Write more about Stellaris? Don't mind if I do. Nuts and bolts tips and tricks this time.
#videogames #strategy #4x #space
https://www.strategygamer.com/articles/stellaris-tips/
This is going to be the first part of a much larger guide to Stellaris than I really had bargained for. Which, I suppose is exactly what you should expect when you're working on writing about a game which is in pretty aggressive flux, dynamically updating, from a company fairly well known for releasing early and releasing often.
Games like Stellaris make it "interesting" to be a games journalist. If you want to do the job right, you need to focus on getting the right information, interpreting it in a sensible way, and assembling it such that it's reasonable for someone to read the article and come away feeling as if they have been exposed to something new. And you want to do so in a way so that the moving target is still mostly in your sights six months out after six months of patches and updates.
It's a very narrow path to walk.
Believe it or not, the copy that made it to the site is actually aggressively cut down from the article which I submitted. The burdens of editing, I suppose. There are a lot of writers, and I've worked with several, who don't take editing of their work lightly. If an editor cuts deep and hard, the writer flips their shit. In my mind, they have missed the whole point of being a freelance writer. We don't write to please ourselves, necessarily. We write to fulfill the needs of the editorial staff. If what we provide is close enough to make it to be run but that editorial staff needs to make changes, that's why they give us money in exchange for the pleasure.
As much as I love this game, and I do, I'm actually looking forward to not having to concentrate on it quite as much until next year. I don't know how professional video gamers make it; if I had to play a single game eight hours a day or more to keep up my professional chops, I'd go into a simpler field of work with less mental stress – like professional assassination or deep-sea mining or air traffic control.
Nobody wants that stuff.
Master of Orion clone? I put it on my wishlist. The latest MOO sucked, so might be interesting to see what they did with the 4X space genre.
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Oh, Hades no.
Master of Orion was a turn based 4X game with a focus on space combat as the primary means of Empire interaction and a relatively limited scope of sets of planetary buildings. Your political set up mainly define how you earned money and gave you a few special powers. (And yes, the latest MOO absolutely sucked. I can make a cogent argument that MOO 3 sucked and was a terrible disappointment back in the day, but that's a different post.)
Stellaris has a lot more in common with the other Paradox grand strategy/real-time games in terms of level of abstraction and means of interaction between empires. Planet side development is more like province development in Europa Universalis 4, and balancing the political preferences of your population as a whole or making use of them to shift into more useful government systems is part of play.
Very different types of gameplay there.
Honestly, if you want to have more fun in the 4X genre at this point, you either have to go back and play those original games via emulation or jump into new approaches to interaction with those mechanics. Endless Space 2 is a far better 4X turn based game than pretty much most of the entries since MOO 2, and I might even give it the edge because of the role-playing/story embedded into the traditional architecture. Star Ruler 2 was an incredible real-time 4X game which never got the recognition it deserved for introducing real-time diplomacy and mechanics built around resource transportation. Stellaris slams right into grand strategy rather than "strategy" and bring something very different to the table.
The best thing about being a gamer in the modern world is that if you have even a little bit of curiosity about something, you can pull up tons – hours – of people playing games you've never heard of to find out if it's something that looks like fun. My measure is to see if I find myself screaming "you're doing it wrong!" at the screen. If I am, I probably want to play the game.
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Yeah, I liked MOO2 the best. But I still liked MOO3 alright. Just not as much as MOO2. The new MOO was just plain horrible though. The best part of it was the voice overs...and some of those were also the worst part. I don't think I even finished it once. I ended up restarting it several times, but didn't play all the way through more than once, if that.
But, I think with a bit of change, it could be an alright game to play. But I think they pretty much abandoned it when it became obvious it wouldn't be successful, which was entirely their own fault.
I have looked for open source 4X space games many times, so I probably do really miss those days. Perhaps I should buy this one, since it's on sale for 75% off on GOG, but with crypto so far down I've gone into extreme savings mode. $10 now isn't much, but if I wait for another sale when I have far more money, it's a lot better. I think for now I'll see if there are any more open source games out now and wait.
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Great article!
I'm only moderately happy with these changes to the game. The Clausewitz Engine games are great but they lack in "simple" intuitive visual cues to "what's going on." These latest changes to Stellaris take it a step further in what I consider to be the wrong direction.
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Of course, they simultaneously make it much more effective and efficient to run larger games on smaller computers. It's much easier to calculate and manage the allocation of abstract resources than it is to try and place them mechanically on board tiles.
From my perspective, it's a pretty vast improvement – though the problem is that it is harder to visualize and harder to communicate. In the next few patches we're supposed to see a little bit more feedback visually on the allocation of jobs and resources, which will help a bit.
I need to test and see if places that you can open a branch office are part of the Expansion Planner, because determining the best place to put a branch office involves a lot of clicking and poking around right now, which is hugely annoying.
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As a visually oriented person, I would appreciate more visual cues for sure... crossing fingers.
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