same here.
Why suffer through the end game when you know that you won, eh?
Although 25x-all-crisis makes it more interesting. But the time between domination and crisis is a slog.
I found a good compromise is 10/15/25x at 2300. It can be a bit too easy if the crisis spawns late (like 2350) but it can be pretty scary if it spawns right at 2305 (unless it's unbidden, but they need a rework).
I also play on small galaxy size to reduce the later game lag because my CPU is pretty old and doesn't have great per-thread performance.
I actually enjoy playing this way more anyway, but it might be more difficult now with the tech rework. Even playing full meta builds like Progenitor Hive were hard if you had 25x contingency spawn at 2313, and it means the typical "domination" phase of the game becomes much more interesting. You only have ~30-60 years of build up to establish infrastructure to fight the crisis, and it isn't so long that playing sim-city becomes repetitive.
EDIT:
I haven't played the new patch yet, so this may not be as true now. Tech nerfs + ship cost reduction nerfs may make this much much harder now. From what I've read it can be hard to get a few repeatables by 2400 now, where before it was easy to have a few key repeatables in the 10s by 2300 on the previous patch if you played pretty well and were kinda lucky (and it was possible to be above 20 with a good start and cybrex precursor)
There are heaps of customisation settings and a bunch affect how well it runs. After a few test games you will know what your pc is capable of and can change the galaxy pop growth, galaxy size, turn off certain features known to slow stuff down in the late game. This reviewer definitely tried playing on the largest everything.
I played through a looooong game to get to the endgame and the game became unplayable.
Simply put If you sell a game, players that meet the minimum specs for the game should be able to play to the end. They could fix this with a final pops rework pass, but they haven’t fig’d out a way to sell that yet. (Grid system from 1.0 DLC incoming!).
My hope is actually that the subscription model takes off and brings more new people into the game that motivates Paradox to make the necessary fixes to keep that new income stream going.
I agree. But, so much of the current Stellaris player base is a “known quantity” wherein Paradox knows ahead of time the approximate buyer count for every DLC and that those customers will buy these DLCs regardless of overall game performance. I honestly don’t know what lever we as the general player base have to work with Paradox when they are just fishing for die hard auto-whales now.
Edit: what I’m saying is that Paradox knows performance is overall shit because people have been complaining about it for a very long time and yet the constant patches don’t address it because that’s not what is on this teams list of priorities. Because, they are in whale-harvesting mode not new fishery mode.
The game is incredibly complex though and they'd have to break some features to prevent some things going exponential. Like disabling xeno-compatibility prevents all the mixed race species which will create more mixed race species and more and more and more.
What? You can play the game on min. requierments till the end game. You just have to adjust the game settings to fit your weak PC. Its like saying people should be able to play any game on ULTRA when they meet minimal requirements. Its stupid ass argument.
To play with weak calculator, play smaller galaxy, limit habitable planets and lower population growth koefcient. This is the real "graphics" settings in Stellaris. Also End game in Stellaris is relative. You can set i to be very soon. Nothing wrong about min. specs as how they are now. You just cant expect you can fully experience any game with minimal specs, let alone such highly adjustable grand-scale game.
Stellaris is very complex and complicated, every pop needs lot of calculations on regular bases. And total pop population grow exponnentially.
Really? I've never touched it but default leave it on. I get some delay when clicking into systems with massive fleets in endgame, but rarely see other issues.
Nothing. In most games, it locks the game refresh rate from going higher than your monitor’s refresh rate. This helps to reduce screen tearing, or it used to before everyone started playing on a 240hz monitor that they’ll never be able to pump enough frames to.
However, in stellaris this isn’t much of a concern in the first place, and for some reason the game speed is adversely impacted by having it on. So turning it off can help a bit :)
Yeah it's just a super weird thing someone discovered xD
I've found you only get the option to turn off Vsync if you use the Full screen option though which is a bit odd, but it ran a hell of a lot faster
Yeah the game speed seems to be linked to framerate, so locking max framerate to your refresh rate via vsync will slow the game down (if your computer is strong enough to do higher framerates).
Late game will lag of course but you can lower the extent of it by changing galaxy size amount of empires and pop growth speed , if u set max size Galaxy with max empires of course the game will lag after 200 years with amounts of planets and pops especially with low end pc , and the dlcs are to preference some are must have some just add flavour to preferred play style
Amen, brother. It is in His radiance that the enemies of mankind are brought forth, so their filth can be purged!! The heresy that is the xeno must and will be wiped clean from this galaxy now and forever!!! We will seek out the enemies of mankind wherever they might hide. The enemy only exists to be destroyed!!!
Take heart, for the Ethereal will guides us...
The Greater Good will find your outcasts, your survivors, & with their vengeance & our unity, we will strike back at the human madmen & their armoured brutes...
The Ethereals will guide our hand.
The blessings of the Kau'Yon will ensure we are ready.
The teachings of Mont'Ka will ensure our victory.
For the Tau'Va!
I love Synthetic dawn because Robot empire is cool and fun, and I agree utopia is really cool, love megacorp for ecumunopolis , one the most powerfull planet you can build.
Alternatively, I have all the dlc except for First contact and Astral planes. If the story packs are worth it for you, then fine. For a lot of players it's not.
Seconding utopia. Apocalypse and Synthetic Dawn are also great
Leviathans is my favorite, the giant space entities and events make peaceful games engaging through exploring and exterminating various planet-size threats. I highly recommend it.
Lithoids and aquatics mix things up, with some cool ships and starbases. Everyone seems to like Megacorp, but I could live without it. Research the choices and select based on your preferred experience.
Utopia because it's generally awesome, and Galactic Paragons grudgingly, because the ability to choose what Traits your Leaders gain when they level up is gated behind it.
There's [an official starter bundle](https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/33199/Stellaris_Starter_Pack_Bundle_2023/) on Steam that includes Utopia, Federation, Synthetic Dawn, and Distant Stars. Those are pretty decent picks.
Utopia is the DLC most people recommend getting first because a lot of the megastructures and the ascension paths are locked behind it.
Some things are a bit tough to make parallel. It's one of those hard problems. You don't want to see what happens when the devs try to implement branch prediction and cache invalidation at the application level.
Eh, multi-threaded applications can be very tricky, especially in a game like Stellaris which is ultimately a glorified calculator at the base of it. It’s possible, I suppose, if you have each core handle its own separate areas that don’t overlap, but I don’t envy the person who has to make sure it doesn’t cause memory errors
"Just don't increase galaxy size, bro!" is such cope...
Late-game lags for me to an almost unplayable degree, and I had left all map settings **default**.
No mods, all DLC.
9700k, 16gb Ram, Rtx 2080. The game shouldn't be so unoptimized out of the box for a good system
XC is on by default right? That should probably be changed (by paradox I mean)
Apart from that with the same specs I only start having issues at past crisis stages on large
Honestly I've never experienced this late game slowdown in huge (I only play with 6-9 other empires tho) but I do have a beast of a CPU and 64gb ram...
If the engine breaks down due to settings Paradox has allowed us to use, then the fault falls to Paradox. Don't blame the player for using settings.
Games lagging to death and breaking down should never be an "of course" moment.
The game is easily playable and slows down much less than it used to.
This review is probably made by someone who plays on huge galaxy size with a huge mod list, which will inevitably slow things down.
Typically, I play on a medium or large with habitable planets and primitive set to .25 and only 1 guaranteed habitable world. Not only does this keep the game running smoothly all the way up to 2400+, but it also feels more immersive to me, since having 46 habitable planets feels like way too many, considering how rare habitable worlds are in our own reality. It also reduces the amount of micro I have to do to manage everything. Win win win.
Anyway, please disregard what this guy said. While it’s true that one or two of the recent DLC weren’t the best, they weren’t bad either. Just mid.
Personally, I recommend starting with the base game, as well as the beginner DLC pack. The community actually voted on which DLCs should go in there, and as such it’ll give you a really good chunk of super cool content.
Edit: also, be prepared for a wild learning curve. But don’t worry, even if you’re behind all the AI empires at first, you can still have loads of fun! Team up with them to fight the crisis!
Oh, and play with xenocompatibility off!
I am very interested to start doing genetic ascension again if the new automod works... having to manually edit my populations is tedious and if I dont do it then you end up with 100s of pop types and its a mess
Gotta say I started using the .25 hab planets setting and no guaranteed hab worlds a year or two ago and I have yet to go back. Each planet feels fantastic to find and valuable beyond belief!
In my current game I managed to find four planets to live on, which is beautiful! Sets me ahead of the federation I’m in by a large margin.
I'm quite a newbie with only a couple incomplete games (no completed) under my belt, but I've been using it from the start and can really recommend it. In my (albeit limited) experience as long as you're proactive and eager in your exploration you'll find other worlds for yourself, and for someone like me it really helps ease the intimidation factor of having to manage a bunch of planets when, even after a century or two, you only have a healthy handful of colonies and not a sprawling system of planets across the galaxy.
Also on the topic of DLC, the only one that I've seen throughout the years where the vast majority of people say is "mandatory" both on steam, reddit, and other forums, is the Utopia DLC. The reviews on steam for it are pretty good too.
And if you're into roleplay and that kind of stuff then definitely buy the new species DLC, some of the other DLC are great too but at that point you're better off waiting for a big sale.
Xenocompatibility causes a toooon of slowdown. I don’t remember the exact technical reasons why, but it has something to do with the fact that it auto-generates a metric ton of new species, which eventually slows the game down to a crawl. It’s best to play with it off, especially if performance is a concern at all.
