What happened since Federations? Why are people so unhappy? O_o

[sillyrobot]

I was around back then, and yes, the forums certainly weren't totally happy with the game. Many of the things we complain about now were also issues then. The problem is 2.2 was supposed to address most of these issues. I remember it being sold as AI and performance improvement because it'd be an easier system for the game to handle. The patch however did nothing to address these...only making them considerably worse.

I don't recall balance and micro being as big an issue back then. Micro issue with the tile system was mostly just people upset about having to manually upgrade all their buildings now and then. Which honestly I kind of liked, as it made that tech occuring actually feel like it did something.

Balance discussions were primarily between the various ethics. Hiveminds and ME definitely didn't have the power disparity they have currently.

And Wiz touted it as a relief for micromanagement as well. "Pops to specific Jobs, as that is one of the more micromanage-y aspects of the old tile system that we wanted to get away from. " https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ary-122-planetary-rework-part-2-of-4.1115992/

Trying and failing isn't bad. Trying and ending up with a result that is diametrically opposed to your claims is terrible.
Micromanagement? Went up not down.
Performance? Went down not up.
Ai? Braindead rather than smarter.
The economy easier to explain to newbies? Beaaaahahaha.

 

[LWE]

The economy easier to explain to newbies? Beaaaahahaha.

The economy was clearly meant to be more complex and involved (in fact, the chain-of-production stuff is quite newbie-unfriendly). It achieved its goal only partially. When you play 1.9.1 you miss some things being de-abstracted, like housing or crime, but some of it simply reduces to an optimization puzzle, partially due to need for balance.

Apropos, Wiz has recently retweeted a rant about developers (and consumers, but mostly developers) looking down on QA.

 

[Janx14]

The system definitely sounded nice at the time. More 'realism', more meainginful choices, less busywork. The grid is a very gamey system, and the new one definitely feels a bit less gamey.

I miss the simplicity of the tiles though. I feel like a city planner now and not a ruler.

 

[macd21]

WHAT ISSUES. Name some. Also, "minor issues" versus game-breaking bugs and problems should be an absolute no brainer when it comes to priority.

Some (but nowhere near all) of the complaints as I remembered them:

Warfare: the AI was shite (no change there), but the mix of FTL systems meant that A) there was no real strategy to the game, as it was impossible to create defensive chokepoints B) warfare was extremely frustrating, as you tried to engage (or avoid) an enemy fleet. Warfare came down to either having the biggest doomstack (even moreso than now) unless you used wormhole drives, in which case you might be able to snipe a victory from a more powerful enemy, but frankly trying to pull that off was even more of an exercise in irritating microing of your fleets than usual.

The economy and the tile system was even worse than the one we have now (and no, the AI wasn't able to manage it any better than it does now). The special resource system was also just pointless. The new system was meant to reduce micro, which it obviously failed at, but that was the goal.

Diplomacy was mostly just lacking in options, with it being frustratingly difficult to influence other states. I think the federations patch has improved this a lot, though it's still not where I'd like it to be.

And these were not 'minor issues.' These were core gameplay elements, that needed a serious overhaul. There were just as many complaints as there are now, but more than any of the specific complaints above was that Stellaris was boring. Anyone claiming that fans were happier with Stellaris two years ago is wearing rose-tinted glasses. The game was in trouble, so the devs promised to overhaul the game. They set out a road map, in which they would take each of the major gameply elements and overhauld them. And they have. It's just that the overhaul has created as much (or more) problems as the game already had. IMO, it's a necessary process they need to get through to get the game to where it needs to be. And I think diverting from the roadmap to deal with the new problems would have been a mistake. I'm hoping the overhauls are done, and they've been working on fixing the things people have been complaining about. I just recognise that they couldn't fix the new problems until the old ones were resolved.

 

[Akka le Vil]

Wiz sold us a Utopian future of a tile-less system with meaningful building upgrade decisions.
The minute the patch went live he left the Stellaris team.

I like Wiz but I think Stellaris would have been better served if Wiz had been made to stick around and fix the problems that arose due to the faulty implementations of his vision. I really feel sorry for Grekulf who sort of inherited a mess so bad that even Paradox postponed the relentless march of DLC in an effort to try and spend time fixing the issues.

Stellaris would have been better served if Wiz hadn't touched it at all, rather.
I was skeptical of his inclusion to the team due to how badly he wrecked EU4 by piling up unrelated systems on top of each others without them being part of a whole and made the game a bloated mess.
Guess I was right. I don't really get why so many people praise him, so far what he did was basically destroying two games I liked.

