Stellaris (PC)

Stellaris is a grand space strategy sim brought to you by the same studio that gave us Crusader Kings, Victoria, and one of my all time favorites, Europa Universalis. Of course I am talking about those Swedes over at Paradox, and their penchant for creating games with huge amounts of depth. When I heard about the game, my first thought was “could this style of gameplay hold up … in space?”

Big Bang

My God, It's Full of Stars!

So you start off slow and have to manage your budget of the two main resources Energy Credits and Minerals. There are also other things that need to be budgeted such as influence, physics research, society research, and engineering research – but more on that later. The first step is to utilize your science ship in order to scan planets for those resources. Once you find them you have to build a construction ship to capture and collect them. It can be slow going for a while, especially if you don’t have the resources to grow. Just as in other Paradox games, budgeting and growth go hand-in-hand, but this can be extremely frustrating at times.

Once you’ve started this process, you’re on your way to exploring the cosmos, which will ultimately lead you to repeat the above process, as well as discover alien races. You have ability to trade with these races, make war on them, or sign treaties. Once you meet your first alien species the game pics up the pace, though it can still feel like a crawl at times. At this point you can expand and colonize other planets, set up frontier outposts to control larger areas of space, and also set up sectors that can be more easily managed.

One of the more frustrating parts of Stellaris for me personally was the Homeworld functions. Your Homeworld allows you to generate all of the resources listed above using citizens that live on it. They only allow you 16 tiles per world on which to collect resources, with various buildings used for upgrades. The part that can get frustrating is when things such as starvation come into play. This is where the game can be difficult, because you don’t seem to have any control over this problem. I found that once I colonized a planet I would have to wait for my race to reproduce enough in order to have the workers to actually capitalize on the resources I desired.

It's a Trap!

If you’re someone who really likes a lot of graphically intense battles, then this is not your game. The combat graphics are pretty basic, and definitely not the focus. As a whole, the graphics of the game are what I would call average. Nothing that will wow you, but the game does have its moments where it can be really beautiful – the stars, for example.