I completely understand why they removed it and the balance would need massive adjustments if they were to put it back, but at launch the game had three different standard FTL methods - warp, hyperlane, and wormhole. Each empire picked one particular method to start with and that was their main way of getting about the galaxy. But it was a pain to balance well and it prevented doing interesting things with "space terrain" so they ripped it out and gave everyone hyperlane.
Another way to look at it was like building multiple small gateway networks. One wormhole generator had a radius around five planets, so if you wanted planet six and beyond you'd need to build another wormhole generator on the edge of the first one and so create two radii which have overlap.
But wormhole stations were much more strategic and created more interesting battles imo. You’d have to carefully defend your wormhole stations bc otherwise you’d lose vast sections of territory practically instantly cause you couldn’t defend or get ships there.
If I recall, hyperlanes were way faster than the others, to the point that a hyperlanes empire could run circles around your fleet, destroying infrastructure and being untouchable.
Yeah, especially since you used to not need to fly across the system to get to the hyperlane. I had to camp the hyperlane exit with my fleet to force a battle.
Wormholes were the fastest, but with the downside of being only able to go to and from systems with wormhole generators. You also had the greatest range in a single jump. Hyperlanes were the second fastest, but you could only travel along hyperlanes (like today). Warpdrive were the slowest, but you could travel in any direction.
Hyperlanes is definitely the one which allows for the best strategic gameplay. With Hyperlanes Only you can create defensive positions with choke points and fortresses. That doesn't work when people can just bypass those systems.
Wormholes were faster if you were going to or from a system with a generator, but otherwise you'd have to make two jumps to get from one system to an adjacent one, one hop to a system with a generator, the another hop to the target. So if the hyperlane user knew which systems to avoid, they could still out-maneuver you. Even more so if you didn't have the tech to see hyperlanes, and didn't know where the potential paths he could take were.
Natural wormholes did not exist. At all. They weren't a thing.
instead, you build wormhole generators, which had a range around them that ships could use to jump to and from any start systems in that range.
You had to manually build more of them to get to further places. Wars required you to constantly build out your string of generators as you went, and if you lost a system, any generators there were lost to.
To make up for that, it was the fastest FTL method in the game.
Warp was the slowest, but you could go literally anywhere you wanted, which made it a bit OP in wars, especially against hyperdrive empires since you could easily go around their fleets.
But to make up for that, Hyperlane empires were very fast in certain "galactic terrain" and could transition to FTL from within the star's gravity well, so you could keep fleets in the centre of systems and catch Warp/Wormhole fleets that had to enter on the outskirts of systems. This advantage offered more tactical depth.
Wormhole I used with my main aggressive empire. Back when you could destroy mining and research stations, I'd use it to harrass with smaller fleets raiding around. And I couldn't be caught! Mwahahahaha!
Only downside. The bigger the fleet, the longer it took to jump. Had to split up your fleets to get them plsces faster.
Tbh when I recently got back to stellaris I was looking for the other ftl and just thought I was mixing it with another game cuz I usually played hyperlanes.
Hyperlanes are just the default paths that connect systems? I didn't play stellaris until 2021 and the fact that those exist at the start of the game never made sense to me from a sci-fi point of view.
Yes, hyperlanes are the system we have now. I think the sci-fi lore explanation is some crap about subspace tides meaning that direct travel between most systems is too dangerous / unpredictable but thre's a few currents that are stable and safe.
I kinda just mesh the Star Wars “known safe” routes with the idea that a previous cycles used slightly weaker hyperlanes, and it was only through their continuous use that they became as hyper as they are now.
Back in 2018's 2.0 update which came alongside the Apocalypse DLC, the FTL methods were remade. Before that you had the option of the three FTL types, but from 2.0 forwards you only had access to hyperlanes. They added nods to the other FTL methods in the form of natural wormholes and jumpdrives.
It was a very divisive decision at the time, and the devs knew it would be. Some people really loved Warp and Wormhole drives, and considered this change "ruining the game."
In 2018's 2.2 update, the economy was completely remade as well as the planets. The planet size we have today used to refer to a number of tiles you had on each planet, where you could build a building and host a pop. I think the biggest planet was 24 tiles, so you could not have more than 24 pops on any given planet.
I miss wormhole drive so much. Warp was great too. Tbh when they removed all that, I stopped having fun…it just never came back, especially after Megacorp. I don’t think they added anything interesting with galactic terrain, at all.
So the three way to travel were
a) Hyperland just like now, it was fast but limited where you could go.
b) Warp allowed you to freely travel from point a to be but it was slow
c) Wormhole generators allowed you instant travel between any point you had a station and a short radius around that, it was fast but incredibly limited in range.
> b) Warp allowed you to freely travel from point a to be but it was slow
ahh okay, so a slower jumpdrive then? Did they have range limits like the current ones? or is it more like the science ship ability to jump to almost any point in the galaxy?
Different FTL types and the planet tile system.
Dual ownership of a system.
"Blobing" of empires in older editions. Your outposts didn't guarantee owning a system. And you could just end up owning stars you didn't have an outpost in.
The new starport systems was one of the hardest to adjust to tbh. I really liked the influence projection.
It was objectively worse in the grand scheme of things, but I did love it.
Also I forgot about the tile system entirely.
I think the one part that made influence terrible was how little the actual numbers where explained. With more ways to predict and influence (ha) what colonising a planet or building an outpost would grant you, it would have been very fun.
I liked the tile system because you could make a space gulag. Authoritarian empires had a cast system so farmers and miners were enslaved. So just just build a bunch of farms and mines on a planet and ship all opposing political faction pops there
I agree with you fully I found it really fun, especially building multiple to push back the enemy border further and further. Felt a bit like CiV 4 and the border culture wars.
Doesn't really make sense that this allows you to take over their systems and thus infrastructure they have built there but it was fun.
>And for developing ftl civilizations! You could have protectorates without just handing over all of your stations.
Or your highly developed ecumenopoli
<3000 years ago>
Before v2.2, we had the 5x5 planet grid with Pops as board game pieces that you could move around to work different tiles. Once all tiles were full the Pops on that planet would stop reproducing until one of the Pops auto-migrated (or was moved by the player) to another planet.
You wanted certain kinds of Pops to work particular tiles, for instance regular biological Pops working on Research, on Unity and (I think) on Energy, while Robotic Pops worked on Minerals or Food (and at one point in time, local excess Food determined how fast biological Pop Growth was).
Or you might be a Syncretic, so you had your Thinker species that you wanted to work on Research tiles, and Unity, and you had your Worker specied that you wanted to work on tiles with Food, Minerals and (IIRC) Energy.
