Stellaris

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.

I was playing last night and auto save settings were default. I tried to save the game before I got off for the night. However, the game told me there were too many saves for the session. I tried to delete some of the saves but the game would not let me. Now I have lost progress and I will not play again because I don't know if I load game back up if it will start saving again.

Limitlessly replayable space game that allows you to live out any space opera fantasy. DLCs keep it fresh but paradox has a Sims DLC mindset where they churn out a lot, good or bad but mostly good and keeps the game alive. Very detailed and UI heavy, you will play games without understanding or using some mechanics and thats fine. I reccommend playing a few single player matches to learn first. If you love stuff like Sid Meiers Civilization you will love this game.

Good concept, great flexibility but the game is so complex and compicated, it takes many hours just to learn how to do the basics. Too difficult to be fun so far.

This game has a lot of systems that are hard to understand at first. I would recommend starting with a buddy that's played it a bit or watching some guides or something to get you up on how to manage your economy and such. Once you figure it out, very fun and addicting, especially with friends. (100% don't need friends to have a good time w/ it though) And you don't need any DLC to have a really good experience, they add more content obviously but I bought my first dlc at 200 hours and didn't feel like I was missing anything. Also, only the world host has to have the DLC and everyone can use it so that helps if you have a friend that plays it. The game and the DLC goes on at least 50% sales very often so grab it then. Also, if you choose a smaller galaxy size it runs fine on weaker hardware, and bc you don't need a mouse or interenet and can pause at any time it's a great laptop game. Would recommend.