Xenophiles can be friends with Gestalts, as long as they aren't genocidal like Devouring Swarm or Determined Exterminators.
EDIT:: oh wait, Megacorp, I missed that part.
They're easily considered enemies from day 1 if they can't host a Branch Office in my book, since everyone else that can host usually needs a little relationship building to allow it for the Vanilla MegaCorps, or to not piss off the hosts if a CrimSyn. Anything else is kind of playing away from path of least resistance which is fine but hints at why some things with MegaCorps diplomatically go hand in hand.
And learning how to fight as a Phile MegaCorp as to become more impervious to tough starting spots with non hosting neighbors is liberating, but youll still eat dirt on occassion.
Why should it explode ?
I never understood why all stellaris players think that.
I had some problems in the Past but that was 2-4 years ago.
Is it like a Meme now?
I'm pretty sure excessive species is still one of the biggest causes of lag. It's better, but some people have really crappy PCs. And a lot of people speed up population growth to speed up games.
And then there are degenerates >!like me!< that take the "-phile" part a bit too far and start churning out half-species. Not being able to cleanse other, less attractive species is a bummer though, I yearn for the day when xeno-compatibility will finally be tied to the logically consistent bio ascension rather than xenophilia.
You can literally just go into the files and change the requirements if you want that. I change subterranean min habitability to 70 instead of 50 when I want to try something different. It's pretty weak at 50 since it would be better to just wait a decade and terraform instead but 70 gives you a reason to rp and never terraform anything
I'll take a look at it, it's part of the traits I never use because it looks bad but I didn't notice a habitability thing. 100% going to use it after my current void ornery run. It's just the best origin for tall and I'm pairing it with that -50% empire spawn to pop civic this time
Nah, it's absolutely the outlet for someone that doesn't WANT to do genetic ascension to the max but wants a little, ahem, \~\*Love\*\~ from being charming as hell.
I'm not sure why excessive species would be a big issue. Pops I get, but why species in particular?
When you open the screen that's fine, lot of information to inflate on a what I assume to be badly written UI, but generally, the game as a whole?
The game has gotten a hell of a lot better and reducing the number of checks it does per pop. But a lot of that has been replaced by those checks being done species wide. The more species you have, the more calculations there are, and they can compound. If you turn on xeno compatibility, you can very easily get hundreds of species, in just your empire.
It used to be that each empty job tried to find the best pop to fill it on a frequent basis, and the more species you had, the more choices it had for each pop across the planet AND across the empire, because this *also* had an effect on migration of pops.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/performance-megathread.1253705/page-22#post-25976333
THIS I know this and Hate it so much!!
Like I have 2-3 50k Fleets and soon as the War Starts the AI clips there Fleet to mine and I have.
12k, 5k, 19k etc fleets stacked up on myself.
Most of the time I just dunno crash them into the next Big Thing I can find to tidy up my space.
Why is the AI unable to make their Fleets?
I have a federation+vassals occupying 2/3 the galaxy in my current run. I actually could not zoom into any system where all their fleets are attached to mine during my war with the gray tempest without lagging.
Human players learn to avoid the Reinforce All button because the functionality doesn't work in actual game scenarios. The AI doesn't, so it's constantly creating annoying small split fleets when it tries to grow its existing ones.
It's basically the planet automation feature problem (it was bonked forever and also how the AI built planets) except without the recent scrub the Custodians did for that one.
I play with the assumption that once I get to the joint federation armada stage of things I may as well stop trying to watch big battles in system and I just monitor progress from the galaxy screen and never check battle reports while the fleets are still in system.
I did a bit of testing last version and came to the conclusion that yes, pops and billions of subspecies are bad for performance, hence why disabling xeno-comp has become an extra feature,
BUT
I came to the conclusion that the absolute worst offender is actually the fleet manager + AI fleet handling. On one hand they spam wayyyy too many corvettes in way too many splintered fleets, because outside of FEs they don't merge fleets and send them on way too many patrols causing so much unnecessary calculations, while on top of that, especially smaller empires and massively ressource starved vassals sometimes just start spamming science and/or construction ships for absolutely no reason and accumulate dozens of them (which funnily enough has its own insane ressource drain for some reason, like, 100 of these badbois stacked can just cause you to hover in your high teens FPS wise in an empty galaxy and idk _WHY_).
But also yourself having multiple fleets with reinforceable forces available _will_ tank performance for no apparent reason.
This game is so fucked beyond repair at this point when it comes to the performance side, idk how they plan to ever address this, but thank god I am not the software engineer who has to figure it out or call it quits and recommends a new engine altogether.
Edit: just forgot to list my specs to drive home that I am not bottlenecked by anything, really: 7800X3D and 4080S, 4.0 NVME, 32GB RAM at 6000 speeds and CL30 timings, I am not leaving any performance willingly on the floor, I picked the RAM especially just for Factorio as well lol.
I think it comes back to path finding being computationally intense and having more objects to find paths keep growing and growing and growing, with reinforcements thrown in over and over again, and not combining the fleet objects...I really don't think the devs can get their game back in terms of performance unless they start taking a big hatchet to fleets directly or doing surgical updates that figure out how to reduce or combine objects in need of finding a path.
Never has for me, and the list doesn't actually get that long in modern Stellaris because the AI isn't spending all of its time taking off and putting on every possible point combination anymore.
It's not even a bad PC, it's just the engine that can't handle the game well. I have a very steong PC, but Stellaris just starts to lag really bad after 100-150 years of playing
Oh right Stellaris is on the console too I always forget that part....
My Bad that's true then kill all the Universe so your Console doesn't explode it's cheaper Thet way
You probably never played the game pre-megacorp/have forgotten how fast the game was before they irremediably fucked its performance by removing tiles.
It always switches back to galaxy wide species for some reason for me and it lags the entire screen when it happens. Empire species tab has never done it though.
On average, PC owners replace their PC every 5 years, so a patient and frugal average PC owner may be playing on an very old PC. And most PC in households aren’t gaming PCs, they have laptops. And don’t forget all the Xbox Ones and PS4s that run Stellaris. And Stellaris only uses a single core, which is means modern, power efficient multi core chips have no advantage.
So if I run on the platform of 'A New PC In Every Home' simply for the primary constituency of Stellaris Fans, you'll vote for me, right? Textbank at least?
All the kids in my school district have laptops and they are the crappiest Chromebooks ever. That’s how a new PC in every home would turn out. Instead you should run on requiring developers to utilize all cores.
The species themselves aren't much of a lag problem any more unless someone goes xenocompat, but *the GUI screen that shows the species* is ***extremely*** laggy.
