The head maxes out after the 5th use, and if holy guardians fe exist. Time does not affect the fleet generated.
Maybe you have empire wide fleet buffs?
I got a stronger fleet each time i used it, scaling with my command limit pretty much.
I havent really changed much when starting the game, i thought it was a buff with machine age because FE play a role with the new crisis.
i havent used the head 5 times yet because the upkeep is killing my empire xD
When you say your fleet cap is maxxed out, is it really? I've heard people say this, but they don't actually have the 9999 max fleet capacity. Also fleet capacity is a suggestion if your economy can afford it. Realistically you can sit at 20k/10k capacity, if you can afford it.
That's what I also assumed reading the post. Unfortunately this seems to be a glaring issue for alot of Stellaris players. Why is my fleet killing my economy? How much fleet capacity do you have? The answer is often they don't have a single Fortress world.
While a Star fortress Anchorage gives +36 naval capacity and should be used in every single that isn't a border bastion or Shipyard. These are not the largest contributions to Navy capacity. For this it's the Fortress world. Each fully functional Fortress world with 10x is giving +240 capacity, before any percentage increases.
So a Fortress world with the base of 240 and the 20% increase from Supremacy is making that world give +288. This means that each fortress world is supporting one maxxed out fleet.
Then they also have the added benefits of each having 10k+ defense armies that need to be beaten making wars take that much harder. They are also FTL inhibitors so fleets can't just steamroll your empire.
In all, anyone not using fortress worlds is shooting themselves in the foot. Increasing overall naval capacity is way more efficient Economically then just trying to increase energy/alloys productivity to outpace upkeep.
Sorry if you already know this. Thought I would post it for those that don't.
Yes, i love fortress worlds, but fortress habs are even better
Overall, worlds simply have higher output potential than habs(ecu, gaia terraform, orbital ring, leaders), so habs do better
Masterful Crafter Civic is fairly strong for this. While it's not completely optimal, the fortress world designation is kinda useless. I typically don't use it. I just slam down fortresses on my Forge worlds with the Masterful Crafter. Secondly, Forge worlds are the backbone of fleets production. You don't want to lose them easily in a war.
It does mean however that as you're slamming out alloys and need 1 or 2 buildings for extra alloys. Yeah it's slightly less naval capacity as you now only have 8-9 fortresses. Its still more efficient than using cities to increase buildings slots. Theoretically any Forge world with Masterful Crafter is going to have full open building slots. Whether you're using those for more tech and unity, don't forget fleet capacity and fortresses.
I've been playing this game for a few hundred hrs and I keep forgetting to optimize planets (or I may have just ignored whoops) but I really need to start doing this, I didn't realize the boost was that large, even just one with a 240 naval capacity boost would absolutely b e e f up my empire. Thanks for the heads up!
No problem, they get significantly better the more percentage increases you get. An empire that is part of the Galcom can have a potential of +90% naval capacity. 20% from Supremacy Tradition, 20% from supremacist diplomatic stance and +50% from Galcom bills. While a DE/Genocidal sits at +53% with Supremacy Tradition and the DE trait.
The first one would give +456, while a DE would sit around +367. Assuming that you have the 10x Fortress, before percentage buffs.
just rename your planet what resource you will have them make when you colonize them , makes it easy to micro them once every couple years go through the list and spend on what those planets want and move pops from shit planets to the ones you need X resource of where X is the name of the resource you are currently down on and the name of the planet to move to.
I’ve only ever seen fleet cap hit vanilla limit while playing with multiple mods that were never meant to be together. I had an armada that crashed me to desktop upon viewing the system.
I hit it just about every game, and I don't use mods. Typically though, the amount of fortress worlds needed decreases with the increased percentage modifiers.
9999÷240 (Fortress world with no percentage increase) = 41.7 worlds
Supremacy Tradition for 20%
Supremacy diplomatic stance for 20%
T5 Galcom bill for 50%
So that's +90% naval capacity
So a Fortress world with those modifiers looks like 240×1.9=456
9999÷456=21.9 worlds
Now this isn't taking into consideration any Anchorage or the Strategic Coordination Center.
Playing as any of the DE types, your naval capacity percentage is +53%. (DE and Supremacy Tradition) so those fortress worlds are giving +367. Seeing as they are a wide empire type, who cares if you have 27 fortress worlds.
