I have been interested in getting Stellaris for a while and since it is on sale on Steam I was thinking of having a go. However, Steam separates its reviews between all-time (which are mostly positive for this game) and recent (which are mostly negative).
What happened? Near as I can discern it is from patch 2.0 which changed gameplay.
Is it now as bad as some say? If it is still bad is it possible to play the game prior to the patch when it was good?
I recall it recently got review-bombed for some reason unrelated to gameplay. Some kind of kerfuffle over fans being angry that translating it into some language not coming fast enough IIRC; my recollection is very vague, thus all the qualifiers.
I still think it’s good; I miss the non-hyperspace types of FTL but most of the other new features are good I think.
As for playing an older version, on Steam you right-click on the game name, pick the Properties category, then the Beta tab to choose which version.
When there’s a sudden spate of negative reviews on Steam, I immediately assume it’s about some kind of either DRM or social media/SJW/anti-SJW bullshit.
Word is that Chinese players are angry because the 2.0 update removed the Chinese localization. Said localization had been incomplete but in the game files. Paradox scrubbed it from the files during the update.
I just checked the workshop. There are 339 items for “Chinese localization” at the time of this posting.
Why leave negative reviews whey they can simply put it back in?
Anyone who’s worked technology customer support already knows the answer to this.
Given a choice between “RAAAAAGE” and “fix it yourself”, a customer will always choose “RAAAAAGE”. Theories explaining this are varied; some believe it’s customer entitlement or a distorted sense of “justice” (“I didn’t break it, why the hell do I have to fix it!”). Others believe it’s just infantile reflex reaction to having something desired taken away erasing any capability for intellectual response.
There’s a 1,500+ post thread on the Stellaris Steam forum about how the game can recover after “Patch 2.0” so I’m guessing the recent negative reviews are related to that.
Funny, but this issue never surfaced that I heard of at PDXCon18 this last weekend. I’m guessing it’s not really bothering the dev team for that game.
I see this complaint repeated. Everyone seems to miss it. No one seems to like that it was removed. So why did they remove them? Can you get them back with a mod or something?
I tend to agree but since it coincided with a major patch there is cause to worry the Devs did something egregious. Wouldn’t be the first time.
The people who are complaining don’t like it - but it makes for a far better game this way. The problem was that the three FTL methods didn’t interact well, and functionally couldn’t be made to work right with one another. Paradox didn’t take out warp and gates because they were too much fun, but because they actually limited the design space.
Why would that be a reason to remove it instead of just letting it obsolete itself? (I’m presuming online play, since removing it offline would be really weird.) Isn’t it better to let players decide they no longer like something than to be seen as the no-fun club that removed it?
Wasn’t about multiplayer. Your FTL travel method was literally something you picked before starting the game, and it was designed to scale at least up until the endgame - and potentially still be usable at the endgame. It couldn’t be made obsolete, without totally removing it. The problem was that it didn’t mesh well with the war and territory mechanics. For an examples:
Hyperlanes were supposed to be faster than other options, but the lanes are created with a random seed when starting a new game. This means that it was virtually guaranteed that, when fighting a war or just normal expansion, you would end up with some areas completely cut off, unable to expand because somebody happened to block the one lane you needed. It was possible to be almost compeltely cut off from day 1, and this could actually cripple your war effort before you even started, because it might be impossible to attack your enemy as they didn’t use Hyperlanes and hadn’t expanded along them. The lanes mightbe cut through a neighboring power and the AI is pretty uninterested in giving you access.
The three FTL concept was good, but it didn’t work well in practice.
Exactly.
Each concept was a good one, but a game with more than one was inherently unbalanceable. There were just too many quirky issues when one empire had one FTL type and the other had another. For any given game, I chose one to be used by everyone in the setup parameters.
And playing with each FTL type, hyperspace was the most fun, for me. It added a layer of “geographic” strategy that the others lacked. The game developers reached the same conclusion.
