Stellaris' Overlord Expansion Breaks Federations! ðŸ˜
Overlord makes the existing nightmare with popup- and notification spam worse, and it even manages to break another expansion.
By. Jacob
Edited: 2022-12-15 19:13
Note. It looks like some of the issues with federations has been solved in later patches, so this article may not be as relevant anymore.
If there is one expansion that you should avoid, then it is probably the Overlord expansion, because it appears to break another expansion: Federations.
Whenever you invite someone to form a federation, and you have the Overlord expansion enabled, they will almost instantly leave the federation – and that is without meaningful penalty or consequences! It seems like this happens when they have subjects with conflicting ethics, and the federation somehow becomes unsustainable.
I also do not think the subjugation aspect of Overlord is very well implemented, for several reasons, but a significant complaint against it is the fact that it introduces more popups and notifications, of which there are far, far too many in Stellaris.
In Overlord, the notifications do not even seem super relevant. E.g. "The x empire can now use the subjugation Casus Belli against us" notification, and the icon happens to be a skull, which is very disturbing and stressful, because I constantly confuse it with the death of a leader. I also do not know what it means, or why the developers feel this is important enough to notify the player about it, like so many of the other redundant notifications in Stellaris. One of the most annoying is when joining the galactic community, and you are presented with numerous notifications about empires having joined. I dread the moment for that reason.
One of the most serious problems Stellaris suffers from is a constant barrage of notification- and popup spam, and it can not be turned off. In fact, if you turn off the popups they will just show up as notifications instead, which is worse, because you can not tell whether you are missing something important.
The federation system is broken by the Overlord expansion, but to be fair, i think it was also suffering from flaws before – the Overlord expansion just made the issue with diverse ethics worse and more pronounced due to having subjects, in fact, you are better off disabling the Overlord expansion if you want to enjoy Federations, because conflicting ethics will cause your little psurdo-alliances to leave the federation.
Even before Overlord, the Federations expansion somehow managed to shoot itself in the foot; it added a few fun gameplay elements, and they are actually more fun than subjugating empires, but ultimately it does not feel like you are truly allied with your federation members, because they can join and leave as they please without consequences, and your federation may be lost as a result. It is just too difficult to create a stable federation in Stellaris.
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