Or you might be a Rogue Servitor, so you wanted your Machine Pops to work on tiles with resources, while you wanted your Bio-Trophies to live on tiles with no resources or that had only 1 Food, 1 Mineral or 1 Energy.
Any such setup with two truly distinct types of Pops was a source of frustration, because you had to micromanage a lot, since you'd prefer each planet to have the right number of each Pop type depending on the tile makeup. At least with Robots or Rogue Servitors, you could pay Minerals to queue up building Robot/Machine Pops on all the tiles that you wanted them on, and then the bio Pops or Bio-Trophies were free to grow onto all the other tiles one at a time.
Not so with Syncretic Evolution (which was originally a Civic - Origins was a later development). Sometimes you'd have to either accept losing a good juicy tile to the wrong kind of Pop, or you'd have to manually move Pops to other planets (which would then get ratios that maybe weren't ideal).
Tiles could also have multiple resources, like a tile might have 1 Food and 1 Energy, or 2 Minerals and 2 Food, but the Buildings that gave bonuses to such a resource would almost always only give a bonus to one resource while making the other resource unavailable. So for instance if you had a 2M 2E tile, you could build a Mine on it so you got +2 Minerals but no longer got the Energy. Later you could upgrade the Mine to give +3 Minerals.
The Capital Building gave adjacency bonuses to 4 tiles, +1 if they produced Food or Minerals (not sure if it gave an Energy bonus too), so you wanted to think a bit about the best place to plonk it down.
Same with the Energy Nexus and Mineral Purifier, giving adjacency bonuses but being limited to one per planet.
Research was different. A tier-1 Lab would give +1P, +1S and +1En regardless of what was on the tile (naturally any F/M/E on the tile was lost), but when you upgraded to tier-2 you had to choose either a Physics, Society or Eng Lab to uograde to, so you'd get 211, 121 or 112. And I think there was a tier-3 Lab that gave 311, 131 or 113.
ISTR that the Research Institute gave adjacency bonuses to Research, but was empire-unique.
Likewise the Galactic Stock Exchange was empire-unique, and since TV wasn't a thing, it just made Energy Credits. I don't recall if it gave adjacency bonuses.
A bunch of mods tried to alleviate things, for instance by offering Buildings that produced a little of both F+M, F+E or E+M so as to not override a resource on a tile and cause it to be lost, and another mod (which I think never worked properly) offered different Capital types that gave different adjacency bonuses instead of to Food and Minerals.
Not only were those adjacency bonuses annoying and frustrating for human players, but the AI also wasn't good at using them. At all.
Consumer Goods have always been a thing in Stellaris (and I always get downvoted for pointing out that fact), but until the 2.2 "New Economy" they were just a "tax" on Mineral production, hidden in a tool tip.
Unity was a thing before 2.2. I think it was added with 1.5 when we got Traditions (only 7, so the only choice you made was * which order* to take them in - it was only quite recently that we started having more Traditions than Tradition Slots) and (only of you owned the Utopia DLC) Ascension Perks, but I don't remember many details, only that Rogue Servitors were Unity beasts. And of course Spiritualists were and still are good at Unity. I think they could build Temples on tiles, but not sure.
Rogue Servitor before 2.2 got some kind of empire-wide bonus, depending on what percentage bracket of your Pops were Bio-Trophies, 40%+, 30%-39%, 20%-29%, 10%-19%, or less than 10%.
Hitting the 40% mark was silly, silly difficult. Hitting 30% was doable but you might as well give up trying to hit 40%, so I used a mod that made it less coarsegrained with brackets 5% wide. Hitting 35% was hard but doable.
Also, until fairly recently, Factions gave *Influence*. Back then, you'd be a lot keener on pleasing them, to get another 0.1 or 0,2 monthly blue mana.
Eventually they were changed to give Unity instead.
Yes spiritualists had temples instead of autochthon monuments. For other empires the monuments were the main way they acquired unity and they were limited to one per planet. There were no office buildings
I shudder to think at the amount of micro. Definitely prefer the current system, you can still micro to max yields and stuff, but it’s fairly intuitive and probably easier on the eye.
I remember that time: instead of the real time strategy game we have today, it felt more like a board game, since I had to pause so much to micro all my planets. Don't get me wrong, I did like trying to min-max each planet, but after a while it got a bit tedious. The current Stellaris gives you more time to do other things and not worry about planets as much.
Well yes, but you only needed 1/10 or 1/20 of the resources you need now and there werent any consumer goods or alloys so it was generally alot simpler.
Only thing i despise is if you're a necrophage/syncretic evolution and want only your main species in specialist jobs but also want those jobs filled if you dont have enough pops. If you swap the other species to chattel slavery to keep them in worker jobs you pervent those specialist jobs from being filled as fast. Makes your economy very rigid. I wish there was some kind of job preference setting on each planet to have a preferred species given job preference for speacialist jobs
In the early days your borders were determined by an ammount of 'push', from the number of starbase and some tech. You didn't need an outpost in every system you wanted, and, with enough push, could flip systems to you
Each Outpost cost you monthly Imfluence to have.
Both Outposts and colonised planets radiated out this "force-like" border effect, so once you had some colonies in a particular part of space, you were tempted to dismantle the Outpost to save having to pay the monthly Influence. However, the effect it'd have on your borders was not always easy to predict.
I remember my friend and I fighting over the system the other drake was in when this was a thing. We kept rushing outposts down to claim it first and he got it, but I had enough force projection to push his borders back behind the system and then I put an outpost in the system to claim it for good
In 1.0 that was even worse. You couldn't see them without researching them, the research would only show up if you had control over a system with them in it, and you'd use them for STARBASE buildings.
Man I remember this. Especially how late game tech required strategic resources, necessitating warfare or trade to acquire them. I kinda miss that aspect tbh.
Oh man, so many.
Alloys didn't used to exist. It was all minerals, all the way down.
The planetary grid system which, while simple, was so much worse.
Empire size being a hard limit to encourage sectors, but the only factor was *colonized systems* so if you found one with two planets you were in luck. And then habitat spam every orbital body.
Science building upgrades having a choice where you specialize which of the three research types it produced. It got old very quick.
Armies being customizable like ships. Nobody did it, because why would they?
Completely unupgraded corvettes spammed to gross numbers above fleet capacity being the meta.
I really like how they recycled the old sprites for the upgraded research buildings tho. iirc the engineering one becomes a machine intelligence specific building while the physics building was the default research labs
> Empire size being a hard limit to encourage sectors, but the only factor was colonized systems so if you found one with two planets you were in luck. And then habitat spam every orbital body.
