Episode 355: Stellaris

[Turrican]

OK I'm trying not be rude here and I realise that in engaging with you I've walked that line a little close, for which I apologise. However, posting that clearly demonstrates that you don't even understand what it is you were objecting to in your original post.

Let me put it more simply - what you think you are arguing, and what you are actually arguing are two completely different things. Go back and read what you posted again, then read what Bruce has posted above (because he's articulating the same argument as me, only much more eloquently) and see if you can see through the logic of what you've actually posted.

You are of course perfectly entitled to your opinion of Rowan, his review and your objection to it. But at least understand what it is your arguing against. People disagreeing with you is no reason to be rude and offensive.

I'm not aware of being rude or offensive to anyone. I think I'm clear on the subject too. My response was to the initial comment that it was disappointing to see the furore over Rowan's review. I didn't attack him, I simply alluded to the fact that if someone slanders, smears and demeans a stranger over the Internet, it makes it harder for me to sympathise when it then happens to them.

As for the review. My issue was never the wording or criticisms. I certainly didn't argue that a critic should censor themself. My complaint was that Rowan had described a game that was quite good and could become very good in the future but that the score was one of the worst in the history of the genre for the site he was writing for.

I thought he should have had more awareness that he was effectively scoring the game far worse than his own review had described. However, since our fellow forumite posted the IGN scoring system on here I'm actually more of a mind that Rowan's score was not actually far off his review. The real issue seems to be that game scores are largely inflated on IGN. There are many "ok" and "average" games that have scored in the 7s and 8s.

I really don't think Stellaris should be scored lower than the majority of the games I listed before but maybe the unfavourable comparison is not Rowan's fault after all. So I stand corrected on that.

[Gormongous]

Well, Rowan's review is not the lowest Metacritic-listed review anymore! Tom Chick gave it one star out of five.

 

Imagine that your favorite history professor has written a sci-fi novel. You’re intrigued. You read it. It’s dry, bereft of imagination, and misses the point of sci-fi by light years. It’s even full of typos and some of the pages are blank. But you still read all 912 pages. It’s flat. It’s lifeless. It’s terrible. You’re crestfallen. That’s Stellaris.

[Bletchley_Geek]

Well, Rowan's review is not the lowest Metacritic-listed review anymore! Tom Chick gave it one star out of five.

 

Obviously Tom is going to love Master of Orion remake. To each his own, I guess.

[Turrican]

This is the same guy who believes Rome 2 and Company of Heroes 2 are also one star games. Enough said.

[Gormongous]

This is the same guy who believes Rome 2 and Company of Heroes 2 are also one star games. Enough said.

It must be nice to be sure that someone's opinion isn't worth considering, no matter how articulate or reasonable they are, because they don't like what you like. Saves you a lot of thought, I bet.

Me, personally, I like a reviewer who isn't afraid to err on the side of scoring "too low," whatever that really means. So many reviewers seem as though they're afraid to be the music exec who told the Beatles to get a haircut, especially after many of them failed to get in on the ground floor of CK2's popularity, so we're seeing grade inflation that puts Harvard to shame. I am not interested in reading a review that attempts to attach a number to Stellaris' ambition and potential, substantial though they both are. I am interested in reading a review that asks why a game about exploration and discovery builds "alien" races out of precisely the same ideological building blocks as humanity. Good on Tom Chick for doing the latter. I don't dislike the game like he does (although that's subject to change the more I have to use sectors) but I cannot dispute his reasons, well documented, for feeling the way he does.

Of course, Paradox is happy to dispute his reasons. Tom was blackballed on Paradox titles after giving CK2 three stars out of five and he has been informed that he only received review code for Stellaris in error. So much for Paradox's magnanimity with Rowan, eh?

[Turrican]

You sound as though you believe there's a nobility in misleading people.

Also, the conversation really isn't about having a difference of opinion or being a fanboy or whatever you guys on here want to use to justify a nonsensical position. Were elements of games such as Rome 2, CoH2 and Stellaris disappointing? Sure. Are they three examples of the worst games ever made? No. And to tell people they are is simply dishonest.

