Stellaris

Fantastic sci-fi 4X game. Ignore recent reviews; they are by Chinese players who are whining about a new DLC for a completely different game.

Keep coping West Taiwan -10000 Social Credit
---
Stellaris is an outstanding game that I've spent countless hours playing. Its highly replayable content, combined with the vast array of choices available, keeps every playthrough fresh and engaging. On top of that, the modding community is one of the best I've ever been a part of, adding even more depth and variety to the experience.

I love my super tall empire, Taiwan. It really helped me with these great game features so I was able to beat out the larger empire next to me and turn it from Bhina into Greater Taiwan. Was good stuff.

I've got too many hours in this game. Too many. I don't agree with Paradox's DLC policies, they have a lot of interesting tactics. But you know what, I still love this game, even if I'm too dumb to figure out how to play properly.

And fuck West Taiwan.

Game is good, battles can work a lot better though but that is paradox for you. Also the Chinese players are salty because of HOI4 update go cry some more Commies!!

I don’t even remember when I first picked up Stellaris, but now, with over 400 hours played and all the DLCs, I can confidently say this game is incredible. It offers a deep and immersive strategy experience, though it does come with a bit of a learning curve.

For anyone who loves grand strategy games, empire-building, and the thrill of exploring the galaxy, Stellaris is a must-play. Highly recommended!

10/10 – Endless possibilities, infinite fun.

Stellaris is a very fun game with a lot to do. You can rule your interstellar empire, engage in both diplomacy and war with other empires. There is even multiplayer so you can play with friends. The downside of course, like many similar games, is a large amount of DLC. If you are picking the game up for the first time, I would recommend researching what DLCs are worthwhile to pick up. I think the earlier ones like Utopia, Nemesis, and Overlord are well worth it, since they add a lot of features that mods depend on. You can also try the subscription just to see what all the DLCs have to offer. Alternatively, have a friend with the DLCs host a multiplayer game and join them. You'll be able to experience what the DLCs have to offer.

Speaking of mods, the modding community is very active, and Paradox Interactive has made it very easy to mod the game personally. There are some really great mods that add an entire expansions worth of content. Also if you look at the achievement stats, most people never play unmodded. Of course this could also be they simply don't play with the Iron Man mode on, but eh.

Be warned though, late game performance is notoriously bad, especially on older machines. This is largely due to populations and colonies, however that is an issue that can be solved with... Xenophobic actions. You could also look for mods that clean up the code and improve performance, but come on, just crack a world or ten, its fine. NOTE: as of writing this review, the developer has showcased changes to the pop system, some late game performance may be better.

Very complicated game that requires a little bit of research on youtube before you really know what you are doing, but once you get a vague idea it is a super fun game.

I've been a long time Stellaris player, I have had some great games and lots of memorable moments playing! That being said, all of these happened before it's current build of many DLCs overlapping and constant AI "tweaks" that make it feel so very different to the amazing game I've played in the past.

Some things that have annoyed/frustrated me to the point of no longer playing:

1. Vassals near holy fallen empires will routinely colonize their holy worlds, the fallen empire will declare war on me to "purge" the vassal planet, then promptly ignore said planet and decimate my core worlds on the other side of the galaxy. This has happened in three separate games now, I just stopped trying to get vassals near holy fallen empires.

2. I've noticed AI fleets will often retreat to their systems a few jumps away after a few months following a defeat within their territory, health mostly intact around 60-80%, while my own fleets take vastly longer amounts of time (sometimes years) within my territory and are usually around 20-40% health. This makes it to where even when I win fleet engagements handily, I usually have to retreat for repairs or lose the next time I fight the same fleet a few systems over.

3. Not as often, I've attacked a reinforced capital system and before I took the station, I had to defeat their main fleet twice, once when I first attacked the system and again when they returned from MIA. Which leads me to think the AI just has reduced MIA times in general and feels very unbalanced when the player fleets can frequently take multiple years MIA.

4. Probably the rarest to occur but mechanics overlap from all the different DLCs, really breaking immersion and fun in general. It's gotten progressively worse with special events in particular, sometimes an event will trigger and then years later the opposite effect will happen. An example: The main one I have trouble with, to the point I contemplate restarting whenever I get this pop-up. You find a subterranean civilization on one of your worlds, do a preemptive strike against them and "wipe them out," event completes, wait a few years and then get a pop-up "the subterranean civilization sends a delegation of minerals to the surface or asks us to share our weapons with them" then followed a few years later by "your excavators explore the ruins of the subterranean civilization and find the treasury" or I've even gotten the "refugees fleeing political persecution" pop up, years after I destroyed their civilization. Also off the top of my head small events that explore the ocean beneath an ice planet double triggers and one where you excavate poor quality minerals for higher quality minerals. There's no shortage of little quirks and overlaps with events that are pretty minor individually but they pile up and make role playing way less enjoyable then it used to be.

In short, I would've recommended Stellaris a few years ago to anyone who would listen but now I don't think I could.

