In the Stars .... plotting.

I've been getting lost in that Stellaris game again ...

Gaming is good at the moment. On the one hand, I'm enjoying my time in World of Warcraft again with an active guild and fun stuff to explore. That may be a little time limited perhaps though. On the other, I had an epic Stellaris campaign that I took all the way through to fighting the Fallen Empires (brutal campaigns) and an end game crisis.

We need a thumbnail though ! Check this out.

I'm working up to doing a heavily modded Battletech play through using the Rogue Tech mod, plus a little addition of my own. Check out the Company Logo. I haven't started that yet because I may well record the play through, for however long it goes. I'd be heavily editing that, because after a while the battles blur into each other. So I'd be picking out the important parts and wrapping a few battles together.

Looking forward to it.

I said to someone not too long ago that I'd tell them whether I thought the Stellaris DLCs were worth buying ... Here we go :

Apocalypse - gives you planet killer weapons and space pirates. Optional, the space pirate marauders are highly annoying and the planet killer weapons are end game things.
Utopia - buy this one. This expansion opens up a new set of Ascension perks and other mechanics.
Distant Stars - meh. Optional. It opens up new clusters of the galaxy with hidden dangers ... I haven't seen these properly fire yet ... but I'm only in my second game with them in. More buy than not buy.
Synthetic Dawn - buy it. This one allows you to play as machine races, which are an interesting variation on playing as the typical organic. Things like energy being required instead of food and actively needing to build up the population instead of watching it grow naturally.
Leviathans - Optional, it adds in a series of mid level power encounters which are quite varied in nature and level of menace. I enjoy these encounters and I'd miss them.

Ones I don't own (make your conclusions as to whether I recommend them !)
Humanoids, Plantoids - give you new ship models and species appearances. Meh.

On top of that is a vast array of mods that are available for the game. I'm using a few quality of life improvements (like a speed dial feature) and some mods that change and expand on game mechanics. Oh and then there's the ship models :

Click for bigger as per usual ! At this point, the Swarm had 10 fleets of 40k power each. Each of those is a fairly powerful fleet. The game makes you split your fleet up like this and it's a good feature when you get used to it. Each separate fleet can be given attack duty, blockade duty or back to base for upgrades or repairs.

In the above shot, I'd gathered the massed fleets together for an invasion of a Fallen Empire homeworld. My swarm had 10x 40k power fleets, the enemy had a few 60k power fleets plus a hefty space station. A brutal fight but the swarm prevailed.

The mod in this case is the Star Wars Rebel Ships mod and the larger ships are Mon Calamari cruisers forming the Battleship wings. If you zoom in real close, you may be able to make out a mass of Corellian Corvette zooming around.

This was the final fleet action of the game, with 12 massed Swarm fleets advancing on the last vestige of the Machine Contingency which had awoken to sterilise the galaxy with only the Swarm able to deal with them.

It was an intense campaign when it kicked off in the end game. Very enjoyable.

The latest campaign has quite different ships. I've only unlocked the corvettes and destroyers so far. Here they are :

Shiny ! The next game will have Next Generation ships and something must have gone horribly wrong because I'll be playing a machine assimilator race.

Warcraft ? I definitely enjoyed the social aspect of the raid I was involved in on Saturday. We made an attempt at battering the content from the last expansion. The social side was awesome, with lots of fun over the voice comms. But it did remind me of the very fiddly and punishing mechanics that exist in the raid encounters in WoW. A single mistake or misunderstanding of the mechanics is punished very heavily.

I think that's made up my mind somewhat on how heavily I'll stay in WoW in the weeks to come. A younger me would have been grinding away to get to the required gear level and I'd have been training myself in raid modes. (I have an idea ... but haven't played that idea for quite some time).

I'd honestly rather play different games now than be subject to those raid mechanics. Like Stellaris !