-Start as the human nation of People's Republic of Donuts
-Meet new neighbors
-Get rid of new neighbors
-Expand borders
-Meet very powerful neighbors
-Become friends with one while the rest hate me
-Meet other friends and enemies
-Entire galaxy a part of either The Golden Concordat or The Galactic Entente
-Galaxy War I breaks out between the alliances
-Goes bad at first then tide turns in my favor
-Win war and annex half the galaxy
-Other alliances members turn their backs on me for "aggressive expansion" so they call it
-Kicked out of alliance
-Whats left of the galaxy declares war on me
-Newly acquired territory and resources helpful
-I let the traitors live but as vassals for backstabbing
-Research advanced technology
-Get bored without other nations, release vassals
-Robots rise up across galaxy
-Deal with mine then let everyone take care of theirs
-Dont realize robots control everything but me
-Try to do something
-Get f**cked by robots
-Now entire galaxy under robot rule

11/10 Would be enslaved by my own inventions again

Goes from exciting to being a chore. Knowing Paradox's usual business model, this is going to get a ton of DLC, and I feel that until they release something dealing with the barebones mid to late game, this isn't worth getting. Don't get sucked into the hype. The beginning is fantastic and there is so much potential here.

Never finished a game but started 500

Stellaris is an experiment by Paradox to simplify their typical grand strategy game offering to try and reach a broader audience, at the cost of deep and engaging gameplay.

While simplifying / distilling a game's complexity to it's core game mechanics isn't per se a bad thing on the surface, it is when those core mechanics are actually somewhat weak. What I found in my time playing was that Stellaris is fun in the early game, deceptive even, with great promise, but as you play you will find that the mid / late game fails.

The early game is fun NOT because you have these events that pop up (that seem to taper off in the mid-game). The early game is fun because you have so many decisions to make that significantly effect your empire. You have very few resources, and how you grow your empire and how you spend these resources are instrumental in getting a growth edge over your nearest potential neighbors. In the mid/late game, it's much more grindy, you have a lot resources, and everything is a tedious war of attrition. There are also a few real sore points that stick out mid / late game:

The key negative points being:

1. You have many procedurally generated empires all around you that feel same-ish, and your ability to interact with them aside form directly attacking them is relatively weak. Especially, your diplomatic options are lackluster compared to something like Crusader Kings 2 or Europa Universalism IV. You will notice this right away.

2. Towards the mid game your empire gets hemmed in, and the only way to advance is combat. Unfortunately combat is actually one of Stellaris' weakest areas, and is less drilled down and detailed than Europa Univerallis IV or Crusader Kings 2. It's really much more rock/paper/scissors in Stellaris. Despite numerous systems Paradox shoe-horns into the game, combat always boils down to your death blob of ships mashing the enemy's death blob, and if you happen to have the better part of the rock / paper / scissors match up on blobs, or are sitting on the better end of the tech scale, you will win the whole war with one key fight.

3. Empire Management is actually not all that engaging mid and late game either. In the early game you start with a 4-5 key planets and every deskin you make with is griping and significant. In the later game, a lot of your systems are wrapped into sectors under the control of an AI governor, and represent to you a disconnected source of resources. You still control your key planets of choice, it just doesn't matter, as whatever choice you make on them is offest by the landslide of resources from sectors and mines on non-planet systems.

The sector management is a good conceptual idea, and it attempts to reduce the overwhelming tedium enjoyed by most 4X games as your empire grows overly large and you have to repeat your micro-management of star systems dozens or even hundreds of times as your empire grows, allowing you to focus on other things. So why is it bad? It's bad because it removes all the fun things you were doing in Stellaris up until that point, and replaces it with the most boring, weakest part of the game, combat. Sectors also have bugs, and don't manage well ...but that can be fixed. What can't be fixed as easily, is just the boring combat mechanics. And forcing you to focus on boring combat through the lack of diplomacy and forcing sector control, just kills the mid and late game making it feel like a real grind.

If you are familiar with other deep, rich and complex strategy games such as Distant Worlds and you're hoping for something like that or Europea Universallis in space, unfortunately, you have to keep waiting. Stellaris is a fun game at it's price for a few hours, but it's in no way something like Distant Worlds with an improved AI, or Crusader Kings II in space.

