Stellaris Review: Accessible Grand Strategy

Stellaris Review: Accessible Grand Strategy

“Alright, Erron. You’ve probably got twenty hours in Stellaris. That’s probably enough to start fleshing out a review. Let’s just check Steam aaand.. oh. Oh. Almost a hundred hours, huh. Okay. Yeah. Let’s do this.”

– Me, on realizing exactly how addictive Stellaris is

I tried my best to get my head around the Crusader Kings series. More specifically, I put a solid twelve hours in one day into Crusader Kings II, and in those twelve hours I learned absolutely nothing about how to play it. The Grand Strategy genre seemed beyond me. It stayed that way until Stellaris. Space games are my jam, above anything else. As it installed, I braced myself for a horribly confusing onslaught of systems, similar to the Crusader Kings games.

Instead, I was greeted by a friendly robot friend, offering me a choice. Full Tutorial, Tips Only, or Nothing. “FULL TUTORIAL,” I said aloud, and then clicked the choice because it’s not actually voiced activated. Still. How do you pull off an easy to follow ‘full’ tutorial, I wondered, for games as complex as these? As it turns out? Very easily. The friendly robot guides you through just about every aspect of playing Stellaris, should you let him, and for me the humor was enough to keep me relaxed as I slowly absorbed the information I was being given.

How I learn to play games tends to go one of two ways. Either the game is immediately intuitive, or I will restart over and over every time I learn something new, so I can be playing fresh with new knowledge to put to use. And so Stellaris went into the second category, not because it’s un-intuitive, but because there’s enough going on that I found it difficult to put everything into practice all at once.

I started with my robot friend teaching me how to survey planets and systems, how to start researching things, and eventually how to build a colony ship. What I failed to realize was that my ships could travel outside of my borders to the systems that were all labeled “Unknown”, and so my progress was halted until I realized that. So I restarted. On my second try, I used what I had learned and then found I was having money problems, so I poked around and found out that you can build specific buildings on your planets to help alleviate those issues.

Build it up, build it up.
Build it up, build it up.

So, naturally, I decided I needed to colonize MANY planets to make a lot of money.. and then I eventually realized that beyond five colonies (or sometimes seven, depending on choices), you start getting pretty serious penalties to research and money.

I poked around some more and discovered that I can create a number of ‘sectors’, which you can shove your territory into and basically let it manage itself, and things inside a sector don’t count towards your five ‘main’ colonies. So I started over. Now I was having a new issue. I could colonize planets for days, but I was hitting points where I couldn’t get my territory to connect. The space between two planets was too large, and there were only stars in between. So I dug around, and discovered I could build ‘frontier stations’, which were costly stations that orbit stars, which claim them into my territory and expand my borders. So I started over.

Now, armed with all of this knowledge, I started going hard, and eventually had a giant civilization among the stars, with loads of production, and other spacefaring races pressing against all my borders. The galaxy was large, and we had filled it up, me and the AI, and — oh, this guy doesn’t like my being against his borders. Oh, he’s declared war on me. Oh, he’s got a MASSIVE military. I didn’t learn how to design and build combat ships!

Slightly outmatched. Slightly.
Slightly outmatched. Slightly.

So I started over.

And now, a hundred hours later, I feel confident enough in my experience with the game to talk a little about it. I have officially played a game where I either teamed up with or took over all opponents, except for the highly dangerous Fallen Empires. I’ve still never beaten one of those in a fight. I’ve also never managed to deal with any of the ‘end-game crisis’ events that can happen, though I have managed to hang on for a very long time as the robots purged all organic life from the galaxy. I have created not one, but TWO highly varied custom races to play as, each tailored to a play style I wished to employ.

I have Uplifted primitive species within my territory and integrated them into my society, and geneticly modified them to really like utterly shite planets so I can colonize those planets without having sad people living there. I have saved other primitive races from extinction by asteroid by flying my fleet across the galaxy to shoot it down before it could destroy a people. I’ve also kicked back and watched the asteroid hit, just to see what would happen.

I’m fairly confident I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I can do, but it’s enough that I can succeed. For now, anyway. It’s enough for now. I’m also fairly confident none of the above really explains, in the barest detail, what Stellaris really is.

Stellaris is a better, more up to date Sword of the Stars. It’s Sins of a Solar Empire meets Civilization. It’s very quickly established itself in the top of a surprisingly large selection of games that all try to pull off galactic conquest and fall short.

Which isn’t to say it’s flawless. There are any number of bugs, but as of yet nothing immediately gamebreaking. Minor things, like an event that sees one of your planets taken over, but which leaves the game still recognizing it as under your control, leaving you unable to do anything with it or take it back from the bad things. The occasional dialogue pop-up that’s just nonsense.

"Good for her."
“Good for her.”

Before release there was some serious stuttering issues, which was maybe the worst bug anyone’s encountered — and which got fixed by the developer in a beta patch less than 24 hours later, which finalized and pushed a proper hotfix to everybody less than 24 hours after that.

The most noticeable bug I encountered is that the soundtrack will inevitably hitch and loop a second long loop indefinitely.. so I just turned the background music off. Seeing how quickly Paradox is working on pushing fixes for these things, that’s a bug that might not exist by the end of the week.

I’m honestly impressed at the fact that I wasn’t able to find at least one gamebreaking bug.

Bugs aside, there are some minor nickpicks. The biggest of which is that the AI is kind of dumb. AI that are your allies just sorta follow your fleets around with their fleets, which is fine for when you’re attacking a single target — it makes a huge stack of fleets that normally tear everything to shreds. But it’s bad for when you’re attacking someone who in turn is attacking an ally, or has allies attacking your allies — your AI teammate’s trickle of reinforcement ships, weak on their own, tend to try and fly right through the bad guys to reach you, and end up getting shredded for their efforts. AI that are your enemy seem to want to drive right for your homeworld when they’re on the attack, but they get stuck in systems if they happen too close to one of your space stations there. It leaves you with plenty of time to drive your fleets up into their territory to punch the shark in the nose to get it to leave you alone.

The end-game crisis events I mentioned, the AI seems to basically ignore them. That’s especially bad, since the two I’ve seen end up with entire AI players being demolished as they sit back and let it happen, and it’s wildly difficult to deal with any of them all alone. It’s also weird given how the AI will declare war on you without much provocation at all, depending on the type of species it is. Much of my early game time is spent fighting defensive war after defensive war, so you’d think with AI that like to fight that they’d be all over the end-game crisis events.. but not so much.

To shreds, you say. And their neighbors? To sheds, you say.
To shreds, you say. And their neighbors? To sheds, you say.

I’ve had an AI empire declare war on me despite the two of us being entirely cut off from one another by another empire we both got along with, meaning neither of us could even get ships to each other to fight.

These issues aside, I’ve greatly enjoyed my time with Stellaris, and I’m very excited to see how it grows. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the Grand Strategy genre like I did, Stellaris might be the game to finally help you crack the genre wide open.

This review is based on a retail code sent by the publisher to SideQuesting for Steam