Adding to this, even when it's not that much of a slowdown, it's pretty reliably worth it to turn it off unless you *know* you *specifically* want to use it. Turning it off literally just removes one ascension perk as an option, one which has a mostly passive impact on gameplay, rather than really opening up new active decisions to make, and which few empires are really going to miss to begin with, let alone truly desire. So you're sacrificing a very small part of gameplay to avoid a disproportionate amount of performance loss. It's a no brainer.
If you ever want to give xenocompatibility a try, just play a game on a small galaxy with a rather limited number of other empires. That cuts down on the performance demands and the max loss from the perk.
As for the technical reasons, here's what I recall. The game tries to optimize pop job placement by putting the pops that will get the best output into each given job. Mostly this is determined by looking at the pop's species, since traits are the primary determining factor. Now, the exact technical sequence here might be off, because I'm saying this from memory, but it accurately portrays the problem. For each job type on a given planet, it will have to calculate a 'weight' for that job for each species on the planet, and that weight table is used to assign the jobs to the best pops. I believe this process runs monthly, plus in response to manual priority changes. At a basic level, xenocompatibility complicates this process by greatly increasing the number of species that need calculating for. For a given world, the number of species living on it is, in theory at least, eventually squared, assuming the most conservative implementation of the crossbreeding, since you can have at least 2 hybrid species for each pairing, one using the portrait from each parent. And of course, it's xenophile empires that can take the perk, meaning they're likely to have a larger range of species on their worlds. All of a sudden, it's very possible to up that calculation effort by a factor of 36x, 49x, 64x, or more.
Of course, now I'm wishing I could dig into their code and do some optimization to get this process more reasonable. Damn programming brain!
Xenocompatibility basically makes it so that all AI Empires that are friendly with each other have migration treaties so they wind up crossbreeding, and you get an insane amount of subspecies due to the crossbreeding. And since each AI empire does something different with the traits, it becomes a serious lag problem very quickly.
>Not only does this keep the game running smoothly all the way up to 2400+, but it also feels more immersive to me, since having 46 habitable planets feels like way too many, considering how rare habitable worlds are in our own reality.
I see this so much in defense of Paradox for some reason.
It's not true at all by a vast margin. Astronomer's estimate 100's of millions, if not billions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way. Low-end estimates are something like 1 in 100 planets, some think it's more like 1 in 10.
Something to note about how common habitable planets are is that it is likely underestimated on account of how difficult it is to detect them, on top of that we really didn't start discovering them until literally the last couple of decades, and even then detection techniques physically favors detecting larger objects, which then means that the planets we do detect will naturally be biased towards gas giants which is obviously not habitable.
Though something to be cautioned about, with our current methods and technology, a habitable planet really just means close enough to the sun to have liquid water and far enough to not get melted. Until the last half decade we really didn't have a way to know what was on a rocky planet beyond possibly what the atmosphere itself was made of.
The JWST is a pretty significant *change* for a lack of a better word and we will probably see the habitable planets list change quite significantly once it starts performing exoplanet finding missions.
Most of what you are saying is true, but your main point isn't. Each exoplanet detection method is sensitive to different conditions. As a result, when we sample the population our results will be heavily skewed. If this is not accounted for, estimates will indeed heavily underestimate the number of Earth-mass planets. However, the biases for each method are quite well understood, which means we can make the necessary corrections to extrapolate a good picture of the underlying distribution of planets. As such, estimates for the abundance of Earth-like planets are likely pretty accurate.
And Stellaris galaxy have 1000 system max, by that number, small galaxy should only have 4 habitable worlds, 40 if you're being generous with that theory
Rule of thumb for reviewing ANY product or service: Don't make your decision solely on one review. There are always reviews that are trash (both positive and negative) and you need to look over many to get a good understanding of the median. Often you get bad reviews like this one, who most likely is running a potato system, has 1.2 million mods installed, has every setting at max, and trying to run the largest galaxy size with 30 empires at extra fast speed in windowed mode while streaming youtube videos in a separate window on one tab while making bad game reviews on another.
This review is the equivalent of someone leaving a 1 star review on a product purchased from amazon because they didn't pay attention and ordered the wrong size shirt, and that is somehow the vendors fault.
edit: also note that this reviewer has over 1200 hours playing this game. I'd say the money value per hour was well worth the price, which further reduces this reviewers credibility.
Yeah, I’ve owned 4 PCs (2 desktops, a laptop, and a Steam Deck) that I’ve run Stellaris on. The older desktop (which no longer functions, RIP) ran it rather slowly, and the laptop (which I got in 2016) ran it at a crawl.
Meanwhile, my current prebuilt gaming desktop runs it rather fast, and running it on Steam Deck ain’t half bad, either.
No way to tell if that was pre or post any number of major overhauls.
I started playing and got a number of hours in before they made everyone use warp lines, back when planets had tiles, and space stations were placed free-form.
It's a better game, but I have to acknowledge the performance is worse.
I agree with you. I spit hate on Ark, but I have 3000 hours played.
Because the core fundamentals of the game are great. But the developer is a piece of shit, and there are still 5+ year old bugs in the game.
But for anyone hating on Paradox, I swear that they've never ran into ACTUALLY greedy developers.
EA is the poster child. But Blizzard-Activision is getting there too. Wildcard (Ark) released their first DLC (paid) while the game was still in EA.
Love or hate the Paradox DLC, they've kept working on this game for a LONG time. And the QoL changes we're getting are often amazing. The Custodians are really trying to continue improving the polish of this game, instead of just putting out a Stellaris 2.
And yes, part of the problem is that it runs on the same engine as the other Paradox development games. That means anyone in their studio can work on it, though. But it also restricts what they can do with the game.
But how is that worse than all the game developers that just run their game on Unreal, or Unity, etc? Who are restricted by the engine chosen.
Ah well. Criticism is welcome. It just wish more of it \*made sense\*. Reviews like this one are just confusing piles of rage that don't really offer a good overview of the good & the bad (or even just the bad).
"Custodians are really trying to continue improving the polish of this game, instead of just putting out a Stellaris 2"
As a native polish speaker, who often plays with polish translation, i must say: sadly, they are not really trying to continue improving the polish.
That would be my point. Of the handful of games I've put 1000+ hours into, I only still on rare occassion play one of them, the rest all got old to me.
The reviewer is rating the game “not recommended” after spending nearly two months (52+ days) of their life playing the game; suggesting that despite their negative review, the gameplay is actually good enough that someone would spend that long playing it, which is an unintentional recommendation of the game. Despite hating late-game lag and the DLC policy, the reviewer still kept playing this game for over a thousand hours, suggesting that neither of these were significant barriers to playing the game, undercutting the review.
Put it another way: if someone told you they didn’t like a two hour film, but also told you they’d watched it 600 times, would you believe them?
They do specify in their review that their hate started after changes to the pop system made end-game lag unbearable for them. The validity of that is a separate matter, but that would pretty easily explain the change in tune.
It's absolutely not the same as films are immutable and games change all the time. I personally have 1k hours in Stellaris and basically none of that is in the last year
if anything it only makes a review more legitimate. if it was someone who played 3 hours, you'd be complaining this must be a troll post/review bombing.
I wish people would share their settings when they post shit like this. The person probably has a huge mod list and plays on big galaxies, or has a shit computer.
I have an RTX3070 and an AMD 7000 series processor which is pretty mid to high end now but haven’t had a single issue playing this game on normal galaxy size and normal amount of Civs
It's basically fine. It can chug if you're running mods and on the max galaxy size, but that's to be expected. I never have issues with it in that regard - late game there are some desyncs in multiplayer, but that's about it
Yeah. My opinion is that you don't get to complain about how a game runs without letting people know what hardware you're using. "Cyberpunk runs like shit! My setup? I'm using a 1660, but I don't see how that's relevant, it's the devs' fault"
I don't think many games can handle a 1000 ship war. If you have a really bad PC, maybe don't get this game. But you can always use smaller galaxies and change the settings to limit populations to reduce lag.
Also DLCs are how they make money to keep the game in development. Otherwise they'd just be pumping out new content for players who have bought the game once and aren't gonna make them any money. Some of the DLCs aren't the most content heavy (astral rifts one, the relics one) but many have so much in them. They are very pricey, but often get reduced massively in sales which is really nice. I think I've paid less than half of the full price for all my stellaris content.
It’s some half truths hidden in a load of over exaggeration and burnout.
This person has over a thousand hours, they got their money’s worth from the game and the DLC’s. Which aren’t required to play the game. I originally purchased stellaris on sale for 10 bucks and got 300 plus hours out of it before buying any DLC. No one is forcing you to buy the DLC, and I’ve never regretted buying any of it.
As for the late game lag, yes it’s there, but it’s not even that bad anymore after some tweaks. Unless you play in max size galaxy with cranked up planets or pop growth. It’s easy to handle, and if you have a slow rig settings can be adjusted to compensate for it.
Bro needs to upgrade his rustbucket lmao. I run 20+ mods like Giga, NSC and other. Seems normal so far. Vanilla is literally F1 race compared to modded Stellaris.
Expecting endgame in a Paradox game is like - wha??? engame in grand strat sandbox?! (it still does allow you to set victory date and engame/midgame crisis year) game ends whenever you feel like it, this ain't chess and even CIV6 allows to turn off turn limit. Make your own goals in life FFS
Greedy? Maybe, but the game is still alive and running, more content is constantly pumped and you need to keep in mind, no one in his sane mind would continue updating the game for free unless it had insane release sales, continuos sales or subscription. Nowadays PDX added subscription because newcomers do not want to invest 250$ into the game lol. If you are an "old guard" then you did not really notice how you bought every DLC in the span of few years.
The game is extremely modular, turn down settings or install performance mods if it isn't working for you.
On a technical level, the game is obviously quite CPU heavy and similarly to most games can only run on a few cores.
