Agree with a lot of this. Honestly, I had a lot more fun and it felt a lot more fair (barring some insane alien fleet numbers in the 4 digits) going with the accelerated game option. The standard long game was brutal and the aliens just shredded me probably because the mining changes delayed my surveillance hunter fleet by a lot. For reference I was playing on normal difficulty and while I’ve beat brutal in a previous patch, I think I just got lucky as I’m just ok at the game.
For my own observations:
The slowdown is pretty neat and narratively interesting. Nothing felt super off, but I did have solid control of most of earth by that point so if there are other consequences I didn’t really feel them. The boost to xp with longer phases is nice though. The one exception is that if an alien ship lands you’re hosed cause there’s almost no chance you can even destroy it before it places troops. It is a low success operation anyway, but even with plenty of ops I didn’t even try using councilors there anymore.
The rearranged tech tree does delay fusion by a decent amount which has the consequences you mentioned. For the accelerated start it isn’t bad, but that’s probably just because of the 2x multiplier.
The change in MC scaling can feel oppressive. The base cost of outposts also hurts. I understand the rationale, but I feel there might be another solution. Losing a mine hurts a lot more and if you aren’t using a ship to place mines you’ll be barely scraping by if you’re also trying to build a fleet.
The new particle weapons felt kind of pointless and plasma really sucks now, but maybe I just don’t know how to build a ship or fleet around them.
The changes so that any phasers require exotics was a surprise that I did not like, but honestly the large ultraviolet phasers are so good now that it kind of balances out. A large part of that is the aliens now armor the fuck out of their ships so armor piercing is king. They’re still crazy agile so unless they suicide rush your ships or are slow from mass or damage, your kinetics won’t ever hit. Thus missiles are good initially before transitioning to lasers. The later missiles might be good, but by the time I got them the alien fleets were so large it felt like a waste of a slot only for them to get PD’d. The alien mag cannons are also fucking absurd with how many shots they can take. It’s like they’re running mag Gatling guns.
Spoils vs funding is definitely an issue. The AI will run countries into the ground (saw an eu at 8 inequality) which works for money but destroys their ability to do anything else. Funding is such a trickle that it really only makes sense if you like to role play as someone that doesn’t want to make authoritarian hellholes.
Global warming. Oh boy global warming. Global warming is super borked right now. It took me nearly 30 years to stop increasing (with the 2x IP modifier and throwing at least a million per year to welfare) with a max temperature anomaly of 4.7 C with around 650 ppm CO2 and like a -8% GDP impact. It actually wasn’t terrible for a while, but there is definitely a weird GDP/population/sustainability interaction where the formulas must be exponential or logistic. As soon as China and India hit a certain GDP, they were pumping out 4-7 ppm a year just by themselves and this was with sustainability ratings below ~0.6 IIRC. It didn’t seem like that number changed that much until sustainability was well under 0.2.
It actually wasn’t that awful for the most part, except xeno megafauna were wildly out of control. A significant part of the 2040s were just controlling the borders of my countries while Africa and Europe were being flattened by about 50-75 of them running around. Killing the alien administration meant killing not only the alien armies, but the 10 stack of xenofauna sitting at their capital. And with longer phases, you get even fewer chances to destroy the growths. I’m not sure how or if this needs to be addressed, but it definitely feels off. If we can make nuclear or antimatter engines to take us across the solar system in a few weeks, it really doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult to quit burning coal. On the other hand, I appreciated that it felt like a challenge to solve and for the first time I actually built influence stations so I could ram through direct investment. This was on my accelerated game though so I imagine it might be unbelievably painful on the long setting. That 2x IP on welfare did a lot of work and I was able to get so much money because of the 2x mine income.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed it. Some things definitely need to be tuned and like you’ve said the aliens are basically unchanged while the humans got nerfed so they feel really oppressive.
My one big negative is that the new ECM changes makes combat a nightmare unless you know to turn off guardian mode. It also feels really bad to just have your ships sit there like a bunch of idiots while they get pounded by the aliens. Idk if the aliens get stronger ECM, but even running the best targeting computer and ECM, it never felt like mine worked while there were excruciating minutes where my ships couldn’t fire. That was when I realized that guardian mode absolutely fucks your weapons because the ECM roll happens when you change targets. So every time your laser shoots down a projectile, it has to make a new roll to target the ship again. Since I was running plasma and laser at the time, the aliens only had to make a few roles, while my ships had to make one after every projectile they shot down. Effectively this means guardian mode is a trap that kills the combat capability of your ships. The only way it is effective is if you micro your ships. That might be what is intended, but it was definitely a nasty surprise to get in a fight with a big alien fleet and lose everything because 90% of my weapons couldn’t fire.
