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Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,819
Location
Italy
pretty horrible as is, but it's interesting how what you praise as "improvement" is turning the game more and more alike to moo3, which you despise.
 

LizardWizard

Cipher
Joined
Feb 14, 2014
Messages
991
:abyssgazer:

For fucks sake. The amount of PDX forums/reddit children crying, "please mommyWiz don't take my legos" over losing a shit tier designed, paint-by-numbers tile system is baffling.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
I can't imagine why anyone would like the tile system. The whole drag and drop pops to get +1 resources is like a shitty phone game.
 
Joined
May 11, 2007
Messages
1,853,654
Location
Belém do Pará, Império do Brasil
I would like to see them handle pops more in terms of infrastructure rather than just food and hard population limits. Hard pop limits are shit that should have gone away with Master of Orion. Reality is messier than that. I would love to see a planet turn into a 40k-style Hive World.

If they're removing tiles they could add some complexity - like, military pops.

I hope they use this to revamp resources, too.
 

rezaf

Cipher
Joined
Jan 26, 2015
Messages
650
Has this game changed in a meaningful way yet?

I have not played in earnest since some months after release. I read the feature list when I heard of a new expansion, but none seemed to really tackle the core issue I had with the game.
Which was that it had some extremely strong opening hours of a fascinatingly fresh 4x experience with a star trek vibe to it, but then dissolved into an empty shell of what almost felt like alpha version placeholder gameplay.
I felt the obvious course of action was to come up with ways to extend the star trek vibe further into the game, but instead they built flashy overpriced superweapons and structures and switched out problematic subsystems with equally problematic replacements or axed them alltogether (hello ftl styles).
Have they achieved anything meaningful since?
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,819
Location
Italy
it's not going to change until the diplomacy expansion hits. right now diplomacy is still sort of set in stone, you're forced to forge alliances according to ideologies and only to ideologies and they won't change, until you purge some population or conquer something. then suddenly everybody hate your guts, even those who were just purging and conquering till 5 minutes ago.
 

Volrath

Arcane
Patron
Joined
May 21, 2007
Messages
4,297
I've noticed the overwhelming negative review bombing on steam since 2.0. What changed? I bought it some time ago on a steam sale whim but never ended up playing it, was thinking of trying it out on the weekend.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
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general dumbing down and a whole cargo of new bugs.
but the new expansion will be the charm. i know. i've known for all the other expansions too.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
I've noticed the overwhelming negative review bombing on steam since 2.0. What changed? I bought it some time ago on a steam sale whim but never ended up playing it, was thinking of trying it out on the weekend.

It's Chinks pissed off that the game doesn't have their language available. Nothing to do with removal of game mechanics or massively overpriced DLC, unfortunately.
 
Joined
Apr 3, 2013
Messages
2,071
Location
Siberia
Stellaris is such a steaming pile of shit, I come back once a year to see if they finally fixed any of the post-1-hour issues and it seems like the game became even more boring somehow. Paradox gonna paradox though.
 

Agame

Arcane
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I cum from a land down under
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Stellaris is such a steaming pile of shit, I come back once a year to see if they finally fixed any of the post-1-hour issues and it seems like the game became even more boring somehow. Paradox gonna paradox though.

Its truly incredible how generic and boring this game is, whenever I try and play I just feel tired and want to go lie down and have a nap. It shows how creatively bankrupt paradox are when they dont have a historical framework to hang a game off. EU and HOI seem fun and dynamic because my brain links into all my knowledge of WW2, European history etc. You remove that and you get: Stellaris, tedious, soulless, spread sheeting against a flashy backdrop of stars and planets...

And to think they could have made Dune style space opera, CK2 in space :negative:
 

rezaf

Cipher
Joined
Jan 26, 2015
Messages
650
I'm not sure this is the problem. Maybe they shouldn't have tried making a full fledged 4x game when they have only experience in the grand strategy genre.

The game is too generic (surprisingly I don't mean in the dull sense of the word at this point) for it's own good. All the random generated alien species don't lend themselves to familiarity, which is where the other Paradox games shine. And yes, they strongly rely on players already having this familiarity because they know about the real world history behind it.

In Stellaris, there's none of that. Everything is a soulless generation. Even ACTUAL 4x games - without storytelling ambitions - almost always give you prefab races. If Stellaris had those, you could have canned events for them, with much more personality than you can ever get if everything is just number driven. Well, there's the endgame crisis races, but they only show that they aren't really trying.
Also, they showcase how you just don't care about all those random empires being gobbled up or destroyed. They mean nothing to the player.

They should just jettison the randomness and go with something like 32 prefab empires, with mid-game event chains and sometimes predetermined relationships and stuff.

Unfortunately, Paradox are still under the delusion that they can make people care by throwing enough microsystems (released as DLC packs of course) at them. It just does not work this way.
It's like you wrote, the only reason it's sufferable in the other games is because they take place in a historical context and the player can just fill in the blanks with stuff he knows from other sources...

Ah well.
 
Joined
Oct 7, 2015
Messages
637
Location
Kangaroo Island
In Stellaris, there's none of that. Everything is a soulless generation. Even ACTUAL 4x games - without storytelling ambitions - almost always give you prefab races.
I really did kind of hope from the start they'd make a fully authored pseudo-historical setting instead of the bland procgenned mess they ended up actually making. I think the game would have benefited massively from it for pretty much the same reasons you listed. Full procgen for everything is just such a dangerous road to go down. Not even Dwarf Fortress goes to the length of randomly generating all the main races.

