Paradox Games

While you could get meaningful stats on slaving and purging from the game itself, peaceful and warmonger would be hard to do.

Take me for instance. I tend to be mostly peaceful with certain exceptions - I happily destroy any Fanatic Purifiers I encounter the moment I feel strong enough to do so. Other types I will never initiate hostilities, though I consider 'peace treaties' to be no more than a temporary cease fire - the war is only truly over when they are no longer an independent political unit (both conquest and subjugation are acceptable results). Anyone who never attacks me or someone I have a Defense Pact with has exactly nothing to fear from my fleets.

Any automated system would likely consider me to be a warmonger due to me initiating multiple wars against a given target thanks to war exhaustion.

It doesn't help that diplomacy is bare bones, trade is non-existent, and that some of the aggressive options and builds are really powerful.

Nah, trade's existent, but it's pretty bare-bones as well.

I like to do things like Devouring Swarms and whatnot but I'm thinking of doing some sort of democratic, more peaceful place soon.

Also, started a Russian KR game. Re-invited the Tsar to return, re-establishing the Russian Empire, and helped the Alash Orda conquer the Turkestan Khanate. I have my own faction but I'm going to probably go to war with Japan and Mongolia to get Transamur and Fengtian, along with all of Mongolia, or at least a significant portion of it. If the German Empire loses the war as well I'll re-take Ukraine and Belorussia.

Really, though, right now my priority is getting my army into a state where it's not really a shambles; it's underequipped and not nearly as big as it could be, but I'm building infrastructure and factories all over the place so hopefully that will help me be able to produce more.

edited 4th Jun '18 8:16:30 AM by theLibrarian

Can't you just integrate your subjects? Or are you going the conquest route because it's faster?

Well, looks like 15.8% of players have the Supremacy (win a war against another empire) cheevo, 10% have founded a Federation, 1% have gone slave-happy enough to get the cheevo for 200 enslaved Pops, 0.8% have blown up someone's home planet, and only 0.6% have gotten Peacekeeper. So there's that.

I was actually impressed how my most recent playthrough went, my first for Distant Stars. Went fanatic egalitarian, xenophile humans and managed to win over the authoritarian gnome cult on one border, and got along fine with some fanatic materialist, egalitarian space dwarves on the other. And I built starbases extremely aggressively, so I was able to quickly wall them away and give myself a healthy chunk of the galaxy to colonize.

By the time I was strong enough to defeat the nearest Marauder group and colonize the L-cluster, I'd amasssed such a technological and military lead that the space gnomes voluntarily asked to become my protectorate, and when I integrated them I was big enough that their rival imperialist hyper-chickens asked to become a protectorate, and so on. The only wars I had to declare to conquer the galaxy were against some Fanatical Purifiers, imperialist reptiles on the outer rim who'd been decimated by those Fanatical Purifiers, an Awakened Empire, a still-sleeping Fallen Empire, and a Hive Mind... and sadly the isolationist xenophobes who just wouldn't become my vassal, and broke their non-aggression pact after I took out the Hive Mind.

My current game I'm trying to get the Peacekeeper cheevo with a fanatical pacifist, Gaia World preference, small-but-tall empire. Problem is, one of my neighbors is a bunch of hegemonic imperialists, and the only empire in the galaxy that wasn't hostile or indifferent toward me at first contact was some federation builders that just got literally chewed up by a Devouring Swarm. I think the only reason no one's declared war on me yet is that I was lucky enough to buy five cruisers from the space nomads before anyone had researched destroyers. This is gonna be a loooonnng two centuries.

Is it weird that I actually prefer peaceful playstyle even with barebones diplomacy and stuff?

Anyway, I do kind of wonder how effective inward perfection is compared to aggressive styles. It at least used to be uber powerful

Paradox Interactive to acquire Seattle-based Harebrained Schemes

7.5 million $? That sounds like a steal to me.

Nice. Guess Battletech's success made them a desired commodity.

New CK 2 Dev Diary, kill lists, which list everyone a character has killed.

Next week's diary is probably the new pagan reformation mechanics that are Holy Fury's headline feature.

edited 15th Jun '18 5:08:50 AM by lrrose

Has anyone played the Star Trek New Horizons mod for Stellaris? It's pretty awesome. I started a Klingon campaign and started with all four of my core sector slots filled, and a few other systems under my control as well.

I've been playing a bit of surviving mars recently and I'm impressed with what they've got but it doesn't feel like a fully realized work yet. One of the major annoyances and key gameplay mechanics is the drones. Their AI is awful. Just terrible at prioritizing and there's no option to manually grab a few and tell them "go fix stuff, that is your only job" so you end up with stuff either breaking or just on the verge even if you have a surplus of drones just sitting there.

The wonders system is also pretty bad wherein they're always at the very end of the tech tree and so ridiculously expensive that by the time you can afford them you don't need them. Making them less effective but seeding them earlier in the tree (with options to upgrade them to be closer to their current game breaking status) would make them actually useful.

The game also needs more random events and anomalies. As it currently stands you have the one big mystery, the three or four anomaly results and weather.

edited 17th Jun '18 1:46:41 AM by thatguythere47

I tried to play New Horizons. Earth got destroyed by that superweapon thing and I couldn't destroy it. I might try again though XD

edited 17th Jun '18 7:10:37 AM by theLibrarian

I restarted my Klingon campaign because I got bogged down in my usual "I'm not aggressive enough" problem. This time I prioritized expansion and decided "My soldiers should not be in a war I'm not already winning peacefully." My enemies in Yridia are now nearly surrounded, cut off, and very weak compared to last time. Still not strong enough, fleet wise, to take their home system, but if I can strengthen my naval cap and build a third fleet inside the Briar Patch Nebula, I should be able to close the vise and knock them down to a OSM (One System Minor) completely surrounded by me.

