Seriously, computer?

[davidgillon]

So I've been taking things easy since putting my mother on the train home last Thursday (and meeting kaberett for a very pleasant lunch). Alongside trying to re-establish my normal daily routine after three weeks away and then two weeks with my mother, I've been taking the chance to play a bunch of Stellaris, which I'd only bought on Cyber Monday and hadn't really had a chance to play.

It's a fairly standard city/empire builder. If you've played any of the other Paradox Interactive strategy games (Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria) then it'll be very familiar as they all share the same core technology, though in this case they've grafted on a very pretty starship combat module (pretty as all you can do is watch it, you don't have tactical control).

Today's session was ridiculous. I've had a pirate kingdom on my doorstep (three jumps from Earth) since the start of the game, and I finally had built up the strength I needed to turf them out. They had about 60,000 fleet strength, I had about 100k split between four fleets. So I jumped into their space from two directions and was making good progress when the game announced.

"The Great Khan has awoken and his fleets have emerged from their hidden anchorages"

Suddenly I didn't outnumber the enemy by 40k, they outnumbered me by 40k. Eep.

But I managed to wear them down, though by the time I finished my poor Home Fleet was down to 7k points. At which point the neighbouring federation declared war against the federation I'm in, and invaded me. When peace finally broke out (there's a really interesting 'war exhaustion' mechanic that can force the end to a war) I'd managed to claim a nice chunk of their territory, so needed a nice, quiet period to set about integrating that.

So one of the other states in my federation promptly had a robot uprising.

Seriously, computer?