2041

There’s an excellent argument for waiting at least six months to play any game. It will usually be better, and it’s often cheaper (Steam sales, etc). But if it’s a game in a genre you like from a trustworthy developer, it’s not necessarily a terrible idea!

I like the current version of Stellaris. That said, it has some real problems, so I’ll be happy to put it away tomorrow for some WAAAGH! Paradox’s patching plan looks pretty aggressive, so Stellaris should improve quite a bit.

2042

It’s not like you’ll never lose to the AI on Endless Legend without a difficulty setting that gives the AI huge bonuses, either.

Civ V is certainly easier to play.

2043

You’ve got an awesome ability to see the positive in so many games. I wish I could do that. If you’re able to do that in your everyday life too that’s even better and will set you up for a lot of happiness. I’m glad I get to read your posts. (I’m not being snarky)

2044

So, uh, apparently the trick with seeing colonizable worlds? It seems that is already in the game.

Having not had a chance to play myself, I find this interesting. It seems that, currently, one of the issues is that many options are hidden in the UI in such a way that people don’t know them.

2045

Yeah, there is a little box in the lower right corner you can check if you want to always keep that view up, as well. Red planets you don’t have the tech to colonize, yellow you can colonize but it’s not ideal, and green you have the tech and you have no reason not to (generally speaking).

Thanks Rob! Conversely, I’m constantly bummed out when people harsh on a game I’m really enjoying. I also wish everyone could enjoy games as much as I do! :)

2046

That one isn’t so hidden though - I seem to recall even the tutorial mentions it.

However, it only gives you green / yellow / red for a planet existing, it does not tell you anything about it unless you go into the system and click the planet. I’d have liked a summary where I could sort on type and size, for instance.

2047

Like I said, haven’t played it yet. I just know I’ve seen, several times now, some complaint about having to check planets manually to see which are colonizable.

2048

For me, a crucial part of that is my belief in whether a developer is going to address issues. Sector/Economic AI is not working right, it was posted a little upthread that offensive computer settings aren’t working. That’s not too much of an issue to me if I know they’re getting fixed in a week or two. On the other hand, if I have issues like that and the developer never addresses them… then I tend to get a little grumpy… as I’m sure you well know (sorry :)).

2049

That’s totally fair. Plenty of great games with incredible promise have fallen out of rotation and off my hard drive because of stuff like this, for sure.

2050

It’s still fun. As an empire simulator/ story generator/ roleplaying game, I quite enjoy it. As a challenging 4x, there’s work ahead for Paradox.

I’ll be dropping it in about, oh… 13 hours (WAAAAGH!), but I look forward to playing Stellaris again once the patching process has begun in earnest. A bunch of credible people seem to trust Paradox as a developer, so I’m optimistic as well.

2051

I’m still kind of torn about this game. I love the anomaly events, but there aren’t enough of those, and they’re only in the early game anyway. Most of the other systems have been done better elsewhere, in my opinion, and the pacing, bugs and atrocious AI put together kind of kill my enjoyment. Still, I feel it could become a much better game, and I have faith that Paradox will support it for a long time to come, but I think it’ll take more than a couple of patches to turn around, and I honestly don’t know if I want to get into the whole DLC threadmill with this game. In the end I guess I might, though.

What I find most disconcerting, is that Paradox apparently knew about a lot of the problems this game has, and chose to just release it anyway. I guess the time of rigorous testing began and ended with CK2 for Paradox. That Stellaris went on to become the fastest selling Paradox game ever, means that there probably isn’t too much incentive for Paradox to change this kind of behaviour. I actually already promised myself that I would only buy Paradox games as complete bundles a few years after release, but obviously broke that rule for Stellaris. Now more than ever, I want to stick with that.

2052

At my own job, I hate when it comes time to determine a release date with a passion. The owner/CEO is, thankfully, extremely understanding of software development, but there still comes a time when you have to ship and the product is never in a state where we’re super happy with it. There’s always known (but not showstopping) issues and tons of features that couldn’t make the cut. Some we put off for maintenance releases and free updates, others get pushed back to the next major release.

In any case, Paradox pushed this out too early, at least in my opinion. That being said, just because they were aware of issues doesn’t mean they were aware of all the issues. Don’t underestimate how many more bugs/issues hundreds of thousands of people new to the software will uncover compared to 3-4 QA people.

I don’t have any insight, but what it feels like to me is that they didn’t leave enough of a gap between code freeze and release. Some of this stuff (Sector AI in particular) strikes me as things that may have broken during a last dash to get it out the door. The offensive roles not applying bonuses seem like something that a unit test would be able to uncover, but… eh, been there before.

Thankfully for me, the issues for me are bugs/technical in nature, not massive design problems. That’s a good sign, IMO. Bugs can be fixed but if the game is just bad, that’s a different story.

2053

The problem for Paradox is… they were notorious for this problem pre CK2. People would actually remind everyone not buy their game until the first few patches or maybe even the first two expansions. Now I was willing to put up with some of that, but they earned trust again. If they blew their trust on this game, that’s bad. I mean it wasn’t just a minor reputation they had… it was very much a standard response to any game they put out… wait for the patches and expansions.

2054

I agree! And for a title that they have hoped would be their most accessible to the wider market, I doubt it’s something they would intentionally shove out the door in a bad state. I was happy with CK2 and EU4’s release, this one is definitely buggier than I would like. HOI4 is going to be interesting, because I want to see if Stellaris was a blip or a trend. In some ways the latter is much more polished than any of their other games, but on the other hand there seems to be far more bugs than I remember in EU4 1.0.

2055

Which is the odd thing about it. CKII, EU IV, and several of their published games had finally broken that mold. If HoI IV releases with the same kinds of issues, that’s a big hit for Paradox. If, however, it releases as smooth as EU IV then any long term damage should be minimal.

But, yeah, it would be a bad step to fall back to the old ways.

2056

Those games have several years of work behind them, even on release day. CK2 was built on top of CK1 and the Sengoku game, from what I understand. EU4 on top of EU1-3. Etc. This on the other hand is the first game of a new IP, and in fact it’s their first scifi game. That’s why I always expected a game that would need a pair of expansions and half a dozen of meaty updates to reach its potential.

2057

I was under the impression CK2 was not built on CK1 which was why it was stable. CK1 was not a matter of if you would have a crash but when. It was not stable at all, and it sounded like it was just too much work to find all the bugs for them. CK is so unique though many were willing to give CK2 a try with the promise that it would be at least stable… and it is!

2058

But given that it is a new game, the need for gameplay debugging and deep testing is all the greater. It seems like a poor decision to have the initial surge of enthusiasm undercut by fairly obvious problems. They knew they were cutting midgame features to make the release date, for instance. As far as I understand, there was not a financial requirement to release at this time (especially since HoI4 is just around the corner). If any game calls out for a long polishing phase it’s Stellaris.

2059

But Stellaris, like CK II and EU IV, is built on a common engine. Modified, yes, but still many of the fundamentals are in place. That they all use versions of the Clauswitz engine should alleviate some of those problems.

2060

I wasn’t referring to the engine persay. We’re probably getting into game tech speak I don’t know a lot about, but I thought they weren’t using the same codes because say the events in CK 1 were such a mess they were basically tripping over each other and thus causing the bugs CK 1 is notorious for. Once you have enough events going in CK 1, easier to do when you have more people playing, then it’s only a matter of time before two trigger that are incompatible with other and bring it done. I was under the impress CK2 was not built directly on CK1 for that reason.