SolOrion

OP seems to want a very competitively focused tightly balanced experience, and Stellaris is absolutely anything but that. I enjoy the game, it's fun, but I can't imagine anyone considering it to be particularly balanced or enjoyable as a PvP/Versus experience.

I've never seen some specify that they want different second person pronouns, but hey new things every day. Man that is confusing to read, though.

I've sort of generally moved over to coop games in general nowadays.

Or even if I'm playing something that's a versus sort of multiplayer- like Civ- I just try not to focus too much on winning. I'm there for the journey, not the destination. If I end up winning, cool. If I don't, that's also cool as long as I had fun along the way.

That GPU shortage absolutely blew. I used a 1650 the whole time, just sitting on my hands waiting for something to be vaguely affordable. Ended up snagging an RX 6600 right at the very very end of the shortage- caught it on a steep sale and paid $220 for it, and my exact model is $200 now so I did pretty good I think lol

If the most resource intensive thing you're looking at is BG3 @ 1080p/60fps, you definitely won't need to spend a few grand. Now is a great time to build. You can get pretty great price/performance at the moment.

Here's a link to a build, I'd suggest buying the SSD in that list, and replacing your hybrid drive. You can keep the hybrid as a spare, if you want, but you don't have to. If that solves your issue and gets you the performance you want, cool.

If it doesn't solve your issues, you can just buy the rest of the parts in the list and build a new PC. It's a PCPartPicker link for the UK, so it'll tell you the best places you can order each part in your country. Alternatively, you can buy a prebuilt- probably wanna aim for $1000 USD or so for a prebuilt. I can't really help you with that, not my thing.

If you do end up building your own there's an extremely helpful very long Linus Tech Tips video that breaks down how to assemble the whole thing.

What's your budget look like? Because if you don't have much to spend, you're best off just tossing an SSD in as your boot disk. That'll help significantly. After that, I'd grab 32GB of matching RAM(make sure it's DDR4, not DDR5) and try that.

After that, you're basically building a new PC because to significantly upgrade your CPU- which is the next thing you'd want to- you'd need at minimum a new motherboard as well and probably a case since prebuilt cases can have proprietary layouts and be weird.

If you wanna build your own PC, but can't figure out what parts would be good/what you actually need feel free to reply with a budget and your general location- country is good enough- and I can send you a link to a part list. I used to hang out in /r/buildapcforme and I kinda miss it lmao

and at least 8gb additional ram.

Honestly, I'd suggest getting 32gb of RAM with a decent speed and just tossing the rest of that mishmash.

I disagree, I think it's funny as long as this is all theory.

If a player was actually serious about wanting to do this as more than a meme, and was arguing this hard for it I'd be mad as hell. In this context, though? It's fine. I think it's amusing how hard people can stretch the rules. It's similar to the peasant railgun. Hilarious concept. I'm still not okay with someone trying to actually use a peasant railgun.

I pay for a single streaming service, and that’s just because it directly supports the people running the service and making the content.

Nebula?

I greatly appreciate your old man mode. Sounds like a fantastic job.

It wouldn’t occur to me to broadcast this to others on the internet, especially with personal details, even for a random solicitor, let alone a family member, let alone my own child.

That enrages me. I don't understand why people feel the need to air their dirty laundry on social media. Keep that shit to yourself, the relevant parties, and your therapist.

Hell I ran the processor (450MHz P3) without a fan, just a passive heatsink.

They still make passive heatsinks that work for modern CPUs, but they're fuckin massive and not incredibly effective compared to just.. putting a quiet fan on it.