I’m sorry, but no. Two years ago, the game was a mess. The complaints were constant. The devs decided to overhaul and change things in response to those complaints - which has lead to new problems.

I'm also sorry, but also no.
The complaints about pre-2.0 Stellaris were not that the game was a mess, they were that the game was barebone. Save for sectors, on which the team was strangely stubborn, things WORKED. There wasn't a lot to do mid-game but it was "clean". There were definite UI improvement to get (one of my pet peeves : it's hard to play a pre-2.0 game due to not having the post-2.0 UI improvement, especially planets), but there was no "mess".

Stellaris needed some redesign (starport spam, sectors that could be used for automation and grand strategy rather than being a "player tax", war score which was an absolutely terrible system, etc.), but NOT an overhaul breaking the core concepts of the game.

Warfare: the AI was shite (no change there), but the mix of FTL systems meant that A) there was no real strategy to the game, as it was impossible to create defensive chokepoints

Guess I understand why you praise Wiz, you seem to have the same absurdly simplistic vision where "chokepoints = strategy".

 

[Kayden_II]

They set out a road map,

Do you mean the ancient one ?: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/stellaris-dev-diary-50-the-journey-ahead.978042/
Do you mean the latest one ?: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/stellaris-dev-diary-141-exploring-the-future.1155962/ ... https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...v-diary-164-summary-of-the-year-2019.1296343/

They set out a road map, in which they would take each of the major gameply elements ( warfare, economy and diplomacy ) and overhauld them. And they have.

It's just that the overhaul has created as much (or more) problems as the game already had.

You were asked to name more important problems Stellaris has to deal with right NOW and your "answer" is a history-lesson how Paradox had "overhauled" warfare, economy and diplomacy, but "just" in a quite incomplete, buggy, unoptimised and unbalanced manner in the PAST ? ...
Strange way to admit that you agree with your opponents since ( plot-twist ) your opponents had already identified these incomplete, buggy, unoptimised and unbalanced "overhauls" as the causes for the trouble Stellaris has STILL to deal with right NOW.

And I think diverting from the roadmap to deal with the new problems would have been a mistake.

01. The ancient road-map is done, so ( accordingly to what you've stated ) it's time for serious completions, serious fixes, serious optimisations and serious balancing aka serious patches.
02. If I take a look to the latest road-map then you've basically the opinion that Paradox should just continue to do business-as-usual, pile up even more new problems they will surely introduce with even more incomplete, buggy, unoptimised and unbalanced "overhauls" ( like for example the one in regards to "Primitives" ( primitive civs ) ) and ( of course ) accompanied with a zillion more DLCs until it's what, finally time to bother Paradox with serious patches ?

 

[-Marauder-]

Warfare: the AI was shite (no change there), but the mix of FTL systems meant that A) there was no real strategy to the game, as it was impossible to create defensive chokepoints B) warfare was extremely frustrating, as you tried to engage (or avoid) an enemy fleet. Warfare came down to either having the biggest doomstack (even moreso than now) unless you used wormhole drives, in which case you might be able to snipe a victory from a more powerful enemy, but frankly trying to pull that off was even more of an exercise in irritating microing of your fleets than usual.

Let's have a look at this. The AI was bad when the game was initially released, it however was slowly fixed and improved as time went on. By 1.9.3 it was semi-decent. 2.2 did NOTHING to improve the AI and warfare. If anything the AI is more broken now than it has been since the game was released. AE's will do basically nothing, crises will either get stuck or fly back and forth, the regular Empires also become less competent and stop working once FTL Inhibitors enter the game and distances increase.

There still isn't really any strategy to the game. Chokepoints matter for a very, very, very short time in the early game and then fall by the wayside again. War comes down to who has the bigger fleet. Doomstacks matter just as much if not more. Because now it's almost impossible to avoid the confrontation as tactical movement has become extremely rigid and limited.

The only thing I give you is playing whack-a-mole with the last enemy fleet. But then again. As bad as that was. It was "more tactical" and "involved" than the current doomstacks on rails. The fundamental problem is, nothing here really improved with 2.2. In many cases "problems" you proclaim as "bad" such as multiple FTLs had already been tackled way before that.

The economy and the tile system was even worse than the one we have now (and no, the AI wasn't able to manage it any better than it does now). The special resource system was also just pointless. The new system was meant to reduce micro, which it obviously failed at, but that was the goal.

