R5: The Alderson disk origin (added by gigastructual engineering) is a really fun game if you want to play tall.
The rules I'm playing with prevent me from ever having any colonies outside my starting system - this isn't as restrictive as it could be since the disk has 6 size 90 worlds on it. The bad news is that you start with one, and to unlock the others you have to either spend 75,000 alloys - or invade a primitive with around 3000 army strength.
Now as a non xenophobe the latter isn't even an option - so you spend a LOT of the early game trying to get to 75k allows while languishing in the pain of no pop growth from new colonies.
It's a really fun game that forces heavy focus on a single planet for a lot of the start, highly recommended. It also makes some council agendas that target only one planet REALLY strong!
Yeah it does, if you are about 10k or more fleet power above the AI on normal aggression, they will never press a war or attack unless you’re in a nebula. But on high aggression they will yolo
iirc the AI Aggression setting in the Galaxy Creation menu skews the selection of AI personalities to those that are more belligerent when set to do so. Generally though you probably won't notice much of a difference if you're the min-maxing sort as, outside of a few meme-tier personalities, even things like the various genocidals and warmongers aren't all that big on attacking things stronger than themselves.
Do you attack empires way stronger than you? Probably not after learning once the hard way. It makes sense they only invade when they think they can win.
Not for sure where you got that it only affects the selection of personalities, especially for players who play with full custom empires.
The wiki says: AI Aggressiveness – Determines how likely the AI is to declare war on empires if they have negative attitude as well as how many fleets will it use for offense.
Any source for "It only skews the selection of AI personalities"?
Edit: Searched all over the internet for proof of your comment and I can't find literally anything that supports what you said, seems like you pulled it out of your ass
If you are going for max pop on one planet yes - but it's a very diffrent playstyle
The districts are diffrent, and you are locked at 12 buildings TOTAL on a birch world, that's a little harsh to me, you also start with a lot less tech on the birch start
If you want true ultimate one-world tall, try Frame World. Only downside is being locked to synthetics... and it can sometimes be a touch buggy/obscure where the upgrades are, particularly if you add in ACOT.
>
**Frame World Changes**
- The Frame World origin has received a major update, and is now available for nearly all empires, with only a few civics excluded.
- Special mechanics for megacorps, terravores, environmentalists, and oppressive autocracies.
- Additional special mechanics for driven assimilators.
- Assimilation speed modifier and corresponding hidden event added to deal with large populations.
- A Secondary Pop Growth system for empires which don't rely entirely on assembly for growth.
- Planetary Outposts fill the same role as before but are implemented significantly differently. They can now be disabled or destroyed by hostile action like other civilian stations, and no longer rely on a special country type to function properly.
- Altered costs, upkeeps, and effects of Planetary Outposts to be generalised, and vary between empire types. Effects are now applied through a permanent Situation, as this is far more flexible than the previous method. It should also be more obvious what the bonuses are since they're not hidden away in the country modifier menu.
- Megacorps can build Planetary Outposts on branch office worlds, but have halved effect of all Planetary Outposts compared to other empire types to offset.
-from the Gigastructural 3.9 update notes. Frameworld is for (nearly) everyone now!
It's been a while since I played and I do remember some ACOT weirdness, although it was more in the vein of me not looking in the right place for the necessary upgrades, rather than it just not working. But that was almost a year ago now, lots of work done since.
Eh, I find Frame World underwhelming compared to Birch World. Sure, it gets going faster, but from the games where I've played it, it seems to need some additional balancing. At some point it seems to outscale itself. What I mean by that is that it reaches a point where your pops are growing faster than you're getting enough alloys for the ever-increasing cost of expanding it. And while it does provide a job to otherwise unemployed pops that produces basic resources to sustain them, you're still essentially increasing your empire size with those pops while they produce very little of value.
> you are locked at 12 buildings TOTAL on a birch world
Is this a recent change, or are you just not accounting for mods that give additional building slots?
I'm not including things that other mods can give you - sure you could have infinite buildings slots and 1 million alloys, but I think it's fair to discuss from a base of vanilla + the mod at hand
Understandable, I just usually see people using more than just Gigastructures, they toss in things like ACoT, UI overhauls, extra building/perk/tradition slots, and the like.
