TheArkayn said: I love this. A lot of the Stellaris music seems too whimsical for my tastes. I understand it's to fit the aesthetic of a wide open world of exploration and curiosity, but the heavy drums and horns of this track really fit my personal mood more when I'm trying to defend civilization from vast hordes of rapacious extragalactic monstrosities. The game could use more "war" music imho. Click to expand...

This. I really enjoy the music in Stellaris, but doesn't match the tone of the game beyond about 20 or 30 years in. Stellaris is currently broken into three stages: Exploration, Politics, and Crisis.Exploration is the early game, and seems to have the best representation in terms of music. You're discovering the local area around you, and trying to build up. The "whimsical" music fits this quite well. But this part of the game doesn't last.Politics begin to occur at first contact but really come into play when you're touching borders with everyone else and there's not much room to expand peaceably - commonly, the mid-game. The political maneuvering that grand strategy players love isn't really there yet, so themed music isn't really appropriate... yet. But Clausewitz's definition of politics is included here, and we certainly need more war music. The closest music in-game is "The Imperial Fleet", and that's really more appropriate to building up forces than going to war. I'm not sure what I would cite as a source for good war music other than marches - but do marches really fit in a universe where war is settled floating in space rather than slogging through mud? I'm not sure, but I hope we will see an expansion of the music here, as this is probably the weakest portion of the game for now, and could use the thematic music to lift it up.The Crisis phase could also use more music. Some of the new music fits this pretty well, especially the robotic music for the Contingency. But some other flavors wouldn't go amiss here either, especially if weighted to play when you're bordering one of the end game crises. However, since all of the crises are combat oriented for the most part, war music will also fit here until the game has a few more years of development under its belt.TLDR: +1 for more musical variety, especially war music.