Things I'm really hoping are properly implemented this week

[Guthuk Gaming]

1. An actual trade bankruptcy. There's no punishment for being negative trade which is a truly funny thing.
2. Voidworm crisis is an instant and permanent desync, forcing you to either turn off voidworms or make the mid game year 2500
3. End Game Crisis isn't properly implemented. 3 of them can't take worlds because they were never implemented in to 4.0. I just assume the unbidden are bugged as well somehow.
4. Increasing the range on bio ships since beta has made them just automatically superior to mechanical ships, the balance here isn't good.
5. Fauna play style got massacred by bio existing. It also could use proper implementation, since it's basically a third hidden ship set, and kind of subpar right now.
6. Battleships have questionable worth for mechanical ship sets, being that they lose to all other mechanical ships, and get OBLITERATED by bio battleships.
7. Devouring swarm kind of became insane with biological ship sets. Suddenly it's hull/armor regen is whacky.
8. Clone Army remains an origin that simply occupies a higher plane of existence than all others (at least progenitor got taken down a notch.)
9. Wilderness seems a bit slow.
10. Telepaths are not okay.
11. Mechanical hangers are still subpar.
12. Parliamentary/Crowdsourcing are just way too strong as they are now.
13. Cybernetic Creed just doesn't work properly, their first colony can't colonize.
14. Holdings seem to break the game.
15. Tooltips are very inconsistent. Some civics specify their job replacements, some don't, some don't even mention entire mechanics they're doing. Most Origins still fail to say even half of what they're implementing.
16. Nanomachine ascension does very little in the current version other than get nano autocannons, which cosmogenesis steals anyway (seriously it's lame.)
17. Purity hive loses it's empire size for modify species cost. It's kind of destroying yourself for no reason as it's implemented right now, a huge newb trap.
18. Please buff Lithoids. They've never been viable since they were released. If their growth penalty got reduced to 15% they'd be playable. Every update since they were first released has made them worse and worse. I don't think an entire race type should occupy the "challenge run" area.

Oh one more: Blank bioships that evolve seems not that abusive on paper, but in reality allows you to get the EXTREMELY expensive bio ships for way too cheap, letting bio get way too much easy tempo play.

 

[Adaman5280]

19. Make slaves usable so i can play my necrophage empire.


And to point 16: nanotech needs a straight up rework. They need to take it back to the drawing board and actually turn it into a proper ascension. First off bring nanotech worlds up to par with machine worlds, they're thematically the same exact thing. Second nanotech has no leader trait? no pop trait? unacceptable. Third give nanotech access to the whole nanite shipset so they can use strictly nanite ships. Gray tempest already has it, wouldn't be that hard to implement. Gray tempest also has special nanite weapon technologies, nanotech should be able to learn those after defeating them. There's more i could add, but this would be a good start.

 

[jedavis]

I'm actually kinda happy that nanotech gestalts have a reason to use the nanotech research lab building now (in that it is crazy good, basically lets you skip all the research base output boosters techs, and shockingly is not planet-unique).

I also think it makes sense for nanite worlds to be worse than machine worlds, since they're a lot less expensive and come online earlier. The current situation where their resource production districts are wildly worse than regular, non-nanite worlds is pretty terrible though. The nanotech buildings are also not looking too hot under the new economic model, especially with the terrible nanotech world designation.

I think the shipset is the least interesting part of nanotech. I basically only care about economy, and think that nanotech's focus on "wide, popless production" is an interesting idea/theme. Though I wouldn't say no to a grey goo army type or something.

 

[Jay Sherman]

1. Fauna play style got massacred by bio existing. It also could use proper implementation, since it's basically a third hidden ship set, and kind of subpar right now.

Yes please! It is 50% of the content of the DLC and it is basically unusable, it would be much more interesting as a shipset, or improved in some way so it is a real option (it never was, it's not bio's fault honestly)

 

[Adaman5280]

I'm actually kinda happy that nanotech gestalts have a reason to use the nanotech research lab building now (in that it is crazy good, basically lets you skip all the research base output boosters techs, and shockingly is not planet-unique).

