Magic cards meets D&D Dungeons

I don’t normally do short updates like this, but I could not resist, as I love the idea behind the new Magic cards featuring classic D&D Dungeons.

The new set is made in collaboration with D&D Forgotten Realms. A setting that I used to visit in roleplaying sessions with my friends (the “pen and paper” or “armchair” kind of roleplaying.) I also explored it in computer games and even play-by-mail.

Did you play any of these dungeons? Which was the greatest? Let me know in the comments.

The new set has a lot of beautiful, fun, and a few daring cards (as usual.) If you don’t own any magic cards (maybe you sold them all as I did some years back,) you can join me and so many others who play the online version MTG Arena (read my review of MTG Arena.)

A good match

It makes a lot of sense for the two brands to cooperate. D&D and Magic are hard-core fantasy brands know by everybody who touches the genre, and for a long time Magic sets have borrowed from the canon of fantasy, and the ancient real-world cultures and their mythology that inspired the first fantasy novels and D&D.

Recently the Kaldheim set featured Vikings with magic powers and alternative versions of the Nordic gods and mythology creatures, such as Sarulf (read: Fenris.) Alternate versions of the Ancient Greeks and the Greek Pantheon were featured in sets such as Theros Beyond Death. Venturing into the scary underworld (Read: Hades.)

It also makes a lot of sense as both Magic The Gathering and D&D are owned by Wizards of the Coast (who is again owned by Hasbro.)

All the new Magic cards.

Most Magic so far

I have played all the various pc versions of Magic the Gathering TCG over the years, and the hugely successful card game is better than ever in the latest version - MTG Arena (Beta).

I must admit I played the Magic card game version for many years and had many good times with the game, so I’m biased.

But is this old game really still good to play? Does it still have what it takes to be compelling and fun? Indeed, it does. The game was so fun I had to uninstall it after a few days of intense play. If I had not, I would not be writing anything.

These days however any pc card game has to be compared to Hearthstone and I feel that MTG Arena is actually better than Hearthstone in some ways while being decidedly worse in others.

Final winning attack in one of the games I played. Sometimes you lose, sometimes you—

If you are a new player to this sort of game, I would choose Hearthstone - it is easy to understand and friendlier in its workings. The intro for new players in Hearthstone is also made for anybody whereas the intro battles in MTG Arena are fairly nerdy.

Also, the inherent issue with mana generation in Magic means that you will have to accept that some of your games fall apart no matter what you do. Some games you will draw mostly mana cards others you don’t get enough mana or the wrong color(s).

Yes, you can and should use strategies in your deck building and playing to help you deal with this in positive ways, but this does not fix the game. It is not like patching a bugged computer program but more like wearing rain clothes all the time, in case it rains. Not an easy thing for at least some new players to understand or enjoy.

Yes, if you played magic before you know this already and have learned to cope. Still games where all you can hope for is that your opponent experiences the same issue or makes a mistake are simply less fun than ones where you have mana and not too much of it.

This is the way it has always been, but if the dear game designers truly want to fix Magic, they need to address the issue! Mana generation is a fun killer, old fashioned and not needed in esports.

It becomes especially evident when compared to Hearthstone’s elegant way of giving players an equal and increasing amount of resources to play cards. You can see how ancient and boring the old mana generation is. Seen over a number of games of magic the mana thing is not terrible, most games are fun to play but mana-issues just happen to often for my linking.

So how is the game better in Hearthstone?

Well, the sheer artistry of the cards is fantastic. Magic has always been great at this, and there is just so much fantastic fantasy art in this game. It is inspiring and impressive. The graphics are more impressive than Hearthstone surely, and many of the touches just looks fantastic.

The daily quest system is also a bit better than Hearthstone in my book. Not a big difference though.

If you have played Magic before, but like me not for a while, MTG Arena is a very nice way to get back into the game. The programming is good and the wait on the servers are near zone - you just get into games straight away. Especially for a Beta version this is very impressive.