[cornchip]

I thought Tom's essay was quite good. I wouldn't interpret his low scores that way, Turrican. Keep in mind there's a lot of garbage that goes unreviewed.

[spacerumsfeld]

Were elements of games such as Rome 2, CoH2 and Stellaris disappointing? Sure. Are they three examples of the worst games ever made? No. And to tell people they are is simply dishonest.

Do you think it is equally dishonest to tell people that he is pronouncing them three of the worst games ever made? Because he is not.

[Bletchley_Geek]

I am interested in reading a review that asks why a game about exploration and discovery builds "alien" races out of precisely the same ideological building blocks as humanity. 

 

Was that Tom's review? 

 

 Every faction you encounter in Stellaris is a randomly rolled set of values. Not procedural. It’s not as if the bird people are better at flying, the reptile people are better at mining minerals, or the people people are better at diplomacy. It’s completely random. The picture on their diplomacy screen is of no relevance whatsoever. There is nothing inherent in the slimy octopus people, the mushroom people, the bug people, or even the vanilla people people. No one eats rocks, or lives in caves, or doesn’t need farms, or uses special rules. All that matters is their ethos, their traits, and how they move across the map. X, Y, and Z. This is where Paradox’s spreadsheet approach to gameplay, which serves them well when they breathe gameplay data into history, undermines a fundamental tenet of sci-fi. Aliens should be alien. Not just rolled dice with a bunch of babytalk names slapped onto them. Im-do. Quasvalyvia. Jouvon. Pouz-dok. Lagun-chuzz. Faffosan. You will always remember the Klackon in Master of Orion. You will never remember the Oogie-Nollocks Union in Stellaris.

 

There's nothing of the sort in Tom's critique, on the contrary. I find it to cry for familiarity, rather than personality. Of course you remember the Klackons, very much as you remember which is the letter between I and U - you come across the letter 'O' pretty much every five words in English or so. Special rules - both in board games and computer games - are a crutch in order to create asymmetry between sides. In Stellaris asymmetry comes just from the FTL methods, something which I think it is much more meaningful gameplay wise than substituting food for minerals. Other asymmetries come from the randomised research paths and randomised starts (remember that in MOO, every race starts with a very specific type of homeworld) - something that Tom ignores completely. Do those mechanisms introduce a lot of asymmetry? I think that depending on the conditions, there may be playthroughs where everything looks quite samey.

 

You've got a point regarding the ethics in Stellaris being something humans can relate to. That's hardly surprising, since it is a game made by humans, for humans (very much like science fiction is written by humans and read by humans. Please name five different works of science fiction where you cannot find in the aliens some human attitude, value or emotion eventually "leaking" into them (Stanislav Lem's planet Solaris may be one of the very few truly alien beings ever in Science Fiction, but funnily enough, we know about it because how it mirrors and amplifies human emotions, values and attitudes for reasons the author chooses to keep away from us).  Whether or not such ethics are universals for sentient life, in a Kantian sense, it is an interesting philosophical discussion to be had.

[Cbirdsong]

You sound as though you believe there's a nobility in misleading people.

Also, the conversation really isn't about having a difference of opinion or being a fanboy or whatever you guys on here want to use to justify a nonsensical position. Were elements of games such as Rome 2, CoH2 and Stellaris disappointing? Sure. Are they three examples of the worst games ever made? No. And to tell people they are is simply dishonest.

 

You take review scores way too seriously. Try engaging with the text of a review, not your perception of what a score means. Tom's reviews are always worth reading, even if I completely disagree with his conclusions.

[paradi6m]

Do you think it is equally dishonest to tell people that he is pronouncing them three of the worst games ever made? Because he is not.

Even if he was, who cares?  I can honestly say that Rome 2 is one of the worst strategy games I have ever played and I've played a lot of bad strategy games.  It's not misleading people to give an honest opinion about a game.  Unless you are accusing Tom of lying about how he felt about the game (which is insane), then there is really nothing to argue about.

[Turrican]

Do you think it is equally dishonest to tell people that he is pronouncing them three of the worst games ever made? Because he is not.

