First contact is *way* too bloody fast

[Pancakelord]

Trying to start a first contact war is still a mission unto its own, sending my fleets in to fight usually gives me like 1-6months to do some damage before communications are established.

People pointed this out on pre-release streams but I wanted to give it benefit of the doubt first, but its true. Tried a few starts this evening testing changes, each time first contact is usually over inside of 9 months, that isnt even enough time for me to move my fleets against an AI in most cases, much less invade them. Just now I - a fanatic purifier - and an AI - a fanatic xenophobe/spiritualist made first contact in ~4 months. As far as I can see they havent met anyone else yet (its only 2218) so they shouldnt have "past experience" to work off.

This either needs to be lengthened to make xenophobia/first contact wars viable, or we need some sort of slider on game setup to determine how long first contact should take (0.5x - 1x - 10x should do it, seeing as the base time is 360 days according to the interface in the top right)

Its a buzzkill shipping 1.4k fleet power in only for the explosions to be prematurely cutoff by my ships being magically sent home when comms are discovered.
Also has anyone seen any Xenophobic AIs making an effort to invade them, yet?

 

[HFY]

I really like the idea that your FIRST first contact is longer and more involved, and the later ones are faster & easier.

That would give you a chance at a First Contact war, but not bog down the tail of the early game too much.

 

[Pancakelord]

I really like the idea that your FIRST first contact is longer and more involved, and the later ones are faster & easier.

That would give you a chance at a First Contact war, but not bog down the tail of the early game too much.

I read somewhere in a DD this is how it is already ... but the first one is over fast so you probably wont notice the time reductions on the others, with how things currently are.

 

[Anschau]

This, or another solution would be for there to be a combat threshold of some sort, that once an army is deployed or a combat ship is destroyed that first contact is translated into an actual war when communications are established. It becomes First Contact War with the Preagian Empire or something with special war goals for border systems or something.

 

[Pancakelord]

This, or another solution would be for there to be a combat threshold of some sort, that once an army is deployed or a combat ship is destroyed that first contact is translated into an actual war when communications are established. It becomes First Contact War with the Preagian Empire or something with special war goals for border systems or something.

I like the sound of that too (Wars also have a ton of variables in script, to vary War exhaustion rates and other things, so you could actually make a "quick" war with special first contact CBs, now that I think about it...).

This one was over fast - and understandably so, I'd found my patron state via lost colony origin, so it wouldn't take long to speak to them, But that response I have highlit almost like this is what should be happening, too, especially as this fired as I was blasting their outpost lol.

 

[Jman5]

They need to bump the roll timer up from 30 days to 60 or 90.

Also, I'm not a fan of the fact that if you knock out an outpost it just disables it temporarily. Feels pretty pointless.

 

[HFY]

I read somewhere in a DD this is how it is already ... but the first one is over fast so you probably wont notice the time reductions on the others, with how things currently are.

Yeah I didn't notice at all if it was longer than the other three on my first attempt.

Also, I'm not a fan of the fact that if you knock out an outpost it just disables it temporarily. Feels pretty pointless.

Hmm, yeah, it would be a good time in the game to be allowed to destroy Outposts.

Very early game the alloy and influence costs to replace those are non-trivial.

You'd be setting the other empire back in a way that can't happen later.

 

[Colonizor48]

Someone maek mod for this plz

 

[DrFranknfurter]

I'm really hoping it's mostly just a bug. There's one issue I've noticed where espionage actions seem to be increasing (gaining insights) even with low rolls that should grant 0 progress, I assume first contact is doing the same thing and they're always ending in the fastest possible time as though you had an unbelievable string of lucky rolls every single time.

But I'd love a slider in the galaxy settings to drastically slow down first contact if the Devs intend this to be the default speed.

 

[Tudwal]

If you can declare war on contact Eta, you wouldn't get kicked out when communications are established.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

If you're being aggressive, it would be nice if you could choose options that delay first contact, and treat such early game warring as equivalent to a total war, with instant changing hands of systems.

Also, you should be able to understand them, without them understanding you...

 

[methegrate]

Trying to start a first contact war is still a mission unto its own, sending my fleets in to fight usually gives me like 1-6months to do some damage before communications are established.

People pointed this out on pre-release streams but I wanted to give it benefit of the doubt first, but its true. Tried a few starts this evening testing changes, each time first contact is usually over inside of 9 months, that isnt even enough time for me to move my fleets against an AI in most cases, much less invade them. Just now I - a fanatic purifier - and an AI - a fanatic xenophobe/spiritualist made first contact in ~4 months. As far as I can see they havent met anyone else yet (its only 2218) so they shouldnt have "past experience" to work off.

This either needs to be lengthened to make xenophobia/first contact wars viable, or we need some sort of slider on game setup to determine how long first contact should take (0.5x - 1x - 10x should do it, seeing as the base time is 360 days according to the interface in the top right)

Its a buzzkill shipping 1.4k fleet power in only for the explosions to be prematurely cutoff by my ships being magically sent home when comms are discovered.
Also has anyone seen any Xenophobic AIs making an effort to invade them, yet?

Yeah... The first contact thing is a cool idea, and the unfilled borders makes for cool map graphics.

Other than that I haven't noticed a meaningful difference between the new first contact and the old project system. It still feels like it takes about the same amount of time, and the outcome still seems defined by whether their ethics align with yours and if they like xenos.

 

[Oscot]

This, or another solution would be for there to be a combat threshold of some sort

It should be that if you declare a first contact war, the timer for actually establishing diplomatic comms stops / slows to a crawl, so the war can take the course and timescale of a normal Stellaris war.
Write it up as "Now they're actively jamming comms with military-level ciphers and codes we have no hope of deciphering their language until this stops in peacetime" or something.

