The biggest tweaks to the mid-game are the new Marauders, who are as horrifying as death stacks of Mongols, but in space. On the other hand, any sensible player is going to notice you’re fielding a Titan and throw everything they have at killing the damn thing, even if it means pausing in the whole nuking-the-homeworld thing. The Titan is ungodly powerful and putting it in a standard battlefleet turns them into a rolling ball of death. Oh, there’s station upgrades and ion cannons to fortify your systems, but the flashiest way is the new Titan class starship. Galactic Emperors have options to counter the new planet killers. Finally, you can realize your interstellar Mad Max dreams. Some civilizations can specialize in living on post-apocalyptic planets. Some civilizations specialize in abducting the population right before everything goes all Alderaan. Obviously, the big headline feature (and the name) is just outright obliterating planets with a new planet-killing ship. Since launch, they’ve been working in other things to do, and I think Apocalypse is where the game really becomes what it was meant to be. At launch, you built up your star empire, tinkered with settings, put things in motion, and then watched until there was another civilization to kick or an uprising to quell. Maybe the most important thing Apocalypse does is build upon the work they’ve been doing on making the mid-game more fun. MonsterVine was supplied with Steam copy for review

It’s good, but you’re going to have to completely change everything you knew about playing Stellaris.

The Apocalypse expansion for Stellaris is one of those expansions, adding important features, fixing a ton of bugs, and even adding a few new tracks to the already stellar (ha!) soundtrack. Paradox, on the other hand, tends to drop patches and expansions that completely change the way the game plays and add tons of new things. They’ll fix bugs and maybe issue some DLC, but the game itself stays the same. Some developers and publishers are content to tinker around the edges with released games.

Stellaris apocalypse features