Weregamer's Game Musings

I'm still playing stellaris in almost all my gaming time, and enjoying it, primarily because I've found and either used or stolen ideas from a bunch of mods that fix problems that are fixable. To be honest, some of these I like because they straddle the line carefully between moving it more toward a pure 4X game and losing the fresh voice in 4X coming from the Paradox grand strategy sauce. Some of the resource constraints pot such limits on early strategies that you are forced to let the early game become just the randomization step for a mostly static patchwork of essentially equivalent-powered empires, so the midgame looks just like one of their historical games. But removing them entirely is too much; I dial then down so the decisions of the early game become significant ones about how to grow my empire - how much physical expansion, how much infrastructure, how much defense - instead of meaningless firefighting while waiting for the static nap to evolve. But all that said

The silver lining for me on having my appendix burst was that my at-home recovery time fell mostly right after Stellaris shipped, so I got more time to play it than normal in the first week. In its release state, it's not quite the 4X Messiah I'd hoped for, but I'm liking it more and more over time, with some caveats. The early part of the game is actually more fun than anything I've played in quite a while. The random mini stories spice up the explore/expand phase really nicely. I've still not gotten through to see the endgame stuff, partially because there are so many ways to destroy yourself that are unfamiliar to a pure 4X player. The complexities of politics and diplomacy, which would be familiar to fans of Paradox's other games, killed me outright once and made an otherwise great start go bad midgame once. It's nice to see that the studio head nailed exactly the two biggest pain points I feel as the targets of the first big patch: borders preventing