What Video Games Have You Been Playing #11: I should go

[FriendlyFire]

You do get a lot of Ordnance points, for Flux cap and Vents (110 per Enforcer, Eagle gets 155 so a pair of enforcers has a total of 220)
Mounting AA guns seems to be a waste to be honest, this gives me an idea, I will add test if Thumpers would work as a general AA weapon
The other thing that I noticed is how compact Enforcers are, they can crowd together in a small area

Do you know why there is a cap on the number of ships I can take into battle and how I can increase this limit ?

 

[Lexicus]

Started up a fire game of Stellaris yesterday. Playing a Hive Mind for the first time ever (normally I play a machine empire or a spiritual monarchy). The patching has made planet management a lot easier although I imagine it's still quite a slog when you have a lot of planets toward the end of the game.

Anyway, been fighting wars with my "western" neighbor for a long time. During the first couple he had overwhelming numerical advantage, but his Wargoal was "humiliate" so I could surrender completely with no ill-effects (Hive Minds pops ignore happiness, and my empire appeared to be immune to the influence debuffs). So I avoided costly early fighting by ending the wars almost at the same time they started by surrendering.

Anyway, by the time of the third attack our fleets were ready, and we had established a defensive pact with our "eastern" neighbor (also a Hive Mind, coincidentally). The other Hive Mind had a more powerful neighbor to the "north" who was also hostile to both of us so I had ships operating to defend both my territory and theirs.

After the conclusion of the most recent war, I suppose we smashed the enemy so badly that I no longer had "mutual threat" diplo modifier with my "eastern" neighbor. I occupied most of the systems of my "western" neighbor (although without having made any claims there was no possibility of holding these systems after the war ended). In any case, my "eastern" hive mind neighbor became hostile and cancelled our defensive and non-aggression pacts. Oddly, their "northern" neighbor with whom I've fought about five wars is now much more friendly to me and has opened their borders. I can see that they're in a war with the other Hive Mind now, so I'm going to take the opportunity to avenge myself on those backstabbers (my former Hive Mind ally) and gobble up as much territory as I can get the Influence to claim. I won't feel that my empire is secure until I've taken significant territory from both the "eastern" and "western" neighbors, but I think the balance of power has shifted decisively toward me (my economy and research have really gotten going).

Looking like a fun weekend.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Some more fun breaking Mass Effect.

Spoiler :

I edited a savegame so that I saved both Ashley and Kaidan at Virmire, then added them to my squad during the Citadel coup. The game gets pretty confused.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

I'm also still/again playing Stellaris.
I accidentally went full Cultural Marxist/White Genocide in my latest game. When I looked at demographics I saw that my primary/founder species (Humans btw) was down to 12% of my empire's population and I didn't even conquer any planets. 15% are robots and the rest are immigrants, refugees or hybrid species.

 

[cardgame]

I want to do that in the name of Federation Building and Freedom and Equality, but every time I even think about managing that many different pops I want to kill them all in the name of racial purity UI and QoL simplicity. Being authoritarian is just too easy/tempting. Democracy needs buffs to be worth its many hassles.

 

[Lexicus]

I'm also still/again playing Stellaris.
I accidentally went full Cultural Marxist/White Genocide in my latest game. When I looked at demographics I saw that my primary/founder species (Humans btw) was down to 12% of my empire's population and I didn't even conquer any planets. 15% are robots and the rest are immigrants, refugees or hybrid species.

That's exactly what happened with my fanatic xenophile/spiritual monarchy. I actually had to piss off my xenophile faction (largest one I had) with a concerted effort to boost the population of my native species, which was benefiting from gene modding but more importantly the psionic ascension perks.

Really the problem is it's just a damn chore to even look through the species list with a Xenophile empire, all the hybrids and immigrants and refugees just spiral completely out of control until simply opening the species list causes the game to lag (x-post with cardgame lol)

It's unfortunate, I do like the way the current system works better overall but I kind of liked the way the old planet/pop system worked in terms of specializing pops and having total control over what each pop was doing. Back then it was straightforward: unlock gene or robomodding, then specialize your pops. I usually created a Leader subspecies with the extra Leader XP/level cap, then pops specialized in generating each of the different resources.

Now it's pretty much: just get rid of all the negative traits, get the general-purpose non-specialized positive traits, and repeat for each species in the empire.

Democracy needs buffs to be worth its many hassles.

Xenophile is still quite strong even without pop specialization because it does allow you to have max habitability on as many different planet types as possible (it also gives a diplo bonus which is very handy for me to have early since I like to snowball economically and only go to war when I've got a strong economy going).

I like playing as Hive Mind and Machine Empire for flavor purposes, it meshes with the "player exercises immortal god-like control over every activity of the civilization" much better than the non-gestalt consciousness empires. It also simplifies the species thing quite nicely, genocide is not discretionary when non-hive/machine pops literally just cannot survive in your empire.

FWIW I never do a federation. I know they patched it so that the strongest civ in the federation now leads it and controls the federation fleet rather than rotating as it was before, but I prefer to become a superpower rivaling the major federations on my own.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

You don't need micromanagement for a multi species empire. Jobs are automatically assigned to the most capable pop.
Egalitarian is better than Authoritarian imho. You get the same influence bonus if you don't deliberatley antagonize factions and specialist production boost is worth more than worker production boost.
Democracy is my biggest government balance bugbear. A paltry, unreliable 5% unity bonus compared to most leader agendas and a chance to lose your best only good sciecne officer.
Democracy is GARBAGE TRASH !

 

[Lexicus]

You don't need micromanagement for a multi species empire. Jobs are automatically assigned to the most capable pop.

