It's been out for a few hours now, and how is everyone enjoying their space adventures

Despite watching tons and tons of EU and Crusader Kings over the years, I had never actually properly played a paradox games, and in my first three hours and change I am hoooooked. My space penguin empire is expanding not all that fast, although even with doing a pretty good job of surveying as much as I can, I've only found one other empire, and I'm about to enter an alliance with them as they are pacifist traders.

Has anyone playing with a democracy been having trouble keeping their ruler of choice elected? I had to support them the first election cycle because I completely forgot about mandates, but ever since then it's been easy to keep them easily winning elections, even though I've punted the mandate the last two elections now

I purchased the game only to discover I have some serious hitching issues. Apparently it's a known problem though the cause does not seem to be identified.

Well, I've only played a couple of hours, but I have a couple of initial thoughts:

1. The game seems more accessible than other Paradox games. Coming from Hearts of Iron, those games had terrible tutorials and lots of complexity for the sake of complexity. Stellaris has a lot of complexity, but the game does a pretty good job of directing you towards what you need to do and the systems seem logically related to each other.

2. It's a lot more freeform, which I enjoy. By which I mean that other Paradox games tend to give you binary historical choices like "Do you want to approve Lend-Lease?" which, while good for historical accuracy, it tends to railroad the player into the same game over and over again. Because Stellaris isn't trying to be historical, you don't have that, so the choices you make feel a lot more meaningful.

It's fantastic. Beyond fantastic, even. It's exactly what I assumed it would be.

I'm playing a race of Fanatic Collectivist Materialists; the backstory is we're mollusks who were uplifted by technology and have created a society where "Research all the things!" takes prcedence over anything else...including basic rights as I am liberally employing slavery throughout my whole empire. Eventually, I hope to start replacing my population with robots and/or cybernetics as I'm RPing the whole "science is our god" angle pretty hard.

I've found a number of empires surrounding me (playing 1000 stars with 29 other races), but they've all been peaceful traders or spiritual seekers with the exception of one xenophobic isolationist, who's a bit of a jerk. Still, I've found enough planets to go over my limit, and made my first sector not too long after.

So far, I've found influence to be my limiting factor; frontier stations have gobbled up a lot of purple points, and I've started to colonize less than optimal worlds just so I can maintain my border while demolishing them. My slowest area of growth seems to be in my fleet; even with six worlds, I'm only at 25 or so ships, but as everyone around me has played nice so far, I think I'm in a good position relative to how long I've been playing (four hours or so).

The first game I started I was literally sandwiched between two very hostile nations. I was doing the tutorial stuff, but not even getting halfway through the introduction one of them already expanded his empire to encroach on my borders and I was left with about 4-5 systems to explore without going to war straight off the bat. So I went ahead and started a new game, and this time I had all the space in the world to just expand as much as I wanted. The other nations I ran into eventually didn't seem close to as developed as I was though, so I'm left wondering if maybe I'm playing on too low difficulty.

I've been enjoying the game well enough so far, although it is a bit slow for my taste (I bet it will get faster once I figure out more stuff though). I'm still not a huge fan of the hide and seek combat these games have, but if I can have fun with all the other stuff I can let it slide.

This game is rough, I feel like it needs an easy difficulty setting of some kind. Like I was minding my business and had 2 planets going when out of no where this other empire declared war on me and then thoroughly stomped my empire out of existence. There was literally nothing i could do, I couldn't produce enough units to fight him off and he just steamrolled me. I had only been playing for like 2.5 hours and hadn't even finished all of the tutorial missions yet and this was on normal.

Edit: I never had this much difficulty in a Civ game

I'm hanging out for a chance to play this. A space paradox game is right up my alley but I am not convinced I can run it. Don't really want to drop the cash on it only to find it doesn't work.

Sounds like a Paradox game to me. Big empire decides it wants you, it usually gets you, just like in real life lol. Also yeah I wouldn't compare Paradox games to Civ, Civ's not particularly deep or really that much like any Paradox game. Going into a Paradox game expecting Civ will lead to probably disappointment.

I wish I had time to properly dig into this game, but I don't right now and I'll probably just wait a while before getting this, especially with the whole Paradox games not usually being complete until the requisite expansion packs, or the multitude of DLC that's become recently.

