SirDiddles

Seems very interesting, has a lot of depth, almost unlimited potential but ...... the interface is god awful horrible. Seriously, someone thought this thru and came up with an interface that makes everything as difficult as possible. Building a ship is about 500 clicks, assuming you can figure out the proper sequence, didn't get the sequence right? That's ok you get to start over. Whoever said, "Yeah it's ready release this.", should be forced to listen to Trump quotes for the rest of his life.

Generally a lot of fun but very grindy, lots of downtime waiting on loading screens, too many ways to die instantly makes this game very frustrating. It's like 1/2 a game.

Stellaris is a very good game with a few serious flaws that affect, well everything. The good points: 1. you can design your own race, probably could use more points in traits to actually be able to customize your race a bit more, but still its a good attempt. 2. graphics are quite good when they are working correctly. 3. overall game design is good with a few caveats. 4. you can design your own ships, sort of. The bad points: 1. As with most 4X games, this one really suffers from a poor AI. I won't go in to details, it would be a very long list. 2. I just started the game and my combat fleet has 4 ships, my neighbor i just met has thousands of ships. 3. Ship design: it would seem like you can custom design your own ships but here are your choices: (depending on the platform) you can put 1 large weapon, 2 medium weapons, or 4 small weapons. Quite often it won't let you build the design you want without pressing the 'auto-complete' button which changes your ship design. 4. Combat: you have no control over your ships once they engage. You put all long range weapons on your ships, guess what ?, you are going to point blank range for fighting. 5. Game killing mid game slow down: has nothing at all to do with how good your system is according to the developers, even on their beast machines they get ridiculous slow down. Rather than build a new platform that uses multi-threading and optimization, they used an older gaming platform that assumes you are only using a single core with limited ram. By turn 200 you are experiencing a massive performance slow down of the game, by turn 300 (if you can actually make it there) the game is unplayable, a single click on anything in game may take 30 or more seconds before it responds, if at all. Making it to end game is all but impossible. So you play for a bit, then start a new game. Frustrating. So in short: 1. you can design you own race, poorly. 2. you can design you own ships, poorly. 3. you can engage in combat, poorly. 4. you can play the game to a point, then you have to start a new game.

This is a decent game. Plays well. Not many bugs. There are many different heroes to play, one is sure to be your style of play. It is free to play but there are many many things to buy. Many of the heroes are not balanced. Some are grossly unfair. But oh well anyone can pick them so it's relatively fair. 1 map, 1. Game matchmaking seems completely random, don't expect fair teams. This game does not support new players in any sense. Players are absolutely caustic towards new players, unfriendly would be a complete lie about how bad they are. Servers: many Russians and Peruvians playing on English servers, prepare to be cursed at in new languages. Company ignores community player base rather religiously. All players think X should be changed, no response. So and So blatantly cheats and uses hacks, no response. But new items will get added that no 1 needs or wants. How so many here can complain about the exact same things as I have and yet give it a 10/10 is beyond me. Goes way beyond fan boys. Maybe company employees writing their own reviews.

A good game at the start. I found few technical issues that were show stopping. Early ships are reasonably well balanced. Game play and winning is largely decided on by players and their tactics. Progression is relatively quick up to about level 5 ships. After level 5 it is a different game. Progression is extremely slow. Weeks playing a single ship before you can progress is typical. Ports and virtually every feature costs real money. To those who have every ship, they have spent several hundred dollars just to buy ports. Premium ships are vastly superior to the regular ships. In every sense this is a p2w game. Thank the gods there are not many of them but faced with a team of premium ships tactics don't much matter. While carriers add a dimension to the game they also distort the essence of play. Playing in a carrier is a different view even, like a map based tactical view, you are no longer in a ship. The airplanes can also rather easily spot destroyers highlighting them for cruisers and battleships to destroy. Even if there are no carriers in your game, prepare yourself, many battleships have planes and even cruisers. So by level 5 in a destroyer prepare to have games were you do ok, and other games where you die without getting a single shot on anything. So by level 5 or 6 playing a destroyer is unpleasant. Quite often when I play my battleship, it is so slow I find the battle has already been decided before I can fire a single round. All my destroyers and cruisers rush forward, engage their mass of ships, get destroyed, and I am left with the carrier to die. Still haven't fire a shot. Not the fault of the game that my teams tactics are horrible, but that is typically what happens. So you have decided the only thing to play is a cruiser. Jack of all trades. Maybe the only consistent and relatively decent ship class in the game. No ability to put on ignore the children who play this game. I would say this alone makes the game loose a full point. Upgrading to a new ship is really annoying. They have made it so that an upgrade actually is worse than your current ship, all you have to do is upgrade everything about it to make it better. Transfer a captain from an old ship. Either pay to transfer him at no penalty or spend weeks with him penalized to incompetency before he understands how to make this new ship work. So pay, then pay, oh yeah new ship = new port so pay, then pay .... you get the picture. My advice would be to play this game to level 4, enjoy it as much as you can, and don't plan on higher level ships, from level 5 ships on you will start to experience a very different game.