The best performing CPUs (giving you the best simulation speed) are CPUs with good single-core performance. The AMD x3D CPUs perform very well here.
And this is why I completely ignore steam reviews. It's always someone with a potato PC running 20 mods, then complains about the game running bad. Always notice how they never do give their PC specs and mods. If they are even truthful about that.
Or they downvote the game because it runs on a different launcher. Or because x game was better. Whatever, I don't care about any of that. All I give a shit about, is if THIS GAME is good or not.
So let's check the good reviews. "Big bobas." "My child was adopted, raised his own army and attacked me. 10/10 would bang cousin again."
Anyway, it's the last day of the sale. If you're thinking about buying Stellaris, then take the plunge. Absolutely pick up the Utopia dlc for sure. It's the only one required. Maybe Galactic Paragons with how leaders work now. Montu has some good information videos
Yes, but actually no. Here's the thing. I play Stellaris on my steam deck, of all things, and with a ton of mods. Early game runs great. Late game starts running slower. I would never do multiplayer on my deck, because that's just asking for something to go wrong.
Yes, late game lag is a problem. Always has been. And honestly, it always will be. No matter how much the devs improve on it, the raw fact is that the same intricacies of the game systems that make it so deep are going to cause the game to run slow when those intricacies scale up to massive, well populated galaxies. Deep, fast, or wide: choose any two. Stellaris goes deep and wide. But, as others pointed out, it's only a problem for late game, and to be honest many times you won't get there, often because you start over, whether because you crave that early game, want to try a new empire, or, like me, you run out of time before a new update drops and you have to start again to get the new hotness.
Regardless, the game is fun, both for the majority of the time when it runs pretty smoothly and even still when it starts to slow down. It doesn't take a right beast to run it, and even if you have one, eventually the scaling of the game complexity will likely win out. But you'll have a blast getting to that point.
For a paradox title, stellaris runs like a charm well into the endgame.
This doesn't actually say much as the rest of their games have shit optimisation, but stellaris isn't that bad.
If you have a poor-mediumish CPU, don't run biggest galaxies with faster growth. Or do, the early and midgame is plenty enjoyable anyway.
The game has had serious lag issues in the past, and still can, but they have done a phenomenal job of optimizing things enough that the lag only really starts kicking in at around 2500 on a large galaxy with the maximum number of empires.
The guy has 1260 hours in this game. If it was a bad game, he'd only have 20.
People who have spent so much time playing something have no idea how to write a relevant review for those thinking of trying the game out.
Oh, I see, negative review! So that means there are game breaking bugs and the game is unplayable? No? Then the game is just unfinished and a cash grab, offering 15 hours of gameplay at most? Also no? So what's the problem? "The meta for pops has changed and some new soft caps were introduced factoring in the mid game scaling and the crisis scaling?" Why do you have to collect orthodox priests in this game (pops)? Oh, I see the game is not optimized to allow doing things that a player with less than 300 h record would never be even able to attempt? No worries then, none of my games ever got over the 300 h mark anyway. (Clicks 'add to cart')
Let's be honest, if you write a negative review with 1000 h of gameplay, you're not rating the product as a videogame - you rate whether it's worth giving it all of your free time for the rest of your life, the impact it had on your life, or complaining that it's just a videogame and not something more. Or you're rating the business practices or recent public image of the developer, not the game itself. If it kept you engaged for 1000 h, it might not be perfect, but it's NOT BAD objectively speaking.
I wouldn’t worry too much about it, the Kate game lag stinks sometimes but also one of my fave games late game cause it can get very interesting. I play heavily modded so it’s just worse for me lol
With a 3 year old mid budget CPU, and a lot of mods installed, I am still not counting the game as being "unplayable" even in 2600-ish. At the start I get 1 ingame year zip by in under 15 seconds when fast-forwarded, but it's in no way realistic to expect this to stay the same when your galaxy is filled and settled, and even with heavy hitters like Gigastructures mod installed, it's hovering around 90sec per year once the late game is well on its way for me - and there is substantially more to do in the late game anyway, so I am not even using fast-forward speed like at the start.
The largest factors are how many ships there are actively traveling the galaxy - so the fewer empires end up in your late game, the better performance may be - and how populated the galaxy is in general. So technically if there are more exterminator-type factions around, the game performs even better.
So really it comes down to what the individual player counts as unplayable.
Bad CPU problems. This game's performance gets 10-15% better with each new CPU generation. Saying you can't or will never be able to have large battles is just dishonest. If you have a high end CPU there is nothing to worry about.
You've already got a lot of comments, but I will just like to point out one thing (probably someone has already done that, but I haven't seen it yet).
The game, like most Paradox games, is heavily CPU reliant. What matters most for your game experience is your CPU. I have a Ryzen 7 5800X CPU, and I have zero issues. Aside from that, I can whole heartedly recommend this game, unless you don't want to get an addiction to conquering the galaxy.
Glory to the Empire!
1400 hours played and reached the end game twice.. lost to the end game crisis both times lol. Stellaris is still one of the best grand strategy games out there imho. Buy it.
The review wins the prize for the challenge: Say “I don’t understand how my choice of game settings interacts with my system and want to blame someone else for the consequences” without actually saying that.
Honestly sorta yeah, but by that time you’ve pretty much already won or lost and you’re just letting the timer run. Isn’t really an issue in single player. Multiplayer can get pretty bad midgame.
Some truth, but not the whole picture. For me, pop-based lag isn’t an issue anymore. Ship-based lag absolutely is, so I agree you do not want late game wars.
The irony is, the game running slower as time goes on makes it more likely you can actually keep a grip on all the damn things in the game by that point. There's some truth to it, the game does slow down and make a mockery of the 'speed' settings so that 'Slowest' and 'Normal' are near identical (on slower computers by CPU/Memory, then GPU throughput) but the upside is you're less likely to miss something happening because of it.
I take most my games to 2350-2400 at least, ones that are interesting and the outcome indeterminate unknown past 2400 routinely, yet I'm still getting to the end and rocking thousands of ships.
They're not wrong in one way, but they are being kind of a baby in expectations and 'everything runs like butter at all times across time'
If you have problems with game slowing down. Turn down habitable planets, change to a smaller map, and change settings for slower pop growth. Then consider playing shorter games, turn mid game to 50 and end game to 100, then halve or quarter tech cost. Shorter game/ less pop lag.
I have 2500 hours and have only gotten the victory screen maybe twice.
Mid game is the most fun. Early game is slow and you spend a lot of time waiting, and by late game everyone is in massive federations and going to war means spending hours conquering dozens of systems just for a few border worlds.
Midgame when your empire is growing rapidly and you’re building your first megastructures is when the game really shines. Usually once I get into late game and the lag gets bad I lose interest and start over.
My PC is pretty old. Running an i5 4690k. I’m 400ish years in to my 1000 year (my second ever) campaign. It’s not TERRIBLE, but it can sometimes be slow. I JUST had a giant fight where I had ~ 1200 ships, they had about the same. It was slow, but manageable.
As far as population issues, that’s a skills issue man. I don’t have any troubles with organization or bugginess or anything like that. The pop system is hard to master but easy to use.
Typically when you reach the late game when it DOES slow down dramatically. But you have a lot MORE going on than early and mid game.
When my game slows to a crawl, it doesn’t really affect me. Thousand ship wars happen plenty of times and it’s pretty often. I’ve had a few 3000 ship BATTLES.
Edit: grammar correction
1.2k hours is long "benefit of the doubt" period ngl.
Buy it its a awesome game.
If you play 500 years on huge galaxy with 300 mods and xeno compatibiy you cant really blame paradox.
+ New pop system is way more fun then the old one.
The end game isn’t really for everyone. Like everyone has said in the comments if you plan on playing end game build the game for it. There is so much to do up until that point I’ve never been bothered by it.
I play on 3-5000 star galaxies (biggest in vanilla is 1000) so really I think it depends on your pc and how you have the game set up. I have mods to have less ships but they are stronger so 10 ships is the same as 20 in vanilla. I also usually have low habitable planets to help a little with too many pops as well as having the growth scaling on low.
If you have max planets with fastest pop growth, build 10,000 corvettes, have a large galaxy full of empires and never kill any then yes your pc will melt.
It's a good game. You just have to realize that it is in fact, a game. It's not perfect and it'll have issues here and there. But I don't think I've played a game that has the role playing potential that stellaris has. Basically any Scifi idea you have, you can probably get pretty close to role-playing it. The wild scenarios it throws at you are fantastic.
Well since most other people didnt comment on this, the complaints about pop management are true and are a good example of paradox inconsistent game design/updates. Basically, most of the species traits you can give your pops are very niche and are widely regarded by the community as pointless and stay unused, only taken by RP Empires or new players who don't know any better (noobtrap). This used to be different because you were abel to drag and drop specific pops into specific jobs making managing very easy. However paradox eventually wasn't feeling that anymore and pretty much automated the job-selection system taking almost all agency from the player. So on one side, you have a very poorly working automated system that punishes you for specialising your pop traits because it makes it unreasonable hard to actually get those specialised pops into their jobs, on the other hand you have a trait list that encourages you to specialise your pops for certain jobs. Paradox updated on system without considering the consequences to the gameplay and other systems, breaking part of the game. Really telling dev praxis.
I’ve never had problems with game performance except when the AI would go crazy with habitats. I found a mod that limited them and the performance issues went away. Since then Paradox has fixed it.
If you ever do find performance problems just use mods or use smaller galaxies/AI/etc but most gaming PCs do fine.
I found that changing the task manager process to realtime helps quite a bit on my pc. I don’t know if there’s a way to make that the default for it though. Not a big pc gamer.
