How is it that a game gets worse and worse every update? How do they do it...

>first run
Savor it. It gets really boring on subsequent playthroughs, nothing stands out. Soundtrack is phenomenal though.

You clearly haven't been following Stellaris since launch when you say this unironically.
The update progress has been insane. You rarely see a game LOSE content with each patch.Removing all FTL travel to lanes only is the best example.

Recently i've seen people appreciate the 'changes' to strategic ressources from people who clearly don't notice that the latest changes are pretty much just slowly reverting it back to the way it was at launch.

is it true this mother fucker: Distant Worlds Universe, is THE space 4x strategy game for the patrician?

Let me give you a standard subhuman answer for this board
>because SJWs
There, there you go.

rent free

I think bad vision?
I agree, this is so frustrating. The game launched with no midgame. I want to start a playthrough every now and then, but as soon as I want to go back to it after a while there is a massive patch that changes this or that core system, so that not only the old save is worthless but I need to relearn the system to play again. This game was "launched" three years ago for fuck's sake.

Things might get better now that Wiz has fucked off (and that change to fleet upgrades seems to suggest that) but Stellaris suffers from the developers being brainlets and Swedes and deciding that balancing a multiplayer mode that nobody fucking plays, trying to add content while also trying to avoid things getting too unfair (in a fucking 4x game) and failing miserably to keep things balanced, Utopia's release when a fucking Dyson Sphere was overpriced junk and instead you'd just shit out habitats for maximum solar power is just one example.

Paradox has this weird obsession for a while now to re-balance their games for multiplayer, at the cost of ruining singleplayer.
Considering this is Paradox i can't help but wonder if they try to force multiplayer so much for future monetization potential.

>and deciding that balancing a multiplayer mode that nobody fucking plays,
Are you retarded? That's the only way to play stellaris.
AI is braindead and always will be dumb compared to actual players.

t. wiz

Is assimilation still broken?

t. faggot who can't get 5+ people to play with him online

Sure, lemme remove all those mods that make the game less of a shallow, broken piece of shit. or maybe I should tell my friends to waste their money on a shallow, broken piece of shit instead.

I actually like the periodic and somewhat senseless overhauls because each time I go back and play this game, it gives me some new stuff to try, without actually having to fork out for the expansions.

the combat
the things that aren't combat
the graphics

>Sure, lemme remove all those mods that make the game less of a shallow, broken piece of shit.
You can play online with mods, retards.
>or maybe I should tell my friends to waste their money on a shallow, broken piece of shit instead.
Tell them to pirate DLC's if they're poorfags.
Anyway, anything is better than playing with AI, because AI literally makes resources out of nowhere and still SUCK even on GA without difficulty scaling.
Even when i'm playing suboptimal empire with slowest start ever.

or, hear me out.

I play a good game like Endless Space 2 instead.

I played it twice, their focus on """""unique""""" empires makes it unplayable.
Music artdirection is godly tho, french should stick to design and music, not gamedesign.

Yeah TF2 has been shit for years now

endless space 2 any good? how about gal civ 3?

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I really liked it when it first came out. Now it fee;s like a completely different (and shitty) game

I cant believe they removed the ability to easily play v1.9 on Steam. Literally a dead game in my library I cant play because modern Stellaris is hot garbage

>el2
>good

it's not as retarded as stellaris but it's just boring and shallow

I like Endless Space 2, there's something kino about playing as the United Empire.

youtube.com/watch?v=HTbS8BEa1oI

>the graphics
this is what put me off from getting it, i watch some LPs and it looks worse than fucking Space Rangers HD

Skeleton crew with absolutley no direction.
Even fucking CK2 is getting more love and attention that Stellaris and that's a good thing

Guys, lets be honest, are there any ANY fucking good comfy or challenging or breath taking Space games right now? Cause i've been looking and everything seems meh at best.

Eve Online

it's dead
t. eve oldfag

thinking of grabbing the bundle desu

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cringe as fuck /gsg/ fuck off Stellaris is literally Paradox gold mine

It's been dead and dying since 2006 user.

based retard

Elite could be called comfy at least i suppose.

Nah, it was ok in oddysey, talking about online ofc.

Didn't they do a complete overhaul of it? Thought people said it was good now?

Nope, its only getting worse.
Anyone who says otherwise is lying about having fun

Endless space 2 is just as boring which is why it bombed. The factions are at least interesting but the game play is shit.

I pirated the game at release, so very first version, and played like 10 hours straight because everything seemed so simple.
And I really suck at ck2 that I played for like 50hours, or eu4. I suck at paradox games in general, I heard stellaris changes all the time so now I'm scared to play it again.

