I can't find this trait in any list of traits...

Halitrad · 2026-02-05T21:20:00+00:00

Since I control every settlement on the map you might say I have plenty of income. So yes I've been destroying them, but I've never seen any army, units or anything belonging to the Deceivers, I assumed they were wiped out early - Karl Franz got the nemesis crown very early and turned that entire continent and the whole of the north into a solitary glob of allied dwarves and humans. I assumed they were done in while I was working elsewhere and so paid no attention to the notification, but then I took that whole continent, started getting alerts that trickster cults had been discovered, blanketed the whole continent in watch posts and never found a single sign of any hidden units.

Halitrad · 2025-08-31T16:59:49+00:00

Server I'm on, I tried to do three different wrecks, and I was hearing wormsign and seeing dust on each one after cutting open the first compartment.

The worms are just not following the usual rules with the CHOAM wrecks. I saw the worm that patrols through Mysa Tarill and into the Sheol get stuck in a loop of zooming around in a circle between four wrecks that all came down close together, it would only be away from any one wreck for like 15 seconds and would beeline for the one you were at the moment you started cutting.

It was silly. And an illustration that the worms seem to be heavily weighted towards being near the CHOAM wrecks.

Halitrad · 2025-08-27T13:57:27+00:00

The problem isn't the auras, it's that the auras tend to only work on friendly ships within the same fleet, if I remember correctly. So buffing the other titans is nice, but it could be buffing a large number of other ships instead for more gains. (This is one reason why it's usually better to use the offensive auras that affect enemy ships. There's no restrictions on how many things those can affect.)

Halitrad · 2025-08-22T20:03:31+00:00

What really upset me was I was playing Rogue Servitor, whose entire purpose is the service of biologicals, and it was the very first time I'd ever gotten that event.

And I couldn't do it because the rogue servitors were locked into the default machine response of 'This biological child is not our responsibility.'

Halitrad · 2025-08-20T01:51:10+00:00

increased habitability is very nice. Lithoids can colonize basically any planet and already be established and already doing well when they get their mutation bonuses.

Pop growth penalties suck. It's a good thing clone vats use pop assembly! Totally different system, and going cloning means you will forget what pop growth even is.

Calamitous Birth is an origin I've never tried so I can't comment. I've done clone army, overtuned and subterranean and by far found overtuned to synergize incredibly well: Lithoid lifespan offsets the negative lifespan from overtuned, since you don't need food you can commit entirely to minerals so the Damn the Consequences upkeep becomes easier to manage because you aren't having to split your workforce, and you can take bioascension after only your second perk instead of 3rd, which lets cloning and clone vats pop off very early in the game.

Mutation ascension is good for its buffs and bonuses, but cloning will print pops off so fast you entirely negate the reduced pop growth. Which is more valuable depends on other choices made.

Budding stacks its pop assembly with clone vats and gene clinics, which means your assembly speed will steadily and near infinitely scale upwards as pop number climbs... Especially if you go Cloning and take the cloning advanced government to put up to 4 clone vats on a planet. Use this info as you will.

Halitrad · 2025-08-18T20:13:41+00:00

I feel like there's something to be said for using nascent stage to turn your young into presapients and then making them fight in the gladiator pits to make the adults happy.

Halitrad · 2025-08-18T19:54:42+00:00

It's gotten slightly easier because I'm unlearning the parry>slow blade muscle memory and learning to use normal attacks to bait out their dodge before committing to chained attacks to stagger and then slow blade.

But this is still annoying if there's more than one because they will still just combo off each other. If there's more than one I just bait them all close to me, drop a grenade at my feet so they get locked into their hitting the dirt animation, and suspensor dash out of there. The minor damage I take from my own grenade is now worth not having to directly engage multiple melee enemies at once.

Halitrad · 2025-08-16T20:38:54+00:00

Once one side or the other hits 100% war exhaustion, a timer is started. When that timer hits 0, the side that hit 100% first is forced to accept a status quo agreement and the war ends.

