Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[Norfleet]

it's a huge question of luck in that they don't happen to have a stack nearby because they are durable enough to just wait until they outnumber you some four to five times in fleet power and then some.

That's not "luck", Vaarna, that's called "shitty recon work". You couldn't spare a few corvettes to post as pickets?

Personally I'd say it's probably best just to play with no Fallen Empires because the Awakened mechanics are bonkers.

But I like ganking their stuff. Maybe it's just me, but I like spitting in their faces and then kicking them in the balls. Isn't there something deeply satisfying about spitting in the eyes of the gods and then kicking them in the jibblies?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Not if it's not so much a god than just a plain cheater.

Also it's not only a bonus to production, they also ignore naval capacity and have ten times the normal resource cap so they actually can reinforce indefinately.

 

[Hellion]

Tried this strategy I read at Paradox's forum. Oddly enough it worked, on non-Insane playthroughs at least.

-Have a decent enough fleet, at least 20-25k power.
-Go to a relatively unimportant star system in your empire (with no planets or crucial space stations) that is relatively close to a Fallen Empire that you might go to war with in the future and fill this system to the brim with large Military Stations that have FTL inhibitors. Thus, when an enemy fleet jumps into this system it will be trapped for a while until it destroys most of the stations. We're looking for more than 20-30 stations here.
-When war is declared, take your fleet and make the enemy doomstack follow it (by warping within their borders or attacking one of their stations). Using your fleet, lure the doomstack into the system with the Military Stations.
-If you manage to, warp your fleet away from the system as soon as the FE doomstack arrives. Otherwise, emergency ftl as soon as combat starts is acceptable too.
-As soon as you regain control of your fleet, go to the FE's star systems and destroy everything: spaceports, mining stations, military stations. If you have enough armies and time, send them to capture their capital first and then the rest of their planets. If you did this right, the FE's fleets will still be battling with your Military Stations.
-Worst-case scenario, you've crippled them. Best-case scenario, they sue for peace due to not having any planets left.

 

[thesheeep]

so they actually can reinforce indefinately.

Yes, but not at your speed. At least... that is the hope.
And I also read (so it might be wrong) that their fleet cap actually goes to a lower level once they awaken. Causing massive losses for them (and they probably won't ever reinforce to their starting level).

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

No I'm fairly sure their production bonuses mean that they can reinforce faster than you too, and they have several hundred thousand minerals up their sleeve to keep doing that. You might be able to spike some twenty of so battleships/equivalent at once, but they'll always have all their shipyards working.

And as I pointed out, the AEs ignore fleet capacity and will build vastly over their fleet capacity. It seems that how much they build depends more on their number of planets than anything related to their production and naval capacity, sort of like their war declaration behaviour is extremely strange as well.

Overall the way I see it, FEs work and are fine, the problem is that AEs are a total mess that can completely ruin a game. Key problems are that where FEs follow certain special rules that make sense AEs follow no rules at all, and that everything hinges on whether or not an AE wakes alone and snowballs and the player lacks the ability to succesfully blitz them before they snowball. AEs, IMO, should obey the two key rules that FEs do: They cannot build more ships, and they cannot colonize or conquer planets. Secondly, AEs should only ever awaken two at the same time and always trigger a War In Heaven.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i can't remember if fallen empires have +50% base production which becomes 100 when they awaken or it is 100 which becomes 200.

 

[Inf0mercial]

All those small plus 5% techs you can take 5 or more times? They maxed them out so they have ridiculous bonuses.

 

[Raghar]

Doesn't AE solve the late game problem of game being completely devoid of new content?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well, not really, because AE's are a midgame thing, with your best chance being immediately fighting them if it's later midgame because if you leave them alone for the endgame there's just no way you can beat them without a lot of luck and using armydropping only. Personally I'd say the thing missing is that there's only one Crisis per game. Moar crises would be very nice, it's a nice solution to the standard 4X endgame snowball problem. Something like the OMG TEH SATAN Crisis with a possible galactic reset and the like should be emphasized, rather than only do-or-die outcomes.

