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[forsaken1111]

You do not have to play for 50 hours to know if you're enjoying a game, regardless of genre. A well designed game keeps you in the fun zone for most of your play time, not just briefly at the very end. If you are playing the game and not having fun for the majority of your time, you probably don't like it and I don't know why you would continue.

I disagree with this. Different games are different. I play the Dominions series, and someone recently complained to me that after 22 hours, he didn't feel like he understood how to play. That's an extreme case and I think 50 hours is higher than you're likely to need for Stellaris, but different games take different amounts of time to get into. Depending on the game and your personality, games are often not fun until you understand them. Furthermore, with games that employ a narrative structure (whether that's an actual narrative or simply an implication of narrative like the one commonly built into strategy games via tech advancement) you often have an early buildup to a dramatic payoff. The building may be less enjoyable to you, but is necessary for the sake of the payoff, and you can't say if you've enjoyed the whole without both of those parts. Crossing the streams a bit, in the anime thread, there was a fellow complaining that a particular character was an asshole who never really got his comeuppance - but had watched only part of the series and in the very next episode, that character got his comeuppance. Bringing this back to Stellaris, the early game feels like a build-up to the mid-game, and it's boring but has elements of interest which at least make you think Stellaris could be a fun game once you really get into the swing of things. And then you get to the midgame, and it's still boring and now there are lots interesting things going on but now you've gotten into ascension and might be starting to hear whispers of the crises so it feels like you're building up to the late game. But then you get there and it's not that great either but you've been playing this long so you see it through. And then it's pretty much over so you set the game aside and see that you've spent 50 all day playing it, so you must have really enjoyed it.

When starting Stellaris, I knew way before 50 hours that I was enjoying the game. The mechanics and events came together to tell a story which I found to be entertaining, and I enjoyed many aspects of the simulation. If you have zero enjoyment until 50 hours have passed, you do not like the game or at the very least it is poorly designed and far too heavily weighted on the latter end of the game.

To use your example of Dominions 4, I still don't 'feel like I understand how to play' on a pro level but I knew very soon after starting my very first game that I was enjoying myself. I liked seeing the little battles with spells being thrown about. I liked making (mostly blind at that point due to my ignorance) choices about what to research based solely on the descriptions of the spells. It wasn't until my 4th game that I even knew you could make more than the starting magic items, but I still was HAVING FUN figuring these things out, I was enjoying the core gameplay and leading little armies around. There wasn't a sudden enjoyment payload that hit my brain at 35 hours and 22 minutes.

[Sirus]

IME single planet countries that emerge midgame (through liberation or enlightenment) never amount to anything.  So I wouldn't worry about it.  The most important thing you could do is have no gaps inside your own borders, that way they can't fuck with you by colonizing/building frontier outposts within your own space.

Would frontier outposts be enough for this purpose or would I need to colonize worlds as well to keep them from snagging them?

I've never really enlightened a species to keep it in permanent vassalhood before. Usually I only do it as a xenophilic species in order to integrate them and broaden the types of worlds I can exploit with my new multi-species empire.

[Karnewarrior]

I think it'd be a neat idea to uplift them into vassalhood and then give them a planet outside of your little cul-de-sac. Then you can either keep them and RP it as them being your philosobot's "voice" to the galaxy, with the actual robomind living in ponderous seclusion, or you can cut them loose, and maybe even cheat/conquer their homeworld and basically just drive them out of your space.

Personally I like the first one. It sounds super space-opera, and could present some interesting situations in the future, like perhaps when the crisis arrives you show up with a massive supertech fleet and save the day or something.

It's your game though, man.

[EnigmaticHat]

IME single planet countries that emerge midgame (through liberation or enlightenment) never amount to anything.  So I wouldn't worry about it.  The most important thing you could do is have no gaps inside your own borders, that way they can't fuck with you by colonizing/building frontier outposts within your own space.

Would frontier outposts be enough for this purpose or would I need to colonize worlds as well to keep them from snagging them?

I've never really enlightened a species to keep it in permanent vassalhood before. Usually I only do it as a xenophilic species in order to integrate them and broaden the types of worlds I can exploit with my new multi-species empire.

Looking it up, if they're a protectorate or vassal they won't be able to colonize outside their borders.  So you don't even need to clear out gaps.

They will get one planet worth of shared borders with you tho.  So any planets or stars you haven't built stations over they'll be able to steal.  Likewise if there's a second planet of the same climate really close they'll be able to take it.  But even in the worst case scenario that they somehow colonize or build a frontier outpost within their borders, they'll just get a tiny bit more shared borders.  And since its shared borders, if you've already built all the mining outposts there it won't change anything.

[ZeroGravitas]

You do not have to play for 50 hours to know if you're enjoying a game

I didn't say I did. I said

I never understood this sentiment. Some times you need dozens or hundreds of hours - especially in a GSG or a Stellaris-type game - just to finish one game, or to figure out how everything works. It takes that long just to find out how the game works. You're not even qualified to say if Stellaris is a good game or not for probably 50 hours.

