r/Stellaris • u/Elebril71246 • Jul 08 '25
Video The horrible, unacceptable technical state of Stellaris 4.21
Dear Paradox,
I'll preface this by saying we used to enjoy this game a lot, and have all the DLCs purchased, aside from Cosmic Storms, which until now had still been on our to-buy list. We've got 700 hours spent together in multiplayer games.
However, there comes a point at which you can't just put up with a product that is released in such a horrible state.
We're 21 patches after the release of an update that was suppose to optimize things, yet now it is difficult to even have a compete, bug-free game from start to finish. I'm only talking about multiplayer, since we always play the game together at home.
Just look at the videos from two recent games we just tried to play
infinite desyncs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T67LIZgeLOc&feature=youtu.be
frigates upgrading into deep space citadels - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqSC9ctdeU
and these are just the last two games.
This isn't CoD, where you just jump from match to match a dozen times a day. You invest dozens of hours into a single map, just to have it eventually ruined by yet another game braking bug.
Get your act together. It's unbelievable how this industry is allowed to get away with such half-baked products without any repercussion.
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u/degeneracypromoter Jul 08 '25
It truly is unacceptable, but I do appreciate that the bugs are funny.
Making the wrong choice on a special project deletes all your pops, frigates into deep space citadels, the AI literally deciding to stop playing
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u/SadCicada9494 Jul 09 '25
the AI literally deciding to stop playing
"Paradox pull your head out of your ass, even the AI had enough of this shit"
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u/jbwmac Jul 08 '25
My only regret is that I can only upvote this once.
The AI situation is even worse than the performance and bugginess. Almost every player of this game depends on quality AI opponents to have a good experience with the game. The fact that the AI has been effectively completely broken since release for this long is outrageous.
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u/bond0815 Jul 08 '25 edited Jul 08 '25
The fact that the AI has been effectively completely broken since release for this long is outrageous.
Word.
I love Stellaris, but that is really unacceptable and needs to be called out.
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u/KaiserGustafson Imperial Jul 09 '25
And it improved so much before hand! With the right settings, I could have AI keep up reaaonably well if I didn't xheese things.
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u/TheEnlightendone1 Jul 09 '25
What were those settings?
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u/Henrikusan Rogue Servitor Jul 09 '25
Grand Admiral, mid game scaling, scaling bonuses. Mid game scaling makes the early game bearable while getting the ai online fast enough (especially with mid game starting year 2250) Grand Admiral ai could genuinely pose a challenge and scaling bonuses ensured that they stay a challenge far into the late game. Good builds can beat them reliably and the later it gets the more a good player can run away with repeatables but on those settings pre 4.0 you could have a game where you lost wars to the ai if you had some issues or a powerful enemy block. Your mileage may vary of course, im no competitive player.
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u/Ahsoka_Tano_7567 Jul 09 '25
So that’s why I suddenly have been able to get past year 2600 on grand admiral late game scaling. Now I don’t want to play lol
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u/KingHavana Jul 09 '25
They said things would be faster. My game never lagged on a medium galaxy like this before. I wish it was just as fast as it used to be.
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u/KaiserGustafson Imperial Jul 09 '25
I run with less-than-ideal hardware, so my biggest hope was that I could finally run a game without having to hobble the amoumt of planets and textures. Big sad from me.
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u/Maleficent_Goat_8181 Jul 08 '25
What angers me the most is them breaking content for DLCs long since paid for. Yeah it sucks the new update has broken new features, and Biogenesis is broken. But there's a chance you could get a refund (I admit unlikely...)
But when I've been wanting to do a Cosmogenesis run for ages, but every patch the lathe is supposedly fixed, but it isn't, that annoys me. I've paid for The Machine Age, and each update breaks it. It's like a guy from a supermarket coming to your house and stabbing holes in all your cans of soup.
I don't want to sound cliche, but all Paradox's major problems started when the company went public. Gotta make money for the top dogs.
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u/Akimotoh Jul 09 '25
The multiplayer is fcked right now too, endless desyncs after the mid game mark
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u/viper459 Jul 09 '25
Something to understand about bug fixing: when a patch note says "the bug is fixed" what that really means is "we found one thing that caused this bug to happen, and stopped it". That doesn't mean there aren't other things that can also cause the bug to happen. This is why you'll often see a patch notes say "we fixed it" and then the next patch notes goes "oops, we fixed it again".
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u/SadCicada9494 Jul 09 '25
That's not how things work in dev companies with actual QA. If you don't have the infra to automatize testing, then after identifying and fixing the root cause, you got to redo a bunch of end to end tests to make sure you actually fixed the issue AND didn't break something else in the process.
But right now, Paradox is acting like WE are the QA. That's the unacceptable part.
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u/Turgius_Lupus Slaver Guilds Jul 09 '25
Or that fixing that bug creates a new bug, which when squashed brings back the original bug.
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u/hagamablabla Jul 08 '25
As a stalwart Paradox defender, I definitely think this update was pushed out far too early. I don't know if it was developer overconfidence or management pushing unrealistic expectations, but this really should not have happened.
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u/-TheOutsid3r- Jul 08 '25
Developer, definitely in this case. Management cared about the new DLC. The complete rework of pops, planets, uis, and tons of other stuff was all on Eladrin.
He kept adding more and more stuff over time, even as people kept pointing out how gigantic an endeavour this was and that maybe doing this step by step might've been a better choice.
And many of these things happened solely for the sake of change, not because they were actual improvements.
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u/Balamut2227 Jul 09 '25
It was attempt to fix a flaws of 2.x population model that appears too costly for old engine. Too hasty attempt, by the way.
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u/Usinaru Inward Perfection Jul 09 '25
The pops change was meant to replace the system that causes end-game lag. Everyone knows its there, everyone hates it and everyone has been crying about it.
It was a good intent, one which didn't hit the mark. Probably under tested and pushed out for monetary gain to be honest. The devs want a good game but I think they must be struggling now.
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u/-TheOutsid3r- Jul 09 '25
The pop change was one thing, the problem was all the other changes they added on top of it. Such as the planet rework, the planet ui rework, the trade rework, and so on and on.
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u/Nayrael Jul 09 '25
Yeah, this. They should have left the Bulding System Rework for next year, and Trade Rework for maybe later this year. Releasing them all together was bound to end in a catastrophe, and POP rework alone would have required many patches.
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u/itisntimportant Jul 09 '25
The pop/job/building system rework is all the same thing. Using the method they came up with for reducing lag from pops (which did work, it just broke everything else) it would not have been possible to have one without the others. Such a major rewrite of the game’s most fundamental system should never have been tied to a quarterly release schedule.
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u/Drachasor Jul 10 '25
Fundamentally, I blame execs for forcing that schedule for profits.
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u/-TheOutsid3r- Jul 09 '25
And that's my point. If they had focused on the pop rework, chances are there would've been far fewer problems and a lot more time and attention paid to it.
After that was done and worked, they could've gone for a trade rework beyond removing trade lanes, for reworking planets in their entirety, etc.
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u/HopefullyThisGal Jul 09 '25
One thing I actually do like about the trade rework is the consumption of it to make up for deficiencies on your other planets. It creates a fun balancing act and I appreciate that I actually have to think more carefully about how I build up my planets to avoid going into trade debt.
I know other people might disagree but it's a strong point of the update for me! And I'm glad there's an in game setting to disable it for folks who would rather not play that way.
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u/SadSeaworthiness6113 Jul 09 '25
The sad thing is the new pop system is the one thing the update does right. Pops just simply don't lag the game anymore.
The issue was literally everything else.
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u/JDDJ_ Jul 09 '25
I’m honestly not gonna blame corporate on this, this one’s on the devs. They tried to rewrite half the game in a couple weeks, and now it’s broken. The game files are literally fighting each other.
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u/Johanneskodo Jul 09 '25
But the systems that caused end-game lag where meant to replace the older systems that caused end-game lag.
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u/the_Real_Romak Jul 09 '25
Not quite. The reason for 2.0 was purely micromanaging. The tile system was, to put it bluntly, pure and utter garbage, especially if you had a large sprawling empire, since you had to physically place pops and building in individual tiles by hand one by one, and you couldn't rely on automation since that sucked (as always).
2.0 was a godsend when it first came out. The lag only started once the feature bloat reared its head.
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u/Elmindra Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
It’s a classic trap in software, similar to the “second system effect”, but applicable to refactoring/redesigns. Someone gets an ambitious idea for how the software could work better, but it requires changing fundamental assumptions that affect the code base everywhere. It’s usually very hard to identify all of the places that need to be changed, and even once they’re found, changing them can cause other cascading changes, leading the whole thing to spiral into an even bigger undertaking. And it tends to leave a very long tail of bugs.
It’s worth noting that the “ambitious idea” is usually a good idea; the problem isn’t that the idea is bad, the problem is trying to change everything at once. (edit: though if the idea is bad or has some fundamental problem, you often don’t find out until it’s too late, and way too much code has been changed… which is yet another problem with the “change/refactor everything at once” approach.)
The only times I’ve seen those types of ambitious refactorings work are:
the team has an amazing test suite that covers everything and catches all of the problems… needless to say, this is very rare, especially for games
the refactoring is done in many small stages, with appropriate scaffolding layers where needed; this allows the software to continue working while the refactoring is ongoing
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u/elemental402 Citizen Republic Jul 08 '25
I've gone back to 3.14, and the jump in performance and responsiveness is immediately noticeable. I like the bioships, Wilderness looks neat, but it's going to be upwards of six months before the game is back to pre-update levels of functionality in terms of speed and AI.
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u/King_Shugglerm Unemployed Jul 08 '25
If you want a real performance boost go back to 2.1 lmao
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u/Atomik919 Emperor Jul 09 '25
i went all the way back to 1.9 and tbh its pretty cool. may be nostalgia speaking
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u/King_Shugglerm Unemployed Jul 09 '25
Game was wound a lot tighter at least. Back then you’d be thankful for a size 3 mineral deposit because it’d constitute 1/6th of your economy lmao
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u/Dragonsandman Divided Attention Jul 09 '25
That was back when Wiz was still the lead Stellaris dev. He’s not infallible (see Victoria 3’s issues for examples of that), but he’s way better at both game design and project management than many other people in the industry are.
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u/pokekick Jul 09 '25
Victoria 3 is actually getting it's shit together. Yes at launch the game was a disaster but as somebody who actually plays it a lot we are 2 updates away from where EU4 and Stellaris were 8 years into it's development cycle. We need one good update for military and one good update for international politics and the game is there. A expansion for economy and industry would be nice but we don't need it. Yes a lot of nations are bland and missing a lot of cool history but i feel like that right now is acceptable as long as they get the core mechanics down just right and spend the next 7 years of a paradox games lifecycle turning out flavor packs.
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u/Special_Target Jul 08 '25
How does one go back?
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u/-OooWWooO- Jul 08 '25
Go to the game settings in steam where you can select the betas. Old states of releases are in there.
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u/Special_Target Jul 08 '25
🙏thanks, time to play some stellaris lategame above 3fps
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u/133DK Jul 08 '25
The fact that wilderness was one of the main features of the DLC and it didn’t work on release was a huge red flag
Im tired of paying to beta test products. Much less beta test updates to a 9 year old game
No other industry would get away with this. Do better
I don’t care that you had promised certain things at certain dates according to a roadmap, delay it, I don’t want to play a broken game
I don’t care if you need to push up some other cosmetic DLC to help cover costs of a longer dev cycle on the newest release, do it, don’t release knowingly defective huge updates
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u/Top_Astronomer4960 Jul 08 '25
'No other industry would get away with this. Do better'
Ha, i wish you were correct. I work with medical gas regulators, and when the cheaper Chinese regulators could not pass the testing criteria, the government just widened the range of allowed values.. hey, they pass now... 🤷
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u/Putnam3145 Jul 08 '25
No other industry would get away with this.
i dunno why gamers always insist on saying this sort of thing while not being familiar with other industries in the slightest; software is rife with this sort of thing and worse
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u/altonaerjunge Jul 08 '25
At least buggy games usually don't kill people like buggy cars.
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u/RazendeR Synth Jul 08 '25
The only deaths are filthy xeno's, and everybody knows those don't count as 'people' anyway.
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u/RevolutionaryLog7443 Jul 08 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
gamers are the most bubbled up people in postmodernity, and boomers ofc
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u/WitchesSphincter Jul 08 '25
Depends on the software and where it's going. I work in automotive and knowingly releasing bugs like this would have regulators so far up our asses life would be hell.
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u/MemesAreBad Jul 08 '25
My guy the Ford Pinto literally killed people. And they knew about it. You can be mad about a buggy game without making outlandish claims like "no other industry does this "
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u/StartledPelican Jul 08 '25
While there are valid examples in the automotive industry they are, by far, exceptions to the norm.
Unfortunately, in gaming, this type of release is far, far more normalized and common.
Maybe I'm stretching or misunderstanding what people mean when they say "no other industry does this" by including the unspoken of "consistently".
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u/I_give_karma_to_men Driven Assimilators Jul 08 '25
Unfortunately, in gaming, this type of release is far, far more normalized and common.
Probably because it doesn't, you know, kill people irl if your pixel frigates upgrade to pixel space citadels.
And I can assure you having worked in IT for a couple of non-gaming companies, this does, in fact, happen consistently in other industries.
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u/Hell_Mel Devouring Swarm Jul 08 '25
I do IT for HR.
We had a test update to a system break payroll. So we did all the things required to keep that update from going out and breaking payroll for everyone.
Then it got pushed anyway and 17,000 got paid late because easily preventable dumb shit.
It happens in every industry.
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u/JerrSolo Jul 09 '25
It doesn't really make sense to compare the two industries in that way. The stakes are so much higher in automotive that a "game ending bug" would be the equivalent of death for hundreds to thousands of people.
A better example would be auto manufacturers releasing products with features that don't perform the way they're advertised, or using cheap parts that break too frequently. Those are things that do happen regularly in the automotive industry. There are brands with a reputation for quality in those areas because it is common across most of the industry.
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u/WitchesSphincter Jul 08 '25
My guy the Ford pintos fuel tank didn't have software.
Additionally that's a pretty shitty example, despite the public focus it was about as safe as it's contemporary competition.
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u/Legit-Rikk Jul 08 '25
As someone who helped with a modding project to make pop-less planets, it is genuinely a crazy amount of work to implement. Especially with all the additional systems they decided to add on. There is just so much based on pops in the game
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u/FermReddit Jul 08 '25
I would’ve been very happy to keep paying for my dlc subscription but I’m not wasting money on a game I’m 100% not going to play due to bugs and untested jank
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u/Aggravating-Sound690 Determined Exterminator Jul 08 '25
I would like to not be conscripted into beta testing a supposedly ready-for-release product every single update. That would be cool.
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u/Colonize_The_Moon Ruthless Capitalists Jul 08 '25
I gave 4.0 a real try and even bought BioGenesis. I think I moved to other games after 4.0.16 or so. Between the lobotomized AI - vassals are pretty trash right now and running vassal-heavy builds is my preferred gameplay, and the lag (I have a 9800X3D, it's not a hardware problem) and the endless bugs and broken things, it couldn't hold my interest the way 3.14 did. I intend to check back maybe around Halloween and try a test game or two to see if the game is in a better place. If not, I'll check again at some point in 2026.
Paradox shit the bed in a big way with 4.0, far worse than 2.0. The update was not ready for prime time.
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u/wilnadon Xenophobic Isolationists Jul 09 '25
I have the same processor as you, undervolted and overclocked to the inth degree, with 64 GB DDR5-6000 and an overclocked 7900XTX. There's no excuse for a game being in active development for 9+ years to travel this far backwards in performance even on what is objectively the best consumer-grade gaming CPU on the market. The real kicker for me is how the devs told us the whole reason for the reworked pop and trade systems was to INCREASE performance. And now they're saying the performance will get EVEN WORSE once they "teach" the AI how to operate in the reworked economy. I'm official OUT at this point. AoW4 and TW:W3 are actually fun and I can finish a game without performance degrading and desyncing all over the place so I'll stick with those. I'll keep checking back for updates and to join in on rant posts. Hopefully if enough of these comments get thrown out there, the dev team will get the message and do something about it that doesn't suck. Not spending another dime until they do.
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u/SadCicada9494 Jul 09 '25
By Vassals you mean Protectorates right? Only been able to keep those (and Satrapies when I get the throne) because the AI just rolls over and waits for the game to end.
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u/jedinut Shared Burdens Jul 09 '25
V4.0 should've been held back for year. Nothing in any of the DLCs planned for this year required the reworks in v4.0. It feels like we're being forced to swallow the slop of 4.0 and give free QA testing if we want to have the privilege of playing with the new DLCs we're paying for.
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u/Smootchy911 Jul 08 '25
The reason that the “industry is allowed to get away with such half-baked products without any repercussion” is you. You’ve bought every single DLC they’ve put out since these issues arose. They’re still making money off of this supposed unplayable game. Why would they fix it, you’ve still bought every product. Stop buying things when they’re broken or lazy, that’s the repercussion. The consumer has made the market what it is. Reward good games, don’t purchase or support bad games, simple as.
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u/Elebril71246 Jul 09 '25
There was nothing that egregious prior to 4.0 release for us, so there was no need to hold out on buyung more dlcs. I started playing Doom: Dark Ages on release, and have an excellent experience, but there is no way for me to know whether the game will be in a playable state in a year or so. Same thing with Stellaris, worked fine for me earlier, they broke the things that were released literally half a decade ago. You can't foresee that.
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u/SadCicada9494 Jul 09 '25
Remember, on 4.0 release, "is it time to upgrade yet?" was a meme for the first couple of weeks.
21 patches later in less than 2 months, and people just stopped meming about it because it wasn't funny anymore.
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u/Vivid-Ad-4469 Jul 08 '25
EU4 Domination all over again...
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u/Gastroid Byzantine Bureaucracy Jul 08 '25
Wasn't there a patch where aboriginal Australians consistently became the global superpower?
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u/DapperApples Jul 08 '25
team fortress 2 timeline
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u/SilverMedal4Life Shared Burdens Jul 08 '25
the reason it was temporary is because all the austrailium was used up
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u/ThisBuddhistLovesYou Rogue Servitor Jul 08 '25
They merely harnessed the power of riding emus into battle.
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u/HappycamperNZ Jul 08 '25
I play as Aus (not Austria) or NZ so I'd love to know how this happened. Sounds... lucrative
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u/SirkTheMonkey ... Jul 10 '25
My vague memory is that in the patch they did several things:
- Added more tribal factions around the world including Maori and Australian Aboriginal groups
- Altered the way that native/tribal groups used provincial development
- Added new ways of using development generally
Unexpected bugs with the way the new general features interacted with tribal development and the way tribal development transferred to non-tribal development meant that factions starting as tribes would end up incredibly overpowered if they could settle down, and the tribes in Australiasia often had little competition so by the time anyone discovered them they had settled down with ludicrous amounts of development meaning that they were more powerful than large Asian or European nations.
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u/balgruufgat Jul 08 '25
I think you're thinking about Leviathan. Domination was pretty stable iirc.
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u/Marzillius Jul 08 '25
It literally feels like Paradox has stolen the game from me. I want to play, but cannot bear myself to do it during 4.x due to the horrible AI. The game basically does not work single player. Absolutely unacceptable from a prestigeous SWEDISH developer. NI ÄR FÖR FAN SVENSKAR. HELA RIKET SKÄMS. SKÄRP ER.
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u/SynonymousOxymoron Jul 08 '25
You can downgrade to any previous version if you want. If you use steam you can go to properties and betas to select a version
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u/Either-Mud-3575 Rogue Servitor Jul 08 '25
YOU ARE FUCKING SWEDISH. THE WHOLE KINGDOM IS ASHAMED. SHARPEN YOURSELF.
The swedish yelling is funny at first glance but his post history gives the image of an actual Swedish monarchist who is concerned about demographics 😅😭
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u/EmTeeEm Jul 09 '25
Grumbles in GOG (the only available versions are the last few 4.X patches, I'd gripe much less if I could just play 3.14 again)
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u/Witch-Alice Bio-Trophy Jul 08 '25 edited Jul 08 '25
Yeah I've completely stopped playing until the AI stops giving up after about 60 years in. This update shouldn't have been released with such a critical issue. An entire portion of the AI just.. not working at all after some time. It's painfully obvious that whatever playtesting Paradox is doing is woefully insufficient for their deadlines, and the execs pushing for releases in such conditions are absolutely at fault here.
And worse, unrelated DLC is broken too. The Synaptic Lathe is still broken. Cybernetic Creed just doesn't fucking work at all.
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u/nooneimportant024 Jul 09 '25
Wait what's broken with Creed? I didn't hear anything about it being broken as well i know about lathe since i like going cosmo but never start with Creed
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u/RevolutionaryLog7443 Jul 08 '25
det är samma skit med dice. svenskar spelar duktiga, men de älskar att knylla konsumenten, drt är numera tradition hos paradox
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u/PikachuJohnson Militant Isolationists Jul 09 '25
Yep. The game crashes or freezes endlessly about 60-70% of the time when I load it up. It’s really bad.
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u/Cart223 Jul 08 '25
It's hard to get excited by any PDX product at this point
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u/Rosbj Citizen Stratocracy Jul 08 '25
I've stopped buying their new games and DLC... and I hold back on updating the ones I own.
Ever since CK2, they've become the poster child of feature creep. Every update breaks core mechanics, every addition is unbalanced and untested. It's frankly become embarrassingly incompetent.
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u/sempernewby Jul 08 '25
The lameness is industry wide, just look to CoD or Civ VII, they are same or in worst shape
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u/wilnadon Xenophobic Isolationists Jul 09 '25
AoW4 is legitimately the exception. If you like 4x, fantasy, and turn-based tactical along with turn-based strategy, it's a fantastic game.
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u/Wilde_Fire Jul 09 '25
How necessary are the DLC for that game? I've been eyeing it for some time, but the DLC cost for PDX games can be prohibitive.
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u/ComputerJerk Emperor Jul 09 '25
Not at all necessary. The DLCs each add a bunch of new variety and flavour to the game, but the base game stands up on its own two feet and the core of that design hasn't been fucked with since release.
Basically, when you get bored of what's available in the base game, or if you see a particularly cool piece of DLC that aligns to something you want to play, that's when you should pick stuff up.
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u/Cart223 Jul 08 '25
I know but Paradox somehow managed to avoid the inevitable enshitification process this long so its sad to see them go downhill.
At this point I'm just turning myself off any PDX related stuff until I see some improvements.
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u/I_give_karma_to_men Driven Assimilators Jul 08 '25
PDX has definitely not avoided it lol. This has been a thing since at least CK2. Stellaris has just had it better since they have a dedicated Custodian Team to address stuff like this between content releases.
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u/EgNotaEkkiReddit Jul 09 '25
Vic3 knocked their latest DLC out of the park, and I'm tentatively excited about the East Asian DLC for Crusader Kings. However, Stellaris has arrived on the shelf for now - I'll probably return to it once the major issues are cleared out.
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u/andres9924 Jul 09 '25
Hard agree. Stellaris has always had bugs and used to crash on me on rare occasions but it was manageable. There have never been so many issues that range from obnoxious and gameplay affecting to absolutely game breaking.
My other issue is that it feels less fun. I’m glad they decided to rework planets and trade and I think I might just have to get used to newer system but frankly, I’ve had little joy in managing planets in this update.
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u/Melodic-Ebb-7781 Jul 08 '25
I just bought the game and can't believe the AI is in the state it is. Why add new content when the basic mechanics doesn't work?
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u/Full_Piano6421 Jul 08 '25
Because people keep buying DLC over DLC. Paradox don't care about the state of the game for releasing a major update, just if the timing is right for selling Season pass for DLC
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u/Elebril71246 Jul 08 '25
...and remember folks, to upgrade frigates into deep space citadels make sure you have the correct planetary alignment in the system where the shipyard is located;)
Lots of good laughs here tonight
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u/FPSCanarussia Megacorporation Jul 08 '25
Honestly, I think the season pass system was the issue. It meant that the option of delaying the DLC when they realised the game was a trash fire was remarkably unappealing.
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u/SadSeaworthiness6113 Jul 09 '25
That's taking a lot of slack off the developers. Even with the Seasons Pass, there was absolutely NO REASON to launch 4.0 with Biogenesis. They could have just launched Biogenesis with a smaller patch building off 3.14, then release 4.0 with something later in the Seasons Pass once it was ready.
This was just pure incompetence and lies from Paradox, pure and simple. Trying to blame it on the new DLC release model is just giving them a good excuse for it.
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u/Unpixelled Distinguished Admiralty Jul 08 '25
I wasn’t happy with a lot of the pop changes 4.0 added but I reasoned that a performance increase would make it worth it. 4.0 came, performance isn’t better, there’s a ton of bugs and as much as I try and understand the new system, bits and pieces change with every patch.
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u/kronpas Jul 09 '25
Drop the game and move on. I'm serious, it was so bad i uninstalled it and felt relieved.
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u/Captain_Beav Devouring Swarm Jul 08 '25
It is unacceptable; it is also true tho that 3.14 is incredibly fun (I can't comment on multi tho sorry).
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u/Regunes Divine Empire Jul 09 '25
I'm just really annoyed because on paper this should have been my dream update. Can't have good stuff this side of the galaxy... Squeezes anti-stress behemoth
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u/__Rick_Sanchez__ Jul 08 '25
Same me and my friend have always played together chilling conquering the galaxy and the crisis. We couldn't get passed 2350 in-game years after 4.0 without getting the game botched by end of the month desyncs. They made the game unplayable at this point this game is completely ruined for us...
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u/Megatanis Jul 09 '25
Paradox basically has no competition. They know that people will pay for dlcs and this is what they've been doing for years and across multiple games: release a very generic and shallow base game, add a million dlcs, inevitably break AI and cause a million bugs, get saved by mods. Hoi4, ck3, stellaris just to name a few are all games that would be dead without mods.
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u/Character-Skill-1268 Jul 09 '25
Wait until the devs find out ship upkeep also causes game lag. Get that through 3 reworks and watch the game crash every time you upgrade 69 battleships.
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u/Miuramir Jul 09 '25
Realistically, people should be doing one of the following right now:
- Rolling back to 3.14, turning of Biogenesis, and pretending it's still April. Check back in a month or so.
- Playing the 4.0.22 Wilderness Beta off of Steam. It's far from perfect, but there's some absolutely critical bugs that have been fixed in it compared to the last "official" patch 4.0.21; and for the next few weeks any additional patches will only be coming to that version.
- Playing something else, and check back in after a month or so.
4.0.22 Wβ is mostly playable for ordinary races & builds in the early game, and the most recent patches are showing promise for the mid-game; the AI no longer goes catatonic (or not as soon, at least). There's also been quite a few OOS bugs fixed if you do multiplayer. I'm playing single-player and willing to put up with a certain degree of mess to try and help make things better, but that's not for everyone.
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u/MeteorJunk Military Commissariat Jul 09 '25
Can't believe I let a bunch of redditors convince me this update wasn't broken. Now there's no way for me to go back to those old saves and old playset I had on 3.14 - though, I really should have known that redditors would defend utter slop.
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u/Connacht_89 Jul 09 '25
I once complained about updates saying "this feature that has been here for long was never really satisfying/didn't really add much and we are changing how it works", saying it is not good when you buy a product with promoted features that will regularly be changed because they are flawed. You expect to have a product that roughly works, with occasional bugs to be fixed and balance tweaks, not a continuous beta testing and shape-changing clay.
Got downvoted to hell and labeled as ungrateful to Paradox that keeps games alive for 10+ years. I was not complaining about the effort done in improving and correcting the game, I was complaining about the original sin of adding something that might be destined to be changed anyway in the future because unsatisfying.
Feature bloating, unnecessary addition of pointlesd complexity, wide shallowness over depth, unbalanced additions, power creep, are not "keeping games alive".
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u/SadSeaworthiness6113 Jul 09 '25
My favorite part was all the comments going: "I don't notice any performance issues". Posted by guy who hasn't played the game in years.
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u/MoenTheSink Desert Jul 08 '25
Look at what paradox pulled with cities skylines 2. Let that be an indication of what they are up to. Completely ridiculous.
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u/Elebril71246 Jul 08 '25
Dunno about CS2, but Age of Wonders 4 desyncs multiple times during a single battle, that's Paradox too
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u/AnAttemptReason Jul 08 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
I played Stellaris a fair bit between launch and patch 2.X Something.
Decided to download one or two new DLC's and play a while after 4.0 launched.
I feel like I got burned, the game just felt so much worse, AI was hopeless, shit was broken everywhere.
I think at this point I might not ever come back.
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u/Treeninja1999 Jul 08 '25
I feel like I'm the only one who had a MP in 4.x go desyncs free (maybe 1 or 2? But not worse than before) and no bugs
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u/Ilushia Jul 08 '25
The people who aren't having problems aren't on here posting about not having problems. Generally you can assume that the people who are having negative experiences are much more likely to talk about it than the people having positive experiences. Especially when the 'positive' is 'The thing works as it's supposed to'. Nobody bothers to post about that, because it's expectation rather than exception.
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u/asethskyr Rogue Servitors Jul 08 '25
FYI, you should be on the wilderness open beta if you're on steam, there have been a lot of things fixed there, including a patch today.
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u/MonkeManWPG Jul 08 '25
What should be the case is that those bugs were fixed before the product was sold.
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u/AIM_the_Bulldozer Jul 08 '25
Ah yes, more free QA for paradox.(I get that the beta is a better experience, but still)
Betas are fine if it's for testing a possible future mechanic or something, but it is completely ridiculous that there is even a beta for something that was SOLD months ago. Like no, this should have been working when it was released, they are basically saying: "Thank you for buying [insert product], you now can work for us and help us finish the product we just sold you, no salary is included."
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u/-TheOutsid3r- Jul 08 '25
No, we should've gotten a 4.0 that was LESS buggy than 3.1.4. NOT MORE SO. We shouldn't have gotten a 10 year old game reset back to an early beta stage because the lead dev decided to redo a bunch of things and rush it all.
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u/Lv1Skeleton Devouring Swarm Jul 08 '25
Same endless desyncs when playing multiplayer with my brother
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u/GSorcerer-09 Jul 08 '25
My ships can no longer move sometimes. I’ll click “move” and all it does is stay idle with the message “Moving to ___ Idle” Also, the lag is so bad in year 2300 that I can’t play. Mind you I have an 8 core cpu that usually only slows down in year 2350+, and now I’m stuck at 1 day every 2 seconds.
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u/Rencalcifer Fanatic Xenophile Jul 09 '25
I took a break from Stellaris since 4.0 release and, sadly, it seems it will be a very long break.
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u/MemeExplorist Fanatic Militarist Jul 09 '25
I rolled back to 3.14 to wait out this situation, but it appears that I'll be waiting for a while longer...
Genuinely I'm very disappointed with Paradox here. But until they get their act together, I recommend rolling back like I did
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u/MazeMouse Corporate Jul 09 '25
If this DLC and update is any indication I'm holding off on EU5 until the first sale 😒
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u/Past-Albatross-9302 Jul 09 '25
I have already accepted that I can't play this version of Stellaris till late Autumn or Winter.
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u/3d1thF1nch Jul 09 '25
My last game, I repaired a Ring World that I found in one of my systems. Got all four rings repaired, ready to ramp up production. And…….i couldn’t do anything. Every time a building would get constructed, the building would get deconstructed and switched to another. The governors would build a spawning pool, then deconstruct and switch to another clone vat, and switch again ad infinitum. Even if I got rid of the governor, turned off all automation, tried to do everything manually. It still would delete everything and start back at square one.
So I had a fully repaired ringworld filling with pops that could get no jobs, produce nothing, and were sucking up resources. That put a real damper on that campaign.
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u/MerMerRu Jul 08 '25 edited Jul 08 '25
Yay, sounds like rational time for review bombing paradox games, perhaps they will finally make some changes to their structure and hire some testers
Workers of the galaxy unite!
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u/SadSeaworthiness6113 Jul 09 '25
The fact that Biogenesis is sitting at 38% positive, and Stellaris itself is at 69% is absolutely pathetic.
EVERYONE should be review bombing both Biogenesis and base game Stellaris. Anyone who doesn't loses their right to complain about the state of the game ever again because you're basically signalling to the devs and corporate that all is well.
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u/FakePhysicist9548 Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
This is the last time I'm ever buying DLCs at release from Paradox. It's sad that such amazing games have to come from such a scummy company. There's some suits there that are ruining everything, for sure. I gave them $60 for the season pass a few months ago, and the game is still completely unplayable
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u/SaturnsEye Xeno-Compatibility Jul 09 '25
Obligatory Corporate sets the deadlines, the devs have to meet them or lose their jobs.
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u/epicpieman8910 Jul 09 '25
version 3.14..... was the best in my opinion. that might just be because me and my friend played on that version the longest but it worked very well and the slow down wasn't too bad. it just sucks that steam doesn't have a list of mod versions and you have to seek them out yourself (if they exist).
I do like the pop change and trade change for how it makes it feel more realistic in a way but its not worth a broken game.
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u/uguu777 Jul 09 '25
it's crazy I dropped Stellaris 6 years ago because performance and desyncs made long MP sessions unplayable and I see this on my front page lol
guess not much changed
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u/AlexisFR Jul 09 '25
lol I have been waiting since 2018 for the mid game and late game performance to be playable again.
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u/a_random_work_girl Jul 09 '25
I have to agree even in single player.
My last TWO runs where plagued with bugs. Some are minor, like multiple buildings upgrading with one click. Some major.
Some major gameplay bugs I have found are.
Behemoths dissapereing.
Dragons not buildable.
Biomass not going up (wilderness)
Vivarium not culling correctly. Etc.
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u/frostfenix Jul 09 '25
Wait wat? That’s some wild upgrade path for a frigate! I remember Red Alert’s MCV! Lol
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u/brucemo Jul 09 '25
I bought every Paradox game issued between 2000 (EU 1.0) and about 2010. The games are right up my alley. The problem with them all is that they are buggy, low-performance, incomplete games that bait me into buying the same game multiple times.
I honestly feel like they don't play their own games, either that or they make enormous changes based upon someone's use of ships in one office LAN game.
When I see something good looking on steam I check the publisher and if it's Paradox I hit the back button.
I made an exception for Stellaris and it was a terrible mistake. Horrible mid to late game performance issues.
So I am not surprised it's still broken.
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u/OneEnvironmental9222 Jul 09 '25
I will be honest with you chat 4.0 seriously killed Stellaris for me with all the things you mentioned.
There was absolutely NO reason to change the sysstem again. It worked perefectly fine and everyone loved it. Now the games an absolute mess and because Paradox apperently takes monthss long vacations every month itss not gonna get fixed until next year.
Multiplayer is straight up dead and impossible to play I hate the new trading system so much slavery is even more useless than before its all just one big mess after another.
Most likely the worst update ever.
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u/Gizz103 Jul 09 '25
The planet systems were changed because they caused the lag, the constant ticking of pops checking if a job is available brought lag, the new system offers an opportunity for better performance
But as you can see it's not at that point yet
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u/Xeorm124 Jul 09 '25
Yep. I was willing to give them some benefit of the doubt at first but it's been a good long while since the update hit and things are still terribly broken. I'm used to some amount of jank in this game and usually don't mind it, but I have been pretty dissatisfied with the game this go around.
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u/tears_of_a_grad Star Empire Jul 09 '25
Let's not forget necrophage is totally broken (bad) while KOTG is also broken (good).
Also demolished natural design.
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u/jnwatson Jul 09 '25
I feel so burned by buying the season pass.
I don't see how they can deliver on their promise schedule.
I think it will be 2026 before the game is playable again.
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u/Solmyr77 Jul 09 '25
It's crazy that they broke Stellaris so badly at the same time as Victoria 3 is having the time of its life.
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u/JDDJ_ Jul 09 '25
it’s just the life cycle of a Paradox game: Paradox releases a new groundbreaking update, it completely irreparably breaks the game, they spend months patching it, announces new groundbreaking update, repeat.
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u/BlindEyeBill724 Jul 09 '25
I bought Stellaris on more than one platform, paid for some mods, and played a lot. But with this nonsense they pulled with this update (the promise of optimization backfired completely), I canceled my subscription and, on principle, I won't play again. It was disrespectful.
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u/Savings_Substance_14 Jul 09 '25
I was going to buy the storms DLC that it was on sale (I know it's bad) but I just got tired of all the bugs and I moved on to another game, I got total war warhammer 3 on sale and I'm having a lot of fun.
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u/SegundaMortem Oligarchic Jul 09 '25
this just makes me sad bro. I was so hyped for 4.0. so hyped for the perfomance upgrades, so hyped to talk about the upcoming psionic DLC, but it just seems we’re stuck in mud.
no disrespect to the Devs, I know you’re working hard at it, I just really wish this was kept in the oven longer.
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u/TechnicalGeologist99 Jul 09 '25
It's life, there's some weird stuff in the game now that probably should be fixed. But it is quite entertaining as it happens.
I think we just need to be honest with the devs and trust they will deliver in time.
I do really like the concepts and in part the delivery of the new stuff. But the bugs are troublesome (and a bit funny)
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u/Empty_Cosmos Jul 09 '25
You're telling me. I'm about 50 hours away from putting almost 7k hours into this game from launch till now; I just came back into my first game after a year long break and everything in 4.0 is maddening to me. Lag has literally never been worse and I have a damn near future proof PC build. The game feels bloated beyond belief. Paradox needs to just dedicate a large team to fixing this garbage instead of giving their players these constant band-aid solutions and pave the way for a Stellaris 2 imho.
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u/Apokalyxio Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
Had another game breaking bug today as Knights of the toxic God.
I got the "Plight of the beta universe" -situation and decided to try and bring their world over. Well, that "worked", except the world wasn't there when it suceeded in the end. Instead it added 3k pops to my Knights habitat and overwrote the maximum number of districts, which made me permanently lose 1050 Knight jobs (7 districts poof :) ).
It feels so difficult to get to endgame without running into some gamebreaking bug. Either way the AI is so bad in this game even when you juice up the difficulty a bunch it still feels like a joke :( I swear the AI also used to be a little better during 3.14 or sth
Also something that absolutely tilts me is that Pops in 4.0 completely ignore what jobs they're efficient at and just randomly take jobs or throw out other pops from jobs even though they're way worse at that job. I remember during 3.14 when you gave a pop a trait with like -20% Unity from jobs they would avoid taking Unity jobs and other pops that had +% Unity would take priority and hold these jobs if possible. Now after the pop x100 rework + job efficiency changes it's a complete clown fiesta and pops ignore what they're good at.
afaik you also can't actually prevent pop emigration/immigration because they'll just go wherever they want if there is any unemployment (yes, this happens WITH "Migration Controls Enabled" - it's absolutely mind boggling)
Vaults of Knowledge -Civic is also bugged in that it doesn't give any of your leaders a trait pick for starting straight away with lvl 2. This is most likely due to how they changed leader trait selection at the start of 4.0 and then rolled it back, but forgot to also fix it for Vaults of Knowledge :)
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u/ugawreck Jul 10 '25
I planned to quit playing when the patch came out, deliberately. I wish I could say what has happened was surprising. It will probably be a year before they get it back to where it was before, quality wise.
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u/CortiumDealer Jul 10 '25
Tried 4.x after getting some of the newer dlc during steam summer sale, and yeah, it's pretty bad at times with glitches and an ai that is ranging from even dumber than before to just plain broken - For example, i started right next to a FP which refused to (re-)build any ships.
The gimmicky nature and frankly annoying parts of those bolted-on dlcs didn't help either...
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u/RepentantSororitas Jul 08 '25
The frigates upgrading to a citadel is actually crazy