Thanks guys. I think I’ll wait. There are plenty of decent games on my backlog, going to play some more Afghan 11, and may even give Civ VI another shot.
But first I’m going to land on Duna in Kerbal Space program!
Personal opinion, as a massive Paradox fan. The game needs one more major patch to be Very Good, one that removes the micro from war and/or makes it more interesting. Wars aren’t very interesting, it’s just doomstack vs. doomstack, so if it isn’t going to be interesting they at least need to reduce the micro for conquering.
To be on the top tier of Paradox games I think it will need a total makeover with CK2 interpersonal scheming or Victoria level politics and social movements. That being said, I vastly prefer grand strategy games to 4x games, so that may just be my bias showing through.
As it is, the game contains alot of interesting and fun content with the various patches and Leviathins/Utopia that has come since launch, it’s worthwhile playing sometime even if it weren’t to receive any more patches.
I don’t think the latest patch really improves end game much at all. War is just a pain in the ass in this game, and unless you’re diplomacying yourself all over the place with a bigger fleet, also not fun, I find late mid game and end game still not worthwhile at all.
I still adore, love, the first few hours of exploration, discovery and early events.
As someone who actually enjoys the game a fair bit, I actually think it will need two more major patches to be Very Good. It needs a huge war overhaul. Everything about it from static defenses to war goals to doomstacks to weapon balance to ground invasion needs to be handled better. But it also needs a huge diplomacy overhaul, with meaningful trade, better federation mechanics and either espionage or some kind of system to non-violently influence the course of galactic events.
IMO Stellaris needs an endgame to be very good. While I agree emphatically that combat and diplomacy both need overhauls, the real bugger is the lack of an endgame. Once I have blobbed out then the only thing left to do is constantly invade other empires. Federations are problematic because your partners often do not want to go to war. Getting enough friends in your federation is not much fun either. So there I sit, attacking every 10 years in order to get enough planets to trigger victory. In the 80 hours I have played Stellaris I still have not won a game because the endgame just completely bores the tears out of me.
Playing a peaceful empire is especially boring, since you can’t even form a Federation when you’re prohibited from aggressive warfare. More diplomatic options along with espionage would be a big plus.
That was pretty good. Thanks for the link.
I’m going to read all the other short stories on that site!
Personally by the end, I don’t need those planets, I wish I could just blow up the planet or wipe out all life on it and move on. Not take a bunch of planets with troops so i can get my war demands met which give me a fourth of what I had to take to get them to surrender. Rinse, repeat.
You can use the “cleanse planet” war demand if you have the right ethics. That means if you win the war they just abandon the planet, basically. And they’re adding planet buster type weapons.
Thanks, I’d never read that!
So in the early days of Dwarf Fortress, some people from Something Awful started a fortress and then handed it off to the next player in line after one in-game year. So each year the fort was run by a different player. This started out well, but slowly descended into madness and depravity. It’s an epic tale. Someone just found the remains of the place in Stellaris.
If you’re interested in reading the story, just Google Boatmurdered :)
Man I remember that, I should go read that again.
Defensive pacts should only kick in when the empire is the victim, right? Some jackass started a war with a militant isolationist fallen empire, and I got dragged in because of a defensive pact. The warscore screen shows us as the attackers. Luckily they are far away, so trying to stay out of it. The traditions and ascension perks are nice. Makes it tough deciding which paths to take.
When I’ve formed defensive pact, I often got options to support offensive wars, but I never got dragged into one that I can recall. That’s very strange.
Maybe I misunderstood something, but I don’t think I had an option. The game went south really fast after that. The war didn’t really go anywhere and ended after some skirmishes between my partner and the fallen empire. I ended my pact with him after that. Right after the war though, the other fallen empire became awakened. This triggered the fallen empire that he started the fight with to become awakened. And while they were getting ready to party, these people show up from another dimension right at the edge of my border and start beating the crap out of me. No one is trying to do anything with the folks from the other dimension as they depopulate my area of the galaxy, so I basically became a vassal to the awakened fallen empire by me, hoping he’d step in. He hopped in beat on the invaders for a bit, but didn’t finish them off, because it was time for the war in heaven. So while he is off fighting with the other fallen empire, they finally killed off the rest of my empire. As I was down to my last 3 systems, and was being hammered again, I insulted the fallen empire that was supposed to protect me, and he showed up to smack down one of the attacking fleets, but then he left again to continue his war with the fallen empire.
