Stellaris, the stratey scifi 4X game, is getting a new big expansion. Stellaris Nemesis will add spying tools that will help prevent final crises and new “Threat” powers that will allow you to “become the crisis”. This involves new spaceships that are capable of eating planets.
The ad trailer above didn’t mean much to me, a Stellaris rookie, but the developers’ Paradox talked more about the additions in a new development diary.
“Become the crisis” is a new ascension privilege that players can select after unlocking two others, and gives you access to “crisis benefits” and “threat objectives”. Committing evil deeds will grant you Threat and allow you to advance through crisis levels, with new ships unlocked as a reward.
At the final level, “an etherophasic engine appears in your capital system,” according to the development diary. The board requires a lot of dark matter to update, and you get dark matter via Star-Eaters, a new type of starship. They eat stars. Gobbling stars will allow you to update the etherophasic engine and win the game by finishing the galaxy.
That sounds a lot to me like Galactic Civilizations 2. Specifically, it sounds like my friend Tom Francis’s GalCiv 2 diary, Plan B, which seems to be just on the internet through this copy of Pastebin that someone made. If you haven’t read it, know it’s very good. It has 4 out of 5 stars on Goodreads.
There is no release date for the DLC, although it is on Steam now.
How do we feel about Stellaris today? I’ve heard so many things about it being broken at launch and fixed or not fixed or worse now or the best 4X game or the worst I lost track of.