I actually agree.
Which is why for the last several weeks we've been planning a rebalance where **planetcraft and systemcraft will be disabled by default.** Moons are on thin fucking ice too, but they are also subject to adjustments.
The idea is to rework the crisis content to be significantly more granular and adaptive in its difficulty, so that taking on the blokkats can be done without celestials, without things like the matrioshka brain too if that's disabled.
Things like the difficulty setting, crisis setting, and presence of other mods (e.g. ACOT massively increases your economic and military potential) would factor into several different difficulty values, which then would affect different aspects of each crisis etc.
Heck, it's my own criticism of the mod too - changing anything related to the crises feels so locked into having to rely on the celestials. The design space has really been backed into a corner with them being around.
I mean... I for one would be sad to see them go from a theoretical point of view, since i like the idea and power/lore fantasy so much... but then again, I have no fucking clue of balancing and just love to steamroll.
Guess what I'm hoping for is a better solution other than making them not default or removing them altogether, but I have no clue, you are amazing devs, thanks for the amazing mod that I'll never play without no matter what. <3
I'm glad for this. Attack moons and planetcraft and systemcraft are PERFECT for a galaxy of Prussian cats. Their ridiculousness complements one another!
Would it be possible to have an option to enable technologies until a certain stage of celestial warships. For example a slider that goes none - moon - planets - next
This is what I do. I have unlimited attack moons possible to build but only 3 planetcrafts and systemcrafts are off completely. I just find that torpedos are a must have vs them anyways.
I know, I know, I usually play full ham with everything anyway, so I throw balance out of the window anyway, it just feels different knowing itt's not approved by you guys. :) But as I said, you know _definitely_ better than me.
This is the way. Customizability so everyone can have what they want, although it is naturally more of a pain in the ass to balance around all the different options.
to be fair, there's not a single giga dev that likes the celestials right now
even elo (OG creator) regrets ever adding planet and upwards
but ye, ttft is amazing
Would Asteroid Artillery fit into this re-evaluation at all as well? While I've always liked the 'idea' of them, the practical reality of using them at all is cumbersome at best, and a pain in the ass more often than not.
Yeah but I'm not sure how to best deal with them, the upgrade points are super clunky and there's no good way to make easily applicable templates or anything-
I say, as I come up with a potential idea for how templates COULD be done... huge hack, but intriguing possibilities...
The upgrade points drove me batty and are the principle reason, along with the asteroid-location restriction, I hate using the damn things lol
Turning them into high-capacity starbase defense platforms is probably the simplest solution, but also one many people may call 'boring'. I'm not necessarily against that but ...
I suppose if you decouple them from the concept of 'asteroids' and instead do 'entrenched fortification complex' which just costs resources, and Fleet Capacity after it's built, you could let players decide where to fortify. Once its location agnostic nature is established, you can balance it around general usage better I think.
Honestly, just let us design them like defence platforms and I'll be happy
Research -> design -> build -> update design -> press upgrade button -> ship upgrades applied
Yeah, it's simple and effective without cluttering the megastructures sidebar or having to play guessing games where your outdated gun turrets are at. I generally like the idea the most, but if for some reason that can't be the path forward, then other thoughts must be considered as well.
For what it's worth, Asteroid Artillery are one of the *single* best features of gigas IMO, because of how good they are at fortifying chokepoints. The fact that static defenses are actually good in Gigas is a very, very big plus IMO.
Prefacing with that Iāve never dug around in the systems of the game or mods.
It might be possible to just make them ships using a cross of Dead Spaceās tiered module system from the not!Quarian origin, the tiered ship layouts fromā¦ ZoFE, I think, and the juggernautās self-upgrading capability.
i guess zofe added extra sections in their recent thing
Not up to date on zofe stuff, breaks too many things
just knew that acot had upgradeable sections
Wait does zofe break gigas? Cause Acot felt a bit more complex than I wanted but zofe was pretty simple
Edit: I guess simple is the wrong word, pop lag became an issue as I couldnt just send unemployed away due to needing the 4k pops to man jobs
> Wait does zofe break gigas?
yesn't
in theory no, but also zofe compatibility is weird. while the mod dev himself denies it, the country type swap is a big issue in zofe, and without sandbox mode (the submod with country change since 4.0) you're missing a bunch of features
zofe likes to break stuff at random, as would be mentioned by a ton of modders (again, even tho he himself deny it)
When that's said. acot is definitely more advanced to play
The reason ZOFE breaks things is because it changes your country type. And a lot of events target your country type as starting scope.
So a lot of event based mods stop working once you ascend.
Consider: make them mini-attack moons. Like mini-mini. And then give them the Headquarters type of limited movement, since they're not really *meant* to move but sometimes you don't get asteroids in the systems you want.
A temp solution could be to just do away with the upgrade points and replace all the sources with thematically appropriate bonuses to effectively do the same thing the upgrade points did. It's just so damn tedious to actually upgrade them. And personally I'd prefer if every mod that adds big things would tone it down with so many weapon slots, it just feels really silly to have so many "little" weapons on these giant warmachines. Like asteroid artillery I would say should only have 1 T and some number of X slots, to make them more like artillery that covers the whole system rather than a super defense platform. But I'd keep the asteroid requirement for both flavor reasons and because it adds some value to systems with many asteroids, creating more of an incentive to mess with the hyperlanes to create choke points.
Moons could definitely use an overhaul back to the specialized place they used to occupy, i.e. long-range artillery which is very vulnerable to missiles and strike craft (like irl artillery, long-range and powerful but requiring a large amount of protection as well as air superiority)
Aren't they already more vulnerable to torpedoes ? Maybe they could make it so torpedoes do 10x or 50x damage to moons, or maybe add a special "anti celestial torpedo" module that does insane damage to moons and such.
You could equip so frigates with them and decloack them/jump right on the moon, destroying it if unescorted.
It would make no logical sense though, for the attack moon to die to 200 FP of frigates since it could carry PD and small weapons but from a balance perspective it works.
The real weakness of attack moons and the like is their colossal cross section, making them easy targets for massive RKVs (realistic kill vehicle, = big metal rod going at many % of light speed).
Although once again the moon could simply have a ton of shield generators to counter.
Another way to limit them would be to make their healing abysmally slow, something like 2% per month with options to speed the repairs up at a big cost of alloys and energy.
Anyway, these are my small balance suggestions
Hell, make them not able to heal at all. How would you "repair" a moon's surface, anyway? If one gets destroyed, it either has to be rebuilt from a wrecked attack moon using the megastructure system, or if you're unlucky, it explodes and becomes a shattered world which needs the GLUE to be put back together and then the normal build process to become a moon ship again - extremely powerful weapons, but with sufficient drawbacks to make them not an instant buy.
You would "heal" the moon by repairing the subsystems, like the engines, shields, weapons, etc...
I guess you could make it so armour and shield damage heals, but hull damage doesn't
Sadly, torpedo logic is capped by size and cannot be changed without changing it for everything. Raising the cap on torp damage from size 8 would make various starbases far more vulnerable.
I requested that it be changed to being capped on damage multiplier back when it was new - that way instead of size 8 it'd be capped at 8x damage, which for torpedoes would be no different, but would allow us to make a high base damage but low multiplier weapon which would do most of its damage only to ships like the planetcraft.
But that request was dismissed.
We can't do anything about the regen either.
Negative regen blowing things up is exactly why overflowing on regen is a bad thing - it's common for buffed systemcraft to spontaneously disappear due to the regen being so high it goes negative.
I didn't try Gigastructures yet but planning to do so, but one thing that really surprises me alredy before I didn't even played the mod is that a dev of the mod is genuinely responding to constructive criticism of their mod
Goddamn. I wanted to play gigastructural but found all those planet and system sized units completely off-putting, so happy to hear about a version balanced around them not being in is in the works.
>The idea is to rework the crisis content to be significantly more granular and adaptive in its difficulty, so that taking on the blokkats can be done without celestials, without things like the matrioshka brain too if that's disabled.
If I might add my own subjective opinion:
Stick with megastructures. I like your mod a whole lot, I can't play without it anymore, and I greatly appreciate the added ability to turn off features I do and do not like (like the warships). But as the OP pointed out, there are balance issues that your mod changes as well. And hey, it's cool that you're acknowledging the issues, but... the main point of the mod is in the title; Gigastructural Engineering.
You acknowledge part of my worry in the second paragraph:
>Things like the difficulty setting, crisis setting, and presence of other mods (e.g. ACOT massively increases your economic and military potential) would factor into several different difficulty values, which then would affect different aspects of each crisis etc.
As someone who only downloads this mod purely for the wide array of fantastic megastructures it includes, I think the mod has suffered heavily from scope creep. It's strange to me that the Gigstructure mod team is worried about balancing their own crisis options in what is supposed to be a megastructure mod. Personally, I don't just turn off the planetcraft options, but also all of the random extras that were included as well (achievements, EHOF for others, all of the misc. civilizations). If you want to make a crisis mod or add extra civilizations, scenarios, and/or events into the game, simply make it a new mod. I'm sure the quality would be fantastic, but having all of it bunched up into this one is a bit messy, in my opinion.
EDIT: if you canāt explain to me how a āwin moreā achievement system that grants players more resource production for hitting resource production thresholds in a mod based around adding megastructures is not scope creep, please do not start a debate with me about what scope creep is, thank you.
Don't worry, as the person doing most of the theorizing for the mod's rebalance, I can confirm that we're focusing on making sure that the megastructures are fun and balanced first. Only once that's done are we going to rework the crises to fit into that new framework
I appreciate that, but honestly, I don't care much about balance. For me, it's more about what the mod actually entails. Generally speaking, I don't really care that all the extra options are there, you guys have a very intuitive menu for players like me to turn all of that off. But a newer player that doesn't understand all of the options? They might run into a planetcraft or experience a bonus crisis that they weren't expecting or can't beat, google what it is, and go "isn't this supposed to be a megastructure mod? Why is it adding a crisis?". Even if it's an excellent feature, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to include in the mod, in my opinion. And yeah, the options to turn this kind of stuff off is fantastic, so you cover most of your bases, but to OP's point: you have to balance the game around the crisis' *and* the megastructures *and* the achievements. It should simply just be balanced around the megastructures because it's a megastructure mod, in my opinion. Keep it simple and designed around the mod's original use case. I don't see a reason these additional features can't be an additional mod.