It truly was a war in heaven though. There was a small group that tried to remain neutral, but just about everyone was involved.
[quote=“Eric_Majkut, post:3173, topic:77250”]
Boatmurdered
[/quote]Wow its been 10 years.
I started replaying this for the first time since launch and the lasting feeling I have after playing a game is vague disappointment.
Everything is lesser than the sum of it’s parts.
Ship design seems less useful, whether I pick laser, kinetic or missiles I just potter away at researching the next upgrade in between other designs. There isn’t really a need for optimal design except when facing awakened empires or end game crises, and the differences between the three largely meaningless (I get that there are differences).
The different FTL capabilities still seem like they were designed by someone who read how Sword of the Stars worked but never actually played the game. I can still remember how frantic trying to destroy a newly built Hiver Gate in one of your systems could be.
Ship supply/fleet limit is largely meaningless.
Research is rarely interesting and as someone else pointed out on thread, rarely particularly meaningful when it comes to ships. Upgrades and bonuses aren’t compelling or or interesting, and you’re rarely offered the chance to research something that offers new capabilities or game changing consequences (e.g. jump drive).
Ethics/Civics/Government types/Factions/Species Modifications are also largely meaningless. I mean, you can use them for roleplaying and for creating your own narrative, but from a gameplay perspective, they offer little.
Ground combat is just pants. It’s pointless, detracts from the game and is just irritating minutiae. It doesn’t expand or elaborate on tactical and strategical opportunities, it’s just a box that has to be ticked. “Oh I must remember to have enough armies+1 to invade” at the start of each way.
Space combat is similarly pants on both a strategic and tactical level. Strategically, the lack of meaningful supply from a distance point of view (i.e. my fleet can go across an entire galaxy as long as I’m willing to wait) and from a time point of view (my fleet can be in enemy systems for years with nary a drawback) is crap. Ironically, this is something the EU series have always excelled at and yet they’ve built a space game that completely fails to model what effect distance from home over time has on units. It’s too simple to build a bigger fleet, defeat their fleets incredibly quickly and the war is one, even if it takes 2 years to actually gain enough warscore for actual victory. EU4 wars could last years without there ever being a clear victor, in Stellaris it’s clear from the first battle (or before).
Tactical space combat, well there is no tactical space combat.
Diplomacy feels like it was tacked on last moment and had no time spent on figuring out how to integrate it into the rest of the game.
The game is still a mess. It’s perfectly playable, but it rarely produces anything coherent and is never compelling beyond the expansion phase. Indeed, I suspect it would be a much better game with a fully colonised galaxy featuring 30-50 small+large expanded empires that you had to play in.
Given that with a year’s development they haven’t touched upon any of the what I see as key flaws in Stellaris, I don’t see any reason to expect that they ever will. I think they wanted to create a franchise as complex as CK/EU/Vicky in space, without having actually created a solid underlying game to start adding a lot of complexity too. It also feels like it didn’t have a proper design document, or else had 5 of them and no overall design doc.
Kedaha, it sounds like you experienced more than “vague disappointment,” lol. It seems you hate everything about Stellaris. I agree that the game could use a logistics (supply) system for fleets beyond a size limit – e.g., the fuel limits in Distant Worlds – and I agree that diplomacy could use an upgrade. Personally, I’d like to see a CK2-meets-Stellaris expansion.
Still and all, I find the exploration and development pretty fun, I like the limited pool of leaders and pops and special ships, I enjoy the semi-randomized research, I like the space combat, and I enjoy the mini story arcs. After reaching the midgame I do start to lose interest, but I’ve already gotten many hours of fun out of Stellaris. I do think it needs more features to make it a truly compelling game.
Two things, I noticed warp charge time became longer and longer the further I was away from my regions, so that’s something, also ship design isn’t straight forward, you will loose if you just mount railgun x 9 on a ship, I got my ass handed to me, points don’t tell the entire story.
That said, if they only did a remakeof sword of the stars, why Kerberos whyyyyyyy…
They self destructed their second sword game trying to solve the blob issue, I say, it doesn’t have to be solved, there are ways to solve it that is in game…one huge fleet defending a big area is its own problem.