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[ZeroGravitas]

That's fair enough. Though that hasn't stopped CKII and EUIV from continuing to make the daily "top games by player count" list on Steam consistently. There's only about a thousand fewer people playing CKII than nuCOM 2, and the latter just had a major DLC drop.

What list are you referring to? Or rather, what do you count as "top games by player count"? Because EU4 has never been in the top 25 as far as I know. CK2 is even smaller (and was never as big, anyway).

When it comes to Stellaris, I think this graph tells the story pretty nicely: http://steamcharts.com/cmp/8930,281990#1m

[Flying Dice]

That's fair enough. Though that hasn't stopped CKII and EUIV from continuing to make the daily "top games by player count" list on Steam consistently. There's only about a thousand fewer people playing CKII than nuCOM 2, and the latter just had a major DLC drop.

What list are you referring to? Or rather, what do you count as "top games by player count"? Because EU4 has never been in the top 25 as far as I know. CK2 is even smaller (and was never as big, anyway).

When it comes to Stellaris, I think this graph tells the story pretty nicely: http://steamcharts.com/cmp/8930,281990#1m

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Top games by current player count. EUIV is 32nd, CKII is 69th. It's also more than a little unfair to compare Paradox games to Civ--Civ is and always has been 'babby's first 4X', and grand strategy games are relatively niche even in the strategy genre. The people they lose are mostly going to be casuals, is what I'm saying. People stuck by CKII and EUIV when they had shitty launches. There's no huge silent audience of people willing to drop full price on a Paradox game who aren't also already devoted to grand strategy. It's like saying that if only M&B Warband was better a bunch of people playing Skyrim would be playing Warband instead.

[ZeroGravitas]

Honestly, I think the biggest issue with Stellaris is something that hasn't really been addressed by the devs. Right now, there's zero replayability. I think part of this stems from the fact that the game is an awkward mashup between a grand strategy and a 4X, but there's really no reason to play twice because once you've played to the end once, you've pretty much seen it all outside some flavour events. Putting aside the fact that right now the mid-endgame is a boring repetitive slog, something that is important in most 4Xs (and strategy games in general) is making the different sides you play as actually feel different from each other, and Stellaris does not accomplish that. Each race is only different by cosmetics, because you can customize ethics and gov type, and the ethics and gov types only provide small percentage bonuses one way or another. Playing as an individual materalist science government and a communal, spiritualist oligarchy will give you pretty much the same experience, outside of the silly flavour events that always happen for spiritualist. There's a severe lack of unique mechanics for gov types/ethics. Yeah, you're more able to have slaves as a communal species, and more able to purge as a xenophobic species, but that won't really change how you play your game. Everything still has the same boring ass endgoal, which is just to paint the map in your colour by slogging through hundreds of boring identical wars with all the federations that form. And even if the endgame events weren't totally broken, you can see all three in one playthrough, giving no reason to play again to try and find more. Even the planets you can settle makes no real difference. It's just either a boon or an inconvenience depending on how lucky you are with RNG, until you get to the midgame and the point becomes moot.

I'm sure unique mechanics for gov types and ethics will come in the inevitable rush of DLC, but they should be ashamed of the state they released the game in. By the midgame I had to force myself to keep playing because I wanted to see the endgame stuff, and once I realized how boring and broken they were, I quit. Tried again as a different race with different ethics, gov, etc, but it was just more of the same. That IGN was spot on, and I personally would've given it a lower score than 6.5, because only half of one game was any fun.

It sucks, I've been playing Paradox games since HOI2, and this is the first one that I've actively disliked. I love 4Xs and I love Paradox, but I just don't find Stellaris to be any fun past the early game, and I have no desire to play it again. We'll see what they do with DLCs, but I'm pretty disappointed.

I think the stuff about the races all playing the same is one of the biggest problems. Klackons in MoO2 do not play like Elerians who do not play like Darlocks etc. Yet no matter what I pick in Stellaris, I'm pretty much playing the same empire.

