Stellaris

Zloth · May 11, 2016

It's getting a little strange out there. PC Gamer gave it a 70. Metacritic says 78. Yet the Steam reviews are NINTEY FIVE percent positive!?

wiretripped · May 11, 2016

First hotfix is out (or will be any minute).

Steam should update your Stellaris version to 1.0.1 momentarily.

This hotfix contains the following:
- Fixed CTD when showing tooltip for an ambient object that gets destroyed
- Fixed CTD when an ambient object gets destroyed while selected
- Fixed fleets getting stuck trying to use wormhole stations belonging to other empires
- Improved performance issues and fixed issues with stuttering in early game

We are also currently working on a second hotfix that fixes various bugs and stability issues. The work with the first larger patch has also begun, no final release date set for that one yet.

If you're not dying to play the game right away, I'd maybe hold off until that "first larger patch" they mention. I'm hoping they'll include several QoL improvements in there that will make the game a much smoother experience.

ElderGnome said:
My friend is greatly enjoying the game, I have yet to pick it up yet. He says the flavor and everything is there and he's going to have dozens of hours of fun with it until the DLC and patches Paradox inevitably releases makes it even more fun.

He enjoys playing with large galaxies and less empires so it's more an "exploration" game than "being stuck in your small corner" game. You can pretty much set parameters to make it play however you want it seems.

I find myself having a similar opinion. There is a LOT of flavor, especially early game, and the exploration phase is very rewarding with events firing left and right. Of course, I have no idea how repetitive these will become in subsequent games, but hopefully they'll patch/DLC more in.
The game also looks gorgeous, IMHO.

wolfing said:
I've already played 3 games of Stellaris. The first one, I got to medium sized (won a war and vassalized and annexed a civilization), then two neighbors got in an alliance and destroyed me. The second one, a militaristic civilization found me while I was concentrated on exploring/colonizing, they declared war on me and annihilated me. The third game I had 2 neighbors, a friendly and an unfriendly, then two bigger civilizations found me, both unfriendly but farther away, so I attacked and vassalized the closest unfriendly and now the map has me, a friend, my vassal and another friendly (still no allies yet) surrounded by two bigger unfriendly civilizations. It's all random.

How are you liking the game, Wolfing, as someone that has played most PDX titles?

I just got destroyed in my first game. I got too distracted exploring and got smashed by the neighboring empire, that took all my planets in one fell swoop. I still need to figure what defensive techs counter what offensive. I felt like he shredded my ships and barely had a scratch himself. Sorry humanity. :sniff:

ChienAboyeur · May 11, 2016

Kordanor said:
I haven't read the review, but yeah, it seems like it's somewhat incomplete. It only has two victory conditions: 40% of all territory conquered or everyone killed.
This makes the end a very unsatisfying drag and not much of a choice.

Actually, this is not the consequence of the winning conditions but the consequences of the players' wishes.

Players like to feel like they are achieving something by playing video games so the design must fit that imperative.

In the case of such victory conditions, comes a time when the player, driven by his imperialistic desires, grows big enough to steamroll the map.
Yet, as the player desires that feeling of achievement, a number of counter measures to avoid the natural outcome of snowballing are introduced.

After a couple of runs to circumvent the measures (to escape the drag in the end), it appears that they are introduced forcefully. Instead of suffering tedium in the end game, the player starts to suffer tedium from the early game.

It does not come from the winning conditions though: should players accept the natural outcomes of their growing bigger than biggest wish (that is, steamrolling a map), you wont have to cope with all those counter measures to give the player the impression of resistance, necessary to their achievement feeling.

Instead of a dragging end, the end would be a breather.

wolfing said:
Every game is totally different.

From reading the examples, no. They are all the same.

It's all random.

What is that all random? The recounts show the same approach all the time. It is all about expanding, crushing the surrounding territories.

The blue ball came out first. The blue ball was put out in the blue box. Then the red ball came out, and was put out in the red box. The yellow ball came out and was ended in the yellow box.

The red ball came out first. The red ball was put out in the red box. Then the yellow ball came out, and was put out in the yellow box. The blue ball came out and ended in the blue box.

