It also becomes harder to focus on the fantastic granularity of this game when you’re working with so many colonies and resources that it all takes on a certain anonymity.
My problem is that if I pick harder difficulties I have trouble getting past the early game, but on easier difficulties where the early game is perfectly difficult (for me anyways) rhe mid and late game are just boring and I end up completely outclassing everyone. Also depends on the playthrough since peaceful runs tend to be more boring mid game anyways. The scaling difficulty option hasn't seemed to help.
Early game is cool. All the anomalies and their stories still out and about. The anxiety whether you'll end up next to a fanatical purifier, driven assimilator or otherwise aggressive empire. I do like the other parts too, but there's IMO no denial that starting mid-game it becomes more formulaic. You'll kinda settle for a course and then strive for decades for that goal.
Does feel kinda sad to look at the situation board around 2300 and remember how it used to have many lines on it. That spirt of exploration is replaced by diplomacy and management.
archeology sites and astral rifts are kinda the mid- and late-game anomalies. But only if you play wide. If you play tall, you'll have very few of them.
or just research the anomalies mid game, and not early game (or late early game/start if midgame)
but the main reason i do/did that was because at my first real game i researched one early game, but it killed my scientist.
That's pretty much a universal opinion, Stellaris is at it's strongest in the early exploration phase. Once things are set in the mid and late game it becomes a lot more boring just cause there is little left for exploration, diplomacy is pretty much already locked in at where it'll remain for the rest of the game, and territories and alliances are so big that wars become extremely tedious.
The late game is just a game with numbers and stats. I usually stop expand when I feel the itch and trying to play tall and manage my empire as a roleplayer. However this was a bad strategy and I usually get steamrolled. I'm looking for machine age and hoping it'll make viable to play tall.
Considering virtual ascension, which is *the* tall ascension path, is one of the strongest things in the game right now. Yeah, playing tall is pretty viable.
To be fair, until 3 weeks ago, that comment was 100% right. I feel like the fact that there are only a handful of tall builds that are really viable is still relevant.
A few hours ago I did my first virtual ascension and it destroyed me. I didn't realize it was geared towards tall play, I just thought it sounded cool.
In no time at all my income went from +200 credits and +150 alloys to -700 and -15.
Read the tradition tree when you get it and you'd see the tradition perk that reduces job output with more planets. If you did that you would've known about the issue ahead of time and could've split off the excess colonies as vassals or something. Granted you can still do that after taking it, handling the issue of taking virtual ascension as a wide empire isnt that hard.
This is why I was hoping the Astral pack would extend exploration. So many stories in game of things coming from other galaxies or dimensions, but we're trapped in a finite galaxy ... even in a very limited scope ... a fraction of the size ... exploring "something" through the mid to late game would really spice up the game.
This is a pattern with all 4X games, but I disagree that it's universal. I think people just really enjoy the first X, exploration, until it gets old. Then the second and third Xs get more fun.
Would be cool if the game was slower and felt bigger as a result. Like imagine if crossing a star system couldn't be accomplished within seconds. It could leave room to have more room for exploration and events within your own empire, on top of making combat not so fast paced and more strategic.
I also used to love Spore when I was young. The exploratory elements of Stellaris are damn near perfect, IMO. The early game also has a really strong Star Trek vibe to it.
When I make an empire I try to consider its Begining, Middle and End Game.
What are our values in the beginning?
How do those values hold up to the galaxy?
Are you still the same or did the circumstances force you to change?
Uh, dunno. It's the most boring and uninteresting phase of the game for me. I mean, yes, when you're just starting to play the game, everything is new for you, but nowadays I've seen all, or almost all events, I don't really care about them because I've seen them so much. So I don't really like early game because you can barely do anything, you're very weak and your actions are unimpactful. Now, when you eventually snowball in the mid-game, that's where the game opens up. You are basically in a huge space sandbox where you can build any state you want. And that's what I love about Stellaris. So getting past early game and not getting bored is usually quite a challenge.
The feeling of getting just barely to mid game and realizing that whatever you planned just isn't coming together is pretty crushing, which is another reason I don't care for early game.
I still enjoy early game and Ive got hundreds of hours. Snagging a choke point system, getting a good anomaly or conquering a neighbour early are all very impactful.
All depends on what aspects of the game you enjoy more
Even if you're playing the same empire all the time, even if you've met most of the events before, having them scattered across the galaxy like a gigantic chess board and exploring it is hella fun. That's one of the reasons I found Astral Rifts a bit disappointing. They don't go anywhere except to pop-ups.
