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Stux posted:the fact it manages to stand out in a very niche genre and have a higher player count than pretty much anything else in the same vein ever did isnt exactly a point against its quality, because assumably given only bad options people would simply continue to not play games of that type as they had been already
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Feb 3, 2021 02:02
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the best possible option before stellaris didnt have stellaris numbers and then lose them to stellaris, stellaris created a larger player base than anything else around had because its fundamentally a game many people like. its just people here really like ck2, vicky 2 and eu4 which kind of biases the discussion. theres also a similar lack of hoi4 discussion around here in comparison to how popular it actually is, but it gets away because its much more of a traditional paradox game so no one has much issue with it even if they dont play it alot.
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Feb 3, 2021 02:06
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Stux posted:the fact it manages to stand out in a very niche genre and have a higher player count than pretty much anything else in the same vein ever did isnt exactly a point against its quality, because assumably given only bad options people would simply continue to not play games of that type as they had been already i think it's a mediocre game in an underserved genre, which means pointing to player count as indicative of quality is dumber than it usually is
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Feb 3, 2021 02:17
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Ham Sandwiches posted:
For sure I will give you that. Even granting that, it's the only space 4x I would play on the market. I'm really not interested in playing another MoO-like. I will give Distant Worlds 2 a shot when it comes out, but the last 4x I've liked was Endless Space 1. Before that, the last space 4x I enjoyed contemporaneously goes back to MoO3 of all games. Whatever glaring flaws Stellaris has, in my opinion it is the best game in the genre right now. I felt like it was presented as a "Paradox" style attempt at a 4x game, and that's more or less what we got. I'm sure I agree with a laundry list of the items you would want them to do differently, but I don't feel like I was hoodwinked. And I can get behind anyone who does not like it, and did not like the direction it went. I would have done things differently as well. It doesn't have the baked in world state that makes other Paradox games appealing. It could have easily had a checkmark option to add in like 4~8 civilizations that would always show up, you would know what they do, and add a bit of story that history usually gives you in their other games. I think the randomized spacenations are the worst aspect of Stellaris, and prevents it from having a familiar feeling that other Paradox games have. I play Stellaris with a nations pack my friend and I have been working on over the years. We've made Sci-Fi nations that attempt to fit into the various AI personalities that match them best. It's more fun to play when you are going up against the Zerg, the Borg, and the Minbari from Babylon 5 vs going up against the Blorg Uglyfriends or whatever randomized species the game spits out. tl;dr i apologize for generalizing groups on the internet. paradox also isn't a singular entity, but for the purposes of the comic personification of distillation of the last 6 years into a 4 line comedic back and forth, i may have cut some corners. stellaris is not a good game, but i really don't know what other space 4x im supposed to play. i haven't enjoyed ck3 since launch so my opinions could be terrible
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Feb 3, 2021 02:18
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Cease to Hope posted:i think it's a mediocre game in an underserved genre, which means pointing to player count as indicative of quality is dumber than it usually is endless space is a mediocre game in an underserved genre. no one played it despite it beingg basically the only "ok" and modern option 4 years before stellaris even existed. people like the game. it takes a special kind of mental gymnastics to see a brand new ip do well and have a very stable playerbase and assume because you do not like it very much that means everyone else is only playing it because they have no other option or whatever.
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Feb 3, 2021 02:23
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Of all the Paradox games, Stellaris requires the most out of me to get its full experience. I have to roleplay my empire, design/curate other empires to play against and just ignore a handful of mechanics. When I have the mood for that full buy-in though it offers me a lot that other PDS games don't, and really no other game on the market does. It's a weird game.
