Recent reviews by Vaeringjar

TL/DR: shiny graphics and nice music. Badly designed and frustrating gameplay. Just play Civ IV or V instead.

The game does a few things interestingly and has good visuals and music. That's it. The army system is better than Civ V/VI 's but is too janky to be called good, first strike advantage for example is so huge it's basically broken, yet could have been solved with a very simple and common initiative system. The battle system is also horribly flawed in that the player can avoid taking losses while the AI can't, so Civ IV's combat system (despite some obvious shortcomings) remains the most balanced one vs both Humankind and Civ V/VI.

It's full of badly designed systems that make the game frustrating to play. For example, your hidden units will ambush your allies forcing you to retreat or fight; if you bomb a tile a little bit it turns into useless wasteland where nothing can be built on, including resource extraction, effectively wiping a resource deposit off the game; the whole region mechanic, outposts, influence etc just doesn't work well enough in practice, I'm usually a super pacifist empire builder in Civ games but here I'm forced to be a super aggressive murderous maniac; the AI is dumb as heck and seems to get cheats even on default difficulty (like the first city costing them no influence I'm pretty sure), making it seemingly powerful early game but an utter cakewalk by mid/late game; demilitarisation mechanic has gotta be one of the stupidest and most obnoxious, pointless, and unimmersive mechanics I've ever seen; war score and war weariness systems are good in theory, but the implementation here is really bad, so if an empire forces you to declare war on them because they don't wanna pay a fine for their crimes, you are forced to be the mentioned hyper aggressive murderous maniac; on the other hand, if a far away AI is stupid enough to declare war on you, you get to take all the spoils of victory without having to do anything; the wonder claims system managed to turn what is usually a really nice flavour system into something incredibly obnoxious, plus the wonders are overpowered and effectively game-breaking balance-wise; quickload shortcut loads the last save, not the last quicksave; map generation likes broken terrain way too much, our planet has lots of large plains, but in this game you can forget about large cavalry or tank battles like IRL because there's a damn cliff or mountain every other tile, and rivers affect tiles instead of in-between tiles like in Civ, turning the tile into a suicide position in what are already ridiculously cramped battlefields; and vanilla Humankind is even more bland and barebones than Civ except Civ has an amazing modding community, I haven't seen any modded 3D assets here for example; etc etc etc I could go on and on and on. The game also has lots of small bugs despite the last content/DLC update being over 6 months old, and in a modded playthrough I managed to trigger a variable overflow late-game. I also had to disable the music due to some tinnitus-inducing pieces, so half the best part of the game wasn't there for me lol.

Overall this is both at best and at worst comparable to Civ VI, which managed to be the only truly and unquestionably sh*tty Civ game ever and literally has a broken engine that is even worse than Civ IV 's 32bit limitation (due to having been made some 19 damn years ago), except I remember Civ VI is being more polished, bug-free, and less frustrating overall.
The only thing that might save this to a non-negative review would be local hotseat, because that'd let you bypass much of the nonsense, if you'd also have 20 hours of extra free time to make your own more enjoyable map to play on.

Huge disappointment overall. Glad I got it as part of a bundle jfc.

But I must applaud there being more competition in a segment effectively dominated by a single franchise for afaik over 20 years. At least they tried.

Very janky. Very unique. 11/10 I love it

Unfortunately I cannot recommend the game yet.
A game which does not have on-demand saves by design should not have game-breaking bugs nor crashes either. Losing hours of progress because of dev's opinion on on-demand saves is just st*p*d.

end-of-2023 update for some steam badge thingy:
Haven't had problematic bugs last playthrough but reportedly others may not be as lucky. The game auto-saves when you open the menu, so you can alt+tab to backup the save, but it's not a great user-experience.

adding a launcher isn't "quality of life"

it's obnoxious af

Game is decent and can be enjoyed, but has some horrid issues that end up draining the fun out of it

Coastal raids are a micromanagement nightmare; they're spammy af; and civilians always kamikaze themselves instead of running away. Literally the best way of dealing with this is to depopulate the coastline and move everything inland. Yay vikings!

