Another move in the right direction:
I wish Scifi 4x games would drop the planet tile building and shipbuilding completely - That should really not be a focus for a 4x game in my ideal game.
Which is strange, because I still think Master of Magic is the pinnacle of the 4x genre, and that has the same kind of city planning as Stellaris has planet planning, but for some reason, it just works there and is not a chore in the same way.
Huh? I don’t really see the similarity between cities in MoM and planets in Stellaris?
I disagree, making combos and utilizing designs to gain advantage is the meat of any 4x, combat however could be less hands on than even Stellaris and I think it would be a blast
I don’t like tiles and I wish they went with a more scalable way of representing the tradeoffs in developing a planet. Ship design and building is definitely something that I want in a space 4x, but it can be done in good versus bad ways. They are making ship construction a lot less painful in the next release.
I don’t get whats so painful about it, most 4x games gets dragged down by endless wars in endgame, a simpler combat where you more direct efforts could shave some sweat off that and leave you to optimizing your empire WHICH IS FUN :)
I mean that each city correspond to a planet, and you buy things for your city to use, kinda like how you purchase things for your planets, just on tiles.
I mentioned that ship construction could be painful (e.g. building 200 new corvettes at 20 different space ports) not that hands-off combat is painful.
Well, it can be painful if you lose due to some problem in auto-targeting or whatever, but hands-on combat would be a poor fit for Stellaris.
Each yo his own of course, but I find purchasing a quarry or a generator to be the most mind numbing of all stuff. I want to be emperor, not the municipal city planner.
For me it is build all the mining and science stations, I have over 1k hours in Stellaris and this is way more micro than the buildings on the planets.
I think it would be better if it were just slots with no natural resources in specific tiles. Only general bonuses for the planet like +20% for food production.
It would decrease the micro of having to pick the right tile for the right building in every planet.
The only saving grace is you can stuff every planet into a system and never think about it again. It’s not optimal, but at some point with Stellaris I just stop caring.
Every change Martin Anward makes is a positive one. And he has made a lot of changes. But there is still so much left to sort out in Stellaris. Well, maybe in a year it will be in a place I’m interested in trying it out again!
In terms of complexity only endless space 2 seems more complex leaving the field relatively open, and I’m not sure which one of Stellaris and endless is actually offer more in-depth gameplay.
I like the design of what Stellaris intended: you manage a handful of core worlds, but other than that it’s in the hands of AI governors. The implementation has two major flaws for me, though:
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The Sector AI was abysmal, and not just at release. It was riddled with nasty bugs and often made terrible decisions. This made the player feel like they had to manage all the planets directly, because the AI was so inept. This is especially bad, because if the AI was doing these things with the player sectors, you can almost guarantee the AI players were having the same problem.
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Choosing buildings on planets has had very few interesting/tough decisions for a player to make, it was usually pretty straight-forward on what you should build where. This makes the aforementioned Sector AI problems all the more glaring, because it shouldn’t be that hard to automate.
Those two issues make planetary development unsatisfying for me right now. Hopefully it improves down the road.
I was in the process of posting this, then saw that you were typing, and correctly calculated that I would lose the race :)
I’m like one of three people in the office today, the only person on my team, and I’ve pretty much wrapped up my projects for the year. I don’t have much better to do than camp Twitter waiting for the dev diary! :)
On the DD itself, it seems like mostly good changes, though maybe not as streamlined and extensive as the ideal would be. The fact that they have time to make significant changes to ground combat at all is amazing given all the other stuff.
I like the idea of being able to make a planet a tough nut to crack, but at a significant expense. Also the ability for certain ethics to annihilate through bombardment.
Not being able to defend with assault armies seems off though.
I like the direction on everything wiz is doing
having said that, this game can be revolutionary IF they focus on emergent story telling…the foundation is there with dynamic species…i’d rather have ck2 in space than eu4 in space…there, I said it
I haven’t really seen much in the way of emergent story telling in the updates so far. Mostly it seems about getting the game to play better in the normal EU4/4X way.