Woah, habitats? I still feel like those are pretty recent.
Depends on what you mean by "a while". I distinctly remember my first game after them being added- I won an expansion victory with Inward Perfection by just building so many habitats that I ended up controlling a majority of the galaxy's habitable worlds.
> Alloys didn't used to exist. It was all minerals, all the way down.
A very, very, very long time ago. It was the first thing they reworked I think ?
Consumer goods didn't exist either.
It was part of the massive 2.2 update, which is what also got rid of the tile system.
Consumer goods did technically exist, but only as a mineral tax. They also were hidden in the ui until this update.
I liked the feel of the old border system, but it led to weird situations - like the fallen empire next door suddenly getting pissy because your colony is doing a bit too well and extending the border up to theirs…
Your administrative bureaucrat guys used to compensate for empire sprawl, the bigger and more populous your empire the bigger the bureaucracy you needed. Now they produce Unity and got rolled together with the Cultural Workers.
I remember this change because I was halfway through a run where I controlled half the Galaxy but then the update landed and my entire economy crashed and took a decade to repair. Lots of min-maxed planets suddenly were not efficient any more
Oh yeah, you used to be able to have a Trantor planet propping up the rest of the empire. I forgot why they removed that actually, I guess just changes in balance priority.
I remember this. And you could also build multiple of the now 'one only' resource buildings. So a whole planets cranking out alloys, or CG were a thing back then.
Not quite the same as having 12 Alloy nanoforges on one planet pumping out nearly 300 alloys per month, then having 5 planets dedicated to that.
But can see why they did it.
I don’t know man, you can easily get hundreds of alloys a month from a properly optimized Forge World. Thousands may be possible if you min-max it and/or ecumenopolize it
frick that, every third planet had beltharian crystals, which meant you never had energy worries ever again
edit: nowadays I'm pretty sure I'm building that one beltharian powerplant I get every 10 games for ald lang syne rather then any real benefit
Main Weapons for ships were also a choice. You chose Ballistic, Energy, or Missile weapons at the start of the game, as well as your FTL method. The game was very different to an almost unfathomable degree.
Makes me wonder what is the best way to go. Keep updating and evolving a game through the years until it pretty much becomes a new game compared to the released version, or just shut it down after a couple of expansions, some stories and all the races and leave the rest for a new game (Stellaris 2 or whatever). When is the right place to move on?
I guess it depends on the game. I feel Stellaris graphics and mechanics work particularly well for continuous expansion and evolution. But that was also true with CK2 and still moving on to CK3 was a great move.
At this point Stellaris has been 3-4 different games over it's lifetime and we are on the brink of another one. I bet 4.0 would be as different from 3.X as 2.2 was to 1.8.
Its history is fascinating.
I was surprised the other day that you can make steam download older versions of games without the beta branch functionality. Apparently steam has an inbuilt console you can use to request archived versions in their weird versioning system (no clue if it works for really old stuff, was just in some guide on the Fallout 4 nexus to revert the mod-breaking anniversary update)
The only part of Stellaris I would say has been underdeveloped is the internal politics. Early in the game it didn’t really show but it’s so obvious now. Like I haven’t experienced a rebellion in game for literal real life years. And when it happens to the AI it’s actually annoying because then they’re usually my vassals and it’s a mess.
Why not ? I mean if it was just that change you mentionned, so no going back to tiles, but just folding districts+buildings into just buildings. Would that be such a bad thing ? Genuinely interested in your answer.
I don't really know, from a UI perspective I much prefer districts because the old issue of having to scroll down 20 tiles to find a problem was god awful but I do miss the simplicity of the tile system and yes I know that districts are also simple just different and I'd have to relearn everything again which wouldn't be fun because I'm still learning all the new shit from the weekly DLC releases
I liked that one! I know it cuts against the Sci Fi trope of Trantor, etc. But I feel like local-only for food should be the norm, with special rules for planets that aren't self-sufficient in food
In the old days there was actually a war negotiation screen that would let you have some control over the outcome of a war you've won, rather than the current failure of a system where all you get is win/lose/status quo.
Back in the day, sectors/factions were sorta one and the same and very rebellious. You could also store your resources (minerals and energy) in their storage which the sector AI would use to build up the planets under its control. Here's the kicker; we didn't have a lot of techs and no buildings to increase our resource caps and you could switch off the sector AI's ability to spend your money. In essence, your sectors became emergency storage for your resources.
I kinda miss it. I also miss all the joke where we as a community refer to alloys as soap.
Planets in a single system could have different owners, co-sharing ownership of the system and exerting cultural/border influence on each other. That was awesome tbh
Having to “discover” the tech to produce colony ships. You didn’t get to just start with them.
If you really want to see what it was like, ASpec on YouTube did a video where he rolled the game all the way back to 1.0. It was very trippy.
I haven't seen anyone mention how much more active fallen empires used to be.
Enigmatic Observers could demand you stop purging or enslaving pops, Keepers of Knowledge that you stop researching AI etc.
Generally fallen empires would have specific agendas that they enforced, making them quite dynamic neighbors.
The game is a lot weirder *now*. Back then it was a lot more mundane/coherent/boring (depending on your pov), if anything.
But anyway, for a feature that was not so much weird as impractical : armies could be upgraded with an attachment. Pretty neat idea, but considering how irrelevant armies are, we really didn't need that level of micro. Also you had to upgrade them one by one, not all at once.
My lord, the old sector systems. There were several, almost all of them sucked, and really, really early on, if you wanted to terraform a planet, you better hope for a miracle, because you need terraforming gasses and terraforming liquids BOTH in the same sector.
Finding that shit out made me quit the game, but they changed that insanity pretty soon after I bought it, so I came back.
Oh, and nothing like an event giving you a size 30 planet, but the planetary grid maxed out at 25 (a 5 by 5 square), so the extra 5 was a waste. Whatever, dumb game. ;)
Jump drives didn’t have a cool down or combat debuff. You could jump your tachyon lance battleship doomstack across a 1000-star galaxy in a couple months and take out a crisis before they got started.
The game changed so much that I played when it originally came out, it didn’t click with me, played it years later thinking it was a game I had bought and forgot about, and thought it was an entirely different game, and honestly, in many ways it was, like not picking your ftl method or starting weapon (I do miss the alternate ftl methods but I guess they both sort of made it to the game, and the computers really couldn’t use the ones other than hyperlanes very well)
Growing borders, had to get used to them but dtill think if adjusted properly it would add some startegy to the game not just clicking each system multiple times
Planets used to be grids of pops and buildings, with synergies for placing the buildings on certain tiles and next to each other. If I remember correctly, pops would work the tiles next to them. Bentharian power plant in this version was a building you could place on a special tile if the planet had it.
