Three and Out – ‘Stellaris’

Stellaris is a huge game, taking upwards to three weeks to beat. It plays like a space opera akin to the science fiction epics by Heinlein or Asimov. In the game you’re tasked with taking an empire and exploring, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating until your empire covers the galaxy. The game’s main points have changed over the course of its life from being a mediocre 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) to being a complex 4X game that requires a steep learning curve. For 4X games, my attention usually falls to three game-defining characteristics. Is the interface intuitive? How does the game’s economy work? Do the story and in-game politics connect to support the conquest you’ve started?

By far the best aspect about Stellaris is the game’s interface. When Stellaris first launched, the game looked like a mash-up between the ancient 1996 Freeciv game and a text-based exploration game. Now the game sports a collapsible menu that hides vast amounts of detail within submenus. Those submenus are supported by the resource bar, giving you an economic snapshot of your empire. The resource bar has also gone through changes. Instead of being a static bar with ticker numbers showing your empire’s income, it functions as a navigation bar to get you to important economic, political, and research actions quickly. Even with the improvements, the game still relies heavily on text-based game events that the player must read. The text-based nature doesn’t detract from the game, instead, these moments allow a player to catch their breath between the long space-opera gameplay that makes up much of Stellaris. Overall, the improvements to the interface are vital to establishing economic, political, or martial dominance.

An intuitive interface allows a player to manage their empire’s economy better, but if the economy is balanced poorly, the interface does little to hide that ugliness. Luckily, in Stellaris, the economy and how to manage it has improved significantly. They’ve incorporated story elements and politics into the economy through text-based events. In the early days of release, the game’s economy was governed by little more than four separate factors: energy, minerals, food, and influence. Now the economy is robust, adding three new resources: alloys, consumer goods, and unity. These new resources are necessary, yet to get them requires an empire to balance the earning and spending of minerals and energy. You must also balance diplomacy along with you economy. Diplomacy feels consequential because the other empires’ AI make land grabs, actively insult you, attempt to barter (poorly), and craft economic and research agreements between their nations and yours. All three areas, the interface, the economy, and the connection between story and politics align to craft a well articulated and strong 4X game.