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Why Stellaris diplomacy feels so bloodless

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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, I'm realizing more and more that it's in the diplomacy - the very heart of what should be Paradox's homeland, that I'm feeling the worst about the game. They've admitted that the lack of visible personality or goals in the opponents us a big problem, but there's also a horrible lack of options. Basically, if you are in conflict with another error, you can either declare war or suck it up. You can't make demands, you can't make threats, you can't warn that something they are doing will lead to war.

Most of this would require a lot of development time, and i do hope that Paradox's reputation for great ongoing improvements will address that. But why on Earth it in the stars is there o option for an ultimatum? Give me that colony you just started along the border, it I will take it by force? As things are now, I just have to declare war, and in doing that there's no advantage to keeping the war goals in the declaration small. In fact, because they will be free to do whatever they like for ten years after the war ends, a limited war is a really bad idea - you need to hurt their infrastructure enough that they will take those years to rebuild.

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