Just wondering what peoples' thoughts are on the most recent total overhaul of the game. I haven't bought the megacorp DLC yet, but I did play a multiplayer game with a friend that did, and I was pretty impressed. Much as I detest tedious micro, the new planet management system is light years ahead of the old one, and represents a much more realistic pace for colony development- no more outpopulating and outdeveloping your homeworld in twenty years. The main issues I've seen so far are poor balancing between raw materials, market balance, and finished goods, and AI. Since nearly all finished goods require minerals exclusively as an input, you get constant mineral deficits and a market that places more value on minerals than the goods made from them.

As for the market, the demand/pricing mechanism is poorly implemented, so you can exploit it for infinite money. Say a good costs 1EC/ea, you put in a bulk purchase order for 10,000 units. You pay 1EC for each of them, but after the order the sell price is boosted to 2EC. You can then immediately dump everything you just bought, selling each for 2EC. They could (and probably will) fix this by considering the price of each unit individually based on whatever formula they use for calculating market demand.

Finally, the AI completely shits the bed with the new administrative cap mechanic, and ends up decades behind any competently managed player empire in both economy and technology. But then I suppose poor AI is nothing new for Stellaris.

Issues aside though, I feel like with this patch, Stellaris has finally taken its place as a worthy successor to the classic Master of Orion 2.

For me, I value gameplay and originality. For example, let's take Splatoon. It gets a lot of hate because it has "kiddy" graphics. But I like it. It's gameplay is great. It's a really fun shooter, and I don't care if it has cartoonish graphics. As far as originality, it has amazing new ideas, such as the ability to swim through ink laid down by your weapon. What do you all value in a game?

Hey! Despite the seemingly negative name, I want to make this thread so anyone can say pretty much whatever you want about the games you've been playing! Whether it's a review, a brief paragraph or two of thoughts, recommendations, or frustrations, let's try to commiserate or proliferate discussion about what we've been playing!

I was reading about it here:

https://www.cnet.com/news/brave-browser-matures-with-move-to-chromium-foundation/

First I heard of it and was curious if anyone has tried it. I love the idea of blocking ads and trackers by default.

I know the trust system is far off. However, I think a really interesting point to include could be the ability to "vouch" for a user via a profile button. Generally, this should be if you know them off-site or you recognize them as a great contributor here.

There shouldn't be any indication to the user that someone has vouched for them-- that makes it easy to manipulate, allowing for more of a tit-for-tat with randos.

There should also be a number of factors involving the invite tree here (user 1 is the person whose profile button was clicked; user 2 is the clicker vouching for the other person here)--

• Did user 2 invite user 1? If so, it's worth a little
• Did user 1 invite user 2? If so, it's not worth much
• Are users 1 and 2 completely unrelated in the tree? That's worth the most.
• Older accounts provide more trust when vouching.

This way, it's harder to manipulate, too.

What do you guys think about this? Obviously it'll be a lower priority than the primary trust system, and will take a while to get the mechanics sorted, but I think it will be a worthwhile addition in the future

e: meant to add that trust given should be directly correlated to the trust of the person vouching; new users shouldn't even have an option to vouch, at least until their trust is x or they've been around for a few weeks.