Paradox Games

I'm in a Spiral galaxy and my capital's in the middle of my arm width wise. I'm making five hundred energy credits a month even with a full 108k doomstack being upgraded, plus a tiny flotilla of Battleships armed to the teeth. All because of energy-producing habitats. Teching up is becoming a long haul, but it's still on-going. When I went neutral, all the others with that in mind looked up to me. So instead of going it alone like I feared would happen, the Federation I was already a part of has swelled. What's better is that I'm the next president in five years, and my fleet will be finish upgrading to full power in two. I'm thinking of embracing my materialist faction in the hopes of dropping one level of pacifist. Those two extra core worlds are irrelevant since I'll still have about four or five slots left for extra systems after that. But I'm not doing any of it until I see my fleet upgraded. The fact is, I did a hell of a lot more than throwing Jump Drives on pre-existing designs. I slapped down Enigmatic power cores and topped up weapons and support slots on all my designs. We are ready to roll fully into battle.

The Unbidden still exist but they're relegated to one system for the time being and I've unlocked their weaponry. The War in Heaven ended with the Fanatics killing the Regulators, so all the old satellite systems joined up with us neutrals. We're very close to a Federation win, but everyone keeps kicking people out of the Federation, so I don't see that happening very soon. I embraced Materialism and am now a war machine. I've Balkanized three Dominions already and am not going to stop, though I might wind up abandoning the idea of the Federation and using Vassals and Annexation to slog my way to a solo victory, if everyone else can't get along.

ETA: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=974467316

edited 12th Jul '17 4:23:36 PM by Journeyman

My National Populist Russia game is going fairly well, I've passed the economic reform aimed at redistributing land to loyal peasants and improving general efficiency by properly mechanizing farming. And I've begun the process of providing cheap access to Cinema to equip the Russian people with the proper information.

Previously I had launched an invasion of Turkestan shortly after pacifying Alash Orda, while it initially went well unfortunately due to enemy air superiority and terrain advantageous to defense (such as mountains and hills) it has sadly bogged down. But I'm building a air base nearby and soon the skies of Central Asia will be Russian once again and after that the ground will surely follow.

edited 12th Jul '17 7:00:29 PM by Fourthspartan56

Still no Unbidden, and it seems that a Fallen Empire is smart enough to Awaken not long after seeing a peer get eaten by an upstart empire. Or else the RNG just hates me, which I'm certainly not ruling out. So I had to rewind to immediately after beating the first Fallen Empire to quickly take out the second before it started building dreadnoughts.

Turns out those Enigmatic Observers are more trouble than the Holy Guardians, solely because of how their home system was set up, with a 60k-ish defense fleet and a cluster of 10k defense platforms all close together. My first try I came at them from a bad angle and ended up jumping right into the teeth of everything at once, and there went my 90k strength fleet. Second try, in which I came from an angle that put more distance between my fleet and their guns, would have worked if I had even the slightest control over my ships. But instead of adopting a firing line and taking down targets piecemeal, they decided to steadily close with a stationary space station, aggroing everything else in the system in quick succession, so the end result was similar to the first try.

Third try was the charm - hop to their People Zoo planet, blow up the shipyard, deal with their fleet when they come to respond, then take out the defenses over their home system. Good news is that these xenophiles are only a little grumpy about being annexed and are fully productive members of my glorious multicultural robot-friendly democracy that just happens to be trying to conquer the galaxy. Bad news is that my navy is now down to about 70k fleet strength and is made up solely of forty-five giga-cannons with engines attached and a millennia-old dreadnought, but at least this means my monthly mineral deficit went from 300 to less than 100. And I pushed my borders out to swipe a system with a ruined Dyson Sphere from my main rival, so when I'm done repairing that I can cheese the marketplace even more.

Once my economy stabilizes and things quiet down in the Holy Guardians' systems - I'm researching an orbital mind-control laser to zap the Space Jesus out of those fundamentalist hyper-chickens - I'll probably pad my fleet out with a couple dozen cruisers in anticipation of the much-delayed Unbidden invasion. Any day now...

edited 12th Jul '17 9:44:59 PM by Tacitus

So, in my game, there's a huge Fanatic Purifier blob in the galactic north (there were two FP empires up there), but the bigger ate the smaller), and I just can't take them seriously because their emblem is the heart. So far, they've destroyed enough other empires that they aren't a majority in their own empire, and yet, I can't stop thinking about them as being some sort of crazy galactic yandere. Well, if they keep it up, Enigmatc Observer-senpai will notice them.

