Ok, so I have a few hours in Stellaris. I stopped playing it a while ago, though. As soon as they changed the core concepts of how ftl propulsion worked, it really broke the concept for me. Then, they changed pretty much the core mechanics of the game. And after still trying to give the game a chance, I finally had to stop and realize the game I had played and sunk around 300 hours in no longer existed without modding it to oblivion to undo the changes that Paradox has done.

DLCs? Yeah... they have a lot of them. I bought them, though, so I could support the game I loved. I wanted to show the publisher that I supported the crap out of this and that it was an amazing concept. I had looked for something exactly like this for a VERY long time to see it stripped down to something much less than the original concept.

Now, we have a generic 4x game that a company that is working out of someone's mother's basement could produce in about a year with a slightly better soundtrack and a load of DLCs that no longer seem to add flavor to the game.

All in all, the game lost it's substance when they were more worried about "balance" and making sure that everything was on an even ground and taking away people's choices and forcing people to develop strategies to overcome what could be conceived as weakness. Paradox seems to have given little to no thought or shown any kind of care towards the playerbase and continues to milk the corpse of a once-great game.