At first I didn't understood the game, I was confused and disoriented, but when I finally understood what I needed to do, it was very entertaining. Being able to create your own civilization with its own lore, is incredible, keep in mind the vast amount of constructions and technologies you can research and build, so many galactic civilizations to purge, allie, or trade. A great game!

This game is like gambling. It's easy to start, but it's hard to stop.
Most addictive game I've ever played, 11/10

Orange Approved :D

No, no, no, no! Don't buy it.
This is, at the time of writing, a 10-year old game, priced as a new 3A. It has graphics and interface from 2016, it has horrible optimization and doesn't even know how to use multiple CPU cores. The game will gradually slow down as you play, so "destroy planets to reduce lag" is an actual meme in the community. My attempts at multiplayer had even more horrifying performance.

But the awful performance and high price for the base game is not what makes me write this review. It's the "DLC"s and "DLC subscription". The thing is, there's nothing to do in Stellaris without DLCs. All the content is carefully paywalled behind those. DLCs themselves aren't DLCs even: their content is included in the base game you buy, just locked away until you buy the DLC. This game is not worth it.

I have not been playing this game for long as of now nor have I put much SERIOUS effort into it, I'm a newbie. but I have played enough to know that this is the best grand strategy game I will ever play. the amount of play-styles and paths it allows for you to take is incredible and the variable outcomes in every play-through make it an easily re playable adventure. peaceful democracy one day, autocratic warrior society the next, theocratic oligarchy the next. not to mention how FUN the combat is. yeah it ain't the flashiest thing watching your fleet travel and fight from a map and even zooming in on them does not give too much of a show, but the feeling of managing a galaxy wide war effort, half a dozen fleets, rotating them in and out of the front, managing multiple fronts sometimes, organizing a home defense and cutting off choke points, the sheer scale of war in this game is incredible. there is legitimate urgency because if you make a mistake or your ships are a hair too slow in arriving somewhere, you could suffer a shift in momentum that sets you back massively, be it an enemy fleet blitzing through a hub and deep int your territory before you can cut them off, or neglecting to reinforce one fleet or build defenses around one station and suffering a defeat. this game is real warfare

Terrible, I was actually pretty excited to play this game until the I had problems with the Paradox launcher not recognizing the steam install of this game. Searched up if there was a quick fix and there was not instead If I wanted to play this game I'd either have to go into the game file and launch the .exe or go into some game files to correct whatever is going on.

I really love incompetent game developers. I really do not appreciate anyone that developed this game or the launcher for it.

Great game, if you like RTS space games.
You can easily sink hundreds of hours into just the base game alone, and although there is a bit of a learning curb, this game is pretty damn awesome.

Things I like.
Quite a bit of customization.
large fleets and battles resulting in tug of war galactic conquest attempts.
the game is ever evolving and highly competitive with the other AI players.
I haven't actually won very many games despite many of them being 100+ hours... granted I'm playing on mostly the larger settings.

Things I dislike.
The political/alliance system is a little broken or over simplistic.
The war fatigue or exhaustion or whatever it's called could use more options. currently it's devour everything as an all consuming mindless swarm, or you can only conquer what you have enough influence for even if they are down to one last planet... It would be nice to have more options here.
Endgame Galaxy threats are unbalanced... they either wipe everyone out or get crushed easily. I think some customization or adaptability would be a great addition, maybe even multiple simultaneous threat options and difficulty scaling options.
Could you add a visible research tree? not just memorization, or looking on external web pages? The research options are complex, and its almost impossible to keep track of all the options and where they lead, a visible in game tree would be awesome.

Overall a great game, tons and tons of replay value, and it keeps you busy.
I wish the expansions were cheaper as I think the price is what scares alot of players away, but the base game is 100% worth it hands down, no arguments.

Resolution won't fit my monitor. Some bug, I guess, but I'm unable to play because when I go fullscreen the cursor won't align to what im clicking and when I try windowed, it wont even go on windowed mode, it's still in fullscreen with ridiculous UI buttons that are hidden due to the resolution being too big for my monitor.

It is quite possible that the game is great, but unfortunately it was stuck in a crash cycle for me:
Paradox Launcher starts the game, game crashes the PC at 30% and upon restart Paradox launcher claims that its directory is corrupt and unreadable. After I remove and reinstall Paradox launcher the same cycle repeats.

Not a big fan of additional launchers requiring account with the publisher, especially since I already have steam.

It is unfortunate that the problem results in this kind of review.

I played this game a lot when I was younger. Now I see that it has some basic flaws that have never been addressed.

First, you'll never be able to catch up with the non-stop torrent of DLC for this game, and as long as you can't, you will be locked out of new features.
Second, every game plays out the same, regardless of your ethics. Send out science ships, expand, go to war, negotiate, expand, join a federation, stagnate, fight the endgame crisis, score. Your only choice is "take over the galaxy" or "don't." This is different from games like Endless Space 2 where every faction has different priorities.
Third, the performance gets worse with every update and even in 1.4 this game didn't run great. You will spend hours watching in-game days tic by, waiting for the next month to come.

