If you'd asked me last week what I missed most about pre-2.0 Stellaris, I'd have said the multiple FTL systems.
Having played a couple games of it through version rollback, I can now say I actually miss the planet tile system the most, followed by the "sphere of influence" star system control method & Influence - based planet colonisation pricing.
First, tiles. Love me these little things, each planet feels like an actual topology and not completely abstracted. On top of the performance benefits of a max of 25 Pops per planet, the adjacency bonuses and innate resources on tiles add an additional level of planning to planet colonisation that provides a more intuitive and interesting method of minmaxing than e.g. plopping down 11 identical Research Labs on a Relic World, and the harder limits on resource production and Pop quantity prevents the ridiculous Resource snowballing that now plagues Stellaris. The Pops themselves have more nuances, too, like Mechanical life-forms built by Organics having distinct tiers rather than immediately upgrading to Droids and Synths as soon as the technology is researched.
As for the influence-based method of governing system ownership, it just feels less arbitrary and game-y than plopping down a Starbase and suddenly "owning" a region of space, and it doesn't suffer from the now
over half-decade-old issue of shared systems (or impossibility thereof); under the old method of determining system ownership I could actually coexist with another empire, both of us controlling planets around a single star! Imagine that! Imagine two mutually exclusive planetary bodies being capable of supporting two nationally and ideologically distinct populations, madness I say! It just. Can't. Be. Done. Indie company, pls forgive. Everyone knows the
reasonable way for planetary populations and their administrative systems to behave is to
immediately surrender themselves to whomever has authority over the megastructure orbiting the system's star, planetary defenses and ideological differences be damned! Seriously, I know even the retards at Paradox could work this out somehow, because not only did it work in the past, it still works for the purposes of Primitive worlds, rudimentary empires that can exist within stellar empires' territories, even territories with - dare I even say it? -
colonised planets.
As for the other differences, the old implementation of Strategic Resources was cool, but it's not much different than empire-wide modifiers now added by buildings, or added to stellar objects or planets by mods. I can take it or leave it, no tears shed. And the various FTL systems, while unique, were frustrating to deal with, and making Stellaris Hyperlanes-only made chokepoints viable; I'm not sure how competing FTL methods could be reintroduced that wouldn't make everything other than fleets obsolete for map control. As for starting weapons, they're good fun at the start in a rock-paper-scissors sort of way but the freedom to research other options makes this choice a minor difference in the long run, at least for games versus AI.
Just think of how well the game could perform if not for the devs' pigheaded obstinance for sticking with the current dogshit Pop system...
Any opinions on the latest Stellaris dlc?
The Virtuality ascension path, while laden with +x, -x modifiers, is also a massive game-changer in terms of how you plan and run your Empire. I wish Paradox would focus on making more stuff like that or like the Clone Army origin, anything that shifts or limits how Pops are created maintained and distributed, and thereby makes me not play the game on autopilot due to everything else effectively being the same shit every time.
The portraits are trash. I hope that a trainee made them because if that's as good as their current art staff gets they'll never make a good portrait pack again (did they lose the folks who made Toxoids? Those dudes don't just look cool in screenshots, they're beautifully animated). Firstly, the Synthetic Age portraits use the same animations for Organic and Cybernetic / Synthetic meshes, so any mechanical parts (that don't have tons of clothes) deform as if made of flesh. It looks wrong, all wrong. But they're still nice Organic portraits at least, right?
Right? Ha. The animations are still nearly as bad when witnessed on the Organic variants, with limbs and torsos stretching unnaturally, as if all of the aliens are just Buffalo-Bill skinsuits for masses of worms. Actually, the current artist
might be able to do a good horror portrait DLC all this shit looks so uncanny, but they won't be good for much else.
Everything else is take it or leave it, the overwhelming meh of more stuff that just doesn't shake up the gameplay or differentiate Empires in any
qualitative way: "here's more ways to purge pops and to research shit! It's a new coat of paint on nearly the exact same gameplay!"
Oh, and I guess Nanite ascension is a bit different (you passively doomstack Nanite corvettes), but it's so tedious it isn't worth pursuing because the corvettes need to be manually merged and can't exceed normal fleet caps, and there's no way to stop them from accruing so you can't enjoy mixed-fleet doctrines because while the corvettes
themselves have no upkeep, they
do blow out your naval cap like Goatse's asshole and will make any other ship unsustainable; in short, a pidgeonholed playstyle.
