(Also, for more information than I could ever explain, you might want to check out the official Stellaris wiki.)
Excellent Changes (or OH MY GOD WHY WASN'T THIS IN THE BASE GAME)
- Borders (1.2/Asimov): It used to be that the game came to a screeching halt when your borders ran up against a rival empire and trapped you in your own territory. Their borders were always closed, unless you were in an alliance or somehow managed to bribe them, and you couldn't explore star systems or complete special project chains (such as collecting animals or surveying dead planets to hopefully avert a mass extinction) or go and kill those fanatical purifiers on the other side. Then along came the 1.2 update, which dramatically improved how borders function. Now, all borders are open by default but can be closed as part of or to instigate a rivalry. I can't tell you how much this improves the game; it means you can complete project chains in much quicker time and gives your science ships much more to do.
- Habitability (1.3/Heinlein): One of the more interesting concepts is the game is colonizing planets: you can only colonize certain planets depending on the biome of your homeworld-for example, humans prefer continental Earth-like planets but can do okay on ocean or jungle planets; and my Lyrites prefer rocky arid planets but can somewhat tolerate sandy deserts. However, before 1.3, the planets were arranged into a wheel pattern that caused some issues: people on arid planets could live on cold tundra planets with no problem, and jungle-dwellers could live in sandy deserts. I actually exploited this once when I uplifted some strong-but-dumb Zukakkans who lived on the arid planet Baidaan III and used some Kenjodans (a race of mammalians whose empire got partitioned into a war; I took two planets and allowed two others to form another empire based on my principles in something resembling a space East/West Germany). To make things even more frustrating, you only gained the ability to colonize planets based on technology, so I had to wait decades until the Kenjodans I conquered could settle new tundra planets and expand my dominion. Of course, this made no sense whatsoever, and finally in 1.3 it was solved when habitability was reworked: now planets are arranged into a grid based on climate, so desert-dwellers specifically prefer dry planets, ice-lovers like cold planets, and humans still like ocean/tropical planets. The technology requirements for colonization were also removed (and the latest patch allows you to start able to colonize... more on that later), so you can colonize every type of planet from the get-go.
- Integrating Aliens (1.5/Banks): As I mentioned, expansion to different types of planets is accomplished through either:
- Sufficiently advanced robots
- Genetically modifying your people
- Using aliens who've come to your planets, peacefully or not
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The latter option is the easiest, most interesting, and most readily available, but it comes at a cost since the aliens may not have the same ideologies and/or be cranky about you conquering their planets for some reason. However, perhaps you're benevolent and want to do more with your new citizens for colonizing; perhaps you want to allow them full rights and even allow them to produce leaders to aid your empire? It was possible in Stellaris, but as with colonization it was only possible via a technology that was really annoying to get. In the latest patch, 1.5, this has been changed so that you can not only have alien leaders from the start but also specially tune the rights each race in your empire has. For example, perhaps there's some lizard people who live long and gain experience quickly (making them amazing leaders), whereas a bunch of bird-people have short lifespans. In this case, you'd allow the lizards to produce leaders but bar the birds.
- In my current game, I conquered a race of spiritualist lizards called the Netraxi, and soon had one of my top-level human scientists die peacefully of old age. I looked in the replacement panel and sure enough, there already was a Netraxi there waiting to get recruited. I of course said yes, and he might just become ruler of my empire, which is interesting to consider (especially since I'm not a xenophobe)
- Factions (1.5/Banks): Another recent change; before 1.5, factions in your empire would form and always be rebel scum that had to be suppressed and/or purged. Thankfully, this was changed so that factions represented political movements/parties that represented specific issues tied to the different ethics in your empire; for example, xenophobes hate aliens having equal rights and like having your primary species as ruler, whereas materialists love having robots but don't like it when you fall behind in technology. It makes things more interesting and actually makes factions helpful rather than an annoyance; it now becomes possible to embrace their ideology and change your ethics entirely!
- The Midgame (1.5/Banks): One of Stellaris' weaknesses is the midgame, where exploration slows and you start to interact with (i.e. conquer) the empires around you. Eventually, you realize that very little is happening and you decide to just abandon your current campaign and see what else there is to offer (well, I do anyways). Thankfully, this has been something Paradox has noticed and is attempting to improve, but I feel they really struck gold with the most recent (as of writing) patch and accompanying expansion Utopia. Now you can choose an endgame goal for your empire, such as uploading your people into robots or becoming psionic, and this gives you a better goal to work with and keep you waiting through the midgame. There's also the option to build megastructures such as ringworlds or Dyson spheres et al., giving you even more incentive to stick around for a bit and keep playing through the midgame slog-fest.
Good Changes (I haven't seen these personally, or perhaps they just aren't as good as the above)
- Slaves (1.2/Asimov): No decent sci-fi would be complete without slaving jerks, and thankfully this has been a key part of playing as collectivists/xenophobes from the very beginning. However, at first it was possible to game the system by enslaving people so that they didn't have happiness and thus join annoying rebel factions. In 1.2, this was changed so that slaves went into one of two factions: Docile slaves who only wanted regulation, and Malcontents who wanted freedom at any cost. With 1.5, this was changed further with an Unrest mechanic that makes slaves highly dangerous and rebellious if not controlled with armies.
