Make popups open up BEHIND the current one. I hate clicking on a pop-up only to have it choose an option for ANOTHER prompt

Or clicking on something during normal gameplay that happens to be the exact instant you get a popup, so it minimizes the popup.

Yeah there should be a brief window of time where you can't interact with a popup. The number of times I've hit escape and accidentally closed a popup that just appeared is far too high.

It’s interesting because this brief time of no interaction is present in CK2, and there it sometimes actually annoys me, but yeah way too many misclicks in Stellaris

Indeed. SCREEEEEEE

Not to mention when you try to pause the game because many pop ups that does not pause the game appears, only to press spacebar at the same time when one pop up that does appear resulting in the game RESUMING when all you wanted was to pause the game to check why are you being spammed.

Our UX designers lament this as well. Hopefully, we will get a way to calm down the event/notification spam one day.

You can only do so much, and my 800 hours in Stellaris shows that the popups aren't THAT big of a deal haha. Also thanks for being communicative with the community, your presence is appreciated.

Can I go back to the previous pop-up? Sometimes I accidentally click on stuff without reading.

Or maybe be able to enable/disable certain pop-ups

Too many popups! Every DLC adds more and more anomaly discovered popups, and there's no way to turn them off. Once you've read them all for the 5th time... Love everything else.

Yea trying to play Stellaris in real-time with no pause like an RTS is difficult with all the pop ups that one must deal with. There is a way to turn them into map blips that you can click on when you feel like it instead of forcing them to pop up immediately, but that more or less just delays the inevitable. Would be interested in an event-less mode that’s catered to a faster game.

I don't want the anomalies to go away. Just not popup windows every 10 seconds.

A checkbox to autocomplete any anomalies that are found would be nice. I should not have to give individual orders every time.

This, there needs to be a remember my last decision checkbox. I only want pop-ups that have a unique decision to make. If the same pop-up shows up more than once in any playthrough there should be a, remember my last decision option.

My favorite is archaeology dig sites. 90% of the time, the only option is "Uhhh keep digging?" Should be an option "keep digging and don't stop until you die or you're done"

Yeah, it's slightly awkward writing. Some of the archaeology sites will drip feed you story and information with each entry, whereas others literally are just like 'our scientists explored further into the rubble and found more rubble [continue]'.

Same for first contact please.

I guess it'd have to only do it for routine difficulty ones cause imagine you check in on your science ship and it's been at a hellish difficulty anomaly for the past year.

I'd like to see it as an edict, "auto-research anomalies", or as a government policy toggle where you could set to never research, maybe research up to middling difficulty, and research everything. That way you could avoid it in the early decades when your researchers are low level and you just need to get your surveying done quickly, but not have to deal with all the pop-ups later.

It shouldn't be an edict. It should be an option.

I think it should be a stance for science ships. Ignore anomalies / Auto research up to leader level / Auto research up to a level you pick / Always ask

I hope they meant a 0 cost edict. So just that you can toggle the option empire-wide through an edict. But I guess you were envisioning an option in the UI for each science ship, like auto survey?

using the edicts menu for standard options feels kinda odd though.

Yeah, it feels kinda hacky, like the sort of thing you'd see in a mod.

Yeah no. We went a long time where auto-survey was locked behind tech. It should just be a option in the menu to turn on/off.

My problem is they come up and i forget to unpause then i spent too much time clicking and checking things before i realise and what should have been progress it's just me wasting my limited play time.

God I have a mercenary focused megacorp and the dividend pop up is the worst

I've played this too. I don't know why Merc dividends are a pop-up event. They happen in regular intervals. I wish they were just a small notification instead. No need to interrupt my gameplay to tell me.

On a similar note, please let us disable empire notifications of treaties without a mod! And add a way to auto-accept embassies!

The UI is a crime against sentience. Every time it throws a pop-up at me WHILE I'M TYPING INTO AN INPUT FIELD I want to punch someone in the dick.

That's where all the fun stuff is though.

It's good when there are decisions or interesting story content. Terrible when it's the same copy paste pop-up, with one button that says acknowledged or gives you two options which are the exact same end result. The game needs an option to turn off all pop-ups where there is no decision, or enable a yes to all similar future pop-ups. I always research every anomaly with the scientist that found it, the moment they find it.

If we're talking broader themes and not just bugs, annoyances or min-maxing, then I would say that Stellaris is a jack-of-all-trades. Hear me out. If we take it as a colony sim or a city builder, then it's somehow both pretty simple and very complex: you rarely need to have a lot of thought as to what to build, but you can spend ages calculating pop growth, planetary bonuses, species traits, civics and priorities to maximize your output. If we take it as a combat-focused RTS, then it lacks tactical, in-the-moment depth, and puts a lot of focus on building your fleet right in the first place - which leads to dull "my fleet advances until it's defeated" gameplay, where fighting a weaker enemy is boring and fighting a stronger one is either hopeless or requires some cheesing. You can rarely pull off a tactical maneuver that is impactful *and* that feels great to do. If we take it as a 4X game or a nation builder, then it's... rather bland. There is a reason why people spend hours designing custom nations and then just... don't play them. Because the thought of a nation, the excitement of imagining them, the idea behind their existence falls flat against very similar gameplay. You spawn, you get more planets, get a strong economy, some vassals and do some wars. The difference in that process for materialists and spiritualists, organics and synthetics, hiveminds and democracies is so very thin that you might as well be playing the same nation with a different civic. Numbers change, but mechanics don't. You can't roleplay a nation of low-tech hordes - you need tech to increase your fleet size. You can't be a scientific, energy-focused glass cannon - you might as well buff up your economy and put some chokepoints here and there. You can, however, be a wealth-focused megacorp thanks to mercs - props for that. That's my biggest gripe - the sameness of different empires. Toxoids are just quirky organics. Aquatics just have a water cannon. Hives just don't care about consumer goods. Lithoids eat minerals and not food. Give them a strong identity, break the balance, make a truly drastic change for each.

To Add to this, I would like to see different types of empires actually work towards different goals, and have mechanics and win conditions to match, other than just genocidal empires. Spiritualist empires should get mechanics and a win condtion for spreading spiritualism and the influence of the shroud, materialists should get their own mini game on robots/scientists that counters spiritualism, hive minds should get a minigame that singularizes other empires into hive minds, machine empires should have something similar for getting biological empires into synth ascension. These mechanics and win conditions should be meaningful at any scale.

> Spiritualist empires should get mechanics and a win condtion for spreading spiritualism and the influence of the shroud It is odd that 'spiritualism' is one of the ethics... yet there isn't a fleshed out religion system. You basically always have to fanfic what your empire is 'spiritualist' about rather than it being linked to any more substantial mechanics. It would add a lot more depth if every pop had a religion, with their religion influencing their ethics and other traits. It gives spiritualists another win-state (converting a majority in the galaxy to their religion, as long as it's an evangelising religion of course), and gives non-spiritualists something additional to care about (do I need to do something about all the pops in my empire converting to the neighbouring states religion?).

Come to think of it, spiritualists getting along better with other spiritualists is pretty unrealistic. Also, I'm given to understand that IRL, dictatorships generally don't get along with each other the way that democracies usually do. It would probably make sense for egalitarians, pacifists, materialists, and xenophiles to get attitude bonuses with like-minded empires, while the inverse ethics get penalties with everyone.

Spiritualists getting along makes a degree of sense when you consider they all worship, or at least understand, that they are interacting with The Shroud and specific Shroud entities in mostly the same way - It's not quite the same as Christians, Muslims and Jews worshipping the same God in radically different ways, so I can see why Spiritualist Stellaris empires would at least come to a 'you're cool, we'll save you for last' kind of agreement even if they don't form a...I forgot the name for the Spiritualist Federation.

holy covenant?

