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Stellaris: Iron Victoria Europa Kings in space!

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My first impressions from the 2 hours is that the game is just amazing:

 

- The score is maybe one of the best that Paradox has ever done.
 

- I would say that Stellaris have the writting "feel" of CK2, even if don´t have the such deep focus on characters, but in term of scale/systems/ect... feel like between EU IV or a light CK2 as aoanla said. With more clear and better designed interface/systems, however there still light rough edge here and there, but nothing serious.

 

Ah! if anyone signed in that minigame they did, I think month ago - there is a bonus dlc if you sign in the paradox website.

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Impressions so far

 

- Music is amazing

 

- I'm pretty dumb and this game does a great job easing me into it.

 

- The writing is good too! 

 

I'm new to Paradox strategy games and this is making me want to go back and play CK2 after I play this a ton.

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My impressions are good, with some qualifications.

  • I was feeling very sour in the beginning because I failed the first five anomaly encounters, even though all were individually below a 35% change of failure. I know that it's statistically possible, but it felt stiflingly unfair and it was keeping me from encountering the writing like I wanted. Not actually a criticism, just a passing annoyance!
  • I love the feel of progression, the "card game" that is technology captures the feeling of blind research from Alpha Centauri without the ability to lead yourself up dead ends. Very few techs and buildings are just adding percentages to percentages: in the early game, at least, one more production point a month makes all the difference.
  • The ship designer is crap, the "core" system is clumsy, and the meaningless granularity of small/medium/large modules is an utter waste of time. If they wanted to impose that distinction, they should have tied it to the different classes of ships, because right now I take different boxes and put stuff in those boxes but sometimes the stuff changes size when I put it in a box so I have to take it out and put it in a different part of that box. It's fucked and it makes me dread upgrading my ships, which is tragic because the UI workflow for upgrading ships is as good as it gets!
  • The randomly generated alien races are cool, especially how the ethoi combine to create AI personalities, but I made the mistake of choosing a large galaxy (600 stars) with a lot of AI races (17, I think, not including Fallen Empires), so they've all begun to blur together anyway. I'm also at the odd point where I want to build a coalition, maybe even a federation, so my diplomats are going across the galaxy trying to find the enemy of my enemy of my friend of my enemy of my friend and then rivaling them. Next game, maybe eight races and a smaller galaxy, so that I have to deal with the neighbors I have rather than looking for new ones...
  • At certain points, the Clausewitz engine is straining badly trying to adapt its cities and provinces to planets and solar systems. I still haven't gotten past the fact that there are separate screens for galaxy view and solar system view, presented as if they're the same screen with a jump imposed between them. It leads to a lot of UI workflow breaks, like trying to zoom out with the mousewheel and going nowhere or double-clicking on a ship's shortcut in galaxy view and getting dragged into solar system view by it. I understand that you make a game with the engine you have, not the engine you want, but there's a lot of wrestling here that wasn't happening in Crusader Kings 2, maybe even just because galaxy view is treated as a window that you close to go back to the default presentation, solar system view, as opposed to province view being a window on the overmap.

Anyway, I played it for nearly twelve hours straight today, so that's the real judgment of quality. I'm going to need to pace myself on this one...

 

So far, my first impression, after about two hours, is generally positive, despite my civ being penned in by aggressive space creatures (not civilisations) in all directions, curtailing my survey ships' explorations. (I definitely don't have the military power to deal with the space creatures themselves, and I'm not spending power on military vessels until I can upgrade a bit anyway. Definitely a bit frustrating if you're going for the Science start as I am...)

 

I also did a really science-heavy play and was also blocked from early expansion by Crystalline Entities, but I found that once I'd gotten maybe fifteen corvettes with missiles, that was enough to drive off all the space monsters around me so that I could get down to researching the galaxy. An especially important fact is that Crystalline Entities don't heal (although I think that Space Amoebas and Void Clouds do) so you can go a couple rounds of combat, retreat and repair, and then come back with full strength to finish them off.

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I have gotten steamrolled twice trying to be a conqueror. The first time I think I might have declared war on a fallen empire accidentally, the second time one declared war on me. Time to start a third game as a friendlier race I think.

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I have gotten steamrolled twice trying to be a conqueror. The first time I think I might have declared war on a fallen empire accidentally, the second time one declared war on me. Time to start a third game as a friendlier race I think.

 

Haha, yes, never piss off a fallen empire. I love that they exist though, as something that you can't immediately steamroll through in early or mid game.

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Haha, yes, never piss off a fallen empire. I love that they exist though, as something that you can't immediately steamroll through in early or mid game.

