Marduk Malar

Stellaris is a semi-grand-strategy space game of conquering a galaxy with soft feet, meaning this is the PG version of strategy or conquering your enemies. Holds your hand and says no no, you cant do that to your enemies, just do this and make amends with it. The game is great at some things as this pushes further up what i liked from Galactic Civilizations games from stardock, also federations dlc does improve the way all AI moves around and the performace of the game specially with me playing with 15 AI with 1000 starsystems on a 7 year old gaming computer, sometimes to mess around i pushed it to 1600 stars from the last time i played, of course it sweats when i reach to year 2400 i think when things tend to get nasty performance wise. Now, my issue with the game is that if you want to go kick someone to kingdomcome and pummel it to the ground, the normal mechanics of the game prevents you to do so by using some warscore/fatigue system that affects some areas that aren't usual to events, just points, reach to a point and if you dont reach certain points in what you invaded, it reverts, same with when the score hits to a point you're forced to make peace for ten years, I modded the game so there is no conflict ending to continue a war even it negatively affects me in some way, another issue is when you destroy someone's planet with the world killer, is just another score mechanic that doesnt do much and you dont trigger a nasty response from another AI, just a -100 on the victim's diplomacy score profile. Compared to distant worlds, is completely the opposite, lacking mostly in stories/events as it only have some, but here you can control every detail if you want even ships to something specific in the middle of battle instead of the AI doing something stupid not doing something properly in stellaris, like many cases that a hostile is in the system, you cant control the ships. With the federations update is also another issue that I find "meh" fun for a while until you know whats in it, in which the trailer oversells it and you once again have to set the mode to role play yourself. I do like exploration, in which falls greatly in to the events stories that's pop up, specially to the places and star systems you can visit and see the "eye candy" of the weird,strange,unknown things that makes sci fi a sci fi. Something that distant stars and leviathans should have been in the first version of the game and then expand from there with cooler stuff. This is a cool/"meh" game with many rules for "conquest", instead, they could have used mechanics for pushing a player to disastrous events that isn't dependent fully on a score based system, give free will to players with serious positive and negative consequences, also set the AI to keep up so that the annoying features i mentioned before becomes irrelevant as it seems the rules are there so anyone good slows down, you might like it and burn the game because you will end up with 1000plus hours, for me, is a play it to the end, probably do 2 or 3 rounds and let it rest for months until i recharge the interest batteries.