>game releases with various means of faster-than-light travel with great strategic impact
>you can entirely regulate and customize the means of travel in the options menu
>Paradox just completely removes the option and only leaves ones means of travel because players clearly can't be trusted with the responsibility of regulating this themselves

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this is really the crux of it. paying for a half finished game was bad enough but the fact that anything they actually decide to flesh out they want you to pay for again is frustrating as hell. And this is coming from someone that doesn't mind buying Ck2 DLC.

>Paradox just completely removes the option and only leaves ones means of travel because players clearly can't be trusted with the responsibility of regulating this themselves
It worked out well in terms of gameplay, i hate in terms of autism tho.

I know this makes me sound like some elitist, but Paradox games have become increasingly more casual and easy over the years.
CK2 is laughable to, say, Victoria 1. And Stellaris is by far the easiest and most approachable Paradox game yet, even beating hearts of iron.
They made Stellaris even easier and automized many processes, planetary development for example.
If you think OG Stellaris was easy you'll fall asleep now.

Really? ES2 was one of the few recent strategy games that I really got into. Very reminiscent of MoO2.

Why remove the option though? They can just set Hyperlanes as the default option but why REMOVE CONTENT THAT WAS ALREADY FULLY OPTIONAL AND CUSTOMIZABLE

Fuck Swedish developers

Never buying anything from those cucks ever again

I actually used to like Stellaris and had bought their expansions (begrudgingly since they are barely worth their pricetags) all the way up until the world destroyers one. I expected them to fucking stop making shit updates and more cashgrab DLCs that require more game breaking updates, but they just kept coming. And I realized the devs weren’t interested in making a good game. They were interested in selling shit to the dumb masses and to get more dumb masses to join in on the scheme. Which is why they’ve dumbed down the gameplay severely to the point where it’s not even the same game anymore. Paradox was the last Swedish developer that I bought games from and they will remain the last.

It's one of core game mechanics, so they're balancing around it.
Even if you turn it on now it wouldn't work because everything is balanced around hyperlanes.

why they removes tiles?

not that I fully support it but the way the quests worked assumed you had the unrestricted one whatever it was called and often some of the earliest quests would be impossible because the link to a star system thats only 3 star systems away is actually like 30 stars away.

What's hilarious is that now, after they restricted the game to Hyperlanes only, they patched in a 'experimental' jumpdrive for research vessels that is basically just the OG warpdrive to get around the fact that player empires can easily get boxed into deadends.
How and why this experimental drive only works for research vessels is just up for guesses.

>How is it that a game gets worse and worse every update
Welcome to Paradox Interactive games
The more dlcs they make for a game and drag it out just slowly makes it worse

I'm still enjoying distant worlds universe

>buy product
>producer retroactively changes the product until it no longer resembles what you actually paid for

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Everspace

It’s like Freelancer mixed with FTL.

It should honestly be a crime

I like it. Then again I also liked Master of Orion 3 more than 2 because I'm hyper autistic about space games and more spreadsheets make my dick hard. I also play Aurora.

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this but unironically

>muh competitive choke points
I'm still so fucking bitter about this game.
I haven't played since 2.0 and I still get a twinge of anger when I think about the retarded changes they made.
Is this the natural mental state of everyone on Yea Forums?
Normally I don't bother wasting mental energy on hating a game, I just quit playing it. But this one just sticks in my craw and won't go away...

It's space 4x kino.

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It's actually because of the triple parentheses people

this is not removing content, but balancing the game.

don't blame the developers, blame the idiots who keep coming back and buying the new DLC. the players allow them to fuck up, they didn't take a stand and demand shit be reverted they just went along under the guise of "it'll be fixed next patch!"

added.

>release game in beta state for full price with some neat FTL options and other interesting things like strategic resources
>too smooth brained to figure out how to make them work even after months of workign on it in your skeleton game
>announce you are going to strip the game down even more to roaring disapproval
>maliously rip options out of the game coding out of spite so people can't even mod it back in
>game crawls along releasing more dlc and still getting simplified even more with only people occasionally remembering a game that no longer exists

Making more intelligent AI is harder than making balance changes for competent or competitive players.
A good example is another Paradox game with similar mechanics, Hearts of Iron 4; a lot of the 'broken' things you can do (case in point, there's a video of a guy taking Russia as Germany in 1938 consistently by tricking them into attacking with substantially weaker troops) rely on exploiting how dumb the AI is and how it fails to react to weird or 'un-historical' situations.

