Somebody, well, a lot of somebodies, only read the wiki and didn't bother to check the tooltips. Missile Defenses and Gun Batteries also provide +1 protection range. Although admittedly, they only grant +5 protection instead of +10 with the hangars, but by the time you get Gateways, overlapping coverage va gateways tends to null that out.
Piracy micro management has turned the game into Shelfware for me
- Thread starter Gray_Lensman
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Somebody, well, a lot of somebodies, only read the wiki and didn't bother to check the tooltips. Missile Defenses and Gun Batteries also provide +1 protection range. Although admittedly, they only grant +5 protection instead of +10 with the hangars, but by the time you get Gateways, overlapping coverage va gateways tends to null that out.
Well, if you don't want the bug on Paradox' bug list, I guess not reporting it is a rational strategy. I'm not reporting it since I've never seen it.
I usually find that I discover how to build gateways before piracy starts to get really annoying. A mixture of starbases and some patrols isn't really that hard to set up. Then you just get gateways and piracy ceases to exist.
Well, if (as seems to be the case) you're one of only a very few people seeing their patrols just stop working, you're also one of the very few people who can provide them with a save and evidence of the problem. If (as an example) it affects 1 in 10 000 players, it could easily evade a QA team that is magnitudes smaller than that. Even more so if it only happens in response to certain conditions, or when you do something specific.
Just checking, because I had problems initially... you *are* setting patrols correctly right? It took me a couple of goes to get it working rather than handling them manually.
Nice to see you're willing to complain about an issue, but not provide information that might lead to it being solved though.
which is funny because i was afraid this game would end up as micro heavy as CK and Europa and in some places its worse now.
And if you don't bug report how is QA supposed to find put you have that problem in the first place. I guess you're right, so feel free to mod it, but you should still report it to get it fixed in the first place.
Back in the day when games first came out, ex. Sid Meier's Civ 1, the developers with the help of their QA departments actually played the games they designed to find/eliminate bugs BEFORE the product was sold. Now admittedly, some bugs still got thru but not many. Now days the lazy developer/publishers just rely on the buyers to be their beta testers. I don't participate in that garbage anymore. Now if they want to actually compensate me in some form or other, I might consider doing them the service, otherwise not. I just mod the game or move on to another product.
Think about it, just a minute... Paradox develops great game concepts, enough so to entice us to buy them along with all the costly DLCs making their games the most expensive of the genre, yet they rely on the buyers to provide beta support instead of using those high prices to actually hire a QA dept. to play the game they designed to actually search and find bugs before they sell the game. Thank goodness for mod capabilities to correct/eliminate buggy design issues.
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Back in the day when games first came out you got the games, bugs and all, and *if you were lucky* they got fixed in the next full price expansion.
Those games were also far, far less complex than current ones.
I don't suppose you've got a save where you're having trouble with patrols have you?
Like I say I've not seen the bug you mention, so I'm wondering if you've missed something.
Not really. A lot of the earlier games were written in C++ or Pascal, some even in machine code, instead of the much easier to use programming languages of today. The only thing complex about games today is their size.
Not anymore... I quit playing for several days after OPing the topic. Actually cleared the game out (some would call it rage quitting) then decided to go back to a previous version prior to pirates. Before starting that game, I came back on the forums to just peruse the comments for anything actually useful and saw the small comment about modding out the pirates. I don't know why I had not thought of that before, but it kept me from actually making the game uninstalled shelfware of which I have hundreds. I've been gaming since the early 80s, which is why I have an attitude towards unpaid beta testing. I just mod or move on to another game and let all the noobie suckers do the beta testing. If the game is good enough, I'll come back every once in a while to see how well it's advanced.
The complexity of the game mechanics, not the programming language. Those games were also turn-based and had very simple military and economic models. Graphics were 2d sprite-based. They also charged more for them, relative to the cost of developing the game, and took much longer to do so. Now the market demands quick updates and no price increases ever, despite the massive increase in cost of developing games. We get poor quality in response.
No, instead of no price increases ever, we get DLCs that run up the total cost for a game like Stellaris to well over $200. Now, I'm not complaining about the price itself, I'm pointing out the fact that for those additional expansion/DLCs/updates we continue to get buggy crap. I suspect that sooner or later, Stellaris will be reasonably finished, much like CK and EUIV, but it will take a while, maybe after the demand softens and they (the developers) can concentrate more on bug fixes than the next DLC expansion.
Expansions existed before, and they generally cost the same as the base game. They also didn't support games for as long. We just moved on from CivI to CivII to CivIII in the span of a few years.
Yeah, piracy needs a rework. I think early game, I'm investing more alloys in making sure it doesn't cripple my trade, than I could be for more useful things. Like putting together a fleet to take out the dreadnought in a system with a wormhole that might lead me to one that has an unclaimed l-gate.
I think the biggest issue is that piracy suppression on ships doesn't scale. It's a bit dumb that as your ships get more powerful, they aren't getting better at killing pirates. So until you can build gates, which is a random chance to get and I feel like I'm hosed here since I have no gates in any of my systems right now, so I might not see it until I solve that. Also kind of silly that we don't have the option to plunk down all the standard slots for an outpost into a single anti-piracy hanger bay (I'd be fine if the trade off was that it would be even less of a snare for invading threats than a fully upgraded one already is).
Right now, piracy demands more attention and resources early game than it should.
I've also noticed that it's present in gestalt empires if they have an open border. So really odd in my current, game where their is piracy in the ancient caretaker's turf, since it's a fallen empire of machines.