The deck creator is in part at least better than Hearthstones. The system for automatically adding mana to your deck is very smooth, you can easily clone decks, and have quite a lot of decks at one, the search filter is smart, and it is flavorful that you can use any illustration in the game as the cover on your “deck box”, and you have an option to choose between two layouts. Well done.

The option to copy deck lists from outside the game could be a nice addition later, but the game really does not have any good social features yet. Hope they will add that later. You can play against a friend but the way they made this feature it does not feel social.

Other good things

Choosing to not show flavor text on cards is a good thing as well. It would take up too much space on screen and would impede the fun and flow of the game.

It is fun when your play or get beaten by some deck which totally blows your mind. Some cards in magic have always been crazy - a lot more so than Hearthstone - and the ways in which you can twist the rules and bend the workings of the game is cool. At the same time it leads to frustration though as you get more games where one of the players had less fun. You can’t have it both ways though, I think.

The actual combat system is better in Hearthstone. It is just more intuitive and fun to attack there than in MTG Arena. Heartstone is more “swipe” and less “drag and drop” - less antiquated if you like.

Once you figure out how to play the game it is a lot of FUN though. Magic just has a lot more depth than Hearthstone, and that is why you will keep coming back.

A fun situation: I killed Black’s 17/4 Enigma Drake which I had first enchanted with Dead Man’s Chest. This resulted in me drawing 17 cards from the top of HIS library, nearly exhausting it, and causing him to forfeit. Just look at all the cards I still have after I played a bunch last turn. Crazy fun :-)

ADDENDUM

I could not stay away from the game for long. Reinstalled it during the holidays, and played a whole lot of magic on the ladder till I hit Platinum 1 rank. The game continues to be improved, and in many ways it has gone beyond Heartstone, but there are still some annoying things like when I play Guild Summit (a 3 mana blue enchantment) I have to manually tap each land even if I only have three mana, and when you draft and get a bunch of new cards at once , I really miss Heartstone’s nice feature which lets you see all the latest cards you have gotten.

/Rune S. Nielsen

A RECIPE THAT STILL WORKS

You might be surprised that World of Warcraft is still going strong after all these years. Why do millions of players worldwide keep coming back for each new expansion pack?

Well, mostly because Blizzard keeps delivering the goods.

To be honest I have not really been disappointed by any of the expansion packs to World of Warcraft, and I have been a regular since 2006. Like the previous expansions, Battle for Azeroth, is worth the wait and your money.

The stuff I liked
Overall the core game is simple but still fun, and it works well for both old and new players. For the first time an expansion pack has such an obscene amount of quests, that even I, a genuine quest addict, had to give up and start doing other stuff than questing. WOW indeed.

One of the reasons the quest part of the game still works is that at its core it is as simple as Tetris or Candy Crush. The WOW core mechanic is "fetch X (insert item name) or "kill X (insert monster or villain name)" and return for a small reward. Not much different from many apps which you also get hooked on.

Sure, there is a lot more to it than that, pretty graphics, good sound effects and actors, lots of cutscenes and for me the most important one - a detailed and fun plot.

In this expansion they have gotten even better at telling one overall story and binding all the areas together to this single story, but as always there is a ton of fun subplots and general craziness.

The overall story is about what happens when Archmage Jaina Proudmore travels home to Kul Tiras and faces the music, she might be a hero elsewhere but here she is a traitor and a murderer.

Some players might see questing as boring, but not me, I always read all the texts and try to do all the quests I can find.

The quest that I enjoyed the most so far was this one which also gave an achivement:

Listening and playing those three fishermen/Kenny-diver/pirate put a huge grin on my face.

I also like the world quests, though not much different than the last expansion they are a nice way to keep using the zones longer than just for the initial leveling.

