Prethoryn Scourge BS

[Isilith]

I have read through some threads here saying they do nothing, and you can easily handle them. Lucky you. Just bought the game, played around for a game, then set to do my ironman game. Muddled through all the other empire eating problems and finally consolidated my empire.

Here come the Prethoryn Scourge, 20 stacks ( that I could see ) that were all larger than all of my COMBINED fleet strength. Oh, they landed 2 jumps from my 4 largest colonized systems, including my home system, before I can even refit my fleet to the standards I found here, they have invaded and conquered 75% of my population and half my empire. To which one of their stacks wipes out my fleet, with 3 titans and 15 battleships ( built to the specs I found here, maxed armor, PD, energy weapons to damage hull/armor ) and a ton of corvettes.

There was literally nothing I could do to stop them. They land on my capital sector, with enough fleet power that the whole galaxy could never defeat them, much less me alone.

My point? It is horrible game design to DESIGN a crisis that powerful and that random. Well over 20X my fleet cap, with more spawning in constantly, landing RIGHT ON MY CAPITAL... bullshit.

 

[yellowpigeonpoo]

The crisis date and strength can be adjusted before the game.... aside from that i can't say much. I never had the Prethoryn scourge crisis and i bought the game since launch

If they act anything like other Crises though you should be able to handle it in a more longterm fight , pick apart their fleets when they are separate and keep going as much as ur economy can sustain the constant fighting. In my experience late economy can overproduce the strength of the endgame crisis, so the trick lays in surviving that initial big stack of death they spawn with.

 

[Person012345]

I have read through some threads here saying they do nothing, and you can easily handle them. Lucky you. Just bought the game, played around for a game, then set to do my ironman game. Muddled through all the other empire eating problems and finally consolidated my empire.

Here come the Prethoryn Scourge, 20 stacks ( that I could see ) that were all larger than all of my COMBINED fleet strength. Oh, they landed 2 jumps from my 4 largest colonized systems, including my home system, before I can even refit my fleet to the standards I found here, they have invaded and conquered 75% of my population and half my empire. To which one of their stacks wipes out my fleet, with 3 titans and 15 battleships ( built to the specs I found here, maxed armor, PD, energy weapons to damage hull/armor ) and a ton of corvettes.

There was literally nothing I could do to stop them. They land on my capital sector, with enough fleet power that the whole galaxy could never defeat them, much less me alone.

My point? It is horrible game design to DESIGN a crisis that powerful and that random. Well over 20X my fleet cap, with more spawning in constantly, landing RIGHT ON MY CAPITAL... bullshit.

Did they infest your capital though? People aren't complaining that they're not powerful enough in concept (there's a slider for that, both up and down FYI), it's that they're broken.The crises aren't/weren't (idk if it's fixed in beta) purging planets, they just land on them now and do nothing. It's a bug. Since IIRC their power depends on infesting planets, since they don't do it as long as they don't land right on top of you it's easy to just mop them up.

 

[Isilith]

That's it, I understand what you are saying. But the game landed them right on my economy... it was gone before I could blink. My complaint is the game making it that RANDOM. It landed right on me, so there was no way to survive that initial big stack 'o death.

All these other threads I see they landed on the other side of the galaxy from their empire. I can see handing that kind of fight, it lets you fight, build, move... wage a war or attrition. The crisis should be challenging, and even brutal on the learning curve, but coded in a way to give the player a chance to experience that learning curve. Not "Hey, here's the crisis, you're dead now!".

P.S. Thanks for the nice response, instead of "git gud".

 

[Aleriez]

Also the entry point of the Prethoryn Scourge is random, sry, you just had bad luck.

 

[Gratak]

If you don't mind that you lose the ability to get achievements, you could enable my Dynamic Difficulty mod (see signature) to reduce the crisis strength when they are already spawned (works even in ironman).

 

[KevinHann]

Don't take this the wrong way, but what was your actual fleet strength? 15 battleships isn't the kind of fleet you should be counting on post 2400 (you do mention other ships, too, but 15 battleships and 3 titans will never stop any end game crisis, you should be looking to produce a bigger fleet by that point.

