Stellaris Dev Diary #163 - Juggernaut & Mega Shipyard

[Kapitalisti]

Ugh does the jugg really need to be so weak on it's own? It breaks immersion when this massive giant ship has as much firepower as a ship 1/10th it's size. I'm not saying it needs to be a fleet onto it's own but would having it be a glorified cheerleader for doomstacks feels lame. Well, I'm sure mods will take care of that quickly enough.

You could always use the NSC mod and build a flagship capable of soloing fleets. Or use the Gigastructures mod and build a Behemoth planetcraft that can solo fallen empires. Or at least it could if it didn't break the game engine.

 

[UnitedBlorgFreinds]

Pops are just a means to generate resources. They're not needed if there are alternatives to generate the resources. Examples: surveying an asteroid gives you x minerals, blowing up a ship gives you x alloys, bombarding a planet gives you a percentage of the stuff that planet is producing.

But your empire gets destroyed when you run out of colonies. If you have no pops on a planet, you have no colony. Therefor pops ARE important for keeping your empire alive.

 

[NHunter_rus]

But your empire gets destroyed when you run out of colonies. If you have no pops on a planet, you have no colony. Therefor pops ARE important for keeping your empire alive.

Technically, marauders and enclaves are countries too, but they have neither pops nor colonies. If a new playable country-type can be modded in, it is possible to make an empire that has no pops and no planets - essentially, player-controlled version of the Great Khanate.

 

[Maethendias]

^or literal hivefleets, swarms roaming the galaxy, with the ships themselves being the very pops in question

 

[DrNukeLear]

That reminds me - will they fix the Titans tech not requiring the Citadel tech, despite the fact that only Citadels can build Titans?

I never noticed this before.

On the subject of Nomad Mothership pops. I’ve managed to mod a “Nomad Mothership” planet (Looks like a ship acts like a planet) with pops. This planet sits in a completely isolated system while a duplicate “Nomad Mothership” ship (Looks the same, but it’s a ship.) flies around the galaxy, until it’s destroyed (at which point the planet is also destroyed).
The only issue I have is when the ship is sent home when borders are closed.

 

[Harlot]

The Avian Juggernaut.

 

[RabbaDooDabba]

The Avian Juggernaut.

First Thanos, now Batman ?

Joking aside, it looks really good.

 

[Janx14]

While useless, it sure is pretty.

 

[RabbaDooDabba]

While useless, it sure is pretty.

Pretty ?
Yes.

Useless ?
Probably not.

 

[The Founder]

I hate to be a wet blanket, but regarding the juggernaut as a super carrier: strike craft don't function very well. Will they function better?

Great. So the Juggernaut is practically useless.

So, uh, will Strike Craft be re-balanced to be you know, useful in fleet battles?

Is there any indication in-game of how big these ships are now? How big is a Titan? How big is a Juggernaut?

It's stuck with only two XL guns and a bunch of bugged strike craft that have been worthless for years (fix the bugs, seriously). Being able to construct ships in the field is genuinely cool, but other than that it's basically a gigantic slow moving liability that we now have to protect in enemy territory. Will it really be worth the upkeep and fleet capacity, not to mention the construction time?

This right here makes me worried... If only because of what it's saying between the lines... Quite literally what this is summed up too is "we don't like you to have to think or plan strategy in a strategy game"...

What got you thinking even for a millisecond the weaponry on this thing maters?
Indeed, how did you not loose it in the Year or so since Titans and Colossi got Introduced? Titans in particular?

By the time you build it, you are in the Collossal Assembly Line age.
2 Battleships should have firepower equivalent to this. And it can build you two battleships in paralell.
It also has a unique level of Auras that even Titans lack access too.

By the time you're late enough in the game to afford a juggernaut your ships should already have regenerating health, so the repair ability is meh.

All the regeneration in the Universe can not replace losses or retrofit ships.

I don't so much dislike the Juggernaut's (intentionally) weak armaments, as just the weapon composition; Strike Craft that will always ignore shields and two X and five M guns that can either fully ignore all defenses, or none. If at least there was a little variation like, say, choosing between a gun loadout or a strike craft/missile loadout so that at least the weapons on the ship itself synergize, I wouldn't really complain, but right now it seems like kind of a mess.

Again: It does not mater. Ever.
You do not build the Titans for the weaponry.
You build the Juggernaut even less for it.
The purpose of those guns is to make sure that:
a) The AI will not retreat it after 30 days
b) It stays on long range.

Even something as "meh" as the +40% Weapon Range is going to deal more damage then all the Weapons on the ship combined. Because your weapons fire their 1st volley a lot sooner.

 

[PalmettoExplorer14]

The Avian Juggernaut.

So we've now seen the Plantoid and Avian Juggernauts. So now we just need to see the Mammalian, Anthropoid, Humanoid, Reptilian, Fungoid, Molluskoid, and Lithoid Juggernauts!

This is awesome!

 

[Proconsul Neral]

I’m afraid the juggernaut will have the same problem that many other things have in this game like titans or megastructures, that being that by the time I can build them I have no need for them.

megastructures are my favorite game feature, but I rarely build them. By the time I can get lucky enough to see mega engineering in my tech tree and then gather the resources to build one I’ve either already grossly outclassed the other AI empires or I have no real need for it.