Ok well, say he was telling people they were some of the worst games ever made, what score do you think he'd give them?

[Turrican]

You take review scores way too seriously. Try engaging with the text of a review, not your perception of what a score means. Tom's reviews are always worth reading, even if I completely disagree with his conclusions.

You're completely missing the point here. I'm not even discussing the review or its merits. If a reviewer awards a score that is either baffling or completely at odds with the accompanying review, why do you think that it's my fault? If a reviewer uses a score, why shouldn't I take it seriously - is it a joke?

Again; I don't have a problem with people critiquing a game or having an opinion different to my own. I just don't like to see a reviewer smearing a well-made and quality title by awarding it the worst score possible.

[Gormongous]

You sound as though you believe there's a nobility in misleading people.

Also, the conversation really isn't about having a difference of opinion or being a fanboy or whatever you guys on here want to use to justify a nonsensical position. Were elements of games such as Rome 2, CoH2 and Stellaris disappointing? Sure. Are they three examples of the worst games ever made? No. And to tell people they are is simply dishonest.

 

Tom is very transparent about his scoring system. One star is "I hated it" and he doesn't pretend that it's anything else. His review completely supports that score. However, when someone on that very review said that Stellaris doesn't feel like a 1/5 to him, Tom said:

 

That's cool. The rating is only a reflection of how much I like a game. There's no reason anyone should necessarily share that opinion.

 

The problem we have here is that you have, independently, decided that numbers like 1/5 and 6.3/10 have a meaning beyond "I hated it" and "Okay," through an impressionistic digestion of years of strategy game reviews, and your concern appears to be that people will interpret those numbers as you have chosen to interpret them, rather than how they are explicitly interpreted in the site's documentation. The solution, apparently, is for Tom and Rowan to misrepresent their own opinions in such a way as to avoid any ambiguity between how they feel about it and how other people might feel about it.

 

As paradi6m says, this is insane. Disliking a game, any game, is not a "nonsensical position" unless you think it's impossible for one person to dislike what someone else likes.

 

There's nothing of the sort in Tom's critique, on the contrary. I find it to cry for familiarity, rather than personality. Of course you remember the Klackons, very much as you remember which is the letter between I and U - you come across the letter 'O' pretty much every five words in English or so. Special rules - both in board games and computer games - are a crutch in order to create asymmetry between sides. In Stellaris asymmetry comes just from the FTL methods, something which I think it is much more meaningful gameplay wise than substituting food for minerals. Other asymmetries come from the randomised research paths and randomised starts (remember that in MOO, every race starts with a very specific type of homeworld) - something that Tom ignores completely. Do those mechanisms introduce a lot of asymmetry? I think that depending on the conditions, there may be playthroughs where everything looks quite samey.

 

You've got a point regarding the ethics in Stellaris being something humans can relate to. That's hardly surprising, since it is a game made by humans, for humans (very much like science fiction is written by humans and read by humans. Please name five different works of science fiction where you cannot find in the aliens some human attitude, value or emotion eventually "leaking" into them (Stanislav Lem's planet Solaris may be one of the very few truly alien beings ever in Science Fiction, but funnily enough, we know about it because how it mirrors and amplifies human emotions, values and attitudes for reasons the author chooses to keep away from us).  Whether or not such ethics are universals for sentient life, in a Kantian sense, it is an interesting philosophical discussion to be had.

 

I feel a little bit like I'm reading Orwellian Newspeak here. Tom complains that the system of randomization for creating alien races produces arbitrary and interchangeable outcomes. Instead, he references the alien races of previous space 4X games for having set traits, many of them asymmetrical in gameplay, that make them distinctive. Your argument is that having those set traits ultimately makes them familiar, rather than strange, which I concede, but Stellaris hasn't exactly solved that problem either. I don't know how many games of the latter you've played, but let me tell you: I would rather have the pre-baked "weirdness" of the Klackons than have the militant spiritualists be parrots in one game and sloths in the next. Because there are a limited number of combinations that produce an even more limited number of personalities, all of which are shared with the player, it still becomes familiar over multiple playthroughs and you still cease to see the races themselves in place of their specific combination of ethics. For me, it has the additional downside of weakening first contact when I encounter an empire of fungi who love me because we believe exactly the same things.

