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Game News Paradox announces Stellaris - a sci-fi grand strategy game

DramaticPopcorn

Guest
They are DLCs now, man
 

Spectacle

Arcane
Patron
Joined
May 25, 2006
Messages
8,363
Paradox games tend to be the most fun after 1 patch (to fix the crashes and gamebreaking bugs), before the game is overloaded with bloated DLCs, nerfs and other stupid shit.
 
Unwanted

Irenaeus III

Unwanted
Shitposter
Joined
Jan 10, 2016
Messages
990
a1M9Oq5.jpg

WKEXUKM.jpg
 
Unwanted

Irenaeus III

Unwanted
Shitposter
Joined
Jan 10, 2016
Messages
990
And here I was hoping my post would get a better reception than a link to leddit
 

MoLAoS

Guest
Paradox are a special group of people. No wonder their dev web cam play session was them searching for friends the whole time and everyone hating them. Blorg!
 

B0rt

Novice
Joined
Jan 13, 2016
Messages
40
if nothing else this game boasts a really fun honeymoon phase.

it's like they realized "Oh, we can pay people for interesting writing, just like any other art asset."

so at the moment many events feel a little like "Sunless Sea" at times, but with an actual decent game attached. not so sure about how this will replay, though.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
Can't be arsed to wade through the big thread in Strategy Gaming, so, for those of you have it... how is it? D1P? Wait a year until it's patched to a playable state? Just plain bad?
 

MoLAoS

Guest
Its not terrible but its massively overhyped and not worth 40 dollars. Seems like they spent most of their time and money on art and music and writing and precious little on gameplay content.
 

kris

Arcane
Joined
Oct 27, 2004
Messages
8,835
Location
Lulea, Sweden
Can't be arsed to wade through the big thread in Strategy Gaming, so, for those of you have it... how is it? D1P? Wait a year until it's patched to a playable state? Just plain bad?

dont listen to MoLAoS, he have a gigantic axe to grind with Paradox.

Yet, despite me liking it quite a bit I would suggest waiting a bit. The things that the game do best, like exploration and interaction between species are things that will be heavily improved upon and expanded over time, so you would be better off waiting for some package deal later.

I am a explorefag, so I am having plenty of fun and often discovering new things even if some events obviously are repeated often. I am even yet to find my first fallen empire.

The game looks and plays well, some parts are just a bit barebones. What I like least otherwise is the resource system which only have one superimportant resource to build everything (minerals) and how easy the game is will depend heavily on your early access of minerals.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
:)

I'm a bit of an explorefag as well. Too bad about the resources if it really is that thin; perhaps it's something they'll address in patches as well. Tempted, and forty bucks is no huge hardship, as long as this isn't a R2:TW (as released...)
 

kris

Arcane
Joined
Oct 27, 2004
Messages
8,835
Location
Lulea, Sweden
:)

I'm a bit of an explorefag as well. Too bad about the resources if it really is that thin; perhaps it's something they'll address in patches as well. Tempted, and forty bucks is no huge hardship, as long as this isn't a R2:TW (as released...)

There are other "unique" resources that come up with tech, but the ones I seen so far at best just affect production of said starting resources.
 

Jinn

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
4,930
Can't be arsed to wade through the big thread in Strategy Gaming, so, for those of you have it... how is it? D1P? Wait a year until it's patched to a playable state? Just plain bad?

I have been having a really great time with it myself. As most people are saying, there is a bit of a bare-bones feeling to it right now, but there is enough to explore and do that I'd say people who have played it for 30-50 hours would still be finding new little details here and there. I've been having an especially fun time playing multiplayer with my brother. We're co-oping as two species trying to gain empirical control of the galaxy, which will ultimately end in a brutal end-game standoff between the two of us. Should be some good times.

And yeah, don't mind MoLAoS. Despite having been playing it non-stop since it's release, he seems to have made it his personal mission to destroy this games image on the codex. I personally find this unwarranted.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
And yeah, don't mind MoLAoS. Despite having been playing it non-stop since it's release, he seems to have made it his personal mission to destroy this games image on the codex. I personally find this unwarranted.

