In my view Pirates are supposed to be a check on whether you have invested enough resources into your navy. Before 2.0 you could be certain you would get a pirate raid right around the time you colonized your first planet. If you still only had 3 Corvettes you were going to lose a resource collector(s). If you built 2 or 3 more corvettes you were fine. But nobody wants to do that because you feel like you are in a land grab race.
I’m honestly not seeing a big change other than the fact that the pirates don’t usually spawn until around 2010 and you can farm them for fleet experience if you set up a unclaimed system near a place you can station a modest fleet. All you have to do is add a few corvettes to your fleet and they are not a problem. The pirates do scale up as time goes on but not in a ridiculous way.
Edit: What would be really cool is if you could issue Letters of Marque and set up pirate bases and raiders around your neighbors.
I moderately enjoy pirates in my space games. I thought Sins did it well, where you could make some earlier strategic decisions to try and buy off the pirates and have them stunt the growth of a neighbor. They also served as a good early game leveling component, before being a simple annoyance in the late game when you might simply wipe them out for forever with an assault on their system.
I was interested to read this because I haven’t really felt the AI was any more threatening than it was previously, which really says something I guess, because as you noted, ship mineral upkeep is pretty significant now.
That being said I don’t really care what bonuses the AI gets as long as the difficulty names reflect their actual difficulty, which seems fine to me. Normal is kind of a cake-walk, Hard you really need to play, and Insane on Aggressive AI is for actual masochists, which is all well and good.
What I was interested to hear is that they are planning on adding a Casual difficulty where the AI is even less aggressive and gets no bonuses whatsoever. The game on Normal already feels like a sandbox mode to me, though I’ve got no qualms with lowering the bar of entry for beginners.
That’s basically the goal, as I understand it. There are people right now on the forums complaining about how hard Normal is. I suppose is could also allow a casual player to have a sort role-play build and still succeed.
There’s going to be people buying the game who the closest they’ve come to playing a grand strategy game is a MOBA. I could see Normal being pretty difficult when you’re just trying to figure out the very basics.
I can’t argue with you that there are some people out there for whom Stellaris must have been their first strategy game. Based on the existence of threads with titles like “Game is impossible because you always run out of food and starve”, they must.
The only possible conclusion I can come to is that they think you can only build farms on food tiles maybe, buildings can’t be replaced, and they don’t know that you can move pops around to different tiles. Also, during the 20+ months that they had a red number next to their food supply before starvation kicked into effect, they must have been remarkably un-curious about it. That is a truly shocking number of things to be unaware of simultaneously, but based on results, these people exist and buy video games.
When you factor in how many people will get a RNG start surrounded by aggressive expansionist civics then you know it’s going to be rough on a lot of people who are new to the genre.
Nowadays I play on high aggresive/hard difficulty. If you just make sure to keep your fleet strength up you can usually keep the aggressive neighbors mollified or looking for other targets. If you go with the Diplomacy tree you can really keep people off of your backs or get enough allies to at least.
I sorta like the pirate raids because taking them out is fairly easy, and the base destruction gives you a nice little boost in minerals when you desperately need it.
I have managed to fast-forward the game by 50 years. It is running at full screen now; I am just alt-tabbed away. Hopefully something will happen when I reach the year 2400. I have a handful of years left. Wish me luck.
Edit: Nothing has happened. I think I give up with this game. I’m very disappointed. I held out hope for a long time. But… it’s just boring.
Did you try playing on a harder difficulty with the AI on aggressive? If you have any familiarity with strategy games, that games default settings are simply too easy to provide a challenge. You can also set Crisis to spawn earlier in the game setup. I’d also recommend upping the Crisis strength by a factor of .5x if you are finding the game to be a cakewalk.
Its a tough balancing act, because plenty of people find the game impossible on the default settings, but if you’ve played these kind of games before, “Normal” is easy, “Hard” is Normal, “Very Hard” is Hard, and “Insane” is actually a legit struggle. If you don’t turn the AI to aggressive, be prepared for a peaceful galaxy unless the RNG spawns in a ton of Exterminators/Purgers/Devouring Swarms.
Or you may just dislike the game, which is possible. But disliking it because there is nothing to do on Normal Difficulty is like saying Civilization is boring on Chieftan or something. True, but kind of missing options to make it less boring.
I was disappointed to hear this. It just goes to show how much harder it is to write a competitive AI for a game where everyone starts with the same stuff. It’s one of the reasons I prefer games like EU4 or HoI 4 with asymmetric starts.
That’s too bad! I always end up getting smashed in between Mongols, devouring swarms, and fanatic purifiers so the games have been far from uneventful/boring.
I considered it, but ultimately I find most of the decisions in the game obvious to the point of being boring. Influence isn’t worth spending on anything but expanding, so none of the edicts etc. seem to matter until you can’t expand any more. Planet development is very boring - I never want to play ‘put a building on the matching tile’ ever again. War might be fun, but if I’m going to play Stellaris as a wargame there are much better 4Xs that do it better. SotS does it better.
Making the AI more aggressive or the game harder isn’t - as far as I’m aware - going to make the choices any less obvious or the planet management less tedious, etc. Just less likely to lead to victory.
Picking technologies is about the only interesting choices I’ve made all game.
I started playing this on Sunday after picking up some of the DLC on sale. I can see this game being really hard for someone new to strategy games, not so much because of its complexity, but because of the bare-bones tutorial and lack of in-game help. As a 4X vet I understand the basic game concepts, but many of the mechanics particular to Stellaris required trial and error or a trip to Google.
I came across Paradox’s wiki last night, which seems to be comprehensive and well-written. Online documentation is fine, but there should at least be in-game links to the site.
Don’t underestimate edicts. I’ve been taking the trait the doubles your edict length so I can get +20% minerals and energy and keep them up perpetually.
I can see how you would think that the game feels empty after the exploration and expansion phases but I find that it’s actually pretty fun in the mid 2300’s when you have battle ships and can build things like habitats. You have to make your fun though unless you have unruly neighbors. I just sent and expeditionary force out to go after some Leviathans. I managed to beat the Automated Dreadnought (Amazing Reward) but then lost an entire 30k fleet to the Enigmatic Fortress. I’m rebuilding and going to go after it again.
After playing 2.0 for awhile, and based on all of my previous experiences, my 2c on the game.
On paper there is so much potential going for the game. I love that you have ‘pops’ like in Victoria, leaders like in Crusader Kings 2, and interstar diplomacy like you would expect from EU4. I just think, in practice, it doesn’t have any of the features that make the other games so engaging. Pops never really bring about social change based on their situation, and so internal management of your empire is never really necessary. Leaders don’t have personality and don’t have family trees, so you miss all of the RPG elements of Crusader Kings 2, and the diplomacy does not even come close to reaching the complexity of EU4.
What does that leave you? War, storytelling events, and tech. War was a massive problem at launch, and it is probably the one major weakness mentioned here that they have done some good things to address in the updates. I do like the storytelling and tech system, but it isn’t enough to make the game particularly fun or dynamic.
I have never been a big fan of Space 4x games, however, so maybe I am more negative because of that.
I think this game is an example of why Paradox shouldn’t always operate force their games to have 5 years of updates and expansions. Wiz and co. have expended alot of effort on the game, and that is appreciated (especially since alot of the good stuff are in free updates). Still, sometimes I think I would rather Paradox have let the game afloat and put these resources into a future game. Or, as a compromise option, make a new expandalone game that borrows assets from Stellaris but has very different design principles and give owners of Stellaris a good discount.
