Old guy's help me learn version 2.2.3 (1960) AAR?

[VoidStalker]

Long story short, I played until I realized that three things had gone sideways...

1) Using the {Intel} & {Own} commands to get rid of the uninvited guests worked to eliminate them, but left the galaxy hyperlanes connections revealed.
2) That also meant that tracking my progress as I went, went right out the window.
3) It also meant that I could see something/anything my actual adversaries were doing.

I have many images that I took, but the last one was posted above, because right after I finally got the second colony ship cleared to land, I went to check how much longer I still had to land the third colony ship when it's anomaly was cleared, and then discovered that the anomaly had not even been started yet! Honestly not sure yet what happened there, as when I checked both, the third worlds science ship was at 72% progress, when the second worlds was at 97% when I zoomed in to take the above two images.

It wasn't until I went in and started to look at the images I had taken, that I realized that problem #3 had been going on in the meantime, as I exclusively played zoomed in on the 'home sector' until I got all 4 worlds landed upon, and had not even noticed as I was playing through.

So, unless folks want to actually see the game I tried to play this morning, with all the space monsters and pirates removed right at the beginning, I'm going to have to call that whole process a failed experiment, and a lesson learned. I don't want all the extras out there, but using the {Intel} command comes at too high of a cost in 1st X fun, so I will simply have to remove then one at a time, as I encounter them, using the {Own} command.

This evenings game will be played from the start to where this mornings game was, and this time the galaxy's hyperlanes will not have been revealed in game, and my worthy opponents will not be exposed...

On a side note:
My health is bad, but I have been getting by ok. I have taken to writing down when I take my medicines, or measure vitals, so that I can track my health. To make that task easier, I made a document in Microsoft office Word 2010 edition I think, and what I use is just a simple table, which I use as a template, and just fill in the blanks. Unfortunately, in the last 24 hours I have been messing up more than my gameplay, which come to think of it, may also be the reason I've been feeling so 'out of it' all day. In addition to using the document to track/record health related stuff, I have been forced to set two recurring alarms on my cell phone, as a last ditch way to remember to take my meds, both day and night times. In addition to the document/alarms, I have also taken to using my phone to take pictures of my various medical doses, weight and blood pressure readings, and exercise activities, so that if I don't remember to write them down in the document immediately, I have the time and date stamp on the image to fall back on.

This was good, when I was going to always need that reminder, and still is, but I had been doing much better at taking my meds for the last couple of weeks or so, and so got used to taking them before the alarms would sound, and thus the alarms were not needed, as mostly I've been able to remember to take them before the alarm sounds.

Unfortunately, what that means is that the alarm gets ignored. Last night, I was proud that I had once again taken my evening meds before the alarm went off and reminded me to take them. My phone has the picture time and date stamp of 9:27pm, well before the 11:00pm alarm, so all was good. That is, until I got up and hit the can, and on the way back to bed, @3:10am I happened to glance over and see my meds still sitting on the counter! I had photographed them, and then went to get a drink to wash them down with, and got distracted {which is a nice way of saying I had a Senior Moment aka a Brain Fart} and never actually took the dang pills! And then later on this morning, I ignored to AM alarm, and didn't take my morning meds until afternoon.

Anyway, after I got out of the hospital earlier this year, I have been trying to keep track of my medical health issues, and it was this that got me writing things down, and on a daily basis, and THAT got me some much needed practice in keeping notes and such, so when I saw some of my gamer clan friends playing Stellaris on the Discord channel, after a few nights of that, I had to start playing some of my own, and...

I shared this little bit of info as a way of saying that the disjointed postings you see here are actually caused by underlining health problems, and my mind wandering between setting out to play 10-20 game years, and then not even getting back to this till later in the evening. On the plus side, because of the need to track medical/health stuff, I'm now putting that to use to play/write for my Stellaris AAR. Just for the heck of it:

Spoiler

That is an image for my health tracking logs, and a filled out one may take up more than one screen, but this is just the final template I had to come up with from scratch, to help me keep things organized.

So, now that this is posted, I'm off to (hopefully) get a meal, a workout, update my health log, and then have another go at a TM game, without the abortion of pre-editing the uninvited out at the beginning...