It's weird cause spiritualism indeed doesn't focus on religion, but more specifically if living creatures have a soul, and if said soul can be replicated in a machine, the answer being "yes" to the first and "no" to the second. None of it is to do with religion but then you have some civics and buildings shoehorned in to make it focused on religion.

Yeah I tried one of the first contact starts which has jump drives not hyper drives. After year 20 (of 250 years) .. same old. Won the game on autopilot, same as normal. There's no difference in gameplay between any of them, really.

The risk you run with this is keeping the game balanced. Drastic differences could make some empire types effectively unplayable.

Balance should never stop you from making something more fun. Plus, assymetrical balance is also a thing.

Yeah this is what bothers me about games with strategy elements in them. Their very nature demands that a "meta" exists, and the devs want their game perfectly balanced so they nerf the things that make the meta, nerf them into the ground and then they're suddenly useless and the previously worst thing becomes the new meta. Even if they tweaked all the numbers right, there'd still be a meta even if it's not got as much of an advantage over other tactics. It's just watching devs play whack-a-mole with "no fun allowed" appearing every time a mole gets hit.

The game already isn't all that balanced, and I'm honestly fine with that. Fun over balance, especially in a (mostly) singleplayer game.

I would love to see dlc that introduced actually unique ways to play as different empires. I think a long requested feature, playing as a nomadic empire, would be really cool. Could totally change how you build your economy, what tech is important, and how you interact with other empires. If I remember right the devs have said that would require a massive change to the code though.

* armies * AI never surrenders in war even when there's clearly no hope * fleet manager and fleets always bug out and break into a mess of small groups of ships and you can no longer manage your fleet without disbanding everyone and starting over * too many species to manage * fleet command limit is pointless as you can just make multiple fleets * fact that starbases can't even get 1/10 as strong as a fleet is ridiculous

I think one reason for fleet command limit is to try and discourage blobbing. In most pdx games they prevent blobbing by having a supply cap in each region, but no such mechanic exists in Stellaris. I think it's kind of pointless since you can just keep your fleets in one region, but that's my main guess as to why it's there, since Stellaris lacks anti-blobbing mechanics of other paradox games.

This was the exact reason given - trying to avoid doom stacks. Of course now we stack multiple fleets but it was a good concept.

I think a good way to counter this would be a logistics mechanic. Regions would have different logistic values based on a number of factors like inhabited planets, starbase level, hyperplane density, megastructures, and even support ships. Would be a neat way to both counter doomstacking while adding ways to do more effect economic warfare, blockading systems as if you were pirates.

Bro and mid game I’ll be facing off against fleet stacks of like 10-15 100k enemy fleets because AI will just set fleets to follow other fleets and they all just fucking stack. It makes solo wars just withering down the enemy planets and attacking developing fleets until maybe a status quo the only option. It’s exhausting and not super fun. But maybe I should just make friends more often.

> But maybe I should just make friends more often. tbh warfare was never the strong suit of Stellaris. Warfare in EU4, CK3 and HoI4 can and is fun because there's lots of room to maneuver for one. We only have very few "provinces" and chokepoints if any. You could do lots in space with asteroid fields, nebulas, big planets etc. But for that Stellaris would need a total overhaul we won't see until Stellaris 2.

How would they do that though? It’s space, they can’t say the reason it terrain. Best they could do is increased upkeep. Or maybe only one fleet can go through a hyper lane at a time. But I don’t think people would like that.

The real solution in my opinion, is instead of discouraging the optimal blob strategy, is to make splitting up your fleets actually worthwhile. Perhaps there should be a Fleet Coordination modifier, where the fewer ships there are in a system, the ‘easier it is for your admirals to make tactical decisions’ and they get a fleet power bonus. This means that a small fleet will still lose to a larger fleet, but the larger fleet may take more losses. Perhaps small “more coordinated” fleets could even get retreat bonuses to lose less ships and make wars less one sided. Command Limit could be a per system soft cap where below the limit ships fight at full strength but when you’re over that limit ships fight marginally weaker, say at minimum 70% when you’re like way over command limit.

Yeah but then you could say you’re damning players who planned and built up their navy properly. They did a decent job with frigates I think. Having a weapon that scales with ship size. The only thing I can think of is also doing that with fleets in a system. Mines could work but idk if that would be navy weapons, probably starbases. For navies I’d say emps or confusion mechanics that can turn a portion of a fleet against their other fleet. Poison their minds or distort their sensors so they can fire on friendlies. Or maybe force them to disengage. Although that might feel terrible.

>Yeah but then you could say you’re damning players who planned and built up their navy properly. Not really, those players wouldn't have planned properly. Either they want to win decisive Battles at the cost of loosing a few ships, or they want to hurt their opponents economy and warscore and drag the war out without heavy losses, than they have already split up and maneuvered their fleets.

>Perhaps small “more coordinated” fleets could even get retreat bonuses to lose less ships and make wars less one sided. This would be my spreferred solution. Huge fleets win battles and can be necessary to achieve objectives, but will put a much larger strain on your war economy and might even collapse if the losses are too heavy. Small fleets loose battles but will be able to retreat and fight again, or launch small counterattacks on unprotected systems. You could even keep the existing fleet cap and all it's associated techs, but just turn it into a soft cap instead of a hard cap so the further you go above, the higher the penalties to retreating (and maybe that fleets upkeep).

Yeah, the only real way would be some kind of gameplay mechanic that would be difficult to "justify" with a realistic sounding explanation.

Quite a few people suggested supply per ship and supply ships. I.e it is very hard to have a fleet half a galaxy away from your supply starbases.

>I.e it is very hard to have a fleet half a galaxy away from your supply starbases. Depends on the kind of sci-fi we are aiming for. Mostly self-sufficient starships like in Star Trek or ships that new ammo and fuel all the time like in Expanse.

Supply lines, integrating it with trade. If you have allies nearby, that'll let you resupply there. Deep empire strikes will need higher tech to last longer, or die out from having no supplies.

This does nothing to prevent an empire from massing all of their forces into a single location, in fact it encourages it. You would have to unrealistically say that more ships in a single area requires exponential more supply upkeep than those same ships spread out over several areas ... which is not how supply chain building works.

That’s an interesting idea, of a supply cap. Could be some sort of “Dilithium crystal” resource that only fleets consume, as a representation of supply. Ship has to be loaded before leaving port and refueled at ports of call. Could have technology chains to make the fleet consume more efficiently, or to extend the supply range from ports. Or my idea may be just a dumb idea, I don’t know, I’m pretty terrible at this game haha

My personal guess is that an leader can only command so many ships before it becomes unmanageable to give commands to them all. And even if you want to blob and have basically all your ships in one giant fleet, when/if you want to split off a fleet it’s done a lot easier because they already technologically are separate fleets.

I'd say Cohesion would help, if there's multiple fleets in a system, they're not all communicating to each other, so if you have multiple fleets blobbed ontop of each other, there's a chance for friendly fire between fleets. Fleet A's ships know what the rest of Fleet A's ships are doing, but Fleet B isn't recieving the same commands so they might drift into the torpedo barrage. If you have fleets coming from separate parts of the same system, they don't have bad cohesion with each other because they're not in the way of each other's weapons. Or if you need multiple fleets for like, a devourer or something early game, they'd naturally break off from each other to attack from seperate angles to recover fleet cohesion. It'd also make one blob of like, five fleets able to be taken on by one fleet because there'd be less coms static logically, with a single fleet following one series of commands instead of 5 fleets with 5 sets of commands all contradicting each other

Let's be honest, while I do think anti-blobbing mechanics would make wars more interesting in many ways, it would also make genuinely impossible to do ultra difficulty runs. I dare anyone to try telling me they could beat a GA x25 crisis with any effective anti-blobbing mechanics in place. They require fleets that number in the thousands.

but I'm gonna blob anyway because that's the best way to do it, if you have overwhelming force you can take less losses, and with reinforcements taking so long, with so much potential to mess up my fleets in the manager, I have every incentive to blob up regardless of how many fleets make up the blob.

