I don't really know what to say if you play a game for 150 hours before realizing you don't like it. Even for a Paradox game that's kind of insane (not the hours played, but hours played without enjoying it). Most games you'll know whether you like it within an hour or so. I think for games like CK2/Victoria 2 you could probably know whether it's your thing within 10 hours.
I can sympathize with this rationality. I found Stellaris pleasing at first, hitting some promising starts. As I replayed I started seeing more flaws, but still had hope - after all, if it could grab my attention for this long it must be doing something. The more and more I played though, the more I realized I was not having fun, I was getting sick of the game. So I turned to modding, started personalizing the common files, started creating custom races to interact with in an attempt to inject life and vibrancy into the game. I found more often than not, I wanted the game to be fun and work more than I wanted to play the game. After trying to balance combat, sort out crisis glitches, make carriers useful without making them OP, make traits meaningful, terraforming not shit, colonization proper sci-fi... It's all the same, after so long, it's just all the same, not even modding could save it - it's too unfinished.
I genuinely think Stellaris will one day be finished and will be quite solid after gorillions of DLC, but I shut down Stellaris and picked Alpha Centauri back up again, and even the worst urban sprawl terraforming was more enjoyable than Stellaris
Part I: Sectors:
-Needs auto assignment of governors so that short lived races do not become micromanage nonsense every time one dies over hundreds of planets
I don't know why, but I find micromanaging dwarf labours to be less annoying than that bloody skull icon telling me some fucking someone somewhere has died, it's like being an omniscient god trying to filter out endless spam that you can't ignore because the spam is vital to the functioning of your peoples
- It is possible to bind combat ships with non-combat ships to create escorts.
- Non-combat ships without escorts automatically use emergency jump to retreat.
In regards to the first, selecting military ships and right clicking on other ships will cause the former to follow the latter. This can be used to make military ships follow civvy ships or other military ships, and is a good approximation of this idea
In regards to the second I'm surprised that evasive doesn't auto trigger that when civvy ships aren't allowed weapons. Civvy ships can't self destruct or use themselves as kinetic torpedoes against enemy ships, so you can't even do some mad gambit where you place your science vessel in the middle of an enemy fleet and rupture its vacuum point generator to cause maximum damage or something :p
- Remove the dramatic advantages of wormholes. I'm thinking increase range of Warp and speed of lanes.
Or make them really awesome (there is no warp drive that makes travel distance = 0, what the hell, if it's too OP at least make it dangerous tech available or something), but linked to gates controlled by Fallen Empires, black hole singularities and warm hole anomalies found throughout the galaxy
I'm quite annoyed altogether that each solar system doesn't feel like a solar system, it's one of those things where it's better the more ignorant you are, the thing it inspires you to learn more about breaks immersion when you learn of it D:
Also for that matter, space isn't treated like space, this is thoroughly annoying. The galaxy is 2d, solar system is 2d, this is a very fundamental flaw to the game