Okay, so, the new Galactic Paragons expansion is pretty fantastic. It changes the game significantly in that every personnel decision feels important, now. Gone are the days of throwing a generic scientist or admiral into a job and ignoring them afterward. It really feels like you’re dealing more with actual people than numbers, it places more emphasis on what your state is actually doing rather than diplomacy being the only interaction, and adds that ‘herding cats’ aspect that managing people is about. It also really allows you to specialize and fill resource gaps. Also, do the envoys / spies have traits? I didn’t notice any. If not, that would be nice to see in the future.

My only complaint is that some of the UI elements, while pretty, don’t play well with UI scaling, and that there’s more UI screenspace than actual information in some cases. For a game like this where you’re interfacing with tremendous amounts of data at any given time, everything should be a lot clearer at a glance (no tiny icons or subscripts, yuck). They also seem to have consolidated some screens. You don’t really need to do that. It’s okay for us to tab over or scroll to see more data, but the information should be clear (and consistent with chosen UI scale settings in-game… accessibility very important, plus gamer audiences ain’t getting any younger, lol). In some ways, the old monochrome data presentation was better and clearer. There was more scrolling but everything was easy to digest, especially when the game gets really busy.

Anyway, in terms of gameplay, especially if you’ve been playing for any length of time, highly recommended expansion. Really good.