[KopiG]

Is that how Sectors work i.e. they keep all the energy/minerals they harvest to themselves? I thought all of these resources were empire wide.

Yes, that's how they work. You can set how much a sector should contribute to your bank, but that cannot be higher than 75%, so in time, the sector's bank will be full and inaccessible by the player. In reality, this means that a sector is basically a 25% taxed entity, which would be okay IF you could access its accumulated bank with some mechanic (influence cost, happiness penalty, whatever) but it seems like that's not the case. I think this really needs to be implemented, to access a sector's bank somehow. It is very very frustrating to see you running hundreds of energy credits deficit while your sectors have thousands banked up.

 

[mathers]

Personally I don't like this expansion. It's about specializing in late game but atm midgame is kinda non-existent. Do you have plans to address it?

I think most of the changes are midgame: Traditions, putting empire on track toward ascencion, habitats. Habitat is not an endgame feature. Then ability to add 12planet is negligible. It is midgame when achiavable and opens up opportunity to grow, things to do when otherwise stagnation would happen

 

[Viper0122]

More portraits please! More bug portraits for the Hive Mind!

 

[Stoßtrupp Gold]

The Unrest effect is neglectable, because all it needs to stump unrest is to build armies. Armies costs minerals (and a minimal amount of energy), which are abundant past early game anyways. Instead of adding a General who imporves Unrest rate by x%, just build x% more armies.

Unless they make Unrest numbers REALLY high, you will always be able to dump it down with armies.

From the twitch stream 4 enslaved pops create a unrest of 45 (=11.25 unrest per pop). Each defensive army suppresses 10 points. So with one army per planet tile/pop slave planets will have a hard time just relying on defensive armies.

What i also saw is that proles are now only +10% minerals, i know it would be toned down, but 10% is a little underwhelming.

 

[Alblaka]

From the twitch stream 4 enslaved pops create a unrest of 45 (=11.25 unrest per pop). Each defensive army suppresses 10 points. So with one army per planet tile/pop slave planets will have a hard time just relying on defensive armies.

This is an interesting figure, since it could imply that you actually need more then just plain (and cheap) defensive armies to keep a planet perfectly stable.
Albeit, if this is universally true and would force you to place a General per Slave Planet, you don't have enough slots to do so.

And, the reason why I didn't pay attention to numbers in the stream, is because cKnoor played horrible (by my standards) and I figured 50% of what he does can be done better anyways and is not representative of effort-gameplay. (Which, don't missunderstand, is entirely fine for a semi-RP fun multiplayer match. But cannot be seen as a representation of balacing factors in an upcoming patch.)

 

[Gaen]

# Colonization & Migration
* Doubled the base time it takes to colonize planets
* Only a single Pop can now be migrating to a planet at any given time

Will be intresting to se how this one plays out.

# Buildings
* Visitor Center now increases habitability by +5%

Doesnt it already do that?

 

[BrokenSky]

Will be intresting to se how this one plays out.

Basically it makes nomad and sedentary actual an advantage and disadvantage respectively.

 

[Balesir]

@General Retreat mentioned this in another thread yesterday i.e. just make the empirical ruler the de facto governor of the core (non-sector) systems i.e. a bit like a character in CK2 being in control of their demesne provinces.

Yep, basically the same thing, but I am suggesting it (in part) for the additional moves it makes feasible. If the core worlds need a governor each and there is a serious hit to worlds without governors, that makes the early expansion phase really too tough. This is especially true as you will need the maximum scientists for exploration at this stage, too. Make the first few planetary governors optional, however, and un-governed planets can be given a good nerf, while not flat-out banning them.

 

[Balesir]

That said, this is all theorycrafting based upon hundres of hours in 1.4 (and earlier), with no actual gameplay of 1.5, and the best way to figure out whether Generals are useful will be to wait the couple days and play it.

Will the buffs and nerfs all balance out to be "enough"? I have no idea - I think you said it right, here; we'll know better after we get hold of the changes and play with them.

 

[Rydelfox]

* Core Sector Systems base value reduced from 5 to 3. Added new early/mid game technologies and traditions to raise it

I've been seeing people, both here and on reddit, referring to "having 3 core worlds the entire game" or "not being able to increase core world until late game" and am wondering if a lot of people missed the part I bolded.

I'm curious when those new techs will appear. If they show up around the time the average player would be looking at getting a 4th planet, it could just be a nerf to aggressive early expansion, returning to the older numbers soon after.

