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Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

LizardWizard

Cipher
Joined
Feb 14, 2014
Messages
991
Anomalies are OK early game though. Fact of the matter is you should really dip into every tree and get the obvious strong starter bonuses rather than finishing trees up, and its right near the top. Opening with map the stars + Discovery is fine (prosperity or harmony are also excellent contenders), just don't waste your time with the rest.

Starter bonuses are ok, but situational and not worth dipping unless were talking about Adaptability or something . I'd rather blow through Discovery + Tech Ascension for 20% research off the bat. Tall right now is pretty strong if you're not grabbing territory like a madman.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
Anomalies are OK early game though. Fact of the matter is you should really dip into every tree and get the obvious strong starter bonuses rather than finishing trees up, and its right near the top. Opening with map the stars + Discovery is fine (prosperity or harmony are also excellent contenders), just don't waste your time with the rest.

Starter bonuses are ok, but situational and not worth dipping unless were talking about Adaptability or something . I'd rather blow throw Discovery + Tech Ascension for 20% research off the bat. Tall right now is pretty strong if you're not grabbing territory like a madman.

20% research is nothing compared to being 20% bigger, or even 50%.

"Tall" is a joke that only fools thing is a relevant gameplay strategy. You need a shit ton of minerals to build Habitats anyway.
 

LizardWizard

Cipher
Joined
Feb 14, 2014
Messages
991
20% research is nothing compared to being 20% bigger, or even 50%.

"Tall" is a joke that only fools thing is a relevant gameplay strategy. You need a shit ton of minerals to build Habitats anyway.

Not really, can easily claim/take those territories with your tech advantage for much cheaper. Getting the techs required for mega engi early is totally worth it right now. So is going for early ascension paths which give much better bonuses than just moar space.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
Not really, can easily claim/take those territories with your tech advantage for much cheaper. Getting the techs required for mega engi early is totally worth it right now. So is going for early ascension paths which give much better bonuses than just moar space.

Being bigger makes you overall faster at research and unity. Early ascension picks are all shit. Mega-Engineering is neat but essentially irrelevant compared to Voidborne and Hab spam, which means you want to have around +500 a month mineral surplus by 50-60 years in.
 

LizardWizard

Cipher
Joined
Feb 14, 2014
Messages
991
Not really, can easily claim/take those territories with your tech advantage for much cheaper. Getting the techs required for mega engi early is totally worth it right now. So is going for early ascension paths which give much better bonuses than just moar space.

Being bigger makes you overall faster at research and unity. Early ascension picks are all shit. Mega-Engineering is neat but essentially irrelevant compared to Voidborne and Hab spam, which means you want to have around +500 a month mineral surplus by 50-60 years in.

If you're spamming Habs and didn't rush Master Builder you're doing it wrong
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
Master builder is (almost) completely useless for Habitats. The limiting factor is influence, not build time. Master Builder is only for Ringworlds which are limited by build time.
 

Destroid

Arcane
Joined
May 9, 2007
Messages
16,628
Location
Australia
Also every 4X has anti-blobbing mechanics of some sorts. Few go as far as Civilization 5 (it had an optimal number of cities, you get 4 ASAP and then you can relax) but still making expansion potentially dangerous is a good way to limit it.

What is the antiblobbing in MoO/MoO2?
 

ilitarist

Learned
Illiterate Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 17, 2016
Messages
857
I think its a split between Discovery and Expansion, in case you find a pretty good lot of planets nearby and get boxed in by a lot of nearby civilizations that don't want to open up the borders..

Yeah, expansion may be OK too, but for me it feels that you really get into expansion *through planets* relatively late in the game and most perks there help with it (most notably instant second citizen and faster colony creation). Early on you have very few planets you can settle on, you need to get other races pops, androids or habitability tech to be able to settle on more than 1/9 planets, so I'd take that tradition tree second or third. Harmony probably works OK as a second one because happiness and longer living leaders, but I feel in general apart from Discovery traditions do not feel impactful till you get into a mid-late game wars and federation, and by that time you'll probably have almost all of them.

