Review and Feedback: Spoilers for the Galactic Paragons Expansion

[The Golden Knight]

Dear Paradox and its Staff,

For anyone who accidentally hovered your mouse over this strip in the Discussion feed, I will be talking about all the specifics with the Galactic Paragons expansion (and maybe others since there had been a number of updates since I played last). In other words...CAUTION: SPOILERS!

ALSO, the experiences documented here presume a strictly vanilla build of the game (OFFICIAL CONTENT ONLY), fully up-to-date at the time of this chronicle's initial posting and distribution. And lastly, Devs, everything I say here is because I care and I want this game to be the best it can possibly wish to aspire for!

So take notes!

First, the "Under One Rule" is absolutely epic! That by itself was worth the price of entry! And that's coming from me, playing as Empress Scarlet (based off my own lore and characters from my own writing franchises) with consolidating absolute power (bordering on outright divine intervention; a biblical heroine for the modern generations) and ultimately forming the Global Empire! This is as close as the game has gotten to my vision of how that story plays out: she has unified Earth, but protests and rebels abound! Yet she can handle everything they throw at her, and it's glorious! My only complaint is that some of the rewards felt underwhelming.

Specifically, the "Second Unification War" (yes, that's a thing; SPOILERS) was an absolute highlight...stressful at the time, to see a formidable enemy fleet magically spawn in my realm with pockets that I needed to RE-conquer, yet when it was all done and over, the triumph felt truly satisfying. (This is also on an "Ironman" game, and I've got the insight achievement to prove it. You can only slightly cheese "Ironman" to a point, and it involves Alt-F4. I know it's not "how you're supposed to play", but just attribute it to one of Scarlet's god/demigod powers!) All of that, for just a +5% weapon effect?! That's equal to a single repeatable tech...yeah, only ONE of those endgame options! The reward was underwhelming, for all the trouble (and the fate of my whole empire at stake) it probably should've been closer to another relic. In-character, Scarlet's exact words would be, "I want their leader's head on a platter! And this time, I mean it LITERALLY!" (Digression: that actually happens in my own stories and that timeline; it's called "World War 4" and ends in "The First Interstellar Genocide"!) So yeah, if I had Dev powers, I would've added a relic called "Rebel Leader's Head" with the flavor text saying, "The Empress/Emperor/(ruler_title) was very clear in his/her instruction, and his/her loyal subjects have carried it out to the letter. So it sits preserved in the Royal Treasury, physically resting on a platinum platter." Make it provide a passive unity bonus, and when activated increases empire-wide stability and decreases crime both by 25. The only challenge is defining what the head would actually look like, given the context of so many varying species portraits - and accounting for ALL those variables in relic form. I won't lie, doing that justice is going to take WORK! And it's work I personally do not have the chops or the drive to see done by my own two unarmed hands.

Later, she's even survived a near-death experience which put her in a "preservation apparatus", and my mind can not help but imagine "THE GOLDEN THRONE!" Any fellow 40K fans, you know what I'm talking about! ;) If you don't, look it up. (Just to get you in the right frame-of-mind, when playing this specific run, I had the whole "Warhammer 40K Dawn of War 2 Soundtrack" playing on loop. Look it up!) It's a real cool idea binding the ultimate luminary to the original capital, yet instead of giving "+800 years", you should've just slapped on the "Immortal" flag like you do with robots (as well as the psionic "Chosen One" event). At that point, unless there are "more shenanigans to come", I think she's earned it. (Also, the more shenanigans, the more fun! That's the only feedback I have to say about that: MORE, PLEASE!) I have no idea what other shenanigans these "rebels" can throw at me, because right now, there's nothing she can't conquer! And I'm looking forward to more anus-kicking! But for now, even with disappointing rewards, with all the story told thus far, the sheer awesomeness was single-handedly worth my $15.

On a similar note, there was a new excavation site I found, and you'll know it's the right one because completing it requires MULTIPLE titanic hoops to overcome. First, it's 110% isolated, with no hyperlanes and no wormhole, so the only way to reach it is with a jump drive (and that by itself is a very late-game tech). Second, it's guarded by multiple permanently hostile fleets each with a military rating in the 5 digits, so blowing them up is a must. Third, before you can start digging the excavation, you need a starbase there, and because it's so thoroughly isolated, the only way to make that happen is by maxing out your Influence at 1k (which on average generates anywhere from 3 to 5 points per in-game month; closer to 10 when you have all the endgame stuff unlocked). And finally, the excavation itself starts at difficulty 1, but eventually ramps up to difficulty 9! So, let me recap:

Research jump drives
Defeat a crazy space navy
Max out your influence
Dig all the way to difficulty 9

And what do you get for all this?! What's the prize waiting at the end of this sequence of obstacles? Only 200 "minor artifact fragments" or whatever that pink currency is called. Devs, if you're reading this, I practically MAXED OUT on the stuff by the time I could attempt this excavation in earnest! For all that legwork, I was hoping for some kind of super cool RELIC! But NO! This is what I call a disappointment! For all the singularities I bore witness to, I was almost expecting a second Planet-Killer. (The lore describes the site as a survey listening post or something of that effect, but I already repaired a damaged megastructure which gave me the all-seeing eye across the entire galaxy! So a second monitoring station would've been redundant...and if THAT was the prize, that explains why I noticed nothing from it. Either way, the alignment of circumstances made 200 artifact pink-currency points extremely underwhelming.)