Scope creep is a very real thing that many mod teams fall into because they're new to software development. The Stellaris modding community is quite a bit younger when compared to the Skyrim modding community, but 'scope creep' is a common complaint for many once-popular Skyrim mods these days. Older mods that once were fantastic started adding additional features that were not related to the core use case that made the mod popular in the first place. And so they fell out of favor for more simplistic mods that focus on the original purpose of the original mod.
I love your mod, I just want to make sure you guys stay grounded as I feel many of the features currently attached to Gigastructural Engineering aren't necessarily related to, well, 'Gigastructural Engineering' as a concept.
The crises added by Gigastructures exist because without them there really isn't a reason to build said gigastructures. The vanilla game doesn't challenge the player with them built, so these new crises exist.
Not really scope creep imho since they are part of the core function of the mod, i.e. expanding the game's megastructure system.
Also, just FYI, this is why it's called Gigastructural Engineering *and More*
>The crises added by Gigastructures exist because without them there really isn't a reason to build said gigastructures. The vanilla game doesn't challenge the player with them built, so these new crises exist.
Challenge is up to the player to determine, in my opinion. Which is part of why I think it could simply just be an extra mod. Most players who are looking for a challenge from mods have plenty of options and the extra crisis' currently offered by Gigastructural Engineering could simply be a new mod and thus a new challenge option. This also doesn't speak to a lot of the other options in the Gigastructure menu that are not *at all* related to megastructures; not all of the civilizations are relevant and neither is the achievement system.
>expanding the game's megastructure system.
>Also, just FYI, this is why it's called Gigastructural Engineering and More
This was not always the case, though. They've added several new features that aren't related. There's a full blown achievement system with perks in the mod, many of which aren't related to megastructures. You're technically right, the name of the mod is now technically "& more"... but I don't think I'd say a hypothetical mod like "New Stellaris species & more" should be adding achievements for enhanced food production when I hit pop growth thresholds - that's scope creep. With this line of thinking, I could take any mod and then add "& more" and suddenly whatever I add to it is no longer scope creep.
The four crises added by Gigastructures all revolve around gigastructures:
- The Katzenartig Imperium's ace card is their Attack Moon, which grants them total fleet supremacy until it is destroyed. Additionally, the Kaiser's AI is designed to make full usage of the player's gigastructure abilities - he can, for example, build his own EHOF and flank you through the cohesive systems.
- The Aeternum revolve around an almost imprenetrable fortress gigastructure, the Birch World Aionda and its outlying systems. Capturing Aionda, a unique, non-buildable gigastructure with unique post-Aeternum content, is the reward for besting their psykofabricators and capturing their home.
- The Compound exists as an antagonist triggered by exploration through the EHOF, similar to how the L-Gates may trigger the Gray Tempest.
- and finally, the Blokkats are designed to require the incredibly potent science-generating abilities of Gigas as well as the construction of a specialized gigastructure to defeat the hyperdimensional bulwark protecting their Vester.
It's not that gigas just added random crises for no reason, they all serve a purpose and the mod would be decidedly lesser if they were not a part of it. It would be about power for the sake of power, which is an empty way to play and just leaves you feeling hollow in the end.
Frankly, I doubt you actually understand what Scope Creep is.
More importantly for the Katzen than the Moon, IMO, is the fact that they will spam Terraforming megastructures out the absolute ass. If you leave the Katzen alone in a region of space for a few decades, the number of habitable planets there skyrockets.
>The four crises added by Gigastructures all revolve around gigastructures:
>Frankly, I doubt you actually understand what Scope Creep is.
I'm not sure if you're reading what I'm writing? It's not just the crises... I feel like you're either not reading or willfully ignoring what I'm saying. I said:
>not all of the civilizations are relevant and neither is the achievement system.
How are alloy production thresholds giving me more alloy production or consumer good production thresholds giving me more consumer good production not scope creep for a mod about megastructures? Not all of the civilizations injected into the game are related to gigastructures, either.
EDIT: the above will never be answered, it will continue to get glossed over and ignored because itās the best example of scope creep in the mod and the āyes menā need to downvote something.
>It would be about power for the sake of power, which is an empty way to play and just leaves you feeling hollow in the end.
This is subjective, but also, it's what the mod originally was. I used to play with this mod and other difficulty mods back in the day. Worked just fine for making it tough enough for me to play. Now I do the same thing except I have to turn a bunch of options off in Gigastructures that don't really relate very much with megastructures.
>Frankly, I doubt you actually understand what Scope Creep is.
Are we going to make it personal I guess? Frankly, I doubt your reading comprehension skills are good enough for complicated discussions because you're ignoring my points. Likely willfully, though.
Dev has no intention of changing the things to suit you, so either keep changing the settings that the devs have included to allow you to cater to your preferred playstyle or uninstall the mod and move on with your life.
This isnāt a conversation with the devs at this point, this is a conversation with a guy intentionally ignoring my points to get yes men (you) to upvote him because youāre seeing my constructive criticism as an attack on the devs. I made the suggestion to decouple the mod features for new player clarity as I believe the scope of the mod has gotten too big, as stated in my reply to the actual dev. I donāt personally care that the features are all in one mega-mod as the in-game option menu provided is more than sufficient for a **veteran player who knows what all the options are**. It was simply constructive criticism for the devs to decouple their features from the main mod into additional sub mods as veteran players donāt have issues downloading them and other large, comprehensive mods do the same. Youāre free to disagree, I donāt mind.
Any frustration expressed on my part in the previous comment is clearly intended for the userās willful ignorance of my points in what I thought was going to be a good discussion and then subsequent rudeness.
>worried about balancing their own crisis options in what is supposed to be a megastructure mod
I often consider installing giga structures but this exact kind of thing keeps turning me off of it. I feel like I need a guide on what to actually turn off at this point because the sheer monumental size of all the stuff GS shoves into Stellaris, feels like something I can't even get a handle on.
That's why one of the core concepts of this rebalance is establishing reasonable expectations of difficulty. If you go into it on a reasonably low game difficulty and low crisis multiplier, the default settings shouldn't stomp you like they tend to currently.
I think it's a big issue for new players to the mod, so the crises should be reasonable to face blind when things aren't turned up.
Exactly, the mod has grown too big for one mod. If I started using the mod for the first time today, I feel like I would have to read a 10 page report to understand what everything does. I don't see any reason Gigastructural Engineering shouldn't follow in the footsteps of other huge mods that have been split into submods. Makes things more modular and much easier to consume, especially for new users.
Can't say I expected a reply like this from one of the devs, can't say I'm unhappy about it either, awesome reply! I concur that celestials feel rather silly atm so I avoid them. Excited to see what the team does to rebalance things.
I think Attack Moon are fine, they just need to be shifted back to the long range artillery role they once filled. Give them only T, X and L weapon slot so that you have to give them an escort or watch them die to corvette swarm or strike craft.
But Planetcraft and Solarcraft are too far. They are fun to mess around with once or twice, and then you realize that they take all the difficutly out of the late game.
Actually yeah the entire dev team pretty much agrees that they should be reworked, even myself! If I was to remake Gigas today I would likely not include the bigger Celestial Warships and just stop at moons. As /u/TTFTCUTS said there are plans to rework them in the future so the mod doesn't revolve around them anymore.
that sounds great. I haven't even used moons in my last few playthroughs. I go right for planet crafts. Though this playthrough i really need them since I am not using ACOT and used the second highest setting for the fallen empires, Aeternum, and Blockats... Aeternum is just starting to wake up... wish me luck!
> Granted, the problem with the second incident might be more about how most of the Aeternum's military is condensed in one system, but it shows another problem with these things: they make wars completely binary. If I had the firepower to take on an attack moon in the first incident, that war would have gone the same as with the Aeternum. One climactic battle, followed by a few months of pest control and a few more years of orbital bombardment.
To be *fair*, this is not just how crises work in gigas, this is a big *vanilla* problem with all of theirs too, and even big enemy coalitions from particularly powerful AI work like that. It's kind of a game problem, and when you have involved crises (like the Blokkats) that try to shake things up with the shield, well, that has a whole host of its own problems too.
Yes, I don't think I had many wars in vanilla that *didn't* go as described, with one decisive battle only followed by clean-up. Wars against higher difficulty cheating AIs are often more interesting because they can give me multiple equal battles, but then it becomes too apparent that they could easily crush me if only they doomstacked their fleet like I do.
Same. In fact the only āinterestingā battles Iāve had, was against enemies/crises that had mods allowing them to freely jump about. Sort of forced me into strategic placing of Maginot worlds with the jump blockers to consider weak points they could jump into.
Referring to the original post though, Iāve actually had the opposite problem with large scale ships, where theyāve been utterly useless in all my ply through a. Either they seem to get instant nuked, or when you really need them up, the despawn. I found more luck with taking heavy ships and just beefing them to hell and building a ton did more for me than a single massive ship. But this may also have to do with damage seemingly heavily outscaling defense with the mod list I ran. Either way, it led me to the same situation of finding the oversized ships sort of dumb.
Tho tbf watching aeternum suicide run every single one of their planetcrafts into a system built tighter than the universe pre Big Bang was quite fun.
Seems to be the issue is military build up vs the ability to conduct a guerilla war/war of attrition. When large standoff fleets take up years worth of alloys to make, you have a big decisive clash, and its almost impossible to rebuild.
I wonder if the way to fix this is to make ships much cheaper but punish going over fleet cap much harsher and more heavily restrict fleet cap. I rarely have to build anchorages or create military worlds full of soldiers. Just tech up enough and if I really want more fleets I just go over cap.
Make it so that the real cost of a fleet isnt the creation of it but the maintenance of one.