 

[Average Manatee]

Doesn't AE solve the late game problem of game being completely devoid of new content?

For about 30s while your fleets fight and one side wins.

Well, not really, because AE's are a midgame thing, with your best chance being immediately fighting them if it's later midgame because if you leave them alone for the endgame there's just no way you can beat them without a lot of luck and using armydropping only. Personally I'd say the thing missing is that there's only one Crisis per game. Moar crises would be very nice, it's a nice solution to the standard 4X endgame snowball problem. Something like the OMG TEH SATAN Crisis with a possible galactic reset and the like should be emphasized, rather than only do-or-die outcomes.

Stellaris's problem is that the devs were so afraid of the tech snowball problem that they nerfed teching to the point where there is only territory snowball. Endless linear territory snowballing in Stellaris is far more incredibly boring than unlocking super ships that destroy planets and shit in MoO. So since there's no possible way for an empire half your size to compete, Paradox is reduced to throwing around Space Mongol event stacks.

 

[Inf0mercial]

Its weird the AI spend so much time on tech, like end game half the galaxy is mine and some tiny fucking 2 system empire is superior in tech to me, its actually a joke at times.

I feel like if the ai put half the money they spend on tech labs into building colony ships and expanding it would put up more of a fight. Then again looking at sectors leaving entire planets with no buildings and their freefalling food production i don't think even that would help.

Getting to the point i am considering actually playing an insane game just to check if a 100% boost to all income actually does anything besides make early game a bad time to go to war.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Better solution IMO would be to have a naval capacity hardcap from stuff (the ascension perk aside) that's much quicker to reach than one might expect so importance of vassals and federations grows.

(also in Master of Orions the problem was that to a significant degree tech snowballing was super-mega-king factor to everything, which is why Psilons were the master race)

 

[Destroid]

Production is king in MoO, not research.

 

[Space Satan]

Not when someone rushes ion cannons. Chain ship reactor detonatons could blast ahuge armadas clustering around.

 

[Raghar]

Doesn't AE solve the late game problem of game being completely devoid of new content?

For about 30s while your fleets fight and one side wins.

So either they would destroy your fleets, and you lose, or you win. It ends boredoom quickly

 

[Average Manatee]

Is this cheesing early game military stations or is there something I don't know?

 

[Pope Amole II]

I'd assume he's just cheesing his spaceport - AI loves to rush into your sistem, get half-killed by it, then escape back. Rince and repeat until the warscore is high enough for it to lose. You also don't want to have any fleet as actually having it might repel them - it's the weak fleet that attracts them the most. Also generates a ton of debris in the process which leads to lots of nice study.

 

[Average Manatee]

Is the AI doing that from across the galaxy though?

I know if you build a military station in the AI's home system it will continually bum rush it with equal forces, not realizing that the range advantage of the station lets it win every time and quickly autorepair. If the AI doesn't have missiles then you can even gun down their spaceport with L-size slots on your station built just out of their range.

 

[Sarissofoi]

Weapon tech in Stellaris is pretty much useless.
For example I barely research any.
First high tier weapons are costly(minerals) and use more power but their damage or other stat increase is fairly low.
The most cost effective ship is corvette with basic components(excluding drive as its essential for strategic movement). Cheap to build, maintain(even at 2 or 3 times or navy limit) and still have its 300HP and guns.
If shields(deflectors) were flat damage reduction like in MoO and ships have different hull armor(as base for HP - treat its as separated component like engines), and different tiers of components actually offer more range of stats and bigger difference then yeah tech could serve as a bigger power multiplier.
But now?
Sometimes giving better weapons is counter productive for ships.
I just swarm enemy with cheap as corvettes and scavenge debris. No tech needed.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Corvettes are indeed much, much more useful than destroyers and also more useful than cruisers. However, battleships start to become a bit of a problem because of how much more range they possess, particularly after Arc Emitters come around which completely ignore evasion. Corvettes are also weak against missiles and carrier wings which they are also vulnerable against because of their low durability and limited point defence.