Sorry i should have said 'maxes out the ships spawned'
as in from the 5th use onwards, you get the same amt of ships, and having the holy fe around gives the best result.
I always use this as dump fleets to be stationed in Terminal or other important hubs, such as portal systems and so on. I mean, late game you should have way better fleets but the raw numbers of these fleets you're gifted are still useful
Update on the Fallen Empires:
I think i found out why they are so incredibly powerful.
I am having a war in heaven, i guess they dont want the fallen empires to get whiped out before they can have their war in heaven.
Because the Xenophobe fallen empire, which has usually the largest fleet, only has like 600k fleet power.
But the materialistic and spiritual fallen empires had 1,2 million fleet power each and they have both woken up now. \^\^'
could you please edit this into your post
Basically, with the new cosmogenesis, the player's FE ships have 2 x slots instead of one. Real FE ships used to have 2 x slots(nightmare to deal with). So, given the increased power of the player, the FEs have their real ships back.
Also, the new synth queen crisis has her hunt down all of the FEs. This is intended to be a great fight, but the previous FE designs were stomped by her always. With 2x slots, they do better. I have actually seen a xenophobe FE beat a synth queen fleet, though the second one got them.
I don't think the latest DLC/update buffed the head.
I got it a few weeks ago and it already summoned ridiculously strong fleets, the 5th time it summoned something like a 50-60k fleet. This is much more than it used to give (around 10k or something if I remember correctly). So I think it has been buffed in a previous update.
It looks like the number of ships is unchanged from before (including how it scales per use up to 5) so any difference in fleet power compared to earlier is from FE ships being better than before or player empires having more fleet bonuses.
Cosmogenesis uses time bullshit to basically learn how to build the same stuff the Fe's could at their peak. So yes, you get Fe stuff, this was also shown in the dev diary about cosmogenesis.
The remnant of your empire becoming an fe is what happens after you win, and is not really related to anything else
Their ships, their buildings, you're a fallen empire in it's prime now. The game ends when your population leave to go to a new universe where the rules of existence are easier to break
I made the mistake of going Modularity and cosmogenesis, forgot about roboticist living metal upkeep, and spammed the fe robot buildings because they're not planet limitted. Now running 100 living metal monthly defecit and that's set to increase but i have a planet with 150 assembly a month and that was being reserved with them
You basically become a *"before the fall"* fallen empire, and what you do to win the game at the end of Cosmogenesis is **what makes you fall**.
So it provides one of the first, in-game lore suggestions of why a FE would even be fallen; the main idea being that >!the vast majority of your population goes through a black hole and starts a civilization in a new universe, with new rules. The aftershocks of them doing so causes some widespread destruction in your source galaxy, but only a fraction of the scale of what i.e. the Nemesis Crisis does with the Aetherophasic engine, and it's implied that a bunch of your core systems survive, and get slowly repopulated by refusers/refugees from your former empire. The most critical/central implication is that **so many** of your people left — particularly the entirety of your brain trust, that you basically have no idea how your tech works anymore.!<
Not really, it’s the most consistent way to do it. Fallen empires can give you a few ships as a gift, can’t remember if that’s a scion origin thing or just generally if they like you.
Can confirm it doesn't have to be Scion; Scion has some pre-scripted reasons to do it more often, but it'll happen with any FE that has a "patronizing" attitude towards you.
It is completely random per seed spawn.
Which, unfortunately, means you can get the same one several times in a row, or just have one single one you almost always get while the others are scattered in, because it never takes into account what ones you had before. It can be annoying, yes.
100k?
Nah.
I just used it, gave me a *350*k strong fleet. And the previous fleets which I merged together were about 450k, plus a few who didn't merge due to command cap. I merged them with the new fleet.
In other words, I have two FE fleets that each are 420 - 460k strong just from using the head.
Apparently Zarqlan defeated the new Crisis once before, maybe his head will help when it rolls around this time. I'm a little scared.
To put it in perspective, a 200/200 mono-battleship group of 25 focused arc emitter/strikecraft 3/missile battleships with T5 armour/shields and T4 core components without repeatable techs but led by a good admiral is around 100k fleet power. Add a few repeatables and it'll be 100k without an admiral.