In all, I kind of regret the hours I spent playing it. The only things I remember are from old content: the Leviathans, the Worm, that sort of thing.

If you ever wanted to play a sci-fi civilization simulator, this is it! The devs keep adding new things, and occasionally completely changing the core systems when it feels like they aren't working. This game is always in active development, and more and more systems are added all the time, along with additional story material. There is a ton of replay value, and you can play a single galaxy for a VERY long time.

The ONLY con is that there are a lot of different systems in this game, and can be a bit overwhelming to learn. My advice? Do the best you can, and don't feel pressured to continue a playthrough if it feels like something's not working.

This game is great. I am severely addicted to it and have had on console before PC. I didn't play it as much then but oh boy do I play it now. Especially as of recent. This game is more of my favorite over the other Paradox games. HOI4 < Stellaris. Unlike paradox's other games this one has more ability to tell your own story and the lore you can develop from this goes crazy. The gameplay is ungodly addictive to me as well

great game.

Don't get all the dlc's. get base game and then add dlc's as you go, feel free to skip a dlc that don't look good. they're plenty of dlc's to pick from and you'll never use them all at once !

can't recommend
Many core mechanics that were there when I first purchased (before all the DLC), are no longer are there.
This was the primary reason I bought the game in the first place.

This is more than, refining the game through balance, adding content via DLC, or expanding the story lines. I purchased some DLC's thinking that maybe the decision would of been reversed, but I was wrong. I chose not to invest any more money into this title let alone $109 more (and that's after a 50% discount). Time to look for bigger and better titles.

Thank you Paradox Interactive. You hit another one out of the park with with another $200+ (and still going) nightmare..

It can be fun if you like this style of game and there is some great mod support.

It's not beginner friendly at all though, and so it is not something that you can just pick up and instantly be good at. That is due to the incredible depth of the game though, but that depth is also the reason that you play a game like this.

Even though there are a lot of positives that you can talk about with Stellaris (not to say that it is a perfect game, but there is some good), it is just always hard to recommend a game by Paradox. The game is certainly old enough to have plenty of expansion packs by now, but there are 23 different premium DLC items as of this writing. You can often find the older DLC on sale. However, the Steam store has nearly all of those DLC items on sale for 50% or more off (at the time of this review) and the total price to buy everything (not including the base game) is still more than $200. Many of these DLC are considered core to the overall experience at this point too with some others being closer.

DLC is obviously a part of modern gaming, but Paradox makes it so that when you buy one of their games then you buy into an entire ecosystem. Even when some parts of that system seem like they should be combined or at least a little cheaper.

I have a theory that if you spend enough time in a game, it is disingenuous to give it a negative review. I don't know what exactly the minimum amount of time is, but I'm confident I've surpassed it, whatever it is.

I've been with the game since launch, and it has managed to get better basically every year. The game has always been pretty fun, though a little quirky early on. The developers have improved it a lot and it is very enjoyable now, if perhaps a little complicated if you've never played a game like this before.

So, yes, I recommend Stellaris.

Essentially a spreadsheet simulator in which you're just trying to make sure that you have the biggest or best numbers around. If you're meticulous and enjoy micromanaging, this is a great game to play. The mods for this game are also amazing! I highly recommend checking out the steam workshop for this game if you ever feel like vanilla starts to get kinda stale. And while this is my most played game, I DO NOT RECOMMEND GETTING THIS GAME FULL PRICE. Frequently this game goes on sale for like 75% and the base game alone is not worth the price tag especially as a lot of features that most Stellaris players like messing with are behind DLCs so unless there's some part of the game that you're desperate to play with I'd get the base game and any interesting DLC while they're on sale.

So this is exactly the type of multiple month game time negative review that gets screen shot and memed on social media, but I'm sad to say I mean it in the most literal sense. I have enjoyed much of my play time with Stellaris, but I emphatically don't recommend anyone purchase this game in it's current, maximum DLC form.
When this game launched, it was a refreshingly basic 4X. Most of the changes made in the early years all the way to the Nemesis expansion added meaningfully to the gameplay without making it overwhelming and complicated for new players. Unfortunately recent patches and expansions have unfortunately been hats on hats, mostly adding complexity without adding fun. I have enjoyed the ride for the most part, but like most Paradox games the continual addition of DLC eventually replaces the game you loved with something you barely recognize while draining your wallet.

does not have a learning curve, but a learning cliff. If in several hours I am no closer to having any clue what im doing or where I am going, with even the most BASIC of gameplay features still being unclear to me no matter how much i read them, how much I follow the tutorials, no matter what I do, your game either is terrible at conveyance, or overtly complicated. This game seems like both.

Generally a very good game and has a lot of potential for customization. Does rely a fair bit on your ability to tell and create your own stories

no help from the "tutorial"
and the community is mostly toxic when asking questions. some are sympathetic by saying "i've had to adapt to the changes in the game by changing my style and learning things over and over, but I also had 100+ hours invested into the game, so that wasn't very difficult for me."

A basic tutorial where you're actually walked step by step thru things wouldn't be out of fkn line considering the scope of this game. Civilization clears this game without question

After effectively completely redesigning the game five times over, it's time to update the AI.

