Stellaris

This game is possibly one of the best grand strategy games within a sci-fi setting. While some of the changes in gameplay made over the years are questionable, as a whole is still a great game. Lots to do with a great amount of variety of game styles. BUT...and it is a big stinky butt. The performance of this game is downright abysmal. I have played my fair share of poorly optimized games, but this takes the damn cake. The fact that you can own a 1400 dollar PC and this game struggles to run without hitching and stuttering at the very beginning of the game is truly an achievement in modern computing. Let us not even mention the end game! The game will struggle so much I pretty sure your PC will start sending you e-mails begging you to put a bullet through its MOBO as a mercy kill. It is quite clear that the game engine that Stellaris is made on is not able to handle the amount of data this game constantly requires to process. The worse part is that Paradox stubbornly refuses to acknowledge this issue and will rather cram in more gameplay mechanics that kill the performance even more, instead of trying to fix the damn game. There are other problems like- unbalanced empire spawns, self-destructing AI, etc. However, there is a gem here somewhere...under a thick layer of stuttering poo. :(

Paradox keeps ignoring everything that was achieved by its own titles. No Europa Universalis diplomacy - a swarm may devout all galaxy without any unified responce whatsoever, no Hearts of Iron logistics - you just doomstack all your fleets in a single system, no Victoria economy - your population, instead of being statistical number, is presented to you as a bunch of actual units on a planet, which not only produces tons of lag, but also is very strange from simulation perspective, and is not helpful in any way from economic planning point of view.

Plays a lot like the Civilization games and as Alpha Centauri is one of my all-time favourites I liked this as well. All the main 4x elements work really well and building up an empire is very fun and involving. This game has an average play time of 90+ hours on GoG, which is among the highest I've seen. In saying that there are issues: -The DLC issue. Impossible to defend really. elements that should be absolute base game things are added in expenseive DLCs, which is ridiculous. Certainly wouldn't buy full price -The tutorial is abysmal. You will spend your first game wondering what the heck is going on. I suggest literally just using the first-play through as a way of trying everything, then quitting and playing from teh start proper -The UI is kind of crap. Tabs everywhere and a lot of them are not intuitive at all. Took me about 30 hours to realise the artefacts tab is a sub-tab of the civics tab... because that's obvious. Actions that should be simple are hard to actually work out I think once you've played for a while and have actually mastered it, it is a super game. I understand a fair amount of people won't get that far

The AI cheats - the devs make the AI able to do things the player cannot ever do and it does it with less resources, faster, with no player limitations that are tightly collared around the players neck no matter how much time you spend tweaking and building your little empire a half pint AI which the UI states has half your military capability will decide, at random, to join with 5 other AI and without declaring war they will all attack in coordinated invasions where their 10K force will immeidately defeat your 25K defense forces in less than 30 seconds on every planet they want the AI can apparently slipstream through space at at least 2x the speed of any player ships and appear at will across the map - while the UI still will claim your military capability is 2x the AI. There is a reason there are a million mods for this game - its not because the game is good - its players trying to balance the game against the devs intentionally cheating AI - the devs are not able to build a game with an AI that is challenging and still plays by the same rules as the player so the devs enable AI cheating across the entire game one you get to mid game and have a decent federation or alliance going you should just quit, delete the game, and start over - because thats where the devs have decided you will flip the trigger that will launch the AI - there is no way to tell if any AI civs are in a combine so when one little AI gets in a skirmish with you the system will not tell you that 6 other civs are now at war with you and there is no way to stop it. I've tried to like this game for years and the frustration is just not worth it anymore.

Probably the best Space 4X game in town, but that comes with some BIG caveats. I really wish I'd frozen the game a while back and not applied any of the patches for the last couple of years. Paradox DLC policy/approach is a bit of a joke really and while the upside is continuing new content (although a whole DLC about storms in space...really???), the devs can't stop futzing with underlying mechanics to benefit (?) a small subset of the player base and to the detriment of people who just want to play casual games and role play. It becomes harder and harder to just do stuff with each release and I think the micromanagent requirements keep getting worse. There's probably been 4 or 5 completely different games of Stellaris really, with all the changes. Maybe there's a market to release retro versions of Stellaris fixed at earlier patch levels :) Go in with your eyes open as to the real cost of a playable game. 3.5