 

As for your other question, I'd recommend the scramblers from Peter Watts' Blindsight, the T'ca and Knnn from C.J. Cherryh's Chanur novels, the Presger from Ann Leckie's Ancillary novels, the titular character from John Carpenter's The Thing, and the Weavers from China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. That's off the top of my head, if I were to hit up TV Tropes' "Starfish Aliens" page, I could probably do even better. Even if some of these depictions have small traces of human thought processes, courtesy of being written by human beings, all of them share a fundamental and (ah) inalienable strangeness that makes Stellaris' "rubber forehead" aliens, after Star Trek, something of a letdown.

[Gormongous]

You're completely missing the point here. I'm not even discussing the review or its merits. If a reviewer awards a score that is either baffling or completely at odds with the accompanying review, why do you think that it's my fault? If a reviewer uses a score, why shouldn't I take it seriously - is it a joke?

Again; I don't have a problem with people critiquing a game or having an opinion different to my own. I just don't like to see a reviewer smearing a well-made and quality title by awarding it the worst score possible.

 

No one agreed to make one star out of five a nuclear option reserved for broken games. That's all you, man. If one star out of five is reserved only for games that are poorly made or not "quality" in some elusive sense, it is a meaningless score that does not belong on the rating scale. Games that are not enjoyable for the reviewer to play, are seen by them to be needlessly obscure, or fail their explicit or implicit potential in some way are just as deserving of one star as a game that is technically deficient. Really, if it's some kind of slander to give one star to a game that you hated as a gamer and a critic, then I have no hope for the profession of games journalism whatsoever.

 

Honestly, I'm beginning to wonder if anyone should even be engaging you. A negative review of a game that is kinda empty and half-baked and that launched with mid-scale bugs in every gameplay system is a "smear" now? What's wrong with you, why are you taking this so personally? Would you be having the same issue if Tom's review was two stars, or does the score have to be in the positive end of the spectrum at three or better (you know, the score he gave to CK2 that got him blackballed by Paradox for being too negative) for the text of his mostly negative review not to be a "smear"?

[sclpls]

It's always nice when a site that has a scoring system for games includes the criteria for scoring. Happily, Tom Chick's quartertothree website contains that information:

 

http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/our-ratings-system/

 

After reading Tom's review, and considering the criteria used, I think the one star is perfectly justified. Using his system I would probably give the game two stars, but the nice thing about his system is I could reasonably see the game receiving any score on the scale which means that someone looking at the review would have to actually consider the reviewer's argument about the merits of the game, and not just consider whether a number is high or low.

[Turrican]

No one agreed to make one star out of five a nuclear option reserved for broken games. That's all you, man. If one star out of five is reserved only for games that are poorly made or not "quality" in some elusive sense, it is a meaningless score that does not belong on the rating scale. Games that are not enjoyable for the reviewer to play, are seen by them to be needlessly obscure, or fail their explicit or implicit potential in some way are just as deserving of one star as a game that is technically deficient. Really, if it's some kind of slander to give one star to a game that you hated as a gamer and a critic, then I have no hope for the profession of games journalism whatsoever.

Honestly, I'm beginning to wonder if anyone should even be engaging you. A negative review of a game that is kinda empty and half-baked and that launched with mid-scale bugs in every gameplay system is a "smear" now? What's wrong with you, why are you taking this so personally? Would you be having the same issue if Tom's review was two stars, or does the score have to be in the positive end of the spectrum at three or better (you know, the score he gave to CK2 that got him blackballed by Paradox for being too negative) for the text of his mostly negative review not to be a "smear"?

I wouldn't worry about engaging with me because as of yet you haven't anyway. I also can't understand why you think I'm taking a review of a video game personally - that doesn't make sense to me at all. Maybe you're allowed to offer a view and that isn't personal but mine is? I don't get it.