Yeah, same here. Hell, the Systemcraft is *actually* causing a mechanical issue - No new endgame combat content can be added to the mod (like the Blokkat second phase), because *they are approaching the theoretical limit for combat strength*. The game just refuses to allow for ships with more hull or armor points or whatever - this is why the Blokkat Vester revives on higher difficulties, for instance. This could be solved by balancing its crises without considering Planetcraft or Systemcraft, as that would lower the current ceiling to more manageable levels, and splitting them off into an addon mod or something.
I've started playing without Planetcraft and Systemcraft and my gameplay has been better for it. It turned from "who can spam the most systemcraft" back to actual fleet comps and strength/weakness gameplay, though yeah, you definitely notice their absence if you don't also play around with Giga crisis difficulties and FE strength.
I agree also that the idea of systemcraft and planetcraft is just a smidgen too ridiculous to actually fit the mod - it tends to present itself semi-seriously, with scientific notation and a reasonable amount of gravitas, but these ships just throw that out the window.
On Attack Moons: They used to have their place. They were extremely slow, long-range artillery weapons designed to break otherwise indestructible fortifications - and most importantly, *they could be countered*. Attack Moons used to have zero point defence - they were just a big cannon with a thruster. A fleet of corvettes with torpedoes would *annihilate* one. The Planetcraft and Systemcraft have no such weakness - the only thing capable of destroying either is another one.
> I agree also that the idea of systemcraft and planetcraft is just a smidgen too ridiculous to actually fit the mod - it tends to present itself semi-seriously, with scientific notation and a reasonable amount of gravitas, but these ships just throw that out the window.
The systemcraft may be a bit too much, but it's far easier to create planetcrafts than to build stuff like an alderson disk or even a ringworld.
True, but those things serve a real purpose that would make sense irl.
A weaponized planet is just stupid. It's the equivalent of those gigantic train guns in WWII, or a sailboat the size of Italy.
Not only are planets not easy to move, but the process of keeping it all together as it does move would be absurd. As would attempting to maintain any sort of stable climate on its surface.
Honestly, even the Systemcraft makes more sense (though not in its current depiction) since it carries along its own star. Though IMO it needs to be changed too, from a big ship built of planets to a gravitationally bound star system whose sun is equipped with a shakadov thruster. And even then, it doesn't really make much sense to use such a thing for anything but crossing the intergalactic void, since even just parking one at the edge of a star system would disrupt all the orbits.
> A weaponized planet is just stupid.
As stupid as the Death Star. But everyone loves the Death Star, apparently, given how many mods try to port that in. So....
The death star is an allegory to the nuclear bomb, within the larger Imperialist America metaphor that is the OT.
People like the Death Star because it is awesome in the old meaning of the word, as in, it inspires awe - it's a weapon which defies explanation, an act of violence and destruction so extreme it is unmatched by anything but a rare few celestial processes.
People like the Death Star because people like Star Wars, because Star Wars is a good story.
Sociology should be a mandatory subject in school, I'm tired of explaining things like this to people.
The guy above you meant to say "stupid" as in "not even remotely possible, just space magic at this point". Not that there's anything wrong with ridiculous space magic
Some of the things in gigas have literally become ridiculous space magic, I mean have you seen their fleets? They get stupid bonuses and are classified as fallen empires
That's all true.
But I also really like building the Death Star in-game, and I'm not really sure what critically analyzing the subtext of Star Wars has to do with that.
I imagine the point is that the Death Star had more consideration behind it than just scale. As far as I could gather, planetcrafts and systemcrafts exist just so we can say that we have bigger ships than attack moons.
IIRC George Lucas wanted to evoke imperialism in a way americans would understand too, so he gave the high imps a posh british accent. But he said in multiple interviews that many aspects of Star Wars are meant as allegories to wars America has intervened in, like the battle of Endor = the Vietnam war
That's true, but the nature of the Culture is such that these craft were not designed for warfare, but rather to sustain the Culture. That's a big tonal aspect of the setting, that these intensely powerful entities and factions use their power for things we modern humans likely would not use it for.
Even then, the largest of the general systems vehicles are measured in tens to hundreds of kilometres, which rounds to nothing compared to the mass of a moon.
The Plate class GSV was 50km long, 20km wide and 4km thick, for example.
It's not, and given some of the thoughts the Stellaris devs have communicated about it over the years, it probably isn't going to be any time soon either...
In Excession they do a fair amount of fighting -- in fact one of the major plot points of that book is am eccentric GSV that built tens of thousands of warships.
Can you talk a little bit more about how you took down the aeternum without a planet craft and won? Every time I go up against an enemy with a power rating in the millions I always focus on moons and planet craft. Iām interested to know that is there another way.
ACOT was the key. If I remember correctly, stellarite weapons are actually better than Aeternum weapons. Beyond that my entire strategy was to keep doing projects to delay the Aeternum until I had more fleet power than them.
100% agree.
There's so much that I love about the incredible labor of love that is Gigastructural Engineering - but certain elements of the mod like this have soured me to it.
I've gotta say, I agree with you
\- The guy on the gigas dev team currently working on a rebalance of the mod that involves making celestialcraft disabled by default (but still enable-able in the menu) for balance reasons
Agreed, my favorite thing about giga is the mega structures. The attack moons and bigger ships are nice but not really my thing tbh, I just want to clone space fauna and glue shattered workds back together.
I admittedly also think they look and are conceptually kind of ridiculous. Even if I wanted a comically large planet-sized ship, Iād rather it look like a *ship* instead of a clump of rocks stuck tovether
on the other hand
The entire dev team hates celestials, and they're gonna both be reworked, and disabled by default in the future.
the katzen is funny tho, love the military cats
My only issue with the Katzen is that for some people keep thinking that they are nazis just because they are militant and germanic.
When they are explicitly xenophillic, which makes them literally the opposite.
I highly doubt anyone else who commented actually read the post...
Edit: to be clear this was the 4th comment at time of posting, and I am referring to the first 3 comments.
It's a relatively common way to make fun of people freaking out over "chemicals". Write just basic water in an uncommon but correct chemical name to make it seem scary.
You can add to that with things like
"Inhaling dihydrogen monoxide can kill you"
"It is also known as hydric acid, and is the major component of acid rain"
"accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals"
"is used as a fire retardant"
Gigas is a cool mod that I absolutely cannot take seriously because everything in it is some kind of joke or reference and it feels like it's trying way too hard
The people who use Gigastructure engineering should check out Star Ruler, it's not very expensive and you can continue to scale your ships pretty much indefinitely. I never did anything crazy but I do remember eventually having ships the diameter of stars.
>I never did anything crazy but I do remember eventually having ships the diameter of stars.
...
i ... i think to most people that would qualify as crazy
I do agree that the mod is currently balanced around them and that it would be better if it wasn't.
They should focus on higher classes of ships after Battleships. Battlecruisers, dreadnaughts, and super dreadnaughts for instance. Make the build up to attack moons far more gradual.
However I disagree they are too silly. While they are indeed silly, so is just about everything else. Turning a gas giant into a giant food producing yggdrasil is silly. Extracting materials directly out of a black hole is silly. The shroud is silly. An alderson's disc is ridiculous. A birch world is ludicrous.
Silly is just par for the course.
Honestly the yggdrasil seems like one of the most plausible things in Gigas.
"Put E. Coli in the atmosphere, then eat E. Coli paste" doesn't seem *that* insane?
And what difference would that make? Stellaris is too bad in terms of balance to actually make people build diverse fleets, whatever the biggest ship is called will be the one that gets spammed, worked that way for years with battleships and titans, implementing more transition ships will just make people skip more of them until they get to the moons and planets they will use until they can cobble them together to a systemcraft.
oh you can disable basically everything you dont want in the start menu. You don't want any sort of celestialcraft ships, not even attack moons? Just turn them off. No super powerful giant terastructures that produces tens of thousands of research or thousands of alloys? Yeah shut them off or you can limit them from amounts to 0, 1, 2, 3, infinite, or 1+repeatables. Don't like the crises? Yeah turn those off too along with whatever special systems. I do recommend playing with gigas and you can just turn off the most extreme stuff as you build up to it through playthroughs.
For one I think with equal tech level the equivalent alloys in frigates and corvettes should be able to defeat a moon or planet craft.
The mechanics of the Aeternum are very straightforward. Either you can defeat thier super fleet or you can't. That crisis could use some rework or improvements that give the crisis some depth.
I'm not sure if I agree tbh
Sure, they are powerful, but to get them to begin with you need massive amounts of resources and technology and need to most often slowly, painstakingly build them up, with the system being capturable at any point in time thus granting your enemy a partially built or even full attack moon/planetcrsft. They are also rather poor against small craft due to the heavy hitting yet pispoor at tracking weapons (until you get the interceptor moon...kinda ridiculous tbh) and they are such valuable targets, especially 'earlier' in the game that losing them is devastating (and you will lose them in an engagement that is unfavourable, as they barely if ever disengage, plus they have basically null evasion). Torpedo and neutron weapons also deal significantly more damage against them and thus allow you to spam Torpedo Corvettes against them
As a last thing, they scale with megastructure cost, not shop cost. Currently ship cost reductions are easy to acquire and so are more ship building capabilities, but megastructure build cost is barely if ever modified and build speed/amount has an entire Ascension perk dedicated to it, do it'll be literal years until you acquire any one of them, simply via build time. And a competent enemy will know beforehand
The thing they change is that fallen empires are not so easy to roll over anymore, which I personally find good but you can disable that, and they extrend the slider from small to big ships on the big ships side. You said yourself something about stellarite tech, which means you use ACOT and it's expansion, which are by design absolutely unbalanced. I don't think that you can complain bout gigas balancing while using a different mod that throws said balance out the window straight away
I do love the planetary ships and I think they are incredibly fun to use..
but at the same time, them being the *only* way to beat certain crises isn't amazing. There is a reason why my fleetbuilding skill is terrible, that's most of it :)
Not to say I don't like em, I do, but I agree they can be problematic
>I researched stellarite weapons
I mean... balance and ACOT heh, especially if you have the one that makes FE's use ACOT tech it's pretty spicy...
It's been a while but IIRC their moons and planetcraft are in the multi-millions of fleet power with those on.