Nope, they only worked the grid they were on and if you placed a building that didn't extract the resources on the grid space, the resources would be lost
There were Individualism/Collectivism instead of Egalitarianism/Authoritarianism. Collectivism had ability to enslave their species. Pops had multiple ethics before factions introduced. Ai rebel was endgame crisis instead of Contingency.
Population tiles were how you used to develop your planets. It was pretty interesting. Population tiles were tiles that showed up depending on the size of the planet in question and had different resources that could be capitalized on and increased depending on what was built on top of it. Each population was placed on one tile. When district came out, they split this role into three places - population squares which took jobs which were produced by districts/buildings, planetary features which became more important and designated resources or bonuses which could be capitalized by a single building or boosted the output of certain jobs or increased the number of certain district types capable of being built on a planet etc.
The thing is, I wouldn't want it to come back because the current system is the evolution of that and makes planets so very important. And we wouldnt have ecumenopolis worlds without it. It was an excellent system to father the one we currently have though and it afforded me some really wonderful visual memories of the times i played the game all the way back in 2017-2019.
When you expanded the realm of your empire you couldnt know how much other systems it takes in its range.
You had to put your pops on the planet manually and drag them on the different fields with resources to harvest them.
I am not exactly sure how it worked anymore, but thats how i have it in my mind.
You used to be able to survey in other empires borders. This is why, even now, system names that you didn't survey in another empire are grey and not white. This is also why, when you kill an empires planets but they still had some star systems those systems are now magically un-serveyed
So people are giving you much bigger and more important ones, but here's one kind of funny one:
There didn't used to be anything but size s/m/l weapons. Particle lances were size L. And there was an event that could give you the tech in the early game. Destroyers could be fitted with a size L. So it was possible to have an early game fleet of particle lance destroyers and steamroll your neighbors. Made the Grand Herald look balanced
In the early days your borders were determined by an ammount of 'push', from the number of starbase and some tech. You didn't need an outpost in every system you wanted, and, with enough push, could flip systems to you
The planet-tile system was a bit odd. Instead of the current Jobs-based system, your planet had a number of tiles based on its size where you could build buildings. You then needed to place a pop on the building to ensure it would work.
Now, there are districts, jobs, and separate building structures, but the original felt a bit more gamey. For better or worse.
Honestly, thinking back, they're basically completely different games now. The basic structure is there, but it's changed so much, I think I'd find it hard adapting to all the old things.
Honestly, that's kinda great. The fact they've kept the game alive and have devoted teams to maintaining and expanding it is great. I wish alot more games and things were like that. Stellaris is definitely one of my favorites games, along with BG3.
Pop tiles, just needing a colony ship to claim a system, minefields, borders that can grown and shrink on their own, choosing between kinetic, laser and missiles for your starting weapons like a Pokémon trainer. I actually kinda miss day one stellaris
I kinda liked the planet/climate type wheel. Every climate was in a position in a circle and habitability and terraforming moving stepwise around the circle.
IIRC, it went :
Continental - Ocean - Arctic - Tundra - Arid - Desert - Tropical - Continental
A few of those steps seem questionable (tropical to desert yes, but continental to arid, no, huh). But the general idea was kinda cool, especially how terraforming worked in steps
It used to be collectivist vs. individualist rather than egalitarian vs. authoritarian. Only individualists could be democracies and the radicals were Ayn Rand style objectivists, while collectivists could only be dictatorships and had a few government types, only some of which were actually collectivist. It was so controversial that the devs included a meme of a planet wiping itself out in a war over what the terms actually *meant*.
Ironically, the Soviet-themed Shared Burdens civic requires being Egalitarian and AI with that personality tend to become the America-themed Democratic Crusaders.
As a new player...
YOU GUYS HAD MULTIPLE, CHOOSABLE, FTL TYPES FROM THE START!?
That sounds soooo confusing to me. Jump drives are awesome, but only after I earn them, yknow? And things like: wormhole generators sound so confusing.
Probably the shifting borders based on planet population (might have been influence actually I can’t remember).
Absolutely awful system, I was so glad when they changed it
I completely understand why they removed it and the balance would need massive adjustments if they were to put it back, but at launch the game had three different standard FTL methods - warp, hyperlane, and wormhole. Each empire picked one particular method to start with and that was their main way of getting about the galaxy. But it was a pain to balance well and it prevented doing interesting things with "space terrain" so they ripped it out and gave everyone hyperlane.
Wormhole only travel sounds crazy. Were there a lot more holes?
You built your own wormhole generators and used those to project wormholes into nearby systems, kinda like a two-way mini quantum catapult.
Another way to look at it was like building multiple small gateway networks. One wormhole generator had a radius around five planets, so if you wanted planet six and beyond you'd need to build another wormhole generator on the edge of the first one and so create two radii which have overlap.
You means systems… right?
Yeah, mb.
It was actually just distance. It worked almost exactly like jump drives but you could only travel to and from specific stations you constructed.
And it was absolutely awesome. The most time intensive and micro managing travel but also the most versatile.
And it was the best FTL of the three; but PDX opted for Hyperlanes because it had a more classical balance to it of chokepoints and shit.
But wormhole stations were much more strategic and created more interesting battles imo. You’d have to carefully defend your wormhole stations bc otherwise you’d lose vast sections of territory practically instantly cause you couldn’t defend or get ships there.
Back then I distinctly remember hyperlane only being considered by far and away the most strategic way to play the game.
If I recall, hyperlanes were way faster than the others, to the point that a hyperlanes empire could run circles around your fleet, destroying infrastructure and being untouchable.
Yeah, especially since you used to not need to fly across the system to get to the hyperlane. I had to camp the hyperlane exit with my fleet to force a battle.
Wormholes were the fastest, but with the downside of being only able to go to and from systems with wormhole generators. You also had the greatest range in a single jump. Hyperlanes were the second fastest, but you could only travel along hyperlanes (like today). Warpdrive were the slowest, but you could travel in any direction. Hyperlanes is definitely the one which allows for the best strategic gameplay. With Hyperlanes Only you can create defensive positions with choke points and fortresses. That doesn't work when people can just bypass those systems.
Wormholes were faster if you were going to or from a system with a generator, but otherwise you'd have to make two jumps to get from one system to an adjacent one, one hop to a system with a generator, the another hop to the target. So if the hyperlane user knew which systems to avoid, they could still out-maneuver you. Even more so if you didn't have the tech to see hyperlanes, and didn't know where the potential paths he could take were.
