Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

[Blaine]

 

[Space Satan]

And on monday, Henrik Fåhraeus will tell you about our plans for first patches.. https://t.co/Ybu7zc1Tjs

 

[Azalin]

No giant kamikaze beetles?

 

[Kane]

This game is trying to speak to me.

 

[Average Manatee]

Corvettes are the most OP ships. Large ships can't hit them

I'm pretty sure it's the weapon slot that decides what can be hit. And destroyers and cruisers have way more (S) weapon slots than corvettes, if you pick the right modules.

Meaning, my anti-corvette destroyers will mop the floor with x2 their number in corvettes, with no serious issue. And corvette swarms tend to lose effectiveness pretty quickly, because they're so individually easy to knock out. Destroyers/cruisers have way more staying power.

Nonetheless, the fact that each ship size still has a role to play even in the late game is a boon, not a problem.

Missiles are definitely the best weapon though. At least I've never seen an AI deploy much point defense and 100% accuracy is a huge advantage over those shitty non-homing weapons.

AI does employ PDS, depending on availability. The tech itself often doesn't become available until you fight missile equipped opponents, though.

PDS does nothing in the quantities the AI uses it in then. Consider that if a Missile weapon has 100% accuracy and normal weapons have 70%, the PDS has to stop 30% to break even, and the PDS itself is weakening their offense so that they need to stop even more to equal you in damage. If your enemy needs 30% of their weapon slots to be PDS then they have to stop 50% of missiles to break even.

Dunno how you are comparing corvettes to destroyers (if its vs. AI then their tech and customization can easily make the comparison invalid), but in case you haven't noticed Corvettes eventually get 60% evasion and can be pushed up another 10-20% through leaders and special bonuses. There's probably a specific destroyer setup that can still beat them, but the Corvettes will dominate any generic AI stack of random configurations and multiple ship types.

 

[Mortmal]

It's all there is to do indeed, a massive stack of corvettes, not worth researching an building any other ship types. Here's the secret of victory , race traits: fanatic materialistic for max research output + militarist for the full planetery bombardement. Pick the traits born engineers if you want missiles, born physicist if you prefer lasers, intelligent for more research boost.
Wormhole(except vs human players) > hyperlane>>>>>>warp .

As soon you are in game choose the policy edict to boost your research , so missiles = engineering . Pick a weapon type and focus strictly on it, antimatter missiles and grab every +5% to damage and attack rateyou can . If lucky research the rare ressource bossting explosives, but its not mandatory and not likely you'll find it anwyay.

Build a spaceport with corvette assembly array + every modules helping improving those ships and building/repairirng/upgrading faster.
Build your corvette doomstack with one weapon type until your max capacity is reached, assign an admiral , build 10 troops ,assign a general. War declare an empire of similar size with vassalize war goal . Move the corvette big stack, you will crush anything he sends at you, if it send anything at all...
Full planetary bombardement , then send the troopers in , rince repeat : 60 warscore points, congratulation you ar e now overloard of an "unloyal" vassal who will still assist you with all his fleet till the end.

You now have your doom stack and the vassal empire fleet faithully stacking to it , next empire same strategy
Congratulations you have won stellaris. There's nothing else to do

 

[Blaine]

So... easy to learn, easy to master?

Sounds grand.

 

[MoLAoS]

Yeah I always make the mistake of being completionist and getting all the ship types and weapons but its a total waste. Also you have to make sure you have a ridiculous standing army at all times because it takes forever to build ships. I had 600 Society research and had researched literally every tech like 80 years in and was just grinding out +core sector planet and + border size and shit. Funny thing, due to the way more systems have no habitable planets and most habitable planets are either too fucking tiny or the wrong type, I never actually need sectors. I mean once you have 16-20 planets in your core sector, out of 1000 systems that's all you could possibly need.

1000 systems
50% have habitable worlds or less
500 systems
50% of those are wrong type
250 systems
50% of those are below 16 size
125 systems
40% of those are over 21 size
50 systems
60% on other side of map
20 systems

Done. Hell 20 planets is like, 1600 research at max. Who even needs that much? You'll be at max tech inside 80 years in all categories and then just load up on power and minerals.

 

[Inf0mercial]

It's all there is to do indeed, a massive stack of corvettes, not worth researching an building any other ship types. Here's the secret of victory , race traits: fanatic materialistic for max research output + militarist for the full planetery bombardement. Pick the traits born engineers if you want missiles, born physicist if you prefer lasers, intelligent for more research boost.
Wormhole(except vs human players) > hyperlane>>>>>>warp .

As soon you are in game choose the policy edict to boost your research , so missiles = engineering . Pick a weapon type and focus strictly on it, antimatter missiles and grab every +5% to damage and attack rateyou can . If lucky research the rare ressource bossting explosives, but its not mandatory and not likely you'll find it anwyay.