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Feb 3, 2021 02:25
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I think trying to find excuses for why people secretly agree with your opinion despite evidence to the contrary is dumb. You can accept people like something you don’t it doesn’t invalidate your opinion
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Feb 3, 2021 02:26
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Cease to Hope posted:i think it's a mediocre game in an underserved genre, which means pointing to player count as indicative of quality is dumber than it usually is assume stellaris is a terrible game, below the median for whatever a good game is and then you imagine the group of people who might play a space 4x being normally distributed, and the value along the axis being the 'quality' level of the 'marquee' game in that genre going from 1 being bad and 10 being a 10/10 game and a 5 being the median. an increase in the total player base compared to shifting the same number of players from one game to the other, suggests that the observed game is of superior quality to the prior games. of course we are not controlling for population growth in this model but if we Stux posted:endless space is a mediocre game in an underserved genre. no one played it despite it beingg basically the only "ok" and modern option 4 years before stellaris even existed. people like the game. it takes a special kind of mental gymnastics to see a brand new ip do well and have a very stable playerbase and assume because you do not like it very much that means everyone else is only playing it because they have no other option or whatever. I wanted to say this in my screed, if I did not get it across. I liked Endless Space 1, and did not like Endless Space 2. It got worse.
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Feb 3, 2021 02:27
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Anno posted:Of all the Paradox games, Stellaris requires the most out of me to get its full experience. I have to roleplay my empire, design/curate other empires to play against and just ignore a handful of mechanics. When I have the mood for that full buy-in though it offers me a lot that other PDS games don't, and really no other game on the market does. It's a weird game. What mechanics do you ignore, if I might ask?
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Feb 3, 2021 02:32
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Stux posted:endless space is a mediocre game in an underserved genre. no one played it despite it beingg basically the only "ok" and modern option 4 years before stellaris even existed. people like the game. it takes a special kind of mental gymnastics to see a brand new ip do well and have a very stable playerbase and assume because you do not like it very much that means everyone else is only playing it because they have no other option or whatever. endless space was terrible and topped 1.5m sales in four years. "no one played it" is pretty silly
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Feb 3, 2021 02:35
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Grevlek posted:What mechanics do you ignore, if I might ask? Mostly just pop movement. Pretty sure I've never relocated a pop since tiles went away. I also tend to not really declare wars or care too much if AI build something in a "bad" way. I also try to maximize things that aren't necessarily super powerful. Since the launch of MegaCorp I've played the same Megachurch race and nothing else, so I try to focus on befriending as many trade partners as possible and doing what I can to improve their planets to rake in more tithe money. So I usually give them beneficial deals, fight wars mostly to protect them or help them expand. Stuff like that. Anno fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Feb 3, 2021 |
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Feb 3, 2021 02:51
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Anno posted:Mostly just pop movement. Pretty sure I've never relocated a pop since tiles went away. I also tend to not really declare wars or care too much if AI build something in a "bad" way. For sure, I *edit never thought of* it as 'ignoring' whole swaths of mechanics but I 100 percent do that as well. The pop fiddlyness I don't engage in at all with, which is weird because one of my favorite ways to play is as a Gaea world restricted group of "uplifters" who splice and dice dna of all kinds of species. I make hyper specialized subspecies of miners, farmers, researchers, and soldiers, but the actual micro required to make sure that the mining race is in the mining job is impossible. What a dumb game 
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Feb 3, 2021 03:01
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Kaza42 posted:Sword of the Stars Sorry you only get the sequel. As it was at launch. Enjoy having your admirals surrender to unmanned asteroids shortly before another crash to desktop.
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Feb 3, 2021 03:46
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Stux posted:the best possible option before stellaris didnt have stellaris numbers and then lose them to stellaris, stellaris created a larger player base than anything else around had because its fundamentally a game many people like. its just people here really like ck2, vicky 2 and eu4 which kind of biases the discussion. theres also a similar lack of hoi4 discussion around here in comparison to how popular it actually is, but it gets away because its much more of a traditional paradox game so no one has much issue with it even if they dont play it alot. i am not making GBS threads on stellaris. it's a game i've had a lot of fun with. but, fundamentally, it is not a game that paradox has supported appropriately. since the period where wiz was intensively supporting the game (because it was completely dire and unfinished) ended, the stellaris team has gone back to being what it apparently was before launch: an understaffed B-team that is pressured to meet deadlines at the expense of the game. paradox may have created a large playerbase, but the game's status as lowest-priority is pretty obvious. which is why mods have to do a lot of the heavy lifting, putting in obvious poo poo that a team with more time and manpower would be able to figure out and implement directly.