@mrbubbles: From what I can tell the direction the tutorial takes you in is just a bad start. Like, it's great for introducing you to a lot of different stuff, but you end up spending a lot of resources early that won't help you increase your income in any significant way (at least not for a while), which means you'll be developing really slowly. You want to focus on getting your mineral production going asap (either building ground buildings or orbital mining operations), and you probably want to build your first outpost fairly quickly (to grab more domain for more mines). Going for colony quickly seems way too slow, and spending your beginning resources on ships or other income buildings is just a death sentence.

Going into my third game just now I'm already noticing my pace through the early game is greatly increased just from learning some basic things.

This games great. I've been playing for over 4 hours and I'm loving it. This is my first complex strategy game (the closest I've got before is playing a few hours of Civilization V) but this one has me hooked. I'm not very good at it (my resources seem to be stagnating for some reason, and my exploration is hitting lots of threatening AI that over-powers me) but I am enjoying it.

@stinger061: If it's any help it's running totally fine on my Surface Pro 3 with an i5-4300u and HD4400 graphics at native resolution, it's surprisingly well optimized

My first empire is called the Democratic Hahn-Mur Concordat and they're fanatic xenophiles that are also repugnant because I figured that was appropriate for a fungus. One of the best interactions I've had about ~2 hours into my game is I found what amounts to a founding document (last copy of a book) for an empire that I encountered (Xenophobic isolationists) and by giving it back to them I got ~1000 energy and increased their like rating by 20 points. It gave me the option to just never tell them I found it, and I could've taken it to my homeworld to translate

I've always wanted to get into one of the Paradox 4X games, but never got any further than messing around with the demo for CK2, so this game is quite a learning experience.

I'm about 4 hours into my first game and I'm just now feeling like I have a basic grasp on how I should be playing. The problem is, I'm fairly weak compared to a lot of the other empires (civs? I dunno). So much so that I'm considering starting over now that I understand the game better. I think I'll do a lot better next time. Although, I'm not sure if you're supposed to feel weak? I know these games are more about being a small player in a larger game rather than the one absolutely dominating like in Civilization, but some of the AI are just way beyond what I have.

I'm having fun with it though and I would recommend it to anyone interested in these kinds of games. Definitely seems way more accessible than CK2 from the brief time I had with it.

So far I am enjoying very much. Luckily i don't have the hitching issue...

I'm wondering how this compares to Endless Space? I wanted a game like that but Endless Space just didn't seem well rounded to me and I quickly stopped playing it.

@phoenix778m: As a big fan of Endless Space: this is WAY better. I will always love how will Endless Space did its UX/UI design, but as a whole rounded game Sellaris takes it so far in the 5 hours I've put into it. I just really like the actual empire managing that is done; the sci-fi stories told in your borders that affect your game as well as the 4Xing.

I couldn't get open borders on a civ that had cut off my main fleet from my home system, so i declared war, it went badly.

I'm really liking this game, a lot more than Crusader Kings 2 which I only managed to put a few hours into. I have a question about how things generally work in this game and games like it.

I've expanded as much as I can in the space I have, Is the only way to expand further, to declare war on one of my neighbours? I suppose that is the case, but it seems like a bad idea, I have pretty much the strongest fleet I can at ~600 I could get to 700 if I upgraded all my ships, but I'm still equivalent to my bottom neighbour who I really want to destroy. I also don't want to declare wars until I can build military outposts, man this game is really great. Tumbatika will one day face the Righteous Arm of the Collective, but not today.

So far I'm loving it. I fired it up at 5pm and now it's six hours laters. I went with a peaceful human start just to get a feel for the systems and I can already appreciate a lot of the management. Really like sectors system.

