Late Game Frustration

[DivinoZara]

This is my current situation:
1) I am the first power of the galaxy: every other empire is marked as pathetic and fallen empires as inferior, there is an awakened empire that is very strong but they are benevolent interventionists so they will not bother me at all (I am an evangelizing zealot and I never warmongered).
2) I have colonized 100% of the planets in my territories (137 out of 179 planets for dominartion victory) and I have 3 vassals with about 20 planets each, so in order to win the game I just need to wait until all of them will be integrated.
3) I finished all the leviathan quests and all the most interesting events in the game.

Here comes the problem: the game is boring as hell. No one is causing me problems, I have nothing to do except waiting for the vassals to be integrated. So what I'm doing actually is watching the screen as the time goes by. Sure, I could start a new war against someone in the meanwhile, but I think it's pointless... it would be boring too since no one can really challenge my fleet.

I think that the biggest flaw of this game is the lack of events in the middle / late game, when exploration anomalies become a marginal part of the gameplay (or you just have a sounds knowledge of them all). This is not a suggestions thread... I'm just trying to say that after 4 patches (5, soon) middle / late game still needs a boost, and a huge one.

The current events / anomalies template needs to be greatly expanded, and everything should be made much more complex to provide challenging situations; to provide an example, there should be hundreds of events like the Baldarak one, with a complex story and a lot of small tasks to accomplish during a vaste period of time. There should also be a category of randomly generated anomalies and events being built over a pool of random rewards (some very common and some very very rare), random text templates and random tasks (mini games maybe?) to do to reduce the predictability.
I know that everyone could script new events and release 'em on Steam Workshop... but, currently, community contributions are not enough to fix this problem and Paradox should not delegate to players the creation of a more interesting gameplay. I doubt that Banks will focus on this problem, but I hope the next patch will... because even if Banks is gonna improve the game with a lot of exciting features, it is not adressing the main problems of this game.

 

[Alblaka]

(I am an evangelizing zealot and I never warmongered)

This part is just so hilariously wrong on many levels :3

Here comes the problem: the game is boring as hell. No one is causing me problems, I have nothing to do except waiting for the vassals to be integrated. So what I'm doing actually is watching the screen as the time goes by. Sure, I could start a new war against someone in the meanwhile, but I think it's pointless... it would be boring too since no one can really challenge my fleet.

I think that the biggest flaw of this game is the lack of events in the middle / late game, when exploration anomalies become a marginal part of the gameplay (or you just have a sounds knowledge of them all). This is not a suggestions thread... I'm just trying to say that after 4 patches (5, soon) middle / late game still needs a boost, and a huge one.

I think the issue is, you are overrating the Victory Conditions. They are a VERY Slapped on feature which is not actually the focus of the design. People were like 'Hey, if this is a 4X, I want a win condition or I will get a refund', so the devs responded by coming up with the most simplistic victory condition they could quickly come up with. Wiz himself said that he is not satisfied with that and will give it a proer work-over, when he finds time to do so in the scope of an update in the future.
Until then, don't expect the game to actually match up to the Victory Conditions.
As you described it, you 'won' that game QUITE some years ago. Just that the Victory Conditions aren't good enough to actually recognize it.

And of course, playing a game that you won and have finished isn't going to be much fun, it was never designed for that.
Noone who plays Stellaris regularily plays games 'to the Victory Condition'. Except once, to get the achievement, or as a 'marathon challenge'. Usually you play until it's clear that there is no way for anything to stop your victory.

(That said, you could argue that this 'technical win' point in the game comes 'too soon', but that's a subjective discussion for another day.)

 

[DivinoZara]

Well, for that concerns the first point, I just declared 4 wars in total during my gameplay, and mainly for the purpose of including small hostile empires that I already surrounded by my territories but weren't accepting my damn supremacy. Little hostile enclaves, basically that were annoying me.
Two big empires asked to become my vassals after losing very big wars against other empires, so all I did was to accept their request and include them into my empire. I'm not constantly warmongering people... sometimes I just wait for things to happen instead of making them happen. If I can get the same outcome without spending resources, it's strategy gold... even in a game where strategy is quite poor (I declare war on X or on Y? I wait or I do that task now? I accept the invitation or not?). You cannot spy empires or create diplomacy issues to create a war between two empires... so you wait and see if this can happen autonomously. Sometimes, with a little bit of luck, it does.

The game is over, yes. I won it. But it kinda bothers me to quit it and start a new one without receiving a message telling me "ok dude, you won... go for a new game". A little bit of entertainment in the meanwhile would be just great. But your points are just trying to move the focus away from the real problem. After a while the game is all about diplomacy and wars... and it's fine. But what I'm asking for is a little more entertainment between wars and diplomatic events. That's all.

 

[Xoatl]

I agree there needs to be more late game events as well as crises. Last few games I've went nearly 150 years and no Unbidden, or Prethoryns, a FE awakened a few times but that's about it.

 

[Emraldis]

But it kinda bothers me to quit it and start a new one without receiving a message telling me "ok dude, you won... go for a new game".

Spoiler: Message

Ok dude, you won... Go for a new game.

 

[henzington]

End game is always an issue in strategy games. The changes to war score should help along with the accession perks.

 

[coyote720]

My friend and I used to play Endless Space co-op against the AI. We played over 100 games. Out of those 100+ games, I think I got a scientific victory once. All the others we simply quit playing when it was obvious we won and there was no more challenge.

 

[alteration]

They should add a super-crysis in late-late-late game, like something that comes out from the galaxy core

 

[nyah]

I think the issue is, you are overrating the Victory Conditions )

The problem is that there is nothing to do except to paint the map, and once you've done that to any extent it becomes dull especially if no AI empire has kept up. The game would be much better if it was more difficult to expand but there was much more to do if you stay small(ish). You could play a game of EUIV or CK2 as a small power, never expand your territory, and still enjoy it - not so with Stellaris.