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[Chiefwaffles]

The endgame crises have really been poor in my games so far. Admittedly, though, somehow this is the first time I've encountered them. (Two 1.5 games - Scourge then Unbidden.)

The unbidden just did very little. They stayed in their area of space (separated from my border by a small unclaimed gap) and occasionally sent lone 50k stacks into a random empire. They did expand, but they never got worse. Their territory just covered a few more stars than at their peak versus when they spawned in. The AI empires could easily crush the stacks and so could I.
Hell, it's been a remarkably long time since they arrived and they're still here. Even though they're right by my borders, they haven't expanded at all recently and the AI doesn't know how to kill them. Maybe every 15 years or so I get a 50k stack wandering in and out of my territory, which I usually just promptly exterminate with my 160k fleet.

The scourge was worse. They never did anything but perpetually bombard worlds. Their troops and constructors stayed in one spot for the whole time they were there. They literally have zero territory over the course of their tiny invasion and when they spawned, their individual fleets were remarkably more powerful than my entire armada. But since they just bombarded the same worlds without doing anything else, it never was a problem.



It feels like the unbidden thing is just a disappointing behavior but the scourge is a bug.
I was expecting an endgame crisis to be a bit more of an actual crisis. Like an empire-destroying galaxy-consuming ever-expanding blob. Not just a couple of separated 50k stacks of ships.

[TempAcc]

The ai in general just seems really terrible atm. The awakened empire I brought down literally kept huge stacks of armies in orbit around its capital while the main fleet roamed around doing... Something? I just went to their capital and murdered all their armies and bombed their world while they just went somewhere else.

I guess I also had a huge number of tiny fleets going into their territory at the same time (which were newly built ships trying to join up with the main fleet), which kinda made the main enemy fleet keep warping from system to system to try and kill them, but its still kinda silly to see a 160k stack roaming around to murder single battleships and corvettes while my own two 80k fleets fuckmurder their most important worlds.

[JimboM12]

The AI for unbidden so far are pretty decent, they'll spread their doomstack fleets out to wipe out multiple colonies and if you try to suicide rush their portal, they'll recall all of them to come defend it. The only reason I didn't smash it initially was because it spawned in the center of a hostile rival who closed their borders to me so I could not reach the Unbidden and to make matters worse they put up just good enough of a fight to buy the unbidden time to spread before my Grand Imperial Fleet (at a whopping 100k at its most powerful) could crush them before it started.

On a cooler note, habitats are fucking awesome. System with only one kinda small planet and a few useless dead worlds? Now you can build a small planet in the same system for the (relatively cheap) price of 5k minerals and 200 influence. And you don't need to research any of the mega construct things, only fortresses and defense platforms I think. No upkeep to maintain other than what you need for colonies. Energy focused habitats are the shiznit.

Also, food being a global resource now is one of the best changes in any game ever.

[Baffler]

The AI for unbidden so far are pretty decent, they'll spread their doomstack fleets out to wipe out multiple colonies and if you try to suicide rush their portal, they'll recall all of them to come defend it. The only reason I didn't smash it initially was because it spawned in the center of a hostile rival who closed their borders to me so I could not reach the Unbidden and to make matters worse they put up just good enough of a fight to buy the unbidden time to spread before my Grand Imperial Fleet (at a whopping 100k at its most powerful) could crush them before it started.

On a cooler note, habitats are fucking awesome. System with only one kinda small planet and a few useless dead worlds? Now you can build a small planet in the same system for the (relatively cheap) price of 5k minerals and 200 influence. And you don't need to research any of the mega construct things, only fortresses and defense platforms I think. No upkeep to maintain other than what you need for colonies. Energy focused habitats are the shiznit.

Also, food being a global resource now is one of the best changes in any game ever.

Orbital habitats are 100% habitable for everyone too, so you can populate them with whoever you please. My only complaint is that they can't have spaceports, and you have to build and launch a colony ship to populate them. Like, I get that the game wouldn't be able to effectively pick a starting pop to put there, especially for a multispecies empire, but it should be considered owned by whatever empire built it, and have pops be able to migrate/be resettled to it after it's been built.

