Print

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

[Shadowlord]

I'll probably finish my current game and wait for a new significant patch or good mod before I play again.

Wait, didn't they just have a new significant patch and dlc?

[Drakale]

Well yeah, hence why I'm currently playing. I'm a fickle thing really.

[Flying Dice]

Mostly I'm tooling around waiting for mods to update.

Might go back and do some weapon tweaks again, because it's still pretty broken (though it looks like the combat computers aren't pants-on-head stupid now).

[Retropunch]

Alright, I'm reticent to put on a let's play, because (if I buy it) I'd like it to be as new and fresh as possible, but, in comparison to something like Sword of the Stars (my all time favorite 4x sci-fi which I have spent more on than any other game in buying it for the other people in the vain hope that they'll get somewhat into it and play a game with me) what's it like?

I keep coming across this and wanting it, but... I'm not as ready to jump on a new game as I once was.

I'd say hold off for now - I believe it's probably another one to two patches and a content DLC away from being a great game. Currently it's just lacking in some areas - diplomacy is rubbish, and there's no espionage or 'soft' actions - it's just war or nothing pretty much. That's the problem really - it was touted as being a 'space empire sim', but it's really more a 4x wa game rather than anything else currently. I believe that'll change as they add more character stuff and soft actions, and it's already starting to take shape.

Give it another month or two and it'll be great - each patch brings it so much further forward, and I don't believe they'll be slowing down soon - Paradox games are always like this.

[Flying Dice]

I just want to be able to completely expel alien populations from captured planets. Instead I have to fuck with game files so that everyone can purge, when it would be so much easier to just have a policy that let you choose between integrate/deport/purge captured populations.

[GiglameshDespair]

I just want to be able to completely expel alien populations from captured planets. Instead I have to fuck with game files so that everyone can purge, when it would be so much easier to just have a policy that let you choose between integrate/deport/purge captured populations.

It's too difficult to deport illegal aliens.
Perhaps you should build a space wall to keep them out.

[Digital Hellhound]

That would make an interesting option. I imagine it'd cost ya (you need to supply them with transports at the least), plus you'd need a target civ willing to take them in (unless you drop them off at the border of xenophobic purifiers who'll just blow them up - you didn't kill them so it's okay, right?) unless you just turn them into galactic refugees drifting from system to system like pre-patch space critters. Which could be cool.

[Flying Dice]

I was more thinking about giving them to their parent civilization, since wargoal costs still prevent you from taking more than a handful of planets at a time. Another option would be building them a colony ship and dumping them on a rock outside your borders, which could end up creating all sorts of interesting situations.

It'd make for an interesting decision in part because of the differing environmental tolerances -- do you keep the aliens that like to live on the frigid shithole worlds and accept the ethical pollution and unhappiness, or do you kill them off/displace them (thus leaving you with empty worlds that add to your energy upkeep and losing the potential to colonize the sorts of worlds they like).

Would also be nice to have an option for mass-brainwashing to convert captured pops to your own ethics directly, especially for spiritualist civs.

[Flying Dice]

Yep, checked weapon stats and tested in-game (tier 4 missiles against tier 1 PD, no less), there's still basically no reason to use missiles in vanilla. I bumped up their evasion and speed slightly (increasing with tier), massively increased their range (the same), and changed PD damage & missile health such that top-tier PD won't one-shot top-tier torpedoes or missiles (or Large tier 4 missiles), and only has about a 50% chance of one-shotting a missile of roughly equivalent tier. I also bumped PD accuracy down a bit so that it scales from 50% to 60%.

Basically this way you still have the distinct advantages of the different other weapon types, but missiles now have their own advantage of standoff range (longer for larger missiles, though smaller missiles also have better speed and evasion). It also means that PD isn't a perfect hard counter--generally with this setup you should need slightly more than 2x as many PD turrets as the enemy has missile launchers in order to shoot down everything, whereas in vanilla you could almost do it with fewer PD turrets than there were launchers.

