Thoughts on Stellaris

[Ksim3000]

Well, as many of you on here, I'm certainly looking forward to Stellaris. I think it has the makings to be a great sci-fi strategy game that will truly be a successor of some kind to the infamous MOO2. I always watch the Extraterrestrial Thursday episodes every week and I am always impressed.

Yet there are a few niggly doubts that do concern me so I thought I would share my thoughts, as numbered below.

1) I noticed during the streams that there was very few planets that had still developing life forms or pre-FTL travel civilisations. I think I can recall counting about 3-4. Two of them were already in the late stage, ready for space travel. One had a basic lifeform still evolving, the other obviously our friendly neighbourhood Blorg "Enlightened" but still, there were only few.

I do recall the developers saying that these civilisations/life forms were not too rare but would not too common either. Yet from what I saw in the streams, I would argue they were certainly "on the rare side" of the galaxy.

I'm not sure this will be available for release but it would be very nice to have an option where the player can before we start a game have the ability to select if we want a lot of pre-FTL civilisations/lifeforms, a balance, few or none at all.

I myself would love to play a space faring civilisation that devotes itself to helping "enlight" pre-FTL civilisations and turning them into empires along with biologically engineering evolutionary lifeforms.

2) The time. I always thought Stellaris would have a more slower approach to the game with it being something like EUIV. It should take about 300-500 years in game to truly achieve everything you need to as an empire. Yet from what I have seen, in just 100 years of gameplay, The Blorg have formed a huge empire, all the cool colonisation bits have been finished, its technologically advanced and all that really remains is to fight neighbouring empires and wait for the late game crisis events to appear.

Now not sure if this was just because of the playthrough itself but I'd certainly like a slower game, taking my time to colonise, research techs and fiddle around with the early era before getting onto an end game "clash of empires."

3) Battle icons. I love the battles but the icons do seem boring to me. I always wanted to see something akin to the ground unit battles of MOO2. Pixels of infantry/tanks/robots fighting it out for control of a planet. Probably a mod/a future DLC or a patch could add in some more colourful pictures just to give ground units a bit of an exciting boost?

Loving the game though and hope to play when I can.

 

[DàbiànLājīdàrén]

ok

 

[Ultimuh]

ok

That was a very insightful response from you.

 

[Ksim3000]

That was a very insightful response from you.

Hey, I'm cool with it. At least the guy likes it.

 

[Ultimuh]

Hey, I'm cool with it. At least the guy likes it.

Fair enough. I myself however don't really have anything against what you said.
I do agree with some of that though. I just.. can't think of anything for or against to reply with.

 

[Ksim3000]

Fair enough. I myself however don't really have anything against what you said.
I do agree with some of that though. I just.. can't think of anything for or against to reply with.

I understand. Its cool.

 

[Eid3r]

I wonder if they will one day, or at launch, add a possibility to slow down technological advance like we've seen in other games before.

This would go a long way to make your game last longer.

 

[Cidasa]

There's no need to be worried about the game being too quick because Stellaris has victory conditions (like Civ 5). One Victory condition is that you have conquered every space empire in the game, the other victory condition is colonizing somewhere between 40-60% of the Galaxy. That are all of the ones I could think of the top of my head.

 

[bel3338]

2) The time. I always thought Stellaris would have a more slower approach to the game with it being something like EUIV. It should take about 300-500 years in game to truly achieve everything you need to as an empire. Yet from what I have seen, in just 100 years of gameplay, The Blorg have formed a huge empire, all the cool colonisation bits have been finished, its technologically advanced and all that really remains is to fight neighbouring empires and wait for the late game crisis events to appear.

Now not sure if this was just because of the playthrough itself but I'd certainly like a slower game, taking my time to colonise, research techs and fiddle around with the early era before getting onto an end game "clash of empires."

