Weregamer's Game Musings

I may be setting myself up for a disappointment. I rarely let myself get this excited about a game that's not only unreleased but doesn't even have any hands-on early reviews out. That said, I can't help it. Stellaris, if it even manages half of its goals and doesn't completely screw itself up trying, could be the first really new space strategy game in a very long time. Of course, the last time I was excited about an ambitious 4X space game it was Spore, and that turned out to belong in the dustbin one step up from the Com Outpost heap. But if they pull it off - if they keep the micromanagement optional enough that those of us with families and limited gaming time can play without getting ultra-frustrated by dumb AI assistants, and manage to make a game with enough surprise variations to make several plays in a row all feel different, they'll have done something as seminal and remarkable as Civilization or MoO2 (or, though RTS isn't my cup of tea I have t

Well, I've put quite a few hours into the game, and it's still a mixed bag. It definitely has the Bethesda addictive magic, with always something to find over the next hill or in the next ruin. I'm warming to the settlement subgame to some extent. There are some UI/UX pain points with the way it's shoved into a completely different game engine. Most notably, there is no way to see what your actual stocks of a resource are except when you are about to build something that uses it. The feature to "tag" resources that you need to build something so junk that would yield them is highlighted during exploration is decent (especially if you take the otherwise unexciting Scrapper perk, or use the console to cheat it on) - but there's no fine control. Certain rare resources I'd always like to see highlighted, and some common ones I don't really want highlighted except when I'm actually low on them. I think the mods available on the PC are also a mus