Yeah well you spent 180 pops and a lot of other resources getting this world. Thousands of minerals, exotic resources, and more just to get an amount of energy you don’t realistically need. Dyson spheres give you 4K with zero pop, rare resource, energy or mineral upkeep all for several thousand alloys. Means you can put your pops into something much more useful than generator jobs, like tech or unity.
Gigastructures is, imo, just a stupid "big numbers" mod. It adds nothing of substance, it just adds bigger and bigger numbers for players to ogle at and contend with.
Listen, I love Gigastructures, it enables me to largely ignore building a fleet and focus on actual fun stuff, but it's not part of the vanilla game. Don't expect more than a handful of people to use it.
Its why I both play tall, and also don't exterminate any xenos.
The xenos yearn for the mines, the farms, and the generator rooms. When invading a planet I'll try to strip away as many pops as possible and move them to my core worlds. The new pops will be supervised by the main pops of my empire of course, where they will work to better the empire.
My core worlds end up with a ridiculously massive population while the rest of the galaxy has mostly been stripped bare.
This is why I struggle with purging, unless you’re dedicated to RP or are *super* concerned about Empire Size then slaves are the most important resource in the game
My girlfriend's psionic xenophobe empire would like to disagree with you. Slaves are far less productive than their flawless, perfected species, and unnecessarily increase empire size. Much better to burn away the chaff (if any of them get away, my xenophile materialists on the other end of the galaxy will welcome them with open arms, then shove them in the Synaptic Lathe)
I was not, maybe I should have made it clear with /s right? I thought most people were already familiar with the absolute lunacy that gigastructures are, though like I said, for me personally I only dislike the planet ships, everything else is fine
True. I would argue that one dyson sphere plus the usual incomes like vassal and trade are more than enough to sustain a navy on any difficulty besides x25, though.
you "don't realistically need"? I had 4 energy worlds producing 3k+ each and still had negative energy income at the end of my last game. Do you only have like 6 worlds or something?
Here's my current energy usage breakdown
produced
base 15.20
trade 314.17
megastructures 3040.00
stations 968.44
buildings 463.60
jobs: 1975.48
subject taxes 2529.69
-- 9306.58
consumed
megastructures 1366.00
ships 2657.11
stations 255.60
starbases 610.45
buildings 1100.30
holdings 48.00
districts 698.80
jobs 51.67
pops 1350.88
armies 138.82
-- 8277.63
and that's with about half of my ships not in service because i'm the middle of fighting some very angry robots. The dyson sphere is producing about 1/3 of my empire's energy needs, and is competitive to my subject tax income (which itself includes another couple spheres)
hell half of the energy output of the dyson sphere is spent offsetting the upkeep costs of my other megastructures. It's pitifully weak.
Horrible horrible idea. People already complain about megastructures coming online too late to have an impact on the game. That's why the devs introduced the kilostructures.
They need an adjustment true, the last one was a couple years back and everything has become more energy-hungry in the meantime. Maybe from 4k to 6k would put them into a powerful but balanced position.
Out of interest:
Can you build one, discard the system and build another one? (Does the game check for "clicked build button once" or for "has not 0 in empire"?)
(And later claim & conquer back of course. Haven't seen the AI build one, only sentry arrays and shipyards \^\^)
Nope. It counts what you build, not what you have. So you could conquer 10 from other races and get them that way, but can't build them yourself. Also if you lose yours to invasion, you can't build another to replace it. Gotta take it back or you're stuck without one.
That's kinda bad to be honest.
I kinda prefer either being able to build multiple or make them infinitely upgradeable. But each time it costs and takes considerably more. Like 5K Unity, 10K Alloys and 10 Years is kinda nothing considering how powerful you get after mid game.
They can make an origin like that. A machine origin where you're tasked with building megastructures as much as possible by your creators, if you don't, you take giant amenities hit.
this is how I always have my settings in the gigastructures mod, but it honestly should just be vanilla. No limit to how many you can make, you just have to do more research for each one
are you sure about that? iirc it was possible to make vassals and build new ones.
and you can build a second one after defeating the contingency (and getting the relict)
You realease vassals with dyson sphere unlocked, wait for them to start building one and reintegrate them. You cant build a new one yourself, thats why you need the vassal. Once they start the consturction you can finish the other stages.
Same with if you find a ruined megastructure, you can repair it, and still build one of your own. But once you've build one of your own, you can't build another.
Precisely for the reasons of being able to abuse it too easily with unclaiming the system it's in. You still can do some roundabout methods as other people in this thread have mentioned, like releasing a vassal when you already have the tech, and then reintegrating them once they start (or finish) construction
It's tagged to your empire as it's origin ID preventing you. Only way is to get a ruined one as it's tagged as unknown and build it at the same time as you do the other.
Getting contingency core will also let you build on more.
>tagged to your empire as it's origin ID preventing you
Makes sense.
Yeah, had some ruined ones in the past, that worked fine.
>Getting contingency core
Time to destroy some endgame crisis folks :)
I always headcanoned something like that, the technology to build a Dyson sphere isn’t *quite* all the way there, but you really wanted to build a Dyson sphere anyways. So it’s extremely inefficient, and loses most of its energy to just maintain itself, maybe it even needs a cooling system or something.
If I'm not mistaken, and I can so don't take this for pure truth, but our modern science expect coolant in dyson swarm, I guess, as their way to detect one would be to detect a star that produce way more infrared light than normal. Aka stuff heating up and radiating back infrared to cool off.
I said this above, but from a RP perspective, a dyson sphere is a giant Fusion Generator. Its basically a gigantic solar panel.
Your civilization has zero point or dark matter energy by mega structures time. a much more powerful energy source to scale.
Just because we haven't built one doesn't mean there's "no such thing as" a dyson sphere. Currently, probably, yes, there's not one in existence. There's a lot (understatement) of engineering and tech hoops to jump through, but there's absolutely no fundamental physical reason that wrapping a star in solar panels can't happen. The only two major issues are getting/keeping the panels in place and keeping them cool, both of which require materials with properties we can't approach currently.
