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[TempAcc]

I just invaded and eslaved the neighboring pacifist bird people in my new game. Got lucky by finding derelict shipyards and got me 6 raider ships early on, which gave me a significant advantage over an otherwise equivalent empire. Got me 3 planets that I'll be using as slave mining/energy production fodder. They do have a faction of identured workers who want to be emancipated though, bluh, they should be happy I didn't just outright purge them like the tribal serpentoid people who happened to share a planet with them.

Also, thus far, forming alliances hasn't been terribly difficult for me. It usualy just takes another empire with non completely contrary ethics, a shared rival and an embassy.

[Majestic7]

SotS species have racial weapon preferences, they are just hidden in the tech tree so that certain species have a greater percentile chance to get certain technology. Unlike in Stellaris, these preferences are hard-coded as well. In Stellaris, at least our ethos choices change the tech chances. I just wish we could change ethos due to cataclysmic events, like losing a major war turning the people and government xenophobic or militarist. I think it would be a nice touch, seeing how the things happening in the galaxy change nations. Likewise, dismantling xenophobic militarists in a bad way should be able to turn them peaceful (think Japan or Germany post-WW2).

[Mookzen]

Is it true that the AI ignores costs and capacity restrictions ?

[TempAcc]

Well, in all honesty, there was a rather odd occurence in my latest war. I assaulted the enemy main military orbital base thing, destroyed it, then recalled the armada for repairs. Once I came back, there was a very low health orbital base at the exact same spot, completely built, but with very low health.

AFAIK, bases only appear on the map and become functional when they're fully built, so I'm not sure what happened there.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Starports do appear on the map as they're being built and so can be destroyed by the enemy. They start off at 0 HP and slowly increase, so the sooner you catch them the sooner they go down. I found this out by immediately rebuilding a starport that was just destroyed. The enemy's ships turned around and destroyed that too, wasting me a whole bunch of minerials.

Then again, if we're talking about military bases here, with the various modules and FTL inhibitor and what not, then I have no idea what happened. I've never caught the enemy in the process of building them, so I'm not sure what happened there.

[TempAcc]

Nah, it was a starport. I had no idea they show up immediately with a tiny bit of health since I never had to rebuild one and everytime I build one I always do it from another screen since I'm usualy micro'ing science ships and other stuff, so I never actualy noticed :v

[Sean Mirrsen]

SotS species have racial weapon preferences, they are just hidden in the tech tree so that certain species have a greater percentile chance to get certain technology. Unlike in Stellaris, these preferences are hard-coded as well. In Stellaris, at least our ethos choices change the tech chances.

Oh, they do of course, but not quite to that extent. Everyone in SotS starts with basic energy, projectile, and missile weapons - the additional random technologies merely nudge you towards particular paths. There is no race that can't outfit a cruiser with a mix of lasers, gauss guns, and missiles from the get-go, and straight-up upgrades of basic varieties are nigh guaranteed to everyone as well. You basically choose what weapons to equip based on a mix of personal preference and random chance (I really like sniper cannons, for instance, so I'll equip them if I get them even if I'm effing Liir), and only change in reaction to what weapons and defenses your enemies start fielding. I think I'd rather have liked if weapon selection in Stellaris was a bit more like that.

Then again, SotS goes into far more detail in its combat mechanics, so perhaps that level of differentiation is just not feasible in Stellaris's model.

[lastverb]

Yes, spaceports appear with 0 hp as soon as you order construction. Fun fact: sector AI builds spaceport on sieged worlds infinite number of times (as long as it has minerals). Of course you are the one getting "spaceport under attack" message.

bump: Did anyone managed to find a way to mod out a hard penalty to diplomatic options for difficulty (-25/-50)? Thats additional 250-500 opinion needed. Making any diplomacy options on 'impossible' trully impossible.

[sprinkled chariot]

SotS species have racial weapon preferences, they are just hidden in the tech tree so that certain species have a greater percentile chance to get certain technology. Unlike in Stellaris, these preferences are hard-coded as well. In Stellaris, at least our ethos choices change the tech chances.

Oh, they do of course, but not quite to that extent. Everyone in SotS starts with basic energy, projectile, and missile weapons - the additional random technologies merely nudge you towards particular paths. There is no race that can't outfit a cruiser with a mix of lasers, gauss guns, and missiles from the get-go, and straight-up upgrades of basic varieties are nigh guaranteed to everyone as well. You basically choose what weapons to equip based on a mix of personal preference and random chance (I really like sniper cannons, for instance, so I'll equip them if I get them even if I'm effing Liir), and only change in reaction to what weapons and defenses your enemies start fielding. I think I'd rather have liked if weapon selection in Stellaris was a bit more like that.

Then again, SotS goes into far more detail in its combat mechanics, so perhaps that level of differentiation is just not feasible in Stellaris's model.

Quite possibly it is just matter of couple dlcs here and there

[Sirus]

Yes, spaceports appear with 0 hp as soon as you order construction. Fun fact: sector AI builds spaceport on sieged worlds infinite number of times (as long as it has minerals). Of course you are the one getting "spaceport under attack" message.

bump: Did anyone managed to find a way to mod out a hard penalty to diplomatic options for difficulty (-25/-50)? Thats additional 250-500 opinion needed. Making any diplomacy options on 'impossible' trully impossible.

Hold on, what? My impression so far is that I'm the one who needs to build the spaceports and that I'm the one responsible for upgrading them. None of my sectors have been doing it on their own.

