Stellaris
Stellaris is a 4X game from Paradox.
For the uninitiated 4X is shorthand for grand-strategy games where the player eXplores, eXpands, eXploits, and eXterminates in the game “world.” The term was invented by Alan Emrich for the game Master of Orion in a 1993 review in Computer Gaming World magazine. Master of Orion and Stellaris has a science fiction settings but 4X games exist in many genres. Civilization, Age of Empires, and Europa Universalis have historical settings. Battle for Middle Earth and Heroes of Might and Magic take place on fantasy worlds.
The escapism in these games probably appeals to the Passionately Stoic because of the world building aspect. Many routes are available to achieving “victory” over the elements: economic, technological, political, or out-right naked conquest. When the real world is beyond your control sometimes it’s fun to escape in a world where your decisions actually affect the story.
I’ve been casually poking at the game for about three weeks. Today I “finished” a game for the first time after half a dozen starts where I got into an untenable position through ignorance of the game mechanics and it stopped being fun to try and worm my way out. Here are some screenshots of my “empire” just after my war with the Obevni Zealots, a Fallen Empire which rested quietly in the overwhelming strength of its fleets and technology until near the end of the game when it “awakened” and began demanding dominion. Its still just as demanding even after the conquest of its original territory by my fleets and army. I guess that’s why they are zealots.
Stellaris, like many games these days can be enhanced and expanded with DLC (Downloadable content). I’m playing with nothing but the basic game. but even after getting through to the end I’ve only scratched the surface of the possibilities. At the beginning it was fun to dig into all the details and try to minimax everything but by the end it was rather tedious building Resource Silos on a dozen planets to store food, minerals, alloys, energy, and consumer goods I was unlikely to ever use. I would have enjoyed the ability to turn these things over to the AI. (It occurs to me now that I might have been able to “vassalize” sectors of the empire just like I vassalized some of my enemies but only at the expense of losing some of the control that I wanted to keep.)
But before the tedious part set in I had a lot of fun. I terraformed worlds into Desert planets suitable for my lizard folk. I created a Resort world for them. I enslaved several alien races and then liberated them. (They use a lot more consumer goods once they have freedom!) I designed some cool battleships. I battled crime on the worlds I conquered…not always with success…so I created a Penal Colony and let crime run rampant there. Over the course of a week I killed about twenty hours this way.
The purpose of this post is not to review the game. Reviews can be found here and here. Rather my intent is suggest to the Passionately Stoic that this is a game worth wasting some time on when the weight of the world bears down on you a little too much and you need to hide away from it for a few hours. We all need some form of escape from time to time. No doubt I’ll spend a few hours more playing Stellaris in the weeks to come.