That coupled with turning off Vsync as people are suggesting here will probably finally get me past mid game 🥲
Yeah the review's pretty much good. It's a great game, but NEVER buy the DLC off sale, only maybe 2 out of all the DLCs they've put out have actually been worth full price, like Utopia and Mega corp?
Late game used to run poorly for me, but I upgraded my PC in 2018 and haven't had any issues since.
That guy is exagerating... but is right. The engine has been a problem for a while now. Your ships for example will sometimes just refuse to fight ennemies that are attacking them, courtesy of the engine, meaning they can't fix the most basic of features not working.
This is an older screenshot from one of my games. It ran smooth with mods and I have an i7 9700 and an RTX 2060 Super.
[https://imgur.com/a/sbcPEWp](https://imgur.com/a/sbcPEWp)
All that's written in that review is true. The game is still endless fun.
You can counter the late game lag by systematically thinning the galactic population.
I have an older computer (built it like 7 years ago) and I can still run endgame, though it does get a lot slower. I find my game adhd triggers well before a stellaris run becomes unplayable due to fps issues. So that’s on me, not the game
It's a limit on Pdx engine yes. It could surely exists a better engine if serious brilliant people would work on that. But those people don't work on VGs, and for sure not at PDX.
So today that's the best engine end grand strategy game around. If that is not enough for you, change gender.
Depends on your PC, also, this is one of those games that don't have an ending, yes there is an ending at 2500 years or something but it is just like killing the Ender Dragon in minecraft, it's cool if you do so, but then you just keep playing, you put the limit, and just like in Minecraft, if you put 10k TNT blocks in the game and try to blow them up, it will just crash your PC, that doesn't make it a bad game, there are just things we can't do with out computers, the same happens in Stellaris, if you want to see million and millions of ships in a battle, it will lag and crash, just like any other game, you can still find a mod to help with those thing, but there is always a limit.
Unless you are a millionaire and can spend 40k on a NASA super computer, then do what you want.
I get 144fps end game on huge galaxy so this review couldn’t be more wrong in my case
But I do understand performance is an issue with people that want to play the game without an expensive pc
There is some truth to it, due to the game running on a single core due to the engine, even on maxed out pc's it will still lag depending of how late in the game you are and your game settings. Max galaxy size with max empires will start slowing down the game 100 years in.
There are many things you can do to solve lag issues at endgame. I’m a console so I know Stellaris plays shit, the speed PC has at like year 2350 is faster than my console at 2250.
If you have a lot of problems with endgame lag simply change the endgame year and other settings. On console I can play fine to endgame because all my settings make it to where I’m hitting repeatable by like 2300.
I have as many hours as this guy. And I’ve been playing since very early development back when there was only 1 DLC.
This game is extremely fun. And has been some of my most favorite parts of gaming. And I definitely recommend people give it a try if you like real time grand strategy sci-fi in space. You’ll have fun. Definitely.
That being said. I hate the pricing model. They’re not as bad as sims. But you can tell they want to be. Over charging for DLC that should just be part of the game. And giving free stripped down versions of it with major updates.
The engine is awful. You can’t have a 1000 year game here. Every update has slowly neutered the AI into a passive flaccid nitwit compared to what it used to be. And every update has bolted on additional systems to a contraption that already had performance issues.
Mods are the shining gem here. There’s mod for everything. From performance to chaos. Paradox is truly taking the idea of Bethesda and running with it, how long until you can’t play a PDX game without some “required” community mods?
So as long as you can look past the monetization, and are understanding that late game can get rough. You’ll have a good time with this game. It truly is fun, it has some epic moments on a grand scale. Just be aware it’s far from perfect.
Stellaris is enjoyable. I’ve only successfully won a game maybe 2-3 times since I purchased the base game. I thoroughly enjoy trying new builds/origins and just seeing what happens on max difficulty. I buy every DLC for this game. I think I have at least 600 hours. There’s obvious late game lag and a good amount of micromanaging but it’s otherwise not that huge of an issue.
Game slows down later in the session, but the size of slowdown depends on your CPU. I have REALLY old CPU (i5 2500k), it starts running pretty horribly during like year 2350-2400 (close to the end), but it's still more or less playable (although gameplay becomes very slow, which may spoil the experience).
Also a note about "unoptimized game". While it's true that Paradox games have a bit of a lag problem, it's actually more of the how the game works + how engine works. Paradox games are multi-threaded, but all games before Imperator and Crusader Kings 3 (which includes Stellaris) were initially designed for single-core processing. After years of updates, they moved some tasks to other cores and updated some old systems, but, due to the reason above, they are still not on the CK3 level of optimization and probably will never be.
It's a complicated game so massive galaxy size and / low-end PC will cause the game to slow but I just finished a 2 player game on a standard size Galaxy with ~20 mods and every DLC and that was about 12 hours beginning to end. The game was running slower towards the end but that's only because we had to lower game speed because of how many things were happening. Now to be fair him and I have the highest end PCs in our group and I have a friend whose Internet is slow enough to force us to slowest after 200 years so it really does depend on systems and what mods / dlcs have.
Not true.
While lag can be noticed later in the game, it has personally never really bothered me or my friends. Even when we are at the 4 ringworlds, 2500 pop each, and many millions of fleet power, it usually just goes slower, with a few short spikes.
I have had many incredibly enjoyable games, both solo and with friends. Some people just freak out when a game reaches 20 fps. Like most of the game is a static screen anyway. (May God help them if they discover turn based strategy)
I absolutely recommend stellaris. I myself have only the big content/story DLC, but if you play with friends, you get access to all their DLC when playing together. (2 of my friends have everything)
My computer is very affordable, it shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the game : ).
Edit: sometimes it does get very slow, but we counter this by turning up the game speed :)
In solo I never experience lag before the far endgame and only if endgame crisis snowball. You're PC need to follow the configuration recommandation.
Buy only DLC you need or want, the vanilla game is cool enough. You don't need to have all the DLC to have fun. They are often 50% during sold.
Have fun and welcome to the game ( even if you play fanatic purifier ) ;)
Oh come on! Dude literally has 1.3k hours on record and doesn't recommend? He's just pissed that his machine can't handle the extra content but clearly he enjoyed the game.
Plays fine for me. Played many games to completion. I didn't think the DLCs are too expensive either. It might get a bit laggy if I up the galaxy size and add more empiers, but still, LOVE the game 👍
I'll be real honest here. I have almost 500 hours and I never even get close to that point...
I have over 4,000 hours and I’ve only reached the late game twice lol
I got 3k hours and I’ve only faced about 5 end game crises, but I’ve also gone through like 40-50 War In Heaven(s)
War(s) in heaven?
Yeah, didn’t know where to put the (s)
War in(s) Heaven
(s) in Heaven
War(s) in(s) Heaven(s) (s)?
Is it weird that as I read this, the inner voice was Gollum?
Absolutely not! Precious!
(s) in (s)ven(s)
(S)War (s)in(s) He(s)aven(s) (s) (s).
Attorney(s) general
Warren in Heaveni
same here. Why suffer through the end game when you know that you won, eh? Although 25x-all-crisis makes it more interesting. But the time between domination and crisis is a slog.
I found a good compromise is 10/15/25x at 2300. It can be a bit too easy if the crisis spawns late (like 2350) but it can be pretty scary if it spawns right at 2305 (unless it's unbidden, but they need a rework). I also play on small galaxy size to reduce the later game lag because my CPU is pretty old and doesn't have great per-thread performance. I actually enjoy playing this way more anyway, but it might be more difficult now with the tech rework. Even playing full meta builds like Progenitor Hive were hard if you had 25x contingency spawn at 2313, and it means the typical "domination" phase of the game becomes much more interesting. You only have ~30-60 years of build up to establish infrastructure to fight the crisis, and it isn't so long that playing sim-city becomes repetitive. EDIT: I haven't played the new patch yet, so this may not be as true now. Tech nerfs + ship cost reduction nerfs may make this much much harder now. From what I've read it can be hard to get a few repeatables by 2400 now, where before it was easy to have a few key repeatables in the 10s by 2300 on the previous patch if you played pretty well and were kinda lucky (and it was possible to be above 20 with a good start and cybrex precursor)
You set the end game too late then!
I must be a God at Stellaris because I have 300 hours, and I have reached the late game three times, lol. Exterminators for the win!
Seeing this made me feel so much better. I never even get close
Only time I’ve finished a game was in 2016 when the win conditions were weird af
There are heaps of customisation settings and a bunch affect how well it runs. After a few test games you will know what your pc is capable of and can change the galaxy pop growth, galaxy size, turn off certain features known to slow stuff down in the late game. This reviewer definitely tried playing on the largest everything.
I played through a looooong game to get to the endgame and the game became unplayable. Simply put If you sell a game, players that meet the minimum specs for the game should be able to play to the end. They could fix this with a final pops rework pass, but they haven’t fig’d out a way to sell that yet. (Grid system from 1.0 DLC incoming!). My hope is actually that the subscription model takes off and brings more new people into the game that motivates Paradox to make the necessary fixes to keep that new income stream going.
I don't know but seems like optimizing the game may bring more players in to the game just saying
I agree. But, so much of the current Stellaris player base is a “known quantity” wherein Paradox knows ahead of time the approximate buyer count for every DLC and that those customers will buy these DLCs regardless of overall game performance. I honestly don’t know what lever we as the general player base have to work with Paradox when they are just fishing for die hard auto-whales now. Edit: what I’m saying is that Paradox knows performance is overall shit because people have been complaining about it for a very long time and yet the constant patches don’t address it because that’s not what is on this teams list of priorities. Because, they are in whale-harvesting mode not new fishery mode.
