I can't decide if I like Stellaris or not. Someone told me that you can re-enact the holocaust on alien life and basically be space Hitler so I instantly bought the game, but it's really bare. I have a really nauseous sensation telling me that Paradox is becoming the new EA and is just going to pump out $20 expansion packs for the next 2 years turning it into a full featured game like EU4 is.
My problems are this:
It's so fucking slow, though this is a complaint I have with EU4 as well. I've never played a 1444-1820 game in EU4 because I just can't fucking stomach it. That shit lasts like 12 hours and I've already accomplished, or failed to accomplish, what weird gimmick I set out to do well before then. In Stellaris, I've made it up to Cruisers once, and that was on the brink of war with 3 much smaller empires in a defensive war. This was like 8 hours into the game. My cruisers were instantly fucking crushed against a less well equipped military because apparently corvettes are the counters to cruisers, which I don't understand. Why bother with building fewer large ships when I should have fleeted out 120 corvettes and done way better for less? I start up another game because I don't want to savescum again or deal with losing and I get so bored of that new pacifist game I wrote this post instead.
So on that note, the wars are garbage. Like absolute fucking garbage. Part of the fun in EU4, CK2, HOI4 is that it takes place on Planet Earth. There are very real physical barriers that you can use to your advantage. Some of my best maneuvers in EU4 was in a game forming Malaysia, where I used the bridge between Singapore and Sumatra to build forts and sortie the fort while also flanking -- allowing me a significant bonus against attacking nations. So with no terrain like that, I have nothing to play off of. There's the option to generate the map with 4 spirals, which I did in the aforementioned game as the Islamic Empire of Sol, but the spirals didn't particularly influence gameplay and enemies were able to cross the arms just fine and make the front omnidirectional as opposed to the fun fronts in HOI4.
What's interesting is that there's a lot of attention to armies, planetary defenses, and military stations that seem completely fucking pointless. Why would I ever want to hire a General? Why would I build and maintain a military station that has some benefits, but is so weak a 5k fleet blaps it instantly? What they should have done is set a front. Like, if I declare war on an empire because I want to seize a few planets, the immediate area around those planets should become the front. There should be long, drawn out battles on the planets. The systems surrounding a contested planet between two major nations should be a fucking graveyard of ships, the planet should be torn to fucking shreds, a constant king of the hill tug of war. Instead it's like, you've got a backdoor in every direction, people can warp in wherever they want with wormholes, and planetary fights are 100% lopsided and ground forces are as expensive as real ships for some reason.
Also, EU4 has over a hundred nations and many more fantasy or hidden nations. Stellaris has, at most, like 30 empires. Stellaris's empires also lack a certain charm to them that is similar to what EU4's random map feature had. There's something about knowing exactly where each country is and what their general strategy is. The big players like Ottomans and France are given personalities and caricatures / polandballs. When you do a randomly generated map with a handful of avatars that are basically mix and match with no identity, there's no way to do that. The games are essentially "the purple assholes and the green assholes are in a defensive pact with the grey assholes so I have to deal with them all at once", instead of "France is allied with Portugal and Venice so going to war with them is suicide".
There's a lot of ideas in Stellaris that are magical and appealing. This post is basically fanfiction because of those ideas. The problem is that it's remarkably plain and comes across as the bastard child of EU4 and Starcraft 2. It plays like a very straight forward RTS but is needlessly complicated with a few obtuse features and is stretched out over 12 hours instead of 30 minutes.
