by Eladrin
Today's update includes some major changes to the planet view, and some very, very basic gestalt functionality.
Planets now start with six building slots in their Urban District, with two Zones available to customize its output. Your homeworld will generally begin with an Industrial (Alloys + Consumer Goods) and an Archives (Unity + Research) Zone at game start. These changes have not been replicated to gestalts or special planets or starts yet.
We are planning one more Open Beta update (3.99.7) this Friday.
Stellaris 3.99.6 'Phoenix' Open Beta Release Notes
Beta Features
- Planets now have six building slots by default and two zones that can be used to specialize their urban districts.
- Most empires no longer start with the early space age industry buildings or jobs
- Known Issue: This has not been replicated to gestalts or special planets yet.
- Planet UI now shows last month's growth for each pop group.
- Added a mixed Research and Unity Archives Zone.
- Adjusted rural job numbers
- Added urban zones to mining districts for Subterranean empires
- Clicking on a built Zone will now bring up the District Details panel
- By player request, the Build Queue side panel now automatically starts open when looking at your planets
- Prevent AI from cheating for zone building
- Industrial Zones now use the correct icon.
- Strata now show their population when collapsed.
- Timeline origin images are now properly masked
- Planetary Ascension area in the Management Tab now functions.
- Add icon and style label for ascension tier in management tab
- Add text with breakdown of the modifiers provided by planetary ascension
- Some Hive and Machine setup has been completed, they should be slightly functional now
- Known Issue: Hives do not get Mining Drones from Mining Districts, so, uh maybe go Void Hive?
- Hive and Machine Worlds have had an initial pass
- Machine Starting Conditions have had an initial pass
How Do I Opt Into the Beta?
[olist]
[ 2025-04-01 11:00:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Today's update adds the Betharian Zone, a Mandarin voice advisor, and new stargazer color variants, with broad fixes throughout.
Stellaris 3.99.5 Phoenix Open Beta update
Beta Features
- Added the Betharian Zone.
- Venerable Scientist" (Mandarin Language) Voice Advisor
- Added new color variants for stargazer portrait
- Unbroke all colonies.
- Fixed issues with Catalytic Processing civics.
- Fixed the zone planet modifiers not being applied if districts have multiples of the same zone type.
- Fixed the Chosen's habitats.
- Pirates are a little less gung-ho to form.
- Planetary deficits now cost trade instead of providing it.
- Increased the base rate of Auto-Migration.
- Pops will now automatically migrate to planets with 20% habitability or higher instead of 40% or higher.
- When the maximum number of auto-modded pops changes, the current number is now updated correctly.
- City Districts now change their name and descriptions based on their zone specializations.
- Compressed unity and added job swaps.
- City set graphics scale adjusted.
- Updated Empire Progression Rewards to always display which technology is unlocked.
- Allowed rural zones on ringworlds.
- Removed bonus production on tier 1 buildings, removed tier 1 buildings planet limit.
- Pop count, Housing, and Amenities on the planet view now use short notation (such as 13.4k rather than 13405).
- Replaced Upgrade buttons for districts with icons.
- Background graphics added for all districts.
- Added progress bars to the zones that are being built or replaced.
- District/Zone/Building Construction tooltips added.
- Changed how selected District is being highlighted.
- Highlight the selected zone slot when building new zones.
- Display old zone name, icon and building slots if the zone is being replaced.
- Display the icon and name of the zone being constructed.
- Rural district zones can now also be built by clicking anywhere within the empty zone slot.
- Further Timeline UI adjustments, fixing background masking.
- Added designation description in the colonization UI.
- Adjusted district numbers in the colonization UI to show the max amount of possible districts.
- Added functionality to deselect a selected colony designation.
- Rearranged and tweaked colony modifier displaying in the colonization UI.
- Added new databank icons.
- Added starting notification for selecting Empire Focus.
- Added planetary deficits to the Planetary view
How Do I Opt Into the Beta?
[olist]
[ 2025-03-28 08:55:35 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Alfray Stryke
Hello everybody! Welcome to our first BioGenesis development diary!
Today we will talk about ships. That are made of meat.
Several weeks ago, Eladrin mentioned that the ship designer changes originally planned for 4.0 "Phoenix" would not be included in the Open Beta, as theyre now needed for our upcoming Q2 DLC release. Weve since seen a fair amount of speculation as to what we might have been cooking thatd require such changes So please allow me to introduce our Biological Ships!
MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS
In BioGenesis, we are adding two distinct Biological shipsets, with unique ship classes and technology. Our goals in adding Biological Ships to Stellaris were to ensure that they are not only different in appearance from mechanical ships (and space fauna), but also in gameplay. Thus, the key mechanical differences are:
- When using Biological Ships, Corvettes, Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers and Battleships are replaced with Maulers, Weavers, Harbingers, and Stingers, each of which have three growth stages.
- Biological Ships, including Starbases, Megastructures and Stations, have their primary construction resource converted from Alloys (or Minerals) into Food and their Energy upkeep likewise replaced with Food upkeep.
- Overwhelmingly, Biological Ship technologies fall in Society Research (Biology) instead of the familiar Engineering Research (Voidcraft).
Different types of ships prompted our UX designer to give the Shipset selector a fresh coat of paint!
Growth Cycles
Similar to Space Fauna from Grand Archive, Biological Ships have growth stages, but unlike Space Fauna, they do not naturally progress through these by aging. Instead, these ships have a unique component slot for supplementary organs that can be researched. Generally speaking, the Juvenile and Mature growth stages will likely be occupied by Growth Organs that allow the ships to progress to the next stage.
Alternatively, docking a fleet to a Starbase equipped with a Growth Chamber allows for additional growth, regardless of ship configuration.,
The accumulated growth progress for ships is shown in both the ships tooltip and the ship details window.
When Biological Ships are designed (either automatically or using the ship designer), all researched Growth Stages are configured as part of a single ship design. Once a Biological Ship has acquired sufficient Growth Progress, it will automatically change to using the next Growth Stage in its design. Alternatively, Biological Ships can be constructed at a shipyard at a later Growth Stage.
The three growth stages of the Weaver Although all Growth Stages of Biological Ships use the same Fleet Command Limit for their ship class, later Growth Stages use more naval capacity, with the Mature stage using 1.5 and the Elder stage using 2 the Naval Capacity of the Juvenile stage.
MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS!
SHIPS MADE OF MEAT
Maulers primarily focus on short-range combat with shield penetration and high damage to armor and shields. Equipped with melee-range mandible weapons and either short-range S-slot or PD-slot weapons, these ships will form the bulk of your navy in the early game. Their unique mandible weapons have similar damage scaling against starbases and larger ships as torpedoes.
The unique Organ components that Maulers have access to are the Corrosive Fluids and Metabolic Recycler (and their upgraded versions)
Weavers are support ships, making use of unique weapons to apply powerful buffs to their allies or debuffs to their enemies.
Weavers have unique access to an array of six support components, each with six tiers that belong in the PD-slot.
The unique Organ components that Weavers have access to are Symbiotic Amplifiers and Developmental Pheromones
Harbingers are carriers capable of deploying large amounts of strike craft and supporting them with point defense or long range missiles.
Strike craft for empires using Biological Ships are deployed in greater numbers per fighter wing, but have reduced hull points and armour instead of shields.
The unique Organ components that Harbingers have access to are Chitin Growth Regulators and the Incubation Matrix
Stingers are powerful late-game warships, equipped with multiple XL weapons or capable of unleashing heavy broadside barrages.
The unique Organ components that Stingers have access to are Exhaust Spiracles and Rangefinder Clusters.
As each of the different Growth Stages of each of the classes of Biological Ships can be built at a shipyard, weve taken the opportunity to implement collapsable headers when selecting which ships to build.
This works for mechanical ships and space fauna too! Since Biological Ships have their own weapons, armour, shield and core components, weve gone through and ensured that the technologies use the appropriate icons depending on if you are using a Biological shipset or not.
Modding Notes
As part of the work required to implement Biological Ships there have been a lot of changes to how ship components are scripted. Heres some highlights:
- class_restriction, size_restriction and slot_restriction are deprecated in favour of using the possible and potential trigger blocks instead.
- Core Components now have an upgrade_path parameter, components that have the same upgrade path are shown on the same row.
- Ship components now support the show_tech_unlock_if = { } field, like buildings.
- New targeting parameters:
- use_ship_main_target: if yes, overrides target_type and target_focus when ship's main target is within range, default no
- target_type (target_enemies (default) / target_allies / target_controlled / target_own)
- target_focus (single (default) / spread)
- target_type: only valid if component_set has affects_target_type = yes
- target_focus: only valid if component_set has affects_target_focus = yes
- New parameters for weapons:
- on_hit: apply effects to target on hit. Scope = ship (target), from = ship (shooter)
- hide_damage_values_from_tooltip = yes/no # If yes, it will hide Damage and Average Damage from weapon component tooltip (default = no)
PRIME CUTS FROM ART!
