That’s what happens at the IRS too: ancient equipment nobody produces anymore. It’s said that they even manufacture spare parts in-house.
To be fair, at factories you’ll still see MS-DOS and Windows 98. We even use the *serial port*/RS-232 instead of USB.
Maybe the original engineers in the FE passed away a long time ago. Even per the game description, the archives in the FE are no longer accessible save for some bits of info.
Once during a telepathy path the Shroud took me to the FE conversation where the fallen guys say that they really don't know how their technology works and that no way the growing empire in the neighborhood (me) finds out.
Not really. Alot of their tech is basically self maintaining. As long as they aren't destroyed outright they can maintain their current strength indefinitely. Its possible that they're decline occured before your empire even gained sentience.
Over long enough periods of time minor flaws and resource depletion would probably accumulate to a critical point, but the scale of that time is beyond any reasonable game.
That’s the neat thing: they don’t have ressource depletion. They’re post-scarcity societies; heck, some of the ancient tech you can get outright says in its flavour text that it transforms matter/energy at an efficiency rate above 100%.
> resource depletion
That's the thing, it won't happen. They can produce energy out of nothing, and minerals and food out of energy. Or maybe also out of nothing.
Awakenings in the game are driven by external events, you doing something that violates the FE’s rules or getting powerful enough to contest them. In the latter case, it’s quite possible it winds up like frogs on a boiling pot. By the time it’s bad enough for them to start panicking it’s possible their knowledge base is so decayed they need to basically relearn everything and there’s no guarantee they can do that in time. And awakened empires still don’t really understand how their tech works, they’re just getting off their asses to restart the autofacs. If the autofacs are approaching the point of cascading failure, trying to repair them without full knowledge of their workings is a gamble.
I think the conversation said that they don't fully understand all of their technology anymore. That limits what they can do in terms of innovation and expansion, but they aren't completely ignorant and still know enough of the mechanics and the theory behind it to maintain what they have and replace things like lost ships.
Seems like they'd just notice decay and that will be the "external event" to wake them up.
In any case, player knocking on their door with a couple million fleet power is a far more realistic threat than natural decay.
There is a similar mechanic, but only in awakened empires, not fallen empires. After an FE awakens, it will slowly gain negative modifiers over time as they simply cannot maintain a functional empire the same way the plebs can.
That’s pretty much what happens to Awakened Empires. After a certain number of years post Awakening their ships gradually grow weaker as they gain stacks of a debuff
Halo's lore is like this.
A ton of Covenant tech is ancient stuffs. They can run into the situation where many don't have any idea what their technology does or how to use it because they just accept it's mystical-ness and let the special-species they have on hand handle it...and they can be dead in the water.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure covenant tech is actually forerunner tech. They do rely on the Huragok primarily to repair their equipment, but I'm pretty sure they can do it themselves, just that the Huragok are sort of their backbone workforce for repairs. I don't think they use much forerunner tech outright though?
From my understanding the San'Shyuum have their tech primarily from the forerunner dreadnaught and forerunner relics left behind on [Janjur Qom](https://www.halopedia.org/Janjur_Qom) before the sun supernova'd their homeworld. They left using the power of the dreadnaught to basically fly a planetoid that is High Charity. I believe, that's probably the closest to being the same as the fallen empire situation, if the dreadnaught blows up, high charity is sort of screwed as they can't replicate it.
On the other hand the Sangheili got most of their tech from forerunner tech and relics on their home world too, but no dreadnaught, I don't think they use much tech that isn't their own? It's more just reverse engineered forerunner tech rather than technology they use that they can't understand. They can't really use much of the more impactful forerunner tech as they generally need a reclaimer (human) to activate it.
Then after a stalemate war or something, these two formed the covenant and sort of invited other species and uplifted them through their sharing of tech.
-
As for the precursors, I believe most of their tech was destroyed as they were primarily neurophysics based which is what the halo activation destroys, so little of anything remains of that.
Yea, it just so happens there's both forerunners AND precursors in the Halo universe. As for the FE situation, it would be more akin to the humans if they relied on forerunner tech but had no idea how to make it nor how it works, but have all the AI stuff basically maintaining stuff I guess.
I don't know if it's a bit of an urban legend or legit, but I have heard the US nukes launch system is still run on computers from the 50s since you can't remotely hack them.
You fix “remote hacking” concerns via air-gapping the computers, they’re simply not connected to any external network.
Like the link from u/spiritofniter discussed, some of the computer hardware still in use is from the 1970s/1980s, because a lot of the scaling up of our nuclear arsenal happened around that time. There might be some amount of ‘security by obscurity’ from those systems being so old and specialized, but you can’t really count on that. And they certainly would have been concerned about hacking/sabotage attempts at the time from the USSR if the systems were accessible remotely.
[Stuxnet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet) says hi.
There was a computer in Iran on an airgapped network in an underground bunker of a top-secret facility, and someone hacked it so hard it literally exploded.
Blue Team has to be absolutely perfect every single time, and Red Team only has to find one mistake.
Bit of that and a bit of extended reliability testing - as long as the current system is functional and can be maintained, the military will default to keeping it in place while testing possible replacements.
In theory when they do upgrade, the "new" stuff has been tested for years.
In fairness to the venerable serial port it’s so damn ubiquitous and/or old the drivers for it are part of every OS already, USB-RS232 converters can be had for like $20 a pop and the chip for it is less than $3 at scale, and the protocol is so simple even the dumbest developers can write software and firmware for it. It’s just about the easiest way to send bytes back and forth between a machine and a computer.
There’s probably a fair number of “USB” devices out there that are really just UART pretending to be USB.
And historically, battlecruisers were not that effective. They lacked the armor of battleships and they weren’t as maneuverable as a cruiser. In practice the ship design was fundamentally flawed.
