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.

>>2268480
If you play with stronger pirate settings and don't pay protection fees they'll often do a similar thing where they infinitely raid a planet until it has no resources left. Because it usually happens with small border colonies they'll end up killing your ground troops in the process. I don't see it as unbalanced though because you have counters in the form of defense fleets, bastions, and planetary weapons/shields. Ground troops on a planet don't do much to stop space fleets, although I'm pretty sure the intercept stat on the specialized defense ones means they can shoot down assault pods.

>>2275974
Why would you not pay protection fees? Not only is that genuinely cheaper than than maintaining several fleets that has to protect your spread-out bases across the galaxy, but you can also quickly become their allies by getting military refuelment, and then gain all their ships and bases once the hive has been defeated.

Also, the issue is that your invasion fleet has practically a free army of infantry to first destroy the enemy troops and ground installations, and after that, you can simply send the actual invasion army to mop up what's left and conquer the planet.
And of course, every ship with assault pods can raid and thus create a free raider army on the ground, not just the troop ships, so your raiders equals the amount of assault pods that your fleets use.
This is a thing that the game doesn't explain at all, despite it being such a huge advantage to you (the computer doesn't do that, it only does stupid things like bombardment).

>>2278426
Because it's easy and boring.
I like that DW2 'fixed' the income loopholes of dw1 but the protection fees are too low to matter, making pirates effectively be non entities. Also blowing up pirate ships gets you free tech. Capturing and disassembling gets you more free tech.
I hope the next dlc makes pirates more of a problem to manage.

>>2278426
Mainly just to roleplay the don't negotiate with terrorists mindset and give your fleets something to do out of wartime besides space monsters, although being friends with pirates can hurt your relationship with the other factions. On the higher restlessness settings this alone can sometimes make your neighbors want to go to war with you, and then you end up having to pay them gifts too if you don't want that. Protection fees get taken out of your cashflow so depending on your finances, particularly in the early game, that could also stifle colony growth and research too.

Bombardment is mainly just a counter to planetary shields since the shielding value is a flat damage reduction, that only specialized bombardment weapons can overcome. The AI doesn't ever consider what's been researched so it just kind of assumes full research for some of these things, which is a significant flaw. I've started playing with tech trading turned back on again just to give the AI a better chance at keeping up, right now I'm doing a Quameno "tech merchant" playthrough where I try and control the galactic balance of power. A big part of this game is messing with the initial settings and finding whatever you like, default is way too boring because you don't get to make very many meaningful decisions imo.

Serious question but why do people spazz out about Stellaris so much? Like, yeah it's not the deepest, most complex, most optimized, mind blowing experience you could ever hope for but... neither is any other game. I think it's a pretty chill space strategy game and its fun grow and develop your empire and manage your pops and resources. And I don't think there's anything quite like it. But I swear on this board people act like it's hot dogwater always calling it slop and whatnot

>>2285533
Because it is.
When it released it was easy to see the potential. A sort of EU in space that directly borrowed many systems from EU. But it had problems. Government type bonuses were very poorly balanced because some things just did not work. The AI was offensively bad. It would actively build on the wrong squares making any delegation to the AI self sabotaging. As a result the AI had to cheat not to provide a challenge like in many other 4x games, but just to survive at a baseline. And they never tried to fix the AI when even just implementing a rng to make them randomly build buildings would have resulted in them accidentally building the correct building more often than they were. And what did they do? Instead of making an effort to make the AI not actively self sabotage they just introduced workarounds because I guess fixing the AI takes up too much dev time from shitting out cashgrab dlcs. And then I think the final straw for most people was the forced hyperlane update.
Stellaris is hated because it perfectly epitomizes paradox's and wiz's modus operandi of ignore problems, shit out minimal effort bread and circuses (dlc) to appease the masses. All while hoping those ignored problems don't come back to bite you. But they have.

>>2285533
It's a shallow and wide game that does everything poorly. The base game sucks and it's 30+ DLC all suck individually so you need to spend hundreds on top of the base cost of the game aka pirate it to have fun for a bit. And they've started using AI for their art with the latest DLC. It's embarrassing.

>>2285533
its the game from type ''the more you play it, the worse it gets" and it getting worse the every update

>>2285997
>>2289321
>>2291720
Ok bros I've finally gotten to the late game for the first time ever and I see what y'all are talking about

>>2187621
Based moo2 fan

Is Endless Space 2 good? I played the first one way back, and it was okayish, but overall simplistic and somewhat shallow experience, a game where it obviously took more effort to create the lore rather than flesh out actual game mechanics. Have it changed with a sequel, and if not, can it at least generate an interesting enough story (Stellaris 1.x wasn't fun because of its non-existent strategical depth, but because it was a tool to essentially generate a nice space opera story from a bunch of cliches)?

>>2299083
I don't think you'll enjoy it based on what you've written. It's a pretty shallow game with great presentation.

>>2299103
yeah this. never ever ever finished any actualy playthrus ever

>>2299083
ES2 features a storyline for each faction.

>>2299083
I think it's significantly better than the first one but the reasons to play it are the same. That is to say, you wanna watch pretty space battles and bask in the overall polish in how everything is presented. The game is actually pretty complex on the planning end thanks to the system where exploring anomalies can get you upgrade modules for your ship blueprints and different fleet formations and all that, but the AI sucks monumental dick so you don't need to minmax at all. In cases like those I just pretend I'm playing a PvE game and don't think of the AI as surrogate players.

I actually started playing SOTSII recently and I've been enjoying it. Everyone says it's bad, and it is, but it's also a pretty cool game if you go into it for the ship content which is the only part that isn't half-baked.

>>2299767
Everyone doesn't say it's bad, some people just get hung up over the artist using AI to generate art which is kind of a scummy thing if he's not replacing it in the final product

>>2300249
He's talking about sword of the stars 2, not sins 2.

>>2299767
Are you playing with the SOS mod for Sword of the Stars 2? Or has anyone else used it? I can't get it to work with a clean Steam install, it seems like it's referencing a bunch of asset files like ship component modules and sound effects that aren't present for me. I'm not sure why. Does it assume some other mod dependency that isn't listed?