I am completely consumed by Stellaris, Paradox’s Master of Orion-style 4X game. You explore planets, you scan anomalies, you mine shit, you research technologies, you talk to your hideous neighbors and you try to avoid dying. It scratches an itch people like me got bad, and it scratches it real nice-like.
It looks gorgeous:
And has space whales:
Multiplayer is in real time, with every player having access to the “Pause time” button if they want to read a prompt to figure out a war. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 4X game pull mp off anywhere near as well.
It is v. slow. Games take days upon days, in real life. The last multiplayer game I actually won took two entire full days of combined game time. The endgame content is excellent but the mid-to-late game period fucking sucks and takes an eternity and nothing goddamn happens. They claim they’re fixing that in next week’s patch so we’ll see.
Combat is weird. Generally good, but, leads into some pain-in-the-ass sloggery. It’s really fun in the early-to-mid game when you’re exploring, fighting off small pirate fleets, running away from space dragons, etc, then it becomes a slog in the mid-to-late, when you have to militantly produce tens of thousands of ships to keep your unfathomable hellblob bigger than the unfathomable hellblob of the other, surrounding races. You have no control over battles once they’ve started - it is a rock/paper/scissors depending on what techs you’ve outfitted your ships with. Point defense systems will shoot down missiles easily, disruptors will take out shields, mass drivers can ignore shields in some cases, and so on. It’s cool, but it requires an extra micro-micro-management level where you fucking outfit each class of ship with slotted weapons, keep it all above your power output levels, and then refit all your ships. So, hopefully the more awful parts of that process will be addressed in the patch as well.
Building hilariously massive fleets is kind cool, but the annoying elements outweigh the majesty pretty quick.
I love the random events a lot. This game does a really good job of rewarding exploration and keeping you entertained with mini-story-arcs:
The soundtrack is absolutely wonderful. One of the few VG soundtracks I ended up buying:
The race-creator is one of those things you get sucked into for like 40 minutes before any game even starts. It rules. My winners so far:
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The Shelby Sluggfederacy: A race of the titular slow-learning, slow-breeding snail people who are good with robotics. They are decadent and require robot slaves to be happy.
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The Mothra Matriarchy: My main race. They are isolationist, environmental moth-people from Monster Island system, who focus on “Inward Perfection”, so I balloon up this badass empire with tons of expansion and minerals/energy coming in. Then eventually some AI declares war on me because my boarders got too big, and I die horribly, just like in every Godzilla movie.
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The Oni: A starfish-themed hive mind that devours any civilization they touch.
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The Biollante Viridium: A rose-themed hive mind that devours any civilization they touch.
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The Bakugan Buggbois: Peaceful cricket-people who try to build federations and unify smaller planets together.
So, yeah, I’d definitely recommend it overall. The DLC is way too expensive, so it’s one of those games where you get the base and just sit around with the DLC on your wishlist until some huge sale. There IS some good content in there, though: robotic civilizations, robotic events, giant space monsters, plant races, and so on.
