Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Urist McScoopbeard]

IMO, the AI was never competitive in Stellaris. One of the easier games compared to EUIV and HOI3 with the right challenges/mods/goals. CKII is possibly easier given the large number of whacky and fun exploits, but they are by their nature: whacky and fun.

EDIT: part of it is the way the game scales. A.) The player is generally much better at growing and keeping apace than the AI is, generally you're only in real trouble of potentially losing in the very early game. B.) Sectors are not only broken, but the failed/unfinished implementation of somewhat different idea.

If you guys, remember one of the things that was talked about when Stellaris was in development/first released was how Paradox kind of wanted to make it a two-part game. Part one was to be purely expansion. Part two was supposed more like what we're used to in EUIV and CKII, an ever-shifting array of alliances, rebellions, and random events over the galactic geography. If it was me designing the game, I would have made sectors more like how areas, regions, and culture work in EUIV. You colonize a few planets and suddenly it becomes a relatively set map tile that then functions autonomously. large swathes of sectors could be razed to change the galactic geography, but the map always fills back up. With independents gradually consuming the uncolonized space. I kind of think something like that might have been the original plan, but they just stopped 1% into the process.

Other than that, the lack of interesting geographical focal points really deadens the game, there's not much pressure to expand to a certain place as long as you are expanding. In EUIV you WANT Constantinople or those juicy developed provinces or anything that gives you a trading or military bonus (all of which happen to be pretty hard to attack and sometimes defend.) Speaking of trading... I thought dynamic trade routes and a more in-depth system in general would have ben a no brainer. What we have now is so... Civ V. Finally of course, I do kind of wish the warfare was abstracted. It's pretty unfun to manage fleets or even manually update designs. The rock-paper-scissors of the weapon types is nice, but it would have been cool to see dynamically growing unit pips. Something of a cross between EUIV and HOI4 would have been awesome (with the ability to micro the important bits or climactic battles.) Of course, the fact that there is really only one winning strategy kind of blows in a strategy game.

[Cruxador]

If you guys, remember one of the things that was talked about when Stellaris was in development/first released was how Paradox kind of wanted to make it a two-part game. Part one was to be purely expansion. Part two was supposed more like what we're used to in EUIV and CKII, an ever-shifting array of alliances, rebellions, and random events over the galactic geography. If it was me designing the game, I would have made sectors more like how areas, regions, and culture work in EUIV. You colonize a few planets and suddenly it becomes a relatively set map tile that then functions autonomously. large swathes of sectors could be razed to change the galactic geography, but the map always fills back up. With independents gradually consuming the uncolonized space. I kind of think something like that might have been the original plan, but they just stopped 1% into the process.

They kind of planned to do that but the initial team wasn't very skilled since they didn't expect Stellaris to be particularly successful for some reason, and they didn't properly realize the idea. Since then, sectors have been diminished instead of expanded upon, perhaps in part because the playerbase in general hates them.

[Descan]

I'm still in that portion of my game, eager to see how it evolves into wartime (I'm trying barbaric despoilers). Fun fact, you can't abduct primitives with the raiding stance since you can't bombard them. I'm disappointed, but I can understand how having what would essentially be a population farm early-game would be broken.

Primitives in what way? Pre-sentients that you can uplift? I'm only asking because I've abducted pops from a Renaissance planet as a Barbaric Despoiler just fine. _{The fact that they actually grow to fill out the missing pops is great. The fact that all of their species, regardless of where they are, get stellar shock once you take over their planet? Not so great.}

That's actually literally what I was talking about. It wouldn't let me bombard atomic age civs.

That was hit or miss for me; If they had an orbital station, I could attack it and make the prim-civ hostile that way. Then bombardment is simple.

Without that, I've had right-clicking on a planet both ask me to confirm that I want to bombard them and turn them hostile, AND had it happen that my ships would just park in orbit and no hostilities commenced.

I fixed the latter by sending a lone army and then retreating as soon as I could, so I could then bombard it into a tomb world and put my Exterminator colony onto it.

[Sartain]

IMO, the AI was never competitive in Stellaris. One of the easier games compared to EUIV and HOI3 with the right challenges/mods/goals. CKII is possibly easier given the large number of whacky and fun exploits, but they are by their nature: whacky and fun.

EDIT: part of it is the way the game scales. A.) The player is generally much better at growing and keeping apace than the AI is, generally you're only in real trouble of potentially losing in the very early game. B.) Sectors are not only broken, but the failed/unfinished implementation of somewhat different idea.