Next Week
Next week well be looking at Ascension, Traditions, and Advanced Governments. See you then!
[ 2025-03-27 12:06:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Today's update includes some AI improvements and fixes to the new breadthwise job allocation.
Stellaris 3.99.4 'Phoenix' Open Beta Release Notes
Fixes and Improvements
- Significant improvements to the breadthwise job assignment distribution.
- AI now understands the use of Zones.
- (Known Inssue: Scripting weights are not yet balanced.)
- Fixed cloaking detection tooltip overwriting value breakdown with generic description
- Fixed demotions not working as they should
- Fixed factions not forming.
- Fixed the integration cost for subjects
- Fixed tooltips for Commercial Zone building mentioning clerks and soldiers
- Tier 1 Development focus tasks now award progress
- Decreased habitat district cost and upkeep
- Void Dweller prescripted systems now have larger deposits
- Habitat districts now have the same base number of jobs as regular districts
- Demense Zones now have the number of squire jobs increased by taking the Voidborne AP.
- Shattered Ring, Ringworlds and Arcologies should now be semi-functional.
- (Known Issue: The "rural" segments of Ringworlds do not yet have Agricultural or Generator zones to choose from.)
- Add toggle on the header of the automation side panel to enable/disable planet automation
- Move "decisions" in management tab and "resettle" in economy tab
- Small fixes for planet view
- Toggle icon in surface tab and add tooltips
- Revamped several tutorial entries
- Added a new Medical Center building that gives access to Medical Workers before Gene Clinics
- Rebalanced Medical Workers
- Rebalanced the Mutagenic Spas building
- Entertainers and Traders no longer benefit from Gene Clinics, Augmentation Centers or Ranger Lodges
- Added a has_any_industry_zone scripted trigger
- The Revolutionary Medi-Gel now provides +25% Job Efficiency for Medical Workers
How Do I Opt Into the Beta?
[olist]
[ 2025-03-25 09:04:49 CET ] [ Original post ]
Metal rusts. Flesh adapts.
Its my great pleasure to announce the start of Stellaris: Season 09, with the BioGenesis expansion leading the way alongside the Stellaris 4.0 Phoenix update. [previewyoutube=_Mrj29R5Orw;full][/previewyoutube] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3417870 The future of evolution is here. BioGenesis continues our remastering of the Ascension Paths by granting you unprecedented power over life itself and hatches May 5th, 2025. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3417840
Evolution had its chance. Now its our turn.
Two Biological Shipsets Command living fleets that evolve alongside your empire. Customize these genetic marvels for specialized roles, from ferocious Maulers to adaptable support Weavers, each capable of empowering allies and weakening foes. Three New Origins
- Evolutionary Predators: Push the boundaries of Species Traits by unlocking and combining unique phenotype abilities to craft the ultimate adaptive empire.
- Starlit Citadel: Solve the mystery of your empires biological attackers while boosting hyperlane choke-point strategies with early access to the Deep Space Citadel megastructure.
- Wilderness: Begin as a sapient planetary ecosystem, a living gestalt of countless lifeforms united in harmony, seeking to spread its consciousness to the stars.
The BioGenesis expansion includes:
- Gestalt Hive Empires (also unlocked by Utopia)
- Two biological Shipsets with distinct mechanics from traditional spacecraft
- Three new Origins
- Evolutionary Predators
- Wilderness
- Starlit Citadel
- Civics
- Genetic Identification
- Crowdsourcing
- Familiar Face
- Aerospace Adaptation
- Shared Genetics
- Civil Education
- Deep Space Citadel Megastructure
- Biological Ascension (also unlocked by Utopia)
- Expanded with BioGenesis to include a mutable tradition tree that reflects your path through Ascension
- Exploration of the effects of Biological Ascension on society
- Advanced Government Forms
- 16 new genetic Species Traits, including phenotype based traits
- Portraits that change based on pop strata and leader level
- The Splintered Hive Fallen Empire
- Two Diplomatic Rooms and City Sets
- 7 music tracks
- And a new Player Crisis Path - Behemoth Fury
Planned Dev Diary Schedule March 27 - Biological Ships and Mechanics April 3 - Ascension, Traditions, Advanced Governments April 10 - Phenotype Traits, Evolutionary Predators Origin April 17 - Deep Space Citadel, Starlit Citadel Origin April 24 - Hive Fallen Empire, Wilderness Origin May 1 - Civics, Behemoth Fury, Preliminary Release Notes May 5 - BioGenesis Release Date
Stellaris: Season 09 Expansion Pass
The Stellaris: Season 09 Expansion Pass is your gateway to an entire year of cosmic evolution, psionic mysteries, and apocalyptic infernos. With instant access to the exclusive Stargazer Species Portrait, this expansion pass delivers three major content packs that will redefine the Biological and Psionic Ascensions and the most ambitious species pack so far! Purchasing the Expansion Pass grants access to all four DLCs as soon as they become available.
Stargazer Species Portrait (Instant Unlock) Dream of the stars with this exclusive portrait, available immediately upon purchasing Stellaris: Season 09. Featuring three phenotypes and unique animations, the Stargazer Species Portrait is perfect for players who seek to embody the spirit of cosmic curiosity.
BioGenesis (Releases May 5, 2025 - $24.99) Take command of the forces of life itself in Stellaris: BioGenesis. Engineer living ships and wield advanced genetic tools to shape the destiny of your empire. Will you create a utopia of adaptation and growth or weaponize biology to dominate the stars?
- Overhauled Genetic Ascension: Choose from three distinct pathsCloning, Purity, and Mutationand customize your evolution.
- Living Ships: Command biological starships that evolve alongside your empire.
- Player Crisis Path: Unleash the unstoppable Behemoth Fury on the galaxy.
- Three New Origins: Play as evolutionary predators, a sapient planetary ecosystem, or a fortress civilization.
- New Megastructure: Construct the Deep Space Citadel to control hyperlane choke points.
Shadows of the Shroud (Releases Q3 2025 - $19.99) The psionic plane holds untold powerbut at what cost? Shadows of the Shroud is a complete overhaul of the Psionic Ascension path, introducing new moral dilemmas, Patron allegiances, and a whole new way of interacting with the mysteries of the Shroud.
- Breach into the Shroud: Shape your empires spiritual destiny with a revamped Shroud system.
- Shroud Panel: Track your empires attunement and unlock new powers.
- Revamped End of the Cycle: The ultimate deal with the devilcan you delay the inevitable?
- Psionic Auras: Let your Shroud influence shape entire star systems.
- New Content: Origins, civics, ships, government types, and more!
Infernals Species Pack (Releases Q4 2025 - $12.99) Forge your destiny in the Stellaris: Infernals Species Pack - our most ambitious Species Pack ever. Adapted to relentless heat and volatile landscapes, you wield the power of extreme environments to reshape the galaxy. Will your empire thrive in the heat, or be consumed by the very forces it seeks to command?
- Player Crisis Path: Burn the galaxy to ashes as your empire thrives in destruction.
- New Origins: Unearth ancient kin or endure the scorching wrath of a dying sun in two new Origins.
- Volcanic Worlds: A new planetary class with unique districts, events, and archaeological sites.
- New Species & Customization: Ships, portraits, civics, and more!
Whats Next?
This Thursday well flesh out the bio-ships! See you then!
BioGenesis is now available for pre-purchase for $24.99 or regional equivalent, or with a 20% discount as part of the Stellaris: Season 09 Expansion Pass, which is available now for $44.99 or regional equivalent.
[ 2025-03-24 15:10:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Another update today for the weekend! Lots of important changes in this one.
Stellaris 3.99.3 Phoenix Open Beta update
Fixes and Improvements
- Habitats are now semi-functional in the Open Beta.
- Habitats now derive their maximum mining, generator, and science district development based on the resources in the system. Orbital deposits grant 1 + (half their base value, rounded down) maximum district development.
- Habitat orbitals are automatically constructed for free when a new district is completed on the central habitat complex, if one can be built
- Habitat orbitals are now megastructures instead of dummy fleets, preventing them from being attacked (and therefore attempting to to flee from attackers)
- Habitat orbitals now collect the resources from the deposit that they are built over
- Habitat orbitals now have the same upkeep as mining and research stations, since they serve similar purposes
- Habitat districts now take longer to build and cost alloys to build
- Habitats now gain +0.25 Max Districts per Planet or Star in the System per Capital Building Tier
- Upon converting MSI's ruined warship into a habitat, it is immediately colonised
- Void Dweller empires now get +50% jobs from habitat districts. This does not currently include scaling jobs from jobs, but should in the future.
