I’d be pretty surprised if Stellaris 2 isn’t in some kind of pre-production. I have no idea what “mystery project” Wiz left Stellaris to work on, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if it were Stellaris 2 because he realized he could never satisfactorily meet his design goals in the first one.
But Paradox has given off pretty strong clues when the last DLC is approaching in the recent past. I think everyone feels like the next expansion of EUIV will be a big one, and the last one. Unfortunately I don’t get this sense from Stellaris, though the new game designer is extremely uncommunicative compared to Wiz, so who knows.
TL;DR - I agree with you that Stellaris 2 can’t come soon enough.
Never crash really, Stellaris is rock solid for me. As it stands now, the game is really good, offers TONS of variation and if you like 4x and the way those play, this is THE best of the lot now.
Also, the game is getting complicated, don’t expect to understand everything immediately, and then I’m not talking about stuff in that newbie guide there…
I think this weekend was the first time I’ve ever had an issue with the game. It runs well for me on windows and linux. I’ve been playing a game to try and figure out the planet management. I still need to better understand empire sprawl and much attention I need to pay to it. I picked up Federations this weekend, so all I’m missing now is the Lithoids. I joined a Federation with a neighbor. When they are president our xp drops, and then it goes up when I’m in charge. So slowly making progress.
Nice! I’ve been thinking of spinning up a game soon and was wondering if I should start on the beta or if that one maybe wasn’t too stable yet. Thanks!
It is only possible to build, upgrade, or restore one multi-stage megastructures at a time. The limit can be increased by +1 for each of the following:
Master Builders ascension perk
Architectural Renaissance ambition edict
Level 5 Research Cooperative president
Multi-stage megastructures can only be built once per empire and can’t be destroyed, except for the Ring World segments. Megastructures conquered from other empires as well as ruined and repaired ones found in the galaxy do not count against the limit.
You want to keep Empire sprawl in check with enough administrative buildings, but it’s simply a mechanic to slow down the progress of empires that are large. There is never a situation where you don’t want to take territory or colonies because of sprawl, but outside of the extreme early game, it is better to build an admin building than a research lab if you are over the cap.
I never found the diplomacy ever worthwhile in stellaris. I just play killbots all the time and at least you know where you stand with everyone.
Id love to play this again, but really after the early game, its just a slog with a huge helping of nothing much interesting happens until the end game crisis.
I’ve been rolling with my favorite killbots in my current game, but that’s more because I hadn’t played since Synthetic Dawn came out and the game has changed just a little bit since then, so having fewer plates to spin has helped with adjusting to that. After one failed start and a bit of save scumming on the second game, about a third of the galaxy is under my control in 2401, and it’ll be about half once I obliterate the pair of fallen empires that have spent the last two centuries glaring at one another.
Mid-game crisis was the rise of a marauder Khanate, and it thankfully wasn’t the one bordering me since I’d killed them all about twenty years earlier. I might go wipe them out at some point, too, if they don’t collapse first.
Two huge federations of all the remaining non-marauder, non-fallen empires are out there, but neither one can even remotely hold a candle to me anymore, especially now that I have some idea of what I’m doing with my economy rather than fumbling around in the dark. They also have an inexplicable tendency to want to kill each other. Looking like a lot of clean-up until the Contingency hits, I crack the L-Cluster, or both, but I’m honestly okay with that for what was always meant to be more of a learning game. Spicing things up can happen later.
I’ve dipped back into this after picking up the latest 2 DLCS having left it alone sometime after Apocalypse dropped. I can’t help but feel there’s a fundamental paradox at the heart of this game in that while each expansion/patch adds and fixes a lot, it simultaneously feels further than ever from being perfect. This has become somewhat muddled with the feeling that while the price for each DLC seems justified at the time, if they’d approached me at the start asking for all this cash up front for these features, I’d have simply balked.
I started a new game playing as a MegaCorp and was having a blast. Unfortunately I got too greedy at the start thinking that fo’ sho’ an overclocked Ryzen 9 would be able to handle whatever I threw at it when I moved the galaxy size slider up to large (not ‘huge’, large!). Getting into the final stretch of the game, the simulation speed has slowed down to a degree I find somewhat intolerable. ‘Fastest’ is now running for me slower than ‘Normal’ did at the start and my patience wears thin.
To be fair they’ve done a good job on the technical side separating the UI entirely from the simulation so you at least don’t ‘feel’ the slowdown when you’re trying to do things, but its still there.
Perhaps I just needed to stick it out a bit longer until the crisis shows up and cleans house a bit but it’s really dragging. I wonder if the combination of the new diplomacy options plus the MegaCorp structure encouraging less genocidal gameplay from myself has resulted in more factions getting to the end stretch than usual.
I really enjoy the game, and I love the roster of species that I’ve built up that I can take into each new galaxy. It always brings a smile to my face seeing the Democratic People’s Republic of Slurm upsetting everyone time and time again, and usually doing poorly as a result. Perhaps Glorious Leader shall one day return and release them from this quagmire.
But for reasons like the above, I don’t think I’ve seen a galaxy through to a ‘proper’ end since launch.
Anyhoo, I’ve since restarted on a ‘normal’ size galaxy as a swarm of ravenous lobsters. I’m hoping that between the smaller galaxy size and the fact that I’m rapidly turning neighbouring empires into empty systems in my quest to create the perfect sapientdog that it won’t get as stuck in the mud.
Out of interest, does anybody play this on anything other than ‘fastest’? Much like Oxygen Not Included I fail to see why there’s even an option when you can always instantly pause. Having to put it back into ‘fastest’ each time I reload is a dumb ritual to go through, at least ONI remembers this setting so I only ever have to do it once.
Have you tried the beta branch? There is a known and terrible performance bug in the live version.
Don’t really play on anything but fastest in Stellaris either. I pause frequently of course, but I suppose the only time I lower the speed is to watch a battle.
