Well shit. I am impressed. What's the plan now? Slowly begin turning worlds to glass? Are there any other planets left other then Olympia?
Current plan: The Avatar goes around cleaning up Fortresses, the Agincourt Ships go around cleansing planets, and we keep doing this until all the Prethoryn are gone. Besides the habitats and Olympia there are no worlds inhabited by sapient life, although I have seen worlds that were simply left uninfested by the prethoryn.
Is this capable of being nominated for any hall of legends type thingies?
Nah leave it, that's for Dorf Fortress stuff
Soon it will stop being about need and start being about how far we can grind their(hypothetical) noses into the mud while displaying our supremacy over them.
Wouldn't feel right in the spirit of the LP, the UN wouldn't seek to humiliate an enemy like the prethoryn, they'd just eliminate them. Maybe send a message before the final shot though: "Hak hak hak fuckers"
Good lord almighty, this is literally THE biggest-resistance-against-overwhelming-odds I have EVER seen in ANY game I've ever seen, god DAMN LW.
Why ty
Apparently I was slightly wrong. You can invade infested worlds, but ONLY if the pops living there haven't been purged yet. It's possible to launch "counter-invasions" in order to save the populations, but once they're all gone the world is entirely infested, and you can only bombard them into a barren wasteland.
I don't consider occupied worlds as infested as such
Holy shit. We've lost a lot of ships fighting these bugs. But their sacrifice was not in vain!
...If we beat them all the way back now that they've eaten mostly everyone, won't the whole galaxy be ours? What would we even do with it?
We lost so many ships we left all the wreckage that millions of years from now scientists will discover as evidence of precursor civs. Also yeah the whole galaxy will be ours in the sense that no one else is left, but it'll be as the commonwealth of all living beings. We will try our best to undo the damage caused by the prethoryn, and have got a preliminary plan for the recovery, but as before, it's still too early to plan for sure while the prethoryn are still so vast.
NO it would NOT be ours. We would put all the xeno pops right back where they were before.
And before you ask, we're NOT keeping the space armadas either.
I think you'll be pleased if the current post-war plan succeeds, but Mum's the word
What other nations/empires/civilizations remain?
How heavily has the game been modded/have you been cheating? I know you did some stuff for the sake of the story/not immediately dying, but could you compile a list of the mods that you applied, cheating that you did, console commands that you used, etc.?
After you finish this LP, are you going to post a link to it on the Stellaris subreddit? If so, what should the summary/description of the LP that you post there to encourage people to click on the link and read this LP be?
No nations remain but the UN of Olympia. Of the mods, in order of significance: Fortress build radius decreased from 200 to 20, allowing for 10x as dense Fortress configurations. This basically saved Earth for a few times and without it, it is likely Earth would've been eliminated wholly before it reached Olympia (and it certainly bought a lot more time to relocate pops to Olympia). The next would be build times in tier 6 spaceports being around 5x faster than normal tier 6 spaceports, so I don't have to sit through centuries of nothing just to build up 1 fleet. I tried modding sentinels to have a larger fleet cap but that didn't really work so I just deleted that and let them run as normal, likewise the mod to increase the prethoryn queen's brood size was pointless as even with more ships she was effortlessly nom'd by the scourge. The only other things are that I'm considering modding the gene ascension path to not be exclusive, so we can change genetics a bit more (potentially even recreate homo sapiens), and I also modified the asteroid colony event so that it could strike the capital planet and kill every pop on the planet. That event has been ticking ever since, so in the first few centuries where we had no spaceport, at any moment an asteroid could have hit Earth and caused humanity's extinction. I kept this modification a secret, as I though it could make for a pleasant surprise, that amidst all of our debates and utopian memes, at any moment a giant rock could hit Earth and everything would be gone. I think the prethoryn are just a less subtle version of giant space rock threat. As for console:
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copy_pop copies a population and places it in a selected world, in this case I used it to nab pops like the Estwani or Lagin'Chuuz which otherwise would refuse to migrate to our habitats, where all the others were fine with it. As far as I can tell a pop will only migrate to another planet if it's the dominant pop. Also the Adnor were still xenophobes and refused to sign a migration treaty, so for all intents and purposes we abducted an adnor pop for their own survival, and definitely not because we love the fluffy mammals or anything. The last cycle of tag switching was to try and find the Mandasuran pop, as the species screen told me some of their descendants still existed, but I had no idea where.
In regards to reddit, nah I don't use it.
After you finish this LP, are you going to post a link to it on the Stellaris subreddit? If so, what should the summary/description of the LP that you post there to encourage people to click on the link and read this LP be?
Yeah, I definitely expected it to die at some parts there, but you've held out a surprising amount.
As far as headlines go:
I beat the Prethoryn with a grand total of 2 planets
I probably wouldn't go for something like that. I never wanted to beat the Prethoryn, I just wanted to have a silly UN of Earth run and see how long it took before humanity was asborbed into a greater political entity. I would have been happy with an asteroid hitting Earth, with being diplomatically absorbed into the Belmacosans, enslaved by the Adnori or exterminated by the Mandasuran Berserkers (with tag switching, we could've even played as a xenos faction, observing human interactions within their Empire), but being killed by the prethoryn? It seemed far too cheap to me. It was not a worthy end. Not to mention they arrived at a time where there was a genuine hope that the Bright Entente could peacefully unify the galaxy. I had even planned to do a whole xenology post detailing the species and political states of the galaxy before the prethoryn arrived from nowhere.
Seems fitting that Utopia means noplace. Noplace, Olympia and the Scourge from nowhere.
Oh, you say that with the best of intentions, but this is how it starts. A few adjustments here, a few Agincourts there, and before you know it we're ruling a galaxy of slave-races genetically engineered as perfect subjects with an iron fist.
It would be fun, after all this time, to turn the UN evil and see what gives.
But seriously! Can we save the slippery slope arguments for AFTER we have beaten the living daylights out of the bugs?
I don't like suggestions for evil for evil's sake, I like it more when logical actions arise and are executed which could be labeled as evil. For example, leaving Earth. Perfectly logical; broke our moral code, is evil. Otherwise NJW's concerns are not too off the mark, as all of our peeps have been psionically awakening and calling their species things like super-human ultra. This is also the most powerful humans have ever been relative to the other denizens of the galaxy, so we've got to respect that we could accidentally cause great damage without even meaning any malicious intent.
This is one of the prettiest populations screens I've ever seen. That is all.
Some other things of note while I slug through prethoryn worlds: The Admiral Haruna Higuchi? The one who got depressed after emerging as the only survivor of a calamitous battle with the prethoryn? Turns out she's the perfect President for the post-war period, in that she's the only candidate amongst all the admiralty, civil service and research sector that is a world-shaper. What this means is, she's a natural director for terraforming!
It's the beginning of the end for the prethoryn. We've lost the avatar a couple more times due to carelessness, but as we're capable of fielding 100 Agincourt battleships led by Mira Petrenko and Bao Miroslav it's been no matter of concern. It really is just a matter of time, as while the prethoryn have bogged us down with their endless ships (which still do 150% damage), the Peacekeeping mission is eliminating 1-3 worlds every reinforcement cycle. The war could be over in a few decades. In the meantime we're saving up minerals to build a sentry array to observe the galaxy and prethoryn movements (though no construction has begun... And I may decide against it on the grounds of protecting the privacy rights of all galactic citizens). Also built more habitats, but nothing major, just one more solar system.
Combat stats as of 2708. We're at the point where 100 Battleships can take on 4 Prethoryn broods and eliminate them all, suffering around 10 ship losses. It's gonna be a while still