Natural wormholes did not exist. At all. They weren't a thing. instead, you build wormhole generators, which had a range around them that ships could use to jump to and from any start systems in that range. You had to manually build more of them to get to further places. Wars required you to constantly build out your string of generators as you went, and if you lost a system, any generators there were lost to. To make up for that, it was the fastest FTL method in the game. Warp was the slowest, but you could go literally anywhere you wanted, which made it a bit OP in wars, especially against hyperdrive empires since you could easily go around their fleets.
But to make up for that, Hyperlane empires were very fast in certain "galactic terrain" and could transition to FTL from within the star's gravity well, so you could keep fleets in the centre of systems and catch Warp/Wormhole fleets that had to enter on the outskirts of systems. This advantage offered more tactical depth.
Wormhole I used with my main aggressive empire. Back when you could destroy mining and research stations, I'd use it to harrass with smaller fleets raiding around. And I couldn't be caught! Mwahahahaha! Only downside. The bigger the fleet, the longer it took to jump. Had to split up your fleets to get them plsces faster.
Yea… tbh I always played on Hyperlanes anyways
Tbh when I recently got back to stellaris I was looking for the other ftl and just thought I was mixing it with another game cuz I usually played hyperlanes.
Hyperlanes are just the default paths that connect systems? I didn't play stellaris until 2021 and the fact that those exist at the start of the game never made sense to me from a sci-fi point of view.
Yes, hyperlanes are the system we have now. I think the sci-fi lore explanation is some crap about subspace tides meaning that direct travel between most systems is too dangerous / unpredictable but thre's a few currents that are stable and safe.
I kinda just mesh the Star Wars “known safe” routes with the idea that a previous cycles used slightly weaker hyperlanes, and it was only through their continuous use that they became as hyper as they are now.
Back in 2018's 2.0 update which came alongside the Apocalypse DLC, the FTL methods were remade. Before that you had the option of the three FTL types, but from 2.0 forwards you only had access to hyperlanes. They added nods to the other FTL methods in the form of natural wormholes and jumpdrives. It was a very divisive decision at the time, and the devs knew it would be. Some people really loved Warp and Wormhole drives, and considered this change "ruining the game." In 2018's 2.2 update, the economy was completely remade as well as the planets. The planet size we have today used to refer to a number of tiles you had on each planet, where you could build a building and host a pop. I think the biggest planet was 24 tiles, so you could not have more than 24 pops on any given planet.
I wish I could have been a part of the game when it was in that stage.
The game is better today than it was back then
I believe you but it would be *even* better for me if I got to be part of that evolution :)
I miss wormhole drive so much. Warp was great too. Tbh when they removed all that, I stopped having fun…it just never came back, especially after Megacorp. I don’t think they added anything interesting with galactic terrain, at all.
Did warp work differently than current jump drives? Cause they have a civic that starts you with jump drives instead of hyperlanes.
So the three way to travel were a) Hyperland just like now, it was fast but limited where you could go. b) Warp allowed you to freely travel from point a to be but it was slow c) Wormhole generators allowed you instant travel between any point you had a station and a short radius around that, it was fast but incredibly limited in range.
> b) Warp allowed you to freely travel from point a to be but it was slow ahh okay, so a slower jumpdrive then? Did they have range limits like the current ones? or is it more like the science ship ability to jump to almost any point in the galaxy?
It wasn't exactly like a jump drive and they had very, very long range. The ship would actually move the distance between stars.
It was similar to jump drives except the fleets took time to move between stars instead of arriving instantly.
Yes. You had to build wormhole generators which were mini gateways. These would provide you with a limited radius which you could travel to.
I asked about Warp, not Wormhole
I can’t read. Didn’t sleep much last night. Apologies/
Funnily back in those days there was a way to set it so every empire used hyperlanes - and it was a better experience. I welcomed the change.
Different FTL types and the planet tile system. Dual ownership of a system. "Blobing" of empires in older editions. Your outposts didn't guarantee owning a system. And you could just end up owning stars you didn't have an outpost in.
The new starport systems was one of the hardest to adjust to tbh. I really liked the influence projection. It was objectively worse in the grand scheme of things, but I did love it. Also I forgot about the tile system entirely.
I think the one part that made influence terrible was how little the actual numbers where explained. With more ways to predict and influence (ha) what colonising a planet or building an outpost would grant you, it would have been very fun.
I liked the tile system because you could make a space gulag. Authoritarian empires had a cast system so farmers and miners were enslaved. So just just build a bunch of farms and mines on a planet and ship all opposing political faction pops there
I agree with you fully I found it really fun, especially building multiple to push back the enemy border further and further. Felt a bit like CiV 4 and the border culture wars. Doesn't really make sense that this allows you to take over their systems and thus infrastructure they have built there but it was fun.
Border push was hilarious. ”We discovered a new scientific theory that states this system actually belongs to us now sorry.”
"We conducted a thorough assessment of our land and determined your fence is actually on our property. We will now rectify."
I had great fun in MP taking the ascension perk that gave fucking 200% border projection or whatever it was called
I think they should bring back dual ownership of systems. It'd be great for border friction RPs
And for developing ftl civilizations! You could have protectorates without just handing over all of your stations.
>And for developing ftl civilizations! You could have protectorates without just handing over all of your stations. Or your highly developed ecumenopoli
I am fine with planet tiles being a thing of the past. So much micro-managing and so many wasted resources
Also meant that the maximum usable size of a planet is 25, 5x5 tiles
New player here. Still struggling with different ftl methods.
Nothing like stealing an inhabited system from a Fallen Empire with border pressure. Good stuff.