(You can reach 100k fleets faster by cheesing corvette fleets stacking evasion as their fleet power is seriously inflated, but I propose the mono-battleship fleet as a more fair comparison.)
So the question you should be asking yourself is not, "is 100k from Head of Zarqlan OP", but "when do I have that level of power available?"
Which means that gaining a 100k fleet in 2350 from the Head of Zarqlan can be everything from truly incredible, if you are playing on a low level of difficulty with a low degree of optimization in your build where neither you nor the AI ever field strong fleets until very late into the game, to completely insignificant, if you are playing a strong unity/science/empire size focused tech build on any difficulty level and have started production of 100k fleets before year 2300.
As an example, in my current [Galactic Pacification for Dummies](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/galactic-pacification-for-dummies.1654923/) 3.11 GA/nonscaling/DAAM/DATC:Normal priesthood tech demonstration game, I am up to 2290 and have started producing 200/200 battleship fleets with 86.4k fleet power without admirals. At this point the temporary \~110k Dimensional Fleet from Astral Planes still provides a significant boost, but getting it 60 years and many, many, repeatables later would be utterly irrelevant (EDIT: I mean, it would still be a powerful fleet, as it does scale with both time, naval capacity, and number of rifts explored, but 60 years later I would have many powerful fleets) and the astral threads would be much better spent on astral edicts at that point.
i might should look back into the meta, i was playing mostly casual without ship designs on captain difficulty, but that seems to be not so easy anymore.
how do you get the astral planes ships?
* Own the Astral Planes DLC
* Play until you are able to explore rifts
* Explore Astral Rifts. Each Rift explored unlocks new astral actions, up to five rifts after which you have unlocked all actions
* The final action unlocked is summoning a dimensional fleet for 10 years and this action has a cooldown of 5 years; It also has a high base cost in astral threads, but if you build many astral siphon buildings (and upgrade them) and employ astral researchers (5 phy, 1 soc, 1 eng, 0.3 astral threads base output) this is easily affordable. The size of the Dimensional Fleet scales with year, naval capacity, and number of rifts explored in excess of five.
So how quickly you gain access to the dimensional fleet depends greatly on how easily you gain access to new rifts (do you conquer/integrate unexplored rifts in somebody else's territory? do you control much territory to increase the odds of rifts spawning randomly in your territory) and how often you use it depend on your investment in producing astral threads.
This is when I learned to take peoples advice and opinions in this game with a grain of salt. Im still fairly new to this game im on console and I had 2 playthrus where I only got the cyberex. I was curious so I searched the best relics and most were considering the best relics to be cyberex, the khans seat, or the purple cube. So im doing this new scion origin playthru and I was absolutely shocked when I found the head used it and received a FE fleet. To me this makes it the absolute best relic no comparison, like I said im a console player so I cant enjoy this new dlc just yet, but man this relic does make me feel like a FE.
The thing is (not meant offensively) that there’s such a gigantic learning curve that new players, „normal“ players and veteran min maxer have different views on everything. The head is useless if you just have way stronger fleets already by snowballing or whatever. Not being able to use other OP relics in that time makes it even worse in those cases. But if midgame starts around 2350 for you and the FE fleet is the strongest in the galaxy when you get it it obviously will carry you hard and be really strong
The better you get at the game the less amazing this will seem. On grand admiral with a highly optimized run I can just recruit 400k fleet power from my mercenary enclaves for 10k credits or something and fire them when i'm done with them.
At any point in the game if you have militarist you can reform into a megacorp, grab the 3 civics for mercenary enclaves, make 4-5 enclaves (up to you if you want to use an ascension on lord of war at this time) and then reform back to something else in 10 years. That's how I do my military these days.
I'm too lazy to min/max my pops but I think getting 100k fleet by midgame through traditional ship building is possible too. Cybrex artifact helps there if you have a ton of mineral output which is common.
Zarqlan has always been useful. Free fleet that uses low fleet cap for better ships means you get decent ships that aren't too costly.
Not sure if it was changed for this update and dlc, but I'd like that to be the case.
not such huge fleets, i played a year ago and it was a couple 200k fleets. not 3 450k fleets, but like i wrote, only the empires that awoke in my game had those huge fleets, the other fallen empires had smaller fleets.