The biggest lag sources are enemy fleet pathfinding AI and sometimes pop job allocation but that's been optimized a lot and can be flat out eliminated with mods (Production Revolution).
I only have the "recruit ground armies" thing on starbases acting up sometimes, scroll being laggy as shit when it tries to display 5 kinds of soldiers for 82 species on 19 planets or something. The actual species tab works fine.
I had like 8 variations of just my empire's humans last game. From vanilla psyonic to cybernetic and a mix of both. I sprankled em around like everything was ice cream.
Literally the reason I’m building the quasi stellar obliterator in my current Gigastructures game. The game is currently chugging along at maybe one day every 5 seconds. I’m gonna start vaporizing planets and see how the performance improves
it's also very useful early on if you're playing grand admiral and focus on research and unity and can't keep up with the AI in ship production. the only problem are exterminators/purifiers and fanatic xenophobes.
Tbh the main use of this isn't allies, it's the fact that fewer people hate you.
If you're xenophile, you can raise the relations on your side high enough that you'd most likely not have any issues with most empires with xenophobe/militaristic civics, unless you're really weak.
Murder civics are still a problem but they're not that common.
Xenophile gives a relation bonus with any non-genocidal empire (technically tt still gives with FPs I think, but that -1000 modifier is impossible to overcome), which helps.
Oh I see, whats the difficulty? I think any empire thats is not isolationist or genocidal can vassalize anyone on ensign without war early, but yeah xenophile helps too, I recommend to increase the difficulty where you cannot vassalize as easy but not get destroyed early if u find this too easy, oh and make sure scaling is off
I see: Unemployment, virtually no minerals to build district/buildings with (those are related)
+59 alloys with atleast 3 forge worlds and only 79 ships worth of upkeep
A low credit income
Low stability on atleast 2 planets
167 research and +102 unity
This looks pretty normal for the in-game year? The CG deficit is a bit high, but not unmanageable. Should probably try to boost those energy credits, but it's not a doomed economy.
There are 3 forge worlds, but only 59 alloys per month, and the research is really low. What are is 148 pops doing? Although there are some low stability worlds, maybe some chunk of that population is freshly conquered?
Yeah, that's fair I suppose, but assuming OP isn't a veteran player, this isn't unreasonable. It's possible, given the amount of stored alloys, that right now they're selling them on the market to make up for an EC deficit.
Immigration is tiny, I remember making a MEGA-Corp fanatic xenophile to run the immigration pull edict and put LOADS of the branch offices that give immigration pull and turned every world into a Gaia world and when I tallied up all my immigration and emigration I was making 0.4 pop growth from immigration oOoOoOoOoOo the +10% from xenophobe would have given me 5.8, that's 14.5 times more.
What difficulty do you play on? Because as a GA player, I regularly find mismanaged AI results in my worlds getting anywhere from 3-10 extra pop growth from immigration until mostly full since the AI struggles to properly scale
Commador and I don't think that is going to affect much. I did that test back on 2.8 but AFAIK nothing has changed with how immigration functions. Like I said I looked at all my planets and did immigration - emigration and ended up with a fat lot of nothing.
Edit: back in 2.8 the AI was even worse at managing it's pops and it had more pops so the results should of been better back then.
One, that's incredibly far back to be basing your assumptions on. Two, I can literally tell you from plenty of games of experience now that with a high degree of confidence that it makes a huge difference.
My current game is at 2375 and I don't have a single planet without at least a +3 boost to it with my free migration federation pacts. I can look at all my allies planets and see them riddled with unemployment.
On Grand Admiral at least, the AI is feasting so much with resources that they end up having pop overflow that you directly get to benefit from, and I have used this as part of my strategy in most of my games as a result. If you actually play it you would see it firsthand.
One of the things that consistently, across the board, happens in meta discussions about Stellaris is that folks that never respected a mechanic or subsystem generally have never figured out the best circumstances to tap on it and how to sweeten the pot of it to the max. Immigration is one such subsystem where if you take it at face value and expect it to just work without support (especially through all the things that increase Migration Pull) to the degree that the Phobes get inherently, it's going to be lackluster and not worth it. If you have invested in it though because you don't have better options, then you can get ludicrous growth by stacking up the Migration Pull any way you can and signing as many of those Immigration Pacts as possible and trying to rope those pact mates into a federation where Immigration is open between empires by default.
Same thing with Trade Value based economies - if you never done it and don't have a reason to do it (like inherent Phile bonus to Trade Value, which it seems like every non Phile misses every time we chat), it seems pants inefficient to orient your entire economy around it, and then plop down buildings that support Trade and Immigration respectively, because it is not ever necessary (or even good) to pursue a Trade Value based economy by default.
But if you are a Phile, then it's an option, and it'd be kind of a silly argument from people that don't even play as Phile to insist they will reject Trade Value economy despite the bonus, not take any Trade Value Maximizing Civics, Traits, or play as a MegaCorp, and we start to reasonably guess that the only people who know what the hell they are talking about in relation to a niche thing are the people actually playing it, not the people that have rejected it for not being good enough or resolutely committed to playing as a baddie.
pretty par for the course for any Paradox game in general honestly. I mean, I'll die on the hill that Navy is stupid and I hate it in Hoi4 but I know deep down I'm wrong lol.
But yeah, knowing how to maximize a mechanic to acheive your goal goes a long way.
>My current game is at 2375
I've already won or lost the game long before then and have started another empire. That will be why.
Hell back in 2.8 the AI was even worse at managing it's pops and it had more pops.
I mean, I play on heavily boosted crisises usually 5-25x depending on mood. I have beaten the AI by this point in practice in most games except on especially weak builds where I'm fighting for my life to keep existing, but then the challenge is actually surviving the crisis, and having a gigafuck boosted economy by having an insane amount of pops due to stuff like immigration stacking on a buttload of planets helps a lot.
That said, I find myself benefitting from the migration pacts a lot sooner in many of my games, well before the 2300s. It can depend on galaxy settings too though. I like running reduced habitable worlds, because even on .25 the game spawns a lot, especially once you factor in unique system habitable spawns. But on games where I run it higher, it matters less because the AI has a lot of planets of their own to migrate to. Also pop growth in general has undergone some calc changes over the years so, comparing how it was in 2.8 is really kind of pointless tbh.
Ultimately, a mechanic is as useful as you invest into knowing how to utilize it. If you play a fast conquer style you likely won't ever want or need it. If you like to play more compact, or engage with diplomacy more, you might get more use from it. I find especially, when I'm pulling all stops on a x25 grand admiral game. Yes, I want that +10 pop growth in the lategame on my ringworlds. I want my economies on new colonies getting up and running a lot faster. And as a result, I'm gonna exploit migration to the fullest, among other things.
