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Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
I want to start by saying I was, on the whole, opposed to heroes in RTS games. I had even submitted a thread about the issue, where I talk about what potential problems hero units introduce. However, like I said in that thread, if Frost Giant manages to come up with a hero system with none of the issues I mentioned, I would be on board. I also have a sneaky suspicion that developers are leaning towards hero units :) So, I have been thinking about ways of hero implementation that will not only not cause the problems I mentioned but might even help solve some of the problems RTS games tend to have. It is clear that RTS games without hero units have traditionally been more successful. When we look at the 5 most popular RTS games (StarCraft 1, StarCraft 2, Warcraft 3, Age of Empires 2 and Company of Heroes 2), 4 out of the 5 have no hero units in their competitive modes. So, why have heroes in the first place? What are their benefits? One huge benefit is in terms of accessibility. You make an RTS game more approachable by having strong characters people identify with. This has been a huge trend in all of gaming. Another important aspect to think about is the business model. Developers have already said that they are making a live service game and while not commiting to a definite answer, you can tell from this answer that they are leaning towards F2P. This means the revenue will be generated through microtransactions. Heroes can act as great tools for monetization. Going back to the point of them being characters players identify with, it would be much easier to sell skins for heroes than for units. Besides, adding too many skins for units in an RTS game can cause problems for visual clarity. Tim Morten also mentioned this in a recent interview. As one-of-a-kind units, heroes won’t have as big of a problem with skins, so by adding heroes to the game, developers can limit the number of different unit skins, while still making enough money from cosmetic microtransactions. While I was aware of these advantages to hero units, I always thought the negatives outweighed these benefits. So, what needs to be done so that heroes don’t cause the problems they tend to cause while still retaining the benefits? Here are my thoughts on one possible implementation that can check all the boxes. Heroes as Scouting Units In this implementation, you would either start the game with a hero (that you pick in the lobby/queue) or get it for free shortly after the game has begun like in WC3. You would be encouraged to use your hero unit as a scout at the start of the game. Every hero would have one ability that helps them with scouting. One hero might have a short teleport, one might have an ability that makes them invisible for a short amount of time, one might traverse cliffs like reapers in SC2. Even a slow hero unit could have something similar to scan in StarCraft. This would greatly help with teaching new players to scout. It is incredibly counter-intuitive to pick one of your workers at a seemingly random time and send it to scout the map. If players had a hero unit at the start of the game with nothing else to do, they would be encouraged to go out there and scout (this can also be easily taught through a tutorial, much easier than saying “take your 15th worker and send it to the enemy base”). This can prevent a lot of frustration new players have when they lose to an early rush or cheese when they don’t even know scouting is a thing. This is similar to the hero implementation in Age of Empires 3. However, AoE3 explorers didn’t really feel heroic. They were useful in early game and then became irrelevant by mid-game. So what else can be done to ensure heroes stay relevant without making the game revolve around them? Transferring Macro Mechanics to Heroes By macro mechanics here, I mean economy or base related tasks that have to be completed at regular intervals such as chronoboost, MULEs, larva inject and creep tumors that you see in StarCraft 2. For those who don’t know the history, these tasks were added to the game as response to the criticism that UI improvements such as multiple building selection meant that one would rarely go back to their base. These mechanics have been controversial throughout the existence of SC2 as many players felt like you needed to practice these repetitive tasks for hours before having any chance to engage with what they considered to be fun parts of the game. Blizzard even experimented with automating larva inject during the beta for Legacy of the Void before backtracking. My suggestion is to transfer these mechanics to hero units. The second ability on each hero unit in addition to the scouting-related ability would be an ability that makes them interact with the base. One hero might have an ability that speeds up the construction of a building, one might have an ability that makes workers around them mine faster, one might boost production, one can have a creep spread-like mechanic. This will ensure that players regularly return back to and interact with their base and it also retains the decision making aspect of some of the macro mechanics (do I speed up the production in this building or the other one). However, due to the one-of-a-kind nature of hero units, it won’t get repetitive and getting good at macro mechanics won’t be a big part of the initial barrier. I also think this is