I’m now convinced Paradox have some sort of notifier hooked up to my steam account so that every time I uninstall this thing, they announce a new expansion.
For far too long Paradox has hidden the broken gameplay and A.I. from player hands by introducing constant additional DLC crap as a distraction. In fact, more often than not, the player has spent all it’s time shovelling through the crap looking for a challenge. No more! Finally has your time come to stop buying DLC and accepting the game is broken.
I get my challenge elsewhere. It’s not what this game is about, for me. Though it’d be nice if it could be both.
Pretty much exactly my read. I’ve played this “broken” game for 300+ hours and enjoyed it immensely, so I’m sure I’ll give the new stuff a try, but I wish they had other priorities than adding new shinies.
This is me in every 4X game.
I have over 2000 hours in Stellaris, I am not buying in to a new skin.
Buying a new skin? What do you mean?
Disclaimer: I haven’t had my morning coffee yet so brain may not worky so good right now. :)
Expansion…
Don’t go into this thread with false expectations like I did.
If the three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch do not make an appearance, I will be deeply disappointed.
So, Stellaris is out in a bundle. What’s the general verdict on the different DLC? Tempting to buy the lot, but given that I don’t really know if I’ll have time to play, I’m somewhat on the fence.
It’s hard to remember where the free patches end and the expansions begin, but the top 3 ‘mostly positive’ ones on Steam are Utopia, Synthetic Dawn and Federations, which I think agrees with my experiences with it.
You really don’t need any of the DLC as a new player unless you have a particular desire to make use of one of the expansion features - playing as a machine race, for example (Synthetic Dawn). I think the DLC is of more interest once you’ve played a couple of galaxies and want to add some new flavours in there.
Welp… right decision not to get the DLC, unfortunately. Tried this the last time 2 years ago, and it really hasn’t improved much, unfortunately. All the Paradox games tend to be built on the "wait for something (hopefully interesting) to happen to you, but this one is by far the most pure version of that experience - coupled with that very little of what happens is particularly interesting.
Annoying, because it’s a game that I really want to like. I like the basic ideas (random end-game crisis, awakening empires, etc., are all excellent ideas for a replayable 4X game), but it doesn’t work when the core game itself is an unenjoyable chore.
Weirdly, also seems to be a lot more buggy than I’m used to with Paradox games at this point in their lifecycle (especially the fleet management is awful).
Stellaris has the problem of having the foundation replaced out from under it periodically so I feel like it never has the opportunity to get polished up, it’s always an active construction site.
I get what you’re saying but I see it a little differently than that. There are certainly some times when you’re waiting for something to happen (Portugal in 1444, for example) but that’s what variable speeds are for. I see player agency in making interesting things happen, though. If the galaxy is calm/stable and you want some action, go kick some things over. Get a giant coalition against you in EU4, etc. Stellaris in particular can really swing wildly based on what the map generator gave you. Starting out with a bunch of devouring swarms or whatever makes for a very active experience compared to having a bunch of xenophiles/pacifists.
That said, Stellaris is just kind of a mess. I’ve said it many times before in this thread, but I just want them to take the (many) lessons learned and move on to Stellaris 2. I’d be down for that. I think their long-tail development model works for established franchises like EU4 where they already have the formula/foundation down. Stellaris is/was too experimental, they should have moved on to a sequel instead of tearing out the foundation multiple times.
Of course, I say all this from the comfort of my armchair… :)
I get your point, but that’s not really… strategic, is it? And that’s probably the core of the problem here. Stellaris is basically a “space empire role-playing game” pretending to be a 4X game. Sure, there’s a fallen empire sitting on a bunch of (presumed) goodies, but seriously - why would I poke that anthill before I have the forces to roll over them? Which kind of circles back to my point about waiting for things to happen - if you have to do dumb stuff to make the game interesting, that’s… a problem with the game.
Not sure it’s a problem that can be fixed, really. I think all the PDox games suffer from this, but it just becomes glaringly obvious once you decouple the games from a “real” frame of reference (that being history - in the case of the other games). Maybe it could work for something more storyline based - i.e., smaller scale where each character and planet actually matter. Or an Emperor of the Fading Suns kind of game. I just don’t see how you get away from the problem of your game being a bunch of numbers ticking up over time, if the scale you’re going for is that of a bunch of numbers ticking up over time just with slightly different modifiers depending on whether you are fungi or twelve-eyed bird people.
All Paradox games are basically “strategy role playing games” rather than competitive strategy games. Frankly, that’s why I like them so much, they’re something genuinely different. This is part of the reason that the “paint the map my color” crowd in EU4 just baffle me, that’s not at all how I look at these games and I don’t think they’re particularly good at meeting that particular need. Which is fine, since virtually every other strategy game out there is built with exactly that game play in mind.
The strategy is planning and building up to kicking the hornet’s nest and figuring out when the right time to execute that plan is. Speaking of EU4 here, mostly. Stellaris is a bit different because Stellaris is just more of a mess (I mean, I had some fun with it but as you can tell I’m pretty lukewarm on the game) and with the galaxies being completely random, you really can end up in a galaxy without much going on. So in that context, I meant that instead of waiting for something to happen to you, you could be strategizing about making something happen yourself.
But sure, even in EU4 you have downtime. You’re waiting for a coalition to fall apart, a truce to end, that sort of thing. I don’t see it as much of a problem in 4X games because of the variable speed settings, just turn it up to 5 until a year or two of calm years passes. In a 4X game – especially those with really bad turn times – having 10 empty turns can really suck. :)
The current direction of Stellaris just seems to be more about telling stories rather than making it a deep strategy game. I’m more into the latter, but there seems to be a ton of people that really enjoy the former. There’s 18,000 people playing it on Steam as I write this and I’d imagine this is a lull considering there’s an expansion out in a couple weeks.
Well, I played the game I just finished on pretty much top-speed throughout (with the exception of when there was an ongoing war)… problem is, that still left a lot of time doing absolutely nothing. And sure - I strategized to make things happen, but that requires building 400 fleet capacity, and 20 destroyers and … yawn, that’s another 30 years that need to pass…
Most well-tuned turn-based games don’t have that issue, because you’re still having to make decisions every turn - and if the early turns involve fewer decisions than later turns, well… they also take far less time. Doing 10 moves in 10 year-turns takes the time it takes to do 10 moves. Whereas in something like Stellaris (and the other RT games), the time it will take to pass 10 years at top speed is exactly the same as it will take to pass 10 years in the end-game… far too long, heh. But sure - there are poorly paced 4X TBS games too.
But yeah - the PDox games have always attracted people interesting in telling stories, despite - IMO - not really catering very well for it (I’ve never understood, for instance, why it took so long for them to introduce “game logs” like the ones they have in Crusader Kings).
I mean maybe that’s why Stellaris frustrates me - I actually did like it v.1.4 or whatever. There were story arcs and stuff happening that made sense. Now it’s such a mess of under the hood systems that I can barely last a few years past the start date before nope-ing out.
Yeah, I’m not a big fan of Stellaris currently and think it’s a bit of a muddled mess. I’ve had fun with it but the game director over the past few years has made it pretty clear what interests him most is telling stories through the game. And that is absolutely fine, it’s just not exactly what I’m looking for.
Don’t get me wrong, I love AARs and campaigns that end up telling a story. But I want that to come out of a really deep strategy game and I don’t think you can have that without good game systems and good AI to utilize them, Stellaris (last I played) is lacking in both. There’s some cool things in there, but… well, as I said, peel away all the junk that doesn’t work, keep what does, and make Stellaris 2 with it!