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[Majestic7]

Any experiences about accelerating technology of sentient species? I got two civilizations with abduction stations sitting on them, one is atomic age and the other early space age. The trouble is, they are both fanatic xenophobes. If I lift them technologically, do I just create enemies for myself...? My civ is xenophile. Hmm, maybe I should just invade them to liberate them from their horrible governments.

[flabort]

PTW

I had a sentient species ascend to space-travel levels in the middle of my empire, but no, no experience accelerating them.

[Chronomancer]

PTW boys

In other news

http://i.imgur.com/bW9mZTK.png [EVENT Spoilers]

[thegoatgod_pan]

I've been playing this all day: major thoughts are
(1) the fleet power rating is a lie. I've reliably lost battles to fleets half my size.  I have no idea why. I'll tech up everything, enter the fight with tier III and tier IV weapons and get schooled. The closest I have to a combat a-ha moment is that smaller ships seem to eat bigger ships alive. I haven't had one succesful fight against the AI yet, they win everything.

(2) there needs to be more detail somehow, and I hope the mods fill it in. I really wish the species weren't just decorative. I wanted mushroom people to have different options than lizard people.

[Glloyd]

My first game has basically gone: "they see me purgin', they hatin', tryna stop me purgin' xenos."

I've been playing this all day: major thoughts are
(1) the fleet power rating is a lie. I've reliably lost battles to fleets half my size.  I have no idea why. I'll tech up everything, enter the fight with tier III and tier IV weapons and get schooled. The closest I have to a combat a-ha moment is that smaller ships seem to eat bigger ships alive. I haven't had one succesful fight against the AI yet, they win everything.

(2) there needs to be more detail somehow, and I hope the mods fill it in. I really wish the species weren't just decorative. I wanted mushroom people to have different options than lizard people.

Fleet power is really variable. It takes into account a bunch of factors, so while you may have good all round ships, your opponent may have glass cannons mounting fuckhuge guns. It's weird.

[Chiefwaffles]

Heh. I just had an interesting war. The aliens surrendered (under my terms for them to become my vassals) to me while we were in the middle of a fleet flight that I was losing. I guess I got enough of their ships down for them to consider surrender in the middle of the fight.

It was actually really fun. My ally was on the opposite side and waged a 2-front war. Not sure how much my ally did, but they definitely helped distract enemy fleets while I occupied one of their border worlds. I then made the mistake of sending my 850 power 1st Expeditionary Fleet into one of their core systems.
In comes a 2k power fleet. I retreat to the occupied system, send away my troop transports and bring in my 400 power 1st Response fleet. Luckily the 1st Response Fleet arrives just in time as the enemy 2k power fleet begins engaging the 1st Expeditionary Fleet.

Battle actually went fairly well, considering the odds. I managed to put a serious dink in their fleet (though admittedly I lost something like half of my Expeditionary Fleet.) I then sent my Homeland Defense Fleet from my Homeworld to my territory's frontline, where I regrouped my Expeditionary and Response fleets.
I then merged the three fleets along with some new ships from my Homeworld.

My combined 1st Emergency Fleet was still fairly underpowered. 1k power compared to what I think was a 1.8k power enemy fleet. I consolidated the rest of my fleets into the 2nd Emergency Fleet which was placed in my territory's frontline. (The map here is actually pretty interesting - both of us use hyperlanes, and there's only one hyperlane to each others' territory. On my side I have a basic Defense platform and Frontier Outpost. That's what I referred to as my territory's frontline.)

The 1st Emergency Fleet then was sent to raid one of the enemy's core planets. I managed to destroy a couple new destroyers of theirs along with their shipyard. Managed to book it before the enemy's 1.8k fleet arrived. After this I then finally combined the 1st and 2nd Emergency Fleets into the 1st Emergency Fleet.
Hoping to put a serious dent into the enemy's fleet while I created a new fleet back in my territory, I sent the 1st Emergency Fleet back into enemy territory, where they engaged the 1.8k power enemy fleet for the last time.

Battle wasn't going too well - a good third or so of my fleet was destroyed with way less enemy casualties. But in the middle of it the enemy accepted my terms and became my vassal.

That was actually really fun. Even if it isn't practical, I do love naming and organizing different fleets. (Prior to the fighting, I had 3 main fleets - Expeditionary, Homeland Defense, and Response. Response was a small fleet originally placed at the frontline before the war to act as a first response unit. The least powerful fleet. Homeland Defense is pretty self explanatory - a fairly standard fleet that more or less just sat at my homeworld for general territory defense. Wasn't powerful, per say, but the intent was to do serious damage and hold out until the Expeditionary Fleet arrived. The Expeditionary Fleet was basically my main one. Most powerful, most ships, was the invasion fleet, etc.)

[tryrar]

Well, I've discovered the hard way not getting deflector tech is suffering . Seriously, they add WAY more survivability than simply adding a bunch of armor does.