Adding the ever-familiar Stellaris refrain of "Did they do literally no testing of one of the expansion's flagpole features again, because this is obvious to any player from even the most cursory interaction with the mechanic"

 

[methegrate]

It should be that if you declare a first contact war, the timer for actually establishing diplomatic comms stops / slows to a crawl, so the war can take the course and timescale of a normal Stellaris war.
Write it up as "Now they're actively jamming comms with military-level ciphers and codes we have no hope of deciphering their language until this stops in peacetime" or something.

Adding the ever-familiar Stellaris refrain of "Did they do literally no testing of one of the expansion's flagpole features again, because this is obvious to any player from even the most cursory interaction with the mechanic"

Yeah... I really like first contact in theory. But agreed, the contact events are over before there's ever even an opportunity for conflict.

In addition to that, I'm not really sure what unique opportunities for conflict the first contact system really builds in anyway. Again, I've only played 3.0 briefly, but afaik conflict is still limited to all-out military action. I.e. you still have to attack their starbases and vessels with your fleet. So it feels like most of what this does is save you the trouble of declaring war.

Again, I really love the ideas at work here. What I'd really like is some basis for asymmetrical first contact conflict though. Like if you could establish competing outposts in the same system as an unknown empire and race for resources. Or if you could stumble on a hostile empire's holdings more easily, so there was a greater risk to your science ships. (So far I've found that neighboring borders shade in almost immediately, even if we aren't in contact yet.)

Or mostly if the event chain forced more choices and had more opportunity for random events. Like, maybe we don't want to actually let players build competing outposts but you could get an event like "Seemingly unaware of our claim, the Xeno Empire has begun building an outpost in System A. Do we let them claim the system or fire warning shots to chase them off?" Or "Empire A has learned that we recently encountered Empire B. They had nothing to say on the matter other than warning us to stay the hell away from the Empire B. Do we keep trying to establish relations with Empire B at the risk of angering Empire A?"

Not sure exactly what it should look like... But so far I've played the new system for an hour and done first contact with eight empires, and I'm already clicking through the pop-up boxes the same way I do for anomalies and archeology.

 

[monkeypunch87]

I love the idea with the slider, it would be a great option to "mystify" the exploration phase for longer. And I completly agree, first contact is way to fast as it is.

 

[grekulf]

Is it mostly because you want to engage in early conflicts that you find it to be too fast, or do you find it to be too fast even for, let's say, a xenophilic empire?

We're certainly open to changing to the times, and internally its been talked about, for example, changing the phases to 50 days, up from 30.

It's unlikely we'll make drastic changes to first contact by adding more complex interactions like some ideas have been mentioned here (albeit cool ideas), so let's focus on what can be tweaked to make the experience better.

 

[sillyrobot]

Yeah... The first contact thing is a cool idea, and the unfilled borders makes for cool map graphics.

Other than that I haven't noticed a meaningful difference between the new first contact and the old project system. It still feels like it takes about the same amount of time, and the outcome still seems defined by whether their ethics align with yours and if they like xenos.

Biggest difference is it doesn't impact social research.

 

[monkeypunch87]

Is it mostly because you want to engage in early conflicts that you find it to be too fast, or do you find it to be too fast even for, let's say, a xenophilic empire?

I play as standard United Earth right now, I'm on policy "Proactive", so I want contact, but First Contact is too fast anyway. And it gets faster the more empires I met. It is kind of off. It feels just a little slower than before 3.01, I was expecting more "mystery" (besides the galaxy map, which is great) and slower/harder progress like archeology sometimes.

 

[Pancakelord]

or do you find it to be too fast even for, let's say, a xenophilic empire?

I did test a few xenophillic empires too, and found they were taking about as long or less time, usually. And even when I didnt want to go to first contact war (I played the starts of 2 games last night like this - one as fanatic xenophile/pacifistic megacorp and one as a rogue servitor) I still found it was too quick as I still wanted to scout their systems and have the "air of mystery" linger for a little longer [as a MC, still learning the new economy, but I didnt feel like there was any rush to set up a branch office too soon, I had other things to focus on, before like 2230, so it would be alright for the FC chain to take a fair bit longer].

There was a single instance where I found it to be a bit longer than the rest (though this was a xenophobe run so still felt short) when I was rolling against an isolationist empire, either by luck or by design this took an extra ~six months. Perhaps the difficulty threshold is too low for most empires, as these had the highest difficulty i'd seen, I routinely rolled low against these birds (no clue exactly what controls for difficulty, yet, beyond first contact stance).

Does being different species classes play into it? The text about audio frequencies, implies me being a mammal vs them a Bird has an effect on difficulty. Thats pretty cool if its the case.

Whilst something like a first contact war leading directly into a regular war (e.g. with a much lower surrender threshold or much faster ticking warscore, so its not dragged out too much) would be nice, I do think a slider to extend the time would be best + making each subsequent FC faster (some hidden empire multiplier on rolls), is best personally.

• If the first one took, for example 10 years, the subsequent ones could all take less time (E.g. the median time being somthing like 10 > 5 > 3 > 2 > 1 with the GC) and youd really feel like each one was different then. Right now they're all over too quick to even notice the time reduction.

The only empire where the current time really makes sense is one where you want to go all-in on diplomacy from day one and immediately want to make some friends, but if you want to do that you'll probably have extra envoys (e.g. diplo corps) and an "open" first contact, so you'll still be finishing things quick enough.

 

[Eelectrica]

Running into this problem myself trying to get the Shoot to Thrill achievement.
Not sure what I'm missing.
Also playing aa a purifier to get it done.
I've vivesected the alien so that achievement fired.