- Voidborne AP and Void Dweller origins now give Habitat District cost reduction
- Void Dwellers now get Civilians on game start
- Added a Hydroponics Zone for Habitats
- Building and Zone Changes:
- Replaced the Early Industry Zone with the Urban Zone. The Urban Zone currently accepts all buildings, limitations will be added in a future update
- Default starting planets now have Basic Offices and Basic Research Labs buildings in addition to the Basic Factories
- Basic Factories provide Laborer jobs and can be upgraded into either Alloy Foundries or Civilian Industries
- The Primitive Factory no longer decreases the Job Efficiency of Bureaucrats, Physicists, Biologists and Engineers
- Basic Offices provide Administrator jobs and can be upgraded into Administrative Offices or Temples
- Basic Research Labs provide Researcher jobs and be upgraded into Research Labs. These Researchers are worse than Researchers from 3.14.
- Administrative Offices now provide Bureaucrat jobs and no longer require a Unity Zone
- Alloy Foundries now provide Metallurgist jobs and no longer require an Industry or Foundry Zone
- Anglers now have a unique zone on wet worlds.
- Civilian Industries now provide Artisan jobs and no longer require an Industry or Factory Zone
- Research Labs now provide Physicists, Biologists and Engineers and no longer require a Research Zone
- Temples now provide Priest jobs and no longer require a Unity Zone
- The Autochthon Monument no longer requires a Unity Zone
- The food processing facility building now gives some base farmer jobs.
- Uncapped rural districts now support the correct zones
- Zones now display an icon and tooltip stating that they provide building slots
- Zones now have auto-generated tooltips stating the jobs that they provide
- Adjusted job counts of Districts and Zones
- Converted the Order's Demense to a unique zone for KotTG
- Scaling Knight jobs are now given by Squires, instead of the Order's Keep. You will no longer get thousands of Knights from keeping the entire galaxy's population as livestock.
- Capital Buildings no longer state that they provide building slots.
- City Districts no longer state that they provide Building Slots
- Jobs are now filled in a more breadthwise manner - weighting still affects job preferences, but pops will attempt to fill all jobs of a strata instead of focusing exclusively on their dream jobs. Somebody still has to make the Consumer Goods even if you had your heart set on being a Physicist.
- The intent of this is to alter the land rush when new jobs open up and to prevent certain economic death spirals. Let us know how it works out for you.
- Mastercrafter civics now provide extra consumer goods and trade to artisan jobs
- Rebalanced biologist jobs for normal empires
- Rebalanced Engineer jobs
- Reworked Artisan sub-jobs
- Fixed the modifier icon for some researcher modifiers not showing
- Researcher sub-jobs no longer show that they provide 0 naval capacity
- Increased the base Consumer Goods income for empires that use Consumer Goods
- Increased the food (or equivalent) and consumer goods income of default countries
- Laborer jobs are now Specialists that produce Alloys and Consumer Goods
- Rebalanced physicist jobs for normal empires
- More progress on the planetary UI.
- New Look for the District boxes in the Planet Summary Screen.
- Removed sound effect when interacting with enclaves
- Revamped initial tutorial events
- Move planetary automation button in planet surface tab
- Added documentation for new district_planet_modifier and triggered_district_planet_modifier modifiers for Zones
- Orbital and Planet Deposits now support habitat_modifier, which as you might expect from the name, applies a static modifier to the habitat(s) in the system.
How Do I Opt Into the Beta?
[olist]
[ 2025-03-21 12:00:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
Weve entered our second week of the Stellaris 3.99 Phoenix Open Beta, and if all goes according to plan are planning another update tomorrow morning with some major changes to the starting situation of your planets. (Goodbye, primitive factory debuffs. I'd say we'll miss you, but... we won't.)
What Have We Learned So Far?
While we recognize that the early state of the Open Beta makes it difficult to provide balancing feedback, its proven itself invaluable already. The Open Beta has found several issues with growth and decline - from robots causing the inevitable decline of your empire to Fallen Empires and Pre-FTL societies being doomed due to not using standard growth models. Youve found economic death spirals and identified needs that will help our designers produce a better balanced and fun experience in the final release. These were precisely some of the types of things I was looking for when we decided to push the Open Beta despite the early state that it was in, and Im thankful that we did. Thank you for all of your help so far, and I hope youll continue to give us your feedback as we continue to update. We will continue the twice-weekly update cadence until the end of the month, with dev livestreams every Thursday.
Mandarin Venerable Scientist Advisor Voice
Back when we released The Grand Archive, we created a version of the trailer in Mandarin, and it was really, really good. [previewyoutube=GU1fQ2ITrik;full][/previewyoutube] After such a positive reception from the Chinese Stellaris community, we decided to call the same voice actor back in to record a full Advisor set. The recordings are now complete, in time to be included as part of the Stellaris 4.0 update. It should show up in one of the next few Open Beta updates. [previewyoutube=Pk8Sd7plxCM;full][/previewyoutube]
Whats Next?
Well have two dev diaries next week that will be a bit meatier than this one, to flesh out some of the other things coming in the next Quarter. See you then!
[ 2025-03-20 12:00:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
We have another update to the Open Beta today, and are planning for another later on this week.
Stellaris 3.99.2 'Phoenix' Open Beta Release Notes
Fixes and Improvements
- Added an Industrial Zone for mixed alloys and consumer goods
- The focus task "Embrace a Faction" is changed to "Promote a Faction"
- Added two focus tasks for MegaCorps to establish branch offices
- Updated costs of special projects that have costs that scale with the number of pops
- Changed every_owned_pop to every_owned_pop_group, so now looping through groups
- Made ethic changes work on pop groups instead of pops
- Updated robot pop checks to pop groups
- Zones now have icons associated with their type.
- Zones now have a larger active area to click on that is clearly visible.
- Planet UI now has basic Zone tooltips
- Replaced a bunch of placeholder icons with less placeholder ones.
- Revamped Rise of the manifesti event chain
- Created new message type for new terraforming candidate events and turned them into a notification
- Lithoid resource traits no longer block cybernetic leviathan traits
- Improved the Modifiers section of the colonization UI.
- Replaced jobs with strata in resettlement view
- Workforce modifier icons added
- Moved resource upkeep and production for pops from species archetype and traits to the resource tables for archetypes and traits, instead of them being part of the pop categories
How Do I Opt Into the Beta?
[olist]
[ 2025-03-18 09:00:11 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
We've updated the Open Beta to 3.99.1, with the following changes:
Stellaris 3.99.1 Phoenix Open Beta update
Fixes and Improvements
- Fallen Empires are blocked from using the Existential Expulsion casus belli
- Negative effects added to the Magnetic Disruption planet modifier
- Assembling robots will no longer cause the slow and inevitable decline of your growing pops
- Changed auto pick leader traits setting to default to off
- Made Species Rights button different for pre-sapients
- Fixed traders not being created from trade zones
- Adjusted amenities and housing from luxury housing
- Pops now have appropriate Diplomatic Weight
- Civilians now grant the benefits associated with culture workers
- Tabs in the Planet view now have correct hotkeys
- Urban Zones now show their titles
- Moved the build district level button from District Details view into the Planet Summary screen
- The Build Queue tooltip no longer says "Previous"
- Displaying the District type names in the Planet Summary screen
- Moved job production changes to buildings for better tooltips
- The Colony View tabs now have ordered ZXCVB keyboard shortcuts
- Rescaled focus reward requirements to be easier to reach the final tier
- Fixed the DLC requirements for focus tasks "Observe a Pre-FTL" and "Build a Mega Shipyard"
- Fixed the requirements tooltip for the Beastmasters focus task "Have 10 Space Amoeba Mothers"
- Fixed the completion check in the Conquest focus task "Have 3 Subjects"
- Drawing leader level focus tasks now require the previous task to be completed
- The chance to encounter the Cultist event chain now depends on your ethics
- The Cultist event chain now fires after a year instead of after a month
- Cultists are now neutral until you choose to attack them
- You can now forgive the Cultists and have them join you
- The trigger num_pops is replaced by pop_amount since there are now 100 times more pops
How Do I Opt Into the Beta?
[olist]
[ 2025-03-14 09:00:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Surprise! An early Stellaris Dev Diary!
Last week I mentioned that on Friday wed evaluate the current build, and Id see if I could provide a timeline for the Open Beta. Things have been progressing well, so weve decided to put a very early version of some of the 4.0 changes to test a few aspects of the new systems.
The Stellaris 4.0 update changes a lot of things - you can find a lot of the details in the dev diaries of the last two months. This first build of the 3.99 Open Beta only contains a focused subset of the changes, and many are still in a work-in-progress prototype state. It is not polished, or even done yet.