Both examples deal of the same: sorting out. Any account of failures does the same.

Stellaris is that: the same approach repeated over and over again. Which is much different from the other PG titles that support multiples approaches that are suggested by the dynamic evolution of the board.

wolfing · May 11, 2016

So your idea of not being the same is that the game should be an RPG the first time, then an adventure game the next time, and then a FPS shooter the next? This is a 4X game, if you don't like what a 4X game is, then that's your problem. Can it be improved? most certainly, with expansions down the line, but as the game is today, is totally enjoyable and very replayable, as long as you understand this is not 'The Dragon Kingdom of Battlefield Lara Croft in Space'.

ChienAboyeur · May 12, 2016

What idea?

Stellaris is not replayable on the same terms as other PG products.

In Stellaris, the project is always the same. As shown by the given examples: they notify of the same project. The project remains the same, the way it is carried out (or not) depends on the dealt hand.

Stellaris's project could be written as a step by step, the project achievement depending on circumstances.
Eg: one step could be to look for alliance as soon as possible as 1 vs 1 wars are hard to manage. Ganking is a priority.

To be compared with the examples provided for CK2. All of them notify of different projects.
The different projects are determined by the dynamic evolution of the board.

Thrasher · May 12, 2016

So to clarify, the other PG products have different scenarios and gameplay depending on what country you pick. Right?

ChienAboyeur · May 13, 2016

Kordanor said:
Well, the developers themselves stated now that it was taken out as it wasn't finished yet and will be patched back in once balanced.
As stellaris isn't a typical Paradox Game but has big 4X elements I'd also compare it more to other games. And in games like Civ or MOO non-domination victory always played a big role.

Paradox cant afford to release finished, complete products.
The first reason is that the rejection of some features is so visceral they must ensure they can always reverse the course of the implementation.
Other reasons are that their games are too complex to be done in one try and that the DLC policy generates a fine line of revenues.

This said, it does not mean they are going for another approach, the domination feature will remain the core. Other features are lacking though, intelligence for example. Without intelligence, it is not possible to exploit the ship design feature.

In a domination approach, causes for low intensity conflicts are also lacking. As the result, war is too sporadic.

Thrasher said:
So to clarify, the other PG products have different scenarios and gameplay depending on what country you pick. Right?

The question was about replayability.
Stellaris is not replayable on the same terms as the other PG products.

Stellaris is like playing poker or another card game: at each start, the player is dealt a hand and plays poker no matter what.
In Stellaris, its is about conquering and dominating. That is the only project.

In other PG, the starting conditions are known. Depending on the evolution of the board though, the player might decide between different projects.
It is possible to follow the same project as in Stellaris, conquering and dominating.
But it is also possible to support other projects to win the game.
In Ck2, holding ten provinces most of the times might be enough to win the game.

Paradox players, though, do not care about this feature and usually keep playing these games along one project: domination. They try to form the largest blob they can. Therefore the way the board developps around them does not matter, it is just territory to be conquered.

That is why Stellaris is so interesting because PG surrendered their previous ideas to focus on the way players enjoy playing their games: growing bigger and bigger.

Indeed, why provide to win the game while staying small while players only desire to grow into a gigantic blob to crush everyone else? Makes no sense.

Stellaris is centered on that project: the big blob that bullies everyone around.

Kordanor · May 13, 2016

Well, combat is definitely a good way to "win" a game. But right now even reaching this victory condition is just insane, especially in a big galaxy.
In Civ or even other paradox games (from my knowledge) you always have a time restriction. So..if the game isn't ended by year XYZ, the player with the highest score wins.

But in Stellaris you might have 30% of the whole map, killed various factions, and the only way to conclude the whole thing is spending another 10 hours to conqer enough planets to win that thing. That's just boring. Of course you could just stop playing, but I very much prefer to bring it to an real end.

wolfing · May 14, 2016

Kordanor said:
Well, combat is definitely a good way to "win" a game. But right now even reaching this victory condition is just insane, especially in a big galaxy.
In Civ or even other paradox games (from my knowledge) you always have a time restriction. So..if the game isn't ended by year XYZ, the player with the highest score wins.

