I believe Stars in Shadow is closer to the original MOO than to MOO2 and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Stardrive 1 & 2 was to me as well a “tactical space battle generator” - the “campaign” bits were at best quite flimsy. Older designs like Sword of the Stars I, Reach for the Stars or even Star Control I are very much on the same vein, exploring how simple could the “strategic” elements be and get away with just generating a string of interesting tactical battles. Gratuitous Space Battles is the most extreme - and pure - of this kind of games.
You’ve got a very good point regarding focus Tom. For whatever the reason, many self-appointed successors to MOO2, and this includes MOO3, have tried to trascend the original design by “adding depth” to the strategic layer. And they’ve all inevitably bogged down, as the tactical and the strategic don’t mix easily.
What I mean by “don’t mix easily” is that for players whose ‘reward signal’ emanates from seeing spaceships fighting it out going off in chunky explosions and getting that 300 feeling of defeating a dumbass AI led horde will find diplomacy, espionage, planet development etc. a hurdle they have to jump over in order to get to what they crave. This very much applies to versions of the same formula where instead of spaceships, what fights it out are Roman Legionaires, Hobbits, Orcs and what not.
On the other hand, those fellas whose ‘reward signal’ emanates from choreographing logistical networks, “growing” cities and colonies like bonsais, will be disinclined in spending sometimes a lot of time micro-managing a vast fleet of ships. Grand Strategy and the Civ-like games (for instance, Stellaris and GalCiv) abstract their “tactical level” to a great degree and that’s I think it is the reason: “pacing”.
Can be these two kinds of games reconciled into a “hybrid”? Probably yes, but I don’t think anybody has truly succeeded. The way to go is to have good “AI”, i.e. AI that can be “trusted” and that is “self-explanatory”, that fights out the tactical battles / develops economies etc. That would allow players of each kind, and those who get reward from both types of gameplay, to switch the General and the Mandarin hats at their leisure over the course of a game session.
Distant Worlds and before it, Imperium Galactica, got to this sweet spot more successfully than any of the new wave of space 4x games we’ve got in the last 3 years. And that without having access to the kind of computing power that enables Deep Mind well publicised successes.
To be honest, I am not sure that developing “perfect” hybrid game like the one above would be worth the effort. With the same skillset you would be making cartloads of money working for a different industry, with sensible hours and sensible customers.
Going back to the topic of the thread.
Stellaris could have been that “perfect” game.
But Paradox seems to be more interested in milking the Crusader Kings / Europa Universalis / Hearts of Iron cow than go and gamble on a genre/setting they’re unfamiliar with. I think that Stellaris, compared with other projects, isn’t that well resourced. I must also say that I think Martin Anward has made heroic efforts to stay true to the very ambitious scope of Stellaris 1.0, make it more consistent internally and exploring uncharted territory.
Yet it seems that they have decided to call it a day, and go for a “Victoria in Space” design, making Stellaris to play more like Europa Universalis and Victoria than to… Stellaris. I find a bit curious. that they have decided to name their 2.0 version after C. J. Cherryh, who yes, created a very compelling and credible universe with starlanes. But she also explored, and more memorably at least to me, how relationships between different sentient species could work out.
We’ll see if they’re going to be doing something in that department at all.
I don’t think that is true. It has sold quite well and still has quite a lot of people playing it according to SteamSpy. They are putting out DLC for it regularly and they dedicate a lot of social media/marketing to it. It seems to get a lot of resources if you pay attention to Paradox (at least more than HOI gets at the very least).
It’s worth repeating, because if you only read Qt3 you would think everyone hates the game and it was a failure, but its the opposite really. The game has done quite well and a lot of people like it a lot. It definitely could be better though, and they obviously know this because they are making big changes to it.
This is well thought out, thanks for the reply.
The things that I remember about Moo2 were the unique aliens and the space battles. So I guess I fall into the space-battle enjoyment side of things over the empire micromanaging side of things. So I kind of like how Stellaris offloads some of that via the sector system (granted, it’s not perfect) but then the space battles are almost meaningless. Yes, a certain build can help but it’s ultimately about numbers - numbers always win no matter how rubbish the ships are in my experience (two full campaigns and many aborted ones).
But I remember in Moo2 my smaller fleet would consistently out fight enemy hordes. On the harder difficulties, it was the only way to survive let alone win. I find that fun (and moo2 had a lot of personality - for example getting to Orion first was a big deal, you felt the loss of a hero, and I would find ways to guarantee their safety. In stellaris I never put a “lifeboat” option on my fleets. If Admiral X dies, Admiral Y will be fine).
Huh, what makes you say that? There’s been 9 major updates, two minor expansions, one very large expansion with a second on the way (I’m not including the cosmetic stuff like the Plantoids and Humanoid packs). That seems like quite a bit to me for a game that released a year and a half ago.
To be honest, that remark of mine was a feeling and a guess. Who knows what are the internal priorities of Paradox. There are rumours of a major “secret” project underway, the one Jon Shafer bounced off quite hard. So I am happy to admit that I may be completely wrong in that respect.
I do visit very regularly Stellaris forums - like at least once a day - and, oh boy, if you read those forums too much you end up definitely not wanting to play the game. Here the negative feedback dominates, or at least in this thread, and certainly Tom deeply disliked Stellaris. But what is written here and pointed out is quite articulate.
See my response to @LeeAbe, @KevinC.