a better solution than automating macro mechanics. Automation removes player agency and doesn’t contribute to the aim of players interacting with their base. By not automating, you also ensure that better players will still get an edge, albeit not as big as it is in SC2. High Impact Combat Abilities By making heroes good scouting units that provide utility for macro, you ensure that the game isn’t revolving around them. However, that also means they don’t do heroic things in battle and that might defeat the purpose of hero units in the first place. My solution would be to give all hero units one high-impact combat ability. SC1 had a lot of high-impact abilities that could not be transferred directly to SC2 due to smart casting. For those who don’t know, smart casting enables only one unit to cast an ability when multiple units are selected. Abilities from SC1 like irradiate and dark swarm would be ridiculously overpowered in SC2 with smartcasting. Even spells like psi storm had to be nerfed somewhat. And when high-impact abilities like disruptor shots are implemented, they become incredibly frustrating to play against and make the game highly volatile. One solution would be to reverse UI improvements in SC2 but that’s obviously not compatible with developers’ expressed goal of lowering the skill floor. Moving these sorts of high-impact abilities to hero units could provide an alternative solution. As one-of-a-kind units, heroes obviously don’t have this issue. They can have high-impact abilities without making them spammable. You can even have abilities that are not possible for regular RTS spellcasters to have. For example the Animate Death ability of Death Knight in WC3, which resurrects some of the units that have died. This would obviously be not possible to have on units that you can make multiple copies of. Another type of ability that you can have with this implementation is directional abilities that are prevalent in MOBAs, where the position of the hero is crucial. This is much harder to implement in an RTS as when you use an ability with multiple spellcasters selected, it is hard to know which unit will activate their ability. Summing Up To sum up, all heroes would have 3 abilities:
An ability to encourage players to scout.
An ability to interact with the base.
A high-impact combat ability.
An additional benefit of designing all heroes in a consistent manner would be that it will be easy to learn for players. You can make it even easier to learn by having consistent hotkey setups across heroes. So, all heroes would have their scouting ability on Q, their macro ability on W and their combat ability on E. This way, if someone comes back to the game after years and sees dozens of new heroes added, they will not have a hard time adjusting. Having three separate abilities for three completely different tasks will also introduce interesting decision making due to opportunity cost. This can be done by either having a mana mechanic or with cooldowns. Opportunity cost for mana mechanic is self-explanatory. If you use your mana on scouting abilities, you have less mana to do macro tasks or use abilities in combat. With cooldowns, you would miss out on macro benefits if you keep your hero with your army or use them to scout. Deciding on where to keep your hero, which abilities to use and when could open a new avenue for player expression. To sum up, this type of hero implementation can have the following benefits that RTS games have traditionally struggled with:
Heroes would make the game more approachable by giving players strong characters to identify with.
Heroes are perfectly suited to F2P approach and monetization.
Heroes can be used to teach players how to scout.
By transforming macro mechanics to be hero abilities, you keep the decision-making aspect and interaction with the base without raising the skill floor.
Heroes would allow impactful abilities without making them frustrating to play against.
Introduces opportunity cost and provides interesting decision making by making you choose where to place your hero and which abilities to use.
I believe that the implementation I propose causes none of these issues. Needless to say, abilities in this implementation can’t be unlocked based on experience if they are not to exacerbate snowballing. The abilities could be unlocked via research or automatically unlocked as the game goes on, e.g. hero starts off with the scouting ability, then gains the macro ability at 5 minutes and finally gets the combat ability at 10 minutes. I also don’t think this implementation would cause serious problems with deathballing as you would need your hero to go back home occasionally or scout on their own. You might need to have your hero at home for macro mechanics while fighting with your army or using heroes to scout while your army is in a defensive position. My last three points were about heroes’ impact on combat. Heroes in this implementation can be durable units with auto-attacks that are not much stronger than regular units. As their kit isn’t focused solely around combat, you would only use their combat ability 1 or 2 times during a given fight and still have the regular RTS micro interactions after that. It would still be unit compositions and unit control that decide the battles. As someone who has said multiple times on this subreddit that I prefer a game with no heroes, I would personally welcome a hero implementation such as this one. What are your thoughts?
