Stellaris: Slow-Fuggin' Slow-Learnin' Hideous Snail-Goblins of the Galactic Federation

King of Posters
#9

SEEMS like a really good game. I can see the flaws, but I think a lot of them have been addressed over the two years it’s been out.

Expansions seem to fill in gaps that shouldn’t be there, as well - for example, if you complete an entire tree of the Civ-like policy zone, like “Discovery” or “Supremacy”, you don’t get any bonuses or anything. But, if you complete that tree with the Synthetic Dawn™ DLC installed, they added in an “Ascension Perk” system that lets you have like +10 planets or +50% combat strength against endgame factions, and so forth. It’s crazy powerful stuff that is weirdly not there in the base game.

I’ll be curious what the diehards say about the big 2.0 patch in four days.

#10

Looks like it’s all on sale cause of the new expansion that’s coming out with the patch.

Base game is at a pretty good price:

That said, I’d say it’s worth it to get this specific DLC bundle, but, that assumes you’d like the game as much as I found I did:

http://store.steampowered.com/bundle/3343/Stellaris__Digital_Anniversary_Edition/

#11

Okay the 2.0 rollout has nnnnnnnnnnnnnnot been a clean one.

The way this game handles DLC is: If the host of the game has a certain DLC, everyone in their game can use it. As such, we’ve all been playing the Apocalypse DLC that rolled out with the 2.0 patch.

Biggest issues:

  • The big rework added a lot more factors to the various buildings on your various planets. But, the game’s netcode wasn’t updated to deal with this, so there is a point in the game, at about the early-to-mid point, when you start getting a “desync” issue because the game can’t handle all the assets that are preset. When this desync happens, everyone is moved into their own separate universes, with other players now controlled by AI. You CAN go back one save and re-load, but that only buys you an in-game year or two before it desyncs again. Thus, the game can’t be played in multiplayer right now.

  • The marauder faction they added to the game is pretty broken. They destroy everything in their path, when going to attack a certain civilization, so you’ll routinely get a unimaginably powerful mass of enemy ships carving a burning swathe through your empire, and since you’re not their target, you can’t call them up and pay them off. So basically, anyone that isn’t their target is helpless against them. Lost my main fleet in the game we played because it just happened to be sitting in the wrong system when these guys came in.

  • War Exhaustion still works such that, if you lose a certain number of planets, you automatically lose the war and with it, a shitload of territory. They say they’re fixing this by making it so, when you reach 100% war fatigue, you just stop gaining influence and unit, and have a -20% happiness, so it’s possible to continue fighting. That’s good.

So, that all sucks.

A lot of the fixes in 2.0 are fantastic. But I can’t play a damn multiplayer game right now. I’m amazed they didn’t find this desync bug when they were QAing, but, maybe they just straight-up don’t QA.

#12

Lotta midsize software companies are relying on users to do the majority of QA these days. I think it comes across really poorly! But the technical infrastructure to do so keeps getting “better” and they struggle to meet their other commitments affordably otherwise.

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#13

sometimes your publisher wants a centralized hub with hundreds of QA workers instead of in-house QA and you get to learn about bugs after the game ships

#14

It might only have been tested over LAN.

#15

The hell kind of garbo company doesn’t do one test over internet for their big new patch and DLC expansion?

#16

I mean, it’s paradox. the next time they release something that works will probably be the first time

#17

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#18

see that right there is why I want to play this, because no one does that shit like paradox

but it’s so much cognitive overhead to learn even one paradox game and I can only barely play ck2 at a high level as is

#19

Not…really? If you can handle real-time 4x games (that has a pause so you can take your time) you’ll be fine with Stellaris.

#20

I should clarify that I find realtime-with-pausing to be aggressively counterintuitive to how my brain works and I have to force it into place cognitively to make it stick

but I guess that isn’t that common, you’re right

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#21

Yeah, it’s a problem they haven’t really found a good solution for yet.

There is a sense of exploration and expansion in Stellaris that, mixed with the building music and galactic scale, hits a real sweet spot that other empire-building games don’t. It feels like you are building a vast empire, not in the abstract. I can see my ships scanning systems, moving out to colonize, sending me in reports, all in one forward-moving march of time. I only pause to hash out the terms of a war, or read a particularly long anomaly report.

Turn-based, though I love it so, feels more like chess, or a map of an expansion, than the real deal.

#22

I guess it’s like an RTS at a Master of Orion scale.

Micromanagement still sucks.

#23

Most Paradox fans have a Stockholm syndrome since they are the only player in town as far as grand strategy is concerned, so everyone is willing to be an alpha/beta tester and there are expectations on Paradox side at this point that the fanbase finds and/or fixes the bugs themselves.

Bugs are whatever, I think the biggest issue is their kitchen sink feature creep plaguing almost every game: instead of focusing on doing a certain region / time period well, they just keep expanding the game with more and more features to distract you from the fact that the existing systems don’t work as intended or are plain banal.

fortunately there are modders, but even they can only fix so much.

#24

It’s their DLC strategy, for EU4 and CK2 at least. You’ve got a handle on filling up all the indicators efficiently? Well here’s another indicator for Prussia/Absolutism/Professionalism/MISSIONS to maintain…

#25

God, I keep finding new and exotic unresolved bugs. They must have done absolutely no QA at all, and just left it to the community to figure out. I can’t get over that. I’ve never seen a release like this.

Chat log of my friends trying to figure this out:

Ken - Today at 10:34 AM
I went rogue servitor to crank out traditions/ascensions
doesn’t seem like any of the ship build speed increase traditions work. I had ships building that had negative days remaining
so it updates the UI timer but the build time remains the same

Mothra - Today at 10:36 AM
Not exactly GotY here

Tim - Today at 11:33 AM
I noticed that a lot of buffs from stuff in the traditions and tech trees do nothing
Especially percentage cost reduction

jommy - Today at 11:43 AM
I found out they do mostly work but it can take up to a month for them to kick in
They also seem to turn off for about a month every time you get another one

So whenever you get your “traditions”, which are empire-wide changes such as you’d get if you pursued the Liberty tree in Civ, there is a bug where nothing takes effect for an in-game month. This happens every time you select a new tradition - all of your tradition buffs will shut off for on month.

It’s wild.

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#26

yeah I like stellaris a lot, but I’m gonna pretend this dlc comes out in a month or something

at least they let you roll back patches!

#27

Oh my mother fucking g-

MY 40k FLEET JUST LOST TO A 13k BECAUSE MY FLEET WAS IDLING INSTEAD OF FIGHTING BACK

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#28

never buy dlc new, always keep your game at the patch right before a dlc you don’t own gets released

I kind of hate modern paradox interactive’s dlc strategy but I can’t complain when the dlc they unveil is actually great.