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[Aegir86]

Love this special forces feature Histidine. Its like I get to play in build-a-bear mode for my personal AI fleets.

Just some further thoughts on it...

 Aside from the revival cost being unintentionally cheap it seems like its pretty easy to keep flying to a hospitable market to just what feels like... thanos finger snapping them back into existence?

I don't know what coding this would imply and if its worth the time and effort... But would it make sense to implement a repair and turnaround time depending on the size/total DP of the fleet? I feel like it would be alot less exploitable and give the player more cause to care over what happens tactically to their pokeball fleets.

[CptZoom]

This mod needs balancing. In nearly every game the factions become hostile for no reason. I don't have market shares, I don't have proximity to their bases, there is no real reason to become hostile, except the AI is basically mimicking Civ VI on Deity, where it seems the strategy is to make everything uber hostile, rather than create dynamics and relationships. I am not a programmer, so I can't say for sure, but it seems like the crux here is that if there is a reason for a faction to attack you they will. Having colonies eventually becomes taxing because the only thing you can do is defend your colony. No exploration, no missions, just slow defeat by attrition. I'm uninstalling for now. The idea is sound and exciting, the execution is not working for me.

[Cat-in-the-Hat]

This mod needs balancing. In nearly every game the factions become hostile for no reason. I don't have market shares, I don't have proximity to their bases, there is no real reason to become hostile, except the AI is basically mimicking Civ VI on Deity, where it seems the strategy is to make everything uber hostile, rather than create dynamics and relationships. I am not a programmer, so I can't say for sure, but it seems like the crux here is that if there is a reason for a faction to attack you they will. Having colonies eventually becomes taxing because the only thing you can do is defend your colony. No exploration, no missions, just slow defeat by attrition. I'm uninstalling for now. The idea is sound and exciting, the execution is not working for me.

The crisis system can feel very over-weighted and front-loaded, to the extent that starting colonies is absolutely not what you want to be doing early on (or even mid game, really). Faction rep => you can manage colonies for that faction that gives the benefit of their military / trade networks (although these revert to their faction if/once you leave). Making colonies too early is #1 the worst noob trap in the game atm. Although, I agree: certainly early on in colony building, it feels like the crisis point escalation needs nerfing by about 1/3 since you do end up spending hours... solely on colony drama / defense, which can be very very draining (even late mid game).

The ideal plan is to start 1/2 colonies early mid-game (after exploring, gearing up, getting credits that you will burn like stars once you start colonies up) that you fully intend to revert to the faction of your choice and THEN STOP. Use this base only for storage & repairs / basic supply+fuel production and do NOT attempt to expand. The crisis system does need some balancing, imho, given that you actively need to play against it early on, or you *will* get swamped: Nex basically assumes that it is a framework mod, and expects you to have IndEvo and a couple of faction mods running (Junkyard, IX, Asteroiders are good ones, as they balance out core vanilla faction aggression / expansion). Prioritise your crisises: Pirates, TT, Persean is usually the order I do them. Don't touch AI cores until you have at least two others sorted and GET A GOOD SABOTEUR AGENT. This is a life-saver once it levels up >3 and auto-removes Path nodes for easy -20 crisis points in the background.

Military relays (+interstellar arrays) are your friends. Learning to use them & min/maxing the bonuses once you have a relay transmitter installed matters. A LOT. Also, make sure to make a Special Task Group (via special features in a colony) & dump all your excess ships in it - it's a free fleet that can be infinitely resurrected for credits and 400+ points of it really helps out. Press for an example:

Spoiler

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There is a meta-strategy here for mods, which Nex essentially assumes you're playing with: at the very least, it expects IndEvo to be running, so a list of specific mods that play nice with Nex's colony/crisis system:

Spoiler

If you have IndEvo installed, make embassies and USE THEM.  The worst crisis early on you can't avoid (Hegemony is easy to avoid) is Persean / TT because these are directly tied to getting anywhere, esp. Persean (although you could join, then leave later, but sub-optimal). Embassies are life savers (literally).

If you also have RAT installed make sure this one research colony is on ruins (and good ones) so that you can make a settlement on the ruin node and get even more goodies as well as the massive fleet bonuses it gives. Your Settlement in this mod is 100% amazing and a life saver, and RAT is a very good mod for learning colonies with due to this (somewhat hidden) settlement feature - you get fleet-wide bonuses to cargo cap,  crew reqs, fuel/supply usage to the tune of 15-20% reductions. Massive. Simply HUGE. Oh, and if you use it on the white tech node (ruins) you get a free monthly mini-techminer for free loot. Super-useful early game.