Really hard to get started! The instructions are very unclear when learning to play, even with the full tutorial engaged. It looks great, but it's really difficult to understand how to even make things happen.

This felt like one of those movies that started out really great, but halfway through gets derailed... and you keep with it because the first half had such promise... but then it never delivers and you're left disappointed.
The first part of the game was great. Exploring around and claiming new systems, watching the border of your civilization grow in increments. The feeling of urgency, trying outrace the other civilizations for claim on this or that. Developing your research, and building your fleets. It was exciting finding new planets that were habitable, and sending colony ships to establish new worlds. There was this great feeling that it was all leading somewhere.
After borders are established, you find yourself asking, "Hmmm, what now?" This isn't a problem for too long, as there is diplomacy to consider, colonies to develop, ships to design, fleets to build, outposts to be fortified. It's all leading up to something...

From diplomacy to trading this game claims to have it all. except after about 25 hours you'll realize it offers all these things at the most superficial level. Here's Diplomacy: You can improve relations, which doesn't really do anything except make them willing to trade, or maybe eventually become your vassal. Sounds cool, right? Except they never want to trade resources on a monthly basis, which eliminates the usefulness of diplomacy altogether. You can do individual trades, where I'll give you X of this for X of that, but it's absolutely tedious to do so. When you're dealing with over 20k units of a resources, it would be nice to be able to just type into the text field "20000". Nope. You gotta sit there and click to increase the amount by 100 at a time. So, if you want to trade 20k energy credits for X amount of dark matter, you have to sit there and click, click, click, click. And that's just for once resource in the trade. Say you want to trade 5 or 6 different things.. Click, click, click.. The whole process makes trading so tedious, and half the time I'm just trying to get rid of resources or gain favor with whoever I'm trading with.
Except gaining favor doesn't matter. It benefits you in no way to gain favor with other civilizations. Doesn't offer you resources. They can become your vassal, except if they do it literally doesn't affect you at all. You don't get access to their resources, and if you do... or something does happen... it's not obvious to the point that a first time player would notice.
And that's what you begin to realize after 40 hours. Nothing you do outside of managing your resources really matters. You uplifted a species into sentience? Cool. It doesn't affect anything except you get to read some pop-ups about their progress. If it adds a new race to your civilization, I didn't notice. By 40 hours I had tons of different species roaming around. But here's the thing: I had no sense of that. There's all this stuff supposedly happening, but no visual representation of it actually happening. I know that's probably too much to ask for in a simulation of this scope, but my mind goes to games like roller coaster tycoon or Theme park, or even Sim City and Rimworld, where you can SEE the progress you're making, you can see the little models roaming around your creation. Here you can't tell what your pops are doing... how they're living... it's all just a few words of text that left me feeling disconnected and dispassionate about what I was building.

It was just a bunch of symbols on a world map, and numbers corresponding to your resources. And the resource mechanics, while not difficult to balance, aren't exactly clear either. You build a new district or building, but the effects don't immediately take place. They go up after a "tic" or two. When you have about 20 different colonies to manage, and all types of buildings and districts are going up at once, it's hard to gauge exactly how resources will fluctuate. Sometimes i'd see drastic changes, once having a massive surplus and the next operating at a deficit. Sure, I could have paid more attention to all the details of upkeep and how much this or that costs... but there seriously is information overloading going on, and at some point you just want to get on with it. After a while I felt like I wasn't playing an empire simulator, but rather just an economy simulator. Constantly jumping between screens to build this or that.
And that's another thing that started to drive me nuts after a while. You can't unpause the game for longer than 5 seconds without being overwhelmed by notifications. You get pinged with a new notification so often that it's nearly impossible to focus on the task at hand. You're constantly distracted by something, and it left me feeling like I'd forgotten something, or something else needed tending to.

So diplomacy is hollow... that leaves us with war, right? Surely spending a couple hours designing many different ship loadouts with all the fancy new toys I researched ought to lead to some fun, right? So now let's pick a fight with my belligerent neighbor who keeps talking smack. I waged war on him, completely overwhelming his puny ship designs with my superior fleet. I took system after system, eventually subjugating the rude birds under my rule. Sounds fun, right? Not really. Here's combat in Stellaris: You spend several weeks or months of game time moving your fleets into position. You fan the flames of politics to justify the war... and then you launch your shock and awe campaign.
That first battle, I didn't know what to expect when I moved my fleet into range of the enemies fleet. The numbers representing the strength of their fleet were pitiful compared to my own, but still I was nervous. I had no idea how to command my corvettes, frigates, and destroyers. would it be like homeworld? 3d fuzzballs of spacewar mayhem? Nope. 2d, and while visually cool, there was nothing more to it than watching a bunch of ships fly around zapping each other with light and missiles. Coulnd't tell who was who, and there was absolutely no input from me aside from a decision to retreat or not. All it was was watching the numbers of the respective fleets go down until one was left standing.

