For me, the humans DID tell the forerunners what they were doing, but the forerunners simply didn't believe them. They figured it was an excuse, since when they retook the planets there was no flood, and the flood conveniently only showed up in world's bordering the humans. That's why the didact reacted so aggressively.
Is there some guide to manually install the mods? I know there's a way to download them from the worshop but i can't get them to actually load, limiting me to the shitty PDXmods library, which is dogshit
R5: I LOVE MEGASTRUCTURES I LOVE NOT WASTING POPS ON BANGING ROCKS AND BOILING WATER LIKE A FUCKING CAVEMAN RAAAAAAH
So i did manage to make it work! Wasn't even that hard. These are the results of charing my fleet headfirst into the local FE. Nothing else even really dented the fleet. Battle was with the Volatile edicts but none of the other ones. Is it still stupid to use missiles? Yes, this would've been ten time better with any other weapon, BUT i like the damn missiles leave me alone.
No AI, all handwritten by your local idiot.
TL;DR: Everything that doesn't need pops became much stronger simply by virtue of jobs being heavily nerfed.
In the military:
Engagements have shrunk significantly, and prices have skyrocketed. 15 Battleships and a Titan is now an engame fleet, meaning the untouched Starbases and Defense platforms have rocketed past them to give the defender a MASSIVE advantage in battle, as the weaker fleets struggle to overwhelm their stationary counterparts.
Similarly, the significant reduction in damage across the board - fewer ships, more hardening, higher replacement costs - have shifted the balance back towards smaller ships, like cruisers and even destroyers. The shield hardening inherent to shield and armour modules have also basically destroyed penetration weapons, with missiles bordering on uselessness and strike craft much weaker than they once were, once again shifting the meta towards 'normal' weapons, like Lasers and Gauss Cannons.
This has also shifted the field greatly towards bioships, which are easier to replace and have very powerful G-Slot weapons, as well as benefitting from the end of the missile kiting meta due to their shorter ranges.
In the government:
Gestalts overall have seen a huge buff due to empire size becoming relevant again. The 30+% empire size from pops reduction for machine intelligence and across-the-board 25% reduction from Hiveminds are once again relevant. Similarly, defensive and peaceful postures have become much more viable now that the defender has such a big advantage.
For traditions, Prosperity stands out with the +20% mining station output - more on that later - and also compliments well with the newly buffed Expansion, now that planets cost a ton of empire size. Smaller empires are also more aligned with traditions like Diplomacy and Subterfuge, now that politics matters again. Similarly, everything that reduces empire size is now a little better: Domination, Harmony and Stecraft, but not as much as the first two.
For civics, tankbound is amazing now, with an easy 10% automated workforce efficiency from the councillor alone - HUGE now that everything's been nerfed down - with even more efficiency to come from Production Overseers, putting your atomated workers on par with real flesh and blood ones.
Other buffed civics were, notably, on Gestalt empires. Astro-ming is amazing now - especially if you can get your hands on the Surveyor relic - and the smaller empires and weaker planets can now be sustained nearly exclusively by your Megastructures and Space Mining stations, if you play your cards right you can get over 600 energy from a single dyson swarm. Swarm, not sphere, you heard me. And with fewer total jobs, the 4K from a completed dyson sphere is enought to hold up a decent portion of your empire. Void hive therefore is buffed too, but not quite as much.
Shared Genetics and Aerospace Adaptations are also strong here due to the military nerfs: aside from the bioship buffs across the board, the smaller number of ships makes the power of the individual ships much more relevant, and their incereased upkeep makes upkeep reduction more important.
Also
In the Economy:
This is the big one, isn't it? Planets are nerfed across the board, meaning everything else has been hugely buffed! This is something i'd been hoping for for a while, but didn't actually realize untili had enough 4.3 experience. The resource incomes of megastructures are now an actually meaningful share of a late game empire's total resource pool, even for science! I couldn't be happier.
Most notable of all, the colossal nerfs to Soldier Jobs and their incerease in Strata to Specialists makes the Strategic Coordination Center much better, and it also benefits from the defender buff, since it gives Defense Platform capacity.