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
RTS games are typically hard to get into and have a steep learning curve. There are a lot of things to learn and master before players can "play the real game", "engage in the core experience" or however you want to call that. In first-person-shooters you move and click enemies, in MOBAs you start with a single unit and gradually unlock abilities. That's a lot easier than making sense of UI and learning how basic economy, tech tree, production, and unit control works. Even advanced players might not truly engage with the core experience until higher ranks. In StarCraft games macro-mechanics are so important that improving them might be your best way to advance to the next league instead of actively scouting, learning proper responses or controlling your army better. Even the basic base management is hard in Brood War This has led many games to oversimplify either micro or macro mechanics or both. However, I think that with good design it's possible to make a good game for a wide variety of players. Solutions will have to come from all angles – UI, UX, game design, art & sound design. It's important to consider players of skill levels when making any change. What exactly are players doing, and how engaging is the core gameplay loop? If we automate something, does the game become shallow or less engaging for them? Does the change reduce skill ceiling where we don't want it to?
80–20%
This concept was mentioned on the Pylon Show. It refers to the idea that an army should be somewhat effective even without too much micro involved (80% effectiveness). The actual numbers might be a nod to pareto principle, but they are not important. In some cases additional effort expended will lead to smaller improvements (95–5), and sometimes to much larger ones (50–50). The core idea is to lower the skill floor of controlling an army. An example that was mentioned is Nova in StarCraft II Co-op. She has a solid army that does "ok" when simply a-moved. This is not uncommon in Co-op. The great part is how much more it can do if you control it properly – siege Liberators and tanks, use Raven's abilities, lay mines, micro Nova, EMP with Ghosts, place defensive drones and use airstrikes. This broad range of options provides tactical choices and rewards micro. A new player might be satisfied with simply a-moving and using an airstrike, more advanced players will try to do as many things and as good as they can. Nova's wide variety of units Another good part is that many abilities can be "pre-cast". What I mean is that a players can siege Tanks and Liberators, place Auto-Turrets, Defensive Drones, and lay Spider Mines in anticipation of the engagement. This lets slower players to engage with these abilities even if they couldn't use them when the combat begins.
AUTOCAST
One of the approaches mentioned was a more common use of autocast on abilities. The idea is that slower players will leave them on autocast, while faster players might disable autocast and/or use them manually and more effectively. Results are:
Lower skill floor
Fights on lower levels look more like those on top levels
Players encounter autocasted abilities more at lower skill levels
There are some potential disadvantages as well:
Autocasted ability is significantly less rewarding than manually casted.
Too many autocasted abilities might result in unnecessary visual clutter.
If the autocast is too smart, the player won't engage in decision-making where and when to use the ability until the player can outperform autocast and overcome the opportunity cost of spending actions somewhere else.
★ ★ ★ I've looked for some good examples in StarCraft II Co-op. Ambusher's Blink might be the best one. Ambushers autocast blink to escape enemy fire, but players are encouraged to use Blink more aggressively as it provides significant DPS boost. This works very well because the manual cast is used differently than the autocast (defensive vs offensive usage). Avatar of Essence's Devolution Wave is not as good example. It's an autocasted area-of-effect debuff. Manually casting it has exactly the same use, but you can affect more enemies if you use it at the right time. I would guess that more than 99% of playerbase has never casted it manually. Vorazuns's Corsairs, Zeratul's Shieldguards and Abrogators are in a similar position. Their abilities have the same use whether autocasted or not, and are mostly not rewarding enough to use them manually. Swarm Host-like units are a better example. They do spawn Locust-like units automatically, but with manual cast you can send them to hit targets outside their autocast range, or you can spawn them in anticipation of the enemy attack. This option to pre-cast and different manual use case are what makes this interesting and rewarding, even if most players will not actually use it. Ambusher's Blink can be used both defensively and offensively I think autocast on abilities work particularly well when the use case for manual casting is sufficiently different from the autocasted ability – as is it with Ambushers and Swarm Hosts-like units. Warcraft 3 has good examples as well, namely Sorceress' Slow and Dryad's Abolish Magic. With these abilities you are not trying to compete with autocast AI, instead you might use them when the autocast wouldn't trigger at all (e.g., against summons or when chasing the enemy), or target the high-priority units first. Disabling and enabling autocast to preserve energy is a skill in itself. However, if players are encouraged to change the autocast state too often, it can quickly become a chore. ★ ★ ★ Two more thoughts about autocast: Using abilities in fights is engaging, and players should be encouraged to do it manually. It might be a good idea to first look at macro mechanics to lower the load on new players, then try to improve the user experience when controlling armies. For example having all abilities in one command card for Tychus does reduce the mechanical barrier to using active abilities. Only after that it might make sense to look at how many autocasted abilities are actually needed. There was an idea that autocasted abilities would have different statistics. This seems highly unintuitive and inelegant. I don't want to see a fight where some Psionic Storms deal 80 damage and others 50 damage. It's better to make the autocast AI less good – doesn't react immediately, stacks unstackable effects a bit, requires certain game state, doesn't hit the most targets with one spell or the most important targets, etc.
