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.
