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[Loud Whispers]

Meh on the dyson sphere still, but the science station is bretty fantastic now. In my games I mod the dyson sphere to cost a hell of a lot of resources but they give 1000 solar per level up to 4000 max. When they become the energy heart of a galactic doom armada they feel pretty fun and significant imo. If it weren't for merchant exchanges trading energy for minerals there wouldn't be much of a balance issue for dyson spheres giving ridonkulous levels of energy (as harvesting a star with such efficiency should no doubt deliver).

[Karnewarrior]

I actually feel like maybe the game should have two loosely-defined "stages", one where you break free from your home system and start colonizing the stars, and a second one where you can build Dyson Spheres and draw off all the energy a star outputs. Stage 1 would have similar mineral and energy amounts as the game now, and stage 2 would jump the civ up to "silly" scales. I'd probably also mostly divide the tech tree - maybe something about how completing a DS freed so much energy that the empire can do some utterly ridiculous shit now.

Fucking with a stage 2 empire as a stage 1 should be utterly retarded, but a pair of stage 2's may fight equally enough that a stage 1 can play kingmaker. FE's would obviously begin the game at stage 2. I'd figure stage 1 empires would be run off hard sci-fi type techs like Antimatter reactors and Sapient AI, and stage 2 empires would start getting into the space-opera / soft Sci-fi tech like hard-light shielding and psionics. Maybe end-game ascension perks would be restricted to stage 2.

This would, I hope, cause some nice, purposeful imbalance and make the game feel like it progresses more. The only caveat would be that you'd need some way of keeping the first empire to enter stage 2 from steamrolling everyone else - this could probably be done by making the gap tangible but not unbreachably huge between late stage 1 fleets and early stage 2 fleets, as well as probably some modifications to the AI to make them both not go on conquering sprees quite as easily if there's only so many stage 2 civs out there, and to make them lump together more and more if the player tries to do so.

I just really like seeing blobs rise and fall. It's what I like about paradox over Civ.

[Radsoc]

There seems to be a relase date now. 21 Sept, 10 euro.

[Reverie]

EDIT 3: Scratch that. The fuckers have jump drives and can just evade me forever because I'm using warp and have two months of wind-down on my main fleet.

You know, while warp absolutely sucks and I agree with you, the smart thing to do would be to split your fleet into smaller ones to warp and rendezvous at the other side, so long as you're just travelling between systems. The cooldowns are manageable then. Maybe also consider using bait tactics before engagements to draw the enemy fleet into the system and toward the star before sending in the fleet proper, so you'd have some chance to engage in your favour.

[Teneb]

EDIT 3: Scratch that. The fuckers have jump drives and can just evade me forever because I'm using warp and have two months of wind-down on my main fleet.

You know, while warp absolutely sucks and I agree with you, the smart thing to do would be to split your fleet into smaller ones to warp and rendezvous at the other side, so long as you're just travelling between systems. The cooldowns are manageable then. Maybe also consider using bait tactics before engagements to draw the enemy fleet into the system and toward the star before sending in the fleet proper, so you'd have some chance to engage in your favour.

EDIT 3: Scratch that. The fuckers have jump drives and can just evade me forever because I'm using warp and have two months of wind-down on my main fleet.

You know, while warp absolutely sucks and I agree with you, the smart thing to do would be to split your fleet into smaller ones to warp and rendezvous at the other side, so long as you're just travelling between systems. The cooldowns are manageable then. Maybe also consider using bait tactics before engagements to draw the enemy fleet into the system and toward the star before sending in the fleet proper, so you'd have some chance to engage in your favour.

I tried doing that. They used their OP drives to snipe each fleet before I could respond. I eventually managed to reverse-engineer the drives, so it's all good.

[BurnedToast]

You know, while warp absolutely sucks and I agree with you,

Compared to what? I don't understand all the hate warp gets.

Hyperdrive is faster, but must follow lanes. I'd consider that more or less equal to warp, depending on the galaxy shape and size.

Everyone seems to love wormholes but I found them to be a massive micromanagement PITA. Early game it limits your exploration and potentially expansion (those station aren't cheap at the start), and lategame they are incredibly slow. They only seem really good for a brief midgame sweet spot where you can easily afford the stations, fleet sizes are small enough that the windup is not unreasonably long, and empires are small enough that you can jump anywhere in the enemy's territory in a single jump.

Jumpdrive is amazing but of course it's a lategame special research thing so it's not fair to compare it.

[Rolan7]

I think I remember wishing that the weakness of wormholes would be that they'd persist a little while, and that enemies could follow them back.

My experience is limited to two runs, both with warp, but it seemed fine.  The wormhole-empires got shafted in both runs.  Hyperdrive enemies were... problematic, but eventually predictable since there's that "see the lanes" research.  I couldn't say which is better, but (at least in the early-mid game, which is as far as I got) warp seemed okay.

[Egan_BW]

Is there any particular reason you can't research multiple methods of FTL and put them on different ship designs depending on their role? Or hey, maybe put them all on one ship if you can spare the power and cost?

[Rolan7]

Not that I saw, and that's particularly weird and sorta awful when you're in a federation.

[Culise]

Indeed, as I recall, a particular mod called Pre-FTL not only starts you as a sublight species, but also lets you research multiple FTL drives and gear out accordingly.  It's still only one drive per ship, which I suppose could be justified by wibbly wobbly sub-quantum distortions in the space-time continuum whatsits or the like (but really just boils down to the fact that there's only one slot), but if you want your warfleet operating with wormhole drives and your scouts with warp drives, it's a neat thing.  There isn't really anything mechanical about the game that blocks it, thus, but rather it's likely a balancing decision. 

[Karnewarrior]

I'd like for a way to play with only Wormholes and Warp, for immersion purposes. I also think to make it more interesting wormhole and hyperdrive should be combined, so that wormhole stations only point to one system but operate really fast. While warp is a lot slower but can go anywhere within a small radius.

So rather like roads in Civ, you can send your fleets away from home but it's slow going, and the closer you get to an empires core systems the faster travel is because there's a denser network of wormhole-lines. But the stations would be relatively expensive, so there'd be an extra layer of strategic management in what the layout of your wormhole "roads" would be.

Hyperdrive does part of it but with the "roads" prebuilt, which basically moves the strategic design aspect into a strategic movement problem.

[Teneb]

Patch notes

Spoiler: No witty title this time (click to show/hide)

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. Here, as promised, are the full patch notes for 1.8 'Čapek' and Synthetic Dawn, which is now locked down and being released in a week. Please note that we might have missed a thing or two while compiling these, so if a promised fix isn't here, it's likely that it was just overlooked. Also, some major revamps (like the changes to components) have been consolidated down to a few lines, because they contain so many individual changes that it would be impractical to list them all.

Click the 'spoiler' button below to show the patch notes:
(This is where the notes would be, except that it exceeds the character limit)

As a bonus, here is a picture of all the new portraits in the Synthetic Dawn story pack, one for each species class:


See you next week for the full release of Synthetic Dawn!

[Cruxador]

Gotta say, I'm liking the new robo-portraits. Only problem is that they make the old one look bad by comparison.

And did they mention the machine worlds ascension perk before this? Regardless of whether it's actually good, that sounds like an amazingly fun thing to use in practice.

[Dunamisdeos]

When this drops, I'm obviously going to play a synthetic empire.

Just gotta work out which portrait. I like the 5th one.

Also, the third one is very obviously inspired by a certain crisis.

I bet if you whack it with a stick it'll tell you the time.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Spoiler: You're missing their obvious inspiration. (click to show/hide)