Automation improves across the board with job efficiency nerfs, since they're no longer as inferior to pops, and since pops are harder to come by, especially now that Virtuality has been taken out back and shot.
Quick Fire round: Ascencions
And last but also MOST:
Cosmogenesis is even more broken. It's now the only source of non-worker automation in the universe, FE buildings are stronger, FE ships are stronger, it's much easier to protect your territory when people start getting pissy and just generally got even stronger than it already was - and it was always very strong. Don't take the Lathe. Do take Enigmatic Engineering and stay at lvl1 and get all the FE buildings anyway.
If you read this far consider yourself kissed passionately on the lips, thank you : )
Edit: Typos.
As it stands, habs are basically impossible to specialize. Normie planets have 3 types of specialization (hive, arcology, machine) and ringworlds can also fully specialize, but habs can't. If you want a hab whose sole purpose is to crank out alloys you're shit out of luck, can't fit that many buildings in there. Hopefully arcships don't have this issue, and hopefully neither will habs once it's fixed for arcships.
So i'm thinking first of all, make your leaders all immortal. Makes sense right? If we're gonna invest this crazy on them, they better live forever, so i'm thinking mechanical species with Immortal Machine or Virtual trait. Gestalts are out, since they can't have Paragon traits, so we'll need individualist machines of some kind.
Transcendent Aristocracy is the only government one that incereases leader skill, but it locks us into psionic ascension and therefore forces us either out of Immortal Machines or out of Under One Rule. That's not a total dealbreaker, we can make our leaders immortal via the Throne from the formless quest, but i'm trying to avoid RNG here so, we'll instead take Under One Rule into Synthetic ascension, which also gives us a nice +2 effective councillor skill from the Virtual Leader Focus policy, where we'll want to pick the dictatorial option when the time comes, so that we can take the +5 effective ruler skill bonus.
For Civics we'll take Entropy Drinkers and Philosopher King, giving us +3 Council and +5 Ruler effective levels, and then we can get +1 Council more from Vaults of Knowledge, plus the vaults themselves which makes our leaders learn a bit faster.
Ethics doesn't directly change the leaders at all, so we'll simply take Fanatic Authoritarian and Materialist for roleplay reasons. We can take Statecraft for +1 Council from the tradition and then +2 Council via Departmental Efficiency, but that one's temporary.
This leaves us, by lategame, with a Level 20 UOR Ruler surrounded by four Level 17 Councillors who are all permanent due to the dictatorship authority combined with the virtual trait. Can you do better? Probably, let me know tho.
Suppose you're an alien on the moon of a gas giant. The moon's orbit has been steadily decaying since the birth f your civilization, and it's now crossing into the roche limit. What do you see?
Presumably stronger tides, more tectonic activity, the planet heats up significantly... and then what? Rocks are gonna start flying off the ground eventually but what's that gonna feel like from the surface? A giant earthquake?
Assuming you survive - you wouldn't - but assuming you did, what would it feel like to waych your beachfront property turn into prime asteroid real estate?
Whenever i play a non-digital gestalt (i basically only play gestalt) i always end up with the issue where i've maxed out my jobs on my planets and they start just filling up with maintenance drones that take energy and produce basically nothing. Is there a way to make them useful? Like civillians are for normal empires and their civics?
So I'm not sure how many of you know this, but Cosmogenesis has several endings depending on which black hole you choose, wether or not you have obsessional directive, and wether or not you're Psionically ascended.
I figured we could get a new interaction, maybe with the new Nomads DLC we got going on we could get an ending where the arcships are made into horizon needles - as opposed to everyone into evacuated into the horizon needles - and the nomads of Cosmogenesis traverse the multiverse as easily as they do the cosmos.
I have so many shitty duplicate mods and i want new and interesting ones please god please idont wanna spend half an hour fighting the UI to transmute something decent please DE
I took pity on one single tiny pathetic nation, who I made a defense agreement with. They then joined a federation and promptly declared war on a fallen empire.