Some will say that Stellaris was never designed to be tactical, and it's more of a strategy game. I kind of get their point... but the problem isn't even that it's not tactical, or player involved enough, it's that you can't even tell what's going on.

All the time I spent designing all kinds of ships, and I couldn't even tell which one was performing in action. I couldn't pick one out from the other, and had no idea what sort of effect each loadout was making on the battlefield. You know how you think something might work on paper, but in practice its totally different? You can't tell if that's the case here. You just load up your different ships however you want, but at the end it just equates to numbers on a screen, and you have no idea which weapons or combinations of weapons are performing effectively or not.

So, combat was definitely a flop. And the strategic side of the war wasn't really fun either. Just keep a fleet stationed in differect sectors of your domain. No real strategic thought to it whatsoever, except where to attack next.

ON top of that, keeping your ships upgraded is absolutely tedious. As soon as you re-outfit your entire fleet, a new upgrade comes along that requires you to go in and redesign all your ships--AGAIN. And again. and again... and then your ships gotta go to a shipyard to get outfitted... so plan your wars around your next upgrade. It's just tedious and annoying... altogether.. without even the benefit of a payoff. Personally I think adding an option to fight a tactical battle or autoresolve could save this game, and then have some total war warhammer type battles, or battlefleet gothic style, or even homeworld style. ANYTHING...

I bought this for 3 or 4 dollars on sale on Steam and still feel ripped off. The core concept of the game is good, but the implementation of it is poor. It's like a mobile game version of Civ5 in space but they rip out a bunch of the good parts and try to sell it to you for additional money. They hook you in with the cheap price of the base game, but don't mention that you need to pay like $100+ in DLC to get a good experience. If you want all the content then you are looking at $300+.

Steam should honestly add a warning on this game that the DLC FAR outstrips the base price of this game. If you thought Destiny 2 was bad by using a similar tactic, this one is way worse IMO. The tutorial is also terrible and the UI/UX feels like it is from 2007 even though they release regular (paid) updates to this game every year.

My god I hate paradox. I cannot fathom what goes in someones mind with 2000 hours in paradox games.
The fact that the game is 70% DLC by now, as is with every other paradox game, is annoying to me.

If you love geopolitic simulators then you'll love a galacticpolitics simulator, I don't. Just maybe look at the dlcs to get a view over how much the rest of the game costs.

Stellaris has pretty positive reviews, but I think it's just winning by default in the "Master of Orion" style space 4X genre, and hardcore fans of that are overlooking a lot of flaws. There's not much competition besides smaller games by tiny indie studios. I'd only recommend this game to someone who wants to play that genre specifically, not someone who just wants a good game. Why?

1. Performance. This game is 8 years old but it still runs slowly. The coding was not done with optimization in mind at all. It should be fast.

2. Event results are important and opaque. They're not shown or easy to guess. This favors people who look them up online or memorized them. That's bad game design.

3. Too many shallow systems. You can design your own ships, but it's just putting the latest researched things in a few slots. You can manage planet economies, but all the incentives are towards dedicating each world to 1 resource type, so just do that.

4. Too much accumulation of tiny bonuses. +5% here, +10% here, sure it adds up, but the bonuses barely affect strategy. Instead of making the player want to do something different, they just average out into gradual overall improvements, with each individual bonus being forgettable.

5. It pushes DLC hard, and there's a lot of it. If you get the base game, it still shows all the items you can't use because you don't have that DLC yet. It's annoying and in poor taste.

It was a great game until they started mass producing dlc for outrageous prices. Do better paradox.

I feel like it's hard to review any Paradox game on it's own merits for two reasons:

One, all of them are - well no it'd be uncharitable to say they're all the same, each game does have its own idiosyncrasies and strengths. It's that once you've played 10 minutes of a paradox game you have more or less the broad experience of any of them. Queue up research, queue up buildings, turn on 4x speed and then wait for something to happen. It's not even that the waiting is particularly long or intolerable, it's just the fact it's the neutral state of the game, especially once you're efficient at setting up and automating early game. Sometimes nothing really interesting happens for minutes at a time and so it's hard to really review a game play loop that consists of around 50% waiting because whether everything else is worth the investment is almost wholly predicated on your tolerance for waiting. I tolerate it fine, but not a single friend I've gotten it for has been able to sit through even half a campaign. You're either the target demo or you're not and if you don't know if you are, you're probably not.

Two, the other reason it's hard to review a paradox game is because infamously for their products about half of the game is scattered across ~40 DLC, making an accurate portrayal hard to nail down. Do I review only the base game even though that hasn't been my experience for years? Do I review the game in its entirety and give a complete view even if it means using the DLC packs I don't recommend? Or do I only talk about the ones I think are good and just let you figure out the rest? Which one of these is even the 'real' Stellaris? It's easy to mislead people into thinking they'll necessarily have the same experience as I am describing out of the box, only to be disappointed when the space dragons are from a dlc, so I need to make sure I mention that. When I start needing to make a spreadsheet just to discuss the game to make sure I'm not lying to people about its content, I think that's another point against recommending it to people outside the community.

