My favorite memory from a grand strategy game comes from the original Master of Orion. It happened late in an epic campaign, in which the entire galaxy had been colonized and everyone was cozy in an alliance. The galaxy had been at peace for a while, if tenuously, with me as one of the surviving seven or so empires.

Then, suddenly, the game triggered a random event that caused my ambassador to try to kill a rival leader. The tenuous peace was shattered, war was declared, and two massive alliances tore the galaxy in half. It was like World War I in space after the assassination of some alien archduke.

Ever since then, I’ve been looking for a game that combines complex strategic systems with random events so magnificently. It’s a difficult combination to find and perhaps an even harder one to design. Designing a game that’s both random and consistently engaging is a problem I thought about constantly during my recent time with Stellaris, Paradox’s latest epic space strategy game.

What is good luck?

Games built on interlocking, randomized systems are increasingly popular, thanks in part to the upswing of PC gaming and the importance of streaming and Let’s Plays. The latter is particularly relevant here: games with systems that make failure random and fun are better as shared experiences than games that require constant reloading (or linear games that play almost identically every time).

“Good luck” in a randomized game is subjective. For me, I feel lucky even if I lose a game of Crusader Kings 2, as long as that loss is due to some hilariously random chaos. On the other hand, I get frustrated by easy defeats in action roguelikes like Nuclear Throne or The Binding of Isaac. “Bad luck” in these randomized games is pretty easy to define, though: anything that bores the player out of engaging with the game.

I had very bad luck with Stellaris. I played deep into four different campaigns and got bored and frustrated with all of them (it was kind of a thing). Yet when I spoke to other critics who’d played Stellaris, they made the game sound like fun. I never saw a rebellion, I never had the AI declare war on me (outside of a terrible alliance decision or a very early game decision), I didn’t see any endgame crises, and I never got into a war where one side wasn’t so clearly dominant as to be boring. Other players told me how they saw all of this and more early on. They had a very different experience with Stellaris.

Grand strategy games are uniquely susceptible to being ruined by bad luck. Many roguelike games are short enough that, if you get an unlucky “boring” run, you can roll the dice for a more interesting setup quickly and often. A small-scale strategy game like Offworld Trading Company has bite-sized 30- to 60-minute scenarios that can be run through in quick succession.

With a game like Stellaris though, you have to commit 10 to 30 hours to a campaign before you can even tell where it’s going. That kind of time commitment means the game only has one or two chances to show off how amazing it is before players get frustrated and move on.

Designing with luck in mind

Strategy games are so large and so complex that they’ve always had the potential for unlucky runs with essentially broken AI. Players used to judge these games on a curve, but the past few years have seen the genre's AI get more consistent at mitigating the likelihood of boring or broken campaigns. Take the Total War series, which has long had issues with poor strategic AI, especially with players becoming nearly-invincible once they survive the early-game rush. After Total War: Rome 2 and its nearly-pacifist enemy empires marked the series' nadir, developer Creative Assembly hit on a brilliant idea for the sequel, Attila: Total War. That game constantly puts the player under pressure, whether it's from a Hun invasion or a climate apocalypse shrinking the economy. Luck becomes irrelevant. (Total Warhammer uses a similar system to even greater effect.)

Even though it shares Attila's devastating winters, Amplitude’s science fantasy 4X Endless Legend takes a different path to success. Its gorgeous world-building motivates players to play through its long-term, game-winning quest systems. Even if you’re not sure exactly what you should be doing in a strategic sense, Endless Legend always makes it clear what exact step you should take to learn more about its fascinating world.

The best grand strategy games create systems that force good luck onto players and ensure consistently entertaining experiences. Paradox’s own Crusader Kings 2 uses comprehensible transparent systems to model courtly politics. The game keeps things moving even during lulls in gameplay by encouraging players to role-play their current Duke or Sultan.

“I did not expect to live in a world where a Total War game finally manages to be engaging... while a Paradox game struggles to keep my interest.”

Paradox’s other major pre-Stellaris release, Europa Universalis 4 uses history as a model to push or pull players in different directions. Some of these are embedded events, like the Iberian wedding creating Spain out of Aragon and Castile. Others are missions given to the players as choices. If you start a new game as the Turks, your immediate missions might be to conquer Constantinople and build yourself a new capital, or take Rhodes and remove the last Crusaders from the Middle East. Subsequent missions might get you into the Balkans or send you east to India and China. Europa Universalis 4, also uses a robust and dynamic—but still comprehensible—diplomatic system to create increasingly tangled threads, leading to increasingly massive (and often pointless) continental wars.

These kinds of things would have vastly improved my Stellaris experience. During the middle of a sleepy Stellaris campaign, for instance, something like Endless Legend’s quests would have given me a good reason to declare war upon and beat most of my neighbors. While even the biggest powers need help in a game like Europa Universalis, Stellaris didn't give me reason to be in an entangling alliance most of the time. And you can forget about Crusader Kings-style role-playing.

All of these things could have mitigated any randomly dull campaigns in Stellaris, and Paradox's plans for the official patch are promising. I did not expect to live in a world where a Total War game finally manages to be engaging from beginning to end, while a Paradox game struggles to keep my interest.

Developers should be expected to ensure that most (if not all) of their “randomized” strategy campaigns at least encourage the players to make interesting choices. The vast improvements that major strategy game developers have made in the past few years have led to a new golden age of the strategy game. With Stellaris, on the other hand, players and critics will have to judge the game based on the inconsistent cards it deals them.