Dewar

Apparently, not having the master challenge prevents you from getting: 1) Costumes 2) XP Boosts which effect the 1-10 character level associated with the master challenges, not in game XP 3) Anything above level 5 So nothing all that bad. I can definitely confirm that I got card packs from hitting level 2 with a character, which is the important thing.for me. Losing out on that extra XP is a bit of a shame, but not critical.

Are you sure the claim was for yourself? If it was for someone else in your court, three things have to be true for you to get the land under you. 1) The title has to be below you (so you'd have to be a king to take a duchy this way) 2) The person whose claim you are pushing needs to be related to you, or already have land in your court 3) France cannot have high or absolute crown authority as that prevents lands from passing from the kingdom through inheritance. Edited to reflect information that Jaraknarn remembered that I didn't. Also, I had no idea about the flag color.

Fighting that lizard thing on the bridge is the right way to go. Fighting it later in the swamp is a huge pain. It was a pleasure to watch the VoD, some real moments of pain and triumph there.

Sounds like they're working on exactly what i want, so that's good. In other news, I'm trying to bring my latest game to a conclusion of some sort. I ended up getting declared on by a federation of five other empires. Man, that was an exhilarating fight, outmatched and doing guerrilla strikes on enemy wormholes to break their fleets apart then nipping at the heels of the smaller fleets. Unfortunately, it was broken AI that ended up deciding the war. I managed to get in and land troops on the capital planet of one of the larger members of the federation. The computer then floated 20k worth of fleet above the planet, but kept sending one or two troops at a time trying to take it back. With their major fleet anchored and the slow drain on resources of sending so many soldiers to their doom, I was able to run around and destroy the rest of their star bases and finally out-grow their fleet. Still really fun. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that combat is the expected mid-game past-time.I wonder if that's the difference between those sites that gave middling reviews and those that gave good ones?

I believe it's just the pacifist/militarist trait that effects influence from alliances/rivals. From the wiki, it doesn't look like it ever actually gives you points for alliances, it just doesn't hurt as much. http://www.stellariswiki.com/Ethos

Yeah, I've found it extremely tough to find accurate Paragon information out there. I guess that's a good sign that they're actually working on the beta and changing things.

I saw a lot of people playing this on my friends list yesterday, and I didn't even know it had come out. There's some weird anti-marketing vortex going on here.

Next NVidia cards have been announced for late May (for the 1080) and early June (for the 1070.)

I thought it was just character XP that was shared, not CardXP? I definitely haven't noticed getting any +100s on my screen when someone next to me last-hits.

The influence you get for rivals varies with your war/pacifist leanings, as does the penalty for alliances.

A being a member of the Holy Roman Empire can definitely make things tougher. There's a lot of framework in place to keep the emperor from just eating everyone below him and becoming all-powerful. Those same structures can make it difficult to do anything as a lower level of royalty.

Weird, I ran into that same issue and it was just a visual thing. Maybe when they patched last, they disabled it entirely? I'm pretty sure I did it last night though. So far I have played four games: 1st UN one I mentioned earlier when I was war declared 30 years in by my best friend and lost. 2nd UN one I got 200+ years in with a pretty strong federation, but then a war was declared that the surrender/impose demands button is not functional for. Then I played an insectoid religious warlike species on hard, but the jump up of difficulty as well as playing with a spiral galaxy and hyperspace killed me pretty quick Now 200 years into a fungoid materialist/war game where I just managed to knock down my nearest rival by a few pegs in the biggest and evenest war I've been in any of these games so far. I think about playing it a lot. I play it every day when I get home, but I'm still not sure why. Whatever middle game Paradox talked about developing just isn't materializing for me. I've had one rebellion total in all these games, it was a bit frustrating but nothing I couldn't handle. I've had some major middle-game events, but no choices to make about them, just clicking "That's too bad" on the pop-up and moving on, War seems to be the only thing worth pursuing once you get big enough, and then once you take out a few people even that looses it's luster. *shrug* But I keep on playing it, so it must not be that bad. I hope they really expand the diplomacy part of the game. The thing I liked about CK2 was being able to take over countries through political games rather than out-right fighting.