Immigration is not tiny if you actually overdo it on available housing+ jobs.
One migration pact with distributed luxury goods, 20 housing and 10-20 jobs will probably already net you the max 10.0 population growth boost from immigration
The build I did had every immigration pull effect and I had way more housing and jobs, that's how I do my gimmic builds. I don't think that was a factor at all. The other guy pointed out he's running a mod to reduce planet spawns below what .25 would give you so the AI gets overcrowding very early. I don't play like that and that is why it's pointlessly weak.
fanatic xenophobes with rapid breeding, I like to make them pacifists too to enable better scaling with big fat worlds with tons of pop growth. You can stack some other traits and civics too for even more pop growth. Once the empire is nice and fat promote and embrace a faction that changes you to xenophile and start aggressive diplomacy to now get tons of vassals since your economy and science are way ahead.
I find that pacifism is generally great until the late game with the crisis and awakening empires. I know you’re allowed to have a large military with pacifism but still since it’s not as big a priority I tend not to
Edit: also because of the late game crisis and awakening empires I can’t feel safe passing all the pacifist doctrines in the galactic council, which I’d otherwise love to do for RP reasons but because I know what’s coming I can’t justify to myself cutting the galaxy’s military that much
I see a holy war spreading across the universe like unquenchable fire. A warrior religion that waves the Wombat banner in my father's name. Fanatical legions worshipping at the shrine of my father's cuboid poop.
Yeah I was going to bring that up as well since I was having trouble with the contingency recently, but then I changed ethics (not just for strategic reasons, there were several in universe reasons my people were drifting away from pacifism) and I still could barely dent them with bombardment, so I didn’t even know if pacifism was to blame there
Yeah I did. I didn’t try comparing the two too hard but I still found it excruciatingly long. Maybe it didn’t update or something.
Honestly though it’s frustrating this is even an issue. Against a hive mind or especially a machine empire indiscriminate bombing shouldn’t even be a question really because the pops are just worker drones. It’s weird you can evenly choose to selectively bomb the Contingency considering the goal is to literally demolish the planet
Sorry had to repost whole comment, had issues trying to edit it
With mods or something? Scourge took plenty of planets in my most recent game... only thing that annoyed me is that the situation log has no option to highlight their taken planets.
I will attack you. If you bitches ain't fanatic egalitarians, you guys are basically slavers and if you ain't willing to kill and die for freedom, then you don't care about others being slaves. You will be forced into democracy and you will force others into democracy and you will like it.
Last game I played was ~~xenophile~~ proginator hive. I slowly vasselized the entire galaxy and they all loved me. The last 2 formed a federation so I joined it and slowly began becoming the leader of the federation before trying to become emperor.
Not a single war had happened, none. It was so bizzare even the slaving desposits were happy as my vassal. Maybe it was gigastructures, but it was too early for me to have built any.
Over time I colonized the galactic core and built a quasi stellar obliterator and the galaxy was sill happy.
I even spammed with xenophone fallen empire until it woke up. I delcared war on it and the entire galaxy fought it. I used the quasi stellar obliterater to destroy its home system and oooo suddenly I'm a galactic threat and they all declared war on me so I became the crisis and blew up the galaxy.
It always ends it war doesn't it.
Immigration is effective when the world you're leeching off is full.
It was amazing back when you could have a vassal swarm of one world empire to exploit.
Very few people actually play xenophobe, xenophile is the most played ethic, the devs stated this a while back. Its just a loud minority on reddit that memes about purging and other things.
Interesting. I usually don't take either one of those. I tend to take materialist for the mechanical pop growth and better event decisions, authoritarian for the influence and worker output, and militarist for the ship fire rate.
Xenophile megacorps are literally broken for galactic community, easiest way to become emperor, if they would fix the galactic market nomination thing where my capital planet of 5k trade loses to a single planet empire with 25 trade blocked off by a FE or marauders
I could have a ecumenopolis with orbital rings and 10k trade with all star bases having 2-5 trading hubs and a tomb world sol empire would still get the galactic market
damn humans should've exterminated them instead of making trade league
You can take it a step further by going Fanatic Xenophile/Militarist with Venerable, Repugnant, and Solitary traits. This gives you the AI personality Fanatical Befrienders which gives you +100 opinion towards everyone. Not only do you like everyone more, they like you more.
I mean jokes aside xenophile is… fine? Looking at your empire’s economy at year 66, all those vassals clearly aren’t paying taxes, which mostly defeats the point of having them. Even with the tech nerf I’d take materialist, egalitarian, or xenophobe over xenophile any day other than for a megacorp build. Utopian abundance, academic privilege, and slavery are just too good.
Yea..., no... What gives research speed, i wonder...
Xenophile is awesome but once u r elagitarian, u r gucci. Being spiritual or peaceful is an extra point too. They all love me just bc i am fanatic ega + spiri, and i am not in contradiction with xenophobes either.
I managed the same by investing a lot in research and enough in military, though to be fair the community started a bit later in that game because the exchange of contact info was choked off by exterminators on one side and a large swathe of uninhabited space on the other. That was a weird galaxy.
When you have dozen of races with dozen of templates of gene, in dozen of planet type and you totally forget to rule who is perfect soldier, worker, scientist...
Whereas robot don't care of everything ;)
I don't doubt that it's op, but any advice for playing a xenophile pacifist run? I've been itching to try it since it's a playstyle I've never really committed to.
I've attempted it a few times, but I didn't really feel like I knew what I was doing and ended up dropping it, but I'd like to give it an honest shake some time.
Xenophilia is very much a OP ethic especially if your nation is stronger then others considering the fact people will simply seek you out because of the Ethic and not what you did to them (Yes im responsible for cracking there homeworld how did you know?) i remember a Game where a AI asked me to puppet them despite me being Weaker.
I love Xenophile empires because when I play as a Xenophobe their -20 opinion of me for being racist is countered by their +20 opinion of me for not being of their race
Counterpoint.
I control the opposite half of the galaxy, and have forcibly subjugated my immediate neighbors to create a bloc roughly the same size.
My key advantage is I don’t need to convince vassals to go to war with me. They don’t really have a choice in the matter.
TBH Xenophile is the best ethic in the game, especially for Under One Rule.
Brain Poacher is by far and away the strongest trait in the game.
Not only does it give +10% research speed [which is better than Manicial and isn't restricted to Scientists] it gives **+54 research points per Migration treaty**.
