My relationship with Stellaris is thoroughly love/hate. I think Stellaris crushes the 4x space genre better than competitors like GalCiv and Solar Sins. But Stellaris has lots of quirks and hiccups that make the game arduous. By far the best part of Stellaris is the opening hundred years or so. I find myself regularly restarting to enjoy the early game because the mid game and any late game pre crisis is rather droll. Creating a species and discovering artifacts and colonizing new planets early on is great.

But late game micromanagement of fifty planets or so is just an awful experience. And the AI can't handle the planet management at all without crippling itself. Add in the fact I can't control my own sector assignments and the planet micromanagement can go fuck itself