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[sprinkled chariot]

Just get your colony going and drop stations on all the system resources. It'll turn into your vassal/protectorate's territory, but you'll keep all your holdings.


Ugh. I want to do a peaceful-ish run where I assimilate people all friendly-like and build a federation, but the entire game appears to be built so that anything other than going full 40Klike PURGE THE XENOS PURGE THE HERETIC PURGE THE MUTANT is a total pain in the ass. *sigh* More mass-murder it is. Different ethos? PURGE. Alien? PURGE. Alien I intentionally suborned? PURGE. Wrong hair color? PURGE. Unhappy? PURGE. Unhappy because of all the purging? PURGE.

XENOS

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 

[Cruxador]

Because everyone is willing to forgive everything they do and praise them for when they do release this DLC... So they try less... and less... and less...

Now, that's just not true. Paradox gets talked to pretty straight by their fans, even on their own forums (which for many developers tend to be total hugboxes) for bad DLC, bad gameplay decisions, and (as in the case of plantoids) bad pricing. The response is generally "it is what it is, here's why it's not changing, but we're doing things differently in the future". At least with the project heads that I'm familiar with. And while not changing stuff is kind of a problem, that only really applies to the DLC itself, so their support policy isn't bad compared to other studios.

Meh sorry guys I was in an exceptionally bad mood.

No worries mate, happens to everyone. Your viewpoint isn't necessarily invalidated by its emotional context, even though I do personally think that it's needlessly ungenerous.

Stellaris is one of the best 4x games of its type (Space) ever made.

"One of" makes that hard to argue,  but still... It's a high claim. Best in what way? Accuracy? Distant Worlds reigns there. Balance and mechanistic challenge? AI? GalCiv2. Interesting factions and characters? Alpha Centauri takes the cake if you count that, but otherwise there's SotS and a pretty wide array of other things which are above it. I think Stellaris has the potential to be great, and I think that in time it will reach most of that potential, but even though it's a fun game in its current state, I wouldn't sing its praises to anyone too highly if they're not in it for the long term.

Alright, here's a question. What happens if you enlighten a primitive civilization that lives in a system where you have a colony? Do you lose your colony? If so, what happens to the people and buildings on it?

The system and its influence area is hatched* in your empire's color and that of the primitives. You still control the same stuff you did before. I got a system that was triple-hatched once.

*As in the diagonal lines used in cartooning for shading, not anything egg-related.

[Neonivek]

Best as in "Overall a good, fun, and worthwhile game"

It gets in the top 10... likely in 5th place. Though I think it doesn't really have a lot of competition which is the problem.

It took me a little bit to realize that there is a surprising lack of 4x space games (you know the type) that are truly good. Endless Space is boarderline dull and it somehow is one of the good ones.

[Cruxador]

Best as in "Overall a good, fun, and worthwhile game"

It gets in the top 10... likely in 5th place. Though I think it doesn't really have a lot of competition which is the problem.

It took me a little bit to realize that there is a surprising lack of 4x space games (you know the type) that are truly good. Endless Space is boarderline dull and it somehow is one of the good ones.

Yeah, it gets into the top ten, but that's more or less just by default. 4x isn't a huge genre to begin with so when you narrow it down to one setting, you wind up with single digit numbers of games that are at all notable.

[PanH]

Just get your colony going and drop stations on all the system resources. It'll turn into your vassal/protectorate's territory, but you'll keep all your holdings.


Ugh. I want to do a peaceful-ish run where I assimilate people all friendly-like and build a federation, but the entire game appears to be built so that anything other than going full 40Klike PURGE THE XENOS PURGE THE HERETIC PURGE THE MUTANT is a total pain in the ass. *sigh* More mass-murder it is. Different ethos? PURGE. Alien? PURGE. Alien I intentionally suborned? PURGE. Wrong hair color? PURGE. Unhappy? PURGE. Unhappy because of all the purging? PURGE.

Fanatic Individualist is actually the strongest ethos atm. You can forget about all ethics divergence and stuff with it.

[Digital Hellhound]

Ugh. I want to do a peaceful-ish run where I assimilate people all friendly-like and build a federation, but the entire game appears to be built so that anything other than going full 40Klike PURGE THE XENOS PURGE THE HERETIC PURGE THE MUTANT is a total pain in the ass. *sigh* More mass-murder it is. Different ethos? PURGE. Alien? PURGE. Alien I intentionally suborned? PURGE. Wrong hair color? PURGE. Unhappy? PURGE. Unhappy because of all the purging? PURGE.

