I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way about this game, but it really suffers from a lack of narrative beyond expansion into the galaxy. This is completely understandable compared to the rest of the Paradox library but I still think the game suffers for it.
In EU4 for example every nation comes with its own narrative, it has its place in the world, and more importantly the world itself has personality. A lot of this comes from the historical setting, France is the big bully in Europe, Austria is struggling to control the HRE, Portugal is ignoring Europe and colonising. The asymmetrical start, combined with the historical setting, means you have a natural progression of enemies and emotional investment in what's going on built in. If I'm Brandenburg I know that Poland will be an ally but long term will be a major foe and I will need alliances to overcome them for example.
Now we come to Stellaris, the random starts are a great idea in my opinion, but combined with the random empires and so on you don't have any sense of who is who, nor any emotional investment in the galaxy or its politics. As such all of this must come after you click start game, and I think this is key, as it stands we are getting mechanics that should massively increase the investment in your own empire but nothing on the galactic diplomacy scale. In my opinion we need to have a connection to, and understanding of, not just our empire but all the other major ones, this is what EU4 has that Stellaris doesn't.
I have some thoughts on how to help improve this aspect of the game, and my major idea is events. Events obviously are a major part of these games and I think they can be used here, empires in this game actually do have a good amount of personality, but your exposure to it is limited to you checking ethics manually and remembering everyone, or simply seeing who declares war. As such I think events that expose you to the ethics of nearby empires and more distant major empires to effectively force you to learn the personalities of each.
Events could be something like if a xenophobe empire invades someone all nearby empires (importantly the player) get events about refugees which they accept or refuse based on ethics and personality. This would of course draw the players attention to the xenophobe empire and help build the galactic narrative, in a sense making them a villain, potentially long before you would pay attention to them currently. Tension building and narrative building events such as this would help give each game and galaxy much more personality.
My other idea is a great powers system such as what we see in V2 and EU4, any empire sufficiently powerful would be a great power and get some extra diplomatic features, perhaps a tributary mechanic (dependant on ethics of course). More importantly they could have more events and events that you would get from further away. I like this as obviously you wouldn't want events from a tiny 2 system empire on the other side of the galaxy, but civil war in the a huge power should give events to everyone (maybe people could pick a side). Basically the game should give benefits to being a great power but also make you everybody's business. The benefit here being that the big players on the galactic stage would get more player exposure as I don't think you could realistically be expected to learn about every empire every game.
I think it's important that any events under this system have gameplay impact rather than being fluff pieces as people skip fluff (so refugees give you alien pops if you accept them for example).
In EU4 for example every nation comes with its own narrative, it has its place in the world, and more importantly the world itself has personality. A lot of this comes from the historical setting, France is the big bully in Europe, Austria is struggling to control the HRE, Portugal is ignoring Europe and colonising. The asymmetrical start, combined with the historical setting, means you have a natural progression of enemies and emotional investment in what's going on built in. If I'm Brandenburg I know that Poland will be an ally but long term will be a major foe and I will need alliances to overcome them for example.
Now we come to Stellaris, the random starts are a great idea in my opinion, but combined with the random empires and so on you don't have any sense of who is who, nor any emotional investment in the galaxy or its politics. As such all of this must come after you click start game, and I think this is key, as it stands we are getting mechanics that should massively increase the investment in your own empire but nothing on the galactic diplomacy scale. In my opinion we need to have a connection to, and understanding of, not just our empire but all the other major ones, this is what EU4 has that Stellaris doesn't.
I have some thoughts on how to help improve this aspect of the game, and my major idea is events. Events obviously are a major part of these games and I think they can be used here, empires in this game actually do have a good amount of personality, but your exposure to it is limited to you checking ethics manually and remembering everyone, or simply seeing who declares war. As such I think events that expose you to the ethics of nearby empires and more distant major empires to effectively force you to learn the personalities of each.
Events could be something like if a xenophobe empire invades someone all nearby empires (importantly the player) get events about refugees which they accept or refuse based on ethics and personality. This would of course draw the players attention to the xenophobe empire and help build the galactic narrative, in a sense making them a villain, potentially long before you would pay attention to them currently. Tension building and narrative building events such as this would help give each game and galaxy much more personality.
My other idea is a great powers system such as what we see in V2 and EU4, any empire sufficiently powerful would be a great power and get some extra diplomatic features, perhaps a tributary mechanic (dependant on ethics of course). More importantly they could have more events and events that you would get from further away. I like this as obviously you wouldn't want events from a tiny 2 system empire on the other side of the galaxy, but civil war in the a huge power should give events to everyone (maybe people could pick a side). Basically the game should give benefits to being a great power but also make you everybody's business. The benefit here being that the big players on the galactic stage would get more player exposure as I don't think you could realistically be expected to learn about every empire every game.
I think it's important that any events under this system have gameplay impact rather than being fluff pieces as people skip fluff (so refugees give you alien pops if you accept them for example).