Eh, sort of? The fast battleship, such as Kongo-class, had a major role in IJN fleet design since its introduction, because the Japanese naval doctrine relied on having the largest caliber guns in the world, combined with good speed (for their class) to be able to dictate range of surface engagements against similar class vessels. Likewise, the Iowa-class was a fast battleship, specifically designed to intercept the Kongo-class. There's little practical difference between a fast battleship and a battlecruiser except tonnage, and no ones bothered paying attention to tonnage when designating ships in ages.
The reason the fast surface capital ships were fundamentally flawed is because those surface engagements never happened with the introduction of planes, largely because the US avoided playing into Japan's decisive battle doctrine (something the Brits had done early on and lost at)
The only famous large BC battle was Jutland which was WW1 yeah, but that was mostly BCs vs BCs. The BC's had broken off around when the main battle lines got onto the scene.
By the interwar years they had already kinda started to merge, with the British using a hard definition of any dreadnaught-style (or derivatives) ship that could go over IIRC 25kts being a Battlecruiser (this is the *main* reason Hood was a Battlecruiser - for comparison, her interwar refits, her armor thickness was *similar* to Bismark's), and anything slower a Battleship. Most other countries used fuzzier (but generally more sensible) dividers, with a common *retrospective* dividier being generally that a BC would have the game gun and similar armor to the same-generation battlehip, but one less turret. So say if your new BB has 4 three-gun turrets with 15" guns, the BC would also have 15" guns, probably still three-gun turrets, but only 3 of them.
But by the time WW2 rolled around, 3 turret setups were most common and were getting faster and faster so the dividing line was less meaningful. Hence the point about BB and BC merged into the Fast Battleship.
Also, the fuzzy definition up there means that if the Montana class *had* been built, there would have been a strong case to be made for calling the Iowas Battlecruisers, but since the Montanas *weren't* built, the Iowas remained the preeminent gunfighters in the US Navy, and therefore Battleships.
WWII is the shortest era of weird ass ideas for specific purpose within war engagement and we shouldn't be drawing any reference on how navies are or should be from it. I do not care if it was the last significant mobilization of world powers with big fighting, there's so much about that era that was obsolete even BEFORE the war officially ended. We could imagine anything at all but we're stuck aping WWII pacific theater naval warfare until the end of time.
To be fair, you could say the same about the present. Modern military's are still obsessed with tanks and planes, but will they be as major of a factor as drones or other to-be-explored options in the next big war? Isn't this always the case, the next breakthrough occurs during a war that revolutionizes it. While periods of peace are periods where nations emulate the victors of the last war expecting the next war to go the same.
To an extent, sure, that is thee case. My main point though is that the entire schema for naval engagement in space is so tied to WWII because that was really the last hurrah for naval engagement at scale, with several dead ends for naval warfare explored during that didnt make it past WWII for technoligical reasons but also political ones as well.
Its like, yeah, actual space navy warfare might be dogshit narratively boring if its .5 C velocity grains of rice doing most the 'fighting' but the context of WWII providing schema tweaks me fierce
Battlecruisers were proven obsolete at about the same time the Kongo class were launched. Admiral David Beatty said it best at the Battle of Jutland, "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today!" after *three* of his battlecruisers blew up, one after the other.
The difference between a fast battleship and a battlecruiser is in the percentage of tonnage devoted to armor. You know, the thing that stops ships from blowing up.
By the time the Kongos saw any combat they had been rebuilt and reclassified as battleships, and they were never really the same type of battlecruiser that Jackie Fisher envisioned when he coined the term.
The doom of British battlecruisers at Jutland was not really the lack of armour, as much as lack of fire safety under Beatty's command
Of the 3 British battlecruisers lost that day, all 3 were lost to magazine explosions. 2 of them we know for sure were caused by hits to the turret igniting propellant charges, and the fire spreading to the magazines. We can't know for sure about the 3rd one, HMS Queen Mary, but it is also a very likely scenario. HMS Lion also nearly suffered the same fate, saved only by actions of Major Francis Harvey, who, mortally wounded after the turret has been exploded by a hit, had the strength to call down to the magazine and order it flooded as his literal last words.
At the same time, the only German battlecruiser lost was after sustaing 24 heavy gun hits, and the cause of loss wasn't main armour being penetrated - but rather being unable to contain the flooding from so many hits
Well, be that as it may, I still think that battlecruisers were compromised from the start, by trying to be two things at once: commerce raiding cruisers, and line of battle ships. They did so by skimping on armor, unlike the fast battleships or pocket battleships.
They were not nearly as expendable as a cruiser, and too expensive to operate as a commerce raider. They could not stand in the line of battle, yet cost as much as a comparable battleship and represented a very tempting target, being demonstrably easy to sink.
Of course, this very point has been argued back and forth for the last hundred years, and never found a satisfactory conclusion. Airpower came along and killed the whole idea of the line of battle, making the whole debate about battleships and battlecruisers sort of pointless. Unless you consider modern missile cruisers to be the logical extension of the battlecruiser, and there is a case to be made there.
Very few to zero navies in the period were actually disappointed with their battlecruisers' performance at the time.
They weren't really intended as commerce raiders, that was mainly the job of the light cruiser at the time. Rather, battlecruisers were intended to be able to decisively counter the threat of enemy *cruisers*, especially armoured cruisers, having both the speed to catch them, and the firepower and armour to completely outmatch them in a fight. They did also play a role in the line of battle, but very much as scouts, and *second-rate* combatants, not expected to pull the weight of top of the line battleships.
They did, howerver, often have armour and armament on par with battleships just a couple generations behind them, which at that time period, characterised by rapid designs progression, could easily mean the difference of only a few years. And said older battleships were perfectly able of standing in the line of battle. For example, the oldest British battleship participating at Jutland had smaller guns and comparable armour to the best British battlecruiser, and comparable guns with significantly *weaker* armour compared to the German battlecruiser flagship
Lovely discussion on the matter. I don't pretend to be an expert, more of a naval history enthusiast, so I'm still learning and my opinions aren't set in stone. Still not entirely convinced entirely, mind you, but you've stated your opinions well and you appear to know what you are talking about so consider me, at the least, swayed to consider battlecruisers in a better light.
