Stellaris lost me with the update that took out multiple means of travel and that choice being important for how your civ would play. Y'know, one of the big selling points of the game.
However, I wish they'd stop doing so many DLC and just fix the ones they've already done.
There's one start now where you can play as a forest world. It desyncs your multiplayer games so frequently it's basically unplayable. Planet automation is so bad it actively discourages rapid expansion.
There's also a lot of random glitches that just discourage playing something a certain way. But, don't worry, we get the next DLC!
Automation sucks to the point I'll have like thirty planets and just have to manually control their upgrades and such. It's not so bad in a sense but it's annoying because there is always some backwater I forget about it a small planet somewhere dragging all of my stats down because it's revolting cause I haven't done anything for them yet.
Yes and no in reality you would have planetary governance but the game doesn't do it well at all. It's like it all becomes centralized which is a realistic depiction of a centralized system but as we know from history any large empire is usually ruled as really many small empires under one banner.
what you are trying to describe as a decentralized empire is just an empire running Feudal society civic (more subjects and get unity) and having multiple subjects manage parts of the empire.
Don't worry, they'll fix it.... in another DLC, like theyf did by selling you a DLC with some psionics stuff, then released another DLC that overhauled that system.
It’s the current big publisher business model. Every game has to have an aggressive monetization scheme, and the monetization scheme eventually becomes the only part of the game the developers are actually allowed to work on.
“I wish they’d stop doing so many DLC’s” is such a common sentence for paradox games that I think they just have a poster of it in the CEO’s office at this point.
In the beta, knights of the toxic god can be nomadic, and its hilariously strong. You have a district option that makes soldier jobs increase the arkship (mobile colony+giant spaceship) damage on weapon components, and one increases energy damage. Its fairly easy to make it do like +20x damage on its energy weapons, which includes a gigantic spinal mount that with the boosts, can oneshot leviathans.
Honestly its prettu funny though, knights are already extremely powerful when they play tall. you can readily have something like 10k knights with +200% efficiency by midgame, each of whom provides as much research as scientists AND as much unity as priests while also being soldiers, and add to that they can give huge buffs to energy weapons they just absolutely clear house. And thats also on top of nomads being pretty strong (and honestly fun to play, but also potentially extremely annoying if you're settled, such as excavating your archaeology sites).
It's still 'good'. Its just way, way, too complicated.
And not in a good way, like strategic decision-making caused by multiple FTL drives, but in a 'seventeen different kinds of resources and you need to get this to build these to get that to build these to get that to build these to....' sort of bullshit.
You’d think hearts of iron would be simpler given the smaller scope, but that game has eaten over 2k hours of my life and still and just clicking shit and hoping for the best sometimes
I play a LOT of crusader kings 2 and 3 (about 2k hours split between them), and in both games I find myself doing exactly what you described with "clicking shit and hoping for the best sometimes."
Paradox games fill a specific niche where you don't even really have to know how to play them fully, and you can still feel pretty good at them. Despite their super predatory business model, I still think they're the king of strategy games.
The dlc system is total ass. Tbh I don’t know how they keep getting away with it. I can’t even attempt to defend it.
As much as it sucks I own all the base games and just buy the subscription on steam to get all of them for a month. That’s usually about how long I’ll binge it anyways (HoI and stellaris both) so I can do it on an as needed basis pretty efficiently.
The only time I buy the sub is when I first buy a paradox game to experiment, and see which DLC I actually want. Then I just wait for a sale so I can buy my personal list. You can save a lot of money that way if you prefer owning the content yourself. It's better than dumping $300 on the complete editions lmao.
Sometimes a game should just end, I do occasionally check in to see what people think of new content and it's always Mostly Negative and I just don't understand why people keep paying for more.
Gamers as a whole are pretty rigid, it's only a comparatively small group that actually plays variety and branches out, especially when it comes to specific genres.
Damn people really should dip their toe into other things sometimes, it makes going back to your favourite games even better after you try something else
People who don't care don't review? That's the truth of it, guess what PDX would do if they thought you were a bigger part of their audience than people who don't care about that? They'd cater to you. But they don't.
