STELLARIS: New Paradox Game in SPAAAACE

[The Brain]

SO my game was cruising along nicely. I was playing in a spiral galaxy, and found myself dominating a good 25% of the map without much competition. Things were going great.

Joined a alliance with another empire about my own size, and we were looking at gobbling up some fractured smaller empires.

Apparently that other ally? He pissed off one of those Fallen Empire people who declared war on him...and by extension me.

No worries though, all the war targets are apparently the other guy...but it was not pretty. His fleet came in and took mine apart, and I had to go completely defensive. We lose, and as part of the terms I get "humiliation" and a crapload of my planets are not ceded, but abandoned.

So that was kind of cool - on the one hand my vaunted fleet was destroyed, and about 1/3rd of my planets suddenly ceased to exist.

The weird thing though is that they were not ceded, they were just all depoluated and my control over the entire arm was removed. But I was able to go back and re-colonize them.

So where did all those billions of people go? Exterminated?

To the lobby.

[Martinus]

So where did all those billions of people go? Exterminated?

Jupiter Ascending

I think even aliens who have advanced way beyond our primitive notions of good and evil would flinch at forcing billions of people to watch that movie...

[Martinus]

So, my first Phoenix Empire game ended prematurely when I was overextended myself and got overrun by wicked aliens. Started a new game, this time with worm holes - this makes for an entirely different game - in many ways you are much freeer as you can get to places your neighbours cannot so it is possible to claim strategic resources with outposts - and get the best planets to colonise.

Also it makes defending your wide empire much easier.

[Zanza]

Tech tree. Hadn't seen that before.

[Martinus]

Thanks for posting that Zanza. I thought that some techs have obvious prerequisites, but I did not realise it's so scripted. Good to know for beelining purposes.

By the way, in case someone has not realised it yet, the low level techs do show up later if you do not pick them up originally - so BB's original problem of not picking the Colony Ship tech can be remedies (although, obviously, it would hold him back as the tech may not show up again for quite a while).

[Martinus]

So in the next patch they are going to change the core planets limit to core systems limit - it will now make sense to colonize multiple planets in systems, even when the planets are not that good (16 pops or so).

[jimmy olsen]

So, if a sector is lacking in a strategic resource, is there anyway to subsidize it if you have an overall surplus?

[Berkut]

So, if a sector is lacking in a strategic resource, is there anyway to subsidize it if you have an overall surplus?

I was trying to figure that out, it doesn't look like there is at this point.

Strategic resources should really be, well, strategic, and shared across the entire empire.

[Berkut]

One thing about the game I would like to see in the future is restoring the "mystery" of exploration. Right now you can see the basic layout of the galaxy right from the start. I would love to see the exploration part of the game be a bit more dangerous and mysterious. I miss the maps of unknown from EU, and how much fun it was to send out your exploring ship off into the completely unknown.

[Martinus]

I guess they want to prevent a situation where a governor of a sector builds something and then it fucks up your global empire's resource availability - so it means they can only use a resource from their own sector.

[Martinus]

One thing about the game I would like to see in the future is restoring the "mystery" of exploration. Right now you can see the basic layout of the galaxy right from the start. I would love to see the exploration part of the game be a bit more dangerous and mysterious. I miss the maps of unknown from EU, and how much fun it was to send out your exploring ship off into the completely unknown.

Yeah but even we know already which stars are far away and which are close to us, so it's a bit of unrealistic.

[Berkut]

One thing about the game I would like to see in the future is restoring the "mystery" of exploration. Right now you can see the basic layout of the galaxy right from the start. I would love to see the exploration part of the game be a bit more dangerous and mysterious. I miss the maps of unknown from EU, and how much fun it was to send out your exploring ship off into the completely unknown.

Yeah but even we know already which stars are far away and which are close to us, so it's a bit of unrealistic.

Not at all, given the assumptions built into the game.

There are maybe 1000 stars in a game galaxy, but of course in reality there are some billions of stars. So my assumption is that there are lots MORE stars out there, but most of them are uninteresting.

So a given star isn't necessarily represented on the map in any case.

Besides, it is a sci fi computer game. You can make up whatever justification we want for why some mechanic that makes the game more fun works that way...

[Martinus]

Fair enough - although not knowing what kind of things you encounter in a star system provides the mystery imo. I mean, for all purposes, seeing a star is a bit like seeing there is an unknown province there.

[Berkut]

Fair enough - although not knowing what kind of things you encounter in a star system provides the mystery imo. I mean, for all purposes, seeing a star is a bit like seeing there is an unknown province there.

True, it provides some small amount of mystery.

But I really liked the way in EU you had NO idea what was in the grey (other than knowing that you were on a Earth map, of course). It was just this giant blank space.

[Zanza]

That would make more sense with asymmetric galaxy maps. As it is, not knowing where the stars are would not matter much as they follow a certain distribution.