Well, right: the game decides for you, it isn't possible to control this yourself. The real problem isn't so much having multiple species, although the various gene-modded subspecies can certainly get annoying. The real UI/QoL problem comes from interbred species.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Well, right: the game decides for you, it isn't possible to control this yourself. The real problem isn't so much having multiple species, although the various gene-modded subspecies can certainly get annoying. The real UI/QoL problem comes from interbred species.

That's not really a problem for me.
Usually hybrids just lose my main's negative traits and retain the poisitve ones.
Habitibality could theoretically be an issue, but by the time I have a large xeno population I already have a high enough food and consumer goods surplus that it doesn't matter at all.

 

[Lexicus]

Usually hybrids just lose my main's negative traits and retain the poisitve ones.

You're lucky mang, for me I felt like it was often the opposite.

But to be clear tho I'm not talking about the traits or the jobs or other mechanics issues there, I'm talking about the overpopulation of the species tab so that just opening it causes the game to lag and when it finally loads it takes 10 minutes to scroll through it all

 

[cardgame]

@FriendlyFire what are the chances? New update today

http://fractalsoftworks.com/2019/05/10/starsector-0-9-1a-release/

 

[Phrossack]

Thinking about the free Stellaris trial and then maybe downloading it. Any suggestions on where to get started, i.e. whether there are any extras I should download while they're on sale?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Some more fun breaking Mass Effect.

Spoiler :

I took Javik (I keep forgetting he's a DLC squadmate) to Eden Prime to get Javik out of stasis. Unfortunately, the cutscene where they first discover the stasis pod just broke and Shepard couldn't move afterwards.

Then I played through it normally, but waited until I was about to open the stasis pod to swap out the squadmates in Gibbed. Sadly, no funny glitches happened. Though seeing a second Javik come walking up made the "I am surrounded by primitives" comment kind of funny.

I should make a compilation video of all the glitches that happen because I put the game into situations that can't happen normally.

 

[Takhisis]

You need your own reddit feed or something.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Thinking about the free Stellaris trial and then maybe downloading it. Any suggestions on where to get started, i.e. whether there are any extras I should download while they're on sale?

This question always pops up on this forum when Stellaris is on sale.
I'll just repeat what I've said several times here:
If you buy it, Utopia is almost mandatory. The game would feel incomplete to me without Megastructures and Ascension paths.
Leviathans isn't as essential as Utopia but I still highly recommend it.
If you like the game you can get the other DLC during the next sale. There'll probably be another one in a few months when they release the DLC that they're working on right now.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Spoiler Mass Effect 3 spoilers :

I'm not really sure what I was expecting.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Pokemon Go (related rave)

I've increased my exercise regime which means more walking and biking. Pokemon Go is pretty close to an ideal exercise distraction and I like Pokemon so this one was a no-brainer for me to pick up again.

They added a bunch of features over the years including player-to-player battles, trades and gift exchanges. Unfortunately, the PVP stuff mostly requires you and your friends to be co-located so I can't fight or trade with my buddy on CFC who plays. Going back to what's new, the game now features a roster from at least several generations and may include the full pokedex at this point though I haven't checked.

The drawback with this game (especially on a bike) is that it can get distracting to try and catch all the Pokemon and spin all of the stops while you're working out. As I got more into the game, I found my exercises were more and more disrupted and I bought a bike mount for my phone to let me take hands off of the game. This helped a lot with the physical logistics of interacting with the game but I was still pretty distracted overall. So I bought this thing called a Go-tcha Ranger that connects to the game via bluetooth and automatically catches pokemon and spins pokestops.

There are some connectivity issues with the unit but overall it works really well and has allowed me to focus a lot more on the bike path so I don't run someone over.

One big letdown is that the AR graphics still suck so I keep them turned off.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Lol I actually saved a Jolteon and a Vaporeon to trade to you for like a rattata or something, only to find out I couldn't.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

More experimenting:

Spoiler Mass Effect 2 spoilers :

I read that the squadmates were split up to pre-Horizon and post-Horizon because of console limitations and that a lot of them had dialogue for the early missions.

So I decided to see what would happen if I brought the later squadmates along to Horizon. Also set the game so that both Kaidan and Ashley were alive. A few interesting things:

- The Illusive Man says that Ashley is on Horizon, but the cutscene shows Kaidan and he shows up at the end. (Wonder if it's diferent for a male Shepard?) Though this happens:

- Thane, Samara, and Legion don't have any dialogue. So if you bring a combination of those two, the dialogue doesn't work right. (Sadly, I was unable to see what happened with Kaishley because the Praetorian by the defense tower never showed up and the game softlocked.) If you bring an unvoiced squadmate and one of the other squadmates, the other squadmate does all the speaking
- Tali does have dialogue, though, and Kaishley recognizes her. If you bring both Garrus and Tali, they also recognize that. Perhaps when they initially decided to split the game, she was supposed to be one of the pre-Horizon squadmates? (Also, spawning a combat drone on top of Harbinger is hilarious because he keeps taunting you while flailing at the drone.)
- Also, the Illusive Man is an idiot. Couldn't he have waited until getting confirmation that Mordin had done something to protect against seeker swarms before luring them to the colony? When I first played the game, between this and the Collector Ship trap, I was convinced that he was working with the Reapers/Collectors.

EDIT:

Spoiler :

Huh, I managed to tweak the savegame so that Ashley 'remembers' romancing my female Shepard in ME1. Which isn't actually possible. I'm going to mess around a little more.

EDIT:

Spoiler :

I couldn't figure out how to change the romance in ME2, but in ME3 my FemShep managed to get the cabin romance scene for both Tali and Ashley. She either spoke with a male voice or was silent (subtitles worked), and some of the animations didn't line up right

 

[cardgame]

Age of Wonders III is a pretty cool game