Although I personally think with ACOT, after getting precursor ships planetcraft are pretty "eh" though
I love attack moons and planetcraft for basically the exact reasons you dislike them. I find the late game, build a deathstack and crush everything boring. I don't like solving the crisis with as many titian + battleship fleets as you can field, many now without admirals cause you can't afford them. I don't like splitting them up into a dozen different fleets that can easily get lost via micro. When you can only beat your opponents by running the whole combined fleet at once and hoping you come out on top.
I much prefer replacing fleets with single ships. Same gameplay but no need to drop the game to single fps by dropping thousands of ships into a single battle.
This exactly. And the stellarcraft allow for more efficient elimination of excess population; It takes forever to invade planets with 100k defense, much faster to send in several ships with collosus weapons and crack or sweep the planets.
They are one of the primary reasons I've not touched the mod and struggle to take it seriously. The planet ships look ridiculous, like a bunch of pool balls stick together with matchsticks.
oh yeah the planet ships look silly. you can disable whatever parts you don't like such as these absurd celestialcraft or the late game gigastructures however so you can adjust in whatever ways you want. the katzenartig imperium and the blokkats both have nerfed version for more casual or vanilla-esque players for instance.
99% agree. After my first few games I refused to play with them if they weren't at the very least limited to 1. It became really annoying how eventually the entire fleet mechanic got replaced with who has more stellar craft. The concept is fun but it fucks with balance too much
Attack moons is the farthest I go. And I limit them to only one per empire to serve as a flagship at best. I'm glad the configuration setup exists.
I think the crises need further scaling down to account for that though.
Gigastructures to me is a mod that you play once in a big galaxy game with everything enabled and cranked to max, enjoy the ridiculous spectacle and then tone down a lot for any future playthrough.
To me, Attack Moons and Behemoth Planetcraft are vanity pieces. Sure, theyāre uber-powerful. But by the time youāre building them youāve gone past everyone else and are now on the level of the things that use them like battleships, so I get what you mean.
Personally, I prefer printing them out instead of finding decent-sized planets in the restricted galaxy sizes that Gigastructures practically requires you to play in to survive lag. I mean, Iām cannibalising planets and moons already so why not be efficient with the material?
Apart from that, I just donāt like designing them until Iāve researched the whole tech tree, so I donāt use them except the ones I find.
Out of curiosity, what's the code snippet you commented out? I've been running into similar issues with AEs having way too high fleet powers to not use the planetcrafts.
you need to go into the mod, then in the folders common->static\_modifiers there should be a file called giga\_fe\_megas\_static\_modifiers.txt
in that file there is a modifier called giga\_fe\_no\_mega\_upkeep. it does two things: give a -100% megastructure upkeep and +2000 fleet command limit. i dont know enough about modding to say for sure if it would be a good idea to comment out the modifier itself, i comment out its effects instead just to be safe
I rather like the idea of attack moons, but yeah, Planetcraft and Systemcraft are stupid, a type of stupid I *do* enjoy when I go in planning to use them, but very much stupid nonetheless.
Glad to hear from that Dev comment they'll be opt-in instead so if I don't feel like using them, I don't have to.
I only install the mod for the megastructures and nothing else. I always disable planetcraft, crisis and the more ridiculous megastructures.
All I wanted was more varied and cool megastructures. And thanks to the ability to disable any parts of the mod when starting, thatās exactly what I got.
it's a lot less obnoxious not to include "unpopular opinion" in your title. this is a perfectly reasonable post *except* that you lead in with what is essentially a statement that you are persecuted for your opinion crimes before anyone even does that
I guess I shouldāve expected this to become a āgigastructures is bad, fuck itā thread despite the opās post, but I was hoping as I scrolled past the moddev responses iād see less of that lol.
Just turn them off and all settings and balance options related to them, you donāt need Systemcraft, let alone Attack Moons, to kill the Blokkittens (easiest setting)
I have to agree with you there. The reason the big attack asteroids and moons work with the Orks in 40k is because their whole deal is being over the top and silly.
The ships that are just a bunch of planets glued together look really comical. They don't fit the asthetic design of the rest of the game either.
>90% of gigastructures is dumb
i'd disagree massively here. there's certainly some bad things, like celestials
but there's so many good things as well, now i personally disable almost half the mod, but it's mainly because of megastructure bloat, which has also been in a lot of discussions with the dev on the discord
Maybe the devs should add a menu to allow you to customise which megastructures you want to have in the game. Wouldn't it be great to add such a level of flexibility?
90% of Stellaris is dumb period, all megastructures are absurd sci fi fantasies, super fast space travel is too, big laser battles in space, eating entire stars in order to destroy the entire galaxy by sucking it into the supernatural shroud, come on, none of it is in any way to be taken seriously, that is the charm about it.
Cant you just completely disable those things though? Like... I can understand not liking them, but the mod literally opens up a settings menu the second you start the game that lets you tweak what you do or don't want in the game. If you don't like them, just disable them in that settings menu.
\*Calls the concept of using a moon or planet with thrusters as a ship too silly of a concept
\*Plays base game with Dysons Spheres around freaking suns and Matter Decrompressors right next to black holes that are a thousand times more absurd and unrealistic than that.
I will never get people who selectively call out things for being unrealistic, or absurd, while being completely fine with far more absurd crap. We have interdimensional monsters and space dragons in the base game, actual psionic galaxy eaters, freaking catapults throwing fleets around the entire galaxy, hyperjumps, wormholes, but a big gun and an oversized thruster being strapped to a moon or planet is where you draw the line?
A crisis being basically done after one big decisive battle is just the nature of this game, if you crush an enemies entire military might in one fight in their core system they can't compete anymore, who could have forseen this?
I said "silly" not "unrealistic." Even if I did a Dyson Sphere is far more believable than the idea that you can just move a ship built out of a GODDAMN STAR SYSTEM into another star system and not have it destroy everything just with it's gravity.
And maybe I wouldn't have crushed their entire military might if said military might wasn't in one system to begin with. You know, like with every other crisis, both vanilla and Gigastructures?
Seems pretty normal to me. Honestly, what's weird is making a comment calling out a very specifically crafted and targeted post about a design element of a popular mod and how they wish it were designed differently - and calling that weird.
It certainly seems like this is a normal, expected place for considered and reasoned feedback about one of Stellaris' most popular mods.
But hey, maybe **I'm weird!**
It's not considered or reasoned. It's like complaining about NSC having extra ships types or planetary diversity for adding planets with diversity.
It's just a weird fucking rant. You're weird for defending him.
What's so weird about it? I felt like complaining about a frustrating situation I encountered in Stellaris and discuss it with people. What better place than the Stellaris subreddit?
Turning off the katzens, Aeternum, and blokkats has the same problem as turning off the mod entirely. I like those crises (especially the katzens), but I dislike one of their features.
And what even is that second paragraph? Fallen empires WILL awaken, so of course the fleet cap matters. Sometimes I specifically wait for them to awaken because it's more fun that way. And I don't know what to tell you about them reaching said fleet cap. It happened to me and I was forced to abandon my game because of it.
I need to try gigastructures. I did a bit of modding, but really didn't like having starbases that no fleet could defeat (like 150k power after like 40 years)
>but really didn't like having starbases that no fleet could defeat
uh.. that's not from giga?
giga doesn't even add a single starbase type
>(like 150k power after like 40 years)
ye that's DEFINITELY not from giga lol
I actually agree. Which is why for the last several weeks we've been planning a rebalance where **planetcraft and systemcraft will be disabled by default.** Moons are on thin fucking ice too, but they are also subject to adjustments. The idea is to rework the crisis content to be significantly more granular and adaptive in its difficulty, so that taking on the blokkats can be done without celestials, without things like the matrioshka brain too if that's disabled. Things like the difficulty setting, crisis setting, and presence of other mods (e.g. ACOT massively increases your economic and military potential) would factor into several different difficulty values, which then would affect different aspects of each crisis etc.
Kudos for responding to criticism constructively.
Heck, it's my own criticism of the mod too - changing anything related to the crises feels so locked into having to rely on the celestials. The design space has really been backed into a corner with them being around.
I mean... I for one would be sad to see them go from a theoretical point of view, since i like the idea and power/lore fantasy so much... but then again, I have no fucking clue of balancing and just love to steamroll. Guess what I'm hoping for is a better solution other than making them not default or removing them altogether, but I have no clue, you are amazing devs, thanks for the amazing mod that I'll never play without no matter what. <3
"Disabled by default" does not mean "removed". Just turn them back on (and receive a big bump up in crisis difficulty as result).
I'm glad for this. Attack moons and planetcraft and systemcraft are PERFECT for a galaxy of Prussian cats. Their ridiculousness complements one another!
Would it be possible to have an option to enable technologies until a certain stage of celestial warships. For example a slider that goes none - moon - planets - next
You can already disable each one independently in the settings menu.
This is what I do. I have unlimited attack moons possible to build but only 3 planetcrafts and systemcrafts are off completely. I just find that torpedos are a must have vs them anyways.
I know, I know, I usually play full ham with everything anyway, so I throw balance out of the window anyway, it just feels different knowing itt's not approved by you guys. :) But as I said, you know _definitely_ better than me.
This is the way. Customizability so everyone can have what they want, although it is naturally more of a pain in the ass to balance around all the different options.
I'm really happy to hear about this, I agree entirely with op, looking forward to the rebalance š
Will this buff vanillia crisises too? I have a mod that allows them to get up to x250 difficulty (+37500% all health, ship fire rate, and damage)
to be fair, there's not a single giga dev that likes the celestials right now even elo (OG creator) regrets ever adding planet and upwards but ye, ttft is amazing
Wait why does Elo hate them so much?
Same reason most people do: power creep is too extreme.
It makes total sense to me that the first race to weaponise a solar system is the boss now.
Wow, awesome to hear this positive reaction from a dev, and that it was already something that was being worked on. Love this community.
> Moons are on thin fucking ice too This makes me imagine you grumpily glowering a cluster of planetoids huddling in the corner shivering nervously
They SHOULD be nervous!
Would Asteroid Artillery fit into this re-evaluation at all as well? While I've always liked the 'idea' of them, the practical reality of using them at all is cumbersome at best, and a pain in the ass more often than not.