Yeah I fully agree. I wish they did more to prevent blobbing tbh because it's kind of annoying when a war basically comes down to a big fight between two mega fleets.

> AI never surrenders in war even when there's clearly no hope War needs an overhaul in general. I was attacked by a neighbor who was using the "expropriation" war goal, and they invited a couple other empires- one of which I couldn't even get to due to closed borders. The status quo was shutting down all my branch offices, and since I couldn't even *reach* one of the enemies involved in the war there was no way for me to do anything but take the status quo and get all my branch offices closed down.

Depending on your war goal, you shouldn't need to fully occupy all enemies to win a war

I think it may have bugged out. I was attacked, I chose "Humiliate" as my war goal (my only option) but it somehow set my war goal to "Vassalize." My options were to completely win the war (which was not possible) or take a white peace- which would close all my branch offices. Honestly, I don't think a white peace should close your branch offices *at all* but that's just me...

Makes me wonder what surrendering would have done lol. THATS where I'd assume you'd lose all your branch offices.

My options were "Surrender and have all branch offices closed" or "White peace and have all branch offices closed, but have all conquered systems (except the capital) form a new vassal under your control. But we're still going to close down all those branch offices for you... and since you're under a truce you can't put them back until ten years have passed."

I'm experiencing this right now. Declared a war on someone, can't get to most of their planets due to another empire having closed their borders to me.

fleet command limit only makes sense to limit admiral bonuses. if you dont have leaders commanding your fleets, youre missing out on some significant bonuses.

They should do it the same way HOI4 does, with reductions to the admiral bonuses if the fleet is overfilled. Then you could add admiral traits that affect the command limit of an admiral.

Starbases curb stomp fleets early game. No one ever said every aspect of a game has to be useful all the time.

yea but why can't it be also useful late game? How about have like late game bigger versions of defense platforms like the FE and crisis factions have?

There are ion cannons, though they could stand to be buffed. The real problem is that you really need to spec hard into defense platform cap for them to even come close to keeping up. Well, that and the fact that you can always build more fleets but you can't build more starbases in the same system to counter that. That being said, I don't think the purpose of starbases is to counter fleets. The point is to serve as a deterrent, to slow down an invasion and give you more time to respond, and to assist your fleet in battle.

yeah your fortress system should basically act less like a fleet killer and more like a sign that the enemy needs to spend more time preparing to breach it, time that you can put into assembling a fleet to help defend and fight back.

I appreciate your answer!

Late game full command limit fleets without repeatables are like 200k. A fully weaponized starbase without defense platforms is like 40k. With defense platforms it's probably like 60k+. I agree they should be able to scale better late, though. Though interestingly enough they actually scale way better ultra-late due to defense platform repeatables being +10% instead of +5% and them also benefitting from normal repeatables.

You can get starbases with defense platforms to 150k very easily in the late game, with their bonuses they can usually take on one 200k fleet, especially if you rebuild defense platforms during the fight

yeah jsut get the module for extra range, and a bunch of the more expensic hevy towers and tehy demolish 200k fleets with ease

I would have agreed with this a year or two ago but recently I think we've massively buffed starbases, I feel like I am consistently getting to late game 75k+ starbases without even really trying. I think you could probably get to 150k if you wanted.

Regarding second point, I have been in hopeless wars. But if I surrendered I lost the game so I just couldn't. 1 out of 25 times I can tank enough to force a peace due to war weariness and build a decent fleet and reclaim my territory.

ok so how does an AI with no station and no navy come back?

You need unyielding and the defensive ascension perk. I got my star bases to equal my fleets (400k) average with a bulwark and a strategic command center. With bulwark and a defensive leader, defense platforms are FREE. They equalled in combat power but the range allowed them to obliterate AI fleets before they got in combat. With my gateway and orbital rings terminal egress is neigh impregnable, and the AI always goes for it.

What do you equip on your defense platforms? Unyielding works perfectly for me, but after some point fleets eventually overcome them.

The space stations are glass cannons, while under direct fire they’re absolutely weak, but if you give them a support fleet who takes the brunt of the damage, they’re actually very powerful, especially if your modules are built around supporting the fleet.

I feel like all my frustrations with the game at this point can be grouped into two buckets: (i) some mechanics are oversimplified / gamified to the point that they break immersion in that they don't make sense or are incredibly unsatisfying especially given the genre (i.e. armies), or (ii) way too micro-manage-y For Stellaris 2, I'd love for them to abstract the societal / political side of the game a la Vicky 3, while maintaining control of fleets / some level of customization (b/c who here doesn't like to feel like a fleet commander?) yet streamlining management (automatic reinforcements, and restricting fleet size with stuff like supply). Likewise, would be great for them to focus more on the RP-aspect a la CK - it's very telling the early game storytelling is one of the stronger parts of this game.

The scroll wheel sensitivity is set to novacaine

Wake me up when the scolling ends.

Lack of distinctiveness of diplomatic personality with AI. Generic internal factions that are totally ignorable. No real sense of internal reform or politics Galactic community tends to just randomly pass everything, very contradictory. Too easy to get alien pops and settle everything - makes terraforming, habitability techs, genetic modification, etc feel pointless unless you're a fanatic xenophobe. Population growth mechanics lead every world becoming a cosmopolitan wonderland unless you actively go into the planetary menu of every single planet. I think it would befit the character of many empires to have easier methods of segregating planets. UI issues: Outliner is really unwieldy when you have a larger empire, really annoying to scroll all the time. Some menus are in weird locations, relics for example. Could just be me but I find the species tab really irritating in general.

> Lack of distinctiveness of diplomatic personality with AI. This is something I’m looking at now that I’m back on the Custodian team. Keep an eye out for today’s dev diary as we’re after more feedback on AI diplomacy.

It could be better, yes, good task for the custodians. Please also look at some UI issues, pop-ups, auto-pause, etc. Could be much improved (and customizable). (That said, for main development, diplomacy is in a really good state now. So much so that internal politics looks lacking. Factions are quite bare bones, compare with Victoria3 internal politics.)

I recently got back into the game after playing on release, and while there have been a lot of changes for the better internal politics still feel just as lacking. Factions are basically entirely irrelevant. If you're a democracy then your empire should have an actual parliament (and potentially different types of parliaments depending on whether every pop gets a vote, or whether certain pops get more votes, or whether each *system* or *sector* gets an equal number of votes), something that gives factions something to map onto and allows you to visual and influence their political squabbles. If you're authoritarian then there should be some broader pool for leader pops (a basic family tree for a monarchy, for example, or a military academy for a military dictatorship), meaning these figures don't just pop out of thin air when you 'hire' them. It would be a lot more meaningful if you had to actually distribute 'control' of planets and sectors like a feudal state, and not just appoint governors like in every other form of government. At the moment it doesn't feel *all* that different between radically different types of government.

Yeah, now that diplomacy is extremely nice and detailed, internal politics should really get another look.

Yeah honestly I want to be clear that despite my constructive criticism I've loved the game since 1.0, and it's in a really good place right now. I'm not a game designer - I don't know how they can reform internal politics without overcomplicating the game (given the game's incredibly broad scope as it is). It could use more dynamism and integration with other mechanics though for sure.

