Stellaris Review

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Stellaris Review

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Mon Jun 20, 2016 3:05 pm

I toyed with whether or not to do this review for the same reason I toyed with whether or not to do the Witcher 3. This is the type of game that you probably already know if you want to play it or not. Mostly because it's a grand strategy by Paradox, which everyone was jerking off over for a while because they were the makers of CK and EU, both games I refuse to play because there's far too much to learn in the beginning and I can't bother to invest the time, but I can't say don't have depth.

But here we are: Stellaris

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Everyone's probably familiar with the concept of the space civilization 4X by now. My personal favorite was Galactic Civilizations 2, but unlike most, Stellaris runs in real time. I keep hearing this game billed as a grand strategy, yet it plays far more like a basic 4x. I suppose the two aren't mutually exclusive, but there wasn't as much extraneous strategy in here as just building faster than your neighbors, which you may note is basically how to win a 4x. It's a disappointment considering games like Civ 5, where you could have only one city to your name and still flatten the competition if you did it right.

The ship building is pretty basic, unfortunately. It's just "upgrade the things from before, but with higher numbers now." There is customization here in how you want to direct your ships in terms of weaponry or defenses, and you do have to balance power requirements, but otherwise everything's set in stone. I preferred the GalCiv2 way of giving you a hangar, and just letting you build what you wanted, then figuring out how much it was going to cost after the fact. If you wanted to build your giant, world-ending dreadnought, you could build your giant, world-ending dreadnought, just be prepared to pay for it.

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Poor balance is a big problem here. As in many bad 4x's, where you start can fuck you right from the beginning. If you don't have enough room to expand and your neighbors are xenophobic militarists, just quit and start over. But it's not just that standard issue. If you play as an individualist, you may as well just be playing with a handicap. As a collectivist, you can purge your cities of separatists or xenophobes or generally just anyone dragging your systems down. With individualist, you're stuck with constantly having to spend resources to lessen their influence, and there's no real payoff for doing so. The same with pacifism v. militarism, the militarism is preferable. That's the thing, they don't compliment each other, one's just plain better than the other.

I liked the massive variety of aliens. I know they're just randomly generated, pulling pictures in and matching them with random traits, but the sheer number of animated artworks they did for the aliens was always impressive, and I liked that.

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Diplomacy always felt weak. For all the alien races you could have in one game (I've played with as many as 30 [40 if you count vassals]), there's shockingly little to do there, especially from a studio well-known for games where you can do all kinds of crazy shit to ingratiate yourself or maneuver your weaker domain around. I realized early on that Federations and Alliances were a complete waste of time, because nothing's worse than some distant Republic declaring war on your neighbor, you capturing a dozen planets and singlehandedly bringing them to their knees, and then that distant star republic getting everything and you nothing.

However, I do like the idea of vassals and uplifting, and I always played as a xenophile, so I ended most my games with a dozen or so different alien species all living more-or-less peaceful lives on my efficiently-run planets. I liked migration access and all that jazz, because it made me feel like I was actually running the free-spirited Republic I'd been told I was running. Sectors, on the other hand, are a feature that can go die a fiery death. I've made a habit of just cutting problematic planets out of a sector just so I can spend about ten minutes giving separatists no reason to bitch, then handing it back, and they always build so terribly. I wish there was an option to have no particular focus, because you have to choose whether they specialize in military, credits, minerals, or science.

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End game crises were a good note, though. My favorite so far was a group of extra-dimensional hunters who warped in out of nowhere and pancaked 2/3s of the galaxy before getting to me. I had spent the whole time building up my power base by filling my sectors with more planets,taking over my neighbors, and getting in with the other two powerful civilizations, then we just steamrolled the hunters right back.

Overall, it feels like a "Greatest Hits of" of space 4Xs, but it never really does much to stand out on its own. The complexities of CK or EU mostly aren't here, and while it competently executes everything other space 4x games do, it never really feels like it has much of an identity other than "Just another one of these, but mostly good". I'll still probably keep playing it, because it's well-designed and again, is still a Best Hits Of, but otherwise, it doesn't really moisten me with excitement.

Would recommend to: People who enjoy 4xs/strategies, space, and spaceship.
Would not recommend to: People who don't enjoy 4xs/strategies
  • 5

Doodle Dee. Snickers
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