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/
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.
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.
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
It might only have been tested over LAN.
The hell kind of garbo company doesn’t do one test over internet for their big new patch and DLC expansion?
I mean, it’s paradox. the next time they release something that works will probably be the first time
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
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.
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
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.
I guess it’s like an RTS at a Master of Orion scale.
Micromanagement still sucks.
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.
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…
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 sameMothra - Today at 10:36 AM
Not exactly GotY hereTim - 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 reductionjommy - 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.
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!
Oh my mother fucking g-
MY 40k FLEET JUST LOST TO A 13k BECAUSE MY FLEET WAS IDLING INSTEAD OF FIGHTING BACK
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.
Okay… important update: It sounds like Stellaris is based upon an incredibly flawed foundation that they’re just now getting around to fixing this
I want to remind you all I adore this game, but it is still weirdly broken in multiplayer, with de-syncs and crashes common to the point were most games of 4 or so people become unplayable.
So, what’s the verdict?
In our tests, 2.3 “Wolfe” is between 10% and 30% faster than 2.2.7 right now. Hopefully it’ll stay that way until release, but the nature of the beast is that some of these optimizations break things and fixing the issues negate them, so we can’t promise anything.
AI
Another forum favorite, we have done some improvements to the AI. First, with @Glavius ’s permission, we’ve used his job weights to improve general AI job distribution. We’ve also done the usual pass of polish and improvements, and of course taught the AI how to use all our new features.
Modifiers
One thing that sets Stellaris apart from other PDS title is how much we use (or abuse) modifiers. Everything is a modifier. Modifiers are modified by other modifiers themselves modified by other modifiers, and sometimes by themselves. It’s quite hard to follow, and leads to every value being able to change at any time without your noticing.“Why don’t you just compute jobs when a new one appears?” has often been asked around these parts. Well, a short answer to that is it’s really hard to know when a new job appears. You can get jobs from any modifier to: country, planet, pops. Each of these can get modifiers from ethics, traditions, perks, events, buildings, jobs, country, planets, pop, technology, etc.
Until now we were trying to calculate modifiers manually, forced to follow the chain in its entirety: when you recompute a country modifier, you then calculate their planets modifiers, and then each planet would recalculate their pops modifiers. Some of our freezes were just that tangled ball of yarn trying to sort itself out.
No More!
For 2.3 “Wolfe” we have switched to a system of modifier nodes, where each node register what node they follow, and is recalculated when used, following the chain itself. We have modifiers that are more up to date, and calculated only when needed. This also reduces the number of pointless recalculations.This system has shown remarkable promise, and cut the number of “big freezes” happening around the game (notably after loading, for example). It has some issues, but as we continue working with it, it’ll get better and help both with performance and our programmers’ sanity.
Expand the hidden block above for all that ^