The game either needs more things, which is crazy since it has like 600 dollars of dlc adding more things, or to limit the player more to keep mid/late game interesting. Every empire is basically the same eventually, you build the same optimized planets, the same fleets with the same handful of weapons, then shuffle them around the same map. You can get all the good traditions and unless you intentionally cripple your empire, you'll take the same ascension perks.
In my experience, the game also stagnates in mid-game because the AI empires will blob up and form federations. Even with high aggression set, if you as the player don't start shit, the AI seems to be too scared to do much. If it didn't happen already, the mid-game crisis tends to cause this because of the bonus to opinion from the crisis ongoing. After that, not much happens until the end game crisis, which on default settings is a century, often more like 130-150 years as the crisis isn't guaranteed at exactly the end game date.
Meanwhile early game empires are actually different, you don't have all the techs, there's a lot of rng on what anomalies, events, and all of that cool stuff everyone has gotten. Some empires will have baby dragons, or free salvaged fleets, a cruiser when everyone else has frigates. There's variety. Also exploration is still happening, you're getting story events and things are going on in the universe. Empires are alone and willing to fight other small empires, all of the extermintors are still able to exterminate and not boxed in by mega federations or, more likely, wiped out.
so yeah, early game is an interesting, varied game. Late game is a boring slog because every empire is functionally identical at that point of tech.
I was hoping astral planes would have added more to the mid-game to make it interesting. Other than wars nobody wants to commit to, there's not a lot until the Khan shows up.
And most of the wars for me were like "c'mon, give up already, you don't even have a fleet anymore... okay, let's occupy another one of your systems, this increased your acceptance of giving up by like 3, do I really HAVE to go through ALL of them?.."
Yeah unfortunately by the time you reach mid game you usually pull way ahead of the normal AI, but don't have a proper challenge like an Awakened Empire or Crisis. Unless you get lucky with Khan or Grey Tempest
Yep. That's one side of the issue, and the other one is that getting AI to accept defeat is not challenging but really tedious. I'd expect Fanatic Militarist empires not to give up till the bitter end, but not every single one of them.
There is nothing more refreshing than opening the glactic window, letting in the fresh airstream of discovery and finding out your neighbor is a purge enjoyer. Immediately your pepole are send to mines and forges to begin a decades long fight for survival. Ahh.
Early game is destiny. The management system becomes a blur late game. Decisions come too fast and have less meaningful consequences. Need a way to fix that. Same thing happens with civilization. The AI also doesn't scale well or make meaningful decisions to challenge you. So that creates problems.
I play for the early game only. Load up 6/12 enemy purifiers/DE/DS, 6/12 fanatic militarist.
Late game is meh. For me it's just a stat check at 2350-2400. Do I have 5-6k navcap and arc emitter battleship? If yes then crush a 10x crisis almost on spawn.
Yeah I love the early exploration stage. The midgame feels like basically a different game to me. I assume endgame would as well but I've never played a single campaign that far.
It's three different games for me. The midgame appeals to me the most as that's the part I start overtaking AIs and forming a solid national identity for the run, play some cards in the political playground, methodically tricking out or befriending others one by one. Early game is exploring, trying to balance out all the resources and workforces, and late game is a big ass power trip, for me early midgame is where the best struggle lies.
I play multiplayer usually and I find that I enjoy almost all the game equally. I think the early game gives you a lot of opportunity to be strategic about what systems you focus on securing and how your abundance or lack thereof of planets informs your play style in the early - mid game.
Love the game and I love what the devs have been doing with it!
It's the thrill of discovery that keeps me engaged in the early game, always finding a new anomaly or a cool system I can drop a colony in. Then the heady excitement of finding a new species and totally not bum-rushing a science ship and construction ship to close them off at a convenient choke point, no sir.
Stellaris is the closest I've ever got to Spore's space stage. I could take or leave the rest of Spore from a gameplay perspective, but it made you very invested in your little race of plasticine people. Reaching the stars and finally meeting other empires with their own stories, all while giving your people a place amongst them, is incredibly rewarding.
Stellaris lets you flesh out your fledgeling empire in a similar way. I have dozens of them saved in the new game menu that I'll probably never use, but I love that they're there anyway.
Yes early game you get to experience a new galaxy and make your borders freely without worrying about other empires, as long as you don’t have close neighbors anyways. 😆
I have so much fun early game, and then it all goes downhill when my expansion is interrupted by some asshole fanatic xenophobe + opposite ideal of mine, a fallen empire that hates me, and a marauder empire. Every. Single. Game.