No, no it wasn't. The Tile system still exists just the same, except now it's locked behind an arbitrary planet population. Which means one has to constantly check back and change stuff. It massively increased micro for the player hurt the Ai and made it so that planets need way more babysitting than ever before.

The special resource system in the past might've been pointless, but finding them for permanent bonuses was at least semi-interesting. The difference between having them and not having them as at times noticeable. With the new one, that's absolutely not the case. They're all just refined minerals. You could replace them with a few tweaks of the mineral production and remove them entirely without changing the game in any kind of noticeable way. They're smoke and mirrors, intentional bloat to pretend there's complexity to this system.

It was proclaimed the system was meant to reduce micro. Yet it did not only fail at it, it massively increased micro to an absurd degree. At the end of the day, the outcome is all that really matters. And we can infer from Dev comments on other threads that they see this micro as part of the balancing/problem facing certain ethoses.

Diplomacy was mostly just lacking in options, with it being frustratingly difficult to influence other states. I think the federations patch has improved this a lot, though it's still not where I'd like it to be.

It introduced favours and envoys. That's pretty much it. Not much else changed in terms of diplomacy.

And these were not 'minor issues.' These were core gameplay elements, that needed a serious overhaul. There were just as many complaints as there are now, but more than any of the specific complaints above was that Stellaris was boring. Anyone claiming that fans were happier with Stellaris two years ago is wearing rose-tinted glasses. The game was in trouble, so the devs promised to overhaul the game. They set out a road map, in which they would take each of the major gameply elements and overhauld them. And they have. It's just that the overhaul has created as much (or more) problems as the game already had. IMO, it's a necessary process they need to get through to get the game to where it needs to be. And I think diverting from the roadmap to deal with the new problems would have been a mistake. I'm hoping the overhauls are done, and they've been working on fixing the things people have been complaining about. I just recognise that they couldn't fix the new problems until the old ones were resolved.

Many of these things were minor problems compared to actual game-breaking bugs and issues. Whom they introduced with 2.2. And none of the problems you're talking about have been fixed. They've just been overshadowed by the slew of new and massive problems the late-mid/late game are facing. It's a bit like people not complaining about someone stepping on their foot anymore, because they just got bonked on the head very hard.

 

[SpreadsheetGamer]

Stellaris would have been better served if Wiz hadn't touched it at all, rather.
I was skeptical of his inclusion to the team due to how badly he wrecked EU4 by piling up unrelated systems on top of each others without them being part of a whole and made the game a bloated mess.
Guess I was right. I don't really get why so many people praise him, so far what he did was basically destroying two games I liked.

I can appreciate if you prefer the game mechanics prior to 2.0, but to say that a certain game designer shouldn't have changed it is to presume that some alternative game designer would only have made changes that you like. Better to be critical of the outcomes than the person.

There is a lot of selective nostalgia making people think that Stellaris pre 2.0 was all roses. It absolutely wasn't. Pops still worked the wrong jobs, but you were allowed to manually interfere, only for sector AIs to then re-allocate the pops you just moved. Pops would jump around to different jobs each day. The border system had absurd outcomes and was highly exploitable. FTL options made static defence pointless. The economy was extremely simplistic and totally uninteresting.

 

[macd21]

I can appreciate if you prefer the game mechanics prior to 2.0, but to say that a certain game designer shouldn't have changed it is to presume that some alternative game designer would only have made changes that you like. Better to be critical of the outcomes than the person.

There is a lot of selective nostalgia making people think that Stellaris pre 2.0 was all roses. It absolutely wasn't. Pops still worked the wrong jobs, but you were allowed to manually interfere, only for sector AIs to then re-allocate the pops you just moved. Pops would jump around to different jobs each day. The border system had absurd outcomes and was highly exploitable. FTL options made static defence pointless. The economy was extremely simplistic and totally uninteresting.

This. People were not happy with Stellaris pre-2.0. Personally I find the game a lot more fun now, up until the end-game, than it was then, when I’d usually get bored by the mid-game. I like the warfare system a lot more now, think the economy is much more interesting, and diplomacy is better (but needs more depth). YMMV, but IMO the ‘game-breaking bugs’ are less of an issue than the failings of the core gameplay mechanics of the old game.

 

[Akka le Vil]

There is a lot of selective nostalgia making people think that Stellaris pre 2.0 was all roses.

More reading what is actually written, less strawman ?

 

[Ediros]

There is a lot of selective nostalgia making people think that Stellaris pre 2.0 was all roses. It absolutely wasn't.

