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If you actually read everything I said you'd have seen that I also said the maintenance cost for the Hyperentertainment Complex is crazy high. I was just explaining the reason why this other buildings are cheaper. Hyperentertainment should really have a maintenance cost of 2 or 3 max. EDIT: Scratch that, 4 max. 2-3 would make the Teldar Processor and Xeno Zoo useless.

However one expensive building does not mean the entire game is an unbalanced mess. Basically everything else yrs decrying as an imbalanced mess is actually fairly balanced as a whole.

 Matt.Kingsley wrote:
If you actually read everything

Maybe if you had been reading you'd have noticed I said this was just one example of many, the one that stuck out to me the most.

But you know, continue fanboying about the game when the developers, themselves, are agreeing with me that the game is in serious need of re-balancing.

Actually from what I've seen from the devs, they think less that the thing you're mainly complaining about (Ethos & Governments) need to be balanced and more that they need to make Diplomacy be more useful and have a point, War be more useful for more than just taking Territory or Vassalising, fixing bugs and adding more mid-game events.

All stuff that really should have been there on release, but I wouldn't call it balancing as such.

 Matt.Kingsley wrote:
Actually from what I've seen from the devs, they think less that the thing you're mainly complaining about (Ethos & Governments) need to be balanced and more that they need to make Diplomacy be more useful and have a point,

I'm complaining about a lot of things being unbalanced, not just that. Massed corvettes, for example, are currently the end-game dominating tactic, which nothing can beat in terms of sheer firepower-- and that's an issue they addressed directly.

The combat aspect is really my only complaint. Personally, I think if they took aspects of the game as it is now, and simply added it to Sins of a Solar Empire, they'd be in a great position.

If I'm honest, a Sins game that just stole the Empire, Ship Builder, and Research Card systems would win it for me.

But as it is, the combat here is rather one-dimensional, illogical, and exploitable. The rock-paper-scissors approach is fine, but projectile weapons are garbage, being short ranged, rather inaccurate, and largely ineffective, lasers are pretty much universally better than projectiles, missiles have their 100% accuracy and range, disruptors annihilate shields and also do more base damage than weapons of the same tier to hull points, torpedo ignore shields and have godly range... It's messy and needs looking at, as right now there's not much to choosing weapons, it's largely "anything but projectile, the more accurate and long-ranged the better."

The complete lack of formations takes away any and all tactics, as does the fact that every fight ends in a mosh pit of ships. Torpedo corvettes will charge in alongside autocannons. Outranging your opponent is still crucial to get the first hits in, but after that range is pointless, as the ships will continue to close in regardless of their loadout.

The exploitability comes with knowing that in mixed fleets, smaller ships get targeted first by the combat ai. A fleet of corvettes and destroyers will lose most or all of it's corvettes before the destroyers take a hit. This can be exploited by using a corvette's insane evasion + evasion buffs to create a small buffer of essentially meatshield ships, which delay the enemy long enough for your bigger ships to dominate. A fleet with a buffer of 10-20 corvettes gains an insane amount of survivability.

Then you have the already acknowledged issue that corvettes are simply flat out superior once they max out evasion. Late-game corvettes can pack evasion in excess of 80%, which coupled with most weapons having inherent accuracy percentages, as well as medium and large weapons found on heavier ships further suffering from trying to hit small corvettes, makes corvette swarms not just combat effective, but economically more efficient than anything else. Nobody cares if they lose corvettes, especially if it forced multiple more expensive ships to waste time trying to hit it.

 Avatar 720 wrote:
projectile weapons are garbage, being short ranged, rather inaccurate, and largely ineffective.

They have a (mostly) longer range than energy weapons and they do slightly more damage for slightly less accuracy, I am using them with my current empire and they are working quite well, so far at least. I am also using quite a lot of point defense modules and I just fought an empire that relied on missiles which also worked out quite well. I haven't found a use for strike craft though, they don't seem to do very much.

Energy weapons have a lot of special variants though so that gives them a definite edge although I expect that will change when more techs are added.

The lack of formations and the largely static combat are quite a serious issue although its one that is at least being prioritised.

Massed PD is the only projectile tech I give the time of day to. Hard-countering missiles is great fun, and Tri-PD corvette screens serve a dual purpose of being cheap screen ships that can also intercept missiles.

