Stellaris

[Arakhor]

I would imagine that you need to scan it to continue.

 

[Dell19]

There isn't a scan system option or an event log icon in the system which is why I'm a little confused

 

[PhilBowles]

The one I found was a large planet with basically all tiles unlocked and far more tiles have a bonus than normal.

Mine was an 8 with a few tiles locked. It was also tidally locked, but as a gaia it had habitability fixed at 100% so the -10 appears not to do anything.

I conquered three planets today which have joined a faction. Should I just lower their dissent every so often by spending energy and influence or do I need to be more proactive? I don't want to enslave them.

I found by accident that creating a sector encompassing them removes the dissent for a while, and it seems to be slow to build up afterwards (perhaps because dissenters are a smaller portion of the sector than the planet?) You can hover over the happiness bar to see why they're discontent - some of it you may be able to change. Otherwise you could purge individual discontents if your faction allows that, I suppose - I might end up doing that with one of mine. Another lesson just learned is that the dissent vanishes when you expand the sector, at least when you do so to encompass another colonised planet. That's dealt with my pacifist issue for now.

EDIT: Just started my afternoon session and changed most of the policies (except slavery, and the ones I can't change) in the government tab. The client species are still both unhappy, but in one case I expect them to revert to normal when the war ends, and in the other the discontent is due to a hefty (-25%) new colonisation penalty, which should end at some point.

I had a quest to investigate the remnants of an empire which I completed and at the end it gave the location of their homeworld which I went to but nothing happened. I can't scan it as its within another nation's border. Is anything further meant to happen?

Some quest chains end without an event and then pick up again or lead to a follow-up event chain, but I'd expect you to have a message saying 'well done, you've found the homeworld'. Either you need to survey the system as normal, or initiate a research project - either through the situation log or the ! icon. I haven't had that quest yet (if it's the First League quest, I've only found two of their sites so far, and those tend to appear as individual event chains - you can't actively go looking for them as far as I can tell).

 

[PhilBowles]

Yes, now I've unlocked continental colonisation I intend to replace my remaining frontier outposts with colonies - but my economic deficit makes that difficult, given that colonies take a while to get to a stage where you can use them as net energy producers even after they stop being 'outposts' and so aren't actively a drain. Plus I'm at my planet limit and my character shortage leaves me with no one to govern additional sectors (not that governors are a strict requirement - with my character die-offs I have no governors but my heir anyway).

Well, I managed to dig myself out of that hole in the best possible way - by learning and exploiting new tools to manage my empire. First point of call was my diminishing credit reserve; a couple of 10-year mineral-for-energy trade agreements with other powers (a new contact that favoured me, and the Boki who decided to end their rivalry with me and immediately developed a positive outlook).

Next up I tried to forestall rebellion with policy changes - I've set my uplift project back further still by calling a temporary halt to native interference (come 2270 I'll be on my way again). That didn't do anything to suppress the ongoing strikes by the Vurxhac (the pacifists), but colonising the robot world and adding it to the same sector reset the 'rebellion counter'. With no change to their status, the Jibru calmed down on their own account, no longer being a new addition to the empire. Though one or two troublemakers have since started up again. My other race, the subterranean Adeek, seem content and I have more or less favourable relations with their government, which sometimes sends me gifts of minerals and only occasionally tries to destroy my surface settlements through cave-ins. My economy boomed with the strikes over and with my army support costs reduced by new tech.

Influence is on the rise due to another tech advance - sadly the scientist I bought with my first windfall got blown up, but at least I got an admiral promoted from the ranks to lead my major fleet.

My war with the Tracpocians just came to an abrupt end with my capture of a second planet. I now have a fairly large vassal state, good relations with the major member of the adjacent Star Compact, and one of the largest empires in planets and population for all that I'm only middling in fleet power and a little above in technology. Now I can get back to the business of uplifting and enlightening lesser civilisations and hoping they don't decide to rebel unlike all the others.

All of which feels a lot like a Paradox game and indeed like a strategy game doing what it ought to - allowing you to dig yourself out of holes with the correct play rather than punishing you all game long for going wrong with an early settler or whatever a la the Civ games.

 

[DaviddesJ]

All of which feels a lot like a Paradox game and indeed like a strategy game doing what it ought to - allowing you to dig yourself out of holes with the correct play rather than punishing you all game long for going wrong with an early settler or whatever a la the Civ games.

Usually a game that allows you to dig yourself out of any hole becomes way too easy when you stop making those early mistakes. If you can win despite them then you are going to dominate without them.

 

[PhilBowles]

Usually a game that allows you to dig yourself out of any hole becomes way too easy when you stop making those early mistakes.

This is also a feature of Paradox games, and frankly they don't offer much replayability on the strategic level as a result - their replayability comes from random events and (in CKII) wildly variable character interactions.

But the point is that they aren't self-correcting - you need to put in the effort to overcome them (either the result of your own mistakes or of random misfortune - though the latter doesn't seem to be much in evidence so far in the game).

