Unbidden every time - please bring back more nuanced Crisis weighting

[Harkinian's Dinner]

Currently, the Unbidden can appear 50 years earlier than the other two Crises, if someone has researched Jump Drives. The problem, of course, is that someone has always researched Jump Drives by then, even if the Endgame Start is set much earlier than default. And even if all the human players make an agreement not to research the tech, the AI empires will do it. Which means the Crisis will pretty much always be the Unbidden.

I really don't get why the previous system for deciding which Crisis you get was gutted. The weighting favoured the Contingency a bit, but it was easy to just tweak the numbers, and I regularly saw all three Crises anyway. I think the new early Unbidden appearance is cool - Dangerous Technology becoming more dangerous is good - but in that case the other two Crises need some equivalent trigger. Make the dangerous AI techs do the same for the Contingency, and the Aetherophasic Engine do the same for the Prethoryn, or something. It's just really bad when there are two different ways to trigger the Unbidden (it can happen from the Extradimensional Research decision too) and the other two Crises only get a random chance to happen if no one does so.

 

[Ryika]

They should just add all three options to the crisis selection during galaxy setup. The old one, the new one, and one where it's truly an equal chance between all three, with no special conditions at all.

Wouldn't be much work either, just around 15-20 short lines of code in the crisis trigger and whatever needs to be done to add them to the selection during setup.

 

[Louella]

I thought the Synth workers techs increased the chance of the Contingency ?


I play a personal mod where all three crises can happen, it can be absolute mayhem, the different crises will all fight each other, so you can sometimes get a 4-way fleet battle happening.

 

[Blackadder23]

I thought the Synth workers techs increased the chance of the Contingency ?

They used to, but this was changed around the time Nemesis was released. Now you can pick a crisis, or you might get the Unbidden early with jump drives. Otherwise, it's a straight random chance between the three.

Like the OP, I liked the old system and don't understand why it was changed.

 

[rubert]

I ended up making a mod for my own use which removes the Jump Drive -> Unbidden interaction.

 

[Louella]

They used to, but this was changed

So... there's no real downside to researching the Positronic Brain and other techs of that nature that are marked "Dangerous Tech" ?

(other than the risk of robot workers going rogue during the contingency events)

So like, if you don't use robots in your empire, you can nevertheless research all the synth techs to get the "In Limbo" event out of the way, and when you get that "ghost signal" event, start refitting your fleet to not use positronic combat computers, and there's no drawbacks ?

 

[Blackadder23]

So... there's no real downside to researching the Positronic Brain and other techs of that nature that are marked "Dangerous Tech" ?

(other than the risk of robot workers going rogue during the contingency events)

So like, if you don't use robots in your empire, you can nevertheless research all the synth techs to get the "In Limbo" event out of the way, and when you get that "ghost signal" event, start refitting your fleet to not use positronic combat computers, and there's no drawbacks ?

I guess that's correct. Although you do have to worry about an AI uprising if you don't give them citizen rights, so in a sense they're still dangerous.

 

[ZeeHero]

I really wish in an un modded game with random crisis it wouldn't be the exact same thing as choosing unbidden. nobody reaches 2400 without enough jump drives to guarantee it, and that's not a lot.

 

[Troyen]

You can work around it by combing an earlier endgame year with a tech/tradition cost multiplier (on Commodore, 1.25x tech cost is enough to delay the AI from getting jump drives until mid-2300s; you may need higher for GA). I did like the old crisis weighting, though it unfortunately tended to make getting the scourge rare.

 

[HugsAndSnuggles]

Even with nuanced crisis weighting, I only got not-Unbidden maybe 5 or 6 times in 1.8k hours. They should really do something else.

They should just add all three options to the crisis selection during galaxy setup. The old one, the new one, and one where it's truly an equal chance between all three, with no special conditions at all.

And an option allowing all three to spawn simultaneously

 

[Derp Throat]

Considering this is broken more often than not, wouldn't it be simpler to just have a 1 in 3 chance of each? It's not like people see a particular crisis and think "oh no, I caused that."

