It’s these emergent narrative threads that games like this produce that make them so frigging awesome!
Well, despite the mixed reviews I’ve gone ahead and bought it. I forgot that I’ve had 40 dollars worth of Steam gift cards in a drawer for quite a while and, well, that’s exactly how much the game costs. Kismet! I’m sure the AI stuff will be addressed soon enough.
They’ve released the first hot fix–for crashes and stuttering. They say second hot fix is coming soon. First patch that’ll make game play changes will still be a while.
I’ve already made a home brew mod to change number of core planets and sectors. Stuff like that is in the common\defines.lua file and trivially easy to mod.
After a relative stalemate with the Condign Pact, I decided to accept a slightly-better-than-white peace. While the Vool Nation and the Sek-Lokkar League to my north were the heavy hitters of the Pact nations, the weaker Imari Administration to my west had forced me to fight on two fronts. I thought I had gotten the upper hand against the Imari at least, with a medium-ish sized fleet harassing their two planets. Then a large Vool fleet warped in. Rather than lose my western fleet, I decided to accept their peace offer: The Vool would cede a single planet to me (I had demanded three). I purged it out of spite.
What followed was a stretch of quite a few years of peace and prosperity. I established a few colonies to my north, east of Vool space. My scientists made many new discoveries, mostly civilian technologies. I build a lot of power plants and mines, and upgraded as many as I could to level III. I even scraped together enough energy to initiate a couple of terraforming projects. The formerly arctic world of Siberia is now an ocean planet. Protip: Pops get really mad during terraforming. A bunch them even wanted to secede. Ingrates. My second terraforming project is underway on the similarly arctic planet of Fulaz III. Only some stone age primitives live there, and nobody cares what they think. I chose the planet because it’s along my southern border; a colony there will allow be to expand southward without burning influence on a frontier outpost.
While my military technology didn’t really advance, my infrastructure did. I have four or five shipyards that can build cruisers, and they haven’t exactly been idle. After I sent a fleet to clear out the space crystals and whatnot to my north, I had them stomp a one-planet empire of dickhead sea birds. I was going to pick a fight with the larger (but friendless) Hiffnar Republic to my southeast, but I made a misstep by consolidating all of my ships into a single fleet before upgrading them. That little refit took over two and a half years. I stuck it out, even though my ceasefire with the Condign expired a couple of months before the upgrade was done.
I’m at war with the Condign again. This time it’s my choice, and there not putting up much of a fight yet. Half of my fleet is in Sol waiting for Vool incursions, and the other half made short work of the Imari fleet. Both Imari planets are under human occupation, and I have yet to see a Vool fleet in this conflict. The AI is probably just being dumb. Regardless, vengeance shall be mine. This campaign will allow me to knock out the Imari so that the Third Condign War will be fought on a single front. Maybe I’ll beat up the Hiffnar during my second truce with the Condign.
I think I agree with IGN. This game just falls apart after the early game, which is very fulfilling. It shows a big weakness in Paradox’s game system. EU4 works because each of the countries sort of have a “goal”: Austria wants to keep the HRE together, France wants to blob even bigger, England wants trade and to form the UK, Portugal/Castille want to colonize, Ming wants to not implode etc. This works because they’re at varying sizes and power levels, and their goals aren’t just “win”.
Similarly, CK2 works just because the little people are just petty personality-driven maniacs who you have to bend over backwards to appease if you want to get anything done.
Stellaris fails in making everyone have the same goal, and start about the same power. The player is just better at the same game. They tried to skirt around this with personalities and government types, but it’s just not thorough enough.
Also, a lot of the end-game events and core systems are literally flat out broken.
Bottom right corner of the screen, in the Galaxy view.
Surely this is a Paradox problem, though, and not a 4x problem. I guess grafting the Paradox AI onto the more freeform Stellaris map is pretty tricky business.
I only played for an hour last night, think I’m going to restart my game. I jetted for a colony as soon as the game would let me and regretted it pretty quickly as I wasn’t equipped to deal with any of the pirates that it immediately spawned in my territory and didn’t have the cash on hand to build up a fleet.
It seems a pretty consistent complaint. They need to beef up the mid and late game, shift focus from managing planets to managing the politics of the galaxy. There needs to be a slow change in scope from the early to the mid and late game with different mechanics. The ealry game is there, and the foundaitons of a mid game are there too, but it appears the game needs more.
Adding the micromanagement hell of directly controlling 50 planets though, isn’t what the later game should be about.
The RNG gods fucked me over hard. I spawned right next to a fallen empire who demand a buffer zone. Unfortunately for me, Earth, my starting planet, falls right in that zone…
Ouch. They should definitely have a check for that possibility when spawning the fallen empires.
Haven’t encountered one yet myself, but I did lose a neighbor to a swarm of bugs. They are rated “overwhelming”, and the moment they gobbled up my neighbor, my other neighbor, the space piggies, asked me to ally with them.
They are rated equal to me. I don’t feel safe.
So some people have been digging around in the game files and found some bugs:
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Sectors don’t clear tile blockers (they’re supposed to, but the logic makes them not do so).
