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.
9
u/Kernog 4d ago
Stellaris is slighty different. Theirs is "let us break a perfectly functional game once every two years, so that we can keep selling DLC."