The time is something that you could tailor with the galaxy generation options. If you want something quick you'd go for a small galaxy with lots of empires so you'd quickly move onto the grand strategy phase. For a longer expansion, 4X-y era you'd go for a large galaxy with fewer empires, that way it could be decades before you even meet another space faring empire, and longer still before your borders met

 

[DàbiànLājīdàrén]

I get the feeling that colonization in Stellaris will basically be the same as EU4, so minimal interactions. The time scale isn't too bad considering that there's FTL as well as instant communication. It's basically like how transportation evolved on Earth.

 

[Ksim3000]

I wonder if they will one day, or at launch, add a possibility to slow down technological advance like we've seen in other games before.

This would go a long way to make your game last longer.

Yeah this would be good. Like on Civ 5.

There's no need to be worried about the game being too quick because Stellaris has victory conditions (like Civ 5). One Victory condition is that you have conquered every space empire in the game, the other victory condition is colonizing somewhere between 40-60% of the Galaxy. That are all of the ones I could think of the top of my head.

I think I'd like to see some extra victory conditions. First to reach a highly important technology. Enlighten most pre-FTL Civilisations. Etc, etc. Still thanks for the reassurance, that gives me some piece of mind.

The time is something that you could tailor with the galaxy generation options. If you want something quick you'd go for a small galaxy with lots of empires so you'd quickly move onto the grand strategy phase. For a longer expansion, 4X-y era you'd go for a large galaxy with fewer empires, that way it could be decades before you even meet another space faring empire, and longer still before your borders met

Yeah this would help a lot. I presume The Blorg play through has been on a smaller map with lots of empires hence why we've seen the game reach such a critical late game stage only 100 years in?

 

[lemmox]

2) The time. I always thought Stellaris would have a more slower approach to the game with it being something like EUIV. It should take about 300-500 years in game to truly achieve everything you need to as an empire. Yet from what I have seen, in just 100 years of gameplay, The Blorg have formed a huge empire, all the cool colonisation bits have been finished, its technologically advanced and all that really remains is to fight neighbouring empires and wait for the late game crisis events to appear.

The beautiful thing about this game is that it's super easy to customize that for yourself, just my selecting the size of the galaxy and number of empires. They've commented that this is an unusual level of crowding early in the game.

Also they don't seem to be that far along in the tech tree, having skipped a lot of stuff like robotics and alternative weapons system. It's really more of a speed run than anything. There's also worlds within and just beyond their borders that they simply haven't gotten the tech to colonize yet.

My impression of the stream save is that it's a lot less complete than you seem to think it is, there is a lot left to do, still a fair bit of uncolonized space and an entire half of the galaxy to explore (nevermind that they've been skipping a huge number of anomalies and events).

It's also worth keeping in mind that colonization, exploration, and peaceful expansion have always been explained as early to mid game tactics. You aren't supposed to be colonizing into the late game, once you get through that it is supposed to start turning into a EU4 style GSG like we're seeing in the streams.

 

[Turin the Mad]

A few brain droppings in context to the opening post

Perhaps as part of the procedural generation (x) amount of room is given to the Fallen Empires, (y) amount of room is reserved for each of the (1 +# of starting AI empires) and (z) is what's left over for populating with the rest of the Things.

They started in a Medium-sized galaxy with nearly the maximum number of AI empires, which doesn't leave a lot of room for the miscellaneous stuff.

Maybe there are more species available for uplifting and enlightenment when the playing field isn't as crowded?

At least we get the option to determine how level the "at this epoch in galactic history" playing field is. IIRC, the default settings have a few non Fallen Empires with a head start on the player(s) and the other AI empires. I rather like not knowing how many uplift-worthy and enlightenment-worthy species are out there. Adds to the great mystery of the galactic unknown, at least for a time.

From what I can tell of the Blorgstream, while they're in the mid-game they don't seem to have come close to gobbling up all of the vanilla techs by any stretch. At a guesstimate the Blorg have completed ~120 techs, about where it should be at the 1 century mark.

Maybe the techs that should take a while need further balancing of costs?

