1681

I believe it’s the side being attacked. So for instance, if an ally of yours is attacked and you’re dragged into the war, you can’t be the one to negotiate peace on their behalf.

1682

I’ve had a bunch of secession movements in my sectors pop up on me. It says the pops are “outraged” but I don’t have a clue why. Is there some way to tell that I’m not seeing?

1683

One way is to hover the mouse over a pops happiness bar to see why they feel the way that they do.

1684

Just in case the location is not readily apparent (this has thrown people, a bit), click on the surface tab, and then the pops will have the bar toward the bottom of their individual face icons.

1685

Being genocidal with distinctly different traits is one way to do that. In fact, I had two different nations, one bordering to the top of my empire, one to the bottom, who both separately declared war on me, largely because I exterminated a race. Purging a planet can be fairly drastic and I need to better work out what to do when I’ve captured a planet. Needless to say, I lost both wars, got reduced to a primitive backwater planet and decided there was no point progressing further.

1686

Well I’m happy peaceful race, pacifist spiritual fanatical so I can’t even colonize planets with primitive culture. I haven’t tried to declare war on anybody. There is still plenty of planets to grab (I can colonize 4 types) without fighting so its seem kinda of pointless. Actually I’m not sure I can even declare war on anybody, I’ll check.

1687

Cntrl-{Number} when the planet is open. Then pane with that number will be added in the lower left of the screen. Hitting the number will bring you back to it, and the little panes are both mouseover able, and have mini-building bars above them. I kept forgetting where I put my critters modified for odd planet types to make colony ships.

1688

Had my first huge war, two actually happening at the same time… and I can see why the AI is sort of broken. My allies only follow what I do. So if I concentrate my force to defend one side of my empire, my allies will actually stop bombarding a planet they’ve almost taken, I am there as more of a token because i have the smaller fleet, and just leave. I’m too close to the same power of this enemy to fight on two fronts, but they won’t fight independently at all.

1689

It’s weird as they clearly have an AI that is capable of acting independently in wars (e.g. the enemy fleet). I can see why they would do this when you, as a single empire, are fighting a federation as it prevents you from taking your doom stack and wiping each enemy nations fleet individually for an easy win (I actually just lost a huge war with 6 federation countries in my game as they grouped very quickly and my stacks couldn’t handle it). Otherwise, automatically following your own fleet seems like a placeholder type of ‘AI’ used during development.

1690

Sorry, the suggest button in diplomacy is only for DeepT’s case: Trying to convince allies to join in an offensive war.

1691

That sounds like they really need the Subject controls available in EU4, where you can instruct your vassals to be aggressive, siege, or join your forces.

1692

Hmm – well, It occurs to me --that my point will be made true here. Why not wait until all patches, addons, gameplay balances and etc have been made to what would otherwise be a great game. I see no point in running it now – don’t you all suspect that balancing and addons will make this particular game more “full” in 6 months? and why play it have full now? (full as in fleshed out)

Sometimes I feel like you all have all made up your mind already about what is a “good” game and fail to see the significant logic of a little bit of waiting.

1693

Yeah I don’t remember this being an issue in EU4 at all. Actually as someone who loved to play Portugal and spent a fair amount of effort staying good with England or Castille (sometimes both) so we could dominate the navel front in Europe which allowed me to play in the New World. They were always so much larger than me that if they entered a war with me it was hard for me to take the lead on anything. This is such AI is so focused on following my lead they’re useless in any war I have with more than one front… and since this is space… it’s all over the place most the time.

1694

A very cool I did not know about this, good tip.

Game definitely has performance issues after a certain point. Going to have to shelve my current game because it is just annoyingly sluggish now that I have eaten up 20% of a large galaxy.

1695

This game isn’t like Civ, where some people will attack you because that’s how their AI was programmed. If you play a peaceful game and have the right attributes, the AI leaves you alone. Playing as a pacifist xenophile is for players who like to be left alone. So restart with a different approach.

1696

I hit the performance no-go point after conquering 60% of the planets needed for victory on the default settings. I’m close enough I think I could finsh the game, but it would be hours of looking at the clock tick slowly, so fuck it. They need to address this or I can’t see how I will ever finish a game. As pretty as the combat is when it runs smooth, I wish they had gone for a more EU-like approach with off-map abstracted battles. It’s not like terrain does anything anyway.

