Stellaris is an amazing 4X space strategy game that has you lead a civilization of space explorers across the galaxy, colonizing planets, building them up, researching technologies, making choices and ultimately grow to be a powerhouse in some fashion. I had a terrific time with it and I could see myself playing it more or less forever like a Civilization title. I even bought some DLC for it because it opened up neat possibilities that weren’t in the base game - something I do fairly rarely.
I played my first game as the United Nations of Earth, a ragtag bunch of nice folks that just want everyone to get along. You have plenty of choices for races - and you can even customize them when you get accustomed to the game enough - and the three that I tried were different and interesting enough on a deeper level than selecting a different nation on Civilization. It’s a bit of a shame that this game has 12+ pieces of standalone DLC and that many of the cool races are stashed away behind them, but at least when you play multiplayer, you can use the races you don’t own. All factions have their own style of government and traits, and the race has some positive and negative effects as well.
The game started a bit intimidating, but at least the full tutorial was really helpful into getting me to understand most of the mechanics you’d need; The gist of the game loop is that you explore systems with your science ships, build outposts there with construction ships in order to claim the systems. Then you build mining and research stations to collect resources. Parallel to that you have habitable planets where you build districts and various other buildings in order to get resources like food, science, minerals, influence or unity. Everything balances itself out in some way; You need housing for citizens to do jobs, you need energy as an upkeep for pretty much everything else. You need minerals to make alloys. Increasing your empire requires more administrative capacity (or you suffer penalties) so a big part of the game is balancing your resources.
In order to help you, you have a science tree split into three branches that end up with an infinite number of production increments for increasing prices. You have traditions that unlock at specific unity thresholds, which act as miniature skill trees for your empire and unlock powerful boosts. You have the galactic market to buy and sell resources - if you are having troubles balancing the books by yourself and you have the galactic federation where you can try and push for bills that help you maximize doing whatever it is you want to do.
Stellaris isn’t entirely a spreadsheet simulator, however. As you explore the galaxy you’ll find planets with anomalies that you can investigate, choices with potentially wide-ranging consequences will come to your desk and the storytelling in the game will evolve alongside your retelling of what is going on. Sometimes you’ll be a race of sentient murder robots that want to eradicate all life, sometimes you’ll be a pacific rock creature that gets enslaved by a psychic hivemind only to be saved by a planet devouring swarm aided by a corporation of foxes. It’s pretty great.
Diplomacy and war are a big part of the game as well. You can use envoys and gifts to try and get better relations with your neighbors, allowing you free access through their borders and even favors that you can call in time of need. Otherwise you build starbases that can be fitted with weapons and other defensive modules, and ships that you can fully customize and place in fleets in order to control optimally. The ship system is something that I didn’t entirely understand and at no point the game explained to me why I should do it. You can select the type of gear you equip on your crafts - weapons, shields, etc - but I always went with ‘automatic best’. The war system is fairly complex; you need a good reason for war, wars cannot last forever, you have to invade or completely destroy planets you want to take over.
I had a great time with Stellaris! I have to admit that I never finished a single game - because I just wanted to see what else I could do with other factions - but it’s probably something that I’ll play on-and-off in the future. If you want a cool space strategy game with tons of depth and enough storytelling to keep you interested, this one is totally that! I kinda wish there was a “Game Of The Year” edition with all the included DLC'.
