Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen, I have 170+ hours on the steam version and more then double that on the GoG version and so I figured it was time to add my review to the list. I enjoy this game completely, in vanilla it is a little drab and sometimes boring but once you get a handle on the way the system works you can add mods to the game. Once you make this mile stone the game REALLY comes alive! I run over 200 mods (Custom built mod list) and this game is endless! I have 33 hours in my current PT and I've yet to meet another race in a huge galaxy with 15 races! The prices are a bit high but they are often on sale for 50% so as I said on steam They're going to charge what they think its worth based on their time/manpower/resources/equipment invested, YOU have to decide if the enjoyment is worth their price. That choice will vary person to person, I find it worth it when on sale. The programming makes late game and loading with tones of mods...time consuming, but I don't know why they made the choices they did as I wasn't part of the dev team. The result can be mostly avoided with mods, but you will feel it, especially if you have a lot of mods on start up! Before i combined all my mods into 1 I had over 16 minutes load to main menu times on a Samsung NVME SSD. Now I have about 1 minute, so its all about investing time and energy into learning how to play the game and, if you plan too, how to mod properly for your enjoyment. I have not even TOUCHED on the conversion mods out there as I have not played them yet! but you have a Star trek, Star wars, B5 (in process), Battle star galactica (In process), and many others which completely transform the game into a game based on AND in that universe! you can play the entire Star trek time line from Enterprise through the movies and beyond! I recommend waiting for a sale and getting the "galaxy edition" and giving it a few dozen hours before buying the whole series!
Now I am not a game developer, nor do I work in the field so take my comment with that knowledge. I love the idea of this game and I have enjoyed almost 50 hours with it (Real life kept getting in the way) but I am going to have to uninstall and remove this from my computer. I do not like having a program tell me what I can and cannot do with it! (I despise windows and have gutted it DIE CORTANA!) The Paradoxes "Launcher" is a annoying piece of crap to say the least, and it interferes with my enjoyment of the game or down right destroys it. A lesson Paradox NEEDS to learn "If it isn't broke, DON'T fix it" all these patches that remove this, Nerf that, make this 10 times more complex etc. They are not making the game better In-fact, in most cases you just end up breaking other stuff and never really fully fixing it. I have been gaming since it's birth. I have played every type there is in the last 40 years and I can say that Paradox is not the worst game Dev out there EA has that title squarely in its trophy room, But Paradox is heading that way. They are heading down a path of "Widest user base" which ensures highest profits, but 99% of the time (my opinion) leaves you with lowest depth, I.E. Skyrim or Fallout4. No hate or such on Beth for those titles they are super "Build Your Own Adventure or BYOA"games but the vanilla game? I wouldn't give you $5 for. And that is where Paradox seems to be heading. Or well EA's route I suppose, but I really hope not. Suffice to say, I am uninstalling this from both platforms (Steam AND GoG) I hate your launcher and see no reason to implement it at all other then as a control measure over the player or a form of DRM actually this idea is exactly what EA does with Origin client. So props to ya I guess Paradox. You're following EA's footsteps beautifully and instead of trying to DL X programs to get around what shouldn't be there in the first place I will just remove the game entirely and be done with it.
