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[IronyOwl]

Worth noting that until the cost is switched over to scaling in Clarke you can actually vassalize an empire, regardless of size, for less warscore than taking one of their major worlds. If you can keep the lid on discontent and rebellion you can wait 3600 days to integrate them... or if you have the right ethics just purge/enslave all of their pops so you don't have to deal with the happiness and faction micromanagement bullshit.

I'm torn between "ooh" and "what the shit, again." I swear they meant well with war score, but it's ever so slightly rough at the moment.

also don't you always keep a spare colony ship around to race toward juicy planets?

a colony ship has a very high upkeep cost. depending on the stage of the game, a spare colony ship can be quite costly.

EIGHT FUCKING ENERGY WHY

I actually kind of like the heavy investment for not just forming a colony, but keeping an entire pop's worth of colonists well supplied in an airtight tin can.

[LoSboccacc]

also don't you always keep a spare colony ship around to race toward juicy planets?

a colony ship has a very high upkeep cost. depending on the stage of the game, a spare colony ship can be quite costly.

EIGHT FUCKING ENERGY WHY
[/quote]

eh the cost of finding a colony and arriving second is much more than that, especially when borders with unclaimed space are in flux at the beginning. it's also nice to snatch a planet out an empire zone by stubbornly refusing researching the alien contact - for as long as they don't establish contact, you can colonize away wherever you like.

[Noel.se]

Beta patch is out!

[Flying Dice]

also don't you always keep a spare colony ship around to race toward juicy planets?

a colony ship has a very high upkeep cost. depending on the stage of the game, a spare colony ship can be quite costly.

EIGHT FUCKING ENERGY WHY

eh the cost of finding a colony and arriving second is much more than that, especially when borders with unclaimed space are in flux at the beginning. it's also nice to snatch a planet out an empire zone by stubbornly refusing researching the alien contact - for as long as they don't establish contact, you can colonize away wherever you like.
[/quote]
I understand the balance side of things, it's just obnoxious that you have to tank your economy to found a single colony for however many weeks/months it takes the ship to get there and create the colony-and that's if you micromanage to the point where the colony ships are sent out the second they finish, instead of one of the poor fools who make them and forget about them.

What I honestly think it should be is that the energy cost should be borne during the colony founding period instead-so after the ship lands you pay a big chunk of energy to establish it permanently. That both makes more sense logistically and fills the same role in game balance of forcing players to weigh the costs instead of colonizing everything ever.

Incidentally, that's why I actually like the way having more pops (and soon, more colonies) increases research times, both from a balance perspective and lorewise--presumably because your scientists and engineers have to figure out how to implement the new techs into practice across your entire empire, which is easier for a handful of worlds than several dozen. It also means that lategame isn't just you researching a new tech every week until you've filled the tree.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, ship rally points would be nice. But can't you shift-click for construction order queuing? If you're okay with the shotgun approach you can also right-click the system from the galaxy map and queue mining or research stations on all relevant resources in the system.

[Loud Whispers]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Aw yeah, spehss Heavens

Shame you have to rely on modding a great deal to inject character into Stellaris and then make something of it, it's rather... Bland at times, and buggy as all hell. I've committed myself to just never, ever looking at what my sector governors are doing. It is a terrible thing, and it pains me greatly. One time I found my governor had taken my science world based around researching the nuclear apocalypse that had befallen some ancient civilization - and removed all of the wastelands they were researching and replaced all of the laboratories with low-yield power plants, mines and farms. The whole issue of farms was especially aggravating, because the planet was run by synths who didn't eat food.
I've resigned myself to just accepting that the governors are hopelessly incompetent and are destroying priceless relics to make way for worthless mines and power plants.

Some observations:

• Learning that you can make fleets follow other ships by right clicking on them is invaluable information. As soon as you learn this, you CAN'T help but send off explorator fleets of convoys trailing science ships as they cross the cosmos. By rushing through people's fledgling Empires, it's possible to discover the majority (if not all) of your galaxy's Empires, and perhaps even establish distant colonies.
• Irradiated species are the best thing ever. That you can't pick this trait on the start screen is a travesty, because they're the only pops the AI can use on tomb-worlds quasi-competently (they will still destroy everything of scientific interest but will at least be able to make a self-sufficient planet ;D And for some reason, an event may occasionally fire where the tomb world gets -10% happiness due to high radiation, but this negative bonus even affects irradiated species so... What's going on?
  
