I'm a very casual player. I typically play on the standard difficulty setting with large universes, using Ironman about half the time. I tend to focus on diplomacy and tech; I played a few variations on devouring swarms, but didn't enjoy that form of play (create fleet -> conquer planet -> repeat didn't do it for me).
I
despise this new update. I've played three games so far, always focusing on tech and avoiding combat. Each time, the result was the same: I excelled at my path and overshadowed my neighbors, but when a massive foe appeared (once a kahn, once an endgame crisis and once a fanatical purifier), they proceeded to wipe me off the map.
- There's a lot of promise in the new economic system, but it's out-of-step with the rest of the game. It heavily favors deep specialization, but the game's war systems deeply punish specialization — in all three of my playthroughs, once I lost a planet, my economy went into an irrecoverable tailspin. Every planet became a single point of failure.
- War seems to be the only meaningful interaction in this update. I used to be able to minimize hostile interaction and rely on high tech to see me through; that just doesn't feel possible now, as any choice that doesn't maximize alloy and fleet production feels wrong.
- There's a lot of road-bump mechanics. What's the purpose of consumer goods? Rare resources? Housing? You can't leverage these things to win the game or accomplish goals; they're just checkboxes to tick off while you maximize alloys and fleet size. This update absolutely ballooned the number of these mechanics.
- Every legacy feature has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into this update. Piracy was always silly, but it at least had counterplay with costs and benefits; now it just feels like a flat tax on empire size. The multiple tiers of technology feel like they're crowding each other out.
Again, this is from a completely casual point of view, but I used to be able to experiment, expand as I saw fit, and explore on my own timetable. Now I feel like there's a single path to
playability — aggressively expand, ignore admin penalties, maximize alloy production, and dominate neighbors thoroughly. Anything that doesn't serve these goals is pointless. In short, this game feels like it went from a sim to an exercise in clicking the right buttons in the right order — a huge step backward, in my opinion.
I don't think the combat-focus is new. Stellaris has always been a wargame that pretends to be something else. Maybe not intentionally, but there has
never been more to do than war. If you're not fighting someone you're either preparing to do so or watching Netflix while the game runs in a separate window. It's been that way since 1.0.
And I've got no problem with specialization. It's the kind of zero-sum tradeoff Stellaris needs more of. Your economy does better if you specialize, but you are militarily more vulnerable. I think that's great.
The rest... I kind of agree with you. I see where they're going with a lot of these ideas, and I actually like them quite a bit more than you. I think the idea behind most of the new resources like consumer goods, housing, etc. is to create a balancing act in your economy, so that you have to keep an eye on everything at once. But you are right, in practice it's all just a tax. You maintain the minimum then put everything else into alloys.
I think the first two things I'd change are:
- Rebalance rare resources. Synthetic factories produce
way too many, and they should be necessary for more components and technologies.
Strategic resources should drive conflict and define how your empire develops. A system with motes or crystals should be worth fighting over. If you have supplies of gas in your empire, that should push you to an energy-focused strategy. Right now, though, you can synthesize them too easily and they're not relevant until way too late. Making strategic resources more scarce and more necessary would help both sides of their purpose.
- Ongoing uses for other resources.
The problem is that alloys are the only resource you need more than zero of. Food, energy, housing and consumer goods all feel like nothing more than taxes because that's what they are. You have a number you have to hit (monthly consumption). Then you add +5 for colony ships. There's no good reason to build anything past that so there's no choice to make. You optimize then move on.
Minerals are more interesting because you need to split them between dedicated military use (alloys) and your civilian stockpile. I like how that works.
The other resources need similar ongoing uses. There should always be something you can spend food, energy and consumer goods on that will build your empire. It should be viable and competitive and should not cap out, so that at any time I could
either spend 200 alloys on a corvette, 200 consumer goods on an X or 200 energy on Y.
This is already tl;dr, so I won't speculate too far. But my basic sketch would be be: Consumer goods, economic development and civilian ships. Food, pop growth. Energy, research and much more significant edicts.
And I'd either get rid of piracy or overhaul it completely. I'm not sure why anyone thought that it's a fun mechanic as-is, but it's not. You just build a few corvettes and click "patrol."
