When you distill all of the science fiction greats into a single strategic title, you end up with a fantastic science fantasy romp full of wonder and depth. Using their in-house engine the masters of history simulations (Paradox Interactive) have turned their eyes to the stars, crafting a deep, re-playable experience.

You create and control your very own space faring empire at its inception. You have a brave science ship and captain ready to survey the system and a fleet of corvettes to defend your home-world. From there the game feels open ended, forcing you to map the nearby cosmos for survival. You will quickly find alien species, some hostile, some not. And they may begin talking to you in a variety of ways, including shooting on sight.

Leaders are named characters such as Scientists and Admirals that take up the important task of heading your fleets, research, armies, and planets. Over time they gain experience and die of old age and must be replaced. Given research, you can even have genetically superior leaders that are more expensive, but kind of worth it.

Planets are composed of tiles, some of which have blockers that you can remove with technology and resources. Population units eat food, spread, have their own political opinions, and are probably the most versatile use of population I’ve seen in a 4X title. Rather than being simply a statistic grown by food, they are entities that must subscribe to your empire wide policies.

Expansionist players will find the AI hating them on almost every difficulty however, the Federation and Alliance mechanics are designed as defensive measures between empires that don’t want to get smashed by said big expansionist player. Large empires over time suffer from ethical drift, unhappiness, and political factions causing mischief.

Every population unit has a political standing that initially is the state’s, but over time population units will adopt different stances. With the right technologies you can even build population units of simplistic robots, droids, and even self aware Synthetic beings given enough time. The farther away from your capital worlds, the more their ethics diverge from the state’s, which can eventually lead to factions of unhappy citizens demanding independence from your tyranny.

Despite the level of depth the exploration and early game portion of the game provides, the mid game tends to turn into a stagnant tech rush or made rush of expansion. There are several mechanics in place that limit this, such as a scaling tech malus for the amount of population units you have representing the difficulty of rolling tech out to the entire populace. Smaller empires have less scientific output, but as a consequence requires less of it as well.

Technology is a card based system where there are three branches you research simultaneously. Cards have weight determined by your state ethics and your researchers traits; with awesome purple cards being the techs that really set your empire apart from the competition. After researching debris of fallen enemy ships you get the choice to research that tech out of order, allowing smaller empires to catch up through salvage.

Combat is based on fleets consisting of ships designed by the player; Corvettes, Destroyers, Cruisers, and Battleships are the four sizes, using increasingly larger amounts of logistics size in return for more space to load it with components. The ship design portion of the game is extremely important but is easy to use, the UI is clearly marked for players new to the genre. Despite each ships and ergo fleet being summed up by combat rating points, you can’t only look at the numbers. Many weapons excel against specific types of defenses and every weapon has range limitations. .

Speaking of range, let us now discuss stagnant but powerful Fallen Empires, whom have a single strict ethos and unique AI personality. They are more or less just going to sit there around their ring worlds until something pisses them off, such as a public insult. They will then go to war with you for the sole purpose of disgracing you in front of the universe. Their ships are highly advanced using a suite of tier 5 components, including larged sized Tachyon Lances that outrange practically every weapon of lesser quality allowing them to blast apart incoming fleets before they can be hit too hard themselves; it’s almost worth losing your entire fleet against them just to get the research topics if you can afford it!

Diplomacy as mentioned is an important game-play aspect, even though the AI is suspiciously timid on normal difficulty but fairly cranky on the higher difficulties. Alliances and their upgrade of Federations are typically sought by the AI as a defensive measure due to a mechanic called Threat. It’s essentially a way of the game telling you that if you continually absorb other empires, the rest of the universe will hate you. This leads to more militaristic players having to go on the initiative if they want war to be commonplace in their playthroughs.

So having hyped the good and the interesting let’s discuss the bad. The User Interface is huge, jam packed with buttons and statistics, and can look absolutely terrifying at first; you’re almost required to watch somebody else play it first. I found myself constantly bumbling through the menus looking for what I wanted to do, each tab has sub tabs and places you can scroll. It’s easy to not even know you can scroll in the tech windows, or even change your government (the button for it is cleverly disguised).

On larger galaxies (800-1000 stars) the game will very quickly become laggy and nigh unplayable on the fast and fastest speeds on computers that have a little age to them. The autosaving mechanic helps with this by saving at the latest every in game year (which speeds by regularly on fastest) adding to the lag. It’s advised you start with less AI opponents if you have a weaker computer, that’s what bogs your CPU down. 

The game itself has a few bugs but nowhere near as many as you might expect of a new title. Slavery is effectively broken, the resulting unhappy slave faction cannot revolt at the moment and the Fallen Empire that hates Slavery currently does nothing about it. Exploration also needs some balance, as your science ships just sort of lose all purpose after a while. There are exploration quests but they only seem to occur once you are forced to fight other empires just so you can send a ship to it.

Stellaris is a quite stellar game with some issues, but many things it does fantastically. For one, multiplayer supports at least 32 players and since the game is real time you don’t really have to wait on anybody, which already makes it the best multiplayer mode any 4X has in my book. The game does a lot of interesting new things very well, including giving you the ability to play a strategy game without being obsessed about score and victory. You can zone out for quite some time without even realizing there are victory conditions, even though the two conditions are not really that interesting (both are essentially brute force conquer the universe goals).

I found the game quite fun and, would heavily recommend it to Strategy or Science Fiction fans!