I have never been much of a PvP or an Instance or Raid gamer, though I do all of them, for me the leveling and the question is what is most fun, and I often just ended up doing the instances and raids the 1-3 times when I get a quest sending me into them.

I have always played on a PvP RPG realm so I'm no stranger to defending myself from gangers and love when I succeed, but I have never like ganking and always the last unresolved quest in my log are the ones where I have to kill other players. As I don't like people ganking me I don't like ganking others.

That being said when I saw that the new Warmode gives me 10% extra xp to enable PvP I switched it on instantly. I'm used to gankers and its always nice to level fast especially when you like me have a lot of high-level characters.

I did not get ganked once leveling, and after reaching the new level cap of level 120 I switched the War Mode off. I guess that since only a few players have war mode on the gankers find too few to pray on in the wilds, so they go to the PvP areas/battlegrounds instead.

The stuff I disliked
Actually I liked most of the things, so it’s like 95% good stuff.

During the leveling there were the odd quest here and there that did not work as well as the others, but mostly this could be fixed by abandoning the quest and redo them. One quest had to be handed in to someone hidden inside a very small tent, so I thought the quest was bugged and spent a lot of time trying to find the right place to hand in the quests but eventually figured it out thanks to a player video on YouTube.

The type of quests I enjoyed the least was the escort quests, trying to get a drunkard to his destination was the worst of the lot. He kept walking in circles and I think the idea was to drag the player to some new areas filled with quest givers, but since I had previously done all those quests this "clever plot" just seemed ever so dumb.

I went to the "horde island" of Zandalar and did the Alliance "war quests" there. They were all right, though the questline on Nazmir was not very interesting, and as I did that first I did not go back till after doing all the quest I could find in Kul Tiras.

Besides the questline on Nazmir I also disliked that all the star-marked elites on the continent of Zandalar waslevel 120 and crazy strong compared to the same type of elites on Kul Tiras, but once I went back as level 120 it was fine.

To clarify: I have no problem with an elite being stronger than other creatures of the same level, but mixing 120 elites with level 110-120 non-elites on a map is stupid, the first elite I met nearly one shotted me. At least put a skull over there level if they are going to be that hard to beat.

Another thing that could have been better was the look of some of the main charcaters in the cutscenes. I don't mean in the animated Warbringer cutscenes, they were all beautifully made, and in my opinion some of the very best new content! I could not help but get a tear in my eye at the end of the "Daughter of the Sea" animated film with Jaina.

The issue is the cutscenes which have an "ingame look" to them. One thing is that the movement of the mouth does not correspond with the speech, I can live with that, but for some reason they have made Jaina's mother look like an undead.

I doubt its intentional, but she is scary pale and the attempt at giving her wrinkles makes her look like a monster. Don't get me wrong I have no issue with wrinkles or old people (none!), but it is sad when older people in a game looks like the undead. I actually think that the Waycrest Mother Hag boss look nicer that Jaina's mother, her face is quite lifeless, yikes.

My key disappointment though, was the new Allied races. Before the expansion came I grinded so many world quests, especially on Argus, to be able to get an Army of the Light paladin and a Void Elf of my own. I was really looking forward to new "hidden" intro quest areas for each of the new allied races.

Instead I got a skin. I probably should have read the fine print better, we are just used to all new races having an intro zone to level inside, and to give that special unique feel for the race.

There was a single scenario with my main for each race, and that was ok, but I missed the into zone.

I started out making a level 20 army of light pally and void elf warlock and got some green gear.

The void elf looked very non-void elf, so that was a bust. The pally looked fine and I really liked the pink crystal hammer she got, wow! I would happily level with that forever, but to make matters worse the green gear can't be used for transmog, so I can't keep looking like an Army of the Light Paladin and no cool hammer.

Then I thought, "no problemo, I'll just transmog her with all the cool Army of the Light gear I found on my main, I even got one of those new outfits from a quest line i did in and instance and outside on Argus. Ta Daaa, two cool outfits for her to choose from!"