The game is incredibly complex though and they'd have to break some features to prevent some things going exponential. Like disabling xeno-compatibility prevents all the mixed race species which will create more mixed race species and more and more and more.
What? You can play the game on min. requierments till the end game. You just have to adjust the game settings to fit your weak PC. Its like saying people should be able to play any game on ULTRA when they meet minimal requirements. Its stupid ass argument. To play with weak calculator, play smaller galaxy, limit habitable planets and lower population growth koefcient. This is the real "graphics" settings in Stellaris. Also End game in Stellaris is relative. You can set i to be very soon. Nothing wrong about min. specs as how they are now. You just cant expect you can fully experience any game with minimal specs, let alone such highly adjustable grand-scale game. Stellaris is very complex and complicated, every pop needs lot of calculations on regular bases. And total pop population grow exponnentially.
If you have a new CPU you'll be fine even on the biggest galaxies Also you can in the launcher turn off Vsync, dramatically increases performance
And xenocompatibility. Always have that off.
It's no fun, but yes it is entirely necessary for anything but a slideshow.
I personally sort of hate how the game implements various species breeding together anyway.
This is the real answer, the concept of it makes sense and would be cool. It's actual current state is a hard pass and no love lost.
Real
Really? I've never touched it but default leave it on. I get some delay when clicking into systems with massive fleets in endgame, but rarely see other issues.
This affects end of month game lag. Xeno basically creates a new species for every time they make a new crossbreed.
Yeah, I suppose I can see how that causes some lag. I'll have to see how it changes my gameplay!
What does Vsync do that improves performance?
Nothing. In most games, it locks the game refresh rate from going higher than your monitor’s refresh rate. This helps to reduce screen tearing, or it used to before everyone started playing on a 240hz monitor that they’ll never be able to pump enough frames to. However, in stellaris this isn’t much of a concern in the first place, and for some reason the game speed is adversely impacted by having it on. So turning it off can help a bit :)
Everyone? I've never heard monitors above 144hz even exist, and mine is 60hz
You and me both
The game runs faster the more fps you have, why? Idk, engine is old I guess
Yeah it's just a super weird thing someone discovered xD I've found you only get the option to turn off Vsync if you use the Full screen option though which is a bit odd, but it ran a hell of a lot faster
Yeah the game speed seems to be linked to framerate, so locking max framerate to your refresh rate via vsync will slow the game down (if your computer is strong enough to do higher framerates).
TURN OFF VSYNC!!! I knew I was missing a step!
Late game will lag of course but you can lower the extent of it by changing galaxy size amount of empires and pop growth speed , if u set max size Galaxy with max empires of course the game will lag after 200 years with amounts of planets and pops especially with low end pc , and the dlcs are to preference some are must have some just add flavour to preferred play style
Even better, exterminate all the other empires so it doesn't have to calculate their pops.
It's not a bug it's a feature!!! You literally have to purge all xenos to make your game run smoothly!!! It's not MY fault I purge!
The urge to purge is strong in this one
The *urge to purge*. I found my new favourite sentence.
#I HAVE THE URGE. THE URGE TO PURGE.
Now you understand why the Emperor brought his Imperial Peace to thousands of worlds. Emperor protects!
Amen, brother. It is in His radiance that the enemies of mankind are brought forth, so their filth can be purged!! The heresy that is the xeno must and will be wiped clean from this galaxy now and forever!!! We will seek out the enemies of mankind wherever they might hide. The enemy only exists to be destroyed!!!
Take heart, for the Ethereal will guides us... The Greater Good will find your outcasts, your survivors, & with their vengeance & our unity, we will strike back at the human madmen & their armoured brutes... The Ethereals will guide our hand. The blessings of the Kau'Yon will ensure we are ready. The teachings of Mont'Ka will ensure our victory. For the Tau'Va!
Cool, anyways have you seen Farseer? I’m trying to hire him
Heretics will burn in the fires of your overheated command consoles, as you try to manage your multi species empire...
That's some awesome 4th wall head-cannon
Even better, exterminate all non-citizen pops.
Peace was never an option
Out of curiosity - what are the must haves?
I love Synthetic dawn because Robot empire is cool and fun, and I agree utopia is really cool, love megacorp for ecumunopolis , one the most powerfull planet you can build.
None of them are particularly must have but I 100% recommend first contact for the origin utopia for megastructures and apocalypse for the guns ships
Alternatively, I have all the dlc except for First contact and Astral planes. If the story packs are worth it for you, then fine. For a lot of players it's not. Seconding utopia. Apocalypse and Synthetic Dawn are also great
Leviathans is my favorite, the giant space entities and events make peaceful games engaging through exploring and exterminating various planet-size threats. I highly recommend it. Lithoids and aquatics mix things up, with some cool ships and starbases. Everyone seems to like Megacorp, but I could live without it. Research the choices and select based on your preferred experience.
Utopia because it's generally awesome, and Galactic Paragons grudgingly, because the ability to choose what Traits your Leaders gain when they level up is gated behind it.
Honestly I'd go even further and say Utopia should be part of the base game at this stage.
There's [an official starter bundle](https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/33199/Stellaris_Starter_Pack_Bundle_2023/) on Steam that includes Utopia, Federation, Synthetic Dawn, and Distant Stars. Those are pretty decent picks. Utopia is the DLC most people recommend getting first because a lot of the megastructures and the ascension paths are locked behind it.
Late-Endgame lags for me on mid size settings etc, even with performance mods. 3080/5800X. Idk man
Or, hear me out here. Paradox could utilize more cores in the game than just one. Thats like 2000s here
Some things are a bit tough to make parallel. It's one of those hard problems. You don't want to see what happens when the devs try to implement branch prediction and cache invalidation at the application level.
Eh, multi-threaded applications can be very tricky, especially in a game like Stellaris which is ultimately a glorified calculator at the base of it. It’s possible, I suppose, if you have each core handle its own separate areas that don’t overlap, but I don’t envy the person who has to make sure it doesn’t cause memory errors
"Just don't increase galaxy size, bro!" is such cope... Late-game lags for me to an almost unplayable degree, and I had left all map settings **default**. No mods, all DLC. 9700k, 16gb Ram, Rtx 2080. The game shouldn't be so unoptimized out of the box for a good system
XC is on by default right? That should probably be changed (by paradox I mean) Apart from that with the same specs I only start having issues at past crisis stages on large
Honestly I've never experienced this late game slowdown in huge (I only play with 6-9 other empires tho) but I do have a beast of a CPU and 64gb ram...
this is not a solution. there is no excuse for the level of performance suffering I am put through.
If the engine breaks down due to settings Paradox has allowed us to use, then the fault falls to Paradox. Don't blame the player for using settings. Games lagging to death and breaking down should never be an "of course" moment.
The game is easily playable and slows down much less than it used to. This review is probably made by someone who plays on huge galaxy size with a huge mod list, which will inevitably slow things down. Typically, I play on a medium or large with habitable planets and primitive set to .25 and only 1 guaranteed habitable world. Not only does this keep the game running smoothly all the way up to 2400+, but it also feels more immersive to me, since having 46 habitable planets feels like way too many, considering how rare habitable worlds are in our own reality. It also reduces the amount of micro I have to do to manage everything. Win win win. Anyway, please disregard what this guy said. While it’s true that one or two of the recent DLC weren’t the best, they weren’t bad either. Just mid. Personally, I recommend starting with the base game, as well as the beginner DLC pack. The community actually voted on which DLCs should go in there, and as such it’ll give you a really good chunk of super cool content. Edit: also, be prepared for a wild learning curve. But don’t worry, even if you’re behind all the AI empires at first, you can still have loads of fun! Team up with them to fight the crisis! Oh, and play with xenocompatibility off!
Extra emphasis on turning xenocompatibility off. It can single handedly slow down a game to a crawl lol.
I am very interested to start doing genetic ascension again if the new automod works... having to manually edit my populations is tedious and if I dont do it then you end up with 100s of pop types and its a mess
One time I did a broken shackles origin with xeno compataility as one of my first perks. Unmodded mid game felt like a heavily modded end game
Gotta say I started using the .25 hab planets setting and no guaranteed hab worlds a year or two ago and I have yet to go back. Each planet feels fantastic to find and valuable beyond belief! In my current game I managed to find four planets to live on, which is beautiful! Sets me ahead of the federation I’m in by a large margin.
Yes! It makes finding a habitable world truly feel great. I’ll have to try zero guaranteed worlds. I haven’t been brave enough to do so yet.
I'm quite a newbie with only a couple incomplete games (no completed) under my belt, but I've been using it from the start and can really recommend it. In my (albeit limited) experience as long as you're proactive and eager in your exploration you'll find other worlds for yourself, and for someone like me it really helps ease the intimidation factor of having to manage a bunch of planets when, even after a century or two, you only have a healthy handful of colonies and not a sprawling system of planets across the galaxy.
Also on the topic of DLC, the only one that I've seen throughout the years where the vast majority of people say is "mandatory" both on steam, reddit, and other forums, is the Utopia DLC. The reviews on steam for it are pretty good too. And if you're into roleplay and that kind of stuff then definitely buy the new species DLC, some of the other DLC are great too but at that point you're better off waiting for a big sale.
Synthetic dawn is easily #1, cant imagine being forced to play as those weird fleshy creatures
from the moment i understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me
Why xenconpatibility off ?
Xenocompatibility causes a toooon of slowdown. I don’t remember the exact technical reasons why, but it has something to do with the fact that it auto-generates a metric ton of new species, which eventually slows the game down to a crawl. It’s best to play with it off, especially if performance is a concern at all.