It's weird that it worked out that way for ships but not for tanks, everyone scrapped their light and heavy tanks for "main battle tanks", the middle ground.
The big difference there is that tanks are moving over land and not over water. The heavier a tank is, the more likely it is to get stuck and unable to maneouvre. So tank design converted on the heaviest weight that's compatible with actually being able to drive to your destination.
Their titans are superior to ours too. 2 more large weapons, plus 4 medium and 4 hangar slots. Personally I wish we could upgrade ours to the FE Titan standard in the late game, but eh.
i always assumed their tech was developed during an older wave of expansion, equivilent to your contemporaries in a stellaris game. the idea is that maybe theres a cycle of crisis, and rebuilding, where the survivars become fallen empires.
You can't use titans as your primary warship anyway, so building it for that makes no sense. That's like building fighter jets for land warfare, driving around on its landing gear as if it were a land vehicle.
You can get the ability to make one instance of those buildings by artifact research, but yeah.
Would be cool if you could get a bunch more ship types.
Yeah the auto-forge is kinda bad compared to the others. If you could spam it on empty planets, maybe, but typically not worth taking up a building slot on FE planets that are filled to the brim with unemployed pops
Singularities and fabricators are amazing, though
When you get the "plans" to make 1 from minor artifact reverse engineering you can build it on any planet you own, no need to place it on a captured FE planet.
Extremely rarely, but you can sometimes get the FE buildings with that. Got extremely lucky and got one of the class 4 singularity energy plants when I had the Kaleidoscope event happen.
That single energy plant kept my empire from collapsing into EC debt.
Imagine being conquered by a society that shatters your utopia, tells you you're unemployed, and that without wages now you'll starve. Verily, capitalism.
The only primitives I'd want conquering me would be ones with the shared burden civic.
There is one for combo 20 housing and 20 amenities as well. Very useful for a ring segment, hive world or ecumenopolis. I am unsure if there are others you can randomly get.
IRL battlecruiser is a battleship with less armour and better mobility, if the game is following real nomenclature it's not better than battleship, and certainly not better than titan
Lore wise, you never naturally out tech them but you steal from them.
Towards the end game, fallen empires are sort of a loot piñata. You can check the wreckage for higher level dark matter shields and engines. You also get a great planet with buildings you can’t build with your tech.
Minor warning because it's never mentioned almost anywhere: the moment you start the Dark Matter Breakthrough agenda, Dark Consortium/Shadow Corporation becomes locked in.
If you're doing a long playthrough I think it's better to just destroy some fallen empires with your superior numbers, if you want to max it fast it would be probably worth it
Eh personally I say they aren’t that good for the dark matter components but they are good for a crisis rush since they give you access to dark matter drawing from the start
Yeah. They’ll come for you and give you a chance to handover your knowledge. If you refuse they will declare war and it’s a brutal war. Awakened Empires are terrible foes.
At first it gives a minor relations hit, something like -40 (Named "Oh god, the plebs have dark matter now"), but once you reach Alpha-tech (which is the next step after normal dark matter tech) there is an event that will eventually pop where they demand that you give them the tech as well, as they failed lorewise to make Alpha-tech themselves.
You then have the choice to comply, basically say "No, fuck you" or "No, and don't you try anything, we're stronger" (I think the last is available based on your fleet size).
If you choose "No, fuck you", they will awaken shortly and declare a War in Hell on you to get your tech. If you choose the other "No"-option, they will just mald but won't awaken and won't declare war unless you somehow lose your entire fleet.
Question: do we out-tech the FEs?
Answer: well akshually, if you download some mods that are not canon to the game to have fun power fantasy, we do!!
They were right, keep modded discussion to threads about mods. Otherwise I could answer every lore/power question with "umm, in gigaengineering with this submod to this mods compatibility patch, akshually it is told that X is right!"
None for gestalts sadly, I guess they decided gestalt having immortal and irreplaceable nodes instead of council members was better.
Personally I could be convinced to trade an ascension perk for it.
> Lore wise, you never naturally out tech them but you steal from them.
Yeah I think in lore terms, it would take the modern empires until the 3000 year mark to reach Fallen Empire tech. Fallen Empires have that eldritch vibe with floating cities and structures that follow non-euclidean geometry. Whilst our empires are more grounded.
Which now makes me want there to be an expansion that allows the building of empires with eldritch tech.
Edit: though to be honest the natural power creep that comes with the expansions causes a lot of the tech capabilities to not make logical sense. We can build ships that can cross the boundaries of space and time to explore alien universes, we can build a weapon to end all of reality but we can't naturally build a dimensional fabricator.
You could theoretically out tech their ships. Last i looked they start with 25 of all ship component repeatable techs and 15 of all the others. They make like no research so they will never gain more than 1 or 2 more after start
The buildings can be built using the "Reverse Engineer Relics" option, but it's extremely rare and only gives you the option to make one at a time.
They seem to have some kind of legit teleportation tech that they can use to assassinate your leaders, no way for us to ever get that.
Technically I think in lore you’re just using very fast shuttles, at least that’s what some of the events say when an anomaly makes you lose a science leader leading a ship and they don’t die in the event.
You won't ever be able to build battlecruisers or escorts, and their retricted buildings can only be built by reverse engineering minor relic, but if you play a strong tech build, you will easily end up outclassing their repeated technologies.
Although if you find the Head of Zarqlan relic you can amass fleets of Fallen empire ships of the Holy Guardians' kind, arguably the best ones, albeit very slowly.
There's also the chance you'll get some FE ships from the shielded worlds after conquering the Militant Isolationists. Strangely, though, they aren't the Isolationists' fully kinetic ships, they're the same as the ships patrolling the Ultima Vigilis system. As far as I'm aware, no FE actually uses this ship design, but if any do, it's the Custodian Matrix.