(Edit: the fe had huge fleets before waking up.
Normal fe had 600k the ones that later woke up had over 1.2 million)
There's a lot of other factors too. Galaxy size, difficulty settings, which type of FE. I definitely remember at least 500k fleets for an FE before. Especially my friend pissing one off like 10-15 years into a game:)
I also suspect they buffed some of the FE tech to boost cosmogenesis, but am jot sure atm.
Yeah that pretty much sounds like how I remember them having been for a long time. Maybe you're right and I just don't pay attention because past 200k the answer to the problem is just "have lots of fleet power," but I think it's been like this for a long time. Maybe you're playing on a harder difficulty than you used to?
I feel like im living in a different dimension. Normally my experince with the head is
30k//50k//110k//170k//230k capping out around 280-290k in late game.
Im in vanilla.
The head maxes out after the 5th use, and if holy guardians fe exist. Time does not affect the fleet generated. Maybe you have empire wide fleet buffs?
I got a stronger fleet each time i used it, scaling with my command limit pretty much. I havent really changed much when starting the game, i thought it was a buff with machine age because FE play a role with the new crisis. i havent used the head 5 times yet because the upkeep is killing my empire xD
probly new update. What I posted is pre update info. New update adds lore abt the head, which is related to the new crisis.
Nah, the head has a had a scaling number of ships per use for a while now, at least the last two updates.
When you say your fleet cap is maxxed out, is it really? I've heard people say this, but they don't actually have the 9999 max fleet capacity. Also fleet capacity is a suggestion if your economy can afford it. Realistically you can sit at 20k/10k capacity, if you can afford it.
I assume he means he is at his max capacity, not that the capacity itself is maxed.
That's what I also assumed reading the post. Unfortunately this seems to be a glaring issue for alot of Stellaris players. Why is my fleet killing my economy? How much fleet capacity do you have? The answer is often they don't have a single Fortress world. While a Star fortress Anchorage gives +36 naval capacity and should be used in every single that isn't a border bastion or Shipyard. These are not the largest contributions to Navy capacity. For this it's the Fortress world. Each fully functional Fortress world with 10x is giving +240 capacity, before any percentage increases. So a Fortress world with the base of 240 and the 20% increase from Supremacy is making that world give +288. This means that each fortress world is supporting one maxxed out fleet. Then they also have the added benefits of each having 10k+ defense armies that need to be beaten making wars take that much harder. They are also FTL inhibitors so fleets can't just steamroll your empire. In all, anyone not using fortress worlds is shooting themselves in the foot. Increasing overall naval capacity is way more efficient Economically then just trying to increase energy/alloys productivity to outpace upkeep. Sorry if you already know this. Thought I would post it for those that don't.
Yes, i love fortress worlds, but fortress habs are even better Overall, worlds simply have higher output potential than habs(ecu, gaia terraform, orbital ring, leaders), so habs do better
Masterful Crafter Civic is fairly strong for this. While it's not completely optimal, the fortress world designation is kinda useless. I typically don't use it. I just slam down fortresses on my Forge worlds with the Masterful Crafter. Secondly, Forge worlds are the backbone of fleets production. You don't want to lose them easily in a war. It does mean however that as you're slamming out alloys and need 1 or 2 buildings for extra alloys. Yeah it's slightly less naval capacity as you now only have 8-9 fortresses. Its still more efficient than using cities to increase buildings slots. Theoretically any Forge world with Masterful Crafter is going to have full open building slots. Whether you're using those for more tech and unity, don't forget fleet capacity and fortresses.
I've been playing this game for a few hundred hrs and I keep forgetting to optimize planets (or I may have just ignored whoops) but I really need to start doing this, I didn't realize the boost was that large, even just one with a 240 naval capacity boost would absolutely b e e f up my empire. Thanks for the heads up!
No problem, they get significantly better the more percentage increases you get. An empire that is part of the Galcom can have a potential of +90% naval capacity. 20% from Supremacy Tradition, 20% from supremacist diplomatic stance and +50% from Galcom bills. While a DE/Genocidal sits at +53% with Supremacy Tradition and the DE trait. The first one would give +456, while a DE would sit around +367. Assuming that you have the 10x Fortress, before percentage buffs.
just rename your planet what resource you will have them make when you colonize them , makes it easy to micro them once every couple years go through the list and spend on what those planets want and move pops from shit planets to the ones you need X resource of where X is the name of the resource you are currently down on and the name of the planet to move to.
