You can live without the Plantoids pack, but not the Asimov patch. The company expands the game for free, and charges for extra little niceties along the way. Downloadable content (DLC) is content built by Paradox Development Studio (PDS) as an extension or add-on to Stellaris.They are modular in nature, which means that a player can choose to play with or without a given DLC by checking them out at the launch menu. If that sounds a little light, that’s part of Paradox’s model: They release a lot of DLC, including cosmetic DLC, for true fans, but a lot of the feature-rich content comes in the way of free patches. Necroids comes with not only a fantastic new set of undead-themed alien portraits, a gothic ship and city set, an advisor, and name lists, but also three whole civics. It’s a cosmetic pack, fleshing out the plant-based species with new portraits, new art for their ships, and new designs for their cities. The pinnacle of Stellaris Species packs, and the one that really popularized the idea that Species Packs should be more than just a ship/city set and some portraits, is Necroids. In addition to patching up the midgame, Paradox has also now released its fist paid DLC for the game, the Plantoids species pack, which debuted on August 4 for $7.99.
The game is a lot more fun now from end to end. If you had reservations based on the initial reviews of Stellaris, you should consider them assuaged. Further patches will continue to add new features, but the game is already a lot better than it was… and it was pretty cool in the first place. With the Asimov patch, which launched in late June, Paradox dramatically expanded the midgame of Stellaris and fixed many of the biggest gripes players had about the game. That’s why those of us who play Paradox games a lot were very excited by Stellaris it had its mid-game flaws, but Paradox was sure to fix them. The initial state of the game and the final state, years and years from now, will be very different. Paradox tends to augment its games over time with huge content patches and feature-rich DLC (much of it free).
Like most Paradox games, Stellaris was released in a finished state, but one that wasn’t quite the full vision of the developers. Interested fans can read more about these additions by way of Dev Diaries here.Stellaris Photo: Photo: Paradox Interactive
This patch notably buffs the Humanoids Species Pack expansion by adding the Pompous Purists Civic, as well as base game changes which bring an improved ship browser to the base game, a greater variety of anomalies, and AI behavioral changes. Today also marks the release of the completely free 3.2 “Herbert” patch, named after renowned science fiction author Frank Herbert.