Weapons like drivers have a higher max damage--though also a lower minimum damage--than lasers of the same tier, but since lasers ignore 50% of armour, it largely doesn't matter. The extra range is the only upside, but even that's quickly nullified on account of every ship having an innate desire to go and hug as many enemy ships as possible. If and when Paradox allow you to tell long range ships to fire from max range instead of closing with the enemy, they'll probably become better.

Another bugbear I have is the fact that in wars, AI allies have no will of their own. Their fleets will gravitate towards yours, and simply follow them around until both of you are destroyed, the war is won, or the war is lost. They will ignore their own territory being attacked in favour of sitting their stack on top of yours as your fleet is getting repaired or upgraded in your spaceport, ages away from the front lines.

You can't order them to do anything, and they will take no initiative, they will simply follow you like a fething puppy. It feels like a lazy way of avoiding having to program more complex behaviour.

Projectile weapons have the same average damage, but they have less armor piercing or shield ignoring than energy weapons, and far less range than missile weapons, and less accuracy than both. Overall, there's no real reason to use projectile weapons except to counter missiles, or for flavor purposes.

 Avatar 720 wrote:

Weapons like drivers have a higher max damage--though also a lower minimum damage--than lasers of the same tier, but since lasers ignore 50% of armour, it largely doesn't matter.

Someone was doing some number crunching on the Paradox forums and autocannon apparently have the highest effective DPS in the game as they have the best chance of overcoming the evade stat.

I am becoming quite annoyed with end game events. The first 2 were horribly bugged (the 'Nid' one) and I just had the crystalline one, due to the location of the system where they spawned (behind a strong alliance who all hated me) it took me a long time to fight my way through even though the coalition was being eaten from behind at the same time as I was attacking from the front.

By the time I did breakthrough I was outnumbered about 2.5 to 1 and got slaughtered. My autocannon did a huge amount of damage though

The new patch has killed performance for me, huge amounts of stuttering.

My own experience with autocannons has been highly underwhelming. I had a fleet of corvettes with Ripper Autocannons and tier 2 shields facing an equal-number, lower strength fleet of corvettes with tier 1 mass drivers and 2 tier 1 deflectors, and got torn a new one for [insert reason here]. The ACs tore through the shields and did little else.

Ugg I hate the research system. Played 4 different campaigns so far. Barely getting weapon upgrades and never getting ship size upgrades. I get armor and shields every blue moon but only once in those four games have I gotten a class two space port even.

So far I have only been playing tiny systems with extra AIs just to get a feel on what to do. One was a patch that was(don't know if it is today) incompatible with the patch, and I had taken over almost half the known galaxy, thankfully with the ship situation no one had gone to war with me as my 12 corvette fleet only had a combined firepower of 300 which degraded quickly under fire.

I wish there was a way to orient the tech tree at least in a certain direction. At the tech level I was at in my long game, I really didn't care about upgrading my hydroponics labs or my power plants, I needed ship and firepower upgrades.

Col. Dash wrote:
Ugg I hate the research system. Played 4 different campaigns so far. Barely getting weapon upgrades and never getting ship size upgrades. I get armor and shields every blue moon but only once in those four games have I gotten a class two space port even.

So far I have only been playing tiny systems with extra AIs just to get a feel on what to do. One was a patch that was(don't know if it is today) incompatible with the patch, and I had taken over almost half the known galaxy, thankfully with the ship situation no one had gone to war with me as my 12 corvette fleet only had a combined firepower of 300 which degraded quickly under fire.

I wish there was a way to orient the tech tree at least in a certain direction. At the tech level I was at in my long game, I really didn't care about upgrading my hydroponics labs or my power plants, I needed ship and firepower upgrades.

There is, scientist with a specialty will increase the chance of getting certain tech cards.

Also, kinda just sounds like you were still in early-mid game. I've done 80 years before even getting destroyers once.

Also, bear in mind that your ethos will determine your techs too, especially pacifist / militarist.

And don't get me wrong, I love the detail of the game and enjoy wasting hours playing it even when I have more important things to be doing, yard work, painting mini's , target practice, etc. Ill have to try and swap out scientists.

How often does the recruitment pool change out?

Col. Dash wrote:
And don't get me wrong, I love the detail of the game and enjoy wasting hours playing it even when I have more important things to be doing, yard work, painting mini's , target practice, etc. Ill have to try and swap out scientists.

