Stellaris - 2300-2310 more things
I don't know why I have the urge to write this up so thoroughly. How many people are still reading?
New colonies
I expanded a bit too quickly to start with, and took some time to catch up with myself. But about now I said, it would be worth having another world or two. It's a significant step, so I said to myself "...and go!" before I pushed the button :)
That builds a ship from one of your planets, which then drives to a new planet and establishes a colony there. In theory you have a choice of species, except that my morlocks won't leave their home world, so only my original Duckbills will go to a new world.
I do have one bonus from, um, one of my starting empire bonuses, that I can send out *private* colony ships that cost energy instead of minerals. And by now, I'm doing well on energy but still need minerals to expand... everything. So I'm not usually limited in building ships (even though by now the mineral cost wouldn't be a big hurdle anyway).
Exciting to have a whole new (big) world. And my various habitability perks make most worlds very attractive.
Also, a few of my pops migrated to the new world! They hadn't ever done that before even when I thought the new world was better than the other ones, I'm not sure if I'd forgotten a setting or got a perk more recently or something else. But now I'm pleased, because it builds up a new world faster and the old world was mostly full so the pop can be replaced by population growth quickly.
The migration is marked with an icon of the pop carrying a classic folded-bag-on-a-stick bindle over their shoulder!
No-one has yet migrated INTO my empire, despite me having some attractive worlds. Hopefully they will eventually.
Some pacifist pops emigrated away when the war happened, but hopefully now the war's over pacifism will take over again.
And after a long fallow period when my science was growing too slowly, I got a rush of "clear blocking terrain to open new tiles on planets for building" techs, which let me expand my existing planets better too.
Those two new planets brought me up to my new max core planets of seven. The base is three, but I got +2 for being pacifist, and +2 for something else, so I went quite a long time without having too many.
Like many things, it's a "soft" cap, but this soft cap is quite hard -- you lose 30% energy and 30% influence, which is quite a lot, so you can't usually bull through it.
After that, you need to delegate some planets to a sector, part of your empire, but under AI control.
Consolidation
As previously mentioned, I need to integrate the new fungus planets into my empire, probably by delegating them to a sector (or maybe delegating my already-developed worlds to a sector where there's not much to do, and hand-managing the newer larger worlds).
There's a few systems I want to make sure to absorb[1]. The one with the ringworld! One with a gateway and maybe another with a wormhole. Any pirate-friendly dead-ends. One or two off to the east side of the galactic spiral to treat with empires there more easily.
[1] I'm not sure what word to use for "add a new system to my empire by building an outpost station in it". "Claim", "conquer" etc all mean something else.
After the war, I got an isolationist faction. Ok, maybe I have too many factions :) I was quite happy with the first few, the pacifists, the faith, and the egalitarians. The military faction were understandable, what with three decade long wars in 100 years. But now it's getting out of hand :)
But I think I can just accept I won't get any benefit from some of them, I can still enjoy the diversity. Even though a more game-y tactic might be to have fewer factions I can actually please simultaneously :)
The game often has a mid-game crisis where, once the empires have mostly reached some sort of status quo in the second century, something big-ish happens to shake things up. But I think that's only in the expansions, not the base game? So I have a century to expand slowly and build my science and economy, before an end game crisis eats the entire galaxy :)
Misc
One of the fallen empire's fleet is called "punitive response flotilla" yes ok fallen empire I can take a hint ok I can't.
Save scumming the war a couple of times showed me which random events came up fairly repeatably and which didn't. I'm glad I didn't reload too often or the temptation to keep re-rolling the die would be a lot greater. (Also, it's useful for game design decide if random events should be predetermined so they always happen the same way in the same game as much as possible, or be as random as possible so if you play out a saved game twice you can't rely on the prior knowledge much.)
Prior to the big 2.0 rework, instead of the current system of hyperlanes connecting nearby systems (but not all of them) in the equivalent of a road network, each empire started with one of three different FTL techs: hyperlanes; jumps (jump to star proportional to straight-line distance regardless of layout of hyperlanes or anything else); or wormholes (each system connects to random systems all over the map).
That was really great flavour that each empire was *really different* and ended up colonising systems in a completely different pattern.
But it didn't really work for war, because geography made little sense when everyone travelled in a completely different way, so there was no notion of import systems, or of fortifying frontiers, etc, there was just "have one giant fleet, hit opposing fleet with it".
So they switched to hyperlanes by default, with the others as something that could come up sometimes but wasn't any empire's primary locomotion.
But I wonder if there'd be some compromise, maybe everyone uses hyperlanes, but some systems have wormholes available right from the start, connecting random different parts on the map, so the topology is more wacky and less flat. So you're more likely to encounter different empires in different ways, and not just "these ones are near me and these ones aren't".
Also, liv started playing stellaris (she has a lot of experience playing civ), and I'm really excited to see how her empire goes. We both really love the duckbill pacifists, but she chose quite a different race to experience a different sort of game and I'm really excited to see how it turns out. I realised how many little things with the interface had bothered me and how nice it was to be able to share that with someone else. And the excitement of finding unexpected space things!
