Traditions
There's the equivalent of a tech tree for "traditions" which unlock various bonuses supporting particular play styles. It lets you specialise your empire somewhat. Some of the bonuses are a flat +X% to something (in theory enough to always be quite significant, although it doesn't always work like that), others unlock particular abilities (e.g. you can't take other empires as vassals at all unless you unlock the domination tradition).
There's also a mechanic when you finish all the traditions in one category you get an "ascension perk". That *doesn't* have to be related to that category, but there's various other restrictions. It's basically a unique bonus but (at least in theory) more so, sometimes granting a big discount to something like expansion, sometimes unlocking a unique ability like megastructures. Originally this mechanic was only in one of the expansions, but they eventually decided, being able to have thematically relevant ascension perks was so useful for other parts of the game and other expansions, they promoted it to the base game. Some of the snazzier perks (like a lot of bio-engineering, and building new megastructures) are still only in that expansion.
Factions
Something else I happened to like was that your empire has many squabbling factions. These naturally spawn when there's enough draw for your pops to embrace a new one, either one based on your empire ethos (I got pacifists, egalitarians, and 'traditionalists' i.e. religious first), or when something else causes faction support (e.g. wars cause military factions, etc).
They produce one of the most constrained resources, influence. Not in great amounts, but there's almost no sources of it as it acts as a cap on expansion rate. Up to a total maximum, depending on faction happiness (so it's easier to achieve if you have fewer factions to please.)
For a while my egalitarians and pacifists were pretty happy, but my spiritualists stubbornly hovered at 55%, just too low to produce any influence, and I couldn't do much to increase that, other than have a bigger proportion of spiritualists, or adopting 'Harmony' traditions (and I had others I wanted for my empire more). Now things are all over the place, but hopefully after the war everything will settle down rather.
What I did like, the things that please factions are quite specific and not just opposite: a few things are directly opposed like pro- or anti- robot or pro- or anti- war, and you have to pick one or the other, but most are things where they care about different things and you COULD do both, but opportunity cost means you have to prioritise the factions you most care about.
Oh that makes sense now!
I'd seen people talking about stellaris before: about befriending space amoebae or encountering crystalline entities; about getting stuck in their home system; about just *watching*. When I actually played it all those things made more sense.
More richness, more choices
I'm still less than half way through a first game, so unsurprisingly I'm already jumping ahead to form generalisations.
The general backdrop of stellaris, both graphics and mechanics is *glorious*. When I zoom in to a space battle or crystalline entity, I go wow. When I accept refugees fleeing a war, I get a thrill of satisfaction. As when I set all the living standards up to "utopian".
But strangely, it also feels a bit bare. Like, there's lots of potential anomalies you might find by surveying. But most of them are "Here's something weird, insert beautiful description here, click ok to collect a small bonus." There's nothing to *do*. Even a choice "A, get science research, B, get energy" would be more interesting. Many of the events related to planets are better here, although even then, it can be kind of obvious which choice *your* empire would take.
I understand, there's only so much effort for content, especially when there's a lot of effort on the UI and AI and so on at the same time. But it feels like, if you mixed-and-matched some art and some prose, you could make a lot more anomalies that were *interesting*, enough that you wouldn't get the sense of "I've sort of seen that one before."
Obviously it's hard to do that for stuff like space fauna that needs stats, balance, 3d art, etc, etc.
I hear, you can improve this a *lot* with a few mods that specialise in this. Which makes sense -- it's something modders *can* add, whereas improvements to the core game can *only* be done by the core developers. And some of the expansions add more here (and it's fair enough you need to pay for those -- that development time isn't free, if you want a better space game, you need to pay for it, or convince twice as many people to pay for the base game :)). But I think it looks like they mostly add fairly big events -- one or two add more "space species" type stuff and one or two add more anomalies, but it's not the headline thing.
I love how many games ARE making themselves open to mods. Although I wish we'd converge on a norm of "non-exclusive attribution license" or something for that sort of thing, where the game creator can choose to claim the mod if they want (so they're never risking getting locked out of part of their own game because someone else has the IP), but they need to credit the author and the author has the option of taking the stuff elsewhere.
Likewise, my impression is that the mid-game, once empires abut each other, is a bit quiet. Unless a fallen empire wakes up. I'm not sure, because I haven't actually played it yet. I wish there was more that would cause shifting alliances and priorities and borders. I guess wormholes do that somewhat, putting different empires suddenly in touch?