Turns out playing as a slave owning, repulsive, xenophobe who just conquered another empire makes your neighbors nervous. Who knew?

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I played a little bit last night, but didn't get through the tutorial. I thought it was probably the best space 4X game I've ever played, but it still felt very bland to me. The 3MA comments that aside from the interface it didn't feel very Paradox-y rang true to me, which is disappointing.

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Played a game as the UN for about 3 hours and 30 years, had my best friend with 180 opinion of me declare war on my uplifted vassal, lost immediately. Played a second game with the UN in which I got a lot less resources, but a lot more habitable planets, got to 40 years in about 2 hours, and am doing much better.

 

Having played a lot of 4X games, I'm a bit disappointed to say it's another one of those. Surprisingly polished, with some interesting smaller ideas (such as the tech cards and race creation) but nothing really ground breaking. So far I haven't really seen the potential for emergent stories that EU4 and CK2 have, and the quest lines have all been fairly short and boring. I was really enthusiastic about the randomly generated space creatures, only to find out that you run into the exact same ones on a second play.

 

Still, I really enjoy Stellaris. It's very smooth and easy to learn (especially for a Paradox game) and it's been a while since I played a 4X (I skipped the new GalCiv and MoO.) I expect I'll be playing it for a while, and it will evolve quite a bit over the next 5 years of DLC.
 

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Also I'm with Gormongous that it drives me absolutely nuts that you can't use the mouse wheel to zoom out to the galactic level.

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I think I'm enjoying the game so far, but I'm finding that my general lack of experience with non-Civ 4X games is really holding me back. I'm trying to get through the tutorial and it's not going great. I just can't seem to get my resource production under way. I have to spend energy to get minerals, which puts me under the limits to complete the mission, so it never seems like I'm building a sustainable foundation. Any advice? Feel free to suggest super basic stuff as I am pretty new to these kinds of games.

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What I do with energy is build more power plants in the planet surface (if possible taking advantage of tile bonus, if not I just choose on tile which isn´t that important) of my capital early on. While building colonies I remain a while in negative or zero, until finished.

 

On side note:

There is already lots of mods (and here is a game where I am really curious of what modders will pull off) - most minor or cosmetic stuff, but there is a 2d Galaxy mod, which removes the Z plane, making the map 2D. It does work with ironman mode.

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I think I'm enjoying the game so far, but I'm finding that my general lack of experience with non-Civ 4X games is really holding me back. I'm trying to get through the tutorial and it's not going great. I just can't seem to get my resource production under way. I have to spend energy to get minerals, which puts me under the limits to complete the mission, so it never seems like I'm building a sustainable foundation. Any advice? Feel free to suggest super basic stuff as I am pretty new to these kinds of games.

 

there could be more optimizations you can make, but even if you learn that stuff you still should just fast-forward until you get enough money to do anything. the game is just paced horribly and making any progress is pointlessly slow

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I played the first 2 hours on normal speed, and I'm pretty sure I should have sped up time just to get the resource juices flowing.

 

I also think I "lost" at least 2 expansions worth of influence points, because the game was hinting that I should have admirals, governors, and science officers. That was an easy 200+ resources I could have been investing into expansion without noticeably hampering my fleet. My science team would have eventually gotten to the exploration I was doing. It didn't SEEM like I could use an un-manned science ship for science research or exploration, making one of those basically useless though. Am I correct or was the interface not telling me true?

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Dropped my 40 bones on it and was pleased. Me and my brother made the Space Pirates from Metroid and had a lot of fun with our collectivist, fanatically materialist, repulsive and autocratic dictatorship.

 

Highlights include:

Immediately fighting random unhostile alien life just cause we knew we could beat it.

Finding a derelict ship building station and activating it to create the huge mothership of our fleet.

Finding the first actual other race we can communicate with, discovering they're peaceful and immediately resolving to play nice and build an embassy while we prepare long term for war.

Briefly trying to use subterfuge to colonise a developing world, only to have them reach space age so we had to crush them in a war before they had time to build ships. And now we're immediately flying our people in to rule the planet.

 

I look forward to getting crushed (as befitting Space Pirates), because it's been going too well for us so far.

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I think I'm enjoying the game so far, but I'm finding that my general lack of experience with non-Civ 4X games is really holding me back. I'm trying to get through the tutorial and it's not going great. I just can't seem to get my resource production under way. I have to spend energy to get minerals, which puts me under the limits to complete the mission, so it never seems like I'm building a sustainable foundation. Any advice? Feel free to suggest super basic stuff as I am pretty new to these kinds of games.

