I've been playing this little known gem called Stellaris. It's p good

>>2187624
I've owned Stellaris for years but never given it much of a shot, I know an update came out recently - how is it? I just much prefer turn-based over real-time and real-time with pause.

>>2187621
>MoO2 is probably my all time favorite
Interstellar Space: Genesis

>>2187653
game seems interest but that UI is extremely ugly

>>2187650
game is in a weird state cause paradox just updated it in a way that introduced thousands of bugs in an attempt to improve performance. The DLC timeline is causing them to struggle with fixing them all.

>>2187624
Kinda controversial as Paradox does weird shit.

>>2187868
Again?! Didn't 4.0 screw up a lot of stuff already?!

>>2187621

>Real Time
Avorion
Cossacks 3
Crusader Kings 2
Distant Worlds 1 and 2
Haegemonia: Legions of Iron/The Solon Heritage (a favorite of mine)
Kenshi (Meets all the requirements)
Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion and 2
Starsector
Star Wars: Empire at War
Stellaris (controversial to some)
X4: Foundations

>Turn Based
Age of Wonders Series
Ara: History Untold (beat Civ, of all things)
Conquest of Elysium 5
Dominions 6
Elemental Reforged
Empire: Total War
Endless Legend
Endless Space 2
Galactic Civilizations 2 and 4
Interstellar Space: Genesis
Master of Orion 2016 (A lot better than expected)
Medieval: Total War 2
Remnants of the Precursors (MoO1 reborn)
Old World
Scythe (has a digital version)
Stellar Reach
Zephon

>>2188331
>Master of Orion 2016 (A lot better than expected)

oh yeah? I forgot this came out. it looks like there are some recommended mods (5x, UCP), has anyone played this and can recommend it?

>>2188331
not sure if this is a bot post

>>2188376
I played with both of those mods and I recall that they improved the game substantially. I can't recommend sucking dick though

>>2188387
it isn't. I posted that list.

Can't I just organize the shit I post?

Is Sins of a Solar Empire 2 still meh and not worth it over Rebellion? The ugly UI (compared to the first) and the AI gen art is really offputting.

>>2188463
Could you explain your view of Cossacks 3 as a "4x space game"?

>>2188387
I think it's a retard post

>>2188376
use the mods because vanilla game has a game breaking bug never fixed.

It’s not space but it’s sci-fi 4x: Dune: Spice Wars. It’s slept on by this gay board.

>RTS but no APM needed. You can do some micro but it’s not super critical to battlefield success. Force projection is more important than engagement tactics by a mile.
>Multiple win conditions: military, espionage, diplomacy, economic
>Probably best espionage system of any 4x game, ever.
>Solid graphics and music
>Well-balanced factions each with 100% unique units and massively different abilities, playstyles

My suspicion as to why this isn’t more popular than it is: people who thought this would be Dune 3: Battle for Arrakis got hard filtered. This isn’t Sandy StarCraft; it’s a legit 4x. Also, while very intuitive with a polished and well-thought out UI, it certainly isn’t a “light” game. If you’re not willing to invest the time to come to grips with all of its interconnected systems, you’ll bounce off of it. However, if you do, you’ll be well rewarded with a high quality strategic experience that is second to none.

>>2196093

It's so good, it's also one of the recent games where it feels like even on standard difficulty, the AI is actually playing to win without needing to resort to perfect map knowledge or better base economy. I have been eliminated by assassination a few times, simply because in any other game I wouldn't expect the AI to actually be able to handle the system and forgot about it until it was too late.

>>2196093
Seconding this, very fun and just the right level of complexity. Kind of like SoaSE in that it's shorter than conventional 4x games and you can finish a game in an afternoon or two. My only criticisms would be sticking too much to the movies design wise and that the most fun faction imo is locked behind DLC.

>>2196718
Which faction is it (that is your favorite)? I’ve only ever played Harkonnen. Love those fuckers to death.

>>2197124
Vernius, they're pretty much all about espionage and exploiting CHOAM and kinda play like an inverse Fremen.

>>2196093
Personally I avoided it because it looked like they'd just taken Northgard and applied a coat of Dune paint.

>>2187621
I liked Endless Space 2

>>2197653
It's easy to think that but they layered a bunch of different systems together in a really nice way. It almost feels like it has offworld trading company dna in it between the landsmeet, choam stock, and economic sabotage.

>>2200320
I was playing on normal as Harkonnen and the Atradies AI used thumpers on my spice fields, which fucked my econ.