But in Stellaris you might have 30% of the whole map, killed various factions, and the only way to conclude the whole thing is spending another 10 hours to conqer enough planets to win that thing. That's just boring. Of course you could just stop playing, but I very much prefer to bring it to an real end.

That's not the way most Paradox games end. After more than 800 hours on CK2 and another 800 hours in EU4, I think I've only "finished" one game (by finished I mean play to the end of timeline). Victoria 2 is different as it only spans 100 years or so. More likely you just set yourself a goal when you start and when you reach it, you play another game. For example, start as Austria and form Germany through merging HRE, or start as France and conquer England, or start as Portugal and colonize America, etc. Others use achievements as their ending conditions. So, in Stellaris you may stop once you feel there is no more challenge, though supposedly the 'disasters' can give you a challenge when noone else will, so there's that.

ChienAboyeur · May 14, 2016

Kordanor said:
Well, combat is definitely a good way to "win" a game. But right now even reaching this victory condition is just insane, especially in a big galaxy.
In Civ or even other paradox games (from my knowledge) you always have a time restriction.

That does not compare.

Other PG products use a different gameplay model. They try to get players to realize that there are other projects to be carried out rather than sheer expansion through land holding.
In this regard, they are failed games as they never managed to convince players and players kept playing with expansionism as their main project.

Stellaris took that situation into account and moves from the situation there could be something else than expansion to the situation there is nothing else but expansion.

While the other products wished themselves as being about something else than expansion, Stellaris fully embrace being about expansion only.

This is a deal changer.

It is not about combat to win a game, it is about measuring who is the best at expansion, hence Stellaris' victory conditions.

The approaches are fundamentally different.

When it comes to combat or war, in the other games, war was not free. Normal as expansion was curbed by putting a price to war.
In Stellaris, war is free as it suits to a product that is oriented toward expansion.

One surprising consequence is that in the other products, war is plenty while it is scarce in Stellaris.

War is plenty in the other games, especially when not going for expansion.

One example: in CK2, starting with Brittany, the first goal was to become King of Brittany. At some point, some external leverage was required and such, a daughter was married to a son of the King of Sweden who was not a direct heir.
By a chain of events, all the other heirs were killed and the daughter ended as the queen of Sweden. Her spouse was weak and died from stress. She was Queen by herself, married matrilinearly. This triggered a civil war. In which the Kingdom of Brittany played as the external leverage as it is possible to join the war of an ally and direct dynasty members are allies. Ultimately, that branch in the dynasty would turn emperor of Scandinavia.

A similar pattern was repeated to get the dynasty hands on England, Ireland etc

While war has a price in CK2, in this game, war was permanent, between the war that Brittany could trigger and the wars that the other members of the dynasty could trigger, it was permanent war.

In Stellaris, war is free. Yet it seldom happens. After letting the game run (normal speed) several times for one hour or so, nothing happened. No war.

It is not about combat. Stellaris is very low on war. Even though war is free.

Stellaris might be a complete turn in PG history.

ChienAboyeur · May 14, 2016

wolfing said:
That's not the way most Paradox games end. After more than 800 hours on CK2 and another 800 hours in EU4, I think I've only "finished" one game (by finished I mean play to the end of timeline). Victoria 2 is different as it only spans 100 years or so. More likely you just set yourself a goal when you start and when you reach it, you play another game. For example, start as Austria and form Germany through merging HRE, or start as France and conquer England, or start as Portugal and colonize America, etc. Others use achievements as their ending conditions. So, in Stellaris you may stop once you feel there is no more challenge, though supposedly the 'disasters' can give you a challenge when noone else will, so there's that.

Cant work this way. These end conditions come as a by product from the other model used in the other games.

The model in Stellaris is supposed to be challenging from start to end. It is expansion in a classical declination.

First, it is expansion toward an exterior. In Stellaris, it happens by getting chummy chummy with people you can to eliminate people you cant befriend.
Then comes expansion through the interior by getting rid of the befriended who are no longer that compatible once the other even less compatible have been got rid of.
And also purging the deviancies that occurred during the external expansion stage (contamination)

Classical expansion scheme.