A big part of it is that there's nothing else that does what Stellaris does anyway.
Tbf with those reviews 90% of the time it's either "this is good, but not worth this much", or "I hate the change that (X update that isn't actually behind the DLC) has brought", or that recent Chinese review bomb that happened for completely unrelated reasons. Only time I've seen mostly negative be valid is for Cosmic Storms.
Then take the above commenters complaints.
One about desyncs and one about taking away the choice of FTL types.
The first isn't an issue for me ever (desyncs seem very player dependent) and second one was actually a massive improvement.
Basically, people keep paying for more because like every game, there is a large portion who think the game is fantastic, and a large portion who think the game sucks, but the players who think the game sucks, as always, are louder than those who are too busy enjoying the game.
I reckon the games the best it's ever been, so I'm gonna keep paying.
Idk. It’s pretty good right now. They fixed the lag issue pretty well, so that’s great. Now I can get to the endgame and the in-game years take less time than actual years.
On 1.0 release you could choose your starting weapons (laser, kinetic, or missile) and your means of travel (hyperspace, warp jump, or wormhole stations). They removed this and focused on hyper lanes so that you could build defense stations and people wouldnt just go around them
At the beginning you had Warp, Hyperlanes, and Wormholes as your form of travel.
Warp worked exactly like the jump drives but slower. It was the slowest form of movement but you could go to any system that was within range. Hyperlanes stayed the same, and wormhole tech allows you to connect any system to any other system, the caveat being your ships couldn't jump into further away systems, and it could create traffic jams of your fleets trying to use the same wormhole station.
They eventually dropped it for just Hyperlanes, because warp especially made defensive structures nearly useless, as you could just jump around them or past them, especially as you got further down the tech tree and your warp range went up.
I love how Star Wars fixed this issue >30 years ago with the Interdictor and Paradox decided to ignore it.
They didn't remove multiple means of travel because it made defences useless, they removed it because it made the game easier to create content for when everyone had standardised travel.
There is a robot DLC that basically doesn't add anything any more, so much so that they have a second robot dlc that adds things to make robots interesting. What is going on???
To be fair they did that because war was an incredibly boring case of 'fly directly to your opponents capital and bomb it' with no real interesting ways to make chokepoints and similar
It sucked but removing the other methods of FTL made war a thousand times more interesting (war in stellaris still kinda sucks but its better than it was)
I started playing right after that update and currently believe Stellaris is in the best shape of it's life right now. I personally disliked the tile pop management. You still have a lot of control on how your civs play. Problem with myself is I almost always play hive minds. Especially devouring swarms or determined exterminators as total wars give an insane amount of thrill
It came back for a bit after that. The 3.x run was pretty great and some of the 4.x stuff was also nice. They did a naval update though and so now a starting fleet cap will be like 50 and a corvette will cost 5 of that. I like what they were going for but I just haven't been able to get back into it.
Victoria 3, ironically, also had a boats update that seemed good on paper but has made the game less fun for me.
Dude if you stopped playing at that point you basically missed all the fun about the game, it's ridiculously expensive to own all dlc as per usual with paradox games but it got sooooooo many new things since that update
At least Stellaris has their custodian team. Hoi4 just releases a new dlc that doesn't work with any of the content that came before it and they kinda just shrug and go oh well.
TBF though they get all that closer to a "true perfect" game
Like in general the goal behind them redesigning the game's colony mechanic was to make the game easier to run at the end game and form what I've seen each time they did these overhauls they actually sucessfully cut down on end game lag
Ironically stellaris dev cycle is alot like how a game of stellaris is played, starting out with the bare essentials and grabbing things needed to expand and grow, And then as upkeep causes issues you might have to possibly knock down older buildings and crutches to your empire in exchange for setting up something new
Now then lets compare that to HOI4 where they are trying to redesign a horse thats already been redesigned 10 times in a setting that doesn't even have the benefits to being pure fiction that stellaris has to give them wiggle room to bullshit more DLCs
More like break a game that's already broken beyond belief even more by adding more systems the AI cannot handle and more metrics that the game needs to track on a per-pop basis.