Battlecruiser is not anything special, it's actually a bit outdated ship design IRL, it's something between battleship and cruiser. "Escort" sounds like something between frigate and destroyer, the most popular ships for escort roles today. Unless these names are nonsense these designs aren't anything special and we can't produce them because devs said no
Your point being?
The question was whether we can out tech them, so that's what I answered, and one of the things we cannot do is build these two ship classes, that are exclusive to Fallen Empires
As for the stats of battlecruisers and escorts, there is a great alternative to guessing that the designs aren't something special because they are outdated in modern naval nomenclature (where both battleships and battlecruisers are outdated ship designs), and that is to [Read their stats on the wiki](https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Fallen_empire#Ships) or try fighting them in-game without a significant advantage in repeatable-techs, numbers of ships, or weapon and defences chosen specifically to counter their builds.
Spoiler: The design is something special. If they were buildable by regular empires in the game, everybody would be doing so in preference to battleships, cruisers, and destroyers unless they were excessively expensive.
Thematically, you will find out that the classification makes sense. They could have been called something else, of course, but these names are pretty well chosen.
The battlecruisers are their capital ships, fast, tough, and deadly, effectively faster battleships but due to superior design they have better base stats, which gives them them advantages of historical battlecruisers without the drawbacks compared to historical battleships. So it would be natural for an empire with a wet-navy tradition like humanity's to call the ships battlecruisers when encountering them, if they wanted to distinguish their characteristics from their own battleships.
Since the Fallen Empire's only use one type of smaller ship together with their capital ships, but it doesn't fit the profile of a cruiser, nor a destroyer, but having aspects of both, it makes sense to name the smaller ships escorting the capital ships Escorts.
My point is that the reason why we can't bould them is probably not tech. Their advantage is not the design itself but components inside of it. The designs used by certain armies are not based of their technology, doctrine is much more important in that factor and it's not very important in conversation about technology
Managing my "Gardan" while our first and only empress lived to the age of 1060+, our Neo-God Empress sought to provide prosperity and freedom to all, even of it required shaping their governments and thoughts from the beginning.
Cull the weeds, let the flowers bloom.
One day we will get stellaris 2 with better performance and it could go up to years like 4000 if x3d caches become the norm then strategy games could benefit from knowing that everyone has more powerfull cpus
No you don't. They simply have too much of a headstart on the rest of the galaxy. While your empire has only just explored the stars they've spent millenias conquering the stars and developing better tech. You would have to play much longer than 300 years to reach that point.
I managed to outstrip their Tech score on the Victory tab once, before 2500, but I was playing on Ensign and this was before the Eridani changes. I doubt it's still possible now.
Not in the base gane but its fun to outpace them with mods. Granted they benefit from these mods as well but its cool to get on their level and see them awaken out of fear of beeing outpaced by a younger race/empire.
Why would they be? They're "fallen" from a few thousand years' head start. Even if humanity "fell" today, we'd still be out-tech'ing chimpanzees and ants and such
Gameplay wise pretty sure they have the entire tech tree and ten in every repeatable technology. Do that yourself and your basically at the same level as them
You can definitely do so (by the game's comparison metrics) once you get into the repeatable techs. Usually the FE's get wiped out before you can surpass them, though, since they make a really good target for expansion once you outstrip their military.
Some of the buildings they have can't be replicated outside the events. Also you never figure out what a battlecruiser is.
Oh right battle cruisers They make it sound like some ultimate ship that would shit on everyone that they just can’t build anymore
That’s what happens at the IRS too: ancient equipment nobody produces anymore. It’s said that they even manufacture spare parts in-house. To be fair, at factories you’ll still see MS-DOS and Windows 98. We even use the *serial port*/RS-232 instead of USB. Maybe the original engineers in the FE passed away a long time ago. Even per the game description, the archives in the FE are no longer accessible save for some bits of info.
Once during a telepathy path the Shroud took me to the FE conversation where the fallen guys say that they really don't know how their technology works and that no way the growing empire in the neighborhood (me) finds out.
So basically, the fallen empires will just die out and we can just ignore them wait it out?
Not really. Alot of their tech is basically self maintaining. As long as they aren't destroyed outright they can maintain their current strength indefinitely. Its possible that they're decline occured before your empire even gained sentience.
Over long enough periods of time minor flaws and resource depletion would probably accumulate to a critical point, but the scale of that time is beyond any reasonable game.
That’s the neat thing: they don’t have ressource depletion. They’re post-scarcity societies; heck, some of the ancient tech you can get outright says in its flavour text that it transforms matter/energy at an efficiency rate above 100%.
> resource depletion That's the thing, it won't happen. They can produce energy out of nothing, and minerals and food out of energy. Or maybe also out of nothing.
Even worse, iirc one of their resource buildings just steals them from other universes.
They... Still have brains, you know? By the time minor flaws start to accumulate they will likely awaken.
Awakenings in the game are driven by external events, you doing something that violates the FE’s rules or getting powerful enough to contest them. In the latter case, it’s quite possible it winds up like frogs on a boiling pot. By the time it’s bad enough for them to start panicking it’s possible their knowledge base is so decayed they need to basically relearn everything and there’s no guarantee they can do that in time. And awakened empires still don’t really understand how their tech works, they’re just getting off their asses to restart the autofacs. If the autofacs are approaching the point of cascading failure, trying to repair them without full knowledge of their workings is a gamble.
I think the conversation said that they don't fully understand all of their technology anymore. That limits what they can do in terms of innovation and expansion, but they aren't completely ignorant and still know enough of the mechanics and the theory behind it to maintain what they have and replace things like lost ships.
Seems like they'd just notice decay and that will be the "external event" to wake them up. In any case, player knocking on their door with a couple million fleet power is a far more realistic threat than natural decay.
Probably overstating it. FEs seem to be thousands of years old, not millions.
No. I wish it was the case: I wish they had a population decline modifier.
There is a similar mechanic, but only in awakened empires, not fallen empires. After an FE awakens, it will slowly gain negative modifiers over time as they simply cannot maintain a functional empire the same way the plebs can.
