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[Flying Dice]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Regarding fleet behavior in combat: Ask and ye shall receive.

Simple changes, but it's probably immeasurably better than vanilla:

1. No more idiotic triangle formation.
2. Changes to sublight movement (including the introduction of deceleration).
3. Various other balance changes, for better or for worse.

Here's the big one, a rework of combat computers:


Standard combat Computers:
- closes range and opens fire (due to a bug in targetting distance calculation, standard uses the orbit mechanic at the moment - I had intended them to use the chase mechanic)
- prefers to target same ship it began firing at
- new standard targeting computers for basic and advanced techs, gives a small bonus to all ship stats

Defensive combat:
- ships actively try and stay at maximum range
- will try and target ships that weapons are most effective against
- prefers to shoot closest targets first

Offensive combat:
- charges in to minimum weapon range
- aggressively targets ships close to death

PRAISE BE, testing now

Okay, test game is started. I've only got corvettes so the differences aren't outstanding (15 range lasers on everything means everything is knife-range combat, heh), but you can still tell. The red ones are Aggressive, the blue ones are Defensive. Same deal persisted through the entire fight, the Defensive ships played back a bit, generally sticking together and firing at whichever were closest, while the Aggressive ones kept charging through the enemy formation.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[jhxmt]

Just so I'm sure I'm not getting something wrong - there are, effectively, three different types of Primitives, right?

1) Pre-sentient creatures, which appear as pops on planets.  You can uplift these if they're in your empire's territory, but you don't need to colonise the planet they're on.  You can also gene-mod them when you uplift them, assuming you have the requisite technologies.

2) Stone-age primitives, which appear as a modifier (not pops) on some planets.  You need to colonise the planet to have any interactions with them (which are limited to, basically, avoiding them or not avoiding them and occasionally suffering a bad event).

3) Post-stone-age but pre-spacefaring-age primitive civilisations, which are the ones for which observation posts are used (and you can use them for science, hurry up their advancement to become an empire, or coverly infiltrate them).  Or, y'know, just invade the planet.

Am I more or less in the right ballpark?  I've only really done anything with #3s so far, so want to make sure I'm not completely off-base with how I think the others work. 

[Retropunch]

Just so I'm sure I'm not getting something wrong - there are, effectively, three different types of Primitives, right?

1) Pre-sentient creatures, which appear as pops on planets.  You can uplift these if they're in your empire's territory, but you don't need to colonise the planet they're on.  You can also gene-mod them when you uplift them, assuming you have the requisite technologies.

2) Stone-age primitives, which appear as a modifier (not pops) on some planets.  You need to colonise the planet to have any interactions with them (which are limited to, basically, avoiding them or not avoiding them and occasionally suffering a bad event).

3) Post-stone-age but pre-spacefaring-age primitive civilisations, which are the ones for which observation posts are used (and you can use them for science, hurry up their advancement to become an empire, or coverly infiltrate them).  Or, y'know, just invade the planet.

Am I more or less in the right ballpark?  I've only really done anything with #3s so far, so want to make sure I'm not completely off-base with how I think the others work. 

Pretty much. In regards to 2, not avoiding them tends to put them in observation reserves, which means that about three quarters of the planet's tiles are taken up, but they give you huge adjacency bonuses. Occasionally they kill off one of your pops though.

I've found it pretty useful as I've just covered my planet in science buildings and basically got a society research planet.

[Flying Dice]

Note that the stone age primitives can either be restricted (as Retro said) into ~3/4 of the planet's tiles, or into exactly three, usually arranged in a triangle so that one tile has adjacency to all three. The latter's best: you can still layer them into a 2x3 with biolabs, but the rest of the planet can still be used.

Also, stone age primitives in a reservation have a chance of approaching your colonists and asking to work alongside them-accepting will create several populations for them of a new species, which can be anywhere from excellent to terrible depending on RNG.

--

TFW you play a materialist militaristic empire devoted to locking down FTL movement in a Hyperdrive-only game and end up allied with a state devoted to founding a federation for Jolly Cooperation with a bunch of happy primitive races working alongside you to accomplish your goals, leading to trimming back your more objectionable policies. I feel like a space opera tsundere. Seriously considering switching over from Despotic Hegemony to Military Republic, gods help me.