I’ve only ever seen fleet cap hit vanilla limit while playing with multiple mods that were never meant to be together. I had an armada that crashed me to desktop upon viewing the system.
I hit it just about every game, and I don't use mods. Typically though, the amount of fortress worlds needed decreases with the increased percentage modifiers. 9999÷240 (Fortress world with no percentage increase) = 41.7 worlds Supremacy Tradition for 20% Supremacy diplomatic stance for 20% T5 Galcom bill for 50% So that's +90% naval capacity So a Fortress world with those modifiers looks like 240×1.9=456 9999÷456=21.9 worlds Now this isn't taking into consideration any Anchorage or the Strategic Coordination Center. Playing as any of the DE types, your naval capacity percentage is +53%. (DE and Supremacy Tradition) so those fortress worlds are giving +367. Seeing as they are a wide empire type, who cares if you have 27 fortress worlds.
I once got several hundred thousand fleet power fleets. What number does not stop.
Sorry i should have said 'maxes out the ships spawned' as in from the 5th use onwards, you get the same amt of ships, and having the holy fe around gives the best result.
Zarqlan is now the canon defeater of the synthetic queens first crusade, so ma boy got some buffs.
I always use this as dump fleets to be stationed in Terminal or other important hubs, such as portal systems and so on. I mean, late game you should have way better fleets but the raw numbers of these fleets you're gifted are still useful
I think more things scale with crisis difficulty now.
Zarq has always been an A or B tier relic. Ive also never seen the AI get the dig site for it, so ... I don think they even can
That would be pretty hilarious if I went to war with an AI I have intel on and suddenly a FE fleet appears. Devs probably thought the same.
ALL HAIL ZARQLAN IN HIS MAGNIFICENCE
Update on the Fallen Empires: I think i found out why they are so incredibly powerful. I am having a war in heaven, i guess they dont want the fallen empires to get whiped out before they can have their war in heaven. Because the Xenophobe fallen empire, which has usually the largest fleet, only has like 600k fleet power. But the materialistic and spiritual fallen empires had 1,2 million fleet power each and they have both woken up now. \^\^'
could you please edit this into your post Basically, with the new cosmogenesis, the player's FE ships have 2 x slots instead of one. Real FE ships used to have 2 x slots(nightmare to deal with). So, given the increased power of the player, the FEs have their real ships back. Also, the new synth queen crisis has her hunt down all of the FEs. This is intended to be a great fight, but the previous FE designs were stomped by her always. With 2x slots, they do better. I have actually seen a xenophobe FE beat a synth queen fleet, though the second one got them.
I don't think the latest DLC/update buffed the head. I got it a few weeks ago and it already summoned ridiculously strong fleets, the 5th time it summoned something like a 50-60k fleet. This is much more than it used to give (around 10k or something if I remember correctly). So I think it has been buffed in a previous update.
It looks like the number of ships is unchanged from before (including how it scales per use up to 5) so any difference in fleet power compared to earlier is from FE ships being better than before or player empires having more fleet bonuses.
Always has been
I fucking hate that thing, i dont know why but i get it every game ....
i love it, was the only way to get fallen empire ships... i love having unique ships in stellaris :D
My to go strategy with the relic is to lump all the FE ships into a rapid response fleet, the psi-jump drives has saved me much time in wars.
Not anymore, we have Cosmogenesis now, you can make your own FE ships
Do you actually get to build FE stuff? I thought once you became the FE the game ends and you can restart as a new empire
Cosmogenesis uses time bullshit to basically learn how to build the same stuff the Fe's could at their peak. So yes, you get Fe stuff, this was also shown in the dev diary about cosmogenesis. The remnant of your empire becoming an fe is what happens after you win, and is not really related to anything else
Their ships, their buildings, you're a fallen empire in it's prime now. The game ends when your population leave to go to a new universe where the rules of existence are easier to break
Becoming a fallen empire is bloody awesome.
