Stellaris

It's also Paradox, so therefore has a trash monetization system. But I still enjoy the game.

Very steep learning curve.. if you expect anything like Civ series, you will lose interest fast but if you take time one of most enjoyable strat games made. I just enjoy it alone..I wouldnt at all given the TOS. It's why it's not a five star.

First of all, I'm okay with the many DLCs: developers need to eat, I understand that. But there are many issues here, which I don't understand given how many updates that game had. My main issue is the user interface. It is absolutely atrocious and mostly useless. Here are a couple examples: - Apparently there's a way to see a view of all your colonies in a single window. I've been told it's "hard to find". I can confirm that, I never found it. - The only way to know what a battle report is about is to click on it, which moves your cursor to the battle and open the star system. There are LOTS of battles, 90% of them are not important. This is very annoying. - The battle report are mostly useless. There are numbers at the bottom, but even when all the numbers are better on my side (fleet size, hit percentage, etc.) I still loose. There are no indication as to what are the possible causes of my failure. - At some point, the battle system was rewritten to make it more enjoyable. That's fine. Except the "fleet strength" indicator is still there, and by account of other players, it is completely useless and badly calculated. - The game insists I use spies and the spy system... except it is empty because I have not the Nemesis DLC. Again, I'm ok with DLCs. But getting constant reminders of issues with my spying network that I cannot fix is very annoying. - The voiceover often tells me there's a battle going on but there's no indicator of it anywhere. The only way to know what's going on is to go all around the galaxy to find it. - Production numbers shift up and down with no indication as to why. I'm guessing it's people moving around, changing jobs, but again the interface doesn't tell me anything. There are a number of bugs too. Some freeze and crashes. My "Ironman" savegame was never corrupted, so there's that. I feel like the current state of the game is to be a frustration generating machine. I got enough of this at work. Play Master of Orion II instead.

Stellaris aims to do a lot of things different than other space empire games. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse of it. It's played realtime with pause and takes a lot of it's gameplay from "Sins of a Solar Empire" but unlike Sins, which can be played completely in realtime, Stellaris relies on it's pause function quite a lot. Most of the time you'll be spending on the galaxy map and in different menus. There is a 3D-view of individual systems, which main purpose is the take pretty promotional screenshots while it's largely irrelevant otherwise. It's definitely on the more complex side as these games go and the sheer amount of customization options is amazing. Beginners should tone down the default settings though, as the so called endgame crisis events might otherwise break their back. The first half of my first game I became the dominant power of the galaxy without much effort, the second half I was fighting an seemingly eternal war against extradimensional invaders which I won only by digging quite deep into the game mechanics. The german translation of this game is not great but acceptable. Static texts are well written and lightyears ahead of sloppy machine translations seen in "Galactic Civilizations 3" for example. Whenever variables like species or faction names are inserted though, it clearly shows that the programmers did not account for conjugations and declensions which foreign languages might require. The voice acting, although rare in this game, is still english. If you're wondering which DLCs might be mandatory, I'd say that Stellaris already plays quite well without any. It's probably best to decide after you tried out the base game yourself.

Stellaris is the quality of a cheap indie game with many broken features such as planetary and sector automation and is pretty much unplayable for enjoyment without mods and mods are hit or miss due to the many errors in the coding of the game.