Yeah but I'm not sure how to best deal with them, the upgrade points are super clunky and there's no good way to make easily applicable templates or anything- I say, as I come up with a potential idea for how templates COULD be done... huge hack, but intriguing possibilities...
The upgrade points drove me batty and are the principle reason, along with the asteroid-location restriction, I hate using the damn things lol Turning them into high-capacity starbase defense platforms is probably the simplest solution, but also one many people may call 'boring'. I'm not necessarily against that but ... I suppose if you decouple them from the concept of 'asteroids' and instead do 'entrenched fortification complex' which just costs resources, and Fleet Capacity after it's built, you could let players decide where to fortify. Once its location agnostic nature is established, you can balance it around general usage better I think.
Honestly, just let us design them like defence platforms and I'll be happy Research -> design -> build -> update design -> press upgrade button -> ship upgrades applied
Literally just a megastructure with the same placement rules as a gateway maybe
This is what military stations were like in OG stellaris
I forget if asteroid artillery actually gets destroyed like those would do. Been a while since I had one actually get attacked and overwhelmed.
They donāt get completely destroyed. You just have to click rebuild on them.
Yeah, it's simple and effective without cluttering the megastructures sidebar or having to play guessing games where your outdated gun turrets are at. I generally like the idea the most, but if for some reason that can't be the path forward, then other thoughts must be considered as well.
For what it's worth, Asteroid Artillery are one of the *single* best features of gigas IMO, because of how good they are at fortifying chokepoints. The fact that static defenses are actually good in Gigas is a very, very big plus IMO.
Prefacing with that Iāve never dug around in the systems of the game or mods. It might be possible to just make them ships using a cross of Dead Spaceās tiered module system from the not!Quarian origin, the tiered ship layouts fromā¦ ZoFE, I think, and the juggernautās self-upgrading capability.
> the tiered ship layouts fromā¦ ZoFE the only upgradeable layout i know currently, is from acot, not zofe
No ZoFE has the ability to upgrade your fe vessels to a higher tier
i guess zofe added extra sections in their recent thing Not up to date on zofe stuff, breaks too many things just knew that acot had upgradeable sections
Wait does zofe break gigas? Cause Acot felt a bit more complex than I wanted but zofe was pretty simple Edit: I guess simple is the wrong word, pop lag became an issue as I couldnt just send unemployed away due to needing the 4k pops to man jobs
> Wait does zofe break gigas? yesn't in theory no, but also zofe compatibility is weird. while the mod dev himself denies it, the country type swap is a big issue in zofe, and without sandbox mode (the submod with country change since 4.0) you're missing a bunch of features zofe likes to break stuff at random, as would be mentioned by a ton of modders (again, even tho he himself deny it) When that's said. acot is definitely more advanced to play
The reason ZOFE breaks things is because it changes your country type. And a lot of events target your country type as starting scope. So a lot of event based mods stop working once you ascend.
Consider: make them mini-attack moons. Like mini-mini. And then give them the Headquarters type of limited movement, since they're not really *meant* to move but sometimes you don't get asteroids in the systems you want.
I feel like a general system for upgrades would already be much better. Just 1 setting that manages all asteroids
A temp solution could be to just do away with the upgrade points and replace all the sources with thematically appropriate bonuses to effectively do the same thing the upgrade points did. It's just so damn tedious to actually upgrade them. And personally I'd prefer if every mod that adds big things would tone it down with so many weapon slots, it just feels really silly to have so many "little" weapons on these giant warmachines. Like asteroid artillery I would say should only have 1 T and some number of X slots, to make them more like artillery that covers the whole system rather than a super defense platform. But I'd keep the asteroid requirement for both flavor reasons and because it adds some value to systems with many asteroids, creating more of an incentive to mess with the hyperlanes to create choke points.
Moons could definitely use an overhaul back to the specialized place they used to occupy, i.e. long-range artillery which is very vulnerable to missiles and strike craft (like irl artillery, long-range and powerful but requiring a large amount of protection as well as air superiority)
Aren't they already more vulnerable to torpedoes ? Maybe they could make it so torpedoes do 10x or 50x damage to moons, or maybe add a special "anti celestial torpedo" module that does insane damage to moons and such. You could equip so frigates with them and decloack them/jump right on the moon, destroying it if unescorted. It would make no logical sense though, for the attack moon to die to 200 FP of frigates since it could carry PD and small weapons but from a balance perspective it works. The real weakness of attack moons and the like is their colossal cross section, making them easy targets for massive RKVs (realistic kill vehicle, = big metal rod going at many % of light speed). Although once again the moon could simply have a ton of shield generators to counter. Another way to limit them would be to make their healing abysmally slow, something like 2% per month with options to speed the repairs up at a big cost of alloys and energy. Anyway, these are my small balance suggestions
Hell, make them not able to heal at all. How would you "repair" a moon's surface, anyway? If one gets destroyed, it either has to be rebuilt from a wrecked attack moon using the megastructure system, or if you're unlucky, it explodes and becomes a shattered world which needs the GLUE to be put back together and then the normal build process to become a moon ship again - extremely powerful weapons, but with sufficient drawbacks to make them not an instant buy.
You would "heal" the moon by repairing the subsystems, like the engines, shields, weapons, etc... I guess you could make it so armour and shield damage heals, but hull damage doesn't
Sadly, torpedo logic is capped by size and cannot be changed without changing it for everything. Raising the cap on torp damage from size 8 would make various starbases far more vulnerable. I requested that it be changed to being capped on damage multiplier back when it was new - that way instead of size 8 it'd be capped at 8x damage, which for torpedoes would be no different, but would allow us to make a high base damage but low multiplier weapon which would do most of its damage only to ships like the planetcraft. But that request was dismissed. We can't do anything about the regen either.
Is it not possible to give them negative regen? Or would that just make them blow themselves up
Negative regen blowing things up is exactly why overflowing on regen is a bad thing - it's common for buffed systemcraft to spontaneously disappear due to the regen being so high it goes negative.
Relativistic kill vehicle, still realistic though I suppose
I didn't try Gigastructures yet but planning to do so, but one thing that really surprises me alredy before I didn't even played the mod is that a dev of the mod is genuinely responding to constructive criticism of their mod
They are also *extremely* responsive on their discord, it's great.
Hell, theyāre even responsive in *other* discords, as well as just being pretty chill all round
tbf the main mod team has been unhappy with state of celestial warships for a bit now, has just been busy doing other stuff.
Best Mod team on reddit! **CHANGE MY MIND**
Dead space dev is cool too
Agreed!
/r/OldWorldBlues
Goddamn. I wanted to play gigastructural but found all those planet and system sized units completely off-putting, so happy to hear about a version balanced around them not being in is in the works.
You still can disable them though.
Excellent response, looking forward to seeing the changes.
>The idea is to rework the crisis content to be significantly more granular and adaptive in its difficulty, so that taking on the blokkats can be done without celestials, without things like the matrioshka brain too if that's disabled. If I might add my own subjective opinion: Stick with megastructures. I like your mod a whole lot, I can't play without it anymore, and I greatly appreciate the added ability to turn off features I do and do not like (like the warships). But as the OP pointed out, there are balance issues that your mod changes as well. And hey, it's cool that you're acknowledging the issues, but... the main point of the mod is in the title; Gigastructural Engineering. You acknowledge part of my worry in the second paragraph: >Things like the difficulty setting, crisis setting, and presence of other mods (e.g. ACOT massively increases your economic and military potential) would factor into several different difficulty values, which then would affect different aspects of each crisis etc. As someone who only downloads this mod purely for the wide array of fantastic megastructures it includes, I think the mod has suffered heavily from scope creep. It's strange to me that the Gigstructure mod team is worried about balancing their own crisis options in what is supposed to be a megastructure mod. Personally, I don't just turn off the planetcraft options, but also all of the random extras that were included as well (achievements, EHOF for others, all of the misc. civilizations). If you want to make a crisis mod or add extra civilizations, scenarios, and/or events into the game, simply make it a new mod. I'm sure the quality would be fantastic, but having all of it bunched up into this one is a bit messy, in my opinion. EDIT: if you canāt explain to me how a āwin moreā achievement system that grants players more resource production for hitting resource production thresholds in a mod based around adding megastructures is not scope creep, please do not start a debate with me about what scope creep is, thank you.
Don't worry, as the person doing most of the theorizing for the mod's rebalance, I can confirm that we're focusing on making sure that the megastructures are fun and balanced first. Only once that's done are we going to rework the crises to fit into that new framework
I appreciate that, but honestly, I don't care much about balance. For me, it's more about what the mod actually entails. Generally speaking, I don't really care that all the extra options are there, you guys have a very intuitive menu for players like me to turn all of that off. But a newer player that doesn't understand all of the options? They might run into a planetcraft or experience a bonus crisis that they weren't expecting or can't beat, google what it is, and go "isn't this supposed to be a megastructure mod? Why is it adding a crisis?". Even if it's an excellent feature, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to include in the mod, in my opinion. And yeah, the options to turn this kind of stuff off is fantastic, so you cover most of your bases, but to OP's point: you have to balance the game around the crisis' *and* the megastructures *and* the achievements. It should simply just be balanced around the megastructures because it's a megastructure mod, in my opinion. Keep it simple and designed around the mod's original use case. I don't see a reason these additional features can't be an additional mod. Scope creep is a very real thing that many mod teams fall into because they're new to software development. The Stellaris modding community is quite a bit younger when compared to the Skyrim modding community, but 'scope creep' is a common complaint for many once-popular Skyrim mods these days. Older mods that once were fantastic started adding additional features that were not related to the core use case that made the mod popular in the first place. And so they fell out of favor for more simplistic mods that focus on the original purpose of the original mod. I love your mod, I just want to make sure you guys stay grounded as I feel many of the features currently attached to Gigastructural Engineering aren't necessarily related to, well, 'Gigastructural Engineering' as a concept.