The worst aspect of this are the computer empires. They're all faceless blobs that don't really do anything different from one another. And literally faceless, because it's no help remembering them by appearance, since there's no correlation between appearance and ethos, and you can have 95% similar AI alien portraits with diametrically opposite ethos/tech levels/traits/etc. So the first thing you learn when playing is "ignore what the computer empires look like."

While I don't always agree with Tom Chick, I think he put it pretty well here:

A race is nothing more than a set of values that is never constant. You can select one of the eight pre-built races, but why bother, since none of them exists in the game? You might as well just roll your own race, because that’s what the universe is going to do. Every faction you encounter in Stellaris is a randomly rolled set of values. Not procedural. It’s not as if the bird people are better at flying, the reptile people are better at mining minerals, or the people people are better at diplomacy. It’s completely random. The picture on their diplomacy screen is of no relevance whatsoever. There is nothing inherent in the slimy octopus people, the mushroom people, the bug people, or even the vanilla people people. No one eats rocks, or lives in caves, or doesn’t need farms, or uses special rules. All that matters is their ethos, their traits, and how they move across the map. X, Y, and Z. This is where Paradox’s spreadsheet approach to gameplay, which serves them well when they breathe gameplay data into history, undermines a fundamental tenet of sci-fi. Aliens should be alien. Not just rolled dice with a bunch of babytalk names slapped onto them. Im-do. Quasvalyvia. Jouvon. Pouz-dok. Lagun-chuzz. Faffosan. You will always remember the Klackon in Master of Orion. You will never remember the Oogie-Nollocks Union in Stellaris.

[Glloyd]

Yeah, that's one of the worst parts of it, and that quote is pretty accurate to how I feel. I can be playing as a human individualist materialist oligarchy, and if I run across a Fungaloid individualist materialist oligarchy, we're fundamentally the exact same. Maybe we'll have a different FTL method, but if it's the endgame we might both just have jump drives anyways. It's really silly. But even then, governments/ethoses only mean a few percentage points in one way or another, not actual mechanics. The one thing that separates the races is fundamentally meaningless. Yeah, a plutocratic oligarchy will make more energy credits, but if you pick the right traits/ethoses you can make up the difference, and by the endgame you'll have researched enough percentage bonuses that 10% is nothing. And even then, your playstyle as a democracy vs an oligarchy isn't going to be much different besides dealing with mandates every four years, and autocracies are more or less the same as oligarchies because ruler elections happen so infrequently it's kinda irrelevant.

[Flying Dice]

Okay, just tested a mixed fleet.

OOB
1x Zeus-class CA, DSS Athena (pair of particle lances, long-ranged)
1x Rifleman-class DD, DSS Minotaur (laser-based brawler, medium-ranged)
2x Inferno-class DD, DSS Audacity and DDS Loyal (particle lance, long-ranged)
3x Valor-class corvette, DDS Gauntlet, DDS Boxer, and DDS Decisive (torpedo boat, short-ranged)

I ran them in two engagements. The first was against a single drone group and mining station, the second against eight void clouds. Here's an album annotating them and highlighting what my and the other modders' changes have resulted in.

But yeah. Fleets with ships with very different ideal ranges and behaviors working together coherently. Particle lances firing across a third of a system. No defensive behavior bug. I'm pleased with the results so far.

--

Yeah, the lack of depth and character is problematic.

[Cruxador]

That's fair enough. Though that hasn't stopped CKII and EUIV from continuing to make the daily "top games by player count" list on Steam consistently. There's only about a thousand fewer people playing CKII than nuCOM 2, and the latter just had a major DLC drop.

It's also vastly more polished and fun.

[NullForceOmega]

Fallen empires are really asinine.  Just had an isolationist one pop after over 300 years, they of course decide that my empire, which does not border theirs at all, is infringing upon their boundaries, so they send their stupidly huge fleets to attack me.

I've seen something similar with other empires upon first contact (and occasionally well beyond) where even if there is no border contact at all, they still claim border friction.

Needless to say this was in no way fun for me, as they basically destroyed my entire empire in moments.

[Flying Dice]

The isolationist FEs (and I believe certain ethic/government types for the AI) don't actually treat their borders on the map as their borders, but also essentially see themselves as having a claim on a certain swath of territory around their borders.