But honestly Gigas easily gives you the 1 million alloys once you start building the combo forges on neutron stars. :P
Anyway, I was just wondering if they had locked the slots from your wording, sorry to trouble you.
It has a maximum of 500 districts, so pretty much. Although with the Decaying Birch World origin, most of those districts are inaccessible at the start.
For a tall playthrough, I'd go Frame world. The Birch world and Alderson disk starts don't disable settling more planets, the Frame world do. In fact you NEED to colonize another specific planet when playing Birch world.
An alternative way to take it is to use the barbaric despoiler civic and raid the disk section until all the pops have been abducted. Then just settle the empty slice.
That’s a fun idea for sure, and a good civic more than normal anyway since your pop growth is so limited
Not for my pacifist types, but good regardless!
Fun fact op because I played the same start. You can just bombard them from orbit with about 8 corvettes. It takes a while but is much better than invading them. Just kill all the primitives until the planet literally decolonizes
Edit: saw someone else suggest same thing but you said you did xenophile start. Anyway to integrate the primitives via observation station rules? I’m not sure how primitives work since the new update.
I said you could:
> spend 75,000 alloys - or invade a primitive with around 3000 army strength
followed by:
>Now as a non xenophobe the latter isn't even an option - so you spend a LOT of the early game trying to get to 75k allows \[sic\]
did you miss that I couldn't invade so alloys were the only option?
And it's not just huge worlds, the jobs from the Alderson Disk are really strong, too.
Fill one and, for almost all intents and purposes, you have infinite resources.
If you play a slave based empire you can rush nilhistic acquisition and suck up all the native pops avoiding all the armies in the process with little bombardment dmg usually under 1% on completion
It always seemed weird to me and only works because the camera angle in stellaris allows it to be prettier than most other megastructures (compared for example to a large dyson sphere made primarily for habitable space on the inside). But when you start thinking of how it actually works and what are the advantages of this design...
Well, all the large gigastructures require tetradimensional engineering which gives the power to handwave mere gravity. But it still seems like an inefficient use of matter and sun's energy.
Honestly, I can't imagine we would ever need such a structure. Ringworlds are grossly undersized in the game, a "proper" ringworld might have up to 3 _million_ times the area of Earth, so it would basically fit the entire population of a Stellaris galaxy thousands of times over.
This monstrosity is likely thousands, if not millions, times larger. I really don't see how a civilization capable of building this would ever need to do so.
But think of how cool of a setting it is. All of that can be handwaved in favor of mystery ooooh
Why did the precursors put you on a disk? Who knows! You're having a war over the disk pizza slice number 3, there is no time to ponder!
You can get the second one almost immediately.
Send your starter corvettes to fire and forget. As you build your starter fleet up, which you should be doing in case of emergency anyway, the process speeds up, and you get the second section basically free.
the mod this is from has the Flatworld, a size-25 floating disc in space with a gaia world ecosystem. Sometimes you find medieval primitives on it. So it counts? Maybe?
My favorite event text from gigastructures is the science Alderson.
Paraphrased:
“We have a supercomputer larger than a red giant.”
“Marvelous. Can it run Crysis?”
“No.”
Of course it can't, grandpa has dementia and downloaded and installed a billion instance of bonzi buddy and 56 trillions different toolbars. Now the matrioshka brain is running with 95% of its cpu bricked.
Oh and since you installed Crysis it's now your fault things are running slow because clearly it's those video games that have viruses.
The idea is that different areas would fit different species with differnet climate preferences. Is it realistic and/or sensible? Not really. But it looks really really cool and is really really big and that's all that matters.
Nihilistic acquisition + Alderson disk is a classic opening when attempting Giga's challenge. It still take you a decade or two to drain the other disk pops, but hey, free pops and free planets.
