Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Stellaris - Paradox new sci-fi grand strategy game

Heresiarch

Prophet
Joined
Mar 8, 2008
Messages
1,451
Got the game yesterday and I paid 70 euros because I was stupid and did not buy it during the summer sales but I was really in the mood of space 4X.

The game plays like a weird chimera of various 4X games messed together. The tradition thing is basically Civ5's social policy, the different FTL travel methods reminds me of Sword of the Stars, the building stuff on planet surface feels like GalCiv, the events and "quests" is sort of Endless series' storytelling.

Some parts of the game feel very unpolished or awkward, especially the controls. Not able to straight zoom out from local system to the galaxy screen is really annoying for someone who used to play Distant Worlds for example. A lot of hotkeys seems to be missing (survey, construct mining platforms, etc.). UI and the universe map seem may turn into a huge mess as I expand with all the tiny numbers appearing everywhere.

I have played only for 2 hours but so far all I do was survey systems, research anomalies/projects, kill some pirates, build colonies, and read the stories and fluff. Hmmm that does cover the all 4 eX's, but for some reason it is missing some of the "spark" that makes the game feel truly unique. And it definitely has not given me those awesome LARPing moments like how CK2 or EU4 does.

I hope it is only because I am still very early in the game and have not seen everything the game offers. Can you guys point me to the right direction to look at the game so I will not blame myself too much on wasting 70 euros?
 

Lone Wolf

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 17, 2014
Messages
3,703
AlphaMod, New Ship Classes, More Events Mod, LEX, ISB series and Star Trek: New Horizons (ST:NH if you fancy a total conversion).

But look, this is one game where you really have to make stories happen. The game world won't relentlessly put stuff on your plate. It's been tough for me, because I hate diplomacy and interacting with NPC empires (other than puritanical conquest). CK2/EUIV use the RNG and event chains to force you into LARPing moments - Stellaris by and large won't. It's a traditional 4X in many ways. Factions and self-imposed playstyles are key for proper enjoyment. Breaking the game is fairly easy, so a great deal of the challenge is committing to the LARP.

And wars are still boring (this aspect of the game will probably be majorly redesigned at some point in the next year or so).
 

Dayyālu

Arcane
Joined
Jul 1, 2012
Messages
4,466
Location
Shaper Crypt
I hope it is only because I am still very early in the game and have not seen everything the game offers. Can you guys point me to the right direction to look at the game so I will not blame myself too much on wasting 70 euros?

I have some bad news for you.

You wasted 70 bucks.

I'v played my fair share of space 4x(from MoO to GalCiv to SoTS) and Stellaris feels both empty and bothersome. It's aggressively mediocre: there's nothing else in the game but what you described. Refund it if you still can.
 

Heresiarch

Prophet
Joined
Mar 8, 2008
Messages
1,451
I hope it is only because I am still very early in the game and have not seen everything the game offers. Can you guys point me to the right direction to look at the game so I will not blame myself too much on wasting 70 euros?

I have some bad news for you.

You wasted 70 bucks.

I'v played my fair share of space 4x(from MoO to GalCiv to SoTS) and Stellaris feels both empty and bothersome. It's aggressively mediocre: there's nothing else in the game but what you described. Refund it if you still can.

That's...sad to hear. I was looking at other space 4x options but seems that ALL of them have some problem or another. ES2 is supposedly very unbalanced, GalCiv3 I have heard is pretty good but I am skeptical due to how boring GalCiv2 was, and I don't know how to feel about the new Master of Orion which came out of nowhere (the game does look kinda hot tho). Or perhaps I should play Albion Prelude or replay Star Control 2...
 

rezaf

Cipher
Joined
Jan 26, 2015
Messages
650
I felt Stellaris was allright at best at release, but filled to the brim with an awesome amount of potential.
Alas, none of that potential has been realized so far.
Which may be because, talking in car terms, making Stellaris great would require the installation of a new engine, but Paradox is a company that changes single screws. Maybe the game will still get there eventually, but at this point in time, it's definately not worth $70.

As for 4x options, still none seems to be able to dethrone good old MoO, with or without the 2 at the end, depending on your tastes.

