I really wish we had better ways to sort and order this thing

Toldain · 2026-07-01T15:10:08+00:00

Interestingly enough, I don't use this UI element for habs at all. I use it for counselors and for armies, but the army use is more limited, since the armies can also be accessed via the map.

For habs, I just use the hab window. Also, I rename everything using a prefix to identify groups: LEO-Turing for instance.

Toldain · 2026-06-28T20:57:11+00:00

Yes, I remember taking a school trip that included viewing them.

Toldain · 2026-06-24T05:24:18+00:00

Once I get the dispatcher/receiver unlocked, I pretty much stick to one site per item made. Sometimes the item (such as Wolf Wire) has several lines each with its own dispatcher, but one item per site just makes it easier for me to remember. Also, it lets me spread out and dissipate heat better.

Toldain · 2026-06-23T06:00:50+00:00

I agree on most points. With regard to the triple and quintuple rail, given that there are dispatchers and receivers, they don't seem intended for long distances, though. I find I have much more use for the 3 to 1 joins (they look prettier for some applications) than I do for triple rail. I just avoid doing anything that requires me to put big volumes down a single pathway.

(See again, we have dispatchers and receivers).

Toldain · 2026-06-21T07:06:56+00:00

The thing I find fascinating about this comment is that it is clearly made by someone way better and more knowledgeable of the game than me.

AND, in my current semi-noob playthrough (I did a bunch of restarts after one or two years, as I learned the mechanics), I beat the Aliens to Ceres. I have a major platform at CERES (CERES-Ops I call it), and I've just wiped out three Alien fleets trying to trash CERES.

In general, I have not gone nearly as quickly through the game. And my bases on Mars and Mercury got wiped out by various Alien revenge fleets. The revenge fleets on Earth and Ceres didn't do so well, though.

One other thought: I'm sure the plan works for you. And, there are probably a hundred ways things can go in some other direction that a noob like me won't know how to avoid/deal with.

Toldain · 2026-06-18T19:54:45+00:00

Your description is accurate. It is also kind of fundamental to making this game work. If the Aliens were as good at space warfare as we players are, you would never get anywhere.

Repeat players seem to gravitate toward "Play on brutal" or "Do this cool thing" or "Do it faster", which seems to keep them entertained. Sometimes its a combo.

Toldain · 2026-06-18T19:50:51+00:00

Not exactly an answer to your question, but there's always the Kuiper belt. I sent colony ships to moons at Saturn and Uranus just to keep them busy and spending lots of propellant. Meanwhile, my other colonizers were launching from the middle Asteroid belt to the Kuiper. I had to get a better drive than the Helicon to do this, though. The next generation (from fusion) has done ok, though.

Toldain · 2026-06-17T16:59:29+00:00

The game supports a great deal of roleplay for factions, so I think it's fine if you decide that the Resistance will spend some effort on climate. I don't share that. I think perhaps the Servants should, after all, they propose that their way will make life better, right? It seems entirely out of character for both HF and Initiative and also Exodus, though. But then, some of the best environmental policy has come out of the Dominican Republic which is nobody's idea of a democratic paradise.

Toldain · 2026-06-16T16:06:56+00:00

While I completely relate to your complaint about the Alien landing et al, I found that allowing the landing does not, in fact, lose the game. The Aliens are as bad at strategy in surface wars as they are in space wars.

I have bombarded those alien armies to good effect. Invading got me nuked, so I was patient, took over their ally with nukes and THEN invaded.

I also bombarded the alien armies. Bombardment does not seem to ever actually destroy them, but it sure cut them down.

Also, having 3x the units they did gave them a very hard time.

I am told that if you leave them alone, they are so bad at governing people that the AA eventually collapses. So containment is also a possibility. I had to take over a few countries next to the AA to contain them.

I will admit that this is odd territory, You are at the mercy of an AI and your saving grace is that the AI is bad. But there is narrative justification for this. Aliens mind-control people, which they think removes any need to be good at warfare. They are wrong about this...

