Senaste recensioner av DozeNaps

Three years ago, I made a review about this DLC. It was generally unfavorable, and I mixed in some details about the espionage system, which apparently wasn't a feature of the DLC, but just added in an update around the time. I have trimmed down the old review and included the summary for the sake of posterity at the end of this review, but I also have some new opinions about this DLC.

It's... alright. I played a small galaxy single player game where I decided to try a bug based devouring swarm empire. I initially went into the game just wanting to try the civic out. It was kinda fun, I enjoyed the alternative responses to a what were normal interactions with neutral factions (PREY...) or the galactic community (your invitation to join was refused due to your "aggressive and predatory behavior". Fools!), and I got a chuckle out of my Baol precursor storyline ending only giving me responses that had me murder and eat the last living Baol.

However, around midgame, when I got to my third ascension perk, and saw the option to Become The Crisis. I remembered my bad experience a few years ago, but I thought it fit in well with my playthrough of being a horrible swarm of all consuming bug monsters.

It was a mixed bag.

On the one hand, they seem to have re-balanced the way you gain crisis points since my negative review in 2021. I was actually able to reach the end of the Crisis tree, and in a fashion that did not feel frustrating, drawn out, or confusing. I just did what I was already doing, as hungry bug monsters, and attacked all my neighbors, gaining new tools for doing so as I continued. I... had fun. It was fun, being the crisis.

However, I would be remiss to not point out a few issues I did run into, given my unique circumstances. First of all, I noticed a difference between the two casus belli that I had in this new crisis bug empire.

Being Devouring Swarm allows you to declare war on anyone you like at any time, by using the special "Absorption" casus belli. You declare you want to eat them, and war begins, no questions asked. Not only is attacking someone so simple, but it seems that they have a special interaction when taking systems - the system just becomes yours, you don't get a temporary 'claim' on it that can be lost when you surrender. It's just yours now. No peaceful negotiations with the hungry bugs.

By contrast, Becoming The Crisis gives you a different casus belli, "Existential Expulsion". Essentially, you are declaring that you want to destroy, not absorb, those systems, and as a result, you no longer try to claim outposts as your own, but annihilate them. This creates unoccupied systems, rather than making them yours.

This is not, inherently, an issue, I don't think, but the problem that I ran into is that it seems to be extremely buggy. There appears to be some sort of mechanic wherein empires you are 'Expunging' can be reclaimed by the people you took it from, not by building a new outpost, but by one just spawning abruptly where it previously was not there. I have encountered this mechanic before with Great Khans, and the means by which it actually works is almost certainly not the intended result.

I had one circumstance where I spent months capturing and recapturing the same three systems, and the minute I had my ships fly out of them, they would abruptly spawn new outposts for the empire I was fighting. It was both maddening and confusing, and I ended up sticking with the Absorption Casus Belli, because at least it made sense.

The issue with the Crisis casus belli aside, the other problem I had was that, well... it was a little too easy, honestly. The AI that I played against simply wasn't capable of responding to the threat I posed in a sensible manner, especially in the late game, when I was punching holes in the galactic territory map with my Star Eaters.

Frequently, they would send their fleets off in wildly different directions, trying to capture isolated systems of little relevance, while my fleet was off somewhere else conquering their worlds and exploding the stars around them. There were several times when my enemy could have beaten me if they concentrated their efforts, but they were extremely easy to divide and conquer.

Sometimes, they would rush out to capture territory I didn't care about like a patchwork of Star Eaten black holes surrounded by systems I technically owned, but didn't care about, because that used to be someone else's system before I genocided them. Not once did they ever actually attack the core of my power, despite it being incredibly exposed due to my forward facing power projection.

I think this is honestly a problem with AI empires in general. Some mechanics were intended to be used against players, because the AI just isn't smart enough to react to certain events. I absolutely would not have had this easy a time if I was playing against people.

And yet, I can't say it was a bad experience. I had a particularly amusing ending, where, about 3 years before the completion of my Aetherophasmic Engine, the Unbidden appeared, right at the edge of my enormous territory (I occupied about 1/3 of the galaxy at that time). My fleets were across the galaxy blowing up suns and I was NOT prepared for them. They did exactly what a player might have done, gobbling up my almost undefended territory with laughable ease, and I hurried over to try and slow them down.

They got all the way to the systems just before my homeworld, where I had clustered all my remaining fleets in a desperate attempt to hold my ground and protect the Engine, when the Abberant appeared, distracting them long enough for me to complete it.

Then I told them they could keep this crummy galaxy and blew it up, ascending to the shroud. Hilarious.

Still, I think that being the Crisis versus all AI players just lacks the excitement that doing it against players would. It was like punching a doll that couldn't really fight back, no challenge until the end game crisis kicked in and sucker punched me.

______

Old review:

The Crisis system is hobbled by a sense of incompleteness. No one really reacts to you being a growing crisis beyond steadily having a lower opinion of you in the diplomacy menu, and the only in game reaction to this growing violent behavior is earning 'crisis points'. You can only progress along the crisis tree by doing very specific actions from a very limited pool. Each of these actions, like "conquer a planet" or "Destroy an enemy ship" earns you specific number of 'crisis' points, and you need a lot of them to get any of the cool stuff promised in the trailers. The problem is that there are a number of actions you can take that definitely SHOULD increase your menace, but the game doesn't even take into account. (and sometimes, even the actions that should count are mysteriously not counted by the game, as if it forgot to add points for the last 7 planets you conquered. No explanation is given for this inconsistent behavior so I have to assume it is a bug)

As an example of this disconnect between actions and 'menace', my first action as a galaxy eating monster was the subjugate the lithoid empire right next to me. The act of declaring war on them, and then the decades-long war where I crushed their fleets and planets one by one, earned me quite small amount of Crisis points. I earned enough to go up to Tier 2 Menace from this, but the progression is not linear - you need 1000 to get from tier 1 to tier 2, but Tier 5 (where you get star eaters) requires 10k crisis points.

And the real problem with all this is by this point in the game, most of the AI had already whittled each other down to 4 other main empires besides myself. By the time I slowly conquer them one by one to grind crisis points, there won't be much of a galaxy LEFT in star eat.

Utterly abysmal. Graphics and halfway decent climbing physics aside, the controls are a mess, the interface is a confusing array of meaningless data, and the 'full tutorial' barely does more than tell the basic controls.

The senses/intelligence displays could have been interesting but is managed in the most obtuse way imaginable, with half a dozen or more 'points of interest' for you to examine which proceed to give you no additional information except a useless ? mark you can memorize the location of - and getting closer doesn't provide any additional context either, you just stare at the mystery object like the stupid dumb monkey you are until you get bored and leave.

I could have pushed past all that but the game doesn't even make a feeble attempt to provide directions on important checkpoints or locations, such as where the rest of the monkies are after you are thrust into a baby monkey rescue right as the game starts - this would have been an excellent use of the 'intelligence' interface to remind me which direction instead of just telling me to go back to them and leaving it there,, but rather of doing that, it just gave me a bunch of useless question mark icons to commit to memory and I wandered around, completely lost, until I jumped off a cliff in suicidal frustration.

I generally give games a chance to wow me, and this one has utterly failed. I have no desire currently to return and try again.