1621

I’ve figured out you can cancel a construction ships chain by simply giving it another order. I have no idea where the stop button is. But I can’t figure out how to abort making a frontier output. (I have a colony ship that will get there before it completes, so I want a refund!)

edit: I went ingame and the button is in the top left of the ship’s selection area. The hotkey is ‘h’. Yes, the same hotkey that launches a browser window pointing to a wiki… But pressing the GUI button worked and I got a refund. So thanks!

I complete agree about managing sectors. 25 to REMOVE a system? And I have to pay that even before I press ‘finish’. Ridiculous! Gerrymandering is now extremely expensive. If I want to move something from the energy-sector to the mineral-sector, I can’t without paying a fortune. I can see why they did it – to avoid the player micromanaging planets by removing one, adjusting it, adding it back to the sector. But couldn’t they come up with another penalty for that? It basically means that once sectors are established they’re never going to change.

As pointed out, the sector AI is braindead, so the penalty is doubled. It costs lots of influence to fix, or suffer the AI.

I can’t see how to play a pacifist in this game. It’s basically war-only, and even then the AI rarely declares war, even when both sides are at -500 with each other and one side is at a clear numerical and technological advantage.

Speaking of wars: I just vassalise. Taking planets seems like a hassle with no benefit? I tried it once and they just refused to work. I spent a bunch of influence but nothing could convince them otherwise?

Now I’ve played the game longer: I still think it’s half-baked. I feel like e.g. PR/Marketing set a deadline to give HOI4 and Stellaris enough room between each other, and that deadline rolled around for Stellaris, missing features be damned.

Even though it’s a half-baked game, I was up til 3:45am playing it.

1622

The bigger issue here imo is that star bases are always shite. They start out with near 400 power, which is fairly strong early on. In the VERY late game they still don’t get above 500, which is less than a lone cruiser. A decent Fortress might eek out 3k strength, but most fleets hover around 12k+. A couple Fortresses can slow them down enough for a fleet to get there. Maybe.

I wish things scaled better with tech. I’d like my level 6 Star Base to last more than 12 seconds considering how massive an investment it is, but it can easily be taken out by a lone ship that jumps into the system. The thing costs more than 4 battleships but has the fighting ability of a destroyer. How about we refit some of these crazy weapons, shields and armor on that massive investment? No? Leave it made out of steel with red lasers? Good idea, guys.

I like that there is a tech that improves the fighting ability of my star base by 25%. But 25% of basically nothing is still basically nothing. I hope at some point they allow the things to use your tech. Hell, at one point I had like insane energy weapons, but I couldn’t build a energy weapon starbase. Reason? I didn’t have Red Lasers, which is apparently all they ever use - the most basic of any tech.

My current main fleet’s strength: 52k
My current main starbase’s strength: 469

1623

I just noticed that my Level 4 star base is hardly more powerful than a level 1. This seems like an relatively easy fix. Just add defensive components slots to a starbase, much like a ship. Each time you level up a starbase you can add a module (observatory of destroyer assembly yard etc.) AND a couple more slots for shields/power generators and weapons. If a starbase cost as much 4 battleships it should be able to hold off a similar size attack squadron for a least a few days.

1624

Yeah there are a few really strange balance issues like star bases not getting stronger that seem to point to just not enough time before release.

1625

Or have them able to be upgraded by tech increases. No matter what you’re using, your starbase (and all other structures) are using the base tier stuff: ie Red Lasers, Nuclear Missiles and (I think) Autocannons. Their armor is the basic armor you start with. They never, ever upgrade. The numbers will very slightly climb as you get “general upgrades” to things. Maybe you get a tech that lets missiles do 5% more damage. Well now your missile-based Starbase does 5% more damage. Of course if it was using the Tier 5 Missiles of Death you’ve had for ages it would be a heck of a lot better. If it used your Durasteel Whatever Armor it couldn’t be easily killed by a couple wayward corvettes.

Edit: Just loaded up my game to double check. My main starbase actually has a power of 413.

Now it SAYS increasing missile tech improves the starbase, but it doesn’t really. If I look at the Details I have TONS of bonuses, but they all apply to the base you start the damned game with, so it amounts to basically nothing. The thing has 9200 health, which is pretty good, but it’s damage amounts to nothing at all, which means fleets just pull up and pound on it till it dies while it never breaks through their shields (and it has no shields itself because reasons, even though it IS listed on the stat screen as 0/0, meanwhile my fleet is running some sort of super deflectors that will stop a supernova).