I messed up the spoils from a war which cut off the systems I won (and 70% of my fleet) from the rest of me, and my allies didn't get the planets they should have. I was able to come back from it about 30 years later (gave 3 systems back to the people I just beat/made 2 a protectorate/just dismantled my fleet), when the same empire I declared war on before decided to go fuck it, and we began a pretty useless, but draining war for 25 years, with no real winner but a big resource dump for everyone. Right as I finally decide white peace is the best option, (late game spoilers I imagine) some scourge comes into the galaxy at the bottom, right by where I was expanding (I can't believe the luck I had in galaxy placement where 10+ hours in I still had a good pocket to fill up) And they had a fleet with a 26k damage rating, and I had no idea how to get my allies in my federation, or anyone, to help fight them so they just shrekt me. I just turned my PC off, part of me wants to start an earlier save before I messed up the spoils of war, but I might just start another one now that I feel a bit better about the basics.

I thought Paradox might finally have made a game accessible enough for me to play, but eeeeeh nope, this definitely isn't the one

returned it within 2h on Steam

I've never really been able to get deep into a Paradox game (I've dabbled the most with CK2), but man, this eases you into things so well. I definitely wasn't taking an optimal approach at first, but yet I don't feel like I've wasted my time. Stuff is being introduced as I reach the point where I can turn my attention to it, rather than being forced onto me, which has meant that, barring the initial information overload, I've never really felt overwhelmed while building out and scaling up.

The game itself seems great. I love the flavor everything has, and there's a real sense of storytelling as you build out your empire and come into contact with different races of different dispositions. Makes everything feel really alive and full of history, something that, say, Beyond Earth really failed to do.

So yeah, really loving it, and loving the fact that I've actually been able to start to come to grips with a Paradox game. It seems intimidating up front, but so long as you're willing to accept that you won't immediately grasp everything, and instead approach that learning process piecemeal, I actually don't think the learning curve is all that steep or difficult to manage.

@hark: You can always go the peaceful route and try to either vassalize or form a confederation/alliance. But ye, these games seem to inevitably force you into wars no matter what, either from you wanting to expand or larger empires encroaching on you.

So far I enjoy it quite a bit, even though I now regret a few of my starting decisions.

FTL travel for one isn't great, especially when you find yourself caught between other factions immediately. My expansion all but halted, since I can't get anyone to agree to open borders.

I also guess that the slow learner perk wasn't such a great idea after all, since now my scientists start dying one after the other without ever having really achieved anything in their lifetime.

Just in general I really don't understand the diplomacy yet. I just can't see a way to get relations up higher, because even very unfavourable trades only give +5 to relations and higher kinds of trades require you to be allies already.

I'm interested and will probably end up getting it, but I'm not really seeing the Crusader Kings etc. influence people talk about. It looks exactly like every other space 4x game.

@ares42: So the one empire I want to attack seems to piss everyone off and two of the other empires that they declared rivalry with have formed an empire. It would be perfect if I could get in that empire, if I declare rivalry/war against him will it make the other two like me more? It would suck if I declared war then tried to join the others and they said no

@jimbo: There isn't really any crusader kings in this or EUIV. It's much more of a traditional Space 4X. But it does do some things to liven up the end game which is usually the most boring part of any 4X - Extra-galactic invasions, AI revolts etc. They also have a lot of smaller quest chains through out and do interesting things by having your populations traits shift over time dependent on interacting with other cultures or genetic engineering etc. I will probably end up wishing for more grand strategy stylings once I finish a few games but I hope they build on that with DLC.

It feels more accessible than Paradox's other games, however it also seems less deep. I'm very much enjoying it but maaaan, I wish someone would declare war on me already.

This game is buggy, buggy, buggy. Not exactly surprising for a Paradox release just a little disappointing. That being said at 9pm yesterday I looked at my clock and thought, "OK like half an hour more," then looked back and it was 1am. Its been a long time since a game got me like that.

@hark: Yes. Having the same rivals will make them like you more and if they are militarists they may even like you for going to war with their rival aswell. Warmongering is often not well liked however.

Generally its a good idea to secure your alliance before going to war though. Especially if your war outcome is gonna depend on that.

AIs dont usually join the loosing side in a conflict ;)

@rethla:Yeah I saw that actually you can't join any alliance while at war, luckily for me I managed to get myself into the alliance, they declared war on someone else whom I can't reach so I'm waiting for that to end so I can deal with my border issue!

