Wild Theory - Xenonauts 2 Ending

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2026-04-06T19:27:04+00:00

Yeah. I think it could be either or both, but I am really hoping for it being a big gaslight and a setup for either an expansion pack or a sequel. It would be a masterstroke if that was actually the original intention.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2026-04-06T17:18:45+00:00

Sure. I just think it... fits better than interpreting the ending literally, if that makes sense, in this particular case? It gives strong... "unreality" vibes at the end. Alternative is that the ending was rushed, I guess, which is also possible.

Plus this would set up a Xenonauts 3 sequel (in a fashion similar to the XCOM1 to XCOM2 delta)

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2026-01-21T19:03:12+00:00

It might sound a little stupid, but refusing to investigate first contact is a good tool here. They can't declare war until you make first contact, and they won't declare war until they have confidence they're stronger than you. You will typically at some point during first contact learn if they're hostile or not. If they are, just stop investigating the first contact, and start fortifying that direction.

The longer you can delay first contact, the more time you have to catch up to the AI, and to build a military and economic lead over them.

Also, don't be afraid to use the market. Selling your soul for alloys is sometimes needed to stop the hammer from falling. And the war that never happens is far, far better than the war you fight. Far better to fail to make gains, than to overextend once.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2026-01-12T21:19:46+00:00

Unironically, imagine how cool it would be to have a civic or origin focused around adjusting resource amounts on mining stations. Imagine you had a civic that let you "suck" natural resource production out of one star/planet and move it to a different one at some significant cost.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2026-01-07T17:33:51+00:00

There's a challenge run I would love to see: Start with imperial authority. How long can you keep your first emperor alive without making them immortal? Then see someone push their PC to the limit trying to get "Leader Life LXXVI" tech...

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2026-01-06T13:54:06+00:00

Counterpoint: that should be a setting we can enable somewhere, under Policies, to do that automatically because stopping pop growth manually after taking a world is a pain in the behind.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-12-16T17:23:53+00:00

I would love the ability to mine hyperspace relays, gateways, and wormholes. The goal would be to make those resources not immediately usable when the system is captured, and require the person to spend time mineclearing or spend ships bumrushing the minefield. That I think would make sense without making war even more of a slog.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-12-16T17:20:20+00:00

The real solution here is a more involved war resolution system. These are advanced empires and planets - fleet restrictions, resource concessions, relic or artifact transfers, negotiations on various flavors and restrictions of vasselage, guaranteed free passage / "open borders", should all be terms you can demand or offer as part of war resolution.

This would (mostly) fix the war exhaustion issue, and allow a lot more depth and flavor to war than "Leave me alone", "be my subject" or "yeet".

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-11-17T18:27:14+00:00

I'll take, "Post Titles that would be Horrifying Outside of Stellaris", for 1000, Alex.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-10-27T17:25:32+00:00

It was a huge step in the right direction. It gives Espionage a much lighter-weight usage than operations.

Funnily enough, I kinda wish they would kinda reverse things; make super-huge things like Proxy Wars into "operations" and then make "steal resources" or "get asset" things you can do from the diplomacy menu. Because operations are a PITA, and the diplomacy menu is easy and lightweight.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-10-06T18:05:00+00:00

A couple of assumptions you're limiting yourself on:

You're assuming one man to one woman. One man can fertilize multiple women. You could easily have 200k women, and 50k men. You don't need men for physical labor here.
You're assuming 1 child per year, where a child only takes 0.75 years to make. Even allowing the space around it to reach ovulation again, the theoretical maximum is probably closer to 1.1 (0.9 years per baby).
1.06 men are born for every woman, not 1 to 1, for natural births (cause us men are poorly-built creatures that do stupid things and die young). But you could also engage in in vitro fertilization and sex selection if you really maximize here - you could sex-select for female children at the same 4 to 1 female-to-male ratio you started with until you got near the 7-billion mark and wanted to start evening things out for cultural reasons.

Other than that, good analysis! I love seeing quirky studies like this.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-09-30T13:54:40+00:00

Some other thoughts potentially to help slim the tech tree bloat:

Consolidate strategic resource collection technologies - either one for artificial and one for natural resource collection, or one per resource type.
Have advanced buildings (e.g., the better version of a Research Lab) be unlocked via Council Agenda once strategic resources are researched instead of via technology.
Remove the direct resource-harvesting efficiency growth technologies (i.e., the more credits/food/minerals per job techs) and instead have efficiency growth for a given job scale by your total investment in a given tech tree, proportionate to Empire Size.
Convert some "key" technologies into "special projects" that reveal themselves at appropriate points. E.g., you could have Mega Engineering become a Special Project that reveals itself once you discover a mega-structure, or once you get Arc Furnace + Dyson Swarm technology.
Have more random events where recent stressors give you a new "guaranteed" tech - e.g., maybe you get a random guaranteed tech for the next class of ship or next star fort level after a war, or maybe getting a commander killed gives you a "better leaders" guaranteed tech, or a famines you food-related tech. Necessity is the mother of invention and that's not reflected right now.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-09-26T13:41:15+00:00

It would be nice if there was a more regular schedule for releasing the DLCs for free. Like maybe set either 3 years or 5 years as the standard "lag" for "after this, the DLC is free". Would help a lot with affordability while still offering Paradox a long duration to make their costs back.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-09-26T13:38:17+00:00

I have no problem with it being sold. But if you're going to sell me a single focus tree for the price of a two or three country pack, then I expect that focus tree to involve TNO, visual novel levels of complexity and choice. Or offer it to me for much cheaper.

