It didn’t change with any expension. There is nothing to do except declare war, take some planet, wait to declare war again.
I’m for anything that will speed up the engine and kill some of the tedious micro that amounts to no advantages.
Killing planet tiles is a major delta from the original game play. That being said, I am not a fan of tiles, prefer MOO1’s sliders.
My main complain about planets is that they are all the same (basically). There are no special, got to have them, strategic advantage planets, or for that matter, planetary tiles that make any difference.
They still have a lot of bugs still, mainly with Marauders and vassals fleets after vassal integration. Not being able to upgrade a vassal’s fleet is just a pain. Now when I integrate, I have to just disband all the ships including science and constructors, more unneeded micro.
I don’t think tiles add any strategy or a single interesting decision. They’re busywork and I’m glad to see them gone. You either match the tile or you ignore it in favor of specializing planets.
I AM curious to see what they replace it with, though.
For me this game is about the first 150 years but End Game has a bunch of crisis scenarios. I think it’s pretty solid.
spoilers here https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Crisis
I’ve played 376 hours to date and only seen one of them. But I seldom manage to get a game into the late 2300’s and I’ve had that same crises 4 times in 2 years of play. It might be because I play the same custom empire type most times…fanatic spiritual, militaristic or vice versa.
Fallen Empires War in Heaven is pretty cool. Had a bunch of those. I think it is considered late mid game.
I haven’t ever finished a game. I think the idea of a victory condition for this game is silly but don’t begrudge anybody wanting to have them or accomplish them. That said, conquest of a 1000 star galaxy seems like an exercise in tediousness.
There are parts in the game after the first 60 or so years where you have to make your own fun. Set goals like defeating leviathans across the map, play into the balance of power or try and upset the balance of power in the galaxy, make mad plans to grab strategic resources from neighbors. But the mid game could use more narrative events and scripted chains: Royal Weddings, trade wars, plagues, insurgencies, heresies, and all that jazz.
The game has come a long way in 2 years. 2.0 was a wonderful reinvention that really improved the core mechanics. I had given up on hyperlane only games before 2.0 because warp was so much better. But the changes in how you use outposts to claim territory and the need to actually navigate a system to reach the next warp point have really improved the game.
I can’t wait for distant stars pack on the 22nd. A revamp of the anomaly systems will be a welcome addition to what is already the strongest part of the game which is that glorious exploration phase.
Edit: And I also want to say kudos to Martin Anward for the courage to gore some sacred cows and shake things up. I’m confidant he can maintain the joy of finding a 24 tile Gaia planet or mining mother load planet but still streamline the development and management aspects.
I’ve played 1536 hours and have not seen any of the end game crises. I normally get the 40% of planets well before the crisis date, but am turning up the difficulty on my next game so hopefully it will delay my expansion (commodore–>admiral).
I mean you can hit 40% planets by 2350 pretty easily with any ethics combo, and quite easily by 2300 as a purifier/swarm/exterminator.
Turning up the difficulty, setting the AI aggressive to hard, allowing a few advanced start AI’s (I’ve noticed from the forums most people turn this setting off), putting the end game year to 2350 and bumping the crisis strength to 3X all made my gameplay experience far more enjoyable.
Also, if you are using mods you will definitely have to adjust those settings even higher, because I’ve yet to see a mod that didn’t totally imbalance the game in the player’s favor. All the most popular ones do. The AI just can’t game the new stuff that mods add in any meaningful way.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but those default difficulty sliders in Stellaris are literally designed for someone who has never played a strategy game before, unlike say, EUIV where if someone reached rank 1 Great Power with anyone other than Ottomans, France or Muscovy on their first EUIV game on Normal I’d be more than surprised, I’d almost require a full video to believe it happened.
Just finished my game in 2407, commodore, 11 AI, 3 Advanced, the rest of the setting were standard. I was really hoping that the advanced AIs would blob and be more of a challenge in the mid game. Only trouble was early when I was still growing. These guys (purifier/swarm/exterminator) are my favorite opponents as I do not have to waste any influence on war goals; just go, take what I can, and peace out.
Thanks for the advice on helping with the end game crisis, MM. I’ll play with those sliders as well, but definitely going with admiral difficulty.
At what point - after how many mechanics have been stripped out and removed - is this game still Stellaris?
This is a big improvement as far as I’m concerned. Maybe in a few years I’ll come back to the game and see if it’s any fun!
Changing the tile system and switching to hyperlanes doesn’t make it any less Stellaris, IMO. Under a brick and mortar publishing system it would probably be Stellaris 2 once they marked it 2.0.
Not sure whether the focus here is reducing micro or whether they are stripping anything and everything that the A.I. struggles with. Firstly the alternative FTL mechanisms and now the tile system, what’s next to go, Diplomacy? I love the game and still enjoy playing it, but I take it for what it is, a flawed gem, and don’t think I’ll be investing anymore money in DLC until there’s some kind of stability of design.
They’re not just stripping it away, they’re replacing it with another system. We just don’t know the details.
Stripping away/simplifying…you say potato, I say potato.
I read stripping it away as in flat out removing, rather than replacing it with something else.
As for simpler, that we’ll have to wait and see! To me the tiles were just pointless busywork… busywork that the AI could never seem to get right, for some reason.
That’s how I feel about the current system. Tiles aren’t horrible, but they are repetitive.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, it was busy work and was not enjoyable when you had many planets, but there has been a focused approach to “revamping” stuff that they have had major criticism that the A.I. couldn’t handle.
The goalposts just seem to keep moving and I’ve lost confidence that the game is going to be better at the end of it (if there ever is an end of it).
This, 100%. It was also what I spent well over half my time in the game actually doing. I’m very glad to see it gone.
I just don’t see this as some kind of dastardly plan to rework the game to make it easier for the AI. The planet tiles / pops are exactly the kind of tightly scoped repetitive combinatorial optimization bullshit that classical game AI should have an advantage over the human player.
Yes, the AI isn’t good at dealing with the tiles at the moment. But improving the AI would almost certainly have been less work than redesigning and reimplementing the whole system.
According to Wiz, it’s not simplified, people are just assuming it is off of one screenshot.
FTL methods proved otherwise.
They’re repetitive, they’re not intuitive (you don’t always care about tile bonuses, you don’t always want to specialize) and they don’t represent anything meaningful (the scale is all over the place). There has to be better ways to do it.