Paradox Games

Unfortunately, you have to be a Machine Intelligence to start as an all-robot empire, you're locked out of the standard government types and your head of state is the AI network. Apparently robots can't outlive their creators, develop individual consciousnesses, and evolve politically like organics. NieR: Automata lied to us all.

On the upside, if you take an organic empire through the Synthetic Evolution ascension line, it will retain whatever government you started with, so yes you can have an immortal bot-emperor until such time he walks on a live power cord and shorts out. And even if you start and stay organic, with the right ethos, policies and technology you can build a population of sentient Synths that can run for office in a star democracy.

I know organic empires build robots by constructing a robot factory building on a planet and letting it automatically contribute to new bot pops, and while I haven't played a synth empire since the Megacorp mega-patch, I suspect they get to skip the "factory" part.

Edited by Tacitus on Sep 9th 2019 at 8:01:27 AM

They do and they don't. Synth empires build robots using Replicator jobs, but they're built using the capital building. You can add an extra Replicator job with an assembly plant.

That's weird - the game's wiki doesn't say anything about that particular limitation. Ah well, doesn't bother me too much - I can just mentally reflavour certain things.

Actually, I have seen videos of AI Rebellions in action, and this does make it funnier how the whole rebellion starts out with individual drone units achieving some form of free will and asking their creators if they have souls - only for them all to get assimilated into a wider AI once the rebellion itself actually starts. "Join my AI network, they said! You'll be free from the oppressor, they said!" :V

So I heard over at the Civ thread that Civ VI is getting a Battle Royale mode. Somehow.

So it seems only a matter of time now before EU IV gets a BR mode, right?

I mean, you can already do the Strategy equivalent of BR by having every player as their own team and make a house rule of no alliances. Small map to minimize the time to contact and there you go. Not sure what the point is to a dedicated Battle Royale mode.

Well, if you watch the trailer, they didn't just get a Battle Royale mode, it also includes an apocalypse themed map and various related science fiction factions, like mutants, cultists etc. As far as BR Ms go, this one is pretty involved.

Right, I did forget that Battle Royales generally involve a shrinking map.

Not really.

Paradox has its own thing going, they don't have to play follow the leader.

I was only kidding, of course. Though something like a massive multiplayer mode would be fun.

Bit of a technical question here; is Stellaris an especially taxing game to run? I need to buy a new laptop and I was debating whether or not I should get a 'gaming' one or just a normal one (and I don't particularly feel like going all-out with a desktop PC since I can't think of many other games I'd play besides low-intensity retro games, and it'd be more of a hassle to set up). My initial assumption was that gaming laptops are for more graphically-intense games like your Overwatches and your Crysises, but I could be wrong.

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Sep 10th 2019 at 5:45:55 PM

Currently there is a massive late-game strain on CPU usage due to the new population system being buggy/unoptimized.

EU IV has the same problem late game. It has something to do with countries blobbing, I think, because it even happens in the lobby when creating a custom country (if it's huge enough, deselecting a province will cause increasing lag).

IIRC the current lag in Stellaris is due to there being too many unnecessary checks for population based events. Like events that can only occur at the end of a month/year are being checked daily for every single pop in the galaxy.

I suspect there is something similar going on with EU IV checking provinces in countries, hence why the lag gets bigger with bigger countries.

Don't think anything will ever beat the "can I castrate?" bug, though.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Sep 11th 2019 at 1:27:41 PM

Anyway, to answer the original question, laptops aren't going to be great for Paradox games, as most, save the highest end ones, use lower-performance processors that can only temporarily sustain high clock speeds and lack the cooling to run continuously at the higher clock speeds of high-end desktop processors.

The very highest end laptops (we're talking $2500 here) may have actual desktop processors, but they're also basically portable desktops that more or less eschew any pretense mobility or being fit for use on one's lap.

Since Stellaris is overwhelmingly CPU-intensive, it benefits greatly from a desktop, especially when looking at sub-$1000 computers. You can still run it on a laptop, but you're going to see significant performance loss, especially late game, compared to a desktop of similar cost.

Edited by Balmung on Sep 11th 2019 at 8:14:17 AM

I understand. P'raps I should get a desktop after all, then. Especially considering I'll want to use it for other things besides gaming. :V

My personal opinion is that unless you travel and work on a computer all the time, a PC is always the best bet. Of course, I don't even have a smartphone and if I'm gonna be out waiting around with nothing to do, I pull a paperback out of my personal library and read that for entertainment.

So, uh, there's an interesting bug/exploit in Equestria at War. If you enable magical weapons for special forces or have mage or infiltrator companies with magic equipment and anything else in the division has regular infantry equipment, all the special forces and mage/infiltrator companies essentially dual wield and get all the stats of both equipment sets. This makes special forces hit like tanks and mage and infiltrator companies hit like support artillery.

So I got my PC and got my Stellaris, which of course I've been playing the hell out of. Wasn't too overwhelming once I understood that buildings don't produce things anymore, buildings employ pops that produce things, or they refine things into other things. :V

Unfortunately during my latest playthrough I've found myself in a rather unenviable position. I pushed up the Midgame year a bit just to make things interesting, which has backfired pretty horrifically because it turned out I have a wormhole that literally leads right to the local Great Khan's doorstep. I had planned to build a heavily-fortified starport on the other end to be safe, but I'd barely gotten started before he rolled up in his 32,000 power fleet while me and everyone else is lucky to have 5,000. It certainly doesn't help that all my neighbours hate me for some reason. It's always the same with them - they act all chummy when they first contact you, but then ten seconds later they turn around and close the borders. :V

I usually either ignore the Khan or immediately surrender to them once they knock on my door, because I seldom see the alloys I would have to invest into defending against them worth it compared to just paying some tax for a few years.

The refugees that flood my planets during the Khans reign almost immediately bring my economy back on course and I can just invest all my alloys into Megastructures knowing that I won't have to worry about the neighbors starting shit.

It is also a great opportunity to snag some valuable systems from my neighbors if I let a construction ship of mine tail the Khans invasion fleets.

A lot of your neighbors will likely hate you based on your ethics and whatnot. Like, if you're an Egalitarian Xenophile you'll be hated by xenophobic authoritarians and whatnot.

And the game has a tendency to put empires with opposite ethos close to your own. Wouldn't want a boring game, would we?

I'm not sure how much the "random start locations" option affects that - if nothing else it might give you more space than your opposites. A workaround might be to roll up a bunch of more diverse star nations and set them to "force to spawn" in your next galaxy.

Realpolitik tends to trump that, though. You're likely to get a daisy-chain of defensive pacts regardless of your ethos if you team up with the rivals of your rivals early on (barring real hardasses like Fanatic Purifiers and Democratic Crusaders).