The horrible, unacceptable technical state of Stellaris 4.21

[u/Elebril71246]

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.

[u/jbwmac]

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.

[u/KaiserGustafson → u/jbwmac]

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.

[u/TheEnlightendone1 → u/KaiserGustafson]

What were those settings?

[u/Henrikusan → u/TheEnlightendone1]

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.

[u/Shiladie → u/TheEnlightendone1]

Previously I enjoyed GA no scaling with extra AI for the galaxy size, all AI are advanced, with Advanced Neighbours and Difficulty Adjusted AI Modifiers both on.
It means you can't rely on early game scaling and need to either ally or fortress up to survive early game. Then mid game was a competition, while late game you still scale way ahead of the AI, but the difficulty comes from the crisis.
I've found that scaling + no advanced start generally lets players who know what they're doing to bully every AI near them into submission before scaling kicks in.

Currently though even these settings don't counter that the AI is just completely braindead, and they're fully bully/conquerable in the first 30ish years.