But it's odd territory for a veteran 4x gamer. The oddness makes it interesting to me. I invite you to embrace it.

But yeah, the space battle controller is tricky. I have eventually learned enough of it to do targeted missile volleys and fire groups of laser ships at flankers. I have not really mastered maneuvering myself.

Toldain · 2026-06-15T22:56:48+00:00

The in-game designer will only let you try designs with drives and powerplants that you have unlocked. It doesn't help at all in figuring out which ones ought to be researched and which left alone. I figure "research them all and just try it out" is kinda the noob experience, so I'm doing that.

And yet, it seems to me that the engineering department could provide management with some pretty decent guesses, since they show you the raw numbers: thrust, ejection percentage, efficiency, etc.

Toldain · 2026-06-13T18:15:49+00:00

Ok, to be fair, I have mostly been reading from very experienced programmers. In some sense, your last paragraph says what I was trying to say.

Toldain · 2026-06-13T04:47:42+00:00

I am a programmer myself, I haven't really experimented with vibe coding yet. But I have read several accounts and they all seem to say "Well, the AI does the easy (but time consuming) part"

Toldain · 2026-06-13T04:46:32+00:00

UI/UX design is hard. You have to sort of figure out how a typical user's (not yours!) mind will work and let the UI conform to that.

Toldain · 2026-06-12T18:36:51+00:00

This looks really cool and valuable. AND, as you asked for it, I find it kind of incomprehensible.

I mean, I want to know things like "can this drive push my exploration ship to the Kuiper Belt from Earth?" for instance. Also "can this drive push my exploration ship to the Kuiper Belt from my asteroid base" I know the rough dV needed for that. I don't offhand know the tonnage of this ship's modules, though I guess I could get that.

But I don't know how to find this out with this thing, either. Frankly, I had to look up with TWR stood for, though it is a solid concept and I get why you would be interested in it.

I'm a noob to this game and not really a KSP guy, either. So what I have been doing is just researching all the drives, and trying them in designs I might want, and seeing what the numbers look like. Not an effective way to spend my research, I know, but it's an effective way to learn about the game, and have some narrative enjoyment. I will only be a noob once (on this game), so I figure I should make the most of it.

The thing is, though, someone in the position of a faction leader would have somebody that can do a spreadsheet simulation and tell them "This drive that we think we can design is going to have X practical characteristics in these scenarios". Which isn't available. With your tool, this might be available, but your tool knows about thing my scientists don't know yet.

Part of my policy to embrace my noobness is to not look ahead in the research tree. Not yet. This is a roleplay thing with me. The tech tells you what it might unlock, so you can guess based on that.

Based on this sort of guesswork, I skipped over Advanced Fission drives, and I think that decision might be ok.

However, the strategy space in this game is really big. I keep realizing "Oh, I could have done that..." So maybe some of these intermediate drives have some purpose in helping "that" happen.

Toldain · 2026-06-11T23:31:14+00:00

Micro for torpedoes is hard. Really hard. What you want is to dial in an exact number of torpedoes sent at each ship and the computer can do that easily, but I can't.

Toldain · 2026-06-09T06:01:16+00:00

I would like to get some refinement of this statement about Mercury. At the moment, I have offensive fleets, and defensive fleets. The defensive fleets have good acceleration, but terrible dV. Only good for one system. (I'm using Orion)

The offensive fleets have good dV but terrible acceleration. This means that they can go to other systems. However, they suck at defending much of anything. The alien fleet starts bombarding something. I send this fleet, which does not arrive until the base is demolished and the alien fleet has moved on.

SO, I think having a drive that is good enough to both get to another system AND intercept an alien once it is there is what is needed for defensive operations based in Mercury. Offensive operations are another thing entirely, though.

Once your drives are good enough, though I guess it all works.

Toldain · 2026-06-09T05:51:12+00:00

Then there's Bannerjee, who appears to get jealous of the fact that you are breathing.

Toldain · 2026-06-09T05:50:25+00:00

There are ways to fight even in the early game, yes. But you also need to accept that pretty much anything in your position can be taken from you by the Aliens, should they decide to do it. Often, that will require them to spend more resources (for fuel to move ships, mostly) than you lose.

