The 2.0.2 Beta patch is really coming along. I suspect it’ll be rolled out as an official patch soon. There are somanyfixes.
They’ve gone back to forced status quo and removed 100% WE penalties. Now, when you hit 100% WE you get a 24 month countdown. After that, you can be forced into peace. It is a good change. The penalties were nowhere near severe enough. Two years gives you enough time to finalize and conquests that you want to finish before the peace.
Tons and tons of other changes as well. This patch is awesome!
I was waiting until it was released live to post, but, yes, once this patch is out, the game is going to be in an excellent state. Even if you didn’t get the expansion, the improvements to wars make it awesome. Great time to play!
I love it! Megacorps play sufficiently differently to give a new experience. They’re kind of a tall play. Lots of ideological wars to get clients, or outright vassalization as franchises. I’ve not played the church or criminal syndicate subtype. Slaver market seems kind of irrelevant so far.
And 2.2 is fraking awesome!!! The new planet system is actually interesting.
I think a little bit of both. I don’t play optimally to begin with since I tend to RP when playing, which is why I rarely play above Commodore. And certainly, the new mechanics meant I was probably a little bit sub-optimal from my normal play. However, from a galactic standpoint I was a significant power. I had better tech than maybe half the galaxy. Equivalent fleet power and economy compared to most. I wasn’t behind the AI, although I was perhaps behind where I would normally be.
But here’s the thing. Two AIs formed a defensive agreement. Then they declared war the next year. I was ravaged as their fleets attacked on two fronts since my fleets were spread out over my space on patrol duty (stupid pirates!). I get my fleet assembled and move to counterattack, by this time I’ve lost 10 systems and 1 planet. I crack one enemy fleet and start taking systems to balance the war score, when suddenly two allied AIs on the other side declare war seeming to take advantage of the chaos.
It was hopeless from there on out. I had to retreat back to my space. I sent my fleet (about 2.5K) up against the first invading enemy (2.2K). It was a bloodbath. I “won” with 1.6K remaining. The two remaining invaders had 2.6K and 2.3K respectively. And they were sweeping through my space. I repaired and built some new ships. But all 5K enemies arrived at my homeworld, and destroyed my fleet. Then the original attackers showed back up.
I’ve never seen the AI so intent on my destruction. I’ve rarely seen the AI gang up on me outside of a Federation. It was impressive. Maybe it was chance too.
I did notice that AIs in a power position relative to their neighbours had no problem just swallowing them up. Note: I play with AI Aggression on High.
All in all, I was in a place where normally I felt like the AI would see me as being on par with them and would leave me alone. Allowing me to continue to develop my game. This time the AI seemed to recognize that alone there was no hope, but together there were a lot of juicy human worlds for the taking.
I’m enjoying it so far, although I’m still shaky on how the new systems all work.
My first empire for the new update is a Megacorp, naturally. Named “The Gainful Path”*, it’s a Spiritualist/Xenophile/Egalitarian Megachurch with the Gospel of the Masses civic.
Still haven’t found anyone I can establish a Branch Office in, yet; everyone is either unfriendly (a Xenophobic Materialist) or an invalid subject (two other Megacorps and a Fanatical Purifier).
Which not coincidentally can be also translated as “The Way of the Profit”.
The AI wrecked me again! Wow. The slower pace of building up your fleet can leave you very vulnerable. Anchorages are very important if you’re next to an aggressive empire. Basically, I had two military focused empires next to me. They ended up growing their fleet faster than me, and once they hit overwhelming they both came over the border. My 1.8K fleet stood no chance vs their 2.6 and 2.9K fleets. And again, VERY aggressive in taking territory. The AI seems at least somewhat improved to me in terms of persecuting a war.
Ok. Game three. A put a bit more focus into the building the fleet this time, and I’m not getting beat to a pulp by ravenous AI hordes.
I actually dedicated one of my planets pretty much exclusively to building naval cap. In addition, since that builds soldiers and I have FTL inhibitors, good luck getting past Fort Junction (it is at a junction of eight hyperspace lanes, talk about a chokepoint).
I adore the new economy and the way you can specialize planets in this way.
Just a heads-up; there’s an opt-in beta patch with a whole bunch of bugfixes and balance tweaks. It also grants early access to the “Legion” empire flag style.
I played a bit last night, finally, and loved it. Gonna start over today – I think it’s time to up the difficulty a bit. Been playing on whatever the default one is and it’s getting a bit easy.