The problem is diplomancy isn't something you can program into an AI. They cannot and will not ever understand the importance of anything beyond pure numbers - the AI will only do things that directly benefit it, regardless of the player's intentions, except in odd cases where their 'decision making' is intentionally random.

I got the game on the Winter Sale so I am not a "Stellaris Expert" or "Stellaris Oldfag". However, In my opinion I prefer the chokepoints because it makes Ground Warfare more valuable; meaning you can't just yeet on a Faction with just Navy, if they have properly defended planet's you will need either years to bombard, DLC late game doomlazors (does not work if its a valuable planet you want to occupy), or a good ground warfare core to immediately take a planet...
I am curious though: Did the devs like remove a pre-game settings option to have whatever FTL system(s) you desire, or did they never have that in the first place?

(I am not talking about the prior version where you chose ftl travel, and other factions got their own, I am specifically asking if there was custom game options to dictate what FTL system(s) was used?)

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>muh competitive gaming
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Seriously, what's wrong with your brain that everything must be a hardcore online competitive experience?
Did mommy not hug you enough as a kid and now you feel the need to flex your "superior knowledge" of the most boring and meta strategies you know in an already niche title in a niche genre?
Guaranteed you bitched and whined for the 2.0 changes.

Why not just utilize deep learning to mirror other player's strategies and use them on AI?

>swedecuck devs

You could decide what FTL options were available for the game at creation before Paradox stripped them out.

Ehhhh, that tech is still far off... Who knows how many years until a game's AI uses deep learning. And (probably) the only company who would take the risk to do that would be Valve. Which would add even more time before a game with Good AI is created...

OK that's dumb just dumb... If they wanted to make multiplayer an even playing field they could have just had a mode with "Standard Ruleset" of hyperlane only FTL, and a mode with "Custom Ruleset" to including other FTL. And the fanbase would be happy with it... I don't see how that would be hard to think of and implement...

removing the other FTL options was a great decision, sorry autists

>did the devs remove ftl options.
Yes, that's the gripe.
Before 2.0 you had the options in the settings to limit which kind of ftl was available in your campaigns. So if you only wanted to play with hyperspace, you could set it up that way.
The real problem though is that not only did they remove the option to use alternative ftl settings, but they also completely removed that code for those setting from the game.
So this meant that many mods were fucked over as well because this code was removed.

I couldn't care less if you cared about choke points or not. If you cared about online competitive matches or not.
The issue I have is that they removed the option for me to play how I liked to play, because a small percentage of the player base whined that one ftl type was more op than another.
The game I paid for is no longer available. I wouldn't have bought the game as it is.
It's OUTERSPACE, if I wanted choke points, I'd play a ground based war game.

GSG is at its best with friends. I don't even play SP anymore.

>Seriously, what's wrong with your brain that everything must be a hardcore online competitive experience?
So playing versus braindead AI is fun?
> all those projections
sry, won't read

>won't read
I must have hit a nerve.

>even their stripped down new low-tech ground based games have more tactical options than their sci-fantasy sandbox

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Because it's incredibly expensive to make/license and would massively increase the system requirements of any game?

Yeah exactly.
If Paradox wants to re-balance the game for lanes, then sure, whatever.
If they have the opinion that lanes work better in Multiplayer than all other travel options, okay fine.
They could have done all that. The options to restrict a match to one single FTL-method has been there since day one.
But apparently Paradox thinks that players simply can't be trusted with the options and might play the game wrong so they just stripped content out.

Or said something incredibly stupid.
Playing against inferior opponent is always boring, nodiscuss.

>nodiscuss
Translation:
>LALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!

So you're saying playing against inferior opponent can be fun?

There is absolutely no point balancing a strategy game for "singleplayer". No traditional AI can compete in any meaningful sense with a human. It just doesn't mean anything.

That said I think they did a pretty shitty job balancing for multiplayer too. And squadrons are still shit. Chokepoints are good though.

So how long does an online Stellaris game take?

The real issue is the "hardcore competitive" players who claimed that if they didn't force these limitations on all players at all times, no one would play in their "competitive" ruleset.
The implication being that their preferred way should be the only way to play the game.
This is also why they nuked the code for alternate ftl types from the game code, otherwise modders could've brought it right back.

>this is not removing content
Really? Considering their 'balancing' of strategic ressources included the REMOVAL of over a dozen planetary and orbital buildings and their strategic values, and their 'balancing' of naval warfare includes the REMOVAL of 3 out of the 4 travel methods and the REMOVAL of space stations to turn them into outpost-bonuses?