[EnigmaticHat]

I just hit a dead end: the game crashes.  Based on time.  I load my save, it crashes predictably at a certain time.

Welp... I was still having a lot of fun with that save

Edit: Went back to the furthest back autosave, played up to the point where it "should" crash.  Doesn't crash.  So its immersion breaking, and confusing because I won't be able to remember what did and didn't happen.  But I still have my save.  Submitted a ticket to Paradox including the .sav, hopefully they can figure it out.

[Majestic7]

I've been playing this all day: major thoughts are
(1) the fleet power rating is a lie. I've reliably lost battles to fleets half my size.  I have no idea why. I'll tech up everything, enter the fight with tier III and tier IV weapons and get schooled. The closest I have to a combat a-ha moment is that smaller ships seem to eat bigger ships alive. I haven't had one succesful fight against the AI yet, they win everything.

If you are using only missiles, enemies with point defense will kill you. The same with lazors versus shields or mass drivers against high evasion enemies. Maybe something like that? Alternatively, they had weapons that sliced your defenses, like lazors against armor.

[Willfor]

So I got myself roflstomped in my first game. The AI out scienced me, and then outgunned me. And when I went into observer mode after complete surrender, it turned out that there was more than enough space for us to coexist, I only /felt/ boxed in. Oh well, will learn for next time.

Since I'm gonna be gone all day tomorrow that's it for me playing until Wednesday.

[Orange Wizard]

Apparently science is important. Who'd have thought.

So I got a couple of science lab techs and spammed them across my planets. Used all my influence with reshaping sectors to build labs too.
Now I'm shooting ahead; the fungi who rekt me last time are falling behind so I'm getting ready to properly invade and annex all their planets.

Purging aliens is fun. Thanks to ethics divergence some of my pops have started abandoning their xenophobic ways; I might have to purge them too.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

So I really don't know if I'm playing this game wrong or if it's just broken by design.
I've played to what I consider the mid point twice now and just find myself up against a wall. I seem to always be wedged between a couple empires with nowhere to go. I can't build any frontier outposts because of the influence cost, I can't colonise anymore planets and I can't conquer rival planets since I'll just go over my planet support limit.

Sure I could go to war with a couple nations and vassalise them but it doesn't seem have any benefits. I can't do anything with their land, they don't pay me anything and I can't get any treaties going since they hate my guts. There seem to be either no way or no incentive to expand at that point, leaving me to do nothing but sit on the fastest speed and tech up.

One thing I find extremely backwards is that the game seems to actively punish you for colonising in the same system. I guess you're meant to spread your colonies out so you have a greater coverage of planets to build mining/research facilities on. I imagine a simple fix there would change the world limit to system limit which would also make terraforming a much more viable alternative.

I've been playing this all day: major thoughts are
(1) the fleet power rating is a lie. I've reliably lost battles to fleets half my size.  I have no idea why. I'll tech up everything, enter the fight with tier III and tier IV weapons and get schooled. The closest I have to a combat a-ha moment is that smaller ships seem to eat bigger ships alive. I haven't had one succesful fight against the AI yet, they win everything.

If you are using only missiles, enemies with point defense will kill you. The same with lazors versus shields or mass drivers against high evasion enemies. Maybe something like that? Alternatively, they had weapons that sliced your defenses, like lazors against armor.

It's part of the scissor-paper-rock balance they've got going on. On paper it doesn't seem too bad, it gives crafty nations that specialises their weapons against their enemies a better chance. However the system quickly breaks apart when you're reminded that there's no espionage system and figuring out what weapons an enemy has is tedium. This results in combat being a crap-shot of whether you or the enemy has the magically combo.

[Glloyd]

You're ight about the planet limit. It bothers me that putting 20 planets into a sector has no negative effects for the sector that I can see, but I can't have 6 planets under my direct control without losin 10% of y energy.

Espionage is desperately needed, as is a less convoluted diplomacy system. I can't figure out asking for peace, and the only way I know how to figure out who's at war with me seems way to obtuse for it to be the intended method.

[Majestic7]

You can use canaries; send a single corvette to pick a fight with the enemy to learn what weapons they are using and tickle their defenses. Of course, you are not guaranteed to have access to all weapon techs, sometimes life just sucks like that.

Regarding boxing in, there are different spawning setting for civilizations. Random, cluster and close or something like that. Cluster is the default setting; meaning civilizations start in clusters of a few species/empires. You could try the random spawning for more early breathing room. I think they wanted to ensure  early conflict with the cluster default spawning or something.

The game certainly needs more political stuff, both internal and external, but hopefully we will get that in the future.

[forsaken1111]

You're ight about the planet limit. It bothers me that putting 20 planets into a sector has no negative effects for the sector that I can see, but I can't have 6 planets under my direct control without losin 10% of y energy.

You can mod the planet limit I believe, but i'd think it would be pretty tedious paging through 20+ planets upgrading buildings yourself like some kind of real-estate developer when you should be running an empire