What is the state of Stellaris right now?

[Scudilo]

I'm thinking of getting back into Stellaris, and I haven't played the game in some time, and that's because of two issues I had with it. The first one was the fact that the Crisis AI was completely broken and incapable of being a threat outside of a handful of systems near where the Crisis spawned, and the other reason was because tall playstyles were becoming increasingly discouraged with every major patch and DLC.

So how are these two issues at the moment? Is there anything else major I should know?

 

[sillyrobot]

Hmm.

The first point is hard to say because I find maintaining interest long enough to reach crisis is difficult. I play until the galaxy is pacified enough and I have several million in fleet power, look at the schedule and realize I have another century to wait for crisis and just stop.

The second I can be much more confident about. Wide is essentially actively encouraged. The new pop limiting mechanics seriously encourage combative wide in order to continue gathering pop via alternative methods once your empire growth malus grows. If you play without the empire-wide malus then the admin-cap becomes nothing as a few colonies are turned over to bureaucrats and research hits 150K per month as wide triumphs again.

 

[Ryika]

Tall's very playable if spamming dozens of habitats fits your definition of tall. It's not strong, but strong enough to be played, but it's largely just a self-restriction that you put on yourself since going wide just means having more of everything.

The crisis is pretty hit and miss from my experience.

 

[Scyobi_Empire]

My current Crisis (Unbidden) has nearly murdered an Awaken Empire and has made a Fallen Empire have 27k fleet power.

Being the other Crisis and sharing 7 borders with the Unbidden is fun...

 

[Ussnorway]

the end game upset lasts around a min... maybe two if your fleets are out of place

tall play is ok in multiplayer where your pals can cover the boaders but not single player

 

[Derp Throat]

• The AI is still bad, but no longer so bad that I feel embarrassed for the devs.
• Crises works but now the khan doesn't.
• Fleet manager bugs have been replaced by new bugs
• Shattered Ring has been nerfed so devs can no longer use deliberately ignoring balance as an excuse for the lack of balance
• Minor text errors

 

[mallibu_pineapple]

I don't get the negativity above.
Crisis AI is much much improved.
Tall is very viable, after all we're not talking about competitive multiplayer here. It's a roleplaying game and always will be, it's not DotA.
I would suggest buying it and see for yourself.

 

[currylambchop]

Tall can compete with wide if tall is void dwellers or clone army (or megacorp to some extent) these countries are basically built for tall play.

 

[ImaTomato]

I don't get the negativity above.

Sycophancy won't make the game better.

Crisis AI is much much improved.

It's still terrible.It's only improved since it didn't work at all in some previous patches.

Tall is very viable, after all we're not talking about competitive multiplayer here. It's a roleplaying game and always will be, it's not DotA.

Tall is only viable because the AI is braindead and non functional.

I would suggest buying it and see for yourself.

Telling someone to buy a non functional product is just disgusting.

 

[WC with 100 clone pops]

Telling someone to buy a non functional product is just disgusting.

Says someone who probably had 1K+ hrs of fun with this game ^^

 

[Foxosaur]

1. I guess to better answer the OP, its about when you stopped playing. If it was pre 3.0, I think its worth playing a couple of games at least, there was a lot of improvements even to things long "given up" like Fleet Manager and reinforcing of fleets. AI is better but if your playstyle was to min-max and will continue to be and play a very aggressive game, you won't find that much different or challenging. That said I've had several good games where the Crisis will steam roll, yes it'll slow down at points but they made some specific effort to demonstrate the Crisis's not getting stuck as much and actually taking over a galaxy, I think it was covered in a dev diary recently even, maybe before summer break(?). I play casually and dont really google for better ways to play and x5 Crisis strength is as far as I bother with so my perspective may be totally irrelevant to you

2. Can't comment on, sorry.

 

[Arrnea]

3.0 and 3.1 have taken the game in the right direction compared to the mess that was 2.2-2.8, but there's still a lot of work to be done to make it as fun as it was in 1.9, not to mention bringing the AI up to spec to be competitive with the playerat least vaguely able to play the game. Right now if you want the AI to not fall over after 50 years, you need to use an AI mod (StarTech or StarNet)... that's not a good place for a game's AI to be in.

For me, there's still a lot of minor to moderate annoyances that make Stellaris frustrating to play through a full game of.
Hopefully that improves with future Custodian patches, and hopefully future DLCs/game updates don't take it backward again as previous ones have done.

 

[Scudilo]

Thanks for all the replies. I think the general gist I've gotten from this thread is that things are better overall, but the big issues with the game are still present.

 

[Lakionzekk]

My current Crisis (Unbidden) has nearly murdered an Awaken Empire and has made a Fallen Empire have 27k fleet power.

Being the other Crisis and sharing 7 borders with the Unbidden is fun...

I have to wonder, what happens if you become the crisis and then Unbidden spawns? Would they still be hostile?

 

[Scyobi_Empire]

I have to wonder, what happens if you become the crisis and then Unbidden spawns? Would they still be hostile?

Yes.

 

[Lakionzekk]

Yes.

That's a damn shame, it would've been cool to see a scenario where you can *befriend* the Unbidden and co-operate in your galactic destruction. But i guess it makes sense lol.

 

[Slaughter]

Seems to be heading to the right place now. Still needs lots of work.

For example, Performance. Its not as slow as it was, I can play on Medium maps now, but it could be FASTER.

 

[ChiefBigFeather]

While scaling got a lot better in some places, in others it is still abysmal. Tech is still extremely strong and scaling it up is still way too easy. Logistic pop growth helped with some issues, but conquering pops still lets you grow orders of magnitude faster. The ship designer is still balanced fairly poorly and some traits are way, way stronger then others.

 

[Derp Throat]

Seems to be heading to the right place now. Still needs lots of work.

For example, Performance. Its not as slow as it was, I can play on Medium maps now, but it could be FASTER.

People made the mistake of believing that when 2.3 came out though.

 

[Incompetent]

While scaling got a lot better in some places, in others it is still abysmal. Tech is still extremely strong and scaling it up is still way too easy. Logistic pop growth helped with some issues, but conquering pops still lets you grow orders of magnitude faster. The ship designer is still balanced fairly poorly and some traits are way, way stronger then others.

On tech, it didn't use to be as broken as it is now: the two changes that really threw it into chaos were a) bureaucrats (meaning tech costs basically don't increase at all as you blob, while your army of researchers gets bigger and bigger) and b) the repeatable tech passive bonus machine effectively got extended into the early game, with the addition of techs that each give +10-20% bonus to production of some resource or other (which may not sound like much until you realize just how many of these techs there are).