Quick recommendation: Not for full price, go for it if it's on sale

As a fan of Paradox grand-strategy games I had high hopes for this 4X game but I'm really disappointed. The first few hours are the most fun, when you are still learning and the noob mistakes you make have consequences, giving you a challenge. However you learn the mechanics of this game VERY fast and once you do the game is very easy. Early game consists of rapid-expansion and colonization of undisovered systems and then choosing to destroy your neighbours or build up an alliance. After that, the game is immesnely boring.

The problem with this game is that there is zero depth to anything, combat about building a single doomstack to annihilate your enemy quickly, diplomacy and trade doesn't exist, the game is remarkably easy. The one thing that gave me something to do whilst whizzing through at max-speed was micromanaging my colonies, however due to the sector system I am now penalized massively if I choose to keep my planets outside of a sector - thought o be fair, handicapping myself like this does give me more to manage.

I feel like this game was abondoned half-way through development, or they are releasing the rest of the game later as a DLC. Either way, poor effort by Paradox.

I played this game quite a bit by now, 50+ hours.
Current patch is 1.2 (Asimov)

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+ Accessible
>> I had a much easier time learning this game rather than when I tried HoI / EU4 (without success...)

+ Great initial impact and early game
>> Cool research technologies (albeit the choices are RNG, which is sometimes irritating) and exploration with science vessels.

+ GREAT soundtrack
>> My most favourite thing about the game, I listen to it almost daily

+ Mod support

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~ Average aesthethics
>> Nothing special here, the game looks fine for what it is but not outstandingly so.

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- Unbalanced weapon types
>> I can't find a reason to use ballistic weapons, they do only a tiny extra bit of DPS than lasers which provide huge armor penetration bonuses instead. Missiles are hard countered by defense points.

- Lack of mid-endgame content
>> Aside a few events at late game, there's not much going on and it quickly turns into a grind. Eventually most technologies get researched, exploration is pretty much done and there's little to do

- Zero tactical decisions during ship battles
>> You can't give orders for, say, focus certain enemy ships or engage in particular manoeuvers

- AI is just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
>> Consistently irrational behaviour from AI throughout the whole game.
A few examples:
1) Getting randomly kicked from alliances / federations for no apparent reason, even when you're saving your allies' asses.
2) Someone refused a trade deal where I was simply giving away some extra resources for nothing in return.
3) Sector AI is absolutely terrible. Even with plenty of resources (10k minerals / 5k energy) it fails to completely upgrade spaceports, even leaving some planets with just a lvl 1, which forces the player to do it manually. Same goes for spaceport modules.

- Performance
>> The game seems to mostly utilise 1-2 cores... mid-late game can become quite sluggish, with a 4690K / R9 290 / 16GB / SSD I was often dipping in 20s / 30s (using max time speed)

- UI is a mess
>> Plenty of things in the UI could be improved (on top of my head, upgrading individual land armies has to be done 1 by 1 and is ATROCIOUS, quick-upgrading spaceports / adding modules from the planet list tab is not allowed.
Also, the ship designer could use some love (copy / pasting designs to quickly make small variants, shortcuts to upgrade / downgrade a piece of equipment ...)

- Refineries / boosters
>> 100% personal opinion, but I hate the way spaceport refinery modules work.
They provide great bonuses to the ships built in spaceports where such modules are built, provided you own the strategic resources necessary to build them.
The bonuses are huge (like +50% armor, +10% damage...), but existing ships built BEFORE the modules were added cannot be upgraded.
That means that you're often delaying construction of ships if you know you can get a refinery in the near future, and also avoiding building ships in other spaceports, where such modules cannot be built for lack of resources.

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Conclusion: a game with a good first impression and potential but plagued with plenty of issues regarding AI, UI, balance.

Stellaris is a mile wide but an inch deep.

I have logged >100 hrs of both singleplayer and multiplayer gameplay, with and without mods, and I'll conclude my experience by saying that Stellaris lacks content in all aspects, and isn't worth picking up at full price. Many features are not fleshed out at all and some feel like afterthoughts due to how poorly implemented they are. There are a few cool features like the ship designer and empire creator, however the rest of the game is extroadinarily shallow.