Now my issue isn't that the DLC exists, I get it, you can't have large company with shareholders and lots of employees update a complicated game in perpetuity for absolutely free, that's just not the real world as much as we wish it was. My issue is a combination of the volume, age, and price of the DLC working against the players. There is a lot of ancient DLC that adds features that other DLC later built off of, like Megacorp. I can't actually imagine playing without Megacorp, because in addition to adding mechanics the game feels absolutely naked without, it simultaneously adds value to other DLCs; e.x. Buy the necroids species and you get a unique civic for a corporate death cult. There's plenty of interactions like that and I would like the fact that old content kept adding value to new content... if Megacorp wasn't also still for sale separately too. And still $20- half the price of the entire base game. For an expansion that's 6 years old. It sucks too because now the newer DLC, instead of getting to build off the assumption of the older DLC , it ends up actually having ADDITIONAL pay-walled options instead of extra value. Instead of being a cute interaction, it's a double pay walled civic perk for $30 - you need BOTH to use it and it's not even a good one. It's really just unacceptable that 5+ year old DLC haven't been rolled into the base game, I refuse to believe whatever they'd lose on 'new' sales is more than what they're already losing by maintaining this impenetrable money wall that keeps out perspective players and pisses off older ones until they stop spending.

Even if you want to argue that age doesn't depreciate the value of DLC (I disagree), then you still have to contend with the fact the volume of the DLC is a nightmare for anyone new or curious about the game - and that's not good for growing or even maintaining the player base. It's approaching an on-boarding cost that is simply unreasonable for anyone but true Dire Whales, and I do not believe Stellaris is the type of game to hold a Genshin tier whale pod that'll keep it afloat, it's just not that type of game. I started playing Stellaris shortly after it came out, I bought only the DLC I wanted as they came out and never felt salty about spending $10 or $20 once or sometimes twice a year to support a game I'm still enjoying. But anyone playing now has to purchase this entire back catalog - and if they want the same experience they need to buy years of DLC all at the same time instead of getting to space it out over years like I did to make the price tag easier to swallow. Sure, you don't NEED it, but that loops back around to, well, that's like half the features of the game. Maybe the review you read didn't mention that the one thing you wanted to try out is one of those DLC features - so now you have to do research before you buy it to make sure you're getting the experience you want. It's a mess of a purchasing decision that adds layers of complication it doesn't need as if TRYING to scare people away from spending money on it. It's truly baffling. If you have to choose between spending $300 on a full game or $30 on half a game, I feel like most are going to rightly choose "buy something else entirely". And I honestly think they're right to.

(I will not address the subscription because I don't want to encourage it)

I waffled a lot on whether to ultimately give it a thumbs up or down because at the end of the day I do enjoy the game. I still put 8 hours into a new campaign every few months and I enjoy doing it. I prefer to review a game on it's own merits and what it is now, rather than what it could be or my feelings on any developer politics. But in the end it equally feels dishonest to anyone looking for genuine advice about it's worth if I said I recommended it. I think the only type of person this game is unarguably for is the kind of person who already knows it's for them and very few others, especially in its current state.

I hesitated on Stellaris for a long time. I'd see promotions for it but couldn't wrap my head around what it is. It wasn't until I tried Crusader Kings 3 that I realized Paradox's unique style and approaches to games. (Which can be good and bad but more on that later.) Stellaris is a strategy game in spirit of the Civilization series. You basically take control of a stellar empire and try to build your way up in the galaxy,. Much like the Civ series, there are multiple paths to a victory and even if you lose, you can still keep playing after someone is declared the victor. Once you wrap your head around the formula, it's pretty fun.

So the good? Stellaris is an excellent strategy game. There are loads of technologies, civics, ethics and more in the game. The models and graphics all look good for what it is. The music is stellar (ha!) and keeps you in the mood while in a long marathon session. I really enjoy the politics in the game and the depth of the technology trees.

The bad: The most common complaint of any Paradox game is the DLC. If you look at it from the standpoint of buying the game and waiting to buy the DLC somewhere down the line during a steam sale, it isn't so bad. But much like the Sims, jumping into the series after the release of like 15 DLCs is daunting and expensive. Luckily, they released the monthly subscription pack that while optional, gives you access to all the DLC. I like it in ways because sometimes you may not be playing it as much so you can always cancel it.

Overall: I am really enjoying the game. I had a few weeks off for Christmas break from work. I got Indiana Jones on gamepass for PC. Played a little bit of it and ended up back on Stellaris for 3 days in a row instead. (not a knock, Indiana Jones is fun but I guess I ended up preferring to play Stellaris.) Here's hoping for many more hours. Oh, did I mention the mods? Paradox games are often mod friendly. You can find just about anything you want for this game! Even Star Wars and Star Trek total conversions!