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Feb 3, 2021 04:29
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Stellaris is this weird, uneven lump of a game. You have the events and the archaeology sites and exploration that front-load the game with lots of fun(if exhaustible) content. That's probably the best part. You have the tech card system that's often more frustrating than interesting, because there are lots of techs that are essentially must-haves, and a lot that are better left on the back-burner for when you need to burn through something quick later on to reroll your tech cards for Psi Theory or Battleships or whatever. The economy is full of moving parts and seems interesting, but all it is something you fiddle with until you produce the maximum amount of alloys and research possible while making just enough energy and consumer goods to keep the lights on. Nothing else is optimal, which means you either roleplay and knowingly play suboptimal(some are better able to do that than others) or play the same way every time. The more I think on it, there are way too many instances in Stellaris where one option is obviously superior to the others. Like: robots. You should basically always have robots, there are no downsides to having them(outside of a smallish faction happiness penalty if you're Spiritualist). You can quickly use them to colonize inhospitable worlds and they're super productive and (basically) everything that gets you more pops ASAP is 100% optimal, because all you have to do is spend some pittance of resources to give them jobs(or maybe they're just slaves who're remarkably easy to keep in line even without nerve stapling). There are the ghosts of things that might act as breaks on that: food, unemployment, unhappiness, crime, stability etc. but in practice, these are never more than minor annoyances(hell, some crime is actually great!) Diplomacy is tedious, because you can't actually do much at all. War isn't much better, and fiddling with transports to actually take planets is a pain and engages perhaps the most vestigial system in the game. But sometimes a cool event happens, you have a cool war with the Khan or even an AI empire. Sometimes you can imagine you're playing something great for a bit before you realize you're just playing something that *could* have been great, but is merely somewhere between average and good.
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Feb 3, 2021 05:25
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I think that's a good assessment. "Ground combat" should have been solved a long time ago.
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Feb 3, 2021 05:34
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:MoO2 had hyperlanes? Yeah, but only to limited extents. A hyperlane took you from arbitrary system A to arbitrary system B (or B to A) in 1 turn, while normally you would only move X parsecs per turn based on your engine tech. You'd normally find 0-5 of these in a playthrough depending on map size and settings.
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Feb 3, 2021 05:52
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Stux posted:stellaris is well liked outside of here and is pretty easily the best 4x style space game I'm almost certain it will lose this title on the day Distant Worlds 2 releases.
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Feb 3, 2021 06:03
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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ulmont posted:Yeah, but only to limited extents. A hyperlane took you from arbitrary system A to arbitrary system B (or B to A) in 1 turn, while normally you would only move X parsecs per turn based on your engine tech. You'd normally find 0-5 of these in a playthrough depending on map size and settings.
