Stellaris

Where does the game begin and the cash grabbing end?

Worth playing but 1. GOG does not have workshop, so installing mods become difficult compare to steam version. 2. GOG version is DRM Free but only for single player, multiplayer you still need an account. 3. The cost of complete games is high too, the price for DLC is too much and the contents is less.

I am thoroughly enjoying this game. Yes it is hard to understand how to play just from the tutorial which is severely lacking but if you persevere and use YouTube etc. it is a great in depth game with Many mechanics and depth. The real problem is the Paradox front end launcher which prevents it working with GOG Galaxy properly. Use the Paradox front end and GOG galaxy will not record Time Played, Cloud sync or List Trophies achieved. If you by pass the front end and just launch the game directly Galaxy will record the Time Played but again will not show Trophies or allow cloud sync. It gives me the impression that Paradox is forcing you to use there front end and bypassing GOG Galaxy. It would appear that the same problem applies to ANY Paradox game that uses the same front end. The price of this game can mount up but it does seem to be on sale regularly and you just need to be selective with the DLC that you choose to buy.

Disclaimer: played one full game on easy no DLCs installed. Being a fan of other Paradox titles I decided to give this one a go. At the beginning I was not disappointed, standard Paradox setup fitted well to the space exploration theme with some obvious influence from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. I enjoyed slowly exploring the universe, colonising, building, discovering the lore etc. So far it was a solid 4X title with pretty graphics and excellent music. The trouble started in the last third of the game once my empire was well set up and exploration, by and large, was done. At that point you simply run out of interesting things to do. Sure, you can go to war or contunue building, but the trouble with the first option is that wars require far too much micromanagement as with the development of wormholes and gateways enemy ships can appear from all sorts of directions and chasing those around the map is simply irritating. The trouble with the second option is that the resources that were scarce at the beginning become plentiful and you would soon have too much of everything and really have no idea what to do with it all. In short, wars are full of micromanagement and 'whack-a-mole' running around and building simply ceases to be interesting. To conclude, it seems that Paradox made a good game that simply lacks focus towards the end. The 'crisis', which seemingly is supposed to take care of that is simply another war you would have to participate in (see above on what is wrong with wars in Stellaris). I would have loved something along the lines of uber-project (i.e. spaceship) in Civ, missions in Imperator or Transcendence in Alpha Centauri to spice things up. Instead, the last 50 years I was almost forcing myself to play just to see what happens at the end and, having reached the victory screen, quit the game with relief. Maybe DLCs fix the issue? To be honest, I don't think I will bother finding out.

Milking with overpriced dlc, AI generated content, fuck off with that