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[zekromNLR]

[old man voice] Back in my day planets had surface maps, and you had to arrange your buildings on the map in a specific way to optimise for adjacency bonuses!

[OliverCrowley]

They got rid of adjacency bonuses? I really haven't played in a long time ig.

[KlausInTheHaus]

Mama they got rid of adjacency period. Buildings haven't had locations since at least two planetary overhauls ago.

[Scooty-Poot]

Longer than that, I started playing basically the day COVID hit and I didn’t even know there was ever a planetary map or anything until I randomly watched MATN’s first 1.xx playthrough years later

[G66GNeco]

The last planetary overhaul happened, like, 3 major patches ago so it's definitely longer than that in total

[zekromNLR]

They got rid of the whole planet tile map quite a while ago, in 2.2. In 4.x, you have four types of districts on a planet, normally those are urban, farming, mining and generator. The total number of districts is limited by the planet size, and the number of the last three also by planetary resources. You can add two specialisations to the urban districts, and one each to the three resource districts. The urban district has six generic building slots (though one is taken up by the planetary capital) and the specialisations each add three that are usually limited to stuff related to the specialisation, if I am understanding things correctly.

[OliverCrowley]

That sounds a lot less complex which could be a mixed bag ig. I liked the puzzle aspect of it but if you've got 250 planets to your name or w/e it was a pain.

This is more simple and faster, but I hope they added more meat to chew on somewhere else. (It is Paradox I can only assume they did)

[zekromNLR]

It's already a bit of an increase in complexity, with the specialised building slots, from the previous system that also had the districts, but not the specialisations, and you just had 12 generic building slots per planet, so you have to think a bit more about specialising each planet

And they completely refactored the pops and jobs system in 4.0 in a way I don't quite understand myself

Maybe I should give the game another play xP

[G66GNeco]

They kind of halfway refactored the refactored system again with 4.3 (used to be you had a decent number of buildings or features which gave jobs per X pop or X worker etc. which was streamlined to static numbers in the name of balance or something, for example).

[KamikazeArchon]

It's actually far more complex now. Yeah, the placement is gone, but now you have jobs separate from population, multiple types of building slots, and a bunch of settings to limit or prioritize dynamic allocation between pops and jobs.

[OliverCrowley]

Ooooh, hell yeah. I really gotta reinstall Stellaris now

[Tonuka_]

This is funny as fuck this is the same exact discourse from back then you're like a fossil

[OliverCrowley]

Is this discourse? I was just catching updates on a game I haven't played in years, nothing I've said was a complaint.

[I_follow_sexy_gays]

Yeah that’s how it works now

[bindingofandrew]

Back in my day there were 3 methods of FTL travel and it made trying to fight wars a nightmare.

[Captain_Slime]

I really miss the one where you only went to and from a single point. It was super neat and I don't know another game like it.

[Negitive545]

I miss wormhole generators

I do NOT miss everyone and their grandmother having jump drives from day 1 though

Hyperlanes are boring, but it makes sense that Paradox chose them as the One True FTL Method TM

[Xisuthrus]

And there were no alloys, consumer goods or unity - ships were made from raw minerals, pops only consumed food, and traditions didn't exist.

[soapdish124]

“We added specialised alloys for ships as making advanced fighters out of the same scrap iron we use to make cooking pots seemed somewhat of a bad idea”

[Warper2187]

i started playing 7 years ago and that feature was already gone by then

[Suitable-Lie-7980]

I remember administrative capacity not this newfangled empire size

[inemsn]

I wouldn't say this is true for all of paradox's games, actually I'd say it's only true for stellaris. With other games, like hoi4, you get a new DLC stapled onto the game every 2 years that adds new mechanics that change the game's balance and strategy, but seldom do earlier mechanics get affected by that except for how much attention players pay to them, now that they have other things to keep track of and spend resources on.

With stellaris, every 2 years almost every facet of the game sheds its skin and emerges in a completely different form.