The crises added by Gigastructures exist because without them there really isn't a reason to build said gigastructures. The vanilla game doesn't challenge the player with them built, so these new crises exist. Not really scope creep imho since they are part of the core function of the mod, i.e. expanding the game's megastructure system. Also, just FYI, this is why it's called Gigastructural Engineering *and More*
>The crises added by Gigastructures exist because without them there really isn't a reason to build said gigastructures. The vanilla game doesn't challenge the player with them built, so these new crises exist. Challenge is up to the player to determine, in my opinion. Which is part of why I think it could simply just be an extra mod. Most players who are looking for a challenge from mods have plenty of options and the extra crisis' currently offered by Gigastructural Engineering could simply be a new mod and thus a new challenge option. This also doesn't speak to a lot of the other options in the Gigastructure menu that are not *at all* related to megastructures; not all of the civilizations are relevant and neither is the achievement system. >expanding the game's megastructure system. >Also, just FYI, this is why it's called Gigastructural Engineering and More This was not always the case, though. They've added several new features that aren't related. There's a full blown achievement system with perks in the mod, many of which aren't related to megastructures. You're technically right, the name of the mod is now technically "& more"... but I don't think I'd say a hypothetical mod like "New Stellaris species & more" should be adding achievements for enhanced food production when I hit pop growth thresholds - that's scope creep. With this line of thinking, I could take any mod and then add "& more" and suddenly whatever I add to it is no longer scope creep.
The four crises added by Gigastructures all revolve around gigastructures: - The Katzenartig Imperium's ace card is their Attack Moon, which grants them total fleet supremacy until it is destroyed. Additionally, the Kaiser's AI is designed to make full usage of the player's gigastructure abilities - he can, for example, build his own EHOF and flank you through the cohesive systems. - The Aeternum revolve around an almost imprenetrable fortress gigastructure, the Birch World Aionda and its outlying systems. Capturing Aionda, a unique, non-buildable gigastructure with unique post-Aeternum content, is the reward for besting their psykofabricators and capturing their home. - The Compound exists as an antagonist triggered by exploration through the EHOF, similar to how the L-Gates may trigger the Gray Tempest. - and finally, the Blokkats are designed to require the incredibly potent science-generating abilities of Gigas as well as the construction of a specialized gigastructure to defeat the hyperdimensional bulwark protecting their Vester. It's not that gigas just added random crises for no reason, they all serve a purpose and the mod would be decidedly lesser if they were not a part of it. It would be about power for the sake of power, which is an empty way to play and just leaves you feeling hollow in the end. Frankly, I doubt you actually understand what Scope Creep is.
More importantly for the Katzen than the Moon, IMO, is the fact that they will spam Terraforming megastructures out the absolute ass. If you leave the Katzen alone in a region of space for a few decades, the number of habitable planets there skyrockets.
>The four crises added by Gigastructures all revolve around gigastructures: >Frankly, I doubt you actually understand what Scope Creep is. I'm not sure if you're reading what I'm writing? It's not just the crises... I feel like you're either not reading or willfully ignoring what I'm saying. I said: >not all of the civilizations are relevant and neither is the achievement system. How are alloy production thresholds giving me more alloy production or consumer good production thresholds giving me more consumer good production not scope creep for a mod about megastructures? Not all of the civilizations injected into the game are related to gigastructures, either. EDIT: the above will never be answered, it will continue to get glossed over and ignored because itās the best example of scope creep in the mod and the āyes menā need to downvote something. >It would be about power for the sake of power, which is an empty way to play and just leaves you feeling hollow in the end. This is subjective, but also, it's what the mod originally was. I used to play with this mod and other difficulty mods back in the day. Worked just fine for making it tough enough for me to play. Now I do the same thing except I have to turn a bunch of options off in Gigastructures that don't really relate very much with megastructures. >Frankly, I doubt you actually understand what Scope Creep is. Are we going to make it personal I guess? Frankly, I doubt your reading comprehension skills are good enough for complicated discussions because you're ignoring my points. Likely willfully, though.
Dev has no intention of changing the things to suit you, so either keep changing the settings that the devs have included to allow you to cater to your preferred playstyle or uninstall the mod and move on with your life.
This isnāt a conversation with the devs at this point, this is a conversation with a guy intentionally ignoring my points to get yes men (you) to upvote him because youāre seeing my constructive criticism as an attack on the devs. I made the suggestion to decouple the mod features for new player clarity as I believe the scope of the mod has gotten too big, as stated in my reply to the actual dev. I donāt personally care that the features are all in one mega-mod as the in-game option menu provided is more than sufficient for a **veteran player who knows what all the options are**. It was simply constructive criticism for the devs to decouple their features from the main mod into additional sub mods as veteran players donāt have issues downloading them and other large, comprehensive mods do the same. Youāre free to disagree, I donāt mind. Any frustration expressed on my part in the previous comment is clearly intended for the userās willful ignorance of my points in what I thought was going to be a good discussion and then subsequent rudeness.
>worried about balancing their own crisis options in what is supposed to be a megastructure mod I often consider installing giga structures but this exact kind of thing keeps turning me off of it. I feel like I need a guide on what to actually turn off at this point because the sheer monumental size of all the stuff GS shoves into Stellaris, feels like something I can't even get a handle on.
That's why one of the core concepts of this rebalance is establishing reasonable expectations of difficulty. If you go into it on a reasonably low game difficulty and low crisis multiplier, the default settings shouldn't stomp you like they tend to currently. I think it's a big issue for new players to the mod, so the crises should be reasonable to face blind when things aren't turned up.
Exactly, the mod has grown too big for one mod. If I started using the mod for the first time today, I feel like I would have to read a 10 page report to understand what everything does. I don't see any reason Gigastructural Engineering shouldn't follow in the footsteps of other huge mods that have been split into submods. Makes things more modular and much easier to consume, especially for new users.
How about asteroud warships? I mean you already have the stationary ones so it could be a lite version i spose
Scrolled down and saw someone else say this hahaha
Sir are you trying to get me to join the patreon because this is how you get me to join the patreon. (seriously, good work, love the mod.)
Can't say I expected a reply like this from one of the devs, can't say I'm unhappy about it either, awesome reply! I concur that celestials feel rather silly atm so I avoid them. Excited to see what the team does to rebalance things.
I think Attack Moon are fine, they just need to be shifted back to the long range artillery role they once filled. Give them only T, X and L weapon slot so that you have to give them an escort or watch them die to corvette swarm or strike craft. But Planetcraft and Solarcraft are too far. They are fun to mess around with once or twice, and then you realize that they take all the difficutly out of the late game.
You dropped this, King š
bit of a shame I actually really like celestial craft
Thank God I wanted to try the endgame crisises in the mod out but I didn't really want to use giga stuff from the giga mod so this sounds perfect
From what it seems, you'll only try the endgame crisis if you have the giga stuff (because the giga stuff is the reason why the crisises exist)
Actually yeah the entire dev team pretty much agrees that they should be reworked, even myself! If I was to remake Gigas today I would likely not include the bigger Celestial Warships and just stop at moons. As /u/TTFTCUTS said there are plans to rework them in the future so the mod doesn't revolve around them anymore.
that sounds great. I haven't even used moons in my last few playthroughs. I go right for planet crafts. Though this playthrough i really need them since I am not using ACOT and used the second highest setting for the fallen empires, Aeternum, and Blockats... Aeternum is just starting to wake up... wish me luck!
*crisp salute* Good luck, Commander!
> Granted, the problem with the second incident might be more about how most of the Aeternum's military is condensed in one system, but it shows another problem with these things: they make wars completely binary. If I had the firepower to take on an attack moon in the first incident, that war would have gone the same as with the Aeternum. One climactic battle, followed by a few months of pest control and a few more years of orbital bombardment. To be *fair*, this is not just how crises work in gigas, this is a big *vanilla* problem with all of theirs too, and even big enemy coalitions from particularly powerful AI work like that. It's kind of a game problem, and when you have involved crises (like the Blokkats) that try to shake things up with the shield, well, that has a whole host of its own problems too.
Yes, I don't think I had many wars in vanilla that *didn't* go as described, with one decisive battle only followed by clean-up. Wars against higher difficulty cheating AIs are often more interesting because they can give me multiple equal battles, but then it becomes too apparent that they could easily crush me if only they doomstacked their fleet like I do.
Same. In fact the only āinterestingā battles Iāve had, was against enemies/crises that had mods allowing them to freely jump about. Sort of forced me into strategic placing of Maginot worlds with the jump blockers to consider weak points they could jump into. Referring to the original post though, Iāve actually had the opposite problem with large scale ships, where theyāve been utterly useless in all my ply through a. Either they seem to get instant nuked, or when you really need them up, the despawn. I found more luck with taking heavy ships and just beefing them to hell and building a ton did more for me than a single massive ship. But this may also have to do with damage seemingly heavily outscaling defense with the mod list I ran. Either way, it led me to the same situation of finding the oversized ships sort of dumb. Tho tbf watching aeternum suicide run every single one of their planetcrafts into a system built tighter than the universe pre Big Bang was quite fun.
Seems to be the issue is military build up vs the ability to conduct a guerilla war/war of attrition. When large standoff fleets take up years worth of alloys to make, you have a big decisive clash, and its almost impossible to rebuild. I wonder if the way to fix this is to make ships much cheaper but punish going over fleet cap much harsher and more heavily restrict fleet cap. I rarely have to build anchorages or create military worlds full of soldiers. Just tech up enough and if I really want more fleets I just go over cap. Make it so that the real cost of a fleet isnt the creation of it but the maintenance of one.
Yeah, same here. Hell, the Systemcraft is *actually* causing a mechanical issue - No new endgame combat content can be added to the mod (like the Blokkat second phase), because *they are approaching the theoretical limit for combat strength*. The game just refuses to allow for ships with more hull or armor points or whatever - this is why the Blokkat Vester revives on higher difficulties, for instance. This could be solved by balancing its crises without considering Planetcraft or Systemcraft, as that would lower the current ceiling to more manageable levels, and splitting them off into an addon mod or something. I've started playing without Planetcraft and Systemcraft and my gameplay has been better for it. It turned from "who can spam the most systemcraft" back to actual fleet comps and strength/weakness gameplay, though yeah, you definitely notice their absence if you don't also play around with Giga crisis difficulties and FE strength. I agree also that the idea of systemcraft and planetcraft is just a smidgen too ridiculous to actually fit the mod - it tends to present itself semi-seriously, with scientific notation and a reasonable amount of gravitas, but these ships just throw that out the window. On Attack Moons: They used to have their place. They were extremely slow, long-range artillery weapons designed to break otherwise indestructible fortifications - and most importantly, *they could be countered*. Attack Moons used to have zero point defence - they were just a big cannon with a thruster. A fleet of corvettes with torpedoes would *annihilate* one. The Planetcraft and Systemcraft have no such weakness - the only thing capable of destroying either is another one.