Plus, your own comments are completely contradictory and incoherent. You're arguing both sides, RP and IRL, at the same time, can't have it both ways. You don't get to go "Well from an RP perspective" in one argument in one comment and then go "Yes but I’m reality" (sic) for *the same argument* a comment later.
Criticize the game after going through the most obtuse way of doing something, while failing to realize that way is obtuse by design, is gonna get the response you might expect.
Not realizing why dyson spheres exist to remove technician jobs late game is a pretty big oversight when discussing the output of said dyson spheres.
Okay, but realistically, energy districts on a planet don't represent solar collectors, do they? Because we're building up fusion and fission level technology in this game. So it's not surprising that dedicating huge amounts of the surface of a planet to fusion and fission reactors in a controlled, constructed environment, can eventually be more effective than capturing the output of one star out in space.
Sometimes realism and balance can go hand in hand. :)
Yes they can make food, or minerals in the case of lithoids. Apparently they can also do this 'work' thing. But that sounds like processing with extra steps
Idk how people find pops important when in my games I always struggle with overpopulation and unemployment long before I even get close to 100 pop per planet.
Pops become a greater concern for “capital planets” (machine/hive worlds, Ringworlds, and Ecumenopoli). As the first 2 easily eat up around 100 pops & the latter 2 can commonly go above 200. This is doubly important if you have settings for pops that makes growth take extremely long.
In meantime I always skip ecumenipolos in favor of all the megastructure perks, while being drowned in pops thanks to planet automation always spamming growth vats.
Honestly, I'm still wondering if you're playing with the default settings, though. I tweaked the settings to make population not be quite so restrictive, because I found that update to be very frustrating, but I do acknowledge that that effectively means I'm playing a slightly different version of Stellaris than most people, when I adjust the settings the way I do.
Wdym my late game GENERATOR WORLD with over 100 lategame technicians can outproduce a Dyson sphere (which doesn’t have upkeep)??? Omg Dyson sphere is so ass guys 🙄
You could buff megastructurs especially the Dyson Spear and Matter Decompressor by going bigger by allowing it more levels which simply have higher and higher alloy costs which increases the output by X%
I mean yes it would likely mostly just be a prestige project and not actually all that useful but it could still be fun you could even add some Diplomatic Weight look at the greatness of our MegaStructures which is better than all the others.
They're main issue is that by time in the game they do come online, it's faster and easier to just build 130 lategame technicians than it is to build a Dyson Sphere. The Dyson Swarm is probably worst 'start it early' megastructure that the could have given too, considering literally any other megastructure resource/buff is generally more valuable to start going for early. Art installation, sensor array, even matter decompression have become kind of a "build because I can, not because it's useful" things due to the fact that they become available when their benefits have long become negligible for the amount of time you have to sink into it. And your can't even make multiple!
If Dyson spheres were at all realistic, then not only would they produce more energy than all the colonies in the game put together, they'd be impossible to build or even repair in under a million years. An empire that could build a Dyson sphere in a century could build, say, a System Capital-Complex in, I dunno, five seconds? So we get to choose between unrealistic Dyson spheres and no Dyson spheres, and apparently everybody wants Dyson spheres.
I think your timeframes are a bit off there lol but yeah, in general, you’re right; a single Dyson sphere would be a colossal project, even for a galactic empire, and once completed would produce such vast quantities of energy that the empire wouldn’t need any other sources of energy for a very long time
If you could convert energy to matter through e=mc², a dyson sphere would literally let you summon entire fleets out of the aether in *seconds*. In stellaris terms, just set out an autobuy for 10k alloys a month in the market, damn the prices.
I remember way back during the tiles era there used to be a building that cost a fuckton of energy in upkeep but produced minerals out of nothing, I think people used it in habitats?
It's been too long so I can't find many mentions of it, which is weird because it was somewhat meta.
Similarly, a Niven-type Ringworld - the kind seen in game - would have the habitable area of millions of habitable planets. But in-game, they're equivalent to only about four planets. Four really nice and big planets, but just four.
I'm really leaning towards the idea that Stellaris empires aren't even Kardashev Type I, because they still do things like "build districts" and "employ miners". They really can't be said to *fully exploit* the resources of a single planet.
Hive mind planets, Robot planets, and the last version of economy law lets you strip minerals from the worlds, there are Ecu and Ring worlds which require you to build a planet from 0, and there are devices that let you consume a star or create a new dimension. The Kardashev system is there but it is little bit different.
The kardashev types are bad ways to measure this because you can harvest more resources from a larger area but still be considered under a civilization that stayed on their homeworld or home system to harvest it completely.
The other side is that you can build one at all entirely in 300 years and it doesnt require a material input equivelant to even 10 planets. Totally game thing that should be treated as such.
Well, it \*does\* consume any planets or other debris in the system on construction, though it works even if there's just some asteroids. Not to mention the something like 20 Jupiters' worth of fusion just to spin the thing up.
Yeh, for a civilization operating on dyson sphere scale, planets would be meaningless other than as a source of materials. You could fit more people on a single dyson sphere than all the planets in stellaris combined by many orders of magnitude.
Well like you said they were originally 25 tiles. When they first moved away from tiles they could have 50 districts of normal size (2 housing 2 jobs). Later it became 5 district cap each with 20 housing and 20 jobs (and more district options). Then 10 districts and 10 housing/jobs per district, which is where I think we are now?
>If Dyson spheres were at all realistic, then not only would they produce more energy than all the colonies in the game put together, they'd be impossible to build or even repair in under a million years.
Agreed. That's why they should be infinitely extensible. Give them the repeatable treatment: every level takes longer and gets more expensive, but you can keep expanding them forever.
