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Stellaris after a few dozen hours

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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 science expeditions and the dearth of midgame stories.

And the extreme mod friendliness is also amazing. Lots of the more minor stuff that gets annoying, and even one huge bug with troop transports, have already been fixed by modders, and if I don't like exactly the numbers chosen by a modder it's trivial to make personal changes.

So it's kind of funny. I expected the game either to suck, or to be a threat to my marriage and job, but it came out somewhere between. In truth it's good enough to replace MoO2, both on its own merits and because I've pretty much squeezed all the juice out of the classic. In a year or two of the continual improvement that Paradox promises and has a reputation for, I expect it will be the best game in the genre without any disclaimers.

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