Apart from Aquatics trait nothing seems to stand out in the new pack.

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Ocean Paradise sounds OK to me, not especially powerful but not totally useless: losing your guaranteed habitables is a downside, certainly, but it's mild compared to losing your guaranteed habitables *and* having a cursed climate preference on your main species, like what happens with Life-Seeded and Shattered Ring. Also you start inside a nebula, which is pretty cool. You will eventually find more wet worlds to colonize. The planetary modifier could do with a buff (Colonial Spirit is indeed quite a bit better overall, which is weird) but I think the overall concept is fine.

On the wider point that "tall is bad", I agree (with the partial exception of Rogue Servitors), but I don't think banishing homeworld-focused origins from the game would solve anything there.

The Aquatic trait on the other hand, I find a little disappointing to be honest. It's not bad but I don't think it's especially worth hyping either.
- The production bonus on energy/minerals/food is nice if you actually use it, but having such a trait on your primary species is situational, given you'll often have slaves, robots or a secondary species to do menial jobs; contrast with, say, +5% specialist output, which will pretty much always be useful.
- Habitability bonus on your favourite biome is good on the guaranteed habitables (if you have any!) but starts to feels like overkill soon after, unless you also take Nonadaptive or something.
- The housing bonus could be good if stacked with other modifiers, but honestly I don't find lack of housing space to be a real issue outside of Habitats (where Aquatic doesn't even apply).
Then there is the fact that the trait doesn't apply at all on what are "ideal" environments for other bio pops, i.e. Gaia, Ecumenopolis and Ringworld (and also Hive World?). By design it seems to be a trait that gives a decent benefit early on but decays to near-irrelevance or even a minor nuisance in the mid-game.

It's supposedly refreshed in the mid-game by Hydrocentric, but honestly by the time you are terraforming planets, the actual bonuses granted by Aquatic are not that significant and you're mainly just coping with your species' eccentricities rather than making strong planets; it compares unfavourably to having a completely generic mix of species and just spamming Gaias with World Shaper, itself a fairly mediocre AP. The deluge Colossus is a nice meme when playing a genocidal empire, but with anyone else I don't think I would use it much, since it's better to make use of conquered pops if you can.

The Aquatic trait wants you to go for ocean worlds, especially early, it gives you a 20% output to minerals/food/energy and a +10% output to specialists on those worlds, you are forgetting about the 20% habitability which is massive at the start of the game.

You can't pick Ocean Paradise without going Aquatic which means you are losing 2 ocean worlds, which means Ocean Paradise isn't just worse than lost colony its worse than all origins which give you 2 extra Ocean worlds.

3 Ocean worlds are always going to be better than 1 Ocean world, the buffs are just not going to make up for the fact that for 1 trait point you are starting the game with 3 100% habitable planets.
 
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The Aquatic trait wants you to go for ocean worlds, especially early, it gives you a 20% output to minerals/food/energy and a +10% output to specialists on those worlds, you are forgetting about the 20% habitability which is massive at the start of the game.

You can't pick Ocean Paradise without going Aquatic which means you are losing 2 ocean worlds, which means Ocean Paradise isn't just worse than lost colony its worse than all origins which give you 2 extra Ocean worlds.

3 Ocean worlds are always going to be better than 1 Ocean world, the buffs are just not going to make up for the fact that for 1 trait point you are starting the game with 3 100% habitable planets.

The Aquatic trait in isolation is indeed rather good on guaranteed habitables (the 20% habitability doesn't help on the homeworld as you're already at 100%), it's just a bit lacking in longevity. Like I say, I don't think it's bad, I'm just not hyped about it.

I'm not really keen on locking origins and APs to traits like this, but with Ocean Paradise I suppose the logic is a kind of soft Life-Seeded: you're not strictly confined to Ocean worlds, but you're effectively obstructed from doing a typical "colonize everything" build with Lithoids or Extremely Adaptive. The difficulty is in making this kind of one-planet origin actually worth it, when as you say, "more planets is better" is the general logic of Stellaris. The main issues are that unless you are a Clone Army, population growth is mostly linear with colonies (so a huge planet isn't actually much use unless you can fill it), and the capital designation is generally worse than you could do on any other planet (especially the inability to use forge/factory specialization). In theory you can just play with guaranteed habitables turned off, so it's not such a relative disadvantage, but in practice that gets pretty painful for most player builds and even more so for the AI.
 