And when I say huge, I mean I'm a crazy colonizing madman, and these nutjobs have about as much territory inside their borders as I do. At a guess, we each control about 1/6 of the systems in a 1000 star galaxy and each have ~150 pops (though only 71 of theirs are not subject to summary execution (59 primary species + 12 robots). That said, their blob will probably look a lot smaller once their purges start to complete and planets get abandoned.

EDIT: Playing with Leviathan Events Xtended and holy crap the new leviathans are insane. Like End of the Cycle insane. Two of the five Leviathans spawned in my galaxy - the Gravekeeper, which is the weaker of the two and is worth ~344k fleetpower on its own and the Throne Watchers, consisting of 6 "Zadkiel" defense platforms worth ~21k each, 6 "Haniel" Fortresses worth ~66.6k each, and one "Metatron" super-ultra-mega-overdreadnought worth '969k fleet power. There is also apparently an extra-powerful crisis leviathan

For some comparison, the Automated Dreadnought is ~80k, the Enigmatic Fortress is ~31k + ~15k in smaller substations, the Infinity Machine is ~76k, and the Dimensional Horror is ~175k. All of this seems roughly consistent with their difficulty in actual combat, though the Dimensional Horror does have the unlisted benefit of insanely long-range weapons.

edited 12th Jul '17 11:45:49 PM by Balmung

on the other hand, Horror is fixed to spawn near the edge of system, which can be abused to reduce your losses in the fight substantially by jumping nearly on top of it.

Also, I'm not sure vanilla leviathans actually are that powerful. A general-purpose fleet (e.g. not optimized vs anything in particular) of about 50k can take out pretty much any of them with at least something surviving.

Fleet power is something of a lie and smaller ships are undervalued while larger ships are overvalued by the calculation, but those are the fleet power values the game gives for the normal Guardians that spawned on my map. Still, it serves to give so indication of what ballpark these things are in - Metatron is in the same ballpark as the superboss from the End of the Cycle, which has been known to hit one million fleet power.

Eh. The End (as in, the entity) isn't the problem with The End of the Cycle.

Stellaris Dev Diary: Voice Packs

Killing a Fallen Empire is an automatic wake-up trigger to the others. It's not bad luck, just a matter of not reading the fine print.

I'm done with that Yamacera game. I've claimed the Federation victory and the only way forward would be to put down both the Unbidden and the Fanatics and hope that disbands most of the alliance. Then I'd leave the remaining Federation, focus on Ringworld building, and slog through beating the rest of the Galaxy to claim that 40% territory requirement. It just seems better if I start a new campaign without the big endgame stuff and work at that goal from the start.

I know that the entity after the End of the Cycle isn't the main challenge, but its potentially enormous strength is icing on the cake. And the added crisis entity in the mod apparently takes a page from the End and gets more powerful for every planet it ruins.

Anyway, I'm ready to do synthetic ascension, but I want to integrate my protectorates and cyborgify them before I actually do the thing.

Also, I got the last Cybrex artifact in the very last system I hadn't surveyed with the precursor_5 (Cybrex) flag. I didn't expect to find anything, as it had already been surveyed by other species. After reloading twice to get it to spawn in my borders instead of someone else's, I'm now repairing a whole ringworld.

edited 13th Jul '17 6:33:42 AM by Balmung

Speaking of mods, I'm planning on starting a new game next week or so, once I get back home, and was wondering if there are any really good mods people would suggest I try?

I'm pretty finicky about mods and I find play testing them to weed out the chaff myself tiresome, but if someone fairly reliable recommends one I tend to try them out. I'd rather have them be pretty seamlessly integrated into the base game and they shouldn't massively throw off the game balance unless they're like a total conversion mod.

I'm mostly after quality of life stuff and features that feel like they're missing from the base game.

edited 13th Jul '17 8:50:15 AM by GabrieltheThird

I did for the Yamacera what the base game did for humanity. Gave them a second iteration. The Yamacera Imperium has a syncretic race of Neo-chimps working the mines. Now I'm dealing with chimp spam and building up Yamacera assault armies to keep up. We're Authoritarian, Xenophile, and Militarist, with Distinguished Admiralty backing up the Syncretic. All in all it's been a fun morning of settling worlds and keeping the chimps from going Planet of the Apes on us.