But no-can't-do. The leather armor I got with my main can't be used for my new paladin, and the same goues for the complet outfit. That is quite stupid Blizzard.

If I level the new paladin from level 20-110 I do get a bonus set of very good-looking Army of the Light armor (but still no hammer!), and that is sooooo many hours of leveling for a character who won't be my main character anyway. And the new "signature ability" for my level 20 is kind of boring looking visually.

Also, it is strange that the heirlooms I will be wearing for the next 90 levels cost a fortune to upgrade and lack a number of key visual pieces such as boots.

My level 20 with the old style heirlooms. Why can't I have the crystal hammer?

But enough whining, I did enjoy the questing a lot and soon it will be time to uninstall the game, so I can get some writing done!

Overall this expansion is a must, or it is if you like this sort of thing (read: "genre defining massively multiplayer online role-playing games set in fantasy universes).

Hope you have fun playing WOW, I sure did.

/Rune S. Nielsen

I GREW UP WITH GAMES

I played a couple of pc games while writing the first ten chapters, but then got so immersed in writing I stopped playing for a long time. Which is pretty strange for me, as I have been playing games all my life.

After thinkling about a youth and adulthood spent playing games of all sorts, I decided to write a short piece about my life with gamin.

So here it is, your chanche to hear about my life (maybe not so different than yours?)...

The life of a gamer
Long before I became a writer I loved to consume all sorts of entertainment, and games more than anything. 

I started early on as I grew up with a dad who loved card and tabletop games. Our family traveled across Denmark often, so we could spend time with our grandparents and the rest of the family, as we lived far away from them.

Games and books were some of the things that made these trips fun. It is just not that much fun watching the same roads and countryside for 500 km once every second month or so. Remember this was in a time before we got smartphones or car-sized tv-screens.

I think you can tell a lot about a person from the types of games they enjoy, or if they don't play any games at all. I have met plenty of hard working and clever people that never play any games, some say its because they don't have time to play because of their job or their children, others because they are afraid of getting hooked on games, and so wisely abstain, and a few because they simply find little enjoyment there.

I have never understood how you could not like some kind of game, just a little, but I have always had great respect for people who simply love other things more or prioritize other things more.

I used to envy those people their clear focus, but on the other hand I had a lot of fun playing. Then as I progressed into the writing process I became so focused on this endeavor that I found myself playing less and less, and eventually I stopped all together.

What I played in my youth
I played with my brother and my parents, we played a lot of card games on the ferry, and my brother, mother and I played "car games" (dad concentrated on the driving,) simple kid's games like you get 1 point each time you spot an animal or someone select a category i.e. Cities, someone else a letter, and then you must come up with a city-name beginning with that letter.

I would also play tabletop games with family and friends such as Clue, Derby and Finance (a bigger version of Monopoly,) and later I moved up to more complex tabletop games like Conquistador (a ridiculously long game,) Space Hulk, Warhammer and Warhammer 40K. I also loved reading and playing Fighting Fantasy novels which was a great combination of two things I loved.

Computer games became big when I was a kid, we first got a simple Pong TV console, and when I was eleven (1981) my brother bought an Oric, a small French computer that you connected to a tape recorder and the TV, so we would now try to get the TV to ourselves as much as possible. Watch out parents! As we were some of the first kids in our city to own a computer, this felt truly special.

We played a lot of different games, but before we could play you had to type in the entire game code into memory, and this we did one letter at a time. It took forever! You actually bought the games code in geeky magazines full of codes, (crazy, I know.)

My brother quickly became adept at programming, while I just typed for hours. You can see why he became an engineer and I became a writer. I wanted to see what the small screen would do once the program ran, a bit like writing a book to see what and how it will turn out.

Later we got an Amstrad, a bigger British computer with a decent sized monitor by the standards of that time, and then later my brother got a pc. 

