But are you still expected to "swiss-cheese" your empire by removing outposts?
Literally asking for a friend, I'm still playing other things until these serious changes reach "release" status.
Yes. The 2.0.2 beta is a bit different than 2.0 because the penalty to unity is reduced, but they also added a penalty to energy, and the penalty to science, which is what mattered most, is unchanged.
Kinda hoping that not-warscore/war exhaustion makes sense when I do find time to play this again.
(also hoping there's a zoom key, but I'm resigned to that trivial change being ignored)
It doesn't really, but they're continuously making small changes and it no longer results in auto-peace, so it's at least better than it was.
But are you still expected to "swiss-cheese" your empire by removing outposts?
Literally asking for a friend, I'm still playing other things until these serious changes reach "release" status.
Kinda hoping that not-warscore/war exhaustion makes sense when I do find time to play this again.
(also hoping there's a zoom key, but I'm resigned to that trivial change being ignored)
No, but your borders will never grow organically. Each station = 1 system. You will never delete them and they have no upkeep cost.
I feel like you probably failed to understand something. As of right now, both beta and not, the optimal thing to do is dismantle outposts in any system that doesn't make enough profit to overcome the penalties from number of systems - there's nothing called upkeep unless you're in the beta (which is available as an opt-in to anyone) but that doesn't change the fact that there's a downside to having them which must be overcome, and which often isn't.
Sorry if those mechanics already got patched out. I *am* honestly expecting Paradox to be watching and adjusting these new mechanics, since I have real faith in them.
Keep in mind that Paradox has multiple teams. If this was Doomdark's team from the height of CK2's development, I'd agree with you. Wiz's team, though, tends to favor kind of fiddly gamey solutions to things that I find unsatisfying, and balance issues like this may be eventually rectified but what replaces it might not be that great either.
But are you still expected to "swiss-cheese" your empire by removing outposts?
Literally asking for a friend, I'm still playing other things until these serious changes reach "release" status.
As of next version the whole 'swiss cheese' strategy will be soft punished. Pirate spawns will be increased or decreased based on your territory's level of consolidation and defense. Strong defenses and no gaps in territory means fewer pirate spawns, gaps and weak defenses means more.
Well, there's two problems with that. For one thing, you'll have better defenses on average if you have a swiss cheese empire since you'll have fortifications at chokepoints but don't have lots of unfortified hinterland. But more importantly, pirates aren't actually a bad thing. Destroying pirates awards you resources and gives your admirals experience, and it's easy to do if you just leave a few police fleets at strategic locations during peacetime. It may involve more micromanaging and less fun, but from an optimization perspective it's definitely not a punishment.
I've not tried it out yet to see how punishing it is, but the actual mechanical reasons why you would do it (systems have a hilariously huge penalty to ownership in the mid and late game) is still in place, so it's going to be a seesaw on how much you want to get punished by one system or another.
The penalty isn't really higher later on - in fact each system increases your penalty by a proportionately greater amount when you have few systems. There are two main reasons why it's generally considered advisable to build up first and then delete later. One of them is the way influence costs are calculated. It's much cheaper to build an outpost if it's adjacent to a system that you already inhabit, and the influence cost just goes up further the further away a system is. The second is that space mining, which doesn't scale, can be an important and useful source of minerals early on, and the beginning is also when you're building a lot of infrastructure and fleets up to your capacity. This utility falls off a lot in the mid-game when most of what you'd want to build is built, and planetary production increases substantially. However, there are people who advocate disregarding these issues and just beelining for chokepoints and not bothering with anything along the way until you've already got your zone blocked off. This is not only viable, if you prioritize things that make your defensive stations better (such as the relevant ascension perk) it'll put you in a very strong position for the rest of the game. But the chance that you miss another alien empire within your area is higher, and you'll have difficulty paying for development within your borders and also providing a fleet bigger than a pirate-slayer, so that'll be a bit of a problem.
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Topic: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE (Read 1671822 times)