For some strange reason, I think the problem might be with you.

Seriously though, there are plenty of techs and buildings that raise happiness and lower ethics divergence. Spiritualist and Collectivist might be your best bet. Pops are still going to be unhappy, but they'll come around.

My collectivist authoritarian-but-benevolent star empire got a bit darker than expected when I realized all my sector governors were building Mind Control Lasers in orbit of their worlds, but eeh, provincials, am I right?

[etgfrog]

I see the scourge end game event is still a bit broken, it spawned in my territory so I moved my 120k fleet over there and wiped them out before they took a planet, now the event is still stuck in my situation log.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

bug report that shit, bro.

[Flying Dice]

The ethics divergence is easily the least significant of the real problems, though. I can deal with pops being unhappy because I purged and they're xenos-loving traitors, I just resettle them onto a useless border world or purge them.

I've fixed the idiotic "the more powerful you are, the more your vassals hate you" thing, but the whole process of uplifting/integrating/&c. is just a total pain in the ass compared to killing everything. It's the same end result, only it takes far more time and resources. It's not like terraforming and gene-modding aren't things you can do that are just flatly more effective than getting subject pops and hoping that they've got the right tolerances or traits.

I say this because all I'm trying to do is get a save to the endgame to do some weapons testing against real threats, but even if you're a fanatic xenophile with the other species happiness trait you're still going to have to conquer some idiots, and being a xenos-lover like that just means that when you do it's harder to deal with them (since they're inevitably xenophobic/spiritualist/militarist jackasses that won't get along), since you can't just purge them or sit below your target warscore while you sloooooooowly kill their pops with orbital bombardment.

:I

[Wiles]

I found dealing with unhappy pops to be a lot easier than it used to be. Between edicts, governors, buildings and artist enclaves I was able to keep factions from getting out of control.

But yeah uplifting/integrating vassals takes forever. I'm not even sure how long it takes because I was never able to do it in my game, I had four protectorates but none of them ever reached the point where I could integrate them.

[Majestic7]

Am I the only one who actually enjoys having a slave swarm? The more subjects I get to guard my borders for me, the better. Besides, I like the idea of vassal states doing my bidding. I never integrate them.

[amjh]

Integrating them makes your empire bigger, and bigger empire makes it easier to get new vassals. At least if I understood the mechanics correctly.

[Cruxador]

Having lots of planets and lots of pops does decrease your rate of technological development. That means that vassal swarms are a pretty legit tactic in theory, though in practice the mechanics make it kind of funky and awkward because if you're real strong they'll hate you. And it's not that easy to manage vassals in any coherent way in the first place. Still better than sectors though, for most purposes besides force limit. So if your goal is to fight powerful things, vassals aren't great, but if you just want a defensive buffer, they should work fine.

Although this is kind of theory-crafting since I haven't played a vassal-centric game in the newest build.

[Hanzoku]

I'm currently gravitating towards the whole 'Embrace the galaxy in the loving arms of the United Earth Alliance. If you don't want to be embraced, our battleships will be with you shortly to convince you otherwise.'

Ahahaha, glad I went to check in the wiki. I had wanted to form a Federation, but hadn't realized it would leave my foreign policy slaved to the incompetent AI 75% of the time. I'll just enjoy my alliance with my two rubber-stamping allies who are 100% A-OK with my massive empire growing larger by taking chunks out of my southern neighbors.

[Biowraith]

Ahahaha, glad I went to check in the wiki. I had wanted to form a Federation, but hadn't realized it would leave my foreign policy slaved to the incompetent AI 75% of the time. I'll just enjoy my alliance with my two rubber-stamping allies who are 100% A-OK with my massive empire growing larger by taking chunks out of my southern neighbors.

The wiki is a bit out of date there; one of the major updates changed Federations so that members now vote on wars instead of the President making all the decisions for everyone.  Votes have to be unanimous so you can just veto any war you're not interested in, although it does mean when you want to start a war you sometimes have to throw the AI a wargoal bone or two to get them to vote yes (rather than just wait til your turn as President in the old system).