I'm currently going through my first match of Stellaris, at 40 hours in and I've only found out about this sub yesterday so this question couldn't have come on a more relevant time for me - and this has been posted only 10 minutes ago too! Plus, I've been thinking a lot about Stellaris as a player, a long-time strategy fan and an hobbyist r/StrategyRPG game developer. Here's my thoughts on it.
First off, is it worth your money? If you get it on sale, it's definitely a yes. The bottom line of everything is that I've been playing it for 40 hours, well into late-game for a single match that isn't even over yet. I got the base game for dirt cheap on the Steam sale last month and I can't argue with the value I've got for my money so far.
Stellaris is a very ambitious 4X that runs great on my low-end machine even on higher graphical settings. There is ton of mods, a crazy degree of replayability, an active multiplayer community, the game is still being developed, there's tons of DLCs for it and many more to come yet since the developers are actively working on it and just came out recently with a major 2.0 overhaul (really how many commercial games get to see a 2.0?)! No one in their right minds can say Stellaris is a bad deal, in any way possible way you look at it.
However, this post isn't asking about "is it worth it" or "is it a fair deal for you buck" but rather "would you recommend it?" Another good question would be "is it worthy of your time" (especially considering a single match will most likely go on for dozens of hours)? Although I have got my money's worth and I plan on finishing this match and maybe even play another one down the road, I don't think Stellaris is worthy of my time.
My first of two major gripes with it is the UI doesn't work. Sure, it's not so bad it prevents you from enjoying the game but they really should have approached it in some other way. It's very inconsistent with most things acting like you'd expect them to but then others not working the same way (right click actions on systems, clicking on notifications, ships won't heal for a period after combat but the game doesn't bother to let you know...). Some of the UI makes me really think "has anyone at all been testing this game that such an obvious mistake has gone through" (like clicking on a governor's death notification which is the only one that doesn't bring up a screen - as a programmer that takes 1 minute to fix).
Add to that the keyboard use and it's even more of a mess. I'm a r/Starcraft2 player and I can easily keep up with 60APM at least. I have no trouble learning, remembering and using a keyboard - be it for a fast-paced RTS game or to learn half a hundred IDE shortcuts for each of the languages I code with for work. The problem with Stellaris is that the keys are badly designed: stop is H; pressing Esc one too many times brings you to the game menu which also pauses the game so you need to Esc again and then Space to unpause (trust me, you'll do that a WHOLE lot of times in Stellaris); the Function keys are a mess, with F2 corresponding to the first visual icon that you'll need to use a lot throughout the game, which makes it awkward to look at your icons and not know immediately which button you should press.
To sum the UI up in a bite-sized sentence: it took me no less than 10 hours to get familiar with it and now, 40 hours into the game, it still sucks.
The sound design is a problem too. The music is OK and even good but there's too few tracks to sustain dozens of hours of gameplay, I eventually turned the music off because I was tired of listening to the same melody a hundred times in a row. The sound effects are extremely annoying - some of the loops are infinite and as short as a few seconds so if you're not moving your map around a lot (and Stellaris you never are, even during most wars) it means you'll be listening to the same 5-second loop for however many hours you sit down to play the game. That's just stupid. There's an "ambience" volume slider but for whatever reason those short ambient noises that keep repeating forever are not governed by that one but by the "sound effects" slider instead, so you're either stuck with them for hours on end or you can choose to play the game without any sound feedback...
Finally my major gripe is the core game design. It's just not strategic, sorry. The game can be challenging but it's never smart. Once a situation comes up, you just make a plan and follow through with it. Good strategy games will always throw things your way so you need to adapt and overcome so that you can get your original plan back on track until it's completed. Stellaris is not like that: you identify an issue, you make a plan to solve that and then the next 2 to 5 hours is nothing but busy work to see that plan to fruition, the game is not dynamic enough to offer anything but busywork until that plan is done and is not respectful of your time while at it.
Stellaris is astonishingly complex when it comes to the detail, complexity and number of options when it comes to the busywork - and it will, without a doubt, keep you entertained for a very long time until that plan and objectives you envisioned hours ago comes to fruition, however that is not good strategy gameplay, despite being entertaining (sometimes a bit boring and repetitive too but OK, we're 4X fans here, we can take it). You take a much much much simpler game like r/Advance_Wars for example: it does a much better job of being truly strategic - the battlefield is dynamic and your long-term plans must always adapt themselves to the current situation if you want to win. A lot of other 4X games do that too but Stellaris doesn't. In 40 hours of gameplay, I have had maybe 5 times where I needed to come up with a strategy. If you understand the game well enough you then devise what you're going to do to handle the situation at hand (which takes maybe a couple minutes) and then you proceed to do several hours of busywork to get it done. It's literally 1% strategy and 99% busywork. Wars are a bit more involved but also symptomatic of the same issues. And it's not like I'm a Stelarris veteran and I already have everything figured out on my head either - this is my first match and still the game lacks strategy! Sure, you can always put the game on the fastest speed available but that doesn't diminish the amount of busywork, just the idle times.
My final verdict: if you're a 4X or Strategy game fan and you can get the base game on sale, you must buy it. It's well worthy of your money (on discount) and if you happen to like it, you'll have plenty of DLC to get later on, active patches coming out, an active multiplayer community, huge degree of replayability, etc. If you don't like it, it's still worth playing once or twice at a discount price before going back to your favorite games (your favorite r/Civ, r/MasterOfMagic, r/HoMM, whatever) - there's a ton of interesting ideas and entertaining-enough busywork to get you through at least one match without burning out. However, it fails to deliver on actual strategy and has many issues that subtract greatly from enjoying the game (such as 5-second ambience "beeping" infinitely or obtuse UI and keyboard usage) - and sadly, this is the death of a strategy game. 6/10 buy only on sale.
