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[Telgin]

Ah, yeah, probably was a reference to that scene.  Of course, Mass Effect kind of gets that wrong too, but that's getting off topic. 

[Karnewarrior]

Given that, barring the slug hitting something, it would take a plurality of stellar lifetimes for it to slow down appreciably, I'm not sure what they got wrong.

If you fire a 20 kilo slug into space, it's going to continue on to hit something. The only way it wouldn't is if you managed to miss so goddamn hard that the slug didn't meet any solid mass for several eons, or if it got lucky and got wrapped into a tight orbit around a star and boiled away, at which point the gas would still be moving at velocity but probably wouldn't be very lethal beyond being boiled metal.

The chances of you nailing a starship in another galaxy is suitably absurd, but so is the chances of Sol not showing any signs of extra terrestrial life until 2200, when Humans discover hyperdrive and then very suddenly are visited by space whales. And that shit happens to me every game! 

[Teneb]

Given that, barring the slug hitting something, it would take a plurality of stellar lifetimes for it to slow down appreciably, I'm not sure what they got wrong.

If you fire a 20 kilo slug into space, it's going to continue on to hit something. The only way it wouldn't is if you managed to miss so goddamn hard that the slug didn't meet any solid mass for several eons, or if it got lucky and got wrapped into a tight orbit around a star and boiled away, at which point the gas would still be moving at velocity but probably wouldn't be very lethal beyond being boiled metal.

The chances of you nailing a starship in another galaxy is suitably absurd, but so is the chances of Sol not showing any signs of extra terrestrial life until 2200, when Humans discover hyperdrive and then very suddenly are visited by space whales. And that shit happens to me every game! 

It is well known that the Tyanki Space Whales are attracted to hyperdrive emissions.

[pisskop]

game boxed me into 10 star systems; crystal swarm to left of me,  Death orb to the right: here I am, stuck in the middle alone

[Teneb]

game boxed me into 10 star systems; crystal swarm to left of me,  Death orb to the right: here I am, stuck in the middle alone

Time to play tall, eh?

[Telgin]

Given that, barring the slug hitting something, it would take a plurality of stellar lifetimes for it to slow down appreciably, I'm not sure what they got wrong.

If you fire a 20 kilo slug into space, it's going to continue on to hit something. The only way it wouldn't is if you managed to miss so goddamn hard that the slug didn't meet any solid mass for several eons, or if it got lucky and got wrapped into a tight orbit around a star and boiled away, at which point the gas would still be moving at velocity but probably wouldn't be very lethal beyond being boiled metal.

Actually... space is so mind bogglingly empty that a shot probably would literally miss hitting anything (except the odd speck of dust or hydrogen atom anyway).  Like I mentioned before, even two colliding galaxies are so empty that solid things are extremely unlikely to hit each other, and planets and stars are way bigger than railgun slugs.  Just think about how big the sun is, but the fact that the nearest star is almost 30 million times farther away than the sun is wide.  If I did the math right just now, anyway.

Although, now that I think about it, I'm not sure what the escape velocity of the galaxy is, so a railgun round would probably remain bound to the galaxy and might oscillate and eventually hit the black hole at the center in a trillion years or something.

This is all assuming firing from a random point in space though, and it is different if you're doing it in orbit around a planet or close to a star.  You're comparatively likely to hit them in that case with random shots, and in fairness that's probably intended to be implied with the Mass Effect dialogue.

game boxed me into 10 star systems; crystal swarm to left of me,  Death orb to the right: here I am, stuck in the middle alone

Crystal swarms are pretty tough to tackle early on, so that sucks.  What's a death orb though?

[Trekkin]

I'm guessing void cloud.