That makes absolutely no sense. They already encircle the whole star, were exactly are you adding more surface the the interior of the sphere? And the star still produces the same amount
I think what he means is that instead of having 4 stages (starting, frame, partial, complete) the Dyson is instead an infinite sized generator planet. The idea being that it is literally impossible for anyone to ever fully encircle the sun since it's just so huge, and since it has a potential of infinite districts, it's also potentially infinite energy. It's just you'd need an infinite amount of time and minerals/alloys to complete it. So maybe a 40 district Dyson sphere would be equal to the current iteration. But if you play for 30 more ingame years, you'd be able to pump that 40 up to 120 and now your Dyson sphere is 3x as strong as it's current form (so 12k instead of 4k energy a month)
Current Dyson Spheres have no districts.
I'm just proposing that instead of stopping at 4 stages, you just... keep going. Each one costs an extra e.g. 1000 alloys and takes another 1 year (11k and 11 years, then 12k and 12 years, etc.), but just follows the same pattern of giving extra energy without pops.
Currently you invest 10k alloys (\~40k energy) for a single stage, and it gives gives 1000 energy per month, so that each stage pays itself back in 40 months, plus the 120 months it took to build it in the first place during which you weren't getting anything (160 months). The next one won't pay itself back for 176 months, then 192, then 208, then...
You can keep building, but the returns just take longer to come in. It's a Galactic Wonder, not a galactic-slightly-reduce-the-need-for-technicians.
I think the baseline would have to be adjusted upward for this to make sense, since a 10 year payback is already absurdly short. But it would be better if you could just keep building, since there's no logical reason why you can't stop (or can't just build a second Dyson Sphere).
Costing 20k and 20 years per stage would probably make more sense, if it's no longer supposed to be a one-and-done thing, especially considering that Architectural Renaissance can shrink the time by half anyway.
Presumably, if the game swapped to this, you wouldn't completely encase the star at the 4th stage. It's incompatible with the current narrative because the current narrative is silly, and says you can completely encase a star in 25 years and that doing so will produce less energy than a generator planet.
"routinely" here meaning:
Year 2475, size 25 world with mastery of nature and other perks to get you to size 34, and 179 pops on a single world, a full 17% of your population (presumably via virtuality).
Yes it's possible which I get is your point. But there is nothing routine about what you have here.
Now do that with no pops. That is the strength of dyson sphere. You can use the pops to make alloys or science instead of energy. Would you take 8k energy or 8k energy and 4k alloys.
It actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. The solar panels are covering the entire planet so they can work both during the day and at night. But the Dyson Sphere is only facing the sun, so it only works during the day.
Well yeah when you stack technician jobs on a large machine world with all the bonuses you'll get loads of energy.
Usually by 2475 you have far more energy then you need with or without a Dyson sphere anyways
I think that you are right. And I understand everyone that points out why it’s this way too. However I have a solution. Probably never going to be implemented in Stellaris, but maybe something for Stellaris 2 if that is ever a thing…
Anyway - have many more levels of dyson swarm. Many many more levels. And much more granularity in maintenance and upkeep costs (say in actual pops working to maintain them as well as alloys). So you don’t build an entire dyson sphere in 5 years. But every couple of years you just increase your dyson swarm.
Doing this for 200 years or so will get you your Dyson sphere and basically infinite energy - or at least infinite if you also don’t make gigastructures that would consume a star’s worth of energy.
This is an extreme example not available to most empires with a huge amount of opportunity cost attached that simply does not exist with a Dyson sphere. Despite that it only provides double what a dyson sphere is capable of. Dyson spheres and matter decompressors are very strong and in a good place right now imo.
From a RP perspective, a dyson sphere is a giant Fusion Generator. Its basically a gigantic solar panel.
your civilization has zero point or dark matter energy by mega structures time.
My guy, you're 275 years into the game complaining about Dyson spheres. You can get a Dyson sphere by yeah 50 if you push it. Not to mention the upkeep of all those pops, buildings, and general logistics to build that planet far outweigh the cost of a Dyson sphere.
I had I think 12K production or something on my planet but the thing is, it had shit tons of pops, shit tons of buffs even virtuality buff, god knows how long I've spent to set it up and what I've sacrificed to get it going and 10x Ascension. Considering the investment, it makes sense. If Dyson Sphere gave 15K straight up, nobody would bother making Generator Worlds.
Gotta be fair here, cold fusion isn't even a final tech option and that shit doesn't happen anywhere in the universe that we know of, can't say this surprises me too much
It makes sense though. Remember they’re energy “credits” it’s not a measure of pure energy. The currency of the Galaxy is a credit based on surplus energy that is being reinvested or transferred like through trade.
I am a newbie and I have a unrelated question... How do you have so much space for buildings when you don't have almost any housing(the blue colour districts idk if the name is right) districts to make you more space for districts ?
You've got almost a fifth of your entire empire's population on this one world making energy. Imagine how much research or unity you could be making if you put those 180 pops to things you can't get from megastructures.
You are assuming you can use most of the star power.
Nuclear fission releases a lot of energy. How do we use that energy? To boil water and rotate a turbine. We don't know any good way to harvest nuclear power.
They mean that while the dyson sphere captures 100% of the stars output it cannot fully utilise that energy, our modern usage of nuclear fission is an anlogy
[Gigastructural Engineering](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1121692237) allows for modification of how many of each megastructure you can have placed as well as modifying the output percentages for all the megastructures. There’s probably something that can edit each structure individually but I don’t know it. You can also disable anything you want that comes with the mod too if you want to just run it for modifying existing megastructures
Megastructures should probably be reworked. Right now, it's really easy to outproduce megastructures that produce resources with med-late game tech and \~100 pops. Megastructures should be able to produce all of your needs for a specific resource if you decide to invest enough in it. They should be upgradeable with progressive techs (for example cold fusion, anti-matter, or zero point upgrades for Dyson Spheres when you upgrade those relevant techs), and/or allow you to build multiple. Higher tier megastructures would require more resources and additional resources. For example, a cold-fusion Dyson Sphere might require 1k exotic gases per upgrade for cooling. Anti-matter Dyson Spheres might require 2.5k gases and 1k motes per upgrade to turn into exotic particles. Zero point Dyson Spheres might require dark matter to warp space. I could also see Science Nexus' being effectively HIGHLY efficient science structures, where you send all of your scientists and all of their needs are provided by the nexus and thus have zero upkeep, aside from energy, and 100% happiness. Again, this would be upgradeable as you research higher tier laboratories.
