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Which species do you find easiest and hardest to play?

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2016 4:20 am
by defaultuser
Based on the type of universe and your personal style, which species lead to the easiest games and which likely to be difficult?

Re: Which species do you find easiest and hardest to play?

Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2016 3:42 am
by MatGB
This is a question I'm very interested in answers to. For me and my playstyle(s), I'm currently finding most species to be roughly balanced and on a par with each other, the toning down of the Egassem I did last week after the massive pump up I did last month has made their full-on-charge out produce the enemy early approach scary to go up against and viable to play with, but they can be stopped/outperformed by various approaches by other species, in my current game I'm playing Clusters/Gysache and was completely blocked at the beginning by an Egassem AI, I had to change my approach to ensure I got ahead in tech then built enough ships quickly to beat them back, and it was hard work (made harder because all the natives nearby were also bad attack troops), but once I'd done it the combination of Great Research and Ultimate Industry/Great Attack Troops was lethal for all the other nearby empires.

I think, currently, the most debilitating species stat is bad ground troops, and I also think too many species have it and some of them don't really deserve it. If you're playing with a species with it and are lucky enough to grab a native world without it quickly you get around it, otherwise you can be in real trouble way into the midgame. But that's for my playstyle, which is ultimately a very fast military expansion backed up by not quite enough ships to defend if I get in trouble.

If playing on high monsters/specials, then a species with bad pilots can suffer, and I personally avoid High Planets as a setting partially as I like to explore bigger maps and partially because I dislike having to build doomstack fleets just to survive the planetary defences (my current game is High, I'm testing Require systems with non black hole stars to have a satellite. for balance).

I generally don't find that the number of starlanes is affected that much by species choice, although if on low starlanes/low planets then having a good supply species can help.

Re: Which species do you find easiest and hardest to play?

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2016 4:44 am
by defaultuser
As I have been playing an older version, I'm not really up on the Egassem changes. What were they?

Re: Which species do you find easiest and hardest to play?

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2016 6:59 am
by MatGB
Ah, I can't remember when they all went in. Great Attack Troops, Great Supply are the earliest, then more recently I changed the population bonuses so that not all the techs are affected by the Bad Population malus, weakening Gysache/Scylior and strengthening Egassem, then even more recently I made some of the production boosts subject to the species bonus, so Ultimate Industry now really does mean Ultimate Industry and they should, in theory, outproduce any other race at a similar point in the tech tree (but suffer on research due to bad pop/bad research, the latter is also strengthened).

At one point while I was doing this Ultimate Industry was more Super-Ultimate-Awesome Industry and they were basically unstoppable in the early game but I managed to fix that (I think). Fairly sure it's about right now.

Egassem and to a lesser extent George are very good at steamroller early conquest, so are weakest in a low natives/sparse/few opponents galaxy and very strong in a dense highly populated one. Etty suffer in sparse galaxies as they can barely see outside their home system, whereas Trith and Laenfa benefit as they can see a huge distance so sparsity makes it easier for them to find targets than other races.

Gysache and humans are all rounders, Chato are similar but prefer a Young Galaxy as it opens up multiple extra planets.

Re: Which species do you find easiest and hardest to play?

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2016 4:20 pm
by wobbly
Not sure if you noticed but while you did change the numbers the pedia still displays the old values. Confused me a bit.
MatGB wrote: Egassem and to a lesser extent George are very good at steamroller early conquest, so are weakest in a low natives/sparse/few opponents galaxy and very strong in a dense highly populated one. Etty suffer in sparse galaxies as they can barely see outside their home system, whereas Trith and Laenfa benefit as they can see a huge distance so sparsity makes it easier for them to find targets than other races.
I'm not sure I agree with Laenfa preferring sparse galaxies. Against the AI with the default game settings I tend to find that the AI will plonk down an outpost in my territory about the time I reach organic hulls. I tend to just wait in the adjacent system for them to build me a free colony. With fast cheap organics they can be very good at quick strikes as they can see where the enemy fleets are. It's actually to their advantage to have the AI close enough that it doesn't have much time to build up. After all you don't actually have to defend your own Laenfa planets. You can partially get round their bad troop problem by building troop ships as your initial scouts.

Re: Which species do you find easiest and hardest to play?

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2016 6:05 pm
by MatGB
wobbly wrote:Not sure if you noticed but while you did change the numbers the pedia still displays the old values. Confused me a bit.
Ah, um, yes. :oops:

I even mentioned I had to do an update while testing the work, then completely forgot when I pushed it and went on to do something else.