I also think it makes sense for nanite worlds to be worse than machine worlds, since they're a lot less expensive and come online earlier. The current situation where their resource production districts are wildly worse than regular, non-nanite worlds is pretty terrible though. The nanotech buildings are also not looking too hot under the new economic model, especially with the terrible nanotech world designation.

I think the shipset is the least interesting part of nanotech. I basically only care about economy, and think that nanotech's focus on "wide, popless production" is an interesting idea/theme. Though I wouldn't say no to a grey goo army type or something.

By all means make them more expensive, make them cost as much as machine worlds to make if that's the problem. Its immersion breaking trying to play as a swarm of nanites while 90% of your worlds are still just regular old machine worlds since they're better in every way. If it were up to me, nanotech worlds would be slightly better than machine worlds. Right now there's practically no incentive at all to building nanotech worlds.

Nanotech in a nutshell: You've ascended into a swarm of nanites! accept for the parts of you that haven't, you know your ships, pops, planets, etc are all still normal machine stuff. So really you've ascended into having 3 decent edicts and that's about it, yay! (thumbs down) this is just bad. It needs some serious help. Out of all the ascensions in the game nanotech has the most potential to be awesome and somehow managed to be the lamest (and arguably worst one).

I don't know about the new nanotech research lab since i haven't played nanotech since it got released, but I'm glad to hear it got buffed presumably.

I think the shipset is the least interesting part of nanotech. I basically only care about economy, and think that nanotech's focus on "wide, popless production" is an interesting idea/theme. Though I wouldn't say no to a grey goo army type or something.

I see no reason popless production and grey goo army shouldn't go hand and hand actually. After all nanotech is supposed to be the wide empire build.

 

[mergele]

Look, you still can't throw a stone without hitting two diferent bugs. I don't care which they fix, as long as its a lot.

 

[Adaman5280]

Yes please! It is 50% of the content of the DLC and it is basically unusable, it would be much more interesting as a shipset, or improved in some way so it is a real option (it never was, it's not bio's fault honestly)

They have a habit of doing this. Remember when overtuned came out and the whole trade off was supposed to be super good pops and fleeting leaders, and then not long after they went *boom* paragons DLC, and suddenly leaders were god tier and that playstyle/trade off was turned upside down. While i realize overtuned wasn't a DLC on its own, its the same idea of releasing something only to instantly invalidate it not long after

 

[jedavis]

By all means make them more expensive, make them cost as much as machine worlds to make if that's the problem. Its immersion breaking trying to play as a swarm of nanites while 90% of your worlds are still just regular old machine worlds since they're better in every way. If it were up to me, nanotech worlds would be slightly better than machine worlds

I almost wish they'd go completely the opposite direction. I spent some time this weekend playing nanotech exterminators and the problem with nanotech is that it incentivizes you to hold on to and manage literally all of the planets you can take, but managing all of the planets isn't actually fun. And I realized that they already solved this problem: terravore breaks the worlds, rather than asking you to manage them for the rest of the game. I wish Subsume would render worlds uninhabitable, but put big juicy nanite deposits on them to harvest for the rest of the game and funnel back to my handful (15ish, maybe) of carefully-managed core machine worlds (to use as upkeep for stuff like nanotech research labs, or nanotech automation buildings that do 100% of a district's workforce, or other wacky stuff).

But sure, I'd love a nanite purge, and nanite armies, and pop traits (or purge your own pops to nanites and feed them into workforce-producing buildings?), and a tooltip that tells me where is a good place to build nanite harvesters (or just be rid of the harvesters), and...