[stabbymcstabstab]

Umm I just notice three very scary lights outside of my galaxy... They look kinda like what pops up when some one is going to jump into a system your in. I'm a little scared.

[Cruxador]

So paradox interactive has policy of ,, kek, no warcrimes in our games, ayyyylmeo" ?

They have a theme of "nothing that can get our games banned in Germany". So no anti-semitic war crimes, and no war crimes involving stuffing undesirables in death camps, and no genocide (aliens are apparently a loophole) and Hitler's face is shaded in HoI and they use the iron cross flag instead of the swastika flag. They seem totally fine with atrocities otherwise.

,, ..."

Seriously, what the hell kind of quote marks are those even supposed to be? Commas? Really?

He probably didn't know that in English, quote marks go at the top regardless of what side they're on. It's a pretty rare phenomena, among languages that don't copy their quote marks from English. Most languages either have one at the top and one at the bottom (eg. German) or big ones on each side that span from top to bottom (eg. French). Of the errors people make in using English, this one is way less annoying than most, including some that native speakers make.

[Radsoc]

I really like this game, but late-game content is a bit dull. I beat the spoilers long time ago, and now there seems to be nothing to stop me from galactic conquest. The problem is that's it's much of the same thing repeated for each civilization. Declare war, move in fleet, get some planets, make sure war score is high enough for vassalization and repeat. Then add performance hiccups and it gets terrible. Maybe setting galaxy size to "huge" was a bad thing.

[Sirus]

I once tried to take an entire empire in a single war. Only 4 planets to capture! But when I added them all up in the war goals I was told it was "too much".

Excuse me? This is a military dictatorship, we are warthirsty xeno-enslaving bugs, and my ships are tailor-made to rip apart everything they own. The hell do you mean it's too much? Why won't you do as I say?

So I made do with three planets, including their homeworld. Of course, now I need to edit the ethics and start a new game, because APPARENTLY having xeno slaves makes my own population unhappy.

[Flying Dice]

Personally, I've settled on a houserule where, once borders have shaken out, I don't try to expand through conquest even as a military civ, barring strategic systems. That, playing with hyperdrives-only, a mod to include Fallen Empire war goals, and the inherent nature of tech researching to become increasingly inefficient means that I tend to bubble out to a certain size and then stop.

I think it's because Paradox was still thinking in terms of grand strategy rather than 4X. You're not 'supposed' to roll over the entire map (even if the nominal victory conditions say otherwise), you're supposed to build a star nation and then interact with others. Once we get default open borders in it'll feel a lot better, I suspect.

[Sirus]

Fair enough, but in that game I wanted to eclipse the stars with my mighty bug swarm. It really should be an option, or something to do with ethics perhaps. You'd think a heavily militaristic society would be willing to go all the way in a war.

[IronyOwl]

Random question, how many of you actually terraform?
It's a huge investment of time, requires a bunch of techs and (admittedly common) strategic resources. More importantly, I never felt the need to. I guess it could be useful when you are boxed in and also unwilling to expand through force (as well as unwilling to accept xenos, including gene-modded members of your own species),
Plus the fact that the planet needs to be inside your border is quite limiting.

I've never terraformed anything, and odds are decent I never will, not because it's hard but because I dislike how... fluid, it makes the galaxy. It's like, having an arctic world and an arid world around that one star is a feature of the galaxy, and it feels like it cheapens said galaxy to just shrug and say "no, they're oceans now."

A decent analogy would be if you could modify tile bonuses. I mean, yeah, it's convenient, but the end effect is that every planet looks exactly like its role. It's boring.

I think it's because Paradox was still thinking in terms of grand strategy rather than 4X. You're not 'supposed' to roll over the entire map (even if the nominal victory conditions say otherwise), you're supposed to build a star nation and then interact with others. Once we get default open borders in it'll feel a lot better, I suspect.

