It's fine to have "natives" who are very difficult to conquer or other obstacles, but natives like the Raargh (could be misspelling that) just make the game less fun because if you conquer them they are basically useless.
If they are really useless for you, just don't conquer them. There are good natives to have and bad ones too. Removing all bad ones is not funnier to everyone.
it kind of contradicts the long story line on them. If the Raargh are really stone age, wouldn't I either be able to wipe them out easily from orbit or via ground troops?
They are fierce and powerful fighters on the ground, and that's why they require more effort to conquer. If what you want is to wipe them out before conquering, use bombardment to reduce their pop. to zero.
Regardless, the "story" says "stone age". 20th century technologies (machine gun, flame thrower, tank, etc) would be enough to wipe out any "stone age" culture completely. A more consistent story might be "this planet is contaminated by: " (take your pick numerous possibilities: radioactive isotopes, insidious nanites, bio-engineered adaptive pathogens, deadly time or space distortions, fierce robots) and then you need technology X or Y to remediate the planet before you take it over
the only 4x game I played where the computer opponents felt "real" and there were big reasons to do diplomacy was Master of Orion.
In MoO2 it was so easy to exploit diplomacy with AIs and make them puppets. It wasn't actually "real" since you could fool them into exchanges clearly bad for them. When playing against humans it was much different, real diplomacy.
I was talking about the original Moo, that one really required a player to use the tool of diplomacy, and computer opponents did feel like they had consistent personalities. Most AI opponents tend to feel (like the ones in the Civ franchise) erratic and there's no real point or reward to anything other than total war for the whole game.
I've played games where I have "Domesticated MegaFauna" researched, and a planet with some nest on it having an outpost... but I still don't see what to do to make or control said creatures
Maybe the Pedia should be more specific. Currently we have:
The text about the tech: "Though huge and alien the time-tested arts of domestication can also be applied to the space monsters that travel the starlanes. Building Colonies or Outposts at monster nests will enable the raising of domesticated monsters."
It's not clear about how you raise those monsters.
In each of the monster nests: "At some point young <monster> will rise from this place. With knowledge of [[tech SHP_DOMESTIC_MONSTER]], these mega-fauna could be domesticated."
Again, it's ambiguous.
It is not that "at some point" monsters will rise from the nest (as in "at some point a door will open and monsters will come out of it"), but that monsters will be born at random frequency.
With tech SHP_DOMESTIC_MONSTER it is not that the monsters "could" be domesticated, but that the hatched monster become automatically controlled by the empire.
I was assuming what you said in the final sentence, but it seemed like one time I had met the criteria (technology + outpost at nest site) some monster either popped up there or elsewhere and wiped the outpost out. It was very confusing, as are many aspects of the game.
3) I'm attacking some computer player and trying to take over their worlds, only now they have good shields on them. I have no idea what tech I have to develop to get my ground troops through the shields
You are right, I can't find any place where player is informed of that. Troop pod description talks about minimum number of troops for a successful invasion, how to select the ones you want, and that ships are lost after using them. But nothing about the requirement of zero planetary shields to be able to initiate an invasion.
I should amend my statement. There could be several reasons why I can't invade (stealth, shields, or maybe even some other aspect I don't get). The problem is I send a fleet there and no battle happens, troops don't land. Nothing tells me what I need to do to overcome either the stealth or shields or whatever is the issue. It's fine to have obstacles for battle or invasion (such as stealth, shields), but it is very frustrating to have no way of finding out what the issue is, or what you can do to overcome it. In MOO shields could be an obstacle but you could always tell if that was the case and you knew exactly how to overcome it.
If someone can point me to where the "String Tables" (or whatever the blobs of text are called that are used by the Pedia etc) I might be able to look those over and give some suggestions
They are in the default/stringtables folder.
Better than suggestions would be actual working on the files to contribute to the project.
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I'm perfectly wiling to help out on this. I just wish to say a few things:
1) I'm not currently on your dev team- so I don't know where "default/stringtables" is (for starters I'm not familiar with where your repository is, not sure how to get access, etc)
2) until I fully understand concept X I probably should just make comments. That is, there are numerous aspects in the game that confuse me (I can make a small list of ones I remember off the top of my head, but it's really a small subset) and until I actually know how they work if I make a change to the text I could be making it worse rather than better)
Points of confusion:
-asteroid reformation:
-the text seems to imply that if you want ships with asteroid parts (rock armor, asteroid hulls) you need a system with a shipyard, and you need an asteroid re-processor in the same star-system. However, I was able to make ships with "rock armor" in system other than the one with the re-processor. Maybe it needs to be the same system for asteroid hulls, or maybe the text implication is off.
-nothing indicates if there is any advantage to having more than one asteroid reprocessing station (like availability goes up) or not
-asteroid systems are often marked "poor" not sure if it is poor as a colony for exobots, poor for reprocessing, poor for industrial output, or what. Some asteroid belts are marked as high in minerals, again it is unclear if this is just a boost to the industry output, makes for better reprocessing, or makes for a better exobot colony, or some combo
-Robots:
-robots show up as a ship part if you develop a robotic hull line, however, there are lots of things that are confusing with them.
-if I add a robot as a part in a robotic ship line I often get the 'clear as mud' warning "That is ROBOTIC" and am prevented from building the ship. Can I only build it at an exobot colony with a shipyard? Or what do I need to do?
-the result of having the robot on board also is slightly unclear. The text seems to indicate that if you have one ship with one robot it gets an extra shield power of 1. If you have two ships with one robot each they somehow add their robotic shields to each other... and the effect is capped at a group of 20. I didn't see any mention on what happened if you had more than one robot on one ship.
-Compressed energy hulls were almost as confusing as the asteroid reformation. But it looked like there I really had to build it in the same system as had a star of a given type (the main thing that confused me was how to meet the other requirements which took a little while)
-Gas giant generators:
-if they only generate industrial output for their system, does that mean that one should only build them in systems where you have colonies and gas giant planets? Or if you have a star system with just gas giants does it increase your overall empire production to put generators there
-Solar generators:
-the text here is bad because it says in the Pedia that industry output for said system is multiplied by X given the type of star (values being different for different stars). The problem is that the value of X is always < 1. So if we take it literally the industrial output goes down if you make said generator (the text should be 1.4 rather than 0.4....)