Yes and suddenly it's morning ;(

 

Huh, yeah it does. It actually might make me play the game again. It's the kind of thing I'm most interested in. I haven't really played that much since they redid the planet system. Cheers for the heads up.

 

I've been enjoying the update and DLC. The new precursors are interesting and the relic mechanics work well to explore that. Haven't gotten much further because, as usual, I ran into a bug that made all of my biological POPs force my robots out onto the streets the moment they caught a hint of food production dropping below zero.

 

With Stellaris free to play until Sunday is anyone interested in getting a game going?
I'd also be down to host a game for people who want to test it out and see what it's like with all the DLC.

 

Anyone still playing? How do you like the new update and DLC?

Personally, I haven't finished a game yet, I got really turned around by the new economy system. Haven't been able to figure out the new focus instead of pops. But I'll try again this weekend probably.

 

Personally, I've really enjoyed playing with Dick. It's been hard getting to know how the new economy works, but I've tugged on it enough to get an idea of what does and what doesn't. It does have a bit of a problem once you start getting into it where growth slows to a crawl and leaves your economy feeling a bit limp as you struggle to keep it up. I reckon a bit of a touch up from the Devs will solve that fairly easily, though we'll likely still see growth slowing down a bit once we hit the mid-game.

 

I've played it a little, but I'm practically addicted to Voidborne and the patch broke it. The new growth formula absolutely guts their growth due to carrying capacity. As in, even while stacking growth modifiers, my main species gew at half the rate of my robot assembly from day one.

Honestly not sure how this wasn't caught. They made a big point of saying one of the devs loves Voidborne and would make sure they came out alright, but it was apparent in my game from minute one. The only way to counteract it is to spam City Districts, which is a non starter of a strategy.

Other than that, the patch seems cool. I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to Espionage, but it's a system I've always wanted.

 

Not a fan of how becoming the Crisis works more or less the same for organic and machine empires. I feel like the machine intelligence shouldn't really give all that much shit about the Shroud and focus on becoming the Crisis in a different way. Hell, they could have done something to combine it with the Contingency crisis. Just having one type of crisis for the player to become is boring.

 

I'm not really a fan of the new building system, among other things in the update. Basing building slots on pops made sense and I'm just not sure what was gained by changing it the way they did. It's just a little annoying to be honest. Ditto for the way they suddenly made envoys about 3000% more important to gameplay, but made very few adjustments to the number of them you can get access to. It's especially irritating if you're trying to play as a diplo-phobic race like some of the machine race options, and you basically can't learn shit about even something as basic as your neighbors' borders without physically sending a ship through their space (which often isn't an option, short of outright warfare, if you're running an Exterminator or Assimilator-type race).

I'm irritated that they gave us a bunch of new shit, as promised, but failed to mention in any promo I saw that they were taking other shit away from us to "balance" it. It kind of ruins the novelty of the espionage system when half of its mechanics just turned out to be more roundabout, resource intensive ways of doing some of the same shit we used to be able to do more or less automatically in older versions.

That and it K.O.'d half the mods I was running. The community has really stepped up to fix that, but there's a few legacy mods I really liked that still worked up through 2.8 despite being for sometimes much older versions, that now just don't function, often because of the very changes that have been annoying me about Dick.

 

On that note, "C6" are now playable.

 

With the new DLC out we're gonna play some multiplayer on Monday. We'll be in Discord from around 4pm UTC, so evening time in Europe.
You don't need to have any of the DLC, but a rough idea what you want to play would be great. That way we don't spend hours customizing races.
Crossplay should be enabled, but I can't promise it'll work if you got a GoG or Humble version. Only ever played Stellaris with Steam friends.