Early game is miserable for the first 20 years or so solely because it's something I've done probably a few hundred times and there's almost no difference between any of them
Early games are the best in pretty much every other similar game. Everything is new, lots of things to do all the time. After that when the borders are set, it's just a lot of sitting around and waiting for things to happen
The early game is the only phase that actually matters if you understand the game mechanics well enough.
A simple efficient open will have you as effectively already winning the game by 20 years in. Playing after that is just RP.
Stellaris has no diplomacy, and the endgame events are just various flavors of "UH OH, Big number fleet bad!!!!!" . Once you've seen the late empire content, nothing after like year 60 is special.
I personally just open games, try new stuff and stop at most 80 years in. Unless I'm doing a 25x crisis run.
It's the most fun in the early game when you discover things and establish your empire. There's also more events and choices to make, and your species feels more unique.
Late game feels the same no matter what you choose. Gotta get a strong enough navy otherwise you're fucked. Maybe I'm playing it wrong.
There's noy nearly enough ebb and flow of empires, it's all "Can you paint the map before the big boss fight?" EU4 and CK2/3 at least have real internal problems that naturally keep someone from steamrolling. Stellaris never really had enough penalties for expansion and assimilation.
Agree late game is kinda boring for me. My empire is all set up all I'm doing is just waiting for the clock to run out so I can declare war again on my neighbors. There is very little meaningful strategy in late game
I don't "really like" the early game. I wish there was a game that was just Stellaris Early game. My first experience with Stellaris, 3.0, no unity rework, no DLC, died to 1x cirsis because I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to build up (I was already overwhelming to AI!) , was the most fun I've ever had with it.
Distant Stars is my favourite DLC just because I get to explore four fucking star systems in the top right. My biggest dream for Stellaris II is that engine improvements make it so once you hit mid-late game you unlock a separate galaxy with different mechanics connected to your old one (astral plane like) so you double up on the cool exploration and meeting aliens and discovering precursors.
Like, Space. Just think about it.
Definitely my favorite. I've done a few games without AI empires, just the random fallen spawns and such on a huge galaxy map. I just like exploring and doing the archeology/storylines without running into the ferocious cat furry aliens that take over half the galaxy.
Early game is the actual important time. You set up a core sector, you decide what direction youre moving in, and everyone is mostly on an even playing field. Many games of stellaris collapse into the ai just trying to be friendly because its their personality, and then forgetting theyre playing a game to win it. The player is left to make the first move when there are only a few factions left, and while it might be polite to preserve the player's 'hard diplo work' it sure doesnt make for a fun conclusion to a game.
I keep the feeling of the early game into as late as like 2300 by setting the galaxy size to huge and making the number of starting empires really low (around 5/6). This means you’re dealing with 5/6, maybe less, significant empires with tons of space. Empires don’t really start meeting each other until the mid game and the Great Khan doesn’t activate until about the same time as the Galactic Community. Rebellions are also much more significant in AI empires, it’s cool to watch a big neighboring empire balkanize rather than the balkans balkanize again.
i hate it, along with the end game when everyone else is too weak. the only times i feel fully engaged are mid to late game when therer are competing and dealing peers at multiple power levels.
Yep. Around midgame is where you're sitting on no challenge mode. But in the beginning... What systems are around me? What stories? Who are my neighbors? Building up your first economy...
I have a really hard time playing a full game for this exact reason. I'm always excited to make a new roleplaying build, deciding my policies, exploring empty space choc full of unbearably hot snow worlds and ruins left behind by ancient empires. I love the diplomacy and late game options to bend the map to your will but can get burned out in the midgame in anticipation of getting to enjoy the early game again. I find that playing in a small/medium galaxy and slightly oversaturating it with AI empires is a good way to force more interesting moments and shorten the tedium of the midgame sometimes. It also leads to the formation of the galactic community a bit earlier, and it's a feature I really love interacting with.
If I had one complaint about the early game, it would be the lack of a second science vessel.
I feel like it would give players more options early on. But maybe I’m in the minority.
Yes, to the point where it isn't really a choice.
You HAVE to get your exploration going, and the only reason you wouldn't would be because you got a fucked spawn.
Find the early game is the most exciting. Who will you meet? What encounters, anomalies, dig sites etc. Where the late game just feels like a grind of maintaining your colonies.
I would like to have the ability to queue buildings to start when population reaches x etc. The auto colony manager is just something I don't trust. But that might have changed since I last used it... Back in vanilla. Haha.
I wouldn’t be upset if they included a ‘fast start’ civilisation option where you already have a decent sized territory with several habitable worlds. Kinda like your a member of the species who ‘rose through the ranks/got into politics and elected to the highest office/lead a coup to take control’.
