Worst space strategy games you've played and why you hope Stellaris won't follow them

[Krajzen]

Personally I greatly disliked GalCiv series and I hope Stellaris won't be similar with
*Very cheesy, cliched, cartoonish story background... Which dominates the entire game (I mean, throwing out 4 of 10 races in GC3 just because of story... yeah cool...) = ISSUE AVOIDED: NO STUPID BACKSTORY
*Cliche, silly, rather one dimensional races (ridiculous 'ork evil' race, 'evil robots', 'evil capitalists', 'space elves', 'ET phenotype', 'ancient honor warrior race', 'bland US-like human democracy'... I liked only Iconians and Thalans) = ISSUE AVOIDED: RANDOMLY GENERATED RACES
*Idiotic cartoonish morality system (all races are always 'good or neutral or evil' and you choose a morality for your race 'good neutral or evil' and each and every random event is copy paste 'good, neutral or evil choice' - seriously?) = ISSUE AVOIDED: AMBIGUOUS ETHOS SYSTEM
*The insanity of space stations, or rather micromanagment: super strong space stations requiring constant production of contruction ships and constant spamming station upgrades, unavoidable for the entire game = ISSUE UNKNOWN
*Turn system+stacks, personally I hate that combination = ISSUE AVOIDED, REAL TIME
*Endgame boredom = ISSUE UNKNOWN, probably averted

 

[Zakath]

I do enjoy GalCiv, but it's an entirely different game from what I want Stellaris to be. It's Civ in space, and doesn't take itself too seriously. Both of which are fine IMO.

The one I most hope Stellaris doesn't come close to is Master of Orion: The Unmentioned Number Which Is After Two But Never Happened Really I Promise.
The premise of the game was good, it sounded like a fantastic idea when they said "You can do anything, but not everything." The game however just didn't work, at all. It was bad, the design was terrible, and...yeah. Nothing good came of it.

 

[yerm]

MOO3 was a great idea and had a decent baseline implementation, but then the glaring flaws just overwhelmed it all and resulted in garbage. Kind of the opposite of Beyond Earth, another colossal failure, but that one was an awful design and terrible setup only salvaged (but not really) by borrowing heavily from Civ5, itself having spent years fixing a really bad vanilla game.

Needless to say I hope Stellaris is not like either of these two games. I want wing commander: armada on steroids. On bath salts even.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

I hope they've thought long and hard about the math behind their economy and ship combat models (whatever they are). I've seen way too many games where the obvious optimization from a player perspective seems to come completely out of left field for the devs and completely destroys game balance.

 

[Harle]

It is really popular to bash MoO3, and granted, it did not turn out the way anyone hoped, but it did a lot of interesting things (and promised even more interesting things), so I wouldn't say that it's the worst 4X Space Game, just one of the more disappointing ones.

I would actually have to say Lost Empire, which was published by Paradox in fact.

Where MoO3 mostly made me want to play other 4X titles with its promises and potential, Lost Empire actually made me stop playing them for a long time. It was so shallow and unimaginative that it stole all of the life out of the genre for me. Granted, it's been a long time and I didn't play it extensively so my memory is poor, but as I recall, you colonized stars, not planets, and each star could have one of something like four to six specializations, with almost no innate variety between them.

At the end of the day you were just telling bright little dots to feed some part of your economy. And they had the audacity to boast galaxies of thousands of stars. Well duh, it's not hard to have thousands of stars when your game mechanics are that shallow. I would've been disappointed if it were a boardgame, and here we are on the PC with computation and simulation at our fingertips.

Sorry to the guys from the now defunct Pollux studios.

 

[AegonTheUnready]

MOO3. They shot for the moon but landed in the neighbors back yard.

SOTS 2. Gah. Execrable tedium.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

MoO3 and SotS2 were both games that weren't finished on budget but were released anyway. I'm not too worried about that happening in this case.

 

[Just a Joke]

At least you can recall their name. I've gone through several 4x game so terrible that I deleted them from my memory.

 

[qer]

Civ V on release . and yes I know that it isn't about space, but it is still 4x and had a woefully bad state at launch (that basically cripple it , making some mechanics that expansions couldn't fix)

 

[Finnway]

*Endgame boredom = ISSUE UNKNOWN, probably averted

They did say Endgame boredom is an issue they're aware of and attempting to address. Catastrophes are part of their solution.

 

[yerm]

Civ V on release . and yes I know that it isn't about space, but it is still 4x and had a woefully bad state at launch (that basically cripple it , making some mechanics that expansions couldn't fix)

I get what you're thinking, but BNW has it at a relatively decent game at this point. I won't call it BTS great it's a good game now. Meanwhile, Beyond Earth, the same engine but actually sci fi... oh god...

 

[qer]

I get what you're thinking, but BNW has it at a relatively decent game at this point. I won't call it BTS great it's a good game now. Meanwhile, Beyond Earth, the same engine but actually sci fi... oh god...