Playing as brain eating butterflies civilization, which uses humans as menial workers. In a few hundred years humans decided to rise against their brain-eating superiors, separated from the empire and flew their ships towards butterfly capital. What they did not foresee, was that with the left over resources and just being 10x smarter butterflies just nuked their ships to splinters (while human tech was equivalent of space axes and sticks). But! How would the measly butterflies take back the planet, when the armies are killed with a gust of wind? Never fear! Let's invent some robots for just this purpose.
Next thing you know, the hunter-killers are crawling around destroying the last line of human defences and behold! "Peace" ensues again, back to the "traditional" way of life, but this time humans being bred and working in the mines are overseered by their robot "supervisors" and discretely taught about their "true" superior masters since childhood.
10/10 would play more if there was more than 24h in a day.

It's a very intricate and complicated game. But if you like strategy resource management games that have tech trees and an infinite amount of scenarios this is the game for you. The learning curve is very steep but I have put in 40 hours into the game and can see myself coming back to this game for years to come when I get that itch to build a civilization and conquer the galaxy!

Really wanted to like Stellaris, but it's turned into the typical buggy Paradox DLC mill. I even bought a few because I was excited for the game, but no luck. It feels like there's no vision or roadmap for the game and it's just a constant flavor of the month churn of power creeping DLC.

Very interesting game but vanilla is missing content and everything cool is hidden behind a paywall. This dlc business model in which you have to spent 282€ for the entire game and some those dlc packages even have a bad to modest rating is dissapointing.

DLC exhaustion, if you have money to burn have fun. otherwise keep scrolling.

A great and fun game locked behind unintuitive UI choices and unexplained gameplay mechanics that get really annoying very fast.

Every Empire is Japan 1945 and will never surrender, even if you occupy every planet in their system, which leads to that you have to claim every system of theirs and then settle for peace. After which you have to wait a time until a truce agreement ended. I have an overwhelming army compared to theirs, why would hold myself to an truce agreement?

War exhaustiong is an unexplained weird mechanic that builds up overtime, so both parties dont go into stalemates. Why my war exhausting goes up so fast even when i win every battle i do not know. How would i? it was never explained proper in the first place.

Empires can just close their borders on you, which makes it impossible to travers their land. Not that you can choose to respect their choices or not, no. Closed borders make it magically impossible for your warships to traverse like some magic field was installed. Got your ships trapped in another empire your with war with? now you gotta declare war on the other nation so your ships can leave.

There are so many different recourses in the game that often only do one or two things and so complicate things with no reason. You load up your first game and instantly feel like you have been hit by a semitruck of information. Since this games version of a tutorial is a text field with short information of the thing you just pressed, the number one thing searched on youtube is "stellaris tutorial"

i like this game and i will play it some more, but it really makes it hard to say it my fav game.

This is a convoluted mess with no direction and no objectives. You will have to take a college course to get started. If you hate reading like I do, stay away from this.

Are you serious!! I log in today and I can't play any of my saves, local or cloud because I haven't purchased 1 D L C and 1 texture pack.. I have played this game for years on multiple accounts, spent tons of money on everything but these 2 items (which aren't even the newest) because i didn't want them ,or a dang subscription and now I can't play my saves!! So this is the benefits of loyalty. This WAS my go to game everyday for years and it's over because of money grubbing greed... I will be uninstalling, how sad

Couldn't get past that the base game instantly recommends getting at least 3 other DLC's to get the base experience...

The game is just unplayable without the DLC's yet the amount they charge is ridiculous. The complete edition is now on sale for $125, $280 being the original price.

The game without DLC's is just barren and boring, most new people will end up losing interest in the game without ever even finishing their first campaign. And if they don't, they will on their 2/4th campaign because everything happening will just be predictable and a waiting game of constant micromanaging. Without any exciting stuff happening after the year 2250/2300.

83% of Stellaris owners never conquered another nations planet according to the steam achievements.
94.1% of Stellaris owners never have finished and won a singleplayer campaign

Even the starter edition is $50, now at an all time low because of the winter sales at $18. Yet for this price they only give you 2 DLC's (Utopia and Synthetic Dawn). 2 great expansions but still only a incredibly small addition to what this game has to offer at such a steep price.

Not a singular new player stumbling upon Stellaris is willing to put down $150 for a bunch of DLC's, instead they'll buy the cheaper versions without any or very little DLC's. And be quickly disappointed (in most cases) as these versions only hold 5/100th of what the game has to offer. And if they do enjoy it, they'll have to spend a bunch of money on additional DLC's just to prolong their enjoyment of the game

I really feel like this is a huge reason why most of the influx of new players during sales instantly vanishes the next month, and why the multiplayer scene is rotten and dying.

First, the game is great. One of the best 4x games ever made.

So why do I not recommend it? Mostly because of Paradox's development strategy of constantly releasing more and more content - stuffing the game like Homer being served donuts in hell - has created a unique feeling of ennui. Stellaris and Crusader Kings have proven that there indeed can be too much of a good thing.

I shouldn't feel exhausted at the idea of playing the game, but I do. The knowledge of all the DLC and expansions, some I have some I don't, some I need some are optional. It's just... exhausting. The subscription service they offer to unlock all DLC for a monthly fee is a solution sure, but I don't like it. It is gross to me and feels like the type of thing you'd see in a cash vampire mobile game. but Paradox games nowadays are cash vampires... so I guess they're a match made in heaven.