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Feb 3, 2021 06:07
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Grevlek posted:I think that's a good assessment. "Ground combat" should have been solved a long time ago. I tore out a piece of an old mod that makes planets get conquered when they hit 100% devastation and have less than 2 armies on them while massively boosting the damage fleets do against armies. It's worked with every mod I've paired it with and I've never looked back, and it even solves the AI sitting fleets over planets forever. Fake Edit: Oh yeah, MoO3 would be the one with the closest thing to how Stellaris treats hyperlanes, but even that allowed "off-roading" at a massive speed penalty. Ardryn fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Feb 3, 2021 |
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Feb 3, 2021 07:24
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Those are wormholes. MoO2 did not have Hyperlanes like Stellaris does. MoO2's movement was like what I think was called "Warp" in Stellaris where you could go from any system to any system in range with no restriction. the restriction was fuel, and the reason people liked moo2 (and the hyperlanes) is that it creates fronts and chokepoints
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Feb 3, 2021 07:36
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I am surprised anyone would consider Stellaris to be anywhere as good as Endless Space 2. Unless you get into the trap of thinking "It's Paradox, so it's probably my fault for not seeing depth and complexity" you get an overdesigned clicker in Stellaris as Lance of Llanwyln has said. ES2 has much better aesthetics and it's actually a game with interesting decisions. Both ES2 and Stellaris have very poor AI never providing a decent challenge, but even this flaw is more exaggerated in Stellaris. Cause in Stellaris a dozen hours would pass before you get into a direct conflict with any AI, and you'll probably need hundreds of hours to realize that no, it wasn't just your luck, the AI is brain dead.
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Feb 3, 2021 08:18
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I really want to like Stellaris. I’ve played a ton of it since it came out and there are moments of perfect flow - exploration is a strong point - and it does have a lot of charm as well. Some of the systems are well thought out and it’s pretty. Ultimately though, when I want to mash digital spaceships together I get more enjoyment out of something with a more compelling basic gameplay loop. Endless Space 2, Sword of the Stars, Stars in Shadow are all great and when I open up Steam they are in general more appealing. So it’s a classic heartbreaker of a game I guess. Every expansion I try to get back into it but end up abandoning the playthrough .
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Feb 3, 2021 09:06
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ES2 was miserable. The tech tree is full of garbage, it's heavily reliant on luck of the resource draw, there's a ton of degenerate strategies, the AI is bone-stupid, and the faction balance is all over the place despite not having any actually interesting factions. It's very nice aesthetically but it's a candy shell on a completely rotten core.
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Feb 3, 2021 09:11
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:You're posting this in the paradox grand strategy thread. A thread about games that often take dozens of hours to figure out if they're good, and evolve over time as patches and DLC come out. Dwesa fucked around with this message at 10:15 on Feb 3, 2021 |
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Feb 3, 2021 10:05
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Cease to Hope posted:ES2 was miserable. The tech tree is full of garbage, it's heavily reliant on luck of the resource draw, there's a ton of degenerate strategies, the AI is bone-stupid, and the faction balance is all over the place despite not having any actually interesting factions. It's very nice aesthetically but it's a candy shell on a completely rotten core. Exactly my point: it's like Stellaris, but better in every regard.
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Feb 3, 2021 11:29
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I never got nearly the sense of exploration out of ES2 that I do in Stellaris, especially with a bunch of mods. It’s Stellaris’s biggest strength imo and why nothing else really does it for me.
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Feb 3, 2021 11:47
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I liked Stellaris fine until there were no new events to find. It doesn't really hold up for the long haul once you know what you're doing and the sense of exploration is gone imo. Last I played it was the Relics DLC. Hyperlane only was absolutely necessary the game needs much more geography. I also wished they'd tied the customization options to gameplay elements. Looking at a star ship/diplo message basically tells you nothing. In EU you always know that France is going to be a shitter, the Turks are going to spread like crazy and so on. In Stellaris you basically only have to take a look around to find the exterminators.
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Feb 3, 2021 13:12
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Grevlek posted:I think that's a good assessment. "Ground combat" should have been solved a long time ago. I wish you could just carry troops on your main battlefleet ships. Let me include a barracks module to do that or something.
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Feb 3, 2021 13:24
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AnEdgelord posted:I wish you could just carry troops on your main battlefleet ships. Let me include a barracks module to do that or something.  Goa Tse-tung posted:the restriction was fuel, and the reason people liked moo2 (and the hyperlanes) is that it creates fronts and chokepoints
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Feb 3, 2021 13:38
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AnEdgelord posted:I wish you could just carry troops on your main battlefleet ships. Let me include a barracks module to do that or something. This is what I wanted to post and I let it be. Your army should get locked to a fleet, and not have its own transport wing nonsense. On battlestar galactica, the marines are on the carrier, not some other ship in the fleet. That might make armies less unique or significant but who cares at this point. Ground forces would necessarily be less important to a space empire. It's unrealistic to conquer a planet in a planet spanning war, if WW2 took six years go sort out why wouldn't it take several years to sort out in space.