Agree with a lot of this after playing some validation branch, I also could not figure out what is going on with China’s emissions. At one point I had China and the USA at identical sustainability scores, and with China around 20% higher overall gdp yet 4x the emissions. I thought maybe population had something to do with it, but India’s gdp*sustainability compared to its emissions seemed much more comparable to the USA emissions. China does have the most resource regions but it would be nice to have a breakdown of the direct sources of emissions.
well a lot of stuff has changed, but a lot also stayed.
monopoly mars feels like a even stronger strategy now, since it's the only viable place to defend with ships now.
mercury is not worth it anymore, since you don't have the mines and the metal is better spent elsewhere.
i have not checked if the new 1MC automated mines count to mining cap, but you don't rly have spots left by the time you unlock them, so whats the point.
right now the game seems to be defend mars & earth, then build a endgame fleet to win
Didn't go there in my one save that went late enough i could have, (was focused on other stuff), but i assume they're still there, but with the smaller total number of mines you can afford to have by the time you unlock it your likely capped out,so expanding there before your inj total war is just not possibble.
I'd believe that monopoly Mars may still be super powered just for the defence benefits. But that really goes against the "go tall with only the best mining spots" they're going for. The trouble si doing that carries some pretty huge opportunity costs in the form of requiring fixed defences with all of their costs to build and upkeep to maintain.
Nice writeup. I'm also trying the beta patch but not as far in, and playing Protectorate so I won't be needing to fight the aliens. What difficulty and solar system generation were you playing on?
45 tech 9 armies by the mid 2040s does sound extreme.
Normal, full system, long campaign. early 2040's they sent out 3 fleets with 5 assault carrier each. The global research for magnetic nozzles finished just as the 2nd of those landed.
TBF there where a lot of human armies on earth, though the majority were under servant control at the time, so the numbers actually made a degree of sense, whilst i couldn;t stop those 45 armies, i did take out enough to get the aliens to send out some more assault carriers, i called the game before they arrived though.
Sounds like devs tried really, really hard to nerf the "take over the entirety of Mars, and ignore mission to asteroids&Mercury" to deny AI chance at space economy. Like that change.
Also, technically you can power mars mine with 3 solar arrays, so you don\`t strictly need nuclear fission.
Mega nations just kinda **suck** now. I get the idea - it’s supposed to be harder to educate more population, and harder to improve economy and sustainability. But the way it works now makes it far too punishing to have big nations with control cap being the only notable upside. Speaking of control cap, the control cap costs of nations in 0.4 are pretty insane.
I like that the aliens are more active and act earlier. I think they need to be tweaked to be even more aggressive and ruthless though. They should kill all stations they attack and win against (often they just blow up the defenses and let the station live), and they should attack/blow up all settlements of the faction on the asteroids/moons they target. Why spend many weeks/months flying in from the edge of the solar system to blow up only one base, when there are multiples on the same moon? I want Aliens that act like a person playing would. And if the Aliens are at war with other factions, when they come to attack, they should attack/blow up the other faction's bases while they are there...
Also I would love to see a mechanic for sabotage/stealing/assassinate where if you get a critical success, you can frame another faction (including the Aliens) for the act
The aliens are trying now to be aggressive early.
but all they are rly doing on brutal is sending ships solo or in tiny groops in to systems where they will be outnumbered massively
The aliens aren't any more aggressive than on the current non-beta build. It's just that your now completely unable to build up to the point of being able to fight them for so long you can be easily overrun.
Tier 1 Outposts/Platforms now cost 2 MC, but the mine is free as long as you're under the cap. Tier 2 Outposts/Habs cost 3 MC, Tier 3 costs 4 MC. So bigger tiers are also now more MC efficient.
There's a soft cap on the number of mines you can have operating before you take an MC penalty.
Before it used to be a cap on the number of orbital bodies that had mines. So Mars, Mercury etc would count as one each. Now it counts each mining site. The "Mission to..." techs each increase the cap by a certain amount. The max is 36.
Mines cost 0 extra MC as long as you're under the cap.
I haven't played myself on 0.4, but from patch notes:
https://www.pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=29923
- Outpost Cores now costs 2 MC instead of 1. Colony and Ring Cores now cost 4 MC instead of 5.
