Things I've learnt playing Stellaris

[CantGetNoSleep]

I've gone back to Stellaris after a long pause and discovered a few things:

1) Earth is the luckiest planet in the galaxy

• We've not been hit by an asteroid - this seems to happen to pre-FTL roughly once every 100 years in Stellaris
• We're not getting eaten by some weird space monster - again, it's a miracle
• There are no galactic storms - we've not been hit by any gravity, magnetic or other storm. There's no evidence of any residue hitting earth. Like ever. What are the odds?

2) Humans are really dumb

• Ok - all pre-FTL go from Renaissance to FTL space flight in <150 years. We humans still haven't gotten to FTL 500 years later.
• Cavemen spot my tiny spacecrafts and become partially aware. Always. Again, we humans are genuine dummies for not having had telescopes alongside our wooden clubs.
• If a spacecraft crashes into a Bronze-age planet, the entire planets becomes instantly aware - thanks to the radio or newpaper or internet I guess. Again, we humans are failures for not having mobiles in the bronze age.
• Our extraordinarily low IQ must be the reason no mad scientists ever bothered joining us and becoming a messiah taking us to the FTL age. Because they sure do that to every other pre-FTL I ever observe it seems.

Main grumble is that I can't ever get a decent number of insights from pre-FTLs. Particularly that must-have compact living one.

3) The solar system must be inaccessible
Otherwise, it would have been colonized by mining drones, voidspawns, Cultoids, and of course Amoebas given they all reproduce at phenomenal rates.


It's funny, but it also rapidly becomes incredibly tedious mechanics. Perhaps we could have slightly more realistic mechanics from the devs?

 

[Thiend]

I'd find the events much better if they were more involved and substantially less common.

The mad scientist event should be a much bigger deal and also stop happening 5+ times per game, for example.

First Contact may have been the space canary in the Cosmic Storm. Just not enough QA done, it could really use a (relatively minor) update.

 

[Ryika]

The way I look at things like the asteroid is that there's probably a large amount of Pre-FTL planets all over the galaxy, just as there's billions of stars in the galaxy and yet we can only travel to a maximum of around 1000. They're just not part of the "simulation", because nothing of particular interest ever happens on them.

Those pre-FTL planets that we see on the other hand, those have the potential to be special, so of course "special" stuff happens on them all the time.

Not that it NEEDS an explanation... it's just game mechanics after all, but I think it's kind of fun to look at events from that angle.

 

[HFY]

There are no galactic storms - we've not been hit by any gravity, magnetic or other storm. There's no evidence of any residue hitting earth. Like ever. What are the odds?

Earth is regularly hit by magnetic and particle "storms" but we call them "sunspot activity" to be mysterious, as demanded by the Illuminati.

 

[Kataclyszm]

First Contact may have been the space canary in the Cosmic Storm.

The canary for me was Nemesis. Billing it as "Now, you can finally know what it's like to play as a crisis" as if Fanatic Purifiers hadn't existed for close to a decade. With a perk literally called "Become the Crisis" with features like brand new ships called... "Menacing Corvettes".

I mean, REALLY?!

 

[Thiend]

The canary for me was Nemesis. Billing it as "Now, you can finally know what it's like to play as a crisis" as if Fanatic Purifiers hadn't existed for close to a decade. With a perk literally called "Become the Crisis" with features like brand new ships called... "Menacing Corvettes".

I mean, REALLY?!

While the names are underwhelming, I will grant that BTC relatively mimics an endgame crisis, while basic purifiers are more akin to a midgame crisis in several ways.

Not ideal, but nowhere near as bad.

 

[Bitzo]

The mad scientist event should be a much bigger deal and also stop happening 5+ times per game, for example.

The mad scientist is single-handedly responsible for me always setting Observation Stance to Active and putting all Stone to Steam Age pre-FTLs on Active Observation in my Xenophile runs. Can't uplift primitives if virtually every single one of them gets some dumbass complaining about some weird Prime Directive non-interference nonsense and sets themself up as their living god while I am in the middle of actively changing their ethics to match mine in preparation for first contact.