And the game generation is flexible enough that a player can still greatly change the feel of the game by adjusting some parameters. A spiral galaxy with sparse connections is going to play very differently than a globular galaxy with many connections. And wormholes are still in the game, but implemented differently.
I can understand that some players don’t like the changes (that’s a truism in any game), but the game really is better now.
I think it had nothing to do with the three FTL methods interacting well, I never saw any issues back when I played the game, and don’t recall any discussion about that from the devs. What happened is that the developers decided they wanted to change the way controlling territories worked in a fundamental way, moving from a philosophy of ‘open space’ to ‘there’s terrain and choke points’. This was easy to do with hyperlanes, since you can only travel across lanes so you can easily create choke points. But they didn’t have any idea how to make the new ‘space terrain’ idea fit with the other two types of FTL, so they took them out as their new model for maneuvering into combat simply wouldn’t work with them.
One of Stellaris’s selling points was that there were multiple types of FTL, which encouraged people to choose it over other options like MOO or Endless Space II that were basically ‘hyperlane only’. When the developers decided to abandon that, people who bought the game, stuck with the game, or liked the game because they weren’t stuck with hyperlanes were very disappointed. Another selling point was that travel had a very open space feel, where you weren’t limited to really specific routes and there weren’t choke points and such, so there’s another set of people who weren’t happy with it. While you can argue that combat works better under the new system they developed in 2.0, that’s irrelevant to the people who specifically wanted options on drive style, wanted to avoid hyperlanes, or wanted ‘no terrain, it’s space’.
I’d argue that moving to hyperlane only opened up quite a bit for other travel, especially towards mid/late-game. Jump drives are still available, and now they’re more than upgraded warp drives. Gateways replace the other method (can’t remember what it was called) later on. It’s not what it was billed as, but the changes were made for gameplay and balance reasons, not “just because”.
Something like that existed, and worked, in the Sword of the Stars games. Most races had some variation of “as the crow flies” FTL travel, with quirks (e.g. the bird race moved faster the more ships grouped up, and they had a special ship to speed it up further ; the dolphins moved very fast in the deep black but slowed down around gravity wells) ; there was one race that could teleport from one planet to the next but could only space travel at slower than light speed (making them hard to expand with but super tough to dislodge) ; and the humans had fast but fixed hyperlane networks. Oh, and the nom-nom-nom race also had hyperlanes only they built them by tearing space-time itself, their lanes collapsed over time (destroying anything inside the lane when that happened) and a given planet could only support X different ripped lanes.
It worked. And yes, as the humans you *could *get bottlenecked and have to choose between war or bypassing the obstruction a STL speed. That was the trade-off for being vastly faster than everyone else within the boundaries of your lanes (it also added a layer of guesswork on the part of your war opponents, because they couldn’t see your network and didn’t necessarily know which nodes were critical for you)
So it’s a one-time choice in the beginning? I guess I can see why they’d remove it as an option rather than just let players find out it didn’t work and naturally stop using it, since that would basically ruin an entire game by the time they switched.
That said, I definitely am the type who thinks that offline games should still have the same game available that you originally paid for. Online is a bit more iffy (though I prefer having a classic server if possible), but I don’t like the idea of buying a game to do one thing and then have that taken away from me.
If you can still load up the old version legally, then I guess that’s not a real problem, though.
In fact, they mentioned that specifically in the developer diary which explained the changes and the reasons for them, as well as why that solution didn’t function. Paradox is unusual up-front and detailed about these matters msot of the time. While I have not played SotS2, there are pretty huge differences in how the game is setup.
Point taken.
And you… probably shouldn’t touch *SotS2 *with Donald Trump’s own ten foot pole. Or maybe you could these days, I dunno, it’s been a long while since I’ve entirely given up on it. God, was it ever rushed and full of horrible bugs. Some of the best patch notes in the months after release though. “Fleets built by players should no longer spawn inside stars” was a longtime favourite of mine, not only because of the aberrant situation itself but because they released a fix for it that only should work :D.
SotS 1, however, remains the bee’s tits.