The best in my personal opinion was StarDrive. It was very flawed, but had the best average amount of fun out of the box. Stellaris was GREAT for the first dozen hours or so, but then my enjoyment of it fell off a cliff.
GalCiv3 I have not purchased, but LPs look soooooooo dull. Just like GC2 (which I do own) was dull. Maybe it's because of their second leg being in application development, but it looks like StarDock just doesn't have it in them to infuse any of their products with any amount of pure "fun". The new MoO is too steamlined, ES2 isn't my cup of tea ... slim pickings. :(
 

Destroid

Arcane
Joined
May 9, 2007
Messages
16,628
Location
Australia
rezaf StarDrive is laughable unfinished garbage. I don't think that guy even tried with the tech tree and he moved on to make StarDrive 2 before he ever made things like the resource shipping work right.
 

Beastro

Arcane
Joined
May 11, 2015
Messages
7,941
rezaf StarDrive is laughable unfinished garbage. I don't think that guy even tried with the tech tree and he moved on to make StarDrive 2 before he ever made things like the resource shipping work right.

It's a fucked up series. Guy seems to put most of his work into making the races look cool in the diplomacy screen.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
I hope it is only because I am still very early in the game and have not seen everything the game offers. Can you guys point me to the right direction to look at the game so I will not blame myself too much on wasting 70 euros?
The right direction to look at the game is away, because you've bought a Paradox game, and, as is traditional with Paradox games, they're laughably terribad garbage for the first approximately 3-4 years of their lives and don't really take form until 4 or 5 expansions later.
 

kris

Arcane
Joined
Oct 27, 2004
Messages
8,835
Location
Lulea, Sweden
I hope it is only because I am still very early in the game and have not seen everything the game offers. Can you guys point me to the right direction to look at the game so I will not blame myself too much on wasting 70 euros?
The right direction to look at the game is away, because you've bought a Paradox game, and, as is traditional with Paradox games, they're laughably terribad garbage for the first approximately 3-4 years of their lives and don't really take form until 4 or 5 expansions later.

I wouldn't agree that is for all their games. But the more recent game, the more this is true.
 

wyes gull

Savant
Joined
Apr 20, 2017
Messages
424
The best in my personal opinion was StarDrive. It was very flawed, but had the best average amount of fun out of the box.
The amount of fucking around in shipbuilding it allowed was impressive and in a good way. There was an item that broke the game by making ships super light and fast but aside even with it, it was still good fun.
Not so impressive was the individual games being pretty much unfinishable with the AIs insistence on building new ships and not decommissioning obsolete ones which meant the game engine couldn't cope with the ship numbers the way it was designed and the games ground to a halt in the late stages. Even less impressive is the dev being aware of all this and going "fuck it and fuck you lot, I'm making a sequel". But hey at least he sort of attempted to fix it (for a while) instead of churning out paid dlc.

Trying to check the forums for whatever the problem was specifically, which used to be full of complaints and wouldn't you know it, the dev deleted them when upgrading. Surprisingly enough, someone had a bit more respect for the game than he did and supposedly managed to make it playable. Good show.
 
Last edited:

Raghar

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Jul 16, 2009
Messages
22,504
I hope it is only because I am still very early in the game and have not seen everything the game offers. Can you guys point me to the right direction to look at the game so I will not blame myself too much on wasting 70 euros?

I have some bad news for you.

You wasted 70 bucks.

I'v played my fair share of space 4x(from MoO to GalCiv to SoTS) and Stellaris feels both empty and bothersome. It's aggressively mediocre: there's nothing else in the game but what you described. Refund it if you still can.

That's...sad to hear. I was looking at other space 4x options but seems that ALL of them have some problem or another. ES2 is supposedly very unbalanced, GalCiv3 I have heard is pretty good but I am skeptical due to how boring GalCiv2 was, and I don't know how to feel about the new Master of Orion which came out of nowhere (the game does look kinda hot tho). Or perhaps I should play Albion Prelude or replay Star Control 2...
Stellaris is EU IV in space. Are you in mood for EU IV? Do you like EU IV. You can watch TwitchTV while playing Stellaris, or read a book while playing Stellaris. THat's no problem. It's just not a BotF, or some more taxing space games.
 

Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
6,216
Location
Space Hell
DD, Ethics voicepacks.
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This week’s diary I’m taking charge and going to write about Voice Over’s for the (unannounced) Story Pack coming alongside the 1.8 ‘Čapek’ update! We still can’t tell you any further details about the name or release date of the Story Pack, but stay tuned for future dev diaries!