• The Social Welfare policy is not as crippling as you'd think, at least under the right circumstances. It costs you 20% of your annual mineral and energy income which is pretty severe, for most prohibitively so (even if it gives you +15% happiness across your Empire, the extra stability is usually not worth the absolute halt in industry and finance). But if you keep your Empire in a closed system where you are better able to control population growth and ethos, and most importantly you keep to optimum worlds for each species within your Empire, not only does the social welfare policy provide extra stability - it pays for itself and more. Pops that are joyous work 20% more productively, completely cancelling out the cost of the Social Welfare policy. Only the Social Welfare policy only costs you minerals and energy, so you're effectively only paying influence for the policy in order to increase agricultural yields and research yields (both getting +20% productivity) in addition to ironclad stability and bragging rights of saying your Empire isn't actually a shithole. From then on all you have to worry about dissidents (who are so unhappy that their productivity is not increased, meaning for every unhappy pop you're losing out on 20% output per pop) or pops living on planets they're not suited to completely (even being 1 step away from the home planet type caps happiness at 60%, meaning output is reduced per pop). Essentially meaning if you want to maintain efficiency and avoid losing out money and minerals over time, you gotta cut out the darn space benefit scroungers! D:<

That or move them to a planet that suits them, but resettling is rather bugged to hell for sectors too. Hmph.

[Neonivek]

Although frontier clinics and that tech that increases habitability by 5% will both help on the happiness front.

Paradise Dome

[Flying Dice]

I'm pretty sure that More Technologies adds more planet uniques to increase happiness. I rolled one that gave I think +10% happiness and a boost to armies, flavored as a blood sport coliseum.

@LW: Don't use sector governors. Just don't. Get the mod that adds edicts to increase the core world cap to a number of different increments. There's zero shame in avoiding having to use a completely broken system, at the very least until they try to fix it in Clarke.

Sector AI is so bad that it will remove all the super-high-yield artifact buildings from captured ringworld segments and replace them with basic farms and mines.

[forsaken1111]

I'm pretty sure that More Technologies adds more planet uniques to increase happiness. I rolled one that gave I think +10% happiness and a boost to armies, flavored as a blood sport coliseum.

@LW: Don't use sector governors. Just don't. Get the mod that adds edicts to increase the core world cap to a number of different increments. There's zero shame in avoiding having to use a completely broken system, at the very least until they try to fix it in Clarke.

Sector AI is so bad that it will remove all the super-high-yield artifact buildings from captured ringworld segments and replace them with basic farms and mines.

The beta patch 1.1 is out now which supposedly fixed sector behavior, it even (again supposedly) correctly uses robot pops and respects the 'do not redevelop' tickmark

[Teneb]

I'm pretty sure that More Technologies adds more planet uniques to increase happiness. I rolled one that gave I think +10% happiness and a boost to armies, flavored as a blood sport coliseum.

@LW: Don't use sector governors. Just don't. Get the mod that adds edicts to increase the core world cap to a number of different increments. There's zero shame in avoiding having to use a completely broken system, at the very least until they try to fix it in Clarke.

Sector AI is so bad that it will remove all the super-high-yield artifact buildings from captured ringworld segments and replace them with basic farms and mines.

FD, apologies for yet another request, but since you are getting pretty involved in modding the game: could you provide a mod list with what you consider essential for this pre-Clarke version? Or at least what you are using.

[Flying Dice]

I'm pretty sure that More Technologies adds more planet uniques to increase happiness. I rolled one that gave I think +10% happiness and a boost to armies, flavored as a blood sport coliseum.

@LW: Don't use sector governors. Just don't. Get the mod that adds edicts to increase the core world cap to a number of different increments. There's zero shame in avoiding having to use a completely broken system, at the very least until they try to fix it in Clarke.

Sector AI is so bad that it will remove all the super-high-yield artifact buildings from captured ringworld segments and replace them with basic farms and mines.

FD, apologies for yet another request, but since you are getting pretty involved in modding the game: could you provide a mod list with what you consider essential for this pre-Clarke version? Or at least what you are using.

Sure!

Okay, essential:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1. ZBeautiful Battles: Combination of generally good combat balance changes and a massive upgrade to the aesthetics.

2. BB compatible Ship Improvements: Some more good combat balance changes.

3. BB compatible Rangefinder: This is what lays the groundwork for properly fixing fleet behavior.

4. Downscaled Ships (BB fix): Another important aesthetic mod, this both makes all ships smaller and makes corvettes & DDs proportionally much smaller in comparison to cap ships.

5. Remove Aura Graphics: What it says, gets rid of all those obnoxious glowing ship auras. This + BB + Downscaled Ships means that you can actually see what the fuck is happening in large fleet battles, even if you're playing with vanilla fleet behavior.

6. More Technologies: GET THIS GET THIS GET THIS. The single most important mod not directly focused on combat, and probably even more important than any of those to the game as a whole. Adds a ton of different stuff, too much to list here.

7. No Galactic Ambitions Survey Data: This stops that tech from preventing you from finding anomalies. You still need to avoid accepting star chart trades, though.

