I always start off being nice until some leader insults me for no reason.
More blood for the blood god 🤷♂️
Heresy fuckin’ detected.
My Stellaris empires always end up starting more like the vulcans with a focus on science and mostly peaceful exploration, and end up a society of soul-crushing academia that will compromise their own sanity, values and safety for any chance at powerful or dangerous knowledge, ruling over a collection of random protectorates that they maintain for little reason other than diplomatic influence and to have someone to lord their vastly supervisor tech over.
So you become the brotherhood of steel
Maybe? I’m not really familiar enough with them to know
Not really. The Brotherhood hordes tech but doesn’t really innovate and they’re basically Fallout Nazis after 4.
They were already pretty fashy but 4 sealed the deal, with an assassination of the few characters keeping them as kind-of-the-good-guys between the entries and the rise of their own Hitler type that, fortunately, a lot of players who missed the political commentary will kill for his sweet coat.
So, you play with the Federation Humans?
Far less friendly, aliens in my empires tend to get marginalized to basic resource planets and banned from growing their population because my primary species is more optimized for research output. Also my most common ascension path is bio-ascension, which federation humans would find very illegal since it’s primarily genetic augmentation.
I start out ad the Ferengi but end up being the joint Ferengi Klingon Empire
What happens when I try to play Stellaris:
I am straight up the Dominion. I have to really keep at raising the cap for my army because I’m going to be pumping out attack vessels non-stop to overwhelm the galaxy with forces.
Although I also like the Ferenghi method of just buying everyone.
It’s too bad I just have the base game cuz I’d love to try doing what I did back in Spore and just blow up every planet that isn’t mine.
When I play Stellaris:
I really wanted to love the game when I tried it but really felt I didn’t know what was going on or how to do anything even even though I did the tutorial and everything. The theme is so cool and really appeals to me, maybe I should try again someday
The same publishing company (but different development studio) recently released a simplified, licensed Star Trek game built on the Stellaris Engine.
It’s a little rough around the edges right now but it’s an official Star Trek title and it’s much easier to get into than Stellaris, and it’s currently on sale for $20
Don’t feel bad; Paradox games are (in)famously impenetrable. I wish I had a suggestion besides “play a lot and lose a lot” 🤷♀️ The only games I can think of with higher learning curves (more like learning cliffs) are EVE and Dwarf Fortress.
Haha I liked dwarf fortress so much though. For some reason I was able to do that one.
The joke is that it’ll take 1444 hours to get through EU4’s tutorial. And it isn’t a bad joke. Stellaris is a little different in that the replayability depends more on randomness than the other Paradox titles. But that randomness suffers from the “bowl of oatmeal” problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation
Particularly in the application of procedural generation with video games, which are intended to be highly replayable, there are concerns that procedural systems can generate infinite numbers of worlds to explore, but without sufficient human guidance and rules to guide these. The result has been called “procedural oatmeal”, a term coined by writer Kate Compton, in that while it is possible to mathematically generate thousands of bowls of oatmeal with procedural generation, they will be perceived to be the same by the user, and lack the notion of perceived uniqueness that a procedural system should aim for.
I’ve encountered that in Angband, one of the earliest (and still-developed!) roguelikes. It’s got 100 required dungeon levels, plus 20 beyond the final boss’s level (basically just for getting cooler loot), and so many of them are procedural oatmeal. Newer versions are better about that, introducing more variety so it’s not identical levels. Amusingly, the developers even lampshade this themselves: you get level feelings every level that tell you what the level has in terms of loot and dangerous enemies; if you go through the levels too quickly, the level feeling you’ll get is something like “looks like any other level”.
I should really try this game again. I’m just so bad at it :(
A solid strategy is to build as many research stations as possible and grab everything that increases reswarch speed when its there. If you do it right you’ll start fielding your first battleships while others are still outfitting their first destroyers.
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