1861

Hah, it wishes.

1862

We don’t need that anyhow. We have that with EU4. Remember Poland can into Space

1863

I’m sure by now that most QT3ers know that Tom’s star rating is purely a random number and that you really should only pay attention to the prose. The prose almost always contains some keen insights, that often cause me to re-evaluate the game, and his Stellaris review is no exception.

I said this

I’m really not finding the game all that fun. It has lots of wonderful features, and some rather innovative design decision. I like the concept of sectors, but the implementation is so awful that I feel when I hand over a nicely developed planet to the sector AI, I’m been forced to give my children to child protective services to be placed with to drug addicted foster family. The alternative is to give the newborn child to the foster service knowing that they’ll never learn to read.

So I completely agreed with his child analogy. I hadn’t bitched about the interface but in fact every problem he had, I’ve had also. What genius decided that we didn’t need a handy way seeing a glance all of our starbase, or at least cycling through our starbase, or fleets, or especially the surface views of all our planets.
I ended up having 3 colony ships that I built in sector starbase that I complete forget about I got no notice they were produced and only noticed because my energy dropped a lot and then had to click on 20 planets to because I didn’t remember which had starbases.

1864

1865

I’m sure Tom appreciates people reading the review, but the number isn’t some random thing. He’s said multiple times that the rating he gives games is based on his opinion, and the prose supports that. (Note that his rating scale is based purely on how much he liked or disliked a game rather than an assessment of product specs.) He is, in fact, a proponent of review ratings. You should check out his podcast with the founder of Metacritic.

1866

Sometimes I feel like Tom Chick hating something is often a sign I will like it. Here is another case in point. I’m enjoying my time with Stellaris more than I’ve enjoyed any space 4X since probably MOO2.
I actually like that the space races aren’t overwritten - I can use my imagination - but I suppose paradox might fix that :/

1867

Same here. I like the game quite a lot. I also agree with almost everything Tom said.

That’s basically the conclusion that /r/stellaris reached about Tom’s Review: He’s right about everything, but we still like the game.

1868

Reddit? Reasonable disagreement? Surely the endtimes are upon us.

1869

Does anyone know what 4x games Tom has given a 4 or 5 star review? If Stellaris is a 1, I want to be playing these games!

I like that Stellaris is getting alot of tough love (not that you can call Tom’s review love in any form, I just mean more generally). It is motivating the developers to improve the game asap, and I would like to see them fix many of its problems before the extra content starts coming in the form of expansions.

In the meantime, I am still having plenty of fun, and am looking forward to the future improvements.

1870

What are you doing here posting about fun games when there’s BSG to be created? :)

1871

Distant Worlds did, as I recall.

1872

Man, I’m just recovering from the case of death I contracted after my vacation. If you were looking for volunteers to throw out an airlock, I’d have volunteered yesterday ;)

1873

I’m sure by now that most QT3ers know that Tom’s star rating is purely a random number and that you really should only pay attention to the prose. The prose almost always contains some keen insights, that often cause me to re-evaluate the game, and his Stellaris review is no exception.

I said this

I’m really not finding the game all that fun. It has lots of wonderful features and some rather innovative design decision. I like the concept of sectors, but the implementation is so awful that I feel when I hand over a nicely developed planet to the sector AI, I’m been forced to give my children to child protective services to be placed with to drug addicted foster family. The alternative is to give the newborn child to the foster service knowing that they’ll never learn to read.

So I completely agreed with his child analogy. I hadn’t bitched about the interface but in fact, every problem he had, I’ve had also. What genius decided that we didn’t need a handy way seeing a glance all of our starbase, or at least cycling through our starbase, or fleets, or especially the surface views of all our planets.
I ended up having 3 colony ships that I built in sector starbases that I complete forget about I got no notice they were produced and only noticed because my energy dropped a lot and then had to click on 20 planets to because I didn’t remember which had starbases.

Tom’s comment that Stellaris had no personality was something that I’ve been in denial about. The rather clever stories in the exploration stage don’t actually count as personality. I wasn’t aware that all of the AI empires were procedurally generated, I fear this maybe Stellaris fatal flaw. The lack of distinction between the races to me was what made me stop buying GalCiv. I certainly don’t remember the leaders of MOO2 (although there were definitely distinctive ones) but I certainly remember all the races. Even when the removed the magic and they said you can create your own race, Silicoids and Psilons are still distinctive races decades later. The distinctive races in SoTS and especially the innovation of having unique FTL travel is what makes it my favorite space game (and judging from the thread I’m not alone in my love for the game.). I think it is a big part of what makes Civ so popular, I generally ignore building up my military in Civ V unless I’m near the Mongol and especially the Zulu.

I really hope Paradox thinks hard about creating 6-12 races who are the ones get the start with advanced tech. They will need to be more distinctive than just having 4 traits and two ethics.

I am cautiously optimistic that they can Paradox can do this. I started a thread about “games that were awful in 1.0 but were great after being patched”. SoTS was one of the top nominees in the thread. By all account, Stellaris is in better shape now than SoTS was.

1874

I just want to point out for next time no matter whether your ships are made in sector starbases or your own core ones, they will appear in the outliner. You should have seen three big colony ship icons in the outliner once they were produced, and you can double click on them to zoom on their location and discover which starbase they came from (they also list their location in the outliner as well).

I really disagree with this. Each AI personality get their own portrait, one out of over a hundred, their ethics, their species traits, their government form, and crucially their own AI behaviour set that it also tells you on the diplomacy screen. The way they even speak to you is dependent on the combinations of the above as well. Paradox have done a good job giving each species their own distinct personality. Familiarity is not the same as personality. Creating 6-12 of the same races lead to familiarity as you are playing with the exact same species in every galaxy. That wouldn’t be fun to me, I like seeing new ones every time. Of course more work could be done to make each empire feel different, but going back to the dark times of a handful of pre-designed races is not a solution that works for me.

1875

Tom is great at critiquing games, matbe not so great at enjoying them. To each their own. I think it’s great while still agreeing with (most) of the points he made.

1876

Tim N, it’s a known bug/feature that colony ships don’t show in the outliner if they’re in a sector, even passing through.

In the end I stopped caring, because I figured out you could go to the planet you want to colonise and press the colonise button, and select the ship from there. (But if you forget you made a ship you’ll only find out if you stumble on it or use that colony button)

1877

Oh! I must have never built a colony ship in a sector then. Or, at least, I did and forgot about it.

1878

Where’s the Paradox statement that they respect Tom’s review and will send him review copies in the future?

1879

Let’s see from the reviews list in Qt3: Age of Wonders 3: Golden Realms, Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. That’s pretty much it.

1880

Well, I got an unfollow from someone from Paradox just by retweeting Tom’s review, so there’s your answer.