 

[ls612]

Usually a game that allows you to dig yourself out of any hole becomes way too easy when you stop making those early mistakes. If you can win despite them then you are going to dominate without them.

And a game that doesn't let you recover from a mistake after playing for 30 hours or more on a map will rightly infuriate people.

 

[Acken]

Thats what usualy difficulty levels are for. See to each his own.

 

[PhilBowles]

And a game that doesn't let you recover from a mistake after playing for 30 hours or more on a map will rightly infuriate people.

It's not just infuriating, it's not really strategy - if you absolutely can't recover from bad play early, you're just being railroaded into following an optimal build/line of play. The game is about uncovering the one correct predefined strategy, not about playing strategically yourself, and as such it's more a complex puzzle game than a 'true' strategy game. Adaptation is an important part of strategy.

I'd say that Paradox games err on the too forgiving side (especially as they don't actually have different difficulty levels), but being able to identify, learn from and correct mistakes is an important part of any strategy game. Civ games err on the too punishing side in that regard, though of course it's not the case that you can never recover from poor early play (though it's probably harder in older iterations than in Civ V).

 

[DaviddesJ]

It's not just infuriating, it's not really strategy - if you absolutely can't recover from bad play early, you're just being railroaded into following an optimal build/line of play. The game is about uncovering the one correct predefined strategy, not about playing strategically yourself, and as such it's more a complex puzzle game than a 'true' strategy game. Adaptation is an important part of strategy.

I don't agree that good strategy is the same as "predetermined strategy". Even in a chess game, with no random elements, a player can't win with a predetermined strategy. You have to respond to what your opponent does. In a game with random elements, you also have to respond to what you find. For example, in Stellaris, you have restricted technology options, so it's simply not possible to pursue a completely predetermined strategy. Whether you can recover from bad play in the early game is a completely different question than whether the strategies are predetermined.

Without well-implemented difficulty levels, it's very hard to make a game enjoyable both to a relatively inexperienced player on their first game (when they will of course make many mistakes) and also to a very experienced player who has played many times and who will naturally avoid all of the mistakes that inexperienced player made.

 

[JohannaK]

I didn't know chess had difficulty levels.

 

[DaviddesJ]

Did anyone say that Chess has difficulty levels?

It did used to be popular to make chess programs for people to play against. (Less so these days when there are more computer game options.) Because a computer can play chess better than most humans, those programs do need difficulty levels. You can make the game so easy that even if a human makes a big mistake early on they can still win, or you can make it harder so that they have to play well the entire game to have a chance to win.

Whether you make the game forgiving of mistakes, or brutal in taking advantage of any mistakes, it's still a strategy game and different people will enjoy it different ways at different settings.

 

[JohannaK]

It was a joke. Since you used chess as an example and then claimed for difficulty levels.

 

[PhilBowles]

I don't agree that good strategy is the same as "predetermined strategy". Even in a chess game, with no random elements, a player can't win with a predetermined strategy.

You could if your opponent either didn't make any moves or moved in a predictable fashion. In single-player strategy games, he opposing factions are either insufficiently proactive - which appears to be the case of Stellaris, and is true of, e.g. Civ V - or have a single stereotyped way to disrupt you, such as by overwhelming you with stacks in past Civ games.

Civ is a particularly instructive example since as a game design it is highly noninteractive - victory is simply a rush to the finish and other players, human or AI, have few tools to interact with you or slow your progress other than warfare. In those types of game, there very definitely is an optimal way to counter the sole opposing strategy and to pursue your own to completion. Even where there are options, you're looking at a pool of 2-5 predetermined strategies to choose from, akin to elementary chess tuition where you'll follow one of several traditional sequences of moves until your opponent does something to force you to change tack. In computer strategy games, the bit where your opponent forces you to change tack doesn't really happen.

 

[Dell19]

In my second game I've taken 7 planets off three empires nearby in the first 60 years and now all my neighbours have a huge threat modifier which means that they tend to not like me. Does the threat modifier work like aggressive expansion in EU or is it linked to empire size?

In my last session a federation of 6 empires declared war and I was able to win in the end but that was partly because two empires are on the other side of me so I was able to defeat their navy before the others arrived. At present I don't think anyone would ally me so I'm a little concerned about what happens if the federation expands.

Large wars seem a bit frustrating currently as their fleet kept on running away whilst switching between a few systems. As I use warp gates my fleet essentially takes twice as long to get to the next planet unless I guess right or have an overwhelming advantage so that I can send fleets to multiple systems.

 

[DaviddesJ]

Civ is a particularly instructive example since as a game design it is highly noninteractive - victory is simply a rush to the finish and other players, human or AI, have few tools to interact with you or slow your progress other than warfare. In those types of game, there very definitely is an optimal way to counter the sole opposing strategy and to pursue your own to completion. Even where there are options, you're looking at a pool of 2-5 predetermined strategies to choose from, akin to elementary chess tuition where you'll follow one of several traditional sequences of moves until your opponent does something to force you to change tack. In computer strategy games, the bit where your opponent forces you to change tack doesn't really happen.

