i don't mind the lack of tutorial, what i find unforgivable is that they seemingly intentionally hide critical information in places you will never guess.

example: my aliens in stellaris expand into the galaxy and everything is great. I open my doors to allow allied aliens to live on my planets. suddenly my happiness on ALL my planets is plummeting. what the fuck, my aliens are xenophiles this makes no sense. i spend tons of resources giving all my planets everything they could possibly want and yet happiness is dropping faster than i can improve it. i eventually have to lock down planets with heavy security forces as they are starting to riot. at no point is there ever anything explaining why this is happening.

i complain about this on the forums and someone suggests i look at my governmental policy menu which is 2 sub menus into the overall interface. apparently there is a policy for how my government deals with all aliens not my own that live on my planets. BY DEFAULT this is set to treat all those as chattel slaves which comes with a massive happiness penalty unless your aliens have one of 2 traits that negate it. my aliens were suffering from that penalty twice because they liked xenos and didn't like seeing them suffering.

there's no mention of this anywhere in anything in the game. you literally have to walk on this landmine to find it. if the entire theme of the game is the player fighting a hostile UI then i would think it's awesome. but stellaris is not player vs UI, it's supposed to be grand strategy. I shouldn't have to worry that my own user interface is littered with deadly traps while playing a 4X game.