The 3.11 Technology Open Beta very quickly found some performance issues with the Breakthrough Technologies that we were experimenting with, and as the pop systems have advanced far enough to be mostly functional, I want to get some broader gameplay done on that system in particular, even if the rest of the systems have not yet reached a fully playable state. A week of Open Beta gets more testing done than we can do internally over months, even if this isnt at a level that I would historically have been comfortable releasing to the public. (Just so you know what youre opting into!)
We also have a feedback survey available that focuses primarily on the Empire Timeline and Focus systems. (Later weeks will have new surveys on different topics.)
So Whats in the Build?
Last weeks dev diary provides a fairly accurate update about the current state of the build. Precursor Selection, the Databank, and Species Modification are all functional.
The general game pacing adjustments, changes to galaxy generation, and notification changes are all in. The leader pacing changes are in, but were reviewing how leaders interact with the new economy before evaluating what changes to make to the traits themselves. Empire Timeline and Focuses are in a functional, borderline releasable, state. We have added a number of Milestones that will appear on the Timeline, though theres some polish were planning to do before release. Most of the basic Focus Tasks that we want are in, along with some of the Progression rewards for completing them.
The Trade and Logistic described in Dev Diary #369 are largely in, but some of the branch office changes and functionality are still on the to-do list.
Basic implementation of Pop Groups and the new Job system are in. This includes simultaneous Pop Growth and Auto-Migration, a partial colonization UI, and a partial update to the Planet UI itself. The major economic changes relating to Districts, Zones, and Buildings are only partially in, but I wanted to get the pop changes under some pressure as soon as possible.
We also renamed Bonus Workforce to Job Efficiency.
Any Known Issues or Things You Want to Tell Us?
The Ship Designer, Hard Reset origin, and Mammalian portraits are all in separate development branches, and will not be appearing during the Open Beta. This build of the Open Beta build will not support Gestalts, unusual planets like Habitats or Ringworlds, or especially unusual civics, origins, or playstyles. Many Ascensions may be in a strange or dysfunctional state. Since many of the more interesting civics and origins arent supported yet, we strongly recommend playing the United Nations of Earth or the Commonwealth of Man, or custom empires similar in complexity. Expect things like Virtuality or Clone Army to be fairly broken right now. You will likely start with an Amenities shortage at the start of the game. We havent decided whether this models an overpopulated homeworld nicely or if we consider it a bug. (It will be less dire once more of the buildings are available.)
Significant parts of the planet UI are still in development, including most flavor elements.
If you manually build a colony ship, it will not appear in the colonization UI. (They can still be used to colonize a planet by pressing the Colonize fleet order.)
Since the Zones UI is still in progress, you cannot get access to the menu to replace them right now. Youre stuck with your Earth Space Age Industry for this build.
The Early Space Age zone doesnt currently have any other buildings you can put into it, so being stuck with it is kind of unfun. We have not yet updated the Diplomacy traditions to reflect that Form Federation is now a technology. Clerks havent been annihilated yet, and many non-core jobs have not been fully converted into the new system. Traditions and other things that modify Clerks have not yet been updated. Civilians are currently an uncapped job rather than being associated with City District development. Living standards have not yet been updated to provide bonuses to Civilians rather than Unemployed Pops. Planetary Logistic Upkeep currently pays you Trade if you have surpluses. While it takes money to make money, thats not exactly what we were going for. The UI element on the Management tab that is intended to show the size change of each pop group since last month is always - 0 Defensive Armies dont spawn, so every planet will immediately surrender when bombarded. (Ground combat fixed?) Some strings may not be present, and some icons are placeholder purple. Many. The Unemployment entry in the planet UI is a little overenthusiastic. Yes, pops grow into their parents strata and get upset if they cant get a job worthy of their upbringing right away, but it shouldnt be a pressing matter until their numbers get over 100. The AI isnt great at picking zones yet. It nods sagely at the first thing it finds that it can afford and decides its an offer it cant refuse. The base colony designation has not yet been removed. Our intention is for the Colonist jobs provided by the Reassembled Ship Shelter to provide the benefits of the old colony designation. (And will thus expire when you upgrade your planetary capital rather than when you reach a certain number of Pops.) We cant guarantee multiplayer stability on this build, but we have identified an immediate economic Out of Sync issue that occurs when Windows and non-Windows users are playing together. Here are the release notes for this build:
Stellaris 3.99.0 Phoenix Open Beta Release Notes
Features
- Pops and Pop Groups
- One of the biggest changes in the Stellaris 4.0 Phoenix update, and one of the primary focuses of this Open Beta, is the new Pop system. Rather than being individuals, Pops are now grouped based on Species, Strata, Ethics, and Faction, mostly for calculation purposes. As part of this change, Pop numbers have been increased by a factor of 100, allowing more granular manipulation of Pops by various systems.
- All Pop Groups on a planet have simultaneous growth every month following the existing Logistic Growth formulas.
- Underrepresented pops are no longer given population growth bonuses.
- Fractional growth is not retained from month to month - if a Pop Group would have fractional growth, it has a chance to gain 1 pop that month based on that fraction.
- All migration is now handled through the auto-migration system rather than push and pull that previously affected pop growth.
- As more granular and simultaneous pop growth is now possible, the minimum growth for small colonies has been removed. Early colonization will be extremely reliant on migration from the empire capital.
- Open Beta Note: Xenocompatibility no longer produces hybrid pops, but has not yet been updated to pool all planetary species into a single group for logistic growth purposes. When this is complete, we are likely to remove the Xenocompatibility galaxy setup toggle.
- A Civilian stratum has been added to represent the masses that do not generally contribute to the empires military economy.
- Open Beta Note: Civilians are intended to replace Clerks, which will be removed in a future Open Beta update.
- Empires now begin with 2000 more pops, most of whom will be Civilians.
- More details can be found in Stellaris Dev Diary #370.
- Planet UI, Zones, Workforce, and Jobs
- The other major economic change in the Stellaris 4.0 Phoenix update is a revamp to how jobs work.
- Rather than Districts and Buildings being especially similar, we are shifting to a model where:
- Planets produce and consume resources through Jobs.
- Districts provide Jobs based on their development. (Mining District: Add 200 Housing and 200 Miner jobs per development level.)
- Zones manipulate what Jobs are provided by Districts. (Foundry Zone: Replace 200 Civilian jobs and 200 Housing with 100 Metallurgists per development level.)
- Open Beta Note: Currently the Zones are simpler, and will just provide the jobs. It is our intention for most Zones to convert rather than add.
- Buildings are planet-unique and change what the Jobs produce. (Mote Harvesters: Technicians now also produce Volatile Motes.)
- Pops produce Workforce that fills up Jobs.
- Open Beta Note: The Planet UI is still very much a work in progress.
- More details can be found in Stellaris Dev Diary #371.
- Empire Focuses and Timeline
- The Situation Log now contains a tab for the Empire Timeline, which keeps track of important milestones of your playthrough.
- The Timeline tab also contains a set of Empire Focus Tasks, which are intended to assist players with forming short and medium terms that align with their empires nature, while reducing the randomness of the tech tree.
- Empires can choose between Conquest, Exploration, and Development as their primary Empire Focuses. You will still gain Tasks from other categories, but they will generally be weighted towards your choice. Some Tasks are basic Core Tasks, and will provide progress along all three tracks.
- Completing Tasks provides progress towards Guaranteed Technology unlocks that are considered critical for that playstyle. You still need to research the technologies, they only provide the research option when you reach progress milestones. If you already have the technology unlocked or as a permanent research option, there is no alternate reward.
- Because Task completion is retroactive and there are no alternate rewards, there should be no benefit in waiting to complete any that you have.
- Should you end up with a Task that you find uncompletable or that you do not wish to complete, you can discard it and gain a new Task for a small cost in Unity.
- It is our intention that empires that behave consistent with their Empire Focus should naturally complete the Tasks of that category.
- More details can be found in Stellaris Dev Diary #368.
- Trade has been revamped into a standard resource.
- Trade is now used as the Market currency.
- The Trade Routes system has been removed.
- Ships now have logistical upkeep paid by Trade based on whether they are docked (free), friendly space (reduced), neutral space (normal), or hostile space (expensive).
- Larger ships tend to have higher upkeep.
- The multipliers based on location are set in defines.
- Juggernauts do not have logistical upkeep, and reduce the logistical upkeep costs for ships in their system by 75%.
- Resources blocks can now include a "logistics" block, which is currently only used by ships.
- Planets now have logistical upkeep paid by Trade based on their local resource deficits. This represents the additional costs of diverting freighters to transport materials between planets.
- Local deficit costs vary based largely on the base market value of the resources in question.
- Trade Policies can set how much of your Net trade after logistics upkeep is converted into other resources.
- Added galaxy setup sliders for Fleet Upkeep Logistics Costs and Planetary Deficit Logistics Costs.
- More details can be found in Stellaris Dev Diary #369.
