Ships actually have different “base” parts that you stick weapons onto. You just need to switch the base part to one that can carry a hanger. (You pick base parts at the top of the design screen)
I think that’s a good point. I do generally read the anamoly events/stories at least the first time. I don’t care particularly because there isn’t any context, but they are better than most strategy games To be fair I think it is virtually impossible task to get most players to care about stories in a strategy game. I didn’t play enough of CK2 to know if they succeeded. I do remember being blown away in Alpha Centuri to find out there was story and the planet was alive and made me anxious to find out the other options.
Yeah, you were nuts to give them independence.
Also, combat mechanics suffer very badly from fragmentation issues. This is a very very old timey RTS term that referenced the degradation of firepower from a clump of units as they get destroyed and how small, cheap units suffer firepower attrition much faster than large, heavy hitting units with lots of hit points. 10 Zealots do 160 damage, 40 Zerglings do 200 damage, but Zerglings die 4x faster than Zealots, so total damage output over time is like a stair step function for the Zealots but nearly a linear function for the Zerglings. It seems like having even +/- one ship will dramatically change the outcome of a battle in Stellaris; this is the fragmentation effect. One additional ship might mean 5 ships more are left at the end of a particularly vicious fight, for ex.
I wish system had terrain stuff going. If a star is i a nebula or gas cloud, it would be nice if that showed up on the system map. It would also be nice to have different combat effects going on. Fighting near a Black Hole could cause projectile weapons to become more inaccurate (stupid, i know, but fun!); nebula turn off shields (as is traditional in this genre), fighting in asteroids screws up missile weapons. Fighting over a star could reduce laser damage (lasers overheating or something). Just stuff like that. Combat is so 1:1, input->output right now.
Aha! I had clicked the slots after research to no avail. Those names above the ship sections aren’t flavor I see! Thanks. Still is issue with transport ship drives though.
I wouldn’t worry about it. Fighters/bombers have a tiny range/are terrible/are bugged too!
Well, if my first end game event is going to be the normal for this game I may get very discouraged from playing. The event happens and I send my fleet out to deal with it. My federation fleet of 20k ships meets the enemy to relieve an occupied system. It looks like an even fight, the enemy has 19k ships in the system. We arrive and prepare for battle. Then 80k more enemy ships warp in and decimate my fleet. There’s no way I can fight that amount of ships with my infrastructure. I didn’t think my empire was doing too badly but maybe I was wrong.
Close another embassy and you can reassign all embassies again. The negative impact is “minimal” for this, like -40 initially with a +10 recovery every month.
For hangar bays you need to change that section. The battleship has 3 sections. The button is on the top, somewhat easy to miss.
More buttons easy to miss:
DeepT, there’s a suggest button in diplomacy. Works like civ, gives you an idea what the allies want.
To change government: oh this was well-hidden. It’s the stupid round button right in the middle, the flag/emblem.
Still mid game on my farthest effort but I have been having fun with the diplomacy system. I’ve been playing the Britannic role of power balancer in the my side of the galaxay. One of my pacifist neighbors was getting steam rolled by a fanatic theocracy of mulluscs, so I managed to wrangle military access by offering a non aggression pact, independence guarantee and a strategic resource for 10 years. Boy were the mulluscs surprised when my battle fleets blunted their attempts to win the first few frontier systems!
Needs and easy setting and more victory conditions.
KevinC
1652
It’s really not, but it depends on a lot of factors. If you’re a charming pacifist or you’re surrounded by aliens who get along, they’ll be pretty docile. I’ve had some pretty peaceful games but I’ve also played in some real bloodbaths (like pretty much every time I’ve played my repugnant and xenophobic slavers).
Personally, I prefer the Paradox approach of having the AI wardec you only when they either hate you or if you have something they really want. I really dislike the AI personalities in a lot of 4X games where war is pretty much a foregone conclusion, because… well, just because. I tend to dislike approaching 4X games from a boardgame perspective, though.
I’m at 2240 and had another game at similar point, I have yet to have any computer player attack me, eventhough by the looks of the map, I have one of the largest empires and I bet one of the weakest navies.
Like Kevin was saying, AI’s don’t attack you “just because they can get away with it” - they follow their own AI personalities. And they aren’t trying to “win the game” necessarily. Though that does tie into one thing I think this game needs, more victory conditions. Also, the AI takes into account your fleet potential as well, so while your navy maybe is small now, you probably have several space ports and withing a year or two could really swell that fleet up, and they aren’t dumb enough to fall for that trick.
Nesrie
1655
I was trying to be the good guy… you know, planets full of different aliens. I got them back in; it was expensive though. Don’t worry though my other game, are reptilian overlords, and we’re just getting slaves in that one.