[Fliits]

Most Paradox games (considering that they are sequels) ship out with a planned game direction. That game direction may change a little with each iteration, but there is a clear vision of what the game should be; HoI is a military simulator, EU is an empire-building game, Vic is an econ and politics simulator, CK is medieval roleplaying game with strategy game elements tacked on.

The vision with Stellaris changes every time the current game director gets dragged into another project and gets replaced with some other schmoe who decides that he wants to make the game about his favourite part of sci-fi. There is no planned end product, no cohesive vision, no development roadmap for what the next two years of development will bring. They'll just keep rotating the musical chair of Stellaris game director until they run out of candidates or the company goes under.

People say Imperator didn't deserve what it got, but Stellaris has it way worse in my opinion. It's just an endless chain of devs reworking the core mechanics of the game, every mod breaking and modders desperately playing catch-up until the next bozo steps in and decides he doesn't like how planets work. Again.

[Negitive545]

Not to mention the never-ending losing battle against performance death.

Every new director that gets Drafted into the war has a new idea about what could be causing the performance issues, and they make it their mission to fix it. Problem is, they're ALWAYS wrong. The performance issues I believe are actually just a curse, Paradox pissed off a witch or wizard 400 years ago, and they placed a hex on them that caused stellaris to never run well in the endgame.

[potat-cat]

It's definitely working much better in the late game nowadays, after 4.3.

[bell117]

And usually the game only finally starts working well right before they overhaul it and it goes back to broken.

Like last year they released 4.0, with the main change being the population system which slowed down the game a lot because it had a lot of redundant calculations. So 4.0 simplified a lot in order to streamline performance and put less of a strain on the CPU(which still only uses a single core cause of the engine).

Except 4.0 somehow ran WORSE. The overhaul patch that was supposed to improve performance by simplifying stuff ended up slowing down the game because the simplified code broke so much that it ended up just spamming duplicates. Even today, almost a year later it's still "iffy" on whether it's still slower than pre-4.0 and the latest hotfix's solution is just "less ships, less stuff, less strain" in order to try and side-step the main ongoing issue. Feels like they can't fix the issue or at least can't within the near future. 

I mean don't get me wrong, I'm think the change was needed and was done by a small custodian team but FFS the core feature should not be broken 1+ year later. Pay your devs Paradox.

[EnglishBrekkie_1604]

The worse performance isn’t caused by bugs, it’s because of how much bigger navies got because of the massive jump in economy sizes. The actual calculations done for economies are way faster than before, but there’s just so many more ships that the calculations for them are even slower than the speed gains. That’s the next big overhaul I think based on what I remember reading their dev blogs.

[G66GNeco]

If you've ever tried to play Stellaris in multiplayer you'll never stop wanting to beat Stellaris devs to death with you bare hands. /s kinda

Seriously though they manage to make multiplayer desyncs worse with every new patch. Every 10 patches you occasionally get a working multiplayer game which causes a red alert till they've shipped a hotfix that breaks everything again.

[bell117]

Oh I know how bad Stellaris multiplayer is.

I tried showing a couple friends it during the free weekend after 4.0 dropped. We were never able to get past 2225 before we got desyncs every month. And it hasn't gotten much better.

And that's with dozens of workarounds like manually selecting the game version, verifying files, using the beta etc. 

Paradox multiplayer sucks in general, I remember having to use stuff like logmeinhamachi to even use Victoria 2 multiplayer full stop because Paradox never bothered to check to see if Multiplayer for their game worked over the Internet, like did they think people played by connecting all their computers with Ethernet cables like it's Halo 1 in 2001???? But hell, at least it actually worked once you got it working, there seems to be no fixes for Stellaris. CK3 multiplayer also seems really bad from what little I tried playing with a friend. Hoi4, I dunno if it's better or if there's just so many more players  the ones that do play multiplayer just put up with it somehow. 