 

[Emraldis]

Yes, that's how they work. You can set how much a sector should contribute to your bank, but that cannot be higher than 75%, so in time, the sector's bank will be full and inaccessible by the player. In reality, this means that a sector is basically a 25% taxed entity, which would be okay IF you could access its accumulated bank with some mechanic (influence cost, happiness penalty, whatever) but it seems like that's not the case. I think this really needs to be implemented, to access a sector's bank somehow. It is very very frustrating to see you running hundreds of energy credits deficit while your sectors have thousands banked up.

* Completely overhauled Sector AI budgeting so that it should now never unnecessarily accumulate resources when it has projects it could spend those resources on

 

[Verx90]

does this mean frontier outposts are no longer destructible through combat? Because I can see no reason to cede frontier outposts when we can just destroy them.

during the stream they mentioned that there is the will to change how space station work in combat ( they mentionet that is patetic that your fleet get slow down because they meet a random minning station and stopped on theyr track)

No too thrilled about those tbh:

Infiltration observation station mission now requires Gene Tailoring technology

and:

(UTOPIA owners): Gene Warriors can only be unlocked if you have the Engineered Evolution ascension perk, still available through tech if Utopia is not activated
* (UTOPIA owners): Psi Armies can only be unlocked if you have the Mind Over Matter ascension perk, still available through tech if Utopia is not activated


And seriously?
Three Core Systems?
With the way AI is ?

you are one of the ppl that liked to be evrything right? you can't be evrything . with the change on the army now we can finaly see some difference betwin the ethics of empires.

It would be offset if the shroud events were random, but they're not, no major event that paradox has put in has been, which means players can just look it up online after a short while and get the best results every time.

do you live with the HOPE that they will be not random ? or that there is a "better choise" ? you are understimating the danger of the space!

edit : they will give you 2 choise, became a slave of the srhoud or fight the srhoud and theyr indistruttible armada of guns that shots explosive gods . gl with the "best" result.

@Wiz Can we finally drain a sectors bank? Or is it that I have 5 sectors each floating with thousands of energy credits while I am running a deficit. Can finally sectors bail you out of an economic crisis? I dont even care if that will cause sector happiness penalty or influence or whatever you might come up with but the sectors's bank must be accessed somehow.

just so you know , sector have a limit capacity of resource, when they reach it, they will give you 100% of the resource they do . all the blame on sector IA is because you don't even have the will to give a sector a completed planet and manage the new one , i see alot of ppl blabing abount the fact that they like the micromanagment but all they want is to keep theyr best planet and leave the true work to sectors. if you are in deficit and teoricaly you take minerals from sector, they will stop pay you 100% and return to pay only 25-50-75% making your deficit , greater. banks are not usefull, banks don't help ppl . hate for banks !

edit : if you are in deficit , sell your fucking heavy asses ships.
edit edit : "sell" is a big word here... i mean, destroy and leave the minerals live in space forever.
edit edit edit : now that i think about it, can't you make a sistem like "Ogame" and take resources from battle debris ? well... research are well accepted anyway .

 

[Azhcristokos]

- Removed warscore gain from blockades
It's annoying and tedious enough that you have to conquer/blockade all of an empire's planets to get only 2-3 planets yourself, making conquering large empires such a boring, repetitive pain-in-the-ass that I honestly just quit the game at this point. Now, I've seen that target planets are worth much more warscore, but I honestly have no idea what that means, as it's never explained. I do hope that it'll counterbalance this removal, but I want to point out that I'm highly suspicious of that working out.

It means that if you take control of the worlds you are fighting for in the first place, you gain more warscore since holding the worlds you declared the war for definitely should be worth more than taking another random world. Blockade warscore was removed to encourage people to actually invade planets. I think it should have just been reduced and ticking warscore (like in EU IV and CK2) added, but this is an improvement.

As has been mentioned before, there are now technologies in the mid and late game that heavily reduce warscore costs so that you can seize a lot more planets in later wars. You still can only take a few systems earlier on when empires are smaller and losing three planets is a huge deal that will effectively cripple your enemy forever. The issue of fighting a 20 year galactic war in the 2400's to take two planets will be gone.

 

[EuropaCam]

This is an interesting figure, since it could imply that you actually need more then just plain (and cheap) defensive armies to keep a planet perfectly stable.
Albeit, if this is universally true and would force you to place a General per Slave Planet, you don't have enough slots to do so.

Don't forget: Slave Processing Plant now also reduces Slave Unrest by 50%

Also Authoritarian and Spiritual ethos reduce unrest as well.

 

[Alblaka]

Spiritual ethos reduce unrest as well.

That's a fix -number, which cant cope with a large slave planet unrest, but is more likely meant to 'smooth over' individually unhappy pops of splinter factions.

Don't forget: Slave Processing Plant now also reduces Slave Unrest by 50%

Aaaaaand we're back to just plopping down armies, alongside a slave processing plant.