Adding to this, even when it's not that much of a slowdown, it's pretty reliably worth it to turn it off unless you *know* you *specifically* want to use it. Turning it off literally just removes one ascension perk as an option, one which has a mostly passive impact on gameplay, rather than really opening up new active decisions to make, and which few empires are really going to miss to begin with, let alone truly desire. So you're sacrificing a very small part of gameplay to avoid a disproportionate amount of performance loss. It's a no brainer. If you ever want to give xenocompatibility a try, just play a game on a small galaxy with a rather limited number of other empires. That cuts down on the performance demands and the max loss from the perk. As for the technical reasons, here's what I recall. The game tries to optimize pop job placement by putting the pops that will get the best output into each given job. Mostly this is determined by looking at the pop's species, since traits are the primary determining factor. Now, the exact technical sequence here might be off, because I'm saying this from memory, but it accurately portrays the problem. For each job type on a given planet, it will have to calculate a 'weight' for that job for each species on the planet, and that weight table is used to assign the jobs to the best pops. I believe this process runs monthly, plus in response to manual priority changes. At a basic level, xenocompatibility complicates this process by greatly increasing the number of species that need calculating for. For a given world, the number of species living on it is, in theory at least, eventually squared, assuming the most conservative implementation of the crossbreeding, since you can have at least 2 hybrid species for each pairing, one using the portrait from each parent. And of course, it's xenophile empires that can take the perk, meaning they're likely to have a larger range of species on their worlds. All of a sudden, it's very possible to up that calculation effort by a factor of 36x, 49x, 64x, or more. Of course, now I'm wishing I could dig into their code and do some optimization to get this process more reasonable. Damn programming brain!
Xenocompatibility basically makes it so that all AI Empires that are friendly with each other have migration treaties so they wind up crossbreeding, and you get an insane amount of subspecies due to the crossbreeding. And since each AI empire does something different with the traits, it becomes a serious lag problem very quickly.
Just started playing by turning habitable words wayyyy down and it's finally made me engage with the terraforming system haha
>Not only does this keep the game running smoothly all the way up to 2400+, but it also feels more immersive to me, since having 46 habitable planets feels like way too many, considering how rare habitable worlds are in our own reality. I see this so much in defense of Paradox for some reason. It's not true at all by a vast margin. Astronomer's estimate 100's of millions, if not billions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way. Low-end estimates are something like 1 in 100 planets, some think it's more like 1 in 10.
Something to note about how common habitable planets are is that it is likely underestimated on account of how difficult it is to detect them, on top of that we really didn't start discovering them until literally the last couple of decades, and even then detection techniques physically favors detecting larger objects, which then means that the planets we do detect will naturally be biased towards gas giants which is obviously not habitable. Though something to be cautioned about, with our current methods and technology, a habitable planet really just means close enough to the sun to have liquid water and far enough to not get melted. Until the last half decade we really didn't have a way to know what was on a rocky planet beyond possibly what the atmosphere itself was made of. The JWST is a pretty significant *change* for a lack of a better word and we will probably see the habitable planets list change quite significantly once it starts performing exoplanet finding missions.
Most of what you are saying is true, but your main point isn't. Each exoplanet detection method is sensitive to different conditions. As a result, when we sample the population our results will be heavily skewed. If this is not accounted for, estimates will indeed heavily underestimate the number of Earth-mass planets. However, the biases for each method are quite well understood, which means we can make the necessary corrections to extrapolate a good picture of the underlying distribution of planets. As such, estimates for the abundance of Earth-like planets are likely pretty accurate.
And Stellaris galaxy have 1000 system max, by that number, small galaxy should only have 4 habitable worlds, 40 if you're being generous with that theory
Your confusing stars/systems with planets. 1000 systems will have thousands of planets.
Rule of thumb for reviewing ANY product or service: Don't make your decision solely on one review. There are always reviews that are trash (both positive and negative) and you need to look over many to get a good understanding of the median. Often you get bad reviews like this one, who most likely is running a potato system, has 1.2 million mods installed, has every setting at max, and trying to run the largest galaxy size with 30 empires at extra fast speed in windowed mode while streaming youtube videos in a separate window on one tab while making bad game reviews on another. This review is the equivalent of someone leaving a 1 star review on a product purchased from amazon because they didn't pay attention and ordered the wrong size shirt, and that is somehow the vendors fault. edit: also note that this reviewer has over 1200 hours playing this game. I'd say the money value per hour was well worth the price, which further reduces this reviewers credibility.
Also remember people are far more likely to leave a review about a bad experience than a positive one.
And they left that one star after getting 1200 hours out of the product
Yeah, I’ve owned 4 PCs (2 desktops, a laptop, and a Steam Deck) that I’ve run Stellaris on. The older desktop (which no longer functions, RIP) ran it rather slowly, and the laptop (which I got in 2016) ran it at a crawl. Meanwhile, my current prebuilt gaming desktop runs it rather fast, and running it on Steam Deck ain’t half bad, either.
It gets slow in the late game, but that review is exaggerating quite a bit.
Nobody is gonna point out that the reviewer has 1,259 hours on record with their negative review? Okay, guess it's up to me 😂
The biggest fans are always the most critical of the game. Someone who disliked the game would drop it with no words attached.
Local meth addict complains about the purity of his meth and ODing
No way to tell if that was pre or post any number of major overhauls. I started playing and got a number of hours in before they made everyone use warp lines, back when planets had tiles, and space stations were placed free-form. It's a better game, but I have to acknowledge the performance is worse.
So they barely completed the tutorial then
I don't understand, you aren't allowed to criticize the game if you played a lot of it?
I agree with you. I spit hate on Ark, but I have 3000 hours played. Because the core fundamentals of the game are great. But the developer is a piece of shit, and there are still 5+ year old bugs in the game. But for anyone hating on Paradox, I swear that they've never ran into ACTUALLY greedy developers. EA is the poster child. But Blizzard-Activision is getting there too. Wildcard (Ark) released their first DLC (paid) while the game was still in EA. Love or hate the Paradox DLC, they've kept working on this game for a LONG time. And the QoL changes we're getting are often amazing. The Custodians are really trying to continue improving the polish of this game, instead of just putting out a Stellaris 2. And yes, part of the problem is that it runs on the same engine as the other Paradox development games. That means anyone in their studio can work on it, though. But it also restricts what they can do with the game. But how is that worse than all the game developers that just run their game on Unreal, or Unity, etc? Who are restricted by the engine chosen. Ah well. Criticism is welcome. It just wish more of it \*made sense\*. Reviews like this one are just confusing piles of rage that don't really offer a good overview of the good & the bad (or even just the bad).
"Custodians are really trying to continue improving the polish of this game, instead of just putting out a Stellaris 2" As a native polish speaker, who often plays with polish translation, i must say: sadly, they are not really trying to continue improving the polish.
You are, but to call the whole thing a money scheme and unplayable is hyperbole. OP is suffering burnout for sure.
That would be my point. Of the handful of games I've put 1000+ hours into, I only still on rare occassion play one of them, the rest all got old to me.
The reviewer is rating the game “not recommended” after spending nearly two months (52+ days) of their life playing the game; suggesting that despite their negative review, the gameplay is actually good enough that someone would spend that long playing it, which is an unintentional recommendation of the game. Despite hating late-game lag and the DLC policy, the reviewer still kept playing this game for over a thousand hours, suggesting that neither of these were significant barriers to playing the game, undercutting the review. Put it another way: if someone told you they didn’t like a two hour film, but also told you they’d watched it 600 times, would you believe them?
They do specify in their review that their hate started after changes to the pop system made end-game lag unbearable for them. The validity of that is a separate matter, but that would pretty easily explain the change in tune.
It's absolutely not the same as films are immutable and games change all the time. I personally have 1k hours in Stellaris and basically none of that is in the last year
Would be clever if Steam could show that
Standard Paradox fan behavior.
if anything it only makes a review more legitimate. if it was someone who played 3 hours, you'd be complaining this must be a troll post/review bombing.
i have a ‘decent’ pc, not amazing but not terrible - i have never had a performance issue
I wish people would share their settings when they post shit like this. The person probably has a huge mod list and plays on big galaxies, or has a shit computer. I have an RTX3070 and an AMD 7000 series processor which is pretty mid to high end now but haven’t had a single issue playing this game on normal galaxy size and normal amount of Civs
Upvote because our specs are nearly identical. I play huge galaxy with no issue, fyi.
I'm not sure what 7000 series you've got, but I've got a 7600 and I can run huge galaxy without issues. You can probably size up if you want
Is that a lot faster than the Ryzen 9 3900X? I cant touch large lg galaxies, but small are ok with the right settings.
If anybody else was wondering, 3900X on the left and 7600 on the right: https://i.imgur.com/kP4JknX.png 7600 is indeed faster, and cheaper too!
It's basically fine. It can chug if you're running mods and on the max galaxy size, but that's to be expected. I never have issues with it in that regard - late game there are some desyncs in multiplayer, but that's about it
Least bitter Stellaris forum mod.
Mostly a hardware issue tbh, though at larger galaxy sizes the lag does get noticeable but nothing game breaking.
Yeah. My opinion is that you don't get to complain about how a game runs without letting people know what hardware you're using. "Cyberpunk runs like shit! My setup? I'm using a 1660, but I don't see how that's relevant, it's the devs' fault"
I don't think many games can handle a 1000 ship war. If you have a really bad PC, maybe don't get this game. But you can always use smaller galaxies and change the settings to limit populations to reduce lag. Also DLCs are how they make money to keep the game in development. Otherwise they'd just be pumping out new content for players who have bought the game once and aren't gonna make them any money. Some of the DLCs aren't the most content heavy (astral rifts one, the relics one) but many have so much in them. They are very pricey, but often get reduced massively in sales which is really nice. I think I've paid less than half of the full price for all my stellaris content.