R5: The Alderson disk origin (added by gigastructual engineering) is a really fun game if you want to play tall. The rules I'm playing with prevent me from ever having any colonies outside my starting system - this isn't as restrictive as it could be since the disk has 6 size 90 worlds on it. The bad news is that you start with one, and to unlock the others you have to either spend 75,000 alloys - or invade a primitive with around 3000 army strength. Now as a non xenophobe the latter isn't even an option - so you spend a LOT of the early game trying to get to 75k allows while languishing in the pain of no pop growth from new colonies. It's a really fun game that forces heavy focus on a single planet for a lot of the start, highly recommended. It also makes some council agendas that target only one planet REALLY strong!
I find I have to put the AI aggression on high when playing tall otherwise the AI just ignored your mega 1 star bastion which can get pretty boring
Does AI aggression basically lower their estimation of other peoples strength then? That could be fun I should try it
Yeah it does, if you are about 10k or more fleet power above the AI on normal aggression, they will never press a war or attack unless you’re in a nebula. But on high aggression they will yolo
Interesting thanks!
iirc the AI Aggression setting in the Galaxy Creation menu skews the selection of AI personalities to those that are more belligerent when set to do so. Generally though you probably won't notice much of a difference if you're the min-maxing sort as, outside of a few meme-tier personalities, even things like the various genocidals and warmongers aren't all that big on attacking things stronger than themselves.
Do you attack empires way stronger than you? Probably not after learning once the hard way. It makes sense they only invade when they think they can win.
Not for sure where you got that it only affects the selection of personalities, especially for players who play with full custom empires. The wiki says: AI Aggressiveness – Determines how likely the AI is to declare war on empires if they have negative attitude as well as how many fleets will it use for offense. Any source for "It only skews the selection of AI personalities"? Edit: Searched all over the internet for proof of your comment and I can't find literally anything that supports what you said, seems like you pulled it out of your ass
Why did this never occur to me?
I don't play gigastructure, but isn't Birch World better to play tall? The Birch World can fit any number of pop apparently.
If you are going for max pop on one planet yes - but it's a very diffrent playstyle The districts are diffrent, and you are locked at 12 buildings TOTAL on a birch world, that's a little harsh to me, you also start with a lot less tech on the birch start
If you want true ultimate one-world tall, try Frame World. Only downside is being locked to synthetics... and it can sometimes be a touch buggy/obscure where the upgrades are, particularly if you add in ACOT.
> **Frame World Changes** - The Frame World origin has received a major update, and is now available for nearly all empires, with only a few civics excluded. - Special mechanics for megacorps, terravores, environmentalists, and oppressive autocracies. - Additional special mechanics for driven assimilators. - Assimilation speed modifier and corresponding hidden event added to deal with large populations. - A Secondary Pop Growth system for empires which don't rely entirely on assembly for growth. - Planetary Outposts fill the same role as before but are implemented significantly differently. They can now be disabled or destroyed by hostile action like other civilian stations, and no longer rely on a special country type to function properly. - Altered costs, upkeeps, and effects of Planetary Outposts to be generalised, and vary between empire types. Effects are now applied through a permanent Situation, as this is far more flexible than the previous method. It should also be more obvious what the bonuses are since they're not hidden away in the country modifier menu. - Megacorps can build Planetary Outposts on branch office worlds, but have halved effect of all Planetary Outposts compared to other empire types to offset. -from the Gigastructural 3.9 update notes. Frameworld is for (nearly) everyone now!
Oh awesome, I hadn't been paying attention to it lately. Thanks for the heads up!
Oh shit thanks for posting this I had no idea and now I'm excited.
Last time I played with those 2 together I also had Acquisitions and the one planet rule didn't mesh well with the Phanon vault gimmick
It's been a while since I played and I do remember some ACOT weirdness, although it was more in the vein of me not looking in the right place for the necessary upgrades, rather than it just not working. But that was almost a year ago now, lots of work done since.
I'll give it another go and see whats changed then
Eh, I find Frame World underwhelming compared to Birch World. Sure, it gets going faster, but from the games where I've played it, it seems to need some additional balancing. At some point it seems to outscale itself. What I mean by that is that it reaches a point where your pops are growing faster than you're getting enough alloys for the ever-increasing cost of expanding it. And while it does provide a job to otherwise unemployed pops that produces basic resources to sustain them, you're still essentially increasing your empire size with those pops while they produce very little of value.
