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By playing any game published by Paradox Interactive AB, you (i) agree to be bound by the User Agreement and (ii) confirm that you have read and understood the Privacy Policy.
Patch 4.0 has ruined the game. So many game mechanics are just completely nonfunctional and will be introduced into the game by the randomly generated AI empires in a broken state. Balance work also just hasn't been done on the core gameplay. Absolutely do not buy this game or any DLC for it at all until at least 2026. That's how catastrophically broken it is right now.
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.
Despite the fact that this is decent game, even if it has some bugs, it is really expensive when you start from scratch. This is how Paradox's DLC policy looks like.
40 bucks (almost full price) for the base game + 150 for all the DLCs. That means you have to pay roughly 200 bucks for the entire game. There is no way to justify that!