I’ll definitely end up getting it eventually, I’m hardly going to stop buying entries in the Civilisation series at this point I can tide myself over till then with the excellent Endless Legend and its expansions (maybe even revisit some old Civ games, Civ3 perhaps?)

One thing that worries me is that if the UI is a mess, does Faraxis have a good history of acknowledging and fixing UI problems? I don’t remember much if anything that needed changing in Civ 5, and it sounds like some major overhauls are in order here.

WRT diplomacy, I’m getting the impression that puzzling war declarations are a result of a typical 4X trigger kicking in, when the AI decides the player is getting too big or successful. Especially when two factions do it at the same time, and you’ve had good relations until then. It’s a stupid way to block steamrolling, if that’s what’s happening.

They’ve rebalanced practically everything, forced ships to have specific role instead of just size progression, added new tech, changed resource system (now it’s a passive bonus if you have at least 1), changed planet system (now it’s 9 types of planets and planets are rare), changed diplomacy (embasies are gone, relations are very much dependent on ethos and rivals), added new casus belli (sometimes you want to purge planet or liberate or make a tributary or forbid slavery etc)… They worked on redesigning basic systems and I struggle to name one they didn’t change.

It feels better to me, not as generic and bland as it was before. My neighbours have a sense of character, empires in general are less dense (smaller number of habitable planets). There are still undeveloped systems – factions are just rebels; sectors develop slowly; there’s nothing like a trade system apart from strategic resources; winning conditions are still a joke even though they’ve added a new one (victory with federation). It’s fun to play right now and I feel this is the best of all worlds in space 4X genre. It’s not a perfect the way Civ4 was some time ago but as space 4X genre doesn’t have perfect game (and don’t tell me it’s MoO2) I honestly thing it’s the best one out there. Though I’m very sceptical if I’ll ever get too >400 hours in Stellaris as I did in EU4.

Civ VI didn’t strike me as particularly slow? I’ve averaged six hours per game, and that time went down dramatically after turning on fast combat/movement. What I will say is that there are parts of the game where it drags; thanks to the boosts it’s very easy for your science/civic progress to outstrip the rate at which you improve your cities, meaning that sooner or later you hit a bottleneck where everything is taking 15-20 turns to complete. This made parts of it a bit more of a slog than Civ V circa Gods and Kings – but then I remember Brave New World reintroduced the same problem there too.

How is Stellaris now? I’ve not been back since launch; it seems like they’re adding new content at what for Paradox is a fairly slow rate so I’ve not felt compelled to give it a second try.