Dakota Tahran

How Stellaris Accomplishes What Total War Can’t

Leading Soviet tank divisions on a determined charge towards Berlin; playing as a

leader of the vicious Danes and sacking England, newly abandoned by the crumbling Roman

Empire; or taking your people, a highly intelligent race of slugs, out into the stars to wage a

savage race war against the evil space-moths to eradicate their stain on the galaxy. These are all

adventures that can be had, over and over again, by never even having to leave your desk. Two

strategy-game behemoths—Creative Assembly with their historically based Total War series,

and Paradox Interactive with history-based titles but also with the galaxy-spanning experiment

of Stellaris—have been defining the genre for decades. With the release of Stellaris in 2016,

however, an itch was scratched that previous titles had been able to reach. Stellaris, by virtue of

taking place in a galaxy undefined by history and Earth’s geography, is able to present

continuous engaging challenges all the way into the late game, in a way that historically based

games like the Total War series cannot.

Creative Assembly has given birth to some amazing strategy games. They’ve explored

many historical settings, including the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, England in the

middle-ages, the reign of the Shoguns in Japan, and, most recently, the mystical era of the Three

Kingdoms of China. Each game does an amazing job of creating an atmosphere to pull players

in. Total War: Attila, explores the tumultuous period during the Hunnic invasions and the Western

Roman Empire’s fall. The map starts out as a vibrant, wealthy Mediterranean paradise. However, as the

game progresses, the map becomes cold and infertile, with snow sticking around longer each year;
once-bustling cities are reduced to heaps of rubble, razed by the savage Huns; and in the midst of the

desolation, tribes of desperate, displaced barbarians trudge through the snow in search of a place to call

home. The point of the game is survival, and that becomes clear after just an hour in when your first city

is burnt the ground, or the fertility drops and your nation plunges into famine. Another thing the

Creative Assembly usually does well is making each faction unique. Did you just finish a game as the

Visigoths after using your Romanized units to hack out a slice of Hispania for yourself? Play again and

have access to a whole new arsenal of abilities, units, and situations. Being turn-based, Total War is also

great at keeping players playing. It’s almost irresistible to hit that “End Turn” button just to see what the

nations around you do—and then, what the heck, just one more turn.

However, no game is perfect, and Total War is no exception. The biggest issue with the series is

the “Snowball Effect.” If a player makes it about twenty hours into the game, the challenge is pretty

much over. By that point, in most games you will have established yourself by owning a few regions,

bringing your regional rivals to heel, and starting up your economy with trade and buildings to finance

your military machine. The artificial intelligence the games utilize is notoriously poor as well, with

seemingly few improvements being made since the very earliest games in the series, so it’s not as if your

enemies have any chance of turning the tables on you once you’ve gained the upper hand. The fun of

the games for most usually ends after the initial underdog status is overcome. The developers’ only

options to keep the game interesting are to introduce a new challenge or allow the AI to cheat. Being

entirely dependent on somewhat realistic historical context, the developers can’t add any new

challenges that wouldn’t have been there historically, or they would ruin the atmosphere they so

carefully created. And AI cheating is nearly universally hated as a cheap way to make the game

artificially difficult instead of dynamically interesting. So, inevitably, every game becomes a tedious slog

to the finish, crushing opponent after opponent, only limited by the speed at which your armies can
move. That is, if you even decide to continue playing once you dominate your corner of the map.

Despite playing around 1,000 hours of Total War games, I’ve only ever finished one playthrough.

This is where Paradox Games’ Stellaris is able to succeed where historically based

strategy games cannot. Stellaris is a real-time strategy game based in a randomly generated

galaxy populated with diverse alien species, most just beginning to explore the stars beyond

their own solar system. The early-game excitement usually features very little combat, and

instead is derived from exploring the unknown galaxy around you. Every notification you

receive details a new race of crazy-looking aliens to interact with, a stone-age species on a

planet ripe for colonization, a groundbreaking scientific discovery, or a mineral-rich moon in a

neighboring system. It’s only once this exploration phase is over and most useful areas have

been claimed that combat starts picking up. The combat is challenging, but once you have a grip

on the game it’s easier to be prepared and it’s fairly simple to gain hegemony over your slice of

the galaxy or to form a network of alliances that any rivals would be foolish to interfere with.

It’s at this point where one’s interest would begin to wane in a historically based

strategy game like Total War. The loose ends are tied up, and you know that if you played

another dozen hours you would win. This is not at all the case in Stellaris. Even once you reach

a point of apparent power and safety, new challenges can pop up at any time. For example,

when the game starts, the galaxy sometimes contains a number of “Fallen Empires.” These are

millennia-old, extremely powerful factions with massive fleets and advanced technology.

They’ve fallen into decadence and passivity, but can become Awakened when provoked, and

will aggressively expand their borders and receive huge buffs when doing so. They can cause
engaging problems for any player. Also, balancing ever-growing energy needs is still a

challenge all the way into the late game, and changing trade networks or having a single world

destroyed can throw an economy into ruin. But beyond this, the truly scary challenge is the end-

game crisis. Once the game reaches a certain point, the entire galaxy will face an existential

threat and be forced to either unite against the invaders or be ruthlessly subjugated. These

invaders can come in the form of immortal eyeball-monsters that conquer to feed or extra-

dimensional beings that roam the universe and sterilize entire galaxies. (Koumarelas, 2020).

Each crisis is shrouded in mystery, from the sub-space echoes or power surges that foreshadow

their coming, to the first time they decimate one of your solar systems. You never know what

they are or where they come from. All you know is that they want to end everything you’ve

built. In this way, Stellaris successfully introduces out of nowhere an engaging late-game

challenge that still keeps you engrossed in the atmosphere.

Stellaris isn’t perfect. Wars become repetitive, and watching your ships shoot lasers at

helpless enemies again and again gets old. The war score mechanic is frustrating, diplomacy

tends to be shallow and carry little weight, the victory condition basically requires force, and

despite how much effort the developers put in to making each round exciting with different

technology focuses, empires’ temperaments, and random events, the game does get tiring

(Savage, 2016). What it does in a fantastic way, however, is keeping your interest through the

late game, especially in those first few playthroughs, in a way that historical strategy games

struggle to do. A player is always wondering what crisis or event is just around the corner, and

when it comes, it’s anybody’s game once again.

 Of course, every strategy game can’t be based in a futuristic galaxy like Stellaris, just as

every game can’t be based on the historical reign of Charlemagne. Variety is necessary, and just

because Stellaris successfully navigates a pitfall that most other strategy games fall into doesn’t

mean I’m always going to play it over Attila or Three Kingdoms. In fact, I still prefer historically

based games. I’ve always been intrigued by history, and being able to take the helm of a nation

during a pivotal moment in the past and attempt to change things (for better or for worse) is

extremely interesting to me. I’m not arguing that Stellaris is a better game, as that’s an

impossibly subjective argument. The point is that Stellaris, having no contextual limitations, is

able to do what historical games cannot. It can continue to introduce challenges in an engaging

way that doesn’t destroy the immersion in the world but enhances it instead. That’s an

impressive feat, and one of the reasons I’d like to see more strategy games take the risk of taking

place in a different universe with different rules, unconfined by history. Historical games have

their place, but the undefined flexibility offered by a game like Stellaris accomplishes something

that Total War just can’t.

 References

Koumarelas, R. (2020). Stellaris: how to survive an endgame crisis. CBR.

Savage, P. (2016). Stellaris review. PC Gamer.