- The main help button now displays the Databank window where you can explore brief articles on many in-game concepts, reducing the need to navigate to external information sources.
- Adjective leader trait names reverted, for example Inquisitor to Inquisitive
- Colonization flow has been improved.
- You can now pre-select a colony designation and turn on planet automation before colonizing a planet, which will apply when the planet has finished colonizing.
- Colonization now completes when 100 colonists have grown or migrated to the new planet.
- Significant improvements have been made to the Species UI.
- One template per species can be set as the default template for that species, and other subspecies can be set to integrate over time into that default template.
- Open Beta Note: Current rate of pop integration is likely to change to be slower as well as monthly.
- The trait selection UI when creating a new template has been improved.
- The special project window pops up and can be started immediately after creating a new template if desired. It is no longer absolutely necessary as you can use integration to slowly convert your existing pops.
- One template per species can be set as the default template for that species, and other subspecies can be set to integrate over time into that default template.
- The Habitable Worlds slider in game setup now has a 'Rare' setting. There will still be a handful of habitable worlds in the galaxy, mostly from special events and guaranteed habitable worlds. Normalized initializer spawn odds to use a handful of scripted variables.
- Added galaxy precursor selection to game setup.
- Leader Adjustments:
- As part of our game pacing and interruption reduction pass, leaders now gain trait selection moments on even levels rather than every level.
- Leader positions now have a significantly greater effect on what traits will appear when they level up and gain a new skill.
- Increased the base number of leader traits to pick from on level up by 1. This is intended to reduce the chance of getting exclusively poor trait options without devaluing other sources of leader trait picks too much.
- Added an "Auto Select Leader Traits by Default" option to game settings, which defaults to Off. On game start or if you switch to an empire, it will toggle the setting on the Leaders tab to your selection. In Coop empires, this override only applies when the primary player of the country joins it. Changing the setting mid-game will not have any effect unless you switch countries.
- Significant improvements have been made to Message and Notification settings, providing you much more control over how you receive them.
- Updated the default message settings
- Revised strategic resource messages and added toast notifications
- Changed trader events into notifications with unique icons. Added sound effect.
- Anomaly discoveries now appear in a toast rather than popping up in the center of the screen.
- Patron Newsletter event was changed into a notification
- The Terraforming Candidate Discovered Event is now a notification
- Order Restored event is now a notification
- Governing Ethic Shift event has been turned into a toast
- Faction Formed Events now appear as toasts following the first event
- Added additional event options to Corrupt Administration event and turned it into a notification
- The Toxic Terraforming Candidate Discovered Event is now a notification
- Changed Inter-Dimensional trade increases event into a notification
- Updated the default message settings
- Added concept tooltips to the left Navigation Bar
- Added the Celestial Orrery system
- Transport ships can now use cloaking
- The Ruler Stratum has been renamed the Elite Stratum, to better differentiate them from the actual Empire Ruler
- The system fleet icon tooltip now shows the total of the fleets' military power listed by that icon, at the top.
- Added unique event options and localization for new life discovered events
- Reduced spammy First Contact events
- First Colony event - Added unique event options and rewards for Ethics
- Adjusted mass extinction event chain localization and picture
- The Betrayal event has been revamped to include multiple options
- Renamed government tab to overview in outliner
- Reduced the frequency of the Rise of the Manifesti event chain
- Added missing reward to fanatic materialist for Comet Sighted event
- Improved readability for event Covenant Formed
- Changed Storm Spotted alert sound to something less intrusive
- The low habitability popup now clearly highlights the negative effects
- Added the two new Society technologies Federation Code and Existential Campaigns
- Ironman mode is no longer required to earn most Stellaris achievements. An unmodified game checksum remains a requirement, and the use of any debug commands blocks them.
- The "Victorious" achievement has been changed to "Win the game through any victory condition in Ironman mode."
- Open Beta Note: Pop related achievements have not yet been updated.
- Several changes to the starbase UI to improve game flow and overall interaction
- Reworked Starbase window to harmonize naming and tooltips
- You are 4x as attractive as you were before.
- FE and Cosmogenesis Escort ships now have the same evasion value of 50
- Changed Curator Insight cost to empire size
- The Eternal Vigilance Ascension Perk can now be acquired early if you complete the Unyielding Tradition Tree.
- Adjusted Anomaly spawn rates to improve the pacing of the early game.
- Added more variance to whether or not prescripted systems will or will not appear in a given game. (They won't all appear in every single game anymore.)
- Fixed the issue of fleets failing to retreat from lost combat if the last ship failed to disengage.
- Human Pre-FTL societies now obey the Pre-FTL Civilizations game settings slider.
- Fixed a script error that was causing far more habitable planets to spawn in the galaxy than expected. Feel free to increase the Habitable Worlds slider if you prefer the old behavior.
- Fixed inconsistent capitalisation causing issues with pre-ftl pop generation
- Cleaned up the end-game crisis triggers. The Unbidden will no longer be the only ones to show up early to the party.
- Fix triggers to properly give Fissile Cores, the unique mutation for crystalline entities
- Treasure Hunters AIs now correctly go through the dialog events
- Fix Black Needle country spawning starbases
- Fixed too many AI empires being generated in coop games.
- Fixed the tooltip for obtaining the Mirror of Knowledge from the Infinity Machine not mentioning the 200 influence it also gives you
- Amenities icon fixed for Drone Storage and Hive Warren
- checks if planet owner is primitive before applying sector or system bonuses
- Set the nanotech ascension path interdictors to use different ship models from the swarmers
- Spitter Gun mutations have armor penetration
- Missiles mutations have numerals corresponding to tier in icons
- Nanite Infused Barb mutation requires nanites to build
- Ancient Driller Beasts mutations uses 88 as its M size cost
- Neutron Throwers mutation damage buff
- Blocked anomalies from spawning on the neutron star for Slingshot to the Stars' quantum catapult
- Handled dyson sphere flags on dismantling swarm while upgrading
- Fixed a broken tooltip inside of the "Extended Shifts" edict.
- Clone Soldier Ascendants can now cyberize
- Completing Inhibit Self-Deterministic AIs removes it from the situation log
- Fix the possibility to build multiple Grand Archives at the same time
- Only display relevant modifiers for Space Fauna ships in tooltips
- Reanimated space fauna ships cannot upgrade no matter what
- Black Needle fleet now correctly spawns to defend their base from bombardment
- Destroy Gravity Snare when there's no valid target anymore
- Broken Shackles check added for relevant Galcom events
- Strip Mine Decision is no longer available on artificial planets
- Inspired Rhetoric will no longer display a placeholder icon
- Fixed situations start value being added multiple times.
- Special system initializers now respect the habitable worlds slider in game setup (to a degree).
- Planetary part of ringworlds no longer take on empire color
- First Contact was changed into a toast and once again shows the correct localization
- Added missing pre sapient loc string
- The dismantle button has regained its missing loc string
- Resolved scope error caused by toast target scope being set to root
- Advanced start empires can no longer have mining stations over resources they do not have tech for
- Fixed Prethoryn Scourge incorrectly calculating target priority for non-edible pops.
- Added an Assign Leader button to the leaders screen that lists available positions.
- Fixed it not being possible to build starbases in systems with non-central stars from the galaxy view (when a construction ship is selected).
- Added a message setting button in event popup windows.
- Hid details that aren't relevant for all species in the galaxy when the Galaxy tab is selected in the Species view.
- Updated the message settings screen to give more space for the message list.
- Changed auto-unpause on the message settings screen from a spinner to a checkbox.
- Adjusted centering of text and icons in toast windows. If a toast with custom description has no icon associated with the custom description, the description will now fill the entire lower section of the toast.
- Add tooltip to Cutholoid Hunter modifier
- Add tooltip to Voidworm Hunter modifier
- Turn reanimated cutholoids and voidworms ship size name consistent with other reanimated Space Fauna
- Open Beta Note: Were still working on Zones and Buildings, and will likely change how we do some of this to be a bit friendlier. Dont update your mods based on what you see in this build.
- Add `resettle_pop_group` effect that allows to resettle a specified portion of a pop group to a target planet
- Add first iteration of `create_pop_group` effect
- Add kill_pop_group effect that takes a pop group and an amount or percentage and instantly kills them
- Add `transfer_pop_amount` effect that transfers pops from a pop group to another
- Removed unused can_resettle_planet game rule and renamed can_resettle_planet_no_owner_check to can_resettle_planet.
- Removed can_colonize_with_pop game rule and moved its checks to can_colonize_with_species.