>is playing with an inferior opponent fun?
I'm having fun toying with you, aren't I?

You're new to imageboards, right?

Paradox doesn't know what gameplay is. There was literally a quote where they explained how they worked hard to incorporate a set amount of clicking and playerinput into various mechanics of the game. So they literally worked to make the game more obtuse and to inflate the number of actions required to hide the fact that there was no fucking game behind all of this fucking clicking on fucking shit.

>u-uh... Y-YOU'RE NEW!

They removed space stations now? Oh fuck I'm not picking this up ever again fuck them. Next year they'll remove the space setting and change the game into a naval 4x or something.

After Dwarf Fortress hits Steam they'll change it to clone that.
They're beyond retarded at this point.
At least they don't update their old shit.

How about you read the changes that took place over a year ago and form an informed opinion

yeah

holy fuck dude just stop, you are an absolute fucking retard and your posts are a chore to read.

You assume I have the time and will to spare in keeping up with a three year old clusterfuck -that I bought at launch- that doesn't know where its going.

To claim a system you have to build an outpost now and the only specestations available are additions to said outpost. So any defense station you build can only be as a cluster around the sun instead of doing the reasonable thing anybody with a strategic mind would do, building them right at lane-entry points.

But FTL inhibitors exist. It barely matters WHERE the station is.

>beyond retarded AI
>performance keeps getting worse
>previous features often break after an update
>retarded balance decisions
>still not enough anomalies
man fuck paradox

Combat system is shit and when it was released you were forced to fight all the time. War against ai was so broken

>I'm not picking this up ever again fuck them
>>They didn't even remove space stations, you're just blindly trusting

>Chokepoints in space.

Yes.
So's Aurora.

You mean you don't enjoy waring against the AI, pushing their shit it, conquering nearly all of their space just so you can get 3 systems? God help you if they're in an alliance.

An FTL inhibitor means pulling the enemy fleet straight into the center of a system and holding them there for a while.
This may have strategic value as a speedbump in uninhabited systems because the fleet will have to crawl out of the gravity well again, but it's a strategic disadvantage in inhabited systems where the target planet is close to the sun.
Surely we don't have to argue that having the freedom on where and how to place your defences is more desirable.
But apparently the space-police doesn't allow the placement of stations anywhere else but at the sun any longer.

I haope the next Hearts of Iron forces you to move your troops only along highways and through chokepoints instead of allowing them to move wherever they want.

Elite, Distant Worlds and maybe x4 in a few years?

endless space 2 is nice

>playing Stellaris
>when ES2 exists

lmao @ u

You forgot
>they leave the most boring version in the game

Yes, Distant Worlds is 1000000000x better than shitlaris

>guys we can't balance combat without chokepoints it's just too hard ;_;
Master of Orion managed it 26 years ago Paradox, i sure you could manage if you tried.

The AI is just as bad though.

Paradox literally does not even know how the games they made a decade ago work anymore.
They are like a video game fallen civilization given flesh.

no game has an AI as bad as stellaris

Utter garbage. Stellaris still has some way to go but it's miles better than it once was.
They still need to sort out pop management, diplomacy, war, pretty much everything but compared to where they started they're slowly getting there

>playing 4x singleplayer

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It essentially works like that already, you don't see it because you just paint meme arrows and let the computer do it.

Star ruler 2 became free to to play and it's fucking great

>war
>be xenophobic militant empire
>encounter xeno filth
>have to work around war score and dont have the option to crush them completely, no more than 3 planets per war please :)

Don't make me remember

>the "hardcore competitive" players
Does such a thing actually exist for paradox games?

>nearly conquer enemy empire,they lost their entire navy
>70% war exhaustion
>lose a battleship
>gain 12% war exhaustion

Hey at least you don't have to spend 38 years fabricating a claim to get a casus belly to claim a single province like in Crusader Kings yet

That's not even what ruined the game for me. But after release the only way to properly expand was war. And you could annex shit so easily. My friends were shit talking me because I was bigger than all of them combinded because "I was playing the game wrong". Nigga, the only thing to do is war and the AI is brainded

how about you play a real strategy game?

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I think my blindest move was to trust Paradox at launch.

You said it, they still need to sort out pretty much everything, 3 years after launch.

Who's hype for Imperator?
I can't wait to watch this trainwreck.

The funny thing is they don't even know how to program a fallen civilization in their game properly without relying on scripted events, so everything just becomes huge ugly blob empires with smaller nations having zero chance at defending themselves due to broken/non-existing attrition and terrain systems. I'm really sad that they are one of the few grand strategy developers out there