While the lack of initial customization in the pre-game empire settings in favor of a more curated experience might seem disappointing at first, Distant Worlds 2 more than makes up for it no more than a few minutes later. On to possibly the most straight-up replacement potentially for Stellaris. From the intricate, puzzle-like mechanics of ship setup, to the cinematic battles, to great voice-acting, this game represents the best of an era and beyond. The Jupiter Incident is a game that, despite its age, can challenge any of its modern equivalents, thanks to the almost lost art of attention to detail. Mission after mission, you are called to improve your ships and your tactical skills as you take on stronger and stronger enemies to eventually save humanity from a great threat. In the story, you command a handful of capital ships after being mysteriously transported into a distant colony and in the middle of a very hostile environment. Nexus: The Jupiter Incident (like a few other games later down this list) does away with all the base/empire building, opening up space (figuratively and literally) for all the intricacies of ship-to-ship combat to be explored in all their glory in a gorgeous 3D environment. Or, from a few years ago, when the HD remaster was released. "Casually adds a boat-load of adventure into your strategy game" Instead, you are immersed in the experience of every first contact and the creation of every colony, before jumping into the next section of unknown space. Here you are not simply ticking off hyperlane junctions and shifting through simplistic pictures of randomly generated alien species. Which is where Galactic Civilizations IV comes in. A section admittedly lacking compared to other aspects of Stellaris. Playing Galactic Civilizations IV as a Stellaris veteran will feel like you are being denied the complexity of technology and combat and instead slammed into a polished and wonderous version of the early decades of a playthrough. As for aesthetics, every single species and faction is 3D animated and, colonized space feels truly alive. Gameplay-wise, it has merged some of the best aspects of Stellaris and Civilisation, resulting in a very approachable learning curve (a rare find in the genre). This latest installment brings to the table an exceptional experience of exploring and conquering the galaxy, both visually and mechanically.
#HOW TO PLAY STELLARIS SERIES#
The Galactic Civilizations series has been a staple of space 4X games for a long time. with a lot of scientists, it's a great way imo to get a lot of '+20% to X resource' techs especially early.A grandson of a grandad of grand strategy plus, with quick enough expansion, i get most of my energy and minerals from space, meaning most of my pops are specialists, which is excellent with egalitarianism and the +25% specialist production from Clone Potential, and there's a dramatic reduction in consumer goods use for specialists compared with not using shared burdens. With shared burdens in addition to that, as long as the pops aren't outpacing housing, it's just fine to have all the extra unemployed folks producing unity. I tend to have a significant energy surplus in my early games, so what i've done is phototrophic to use up that surplus of energy and reduce food consumption, and catalytic processing to use all that extra food on alloys, which leaves me with a lot more minerals to build faster. Those things can easily outpace your ability to provide infrastructure leading to massive stability hits from unemployment and housing shortages on an early colony. Notes: hard limit of 100 clones unless you go fertility route, taking pops from other empires won't let the pops grow (or assemble DO NOT BUILD ROBOT ASSEMBLY PLANTS, THEY KILL YOUR CLONES) on your clone worlds but will let you settle other worlds in your territory.*no clue on why you can't make robots or why pops can't grow on clone worlds, might be a bug I went from 3 small planets to 5 (6 and 7 in the future) because they grow on worlds without Vats and plan to Ecunopolis my homeworld and make it entirely clone populated with the rest of my world's getting terraformed into worlds ideal for my secondary citizens to gather resources for future extraction. I vassalized my neighbor and moved his pops from the world I took onto my 3 worlds, they won't grow if your clone pops are on the world but even xenophobic empires can just make one species residents and have them settle, cause they grow on worlds with no clones. I did a little bit of investigating using the save system and let me say that the Clone Soldiers Ascendant are incredibly powerful even if there is a hard limit of 100. I have been playing with the empire for two days now and can say that conquest is the way to go.