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I would rank this as the best species pack so far, but yes, it's a bit lacking because Anglers and Ocean Paradise are just "why would I want this?". I would expect also that those are getting some minor buffs eventually.
 
This pack is probably 70+/30- to me. Amazing ship set! Love the naval look. Dragon Waifu mini game! Absolutely love my dragon mommy! Some of the decisions are kinda... pointless? Would be nice to have this event chain cleaned up a little. Aquatic trait is good. I like the flavour. Ocean paradise is interesting. Don't know if the ice thing is worth it yet though. It's weird habitats and gaia and ring worlds don't count. My friend got boal and idk if they should use them or not. Some of the name packs are nice.

I don't understand if anglers is good or not. The pirate name list is a bit silly, why would I name my own fleet mutineers? I want off captain bones wild ride.

The pirate advisor gets annoying. Especially once I heard 'scientific booty' enough times. I was really hoping for a bubbly soft underwater voice. The city look is ok but it's really bright white so it looks very 'good guys apple' to me.

Most of the portraits are pretty great. I think they could have used a few more fish boys. The robot should not have had a human shape though. The aesthetic is cool but it's just a human robot for no reason.
 
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The Aquatic trait wants you to go for ocean worlds, especially early, it gives you a 20% output to minerals/food/energy and a +10% output to specialists on those worlds, you are forgetting about the 20% habitability which is massive at the start of the game.

You can't pick Ocean Paradise without going Aquatic which means you are losing 2 ocean worlds, which means Ocean Paradise isn't just worse than lost colony its worse than all origins which give you 2 extra Ocean worlds.

3 Ocean worlds are always going to be better than 1 Ocean world, the buffs are just not going to make up for the fact that for 1 trait point you are starting the game with 3 100% habitable planets.
It depends, if you play without guaranteed worlds it is still good. Also, I think aquatic is interesting without the ocean origin. Necrophage / syncretic gives you the possibility of 2 aquatic races. Make them fertile and communal, take adaptability, and you have an efficient empire without the need to ever build a city district.
 
This pack is probably 70+/30- to me. Amazing ship set! Love the naval look. Dragon Waifu mini game! Absolutely love my dragon mommy! Some of the decisions are kinda... pointless? Would be nice to have this event chain cleaned up a little. Aquatic trait is good. I like the flavour. Ocean paradise is interesting. Don't know if the ice thing is worth it yet though. It's weird habitats and gaia and ring worlds don't count. My friend got boal and idk if they should use them or not. Some of the name packs are nice.

I don't understand if anglers is good or not. ...
Pointless decisions are all over Stellaris, so that isn't surprising. I really, really hate the "keep digging" thing in archeology, it ruins like all of the fun.
Hydrocentric is probably useful sometimes, but Ocean Paradise, which is meant for it, is just Life-Seeded with a new coat of paint.
Anglers...I'm pretty sure is bad, the issue is that in theory, the better jobs will boost you up and lessen the need for more expensive districts, but in practice, those more expensive districts will rapidly outshine it.
This. Quite surprised by the decision to go "pirate".
Between the advisor voice and the weirdly-experimental Anglers civic, I'm pretty sure someone thought Stellaris needed more "sailors in space" tropes, and saw this DLC as a good opportunity. I just don't like these things being tied to the actual Aquatic trait instead of being their own thing (we should've gotten 2 advisor voices, one pirate and one dolphin person, and Anglers really should've been a civic any non-lithoid organic can take).
 
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Anglers seems pretty meh.

Ocean Paradise again yeah that's Life Seeded, and who was playing life Seeded.

I mean any origin that gives me 3 ocean worlds as an Aquatic seems far better than one world with 30 Districts

you get 3 100% habitat colonies and 36 building slots and at least 50 districts.

Ocean Paradise gives you 12 building slots and 30 districts.
More rp material is good imo, not everything needs to be about min-maxxing and powergaming
 
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Doing some more thinking about Ocean Paradise, I do think it could stand to be a little buffed or at even reworked a bit.

