Recent reviews by Leucean

Stellaris. The game that slowly eats away at your life and your time. It is the definitive example of a game gluing your arse to the chair. The game begins as a real time 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) game in the early game, shifting to a grand strategy game in the later stages of the game. So now you may ask, what makes this game so appealing? (note that this review will not encompass the DLC)

Summary:
You begin on your home world with nothing but a starport, a few corvettes, a constructor ship and a science ship. You leave your science ship to explore the vast galaxy, while constructor ships build up your star nation's infrastructure. Immediately, the galaxy is your playzone, and if you will, ambition.

Diplomacy and Xenos:
Suddenly, you meet some alien vessels. After deciphering their language, you discover their ethos, government, and policies. There is a whole bunch of possibilities you may encounter in this area. However, therein lies a weakness in Stellaris- the lack of variety of xeno governments. Time and time again, I meet neighbours who are militaristic xenophobes, keen on taking my territory, and wiping my species out. It is not like they would be able to conquer my territory, but it would be nice to see other forms of government, such as traders, pacifists, or xenophiles.

Research and Unity:
Research and Unity are important components in your nation's development.

Research allows the player to obtain more technologies over a period of time. This is generated by research stations, planetary science labs, shield generators, clone vats, and military academies. However, the game develops into a frenzy to develop the highest amounts of research to outpace the AI, for absolute domination. While this inherently is not a bad thing, the notion of reaching technological supremacy has turned into the meta. This forces the game into a standard playstyle, which is forcing science. The non-linear technology tree on the other hand, is a very good choice in creating more deviation in each playthrough. Unlike the Civilization series, Stellaris does not force a certain series of technologies to be the meta. This allows for more situational technologies to be developed.

Unity, on the other hand could be seen as improvements to the player's nation. Instead of researching them like technologies, they are obtained after sufficient Unity is generated by the nation. Unity is acquired through the planetary capital, monument and the spaceport deep space black-site. The Unity tree is the only instance of linear development in this game. However, there is no set structure to advance through the tree, apart from the discovery tradition. Because of the research meta, the discovery tree is the go-to choice as the starting tradition. But after the discovery tree, there is infinite possibilities to proceed on with the Unity tree.

AI:
The AI in this game is retarded. It is one area the developers need to rework. It is slow to expand, it is slow to research technologies, it is slow to develop its nation, and most of all, the movement of the military ships is ridiculous. The AI is bad at managing all of these tasks. Instead of feeling like genuine competition to win the game, it feels like a detour, being an annoyance. The AI empires have to be augmented with various bonuses in order to stay relevant to the player empire.

Empire Management:
The game is micromanagement heaven. Assuming the player does not have sectors, every bit of the nation can be managed in earnest. A player can directly control the buildings built, the starports, military et cetera. The limiting factor is still the empire's limits on starbase capacity, naval capacity, fleet capacity, and administrative capacity. The methods to improve these include research, and for fleet power, anchorages in starbases as well as fortresses. But overall, naval capacity is limited by starbases, which itself is limited but population and research. This again demonstrates the research meta.


Leaders and Government:
In Stellaris, government forms are essential in determining your playstyle. After all, a determined exterminator should never be allowed to form a federation. Therefore, in empire creation, the player has to plan his playstyle from the get-go, because changing government ethos mid-game is a true pain in the arse. To chance government ethos mid-game involves the factions aspect of the game.
The factions are groups of populations who support differing ethos. This is the player’s main source of influence. Influence is generated from the faction’s happiness by the player’s actions. Every faction has a different set of requirements to become happy. This faction happiness also affects the player empire, because low faction happiness will cause the associated pop to have lower happiness, decreasing productivity. When a faction support reaches 20% of the player’s population, the player can choose to switch the government ethos to the faction’s ethos, removing the least supported ethos of your government.

Leaders are important in the game, providing bonuses for the various aspects of the game. The 5 forms of leaders are the empire’s leader, governors, scientists, admirals and generals. These leaders have a limited lifespan, but can be improved with genetic engineering or research. The leaders provide specific bonuses but all of them have a flat level-based bonuses. These bonuses can change the outcome of one’s empire so it is important to take leaders into consideration.

Species:
In the starting menu, you can choose to create a species with differing traits and appearance. This opens up a wide array of possibilities for a player’s species, giving opportunities to do things such as roleplaying, challenges and hardcore playthroughs. The traits can be changed in-game through genetic engineering.

Combat:
In the game there is two forms of combat, naval combat and army combat. Naval combat is performed with the military spaceships. There is a wide variety of spaceships. Corvettes, destroyers, cruisers and battleships. Each has a role in the navy, however cruisers seem to be absolutely worthless past the midgame, because of their lack of strength in any aspect of the combat. One bad thing about the fleet combat is the emphasis on ‘monofleet doomstacks’, or single-class fleets that have fleets that follow it to achieve the greatest fleet power. This causes the game to lack many tactics but instead focus on just being able to maintain such a huge navy.
Army combat on the other hand, is even worse. With no army cap, the player can spam as many armies as possible, with the only limiting feature being population. But with cloning vats, even that could be combated. So, the land invasions only are who can produce the largest army power.

Crises:
The end game crises are a large-scale event that spawns a hostile empire near the end of the game. There are three of these events, the Contingency, the Unbidden, and the Prethoryn Swarm. These end-game events require a strategy to combat them. For example, the Swarm should be combatted with lots of point defence since they use a lot of strike craft and missile type weapons. These events bring a large amount of satisfaction upon defeating them, but more importantly, allows the shift in the balance of power in the galaxy,

Conclusion:
Apart from the still unreliable and utterly useless AI, the game is very enjoyable to play. I have spent many hours consecutively. The game has much variety, and replay value, and overall, is a good game to get into.

9/10