Feudums and Stellaris: Man vs. Machine

The new game Stellaris seems to be sucking all the oxygen out of the room during the last 24 hours since its release. Stellaris is a new space strategy game and has a slight resemblance to Feudums in a way most people may not get.

All strategy games suffer somewhat from the same flaw. The larger a player grows, the more micromanagement they have do to keep up on things. Not only does this make getting large a game killer (in terms of fun), but for a lot of games it also involves an enormous amount of time invested.

Hats off to Stellaris who at least tried to address this issue.

So, as in most strategy games, one colony/country/kingdom/settlement/village/"you pick it" is never enough. That's the fun of games. But at some point, you get too big and all that fun you had growing gets eaten away by the amount of soul-sucking micromanagement that needs to get done to keep it up and running. Now, Stellaris attempts to solve this with sectors.

In Stellaris, each player can control a limited amount of area. Get too big and your game play is hit with penalties. Developer Paradox tries to combat this by allowing players to create sectors and let an AI run your resource gathering and other icky stuff that isn't fun to deal with any more.

And that's where Stellaris and Feudums nearly run into each other. Those sector AIs are what we would call vassals in Feudums. The difference, of course, is that in Feudums, vassals are actual other human players.

Will that make much of a difference?

Let's see what IGN says about that ... "... Once you expand past five star systems, you’re penalized with a mechanic designed to prevent micromanagement. You’re forced to create sectors: clumps of your empire given over to an AI governor in order to give you resources without hassle. Unfortunately, these sectors are black holes where fun gets sucked into an event horizon, never to return.

Sectors take the best part of Stellaris – planet management – and turn into...nothing. They don’t do anything except contribute resources. Most importantly, they don’t create compelling internal politics to an empire – at worst, a discontented sector might threaten to rebel, but that’s easily stopped with a tiny payment. Ideologies would seem to be a great way to keep internal politics fresh, but they have such a minor effect at the macro level that they’re easy to ignore. ..."

Having a human being behind that vassal name means Feudums will be much more dynamic - requiring not the micromanagement of resources and building farms and such but instead of social interactions. And we think that the social aspects is what will set Feudums apart from its competition and make it a game changer.

(***Editor's Note:  This article refers to the original version of the Stellaris game***)