I kind of don't like the standard FTL, it says best for beginners which is why I chose it but I find it has completely limited me as all my neighbours are able to jump to systems I can't reach and continue expanding. I'm researching a tonne of stuff that clearly implies that I'm supposed to have encountered a lot of different types of systems and planets but because of my situation I've only seen the area around my start position. I might just declare war for the secession of the a strip of planets so that I can finally get out of my cage.

@iamdanthemanstan: I've also got a lot of bugs, acheivements don't work, the game chugs like a mofo the longer you play meaning at some point I need to quit and reload. Trade offers are kind of fucked, some things like open borders for example require non aggression pacts, but because I already did that, (and therefore can't offer it as part of the new deal) the game acts like it doesn't exist so I just cant do it. Super annoying but like you said I've still not been able to put it down.

I love this game a lot, but the graphical options are somewhat lacking. I really would like to be able to look at the galaxy map and not have it run sub 20 fps. I think I can use console commands to disable the dust, but I don't have the wherewithal and know-how to do it without breaking the game or anything. I hope that a mod fixes it (or paradox?).

Great game, though. Made two civilizations, and want to make more!

@hark: achievements aren't bugged they just only unlock in ironman mode. It's the same in most of the paradox grand strat games.

So ended up playing this for 7 hours even though I was planing on starting Uncharted today. I was right that after figuring more things out the game gets much more intense as there's always something to pay attention to. The game still gives me the same feeling that EU4 did (that I'm playing it "wrong"), as I bumped it up to hard and still was easily top 3 biggest empire while noone really bothered me or tried to get in my way. And then as soon as I get tired of building and want some action the game just becomes this huge mess of things being completely unintuitive and you just seem to get penalized more than rewarded for conquering. I guess maybe it pays off in the long run ? It just seems to me like the developers expect you to be super war-hungry from the get-go, but in the end it's just way better to develop your empire in peace.

@zalrus9: I wouldn't worry about messing anything up with console commands. I haven't tried them in this game at all but I doubt it's too easy to seriously mess anything up.

I've got the bug where it hitches every time the day changes. It sucks, but it's still playable, and I'm liking it so far. It seems to be a pretty common issue, so hopefully it will be fixed soon.

I sunk a bit over 5 hours into it (with about 45m before that for creating my race, so total about 6h), and damn I'm loving everything so far. I was gonna make a human race but then I saw some molluskoids that looked like hydras and went with that because they seem rad. Slow Breeders (and man, that really makes a difference with new colonies), but Resilient, Nomadic and Enduring. Also Fanatic Xenophiles and Materialists with a Direct Democracy.

My leader lasted only her first term because she ran on a mining platform and I only made like one (of 4) before it ended. After a handful of leaders I finally started making enough mines for one Hydra-person to last like 3 terms. I also went Wormhole Travel because it said 'for advanced players' and figured it was a bad idea and I should do it. It's actually not that hard to use, and I managed to get a tech that increased the range by like 50% or something dumb, along with it's wind-up speed.

I've only really met two civilizations (some others have heard of me through them, but I can only see those two), because I jumped to a different arm in a 4-arm spiral galaxy on accident (it was the only system left within Wormhole range at the time). I'm also pretty sure there's either nobody on my arm, or they're clustered near the center, because so far I have like the whole back half of it to myself (and some crystal things and old mining drones for hostile company).

The Hydrathi Cooperative shall expand and love all you weird aliens!

I guess you havnt had your first war yet huh? ;)

Liking it so far after 6ish hours. I'm still running into the same problems after multiple restarts:

- Not enough worlds to colonize while my neighbours have 2-3x as many colonized planets.

- Not enough influence gain to support outposts. It always goes negative after a while so I can't hire new people anymore and more.

- Can't build a fleet big and advance enough to rival my neighbours so I get eventually steamrolled.

All of these points relate to a poor start, but I haven't really figured out how to get better (I'm not that fantastic at these kinds games). Maybe I should decrease the number of other species by a lot.

@gundogan: i'm not really sure how viable this is as I only just realised it was possible but, you can claim land by building a colony even if you don't have a frontier built. Meaning you can build a colony outside of your empire's land and it'll basically claim the system the planet is in. Seems like this might be useful as now I can expand without spending influence. I think the area claimed seems to increase with the pop of the planet but I'm not entirely sure.

