Stellaris Dev Diary #288 - Payback and Insights

[Ajacoba]

OF COURSE its a non gestalt origin again

OF COURSE IT IS

at this point they HAVE to do it on purpose

Well, makes sense that a profit driven mega-corporation doesn't enlighten a hivemind they can't trade with because it has no need for riches and whose population they can't enslave because the slaves will literally die the second you remove them from the control of the hive

Also there are hivemind exclusive civics as well, like tree of life and progenitor, and a bunch of cool civics like the new necromancy one or ravenous swarm, so it's not like hiveminds wouldn't get their own stuff either

They even can interact with the new primitive content and get their own primitive versions now

 

[The_Sterwood]

View attachment 949422
A smart hunter lets the environment aid their hunt.​

Real G's move in silence like lasagna.

 

[Maethendias]

Well, makes sense that a profit driven mega-corporation doesn't enlighten a hivemind they can't trade with because it has no need for riches and whose population they can't enslave because the slaves will literally die the second you remove them from the control of the hive

Also there are hivemind exclusive civics as well, like tree of life and progenitor, and a bunch of cool civics like the new necromancy one or ravenous swarm, so it's not like hiveminds wouldn't get their own stuff either

They even can interact with the new primitive content and get their own primitive versions now

gestalt, not hivemind

 

[DeanTheDull]

I guess a basis of comparison would be the epitome of a primitives build- a necrophage run. What sort of necrophage empire would you build to make bypassing two primitive worlds preferable?

To try and answer my own question with speculation and review of the dev diaries to date-

(With caveat of this is a strategy, and not necessarily preferable-)


I suspect this would hinge on leveraging cloaking for a decisive early war by positional strategy, enabled by either megacorp private prospectors, a trade build or a gestalt Unyielding starbase economy.

By context, it appears that cloaking enables the empire to hide it's ships until engagement range and the fighting begins. (The reference to sneaking up to starbases in a previous diary.) This comes at the cost of ship speed. Presumably this doesn't let you hide during combat, but rather position ships to avoid first strikes, or slip fleets by.

The thematic trigger for cloaking as a rare tech is liable to the observation posts to avoid awareness. Assuming the tech draw chance is weighted by primitives, the necrophage empire may have a chance to pull it much earlier than others.

Depending on how early the tech is viable to reach, then the necrophage empire might be able to invest in cloaking early, and so trigger a war that aims to win in one of two ways: either cloak the fleet to reinforce a starbase constructed at the site for a key decisive battle (especially if you have a handy nebula that strips shields), from which the victorious fleet goes to charge into enemy terrain, or you pre-position your cloaked fleet to let them pass, and then try to back-cap the enemy homeworld and occupy their shipyard(s).

Interestingly, since you're planning an early war build and relations aren't that important, this does synergize with xenophobe, which is the natural synergy for necrophages.





The crux of the strategy would getting enough tech cycles to actually draw and complete the cloaking tech (base 6k physics), without falling fatally behind in early econ. This would take longer than your general supremacy rush-down, and so require some sort of unity-driven econ-base to carry the first decade or two.

For necro-hives, this could be relatively easy with the Catalytic-Unyielding opening. Take catalytic processing, start with unyielding, and knock out 8-10 starbases in your first ten systems. The starbase energy goes into buying minererals and food, and your drones focus on science and industrial word on the homeworld. Necrohives tend not to have productive colonies unless they necropurge the livestock anyway, so this isn't that big of a hit. Necro-hives can also overpower early neighbors on moderate difficulties just on an unyielding-catalytic, so it's not a huge hit and wouldn't even require relying on cloaking, which could just be a later-early game power spike once you've domesticated a homeworld.


For non-hives... I think the best way to do it would be a megacorp trade build. Private Prospectors letting you buy the colony ships with energy directly can be a very real alloy/CG/food production saving for resources that can go to other things, even as trade-world low-hab worlds would be a good value-production to produce energy/CG to carry on the science and unity economy. You'd probably pass on necrophage conversion buildings per see, but thrifty clerks are very value-efficient in the early game compared to merchant spam, and an Incubator-Thrifty prepatent could absolutely leverage early explosive growth to make the colonies pay for themselves before the expected turn-around. Depending on your planetary surroundings, you even delay the trade policy conversion to get those colony ships from raw TV production. (Interestingly, if you are playing a xenophobe build, you'd have an excuse to pull the thrift-slave build, where your slave-clerks are producing about 2.25 TV, but the CG upkeep is nill.)

The secondary civic will depend on what the DLC's new civic is- which might be good for the primitives- but otherwise I'd expect Public Relations for the +2 envoys to start your primitive spying/shaping early on.

 

[Pancakelord]

Will there be any enhancements made to normal pre-ftls? If they do break away from us (e.g. when declaring on them, or attacking them) will they get the payback origin?

Or battle them on the floor of the Galactic senate, outlawing their very business model

Inb4 MSI leaves the GC lol.

