Seeking advice for What Unity version + Assets to complete a project?

At one time Complete Games were made using Unity 5.x. Can this still happen?
When starting a new project what is the best, most stable version of Unity to use?
Updates are constantly made but Assets used to help make games are not always up to date.
What advice is to complete a project start to finish, Which version of Unity should be considered?
example: just updated to Unity 2018.14 open my project and being prompted for 2019.
I have purchased many assets over the years, and some never used (by the time to learn them) and they are depreciated. Others (like Gaia, Enviro and Aquas) keep up to date, but I'm not sure if a project can be completed without updating Unity + Assets every week, month etc.
Thanks!

 

It's up to you, if you have the time and the deadlines are allowing you to do so, you can start a project in 2019.1, if you want more mature, and you don't have time to fiddle around and maybe submit bug reports every now and then, then try 2018 (I don't write version because grab the latest, we'll have LTS soon).
You also need to test your assets which you are planning to use, because there is no universal solution, every publisher updates on their own pace, if even.
Also forget HDRP and such (preview features in general) if you want stability and don't want to play along and test a lot.
I wouldn't even start in LWRP for at least one more cycle.

 

Yes, but depending on your publishing platform, need for newer features or fixes, or need for 3rd party assets, it may or may not be a good idea for your project. (For example, ARM64 support is now needed to get on Google's store, but 5.x doesn't have that)

Those are 2 different questions with potentially different answers. The most stable version of Unity right now is probably Unity 2017.4.26 LTS. I wouldn't start a brand new project on it though. For a new project which you plan to complete in a few months I'd go with 2018.3.14 and move to 2018.4.x LTS when it comes out. For a project with a development time expected to be over a year, I'd probably go with 2019.1.0 with a plan to end up on 2019.4.x LTS as your project matures.

The idea being you probably would like to take advantage of as many latest/greatest features as you reasonably can, but also end up on a fairly stable LTS version as you approach completion of your project.

The vast majority of asset developers make virtually no profits for their work. I doubt most test their assets against betas, and instead respond to issues reported by users with newer Unity versions. This is simply because making $30 per month on their asset doesn't justify spending a lot of time testing it against every new Unity release.

Ignore the built in Unity version prompts. Unity telling you there is a new major release should have nothing to do with your plan for a project already in development.

Early on in a project, you're pretty free to pick up every minor Unity update, because the cost of testing your project against the new version is small compared to picking up fixes which may save some headache later. Typical of any software development, whenever you make a change you need to test everything that change touches. When you upgrade your Unity version, since Unity touches everything you need to retest everything in your project.

So as your project grows, you should be sticking to a single Unity version unless a later version has new features or bug fixes that are "must have" for your project. Ideally this is an LTS release so you can have relatively painless access to bug fix updates from Unity with fairly low risk to the new Unity version breaking something else in your game.

Also, use version control. If/when you update Unity versions you can easily undo the changes, or undo anything that somehow damages your project. If you for some reason don't want to use version control, you can use frequent backups by just creating a zip file of the entire project folder (though you can skip the library folder for space savings). Frequent as in daily, and don't delete the old ones.