Amoeba Swarm is an Overpowered Annoyance
Another game of Stellaris wasted, this time thanks to an Amoeba Swarm encountered too early in the game.
By. Jacob
Edited: 2022-02-05 16:18
I recently wasted another 20+ hours playing Stellaris, and I really do mean wasted, because this game is heartbreakingly broken in too many aspects. For one, it is painfully slow to move your fleets, an aspect that often breaks the game when you are under attack. And it is not always possible to prepare for those things by prepositioning your fleets in key locations. The game requires a painful and inhuman amount of time and attention, often to such a degree that it is pure torture to play the game.
You can not even move around comfortably within your own territory. It is mindbogglingly stupid how slow this game is. The slow movement also contributes to the annoyance in dealing with random events.
In my current game I was unfortunate enough to encounter an Amoeba Swarm that was hostile and decided to randomly attack me. Despite my fleet being a decent amount stronger than the attacking Amoeba fleet, I still lost against them, loosing years of in-game time and resources invested in building those fleets, and basically leaving me defenseless against everything else. And.. To add insult to injury, the few surviving ships went "missing in combat" — for more than a year of in-game time!.
That is just more time wasted, and it practically adds nothing to the gameplay.
Also. It happened in a system with a Star Base equipped with a cannon, but as we know, both Defense Platforms and star bases are extremely underpowered, too expensive to build, and unable to defend in any meaningful way. I am not even sure it was shooting at the Amoeba, and while my fleet was stronger, it just did not seem to matter much.
The Amoeba Swarm encounter was simply too early in the game for me to deal with it, and I am actually starting to wonder if I really want to continue playing. The game is just brutal.
The amount of time you waste is simply unbelievable. Stellaris demands your full attention for several days, only to squash you like an insect with some totally overpowered random event.
It does not get better in later game, not even when you are doing fairly well, because the game will basically be reduced to galactic wack-a-mole, where you, again, will be wasting time moving ships around. Its usually no fun at that point, so you might as well just start a new game when that happens.
The technology to improve travel speed is just not effective enough, and is not always available due to the randomized Technology system.
I will categorize this event together with the Abandoned Terraforming Project Event, both events that probably should not have been in the game. In fact. I think there a bit too many events in the game.
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