Anyway, if Tom Chick hated Stellaris then cool, that's absolutely fine by me. There have been many games I hated, but I was objective enough to give them a genuine mark if I wrote an online review for them. Tom is trying to have his cake and eat it here. Why does he use stars at all? Why not simply make the scoring system, "love it", "like it", etc. Where is the need for a numerical system if not to denote a sliding scale, rather than a different category.

Using numbers like most other sites that grade on a sliding scale is a choice - one that Explorminate or Angry Centaur have chosen to steer away from, and the clarity of their reviews and scoring benefits from it as a result. I realise that Chick's reviews are very subjective and that's fine by me too but if you score a game 1/5 (whatever the one means) you're conveying the wrong impression of the product.

[sclpls]

He isn't conveying anything incorrectly though because 1 star means he hated the game, and he did. Nothing incorrect has been conveyed. I think what you mean is that you inferred the wrong thing, bu that isn't the fault of the reviewer.

[Gormongous]

I wouldn't worry about engaging with me because as if yet you haven't anyway.  I also can't understand why you think I'm taking a review of a video game personally - that doesn't make sense to me at all.  Maybe you're allowed to offer a view and that isn't personal but mine is?  I don't get it. 

 

Anyway, if Tom Chick hated Stellaris then cool, that's absolutely fine by me.  There have been many games I hated, but I was objective enough to give them a genuine mark if I wrote an online review for them.  Tom is trying to have his cake and eat it here.  Why does he use stars at all? Why not simply make the scoring system, "love it", "like it", etc.  Where is the need for a numerical system if not to denote a sliding scale, rather than a different category.  

 

Using numbers like most other sites that grade on a sliding scale is a choice - one that Explorminate or Angry Centaur have chosen to steer away from, and the clarity of their reviews and scoring benefits from it as a result. I realise that Chick's reviews are very subjective and that's fine by me too but if you score a game 1/5 (whatever the one means) you're conveying the wrong impression of the product.  

 

Turrican, it feels like you're caught up in a fantasy that numerical scores appeal to an objective (or at least shared) reality that descriptive scores do not (and maybe cannot?). The argument that Tom should not be allowed to grade his reaction on a scale from one to five, unless he alloys it with some arbitrary tilt to account for the public's tastes at large, because, despite an easily accessible ratings guide, it might still be conflated with a (nonexistent) numerical metric that is consistent within and between publications is patently ridiculous, most especially because you cop to having no problem with the exact same five-step scale if it used descriptive gradations from "I hated it" to "I loved it."

 

It's really just the fact that it's a number, isn't it, and therefore that it elides some explicit meaning? People who fail to read the text of the review and just look at the number could possibly, in the worst of all worlds, mistake the 1/5 for "bad game" and not "game I didn't like" and...? I don't really see the danger here. If you're trying to protect strategy gamers from poor reading comprehension, attacking the time-honored (albeit often unnecessary) use of numerical scores to sum up personal opinions is a strange place to begin. Isn't it just as likely that, if descriptive scores become broadly accepted in games journalism, the same over-hasty person will just read "game I didn't like" as "game I didn't like (because it's a bad game)" and get the same "wrong impression" as a 1/5 supposedly gives?

 

 

EDIT: I also read the eXplorminate review that you keep referencing and I honestly found it a very weak review, even given the broad range of possibilities in the professional space. It's overwhelmingly a feature list, with occasional interjections about how breadth of options means depth of gameplay. It doesn't even appear that the reviewer reached the endgame, something I did in twenty-odd hours, because he discusses the concept of endgame crises in the purely hypothetical register of "this could be interesting." If this is your gold standard for a good review, Turrican, then I don't think it's possible for us to see eye-to-eye.

[Badfinger]

I'd absolutely recommend checking out the body of Tom's review work on the site.

 

http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/review-list/

 

He is not afraid to use all the numbers from 1-5, and does so regularly. Tom gave MGS 4, a game some people would be willing to argue for as game of the generation, a single star. He gave a game called Bug Princess 2 five stars, and I've never heard of that. He gave Halo 4 one star and Assassin's Creed 3 five stars.