My, that's virtually unheard-of.

Thanks guys. I will put this on my to-play list, a patch or two in.
 

Beowulf

Arcane
Joined
Mar 2, 2015
Messages
1,963
I've put 26 hours into the game, and I would say, that unless you are starved for a new space 4x game, I recommend waiting.

There is a solid foundation, upon which they will undoubtedly build (with DLCs, as one can easily imagine), but the base game needs many months of fleshing out before it can be called really good.
It really nails the early exploration and the event chains are very well written, I suppose they must have hired some good writer for that. Game also looks good for the genre and the UI works well for what it does.

Now - what doesn't work that well:

The UI, while functional, lacks many essential features, like lists, and ledgers. For example - there is no list of discovered habitable planets, you just see icons on the map. There is no list of built stations or terraformig projects started. In larger empires you need to click a lot to find what you need.
Exploration is good, but later on it gets tedious as you can't automate it, you have to manually give orders to survey every system. You can queue orders with shift key, but the moment something wrong happens (e.g. you encounter hostile aliens, and that happens a lot), the orders chain is cancelled and your ship returns to safe world and sits idle.
There are no auto-pause options for messages and popups in game, which is really strange coming form Paradox and their venerable Clausevitz engine.
While I haven't experienced any CTD, and there are only few complaints about having those on the forums, there are a lot of bugs with varying degrees of impact upon the gameplay. Those vary form ships getting stuck in a loop, event chains being broken to game breaking bugs like genetically modifying your xenophobic species making them think they are dominated by other species and getting substantial happiness maluses.
The diplomacy, which was always a hallmark of Paradox games, is rather bare-bones, and your ability to get into alliances is mostly decided before game, by your ethos choices.
The combat works good only for small engagements in the early game. Later on it's just poor. There are no fleet postures, no positioning, no individual ship settings (like keeping distance, or retreating when X conditions are met). Ships just charge at each other, and with some bigger ships there is a lot of clipping going on. There are strategic choices when designing ships, that should be important (standard rock paper scissors design for weapons vs shields/armor), but due to the nature of the combat their impact is somewhat lost.
You cannot rearrange the order of you ships, unless you remove and add ships manually to your fleet until you get desired effect.
Most wars follow the decisive battle doctrine - yours and your enemy's doom stacks face each other. If you win that battle, you can rather safely steam-roll the rest of his empire.
There is no espionage.
You can only manage a few planets, the rest you have to organize in sectors, managed by the AI. It wouldn't be bad, but the AI can be very inept at managing those.

And there are lot of design decisions that can be improved, or make me scratch my head. For example you cannot transfer between galaxy map and sector map using mouse wheel, you have to click a button or use a key short-cut. While in system view, when you select an object, like planet, ship, or whatever and press appropriate button, you can freely rotate the camera in the z plane, but when you don't press that button, even if your field of view is exactly the same, you are blocked from crossing the ecliptic plane. And one could list a lot more of those minor issues, but overall they bring the game down.

Tl;dr: It's not a bad game, but rather meh/10. I recommend waiting until it's fleshed out and possibly with some discount to offset the new DLCs price.
 
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Mortmal

Arcane
Joined
Jun 15, 2009
Messages
9,158
Can't be arsed to wade through the big thread in Strategy Gaming, so, for those of you have it... how is it? D1P? Wait a year until it's patched to a playable state? Just plain bad?

dont listen to MoLAoS, he have a gigantic axe to grind with Paradox.

Yet, despite me liking it quite a bit I would suggest waiting a bit. The things that the game do best, like exploration and interaction between species are things that will be heavily improved upon and expanded over time, so you would be better off waiting for some package deal later.

I am a explorefag, so I am having plenty of fun and often discovering new things even if some events obviously are repeated often. I am even yet to find my first fallen empire.

