Print

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

[umiman]

Yeah I'm not a big fan of how slow pop growth is right now.

Not to mention how slow movement speed is.

Everything is just so slow right now.

And I would agree that this system actually takes more micro than before. In the past I could build everything in one go and forget about the planet. Here I have to needlessly wait for the super slow pop growth before I can do anything. And yeah, the automated builder is just for decoration. Doesn't do anything.

[BurnedToast]

Let me know if anyone figures out a good habitat build.  Just played my first game going wonder heavy and once I started building habitats I realized that I didn't know how to use them.  They cost 4 or 5 alloy in upkeep which was my first big surprise.  I think I went with 3 residential, 1 entertainment, 2/3 science, 2/3 economic.  I dropped a couple mote/crystal/gas fabricators in each but never even finished filling them up.  I had four built before my first section of a ring world was completed.  Ring world A had to be food centered so that all planets could be mining focused, realized at that point the best use of habitats were farming pop to fill the ring faster.  Second ring world section was energy generation.  With all the food and energy I could need I didn't even finish the ring world and went straight for the mining wonder then ecumenopolis. 

End game, I have a bunch of habitats and ring world sections I never put much effort into because they don't fit well into the mineral/alloy cycle.  If there was a spam-able mining building similar to the hydroponics farm for planets, that would be great (broken?) since I could move industry to the habitats/ringworld.  As it was, my capital was full mining districts and had all its building slots available to accomplish most of my industry.

Habitats were overnerfed. Not that they were ever amazing, but now they aren't generally worth building at all IMO.

But that said if you do want to build them, I think you already found the best use - farming pops. Since stellaris' population growth is stupidly linear, 10 pops (or w/e) in a habitat create as much immigration pressure as 1000 pops stuffed in an overcrowded ecumenopolis. So you can build a ton of habitats for the sole purpose of creating immigrats to fill up your big worlds.

[Empty]

Is it me or are machine races really gimped with their growth now?

[Digital Hellhound]

I've been playing with a Machine race with buffs to pop growth and have become the second-largest species in the galaxy fairly quickly, so I don't know about that. Most of my worlds run with +5 monthly pop growth right now, and since there's no 'newly founded colony' slowdown or emigration pull to pop growth, I can have my more developed worlds popping out, uh, pops to resettle into the new colonies to fill them up fairly quickly. My biggest annoyance is the AI's bizarre priority choices when assigning pops to jobs. My economy routinely crashes as the AI decides to shift all my energy and mineral producers into new potential jobs, which is... irritating. I wish they'd allow you to directly assign pops to jobs rather than having to fiddle around with the priority settings. The fact Machine pops don't have to wait for demotion/promotion between social strata is actually a downside here.

I struggled a lot early-game, but I was saved by the one thing I don't need. I produce enormous amounts of food for sale or for my Bio-Reactors, which is nice and keeps my economy going. I like to think half the galaxy eats my soulless, mass-produced, identical food crops, especially the xenophobes, spiritualists and other AI-haters.

[Telgin]

If they have the same or comparable assembly speed to other empires then, yeah, machine empires are probably suffering right now.  It takes 50 months to build a robot pop now, or something like that.
 Pretty sure the devs acknowledged that robot assembly was too slow for them right now.

Yeah I'm not a big fan of how slow pop growth is right now.

Not to mention how slow movement speed is.

Everything is just so slow right now.

And I would agree that this system actually takes more micro than before. In the past I could build everything in one go and forget about the planet. Here I have to needlessly wait for the super slow pop growth before I can do anything. And yeah, the automated builder is just for decoration. Doesn't do anything.

It's definitely slower than before, and it feels like a lot of early things like techs were slowed down.  And you're right about needing to wait for pops to build things on planets, but at least there's no need to go back and hit the upgrade icon on every tile of every planet now.

I actually wonder if it's even economically feasible to have every building maximally upgraded on every planet now.

[Chiefwaffles]

God. I honestly hope they spend the entirety of their time on the next patch just polishing the UI, performance, balance, and bugs. Nothing else.

