Man, they made this game really good for the first quarter, too bad they really didn't work out the mid and late game.. ughhhhhh
That's the way it is with Paradox Interactive games. You buy the shell of a game in the knowledge that in six months to a year, it's going to be incredible.
The reason you buy it on release is, of course, to have six months to a year to learn how it works so you're ready to go once it's fun.
Yeah it's really intimidating me so far. I'm not sure why I would do a lot of the stuff. It has a decent tutorial bot it seems but I'm just trying to wrap my head around it. Really what I need to do is just go through a match and fail, and get familiar with the layout, then go back and start learning the intricacies. That or maybe take notes or something. But it's just a lot to take in. Especially since I'm not too familiar with these types of games for the most part.
If it's not in a tooltip, there's a solid chance it'll be in the wiki. Wikis are sort of a must for playing Paradox games; fortunately, they also have the best-maintained game wikis of pretty much any game.
Stellaris is the most straightforward PI game by miles. I didn't use any tutorials or anything and I was off to the races on my first go just by experimenting. I don't see how it's intimidating compared to, say, Europa.
I can't imagine getting into EU4 today compared to release. There's just too much to get your head around. Hell, just thinking about the weird machinations I used in my last game to declare war on Bohemia* makes me wonder why any of my friends allow me to pull them into games of EU4.
*they were allied with a very large Castille and huge Sweeden and used Aragon's alliance with Castille to force Castille to break their alliance with Bohemia and did something similar to Sweeden and then once Bohemia was alone pushed my Imperialism CB to force Bohemia to break up into a dozen smaller countries that I could gobble up
Here's something that isn't terribly intuitive. If you want to create a transport ship you have to create an offensive army. The nice thing seems to be that the transport ship is created automatically as part of the process.
So there seems to be a fairly significant bug in the Election systems of Military Republics (and maybe all elected government).
If your empire has another species in it, they are somehow able to have species run for Ruler even though your government policy is set to "Primary Species" as Rulers and Voters.
I'm in my second game and I, for the life of me, cannot produce enough energy. It's very frustrating. I can't upkeep a fleet large enough to keep my neighbor from just walking up to me and smashing me.
Yeah, there's definitely a mid game hump where mineral production goes from being infinitely more valuable than energy to being about half as important as energy production. I usually switch over some of my mineral production on my core worlds to energy production. Also, people are usually willing to trade you energy for minerals so that can be a stopgap measure.
I can keep the fleets solvent in port. It's when they have to leave to go fight. Not to mention, they seem to have 2K or so more than me no matter how aggressively I grow my navy.
If you run across a scenario that involves Titanic Life forms, it's probably better to leave them alone. They managed to take over a planet I recently colonized and because of a couple of bugs they only way they can be removes is by send 100 Army Legions.
(The bug is being unable to bomb occupied planets)
So I finished my first game of Stellaris completely, and man, the end game of that is super annoying.
Biggest issues.
1. Federations are kinda stupid. Waiting 15 years before you can do anything foreign policy wise with no way to petition the leader kinda sucks. 2. AI can't fight worth jack, literally sends fleets through my entire empire to fight on the other side of the front instead of decimating my economy. 3. No easy way to find habitable planets quickly, most of these games have a info screen that will list the interesting planets for you to quickly look at. Not so with Stellaris. 4. Late game tech is +5% increases to a few different things. yayyyyyyy.... *yawn* 5. You can only get military access rights if you border a civ, so sometimes you are left with no way to actually fight who you are at war with. 6. Game starts getting super slow and buggy when managing large fleets and allies don't combined their fleets at all so you end up with your big fleet and a Million little guys clogging the screen. 7. Ships give up defensible ground too easily, no way to disengage from a fight when you get locked in, beyond warping to the next star system. Strange that your fleets can't actually pull back. You can't have your fleet protect the weaker ships or pretty much do anything tactically. 8. Sectors, factions, politics are just not working that well.
3. No easy way to find habitable planets quickly, most of these games have a info screen that will list the interesting planets for you to quickly look at. Not so with Stellaris. 5. You can only get military access rights if you border a civ, so sometimes you are left with no way to actually fight who you are at war with. 8. Sectors, factions, politics are just not working that well.
These issues are getting fixed in the next patch, which is currently in the beta track and should probably be out in the next week or two.