Tl;dr Great game, I hate it.

This game is bad.
There is no game here.

When you start it, it is like crack-cocaine: NEW SCREEN HERE NEW POPUP THERE NEW LORE HERE NEW CONTACT THERE NEW EMPIRE HERE, etc.

And that high keeps you going for hours, you transfer saves - everytime you log in you are instantly hooked, sucked into it, stuck like a parasite to an organ...until you lean away from your monitor.

And when you lean away from your monitor - you realize that there is nothing inside this game. Nothing.
There is no strategy, there is no variety, there is no progression, there is no INCENTIVE to play this game, like AT ALL.

Your goverment type choice, your species choice, basically everything in the starting screen before you are spawned in the game DOES NOT matter.

It doesn't matter for one simple reason - it means nothing. It doesn't matter if you are a pacifist, an egalitarian, a democracy, a dictatorship, etc...it changes NOTHING about how the game is played.
Which is a huge fucking letdown considering how eagerly the game presents you with such customization.
And the game...is played pretty simply:

BUILD SHIP.
CONQUER OTHER TO BUILD MORE SHIP.
CONQUER EVERYONE.
WIN.

Amazing.
And that wouldn't be the problem i+f there was anything else. But there isn't. The "anomalies", "excavations" don't really fucking matter - what matters is what type of resource you are going to get after clicking the "accept" button. And even then, it doesn't matter what "resource" do you get, because the resource that you need is ALLOY. TO BUILD MORE SHIP.

It doesn't fucking matter if you you want to build allies, be peaceful or avoid confrontation. IT DOESN'T MATTER. Because WAR in this game is THE ONLY was to win it.

If the combat would save it - it would be much fucking better, but the combat by far SUCKS the most ASS imaginable. COMBAT in a video game of this type is supposed to be A THRILLING, BALLS TO THE WALL KIND OF EXPERIENCE, where you look at every unit, how it falls, how it operates, what fucking damage it has, etc. STELLARIS prefers to do it pretty simply: PRESS BUTTON MORE NUMBER WIN.

That's IT. PRESS BUTTON, MORE NUMBER = WIN. LESS NUMBER = LOSE.
THEN WHY THE FUCK DO YOU NEED SHIP "UPGRADES" THAT CHANGE NOTHING?
WEAPON "UPGRADES" THAT CHANGE THE SPRITE COLOR FROM BLUE TO RED?
WHY CAN'T I SELECT A FUCKING TECH TREE, WHY DOES A FUCKING TECH TREE HAS GOT BE FUCKING RANDOM???

War is the only way to win this game.

And that would NOT be a problem if this game was sold as "CONQUER AND KILL EVERYTHING". Then, there wouldn't be a problem and I would never buy it. But the game tells you that it's an "EMPIRE BUILDING SIMULATOR", which it is not.

It would NOT be a problem if the game did not have USELESS ESPIONAGE MECHANICS.
it would not be a PROBLEM if the game did NOT have "DIPLOMACY"!!

This game's capital G GAMEPLAY is: "click on windows and click on pop-up's and click on alerts and double click on "hyperlanes" and triple click to build an army and quadruple click to add more ships".

Technology DOES NOT MATTER. Espionage DOES NOT MATTER. Allegiances and federations DO NOT MATTER.

I DON'T GIVE A FLYING FUCK IF THE CATFUCKER'S FEDERATION HAS ESTABLISHED A COMMERICIAL AGREEMENT WITH THE PUSSYRIDDEN BULLDOZERS!!

ALERTS ARE USELESS!! "RANDOM EVENTS" ARE MORBIDLY PATHETIC GARBAGE.
TECH TREES ARE A CRIME AGAINST INTELLIGENCE. RANDOM "ALLIES" ARE CARDBOARD CUTOUTS OF NUMBERS
THIS GAME IS ALL. ABOUT. NUMBERS.
AND EVEN AMONGST ALL OF THOSE NUMBERS, ONLY THE "DAMAGE" NUMBERS COUNT
IT'S MADNESS!!

This game is literally like crack-cocaine. It greets you with this overwhelming "complexity", "freedom" and "choice", only for you to come down hard as a fucking asteroid from it. "There is nothing there, is it?"

It's empty. There is no game here.

It also seems that this game has a sentiment "modded is better". If your game needs mods to be good - your game sucks HUGE BALLS.

And don't get me started on the "DLC's". They are not "DLC's". They are THE GAME.
And paying for this "GAME" with all it's DLC's is an endavour only rich kiddies with oil rig daddies can afford.

There probably would be nothing bad in it if there was a game to play here. But there is no game.

You can imagine that you are playing a game - but there still is none.

A completely unrewarding, shallow, and frankly, piss-boring experience. It is rare that I come across a game that has such little in it and it makes me mad.

FUCK YOU PARADOX FOR MAKING ME BELIEVE IN A GOOD GAME FOR ONCE!!

P.S: Good atmosphere. Astonishingly good OST. Great concept.
Terrible
Fucking
Execution.