I haven’t been keeping up with this of late, but I really enjoyed it the last time I played and I’m glad to see we have more story DLC coming very soon.
Robot workers and citizens can now form entirely mechanical societies at the start of the game and seek greatness among the stars – including the ability to rise up and conquer those squishy organics. Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn will be released for Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs later this year.
As someone on their forum said, sounds like it’s adding Skynet, the Borg, and the Culture.
I was hoping for some overhauls to combat (which I think works fine, but I would appreciate the things folks that don’t like the combat are asking for, of course) so maybe that’s coming with whatever patch drops with this content?
They talked about some tweaks to combat in the first dev diary of the cycle.
The big points are making it more effective to use upgraded corvettes (as opposed to spamming a ton of crappy ones) and a rebalancing/reworking of missiles.
They’ve said they really want to rework FTL, static defense, etc but I get the impression that’s longer term.
My last game was pretty good but the changes that they made to the Prethoryn Scourge crises were way too OP for me. It just became tedious fighting unending 100k fleets and I couldn’t make any headway purging their planets. I even had an awakened Ascended Empire as my overlord but he got tired of fighting the scourge and decided to go after some other AI players that he didn’t like instead. I guess you could role play and say that he thought I could handle it but an existential crises like the scourge should get the AI’s full attention.
I could have held my own longer but playing wack a mole with the scourge is really tedious and like I said there was no way to push them back. I could pick off a planet here and there but the wave was unstoppable. I had the ascension perk that gave me +50% damage too…as well as psi drives and shields. I like the idea but it needs some tweaking.
Looking forward to the next update.
Stellaris still needs an endgame. Fighting massive, time consuming blobs at the end of the game gets quite boring. Prior to that it is a wonderful game.
I always liked the idea that the tech tree in these sorts of games should have some really wild, balance-of-power-wrecking uber techs at the end. That would spice things up a bit.
I’ve tried Stellaris twice now; once when it was released and once with the latest patch and I get bored long before I reach the end game.
the sci fi setting screams create a more story driven strategy game…if i was paradox, THATS what I would focus on…emerging story gameplay
and I don’t need to see every freakin ship on the screen…ONE ship that represents my fleet is good enough…eu4 and ck2 don’t represent every soldier on screen, why the @#$$ does stellaris?? !!!
there, I just fixed your game for you…make it so
The best part of the game to me is the initial system/planet exploration and all the cool stuff you find, complete with all the little mini-quest type stuff. I love that. That part plays almost like some kind of sci-fi RPG. A blend of more of that with more emergent story stuff and strategy stuff that’s actually interesting mixed in would be my dream game.
I don’t think that anyone would bitch about a little more Starflight in our Stellaris, but Stellaris isn’t Starflight. It’s a 4X.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? People still try to copy MoO and what a 4X is SUPPOSED to look like.
This genre has hardly experienced any evolution in the last 20 years and I also wish modern “4X” games could see the value in more RPG elements. CK2 is a great example for that.
Synthetic Dawn/1.8 release date is now listed as September 21 on Steam.
I just wish they copy MOO straight-up. Almost every one tries to add their own spin on it that screws it up.
The same thing can be said about MoM. I just wanted an updated UI / Graphics that will work on a modern system. A better AI would help a lot, but other than that, do not change anything. Do not try and balance it or “fix” it in any way.
Well, Stellaris is a pretty different game from MoO, and I think that’s a good thing. I think modelling pop preferences and factions and internal power struggles is a pretty deep vein to mine, and they are really only scratching the surface.
I do too. I find it kind of funny, I always hear “I just want them to redo MOO/MOO2”. But when NeuMOO came out, a complaint that was frequently leveled against it was that it was just a clone and they didn’t add anything new.
It’s almost like game devs can’t win. :) I don’t think you could pay me enough to be in the business, at least in any sort of public-facing capacity!
I didn’t like NeuMOO because I thought it missed pretty much everything that made MOO great. But then, I didn’t particularly like MOO2.
Yeah, NeuMoo really had some bewildering design choices.
I agree, nostalgia is just such a bitter pill, move on will ya