Secrets of the Frontier adds a 100% guaranteed "noob friendly" system with a faction in it that will help defense. The faction is easy to please and will produce decent military defenses and hates the harder crisis factions so will always be backing you up with them. If you intend to go down this path, your galaxy seed is gonna matter: getting both a pristine nanoforge *and* having the system spawn close to other decent systems is a must before you start (my current game, Mia managed to spawn all alone with nothing but garbage/empty systems in a 8yr bubble around it. Suffice to say, not currently aligned with the Dusters in this one). But it can help a new player immensely while they learn to make colonies properly, and is a very good choice to load in with Nex to learn the ropes. Make sure to unlock the Faction specific quest line before selling that pristine - which you do want to do, since it'll turbo-charge their fleet production.

TASC: if you can unlock the stations, USE THEM. There is an edge case here where making AI colonies from these (and keeping them size 3) and stacking fuel / mining / void can really ramp your growth if you are careful and micro-manage the Hazard Pay to make sure you never hit size 4 on them so you avoid triggering Hegemony angst. Just be careful if you're also running the Sindrian faction mod, since they have a specific crisis of their own related to fuel that is a bit easy to trigger with this strategy (but do use them, they're fun).

If you have AotD installed then you're in for a world of hurt, since making colonies in this mod is even more difficult and ramping up any kind of military even more so. Making sure that you only have 1/2 bases and one of them is a research facility base that you basically do nothing but research until hitting tier 2/3 is practically required. Do this on a world you expect to throw away to the faction of your choice - and let it run in the background as you tech up while exploring. Due to the complexity of AotD-VoK, you're gonna need to plan a one system very carefully to survive, since you need exponentially more colonies to actually make an economy/military, which will speed-run a TT / Persean crisis. Don't run AotD-VoK until you know what you're doing, trust me. The best tip here is to build on a pre-Colony Collapse facility and pray you get the Vault event: investigate, hack, small energy = +1-4 free research per month = 1+1+3 = 5. And... (don't say this too loud) getting +4-5 research a month is by FAR enough to max the >T3 research out, easily, on its own. Worth finding one of the "easy" stations and sacrificing an entire fleet to clear it early game, then forgetting all about colonies until you've cooked enough research. And remember: when you do build, you need to build each stage in turn, which is a massive time sink - so focus on crisis strategies / mitigations before you attempt to do this: you have 2+ years before your military can even sneeze at the AI fleets

[close]

Basically: do not run Nex without IndEvo + 2-3 faction mods, it's not designed for purely vanilla. Run it with IndEvo and make sure that a salvage yard is one of your early priorities: Nex has a lot of combat. Salvage Yards (and Junk Yards from JYD - Junk Yard Dogs) are your salvation early on - you need to have one to survive:

Spoiler

[close]

You can also (rather easily) make Remnants (vanilla flavor) neutral by doing a couple of quests / selling cores in Free Market via a hidden Contact - although I've forgotten which mod adds her in. This obviously makes exploration a lot safer, and can even allow sneaky colonization of systems with fleets in that will be hostile to vanilla human factions. Likewise, at Freeport you can trade in your excess BPs to exchange for a RNG selection - sometimes you can snag an early Paragon BP (again - not sure if a mod). Same goes for the Academy Research mini-missions (I think this one is IndEvo or AotD).

A good strategy (with IndEvo + RAT installed) is to make a single colony on ruins for the bonuses, have it produce nothing but tech-mining for the goodies, get a Persean Ambassador and forget about colonies until much later in the game - you can even (RAT only) use a Faction colony for extra safety if you don't want to even start the Crisis Clock. Settlements are that much of a game changer.


Edit: one last thing, and the most important. In Starsector, Faction Knowledge => Player Knowledge but it's also the case that Player Faction = Player Knowledge. Which means when you start buiilding, as long as you stick the general theme of your faction (Low tech for Hegemony, High Tech for TT etc) you'll have an "ok" set of builds. However, as soon as you create your own faction, you lose access to these BPs and start using your own individual knowledge. Which means, until you go out and buy/find a stack of BPs, when you hit that "build me the biggest baddest Starbase you can" the game will do so, using your own BP selection: which early on likely means a 1,500,000 credit sink armed with peashooters and basic Sabot missiles. So yeah, something to think about before starting colonies and/or fleets.

[Histidine]

Nice writeup But I wouldn't say IndEvo or faction mods are particularly required.

[edit: expanded a bit]
Aside from the crises which are vanilla (and honestly mostly easy to manage once one knows how they work), factions declaring war on you under the Nex system should be reasonably easy to mitigate just by buttering up the major factions (Hegemony and League in vanilla) a bit before starting a colony, so they don't decide your new faction is easy pickings. Welcoming is good, Friendly is better. If it gets to Suspicious, quick action to avoid an opportunistic war declaration may be needed.
I'll probably also turn on strategic AI by default in next major release, among other things NPC factions tend not to bully a weak player outside of crises.

[Ishman]

It should also be noted that a fair amount of nex can be configured to your liking. I *crave* the exploration stage of starsector, so push back the timers for nex's war mechanics ~10 in-game years, which is enough to explore most of a normal sector over 2 IRL days.