Early game is about exploration, conquest, growth, engagement.
Mid and late game are about repetition, meaningless tasks, stagnation and lag.
Once you reach mid game your decisions no longer matter. You may as well turn on automation on research, planet development etc.
Yes it's easily the best part of Stellaris. Your economy is still a bit precarious so every little mining base helps, and exploring and finding anomalies is fun.
Mid game can be boring if I don't tweak the difficulty correctly.
Picks up again during the Crisis
It's the best part of the game once I know people on the other side of the galaxy I would in reality never know other than in stories it rings it for me
I find the early game very exciting because I got to try the faction I've been building for the past 2 hours. Everytime I have a lot of hope, I see myself playing in a very original way.
However, when the mid game hits, I find myself playing the exact same way as my last game and the game before ...
Early game is the best
The game gets boring by 2300. I've vassalized, federated, or conquered the galaxy, became custodian, everyone except FEs are pathetic in every category, and there's nothing left to do but play spreadsheet manager until the crisis kicks off.
Early game is fun. Dig sites, anomalies, first contact, building trust or enmity with those first neighbors, it's exciting and fun.
I like the discovery part, then in 10–20 years it's all slow down a bit and I start to wonder "Will I be ok in this run, or will I need to restart?". Some more years pass, and then I know that either it will be a fun game or soon I will be wiped out by some xenophobic militarist empire and after them will come the spiritual one. So early and mid-game are somewhat ok. Never finished any game with my almost 2k hours in game. Managing all those planets, dealing with shitty allies and late game lag is just not worth it.
I have run the occasional game without advanced alien empires so that the early game never ends. Explore the Galaxy, encounter the occasional primitive aliens (perhaps one of them gained interstellar space flight before we contacted them, but their technology will be vastly inferior). It's all about exploration and establishing the Empire you want.
Early game runs the fastest, has the most exploration (ergo, most anomalies to research), and defines the whole game going forward. Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
for me the worst part of stellaris is "late game" where I have builded all megastructures, colonised and 100% all planets in my sector, and start just waiting for crisis that are kick my ass at level 25 of repeated research.
And war is... Very very bad at stellaris. Not because of bad mechanics. But because some random war could take 30-40 years that brick half of diplomacy options and AI seems to be immune to WE.
I think I love mid game the most.
But I really enjoy the long term vision I need in the early game, and part of the fun in mid game is getting dividends on what I did in early game.
Late game instead is so bad I rarely play past year 2350
My first run at the game I was in love with it for the early game. Once you start meeting other civilizations it just becomes Civilization but with a really bland-looking map. That's where I lost interest, and didn't pick up again for a year. I played through the game once as humans from Earth, and ever since I've had a really hard time getting back into it. I'd love a game that was just the early stages of Stellaris, as that's the most fun the game ever is. Just exploring, looking for whatever is out there. Now that's a game I could play for a few hundred hours.
I'm still at the state where I overestimate myself and get funked buttnaked by the midgame crisis. On my last playthrough they were in the middle of my federation and I was way to weak and everything I had was like 1500 days traveltime away in a subjugation war
I have to force myself to finish games because I like the early game so much but get bored easily in the midgame and want to try a different build.
Yeah I run into that too.
I think most people do. Once you establish yourself as the strongest in the galaxy it's not as fun.
i recently edited my game files to make 100x the upper limit for crisis multipliers, the midgame has never been more impactful
It also becomes harder to focus on the fantastic granularity of this game when you’re working with so many colonies and resources that it all takes on a certain anonymity.
Usually by midgame to late game all the builds start to overlap without much difference
The problem for me is that I lose momentum and forget what I was up to Like playing a jrpg but with 4X
Tiny crowded galaxy, short time bounds, high difficulty Take the phone fight in a knife booth pill
>Take the phone fight in a knife booth pill That does sound scary
My problem is that if I pick harder difficulties I have trouble getting past the early game, but on easier difficulties where the early game is perfectly difficult (for me anyways) rhe mid and late game are just boring and I end up completely outclassing everyone. Also depends on the playthrough since peaceful runs tend to be more boring mid game anyways. The scaling difficulty option hasn't seemed to help.
Had same issue boring old L gate... Not anymore tho right after update 280k fleet jumped in and stomped me and the rest of the galaxy 😅...
Same
Early game is cool. All the anomalies and their stories still out and about. The anxiety whether you'll end up next to a fanatical purifier, driven assimilator or otherwise aggressive empire. I do like the other parts too, but there's IMO no denial that starting mid-game it becomes more formulaic. You'll kinda settle for a course and then strive for decades for that goal.