I absolutely adore the expanding on leaders across the board, not just the renowned and legendary ones that can join (or you starting out with your own custom-made legendary character thanks to "Under One Rule"). But like everyone's arguing about, I too chafe under the "soft-cap" now imposed, particularly in endgame when most of the galaxy's resistance is reduced to "mop-up duty" and micromanaging landing troops plus navies plus constantly picking out repeatable techs PLUS all the other shenanigans really tests your brain's capacity for multitasking (that's what happens when you make war with 1 or 2 main factions, and each one has splintered into 4 or 6 fragment factions, so you have to clean that up as well - really makes a MESS out of the galactic map). The XP limits get steep after a while, plus with a big empire spanning hundreds of stars, you're inevitably going to need more than a dozen leaders grand total. The farthest you can possibly get (as far as I've seen) was raising the soft-cap to 13. Yes, THIRTEEN, that's it! You want to know how to fix this? Make raising this an endgame repeatable tech, same way you've done with starbases.

There's one other MILD disappointment, and I'm sure it's all fair under "game balancing". The ascension perks; I'm not complaining about shifting some of the ascension perks under tradition trees (that's just a straight-up tradeoff, a net-zero change). What I never liked was how genetics is mutually exclusive with psionics. I GUESS it makes sense that you can't do genetics if you're going to turn your population into robots...but what of the new cybernetics path? Why can't we have both genetics AND cybernetics?! AND psionics all on top of that?! Again, I get it from a "game balancing" point of view, but if I'm going to become a literal God-Emperor (or roleplay as a female equivalent), what good narrative sense should stop me from having ALL the goodies? That should be a new benefit added for an event tree AFTER the preservation apparatus; like immortality wasn't enough, let's give a bonus ascension perk and/or tradition tree to bend this rule! IF Warhammer 40K's God-Emperor of Mankind can master both genetics AND psionics (or whatever their psychic equivalent is), or even my aforementioned "All of the Above", I don't see why Scarlet should be forbidden from doing the same! (Yet this is specifically within the "Under One Rule" context, where the ruler is so incredibly powerful it blurs the line between mortal and deity.)

Because with the way I set the timeline and map-generation parameters, I was flabbergasted with how much I could accomplish in only 100 years of in-game time; I didn't even get to the "Endgame Crisis" stage yet; only hardly "Mid Crisis" of raider parties unifying, and it was enough for my two biggest rivals (at the time) to work together with me as we absolutely crushed and annihilated our collective "mutual enemy". That was fun. Sure I could've contained it by myself with enough time, but it was fun seeing those factions come together for a common goal - and me being part of it. And I set the victory timer to Y3K. So since games start at year 2200, that's a long, 800 year journey. What's to fill the void of all the repeatable techs and finishing 75% of the galaxy at that point with another 600 years left to go?

My biggest technical issue comes from the mouse cursor/arrow being misaligned when playing in fullscreen. At least there's a workaround for it: play in borderless windowed mode. But still, what gives! Good news is, that aside, there has not been a single crash encountered! (Alt-F4 does not count.) I've found a handful of VERY MILD typos, so given modern standards, that's a rock-solid release from a "nuts-and-bolts" perspective, even though Stellaris as a game is growing as ancient as the empires it enshrines.

...OK, now that I think about it, the framerate does dip in the endgame, and there are times the game pauses for seconds with every in-game month ending. That's because there is *SO CURSING MUCH* going on under-the-hood with empires of that scale (largest galaxy map, all-seeing eye megastructure, and me having dominion of 75% of that entire map - 50% of the map on a more conservative guess by way of "eyeballing it"), that I might be pushing the very game engine to its breaking point! I'm running on a DREADNOUGHT of a gaming rig, with Windows 11, RTX 2070 SUPER graphics card, i9 CPU, and 256GB of RAM! (Yes, you read that correctly, I am close to having the best damn hardware money can buy! I'm not exaggerating in calling it a "Dreadnought". It even WEIGHS like a small capital ship, also! And for pun, the brand name of some parts is "Corsair".) So whatever stuttering or quirkiness the game has going on, everything's good on my end. I don't know of a quick or easy fix, just it'd take some real programming wizardry to utilize the full power of my computer in a way that'd make it say, "Finally, a worthy challenger! Our battle will be LEGENDARY!"

I almost forgot one detail. There's a strange group of planets with an alien race that has been said to connect their planets with hyperlanes or something. "Grand Theft Planet" made me burst laughing, then I yelled, "WHAT?!" That's awesome, but when they wanted to gift me a planet, I instead chose, "Give me your SECRETS!" Then they responded, "You want our secrets? Come and take them!" One tense and tough invasion later, and I still have no idea on their secrets. Nothing. I neutron-bathed each and every one of them, then landed my own colonists, so maybe I destroyed the secrets with it. AH WELL!

Let me know your thoughts, and Devs, if you see this, it'd be nice if you let me know. ;)

Glory to the Empire!
Long live Empress Scarlet!

Semper Bellum!
Jay

[The Golden Knight]

P.S. Small detail, but just now I noticed that stealth features can NOT be placed on battleships or larger. It only fits on cruisers or smaller.

COME ON!

I mean part of me says "I get it", but remember: God-Emperor. I want to say "Why NOT have a stealth battleship!" Except for "Dark Matter Cloaking", but that hard-caps at 1 point of stealth. Quite flimsy in endgame, but whatever. Tradeoffs.

[Knightspace]

Originally posted by The Golden Knight:

but that hard-caps at 1 point of stealth. Quite flimsy in endgame, but whatever. Tradeoffs.

Psi-Phase Field Generator raises this up to 2, you can get it after you research psi jump drives. There are admiral traits, civics, traditions and ascention perks that raise this further, beyond even 5 stealth points.

Well, that's how it used to work in 2.7, i have no idea how Paradox screwed up with that leader rework now.

[TehJumpingJawa]

"hey chatgpt, write me a meandering forum post so long & verbose that nobody will read it"