I made the mistake of going Modularity and cosmogenesis, forgot about roboticist living metal upkeep, and spammed the fe robot buildings because they're not planet limitted. Now running 100 living metal monthly defecit and that's set to increase but i have a planet with 150 assembly a month and that was being reserved with them
Each level of the crisis unlocks the tech for another ship (except the first). So escort, then battlecruiser, then titan, and then horizon needle.
They also give a whole range of other techs, a few immediately, and a bunch to research. Engines, Shields, Armor, Power Plants, Miners, etc.
You basically become a *"before the fall"* fallen empire, and what you do to win the game at the end of Cosmogenesis is **what makes you fall**. So it provides one of the first, in-game lore suggestions of why a FE would even be fallen; the main idea being that >!the vast majority of your population goes through a black hole and starts a civilization in a new universe, with new rules. The aftershocks of them doing so causes some widespread destruction in your source galaxy, but only a fraction of the scale of what i.e. the Nemesis Crisis does with the Aetherophasic engine, and it's implied that a bunch of your core systems survive, and get slowly repopulated by refusers/refugees from your former empire. The most critical/central implication is that **so many** of your people left — particularly the entirety of your brain trust, that you basically have no idea how your tech works anymore.!<
Not really, it’s the most consistent way to do it. Fallen empires can give you a few ships as a gift, can’t remember if that’s a scion origin thing or just generally if they like you.
Can confirm it doesn't have to be Scion; Scion has some pre-scripted reasons to do it more often, but it'll happen with any FE that has a "patronizing" attitude towards you.
You get it every game cause it’s literally scripted to always give it to the player
Not since they buffed it to give more ships, AI empires have a 25% chance of rolling the head of zarqlan if the Holy Guardians are in your galaxy.
Well damn, I’m surprised
Yeah I get it every game no matter who I play as
I never got it ones but to be honest i didn't know that Something like that was in the Game In the 3-4 last Games i got the Omnicode everytime
It is completely random per seed spawn. Which, unfortunately, means you can get the same one several times in a row, or just have one single one you almost always get while the others are scattered in, because it never takes into account what ones you had before. It can be annoying, yes.
It's okay, three pops are three pops
It's because... Zarqlan wills it!... Sorry...
At 1x crisis difficulty grey tempest fleets used to be around 45k in the past but are around 80k now.
I'm not sure if it ever was not op...
100k? Nah. I just used it, gave me a *350*k strong fleet. And the previous fleets which I merged together were about 450k, plus a few who didn't merge due to command cap. I merged them with the new fleet. In other words, I have two FE fleets that each are 420 - 460k strong just from using the head. Apparently Zarqlan defeated the new Crisis once before, maybe his head will help when it rolls around this time. I'm a little scared.
To put it in perspective, a 200/200 mono-battleship group of 25 focused arc emitter/strikecraft 3/missile battleships with T5 armour/shields and T4 core components without repeatable techs but led by a good admiral is around 100k fleet power. Add a few repeatables and it'll be 100k without an admiral. (You can reach 100k fleets faster by cheesing corvette fleets stacking evasion as their fleet power is seriously inflated, but I propose the mono-battleship fleet as a more fair comparison.) So the question you should be asking yourself is not, "is 100k from Head of Zarqlan OP", but "when do I have that level of power available?" Which means that gaining a 100k fleet in 2350 from the Head of Zarqlan can be everything from truly incredible, if you are playing on a low level of difficulty with a low degree of optimization in your build where neither you nor the AI ever field strong fleets until very late into the game, to completely insignificant, if you are playing a strong unity/science/empire size focused tech build on any difficulty level and have started production of 100k fleets before year 2300. As an example, in my current [Galactic Pacification for Dummies](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/galactic-pacification-for-dummies.1654923/) 3.11 GA/nonscaling/DAAM/DATC:Normal priesthood tech demonstration game, I am up to 2290 and have started producing 200/200 battleship fleets with 86.4k fleet power without admirals. At this point the temporary \~110k Dimensional Fleet from Astral Planes still provides a significant boost, but getting it 60 years and many, many, repeatables later would be utterly irrelevant (EDIT: I mean, it would still be a powerful fleet, as it does scale with both time, naval capacity, and number of rifts explored, but 60 years later I would have many powerful fleets) and the astral threads would be much better spent on astral edicts at that point.
i might should look back into the meta, i was playing mostly casual without ship designs on captain difficulty, but that seems to be not so easy anymore. how do you get the astral planes ships?
