the game is all about snowballing, having the buffs early is far more relevant than having them later.
Oh! In that case maybe I’ll just try Captain or Commodore. Thanks.
np, it’s actually a pretty unintuitive way to name the mechanic because the term scaling makes my brain think, ah it will get harder. And while it does, the name doesn’t imply to ME that it will make the game start at Novice difficulty (or whatever the lowest is)