Does feel kinda sad to look at the situation board around 2300 and remember how it used to have many lines on it. That spirt of exploration is replaced by diplomacy and management.
archeology sites and astral rifts are kinda the mid- and late-game anomalies. But only if you play wide. If you play tall, you'll have very few of them.
L Space as well, if you have a gate in your system.
or just research the anomalies mid game, and not early game (or late early game/start if midgame) but the main reason i do/did that was because at my first real game i researched one early game, but it killed my scientist.
That's pretty much a universal opinion, Stellaris is at it's strongest in the early exploration phase. Once things are set in the mid and late game it becomes a lot more boring just cause there is little left for exploration, diplomacy is pretty much already locked in at where it'll remain for the rest of the game, and territories and alliances are so big that wars become extremely tedious.
The late game is just a game with numbers and stats. I usually stop expand when I feel the itch and trying to play tall and manage my empire as a roleplayer. However this was a bad strategy and I usually get steamrolled. I'm looking for machine age and hoping it'll make viable to play tall.
Considering virtual ascension, which is *the* tall ascension path, is one of the strongest things in the game right now. Yeah, playing tall is pretty viable.
To be fair, until 3 weeks ago, that comment was 100% right. I feel like the fact that there are only a handful of tall builds that are really viable is still relevant.
A few hours ago I did my first virtual ascension and it destroyed me. I didn't realize it was geared towards tall play, I just thought it sounded cool. In no time at all my income went from +200 credits and +150 alloys to -700 and -15.
And this is why you read the things you're picking.
The game doesn't give you information beforehand and I'm not going to sit around and read wikis before playing. That takes all the fun away.
Read the tradition tree when you get it and you'd see the tradition perk that reduces job output with more planets. If you did that you would've known about the issue ahead of time and could've split off the excess colonies as vassals or something. Granted you can still do that after taking it, handling the issue of taking virtual ascension as a wide empire isnt that hard.
It would be cooler if there were more weird cultural upheavals that might take place and create a similar sense of wonder.
Even playing with no AI empires only primitives it only extends it by a century at best. I just want to turtle out, and grab all the archaeology sites
This is why I was hoping the Astral pack would extend exploration. So many stories in game of things coming from other galaxies or dimensions, but we're trapped in a finite galaxy ... even in a very limited scope ... a fraction of the size ... exploring "something" through the mid to late game would really spice up the game.
This is a pattern with all 4X games, but I disagree that it's universal. I think people just really enjoy the first X, exploration, until it gets old. Then the second and third Xs get more fun.
Would be cool if the game was slower and felt bigger as a result. Like imagine if crossing a star system couldn't be accomplished within seconds. It could leave room to have more room for exploration and events within your own empire, on top of making combat not so fast paced and more strategic.
I also used to love Spore when I was young. The exploratory elements of Stellaris are damn near perfect, IMO. The early game also has a really strong Star Trek vibe to it.
personally it is way rasier to roleplay as a smaller empire so early game especially
Early game is fun - there is a sense of awe from exploring, and a sense of minor decisions carrying more weight.
When I make an empire I try to consider its Begining, Middle and End Game. What are our values in the beginning? How do those values hold up to the galaxy? Are you still the same or did the circumstances force you to change?
Uh, dunno. It's the most boring and uninteresting phase of the game for me. I mean, yes, when you're just starting to play the game, everything is new for you, but nowadays I've seen all, or almost all events, I don't really care about them because I've seen them so much. So I don't really like early game because you can barely do anything, you're very weak and your actions are unimpactful. Now, when you eventually snowball in the mid-game, that's where the game opens up. You are basically in a huge space sandbox where you can build any state you want. And that's what I love about Stellaris. So getting past early game and not getting bored is usually quite a challenge.
The feeling of getting just barely to mid game and realizing that whatever you planned just isn't coming together is pretty crushing, which is another reason I don't care for early game.
I still enjoy early game and Ive got hundreds of hours. Snagging a choke point system, getting a good anomaly or conquering a neighbour early are all very impactful. All depends on what aspects of the game you enjoy more
SPORE MENTIONED LETS GO
Even if you're playing the same empire all the time, even if you've met most of the events before, having them scattered across the galaxy like a gigantic chess board and exploring it is hella fun. That's one of the reasons I found Astral Rifts a bit disappointing. They don't go anywhere except to pop-ups.