If you want to learn to play aggressively try making a vanilla game borg race. Driven assimilator with your first species being specced for energy and minerals and robots for unity/science. If you're not constantly pushing against your neighbors you're spending influence for outposts or colonizing space you already occupy. You get a bit behind on unity/science but what's that matter when you've got like 1k minerals by 2300? It makes for a super fast game where you never hit the mid-game slump because you just keep pushing.

I can definitely say I prefer the vanilla game over New Horizon. I like the Hyperlane system, especially after they upgraded the algorithm to do constellations and chokepoints right.

I think I'm going to try that Borg idea. I've already made a copy of the Romulan Star Empire that I'm proud of.

Played through a good KR game tonight. Managed to keep the Duestch-Ostasien colony under my control by joining in the war and sending an actual army in to help them, fortified my border with France, and by the time the war kicked off my armies and navy were strong enough that we were equal with the Union at sea and the French couldn't get past us. Adding to the hundreds of thousands of losses that they'd already taken in Italy and a much more powerful Reichspakt (which included Ireland, Poland, South Africa, Austria, and Spain) and as soon as I went on the offensive they crumbled.

I'm thinking next time I pick up HOI 4 I'll try vanilla again, mainly to try and do an Italy game.

edited 20th Jun '18 6:44:20 AM by theLibrarian

Borg idea didn't go so well, but I made another Yamacera faction called the Imperium (Xenophobic fanatic materialists who use droid armies so they don't have to touch enemy soil, though I just now got ahold of Droid tech and I just won my third war, so that hasn't happened yet.) that started off damn close to a devouring swarm of tiger people called the Ragerians. The first war was a stalemate after they took my frontier fortress system and I quickly fortified the one behind it. After that they attacked a group of fox people I'd had contact with on their other side, and I jumped in once I was ready/over the truce. That one went smashingly. First I did a double battle to take back my old base, and then ran amok in their frontier area to take a full constellation and part of another. The foxes lost territory and people, but they didn't die. The third war happened when the tigers declared war on another race, and when our truce ran out, I directly invited the foxes to try and retake their territories. The foxes might have retaken a base system but otherwise lost at least one other system. I freaking broke the tigers' backs and snapped up a lot of territory before they came back to fight.

We peaced out and I'm currently in the far end of the truce building up for the next war. Doubt I'll conquer everything. Frankly, I don't want their territories in the next arm over yet. I want them to live and soften up the people over there while I deal with the foxes. It's not so much "don't suffer the xeno" as "we want this alliance of convenience to become a permanent alliance. With you people living in and working your one safe constellation for us while we guard the gate with battlestations. It's for your own protection. After all, you wouldn't have survived the tigers without us. We know how to defend ourselves." Which we do. Every chokepoint is protected by a top level battlestation, with a shipyard in a star system one or two lanes away. The chokepoint stations are then backed up by a baseworld if possible, completely filled with strongholds/fortresses, a planetary shield generator, and a military academy for training improved droid soldiers. I don't plan on going the synth route. I want droids to be the top level. I do plan on going the Megastructures route and using habitats for base worlds where necessary.

Early CK2 dev diary on the new pagan reformation system.

That looks really interesting. Hopefully they make the process of reforming Pagans easier than it currently is.

Also, I think my Sol Confederacy is moving towards soon becoming Psionic. We came across an Ocean World last night that was actually sentient and gave us a big jump in Psionic research. Also, the Great Khan has proc'd so we're taking in refugees from the horde's neighbors. Fitting with our Pacifist nature, if the Great Khan makes it to our borders I'll surrender and become a Satrapy. No reason to fight a hopeless war.

That reminds me my Hive Assimilator mod is done, now I just have to figure out how to upload a mod on Steam Workshop.

People often say psionic ascension was underpowered, but I never got why. Not only do you get the buffs instantly of having to go through a lenghty science project, you also don't get constantly humiliated by the spiritualist Fallen Empire for being soulless machines.

It's also better than biological ascension, but that's a low bar to pass.

I actually decided to play a materialist empire again for once in the all-human multiplayer game we set up.

Turned out having the same start species can mess with ascensions because my leader is now a psionic synth while my friend's psionic empire's leader lost their psionic trait somehow.

Probably going back to psionics next game.

One illogical thing I found out during my Bio-ascended Despoiler game is that if you abduct a pop from a different empire and they ascend to psychics or cyborgs you can go to the "all species in the galaxy" overview and create a template with those traits and apply it to your pops even if you don't have the related ascensions.

And here is my mod.

edited 21st Jun '18 10:58:15 AM by Kiefen

DIY religion. I like. Maybe there can be a tech to allow a third Doctrine?

...wrong game. :P

But yeah. Just imagine what this would do for Shattered World games. "You get to create a reformed religion at Realm Size X. Go nuts!"

Damn it, now CK2 is literally, objectively unplayable until Holy Fury comes out.

edited 21st Jun '18 2:59:25 PM by Rationalinsanity

This always happens to me XD I if a DLC is getting close I don't play a Paradox game until the DLC comes out and I can get it.