I think it's a difference in priority when critiquing something. When I wrote that I wasn't trying to (and I'm still not really) trying to do some real in depth analysis of stellaris and how "good it is" my priority is, was it worth the money I spent, can I recommend it to people? The money for time spent thing is why the hours are important. If a game has a good 50 hours but then gets boring, but it's five bucks, even if after playing 300 hours you could say it's a technically bad game I don't think that'd be fair to it. It would be certainly worth the money spent... Which sorta makes it a good game? Despite the reservations about it? Maybe? That at least seems like a reasonable thought to me. Stellaris I'm not totally sure on that front. I spent 40ish bucks on it and got 71 hours. That's a pretty fair ratio to me. Sure, only about 20 of those hours were really good. And maybe another 20 enjoyable. And the last thirty were a bit sourer, but they were at least worth my time (otherwise I wouldn't have put them in) so can I really say it failed in it's ultimate objective of entertaining me for an amount of time relative to the money I spent on it? From that perspective even if I think it has many many failings can I call it bad? Maybe from a critical stand point if I was trying to be a critic. But I'm not, I'm just thinking about if I could recommend it.

I agree with most of what you said here actually, except this part specifically

And the last thirty were a bit sourer, but they were at least worth my time (otherwise I wouldn't have put them in)

This is 100% observably false - and I'm not talking about you personally, but ALL THE TIME you see people sucked into things they actually don't enjoy, either out of habit, or compulsion, and generally when they aren't critically thinking that much about what they actually enjoy.

But again, if we go back to the first thing you said:

I think it's a difference in priority when critiquing something.

That's really the main point, I agree. If you're mostly worried about "Am I constantly having fun while playing this game?" then you can set yourself whatever introductory time necessary before you start checking, and then keep checking that. But if you're interested in something else, then you may not know if the game fits your criteria for dozens or hundreds of hours.

It took me about 300 hours of EU4 to decide I didn't like the game. I still play it occasionally to check on new content, but overall I gave it a negative review on Steam for any number of reasons that aren't "I'm not constantly having fun while playing this game."

[Dunamisdeos]

I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Is it that a game can be good even if it is not an enjoyable experience, and conversely bad even though you put 300+ hours into it? If so, are you saying that you lack critical thinking skills, and therefore spent 300 hours doing a thing you did not enjoy?

I have never met a single person who spent so much as 10 hours doing a thing then retroactively realized they had actually disliked all of it the whole time. I don't think that's how anything works.

Also, I don't think Stellaris or even dwarf fortress takes hundreds of hours to understand the mechanics. Dozens, yes, but only in a game like dwarf fortress.

[Cruxador]

I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Is it that a game can be good even if it is not an enjoyable experience

he's speaking about constant fun specifically. It's expected that a game has its ups and downs, and a game that's fun overall may still have parts you don't enjoy.

I have never met a single person who spent so much as 10 hours doing a thing then retroactively realized they had actually disliked all of it the whole time. I don't think that's how anything works.

I don't know anything about your love life, but I can assure you that people can spend much more than a few hours in a situation that they layer realize they hated all along.

[Dunamisdeos]

Ok, so we are saying that different people have different expectations, and can therefore have fun with different things according to their own expectations?

Like I'm looking over the last few pages are there is a lot of contradictory things being said. It reads like one of those "I have a strong opinion but I'm going to give it as obliquely as possible so when you guess the conclusion I want I can say WOW THAT'S A GOOD POINT, THANK YOU FOR MAKING IT I AGREE TOO" kind of things. And people get banned around here for being deliberately obtuse. So I want to help cut to the point, you see. No sarcasm.

But to add my two cents in clearly, I've played a lot of games with a lot of very varied people and I've never met anyone who suddenly realized, oops, they actually hated the last 50+ hours of the game. I've met people who had fun and enjoyed the first part of a game but found that it got stale later, or introduced features that they did not care for later, but this is not the same as not enjoying the entire experience.

[Retropunch]

I get what's being said about 'you can end up doing something you don't like for too long', but 30-50 hours is...sorta a bit long. It's not like where you randomly end up watching a 4 hour live stream of a rubbish game, 30-50 hours is multiple sessions where you've sat down and made a conscious decision to play Stellaris instead of the literally infinite amount of other games available.

It all depends what you class as 'fun' - many people wouldn't say the Dark Souls series is 'fun' in a classical sense, but it's 'fun' in a rewarding sense. Many people judge 4x games on if they give you the 'just one more turn' feeling - if it can keep you doing it for 50 hours that's pretty 'fun' in my opinion.

[Dunamisdeos]

Yeah I don't mean to come across as attacking anyone, just legit looking for clarification. If that's what being said...

It all depends what you class as 'fun' - many people wouldn't say the Dark Souls series is 'fun' in a classical sense, but it's 'fun' in a rewarding sense. Many people judge 4x games on if they give you the 'just one more turn' feeling - if it can keep you doing it for 50 hours that's pretty 'fun' in my opinion.