BNW is decent, but if the base game has been better, it would have been much better. Civ 5 at release was horrible, and it make future work worst. If the released game is good, expansions are great. Compare your sentence " relatively good game" with your next one "BTS great" . if civ 5 base game (and the release mechanics) were better , future expansions wouldn't be needed to have a "decent" experience. PS: civ 4 ftw

 

[Mauer]

The one thing that puts me off most space strategy games in the tedious micromanagement. From moving ships and fleets around a few tiles at a time to managing building and ships construction queues in every single planet/city, some games allow automation of this but it's usually so inefficient I don't like doing that either and you still end up with a bunch of units you don't really need or want to move around.

This goes for the civilization series as well, and the Total War games also suffer from this, but space games, by virtue of being so large and dealing with so many single provinces/systems/planets/etc., really compound the issue.

The beauty of PDS games is that you don't actually have to micromanage all that, you have your standing army and build it up as necessary without worry of wasting "production"; same for buildings, you build them when you can afford them and when it makes sense to build them only. So I hope they stick to this instead of going the way other games do it.

Also proper diplomacy, no "invasion means annexation" nonsense.

Also no steamrolling research in order to win always, PDS games solve this by tying technologies to set dates, IDK how they would do it in a futuristic game, but I hope something analogous is in place.

 

[Naithin]

I realise GalCiv 2 was supposed to be the pinnacle of space 4X's (I'm unsure whether GalCiv 3 has yet unseated it in popular opinion) - but I personally found it incredibly soulless. No personality to the game whatsoever, very empty and bland as a result.

Thankfully it seems that Stellaris is already managing to avoid this problem, so I'm not too worried. Nonetheless, if there would be one thing I'd want the devs to remain conscious of personally, it'd be this.

 

[Pugmak]

MOO3: The UI Drill Down.

That's what chapped my tail about MOO3. The UI design. Go to this page to do this thing, fine. Then tab, sub tab, another sub tab, etc, so on, so forth ad nausea.

All Civ after #4. Too much spent on graphics and not nearly enough on game play. The maps got smaller and smaller, even on huge. The game no longer felt massive, just crowded. Graphic items and icons made far too large and intrusive. Game designed to force a particular play style with at least one AI civ dumped right in the player's lap.

 

[Teije]

I liked GC2 alot, but am finding GC3 very bland. Just picked it up on a sale and am underwhelmed. And this is before finishing my first game. Just not much significantly different and better from GC2 that I've reallly noticed.

So far as worst 4X, that's pretty hard. Endless Space is fine. MOO3 not very good (but I didn't find it as bad as most). Actually not a big fan of MOO/MOO2 either (heresy I know!). Actually really liked Space Empires IV back in the day. My all-time favourite is Ascendancy, but played it recently on the tablet and it's aged of course. Starbase Orion is actually one of the best recent ones, but only on iOS.

And most of the recent crop has been disappointing or vaporware in one way or another, except for Distant Worlds which I enjoyed for a considerable time. Look at spacesector.com which follows them the best

Which is why I'm so looking forward to Stellaris. It's been a long drought since Ascendancy...

 

[ParagonExile]

People really enjoy shitting on Galactic Civilizations for some reason ;-;

But OT;

While I like the game immensely, I hope Stellaris is not very similar to Sins of a Solar Empire. It is supposedly a 4X game but is really just a space warfare simulator with some 4X elements inconsistently applied. I hope Stellaris places much more emphasis on *not* fighting and makes the expanding, exploiting and exploring more interesting.

 

[Sinister2202]

Since the game could last very long in terms of "no end date", I just wish the game doesn't have giant blobs of empires in late game and lack opponents to do diplomacy/war with.

 

[Daltesh]

Emperor of the Fading Suns. Had it been completed and had better direction, it could've been an amazing game, but as it was it shipped with several key features either missing or broken and they simply never managed to fix it all.
I'm confident with Paradox's current design doctrine they will be able to patch out most major issues, but I do have a mild dread that it may fall into that first problem of shipping a bit bereft of features some would see as integral to the genre.

But on the flip side, I also have high hopes. The game they seem to be building isn't quite what I was hoping for when it was announced, as it seems more inclined towards the arcadey elements of the 4X genre rather than the simulation elements of the GSG genre, but from the DDs alone I can tell it's going to fill some very important holes left thus far vacant in the genres.

 

[*Aqua*]

I hate the combat in Endless Space. There's nothing exciting about it. You just sit there and watch things. Again and again. And Again. And again.
There are only three kinds of weapons (long, mid and short range) and three battle phases and if you picked long range for your whole fleet half of the enemy fleet was obliterated after the first phase before they could do something. What was left wasn't a real threat anymore. Totally boring.

Conclusion:
Don't let the player watch the same boring stuff over and over again without giving him an option to skip it. Allow micromanaging but don't force it on players and give him the ability to skip repetitive tasks.