There was a massive carpet bombing from China, because Paradox said they weren’t doing a Chinese localization.
Things are still quiet right now because the entire country of Sweden is on a month-long vacation, but Martin did tweet out this sneak peek of the new planet interface:
Wow, a lot going on there. I’m excited that tiles are on the way out, and some refined resources seem nice.
It should be pretty interesting when they come back and start talking about how all this works.
I really liked the idea of adjacency bonuses in Stellaris, but they never seemed well used.
I really like GalCiv 3’s planet hexes, and the way you unlock new ones through terraforming. Wish Stellaris put more into planet management… this seems like less.
Could be a less-is-more situation, but we’ll have to wait and see the details. By that, I mean it might have less click-click-click actions but more decision-making. For all the clicking, there wasn’t much of that in the previous system.
So I thought the country went on vacation in August. Do they also take off July? What kinda of crazy country lets vital workers like game programmers take month-long vacations? ;-)
I know, right?! shakes fist
Yea… Wiz has been spending a lot of his vacation working. We ought to report him, working on Stellaris when he could be on a beach in Spain.
In all seriousness if the next major expansion focuses on non-war interactions with neighbors and they actually manage to kill the boring tile-beast, 2.2 might finally be the version that made Stellaris into a pretty great game.
Swedes basically take all of July off. They have to appreciate the summer, because the winters there are cold, long, and dark.
No offence to the developers, but I recall having this exact same belief every major patch since at least the utopia expansion. It has so many things going for it, but after a gaming session I always feel it is less than the sum of its parts. We’ll see what happens.
@Tim_N wraps up my feelings about Stellaris as well.
It’s pretty obvious that Stellaris is evolving - or devolving - towards a more orthodox approach to the space 4x genre… at least visually. But I am still kind of hoping for a “Victoria in Space” kind of game, with its rich economic and sociological simulation.
Every change Martin has made has been to improve the game by removing bad stuff. He’s done exactly what I would do, were I handed this game to improve.
But every time they remove some boring, bloated feature of the design, the boring busywork that masks the shallow gameplay loop is slowly peeled away. There’s nothing much of quality underneath it all.
It can’t be that obvious if in the reddit thread about these pictures everyone was saying the exact opposite - it would be hard to do more simulation when stuck with the planetary sudoku that made every planet be the same.
Well, I saw the screenshot and thought “MOO”. And it wasn’t cows what I was seeing.
No idea what he Reddit zeitgeist is, to be honest, I don’t take that site very seriously. Too many loonies and fanatics hang out there for me to feel comfortable.
Not sure either that “planetary sudoku” was that “complicated”. Actual Sudoku is an NP complete problem, Stellaris tile game is quite trivial intellectually unless you use mods adding interesting choices when it comes to decide what to build and incentives to review the layout of planets as tech level increases.
As with the FTL I can’t just help thinking that Martin and co just didn’t know what to do with some of the game systems. And they gave up on them.
Well, it’s not a healthy place in many subreddits, but it’s not a bad one to track PDS games. If you ignore the same memes over and over. And the wehraboos.
Anyway, switching POPs around over and over wasn’t fun and didn’t fit the AI ticks, so that’s done. But they’re not going away, POPs will have different jobs, different ethics and different needs, buildings will still do their own things. There just are no visual placements at a scale that doesn’t help.
Of course, I didn’t notice this picture wasn’t here, which is kind of important. To me, what people read into the whole lot (there’s a few more) seems more interesting, detailed and expandable than the fixed grid with the weird scale. Mods or not, it doesn’t feel very emperor-y.
Never heard this term before, so I looked it up and Urban Dictionary ran an ad saying “Get a wehraboo mug for your dog Manafort.” That is either a timely algorithmic happenstance or some really subtle and ingenious social commentary.
I’m hopeful that once they’ve peeled away all the crap they’ll actually be able to deal with the core structure. They need to finish the teardown before they can rebuild.
Of course, I didn’t notice this picture 15 wasn’t here, which is kind of important. To me, what people read into the whole lot (there’s a few more) seems more interesting, detailed and expandable than the fixed grid with the weird scale. Mods or not, it doesn’t feel very emperor-y.
That is something that looks way more interesting - I just checked Martin’s Twitter account and saw the newer screenshots and some breadcrumbs of context.
The tile system had a distinct feeling of being just the first step towards… something else. We will never know if that something would be an interesting innovation or a brainfart. Seeing the new screenshots certainly looks to me more like Victoria I minus the world market than MOO.
NB: Twitter is also chokers with loonies and fanatics but I made it there first!
That is hilarious