2.2 and snowballing

[DiabolisCZ]

Hello fellow xenos

First of all I really like the new economic system. It took a few games to get how it works but now, after a week of testpalying, I think I understand it. However, I have a feeling that the new economic system is too rewarding for a good play (while very punishing the bad play). If you cen get past the first slow buildup and get a hold of few planets that you can specialise, you can become very powerfull. Especialy some builds (devouring swarm) seems almost unstopable after certain break point.

I have not played end game crysis due technical issues in the late game. However, in my latest game at 2370 I am researching repatables and have about 200k strong navy that could be easily doubled if I wanted.

Is it too easy now to get unstopable? What is you experience?

PS sorry for my English

 

[Uncle_Joe]

As I mentioned in another thread, I felt like my econ was pretty tight up until I discovered Terraforming. After that the only limit on my econ was how many colony ships I wanted to spam out and how many colonies I wanted to babysit.

So ya, I think once you hit a certain breakpoint (for me, it was terraforming) then everything else just because trivial. I had 3x the navy of my closest opponents and significantly higher tech. I eventually just got bored and ended the game.

You are correct that the new econ and reward smart play (and that's a good thing) but the AIs still need work and I think there is too much usable real estate late in the game.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

I have seriously modded my game to my liking in a way that make more sense to snowballing.

First of all I view science as education so when an empire grow it will need ALLOT more science or educators to keep the population educated enough not only to get new technology but for the society to be able to use it. New technology in the hands of stone age knowledge people is of no use. Thus the tech penalty for going over the cap is 10%

For Unity this is even more troublesome and I have raised it to 15%... basically in order to keep unity in a continually expanding and sprawling empire you will need to spend huge resources to unify the whole population under new ideas, traditions and the like.

The AI cope quite well under this and I always now have to choose wisely how I expand. If I play something like a Hive that wants to spread like a locust I would usually lack in unity in comparison and can't expect to rush through the unity tree any time soon and I will have to use a good amount of technology to stay in the tech race.

Now... when you expand really quickly your penalties will generally grow faster than you can meet them. So you will need to stop and consolidate or you will get behind. This have meant that most late game become much more interesting and challenging. Smaller AI empires will keep up with technology quite well and in some cases be stronger than bigger empires that struggle with being able to disseminate new technology through its empire which make their economy stall. It also seem like large aggressive AI that conquer some chunks of neighbors seem to run out of steam after a while which is interesting.

Although I started all my games so far with slightly lower tech/unit speed and moved mid and late game events slightly forward.

Still you will need to play with advanced AI and I also recommend Galvius AI mod which is great for making the AI at least somewhat competent. But I have so far found that I will need to be very careful with how I develop my empire in order to be strong enough in the end AND running away with both unity and tech at the same time is almost impossible now. You will more or less have to decide in being good on either one.

The old values of 3% for tech and 5% for unity on admin cap was not serious in my opinion... this will not even make a dent in the rather unrealistic snowball effect of both education/science or spreading traditions and ideas in your empire. Adding more planets, POP and districts would always make both of those go faster which make no sense at all from a realistic perspective.

This is in my opinion a Paradox general problem... they need to make sure most people have fun... struggling with economy and juggling the problems of conquest and profit is not something that most people like to dig too much into... thus Paradox mainly dabble in it.

Anyway... just my two cents of pacing, game balance and the snowball effect.

 

[Jordedude1234]

Still you will need to play with advanced AI and I also recommend Galvius AI mod which is great for making the AI at least somewhat competent.

Are Advanced AI and Galvius AI compatible with each other?

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Are Advanced AI and Galvius AI compatible with each other?

No... I meant high difficulty AI and Glavius mod...

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Another effect of the changes I have done is that going for conquering the galaxy might actually be more to a detriment now than a positive thing in the end.

The reason being that you will not have time to keep up with tech and unity in a way to beat the crisis. You might beat all other AI but once the crisis hit you will stand alone with mediocre science progression and perhaps only half or more likely worse through the ascension perks.

So... in some respect trade and diplomacy can actually be rational to the most aggressive of tactics.

This means that too successful devouring swarms will basically win the Darwin award for stupid behavior as they should because there will always be a bigger and more dangerous thing out there than you.