Stellaris: Nomads DLC

I really want to like this, but it seems to follow the trend of subpar Stellaris DLCs. Here are my thoughts: The Nomads DLC needs a lot of work. The ideas it presents are very promising and the roleplay possibilities are great, but the gameplay itself just sucks right now. Operational reserves shouldn't exist -- it should've remained as standard Energy and Mineral balances. It adds a layer of abstraction to your economy that's pointless. Waylines act as your logistic network/ trade routes. They are pretty neat but it feels like you're tied to them. Which kinda defeats the point of a nomadic empire imo. Military arkships are STUPID powerful. At the start of the game, you can subjugate most nearby empires (even on Grand Admiral difficulty). The ordinance districts don't help the balance. Also, the fact that Arkships have the same model no matter the shipset you are running really sucks. I get that making 3 models per shipset would take a lot of time but it sucks that only Humanoid ships match the arkships. I have faith that this will eventually be a great DLC, but as is, it needs work. 

The design of the arc ship doesn't change depending on your shipset. Nomadic wars against other nomads are bugged. Seizing waystations doesn't work. Wanderlust perk doesn't explain where you need to go. The alert for it doesn't show any systems to target. When you fight another arc ship in combat it just runs away and you ping pong around with no way to actually pin it down.

Hi everyone,Honestly, it’s been a while since a set of Steam reviews caused me such massive cognitive dissonance. Real talk: I absolutely love this expansion. It’s a complete overhaul of the gameplay loop, provided you actually choose to play as a nomadic empire in any of its forms.As a nomad empire, you can adapt different previous origins. Not all of them, since some are obviously incompatible, but a lot of them are selectable. On top of that, they’ve introduced 4 origins specifically for nomadic empires, which is no small feat.I started playing with the sacred pilgrimage origin and mixed ethics—one nomad ethic and one of the usual ones, specifically the space archaeologists. My selected ark is the scientific one, and honestly, between the ethic, the ascension trait they implemented to hunt for points of interest across the galaxy, and my own pilgrimage, I have a ton of fully unique, mechanic-driven things to do. I haven’t noticed any balance issues, which brings me back to my cognitive dissonance:I see a lot of people here foaming at the mouth over one thing and its exact opposite. Many complain that playing with arks is hot garbage, that it's useless, that you can't progress, and that planet-based empires with fixed installations are way stronger. Others straight-up MAKE UP that you can have a 15k strength fleet within 10 years—and I say they're making it up because it’s materially impossible. If you start with a military ark and focus entirely on upgrading its military aspect with your starting resources, you won't do any research, meaning you can't upgrade the ark properly, so you won't have enough slots to fit weapons and upgrade them scientifically. Others claim they got attacked by a 15k strength nomad faction, when in reality they probably just messed up by attacking the neutral faction, which is literally just an ark that sponsors televised battles. And finally, you have those saying that they don't work, that they don't let you play as actual nomadic empires, and other "blah blah blah" nonsense. Honestly, I wonder if any of them have actually played the DLC. Someone out there is saying that the nomad origins are useless—that, for example, the pilgrimage one is just going to 5 places and doing a few projects. As if traveling to those locations scattered across the galaxy wasn't enough of an adventure. I guess they say "5" because they play on a tiny map, because I have to visit quite a few more. But let me tell you, it’s not just a "show up and leave" thing. You have to develop your path, deal with whatever issues you encounter, and make choices. Ship events pop up, and your decisions upon reaching those sacred sites have all kinds of consequences.I assume the other origins have received the same amount of effort. When you pair them with ethics—which also have consequences—and the ascension perk, well, you end up with plenty of things to do. And that's not even mentioning the contracts, conflicts, and other mechanics adapted for arks in a regular playthrough.Then I see these incredibly wise and learned people talking about min-maxing, while simultaneously being unable to do basic math, whining about why they are losing resources when they have multiple fully operational ships. Like, damn, do you really think energy upkeep only applies to flagship vessels? There are plenty of expenses, and I don't think it's that hard to balance things out a bit. We’re all geniuses here, except when it’s actually time to prove it.I also wonder how it’s even possible that, right after the DLC dropped, people here have already played enough hours to practically beat the game and review it from such "broad perspectives." Having 3 arks and everything maxed out. I don't know, Rick, it looks fake to me. I've sunk quite a few hours into it and I haven't even reached the mid-game yet. What speed are these people playing at? Maybe at that pace, it’s normal that they have no clue what’s happening around them and don't understand the game mode.If you like Stellaris and want something fresh, I highly recommend it. It brings a lot to the table for very little. For me, it has completely revitalized the game, and if you enjoy exploration and adventure, you’ll have plenty of options. Don’t pay much attention to the dissonant crowd. Steam reviews are becoming more worthless by the day.