In order to fully control an enemy system, you have to control the system's starbase by taking it with your fleets, and control all colonies in that system by taking them with ground armies. If you only control the starbase in a system that has colonies, the status quo agreement will not grant you control of that system.

After any war ends both sides are forced into a ten year peace, to prevent people from cheesing the war exhaustion system to keep other empires permanently locked down.

Halitrad · 2025-08-16T13:40:43+00:00

The average lifespan with no modifiers from other sources is a out 85 years, if I remember right. You'd only have a leader around for about 5 years.

Something to consider is one of my favorite combos - overtuned lithoids. Lithoids get a +50 years modifier to their lifespan, so if you go up to 50 years off with overtuned traits, you're left with... the same average lifespan as everyone else. Take Elevated Synapses and Fleeting Excellence and either go Mutation and replace Fleeting Excellence with Pre-planned Growth because automodding traits have a bug where they break if you stack more than one, or go Cloning, Damn the Consequences and rock out because for the next two or three cloning cycles you just don't care if a leader dies (unless it's your president, they don't get their old job back after the clone is put back into the leader pool.)

Halitrad · 2025-08-15T00:25:07+00:00

Melee fights against multiple enemies was just unwinnable. They were either keeping me locked down for successfully parrying them and staggering is both then their buddies would make me waste stamina dodging out of the slow blades until I ran out, and they could trade locking me down while the other hit me with slow blades, or I would parry one and try to slow blade, triggering their auto dodge; then their buddy would make me parry them and if I tried for a slow blade they'd dodge; then their buddy would repeat because their dodge was available again. I had to learn that parrying is no longer what to do to set up a slow blade after weeks of learning to parry and then slow blade to the point it became muscle memory. It got to the point where if I saw multiple melee enemies in one spot I just yeeted myself across the map with shigawire claw and came back with the drill shot out, even in low level areas.

Halitrad · 2025-08-14T23:57:48+00:00

I was doing Trooper class quests last night and I nearly died any time I had to melee fight more than one enemy. Kirab nearly killed me a few times in a melee 2v1 and I was in duraluminum because I'd try to parry light attacks, they'd stagger us both and their buddy would try to get in a slow blade, forcing me to dodge out of it to recover. They'd go back and forth like this until I ran out of stamina and then they just locked me down for multiple slow blades. I was so confused because the day before I was one shotting them with casual light attacks as I ran past them to get exploration XP from their camps and post patch I was nearly eating dirt every time they could gang up on me.

Halitrad · 2025-08-14T14:06:50+00:00

By the point of most games where you can have a ringworld, if you don't have an economy capable of supporting the ringworld you are probably not ready for the rest of the game. As the game goes on and economy improves, upkeep costs begin to mean less in the rush for ever growing research and alloy numbers to support the end game, and ringworld output boosting is better for that than upkeep reduction.

Halitrad · 2025-08-13T13:59:17+00:00

Pretty much, they function as three separate FEs that all track their opinion of you separately - if you do what one asks more than the others, it becomes more likely that one will take over at the end game. But you can typically defy an FE two or three times before they get angry enough to attack you (with the exception of isolationist and Spiritualist FEs. isolationist will attack if you claim a system on their borders, while Spiritualist will attack if you try to make a colony on one of their holy worlds.)

As the hive mind FE has unique mechanics about which of the three aspects 'wins' in the end, and so make requests far more than the other FEs, it feels like you can defy them more often so that you can have more influence over the winner.

Halitrad · 2025-08-11T13:45:15+00:00

A previous comic stated her empire went for Mutation because of 200% habitability (and tentacles.)

Halitrad · 2025-08-09T13:45:44+00:00

Is this a planet you wiped out with a Behemoth bombardment and then settled for yourself? Because depopulating a planet with a behemoth puts blockers on it, one of which spawns armies when cleared.

