Stellaris grand strategy space game by Paradox discussy thingy thready thingy

Oh, those are indeed interesting. Planetary Survey Corps is much improved, since it doesn’t phase out when you don’t have anything left to survey. I always hated that, because it led to weird things like trying to avoid contact with aliens because once you research their language, all their planets are surveyed.

OTOH, there’s a bug in the pirates script that fills your drive with the error log. Ops. It should be fixed early tomorrow.

It’s kind of odd how much they’re still balancing the patch. It’s not why I’m not playing it yet (finally killing Ming in a Japan endgame), but it doesn’t help.

Maybe this is the game. Waiting for a patch. Waiting for a patch to the patch. Waiting for new gameplay changes. Talking about it. We’re all having fun, right?

I’m having fun with the current game, so it’s not really a waiting game for me. I do look forward to the new changes/additions, though.

Part of me is inclining to thinking maybe they should have had a separate battle system, but fewer battles (seems like the idea is to have fewer, more decisive battles now anyway.)

I thought the changes in 2.0 were mostly about making battles less decisive. Have they started backing away from that? I admit that I am surprised how high the retreat rate is.

@MikeJ ignore me. I’m the epitome of casual with this game.

This thread is too quiet… let’s stir the pot a bit :)

http://www.zam.com/article/1702/stellaris-apocalypse-review

From the review:

This leads to the same chronic issue Stellaris has always had, nothing interesting happens in the mid-game. There’s no difficult crisis to manage, there’s no inter-faction intrigue that Utopia’s expansion promised, and there’s no large-scale war or threat of conflict that Apocalypse wants you to experience. You just research, expand, and wait for something interesting to happen… except it doesn’t. Maybe a pirate haven spawns every now and then, but at most they’ll attack one or two systems. Bear in mind, this is after 10 to 15 hours of gameplay on the fastest setting available for each individual campaign. Unless you intentionally raise the difficulty level and give your AI opponents a buff, or are always the aggressor yourself, they’re just going to hang out and ignore you.

and

For a game that is marketing itself about the grand space opera of conquest and exploration, it’s just plain boring past a certain point in the early game. Stellaris has always managed to nail the eXplore, eXpand, and eXploit aspects of a 4X game, but we’re still a long way off from seeing eXterminate play a role in the middle of campaigns. Giant Colossi capable of exploding planets sound great, and from a design idea surely fill that necessary gap. However, if you never reach them until hours and hours of middling boredom and complacency, then that’s a failure by design.

Or maybe not stirring much at all, I think that the last 100+ posts or so have been, with varying degrees of self-denial (and I am including myself), in agreement with this assessment of Stellaris :(

Yep, can’t argue with anything said, 2.0.2 really hasn’t changed the fundamental problems. The start game is more methodical and the end game crisis is still crazy but the middle 60% of the game is still a snore-fest.

Yep, I would agree with a lot of the above assessment. And yet, I’ve still had a really good time the last 2 or so weeks building my imaginary space empires.

I’ve noticed AI empires simply can’t stop expanding, rather than just claiming strategic systems. It really helps you in the mid and late game, as they get slammed by the penalty hit for each system on research.

I find about 20 systems is about an ideal size. 4-5 colonized planets, and the rest for resources. You can generate enough minerals to build everything you need and maintain fleets just up to your fleet power, and you can still power through the research tree, especially if you grab all those precious modifiers.

In my current game, I really wish there was a console command to increase difficulty. It take a long time to reach a point where I actually want to attack, I find out that I was a little to successful in the landgrab phase, and none of the regular empires can really fight me. I suppose if I just go crazy and attack everyone they will eventually band together. However, I’d prefer to be the one desperately trying to hold the line.

I certainly was sold, way back when, on the promise that this game would have internal issues that would keep the mid-game interesting. Politics, schisms, rebellions, foreign powers meddling. That review above is exactly how I feel about the game.

It’s just dull, unless you are somehow incredibly fond of the main gameplay loop: putting mineral buildings on mineral tiles and energy buildings on energy tiles.

My midgames have been full of fighting off fanatic purifiers, militantly expanding democracy via a very aggressive member of my federation, and trying to gear up (via wars of expansion and internal developments) for the endgame crises I know are coming. One game got wrecked due to a Great Khan coming to power near my empire as well.

Not saying there couldn’t be more to do. Politics and internal strife like rebellious sectors could potentially be interesting. I don’t deal with those things in EU4, though, and I don’t find the midgame boring in that game either.

Yeah, I’m really looking forward to that scaling difficulty modifier. I’ve wanted that in most every strategy game I’ve played.

I hope they make it fairly flexible. Like I want to start at this difficult, this difficulty by mid-game and this difficulty by end-game.

Though I do question why I need to be so careful setting things up to have a game that doesn’t feel too easy or where I get crushed at the beginning.

Maybe the game should be dynamic? Like the game thinks you are doing well so it triggers an event where one of your rivals gains some kind of “golden age” or “dynamism” modifier. Or if you are doing poorly, they get a “corrupt” modifier. At least seeing these events would let you know if you are doing well or if the game is propping you up.

Or maybe the basic game mechanics could allow for catch-up in terms of tech, or something? Like if your empire doesn’t have credible external threats, internal divisions get worse.

I do wonder why I had the feeling that I was credibly threatened back in the MoO2 days. Am I better at these game, or the AI is worse, or I’m just not playing at enough of a penalty? Playing with really big AI bonuses can feel sort of dispiriting.

It’s the RNG at start that pretty much determines my games.

Start a game with religious fanatics on one side and militant isolationist on the other and I’ve had the AI making claims on my systems early.

Start another with democratic neighbors, and nothing but peace and harmony.

Also, starting on the galactic fringe is easier to defend. Starting in the middle just means you’re the crossroads for everyone.

I started with a xenophobic empire, its a great way to get everyone to hate you.

Not enough penalties. It’s easy to forget just how outrageously '90s strategy game AIs cheated. Something like MOO probably gave the AIs 500% resource production at the hardest levels.

I think I’ve got a good game going now. We will see. I’ve up the difficulty, and made the galaxy more crowded, so I am adjacent to 4 empires fairly early, two of which are pretty hostile. Also tried to select a race that was less min-max.