 

[VoidStalker]

Ever play AoE? I always thought the little priest units were great, but what the heck are they saying?

I think it is; "I own you"

So tonight's game will look something like the above.

Till after dinner, folks!

 

[VoidStalker]

So, here we are, 6:08am on Aug the 25th.

So, cheating will take place once my scouts start running into the 'Uninvited' and no sooner...

And now, to set the mood...

As I develop more familiarity with all the behind the scenes stuff, I'm attempting to develop a methodology, where I can learn by doing, and eventually get things to become 2nd nature, and once these things become a hard wired into my brain kinda thing, then we can call them HABITS. And by working on these thing here and getting feedback, let's hope that these will all be good habits!

So, treating the posting of AAR content as a hurdle for me, and I want to get things right, so as a potential way forward, I'm thinking that getting the first and last images taken in game posted, will be a good thing, as I will have defined the game time span to be covered using these images, and that will (I hope) help me to keep things organized and focused. That said:

This is most everything I can think I need on the first day of the game play wise, except for my shipyard activity, which I goofed on this morning, so you don't get the shot of the first new ships construction date. I want to show what the construction ships are doing initially, and where the Science ships are going, and what the researchers are doing, as well as the "Known Universe" kind of thing, and at game start, all that could be squeezed into just one pic.

Now, when I started getting tired this morning and started the whole 'not thinking clearly' event chain, I stopped immediately, and did healthy stuff, and am now feeling much better! So, that left me far short of my goal, but also left me feeling good enough to continue now.

This time, and in fact, about every time except for the dratted first time, I managed to get a look into the Imperial shipyards.

So, in this play session, I played from start up to May 4th, 2204.

I once again decided to try my hand at early, fast colonization of the home sector, and got lucky, and had just one Anomaly blocking the third discovered habitable world, so in the screen shot above, we see colony ship 2 about to head too the first surveyed habitable world, which at size 13 is the least of the three discovered so far, with the size 24 and size 20 being equally habitable, and bigger. When I said I got lucky this time, only the size 20 had an anomaly preventing fast colonization, last time it was both the size 20 & 24 worlds that were delayed.

As far as lessons learned, I finally had a thought, and it was that, in addition to checking out the anomalies discovered as they were reported (just a quick player look at where they were), along with checking out which worlds were bigger/better before blindly sending out colony ships, might just be a good idea, and so for the first time, I did that, and this will lead to some interesting things.

 

[VoidStalker]

Working on the images...

Here I want to test out ideas for tracking several things, and am open for suggestion on what and how to present this information. Here is what I did on this particular playthrough:

Spoiler

The initial tradition, for absolutely no good reason, was for starting off on the Discovery path.

I wanted that 35% bonus more than anything!!!

Then I did something, maybe good, maybe bad, but now I opened the Expansion path, instead of finishing the Discovery path.

I wanted that extra Pop!!!

And then more pop growth.

After that, it's back to the Discovery tree!

 

[VoidStalker]

Some questions while I work on more images...
Is there some sorta way to hide parts of a post, so that, if folks want, they can click on the hidden content, but otherwise not be bothered with it? As I start to post more and more things, I'll be wanting folks to have lots of information, but will want most images (and all my links) to be things that one must click on to see, so the main focus will be on the story.

On other forums, there is something I vaguely remember as a "Spoiler" feature. Do the Paradox forums have anything like that?

 

[HistoryDude]

There's spoilers here.

Well, hopefully this time goes well...

 

[VoidStalker]

What are some good base guidelines for requiring defense spending when expanding? Is number of systems a good part of that? What about populations within the region? What about hyperlanes, should they also be role played in some fashion?

 

[VoidStalker]

One of the lessons I've recently learned, is that I really need to stay up on my surveys as they go, because reading another AAR, I read where the author re-directed his colony ship to a better, later surveyed world than the one he had intended the colony ship for, and sure enough, this proved to be the case in my own game. Initially, we surveyed Alpha Centauri, and all I had paid attention to was that it was habitable, overlooking that it is smaller (size 13) than my homeworld (size 16), and I was all set to send the 1st colony ship to settle there, but then I checked out the (not to scale) planet in Sirius's 3rd orbit, and low and behold, that world is half again the size of my homeworld (size 24).