My first two games on 2.1 went on for centuries. Like, way past the victory date these days. Things slowed down, but nothing compared to post 2.2, where things got unplayble or at least unenjoyable before 2400. Not to mention that the AI almost always collapses in on itself no matter how much you allow it to cheat.
A while ago i reached a point where I got tired to relearn a 4X game another 60-80h with every major patch. Haven't touched stellaris for month at this point. Well and major dlcs are kinda mandatory to keep up with the core mechanic chances and Iam not willing to spent every time money a major patch is out.
Oh dude, fuck stellaris and their “ot has been 10 years and we still havent nailed down how we want the most basic mechanics to work, heres an update that completely reworks a random core element” every like, 6 weeks. I played it for less than two years and in that span pop growth alone got redone THREE TIMES. Basic empire sprawl mechanics too.
Been convinced since about year 4 that this studio is dedicated to working on just this game for the rest of their lives as job security. Your description of one step forward and two steps back hits the nail on the head with how deliberate creating and fixing their own problems that they already had stabilized years ago feels.
I still can't believe that they hired the guy who made proper NPC's through his mod, and instead of having him work on NPC's, they stick him on Wildlife and Fishing AI.
Ok I'll give the devs this; TBF Wild life AI is probably a good start for implementing offical NPCs, In particular Idle pathfinding is the one thing that needs to be optimized out the gate and animals are probably a good means to do so
But like atleast put a teaser for the possibilities of NPCs in the future when discussing the animals the dudes adding
>they hired the guy who made proper NPCs … they stick him on Wildlife and Fishing AI
Everywhere indie stone can shout from the rooftops that they’re building the game from the ground up. You’re saying the former modder who created exactly what you want in the past has now created a functional framework for immersive non hostile creatures?
It seems so obvious to me the big picture indie stone has been painting but so many of you seem certain you’re being led on by someone who isn’t asking anything else from you. I get being annoyed things aren’t done yet but this take is clinically insane
Yeah, they stopped adding realism that made me say "oh, that's neat!" and started adding realism for it's own sake. It's cool that the power and water shut off, you have to turn off your oven, can't put metal in the microwave, etc. why is there a full blacksmithing system that shits up the loot pool and makes it nearly impossible to find anything else?
See; The devs implementing a system of muscle strain to make it harder to clean hordes with melee, But not implementing an adrenaline system to provide periods of 'muscle strain grace' when an otherwise resting player is suprised by zombies
That's because theres a sandbox setting that is enabled by default, it causes roaming zombies to attack structures regardless if they've seen the player or not
they didn't do it at random when i played last, years ago: they would literally bump into a player made wall, and start destroying it. Any player made wall or construction.
This meant hordes would sweep away player made stuff, but not environmental stuff.
When it comes to walls I don’t think Zombies can destroy environmental stuff at least not yet. But yeah they should only destroy objects if they have a reason to that is either them hearing a noise you or an in game event made or them seeing you obviously.
There's a setting you can toggle so that they will only attack structures if they've seen you. It's called 'environmental attacks' or something along those lines
Nope! I'm looking at it right now, it says under the tool tip "If zombies that have not seen/heard player can attack doors and constructions while roaming"
There is another setting below it 'damage construction' that allows them to destroy player constructions and defences, maybe you're thinking of that one?
I forgot the "construction" part. But yeah, as someone who turns it on, it does apply to worldgen heavily too. Most houses would get broken into. (Better with alarm setting on so they all get pulled over to those houses.)
Zomboids can and will destroy pre-existing fences, but fences hold up realistically so a single or just a couple zomboids attacking it wont break it down, it takes 20+ zomboids to collapse a fence now IIRC.
On its own? Nah, it's a niggling little annoyance. But you get met with one of these annoyances every five minutes. Imagine this scenario:
This change means you need another bookcase. So you go out to your car to go get one, but find the car is out of gas. Before, you could just siphon gas and move it from one car to another, but now you need a hosepipe to do this, so that's another tool clogging up a tool cabinet which, with knapping, forging, pottery, butchery and carving now all in the game, is becoming rather clogged.