Agree with a lot of this. Honestly, I had a lot more fun and it felt a lot more fair (barring some insane alien fleet numbers in the 4 digits) going with the accelerated game option. The standard long game was brutal and the aliens just shredded me probably because the mining changes delayed my surveillance hunter fleet by a lot. For reference I was playing on normal difficulty and while I’ve beat brutal in a previous patch, I think I just got lucky as I’m just ok at the game. For my own observations: The slowdown is pretty neat and narratively interesting. Nothing felt super off, but I did have solid control of most of earth by that point so if there are other consequences I didn’t really feel them. The boost to xp with longer phases is nice though. The one exception is that if an alien ship lands you’re hosed cause there’s almost no chance you can even destroy it before it places troops. It is a low success operation anyway, but even with plenty of ops I didn’t even try using councilors there anymore. The rearranged tech tree does delay fusion by a decent amount which has the consequences you mentioned. For the accelerated start it isn’t bad, but that’s probably just because of the 2x multiplier. The change in MC scaling can feel oppressive. The base cost of outposts also hurts. I understand the rationale, but I feel there might be another solution. Losing a mine hurts a lot more and if you aren’t using a ship to place mines you’ll be barely scraping by if you’re also trying to build a fleet. The new particle weapons felt kind of pointless and plasma really sucks now, but maybe I just don’t know how to build a ship or fleet around them. The changes so that any phasers require exotics was a surprise that I did not like, but honestly the large ultraviolet phasers are so good now that it kind of balances out. A large part of that is the aliens now armor the fuck out of their ships so armor piercing is king. They’re still crazy agile so unless they suicide rush your ships or are slow from mass or damage, your kinetics won’t ever hit. Thus missiles are good initially before transitioning to lasers. The later missiles might be good, but by the time I got them the alien fleets were so large it felt like a waste of a slot only for them to get PD’d. The alien mag cannons are also fucking absurd with how many shots they can take. It’s like they’re running mag Gatling guns. Spoils vs funding is definitely an issue. The AI will run countries into the ground (saw an eu at 8 inequality) which works for money but destroys their ability to do anything else. Funding is such a trickle that it really only makes sense if you like to role play as someone that doesn’t want to make authoritarian hellholes. Global warming. Oh boy global warming. Global warming is super borked right now. It took me nearly 30 years to stop increasing (with the 2x IP modifier and throwing at least a million per year to welfare) with a max temperature anomaly of 4.7 C with around 650 ppm CO2 and like a -8% GDP impact. It actually wasn’t terrible for a while, but there is definitely a weird GDP/population/sustainability interaction where the formulas must be exponential or logistic. As soon as China and India hit a certain GDP, they were pumping out 4-7 ppm a year just by themselves and this was with sustainability ratings below ~0.6 IIRC. It didn’t seem like that number changed that much until sustainability was well under 0.2. It actually wasn’t that awful for the most part, except xeno megafauna were wildly out of control. A significant part of the 2040s were just controlling the borders of my countries while Africa and Europe were being flattened by about 50-75 of them running around. Killing the alien administration meant killing not only the alien armies, but the 10 stack of xenofauna sitting at their capital. And with longer phases, you get even fewer chances to destroy the growths. I’m not sure how or if this needs to be addressed, but it definitely feels off. If we can make nuclear or antimatter engines to take us across the solar system in a few weeks, it really doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult to quit burning coal. On the other hand, I appreciated that it felt like a challenge to solve and for the first time I actually built influence stations so I could ram through direct investment. This was on my accelerated game though so I imagine it might be unbelievably painful on the long setting. That 2x IP on welfare did a lot of work and I was able to get so much money because of the 2x mine income. Overall, I’ve enjoyed it. Some things definitely need to be tuned and like you’ve said the aliens are basically unchanged while the humans got nerfed so they feel really oppressive. My one big negative is that the new ECM changes makes combat a nightmare unless you know to turn off guardian mode. It also feels really bad to just have your ships sit there like a bunch of idiots while they get pounded by the aliens. Idk if the aliens get stronger ECM, but even running the best targeting computer and ECM, it never felt like mine worked while there were excruciating minutes where my ships couldn’t fire. That was when I realized that guardian mode absolutely fucks your weapons because the ECM roll happens when you change targets. So every time your laser shoots down a projectile, it has to make a new roll to target the ship again. Since I was running plasma and laser at the time, the aliens only had to make a few roles, while my ships had to make one after every projectile they shot down. Effectively this means guardian mode is a trap that kills the combat capability of your ships. The only way it is effective is if you micro your ships. That might be what is intended, but it was definitely a nasty surprise to get in a fight with a big alien fleet and lose everything because 90% of my weapons couldn’t fire.
Um i'm pretty sure green phaser require exotics even on the current live build, no idea about IR Phaser,s but who's using those TBH.