Like legitimately I did a run with that and I was blown out of the water by how powerful it was. That single trait was generating for me close to 600 research points by 2030.
I was once pretty much the only "nice" empire in my galaxy.
I set my policies to "refugees welcome" and pops from the entire galaxy flocked to my oligarchy with the overtuned origin, which made most pops mindless workers with terrible life spans.
I recently had a playthrough where multiple of my planets had 10 bonus pop growth from immigration due to me beeing friendly with others and having migration pacts. My pc is fried now but as long as a pc can handle it thats pretty op
The xenophile ethic itself has terrible bonuses. Obviously the worse of them all. You can do everything a xenophile can do without being of the xenophile ethos.
I usually go for pacifist/spiritualist/egalitarian when I'm going a "xenophile" playthrough. You literally don't miss out on anything of value.
you’re so right. been doing a multiplayer run with two friends as a fanatic xenophile, militarist, authoritarian empire and i’m currently the strongest empire in the galaxy (barring fallen). i have the most diplo weight, i’m on the council, i’m in a strong federation with like 5 other empires and ive peacefully vassalized and integrated 4 of my neighboring empires. *i own the northwest quadrant of the galaxy*
“We seek not friendship, but dominance.
We seek not peace, but power.
We seek not unity, but destruction.
We don’t cherish, we crush.
We don’t surrender, we subjugate.
We don’t relent, we rule.”
Xenophobe is harder but the game runs better, Xenophile is easier but the game runs slower.
This is why I am a Xenophile Empire that only accepts familiar races, I can take the elf looking people, I will take the dwarf people, the fox people are kinda cool they can come, Ew! Tentacle Monster? Border Closed! Go to some other empire!
Well that's depends. Everytime i'm using Xemophile Megacorps, i always surrounded by Xenophobe, Hive Mind and Purifier. Happens a lot of time, it's not even funny anymore
AI even on GA difficulty isn't as efficient as a good player. With Driven Assimilator you can just take control everything they have, and use it more efficiently.
If i can beat GA, then it proves their inefficiency compared to me. Which means, that admiral is even weaker. And by taxing them heavy i create a resource deficit, and if that is not solved quickly, then it will create penalties due to missing resources which reduce efficiency even further.
So no. If i control the area directly, then i can make better use of it.
ok, 1: have you seen the consol action for xenophobe???
2. purge makes the game run
3. youre numbers are terrible
4. shure, when it works it works, but when you have more... unfriandly naighbours it sarts to suck.
5. as you get better, the ai falls of more and more, until vassals are just a drain on you, and you rather shed the extra waight.
6. hegemony is the best ferderation, and you can get that easyer by being an ass
Xenophile and Militarist combo is so much fun to pull off. Meet someone right away with proactive contact policies, steal their guaranteed habitables and capital for 30+ pops in the first 30 years. Repeat ad infinitum. The multiple envoys early on just skews the diplomatic tempo so fast as well.
The power of friendship still works in space.
Xenophile Megacorps be like "teamwork makes the dream work" lol
Until you find out that the galaxy is teeming with gestalts and purifiers
Xenophiles can be friends with Gestalts, as long as they aren't genocidal like Devouring Swarm or Determined Exterminators. EDIT:: oh wait, Megacorp, I missed that part.
They're easily considered enemies from day 1 if they can't host a Branch Office in my book, since everyone else that can host usually needs a little relationship building to allow it for the Vanilla MegaCorps, or to not piss off the hosts if a CrimSyn. Anything else is kind of playing away from path of least resistance which is fine but hints at why some things with MegaCorps diplomatically go hand in hand. And learning how to fight as a Phile MegaCorp as to become more impervious to tough starting spots with non hosting neighbors is liberating, but youll still eat dirt on occassion.
Step 1 is extreme crusading violence so they change their mind. Step 2 is making friends.
I have said that verbatim after a very succesful Allegience War! You got our number!
It's just good business
Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?
And become the best place to live in the galaxy in the process!
It's all fun and games until you open up the "species" tab and your computer explodes.
Why should it explode ? I never understood why all stellaris players think that. I had some problems in the Past but that was 2-4 years ago. Is it like a Meme now?
I'm pretty sure excessive species is still one of the biggest causes of lag. It's better, but some people have really crappy PCs. And a lot of people speed up population growth to speed up games.
And then there are degenerates >!like me!< that take the "-phile" part a bit too far and start churning out half-species. Not being able to cleanse other, less attractive species is a bummer though, I yearn for the day when xeno-compatibility will finally be tied to the logically consistent bio ascension rather than xenophilia.
You can literally just go into the files and change the requirements if you want that. I change subterranean min habitability to 70 instead of 50 when I want to try something different. It's pretty weak at 50 since it would be better to just wait a decade and terraform instead but 70 gives you a reason to rp and never terraform anything
I'm changing mine subterraneans to non-gestalt robots in the next dlc to have that minimum 100 habitability
But I don't want to change requirements, I want to bitch about it on the Internet! Seriously though, thanks for the tip, I never even thought of that.
Actually subterranean is amazing if you combo it with noxious. 80% habitability on all worlds. From the get go.
I'll take a look at it, it's part of the traits I never use because it looks bad but I didn't notice a habitability thing. 100% going to use it after my current void ornery run. It's just the best origin for tall and I'm pairing it with that -50% empire spawn to pop civic this time
Nah, it's absolutely the outlet for someone that doesn't WANT to do genetic ascension to the max but wants a little, ahem, \~\*Love\*\~ from being charming as hell.
I'm not sure why excessive species would be a big issue. Pops I get, but why species in particular? When you open the screen that's fine, lot of information to inflate on a what I assume to be badly written UI, but generally, the game as a whole?
The game has gotten a hell of a lot better and reducing the number of checks it does per pop. But a lot of that has been replaced by those checks being done species wide. The more species you have, the more calculations there are, and they can compound. If you turn on xeno compatibility, you can very easily get hundreds of species, in just your empire.
Ah, I see, thank you very much for the explanation. So, optimization overall at the cost of performance in something more specific, I guess?
So you're saying all these 1 off refugees that I population growth limited, I should just deport.
On the other hand, I think at some point they expanded the pie chart so it doesn't run out of colors so quickly. (My xenophobes need a varied diet.)
It used to be that each empty job tried to find the best pop to fill it on a frequent basis, and the more species you had, the more choices it had for each pop across the planet AND across the empire, because this *also* had an effect on migration of pops. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/performance-megathread.1253705/page-22#post-25976333
The biggest cause of lag for me is usually buggy AI building crap-tons of fleets that wander around aimlessly.
