Interestingly, Stellaris is my favorite of the Paradox games, and I say that as someone who has played all of them and put a lot more hours into EU4 than I would like to admit. Part of that is because Stellaris is really a stripped-down refinement of a lot of mechanics that they've developed in previous games and are slowly ramping the detailing complexity up via their DLC, as they tend to do.

But the other reason is because I like being a huge space empire of brain-eating hiveminds who get to develop and design their own spaceships. There's something just innately gratifying to me about getting to start with almost nothing and expanding outwards to establish something absolutely new.

Which means that the new CK2 stuff which allows you to start with Shattered World or Random World really strikes me in my wheelhouse if you turn everything down to "characters are only Counts at best" and you just claw your way up.

I'm definitely a little perverse that way, though.