Recent reviews by EpsilonEthereal

You literally cannot go wrong with it.

Game is really good.

For mods.

I'm no professional reviewer. I'm not even a professional Stellaris player (if such a thing exists.) I love space, I love strategy and I love killing dirty filthy xenos. Stellaris is a game about finding new planets, colonizing alien worlds and getting into bad, Sad (!) trade deals. Potentially the worst trade deals in strategy game history. There are many things I would call Stellaris: Good. Bad. Xeno Annhilation Simulator. But overall this game sucked over 560 hours of my life into it before I uninstalled it. As of today, December 10th, 2017, Stellaris is no longer installed, but I am writing a review for it.

Why? I love the game, but I also hate the game. During my first playthrough, I lost in the first 100 years. I was a poorly created nation that I thought would've been fun. This is the reason why it's easy to lose sometimes. There are definitely better Empires that can be created and are usually the "fun" empires to play. While there are offshoots, such as the One Planet Challenge and Inwards Perfection, it's mostly the same monotonous empire type, but that can't stop more roleplaying capabilities. That is a lot of the fun when it comes to Stellaris, is working around a relatively constricted system and making it yours. With mods at your side and a customizable Galaxy, almost any science-fiction empire, coalition, alliance or federation can be played. While the game isn't completely unplayable with mods, there is a reason why I have almost no achievements in Stellaris -- mods disable achievements.

I don't have the greatest PC in the world. It's quite bad actually. After first the 50 years the game starts to slow down, and by the time the massive deathball fleets start slugging it out, it feels like it takes 50 years for the battle to end. Looking at discussions and other player's comments, Stellaris does have issues with performance when it comes to the later years. The difference here is that while my bad PC starts chugging after 50-70 years, better PC's can start chugging after a mere 100 - 150 years, which just by glancing at screenshots and discussions, a lot of players like to go into the 200 and 300 year long campaigns. The longest campaign I've seen went into the 2700's, and the game starts in 2200.

Combat is negligable. It's a matter of who has the largest fleet in the game and comes down to one battle and then becomes either you building up a fleet to take back your captured planets to keep your warscore afloat or moving from planet to planet pumping your warscore up. Although it can be made more interesting, say with friends you intentionally don't have any fleets over 50K fleet power, you can have such a skirmish-based war, but in most conventional wars there is nothing like this. In the upcoming 2.0 update, there are changes coming to this, the idea of a death stack fleet is going to be hard to take away.

Colonizing becomes less of an effort and more of an off-hand thing after the first 30-ish years. You look closely at your colonies and make sure that their needs are tended to for your first five or so colonies. Afterwards it becomes more of a template system applied over planets and using them to produce more ships and armies to conquer more smaller empires and take their planets or make them fight for you.

Exploration is one of the funnest aspects of the Stellaris early game. Getting anomalies, finding new Empires, figuring out who your rivals are, figuring out who your friends are and having your sciENTIST DIE AGAIN BECAUSE OF A FAILED 5% ANOMALY. But this early game is also the most dangerous. Your beginning fleet can be destroyed by the wrong jump into a system with a Leviathan. You can lose your entire science ship fleet in one year. Some slightly larger empire can have a fleet twice the size of yours. Some slightly smaller empire can have a fleet half your size and suddenly look conquerable. Drawing your borders and finding your mid-game is one of the best parts of the game.

The mid-game is when it starts to fall apart and Paradox tries to fix a hole in a tanker with scotch tape. The game starts to slow down. The anomalies start disappearing. The special projects are being researched. The fleets are staring each other down and waiting to fight. Colonies start becoming self-sufficient, and half your colonies are in sectors anyways. While the game starts picking up in diplomacy and war in these parts, the diplomacy is mediocre to say the most and I've already covered the combat. Diplomacy boils down to rivaling your to-be friend's rivals, and sending them some minerals, food and energy monthly for nothing. You then send a non-aggression pact and then a defensive pact. Don't get me started on how the AI declares wars either.

During the late game, things become interesting again. 150-200 years into the game, the legendary and scary Crises start popping up. Everything from the Robotic Contingency, to the interstellar Prethorean Scourge and the devastating Unbidden and their kin. While not exactly an end-game crisis, the War In Heaven divides the galaxy and introduces the galactic powerhouses of the Awakened Empires. All of these breathe new life into the game again, and can be the key to winning the game in a matter of years or fighting a losing war over the course of decades.

Overall, Stellaris is good and bad. I love it so much, otherwise I wouldn't have spent 564 hours on it. I befriended Xenos and I annihilated them. I conquered the galaxy and I helped the galaxy. I lost the game in 10 years and I won the game in 200. I love this game and I hate this game. It's still rough around the edges but is definitely a diamond in the rough. It's a game that, like most Paradox games, still need a couple years before it becomes one of the definitive games in the space 4x genre. I recommend it, but play it later. It still needs a little bit of time to mature.

A great rogue-like game. You will die constantly. You will spend hours finding the near-mythical crystal sector. You will have one favourite ship, and it won't be the Engi B. You will die. In sector 1. A lot. And you will also die when you've found the perfect weapons system and you think "just one more jump, I'll make it."

FTL: Faster Than Light is an amazing timewaster, a beautiful game that has a surprising amount of story, and one of the best Sci-Fi games I have played in a long, long time. Whenever someone says they want a sci-fi game, a timewaster or a rogue-like, I ALWAYS recommend FTL before anything else.