Though they have their own personalities, from peacekeepin' police of the galaxy to wannabe-worshipped faux gods, I tend to think of them all as something between boss fight and barely sentient terrain feature. They divide the galaxy into sections, so powerful as to be effectively impassable, like a mountain range or ocean. In the base game, they're big bastard blockades, often preventing expansion for the smaller galactic newcomers (yourself included). In Stellaris, the points of interest are in place but they're unoccupied, for the most part, and the shape of the galaxy is yet to be decided.Īs mentioned, Fallen Empires are the exception. That's not true in a historical grand strategy game, where the map is already written and is waiting to be defaced and/or amended. In the Fallen Empires and many of the stories that science ships can discover there is a sense of the past – of the millions of years that have lead to the point at the start of the game when you begin with the 4X staple of a single territory to develop and expand from – but the world is full of gaps waiting to be filled. The density of a Europa Universalis or Crusader Kings, with a world packed full of characters creating and springing from history, is not there. By taking elements of grand strategy and planting them firmly in a 4X structure, Paradox created something fascinating, though not without rough edges and areas where the design is so taut as to wear thin. The trick of Stellaris is its knitting together of two genres that are adjacent to one another, but unaccustomed to intermixing their inner workings. No matter what the state of their release, they're going to be much-changed a year or two down the line. That's how Paradox grand strategy games tend to work.
I liked the game far more than many other critics around the time of release and while I think the game as it stood on launch day was fantastic (if flawed), I was open about my expectation that it would be a foundation for greater things. With Leviathans, and more notably the free Heinlein update that arrived alongside the paid-for story pack, Stellaris shows sure signs that it will fulfill its early promise. Stellaris: Leviathans brings some gargantuan beasts and big features to Paradox's sci-fi strategy game, but is it a small step forward or a great leap into the unknown? Space dragons, wars in heaven, awakening gods, secret enclaves and (most delicious of all) user interface improvements.
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