Stellaris

khorum_sl said:

I'm still not sure if putting too many planets in a sector degrades its output with the same penalty you get when you go over the limit on direct-controlled planets.

That bit about outposts in sectors NOT costing influence for maintenance is promising, but should I be cutting up my sectors into smaller sectors instead of just expanding them whenever I add a new system to that region?

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There is a limit on sectors as well, so that you don't put every new planet you conquer in a new sector, although the number is not readily visible in the UI (honestly I have no idea where it is), but there are Society techs to increase your maximum sector limit.

Your sector limit shows on your empire screen, the one with the planets list. Its up on the topbar of that screen. Max sectors seems to depend on controlled planet development and techs in some way.

I'm sure maths are involved.

I'm just assuming that sectors share your max core planets, and putting more than core in them degrades the output by the same that it would you personally. 10% of the first over, not sure if it ramps up from there or if it's just 10% per or what.

Quick sector question. I made my first sector and gave it an Industry/Mineral focus. I'd like to disable that now so that its development is more balanced. I can choose a different focus for the sector, but can't seem to just disable the current focus so that there is no focus in the sector. There has got to be something simple that I'm missing, right?

Yeah, I think sectors always have a focus.

Imperium of Man mod seems fun. MOR DAKKA

Man this game is ripe for a Bablyon 5 mod. So happy this game exists now.

Yea so many possibilities with this game. Dune mod would make me a happy guy.

Dr. Mario Speedwagon_sl said:

Khorum I expect better from you than to allow space Muslim rapefugees to take you over from the inside like that.

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Yeah well I had to abandon that game because some ancient race declared war on me after I started researching self-aware AI..... BTW the techs marked "Dangerous" with the red borders are marked that way for a reason. It was kinda cool actually, they were just chilling there being space gardeners until I started using AI populations on research planets. Do they not freak out if you just stick to robot armies/leaders?

Anyways, the space-mexicans/rapefugees are actually a cheap way to bypass some of the planetary colonization barriers! If you absorb enough (LOYAL) immigrants with tolerances for biomes that your native species can't tolerate, you can eventually build colonization ships with those immigrant species so you can colonize planets that would be way out of your native species' habitation zone.

You can eventually research the techs to allow your empire to colonize everything, but even then the space-mexicans will have specific racial bonuses for their preferred biomes so they'd still be more efficient until the way late in the game.

The downside is that you'd have to attract them as foreign immigrants or as protectorates, since invading or getting them as ceded planets is massive MASSIVE pain in the dick with the hostile factions.

aaron_sl said:

Just so you know that thing with frontier outposts in sectors not costing influence is supposed to be an exploit that should be patched soon, so enjoy it while it lasts.

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Still haven't heard anything definitive about whether or not sectors suffer the same penalties as the core government if they get more planets than the direct-control limit that the central government has.

aaron_sl said:

Just so you know that thing with frontier outposts in sectors not costing influence is supposed to be an exploit that should be patched soon, so enjoy it while it lasts.

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I have absolutely no idea how you are supposed to expand in the early-middle game with this not working the way it does right now.

Oh well. I am almost done with my first game. The Scourge (Stellaris Zerg) invaded my galaxy, pushed me back and lost four planets to them. Then pushed back at them only to discover that it is currently bugged and you cannot exterminate them from a planet. They are not sure when this will be 'patched', so I downloaded a mod that does it.

Anyways, the Scourge have their capital and three other planets left, out of about 15 planets previously and then suddenly, one of the super advanced races demands that I stop attacking the Zerg. Wat.jpg.

So I back off, as I am not ready to fight them. The Scourge slowly retake the territories I was forced to abandon on my quest to purge them. I shift all of my focus from research to Energy Credits, triple the size of my fleets from one at 20k and one at 15k to a 40k, a 35k and a 30k. Then I go and stomp the heads in of the giant space llamas that made me stop my crusade. Fallen Empire? Pffft! Tachyon lances and point defense nomnomnom.

Cleaning them up, then there is a second Fallen Empire, space cockroaches with a giant arse ringworld around a sun. They only have the one system, so once the Scourge are gone, I will destroy them and return to pacifying the remaining populations to the empire of Rimelandia.

Not sure I will do another playthru of it right away, as there are not many differences between races, other than movement type, starting traits, and appearance from what I have seen - they all use the same tech trees. I will probably wait for mods. But I am around 25ish hours into it and will likely take another 10 or so to wrap it up. Worth the money, particularly if they support it with DLC and the community cranks out some mods that are more than skin/map packs.

Well the good thing is they are very nice in providing mod support so that will help mod teams immensely. One of the more popular mod teams for sins of a solar empire may start working on a mod on it soon. Expect to wait a while for anything really decent. Like 6-12 months minimum for a full conversion pre-alpha depending on how hard it is to do the full conversion in the first place. The Sins mods have been out for years and some of the top ones are being rebuilt from scratch atm so these teams will be busy probably right up until the end of the year based on their commentary in the mod forums. So don't expect anything amazing until next year.

Rime_sl said:

there are not many differences between races, other than movement type, starting traits, and appearance from what I have seen - they all use the same tech trees.

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Pretty sure I saw a vid with the lead dev saying that there are a lot of differences in the techs different races will see. Some rares ones are unique to some races, some are weighted etc

While they are weighted (Humans favor missiles into kinetic for example), other than the two (I think) unique racial techs, you could eventually get any setup on any race, it just takes a bit more time.

Heads up for those of you on older computers (the one I am currently using is three years old?)... it is really, really chugging. Not lag, but turns are taking forever. At this point in the game (Around 2545 in a 600 Star Galaxy) it is taking around 1 minute per 'month' on fastest speed, so 12 minutes a year. Tried it on my new rig and it is around 4 minutes a year for the same point in the game with the whole map revealed.

The game is clearly CPU heavy. Wonder if it's single or multi-threaded and to what degree if it is.

EDIT: After further checking it looks like virtually all of their engines have multi-core support. Their issue is handling parallelization which is entirely an issue with the API they have to work with. Until DX12 and Vulcan are used by developers we are stuck with brute forcing this via ever more powerful CPUs which is inefficient to say the least. In other words don't expect major performance improvements if they already milked the cow dry.

I love sci-fi strategy but I'm on the fence with this one mainly due to this ING review:https://youtu.be/eoAkomMEFQo

Can anyone that played this watch the review and comment?

Changing my opinion from 'this is a great game on anything that meets the minimum specs' to 'Wow, do not bother unless you are rocking a brand new machine'. Even on the box I built six months ago, around 2600 and 71 planets (I need 83 for the 'Conquest victory') it is taking 10 minutes a year on the fastest speed setting. Considering it takes something like 2-3 years to research a new tech and probably 3 years to go from one side of a 600 Star map to the other... ouch.