I really like the new planetary management/pop system, much more interesting to specialise your planets now, and it’s also great that pop growth now isn’t proportional to the number of planets you have… It’s a major shame about the lack of optimisation and the bugs, though. My biggest hope for this update was a performance boost so fingers crossed they’re still gonna deliver on that!
Also, I’ve seen a lot of UI complaints, especially around the planetary management. It definitely had issues on launch but I’ve not found it unplayably bad like some others? Definitely could display more info but not disastrously bad
I love the new civics/origins and bio ship sets, but ambivalent on gameplay
Bioships feel underwhelming since we already had beast tamers and orgo processing (civic free is nice tho), was also annoyed how nature varients take up more naval cap. Like it makes sense why, but I had two fleets mature during a war and ruin my economy (nav cap suddenly jumped to 248/120 when I had 3 fleets of 50)
Wilderness seems to be too strong
Looks like the ai understands this system less, I had a very mediocre run turn out as the galactic power
Probably my biggest beef with Stellaris is that the AI is dog water, I messed around with some of the AI overhauls but I believe most of them turn every civilization into “We’re going to wipe you off the map” when I mostly want to vibe.
Pretty sure there’s an “AI aggressiveness” slider when you’re starting a new game, have you tried fiddling with that? Also you could make a custom start and put only empires with peaceful ethics in your game.
Even in Vanilla I always seem to end up surrounded by really hostile chud Empires that are completely unwilling to negotiate so I find myself intending to play the United Federation of Planets and forced to play the Tau Empire lmao
I played with the Federations dlc a couple times and then realized I had basically no say and found the constant voting really irritating.
Yeah, it’s often kinda frustrating. The first run I did with Federations enabled was kinda darkly hilarious at least because I played a leftist faction, joined the federation, got forced to do loads of ancap shit because everyone else was hyper capitalist which made the galaxy inefficient and almost everyone got killed by the late game crisis.
Yeah I was envisioning the Star Trek Federation and it was much more like the Star Wars Republic where no one was willing to goto war against the aggressive advanced civ on my border.