I have almost 400 hours in Stellaris pre 2.0 and it never bothered me much then either, I used to play on high aggressiveness to get more action in the game but with the new fleet/station system it seems like I'm a lot more vulnerable to the AIs predations, to the point where the only sensible approach is to avoid war completely.
Seems to me that fighting smaller, multiple-front wars with multiple skirmishes rather than one big battle (which as I understand it is the intent of 2.0) is a losing proposition if an equal AI can rebuild and reinforce faster than you can due to code shenaningans

[Dorsidwarf]

I always found that since the AI still tries to play doomstacks I just split my fleets in two and doubleteam them, occupying systems then retreating when they try to smash me, until their war exhaustion ticks up and a white peace is enforced with me occupying a chunk of their space.


would be nice if the AI were more disinclined to attack empires who frequently took territory in defensive wars though. A sort of inverse Threat

[dennislp3]

I think they should drop the techs that allow larger fleets and maybe bump up the fleet limit that comes with larger vessel research....as it is right now it seems like doom stacks are still the way to go and it seems to easy to keep my fleet size limit up with my total limit until much later in the game.

[Damiac]

So at the start of the war, I was caught unprepared. So the enemy occupied about 8 of my systems, including a planet.
I built up and pushed them back, destroying their fleet a few times, eventually getting the warscore tied up, at around 84. 
At this point, 4 of my systems are still occupied by them.
I move in to take another system, and fight another enemy fleet.  The instant combat ends, I get a message from the AI that started the war, saying it's over, and it's a status quo.  I have no option but to agree.

What happened here is that your war exhaustion hit 100% after that combat. The AI proposed a status quo peace and you cannot refuse them if you're at 100%. They're already changing this for next patch, where you can refuse but you will suffer severe penalties on unity and influence income for fighting an unwanted war, so the choice will be yours.

Also, it seems that garrisoning armies doesn't knock down unrest anymore.  This is sort of a problem when you play with slaves, and the tooltip indicates that you should be able to lower it with garrisoned armies, so I think it's a bug. Anyone else notice that, or discover any workarounds?

This is correct. ONLY defensive buildings such as forts built on planets or certain edicts will knock down unrest. You CANNOT garrison assault armies, and defense armies are generated automatically.

That makes some sense, but I guess it's weird that I just have no way to bring down unrest other than wasting planet tiles on an otherwise useless building.  I mean... it sort of defeats the purpose of running slavery (food and minerals +10%) if I have to waste more than 10% of my building space on keeping unrest down. The idea of taking unity as a slaver species seems.... odd...  Of course I have the special slave processing facilities on all my worlds, because that's another +10%! Plus 2 food and 2 minerals ain't bad either.  However it seems probable that just keeping pops happy instead of enslaving them is the much better strategy now, due to the limited controls one has on unrest...

The war exhaustion thing just seems to prevent someone from making a comeback in a slightly losing war.  I had 1 planet and a bunch of empty systems occupied, and smashed their fleet.  After that last battle, while it's possible it took us both over 100%, the AI exhaustion was higher.  So why should they come out ahead after the war? They were losing!

What bothers me about this is that it prevents an empire with a great economy and a weak fleet from mobilizing their industry to churn out a fleet, push back the attackers, then take some of their territory.   Or even just push the attackers out, because it takes so little to fill up the war exhaustion.  This might not be such a big deal, except that now, I've gone and churned out a fleet, pausing my economy, increasing my maintenance, and since the enemy "Surrendered" I can't actually use this fleet on them for 10 years, giving them plenty of time to build back up.  Why the hell would I accept that truce?  No nation would, it makes no sense.  "Oh yes, they've been our rival for years, and just tried to kill us, but we managed to cripple their fleet. Then they asked politely if we would just let them keep the systems they went through on their way to kill us, and of course we said yes, take 10 years to build back up and try to kill us again please!"

I don't hate all the changes, and even the ones I hate currently probably just need some work to make more sense, but this in particular is very frustrating to me.

Since then I've tried a war of aggression against an AI.  When you're ready to fight at the start of the war, it's another story entirely.  My exhaustion went up to about 14 over the entire war.  The AI was at 100% for quite a while (I took a long time to take a planet, I wasn't prepared for the new defensive army strength, a positive change in my opinion).  Even though the AI was at 100%, they wouldn't surrender until I actually occupied the planet, which is odd.  But all in all, the mechanics felt sensible for a straightforward invasion with superior forces.  It's the back and forth wars that make a bit less sense, in my opinion.  Maybe you should be able to take away some exhaustion when you take back systems, so as to allow comebacks.

