Well I played a lot of 4x games in different settings (space, fantasy, whatever)... I couldn't say which one was the worst.
But there is some general stuff I find annoying on several 4x games:
- General
- Too many stacking/multiplying stats rendering entire gameplay features almost impossible to balance.
- Too complex gameplay mechanics often proving to be cumbersome or out of balance the bigger an empire gets.
- GUIs either being too cluttered with unnecessary stuff or they are lacking the information one would actually need. Haven't seen any game getting that part right... ever.
I wish for Stellaris to do better in them but yeah, numbercrunching stuff and an acceptible GUI are the hardest parts about a game to get right.
- Major Races/Minor Factions and their Traits/Behavior
- Balancing around major races failing thanks to special colonization traits allowing a specific race to steamroll 2/3 of the galaxy early on.
- Balancing around major races failing thanks to predictable military/economic/influential powerhouses later on with no one left to counterbalance.
- Minor factions may exist, but don't play any role whatsoever neither on local nor on global scale and therefore can be steamrolled quite easily.
I hope Stellaris performs much better on that due to how the Species/Ethos system works together with Population Units.
- Starsystems/Planets/Colonies/Starbases/Shipyards
- Often too much micromanagement hell or repetitive tasks. Bore-out or Burnout, whichever comes first.
- Often no automatation, which just sucks after 50+ or more planets/colonies per faction and renders a game unplayable.
- Too many stacking Planet/Colony improvements (general ones + race specific ones, etc) doing almost the same instead of concentrating around a few which would actually matter.
- Starbase/Shipyard spam becoming mandatory and often being more time consuming than the tedious planet/colony management of 50+ planets already is.
- Different Planet Types not of a strategic importance later on thanks to terraforming space magic, so they are only a minor annoyance early on
I wish Stellaris has at least some form of automation for boring, repetitive tasks and not to resort on completely cutting back management abilities as a cheap shortcut. That said I would welcome it if Stellaris implements only the most essential stuff, like only essential improvements for colonies, instead of every improvement type coming in 10 different flavors, all of them doing the basically same thing just with a different value. Quality over Quantity is my opinion on the matter.
- Technology/Research
- Neverending race with upgrades to upgrades most of which don't make any sense or difference, just to bloat up the tree and make it look more sophisticated than it actually is.
- Often abused to gain a huge lead in progression, resulting in balancing problems mid/endgame, especially when race specific researches start to stack up with race specific traits.
I hope that the approach of Stellaris with research depending on the outcome of various research events doesn't render it in some sort of Russian Roulette. It may prevent a huge lead in progression for a single race, but it might also lead to no progression at all.
- Mid-Game/Endgame and/or Diplomacy/Victory
- Conquest often turning out to be the only viable long-term strategy of dealing with enemies/other factions and the only way to end the game.
- Just keep on expanding and annex everything. No real political problems in your own empire to deal with, other than the dumb and generic "overexpansion" penalties which are counterproductive on large scale gameplay.
If Stellaris only gains a bit of the flavor of the EU series in Mid/Endgame then above concerns won't be much of a problem anymore. Because that's what the EU series is being best in.
There are surely a lot of other things that I could nitpick on but I would have to play several of the games again to encounter the problems.
The only game I played in the past months was Galactic Civilizations III when it was released earlier this year, and some things stuck with me ever since:
Things I particularly disliked:
- While the hexgrid allows for quite interesting features, the overall execution of it is poor when it boils down to strategy (it isn't any different in GC2 with its sqares). There is almost no strategy involved in conquering an AI's empire or defending one's own empire. No narrow passages or other invincible barriers and stuff that allow for a controlled border. The enemy can go from anywhere to anywhere and so can you, which is just a free for all. It just boils down to controlling loads of fleets and how many ships you have to scare off the enemy from even crossing your border. That just sucks on a large scale map when management becomes tedious.
- Starbase spam.
- Unbalanced faction-unique colony improvements as well as research resulting in some factions being predestined to win/fail every time.
- Resource system nice in concept, but bad in execution due to how nothing of importance really requires that stuff. At later stages almost all generic non-resource-requiring improvements/weapons etc are performing much, much better than the ones that actually do require resources. So the battle for resources is superfluous to begin with, but the AI is still going like crazy after them while I simply don't care in the first place. Something I hope for Stellaris to excel better at.
Things I liked:
- That shipyards are moveable but have to be tied to/sponsored by planets and the their efficiency depending on the distance to the sponsoring systems. I swear, something similar should have been done with the starbases as well. Don't know why they didn't.
I really wish that something similar to that would be actually implemented for Stellaris as well, so there are sponsoring systems for shipyards/starbases and similar objects to limit their number (and therefore the amount of micromanagement) and to make their placement strategically much more important.
- Economy relying on multiple optional mechanics, like Tourism for example. Haven't seen that in another game yet, but still it's not really that fleshed out.
The past 2-3 years I also played Galactic Civilizations II, Endless Space, Sins of a Solar Empire Trinity/Rebellion, Europa Universalis III&IV, Civilization IV&V, Fallen Enchantress (the devil knows why, probably because it was on a Steam sale) and several others I don't even remember anymore. Also I don't remember anything annoying in particular with the ones listed that is not covered in the general section above already, but that's also because I haven't played them in a while.
I just remember that both Sins and Endless Space had real nice traderoute features or something which automatically created traderoutes when tradeports were present on adjacent colonies or something. I somehow wish for something similar in Stellaris because I missed that a lot in GC3. As long as tradeports are onetime colony improvements and traderoute establishment is being done automatically and doesn't require any further micromanagement I think it would be at least much better than GC3's implementation of stupid manual traderoutes that generate almost no income. At least I remember that those little traderoutes not only resulted in a lot of proft but they also added a bit of "life" in the otherwise boring and dull galaxy by adding small ships as background gfx.
Also Sins had a combat system I really liked, altough fleet management was... urgh.
Also on the EU series... While I think that the EU games are really masterpieces in their genre, it just happens that I am not really into them in general. It's probably because of their historic background. I always hated history back at school. In games I like it much more when a world/galaxy starts out as a blank paper to be filled with my own deeds, which is why I am looking forward to Stellaris.
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