Some things I didn't realized or think about, is that I can zoon in/out on a planet, and change it's apparent size, and had I done that in the above image (or more correctly, in the three screen shots that made up this image), then I could have made a better and more useful image.

How big can continental planets get in Stellaris? How small can they be?

I'm going to go back into the save game file real quick, and test out different zoon levels, and better mouse positioning, to try to get a better feel and image.

 

[VoidStalker]

Got it!

I love the graphics in this game! And now, I have a nice tool to use for trying my hand at in story content.

 

[VoidStalker]

So, during the latest gameplay, I ended up with a near race, between the construction ship having the StarBase in Sirius system up and running in time for the already on it's way colony ship, and there was no pressure one way or the other, but when I went back and looked at all the pics I took, not knowing if the colony ship would arrive before the base was done, and thus have no suffer the ignominy of just having to hang out in orbit and wait for it to complete before in could begin it's landings...

Then I had a twisted idea!

I can manufacture fake messages, and impose arbitrary conditions not seen in game, but as part of the role playing/story telling.

Some of the images from in game, and it seems that the colony ship has a different name?!?!?


Not too sure what happened there.

Different ways of showing the progress, I like the terminal moments within the Sirius star system, but wish I had thought to stack the ship images on the maine screen.

I didn't know that the percentages were a 1:1 ration with days needed.

Seems that the base was operation as planned, lol.

 

[VoidStalker]

Ah wait, that is the second colony ship, and it was diverted from the size 20 world because of the Anomaly attached to it.

 

[HistoryDude]

Well, those colonists were very unlucky.

 

[VoidStalker]

Well, those colonists were very unlucky.

~7:00am, Aug 27th

Muhahahaha!

I think that they were very lucky. But you have just given me some very much needed feedback. In my posts, I though I had made it clear that they did indeed make it to their destination, but it was the timing of their arrival as opposed to the construction ship's completing the local StarBase that gave me the idea to create the wholly contrived, fake message up thread, as a way for me too take things from the game and write a story episode about what was going on.

Sorry for the confusion.

Maybe using fake, "Story-Spicer-Upper" messages that look like a real in game message is a bad idea? I had thought about doing a series of messages, that would simulate message traffic between the outward bound colony ship and it's headquarters, starting off with mentioning an annoying, but not critical mechanical problem, then, as the non-existent problems worsen, additional messages could be used to develop it into a crisis, perhaps even with fake options at the bottom of the message box, to make the reader more involved in the story and drama of my AAR, but... I don't want folks to be actually deceived and fooled, at least not if they are paying attention.

What are your thought of theatrical embellishments?

I have a few things I still need to get down, before I attempt a full on AAR story/game, but at least now I feel confident that I know enough to ask intelligent questions. Things I think I know enough about to start a game:

1) Home world.
2) Colony ships.
3) Colony worlds.

Right now, my limited understanding is that I want to clear that initial blocker as fast as economically prudent, meaning right around the time I actually have a job for them to do, but as I can only do one thing at a time on a planet. I have to do the blocker project, and only then can I start the next project, that will end up providing the free pop with employment. Is this in fact correct, that a planet is only capable of building things in series, one at a time, or am I missing yet another obvious thing...?

Unfulfilled job positions can stay unfulfilled for a considerable time, especially when Emigration is trying to draw population from my core world(s), and unlike Unemployment, no bad effects occur within the population for there being too many jobs. What is the difference between Districts and Buildings, It seems districts employ folks of 'low' class, while the building employ folks of 'middle' class...?