Well the first thing I would say is that it doesn't really matter. The resource collection seems completely out of whack to me about 6 hours in. I've run out of storage for Energy and Influence, but I am constantly lacking minerals, as its minerals you have to use to build stuff. It's screaming out for a galactic market place like in Endless Legend so that you buy stuff with other stuff.

The game gives you more than enough time to learn how it all fits together. The victory conditions, such as they are, do not mean you have to optimise everything you do towards a victory condition from the off. You can go at your own pace. It lends the game a sense of scale and exploration that I've not encountered before I have to say.

I do which someone could create an AI that can recognise mutually beneficial trades though. Seriously, why does every AI in existence have to demand a ridiculous trade in their favour to give you something you can both benefit from?!?

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I was doing a small bit of trading and was completely unable to get what I wanted, then I realised that it was actually because the ethics of the other species essentially prohibited them wanting to give me it in any circumstance.

 

(it was to allow civilian ships in their borders, but their collectivist nature made that effectively impossible)

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I was doing a small bit of trading and was completely unable to get what I wanted, then I realised that it was actually because the ethics of the other species essentially prohibited them wanting to give me it in any circumstance.

(it was to allow civilian ships in their borders, but their collectivist nature made that effectively impossible)

Oh it does a good job of explaining why some trades are complete non-starters. However when you are in an alliance......

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The patch broke my save, couldn't zoom out past the sun. Damn that game was going well.

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Oh it does a good job of explaining why some trades are complete non-starters. However when you are in an alliance......

Oh is there a formal way to forge an alliance that's not just one ruling the other or agreeing to be friendly? I thought I'd gotten as far as I could with my neighbours, without establishing an actual power structure.

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Yes, as far as I can tell you can form alliances or federations without vassalizing other empires.

 

I was surprisingly super conflicted internally at taking out what amount to Space Barbarians that were keeping my science ships from sciencing because my race were xenophiles. I eventually human'd up and did it.

 

It's unclear (and kind of fun) to know how or when I'll run into other people's problems. I was able to research a fancy power generator that needed a strategic resource that I happily discovered on a planet where I already had a mine. I only have 3 colonized worlds right now. I don't know if that's fast or slow for where I am. I don't know when I'll get the option to terraform or research colonizing other worlds. I'm researching a rare technology that is taking 4x as long as any other technologies I had the ability to research, and I don't even know how beneficial it'll end up being.

 

Can you colonize planets that are outside your borders? If not, is the only way to expand (peacefully) either building frontier outposts or the slow creeping drip of influence ala Civ culture?

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Yes, as far as I can tell you can form alliances or federations without vassalizing other empires.

 

I was surprisingly super conflicted internally at taking out what amount to Space Barbarians that were keeping my science ships from sciencing because my race were xenophiles. I eventually human'd up and did it.

 

It's unclear (and kind of fun) to know how or when I'll run into other people's problems. I was able to research a fancy power generator that needed a strategic resource that I happily discovered on a planet where I already had a mine. I only have 3 colonized worlds right now. I don't know if that's fast or slow for where I am. I don't know when I'll get the option to terraform or research colonizing other worlds. I'm researching a rare technology that is taking 4x as long as any other technologies I had the ability to research, and I don't even know how beneficial it'll end up being.

 

Can you colonize planets that are outside your borders? If not, is the only way to expand (peacefully) either building frontier outposts or the slow creeping drip of influence ala Civ culture?

You can colonize and build frontier outposts outside your borders. 

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Ok, wildly important information. Plyem and I weren't sure last night. I just don't know that there are habitable worlds I can expand towards outside my borders right now :D

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I think I'm enjoying the game so far, but I'm finding that my general lack of experience with non-Civ 4X games is really holding me back. I'm trying to get through the tutorial and it's not going great. I just can't seem to get my resource production under way. I have to spend energy to get minerals, which puts me under the limits to complete the mission, so it never seems like I'm building a sustainable foundation. Any advice? Feel free to suggest super basic stuff as I am pretty new to these kinds of games.

 

I have taken to concentrating on getting mineral income well above the recommended 30, then circling back to get the credit income up. If you have enough minerals, you can do tricks to get your income high such as docking all your ships, building extra power plants on the surface, or (if really desperate) destroying a station or two and rebuilding it later. The biggest mistake I made for my starting game was building a lot of research stations. They are very important, but you can use that income for other things right at the beginning and circle around to build them a little later.

 

 

I played the first 2 hours on normal speed, and I'm pretty sure I should have sped up time just to get the resource juices flowing.