ETA: Also, I have a slew of mods I'm not using but that seriously bulked out traditions, ships, and race creation. If that's what you're looking for I can hunt up the list of subscribed mods tonight.

edited 13th Jul '17 7:48:49 AM by Journeyman

Animated Synthetic Portraits Extended is a must if you're doing synthetic evolution and prettt nice even if you aren't.

Alphamodplus and Starports lets you do a lot more with starports.

More governments/civics is my preferred civics mod.

Realistic Ships has better dreadnought designs than most other mods due to making "advanced sections, instead of just stacking three guns in each slot and bolting more sections in the middle (though there is some of that)

edited 13th Jul '17 8:24:58 AM by Balmung

So the new dev diary has been released, Ethics Voice Packs. So VIR (the tutorial and notifications robot) can have different voices aligned with each ethos (you can choose whichever you want regardless of your ethos) and it will be included with the unannounced Story Pack coming with 1.8.

Nice bit of immersion, and at least it's free.

Tried a Commie South Africa game again in HOI 4 today. Didn't work out >.> I really want to try that and free Africa from European influence, but even beating Portugal is practically impossible >.>

It actually isn't free, it's part of the unannounced story pack that's being released alongside 1.8. Which will likely cost between $10-15 if Leviathans is anything to go by.

edited 13th Jul '17 3:47:10 PM by Fourthspartan56

Yeah, I figured.

Problem is that HOI's war system is too simple. It always comes down to all or nothing. There's no armistice, no negotiations, no conditional surrender.

Honestly, I like the way Kaiserreich handles it, where you can actually decide to peace out after satisfying your demands.

Yeah. Normally I'm able to grab Angola and Mozambique like I intend, but since I have to get rid of mainland Portugal too, I can't end the war.

edited 14th Jul '17 6:15:36 AM by theLibrarian

After a day stumbling around making races and trying new campaigns, I've come to the conclusion I am not a belligerent. I'm just not in the right mindset to build up my defenses and weapons ahead of everything else and kick down doors left right and center. Heck, in the beginnings of my YFW (Yamacera Federated Worlds) games I'm usually striking defense pacts with the local Hegemonic Imperialists and actively protecting them. That's what I'm good at. The Cold War. The slow build up of economic power, using frontier posts to snag terraforming projects out of enemy territory, and then turning them into footholds the enemy has to put up or shut up to get back.

This constant fuss of everyone setting up agreements against me just goes against my very nature. So I think I'll stick with the two-faced tech hippies and try another YFW campaign without the Fallen Empires that forced me to turn the last campaign into a slog.

The Unbidden finally, finally showed up. Right in the system I was building my first Ringworld section in.

Then their first invasion fleet made a beeline to the brand spanking new protectorate I had literally spent the entire game dragging out of the stone age. The one that decided to reset over two centuries of progress toward that end when the observation post orbiting the planet inexplicably flipped from 70% complete to 0% in the process of being transferred to a sector.

The Unbidden are dicks.

Ha! I feel the same way about the other nations in general. Right as I was expanding my borders, some other nation plops a colony right in my fucking path. Didn't block me but did leave them a foothold to declare war over. Years later. While I've been ignoring the possibility of war and just building up my resource base. Which still isn't ready for mass scale war like this. They want me gone off the map, and I'm just trying to hold on against a fleet much bigger than mine.

I am so dead.

I tried playing a more military minded empire recently. But pretty much all my neighbours got bigger fleets than me because building ships is just so damn expensive. Corvettes are supposed to be the cheap, easily disposable ships, why does each individual corvette cost more than an entire building?

The only way corvette spam works is if it's naked corvette spam. No upgrades, period. Add in a corvette assembly upgrade for your starport, and it really is quite cheap. Otherwise the costs snowball out of control.

I lost the war but not the game. I currently have three worlds. The war left me with one, and a quick revolt on one of the old worlds left me in possession of it, with a route to one I hadn't colonized originally. So booyah. Still hemmed in, but it's not quite as painful as it was. Funny thing is that when I was managing alone, I wasn't able to get defense agreements,. Now that I'm a rump state, I've got at least two or three of them. I'll live. Won't be pretty, but my income's already climbing back to where it was, and I'm working on starports to protect myself further.