Geoff the Medio wrote:In the battle detection branch, I've extended good stealth to also apply to ships. Perhaps that would help, as stealthy species can bypass most monsters.
Sure it will do. Problem then may be they get too stealthy, +40 is a lot. I suggest using only half the planetary bonus or adding a new species trait where great is +20 and good is +10.
They [Sly] actually had bad industry and pilots, but perhaps they need to be made even worse?
I need to play more. But right now my feeling is that they get huge populations by using only GGs. This coupled with the incredibly short supply lines of the Sly and the reasonable limitations of the IS (or the fact that I'm still not using the supply focus) forces me to focus on research on many of the isolated colonies. With so huge populations, if you exploit the growth techs, you get overwhelming amounts of RP and go cocky with all good tech lines. So your planets stay undetected and full of mines that wreak havoc on the enemies that colonised the same system than you, your colonisers also stay invisible, and you can go for several main tech lines at once. So it works very well, the stealthy strategy for the Sly, even with poor use of the IS, by just getting very ahead on research and then start pumping stealthed scattered asteroid carriers with multispectral shields and death rays when the others are still on laser and plasma shields.
So answering your question, I think a VERY_BAD_POPULATION trait for Sly is the way to go, to make their GGs not so growth-tech exploitable (I'm assuming that a 50% population modifier will give you 2/3 of what I'm seeing with the current 75% modifier, and that the modifier also affects the increases you get from growth techs).
For better use of the IS I was forced to do some extra micromanaging with the production queue (as Ophiucus comented). That suggestion about the two bars in the production queue is still a very good idea.
So I still would like to have a 2x inner slot hull with 20 stealth base stealth [...]
Make a pull request?
For this also I still need to play more. Going camouflaged asteroid (the one with 4 inner slots) is also possible to colonise past enemy lines, and it's not hard to get it (it's maybe harder to get the detection and stealth techs, so you can parallelise).
Only problem I saw is that enemy armed forces will prevent you from colonising GGs in that system. May this be considered a bug or is it intended?
Finally, I got a problem: can't colonise GGs that have been outposted by the enemies. If I conquer the outpost (which is not very stealthy, I now) it's an outpost in the middle of nowhere, so I can't build a colony building in there, and I have no way to destroy the outpost, right?.
Could it be possible that colony ships where able to colonise allied outposts? That would fix the problem.