[Karnewarrior]

-[empty           snip]-

Yeah, space is empty and big, but time is bigger, and solid matter has a habit of failing to dissolve randomly. The shot would continue one until it hit something or something broke it apart, like the boiling I talked about before. That changes things, because we're not talking about a timescale of tens of thousands of years, which would make it ridiculous that such a slug could even escape the galactic orbit, much less hit something. But on the timescale of the "life" of the round, it becomes more likely that eventually, after eons of flying at luminal speeds through space, it finally hits something big enough to "count". Or, again, something acts to break it up, like a gravitational anomaly or nearby supernova boiling it away.

It's silly to think a sapient is ever going to see it again. Voyager is probably lost to Humanity forever, and we still know where it is, it's transmitting a signal! And moving quite slowly!

But eventually it will take a trip through a solar system and be thrown into an orbit where it hits something or boils away. There's nothing else that will actually stop it, so it has to happen eventually.

[BurnedToast]

Incidentally, typical Stellaris games usually only last 250 years. That means in >250 years your species will go from basic interstellar travel to immortal gods transcending the universe, time, and space.

CK2 games are longer than Stellaris games.

I actually feel the opposite about tech progression. Stellaris species are insanely stagnant if you look at the actual stats and not the scifi technobabble. Ships from the start of the game still present a credible threat to your 250 years later "transcend time and space" fleet in equal numbers - they won't win, but they will score kills. It's even worse if you compare them on a per-cost basis, the high tech fleet still wins but not by a huge amount (before the combat/tech revamp a few patches back, the low tech ships would actually win per cost) Stellaris' primary military technological advancement seems to mostly be figuring out how to order more ships to be in the same fleet without charging you extra.

Compare to real world 250 years ago - it was still the age of sail with cannon broadsides and compass navigation. If you ignore logistics (food, fuel, ammo), a single modern destroyer could kill roughly an unlimited amount of age of sail ships at the same time.

Economically it's the same, per-planet is only about 2.5 times as strong as starting tech. Meanwhile 250 years ago was the very beginning edge of the industrial revolution.

That's actually one of the biggest reasons stellaris is all about expansion, and why tech penalty is such a stupid anti-snowball mechanism. Stellaris has the weakest, most meaningless tech progression of any 4x I've ever played.

[ZeroGravitas]

That's actually one of the biggest reasons stellaris is all about expansion, and why tech penalty is such a stupid anti-snowball mechanism. Stellaris has the weakest, most meaningless tech progression of any 4x I've ever played.

yes, and it's really frustrating.

it's like, there's a "fallen empire" that's thousands of years old, untold technical prowess, etc?

yeah, give me 100-120 years, i'll be able to beat them given IRL earth starting technology. it's dumb.

[ZeroGravitas]

little more explanation of the new planet system:

Under the new planet management system, how you use your district slots will shape the ways you can develop a planet - city districts give lots of housing for pops and infrastructure to support buildings with specialized jobs, but come at the expense of raw resource production.

https://twitter.com/Martin_Anward/status/1022451921867694082

[Telgin]

One of the biggest mysteries right now, unless more information was leaked, is what the trade value resource is used for.  Is it a source of currency spent in the galactic market?  If so, it doesn't make a ton of sense since other empires would presumably want to trade in directly useful materials, like minerals or energy.  Nor would it make a ton of sense for something like that to be generated by clerks.  Maybe it has some impact on an empire's internal economy instead?

[pisskop]

omg it really is starting to resemble Victoria

[Criptfeind]

Maybe Trade value could just be a thing that you can't use, but when you trade to others it turns into a useful thing (like energy or maybe minerals) basically letting you get "free" goods from trading with others.

Or it could be an EU style trade system, trade value is how much money you can extract from a system by controlling the trade in it.

Either way would be interesting, because they speak of an actual reason to interact with AI, which is sorely lacking in stellaris right now.

[Karnewarrior]

You know, I'd rather they ported over the whole economic sim from Vicky wholesale. A Galactic Market, where you buy and sell Antimatter at fluctuating prices based on supply and demand.

They could even do something interesting with it where only civs start with their own market which then merges with other civs markets as they expand until the Galatic Market is one entity!