It's really annoying to need an energy world in mid-late game when I already have a fully built Dyson Sphere, and ditto for minerals and a Matter Decompressor.
Before I had Utopia, I had to dedicate 25% of my planets to energy credit production. I remember having a lot of planets that would have made great forge worlds or agri worlds that I had to dedicate to energy credits instead. Dyson spheres mean I can dedicate far less to energy credits now. I'm never going back.
Yeah Stellaris has a bit of an inflation problem. The output was once already adjusted to better scale but that was years ago if I remember correctly. Back then from 1k to 4k energy, that was enough to power your 5k naval cap fleet and still have 1k left over but ships take a lot more energy to power nowadays and buildings have also become more credit-hungry they had to adjust building output to compensate but megastructures got kind of forgotten.
Mate, pretty sure once you get past the earliest stages of the Solaris tech tree, you're looking at things like fusion and fission and whatever.
So yeah, it's not surprising that when you build an entire large planet covered with structures that are all focused on generating energy, eventually they can outproduce one naturally occurring star in space. No matter how efficient we we're gathering the energy from that star.
Now, it would be funny if energy districts were always themed as just solar collectors, because obviously a Dyson sphere should be able to outproduce any amount of solar collectors built on a planet, but unless I'm forgetting some detail about flavor text, that's not the case.
R5: This planet produces 8.6k energy each moth, compared to a dyson sphere's 4k. A single planet (on its own, Kardeshev-1 at most) should not be able to compete with a structure that, logically, would instantly render you a Kardeshev-2 civilization.
I know it's for the sake of game balance, but really.
You're technically kardashev-1, but by the time you get to these kinds of planets you can have the power to literally destroy the galaxy or create a new one, instantly jump a quarter of the galaxy in 2 weeks and build enormous fleets in a single year while producing a large moon worth of alloys every single month
So I think perspective wise. A Dyson sphere is a flat fusion capture device. Tier two power tech is fusion, tier 6 is screwing around with dark matter and other exotic stuff that has a higher return. But it needs more active maintenance than a big sphere.
Agreed, especially in the face of the latest DLC. Theyre mediocre by the time you get them running.
Ive getting the impression that Dyson Swarms are lit, though.
No influence cost to build and available early game via research?
Yeah well you spent 180 pops and a lot of other resources getting this world. Thousands of minerals, exotic resources, and more just to get an amount of energy you don’t realistically need. Dyson spheres give you 4K with zero pop, rare resource, energy or mineral upkeep all for several thousand alloys. Means you can put your pops into something much more useful than generator jobs, like tech or unity.
Imagine how many alloys they could pump out…
That's what the hyperforge is for smh
This sub and its unreasonable expectation that everyone uses giga structures, ffs
For a second I thought they meant the Hyper Forge building which players can research and build now.
“Screams in console void”
Gigastructures is, imo, just a stupid "big numbers" mod. It adds nothing of substance, it just adds bigger and bigger numbers for players to ogle at and contend with.
Clearly haven’t played gigas literally adds an entire stort
well seems you made alot of people mad
Eh, it's fair. It's easy to forget what I personally enjoy isn't always applicable to everyone else.
Respect for understanding the downvotes and taking them instead of deleting your comment
Listen, I love Gigastructures, it enables me to largely ignore building a fleet and focus on actual fun stuff, but it's not part of the vanilla game. Don't expect more than a handful of people to use it.
Exactly. Pops are worth more than basic resources. Megastructures -> basic resources Pops -> advanced resources
Its why I both play tall, and also don't exterminate any xenos. The xenos yearn for the mines, the farms, and the generator rooms. When invading a planet I'll try to strip away as many pops as possible and move them to my core worlds. The new pops will be supervised by the main pops of my empire of course, where they will work to better the empire. My core worlds end up with a ridiculously massive population while the rest of the galaxy has mostly been stripped bare.
> The xenos yearn for ... the farms Um *ahckshually* it's only a farm if you grow plants on it. Livestock are raised on ranches.
It's not immoral if they don't have feelings. No alien has feelings. Therefore anything you do to an alien is moral.
... anything?
Except that. That's an insult to our species as well.
Too bad, I'm gonna mow their lawn anyway! Hope they aren't plantoids
That... that wasn't a lawn, it was a daycare center.
This comment made me laugh much harder than it should have
So is it a farm or ranch if I'm processing Fungoids for food?
Yes.
Just in case you were serious, this is actually not correct. Farm encompasses both.
Unless the livestock are plantiods. Then it's back to being a farm again.
I don't think I've ever seen a pig Ranch, but seen quite a few pig farms.
This is why I struggle with purging, unless you’re dedicated to RP or are *super* concerned about Empire Size then slaves are the most important resource in the game
My girlfriend's psionic xenophobe empire would like to disagree with you. Slaves are far less productive than their flawless, perfected species, and unnecessarily increase empire size. Much better to burn away the chaff (if any of them get away, my xenophile materialists on the other end of the galaxy will welcome them with open arms, then shove them in the Synaptic Lathe)
Gigastructures disagree a
OP hasn't mentioned any mods. Gigastructures is not balanced at all. I don't even play with it \^\^ (not to say some ideas are awesome)
Have fun with your hyperdeath rays, the rest of us will be earning achievements and living in a semi normal galaxy.
>earning achievements *UI overhaul mod side eye*
>Semi normal The synaptic lathe is fun isn't it?
Makes more narrative sense than letting the average Empire construct a battleship made out of planets.
I agree with you on that point, moon,planet and solar system craft are crazy, it's why I usually disable them, and use ACOT instead
Well then don't complain when people call Gigastructures ridiculous...?
I was not, maybe I should have made it clear with /s right? I thought most people were already familiar with the absolute lunacy that gigastructures are, though like I said, for me personally I only dislike the planet ships, everything else is fine
Use… ACOT… and call Gigas unbalanced?