I've learned that I need to pay attention to the Amenities and Housing on each planet, as these two things seem not to be shared, empire wide issues, but rather locally needed/supplied things. To meet these needs, I've found City Districts and HoloTheaters are my friends. As I have yet to break the '100 year' mark in any of my gameplay, there remains much (the bulk) of what the game has to offer yet to be explored, including the whole "Strategic Resource" topic, and the restrictions on what you can do later in game, based upon having them and tech that are pre-requisites to even collect them. I remember reading about some rich guy in the past, that IIRC was big into oil wells, and the production of something called Kerosene, which was a big thing back then, and that he also had a disposal problem with a highly dangerous waste product, that there didn't seem to be any use for at that time, until the invention of the internal combustion engine, that is. That dangerous waste by-product, that he had been throwing away, for years, we know today as Gasoline! Another example, would be the guys that were operating a Gold mine out in the US or Canadian west a long time ago, and they themselves had a problem, with a bluish colored ore that was mixed in with the Gold bearing ore, but it wasn't Gold, and so they were throwing it away. They were right, it wasn't Gold...but it was SILVER!!! So Paradox is spot on with this feature, but I am overwhelmed by the information overload, and never really get to that point in my games.

For my Colony ships, I am realizing that, as far as I know, there is no reason I cannot just build them and then send them once I find them a place for them to go, as opposed to finding the place first, and only then beginning construction, as I have been doing to date. I also recently realized that I need to pay attention to the size of the worlds I'm sending them to, and I'm thinking that, maybe I just might want to try to have one world with all 'low class' jobs/population, so that, instead of drawing folks away from my home world and never giving anything back, maybe, just maybe, I can have surplus housing and 'middle class' jobs open on my Home World/Core Worlds, and actually get some Immigration going on, instead of just Emigration? What can I do, to get my outer fringe worlds folks moving back to the CORE worlds...?

Other things I am learning, I now finally figured out how to assign ships to multiple missions, even in groups (most times). I figured out, at long last, that when I get the whole "Construction finished" message and double click on it, it not only centers the map on the location, but selects the planet/ship/base that triggered the message, but when I get the "Survey complete" message and likewise double click on it, this does not select the ship(s) that triggered the message, and this is one of the big problems I was having, as I didn't know this was the case, and so if I was giving orders to one survey squadron on one side of the galaxy, and told them what to do, and then double clicked to the other location, and then ***Assumed*** that the same game mechanic applied, and that the survey ships that had triggered the message would now be selected by this process, thinking (but not double checking) that I was now controlling the new group, and then issuing them orders, but in fact, I was still controlling the first group, to my immense frustration, and the ruination of many a game of Stellaris because of this. Is the anyway that Paradox can change this game mechanic, perhaps to select all currently idle survey ships in the system at the time (leaving unselected those survey ships investigating Anomaly's, conducting Research Projects, or just passing through), so that this game mechanic would work identically with the Construction Complete game mechanic, and eliminate this issue...?

Anyway, now that I spent this time doing this, I've gotten tired and need a nap.
~9:50am, Aug 27th

 

[HistoryDude]

The idea of using fake messages for the game is fine - it adds immersion. A bit confusing, but I don't think that that matters. I'd advise keeping it.

Planets can at least be queued to make multiple ships. I'm not sure if they will build one at a time.

And multiple survey ships can be used at once.

 

[VoidStalker]

The idea of using fake messages for the game is fine - it adds immersion. A bit confusing, but I don't think that that matters. I'd advise keeping it.

Thanks, I was trying to make it look as authentic as I could, for a quick little showcase of things, but included a blank message also in the image to show it was fake.

Planets can at least be queued to make multiple ships. I'm not sure if they will build one at a time.

Planets can build ships?!?! How? So far in my playing, I have only been able to build ships at starbases, is this tech/patch dependent?

And multiple survey ships can be used at once.

I've seen that, at last. I like getting 3-5 ships together, and then they make short work of most systems. Super crowded ones still take a bit of time, but that is part of the fun.

So, after many hours of playing out with the broken game, with 60 leader pool size and 16 tech choices possible, I finally broke down and asked for help, got the location for the modified files, and after many an hour, managed to triumph at last, unfortunately, my save game was based upon the old files, and so to get the benefit of the smaller leader pools and tech choices, I had to make a new game. This really made me mad, and disgusted, and even a bit upset.

OTOH, if I wanted the right file settings to help me play better, I was going to have to make that move sooner or later, so I grabbed every single picture and save game, and all the folders that they were in, add tossed them into the trash, and then emptied the trash can, and they are all now gone forever!

