Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I am your host this week, T.J. Hafer. And joining to me today, we have a freelance critic and consultant, Rowan Kaiser.

Hello.

We have freelance writer, John Bolding.

Howdy, howdy.

And we have the host of Friends at the Table and Vices Waypoint Radio, Austin Walker.

And we are once again asking you to listen to us discuss Dolores, which recently received a big patch and expansion in the form of the 2.6 Vern patch and the Federation's expansion,

which was supposed to be finally fixing diplomacy,

which has been the one major pillar of the game that was not previously addressed by any of the

other expansions. The question is, did it work? Is Stolaris good now? I think this is the time of

year that we all, you know, poke our heads out to check and see if the see if the, the mythical Rowan Kaiser, uh, likes Stolaris yet. Uh, so why don't you start us off, Rowan? What do you think of this, uh, this new stuff? Well, so to go back a little bit, I haven't really played since they added, uh, SIV five, uh, style ascension points or whatever perks.

So that was, I think, the first or second major expansion after release,

and I thought that that improved things, but still,

there was still just like a gaping hole in the midgame.

So I swore, okay, this game is still pretty boring.

I will come back when they fixed diplomacy, because if it was going to be space EU

4, that was the big thing that I felt needed to be fixed.

In that time, they fixed war or attempted to, and we can discuss whether they did.

And they also worked on the economy, which actually, economy is kind of a small word for it.

They basically, like, the entirety of how you deal with infrastructure has changed.

And they also added a bunch of, like, little flavor packs, I think they call them.

Leviathens being the big one, literally, where they're a bunch of big-ass monsters around in the universe that you can beat up and get special things for having defeated, just like fleshing out the idea of the world at that point.

But as I had said, like my promise was on diplomacy, and I would check it out at that point.

...