There are two fallen empires, one off to the northwest of me, and one to the southwest. The empire to my south and I have left a buffer of about a dozen systems near their borders, because I guess neither one of us wants to be the first stop on their tour.
Encroaching too close to a certain kind of Fallen Empire can prompt them to notice you in ways you don’t want.
Yep, I’m fine with keeping a little distance. The way it is situated you would be the freeway for the War in Heaven.
So, an excavation project dug up the head of some guy important to that Fallen Empire I pissed off earlier over the holy world, and they’ve decided I’m the chosen one and gave me the world plus I can call a fleet of theirs to my aid if I activate the relic. So I guess worked out okay in the end.
Love that relic, it’s a game changer if you find it early enough.
I started right next to a Fallen Empire, a decaying technological isolationist type. For a time they gave me open borders, and I was able to settle “west” of it – but for mysterious reasons they later closed their borders, and now I can no longer traverse their territory. So my empire is split in two, with no way to communicate. My stranded trade hubs can’t reach my capital, which means they’re detached from the trade network. I guess I’ll have to demolish them and build something else in my western starbases. In the meantime I’m researching Jump Drives, but I doubt those will solve my trade problems.
Also, I opened a Gateway to the other side of the galaxy, and I made friends with the civ on the other end of the gate. For now. I’ve finally figured out the ship designer, and I’m building battleships with artillery as well as line battleships. Plus my humans are all now psionic. But robots and birds threaten to outnumber the human race in my empire, so I’ve just started researching genetic modifications to make humans breed faster. This game is a hoot. :)
@MikeJ and @KevinC have already highlighted some of the good stuff (and humor!) in the AI+ devblog, and rightly so – it’s a really encouraging post. I liked the graphical comparison between 3.2 and 3.3 AI mid- and late-game development. But I wanted to ask you all about this bit:
So if we compare two planets where both of them have 5 mining and 5 energy districts each, we can gradually specialize the planets by replacing the districts one pair at a time until we end up with one planet with 10 energy districts and another with 10 mining districts.
This approach works quite well in practice and is also very dynamic in the sense that it allows the AI to make hybrid planets in the early game which becomes more specialized over time as the empire expands.
I don’t do this! I rarely specialize my planets, unless I see some obvious bonus on the planet trait screen. But it sounds like the AI (and other players) do so. Do you guys?
For sure! Before this I used to have roughly the same build order for every planet, which was boring – this is more fun and adds some color to your holdings.
Well, apparently a derelict ringworld mattered to them, and now they are awake and angry. I own that the system with ringworld now so I’m expecting them to take it out on me once they finish their build up. Their relic keeps sending me fleets though. Right now trying to fortify and get ready for the whooping they are about to deliver.
Specializing can be pretty powerful. It’s easy to miss, but have you seen the button where you can designate each planet as a specific type? Mining world, administrative world, forge world, etc. If you don’t have it manually set the game will auto-select one for you based on what you’ve built there. In any case, those alone can provide substantial benefits to particular resources and jobs.
As the game goes on you can kind of compound those bonuses. Say you have a race of insect people you have a migration treaty with and they have very nice racial bonuses to mineral output. You can settle that race on your mining world, gene-mod your own citizens on that planet, or maybe design a mining robot that you can manufacture there. Things like that.
Uh oh! Good luck and keep us posted. :)
Jump drives will not. But you will soon be able to build Gateways, and those can solve it. You can change your capital planet, in case in helps trade; it doesn’t really change anything else in a significant way.
I’m thinking you opened a wormhole, not a gateway, by the way you described the situation, and are a little bit more off from building them. Shouldn’t be much, though.
Specializing planets is one of those things (IMHO) that actually does have a noticeable effect on things, unlike (for example) nitpicking your ship design or army composition. However, it’s still (again IMHO) small potatoes compared to where you probably are in the game by the time you can do cool stuff with it. By which I mean, by the time you can bring over the insect people or gene-mod and resettle your own people to max out the mineral bonuses, you’ve probably outstripped your neighbors, so it won’t make a huge difference there, and similarly the fallen empires and crises are still too far away for you to have a shot at. Now, micro-ing your planets will get you to their level sooner* but it’s kind of a pain to micro planets at that scale, I find. So you have to really enjoy the “story” of importing a bunch of alien workers to your planets, etc etc. But I do enjoy that kind of thing, so there.
*So will redesigning your ships, in one of my earlier games I reworked my whole fleet to be a response to their solely-energy-based ships, but I think in some later patch they might have given them more balanced compositions.