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Sectors don’t build construction ships, spaceports, or mining/research stations (they’re supposed to, again)
Number 2. is fixable by doing it yourself. In fact, build starports in your sectors, your naval force limit will be gimped otherwise. However, 1 is unfixable without queuing up the blocker removals yourself before putting the colony in a sector.
Also, a lot of late-game crises are bugged. The unbound one seems particularly prone to failure.
Bastards! The Vool Ascendency had just finished their first mining colony when a bunch of bloody zealots calling themselves the True Path broke from the government, destroyed the mining station and fled into the darkness.
So we’ve broadened our focus from colonizing to hunting the vermin down. Their will be …whatever the hell the fungi equivalent of blood is… amongst the stars. 
They’ve been pumping out hotfixes steadily so far. We’re on 1.0.2 right now. They said a more substantial patch is coming soon, hopefully the sectors and late game crisis issues will be resolved.
I feel that they should take their time with DLC, make it really beef up that mid/late game everyone is worried about.
Also, war score confuses me. Space Piggies and I are now at war with the bugs, so I had the ability to suggest war demands. But I couldn’t move on because it said the warscore was too high. I couldn’t find a war score limit anywhere in my empire. I thought maybe it was influence, but that didn’t seem right. If it was my ally’s influence then that number should be in the demands screen, or the warscore should turn red when you over whatever number it is that you can’t go over.
I suspect that you just can’t go over 100 points’ worth of war demands. Lame. In my last war I even just vassalized the League of Hiff rather than demand planets (they had too many to demand in one go). It looks like you can “integrate” a vassal after 10 years.
It turns out there won’t be a Third Condign War; not with that name, anyway. The Condign Pact has expanded into a federation. Hostilities between us haven’t been renewed. I’m still beset on all sides by enemies, though. The Reagg Concord declared war on me, and includes nations to my northwest, west, south, and southeast. We’ve had a few fairly big battles, and they even managed to temporarily occupy Eden for a few months. It’s largely a stalemate, but I’m winning slightly at 17%.
I’ve read ship and weapon sizes are in need of rebalancing. Apparently corvettes are overpowered and large weapons are underpowered. Essentially, a large weapon does roughly the same damage per second as two mediums or four smalls, but with less accuracy. At least one min-maxer says that battleships work well if you outfit them properly, but destroyers and cruisers currently aren’t really worth building. I’ve got a few battleships decked out as carriers and equipped with point defense guns; they seem to be doing pretty well, even against swarms of corvettes.
I’ve been building power plants like crazy, and I’m now able to keep several terraforming stations operational at once. Looks like I may be better off building up rather than out for a while.
Argh. It looks like incorporating a vassal takes 750 influence at 3 influence per month. That won’t do. And I discovered it after vassalizing two other alien races. Maybe I’ll try being an overlord for a while after all. We humans might just be mellowing out after all those years as xenocidal maniacs. (Of course, I might just figure out a way to use modding and/or console commands to get rid of that pesky war demands limit).
Oh, well. The Hiffnar were actually somewhat helpful in this last war against the Reagg Concord. The odd thing is that my new vassals are far from where the fighting was. I’m sure I smashed up their fleets a bunch, too.
Maybe I’ll try being peaceful for a while again. I sort of want to explore more of the tech tree and amass a larger fleet before my next conflict.
Just picked this up last night and played for a couple of hours. This will definitely be fun, and the supposed mid-game slump doesn’t bother me much. That’s usually about the time that I quit a Civ5 game anyway.
I’m going to restart my game by what I think is just a bad random start layout. The few systems that are warpable to are constantly patrolled by hostile Space Amoebas preventing me from surveying.
You can set you science ships to Passive mode and manually direct their surveying. It takes a little extra effort but for close systems early on it’s manageable.
There’s a lot of 'em. Study them, many aren’t hostile at all, and some only if you get too close.
If they’re the latter, you can set your science ships to not run away. Just make sure they aren’t in a system with the space monsters that will attack on sight.
Should have read Grey’s post first.
I’m annoyed at the apparent limit on demanding ceded planets. I’m just gonna mod my way around it. It looks like the easiest way is to crack open the file 00_war_demand_types. There are a few traits and technologies that reduced the cost of demanding planets, but they’re not listed in the tooltip. I just changed the Manifest Destiny tech from an 80% cost multiplier to a 0% cost modifier. Looks like in-game that reduces the cost per planet to 1. I might be on the honor system about not demanding planets after a few minor victories, but I can live with that.
I do this because I want to fight a big giant war over more than a tiny amount of territory. I’ve spent a few years upgrading and expanding my fleet. The two federations that seem intent on boxing me in and intimidating me into playing nice will get what’s coming to them.
Oops, that didn’t work as intended. I waged a war against the Vool and their allies, demanding all of their planets; 14 planets total between four empires. I barely had time to to occupy two planets before they capitulated, because I “only” demanded 14 points’ worth of stuff. That’s no fun. I want to make completely unreasonable demands and then have fight for them.
Does anyone know where to alter the maximum amount of war demands? I can’t find it, even though I suspect that it’s right under my nose.