By no means was 1.9 perfect, but frankly put, despite being rougher around than the ages, it's still better to me than a disaster of everything that followed. I can actually play till late game.

Tile system needed tweaking, not an overhaul. The defense stations were too weak, but mods fixed it. Rare resources were useful, since you could trade them away and get some money for them. However, you only needed 1 of each to get full benefit, which was a bummer.

FTL was a problem because you had no way to predict, sabotage, lure enemy inside of a fortress system. All of them could be adressed, instead Wiz messed things up and left. Now 2+ years later the game is still broken.

 

[SpreadsheetGamer]

More reading what is actually written, less strawman ?

I shouldn't have said "all roses", that is indeed not what anybody here is suggesting. What I should have said is that there is a risk of romanticising the past due to selective nostalgia.

Personally, I had all but stopped playing Stellaris during 1.x and the only thing that brought me back was the extent of changes in 2.0. So it's really difficult for me to believe someone would prefer to play 1.9x over what we have now. Maybe people who think that just didn't get enough time on 1.x to get sick of the fundamental problems it had.

 

[SpreadsheetGamer]

By no means was 1.9 perfect, but frankly put, despite being rougher around than the ages, it's still better to me than a disaster of everything that followed. I can actually play till late game.

Tile system needed tweaking, not an overhaul. The defense stations were too weak, but mods fixed it. Rare resources were useful, since you could trade them away and get some money for them. However, you only needed 1 of each to get full benefit, which was a bummer.

FTL was a problem because you had no way to predict, sabotage, lure enemy inside of a fortress system. All of them could be adressed, instead Wiz messed things up and left. Now 2+ years later the game is still broken.

For me, 1.9 was just too shallow economically. The one point I will agree with you is that strategic resources were far superior in 1.9x in that they actually were 'strategic resources'. The current system we have with both the market and the ability to manufacture motes, crystals and gas an absolute joke. They are not strategic resources at all.

 

[Ediros]

For me, 1.9 was just too shallow economically. The one point I will agree with you is that strategic resources were far superior in 1.9x in that they actually were 'strategic resources'. The current system we have with both the market and the ability to manufacture motes, crystals and gas an absolute joke. They are not strategic resources at all.

True, economy wise, 1.9 was too shallow. You took over a planet, build all the buildings you needed and put it in the sector. It was too simple for AI to screw up.

However, this allowed the players to focus on the galaxy and politics (barebones as they were) instead of constantly paying attention to the planets as it is currently. Stability, housing, empire sprawl (without buerocrats) all could be used to help mitigate that, without making it needlesly complex.

However, your problem is that you want an economy game from 4x. Instead of turning stellaris into What it is, you could play rollercoaster tycoon, simcity, etc. I didn t buy stellaris to control every single aspect of life for the retarded ai. I bought it because I wanted my empire to go from 0 to defeating all 3 crises at once.

 

[Akka le Vil]

I shouldn't have said "all roses", that is indeed not what anybody here is suggesting. What I should have said is that there is a risk of romanticising the past due to selective nostalgia.

For the record, I despise the "nostalgia" argument. It's so hugely overused and so often completely ignore reality that it's nearly a red flag in any argument.
Facts check :
1) Stellaris was only released four years ago. "nostalgia" is a bit ridiculous to use for such a short time.
2) At the time of the change, there already was a considerable backlash. It's not like people only now start to think it was a bad idea with memory clouded by the past.
3) A number of people still play 1.9, so obviously there is no nostalgia going, because they ARE playing this version RIGHT NOW.

It reminds me the famous "you think you do, but you don't" in World of Warcraft, which spectularly exploded in the face of the guy who said it. And at least WoW had the excuse of being over 12 years old at the time, not less than a third of that.

Personally, I had all but stopped playing Stellaris during 1.x and the only thing that brought me back was the extent of changes in 2.0. So it's really difficult for me to believe someone would prefer to play 1.9x over what we have now. Maybe people who think that just didn't get enough time on 1.x to get sick of the fundamental problems it had.

Seems to me that the problem is not "others are nostalgic", but rather that you are simply unable to conceive that others could have points of view that differ from yours, and as such you need to dismiss their opinion by claiming it's just due to "nostalgia".

Realize that your opinion is just as incomprehensible to me ("I prefer a simplistic design which loses variety and asymmetric warfare in order to add absolutely nothing to the game and increases the doomstack problem" doesn't make any sense for me) than mine might be to you.