> UI issues: Outliner is really unwieldy when you have a larger empire, really annoying to scroll all the time. UI overhaul dynamic + tiny outliner v2 makes this 10x better (I know we're talking criticism of the full vanilla unmodded game but just wanted to mention for any onlookers). Although I still have to scroll a bunch in lategame (more accurately drag cause the scrollbar seems to barley move at all with the scroll button) to swap between seeing my 8000 naval cap worth of fleets and my planets. > Could just be me but I find the species tab really irritating in general. This is literally everybody.

> Galactic community tends to just randomly pass everything, very contradictory. Classic Synthetic empire being the one proposing less rights for robots. Troll hive mind demanding rights for workers.

I don’t enjoy the current iteration of subject states. The whole game devolves into 2-3 major powers and their vassals within the first 100-150 game years. That being said I still love a new play through the game a couple of times a year.

I would love an Alliance slider similar to the Aggression one, that decides how willing AI is to give up autonomy/join federations and pacts with others, as well as maybe one that increases/decreases restrictions for forced vassalization. Like, so I can choose to make vassal wargoal really hard, like requiring your opponent to be fully Pathetic compared to you, or inversely make it virtually unrestricted and allow vassalization of any nation you can take in a fight. That could be used to force more skirmishy wars; nobody really wants to completely conquer the other, with more small skirmishes until the mid/late game starts to roll around, with the ones getting conquered being largely small and weak states. This is pretty similar to the real world; it usually wasn’t until empires were near their peak that they started taking on massive conquests (Rome being the exception, with conquering Carthage being their first true imperial Holding.)

I’m looking at the AI’s willingness to become subjects for 3.8.

You're cramping my barbaric despoiling, let me bully minor powers in peace please.

Send a cloaked fleet into their capital system, declare war and start abducting pops before they react instead. It’s what MSI would do.

> I don’t enjoy the current iteration of subject states. The whole game devolves into 2-3 major powers and their vassals within the first 100-150 game years. I was annoyed by this at first but I actually like the challenge it provides. Without the super-overlords grand admiral wouldn't feel challenging after year 30. It's still not that challenging once you've made it past the 30 years but there are some scary AIs sometimes

My biggest issue is: "ok, i have 45 minutes to play and then i have to go to sleep, have an early morning tomorrow", "oh, just this so that i don't forget", "oh, just that", ... (3 hours later) "ah, shit :/". What I would really appreciate is a clock somewhere on the HUD. I wouldn't mind an alarm either. Either a soft one which would bring up a popup dialog when it rings, or even a hard one which forces a save & quit, lol. On another note... I really wish that we could create notes (pun intended) inside the game. There's lots to plan, but you have to have everything in your head. Like, I'd want to note down that I'll specialize this planet for this & that when it develops some more. But notes for other things as well.

Notes would be great. I literally take notes on paper so I can remember the things I intend to do and the problems I have to solve tomorrow

Wait, do people not play with their phone next to them and constantly swap between the notes app and the calculator?

That's me in the early game seeing if I have the fleets to wipe out those marauders on my borders

More games need an in game notetaker. Actually, I don't think I play any that have one.

There is a planetary manager, which lets the planet auto build stuff related to a set purpose. Like if you want it to produce minerals, it'll build stuff that increases mineral production. I've never used it tho, I'm too much of a micromanager.

That system doesn’t work very well. Its biggest flaw (though it has many) is that it appears to be reactive: it only builds things if something goes wrong on the planet - if there’s no unemployment, housing issues, low stability etc it just stockpiles resources. It has no means of planning ahead.

The automatic management actually works pretty good nowadays. It’s not perfect, but as long as your economy isn’t close to crippling it will handle things and even give you okayish good returns. I have not touched 60 of my 70 planets in my whole playthrough (year 2400 right now) and they are all perfectly fine, and even specialized. Yes, some minor mistakes at there, but overall it’s perfect for lategame.

rule 1 of stellaris: if youre economy aint red, youre not doing enoth tech

The automation is mostly great. Just need to disable a few settings (deficit spending, rare resources). My main gripe is that it seems to like to upgrade buildings before building new ones...or maybe it's just that it will choose to do so over building a city district, but either way sometimes I check on a tech world and have expensive t2 or t3 research labs when they could have just slapped more t1 labs down

Civ 6 style pins or notes would be nice, sometimes I don't come back to a Stellaris save for weeks and I have to pretty much re-learn what past-Beals was doing for an hour.

The economy. The fact that you can magic resources out of thin air from the internal market system disincentives trade between empires, reducing your total interaction to surrounding states to either peace, war or in a federation with you. I never use any of the agreements they're pitiful in my games. This drastically reduces the foreign policy complexities of the game. If you were incentivised to cooperate with surrounding empires to fill resource shortages it would produce a far more interesting web of galactic relationships.

Trading with other empires is actually very profitable as long as you offer strategic resources. 100k alloys for a couple thousand motes or something is a very good deal. Once you find a FE that is willing to trade you can keep your economy afloat even when all your resources are crashing simply cause you have a strong income of SR to trade with. In my current game I had a energy deficit of like 1-2k as well as 500 mineral and food deficit for decades while fighting a fanatic purifier and it was fine cause I had a lot of SR and a FE to trade with

is there a way to make the trade number go up faster??? id love to trade in the end game, but i dont wont to click on the alloy button 200 times

Oh thats easy. Armies! Every planetary invasion should just load up a game of HOI4 and make you play it out before anything continues. No, but armies are a problem. Ship designs that are automatic... The only thing they're automatic is automatically terrible.

I admittedly don’t play very aggressively but I’ve found success keeping automatic ship designs until approximately mid-game, when I’ve finished researching all the ship classes, then switching to manually designed ships. You get the benefit of not having to think about the granular problem of ship design early game when it doesn’t really matter, and then you can strengthen your fleets (and reduce the amount of resources you’re spending on re-outfitting them with each finished tech) once you’re ready to start actively warring with neighbors.

I've only done custom ships maybe 3 times in a hundred playthroughs. There's really not shit wrong with auto-best and you can control it be picking the right technologies.

*Atrocious least to say. I would love my own design that doesn’t require me to manually change every ship after certain tech is done ( jump drive im looking at u mate ) and I don’t want Auto-designed ships to appear in my load out. Armies sucks but it’s bearable as I usually crack there worlds >.>

Is the separate auto-upgrade checkbox not vanilla? It should be near the naming and saving at the lower right of the ship designer, it will automatically replace components with their new versions.

It is, but certain upgrades are not applied auto to ships and at least for i always have to upgrade manually afterburners for some god damn reason…

1) the pacing of gameplay. You can have dozens of anomalies and events in the early game, decades of peace and then everything happening all at once with a war in heaven and robot uprising and crisis invasion. 2) a lot of the combat can be overcome with larger number which trivialises a lot of it, like fleet capacity or how little impact you have on the tactics of a battle. It’s gotten better with cloaking and firing arcs (the balancing of fleets) but it does feel like a hassle to redesign a whole navy for a specific combat vs actually being good at the combat itself. Add into that, wars aren’t very dynamic and the AI can be very stuburn about accepting peace. 3) how the game treats or overcomes habitability makes so many systems feel pointless fast. Terraforming, tech bonuses, getting pops from other empires that can colonise those planets etc etc don’t lead to as fun and unique of a game. Yes numbers going up feels good but I honestly feel like I start to have less fun when I have 40 planets compared to just 10. Building becomes a chore and very repetitive. 4) armies, I hope it gets roled into fleets one day. 5) pop ups. I hope it gets less spammy as it does now.