 

[Thiend]

The mad scientist is single-handedly responsible for me always setting Observation Stance to Active and putting all Stone to Steam Age pre-FTLs on Active Observation in my Xenophile runs. Can't uplift primitives if virtually every single one of them gets some dumbass complaining about some weird Prime Directive non-interference nonsense and sets themself up as their living god while I am in the middle of actively changing their ethics to match mine in preparation for first contact.

That's the other major problem. Fully MOST of the pre-FTL events are dependent on specific (usually Star Trek) moral references like that, when I'm NOT following the Star Trek prime directive and in fact think it's a fabulous example of faux-intellectual stupidity that can't even be consistently applied in it's own universe.

Or, for another example, the event where your scientists sacrifice themselves to block an asteroid. This is someone's idea of a Star Trek script, but what if you're playing xenophobes? Or just not-xenophiles? Your observation post opting for suicide is just not realistic in all scenarios, but it does HAPPEN in all scenarios - apparently the same scientists that were conducting inhumane experiments also died to defend... their test subjects? Huh?

A significant percentage of the events are really good options for particular ethics to unlock, and absolutely awful standard invariable outcomes not accounting for ethics.

 

[Kataclyszm]

I will grant that BTC relatively mimics an endgame crisis, while basic purifiers are more akin to a midgame crisis in several ways.

I honestly cannot fathom how you'd come to this conclusion.

 

[Lazy Name]

Cavemen spot my tiny spacecrafts and become partially aware. Always. Again, we humans are genuine dummies for not having had telescopes alongside our wooden clubs.

To be fair, they could just believe every shooting star is life beyond the sky, and they just happen to actually be right this time.

 

[Kami-sama]

4) We are very original at insulting each other
So original in fact that if aliens are secretly observing us they're thinking "Damn, I gotta remember that one."

 

[Thiend]

I honestly cannot fathom how you'd come to this conclusion.

Fanatic Purifiers (at least in live population growth, no idea about the beta) burn out as they expand. They have a built-in expiration date that they can defy, or not. They're also only a local problem unless and until they get so wide that they're local to empires far away, precisely because they don't scale up that well - a purifier getting wider doesn't get much stronger.

BTC gets tangible significant increases in power the larger it becomes, which pretty rapidly makes it everyone's problem if it doesn't get immediately shut down.

Thats pretty much it. Midgame crisises are designed to kind of run out of gas eventually, which Purifiers do a lot of the time. Endgame crisises don't really have that problem, and BTC doesn't either.

 

[Ryika]

I'd say in the hands of the AI Purifiers are more like a local early game crisis. By the time the default midgame comes around, everybody will long have banded together and beaten the Purifier up a few times. Or at least that's how it generally works out on higher difficulties where the AI modifiers strongly dilute the Purifiers bonuses.

But I don't think they're "designed" to stagnate, they're designed to steamroll through constantly gaining resources through, well, fanatically purifying more and more people. They certainly fall behind if they stop warring and focus on internal development, but that's just not the playstyle they're designed for.

And of course as a Fanatic Purifier, you can just pick up the Nemesis perk yourself and then directly turn the minerals you gain through purging people into more ships. There is a point where you would have been better off keeping pops around instead of purging them for a very short term resource boost, but it's not like the expected outcome is that you conquer a third of the galaxy and then inevitably run out of steam. As long as you have access to things to purge, you can continue to snowball.

 

[Thiend]

I'd say in the hands of the AI Purifiers are more like a local early game crisis. By the time the default midgame comes around, everybody will long have banded together and beaten the Purifier up a few times. Or at least that's how it generally works out on higher difficulties where the AI modifiers strongly dilute the Purifiers bonuses.

But I don't think they're "designed" to stagnate, they're designed to steamroll through constantly gaining resources through, well, fanatically purifying more and more people. They certainly fall behind if they stop warring and focus on internal development, but that's just not the playstyle they're designed for.

And of course as a Fanatic Purifier, you can just pick up the Nemesis perk yourself and then directly turn the minerals you gain through purging people into more ships. There is a point where you would have been better off keeping pops around instead of purging them for a very short term resource boost, but it's not like the expected outcome is that you conquer a third of the galaxy and then inevitably run out of steam. As long as you have access to things to purge, you can continue to snowball.