Colonies are money printers in SS once Commerce's effects come on-line, but what isn't mentioned too frequently is that they're also a money-sink in modded SS, as if you want them to be self-sufficient enough that you can ignore them, you'll have to invest millions in military structure upgrades. And therein lies the rub - income in SS is snowbally. Once you have thousands in cargo space, you can dump goods on the black market on planets experiencing shortages and make enormous profits. Even if you're buying goods at the default price (from your colonies as an example), you make quite the profit, if it's through arbitrage by buying at places with surplus, or trading mod-added items that are always in demand everywhere, the profits become obscene. Most experienced players have an intimate understanding of these mechanics, and unless they're undergoing self-enforced challenge runs, will do something along the lines of accumulating a few tens of millions as seed money to kit out large fleets or start up colony mechanics and arrive at SS's endgame.

Mods, overall, make the game harder if you aren't familiar with all of these factors or options on how to mitigate it, such as starting colonies while commissioned and pushing strong factions together to form alliances to avoid their mechanics. Abusing the options introduced by many new factional weapons, hullmods, and ships with standout features in their size class, and combining them to rip the sector apart, only comes with experience.

Some mod content is intended to give challenge to people who've been playing this game since before Corvus was the sole starystem, and there were only combat missions on the main menu screen.

[Cat-in-the-Hat]

Nice writeup But I wouldn't say IndEvo or faction mods are particularly required.

Aside from the crises which are vanilla (and honestly mostly easy to manage once one knows how they work), factions declaring war on you under the Nex system should be reasonably easy to mitigate just by buttering up the major factions (Hegemony and League in vanilla) a bit before starting a colony, so they don't decide your new faction is easy pickings.
I'll probably also turn on strategic AI by default in next major release, among other things NPC factions tend not to bully a weak player outside of crises.

Fair enough - reword that to "your life expectancy will dramatically increase if you do use it with IndEvo + 2-3 faction mods", especially for a new player. Also, these little gummy-bears ("High Value Prisoners") are amazing for speed raising faction standing to get back to peace terms:



Again, no idea which mod adds these in.

[Sannh]

So I had this happen today.

I play with Nexerlin, Industrial evolution and Starlords. So I'm guessing thats whats doing it. Anyone know how, or if, I can mediate this?

[ChaseBears]

I can't speak to this being just random chance, but it feels like compared to earlier versions colony expeditions are overwhelmingly targeting uncolonized core worlds over expanding to new systems.  This is under just Nex and some faction mods.

[Frosterus]

Has anyone had any luck with defense fleets lately?
I'll assign a 400 power fleet to defend one of my colonies and somehow miraculously the Luddic Church's single (weaker) fleet gets past all of them and invades my planet anyways.
I've basically had to run back to my colony and watch the defense fleet do their actual job, because if I'm out exploring they somehow lose.

[TheDefend]

are there any way to make random core sector start to have the faction more grouped/clumped up?

[Cat-in-the-Hat]

I can't speak to this being just random chance, but it feels like compared to earlier versions colony expeditions are overwhelmingly targeting uncolonized core worlds over expanding to new systems.  This is under just Nex and some faction mods.

Ye, very much so. Currently 219 and all factions have kept to the inner circle & not touched the 1st circle of unexplored sectors  (although I am running AotD-VoK, so they're slower).

[Sentrynest33]

I can't see the relations for my contact and his faction when I'm speaking to him. I tried with only Nex and the must have mods to get Nex running. Here's a screenshot what it looks like. I'm not sure if this is vanilla bug or what is behind it.

[El Jojo]

I can't see the relations for my contact and his faction when I'm speaking to him. I tried with only Nex and the must have mods to get Nex running. Here's a screenshot what it looks like. I'm not sure if this is vanilla bug or what is behind it.

I got the same bug with vanilla, reported it to the dev team and they're looking into it, so not Nex's fault.

[Sentrynest33]

I can't see the relations for my contact and his faction when I'm speaking to him. I tried with only Nex and the must have mods to get Nex running. Here's a screenshot what it looks like. I'm not sure if this is vanilla bug or what is behind it.

I got the same bug with vanilla, reported it to the dev team and they're looking into it, so not Nex's fault.

Thanks for the info. I guess we are waiting a patch then.

[robepriority]

Hello,

thanks for all your work on this great mod.

I may have found a bug. After ceding governship of a planet, it still is shown in my colony list. To make things worse under my government it had a good positive income. Now it has a large negative, which seems to be substracted from my account.

Any ideas?

Hello and thanks!
The description sounds like you have a lot of (potentially expensive) things stored there, move them off if you can.

Quick question! I don't know if this intended or not but I'm allied with the Persean League and I still ended up getting blockaded by them. It feels a little weird to me that we're literally at war with the Hegemony together and they divert a bunch of resources towards blockading one of their only allies.

Yeah, I haven't yet attempted to change colony crisis behavior based on alliances.
They already don't care about relations in vanilla so there's precedent, but I might be justified in blocking at least the League crisis and maybe others when allied. Maybe later?

IMO open warfare(invasions) should be a crisis outcome, or a separate situation track.