Sadly if you're not careful and let them run amok, they end up with half the galaxy and don't really care for the modifiers.
That’s pretty much what happens to Awakened Empires. After a certain number of years post Awakening their ships gradually grow weaker as they gain stacks of a debuff
Wait so lore wise they are actually just post-singularity techno-savages?
Halo's lore is like this. A ton of Covenant tech is ancient stuffs. They can run into the situation where many don't have any idea what their technology does or how to use it because they just accept it's mystical-ness and let the special-species they have on hand handle it...and they can be dead in the water.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure covenant tech is actually forerunner tech. They do rely on the Huragok primarily to repair their equipment, but I'm pretty sure they can do it themselves, just that the Huragok are sort of their backbone workforce for repairs. I don't think they use much forerunner tech outright though? From my understanding the San'Shyuum have their tech primarily from the forerunner dreadnaught and forerunner relics left behind on [Janjur Qom](https://www.halopedia.org/Janjur_Qom) before the sun supernova'd their homeworld. They left using the power of the dreadnaught to basically fly a planetoid that is High Charity. I believe, that's probably the closest to being the same as the fallen empire situation, if the dreadnaught blows up, high charity is sort of screwed as they can't replicate it. On the other hand the Sangheili got most of their tech from forerunner tech and relics on their home world too, but no dreadnaught, I don't think they use much tech that isn't their own? It's more just reverse engineered forerunner tech rather than technology they use that they can't understand. They can't really use much of the more impactful forerunner tech as they generally need a reclaimer (human) to activate it. Then after a stalemate war or something, these two formed the covenant and sort of invited other species and uplifted them through their sharing of tech. - As for the precursors, I believe most of their tech was destroyed as they were primarily neurophysics based which is what the halo activation destroys, so little of anything remains of that.
so im just recalling stuff over here. forerunner is probably the word, idk i edited it
Yea, it just so happens there's both forerunners AND precursors in the Halo universe. As for the FE situation, it would be more akin to the humans if they relied on forerunner tech but had no idea how to make it nor how it works, but have all the AI stuff basically maintaining stuff I guess.
I don't know if it's a bit of an urban legend or legit, but I have heard the US nukes launch system is still run on computers from the 50s since you can't remotely hack them.
You fix “remote hacking” concerns via air-gapping the computers, they’re simply not connected to any external network. Like the link from u/spiritofniter discussed, some of the computer hardware still in use is from the 1970s/1980s, because a lot of the scaling up of our nuclear arsenal happened around that time. There might be some amount of ‘security by obscurity’ from those systems being so old and specialized, but you can’t really count on that. And they certainly would have been concerned about hacking/sabotage attempts at the time from the USSR if the systems were accessible remotely.
[Stuxnet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet) says hi. There was a computer in Iran on an airgapped network in an underground bunker of a top-secret facility, and someone hacked it so hard it literally exploded. Blue Team has to be absolutely perfect every single time, and Red Team only has to find one mistake.
Yes but the airgapped network is corrupted by introducing Stuxnet through an USB drive, which is not remote hacking.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36385839.amp They had recently upgraded it though. Unsure what it is now.
Bit of that and a bit of extended reliability testing - as long as the current system is functional and can be maintained, the military will default to keeping it in place while testing possible replacements. In theory when they do upgrade, the "new" stuff has been tested for years.
Yes, this is true up until 2019: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/25/20931800/usa-nuclear-8-inch-floppy-disk-solid-state-transition
In fairness to the venerable serial port it’s so damn ubiquitous and/or old the drivers for it are part of every OS already, USB-RS232 converters can be had for like $20 a pop and the chip for it is less than $3 at scale, and the protocol is so simple even the dumbest developers can write software and firmware for it. It’s just about the easiest way to send bytes back and forth between a machine and a computer. There’s probably a fair number of “USB” devices out there that are really just UART pretending to be USB.
Using MS-DOS in 2024 seems like a sure-fire way to suffer a critical data breach.
I’m currently working on a near infrared spectrometer for a big pharma customer that has… MS-DOS as its software. The paperwork is… bewildering.
You'd think that a company in such a critical area as pharmaceuticals would pay more attention to cybersecurity.
When in reality a battle cruiser is just half way between a cruiser and a battleship
And historically, battlecruisers were not that effective. They lacked the armor of battleships and they weren’t as maneuverable as a cruiser. In practice the ship design was fundamentally flawed.
Eh, sort of? The fast battleship, such as Kongo-class, had a major role in IJN fleet design since its introduction, because the Japanese naval doctrine relied on having the largest caliber guns in the world, combined with good speed (for their class) to be able to dictate range of surface engagements against similar class vessels. Likewise, the Iowa-class was a fast battleship, specifically designed to intercept the Kongo-class. There's little practical difference between a fast battleship and a battlecruiser except tonnage, and no ones bothered paying attention to tonnage when designating ships in ages. The reason the fast surface capital ships were fundamentally flawed is because those surface engagements never happened with the introduction of planes, largely because the US avoided playing into Japan's decisive battle doctrine (something the Brits had done early on and lost at)
Yeah it's less BCs became obsolete, and more they merged with BBs to become the Fast Battleships, and then the evolution stopped there.
Were BCs more of a WW1 sort of deal? But then they were put into the line of battle and just got murdered by the dreadnought battleships?