I feel point 3. Yeah I have to say I like seeing number go up, but at the end its just a matter of planets you are willing to manage, rather than building something unique

I found that planet automation became quite good, especially at making refinery planets. Just throw in 4 automated refinery planets and have unlimited rare resources. Keeps resource use low too, like 20 monthly energy and minerals is enough for like, 40 planets I think.

Biggest flaw is late game lag

You damn right, the only reason i dont fully conquer the galaxy is the end game lag and i hate starting new game.

30 hours of build up, and yo cant even use it also, often you jsut get a war in heven, giving you the galaxy for free

While the continuous updates are *Awesome* there is Legacy stuff (like Clerks, and some older Origins like the Gateway one) that can definitely feel like old and neglected parts of the game.

That is why they have a team constantly working on and updating that stuff. Custodian updates have been some of the biggest QOL updates recently.

Even clerks aren't that shallow though. Mostly you avoid them, but trade builds often do make good use of them. A bit of a noob trap though, wheh they don't know that you should disable them in most empires.

Ok this will sound stupid but just how accurate the fleetpower rating is and how much stuff it accounts for. I have seen countless people complain that fleet combat amounts to who has the bigger number and that the amount of ships/admirals/etc dont matter even though these things can and will change battles. In eu4 for example you only see army size. 40k of strongest most disciplined soldiers in the world and some chinese farmers will look the same on the map and because of this destroying a numerically superior foe feels amazing. Meanwhile in stellaris i honestly dont even look at the amount of ships or what type they have , just look at the fleet number and if its bigger i fight. Also because of how accurate the numbers are (atleast in singleplayer) i will very rarely get surprised by the outcome of the battle. In other games it is quite common to get surprised when my twice more numerous army gets defeated or when my elite spartans suddenly lose. This makes me think about my battles more , if i cant fully predict the outcome of the battle i will do everything to stack it in my favour and will notice why i lost or won. When i lose in stellaris i wont think that my opponent had a better admiral , better location , better fleet composition and templates. I will think that i lost because my number is smaller.

I disagree in the new patches. Fleetpower seems to just be a calculation based off dps and hull/armor/shields; it can't account for range or combat interactions etc. This makes sense, it's not like it'd be computationally feasible to have it simulate an actual battle to know the "true" fleetpower, but it means I can regularly roll over 2-3x higher fleetpower fleets from the AI because they build really bad ships. Also autocannons in particular have a very inflated rating, almost to the point where it should be considered a bug because it can theoretically be exploited to push diplo weight above a needed threshold. That type of gaminess is always possible to an extent, but it shouldn't be as dramatic as it is with autocannons. Seriously though, once you learn how to build good ships you can laugh at the supposed fleetpower of enemies. Although currently I have a big gripe with the damn combat computers; the `maintain_range` behavior is kind of dumb how it is right now and I feel like even with 600 sublight speed battleships in the extreme case my ships aren't kiting properly.

I just started paying attention to my fleet comps today and my 14k fleet rolled 24k worth of an AI fleet.

yeah, didn't they just fix this or contribute seriously toward fixing this? I'm still terrible at it but it does seem like they're working on it.

Managing 10+ planets is a chore. Automating sectors and planets is a bit too complex and does not work properly most of the time. Also, as others mentioned - pacing. Especially when it comes to planets developement. It is too slow at the beginning and then at one point is speeds up so much that you spend a lot of your time on pause, just managing planets.

Good thread, keep it coming.

It really bothers me how long a bug can remain in the game. I get game development is hard, but if a bug can remain through one or two expansions, it means they don't give a huge priority to bug fixing. Why do I still have pre-sapients that I can't uplift because they don't show up in my species list? I just ran into an empire with the same species as mine, so I'm gonna have to send a spy there to find out if it's a glitch or if they were formed by migrants rebelling.

The lack of fleshed out ground combat and internal politics. My factions and leaders are basically nothing but bonuses or minor negatives, and it'd be kinda neat if they were more involved. As it stands I basically ignore factions

The problem is, if you have 20 planets to invade in order to finish that liberation war, you are not wanting more micro, but just sending a big blob set on auto invade. I think an improved system would need to bring 20% better results if you manage the fight, but without adding more micro. Maybe adding a specialization to the armies with a rock paper scissor system (artillery has a big damage bonus on infantry, armor is resisting to artillery, planes kills the tanks but are shredded by artillery). And a better UI: You select the species, then the army type, then the specialization. During the actual fight, you select the units on the frontline. Oh, and tier 3 fortresses can kill a few armies when they start the fight. So, you want to put a few clone or droid armies as meat shield in the default battle position.

Oh yeah I wasn't implying adding micro. I'd see improvement more as making designing armies more like designing fleets/ships but more streamlined. Maybe you only have like four basic types (armor, infantry, artillery, and air power) and you design your armies to face different threats (lightly fortified planets, heavily urbanized worlds, etc). You keep the basic "click on planet invasion launches" bit, and all the player does is force composition, logistics and selecting the general. Adding an insurgency and occupation mechanic would also be neat but maybe a bit much

Too many limits in empire selection, railroading the design process. * Can't play the Orks from WH40K because you need to have a plantoid or fungoid portrait to get the budding trait. * Can't play as Cybertronians, Autobots, or Decepticons because machines need to be Gestalt Consciousness. No empires of independant B-1 battledroids fumbling through post war life, or sentient appliances from the Brave Little Toaster searching the galaxy for new masters after a plague wipes out the humans. * Can't play as Space Elves that worship giant trees , or Naruto Ninjas with the Chakra tree, or the Machine Guardians of the flying city of Laputa, because the Tree of Life Origin requires Hive Mind, * Can't have your leader cosplay as a Spartan or Mandalorian or Dalek because only machines can have machine portraits, and vice versa can't have an empire of Arnold Terminators representing Skynet, or Agent Smith leading the Matrix. * Can't roleplay as Fallout humans building space bunkers, because Subterranean is an Origin, and not split up into a trait and a civic like how Aquatic and Anglers are. I know some people like being able to stereotype species at a glance, but I'd like to be able to have more alien aliens, and decide my own limitations. It has gotten better recently, though. The Crystallization trait for Lithoids, to replace Budding, was very welcome, and Lithoids can also be Radiotrophic now!

UX and UI is rough. A lot of the interface has been cluttered over the years, leading to features that can just be ignored because you forget they are there. Think finding diplomatic agreements you're in, or edicts, or plantary decisions, or idling science and constructor ships. It's so easy to get lost, and then realize, "hey, this guy has been sitting in a corner for a decade!".

Weirdly I'm going to say a lack of natural pause points. By that I mean there are no points where I think "ah, I've achieved something and can now take a break" because there's always fifteen other things on the go. The result is I find it almost impossible to stop playing within a reasonable timeframe, which actually ends up being a bit of a deterrent. There's no sense of satisfaction for me in this game if I play for less than several hours. Might just be me though. I don't have as much time as I'd like and playing for an hour or two achieves so little that I feel like I might as well have done something else entirely.

Stellaris Content Design Lead here: this kind of feedback is invaluable.

Lots of uses for influence, from diplomacy to expansion to messing with primitives, and not nearly enough ways to gain it. This means lots of activities are time-gated that I at least thing shouldn't be.

DLCs. They're great, I want all of them. I've been disappointed by some by price point. Right now, on Steam sale the whole thing is almost affordable. Acquiring the "full game" piecemeal, without sales would cost well over $200 USD. I recognize that's an unlikely approach, but I've had friends who have looked at the DLC and have disavowed any interest in the game because of that potential outlay.