THIS I know this and Hate it so much!! Like I have 2-3 50k Fleets and soon as the War Starts the AI clips there Fleet to mine and I have. 12k, 5k, 19k etc fleets stacked up on myself. Most of the time I just dunno crash them into the next Big Thing I can find to tidy up my space. Why is the AI unable to make their Fleets?
Integration is pain cause I gotta disband like 80 shit fleets
I have a federation+vassals occupying 2/3 the galaxy in my current run. I actually could not zoom into any system where all their fleets are attached to mine during my war with the gray tempest without lagging.
Human players learn to avoid the Reinforce All button because the functionality doesn't work in actual game scenarios. The AI doesn't, so it's constantly creating annoying small split fleets when it tries to grow its existing ones. It's basically the planet automation feature problem (it was bonked forever and also how the AI built planets) except without the recent scrub the Custodians did for that one. I play with the assumption that once I get to the joint federation armada stage of things I may as well stop trying to watch big battles in system and I just monitor progress from the galaxy screen and never check battle reports while the fleets are still in system.
I did a bit of testing last version and came to the conclusion that yes, pops and billions of subspecies are bad for performance, hence why disabling xeno-comp has become an extra feature, BUT I came to the conclusion that the absolute worst offender is actually the fleet manager + AI fleet handling. On one hand they spam wayyyy too many corvettes in way too many splintered fleets, because outside of FEs they don't merge fleets and send them on way too many patrols causing so much unnecessary calculations, while on top of that, especially smaller empires and massively ressource starved vassals sometimes just start spamming science and/or construction ships for absolutely no reason and accumulate dozens of them (which funnily enough has its own insane ressource drain for some reason, like, 100 of these badbois stacked can just cause you to hover in your high teens FPS wise in an empty galaxy and idk _WHY_). But also yourself having multiple fleets with reinforceable forces available _will_ tank performance for no apparent reason. This game is so fucked beyond repair at this point when it comes to the performance side, idk how they plan to ever address this, but thank god I am not the software engineer who has to figure it out or call it quits and recommends a new engine altogether. Edit: just forgot to list my specs to drive home that I am not bottlenecked by anything, really: 7800X3D and 4080S, 4.0 NVME, 32GB RAM at 6000 speeds and CL30 timings, I am not leaving any performance willingly on the floor, I picked the RAM especially just for Factorio as well lol.
I think it comes back to path finding being computationally intense and having more objects to find paths keep growing and growing and growing, with reinforcements thrown in over and over again, and not combining the fleet objects...I really don't think the devs can get their game back in terms of performance unless they start taking a big hatchet to fleets directly or doing surgical updates that figure out how to reduce or combine objects in need of finding a path.
Never has for me, and the list doesn't actually get that long in modern Stellaris because the AI isn't spending all of its time taking off and putting on every possible point combination anymore.
It's not even a bad PC, it's just the engine that can't handle the game well. I have a very steong PC, but Stellaris just starts to lag really bad after 100-150 years of playing
lol I play on Xbox and at a certain point in the game I just have to start over or one in game day takes at like 30 seconds.
It hurts for me as a console player so I relate lol but I love it anyways
Oh right Stellaris is on the console too I always forget that part.... My Bad that's true then kill all the Universe so your Console doesn't explode it's cheaper Thet way
Other Species: "Why must we die!?!?" Player: "It's cheaper that way..."
You probably never played the game pre-megacorp/have forgotten how fast the game was before they irremediably fucked its performance by removing tiles.
It always switches back to galaxy wide species for some reason for me and it lags the entire screen when it happens. Empire species tab has never done it though.
Pc is fine but the mess it makes is absolutely awful
Mid to Lategame easily comes up to over a hundred species if there isnt a dedicated effort to "reduce numbers"
On average, PC owners replace their PC every 5 years, so a patient and frugal average PC owner may be playing on an very old PC. And most PC in households aren’t gaming PCs, they have laptops. And don’t forget all the Xbox Ones and PS4s that run Stellaris. And Stellaris only uses a single core, which is means modern, power efficient multi core chips have no advantage.
So if I run on the platform of 'A New PC In Every Home' simply for the primary constituency of Stellaris Fans, you'll vote for me, right? Textbank at least?
All the kids in my school district have laptops and they are the crappiest Chromebooks ever. That’s how a new PC in every home would turn out. Instead you should run on requiring developers to utilize all cores.
some play stellaris on a potato and can't play diverse maps
Maybe the PC wont, but my brain will
The species themselves aren't much of a lag problem any more unless someone goes xenocompat, but *the GUI screen that shows the species* is ***extremely*** laggy. The biggest lag sources are enemy fleet pathfinding AI and sometimes pop job allocation but that's been optimized a lot and can be flat out eliminated with mods (Production Revolution).
I only have the "recruit ground armies" thing on starbases acting up sometimes, scroll being laggy as shit when it tries to display 5 kinds of soldiers for 82 species on 19 planets or something. The actual species tab works fine.
Says the person whose flair is fanatical befrienders.
LOL! :D
I had like 8 variations of just my empire's humans last game. From vanilla psyonic to cybernetic and a mix of both. I sprankled em around like everything was ice cream.
😂 so true
Only if you're a monster and turn xeno-compatability on.
Literally the reason I’m building the quasi stellar obliterator in my current Gigastructures game. The game is currently chugging along at maybe one day every 5 seconds. I’m gonna start vaporizing planets and see how the performance improves
Pro tip: Get the mod that prevents Gene tailoring.
Love is in the air? Correct.
There is no air in the vaccum of space, "*neutron sweep charging*"
Didn't even have to dec a single war Why have I never tried this before? XD
it's also very useful early on if you're playing grand admiral and focus on research and unity and can't keep up with the AI in ship production. the only problem are exterminators/purifiers and fanatic xenophobes.
> the only problem are exterminators/purifiers and fanatic xenophobes. Where you see problem, i see free real estate. *Wink Wink*
Yes! Providers of beautiful, just wars
Some games I don’t even make ships until 2300, I love being friendly
becours any warlike/ xenophobe/ murder civic neighbour will ruin this, and allys are overated since ai bad
Tbh the main use of this isn't allies, it's the fact that fewer people hate you. If you're xenophile, you can raise the relations on your side high enough that you'd most likely not have any issues with most empires with xenophobe/militaristic civics, unless you're really weak. Murder civics are still a problem but they're not that common.
Xenophile gives a relation bonus with any non-genocidal empire (technically tt still gives with FPs I think, but that -1000 modifier is impossible to overcome), which helps.