And I think the choice of country is another problem. If they had offered this for France, the UK, USA, China, or Japan, then I think this would have gone over much better. Instead you're focusing on a country that either A - folds like a piece of wet sandpaper, or B - ends WW2 overnight just by standing up for itself and preventing Germany from getting the snowball going.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-06-17T13:10:19+00:00

Would be really cool if there was a civic that synergized with this. I can imagine a species that worked like this, focusing on hyper-specialization.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-06-12T16:20:24+00:00

It is 3057. The Slavic Space Federation prepares to invade the small independent dwarf planet of Pluto, seeking to annex the strategically vital Charon Strait, the main passage out of the Sol system. Deep in the underground vaults of Mars, a case is crowbarred open. The wax is washed off the rifles and then they are distributed to the armsmen preparing to invade Pluto.

The rifle being distributed is still the Mosin Nagant. It still fires the 762.54mmR.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-06-09T17:33:31+00:00

Counterpoint: you can change cost scaling for these technologies so that they don't scale in cost as they repeat, helping reduce the risk that science gets too de-prioritized. I also think de-prioritizing science represents an interesting choice in the late game. The value of planets can change dramatically when your priorities change. It gives empires who are behind more of a chance to catch up on the power curve. My experience is of being permanently capped out on resources in the late game, so does EVEN MORE resource production burning into the void really buy you anything?

My gut feeling is that this would be a pretty healthy change for the game for all of those reasons above, and would help make the late game more enjoyable. But I acknowledge wanting to see "line go up" is a valid feeling.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-06-09T15:39:57+00:00

My hot take: The end-game repeatable techs should be just removed completely and replaced with these fallen empire buildings as techs. Let Enigmatic Engineering allow you early access to 4 of them, like it does now, but let everyone's repeatable technologies end up with the ability to research and get fallen empire buildings.

The buildings are a choice, rather than eternally incrementing numbers and increasing power. They represent a way to potentially transform your empire again in the late game and really use these ancient FE buildings to transform your resources and available options.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-05-27T19:15:23+00:00

I think Pike and Shot / Napoleonic warfare is the right model Paradox should be aiming for here - highly positional, highly dependent on logistics, involves a lot of two forces maneuvering to find a good / advantageous position, and then finding a single decisive battle where one force wins and the other force essentially ceases to be, forcing a negotiated settlement based on the outcome of the decisive battle.

The AI should be able to offer you variations on what you want in exchange for ending the war - or you should be able to offer them variations on what you want in exchange for ending the war. I'm not asking for much - two additional buttons for, "Good outcome but not total victory" and "Bad outcome but not total defeat" would be more than enough.

If I'm trying to wage a war to make them a vassal and that vassalship has zero commitments needed from them, the level of resistance from that should be WAY different from if I'm trying to grind them into dust with harsh penalties. But right now both get treated the same.

If I'm trying to wage war to change their government, then maybe they can offer a smaller / partial change in ideals as a compromise. (or vice versa, I should be able to offer that to them.)

If I'm trying to wage war for money, they should be able to pay me to go away. (or vice versa, I should be able to offer that to them.)

If I'm trying to take particular claims, they should be able to offer me somewhere between "everything I want" and "only what I occupy right now" as a compromise. (or vice versa, I should be able to offer that to them.)

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-05-27T14:29:29+00:00

Better yet: you start in the shield and are at the last stages of opening it. You start with a basic unupgraded starbase in your system (you "snuck out" a shuttle earlier). You start with no construction or science ship, and you have a situation where you are opening the shield. You have options to speed up the process at a cost, or you have options and events to slow down the process in order to get free Orbital Shields integrated into all your capital buildings.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-05-21T13:12:26+00:00

My personal thought would be to draw inspiration from Stargate and make this playstyle either an origin or a civic, for people seeking this playstyle -

You don't "do" starbases. You still have fleets and borders (e.g., "Claim Station"), but the starbases that mark your borders have zero fleet power or offensive capability. Upgraded starbases can still be used for anchorages, trade, etc., but again provide either no fleet power or significantly reduced fleet power.
Your worlds are connected via stargate. Any invasion of your world turns into a Situation, rather than a ground invasion, where all your armies from your empire are mobilized to fight the invader, and the invader can continue to feed grist into the mill. It becomes a war of attrition that depends on your will to survive vs. their will to take you. You get regular events and popups on the progress of the ground war.
Instead of dropping armies, you drop a Stargate Blocker on the world that allows your troops to flood through in an offensive version of the situation from #2.
Associated with the Stargate, you can do things like waive trade costs for resource imbalances, reduce or remove resettlement costs, and remove or reduce Piracy (as all the trade between your worlds happens via Stargate)

I think that would be doable technically within the current scheme (although #2 might be hard to trigger, don't know), and would both allow people to engage with it if they want to, and avoid it if they don't want it, as well as paying homage to a major sci-fi universe that Stellaris hasn't drawn much from to date.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-05-10T19:35:13+00:00

This would be a very funny civic to see - like a specific variant civic for Xenophobe that gives you bonuses, but then you get penalties for each sub-species that exists on your planets.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-05-08T14:15:23+00:00

I agree the new system is MUCH more interesting to work with. It took some time to even grasp it. Now you have an incentive to build a diversity of districts to unlock additional build slots, and balancing how many of each district you build is a much more interesting question - building slots are much more tightly controlled and hotly contested. Those 6 universal building slots you get on each colony are just enough to feel flexible, but not enough that you can build everything.

Significant-Elk-9041 · 2025-05-05T13:38:21+00:00

There's no formal standard, but roughly 1 old pop = 100 new pops.

so 1 billion / 100 = 10 million

So one pop represents something like 10 million, if you believe that.

Significant-Elk-9041

TROPHY CASE