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[umiman]

Question that's been bothering me: Aren't torpedoes relatively useless against larger ships because they have no armor pen?

More or less.

It's why everyone spams plasma and kinetic (when there's no plasma).

As far as I'm aware, the only enemies worth using torpedoes on are the Unbidden since they're basically all shields. Everyone else doesn't have enough to justify it and they all love to stack armour. Since kinetic does good damage to both (and has huge range with the artillery versions) and plasma just owns armour, it's why everyone just uses those.

That being said, you shouldn't ignore shields yourself. I found that fielding ships with no shields at all to just lead to absurd losses. Not really sure why that is but that's been my experience.

[Flying Dice]

Because if you don't have good shields all of the high armor-pen weapons destroy you.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Here's a question: I just got contacted by a bigger, meaner empire than the one I barely fought off and they want me to become their vassal. Is that basically a game over if I accept?

Technically no. It's only game over if they integrate you, which can only occur after 10~ years. So that's 10 years to tech up, rebuild your fleet and fight for a war of independence. Mind you, if the AI thinks you're weak enough that they ask for vassalage you... You might not have the strength to fight for independence even after rebuilding. So whether you accept or not is up to you. If you think you can fight them off once your fleet is rebuilt then go for it, so you have the breathing room to do so. Otherwise... Well. You're damned either way I suppose.

[Sirus]

Yeah, I was sorta afraid that would be how things worked, so I went ahead and declined the offer. This particular campaign is just frustrating because I have no friends nearby and my worlds are spread far and wide by necessity. If they decide to wipe me out, I'll just shrug and start a new game.

My people are Pacifist+Xenophile+Spiritualist. Literally all of my neighbors are Militarist, Xenophobic, Materialist, or some combination of the above, usually one of them at Fanatic level. They also somehow managed to get nice clustered starts so they have 7 or so colonizable systems within easy reach.

[umiman]

I mean, being pacifist, spiritualist, and xenophillic is kinda like this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[EnigmaticHat]

Everyone who believes the strong should eat the weak puts themselves in the strong category.

[Cruxador]

Xenophobic spiritualism, on the other hand, is a nice combination. Border extrusion plus growth bonus lets you expand just by pushing your border over planets and moving in, with very little war needed to remove specific impediments.

[Paul]

I like the trading aspect and being able to trade future resources.

I started a huge galaxy game with nothing but advanced start AIs (normal difficulty), and one of my neighbors jumped on me early when all my minerals had been going toward stations and colony ships and planetary upgrades before I had a chance to build up a decent fleet. I had no minerals, but my mineral income was great.

So I traded a chunk of my mineral income for the next 30 years to every friendly empire I knew in exchange for all the current minerals they would part with. I traded up several thousand minerals and got all my spaceports churning out ships. I lost one spaceport in the buildup time, then completed a fleet equal to his (and over my limit) and hammered his with a swarm of missile corvettes. I knew he was rocking nothing but plasma with no PD after the loss of the spaceport, so I was confident sending in my missile armed, armorless, shield heavy corvettes. Due to plasma not being so great vs shielded corvettes, they wiped the floor with his fleet, losing only a third of my fleet power. I then went through and blew up all his spaceports. Now the big neighbor who tried to jump on me is paying me 25% of his income, more than I traded away - and after losses I was left with a fleet just barely under my limit to protect from my other unfriendly neighbors.

I also tend to trade away minerals for energy after I've built stations on every rock in my territory and end up with negative energy income and hundreds of mineral income. A lot of the AI seem to enjoy trading future energy for minerals 1:1 and I guess it's the way I play but I'm always short on energy income. But if I trade away 30 minerals and get 30 energy to power the 30 stations on 2 mineral rocks that otherwise wouldn't have been built I'm still gaining 30 minerals a month.

[Wolock]

I discovered the technosphere not too far from home. Once I got a lvl 5 scientist I helped it calculate infinity and received the +10 research point and the 10% bonus from the black hole system. It's a pretty huge bonus when you still at corvette level. Also I've explored half of my galactic arm and I'm still the lone spacefaring civ I know of and I'm stuck with only three habitable planets.

[Paul]

I discovered the technosphere not too far from home. Once I got a lvl 5 scientist I helped it calculate infinity and received the +10 research point and the 10% bonus from the black hole system. It's a pretty huge bonus when you still at corvette level. Also I've explored half of my galactic arm and I'm still the lone spacefaring civ I know of and I'm stuck with only three habitable planets.

Did you turn your habitable planet chance down? The initial 3 planets are guaranteed by the way the game generates empires. Every empire gets at least two ideal worlds right next to them. If you turn the chance down you end up with those and hardly anything else.

The RNG can be crazy though. I have had games where there were no other good worlds nearby, and other games are insane. My most recent game has a 25 space gaia world 1 warp from my homeworld. I have had that before, but they always had the holy world thing - this is the first time I have actually been able to grab a 25 square perfect gaia with no tile blockers as my first colony.

[TempAcc]

Did the crystal aliens get removed or something? Ever since I got heinlein I haven't seen them anywhere.

[Sirus]

I see almost nothing but crystal things, actually.

[USEC_OFFICER]

I've seen them once and reverse-engineered crystal plating off of an AI empire in my latest game. So they are still around. It just seems like interstellar threats in general, drones, pirates, void clouds, etc, are much more rare than they used to be. They're also all clustered together in a couple systems instead of being spread out, so chances are that an AI dealt with them before you could see them. Not a design choice I'm fond of, given how these kinds of things have special technologies to reverse engineer. But eh.

...

You know what I haven't seen in forever? The space cows. Or whatever they were called. Before 1.3 you saw them every game, usually as your first encounter. Now? I haven't seen hide or tail of them.

[TempAcc]

I see them sometimes still, though they did use to be way more common. My guess is that lots of things are spawning inside fallen empire territory and getting asploded to oblivion.

Pirates, however, seem pretty common in my games. I always get that pirate event in the early game, and usualy I end up finding a midgame tier pirate fleet some systems away from my capital. Space amoebas and void clouds are still around, too, but I haven't seen the crystals ever since the last update.

[Draignean]

Goddamn this game still sounds awesome. I know I asked a similar question earlier, but there I was directly relating it to to SotS (which is the best sci-fi 4x), now my question is, is it worth the ~80 USD to buy the game and expansions?

(No, expansions aren't mandatory, but there's always that thought of: "well, maybe the expansions would fix all those niggles I had the base game" [Again, like in SotS.] if I don't try them. )