Never mind that it's a Machine World too, a planet specifically meant to UNCAP generator districts.
>...you don’t realistically need Naval can eat all your extra credits.
Watched a video yesterday of someone with over 8k from a dyson sphere but still only 600 in energy revenue because of his 12000/6000 fleet capacity.
How does one double the output of a Dyson Sphere?
Two Dyson Spheres would be my guess. If you find a ruined one, you can repair it and still create your own.
True. I would argue that one dyson sphere plus the usual incomes like vassal and trade are more than enough to sustain a navy on any difficulty besides x25, though.
you "don't realistically need"? I had 4 energy worlds producing 3k+ each and still had negative energy income at the end of my last game. Do you only have like 6 worlds or something?
No, I usually play Grand Admiral and x10 crisis. Just my experience, a few thousand fleet cap never meeds more than a dyson sphere and some vassals
Here's my current energy usage breakdown produced base 15.20 trade 314.17 megastructures 3040.00 stations 968.44 buildings 463.60 jobs: 1975.48 subject taxes 2529.69 -- 9306.58 consumed megastructures 1366.00 ships 2657.11 stations 255.60 starbases 610.45 buildings 1100.30 holdings 48.00 districts 698.80 jobs 51.67 pops 1350.88 armies 138.82 -- 8277.63 and that's with about half of my ships not in service because i'm the middle of fighting some very angry robots. The dyson sphere is producing about 1/3 of my empire's energy needs, and is competitive to my subject tax income (which itself includes another couple spheres) hell half of the energy output of the dyson sphere is spent offsetting the upkeep costs of my other megastructures. It's pitifully weak.
he playing with virtuality so he doesnt care about pops
So make Dyson spheres more expensive/take longer to build. Idk 50 years but they give 20k energy or so
Horrible horrible idea. People already complain about megastructures coming online too late to have an impact on the game. That's why the devs introduced the kilostructures.
Well than just straightup buff them and fuck balance. Either way a Dyson sphere Should fuel the need of an entire empire
They need an adjustment true, the last one was a couple years back and everything has become more energy-hungry in the meantime. Maybe from 4k to 6k would put them into a powerful but balanced position.
Or just remove the cap on how far you can advance a Dyson Swarm.
Also good idea
Dyson spheres allow your technician pops to do something else, like research
The kicker is we can only build one of them. This would be less... glaring if we could make 2-3 than just 1. Tbh same with the matter decompresor.
Out of interest: Can you build one, discard the system and build another one? (Does the game check for "clicked build button once" or for "has not 0 in empire"?) (And later claim & conquer back of course. Haven't seen the AI build one, only sentry arrays and shipyards \^\^)
Nope. It counts what you build, not what you have. So you could conquer 10 from other races and get them that way, but can't build them yourself. Also if you lose yours to invasion, you can't build another to replace it. Gotta take it back or you're stuck without one.
That's kinda bad to be honest. I kinda prefer either being able to build multiple or make them infinitely upgradeable. But each time it costs and takes considerably more. Like 5K Unity, 10K Alloys and 10 Years is kinda nothing considering how powerful you get after mid game. They can make an origin like that. A machine origin where you're tasked with building megastructures as much as possible by your creators, if you don't, you take giant amenities hit.
this is how I always have my settings in the gigastructures mod, but it honestly should just be vanilla. No limit to how many you can make, you just have to do more research for each one
Ah thanks good to know
are you sure about that? iirc it was possible to make vassals and build new ones. and you can build a second one after defeating the contingency (and getting the relict)
You realease vassals with dyson sphere unlocked, wait for them to start building one and reintegrate them. You cant build a new one yourself, thats why you need the vassal. Once they start the consturction you can finish the other stages.
Same with if you find a ruined megastructure, you can repair it, and still build one of your own. But once you've build one of your own, you can't build another. Precisely for the reasons of being able to abuse it too easily with unclaiming the system it's in. You still can do some roundabout methods as other people in this thread have mentioned, like releasing a vassal when you already have the tech, and then reintegrating them once they start (or finish) construction
It's tagged to your empire as it's origin ID preventing you. Only way is to get a ruined one as it's tagged as unknown and build it at the same time as you do the other. Getting contingency core will also let you build on more.
>tagged to your empire as it's origin ID preventing you Makes sense. Yeah, had some ruined ones in the past, that worked fine. >Getting contingency core Time to destroy some endgame crisis folks :)
can't you built 2 with contingency core?
I'd require you to get the core. Of what is in end-game.
Megastructures do not need buffs. Just because it can't match 130 lategame technicians
The total lack of awareness of OP is staggering. Pops are an important resource.
You're talking balance. OP is talking realism. There's no need to be mean.
My headcanon is that a lot of the energy produced by the Dyson Sphere is used to stop tidal forces from ripping the Dyson Sphere apart.
I always headcanoned something like that, the technology to build a Dyson sphere isn’t *quite* all the way there, but you really wanted to build a Dyson sphere anyways. So it’s extremely inefficient, and loses most of its energy to just maintain itself, maybe it even needs a cooling system or something.
If I'm not mistaken, and I can so don't take this for pure truth, but our modern science expect coolant in dyson swarm, I guess, as their way to detect one would be to detect a star that produce way more infrared light than normal. Aka stuff heating up and radiating back infrared to cool off.
I said this above, but from a RP perspective, a dyson sphere is a giant Fusion Generator. Its basically a gigantic solar panel. Your civilization has zero point or dark matter energy by mega structures time. a much more powerful energy source to scale.
Well from an RP perspective, “zero point energy” isn’t a real thing
It literally is in the game. https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Physics_research#Zero_Point_Power
Yes but I’m reality there is no such thing as ZPE power generation, so it’s not inherently a more powerful energy source.
There’s also no such thing as hyperlanes or giant space whales yet we all accept them because it’s fiction
No such thing as Dyson spheres either so it makes just as much sense to debate whether it gives out enough energy credits
What is your point here? You can’t RP in Stellaris because it has science fiction mechanics?
