Stellaris

I bought the game in a bundle for 1€, which i think is a fair price, given that it's almost a "freemium" type of game. While the base game is worth it in a vacuum (no pun intended) and offers enough to be a stand alone game, it's blatantly obvious that the entire game was created around the business model of milking the fans by adding more and more DLCs. Theoretically this wouldn't be that much of a problem, if the content of the DLCs wouldn't obviously be things that all could have been in the game from the beginning and the prices wouldn't be so insanely high. Seriously 4€ ON SALE for nothing more than a Species Pack is almost mobile game pricing. Overall actually not a bad game, but a business model i absolutely don't want to support.

After seeing the videos, reviews, price and release date (2016) I expected this game to be quite polished -it isn't. The game is mostly stable, BUT the user interface is terrible -like early access terrible. My specific complaints are it does not support you to do things at larger scales later on in the game. In the early game, adding resources or increasing fleet sizes by 1 make sense, when you have to press that +1 resource or ship button 100 or 500 times to get the number you want something is wrong! (no it doesn't let you enter the number you want to set it to). When you are at war and you are reinforcing your fleets they get wildly out of control, to the point you end up with 100's of individual ships flying around together each in their own individual fleet. Even on a small map with auto build enabled, trying to manage 20 or 30 planets is hard. They use all the resources you allocate them and then destroy your minerals/commodities/alloys/energy resources balance very easily. Missions and random encounters are very boring and repetitive to the point you just about ignore them. On the plus side, the diplomacy is interesting, the artwork is very nice, it is satisfying to crush your enemies and infuriating when they stab you in the back or you make a big mistake. I played one game start to finish and then uninstalled it. I don't want to play again.

I seriously can't understand how I can review this game without speaking about how Paradox is throwing customers into rabbit hole of DLC spendings. This game starts fantastic an you can see that on a surface of first impression it is just epic respawn of classic superhit like Master of Orion 2. I have almost all DLCs and when you buy a base game you might be rendered of some cool features. The question is which ones are worth it and which ones are just garbage. Doesn't matter because paradox will just shove them all for unaware ppl to just throw money at them.Within game the problem starts once you actually advance to late game. Since Paradox probably figured out that only minority of players advance to late game they just winged it. Late game is crashing there ale lags, scientific progress is just "Technology A level 987 = gives 5% to x", Like there was absolutely minimum work done to late game. The pinnacle of this is the finall splash screen. It's the most pathetic victory screen I have ever seen in videogames. It is equivalent to windows pop up message "you have won". I don't know if I will play again knowing how low effort they've put in late game

Got it for christmas on steam when new, the game has since been dumbed down (from 3 FTL methods to one) and rather than propper DLCs worth the price each one adds small things for high price. Add it to your wishlist and wait for everything to go on sale together for a reasonable price, because it's not worth paying so much for the plethora of DLCs.

I had a blast playing Stellaris for the first 4 months or so. I was so impressed by the base game that I bought all the DLC available at the time. It was a sleek, interesting, divergent, and satisfying 4x of the mid-weight variety. In my opinion: just about perfect, and filling a niche that I feel is underrepresented (space 4x). I started playing post 2.0, so I read at the time that a lot of people were upset about the strategic changes that had been made to the game, and while I understood the complaints, I found the hyperlane system + the upgradable warp mechanisms to be very strategically engaging and fun to play around. However, I now fully understand how those that loved 1.9 must have felt, once the developers rolled out the "economic overhaul". They took a game that I felt was almost a perfect weight for what it offered, and added incredibly cumbersome micromanagement and complexity without actually adding any gameplay depth to try and make it a "grand" 4x, and in the process broke the AI, broke the optimization, broke the UI, and broke my will to play the game. Worse, it became very clear that they rolled out updates and changes that coerced players into buying the latest DLC. (Oh sure, this particular resource and build path seems totally pointless.... unless you play the new faction that uses the resource and build path! Available as soon as you buy that new sweet sweet DLC!) The game also used to be quite streamlined and fast to play, and now it's a total grind. It is my opinion this was intentionally designed into the game to inflate their "hours played" numbers in order to manipulate algorithms tracking player interest. In short, the game used to be very fun, but now it's a mess, and I have no faith that the developers can clean it up. Their only interest seems to be selling the next DLC.