I last played over a year and a half ago and left off saying that I might check out again later once more DLCs and patches have been out. Well, I did buy a couple of other DLCs, occasionally paid some attention to the updates, and I did give it another whirl. Unfortunately while I agree that the game is much improved since then, I still found the fun factor lacking and ended up being mostly very bored.

A lot of that is at least partly my own fault, I realize. The patches released since the last time I’d played have completely overhauled the planet development system and how resources are used. Between the new districts, the housing mechanic, population having jobs, alloys and so on, there is a lot to take in. The learning curve is quite formidable even if one already understood the previous version of the game. Out of a preponderance of caution as I had to relearn everything, I set the game difficulty too low, not giving the AI any resource boosts at all. This resulted in a far too unchallenging experience. I then exacerbated it by choosing to play a so-called tall faction that expands only slowly and tried to be friendly with everyone. Whenever a neighbor started getting antsy, I send over envoys to foster good relations. This allowed me to avoid any wars whatsoever until past the late game, earning a nifty trophy that I didn’t even know existed.

The result was an almost entirely peaceful game that got progressively more boring the more I out-teched the other factions. Barring things like wiping out mining drones, the only combat I was involved in was being raided by marauders. The first time I just paid them off. The second time I decided to test how tough they were and got thoroughly trounced, though I still did enough damage that they gave up. The third time I knew I had the raiders completely outmatched but though they said they would be sending a raiding fleet, none ever showed up. Even up to the end game date whenever I tried talking to them they only asked if I was ready to pay the tribute the demanded. I thought nothing more of them until I received a message that due to another empire destroying one of their habitats, a Great Khan has arisen and mustered a Horde. Finally something interesting happening I thought. But as it was in the late game by then, the empire destroyed the horde without breaking a sweat and that was that.

Much later than that, still at peace and still being more powerful than everyone else despite not expanding outside my little patch of space due to completing a ring world, a science nexus and many orbital habitats, I finally received a message indicating that the Prethoryn Scourge was approaching. Okay, I thought time to fortify everything, refit everything t be anti-armor and prepare fr the oncoming storm. Except I did everything and still nothing happened. So I went online and learned that upon first receiving the message, the mean time until you first encounter the Vanguard is about 60 years. That’s insane! At the slow speed the game runs on where I’m at, it would take days of just waiting to get the date to that point. There’s no way I’m going to waste my time doing that. Research has long been boring since it’s just small incremental improvements and nothing changes. It would still take me a long, long time to fill up my ringworld with people and I could get my Dyson Sphere fully complete, but why bother?

I suppose the game would have been a lot more interesting if I didn’t try so hard to be a purely defensive pacifist. I could try to pick a fight with the one Awakened Empire in my game to make things more lively for example or plain tried to conquer the whole galaxy. If I’d explored more outside my niche, I would probably have encountered more events and provoked earlier crises. But I honestly that being a pacifist was a valid playstyle and with all the DLCs, surely something interesting would happen anyway. It is kind of fun to mess around in the galactic community, trying to pass resolutions to weaken the next strongest factions while increasing my own voting strength and being in a Federation gives spare capacity for a whole another fleet. But on the whole, I conclude that in order for the game to be much fun, you should probably be fighting and expanding all the time.

I was also annoyed that the game still has enough bugs to make playing somewhat annoying. The Fleet Management screen is particularly problematic as occasionally ships that are physically in a fleet don’t register in that screen and if you rely on auto-designing too much. the system gets confused over which ships are which designs and are part of which ships. Sometimes replacing modules on a starbase is wonky as well. The interface can be something of a pain as for example when trying to send a science ship to work on a special project in the Situation Log. I still can’t believe that there isn’t a log of past events as sometimes you need to go back to check where a specific event happened. I know the game keeps expanding and reworking mechanics but maybe add some quality of life interface improvements too?

But on the whole it seems to me that my main complaints are still the same as the ones I had last time. It’s too easy to get all of the Traditions and get to the end of tech tree in every game. Probably someone with a good experience of the game can tweak the initial game settings just so get their preferred gameplay experience but to me it seems clear that the default settings just don’t work. Judging by how quickly the marauders got wiped out in my game, it seems that they were tuned to be too weak that late in the game. Surely it should be possible for the system to be more intelligent in giving them appropriate level of power considering what else the rest of the galaxy has?

Anyway I’m putting this game down and probably not coming back to it. I’m still tempted to try the popular Star Trek mod one day but this experience has soured me enough that I can’t say for sure. It’s just such a huge investment of time for not much interesting gameplay. On paper it seems like a game that I should like with all of the features that I want but I just can’t seem to get the gaming experience I’d like out of it. I think you’d pretty much have to role-play and set specific goals for yourself to make things fun and really know how to tweak the game settings. Maybe add event chains that aren’t tied to exploration and have many more of them? I don’t know but currently this make your own fun philosophy here isn’t satisfying to me.