SIMPLE UNIT CONTROL
This returns back to the 80–20 principle, but instead of increasing effectiveness through manually casting abilities, the effectiveness can be increased incrementally with focus on simple control based around moving and attacking. My thinking here is that you can more naturally improve your army control if it's based around simple concepts like moving, attacking or target firing. This has few advantages:
Effectiveness is improved more incrementally.
Resulting battles are easier to parse – fewer effects, no knowledge of abilities required.
More focus is put on kiting, and army positioning – arcs and surrounds. Brood War did a good job by distinguishing units and interaction based on movement alone. Vultures or Mutalisks can shine with just movement micro. Warcraft 3 also heavily focuses on army movement and positioning. Unit positioning is extremely important in Warcraft 3 These simple unit controls could include positional units like Lurkers, Siege Tanks, Liberators or heavy machine guns or cannons in Company of Heroes with their limited firing arc and setup time. All these can be very interesting and scale well with player skill.
MACRO MECHANICS
The 80–20 concept could be the most useful with macro mechanics (economy, basebuilding and production). Most of new players will want only very few tech and economy decisions before going to play with the army. But I think that for experienced and competitive players there should be enough room to improve macro through high APM and multitasking. In the previous post I mentioned that it's hard for me to return to competitive 1v1 due to not being satisfied with my mechanics. I believe applying this 80–20 concept could help with that. It wouldn't be helpful to just new players but also to anyone returning to the game. ★ ★ ★ How to do this correctly is a very difficult problem and will require a lot of prototyping and testing. StarCraft II's Chronoboost, MULE and Larva Inject work, but they can feel a bit forced. They do provide some room for decisions, and the inject raises skill ceiling as well. Few other examples how to introduce some optional complexity to macro: adjacency bonuses in Supreme Commander, more efficient manual reseeding of farms in Age of Empires, transferring workers, overbuilding workers before transferring them to an expansion, collecting scattered resources or wrecks from previous battles, creep spread, switching add-ons in StarCraft II, updating resource drop-off points, and more. In Supreme Commander adjacency bonuses reduce operating cost It would help casual players a lot if repeating tasks were reduced, and macro was limited only to important decisions. There is nothing worse than watching a casual player making 20 Pylons without using the shift key. This could include limited auto-queues for workers, auto-hotkey for some production, etc. Repeating tasks can be reintroduced for more serious players, and as a player progresses through ranks these tasks would become more important. This is of course more easily said than done.
MORE THINGS TO HELP
Now for some other things that might help with lowering the skill floor and onboarding. They might or might not fit into a particular game.
Already mentioned ghost mode would be great. However, it should not become a crutch for overly complex buildorders.
Hotkeys for select all army / all units onscreen / all army units not in control groups.
Global build UI similar to found in C&C games or Spellforce.
Shared ability command card similar to what Tychus have (no need to switch between units when using different abilities).
Easier default commanders in Co-op compared to StarCraft II where default commanders are not very casual friendly – especially Raynor.
Better after game feedback. In RTS games it's often difficult to see what you did wrong. It would be even more difficult to find this algorithmically, but perhaps some machine learning model could manage it decently.