You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1078310.html using OpenID.
comments so far.
New colonies
I expanded a bit too quickly to start with, and took some time to catch up with myself. But about now I said, it would be worth having another world or two. It's a significant step, so I said to myself "...and go!" before I pushed the button :)
That builds a ship from one of your planets, which then drives to a new planet and establishes a colony there. In theory you have a choice of species, except that my morlocks won't leave their home world, so only my original Duckbills will go to a new world.
I do have one bonus from, um, one of my starting empire bonuses, that I can send out *private* colony ships that cost energy instead of minerals. And by now, I'm doing well on energy but still need minerals to expand... everything. So I'm not usually limited in building ships (even though by now the mineral cost wouldn't be a big hurdle anyway).
Exciting to have a whole new (big) world. And my various habitability perks make most worlds very attractive.
Also, a few of my pops migrated to the new world! They hadn't ever done that before even when I thought the new world was better than the other ones, I'm not sure if I'd forgotten a setting or got a perk more recently or something else. But now I'm pleased, because it builds up a new world faster and the old world was mostly full so the pop can be replaced by population growth quickly.
The migration is marked with an icon of the pop carrying a classic folded-bag-on-a-stick bindle over their shoulder!
No-one has yet migrated INTO my empire, despite me having some attractive worlds. Hopefully they will eventually.
Some pacifist pops emigrated away when the war happened, but hopefully now the war's over pacifism will take over again.
And after a long fallow period when my science was growing too slowly, I got a rush of "clear blocking terrain to open new tiles on planets for building" techs, which let me expand my existing planets better too.
Those two new planets brought me up to my new max core planets of seven. The base is three, but I got +2 for being pacifist, and +2 for something else, so I went quite a long time without having too many.
Like many things, it's a "soft" cap, but this soft cap is quite hard -- you lose 30% energy and 30% influence, which is quite a lot, so you can't usually bull through it.
After that, you need to delegate some planets to a sector, part of your empire, but under AI control.
Consolidation
As previously mentioned, I need to integrate the new fungus planets into my empire, probably by delegating them to a sector (or maybe delegating my already-developed worlds to a sector where there's not much to do, and hand-managing the newer larger worlds).
There's a few systems I want to make sure to absorb[1]. The one with the ringworld! One with a gateway and maybe another with a wormhole. Any pirate-friendly dead-ends. One or two off to the east side of the galactic spiral to treat with empires there more easily.
[1] I'm not sure what word to use for "add a new system to my empire by building an outpost station in it". "Claim", "conquer" etc all mean something else.
After the war, I got an isolationist faction. Ok, maybe I have too many factions :) I was quite happy with the first few, the pacifists, the faith, and the egalitarians. The military faction were understandable, what with three decade long wars in 100 years. But now it's getting out of hand :)
But I think I can just accept I won't get any benefit from some of them, I can still enjoy the diversity. Even though a more game-y tactic might be to have fewer factions I can actually please simultaneously :)
The game often has a mid-game crisis where, once the empires have mostly reached some sort of status quo in the second century, something big-ish happens to shake things up. But I think that's only in the expansions, not the base game? So I have a century to expand slowly and build my science and economy, before an end game crisis eats the entire galaxy :)
Misc
One of the fallen empire's fleet is called "punitive response flotilla" yes ok fallen empire I can take a hint ok I can't.
Save scumming the war a couple of times showed me which random events came up fairly repeatably and which didn't. I'm glad I didn't reload too often or the temptation to keep re-rolling the die would be a lot greater. (Also, it's useful for game design decide if random events should be predetermined so they always happen the same way in the same game as much as possible, or be as random as possible so if you play out a saved game twice you can't rely on the prior knowledge much.)
Prior to the big 2.0 rework, instead of the current system of hyperlanes connecting nearby systems (but not all of them) in the equivalent of a road network, each empire started with one of three different FTL techs: hyperlanes; jumps (jump to star proportional to straight-line distance regardless of layout of hyperlanes or anything else); or wormholes (each system connects to random systems all over the map).
That was really great flavour that each empire was *really different* and ended up colonising systems in a completely different pattern.
But it didn't really work for war, because geography made little sense when everyone travelled in a completely different way, so there was no notion of import systems, or of fortifying frontiers, etc, there was just "have one giant fleet, hit opposing fleet with it".
So they switched to hyperlanes by default, with the others as something that could come up sometimes but wasn't any empire's primary locomotion.
But I wonder if there'd be some compromise, maybe everyone uses hyperlanes, but some systems have wormholes available right from the start, connecting random different parts on the map, so the topology is more wacky and less flat. So you're more likely to encounter different empires in different ways, and not just "these ones are near me and these ones aren't".
Also, liv started playing stellaris (she has a lot of experience playing civ), and I'm really excited to see how her empire goes. We both really love the duckbill pacifists, but she chose quite a different race to experience a different sort of game and I'm really excited to see how it turns out. I realised how many little things with the interface had bothered me and how nice it was to be able to share that with someone else. And the excitement of finding unexpected space things!
You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1078310.html using OpenID.
comments so far.