As for Average Manatee : early research boost and better production from what you have helps you get everything. Science is a king, and in Stellaris additional research alternatives are immensely important. While you enjoy your bonuses to expansions and researching some useless thing for ages scientific guys will get all those bonuses and more through science. In MoO2 production may have been viable because there was a chance of you conquering empires before they have time to research hundreds of techs; in Stellaris you probably won't even connect your borders to anyone before long into a game, you can't rush here.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
1 destroyer with advanced tech will rape a production race's starbase and any ships up to and including battleships with their shit tech and then it'll blockade the homeworld.
Pssh. If they're producing battleships, they're already doing it wrong, they should be spamming Torp Corvettes.
 

ilitarist

Learned
Illiterate Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 17, 2016
Messages
857
What is the antiblobbing in MoO/MoO2?

One of the good thing about MoO2 was that they balanced the game around you always feeling constrained, at least this is how I remember it. Other AIs limited expansion. They also made it so that many planets are not self-sufficient, i.e. many colonies would need to be supplied with food.

They limited expansion not through some sort of modifiers but the same way Civ4 did it: most colonies didn't pay for themselves for a long time, you'll have to spend a lot of resources (infrastructure/trade fleets, buying necessary buildings) and time for them to turn any profit, otherwise they just suck food out of your empire. True, it feels much more natural and elegant than what most 4X do. Endless Series/Civilization5 give you global happiness penalty for each new city/colony and this seems to be a most popular approach. Paradox uses some arcane formulas everywhere but in EU4/CK2 it's not as noticeable.

Another similar example is Age of Wonders 3. It doesn't have expansion penalties per se but it makes little sense to build too much cities, they take a long time to turn profitable and in that game there's not enough space usually to just expand. Plus there are a lot of neutral spaces you have to fight for. MoO2 is really like that.
 
Joined
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Messages
14,152
As for Average Manatee : early research boost and better production from what you have helps you get everything. Science is a king, and in Stellaris additional research alternatives are immensely important. While you enjoy your bonuses to expansions and researching some useless thing for ages scientific guys will get all those bonuses and more through science. In MoO2 production may have been viable because there was a chance of you conquering empires before they have time to research hundreds of tech

You fundamentally misunderstand 4x games. Production is king because production lets you produce more production and science than science does. This was the case in MoO2 and is the case in Stellaris. If you want post a date (midgameish) and your normalized research rate (total research / research cost) and we'll compare.

in Stellaris you probably won't even connect your borders to anyone before long into a game, you can't rush here.

wut
 

ilitarist

Learned
Illiterate Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 17, 2016
Messages
857
You fundamentally misunderstand games in general if you think such comparison would make any sense.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
Comparing research rates between empires employing different strategies doesn't compare the research rates of the two strategies?

Tell me more.
 

ilitarist

Learned
Illiterate Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 17, 2016
Messages
857
We're talking about general strategies and their results. Numbers that you get after playing for some time depend on the luck of the draw and other factors as much as on strategy.

Plus those numbers won't be enough. They won't show research you got through surveying. Won't show additional bonuses you got from better anomalies. Won't show how often you got research you need when you needed it thanks to research alternatives.

I also don't see how can you apply MoO2 knowledge to Stellaris. Does chess work that way? And I'll spell it out again: in MoO2 you could relatively early meet some race and build a fleet that will destroy them or limit their expansion. It's much harder to do in Stellaris and there's less reason to do so. You also have little to spend production for without a good science. In MoO2 you could send your dudes to science after you build everything you can, in Steallaris early focus on production means you have built up your couple of planets to completion slightly earlier than other factions. But as the limiting factor here is population growth (and you won't affect it that easily) you'll be stuck wishing you'd have something apart from corvets and trade centers on stations to spend those minerals on.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
We're talking about general strategies and their results. Numbers that you get after playing for some time depend on the luck of the draw and other factors as much as on strategy.

If your strategy can't overcome luck to even be comparable with other strategies then its a poor strategy.

Plus those numbers won't be enough. They won't show research you got through surveying. Won't show additional bonuses you got from better anomalies. Won't show how often you got research you need when you needed it thanks to research alternatives.

I was being charitable by comparing only research rates. We could compare mineral income and fleet cap as well. Don't know of a way to compare total techs unfortunately (I think the end-game screen lists total techs research but I'm unaware of how to trigger it midgame to check.

I also don't see how can you apply MoO2 knowledge to Stellaris. Does chess work that way? And I'll spell it out again: in MoO2 you could relatively early meet some race and build a fleet that will destroy them or limit their expansion. It's much harder to do in Stellaris and there's less reason to do so. You also have little to spend production for without a good science. In MoO2 you could send your dudes to science after you build everything you can, in Steallaris early focus on production means you have built up your couple of planets to completion slightly earlier than other factions.

