I hadn't played Stellaris, but my 19 year old son started and recommended it, and when your teenage kid takes time from being a teenager to recommend something, you play it to have something to talk about, even if it is Barbie Fashion Show. My initial impression was good--I like research and colony development, and it seemed to have a lot of those. However that impression lessened as a I realized it was really just a series of converting resources into other resources and balancing them with a series of upgrades to parts of that conversion rather than actual new colony options. Then--my first combat. I reloaded because apparently I had hit the Auto-Resolve button. 2 more times and I still couldn't find the manual combat button. Hmm, maybe in the game options I've got Auto-Resolve set as automatic? Nope, nothing there. Google--Stellaris has no manual tactical combat. What is the point of outfitting my ships in detail if I don't get to use them? No tactical combat alone is an absolute deal-breaker--trying to get him and my son-in-law to play IG:S instead. Not to mention--no choices on leader level up, frustrating card version of techs you can research, absurdly slow ship movement, production speed the same on a 1 pop planet as a 50 pop one, etc. IG:S > Stellaris on any objective measure.
Perhaps. I have both and I get a lot more out of ISG, but Stellaris is not as shallow as you perceive. As regards questionable mechanics, I assure you both games have them. Right now, the biggest factor (but not the only one), contributing to my elevating ISG above Stellaris is... those stupid star lanes. Each game has strengths and weaknesses though, ISG has better leaders, Stellaris better events. ISG lacks pirates (and I'm glad as they make no sense) but Stellaris has fallen empires which I like, etc. Combat is comparing two systems that can't be compared. ISG is Tactical, the smaller number of ships allows that. Stellaris is more hands off strategic, but you can field thousands of Ships... try that with ISG and I'll send you some aspirin. In the end, they are different games, both good in their own right, both can be improved. I only feel bad that ISG doesn't have the recognition it deserves, it is clearly superior to many games like it.
I wouldn't go that far, but I do agree Stellaris has some enervating features and that IG:S is, if not already the better game, at least the most promising of the two games. The only thing I consider Stellaris the top dog of 4X is in roleplaying possibilities, particularly during empire creation (politics also appears to be well done - actually, it promises more than it delivers, but it takes time to notice this). This, roleplaying, is the one area where IS:G (and every other Space 4X I have ever played for that matter) could see some improvement. Most people I know that will play Stellaris but will refuse to play any other space 4X does so because of a combination of graphics and the roleplaying possibilities Stellaris allows. Funny you would say that, as I HATE the War in Heaven event in Stellaris (which I play with all DLCs), so I couldn't care less about those Fallen Empires; I particularly hate the fact that the League of Non-Aligned Powers undo all politics and then, to add insult to injury, it never disbands after the said war is over. P.S.: I entered this forum just now, but I already like it. It's not every day you come across Grand Admiral Thrawn and Tolkien chatting about a strategy game!
Bonus points for recognizing Tolkien--I just always liked this picture of him. I'd never even heard of Grand Admiral Thrawn, I thought that's just what @Konstantine looked like (seriously hadn't heard of him or even Star Wars: Rebels at all, Googled it).
Thanks @PlotinusRedux , I'll remember that if we ever go head to head. No, that's not what I look like, (but do possibly share some traits with the fictional Thrawn).
I have not fired up Stellaris, since maybe the 3rd week after it came out. Now so much has been stuffed into, I probably won't spend the time to relearn it.
I bought it only two years ago yet I know what you mean. Between the releases, changes and DLCs, I just stopped updating it, really turns me off when games go that route. See this, it's over a year old and I can't generate enough willpower to continue. I like many aspects of it, but basically I've locked up dozens of Systems by controlling Pieth and Boeawai. I've stationed fleets and bases there while I exploit the systems I've contained, not much strategy in that. While I love the exploration and events, Stellaris is more of a grand strategy 4x hybrid. That could be a lot of fun, but like you, I think I will wait for them to move on to something else before returning to it, this way I can just download the latest version and the DLCs I find appealing, and only learn it one more time.
I'm playing without the DLC's because my son is. I'm going way too slow because I keep pausing on every decision, thinking through ship designs, etc. Apparently he just puts it on fast/fastest, never pauses, and easily beats the AI including Fallen Empires--I guess it really just comes down to fleet size mostly in combat like a game of Risk. I don't know that it's really "Grand Strategy" if you mean by that Crusader Kings, etc.--diplomacy is primitive, leaders are just temporary bonuses--there's nothing like legacies, etc.--, internal factions try to look like they matter but really they're just affecting what percent of a max 2 influence/month you get, the literally have no other effect on the game; the "hyperlanes" that provide choke points, which I like, but I suspect they exist mainly to simplify the AI, and aren't really a "grand strategy" element. I mean, it's not that the game is *bad*, and I'm enjoying my first play through trying to figure out what is going on as I go--I love tech, and it has lots of tech, even if under the surface they're really just different levels of around 15 techs or so so far. It does have a very good presentation that makes the underlying fairly simple of conversion of resources feel like something more--which is more of a compliment than a criticism, despite how it sounds. It definitely presents an almost trivial problem for the AI compared to IGS--each system only connects to 1-5 others instead of every system connecting to every other system; constellations are generated to have a single "bridge" choke point between them for the AI to try to control (I actually looked in the save game file, they literally have "bridge" as an attribute); all tactical combat is AI vs AI; all the buildings, districts, etc., are really just converting pop to minerals, energy, and food, then minerals to consumer goods and metal--balancing those gets complicated for a human but is simple for a computer; etc.
I'm sorry @PlotinusRedux I should have qualified the meaning. By Grand Strategy I mean that you only kind of influence strategy at a high level, you can't really do more than that. In that sense ISG gives you a lot more freedom and greater choices, and is actually a tribute to the skills of the dev team, (which I suspect had to come up with a lot of code to enable the behavior that allows the game to be played that way). Stellaris is like the kind of game where I send Armies to fight other Armies but can't influence the battle direct. It's the power of my Armies and skill of leaders against the AI... I hate warfare in Stellaris by the way, not because of the lack of tactics alone. But, it sure looks pretty and has some good exploration.
Ah, looking it up, it seems I've always assumed "Grand Strategy" meant something more than it did--I always thought of Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis that had complex diplomatic and internal dynamics. Apparently *Risk* is labelled a Grand Strategy game and it just means something like not having tactical battles? I don't really get the "it looks pretty" thing--it looked about the same as ISG to me, the colonies themselves actually looking worse than ISG--they don't show the colony itself with what you've built, etc. In a system I zoomed in way in and could sort of see what you mean--though I'd never actually zoom in that much normally because it isn't a useful way to view the system. Viewing individual ships in ISG had a point--tactical battles. In Stellaris--other than just something to do once or twice--I don't see any reason you would do so. So Stellaris *can* look pretty--but only if you zoom in to levels that have no practical use. Or am I missing something (which I often do)?
Yes, the name is rather counter-intuitive I would think. It has it's moments, the scans, some of the art work, the solar systems that actually look like solar sytems. If you want an awesome colony view by the way, I will show you something tonight that I absolutely adore. It's a different game, but I love both the way it looks and the way the player can interact with it. It blows Stellaris and ISG away.
Hi PlotinusRedux, I agree Stellaris is not a bad game at all. When it came out I disliked a few things such as not being allowed to eliminate races that had not made it to the big league. I just put it aside and never came back. Not the first game that just sat on my HD. Mostly playing arpg's of late.
