I agree. It is like cheating, but you are only cheating yourself so it is a misdemeanour and not a crime.
Well I guess if you consider it cheating that's what you consider it.
My view on it is this: It takes my friend and I, since we mostly play on speed 1-2, something like 50-60 hours to play Stellaris, mostly in 2-3 hour chunks a couple times a week. That means we're going to be living with this game and taking time out of our schedules to play it for like 2-3 months. The last game we started something like the week after Thanksgiving and finished it a week or so ago, including me playing a number of times over Christmas holiday at my mother's. Now, if we are going to make that kind of time investment, we want to be playing on a map we think we will find enjoyable. Now, by this I don't mean easy... but there are maps that are easy, maps that are challenging, and then there are maps that are serious PITAs. If it's a PITA map and we can tell it in an hour, we re-roll because... why torture ourselves for the next 10 weeks? We do this to have fun, not to be tortured.
And no, fun doesn't mean easy -- we like a challenge. But the time we rolled on a hyperspace only map where we were placed in such a way that I was blocking his entire path into the rest of the galaxy so he couldn't make a continuous empire without attacking me (obviously not what we want for *co-op* play), yeah, we re-rolled that. Because sure, it's possible to play that way but again, why make ourselves miserable? A re-roll costs us an hour or so... which is like 2% of the total play time.
Again if you want to call that 'cheating' and refuse to do it, go ahead. But to me, there is a line between challenging fun and PITA, and I draw the line at PITA and stop playing.
But that's just me.. cause I don't consider PITAs to be fun.
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