My “guess” wasn’t so much motivated by the total accumulated number of DLC and patches. The cosmetic updates may have been for some time in the pipeline. And a great deal of the content of the patch notes involves mostly scripting. There’s little, and that’s an impression got by looking from the gallery, work done on the “fundamentals”.
It takes them way longer time to roll improvements to the UI, graphics or the AI (most notably, the sector AI which). Stellaris UI is in some parts screaming for a major overhaul, for instance (the Traditions screen and that massive drop down menu to access like 50% of the game screens are a bit kludgy).
Of course, perhaps the above could also apply to HoI or EU.
I was just curious because I had the opposite impression! Stellaris seems to get the lion’s share of the spotlight and marketing muscle and it seems to sell quite well (nearly double HOI4, which released around the same time).
I obviously have nothing concrete to go off of either, just my own guess. :)
Yes, a certain build can help but it’s ultimately about numbers - numbers always win no matter how rubbish the ships are in my experience (two full campaigns and many aborted ones).
I think that Stellaris just brought home to the space genre a well established historical fact which is best summarised by Horatio Nelson’s dictum: “Only numbers annihilate”. The only mechanism that has historically kept in check mass is deception and friction. Not surprisingly, both of the latter concepts loom large in present day thinking on strategy and tactics.
Deception, in the sense of misleading an opponent with superior numbers or firepower to deploy these assets in an ineffective manner, is not really possible in Stellaris against the AI. The AI knows where your fleets are all the time. There’s no real way to force an opponent to become overextended because redeploying fleets is very simple. Surprise in Stellaris is most often achieved by means of the assymetric FTL system: something which has been deprecated.
Friction doesn’t exist at all. Every ship gets right what is supposed to do every time. No ship component turns ever to be faulty. There’s no misjumps or any other hazards affecting the strength of your fleets. It does not seem to ever be anything like a “critical hit” in the combat system.
I think the redesign slated for Stellaris 2.0 will try to address some of these shortcomings in a staged manner.
But I remember in Moo2 my smaller fleet would consistently out fight enemy hordes. On the harder difficulties, it was the only way to survive let alone win. I find that fun (and moo2 had a lot of personality - for example getting to Orion first was a big deal, you felt the loss of a hero, and I would find ways to guarantee their safety. In stellaris I never put a “lifeboat” option on my fleets. If Admiral X dies, Admiral Y will be fine).
That was you, looking for the synergies between ship components that the AI hadn’t been told existed :-) That’s a puzzle aspect in ship design and fleet composition which I also find very rewarding, and that I don’t feel like I get to experience very directly in Stellaris.
Well, we put the spotlight on Stellaris probably because we like it more than HOI4 :)
If we measure performance of games in terms of sales, @KevinC, certainly Stellaris has done much better than HOI4. If we measure it as in critical acclaim, I think that HOI4 did better. And last, if we measure it in terms of “disappointment of expectations” I think Stellaris set the expectations very high.
My expectations of HOI4 were very low: I was bracing myself for a hot mess of an unplayable overwhelming yet bland war game and that’s exactly what I got by my reckoning :-)
I don’t disagree! Just to be clear, I was only speaking at to why I believe Paradox isn’t short-changing Stellaris in regards to dev resources. My impression is that they market it a little harder than their other games and their sales figures look pretty good compared to HOI4 which also is humming along in terms of development.
On a second thought, the “signs” I was taking as “under resourcing” could just be me not accepting that the challenges posed by Stellaris are actually very hard. So progress needs to be slow.
Yeah, and a space 4X just isn’t something that have previous experience with. At least when EU4 and HOI4, they have the average of having done three previous games in each series. There’s a lot of institutional knowledge there that I don’t think they had when it came to Stellaris.
The FTL travel that they are revamping right now is a great example. SOTS did different FTL mechanics per race to terrific effect so I’m sure the idea sounded great, but it just wasn’t very good in practice (at least with how the rest of Stellaris is set up). That’s something that they just don’t have to deal with in their historical games since they’ve already hashed that all out long ago.
Martin A. openly recognised that borrowing that from SOTS without at the same time, design the races around their mode of propulsion, and then balance the whole thing, was a bad idea.
I think it was brave to come forward like that.
Commenting on the changes themselves I’d say that equalising things for every race seems to me as a bad idea. On Stellaris 2.0 namesake novels the sentient races reacted in very different ways to FTL travel, that was used to great effect as a plot device. I would like to see some sort of “soft” assymetry like that being introduced, to give more diversity to procedurally generated races. Perhaps via racial traits?
Also, the effect the changes on the FTL mechanics on warfare is something I await with interest. Not so much because I think the chosen path will fix the issues (perceived and real) with the current system, but as I think it is quite an experiment in game design… Martin has exposed to us a lot of detail which usually one wouldn’t have access unless being able to walk into Paradox offices and sit through one of their development meetings.
Dude, Stellaris is incredible. The updates they’ve implemented have fleshed it out, and it’s just incredible. The author doesn’t even have the respect for the developers to give their new features a try, or revise their review. What a turd.
If that is his real name.
I’d wager cold hard cash that it’s Carlos Danger’s sockpuppet.
Also, even though the review was not updated, Tom did stream the game again after a big update, IIRC, and came to the conclusion that he still found it incredibly boring.
“Please re-review this! We just put out a patch that does ABC!” was always my least favorite pitch. That one batted a solid .000.