[Sirus]

Folks have been saying that sectors are still broken.

I dunno, but mine seem to be working okay. Maybe because I built much of their infrastructure before declaring them but as of now they're all contributing a decent amount to the empire's coffers while continuing their own improvements. One of my sectors even colonized a world within their borders and are now allocating minerals towards getting another colony ship built.

[Chiefwaffles]

My sectors focus a bit too much on food with the balance focus, but that's fine. Hell, it even lets me skip farms on my core planets and get large growth boosts.
They colonize pretty frequently, actually build stuff, and are otherwise pretty smart. I feel safe giving newly conquered or settled worlds to a sector now.

[Baffler]

They don't seem to respect their focuses very well though. I had a sector with three inhabited systems, one planet each, and two of them had titanic life on them and one had an anomalous magnetic field. Okay, neat. I called it the Titan Expanse, included a few uninhabited systems for resources, and set it to research focus. It soon thereafter played host to the most productive mining operations in the whole empire. I think maybe it's a bit too zealous for my purpose with the 'respect tile resources;' but I don't really want it to have the sector on life support either and I don't know how smart it is about remaining self-sufficient.

[Descan]

I feel like they should make sectors both more autonomous, yet also offer a bit more control. I'd love to have governors decoupled from the leader pool; The player can't generate a governor but every planet and sector has a toned-down CK2-style leader, with a couple traits based on their planet/sector focus, who contends with other governors and the player (asking for one system or another to be put under their control, planet governors asking to be made into a sector, vying with each other and the player for minerals/energy, trying to get more autonomy or even forcing a demand upon you to allow them independence or see civil war (with an auto-generated fleet based on your fleet power and the sectors income, with the in-universe justification that they've been syphoning off minerals to create a secret fleet))

Expanding on that, I'd like each sector to be a faction in my empire, lead by the governor, who need to be appeased the same as a faction (though with different bonuses, like getting more minerals out of them or energy/research, or preventing civil war and governors colluding to a la a CK2 independence faction) and with ethics based on the dominant ethics of that portion of your empire (and those ethics being the governing ethics of the new empire if they do become independent) I'm not sure that each planet should be a faction though... That would quickly fill up the faction list.

It always felt weird to have half my empire leaderless because I have 3 or 4 science vessels (which is a small number even then) 2 fleets and an army, plus the 3 reserachers. That only leaves you with 1 or even 0 governors from the beginning, and only a small number within a decade or two.

Obviously this idea is most suited to democracies, and least suited to dictatorships, but it can probably be molded a tad or just be a Democracy-only system (seems a lot of work to just use for one government type, at least without some corresponding systems for the others, though hell, even Hive Minds can use it, if they're of the Zerg/Bugger variety where there are multiple Queens/Cerebrates each controlling a portion of the species and sometimes fighting or vying with each other)

As for the bit more control, I was just thinking of like, allowing the expenditure of influene to force a building to be built on a slot. I.E. if you really want them to build that clone vats, or the mineral/energy production multiplier building, or when the AI simply refuses to upgrade that spaceport or the planetary HQ, etc.

[EnigmaticHat]

Can I put an idea out there?  Sectors were clearly originally meant to be like duchies in CK2, where the entire thing can be appeased and managed as one unit, but the trade off is that it will get unhappy/rebel as a unit as well.  However, there's one big problem with this: you can change sectors.  Like you can just take planets out of a sector and put them in another one.  Kinda breaks that whole concept.

So like, there should be a grace period where sectors are malleable, but after that there should be some kind of consequence for removing systems.  Like either people get mad at you, or the sector has a bonus that builds up over time and you lose that bonus.

[Chiefwaffles]

Democracies should basically just elect all governors automatically with zero influence by the player. It could be influenced by a faction system - a stronger Human First part will likely draw support for a Human First candidate or general xenophobic candidates. So in exchange for being able to not worry about governors and not having them count against your leader count, you have to put control of them into the game?

