When comparing STAR WARS: Rogue Squadron 3D vs Stellaris, the Slant community recommends Stellaris for most people. In the question“What are the best singleplayer games on Steam?” Stellaris is ranked 119th while STAR WARS: Rogue Squadron 3D is ranked 143rd. The most important reason people chose Stellaris is:
Oftentimes, if you play the game without min-maxing everything, you will find yourself with interesting stories to tell. While the coded events themselves may lose their touch after a while, the interactions with the various races nearby will often be different. You might find yourself in situations where the whole galaxy is against you. You also might find a race of primitives who you uplift, who will become fast friends with you. It's possible that you might grow attached to them, only for them to suddenly and violently be taken over by that Xenophobic Militarist on your borders. The reason some stick with this game for so long is because they love these interactions, despite how shallow they may be sometimes. The fact that you can even be a Fanatic Militarist in the game and still have friends afterward is something that some may find particularly fun.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro GIve a great sense of taking part in the StarWars universe
From the fantastic voice acting, the cinematic sequences to the licensed music and sound effects, this game gives off a great feeling of taking part in the universe of Star Wars. While there has been many games that have held the license, this has been regarded as one of the better titles for some time, which shows with the care they took in presentation.
Pro Easy to learn and play
Rogue Squadron has very accessible controls that allows for the game to have a bunch of differing missions due to how easy it is to fly the ships. More akin to Starfox over Star Wars flight sim titles such as X-Wing, allows for arcadey controls that is no where near as punishing as other sims. This means the game can be more accessible for any type of player.
Pro Expansive content
Even though this is an older game originally released for the Nintendo 64 back in 98, the amount of content is quite good as there is a plethora of missions available. Escort/rescue missions, dogfights and bombing runs make up some of this content, all of which take place on many different worlds or space set pieces, all of which take place in the cannon universe of Star Wars.
Pro Medal system allows for plenty of replayability
Each missions has a bronze, silver or gold medal that can be earned by completing the stage and certain tasks contained withing under a certain time limit. With gold being the toughest to earn, there is plenty of reason to revisit stages in order to earn the gold medal. This means hours of extra time spent with the game.
Pro Emergent stories
Oftentimes, if you play the game without min-maxing everything, you will find yourself with interesting stories to tell. While the coded events themselves may lose their touch after a while, the interactions with the various races nearby will often be different. You might find yourself in situations where the whole galaxy is against you. You also might find a race of primitives who you uplift, who will become fast friends with you. It's possible that you might grow attached to them, only for them to suddenly and violently be taken over by that Xenophobic Militarist on your borders.
The reason some stick with this game for so long is because they love these interactions, despite how shallow they may be sometimes. The fact that you can even be a Fanatic Militarist in the game and still have friends afterward is something that some may find particularly fun.
Pro Highly moddable
The fact that Stellaris is so modifiable makes a huge difference to the game. There are so many ways to customize the game to your liking.
If there's a design decision you dislike, you are always capable of changing it yourself (within certain limits), and you can make the game completely different. You can play as a race from your favorite books, anime, whatever, because so many talented people are making mods for the game.
Pro Great early game exploration
The exploration, and the early game in general, is very interesting, with a plethora of events, not limited to Anomalies surveying player and AI science ships can encounter.
Pro Constant updates
Stellaris is steadily receiving updates, tweaking game balance and fixing bugs alongside with quality of life improvements and new content. Though some of the bigger updates content is often sold as DLC.
Cons
Con Controller settings need to be tweaked
In order to get a controller working properly with the game, one will need to go into the settings of the game in order to change some options. Basically out of the box controller support is pretty poor, though once tweaked the controller will work fine.
Con In game resolution settings may crash the game
While there is a setting in the game to adjust the resolution the game is played in, changing this setting may make the game crash when a mission is launched. While this setting can be changed in an ini file which will not make the game crash, having a broken option in the game shows a lack of polish.
Con No graphical options
The game is basically a straight port of the N64 title, meaning there is zero graphical settings to be found other than resolution (which is broken). So for those looking for a more polished title that would allow them to take advantage of PC centric graphical settings, this may not be the game for you.
Con Mouse and keyboard controls are very poor
This game was originally designed for a controller, which shows when trying to play with a keyboard and mouse. While this port does offer keyboard controls, they work so poorly that it makes the game almost unplayable when using this control scheme.
Con The AI is inconsistent
While the AI in Stellaris works fine most of the time, it has its fair share of problems and oddities.
One of the main problems is automation with the help of the AI. When your empire grows too large, you have to relegate some star systems to “sectors” that are controlled by the AI, automatically performing upkeep and advancement tasks with settings and rules assigned by you. In theory, this would reduce the amount of micromanagement you have to perform, but the AI has a tendency to ignore your inputs, and just randomly reassign resources. This creates a situation where 10 solar systems manually controlled by you have a higher output than 80 systems controlled by the AI.
Another significant problem is the AI controlling the enemy empires. While these function well enough to give you a decent challenge, they sometimes get stuck into logic loops. For example, the AI can decide to endlessly rebuild a single structure, needlessly wasting resources, which causes that empire to stagnate and eventually collapse. Or it can “forget” to allocate food resources after a war while spending everything on just rebuilding, causing a collapse from starvation. It can feel really aggravating when enemy empires just start imploding for no apparent reason, leaving you with a massive fleet with nowhere to point it at.
These two AI problems, among various others, can worsen the overall experience and sometimes take the enjoyment out of a playthrough.
Con Lack of uniqueness ever since the 2.0 update
Ever since Paradox released the 2.0 update, the game has become trash. They simplified the game to the point of absurdity, so now it's pretty much just EU4 in space, except unlike EU4, it's just bad now.
Con Basic economic system is unrealistic, illogical, unworkable and very badly explained
When the game had a simple 'tile' system it worked fine. Now the need for specialist workers creates a level of frustration which simply ruins the playability of the game.
Con Lack of vanilla content, currently
Unfortunately, the game is lacking a bit in certain types of content. There is a great number of events in the game, but not enough as it is. With how many events there are, it is likely that you will see many of these events occur over multiple games. For instance, finding Sol or Sanctuary once may be interesting, but finding it every couple games makes it seem less special.
Con High learning curve
There is a lot to learn in this game that isn't explained very well and is sometimes hard to find. Edicts, policies, and civil rights for example.
Con Needs more traits/ethics/flavor
There are very few options to really make your species unique. There are mods that address this but they can break when patches are released. More added to vanilla would be great.