Reducing the number of cheeses and rushes in lower leagues. Possible options could include a different take on stealth than in StarCraft games, free scout like in Age of Empire games, or something like Orc Burrow mechanic in Warcraft 3. It wouldn't completely prevent aggression, but the damage would be limited to not mining. Something like that could keep early aggression viable but not game ending unless one player messes up.
Good and engaging tutorials. They could be combined with a challenge providing bonus experience, other rewards and even leaderboards. They could focus on a variety of skills from basics to those aimed at the competitive mode.
CLOSING
I mentioned a lot of things, but I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas that could improve the experience for new and returning players. It's a difficult problem and solutions will have to touch and affect many aspects of the game. Thank you for reading.
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread (7 September 2020)
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread (16 September 2020)
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
What level of management is REQUIRED in this game/simulation.
Hey everyone! I am new here and have watched many videos and tutorials, as well as booted up the game and poked around its tutorial as well. I know that just about everything (to a depth I probably don't even have a grasp of yet) can be micro managed, and most everything can also be automated. What I'd like to know is what level of management is required? For instance, if I wanted to just observe the galaxy simulate itself and occasionally take control of a single ship or small fleet is that doable? Could I effectively just RP as a single ship in my empire? The reasoning here is that I learn much better poking at stuff myself, than wall of text pop-ups (I'll read them, they'll make sense, then 2 minutes later I have no idea what I just read). So if I can let the game reasonably run itself without my empire/race/government collapsing then I can fly around a bit and explore the games mechanics. Is this level of hands off approach viable? Will I NEED to watch resources of some kind, or make decisions on anything large scale? Is it possible even to just spectate and pause at will to click and read tool tips etc? If so, is there a simple way to set up a game like that? Everything I've watched shows some level of micro management, and I get it, it's not really game if you aren't playing. Sorry in advance if its something really simple I haven't done, like a big red spactate button or just set all races as AI.
Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread (30 August 2020)
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Starport Delta Gameplay & Features | Indie space station building & management strategy game for PC
This is an overview of all the Features and Gameplay from the Indie space station building & management strategy game for PC called Starport Delta and made by the developers at Clouidfire Studios. Build vast space stations amongst the stars with a focus on survival against space hazards. Play the tutorial, campaign, sandbox, challenge mod or a custom game. Video version of this text: https://youtu.be/hma1ikWfwE8 I noticed this game back in 2019, featured in my list of upcoming games for 2020 and finally got to play it a little while ago, thanks to the developers over at Cloudfire Studios who sent me a copy. The version I am playing is 1.1 and it’s been updated with new buildings, research map, new camera options and upgrades for the laser defence turrets. The first thing you will notice about this game is that it’s quite static. This is something you can guess from the title since the whole gameplay revolves around a stationary space station which serves as a Starport for a fictional human spacefaring empire. But this doesn’t mean that the game isn’t eventful. Since you don’t go where the action is, it comes to you in the form of meteor showers, pirate attackers, electrical storms, radiation bursts and even space worm attacks. Against each one of these there are countermeasures and defensive actions you can take or specific buildings you can add to your spaceport, like a defensive laser to shoot down the pirates or a force shield projector to stop those meteorites. Now how do you finance such buildings? Well with space bucks of course, which you earn in several ways. There is the simple tax revenue from all the residents living in the special residential buildings and the main spaceport building. Then there are sales of harvested minerals through trade deals made in the trade hub and special mini assignments which endlessly pile up on a starports commander's schedule. This mini game of hide and seek which rewards you with space bucks or minerals each time you finish it might look easy at first, but this is because you have a relatively small Spaceport in the late game however it becomes a tall order to search through dozens and dozens of buildings to find a lost member of Cloudfire Studios, an escaped alien slave or a slick thief. You can even choose what to do with the aliens or people you find in these missions. Give them a home at your spaceport or kick them out the airlock even earning more in the process but increasing the risk a space worm will be attracted by all the floating ice snacks. The economy in StarPort delta is pretty straight