You say it’s Stellaris dumbed down. I say it’s Stellaris without the fat, dead weight and overcomplication. Stellaris is up its own ass with the level of management and absurd resources and everything else. So many different currencies and resources and different stats and buildings and fucking planets and everything. It never felt intuitive to me and feels functionally impossible to play. Nevermind enjoy. Every menu you open is another deluge of information that feels like you need like 5 years of logistics experience to even comprehend. I’ve got a couple hundred hours in it and I still haven’t figured out most of the game. Doesn’t help that because the game is so needlessly complex the tutorial seemed to have been planned out by a lobotomized chimp. Oh great. One of 45 popups that occur in the first 5 minutes, overwhelming you with information that you won’t remember, and then never being mentioned when actually maybe useful.
Infinite is not Stellaris dumbed down, it’s just made for the average gamer when Stellaris very very very much isn’t.
No worries, I get heated up over my interests too. And you are correct that the learning curve is steep, but that’s pretty much all paradox games. Appealing to a certain niche of history or sci fi nerd who love controlling every single detail.
If you have some questions about stellaris feel free to hit me up, I have over 4k hours logged in the game and written several mods for it.
I mean I wouldn’t say it’s all Paradox games. Surviving Mars and Cities Skylines (1 at least) are both pretty intuitive from the get go. Same with Surviving the Aftermath. Stellaris is just on a whole fucking other level.
I have no idea how many hours I have in Stellaris off hand. It’s the console version, not the PC version and I know there are differences but none so extreme as to make my experiences so meh. I took over the galaxy once with a Terran like empire and just systematically destroyed everything in my way but every other playthrough I’ve done just ends up being too confusing and too overwhelming too quickly and it spirals rapidly out of control. I played the multiplayer with a buddy and he was trying to explain stuff to me and I felt brain-dead. I couldn’t grasp why things were connected. That was my main issue I think. Just not understanding how all the things were plugged into each other. I could track individual stuff, love me some resource management, but there were too many things that all depended on each other in 15 different ways and it felt like a feedback loop of changing one thing fucked everything else up and I just gave up.
Not saying the game is bad for the record. Just bad for me. Infinite I can see the connections easier. Still clunky for me but more intuitive I suppose.
Again hope this isn’t coming off aggressive. Tone is hard via text.
It took me playing the classic masterpiece designs of board gaming like Agricola, Concordia and Dominion to make me realize how bloated most strategy video games are.
It ain’t about how complex the system is, it is about how meaningful and interesting your choices are and honestly some video games are just horrendous at making you do 1000 little tasks that don’t really matter.
That massive number of resources, planets, pops, fleets, and everything else is not only understandable but feels magnificent when you have them dancing to your tune. Also my brother in SpongeBob, you literally got mad at a tutorial. On a more serious and hopefully helpful note, the game grows on you like a fungus. It’s really not much worse than Civ. Energy is gold, Minerals and Alloys are effectively Production, Unity is Culture (and works almost identically to Civ V, you can’t use it to outright win is all) and the scinces are well Science. As for all the others, my man those are your Strategic and Luxury resources. But that’s only where the fun starts, the real madness is civ and species generation. I once made space orbital dwelling, advanced robotics having, xenophobic, pacifists that relied on slave labor stolen from nations that declared war on my seemingly defenseless empire. I also made the Megachurch of Dewy, Cheatham and Howe.
Edit: I almost forgot the best terrible civ I made, OnlyStreams.
I think that you have got to learn and come to accept that people have different tastes. Stellaris certainly can be too difficult for some people, but that doesn’t take away from its brilliance.