Games Stellaris Out Next Week

[SilverHood]

So Stellaris is out next week, who is excited?

If you haven't heard of it... it's made by Paradox, same people who made Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron. It's their take on the 4X space genre.
Stellaris

For game play videos, I recommend the dev play through series on YouTube, called Stellaris - All hail Blorg, Space Friends

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shoiYDp7EEA


The thing that excites me the most is the late game challenges... such as demons from the void appearing after your scientists open a gate (to hell?), or the synthetic workers rising up in a robot rebellion against their masters, because you had to push for Sentient AI, right?

Anyway, I pre-ordered based on the above dev stream, looks like a lot of fun, and should keep me busy until Hearts of Iron 4 is released.

 

[Raven]

Yeah I saw this. Very highly moddable too. Once I get my exam out the way in June I will be getting this.

 

[Zarjazz]

Already pre-ordered it a month or two ago. I love this genre and Paradox have really been turning out very good games in the last few years.

 

[Shagrat]

looking forward to it, looks good.

 

[fettoken]

Few questions.

Is there real time strategy combat elements?

Is there a ship-design feature, and how in depth in terms of feature is it?

Are there technology-researches?

 

[SilverHood]

Few questions.

Is there real time strategy combat elements?

Is there a ship-design feature, and how in depth in terms of feature is it?

Are there technology-researches?

Everything is real time. The fleet battles are not tactical though. Just blobs of ships crashing together.

Ship design is modular based on chassis . I think there's 4 or 5 types available.

There are 3 lines of tech, you will get 3 random options for each, and you research 3 different tech lines at once. Some are rare and will only show up once a game, others are more vanilla and will be available many times.

 

[Fafnir]

yep preordered via GMG...

 

[Shagrat]

enjoying this so far

 

[SilverHood]

It's a lot of fun. My first game I crashed and burned, even though I had a fantastic start and my scientists were *AMAZING*. My neighbors were intent on world domination, not good for your first game. I had to fight off some space cows, and this weakened me enough for my neighbours to gang up on me. Game over.

My second game, I had a slow start, with a real lack of resources. This made me prioritise certain things better I think, such as blocking my neighbours using frontier outposts to claim valuable space. With my 3 southern neighbours bottled up, I managed to build up a decent size empire by the start of the mid game, while still having space to expand, taking care not to disturb the isolationist fallen empire to my north. My scientists are super unlucky this game, having lost at least 7 to anomalies so far, even when there's a less than 15% chance failure rate.
Just curb stomped my rival, god damn wormhole tech means catching their fleet is impossible, so I just systemically dismantled their systems and took their 3 most important worlds.

This then caused some major coalition building. We now have the Righteous Entente, the Glorious Axis, the Galactic Concord, the Bright Alliance, and finally, the Favorable Alliance. There are 15 unaligned empires, including my own and the fallen empire. Most of these are on the fringes of the galaxy with no neighbours.

End game is going to be fun

 

[Scouse]

Gonna wait until Xmas sales. It'll run better and be better balanced by then.

But yep. Want.

 

[SilverHood]

Gonna wait until Xmas sales. It'll run better and be better balanced by then.

But yep. Want.

Don't disagree, having a lot of fun, but the end game is not as fun as the early game. Just had my first major war, and even though I was winning with a 20% warscore, I didn't have the energy to persue it to the 60 I needed, the amount of micro needed to maintain a 4 front war was too much, so I went for a white peace.

I think this game needs to be played on a smaller map. The above is 800 starts and it's too much.

 

[Shagrat]

so just stumbled across my first Fallen Empire.

The ship I sent into there space to survey just vanished (and didn't reappear until about 10 years later on the other side of the galaxy), and they basically told me to just bugger off. Overwhelmingly technically superior to me (unsurprisingly as they said they were aeons old) and there are no planets in there area of space, just Ringworlds in various states of disrepair floating around the suns.


so cool!!!

 

[SilverHood]

so just stumbled across my first Fallen Empire.

The ship I sent into there space to survey just vanished (and didn't reappear until about 10 years later on the other side of the galaxy), and they basically told me to just bugger off. Overwhelmingly technically superior to me (unsurprisingly as they said they were aeons old) and there are no planets in there area of space, just Ringworlds in various states of disrepair floating around the suns.


so cool!!!

Every time before I quit for the evening, I've been saving manually, then declaring war on the Fallen Empire to see how far I have to go ...
Fleet Strength numbers...
25k - wiped out in seconds.
45k - wiped out in less than 30 seconds.
65k - Lasted about a minute and took out a good 10-15k of their numbers.
Next attempt I'll hopefully have around 90k. Lasers seem to do more damage than missiles to these guys.

 

[SilverHood]

So I've played about 10 hours of end game now, and it's fairly disappointing. There's severe performance issues, with the game grinding to halt during big battles.
I did managed to spank the two fallen empires next to me, very satisfying. I could probably curb stomp the rest of the galaxy, but dealing with above performance issues makes me not want to. Hopefully they'll fix it soon

 

[Shagrat]

yeah ive encountered that as well.

im not sure about the mechanic around the number of planets you own either at the moment, seems to make conquering your enemies not worth it.

 

[SilverHood]

yeah ive encountered that as well.

im not sure about the mechanic around the number of planets you own either at the moment, seems to make conquering your enemies not worth it.

Yeah, sectors are a strange mechanic. I hated it at first. The need to micromanage is strong early in the game with nothing much going on. I like it now that I'm controlling almost 200 planets though, each of my 5 sectors is big enough to easily develop their own colonies, I just send the colony ship in and forget about it. Each sector can manage 2-3 colonies at once. Everything has to be focused on generating credits though, or you go bankrupt. So what I tend to to do for new territory, is build the base colony up myself, with a nice mix of science, minerals and credits and once most tiles are covered, give it to a sector, and then colonize a new planet and repeat. I have a core limit of 9 planets right now, so that's 8 colonies on the go at all times.

When you conquer enemies and get a bunch of worlds all at once, this dynamic kind of breaks. I usually split the newly conquered planets between sectors, gerrymandering them US style, so that instead of one rebel faction, there's 3-4 weaker ones. With some re-education campaigns, most of the rebels are gone after 50-100 years. Doesn't apply to Fallen Empires. They hate their alien overlords.

I just recently ran into independence movements for my sectors, which is kind of tempting. It would allow me to research tech at a decent rate by shedding some 500-1000 pops, but the credit drain might be too much. My new sector vassal(s) would be the the size of the 2nd largest empire with between 30 and 50 planets, so could be a nice buffer. Will have to see how that would affect my naval force limit and credit flow.

 

[Scouse]

Does it grind as much as Civ V does later on?

I've quite an old processor and wouldn't mind a comparison of sorts.

 

[SilverHood]

Does it grind as much as Civ V does later on?

I've quite an old processor and wouldn't mind a comparison of sorts.

Yeah, it's near on unplayable at later stages at fast speed. Civ 5 never lagged for me.

 

[Scouse]

Yeah, it's near on unplayable at later stages at fast speed. Civ 5 never lagged for me.

What CPU do you rock?

 

[SilverHood]

What CPU do you rock?

I have an Intel i7-3770 @ 3.4 GHz