Print

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

[BFEL]

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Is that it?

Yes, that was it. Thank you!

Found one that actually sounds like it could be directly correlated if you squint at it hard enough.
"Total Revenue Generated by Arcades and Computer Science Doctorates awarded in US"

Another one.
"Juvenile Drug Arrests (US) and Number of Kids Killed by Their Parent"

[Cruxador]

Found one that actually sounds like it could be directly correlated if you squint at it hard enough.
"Total Revenue Generated by Arcades and Computer Science Doctorates awarded in US"

Another one.
"Juvenile Drug Arrests (US) and Number of Kids Killed by Their Parent"

Well, they're all directly correlated. It's causation you're thinking of. I think that the causal relationship is probably indirect anyway but those definitely could be well related.

[Karnewarrior]

Anyone have advice for taking down fallen empires? My local crotchety old man just demanded I abandon half my colonies, which I of course did, but I imagine my not! Incubator hivemind is displeased about.

Besides, plasma cannons dominate regular empires but apparently not fallen empires. And I want juicy ringworlds.

[Majestic7]

Fight a war with them and lose, but destroy a ship or two -> analyze debris and get some nice tech open, use those techs against them. If you can zerg rush them, you can win by war of attrition as long as you destroy ships here and there since they don't build new ships.

[Orb]

Bombers or torpedoes. Fallen Empires have little PD and mostly use shields. Also Bombers are just ridiculously powerful right now anyway.

[forsaken1111]

Plasma cannons dominate empires that don't have good shields. Use anything with shield piercing against fallen empires

[Loud Whispers]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So I tried another enigmatic observer run, where my little band of people kept to their one solar system and with some modding, colonized it to its fullest extent. Besides defending the system from hostile encroachers, there is something quite charming about personalizing and characterizing each planet - the Command planet, the great Fortress of Terra, control centre of the sol system. Mars, the technocratic centre of learning and investigation. Venus the power plant of the galaxy, twinned with the industrious Mercury. All that leaves is the little Lunar moon, boasting officer training centres, virtual reality arenas and a secret cloning facility from which to raise the clone legions. The clone soldiers with all bonuses stacked boast 28% more damage, 39% more morale damage and have 9% more health and morale than regular baseline assault troops, all for the same price and maintenance - not factoring in how addons affect them. Pretty nice. But that's after dedicating a planet and a tile to their construction, and they don't stand up on a quality basis to the destructive capability of Xenomorphs, the emotionless warfare of the Synths, the mind warfare of the Psi Warriors or the superiority of Gene Marines. The great advantage clone armies have is that not only are they better than assault troops for the same cost, they are manufactured far faster than any other soldier is trained.
Gene Warriors, Xenomorphs and Psi Warriors all take 360 days to manufacture, Synth Armies 120 days and Assault Troops 60 days. Clone armies take 30 days to manufacture. The issue lies though in how meaningless production time is for armies.
For starters it only affects buildup of armies, and once you have 10 armies you are set forever (only needing to build more armies for sectors out of transport warp reach - and only if you don't have transports designable). Attrition is meaningless, attacking units very rarely die in planetary invasions since planetary invasions are afterthoughts - the cleanup of what the space crew has already done.

It would be nice for example to have transport ships (or at the very least attached soldiers) to be able to conduct boarding actions of enemy ships, or a planetary invasion system that isn't so unsatisfying and unbalanced. As it stands once one has gained void supremacy, there is nothing the defending planet can do to stop defeat. It would be neat for example if you had to take every tile on the planet tile by tile, so an ocean based species would find fighting a conventional war against a desert based guerilla exceedingly difficult without resorting to militiarist tactics (like full orbital bombardment). And why are all tiles the same climate sphere for that matter on all the planets? It is sad that you can't have a tundra species living on your ice caps, a jungle species in your jungle, desert species on your equator and temperate species in the upper and lower bands all living on one planet.
I also like the idea of tile by tile invasion, because then attrition means something and if the defender can hold onto their production cities and such, then they can still wage war from the ground up (as well as actually making planetary shields worth something). Starvation would actually have to be implemented too, for real, but the infamy system is broken so PI have decided it's more realistic that you can't starve your enemy into surrendering or starve your own people through incompetence/malignancy ~o.o~

Plus - how amazing would it be for stuff like the special units having special interactions with the tiles be? So Xenomorphs conduct wanton devastation and kill all resistance with great efficiency, but if you don't have a kill switch for them, may end up infesting certain tiles (tile blocker?). Or psi warriors being able to take tiles without collateral damage due to their unique form of precision warfare?
And good god - how come the cloning vats don't let you clone pops?

I will say this though, if you keep things small and limited to as few systems as possible, things are pretty neat. It seems the later game, large empire crunch is a little bit more unfinished

[PTTG??]

On reflection, espionage is totally missing from the game. There's room still to add a whole class of leaders -- call them diplomats -- and start trying to steal tech, assassinate alien leaders, sabotage starports...

Where is this stuff?

[umiman]

On reflection, espionage is totally missing from the game. There's room still to add a whole class of leaders -- call them diplomats -- and start trying to steal tech, assassinate alien leaders, sabotage starports...

Where is this stuff?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Flying Dice]

Except that with Paradox games each of the sesame seeds and pickles are additional cosmetic DLC costing $1.99 each.

[LoSboccacc]

On reflection, espionage is totally missing from the game. There's room still to add a whole class of leaders -- call them diplomats -- and start trying to steal tech, assassinate alien leaders, sabotage starports...