Which makes it all the stranger that there's... not a lot to do there. You know how infuriating I find it that you can't, like, initiate trade with friendly empires or something? Civilian trade, not selling minerals for energy or the two other things a friendly empire still doesn't hate you enough to refuse even considering. It doesn't need to be complex! Just... something other than staring at him across our territory border thinking "I'm definitely not going to kill you."

Fair enough, but in that game I wanted to eclipse the stars with my mighty bug swarm. It really should be an option, or something to do with ethics perhaps. You'd think a heavily militaristic society would be willing to go all the way in a war.

A lot of this is probably balance and granularity issues. You could argue that (some) Collectivist civilizations shouldn't have to pay Influence or that Materialists should be pragmatic enough not to care about another empire's ethics or that pacifists shouldn't be able to declare war at all and so on, but it gets wonky and un-universally applicable pretty fast.

So, maybe your bugs are so warlike that they just can't handle divvying up more than three planets at a time lest their rivals gain an edge and stab them to death, or they want to leave their prey crippled and reeling so they can draw back and strike it again, or they feel like their performance wasn't good enough to warrant more than 3/4ths of the enemy as cattle, and so on. It's probably easier to figure out why their net total is mostly normal than trying to let them cut weird corners nobody else can, with or without trying to balance it out with more angles afterwards.

[EuchreJack]

I think it's because Paradox was still thinking in terms of grand strategy rather than 4X. You're not 'supposed' to roll over the entire map (even if the nominal victory conditions say otherwise), you're supposed to build a star nation and then interact with others. Once we get default open borders in it'll feel a lot better, I suspect.

Which makes it all the stranger that there's... not a lot to do there. You know how infuriating I find it that you can't, like, initiate trade with friendly empires or something? Civilian trade, not selling minerals for energy or the two other things a friendly empire still doesn't hate you enough to refuse even considering. It doesn't need to be complex! Just... something other than staring at him across our territory border thinking "I'm definitely not going to kill you."

And then you do, because there is nothing else to do.

[LoSboccacc]

Fair enough, but in that game I wanted to eclipse the stars with my mighty bug swarm. It really should be an option, or something to do with ethics perhaps. You'd think a heavily militaristic society would be willing to go all the way in a war.

yeah, at most it should be balanced by diplomatic penalties, so that now everyone hates you and will ally against you at the drop of a hat.

[lastverb]

Regarding fleet behavior in combat: Ask and ye shall receive.

PRAISE BE, testing now

Please do tell how it goes. Especially if battleship with range 60 weapons only and PD with Offensive comp do rush to point-blank. Also if it balances ship sensor (in vanilla 1.03 you get 100% accuracy with EVERY weapon as long as you use sensors t2+ of course deducting evasion).

[Retropunch]

I think it's because Paradox was still thinking in terms of grand strategy rather than 4X. You're not 'supposed' to roll over the entire map (even if the nominal victory conditions say otherwise), you're supposed to build a star nation and then interact with others. Once we get default open borders in it'll feel a lot better, I suspect.

Which makes it all the stranger that there's... not a lot to do there. You know how infuriating I find it that you can't, like, initiate trade with friendly empires or something? Civilian trade, not selling minerals for energy or the two other things a friendly empire still doesn't hate you enough to refuse even considering. It doesn't need to be complex! Just... something other than staring at him across our territory border thinking "I'm definitely not going to kill you."

And then you do, because there is nothing else to do.

I'm gradually finding this out, and it's pretty much ruining my view on the game. It's literally war or nothing. It doesn't need to be as involved as CKII in terms of setting up marriages and whatever, but there is just nothing to do other than fight. Whilst I was originally impressed by how different the nations seemed, I can't interact with them in any other way than blowing them up.

That's fun enough in itself, but I feel that it's lost a lot/pretty much all it's replayability, as I don't know how else I can play the game other than as a warlord. I can't be a small independent nation carving a niche for myself, nor can I be mercantile empire or a sprawling pacifist religious cult.

I am heartened by the fact that they know the game needs big changes though, and I'm sure diplomacy will be DLC number 1.