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FWIW, this thread made me re-install Alpha Centauri.

For GOG's sake, it only takes up half a gig. I can't believe you ever uninstalled it. Cretin. :)

I was doing so well in my expansion plans with 12 planets colonized and a strong niche carved out... I didn't upgrade my military ships enough though (and didn't maximize the number of ships I could have had) and suddenly a 4 empire alliance came against me... wow. They are mopping me up. Too many ships for me to defend against.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eaglesfan27 (Post 3101198)

Is that cause for a game restart?

That's what I figured.

Quote:

Originally Posted by RomaGoth (Post 3101202)

Is that cause for a game restart?

Maybe. I only got to play for a bit today. I'm going to try to salvage the situation this weekend.

So I have colonizable planet in my rival's empire. It hasn't been colonized yet. What's the best way to get it? I declared war but the game won't let me colonize it. I end up vassalizing the enemy yet I can't get to the territory. Is there anything I can do?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eaglesfan27 (Post 3101221)

Maybe. I only got to play for a bit today. I'm going to try to salvage the situation this weekend.

Atta boy!

Quote:

Originally Posted by NobodyHere (Post 3101237)

One thing I've done is to build a outpost on an adjacent world outside, push your claim into the one you are discussing, and then colonize it. That works if it';s on the border, or not near anything that makes claims of their own (Outpost, Colony)

Once you have made your opponent your vassal, you're screwed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brian Swartz (Post 3100664)

Cool! Since there seems to be a fair amount of interest in it around here, let me float a couple trial balloons on what I'm working on for the next version, which will likely be the last one before the Clarke patch hits in a couple weeks.

** Increasing core planets cap via technology. Everybody always wants more tech to research, right? There's a lot I'd have to learn to do scripting/events for a more elegant solution -- I do have a background as an amateur coder so I'll get there, but it'll take time.

Under this approach the core planets cap would start quite low. I'm thinking 3. Then in each field and tier there would be a tech with a fairly high -- exactly how high I'm not sure, I don't want it to be colony-ship level of automatic but a lot more likely than your average tech -- weight of showing up that would increase it. There are four tiers of technology the way it's set up, so you'd have a dozen new ones that would deal with this. Society/Engineering/Physics would each have a tier-1 tech that gave +1 core planet, a tier-2 that gave +2, and so on. If you researched them all, you'd have 33 at the end. If I wanted I could also put in a couple rare techs that would give +5 or +10 but you wouldn't normally get.

Best way I can think of right now to have the limit scale up with the size of an empire, yet still require the use of sectors for most of the empire.

** RealTime Lite. Ran into a couple issues here, which is why I'm calling it 'Lite'. One is that I don't want to cripple the AI -- it isn't great yet at fleet deployment and if I slow travel times down significantly without slowing down combat that already takes plenty long enough, they wouldn't be able to send reinforcements in time for it to matter. I think that would give the player too much of a wartime advantage. I thought about just slowing down the civilian ships in terms of their in-system travel, but this would hurt the early game. One of the best things about that aspect I think are the choices you have to make in terms of what you can afford -- do you build the mining station or the power plant or the colony ship or the frontier outpost, etc. Slow down the time it takes to explore/build stations much, and everyone ends with a backlog of resources, allowing them to just build too much of what they want. I can't just change the costs, partly because I don't think there's a way to to alter what mining or research stations are priced at.

Slowing down the pace of expansion is going to have to rely on Plan B. Well, plan C or D, more accurately. Slowing population growth will help, esp. reducing the impact of extra food since the AI is less than stellar in pumping out the pops. Secondly, I think the actual colonizing part(the year you spend waiting for the colony base to get set up) ought to take a lot longer.

Station-building and exploration would still take as long or close to it, may slow it down a bit but not very much. With population and developed colonies harder to come by though, and compounding that the tech slowdown already in place, I can get it a lot closer to where I'd like it to be. Then I'd make a couple other tweaks, wait for the Clarke patch which is supposed to have among other things some AI changes, and re-evaluate at that point.