 

[mrinku]

Keep in mind we've only really seen those primitives that the Blorg have encountered. Presumably all the other empires have encountered their own and taken the appropriate action. I think the primitives do still outnumber the FTL guys... and some of the FTL guys probably started without it, like the Space Owls.

The rapid expansion has everything to do with the cheap and easy FTL the game (and much SF) assumes. If you can get to a planet in a matter of days or weeks it's just a matter of transport capacity to colonise.

I'd be fairly confident the game can be tuned, even without mods, to have a longer expansion phase. Larger galaxy and fewer empires can definitely be chosen in setup.

Wiz has also been fast forwarding a lot. Not just running the game faster, but doing a lot of the managing between streams. I think there's a bit more work than the stream suggests..

 

[lemmox]

I think I'd like to see some extra victory conditions. First to reach a highly important technology. Enlighten most pre-FTL Civilisations. Etc, etc. Still thanks for the reassurance, that gives me some piece of mind.

The victory conditions are also completely cosmetic, so I wouldn't worry too much about them. You can keep playing after one is reached and the AI don't even know they exist.

 

[Exemplar Voss]

2) The time. I always thought Stellaris would have a more slower approach to the game with it being something like EUIV. It should take about 300-500 years in game to truly achieve everything you need to as an empire. Yet from what I have seen, in just 100 years of gameplay, The Blorg have formed a huge empire, all the cool colonisation bits have been finished, its technologically advanced and all that really remains is to fight neighbouring empires and wait for the late game crisis events to appear.

Now not sure if this was just because of the playthrough itself but I'd certainly like a slower game, taking my time to colonise, research techs and fiddle around with the early era before getting onto an end game "clash of empires."

Honestly, a lot of it was the playthrough. It was on fast most of the time, and Wiz was explicitly skipping a lot of stuff, including anomalies and special projects.

Second, that empire isn't huge, at least not in a way that matters- yes it covers a lot of space, but the real meat of it is in a handful of clusters centered around 1 or 2 systems. They're just fairly far apart, and linked by frontier outposts, and propped up by eating another early game empire. The real 'empire vs empire' conflicts haven't even started yet- we've got two loose alliances going at each other, and the second formed specifically as a response to the Blorg eating lizard-klingons.

We'll see how things shake out when they eat a chunk of the Just League, if they pick up more members in retaliation, and how the new Northern Federation reacts. And we don't know what took a chunk out of the big Cockatrice empire on the other side of the galaxy, and they're pretty big themselves, as are several others around the galactic center.

In EuIV terms, I'd suggest the Blorg are basically a successful Bohemia, round about 1550-1600. Enough weight to throw around, but nowhere near in a position to go head to head with France, and enough Aggressive Expansion among lesser powers that they can't simply faceroll everyone.

They also benefited immensely from a happiness bonus that has since been excised from the game- the huge happiness boost the first re-election of their ruler gave them. It basically ended five different factions that were growing in strength, particularly among the lizard klingons. The boost also lasted 40 years, which meant the Blorg empire was absurdly stable for a very long time. Expect that factions resulting from the current war to linger a lot longer, as the Blorg have very few ways of boosting happiness (mostly frontier clinics and the virtual combat arena, for a +5 happiness and +5 habitability for planets that have both, which AFAIK is none of them).

In some ways the way the galaxy generation also did them a kindness, with a backyard that wasn't developable by the two empires living there, so they ended up expanding and peacefully befriending empires that should have taken advantage of that (though their vassals were a clearly a pre-FTL race that just recently made it out). With more pressure on them from that direction, it could have been very interesting indeed.

 

[Mordaith]

Not sure if it has been mentioned, but Wiz said a few times that they are currently in the early mid game. And that the end game was still a good distance away.

 

[Cyridius]

There's no need to be worried about the game being too quick because Stellaris has victory conditions (like Civ 5). One Victory condition is that you have conquered every space empire in the game, the other victory condition is colonizing somewhere between 40-60% of the Galaxy. That are all of the ones I could think of the top of my head.

The AI(Thankfully) don't play for victory conditions, so they might as well not exist.