RNG infests this game, to the point where I would argue that it cannot be competitive in online play. Your starting system could be a bountiful land of riches, or a completely barren wasteland. I've had starting systems turn out to be absent of any resources beyond that of what your home planet provides. This is extremely influential in the early game where expansion is costly.

The research "tree" is also a pure dice roll, and is arguably one of the worst """features""" of the game. You will never know which technology is next available once your current research is complete, which eliminates any forward planning or strategy. You can't plan to get a specific weapon type, or plan to expand rapidly, all of it is a dice roll and can end up screwing you over mid-late game by not giving you the options which you may desperately need.

Much like Britain's economy post-Brexit, the economy in Stellaris is severely lacklustre. There are two resources, one of which is rarely used outside of maintenance fees for ships and buildings, the other is exlcusively used for building and upgrading. The former never tends to be in short supply and is thus not useful in trading. Luxury resources are pretty much non-existant (In all my logged game time I cannot recall ever using or trading the very few that exist in Stellaris), which is the polar opposite of a game like Civ 5 where luxury resources are in constant circulation between empires.

The combat splits into two categories, ground and space. Ground combat is similar to what you see in other Paradox grand strats, it's something you cannot control or have any influence over, and it basically comes down to whoever has the bigger army wins in most cases. Space combat is exactly the same, however you're forced to watch fleets engage in a cinematic-only perspective, meaning you can't control or influence it either. This is particularly annoying because your fleets might end up randomly engaging enemy mining structures instead of attacking the target you told them to attack. I've seen multiple enemies exploit this; my fleet warps in, engages some random little mining structure, which gives the enemy time to escape.

Seeing as you can't influence space battles in any way, I question why we have to watch these big pointlessly embellished 3d(!!!) engagements between ships, and why it cannot be similar to ground battles which is summed up simply in a window. You will find players with weaker PC's chugging along, barely able to keep up in bigger engagements, which brings the game speed to a crawl, as it's P2P. The game will move at the speed of the player with the slowest PC/Connection.

Over multiple replays, you will see the same event chains and anomalies over and over and over, and you won't care about them any more. You will skip every one of them. The variety of events and anomalies is extremely low. Much of the early game will be cluttered with these events which you will have seen plenty of times before if it is not your 1st game. You'll know you've hit the mid game because absolutely nothing will happen and you'll end up doing busywork when it crops up.

Stellaris' soundtrack managed to drag itself out to >2 hrs long, yet it's incredibly uninspired, boring, and every track sounds similar. Confusingly, in-game there will be very long periods of silence as music will just decide when it wants to play. There's no fancy multi-layering of sounds, the same soundtrack will play regardless of whether you're at war or peace, whether you're zoomed into a battle or not.

The game desperately needs more content in all areas. If you're into 4X games, or strategy games in general, don't bother picking up Stellaris until it has more meat on the bone.

Review as of: 29/07/2016

Aug 4, 2016

At best this game has been boring from the start. But I held off writing a negative review because it had the potential to be a great game if the devs responded to community feedback and increased the content in a measured fashion (instead of relying on mods to do that for them).

But with the release of the first DLC, the proverbial camel's back has been broken. Let me first explain what this game was lacking in cosmetics that irked me: There are only 6 ship models in the game. You can have dozens of factions, but there are only 6 ship model styles to choose from. You couldn't even at least select a color for the ship chrome. Now, compare to most games where there is a unique ship model for EVERY faction (and that always comes out to being more than 6). The city artwork is similarly non-diversified. What a wasted opportunity for immersion.

Now the boring: The game is slow. Immersion would really help here, but as I said above, there's too little to carry me over. Every faction I play and every faction I meet just feels like "Alien Species #2". Ironically, when you first meet alien races that exactly how they're labeled... Another reason this game is boring is that the starts always feel formulaic. There will always be an inhabitable planet within your starting territory that is medium size. There will always be a large planet just outside your empire range. ALWAYS. So you automatically research colony ship and always colonize basically the same way. There's no square 1 diversification in the game. You don't have to be a statistician to understand that a slight variable early on has large repurcussions down the line. What a wasted opportunity to make the game play differently each time. Instead there's the same hostile BS in surrounding systems. The same gas grazers, etc. Same same same.