* It has some weird anti-synergy with the aquatic trait. I feel like one strategy that could compensate for the lack of habitable worlds would be to take adaptive/extremely adaptive, colonize every planet you see and use the pop growth to feed the big world while keeping the populations on your feeder planets deliberately small to encourage growth and avoid habitability issues, but because the aquatic trait gives severe habitability penalties on non-wet worlds you can't do that.
* Unless you're going for some kind of size 30 ecumenopolis meme, you probably actually don't want the planet to be your capital. In part, this is a wider problem with the planetary specialization bonuses being far, far stronger than the capital bonus in most cases, but the planet is also extremely resource rich with massive numbers of guaranteed food deposits.

One little synergy that could be kind of interesting is agrarian idyll. Maxed out on agriculture districts, the planet can easily produce 800+ food while also being able to nearly max out building slots just from agriculture districts alone and being able to fit a large population (with aquatic housing buff) who can do something else like research. The only issue is that there's no situation where you'd ever need that much food, even selling it won't be viable as you'd just crash the market.
 
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I also feel like Catalytic Processing is a required trait if you go with Anglers, because there's just no other way to make use of all those Agriculture districts. And you're also being nudged into picking Thrifty and Agrarian for your species traits, especially if you went with Catalytic. So if you want to play with Anglers, really the only choices you're making are portrait, origin, ethics, and authority.
 
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More rp material is good imo, not everything needs to be about min-maxxing and powergaming
Things being good for winning and things being good for roleplay are not in any way mutually exclusive. The closer in power civics are, the more opportunities there are for triumph over other empires via pushing thematic advantages.
 
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While Ocean Paradise is better than Life seeded its worse than say Aquatic Lost Colony which means it's not that good.

Paradox is giving players a false impression that Tall is viable, it isn't and Origins like Ocean Paradise help push that which is not good.
This is the second time I've seen the Ocean Paradise origin associated with tall. It's HORRIBLE for a tall play style to the point that it FORCES you to play wide. You lose your two guaranteed worlds and are forced to take the Aquatic "perk" which makes a lot of other worlds completely undesirable to you. So you have to go super wide looking for wet worlds you can settle early and eventually terraform, and Ocean worlds that give you a bonus.

If you are going aquatic and playing tall literally any origin is BETTER because you have more early district slots and more ocean worlds that are somewhat close together. This is especially true if you go Hydrocentric. Think about it for a moment . . .

You start with a size 20 capital world, and then get two size fifteen worlds nearby . . . that becomes a size 23 and two size 18s for at total "size" of 59 versus thirty. But wait! You also now have three starting population growth pools early on instead of just one. Eventually you have more building slots. Sure you can't get a size 30 Eucemopolis but that's not your GOAL if you are playing tall.

What you want are a lot of good systems, and worlds, in as compact an area as possible. Eventually the aquatic trait and hydorcentric are GREAT for playing tall. You can terraform every world into an ocean world and increase its size fairly early compared to trying to reliably get the various sorts of special worlds. But you don't have to, and really shouldn't want to, take Ocean Paradise for this.

Your giving too much up for very little benefit.

The first game I played, as a tall player, I went for a hive mind to stack population growth on my three worlds and used the civic that gave extra research and rushed Terraforming. But Prosperous Unification and Tree of life were BOTH better options for me than Ocean Paradise. Did I want to stack population bonus' on my ocean worlds or would I rather add more districts to my home world? Either way I'd be increasing its size later.

My next game I went with Syncretic Evolution and stacked resource output. My main race isn't aquatic (yet) but my secondary one is . . . Servile, Aquatic, slaves are pretty buff. I chose Masterful Crafters and reanimated armies for a research boost early on and went for slavers guilds as my third civic later. Why would I give those huge bonus', which can apply to any world I terraform going forward, just to have ONE super world that is going to make my capital a huge target?

So that's Three different great civics to pair with aquatic for a tall playstyle IF you can deal with only having three worlds for a good portion of the early game. Are there others? Sure! Why not go with Necrotic instead of syncretic? You lose the bonus' of Servile but can instead make an even better leader race. What about Mechanist to give you robots to live on all those worlds that are eventually going to become Oceanic? On the Shoulders of Giants for all those perks?