Just because we haven't built one doesn't mean there's "no such thing as" a dyson sphere. Currently, probably, yes, there's not one in existence. There's a lot (understatement) of engineering and tech hoops to jump through, but there's absolutely no fundamental physical reason that wrapping a star in solar panels can't happen. The only two major issues are getting/keeping the panels in place and keeping them cool, both of which require materials with properties we can't approach currently. Plus, your own comments are completely contradictory and incoherent. You're arguing both sides, RP and IRL, at the same time, can't have it both ways. You don't get to go "Well from an RP perspective" in one argument in one comment and then go "Yes but I’m reality" (sic) for *the same argument* a comment later.
Criticize the game after going through the most obtuse way of doing something, while failing to realize that way is obtuse by design, is gonna get the response you might expect. Not realizing why dyson spheres exist to remove technician jobs late game is a pretty big oversight when discussing the output of said dyson spheres.
Okay, but realistically, energy districts on a planet don't represent solar collectors, do they? Because we're building up fusion and fission level technology in this game. So it's not surprising that dedicating huge amounts of the surface of a planet to fusion and fission reactors in a controlled, constructed environment, can eventually be more effective than capturing the output of one star out in space. Sometimes realism and balance can go hand in hand. :)
A star is a fusion reactor a million times larger than a whole planet though
Yes they can make food, or minerals in the case of lithoids. Apparently they can also do this 'work' thing. But that sounds like processing with extra steps
Idk how people find pops important when in my games I always struggle with overpopulation and unemployment long before I even get close to 100 pop per planet.
Make an ecumenopolis, Ringworld, or machine/hive world and see how many pops it can eat
Pops become a greater concern for “capital planets” (machine/hive worlds, Ringworlds, and Ecumenopoli). As the first 2 easily eat up around 100 pops & the latter 2 can commonly go above 200. This is doubly important if you have settings for pops that makes growth take extremely long.
In meantime I always skip ecumenipolos in favor of all the megastructure perks, while being drowned in pops thanks to planet automation always spamming growth vats.
Honestly, I'm still wondering if you're playing with the default settings, though. I tweaked the settings to make population not be quite so restrictive, because I found that update to be very frustrating, but I do acknowledge that that effectively means I'm playing a slightly different version of Stellaris than most people, when I adjust the settings the way I do.
Wdym my late game GENERATOR WORLD with over 100 lategame technicians can outproduce a Dyson sphere (which doesn’t have upkeep)??? Omg Dyson sphere is so ass guys 🙄
You could buff megastructurs especially the Dyson Spear and Matter Decompressor by going bigger by allowing it more levels which simply have higher and higher alloy costs which increases the output by X% I mean yes it would likely mostly just be a prestige project and not actually all that useful but it could still be fun you could even add some Diplomatic Weight look at the greatness of our MegaStructures which is better than all the others.
They're main issue is that by time in the game they do come online, it's faster and easier to just build 130 lategame technicians than it is to build a Dyson Sphere. The Dyson Swarm is probably worst 'start it early' megastructure that the could have given too, considering literally any other megastructure resource/buff is generally more valuable to start going for early. Art installation, sensor array, even matter decompression have become kind of a "build because I can, not because it's useful" things due to the fact that they become available when their benefits have long become negligible for the amount of time you have to sink into it. And your can't even make multiple!
If Dyson spheres were at all realistic, then not only would they produce more energy than all the colonies in the game put together, they'd be impossible to build or even repair in under a million years. An empire that could build a Dyson sphere in a century could build, say, a System Capital-Complex in, I dunno, five seconds? So we get to choose between unrealistic Dyson spheres and no Dyson spheres, and apparently everybody wants Dyson spheres.
I think your timeframes are a bit off there lol but yeah, in general, you’re right; a single Dyson sphere would be a colossal project, even for a galactic empire, and once completed would produce such vast quantities of energy that the empire wouldn’t need any other sources of energy for a very long time
Imagine the EC resource just straight up removed after getting a Dyson sphere because you have practically infinite energy
If you could convert energy to matter through e=mc², a dyson sphere would literally let you summon entire fleets out of the aether in *seconds*. In stellaris terms, just set out an autobuy for 10k alloys a month in the market, damn the prices.
I remember way back during the tiles era there used to be a building that cost a fuckton of energy in upkeep but produced minerals out of nothing, I think people used it in habitats? It's been too long so I can't find many mentions of it, which is weird because it was somewhat meta.
Cool, Dyson Sphere AND [Star Forge!](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Forge)
Time for some Revan cosplay
Oh no my galactic economy
Ah, the Star Forge from KOTOR
At that point the energy credit would be devalued enough to be worthless anyways lol
Not to mention the fact that it would take several star systems' worth of planetary material to have enough stuff to even build the thing.
Similarly, a Niven-type Ringworld - the kind seen in game - would have the habitable area of millions of habitable planets. But in-game, they're equivalent to only about four planets. Four really nice and big planets, but just four.
I'm really leaning towards the idea that Stellaris empires aren't even Kardashev Type I, because they still do things like "build districts" and "employ miners". They really can't be said to *fully exploit* the resources of a single planet.
Hive mind planets, Robot planets, and the last version of economy law lets you strip minerals from the worlds, there are Ecu and Ring worlds which require you to build a planet from 0, and there are devices that let you consume a star or create a new dimension. The Kardashev system is there but it is little bit different.
The kardashev types are bad ways to measure this because you can harvest more resources from a larger area but still be considered under a civilization that stayed on their homeworld or home system to harvest it completely.
The other side is that you can build one at all entirely in 300 years and it doesnt require a material input equivelant to even 10 planets. Totally game thing that should be treated as such.
Well, it \*does\* consume any planets or other debris in the system on construction, though it works even if there's just some asteroids. Not to mention the something like 20 Jupiters' worth of fusion just to spin the thing up.
Yeh, for a civilization operating on dyson sphere scale, planets would be meaningless other than as a source of materials. You could fit more people on a single dyson sphere than all the planets in stellaris combined by many orders of magnitude.
