Gameplay Quirks

[Serenitis]

What weird or odd things do you find yourself doing all the time in SiS?


I'm not a fan of assymetrical ship loadouts, and will take decidedly un-optimal fittings in order to avoid them.
Also, Orthin ships are cool & good because I can hide assymetry in the nose mounts where I don't have to look at it. Therefore it doesn't count.

When I acquire the tech to build shipyards, I will always re-design them to use a nuclear generator instead of whatever more advanced and expensive one gets put there by default (depends where you are in the tech tree).

I spend a non-zero amount of time micromanaging planets to remove aquatic pops from terrestrial environments and vice-versa.
It literally does not matter, but here I am doing this nonsense yet again.

Related: I hard avoid the cloning techs, because the faster growth makes managing pops much harder as there is frequently not enough room to move them around.
This bugged me so much I re-ordered the tech tree to make atmosphere generation the pre-req for weather control instead of cloning.

I always end up colonising and terraforming everything, no matter how I intended to play at the start of the game.
The siren's call of making nice places for my pixel spacemans to live is too strong.

For whatever reason, I super dislike 'starting fights'. Even in a made up game with zero consequences.
So my games will always end up as either 'maximum friendship galaxy' or 'science hermit in the corner'. Again, regardless of whatever I initially intended.

Related: I very rarely actually finish or 'win' my games. I will go as far as getting all my planets into a nice tidy order, and then restart and do it again.
What this 'order' actually entails varies from game to game.
'Endgame' stuff isn't all that interesting to me it would seem.

I don't like playing as Gremak because slavery etc. Even though you can ignore it entirely and it makes p. much zero difference.
Yet I don't seem to have any issue at all with the Tinkers.
It is the same mechanic, lol.

[zolobolo]

I always end up colonising and terraforming everything, no matter how I intended to play at the start of the game.
The siren's call of making nice places for my pixel spacemans to live is too strong.

Avoiding colonising unhospitable planets due to micro and terraforming because I never get to the end of the tech tree

[PrivateHudson]

You pretty much said it all, especially about cloning. Also, I hate to bomb civilians, even when it will bring the war to a faster end, and only resort to such brutality in the face of all my defense collapsing otherwise. I never ever reach terraforming, and sometime finish game with more planets claimed by outposts in order to deny them for others, than colonized.

[Serenitis]

...especially about cloning.

The cloning thing is kinda weird when you think about it.
Faster pop growth means more output from everything quicker. Which means more advantage, which can then be leveraged to gain more territory and so on.
Population = victory as in most 4x games.
But we're deliberately avoiding doing this, sacrificing this obvious advantage for 'personal' organisational reasons. The actual pop composition of a planet really doesn't matter beyond the binary is it present or not.
It's fascinating.

[e]

Here's something interesting psychology-wise.

Spoiler: show

I recently played a game as Humans. I had quite honestly, a terrible start - nothing but marginal colony planets, all in an 'island' of stars out of reach of everything else.
No pirates, no Marauders, nothing but dead and mostly dead rocks.
I had to almost entirely ignore mining/shipbuilding just to have enough space for labs so I could get the first range extension.
Once that was done I could re-tool my colonies and start building my fleet properly.
I met a few pirate bands and incorporated their ships. Landed a colony on yet another marginal world, but this one was right next to a Maruader base so it was getting attacked constantly for a while as I couldn't afford to pay them.
Which is good. Marauder ships were captured, and tech learned. Can't do anything about the base yet, but it's not going anywhere.
Had a pair of CL hulls left over which I planned to turn into makeshift missile ships.
I've now got ~25M pop spread over 6 systems. But my 'best' colony is a medium Arid.

There's 1 system left that I can reach now my range has extended to it. It has a pirate band on it, and they have a colony ship!
And the system itself has a medium Glacier (7 pop) and a large Island (10 pop)! This system alone is going to nearly double my population.
Colonise and set up for farming on the only high fertility planet I now have.

My territory pushes out and I meet the Orthin due to touching borders. My least favourite neighbours.
They don't like me, because I haven't done enough science for thier tastes. (And touching borders.) They won't even talk to me. They also have nearly 90M pop. Uh oh...
Time passes, the new system is fully developed. The Island farm world has allowed me to free up a lot of space on other worlds. I have some actual productivity now.
I start refiting my fleet now I have the industrial capacity to actually do it - still can't aford to do it instantly.
More new ships come online - I'm up to 24 now.

The Orthin do the predictable. They outright demand the 'farm' system.
Thier fleet is on the border. It has nearly 50 ships in it, including 4 ion gunships. There's no way I can fight that - nearly half of my fleet is still unshielded with titanium armour so I'd lose 4 ships per turn until those gunships are gone. And the only weapons I have that could do it are nukes, and they have far too many ships for those to work (PD coverage).

There's no way I can give them that system as it would put me back to the previous struggle times (I'm also super averse to giving in to demands), plus it would also make an aggressive and unfreindly bunch even stronger and they'll just do it again.
If I don't give it to them, they will declare war and take it anyway (plus everything else probably) as I can't realistically stop them.

Alright then.
Game ends lol.