For me, 1.9 was just too shallow economically. The one point I will agree with you is that strategic resources were far superior in 1.9x in that they actually were 'strategic resources'. The current system we have with both the market and the ability to manufacture motes, crystals and gas an absolute joke. They are not strategic resources at all.

That's precisely what I said here :

I'm also sorry, but also no.
The complaints about pre-2.0 Stellaris were not that the game was a mess, they were that the game was barebone. Save for sectors, on which the team was strangely stubborn, things WORKED. There wasn't a lot to do mid-game but it was "clean". There were definite UI improvement to get (one of my pet peeves : it's hard to play a pre-2.0 game due to not having the post-2.0 UI improvement, especially planets), but there was no "mess".

Stellaris needed to get more meat, but it didn't need to be gutted and (badly) remade.

 

[Cat_Fuzz]

Yeah, i have same question. AFAIK old treads are no longer available, but i'd like to read old complains. As someone who was around since first DD, i recall the complains being basically the same. Sure, people complained about old FTL, and tiles systems, but those weren't fixed. One types of issues just got switched to another. I also recall constant discussion about government types, special buildings, ethos, Empire and POPs, space combat, Sectors, and other. And non of it is really fixed or even balanced.

From memory, problems that existed in 1.9 where:

• Sectors - the automation and AI of sectors was largely seen to be lacklustre. It didn't upgrade things, most of it didn't work very well, and there were numerous threads asking the devs to look at improving the sector AI (I'm certain that sectors were the first quarantine thread). Now planetary automation does upgrade and build things, but it's incredibly capricious in its decisions on what to build, and there doesn't seem to be any logic to some decisions, such as building housing buildings on planets with no jobs, or vice versa.

• Doomstacks - £Fleet combat and warfare in general before the overhaul was basically 'who has the biggest fleet and who won the first engagement'. If you won the first engagement (usually by having the bigger fleet), you won entirely. The opposing empire would not be able to recover from the defeat and you would have impunity to take their territory as you saw fit. While doomstacks are not 'fixed' in subsequent patches since 2.0, the change in the warscore system does give losing sides opportunity to ally itself with others for protection. The AI however is still in a bad place and needs refining to get it working well.

• Mineral Monopoly and economic snowballing - Minerals basically were the economy; if you had a strong supply of minerals you basically won the game. However given that the other resources were food and energy, it was much much easier to acquire minerals, further adding to the 'boring' state of gameplay. The newer system in theory promised to make the economy more complex and provide some decision making on what to focus your economy on. In practice it mostly changed the meta from minerals to alloys and added some more steps to get to the same point (with the addition of creating death spirals for some AI unable to acquire as much territory)

• General lack of things to do - Taking the above into consideration, there really wasn't a great deal to the game in 1.9 other than 'get as many minerals as you can, build the biggest fleet and win'. Arguably this is still true of now, albeit with an economic system to tweak and now the Galactic Community to try and influence others and while some may say these have not been implemented well, they at least exist, where before there was literally one thing to do (ie swing the biggest space member in the galaxy).

There were other things as well but these largely got scaled back or are still bugged out now

 

[FlyingPhoenix]

The new system isn't any better than the old, it's just more convoluted. Its still an economy where only one resource matters.

 

[macd21]

True, economy wise, 1.9 was too shallow. You took over a planet, build all the buildings you needed and put it in the sector. It was too simple for AI to screw up.

However, this allowed the players to focus on the galaxy and politics (barebones as they were) instead of constantly paying attention to the planets as it is currently. Stability, housing, empire sprawl (without buerocrats) all could be used to help mitigate that, without making it needlesly complex.

However, your problem is that you want an economy game from 4x. Instead of turning stellaris into What it is, you could play rollercoaster tycoon, simcity, etc. I didn t buy stellaris to control every single aspect of life for the retarded ai. I bought it because I wanted my empire to go from 0 to defeating all 3 crises at once.

This may be a matter of conflicting preferences. Plenty of people were asking for a more complex economy system. People asked for management of all of their worlds to be left with them, because they hated losing control (there’d be less call for that if the sector AI wasn’t so terrible, but some fans really hate not having direct control over every world). Some people really want that level of granularity. Personally, I’d prefer to turn over control of most of my worlds to a reliable sector AI after a while. But when you get down to it, I find the new economy system much better than the old one.

 

[macd21]

You were asked to name more important problems Stellaris has to deal with right NOW and your "answer" is a history-lesson how Paradox had "overhauled" warfare, economy and diplomacy, but "just" in a quite incomplete, buggy, unoptimised and unbalanced manner in the PAST ? ...

