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[Broseph Stalin]

Cuuuuuuue jump drives!

Two can play at that game. Because my only concern with the defenses is anti-armor capability the system appears much much weaker than it is. My plan is that it looks so defenseless that they go straight after it, then I jump all available fleets into the system with their maxed out armor and then I lose anyway because I fucked up something else.

[Rolan7]

Technically you're missing the serious debuff that fleets get while jump drive is charging (120 days, I want to say).  Though *that* also runs both ways, if they jump past your Thermopylae.  I haven't spent enough time in the late-game to have really noticed the AI use jump drives at all, and I would be somewhat surprised if they're smart enough to jump around chokepoints.  Maybe jump directly to objectives, but I assume the reinforced system is a priority target for them.

[Madman198237]

Technically you're missing the serious debuff that fleets get while jump drive is charging (120 days, I want to say).  Though *that* also runs both ways, if they jump past your Thermopylae.  I haven't spent enough time in the late-game to have really noticed the AI use jump drives at all, and I would be somewhat surprised if they're smart enough to jump around chokepoints.  Maybe jump directly to objectives, but I assume the reinforced system is a priority target for them.

Yeah but it's a Fallen Empire. I had one of those try me in my first-ever game. I had just refit all my ships to take the thing on and I still needed to outnumber them, sometimes substantially, in a straight-up fight, if I wanted to win. And they were CONSTANTLY jump-driving around, so many times they had that debuff and could still take on my ships.

[pisskop]

My experience with war with an FE was through a wormhole.  I declared them my rival though they were only just considered less than overwhelming.  They ripped my expansions out of the hole up until I saw they separated their fleets.  I was able to completely destroy one fleet and cripple the other, but their own space stations spooked me.  I was at 50k power with 80% of my fleets combined, and taking losses meant stopping to refit.\

But yea, they got bodied pretty hard due to their predictable stupidity by a midgame civ that ran heavy engineering.  I even took their systems from them, and they just . . . kind of sat around mewling at me from a telescreen?  Why wouldn't they wake up for somebody literally enslaving them?



P:  Speaking of, I seem to prefer running twice as much armor as shields...  bad?  With regenerating hulls and that other one, I find it OP since the game seems to almost assume that I have way more shielding.

[Karnewarrior]

But yea, they got bodied pretty hard due to their predictable stupidity by a midgame civ that ran heavy engineering.  I even took their systems from them, and they just . . . kind of sat around mewling at me from a telescreen?  Why wouldn't they wake up for somebody literally enslaving them?

The alien occupation is fake news.

[Telgin]

Cuuuuuuue jump drives!

Two can play at that game. Because my only concern with the defenses is anti-armor capability the system appears much much weaker than it is. My plan is that it looks so defenseless that they go straight after it, then I jump all available fleets into the system with their maxed out armor and then I lose anyway because I fucked up something else.

My fairly limited experience with fighting FEs implies that they won't use jump drives to bypass chokepoints, probably for the reason listed above.  It's close to impossible to get a bastion to a fleet power that matches, much less beats, a FE fleet, so they just try to steamroll the stations.

And while I've never seen the AI use jump drives to get into combat (which would be a very bad idea given the 50% weapon damage debuff for 200 days after using them), I have seen it try to do so.  It just gets stuck in a weird loop of charging the drives and then canceling them to fly to the system like normal.  Not sure what to make of that.

In any case, a station in a pulsar system with defense platforms that use lots of energy weapons should fare well against FE ships, or, at least as well as a bastion can.  I'd definitely plan to have ships back it up if at all possible.  This could even be a rare case where having a second set of ship designs specifically for fighting in pulsar systems might make sense, although even here maybe not since said ships wouldn't be useful in assaults.  It's too bad that there's no concept of system patrol boats.  Can you even remove the hyperdrive from ships?  I think you could before 2.0, but never tried.  It would still be of limited value since the ships would eat up your naval capacity like normal, of course.

[Nelia Hawk]

i seen the ai getting stuck in the "not moving/trying to move to somewhere" switch every second quite a few times... last time was in the marrauder crisis and i had sensor links to a ai federation and just saw their fleet stuck on the border of one of their systems constantly swapping between "no orders" and "attacking a marrauder sector"...

few months later they moved 3 systems to the left and were stuck again like that...

think they unstucked themself after my (player) friend joined their federation and i guess they all tried to join his fleet then.

but yea seen that happening a few times.

[Kanil]

Can you even remove the hyperdrive from ships?  I think you could before 2.0, but never tried.  It would still be of limited value since the ships would eat up your naval capacity like normal, of course.

I'm pretty sure you still can, I recall noticing that appeared to be an option in my last game.

Not sure what kind of situation I'd have to be in where that makes sense, though...

[Broseph Stalin]

My fairly limited experience with fighting FEs implies that they won't use jump drives to bypass chokepoints, probably for the reason listed above.  It's close to impossible to get a bastion to a fleet power that matches, much less beats, a FE fleet, so they just try to steamroll the stations.

And while I've never seen the AI use jump drives to get into combat (which would be a very bad idea given the 50% weapon damage debuff for 200 days after using them), I have seen it try to do so.  It just gets stuck in a weird loop of charging the drives and then canceling them to fly to the system like normal.  Not sure what to make of that.