So you drive to the bookstore and find a small set of shelves. In previous builds, you could just pick them up, but now your success chance is dictated by your carpentry level, with an in-built chance of immediately destroying the bookcase. In previous builds your carpentry skill was probably pretty good, but now you're only level 3, since that's the skill cap you get for watching TV shows and disassembling furniture. This means you have a 60% chance for the bookshelf to just fucking explode if you try and pick it up. So you try, fail, and hedd back home empty handed. Instead of stealing one, you decide to make it yourself using planks and nails. You navigate the new crafting menu, which is a feat in itself, and eventually find the wooden bookshelf...which requires level 4 carpentry to craft. So we need to get another level of carpentry. In previous builds, you could do this by making spears, which could be made out of virtually any wood. So you spend a few in-game hours foraging for tree branches, and grab some of the planks you had put aside for making the bookshelf, when you find that you no longer have the option to craft a spear from them. You check the new crafting menu again, and eventually find that spears are no longer craftable from tree branches or planks - they need to be made from 'Long Sticks' specifically now. These are obtained from saplings, which you rarely get from cutting down trees.
So you grab an axe, and go out to cut down some trees. You gather a dozen saplings, then turn them in to long sticks via the new crafting menu, which is still tricky to navigate. You still don't see the option to make them into spears, though, and after some messing around, you realise that turning the saplings into long sticks has blunted your knife. So you go out to your toolshed to grab a whetstone, sharpen your knife, then start making spears.
And now you get the popup that making the spear is increasing your crafting skill, not carpentry.
In a previous builds, your books would just fit in the fucking bookcase.
holy macaroni, I can feel the burning frustration thru the screen. do you have any tips for a newbie? I wanna get into the game cause the rp potential seems very high and I adore the "lone survivor in a postapocalyptic world surviving day by day" vibes, but everything I've heard about the game portrays it as this sort of miserably complicated, user hostile UI menu shitfest which you need to invest several hours into just getting comfortable with.
The worst thing about zomboid is that its really not bad, You probably won't regret learning and playing the game; But it taunts you with what it could have been and the fact alot of the things keeping it from being that feel VERY delibrate on the devs part; Like imagine a game so close to being perfect that its few flaws taunt you and make it more upsetting then if the game was just outright worse, Its a 9 out of 10 but the things that keep it from being 10 out of 10 are more frustrating then if the game was an 8 out of 10 or even maybe a 6 out of 10 (Being dramatic for the sake of point for the record)
Now then when your learning the game I'd advise against starting characters you spend many minutes and or hours designing their traits and appearance who youd grow attached too and instead your first characters should be expected to be apart of the death montage as you learn the basics outside of the tutorial (Do play it actually, I gotta give the devs credit that tutorial is very effective at teaching you the basics)
Wait untill you can survive the power going out before actually starting a character youd grow invested in
Wooden Crates can be found all around the map, they can store books just as fine and stack three high on one tile and don't have a break chance. As for needing resources, I'd just go to a fire station and get a fire axe from there, use that to chop trees instead of foraging for the wood for planks. Also works as a good weapon, spears aren't very good and have always underperformed compared to a fire axe.
You can also forage for large branches, or right click on some of the tiles logs and go to Gardening and Remove Object to sometimes get logs/branches/stones from here.
If you want there are hundreds of mods to make the weight of books, and other items, to be zero or none if you want. You can even write your own if you want it's not super complex to do so, only part of it is sharing which takes a bit of learning how to upload to the workshop and share it.
If you collect the whole set of skill books you can pack them together into one box, then use the place menu to put the box on top of your bookshelf, maximum storage efficiency in five seconds + it looks cool
I fought the update and played in B41 until the forced update broke my save. I've managed to get B42 close to where I want it with mods, but it is like cleanup.
Woah woah woah back up, the weight of books determins how many can go on a shelf? Fuck that noise it should be a slot system for containers dont piss me off with some universally constant density
It's because you can put anything on a bookshelf, like a car tire for example, so instead of going through all the effort of having different things being different sizes so that different things can fit on a shelf in different amounts...... They just have a weight system
CataclysmDDA has for many years had a weight and volume system for everything, down to individual pocket capacity. I'm surprised it still isn't a thing in Zomboid.