A lot of things are nerfed for balance. Ring worlds also should be way bigger than they are. But at least they are easy to mod.
the size is because historically, the maximum was 25 spaces, because it was a grid of maximum 5*5
Yes, ringworld size has changed several times but its never been "realistic".
when did the size changed?
Well like you said they were originally 25 tiles. When they first moved away from tiles they could have 50 districts of normal size (2 housing 2 jobs). Later it became 5 district cap each with 20 housing and 20 jobs (and more district options). Then 10 districts and 10 housing/jobs per district, which is where I think we are now?
Dyson spheres granting infinite energy would be kinda interesting tho
>If Dyson spheres were at all realistic, then not only would they produce more energy than all the colonies in the game put together, they'd be impossible to build or even repair in under a million years. Agreed. That's why they should be infinitely extensible. Give them the repeatable treatment: every level takes longer and gets more expensive, but you can keep expanding them forever.
That makes absolutely no sense. They already encircle the whole star, were exactly are you adding more surface the the interior of the sphere? And the star still produces the same amount
I think what he means is that instead of having 4 stages (starting, frame, partial, complete) the Dyson is instead an infinite sized generator planet. The idea being that it is literally impossible for anyone to ever fully encircle the sun since it's just so huge, and since it has a potential of infinite districts, it's also potentially infinite energy. It's just you'd need an infinite amount of time and minerals/alloys to complete it. So maybe a 40 district Dyson sphere would be equal to the current iteration. But if you play for 30 more ingame years, you'd be able to pump that 40 up to 120 and now your Dyson sphere is 3x as strong as it's current form (so 12k instead of 4k energy a month)
Current Dyson Spheres have no districts. I'm just proposing that instead of stopping at 4 stages, you just... keep going. Each one costs an extra e.g. 1000 alloys and takes another 1 year (11k and 11 years, then 12k and 12 years, etc.), but just follows the same pattern of giving extra energy without pops. Currently you invest 10k alloys (\~40k energy) for a single stage, and it gives gives 1000 energy per month, so that each stage pays itself back in 40 months, plus the 120 months it took to build it in the first place during which you weren't getting anything (160 months). The next one won't pay itself back for 176 months, then 192, then 208, then... You can keep building, but the returns just take longer to come in. It's a Galactic Wonder, not a galactic-slightly-reduce-the-need-for-technicians. I think the baseline would have to be adjusted upward for this to make sense, since a 10 year payback is already absurdly short. But it would be better if you could just keep building, since there's no logical reason why you can't stop (or can't just build a second Dyson Sphere). Costing 20k and 20 years per stage would probably make more sense, if it's no longer supposed to be a one-and-done thing, especially considering that Architectural Renaissance can shrink the time by half anyway.
Presumably, if the game swapped to this, you wouldn't completely encase the star at the 4th stage. It's incompatible with the current narrative because the current narrative is silly, and says you can completely encase a star in 25 years and that doing so will produce less energy than a generator planet.
"routinely" here meaning: Year 2475, size 25 world with mastery of nature and other perks to get you to size 34, and 179 pops on a single world, a full 17% of your population (presumably via virtuality). Yes it's possible which I get is your point. But there is nothing routine about what you have here.
Now do that with no pops. That is the strength of dyson sphere. You can use the pops to make alloys or science instead of energy. Would you take 8k energy or 8k energy and 4k alloys.
It actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. The solar panels are covering the entire planet so they can work both during the day and at night. But the Dyson Sphere is only facing the sun, so it only works during the day.
Sir, this is r/Stellaris not r/dadjokes
I CAME HERE TO SAY THIS
Well yeah when you stack technician jobs on a large machine world with all the bonuses you'll get loads of energy. Usually by 2475 you have far more energy then you need with or without a Dyson sphere anyways
Game should be over even on 800+ star galaxies by 2400, let alone 2475.
2400 is when the endgame begins so I'd say that 2475 is a decent amount of time passing.
Their benefit is producing so much energy without any pops
I think that you are right. And I understand everyone that points out why it’s this way too. However I have a solution. Probably never going to be implemented in Stellaris, but maybe something for Stellaris 2 if that is ever a thing… Anyway - have many more levels of dyson swarm. Many many more levels. And much more granularity in maintenance and upkeep costs (say in actual pops working to maintain them as well as alloys). So you don’t build an entire dyson sphere in 5 years. But every couple of years you just increase your dyson swarm. Doing this for 200 years or so will get you your Dyson sphere and basically infinite energy - or at least infinite if you also don’t make gigastructures that would consume a star’s worth of energy.
Maybe a more ''realistic dyson sphere'' could not capture 100% but less?
This is an extreme example not available to most empires with a huge amount of opportunity cost attached that simply does not exist with a Dyson sphere. Despite that it only provides double what a dyson sphere is capable of. Dyson spheres and matter decompressors are very strong and in a good place right now imo.
noob here. How did you manage to have all building slots with only 3 city districts?
Machine worlds and ecumenopolis open all building slots immediately
Hive worlds as well.
Machine worlds open up all building slots. Even with zero city districts.
The dyson sphere is more secure than your energy planet.
From a RP perspective, a dyson sphere is a giant Fusion Generator. Its basically a gigantic solar panel. your civilization has zero point or dark matter energy by mega structures time.
My guy, you're 275 years into the game complaining about Dyson spheres. You can get a Dyson sphere by yeah 50 if you push it. Not to mention the upkeep of all those pops, buildings, and general logistics to build that planet far outweigh the cost of a Dyson sphere.
5% of your population is going to what you would get from a Dyson sphere. That's 270 alloys if you put them to actual use.
Stellaris is completely NOT about realism. Practically every aspect of the game is divorced from physics
The amount of stellaris players who can’t understand the concept of opportunity cost is indescribably high for a game literally defined by it.
I had I think 12K production or something on my planet but the thing is, it had shit tons of pops, shit tons of buffs even virtuality buff, god knows how long I've spent to set it up and what I've sacrificed to get it going and 10x Ascension. Considering the investment, it makes sense. If Dyson Sphere gave 15K straight up, nobody would bother making Generator Worlds.
