Recent reviews by Milklander

Hey! Do you love conquering the galaxy? Do you enjoy massive fleet battles between alien empires? Does the idea of fighting off an extra galactic invader excite you? Awesome! Well forget all that because that was back in the glory years of 2016-2018, now this game is *click* *click* *click* Stellaris has fallen so far from grace its unbelievable.

All the cool stuff that was part of what made Stellaris fun has been replaced with pointless micro management or outright ruined. Fleets have to be split up now because reasons, some people don't like the doomstack. The result? 6 different fleets, 5 of them all set to follow the first one... Yeah really sorted that doomstack problem.

Late game you will be migrating people as your planets become over populated too. That's right YOU will do that. They don't migrate themselves anymore like they did in the past.

Your massive empire that had sectors to manage it for you in the past now still has sectors... but they're largely useless. You can set individual planets to auto build or the entire sector. Neither will give anything close to satisfactory results. And enabling both at the same time? Who knows what happens then....

Your 2 resource types you had to manage in the past is now like 10 different types. Yay. Fun.

Also the AI which struggled a bit with 2 resources but generally muddled through is now entirely incompetent with the added complexity of more resources to juggle.

Stellaris always struggled a bit with late game performance. This hasn't changed. They take a step forward with optimisations then take two steps back by adding complexity nobody asked for.

What nobody asked for but were given anyway:
- More micro
- Pointless clicking
- Different types of resources, alloys are cool, the other 6? Gtfo.
- Ruining sectors
- All this BS indirectly making the AI worse

I realise I have not talked about federations at all really but that's because I don't care about it. It's been what... 2 years since the big 2.0 change to the game and it's still a shambles? Who is steering this ship? Who is in charge of these terrible design decisions they keep making? Time to hire somebody competent and do some actual usability testing with your game.

I haven't seen an end game crisis since 2018. I get fed up with the boring micro and bail before I get the chance to fight one. Also yeah the performance still sucks on Ryzen 3700X, Vega 56 and 32GB of RAM.

The old naval system was garbage. The new naval system is more complicated garbage. I mean ffs how complicated and obtuse could they make things!? Land warfare is fine, I get it, I figured that out on my own. Air warfare is fine, I get it, its simpler than land and has less depth but that's okay. No issues with either of these. But naval warfare is just build ships (takes a loooong time) set regions and ??? Idk. Naval invasions are still a total ballache as well. You need to get naval superiority in every region from where you start to where you land.... Can't I just load a bunch of guys into boats and send ships with them??? It's just a game! Make it fun ffs.

PROS:
- New focus trees and stuff? Honestly I don't know what else was added. I was looking forward to the navy rework since the old system was a bit crap (but at least it was somewhat simpler!).

CONS:
- Navy still sucks.
- Navy too complicated.
- Naval invasions still a massive ballache to do.
- Because of the previous 3 points playing USA, Japan or UK is still basically a no go since they are heavily navy focused.
- Researching many little tiny bits of ships IS NOT FUN.

OVERALL:
Its HOI 4, its still a very fun game, I would get this expansion for 4 quid or less. Just ignore the navy aspect of it. It is clear they have done ZERO play testing with this with actual users.

I can't recommend this for the following reasons:
- Lag, the performance is worse than before! And it wasent even particularly good before.

- Micromanagement hell.

- Sectors are useless now. This exacerbates the above point.

- The AI was never Stellaris strong point but now it is beyond hopeless.

- It's just no fun in it's current state. This update/DLC needs quite a few more months development and playtime.

- Probably the worst thing... Paradox said that performance would improve with the removal of the tile system. They also said they wanted to reduce the amount of pointless clicking required in game. And they have essentially done the OPPOSITE for both of these things.