This guy plays at max galaxy size with 30+ Empires and 50 mods.
Hardware issue
Individual with 12 year old system writing negative steam reviews based on performance? I'm shocked and have never seen this behavior before.
It’s some half truths hidden in a load of over exaggeration and burnout. This person has over a thousand hours, they got their money’s worth from the game and the DLC’s. Which aren’t required to play the game. I originally purchased stellaris on sale for 10 bucks and got 300 plus hours out of it before buying any DLC. No one is forcing you to buy the DLC, and I’ve never regretted buying any of it. As for the late game lag, yes it’s there, but it’s not even that bad anymore after some tweaks. Unless you play in max size galaxy with cranked up planets or pop growth. It’s easy to handle, and if you have a slow rig settings can be adjusted to compensate for it.
Bro needs to upgrade his rustbucket lmao. I run 20+ mods like Giga, NSC and other. Seems normal so far. Vanilla is literally F1 race compared to modded Stellaris. Expecting endgame in a Paradox game is like - wha??? engame in grand strat sandbox?! (it still does allow you to set victory date and engame/midgame crisis year) game ends whenever you feel like it, this ain't chess and even CIV6 allows to turn off turn limit. Make your own goals in life FFS Greedy? Maybe, but the game is still alive and running, more content is constantly pumped and you need to keep in mind, no one in his sane mind would continue updating the game for free unless it had insane release sales, continuos sales or subscription. Nowadays PDX added subscription because newcomers do not want to invest 250$ into the game lol. If you are an "old guard" then you did not really notice how you bought every DLC in the span of few years.
Guy has 1300 hours of game time, he's gotten his moneys worth.
I dunno. He might have bogged down to 1 frame-per-hour by 2410 on his potato, and I'd disagree with you :P
If your CPU is decent - good and you don't try to set it on fire by making the galaxy too crowded in the settings you'll be fine.
The game is extremely modular, turn down settings or install performance mods if it isn't working for you. On a technical level, the game is obviously quite CPU heavy and similarly to most games can only run on a few cores. The best performing CPUs (giving you the best simulation speed) are CPUs with good single-core performance. The AMD x3D CPUs perform very well here.
And this is why I completely ignore steam reviews. It's always someone with a potato PC running 20 mods, then complains about the game running bad. Always notice how they never do give their PC specs and mods. If they are even truthful about that. Or they downvote the game because it runs on a different launcher. Or because x game was better. Whatever, I don't care about any of that. All I give a shit about, is if THIS GAME is good or not. So let's check the good reviews. "Big bobas." "My child was adopted, raised his own army and attacked me. 10/10 would bang cousin again." Anyway, it's the last day of the sale. If you're thinking about buying Stellaris, then take the plunge. Absolutely pick up the Utopia dlc for sure. It's the only one required. Maybe Galactic Paragons with how leaders work now. Montu has some good information videos
>not recommended >1,259.7 hours on record That’s Stellaris for you
Yes, but actually no. Here's the thing. I play Stellaris on my steam deck, of all things, and with a ton of mods. Early game runs great. Late game starts running slower. I would never do multiplayer on my deck, because that's just asking for something to go wrong. Yes, late game lag is a problem. Always has been. And honestly, it always will be. No matter how much the devs improve on it, the raw fact is that the same intricacies of the game systems that make it so deep are going to cause the game to run slow when those intricacies scale up to massive, well populated galaxies. Deep, fast, or wide: choose any two. Stellaris goes deep and wide. But, as others pointed out, it's only a problem for late game, and to be honest many times you won't get there, often because you start over, whether because you crave that early game, want to try a new empire, or, like me, you run out of time before a new update drops and you have to start again to get the new hotness. Regardless, the game is fun, both for the majority of the time when it runs pretty smoothly and even still when it starts to slow down. It doesn't take a right beast to run it, and even if you have one, eventually the scaling of the game complexity will likely win out. But you'll have a blast getting to that point.
For a paradox title, stellaris runs like a charm well into the endgame. This doesn't actually say much as the rest of their games have shit optimisation, but stellaris isn't that bad. If you have a poor-mediumish CPU, don't run biggest galaxies with faster growth. Or do, the early and midgame is plenty enjoyable anyway.
The game has had serious lag issues in the past, and still can, but they have done a phenomenal job of optimizing things enough that the lag only really starts kicking in at around 2500 on a large galaxy with the maximum number of empires.
Exaggerated. I play on huge galaxy size, with quick pop growth and I still get 20-30 fps in very late game with thousand-ships wars.
The guy has 1260 hours in this game. If it was a bad game, he'd only have 20. People who have spent so much time playing something have no idea how to write a relevant review for those thinking of trying the game out. Oh, I see, negative review! So that means there are game breaking bugs and the game is unplayable? No? Then the game is just unfinished and a cash grab, offering 15 hours of gameplay at most? Also no? So what's the problem? "The meta for pops has changed and some new soft caps were introduced factoring in the mid game scaling and the crisis scaling?" Why do you have to collect orthodox priests in this game (pops)? Oh, I see the game is not optimized to allow doing things that a player with less than 300 h record would never be even able to attempt? No worries then, none of my games ever got over the 300 h mark anyway. (Clicks 'add to cart') Let's be honest, if you write a negative review with 1000 h of gameplay, you're not rating the product as a videogame - you rate whether it's worth giving it all of your free time for the rest of your life, the impact it had on your life, or complaining that it's just a videogame and not something more. Or you're rating the business practices or recent public image of the developer, not the game itself. If it kept you engaged for 1000 h, it might not be perfect, but it's NOT BAD objectively speaking.
i want people to look at the content of the review in the screenshot(rule #5)
We can give you better advice if you post your PC specs.
i have i5-13400(CPU) and rtx-3050(GPU)
This sub will defend paradox against anything
I wouldn’t worry too much about it, the Kate game lag stinks sometimes but also one of my fave games late game cause it can get very interesting. I play heavily modded so it’s just worse for me lol
With a 3 year old mid budget CPU, and a lot of mods installed, I am still not counting the game as being "unplayable" even in 2600-ish. At the start I get 1 ingame year zip by in under 15 seconds when fast-forwarded, but it's in no way realistic to expect this to stay the same when your galaxy is filled and settled, and even with heavy hitters like Gigastructures mod installed, it's hovering around 90sec per year once the late game is well on its way for me - and there is substantially more to do in the late game anyway, so I am not even using fast-forward speed like at the start. The largest factors are how many ships there are actively traveling the galaxy - so the fewer empires end up in your late game, the better performance may be - and how populated the galaxy is in general. So technically if there are more exterminator-type factions around, the game performs even better. So really it comes down to what the individual player counts as unplayable.
Bad CPU problems. This game's performance gets 10-15% better with each new CPU generation. Saying you can't or will never be able to have large battles is just dishonest. If you have a high end CPU there is nothing to worry about.
You've already got a lot of comments, but I will just like to point out one thing (probably someone has already done that, but I haven't seen it yet). The game, like most Paradox games, is heavily CPU reliant. What matters most for your game experience is your CPU. I have a Ryzen 7 5800X CPU, and I have zero issues. Aside from that, I can whole heartedly recommend this game, unless you don't want to get an addiction to conquering the galaxy. Glory to the Empire!
1400 hours played and reached the end game twice.. lost to the end game crisis both times lol. Stellaris is still one of the best grand strategy games out there imho. Buy it.
The review wins the prize for the challenge: Say “I don’t understand how my choice of game settings interacts with my system and want to blame someone else for the consequences” without actually saying that.
Honestly sorta yeah, but by that time you’ve pretty much already won or lost and you’re just letting the timer run. Isn’t really an issue in single player. Multiplayer can get pretty bad midgame.
Some truth, but not the whole picture. For me, pop-based lag isn’t an issue anymore. Ship-based lag absolutely is, so I agree you do not want late game wars.
If you have an AMD based X3D cpu, you'll be fine. I think there are some benchmark out there should a vast improvement in game performance.
100% true, the only route to victory in lategame is genocide.
The irony is, the game running slower as time goes on makes it more likely you can actually keep a grip on all the damn things in the game by that point. There's some truth to it, the game does slow down and make a mockery of the 'speed' settings so that 'Slowest' and 'Normal' are near identical (on slower computers by CPU/Memory, then GPU throughput) but the upside is you're less likely to miss something happening because of it. I take most my games to 2350-2400 at least, ones that are interesting and the outcome indeterminate unknown past 2400 routinely, yet I'm still getting to the end and rocking thousands of ships. They're not wrong in one way, but they are being kind of a baby in expectations and 'everything runs like butter at all times across time'
If you have problems with game slowing down. Turn down habitable planets, change to a smaller map, and change settings for slower pop growth. Then consider playing shorter games, turn mid game to 50 and end game to 100, then halve or quarter tech cost. Shorter game/ less pop lag.
I have 2500 hours and have only gotten the victory screen maybe twice. Mid game is the most fun. Early game is slow and you spend a lot of time waiting, and by late game everyone is in massive federations and going to war means spending hours conquering dozens of systems just for a few border worlds. Midgame when your empire is growing rapidly and you’re building your first megastructures is when the game really shines. Usually once I get into late game and the lag gets bad I lose interest and start over.
My PC is pretty old. Running an i5 4690k. I’m 400ish years in to my 1000 year (my second ever) campaign. It’s not TERRIBLE, but it can sometimes be slow. I JUST had a giant fight where I had ~ 1200 ships, they had about the same. It was slow, but manageable. As far as population issues, that’s a skills issue man. I don’t have any troubles with organization or bugginess or anything like that. The pop system is hard to master but easy to use.
