Stellaris

The big downside to playing Stellaris is hesitating to start a new game about 3 months before any major update is announced to drop, which leaves you about six weeks in the year to play (I stopped playing a couple of years after release for this reason, also because all mods become obsolete with every update). Also needs major revamps to warfare, trade, religion and espionage.

Stellaris initially wows you with its cool premise and interesting options for customization. But it's also a game that as you play more of you start to see flaws. The influence system is used for many important mechanics but your means of generating it is overly limited. The end result is a game that discourages radical and expansionist play, often pushing you through the same gameplay loops constantly. It's highly moddable and there's a lot of content, but Paradox has made better.

This is one of the most Civ like simulation games I've encountered, and I mean that in a good way. If there's an issue it's with how all this is introduced to new players. The interface and realtime with pause mechanics are really forbidding and you're just barraged with information. After playing for 20 hours, I am just beginning to understand the base game's rule set. addendum: My big issue with this game, the ridiculous endgame difficulty spike.

Who doesn't desperately want to like their best friend's partner? Even though the first meeting doesn't go all that well, they'll have oodles of goodwill, because there must be something special to them - you even share interests! But after a lot of awkward attempts at starting conversations that seem to lead nowhere, you start to doubt is this person will ever be more than alright - but you're going to keep trying to make things work. Stellaris.

huge inter stellar strategy. (2019)

I couldn't put it any better than DavidBlast .

When I played this at launch, its potential was immediately evident but content was sparse and the game quickly became boring. Many years later, Paradox is still releasing DLCs and with all of them installed, it's one of the richest games out there for lovers of detailed 4X games. The best experience is still early game, where exploration and anomalies dominate. Huge galaxies become a bit of a grind from midgame onwards.

nice but tooooooooo long

Core game is full questionable design decisions, but fortunately Stellaris is heavily moddable and the Steam workshop features thousands of mods for almost any kind of customization. It's like Skyrim and Rimworld: "Would not play without mods."