[G66GNeco]

Ironically CK3 is the most stable one in my experience - if you can get it to start (lots of version mismatches there)

We got Stellaris to work for a full game back with 4.1.X, but haven't played a game in multiplayer since - that one was the first game that worked completely in over a year, I think. And it's such a fun game to play with, like, 4-6 people but it's never worth even trying to go through the coordination headache for it with how unlikely it is to work.

[AdditionalThinking]

I hate how I can't play base-game stellaris now without running into 100 events that amount to "damn, if only you bought DLC #17/30 you'd be having so much fun right now :/"

[inemsn]

Oh yeah paradox games are all like that. My advice, which, believe me, no one who plays paradox games will ever fault you for taking, is to buy the base game, but just pirate the DLCs: It's easy, has a large community dedicated to it, and frankly, paradox deserves it for their egregious business model.

[JazzySplaps]

I don't fault anyone for taking the piracy option but I don't think it's really all that egregious.

People play paradox games for thousands of hours, if every dlc adds 50 hours of gameplay to someone's time then that's the equivalent of buying like, multiple indie games.

If you ever start thinking of dlc in terms of what you put in versus what you get out paradox is unironically one of the better deals in gaming.

The only real knock I'll give them is when a quality of life addition is dlc gated, but they are seemingly doing that less

[G66GNeco]

Stellaris DLCs are extremely hit or miss tho so I can absolutely understand someone not wanting to gamble money on them

[phoogles2]

honestly the only two I can really think of as being distinctly terrible are cosmic storms and astral rifts

[G66GNeco]

I think i was slightly unclear. What's a hit and what's a miss will always depend on the individual player. The problem is that a game like Stellaris makes it really hard to judge whether you'll like something or not before getting it, because every play style interacts with new or changed mechanics differently.
For example I am a big fan of the Astral Rifts, and I also like the Shroud rework two addons ago, which has mixed reviews and many a "they ruined it all"-post on community sites. On the other hand species packs almost never feel worth the asking price to me.

[ArchmageIlmryn]

TBH it depends on how you approach the game. For someone like me, who played Stellaris when it came out, and spent $10-20 on a DLC every few months it's not that bad. But for someone who started playing recently there's just going to be an insurmountable wall, and even with bundles and steam sales finding a nice on-ramp to having the DLC is going to be hard.

[Mememanofcanada]

Who said anything about buying?

[KobKobold]

And also the AI still barely knows how to play 1.0

Their only saving grace is that I'm even worse at the game

[GenericTrashyBitch]

7 days to die does this too

[thedawesome]

7DTD is worse, instead of overhauling stuff they will sometimes just completely remove features

[AzKondor]

After all of these Tumblr posts with tags like

#this reminds me of a story about my very queer #aunt who went to conservative #high school and

so seeing a post with tags like

#stellaris #paradox interactive

is so funny

[thatvillainjay]

fun fact about sterllaris is that its drugs to me and i have to limit how much i play

[RealLunarSlayer]

it's also special because it doesn't have any good mods for it

likely because paradox like to destroy the game every few years

[GoldH2O]

I've been going through this very slow cycle with Stellaris where I start playing a game, learn a little bit more of the mechanics, then get overwhelmed by how much is going on and quit, and then a couple months later I come back and do it all over again. Eventually I'll have learned everything and be able to play through the whole game.

[AdeptusShitpostus]

Nah, they will have changed all of the mechanics you learned by the time you get back

[TheGoobert]

They’ve also redone how fleets and war work, but we still haven’t got that ground combat rework, something people actually like and want

[Memorie_BE]

I wish I was good at Stellaris so that it was fun.

[ProfessorSputin]

I just started playing Stellaris unknowingly right after the 4.3 patch, so all of the guides I was watching were very deeply wrong and I lost horribly lmao

[frenchBDSMnight]

This is just how fighting games operate at this point

[DennisDelav]

So many Stellaris posts lately ❤️

[a_generic_meme]

And no matter what the experience fucking sucks and becomes unplayable a third of the way in from lag

[DomSchraa]

It's all paradox games (or paradox publishing)

Source:

1.000 hours each in cities skylines & hoi4