Are there too many space strategy games? Between Galactic Civilizations, Distant Worlds, StarDrive, Endless Space, and many more, it seems like the genre is thoroughly colonized. But there’s also room for a disruption beam: most of these other games are on the same foundation that Master of Orion 2 built, a Civilization-in-space with tactical combat and ship customization. It’s too similar; Stellaris

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Also giving hope: Paradox Development Studio has been on a ridiculous hot streak lately. With Crusader Kings 2 and Europa Universalis 4, Paradox took their games’ typical strategic depth, and especially in Crusader Kings’ case, did things that hadn’t done before, like putting The Sims-like interpersonal relationships at the heart of a grand strategy game. It’s that level of creativity, of infusing a traditional form with novelty that Stellaris and the space 4x genre need (4x: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate--the traditional form of a Civilization-like game). Happily, Stellaris looks like they have the right people on the job.Here’s what makes Stellaris look good: First, it’s initially accessible. Paradox games have long had the problem of putting their entire map and all of their options in front of players, so that their first impression is one of immense complexity, especially when compared to games like Civilization, which slowly unveil their complexity and their map at the same time. Stellaris initially looks and feels like a relatively typical space start game: you start with a single planet and some explorer ships, the music is pleasant, calming science fiction-style, and you slowly explore and colonize the galaxy.The initial cool thing about Stellaris is that exploration gets a special focus. The “science ship” isn’t merely a scout ship that happens to be used for exploration, but its own special unit, which can have characters assigned as captains, which gives the whole process a nice Star Trek “continuing five-year mission” vibe to it.But it’s with the further expansion that Stellaris starts to get really interesting. For one thing, it doesn’t have a tech tree, the defining characteristic of almost all grand strategy games. What makes sense in a historical game like Civilization, with our knowledge of how technology proceeded in reality, doesn’t make sense in the future. So Stellaris uses a card game-like system, so that when you need to research a new tech in any of its three groupings (Engineering, Physics, and Social), you get three cards with tech choices, and the two you don’t pick get shuffled back into the conceptual deck.The second cool thing about the setup is that each in-game empire is customizable (for players) or procedurally generated (for AI). Some of this is aesthetic: empires have different potential looks, both in terms of ships and their initial racial characteristics, like being mammalian or avian, and what kinds of planets they can colonize.But each race is also sorted by their ideologies and government. There are four different “Ethos” axes, like Individualist/Collectivist, or Pacifist/Militarist. From the various different Ethoses all kinds of things change – certain technologies are more likely to be drawn with certain ideologies, and government types rely on the empire’s ethos, so you can’t have an autocratic dictatorship with an individualist population.What makes this really cool is that it changes over time. Your starting race isn’t monolithic but is instead divided into different chunks of population, or “pops” (which is a word that should fill longer-term Paradox fans with glee, as it was one of the best ideas in Victoria 2). They can decide they want different Ethos combinations, and cause trouble within your empire. What’s more, you can also integrate other races into your empire, which is a good idea, because unlike other space 4X games, you might need an aquatic race to colonize ocean planets and help out your desert birds. But they’ll also have their own ideologies.The long and short of this is that Stellaris is supposed to have internal politics to match the traditional space strategy game’s external politics. This is a huge gap in the genre, traditionally, but it’s one that Paradox, especially with the backstabbing Game of Thrones-like Crusader Kings 2, has proven uniquely capable of handling.Stellaris has other exciting-sounding concepts planned for its mid-game and late-game, like a dense web of a diplomatic system once the galaxy is largely colonized, similar to Europa Universalis. Likewise, for the end-game, Paradox has various crises planned, where something in the galaxy may go horribly wrong and make everything more difficult. The two they described were an engineering crisis creating a new, powerful robot faction, a la the Cylons or the Geth, or a physics crisis bringing in evil forces from another dimension. (Unfortunately, we only saw the early game in action, so implementation of these concepts remains to be seen.)There were, and still are, a lot of reasons to be skeptical of Stellaris. The space strategy genre is well-worn, and Paradox hasn’t ever attempted something like this before. But based on what I’ve seen and heard, they’re on the right path with just about every aspect of the game.

Rowan Kaiser is a contributor to IGN and an expert in the strategy game genre. Talk about your favorite strategy titles with him on Twitter at @RowanKaiser