Anyway, I now have a brand new galaxy to explore, and unlike all previous playthroughs, I took complete notes (screen shots) of my new race/empire/what have you, and will get those posted in a few minutes, and folks can then see all the choices I made and tell me what they think, and where I made bad goofs, lol.

So, in the whole race creation section, I think this is everything that gives actual bonuses and penalties, as well as setting the stage? If more is needed, let me know what that is, as I'm wanting to delete base stock images as I go, not mainly because of the space they take, but so I don't get overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

By contrast, the actual game setup screen took very little time. In the last game, I choose 18 enemies to confront, this time I reduced that to 12. There really are NO options here to turn off all the 'random monsters', unless there is a lower difficulty setting below Cadet, so as before, the uninvited will be {Owned} upon making themselves known.

 

[HistoryDude]

I confused staircases and planets, I think. Sorry.

Shame about having to restart again. What's your new empire called?

 

[VoidStalker]

Shame about having to restart again. What's your new empire called?

That is a good question. I've been thinking about running a human race, and don't really want to use the Sol system, but that is what I am familiar with. I'm going to call them the War Mongers, partly inspired by an excellent AAR I'm been enjoying featuring "Normans in Space", but also some stories about a guy born on a distant earth, who turns out to be totally bad ass. Is there a way to make a random system for my guy, and then keep that system each game if I like how it looks...? Right now, I've just been using Sol, but if I used say a random trinary system, would that system be randomly generated once and then stay the same from then on, or would it always be randomly generated each time I started a game? I want something different than Sol, but I want it to be the same in every game, so when I write a back story, I can go into loving detail on how we as a race explored and expanded, and exploited our HomeSystem, which is a hard thing to write if the system is randomly generated every game.

I want my folks to be a warrior race, that while realizing that not everyone is cutout to be a warrior, still love personal fighting prowess, most especially with unpowered weaponry, over all, and enforce physical fitness and physical health throughout the entire population. I'm not sure what in game things would go right with this, but I've picked the bonuses I could see working within this. I want physical health/strength/fitness to be a species wide belief/goal, like as in "Everyone has the right to be fit and healthy, no matter what", and that every effort is made to advance medicine to cure diseases and heal injuries, such that the only folks that do NOT enjoy a fit/healthy body are the ones that are beyond the civilizations current medical/technological capabilities to heal.

At the same time, even though the warriors are the most beloved and respected members of the society, they (both the warriors and the society as a whole) encourage respect and honoring ALL skills, and recognize that while Warriors are great, at war, they might not be great at many other things, like running an empire, for instance, and so personal fitness, health, and fighting skills are prized above all things, but that should not in any way give one the impression that the species respects and honors nothing else.

I confused staircases and planets, I think. Sorry.

I think your spell check needs a good swift kick in the...
Pretty sure you mean

I confused starbases and planets.

But that's ok, I'm sure that the only thing I have so far been good at is causing confusion.

What this latest snafu with the files being updated means is, a saved game will always use the values within the files at game creation, and just altering the files values after the game is created won't fix the problems I was having with to many leaders, and WAY to many tech options. In the case of the too values that I had messed up.

The leader pool was set to 60, rather than 3.
The tech choices was set to 16, rather than 3.

I got what I wanted, in that, when I ended up deleting and replacing the modified file with the original one, the two changes I knew about went bye-bye, but unfortunately, I also got rid of changes I DID NOT know about (as in, I must have made these changes years ago, back when I first started playing around with Stellaris, but then subsequently forgot all about them, until I started playing Stellaris again recently, after watching others playing via Discord screen sharing), so now, after starting a whole new game, and playing a few years into it, I noticed some things I don't like/want.

My old game, I had three habitable worlds within 2 jumps of my home world, with a combined 13+20+24 = 57 size, while in the new game, it was one world of just 14 size. That's a huge hit, as 57 is 4 times what the new game offers, but that isn't the worst thing, either. I was gamely still pushing exploration out further, hoping that more worlds were nearby, when I wasn't able to build my StarBase - outposts like I had been previously, because now they cost HUGE amounts of 'Influence' in addition to their alloys costs. Before, they had cost some minor amount to build, but now were costing 33/67 for two bases within just a few jumps from my homeworld.