forward, you have the mentioned space bucks and minerals. The primary way of getting more minerals is by sending out mining ships to the nearby mineral rich asteroid. Those ships are created by building a mining depot and are fully automated. All they need to work is for the mining depot to be in range of power and oxygen. And that power and oxygen are created by their respective buildings. Other buildings I have not mentioned are the Food farms, which provide food to residential buildings in a small area around them, gardens provide benefits and increase the tax revenue from residential buildings, retail plazas give residents a place to relax and shop and so increase the startport overall tax revenue. The research lab boosts the speed of research while the repair depot passively fixes all other buildings around it as there is a system of maintenance and repair for all buildings, which will get additional damage from all the space hazards. All buildings in this game require power so the generator buildings are essential. Most other buildings require oxygen since there are people working there while only residential buildings require food and entertainment buildings. This interplay between buildings operating needs and their output for other nearby buildings creates a really neat grid on the hexagonal map around your starting port building. The more kinds of buildings you add the more complex it gets and problems will start to mount as each time your buildings blows up it leaves behind debris which you can’t build on again. To make matters worse and the gameplay harder, as you research more technologies you get access to the ability to upgrade buildings when you have 3 and later 9 all bunched up tightly together. These clusters require perfect placement and lot’s of space, so one your startports area becomes riddled with leftover buildings it will get harder and harder to find suitable spots for those gigantic upgraded buildings. The upside is that they give a much larger range in which other buildings will benefit from their service. The game offers quite a few mods to play. A basic tutorial, the campaign which is a much better tutorial but with an added benefit of a story line, fully voiced characters, including your own and all of them having quirky senses of humor, especially the artificial intelligences. Then there is the sandbox with four variants. They go from a Zen setup where you just build and aren’t disturbed by natural or human disasters and another three setups with increasing severity of hazards. They all offer exact goals the player needs to reach to complete them. There is also the challenge mode which has the highest goals but also challenging gameplay. At the end you have the custom game mod in which you can manually define each setting and option for your game. From the amount of space bucks, from the environmental and building details to the frequency of space worm attacks. To be able to view everything and organize your startbase in more detail you have a bunch of different overlays at the top UI bar where you can also slow down or speed up the time. The update 1.1 added new camera options which offer both a more cinematic view and a simplified top down design view. The developers have expressed a willingness to add, change or remove game elements in accordance with the players wishes and feedback so if you end up playing this game feel free to tell them your thoughts on Steam, social media or in their discord server. As for the performance and stability I have played it a number of hours by now and haven’t faced any problems. The music might get a bit repetitive or it might not be your style, so it would be a cool idea for the developers to add a space jukebox in the UI. So that would be my short overview of this game. Game's Steam store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/888130/Starport\_Delta/
Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread (11 August 2020)
Thank you to Regunes for the latest edition to our guide list, with their video "STELLARIS META-BREAKER : Secret moves to dominate the galaxy! Episode 1." Be sure to check it out. Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread (23 August 2020)
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread (3 August 2020)
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread (18 July 2020)
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Starport Delta Gameplay & Features | Indie space station building & management strategy game for PC
This is an overview of all the Features and Gameplay from the Indie space station building & management strategy game for PC called Starport Delta and made by the developers at Clouidfire Studios. Build vast space stations amongst the stars with a focus on survival against space hazards. Play the tutorial, campaign, sandbox, challenge mod or a custom game. Video version of this text: https://youtu.be/hma1ikWfwE8 I noticed this game back in 2019, featured in my list of upcoming games for 2020 and finally got to play it a little while ago, thanks to the developers over at Cloudfire Studios who sent me a copy. The version I am playing is 1.1 and it’s been updated with new buildings, research map, new camera options and upgrades for the laser defence turrets. The first thing you will notice about this game is that it’s quite static. This is something you can guess from the title since the whole gameplay revolves around