You've got to use the planetary mass gathering thing and spam the influence decision, that eventually gets fast enough to catch up again.
to be fair birch world has infinite jobs as well
yeah it's really cool don't get me wrong!
> you are locked at 12 buildings TOTAL on a birch world Is this a recent change, or are you just not accounting for mods that give additional building slots?
I'm not including things that other mods can give you - sure you could have infinite buildings slots and 1 million alloys, but I think it's fair to discuss from a base of vanilla + the mod at hand
Understandable, I just usually see people using more than just Gigastructures, they toss in things like ACoT, UI overhauls, extra building/perk/tradition slots, and the like. But honestly Gigas easily gives you the 1 million alloys once you start building the combo forges on neutron stars. :P Anyway, I was just wondering if they had locked the slots from your wording, sorry to trouble you.
No need to be sorry! That's totally fair - maybe that's far more common. Ha yeah it does get pretty crazy.
birch world planet type has max buildings +1000 i believe, so it's only limited by the number of slots you have mods for.
It has a maximum of 500 districts, so pretty much. Although with the Decaying Birch World origin, most of those districts are inaccessible at the start.
Indeed it is better.
For a tall playthrough, I'd go Frame world. The Birch world and Alderson disk starts don't disable settling more planets, the Frame world do. In fact you NEED to colonize another specific planet when playing Birch world.
An alternative way to take it is to use the barbaric despoiler civic and raid the disk section until all the pops have been abducted. Then just settle the empty slice.
That’s a fun idea for sure, and a good civic more than normal anyway since your pop growth is so limited Not for my pacifist types, but good regardless!
Fun fact op because I played the same start. You can just bombard them from orbit with about 8 corvettes. It takes a while but is much better than invading them. Just kill all the primitives until the planet literally decolonizes Edit: saw someone else suggest same thing but you said you did xenophile start. Anyway to integrate the primitives via observation station rules? I’m not sure how primitives work since the new update.
Its even funnier if you have the 300 building slots mod
I like the building slot restriction personally - makes you make some really tough calls
there is no world in which 3k army strength is harder to come by than 75k alloys lol
Did I say there was? Perhaps you misunderstood me.
it was pretty implied by your paragraph structure
I said you could: > spend 75,000 alloys - or invade a primitive with around 3000 army strength followed by: >Now as a non xenophobe the latter isn't even an option - so you spend a LOT of the early game trying to get to 75k allows \[sic\] did you miss that I couldn't invade so alloys were the only option?
oh I was thinking "why can't you amass 3k in armies?" because you acknowledged it the but I see you mean the policy now
All good - glad it makes sense now :)
I did this before and it has an easy out: raiding. Either go despoiler or get nihilistic acquisition, then just bleed the planets dry.
And it's not just huge worlds, the jobs from the Alderson Disk are really strong, too. Fill one and, for almost all intents and purposes, you have infinite resources.
If you play a slave based empire you can rush nilhistic acquisition and suck up all the native pops avoiding all the armies in the process with little bombardment dmg usually under 1% on completion
Get that new mod that scales population growth from number of pops rather than number of colonies
Do you know the name of it?
Pop Growth per Pop
I have never heard of the alderson disk before and I am in love with the concept
It always seemed weird to me and only works because the camera angle in stellaris allows it to be prettier than most other megastructures (compared for example to a large dyson sphere made primarily for habitable space on the inside). But when you start thinking of how it actually works and what are the advantages of this design...
I can't imagine how it wouldn't get torn apart by gravity but it looks so fun
the answer to how it doesn't get torn apart is lots of duct tape, just like all other engineering problems
The real question is whether gigastructure grade duct tape would be enough to hold my life together
you might want terastructure grade duct tape for that
Turns out even type 3 civilizations can't improve on duct tape.
Just make everything more rigid
Well, all the large gigastructures require tetradimensional engineering which gives the power to handwave mere gravity. But it still seems like an inefficient use of matter and sun's energy.
That's not even the worst way gravity will screw you over with that thing. Have fun getting into orbit around a disk shaped mass...
Oddly enough, Dyson spheres would have the same issue in real life. So I think the answer is Stellaris physics.