 

I often disagree with Tom's reviews, but he is one of my favorite reviewers because he's critical and consistent. I am familiar with his tastes, and have a reasonable sense for praise or criticism from him that lines up with how I feel or if it's about things that don't concern me. All I'd urge (in discussions about Stellaris and scoring I had to remind myself of this as well) is to make sure you agree or disagree with the content of a review rather than the number.

[Turrican]

He isn't conveying anything incorrectly though because 1 star means he hated the game, and he did. Nothing incorrect has been conveyed. I think what you mean is that you inferred the wrong thing, bu that isn't the fault of the reviewer.

You're not wrong, but I still think that using a scoring system which is totally subjective and initially misleading, isn't helpful to people who are not regulars to the site or when sites like Metacritic average out scores which will now be slightly skewed as a result.

[Turrican]

Turrican, it feels like you're caught up in a fantasy that numerical scores appeal to an objective (or at least shared) reality that descriptive scores do not (and maybe cannot?). The argument that Tom should not be allowed to grade his reaction on a scale from one to five, unless he alloys it with some arbitrary tilt to account for the public's tastes at large, because, despite an easily accessible ratings guide, it might still be conflated with a (nonexistent) numerical metric that is consistent within and between publications is patently ridiculous, most especially because you cop to having no problem with the exact same five-step scale if it used descriptive gradations from "I hated it" to "I loved it."

 

It's really just the fact that it's a number, isn't it, and therefore that it elides some explicit meaning? People who fail to read the text of the review and just look at the number could possibly, in the worst of all worlds, mistake the 1/5 for "bad game" and not "game I didn't like" and...? I don't really see the danger here. If you're trying to protect strategy gamers from poor reading comprehension, attacking the time-honored (albeit often unnecessary) use of numerical scores to sum up personal opinions is a strange place to begin. Isn't it just as likely that, if descriptive scores become broadly accepted in games journalism, the same over-hasty person will just read "game I didn't like" as "game I didn't like (because it's a bad game)" and get the same "wrong impression" as a 1/5 supposedly gives?

 

 

EDIT: I also read the eXplorminate review that you keep referencing and I honestly found it a very weak review, even given the broad range of possibilities in the professional space. It's overwhelmingly a feature list, with occasional interjections about how breadth of options means depth of gameplay. It doesn't even appear that the reviewer reached the endgame, something I did in twenty-odd hours, because he discusses the concept of endgame crises in the purely hypothetical register of "this could be interesting." If this is your gold standard for a good review, Turrican, then I don't think it's possible for us to see eye-to-eye.

 

You're way too in love with the sound of your own voice to be able to consider other views.  It's not about objectivity to me but breadth. For instance, if a reviewer scores a game "Consider Buying" it's more interesting and honest because the rating will reflect the review and leads into understanding how the reviewer has evaluated the game. However, if the score is "This is Street Fighter but I've never liked beat'em ups so I give it 1/10" this is both unfair and will turn readers off reading further.  

 

Nobody has argued that Tom shouldn't be allowed to use whatever score system he wishes, just as nobody has claimed he shouldn't be able to express his opinion.  You keep using strawman arguments.  I am simply expressing my dislike for his system.  I don't know why you say "It's just numbers to you isn't it?", I've already stated that yes, that's exactly what it is. It's not gamers I am concerned for, it's developers and worthwhile games that may not get the interest they deserve if they are rated 1/5 on a site.  You haven't explained why Tom's system has to be wed to numbers at all.  Aren't the stars superfluous?  Why would he need to use two scores, the number and the short description?  You seem to be denying that numbers have any intrinsic value; which to me is as obtuse as it is incorrect.  If a site decided to score games in the reverse, 10 to 1 so that MGSV got 2/10 and Dark Souls got a 1/10, would you think that was cool too (as long as they put a guide to the scores somewhere on a different web page)?