Every single (6) run I tried with Nomadic empires was ended by a game breaking bug. Some very obscure . . . some very obvious and discovered by merely playing for two hours. Did ANYBODY playtest this DLC ?

For a $25 dollar DLC, there is no excuse for there only being 1 shipset for Nomad empires (default human). it is especially jarring to play as an aquatic or thermophile empire and the default land textures not change. Its a very easy fix for the devs to have added and is frankly lazy. But every shipset should have a corresponding artstyle for arkships. Another problem are the lack of war options, namely the ability to wage war and be able to deny another terrestrial empire's control over a system. All we can do is vassalize or make tributaries. $25 alone is too high of a cost for a DLC when there are other quality full games for the same price or less.

The DLC is cool however, there are no specific ship designs for every sets, this is not acceptable. With how much the game alongside his DLC's costs, it should not even be possible to skip on the bare minimum.

Many aspects of the Nomad empire types eighter don't function or don't feel fun at all. Too much resource deficit at the start without any means to quickly balance it out. Ark Ship combat appears broken in multiple ways, charging straight into enemies, and enemy ark ships just flat out leaving combat constantly into a neighboring system. Product feels unfinished and rushed in this stage, and really needs another go over.

Edit: They've essentially fixed all the bugs and issues I've ran into since playing with this last beta branch, which is great! However, I'm not a QA tester, If this is the continued practice of PDX to drop half-baked DLC, charge full price, punish the players who buy on day one with broken mechanics, they need to look at changing the pricing strategy. You make it half off on day one, and then after a week of bug fixes you change it to full price, I'll change my review to positive. Something like that. Meet me halfway lol ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Really was looking forward to this DLC, unfortunately it's too buggy and broken in such obvious unforgivable ways immediately. A couple of the big things they advertised being able to do was be a pirate, yet the pirate stations do not actually funnel resources correctly, and the plundering bombardment stance not only doesn't actually collect resources, but it kills all of the pops on a planet until the planet decolonizes.(Kinda hard to pirate dead people) (Why the ♥♥♥♥ wouldn't you put a "minimal pops" killed to like 10k like the other bombardment stances have) But hey I'm not tripping, one things buggy no problem, screw it I'll play terravores. Always thought it was stupid you were planet eaters who lived on planets, so I set that game up too, nomad planet eaters sounds perfect. Wrong. There is no function to actually consume planets that I can find, there's no buttons no decisions, no options. I captured a primitive world and it immediately became a vassal and purged all of its pops and destroyed itself, still couldn't crack the planet. The tooltip for "nomad ships can consume planets" is just that, it just says THAT. Wtf does that mean and how tf do you do it?? What are we doing.. $25 to be a QA tester is just not it anymore. These aren't even obscure bugs, they're CORE functions of distinct obvious playstyles. Shelving this ♥♥♥♥ for a week until the hotfixes roll out to fix this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. SHM PDX.

Editors note: I forgot to mention the biggest problem the arkships have. You have no good way of getting science or unity so you fall behind VERY quickly, on top of its other eco problems and it does have, no it isn't 'lol u suck' edit2: comments off now, getting personal attacks because my review is "wrong". I'd say the fact as of this edit the dlc has a MASSIVE 42% positive shows how spot on this review is. I love the idea of this dlc, but it isn't good as it is right now. I want to love this DLC so much, as a person who loves playing "horde" factions in Total War games (basically you don't care about controlling territory, you just roam the map being a rat) this sounded exactly like that. The problem is it isn't really at all. Pros: +The ark ships do look very cool, even if they only have the one style +The contracts you get from other empires gives it some nice flavor +You can actually micro the Ark ship even in combat, this gives it a crazy amount of control on the battlefields, actual micro in my stellaris?? Cons: -While the DLC talks about it being 'no territory, free roam the stars' it doesn't quite work like that for a few reasons -You still need to collect and gather resources, the two ways of doing so are...odd. The first is you can forcibly harvest stellar bodies in a system to gain a big lump sum with a big downside of -75% income from mining stations for 20 years. You also can't re-harvest that system for 20 years. The second is to build Waystations, which by themselves do nothing, for some reason?, but in the station you can build upgrades that will harvest and store the resource the upgrades are tied to, seems cool! Here's the problem with these two systems: Harvesting forces you to constantly be on the move, but other empires *will* declare war on you if you harvest their systems, while Waystations force you to basically become friends with another empire and more or less live in their borders as a kind of guard dog. So while you *can* harvest, the moment lines are drawn you are forced into being basically a +1 to an empire or your eco collapses in on itself. I don't really know how or if they can fix these problems without doing a total overhaul of the systems they have for Nomadic empires, while it may be unpopular with some I think the only option would be so buff the ♥♥♥♥ out of the Arks eco, you shouldnt have to scavenge just to have a decent eco. Despite the Arks being "Side-grade" planets as they put it, they are strictly a downgrade in everything but the fact they can shoot.