>>2188331
yah I'm gonna pick up elemental, probably way more stable than fallen. Also throw on space empires IV there. Looks like shit, but it plays fine.

>>2188331
stellaris deserves mixed reviews at this point. souring me on pdox the longer I watch them screw around with a released game.

For bonus points I'm mentioning 2D JRPG total war game lost technology, but yah you posted all the big ones not just space.

>>2202983
Well the most basic question would be is Stellaris worth playing without the DLC?

>>2202986
I ditched stellaris around utopia, came back at synthetic dawn and quit again.
No it's not worth it without the dlcs, and it's slightly less not worth it with the dlcs. Whatever the game could have been was stripped out long ago in favor of being a minimal effort dlc farm. This is especially so ever since distant worlds 2 got fixed up and got its dlcs.

>>2187621
>>2203273
Seconding Distant Worlds 2 > Stellaris. I recently revisited it with more of an attempt to understand the systems and rely less on automation, and I've been particularly impressed by the complexity of the ship designer and how it integrates into the other systems. For instance, even at the escort ship level there's significant differences in slot configurations between each of the dozen races, especially early game when tech is slot inefficient, so not only do you analyze a hull on a race-by-race basis according to its discrete dimensions like slot capacity, weapon firing arcs, and costs, but these analyses run on a time axis as well. And to give an example of how significant these differences can be, the Mortalen (space Nazis) heavy frigate is so well-armed that its guns are about on par, or better if you consider firing arcs, with the Haakonish (space Jews) light carrier, which is a capital ship. It never sat well with me how shipsets are just skins in Stellaris, like it's some gacha game. And the ship combat is downright embarrassing and breaks any immersion you have of these being advanced civilizations as everyone resorts to the same tactic of fucking fleet jousting, where battles last 20 seconds if you're lucky because the loser loses at the moment of engagement.

Meh, there's a ton of stuff that the automation in distant worlds 2 should be improved upon.
For example, the automation lets colony ships be built by the planet instead of the starport, which makes making them extremely slow, so you have to manually order a starport to build the colony ship, lest you wait ten times as long until it gets build.
Another problem is that it's not clear what thing can stack, and what doesn't stack, and there's sometimes options for a hull that you wouldn't be able to use in the first place (research labs for anything not a starport or a research base).
Also, spies are too cumbersome to use, yet are necessary for you to gain the tech advantage.
Also, one of the most infuriating thing is when your generals, admirals, scientists and spies all get negative traits even when doing something they succeed at.

>>2187868
Is Stellaris reaching endstage? I kinda want to play PDX games when they reach their EU4/CK2 stage only...

>>2214845
The mortalen are more space samurai, Warlike but extremely honorabru.

>>2218469
The ai does fine with spies assuming you tweak the automation settings to disallow the higher risk lower payout operations. The one caveat is you can't also select what tech you want the ai to prioritize stealing and really I think spies need a rebalance so you don't get to pick techs to steal. It's just too easy to steal every tech under the sun.

>>2202986
it is/was until some of your favorite mods would require DLC.

I didn't have much of the DLC and relied a lot on mods from the workshop. I slowly buy DLC when they're on a massive discount (under $10 or lower even)

>>2202983
>2D JRPG total war game lost tech

wait what? which one is that?

>>2224015
Yeah being able to steal the reactor from the lizards and fuel cell from the frogs lets you save on like 2-4 general slots on your smaller ships in exchange for tripling your fuel range. Then if you get the drive the spiders have, you just get to travel end-to-end across the galaxy. Potentially in the first 30 years if you get them all as neighbors. Shit's broken. I just manage it manually when I need to since 12 months is a long enough interval and once you get a few crucial techs you're good to leave it automated.

Tech stealing is incredibly overpowered in its current state because it's so much more effective than research due to how it scales proportional to the research size of the tech. It lets you skip potentially hundreds of years/tens of hours in real playtime. I think to balance it, it should just straight up be removed as an option for all but a few espionage races, and the scaling should be nerfed. If you want somebody's tech, you're gonna have to take it from them the old fashioned way. But that said, salvage is also broken. I play with all the random events turned off because of that, but I still just got T3 Impact Assault blasters on like year 70 in my current Zenox game from a random salvage of some neutral base that got destroyed by Gravillex. Any empire that goes to war with me is fucked and the game is way too easy now, so I have to pretend for the next several dozen years that I can't afford the few thousand credit increase in maintenance it would be to arm all my frigates with them.