@rethla: Nope! As I said, it feels like I'm the only civ on the arm. I haven't run into anyone to contest expansion space with yet, all my fights have been against the local space fauna (clouds, crystals, mining drones). I did annihilate some pirates that decided to start being jerks, but they just had one crappy station and their fleet had been dealt with in another system. I think the drones have been the most combative of the bunch. I have seen a group of three other things that have like a 500 military score which is keeping that system out of my reach for now.

I figure an actual war will require a few portals on the front, not counting offensive invasion stuff because I don't see myself doing that any time soon.

@gundogan: Well Influence is not something you gain alot of and you should use it sparsely and where it matters. It sounds to me like you try to rush something with that resource for which its not intended.

I've played a ton of Civ and some space 4X games in the past, though never a Paradox game before, and I'm loving it after a first night with 3-4 hours in it. Slow going at first, and definitely made some mistakes in prioritizing and colony selection, but overall it's done a great job introducing new concepts and the different management levels in the early game. The exploration and quest elements are great in particular in giving small new objectives beyond just expanding, researching, and building up an economy.

The only thing I've had trouble with so far is diplomacy. I have a couple neighbors with equal navies and friendly relationships, but otherwise I don't know what to do with them. I've been setting up fairly minor trade deals, but nobody wants to do anything significant in terms of diplomacy. I'm playing a pacifist, research race, so I'm not planning on steamrolling over anyone, but I'm having trouble seeing how to push diplomacy forward in terms of long-term alliances.

I've started over a handful of times because I've wanted to experiment a bit but I will say the start is just really slow.

@deathpooky: Apparently an embassy bumps up their relationship by 1 a month. At least that's what I thought it meant, so I'm guessing trade deals in their favor + embassy over a period of time will eventually get them to like you enough to do some more stuff like Alliances and such, but I'm not entirely sure.

Also I totally put a colony in a terrible place (surrounded by 3 potentially horrible tile blockers with more elsewhere), reloaded (it was just a year), and put a colony on a different world that probably ended up being more terrible because the native population out-populates me there to the point where I can't even upgrade the colony to an actual city. Once I get them into my Cooperative though, that planet's gonna be awesome.

@rethla: Yea, but most of the time I'm getting closed in so fast by others without any worlds to colonize so I feel that I have to build some outposts. Although my recent start seems nice: a bit more alone and actually some (ocean) worlds nearby I can colonize so no need for outposts. Maybe my childeren of Cthulhu (long lasting super religious and military squid looking people) can finally flourish!

I'm liking it so far. This is my first honest attempt at a Paradox game and it took some time getting used to but I feel like I've got a good grasp on stuff now. Something about having discrete star-systems makes it a little more digestible than when I tried getting into Hearts of Iron 3 and Europa Universalis 4. Right now I've reached the edge of accessible space without declaring war on a seemingly superior empire or researching more advanced warp engines. Me and three other empires recently formed a federation so maybe I should try and get some shared research going. I'm playing a race of fanatically religious illithid-looking dudes so sooner or later there will be some back-stabbing for the greater good.

How hard is this game overall? Is it easy for newcomers? I would like to get this game, but am pretty intimated by what looks to be pretty complicated game mechanics. I've played Shogun 2 and struggled through some of Civ 5, but am always fascinated by these types of games.

@mattchops: Well, I seem to have a somewhat different experience than others in this thread, but I'm finding the game fairly easy, even on hard (not tried insane). That's coming from someone who plays Civ 5 on level 6-7 though. My experience with paradox games is generally that they aren't that super challenging, they're just incomprehensible, and while this one might be better than the others it still has its fair share of archaic mechanics etc. When playing these games it's extremely common for me to end up in situations where things I had no intention of doing happens, like just earlier I accidentally ditched all the planets I had just conquered because I did some stuff in the wrong order.

Overall I'm finding the AI to be very simplistic, hidden behind all the complexities, which was the same experience I had when trying out EU4 some time ago. The game is still fun though, as it really nails the feeling of running a space empire.

Anyone have any advice on gaining influence? I can't seem to find any way to increase monthly gain, just lump gains from events and such.

@alphasquid: Upgrade buildings and make some rivals.