E: This weekend, Stellaris is 60% off ($16 US), prior DLCs are 50% off (Leviathans $6, Utopia $10, fuck the species packs they don't count or matter). If you're gonna buy at all, now's a good time, next sale will probably Steam Summer.Now that I've gotten into it, I really love the FTL changes. I was already a hyperlane-only player, but I do admit that wormholes are
conceptually an interesting addition. The new implementation looks to be exactly that, they're strategic territory that you want to occupy and defend, and an excellent reason to use the combat-oriented starbase modules.
The game is skewed to spawn empires of opposite/whatever ethnics as you. Don't ask me how badly but it certainly not in your favour.
Eh, I think you might have had bad RNG. I'm playing Fanatic Militarist+Materialist (to RP as one of those space opera hegemonic empires that vacuums up other species) and the single most common I've found is Militarist. Only one pacifist, two spiritualist (to one materialist), and the FE at my borders are Enigmatic Observers.
Well, I asked this a year ago and the answer was negative, so I might as well ask again since it seems that things have changed on this front: to what extent is it possible to play a Metroid "Space Pirate" race? Lots of conquest, genetic modification, slavery of other races, raiding others, etc.
More so than it used to be. It's harder to gobble large chunks of empires but much easier to snap up a few planets, gene modding and slavery were already in a decent state, and we've got the ability to raid planets without capturing them and siphon resources from occupied enemy systems. From the AI side of things there are the asshole space Mongolians who go around shitting in everyone's garden blowing up space stations and bombarding planets for giggles (who are also a decent source of tech upgrades if you can kill one of their fleets).
Apocalypse is definitely on the "only if you're specifically interested in what it advertises" list in regards to Paradox DLC. Utopia is almost essential, but Apocalypse just adds some neat toys for late-game warfare.
In other news, I'm having mixed first impressions with actual conquering of planets.
First is war score Mk.2 war weariness/whatever. In theory it's fine, but it makes doing anything other than "conquer a couple planets" highly unlikely as it's impossible to keep your war score weariness from going up way too fast. By the time you've conquered one planet, you're already at 80%.
Contributing to the problem is the actual conquering of planets. For instance, I just finished waging three different wars to conquer a single planet where the AI thought putting down three strongholds would be a fun idea. Since combat width is a thing and I only had assault armies plus a few gene troopers, I had to wait ages while my indiscriminate-bombarding fleet ever-so-slowly whittled down their forces until they had few enough troops that I could send in my ground forces.
It just feels like a longer, more tedious version of the previous fortification mechanic. You still have to bombard the planet (though it's not a requirement really any more for planets w/o care given to defense, admittedly). Just instead of waiting until you whittled down fortifications, you need to wait until your bombardments kill enough units to make combat viable.
Honestly I kinda like it. It
shouldn't be easy to roll over fortified planets. The two big problems Stellaris had with the strategic layer of war were the ability of fleets to totally bypass defenses and the relative ease with which planets could be taken and retaken.
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Topic: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE (Read 1667929 times)