Also what settings did you select when starting the game? It is understandable you'd run into trouble with your first ironman run if you don't have experience with the game. In terms of the end game crisis, you have sliders for both the year they get a chance to appear, and a multiplier for how strong they will be.

Keep in mind there is a mid-game crisis, too, if one of your Marauders spawns a Khan, 2300 by default - their fleets can also kill you if you aren't prepared to fight them.

It so happens that I'm also on my first ever ironman run right now. I've had several very long games before but most of those were heavily modded so jumping in ironman plus learning on the go how the new economy should be used makes it difficult. I'm around 2300 and I got 8 battleships and plenty of corvettes, plus a few other mid-tier ships - I also have the means to produce a lot more within the next 5 years should I need to. This is while I totally leveraged the diplomacy to secure friendly borders and focused entirely on a self-sustaining economy, never building a fleet until a couple years ago a Marauder fleet attacked me combined with some Wraith thing paying me a visit (never seen those before). I'm not sharing this to boast, just to share a similar experience and how this is going for me so far.

In case your fleet is indeed too small for the end game, what could have been done better to make it sufficient for the threat you clashed with?

I'll be curious to see what difficulty settings you applied. I think I selected 5x strength for my end game crisis, starting to sweat about facing it now.

 

[Saviour of Galaxy]

My point? It is horrible game design to DESIGN a crisis that powerful and that random.

No, its not.
Learn more if you want to chalange it. Tone it down if it's too strong to you. Turn it off if you can't handle it.
But do not try to ruin fun for those who like challange.

 

[ArcticISAF]

Seems like you've got unlucky more than anything, with them landing directly on you. Prethoryn Scourge is probably my favorite crisis, for how they spread out and dominate a complete section of the galaxy. And how you can focus your attention to one part of the map. They are pretty much unstoppable on initial landing (imo), due to the dense layering of the fleets they start with. Once they spread out and capture some territory, you can generally isolate and defeat fleets one by one before reinforcements arrive.

Generally, I think on a normal playthrough, you'll spend a lot of time doing harassment and building up more of your fleet. By repeatable techs and sheer numbers, naval cap. Building the economy to support rebuilding. Sometimes tagging your fleet along AI combined fleets as they attack can be quite effective as well (in previous versions at least).

If need be, sacrifice the AI nations while you build up. Do what you need to, to survive. Of course, letting them die too fast can be bad as well (depending on proximity).

When the crisis doesn't land on your capital next time, I think you'll have a lot more fun with it.

 

[magickware99]

That's it, I understand what you are saying. But the game landed them right on my economy... it was gone before I could blink. My complaint is the game making it that RANDOM. It landed right on me, so there was no way to survive that initial big stack 'o death.

All these other threads I see they landed on the other side of the galaxy from their empire. I can see handing that kind of fight, it lets you fight, build, move... wage a war or attrition. The crisis should be challenging, and even brutal on the learning curve, but coded in a way to give the player a chance to experience that learning curve. Not "Hey, here's the crisis, you're dead now!".

P.S. Thanks for the nice response, instead of "git gud".

You got unlucky. Afaik the spawn point of the three crises are completely random.

It does make certain games end instantly if you're not ready for them/the contingency (another end game crisis) decides to show up on of your planets.

It's actually one of the things that I dread in 2.2- having one of my planets be the hidden spawn point for the contingency. Given how fragile your economy is, having a fully developed planet completely obliterated in the late-game can kill you unless your resource stock-pile for everything is well over 100,000, at which point the only reason you didn't conquer the entire galaxy is because of end-game lag.

 

[Baqar79]

I have to admit, when I first played the game I had no idea what the different difficulty options did (let alone what crisis strength meant), so went with the default options. The Prethoryn Scourge was the crisis that spawned for my first game and I got very close to giving up, even though they spawned on the other side of the galaxy for me.

I think the OP is making a fair complaint, that is easy to write off once you are familiar with the game. I mean if I started my very first game and thought "I like the idea of starting my first game with the biggest galaxy setting" automatically the Crisis strength is increased by 50%, so if the Prethoryn scourge spawned where I started it would of absolutely been a GG moment.