If you specialize your planets too much, losing a planet or having one occupied in a war can cause real problems. In a Stellaris war, I find it’s hard to defend everywhere, and you have to expect your enemy will occupy a planet or two while you keep your fleets together and try to win some decisive battles. If you manage that, you can retake your planets in the mop-up stage, but if you were counting on one of those planets for half your energy, you might be in trouble.
Given the development curves in the latest DD, I’m hoping this will no longer be true once the next version releases.
How do you guys handle sprawl? I picked a larger map and there is a lot of open real estate, but grabbing too many systems invites bad effects.
I’ve done some reading and it seems like you can either A) keep your empire small or B) ignore sprawl and grab enough resources from systems to offset it.
If you’re playing the release version (3.2.x), you can mitigate sprawl by building administrative buildings that create Bureaucrat jobs. I can’t remember the exact name of the building, but the job you want is definitely Bureaucrat. Those ‘crats decrease sprawl. Also, some Traditions decrease sprawl, in the Expansion tradition I think. And some species’ traits can reduce sprawl, I think? At least my robots have a sprawl-reduction trait. (Maybe they can compress themselves.)
One big change in the beta patch is that some of these sprawl-mitigation techniques have been nerfed or disabled. On the other hand, sprawl in the beta affects fewer things – research and a couple other things? People are divided on whether these are good changes. I plan to try it for myself after I finish my current game.
How do I settle that race? I’m guessing forced Resettlement? My current ethics preclude that, but if they didn’t, I’m not sure how I’d go about it.
Also, thanks for all the tips on specialization. I’d noticed that the AI assigns specialties to my worlds, but I hadn’t realized I could do that manually. I plan to increase the difficulty for my next game, so I need to get more efficient.
Yeah, forced resettlement if your government type allows it. If not, you could look at constructing robots specialized in a particular resource or genemodding the population on that planet. Depending on which way I’m going, I typically have modded (EDIT: to clarify I mean in gene-modded, not game mods) robots or species templates that I apply to certain worlds. It’s not essential to manage at that level but if you’re looking to squeeze more minerals/energy/research/whatever out of a planet it can make a difference. :)
Ah OK, thanks for the explanation!
I just finished reading the entire AI++ devblog thread. One of the AI devs has been active answering questions throughout the thread. It’s really great to see an open discussion about AI by a developer. Apparently about half the AI improvements are already in the beta, and people are saying the improvements are noticeable. One more reason to try the beta.
Hmm, maybe so? I’ll check again. Also, if I can learn to construct Gateways, that would indeed solve my split-empire problem – which is HUGELY entertaining, I have to add. The latest development is that my former Federation partner, to my west, has suddenly laid claim to half the systems in my stranded western region. It makes sense – they’re cut off from me, and they’re right on his border. So fun.
Starbase/Naval Capacity question. Is there a way to increase Starbase capacity beyond the tech research (and I think 1 perk)? Also is there something beyond tech research and anchorages (I think one of the perks hits here as well) for naval capacity? Trying to figure out how the hell you would combat a 300k fleet like some I’ve seen running around.
@KevinC the other FE was still just minding their own business, and the fanatics decided to start on someone else I guess, or it started that while this other event was taking place. We got the interdimensional event and it was on the opposite side of the galaxy from myself and the two FEs. They were tearing through folks over there, and that eventually woke up the second FE who are benevolent interventionists. Everyone pitched in to kill off the invaders and kill the portal, and seeing the size of FE fleets I signed up to be the flunky of the benevolent interventionists for the time being. I have the perks that improve my fighting them and endgame forces, but my 50k fleets will still melt against the behemoths they are running around. The most I could hope for is to maybe win a battle or two at one of the two citadel chokepoints where they would likely come in. I will probably start another game at this point once I figure out what I should be doing for the naval bits.
You can increase Starbase capacity via tech. You also get more Starbases based on how many systems you own as well as other factors. Here’s the breakdown:
The base starbase capacity is 3, which can be increased by the following:
- +1 for every 10 systems owned by the empire
- +2
adopting the Unyielding tradition tree - +2
Fortress Doctrine from 
Unyielding tradition tree - +2
Stellar Expansion technology - +2
Manifest Destiny technology - +2
Fortify the Border edict - +4
Trading Posts civic - +5
Grasp the Void ascension perk - +10
Covenant: End of the Cycle - +1
Interstellar Expansion repeatable technology (can only be researched 5 times) - +2 for each Strategic Coordination Center level, except the site of the megastructure (Total: +6 )
Naval capacity can be increased by jobs, techs, traditions, civics, etc. Look to add Soldier jobs to your planets to increase naval capacity.