On the last point: it is heavily engineered. Stellaris focuses on resources mainly. It does not care for people. Yet the number of planets a player holds is hard capped to a low number (based on the real world experience, in a resource driven approach, it should be around 200 planets)
Another point is that, despite the technological race, no technology appears to raise the cap (people do not learn how to administer better in their resource driven approach)
It is required to force the player into the sector mechanics that fosters deviancy (the factions thing)

The challenge is not supposed to end until the completion.

wiretripped · May 17, 2016

For those interested, they released a post-release dev diary yesterday, detailing their roadmap for the near future.

Now, before we begin the expansion cycle in earnest, we will spend the rest of May and June only focusing on bug fixes and free upgrades to the game. We carefully listen to all your feedback, which has already made us alter our priorities a bit. As a veteran designer of our complex historical games, I was anticipating a fair amount of criticism regarding the mid-game in Stellaris compared to that of our historical games, but I was more concerned with the depth of the economy than the relative lack of diplomatic options, for example. I also find much of the feedback on the Sector system interesting; the GUI and AI concerns will receive the highest priority. One area I was not at all surprised to get flak for is the lack of mid-game scripted content, however. We simply took too long getting all the early and late game stuff in, and neglected a whole category of events called “colony events”, which were supposed to be the bread and butter of the mid-game for the Science Ships.

We’ve been digesting and discussing your feedback and how to best go about improving the mid-game to make it more dynamic, both in the short and long run. Let’s start with our short term plans. When the game was released, we had already proceeded to fix a lot of issues. Together with some other pressing issues that have been reported, the plan is to release the 1.1 update - “Clarke” - near the end of May. We will try to cram as much as we can into this update, but the more fundamental stuff will have to wait until the next update (“Asimov”), which is scheduled for the end of June. The “Clarke” patch will mainly be a bug fix and GUI improvement update. Here are some of the highlights:

"CLARKE" HIGHLIGHTS

* Fixes to the Ethic Divergence and Convergence issues. Currently, Pops tend to get more and more neutral (they lose Ethics, but rarely gain new ones.)
* The End of Combat Summary. This screen looks bad and also doesn’t tell you what you need to know in order to revise your ship designs, etc.
* Sector Management GUI: There are many issues with this, and we will try to get most of them fixed.
* Diplomacy GUI issues. This includes the Diplomatic Pop-Ups when other empires contact you, but also more and better looking Notifications, and more informative tooltips on wars, etc.
* AI improvements: Notably the Sector AI, but also plenty of other things. This kind of work is never "finished"…
* Myriads of bug fixes and smaller GUI improvements.
* Late game crises bugs. There were some nasty bugs in there, blocking certain subplots and various surprising developments.
* EDIT: Remaining Performance Issues. We know about them; they might even be hotfixed before Clarke.
* EDIT: Corvettes are too good.

Read more here.

Kordanor · May 17, 2016

No word about additional victory conditions

But at least they are going to add some mid game content.

wiretripped · May 18, 2016

No word on that yet, no, though I don't doubt more will be added in the future. IMHO, they have their priorities straight. Compared to the stuff they listed, victory conditions are trivial for me. None of their grand strategy games have victory conditions, so I don't miss them here either.

What I *do* miss is being able to interact meaningfully with other empires, other than warring on them -- spreading influence through trade and diplomacy rather than conquest. Diplomacy is kind of a joke at the moment, so I am glad they are addressing this in the near future.

Me, I want to roleplay a space empire, and not paint the galaxy in my color. Fleshing out sectors and giving leaders some sort of personality would go a long way for that; maybe even like having a galactic council. I want more CK in Stellaris.

ChienAboyeur · May 18, 2016

Dynamism, that is a way to put it.

Staticness could be another way. When you can let Stellaris run for more than 30 ingame years with nothing happening, staticness sounds right.

rune_74 · May 19, 2016

It obviously needs more added but I have sank a lot of time into it.

