If you're a TL;DR sort of person, here you go: Stellaris is not a 4X game at all. Its core design goes a completely different direction. It has some cool bits in it that will probably catch on in future 4X games, and by using mods to tune it I got a hundred or so hours of fun out of it before the honeymoon wore off, but in the long run it will likely be remembered as a non-4X game that was nonetheless a good influence on the genre.
Pre-release, the big excitement about Stellaris was the hope for innovation in a 4X in ways to make the late game less of a grind - that period when you know you've won but the mechanics of getting the victory screen will take hours more.
This was a bit of marketing poetry, or maybe outright disingenuous. At its core, Stellaris is not a 4X game. It's a pretty standard Paradox set-piece grand strategy game with a "1X" game bolted on the beginning to substitute for the real-world history that their other games can leverage.
Reading the Steam and Paradox forums and looking at most of the gameplay mods being written brings out this dichotomy clearly, too. For example, I saw some Paradox fans talk about how Stellaris fixes the "boredom" of the exploration phase. Awrk? The exploration phase is one of the most exciting parts of a 4X game - all that terra incognita: territory, opponents, strategic spots all unknown and some that won't even be known when you first see them. Early plans that may or may not survive discovering the actual lay of the land. In a good 4X (and IMO of course) the exploration phase is second only to the middle of a war for being the time it's hardest to resist JOMTS.
So, this is not the replacement for MoO2. I do think and hope that the two things it really does well in the exploration stage will be adopted by future real 4X games. The "anomaly" vignettes, including how large the pool is and how generally well written they are, are a lot of fun. So is the simple, balanced, but still meaty and replay-worthy race/empire design. And the inclusion of three different FTL drives, distinct but balanced, is very cool - one of the many ideas that Sword of the Stars tried and failed to pull off.
And it's not a total loss by any means - I got 100 or so hours of play before the honeymoon wore off, and will still be playing from time to time (at least until Civ 6 arrives), because you can use mods and the game settings screen to make expansion and exploitation doable and avoid most of the ways that things are railroaded into the Paradoxy midgame.
As I wrote a couple days ago, throwing out their mechanics wholesale leaves the game just broken, but if you tone down the cash and mineral maintenance costs for everything but ships and non-spaceport stations, and leave the "influence" mechanics pretty much alone, you can get a playable, if slightly odd, 4X-style game. The diplomacy, tuned for the Paradoxy game, feels somewhat broken, and the lack of anything but military victory conditions is a bit limited.
I'll finish this up here; probably in the next couple of days I'll follow up with a post on the set of mods I am using.
To go into more depth for those inclined:
Pre-release, the big excitement about Stellaris was the hope for innovation in a 4X in ways to make the late game less of a grind - that period when you know you've won but the mechanics of getting the victory screen will take hours more.
This was a bit of marketing poetry, or maybe outright disingenuous. At its core, Stellaris is not a 4X game. It's a pretty standard Paradox set-piece grand strategy game with a "1X" game bolted on the beginning to substitute for the real-world history that their other games can leverage.
Reading the Steam and Paradox forums and looking at most of the gameplay mods being written brings out this dichotomy clearly, too. For example, I saw some Paradox fans talk about how Stellaris fixes the "boredom" of the exploration phase. Awrk? The exploration phase is one of the most exciting parts of a 4X game - all that terra incognita: territory, opponents, strategic spots all unknown and some that won't even be known when you first see them. Early plans that may or may not survive discovering the actual lay of the land. In a good 4X (and IMO of course) the exploration phase is second only to the middle of a war for being the time it's hardest to resist JOMTS.
So, this is not the replacement for MoO2. I do think and hope that the two things it really does well in the exploration stage will be adopted by future real 4X games. The "anomaly" vignettes, including how large the pool is and how generally well written they are, are a lot of fun. So is the simple, balanced, but still meaty and replay-worthy race/empire design. And the inclusion of three different FTL drives, distinct but balanced, is very cool - one of the many ideas that Sword of the Stars tried and failed to pull off.
And it's not a total loss by any means - I got 100 or so hours of play before the honeymoon wore off, and will still be playing from time to time (at least until Civ 6 arrives), because you can use mods and the game settings screen to make expansion and exploitation doable and avoid most of the ways that things are railroaded into the Paradoxy midgame.
As I wrote a couple days ago, throwing out their mechanics wholesale leaves the game just broken, but if you tone down the cash and mineral maintenance costs for everything but ships and non-spaceport stations, and leave the "influence" mechanics pretty much alone, you can get a playable, if slightly odd, 4X-style game. The diplomacy, tuned for the Paradoxy game, feels somewhat broken, and the lack of anything but military victory conditions is a bit limited.
I'll finish this up here; probably in the next couple of days I'll follow up with a post on the set of mods I am using.
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