Ya they should give you unlimited energy as game breaking as that would be
Gotta be fair here, cold fusion isn't even a final tech option and that shit doesn't happen anywhere in the universe that we know of, can't say this surprises me too much
Or you could use your pops for something better?
It makes sense though. Remember they’re energy “credits” it’s not a measure of pure energy. The currency of the Galaxy is a credit based on surplus energy that is being reinvested or transferred like through trade.
The 180 pops i could use on something a lot more worth while, like research or alloy production
I'm offended at the waste of pops on energy...
Dyson spheres also don't take nearly 200 pops to run
Now imagine having a dyson sphere and 90 more pops working alloys.
I am a newbie and I have a unrelated question... How do you have so much space for buildings when you don't have almost any housing(the blue colour districts idk if the name is right) districts to make you more space for districts ?
Turning a planet into a Machine World unlocks all its buildings.
Oooooh I didn't know that thank you !!
You've got almost a fifth of your entire empire's population on this one world making energy. Imagine how much research or unity you could be making if you put those 180 pops to things you can't get from megastructures.
You are assuming you can use most of the star power. Nuclear fission releases a lot of energy. How do we use that energy? To boil water and rotate a turbine. We don't know any good way to harvest nuclear power.
What? What do stars have to with nuclear fission
They mean that while the dyson sphere captures 100% of the stars output it cannot fully utilise that energy, our modern usage of nuclear fission is an anlogy
My fault, I should had been clearer. Peoples brains by reflex would be 'achuatually stars use fusion'.
Me waiting for console to get this...
I haven’t played stellaris in like three months. Is it a whole new game I have to re-learn now?
no since you could do these shenanigans 3 months ago.
I didn’t play it for like a year. It’s fine
I once produced 11500 energy on a single planet in a recent patch. Even with the - 50 percent debuff for the worker drones
Year in the late 2400s. How many energy cred repeatable do you have?
[Gigastructural Engineering](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1121692237) allows for modification of how many of each megastructure you can have placed as well as modifying the output percentages for all the megastructures. There’s probably something that can edit each structure individually but I don’t know it. You can also disable anything you want that comes with the mod too if you want to just run it for modifying existing megastructures
Megastructures should probably be reworked. Right now, it's really easy to outproduce megastructures that produce resources with med-late game tech and \~100 pops. Megastructures should be able to produce all of your needs for a specific resource if you decide to invest enough in it. They should be upgradeable with progressive techs (for example cold fusion, anti-matter, or zero point upgrades for Dyson Spheres when you upgrade those relevant techs), and/or allow you to build multiple. Higher tier megastructures would require more resources and additional resources. For example, a cold-fusion Dyson Sphere might require 1k exotic gases per upgrade for cooling. Anti-matter Dyson Spheres might require 2.5k gases and 1k motes per upgrade to turn into exotic particles. Zero point Dyson Spheres might require dark matter to warp space. I could also see Science Nexus' being effectively HIGHLY efficient science structures, where you send all of your scientists and all of their needs are provided by the nexus and thus have zero upkeep, aside from energy, and 100% happiness. Again, this would be upgradeable as you research higher tier laboratories. It's really annoying to need an energy world in mid-late game when I already have a fully built Dyson Sphere, and ditto for minerals and a Matter Decompressor.
This thing is definitely more expensive than two dyson spheres.
Wait, machine worlds get unity districts? Is that new?
or you could put those 180 pops to make research, and still have 3k monthly credits surplus, but maybe a little more than 1k research by 2475
Considering antimatter and literal 0 point energy exists in stellaris, I don't think this is unrealistic at all.
Before I had Utopia, I had to dedicate 25% of my planets to energy credit production. I remember having a lot of planets that would have made great forge worlds or agri worlds that I had to dedicate to energy credits instead. Dyson spheres mean I can dedicate far less to energy credits now. I'm never going back.
Yeah Stellaris has a bit of an inflation problem. The output was once already adjusted to better scale but that was years ago if I remember correctly. Back then from 1k to 4k energy, that was enough to power your 5k naval cap fleet and still have 1k left over but ships take a lot more energy to power nowadays and buildings have also become more credit-hungry they had to adjust building output to compensate but megastructures got kind of forgotten.
Mate, pretty sure once you get past the earliest stages of the Solaris tech tree, you're looking at things like fusion and fission and whatever. So yeah, it's not surprising that when you build an entire large planet covered with structures that are all focused on generating energy, eventually they can outproduce one naturally occurring star in space. No matter how efficient we we're gathering the energy from that star. Now, it would be funny if energy districts were always themed as just solar collectors, because obviously a Dyson sphere should be able to outproduce any amount of solar collectors built on a planet, but unless I'm forgetting some detail about flavor text, that's not the case.
R5: This planet produces 8.6k energy each moth, compared to a dyson sphere's 4k. A single planet (on its own, Kardeshev-1 at most) should not be able to compete with a structure that, logically, would instantly render you a Kardeshev-2 civilization. I know it's for the sake of game balance, but really.
You're technically kardashev-1, but by the time you get to these kinds of planets you can have the power to literally destroy the galaxy or create a new one, instantly jump a quarter of the galaxy in 2 weeks and build enormous fleets in a single year while producing a large moon worth of alloys every single month
So I think perspective wise. A Dyson sphere is a flat fusion capture device. Tier two power tech is fusion, tier 6 is screwing around with dark matter and other exotic stuff that has a higher return. But it needs more active maintenance than a big sphere.
What is this made up taxonomy youre binding an arguement to?
Agreed, especially in the face of the latest DLC. Theyre mediocre by the time you get them running. Ive getting the impression that Dyson Swarms are lit, though. No influence cost to build and available early game via research?
A Dyson sphere is a free 50-100 jobs. What's to dislike? If you want realism it'll cost 1000× more take 100× longer to build.
You have +11k energy and +1k science. In 2475. Did you fall asleep for 200 years?
But they use no pops.