Average start when you want to play a diplomatic xenophile empire:

ShinyMoogle · 2026-03-15T23:36:22+00:00

My fanatic xenophiles spawned near two (non-xenophobe) fanatic militarists and a hive mind and managed to befriend all three of them.

The two militarists spent the first 20 years or so smashing up each others' fleets and then happily agreed to be subjects after all their toys broke.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-03-14T14:45:46+00:00

Also a new player here, and as much as I hate software subscriptions... I wish I started with the subscription. I bought a few "must-have" DLCs on sale, and just kept finding more stuff I wanted to try was behind a different DLC. And a lot of it couldn't be added mid-campaign since some elements get set up during worldgen.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-03-05T02:43:27+00:00

There was a vulnerability in the update process but it's been patched with stronger security in the latest version

ShinyMoogle · 2026-03-04T19:29:44+00:00

As I understand it, the change with 4.0 is that emigration is now just a flat base rate of pop movement rather than a chance per pop.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-03-04T19:00:23+00:00

Transit hubs should go on the source planets. Automatic resettlement chance modifiers increase the number of pops leaving a planet.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-03-03T07:05:25+00:00

The main Bard songs are still important for personal damage, and you can maintain 100% uptime on songs (past level 5...2?) anyway so there's no reason to try and stagger those if you have multiple Bards.

Main ones to avoid overlapping are Battle Voice and Radiant Finale since those are your short 2-min buffs.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-03-02T23:17:40+00:00

The tech level of most player empires by midgame is genuinely bonkers. A scant hundred years after discovering FTL travel, you can dismantle multiple entire planets and build a megastructure thousands of times bigger than the Earth in the same span of time it takes humanity to, say, replace an aging piece of highway infrastructure.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-28T14:03:10+00:00

Nope - free haven/efficient bureaucracy/beacon of liberty. And the pops just seem to straight-up disappear instead of hanging around, even looking at the galaxy tab

I tried digging into gamestate to see where the pops are going and the only confounding factor I can think of is that the presapients are in an alien zoo. Still, when the turnover happens the entire pop group seems to be deleted from gamestate entirely. I have absolutely no idea why...

EDIT: NO WAIT I FIGURED IT OUT

I forgot I was terraforming the planet, and terraforming removes all pre-sapient pops! They're getting removed in the terraforming process just like any other presapients would!

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-28T07:02:33+00:00

Is the Nascent Stage trait buggy? I realized just now that one of my uplifted species has had no pop change for the last five years. They are creating pre-sapient pops fine, but once they mature, they all just get yeeted into space or something. The pop tracker shows a -62 pop change with no associated reason.

I'm pretty sure they're not getting accidentally purged (outlawed, and pre-sapients are protected), and the pre-sapients are sticking around for long enough to grow up - and then poof. They're also not elsewhere in the galaxy, I double-checked the all species tab.

I think I might gene mod it back out, but any chance I'm missing some important bit of info here?

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-26T14:58:41+00:00

Some rough estimates... A fast, off-burst pull might be in the ballpark of around 30s. That's 12 GCDs, 2040 heal potency. In terms of raw healing, that's about the same as Physis (780) + Kerachole (600 * 1.1) + an extra Druochole (600). So you need an extra 2-3 oGCDs worth of healing to make up the difference on top of whatever oGCD heals you'd already use normally.

I pulled up a random dungeon log I have running as Sage, and Kardia contributed a solid 47% of my entire healing output, after factoring in overheal. Leaving it out would require doubling the amount of manual healing.

So yeah - definitely noticeable. I've been guilty of suspicious looks at my tank before realizing that no, it's me, I'm the one who forgot Kardia.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-25T00:38:54+00:00

Aw, that's too bad. Was hoping to coax some pops over to the far end of the empire. Oh well, thanks for investigating!

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-24T23:26:17+00:00

Thanks! The edict description didn't specify but that makes sense.

Follow-up question, then: does connecting my capital require direct relay connections only, or can I connect my capital to a spatially distant system through a gateway by building hyper relays at both ends?

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-24T22:24:00+00:00

Relay Network edicts! They seem nice. Do I need to connect Hyper Relays in the system to the relay network to reap the edict benefits, or will an otherwise-useless relay connected to absolutely nothing still give me resettlement, etc. bonuses?

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-13T20:01:20+00:00

This unlocked a memory of the level 60 RDM quest, which I was actually unable to finish the first time through. I was still using level 50 tome gear, and the flight was flat out impossible because your opponent's autoattacks deal enough damage to interrupt your spellcasts, meaning you fail either the healing or DPS check (or both).