On a semi-related question, just how is one supposed to build up a large surplus of minerals? It's easy to build up EC since planetary power generators produce obscene amounts of it and almost nothing uses it except as upkeep (Paradox may want to look at Eternal Space for ideas - some additional abilities that cost EC to use could be cool). Mineral mining, on the other hand, just seems to constantly lag behind. Even when your mineral production is much higher per month than your EC, you need minerals for everything.

Want to build mining stations? You need minerals. Need more EC to build more mining stations? You need minerals. You need to fight some space amoebas to gain access to a new system which hopefully has more resources? You need minerals. And then once the amoebas are gone you need to either colonize a planet or build an outpost station, either way, you need minerals.

I'm probably playing this all wrong, but for me it's a constant struggle to put just enough minerals together to keep moving forward, at least if you want to stay in the tech race or not run into an EC deficit. I have a fairly good-sized empire, with dominion over a fairly large swath of space and 7 planets (all but one of which are within sectors), yet my mineral production is somewhere in the 50s. I just lost most of my fleet against a much smaller empire (that somehow is more advanced than me despite having just one planet and a presence in only 4 systems, none of which have much in the way of research bonuses), and now I can't possibly rebuild it before those damn space slugs manage to wreck my infrastructure and my vassal.

[LoSboccacc]

From a previous link on this thread: Get two planets in a second sector, set to mineral prod, tick allow redevelopment and untick respect tiles. Dump minerals on them until they stop adsorbing and finish growing

[Knave]

Yes, spaceports appear with 0 hp as soon as you order construction. Fun fact: sector AI builds spaceport on sieged worlds infinite number of times (as long as it has minerals). Of course you are the one getting "spaceport under attack" message.

bump: Did anyone managed to find a way to mod out a hard penalty to diplomatic options for difficulty (-25/-50)? Thats additional 250-500 opinion needed. Making any diplomacy options on 'impossible' trully impossible.

Hold on, what? My impression so far is that I'm the one who needs to build the spaceports and that I'm the one responsible for upgrading them. None of my sectors have been doing it on their own.

On a semi-related question, just how is one supposed to build up a large surplus of minerals? It's easy to build up EC since planetary power generators produce obscene amounts of it and almost nothing uses it except as upkeep (Paradox may want to look at Eternal Space for ideas - some additional abilities that cost EC to use could be cool). Mineral mining, on the other hand, just seems to constantly lag behind. Even when your mineral production is much higher per month than your EC, you need minerals for everything.

Want to build mining stations? You need minerals. Need more EC to build more mining stations? You need minerals. You need to fight some space amoebas to gain access to a new system which hopefully has more resources? You need minerals. And then once the amoebas are gone you need to either colonize a planet or build an outpost station, either way, you need minerals.

I'm probably playing this all wrong, but for me it's a constant struggle to put just enough minerals together to keep moving forward, at least if you want to stay in the tech race or not run into an EC deficit. I have a fairly good-sized empire, with dominion over a fairly large swath of space and 7 planets (all but one of which are within sectors), yet my mineral production is somewhere in the 50s. I just lost most of my fleet against a much smaller empire (that somehow is more advanced than me despite having just one planet and a presence in only 4 systems, none of which have much in the way of research bonuses), and now I can't possibly rebuild it before those damn space slugs manage to wreck my infrastructure and my vassal.

See, in my playthrough, I'm having the exact opposite problem. Swimming in minerals, but constantly finding myself dip into negative monthly EC. Maybe it's just our galaxy's layout

[TempAcc]

Yea, it really depends on the galaxy's layout and were you start on. I've had campaigns in which I have tons of minerals from the get go but little non planerary EC sources, and the other way around too. Hell, I've had starts in which I'm starved for both. Its not much of a big deal in the long run if you make some dedicated mining/energy generating planets though, and EC deficiencies can be made up for using the special mineral energy plant things if you happen to find sources of it.

There's also a questline involving ancient mining drones which leads you to mineral rich places across the galaxy.

[Ludorum Rex]

I'm probably playing this all wrong, but for me it's a constant struggle to put just enough minerals together to keep moving forward, at least if you want to stay in the tech race or not run into an EC deficit. I have a fairly good-sized empire, with dominion over a fairly large swath of space and 7 planets (all but one of which are within sectors), yet my mineral production is somewhere in the 50s. I just lost most of my fleet against a much smaller empire (that somehow is more advanced than me despite having just one planet and a presence in only 4 systems, none of which have much in the way of research bonuses), and now I can't possibly rebuild it before those damn space slugs manage to wreck my infrastructure and my vassal.

The cost of research scales with the size of your empire, so you don't need to expand to keep up, and aggressively expanding can actually cause you to lag behind in tech. (which might explain how the small empire is ahead of you in tech). I agree that minerals are very often the limiting factor to expansion - but energy credits can easily become an issue as well, as they drain fast during war. You can create a very strong power base from just a few good systems. You definitely want to be careful not to overextend with a lot of crappy colonies if you don't have the fleet to defend them.

[dennislp3]

I specialize planets...research worlds, mineral worlds, energy worlds. This helps a ton...running power hub which gives +10% more energy on a planet has a much more noticeable effect on a planet producing 50 energy vs a world producing 10 energy credits. Throw in edicts and other buffs and you have yourself a huge difference. This also helps when making sectors...for instance I can split off two research worlds with an energy world into one sector...the energy world powers the research worlds (which in a sector need their own power source to operate) and simply read the reward of the massive research from 2 worlds.

Using this method I have found that I am able to keep up with even races that are heavily specialized in research and my resources dont seem to run out ever unless I go on a massive spending spree of some sort. This also allows you to expand rapidly without the population penalties becoming too large as long as you make enough specialized research worlds.