So far the update + DLC has probably been my favorite update to Stellaris thus far. But it's just so unpolished. The AI is completely broken. Machine races are nerfed to high hell (or just made more annoying in playing). Assigning pops to specific jobs is actual hell. Knowing anything about pops at all is impossible ("4 of your pops got the vegetable trait. GOOD LUCK KNOWING WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY DO!!!!"). Marketplace is just... weird balance-wise right now. Patrolling is strange. Micromanagement in terms of buildings is up. Pops just behave weirdly in general, and much more.
Yet again, regardless of that, this has been my favorite update. It just feels like the dev team has been so focused on completely redoing and adding mechanics that they forgot to really take a look at the game as a whole and look at how the different parts interact with each other.

[Dunamisdeos]

First of all, slavery is how to win at Stellaris now.

Pop growth slow? Go grab some from your neighbor. Need resources? Declare war, take one planet, sell everyone there on the slave market, instant 30000-50000 energy. Buy some stuff. Buy a space Mercedes. I spend lots of time micromanaging slave pops between worlds to balance efficiency and worker/technician use. You can jump-start colonies, specialize your main pop into sciency things, all of that.

I'm playing spiritualist xenophobes. My buddy is playing a materialist/egalitarian technocracy. I have kept up with and occasionally exceeded his scientific output for most of the game by sheer force of bodies available to run the research labs (we are around mid game). Fun fact: non-slaving empires can buy slaves on the market and free them.

Secondly, has anyone else noticed that Purity Orders and the like are now extremely, extremely dangerous? They used to just be angry and able to keep up with the rest of the galaxy, but now they seem to just run roughshod over everything.

And thirdly, they need to work on transparency/UI upgrades. There is a way to do everything but it's hidden behind 16 mouse clicks and no explanation.

[umiman]

Oh yeah, don't get me started on patrolling.

Fucking Christ who even plays this game? Surely the devs don't.

1. We don't know how much of a piracy-reduction a patrol actually is, leaving us to guess how many ships we need to assign to a route. (yes I know there's a hidden modifier tucked away inside the ship designer but seriously? Why is it hidden?)
2. The routes don't make any sense. I have a trading route that literally goes through another empire, taking the long way around, before coming to my capital.
3. Why is it so goddamn annoying to assign patrols in the first place? Every time you go to war you need to grab all the patrols and bring them into the fight. Then when you're done comes the stupid manual assignment and slowly waiting for them to move around so you can micromanage these dumb patrol routes.
4. Why do I need to patrol trade routes from my own stations but not trade routes from other empires? How does that make any sense? Why aren't there trade routes from other empires to begin with?

What the hell is wrong with the Stellaris devs seriously. How do they fuck up every single time?

I'm still entirely unconvinced to the benefits of this new system other than it initially looks more complex but ends up boiling down to the same exact thing... except worse since the AI has gone back to being completely incapable of handling it again. I would not be surprised if those poor modders who's job is to fix this stupid mess to make the AI competent finally throw their hands up and give up as the devs keep faffing about and messing everything up every patch.

[BurnedToast]

First of all, slavery is how to win at Stellaris now.

Pop growth slow? Go grab some from your neighbor. Need resources? Declare war, take one planet, sell everyone there on the slave market, instant 30000-50000 energy. Buy some stuff. Buy a space Mercedes. I spend lots of time micromanaging slave pops between worlds to balance efficiency and worker/technician use. You can jump-start colonies, specialize your main pop into sciency things, all of that.

Not just slavery, but war and hard expansion in general.

They spent so long making the game snowball less with mixed results, then they drop this update and make the game even more snowbally than ever. A big part of the problem is the utterly broken AI, but even if that was fixed pop growth is just too slow compared to everything else. It's so out of pace that stealing the enemy's stuff is the only way to grow at a reasonable rate.

Playing "tall" was never, and probably never will be a viable choice outside of "fun" or "roleplay" but they completely gutted it with this update anyway.

Is it me or are machine races really gimped with their growth now?

They had some kind of livestreamed "play with the devs" event right before the update came out, and one of the players stomped all over the devs using a robot race. So they last minute overnerfed robot races and robots in generally really hard. To be fair, they were kind of OP.... but not really worse than hive minds are right now and hive minds didn't get touched.

[Dunamisdeos]

Isn't there a little crosshair symbol on the fleet itself when you click it? I'm fairly sure how it works is that when that ship/fleet is in-system it provides that level of piracy reduction.

Also, a starbase in a system 100% suppresses piracy from what I can tell. I just build my anchorages along my trade routes and park like, 1-2 corvettes in a system that I can't put one in.

Have not yet needed to shift those patrols into my wars.

I do like the new Federation mechanics, no more AI taking leadership. That Federation fleet is all mine.