I’m starting to suspect there is some sort of bug with starbases not doing what they’re supposed to,

1626

Ok, populations have immutable traits (such as strong, talented, weak, etc), and ideologies. The ideologies is what makes them hate you. Given enough time, ethics correction (green % numbers) will make the pops your alignment.

Now, if your alignment is Xenophobic, the pops will also take that and hate you too thought :)

I haven’t had much sleep the entire freaking week, this game is horrible. It’s not one more turn, it’s one more hour. I find myself waking up early even when I don’t have to.

Make Sleep Great Again!

1627

Drop the password and try it. For whatever reason the game hangs on retrieving hotjoin request/password.

1628

If you are in an alliance and you want to declare war on someone, but your ally doesn’t want to, is there a way to go it alone without leaving the alliance?

1629

Not that I could find. An hour of trying, I gave that up.

1630

You have to sweeten the war goal pot so they greenlight the war.

1631

They just wanted to liberate various systems from another empire. If I added anything I wanted, they refused. Is there a way to see what they want. I also didn’t see a way to do things like say, you get this planet and I get this other one.

1632

Hahahahaha!

I had a problem. There was a xenophobic civilizacion in a early space age in the center my empire. They had a space base.

I was short of everything, expanding like crazy, and I had no idea what to do with these kids. Out of options I started a infiltration program. But one of my operatives falled in love with a indigenous girl. And after many failures the indigenous where suspicious and very angry.

So this operative decide to cut contact with the empire, and tell me fuck you. Just after that, these guys started a nuclear war, and wiped themselves (and my operative, I guest).

The problem solved itself :D

1633

I think I ran into a bug. I had an embassy with a faction that got destroyed. I didn’t get my embassy count back. When I mouse over my embassy thing, it says I have an embassy with Alpha, Beta and .

Is there a way to recover from this?

1634

You can augment your starbase with some expensive military bases that you can’t upgrade once placed. You also can’t place then close together, so the large fleets just take them out one by one :(

1635

yea, bases are moslty useless. stuff to delay enemy forces a few seconds.

1636

Even though my first start is (suspiciously) smooth, you confirm what I suspected.

I am experiencing another really odd wonky thing with ship designs. When you do NOT set it to auto-upgrade ship designs based on research you seem to miss out on some types of research becoming available for your ships! Or even the ability to upgrade some things (like transports). Two examples:

With auto-upgrade OFF:
Battleship never got hangar bays at all, even after I had 5 relevant upgrades to the items for them. Bay not present, and hangar using items not in left pane at all. I could use “Auto-Complete” and no luck.
Transport ships have base newbie ship drive, no ability to upgrade.

Flip auto-upgrade ON:
A battle ship is auto generated with a template that has hangar bays! YAY!
No love for transport ships.

I think unless I keep auto-upgrade on all the time, this is bugged.

1637

The Europa Universalis series overcomes the ‘narrative gap’ by riding the coattails of history. I don’t need the game to popup with goals and ethos and cultural assets that EU inherited by using real world countries and cultures. OTOH, it’s hard to care about Stellaris’ randomly generated civilizations because of that very absence of context, and the game focuses much more on random events than interactions between the civs themselves. I think that is why in Stellaris the middle game seems so pointless; you have to create your own storylines to follow i.e. EU, but you have no context in which to place those stories, so you don’t care.

In other words, what the first update/DLC badly needs is some kind of fleshing out of cultures between civs, and not the plus or minus bonuses but what do those cultural traits actually mean and have a practical effect on. Which means there needs to be more game systems than are currently present for traits to act upon, imo.

1638

Also, here’s my interactivity so far:

First game, smallish empire, neighbor Rivals me, then many decades later, declares war. Their 1000 force fleet demolishes my 700 force fleet without a scratch; something to do with shields? Might put this one on the back burner until i’m better at the game.

Second game, neighbor Eivals me (and is also human?). Neighbor also boxes me in, preventing further expansion. War seems inevitable, so i get there first, my 700ish fleet demolishes their 300ish fleet, and i vassalize them.

1639

Well in my first game I managed to not get the tech that allows you to build colony ships. Or maybe I skipped it without realizing.

There isn’t much of a story there. I simply started a new game and researched colony ships from the get go.

1640

I keep hearing complaints about how passive the AI is. I am completely surrounded by other empires and can’t really explore anymore without giving resources to get border access. I also can’t really ally with anyone because they’re all at war, almost always. The only one that isn’t right now is a tiny place I liberated hoping to get cheaper border access.

On the primitive planet front, I infiltrated, rose them into my empire, gave them independence and now they’re colonizing planets right next to my border shrinking my borders… that’s nuts.