Galaxy planet settings

[Tisifoni12]

More an observation than a question.

I think it's going to be more fun without the automatic first couple of colony worlds to expand to, but if you turn that off you seem to have to dial up the frequency of habitable worlds up quite far above 1 (is that the default ?), to like 2.5 or 3 and even then finding that first couple of colonisable worlds can be a challenge.

Tempted if I have those first couple of worlds to 'go tall' as generally can pull in enough resources from my worlds and their immediate 'hinterlands' for a viable economy, but always seem to end up reacting to contact with other empires by needing to expand to a borderline. Recent games always seem to end up with hostiles on my doorstep . . . *

* A quick early end due to fanatic purifiers, or vassalized by imperialists . . .

 

[prismaticmarcus]

I'm still on version pi so I don't know whether that's been changed, but for some years I've always left it at the default frequency and turned guaranteeds off and have never really noticed a problem in that regard.

 

[Losttruppen]

No Guaranteeds and low Habitables can have some pretty inhibiting effects on the AI.

I like to turn Habitables to 5x, Guaranteed x2, Pre-FTL x5, and play Life Seeded so they get everything and I get to scrounge; plenty of natural Gaias and Relics and you can Force Spawn some Life Seeded AIs to steal from if you want.

 

[jedavis]

I used to play a fair bit of 0 guaranteed habitables, low habitables, and force-spawned only empires with Continental preference (mine included). Having a good planet be worth fighting over was kind of fun. The AI felt like it got a lot more aggressive when it was out of planets to grow on.

One of the things that makes me saddest about Stellaris is that habitables are so plentiful and logistic pop growth so effective at slowing pop growth that you will never fill your planets, even playing pretty tall. This seems very contrary to how I expect life to behave; fill planets up to capacity, run out of space, ecological breakdowns (declining habitability reducing efficiency and increasing upkeeps), population controls with negative impacts on happiness and stability, war for territory... And civilians feel like a step in the wrong direction here, making managing local excesses of pops even easier than it was before.

Technology is what you do to stay ten years ahead of Malthus (whether that's terraforming or habitats to make more space, or cruisers to take more space).

 

[Trigaea]

I meet in the middle and turn down guaranteed habitables from 2 to 1.

It gives the AI some breathing room while also providing an early game challenge to find somewhere new.

 

[Nabil ad Dajjal]

I love the new 'Rare' setting for habitable worlds, it does make planets feel a lot more meaningful.

The only snag is that right now you need to turn on guaranteed habitable worlds or the AI suffers even more than normal, but three planets per AI empire plus pre-FTLs, pre-sapients, and uniques adds up to a lot more than I would like to see.

My dream is for the AI to actually get decent enough to play with rare planets and no guaranteed habitable worlds. Either via an AI rework or (more likely) someone in the modding community reviving Starnet and making it work for 4.0.

 

[Ohirra]

[Laughs in Void Dweller]