Stellaris

[Catalogue of ills]

Does anyone else pour too many hours into this? It's a 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) space conquest game for the PC that I'm finding very addictive. What I like about it is that you can find your own level. There are things that you have to do: explore new star systems, build starbases to make them part of your empire, build mining stations so you have an economy, and ultimately expand into other territory through wars. But within that, there's an amazing depth of options - you have inhabited planets and get to choose what kinds of economy they have, what kind of governance, which jobs you are going to prioritise. There are long research trees, so you get to decide which kinds of tech you want to prioritise, similarly there are several society management options you can follow. You can decide what rights to give the different species in your empire and can encourage certain ethics, and you can genetically engineer species to make certain planets more habitable. I've been playing for 140 hours and feel like I've still only scratched the surface.

[Lemming]

Great game. I play as a pacifistic Science Directorate of snail-people every time and invariably get wiped the fuck out by Hegemonic Imperialist slaver-empire neighbours at some point, as my worlds fester because I forgot to build power plants and assign governors.

Worth mentioning for Star Trek fans, there's a huge Star Trek mod called Star Trek New Horizons which has an incredible amount of detail and includes a ridiculous array of alien people, even ones only seen in one episode like the Gorn or those half-black half-white people. You basically can't lose if you play as the Federation, but it's still a lot of fun.

[Catalogue of ills]

Great game. I play as a pacifistic Science Directorate of snail-people every time and invariably get wiped the fuck out by Hegemonic Imperialist slaver-empire neighbours at some point, as my worlds fester because I forgot to build power plants and assign governors.

If it has a fault, I'd say it does push you into war and it's difficult to play as completely pacifist (although pacifists can wage liberation wars, which are great). I guess you could build massive citadels at each of your choke points and see how long you can keep aggressive neighours out for.

[Mobius]

Yes I loved this game used to play it loads on PS4

I really wanna re-buy it on PC cus it'll just be better with keyboard and mouse, but it's a bit pricey with all the DLC

[Chairman Yang]

Yeah I want to get into it again but it was a bit dry with just the base game. Could any of y'all recommend what DLC are the best to fill out the game?

[Catalogue of ills]

Regarding price, like all Steam games it is periodically discounted - I got the base game for about 33% of the usual price, it pays to check back regularly to see if they have it on offer. I haven't ventured into the DLC yet, but it looks like I might win my current game, so I'll probably have a break then and come back to it later with some DLC for more challenge. Looking on Reddit, Steam etc., it appears that Utopia is the most popular DLC. They did update the base game recently and added diplomacy - this means you don't automatically get to see other empire's stats, you have to set up an espionage network to gain intel about them. But as the number of enovys you have is limited, it can mean going in a bit blind on someone, which carries the risk that they have a defence pact with some horrible space cunts that you didn't know about. Which of course adds to the fun.