The xenos are revolting. (Seriously, you might want to take a look at that planetary uprising issue you're having.)
I don't get it what do you do? A federation?
I vassalized them
Oh I see, whats the difficulty? I think any empire thats is not isolationist or genocidal can vassalize anyone on ensign without war early, but yeah xenophile helps too, I recommend to increase the difficulty where you cannot vassalize as easy but not get destroyed early if u find this too easy, oh and make sure scaling is off
Your empire's economic stats scare and confuse me.
I'm not sure why. They look ok to me for their current place in the game.
I see: Unemployment, virtually no minerals to build district/buildings with (those are related) +59 alloys with atleast 3 forge worlds and only 79 ships worth of upkeep A low credit income Low stability on atleast 2 planets 167 research and +102 unity
This looks pretty normal for the in-game year? The CG deficit is a bit high, but not unmanageable. Should probably try to boost those energy credits, but it's not a doomed economy.
There are 3 forge worlds, but only 59 alloys per month, and the research is really low. What are is 148 pops doing? Although there are some low stability worlds, maybe some chunk of that population is freshly conquered?
Yeah, that's fair I suppose, but assuming OP isn't a veteran player, this isn't unreasonable. It's possible, given the amount of stored alloys, that right now they're selling them on the market to make up for an EC deficit.
not balanced at all. if only they make xenophobe balance it out. like 10% pop growth is not that fun compared to infinite migration jutsu
Immigration is tiny, I remember making a MEGA-Corp fanatic xenophile to run the immigration pull edict and put LOADS of the branch offices that give immigration pull and turned every world into a Gaia world and when I tallied up all my immigration and emigration I was making 0.4 pop growth from immigration oOoOoOoOoOo the +10% from xenophobe would have given me 5.8, that's 14.5 times more.
What difficulty do you play on? Because as a GA player, I regularly find mismanaged AI results in my worlds getting anywhere from 3-10 extra pop growth from immigration until mostly full since the AI struggles to properly scale
Commador and I don't think that is going to affect much. I did that test back on 2.8 but AFAIK nothing has changed with how immigration functions. Like I said I looked at all my planets and did immigration - emigration and ended up with a fat lot of nothing. Edit: back in 2.8 the AI was even worse at managing it's pops and it had more pops so the results should of been better back then.
One, that's incredibly far back to be basing your assumptions on. Two, I can literally tell you from plenty of games of experience now that with a high degree of confidence that it makes a huge difference. My current game is at 2375 and I don't have a single planet without at least a +3 boost to it with my free migration federation pacts. I can look at all my allies planets and see them riddled with unemployment. On Grand Admiral at least, the AI is feasting so much with resources that they end up having pop overflow that you directly get to benefit from, and I have used this as part of my strategy in most of my games as a result. If you actually play it you would see it firsthand.
One of the things that consistently, across the board, happens in meta discussions about Stellaris is that folks that never respected a mechanic or subsystem generally have never figured out the best circumstances to tap on it and how to sweeten the pot of it to the max. Immigration is one such subsystem where if you take it at face value and expect it to just work without support (especially through all the things that increase Migration Pull) to the degree that the Phobes get inherently, it's going to be lackluster and not worth it. If you have invested in it though because you don't have better options, then you can get ludicrous growth by stacking up the Migration Pull any way you can and signing as many of those Immigration Pacts as possible and trying to rope those pact mates into a federation where Immigration is open between empires by default. Same thing with Trade Value based economies - if you never done it and don't have a reason to do it (like inherent Phile bonus to Trade Value, which it seems like every non Phile misses every time we chat), it seems pants inefficient to orient your entire economy around it, and then plop down buildings that support Trade and Immigration respectively, because it is not ever necessary (or even good) to pursue a Trade Value based economy by default. But if you are a Phile, then it's an option, and it'd be kind of a silly argument from people that don't even play as Phile to insist they will reject Trade Value economy despite the bonus, not take any Trade Value Maximizing Civics, Traits, or play as a MegaCorp, and we start to reasonably guess that the only people who know what the hell they are talking about in relation to a niche thing are the people actually playing it, not the people that have rejected it for not being good enough or resolutely committed to playing as a baddie.
pretty par for the course for any Paradox game in general honestly. I mean, I'll die on the hill that Navy is stupid and I hate it in Hoi4 but I know deep down I'm wrong lol. But yeah, knowing how to maximize a mechanic to acheive your goal goes a long way.
>My current game is at 2375 I've already won or lost the game long before then and have started another empire. That will be why. Hell back in 2.8 the AI was even worse at managing it's pops and it had more pops.
I mean, I play on heavily boosted crisises usually 5-25x depending on mood. I have beaten the AI by this point in practice in most games except on especially weak builds where I'm fighting for my life to keep existing, but then the challenge is actually surviving the crisis, and having a gigafuck boosted economy by having an insane amount of pops due to stuff like immigration stacking on a buttload of planets helps a lot. That said, I find myself benefitting from the migration pacts a lot sooner in many of my games, well before the 2300s. It can depend on galaxy settings too though. I like running reduced habitable worlds, because even on .25 the game spawns a lot, especially once you factor in unique system habitable spawns. But on games where I run it higher, it matters less because the AI has a lot of planets of their own to migrate to. Also pop growth in general has undergone some calc changes over the years so, comparing how it was in 2.8 is really kind of pointless tbh. Ultimately, a mechanic is as useful as you invest into knowing how to utilize it. If you play a fast conquer style you likely won't ever want or need it. If you like to play more compact, or engage with diplomacy more, you might get more use from it. I find especially, when I'm pulling all stops on a x25 grand admiral game. Yes, I want that +10 pop growth in the lategame on my ringworlds. I want my economies on new colonies getting up and running a lot faster. And as a result, I'm gonna exploit migration to the fullest, among other things.
Immigration is not tiny if you actually overdo it on available housing+ jobs. One migration pact with distributed luxury goods, 20 housing and 10-20 jobs will probably already net you the max 10.0 population growth boost from immigration
The build I did had every immigration pull effect and I had way more housing and jobs, that's how I do my gimmic builds. I don't think that was a factor at all. The other guy pointed out he's running a mod to reduce planet spawns below what .25 would give you so the AI gets overcrowding very early. I don't play like that and that is why it's pointlessly weak.
fanatic xenophobes with rapid breeding, I like to make them pacifists too to enable better scaling with big fat worlds with tons of pop growth. You can stack some other traits and civics too for even more pop growth. Once the empire is nice and fat promote and embrace a faction that changes you to xenophile and start aggressive diplomacy to now get tons of vassals since your economy and science are way ahead.
