Recent reviews by Demon of Elru

More Bethesda trash.

Great game! The very last time the original crew was together after Star Trek VI. Fun and challenging games especially if you have never played them. Some puzzles can be unfair but such is the 90's adventure game! I highly recommend this and the 25th anniversary! Especially if you have an MT-32 or MUNT!

Classic Sierra!

Classic Star Trek must have for any adventure gaming and ST fan! Works well with MT-32 hardware and MUNT.

Fun election and political sim! Quite indepth and very accurate and lots of statistic to look over!

Despite the reviews I think it is a faithful remake for the most part. Play both version both are good in their own right.

Not as complex as previous titles, but still fun and satisfying nonetheless. Graphics are very nice and gameplay though simplified works well. Definitely worth picking up.

Lots of fun! Blows away Simcity in every catagory. Lots of micromanaging for those who want it.

Amazing game keep up the great work CA!

Where to begin...Having spent so many hours in the game pre 2.0 I was very much enjoying how the game was (slowly) progressing. Yes it had it share of major issues hence the need for a 2.0 type fix. However it was just a fix it was a complete redesign of the core mechanics of the game. Simply put, a 100% different game than what was originally purchased.

The redesign has made the game even slower and very tedious now. Having to build outposts in every single system to "claim" is not only absurd but downright boring and takes away from the game. The early game is very important, now instead of focusing on your early economy you must focus on "claiming" systems buy spending resources to build outposts. If you don't you will simply be boxed on and might as well restart.

This brings me to the removal of 3 FTL choices in favor of the most basic and frankly restrictive one, hyperlanes. This was done because it was easier for PDX not because it was a better design choice. This makes travel very long and even in your own empire it still takes multiple travel lanes to get around your empire. PDX claims this opens up "strategies" when in reality it only leaves one strategy "chokepoints". To me chokepoints are a lazy sidestep to the real problems the game faced. Chokepoints have become the ONLY strategy available in the game and makes everyone very one dimensional. Just build your border like a DMZ and you're golden. Not much strategy or even forward thinking involved in that.

Let us discuss the AI , now its never been that good to begin with in Stellaris but 2.0 has completely broke it and made it useless. The CPU has no idea how to manage its empire with the changes. Conquering and AI planet mid game only to find it has built 1 mine and 2 power plants the entire time. This has been a glaring issue since the release of 2.0 and has been largely ignore by PDX because they refuse to accept anything but blind praise. This is why they only respond to threads praising them on their forums and delete and ban all criticizm. The AI has been untouched since 2.0 came out and instead of working to fix the this game breaking issue PDX takes their sweet time pumping out more DLC to release "alongside" their patch. A blatant cash grab from DLC has become the PDX way. And when "Distant Worlds" releases its a given it will create even more bugs and balance issues. Unacceptable plain and simple.

As for war in Stellaris 1.9 again had its glaring issues being the warscore system needed major work. However I liked the idea of warscore. You have war goals and as more are achieved your score raises until its 100% forcing an unconditional surrender. The problem however was the doomstack combat. All wars came down to who had the biggest fleet and who won the battle. After the battle the winning side would steamroll their opponent. This needed major work I agree. However 2.0 once again completely revamps the system to pretty much a carbon copy of EU IV. Because basing your political/diplomatic/ and war systems on 16th century European politics is a one size fits all fix. So now you need a "casuss belli" to go to war (which is absurd and frankly lazy) and to conquer star systems you must makes "claims" in each one like a 16th century noble. Poor poor poor design choice. This isn't European history in space and to pretty much make the game EU IV in space is an insult to the players. On top of that warscore has now become war exhaustion, right now like the AI its 100% broken and wars drag on and on until their is a status quo treaty. The way war exhaustion is calculated makes no sense. Your exhaustion goes up per ship lost which allows the AI to constantly emergency warp out of battle leaving you the "loser" even though you took the field of battle simply because of their simplistic design. Bad choice for a war system in fact its downright terrible.

Diplomacy has remained largely unchanged, which isn't good a thing but not a bad thing either. Again diplomacy is laughbly simplistic based on modifiers and +'s to "scores". Easy to game the AI. Still missing is the ability to join wars midway through on a specific side or to request your allies come to your aid. This all must be done before war is declared. Also the diplomatic options are rather limited. There is very little trading available and what you can trade is just basic resources for maybe a research agreement. That is the extend of diplomacy. Again very bland and seems to ignored by PDX.

Finally we come to the game itself, which is built on a 12 year old 32 bit engine. This causes the game to severely bog down mid to late game no matter you PC build. FPS dip into the 30's and below and makes the game even longer because its constantly stutterring and trying to catch up. There is no excuse for this in 2018, there is no excuse to build a game on a 12 year old engine that has obvious limitiations and is poorly optimized. The Clauswitz engine is ancient and needs to be retired for good. I will not be purchasing anymore PDX products until they build a new modern 64 bit engine that can handle the games they want to design.

I continue to play this because I have invested so much time into it. But I doubt I will be purchasing anymore DLC for this game and I certainly cannot give my reccommendation for it.