Stellaris

GOOD

I created a race of robots that were unified under one goal, to cover the entire galaxy in their own bodily fluids. As an aquatic robotic hand made with blood sweat and tears, this race reached its ultimate goal and decided to just cover it all in sea-men.

This game is the best 4X strategy game I have ever played! It's amazing!

I like it here

good

I'm not a big fan of this game, but to be honest it's not that bad either. I'll give it a weak thumbs up, because, after all, I did play it a decent amount of hours. I played the game until year 2500 ( the default end game year, after which you can technically still play ), and honestly I don't feel the need to play it again anytime soon. Personally, I prefer Crusader Kings, because it has funny elements ( ex: being a jerk king ) and has more personality. Stellaris is a game that starts really smoothly - smoother than CKIII - with a great tutorial covering most of what you need to know, although not everything. But eventually it gets tedious and quite repetitive. Building spaceships, colonizing planets, enhancing your colonies, doing tons research to unlock many, many things is fun and addicting. But the more you play, the more you realize the things you do in the first dozen hours ends up being the same things but on a much, much larger scale later. There will be a lot of micromanagement as you repeatedly pause the game to catch up on multiple events unfolding all over the map as your empire grows bigger. There will be some events, usually catastrophic like a galactic invasion, which will shake things up once in a while but honestly, in my playthrough, I didn't find them very fun. The balancing is all over the place, especially when you introduce DLCs to it, some of which will quickly make you overpowered by letting you have huge buffs at your disposal while the AI has no access to it. But even without the DLCs, you end up with either very easy and simple obstacles or absolutely unfair and impossible ones. It's just a bunch of gameplay elements all thrown together in a big melting pot. I fear the DLCs really destroyed any chances of having an adequate balancing in this game. Many elements from Stellaris reminded me of the old Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri such as managing colonies along with political and societal aspects, for example. I like the diplomacy angle a lot. However, based on my experience, the AI isn't reacting in a smart manner, ignoring large scale conflicts until it's too late. Once you get an understanding of how it behaves, it becomes quite predictable and it's just a matter of if you prepare well enough for the inevitable things that they will do. I find space combat quite deceiving in how it's portrayed versus what it actually does. In reality, space combat is quite bad in this game. Spaceships will just fly in circles instead of engaging in dogfights or having actual battles. Through all those lasers and cosmic explosions, it's just a bunch of 3D models swirling around, clipping through each other, and the only thing that matters is the overall power rating. You will rarely enter a battle with an outcome you didn't expect, unlike games such as Total War games in which sometimes one thing can change the tide of the battle. The space combat is especially tedious when you're waging war on the map, trying to efficiently attack enemies that scurry from system to system. You constantly need to zoom in/out to see actual enemy movement due to their icons not indicating where they are heading when they're in a solar system, often causing cat and mouse games on the galactic map as you chase them and reconquer systems they conquered before you. Some events will make it pretty much impossible for you to survive if you are in the wrong part of the galaxy unless you have the option to surrender and lube yourself up and bend over. One example are dormant, ancient empires which awaken and wipe the map off of anybody whenever they want, or another would be barbarian, Mongol-like hordes which will seldom unite and lay waste across the known space. The problem is that whatever progress you've made isn't worth anything against them since you are locked behind dev-imposed logistical limits while they are not. They can have as many fleets as they want, while you can only control a few due to a fleet cap, even if you realistically would have all the necessary materials and people to make a lot more. If you go beyond the cap, you are punished severely with ressource drains. You can make federations, similar to what we see in Star Trek. It's a bit clumsy. You can quickly abuse your powers and your federation allies won't care. When they contribute to fleets, they send them piece by piece and you need to handle all the fleet management to combine them. The biggest issue with the federation system is its self-imposed tax and ressource spending. It makes no sense to tax per construction instead of a tax on overall energy credits because some constructions generate way more energy credits than others. You also have to spend all your own ressources if you want to build a federation fleet instead of creating a federation fund which would've made way more sense. I haven't experienced a bug in many hours of game time. I have no idea how people can complain about so many bugs in the game. I think some people just don't understand the intrinsic details of the game and call them bugs. On a few occasions I had to refer to internet to figure out the purpose or use of specific things in the game which aren't explained. I feel like a complex game like Stellaris is required to have more information than it provides. Then again, you get games like Dwarf Fortress in which the tutorial barely covers 10% of the game, so maybe I'm complaining for no reason here. Some sounds ( the sounds species make when you engage in talks with them ) are inexplicably very loud compared to the rest of the sounds in the game. The music is incredible, very relaxing. I was actually listening to the music of Stellaris way before I bought it. The UI is great and very efficient. The one UI I found confusing for the longest period of time was fleet management. Even if the tutorial covers it, I feel like some buttons are less necessary than others but they still hold the same amount of pixels than more important ones. Some icons are more or less descriptive of what they do. In conclusion, it's not that bad even though I'm complaining a lot here. There's definitely an addicting, fun side to Stellaris when you grow your empire. However, there will inevitably be a stale and off time that kills the momentum. I'm not saying I'll never play it again, but I need a break now. 6.5/10.

It's alright.