Build a spaceport with corvette assembly array + every modules helping improving those ships and building/repairirng/upgrading faster.
Build your corvette doomstack with one weapon type until your max capacity is reached, assign an admiral , build 10 troops ,assign a general. War declare an empire of similar size with vassalize war goal . Move the corvette big stack, you will crush anything he sends at you, if it send anything at all...
Full planetary bombardement , then send the troopers in , rince repeat : 60 warscore points, congratulation you ar e now overloard of an "unloyal" vassal who will still assist you with all his fleet till the end.

You now have your doom stack and the vassal empire fleet faithully stacking to it , next empire same strategy
Congratulations you have won stellaris. There's nothing else to do

Have you played mid to end game a lot? AI federates like a bitch and trying to take on 5 inferior ai nations is a nightmare as they flood your space with 2k fleets that you cant stomp as they keep running away and every single of of those fucker has an admiral with emergency warp jump so even when you catch them they run away, or they hit your fortress ftl blockers then activate and jump away anyway leading to rage, if you picked wormhole congrats you can sit in centre of your empire and warp out playing whackamole until the ai loses all its fleets and fucks off, if you picked any other ftl type get fucked you can never catch the ai and with 5 enemies as soon as you stomp a few fleets they have more up and running and its impossible to get the needed warscore.

Spiral galaxy is rage inducing at times i am never picking it again i am still traumatized from a hyperspace game where literally everyone around me federalized and had warp travel, literally fucking impossible to track all their fleets down and fortresses got taken out too quickly for my fleets to arrive or the fuckers just activated emergency warp jump and ran. Early game its manageable but later on with sectors that never follow my orders to build fortresses like i say they are impossible to defend as the ai kites you forever and i don't want to devote 2 hours of my life to a fight where when i finally win i only make one of them my vassal as for some reason even though i kicked the shit out of all the other 4 its "asking too much" to make then kneel as well even if i have occupied every single planet they have.

Waiting for a mod to make it possible over 100 war score you just need to occupy every one of their planets.

 

[Hobo Elf]

This game is so dull. Kinda disappointing. It's still the best space strategy game I've played in a long time. Says a lot how shitty the genre is.

 

[Mortmal]

So... easy to learn, easy to master?

Sounds grand.

Yes except one thing, the bugged space mongol invasion wich can be hard to repel as the planet infestation cleansing eventdont trigger.

Have you played mid to end game a lot? AI federates like a bitch and trying to take on 5 inferior ai nations is a nightmare as they flood your space with 2k fleets that you cant stomp as they keep running away and every single of of those fucker has an admiral with emergency warp jump so even when you catch them they run away, or they hit your fortress ftl blockers then activate and jump away anyway leading to rage, if you picked wormhole congrats you can sit in centre of your empire and warp out playing whackamole until the ai loses all its fleets and fucks off, if you picked any other ftl type get fucked you can never catch the ai and with 5 enemies as soon as you stomp a few fleets they have more up and running and its impossible to get the needed warscore.

Spiral galaxy is rage inducing at times i am never picking it again i am still traumatized from a hyperspace game where literally everyone around me federalized and had warp travel, literally fucking impossible to track all their fleets down and fortresses got taken out too quickly for my fleets to arrive or the fuckers just activated emergency warp jump and ran. Early game its manageable but later on with sectors that never follow my orders to build fortresses like i say they are impossible to defend as the ai kites you forever and i don't want to devote 2 hours of my life to a fight where when i finally win i only make one of them my vassal as for some reason even though i kicked the shit out of all the other 4 its "asking too much" to make then kneel as well even if i have occupied every single planet they have.

Waiting for a mod to make it possible over 100 war score you just need to occupy every one of their planets.

I have played the game to the end and complete domination, in iron man . So yes they can flood your space with tiny fleets but they cant take anything, even if they destroy stations the bulk of my production is on planetary surfaces 5 good planets fortified impossible to invade. Buiding a space fortress and defense platform around your only usefull spaceport and eventually your wormhole stations is enough.
You just ignore them and conquer their planets one by one , they cant even take them back, it seems the game mechanics doesnt even allow to retake planets durign a war...
Usually with such an agressive strategy the federation wont have time to get big anyway.

Oh yes and i frogot to say i never was war declared once, last game, not even once.

 

[Mortmal]

Yeah I always make the mistake of being completionist and getting all the ship types and weapons but its a total waste. Also you have to make sure you have a ridiculous standing army at all times because it takes forever to build ships. I had 600 Society research and had researched literally every tech like 80 years in and was just grinding out +core sector planet and + border size and shit. Funny thing, due to the way more systems have no habitable planets and most habitable planets are either too fucking tiny or the wrong type, I never actually need sectors. I mean once you have 16-20 planets in your core sector, out of 1000 systems that's all you could possibly need.