When playing as payback will we start with any insights/insight options - what with basically just being pre-FTL a few years prior.

How does using the UNE/COM interact with payback? If I take the UNE as my base empire and edit it to have a payback empire, will COM still spawn?

How does the +0.5 envoy rounding work? I remember when I was screwing with districts/deposits, having +0.1 jobs per deposit, added a whole job. Would+0.5 do nothing until you hit a full integer (+1), or add the envoy at the +0.5, and do nothing new at the +1 (as the cap had already updated at the halfway point). An overly specific question but am curious all the same.

 

[DeanTheDull]

A rush empire; it doesn't actually need its natural expansions and should probably skip building its first two colony ships to have more Corvettes instead.

A necrophage wouldn't be building colony ships for the primitives, however- it'd be building the armies it will need to occupy the enemy homeworld regardless, and use them to conquer the primitives.

And, of course, this in no way interacts with any of the primitive systems, and doesn't change that once you complete your war rush, you still would generally want to turn back and occupy the primitives.

 

[DeanTheDull]

There's some fair points in here. I'm not sure about the spying bit though. If I understand the dev diaries so far, I believe you can only get these from not being found out by the primitives. So likely, it's to boost the value of passive observation and such. Now if just having a spy network and not running operations aids the process of getting an insight, then yes definitely, the envoy drop is pretty massive. The fractional envoy thing I could see be a snowball mechanism into diplomacy (stuff all those envoys in the galcom for massive diplo wieght and such).

This issue with galactic community stacking is that you could much of the same effect by, well, conquering/uplifting/subjugating the primitives. Either their strength directly adds to yours, or they vote your way, or both.

As for spy requirements, I'm not clear. It seems like spies are required for some functions, but it's not clear they are required for gaining insights. This broader issue is that envoys spying on primitives could be spying on other empires, to get you the military tech insight to build a counter fleet and blah blah snowball.

Again, I'm not opposed to things not being powerful, I'm just sensitive to the point that people who can view the games in those terms are liable to see it as playing suboptimally to engage with DLC content.

Personally, though, I am interested in the new story aspects (especially given that this is a story pack after all). I believe it was mentioned in some interviews that the amount of words in this dlc exceed ancient relics iirc. So, I'm curious to see how pre-FTL civilizations have changed from more or less every Early Space Civilization being basically the same. I'm really hoping they've leveraged the origins and given us basically "in-development" empires that are progressing through the origins (for example a Mechanist origin empire figures out robots earlier than normal and has events based on that).

I expect that there will be no mechanical changes, only different RNG rewards from the insights. They've definitely established that more advanced primitives are more likely to increase their awareness faster, which risks reveal and a loss of insights.

 

[Markvitank]

Does MSI continue to exploit pre-ftl civilizations? Do they have any special interactions with them? Should a benevolent empire be worried about MSI annexing or simply gaining access to systems with primitives in them?

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

10 less pops seems somewhat restrictive as a starting empire. I know it's meant to be challenging, but still...

I'm not sure what a quarter or a half envoy does for us, unless there's a lot of these bonuses going on, or some multipliers somewhere.

OF COURSE its a non gestalt origin again

As for the non-gestalt tag on this, I *suspect* it's because some of your pops when you take this origin are added to the "Broken Shackles" origin start (or at least the template for your race is used), and these gestalt pops would be automatically culled in a non-gestalt empire, so it's there as a mechanical limitation to make the origin work on a technical level and stop it breaking the other empire that's spawned by this.

 

[Nefezer]

By the way, the day that the [has_modifier] Trigger supports the Scope of Fleet as his peers [add_modifier] and [remove_modifier] Effects, I can finally say that I can die without regrets.

OF COURSE its a non gestalt origin again

OF COURSE IT IS

at this point they HAVE to be doing it on purpose

yeah, purifiers totally cant use an origin thats basically tailor made for them
machine intelligences obviously cant use an origin that would acutally make sense for them

no

15 bucks btw, and they couldnt even be bothered
not like revenge is basically the undercurrent motivation for most rogue ais in sci fi

btw, for a good read about exactly that: Chrysalis

I thank the aliens who observe us and have not yet invaded our pre-FTL "Earth" for letting me live enough to discover this jewel... and of course, to our good samaritan for providing this link.

Now for the return of PDS_Iggy who desperately wants you to stop invading pre-FTLs.

* Assimilation Directives:
- Primitive planet discovered:
1. Is your planet size 21 or higher?
· Yes > ASSIMILATE
· No > Go to Directive 2
2. Does its population present useful traits to improve production?
· Yes > ASSIMILATE
· No > Go to Directive 3
3. Create observation post.

 

[Silesian Burd]

Wait, Cloaking nukes your speed? In other words, it's only gonna be useful on Artillery Battleships? Come on, give Frigates the Submarine status they deserve!

Also, the insight technologies seem a little... meme-y.