I think the biggest issue is that piracy suppression on ships doesn't scale. It's a bit dumb that as your ships get more powerful, they aren't getting better at killing pirates. So until you can build gates, which is a random chance to get and I feel like I'm hosed here since I have no gates in any of my systems right now, so I might not see it until I solve that. Also kind of silly that we don't have the option to plunk down all the standard slots for an outpost into a single anti-piracy hanger bay (I'd be fine if the trade off was that it would be even less of a snare for invading threats than a fully upgraded one already is).
Right now, piracy demands more attention and resources early game than it should.
I've also noticed that it's present in gestalt empires if they have an open border. So really odd in my current, game where their is piracy in the ancient caretaker's turf, since it's a fallen empire of machines.
Here are three additional suggestion reduce micro management of your fleets:
- To get your patrol on the correct trade route you can manually define the route of your patrol (Shift-click I believe)
- As the trade value increases just increase the number of corvettes and click "reinforce" (also I'd recommend to use a cheap design for this since the actual performance does not matter)
- You can completely avoid any piracy by building gateways in the later game
Shift-clicking patrol to add legs to a route doesn't work. It creates a second route alright, but that route starts in the system you are currently in. So if you want a route that goes A-B-C, but the calculated route to C is A-D-C, the first patrol A-B gets set up and then when you add C you get a orders to patrol A-B, A-D-C
When the trade route ticks up enough means you're constantly checking the piracy and trade values along all your routes. It's not like there is a notification about piracy befire pirates spawn.
Sure! Around 2300-2350 you can start to build gateways to negate piracy at a 100 influence a pop. Or to put in another way, 1 protected node every 3 years assuming you don't engage in diplomacy, claims, habitats, megastructures, building strategic gateways, or system acquisition for the 50 years or so that you are building internal gateways whose only point is to reduce micro and which increases lag/stutter as all those trade starbases check all those new gateway accessible regions for trade pickup.
Your "trade" gateways can also be "strategic", depending on exactly what your setup is.
Your diplomatic choices don't all cost influence.
In most cases I've found that system acquisition is mostly done by the time I'm building gateways.
I'd also disagree that the only point to setting up trade gateways is reducing the micro. It also speeds up travel, especially if you hook your shipyards into the network. It let's you reduce your trade protection bastions, freeing them up for repurposing to Anchorage, or to allow them to ge demolished and replaced with border bastions.
Typically, the trade hubs are at least 6 jumps from my frontier to take full advantage of their radius. So not none, but limited strategic value.
But others have a constant drain. So that 50-year stint can become 100 years if you have a few defence/research agreements on the go.
I obviously go much wider than you. I'm done expansion sometime in the late 2400s -- maybe. Often, I want to keep going, but the games gets too tedious before then -- from all the other types of micro.
Hooking your ship construction into the network is a no-brainer, but not part of the gateways constructed for trade since the starbase where you are building for trade has trade modules not ship construction modules. Having a gateway near your destination speeds up travel. Having a dozen scattered through your docile systems where you might end up moving a survey vessel or a couple of construction ships doesn't help much at all. Replacing hangars with anchorages is helpful, true, but is a consequence of spending a half-century or so constructing extra gateways.
Seems to me there's LESS piracy now. It used to be you would always have pirates popping up in the early game, and you'd have to clean them out with your little fleet, now you just make sure the little skulls don't light up red and you never have a single problem. Even if you get the red skills showing up, the "patrol" button does a fine job until you fix the problem with your trade route.
I have to assume you're doing something wrong.
I suppose that depends on the layout of the edges of the empire, and where the choke points are, and if there are any useful trade points up a dead end.
I'll put that down to differing approaches though, and possibly different colonisation style/ability.
Don't forget there are ways to boost influence with protectorates and faction stuff. So that can compensate for, 9r overwhelm your research/defence agreements.
I tend to be mostly butted up to other empires at that point. Perhaps I'm in denser galaxies, or just get unlucky that AI empires expand towards me for preference?
I honestly don't get what you're saying about shipyards not being part of the trade gateways here. The network is the network, and it means you don't have to worry about where the shipyards are - a shipyard in the centre of the empire contributes as much (or almost as much) as one right on the border in a war. So those "docile" systems could well have shipyards either in the gateway system, or one system over (I need to play with this a touch as I've had inconsistent results with reinforcement...).
Possibly because I run "Full" hyperlane density -- chokepoints rarely exist.
To a point, I suppose. Faction stuff peaks in the mid 2200s. Rivalries tend to fall apart a bit later as empires fall to pathetic comparisons. I don't like vassals or protectorates so I tend to be one large blob.
I find there is often a segment of a galaxy I can wall off from other empires and slowly expand into as I can. Once I'm pressed up against other empires, my starbase influence converts to claim influence as I slowly take those systems away. Claims are cheaper on average, but there are a lot of systems to claim!
Assume for the moment you didn't build gateways to simplify trade protection/collection. You'd still have a gateway network, right? It'd still include your ship construction/upgrade facilities and access to strategic/tactically useful locations, right? What it wouldn't include are the dozen or more internal trade collection stations that aren't on a front. I'm restricting my gateway conversation just to the latter, because of course I'd build out/co-opt existing gateways for strategic movement around the edges of my empire and to access fleet facilities. The trade gateways are an extra cost that offers pretty much one single value to the empire: trade consideration reduction. That reduction has three main effects: the player gets relief from scanning all the routes for signs that trade is being disrupted/piracy is growing, the reclamation of small corvette fleets that can be repurposed for military use, and the repurposing of dedicated trade defence modules to anchorages/ship construction/whatever. Very occasionally, one of the trade gateways may prove useful for shutting a ship around inside the empire.