I'd be interested in what those of you who are interested in the RealTime mod concept think of these ideas.

Just curious. Is the mod going to be updated to support 1.03? I have some play time this weekend and love playing with your mod enabled.

edit: Nevermind, I just realized the warning doesn't stop me from using your mod with 1.03 :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by MizzouRah (Post 3101258)

Atta boy!

I tried salvaging the situation, but I learned a valuable lesson. Get some allies onboard when I can. Also, I need to maximize my military earlier in the game. We just were facing overwhelming odds and you can't add allies once you are in a war. Those two things crushed me as their 3 fleets together obliterated my main fleet and I couldn't rally fast enough.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eaglesfan27 (Post 3101382)

Thanks for killing us! :)

Getting allies can be quite difficult on hard difficulty I've found - one of the modifiers you get is just a flat -25 on all other empires' desire to ally with you.

I had an allied war with me and my two allies vs three allied empires. My allies would just send all of their armies to where ever my largest army was. I didn't see anywhere they would attack the enemy on their own even when we had three fronts. Has anyone else seen the AI act the same way?

The part that sucked is that I wasn't getting any systems because one of the other Allies declared the war and I had to go capture the four systems that was going to my ally just to win the war. I even tried just sending my 10k stack to my home system and the ally stacks just followed me there and waited.

That's intended behavior, the allies will go with you to strike as one big group. I wish they'd allowed something more like the targets or whatever you can give in Hearts of Iron.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brian Swartz (Post 3101392)

That's intended behavior, the allies will go with you to strike as one big group. I wish they'd allowed something more like the targets or whatever you can give in Hearts of Iron.

Yeah, it was the one big group that obliterated my fleets when it was 3 vs 1.

New dev diary this morning with highlights on the upcoming patch(Clarke): https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...-patch.936898/

Looks very good. I especially like the ability to adjust AI aggressiveness.

I'm currently in an alliance proposed by the AI. I have another faction that I would like to ally with, but the other part of my current alliance isn't interested. Is there any way to sway them? I don't see it on the negotiations screen.

Also I'm in, what I think is the mid game. I've maxed out my fleet, most of my neighbours are at a pretty similar place to me. Most of the available space is colonized. What should I be looking to do? I have 10 planets or so, 5 in one area, 5 on the other side of two factions. I have two fleets, each in the 4K power range. The one neighbour I would want to attack is pretty similar in size and strength to me. Should I focus on colonizing more world in my home system now that I've researched how to do so? Is terraforming things a good option? Anything good to do with my science ships? They're pretty much stuck right now with nothing to scan. I'm leaning towards attack the nearest faction that doesn't like me, but I'm not sure if that's a great plan of action.

If you attack your neighbor make sure he's not allied with a bigger power first.

I would start colonizing the rest of your available systems in your planet. If you have access to teraforming gasses then teraforming is a good option. Also if you are not xenophonic then you can do some migration treaties with allies. That will get other species on your planets that you can use to settle planets that your primary species might not have access to.

For the science ships, pick your biggest science planet and "assist research."

You can get a lot of value from science ships helping in research. In an early war, I captured a planet that had a ton of natives, and the labs next to those natives got a bunch to tech research for each square next to it, I quickly moved it to making just food and labs, and it was making around 10-15% of my green biology tech, and then after introducing the science ship, that was boosted considerably.

Just got my crap kicked in when I thought I was doing really well. This game is amazing.

Playing as space tortoises with Hyperspace travel in a ring galaxy, we were a little crowded right off the bat with neighbors just north and east of me in the east/southeast sector of the ring. If I didn't expand quick, I was going to be boxed in immediately. I deemed the north avenue more important, and sent a construction ship out really early to establish a border outpost. Unfortunately, the Avians north of me beat me to it. So I used the extra resources to build up my navy and sent the construction ship out east instead to secure that lane. The Artrhopods on that side were much slower, and I easily established my lane while effectively boxing them in. They began slinging insults immediately, and I was certain that war was inevitable. So I changed my turtle (heh) strategy to a more offensive one, and started researching better missile weapons. After a quick, brutal war, the Arthropods were no more - unfortunately, I did not realize that taking out a capital world gave me the entire race and all its planets, and my economy was tanked for a few years there while I recovered.