My brother and I tried to make our own computer games, not that I ever contributed much besides enthusiasm plus the odd idea or visual, but we never quite got them finished. Mostly because my brother programmed them with the clear vision of improving something which annoyed him in the games you could buy - he did not like the flickering sideways scroll in the science fiction shoot-em’-ups for instance, so he programmed a flawless scroll which could do a sideways scrolling of the screen and move a sci-fi fighter up and down in a much more realistic manner than any game on the market. Unfortunately the improvements he came up with always let the game get some large (code wise) that our home computers, did not have memory enough to play the full game, yes you could do the scroll, there could be some enemy fighters and bullets and a short circuit to fly over, but there simply was no space left for all the levels you were supposed to cross for it to be real game, so that was the end of my dreams as a "future game creator".

Why the computers did not have enough memory - well as an example the Oric had only 16 kilobytes of memory which is a LOT less than the memory this one article takes up on your device!

Nostalgia in a box.

Roleplaying it out
When I was 15 (in 1985) I got my first roleplaying game, the Marvel Super Heroes RPG, and it was a shaky start because for some reason my mom and dad did not want to play the Invisible Girl and the Thing.

I wonder why .-)

The roleplaying games I mostly played were of a type not so common these days, there was no running around or dressing up, we just sat at a table much like for a tabletop game. Before playing you would create one character for each player on sheets of paper, and me or some other person running the game would prepare obstacles for the players to encounter during the game and a story for them to experience. In a super hero game this would mean that each of the players were a super hero and were expected to act and talk like Spiderman or whoever they portrayed, while I would do the voices for everyone else in the universe then encountered, such as super villains trying to get the best of the heroes played by my family on our first and only Marvel adventure. You also used a lot of dice which you rolled to find out if an action would succeed or not. Can Hulk even feel if Thor punches him? Let’s roll the dice and see.

I later bought the Fighting Fantasy Roleplaying game and the Warhammer Fantasy RPG, and once I started in high school I got all my new mates to play, and we were hooked. For the next 10 years I did little else than try to play as much as possible. We would play during high school breaks, in evenings and for all of the weekend when possible.

Besides participating in other peoples games I wrote new scenarios every week, and always had two or more groups going. Here I was the games master, and typically hosted the games in my room. 

I hosted so many games at home, that to this day most of my close friends are former roleplaying gamers, I met back then.

Another fond memory is driving with my older brother in his small cool Nissan sportscar, where I told him stories, mostly things I had planned as a roleplaying game or something I had played previously. I think we both enjoyed that a lot.

I later started earning a bit of cash from the hobby. During high school I started to write articles about roleplaying games and reviewed all sorts of games, from big hits like Dungeons and Dragons to fringe games like Runequest, and I covered Copenhagen live events and gaming conventions. At first, I did so for free for fanzines but went and got a job writing the RPG section in a national wide Gamer magazine (about games for Commodore 64, Atari, and Amstrad). Together with two other young men I worked every Thursday night at a local school playing RPG games with the kids from the school as part of a culture club, that also paid a bit, though for the work I put into it, they got a bargain deal.

Tabletop games
I have always played tabletop games, and still do, though only a few times a year when two friends and I play. These days it’s mostly Games Workshop's Shadow War Armageddon (I might review that later on, see below if I get around to it).

During my RPG-phase I did not play all that many tabletop games, but once it became apparent that my friends and I were too busy with girlfriends and our first real job (and later wife, career and kids) to actually commit to playing regularly, I got frustrated with RPG. Playing is such a "team event", and if you can't trust people will show up every time, it ruins it for everybody.

I started playing strategy games like Warhammer 40K, Space Hulk, Blood Bowl and lots of others, but I got tired of those as well, I still paint figures a bit though, that’s always fun.

Then one day someone introduced me to Magic the Gathering, a really fun fantasy card game. They call it a trading game, but we never traded anything, we did buy a shitload of cards though.

