Stellaris

This game is really fun. I've spent so many hours into it that you wouldn't believe. But it seems that this game is already aging... and Badly. With the introduction of 4.0, the tons of new unnecessary mechanics, and nother really new other than ship skins, it seems the game's only way to survive is to rebuild it with each iteration making the lastest one totally unplayable to me. 4.0 Introduces chaos to something that really never needed to be changed. You can no longer control what populations grow in your planets to maximize production, and completely got rid of our freedom of control. Now everything grows automatically, and it's so frustrating when you are trying to have different subspecies that excel at specific tasks. Well not anymore, now somehow when you have several subspecies, your main one keeps growing and there's no way to control that. These people have wrecked something that didn't need to be changed... Don't they know what if something already works, it doesn't need to be changed? Instead of improving the planetary invasion system to make it more interactive and engaging, they decided to redo the whole planetary system. Eladrin shouldn't be game director... He should have looked at his predecesor's works and improved upon it, not change it entirely for the worst. It's time to turn the page, and for Eladrin to pass the mantle to someone more capable.

In order to play this game, the maker seems to think you already know how to play the game. Even with the full tutorial, couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be doing. It doesn't fully make sense to me. I understand what I am supposed to do in most 4x Space Strategy games but Stellaris adds way more complexity than all of the other space strategy games I have played. It looks absolutely beautiful, but even the youtube videos I've seen of people playing, I don't even get what they are doing. This game makes me feel like a big dummy like the kid on the Sanford And Son show.

just bought stellaris plus a couple of dlcs during sale, now ~60 years into my first vanilla round. what shall I say? it’s no master of orion for sure. here’s what’s fascinating: * modern graphics – kinda * runs on my 2015 macbook air – yeah! * nice stories here a quick extract of what is not * hyperlanes – really: no other way of transport is really lame. I understand this has been changed in a previous version – not a good choice. * construction ships – seriously: I have to click every wicked little research and mining dot separately instead of just saying 'build stations'? * construction of ships: is a sub-menu of the star stations – what? * why do the side quests take up slots in my main research – I mean that’s what science ships are for, no? * somebody dies: who was he/she, and why do I not care at all? just hire a new guy (they all cost the same) and continue. sure they have special aibilities, but am I really going to juggle them every time I do a new research? not very likely ... * confusing ui/access: where do I repair my ships again? and which of the however many options to access population allows me to transfer them again? * I don’t have many planets yet and the messages become quite overwhelming already – and by overwhelming I mean boringly overwhelming. so overall it’s a very weird mixture of intuitive and counter-intuitive gameplay. is it worth 10 euros – sure. just expect to juggle and micromanage too much – especially for a “real-time” environment.

The game without addons is simply incomplete, and even if you do research what DLC would be good it feels like a giant pyramid scheme. Most disappointing are the space battles, there is 0 depth to it, even ancient games like Star Wars Rebellion do it far better. If you read everything you understand the game well enough, but it is still riddled with terrible design choices and mechanics, worst of all is war in my opinion, you have to lay claim to systems, and when the war ends you only keep the systems you claimed, as opposed to all the systems you conquered.

I want to like this game, I do, but about halfway through the game, without even trying, I run out of new technologies to research and start experiencing hangs from 30 seconds to five minutes. Why do I say those in the same sentence you ask? Good thing you asked. Around mid-game, these freezes became so frequent, that I tried some of the usual things, checking memory usage, CPU, GPU, IO statistics, anything to suggest it was my hardware. Nope. They got worse and worse to the point I'd alt-tab away and search for support options while it was frozen, coming back when it unfroze. I was spending only half my time in game actually able to play. I could open windows in the game, review things, but not actually issue orders to units, so it wasn't frame rate or anything like that. Then I realized, it was every time a new technology was researched. So I kept playing, and sure enough, every tech advancement resulted in a pause from 30 seconds to five minutes. The techs available are frankly? Boring. I find myself exhausting the tech tree and never getting some techs, then another playthrough getting them early on. I know it's semi-random, but really, there shouldn't be a point where you are just locked out of technologies entirely because of the luck of the draw. And yes, this was playing the same custom race as a previous try. Maybe when this game is no longer a beta release, it will be ready to play, but no matter what the authors say, it feels like a beta product.