Stellaris is a RTS(real time strategy) game that shares a 4x genre. Now a 4x game normally involves making and expanding an empire with the 4 x’s meaning explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. Now the average game of Stellaris starts with you making your own empire or chosen from a premade list of empires and then customizing the galaxy you’ll either rule or die trying. You can customize the galaxy in plenty of ways, some of these include changing the size which influences how many solar systems are in the galaxy. For example small is 400, medium is 600, large is 800 and it increases all the way to 1200 systems in a galaxy. One other way you can customize the galaxy is by choosing the shape it takes whether that be an eclipse shape or a spiral and a few others to choose from. Now the most important decision is the amount of empires you’ll be contending with these empires can range from 1 to 20 other empires to contest with for rule of the galaxy and these empires can range anywhere from xenophile materialists who just want to trade and establish branch offices; To militarist xenophobes who hate everyone. Or the hungry devouring swarm hive minds who just want to turn everyone else into their happy meals; To even sentient robots who might be friendly. This video should go way more in depth on the species creation process than we did here. Despite its age it should still hold true to some extent.
Now Stellaris, like most 4x games, is a very long game with a single match in a medium galaxy going for anywhere from 15 to 30 hours. So the game is very heavy on commitment especially if you’re going to play with friends. You can pause the games but most people prefer to only do that when you’re playing by yourself. But it is very inconvenient for people who have busy lives. Now for quality of life and how easy it is to learn, the game is very difficult to learn, most people recommend you watch a variety of people. ASpec being one of them. But the game once you get used to managing the several different materials and learn what all the menus do feels very well put together and if you disagree there are mods that rearrange the ui (user interface) of the in game menus. But as stated the game is not very beginner friendly and the tutorial the game has at the start is not very helpful. But if you can get over the steep learning curve then it should get easier from there.
Now let’s talk about performance. The late game can get laggy at least during fleet combat when there’s tons of ships in one system which. But that’s only if you go and view the combat at full speed. If you use the slow down feature and look it should fix most issues relating to late game fleet combat lag. And the game while you think it’d be intensive and require a high quality pc surprisingly doesn’t as it runs well on a premade best buy pc.
If any of you have experience with paradox (the developer of Stellaris) then you know they LOVE to make the base game a little barebones and then add a whole bunch of dlc’s. Does Stellaris hold true to this pattern? Both yes and no as the base game does contain a lot of stuff and is pretty good as is. But the dlc’s add so much more that once you get them the base game and full dlc game will seem like 2 different games. The top 3 most recommended ones from the community seem to be. Utopia in 1st place adding megastructures and making late game way more interesting, Megacorp in 2nd adding a new government type and more megastructures, And in 3rd place galactic paragons making the leader rework both fun and functional. Plus if you have a friend who has the dlc’s they can host a game and dlc will share between you two which is awesome.
So let’s summarize this review so in the end Stellaris is a 4x grand strategy rts where you manage a galactic civilization either of your own design or one that’s already been made. And you start off small, slowly expanding and befriending other intergalactic species. Or waging war on them and trying to make yourself the apex predator of the galaxy. While managing your planets and ships and making sure you have a positive earning of all materials. Now the game’s performance is surprisingly good unless you directly look into a late game fleet fight and even then all you need to fix it is to slow it down the game. And last but not least the game with and without dlc is 2 different games. So without any dlc the game is good but not great but with dlc the game is great. And of course if you don’t want to buy all the dlc paradox allows you to buy the dlc on a monthly purchase to test them out. So in the end i’d recommend buying the game to test it out and then buying the monthly purchase to see which dlc’s you like and which ones you can live without. If you want to watch a full game then watch this guy. He makes great content and shows full games of Stellaris only editing out small chunks of gameplay.
