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[umiman]

-snip-

Neat. How many years did that take ingame? I don't think I've ever made it past early game, longest game I'd played before losing interest was about 70 years.

I took that screenshot at 2440 years (I know it exact because that's when my final peace treaty was expiring).

Yeah, it's super boring when you're steamrolling. Also the crisis didn't spawn this time, but it was only 40 years after they start rolling for the chance to start spawning.

This game was really really difficult for the most part because of the max difficulty settings. The AI was always more powerful than me and I basically had to fight three massive empires forever. I could never get into a position to actually crush them in any meaningful way and we must have fought like 10 - 15 times, each time was white peace due to both sides being unable to do anything. Actually it was more like me holding on by the skin of my teeth. Most wars would end up with me at 100% war fatigue and the AI at like 70% or something and rushing to inflict as much damage as I can in 2 years before I'm forced to surrender. Pretty frigging sure max difficulty AI gets cheat bonuses to war fatigue by the way.

I've never played a game where the entire game I had more admirals and generals than scientists or governors. Right from the start I had to use 4 admirals just to live as the AI stacks were so big. At the end of the game I had 7 admirals and 3 generals. I actually had sectors with no governors for the longest time due to lack of leader slots.

My big break came when the robot FE wanted to inoculate my Dorfs and I said no. So they came to attack me. They did this without awakening so they only had a relatively small fleet of about 50k each. Not to mention they were so far away from me and I could see the straight single line they were taking towards my capital. So I just fortified and beat them back several times, while researching their debris for the massive jump to late game tech. So with dark matter power everything and tachyon lances and so on, I could obliterate the other empires finally and steamrolled the game.

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Edit: I think if you find yourself getting bored because of how easy it is to steamroll in this game, just crank the difficulty to max. It sounds lame since all it does is let the AI cheat like a MF-er, but from my personal experience it makes Stellaris way more fun.

[Spehss _]

Edit: I think if you find yourself getting bored because of how easy it is to steamroll in this game, just crank the difficulty to max. It sounds lame since all it does is let the AI cheat like a MF-er, but from my personal experience it makes Stellaris way more fun.

Nah, the difficulty doesn't seem to be the problem for me. In most of the longest games I've played, I'd lose interest after getting into an unwinnable war and losing most of my fleet. I would get tired of having annoying alien neighbors so I'd try starting a war to wipe one out and get in over my head. That was before 2.0 and war and border expansion changed.

[Damiac]

Edit: I think if you find yourself getting bored because of how easy it is to steamroll in this game, just crank the difficulty to max. It sounds lame since all it does is let the AI cheat like a MF-er, but from my personal experience it makes Stellaris way more fun.

Nah, the difficulty doesn't seem to be the problem for me. In most of the longest games I've played, I'd lose interest after getting into an unwinnable war and losing most of my fleet. I would get tired of having annoying alien neighbors so I'd try starting a war to wipe one out and get in over my head. That was before 2.0 and war and border expansion changed.

This was my early experience too. After 4 or 5 times of that I kind of realized you are supposed to have your navy at the cap all the time.  AI is very focused on keeping a competitive navy, they don't seem to ever try to go greedy and focus economy to the detriment of their navy. 

[Dunamisdeos]

I often keep just enough fleet to keep myself "equivalent" to avoid war and build up my economy, then bulk up super fast when it's blastin' time.

[Mephansteras]

Note that station defense power is calculated in as well, so that having some highly defended choke points can make up for not having a huge fleet.

I noticed this in my Space Dwarf game where my 20k+ strength defense stations were putting me over the edge of fleet power even compared to, say, the FEs.

[Loud Whispers]

I'm a fan of being just one step below absolutely greedy. Aggressively focus on economy, exploration and expansion, while building up your fleet cap with a shell fleet of competent ships and low cost ships for pirate killing. Keep doing this until your economy is outpacing your rivals or until you are attacked. When attacked, upgrade your shell fleet into a fully upgraded fleet; show the AI the error of their ways.
I find this works wonderful for early game exterminators vs insane AI

[Cruxador]

Defensive stations benefit from just about everything that benefits ships too, and some of the things that are balanced using a evasion penalty can bring them to a level where one defensive station holds off entire militaries easily.

