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