games

I've only ever finished a campaign when I used "Become the Crisis".

I think the game would benefit from scarcity being introduced. As it is right now, there's rarely a need to fight because there's nothing to fight over. If your deposits and planets could actually run out of resources, you would need to either negotiate trade agreements or fight over territory to keep things running and it would add a more natural and narratively coherent end to campaigns rather than the current system. Right now, some guys just show up in the 3rd act, completely unrelated to anything happening prior.

I've actually never finished a full game of Stellaris. I usually play max-size galaxies, so that might have something to do with it,

That's definitely a strong contributing factor imo. For as many games of it I've started the only one I actually stuck with all the way to the end was one minimum size galaxy fanatic purifier run with a species of adorable butterflies. Any bigger than that and eventually it just hits a point where not only is trying to stay on top of planets a chore but it stops feeling like there's even a point to it since I've snowballed to such a point that I can just brute force whatever's left while slowly waiting for that to finish.

I did have one particularly long running game with an empath tree of life spider hivemind that wound up as the permanent head of a huge federation that also became the sole galactic community security council member and made war impossible, putting the galaxy in stasis with nothing left to do but run out the clock since even the crisis couldn't put a dent in it. That game I played extremely tall (after getting penned in by my loyal allies/federation and some fallen empires) and just relied on barbaric despoliation to capture pops (for livestock) from whoever my federation declared war on to keep my economy growing. I did eventually abandon it once it became a waiting game, though.

I only play as The Culture or as some Skynet analogue. One time I started conquering the galaxy and used the gigastructures mod to collapse every star in my grasp into black holes since they're much more enduring than stars, and built black hole ring worlds harvesting ergosphere energy. Every star had a warp gate for instant point-to-point travel across the empire. Turned an O class star into a star system eradicator weapon with galactic reach.

All my Culture type playthroughs are as those life-loving robots and I win by making nice with everyone until they just join my side, making war only against eradicator types and sometimes slavers

yeee newer Stellaris stuff is cool as hell tbh (I rly love the new human portrait set, the new art style is great)

I'm playing a megacorp with the new worker cooperative civic (mutual aid trade policy seems mildly busted) as well as one of the new origins (synthetic fertility)

playing without checksum mods and with iron man on again as well to get some more achievements, it's fun

I'm not alone in struggling to finish a campaign, it seems! I really enjoy the sense of discovery and exploration that comes with starting a new game, but once I hit the mid-game point and the world's boundaries are established, my interest starts to fade.