[Telgin]

I picked this game up just before the 2.0 patch was released, and kind of dropped it at that point until now since I'd have to relearn it.  When I picked it back up, I wanted to play it with a modded species, so I looked into modding.

I'm pretty surprised at how difficult it is to mod species in this game.  All of the tutorials I've found are for much older versions of the game and don't seem to work anymore.  After activating the mod, the game loads just fine, but the new species isn't available.  Nothing in the game's error logs either.  It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't take 30 seconds for the game to start up to test the mod.

At this point I'm wondering if it's just me having the portraits in the wrong DDS format, since all of the tutorials only tell me to export to DXT5 DDS, yet GIMP's DDS plugin gives at least 3 different versions of DXT5 that it can export.  But then, I'd expect the species name to at least show up in the empire builder.

Oh well, maybe I'll have to just play vanilla and maybe graduate to the Star Trek mod once I've done that for a while.

[Bormok, God of Mud]

Rough steps for adding a species:

• Add DDS files to mod\MOD\gfx\models\portraits\CLASS
• Go to mod\MOD\gfx\portraits\portraits and edit a copy of the TXT file appropriate for your species class.
• Go to mod\MOD\common\species_classes and edit a copy of 01_base_species_classes.txt in order to add your species name to the appropriate class.
• If you'd like the portrait to be used by a default empire, add a TXT file to mod\MOD\prescripted_countries.

[Telgin]

Thanks, but that's more or less exactly what I did.  There's no feedback from the game though, so I can't tell what I did wrong.

After deleting and recreating the mod, I followed a different tutorial for setting up name lists, and that works, so I know the mod was being loaded at least.  I'll fool with it more tonight and hopefully get it working.

Incidentally, I wish there was a more comprehensive guide on modding.  I know that there's a Stellaris wiki with some information, but it's pretty sparse and out of date.  I guess with 2.0 being fairly new, that's not surprising.

[Bormok, God of Mud]

Ahh, I'm sorry. The general problems I've run into are accidentally removing a bracket or misspelling a label while editing.

[umiman]

I'm trying to figure out why adding mods makes the AI worse than garbage.

I added a few mods like NSC (Next Generation Ships) and more traditions and ascensions and stuff like that. I figure since everyone gets access to OP stuff, everything will be gravy right?

Well, it turns out even at max difficulty and max AI aggression, the AI actually is worse than vanilla. Noticeably worse. In vanilla the AI would basically never stop declaring war on me ever at max difficulty but when the game is modded, the AI doesn't really do anything. In fact, despite all the bonuses to traditions, tech, and resources, they constantly fall behind me, usually right from the beginning. Which is strange considering they get:

AI empires receive +60% naval capacity/technology/unity and +100% energy/minerals/food. NPCs receive +100% ship weapon damage and +100% hull/armour/shield.

So I figure maybe the AI doesn't know how to use the modded stuff. But when I check they are happily getting the traditions, using the OP weapons and gear on their ships, using the new edicts for their planets, and so on. So they clearly know how to use them.

My current theory is that because the mods give empires so much to do internally, the AI can't be bothered declaring war because it's spending all its time improving internally instead.

Either that or it's mentally handicapped.

Any ideas?

[Loud Whispers]

One thing I noticed is that the AI crises will not attack or expand if they do not have access to your base by hyperlane. I noticed this after using the hyperlane remover/adder mod

[ZeroGravitas]

My current theory is that because the mods give empires so much to do internally, the AI can't be bothered declaring war because it's spending all its time improving internally instead.

lol? that's not how that works

[umiman]

A new patch just came out.

My favorite part of it is this:

Reduced firing speed on Colossus from 90 to 30 days. Reduced weapon charge time on Colossus from 270 to 90 days

Yay they're actually usable now.