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Feb 3, 2021 13:40
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Only if they do something sane and have unit modules be a new thing that doesn't use an existing slot. Forcing you to make weaker ships to carry troops would just make the problem with transport ships worse.
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Feb 3, 2021 14:15
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ilitarist posted:I am surprised anyone would consider Stellaris to be anywhere as good as Endless Space 2. Unless you get into the trap of thinking "It's Paradox, so it's probably my fault for not seeing depth and complexity" you get an overdesigned clicker in Stellaris as Lance of Llanwyln has said. ES2 has much better aesthetics and it's actually a game with interesting decisions. Both ES2 and Stellaris have very poor AI never providing a decent challenge, but even this flaw is more exaggerated in Stellaris. Cause in Stellaris a dozen hours would pass before you get into a direct conflict with any AI, and you'll probably need hundreds of hours to realize that no, it wasn't just your luck, the AI is brain dead. es2 is exceptionally unfun which is why no one plays it lol Cease to Hope posted:endless space was terrible and topped 1.5m sales in four years. "no one played it" is pretty silly yeah this is why im going off of an actual sustained player base and not just units shifted. you can go look up exactly how many players es1 managed to retain when it had basically no competition, then see how many people stellars manages to keep consistently playing, a number which has actually managed growth over time. its well liked. you are allowed to not like a game without having to attribute all the people who do like it to be playing it in error or whatever.
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Feb 3, 2021 14:26
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ES2 is not a game no one plays, it's the fourth 4X game by players on Steam. The list goes like this: Civ6, Civ5, Stellaris, ES2, Civ 3, Civ4, Sins of the Solar Empire, Endless Legend, Age of Wonders 3, Age of Wonders Planetfall. You are allowed to not like a game without having to attribute all the people who do like it to not exist.
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Feb 3, 2021 14:36
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ilitarist posted:ES2 is not a game no one plays, it's the fourth 4X game by players on Steam. The list goes like this: Civ6, Civ5, Stellaris, ES2, Civ 3, Civ4, Sins of the Solar Empire, Endless Legend, Age of Wonders 3, Age of Wonders Planetfall. stellaris has literally 10x the number of players. its v cute to try and turn the argument around but when youre saying "i dont know why people play stellaris, es2 is so much better" it really destroys your own position, because that means people arent playing stellaris because they have no other option. theyre playing it because they prefer stellaris.
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Feb 3, 2021 14:39
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Are you trying to say that every person who plays Stellaris has tried ES2 and decided that they like Stellaris better? Do people who play Stellaris just don't know about Civ6 which has 5x times players and is, therefore, a better game?
ilitarist fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Feb 3, 2021 |
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Feb 3, 2021 14:47
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civ 6 isnt a space 4x, but youre assuming people dont play both lol again, just a lot of effort trying to prove a game you dont like is objectively bad or whatever despite lots of people enjoying the game. very strange.
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Feb 3, 2021 14:52
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Am I being trolled?.. This is the second time you post a direct attack on the point you've made in your previous or the same post. How do I deal with this, I'm not prepared.
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Feb 3, 2021 15:03
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Let’s just agree that all paradox games suck *boots up EU4 for 1673rd hour of play*
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Feb 3, 2021 15:12
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I wish they'd put more focus on historical events again, try to work in ways to incorporate them dynamically. I know that's like, the whole idea and easier said than done but I miss EU2 days when I'd get a wall of text about the Wars of the Roses and have to take a side.
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Feb 3, 2021 15:32
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