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[EnigmaticHat]

To me the point of the mineral/alloy separation is that you no longer have to directly choose between civilian expansion and military expansion.  In previous versions if you had a giant mineral output to make ships and you got to the point where no faction could attack you, you could turn around and put that entire mineral output into civilian production.  The result was snowballing.

Now military and civilian production are separate resources; you can't just cancel all your alloy production and put the minerals into research habitats, because you won't have the consumer goods to support all those researchers.  Also because defensive and offensive production are slightly separate now, and upgrading costs so many alloys, if you just cease military production completely you'll fall behind faster than you would in the past.  But of course since alloys can't be used for most civilian purposes there's no incentive to stop military production any more.

Overall I really like what they did with the resources because its much more clear what they mean.  Have a lot of unity?  You'll reach a midgame peak faster because traditions don't require any kind of upkeep, but fall off later once you have 4+ traditions groups done.  Have a lot of influence?  You can grow your borders fast.  Have an excess of civilian goods?  That means you can expand your civilian economy.  Huge amount of alloys?  No point having that if you're going to play passively.  The end result is that now having certain ethics or choosing to produce certain resources is making a much more specific statement about your future.  My main complaint is that the current state of research makes the anti-snowball stuff pretty useless.

[Dunamisdeos]

I do tend to get way, way ahead in research, thereby resulting in winning every war with ease.

Granted it's a deliberate strategy on my part.

[dennislp3]

So I didn't realize it before....but I found an insane combo

Tomb World start + fanatic purifiers. To get even more silly throw in adaptable and you literally colonize every planet (but I understand they will fix tomb world starts having high habitability on all planet types)

With armageddon bombardment you can turn worlds into tomb worlds which means if you see an enemy planet with a ton of slots you can just bomb it into a tomb world and you are good to go.

Take the ascension perk that allows raiding if you want to steal some of their pops for unity first.

[ZeroGravitas]

Oh, that's a neat combo. I'd love to try that but I need to get that Pacifist achievement first.

[Rolan7]

There's something that still confuses me a little:  The "special projects" which spawn while surveying systems.  I don't see any mechanical difference between them and anomalies, except that they require more clicks.

Anomaly:  Click one button to either dedicate the science ship to the digression, or leave it for later if you're surveying as fast as possible.

Special project: Pause, bring up the situation log.  If you're fast enough, the science ship is still "present", and you can activate the special project.  Otherwise you go to the system, leave the system, select the nearby science ship, right click the special project.

I sorta see some value in it switching up the early survey game... but through meaningless UI busywork.  I feel like I'm missing something.  Maybe they're timed?
Edit:  But the case which prompted this is a 3 billion year old skeleton so probably not timed.  Why is this not just an anomaly?

[Trekkin]

There's something that still confuses me a little:  The "special projects" which spawn while surveying systems.  I don't see any mechanical difference between them and anomalies, except that they require more clicks.

Anomaly:  Click one button to either dedicate the science ship to the digression, or leave it for later if you're surveying as fast as possible.

Special project: Pause, bring up the situation log.  If you're fast enough, the science ship is still "present", and you can activate the special project.  Otherwise you go to the system, leave the system, select the nearby science ship, right click the special project.

I sorta see some value in it switching up the early survey game... but through meaningless UI busywork.  I feel like I'm missing something.  Maybe they're timed?
Edit:  But the case which prompted this is a 3 billion year old skeleton so probably not timed.  Why is this not just an anomaly?

I think they're handled differently by the events system. Anomalies, as far as I know, have one step and can only require a science ship; anything more complicated is a special project. I vaguely recall seeing some special projects that default to having a single step, like anomalies, if your empire doesn't meet the conditions to explore them further, so maybe that accounts for the similarities you're seeing.

[ZeroGravitas]

There's something that still confuses me a little:  The "special projects" which spawn while surveying systems.  I don't see any mechanical difference between them and anomalies, except that they require more clicks.

Anomaly:  Click one button to either dedicate the science ship to the digression, or leave it for later if you're surveying as fast as possible.

Special project: Pause, bring up the situation log.  If you're fast enough, the science ship is still "present", and you can activate the special project.  Otherwise you go to the system, leave the system, select the nearby science ship, right click the special project.

I sorta see some value in it switching up the early survey game... but through meaningless UI busywork.  I feel like I'm missing something.  Maybe they're timed?
Edit:  But the case which prompted this is a 3 billion year old skeleton so probably not timed.  Why is this not just an anomaly?

I think they're handled differently by the events system. Anomalies, as far as I know, have one step and can only require a science ship; anything more complicated is a special project. I vaguely recall seeing some special projects that default to having a single step, like anomalies, if your empire doesn't meet the conditions to explore them further, so maybe that accounts for the similarities you're seeing.

yes they are literally handled by different systems

the question is why. it's just another typical paradox design decision. adds nothing to the game but makes everything more fiddly.

[Telgin]

I've been wondering about this for a while myself, and my guess is that many things that are special projects could be made into anomalies.  Special projects are probably needed for anything with multiple steps, anything that requires research investment or which generate or follow event chains, but I'm pretty confident there are some special projects that don't meet those criteria.  Maybe some that have been changed over the years but used to need those features.

I'd like to see any special project that only requires a science ship in orbit to be changed to anomalies where possible, since I agree that it's a real hassle to pause the game, go to the system with the ship,  click the ship, then ctrl+shift+right click and select the research option every time one of them pops up.