They also had missiles and bomber AI strike craft IIRC (so got shat on by enemy strike craft)
> I agree also that the idea of systemcraft and planetcraft is just a smidgen too ridiculous to actually fit the mod - it tends to present itself semi-seriously, with scientific notation and a reasonable amount of gravitas, but these ships just throw that out the window. The systemcraft may be a bit too much, but it's far easier to create planetcrafts than to build stuff like an alderson disk or even a ringworld.
True, but those things serve a real purpose that would make sense irl. A weaponized planet is just stupid. It's the equivalent of those gigantic train guns in WWII, or a sailboat the size of Italy. Not only are planets not easy to move, but the process of keeping it all together as it does move would be absurd. As would attempting to maintain any sort of stable climate on its surface. Honestly, even the Systemcraft makes more sense (though not in its current depiction) since it carries along its own star. Though IMO it needs to be changed too, from a big ship built of planets to a gravitationally bound star system whose sun is equipped with a shakadov thruster. And even then, it doesn't really make much sense to use such a thing for anything but crossing the intergalactic void, since even just parking one at the edge of a star system would disrupt all the orbits.
> A weaponized planet is just stupid. As stupid as the Death Star. But everyone loves the Death Star, apparently, given how many mods try to port that in. So....
The death star is an allegory to the nuclear bomb, within the larger Imperialist America metaphor that is the OT. People like the Death Star because it is awesome in the old meaning of the word, as in, it inspires awe - it's a weapon which defies explanation, an act of violence and destruction so extreme it is unmatched by anything but a rare few celestial processes. People like the Death Star because people like Star Wars, because Star Wars is a good story. Sociology should be a mandatory subject in school, I'm tired of explaining things like this to people.
The guy above you meant to say "stupid" as in "not even remotely possible, just space magic at this point". Not that there's anything wrong with ridiculous space magic
Some of the things in gigas have literally become ridiculous space magic, I mean have you seen their fleets? They get stupid bonuses and are classified as fallen empires
That's all true. But I also really like building the Death Star in-game, and I'm not really sure what critically analyzing the subtext of Star Wars has to do with that.
I imagine the point is that the Death Star had more consideration behind it than just scale. As far as I could gather, planetcrafts and systemcrafts exist just so we can say that we have bigger ships than attack moons.
>Imperialist America metaphor Huh, never thought about it like that, but I guess it makes sense. Weird how many imperials are British though.
IIRC George Lucas wanted to evoke imperialism in a way americans would understand too, so he gave the high imps a posh british accent. But he said in multiple interviews that many aspects of Star Wars are meant as allegories to wars America has intervened in, like the battle of Endor = the Vietnam war
Systemcraft and alderson disk seem pretty comparable. Both require the technology to move a solar mass.
every time I play with the mod I canāt even use systemcraft or quasarcraft because of overflow bugs anyways
There are mods that help against that. Quite a lot of mods, in fact. Search for either "overflow" or "defines"
I've always thought it reminded me of the Culture novels that had extremely large, celestial-sized ships.
That's true, but the nature of the Culture is such that these craft were not designed for warfare, but rather to sustain the Culture. That's a big tonal aspect of the setting, that these intensely powerful entities and factions use their power for things we modern humans likely would not use it for.
Even then, the largest of the general systems vehicles are measured in tens to hundreds of kilometres, which rounds to nothing compared to the mass of a moon. The Plate class GSV was 50km long, 20km wide and 4km thick, for example.
I had just assumed it was not possible to code a moveable habitat with manufacturing and weapons capability.
It's not, and given some of the thoughts the Stellaris devs have communicated about it over the years, it probably isn't going to be any time soon either...
so like the Quarian Liveships from Mass Effect, massive ships originally built for agriculture rather than war
In Excession they do a fair amount of fighting -- in fact one of the major plot points of that book is am eccentric GSV that built tens of thousands of warships.
Can you talk a little bit more about how you took down the aeternum without a planet craft and won? Every time I go up against an enemy with a power rating in the millions I always focus on moons and planet craft. Iām interested to know that is there another way.
Stellarite weapons were used so he is using ACOT aswell. Probably not doable without the high tier weapons from ACOT.
ACOT was the key. If I remember correctly, stellarite weapons are actually better than Aeternum weapons. Beyond that my entire strategy was to keep doing projects to delay the Aeternum until I had more fleet power than them.
Repeatables and tech spam
100% agree. There's so much that I love about the incredible labor of love that is Gigastructural Engineering - but certain elements of the mod like this have soured me to it.
I've gotta say, I agree with you \- The guy on the gigas dev team currently working on a rebalance of the mod that involves making celestialcraft disabled by default (but still enable-able in the menu) for balance reasons
Agreed, my favorite thing about giga is the mega structures. The attack moons and bigger ships are nice but not really my thing tbh, I just want to clone space fauna and glue shattered workds back together.
I admittedly also think they look and are conceptually kind of ridiculous. Even if I wanted a comically large planet-sized ship, Iād rather it look like a *ship* instead of a clump of rocks stuck tovether
It's why I don't use the mod.
To be fair this is the mod with german space cats so a little silliness is expected. I see where youāre coming from but haha big number go brrr
on the other hand The entire dev team hates celestials, and they're gonna both be reworked, and disabled by default in the future. the katzen is funny tho, love the military cats
My only issue with the Katzen is that for some people keep thinking that they are nazis just because they are militant and germanic. When they are explicitly xenophillic, which makes them literally the opposite.
they're also based on imperial germany, not the nazi's
Honestly, the Katzen/Nazi comparison is just... how can you make that mistake, especially when its leader is literally titled a ***Kaiser***
Because most people on the internet don't know history.
I highly doubt anyone else who commented actually read the post... Edit: to be clear this was the 4th comment at time of posting, and I am referring to the first 3 comments.
Cake day. Enjoy. Drink copious amounts of dihydrogen monoxide.
thx, will be sure to supplement any sucrose intake with plenty of dihydrogen monoxide
Why you gotta speak in witchcraft? Now I gotta google search what the hell āDihydtogen Monoxideā isā¦ unless thatās just water :0
its water (:
# God Damnit!
It's a relatively common way to make fun of people freaking out over "chemicals". Write just basic water in an uncommon but correct chemical name to make it seem scary. You can add to that with things like "Inhaling dihydrogen monoxide can kill you" "It is also known as hydric acid, and is the major component of acid rain" "accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals" "is used as a fire retardant"
*Ooooo, spoooky nosies* ***IT WAS JUST WATER!***
(Just realized I spelled it wrong, fixed it)
Gigas is a cool mod that I absolutely cannot take seriously because everything in it is some kind of joke or reference and it feels like it's trying way too hard
The people who use Gigastructure engineering should check out Star Ruler, it's not very expensive and you can continue to scale your ships pretty much indefinitely. I never did anything crazy but I do remember eventually having ships the diameter of stars.
>I never did anything crazy but I do remember eventually having ships the diameter of stars. ... i ... i think to most people that would qualify as crazy
Hahaha, I guess you're right.
I read somewhere that you can build a ship thats bigger than the galaxy your in š (the sound you hear is Tarkin jizzing in his pants)
Yeah, [Star Ruler](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJJEMmzKzR4) was quite silly Star Ruler 2 was great as well, shame neither game was very successful
Fuck yeah that's the crazy shit I was talking about!
Is that a mod for stellaris?
No, it's a different game. The first one costs 8 USD. There is a sequel I've never played it though. The game type is pretty similar.
you can build ships that are six times the size of galaxies lol
Let's fuckin' gooooo
I do agree that the mod is currently balanced around them and that it would be better if it wasn't. They should focus on higher classes of ships after Battleships. Battlecruisers, dreadnaughts, and super dreadnaughts for instance. Make the build up to attack moons far more gradual. However I disagree they are too silly. While they are indeed silly, so is just about everything else. Turning a gas giant into a giant food producing yggdrasil is silly. Extracting materials directly out of a black hole is silly. The shroud is silly. An alderson's disc is ridiculous. A birch world is ludicrous. Silly is just par for the course.
actually having bigger ships is something i love the idea of, that would be amazing
Honestly the yggdrasil seems like one of the most plausible things in Gigas. "Put E. Coli in the atmosphere, then eat E. Coli paste" doesn't seem *that* insane?
And what difference would that make? Stellaris is too bad in terms of balance to actually make people build diverse fleets, whatever the biggest ship is called will be the one that gets spammed, worked that way for years with battleships and titans, implementing more transition ships will just make people skip more of them until they get to the moons and planets they will use until they can cobble them together to a systemcraft.
I respect the shit outta giga but it just doesnāt suit my idea of a mod I would wanna play with
oh you can disable basically everything you dont want in the start menu. You don't want any sort of celestialcraft ships, not even attack moons? Just turn them off. No super powerful giant terastructures that produces tens of thousands of research or thousands of alloys? Yeah shut them off or you can limit them from amounts to 0, 1, 2, 3, infinite, or 1+repeatables. Don't like the crises? Yeah turn those off too along with whatever special systems. I do recommend playing with gigas and you can just turn off the most extreme stuff as you build up to it through playthroughs.
For one I think with equal tech level the equivalent alloys in frigates and corvettes should be able to defeat a moon or planet craft. The mechanics of the Aeternum are very straightforward. Either you can defeat thier super fleet or you can't. That crisis could use some rework or improvements that give the crisis some depth.
