I think we are into “haters gonna hate” territory with SlyFrog. The latest Stellaris expansion could pop out of the box, sing a tune, give oral, revamp the game, whistle God Save the Queen and it still would not be enough for some people.
I would have been fine if the original game I purchased (over a year ago I think) had it in there from the start, instead of making me pay extra money for a good game.
And before you say it, I’m sure it was an absolutely wonderful, complete game out of the box for you. Fanboys gonna suck off developers and publishers.
So games you don’t like shouldn’t put out DLC? (We’ll just ignore the game is well reviewed and quite popular outside of Qt3). I just don’t buy DLC for games I don’t like, you should do the same.
I love how anyone who likes a product you don’t is a fanboy. I quite enjoyed Stellaris out of the box and got something like 70 hours of entertainment out of it, but admit is could use some changes. I have no problem paying $20 if it gives me another 70 hours.
Not yet, you can only pre-order from Paradox. I buy from there as I kinda like having games on my Paradox account where possible. It gives you a Steam key as well.
Yeah it’s really annoying since they having that 3 for 2 dlc sale for EU4 as well. I asked whether they would honour it as it wasn’t going to be fixed before the sale ends and it wasn’t my issue (you gotta ask) but no reponse, unsurprisingly.
I’m in NZ btw so an issue with Oceania/Australasia?
Yeah.
I swear I can remember a process where you can take a cd-key bought from steam and add it to your Paradox account.
Heh so it’s a form letter. Guess they’re getting a few tickets about it…
I replied to ask whether I could buy on Steam and transfer to Paradox, but no response.
They had a process in place for that with the base game, but if you can also do that with the new expansion please let me know! :)
Hmmm I’m wondering if this does anything
Adds fancy badges to your forum profile and gives you avatar options based on the games you own.
Ah yeah just saves you manually entering keys. Seems it doesn’t give you the Paradox versions of the games.
Just realised, the Stellaris process only gives you the Paradox version for as long as your Steam account stays linked to your Paradox account. I guess that may be to stop people buying on Steam then refunding. :/
I was surprised to hear of the issues with the Paradox store in AU/NZ. I purchased Apocalypse just before the sale they had on and had no problems.
Same here, I got it as soon as it was announced via PayPal and had no problems.
So…uhhh…the Contingency…errr…that seems challenging to say the least…I thought the AE were strong but they are getting stomped like everyone else.
I do not know about sucking them off - I will leave that to your fantasies - but I would not mind thanking them for the 244 enjoyable hours (so far) I have spent playing the game despite its flaws.
I had fun with Stellaris at launch, but it was definitely a flawed game. That being said, I’ve been purchasing and playing flawed games since I got into this hobby in the 80’s. Some are flawed to the point where I just dislike them. Some are flawed but I can enjoy them despite their shortcomings (Stellaris). But flaws aren’t flaws anymore, they’re apparently “DLC holes”, despite the fact that the vast majority of the issues are being addressed in a free update that everyone gets regardless of an expansion purchase.
Yeah, I could find a few of those in their other games, but Wiz and Daniel (I think he’s Daniel) have been pretty good at making the base game good. Which makes the DLC overpriced since it has less things, but what can you do?
Do you feel Stellaris is a noticeably more complex game now than at launch? I’d agree with less buggy (though it wasn’t particularly buggy to begin with), but I don’t feel that it’s any more complex now than it was at launch.
I have a tendency to get absorbed into repetitive games when I’m bored and simply want to pass time, and I’ve spent a while thinking about what I, as a player, spend most of my time doing in Stellaris, and whether the decisions or actions I make in that time result in meaningful outcomes.
Planetary buildings: I respect tile bonuses and generally early-midgame tiles without bonuses goes to energy production, and midgame onward is swapped to mineral production.
I’m not convinced that anything to do with planetary buildings adds meaningful depth, trade offs or choices and couldn’t be replicated with a “respect bonuses and build to balance energy and mineral production” rule that would remove endless hours of repetitive and pointless clicking. The sector AI doesn’t adequately perform this, and even in viewing other Empires’ planetary construction, the AI is still laughably bad at something as simple as this. Actually, I don’t know why planets just don’t have energy/mineral/food/research stats and no building production.
Science ships are the most ‘rewarding’ part of the game but again, what meaningful depth do they add, what choices and trade-offs, and what complexity do they offer?
Technology upgrades (beyond rare items like jump drive) are very iterative and not particularly noticeable in practice. There are no real trade offs, and the randomisation of available techs to research doesn’t add anything of consequence.
The building of stations is a given. Unless suffering a crisis of energy production, you will build all available stations and all available spaceports.
The only choices I have found that make a noticeable difference are:
Species Creation
Frontier Outpost locations (i.e. early ‘marking’ of territory)
Decisions on going to war (but not other forms of political interactions)
Ship Design
My path through Traits and Ascension Perks varies wildly but I’ve yet to find it ever make a real difference. Tactical decisions around planetary invasion, where to send fleets etc are meaningless as every war boils down to a climactic blob vs blob battle the winner of which takes all the spoils.
The EU series since its inception, for whatever criticism I may have of it, has been very well designed at ensuring that wars do not end quick, and the end of a war is not the end of an empire. In Stellaris, the end of the battle is the end of the war is the end of the empire, even if it will take several more wars to gobble up all of its territory. The first loss starts an inevitable decline, except in the case of player empires where you can quite easily game the AI into stupidity.
(I have 700 hours of EU4 and would have thousands more hours of EU1/EU2. Between my brother and I sharing Stellaris, we’re up to ~200 hours)
I’d really like to give the whole tile the old heave-ho. IMO, you still want some kind of capital cost to access resources, but that could be done in a more straightforward way that would be completely trivial to automate. Ditching tiles would also allow separation of resources and production, concentrating population on certain core worlds, etc.
On the other hand, some people seem to like their little worlds with people, and would view a less clicky approach as akin to the dreaded spreadsheet gameplay.
That’s a great question! With the great big caveat that I haven’t played in quite some time (shortly after Utopia launch, maybe?), my initial response would be… a little, perhaps. I did like the inclusion of unity, traditions, etc and I felt like changes they made to Ethics/species creation made them more interesting and feel more impactful than 1.0 was. I haven’t played Synthetic Dawn yet so can’t comment on what machine empires may bring to the table.
My problem thus far is that every time I hit the midgame onwards, I start getting frustrated by way warfare is handled. Once my empire spans a certain size, it just got tedious chasing AI fleets from system to system (and rebuilding all the stations they’d destroy on their way through, which I think someone mentioned doesn’t happen anymore). When they mentioned they were reworking FTL and warfare to allow chokepoints and effective defenses, I shelved the game until that expansion came out.
Other than that, I have enjoyed my time with Stellaris but it didn’t feel as complex to me as the EU series. I’d be interested in someone’s opinion that’s played more though, and played more recently. I’ll probably be better able to answer the question after this weekend when Apocalypse comes out!