However, to remove the possibility of late-game cheese with corvette missileboats kiting forever, I gave the energy lances, kinetic artillery, and large mass accelerators (basically all the yuge cap-ship weapons) much longer ranges and slightly improved shield damage/pen stats (varying) so that they could outrange all small missiles and most (in some cases all) medium missiles. Of course large missile still retain a (slight) range advantage, and all missiles have lower cooldowns than those big guns (and also better accuracy), meaning that there shouldn't be a point where battleship snipers can just pew pew missileboats with impunity. Torps are mostly fine where they are now, but I gave them a slight tier-scaling speed increase.

That, and I gave the autocannons a slight tier-scaling cooldown buff. They're supposed to be short-ranged chainsaws, they should act like it. Also bumped strike craft attack and recall ranges waaaay out, to something like 2.5x the maximum range of any other weapon, which is still absurdly short for carrier-launched fighters but with the game's scale the way it is...

Tentatively, it looks like they might have unfucked combat behavior for real, so I didn't touch that.

[Putnam]

Point defense systems always aim for fighters and bombers before missiles, including if the missiles are in range and the fighters aren't. This is highly exploitable.

On the other hand, that's a bug more than a balance issue.

[lastverb]

Point defense systems always aim for fighters and bombers before missiles, including if the missiles are in range and the fighters aren't. This is highly exploitable.

On the other hand, that's a bug more than a balance issue.

It's there since day 1. I have been exploiting it hard to teach "evade stacking is OP" bobs. It was even better in first days since fighters/bombers didn't even move away from a carrier, so never got in range to be shot.
Good to know they didn't even fix such a basic stuff since then.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, that's one of the side reasons I gave strike craft such a long range, I'm not sure where the PD targeting priorities are defined, they don't appear to be in standard_ship_behaviors unless there's something even weirder going on with how the game handles projectile-based weapons.

'course that's not really the intended reason, just a bonus that comes about because even after multiple patches the game is still buggy and unbalanced. #justparadoxthings

Now I wonder if I should check to see if that one set of event policies is still fucked up and half-unusable because they changed the format for its terms halfway through writing them.

[lastverb]

Yeah, that's one of the side reasons I gave strike craft such a long range, I'm not sure where the PD targeting priorities are defined, they don't appear to be in standard_ship_behaviors unless there's something even weirder going on with how the game handles projectile-based weapons.

PD priorities are hardcoded, unless something changed since 1st patch, but prioritizing things outside of range would still be a bug.

[Drakale]

So many little bugs like that not being fixed, it's kinda maddening.

My sectors seem to love emptying their funds building lvl 6 space station while not building any ground improvement, the priorities are all wrong. Literally there are worlds with a full 20 pop and not a single improvement, despite me dumping massive funds in their banks.

Also, the game need a way to order ships in a generic menu and it get auto assigned to idle spaceports. I only ever use my core worlds build queue because selecting sectors world production is such a pain.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, that's one of the side reasons I gave strike craft such a long range, I'm not sure where the PD targeting priorities are defined, they don't appear to be in standard_ship_behaviors unless there's something even weirder going on with how the game handles projectile-based weapons.

PD priorities are hardcoded, unless something changed since 1st patch, but prioritizing things outside of range would still be a bug.

That's what I was thinking, but part of me couldn't help wondering if they were being really obtuse and treating missiles + torps + strike craft as ships for targeting purposes (as a special class or something to keep non-PD from targeting them), with bad code and the weight difference between the size_difference_penalty and distance_to_fleet_penalty resulting in the bugged targeting.

That, or they intended for strike craft to be like Protoss Carriers and fighters and only ever be active at extremely close ranges (where their relatively high damage potential would make priority-targeting them make sense) and the fact that strike craft would deploy and then fly around uselessly at far beyond their allowed attack range was the bugged behavior.

Honestly the entire facet of strike craft combat seems like they had a list somewhere with an item that said "Carriers and starfighters" and all they bothered doing was getting the assets in-game without bothering to think about how they should work. :I

e: At any rate, giving them such a long engagement range should at least ensure that the AI doesn't accidentally exploit it, and I don't do so myself.