I can imagine wanting to play it again, but I’ll be honest, I haven’t fired it up since a week or so after Ancient Relics. Unless the next DLC looks really, really spectacular I’ll probably just check back in a year and hope some of the underlying problems with the mid-game population explosion and the resultant lag and micromanagement hell have been resolved.
At this moment, even a really interesting Diplomacy overhaul that surpasses my expectations would still be a hard pass if those other issues aren’t addressed.
I have been playing again recently. The last time I spent any time with the game was around the time Apocalypse hit, so I was in for quite a few changes. Once I got up to speed, I’m poking along at my own pace. To me, it is still a very middling game. By mid game (mid game crisis hit recently) I am in a position to, and have steam rolled over my neighbors who have pitiful fleet strength, making me wonder what they’ve actually achieved in game. I’m not even trying to squeeze every little bit out of my economy, but empires around me aren’t too great in comparison. I don’t know what I did to make my energy income bounce from -80 a month to +40 - might’ve been trade. I don’t know! That’s an issue. I like population automation, I don’t like the fact that the automation also means I have no control, or no way of knowing how I pulled myself out of such a hole like I did. Some basic steps I know helped, such as reducing my starbases, but such a swing doesn’t make sense to me.
I was talking to a friend about my adventures in Stellaris, and I caught myself at one point wondering what the point in war was. I attacked my neighbours because I was stronger, because I could. I didn’t need their worlds, that’s for sure. I have enough jobs going on my current planets, the new planets are more of a burden on my admin cap than anything else. I think the only reason to attack is to create space when overcrowding hits. But that’s still seemingly a long way off I think and circumvented by structures/wonders. The only other reason to war is to get access to natural sources of goods like crystal or gas, but they don’t occur near often enough, and it is far easier to convert minerals into those goods using a building, or just buy from a market. In EU or CK, I at least had a reason to go to war. EU was classically building an economy. CK was being able to call on bigger armies and build prestige. Either way, I felt like I had a reason to fight. Stellaris, I’m not so sure, especially when fighting an AI that hasn’t quite worked out how to play the game.
Also, I haven’t come across issues with lag. I do have it installed on an SSD however, as I do every Paradox title.
The game encourages me to play tall, but it is so easy to play wide. That’s one thing I’ve learned.
You have to get bigger cause you know that the crisis is coming probably.
Also about lag: even on SSD the game goes quite slow even in beginning. I spend much more time in it just staring at the screen waiting till I get enough minerals/influence to send constructor ship to build new stations, or for new building slot to appear. It’s only interrupted by events that I saw many times already. Since 2.0 I haven’t been able to get out of early game because of this.
I’m not going to be too worried until it impacts their core games. I mean, any time a company goes public it’s just a matter of time in my opinion, but they often can keep it together until the important founders all move on.
Now that it’s revealed that they were indeed mobile UI screens (i.e. Stellaris: Galaxy Command has Arrived! | Paradox Interactive Forums), I think we ended up being both right. They are for the mobile game, but they shouldn’t be! As you said some of the tiny icons look pretty bad for a phone.
Also Paradox usually have inventive ads. This one was imagine playing A GAME on YOUR PHONE which is even more pathetic than classic “do not play this game if you’re under 18” or “lvl 1 crook lvl 60 mafia boss”. That one was directed by your grandma who hasn’t been to subway for several years and is surprised people play games on their phones now.
I don’t know, but I see so many “traditional” game developers stumble in this exact same way when they try to dip their toes in the mobile market.
I get the thinking: the ludicrous amounts of money the big games make would be enticing to any business. Since they’re PC developers they don’t have the skill set to do a mobile game on their own, and since they’re dipping their toes in they don’t want to staff up a full team of their own. Instead, it makes sense to contract out the work to a studio that has expertise in mobile games.
The problem is that it seems like everything and everyone in that business is scummy. I feel like I’ve seen this type of scenario play out so many times.
This whole episode has kind of left a bad taste in my mouth. What is most egregious about it is that you can tell not one person that works at Paradox is remotely excited about this release. It is the grossest kind of cynical cash grab.
Let’s hope the announcements at PDX con are worth this insanely long wait we’ve had with virtually no news.
Oh, that depends on me getting to the end game. And I find Stellaris doesn’t do enough to drive me towards that end game. For fun, I played the same race wide. I got lucky being able to colonise a large number of systems that were otherwise unreachable for the other aliens. The penalty for going beyond the admin cap is not even an issue. Unity is suffering, I have a bit of a deficit on my energy, but when I’m pulling in 200/month of food and minerals that I can sell off in bulk, I don’t have any problems. Compare to CKII where exceeding demense limit has some major drawbacks in terms of keeping vassals happy, I am underwhelmed.
I am also fairly tolerant of bad AI. Civ V and Civ VI for instance bother me mildly opposed to the general backlash this forum has. In Stellaris, the piss poor AI is annoying me. Somehow my fleet is all powerful despite being composed of roughly 30 corvettes at 1k strength with swarm missiles.
After this, I think I’m going back to the diplomacy model, trade manipulation and general excitement that is EUIV.
This x100. Despite the many changes they’ve made, e.g. nerf warp types, nerf planet mgmt, designed to improve the AI, they still don’t have a game that is worth playing to the end. Once you get near the crisis, you either know you’re going to win or lose so there’s no point. Adding copious DLC with new options is just trying to apply a plaster, over a plaster, on top of a leg fracture.
Maybe, this Galaxy Command move is genius, because the expectations for mobile games are a lot less.
