Enraged Titans: Bugged event in Stellaris
Stellaris still suffers from endless popups, bugs, and broken events that ruin the core gameplay. Despite all expansions, the game feels unfixed and cluttered with frustrating, illogical mechanics.
By. Jacob
Edited: 2025-11-12 23:36
Stellaris is the type of game I really want to see succeed, but it still suffers from fundamental, game-breaking flaws and bugs — perhaps most importantly, the popup spam notification nightmare has still not been addressed meaningfully as of 12 November 2025. While the developers gave us a way to decide which type of notifications and popups to show, I just don't want to be the one to make that decision, as it distracts from the game, and I am afraid I might unintentionally miss something I want to see; I want the game to show what's relevant, and nothing beyond that. Most of the notifications and popups just don't seem to be important enough to warrant the level of stress and discomfort they cause the player.
Yet, I still come back to Stellaris occasionally, trying hard to ignore the popups and play around the flaws and bugs. I own all the expansions and keep buying whatever new expansion they release.
We don't need more expansions at this point.
What Stellaris desperately needs before anything else, is improvements to the core game, bug fixes, and the removal of nonsensical popups and disruptions. Guaranteed events, especially around planet colonization, should only have a chance to occur — they should not appear in every game you start.
I own all expansions and play with everything turned on. I have even learned to enjoy the chaos of cosmic storms, which I initially disliked because it added extra events — and I still dislike it in principle for that reason. But in spite of numerous patches and expansions, Stellaris is still not "fixed" at its core. You should not be adding content and features when you still haven't fixed existing, game-breaking bugs and flaws — you only make things worse and harder to fix.
Enraged Titans
As I have argued about the Underground Vault event, some things just don't work in this game — sometimes because they distract from the core gameplay by stressing and irritating the player with things that are inhumane to micromanage given the circumstances, but most importantly, sometimes simply because they're bugged.
In my current game, I found a size 25 planet that I terraformed to my species preference. It was occupied by titanic life, which oddly wasn't killed by the terraforming. I colonized it and built it up to a fair level, only to lose the entire colony to "enraged titans" — this all happened before I could build a ground army large enough to even attempt to defend the colony. The colony was devastatingly lost, and I had to recolonize the planet.
I would like to bring attention to my earlier criticism of the Underground Vault event, because once again we are dealing with consequences that are simply too punishing for no good reason. It also becomes ridiculous, because you can't really do anything to defend against even basic life forms, in spite of all the insane technology you have. It is all superfluous until late game, and then everybody has it anyway.
The developers add these events for an extra challenge, but they only serve as irritating and dumb disruptions of the gameplay, while expanding an already tediously large surface for developers to introduce more bugs and flaws.
This was a tremendous setback, costing an inhumane amount of time — especially because of the costs of terraforming, but also because I am playing with the Doomsday origin and have struggled to find planets to colonize. This is something you might add to a game if the player has the resources and time to deal with it — not in a game like Stellaris, where it can cause a devastating setback.
Trying to recover...
Even as I painstakingly took the time to build up a ground army to retake the planet and defend against future threats, creating a new colony ship and waiting for recolonization to finish, I was unable to overcome the threat because of a bug in the game. It turns out the population is "magically" purged and slowly dies in batches of 150, sometimes several hundreds, for no reason — and what happened to the "enraged titans"? Well, they magically disappeared, so my great ground invasion army is now totally superfluous.
Another thing I noticed with this horrible bug is that the colony I lost, including its buildings, was still intact when I finished recolonization (except the lost population). This is just another aspect of the same bug, and it is quite telling of how lazy the developers have been. Whatever relief I felt from that fact quickly evaporated as I tried to figure out what caused the inexplicable disappearance of the population.
Note. The in-game text tells me that my population is going down by about 150 per month, but it doesn't say what's causing it or what can be done to stop it. The planet's stability is also inexplicably affected in a negative way.
What's left to do? The colony is permanently lost. I might as well end the game and write off the hours upon hours I spent playing this current session. It is so distracting that I find it incredibly hard to enjoy, and I really do not feel like starting all over because of this.
Bugs like this is making me take very long breaks between playing Stellaris, because I just know something is broken and will ruin the game. I still physically feel the pain, fear and heartbreak I felt from the war exhaustion bug that I mentioned in my review of Stellaris from 2022 — and to be fair, I do not know if they have fixed that bug, but it just proves my point that Stellaris is physically painful to play. Developers have not taken enough care to ensure that such game-breaking bugs do not exist — each new game of Stellaris takes so long to play (at least 2-3 days to get interesting in my case), so such bugs can literally be felt physically when you encounter them. It is so painful I wouldn't be surprised if someone got a heart attack over it.
But this is nothing new for Stellaris, of course. I have previously pointed out how torturous it can be to play. That still remains.
Conclusion: Event consequences are too negative
The question is whether these types of colonization events are even needed in the game. I don't think they add anything of value — most often they are just a nuisance that disrupts the gameplay as I contemplate how awful it all is. Nobody likes playing wack-a-mole, and most the time your fleets are just too precious assets to send off to deal with such nonsensical things.
Stellaris is filled with nonsensical features that contribute nothing valuable to the core gameplay. The fact that this event is bugged proves how much unnecessary content has been added with little testing or thought — of course, all this pain could have been avoided entirely if the developers had a policy of not adding such devastating consequences to colonization events.
The developers have "spammed" the game with nonsensical popups, events, and other distractions that stress and divert the player's attention away from the actually enjoyable parts of the game — and in the process, they have also managed to break it further by introducing new bugs.
Many events also make little logical sense and often fail to work as described. In my current game, I obtained "Universal Marcophage", which should make my species immune to illnesses, but it doesn't work as advertised and was implemented with no regard for other events. If you want to implement such a feature, then it should work as described, and should not allow biological events to influence you negatively.
The Universal Marcophage event is another example of poorly implemented, nonsensical design. Currently, its negative effects don't seem reversible, and the eventual mutation it causes appears to be guaranteed. That shouldn't be the case. Such guaranteed negative event chains are not important enough to disrupt the core gameplay — they add nothing of value and only irritate the player with yet another thing to avoid, knowing it will be negative.
Tell us what you think: