Stellaris

I used to like Stellaris, but it suffers from being what it is: a Paradox game.

Those who know what that means will agree, but to the uninitiated, it goes like this: Paradox releases a barebones, but fun, skeleton of a game that lets you paint the map via conquest. Over time they add DLCs to this already full price game, some are merely cosmetic, like the new species and ship types, and these are fine. Nothing you couldn't get with mods, but interesting. Sometimes you'll get new origins. Again, nothing you couldn't get with mods.

However... Over time, Paradox begins messing with the core components of the game. They release updates to accomadate new features, like federations. You, as the player, will be able to access a little bit of this feature, but you can't meaningfully use it without the DLC. This is the case for 'free' updates that are released with corresponding DLC. With these updates, the AI can and does utilize all the features of the DLC, and the DLC, by virtue of existing, alters how the AI plays the game, regardless of if you have it or not. So Espionage, you can barely use without buying nemesis, but the AI can use it fully and will destabalize you with no means for you to prevent it effectively. You can't improve your spies, or do the same operations.

Some DLCs, like megacorp, are stand-alone, and you are, mercifully, not forced to buy them to compete with the AI. If you don't buy megacorp, you aren't going to be fighting Megacorps.

In addition to invasive DLC-paired updates that affect your experience whether you own them or not (to your detriment if you dont, remember), Paradox routinely makes large 'updates' to core gameplay systems, which you have to grin and bear if you want to use the DLC you already own. They went from a tile system for planetary construction to a purely numbers based one, added luxury goods and alloys as new resources, rebalanced weapons and ship types, and so on. These wouldn't be so much of a problem were it not that they go hand in hand with what Paradox does to poison all of its games:

The continual addition of ever-increasingly complex stability mechanics.

What do I mean by this? I mean that Paradox routinely makes your empires less and less stable regardless of size over the lifetime of a given game. I dont mean playthrough, I mean the development cycle of the GAME. When this game came out, you could manage a fairly large empire without much difficulty. Now, you have a dizzying number of maluses on half of your planets, with the AI influencing your internal politics, and random events firing to make managing a vast territory a struggle.

The stability issues are further compounded by abysmal diplomatic AI, where most of the map quickly ends up in federations or vassalized to a handful of powers, or your allies are dragging you into offensive wars that they have no realistic chance of winning. Your 1 system neighbor might declare war on the 72 system empire beside you because they feel bold having you as an ally. As with all paradox games since Crusader kings II and Europe Universalis, winning is based on war score and war exaustion. The former is how much you are occupying and are winning fights, the latter is a timer that decides how long your empire wants to keep fighting. War exaustion is largely arbitrary, and is there only to make it harder for you to wipe out your enemies, or rebound from a defeat. That you can completely rebuild your fleet and are holding the enemy at bay is irrelevant. That you have enough resources to keep fighting for another 50 years doesn't matter. The game has decided that you have about 8.3 years (give or take a lil bit) to win a given war before you are forced to surrenderor make peace. Then you are incapable of attacking the same target again for about 5-10 in game years. You cannot break your truces, even if you are playing a hypermilitant aggressive devouring swarm or a stellar empire of fanatic purifiers, or if you are literally SKYNET, trying to exterminate all life in the galaxy. You have an arbitrary timer to contend with.

I haven't even addressed the elephant in the room yet:

Lag. This game lags, badly. Not because there is too much in the way of graphics, but because it is poorly optimized and makes poor use of your machine's systems. Prior to the changes in how population worked in the game, planets could maintain a maximum of 36 population, and then they would simply stop breeding upon being full. On a 600 star map, perhaps 50 systems had colonizable planets, and at most, there were 3 colonizable planets in a given system. A galaxy's population was capped at, realistically, about 4,800. The game ran fine all the way to the end. But Paradox was not content with this.

Paradox decided to change how planet construction worked, and changed how the game functioned to allow a theoretically infinite number of populations on a given planet. That is to say, every planet, every space station, will always be producing population. Always. The AI will also build tons of orbital habitats, which function like planets as well. These are all being affected by overpopulation after a certain point, and start taking stability hits. So the game is then calculating breeding speeds, revolt probabilities, WHERE these planets are sending their surplus population, how it affects the speed of THAT planet's population growth from immigration, ideology change probabilities, and so on and so forth. In my last game, before I even hit an endgame crisis, I was sitting on some 4,000 pops.... Just my empire. The AI was buidling dozens of space habitats, and I had to resort to using a planet cracker to wipe out colony after colony, system after system, 50-90 populations at a time, just to keep the game above 10 fps. The game runs fine in the earlier game, but over time it noticably slows, until in the late game, it chugs painfully if it doesn't crash outright. If you want to make it to the endgame on a normal sized map, you have no option but the wholesale extermination of all other life in the galaxy. I haven't been able to finish a game of Stellaris without a crash since the Niven update, and that was years ago.