So why is it that the Crisis strength isn't influenced by the difficulty setting (but changes with the galaxy size) is a bit odd to me.

I also don't think it's bad at all to consider having a "training wheels" difficulty crisis (which should be the default setting, since I myself was lost as to what the options did at first), so you can at least enjoy the content without being wiped off the face of the galaxy; perhaps even guarantee with this difficulty mode that the Crisis wont spawn within your borders.

My first game was incredibly enjoyable, as I just enjoyed playing in this new exciting Galactic sandbox; learning what things did what, having fun with some of the story based anomaly content, role playing my civilization....challenge was actually the one thing I didn't really want.

 

[peenerz]

Rip, very unlucky

 

[Aegrim]

Check out my bad luck, on a large map size the L cluster only had 2 entrances, both in my space. The L cluster has nothing amazing just 1 nanites resource.

The extradimensional invaders emerged inside the L cluster which I didn't know could happen, and they've spilt out into my empire first cutting it in half and eating 20 of my 41 colonies including Sol and my main shipyards.

Luckily I had a ecumenopolis and force evacuated everyone from earth to it where they now live, many of them homeless all of them unemployed. I've sent them to work in new colonies I've formed for resources but my economy is tanked. My economy is based entirely on selling the alloys I make now that I could really use for ships but I manage to build a few to keep my numbers expanding and after 50 years I've kept them 2 jumps from my new main shipyard and right on the door of a colony with plans to finally start reclaiming space.

 

[KevinHann]

That sounds a bit more thrilling than "I was ready when they appeared and just wiped them out"

 

[Eelectrica]

Just the way it goes sometimes. In a recent game I had the contingency spawn two hubs on the edge of my tiny trading empire. Game over, onto the next one.

On the flip side I've played a determined exterminator war machine that also had the contingency spawn in a couple of locations within the empire, but battled back and went back purging the galaxy.

In my current game I'm fighting the unbidden, I have no idea how the game is going to go and that's awesome.

 

[YagabodooN]

The scourge always comes from the edge of the galaxy and always starts in uninhabited systems unless there are none. They are also the 'default' crisis that spawns if conditions for the others are not sufficient enough (no synthetics, not enough empires using jump drives). In my recent game my crisis was...overdue so I intentionally left a few edge systems open and prepared to contain them.
You should have way more than 15 BBs by the endgame to fight with, for a standard settings/size galaxy you should have about 150-200k fleet power minimum.
Use a Plasma/energy PD build with the defender of the galaxy perk and you can take on scourge fleets twice your size with modest losses.
oh, and your 40k something citadels are not going to hold off a standard crisis fleet long enough for you to save them, but you can bait the scourge into attacking them and intercept for an easy fight if you are close.

good luck

 

[Badesumofu]

I think the real problem is that regular empires are so weak in the hands of the AI that they give new players a wrong idea about how strong their fleets should be at different times.

3 Titans and 60 Battleships would be a good fleet for about 2325. You would never get the sense of needing anything like that from regular empire AI, though.

 

[Verx90]

END GAME CRISIS .

they are not supposed to be izy , they are supposed to be the end .


the pretorion scourge advise you before coming, if you are on the edge of the map, you better be prepared that you could be the first to be hit ; at game launch and some update afters , the pretoryon ALWAYS spawned on the player .

you lost the capital ? time to go rouge! fight for evry sistem, for evry planet .

 

[ArcticISAF]

at game launch and some update afters , the pretoryon ALWAYS spawned on the player .

Definitely not true they'd always spawn on you, as I'll refer to a screenshot I took near release (12 Jul 2016). https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=723428759

I agree with the other sentiments, keep fighting the good fight - as long as you're still having fun with it and all.

 

[Verx90]

Definitely not true they'd always spawn on you, as I'll refer to a screenshot I took near release (12 Jul 2016). https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=723428759

I agree with the other sentiments, keep fighting the good fight - as long as you're still having fun with it and all.

Yep , i exageeated a bit , but they still had like 80% spawn chance on you if you were on the edge of the map. Dev increased the chance of more random chance around 1.6 (if im not wrong , "ive no memory of this place)