AI empires frequently beat me to the cake of ending an endgame crisis (I mostly get unbidden for w/e reason). It didn't use to be like this. I used to be instrumental in protecting the galaxy.
That'd be all.
That'd be all.
Bring back hard endgame crisis's
- Thread starter IkkeTM
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End-game crises are really hard to balance. No matter what difficulty level you set them at they'll be too strong for some players to have a chance of beating when they show up, but so easy that other players won't even notice the speed bump. You can't scale their difficulty to the player's strength because that will please no one, so you need to conspire a way for the crisis to start out really strong but get easier to defeat as it sticks around.
Unfortunately that's exactly the opposite of what happened with the Unbidden: the last time they came around I simply gathered up my ships, sent them into the spawn system, and crushed their fleets before they had cleansed a single planet. I love the intended idea of a long war against the Unbidden, but they need more firepower at the start and need to get more vulnerable to incursions on their territory as they expand and so split their fleets to cover more ground.
Unfortunately that's exactly the opposite of what happened with the Unbidden: the last time they came around I simply gathered up my ships, sent them into the spawn system, and crushed their fleets before they had cleansed a single planet. I love the intended idea of a long war against the Unbidden, but they need more firepower at the start and need to get more vulnerable to incursions on their territory as they expand and so split their fleets to cover more ground.
I feel that this problem applies to all the crisies except the Preythoran. They get a massive boost right at the start with lots of ships to set a foothold in their space, but they are cleared out over time by attacking their fleets individually and then going for their planets. This is a system that works, although it can be very bad if they happen to appear in your space first and consume all your planets before they're spread far enough to start whittling them down.
The Unbidden and AI uprising, on the other hand, start off with too little to fight with and consequently get demolished right out of the gate. It's disappointing, really. I've never had an AI uprising successfully gain a foothold in any of my campaigns (although I've only seen a few of them, honestly). I feel the crises need to be dealt with in one of two ways: either they gain a small foothold but every nation charges into their space guns blazing in a massive galaxy-scale effort, or they gain a large amount of space but get spread out enough that they can be defeated pretty easily.
The Unbidden and AI uprising, on the other hand, start off with too little to fight with and consequently get demolished right out of the gate. It's disappointing, really. I've never had an AI uprising successfully gain a foothold in any of my campaigns (although I've only seen a few of them, honestly). I feel the crises need to be dealt with in one of two ways: either they gain a small foothold but every nation charges into their space guns blazing in a massive galaxy-scale effort, or they gain a large amount of space but get spread out enough that they can be defeated pretty easily.
The last few games, I've ended the Unbidden with a rush on the portal. If you wait until a few fleets jump out of the portal system, you often take them on one at a time, and usually smash the gate in between waves.
And since they appear so late in the midst of my large empire, the only thing I lose is a bit of time, some ships, and the influence to replace,the colonies.
I took me like 6 games to finally get the AI rebellion... It finally happened, i said shit just got real, so i sent all my 3 fleets to engage (200k combined), found a 15k fleet, killed it in seconds, took the planet with my Gene army in seconds and to top it off an Asendency sent another 100k to back me up. Basically the rebellion lasted minutes. Most disappointing endgame crisis ever.
If really is the case, than i suppose we need buff of every single crisis, becouse Scourge is really bad.
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I've played tons of games over 366 hours of play...I've only ever seen the unbidden, and even then I've barely seen them do much since their rework...
To be honest I only care about end game crisis if they spawn in my empire, otherwise I let the AI kill the threat and they usually do it really quickly.
Also, I never saw the AI rebellion event after hundreds hours of gameplay. How is it possible ? I always research sentient AI so I should have encounter that crisis at least once, no ?
Edit :
Really nice idea !
Also, I never saw the AI rebellion event after hundreds hours of gameplay. How is it possible ? I always research sentient AI so I should have encounter that crisis at least once, no ?
Edit :
Really nice idea !
Don't give synths any rights and have a ton of them. That's what worked for me.
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I want an option to make endgame crisises non-excluding - I wish to face all three at once ! 
I only give them rights after the crisis occured and I'm usually using them a lot, especially if I researched robots very early.
Sometimes I have an event chain starting with some little "rebellions", like synths building spaceships, but there is no choices so I always considered these events as narratives. Is AI rebellion related to this event chain ? If so, is it possible that something like my empire ethic prevents synths from triggering the crisis ?
I've never lost a colony to the Scourge. Even if they have "air" superiority, my defense armies crush their invaders every time. And a lot of the time their armies just sit in space, not doing anything, while there are vulnerable planets not far away.