Both games are 4x, they follow similar paradigms. Civ? Alpha Centauri? Everything game in the genre? All about spamming as many cities/colonies as possible. This is because production growth is exponential (more production lets you make more production faster) while also driving research (more production lets you build research faster). Research is at best only linear with the additional caveat that research requires production to implement after research. e.g. better buildings, note that all building upgrades in Stellaris have a horrible RoI compared to building new buildings. In fact all tech in Stellaris is uniformly weak compared to tech in other 4x games, making research-first strats more awful. At least in MoO2 you could rush to MIRV Merculites and make up your production deficit by destroying opponents with your massive combat advantage.

But as the limiting factor here is population growth (and you won't affect it that easily) you'll be stuck wishing you'd have something apart from corvets and trade centers on stations to spend those minerals on.

If I have 2x as many planets, my base growth is 2x. From there I throw on Harmony and the edict and have +50%. That's 3x your growth, and when I have 4x as many planets it will be 6x, and so on. I also have significantly faster research rate to research more things to spend stuff on. It's true that you run a high mineral surplus, but habs unlock around 2250s and you need around 13k minerals every 17 months in order to maximize habitat growth. And habitats are basically cheating in how powerful they are in augmenting both your economy and research.

I don't think you actually understand the research cost formula and think that expansion somehow retards research rather than greatly amplifying it. This seems to be a consistent issue with the Stellaris playerbase.
 

Quatlo

Arcane
Joined
Nov 15, 2013
Messages
941
How do you keep up with the research malus from expanding? You only expand on good planets first or just spam 9001 labs on some planets to make up for the loss?
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
How do you keep up with the research malus from expanding? You only expand on good planets first or just spam 9001 labs on some planets to make up for the loss?

Mathematically every planet is a net win as soon as its sufficiently filled and has infrastructure built, which is why it's important to grow quickly and keep up in buildings. Your research rate trends upwards to 20x your average planetary research rate as # of planets goes towards infinity. Systems are a fairly minor penalty, especially when you need lots of minerals to make habs anyway (which supercharge your research since they don't require more systems). You can create a vassal and give them all of your non-planet systems if you want to be cheesy though.
 

ilitarist

Learned
Illiterate Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 17, 2016
Messages
857
The Brazilian Slaughter, so you say that you have to not overexpand. I didn't think it was the case. Still it doesn't take in the account pirates and zero-sum nature of the game, doesn't it? Isolating some branches so that only you can eventually capture them is probably the best way. But other than that isn't it better to capture everything ASAP leaving other empires with lesser part of a pie?

I guess you can conquer it later with claims costing less than building outposts. But it would be a lost time and things can go wrong in a multitude of ways.
 

mbv123

Arbiter
Joined
Apr 1, 2017
Messages
917
Location
Lettland
Figured I'd give this a try.
Played for 3 hours and all I've been doing is surveying planets and building mining stations which in turn help me in the grind to build more mining stations quicker. Feels like I'm playing some facebook clicker. Also the interface is absolute garbage which certainly doesn't help in your clicking simulator.
 

Goliath

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 18, 2004
Messages
17,830
One thing I think Stellaris lacks is a more... fixed set of characters, and by that I mean races. The only ones remotely memorable at the CoM and UN, who were clearly made to be at odds because they're the only ones who are supposed to spawn with the same race yet different polities, the crisis races (Unbidden, Prethoryn, Contingency, etc). Also the Blorg, because Wiz used them on a stream and now "Fanatic Befrienders" is actually a thing lulz.

Compare to MOO and MOO2, where almost all races are memorable.
At least there should be an option to somewhat control what kind of randomized empires you get. E.g. currently you may start between two fanatical purifiers or end up with a galaxy full of xenophile, pacifist, egalitarians and nothing ever happens.

There should be a "bad boy" slider which determines the amount of aggressive civs in the galaxy.
 

Pizzashoes

Scholar
Joined
Oct 31, 2017
Messages
444
Figured I'd give this a try.
Played for 3 hours and all I've been doing is surveying planets and building mining stations which in turn help me in the grind to build more mining stations quicker. Feels like I'm playing some facebook clicker. Also the interface is absolute garbage which certainly doesn't help in your clicking simulator.
Yes, this is how the game plays. One esteemed gentleman in the thread has even been promoting how optimal this way is.
 

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