Sky high, with a heartache of stone"
Ministry - NWO
Still disappointed by Galactic Civilizations 3 and Distant Worlds: Universe, I haven't been very willing to jump back into the 4x genre. But, when I discovered last year that Stellaris, of which I'd heard relatively little, was made by Paradox itself and not merely marketed under their logo, I decided to buy it without further question.
Now, Paradox is far from saintly. They're as enamored of market manipulation and datamining their customers as any other for-profit enterprise, to the point of constantly trying to sneak log-in incentives and other camouflaged Digital Rights Management mechanics under GoG's radar. Most infamously, they're prone to releasing products as mere skeletons of what they should be, only to bleed their audience with endless downloadable content packs for five to ten dollars a piece. In fact, half of Stellaris' content seems to have been released in just such a manner, more than doubling the game's price. Nevertheless, Paradox has remained one of the major positive forces in the game industry for its willingness to advance more thoughtful genres like strategy or role-playing in a marketplace glutted with ACTION!
Welcome to Nyctimus, ca. 2680. Second moon of the gas giant Lycaon in the Bendis system, homeworld of the mountain-born and high-minded Feral species...
... and capital of the more than hundred inhabited worlds (ringworld included) and five hundred stars of the nearly galaxy-spanning Feral Transcendence.
The purple empire on the left is my protectorate. The orange one near it and just above my border was my first alien contact and has remained my stalwart trading partner and ally from the beginning of recorded history. Though, more recently, they've been massing defenses along our shared border. I don't know why. Maybe it has something to do with the threat posed by my endless rampage through the galaxy's southern reaches, culminating in the near-extermination of the filthy hu-mon species... which to my great chagrin pre-empted my final war declaration by wheedling their monkey paws into a last-minute alliance with by declared besties. Despite my best efforts I won't be killing all hu-mons today :(
Yessir, Stellaris has diplomacy, a surprisingly well-tuned system of likes and dislikes based on past actions, trade deals, and your civilization's governing ethics. AI opponents do not simply declare war as a default action, nor do they meta-game as a single entity against you. They perform like reasonably discrete actors with declared agendas, in a style reminiscent of Alpha Centauri. It boasts about the same amount of modular unit design as well, which is to say not much, but enough to fiddle with occasionally. There's a great deal of other inspiration, declarative or implied, from other games as well (and not just the inevitable Master of Orion similarity) but to me the greatest inspiration, oddly enough, seems EVE-Online. Maybe it's all the asteroid mining or the Titan ship class or the ships catching each other while trying to leave a system, but mostly the heavily interdependent in-game economy. Much like Mount and Blade, Stellaris creates an impression that if you were to replace all the individual NPCs and faction with actual players, this is what an MMO should look like: packs within packs of constantly interweaving individual actors and not a homogenized herd of obedient servants all performing one utterly predictable task. From your intrepid exploration vessels to star-occluding fleets and massive megastructures it provides interesting and costly choices for domestic development to picking your friends or foes, to choose-your-own-adventure interstellar dramas, to crushing your enemies and seeing them etceterad before you. And, though they're not as impactful as they might be, it even incorporates some of the grandiose capstone projects so conspicuously absent from some of its competitors.
In fact it's difficult to find anything specific to discuss regarding Stellaris precisely because it's both so vast in scope and so well integrated. Its individual elements show little depth, but the game as a whole is impressively engaging in the balance it strikes between automating repetitive drudgery while still letting you decide upon the myriad facets of interstellar governance, and remaining fundamentally an expansion-oriented 4X title. You do have caps on your various measures of success (fleet sizes, number of colonies) but they're softer than usual soft-caps letting the player deliberately balance the empire's economy and decide just how far over the limit to go. My own empire has hovered about three times its administrative capacity throughout its growth from the first dozen stars to five hundred. Even your expansion ties back into a conscious decision of who you are as a leader, as the "influence" currency you use to claim systems is partly generated by the various political factions in your empire, each with their own demands and reactions to your political stances. On the galactic level, scalable, customizable maps, time frames and factions give it a great deal of replay value.
Conceptually, this is more of an embodiment of the genre than an advancement: all four X-s accounted for. Yet every aspect, every stage of the game, is expertly handled. The interface alone should humble other would-be designers. Planet, fleet and other screens are designed around presenting a Milky Way's worth of information clearly and functionally with just enough fluff to give it some personality, with adept use of ideograms to cram as much data as possible into every screen without cluttering it. Almost everything is cross-referenced, letting you jump from leaders to their domains to production and map locations seamlessly.
It's huge, it's deep, it's hard, it's long, it's... starting to sound pornographic... and building a rearguard of tight'uns isn't helping. With just a few more overpriced DLC packs, Stellaris will earn its permanent place in gamers' memories as a definitive strategy title.
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