Oblique Strategy: Skirting the Edge of Intergalactic War in Stellaris
Up until a few days ago, I had never played a grand strategy game. I’d heard of Sid Meier’s Civilization, Total War, Europa Universalis and others, but I’d never really paid attention to them. As far as I was concerned they were games I would never play, my lack of a capable PC allowing me to forget all about them. When I was asked to go to a two day multiplayer event to play one of these games, you can then imagine my trepidation. Stellaris, the 4X grand space strategy title that I’d be playing, sounded complicated. My research also told me that Paradox, the developers behind it, were renowned for making particularity complex strategy games. Safe to say, I was scared. However, I’m not one to shy away from a challenge, so I agreed to travel to the event, for better or worse.
As soon as I arrived, I felt out of my depth. Standing outside, I joined a conversation with some fellow journalists, their talk of strategy games going completely over my head. I didn’t know what they were talking about and I was now more afraid than ever of what I might find in the room opposite me. Despite my reservations, I sat down at a PC, listened to a short presentation, and then we were told to start the game. Before getting into the action, we had to customize our empire, deciding things such as its name, what race our people would be and defining our government and ethics. I decided to make a xenophobic human race who had direct democracy, which meant every five years there would be an election. My empire name: Death To All But Metal. (Thank you, Steel Panther.) As the day went on, my name became less and less fitting—Death To No One But Myself would sound more accurate.
On the first day, Paradox told us that attacking each other was forbidden and so the room entered into a non-aggression pact. This allowed us to come to grips with how to play the game and give us an opportunity to build up our empires. The goal of Stellaris, in its most basic form, is to expand your empire and become the strongest and biggest one within your allocated solar system. In order to do this, you have to explore planets beyond yours using science ships, you have to inhabit other worlds and you have to maintain a healthy income of resources in order to build and upgrade your empire. This is just a tiny portion of the things you have to do and think about, though. Strategy game newbies like myself will probably take their first look at the game, even just the starting menus, and think Stellaris looks terrifying. However, help is at hand in the form of very useful tutorials.
Showing up on the right hand side of the screen, these tutorials were a life saver to me throughout my time with Stellaris. They taught we how to make new ships, how to mine for resources on other planets and how to recruit people, such as Scientists, in order to make things like research run smoothly. Without the tutorials, I would have been lost. And smart, careful placement on the screen meant they were never too intrusive or annoying. I also found the hints very useful, things such as hovering over resources icons giving you extra guidance. Just because it’s helpful doesn’t mean Stellaris pampered me, though. It didn’t hold my hand but it didn’t feel like it was throwing me in the deep end either. Instead the tutorials just guided me to where I should be, and learning how the game works for myself seems like a large part of what Paradox is aiming for.
These tutorials were useful, but I found a better to way to learn: by pissing my empire up the wall.
After we’d had lunch, I looked over my small, but functioning empire. I’d played about 2 hours at this point and I was relatively happy with my progress. Martin Anward, the AI Lead at Paradox, even came over while I was waiting to restart and said I was doing well, his excitement upon seeing my Gala World being completely lost on me. Once we returned to the game, however, I got cocky. I decided the best thing to do would be to start a war with a neighboring empire, the Bakuturian Sovereignty, who were much more powerful and bigger than me. It was a mistake. To wage my unwinnable war, I had to communicate with them. To do this, you click on the emblem of your chosen empire or you can select them via the Government tab on your top left. Early on I had declared them as my rival, which I did to gain influence points. These are currency that you can use to build frontier outposts, their purpose being to extend how much of the solar system you can build and settle on. Influence points make up a third of your main resources, and while they aren’t as useful or important as energy and minerals, they are vital to expanding your empire.
