Stellaris

I played it with steam for about 1k hours. lack of UI mod or some UX mods are terrible.

Das ist mal ein Spiel welches nicht nach einer bestimmten Zeit als erledigt gilt, sondern immer wieder und gerne auch in Zukunft mit Begeisterung gespielt werden kann und der Spielablauf ist jedes mal ein anderer. Hier ist Langeweile ausgeschlossen.

I have the game on Steam and have put in hundreds of hours. The game is, okay, but disappointing. I love sci-fi and grand strategy games, so this seemed like a no brainer. Unfortunately the execution of the game is lacking. The first few games are tremendously fun, as you haven't seen the universe before and you don't know whats coming. After a few games, you realize that you've seen everything the game has to offer. You get the same events, the same anomalies. Sure, you get different neighbors, but they all feel pretty much the same unless you get unlucky. The tech is the same, the gameplay loop is the same. It gets old fast. It doesn't help that the starts are randomized, meaning unlike in EU4 where you can choose to play a tough nation, every start feels pretty much the same. You can mess around with sliders, but the start of the game will usually feel pretty similar. The only way to really have fun is to role play, but unlike Crusader Kings the roleplay options are limited. It's designed to be a strategy game, not a roleplaying game. Of course, it doesn't help that the devs have changed course multiple times over development and made radical changes to the game. EU4 has had a similar number of DLCs but the core game feels the same, not so here. They have added things to try and address these issues. New events, starting legacies, space faring entities, Unfortunately, most of these are locked behind DLC or you only get very basic options without DLC. Besides, it's a band-aid. It just pushes back the time it takes to realize the game is a mile wide and an inch deep. By no measure is it a terrible game. I get the itch to come back to it every couple of years. Then a play a game and remember why I stopped playing in the first place. It's not bad, just disappointing.

Something is messed up with how the game loads, as most of the time, it floods the CPU processes to a complete crawl, where not even external USB devices remain responsive. Sometimes, outright complete hang of entire PC, other times, it seems to load to about 30 percent until the game itself outright crashes. Every once in a while after multiple reboots, it might actually load into the game, and in those cases it runs smoothly without issue. This might be one of those games where you want a dedicated machine that you keep on and you just never close the application to avoid the crashing on load. The game itself seems fun but also not very beginner friendly. I feel like I should have read a technical manual on the game before starting the game even when playing with the tutorial and tool tips on.

This is the best Space strategy game that ever was. Why the 4 starts? Poor optimisation. I have a 5 years old i7 and the game becomes literally unplayable at certain point, slowing down to about 1/3 of it's normal speed. There is no multi core support, they run the whole game process on 1 core and in later stages of the game there are hundreds of stars with thousands of planets visible, thousands of ships, various trade-lanes and other process and this is running real-time on a single core, slowing down the pace to unbearable slow motion. Mind you I run the small Galaxy settings, I wonder if there is a PC that could run the largest galaxy without this slow down? There are also various performance related bugs, like for example if your fleet of ship splits for any reason (lost a fight and is returning from an emergency jump, or you split it intentionally), then populating the fleet list with extra fleets will also slow down the game. There are probably other glitches that cause these slow downs and Paradox doesn't care about fixing them. They usually only affect mid to late game performance. I don't personally mind their DLC business, people need to realise that you can't finance a game development for a decade from a single sale of 30-40 euro game! The crying about prices of DLC are out of touch with reality.