Unrelated to the above, but what's the highest fleet power any of you have ever achieved in a defensive station, without mods?  I've been seeing how far I can push them with the new strategic coordination center, and since you can get up to 40 defense platforms on a single citadel with it, you can get some pretty high numbers.  I've got four bastions at about 172K fleet power right now at 2445 and hope to get to over 200K by 2500.  Up to 22-23 levels of repeatables on relevant techs right now.

It's probably academic since I'm pretty sure the station would take painfully high losses from the defense platforms in any serious fight, but it's fun to look at the numbers.  It's also murderously expensive in alloys so I'd never do this against human opponents.  Upkeep is pretty insane too, and it looks like defense platforms do cost (a small) alloy upkeep, where they didn't have mineral upkeep in 2.1 from what I recall.

[dennislp3]

Anomolies become special projects. Anomolies are randomly generated and give random results. Sometimes those random results are special projects which are actual events as opposed to anomolies.

As for stations...~200k seems to be the upper limits for them barring any repeating techs

[Paul]

I always thought that was dumb too. Some of the special projects are literally just an extra delay for the science ship. No extra choices or special requirements, just the science ship has to be told to spend another few months researching it. Why not just up the anomaly difficulty so that it takes more time and slap whatever the end bonus is onto the anomaly in the first place and save us the extra tedium? It makes sense in some cases where it's like it needs a construction ship or a 5 skill scientist to look into it, but many of them are pointless.

[Dunamisdeos]

It makes more sense with the chains like the worm or precursors, but yeah things like the gigantic skeleton and whatnot are annoying, because i have to figure out where the hell my science vessel is, click it, cancel it's whole chain of commands, and manually tell it to look into it.

[Culise]

I think the only reason is because of scientist skill thresholds - anomalies don't have a hard limit, but special projects can.  That and the fact that even with the removal of the failure states, anomaly levels are still tied (when combined with scientist skill) to investigation time, so adding more time to an anomaly would require adding more difficulty, though that's probably not nearly as big of a reason outside of the really long projects like Russell's Teapot (which does offer a choice, and is thus not especially germane).  I wouldn't mind if they went back and reworked it to either give more options or just integrate those one-path projects into the anomaly proper, but I do understand that it's probably not the highest priority right now. 

[Telgin]

The scientist skill thresholds are a valid reason, but I suspect those are actually just holdovers from back when anomalies had effective skill thresholds.  Probably an unimportant thing to rebalance or change at this point, especially when things like 2/3rds of the crises are broken.  Just got the box art troop transports for the Contingency and decided to shelve that save until it's fixed.  Maybe this week, but it took like 2 weeks just to fix the pathfinding bug for them last time.

Also managed to get a defense station up to 211K fleet power in 2475 or so with 30 levels of repeatable techs.  I'll find out how they fare against the Contingency once the crises get fixed.

[Rolan7]

Playing the Inward Perfection civic is pretty chill.  I'm actually managing to resist the urge to expand, and my neighbors only aggressed a couple of times before learning to leave me alone.

Well, that's just a narrative of course.  They leave me alone now because I float a decent navy, and have an overwhelming tech lead.  I've got this one research planet, with a dimensional portal, which I've been pouring a sizeable portion of my total income into.  Mostly in the form of exotic gasses for the research complexes, but now I'm relocating pops to it.  It's 2310 and I've almost got zero-point power, the requirement for Master Builders, because I'm definitely playing tall.

I'm not sure if the research speed is super great, but it feels pretty good.  I'm only a few points over the administration limit, and my economy is doing so well that I can
Take the Unity option for trade
Let my people farm because they want to (Agrarian Idyll, grants amenities) then sell 100/month off
Buy about 10 strategic resources/month from the market
Have social welfare dropped because everyone was deliriously happy anyway, no one is unemployed, and I was falling behind in consumer goods AGAIN for some reason.

And have nutritional plentitude, health care edict, and individually running the "Encourage Planetary Growth" food-decision on each planet.  Which is quite tedious, there's no notification when it times out...  But it's worth it, because pops grow so slowly, and in this run I don't have immigration.

This all took some juggling and trading before I genetically modified the race to be Extremely Adaptable, now I'm running a nice surplus across the board.  Habitability penalties were certainly a factor in my consumer-good woes.

Edit:  In like 2020 my nearest neighbor actually vassalized me, which was... so amusing that I just accepted it?  It was a little frustrating not being able to expand into the areas I'd cut off for myself, but I also didn't have to worry about war for a few decades.  Apparently the "tribute" is merely fleet power, which I didn't care about.  When I was done building up what I could, I had an easy war of liberation.

Later they (on my northern border) attacked me because I didn't bother to build my navy up at all.  I had built up our 2-system border with signal-jamming starbases which ensured they lost a lot of ships.  I counterclaimed and won a few systems so that we'd only have a 1-system border, and they haven't bothered me since.

[EnigmaticHat]

See when I played Inward Perfection I spread out quickly throughout the galaxy.  Its still been a pretty violent game, just all defensive wars.  To explain just how much of an asshole I am when I play xenophobes, when I found a machine consciousness close to me I asked for open borders, moved a construction/scientist ship past them, blocked them off, and then closed borders again.  Limiting them permanently to like 10 systems unless they could kill me.  (this is a bad strat by the way for many reasons, but it was funny and it worked out in the end so I have no regrets)

Border friction is a hell of a drug