Weapon tech's damage increase I think is in a decent place, it dodges the problem that (for example) Europa Universalis games have where a single tech can have way, way, wayyyyyyy too much impact and older weapons become completely obsolete. But it is true that weapon tech is not top priority for ship improvement, as far as I can figure out the priority is power>AI>sensors>shields/armor>weapons for ships (size+spaceport upgrades aside, obviously). Improvements to everything else come after improvements to power, with effective value of each fleet cap point used also costing more (but one can obviously make sure they can afford their fancy new boats).

EDIT: Stellaris doesn't have a particularly good ship balance, but at least it's not MoO3 where one weapon type crushed all from patch to patch (IIRC launch was missiles killing everything, then it was carriers...). In Stellaris the problem is more that certain weapons are useless (every laser and torpedo), and some are too good to not use (small mining lasers at first, later disruptors and plasma tree).

 

[Mortmal]

Pretty much this, but the best strategy is still to ignore completely tech and just landgrab as much possible.Your naval capacity will be so high it doesnt matter what you are fitting on your ships. Plus you can survey scan the wrecks and catch up enough with more advanced empire, you dont lag behind in tech nearly as much as i thought first.The easiest way i've found to play the game is a fast reproduction +high adaptibility , ascetic hive . I saw the AI ply once that empire i created and it did really good expanding like a cancer.

 

[Inf0mercial]

Honestly do you guys use all that armor? I have found simply maxing shields then as soon as possible grabbing capaciters, end game battleships regen shields so fast it becomes a damage threshold type thing where the regen value is simply negated as damage to the ship, then power comes in and lets you jam more shields for more regen.

 

[thesheeep]

Yeah, no idea what the point of hull modules is.
You have far too much power points to spend on weapons and misc stuff, so you might as well have shields.

I guess focusing on hull only, requiring less power modules, etc. would make the ships cheaper, though, right?

 

[Hellion]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-69-beyond-utopia.1015396/

Stellaris Dev Diary #69: Beyond Utopia
The Adams Update
With Utopia and Banks now out, the next thing we have planned for you is the 1.6 'Adams' update. This update, named after Douglas Adams, is going to focus completely on bug fixing and quality of life changes, with no major feature additions and no accompanying paid DLC.

As before, THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE OR FINAL LIST, AND NOTHING BELOW IS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN (unless it already did)!

• Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic manuevering.
• Superweapons and planet killers.
• More story events and reactive narratives that give a sense of an unfolding story as you play.
  
• More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations.
• A 'galactic community' with interstellar politics and a 'space UN'.
• Buildable Dreadnoughts and Titans.
• Reworking the endgame crises to be more balanced against each other and the size/state of the galaxy.
• Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.
• Deeper mechanics and unique portraits for synthetics.

Interesting.

 

[Inf0mercial]

• Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.

Cap on single fleet power? Higher maintenance for larger fleets? Not sure how i would feel about this, wormhole already discourages over 50k fleets as it takes like 40 days to travel 150k fleets take like a 100 days to travel anywhere, more in that vein maybe?

• Reworking the endgame crises to be more balanced against each other and the size/state of the galaxy.

????? What does this even mean? I can't see a "tell Ai to actually attack the unbidden like they should have been since fucking release" in there.

• Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic maneuvering.

Huh maybe i'll actually give feds a try one game i never bothered so far really, i always expand too much/ too fast so everyone gets threat on me and refuses to trade so i expand to gain resources then i get more threat they declare war on me in a federation to try and win i kill them all and they get more threat.....rinse and repeat for my game diplomacy experience.

• Buildable Dreadnoughts and Titans.

Mmmmm why they put ship types in that the player themselves could not build i will never know.