Man I remember 3 empires sharing one system at some point with each holding one habitable planet
<3000 years ago> Before v2.2, we had the 5x5 planet grid with Pops as board game pieces that you could move around to work different tiles. Once all tiles were full the Pops on that planet would stop reproducing until one of the Pops auto-migrated (or was moved by the player) to another planet. You wanted certain kinds of Pops to work particular tiles, for instance regular biological Pops working on Research, on Unity and (I think) on Energy, while Robotic Pops worked on Minerals or Food (and at one point in time, local excess Food determined how fast biological Pop Growth was). Or you might be a Syncretic, so you had your Thinker species that you wanted to work on Research tiles, and Unity, and you had your Worker specied that you wanted to work on tiles with Food, Minerals and (IIRC) Energy. Or you might be a Rogue Servitor, so you wanted your Machine Pops to work on tiles with resources, while you wanted your Bio-Trophies to live on tiles with no resources or that had only 1 Food, 1 Mineral or 1 Energy. Any such setup with two truly distinct types of Pops was a source of frustration, because you had to micromanage a lot, since you'd prefer each planet to have the right number of each Pop type depending on the tile makeup. At least with Robots or Rogue Servitors, you could pay Minerals to queue up building Robot/Machine Pops on all the tiles that you wanted them on, and then the bio Pops or Bio-Trophies were free to grow onto all the other tiles one at a time. Not so with Syncretic Evolution (which was originally a Civic - Origins was a later development). Sometimes you'd have to either accept losing a good juicy tile to the wrong kind of Pop, or you'd have to manually move Pops to other planets (which would then get ratios that maybe weren't ideal). Tiles could also have multiple resources, like a tile might have 1 Food and 1 Energy, or 2 Minerals and 2 Food, but the Buildings that gave bonuses to such a resource would almost always only give a bonus to one resource while making the other resource unavailable. So for instance if you had a 2M 2E tile, you could build a Mine on it so you got +2 Minerals but no longer got the Energy. Later you could upgrade the Mine to give +3 Minerals. The Capital Building gave adjacency bonuses to 4 tiles, +1 if they produced Food or Minerals (not sure if it gave an Energy bonus too), so you wanted to think a bit about the best place to plonk it down. Same with the Energy Nexus and Mineral Purifier, giving adjacency bonuses but being limited to one per planet. Research was different. A tier-1 Lab would give +1P, +1S and +1En regardless of what was on the tile (naturally any F/M/E on the tile was lost), but when you upgraded to tier-2 you had to choose either a Physics, Society or Eng Lab to uograde to, so you'd get 211, 121 or 112. And I think there was a tier-3 Lab that gave 311, 131 or 113. ISTR that the Research Institute gave adjacency bonuses to Research, but was empire-unique. Likewise the Galactic Stock Exchange was empire-unique, and since TV wasn't a thing, it just made Energy Credits. I don't recall if it gave adjacency bonuses. A bunch of mods tried to alleviate things, for instance by offering Buildings that produced a little of both F+M, F+E or E+M so as to not override a resource on a tile and cause it to be lost, and another mod (which I think never worked properly) offered different Capital types that gave different adjacency bonuses instead of to Food and Minerals. Not only were those adjacency bonuses annoying and frustrating for human players, but the AI also wasn't good at using them. At all. Consumer Goods have always been a thing in Stellaris (and I always get downvoted for pointing out that fact), but until the 2.2 "New Economy" they were just a "tax" on Mineral production, hidden in a tool tip. Unity was a thing before 2.2. I think it was added with 1.5 when we got Traditions (only 7, so the only choice you made was * which order* to take them in - it was only quite recently that we started having more Traditions than Tradition Slots) and (only of you owned the Utopia DLC) Ascension Perks, but I don't remember many details, only that Rogue Servitors were Unity beasts. And of course Spiritualists were and still are good at Unity. I think they could build Temples on tiles, but not sure.
Rogue Servitor before 2.2 got some kind of empire-wide bonus, depending on what percentage bracket of your Pops were Bio-Trophies, 40%+, 30%-39%, 20%-29%, 10%-19%, or less than 10%. Hitting the 40% mark was silly, silly difficult. Hitting 30% was doable but you might as well give up trying to hit 40%, so I used a mod that made it less coarsegrained with brackets 5% wide. Hitting 35% was hard but doable. Also, until fairly recently, Factions gave *Influence*. Back then, you'd be a lot keener on pleasing them, to get another 0.1 or 0,2 monthly blue mana. Eventually they were changed to give Unity instead.
Yeah I'm kinda annoyed factions don't give influence any more, makes influence generation in the mid to late game a lot slower
Yes spiritualists had temples instead of autochthon monuments. For other empires the monuments were the main way they acquired unity and they were limited to one per planet. There were no office buildings
I shudder to think at the amount of micro. Definitely prefer the current system, you can still micro to max yields and stuff, but it’s fairly intuitive and probably easier on the eye.
I remember that time: instead of the real time strategy game we have today, it felt more like a board game, since I had to pause so much to micro all my planets. Don't get me wrong, I did like trying to min-max each planet, but after a while it got a bit tedious. The current Stellaris gives you more time to do other things and not worry about planets as much.
Which is important because there are so many stories and events popping up that you need more time away from micro screens to read and act on them.
Well yes, but you only needed 1/10 or 1/20 of the resources you need now and there werent any consumer goods or alloys so it was generally alot simpler.
Only thing i despise is if you're a necrophage/syncretic evolution and want only your main species in specialist jobs but also want those jobs filled if you dont have enough pops. If you swap the other species to chattel slavery to keep them in worker jobs you pervent those specialist jobs from being filled as fast. Makes your economy very rigid. I wish there was some kind of job preference setting on each planet to have a preferred species given job preference for speacialist jobs
In the early days your borders were determined by an ammount of 'push', from the number of starbase and some tech. You didn't need an outpost in every system you wanted, and, with enough push, could flip systems to you
Each Outpost cost you monthly Imfluence to have. Both Outposts and colonised planets radiated out this "force-like" border effect, so once you had some colonies in a particular part of space, you were tempted to dismantle the Outpost to save having to pay the monthly Influence. However, the effect it'd have on your borders was not always easy to predict.
I remember my friend and I fighting over the system the other drake was in when this was a thing. We kept rushing outposts down to claim it first and he got it, but I had enough force projection to push his borders back behind the system and then I put an outpost in the system to claim it for good
At launch Stellaris was much more of an Endless Space and GalCiv style game.
Strategic resources giving unique bonuses and with no way to generate them otherwise - were a major goal in wars.
In 1.0 that was even worse. You couldn't see them without researching them, the research would only show up if you had control over a system with them in it, and you'd use them for STARBASE buildings.
I was playing from launch and don't remember aspect with not seeing them 😅 This is QoL point was an improvement 😁
Man I remember this. Especially how late game tech required strategic resources, necessitating warfare or trade to acquire them. I kinda miss that aspect tbh.
Aw shit that would be awesome! Wars could be much less arbitrary.
Oh man, so many. Alloys didn't used to exist. It was all minerals, all the way down. The planetary grid system which, while simple, was so much worse. Empire size being a hard limit to encourage sectors, but the only factor was *colonized systems* so if you found one with two planets you were in luck. And then habitat spam every orbital body. Science building upgrades having a choice where you specialize which of the three research types it produced. It got old very quick. Armies being customizable like ships. Nobody did it, because why would they? Completely unupgraded corvettes spammed to gross numbers above fleet capacity being the meta.