Meanwhile, the Avians up north were trying to make nice with me, and I found a fallen empire to the southeast and some creepy looking fungal dudes to the southwest. Since I already had the navy handy, I decided on a quick war with the Avians to grab a few planets on their west edge - just enough to give me a path through the galaxy past their small empire, since the south was pretty well closed off to me. The war went well enough, and I actually managed to snag a little more than I bargained for, but in the end I had a nice pathway north, some new planets, and had carved out a nice little chunk of galaxy around myself.

I began a large expansion push to the empty space north and west of my Avian neighbors, who were much less friendly now, and managed to grab a huge bit of resource-rich space, and started meeting the neighbors all around - news in the galaxy was spreading fast, and I was being introduced to many new races who heard of me through some of their contacts. It looked like the big bullies around town were myself and the United Jogollwa Provinces - who had already vassalized two other races. Unbeknownst to me, my latest land grab to the north gave me a border with them when I colonized a planet in order to get a strategic resource. But our ethos seemed aligned, and I quickly sent in an embassy.

In the mean time, alliances are starting to pop up everywhere. The Mith-Fell State, my Avian neighbors who hate me, jump into the Bright League, which notably includes the fungal dudes to my southwest, among other non-adjacent races. But everyone seems cool. We enter a renaissance of science and development, mining everything in sight and feeling pretty fat and happy.

Until my Mith-Fell pops decide they really don't like Tortoidan rule. They're wreaking havoc everywhere - destroying buildings, demanding independence...I probably should have paid a little more attention after winning that war. Then the Jogollwa Provinces declare war out of the blue. Their technology allowed them to cross a quarter of the bloody galaxy directly to my home world, and suddenly I've got a 5k+ fleet on my capital planet's doorstep. I get my troops mustered, and things are looking bloody, but in my favor. Until a second 5k+ fleet hops right into my space! Now it's bloody murder, and none of it good. I immediately sue for peace, and have to give up ALL of my northern expansion, including about ten mineral rich systems that I had just finished mining. Frustrating, but I managed to get out of it with 2k worth of a fleet, and my economy was still in pretty good shape despite the hit, so I started immediately rebuilding our fleet.

The Mith Fell State, sensing weakness, declares war. I pause and go check out their military strength - Pathetic! This is perfect. I can use the remnants of my fleet to mop them up, then have a unified front to defend against Jogollwa when they come back. I roll in with my now almost 6k fleet and almost immediately take out their home world. I'm seriously wondering what the AI was thinking, picking this fight, when I hear "Planet Invasion underway" and "Station under attack." What the hell? My Mith-Fell pops are now in full military revolt, and my ground-based armies are under fire. We hold them off on three worlds, but they re-take one of the planets, and immediately have a 2k fleet in the air (?!?). We put them down, but not without some losses. Meanwhile my starbases are churning out ships as fast as they can.

And then comes the realization of why they joined the war - their alliance. I now have multiple 5k fleets just mopping up my south border; having pulled all my military to the north to defend against Jogollwa and then Mith Fell, I had nothing down there. I send my now ragged fleet down to try to defend, but despite a nearly 1k advantage in military might, they make short work of me, and now I have literally zero navy.

I have no idea if I'm going to go back to the game - I don't even know if I'll have a game to go back to, to be honest - but man, that was amazing. I got a little big for my britches early, and everyone noticed it. I didn't do a good enough job securing my borders, and expanded a bit too far to be able to take good care of my empire. I don't know if it was by design or happenstance, but the AI took complete advantage of it, and I got crushed.

I'm already looking forward to starting over.

great (and sad) story Vince, let us know what happens if you go back to that empire.

Oh boy. I bought it last night. Oh boy. I was up until 4:30 playing it.
Interesting game. Some things I havent done. Some things Im not sure what Im doing (Tech).