I don't have a lot of free time this week, so I'm taking some time off from Stellaris and then playing a game through of Hearts of Iron when it comes out next week. I'll probably be back to Stellaris after the second major patch.
One of my major complaints about Stellaris is probably unfixable - the random start means that you can't actually tell how hard a scenario is going to be until a few hours in. In the historical Paradox games, I generally adjust difficulty by just picking smaller nations in worse starting positions, but for Stellaris I'm just going to have to turn the game difficulty up.
I think my other complaint is a lack of goals if you're not playing to do a hyper-aggressive galactic conquest - I was playing as peaceful space puffins and so I just colonized aggressively until I was big and strong enough to beat away the fallen empires that wanted me to not use AI, and then I immediately got bored and stopped playing.
According to the forums, I think the 1.1 patch has been released. Which is decent timing because I wasn't looking forward to the Titanic ground war of pointlessness.
I do like the scale of the game, even with the dodgy sector mechcanics, it's nice to rule 30+ star systems rather than the 5-10 systems in a Civilization reskin. The same goes for Naval Combat, although parts of that still need tweaking. I think between Galactic Civ, Endless Space, and Stellaris, I do like the ship design of Stellaris the best. GalCiv mechcanics were too simplistic, and Endless Space's scale was too small.
Comments
The reason you buy it on release is, of course, to have six months to a year to learn how it works so you're ready to go once it's fun.
Wikis are sort of a must for playing Paradox games; fortunately, they also have the best-maintained game wikis of pretty much any game.
I guess my advice is Git Good.
*they were allied with a very large Castille and huge Sweeden and used Aragon's alliance with Castille to force Castille to break their alliance with Bohemia and did something similar to Sweeden and then once Bohemia was alone pushed my Imperialism CB to force Bohemia to break up into a dozen smaller countries that I could gobble up
lol wtf.
If your empire has another species in it, they are somehow able to have species run for Ruler even though your government policy is set to "Primary Species" as Rulers and Voters.
Putting Frontier outposts in Sectors removes the influence penalty for having them.
(The bug is being unable to bomb occupied planets)
Biggest issues.
1. Federations are kinda stupid. Waiting 15 years before you can do anything foreign policy wise with no way to petition the leader kinda sucks.
2. AI can't fight worth jack, literally sends fleets through my entire empire to fight on the other side of the front instead of decimating my economy.
3. No easy way to find habitable planets quickly, most of these games have a info screen that will list the interesting planets for you to quickly look at. Not so with Stellaris.
4. Late game tech is +5% increases to a few different things. yayyyyyyy.... *yawn*
5. You can only get military access rights if you border a civ, so sometimes you are left with no way to actually fight who you are at war with.
6. Game starts getting super slow and buggy when managing large fleets and allies don't combined their fleets at all so you end up with your big fleet and a Million little guys clogging the screen.
7. Ships give up defensible ground too easily, no way to disengage from a fight when you get locked in, beyond warping to the next star system. Strange that your fleets can't actually pull back. You can't have your fleet protect the weaker ships or pretty much do anything tactically.
8. Sectors, factions, politics are just not working that well.
I don't have a lot of free time this week, so I'm taking some time off from Stellaris and then playing a game through of Hearts of Iron when it comes out next week. I'll probably be back to Stellaris after the second major patch.
One of my major complaints about Stellaris is probably unfixable - the random start means that you can't actually tell how hard a scenario is going to be until a few hours in. In the historical Paradox games, I generally adjust difficulty by just picking smaller nations in worse starting positions, but for Stellaris I'm just going to have to turn the game difficulty up.
I think my other complaint is a lack of goals if you're not playing to do a hyper-aggressive galactic conquest - I was playing as peaceful space puffins and so I just colonized aggressively until I was big and strong enough to beat away the fallen empires that wanted me to not use AI, and then I immediately got bored and stopped playing.
I do like the scale of the game, even with the dodgy sector mechcanics, it's nice to rule 30+ star systems rather than the 5-10 systems in a Civilization reskin. The same goes for Naval Combat, although parts of that still need tweaking. I think between Galactic Civ, Endless Space, and Stellaris, I do like the ship design of Stellaris the best. GalCiv mechcanics were too simplistic, and Endless Space's scale was too small.