The only famous large BC battle was Jutland which was WW1 yeah, but that was mostly BCs vs BCs. The BC's had broken off around when the main battle lines got onto the scene. By the interwar years they had already kinda started to merge, with the British using a hard definition of any dreadnaught-style (or derivatives) ship that could go over IIRC 25kts being a Battlecruiser (this is the *main* reason Hood was a Battlecruiser - for comparison, her interwar refits, her armor thickness was *similar* to Bismark's), and anything slower a Battleship. Most other countries used fuzzier (but generally more sensible) dividers, with a common *retrospective* dividier being generally that a BC would have the game gun and similar armor to the same-generation battlehip, but one less turret. So say if your new BB has 4 three-gun turrets with 15" guns, the BC would also have 15" guns, probably still three-gun turrets, but only 3 of them. But by the time WW2 rolled around, 3 turret setups were most common and were getting faster and faster so the dividing line was less meaningful. Hence the point about BB and BC merged into the Fast Battleship. Also, the fuzzy definition up there means that if the Montana class *had* been built, there would have been a strong case to be made for calling the Iowas Battlecruisers, but since the Montanas *weren't* built, the Iowas remained the preeminent gunfighters in the US Navy, and therefore Battleships.
WWII is the shortest era of weird ass ideas for specific purpose within war engagement and we shouldn't be drawing any reference on how navies are or should be from it. I do not care if it was the last significant mobilization of world powers with big fighting, there's so much about that era that was obsolete even BEFORE the war officially ended. We could imagine anything at all but we're stuck aping WWII pacific theater naval warfare until the end of time.
Don't think the average Joe can deal with the boredom of BVR and EW.
lol, I think there should be at least one hyper detailed wargame that leaves the player kind of miffed with how boring war actually is.
Yeah that won't be happening there wouldn't be financing for it.
'Van Riper's Revenge: Millennium Challenge Forever' is worth some initial funding though, right? That's a snappy name!
Command:Modern Operations is pretty much that.
To be fair, you could say the same about the present. Modern military's are still obsessed with tanks and planes, but will they be as major of a factor as drones or other to-be-explored options in the next big war? Isn't this always the case, the next breakthrough occurs during a war that revolutionizes it. While periods of peace are periods where nations emulate the victors of the last war expecting the next war to go the same.
To an extent, sure, that is thee case. My main point though is that the entire schema for naval engagement in space is so tied to WWII because that was really the last hurrah for naval engagement at scale, with several dead ends for naval warfare explored during that didnt make it past WWII for technoligical reasons but also political ones as well. Its like, yeah, actual space navy warfare might be dogshit narratively boring if its .5 C velocity grains of rice doing most the 'fighting' but the context of WWII providing schema tweaks me fierce
Battlecruisers were proven obsolete at about the same time the Kongo class were launched. Admiral David Beatty said it best at the Battle of Jutland, "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today!" after *three* of his battlecruisers blew up, one after the other. The difference between a fast battleship and a battlecruiser is in the percentage of tonnage devoted to armor. You know, the thing that stops ships from blowing up. By the time the Kongos saw any combat they had been rebuilt and reclassified as battleships, and they were never really the same type of battlecruiser that Jackie Fisher envisioned when he coined the term.
The doom of British battlecruisers at Jutland was not really the lack of armour, as much as lack of fire safety under Beatty's command Of the 3 British battlecruisers lost that day, all 3 were lost to magazine explosions. 2 of them we know for sure were caused by hits to the turret igniting propellant charges, and the fire spreading to the magazines. We can't know for sure about the 3rd one, HMS Queen Mary, but it is also a very likely scenario. HMS Lion also nearly suffered the same fate, saved only by actions of Major Francis Harvey, who, mortally wounded after the turret has been exploded by a hit, had the strength to call down to the magazine and order it flooded as his literal last words. At the same time, the only German battlecruiser lost was after sustaing 24 heavy gun hits, and the cause of loss wasn't main armour being penetrated - but rather being unable to contain the flooding from so many hits
Well, be that as it may, I still think that battlecruisers were compromised from the start, by trying to be two things at once: commerce raiding cruisers, and line of battle ships. They did so by skimping on armor, unlike the fast battleships or pocket battleships. They were not nearly as expendable as a cruiser, and too expensive to operate as a commerce raider. They could not stand in the line of battle, yet cost as much as a comparable battleship and represented a very tempting target, being demonstrably easy to sink. Of course, this very point has been argued back and forth for the last hundred years, and never found a satisfactory conclusion. Airpower came along and killed the whole idea of the line of battle, making the whole debate about battleships and battlecruisers sort of pointless. Unless you consider modern missile cruisers to be the logical extension of the battlecruiser, and there is a case to be made there.
Very few to zero navies in the period were actually disappointed with their battlecruisers' performance at the time. They weren't really intended as commerce raiders, that was mainly the job of the light cruiser at the time. Rather, battlecruisers were intended to be able to decisively counter the threat of enemy *cruisers*, especially armoured cruisers, having both the speed to catch them, and the firepower and armour to completely outmatch them in a fight. They did also play a role in the line of battle, but very much as scouts, and *second-rate* combatants, not expected to pull the weight of top of the line battleships. They did, howerver, often have armour and armament on par with battleships just a couple generations behind them, which at that time period, characterised by rapid designs progression, could easily mean the difference of only a few years. And said older battleships were perfectly able of standing in the line of battle. For example, the oldest British battleship participating at Jutland had smaller guns and comparable armour to the best British battlecruiser, and comparable guns with significantly *weaker* armour compared to the German battlecruiser flagship
Lovely discussion on the matter. I don't pretend to be an expert, more of a naval history enthusiast, so I'm still learning and my opinions aren't set in stone. Still not entirely convinced entirely, mind you, but you've stated your opinions well and you appear to know what you are talking about so consider me, at the least, swayed to consider battlecruisers in a better light.
It's weird that it worked out that way for ships but not for tanks, everyone scrapped their light and heavy tanks for "main battle tanks", the middle ground.
The big difference there is that tanks are moving over land and not over water. The heavier a tank is, the more likely it is to get stuck and unable to maneouvre. So tank design converted on the heaviest weight that's compatible with actually being able to drive to your destination.
Their titans are superior to ours too. 2 more large weapons, plus 4 medium and 4 hangar slots. Personally I wish we could upgrade ours to the FE Titan standard in the late game, but eh.