I really like the changes. I found the game a bit monotonous before, especially when the mass-upgrading of buildings that’s done away with. Now you actually have to spend somewhat rare resources to upgrade buildings, and the basic resource districts don’t get upgrades. Despite the claim that Pops would automatically take the jobs they were best at, it seems it’s not set up well enough to allow Robots to take a job from an organic Pop when there’s an open job that the Robot can’t do but the organic can. Before I upgraded Robots to be able to do more jobs, I was spending way too much time opening and closing jobs to get Pops working all of them instead of letting the Robots sit idle at the same time there was a clerk vacancy. There’s a number of other minor annoyances as well, like being unable to zoom to a system from the trade route listing of whether all your trade value was coming in. After having a wide-flung empire, and having had the names of the systems in previous games the vast majority of the time, I have no clue where a system is most of the time if it’s not one of my main ones. After I set up a new trade base, I forget their system names and when I check back on my trade, I can’t remember exactly where the system getting pirated is located. They also lie to you about the maximum piracy in a system - I’ve definitely seen it get higher than what it says the max is.
I’ve definitely felt much more strapped for resources in this game than I have in the past. Minerals and Alloys I can never seem to have enough of if I want to be sure I’m maintaining enough energy and food and consumer goods too. I previously had problems with my resources filling up while not at war, but this time I can barely keep my navy up the level that I want it to be at. When I do get wardec’d I just have to take what navy I have and hope it’s enough, because I’m already trying as hard as I can to build it up. Given the time it takes buildings to be built and then the jobs they create to actually get filled, when I run dreadfully short on something I tend to overdo building more capacity for that resource unless it’s minerals and alloys.
I like the fact that there’s no inherent resource generation of research, which means I can concentrate all my labs on a few planets and have all their research boosted.
I don’t seem to be able to access the 2.2.1 patch on GoG though. I patched it to 2.2.0-1, but it has a different checksum than the one in the news on the game loader. There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about that. There are a lot of little things that need to be fixed, like some low-res art buildings and numbers not aligning correctly. It’s sad that as good as Paradox games are mechanically, they often suffer in presentation. “Literally unplayable” as some say.
I slowly upped the difficulty level before 2.2 and was able to deal with the highest difficulty level and max AI aggressiveness, though just barely, despite not having played all that many games. After my first game figuring out what the heck was going on in 2.2 at Commodore where I got my ass handed to me, the next game at Commodore, which I’m in now, seems fairly easy. The AI declared war with a much stronger fleet but never actually sent it, keeping some of it patrolling for pirates. I smashed each of their fleets in turn with my one fleet, repairing in between, and managed to take a couple systems that cut off a significant part of his empire. The next war, which the AI also foolishly declared despite being weaker than I and my ally combined, I was able to take over a dozen systems and a few planets, and pushed my way out of being unconnected to the vast expanse of unclaimed space. Since then, I’ve been by far the greatest normal power on the map (although I submitted to the Great Khan - almost always the right move if you’re right next to him), and am just waiting on researching all the tech and getting enough Alloys to upgrade my starbases and build up my navy for the end-game crisis.
That’s a shame because the test patch is quite good and fixes a lot of the little annoyances. I wish I could post a screenshot here of my current game. I had a good start, and I’m not remotely in first place. Note, I’m also playing with the Glavius Ultimate AI mod.
Stellaris is both a 4X and a Grand Strategy game. Personally, I think once the 2.2 version is polished it will be the best 4X since Master of Orion 2. But it is a complex game, especially with the 2.2 patch which radically changes the economy. Although in some ways it is probably easier for players who have never played Stellaris than for players who have to get used to the changes. It is really hard to say if it is good for a newbie. I’ll say yes, if you have a high tolerence for complexity and learning curve, otherwise you’ll be frustrated. Consider picking up Galactic Civilization III. It isn’t the best game in the genre but it is pretty solid, often on massive discount and a good entry game I think. Either that or Civilization 5 or 6 (but those aren’t in space).
I think it’s probably a good introduction to Paradox’s style of grand strategy games since it’s not based on real life at all. It plays somewhat similar to other Paradox games because it’s based on the same engine. Instead of having provinces though, you have star systems. It’s still extremely complex, and the most recent patch really made you do a lot more consideration of what you’re doing. To add that complexity they killed one source of complexity that was really fake difficulty, but just because you can’t micromanage your colonies as much doesn’t mean that you can just let them do any old thing - you have to carefully manage your production of a bunch of different resources, and the ways in which you have to produce those resources are quite varied and it’s a lot harder to just suddenly make more energy than it was before because you can’t simply place power plants everywhere now and are limited by the number of generator districts per planet. This is mitigated by the ability to sell stuff on the marketplace for energy and buy practically everything but research for energy.
Anyway, it’s a great game that has a lot of depth to it. I had played other older Paradox games and was waiting for their new ones to come out somewhere other than Steam and jumped on this one and absolutely loved it that I bought all the DLCs once they were on sale. The game is even better now than before without DLCs, with a few of the features of DLCs now being integrated into the base game in some way, and they’re just not as crucial to making the game able to hold your interest over the long term because it’s just so much more complicated. I wish I had turned them off for my first game in 2.2, because there’s so much going on I wish I had just the stuff from the base game that changed to deal with while learning it.
offtopic edit because of consecutive post limitations: GOG has a patch to 2.2.2 now. It never did get 2.2.1, but I’ll take a version beyond that!