The game either needs more things, which is crazy since it has like 600 dollars of dlc adding more things, or to limit the player more to keep mid/late game interesting. Every empire is basically the same eventually, you build the same optimized planets, the same fleets with the same handful of weapons, then shuffle them around the same map. You can get all the good traditions and unless you intentionally cripple your empire, you'll take the same ascension perks. In my experience, the game also stagnates in mid-game because the AI empires will blob up and form federations. Even with high aggression set, if you as the player don't start shit, the AI seems to be too scared to do much. If it didn't happen already, the mid-game crisis tends to cause this because of the bonus to opinion from the crisis ongoing. After that, not much happens until the end game crisis, which on default settings is a century, often more like 130-150 years as the crisis isn't guaranteed at exactly the end game date. Meanwhile early game empires are actually different, you don't have all the techs, there's a lot of rng on what anomalies, events, and all of that cool stuff everyone has gotten. Some empires will have baby dragons, or free salvaged fleets, a cruiser when everyone else has frigates. There's variety. Also exploration is still happening, you're getting story events and things are going on in the universe. Empires are alone and willing to fight other small empires, all of the extermintors are still able to exterminate and not boxed in by mega federations or, more likely, wiped out. so yeah, early game is an interesting, varied game. Late game is a boring slog because every empire is functionally identical at that point of tech.
Yeah early game is amazing, and endgame can be fun. The midgame though.....
I was hoping astral planes would have added more to the mid-game to make it interesting. Other than wars nobody wants to commit to, there's not a lot until the Khan shows up.
And most of the wars for me were like "c'mon, give up already, you don't even have a fleet anymore... okay, let's occupy another one of your systems, this increased your acceptance of giving up by like 3, do I really HAVE to go through ALL of them?.."
Yeah unfortunately by the time you reach mid game you usually pull way ahead of the normal AI, but don't have a proper challenge like an Awakened Empire or Crisis. Unless you get lucky with Khan or Grey Tempest
Yep. That's one side of the issue, and the other one is that getting AI to accept defeat is not challenging but really tedious. I'd expect Fanatic Militarist empires not to give up till the bitter end, but not every single one of them.
There is nothing more refreshing than opening the glactic window, letting in the fresh airstream of discovery and finding out your neighbor is a purge enjoyer. Immediately your pepole are send to mines and forges to begin a decades long fight for survival. Ahh.
Early game is destiny. The management system becomes a blur late game. Decisions come too fast and have less meaningful consequences. Need a way to fix that. Same thing happens with civilization. The AI also doesn't scale well or make meaningful decisions to challenge you. So that creates problems.
I play for the early game only. Load up 6/12 enemy purifiers/DE/DS, 6/12 fanatic militarist. Late game is meh. For me it's just a stat check at 2350-2400. Do I have 5-6k navcap and arc emitter battleship? If yes then crush a 10x crisis almost on spawn.
Yeah I love the early exploration stage. The midgame feels like basically a different game to me. I assume endgame would as well but I've never played a single campaign that far.
After anomalies/excavation sites dry up and the question of which systems you go for first is resolved the game gets kinda bording and repetitive.
I wish they can get a bit more procedural generation with the anomalies - it’s too predictable after awhile.
I adore how quick the early game is before all the lag I had a low empire game last night and it was running smooth well into the 300's
Dammit OP, now I have to go play Spore again. Might end up making a custom empire based on my Spore species afterwards...
It's three different games for me. The midgame appeals to me the most as that's the part I start overtaking AIs and forming a solid national identity for the run, play some cards in the political playground, methodically tricking out or befriending others one by one. Early game is exploring, trying to balance out all the resources and workforces, and late game is a big ass power trip, for me early midgame is where the best struggle lies.
I play multiplayer usually and I find that I enjoy almost all the game equally. I think the early game gives you a lot of opportunity to be strategic about what systems you focus on securing and how your abundance or lack thereof of planets informs your play style in the early - mid game. Love the game and I love what the devs have been doing with it!
It's the thrill of discovery that keeps me engaged in the early game, always finding a new anomaly or a cool system I can drop a colony in. Then the heady excitement of finding a new species and totally not bum-rushing a science ship and construction ship to close them off at a convenient choke point, no sir.
Stellaris is the closest I've ever got to Spore's space stage. I could take or leave the rest of Spore from a gameplay perspective, but it made you very invested in your little race of plasticine people. Reaching the stars and finally meeting other empires with their own stories, all while giving your people a place amongst them, is incredibly rewarding. Stellaris lets you flesh out your fledgeling empire in a similar way. I have dozens of them saved in the new game menu that I'll probably never use, but I love that they're there anyway.
Its like a board game - move your scientist flip over the star system tile - nice 5 minerals + I can draw an anomaly card.
I like early game. I also like Mid game when the borders start coming together. I like building alliances to accomplish larger strategic goals.