However, the game lost it’s steam way earlier for me. While the beginning felt great and full of stuff to do and discover, as the game quickly progresses to alliance and the Federation status, it freezes and becomes a borefest, with very, very limited diplomacy or non-warfare options, and warfare itself being limited by the size of the players involved. Plus, the game starts to slow down, and while playable, waiting for the years to pass till you can start a war is boring. This has been the most fun I’ve had in the early stages of a 4X in a long time, but also the most bored I’ve been in the late game.

Technology and research is incredible mild and boring, with lots and lots of uninspired incremental upgrades. When you get a technology that offers real new options that’s great, but the technology tree dries of interesting stuff way before the game ends. By the federation phase I was already just researching incremental upgrades (which took ages).

I do think the underlying design (little micro compared to other games of this size, pop based modelling, combat and production model) has amazing potential, but that desing does not seem to come with enough content and variety for a game this long. In a way this is expansion heaven, and I’m confident this will become a great game, but right now I don’t think I can recommend it.

The vast scope of the game seems to have forced the designers into making everything very similar to each other. Diplomacy options are always the same, policies and social engineering is mostly bonus based… While in their history based games they seem to have a rich background to draw interesting mechanics from, here it looks like they wanted to leave it so open to the player imagination that everything feels samey. In their game where more crazy stuff could have been present, they went to make it the less original and more samey.

That, and a very different design paradigm switch from a typical Paradox game (no victory conditions, just play a country until the timer runs out, with guarantee you have interesting new content and options at every single step of the timer, since the length is preordained) to a typical 4X (victory contditions -which are very uninspired- and a paint the map approach that means pacing needs to be much more carefully controlled and designed or you run the risk of running out of content too early in the game).

Edit: Just read a few reviews after coming with an opinion on this. The PC Gamer review mirrors my feeling exactly (and my playthrough, it seems, since I also had the Unbidden appear).

1697

The same argument could be made for any game, and if that’s your feeling then go for it. My counter would be that after years of gaming I’ve realized that a lot of the fun and fond memories I have are from discovering a game together with others, and that happens when a game first comes out, not six months later. We are all here in an active thread finding things out together, sharing what we’ve discovered, and so on. Six months from now Stellaris may very well be a better game, but I can guarantee that this thread won’t be as active. And six months from now I’ll still get whatever it becomes and also have had the fun of this moment.

1698

Basically your entire post is spot on for me, but this bit in particular. My enjoyment of Stellaris ended up falling off of a cliff once I reached a certain size, to the point where I’d probably put this behind Europa Universalis, not to mention my beloved Crusader Kings. I haven’t even booted it up in 4 days, in part because of Doom, and in part because the last few times I played all I really had left to do was let the game grind on the fastest speed as I wait 25 years to diploannex one of my 6+ vassal empires, only to start on the next. There were a lot of little moment to moment annoyances that bugged me too, like all the vassal empires ONLY keeping their fleets glued to yours with no way to have them spread out and conquer an empire faster.

I could also just call that game won and move on, but I don’t even really want to start a new game of Stellaris either since I’ll know what’s waiting for me after the game advances a bit.

Edit: For the hell of it, roughly where I left off. http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/275095429932219595/5F90C00398534D97AF285F8A451DC10B953760EA/
The blue, orange, green, and brown around me are all vassals, along with some smaller crumbs scattered around. I’m a bit farther than that screenshot but close enough.

1699

Is that so much different from any EU 4 game?

Doesn’t stop me from playing. However Eu4 might have a bit more options which I hope Stellaris will get sooner or later.

1700

I’m going to adopt a compromise position. Part of the fun of a game, at least in the context of playing with a bunch of experienced gamers of QT3, is the armchair quarterbacking, plus hints and discussion of the tradeoffs. I too have found that picking up games 6 months or a year after they are released means you lose some of the magic of the newness.

I virtually never finish a Paradox game, that very well maybe the case with Stellaris. The exploration and expansion phase is a lot of fun, along with a bit of exploit. (Now that I know that zillion corvette is better than a comperable cost fleet of battleships, I’ll probably not waste much time building anything bigger.).
My theory with all Paradox games, and most monster games is that end game gets play test a fraction as much as the beginning. Other than sector AI, (which is arguable mid-game) I haven’t found any show stopping bugs. I even found a new entertaining story, the pot planet, which had me smiling each time a new dialogue came up.

I restarted to give myself a couple extra core planets and vow to play more warlike. I’ll probably play it for a few more weeks and then try out HOI IV. Then in 4 to 6 months, I’ll try and finish a game unless Civ VI turns out to be really good.