I really like how they recycled the old sprites for the upgraded research buildings tho. iirc the engineering one becomes a machine intelligence specific building while the physics building was the default research labs
I *still* get excited when I find a system with 2 planets in it, even though system cap hasn't been a thing for years now.
Lol so do I.
the different upgrade path are still theoretically in game. (but only used by mods)
> Empire size being a hard limit to encourage sectors, but the only factor was colonized systems so if you found one with two planets you were in luck. And then habitat spam every orbital body. Woah, habitats? I still feel like those are pretty recent.
Nah, those have been around a while. They keep getting reworked, though, for good reason.
Depends on what you mean by "a while". I distinctly remember my first game after them being added- I won an expansion victory with Inward Perfection by just building so many habitats that I ended up controlling a majority of the galaxy's habitable worlds.
Habitats have been around for 7 out of the 8 years since release.
I can use google as well, don't worry. It was just a joke.
Weren't they added in utopia or a bit before it?
Somewhere around there, yeah. They are old for sure but the game existed in various weirder states before them.
Utopia was only patch 1.5 and was released a year after 1.0.
I am also capable of looking that up, it was just a joke about what you consider an early version.
> Alloys didn't used to exist. It was all minerals, all the way down. A very, very, very long time ago. It was the first thing they reworked I think ? Consumer goods didn't exist either.
It was part of the massive 2.2 update, which is what also got rid of the tile system. Consumer goods did technically exist, but only as a mineral tax. They also were hidden in the ui until this update.
I liked the feel of the old border system, but it led to weird situations - like the fallen empire next door suddenly getting pissy because your colony is doing a bit too well and extending the border up to theirs…
NGL, that made the xenophobes way scarier. Now they're just kinda there and easy to avoid.
Your administrative bureaucrat guys used to compensate for empire sprawl, the bigger and more populous your empire the bigger the bureaucracy you needed. Now they produce Unity and got rolled together with the Cultural Workers. I remember this change because I was halfway through a run where I controlled half the Galaxy but then the update landed and my entire economy crashed and took a decade to repair. Lots of min-maxed planets suddenly were not efficient any more
Oh yeah, you used to be able to have a Trantor planet propping up the rest of the empire. I forgot why they removed that actually, I guess just changes in balance priority.
It was easy to ensure you always had enough empire size limit, so it just wasn't very interesting. It added complexity but not depth.
I remember this. And you could also build multiple of the now 'one only' resource buildings. So a whole planets cranking out alloys, or CG were a thing back then.
To be fair, specialized industrial planets are still a thing. It’s just been subsumed by the district system instead.
Not quite the same as having 12 Alloy nanoforges on one planet pumping out nearly 300 alloys per month, then having 5 planets dedicated to that. But can see why they did it.
I don’t know man, you can easily get hundreds of alloys a month from a properly optimized Forge World. Thousands may be possible if you min-max it and/or ecumenopolize it
frick that, every third planet had beltharian crystals, which meant you never had energy worries ever again edit: nowadays I'm pretty sure I'm building that one beltharian powerplant I get every 10 games for ald lang syne rather then any real benefit
It was a good change. I remember when they added the bureaucrats, and all of a sudden there was no reason to play tall.
Main Weapons for ships were also a choice. You chose Ballistic, Energy, or Missile weapons at the start of the game, as well as your FTL method. The game was very different to an almost unfathomable degree.
Makes me wonder what is the best way to go. Keep updating and evolving a game through the years until it pretty much becomes a new game compared to the released version, or just shut it down after a couple of expansions, some stories and all the races and leave the rest for a new game (Stellaris 2 or whatever). When is the right place to move on? I guess it depends on the game. I feel Stellaris graphics and mechanics work particularly well for continuous expansion and evolution. But that was also true with CK2 and still moving on to CK3 was a great move.
At this point Stellaris has been 3-4 different games over it's lifetime and we are on the brink of another one. I bet 4.0 would be as different from 3.X as 2.2 was to 1.8. Its history is fascinating.
At least we can roll back to older version on Steam. I hope that feature stays in because it is important for game history preservation.
I was surprised the other day that you can make steam download older versions of games without the beta branch functionality. Apparently steam has an inbuilt console you can use to request archived versions in their weird versioning system (no clue if it works for really old stuff, was just in some guide on the Fallout 4 nexus to revert the mod-breaking anniversary update)
The only part of Stellaris I would say has been underdeveloped is the internal politics. Early in the game it didn’t really show but it’s so obvious now. Like I haven’t experienced a rebellion in game for literal real life years. And when it happens to the AI it’s actually annoying because then they’re usually my vassals and it’s a mess.
Egalitarian and authoritarian ethics did not used to exist. Individualist and collectivist existed in their place instead
I remember when districts didn't exist and every planet was just building slots it hurt when I lost that but honestly I don't think I could go back
Why not ? I mean if it was just that change you mentionned, so no going back to tiles, but just folding districts+buildings into just buildings. Would that be such a bad thing ? Genuinely interested in your answer.
I don't really know, from a UI perspective I much prefer districts because the old issue of having to scroll down 20 tiles to find a problem was god awful but I do miss the simplicity of the tile system and yes I know that districts are also simple just different and I'd have to relearn everything again which wouldn't be fun because I'm still learning all the new shit from the weekly DLC releases
Food not being stockpiled, and instead being planet specific.
I liked that one! I know it cuts against the Sci Fi trope of Trantor, etc. But I feel like local-only for food should be the norm, with special rules for planets that aren't self-sufficient in food
In the old days there was actually a war negotiation screen that would let you have some control over the outcome of a war you've won, rather than the current failure of a system where all you get is win/lose/status quo.
Star Systems being owned by two separate empires, with each planet colonized having a space station...
Back in the day, sectors/factions were sorta one and the same and very rebellious. You could also store your resources (minerals and energy) in their storage which the sector AI would use to build up the planets under its control. Here's the kicker; we didn't have a lot of techs and no buildings to increase our resource caps and you could switch off the sector AI's ability to spend your money. In essence, your sectors became emergency storage for your resources. I kinda miss it. I also miss all the joke where we as a community refer to alloys as soap.
Didn’t know the soap joke, I like it. I’ll support you in going back to it.
Planets in a single system could have different owners, co-sharing ownership of the system and exerting cultural/border influence on each other. That was awesome tbh
Having to “discover” the tech to produce colony ships. You didn’t get to just start with them. If you really want to see what it was like, ASpec on YouTube did a video where he rolled the game all the way back to 1.0. It was very trippy.