I don't have a lot of time to try and decipher what Chien is trying to say.

ChienAboyeur · May 19, 2016

When after tons of hours sunk in Stellaris, and that the issue of staticness is required to be reported by another, better the mom still is alive to lace the shoes on.

wiretripped said:
Me, I want to roleplay a space empire

After roleplaying a party, roleplaying an empire…

SirJames said:
How's the multiplayer? Can anyone see if there's a lot of multiplayer going on? Can we play 3v3s? co-op? Is it possible to play a match in ~45 minutes?

The time format

Week end:

first day: start at 10 am, food break at 1pm, resume at 2pm, food break at 7pm, resume at 8 pm up to 2 am

second day: same save for the last bit in the schedule

Another thing: in Stellaris, things happen throug an avatar (you cant ally without the approval of the avatar for example) and ganging up is recommended.
There is also no come back mechanics.

It means that a player who clears his schedule up to participate to a MP session might be out after two hours.

Stellaris is more about chilling up with friends than gaming.

Kordanor said:
No word about additional victory conditions

But at least they are going to add some mid game content.

If the rage is high on their forum, they might add some substitute for victory conditions. The core conditions will remain the same though.

And yes, that is about content not dynamism as the communiqué claims it is.

Adding more content wont make the game more dynamic. The thing is that in mid game, the player runs out of content to browse through. They could have added their colony event, the play would have stalled the same.
A high level of activity does not mean dynamism.

wiretripped · May 19, 2016

ChienAboyeur said:
When after tons of hours sunk in Stellaris, and that the issue of staticness is required to be reported by another, better the mom still is alive to lace the shoes on.

Wut?

Someone cannot into translate.

Pladio · May 19, 2016

Yeah I have given up on chien.

Although he seems to make some good points sometimes, I am never sure.

It's a bit sad though because he seems like he really is trying....

Kordanor · May 19, 2016

Yeah, I think he is making a point.

Stellaris is so dynamic, that it's dynamicness becomes foreseeable and repetitive.
Much like if you roll one dice once the result is random. But if you run 1000 dice once, the expected result is pretty much 3.5.

So in Europa Universalis for example you have less dynamic parts, but more fixed parts and more fixed things which can and will happen. But it's more like groundhog day. While you can live though the same day over and over, tiny changes can have a big impact to the rest of the day. And if you could also jump into the other people's bodys who would normally always do the same thing during the days, you could try out even more.

But that's not the case in Stellaris. If you don't die, you will pretty much end up in a very similar position. And not much which is thrown at you is vastly different than what you experienced in different playthroughs. In addition the things which actually can happen are rather limited.

So the patch will add some more content, which will keep the game interesting for a little bit longer. But it will not add dynamism. And I am actually not sure what would be a good way to do that. You would probably need to have more "statics" to add more dynamics in it as well. Like bigger differences in personalities. So that this one faction always does a certain thing, and another faction does a different certain thing. Like if you put a branch with leaves under a waterfall. It will bend, jump back, bend, jump back and so on. It will not just flow with the stream.
But it would be a very hard thing to improve on that besides of putting more restriction and personalities to all ethics. Also it's all for nothing if the player doesn't see behind the surface. The player might have a better idea about how France will behave in a certain century than random fantasy race X. Did they grow that big because of their policy? Because of pure luck with their starting position? If you don't really see the personality behind it, you also cannot really utilize that personality.

Oh, and yeah, victory conditions also play a role.

Of course only if you are actually playing in order to reach them and not only to build a nice empire.
Once they are more victory conditions you could try different approaches to win the game. Right now, it's pretty clear that war is the only way. A pacifist will have a hard time of finishing the game.
Needing to occupy 40% of the galaxy is something you cannot do without lots of war.
And in a tiny galaxy it also basically means that it's unavoidable that everyone hates you near the end.

Stellaris

I smell a... wumpus!?

Machiavellian

SasqWatch

Dalek SasqWatch

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Wheeee!

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Wastelander

Dalek SasqWatch

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Machiavellian

Wastelander

Machiavellian

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Machiavellian

Guardian of Nonsense

Wastelander