8. What war ethics?: Removes the bullshit massive diplo hit you get if you've started a war recently.

9. UI Overhaul 1080p: Another essential aesthetic mod. Removes a lot of pointless scrolling, for one.

10. ShipDesignerCompacter: Essential if you spend any time in the ship design screen. Main feature is that it compacts the class design list so that more than a handful of classes are visible at once.

11. Multiple Crisis: Duh. Allows all three crises to trigger in a single game. Though you can do the same thing in a much less roundabout way by removing a single NOT flag from each crisis text file-that's what I ended up replacing the mod's file with.

12. Improved Ethics: Massively increases the amount of bonuses and maluses associated with each ethic. Also allows you to pick more, giving four ethos points: 2x fanatic, 1x fanatic + 2x normal, or 4x normal at most. The general intent seems to be to give greater value to ethos in defining the character of a species, and it does a decent job. Fair warning that the author didn't check their work too well, I had to fix some typos. The game also doesn't seem to recognize some of its own modifiers, that or they're very narrow in what they can be applied to.

13. Extended Traits: Not one of the "Lol get ten million trait points" mods. Adds extra traits to fill out the gaps in the vanilla bonuses and maluses.

14. AI Rebalance: AI reacts better to peacetime fleet movements, is more aggressive and willing to commit to battle in wartime, cooperates better with allies, and is more willing to work with each other to eliminate major threats.

15. 995/Flexible Core Planet Cap: This is the best "more core planets" mod, because it makes the changes available as no-cost edicts. This means both that you can choose your own increase (anywhere from ~10 to 990 more core planet slots), and that it can be used in multiplayer without forcing players to have more core planets than they want-this could, for example, be used to give a handicap.

16. Fox Sensor Mod: Extended range on sensors, station sensors have an additional range bonus. You can now see a bit into the borders of your neighbors, in other words. No more surprise buttsex fleets except from wormholes.

Optional but recommended:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1. More Galaxy Sizes: There's a ton of these mods. This one happens to be fairly middle-of-the-road and is updated for the current version.

2. Cybrxkhan's Assortment of Namelists for Stellaris: Some of the names are pretty shit, but there are plenty of good ones and it means that you won't run into problems with very large galaxies.

3. 48 Empire Colors: A good amount. Enough to populate a 1500-system galaxy.

4. Nomines Deorum: A set of new name themes for Human empires. Quite good.

5. Larger Homeworld (25 Tiles): Sorta cheaty, but whatever. Having a tiny homeworld sucks. You can still roll a home system with no station-mineable resources, so there's plenty of room for the RNG to fuck you anyways.

6. Remove Stranded Foreign Stations: After you peace out of a war, it gives you an option to delete all wormhole & military stations that aren't yours but are in your territory, or all non-allied ones. Don't get screwed by the AI surrendering automatically when they've got a dozen wormhole stations in your space.

7. Deadly Orbital Bombardment: What it says on the tin. The per-month probabilities for Full are 50% pop death, 80% building ruined, 8% tileblocker creation.

8. Better Empire Names: Tries to make it so that some alien empires aren't named after their primary species.

9. Galaxy Centers: Adds star spawns to the galactic core region, turns down the lights in it.

10. No More Brawls: Interstellar wars are no longer called brawls, only wars, conflicts, and disputes.

11. Better Zoom: Know how you're zoomed all the way in when you exit system view? Not any more.

12. Dark Galaxy: Makes the galaxy much darker. The white dust is only fog of war, explored space is black or territory-colored.

13. Ringworld Construction: Duh, who doesn't want a kickass megaproject to work on?

Of course I've also made a bunch of balance changes of my own, but those aren't really in a coherent mod, and I didn't even fucking document them (lol) so I can't enumerate them in detail.

[Teneb]

-snip-

Are these in the forums? Or steam workshop? Should've asked first. I'll search them both, but it may help others.

[Flying Dice]

-snip-

Are these in the forums? Or steam workshop? Should've asked first. I'll search them both, but it may help others.

All workshop. The forums make it a pain in the ass to find stuff, some mods aren't there, and the masterlist doesn't get updated enough.

[Teneb]

I'd like to throw another mod into your list: Fixed vassal opinons. As it is, the stronger you are, the more your vassals hate you. This inverts that, which makes sense. If you are strong, you have loyal/intimidated vassals. If you lose all your ships in a war... (at least this is what i hope out the mod causes)

Damn, now i want to get into Stellaris modding.

[Majestic7]

Beta patch fixes sectors.

I was playing with sectors even before it since, honestly, I hate micro. If I had to manually take care of a dozen planets, I'd never get a dozen planets. I tend to neglect even the five planets I have. Usually I just choose four homeworlds of other species so I have more options for colony ships, but forget to build their infrastructure very well. I'm supposed to be a space emperor, not a space municipal engineer, dammit. If I want to build infrastructure, I'll play Cities Skylines.

Plus if the AI uses the sector AI to manage its planets, optimizing all your planets by hand gives you undue advantage in single player.