Old Player coming back

[Sparviero]

Hi everyone! I played Stellaris when it first came out. I enjoyed it and after I moved on, without specific reasons.

Recently I read something about the patch 2.2 and the game got again my attention becouse the new economy/planet building features look promising.

I have just one question.
does the game push you to expand fast? Bigger is better?
I can't remember how was this aspect of the gameplay when I played it, so I'm not trying and I'm not interested to make comparisons of any sort. I just prefer when have a small empire is a viable option.

Thank you for your time.

 

[sillyrobot]

Small empires can certainly be an option especially in single player. There are specific initial choices that promote/reward "Tall" play. Apparently, Megacorp empires from the new DLC are among them, but even without DLC it is entirely viable.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

In the new econ wide play will involve more interaction. Peace is as involved as war now, but it is completlyviable and its not like you can't pause the action to think about things.

Word of warning thuogh, don't go in thinking you can fill a planet and forget it. worlds adapt and evolve, your needs and the needs of their pops must be conciderd in tandem.

 

[Aotrs Commander]

Expanding fast can be detrimental (especially if you're a megacorp, which suffers double the penalties from what was previously the tech penalty based on empire size . Instead, you now get an administration capacity, which is the point at which you start taking those penalties, so you have more wiggly room and tall empires are much more viable).

The big issue is you abslutely cannot run planets like you used to. You only build or upgrades buildings when you have spare population, otherwise what happens is all your workers making food/minerals/energy immediuately promote to the ne specialists and your economy tanks (and specialists and above don't demote back down to workers instantly). So some actual manage of your planets is now requireed, rather than old system where you could and often would queue up the planet's entire building structure and forget about it until upgrades rolled around.