- Added the script effect "copy_traditions_from = { target = FROM exceptions = { tradition1 tradition 2 } }" that copies tradition from a target country into the scoped country
- Added "add_ascension_perk" and "remove_ascension_perk" effects, scope must be a country, adds or removed the specified perk syntax: add/remove_ascension_perk = perk_key
- Added "copy_ascension_perks_from" effect: Copies the Ascension Perks of the target country into the scoped country. They are added to the existing perks, and the potential/possible triggers are respected. The perks listed in the exceptions list are not copied. copy_ascension_perks_from = { target = FROM exceptions = { perk1 perk2 } }
- Added "remove_tradition" effect. Remove the target tradition from the scoped Country. remove_tradition = tradition_key
- Added effect "remove_tradition_tree" Remove the target tradition tree from the scoped Country. remove_tradition_tree = tradition_category_key
- Added spawn_design to static galaxy system data, which forces a specific design to spawn in the system.
- Added gamesetup_settings script for configuring the settings list in game setup.
- There is now an event_message_type in events that lets you override the default message type EVENT_MESSAGE_TYPE. This can e.g. provide separate message settings.
- Scripted loc can now be used in concept tooltips and the top bar tooltips.
- New on_action on_favor_gained that gets triggered when a country receives a favor.
- Added the used_defense_platform_capacity_percent trigger, letting you check how much of a starbases defensive platform capacity is used.
- Message notification background is now separated from the message type icon.
- New on_action on_research_option_added that gets triggered every time a new permanent research option is acquired.
- The actual script file and line are now printed when there are errors logged in scripted triggers and scripted effects, in addition to the previously available information.
- kill_pop has been replaced with kill_pop_group. For ease of use kill_single_pop and kill_all_pop scripted effects have been made.
- Replaced resettle_pop with resettle_pop_group.
- Added "playme" console command as shorthand for human_ai and ai_ignore_was_human.
Okay, How Do I Opt Into the Beta?
If youre ready for a confusing, possibly frustrating, and unfinished experience, and youre on Steam, you can opt into the Open Beta. [olist]
Whats Next?
We expect that the next Open Beta update, 3.99.1, will have Civilians in a more complete state, and more of the UI and AI should be in place. Buildings, Zones, and Jobs should also have more progress too. Our next Dev Diary will be on Thursday, March 20th, but I hope to have an update to the Open Beta before the weekend. Here is the link to Stellaris Open Beta Survey 1: Empire Timeline and Empire Focus!
[ 2025-03-11 12:00:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
Were still hard at work getting the features weve been describing into the game, but this week were giving you a bit of a progress update, and Ill be giving my thoughts on what shape theyll be in when we begin the Open Beta. As with everything over the past couple of months, all of this is still subject to change.
Weve successfully gotten past the critical milestone of the game is no longer completely broken, and things are starting to come together very nicely.
DD #367: Precursor Selection, Databank, Species Modification, and Ship Designer
The first three are fully functional and will be in the Open Beta. The Databank still has some placeholder graphics on some buttons, and were planning on adding more entries, but its good enough for the Open Beta.
The work for the Ship Designer changes was done in the Q2 DLC branch to support that release, and while it is functional it will not be in the Open Beta (but will be in the final release).
DD #368: Pacing Adjustments, Galaxy Generation, Leader Traits, Events/Messages/Notifications, Empire Focuses and the Timeline, Hard Reset, and Achievements
Wow, we covered a lot in that dev diary. All of these are functional, but like the Ship Designer, Hard Reset is in a different branch and will not be present in the Open Beta (but will be in the final release). The Timeline shows a number of important milestones, and is generally functional. Theres still some polish to be done here, but I feel like its in a good enough state for the Open Beta.
Many of the basic Focus Tasks are in too, along with some of the progression rewards for completing them. Weve added a couple of new Technologies to use as awards, such as Existential Campaigns, a tier 5 Society Tech. Still to-do are Tasks for nonstandard gamestyles, and we havent moved things like Form Federation out of the Diplomatic Traditions yet. Currently almost all of the Focuses relate to the base game only, but its good enough for now. We will have more in the actual 4.0 release. Achievements no longer require Ironman, but the use of any debug commands disables them for that run. We havent updated them to the new systems yet though, so getting things like 100 pops on a planet is trivially easy.
Well that was easy.
DD #369: Trade and Logistics, Mammalian Portraits
Most, but not all, of the features described in dev diary #369 are in a functional state. Trade is a normal resource that is shown in the top bar. Theres Logistical upkeep on ships and for local planetary deficits, and it has replaced energy as the market resource.
We have not yet completed the entire trade economy for Gestalts, but they will have some baseline generation to handle this from their Maintenance Drones for the Open Beta. Our mammalian friends are done, but like Hard Reset, are in their own development branch and will not be present in the Open Beta.
DD #370: Pop Groups and Workforce, Colonization, and Civilians
This is the core of what were interested in testing during the Open Beta. Pops have been converted to using the new Pop Group system, and most aspects of Workforce are functional. Were still going through the various jobs and updating them, and some of the weirder stuff in Stellaris (like, for example, Permanent Unemployment) hasnt been worked on yet. Broken Shackles is hilariously broken right now. (Its in the name, after all.) Multispecies pop growth is working, but we havent made Xenocompatibility pool different species together yet.
Simultaneous pop growth! Your homeworld starts with an extra 2000 pops, most of whom start as Civilians. This number is subject to change based on our internal playtesting and the Open Beta.
DD #371: Planet UI & Zones, Surface UI, Ecumenopoli, and Habitats
This is the other big part were still working on. The backend for the new mechanics is mostly complete, but were still doing the design side implementation of the new jobs, zones, and buildings. The actual surface UI is still very much a work in progress - its getting to a functional state, but isnt near the polish level of the designs you saw in the dev diary. Its likely to be part of the way there (but not complete) at the start of the Open Beta. Special planet types like Habitats and Ecumenopoli are unlikely to be fully implemented for at least the first part of the Open Beta. We have completed tying Habitat maximum development directly to the sizes of the deposits in the system, but havent had a chance to recreate their districts or zones using the new systems yet.
Performance
In a couple of threads, I mentioned that were not yet taking full advantage of some of the new model's performance benefits. Many things are still being calculated daily rather than monthly and are still largely single-threaded. We plan to keep it that way for the first couple of patches of the Open Beta because it will make it significantly easier for us to spot and fix any major issues that crop up. As a reminder, the 3.11 Technology Open Beta found an issue like that with the Breakthrough Technologies, and finding these sorts of fundamental problems is my primary desire for the Open Beta. The Stellaris community is pretty exceptional at providing general feedback with the information provided by dev diaries, but a week of Open Beta testing will hammer the systems harder than we could do with months of internal testing.
So WHEN is it? Whats Next?
I cant quite tell you that right now. This Friday, well be evaluating the status of our current build, and Ill try to provide a possible timeline for sometime next week. Until then, its back to the code mines for us! See you next week!
[ 2025-03-06 12:00:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
This week, Gruntsatwork will discuss the technical details of pop group scripting. This topic is likely to be of most interest to the modding community.
The systems were implementing now are just scratching the surface of where we want to go with them - were looking forward to some of the things well be able to do with these tools over the next few years as well as seeing what you do with them.
As with all of these dev diaries, some of this is still subject to change during implementation and during the beta.