Disappointing that one of the coolest science fiction tropes and most important scientific lines of thought on alien intelligence and how a species might shape the galaxy is reduced to an afterthought, a vestigial feature. I know this was slightly off topic but I just want the devs to do something about how pointless things like megastructures tend to be in this game and the juggernaut seems like it will be a new addition to a growing list of pointless vanity projects.

p.s. I’d like to see the tech tree completely overhauled. One of my biggest problems with Stellaris is how almost everything important is in engineering and the fact that you can’t try for specific tech. I’d love to rush a Dyson sphere and have that be an empire defining moment. Like hey these guys are the guys who built a Dyson sphere.

 

[klingonadmiral]

Anthropoid

Seen in the original post of this thread

Humanoid

Can be seen on the expansion's steam page

 

[PalmettoExplorer14]

Seen in the original post of this thread



Can be seen on the expansion's steam page

Thank you!

Now that I think about it: this might be the Reptilian Juggeranut.

 

[generalis Julius Caesar]

Looks cool, but by the time any of these features even come into play the game will have slowed to a crawl.

Please stop adding stuff and just focus on getting the game to run past the mid-game. It’s been years and still no effort has been made to fix the engine.

Imperator runs great. Stellaris should be able to as well. I cannot wait for the day I even reach a Stellaris endgame on a galaxy of more than 800 stars on my top notch gaming computer. The game is fun — now if it were playable we’d get somewhere.

Yes I agree.

Its plenty to have your ships healed up by the time there fleet returns to fight.

True.

IF you are going to release another species pack after this dlc you should do gaseous species or a gelatinous species with new ships designs and planet types )

No!

Give me dolphins or give me death!

You two, compromise.

I've never been particularly happy with the shipbuilding in Stellaris - it's too restrictive and tech updates don't feel particularly satisfying. One of the things I really loved about Master of Orion 2 is that as your tech improved, you got miniaturization so you could fit more on the same hull. So at the start a Stellar Converter fit on a Doom Star only, and pretty much took up all the space so it acted like a Colossus. But later, you could fit one with a phasing cloak, and a loadout of disruptor cannons and maybe a short range teleporter on a mid-sized ship and absolutely wreck the place. While weapons improve in Stellaris, it's so abstract that it's a numbers game. I'd love to see things like dark matter power cores giving you the ability to put spinal weapons on cruiser and up-gun destroyers to be other than point defense boats. Seeing the juggernaut, which is a cool concept (bottleneck systems are strategically important in crises or you can get overrun, and they're not always easy to build starbases in depending on the local hyper-network topology, your political relationships with the previous owner, and/or the emergence location of the crises) so having the ability to repair in-place would be very important. One would probably not be enough, though.

I'd also love to be able to fortify a Gateway and jump loci, at least somewhat. The current "Starbase in the middle of system" is frankly only useful because the AI's routing is terrible. In most systems, it's perfectly possible to hide out at the system edge or sneak around to another hyperlane exit or gateway. It would also be useful to have an automated "stay in formation facing this direction" for fleets, because if you get them lined up, after the first battle they return to their starting point but stop when they get there and do not re-orient. This can cause unnecessary losses and increases micro.

Other things I'd like to see while i'm on a rant - you can mine Dark Matter, but can't actually use any of it until you've salvaged a fallen empire shit or nicked the knowledge out of their brains? That's really immersion breaking. Any species who gain the knowledge of handling Dark Matter should be able to figure out how to use it for stuff once it's in their possession. Same for nanites - it should be a researchable technology with potential for gray goo events.

No, one your first one. But yes on the last two.

Those ships are nice and such, but I thought this was about Diplomacy?
Or do I misunderstand Diplomacy here ?

You mean killing things isn't diplomacy?

The Avian Juggernaut.

It's perfect!

 

[Mohreb]

It has the same problem as Titans. No moddable chassis, strange that I can decide for the whole fleet what role they are in (artillery, carrier or gunship) but Titans (and soon this wanna be carriers) must use XL slots, which does not have all the same categories as other weapon slots. (no 100% pen weapon to work well with the rest of the fleet :S)
Why is it hard to keep the same approach as the other ships? (as in modular design and player choices)

 

[sortulv]

It has the same problem as Titans. No moddable chassis, strange that I can decide for the whole fleet what role they are in (artillery, carrier or gunship) but Titans (and soon this wanna be carriers) must use XL slots, which does not have all the same categories as other weapon slots. (no 100% pen weapon to work well with the rest of the fleet :S)
Why is it hard to keep the same approach as the other ships? (as in modular design and player choices)

Stop thinking of it as a ship. Think of it instead of a mobile starbase. Normally you cannot design those at all, so player choice is massively improved.

 

[generalis Julius Caesar]

Stop thinking of it as a ship. Think of it instead of a mobile starbase. Normally you cannot design those at all, so player choice is massively improved.

Correct.

 

[Nussor]

Eh, I'm not impressed. It all seems trite and inconsequential.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

Eh, I'm not impressed. It all seems trite and inconsequential.

As someone that typically ends up with one 6-shipyard station and maybe a handful of 1-shipyard bastions, the mega-shipyard is a VERY nice addition. Proper mass-upgrading and rapid fleet production in a centralized location? Perfect!

The Juggernaut is nifty, too. Not necessarily a huge game-changer, but it'll make a handy flagship for my primary fleet and allow them to more effectively operate away from home.