I know the devs didn’t want us to terraform everything but is there a way to actually lower the 3k timeline. i am not sure adding more gases and liquids will help or not.
Same here. In Paradox games having hundreds of years of alliances, peace, marriages… it counts for something. In Civ games, as soon as you have one less archer, they go to war with you. Now I understand there’s a lot going of backstabbing in history, but there are usually plenty of other civs to fight with.
I formed an alliance with almost every inferior, pathetic and small empire around me, now the big guys won’t touch us because they’re afraid of me. We’ll see how long this lasts. I’ve got a bone to pick with some other mammals who hated me from the start. I can’t enslave them but… one of the species in my federation is one I liberated from him.
Got crushed my first game because I never got tech allowing me to make ships larger than corvette. One failing I see with the AI is it tends to send troop transports piecemeal instead of massing enough troops to defeat a strongly defended planet.
Teiman
1657
My current civ has grown like crazy. So much neighbors empires are scared of me. They first want to form a alliance, then they want a pact of no aggression.
I did not knew for a long time that building outpost and then adding the outpost to a sector means I don’t have to pay the monthly cost of the outpost. My empire would have been even bigger with this information from the start.
Learned something new:
- Fallen Empires remain inactive until a player find them, and them they enforce their new borders.
Had a whole arm of my empire wipe out because I accidentally found a Fallen Empire that enforce his borders and asked me to remove 5 worlds. Probably I should have scanned in a wide area before settling there. The whole thing wiped out all the planet of a empire I just merged to my empire.
I probably should stop playing this game a few months, until they fix a few things, but I am having a lot of fun, and enjoy reading people stories. Half of the fun of playing a game like this one is to read people reaction to it in forums.
At the scales this is working on there’s a much more complex relationship. Ships tend to single target, and big ships do a lot of overkill to small ones, so a lot of DPS of bigger ships gets lost. I think Corvettes vs. destroyers work as you say, but say Battleship versus corvettes works very differently. In my current game I get destroyed by fleets of inferior combat value but higher ship count. My big ships spend their time doing damage to 50 insubstantial smaller ships (that amount to maybe 200 combat value of 15k), spending a couple of minutes not damaging the real threat, and by the time you get to the big ships you have lost one of two ships and your combat value has dropped.
Of course, there’s also armor to offset for that, but overall I’m finding the system to have an OK depth. Individual ship damage *to make bigger ships lose DPS progressively) seems to be too much for the scale here, or at least I don’t miss it too much.
And I agree with you about terrain, there needs to be shitloads more of it, and it needs to radically affect tactics and strategy (FTL movement).
First impressions, whitout having yet finished the first game, is that it’s a good 4x (as opposite to the competent but mediocre ones out there) with potential to be great if enough content is added (and this being paradox, I’m sure it will :) ).
Strato
1659
This game engages me as I try to make numbers bigger. It feels like EU or CK as I look at my income and my army, survey my holdings and decide on ways that I need more. But at the same time, it feels so empty because the narration of the game feels like it is heavily influenced by what is in my head as opposed to what is occurring in the game world itself. I don’t have a Space France or Space Ottoman empire to clash with, or even subtly undermine. In fact, the diplomacy for me feels completely lifeless. Combat doesn’t seem anywhere near as tense or exciting as say, in EUIV, pitting my highly disciplined Brandenburgian soldiers against the superior in number rabble of Poland/Lithuania.
Paradox seem to aim for longevity with their games, and that all stems from having a solid foundation to begin with. Stellaris has that thankfully. But I feel like I’d be wasting my time playing this game in its current state. What I want to see is other avenues to play the game, other goals to fulfill that go beyond conquest. And also have an accelerated start style option that plays out the game, and gives an option for when other space folk can start and jump into the universe. For instance, when I had the pirate event happen, my immediate thought was if I could ever form a pirate/mercenary faction from the outset.
Pod
1660
I want something like this, aswell. But right now there’s no way to disengage properly, so if one civ parks near an asteroid belt there’s no real way to draw them out.
Hopefully the combat system gets fleshed out in the next few patches. I don’t like how the ships CHARGGGEE into combat, as it means the front of the wedge doesn’t get the point-defence protection offered by e.g. ships in the middle of the wedge. I’d really like some better tactical orders. e.g. I’m hoping that we can properly tell ships to keep range, rather than turning into a mushball. There’s already the red-gun-attack and blue-shield-defend battle computers, but they don’t seem to work in the slightest other than adding bonus points.
There is?! How did I miss this!
FYI that’s a bug. But one I happily exploit. If the sector AI isn’t going to upgrade my colonies, I feel justified in having more outposts.
