Introduction
Hi.
I'd like to preface this post by saying that this is an opinion piece by me, a veteran of the game who started playing since just before Synthetic Dawn came out. That may not be veteranly enough for some of you, but I think I can speak to the state of the game as I've been there for every major update.
After browsing the forums for a bit, I noticed people getting upset with the way Paradox has been treating Stellaris lately, but a lot of the complaints miss what I think are the real problems with the game, which is where this post comes in. I will break down the issues the game has in its current state, and while I may not be able to provide adequate solutions, hopefully this post will allow people to brainstorm their own.
This will get very rant-y.
Pre-2.0
I started playing the game just before Synthetic Dawn and instantly fell in love. The game was incredibly complex and reminded me a lot of Civilization V, which is a game I love to death. The ability to create your own empires was amazing, since most strategy games have a set of pre-made empires and only sometimes a half-hearted attempt at customization, whereas in Stellaris the customization is the point of the game - the pre-made empires are just there to give you an idea of what kind of empire you can design yourself.
However, the game was lacking in the strategic sense of things. Wars came down to one major battle between two opposing deathstacked fleets, where the winner of the battle would then proceed to win the war. There was basically no way to defend your territory because of how underdeveloped the concept of military stations was, and the multiple FTL types meant there was no galactic "terrain" - no naturally defensible areas one could "dig into". Then, 2.0.
Apocalypse and patch 2.0
A common opinion in the community seems to be that the FTL rework 2.0 brought in was a terrible idea and took away from the game. I struggle to contain the frustration I have with these people, as they could not be any more incorrect.
The FTL rework was not just good, it was great. Moreover, it was necessary.
Before 2.0, I would always play the game with every empire forced to use the hyperlane FTL type, and it made the game a little more strategic as maneuvering your fleets around enemy territory became an actual part of invasion strategy. However, with 2.0, Paradox took it to a whole new level. Taking out the penalty for traversing hyperlanes far from home made movement much more strategic since fleet speed became an actual factor, and the removal of the god-awful Frontier Outposts was a great idea (see Civilization IV's culture-based city borders vs Civilization V's static hex claiming). The galaxy finally had terrain one could move about and dig into with the new amazing starbases, which were balanced very well to allow a defensive playstyle.
There are two common complaints about this system which I will now proceed to get very frustrated with.
The more common of the two complaints is that by removing the other FTL types, Paradox took out customization options and content which users paid for. The response to this is twofold - firstly, the FTL types were essentially identical. The wormhole and the old "jump" FTL were just a cosmetic change. The problem was very clear - they allowed you to bypass all enemy defenses and jump straight to your destination instead of having to navigate through enemy defenses. It was a bad system, and it had to go.
The other comment is that the new hyperlane "borders" make for the same kind of warfare as before - you defeat an enemy in one giant battle (except this time it's at a chokepoint between your empires) and then proceed to win the war. This line of thinking is also incorrect, for multiple reasons. With the new disengaging from combat feature an empire could very quickly come back from losing a large battle since most of its ships could simply be repaired, and if you end up winning a war after one decisive battle, you were probably fighting an opponent who is incredibly weak and you would wipe the floor with regardless. In addition, there is never just one chokepoint, your empire does not consist of just one star system, so even if one particular enemy might only have one chokepoint connecting your empire with theirs, you could always be invaded on another front on another side of your empire - the galactic terrain doing its job.
The FTL rework was objectively good, and it's a real shame that so many people in the community protesting Paradox's handling of Stellaris don't seem to realize this.
MegaCorp and 2.2
This is where things get sour.
With the amazing patches that were 2.0 and 2.1, I was excited for MegaCorp. There were some red flags, like the fact that the new jobs system was managed by an AI, since Paradox has an excellent track record of having terrible AI in nearly all of its games (Stellaris most definitely included), but with how well Paradox reworked FTL, I was ready to be proven wrong.
I wasn't.
Ignoring the usual initial hiccups where Paradox always releases its DLCs and major patches in unfinished, barely playtested form (something that's par for the course if you're a Paradox veteran), the new system was a disaster. Paradox set out several goals for the new jobs system:
1. Reducing micromanagement so that players can focus on the macro level of strategy
2. Encouraging players to play more tall builds instead of wide
3. Encouraging players to play more multi-ethnic empires, like xenophiles
All of these goals were failed spectacularly, and I will now break down how and why.
Goal the first: Paradox wanted to reduce the level of micro necessary to keep an empire running efficiently. What ended up being accomplished was the opposite; before 2.2, planets needed to be micromanaged to get more efficient. You had to place the correct pops on the correct tiles with the correct buildings on them in the correct order to squeeze out the maximum possible efficiency out of them. You micromanaged to get the best possible results. Now, you micromanage as damage control against the awful job AI which fails to put any of the pops in the right jobs. There are so many problems with this system with so many specific examples I could give that I would completely stray from the main point of this post if I were to list them all, but I'll give one example: pops don't always promote to the higher level of stratum, even if there are slots open, when you prioritize low-strata jobs.
Goal the second: they wanted to encourage players to play more tall builds. This was accomplished at the cost of wide empires being nerfed into the ground, as to stay under your administrative capacity you have to build tons of buildings which increase the cap, buildings you don't have space for because building slots are now extremely valuable, meaning you have to either take massive sprawl penalties or forsake your economy in order to keep up with the new system.