Where is this stuff?

that's like my worst fear, game mechanic added trough even more specialist, because it's not annoying enough to manage all sector governors, scientist and fleet leaders as it is. I'm spending points in long lived races just because reshuffling them every so often as they die like flies is *that* annoying.

[Glloyd]

Before LoSboccacc's comment, I actually thought this was the HoI thread, because the same thing applies there. Dammit Paradox. At least that felt more finished then Stellaris though. That first release was not good, and they don't seem to have any plans to fix what I consider to be the fundamental problems with Stellaris, which also sucks because it has a ton of potential, but it's all gonna be locked behind DLC.

[Retropunch]

Before LoSboccacc's comment, I actually thought this was the HoI thread, because the same thing applies there. Dammit Paradox. At least that felt more finished then Stellaris though. That first release was not good, and they don't seem to have any plans to fix what I consider to be the fundamental problems with Stellaris, which also sucks because it has a ton of potential, but it's all gonna be locked behind DLC.

Agreed, after playing both games I'm now thoroughly pissed off with Paradox. Both games have been designed from the bottom up with DLC in mind - that to me is a terrible, terrible direction for games to go in. Yes, the Paradox DLCs are mostly pretty hefty, but they've purposefully locked out major elements so that you're forced to buy them to get the proper experience.

Perhaps they can redeem themselves with the free patches - I think everyone would go crazy if they tried to peddle a DLC now, so they're probably gonna have to do some serious change ups before we get to that point.

[Majestic7]

What are the fundamental things lacking in Stellaris?

I see several things that could be improved and expanded, but... Yeah, espionage is missing, but is shitty espionage system worth it? That is just checking a checkbox from some arbitrary list of game qualifications without thinking about its value. For example, I think Distant Worlds is the best 4X to come out for a long time. I think it has shitty espionage system. It is useful, yes, but it is boring and unattached to most of the other parts of the game. You use it to affect the main game - like through sabotage and stealing technology - but the main game has no real effect on espionage. It is just this separate thing used to for arbitrary bonuses and maluses. Same thing in Civ and Beyond Earth etc. (Or EU4 where I mainly use spying just for fabricating claim; I think CKII has the best intrigue among Paradox games.)

I'd rather see an interesting, dynamic espionage system that, for example, could be the source and driving force behind event chains and so forth, instead of another system of ticks and tacks. I don't even really miss espionage; I imagine infiltrating other species would be pretty hard. What I miss the most right now is more middle game content and more differences in technology. That is, more rare technologies that are only unlocked by certain combinations of events and ethos etc.

[Glloyd]

I doubt it, the free patches (from what they've shown) don't have enough content to bring the game to a proper state. I'd wager that by the end of the summer they'll have announced the first DLC for Stellaris, and possibly HoI4. I haven't played Stellaris since release, but it felt barely finished, and was sorely lacking in content, with zero replayability. Not to mention the gamebreaking bugs, that while patched within a couple weeks of release are still evident of the general lack of polish that I've come to associate with the game.

DelayedNinjaEdit:

What are the fundamental things lacking in Stellaris?

Honestly, I think the biggest issue with Stellaris is something that hasn't really been addressed by the devs. Right now, there's zero replayability. I think part of this stems from the fact that the game is an awkward mashup between a grand strategy and a 4X, but there's really no reason to play twice because once you've played to the end once, you've pretty much seen it all outside some flavour events. Putting aside the fact that right now the mid-endgame is a boring repetitive slog, something that is important in most 4Xs (and strategy games in general) is making the different sides you play as actually feel different from each other, and Stellaris does not accomplish that. Each race is only different by cosmetics, because you can customize ethics and gov type, and the ethics and gov types only provide small percentage bonuses one way or another. Playing as an individual materalist science government and a communal, spiritualist oligarchy will give you pretty much the same experience, outside of the silly flavour events that always happen for spiritualist. There's a severe lack of unique mechanics for gov types/ethics. Yeah, you're more able to have slaves as a communal species, and more able to purge as a xenophobic species, but that won't really change how you play your game. Everything still has the same boring ass endgoal, which is just to paint the map in your colour by slogging through hundreds of boring identical wars with all the federations that form. And even if the endgame events weren't totally broken, you can see all three in one playthrough, giving no reason to play again to try and find more. Even the planets you can settle makes no real difference. All species are guaranteed two habitable planets within close-range and past that it's just either a boon or an inconvenience depending on how lucky you are with RNG, until you get to the midgame and the point becomes moot.

I'm sure unique mechanics for gov types and ethics will come in the inevitable rush of DLC, but they should be ashamed of the state they released the game in. By the midgame I had to force myself to keep playing because I wanted to see the endgame stuff, and once I realized how boring and broken they were, I quit. Tried again as a different race with different ethics, gov, etc, but it was just more of the same. That IGN was spot on, and I personally would've given it a lower score than 6.5, because only half of one game was any fun.

It sucks, I've been playing Paradox games since HOI2, and this is the first one that I've actively disliked. I love 4Xs and I love Paradox, but I just don't find Stellaris to be any fun past the early game, and I have no desire to play it again. We'll see what they do with DLCs, but I'm pretty disappointed.

EDIT: Honestly, I think the fact that discussion in this thread dried up so quickly is evident that it is lacking somehow. Is anyone here still playing this regularly? I remember when CKII came out that thread was rapidfire for months, it's still very active. In the first few months there was all sorts of cool stories and playthroughs. Here there's been just over 20 posts on this thread since the start of June for a game that came out less than a months ago, and most of those were related to DLC or the argument about how the tech penalties for having a large empire don't make sense by comparing it to real countries.