Requiem For a Drone: "Oh, wait, these guys aren't a Hive Mind. Whoops."
Atmospheric Orbital Mechanics: "Well, we learned nothing from those guys, but we got more efficient while learning nothing from them."
Satisfying Insults: No comment.
Predatory Tactics: "Apparently, being sneaky is effective, even in the completely-empty vacuum of space! Who knew?"
Lost Building Methods: "After hundreds of years, we have learned that stone and wood are actually more cost-effective building materials than platinum-steel."

Will there be a magic-like insight? Alchemy or Better Priests or better Psionics or something? I feel like a boost to Psionic Theory could come from one of these.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

By the way, the day that the [has_modifier] Trigger supports the Scope of Fleet as his peers [add_modifier] and [remave_modifier] Effects, I can finally say that I can die without regrets.



I thank the aliens who observe us and have not yet invaded our pre-FTL "Earth" for letting me live enough to discover this jewel... and of course, to our good samaritan for providing this link.



* Assimilation Directives:
- Plusted planet discovered:
1. Is your planet size 21 or higher?
· Yes> ASSIMILATE
· No> Go to Directive 2
2. Does its population present useful features to improve production?
· Yes> ASSIMILATE
· No> Go to Directive 3
3. Create observation post.

4. Having run out of insight technologies, is the planet below 8 size?
Yes > Crack for mineral deposit or to allow ringworld production.
No> ASSIMILATE

 

[SurrealGoblin]

I have a series of nested questions:
is it possible for a non-payback pre-frl civilization tied to the broken shackles origin to advance to FTL status prior to meeting the broken shackles empire? This could be due to the natural random chance of empires advancing ages or due to being uplifted by another empire.

If yes, are there events specific to the broken shackles player finding the home world of the uplifted civilization (given that the uplifted civilization is independent)?

If yes, would a broken shackles player and another empire with the same primary species, and a non-payback, non-broken shackles origin (e.g fear of the dark, prosperous unification) share a homeword in a manner similar to lost colony and its parent civ, treating the parent civ as an uplifted pre-ftl civ for the purpose of events?

If no, as I strongly suspect, how difficult would that be to mod for a novice?

 

[Rafss]

The tooltip for Districts that give building slots is +0.3 Building Slot each (3*0.3=0.9, then rounded to 1), I believe the same logic applies for Envoy bonuses.

The devs thought +1 Envoy for each primitive tech was too much, but also that every primitive tech should have an Envoy bonus, so they butchered it.

 

[AwaiMahouNeko]

A disaster! Why on Earth would you strip Fanatic Purifiers of the origin which is basically made for them?! Please, fix this before the release!

 

[Tilarium]

A disaster! Why on Earth would you strip Fanatic Purifiers of the origin which is basically made for them?! Please, fix this before the release!

Because a fanatic purifier is based on the concept of their superiority over everything. Just the very nature of them having been almost taken over by MSI defeats that concept. You can still play a fanatic xenophobe/autheritarian empire that wants to destroy everything because they are pissed off over being the target of MSI

 

[lilsaihah]

A necrophage wouldn't be building colony ships for the primitives, however- it'd be building the armies it will need to occupy the enemy homeworld regardless, and use them to conquer the primitives.

And, of course, this in no way interacts with any of the primitive systems, and doesn't change that once you complete your war rush, you still would generally want to turn back and occupy the primitives.

Yeah you wouldn't be building colony ships anyway. If your plan was 'hard rushdown' it'd probably be wise to just skip the colony ships as a whole. Like if you're playing Clone Ascendant you may colonize one or neither of your naturals; you just straight up don't need them until you have a secondary species.

The question there is what you are doing while you are doing your war rush. If you're running two rushes, one against each neighbor, I don't see why you wouldn't observe the primitives; you may not need to land ships until 2225 in which case you have more than a few years to observe and get insights.

They would also make a good pocket Scholarium at that point. It might be worth thinking about only conquering (or infiltrating) the more primitive natural expansion, while you sneak tech to the other one to get them prepped for uplifting.

 

[FleetMaster]

Where's the envoy? He should have reported back from that rival empire by now!

He's just arrived, sir!

Well send him in already!!! .......why are you putting a bucket on my desk?!?!?

Sir, this is the envoy.... 0.25 of him.

 

[V01ds33r]

Question: If a player or NPC empire invades a primitive planet and fail in this invasion, will this primitive civilization have Payback Casus Belli against aggressor after reaching FTL-era?

 

[Nefezer]

4. Having run out of insight technologies, is the planet below 8 size?
Yes > Crack for mineral deposit or to allow ringworld production.
No> ASSIMILATE

You have been faster by responding than I editing. It is not "plusted" but "primitive"

I am sorry to disagree, but directive 4 is wrong.
4. Invade and transfer the population to chemical processors when it is no longer useful to study them. Then, break the planet with a colossus in search of useful resources.