Stellaris—a 4X sci-fi game with interesting pro’s and con’s.
I especially like the very detailed race creation, with choices ranging from basic morphology to meta-ethics and government type. I also like that the game accounts for ethical drifting within your population, different models of FTL travel and malignant events such as UFAI fooming (called synth rebellion in the game).
However it’s a young and complex production, and some of its strategic aspects are poorly balanced, read the negative Steam reviews for those, I’ve not played it enough and with the right focus to have an opinion on those.
As a pure sci-fi 4X, it’s not the best: you will probably enjoy Endless Space or Beyond Earth much more. But as a meta-civ simulator, I think it’s amazing. I play Stellaris as if I’m playing a space version of Democracy 3: coming up with ludicrous empires and having fun evolving them in space, without much focus on winning.
I started Stellaris and regret it. I agree with many of the pros, but I find two extreamly annoying downsides. Firstly, even the fastest mode is quite slow, especially early on.
Secondly, there is a mechanism whereby if an empire is loosing a war, it surrenders; this would be reasonable except I had no idea this would happen, afaict there is no ‘moral level’ which would warn of a surrender, no way to negotiate a conditional surrender. Loose one minor outlying system and your entire empire surrenders.
Thirdly, it seems that ‘hard difficulty’ provides a 50% bonus to everything your opponents do, while normal difficulty provides no bonus. I suspect that hard difficulty is very hard, while normal will be quite easy. Adding a custom ‘the AI gets an x% advantage’ sounds like a very easy modification that would make the game far better.
Games Thread
Stellaris—a 4X sci-fi game with interesting pro’s and con’s.
I especially like the very detailed race creation, with choices ranging from basic morphology to meta-ethics and government type. I also like that the game accounts for ethical drifting within your population, different models of FTL travel and malignant events such as UFAI fooming (called synth rebellion in the game).
However it’s a young and complex production, and some of its strategic aspects are poorly balanced, read the negative Steam reviews for those, I’ve not played it enough and with the right focus to have an opinion on those.
As a pure sci-fi 4X, it’s not the best: you will probably enjoy Endless Space or Beyond Earth much more.
But as a meta-civ simulator, I think it’s amazing. I play Stellaris as if I’m playing a space version of Democracy 3: coming up with ludicrous empires and having fun evolving them in space, without much focus on winning.
I started Stellaris and regret it. I agree with many of the pros, but I find two extreamly annoying downsides. Firstly, even the fastest mode is quite slow, especially early on.
Secondly, there is a mechanism whereby if an empire is loosing a war, it surrenders; this would be reasonable except I had no idea this would happen, afaict there is no ‘moral level’ which would warn of a surrender, no way to negotiate a conditional surrender. Loose one minor outlying system and your entire empire surrenders.
Thirdly, it seems that ‘hard difficulty’ provides a 50% bonus to everything your opponents do, while normal difficulty provides no bonus. I suspect that hard difficulty is very hard, while normal will be quite easy. Adding a custom ‘the AI gets an x% advantage’ sounds like a very easy modification that would make the game far better.