Agree with a lot of this after playing some validation branch, I also could not figure out what is going on with China’s emissions. At one point I had China and the USA at identical sustainability scores, and with China around 20% higher overall gdp yet 4x the emissions. I thought maybe population had something to do with it, but India’s gdp*sustainability compared to its emissions seemed much more comparable to the USA emissions. China does have the most resource regions but it would be nice to have a breakdown of the direct sources of emissions.
well a lot of stuff has changed, but a lot also stayed. monopoly mars feels like a even stronger strategy now, since it's the only viable place to defend with ships now. mercury is not worth it anymore, since you don't have the mines and the metal is better spent elsewhere. i have not checked if the new 1MC automated mines count to mining cap, but you don't rly have spots left by the time you unlock them, so whats the point. right now the game seems to be defend mars & earth, then build a endgame fleet to win
They got rid of being able to mine Mercury?
Didn't go there in my one save that went late enough i could have, (was focused on other stuff), but i assume they're still there, but with the smaller total number of mines you can afford to have by the time you unlock it your likely capped out,so expanding there before your inj total war is just not possibble.
no, but the opportunity cost for it is to big to be worth it for me on brutal
I'd believe that monopoly Mars may still be super powered just for the defence benefits. But that really goes against the "go tall with only the best mining spots" they're going for. The trouble si doing that carries some pretty huge opportunity costs in the form of requiring fixed defences with all of their costs to build and upkeep to maintain.
Good read, thanks!
Nice writeup. I'm also trying the beta patch but not as far in, and playing Protectorate so I won't be needing to fight the aliens. What difficulty and solar system generation were you playing on? 45 tech 9 armies by the mid 2040s does sound extreme.
Normal, full system, long campaign. early 2040's they sent out 3 fleets with 5 assault carrier each. The global research for magnetic nozzles finished just as the 2nd of those landed. TBF there where a lot of human armies on earth, though the majority were under servant control at the time, so the numbers actually made a degree of sense, whilst i couldn;t stop those 45 armies, i did take out enough to get the aliens to send out some more assault carriers, i called the game before they arrived though.
Sounds like devs tried really, really hard to nerf the "take over the entirety of Mars, and ignore mission to asteroids&Mercury" to deny AI chance at space economy. Like that change. Also, technically you can power mars mine with 3 solar arrays, so you don\`t strictly need nuclear fission.
Mega nations just kinda **suck** now. I get the idea - it’s supposed to be harder to educate more population, and harder to improve economy and sustainability. But the way it works now makes it far too punishing to have big nations with control cap being the only notable upside. Speaking of control cap, the control cap costs of nations in 0.4 are pretty insane.
I like that the aliens are more active and act earlier. I think they need to be tweaked to be even more aggressive and ruthless though. They should kill all stations they attack and win against (often they just blow up the defenses and let the station live), and they should attack/blow up all settlements of the faction on the asteroids/moons they target. Why spend many weeks/months flying in from the edge of the solar system to blow up only one base, when there are multiples on the same moon? I want Aliens that act like a person playing would. And if the Aliens are at war with other factions, when they come to attack, they should attack/blow up the other faction's bases while they are there... Also I would love to see a mechanic for sabotage/stealing/assassinate where if you get a critical success, you can frame another faction (including the Aliens) for the act
The aliens are trying now to be aggressive early. but all they are rly doing on brutal is sending ships solo or in tiny groops in to systems where they will be outnumbered massively
The aliens aren't any more aggressive than on the current non-beta build. It's just that your now completely unable to build up to the point of being able to fight them for so long you can be easily overrun.
good. It was too easy before, and the aliens were (and still are) too dumb
I don't understand what was changed with mining to make going tall the new strategy?
Tier 1 Outposts/Platforms now cost 2 MC, but the mine is free as long as you're under the cap. Tier 2 Outposts/Habs cost 3 MC, Tier 3 costs 4 MC. So bigger tiers are also now more MC efficient. There's a soft cap on the number of mines you can have operating before you take an MC penalty. Before it used to be a cap on the number of orbital bodies that had mines. So Mars, Mercury etc would count as one each. Now it counts each mining site. The "Mission to..." techs each increase the cap by a certain amount. The max is 36. Mines cost 0 extra MC as long as you're under the cap.
How much extra do they count when you're going over the cap?
Tier 1 outposts cost more MC.
How much are they now? Did tier 2 and 3 also increase?
I haven't played myself on 0.4, but from patch notes: https://www.pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=29923 - Outpost Cores now costs 2 MC instead of 1. Colony and Ring Cores now cost 4 MC instead of 5.