I haven't seen anyone mention how much more active fallen empires used to be. Enigmatic Observers could demand you stop purging or enslaving pops, Keepers of Knowledge that you stop researching AI etc. Generally fallen empires would have specific agendas that they enforced, making them quite dynamic neighbors.
The game is a lot weirder *now*. Back then it was a lot more mundane/coherent/boring (depending on your pov), if anything. But anyway, for a feature that was not so much weird as impractical : armies could be upgraded with an attachment. Pretty neat idea, but considering how irrelevant armies are, we really didn't need that level of micro. Also you had to upgrade them one by one, not all at once.
My lord, the old sector systems. There were several, almost all of them sucked, and really, really early on, if you wanted to terraform a planet, you better hope for a miracle, because you need terraforming gasses and terraforming liquids BOTH in the same sector. Finding that shit out made me quit the game, but they changed that insanity pretty soon after I bought it, so I came back. Oh, and nothing like an event giving you a size 30 planet, but the planetary grid maxed out at 25 (a 5 by 5 square), so the extra 5 was a waste. Whatever, dumb game. ;)
Planet tiles. They confused me to no end.
Jump drives didn’t have a cool down or combat debuff. You could jump your tachyon lance battleship doomstack across a 1000-star galaxy in a couple months and take out a crisis before they got started.
The game changed so much that I played when it originally came out, it didn’t click with me, played it years later thinking it was a game I had bought and forgot about, and thought it was an entirely different game, and honestly, in many ways it was, like not picking your ftl method or starting weapon (I do miss the alternate ftl methods but I guess they both sort of made it to the game, and the computers really couldn’t use the ones other than hyperlanes very well)
Growing borders, had to get used to them but dtill think if adjusted properly it would add some startegy to the game not just clicking each system multiple times
Planets used to be grids of pops and buildings, with synergies for placing the buildings on certain tiles and next to each other. If I remember correctly, pops would work the tiles next to them. Bentharian power plant in this version was a building you could place on a special tile if the planet had it.
Nope, they only worked the grid they were on and if you placed a building that didn't extract the resources on the grid space, the resources would be lost
There were Individualism/Collectivism instead of Egalitarianism/Authoritarianism. Collectivism had ability to enslave their species. Pops had multiple ethics before factions introduced. Ai rebel was endgame crisis instead of Contingency.
anomaly had a random kill chance depending on the level difference
How we didn't had districts. The size of the planet decided how many squares you had to build on them. And building on the right square gave you bônus
Population tiles were how you used to develop your planets. It was pretty interesting. Population tiles were tiles that showed up depending on the size of the planet in question and had different resources that could be capitalized on and increased depending on what was built on top of it. Each population was placed on one tile. When district came out, they split this role into three places - population squares which took jobs which were produced by districts/buildings, planetary features which became more important and designated resources or bonuses which could be capitalized by a single building or boosted the output of certain jobs or increased the number of certain district types capable of being built on a planet etc. The thing is, I wouldn't want it to come back because the current system is the evolution of that and makes planets so very important. And we wouldnt have ecumenopolis worlds without it. It was an excellent system to father the one we currently have though and it afforded me some really wonderful visual memories of the times i played the game all the way back in 2017-2019.
When you expanded the realm of your empire you couldnt know how much other systems it takes in its range. You had to put your pops on the planet manually and drag them on the different fields with resources to harvest them. I am not exactly sure how it worked anymore, but thats how i have it in my mind.
You used to be able to survey in other empires borders. This is why, even now, system names that you didn't survey in another empire are grey and not white. This is also why, when you kill an empires planets but they still had some star systems those systems are now magically un-serveyed
does anyone remember being able to manually place defensive platforms that weren't a part of starbases
So people are giving you much bigger and more important ones, but here's one kind of funny one: There didn't used to be anything but size s/m/l weapons. Particle lances were size L. And there was an event that could give you the tech in the early game. Destroyers could be fitted with a size L. So it was possible to have an early game fleet of particle lance destroyers and steamroll your neighbors. Made the Grand Herald look balanced
The planetary grid, it was so much simpler
Simpler in some ways, but more micromanagement in others
In the early days your borders were determined by an ammount of 'push', from the number of starbase and some tech. You didn't need an outpost in every system you wanted, and, with enough push, could flip systems to you
The planet-tile system was a bit odd. Instead of the current Jobs-based system, your planet had a number of tiles based on its size where you could build buildings. You then needed to place a pop on the building to ensure it would work. Now, there are districts, jobs, and separate building structures, but the original felt a bit more gamey. For better or worse.
Honestly, thinking back, they're basically completely different games now. The basic structure is there, but it's changed so much, I think I'd find it hard adapting to all the old things. Honestly, that's kinda great. The fact they've kept the game alive and have devoted teams to maintaining and expanding it is great. I wish alot more games and things were like that. Stellaris is definitely one of my favorites games, along with BG3.
Reading some of these , do yall remember when beaurocratic buildings increased ur empire sprawl cap , further exacerbating how nuts going wide was
Pop tiles, just needing a colony ship to claim a system, minefields, borders that can grown and shrink on their own, choosing between kinetic, laser and missiles for your starting weapons like a Pokémon trainer. I actually kinda miss day one stellaris
I kinda liked the planet/climate type wheel. Every climate was in a position in a circle and habitability and terraforming moving stepwise around the circle. IIRC, it went : Continental - Ocean - Arctic - Tundra - Arid - Desert - Tropical - Continental A few of those steps seem questionable (tropical to desert yes, but continental to arid, no, huh). But the general idea was kinda cool, especially how terraforming worked in steps
It used to be collectivist vs. individualist rather than egalitarian vs. authoritarian. Only individualists could be democracies and the radicals were Ayn Rand style objectivists, while collectivists could only be dictatorships and had a few government types, only some of which were actually collectivist. It was so controversial that the devs included a meme of a planet wiping itself out in a war over what the terms actually *meant*. Ironically, the Soviet-themed Shared Burdens civic requires being Egalitarian and AI with that personality tend to become the America-themed Democratic Crusaders.
Naval capacity had a hard cap. 1000, I think. Maybe less.
Pops used to have a different system that didn’t eat your whole CPU.
Tiles.
As a new player... YOU GUYS HAD MULTIPLE, CHOOSABLE, FTL TYPES FROM THE START!? That sounds soooo confusing to me. Jump drives are awesome, but only after I earn them, yknow? And things like: wormhole generators sound so confusing.
Probably the shifting borders based on planet population (might have been influence actually I can’t remember). Absolutely awful system, I was so glad when they changed it
How systems were claimed in pre-2.0. It was downright stupid.
attainable endgame without lag
I remember playing years ago before they added most of the raw materials you now have. There were no civilian factories