The first but least troublesome issue is the new mindset required to divvy your planets into AI-controlled sectors. Somewhere inside the colored blob of your empire, apportioned into sectors, a nucleus still under your control. When you’re running out of money or production, you can bump up the tax rate on a few sectors until you get your spending under control. You’re going to want to appoint a governor so every planet gets a little bonus of some sort. You give these sectors general instructions. You can imagine a starship captain telling his navigator to go there. Paradox figured the name “sector” sounds spacey enough, and they’re right. Your overflow planets coalesce into the rough equivalent of states or provinces. So once you have more than five (give or take), you have to turn some of your planets over to middle management. Which makes for a pretty paltry galactic empire. How do you then multiply the number of cities without multiplying the workload? A central tenet of Stellaris’ design is that there will only be five (give or take) cities - planets, in this case - at a time. It furthermore presents it as a gameplay solution to the usual late-game micromanagement in any game where you start with one city. Stellaris embraces this conceit wholeheartedly. They are among my favorite historical essays.Īfter the jump, what does this have to do with sci-fi? To their immense credit, Paradox’s strategy games are the same thing. It is about people trying to hold power against the demands of social unrest, religious freedom, petty rivalries, Popes, capitalists, natives making a fuss about self-determination, evolving political philosophies, progress, entropy. History, Paradox’s favorite subject, is not a strategy game. He does not get to move sliders willy-nilly. He does not get to gobble up territory indiscriminately. He does not get to tell each point of population which tile to harvest. Some things are outside the control of a ruler. It’s a concept Paradox has explored to great effect, especially with Crusader Kings and Victoria (minus the galactic part, of course). The central concept in Stellaris - that a galactic emperor isn’t a god - doesn’t work.
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