The game looks and plays well, some parts are just a bit barebones. What I like least otherwise is the resource system which only have one superimportant resource to build everything (minerals) and how easy the game is will depend heavily on your early access of minerals.

Sorry but molaos is right, its not nearly as good as expected, very shallow, and quickly lose its novelty. But as many of you guys are easily satisfied you probably wont notice, so go for it .
 
Joined
Aug 6, 2008
Messages
7,269
Wait for the 80 DLCs.

I'm not saying that to be edgy - but more of a statement of reality. I think it's going to be great eventually - but it isn't great now.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
I caved.

Early game is fun enough. I've made a couple of attempts to get my feet wet, and there have been a few amusing events, like a scientist who took off on his own to make all kinds of mayhem. I like the space monsters and am trying to work up the courage to attack a system controlled by them. So far haven't had any space fights apart from a couple skirmishes with raiders.

Figuring out how the planetary economy works and whether it's better to landgrab with colony ships ASAP or go more gradually. Also doing the usual stuff with a 4x game, trying to figure out how to balance research, resource-production, colonisation, and the rest of it.

My neighbours don't seem all that friendly though. Says something like "Fanatical Purifier" on the description. That can't be good, right?
 

Mortmal

Arcane
Joined
Jun 15, 2009
Messages
9,158
My neighbours don't seem all that friendly though. Says something like "Fanatical Purifier" on the description. That can't be good, right?
It doesnt translate into anything in the game and thats one of the big problem with this game, you could be very well declared as rival by some pacifist alien dwelling on the other side of the galaxy but the militaristic xenophobe ones no doing anything at all . That all sounds very great on the paper but nothing works .
 

Prime Junta

Guest
My neighbours don't seem all that friendly though. Says something like "Fanatical Purifier" on the description. That can't be good, right?
It doesnt translate into anything in the game and thats one of the big problem with this game, you could be very well declared as rival by some pacifist alien dwelling on the other side of the galaxy but the militaristic xenophobe ones no doing anything at all . That all sounds very great on the paper but nothing works .

Hm, that's too bad.

The early game has been going rather too smoothly. Bumped into two empires blocking my expansion, one is the xenophobic one and the other is just generally unfriendly. I also lack the tech to settle non-ideal worlds, which is crimping my style as well. Cleared out the space monsters. I've still got my Civ reflexes on and am expecting to get swarmed Any Time Now, but if it's not happening it's not happening. Guess I'll have to start a little interstellar war of my own then. Just invented antimatter missiles; guess we'll see how they work against the Avar Empire.

Overall I'm liking the tech development -- prefer the unpredictability of the system to the always-same tech trees in Civ -- as well as the exploration. The resource system seems very thin on the ground though; just exploit everything you can, taking care not to exceed your energy budget.
 

Mortmal

Arcane
Joined
Jun 15, 2009
Messages
9,158
Hm, that's too bad.

The early game has been going rather too smoothly. Bumped into two empires blocking my expansion, one is the xenophobic one and the other is just generally unfriendly. I also lack the tech to settle non-ideal worlds, which is crimping my style as well. Cleared out the space monsters. I've still got my Civ reflexes on and am expecting to get swarmed Any Time Now, but if it's not happening it's not happening. Guess I'll have to start a little interstellar war of my own then. Just invented antimatter missiles; guess we'll see how they work against the Avar Empire.

Overall I'm liking the tech development -- prefer the unpredictability of the system to the always-same tech trees in Civ -- as well as the exploration. The resource system seems very thin on the ground though; just exploit everything you can, taking care not to exceed your energy budget.
You can forget all your civ reflexes, for example if you take a planet during a war, AI will never counter invade, wont take your planest either, wont harass vulnerable stations its just not in the game.All it can do is mass moving it fleet to your capital if and only if it outguns your fleet, no matters what kind of defenses you built .
Great framework, potential, and look but as of today some part of it are worse than the space 4X indie sharewares i was playing on DOS and win 3.1.
 

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