I wanted to toss in a second little update. Not sure if anyone cares about this game anymore, but it's gotten so much better I wanted to highlight it again.
I thought this game was the biggest waste of money I'd ever spent on a video game when I first got it, even more than Civ5. But it is now possibly my favorite game.
There was a recent patch about the time I posted my previous comeback "oh this is fun" post. They had a MASSIVE update that made it even better than my last post, and then a second opt-in post after that. They've nerfed the hell out of a bunch of stuff, which was the main problem with launch game. Everything was insanely overpowered so you could do whatever you want and it was awful. A few highlights.
- They've increased maintenance for a lot of things to make actually having a monetary economy a point. In the past, you'd just reseach tourism and then run 0%ish money to fund your entire empire. I actually find myself often wanting to make money planets.
- Starbase administers have been reduced. I honestly didn't even realize these EXISTED until this patch. Apparently you've always needed an administer per starbase, but you could effectively slap down infinite starbases. This has been massively reduced, but replaced by an interesting building that provides 1 administor and has adjacency bonuses in the planet layout screen, but does nothing else. Very strategic uses to use up an entire tile.
- The mini-game of planet layout is a LOT more fun now. I think they must have taken a page from civ6. Farms have been redone so that food is a resource and only cities provide population. The colony capital has had its pop cap reduced to 3 (!) and cities only improve that pop point by 3 each and they are not upgradeable. However each pop cap is a full production point upgrade. What that means is you need pop and it's hard to come by, so aligning your planet layouts perfectly has become insanely important. (3 farms used to provide like 70 pop end game, 3 cities with no adjacency bonuses are 12 pop counting the capital.)
In the old method, you'd slap down a couple farms then coat the entire planet in research academies or whatever. The new way, you need to find a layout that gives your cities the rare adjaceny bonus while also not ruining your layout with relatively useless cities. So an anti-matter plant gives your city a 30% bonus to pop, and the administration center provides another 10% and both of those building provide influence bonuses so you put your missionary center in the mix, etc. I.e., it's a lot more complicated now and a lot more fun than just all research/money/factories.
One final anecdote about the AI improvements, I actually quit a game I had CLEARLY won because I wasn't expecting the AI improvements.
To paint the scene, I had famer's gambited to victory. I had DOZENS of colonies all over the galaxy, maxed out research, insane economy, the game was over. I finally found an opponent I knew technically existed in the corner of the galaxy. They had drawn a complete crap of a start with no planets in range. They were stuck with 4 colonies to my like 40. They had virtually zero research power. However they had recognized the problem and solved it by beelining down the engineering tree, which gives you extended ship range and speed. That would get them out of their little hole, and allow them to expand. A side effect of beelining that tree is that it gives you access to larger and larger ship hulls.
So I find them, have like 4000% their tech rate, but they've got massive ship range, fast ships, and large hull ships. They start sending out "fleets" of 1 or 2 complete horse shit garbage ships with the bare minimum weapons and defensed and slaughtering anything I can hit them with at the time via sheer size. In combination they start sending out long range transport ships to attack every planet of mine in range. Sure I catch most of them in transit, but I can't have my limited fleet everywhere. I'm literally losing core planets left and right to a dead AI in an already won game, plus their massive ships are tearing through my much better medium ships faster than I can get them to the front lines.
I obviously would have won eventually but I was in no mood to recapture a dozen planets in a game I'd already won. It was a rude awakening to the new AI and I started a new game on a higher difficulty.
I thought this game was the biggest waste of money I'd ever spent on a video game when I first got it, even more than Civ5. But it is now possibly my favorite game.
There was a recent patch about the time I posted my previous comeback "oh this is fun" post. They had a MASSIVE update that made it even better than my last post, and then a second opt-in post after that. They've nerfed the hell out of a bunch of stuff, which was the main problem with launch game. Everything was insanely overpowered so you could do whatever you want and it was awful. A few highlights.
- They've increased maintenance for a lot of things to make actually having a monetary economy a point. In the past, you'd just reseach tourism and then run 0%ish money to fund your entire empire. I actually find myself often wanting to make money planets.
- Starbase administers have been reduced. I honestly didn't even realize these EXISTED until this patch. Apparently you've always needed an administer per starbase, but you could effectively slap down infinite starbases. This has been massively reduced, but replaced by an interesting building that provides 1 administor and has adjacency bonuses in the planet layout screen, but does nothing else. Very strategic uses to use up an entire tile.
- The mini-game of planet layout is a LOT more fun now. I think they must have taken a page from civ6. Farms have been redone so that food is a resource and only cities provide population. The colony capital has had its pop cap reduced to 3 (!) and cities only improve that pop point by 3 each and they are not upgradeable. However each pop cap is a full production point upgrade. What that means is you need pop and it's hard to come by, so aligning your planet layouts perfectly has become insanely important. (3 farms used to provide like 70 pop end game, 3 cities with no adjacency bonuses are 12 pop counting the capital.)
In the old method, you'd slap down a couple farms then coat the entire planet in research academies or whatever. The new way, you need to find a layout that gives your cities the rare adjaceny bonus while also not ruining your layout with relatively useless cities. So an anti-matter plant gives your city a 30% bonus to pop, and the administration center provides another 10% and both of those building provide influence bonuses so you put your missionary center in the mix, etc. I.e., it's a lot more complicated now and a lot more fun than just all research/money/factories.
One final anecdote about the AI improvements, I actually quit a game I had CLEARLY won because I wasn't expecting the AI improvements.
To paint the scene, I had famer's gambited to victory. I had DOZENS of colonies all over the galaxy, maxed out research, insane economy, the game was over. I finally found an opponent I knew technically existed in the corner of the galaxy. They had drawn a complete crap of a start with no planets in range. They were stuck with 4 colonies to my like 40. They had virtually zero research power. However they had recognized the problem and solved it by beelining down the engineering tree, which gives you extended ship range and speed. That would get them out of their little hole, and allow them to expand. A side effect of beelining that tree is that it gives you access to larger and larger ship hulls.
So I find them, have like 4000% their tech rate, but they've got massive ship range, fast ships, and large hull ships. They start sending out "fleets" of 1 or 2 complete horse shit garbage ships with the bare minimum weapons and defensed and slaughtering anything I can hit them with at the time via sheer size. In combination they start sending out long range transport ships to attack every planet of mine in range. Sure I catch most of them in transit, but I can't have my limited fleet everywhere. I'm literally losing core planets left and right to a dead AI in an already won game, plus their massive ships are tearing through my much better medium ships faster than I can get them to the front lines.
I obviously would have won eventually but I was in no mood to recapture a dozen planets in a game I'd already won. It was a rude awakening to the new AI and I started a new game on a higher difficulty.
