[semperdark]

You should adjust the "mid-game start year" and "late-game start year" sliders at game setup. Note that those are just the earliest possible start times, and the chance starts rolling yearly.

Definitely frustrating that you have to try to predict the game trajectory in advance. A game going well is almost a bad thing - you end up ahead of the curve and sit around doing nothing.

[TeMPOraL]

I personally find there's no depth to it: the winning strategy is to focus on growing your economic base and pump all spare capacity into research - by mid-game, you'll out-earn and out-tech every opponent other than the fallen empires.

In my last long playthrough, the second half of the game was literally me just racing against the victory condition clock to see how much megastructures I can cram in, so I can see what they do in a single game. It got briefly interesting for a moment, when a fallen empire decided to start their crusade at my doorstep - I had to engage in some micro-heavy delaying action for some of in-game years, until my exponential trajectory made me out-tech them and I could get back to building megastructures.

I mean, I like the game - but I wish there was some more meaning attached to things, for the actions to be more complex than scaling some numerical modifiers, for the tech tree to not be a tree and not be shared, for battles to be something more than "weapons are rock-paper-scissors, whoever brings more total points into the fight wins"...

[semperdark]

Absolutely, it's been a long while since I booted up Stellaris. Something like Starnet and absurdly hard cling-to-life difficulties brings a little spice, but it's pretty much a solved game of tuning resource flows.

On launch they made a big deal about how they had the "cards" instead of a tech tree... turns out that's pretty much just a tech tree.