There's never going to be anything that could possibly be broken or exploited in Stellaris, at least not intentionally, because it's a game that's meant to be played on an office LAN with you and your closest friends or coworkers over the next six months.Īnd, like you point out, that's also why there's never going to be a midgame, not a real one. The game was designed from the ground up to be balanced as a multiplayer sci-fi wargame with 4X elements, and all the species customization and event chains are just a grudging bone thrown to the way that the other nine people out of ten play Paradox games, as engines for emergent singleplayer narratives.
Yeah, I think there's a design philosophy behind Stellaris that will keep it from ever feeling like something truly rare and unique. You will never see enemy hold system that you have to fight for. They're all there to allow you to balance things out, see if you rather want +5% food or +10% speed of energy weapons. All the unique anomalies and special resources are within strategic sane boundaries. It switches from the early game wonder to late game clicking through turns while most 4X like Civilization have a middle game where everything is actually decided, when it's fun to play. Meanwhile in something like Endless Space 2 the game evolves by the endgame the way of interacting with most mechanics completely changes, you stop caring about one type of resources at all while you need some others and they seem worthy of a galactic-scale war.īut Stellaris is balanced even though it's random. Even your relationships with resources are the same - even after 250 years of play you will struggle with energy balance and will be able to use any amount of minerals in a day. Really nothing feels like a significant change. Wow, our researches now produce whole 10% more of science and admirals have another 10% bonus - that's a whole new game!. We're all psionics, we took 2 ascension perks for that. Unlike Endless Space 2 there's species-wide story but. You research future tech and mop around, you fight wars where 90% of the action is capturing systems of an enemy with 0 ships and you still have to manage armies to capture planets. It's like Civilization after turn 400 when everything is decided and you just have to click end turn to get your spaceship to fly - only you'll have to do it for most of the game and you might not even win. You already have most of interesting inventions and traditions you really wanted now you get whatever is presented to you. There's no grand battle for deciding the fate of the universe, it's all feels determined when it happens. First there's initial stage: you note how starlanes go, you settle first colonies and really get into managing them, you throw pops around, you manage resources. So the ideological problem is this: Stellaris doesn't have midgame. You may use new species to colonize more but your 21st planet is not that exciting anymore and requires too much involvement to get your empire's productivity raised by 4% or something. Getting new planets and species is hard to notice, that unrest doesn't really affect you. Strategic resources are roughly equivalent to being one step in research ahead and you get plenty of those.
I fought wars to get systems with enclaves and access to Leviathans (both added in DLC) but even that doesn't help that much some of your inner factions become happier.
But why would you if an empty space on any of your planet with any POP on it will produce more research? There's nothing special when everything is so big. Someone mentioned craving enemy's black hole system for physics research. And when you have 70 systems you don't see other empire special systems as special. Some blobs may be bigger, some smaller some have a lot connections to each others, some don't. As TJ had said by the dreaded midgame you have uniform blobs bumping into each other. Space becomes more systemic and thus boring. There's less random stuff here, you don't get to colonize a planet that will add 5 rich systems to your empire. They've embraced familiar mechanics from EU4 and made the game even more, so to say, granular: your ships really fly through all this space, you capture each system individually. I think I've figured out ideological problem with Stellaris.
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