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We caught up with the game director of Stellaris - Paradox Interactive's first grand strategy game set in space - discuss the various stages of the game, about the tech tree and potental dangers of technology as well as the mushroom race born in the mind of a CEO.

"Unlike our other games, it's not historical, of course," says Fåhraeus. "It's set in the future, but it has a lot of commonalities with our other titles. It has the same level depth and complexity, and the warfare and eveyrthing you'd expect from a Paradox game."

Fåhraeus went on to explain how the early game was a lot about exploration and discovery, finding out things about your procedurally generated universe and the races (also procedurally generated) that inhabit it. The mid-game will be more along the lines of Europa Universalis IV with deals, treaties and alliances forming. He also talked about how population comes into play later on (perhaps similar to Victoria II).

"It's going to be pretty hard to keep everyone happy. And this means that you can get factions that want independence or that want a change in government."

In addition to this to keep the end game exciting there's also potential end game crises scenarios that may be triggered as a result of researching dangerous technologies.

In terms of what sort of science fiction Paradox are covering, it seems they are not really limiting themselves.

"We are playing a pretty wide field," says Fåhraeus. "You could expect to see pretty much every science fiction trope you can imagine in this game."

"I wouldn't say though that it's completely space opera either. We tend to stick within the realm of reason, at least. And when it comes to telepathy and psi and so on it's more a matter of what world view do you have. Do you believe that the only thing we can be sure of is your subjective experience, there's pretty deep descriptions for this - so the material world is like a shared dream or is it objective reality. That's the difference between materialists and spiritualists."

We had also spotted a very interesting race among the media released from the game - namely the mushhroom people.

"It's a funny story, because it is actually a request by our CEO," says Fåhraeus of the mushroom race. He said you have to have this mushroom, which is very common here in Sweden so we did that alien race, so that's one of my favourites."