Usually it's just stations, honestly. There's a very strict limit on how many actual starports you can have, and I feel it's very constricting, and far too low at the moment. Three bases to start with? That's in insanely strict cap. There simply aren't enough of them - and not even in an "interesting choices" way, because it tends to be fairly obvious which systems you absolutely need to upgrade a station in. They also take too much to upgrade. Defensive platform or colony ship? Not much of a decision there: of course colony ship, as long as you're not under fire and desperate.masseffect7 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2018 9:19 amAbout the only thing I like is the addition of starports, but I don't like having to put a starbase in EVERY system. So, essentially you have all the drawbacks of hyperlanes in that you have limited paths, but you have none of the advantages in the faster speed. I know everyone is slower now, but speeding it up could have made the early game less of a bore. Also, the game has basically become one of waiting for your minerals to build up, build a star base, repeat.
I feel this way too. Previously, I avoided having hyperlanes entirely (and would keep them out of my games) just because it was so easy to get blocked in. I'm somewhat okay with the old warp travel, but hyperlanes are the one I disliked the most. They're slow, and have no advantages. Empires using hyperlanes inevitably lost to those using anything else just because they aren't good. The addition of having to fly through the entire star system to continue is also painfully slow. I understand why they made these changes, but the "why" doesn't justify it, honestly. Instead of providing interesting choices and decisions, they reduced it to "which of these three paths do I take next". Instead of wondering how you'll cope with the FTL methods of other races, it's fairly obvious which directions they'll come from, and trivial to prepare. In essence, they've reduced what used to be a 3D galactic map to a painfully-slow 2D.masseffect7 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2018 9:19 amI hate hyperlanes, I hated them before and I hate them even more in this iteration because they seem to have slowed down space travel. So, essentially you have all the drawbacks of hyperlanes in that you have limited paths, but you have none of the advantages in the faster speed.
I dislike all the Civ games, honestly, as well as Crusader Kings II, and all those others. The map and surrounding environment altogether had too much control in "defining" your potential actions. There was usually a very clear "optimal" way to do things because of how the map was laid out, and I didn't like that. That's part of why I liked wormholes (interesting tidbit: I didn't enjoy Stellaris nearly as much before I started using wormholes): they open up the galaxy and give you a wide variety of choices about how you're going to expand. Instead of "which lane do I travel down next", it's "which of these dozen stars would be the best place to build an outpost". (That's something else I dislike: building outposts used to matter a lot more due to star layout: you could place outposts to encompass multiple stars, and, if cleverly placed, you could take more stars later when your borders expanded.)masseffect7 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2018 9:19 amI realize I'm in the minority, but I think I'm in the group of players who are so put off by these changes that I will never go back to Stellaris. As I said, I'd be fine if these changes had been made in the sequel. For example, I hate Civ VI, but I'm fine with it because I really like Civ IV and V, which are completed games.
I didn't find myself hating the game, though. I'm still in the process of giving it a chance, I guess. I'm going to wait to see how combat holds up now before I make a decision. And, in waiting to see how combat holds up... I'm also going to wait until they patch the game-breaking bugs. I actually have a good amount of faith that they will, and I'm not worried about that.
Edit because Flakesninja:
I think he's saying "Save the big changes for a Stellaris II, whenever they get around to it", not "Sell Stellaris 2.0 as its own game". I find that completely reasonable, as they'd have time to upgrade and overhaul basically everything over the time it was in development. That's common practice, really. That's basically how Hearts of Iron, Civilization, and all the others work.Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2018 10:19 amso your alternative to breaking the promise of contiously improving and maintaining the game for a minority is to break the promise for a majority and demanding additional 60+bucks for whats essentially a patch?
that sounds vastly more like "testing customer loyalty" than what they actually have done.
Emphasis mine - "improvement", in this case, is an opinion, not a fact.Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2018 10:19 amyou mean the same price you pay for pmuch any other game out there for which you dont get the amount of improvement paradox hands out to everyone for free?