A howl on the wind…

I wrote on Twitter a week ago:

Finally got around to playing #Stellaris, and it immediately just felt unnatural. The lack of smooth zoom transition between system and galaxy view is bizarre. The game feels ancient and clunky to control compared to Sins, MoO 2016, Endless Space, etc. Maybe 2.0 will improve it.

— Tino Didriksen (@TinoDidriksen) February 14, 2018

And well, 2.0 wasn’t enough.

In short, I don’t much care for Stellaris. If you’re looking for an updated version of Master of Orion 2 or Ascendancy, this is not it.

I played half an hour before patch 2.0 and really didn’t like the game. Then I noticed 2.0 was due out soon, so I figured I’d give it another shot. Well, after 4 more hours playing at Fast (and a bit Fastest) speed, I still don’t like the game. It’s overall better than before the patch, but still just not what I want.

The UI, sound effects, music, etc feels ancient and clunky, in the bad way. The quest system is severely lacking compared to Endless Space. Research takes bloody ages to complete, and when it finally finishes it doesn’t tell you what you just gained access to. Pirates are an awful mechanic.

Ship movement is the sharp inverse of what I want. Ships will move slowly through a system, laboriously spool up their engines, and then instantly jump to another system. What I’d prefer is if ships could enter and leave systems almost instantaneously, and instead spend the majority of travel time between systems.

I do like that you can build space stations in otherwise dead systems to guard them, but I don’t like that you must explore with a science ship before being able to move other ships in.

Finally, it’s real-time. I rather strongly dislike real-time 4X. I was able to play Stellaris thanks to pausing all the time, but that’s not ideal. This game just isn’t for me.

Simple function for turning IPv6 and IPv4 into a blob that’s suitable for SQL type binary(16). This maps IPv4 to the IPv6 address space reserved for them.

function ip2binary($ip) {
	$rv = inet_pton($ip);
	if (strlen($rv) == 4) {
		// https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2765#section-2.1
		$rv = inet_pton('::ffff:'.$ip);
	}
	return $rv;
}

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My 4th published piece of sci-fi flash fiction: Sinker.

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