1000 systems
50% have habitable worlds or less
500 systems
50% of those are wrong type
250 systems
50% of those are below 16 size
125 systems
40% of those are over 21 size
50 systems
60% on other side of map
20 systems

Done. Hell 20 planets is like, 1600 research at max. Who even needs that much? You'll be at max tech inside 80 years in all categories and then just load up on power and minerals.

yes no need to research any of thme just go for + influence and + food + leaders research.There's no reason to colonize

 

[MoLAoS]

I do take influence as soon as I can get it. Colonizing helps a lot though. I mean you can get a lot done with just research and mining stations and frontier stations, too, but late game colonies that are 100% research help a lot.

 

[Mortmal]

I do take influence as soon as I can get it. Colonizing helps a lot though. I mean you can get a lot done with just research and mining stations and frontier stations, too, but late game colonies that are 100% research help a lot.

I can completely skip it, no need to research planet types nor terraformation . Ah and + navy , take + navy + influence + food + leaders in that order.
I guess eventaully if you find some awesome planet with lot of research it may be worth it , but my strategy works 100% all the time.

 

[varangos]

By the way at which time its considered to be mid game\late?
In my current game I'm at 130 years,found 2 fallen empires and all other races.

Ai is really passive,only war I had is when a 5 race confedaration rekt me in short order,I reloaded an earlier save and since then nothing.

Also Its best to Max one type of defence?currently for my bigger ships I only use hulls that give extra hit points,my battleships have 6000 hit points,is it worth the risk?
How many point defence per cruisers battleship?

 

[Mortmal]

By the way at which time its considered to be mid game\late?
In my current game I'm at 130 years,found 2 fallen empires and all other races.

Ai is really passive,only war I had is when a 5 race confedaration rekt me in short order,I reloaded an earlier save and since then nothing.

Also Its best to Max one type of defence?currently for my bigger ships I only use hulls that give extra hit points,my battleships have 6000 hit points,is it worth the risk?
How many point defence per cruisers battleship?

Point defense are useless just go for hull .Well 90% of the stuff is useless.

 

[Kane]

By the way at which time its considered to be mid game\late?

Midgame starts around ~2400.

 

[Average Manatee]

You don't even need to research weapons honestly.

Corvette with 3 space torpedoes (level 1 torpedoes): 8.3 damage/300 hull/250 shields. 550 health * 8.3 damage = 4565 effective power
Corvette with 3 devastator torpedoes (lvl 3 torpedoes): 10.27 damage/300 hull/125 shields. 425 health * 10.27 damage = 4364 effective power.

(Probably not quite how the game calculates it but its how you estimate power in most games)

Conclusion: Researching weapons can in fact make you weaker. Those late game weapons, while more damaging, are not more efficient in terms of damage per point of power needed. This leads to significantly less shielding. Obviously depends on your exact tech and the breakpoint at which you can go from one shield to two. Larger ships benefit more but even then being 10% bigger will offset a tech level difference easily.

By the way at which time its considered to be mid game\late?

Midgame starts around ~2400.

Heh, that's like 10 years after I've won on medium size.

 

[Talby]

Well, just when I was becoming the dominant superpower in the galaxy a bunch of eyeball monsters showed up and started wrecking everything. Time to withdraw the fleets to the core homeworlds and hope for the best.

 

[varangos]

Also what military power one must have to beat fallen empires?I have a 28k stack and still their power is overwhelming lol.

 

[Jaedar]

Played this for quite a while.

Was cool at first, exploring the galaxy, finding anomalies, making first contact...

But it gets very dull after a few hours.

Then extra dimensional aliens showed up and I thought maybe there'd be something interesting. But nope, I eradicated them by my self without much effort.

The only thing left is map painting combined with endless churning out of colony ships (that I won't do more with than just send to a planet in a sector).

 

[Blaine]

It gets boring fast because you should have bought the game in 2018 when it was actually finished.

I can't help but think there's an ironic joke to be made about paradoxes here.

 

[Jimmious]

Is anyone of you playing in at least Hard difficulty?
I just got impressively raped by a Mega Corporation who started war on me and my allies.
He walked over us with like 4K sized fleets while together we massed 2K at most.

So yeah, the AI wasn't passive and the game is not so easy, for me at least.
Restart.

 

[Blaine]

Really, a game where the ship balance is so shitty that fleet composition and tech barely matters, you can't control battle maneuvers, and the sole winning strategy is to pump out more ships than the other guy is pretty off-putting. From what multiple people have been saying, that's pretty much the case.

"Crank up the difficulty and the AI will shit out thousands more ships than you" isn't a particularly compelling argument in that context.

 

[MoLAoS]

By the way at which time its considered to be mid game\late?

Midgame starts around ~2400.

But, but, I was researching the endgame society techs only like at 2342. Even had most of the other 2 kinds of techs. This was on a huge map. And next time I know how to do it even faster. How the hell is midgame only starting at 2400? Does midgame just mean that you have every fucking tech in the game and then you just have to slog through boring wars with enemies?