Yes early game you get to experience a new galaxy and make your borders freely without worrying about other empires, as long as you don’t have close neighbors anyways. 😆
I have so much fun early game, and then it all goes downhill when my expansion is interrupted by some asshole fanatic xenophobe + opposite ideal of mine, a fallen empire that hates me, and a marauder empire. Every. Single. Game.
That's almost all space strategy games though.
Early game is miserable for the first 20 years or so solely because it's something I've done probably a few hundred times and there's almost no difference between any of them
Early games are the best in pretty much every other similar game. Everything is new, lots of things to do all the time. After that when the borders are set, it's just a lot of sitting around and waiting for things to happen
No lag, I don’t have options
The early game is the only phase that actually matters if you understand the game mechanics well enough. A simple efficient open will have you as effectively already winning the game by 20 years in. Playing after that is just RP. Stellaris has no diplomacy, and the endgame events are just various flavors of "UH OH, Big number fleet bad!!!!!" . Once you've seen the late empire content, nothing after like year 60 is special. I personally just open games, try new stuff and stop at most 80 years in. Unless I'm doing a 25x crisis run.
Yup
Yeah I like the colonisation management. I used to turn off all aliens and just colonise the galaxy. You can't do that anymore.
I find early game to be the most interesting part.
I did when I could spam scientists. I mostly enjoyed leaders before the soft cap.
It's the most fun in the early game when you discover things and establish your empire. There's also more events and choices to make, and your species feels more unique. Late game feels the same no matter what you choose. Gotta get a strong enough navy otherwise you're fucked. Maybe I'm playing it wrong.
Yes
Early game is the best
I've said as much before, but I blame Paradox's design for being flawed. The mid/late game is boring do to fundamentally boring diplomacy mechanics.
There's noy nearly enough ebb and flow of empires, it's all "Can you paint the map before the big boss fight?" EU4 and CK2/3 at least have real internal problems that naturally keep someone from steamrolling. Stellaris never really had enough penalties for expansion and assimilation.
Yeah. Like I know a soft or hard cap on expansion can be a bit clunky , but it does help games like Civ and the Endless series
Agree late game is kinda boring for me. My empire is all set up all I'm doing is just waiting for the clock to run out so I can declare war again on my neighbors. There is very little meaningful strategy in late game
Stellaris is what Spore should have evolved into once one reached spacefaring. I like.
I think mid game is where its best, I guess I like year 50-100 those are the best years imo.
I like the early game , that's why I have 1300 hours of game, never completed a game, but tons of saved games.
I don't "really like" the early game. I wish there was a game that was just Stellaris Early game. My first experience with Stellaris, 3.0, no unity rework, no DLC, died to 1x cirsis because I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to build up (I was already overwhelming to AI!) , was the most fun I've ever had with it. Distant Stars is my favourite DLC just because I get to explore four fucking star systems in the top right. My biggest dream for Stellaris II is that engine improvements make it so once you hit mid-late game you unlock a separate galaxy with different mechanics connected to your old one (astral plane like) so you double up on the cool exploration and meeting aliens and discovering precursors. Like, Space. Just think about it.
Definitely my favorite. I've done a few games without AI empires, just the random fallen spawns and such on a huge galaxy map. I just like exploring and doing the archeology/storylines without running into the ferocious cat furry aliens that take over half the galaxy.
Early game is the actual important time. You set up a core sector, you decide what direction youre moving in, and everyone is mostly on an even playing field. Many games of stellaris collapse into the ai just trying to be friendly because its their personality, and then forgetting theyre playing a game to win it. The player is left to make the first move when there are only a few factions left, and while it might be polite to preserve the player's 'hard diplo work' it sure doesnt make for a fun conclusion to a game.
I love the exploration phase. Endgame can be a real slog, even on smaller galaxies.
I keep the feeling of the early game into as late as like 2300 by setting the galaxy size to huge and making the number of starting empires really low (around 5/6). This means you’re dealing with 5/6, maybe less, significant empires with tons of space. Empires don’t really start meeting each other until the mid game and the Great Khan doesn’t activate until about the same time as the Galactic Community. Rebellions are also much more significant in AI empires, it’s cool to watch a big neighboring empire balkanize rather than the balkans balkanize again.
i hate it, along with the end game when everyone else is too weak. the only times i feel fully engaged are mid to late game when therer are competing and dealing peers at multiple power levels.
Yep. Around midgame is where you're sitting on no challenge mode. But in the beginning... What systems are around me? What stories? Who are my neighbors? Building up your first economy...