The AI rebellion has this long and convoluted event chain that goes on for years, even decades if you're unlucky, which can be interrupted by other crisis popping up. That event is a part of it as far as I know, but the chain takes so long that even if the event chain starts, the Unbidden or the Scourge pop up and the AI rebellion is never mentioned again.
Making it so other crisis can't interrupt the AI rebellion would fix this, but with how weak they are, the games that have them spawn might as well not have any crisis altogether.
On the other hand, if Paradox adds more crisis, they should really make a "Minor Crisis" system for different smaller crisis to pop up without interrupting or being interrupted by the big crisis like the Scourge and the Unbidden, or whatever else they may have added by then. Why? Because I don't think the AI rebellion currently can be buffed to compete with the other crisis without having a stupidly big advantage.
I definitely think there should be some level of difficulty toggling for end game crisis in galaxy settings.
These should vary from, relatively easy, as they can be now, to insanely OP.
A big problem I've had is with Awakened Empires basically kicking the snot out of the invaders pretty quick.
In a recent game Xenophobic AE that had Awoken on the year the Prethoryn arrived basically destroyed them entirely with initially a single fleet of 66k fleet power.
Problem was that while the Prethoryn had far superior fleet power (somewhat inflated based on their actual capabilities) they always threw a fleet of similar fleet power at the AE fleets rather than consolidate their forces and overwhelm them.
As a result of this the AE simply destroyed 60k fleets one by one, loses no ships as they have a small number of very powerful ships. All the while the AE was pumping out 60k fleets and quickly destroyed the Scourge despite being initially hugely outgunned.
Now of course AEs should be very powerful, but in my opinion the Awakening needs to be rarer or balanced as a sort of End game crisis of it's own. Basically every game I play these days has one or more Fallen Empires awakening.
These should vary from, relatively easy, as they can be now, to insanely OP.
A big problem I've had is with Awakened Empires basically kicking the snot out of the invaders pretty quick.
In a recent game Xenophobic AE that had Awoken on the year the Prethoryn arrived basically destroyed them entirely with initially a single fleet of 66k fleet power.
Problem was that while the Prethoryn had far superior fleet power (somewhat inflated based on their actual capabilities) they always threw a fleet of similar fleet power at the AE fleets rather than consolidate their forces and overwhelm them.
As a result of this the AE simply destroyed 60k fleets one by one, loses no ships as they have a small number of very powerful ships. All the while the AE was pumping out 60k fleets and quickly destroyed the Scourge despite being initially hugely outgunned.
Now of course AEs should be very powerful, but in my opinion the Awakening needs to be rarer or balanced as a sort of End game crisis of it's own. Basically every game I play these days has one or more Fallen Empires awakening.
Simply buffing fleet numbers is a poor solution to making Crises more threatening, because all it does is further mandate Infinite Expansion as the only competitive model of play.
Why couldn't the Unbidden, instead of spawning with the doomstack to end all doomstack in one place, instead spawn across multiple systems at once, forcing you to split up your fleets to deal with them while they then coordinate to open up a super-portal that can bring in larger fleets?
Why couldn't the Unbidden, instead of spawning with the doomstack to end all doomstack in one place, instead spawn across multiple systems at once, forcing you to split up your fleets to deal with them while they then coordinate to open up a super-portal that can bring in larger fleets?
Too easy... too hard... if you throw in something like an endgame crisis, the player ought to at least be impacted by it somehow. Not something the AI empires will take care of for you. Scaling ought be relatively doable though, just scale it with the galaxy's fleet strength and/or mineral output. +50% for hard, +100% for insane.
I'd really like this for the AI crisis as it currently stands, because right now it seems like a force that could turn into AFE levels of threat if it can get started, but which rarely happens due to the relative size and powers of the surviving empires of the time.
I think the crisis would function better if it tended to start within weaker nations (counting federations as one nation) or at least not within strong nations to give the crisis early feeding options to power up - even if they have no synths, the sentient AI should be smart enough to locate the center of the rebellion intelligently.
For that matter, all crises should probably start like that, so it doesn't trigger enormous AI response by being in the middle of their territory. Players and AI should both be incentivized to let the crisis go early on to weaken enemies. Plus, from a balance perspective, that means stronger players can benefit by allowing the crisis to grow towards their threat level.
After 430h of stellaris, I finally get the AI rebellion crisis. 6 in game months later a 90k AI empire fleet appears and lands 30 genewarrior armies. I think AI rebellion needs to be significantly buffed or should trigger much earlier.