Stellaris

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Furry

Furry

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Gavinmad said:
better hope the population changes they have in beta are good cause atm ring worlds are dead. Machine empires are fine in general.
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ringworld start is literal trash. On higher difficulties, bests atm are probably scion, or hegemony where you play as their technocratic overlords, but those starts feel kinda like cheating to me. Machine empires are strong, but I don't really feel OP. Devouring swarms are also pretty strong with their pop growth being just bonkers, but in grand admiral it's a real bad idea to invite every dick in the galaxy to come swinging your way.
 
Gavinmad

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Furry said:
ringworld start is literal trash. On higher difficulties, bests atm are probably scion, or hegemony where you play as their technocratic overlords, but those starts feel kinda like cheating to me. Machine empires are strong, but I don't really feel OP. Devouring swarms are also pretty strong with their pop growth being just bonkers, but in grand admiral it's a real bad idea to invite every dick in the galaxy to come swinging your way.
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Wasn't even talking about shattered ring, just ring worlds period. Ecus/hive/machine worlds are kinda shit too now, although not quite as bad as ring worlds.
 
Rime

Rime

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You will never get enough population to fill them.

The population change is probably the worst decision they have ever made, and this is from someone who abhorred the changes to everyone having to use stellar lanes, rather than the three different methods (Wormholes for life!).
 
Rime

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Not only does it grow slower, there is a population CAP based on each society/player, that after which, it goes so slowly that it might as well not at all.

Slavery, releasing and then reintergrating, and robots are the 'new' meta to get around it.

Supposedly, this was the 'final band-aid' solution Paradox could come up with to deal with the late game lag fest.

Lots of opinions on it on reddit.
 
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Ridas

Ridas

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No point going for multiple planets anymore. I went 3 and 2 the last 2 playthroughts and wasnt even close to filling them (1 Ecu in both games).
 
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Aaron

Aaron

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Jebus! Well, I guess playing tall is where it's at now. I take it that origin where you start with a 25 zone Gaia world and then never colonise beyond it is pretty powerful now?
 
Ridas

Ridas

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Yes, I finished a grand admiral game today with Gaia origin and I took a relic as second and turned it into an Ecu eventually. I never went for a third planet and cruised through the game.
 
Furry

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Aaron said:
Jebus! Well, I guess playing tall is where it's at now. I take it that origin where you start with a 25 zone Gaia world and then never colonise beyond it is pretty powerful now?
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This does give me an idea. Calamatous birth, Terravore, - the fuck out of pop growth. Send out loving colony rocks to crater everything in the area, and then eat all the planets. From there I just recolonize over and over and send all the rocks home. Can you crater a planet multiple times? The science must be done! Probably wont even bother defending my space, just have a last stand mega base world with a few fortress habitats loaded with +strength armies.

Edit: Year 20 and homeworlds at 80 pop. I'm basically importing bodies as fast as I can build buildings. The great housing crisis of Qva prime is real. I'm short on tech to handle this. Edit and oh shit, I guess planets blow up if you consume them too much? I don't remember that being a thing.
 
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Burns

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What pops does this really start to get bad in the vanilla game? My Necroid's slave race is at 213 pop and they currently cost 116 points to reproduce, but I have 200+ mods running...

The reddit thread linked above lists a couple ways to fix this:
 
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M

Mountain Biker

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I always end up playing wide in Stellaris so I find it hard to believe that you could win on two planets. That said, I haven't played a full game in probably two years so everything is probably different now. I definitely like the idea of playing tall because micromanaging 50 planets gets old after a while.
 
Kais

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Put me in the camp that doesn't like the pop changes. Seems the current meta for normal civs is to settle 3-4 big worlds and specialize them. Research/energy, industry (maybe 2), and bureaucracy. These are the only colonies you give a shit about. Settle a handful of small planets that you build a bunch of city districts and almost no other jobs to keep the planet carrying capacity/housing high and hit the pop growth sweet spot. Now because there are no jobs unemployed pops resettle on the big planets. Space stations with Transit Hub module gives a 100% bonus to resettlement of unemployed pops.

I went into this playthrough blind to Dick and my normal early expand like mad to 2 dozen planets it's just not working like it had been. Generalized planets are wasting pops that should be in a specialized world with stacking bonuses.

e: Concerning jobs, Aspec is of the mind that Clerk jobs have 0 benefit and just eat pops that should be doing literally anything else.
 
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Furry

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Furry said:
This does give me an idea. Calamatous birth, Terravore, - the fuck out of pop growth. Send out loving colony rocks to crater everything in the area, and then eat all the planets. From there I just recolonize over and over and send all the rocks home. Can you crater a planet multiple times? The science must be done! Probably wont even bother defending my space, just have a last stand mega base world with a few fortress habitats loaded with +strength armies.
Click to expand...

I feel like this idea is pretty strong, but it's biggest weakness was that it started falling apart when you got extremely high pop on cap without really the tech to properly take advantage of it. I'll try to optimize it, but I think 1 or 2 feeder planets will be far optimal, adjusting for the quality of planets you have close. Playing wider than 3 important planets is probably bad. The AI caring about my rubble worlds helped me fend off the first fleet, which is often a major ass raping in grand admiral. Didn't ever break into my core systems. Second invader pretty much put me in the gonna die state, though. I just got starholds, so I was very close to having a chance.

Will optimize with +mins trait and trying to go a harvesting focus policy early for the fast breakout. Mins are crazy important and I felt like I never had enough despite a pure focus. But it's neat in that it completely erases lithoid's normal weakness. Calamitous birth is much better/funner now. I found it a pretty unimpressive start before.
 
Jozu

Jozu

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I have finally got into a game long enough where I could potentially end up winning. My last two tries were foiled by some cpu idiot unlocking L gate which led to Grey Scourge and i got raped. Next game I awakened a fucking Dragon leviathan by doing an archeological dig and wiped my whole civ.

This game I got extremely lucky, my starting position is at the edge/bottom of a large spiral galaxy with a single choke point to defend my main 3 worlds. I managed to keep away any interlopers and live long enough to unlock tech to be able to start to overpower my neighbors. Im at the point now where there is only 1 ai civ that is doing better than me on other side of galaxy. Another randomly awesome thing that happened was I did another archelogical dig after losing 3 scientists, and finally uncovered a massive dragon fleet of strange space aliens that are under my control. (it has a yellow skull icon)They rape face so bad Its almost unfair. Every other civ is pathetic to me now.
 
Aaron

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This game definitely has more luck involved in it than most space based 4x games I've played. I think it's a bit of a turnoff for me.

I really should love this game, but every time I try and get into it... it just seems a bit off.
 
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Furry

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Aaron said:
This game definitely has more luck involved in it than most space based 4x games I've played. I think it's a bit of a turnoff for me.

I really should love this game, but every time I try and get into it... it just seems a bit off.
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Lower difficulties there isn't too much luck involved. Highest difficulties, there is a huge luck factor at times. Playthrough I'm on right now I have a really, really nice starting position, with the caveat that there's the marauder home systems right in the fucking middle of it with 0 chance of bottlenecking them effectively. I'm putting everything into building a force that can take them out proactively, but running low on time. If the khan wakes up soon I'm gonna be royally fucked.

Depends on your gaming mentality if you like it. I played dwarf fortress a lot, so I definitely have the mentality that 'losing' a game can be fun.
 
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