In any case, a station in a pulsar system with defense platforms that use lots of energy weapons should fare well against FE ships, or, at least as well as a bastion can.  I'd definitely plan to have ships back it up if at all possible.  This could even be a rare case where having a second set of ship designs specifically for fighting in pulsar systems might make sense, although even here maybe not since said ships wouldn't be useful in assaults.  It's too bad that there's no concept of system patrol boats.  Can you even remove the hyperdrive from ships?  I think you could before 2.0, but never tried.  It would still be of limited value since the ships would eat up your naval capacity like normal, of course.

Oh I have no delusions about the fort being enough. The plan was to have separate, armor/laser design for my fleet then retrofit the whole fleet when the storm comes. As long as they don't jump past it I can batter their fleet at Thermopylae until I get them weak enough to go on the offensive, then I'll retrofit back into more sensible designs.

I've seen the AI jump into combat but they were pretty much out of options. Their entire empire was totally occupied, their federation allies couldn't get within five systems of me because of closed borders and they couldn't just surrender because they were only 1/3 of a federation. I only ever jump into a fight with bare bones outposts. Baiting them into attack thermopylae and then jumping in a freakish number of ships would make a cool scene but if the fort does it's job they'll go after it whether it seems like a good idea or not.

[Radsoc]

"Galactic market" that's something to look forward to.

[Broseph Stalin]

Thermopylae is now defended by fort Leonidas boasting a whopping 158k worth of "test me fucker" backed up by anti-disengagement buffs. I've got alternate Armor and Laser designs for all my ships and I have subjugated half of the galaxy to feed my fleet, I accidentally won a domination victory by spamming mineral dedicated habitats, when the time is right I will retrofit my three enormous fleets and rename them each Hundred Spartan so the galaxy can tell the tale of how Leonidas and the three Hundred Spartans held the pass at thermopylae.

In other news I am definitely playing with marauders off from now on. I have a massive empire and on top of that most empires are my tributaries so just about every star in the sky is kicking 25% of it's energy and mineral wealth up to me. With all that I am still struggling to feed my war machine so no, Mr Khan you did NOT get a fleet as large as mine by pulling some "hidden" ships out of storage.

[Cruxador]

"Galactic market" that's something to look forward to.

This seems actually more like an AI boost that the player gets access to than something truly for the player. The AI had always has trouble with preparing adequate resources, most dramatically when it falls into a starvation spiral. This probably results from an inability to plan ahead, using instead hard-coded guidelines for success. Imagine how much worse this would be with all the new resources. The market will let the AI handily bypass the problem.

[Radsoc]

I think Paradox solved market problems in an excellent way before, at least in Victoria and maybe some HoI and EU games, with dynamic prices based on supply and demand. At least the current implementation with trader enclaves is horrible as it exists independently from any kind of economy.

[Telgin]

"Galactic market" that's something to look forward to.

Agreed.  I'm already looking forward to all of the improvements shown so far, but the teased features like trade routes and whatever the final galactic market looks like are making me even more anxious for the update.  As others have said on the Paradox forums, it's making it hard to play the game as it is, which might be for the best since I've done little else lately on the days I've had free time.

One small note in the last dev diary was that unity and research costs are now penalized based on the number of districts instead of planets, which I'm very glad to see.  I never liked skipping over small planets and was a (perhaps mistaken) believer that even the smallest planets were worth taking, but this makes that definitely correct now.  Larger planets are still better since they require equal work to colonize for more space, and it sounds like they'll have a higher infrastructure cap that makes them better suited to specialist work, but you don't have to skip over a small planet completely now.  They'll actually be useful for raw resource production, which has the interesting side effect of potentially making players want to redevelop larger planets into research or manufacturing hubs later on, while pushing off mining and farming work to new, smaller colonized planets.

The changes to habitats look really interesting too, but it's kind of early to tell how the changes will feel in game.  They look to be smaller since they have only 6 districts by default, but that may feel like plenty in practice.  I'm more curious to see what they end up doing with ringworlds.

This seems actually more like an AI boost that the player gets access to than something truly for the player. The AI had always has trouble with preparing adequate resources, most dramatically when it falls into a starvation spiral. This probably results from an inability to plan ahead, using instead hard-coded guidelines for success. Imagine how much worse this would be with all the new resources. The market will let the AI handily bypass the problem.

That's probably a nice side effect of it, but it at least looks like the intention was to make most empires at least somewhat dependent on each other to trade resources.  Wiz didn't go into any detail at all, probably with the intention of holding that for a later dev diary, but he did specifically mention that machine empires were now designed to be self-sufficient, which implies it's in contrast to other kinds of empires.  Of course, since that comment was right after mentioning that machine empires get extra jobs, and thus resource production, that means it's probably not going to be a case of empires being seriously shut out of certain resources.

I imagine that in practice players probably won't have much trouble building self-sufficient empires of any kind, but I guess we'll see.

[Broseph Stalin]

Declared war on the FE after releasing a few subjects and trading away a few systems that could distract them from Thermopylae. Two battles so far, each about a second in a half long as every piece of ordinance I could bring to bear dogpiled on the two massive shield heavy ships they sent. I lost a cruiser and 3 platforms but they're already being replaced.

Five more battles, same result each time. I just hit too hard and too fast for them to do anything meaningful. Maybe if they made one huge push they could have really done some damage but these little battles have ruined them. Their fleet power is now "pathetic" compared to mine and the time to refit my ships and to seize their lands has come.