Played a bit as a fanatical purifier.
- Fortress-starports are fucking useless. OK, maybe they work on Normal, but on Insane they just get shat down instantly after sucking up thousands of minerals to build and hundreds of energy to maintain. For reference they seem to cap out at around 50k power, but the game seems to overvalue large single units so expect even less. If you want to use them in battles put the module on them that lowers the enemy's chance to disengage, then dogpile with your navy to wreck them.
- Land Troops are not fucking useless. AI will just sit around bombing them for years before invading. Strong/Very Strong is probably a legitimate pick now.
- Claiming lots of space early now gives huge advantages to players, since you get both star base limit (star bases can give lots of energy/some food or force limit) and cheap resources. Hyperlanes make it pretty easy to block AIs on choke points, you'd think on insane they'd be shitting outposts everywhere but I claimed like 1/5th of the normal size galaxy for my own. Definitely want to maximize influence gain for these. Energy seems way more prevalent as a space-harvestable resource, you'll not have problems colonizing multiple planets at once.
- Research penalties have completely changed, now bigger is pretty much always better. No reason not to blob now. I was half assing it and at around 150 planets my normalized tech rate was around 200/200/200. Even staying on one planet with a science nexus would only get you around 250/250/250 + planet.
- Ship balance seems broken again. Now that you don't need stuff like plasma to beat 80/90% resistance armor there's no reason for half the advanced weapons, in fact plasma gives -75% penalty against shields on top of lower base damage. I ended up using kinetic artillery + Tachyon Lance battlecruisers, which stacked up +25 tracking and +30 chance to hit from other sources so they mowed down stuff of all sizes easily. In general ship class unlocks seem to mean a lot less now, if anything small ships seem to have advantage early on since evasion is the only real defensive ability ships have. Weapons mean way more but of course you can loot them.
- The individual fleet cap is 100% just tedious bullshit. It would have mattered if they kept leaders costing influence but now that leaders come from energy you can easily run 4+ fleets, so all splitting fleets does is make it harder to manage properly as one fleet runs ahead of the other or w/e.
- 1000 naval cap was easily hit (and required) while fighting the contingency crisis. If I didn't have FP bonuses I bet soloing crisis would be impossible (though I did set crisises to start in 2300, had they been on 2400 the whole galaxy would have been conquered, as it is they only appeared 2 planets before I technically "won"). Dunno how the heck you're expect to beat above 1x crisis difficulty stuff due to exponential costs above the cap. It would seem to be impossible since it's not like the AI will ever be worth shit at helping out. Just looks like Paradox was tired of people complaining that the game ground to a halt with big fleets, so they nerfed fleet sizes.
- Master of Nature is now shit (lol 100 influence for 1-3 tiles). Habitats OP thanks to above research change.
- War exhaustion is pretty sensible and works. Thankfully purifiers can take any system they conquer, needing to claim systems seems shitty. At least non-purifiers can get a lot more influence from rivals and factions though, so maybe it balances out and you can still abuse habitat spam.
- Ships are slow as fuck now. You'll never be able to get anywhere quickly. As always, this hurts the AI way more than it hurts you. A huge federation spanning half the galaxy declared on me, by the time they had a proper doomstack (around 190k, my 5 fleets were around 50k apiece and scattered across the galaxy), they also had 80 WE from my conquering a whole empire and they only conquered one planet before accepting a peace.
Overall meh/10. Will probably have a lot fixed in 4-6 months. DLC probably not worth it.
did the battles improve?advanced smaller force has a chance against bigger not so advanced fleet?
Honestly didn't even notice. Since as mentioned ship classes don't matter hugely and weapon/defense parts can be scavenged, you'll probably never be more than 1 tech ahead or behind of anyone. The research change which made small empires not massively better than large empires (and large empires being better mid/late after they've built up a bit) removes any chance of the "I'm in 5th-tier of weapon repeatables by 2300 and you're still on tier 3 weapons, lol" stuff. The main change is that you usually only lose 1/3rd or so of your fleet max if you lose. Ships retreating from combat and having reduced stats after taking damage also sort of tilt things back towards the bigger fleet.
Oh, and I almost forgot: Colossus world destroyers. Fucking useless piece of shit. 15k of minerals, huge research time, an ascension perk. Has zero actual use in combat and only good for blowing up worlds. Worst of all, by unlocking it you also unlock a half-dozen weapon replacements, in case you cared what color beam the world destroyer uses. These WILL pollute the fuck out of the research cards you draw. What a complete waste of time, Paradox should be ashamed for making something so worthless and trying to get people to pay for it. Do not under any circumstances pick this ascension perk. Pick the fucking +unity perk as your 8th if you have to.