You can buy the dlcs way cheaper on the internet, and as long as one person has all the dlcs everyone can use them in MP

Poor war system, especially involving AI. You can take out the enemies primary fleet, display that you are so much more powerful than them, crack their worlds yet they won’t surrender because there’s still a planet that you don’t control. And who controls it? Another empire who’s at war with them. Who also wants them to surrender but can’t because you control territory. Ground invasions are boring. Can cause lag in late game. Some base game level stuff is locked behind DLCs. I’d expect DLCs to give niche origins and new stories. Not base game mechanics like ascension and megastructures. But the ability to share DLCs is really good.

There's a disconnect between the army system and the navy system. Instead of having them one and the same; ie hangers having drop ship variants, planetary bombardment specific weapons, ship boarding to take over enemy ships as an alternative to debris research. That last one would also give a reason why shields are important over armor. There's only linear technological improvements. There could be weapons that work different in gravitational fields like black holes. Things that show your people developed to become better hunters in a specific environment. Similar to the extradimensional crisis, where their color affects their ship stats. Space travel is also linear. It should be somewhat constrained early on to space out the exploration aspect. Having certain hyperlanes requiring more stable warp drives would be a good start. They already have a storm system, so they could make it so some people are stranded during the hyperspace storms for a few years, allowing you to develop tech to bypass it eventually. There needs to be more aesthetic DLC for add variation to the base game. It doesn't feel like it'd cost too much to add these. This is more a miss opportunity for their part. The diplomacy agreements and situational system needs to have improved integration; research agreements allowing you to gain certain tech for weapons, or sociology, etc, migration treaties having a sort of culture shock occuring which affects factions and ethics, trade agreements creating economic boom if you have excess resources or busts if you don't secure enough resources to supply your growth. Finally, there's no fun end game tech; you're still preparing for the crisis in the end, but there's nothing like system-forming solar systems, extracting stars from stellaris nurseries, harvesting neutron stars, etc. I personally don't like the district, building design of planets, but I don't have a good replacement suggestion for it.

1). Diplomacy feels very basic for a game like this. Even with the dlc espionage is meh... 2). I would expect a lot more political play than actual full scale wars against non genocidal empires. I mean, we have the means of FTL and nuclear munition is what we start with... It doesnt take a genius to realize that full scale war is not in the best interest of anyone. On the other hand, border skirmishes that could escalate or not would be nice to have. Or at least limited wars, like, you capture what you claimed and there is a peace proposal from the losing side. You would ofc be able to negotiate war reparations or anything like that but the option to end the war would be there. No need to go to their home planet and nuke them... 3). That the base form of the ships you research stays the same throughout the game. I am sure that more things would be different on 2100 corvette and a 2500 one, other than what weapons and armor you choose to put on it. What about more slots ? What about upgrades on the platform itself instead of just the equipment used? 4). I think that the DLCs should be a bit cheaper. 10$ max for a DLC like Utopia and half of that for story packs or spices packs. Personally I dont buy from steam because everything is so expensive for my budget, even on sales. 5). AI performs poorly. It has improved, but still, the only viable option is Grand Admiral for anyone that has put a few hours in the game. AI doesnt need more buffs, it just needs to be smarter. Its hard but there is no other way. I think machine learning could be used on pvp games so AI can learn from players and get better slowly 6). Game performance... I dont need to say anything more, do I ? 7). This game touches on a subject that is epic by default. Star Wars, Warhammer ect. lots epic battles come to mind. However there is nothing epic about army combat on the ground... You can really do better than that Paradox. Other than that. Solid game 8/10 would recommend :D

Armies are a weakness in Stellaris. Not because they are not fleshed out, but because they exist at all. Stellaris is a very high level game about space exploration in which planets are gardening resource centers. It should not have deeply customized or managed planetary-level armies. This would be pulling directly away from the core themes of the game. Really it should probably just have planetary sieges and armies should stop existing at all, with all effects that currently affect armies affecting siege ability or just going away.

I wish armies could play a role within space battles. Landing armies on enemy ships to sabotage and such. It would also give a new and far more important role to strike crafts. I dunno just thinking.

If our community wasn't so lovely I would say this post is going to get you some hate mail in your DM's.

Mhm if i'd make an ideal Stellaris... More flavor of everything. Like give the Chosen one as a psionic their own skill/event tree to form out their powers and abilities a la Nemesis (like nuking a planet to make it shrouded, creating a special Gaia-shrouded world, as a drawback only psionics have habitability there, using them as a powerful army like a Son-Goku, maybe even making them into a powerful spaceborn fighter somehow) and you have to keep feeding your chosen one more and more amounts of Zro or ancient Artifacts to level up. Next, less Planets with more identity "We fight for our Homeworld" vibe, a habitable world in the goldilocks sphere should be a rich price in the Galaxy, give Planets more everything but put significantly less planets out there that are inhabitable. Habitats become 2nd rate planets, maybe with a softlock on them so they do not get spammed. That would at the same time fix Pop lag, you do not have to micromanage 40 planets, more space in the Ledger, make Invasions less tiresome, you do not have to invade 60 Planets to finish a war. Rather have 5 Planets to conquer with identity and maybe interesting ground combat mechanics and a lot more events (once again, not tiresome if you only have to conquer 3-5 Planets). Maybe also integrate Armies into your Fleet/Ships so you do not have to manually send them around. Speaking of War, enemies take forever to surrender, even if hopelessly outmatched just because they allied a guy on the other side of the Galaxy that can't help them at all. But i still have to beat that guy up. That is stupid. Espionage, like, what even is the current state of that? Not being able to assassinate leaders, arm rebels/slave rebellions, make Propaganda for your ethics (or any ethics to be honest). The best we have is putting a pirate fleet in a backwater system that the enemy most likely does not care about. (Yeah and the Stellarite, that one is pretty good but gotta get that first) Oh and freedom. Do not hold back, give us all the crazy amazing creative late game technologies/megastructures and ways to ascend up and beyond in the late, later stages of the game. Like maybe ascend into Energy beings or something. I am still missing the fact that only Megacorps have access to Zombies, not normal Necromancers. Like where is my Necromancer-civic Colossus Beam that makes everyone on the Planet into a Zombie. Or a Megastructure that is a gigantic cannon which costs like 100k Energy and 50k Alloys to fire once but can destroy a star system from afar, whilst giving every Empire a Casus Belli against you to dismantle it. I miss more things like that, i feel like the Devs are holding back on that end. Ah yes and finally... AN AJUSTABLE SCROLLING WHEEL SPEED

A lot was mentioned, I'll pile on one more. I always feel species and Empires kinda lack flavor. For some reason they don't register in my mind as anything else than "these dudes that xyz" or "the corp I vassalized" etc. I understand making what's basically procedural generation is not going to create iconic species like I don't know, Mass Effect roster, but I'd really like giving a damn about species in my game. Could be a me problem.

I’m new to this genre and only have a couple hours in this game and I find the lack of an encyclopedia frustrating. Civ has a nice one in game that tells you anything you need to know.

Lag is the biggest problem but it stems from Stellaris's, though innovative, fundamentally broken pop system. As it stands, we need hardware that doesn't exist to smoothly run a late game galaxy with max planet density and development. That's bonkers.

It's a huge pile of half-baked ideas. The Custodians are a good start but they've got a lot of backlog to work over. Very 'thrashy' pattern of development over time - patches are still often big reworks of systems rather than small tuning changes. This late in the game's lifecycle, this suggests to me that there isn't really a clear vision or a great ability to anticipate the consequences of a particular change on the part of the devs. The fact that Crucible Worlds made it into 3.6 in anything resembling their final form is just... damning.