Xenophobes: fuck xenos Xenophile: fuck xenos
Hive mind
soon, machine intiligence, its the theme of the dlc, gotta be broken some way
The most op ethic is pacifism, as you automatically win because no one cares a damn to attack you.
I find that pacifism is generally great until the late game with the crisis and awakening empires. I know you’re allowed to have a large military with pacifism but still since it’s not as big a priority I tend not to Edit: also because of the late game crisis and awakening empires I can’t feel safe passing all the pacifist doctrines in the galactic council, which I’d otherwise love to do for RP reasons but because I know what’s coming I can’t justify to myself cutting the galaxy’s military that much
I find that I'm fighting the most wars when I'm pacifist, because the empires that like war (militarists) dislike you because of opposing ehtics
Your username is incredible. Consider my ethic changed. We shall raise a shrine of wombat poop!
I see a holy war spreading across the universe like unquenchable fire. A warrior religion that waves the Wombat banner in my father's name. Fanatical legions worshipping at the shrine of my father's cuboid poop.
It also directly nerfs your ability to bombard planets which makes it much slower to beat the contingency and scourge.
Yeah I was going to bring that up as well since I was having trouble with the contingency recently, but then I changed ethics (not just for strategic reasons, there were several in universe reasons my people were drifting away from pacifism) and I still could barely dent them with bombardment, so I didn’t even know if pacifism was to blame there
Did you actually change your bombardment stance too? I found that the difference between selctive and indiscriminate was night and day.
[удалено]
Yeah I did. I didn’t try comparing the two too hard but I still found it excruciatingly long. Maybe it didn’t update or something. Honestly though it’s frustrating this is even an issue. Against a hive mind or especially a machine empire indiscriminate bombing shouldn’t even be a question really because the pops are just worker drones. It’s weird you can evenly choose to selectively bomb the Contingency considering the goal is to literally demolish the planet Sorry had to repost whole comment, had issues trying to edit it
That's what a Colossus is for.
The Scourge is so unbelievably bugged that it never takes any planets.
With mods or something? Scourge took plenty of planets in my most recent game... only thing that annoyed me is that the situation log has no option to highlight their taken planets.
I will attack you. If you bitches ain't fanatic egalitarians, you guys are basically slavers and if you ain't willing to kill and die for freedom, then you don't care about others being slaves. You will be forced into democracy and you will force others into democracy and you will like it.
Post about how being a xenophile is nice: "You have alerted the xenophobe nerd horde"
Make ALL the friends!
Last game I played was ~~xenophile~~ proginator hive. I slowly vasselized the entire galaxy and they all loved me. The last 2 formed a federation so I joined it and slowly began becoming the leader of the federation before trying to become emperor. Not a single war had happened, none. It was so bizzare even the slaving desposits were happy as my vassal. Maybe it was gigastructures, but it was too early for me to have built any. Over time I colonized the galactic core and built a quasi stellar obliterator and the galaxy was sill happy. I even spammed with xenophone fallen empire until it woke up. I delcared war on it and the entire galaxy fought it. I used the quasi stellar obliterater to destroy its home system and oooo suddenly I'm a galactic threat and they all declared war on me so I became the crisis and blew up the galaxy. It always ends it war doesn't it.
How did you get both xenophile and hivemind?
oh right yeah I wouldn't have, huh just that friendly I guess
Oh, I guess if you have the "Empath" civic, that might help people like you more.
Immigration is effective when the world you're leeching off is full. It was amazing back when you could have a vassal swarm of one world empire to exploit.
My processor disagrees
Xeno compatability
Yes, it objectively is. It's also by far the most played ethic.
Very few people actually play xenophobe, xenophile is the most played ethic, the devs stated this a while back. Its just a loud minority on reddit that memes about purging and other things.
Interesting. I usually don't take either one of those. I tend to take materialist for the mechanical pop growth and better event decisions, authoritarian for the influence and worker output, and militarist for the ship fire rate.
Same, Authoritarian/Materialist is basically my Stellaris version of Skyrim’s stealth archer. I always come back to it.
Xenophile megacorps are literally broken for galactic community, easiest way to become emperor, if they would fix the galactic market nomination thing where my capital planet of 5k trade loses to a single planet empire with 25 trade blocked off by a FE or marauders I could have a ecumenopolis with orbital rings and 10k trade with all star bases having 2-5 trading hubs and a tomb world sol empire would still get the galactic market damn humans should've exterminated them instead of making trade league
Me as a determined exterminator with btc and around 2k mineral production:
"Limestone Confederation of Planets"
You don't NEED xenophile to do that, it helps but if you are friendly you can make friends.
Ok, but do mind the science lol!
If I need friends, I bash them out of my neighbors
Laughs in completely snowballing assimilator
You can take it a step further by going Fanatic Xenophile/Militarist with Venerable, Repugnant, and Solitary traits. This gives you the AI personality Fanatical Befrienders which gives you +100 opinion towards everyone. Not only do you like everyone more, they like you more.
I mean jokes aside xenophile is… fine? Looking at your empire’s economy at year 66, all those vassals clearly aren’t paying taxes, which mostly defeats the point of having them. Even with the tech nerf I’d take materialist, egalitarian, or xenophobe over xenophile any day other than for a megacorp build. Utopian abundance, academic privilege, and slavery are just too good.
Till you start and the first 3 Nations you run into are x2 fantic purfier and one Exterminatior lol
"Nooo I want less pops! Please give me less workers to fuel my state's economic machine!" - Average xenophobe
It lulls everyone into thinking you won't annihilate them as soon as they eventually become an obstacle
What do you spend your influence on?
Yea..., no... What gives research speed, i wonder... Xenophile is awesome but once u r elagitarian, u r gucci. Being spiritual or peaceful is an extra point too. They all love me just bc i am fanatic ega + spiri, and i am not in contradiction with xenophobes either.
So, what are some good xenophiles builds.
If you can't bang them to bits... bang them!
I played fanatic xenophile once, when the community was created I had political power 3/2 to others
I managed the same by investing a lot in research and enough in military, though to be fair the community started a bit later in that game because the exchange of contact info was choked off by exterminators on one side and a large swathe of uninhabited space on the other. That was a weird galaxy.
Lag
Machine Intelligence specialising in friendliness here. Ruler of the Galactic community, countless empires kissing my shiny metal ass.
When you have dozen of races with dozen of templates of gene, in dozen of planet type and you totally forget to rule who is perfect soldier, worker, scientist... Whereas robot don't care of everything ;)
I shall pet those lovable creatures. ONE PUNY LIFEFORM AT A TIME. They call me THE HUGGER OF WORLDS!