a stationary space station which serves as a Starport for a fictional human spacefaring empire. But this doesn’t mean that the game isn’t eventful. Since you don’t go where the action is, it comes to you in the form of meteor showers, pirate attackers, electrical storms, radiation bursts and even space worm attacks. Against each one of these there are countermeasures and defensive actions you can take or specific buildings you can add to your spaceport, like a defensive laser to shoot down the pirates or a force shield projector to stop those meteorites. Now how do you finance such buildings? Well with space bucks of course, which you earn in several ways. There is the simple tax revenue from all the residents living in the special residential buildings and the main spaceport building. Then there are sales of harvested minerals through trade deals made in the trade hub and special mini assignments which endlessly pile up on a starports commander's schedule. This mini game of hide and seek which rewards you with space bucks or minerals each time you finish it might look easy at first, but this is because you have a relatively small Spaceport in the late game however it becomes a tall order to search through dozens and dozens of buildings to find a lost member of Cloudfire Studios, an escaped alien slave or a slick thief. You can even choose what to do with the aliens or people you find in these missions. Give them a home at your spaceport or kick them out the airlock even earning more in the process but increasing the risk a space worm will be attracted by all the floating ice snacks. The economy in StarPort delta is pretty straight forward, you have the mentioned space bucks and minerals. The primary way of getting more minerals is by sending out mining ships to the nearby mineral rich asteroid. Those ships are created by building a mining depot and are fully automated. All they need to work is for the mining depot to be in range of power and oxygen. And that power and oxygen are created by their respective buildings. Other buildings I have not mentioned are the Food farms, which provide food to residential buildings in a small area around them, gardens provide benefits and increase the tax revenue from residential buildings, retail plazas give residents a place to relax and shop and so increase the startport overall tax revenue. The research lab boosts the speed of research while the repair depot passively fixes all other buildings around it as there is a system of maintenance and repair for all buildings, which will get additional damage from all the space hazards. All buildings in this game require power so the generator buildings are essential. Most other buildings require oxygen since there are people working there while only residential buildings require food and entertainment buildings. This interplay between buildings operating needs and their output for other nearby buildings creates a really neat grid on the hexagonal map around your starting port building. The more kinds of buildings you add the more complex it gets and problems will start to mount as each time your buildings blows up it leaves behind debris which you can’t build on again. To make matters worse and the gameplay harder, as you research more technologies you get access to the ability to upgrade buildings when you have 3 and later 9 all bunched up tightly together. These clusters require perfect placement and lot’s of space, so one your startports area becomes riddled with leftover buildings it will get harder and harder to find suitable spots for those gigantic upgraded buildings. The upside is that they give a much larger range in which other buildings will benefit from their service. The game offers quite a few mods to play. A basic tutorial, the campaign which is a much better tutorial but with an added benefit of a story line, fully voiced characters, including your own and all of them having quirky senses of humor, especially the artificial intelligences. Then there is the sandbox with four variants. They go from a Zen setup where you just build and aren’t disturbed by natural or human disasters and another three setups with increasing severity of hazards. They all offer exact goals the player needs to reach to complete them. There is also the challenge mode which has the highest goals but also challenging gameplay. At the end you have the custom game mod in which you can manually define each setting and option for your game. From the amount of space bucks, from the environmental and building details to the frequency of space worm attacks. To be able to view everything and organize your startbase in more detail you have a bunch of different overlays at the top UI bar where you can also slow down or speed up the time. The update 1.1 added new camera options which offer both a more cinematic view and a simplified top down design view. The developers have expressed a willingness to add, change or remove game elements in accordance with the players wishes and feedback so if you end up playing this game feel free to tell them your thoughts on Steam, social media or in their discord server. As for the performance and stability I have played it a number of hours by now and haven’t faced any problems. The music might get a bit repetitive or it might not be your style, so it would be a cool idea for the developers to add a space jukebox in the UI. So that would be my short overview of this game. Game's Steam store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/888130/Starport\_Delta/
Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread (10 July 2020)
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread (3 July 2020)
Thanks toArclinon for our newest guide, "Stellaris: Top 9 Megastructures"! Be sure to check it out! Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread (27 July 2020)
Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Stellaris Space Guild - Weekly Help Thread (24 June 2020)
Thanks toArclinon for our newest guide, "Stellaris: Top 9 Megastructures"! Be sure to check it out! Welcome to this week’s Stellaris Space Guild Help Thread! This thread functions as a gathering place for all questions, tips, bugs, suggestions, and resources for Stellaris. Here you can post quick-fire questions, tips, and other tidbits of knowledge that may not deserve their own discussion thread. If you would like to ask a specific question about the state of your Stellaris campaign, please include links to relevant screenshots to assist the people helping you. This ensures that you get the most accurate advice for your specific campaign. GUILD RESOURCES Below you can find resources for the game. If you would like to help contribute to the resources section, please leave a comment that pings me (using "u/Snipahar") and link to the resource. You can also contribute by reaching me through private message or modmail. Be sure to include a short description of what you find valuable about the resource. WIKI:
Good news! For this game we also have cheats. On this page dedicated to the cheats of Automation Empire you will find all the cheats and cheat codes that will surely improve your experience with this game.. also has a Trainer available on this site. If you go to the Trainer page, download it and run it while you play, you will be allowed to get new features, usually additional non-achievable Automation Empire. From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games This page is a stub: it lacks content and/or basic article components. You can help to expand this page by adding an image or additional information. Not to be confused with Automata Empire. Automation Empire; Developers; Hi Folks, that thing with those trains... i don't really get it. So you start with a Train with 4 Wagons. To expand the number of Wagons you put more Silos on the Track. BUT it doesn't matter if the Silos are loaded. Once the Train arrives with more Wagons you can destroy those Silos, the Train will keep the Wagons. The Loading of the Wagons is always just by that last Silo of the row (or 1st Automation Empire. Description: Build and manage a massive industrial network of factories, mines, and farms. Employ a fleet of trains, trucks, and robotic drones. In the age of automation, efficiency is survival! Trailer: Tutorial: building; Sandbox Automation Empire. Game » consists of 1 releases. Released Nov 20, 2019 PC; Automation Empire. Summary. Short summary describing this game. Navigation. Game Wiki; Images (1) Forum (1) News; Guide; Releases (1) DLC ; Reviews ; Related Pages Similar Games Characters Locations Concepts Objects Credits; Get this guide Useful Tips & Tricks & Controls-To add minecarts or crawtrains to a track; select the track you have built and pres the ”add” button to buy some.-It’s possible to transfer resources between a step conveyor and minetrack via this simple setup. Automation Empire game guide focuses on Beginners Guide and some useful Tips and Tricks. The guide will give you basic tips and tricks on Automation Empire game. While writing this instruction, we pick up many pieces of information from several sites for you. -> Automation Empire is unable to provide 12 fully automated Done-For-You clickbank affiliate sites. -> This software can’t auto-transcribe the content from YouTube videos, a lot of errors here. -> Automation software can’t help you to scale up your way to success as a Clickbank Affiliate. Automation Empire. All Discussions Screenshots Artwork Broadcasts Videos Workshop News Guides Reviews 63 in Group Chat | View Stats. Build and manage a massive industrial network of factories, mines, and farms. Employ a fleet of trains, trucks, and robotic drones
Hey Leute,hier der Beginn einer Kleinen Tutorial Serie von Automation Empire. Hier geht es um Bau Regeln, kleine Tipps und die nervige Steuer.Ich hoffe es ha... Automation Empire Tutorial/Tips on how to use COMBINERS the RIGHT WAY!New Real-Time Strategy Tycoon Sim Production Management Game 2019 - Factorio/Satisfacto... Faster than a speeding minecart! Find out how to transport items INSTANTLY! Enjoy my content? Support me on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/katherineofsky... Automation Empire is a new game coming to Steam soon! It is a game that fits into the management/automation/simulation/factory type genre. Automation Empir... Quick start your game with these efficient designs! Enjoy my content? Support me on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/katherineofskyA huge thank you to DOG HO... AUTOMATION EMPIRE - LAUNCH DAY LIVE STREAM - Wed 20th Nov 8pm UK (3pm EST) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q1eDSziDk0Automation Empire - How To Unlock Roc... Hey Leute,hier der Beginn einer Kleinen Tutorial Serie von Automation Empire. Hier geht es um "Was ist Automation Empire?" und "Interface".Ich hoffe es hat b...
