What is the state of Stellaris right now?

[Willy Waggler]

It's shit.

 

[sillyrobot]

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).

Yeah, my typical century target is to have research exceed 50K per month. By 2350, I'm aiming for 100K a month and have hit 150K a month within that timeframe. Those numbers simply didn't exist in older versions.

The other huge effect was the removal of building competition. Since alloys are created by districts now, more buildings per colony become labs even with fewer buildings per colony being possible.

 

[ChiefBigFeather]

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).

Yes, this is true. The one mechanic to curb snowballing got even weaker.

There are some things you can do to smooth things out a little. Here are my subjective changes:
Play with Startech AI
play with 1.25x tech and tradition cost
play with 0.75x habitable planets

modding:
mod techs costs (I multiplied t2 tech costs by 1.5, t3 techs by 2, t4 techs by 2.5 etc.)
reduce the assist research bonus (as it is another multiplicative bonus on top)

after those changes, I usually go for a 2275 mid game and a 2325 endgame with 2x crisis strength. The game is a lot more fun for me that way, but this is very subjective.

 

[Wez_2021]

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

Why are you bothering to post here if the game disgusts you?

 

[gamerk2]

In Stellaris' economic model, pops are king. Tall only really works if you mean Tall in terms of "number of systems", in which case you can spam habitats. Tall as in "few number of pops" is simply not viable; you can't get enough resources to stay afloat.

 

[Millbot]

There are a number of things that I would like to see, but if we focused purely on QoL fun gameplay. Midgame year needs more stuff for us to do that is actually fun, warfare in stellaris is pretty tedious. Endgame, we just need more stuff that does what the crisis does, where there are achievable win goals that aren't trying twiddling your thumbs because of the crisis war or waiting for the end game year to tick.

Actually, can I just say screw setups where you have tp pick an end game year and have no goals to work towards. I mean, I have criticisms about becoming the crisis being tedious but at least when I get everything in place I can end the game. I'm pretty tired of every update and every different built putting me in a spot where I need to trail and error stuff in hopes of getting good pacing that just doesn't drag on and I don't finish most of my games because the vanilla win condition does exactly that. It's rubbish design and I'm annoyed that the devs have hinted that they are inclined to do more stuff like become the crisis. NO, the game needs more win goals that we work towards that aren't dictated by some arbitrary year.

 

[Slaughter]

Midgame year needs more stuff for us to do that is actually fun

Yeah, I think the big issue with midgame is that it becomes a 3X game. There's no more Exploration to do, except the L-Cluster, maybe, and the odd system enclosed off by some buff Leviathan or something like that.

 

[legionof1]

I think current state is decent, we got alot of sliders we didn't have before, AI economic managment is at least not actively starting its own death spiral when left alone. Before we had a state where you mearly needed to not shoot yourself in the foot and you would win, cause the AI would spend the whole game actively doing so.

There are still some outstanding bonehead behaviors but nothing too bad. Lots of civics got a balance pass in Lem, and content added/adjusted for old DLCs which was a big leap for overall quality imo. And they certainly have been more outwardly responsive/engaged with bugs then in the past ever. If they are still being as bad at handling them behind the curtain is yet to be seen, but for the first time in years many someones are actively shoveling the snow drifts over in the bug forum. Almost no thread there gets off the front page with out getting a confirmed/dupe/ect tag