Pop Groups and Jobs
Hello everyone, Gruntsatwork here! Let us talk about some of the script changes that are coming with 4.0 when it comes to pops and jobs As Eladrin already mentioned in Dev Diary 370, we are changing the way we look at Pops by grouping them together into Pop Groups. These groups are defined by their species, traits, ethics, and factions but NOT their jobs. It is entirely possible and likely for a pop group to have pops working different jobs. The goal is that for most purposes in the game, you will reference pop groups instead of pops, which should hopefully save us from iterating through every single pop in our empire whenever a modifier needs to be re-calculated. This allows us to tone down or remove some of the most performance-intensive actions we used before and replace them with far more performance-friendly variations instead. For example, that means that both random_owned_pop or any_owned_pop have been relegated to the dark corners of history and replaced with random_owned_pop_group and any_owned_pop_group. The same holds true for many of the effects used on those pops, like create_pop or kill_pop, or move_pop. Going forward, we will now create, move and kill pop groups, either in their entirety or through percentages. And for the eagle-eyed among you, YES, that means you no longer have to loop through singular pops to do unspeakable things to them, you can nicely target their pop group and let it do the math for you. Thanks to the tireless efforts of our programmers, who have given us some new functionality for scripted triggers like comparators, other old tools, like num_pops, will see a resurgence as a scripted trigger. We expect the modding folks to find a lot of use in that, even as we slightly dread what you will come up with. As also mentioned by Eladrin, this means we no longer have a constant contact between pops and their job. Instead, there is a single moment of assignment when the pop group briefly knows which job it is supplying and with how much workforce. From then on, the job only knows that it has been supplied with workforce and thus must produce the associated resource. As long as the assignment stands, we have no need to check on the pop again. This brings us to one of our biggest changes: removing all production modifiers on species traits and replacing them with bonus workforce. Simply put, because the workforce assigned to a job does not know which species it came from during most checks, production bonuses from species (modifiers like +10% Research from Jobs from the Psionic trait) cannot be applied. Instead, species traits now provide modifiers like +10% Bonus Workforce for Researcher Jobs, which means 100 Psionic Pops working 100 Physicist jobs will have the job upkeep and output of 110 Physicist jobs. In other words, we only pay upkeep on 100 Pops, but we get the output of 110 Researchers! This also has the side effect of the modifiers for job output from species traits are now multiplicative with other modifiers. As an example, in 3.14 if we had 1 Psionic (+10% Research from Jobs) Pop working a Researcher job in an empire with the Meritocracy civic (+10% Specialist Job Output) on a Relic world with a Central Spire (+15% Research from Jobs), the total output would be 3 (1 + 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.15) = 3 1.35 = 4.05 of each type of research. In 4.0 if we have 100 Psionic (+10% Bonus Workforce for Researcher Jobs) Pops working 100 Physics jobs in an empire with the Meritocracy civic (+10% Specialist Job Output) on a Relic world with a Central Spire (+15% Research from Jobs), the total output would be 3 (1 + 0.1) (1 + 0.1 + 0.15) = 3 1.1 1.25 = 4.125 physics research. This brings us beautiful new script entries like this one from the Psionic trait:
It doesnt have to be like this. But it can be. Grunts made his choice. - E This is perfectly serviceable - G I have hopes to refactor this - AS As a side note, some checks can still query a pops job, but only indirectly, by scoping to a job and determining which pop group is filling it. This means we can still ensure functionality for Death Cults and similar targeted kill_pop effects. In contrast, production bonuses on the planet or the empire are still available since they simply affect everyone. So for species traits, we encourage the use of these new modifiers
pop_job_bonus_workforce_mult
To increase the bonus workforce a pop generates for a given job.
pop_job_workforce_mult
To increase the workforce a pop generates for a given job, this is not bonus workforce.
job_max_workforce_mult
To increase the maximum workforce a Job can accept
As a reminder, a job's workforce will fill to its maximum allowed but not beyond that. If a pop generates more workforce than usual, fewer pops will be required to fill the job to max, but it will not produce more than its maximum. If a pop generates a bonus workforce, it can go beyond the job's maximum and scale its production up.
In addition, we have also split quite a few of our economic categories that depended on triggered checks of species traits. This also includes the use of triggers to fake an inheritance of economic classes, which we have removed in many cases and only left in the ones we deemed the most reliant on them.
For inheritance, we recommend the normal parent-child structure of economic categories OR, to use static_modifiers to grant the modifiers of any combination of economic_categories.
Most, if not all, of these changes were made to improve performance: reducing calls, loops, and modifier cascades that would otherwise trigger recalculations across every planet and pop in your empire, just in case a deficit check was needed at that moment.
Looking ahead, we see great potential in workforce mechanics, both for us and the modding community. We've hinted at automation workforce decoupled from pops and some of you may have already considered new applications for Virtuality. Who knows what other, more extreme variations in the type and number of pops empires require might now be possible?
Simply put, we now have the workforce to power Stellaris for years to come. Pun very much intended.
Whats Next?
Our planned livestream is going to be delayed a bit, and will likely end up being alongside the Open Beta. Right now our primary focus is on implementation. Next week well have some more updates on how things have been going.
[ 2025-02-27 12:00:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
This week were looking more at the economic changes of the Stellaris 4.0 Phoenix update, and how were going to update the Planet UI to work with them.
As this is all still in development, things are still subject to change, and Im going to be using a lot of the UX Design Mockups in this dev diary. The final versions will not match these work-in-progress designs precisely. The Open Beta will definitely not be at these polish levels. Also be aware that numbers on these mockups are all placeholders meant to help the rest of the team get the layout right, so things like the Pop Counts or Production numbers arent accurate.
Planets - Districts - Zones - Buildings - Jobs
As mentioned last week, one of the fundamental changes were making to the economy behind the scenes is that planets are now the source of production rather than the pops themselves. This is a generally subtle change from your perspective as a player, but this opened up an opportunity to revamp exactly how planets are structured, and to formalize some of the job hierarchy. A few of you have already guessed some of the things Im going to share with you. Were introducing a new planetary feature: Zones. By specializing Districts, Zones function similarly to how the Forge World, Factory World, and Industrial World designations previously modified the jobs provided by Industrial Districts only now as a more structured, intuitive, and flexible mechanic. The 4.0 Planet Hierarchy is:
- Planets produce and consume resources.
- Districts provide a base number of Jobs for each level of development.
- Zones manipulate what Jobs are provided by their District.
- Buildings typically modify the production of Jobs themselves, though may also provide static numbers of Jobs.
- Jobs are filled by Workforce, and make the planet produce a single resource by default (unless they have been modified).
Upgrading Districts is now clearly shown as a button on the Planet UI - this should reduce the number of it took me X months to realize you can build districts posts. As part of the increase in differentiation between Districts and Buildings, weve changed some of the terminology slightly - instead of building a dozen Districts across a planet, you will upgrade their development level. Functionally this remains the same.
Zones are our new addition to the Planet Hierarchy. Zones let you change the nature of their District. By default, the City District will provide Housing and increase the maximum number of Civilians that your planet can support. (Based on design discussions over the past week, were leaning towards your Empire Capital having a bonus increasing this number significantly, which has the nice secondary effect of making the conquest of Homeworlds in the early game carry the societal challenge of suddenly creating many angry Dissidents that will be unable to promote back to Civilians as this bonus is lost.) If you build a Foundry Zone, the City District will replace some of their Civilian capacity and housing with Metallurgist jobs for each level of development. If you then build a Factory Zone, the City District will provide both Metallurgist and Artisan jobs, but with further reductions to their Citizen capacity.
While you can build multiple Zones of the same type (in your City District, for example), the first Zone of each type built on a planet gains three slots for Buildings. (Duplicate Zones do not grant additional Building slots.) Buildings typically modify the production of their associated Job, and most are now Planet Unique. The majority of Buildings are restricted to the specific relevant Zones that they can be built in, but some can still be built anywhere. The Government Zone and Urban Zone can, however, accept most Urban buildings. The build list will be filtered appropriately. The majority of Jobs will now have a single output by default, so Researchers are being broken apart into Physicists, Biologists, and Engineers. Origins and Civics that previously replaced Jobs will now typically instead have a Building that modifies the associated Job. A benefit of this is that it should now be able to stack better with other similar Civics - we hope to be able to reduce restrictions so perhaps youll be able to sacrifice willing Pops by flinging them into a black hole for money.
The Planetary Surface
Your homeworld is a bit of a special case in Stellaris - its not a brand new colony, but its also not very specialized. It needs to provide a little bit of everything, but could really use some cleanup after all those years of development (becoming an Early Space Age civilization is a dirty job.) Heres the work-in-progress UX mockup of what Earth may look like at the start of the game:
The unspecialized mess of being an Early Space Age civilization gives us a relatively unspecialized zone that provides us with the basic resources necessary at the start of the game. Well eventually want to replace that Zone with a more specialized one. As we head to the stars, well naturally want to colonize our Guaranteed Habitable Worlds. The new Colonization UI will let us immediately set the desired planetary designation for our brand new colony.
Dont worry, youll be able to select something other than Factory World... Heres what our new colony could look like once the colonization process finishes:
...But why did you choose Mining World for a planet with Poor Quality Minerals? The Reassembled Ship Shelter provides Colonist jobs that will provide the Amenities and Stability previously granted by the Colony designation. As shown, the technologies required to expand on an alien world are not necessarily the same as those you need back on your home planet. Our UX designer has created these explanations of the new UI:
And heres what our two planets might look like after some time has passed.
Special Cases
Ever since MegaCorp, paving the entire world has always been a grand ambition of Empires. Were currently thinking that an Ecumenopolis should act like the megacity it is. The Ecumenopolis will have multiple Urban Districts - one large main one and three more smaller Arcologies.
Wait, this means you can make a Fortress Ecumenopolis Although the gameplay of upgrading a Habitat Complex by building orbitals throughout a system made Habitats more interesting, having to hunt down that last moon to place the orbital proved incredibly annoying. For 4.0, were removing this pain point. Upgrading Districts on a Habitat will spawn Orbitals throughout the system as their Development Level increases. Some of the district capacity will be available immediately upon colonizing the Habitat Central Complex, with the remainder gated by upgrading the Capital Building. Were also considering having the district capacity for Habitats more closely linked to the deposits available in the system instead of the current behavior where each mineral deposit grants a static amount of capacity. We expect to see some unique or former districts for habitats be reimagined or return as Zones, such as the Orders Demesne for KotTG or Sanctuary Districts for Rogue Servitors.