I was in the slow process of winning that war, when the unbidden showed up. I was caught completely flat-footed and had to rush back to get them buy they built a dimensional anchor before I could catch them, and with the weakened federation they spread really fast and are building anchors about as fast as I can kill them, even tho I've already taken the portal system and beat them with no losses every time.
And then, or course, the other FE wakes up on the other side of the fucking galaxy.
Never sign a defender agreement with anyone ever.
TL;DR: Crisis paths - soon™ to be ambitions - should fundamentally change the way your society operates, they should, in my humble opinion, change the path resources take, the way systems interact and so on. Here's a few stupid pipedream ways to acheieve that:
Cosmogenesis:
I think the lathe is a stupid idea. Gee, i'm the most technologically advanced society in the history of the galaxy, time to strap my people to the murder machine for...computing reasons? What? It makes no sense, especially since you get Fallen Empire buildings and their crazy automation, everyone should be either a civillian producing research or a researcher.
Instead i think it should be centered around the Applied infinity thesis tech. By following a very expensive short sub-tree - composed of research into four or five different fields required for the project - you can fundamentally change the way the economy works.
For example, you can turn all your mineral deposits into alloys, or turn every star that produces energy into research. You can make it so that farmers can only grow crystal. You may be able to turn a black hole back into a star, or duplicate a system. Maybe your research into hawking radiation makes all your planets around black holes terraformable. So on and so on.
This way, when the tech fires, something big happens that you must now adapt to, it could destroy your empire, sure, or it could make you incredibly powerful. You won't know until you try. Every experiment could make or break your system, depending on your reaction.
I think it's very fitting.
Nemesis:
First of all, why the fuck are the ships pirate themed? What? You're telling me the most mass-produced ships in the galaxy look like THAT? Also, why dark matter? It's thematically irrelevant and frankly just muddle the waters with the advanced technologies.
I think this crisis is undercooked but interesting. The idea of breaching the shroud is one that shows up in most crisis in one way or another, and i like that this crisis FORCES you to be agressive and destructive.
I think this crisis should relate much, much more to psionics. I think it should have a story related to something in the shroud that wants this fusion to happen, and it should be centered around the emotions of the galaxy's denizens.
The mechanic, therefore, should be one of lows and highs. You get happiness bonuses for elite at the cost of miserable lives for the slaves, mandatory purges of entire planets to feed the sadistic thing in the void. Whatever it is demands suffering from the low and debauchery from the high, and in exchange it will give them both job efficiency bonus, but most of all, it will make your fleets, leaders and councils powerful beyond imagining.
How cruel can you be for power? How willing are you to sacrifice and hurt others for your ambitions?
Behemoth:
In my opinion this is the closest crisis to the ones i envisioned, as Behemoths are so strong as to fundamentally change the military balance. Feeding the behemoth is also a particularly interesting mechanic that you wouldn't otherwise engage with on any other playtroughs, which i think is the best part of a crisis.
What i would do, first, is i'd feed it my own pops. Here, not in cosmogenesis, is the theme of hunger and biomass a relevant one that could work. After all, we're all gonna part of it one way or another, right?
Also i'd make this crisis path failable, like Nemesis is. The hive FE failed to transfer their consciousness to the behemoth, why can't you? A class IV behemoth should be a deeply unstable creature, and in my humble opinion it should have a time limit of a few years at most before it simply tries and fails to absorb your entire empire, leaving you in the same situation as the FE hive. This also gives us a non-psionic endbringer analogue.
I can't really speak on hyperthermia, i haven't done it yet and don't fully understand it like i do the others tbh.
NASA is a semi-independent agency whose programs are individually funded by Congress, leading to a LOT of issues. The Soviet space program was independent, and could generally make its own decisions regarding how it wanted to spend their funds, with Roscosmos, as a state company, being somewhere in the middle: directly under government control but without individual programs being funded separately.
How does this work for the CNSA and CMSA? I know they're under the ministry of technology, but how does that relationship manifest? Do they get individual funding for each program? A general fixed budget? a general mobile budget? How does it work?