Making requests for an unreleased game is pretty dumb. There's game design and making proposals on it without actually playing the game for a long time is dumb. And UI and balance stuff will be fixed post release. However I very much hope Paradox will focus on the thing it always leaves underdeveloped.
Flavor.
Every Paradox strategy to date met me with a promise of flavor. I remember EU2 historical events. Victoria 1 asking me to chose naval doctrine with pretty picture of some ship. And there was period music on background, and most important capitals had special icons. I remember Crusader Kings 2 meeting me with diplomatic messages from characters starting with appropriate greeting depending on culture and disposition.
But this facade had very quickly disappeared. When I saw first several diplomatic messages in CK2 I thought there would be a system of special messages. But no, there are only couple of them and soon you stop noticing those snippets. Same for everything else. But there was still a historical context filling everything with meaning. EU4 national ideas helped somewhat, but the game mostly feels real cause all those names like Burgundy or Novgorod resonate with what I know.
We won't have this in space. Perhaps playing as humans we will automatically name places with familiar names. But overall my greatest concern about Stellaris is it would be sterile and soulless. I try to imagine playing EU4 with random names on random map and it feels ten times less appealing.
I hope that Stellaris will try to hold us with flavor. Images or videos for events. Special personality for races. Vocabulary depending on this personality. Imaginative tech, planet, event, trait descriptions. I understand things like those take time, but this is very important for players even if we're not conscious about this, and it's not something you can add later. Please think about it.
TLDR: Stellaris will need much more flavor everything cause we can't invent our own context based on our knowledge of history.
Flavor.
Every Paradox strategy to date met me with a promise of flavor. I remember EU2 historical events. Victoria 1 asking me to chose naval doctrine with pretty picture of some ship. And there was period music on background, and most important capitals had special icons. I remember Crusader Kings 2 meeting me with diplomatic messages from characters starting with appropriate greeting depending on culture and disposition.
But this facade had very quickly disappeared. When I saw first several diplomatic messages in CK2 I thought there would be a system of special messages. But no, there are only couple of them and soon you stop noticing those snippets. Same for everything else. But there was still a historical context filling everything with meaning. EU4 national ideas helped somewhat, but the game mostly feels real cause all those names like Burgundy or Novgorod resonate with what I know.
We won't have this in space. Perhaps playing as humans we will automatically name places with familiar names. But overall my greatest concern about Stellaris is it would be sterile and soulless. I try to imagine playing EU4 with random names on random map and it feels ten times less appealing.
I hope that Stellaris will try to hold us with flavor. Images or videos for events. Special personality for races. Vocabulary depending on this personality. Imaginative tech, planet, event, trait descriptions. I understand things like those take time, but this is very important for players even if we're not conscious about this, and it's not something you can add later. Please think about it.
TLDR: Stellaris will need much more flavor everything cause we can't invent our own context based on our knowledge of history.