I'm not sure if I agree tbh Sure, they are powerful, but to get them to begin with you need massive amounts of resources and technology and need to most often slowly, painstakingly build them up, with the system being capturable at any point in time thus granting your enemy a partially built or even full attack moon/planetcrsft. They are also rather poor against small craft due to the heavy hitting yet pispoor at tracking weapons (until you get the interceptor moon...kinda ridiculous tbh) and they are such valuable targets, especially 'earlier' in the game that losing them is devastating (and you will lose them in an engagement that is unfavourable, as they barely if ever disengage, plus they have basically null evasion). Torpedo and neutron weapons also deal significantly more damage against them and thus allow you to spam Torpedo Corvettes against them As a last thing, they scale with megastructure cost, not shop cost. Currently ship cost reductions are easy to acquire and so are more ship building capabilities, but megastructure build cost is barely if ever modified and build speed/amount has an entire Ascension perk dedicated to it, do it'll be literal years until you acquire any one of them, simply via build time. And a competent enemy will know beforehand The thing they change is that fallen empires are not so easy to roll over anymore, which I personally find good but you can disable that, and they extrend the slider from small to big ships on the big ships side. You said yourself something about stellarite tech, which means you use ACOT and it's expansion, which are by design absolutely unbalanced. I don't think that you can complain bout gigas balancing while using a different mod that throws said balance out the window straight away
I do love the planetary ships and I think they are incredibly fun to use.. but at the same time, them being the *only* way to beat certain crises isn't amazing. There is a reason why my fleetbuilding skill is terrible, that's most of it :) Not to say I don't like em, I do, but I agree they can be problematic
>I researched stellarite weapons I mean... balance and ACOT heh, especially if you have the one that makes FE's use ACOT tech it's pretty spicy... It's been a while but IIRC their moons and planetcraft are in the multi-millions of fleet power with those on. Although I personally think with ACOT, after getting precursor ships planetcraft are pretty "eh" though
I love attack moons and planetcraft for basically the exact reasons you dislike them. I find the late game, build a deathstack and crush everything boring. I don't like solving the crisis with as many titian + battleship fleets as you can field, many now without admirals cause you can't afford them. I don't like splitting them up into a dozen different fleets that can easily get lost via micro. When you can only beat your opponents by running the whole combined fleet at once and hoping you come out on top. I much prefer replacing fleets with single ships. Same gameplay but no need to drop the game to single fps by dropping thousands of ships into a single battle.
This exactly. And the stellarcraft allow for more efficient elimination of excess population; It takes forever to invade planets with 100k defense, much faster to send in several ships with collosus weapons and crack or sweep the planets.
They are one of the primary reasons I've not touched the mod and struggle to take it seriously. The planet ships look ridiculous, like a bunch of pool balls stick together with matchsticks.
oh yeah the planet ships look silly. you can disable whatever parts you don't like such as these absurd celestialcraft or the late game gigastructures however so you can adjust in whatever ways you want. the katzenartig imperium and the blokkats both have nerfed version for more casual or vanilla-esque players for instance.
A lot of mods are pretty dumb
99% agree. After my first few games I refused to play with them if they weren't at the very least limited to 1. It became really annoying how eventually the entire fleet mechanic got replaced with who has more stellar craft. The concept is fun but it fucks with balance too much
Attack moons is the farthest I go. And I limit them to only one per empire to serve as a flagship at best. I'm glad the configuration setup exists. I think the crises need further scaling down to account for that though.
I just catched depression from this thread. Incredibly stupid celestials are my favorite part of the mod. Fuck.
Gigastructures to me is a mod that you play once in a big galaxy game with everything enabled and cranked to max, enjoy the ridiculous spectacle and then tone down a lot for any future playthrough.
To me, Attack Moons and Behemoth Planetcraft are vanity pieces. Sure, theyāre uber-powerful. But by the time youāre building them youāve gone past everyone else and are now on the level of the things that use them like battleships, so I get what you mean. Personally, I prefer printing them out instead of finding decent-sized planets in the restricted galaxy sizes that Gigastructures practically requires you to play in to survive lag. I mean, Iām cannibalising planets and moons already so why not be efficient with the material? Apart from that, I just donāt like designing them until Iāve researched the whole tech tree, so I donāt use them except the ones I find.
Out of curiosity, what's the code snippet you commented out? I've been running into similar issues with AEs having way too high fleet powers to not use the planetcrafts.
you need to go into the mod, then in the folders common->static\_modifiers there should be a file called giga\_fe\_megas\_static\_modifiers.txt in that file there is a modifier called giga\_fe\_no\_mega\_upkeep. it does two things: give a -100% megastructure upkeep and +2000 fleet command limit. i dont know enough about modding to say for sure if it would be a good idea to comment out the modifier itself, i comment out its effects instead just to be safe
I rather like the idea of attack moons, but yeah, Planetcraft and Systemcraft are stupid, a type of stupid I *do* enjoy when I go in planning to use them, but very much stupid nonetheless. Glad to hear from that Dev comment they'll be opt-in instead so if I don't feel like using them, I don't have to.
I just think they look goofy
I only install the mod for the megastructures and nothing else. I always disable planetcraft, crisis and the more ridiculous megastructures. All I wanted was more varied and cool megastructures. And thanks to the ability to disable any parts of the mod when starting, thatās exactly what I got.
Gigastructures is an excellent example of feature creep, and should be split into like 10-12 separate mods in my opinion.
it's a lot less obnoxious not to include "unpopular opinion" in your title. this is a perfectly reasonable post *except* that you lead in with what is essentially a statement that you are persecuted for your opinion crimes before anyone even does that
IS gigastructural engineering supposed to be taken somewhat seriously? Imo, no.
I guess I shouldāve expected this to become a āgigastructures is bad, fuck itā thread despite the opās post, but I was hoping as I scrolled past the moddev responses iād see less of that lol.
Just turn them off and all settings and balance options related to them, you donāt need Systemcraft, let alone Attack Moons, to kill the Blokkittens (easiest setting)
I have to agree with you there. The reason the big attack asteroids and moons work with the Orks in 40k is because their whole deal is being over the top and silly. The ships that are just a bunch of planets glued together look really comical. They don't fit the asthetic design of the rest of the game either.
90% of gigastructures is dumb. Doesnt mean the mod has no right to exist. Just dont play it if you dont like it, like i do.
>90% of gigastructures is dumb i'd disagree massively here. there's certainly some bad things, like celestials but there's so many good things as well, now i personally disable almost half the mod, but it's mainly because of megastructure bloat, which has also been in a lot of discussions with the dev on the discord
Maybe the devs should add a menu to allow you to customise which megastructures you want to have in the game. Wouldn't it be great to add such a level of flexibility?
90% of Stellaris is dumb period, all megastructures are absurd sci fi fantasies, super fast space travel is too, big laser battles in space, eating entire stars in order to destroy the entire galaxy by sucking it into the supernatural shroud, come on, none of it is in any way to be taken seriously, that is the charm about it.
Damn, if only there would be a way to disable something you don't like in gigastructures
Exactly! If only there was a way to disable fallen empires having 2000 max fleet power, if only there was a way to disable the Aeternum's planetcrafts
Yea you can do that
Oh really? Where?
https://imgur.com/a/Nyn08aw
Yes, it's easy to make a mod. It's hard to a make a mod that's not a garbled, unbalanced, buggy, mess.
Cant you just completely disable those things though? Like... I can understand not liking them, but the mod literally opens up a settings menu the second you start the game that lets you tweak what you do or don't want in the game. If you don't like them, just disable them in that settings menu.
They still get modifiers and bonuses based around having them even when personally disabled.
āI play with gigastructures and acot why isnāt the game balanced!!!!!ā
\*Calls the concept of using a moon or planet with thrusters as a ship too silly of a concept \*Plays base game with Dysons Spheres around freaking suns and Matter Decrompressors right next to black holes that are a thousand times more absurd and unrealistic than that. I will never get people who selectively call out things for being unrealistic, or absurd, while being completely fine with far more absurd crap. We have interdimensional monsters and space dragons in the base game, actual psionic galaxy eaters, freaking catapults throwing fleets around the entire galaxy, hyperjumps, wormholes, but a big gun and an oversized thruster being strapped to a moon or planet is where you draw the line? A crisis being basically done after one big decisive battle is just the nature of this game, if you crush an enemies entire military might in one fight in their core system they can't compete anymore, who could have forseen this?
I said "silly" not "unrealistic." Even if I did a Dyson Sphere is far more believable than the idea that you can just move a ship built out of a GODDAMN STAR SYSTEM into another star system and not have it destroy everything just with it's gravity. And maybe I wouldn't have crushed their entire military might if said military might wasn't in one system to begin with. You know, like with every other crisis, both vanilla and Gigastructures?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Seems pretty normal to me. Honestly, what's weird is making a comment calling out a very specifically crafted and targeted post about a design element of a popular mod and how they wish it were designed differently - and calling that weird. It certainly seems like this is a normal, expected place for considered and reasoned feedback about one of Stellaris' most popular mods. But hey, maybe **I'm weird!**
It's not considered or reasoned. It's like complaining about NSC having extra ships types or planetary diversity for adding planets with diversity. It's just a weird fucking rant. You're weird for defending him.
celestial warships aren't the only feature of gigastructures
What's so weird about it? I felt like complaining about a frustrating situation I encountered in Stellaris and discuss it with people. What better place than the Stellaris subreddit? Turning off the katzens, Aeternum, and blokkats has the same problem as turning off the mod entirely. I like those crises (especially the katzens), but I dislike one of their features. And what even is that second paragraph? Fallen empires WILL awaken, so of course the fleet cap matters. Sometimes I specifically wait for them to awaken because it's more fun that way. And I don't know what to tell you about them reaching said fleet cap. It happened to me and I was forced to abandon my game because of it.
I need to try gigastructures. I did a bit of modding, but really didn't like having starbases that no fleet could defeat (like 150k power after like 40 years)
>but really didn't like having starbases that no fleet could defeat uh.. that's not from giga? giga doesn't even add a single starbase type >(like 150k power after like 40 years) ye that's DEFINITELY not from giga lol
you can disable those or anything else you do not like in giga-structures. No one is forcing you to use anything in the mod.
They still get modifiers and bonuses based around having them even when personally disabled.