This is gonna be a fun patch to minmax into the ground.

 

[EuropaCam]

This is gonna be a fun patch to minmax into the ground.

I'm taking a wait & see attitude until it hits. Then we can complain as necessary.

Although looking over the patch notes (sorry, was late to this party) I'm wondering if there's any good reason to pick Authoritarian if you're not using slavery. Certain government types?

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

One point that would favor tall would be if the tech levels grant way larger boni. E. g. laser II does double damage to laser I, laser III double damage to laser II... same for production, tech buildings.
That way the tech advantage a tall empire can have will really matter.

This isn't always the case since tech is highly RNG based and you can't force everyone to use a single starting weapon type. If the wide empire happens to research a few defensive counters to the tall empire's weapons, it devolves into a numbers game. If the tall empire isn't given the option to research any upgraded versions of their weapons but the wide empire is? You end up with a war where one side has both a small tech lead that gives enough of an edge to make it almost impossible for their enemies to fight back without more ships while still outnumbering said enemies. On top of that, a wide empire with enough dedicated research worlds (or that follows a specific ratio of agri/mining/energy/science worlds that's fairly science-heavy) can actually ignore the gradually growing tech costs (I've actually played a mod where you can import and export food between worlds, which sounds like it'd be close to how the empire-wide food storage would be handled, and made a size 25 planet into a dedicated research world with almost nothing else. An even split of physics, engineering, and society labs with a species that excels at research puts the research from each well above 30-40, perhaps in the 60s, each month). There's a point beyond which the acceptable concern about diminishing returns expansion has on research turns into a barely-noticeable inconvenience and wide empires start to outstrip tall ones if they're managed a certain way.

I've been seeing people, both here and on reddit, referring to "having 3 core worlds the entire game" or "not being able to increase core world until late game" and am wondering if a lot of people missed the part I bolded.

I'm more interested in the fact they refer to it as "core worlds" even after I pointed out you haven't been limited by the number of planets for a while. One person a page after I asked if anyone remembered how it was on start even complained about how many core worlds the pacifists could start with, making it seem like there's some people who don't realize it's core systems now and even with three you could still find systems with 3-6 inhabitable planets. That's before Banks and Utopia will drop, where you can build habitats and terraform some barren planets to make some systems with few or no inhabitable worlds more attractive or build Ringworlds if neither of these are really useful in a system. Depending on the exact requirements for building habitats and the chances of barren worlds being terraformable, three core systems in Banks will almost certainly be at least worth as much as five in 1.4.

 

[pieman]

The downside to this of course it that once again core system is becoming a balance feature, which means that any claim along the lines of "oh well if you like micromanaging your empire you can just mod it to be 100 base or something ridiculous" is made even less valid, since removing one balance-relevant feature without replacing it (obviously) throws off balance, as well as making several bonuses worthless, making modding it out a far more complicated task than implied.

This of course means that addressing the concerns of those who don't like the core/sector system as is will become more important (though if the bonuses to core systems are sufficiently cheap it may be that these concerns are already addressed, though it does mean that if you care about having control over your planets at all you are, as mackau has said, somewhat railroaded. Either way, we'll see how 1.5 and 1.6 work regarding this - hopefully the increased customisability of governments will help).

But if it doesn't (or even if it does), an expansion with one focus on sectors and vassals would be pretty cool somewhere down the line IMO. (Maybe some kind of centralization mechanic, with low centralization giving sectors more autonomy and very low making them nearly vassals, with their own ethics and laws and with high centralization allowing things like building in sectors but having higher bureaucratic costs?).

I like this. Would love to see an "end of Rome" scenario where decentralization reaches such extremes that the sectors of an empire split into a loose conglometate of states, like, either a federation or even just separate states. Big empires fracturing is always one of my favourite events in paradox games.

(Gameplay ramifications be damned! Im here to RP.)

 

[mathers]

I like this. Would love to see an "end of Rome" scenario where decentralization reaches such extremes that the sectors of an empire split into a loose conglometate of states, like, either a federation or even just separate states. Big empires fracturing is always one of my favourite events in paradox games.

(Gameplay ramifications be damned! Im here to RP.)

This is my biggert pain as well: Sectors should strive to be independent a la ck2.

 

[Verx90]

This is my biggert pain as well: Sectors should strive to be independent a la ck2.

but i usualy build BIG BLOOB sector , i would be fuuu in a sec

i think this would make build tall be a bit toooooo hard , but this could be the way federation will be upgraded in the future . a big blob considerate 1 empire(unificated federation or whataver this language call them) but composed of a variety of sector that are the old nation inside the federation that are active like vassals in CK2 .
there is even someone that can realy understand me when i speak in this trash way ?