Card games
During my public-school years, I spent countless hours playing cards with my classmates (mostly a game called Master and Slave, no idea why we played that, but it was great fun). I was never much into games of chance, I'm not the betting type, and I don't like losing money, but I did play a bit of Poker, but it was not really my thing.

I love other card games though. Besides Magic I have played all sorts of "trading card games" for instance Doomtown and later the World of Warcraft game. I enjoyed them immensely and for many years I would host little tournaments at home only for me and my friends. This eventually led me to play Hearthstone on my iPad, pc and phone.

I only ever played two tournaments outside my own home, one time at a local comic/games shop in Copenhagen I participated in a draft tournament, and got a decent deck drafted, but lost my first game to some kid from Sweden, who I was pretty sure cheated with his life total, and then lost to someone who played smarter and had made a better deck than me. I decided to call it a day.

The second time went better, I won the National Danish Championship in an obscure card game called Warlords. If you don't remember it, I won't hold it against you. It might sound great being the National Champion, but I had not played the game very much, and did not own many cards. It was a wonder I won anything at all, and I never bought a single Warlords card after winning that tournament, nor played any other tournament ever again. Why not stop while you are ahead?

How did I manage to win with a lousy deck and not much experience?

I copied one of my favorite strategies from Magic; Rush the opponent with lots of good small creatures right from the start and combine it with a few nasty surprises if the initial rush fails.

Lucky for me most of the opponents I met during the tournament had slower decks and did not get enough defenses down in time. In the final game I met the then current champion and was lucky to make "his card house crumple" before his nasty dwarf defenses and cannons were ready to obliterate me.

Well enough bragging and "old wife’s tales". Its time to write the next chapter...

/Rune S. Nielsen

LEGENDARY

HeartStone, Blizzard
PC

HearthStone is one of the best games of the decade. It is a free fantasy card game full of dragons, pirates and legendary fun.

At the core the game is about playing short card games against a real-life opponent. To ensure that you duel against people with an equal level of skill there is a ladder system designed to advance you to a group of better players if you win more games than you lose or the other way if you lose more than you win.

“HearthStone is one of the best games of the decade.”

— Dane East, Writer

A proven concept
At its core the game is inspired by non-computer trading-card-games like the World of Warcraft card game, which I enjoyed immensely and Magic the Gathering. By simplifying the game rules, the creators have managed to make a game which is simple to learn and play but very difficult to master.

Last month I was ranked level 4 and so far this month I’m level 5 in standard play. One day I’ll reach Legend. Just have to keep at it :-)
(update: I did reach Legend in both Standard and Wild, will get there too in Classic one day :-))

I can recommend the game, but the player base which consists of millions of players worldwide has become better and better at playing the game, and even on low levels you see people playing well and with tier-one decks found and copied from the many internet fan sites. Getting a high ranking have in my opinion never been more difficult. If you don't want to play the ladder you can play casual games against other players or single player dungeon runs. 

Too big for it's own good
There are also a couple of things not so great about the game. Though the game is free to play you will need to cough up cash if you want to have any chance of building the best decks, and unfortunately, I can't play HearthStone on my iPad any longer, as the games gotten so big it fills up nearly the entire hard disc! Maybe they should do something about that? I also gave up playing the phone version because the cards there are so tiny you can’t read the text on them, and often bad wi-fi reception in an area (read at the dentist or while on vacation in the country side) can make the game frustrating to play, so now I exclusively play it on my pc.

PS: Thanks to Thijs Molendijk, Brian Kibler and other elite players for making such great decks! Often, I have a really good idea for a deck but can't completely realize it in an effective enough way to win consistently, and then I see the same idea realized flawlessly in a beautiful deck list made by some of the world’s best players. Thanks for all the decks!

/Rune S. Nielsen

NO SECOND CHANCES IS MOST FUN

Stellaris, Paradox Entertainment
PC

If you like Science Fiction, exploration of space or strategy games (and have a lot of time) this is a game for you. 