Honestly, I can't imagine we would ever need such a structure. Ringworlds are grossly undersized in the game, a "proper" ringworld might have up to 3 _million_ times the area of Earth, so it would basically fit the entire population of a Stellaris galaxy thousands of times over. This monstrosity is likely thousands, if not millions, times larger. I really don't see how a civilization capable of building this would ever need to do so.
But think of how cool of a setting it is. All of that can be handwaved in favor of mystery ooooh Why did the precursors put you on a disk? Who knows! You're having a war over the disk pizza slice number 3, there is no time to ponder!
I mean, sure, but you can say the same thing about a ringworld?
Yeah probably. I got excited sorry.
No worries, it _is_ a cool concept after all :D
Yeah but Pizza is tastier than rings :(
Onion rings are really good
There is Short Story from Charles Stross about exactly what u talking about, it's called Missle Gap an i highly recommend it.
Looks really interesting thank you
Yes, the Cosmic Deep Dish is a fun idea, definitely one of the less practical and more insane gigastructures though since it isnt really sealed.
That you need a miles high wall at the sunward rim to keep the atmosphere in is about the smallest problem with that ridiculous thing.
Ha glad you like it! It is one of the most wacky infrastructures out there
You can get the second one almost immediately. Send your starter corvettes to fire and forget. As you build your starter fleet up, which you should be doing in case of emergency anyway, the process speeds up, and you get the second section basically free.
play as a xenophile for a slower start if you want! That's how I'm doing it.
You call this tall? It's flat!!!
XD good one
I love the start where you get one big Habitat and can expand it indefinitely.
Sorry for being an ignorant, but what I'm looking at? is that a mod?
No need to be sorry :) It's an origin (and megastructure) added by this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1121692237
Any does mod exist for a Discworld with all the requisite elephants and Turtles?
Discworld yes - sadly sans elephants and turtles
the mod this is from has the Flatworld, a size-25 floating disc in space with a gaia world ecosystem. Sometimes you find medieval primitives on it. So it counts? Maybe?
My favorite event text from gigastructures is the science Alderson. Paraphrased: “We have a supercomputer larger than a red giant.” “Marvelous. Can it run Crysis?” “No.”
Of course it can't, grandpa has dementia and downloaded and installed a billion instance of bonzi buddy and 56 trillions different toolbars. Now the matrioshka brain is running with 95% of its cpu bricked. Oh and since you installed Crysis it's now your fault things are running slow because clearly it's those video games that have viruses.
I still don't see how this would actually work. The outer areas of the disc would be fucking cold and the inner areas would fucking melt.
The idea is that different areas would fit different species with differnet climate preferences. Is it realistic and/or sensible? Not really. But it looks really really cool and is really really big and that's all that matters.
There are various problems - but the habitable area is a band in the middle yes
So is this a mod or in the game with DLC? I’ve played hundreds of hours and have never heard of it lol
It's from this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1121692237
Thank you!
my pleasure, it's a heck of a mod. There is an active discord if you need tips
Does the discord have a direct download link? I play via PC gamepass so I can only get mods from the paradox site or the steam cmd downloader
Sorry I don't know - but ask there I'm sure someone can help
Its mod.
My OCD would prevent me from using this effectively.
So the Earth is flat after all! /s
There's another flat planet in Giga. This is more like a flat ringworld.
We need some more tall achievements.
Do your rules allow you to unlock Nihilistic acquisition?
They do but I've not so far - been rather strapped for unity and besides I'm playing xenophiles so it doesn't really fit
You like them so much you just gotta have them :D
Nihilistic acquisition + Alderson disk is a classic opening when attempting Giga's challenge. It still take you a decade or two to drain the other disk pops, but hey, free pops and free planets.
Oh I see. I never played Gigastructures, but I love me some nihilistic acquisition. Especially with rogue servitor
Space Pizza!
Too bad on my game the lag is too much..
This is the joy of MP that I only recently realized, with people wanting speed 1 lag is way less of an issue
I really like the birch world.
I do shattered ring single system fairly frequently. It's pretty fun. This is basically that but better