How often does the recruitment pool change out?

Genuinely don't know, haven't kept tabs on it to that extent.

I have to say, finding some of the little events is preetty cool.

Different ethea having different effects on some of the discoveries and anomalies you find are fun, too. Encourages you not to skip things because you assume you've seen it before, and gives you some incentive to try out ethea you otherwise might not.

That comet that uneventfully flew past might mean something totally different to another race.

Fanatic individualists LOVE that comet.

Xenophobes very much don't.

Fanatic Collectivists hate it.

Gave me EU4 flashbacks, except this time around we're meant to be living in more enlightened times...

There are some pretty cool events, its just a shame that there isn't more variety in quest chains.

So, what had everyone been doing for FTL drives? Hyperlanes aren't bad, but you can get fethed over if your route gets taken over by another empire. Wormholes are nice though, and the stations aren't expensive to maintain.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:
I am becoming quite annoyed with end game events. The first 2 were horribly bugged (the 'Nid' one) and I just had the crystalline one, due to the location of the system where they spawned (behind a strong alliance who all hated me) it took me a long time to fight my way through even though the coalition was being eaten from behind at the same time as I was attacking from the front.

By the time I did breakthrough I was outnumbered about 2.5 to 1 and got slaughtered. My autocannon did a huge amount of damage though

The new patch has killed performance for me, huge amounts of stuttering.

Based on my playtime the end game events are either stupidly easy or annoying as hell with no middle ground. The AI in general is just terrible with them (as well as war).
Early game still goes fine for me but late game stutter is killing my games before I can finish them, from what Ive read it might be alliance visibility. But if youre not in an alliance you might just get torn apart by a bunch of AI's ganging up.
Together they sort of kill the game, well TW:Warhammer will be here in two days, maybe after a load of patches Stellaris will be worth it again.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
maybe after a load of patches Stellaris will be worth it again.

Crusader kings 2 has had 42 content containing updates, most of which are unit packs and the like but 11 of them have been substantial. Most of the significant updates have also improved the base game as well.

Stellaris is the most successful game that Paradox has yet released so its a fair bet that it will receive even more support than CK2.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
maybe after a load of patches Stellaris will be worth it again.

Crusader kings 2 has had 42 content containing updates, most of which are unit packs and the like but 11 of them have been substantial. Most of the significant updates have also improved the base game as well.

Stellaris is the most successful game that Paradox has yet released so its a fair bet that it will receive even more support than CK2.

I know their support is good, its just that I feel like these are some basic issues the beta testing should have picked out. Especially the end game events, its supposed to give some much needed excitment, but the AI is not even aware that its getting murdered. The lag though, that shouldnt be an issue a few patches cant solve.

I didn't have any performance issues until i installed the latest patch, that seems to have broken something.

I only had performance issues late-game-- as in, "I'm about to take on a fallen empire and I stand a very good chance of winning" late game.

I can't help but feel a smug bit of "I told you so" looking at the 1.1.0 beta. Amongst the balance changes, they buffed Individualist like I suggested they needed to, and nerfed Theocratic Republic to differentiate it more from Direct Democracy (I actually would have preferred that they buffed Direct Democracy, but there you go). There's been tons of other changes, though, pretty much everything but spiritualist, collectivist, and materialist have been altered, sometimes drastically.

I approve of the changes to combat that 1.1 has made. My Destroyer fleet ripped apart a massed corvette fleet that in 1.0 would've easily scrapped my Destroyers. From what I can tell target priority is still the same, though, so corvette screens will likely be fairly useful, but nowhere near boosting fleet survivability to the extent they used to.

I hope they introduce some basic combat behaviour options at some point; having everything pile into a melee still feels wrong, and the OCD tendency of not firing at heavier ships until all the smaller ones are dead is a little annoying at times, as is the lack of targeting lower-health ships first. Most of the casualties my Destroyer fleet took was from the fact that each of my ships seemed to be targeting a separate ship, whereas the AI ships had a couple of ships targeting a small number of mine at a time. Once I took a few down and started to combine firepower due to having fewer targets, the fight went a lot smoother, but if they'd done that to start with, I'd have lost maybe only 1/3 as many ships as I did.

Anyone up for starting a multiplayer game with 1.1 enabled?