So, the Stellaris Utopia expansion, the GalCiv3 Crusade expansion and Endless Space 2 seem like they should all be available “soon”.
I’ve purchased the base games for all three and will probably buy the two expansions. However, with the current home situation, every hour of gameplay is precious. It might be some time before I get around to playing all three in any serious manner. Which should I be diving into first? What do people see as the strengths and weaknesses of each?
I am pretty familiar with Stellaris and I’ve been following the dev diaries for Utopia pretty closely. I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of what is coming in that game, and it’s pretty exciting and a big step forward for the game. On the other hand, I know that Utopia doesn’t fix some of the things I dislike about Stellaris (mainly how wars play out), and I know that still more expansion goodness will be coming down the line. Which makes me tempted to wait a bit longer.
I played GalCiv3 on release and it felt very generic. However, I am excited with Brad back as lead designer, and his approach for Crusade sounds interesting. On the other hand, we can’t really know much about it, and it’s hard to know whether all the moving pieces really work together as a coherent whole. Space 4x is a genre where it’s easy to describe a game that sounds amazing but hard to make a game that isn’t let down by problems in one element or another.
ES2 is a game that I am having a hard time grasping, for some reason. I played the first a bit, but never got around to playing EL much. It seems like they are trying to do a lot with the game, but I am having a hard time figuring out how all the various elements fit together. I guess I would need to play it to get a sense of the whole thing, but I’v been reluctant to dip into the early access when things aren’t finished and in such a state of flux.
If someone held a gun to my head and said I could only choose one of these, so far it’d be Endless Space 2. The Crusade expansion looks fascinating and I can’t wait to play it, and Stellaris…meehhhhhhhh…so that’s my $0.02.
I can’t add quantitative measurements or anything like that, but Utopia is what I’m looking forward to the most and it’s not even close, really. Endless Space 2 has been pretty meh, but I attribute that to it being Early Access. I won’t pass any kind of judgement until it’s released, but it certainly hasn’t grabbed so far. I love Amplitude’s races and style, so I’m sure I’ll enjoy it further down the road.
I feel the same way as you, @MikeJ. GalCiv3 was generic. Crusade definitely sounds interesting and I like the direction Brad is taking it. It has more of a hurdle to climb for me than the other two games and @Island_Dog has a vendetta against me so he makes sure they will never, ever, ever allow for clustered/team starting locations in the game.
Stellaris has it’s share of issues which have been discussed on the forum, but I feel like Unity is bringing a lot to the table. The new features (in theory) target many of the shortcomings of the current game.
Overall, I find a Paradox-style grand strategy game to have a lot more potential than a typical 4X, which I feel has been largely stuck in the mud for the past 20 years. That’s just personal preference, but it’s a big reason I’m more interested in seeing what Utopia brings than the other two right now.
Two logins of a few minutes a day during will cut it in a lower-tier kingdom pretty easily, honestly. 1x/day otherwise.
I mean, at heart, it’s a team-based TBS. Build your province’s land according to your preferred strategy (economy versus military versus ops), make attacks and ops against enemies, work with your teammates to achieve more cohesive strategies. The races are pretty well defined and play fairly differently, and the personalities add a nice component to the mix (so suddenly the normally thief-less, high-offense Undeads can play a pretty potent Attacker-Thief hybrid with the Rogue personality).
It doesn’t pull a lot of punches, and there’ll be a little math sometimes. If you wind up randoming into a highly active kingdom, they’ll ask a lot of you. . . or ask you to move your province elsewhere.
But it’s a ton of fun, and something I played from about 1998 to 2011 or so more or less without a break. I picked it back up last year and have been having an absolute blast.
edit: I think you can also see a lot of this game’s DNA in properties like Clash of Clans and the like. There were a ton of copycat text-based strategy games in the late 90s/early 00s, but nothing ever quite like Utopia (and its partner game, Earth: 2025, sadly shuttered a few years ago).
I used to play a long time ago, like 2002 / 2003.
Eventually I found myself logging in at crazy hours, after coming back from a night out, middle of the night, all to do that “crazy attack”, and stopped.
Doesn’t need much time investment if you can manage to avoid the compulsion…
Endless Space 2 is looking like it’s going to be very solid. But it’s nowhere near done yet. There are some important features missing and balance is all over the place. Wait on this unless you are very curious about the process.
Stellaris remains a mess, despite slow improvement. But war is about the only way to interact with your opponents, and war is dull and boring. Internal management may become more interesting with the next expansion, but I have doubts to go along with my hopes.
I’ve not played GalCiv 3, but I was underwhelmed by the previous game. There is a lot of generic, boring stuff in there. It is probably, however, the most functional and complete of all the games.
So sadly, I can’t really recommend any of them. Go play SotS for some giggles until Endless Space 2 emerges would be my suggestion.
Oh they just had a massive update that includes a single player mission and such, so they’re still plugging along. I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve played of it too.
Crap, I linked to the update and Discourse linked to the video. Sorry.
I’ve been keeping my eye on this game for awhile, just haven’t pulled the trigger.
Out of the games you mentioned, I guess I think GalCiv3 is the least broken of the those games and has the easiest chance to fix. I found the base game bland and boring, but everything Brad has mentioned about Crusades sounds awesome.