And to be perfectly honest I'm not entirely sympathetic to people complaining about it. There should definitely be some clarity changes so that you can glean that from your interactions with them (and also the ability to abandon a colony, holy sheeyeet we need that badly), but if someone settles a world without bothering to scout around it, and even if they think "Gee, I'm sure that these ancient paranoid assholes won't mind if I set up camp a couple lightyears away from the edge of their metaphorical lawn," I sorta see them as having it coming. But yeah. If you talk with them, they should pretty clearly tell you to not stick your nose in anywhere near them, let alone inside their claimed territory, instead of the sorta vague "me so strong me bomb you long time" schtick that all the aggressive powers get.

That's not to say that there aren't myriad problems with FEs, just that the ornery militant bastards being mean shits to anyone within striking range should honestly not come as a surprise. It's one of the few good points about the AI, that there are some expressions of it that can't be gamed or quietly managed and will just absolutely shit all over you if you try to play "I'm not touching you! " games with them.

[kilakan]

Isolationist FE's also get SUPER angry if you have a ship inside their borders when they first contact you.  I've been attacked by them a few times because poor old 120 yo grandpa system surveyor was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[IronyOwl]

Really? I tried to survey a militaristic border guarding FE and they didn't seem any less cool with me than normal.

[Flying Dice]

Just meeting them should never be enough to trigger a DoW unless you also insulted them AFAIK.

And oh hey, if you want another fix, go to your defines file (Stellaris>common>defines>00_defines.lua) and search for the line MILITARY_STATION_MAINTENANCE_MUL. Change the value from 0.75 to -0.25. The intent was for military stations to have 25% lower maintenance costs compared to warships, but in typical Paradox fashion they didn't bother to do Q&A testing or even double-check their code, so the actual effect is that military stations cost 75% more in maintenance instead.

I've got a design for an eight particle lance fortress that only costs slightly more in upkeep than a three-lance BB with the -25% docked maintenance reduction.

Another change I made for myself that might be worth considering is dropping mining and research stations from 1 energy upkeep to 0.5. Otherwise it's actually somewhat counterproductive to ever build stations on one-resource nodes, since you could get double the minerals with a T1 mining building or triple the research points with a T1 lab for the same energy cost.

[NullForceOmega]

snipped for text wall

They were in a different spiral arm, I had NO contiguous territory, they just declared war on me because I had first contact.  This isn't a sympathy request, its a WTF.  As in: I have no close contact with you, we don't even have any neighbors in common, all I did was get your attention by accident with a damn science ship, does that really require you to arbitrarily obliterate me?

It was a matter of days from first contact that they decided to wreck my shit, no insults, no nothing, they just said, 'nope fuck you' and killed me.

You want real insanity?  In a different save I've got another isolationist FE that has had continuous REAL (I've actually pushed their borders back, and have colonies in the area I occupy) border friction with my empire for almost a thousand years, and they aren't even pissed, just kind of irritated.

[IronyOwl]

snipped for text wall

They were in a different spiral arm, I had NO contiguous territory, they just declared war on me because I had first contact.  This isn't a sympathy request, its a WTF.  As in: I have no close contact with you, we don't even have any neighbors in common, all I did was get your attention by accident with a damn science ship, does that really require you to arbitrarily obliterate me?

It was a matter of days from first contact that they decided to wreck my shit, no insults, no nothing, they just said, 'nope fuck you' and killed me.

Did they actually conquer your planets or anything, or just roll over your military and then leave?

[NullForceOmega]

While they were attempting to blockade everything I sent my navy (27k strength) on a suicide mission to their ringworld and blew their transports (and an awful lot of their reserve fleet) straight to hell  They had already smashed my starports, and with all my planets blockaded it was functionally game over.

[IronyOwl]

Do FEs just fight to the death or something? No surrender option?


Unrelated: I'm guessing there's no workaround to that thing where an in-growth pop stops growing if the last pop from its race migrates off the planet, unless you have resettlement or purging enabled? It's rather unfortunate to lose a tile to a ghostly 1/3 of a pop, but I don't think my individualists are allowed to enable resettlement to fix it.