I gave up the game I am streaming. I love the fact everybody hates my evil empire and has allied against me. to my right is a federation of 6, formed because of my aggresion. However when I declare war on them, I can demand about 6-8 planets. To achieve the proper warscore to get these planets I have to conquer about 60-80% of the ENTIRE federation. after which I get my 6-8 planets and a 10 year truce. The federation easily has 80 worlds, So I have to conquer them 10 times!!! to eventually annex them. Other then not making any sence, this is incredibly tedious.

I abandonded that game. My empire wouldnt give a shit about truce or war goals to begin with. Why cant I declare war, fight them for a few centuries, and when I have occupied all of their worlds, just take them over, or exterminate their population or someth? The war score system really needs to be looked at as it really doesnt fit the game imho.

However, the Big Empire, which was initially friendly with me, inexplicably declared war on my vassal race, which I had previously Uplifted (why does this even happen? Isn’t the point of vassalage supposed to be that their politics goes through me?). Now warp drives need a cool down period before they can jump or move again, while hyperlane tech is faster and doesn’t need the cooldown (or so it seems to me). The result? Same game of whack-a-mole that you’ve described, but with the tech reversed.

In that sense I think it’s balanced – they’re each with their pros and cons.

Anyway, as a complete newbie to 4x I found Stellaris easy to get into, although I think your review was very reflective of my experience too (although 17 hours in I’m still in mid game).

And yeah, even that idea is very rooted in modern diplomatic thinking. If I’m playing a species of interstellar locusts I’m probably going to be less concerned with my empire’s prestige than I am about consuming the rest of the galaxy. The Shivans from Freespace didn’t give a shit about prestige. There isn’t really much scope for these races to exist in Stellaris as it stands.

Still, the computer can have all the help it wants if that’s what it takes for it to be a challenge. The real problem is the lack of feedback on how your ships are performing; given the vast number of possibilities the ship designer provides I really don’t think a blandly numeric measure represents the true strength of a fleet in the same way that it does in something like EU IV or Crusader Kings, but the game isn’t interested in going into more detail than this.

The timing of the release is kind of bizarre really, what with Hearts of Iron 4 coming out in a couple of weeks.

One thing I will say in its favour is that they’ve nailed the multiplayer functionality, finally. Lightyears better than CK2 or EU4 – our test game the other night was happily going along with 8 players, including with hot-joining which would’ve once required a restart.

If it has to remain, then (as I just suggested in the dev diary post on their forum), we need goals like “Annihilate.” Or maybe “Devour.” You don’t get to negotiate when you’re up against something like a Saberhagen Berserker. The current Galaxy doesn’t feel dangerous enough, when all the factions are so willing to parley. It removes player agency too. Sometimes it’s fun to play the tentacled Monster From Outer Space.

I’m torn about whether to keep playing, or let it sit for a few months and wait for patches. I do enjoy the early exploration phase, but I don’t know how many games I can play if I know I’ll bail out halfway through.

Still, there’s enough good here that I’ll keep an eye out for DLC and patches in the future.

Sad that Paradox has went back to old ways of putting betas for all to play. EU4 was in much better shape on release.

You didn’t say anything about random races idea and I find it the most interesting feature in the game. Other space 4X often had race constructors but those mostly felt like an exercise in making unbalanced versions of existing species; Stellaris, on the other hand, lets you roleplay most space empires you can think of. Or play as random race. Or create race of your clones and set it as always appearing in every game you play. There was something like that in GalCiv3 but it lacked random races so you always knew who you’ll met, here in Stellaris there are set personalities but they feel different depending on random techs and traits of the race. This is the are I expect most expansion.

And no peaceful win state is a bummer, sure.