As I said, races feel very "samey" because you are too limited on how many picks you can take and the differences those picks make don't really make your race that radically different. One HUGE reason this is stymied is that there are many interesting -1 quirks to allow you to get positive traits, but since you can only take 4 picks period, well... you can take 4 interesting -1 quirks and then be left with ... yep, 0 picks to spend on positive traits. So you end up taking a couple of quirks that really don't push your race one way or the other toward something interesting. HATE HATE HATE. "But it's fixed in the mods" "Use the extended traits mods" Sorry, it's the vanilla game that counts here. I'm not fixing the game with other peoples' stuff. I want to BUY a COMPLETE game. Not have to fix it myself with mods that may or may not contain the changes that would make me happy. VANILLA GAME COUNTS. Next you'll tell me how Phantom Menace was a good movie if I'd read the novelization or some crap. NO.

What's the biggest fix that has gone unaddressed with the game? Nothing less than the END GAME. What is the end game? Well... er... you get bored. Because there is no diplomatic victory, no military victory, no economics, no... well... nothing except control everything everywhere. For some, this may be fine. For me, it means that after a certain "charm" point (where you're still discovering new features in the game) it turns into a slog. Kill. Repeat. Kill. Repeat. Could there please be some other alternative for ending the game? Other than me getting bored?

But in the end, it's the terrible ethics of the developer that have pushed me into outrage. You are asking people to PAY for cosmetic DLC when the core game itself is still woefully lacking. You should be GIVING this art away. It should have been there IN THE FIRST PLACE. Compare this team's work ethic to that of the team behind Cities: Skylines. They continued to add major modifications to their base game even after releasing DLC. Their approach toward their core game was so admirable I bought their DLC simply to support them. Did I need snow or after dark? No. But I appreciate that they added underground lanes to the base game (instead of making it a DLC) so much that I felt obliged to buy their DLC. You should too. Please encourage developers like those behind Cities: Skylines and Thea: The Awakening. And please discourage Paradox from these shennanigans. If you want to play Stellaris, my recommendation is ONLY BUY ON SALE.

If you want a good space 4x game, check out the Master of Orion reboot.

Its okay but it should really be labelled something like early access. I can't give it a recommendation without transparency.

Two words coming to mind are wasted potential. One might thing EA released this, because it's horrendously buggy and unbalanced. As it is right now, it ends up unplayable sooner or later along the game always. Maybe, with some serious patching, it'll become better.

There is hope. Much of the engine is clear and usable, the groundwork is generally well done, you get a cozy environment in your galaxy with a lot to tweak, options to do more or less of that yourself, many ways to go. The UI gives mixed feelings, some things are very clear but others are just catastrophically stupid, causing dozens of extra clicks for simple matters. A number of bugs will cause a lot of game restarts, with blank windows filling the screen or clicks stopping to register every now and then. The balance of resources feels mostly good, and I'm guessing constantly running out of energy is more due to lack of my gameplay skills. It makes sense to have some lack of resources, so you'll actually need to balance it. Strategy games tend to be too easy in this regard, so I consider this a better option.

The AI. That's where it all falls down. Even if you set the AI to passive, what it means is excessively aggressive. If you get a late game event with really bad guys taking over the galaxy, the AI empires just ignore them and try to fight you twice as hard when you're supposed to be saving the galaxy on your own. There's a lot of other illogicals in the AI behaviour, which simply make the gameplay extremely frustrating. And when I say extremely, I mean "this monitor's going out the window" level of frustrating. There's just no balance and no sense. It's hard to make it perfect, I've seen that with way too many thousands of hours in strategy games, but this is not "slightly untweaked", it's a ♥♥♥♥ poor job. Unfortunately.

Give us an easier way to manage all spaceports, give us a more balanced AI and wouldn't be a bad idea to add a beginner friendly difficulty level to get you started at first. The first gameplays ended way too quickly with a massively overwhelming attack by... well, everyone. Make love not war, you know?

To sum it up: close to unplayable now due to bugs, UI frustration and mostly AI problems, but with a LOT of hard work, that might change. I dearly hope that happens. I would like to play this game. Should further patches change it, I will gladly change my opinion.