I don't think there are more important problems with the game now. My answer was referriung to why those problems haven't been fixed yet: because they've been overhauling the problems with the game's core warfare, economy and diplomacy systems, which took priority over the bugs that emerged in the meantime. The warfare and eocnomy overhauls created new issues, but they couldn't divert the resources necessary to deal with them until the core gameplay problems had been dealt with.

Stellaris now is massively different from Stellaris on released. And that's because the devs realised there were fundemental issues with the core systems, not mere bugs. No amount of tweaking AI was going to fix the warfare system, or make the economy interesting. They had to basically be rebuilt from the ground up. That takes time and manpower.

Like I said before, I'm hoping that now the overhauling is complete, we'll see more attention to the problems. I just recognise that the devs couldn't both overhaul the game and deal with the bugs at the same time.

 

[Pancakelord]

From memory, problems that existed in 1.9 where:

• Sectors - the automation and AI of sectors was largely seen to be lacklustre. It didn't upgrade things, most of it didn't work very well, and there were numerous threads asking the devs to look at improving the sector AI (I'm certain that sectors were the first quarantine thread). Now planetary automation does upgrade and build things, but it's incredibly capricious in its decisions on what to build, and there doesn't seem to be any logic to some decisions, such as building housing buildings on planets with no jobs, or vice versa.

• Doomstacks - £Fleet combat and warfare in general before the overhaul was basically 'who has the biggest fleet and who won the first engagement'. If you won the first engagement (usually by having the bigger fleet), you won entirely. The opposing empire would not be able to recover from the defeat and you would have impunity to take their territory as you saw fit. While doomstacks are not 'fixed' in subsequent patches since 2.0, the change in the warscore system does give losing sides opportunity to ally itself with others for protection. The AI however is still in a bad place and needs refining to get it working well.

• Mineral Monopoly and economic snowballing - Minerals basically were the economy; if you had a strong supply of minerals you basically won the game. However given that the other resources were food and energy, it was much much easier to acquire minerals, further adding to the 'boring' state of gameplay. The newer system in theory promised to make the economy more complex and provide some decision making on what to focus your economy on. In practice it mostly changed the meta from minerals to alloys and added some more steps to get to the same point (with the addition of creating death spirals for some AI unable to acquire as much territory)

• General lack of things to do - Taking the above into consideration, there really wasn't a great deal to the game in 1.9 other than 'get as many minerals as you can, build the biggest fleet and win'. Arguably this is still true of now, albeit with an economic system to tweak and now the Galactic Community to try and influence others and while some may say these have not been implemented well, they at least exist, where before there was literally one thing to do (ie swing the biggest space member in the galaxy).

There were other things as well but these largely got scaled back or are still bugged out now

Yep.

They fixed sectors by removing any point in using them or any flavour from having them lol.

no space-autobuild​

pre-utopia, factions were tied to sectors and pushed for autonomy/independence etc.​

Moreso if you had pissed off alien pops (they'd want to reform their old empire), slaves might try and make their own liberated nation from a sector etc.​

Doomstacks are still alive and kicking.

A lack of hard-counters (e.g. AOE weapons melting multiple ships clumped up) and an AI that never specialises its fleets &​

A warscore system that generally prioritises ... basically "K/D ratios" over actually capturing and holding various bits of alien infrastructure or systems​

will always mean large blobs of "generic"-build ships swarming the enemy are the best strategy.​

Mineral economy was replaced with alloy economy.

Until they add legit non-mil ways to play like culture/religious warfare a la civ etc, this will always be the case.​

General lack of things to do in midgame still.

Pop micro doesn't count,​

Archaeology, which should be dig-sites popping up in your empire in the mid-game, appears in the earlygame for some reason unknown to me.​

Inter-empire diplomacy remains too shallow to meaningfully add to gameplay ("Set envoys and forget", "set GC votes and forget")​

and fails to offer a "non-war" way to play.​

People keep asking for "unifying federations" we... actually had that. Sort of. And we could have had it again via federations. PDX missed a huge opportunity.​

Pre 2.0 sectors could be made largely autonomous, doing their own stuff without player input.​

A federation could have a "final form" whereby it becomes 1 nation with each old nation being a sector under a new flag (the player always becomes leader in SP, could have co-running in MP, or just disable it in MP if thats impossible, but i think the clausewitz engine supports 2+ players on 1 empire as its doable in HOI4)​