So, although I think this expansion is fun, there's a few things that badly need fixed before I can give it a recommend. However, I will start with the pluses. Arkships themselves are REALLY freaking cool. I like the amount of diverse ways that you can equip it and utilize it for things. There is very clear playstyles for you to follow with them, and to be honest at the baseline, they are a bit OP if it wasn't for a few issues that I think need badly looked over. If you start with a Military Arkship and modify it correctly, you can EASILY get it to 10k fleet power within 20-30 years of a game starting. This isn't really amazing for min-max players that break the game, but it is amazing for more casual players that are bad at developing their military (like me). However, as I stated there are some big issues. Lets start with the simplest one, and we'll go from there. Operational Reserves are just...broken, misleading, and downright confusing most of the time. As people have pointed out, there are no "breakdowns" for what is actually using all your minerals or energy, it just shows you how much your deficit is and it expects you to fix it. And I have an assumption that for whatever reason, the reason they don't show these upkeeps is that for unfathomable reason, they weren't made 1 - 1 with the base game. I only say this because in the game I am currently playing, my BASE operational reserves usage is -1800 Energy Credits / month. Look, I'm a bit green when it comes to min-maxxing Stellaris, but I'm not SO bad that I should be going that far in to debt. When I looked at my Arkships I owned, they both had positive energy output. Not by much, but it still wasn't negative. Meaning that the only thing that could be causing the -1800 Energy / month is my 3 Arc Furnaces (None of which are even level 4) and my waystations. But conveniently, they do not tell me what their upkeep is. That math just DOES NOT add up to me. Even if my Arc Furnaces were maxed, that would only be -400 of the -1800. Where the hell is the other -1400 coming from? This wouldn't be an issue if the harvesting mechanic felt meaningful, but against numbers that high it just doesn't work. The harvest mechanic seems just odd in general, because you end up with more STRATEGIC RESOURCES than normal ones most of the time, which makes no sense at all. The central issue is that it takes 90 days to harvest the resources. Meaning that for my deficit above, with no buffs to harvest speed, I would need to be harvesting.....5400 minerals or energy credits PER operations for it to be even remotely useful. Fun fact, the most I have ever seen a singular one give is around 2000. The only reason that this isn't a downright negative to me is because you can buy stuff with trade to top up your reserves, which maybe that was what the developers were intending? But if that is the case, then they BADLY need better market controls to like "auto sell till you are at X amount of a resource" cause that's a lot of work with a volatile economy. The other big minus is that nomads really do not have a good way to produce Unity OR Science, meaning you fall behind in both quite often because you need to devote your districts to producing consumer goods / alloys else you end up death spiraling. It seems like they want you to focus a lot more on using waystations for deposits that gather science, but with a lack of explanation of how waystations and waylines work, I don't really understand quite how to use them other than they gather resources for you that need collected by your arkship or logistic ships periodically. Like, I don't even know if "resource collection speed" is how fast my logistic ships collect from depots, or if its effectively a % modifier on station outputs. This is another gripe that I don't understand: Why the hell would you make a resource mechanic for gathering that REQUIRES your Arkship to stay close to a specific area else it takes in-game years for those resources to get to you and results in an inefficient setup? My solution for now has been to keep one Arkship near my waystation territories, but really this should just be a mechanic where once a depot is full, it automatically "sends" the resources and they arrive after a specific period of time, rather than using a logistic ship to deliver them which is woefully inefficient cause of the sheer quantity of resources. Really, for the theme of nomads, I feel like contracts should be giving you a lot of science and unity, but they don't. Usually all they give you is some trade and >1000 of a basic resource. Overall, I really like the theme of this DLC but I don't recommend it at the moment. Its fun, but its clear that they did not listen to us complaining last year to take the time to make sure that when they are making new DLC that they make sure to parse through it with a fine mesh comb to make sure everything makes sense. Its far too reliant on doing super specific playstyles and hitting very specific technologies which are not guaranteed. This expansion had such huge potential to be very good, and you ruined the core part of the expansion with conflicting design philosophies. Paradox....Do better. Please. All of us avid Stellaris players enjoy the DLCs you release usually, but none of us want something half baked that seems to not had a single actual player playtest them to see if any of what was done makes sense. Edit: Updated because of some bug fixes and and the addition of a slider for AI Nomad Empires