this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Ahh to play it again for the first time.
When the events were all new, I was so busy reading I didn't mind the lag, and AI behavior wasn't super obvious.
Stellaris 2.1 was a magical time. The update right before tile changes
Paragon was a bit of dead on arrival for me and kind of when I lost the last of my steam.
We already complained that the AI wasn't competent enough to make a good story, and they plugged on an incredibly complicated system to allow humans players with 2 brain cells to dominate them even easier.
And on top of all that the game can't get through an hour without desync so I either play with lobotomized AI or never finish a game with friends.
I lost my steam around mega corp. I played a few times since then but then the game would update, half my mods would never update and I'd lose the save.
Maybe I'll come back when development stops and mods can really run away
Mods are where it's at. The AI isn't competitive when you play fair (the vanilla game's idea of difficulty is just a multiplier to the crisis faction's strength). The only way for the AI to truly be challenging is for the AI to have an overwhelming resource advantage and mods do that best. I played with the Gigastructures mod and it was amazing. I was really skeptical of that mod before I tried it. I thought it'd just be power creep.
And it does have power creep. But it also introduces really well made, unique, and unbalanced challenges. Like, the blokkats are an enemy that is impossibly strong at first. First time around, they devoured half the galaxy before I could catch up to them. It was the first time in Stellaris where I was genuinely afraid I was gonna lose the game.
Similarly, other mods keep the game feeling fresh with more events and special planets and the likes.