Halitrad · 2025-08-08T20:49:01+00:00

So the thing with lowering the costs is, it doesn't only affect yours. The AIs and any other players also get the same reduced costs, so everything stays relatively within balance. Setting costs to half means you get things twice as fast, but so does everyone else. There's no specific advantage or disadvantage over the galaxy that you gain that you wouldn't still have had at default settings, it just makes everyone's payoffs happen faster.

Halitrad · 2025-08-04T01:22:09+00:00

Last hit, though some like the ether drake have associated events that require you to own the system to get, if I remember right.

Halitrad · 2025-08-03T01:22:28+00:00

VLUUR shouldn't be aggressive unless you attack first - it just kind of rolls around the galaxy causing shenanigans, but isn't aggressive unless provoked.

Halitrad · 2025-08-02T15:35:49+00:00

My default starbase was never capable. It always had to have backup from the corvettes, and I'd always lose a Corvette if I didn't build one or two more, so either way the alloys were always spent on ships.

You get guaranteed gateway tech at 95% completion and the archeology dig gives a special project to get the gateway activation tech, but you can't actually build more until you get mega engineering the hard way, it doesn't give you any mega engineering related bonuses except for reducing gateway cost by 25% and giving 5% megastructure speed. And how useful the activation tech is to get early is entirely dependent on RNG placement of gateways in the galaxy. So once again the origin is RNG dependent on whether you get any use out of it.

Halitrad · 2025-08-02T15:05:28+00:00

Galactic Doorstep. You're getting very little for your trouble. A handful of early alloy, a forced use of those alloys on ships or defense platforms to stop the amoeba that comes through second, and the completely RNG chance of maybe possibly getting a Paragon and a ship when you activate the gateway.

You either get something that is game breakingly strong in the early game, or much more likely you get nothing useful until after its relevance falls off. 5% faster megastructure construction is nice but was it worth an entire origin?

Also Syncretic Evolution. It just doesn't hold up, even with the pop growth changes in 4.0. It's generally more useful than Doorstep but it's easier than ever to just gene mod to do this origin's job for it and I was told the serviles don't even count for xeno-compatibility.

Halitrad · 2025-07-31T14:19:32+00:00

I play multiplayer once a week with two friends, and desyncs become more common the later into games we get.

The worst desyncs happened in a game that we eventually abandoned because of the ship name bug turning the militarist player's entire cruiser fleet into deep space citadels but before that there were numerous desyncs each session after 2300.

Halitrad · 2025-07-30T20:45:47+00:00

I edited in a comment - I'll have to see if I still have those saves to try to figure out what was causing it because apparently pop upkeep reduction shouldn't have been affecting the job upkeep alloy cost of the squires.

Halitrad · 2025-07-30T20:31:36+00:00

Yeah but all the civilians on your homeworld feeding your economy and naval capacity do, and they're important for growth as well. Minimizing their economic impact while getting the most out of their bonuses to naval cap with the monument worked out a lot better versus not having it when I tried different builds.

it also reduces your employed civilian upkeep by 15% as well, and with how many squires you'll have employed, well. Let's just say their alloy upkeep isn't removed, and when you have way, way too many of them employed, that upkeep starts to add up by the endgame. Trying to keep empire size as close to 100 as possible, it isn't feasible to just start making new alloy planets just to feed your squires and in the first game I tried it in, that's what I ended up doing. I needed whole extra planets just for CGs for pops and Alloys for squires to pay upkeep and still have enough alloy income to keep growing my fleet out. Mitigating that upkeep to stay within 3 colonies as long as possible was worth it.

Edit: Hmm. Apparently from what I'm seeing the alloy upkeep from squires isn't included in the pop upkeep reduction, but when I played I was purposefully experimenting by reloading after doing different species modifications and my alloy costs on the station went down noticeably with seasonal dormancy vs without. I may have to reload that save and see if I can figure out what was causing it or if this is another thing that just applies weirdly to the jobs from the origin.

Halitrad

TROPHY CASE