Um, can you point me at the bits I dfeinitely need to do? I'm in the middle of testing two new things by others and working on some other stuff and I'm certain I'll get mixed up (again).
MatGB wrote: Egassem and to a lesser extent George are very good at steamroller early conquest, so are weakest in a low natives/sparse/few opponents galaxy and very strong in a dense highly populated one. Etty suffer in sparse galaxies as they can barely see outside their home system, whereas Trith and Laenfa benefit as they can see a huge distance so sparsity makes it easier for them to find targets than other races.
I'm not sure I agree with Laenfa preferring sparse galaxies. Against the AI with the default game settings I tend to find that the AI will plonk down an outpost in my territory about the time I reach organic hulls. I tend to just wait in the adjacent system for them to build me a free colony. With fast cheap organics they can be very good at quick strikes as they can see where the enemy fleets are. It's actually to their advantage to have the AI close enough that it doesn't have much time to build up. After all you don't actually have to defend your own Laenfa planets. You can partially get round their bad troop problem by building troop ships as your initial scouts.
Note: I didn't say Laenfa suffered in dense galaxies ;-) I basically agree with you, and I really must try that scout/troop ship idea, that could be quite nifty in the early-to-mid—Symbiotic Hulls then Proto when available?

Etty suffer in sparse and/or spread out galaxies, because they can't see much, Laenfa, well, they do well in any setup as long as you know what you're doing with them. I constantly forget that the AI can't see my planets when I'm playing them and get all paranoid when they get close. Every time.

Re: Which species do you find easiest and hardest to play?

Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2016 7:05 pm
by wobbly
MatGB wrote:
wobbly wrote:Not sure if you noticed but while you did change the numbers the pedia still displays the old values. Confused me a bit.
Ah, um, yes. :oops:

I even mentioned I had to do an update while testing the work, then completely forgot when I pushed it and went on to do something else.

Um, can you point me at the bits I dfeinitely need to do? I'm in the middle of testing two new things by others and working on some other stuff and I'm certain I'll get mixed up (again).
Pretty much the species menu of the pedia. (Also mouse over race in the galaxy settings). For example the pedia entry for Cray is bad industry: -50%, Good Research: 150% but when I switch focuses on my planet the numbers are actually
bad industry: -25%, Good Research: 150%. I know Egassem industry is also wrong in the pedia & also Laenfa Research. I assume most of them are also out.

Re: Which species do you find easiest and hardest to play?

Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2016 6:18 am
by MatGB
Yes, that's it, thanks.

I added more stuff into the numbers that get affected by the modifiers, then reduced the modifiers, Bad went to 25% and Ultimate went to 300%, I'll get that updated (it's a very minor change that then propagates to multiple places)

Re: Which species do you find easiest and hardest to play?

Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:41 am
by spikethehobbit
'Pedia really should pull numbers from the database, so changes like these propagate automatically.

Re: Which species do you find easiest and hardest to play?

Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2016 9:52 pm
by defaultuser
I have been mulling my own question somewhat. Although I haven't used them in a while, Chato seemed to be the easiest (especially if selecting for a young universe). The bad troop thing hurts, but the ease of colonization and the large research bonus without a corresponding industry deficit generally would get me out in front.

I think I have had some of my easiest and hardest games with Egassem. It really just depends on the initial layout.

Recently I had a game where the local area, while off by itself, had relatively little for the home team to colonize. There were also no natives in that starting area, and the next cluster was far away with just empty spaces and gas giant worlds connecting. So a lot of early research had go towards Construction. By the time the two partial areas were linked, AIs were ahead in research and production. Luckily no "back door" to worry about, so I had some success concentrating forces and getting them to fight each other at least part of the time.

On the other hand, I just had one where right away I found an unprotected Scyllior world. Well, that made things very easy. It wasn't long before Titan hulls were swatting Robocruisers out of the way.

Re: Which species do you find easiest and hardest to play?

Posted: Mon Sep 12, 2016 2:36 am
by godel
Any species with bad attack troups is harder.
I tend to have close distance (6 out of 80 or tighter) games. An early start is important.
The eggasm are nutzo.
I feel that the balance would be better served if the troop production rates were like this
+2 10
+1 8
0 6
-1 5
-2 4

That would produce a result that would still have advantages without the crushing problems we now have.