Spoiler: A Slave Story (click to show/hide)

This is a story about life and liberty and justice.

So I'm playing as an ultra-evil spiritual slaving civilization. Very early in the game I nab this Klingon-looking steam-age primitive society and move them en-masse to my homeworld/initial colonies.

For a very long time they were all I needed. My counterpart human player in this game founded the Galactic Market, which (as many of you know) among other things is what enables the slave trade. This particular slave, let's call him Steve, was the test subject for this new feature. It worked beautifully, and he sold for a solid 650. Goodbye Steve, you lucky bastard, said his fellow slaves.

But quite some time later I found my technology and economy were starting to outpace my population. Not enough hands to work the factories anymore, and of course I am not willing to just WAIT for my population grow naturally. So I set off to find more friends to give me a hand or two or twenty. I mosey on over to the next neighbor and take his homeworld. Who do I find there but a whole lot of indigenous bird people...... and Steve. Steve had apparently been bought and freed by this wonderful, egalitarian avian society. Steve was the first of his kind in a very long time to experience freedom, and justice.

Anyway the moral is that there is no liberty or justice in The Imperium's galaxy. Welcome home, Steve.

[Telgin]

I know there's a way to see the piracy suppression numbers on ships and fleets, but I couldn't tell you where off the top of my head.  It was a little pirate skull icon, and I recall that corvettes were worth 10 points of it each.  I know you can also see the piracy levels by going into the trade route map mode, but I actually don't know if the numbers correspond to each other directly.

I haven't seen trade routes do hilariously dumb things like path through other empires, but I've heard of people with problems like that.  Apparently it's not uncommon for trade routes to take different paths than the patrol routes you can set, which sounds very annoying.  I've read you can set multiple waypoints in a patrol route by using shift, but haven't tried it.  That would solve that problem to a point, if it's true.

And I'm still figuring out the suppression mechanics, but I think starbases suppress all piracy in their own systems, plus some amount in neighboring systems based on what weapon modules they have built and with hangars being the best.  Not really sure how having guns on a starbase helps to protect neighboring systems that need FTL drives to reach, but it's how it works.  I think.

[umiman]

I seem to have run into a bug where there are no influence upkeep costs for anything. I have alliances, defensive pacts, branch offices up the wazoo, etc. Zero influence costs.

Playing as a Megacorporation. No mods or anything.

[Rolan7]

Each missile or gun battery increases the starbase's range of protection by one.  Like each trade post increase collection range.  Everything in the range of a 4-missile starhold has 36 trade value protected (16 for starhold, 5 each for missile).  Protection from multiple starbases overlaps, fortunately.

Piracy can still happen in a system with a starbase, but trade routes don't appear to generate piracy in the system they originate.  Only along the route.  Which is why your capital starbase is so great, it generates *no* piracy even if it's collecting from systems 6 jumps away, since piracy is only generated between the capital and the collecting starbase.

Ooh - hangars work the same as missile batteries, except they provide 10 protection each instead of 5!  I should have researched those earlier.  They also make more sense than gun batteries protecting nearby systems, heh.

[umiman]

Each missile or gun battery increases the starbase's range of protection by one.  Like each trade post increase collection range.  Everything in the range of a 4-missile starhold has 36 trade value protected (16 for starhold, 5 each for missile).  Protection from multiple starbases overlaps, fortunately.

Piracy can still happen in a system with a starbase, but trade routes don't appear to generate piracy in the system they originate.  Only along the route.  Which is why your capital starbase is so great, it generates *no* piracy even if it's collecting from systems 6 jumps away, since piracy is only generated between the capital and the collecting starbase.

Ooh - hangars work the same as missile batteries, except they provide 10 protection each instead of 5!  I should have researched those earlier.  They also make more sense than gun batteries protecting nearby systems, heh.

Thank god.

I'm going to start building hangar stations then instead of relying on the idiotic patrolling system.

I tried using the shift-click patrol thing to make my patrol go where my trade route actually goes and it just crashed the game instead.

[forsaken1111]

Patrols are okay for short segments but yeah building strategically placed stations with wide protection radii is an awesome strategy. I use patrols for problem systems and I don't patrol the whole trade route between two stations, I only have them patrol the section not covered by the stations or the area where piracy is a major problem.

And oh my god once you really get rolling pop growth can get out of control. I have had to severely control my population or else my empire will collapse under the weight of bodies.