>>2218469
The only big AI fail imo is the ship design. It doesn't seem to regard firing arcs or size, so it'll do things like put direct fire PD on rear L nodes that never do anything. There's also a bug where switching to another faction in the game editor overrides their weapon preferences, but I'm using it as a feature. No weapon preferences, no AOE, low PD, early hangars, then I just pass cycle through all the factions and set their early research too.

>>2225900
One option that the game developers of Distant Worlds 2 should really implement is to lock in certain ship items even for automated retrofitting and upgrading.
If I want my ships to use equinox hyperdrives and not a fucking kalista, or my ships should have recreation centers for the lowered maintenance then make it so, and if I want to use ackdarian turbo engines instead of the space-inefficient bigger engines, then keep it like that, dammit.
The automation in this game is anti-fun and extremely set to be a disadvantage to you.

>>2226833
You can go into the design automation settings and tell it what qualities for drives and engines to prefer, like efficiency over speed. I'm not sure how effective this is for getting it to use the specific components you'd want though because I don't use it. And yeah it will never put recreation centers on ships, that's something someone's probably gonna have to snipe a dev livestream to request.

But I wouldn't recommend using automation at all for ship design (among other things), it's just something to make the game "less intimidating" at the start for noobs at the expense of periodically nuking your economy and crippling your military capabilities as everything rushes to retrofit when you get a hull upgrade or start using rare resources for components. Upgraded hulls are meant to be premium or specialized versions of the base design that are in exchange far less cost efficient, and having high tier equipment can increase your maintenance costs several times over, so you don't wanna just indiscriminately turn all your light cruisers into high tech blaster command cruisers or whatever madness the automation gets up to. The AI empires can handle it because their economies cheat, but players have to be smarter with their fleet logistics by making good use of the ship and fleet designers, which is where I think the fun in this game is. Nothing beats developing a bunch of one-off ships for a special forces stealth fleet and watching it wreak havoc against your enemies.

>>2187621
Platings
and Energy weapons
The best setup

No mention of Terra Invicta? Absolute gem, that one, made by the people that made the Long War mods for XCOM. It's a geopolitics simulator that turns into a space game as 7 Illuminati organizations compete to achieve their agendas in the midst of an alien invasion. The tech level is on the hard sci-fi end, with interplanetary travel taking months and hundreds of tons of fuel, realistic rail gun rounds and missiles taking minutes to reach their target as they fly through kilometers of space, orbiting bodies changing launch windows for military attacks and what have you. Perfect for autists.

>>2187653
this

>Riftborn
>Sophons
>Vaulters
>Nakalim
Which of these should I try out next?
Umbral Choir Vodyani had a very exotic playstyles.

>>2254497
I've never played the nakhalim, sophons and vaulters are both very standard. Riftborn are aesthetic and the next least standard in that list.

>>2254497
Nakhalim are all about rushing exploration. You get relics and can drop completed colonies on slumbering ruins. Relics let you unlock special planet developments and strong empire buffs to approval and influence, and other things. They also control your research rate. If you don't find relics, you're fucked.

>>2232785
They're coming up on official release.

I wish they'd do an economic rebalance based on PPP for nations. It's very silly for Europe to have as much economic output as it does, for example. A military rebalance would be nice too. It's pretty goofy that hypersonic missiles are a technology you're not likely to unlock until the end of the 2020's, while several nations had mass production when the games start date is.

>>2187653
ISG is literally MoO2 in new coat of paint..
>>2187621
Aurora or Distant worlds

>>2188331
>Master of Orion 2016 (A lot better than expected)
It's strange how opinions change like that. I played the game a couple of years ago for the first time. Thought it was decent game, nothing special but solid. I remember when the game came out lots of people were dissapointed, like the expectations were unbelievably high. I'm not a fan of the space lanes but the real time battles are okay. The battles are a lot faster so late game turns don't take up too much time, it also makes multiplayer more viable. It's a shame the game was recieved that badly because wargaming pulled the plug after the few dlc's it got.

>>2188376
It's a decent game. It does everything you'd expect from a 4x with no need for dlc's. It also has a great presentation with fully animated and voiced leaders and galactic news.

>>2232785
slog , devs slowly but surely killing all fun

Wow, raiding a planet in distant worlds 2 is super-overpowered, and you can have your invasion fleet raid and then also conquer the planet as well. Heck, every ship with assault pods can raid, so now you can first send a trillion raiders to kill the planetary defenses, and don't have to worry about any war score losses because dead raiders don't affect you negatively, unlike dead army troops.
The game is way too unbalanced.