For the upcoming Story Pack we felt that we wanted to experiment with VIR, our friendly advisor, see how it would feel to have different set of VO cues depending on your Empire’s ethic. A VO Cue is a term that we use to describe a Voice Over line that triggers at a certain point in the game as for example “Hostile Fleet Detected” or “Research Complete”.

We started with a test case in-house to try it out and we concluded that it was a great experience! From then on we moved on with the process and allocated time to write unique script for each role, character description, casting, auditions and finally recording sessions. It has been personally a long and hard process but in the end I’m really pleased to finally show of 3 samples out of 10 Voice Packs!



There will be a automatic settings for the VO Packs in the game so that the VO will switch depending on what Ethic you start with in the game and also switches while you're playing if you decided with switch Ethic's in your campaign. If you're not into that you will be able to select with set of VO Cues you want to play and you will always be able to switch back to the original VO if you desire.

Now that you have heard some of the results you might ask yourself how the whole procedure works with recording VO? So I’ll describe to a certain detail how the whole process goes by. :)

First of you need to write a script and if you have talented Content Designers. and we do have in our team, there is no problem to get good a script. Once the script is complete and approved it gets handed to me and I take it to the next step: Casting!

Casting of it’s own is also a long process which takes time. With help of a Casting Director you can get in touch with several possible Voice Actors that can help you to deliver the best result out of each script. When you have picked out potential actors that you think will suit for the role, you bring them in for a audition. In an audition you let the actor read a certain part of the script which usually depict the character the most and also give the best material for the Voice Actor so that they can perform as good as possible. After all the auditions are done you pick the actor that suited the best for the role. Sometimes during auditions actors comes for a certain role to read but during the session you realize that the actor would be more fitted for another role and that happened to our Militarist! We brought her in to do a audition for another role first but while she was reading the part for the first role I heard that she might be better suited as a angry general, so I asked her to try out for the Militarist and it was a really good fit! So good that we ended up with her as the Militarist.

With all the casting/auditions done you move on to the actual recording session, get as much possible material from your actors. It is important that you’re there to act as a “director” for the actors so that you can give the instructions and guidelines so that they can give you all the right emotions and takes that you require for your character in the game.

As soon as the recordings were done I moved on to editing. There is a lot of editing when it comes to VO since it is not only about how the recording equipment sound but also the sheer amount of assets you need to go through..

VY1grVq.png


While editing you usually “zoom in” really close in the waveforms of the recordings to mess around/cutting noise such as clicks and pops. So yes, we Sound Designers tend to get really nerdy when it comes to VO editing:

aHHJbEZ.png


After you have done all the editing which is removing “clicks” and “pops”, ugly breath takes, add fade in/out, you move into adding “effects” to the VO so we can get that cool Robotic style. For each VO I gave them something else than just using the same settings as for “Default VIR”.

So in short terms that is how you record VO!

That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about robots and robotic modification.
 

Heresiarch

Prophet
Joined
Mar 8, 2008
Messages
1,451
I have played the thing for 15 hours so far and it is actually pretty decent. Not ground breaking nor really worth 70 bucks but it is a proper 4X with lots of thing to do. Also from what I have read from the patch notes, Paradox put in a ton of improvement and new features and will keep doing so.

One thing that keeps annoy me is how bad the UX is. For example the indications that the game is paused are not very obvious, especially for a game like this in which the main game screen is often static. And I really wish I could rebind the galaxy/local map to the tab key instead of reaching out to M.
 

decaf

Learned
Joined
Apr 21, 2017
Messages
351
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ev-diary-77-ethics-voice-packs.1035192/page-9
Wiz Game Director (Stellaris):
Refragmental said:
I don't think there has been even one complaint about the voice being female.
At least not here or reddit.​
There has. Besides that though, we had a discussion while recording on how aggressive female voices will be called crazy or overacting because that literally always happens, regardless of context, so it's interesting to see just how much of the criticism has focused on that, with zero self-reflection on how a male voice with similar tone and style would get a pass. It's amusingly predictable, as is the offended self-righteousness upon pointing it out.

Wiz Game Director (Stellaris):
To be clear, what I am saying is not that the Militarist VO is perfect and beyond all critique, what I am saying is that we had a script for the Militarist VO that called for a more 'crazy' approach, and we picked the actor (after auditioning both male and female voices) that did the role best, knowing that picking a male voice would have been a safer bet no matter the quality of the actor. So it's a bit amusing, like I said, to see the backlash and the absence of self-distance and self-reflection coming with it, because we *knew* this would happen and chose to pay that price.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...v-diary-77-ethics-voice-packs.1035192/page-10
Wiz Game Director (Stellaris):
Refragmental said:
Again, it has nothing to do with it being female or male. Why do you keep driving that point?​
Because it does, in fact, have a lot to do with that.

