Print

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

[Shadowlord]

Blorg body pillows and tentacles.

🐙

[Donuts]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So some retarded AI empire decided "hey let's get jumpdrives" and spawned the Unbidden right up my arse, with 60k fleets constantly flooding out and pretty much melting my entire fleet instantly.

Fun??

[Retropunch]

Not to mention in a WEIRD oddity... each expansion begets an expansion for each expansion as they never feel sort of fully cooked.

I couldn't quite understand what was annoying me so much, but I think that's it.

For stuff like CK2 and EUIV, the DLC seems fully fleshed out and a sort of complete product by itself. The Stellaris DLC's just feel a bit...not rushed, just that they seem to be just an incremental improvement in a few directions rather than a complete addition of a particular aspect. Part of this is that they should have been included in the base game, and part of it is that they just don't really seem to nail what they were trying to do.

[Draignean]

Alright, so I have this game now. Had pretty good fun with it, up until my first war.

I really like the idea, with war goals and clear lines of diplomacy still in play (though I'd also enjoy it if there was a no-holds-barred-eat-what-you-kill option for fanatic militarists or empires that REALLY hate one another), but goddamn combat and fleet movement is frustrating in this game- not to mention the constant deluge of 'situation log updated' that makes me want to murder someone.

I suppose I'm spoiled on SOTS, which (being turn based) had a very clean and comprehensible understanding of who was going to fight who. I really don't like the fact that I can send my fleet to defend on of my systems from the strategic map, and end up with that system captured without a fight due to the defense fleet sitting at the system edge while an attacking force 1/3 their size swats my heavy defensive stations out of the air and invades the planet.

Bah. It really took away from how much I was enjoying the game. I don't want to have to swap between the tactical and strategic maps (disorienting as hell) to make a very simple defensive action. I also do not want there to be a single click option that can make me jump to the attacking empire's homeworld. I don't want that. I have no use for that. I don't know when I'd ever have a use for that.

Got so damn frustrated with the war I only asked for one planet. Going to have to deal with the Unbidden and then come back the whaling on these idiots.

[Taricus]

Put the fleet into aggressive stance, they'll automatically pursue and engage enemy fleets in system.

[Greenbane]

I've recently started a 1.5 Utopia playthrough with a fairly standard democratic Human civ, and I feel I'm losing traction again, just like the last time I played.

I start exploring, colonize 2-3 planets, build some frontier outposts (not many due to influence restrictions) to enable grabbing resources from a few more systems, surveying an outer ring of systems all along, researching anomalies and finding a couple of alien civs. My energy and mineral production grows and I can more easily develop my colonies, build mining/research stations and support a larger fleet. Around this time I have enough tech to upgrade my corvettes for the first time, and build my first destroyers.

And then I hit some kind of lull. My colonies are soon developed as much as their population growth allows, so building new stuff becomes a sporadic task. And this is when I start losing traction, even though I don't think I've even reached the mid-game: what's there to do other than continue teching up, survey ever outwards and maybe pick a fight with a neighbour, just because?

I could theoretically colonize more planets, but at least on the default map settings, yellow+ worlds aren't common at all. So there aren't any suitable candidates anywhere near my space. Mars and another random planet can technically be terraformed, but for a truckload of energy and a second technology from who knows how far up (down?) the tech tree.

Thoughts appreciated.

[Retropunch]

Alright, so I have this game now. Had pretty good fun with it, up until my first war.

I really like the idea, with war goals and clear lines of diplomacy still in play (though I'd also enjoy it if there was a no-holds-barred-eat-what-you-kill option for fanatic militarists or empires that REALLY hate one another), but goddamn combat and fleet movement is frustrating in this game- not to mention the constant deluge of 'situation log updated' that makes me want to murder someone.

I suppose I'm spoiled on SOTS, which (being turn based) had a very clean and comprehensible understanding of who was going to fight who. I really don't like the fact that I can send my fleet to defend on of my systems from the strategic map, and end up with that system captured without a fight due to the defense fleet sitting at the system edge while an attacking force 1/3 their size swats my heavy defensive stations out of the air and invades the planet.

Bah. It really took away from how much I was enjoying the game. I don't want to have to swap between the tactical and strategic maps (disorienting as hell) to make a very simple defensive action. I also do not want there to be a single click option that can make me jump to the attacking empire's homeworld. I don't want that. I have no use for that. I don't know when I'd ever have a use for that.

Got so damn frustrated with the war I only asked for one planet. Going to have to deal with the Unbidden and then come back the whaling on these idiots.

As Taricus said, putting your fleets in aggressive stance is the way to go, and then just put them where you need them and forget about them.

I have to say though, I only play Stellaris as hyperlanes only - it gets so tedious to try to work out what can jump from where. With hyperlanes I just have however many battlegroups are needed to defend each jump point into my empire stationed around my fortresses with jump nets enabled. It's got rid of a lot of the combat tedium for me, and stops me having to jump all over the place. 

Jumping to the attacking homeworld can be useful if you've got 5 fleets that you all want to just immediately try and alpha strike them.

[Draignean]

Aye, thanks for the advice.  I admit I hadn't messed about as much with fleet stance as I should, and I'm definitely looking into some mods to buff up defensive stations somehow. Heaviest stations I have, deployed in an optimal pattern, don't really do a damn thing except discourage light raiders and transports.
 
Hyperlanes only reminds my of some of the more fun humans only games from SOTS. Battle of Serenity Valley and all that- one world, utterly inconsequential except for the fact that it has node lines to number of key worlds.

I'll probably try and finish my game of slaving spiritualist fungi (who attack using armies of psionically enhanced xenomorphs) and start again with a few additions. It's fun, though I typically end up building upwards when I hit my planet limit. Habitats are absolutely amazing.

[Baffler]

Alright, so I have this game now. Had pretty good fun with it, up until my first war.

I really like the idea, with war goals and clear lines of diplomacy still in play (though I'd also enjoy it if there was a no-holds-barred-eat-what-you-kill option for fanatic militarists or empires that REALLY hate one another), but goddamn combat and fleet movement is frustrating in this game- not to mention the constant deluge of 'situation log updated' that makes me want to murder someone.

I suppose I'm spoiled on SOTS, which (being turn based) had a very clean and comprehensible understanding of who was going to fight who. I really don't like the fact that I can send my fleet to defend on of my systems from the strategic map, and end up with that system captured without a fight due to the defense fleet sitting at the system edge while an attacking force 1/3 their size swats my heavy defensive stations out of the air and invades the planet.

Bah. It really took away from how much I was enjoying the game. I don't want to have to swap between the tactical and strategic maps (disorienting as hell) to make a very simple defensive action. I also do not want there to be a single click option that can make me jump to the attacking empire's homeworld. I don't want that. I have no use for that. I don't know when I'd ever have a use for that.

Got so damn frustrated with the war I only asked for one planet. Going to have to deal with the Unbidden and then come back the whaling on these idiots.

As Taricus said, putting your fleets in aggressive stance is the way to go, and then just put them where you need them and forget about them.

I have to say though, I only play Stellaris as hyperlanes only - it gets so tedious to try to work out what can jump from where. With hyperlanes I just have however many battlegroups are needed to defend each jump point into my empire stationed around my fortresses with jump nets enabled. It's got rid of a lot of the combat tedium for me, and stops me having to jump all over the place. 

Jumping to the attacking homeworld can be useful if you've got 5 fleets that you all want to just immediately try and alpha strike them.

It can also be useful to have the bulk of your ships in the traditional doomstack, but also keep a couple of wolfpack type groups for commerce raiding. Wars in stellaris tend to be mostly attrition-based grindfests (except for a brief window in the early game where you can easily destroy spaceports but your economy is too weak to replace large losses), so targeting mining/scientific stations, or better yet frontier outposts, is pretty well worth splitting one or two dozen fleet capacity off the main group. Especially if the enemy hasn't bothered with military stations, or you expect to be at war with them again in the future.

I use a trio of destroyers, designed to support each other on independent missions rather than take part in fleet actions. They have much higher DPS and more strategic mobility, but they have no armor and their shields are very weak - only just enough to keep them from taking chip damage from the stations' weapons. I've certainly had a lot more success in wars since I started using them.

[Sirus]

I usually have some amount of success using swarms of torpedo corvettes for commerce raiding. They have small shields but are mostly reliant on evasion to avoid damage from station guns. Once self-repair hulls come into use I don't even bother with the shields.

The torpedoes also allow them to smash targets of opportunity without battering through enemy shields, like the enemy fleet that just retreated from a losing battle with my own fleet. They're usually fast enough to play catch-up as well.

[Retropunch]

It can also be useful to have the bulk of your ships in the traditional doomstack, but also keep a couple of wolfpack type groups for commerce raiding. Wars in stellaris tend to be mostly attrition-based grindfests (except for a brief window in the early game where you can easily destroy spaceports but your economy is too weak to replace large losses), so targeting mining/scientific stations, or better yet frontier outposts, is pretty well worth splitting one or two dozen fleet capacity off the main group. Especially if the enemy hasn't bothered with military stations, or you expect to be at war with them again in the future.

I use a trio of destroyers, designed to support each other on independent missions rather than take part in fleet actions. They have much higher DPS and more strategic mobility, but they have no armor and their shields are very weak - only just enough to keep them from taking chip damage from the stations' weapons. I've certainly had a lot more success in wars since I started using them.

Yeah definitely - I tend to make sure my empire entrances are secure, have one main force and then a few others marauding through messing stuff up. The AI doesn't seem to manage to work out the biggest threat too well, so often they'll just go after my little 500 power force instead of my 20k one.

[umiman]

If you're playing with hyperlanes only, which I highly recommend, then I also highly recommend the True Hyperlanes Only mod.

See, with hyperlanes only, once you research jump drives, everyone just flies everywhere and hyperlanes become a very annoying piece of modern art sprawled all over your map. Also none of the advanced civs use them.

The mod changes this so there's no jump drives but gives you alternatives to that instead while keeping every faction on hyperlanes.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

that new crisis sounds lit!

[Greenbane]

Any comments on my last post? Am I missing something?

[umiman]

Any comments on my last post? Am I missing something?

What do you want us to say?

The past 315 pages basically is just us whining about how there's not enough content in the game and it needs way more DLC.