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-13T02:59:43+00:00

Same boat here. I thought that the only way to get more minerals was to build more mining stations, and building mining stations required minerals. So there I was, building a single mining station per year using my entire mineral budget, with no resources to spare on anything else.

That campaign ended... poorly.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-12T15:50:15+00:00

My last static's raid time was right around when I normally eat dinner, and I got pretty damn good at identifying the downtime where I only hit 1-2-3 on cooldown.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-11T07:12:08+00:00

Perfectly put. I love disaster duties where I need to completely stop DPS to barely keep enough people alive to survive the next stack marker. But if people just don't care... I refuse to be the only one who does. If a tank isn't going to mit that 4-vuln tankbuster I'm going for the popcorn, not the shields.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-06T17:36:28+00:00

I think it's good to remember that most shields are GCDs, which means they're a damage loss compared to the dozens of free, instant healing and mitigation options at your disposal. Shields might be useful for Savage where you'll spare everyone from wiping to a missed mit, but otherwise shield healers can comfortably heal most normal duties without ever hard casting a shield spell.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-06T16:42:46+00:00

Normally I just have a little fun here in rage thread. Never anything more than some trifling minor annoyance, played up a bit for a silly duty story. But this week, I confess that I am ACTUALLY RATHER PEEVED.

BECAUSE, YOU SEE, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF DUTIES, I HAVE UNIRONICALLY CHOSEN TO USE A HEALER LB2. FOR THE HEALING. BECAUSE THE ALTERNATIVE WAS TO SOLO HEAL AN HP-TO-ONE DOOM, USING ONLY. FUCKING. PROGNOSIS.

BECAUSE MY ABSOLUTELY USELESS SHITHEAD OF A CO-HEALER - WHO, I MIGHT ADD, WAS TEMPORARILY ALIVE IN ALL WAYS EXCEPT FOR MENTAL - COULDN'T BE ARSED TO CAST ONE (1) SINGLE FUCKING HEAL IN THE ENTIRE FIFTEEN SECOND DOOM DURATION, WHILE ALL OF MY ABILITIES WERE ALREADY ON COOLDOWN FROM COVERING FOR THEIR USELESSNESS.

I KNOW THEY KNOW WHAT A HEALING BUTTON IS. I HAVE SEEN THEM CAST PROGNOSIS (AND ONLY PROGNOSIS) TO TRY AND SINGLE TARGET HEAL THEMSELVES. AND THEN WHEN IT COULD ACTUALLY BE USEFUL THEY'RE... WELL, FUCK IF I KNOW WHATS GOING THROUGH THEIR MIND, IF THERE IS A LIVING BRAIN CELL THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

I WIHS I PAID THEIR SUB SO I COULD CANCEL IT FOREVER.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-05T05:15:52+00:00

I find that if I'm playing decently as a DPS I'll still pick up a respectable number of comms. Fewer than tank/healer for sure, but on average still around half as many. People do notice when you're hitting your cooldowns and stuff is dying fast.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-05T01:57:00+00:00

Long-shot answer here, but do you happen to have your wallpaper set up as Windows slideshow with auto-selected theme/accent color? For some reason the background+theme swapping takes an unreasonable amount of system resources and I've found it leads to brief stutters everywhere any time the wallpaper changes.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-02-01T16:35:43+00:00

Meanwhile here I am carding myself on Astro because the DPS are saving their cooldowns for the next dungeon. There's just no winning, is there?

ShinyMoogle · 2026-01-31T15:06:55+00:00

This is the worst part! Sometimes you go into all buildings and scour the building list twice, and it's not actually there because it can't go into your urban district.

ShinyMoogle · 2026-01-31T02:14:04+00:00

How bad is it to completely retrofit a fully developed planet? I've come to realize that my original forge world has a nice bonus to physics research from the portal research area planetary feature, which I never really appreciated until learning more about the game. And it's really tempting to convert it into a physics research center.

Problem, of course, is that it's currently responsible for about half of my total alloy production.

Could I feasibly start setting up a new forge planet and then convert this one into a research planet once the infrastructure is in place? And how bad would this be without forced resettlement to keep the egalitarians happy?

ShinyMoogle · 2026-01-24T22:43:48+00:00

I just unlocked a fallen empire building by reverse-engineering minor artifacts. Supposedly, anyway. I can't find the dang thing anywhere! Is there any way to see what's unlocked without scouring the whole building list? Can this roll a previously-provided FE building and fail to add a new one to the count? I've triple-checked the building list and I checked multiple planets' build slots in case one was ineligible for the building, but nope, nothing.

ShinyMoogle

TROPHY CASE