The problen with Stellaris is the 101 add-on pack sold seperately. It feels like they are milking the customer and getting all add-ons can be very expensive.

I'm used to that from Paradox and I'm fine with having to pay extra for more features and more options, but I would have hoped the basic game itself would have had a bit more game in it. I had fun with basic EU4 and basic CK2, until eventually I decided I wanted more, and paid for it. Basic Stallaris seemed to be devoid of any content. I mean, there were some events, some planets had an interesting resource, but it was nothing like the lively piece of history in action that EU4 and CK2 are.

But maybe it's gotten better since then. I tried it pretty early.

The DLC thing is annoying, and is a serious problem for EUIV, but for Stellaris the biggest dealbreaker for me was that each patch or update completely changed the game. Totally altered X/Y/Z, did away with transportation methods, total 180.

So then you have to relearn everything. And it's a slow paced, very abstract game to be begin with so it becomes a slog.

EU4 has also had a few of those updates. Not every update changed everything, but some did.

I don't really have a problem with that, though. These games, especially a new one like Stellaris, are also a search for the right approach to the game they want. Sometimes they realise (based on feedback most likely) that they took the wrong approach and have to make dramatic changes. Would you rather they abandoned the game and release a new game that does it right, or that they update the old one? I quite appreciate Paradox's approach. You get way more value out of the game than with most other games. And if they did that with Stellaris, that gives me hope, because the initial version of that didn't work for me.

And if you really prefer the old version, you can just continue playing that.

Also its important to add that a lot of the DLC content ends up in future patches.

They dont fix bugs only, they actually improve the game. For free.

There is so much detail in stellaris that i feel like i owe them the $10 some bucks when a good DLC comes out.

The amount of writing that goes into anomalies alone is worth probably a couple of books

The genre wouldn't exist without those add-ons. Since the market for grand strategy games is small this is their way to be profitable. That is how paradox sells all its titles.

Stellaris is a grand strategy game with random maps. If you go into it expecting a normal space 4x similar to masters of orion it is easy to get disappointed since many of those aspects are weak. Instead think of it as HoI or EU4 in space and it makes a lot more sense.

I went in hoping for EU4 in space, but instead I got glacial Master of Orion. That was my disappointment.

Maybe it would have been more interesting if, like in EU4, the galaxy was already populated. Maybe that's indeed what it is in newer versions, but not back when I picked it up.