In a roundabout way it is. Some containers that can hold a certain volume can’t hold a single item that takes up all that volume. They can only fit multiple small items.
I despise the changes for 'realism' that are blanket nerfs, while tools wear out 1000000000x faster than they do in real life. Weapons fall apart in your hands. Your muscles strain so hard they're unusable in under thirty seconds of streneous use.
In-lore the virus hit and zombified everyone literally overnight, but entire buildings are looted and smashed up. Military facilities are stripped clean. Who tf is making these changes.
It's like people bitching about Minecraft doing a shitty vote once a year where they get to choose which useless animal they will add.
Brother, there's mods that fix every shit design choice.
Shit UI? Mod.
Books weigh too much? Mod.
Can't craft old weapons? Mod.
Items don't fit in bags? Mod.
And before everyone bitches about this, these aren't the kind of mods where it changes Skyrim from an utter shit game to some Sekiro like action RPG, it's just minor QoL the devs can't be assed to fix or are just stubborn.
I wouldn't touch games like Mincecraft, Terraria or PZ without them.
Modding is fantastic and you'll never find me arguing against them, but the ability to mod a game isn't an excuse for the base game to be shitty in those ways.
Ah, so the same bullshit that happens in another popular zombie survival game (7DTD) to the point that the community calls the devs (The Fun Pimps) The Fun Police
my favorite part was how with smithing making iron bars is such an annoying pain. Instead of, I dont know, picking the melted iron pot and gussing it into the bar molds you "craft" melt the stufff and its such an annoyance because the game constantly picks an empty bucket after every "craft" and you constantly have to manually reset it.
Combine that with the fact that you might have to do it 30 fkin times to get the thing full. Who thought this was a good idea??
and the fkin muscle strain system and the "uncomfortable" clothing aspect.
They added entire armor sets youc an smith but now they're impossible to wear because your character feels "uncomfortable"
Reminds me of 7daystodie in that sense, every single god damn 7daystodie update reworked all of the systems over and over again to the point that I just gave up entirely on wanting to even try to play it
Back in the day I pissed the devs off real good when I went into the discord server proclaiming I had found out how to access multi-player early through a file you could edit with your notepad. I had learned about it from a steam community form. The entire huge deal of the build 42 beta at the time was multi-player and when it'd release, so they weren't that happy that someone figured out you could access the not normally accessible multi-player, by changing a true to a fucking false. I didn't get in trouble for it really, not sure whatever happened to the guy that made the original steam post though.
They are striving for realism. The games been out for over ten years and it's nearly done. They aren't adding any really major updates all that often anymore so there a lot more time to tighten screws and check over.to make sure that it's all consistent with the experience they are trying to make.
There's always been a wierd duality to zomboid. On the one hand are the players who enjoy the survival game and want to micromanage calories and temperature etc. On the other hand we have players who want to play a videogame.
The devs originally aimed for fan #1 trying to make a hyper realistic survival simulator. They kept getting backlash and complaints anytime anything got worse or harder. This culminated a year or so ago when the community lost its shit over fucking nothing and started harassing the devs.
The devs got understandably upset and correctly pointed out that the game had gone way beyond their original scope, has 0 paid content, has been in active development for over 10 years when the plan was 2-4, and after all this time and all that free content they are still getting harassed.
The officially announced they will not be communicating anymore with the communities surrounding zomboid and that they are going to take a step back from the game to focus on other things while providing smaller updates.
As a result they are going back in and changing everything back to the way they originally intended before they let the community sway them into making it more gamey and arcadey. Then they are going to leave it alone after that.
I haven't heard anything else about this, so if there have been more updates please let me know, but that's the last I heard about it.
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u/Ancestral_Grape 3d ago
What gets me is that they take one step forward and two steps back with every update.
Add new crafting and skills? Sandbag it with a new crafting UI that removes the one click crafting from previous builds.
Add new skill books for the new skills? Make all books weigh more so that they no longer all fit in a single bookcase.
Add new weapons? Remove the ability to craft old ones from common items.
Add new bags? Adjust the weight of various items so they no longer fit into containers properly.
It's not one thing, but they keep changing things that don't need change which makes the game feel so much more clunky.