Bay 12 Games Forum

I wish I knew why, every time I try to play tall, I am inevitably surrounded by extremely wide empires that out-tech me by a considerable margin.

I build the frontier outposts, I do my damned best to get strong researchers and research-boosting ascension perks and civics. Yet every time, I swiftly fall behind in the tech race. In this game, ferex, I'm very close to a bunch of evangelizing zealots. Their empire is huge, 13 colonies all told. They're strong enough that not even the militant isolationist fallen empire bothers them, even with their borders being pressed together.

Then there's me, with my single colony and loads of outposts gathering as much as I can. Even leaving aside the obvious disparity in fleet capacities, I'm little more than a baby compared to these titans. I'm starting to think that all this guff about playing tall just isn't for me.

Gordon snags a Fortify, thinking about how useful it would have been in the battle just fought.

IME single planet countries that emerge midgame (through liberation or enlightenment) never amount to anything.  So I wouldn't worry about it.  The most important thing you could do is have no gaps inside your own borders, that way they can't fuck with you by colonizing/building frontier outposts within your own space.

Would frontier outposts be enough for this purpose or would I need to colonize worlds as well to keep them from snagging them?

I've never really enlightened a species to keep it in permanent vassalhood before. Usually I only do it as a xenophilic species in order to integrate them and broaden the types of worlds I can exploit with my new multi-species empire.

Question: is there any point in continuing to play single-planet tall when you have six inhabitable worlds within four hyper jumps of your homworld, along with another world with primitives, and all within a single, defensible cul-de-sac?

Related question: is there any way for a robotic, machine consciousness empire to take possession of an inhabited world without killing off all the natives? Say, enlightening them into a vassal and then merging them into my own empire but leaving the organic pops in peace.

Sirius, please tell me you used the three pronged beak avian penguin model so its actually the same birds.  That would be amazing.  And oh my god we both got the event horizon.  Maybe my game is a distant prequel to yours.  Or... perhaps its the same universe, but things happened differently.  What will be... was.

I sure did!

That's almost certainly why. Natsume needs to get their act together.

What an amazing coincidence. I went with a Plantoid blood-sucking race but my livestock species is a race of space penguins named...Sanguins.