You can still order that colony ship around, even though it's the color of your sector and doesn't show up on your overlay.

So apparently my game ends as I am stuck in a war that will never end.

Somehow I missed this all this time. I've filled in some of my info, will fill in the rest when I get home.

Anyone have any experience with defense bases? Do they block an enemy from getting any deeper into your space like forts in EU4? Do they force an enemy to fight them when they enter the gravity same well before they can blow up mining bases and such? Or are they only useful combined with ships at the location that get buffs from the base?

For troops you mean? You just build the troop on the army screen of the planet and they come with transports. Note, I had to ask someone this as well, and never got to the point of actually invading during my war, so I might be missing some nuance there.

I'm really bummed that my second game has been fairly bereft of primitive cultures anywhere near me. Of course, a primitive culture is ultimately why I lost my first game, so maybe that's better in the long run. I'm about 60 years in, and have reached the point where everything feels fairly stable and I'm just researching colonizing techs and creating sectors from the less-habitable options out there. The one real challenge I'm facing at the moment is begging to get into the good graces of the race who currently owns the planet with the last species I need to connect for a big story mission, and keeping my military updated enough so I don't look weak to a few larger, but currently cordial, neighbors. I think I'm in the stage that internal strife is supposed to be making things interesting, but I'm still over 80% loyalist, and that's even with immigration treaties with anyone around who will sign on with me. I guess I need to work on my happiness or something. I did win one war though, so that's something. Through an ally we support a faction in a totalitarian neighbor that ended up splitting them in half to form a new republic, who then joined the alliance. I've got the tech to make it a federation now, but I'm not 100% sure how to actually do that.

I don't know if Nintendo games are really blu-ray filling monstrosities like a lot of PS4/XB1 games. You can get 32gb SD cards for around $12 on the cheap end, and probably cheaper if you are manufacturing them yourself. If the NX turns out to really be a fully portable system with some sort of dock or base station, then you can't really do disks because of the power usage of spinning a disk all the time as well as bump protection.

i wonder if that would be possible with the general size of a Blizzard game's playerbase.

I have taken to concentrating on getting mineral income well above the recommended 30, then circling back to get the credit income up. If you have enough minerals, you can do tricks to get your income high such as docking all your ships, building extra power plants on the surface, or (if really desperate) destroying a station or two and rebuilding it later. The biggest mistake I made for my starting game was building a lot of research stations. They are very important, but you can use that income for other things right at the beginning and circle around to build them a little later. You need a scientist on a science ship to really do anything, and you loose quite a bit of research if you don't have a scientist on one of your research types, but you can get by without governors until you have sectors, and generals and admirals until you're in fights with enemies that are approximately equal in strength. Many of the diplomatic options are limited by green techs. I just unlocked federations, and the ability to have a non-human be my president. But not mining, research, or observation stations.

This stuff maybe be more suited to the Game Dev forum, or maybe https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/10468-creativity/ This thread is more for shilling things that you have worked on for profit or clicks. Edit: I mean, you're welcome to post it here if you want, but it might get more eyes over there.

Played a game as the UN for about 3 hours and 30 years, had my best friend with 180 opinion of me declare war on my uplifted vassal, lost immediately. Played a second game with the UN in which I got a lot less resources, but a lot more habitable planets, got to 40 years in about 2 hours, and am doing much better. Having played a lot of 4X games, I'm a bit disappointed to say it's another one of those. Surprisingly polished, with some interesting smaller ideas (such as the tech cards and race creation) but nothing really ground breaking. So far I haven't really seen the potential for emergent stories that EU4 and CK2 have, and the quest lines have all been fairly short and boring. I was really enthusiastic about the randomly generated space creatures, only to find out that you run into the exact same ones on a second play. Still, I really enjoy Stellaris. It's very smooth and easy to learn (especially for a Paradox game) and it's been a while since I played a 4X (I skipped the new GalCiv and MoO.) I expect I'll be playing it for a while, and it will evolve quite a bit over the next 5 years of DLC.

The DLC is awesome.

It occurred to me that both the streamers and other people watching them may not want to be spoiled on this stuff so, in response to Kyir,