I play the single player Iron Man unmodded version exclusively, and I only play on the largest galactic maps, so if you disagree with my comments it could be that you play the game in another way - it is a very big game indeed.

Playing on Iron Man means there are no second chances, and I find that this is where the real fun is found, as it reminds me more of real life. I like it when there are no save games to go back to when you screw up, feel unlucky or a bug in the code hurts your empire badly, for instance in the latest game the population of one of my planets became so angry that they defected the entire planet to a neighboring alien civilization, and while that was unfortunate, the real issue was that a bug in the game made my home world leave my empire at the same time!

It was removed from the game more or less; Though I could see it on the map, I could not interact with it in any way. That’s like Earth disappearing because the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri are angry or something. Though this almost made me quit that game, in anger, I managed, and felt better for prevailing. Still, I read that the bug should be fixed now.

"Mine, all mine..."

Mission nearly Impossible
Another issue with playing Iron Man is if you like to win the game, and I do, because as there are no second chances, and no console command cheat codes or mods to help you out, the game used to be impossible to win (unless you were extremely lucky, or a much better player than me). So, I had to get used to "you lose again Dane!" This might not sound so bad, but keep in mind that playing a game of Stellaris takes weeks. It is rather annoying to lose a game because of a bug after playing for more than 20 hours.

After the most recent official DLC content, Apocalypse, came out I could finally build some big and nasty spaceships to rival those of the computer-controlled empires, and so my Titan and Colossus class ships are by far my favorite new thing in this hard game. Thanks to them I won my first game on Iron Man - yes, yes, I won before but that was with save games, and that feels like cheating.

Victory at last!
After I won a domination victory (own 40% of all the planets) I actually kept on playing and eventually conquered all of the galaxy. This is what that looks like, if you have not tried it on a big map:

Breaking the game
When you go that far out into an extreme in a game it is fun to watch the design and playability implode. For instance, I had hundreds of space stations and warships so upgrading them after researching "Focusing Arrays IV" or something takes 10 minutes, I mean just to click on each individual ship and station and select upgrade. Why is there no "upgrade all" button?

For some reason the game suddenly decided to no longer display my transport fleets in the right menu bar either. I guess I must have exceeded some sort of limit with all the stuff I built.

Have a look at this top bar:

As you can see several of the key metrics numbers break the design because they become so big in the latest stages of the game. Guess they should do something? What is more important though is that when you control hundreds of space stations, planets and fleets the game slows to a crawl. It would be great if there was an even faster game time setting - there are three, but it is still very slow going, playing at maximum speed, when you finally build that awesome really big empire on the largest maps (and I have an ultra-fast pc, lots of ram and lots of space on my hard drive, so it’s the game that is the issue here, maybe they should upgrade the engine from 32-bit to 64-bit perhaps?).

A golden oldie
When this game first came out, I was thrilled, I have loved this type of game since the original Master of Orion games first appeared many years ago. Before buying Stellaris I had just played a ton of games of the new version of Master of Orion by the same company that did Tank War, and though I loved that stroll down memory lane, I instantly felt that Stellaris was a much more mature version of the same game concept. Sometimes the clones do become better than the originals.

Don't get me wrong though Master of Orion is a lot of fun it just seems childish in its vibe and outlook when compared to Stellaris. Not that Stellaris is better in all ways. MoO seems more polished and there used to be more bugs in Stellaris (and I played MoO right from the first public test version, so I experienced lots of bugs in that game as well). Though most bugs in both games are fixed by now, some of the mechanics in Stellaris really used to feel half done or half realized - probably on purpose, to get the gamers to buy the expansions and the modders to care about upgrading the game.

A lot of these earlier issues and bugs have been resolved by the Paradox team in recent DLCs and patches, and the game in its current form is so much better than the first version.

/Rune S. Nielsen