- Fallen empires (1.3/Heinlein): Far more interesting than normal empires, fallen empires are ancient beings with advanced technology who once controlled much of the galaxy, though are isolationist and have a relatively small amount of territory (somewhat like the Siranians from Spore Revolution). However, they were relatively uninteresting and not varied enough before 1.3 came out, which made it so that they could awaken depending on galactic events and some of them will even ask the younger races for help. Under the right circumstances (i.e. an accompanying DLC), two awakened Empires can even start a massive War in Heaven that will involve all the younger races of the galaxy and massively reshape the map.
- Infiltration (1.5/Banks): Those of you who have read my Lyrite playthrough will know that it is possible to infiltrate industrial-age aliens in an attempt to gain control of their precious planet (like lizard-people are certainly not doing to our own Earth) by disguising your people to resemble the natives. Though pretty explicitly mentioned as due to genetic manipulation, I preferred to explain early-game infiltration (i.e. before you discover genetic engineering tech) as holographic disguises, until Banks came along last month. Now infiltration explicitly requires said technology, which makes it more of a midgame option. That's okay, because now it makes more sense and invading the poor fools is still a perfectly valid option.
- Space Monsters (1.3/Heinlein): Another classic sci-fi theme present in Stellaris is spaceborne creatures, like the various noncorporeal beings or the Crystalline Entity from Star Trek. From 1.0 onwards, the monsters were spread like butter over regions of the galaxy with no context of how they got there or where they came from (especially since I doubt many of them had "natural" FTL travel). In 1.3 however, space monsters were changed so that they inhabited a particular region of space, with a home system containing a powerful base and special rewards. I quite like this change as it makes finding space monsters less irregular, though it is somewhat obnoxious to see mining drones over and over again like in my current campaign.
Neutral Changes (not good, but not horrible either)
- Hyperdrive (1.3/Heinlein): In Stellaris, you have three options for faster-than-light travel (FTL): warp drive that allows you to travel slowly to any star system (based on the Alcubierre Drive and Star Trek's warp drive); hyperdrive that allows you to travel very fast along predetermined and strategic routes (my personal favorite); and wormholes that require special stations to send ships to any star instantly. Since release, the particular numbers behind the methods have been heavily balanced, but a drastic change was made in Heinlein when hyperdrive charging was increased and required ships to move to the outer edge of a star's gravity well to go to FTL (previously hyperdrive ships could jump to hyperspace anywhere in a system). While it slows down hyperdrive considerably, that particular method of FTL was pretty overpowered anyways.
Bad Changes (why Paradox why)
- Warp Drive (since 1.0): As I mentioned earlier, warp drives are slow; need to charge up and cool down when leaving and entering a solar system, respectively; but have the advantage of unlimited movement between star systems. Since release, however, that advantage has become somewhat moot with continuous nerfs to warp drive, whether it's slowing it down even further or increasing the chargeup/cooldown times. Warp drive is now almost unbearably slow and is not a good pick, which is a problem because I feel that there should be at least some incentive to choosing one FTL type over another, even if it is just to shake things up. However, I have heard that future plans for the game include making hyperdrive the starting option and having warp/wormholes be research options, so that may be the incentive for this.
- Uplifting (1.4/Kennedy): Oddly enough, this particular issue is going to be fixed in the upcoming 1.6/Adams patch on the 1-year anniversary, but until then this poor design decision is still valid and annoying. Anyways, remember how I mentioned the Zukakkans, the lizard people I uplifted from a pre-sentient state? This is a perfectly viable midgame option for empires wishing to gain one or more of the following: access to new planet types for colonization, a new species, a working class of dumb laborers, or even the fabled cockroaches who can live anywhere (especially nuked planets). While it used to be perfectly fine to simply have their planet in your borders (I got access to Baidaan III by colonizing a nearby Earthlike planet the settlers named Albion), in 1.4 this was foolishly changed so that you had to colonize the planet itself to uplift them. Not only did this "break immersion" since researching/conquering planets has no habitability or colonizing requirements, it also made uplifting less of an incentive and reduced it to merely a prerequisite for actual genetic engineering. Sure, using robots is an option, but it's tedious to micromanage building them manually and there's always the chance they can rebel if your research makes them too smart. Furthermore, roughly 90% of uplifting happens because you want a species to be able to handle new planetary climates to expand your empire. At least this is going to be fixed very soon, but I'm still somewhat annoyed the colonization route was even considered to be a better option than simply allowing you to uplift when the planet's in your borders. Remember, game devs: if it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Conclusion
As mentioned before, these are only the biggest changes I felt affected me and were worth talking about. There are plenty of other tweaks that have been made over the years, like changing space battles so they aren't horrible swarming messes, minor weapons balances you'll only notice in a mouse-over tooltip, or the new set of beautiful skyboxes that replaced the bland default one. I feel that the game has improved significantly since release, especially with the new Banks update back in April (as you can tell by the changes I listed). Will the game be even more awesome on May 9th, 2018? Only time will tell... |
| Here's another one of my favorite Banks changes: ship/station colors based on your flag! This in particular is a Netraxi construction ship, since they had a purple and green flag. |