Highly lore based but extremely bad at incorporating it (the amount of times it unpaused without reason while reading, the amount of time wasted.) More my issue than the game probably and more said aloud than phrased well, how the fuck is the AI always ahead of me when theyre supposed to get no bonuses and i have a good origin? How is it my “meta” build play is on equal terms with a challenging origin at 10-15 years? The FICKLENESS of it all, theres too much micromanaging, and even then theres random things to mess you up, like oh idk, your peaceful neighbor suddenly breaking non aggression pact even though you have 5 envoys with them and auto warring you. And most importantly. Its OLD, and outdated. Almost Everything we know and love is from the DLCs (way too expensive overall, but i get the release prices, would be good to incorporate the older, more popular ones into base game, I understand less money but like… youre paying for base stellaris, okay, like it? Heres like $450 of dlc to get the “true” experience for a total of $530) which creates a patchwork effect, literally having separate dlcs influence each other. It needs a strip-down and maintenance but the way they have everything spread out its hard to, since dlcs overwrite some mechanics (top of my head ancient relics DLC) it works very well overall and they still progress tho so eh, why worry

Hm... as someone who actively thinks of writing my own "stellaris", but barely has any willpower to code after doing it for 8 hours straight: * **stale game loop** \- no matter what exotic build you create, game's core loop is always "grow economy to build labs and ships". Tech and fleet are your military might, diplomatic might and solution to every single problem game has to offer. This gets stale after a few replays. Contrast CK2/3 where playthroughs focused on specific stat (say intrigue vs martial) differ a lot. * **single-core with multi-threaded mechanics** \- main CPU hog is populace, something player rarely interacts with aside from tedious chores. Populace mechanic is single-core causing tremendous lag late game. Games designed with heavy workload on a specific mechanic should not allow themselves to make this mechanic a one-core bottleneck. * **mid/late game boredom** \- game features that were meant to fill up mid-game fell flat. * Diplomacy is pretty much "I have bigger fleet, do as I say" and international community is just a bunch of modifiers constantly moved around by irrational AI. Part of the issue is coding where every AI empire has to propose a law if possible, even if the only law changes available are against their interest. * leviathans are just a military power check, if you have enough fleet you won, if not you loose. The only exception is enigmatic fortress, but it's been ages since I've seen it spawn in a playthrough... * vassals are just other empires that pay you not to attack them and mismanage their economy forcing you to clean up their mess when their unstable planets constantly revolt. They quickly loose power because once they are your vassals they loose bonuses that AI gets as a crutch. * **power creep** \- every new DLC must add something more broken, more powerful. When Stellaris started getting to battleships was fun, now it's just a checkpoint on the road to super-ultra-battleships and other cool stuff. For many "stealth in space" mechanical advantage is the main selling point of the latest DLC. * **repeating content** \- some of it is band-aid for mechanics that were not well-designed at a time (every player gets rubricator, every player gets head of zarqlan, only players get precursors). But with the latest DLC in place it's clearly visible that game is barebones in terms of content. pre-FTL civilisations will eventually destroy themselves in nuclear war, even the pacifist ones. Reason is - they will run out of other events they can show to player and eventually when next event fires, the only available event on the list will be nuclear annihilation no matter what. Again this is also problem of coding where list of events gets shorter and shorter until players has seen ech of them in every playthrough. * **false complexity** \- addition of alloys and consumer goods as advanced resource produced from another resource was a moot idea. While it may sound like adding another layer of gameplay it only moved importance from one resource of another and practically shot AI in the face, as it was unable to cope with new mechanic and to this day struggles with economy. It could have been done better, though it's now probably too late for changes. * **no tactics** \- you design your fleet, then send it against the enemy. Aside from pretty visuals it works the same as CK2/3 or EU4 except is even less interesting because your admirals don't even choose tactics and it's just a bunch of modifiers and nothing more. * **empty mechanics** \- some mechanics could be so much more if not for the fact that they were added as an afterthought. Does anyone even remember that ships and armies have experience levels?

Alot of military aspects seem half backed. As some people have mentioned armies are very underdeveloped. My biggest issue is that defense in war just sucks. First off Starbase cannot get nearly as strong as fleets. Honestly past mid game they become an irrelevant speedbump at most. Real battle is just waiting for armies to clean up for 30yrs after the fighting stops

The learning curve and the fact that the late game lag lends itself to one play style being favored over all others (aka: all the genocide jokes and memes you see on the Reddit)

Armies, factions & those 10 similar robot species

Hard agree. All robot templates should be able to be combined. Once you have synthetics robots and synthetics should be able to be combined as well.

When you are about to click but then a popup pops up at the exact timing so you end up clicking something you didn’t mean to, dumb AI and sometimes lackluster midgame

Honestly imo, and from what I'm reading in this post, late game optimization, the amount of events, species, pop ups, fleet manager, armies and late game performance and lag. All of these are almost exclusively late game problems, or are annoying early, but become a real problem late game. So I'd say stellaris really needs some updates to optimise it. For the rest it's great! However the dlc prices can also add up quite quickly, but that opinions is very different from person to person, I personally don't think some dlcs have the right to cost as much as they do, mostly necroids and first contact.

i think the technology system is currently very flawed. there's a massive step-up in capacity as soon as you get lvl2 research complexes, which is gated by getting an exotic gas tech (basically doubling your chances if you have exotic gas close to your spawn). you're then incentivized to rush through the technologies to hit repeatables well before 2300, in which case... you just spam repeatables, megastructures, and feeder planets forever. i've said this before, but it feels like you're racing towards this unchanging forever future. the stellaris early game is fantastic but the lategame turns into this unbearable slog. i find myself causing chaos and breaking up alliances by the mid 2300s just to see something interesting change. increasing tech costs just changes the lag before you hit the exponential phase (lvl2 research complexes) and exacerbates the inequality between players who hit and players who don't. currently unity has a better implementation but it's not *good* either. i've tried giga/acot and find them really silly, but they at least try. the galactic community is also a terrible implementation. pre-designed legislature with minimal benefits that takes YEARS to pass even if you have a simple majority voting bloc just feels worthless. you can't make political alliances outside vassalage and you can't negotiate deals. the imperium is the only interesting thing they've added in a long time but it has civic/RP requirements and only occurs very late in the game. in general the political aspect of the game is really underdeveloped. there really is no negotiation or nuance to the politics: you can't offer up a system to ensure a decade of peace, you can't enforce a truce between two quarreling neighbors, you can't undermine a threatening alliance, you can't induce a rebellion... your options are a) unconditional defensive/nonaggression pacts, b) vassalage, and c) federation. i really dislike federation implementation bc of how annoying it can be to get anything good out of it, esp compared to the new specialist vassalage options. even wars lack sensible political affordances: the peace negotiation system doesn't have an option for negotiation! meaningful outcomes should include things like war reparations, which could easily be implemented as a situation that allows you not to pay--but this would end the truce early. as a matter of fact, *most* political agreements should be violable but come with escalating consequences. i swear i actually do like this game--it just frequently stops being fun during the midgame bc so many of the interesting systems were created for the early game.

Mid to late game slowdown/lag. Kills every game I've tried to finish.

I think overall it's a fantastic game, I have been playing it since 2016 and I'm still having fun. There are some flaws though. 1. The writing is great, but the text is presented in a format that makes it difficult/boring to read. I think the content team should borrow some Ideas about narrative structure from disco Elysium. 2. The game balance is not great. There are some interesting origins/civics that are not very good (life seeded, calamitous birth). I at least feel that I would like to try them, but that I can't, since they are so bad. 3. I wish there was a possibility to have even fewer habitable planets, and a "neutral zone" (stars no one can claim). That would enhance the exploration part of the game.