 

I also think I "lost" at least 2 expansions worth of influence points, because the game was hinting that I should have admirals, governors, and science officers. That was an easy 200+ resources I could have been investing into expansion without noticeably hampering my fleet. My science team would have eventually gotten to the exploration I was doing. It didn't SEEM like I could use an un-manned science ship for science research or exploration, making one of those basically useless though. Am I correct or was the interface not telling me true?

 

You need a scientist on a science ship to really do anything, and you loose quite a bit of research if you don't have a scientist on one of your research types, but you can get by without governors until you have sectors, and generals and admirals until you're in fights with enemies that are approximately equal in strength.

 

 

Oh is there a formal way to forge an alliance that's not just one ruling the other or agreeing to be friendly? I thought I'd gotten as far as I could with my neighbours, without establishing an actual power structure.

 

Many of the diplomatic options are limited by green techs. I just unlocked federations, and the ability to have a non-human be my president.

 

 

You can colonize and build frontier outposts outside your borders.

 

But not mining, research, or observation stations.

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I'm entering the late game right now (it's the year 2360) and I have two big reactions to this game as an overall experience.

  • All of my best in-game stories have come from the uplifting, observation, and genetic modification systems, to the point that I wish the game i) presented these systems more prominently in the interface and ii) had more gameplay systems that were reactive to them. Uplifting a race of beetle-people and discovering that they're ugly, solitary, and slow is one thing, having them slowly migrate throughout your empire and make people miserable on previous prosperous planets is great, genetically engineering them to be less unhappy by removing "undesirable" traits is awesome, but then it stops there. As far as I can tell, there are no penalties for engineering a custom-built population for every planet, except the research cost and the risk of them migrating to sub-optimal planets. More events, is what I'm saying, and more chances for the uplift process to go wrong, beyond just the uplifted species having undesirable traits. Also, would it kill them to leave you access to observation stations in your sectors, like they leave you access to spaceports? The sector AI doesn't do anything with the observation stations on its own, so you have to leave the system unincorporated if you want to infiltrate or uplift them. It feels like an ugly kludge and it basically opts me out of interesting content.
  • Fallen Empires are a great idea in theory, if only because they give the galaxy a distinct political geography that's usually missing from space 4X games, but in practice they fall apart rather pathetically as the player nears the end of the mid-game. I fought the Gwelicor Ascendancy, who were militant isolationists, and won not because I had better weapons (I had the missiles IV tech and shields III, mostly on battleships and cruisers) or because I had more ships, but because I could keep producing ships and transports while the Gwelicor, being a Fallen Empire, couldn't. Every ship that I lost I rebuilt, but every ship that they lost was gone forever, which meant that I won a sixty-year war against them by shooting down all their defenseless transports (which they couldn't replace) and then losing roughly 60,000 attack power's worth of ships in a war of attrition. They could destroy my stations but not occupy any planets, so they couldn't actually enforce any of the wargoals necessary to end the conflict that they were "winning." Eventually, I destroyed every ship that they had, landed troops on one of their ringworlds, and they instantly surrendered. I'd put maybe 100,000 minerals of destroyed ships into this conflict, but I'd gotten nearly all of the endgame tech from their debris, maybe fifty years early, and the Gwelicor are just sitting there defenseless, waiting for the truce to end and for me to annex them. It feels really gamey and I don't think that Paradox has thought the feature through. Probably, in the multiplayer games that constitute most of their testing, no one ever decides to fight a sixty-year war of attrition against a Fallen Empire, but it was definitely a natural path that my singleplayer game took.

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I'm really bummed that my second game has been fairly bereft of primitive cultures anywhere near me. Of course, a primitive culture is ultimately why I lost my first game, so maybe that's better in the long run.

 

I'm about 60 years in, and have reached the point where everything feels fairly stable and I'm just researching colonizing techs and creating sectors from the less-habitable options out there. The one real challenge I'm facing at the moment is begging to get into the good graces of the race who currently owns the planet with the last species I need to connect for a big story mission, and keeping my military updated enough so I don't look weak to a few larger, but currently cordial, neighbors. I think I'm in the stage that internal strife is supposed to be making things interesting, but I'm still over 80% loyalist, and that's even with immigration treaties with anyone around who will sign on with me. I guess I need to work on my happiness or something.

 

I did win one war though, so that's something. Through an ally we support a faction in a totalitarian neighbor that ended up splitting them in half to form a new republic, who then joined the alliance. I've got the tech to make it a federation now, but I'm not 100% sure how to actually do that.

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