The TLDR: This is my last Paradox game. I have no plans to purchase another. I have been burned too many times, between this, Europa Universalis, and Imperator, to give this company another dime of my hard earned money. I do not recommend new players get this game, at this stage.

I used to like Stellaris, but it suffers from being what it is: a Paradox game.

Those who know what that means will agree, but to the uninitiated, it goes like this: Paradox releases a barebones, but fun, skeleton of a game that lets you paint the map via conquest. Over time they add DLCs to this already full price game, some are merely cosmetic, like the new species and ship types, and these are fine. Nothing you couldn't get with mods, but interesting. Sometimes you'll get new origins. Again, nothing you couldn't get with mods.

However... Over time, Paradox begins messing with the core components of the game. They release updates to accomadate new features, like federations. You, as the player, will be able to access a little bit of this feature, but you can't meaningfully use it without the DLC. This is the case for 'free' updates that are released with corresponding DLC. With these updates, the AI can and does utilize all the features of the DLC, and the DLC, by virtue of existing, alters how the AI plays the game, regardless of if you have it or not. So Espionage, you can barely use without buying nemesis, but the AI can use it fully and will destabalize you with no means for you to prevent it effectively. You can't improve your spies, or do the same operations.

Some DLCs, like megacorp, are stand-alone, and you are, mercifully, not forced to buy them to compete with the AI. If you don't buy megacorp, you aren't going to be fighting Megacorps.

In addition to invasive DLC-paired updates that affect your experience whether you own them or not (to your detriment if you dont, remember), Paradox routinely makes large 'updates' to core gameplay systems, which you have to grin and bear if you want to use the DLC you already own. They went from a tile system for planetary construction to a purely numbers based one, added luxury goods and alloys as new resources, rebalanced weapons and ship types, and so on. These wouldn't be so much of a problem were it not that they go hand in hand with what Paradox does to poison all of its games:

The continual addition of ever-increasingly complex stability mechanics.

What do I mean by this? I mean that Paradox routinely makes your empires less and less stable regardless of size over the lifetime of a given game. I dont mean playthrough, I mean the development cycle of the GAME. When this game came out, you could manage a fairly large empire without much difficulty. Now, you have a dizzying number of maluses on half of your planets, with the AI influencing your internal politics, and random events firing to make managing a vast territory a struggle.

The stability issues are further compounded by abysmal diplomatic AI, where most of the map quickly ends up in federations or vassalized to a handful of powers, or your allies are dragging you into offensive wars that they have no realistic chance of winning. Your 1 system neighbor might declare war on the 72 system empire beside you because they feel bold having you as an ally. As with all paradox games since Crusader kings II and Europe Universalis, winning is based on war score and war exaustion. The former is how much you are occupying and are winning fights, the latter is a timer that decides how long your empire wants to keep fighting. War exaustion is largely arbitrary, and is there only to make it harder for you to wipe out your enemies, or rebound from a defeat. That you can completely rebuild your fleet and are holding the enemy at bay is irrelevant. That you have enough resources to keep fighting for another 50 years doesn't matter. The game has decided that you have about 8.3 years (give or take a lil bit) to win a given war before you are forced to surrenderor make peace. Then you are incapable of attacking the same target again for about 5-10 in game years. You cannot break your truces, even if you are playing a hypermilitant aggressive devouring swarm or a stellar empire of fanatic purifiers, or if you are literally SKYNET, trying to exterminate all life in the galaxy. You have an arbitrary timer to contend with.

I haven't even addressed the elephant in the room yet:

Lag. This game lags, badly. Not because there is too much in the way of graphics, but because it is poorly optimized and makes poor use of your machine's systems. Prior to the changes in how population worked in the game, planets could maintain a maximum of 36 population, and then they would simply stop breeding upon being full. On a 600 star map, perhaps 50 systems had colonizable planets, and at most, there were 3 colonizable planets in a given system. A galaxy's population was capped at, realistically, about 4,800. The game ran fine all the way to the end. But Paradox was not content with this.

Paradox decided to change how planet construction worked, and changed how the game functioned to allow a theoretically infinite number of populations on a given planet. That is to say, every planet, every space station, will always be producing population. Always. The AI will also build tons of orbital habitats, which function like planets as well. These are all being affected by overpopulation after a certain point, and start taking stability hits. So the game is then calculating breeding speeds, revolt probabilities, WHERE these planets are sending their surplus population, how it affects the speed of THAT planet's population growth from immigration, ideology change probabilities, and so on and so forth. In my last game, before I even hit an endgame crisis, I was sitting on some 4,000 pops.... Just my empire. The AI was buidling dozens of space habitats, and I had to resort to using a planet cracker to wipe out colony after colony, system after system, 50-90 populations at a time, just to keep the game above 10 fps. The game runs fine in the earlier game, but over time it noticably slows, until in the late game, it chugs painfully if it doesn't crash outright. If you want to make it to the endgame on a normal sized map, you have no option but the wholesale extermination of all other life in the galaxy. I haven't been able to finish a game of Stellaris without a crash since the Niven update, and that was years ago.

The TLDR: This is my last Paradox game. I have no plans to purchase another. I have been burned too many times, between this, europa universalis, and imperator, to give this company another dime of my hart earned money. I do not recommend new players get this game, at this stage.

Edit: As of writing this review, I have 20 hours logged in Stellaris. Stellaris has been out for 29 hours.

This is the story of those 20 hours.

My friends and I all arranged to play stellaris together on release. I didn't know what to play until I remembered that happiness is a core game mechanic - unhappy people rebel, happy people don't. I don't want rebellions, those make people even more unhappy. If I took "Spiritualist," I'd get a nice 5% bonus to happiness. Even better, if I grabbed "Fanatic Spiritualist" I'd get a whopping 10% bonus to happiness and wouldn't have to worry about rebellions ever.

It wasn't deep enough.

I found the communal trait, which adds +5% happiness, and the charismatic trait, which gives everyone on a planet a +1% happiness bonus for every member of my race on that same planet.

I had to go deeper

I found out that by balancing my racial attributes, national ethics, and even my form of government, I was able to get a total +25% boost to my happiness. I ended up as a fanatically spiritual, pacifistic race of charming people who just like getting along with everyone. To top it off, I found the most fitting racial portrait - a classic grey alien, the kind you see in all of those old movies and tv clips about "Alien abductions." Classic grays, but with a big, doofy grin slapped permanently across their faces.

My friends all started on the opposite side of the galaxy from me, so I was stuck surrounded in a sea of AI. It didn't matter what I did, my people remained happy. I manipulated my neighbors and pitted them against each other for my own gain. I created a superalliance with my angry fungus neighbors and invaded the birds who were restricting my movement, distributing them across my empire while stripping away their power and influence even on their homeworld. I shipped them across my empire, balancing them with my own grinning populace across the empire - we live on the same kind of world, after all.

And we were all so, so happy.

But we needed more friends.

So I found some primitives, who hadn't achieved spaceflight yet. I set up a research post and began lightly observing them. Then, of course, I began the process of bringing them up to speed with the rest of the galactic community.

I then genetically modified the boars to be just as happy as we are. This is where this game is, now: My friends are politicking on the other side of the galaxy, making and breaking alliances in power struggles that send ripples far enough that I've seen their effects over in my corner of the galaxy, where I've spent my time well: genetically modifying the subjugated aliens of my empire to be happy, just like us.

Thanks to this game, I have been awake for 40 hours and it's finals week.
And I have no regrets.

Update from 5/11:

I managed to explore around an unexplored chunk of the outer rim, finding several of my friends. Meanwhile, I enlightened 2 more species and was working on a 3rd when we saved and quit. They were fully integrated into my empire very quickly but we only bothered to modify one of them, as the other was naturally happy.

My alliance with the angry fungus was expanded with the addition of my super-xenophile cat-neighbors. Fully 1/3 of the galaxy's cat-people population quickly migrated to my planets and set out being so productive and so happy as a result of being surrounded by my people that engineering them would actually be a waste of resources.

The Alien loving cats, the angry fungus, and I all immediately set about molding our corner of the galaxy's nations to mirror our own by invading them and "liberating" all of their planets under new governments we set up to be more sympathetic to our ethics.

The entire time my friends were wailing, moaning, and there was much gnashing of teeth as they were slowly ground down by a non-player Empire that was consistently thrashing their armies until, after 15 years of war, they managed to research better shield systems to counter their powerful lasers and turn the tide of the war and secure them a white peace.

My friend Joe wasn't so lucky and couldn't secure an alliance with the rest of my friends on their side of the galaxy before the same non-player empire declared war on Joe, took one planet, liberated another under its own new government, and vassalized him.

That's when we saved and quit until next time:
In summary:
I'm slowly increasing in power and enlightening more races into blissful happiness as my friends are at constantly at war and Joe is getting vassalized by non-player empires.