One thing that can be improved is the fact that you need to develop fleets and have powerfull technologies to just have a chance to survive. Stellaris is a sandbox game, but each game you have to create a fleet economy otherwise you cannot play. It would be nice to have empire that can expand without combat. For exemple, you could buy systems (IA will always say no at the moment), you could run a special spying operation that will get you some systems... I know that it would be hard to balance but it can be fun.

Expensive DLCs with important game mechanics

[удалено]

Stellaris is extremely complex XD get a friend and watch him struggle. But yes, stellaris is a story generator and that’s why I love it

Right now? Not being able to have my primitive science ships just to a system and complete research projects. Have to jump them in system, then tell them to do it. Annoying.

Configurable key mapping! I have several keys in Stellaris that I want to change but cannot in game. As a workaround I use AutoHotKey, but it’s kind of tough to setup for some people, and this seems like a relatively easy feature from a dev standpoint

Armies are the obvious one that a lot of people are going to say. But for me things are a bit different. Lack of border security, and here's what I mean by that, a fortress, a permeant defensive structure isn't going to be the hard point you want it to be. Frequently when I'm in the middle of a war, the A.I. will ignore my fleets that are blazing through their territory, and instead just having one or two fleets attack me from a flank that I thought I had secured or had over looked. Basically Gruella warfare, and it's frustrating trying to chase these fleets around because they'll take over a star base, build and FTL inhibitor, and then suddenly the fleet I had chasing them just stops moving. Like, really my biggest gripe with Stellaris is basically all of the war stuff >.<

I wish the AI didn’t recognize FTL disrupters as preventing jumps, instead considering them more like ”this must be attacked before I continue, so I add that to the list of orders”. Same with Science Ships; I should be able to order them to hop skippidy do across the galaxy to see if there’s anything cool to yoink.

So many pointless pop-ups the game needs me to click on. I've used alt-f4 on games where I've gotten notification fatigue. The notifications on the top of the screen aren't bad, but the ones that need me to click okay or acknowledged, pull me out of the 4X grand strategy experience.

Honestly with the Custodians and regular sales, I’m ok with the DLCs. Monetization is the only reason the game can remain in its state of constant updating and getting new additions, and they don’t make it pay-to-win or seriously alter fairness in a game; buying more doesn’t automatically make the game easier, and often makes it harder, but more rewarding. That said, would like reforms to armies (make it so there’s a lot more types, like Infantry, Tanks, Landcruisers, Assault Drones, Assassins, etc, as well as letting you customize loadouts, maybe not to the same degree as ships but still some flexibility), force unconditional surrender if opponent suffers economic crash (shouldn’t still Be fighting if they’re bankrupt)/make economic issues prompt toward surrender, and also some over the milder parts of Gigastructures added (not like the Nicoli-Dyson Beam or anything, but like the Star Lifter, uncapped Dyson Spheres, Interstellar Habitats, Neutronium Gigaforge, the stuff that adds lategame goals to accomplish but don’t do as much wild unbalancing as other parts of that mod can.). Also, more interesting Midgame crisis, like maybe empires with too much Sprawl can have a Horus Heresy-Style civil war break out? Like, just the strongest empires that control half the galaxy, so that the smaller empires have a chance to expand. Their vassals could get in on it too, picking one of the sides to join, but the winner automatically gets a bunch of penalties to the vassals of the enemy (They’re traitors, so no mercy needed!).

borring invasions of planets, there is notting to it, it's just make big army and invade.Or put fleet in orbit and bomb, then invade

The war AI. If aliens came to earth and started bombarding the planet and abducting and assimilating people, the entire navy flying off somewhere else to sneak attack some far-off enemy base would not go over well. But this is the AIs whole strategy. I play Stellaris to roleplay space so this kind of shit annoys me. Also the pricing. I wanted to get my brother into the game, but even on Steam sale, buying the game and all the DLCs today is still like €112. It’s too much, he wouldn’t do it.

General performance in later stages of the game, everything slows down to a crawl. I've heard it's because it's terribly optimized for multicore CPUs, essentially offloading everything to the first core.

The AI. For a long time it was pretty bad on just how absolutely brain dead it could be and it still kind of is. Have an ongoing campaign where I am at war with other empires and I keep finding worlds with pops in the dozens to hundreds but they have barely built up anything so unemployment and lack of housing is just everywhere. For a game about making your own stories, having computer controlled groups that can at least bother to manage their civilizations properly can really help in making those other nations feel more alive.

The two weakest parts of Stellaris are: armies and espionage. Armies should be eliminated, made into ship modules, and incorporated into bombardment / Devastation. Planets should simply surrender after some time being bombarded. Soldier jobs could even deal some damage back if it's a Fortress world. Have a bunch of modifiers for ethics and civics; it could be a whole revamp. No more army fleets, yes to proper invasion fleets capable of defending themselves. Espionage requires far more control. The missions are fine, but more would be better. But what I want for all the time, funds, and Influence are results I can rely on. Let me choose what starbase to shut down, let me spend more money (lots of money!) to spawn more pirate fleets. They need to be big events when they go off, so where's the actual Shadow War? If some other nation is trying to swarm my space with pirate scum during a war, I want my counter-intelligence agent to damn well know about it and I'd assign her to stop it or at least minimize it. There's much more they could be doing to make the Spy Game more interesting than checking a box that basically says "I don't want to look at this again until it succeeds". And the feature that is missing from Stellaris? An in-depth and customizable timeline feature. It would probably have to come with a warning: can spiral out of control and create text files in the GB range, so put limits on how many data points you want to track. After-action reports and RP is a big part of Stellaris and being able to go back and view some kind of record (even just text) of what these empires did, perhaps even regardless of modding, would be invaluable to retelling these stories later.

Readability, needs option to have bigger text. Also **voiceover would help a LOT**. I love the events but never really read them, the fast forward time gets me into a strange rushed mental state.

no real win conditions. its endemic to paradox games, but i find that with stellaris its my biggest gripe. as it acutally has a fairly balanced start. the CIV series, arguably the biggest 4X games out there, have multiple different win conditions with a varietly of different gameplay styles to match. in stellaris, the "win" condition is either you kill literally everyone else, completely, or you have more "score" at the end date. the problem is that the outcomes of a game of stellaris are determined very early on. so reaching the end date is much more of a tedious chore than anything else. (i am aware that you can change the end date in setings).

Why does the other side get a super early status quo in an uprising where they get to gore my borders, I'm *nowhere* near 100% exhaustion but they get to keep what territory I haven't claimed back just yet??? (Imagine if during the Warsaw Uprising, the Polish resistance said "we give up!" and then the Wehrmacht said "ok, but you *only* get to keep that one block and these 3 streets")

I feel like a space game should have a feeling of exploration, but I don't think it achieves that. i.e. whenever I go to explore a new star system, it's pretty much the same as every other system. I also don't like that different ethics will just randomly have different levels of starting development on the homeworld like spiritualist empires getting an extra industrial district feels cheap

I never liked Paradox’s model of pushing out endless DLCs for features that should’ve just been updates in the game. They do this with all their products.

No ability to turn off certain pop ups. I don't care about empire X having a commercial pact with empire y. The RNGness of normal tech that can put you behind significantly. (Eg you might be wanting research complexes to get your science up to snuff, but you're stuck waiting decades on other research until it finally pops up).

I would tolerate all the pop ups if they had a voice actor to read them out

I feel like there's still some gameplay systems that are a bit hollow or underdeveloped.