That factor is a gamebreaker for me, as a StarBase is a physical construct, and a precursor to expanding and exploiting, and to have their construction limited in such a fashion seems not just wrong, but counter intuitive as well. One could make the argument, that it is the StarBase that allows an empire to expand it's influence deeper and ever deeper into the galaxy, and that this process should increase the Empires Influence, rather than being limited by it.

What this whole file editing thing means for my immediate future gameplay, is that I'm going to have to experiment with getting the gameplay back to my comfort zone by editing the game files again (and perhaps several times), so that it is as fun and enjoyable as it had been.

Lessons learned:
1) I now know that altering the game files used to create a game cannot be undone by just changing them back, you have to make a new game each time.
2) Altering the game files like I had done way in the past, without any memory of what I had changed is bad, and frankly, unworkable.
3) Now that I am making an effort to learn this game, and keeping records of what I am doing, I decided to address this issue, and below is how I'm trying to do this:

I realize that I want more than just three leaders at a time to pick from, so have increased the pool back up to 10. Hopefully, 10 choices will prove more to my liking than 3, and not be as overwhelming and tedious as having this value set to 60 was.

While I was at it, I felt like trying to ensure that I wasn't going to be loosing my leaders after I started getting to know them, and so added 100 years to their death by old age lifespans. Again, time will tell if this even matters, or works, but I felt like trying this after all the time I was forced to invest into going over these files in the first place.

To fix the problem with the StarBase's increased Influence costs, I at first was tempted to attempt to adjust the initial max value from the cap of 1,000 to some lesser amount, while also changing the base cost and added hyperlane costs, but then I realized that there was a simpler, and more direct potential solution right in front of me, and that was to set the maximum cost at zero Influence, and, if this actually works, solve that particular problem entirely and permanently. I also reduced the maximum cost of a claim down to 100 Influence instead of 1,000 Influence.

By documenting these changes with screen shots of the changes, I'll be able, going forward, to remember what I changed, and right where to go to fix it in the future, unlike the unfortunate situation right now.

It is a learning process, and it's just taken me far longer than I had thought to get up to speed, and start playing and writing a compelling tale. Battling serious health problems at the same time is like turning up the difficulty setting, but as I don't have a choice there, I'm using my focus on learning and playing a Stellaris AAR as a way of focusing, and forcing myself to write things down, as this helps me also write things down for my health stuff.

Right now, I have made (yet another) game, so I can test out the three screen shots worth of changes, and if they work as designed, then I have only one more thing I would like to change, and that is the whole HomeSystem question. In fact, I think that rather than use the current save game, I'll redo my setup, and try out the random trinary system, and see how that works.

 

[HistoryDude]

Stupid autocorrect! Yeah, that was I meant.

I think the random systems change per game, but you can always just play one game via save games... I suspect that you can also mod the game to create a new starting star system. Or just use Deneb (Commonwealth of Man's home system). All that assumes that stuff is in the version you're using.

 

[VoidStalker]

For me, that last few days have been no real playing, just trying to get a solid game with a good starting setup. I did a bit of a game, but found just two new worlds within 5 jumps, but then I once again used the {intel} command, and saw that while I only had to good potential colonies, the AI closest to me had 4, and none of them were that far away from their home system.

I am explaining this in a far more simplified way that what happened, what with my known capacity to mess things up, lol. Any way, it's a learning process, and I learned how to make several playable games, each with a good starting position, all verified by taking a peek at what was nearby, to ensure I have a good story to tell while colonizing like crazy, and to achieve that I did some more file editing, and learned by trial and error what to do (and what not to do), and now I have some idea how Stellaris makes games, if you want multiple games with a custom race setup. Here are the starting games I have now, and will be playing some on each map, so I can determine which one I want to use in my AAR.

I didn't at first know to change the flag, so I could remember which game was which, but eventually stumbled upon that trick, and it makes things much easier. The first game I'm going to try out, is actually the second one down, and it is the only one that I made using the same empire name as any of the others.

 

[HistoryDude]

Hopefully there isn't any more bad setups?