More complex systems could be developed from this point, but it feels like a good starting step possible to implement within the current mechanics. I just want any part of the game after the start to be more than "wait for [technologies/ships/buildings/megastructures] until you can expand]".


Hell, in my current playthrough I've been trying to convert my Xenophile Materialist Egalitarian oligarchy into a Xenophobic Authoritative monarchy. But even with reading the wiki and specifically changing my empire to promote growth of the xenophobe and authoritarian ethics, it's nearly impossible to convert my populations. I had to gene mod species for specific traits, suppress and promote factions, remove as many +government ethics attraction modifiers and add as many +ethics divergence modifiers as possible, and yet I still couldn't do anything. It doesn't help that I can't embrace factions (moving your official ethics towards their ethic) without enough support, and without the official ethics, I can't do many of the things that would garner support for the factions.
Xenophobe ethics attraction increases with xeno slaves, but you can't enslave aliens without the xenophobe ethic.
The "one ethic per pop" is probably a culprit here. It makes ethics a zero-sum game, so to increase Xenophobe support in your empire, the support for another ethics has to decrease, which is hard when you can't manage the attractions of every ethic easily.

At this point, my biggest annoyance with Stellaris is the ethics gateways the game's full of. Why do I have to be militarist to bomb planets more? Why does the government have to have an official stance on hating aliens for me to enslave them? You should be able to do any action, and the biggest blocker should be your people. Sure, you can Armageddon bomb that planet as a pacifist, but that may just cause riots in your city. Sure, you could enslave aliens, but your xenophiles will really not appreciate that. But instead, it's this gamey binary mechanic.

[forsaken1111]

They don't seem to respect their focuses very well though. I had a sector with three inhabited systems, one planet each, and two of them had titanic life on them and one had an anomalous magnetic field. Okay, neat. I called it the Titan Expanse, included a few uninhabited systems for resources, and set it to research focus. It soon thereafter played host to the most productive mining operations in the whole empire. I think maybe it's a bit too zealous for my purpose with the 'respect tile resources;' but I don't really want it to have the sector on life support either and I don't know how smart it is about remaining self-sufficient.

Did you have it set to respect tile resources? Was redevelopment enabled?

So long as I don't tell mine to respect tile resources they seem to appropriately work towards the focus I select.

[TempAcc]

Converting pops seems really, really slow overall. Even using the orbital mind control laser spaceport module doesn't seem to do much to make it much faster.

The AI for unbidden so far are pretty decent, they'll spread their doomstack fleets out to wipe out multiple colonies and if you try to suicide rush their portal, they'll recall all of them to come defend it. The only reason I didn't smash it initially was because it spawned in the center of a hostile rival who closed their borders to me so I could not reach the Unbidden and to make matters worse they put up just good enough of a fight to buy the unbidden time to spread before my Grand Imperial Fleet (at a whopping 100k at its most powerful) could crush them before it started.

A good way to make the AI flip out is to send a steady stream of small disposable fleets directly into the portal system. This will cause their doomstacks to keep warping from system to system and keep them from gaining territory as they repeately try to murder your tiny corvettes. This way you can stop their expansion while sending your own doomstack to intercept theirs while they warp around, stopping them from joining up to fight you.

[JimboM12]

A good way to make the AI flip out is to send a steady stream of small disposable fleets directly into the portal system. This will cause their doomstacks to keep warping from system to system and keep them from gaining territory as they repeately try to murder your tiny corvettes. This way you can stop their expansion while sending your own doomstack to intercept theirs while they warp around, stopping them from joining up to fight you.

That's a good idea. I just led a Federation fleet comprised of 4 races (including a awakened empire) towards the portal in a giant epic battle we narrowly won.

[Greenbane]

Hey guys, I have this concept for a pseudo-reptilian species which I can't quite replicate with vanilla traits. It's somewhat related to the Syncretic Evolution civic, but instead of starting with a randomly generated subservient partner species, it'd have to be two with fixed definitions, for a total of three species within the nation.

Would it be possible to mod in a special trait for that, detailing the specific characteristics of these subspecies, or would I need to do it through events?

[umiman]

Are you trying to create the lizardmen?