[Wiles]

I was hoping 2.0 would fix the crash problem I have been having since 1.6 but no dice. Once I get to the late game the will completely lock up my computer. It's pretty frustrating as it starts crashing just when the game starts getting interesting again (late game crises, mega-structures). I didn't even get to use my planet-killer. I should just shelve Stellaris and not get hyped when they release new stuff. It's my favourite game that I can't play.

[Radsoc]

I like the implementation of war exhaustion in EU4. Here I agree it can be flawed. A ten year cease fire is too much as well.

War exhaustion should scale with 1) manpower losses and population size. ("Manpower" needs to be in game). 2) Energy/Mineral gain losses and total potential compared to the enemy. I mean the Soviets lost a lot of manpower before Stalingrad, but in relative terms not so much, and their production capacity outgrew that of the EU-invaders.

Should be no cease fire in Stalingrad-like situations.

But in general I like the changes.

Navy cap should scale with galaxy size as well.

[Criptfeind]

The good news is that they are going to add in the ability to keep fighting past 100% exhaustion, at the cost of all your unity and influence gain and a 20% happiness penalty. Which is a big penalty, but it feels like a step in the right direction. A few months of unity and influence and happiness aren't that big of a deal, if you only need to stretch a little bit further, it feels fair for when you're on the offensive. It might not be sufficient for defensive war situations where you were on the back foot but just wiped out the enemy. Or maybe it will be good enough, to represent the issues involved with getting rekt in a war, even if you manage to come back into it later.

Also... Is it just me, or does the Federation fleet not follow the rules for fleet cap? I'm not sure, not being in a federation in my current game myself (In my game there's only one federation that has almost everyone except me in it, and I was in it early game, but I left to go my own way and they never really forgave me...) But I saw it fly though my lands on it's way to some war or another and it had a pretty shocking 85k fleet strength (considering that the federation members were all otherwise tooling around like fleets in the 10-30k size... Only me and the fallen empires could make a fleet that strong.) Although I was unable to see how many ships it had because it was made up of dozens and dozens of ship types with only a few ships each, but I'm pretty sure there's no way that they did that within the limits of whatever technology the federation has.

Also it feels like federations as a whole have to be stronker now, since fleet upkeep is so much more expensive the value of the federation fleet must go up a ton. Not to mention with the absolute fleet cap you'll more quickly reach a point where multiple nations sending fleets can become bigger then a single nation sending a much larger fleet. (And since AI cheats a ton apparently >.> <.<) I wonder if vassals and tributaries should be buffed a little bit to compensate.

[Damiac]

I like the implementation of war exhaustion in EU4. Here I agree it can be flawed. A ten year cease fire is too much as well.

War exhaustion should scale with 1) manpower losses and population size. ("Manpower" needs to be in game). 2) Energy/Mineral gain losses and total potential compared to the enemy. I mean the Soviets lost a lot of manpower before Stalingrad, but in relative terms not so much, and their production capacity outgrew that of the EU-invaders.

Should be no cease fire in Stalingrad-like situations.

This was the point I was trying to make, this is a good illustration.  This is why I think it would make sense if war exhaustion could be subtracted when someone starts "coming back".  Don't my people want to take the fight back to those filthy xeno invaders after they bombed one of our worlds? I get that they want to stop the bleeding, but when our fleet went on the offensive and we started taking back systems, wouldn't they be reinvigorated?

Or, space hitler just suddenly invaded one of my colonies, space poland.  Then he took a number of systems between space poland and space moscow. But by that point his fleet was hurt, and mine was being reinforced all along. Then we pushed space hitler's forces back! Back halfway to space poland! But then all the space russians were like "Ehh... this war has gone on long enough. Let's just stop now, even though we're on track to take back space poland, and in fact could go all the way to space berlin now that their fleet is destroyed, and end the threat of space hitler forever. But I'm bored of this war NOW, so let's just let them have space poland and a bunch of our systems, I'm sure they won't use the additional forces to attack us again in 10 years, oh no sir"

[Majestic7]

One interesting thing in WE is that the space barbarian mercenaries cause WE. I don't think they should, that is the whole point of mercenaries, outsourcing casualties. Especially not for xenophobes or the like.

[TalonisWolf]

Well, just stumbled across this mod:

Dwarf Fortress Namelist

[Dunamisdeos]

That's amazing.

[Cruxador]

Well, just stumbled across this mod:

Dwarf Fortress Namelist

There's a dwarf advisor voice too. No idea if it's any good.