And finally, goal the third: Paradox wanted people to play more multi-ethnic empires. The new jobs system had the opposite effect, as the jobs AI fails to put the best pops with the best traits on the correct tiles, and because only one pop can grow at a time, you will never hit the right balance of pops for each species to be able to cover every job every specific species is good at. You could do population controls, but then you take a flat penalty to growth for wanting a more efficient planet, and you also get no notification for when a new pop is born, so if you forget about a planet for a few years, you'll come back to a world full of a species that is now working jobs it's less efficient at than another species.
The jobs system is terrible. I played several games with the most up-to-date version, and ran into massive problems every time. My favorite empire type, a syncretic evolution slave empire, was nerfed into the ground not by balance changes, but mechanically. It's not longer possible to play efficiently unless your empire is homogenous.
In addition, the new market system meant resources are now worthless, since whenever you run low on any resource all you have to do is dump your stockpile of whatever you have too much of and buy whatever you're missing, completely destroying trade with other empires, since it was now obsolete.
Stellaris: Federations, or why democracy doesn't work
The bad continued.
With none of the issues from 2.2 solved, Paradox released Federations, which was surprisingly well-received despite not adding anything to the game other than more problems you could only do damage control against.
The Galactic Community is implemented incredibly poorly. The fact that the proposals to be put to the senate floor have to have the most support from the galaxy means any proposal that does make it to the senate floor will inevitably pass with near perfect support. In addition, the random nature of the game means if you are an authoritarian empire that happened to spawn into a galaxy of egalitarians, you will lose on every single issue in the galactic community and end up taking massive penalties for it.
The new diplomacy system is also laughably bad, as it accomplishes literally nothing: to propose friendly actions you have to either be in good relations with an empire OR have an envoy sent to improve relations, meaning there is literally no requirement for any diplomatic actions since all you have to do is send an envoy to make deals with other empires. Sure, they might not accept any if your opinion with them is too low, but that also doesn't matter as harming relations is incredibly easy. In addition, you can tell that Paradox didn't even bother integrating this new system into how things used to work as all opinion modifiers from back in the day stayed the exact same despite the fact that opinions now range from -3000 to 3000 compared to the typical opinion ranges of -200 to 200 of the old system (yes, I know they could get higher or lower than that, but opinions under -200 under the old system basically meant you were never going to make friends with that empire anyway and opinions over 200 are just redundant).
Instead of reworking international diplomacy, Federations should have reworked internal politics, making factions more in-depth and ethics a more fluid system to drift between.
The Conclusion
Stellaris 2.1.3 was for me personally the last fun version of the game. While the new updates did add some nice features, like the way origins are split from civics, and new content that doesn't affect game balance too much, like events, it's not worth playing any later version because the game is wildly unbalanced and full of design oversights.
If you have any questions or disagreements, feel free to comment or PM me, I'd be happy to have a conversation about any of these points or anything else the community might think I missed or was wrong about.
P.S. The archaeology DLC was really stupid. It's literally just anomalies that take multiple attempts to research. Fight me.
Edit the First:
Stellaris had plenty of problems back in 2.1.3, but they were problems that could only be felt by an experienced player with hundreds of hours in the game. For example, in the mid-game of Stellaris there is nothing that drives you to invade other empires. In Civilization V, for example, there is always a reason to invade one of your neighbors: one of them might have a strategic resource that you don't have, or is getting close to a particular victory condition, or they might snowball out of control if you don't stop them now. In Stellaris, I often find myself thinking "I should probably invade one of my neighbors because that is what you do in this game that I am playing", instead of being organically driven to do this due to well-implemented game mechanics.
With versions 2.2 onwards, the problems in Stellaris became very low-level. The constant damage control against the jobs system, the lack of selective purging (which was taken out in 2.2 and never properly re-implemented all the way up to 2.7 despite the patch notes never saying it was removed), the new resources which now cause you to sit on a giant stockpile of everything because you can't spend any due to lack of building slots... These problems didn't exist before 2.2 because the game was actually pretty well-balanced.
Edit the Second:
You might have noticed that I didn't mention performance issues anywhere in this thread and that is because I have a computer that can run Stellaris pretty well even hundreds of years into the game. While I realize that performance issues are a problem for many others, my concerns are primarily centered around game balance and design.
Edit the Third:
Unless you have some kind of genius revelation that nobody else has had in the last two years, I won't be engaging with anyone who tries to defend the old FTL system pre-2.0. It has already been talked to death, and also you're wrong.
4th Edit:
Changed the phrasing a little bit to be less hostile. I was being unnecessarily rude in some places.
Edit #5:
I also feel the need to mention that selective purging has been broken since 2.2 came out. It's now called "forced decline", and it doesn't work; Gestalt Consciousness empires may not force decline on their own population (for no reason), and while non-GC empire may force decline on enslaved species, the decline speed is set to the base of 5/month (so the extermination speed boost doesn't apply), and forced decline stops automatically after one pop is purged. This means you have to go back and restart the decline again if you want to exterminate just one planet and not an entire species.
As a little cherry on top, pre-sapients may not be forced to decline with the "tolerated" policy, and the extermination policy literally does nothing.
This means pre-sapient pops are permanent unless you choose to uplift them. Also, pre-sapient and certain primitive jobs have a limit of -1, and pre-sapient "jobs" count towards the job limit, meaning your unemployment calculations will always be off by the number of pre-sapients on the planet.
It's hard to believe that Paradox cares.
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