Tardigrade Mod
I joked about making a tardigrade mod with/for Rachel. A Tardigrade starting race. Tardigrade-relevant events and anomalies. Etc. I don't know if I actually will, I don't know how many more projects I need, but it would be really cute to do :)
There's the equivalent of a tech tree for "traditions" which unlock various bonuses supporting particular play styles. It lets you specialise your empire somewhat. Some of the bonuses are a flat +X% to something (in theory enough to always be quite significant, although it doesn't always work like that), others unlock particular abilities (e.g. you can't take other empires as vassals at all unless you unlock the domination tradition).
There's also a mechanic when you finish all the traditions in one category you get an "ascension perk". That *doesn't* have to be related to that category, but there's various other restrictions. It's basically a unique bonus but (at least in theory) more so, sometimes granting a big discount to something like expansion, sometimes unlocking a unique ability like megastructures. Originally this mechanic was only in one of the expansions, but they eventually decided, being able to have thematically relevant ascension perks was so useful for other parts of the game and other expansions, they promoted it to the base game. Some of the snazzier perks (like a lot of bio-engineering, and building new megastructures) are still only in that expansion.
Factions
Something else I happened to like was that your empire has many squabbling factions. These naturally spawn when there's enough draw for your pops to embrace a new one, either one based on your empire ethos (I got pacifists, egalitarians, and 'traditionalists' i.e. religious first), or when something else causes faction support (e.g. wars cause military factions, etc).
They produce one of the most constrained resources, influence. Not in great amounts, but there's almost no sources of it as it acts as a cap on expansion rate. Up to a total maximum, depending on faction happiness (so it's easier to achieve if you have fewer factions to please.)
For a while my egalitarians and pacifists were pretty happy, but my spiritualists stubbornly hovered at 55%, just too low to produce any influence, and I couldn't do much to increase that, other than have a bigger proportion of spiritualists, or adopting 'Harmony' traditions (and I had others I wanted for my empire more). Now things are all over the place, but hopefully after the war everything will settle down rather.
What I did like, the things that please factions are quite specific and not just opposite: a few things are directly opposed like pro- or anti- robot or pro- or anti- war, and you have to pick one or the other, but most are things where they care about different things and you COULD do both, but opportunity cost means you have to prioritise the factions you most care about.
Oh that makes sense now!
I'd seen people talking about stellaris before: about befriending space amoebae or encountering crystalline entities; about getting stuck in their home system; about just *watching*. When I actually played it all those things made more sense.
More richness, more choices
I'm still less than half way through a first game, so unsurprisingly I'm already jumping ahead to form generalisations.
The general backdrop of stellaris, both graphics and mechanics is *glorious*. When I zoom in to a space battle or crystalline entity, I go wow. When I accept refugees fleeing a war, I get a thrill of satisfaction. As when I set all the living standards up to "utopian".
But strangely, it also feels a bit bare. Like, there's lots of potential anomalies you might find by surveying. But most of them are "Here's something weird, insert beautiful description here, click ok to collect a small bonus." There's nothing to *do*. Even a choice "A, get science research, B, get energy" would be more interesting. Many of the events related to planets are better here, although even then, it can be kind of obvious which choice *your* empire would take.
I understand, there's only so much effort for content, especially when there's a lot of effort on the UI and AI and so on at the same time. But it feels like, if you mixed-and-matched some art and some prose, you could make a lot more anomalies that were *interesting*, enough that you wouldn't get the sense of "I've sort of seen that one before."
Obviously it's hard to do that for stuff like space fauna that needs stats, balance, 3d art, etc, etc.
I hear, you can improve this a *lot* with a few mods that specialise in this. Which makes sense -- it's something modders *can* add, whereas improvements to the core game can *only* be done by the core developers. And some of the expansions add more here (and it's fair enough you need to pay for those -- that development time isn't free, if you want a better space game, you need to pay for it, or convince twice as many people to pay for the base game :)). But I think it looks like they mostly add fairly big events -- one or two add more "space species" type stuff and one or two add more anomalies, but it's not the headline thing.
I love how many games ARE making themselves open to mods. Although I wish we'd converge on a norm of "non-exclusive attribution license" or something for that sort of thing, where the game creator can choose to claim the mod if they want (so they're never risking getting locked out of part of their own game because someone else has the IP), but they need to credit the author and the author has the option of taking the stuff elsewhere.
Likewise, my impression is that the mid-game, once empires abut each other, is a bit quiet. Unless a fallen empire wakes up. I'm not sure, because I haven't actually played it yet. I wish there was more that would cause shifting alliances and priorities and borders. I guess wormholes do that somewhat, putting different empires suddenly in touch?
Tardigrade Mod
I joked about making a tardigrade mod with/for Rachel. A Tardigrade starting race. Tardigrade-relevant events and anomalies. Etc. I don't know if I actually will, I don't know how many more projects I need, but it would be really cute to do :)