The multiplayer games I had were a blast. The contingency wiping out almost all life in the galaxy before I destroyed their central core. Fighting the scourge and it taking 100 in game years but managing to break even with them on attrition and eventually start beating them back. I remember some of my games from back then. Yeah this is dependant on individual opinion but in my opinion I had a lot more fun back in 1.9. No need to travel all the way across each system to get to the next one. No need to manually take every single system 1 at a time. No need to have say 5 fleets and set 4 of them to follow 1 main fleet when you attack. I haven't ever played any kind of RTS game where adding in more resources to manage made things more fun. I never wanted more than minerals/energy credits. No need to juggle 5 different resources. It literally only exists because the AI can't juggle dealing with 5 different resources, a bit like me tbh. No weird sector resource that as far as sectors are concerned counts as minerals/energy/motes/whatever you want it to be. They would even send colony ships if you allowed it. Sector construction ships that replaced all the space stations destroyed by enemy actions. Yeah they would dump a mine on top of a +3 physics tile but who cares, they mostly worked. Give it a huge resource boost with the difficulty settings and the advanced starts could be a legitimate threat for a good player. It was still bad but if you were average or bad player it could be a legitimate threat. In 1.9 (and yes I know I can roll back to it) we had: You know how people always talk about 'classic WoW' as in classic World of Warcraft? I was never a big WoW player but i've heard/read people rave about classic WoW.

Stellaris patch 1.9