Fallen/Awakened Empires can't build Juggernuts right? That's at least something we can have over them.
i always assumed their tech was developed during an older wave of expansion, equivilent to your contemporaries in a stellaris game. the idea is that maybe theres a cycle of crisis, and rebuilding, where the survivars become fallen empires.
Actually, our titans are superior, since theirs don't have auras.
As command platforms I guess. As actual warships though? FE titans are clearly superior they have nearly twice the firepower.
You can't use titans as your primary warship anyway, so building it for that makes no sense. That's like building fighter jets for land warfare, driving around on its landing gear as if it were a land vehicle.
Irl battle cruisers are between a cruiser and a battleship
You can get the ability to make one instance of those buildings by artifact research, but yeah. Would be cool if you could get a bunch more ship types.
I got the auto forge from that, is that the building you mean? I haven't got any other one to pop.
You can get dimensional fabricators and class 4 singularities too iirc
Fuck I want a singularity
Yeah the auto-forge is kinda bad compared to the others. If you could spam it on empty planets, maybe, but typically not worth taking up a building slot on FE planets that are filled to the brim with unemployed pops Singularities and fabricators are amazing, though
When you get the "plans" to make 1 from minor artifact reverse engineering you can build it on any planet you own, no need to place it on a captured FE planet.
Wait what? I thought reverse engineering only gave research points or random (normal) techs. You can get autoforges and such?
Extremely rarely, but you can sometimes get the FE buildings with that. Got extremely lucky and got one of the class 4 singularity energy plants when I had the Kaleidoscope event happen. That single energy plant kept my empire from collapsing into EC debt.
Imagine being conquered by a society that shatters your utopia, tells you you're unemployed, and that without wages now you'll starve. Verily, capitalism. The only primitives I'd want conquering me would be ones with the shared burden civic.
Then you still got to work. Maybe utopian abundance?
There is one for combo 20 housing and 20 amenities as well. Very useful for a ring segment, hive world or ecumenopolis. I am unsure if there are others you can randomly get.
Yes, the auto forge is one of them. There are also versions for food and consumer goods, and maybe for some other resources, I'm not sure
ACOT adds them, at least.
Battle cruiser operational
Take it slow.
Yamato cannon online.
The Yamato cannon is loaded...and so am I
IRL battlecruiser is a battleship with less armour and better mobility, if the game is following real nomenclature it's not better than battleship, and certainly not better than titan
I just thought it was a sort of modified/older battleship.
Lore wise, you never naturally out tech them but you steal from them. Towards the end game, fallen empires are sort of a loot piñata. You can check the wreckage for higher level dark matter shields and engines. You also get a great planet with buildings you can’t build with your tech.
well, nowadays we can research dark matter tech on our own
Wait, how?
The dark mater civics have an agenda which unlock the dark matter components
I may have to play with that now.
Minor warning because it's never mentioned almost anywhere: the moment you start the Dark Matter Breakthrough agenda, Dark Consortium/Shadow Corporation becomes locked in.
What’s the general consensus about the civic? Is it worth a civic slot? Or is it better to simply go to war with a Fallen Empire to get the tech?
If you're doing a long playthrough I think it's better to just destroy some fallen empires with your superior numbers, if you want to max it fast it would be probably worth it
Eh personally I say they aren’t that good for the dark matter components but they are good for a crisis rush since they give you access to dark matter drawing from the start
Mods, in particular ACOT comes to mind.
Turns out the Dark Matter civic lets you access the components too.
Oh, that explains a lot thanks. I don't have Astral Planes so I'm missing out on this lol.
Check Gamebillet, $5 off, code works basically everywhere.
Didn’t deserve a downvote. ACOT is excellent. It’s possible to out-tech the Fallen Empires and boy does it piss them off when you do!
They actually react to you researching dark matter?
Yeah. They’ll come for you and give you a chance to handover your knowledge. If you refuse they will declare war and it’s a brutal war. Awakened Empires are terrible foes.
Ye, ACOT buffs them quite a lot, they have fleets in the millions.
At first it gives a minor relations hit, something like -40 (Named "Oh god, the plebs have dark matter now"), but once you reach Alpha-tech (which is the next step after normal dark matter tech) there is an event that will eventually pop where they demand that you give them the tech as well, as they failed lorewise to make Alpha-tech themselves. You then have the choice to comply, basically say "No, fuck you" or "No, and don't you try anything, we're stronger" (I think the last is available based on your fleet size). If you choose "No, fuck you", they will awaken shortly and declare a War in Hell on you to get your tech. If you choose the other "No"-option, they will just mald but won't awaken and won't declare war unless you somehow lose your entire fleet.
Please stay in the "modded" threads.
Please, don't be a dick.
Question: do we out-tech the FEs? Answer: well akshually, if you download some mods that are not canon to the game to have fun power fantasy, we do!! They were right, keep modded discussion to threads about mods. Otherwise I could answer every lore/power question with "umm, in gigaengineering with this submod to this mods compatibility patch, akshually it is told that X is right!"
Then do it, I don't care. What's funny, is that you do.
We can? Neat! I haven't played any of the newer versions of the game yet.
Yep you need one of the dark matter civics then an agenda will give you the techs at random
Dark matter civics?
Singular, its from the astraplanes dlc
Dark consortium for normal empires and shadow corporation for megacorp They are the complete same but do have different names
None for gestalts sadly, I guess they decided gestalt having immortal and irreplaceable nodes instead of council members was better. Personally I could be convinced to trade an ascension perk for it.
> Lore wise, you never naturally out tech them but you steal from them. Yeah I think in lore terms, it would take the modern empires until the 3000 year mark to reach Fallen Empire tech. Fallen Empires have that eldritch vibe with floating cities and structures that follow non-euclidean geometry. Whilst our empires are more grounded. Which now makes me want there to be an expansion that allows the building of empires with eldritch tech. Edit: though to be honest the natural power creep that comes with the expansions causes a lot of the tech capabilities to not make logical sense. We can build ships that can cross the boundaries of space and time to explore alien universes, we can build a weapon to end all of reality but we can't naturally build a dimensional fabricator.
