You feel like you are making progress, doing okay, maybe even doing well. Just explore, do some research, claim some systems, build up your fleet, maybe colonize another planet. You can play for a bit without worrying about too much. It is nice and simple when you start out, a lone planet in a cluster of stars as opposed to being thrust into the political economic simulation of some European age. The reality is that nearly every aspect of the title is its own mini-game and if you forget to pause while you’re down the rabbit hole of managing your planets or running your fleets you can suddenly find yourself with quite a queue of notifications about scientific research choices, explorers reporting back about artifacts or anomalies, diplomatic requests, and the other bits and pieces that the game would like you to attend to.Īnd yet it isn’t as dense or complicated to get going as most of their other titles, and I say this who owns most of them. The concept is simple start and maintain a space empire via exploration, military strength, and diplomacy. You’ll need to because being a Paradox Interactive title means that the game is incredibly complicated. And you’ll need to pause it now and then. You can speed the game up, slow it down, or pause it at need. It is a Paradox Interactive game and built on their Clausewitz Engine, which has been powering their deep strategy games since Europa Universalis III, which means that it runs along popping events at you as they occur. It is one of those games you stay up playing late into the night to get in “just one more turn!” Stellaris is one of those 4x empire building grand strategy games along the lines of the Civilization series, only in space… so maybe more like Masters of Orion. The achievements also indicate that I played some in 2018, which is when I no doubt bought some DLC for it. My first achievements… i with they sorted in time order…

How to play stellaris