 

[Revengeance_oov]

• Multiracial Hives should be able to turn off which species can become leaders. They can't even Nerve Staple without running Purity.
• Pacifist Necrophages need a way to expand (as they can't take over their guaranteed PreFTLs).
• Tons of events/anomalies lock out Gestalts for no obvious reason (e.g. On Solar Sails, Skrand/Keides) - these may have made sense once upon a time but no longer do (e.g., Astral Rift outcomes can give Gestalt leaders, but for some reason a hive can't raise Keides from birth)
• EvoPred should not gain and then lose certain event-given traits (e.g. Inner Darkness from the dark matter geyser colony event).
• Some events/modifiers that add jobs add only 1, instead of 100 (looking at you, Crime)
• Ecu/Machine/Hive world bottom row districts are super poorly labeled and should possibly even get a second specialization to avoid incentivizing the 1-1-1 meta just to unlock buildings (I personally don't mind this rule for regular worlds)
• Ecumenopoli need a buff, being woefully inferior to Hive/Machine worlds due to their transformation requiring full development, monopolizing the build queue, and costing 200 influence
• Hive/Machine World Perk tooltips falsely reports "double jobs" (they provide triple jobs to urban districts, but no bonus to the bottom row districts)
• Physics labs should not require access to Volatile Motes
• Bio shipset starter techs erroneously count as T1 instead of T0, allowing very fast access to critical T2 techs such as Terrestrial Sculpting, Cloning, and Colonial Centralization.
• Players should be able to control which species are eligible for assembly; currently, robots are impossible to specialize to different worlds
• Jobs don't show production values in tooltips (and the tooltip for production of the entire stratum shows gross values rather than normalizing to 100 Pops)
• Migration is a fixed rate, rather than being a function of Civilians and/or free jobs
• Migration pacts should not only draw to/from capital worlds, as this results in a punishingly slow growth rate.
• Certain origins with locked ascensions (Wilderness, EvoPred) require taking an Ascension Perk, while others (Synthetic Fertility, Teachers of the Shroud) do not. (If nothing else, they could just trigger the Biomorphosis situation after N years or the second completed tradition tree or whatever, instead of consuming a perk.)
• EvoPred advanced government tooltips are misleading - the empire size reduction is calculated per pop, which is a) multiplicative with other forms of size reduction, and b) punishes multiracial empires with significantly greater sprawl penalties.

 

[Exasperation]

I think if I were in charge of a nanotech ascension rework, I would try something like the following:
1. Add a nanobot trait with the following effects: half of energy upkeep replaced with nanite upkeep, nanite upkeep reduced to 0 on nanite worlds and worlds with the subsume world situation active (similar to how radiotrophic works) + a budding-type effect that only activates on nanite worlds. Your existing pops will gradually be converted to nanobots once you reach a certain point in the ascension, this point would be after you get access to subsume world.
2. Roboticist/replicator jobs replace upkeep with nanites (again, after subsume world, probably at the same point your pops start converting to nanobots).
3. New zones restricted to nanite worlds with no building slots, no jobs, but the following effects:
- Mineral Aggregation: per district add X mineral upkeep and Y nanite production to maintenance drones (these would be small numbers, maybe like X = 0.4, Y = 0.1 per 100 drones, but since they're per district they can potentially scale up quite a lot).
- Organic Aggregation: as above, but with food upkeep instead of mineral.
4. Make a full nanite shipset (including things like nanite defense platforms) and have the shipset switch upon completing the tradition tree.

Basically, the idea of 1-3 is to a) add the ability to turn nanite worlds' population mostly into a big pool of undifferentiated nanobots that consume raw matter and churn out nanites and more nanobots and b) push you to do so by requiring nanites to support your non-nanite worlds.

 

[Red Death]

19. Make slaves usable so i can play my necrophage empire.

Also Necrophage purge please!

Increasing the % of your starting pops that are pre-patents would also be nice so that we can actually have some pop growth. The number of them you get is especially low for Hive Minds. But this is less of a priority.

 

[masteriw]

Are slaves still allowed to work "citizen" jobs?
This is one of the stupidest bugs 4.0 introduced tbf

 

[mcantrell]

The AI is the big thing to me.
Turning on planetary automation is a death sentence, which is annoying if you're playing wide.
The enemy AI is apparently all but unable to handle the new building system, bio fleets, et cetera.