...then I agree.

[ZeroGravitas]

I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Is it that a game can be good even if it is not an enjoyable experience, and conversely bad even though you put 300+ hours into it? If so, are you saying that you lack critical thinking skills, and therefore spent 300 hours doing a thing you did not enjoy?

I have never met a single person who spent so much as 10 hours doing a thing then retroactively realized they had actually disliked all of it the whole time. I don't think that's how anything works.

Yeah, that's not remotely what I said, and if this is such a difficult concept to understand, I'm not sure I'll be able to explain it to you. My entire point was that the whole "enjoyable experience" and "fun" thing don't necessarily have anything to do with each other.

Also, I don't think Stellaris or even dwarf fortress takes hundreds of hours to understand the mechanics. Dozens, yes, but only in a game like dwarf fortress.

You literally can't even get to crisis mechanics until 200 in-game years. So you have to know enough about the game to survive that long, and then no matter how well you had been doing, you find out if you had actually been doing "well" relative to the hardest in-game challenge.

And then you've only been playing one galaxy size, one ethics set, one authority.

[E. Albright]

Question: is there any point in continuing to play single-planet tall when you have six inhabitable worlds within four hyper jumps of your homworld, along with another world with primitives, and all within a single, defensible cul-de-sac?

If you're really aggressively pursuing the one-planet route, you'll still get faster ascension and (depending on how far out you push your borders to get orbital resources - it should be really, really far) probably faster research than with 7 colonies for a core. Colony and pop penalties hurt a lot more than surface facilities help in those areas. You'll get a more stable empire, but in the long run you'd probably be stronger if you waited to colonize all that. Which is one of the quirks about how Stellaris deals with "smallpox" (i.e., tiny cities/colonies everywhere with no incentive to be tall) that has always seemed silly and irritating.

Most of the additions in the DLCs are the same. Yeah, you can make megastructures, but they don't add anything to the gameplay (except maybe rushing habs but even then probably not) - they come too late and are generally not worth the cost. They don't help you win, they don't help the AI win, they don't add meaningful decisions to the game...

If you're playing one-planet, the Research Complex is a huge boost, and very much accessible in the first hundred years.

You literally can't even get to crisis mechanics until 200 in-game years. So you have to know enough about the game to survive that long, and then no matter how well you had been doing, you find out if you had actually been doing "well" relative to the hardest in-game challenge.

As a data point in support of this, I got Stellaris when it went on sale in September. Through insomnia and neglecting some things I probably shouldn't have, Steam tells me I'm pushing 300h of gameplay. I've never seen a crisis because the Fallen Empire mechanics took so long to get the hang of and/or so thoroughly irritate me (let's just say that I'm not great at Stellaris and/or my playstyle meshes very poorly with dealing with Awakened Empires) that I've never slogged out far enough to see a crisis yet. I haven't even actually had the patience to go all the way through a war with an Awakened Empire, and since I've been hooked on doing bigger galaxies, I have yet to finish a game. I've done a whole bunch of different early-to-mid-games, though.

The ambivalence and uncertainty described upthread perfectly fit my severely mixed feelings about this game that I've put ~300h into playing and really like and/or might hate. To date, it's been "just one more turn" right up to the turn when it very suddenly becomes "time to do something - anything - else". Perhaps that's where it transitions from "4x + GSG" to "just GSG"...

[ZeroGravitas]

I ran into a similar situation when the machine empire patch came out. I really wanted to see the Contingency but the game had basically ended by 2140 (well, there was one FE left, but it was the new one and they allegedly have some interaction with the Contingency). So I just had to sit for a few hours with nothing to do.

[Sirus]

I wish I knew why, every time I try to play tall, I am inevitably surrounded by extremely wide empires that out-tech me by a considerable margin.

I build the frontier outposts, I do my damned best to get strong researchers and research-boosting ascension perks and civics. Yet every time, I swiftly fall behind in the tech race. In this game, ferex, I'm very close to a bunch of evangelizing zealots. Their empire is huge, 13 colonies all told. They're strong enough that not even the militant isolationist fallen empire bothers them, even with their borders being pressed together.

Then there's me, with my single colony and loads of outposts gathering as much as I can. Even leaving aside the obvious disparity in fleet capacities, I'm little more than a baby compared to these titans. I'm starting to think that all this guff about playing tall just isn't for me.

[EnigmaticHat]

As I understand it, playing tall is mostly about exploiting a specific build (the one planet build everyone is on about).  Beyond that, Stellaris is designed so that tall empires are weaker than wide empires.  You'll end up strong for your size (especially if you don't accidentally let someone steal your 2 freebies), and its your best bet if you get cut off, but if you're playing normally you'll be pretty weak.  Building tall is basically "working with what you have".

The one planet build means something specific.  I've never done it so I couldn't tell you *what* specifically it entails, but something specific.