Stellaris

Has anyone played Stellaris lately? It is still my most played game in Steam by counted hours but I have not touched it in a few years as I got burned out.

I noticed that it got a new update. While watching the videos, I remembered that the game looks pretty awesome and those DLCs must have improved the game a lot.

When I played it, the exploration phase, especially for the first times, was awesome. Then came quite boring building the fleet part and once the fleet strength was considerably over 20k (or 100k actually, but the change occurred exponentially) the conquest part, which was fun at first but got pretty boring over time. The galaxy is vast…The end game crisis was again challenging time and the race to have a good enough fleet to handle it quite exciting.

Stellaris is one of my favorite strategy games, especially the early exploration phase as you mention is amazing. The soundtrack is actually my favorite of any game's, I can listen to those haunting synth tunes for hours.

But I haven't touched Stellaris myself honestly since Necroids. I remember being too annoyed at the broken fleet manager and the fact you can't determine your own sectors in my last game. Since then though, they started a new team, called the "Custodian team", in which they're tackling tech debt, bugfixes and adding content to older DLC. From what I am reading on the fora things are moving in a good direction.
I suffer from "next patch anticipation" though: since they're continuously improving the game I keep holding off to play until the next patch. Also I am still waiting for a DLC that adds meaningful internal politics.

wiretripped said:

I suffer from "next patch anticipation" though: since they're continuously improving the game I keep holding off to play until the next patch. Also I am still waiting for a DLC that adds meaningful internal politics.

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I feel the same way plus that I always forget to buy the DLCs when they are on discount. Paying the price of a new game just for a spin is too steep. Well, we can still wait a couple of years and try then Hard to imagine that the game gets worse over time.

I got Galactic Civilizations 3 for free and tried it. I realise that Stellaris is better in almost every respect...tempted to play it instead but will resist the temptation...

I played it quite a bit some years ago, yet haven't touched it recently. I'm not as big a fan of this genre as I used to be, perhaps I need to schedule a replay of this and see if it invokes the same fun it did way back when.

largh said:

I got Galactic Civilizations 3 for free and tried it. I realise that Stellaris is better in almost every respect…tempted to play it instead but will resist the temptation…

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I've been meaning to start a new Stellaris game with one of the Star Trek complete overhaul mods, Star Trek New Civilisations. I've tried Star Trek New Horizons in the past, and while I did enjoy it, I found it a bit too confusing, as they added a bunch of extra resources for what seemed like just the heck of it.

New Civilisations is kind of a spin-off from New Horizons, made by one of the original devs of the latter, but it's actively being developed (there's like 2 or 3 updates weekly) and the dev is very responsive on the forum (which leads to quick bug fixes if needed).

Imo, the Star Trek universe fits Stellaris' gameplay like a glove.

Wow, this game looks great, but I'm afraid I would end up spending hundreds of hours playing it.

Oh yeah, Red, it's got quite the rabbit hole that anyone could lose themselves in for a long time.

The real time aspect of it is a downer for me (just as it was with Sins of a Solar Empire), but I did play the base game quite a bit. I never got to the end game crises part.

I played Gal Civ 3 a lot, too, and had plenty of fun there as well. And lots of Endless Space, as well. I do like the 4X stuff!