Fun game. And will be a great diversion.

With the update, I went back to vanilla (no mods). I'm enjoying it except for the 5 planet max. What is the point of that? Is it to force mismanagement of my sectors so the AI can catch up? I can't believe it would be to reduce micromanagement or they'd make it an option.

Dola, can researching debris be a net loss? If I only get +5 Society research out of the debris but my Society research team was tied up for a month, did I just lose out on all the research they would have been doing?

Judging by some playthroughs I've been watching, research is supposed to be banked during these periods. There seemed to be some evidence that it only banked correctly for the first month though - not sure if this is the case or if it has been fixed since.

Quote:

Originally Posted by cuervo72 (Post 3102633)

Thanks. I don't understand the design choice to also show the research team as occupied (as opposed to just the ship). Hey, team, you just keep researching Beryllium Spheres. Let Cpt. Janeway sift through the space garbage.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bobble (Post 3102600)

I think the intent is to model a vast galactic empire and the inherent inefficiencies that would be present. It is also a parallel to some of the other PDS titles' (EU/CK and Vichy) governmental/societal structures.

i personally don't have much of an issue with it. I micro the 5 most important planets and I am happy to let the AI manage the rest in sectors.

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Originally Posted by dzilla77 (Post 3102821)

I must have completely missed that part of CK and EU. I probably wouldn't have tried Paradox's other games if either of those put a crappy arbitrary 5 province limit in place.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bobble

I don't understand the design choice to also show the research team as occupied (as opposed to just the ship). Hey, team, you just keep researching Beryllium Spheres. Let Cpt. Janeway sift through the space garbage.

I think the idea here is a science ship doesn't have the resources to properly analyze stuff like this. They collect the data and do basic experiments, the research teams back on your homeworld analyze it and do more advanced stuff. Ergo, a co-operative research project.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bobble

If I only get +5 Society research out of the debris but my Society research team was tied up for a month, did I just lose out on all the research they would have been doing?

It can be, but it's rare. You store up some research(not exactly sure how much, haven't tested it) when one field is tied up on something like this.

Here's the changelog for 1.1, spoilered for size.

Spoiler

That's definitively a Paradox sized update.

And the game just crashed. Have to see if that becomes an issue.

I've played two games. Both times some other civ has declared war on me and both times I have been sorely, sorely out gunned. I've had the max number of ships I can in my navy, but still tend to get wiped out in the battles. I am not sure if it's a tech gap or just poor ship design on my part...

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Originally Posted by Honolulu_Blue (Post 3103005)

were they fallen empires? also you can set it up so you start with some advanced civs. They would likely outgun you in the tech war if so.

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Originally Posted by Thomkal (Post 3103012)

were they fallen empires? also you can set it up so you start with some advanced civs. They would likely outgun you in the tech war if so.

No. Just regular old civs.

Possibly your naval capacity just isn't going up fast enough? Building and upgrading spaceports quickly can be important to make sure you don't get overrun.

I don't think I'm very good at this game yet....

I play on a medium galaxy with about 6 or 8 opponents.
Then I get to explore. Take my time learning how the game interacts. See what Techs I need. Tech up. Exploring.
The only conflict is with locals hanging around.

I put a frontier outpost in a galaxy with a low end civilization. I built an observation post and infiltrated the planet and annexed it. Can I disband my frontier outpost now?

I would suggest just saving your game and trying it out to see what happens.

Good idea. So much to this game I havent touched yet.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tarcone (Post 3103778)

I put a frontier outpost in a galaxy with a low end civilization. I built an observation post and infiltrated the planet and annexed it. Can I disband my frontier outpost now?

I think you should be all good. I've been taking frontier outposts down in systems that I eventually colonize without any ill effects.

I really wish they would give you a preview of where your borders would end before you build or disband a frontier outpost.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vince, Pt. II (Post 3103788)

I really wish they would give you a preview of where your borders would end before you build or disband a frontier outpost.

A thousand times this.