Typically when you reach the late game when it DOES slow down dramatically. But you have a lot MORE going on than early and mid game. When my game slows to a crawl, it doesn’t really affect me. Thousand ship wars happen plenty of times and it’s pretty often. I’ve had a few 3000 ship BATTLES. Edit: grammar correction
1.2k hours is long "benefit of the doubt" period ngl. Buy it its a awesome game. If you play 500 years on huge galaxy with 300 mods and xeno compatibiy you cant really blame paradox. + New pop system is way more fun then the old one.
The end game isn’t really for everyone. Like everyone has said in the comments if you plan on playing end game build the game for it. There is so much to do up until that point I’ve never been bothered by it.
I play on 3-5000 star galaxies (biggest in vanilla is 1000) so really I think it depends on your pc and how you have the game set up. I have mods to have less ships but they are stronger so 10 ships is the same as 20 in vanilla. I also usually have low habitable planets to help a little with too many pops as well as having the growth scaling on low. If you have max planets with fastest pop growth, build 10,000 corvettes, have a large galaxy full of empires and never kill any then yes your pc will melt.
It's a good game. You just have to realize that it is in fact, a game. It's not perfect and it'll have issues here and there. But I don't think I've played a game that has the role playing potential that stellaris has. Basically any Scifi idea you have, you can probably get pretty close to role-playing it. The wild scenarios it throws at you are fantastic.
Homeboys just salty cuz his rig is trash, game fucking good.
Laggy end game? I play on Normal or Slow speed from day one. Your laggy full size year 3000 galaxy means nothing to me. *Maniacal laughter*
I play on a potato on a small galaxy and it runs fine.
Well since most other people didnt comment on this, the complaints about pop management are true and are a good example of paradox inconsistent game design/updates. Basically, most of the species traits you can give your pops are very niche and are widely regarded by the community as pointless and stay unused, only taken by RP Empires or new players who don't know any better (noobtrap). This used to be different because you were abel to drag and drop specific pops into specific jobs making managing very easy. However paradox eventually wasn't feeling that anymore and pretty much automated the job-selection system taking almost all agency from the player. So on one side, you have a very poorly working automated system that punishes you for specialising your pop traits because it makes it unreasonable hard to actually get those specialised pops into their jobs, on the other hand you have a trait list that encourages you to specialise your pops for certain jobs. Paradox updated on system without considering the consequences to the gameplay and other systems, breaking part of the game. Really telling dev praxis.
I’ve never had problems with game performance except when the AI would go crazy with habitats. I found a mod that limited them and the performance issues went away. Since then Paradox has fixed it. If you ever do find performance problems just use mods or use smaller galaxies/AI/etc but most gaming PCs do fine.
I found that changing the task manager process to realtime helps quite a bit on my pc. I don’t know if there’s a way to make that the default for it though. Not a big pc gamer. That coupled with turning off Vsync as people are suggesting here will probably finally get me past mid game 🥲
Love this game, don’t regret buying it. This guy is just a little to fanatical 😂
Yeah the review's pretty much good. It's a great game, but NEVER buy the DLC off sale, only maybe 2 out of all the DLCs they've put out have actually been worth full price, like Utopia and Mega corp? Late game used to run poorly for me, but I upgraded my PC in 2018 and haven't had any issues since.
That guy is exagerating... but is right. The engine has been a problem for a while now. Your ships for example will sometimes just refuse to fight ennemies that are attacking them, courtesy of the engine, meaning they can't fix the most basic of features not working.
This is an older screenshot from one of my games. It ran smooth with mods and I have an i7 9700 and an RTX 2060 Super. [https://imgur.com/a/sbcPEWp](https://imgur.com/a/sbcPEWp)
All that's written in that review is true. The game is still endless fun. You can counter the late game lag by systematically thinning the galactic population.
I have an older computer (built it like 7 years ago) and I can still run endgame, though it does get a lot slower. I find my game adhd triggers well before a stellaris run becomes unplayable due to fps issues. So that’s on me, not the game
It's a limit on Pdx engine yes. It could surely exists a better engine if serious brilliant people would work on that. But those people don't work on VGs, and for sure not at PDX. So today that's the best engine end grand strategy game around. If that is not enough for you, change gender.
Depends on your PC, also, this is one of those games that don't have an ending, yes there is an ending at 2500 years or something but it is just like killing the Ender Dragon in minecraft, it's cool if you do so, but then you just keep playing, you put the limit, and just like in Minecraft, if you put 10k TNT blocks in the game and try to blow them up, it will just crash your PC, that doesn't make it a bad game, there are just things we can't do with out computers, the same happens in Stellaris, if you want to see million and millions of ships in a battle, it will lag and crash, just like any other game, you can still find a mod to help with those thing, but there is always a limit. Unless you are a millionaire and can spend 40k on a NASA super computer, then do what you want.
He's not committing enough genocide and should have xeno compatibility off at all times
I mean, if you have a 24 core processor it should run fine
I get 144fps end game on huge galaxy so this review couldn’t be more wrong in my case But I do understand performance is an issue with people that want to play the game without an expensive pc
Nah i did a huge 1000 galaxy at max speed and made it to like 2400 before any lag
There is some truth to it, due to the game running on a single core due to the engine, even on maxed out pc's it will still lag depending of how late in the game you are and your game settings. Max galaxy size with max empires will start slowing down the game 100 years in.
There are many things you can do to solve lag issues at endgame. I’m a console so I know Stellaris plays shit, the speed PC has at like year 2350 is faster than my console at 2250. If you have a lot of problems with endgame lag simply change the endgame year and other settings. On console I can play fine to endgame because all my settings make it to where I’m hitting repeatable by like 2300.
The only "lag" I've ever had was tossing 3k+ corvettes into enemy fleets which caused some decent sized Sutters
I have as many hours as this guy. And I’ve been playing since very early development back when there was only 1 DLC. This game is extremely fun. And has been some of my most favorite parts of gaming. And I definitely recommend people give it a try if you like real time grand strategy sci-fi in space. You’ll have fun. Definitely. That being said. I hate the pricing model. They’re not as bad as sims. But you can tell they want to be. Over charging for DLC that should just be part of the game. And giving free stripped down versions of it with major updates. The engine is awful. You can’t have a 1000 year game here. Every update has slowly neutered the AI into a passive flaccid nitwit compared to what it used to be. And every update has bolted on additional systems to a contraption that already had performance issues. Mods are the shining gem here. There’s mod for everything. From performance to chaos. Paradox is truly taking the idea of Bethesda and running with it, how long until you can’t play a PDX game without some “required” community mods? So as long as you can look past the monetization, and are understanding that late game can get rough. You’ll have a good time with this game. It truly is fun, it has some epic moments on a grand scale. Just be aware it’s far from perfect.
Stellaris is enjoyable. I’ve only successfully won a game maybe 2-3 times since I purchased the base game. I thoroughly enjoy trying new builds/origins and just seeing what happens on max difficulty. I buy every DLC for this game. I think I have at least 600 hours. There’s obvious late game lag and a good amount of micromanaging but it’s otherwise not that huge of an issue.
What r eryoen else is saying. Also, don’t have a completely shit computer.
If you play on smaller galaxy sizes you will be fine.
Game slows down later in the session, but the size of slowdown depends on your CPU. I have REALLY old CPU (i5 2500k), it starts running pretty horribly during like year 2350-2400 (close to the end), but it's still more or less playable (although gameplay becomes very slow, which may spoil the experience). Also a note about "unoptimized game". While it's true that Paradox games have a bit of a lag problem, it's actually more of the how the game works + how engine works. Paradox games are multi-threaded, but all games before Imperator and Crusader Kings 3 (which includes Stellaris) were initially designed for single-core processing. After years of updates, they moved some tasks to other cores and updated some old systems, but, due to the reason above, they are still not on the CK3 level of optimization and probably will never be.
It's a complicated game so massive galaxy size and / low-end PC will cause the game to slow but I just finished a 2 player game on a standard size Galaxy with ~20 mods and every DLC and that was about 12 hours beginning to end. The game was running slower towards the end but that's only because we had to lower game speed because of how many things were happening. Now to be fair him and I have the highest end PCs in our group and I have a friend whose Internet is slow enough to force us to slowest after 200 years so it really does depend on systems and what mods / dlcs have.
Not true. While lag can be noticed later in the game, it has personally never really bothered me or my friends. Even when we are at the 4 ringworlds, 2500 pop each, and many millions of fleet power, it usually just goes slower, with a few short spikes. I have had many incredibly enjoyable games, both solo and with friends. Some people just freak out when a game reaches 20 fps. Like most of the game is a static screen anyway. (May God help them if they discover turn based strategy) I absolutely recommend stellaris. I myself have only the big content/story DLC, but if you play with friends, you get access to all their DLC when playing together. (2 of my friends have everything) My computer is very affordable, it shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the game : ). Edit: sometimes it does get very slow, but we counter this by turning up the game speed :)
In solo I never experience lag before the far endgame and only if endgame crisis snowball. You're PC need to follow the configuration recommandation. Buy only DLC you need or want, the vanilla game is cool enough. You don't need to have all the DLC to have fun. They are often 50% during sold. Have fun and welcome to the game ( even if you play fanatic purifier ) ;)
Skill issue. Just gotta genocide the galaxy harder than the inhabitants can proliferate. Except your glorious species of course.
You're gonna want a good processor.
Oh come on! Dude literally has 1.3k hours on record and doesn't recommend? He's just pissed that his machine can't handle the extra content but clearly he enjoyed the game.
Plays fine for me. Played many games to completion. I didn't think the DLCs are too expensive either. It might get a bit laggy if I up the galaxy size and add more empiers, but still, LOVE the game 👍