Celestial Vines is too much difficult to expand territory in the early(especially in pvp). The Unfallen have to spend many rounds to build enough vine civilians for expand and colonization. The vine's expand will be interdicted by other factions easily.

    I think the Unfallen should add a vine civilian at the game beginning to help the Unfallen pass earlier stage smoothly.

I agree that the Unfallen have a difficult time starting out given how slow and expensive their expansion vessels are. Have you checked out the G2G Balance mod? In it they get a 20% boost to expansion speed (whatever that means, I haven't actually played them with it), and it seems that the mod is there to test changes before they are officially added to the game.

So it looks like the Unfallen will get a boost to vine-spreading speed in the near future, which should help allay some of their weaknesses.

As for their vineships being interdicted by enemies - this isn't a super common problem for me in SP, though pirates are extremely annoying and dealing with them takes higher priority for the Unfallen than for other factions. But I bet in MP this becomes a crippling weakness. What do you think of the idea that Unfallen Vineships are changed so that they can slot in (and their base design starts with) a weapons module, in this case kinetics? They are far too expensive to use for combat, but this way they can at least defend themselves against opportunistic scouts or pirates.

I'm sorry for replying too late…

I feel a weapons module maybe not very effective,boost to vine speed maybe better.

No need for apologies! The forums are really slow right now, there's no chance I would've lost this discussion.

I was mostly thinking about the weapon module slot working in conjunction with the defense module slots that vineships already have, and in particular, using multiple (2) vineships to defend against early game aggression from 1-2 CP worth of scout ships or pirates.

So it wouldn't do much against dedicated harassment before you get your second vineship out, but it would reduce the need to escort vineships with armed guards, saving you some precious early-game industry and also increase the likelihood that your first vineship survives random encounters as it entwines its first system.

Hopefully, though, a vineship would have comparatively higher starting defense and hp than other ships you are likely to encounter in the early game, meaning that it might be able to survive a combat or even two. It's all about making it so that a) the enemy has to dedicate resources to preventing your expansion, rather than doing it opportunistically and at essentially zero cost; and b) keeping vineships from needing to run at the first sight of an enemy ship, losing all that time they spent entwining the system and thus setting the Unfallen vastly far behind their competitors in the early game.

Adding a speed boost to vining would make that less of an issue, sure. But unless you only boosted the entwine speed with a single vineship (doing it in a way that didn't stack with additional vineships), you might make the Unfallen too quickly reach the stage at which, with large fleets composed of vineships, they colonize faster than other empires. 

With all of that said: the current version of the G2G Balance mod is testing a buff to vineship entwine speed. Hopefully that is all that is needed to buff their early game, and hopefully it is being done in a way that does not give them too much power in the late game.

i had 2 game with the unfallen a little while ago.

in one game i had 1 minor and 2 unique planets, one starsystem away. (what I will describe as the bast start you can get) but at the end of a node on the edge of the galaxy
and at the second game i had a normal start, but at the middle of the galaxy.

it may surprise you but by starting at the middle of the galaxy, i had a better game then the "perfect start" one.

and i think it was BC I try to play wide at the second game (with alot of vine ship, and as wide as I could). insted of play high, with the first game.
so not sure what to make out of it, but playing wide with a tall empire my be the way.

hoo and btw, at the 2/3 military tech. you can get a battle card called "diplomatic action" that make every ship that cant atk almost immortal (a must tech for PVP)

If im not mistaken the Unfallen can impose peace . Thats OP in its own way early game and you can expand easily.

Imposing Peace comes from the passive Pacifist law, it's very expensive for the early game, can only be used during cold-war and everyone else still has the ability to impose war often for free. So I would not call it OP in any way.

Well you can always make it cheaper and you do start with 20 extra influence, slow early game is part of the profile, it also makes bad starting system a death sentence.
The increase in entwine speed sounds nice and also they made it so that progress on entwining is no longer instantly lost and can be iterated upon later.

Hear hear! ;)

The Unfallen's biggest problem is their strengths, especially early game, are obscenely lopsided. They get to reuse their colony ships... but colonization early game takes twice as long. They start with a bunch of influence, but lack strong early-game laws without a bunch of anomalies. They generate a bunch of food naturally... and also start with a bunch of food generation techs and love them some fertile planets anyways.

Basically, the Unfallen need to diversify their portfolio, especially early game. They have a lot of very strong things that are so strong, balance requires they be gimped in other areas that make them incredibly starting-location dependant. I don't even bother going through a game if I can't immediately colonize a second planet in my system, and if it takes more than three turns to get a vine ship to somewhere I can actually plant my roots, that's another quick restart. I think tweaking Vineships is the first place to start, however. Too much of their strength is in how ludicrous it is late-game to be able to snag basically any system you want in all of 4 rounds with a handful of them. Let alone the fact that the fastest way to entwine planets is taking them from other people.

The5lacker wrote:

Let alone the fact that the fastest way to entwine planets is taking them from other people.

Yeah, this has bothered me a bit as well. Lore wise the Unfallen are supposed to be pacificts, but gameplay wise they're encouraged to field powerful fleets from the start because they have the most vulnerable and easily interruptable colonization method that needs constant protection from early game threats like pirates and cold war aggression, and on top of that acquiring systems through warfare is instant as long as they're close enough to owned systems. If not, the Unfallen will raze the system to the ground. Peaceful indeed.

The lopsided strenghts are also a good point to bring up. Early game colonization is too slow and losing a vineship is a death sentence, making the Unfallen extremely starting system dependent and vulnerable, whereas late game colonization with vineship stacking is way too fast.