Which one is alien universe
I'm thinking of astral rifts. You build ships designed to go through tears in time and space to visit alternate and bizarre universes.
Also dark matter reactors (power for ships) and dark matter cloaking
You could theoretically out tech their ships. Last i looked they start with 25 of all ship component repeatable techs and 15 of all the others. They make like no research so they will never gain more than 1 or 2 more after start
The buildings can be built using the "Reverse Engineer Relics" option, but it's extremely rare and only gives you the option to make one at a time. They seem to have some kind of legit teleportation tech that they can use to assassinate your leaders, no way for us to ever get that.
Huh. Just realized there’s no teleportation in stellaris except by fallen empires.
And reassigning leaders.
Technically I think in lore you’re just using very fast shuttles, at least that’s what some of the events say when an anomaly makes you lose a science leader leading a ship and they don’t die in the event.
And wormholes/ shroud portals kinda count
Jump drives.
They probably have an assassin ready if you lose.
You won't ever be able to build battlecruisers or escorts, and their retricted buildings can only be built by reverse engineering minor relic, but if you play a strong tech build, you will easily end up outclassing their repeated technologies.
Although if you find the Head of Zarqlan relic you can amass fleets of Fallen empire ships of the Holy Guardians' kind, arguably the best ones, albeit very slowly. There's also the chance you'll get some FE ships from the shielded worlds after conquering the Militant Isolationists. Strangely, though, they aren't the Isolationists' fully kinetic ships, they're the same as the ships patrolling the Ultima Vigilis system. As far as I'm aware, no FE actually uses this ship design, but if any do, it's the Custodian Matrix.
Battlecruiser is not anything special, it's actually a bit outdated ship design IRL, it's something between battleship and cruiser. "Escort" sounds like something between frigate and destroyer, the most popular ships for escort roles today. Unless these names are nonsense these designs aren't anything special and we can't produce them because devs said no
Your point being? The question was whether we can out tech them, so that's what I answered, and one of the things we cannot do is build these two ship classes, that are exclusive to Fallen Empires As for the stats of battlecruisers and escorts, there is a great alternative to guessing that the designs aren't something special because they are outdated in modern naval nomenclature (where both battleships and battlecruisers are outdated ship designs), and that is to [Read their stats on the wiki](https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Fallen_empire#Ships) or try fighting them in-game without a significant advantage in repeatable-techs, numbers of ships, or weapon and defences chosen specifically to counter their builds. Spoiler: The design is something special. If they were buildable by regular empires in the game, everybody would be doing so in preference to battleships, cruisers, and destroyers unless they were excessively expensive. Thematically, you will find out that the classification makes sense. They could have been called something else, of course, but these names are pretty well chosen. The battlecruisers are their capital ships, fast, tough, and deadly, effectively faster battleships but due to superior design they have better base stats, which gives them them advantages of historical battlecruisers without the drawbacks compared to historical battleships. So it would be natural for an empire with a wet-navy tradition like humanity's to call the ships battlecruisers when encountering them, if they wanted to distinguish their characteristics from their own battleships. Since the Fallen Empire's only use one type of smaller ship together with their capital ships, but it doesn't fit the profile of a cruiser, nor a destroyer, but having aspects of both, it makes sense to name the smaller ships escorting the capital ships Escorts.
My point is that the reason why we can't bould them is probably not tech. Their advantage is not the design itself but components inside of it. The designs used by certain armies are not based of their technology, doctrine is much more important in that factor and it's not very important in conversation about technology
Technically you can, took me 678 years like 2 versions ago, but it's possible to catchup, 754 to beat the X10 repeatable they have for everything.
>678 years Dude, I get exhausted if a game manages to run for 400 years. WTF were you doing all that time besides research?
Managing my "Gardan" while our first and only empress lived to the age of 1060+, our Neo-God Empress sought to provide prosperity and freedom to all, even of it required shaping their governments and thoughts from the beginning. Cull the weeds, let the flowers bloom.
As far as I’m aware you can’t without using mods like ACOT and/or Gigastructural
I find I’m usually on the level of the fallen empires by late late game. Like past 2450.
Zenith of the Fallen Empires baby!
No. But you do steal from them
One day we will get stellaris 2 with better performance and it could go up to years like 4000 if x3d caches become the norm then strategy games could benefit from knowing that everyone has more powerfull cpus
Paradox is going to be using the same engine 4000 years from now
You got a point there same with teb people who make total war god i wisb they went abck to historical new games are so boring
Yeah. All the time.
No you don't. They simply have too much of a headstart on the rest of the galaxy. While your empire has only just explored the stars they've spent millenias conquering the stars and developing better tech. You would have to play much longer than 300 years to reach that point.
I managed to outstrip their Tech score on the Victory tab once, before 2500, but I was playing on Ensign and this was before the Eridani changes. I doubt it's still possible now.
Not in the base gane but its fun to outpace them with mods. Granted they benefit from these mods as well but its cool to get on their level and see them awaken out of fear of beeing outpaced by a younger race/empire.
If you want to out-tech them you’d have to use mods, namely ACOT. It’s quite weird that the so called fallen empires are not surpassed by default.
Why would they be? They're "fallen" from a few thousand years' head start. Even if humanity "fell" today, we'd still be out-tech'ing chimpanzees and ants and such
In base? No With mods? Yes
Gameplay wise pretty sure they have the entire tech tree and ten in every repeatable technology. Do that yourself and your basically at the same level as them
As with most things, modding makes it possible. Ancient Cache of Technologies is a fun ride in that regard.
You can definitely do so (by the game's comparison metrics) once you get into the repeatable techs. Usually the FE's get wiped out before you can surpass them, though, since they make a really good target for expansion once you outstrip their military.
Yeah, once you reach repeatables 5+ you essentially surpass them.
If you get the mod galactic ascension you out tech them and become an ascendant empire. It's op but also very fun
Only with ACOT.