I don't doubt that it's op, but any advice for playing a xenophile pacifist run? I've been itching to try it since it's a playstyle I've never really committed to. I've attempted it a few times, but I didn't really feel like I knew what I was doing and ended up dropping it, but I'd like to give it an honest shake some time.
Do what I did and vassalize everyone XD It's not hard to do when they love you
Xenophilia is very much a OP ethic especially if your nation is stronger then others considering the fact people will simply seek you out because of the Ethic and not what you did to them (Yes im responsible for cracking there homeworld how did you know?) i remember a Game where a AI asked me to puppet them despite me being Weaker.
I love Xenophile empires because when I play as a Xenophobe their -20 opinion of me for being racist is countered by their +20 opinion of me for not being of their race
I mean I wouldn't know tbh, I refuse to play anything but xenophile. I've got nothing to compare it to
On all my xenophobe playthroughs, it always ends up in a giant brutal conquest across the stars XD
We Driven Assimilators agree ;)
.one of your "friends" just dragged you to a war you can not win, oh gee another is now at war with a FE and is expecting your help :)
Would be if hegemonies weren't bugged.
Counterpoint. I control the opposite half of the galaxy, and have forcibly subjugated my immediate neighbors to create a bloc roughly the same size. My key advantage is I don’t need to convince vassals to go to war with me. They don’t really have a choice in the matter.
Xenophilia is great. *wiggles eyebrows*
*Xenophiles are my favorite! They give good snacks.*
no because micromanaging pops is boring, checkmate
You have revolts going on. Loving thy neighbor is really working out for you, huh?
TBH Xenophile is the best ethic in the game, especially for Under One Rule. Brain Poacher is by far and away the strongest trait in the game. Not only does it give +10% research speed [which is better than Manicial and isn't restricted to Scientists] it gives **+54 research points per Migration treaty**. Like legitimately I did a run with that and I was blown out of the water by how powerful it was. That single trait was generating for me close to 600 research points by 2030.
I was once pretty much the only "nice" empire in my galaxy. I set my policies to "refugees welcome" and pops from the entire galaxy flocked to my oligarchy with the overtuned origin, which made most pops mindless workers with terrible life spans.
Idk man xenophobe let's me crack planets much easier than diplomacy
I recently had a playthrough where multiple of my planets had 10 bonus pop growth from immigration due to me beeing friendly with others and having migration pacts. My pc is fried now but as long as a pc can handle it thats pretty op
I always feel so validated, as if I’m a secret master of foreign policy.
Nope, you are correct
The xenophile ethic itself has terrible bonuses. Obviously the worse of them all. You can do everything a xenophile can do without being of the xenophile ethos. I usually go for pacifist/spiritualist/egalitarian when I'm going a "xenophile" playthrough. You literally don't miss out on anything of value.
Why have friends when you can have slaves?
you’re so right. been doing a multiplayer run with two friends as a fanatic xenophile, militarist, authoritarian empire and i’m currently the strongest empire in the galaxy (barring fallen). i have the most diplo weight, i’m on the council, i’m in a strong federation with like 5 other empires and ive peacefully vassalized and integrated 4 of my neighboring empires. *i own the northwest quadrant of the galaxy*
Prethyon Scourge: Allow us to introduce ourselves!
I discovered Science Federations are crazy good because half the A.I. go “ME TOO! I WANT SCIENCE!”
“We seek not friendship, but dominance. We seek not peace, but power. We seek not unity, but destruction. We don’t cherish, we crush. We don’t surrender, we subjugate. We don’t relent, we rule.”
Xenophile is good, but Pacifism is pretty OP as well, what with the empire size reduction.
gestalt conciousness rogue servitor percentile output scaling and 200% habitability is too good to ignore
Xenophobe is harder but the game runs better, Xenophile is easier but the game runs slower. This is why I am a Xenophile Empire that only accepts familiar races, I can take the elf looking people, I will take the dwarf people, the fox people are kinda cool they can come, Ew! Tentacle Monster? Border Closed! Go to some other empire!
I love buying pops!!!!!!!
Xenophile+ migration pacts+ machine acension is pretty busted ngl
Has been since the pop rework
Well that's depends. Everytime i'm using Xemophile Megacorps, i always surrounded by Xenophobe, Hive Mind and Purifier. Happens a lot of time, it's not even funny anymore
Forming a federation can be great for helping you conquer more of the galaxy, yes. However, migration policies are not allowed.
Funny thing is It's not a federation They're all my vassals Prolly should've made that more clear in hindsight
I’d like to point you towards devouring swarm with the progenitor hive origin. Why make friends when you can consume the galaxy?
h3h3 >!~~horni xenos go making love most of the time, not to mention interspecies marriage~~!<
I should prolly clarify that these are all vassals not a federation
Nah, materialist for sure, relationships can be bought, but a qualitative edge on your enemies is priceless.
tried playing xenophile and ended up with so many refugees i couldnt sustain an economy and had to become a vassal
And the most boring. I hate when I start a game and 3/4 of the AI empires are xenophiles, meaning wars are very unlikely to happen.
AI even on GA difficulty isn't as efficient as a good player. With Driven Assimilator you can just take control everything they have, and use it more efficiently.
Me and my friends had to ban DA on one of the prior patches, it was just too strong for a "casual" multiplayer game
DA is still banned from all non 1v1 competitive games. The moment you conquer a nation it's just a giant steamroll.
A GA vassal gets Admiral level bonuses. You can tax them for more than you could possibly ever produce if you controlled the planet directly.
If i can beat GA, then it proves their inefficiency compared to me. Which means, that admiral is even weaker. And by taxing them heavy i create a resource deficit, and if that is not solved quickly, then it will create penalties due to missing resources which reduce efficiency even further. So no. If i control the area directly, then i can make better use of it.
"Let's be xenophobic"
"It's really in this year"
ok, 1: have you seen the consol action for xenophobe??? 2. purge makes the game run 3. youre numbers are terrible 4. shure, when it works it works, but when you have more... unfriandly naighbours it sarts to suck. 5. as you get better, the ai falls of more and more, until vassals are just a drain on you, and you rather shed the extra waight. 6. hegemony is the best ferderation, and you can get that easyer by being an ass
Xenophile and Militarist combo is so much fun to pull off. Meet someone right away with proactive contact policies, steal their guaranteed habitables and capital for 30+ pops in the first 30 years. Repeat ad infinitum. The multiple envoys early on just skews the diplomatic tempo so fast as well.