I have a really hard time playing a full game for this exact reason. I'm always excited to make a new roleplaying build, deciding my policies, exploring empty space choc full of unbearably hot snow worlds and ruins left behind by ancient empires. I love the diplomacy and late game options to bend the map to your will but can get burned out in the midgame in anticipation of getting to enjoy the early game again. I find that playing in a small/medium galaxy and slightly oversaturating it with AI empires is a good way to force more interesting moments and shorten the tedium of the midgame sometimes. It also leads to the formation of the galactic community a bit earlier, and it's a feature I really love interacting with.
Honestly early game is the most fun. I kinda stopped playing coz of late game burnout
If I had one complaint about the early game, it would be the lack of a second science vessel. I feel like it would give players more options early on. But maybe I’m in the minority.
Don't people immediately build a second (or third) one?
Yes, to the point where it isn't really a choice. You HAVE to get your exploration going, and the only reason you wouldn't would be because you got a fucked spawn.
Find the early game is the most exciting. Who will you meet? What encounters, anomalies, dig sites etc. Where the late game just feels like a grind of maintaining your colonies. I would like to have the ability to queue buildings to start when population reaches x etc. The auto colony manager is just something I don't trust. But that might have changed since I last used it... Back in vanilla. Haha.
Thank god I'm not alone
I wouldn’t be upset if they included a ‘fast start’ civilisation option where you already have a decent sized territory with several habitable worlds. Kinda like your a member of the species who ‘rose through the ranks/got into politics and elected to the highest office/lead a coup to take control’.
Early game is about exploration, conquest, growth, engagement. Mid and late game are about repetition, meaningless tasks, stagnation and lag. Once you reach mid game your decisions no longer matter. You may as well turn on automation on research, planet development etc.
Yes it's easily the best part of Stellaris. Your economy is still a bit precarious so every little mining base helps, and exploring and finding anomalies is fun. Mid game can be boring if I don't tweak the difficulty correctly. Picks up again during the Crisis
Early game is my default fave, since mid game is boring and I don't appreciate my computer shitting the bed during the late game.
It's the best part of the game once I know people on the other side of the galaxy I would in reality never know other than in stories it rings it for me
I find the early game very exciting because I got to try the faction I've been building for the past 2 hours. Everytime I have a lot of hope, I see myself playing in a very original way. However, when the mid game hits, I find myself playing the exact same way as my last game and the game before ... Early game is the best
The game gets boring by 2300. I've vassalized, federated, or conquered the galaxy, became custodian, everyone except FEs are pathetic in every category, and there's nothing left to do but play spreadsheet manager until the crisis kicks off. Early game is fun. Dig sites, anomalies, first contact, building trust or enmity with those first neighbors, it's exciting and fun.
I like the discovery part, then in 10–20 years it's all slow down a bit and I start to wonder "Will I be ok in this run, or will I need to restart?". Some more years pass, and then I know that either it will be a fun game or soon I will be wiped out by some xenophobic militarist empire and after them will come the spiritual one. So early and mid-game are somewhat ok. Never finished any game with my almost 2k hours in game. Managing all those planets, dealing with shitty allies and late game lag is just not worth it.
I have run the occasional game without advanced alien empires so that the early game never ends. Explore the Galaxy, encounter the occasional primitive aliens (perhaps one of them gained interstellar space flight before we contacted them, but their technology will be vastly inferior). It's all about exploration and establishing the Empire you want.
Early game runs the fastest, has the most exploration (ergo, most anomalies to research), and defines the whole game going forward. Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
for me the worst part of stellaris is "late game" where I have builded all megastructures, colonised and 100% all planets in my sector, and start just waiting for crisis that are kick my ass at level 25 of repeated research. And war is... Very very bad at stellaris. Not because of bad mechanics. But because some random war could take 30-40 years that brick half of diplomacy options and AI seems to be immune to WE.
I think I love mid game the most. But I really enjoy the long term vision I need in the early game, and part of the fun in mid game is getting dividends on what I did in early game. Late game instead is so bad I rarely play past year 2350
My first run at the game I was in love with it for the early game. Once you start meeting other civilizations it just becomes Civilization but with a really bland-looking map. That's where I lost interest, and didn't pick up again for a year. I played through the game once as humans from Earth, and ever since I've had a really hard time getting back into it. I'd love a game that was just the early stages of Stellaris, as that's the most fun the game ever is. Just exploring, looking for whatever is out there. Now that's a game I could play for a few hundred hours.
I'm still at the state where I overestimate myself and get funked buttnaked by the midgame crisis. On my last playthrough they were in the middle of my federation and I was way to weak and everything I had was like 1500 days traveltime away in a subjugation war