Thoughts on Stellaris

I tried out "Stellaris" on sale. These are some ignorant newcomer impressions from the first 93 minutes, as I figure out whether to keep the game. I can't readily give it a thumbs-up or -down.

I was overwhelmed by the variety of options and possible events. Incorporate aliens into an empire and decide whether to grant full citizenship or a dozen flavors of oppression or tolerance or death. Genetically engineer your race or decide to become a robot race. Develop psychic powers and make pacts with beings from beyond who might doom the galaxy. See individual population units' morals drift over time from exposure to events and other empires. That's very detailed compared to simply plopping down colonies, and has a ton of possible fun stuff to see! Even the research system involved assigning specific chief scientists who have their own talents and experience level. I was surprised that there was only one FTL option, and learned from the wiki that the others were removed.

I started out with the oligarchic Raltek Confederacy, materialist space foxes who really like birds. After an hour and a half I was surprised that I hadn't actually colonized a second planet yet; I'd just built a starbase to claim a second system and was setting up some mining stations. I was obviously not going to have the resources for a colony ship for a year or more, and the game was playing out over individual days. Also, the tutorial had me build a new farm on the homeworld, but since my race bred slowly, it was going to be months before they even fully staffed the existing on-planet facilities, let alone the new one, let alone a colony ship. So, I was puzzled by the time scale, making micromanagement decisions like whether to investigate an anomaly but knowing that the "expand" part of this game was going to be really slow.

Then there was the first battle. The tutorial system kept making dramatic things happen and not pausing the game half the time. I had a window showing me the fleets' stats and an overall "you're winning" meter, but there was obviously a lot of work put into having 3D ships flying around in circles shooting energy rays. What it made me think of was a silly old Buck Rogers show in which a space battle was shown as two model ships circling each other while a scientist kept saying "Get above him!" This version looked cool, but it didn't help me understand what was happening or what I should do.

Doing any of the quests that were piling up, like investigating anomalies or finding the cult bases, was obviously going to take months, during which I was going to be waiting for my minerals to hit 90 so I could build another mine or something. Later, I was presumably going to get overwhelmed with trying to manage dozens of star systems with multiple planets. So, overall, this game looks cool and obviously has a lot of detail and things to see, but I feel like I'm never going to see 90% of it because I'll be too busy managing population units and mining stations to pay any attention to ship design and so on.