The game also just feels so goddamn focus tested and trope-laden that it tries to appeal to everyone, and two(?) years on from launch barely appears to anyone now that the honeymoon period is done with.
e,g: Ship design? Nothing more than a genre trope. Completely unnecessary within the mechanical scope of the game. The only reason it's there is because "oh if it's a sci-fi 4x game it has to have customisable ships!"
Seriously if it's not actually a combat-focused game it doesn't need to have a ship editor. They could have easily gotten away with having prefab ships that levelled their stats through idea groups and tech, like in all their other games, and I think people would have actually praised them for the decision.
 

rezaf

Cipher
Joined
Jan 26, 2015
Messages
650
Ship design could play a role - though I'm still a bit puzzled why they didn't borrow their own idea from research in the older HoI games. You could dole out new designs to different contractors, it could be companies in free market economies, some sort of collectives in socialist, royal institutions in monarchies etc.
Same with research, having three individuals running the entire research of your galactic empire makes no sense whatsoever. Thus handing it the HoI way would be much more reasonable.
Also, I think I wrote this earlier somewhere in this thread, they could've copied fleet combat from these games. Let's face it, Paradox' implementation of space combat in Stellaris sucks donkey balls, and if you had instead a battle screen like in HoI naval battles, it'd make much more sense. A rocket wouldn't have to fly for three weeks before it hits it's target due to abstraction either.

Man, this game really grinds my gears. It had such a massive amount of potential ... and yet.

What gets me most is how they are - there can be no better word - fooling around when it comes to rebalancing/replacing/removing stuff as the patches come and go.
There's a programmer sketch where two developers stare at their screen and one says: "Now we tried < and <=, it still doesn't work. What are we to do?", to which the other responds "Let's try >"... Paradox in a nutshell.
 

Nirvash

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 20, 2017
Messages
1,108
I've noticed the overwhelming negative review bombing on steam since 2.0. What changed? I bought it some time ago on a steam sale whim but never ended up playing it, was thinking of trying it out on the weekend.

With 2.0 they reworked expansion (to own a system you need to build a spacestation in, yes for EVERY system) they REMOVED wormhole and warp travel (only hyperlanes now) and travel speed is now very very very very slow.
war is also 100% broken.

2.0 REMOVED features.
 

Storyfag

Perfidious Pole
Patron
Joined
Feb 17, 2011
Messages
15,899
Location
Stealth Orbital Nuke Control Centre
I've noticed the overwhelming negative review bombing on steam since 2.0. What changed? I bought it some time ago on a steam sale whim but never ended up playing it, was thinking of trying it out on the weekend.

With 2.0 they reworked expansion (to own a system you need to build a spacestation in, yes for EVERY system) they REMOVED wormhole and warp travel (only hyperlanes now) and travel speed is now very very very very slow.
war is also 100% broken.

2.0 REMOVED features.

Erm. Plenty of wormholes, gateways and warp jumps in 2.0 for me.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,819
Location
Italy
I'm not sure this is the problem. Maybe they shouldn't have tried making a full fledged 4x game when they have only experience in the grand strategy genre.

The game is too generic (surprisingly I don't mean in the dull sense of the word at this point) for it's own good. All the random generated alien species don't lend themselves to familiarity, which is where the other Paradox games shine. And yes, they strongly rely on players already having this familiarity because they know about the real world history behind it.

you probably see it by yourself, but do you know what fixed that for me? of course a shitload of mods, and then creating my own empires to populate the galaxy with. with a bit of overpowered starting systems here, or overpowered traits there, i could already direct who was going to be a threat soon, who later, who would have formed a federation with whom... i gave them even a little bit of lore because i'm a sore loser larper like that. and it worked. suddenly i had friends, enemies, familiar faces.
i wish i had skill and patience to create whole scenarios. that's really the thing stellaris needs.
 

Mortmal

Arcane
Joined
Jun 15, 2009
Messages
9,158
I am looking at the steam chart,and it looks like people are tired of halfassed DLC swarm. It is below HoI 4 and EU4. Normally the games get a boost in players during a new dlc time.
http://steamcharts.com/cmp/394360,281990,236850#6m

It seems that the last DLC really killed the game.
Not only, its less complex, its the most mainstream of their games, no emerging gameplay like in CK2, no emotional attachment to nation like in EU4. last DLC did not improve combat at all and i have an hard time remembering anything of worth added. The new spaceports are still irrelevant , planet killers useless...No reasons to be excited anymore.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,087
Location
Bulgaria
I am looking at the steam chart,and it looks like people are tired of halfassed DLC swarm. It is below HoI 4 and EU4. Normally the games get a boost in players during a new dlc time.
http://steamcharts.com/cmp/394360,281990,236850#6m

It seems that the last DLC really killed the game.
Not only, its less complex, its the most mainstream of their games, no emerging gameplay like in CK2, no emotional attachment to nation like in EU4. last DLC did not improve combat at all and i have an hard time remembering anything of worth added. The new spaceports are still irrelevant , planet killers useless...No reasons to be excited anymore.
Yeah,wiz is really shit developer. It is the only paradox game that i played once on release and never touched again. The core of the game was rotten and had no chance of improvement. If the map was hand made and had unique empires like EU or CK,it could have been good game. But random generations....bah it is shit "feature".
 

LizardWizard

Cipher
Joined
Feb 14, 2014
Messages
991
Yeah,wiz is really shit developer. It is the only paradox game that i played once on release and never touched again. The core of the game was rotten and had no chance of improvement.

Wiz only took over post-release.
 

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