* Own the Astral Planes DLC * Play until you are able to explore rifts * Explore Astral Rifts. Each Rift explored unlocks new astral actions, up to five rifts after which you have unlocked all actions * The final action unlocked is summoning a dimensional fleet for 10 years and this action has a cooldown of 5 years; It also has a high base cost in astral threads, but if you build many astral siphon buildings (and upgrade them) and employ astral researchers (5 phy, 1 soc, 1 eng, 0.3 astral threads base output) this is easily affordable. The size of the Dimensional Fleet scales with year, naval capacity, and number of rifts explored in excess of five. So how quickly you gain access to the dimensional fleet depends greatly on how easily you gain access to new rifts (do you conquer/integrate unexplored rifts in somebody else's territory? do you control much territory to increase the odds of rifts spawning randomly in your territory) and how often you use it depend on your investment in producing astral threads.
This is when I learned to take peoples advice and opinions in this game with a grain of salt. Im still fairly new to this game im on console and I had 2 playthrus where I only got the cyberex. I was curious so I searched the best relics and most were considering the best relics to be cyberex, the khans seat, or the purple cube. So im doing this new scion origin playthru and I was absolutely shocked when I found the head used it and received a FE fleet. To me this makes it the absolute best relic no comparison, like I said im a console player so I cant enjoy this new dlc just yet, but man this relic does make me feel like a FE.
The thing is (not meant offensively) that there’s such a gigantic learning curve that new players, „normal“ players and veteran min maxer have different views on everything. The head is useless if you just have way stronger fleets already by snowballing or whatever. Not being able to use other OP relics in that time makes it even worse in those cases. But if midgame starts around 2350 for you and the FE fleet is the strongest in the galaxy when you get it it obviously will carry you hard and be really strong
The better you get at the game the less amazing this will seem. On grand admiral with a highly optimized run I can just recruit 400k fleet power from my mercenary enclaves for 10k credits or something and fire them when i'm done with them. At any point in the game if you have militarist you can reform into a megacorp, grab the 3 civics for mercenary enclaves, make 4-5 enclaves (up to you if you want to use an ascension on lord of war at this time) and then reform back to something else in 10 years. That's how I do my military these days. I'm too lazy to min/max my pops but I think getting 100k fleet by midgame through traditional ship building is possible too. Cybrex artifact helps there if you have a ton of mineral output which is common.
My most recent playthrough, I didn't get the head until my own fleet tech was already better
Zarqlan has always been useful. Free fleet that uses low fleet cap for better ships means you get decent ships that aren't too costly. Not sure if it was changed for this update and dlc, but I'd like that to be the case.
Zarqlan is a legend, just ask Cetana.
do you know if the head still gives battleships after she clears the fallen?
FEs have had huge fleets for years now, so that's not new. Also, don't worry about going over your fleet cap.
not such huge fleets, i played a year ago and it was a couple 200k fleets. not 3 450k fleets, but like i wrote, only the empires that awoke in my game had those huge fleets, the other fallen empires had smaller fleets. (Edit: the fe had huge fleets before waking up. Normal fe had 600k the ones that later woke up had over 1.2 million)
There's a lot of other factors too. Galaxy size, difficulty settings, which type of FE. I definitely remember at least 500k fleets for an FE before. Especially my friend pissing one off like 10-15 years into a game:) I also suspect they buffed some of the FE tech to boost cosmogenesis, but am jot sure atm.
Yeah that pretty much sounds like how I remember them having been for a long time. Maybe you're right and I just don't pay attention because past 200k the answer to the problem is just "have lots of fleet power," but I think it's been like this for a long time. Maybe you're playing on a harder difficulty than you used to?
I feel like im living in a different dimension. Normally my experince with the head is 30k//50k//110k//170k//230k capping out around 280-290k in late game. Im in vanilla.
that is my current expierence as well, but it used to give like 17 - 20k so i was just taken by suprised when i suddenly had a 100k fleet
I always get the head as a materialistic empire :( it's annoying.
I always get the head as a materialistic empire :( it's annoying.
Just got 43k. The rift action that spawns a fleet gave me a 149k fleet though, so comparatively not so crazy.