1961

Yeah, that’s likely the more accurate statement. :)

BTW, as an aside, is my (faulty) memory correct in that I read a post of yours that mentioned you finished your degree? If so, congrats!!

1962

I did, thank you! Walked on the 7th. Which meant that I was able to get back to Xcom and Offworld Trading Company, and finally look to close out my Ottoman game this month.

Which, let’s face it, is really the best part of getting that degree, not the piece of paper or fancy cords* I got ;)

*magna cum laude!

1963

Nations aren languages and borders are meaningless, anyway.

Travel back in time to europe 401, kill a cow, travel back, and you will find completelly different borders, languages and customs.

Theres no meaning to france, germany, italia, uk. There are just the result of a procedural algorithm, the bigger one we have experience, the real world.

1964

Poor cow. Out of curiosity, would the farmer you target be called O’Leary?

//early urban legend, wrong continent, 1470 years later

1965

But if you kill that cow, it couldn’t make milk, which means no cheese. And if it couldn’t make the milk for that cheese, where else would the cheese for that pizza come from. YOU HEAR ME, YOU KILL THAT COW YOU KILL CHICAGO PIZZA, you monster.

1966

OK, I hit the point where not having a list of discovered planets and their type is a major pain. I finally got the tech to uplift and you get to choose their preferred planet type. Well, I’ve got a ton of red colored planets but I have no idea how many of each type there are. I guess I can mouse over each system with a red planet icon and keep a tally but that is definitely less than optimal.

1967

Basically don’t give a score, give the function that defines the Chick Parabola for a game. I like it! And the fanboys would be so confused.

1968

We are busy people (how many reality TV and chats shows do i need to fit in my life alongside my bucket of soda and fastfood), we need a score!

1969

So, am I missing a way to scout out what kind of ships a potential enemy has? For the most part you can’t see the enemy’s ships unless they happen to fly out of their area to somewhere you can see them, or you get access to their area and scout them out.

Have people just been going by the estimated relative strength on the diplomacy screen and hope your ship designs do OK vs theirs?

1970

I’ve been using relative strength mostly, but I feel like battle is a bit broken because it’s not just strength but how many ships. It seems like if you say have 3 ships that are 1k strength against 100 ships at 1k strength, the 100 ships wins every time. Anyone else have a different experience?

1971

The game needs spies!

If you’re fighting multiple wars with a neighbor, you’ll eventually know what FTL he uses and whether he prefers rocks, paper or scissors for weapons. That first fight, though, can result in a lot of redeployments and refits. Let’s hope there’s an advanced diplomacy and subterfuge DLC on the way.

That boils down to ‘Corvettes OP,’ and they are. Their naturally high evasion makes a big difference. That is likely to be addressed in the patch next week.

1972

A few times I have been able to click on the “inspect” button for my opponents ships but not once combat has actually begun. Espionage of course when implemented will fill the intel gap eventually. Until then I have just gone on the fleet power, capacity and tech level comparisons. That and try to build balanced ship builds…moslty point defense and shields. I haven’t tried armor much.

My experiences with fleet combat have been all over the place. I have seen AI corvette fleets maul my destroyers plus a cruiser or two. Lately though with 10k+ stacks of 2+ BB, 4+ C, 6+ DD and 10+ Corvettes I have seen the Corvettes mostly get picked off first in combat and had to replace them.

Which brings me to one of my (admittedly minor) gripes. Fleet composition seems to be modeled on the modern idea of heavy combatants (CV/BB) being screened or supported by smaller combatants. I would much rather have an Age of Sail type system where you are either a ship of the line or you are not. SOL’s clash in the big battles. Anything below a Battle Cruiser should be doing raiding, recon or security.

1973

I think Corvettes, being at the front of the formation, tend to get targeted first. If they have high enough evasion they can soak more than their weight in hits.

Which brings me to one of my (admittedly minor) gripes. Fleet composition seems to be modeled on the modern idea of heavy combatants (CV/BB) being screened or supported by smaller combatants. I would much rather have an Age of Sail type system where you are either a ship of the line or you are not. SOL’s clash in the big battles. Anything below a Battle Cruiser should be doing raiding, recon or security.

I think the WW2-style combat model (with screens) is going to be more popular than an Age of Sail model. Though there is room for mods for both. I’d like to see a mod that did the kind of evolution that happened in the Honor Harrington books.

1974

Having read all the main sequence books, I would so love this! The fighter/bomber techs sort of match LAC and I don’t mind it being more Wing Commander there. Star Fire has fighters too.

Missile pod technology would be awesome! It will be interesting to see how the DLC and mods shake out for this.

1975

I’d worry that the most interesting thing about missile pods is the one-shot nature. I wonder if you could mod ammunition expenditure into the game, and whether the AI is up to handling that in a non-catastrophic way. Though maybe if you have the AI only play the SLN navy, at least it would be in-character.

1976

They could expand on the military stuff a lot, make it a bigger game inside the game, however EU 4 was never about much strategy on the troop side…

1977

I just really, really want espionage. Ever since Seven Kingdoms it’s been one of my favorite things in any game like this.

1978

There needs to be a mod for hyperlane travel that requires traversal across the system to get from one hyperlane to another. If we can have that we will be very close to having computerized (but simplified!) Imperial Starfire.

1979

Usually I find spying boring, but it was decently done in civ 5 and annoying as heck in Starbase Orion but flavor in the first and game ending in the latter…

1980

I don’t own the game but I’ve been background watching some high level multiplayer twitch streams – mostly former Civ 5 competetive players, people who have been playing 20 hours competitively a week for years now. Surprisingly the Stellaris mechanics seem to mostly hold together with 16 experienced min maxers in a map doing their best to break things. I mean, everyone agrees a few things are broken (corvettes etc), there needs to be more ways to restrict movement, and there are some RNG elements that drive people nuts, but overall with a few patches it could be a very good competitive game.