Pretty much ANYTHING that doesn't change your starting world type is better than Ocean Paradise for a tall aquatic game. Ocean paradise WOULD be good for a wide game IF it didn't force you to take aquatic. Then it would just be giving you a super buffed up capital world while expecting that you are rolling the dice as you try to scoop up as many systems and worlds as possible . . . you can still do that with aquatic but the penalties mean that rolling the dice and colonizing marginal worlds is going to get you huge penalties for most of the early game after which you are going to surge.

In summary: You do NOT want to take Ocean Paradise if you are planning on playing tall. Not unless you are going to the extreme and doing some sort of one system/planet challenge run anyway. If you do that . . . well if you only can have one planet you might as well make it the best one you can get! lol
 
I also feel like Catalytic Processing is a required trait if you go with Anglers, because there's just no other way to make use of all those Agriculture districts. And you're also being nudged into picking Thrifty and Agrarian for your species traits, especially if you went with Catalytic. So if you want to play with Anglers, really the only choices you're making are portrait, origin, ethics, and authority.
Thrifty yes, but Agrarian is mostly unnecessary. Because of Aquatic and homeworld stability bonuses, homeworld Anglers start with a 1-to-1 input-to-output ratio for catalytic technicians, about a half-pop more efficient than mineral-alloys, and and stays about a half-pop advantage through the game as you start incorporating homeworld designations and resource efficiency modifiers. Your first colony as an alloy world and your second food as a food world is already producing surplus food to cover needs, so Agrarian is mostly unnecessary.

Thrifty is key, because it and the Civilian Economy policies are key to getting 25% bonuses on your homeworld to the Pearl divers (and Angler TV). This is key to making Pearl Divers more pop-efficient than early technicians, which in turn lets them be more efficient at buying minerals than miners- of which you won't really have the worlds for.
 
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I brought the dlc so I can play fish and nothing else. I'm sad there are no worlds that are 100 percent war with this dlc but I'll get over that. If this dlc had just been the portraits I still would have brought it and been happy.
 
Thrifty yes, but Agrarian is mostly unnecessary. Because of Aquatic and homeworld stability bonuses, homeworld Anglers start with a 1-to-1 input-to-output ratio for catalytic technicians, about a half-pop more efficient than mineral-alloys, and and stays about a half-pop advantage through the game as you start incorporating homeworld designations and resource efficiency modifiers. Your first colony as an alloy world and your second food as a food world is already producing surplus food to cover needs, so Agrarian is mostly unnecessary.

Thrifty is key, because it and the Civilian Economy policies are key to getting 25% bonuses on your homeworld to the Pearl divers (and Angler TV). This is key to making Pearl Divers more pop-efficient than early technicians, which in turn lets them be more efficient at buying minerals than miners- of which you won't really have the worlds for.
Yep! Just did Anglers/Catalytic/Thrifty and it made for a very smooth economy. Freed up some buildings. Not as streamlined as a Hive or ME, but something in between them and the usual consumer good economy.
 
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Cosmetic packs have always been and are always going to be proportionally quite expensive. As I understand and as I think has been conveyed by devs in the past, this is mostly due to the disproportionate cost and time involved in creating and rigging the 3D ship sets. In my opinion, giving the ships moving turrets was a mistake, and we could have lived with lasers being fired from static weapon nodes or something, but we also kind of have to deal with it now.

Story packs are proportionally very content heavy because it's mostly just content design stuff, which is relatively labour efficient to do.

I mean, initially the cosmetic packs didn't have content at all. That's why the humanoids species pack got a revamp to add content retrospectively, because it launched as a purely cosmetic pack for about the same cost as the aquatics species pack did today.

Personally, I think cosmetics are valuable. They add a lot of immersion and variety to the experience and represent a lot of work by skilled people. If you don't care about stuff like that and only want stuff that's going to meaningfully affect the gameplay experience, it's fine not to buy cosmetic-heavy content. It is optional.



Ocean Paradise is considerably better than life seeded. I don't think it's going to be super meta, but it's a funny little roleplaying origin.

Okay, I did some testing and er..

View attachment 776805

Pretty sure someone could find a broken use for this.

Can't lie, I actually hate Bubblemenopolis.

Also, weird question, but what is that modifier on this planet? It obviously used to be an Ocean Paradise, did some special event pop when you turned it into an Ecu?