 

[Lykus Cerebros]

You can work around it by combing an earlier endgame year with a tech/tradition cost multiplier (on Commodore, 1.25x tech cost is enough to delay the AI from getting jump drives until mid-2300s; you may need higher for GA). I did like the old crisis weighting, though it unfortunately tended to make getting the scourge rare.

Really? I always got the scourge.

I had to Manually spawn the other two to actually be able to fight them at least once.

 

[BlackholePD]

Yeah this is a problem. I picked up the game a few months ago and have got the Unbidden like four times in a row... don't think I've seen the Prethorn or Contingency since 2019. Very dull. I like to leave things on random to spice things up but I'm going to have to manually select one of the other crises next time I play - which takes some of the fun out of it. Wish I could manually exclude the Unbidden

 

[SirBlackAxe]

Maybe they could set it up like the L-Gate outcome, where the crisis is chosen on game start. Stuff like jump drives would move the date the crisis happens earlier if you're going to get the corresponding crisis, but wouldn't influence which crisis you get.

 

[Harkinian's Dinner]

It's not like people see a particular crisis and think "oh no, I caused that."

That is exactly what we think though. Anytime we didn't get the Scourge in the previous version, we would know it was our fault, which was a major appeal of the Crisis system, and in fact pushing for specific crises in order to screw eachother over was part of the multiplayer metagame for my player group.

In the current system, picking Jump Drives is still a weighty decision that always gets a lot of fun discussion among the players, it just feels less impactful because the AI will likely do it anyway.

Changing to a pure 1/3 chance with no way to influence it is the absolute worst possible solution. Though the BEST solution involves having it as another option in setup, ALONG with the old, but improved, "cause your own destruction in your hubris" system.

 

[Leylos]

I think the problem is that only the Unbidden can now be influence to spawn earlier.

Each of the crisis should have a mechanic for this.

 

[Lykus Cerebros]

I think the problem is that only the Unbidden can now be influence to spawn earlier.

Each of the crisis should have a mechanic for this.

Yes!
I appreciate the possibility to set a specific crisis that's a very welcome change.

But I never understood why the weighing system was removed only halfway. Removing triggers for other crisis bit at the same time leaving one in place while at the same time allowing this crisis to spawn even earlier makes no sense to me.
I really hope we get an expanded slider for crisis type with random, each individual crisis and weighting system.

 

[Kapi96]

A million times this! The crisis system was decent before, could and should have been improved upon, but instead it was just ruined.

Bring back the triggers based on tech and stuff, also give an option to have multiple crises, ideally only the first one gets the increased weighting from years passed, but the others are still able to fire at their base weight. Make dangerous tech actually dangerous again, if you use warp drives there should always be a chance of that causing the unbidden to show up, even if the Prethoryn are already ravaging the galaxy! Same with advanced AI tech and the Contingency.

Also, why on earth are there only 3 crises still? Let's have some cool new ones too (would especially enhance the game with the option to remove the limit of 1 per game)!

 

[Zoomy]

Did the devs intend for all Unbidden all the time? Can't think of any other reason why they'd do such a thing.

 

[Lykus Cerebros]

A million times this! The crisis system was decent before, could and should have been improved upon, but instead it was just ruined.

Bring back the triggers based on tech and stuff, also give an option to have multiple crises, ideally only the first one gets the increased weighting from years passed, but the others are still able to fire at their base weight. Make dangerous tech actually dangerous again, if you use warp drives there should always be a chance of that causing the unbidden to show up, even if the Prethoryn are already ravaging the galaxy! Same with advanced AI tech and the Contingency.

Also, why on earth are there only 3 crises still? Let's have some cool new ones too (would especially enhance the game with the option to remove the limit of 1 per game)!

Don't know if you play iron-man but you can use console commands to spawn in multiple crisis. There are also some mods.