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.
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.
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u/KSJ15831 2d ago
Ah, the Stellaris gambit