 

Lastly, you've again spent your time arguing against things I haven't said. I didn't critique the Explorminate review, I said that they use a rating system similar to Tom's (only more objective) and don't have the need to pair it with a numerical score. For the record, I thought the review was fine and superior to Chick's which I thought was very poor, regardless of whether his view coincided with my own or not. I understand why you say it is a feature list but because of the space used to describe what the player will actually be doing in the game (as well as the critical opinion) it's actually more informative to a potential purchaser than Chick's screed of why he hated the game so much followed by his own feature list of begrudged positives at the end.  Tom is probably my favourite participant on 3MA and I always find his views interesting to listen to even if I don't agree with them. His written work is more hit and miss for me. I don't feel the same need as you do to see eye to eye, I can accept that people have different opinions - which I thought was kind of your argument in the first place...

[paradi6m]

...

Tom gave the review one star out of five, Explorminate also have a five point scale with 'Avoid' at the bottom.  Would you have less of a problem with Chick's review if it said 'Avoid' at the end instead of having a star?  If so, I should inform you that that is a really stupid position to take.

[Bletchley_Geek]

I feel a little bit like I'm reading Orwellian Newspeak here. Tom complains that the system of randomization for creating alien races produces arbitrary and interchangeable outcomes. Instead, he references the alien races of previous space 4X games for having set traits, many of them asymmetrical in gameplay, that make them distinctive. Your argument is that having those set traits ultimately makes them familiar, rather than strange, which I concede, but Stellaris hasn't exactly solved that problem either. I don't know how many games of the latter you've played, but let me tell you: I would rather have the pre-baked "weirdness" of the Klackons than have the militant spiritualists be parrots in one game and sloths in the next. Because there are a limited number of combinations that produce an even more limited number of personalities, all of which are shared with the player, it still becomes familiar over multiple playthroughs and you still cease to see the races themselves in place of their specific combination of ethics. For me, it has the additional downside of weakening first contact when I encounter an empire of fungi who love me because we believe exactly the same things.

 

Orwellian Newspeak LOL. Thanks for confirming my reading. For me it means that I am presented with aliens that challenge anthropocentric preconceptions, for instance "insectoids" = "hive mind" = "inflexible". Or that every Space 4X game needs to a sandbox to re-enact for the umpteenth time the same tired space opera tropes with planets blowing up, great galactic evils being vanquished, and so on. 

 

Limited combinations? Would you please run some numbers to see how many different combinations you can generate with Stellaris sets of ethics, traits and FLT propulsion methods? There's 4 ethics dimensions and 4 possible levels, that's 256 different "personalities" for you. If you multiply that by the number of FTL propulsion methods, then there's 768 possible different races. If one starts counting possible combinations of traits, positive and negative, that number goes into several thousand (here I am assuming 2 traits max per race). If all your games have 32 empires, I wouldn't be surprised that your neighbours look pretty similar, after 6 or 7 games. 

 

I am playing two Ironman games, about 16 hours in total so far, and I have barely reached the "mid game" on any of them. How many games have you played already to the bitter end? 100? 

 

As for your other question, I'd recommend the scramblers from Peter Watts' Blindsight, the T'ca and Knnn from C.J. Cherryh's Chanur novels, the Presger from Ann Leckie's Ancillary novels, the titular character from John Carpenter's The Thing, and the Weavers from China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. That's off the top of my head, if I were to hit up TV Tropes' "Starfish Aliens" page, I could probably do even better. Even if some of these depictions have small traces of human thought processes, courtesy of being written by human beings, all of them share a fundamental and (ah) inalienable strangeness that makes Stellaris' "rubber forehead" aliens, after Star Trek, something of a letdown.

 

Thanks, that obviously took a fair bit of research. But sorry, of that list only China Mieville's and the scramblers would fit in the same category as Solaris' Planet (or Ray Bradbury's martians). T'ca, Knnn and the Presger could totally be represented by some of Stellaris Fallen Empires - which are not playable though. Have you tried to converse with those? It's quite like talking to a wall. And The Thing from The Thing was a sentient being at all? The movie is deliberately and very effective at remaining ambiguous about that.

 

Now, how does very alien feeling species compare with the Master of Orion "crew of characters"?

[Gaizokubanou]

And The Thing from The Thing was a sentient being at all? The movie is deliberately and very effective at remaining ambiguous about that.

 

One of the thing built a spaceship so I'd say they are sentient til they start morphing.  But building a spaceship itself kinda give them understandable 'mind'