That doesn't really match my experience in Civ IV, which I played more than Civ V. If playing at high difficulty, you need to combine many advantages in order to succeed. So that means you may need to war on your opponent for profit, and you may need to trade technologies on favorable terms, and you may need to bribe opponents to keep them from attacking you, and you may need to make do without a key strategic resource if it doesn't appear in your territory, and so on. The games where you can just do one thing (or one of three things) from beginning to end the same way every time don't have much staying power. The best games are those where you do have to react to circumstances as they develop, differently in each game.

 

[Kozmos]

As someone else complained, sector AI is dumb. Unbidden spawned on the other end of the galaxy in my game. I have wormholes and displeased neighbours, guess this is gg.

 

[JohannaK]

did you allow redevelopment? That's never happened to me, I don't think. I still have way wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too many planets to really bother checking all of them, but my sectors are really rich in both resources and tech, that's what keeps me going on. I'm especially happy since I've been maintaining full mobilisation (my full forcelimit out of dock) for years and I still have +200 energy and +750 materials per month.

There's a problem though. I border a Fallen Empire I've been aggressively expanding around, rivaling and insulting. They have a -529 opinion of me and are indescribably pissed off, but they don't declare war. In other news, the Fanatic Spiritualist Fallen Empire is now Inferior to me. I have to check out if this is because they lost a planet to the Prethoryn or the other Xenophobe FE that I border is also Inferior. The one that hates me is Equivalent.

 

[Ailedhoo]

I have ended up in a war with the Tendra-Zuhn Enclave after rivalling them and they demanded I destroyed my colonies; hence they declared war on me when I told the militant isolationist fallen empire were to put it. They were scary but with my vassals I was scared not of the fungi empire and henceforth went to dine on mushroom soup.

Spoiler large image of ring-world :

Eternal Bastion came first to be taken over by the mighty fleets of the Ard-Rheam and its vassals; a ring-world has come under our control for the first time.

Spoiler Beacon of Infinity :

We then came to the Beacon of Infinity, the throne of the mighty fallen empire; it was a awe to behold and henceforth a duty to bring into our enlightened fold.

Spoiler in the end :

In the end the fallen empire's leader chose wisdom after our removal of their fleets; they surrendered and thus a entire imperium became one with our directory. SCIENCE!

Spoiler election :

My session ended with a election; the elites of the Ard-Rheam came to choose a new overseer to serve as director of the empire of SCIENCE with utmost prestige. Usually the former overseer would have left office by the death bed but Bhudlakras Iku'nane was able to contest for the position held. In the end a second term was not for Bhudlakras Iku'nane; Dluure Son, a gifted scientist, was granted the honour to be burdened with the mantle of leadership, guiding the Ard-Rheam in its great expansion of empire and mind.

Spoiler our empire :

Now SCIENCE has seen the Ard-Rheam grow more powerful, with the Ring-Worlds providing us needed energy to ensure we will not be in deficit again and that we can begin to expand our mighty fleets to match the rest; we are beacon of reason and logic which will continue to push the boundaries of SCIENCE for the benefit of all. Quocunque Jeceris Stabit!

 

[PhilBowles]

That doesn't really match my experience in Civ IV, which I played more than Civ V. If playing at high difficulty, you need to combine many advantages in order to succeed. So that means you may need to war on your opponent for profit, and you may need to trade technologies on favorable terms, and you may need to bribe opponents to keep them from attacking you, and you may need to make do without a key strategic resource if it doesn't appear in your territory, and so on. The games where you can just do one thing (or one of three things) from beginning to end the same way every time don't have much staying power. The best games are those where you do have to react to circumstances as they develop, differently in each game.

I think we're arguing at cross-purposes - I'd see that tech trading, bribery, and war as part of a single strategy that is always essentially the same way of dealing with opponents, and always works - much as a single opening in chess may involve moving a knight, a pawn and a bishop rather than just moving the same piece.

The point is there's basically a set formula of actions you follow to appease the AI and progress your own game and this doesn't much vary with AI behaviour. If the Civ IV AI were capable of winning peaceful victories, or if the game allowed interaction other than warfare to prevent you from doing that yourself (or indeed if the game AI realised that - unless the AI player has specific civics that can use it - gold is fundamentally not a valuable resource for anything other than bribing AI players that don't recognise that fact, and so refused to trade for it), you wouldn't be able to successfully adopt this approach - and it should differ from game to game (and opponent to opponent) what you needed to do to subdue or beat them, beyond "conquer the smaller ones and buy the bigger ones off".

I'm not sure why strategic resources are ever a limitation in Civ IV unless no civ you have contact with has access to them (which has happened occasionally to me on island maps), as they're freely tradeable and the game doesn't use Civ V's system of limited quanties - once you have a source of the resource you have an infinite supply, and trade deals last indefinitely.