>use the overacted voice sample (female)
>people don't like it
>ur sexist

Only in video games.
 

Grif

Learned
Joined
Nov 4, 2016
Messages
231
Man, Wiz really not doing himself any favour with this dogged m'ladying. Who does he think he's fooling anyway?
 

Wilian

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 14, 2011
Messages
2,819
Divinity: Original Sin
Got the game yesterday and I paid 70 euros because I was stupid and did not buy it during the summer sales but I was really in the mood of space 4X.

The game plays like a weird chimera of various 4X games messed together. The tradition thing is basically Civ5's social policy, the different FTL travel methods reminds me of Sword of the Stars, the building stuff on planet surface feels like GalCiv, the events and "quests" is sort of Endless series' storytelling.

Some parts of the game feel very unpolished or awkward, especially the controls. Not able to straight zoom out from local system to the galaxy screen is really annoying for someone who used to play Distant Worlds for example. A lot of hotkeys seems to be missing (survey, construct mining platforms, etc.). UI and the universe map seem may turn into a huge mess as I expand with all the tiny numbers appearing everywhere.

I have played only for 2 hours but so far all I do was survey systems, research anomalies/projects, kill some pirates, build colonies, and read the stories and fluff. Hmmm that does cover the all 4 eX's, but for some reason it is missing some of the "spark" that makes the game feel truly unique. And it definitely has not given me those awesome LARPing moments like how CK2 or EU4 does.

I hope it is only because I am still very early in the game and have not seen everything the game offers. Can you guys point me to the right direction to look at the game so I will not blame myself too much on wasting 70 euros?

Do you want to know the best thing? What you just described is what is commonly, even in here Codex, considered the 'good part of the game'

It's only downhill from there on out.

:lol:
 

Mark.L.Joy

Prophet
Joined
Sep 11, 2016
Messages
1,278
Lol, imagine the smugness in this guy's face while he passed on a better business and artistic decision just so that he could preach his retarded religion:
1443721215703.jpg
 

Heresiarch

Prophet
Joined
Mar 8, 2008
Messages
1,451
OMG the mid-late game is so fucking stale. I thought it would be like CK2/EU4 in that I would keep seeing crazy events even late game but nope, I was just researching shit (and I have actually researched EVERYTHING without even me knowing), terraforming planets, colonizing them, building buildings, building ships...yawn...

There were no more interesting anomalies to find/explore, I had way too much minerals/credits, there were no gamechanging technology. I was stuck at 5/6 of the procursor quest, the fallen empires didn't wake up, the only two guardians close to me were just 1 research mission + 1 mini-text adventure after an anticlimatic battle. I have basically spent the last 10 hours doing monotonous empire administrative work.

The Scourge appeared and WTF, 400k fleets destroying everything in its way? They are still quite far away from me but I can't help but feel it to be a cheap way to give an "END GAME CHALLENGE!!1". And with the way fleets movement, ship battles, and ship design/building/logistics work in this game, it will probably a nightmare to actually fight those space zergs.

I don't really understand how the mid-late game can be stretched out sooooo much and despite that you had a whole galaxy to play with, there is so little exciting stuff to do.

Now I understand why people would say just go play Distant Worlds instead of Stellaris. While DW late game has also little to actually "do", at least the universe is completely dynamic and it's fun even just to watch how civ ships doing their own business.
 

Heresiarch

Prophet
Joined
Mar 8, 2008
Messages
1,451
Also I just bought Endless Space 2 and played it for 4 hours and now I am missing Stellaris' massive universe and how it actually explains how the production/food/whatever stats work and how it has an actually functioning wiki. ES2 has gorgeous music and graphics but the gameplay core seems to be completely imbalanced (what's the point of all those +food buildings??), and it's frustrating to find the real reasons why the numbers work like that (i.e. I have an planet which products 11 industry/person, but I checked all the parameters and still don't know how it came like that...). And a quick look at the tech tree together with my experience with Amplitude tells me that the mid-end game would be not too exciting to play as well...sigh.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom