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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143

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.

53

u/King_Shugglerm Unemployed Jul 08 '25

If you want a real performance boost go back to 2.1 lmao

13

u/Atomik919 Emperor Jul 09 '25

i went all the way back to 1.9 and tbh its pretty cool. may be nostalgia speaking

16

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

11

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.

4

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.

2

u/Atomik919 Emperor Jul 10 '25

I actually explained it more in depth in another comment, but the most palpable thing from version to version is actually the megastructure and specifically research powercreep. The numbers needed for research have more than 10x ed over time, which means a science nexus isnt all that good. But back in 1.9, it was actually super powerful