Some better feedback about mechanics such as Wilderness would be nice.
Bio Fleets apparently use up 1x/1.5x/2x naval cap based on their maturity stage, I must have missed that tooltip.
Handling Wilderness edge cases -- like what do you do if they happen to capture a Ringworld segment? ... Why can't they do ringworlds, again? ... would be nice.
Having special exemptions for Wilderness's rules on gene editing, purging, and assimilation would be nice. Why do I have to wait to slowly get the species to integrate towards the default species instead of being able to just engineer them, even with purity?
Give me the ability to prioritize the use of one drone type over another as biomass, so I can get rid of the ones without Inner Darkness or some other neato unavailable-to-edit trait.
The Bodysnatchers civic feels a bit underpowered, but maybe that's just me. When I used it against another empire with the full compliment of 2000 bodies, it didn't seem to do much.
It would be nice if bodysnatchers gave you bonuses to intel, op success, et cetera for a while afterwards. You're basically filling their worlds with hollowed out husks in the shape of their people, after all.

 

[Wolfgang I]

Lots of good points.

I think a third slider for the midgame stuff that is influenced by crisis settings would be nice at this point. I mean the Khan and the voidworms are really strong with high crisis sliders even if voidworms can be countered with faster ships with point defense/galactic trawling and you can surrender to the Khan. I like a midgame start of 2225.

I'm currently playing a fauna playtrough and I would like mutations based on the new bio ship stuff. I mean adapting that makes more sense than normal tech. Also an ability to replace or evolve the base weapons that you are stuck with right now.

 

[Red Death]

The Bodysnatchers civic feels a bit underpowered, but maybe that's just me. When I used it against another empire with the full compliment of 2000 bodies, it didn't seem to do much.
It would be nice if bodysnatchers gave you bonuses to intel, op success, et cetera for a while afterwards. You're basically filling their worlds with hollowed out husks in the shape of their people, after all.

The biggest benefit is being able to assimilate individualist pops into drones. That is an enormous benefit, it's essentially a better version of Necrophage that also has no penalties.

 

[RoverStorm]

Clone Army remains an origin that simply occupies a higher plane of existence than all others (at least progenitor got taken down a notch.)

Please buff Lithoids. They've never been viable since they were released. If their growth penalty got reduced to 15% they'd be playable.

Funnily enough, Lithoids make excellent Clone Army species, as even with -25% you quickly hit the population cap anyways.

I'm going to add that a LOT of civic councilor effects are broken and either work incorrectly at best, or do literally nothing at worst.

Corporate Hedonism and Maritime Machines both have councilor position that do absolutely nothing.

In fact Pleasure Seekers and Corporate Hedonism also don't apply their pop growth per entertainer, which is tied to the civic itself.

 

[VexacionRT]

The AI is the big thing to me.
Turning on planetary automation is a death sentence, which is annoying if you're playing wide.
The enemy AI is apparently all but unable to handle the new building system, bio fleets, et cetera.

There are a whole host of buildings the AI won't build(https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ist-of-buildings-the-ai-never-builds.1752963/) which seems to be due to the changes they made to the colony_automation files. If buildings like alloy foundries, research labs, etc... aren't allowed to be automatically built on purpose I suspect the reason is because that they never built any logic to replace buildings historically let alone for this overhaul(drone storage is an example of an exception).

A bigger problem is there doesn't seem to be anything built in to automatically change out zone specializations(I may have missed it). This is a problem for AI empires as their zone specialization are based on the state of their economy at the time of colony completion(and they also receive one instantly on colonization for some reason https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-specialization-on-colonize-intended.1752946/). Spiritualist empires end up with unity zones for all of their initial colonies(spiritual enclave). Saw one AI that lucked into 6 planets, unfortunately it was at the mercy of planet automation based on economy weights and ended up with 6 unity colonies and ended up dying very quickly to a neighboring devouring swarm.

Automation also can't repair right now...

I suspect the reason why they haven't built in logic to replace buildings/zones is because they are afraid of creating loops of automation replacing buildings/zones so they chose to leave automation as being able to do less rather then continually make it more robust. This kinda worked pre-4.0 since all normal planets had Industrial districts so the AI always had access to districts for core resources but City zones make this a big problem especially an automation system based on economy weights.