It's not deterministic like the voidworm/khan crisis endings, but it still doesn't keep momentum up with size. By just expanding normally, your fleet will not keep up with your empire size as well as an empire that didn't purge all of the conquered pops and there will naturally come a point at which there are enough empires bordering you to overwhelm you.

It's not that it's impossible to win as purifiers, it's that the mechanics lend themselves to the same kind of rubberbanding expansion and then decline that normally happens to a midgame crisis. Nemesis bypasses that to work more like an endgame crisis, and absolutely purifiers can take it too - but that's still basically taking it to turn into an endgame crisis from a midgame crisis.

 

[CocoCincinnati]

I've said it before and I'll say it again...one of these days the devs are going to reveal the existence of an enclave who are firing these asteroids, it is statistically impossible to be happening randomly, the only possible explanation, in game and out of game, is that there is an intelligence behind it.

Also, how come a pre FTL society can shoot down our observation station, but we can't fire at ships bombing our planet?

One good thing about events that always happen, anytime a mad scientist jumps a stone age society to the space age, I always let them nuke themselves back to the stone age where they belong so that they can develop more naturally....and considering they blame me for the death of "their god", it's not a good idea to let them join the galactic community anyway, regardless of my own ethics.

 

[HFY]

I've said it before and I'll say it again...one of these days the devs are going to reveal the existence of an enclave who are firing these asteroids, it is statistically impossible to be happening randomly, the only possible explanation, in game and out of game, is that there is an intelligence behind it.

It could be the Xenophobe FE.

Killing off pre-FTLs "quietly" so they don't survive to bother the FE seems like a reasonable motive.

 

[grommile]

It could be the Xenophobe FE.

Killing off pre-FTLs "quietly" so they don't survive to bother the FE seems like a reasonable motive.

They don't even know they're doing it. The black hole asteroid gun has been running an automatic targeting protocol since their last big war.

 

[jedavis]

That's the other major problem. Fully MOST of the pre-FTL events are dependent on specific (usually Star Trek) moral references like that, when I'm NOT following the Star Trek prime directive and in fact think it's a fabulous example of faux-intellectual stupidity that can't even be consistently applied in it's own universe.

Or, for another example, the event where your scientists sacrifice themselves to block an asteroid. This is someone's idea of a Star Trek script, but what if you're playing xenophobes? Or just not-xenophiles? Your observation post opting for suicide is just not realistic in all scenarios, but it does HAPPEN in all scenarios - apparently the same scientists that were conducting inhumane experiments also died to defend... their test subjects? Huh?

"I'll never get tenure if I don't get at least three more publications in top-tier journals out of this primitive backwater full of despicable xenos. I have worked all my life for it, groveled for grants, suffered untold privation and isolation, and all for naught. I would rather die! And I'm taking all of you lazy ingrate grad students with me."

That's how I imagine it, anyway. Sure happens a lot, but academia is a rough gig.

 

[Thiend]

I've said it before and I'll say it again...one of these days the devs are going to reveal the existence of an enclave who are firing these asteroids, it is statistically impossible to be happening randomly, the only possible explanation, in game and out of game, is that there is an intelligence behind it.

Also, how come a pre FTL society can shoot down our observation station, but we can't fire at ships bombing our planet?

One good thing about events that always happen, anytime a mad scientist jumps a stone age society to the space age, I always let them nuke themselves back to the stone age where they belong so that they can develop more naturally....and considering they blame me for the death of "their god", it's not a good idea to let them join the galactic community anyway, regardless of my own ethics.

It could be the Xenophobe FE.

Killing off pre-FTLs "quietly" so they don't survive to bother the FE seems like a reasonable motive.

Fear of the Dark is approximately an answer, although it's also technically not asteroids.

 

[hart30]

To me its nemesis, what regularily destroys my fanatic purifiers. Especially that one devouring swarm I designed, so the AI is able to get the maximum power out of civics, traits and such.
In most games it manages to conquer 1/3 of the galaxy, sometimes even half (eating whole federations). Then it picks become the crisis and gets overwhelmed. As every tiny pleb empire attacks from all sides and the swarm has just not enough fleets to be everwhere at once...

All the large builtup to be the arch nemesis for my empire throughout this playthrough - wasted. I end up not having to lift a finger...