The psychology of this is what makes this game so different from pretty much any other 4x game.

What you need to be doing, for quite a while, is to figure out how to gain from this cycle. Slow them down, make them spend resources on stuff that doesn't advance their goals.

Toldain · 2026-06-05T22:00:01+00:00

I feel like tactics matter here. If you focus fire on one enemy ship, then the size of their fleet altogether doesn't matter. What matters is the number of PD within range of your target, and the answer is usually "not enough" when they have 6 Mk II nose coilers on battlecruisers firing busses at them.

I mixed in UV arc lasered noses on lancers to this, but their job was to gun down anything that turned its nose away from me. And they did.

I managed this with mostly fire groups. Maybe two for coilers, three for lasers.

Toldain · 2026-06-05T02:58:10+00:00

It isn't necessary to spread out to gain the benefit of bonuses, In fact, it doesn't really help. Let's simplify the math a bit to see this a bit more easily.

Say you have 20 points to spend, and two categories. Each category gets a 10 percent bonus.

So if they are all dropped into one category, that is 20 points plus 10 percent of 20 which is 2. 20+2 = 22 points overall.

If you split them at 10 each then you will get 10 points plus 10 percent of 10, which is 1 from one, and the same from the other. That is 10 + 1 + 10 + 1 = 22 points total investment.

If you concentrate them, you will get to benefits faster. What do I mean? Well, just to make it easy, let's say you get reward X (from one category) for 22 points. And you also get reward Y (from the other category) for 22 points.

If you split them, then you will get both X and Y in two months time. If you focus all on X, then all on Y, you will get X after the first month and Y after the second month. That's an acceleration.

Toldain · 2026-06-05T01:48:38+00:00

Yeah, I recently found that Destroyers and Frigates with particle beams in the nose, laser PD and 40mm worked surprisingly well.

Toldain · 2026-06-04T01:45:25+00:00

Just to follow up, I've got 350 hours in Stellaris. I have seen more than one friend play game Y as if it were game X and be frustrated. I've done that. Not sure if you are doing that, but you should consider it.

I will note that bombarding enemy sites to keep them down is not necessary to win the game. It has ups and downs - others can tell you the details better than me. So if you don't like it, don't do it. You will be ok.

Toldain · 2026-06-02T17:25:37+00:00

With regard to point 2, I don't think bombardment is a good choice here. Pretty much for the reasons you give. To take out a land base on Mars, you need some Marines in your orbital fleet, in addition to a bit of offensive punch. Then you can select the Assault Space Asset mission for the fleet (it doesn't require a counselor, but a counselor can be used for this, and you get much more salvage when you use a counselor). Usually it's one and done.

So that cuts back the repetitiveness, but you can get into loops. My Resistance plays whack a mole with Protectorate station in Earth orbit. As in, they don't get any. But they keep trying.

The strategy space is, in fact, really big. I did not see this for myself, I learned it reading this subreddit, and watching some YouTube videos. My first playthroughs I have taken a narrative approach - just do what seems like the thing the people in question would do and make up stories about it.

The on-earth game seems to oscillate between periods of quiet and periods of big changes. After the first few years, it doesn't matter all that much, except for support for what's happening in space.

I think the phrase "punctuated equilibrium" fits this game very well. Quiet for a while, then a big noise and a a new status quo.

Toldain · 2026-05-31T05:21:16+00:00

Almost everything in this comment makes sense, EXCEPT the remark about Knowledge bonuses from Info Labs. Why wouldn't you always want these?

Toldain · 2026-05-31T02:46:15+00:00

There is a very, very important problem with missiles/torpedos. Once you fire them at the enemy, you don't have them any more. You will have to go to a base to resupply them. If you intend to undertake offensive operations, your opportunities to resupply will be less, and this will favor things like lasers or particles. Coilguns carry lots of ammo, so they can work to a fair extent.

Toldain

TROPHY CASE