On the road to the stars: how friv game Stellaris has changed by 2022

In 2016, Friv2Online released Stellaris, a global strategy game about conquering the universe, which immediately became a supernova for the entire genre, demonstrating an incredible scope for playing, a variety of mechanics, amazing art design and space potential for development through massive content DLC and custom modifications. In this article, we will trace the evolution of the project and talk about Stellaris: Overlord, a fresh expansion with advanced vassalage.

Prior to the birth of Stellaris, the space-based grand strategy genre was in stagnation for years. Not that there was nothing to play at all, just projects that came out in different periods of time did not go so far from the immortal classics of Master of Orion.

Distant Worlds: Universe, the Galactic Civilizations series (recently expanded with the fourth part), the Endless Space dilogy are certainly good and unique, but they are all created according to the patterns of old-style simulators, while Stellaris has become the next generation space 4X strategy, new, unsurpassed to this day standard.

Stellaris features a lot: from the stylistically verified design of interfaces and art, immersive musical accompaniment from Andreas Waldetoft, to the magnificent detailing of space bodies, stations and ships ( you can zoom in on the camera and examine any object in the friv game in detail), as well as an abundance of opportunities for customizing races.

The player is free not only to customize the image of the ward faction, choose their coat of arms and name, but also think over their home world and background, determine the appearance of cities and ships, choose political systems and principles, appoint a leader.

Thanks to a wide range of tools, the user can play as a race of intelligent invader mushrooms or fanatically authoritarian reptilians from the galactic outskirts, religious humanoid xenophile birds or a race of intelligent exterminator machines - new life forms complement the game universe every year.

Stellaris implements everything that the regulars of global space strategies are used to , but in a slightly different way. For example, diplomatic relations in the game begin with the first contact and study of unfamiliar species with the help of scientific institutions.

Some races are developed and actively explore the galaxy, others live on the surfaces of planets. With civilizations , you can enter into alliances, create coalitions, trade and exchange knowledge, fight and even completely eradicate species, if this is provided for by the strategy of your faction.

Battles in Stellaris take place in real time, which is why epic skirmishes of large fleets equipped with various caliber guns often look no less impressive than battles in, say, Homeworld.

Military confrontation is not at the forefront, but it is quite possible due to the contestation of territories between large empires, the hunt for artifacts, or some kind of popular uprising. Even if you're very friendly, it's a good idea to design a few warships to guard, as no one is safe from pirates , AI invasions , or invaders from the far reaches of space.

The slow rhythm of Stellaris allows you to slowly expand and explore systems, manage the economy of colonies, build stations and extract resources, as well as conduct research in the fields of physics , sociology and engineering - the technology tree is always unique and expands due to the artifacts you discover, new factions and random events.

For obvious reasons, Stellaris has earned special respect from fans of multiplayer. True, in the early stages of development, the game was more like a budding, but clearly unfinished sandbox , which Paradox is still filled with in the usual manner for the studio - like Surviving Mars or Europa Universalis, Stellaris receives various content DLC from year to year.

In 2016, two expansions were released for Stellaris: the Plantoids Species Pack and the Leviathans Story Pack. The first added a new phenotype to the strategy - sentient plants with plant ships that eventually learned to transform planets into blooming oases and reproduce by budding.

The Leviathans Story Pack, on the other hand, diversified the plot with stories about the forerunners and the non-playable race of mollusc Guardians - powerful guardians of the systems. In addition, the first enclaves appeared in the friv game - independent associations of traders and explorers scattered across space.

The main event of the story DLC was the conflict between the fallen empires, which is gaining monstrous proportions closer to the end of the campaign. The player can limit himself to researching ancient artifacts and searching for the native planet of the ancients, or he can take part in someone else's war, speaking for one of the sides.

In 2017, Stellaris received three expansions, the first of which was April's Utopia, which allowed players to embrace the traditions and paths that define new vectors for the development of empires: factions learned to live in harmony with themselves, strive for technological superiority and scientific discoveries, mix synthetics with organics for creation of cybernetic life forms.

The primitive races were indoctrinated, while the advanced races received a new form of government and several civic models, including technologically savvy mechanists and syncretists with peaceful but stupid slaves.

Finally, Utopia gave players the ability to build their own mega-structures (functional wonders of the world), such as ring worlds, gigantic habitable stations, intelligence and science centers, and even Dyson spheres around stars that increase the flow of energy credits.

In September 2017, Paradox announced the Rise of the Machines with the release of the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack featuring a new type of robotic civilization.

Three months later, another DLC Humanoids Species Pack was released, as you might guess from the name, expanding the settings of the human race: new ship models, portraits, civilian models (hedonists and inventors). In Stellaris 3.1, this add-on received a few more innovations.

The franchise received two major expansions in 2018. The release of the first major DLC Apocalypse was accompanied by patch 2.0, which radically changed a number of basic game mechanics. Apocalypse himself brought star marauders, grandiose flagships and the super-powerful destroyer of worlds, the Colossus, to Stellaris.

The addition of MegaCorp allowed players to take under the protection of not only races, but also mega-corporations with their own unique cultures, labor markets and futuristic metropolitan planets.

In the spring of the same year, Paradox traditionally released the Distant Stars Story Pack themed add-on with an abundance of new stories, unprecedented space creatures, anomalies and events, and in September they added even more stories, which made the friv game much more colorful, unpredictable and diverse.

In 2019, the studio threw all its efforts into adapting the franchise for other platforms, resulting in the long-awaited Stellaris: Console Edition, also distributed in a Deluxe edition with Plantoids Species Pack, Leviathans Story Pack and Utopia included.

The Ancient Relics Story Pack, released in June, added the ability for players to discover relic worlds and conduct archaeological surveys there to study the technologies of lost civilizations, while the Lithoids Species Pack expansion gave Stellaris an empire of Lithoids - sentient stone creatures.

2020 sees the release of Stellaris: Federations, the most politicized DLC ever , with an expanded federation system and an in-depth diplomacy model, as well as a new galactic community mechanic with a Senate that can vote on resolutions, impose sanctions, and promote galactic-wide goals.

And in 2021, the Nemesis DLC was released, where espionage, covert special operations, counterintelligence and sabotage finally appeared, and at the same time another vector of events that allowed the player’s empire itself to turn into a crisis for the galaxy.

In between major updates, faction DLCs were traditionally released: towards the end of 2020, the Necroids Species Pack with a new kind of intelligent undead, in November 2021, the atmospheric Aquatics Species Pack with amazing hydrocentric races that live in ocean worlds.