Combat is very fast paced, and:
- Unit control isn't very good. Good luck splitting your forces or making wounded retreat fast enough.
- Towers die very quickly, have fun rebuilding them over and over because your army will always arrive a second too late.

extremely basic QoL 101:
- Map can't be dragged around with the mouse... like... *facepalm*
- Can't do anything while paused. Enjoy learning the game when you have to figure everything out realtime.
- no game speed option, a feature old as time
- sound options doesn't include a master/overall volume control
- missing a restart option in single player. Useful when you messed something up but really like the map
- if you're busy you may not notice one of the spam raids on your capital. Have fun suddenly losing from one second to the other despite enjoying and winning the game
- you can't choose which factions to participate in a game, which is another basic 20-year old feature, meaning you can't disable the stupid giants-mercenary-spamming clan.

typical AI nonsense:
- cheatsy unit spam that reportedly doesn't cost resources. Somehow a clan with half my land can support an army twice the size, and rebuild their losses faster than me
- hates the player. In a game with a player and 7 AIs, AIs far away you've never shared a border with will send mercenaries on you instead of their actual enemies... *logic*

removal of hardcoded modding limits is a dream come true

v41Beta is a masterpiece, + plenty of great mods

edit: added this edit line for the awards thing

- - - - - Multiplayer is borked af.

Lag is terrible despite having a very good internet connection and the game not using more than a quarter of my CPU and half of my GPU. The game will lag so bad Windows thinks it has stopped responding.
This is the most horrid experience I've ever seen out of any game. It's even worse than when I had ♥♥♥♥ internet and my ping in RO2 would climb to 900 when other people started skyping. One would have thought they'd test such monstruosity for a "definitive edition", what a joke.
Last 3v3 match the game was literally frozen more time than it was not. Highscore is 90 seconds where I can't do a damn thing. LITERALLY. what the actual ♥♥♥♥?
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, ♥♥♥♥ if I know what the hell affects it. Server says ~50ms, which is clearly a lie.
When this crap lags, which is all the time, for some absurd reason it directly affects fps too, even the damn hometown which is just a semi-static scene with no internet interaction grinds to a halt. Powerpoint slideshows have higher fps.
This thing was made by drunk keyboarding monkeys, except they're so dumb even apes who bought GME at 420 consider them retarded.

This crap is literally unfit for purpose. Why this is even being sold is beyond me. I'll demand a refund if it doesn't improve. This thing only worked one day, completely unusable all others. What a scam.

Update: looks like the servers are good enough between 00:00 and 12:00, after that it's unplayable. Shows how much Microsoft cares. Good to know.

- The recently played with player list is also borked. 2 times already I wanted to block an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ but half the players don't show up, so you can't

- This game's AI is absolute garbage and updates are released which are completely borked, showing there's no coder dedicated to AI development in a multi-million game company. Even unpaid hobbyist modders make a better job of it. It's so laughable it's not even funny.

- Autosave setting "all" is misleading and instead of autosaving every turn, it's actually the setting to never autosave 'cause logic
- dx12 crashes on my dx12-capable system
- the pointless make-you-wait-10-seconds splash screen on loading, beyond being annoying af, do not respect your master sound volume setting; enjoy getting ear-raped if your system-game sound config so wills it!
- attempting to close the 2k launcher crashes the game even if you cancel closing it lmao
- can't set precise values in setting sliders. Mouse wheel speed default is 50, but I can only set either 49.85 or 50.14 after changing it...
- cannot configure arrow keys' movement speed, making them completely useless
- cannot configure zoom speed
- enabling/disabling mods is horribly tedious. PDX's launcher may be garbage and completely broken but at least it's all just a simple damn checkbox click
- Civ IV is still better

Needed to write a review for the summer sale thingy, so I just randomly picked a game that easily deserves a positive one. Alright, that was easy, gg.

I think Stellaris overall, and with mods, is a great game. This DLC however was clearly not in shape for release. Files include commented out "TODO" code, such as AI not being coded to use the ecumenopolis feature. AI is even more braindead than is usual for Paradox games, and particularily incompetent compared to the previous Stellaris version.

Performance has taken a dump too, and this time mods were able to partially compensate for it. Think of that what you will.

The changes in this patch and DLC are great in theory, it was simply released in a beta-like state yet sold as a finished product, like Fallout 76 was. Unacceptable and immoral.