Goodbye, hunting for where that last minor orbital is hiding!
Next Week
Next week, Gruntsatwork will go into some of the scripting details of Jobs and Pop Groups. We should also have some more information about the upcoming 4.0 livestream. See you then!
[ 2025-02-20 12:00:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
This week were going to look at the upcoming changes to Pops in the Stellaris 4.0 Phoenix update.
Last week I said we might also look at the Planet UI, but Im going to save that until next week since theres quite a bit to cover here (especially if youre into the technical details), and Id rather not split the feedback.
Pop Groups and Workforce
As mentioned in Dev Diary 366, the Pop and Jobs system introduced in Stellaris 2.2 Le Guin has always had significant performance implications in the late game, and weve been working on incremental improvements ever since. In the Stellaris 4.0 Phoenix update, Pops will be grouped into Pop Groups based on species, strata, ethics, and faction, and these Pop Groups will produce Workforce that is used to fill (or partially fill) Jobs. As part of this change, were changing the overall scale of Pops - most things that previously affected or manipulated 1 Pop would now affect or manipulate groups of 100. The new systems can manipulate any number of Pops within a Pop Group just as easily as manipulating one, and Ill go into some of the benefits of the finer resolution below. Our primary desire with these changes is to improve late-game performance, but while working on it we took the opportunity to streamline some aspects of planetary management and improve the planet UI. Lets take a closer look at some of the details.
Workforce
In Stellaris, the core economic loop since 2.2 has been: Pops fill Jobs, and Jobs produce resources. With the 4.0 Phoenix update, were making a subtle but important change - Pops will now generate Workforce, which is used to fill Jobs, and planets themselves will produce resources. At a basic level, this works almost the same way. By default, every Pop generates 1 Workforce, so Jobs are still filled at the same rate. However, this shift is crucial for backend performance improvements, reducing the number of calculations the game needs to make each month. Example: Then vs. Now Before (3.14):
- Take a planet with 100 Pops working Metallurgist Jobs, where 20 of them have a +10% Production Bonus from a Species Trait.
- These 100 Pops produce 612 Alloys per month.
- Every Pop is individually checked - 80 produce the standard amount, while 20 get a 10% Alloy production bonus from their species trait.
- Instead of tracking individual Pops, we track Workforce filling Jobs.
- Jobs are now filled by 10,000 Workforce (since Pops are scaled up by 100).
- 8,000 Workforce comes from regular Pops, while 2,000 Workforce comes from the bonus-earning Pops.
- The species bonus is now 10% bonus Workforce when working Alloy jobs - those Pops contribute an extra 200 Workforce, making the total 10,200 Workforce. Bonus Workforce is allowed to go over the required Workforce for a job, yielding extra production.
- If 100 Workforce still produces 6 Alloys, the planet still produces 612 Alloys - same output, different system.
Pop Growth
With more granular Pop units, we have more ability to support simultaneous growth of Pops on a planet. Each species present on a planet will grow normally, and with the smaller unit size, will grow every month. This results in several benefits, including multi-species empires not getting their growth dominated by underrepresented species, and also lets us remove the floor on colony Pop growth. This does mean that newly settled colonies will be very reliant on migration to grow their population until they develop to the point where they can support their own Pop growth, and removes a long-running issue where spamming colonies regardless of habitability simply for the minimum flat Pop growth was optimal. Xeno-Compatibility will pool all species on a multi-species planet together to calculate their growth rate, then split the growth proportionally across the various species. Assembly works largely the way it did before, except that fractional Assembly will become microPops thanks to the finer resolution of Pops. Machine and Organic Assembly will no longer conflict with one another, as the Organic Pops will handle their own growth, while all mechanical assembly will be channeled towards the highest score mechanical Pop templates available.
Colonization and Civilians
Since your new colonies will be extremely reliant on migration from their homeworld until they reach a critical mass of inhabitants where they can begin to support themselves, were adding a new population stratum called Civilians (or Residents, for species without full citizenship). These Civilians form the generally content base of your empire, and will trickle out to the colonies, looking for better opportunities. Unemployed Pops will still exist and downgrade through the strata, with unemployed Worker stratum Pops demoting to Civilians over time. This will have an impact on stability, as Civilians are largely content and non-disruptive. Spoiler: More Technical Details [spoiler] This is mostly for you modders out there to abuse, but in the new system, Unemployed Specialist will technically be a Job - therell be one for each stratum. Every Job can have a demotion target assigned to it, and a time. In our implementation, all of the Specialist stratum Jobs will demote to Unemployed Specialist; Unemployed Specialist will demote to Unemployed Worker, and Unemployed Worker will demote to Civilian as they give up on their dreams of productivity and veg out in front of the holoscreen.[/spoiler] Your homeworld will start with a fairly large pool of Civilians to support your early expansion. Were a bit worried about early conquest of homeworlds being too easy of a snowball with this increased starting Pop count, so are considering various ways of making it more challenging to take homeworlds in the early to mid game. One idea we have includes having Civilians create impromptu defensive militias to help defend their home, and possibly starting you off with a few Defensive Platforms. Another idea is for aggressively invaded Civilians to take Resistance Jobs that they must then demote out of over time. The number of Civilians converted to this new Job and how long it takes them to drop out of it would be modified depending on how their people are being treated by their new and old masters. We welcome your ideas and suggestions.
Clerks are dead! Long live Civilians!
Were currently still experimenting with the effects Living Standards have on Civilians (and Pops in general) - its likely that more of the Trade generation from Living Standards will be shifted to the Civilian stratum, and production from Unemployed Pops in the old system may also move to the Civilians. This will give them some of the functions of Clerks in the old economic model. In Gestalt empires, they are likely going to be outright named Maintenance Drones rather than Civilians. Were also renaming the Ruler stratum to Elites, so Ruler isnt double-dipping between your Empires ruler at the top economic stratum.
Next Week
Next week well be going through the new Planet UI, and how all of this changes things there.
[ 2025-02-13 12:00:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
Today were going to take a glance at the Trade and Logistics changes coming in the Stellaris 4.0 Phoenix update, then check out some new portraits.
Trade and Logistics
Trade as a Standard Resource The Trade system introduced in the Stellaris 2.2 Le Guin update was raised as an especially frequent point of confusion for many players. UX issues around disconnected trade stations combined with some quirks of being a modifier based system (like ignoring habitability) made some of it unintuitive. The system had a major impact on performance as well, so while examining Stellaris for optimizations, we decided that we wanted to revamp the system. In 4.0, Trade will become a standard advanced resource, generally produced in the same way as before, but will follow all of the standard rules around resource-producing jobs. The Trade Routes system has been removed - any produced Trade will be immediately collected like any other normal resource.
Weve done some cleanup to the top bar while we were in there. Logistical Upkeep Hello, Gruntsatwork here, with Eladrins UI wizardry done, I shall step in to reveal some of our trade secrets to you. The majority of your trade upkeep will come from 2 sources in the new system. First, local planetary deficits will carry a small trade upkeep, a fraction of the missing resources value on the galactic market. This represents the logistical effort required to commandeer freighters to supply a world that is not self-sufficient and therefore requires resources to be transported in from off-world. Mind you, this will occur in addition to normal deficits, if your entire empire is not capable of supplying those needs either. In short, your planets will either satisfy their own local needs, or require trade to offset the logistics cost. The second major trade upkeep will come from Fleets. Any fleets currently docked at one of your starbases have no trade upkeep. Once your fleets start to move they will gain a small Trade Upkeep, representing the logistical efforts required to support them. This small upkeep will increase if your fleets are in hostile territory that is territory owned by another empire you are at war with, as supplying them becomes so much more dangerous and space insurance coverage is no joke. In the future, logistical upkeep could potentially be used to counter-act Doomstacking, for example by scaling upkeep with the number of ships in a fleet, dividing by the number of fleets, fleets per system etc, we have no concrete solution yet, but welcome your thoughts. With these new sources of trade upkeep, it is of course important to mention that we will also introduce a new trade deficit. Like Unity, this will not create a Deficit Situation but a country modifier that persists until the deficit is dealt with. Running a trade deficit will reduce advanced resource production (alloys, consumer goods, unity, and research) and all ship weapons damage. Stockpiling Trade and Using Trade in the Market Our intent is for Trade Policies to continue to exist going forward. Currently, we expect to have half of your net Trade income (after paying Logistical Upkeep) converted to other resources using your Trade Policy, plus any that might otherwise overflow your storage. Some of the current Trade Policies may be tweaked a bit. The rest will go into your resource stockpile as an advanced resource. In addition, the galactic market has been adjusted so that its primary trading resource is Trade. As such, energy is now available on the market as a standard resource. The energy storage cap has been brought to the same level as minerals and food, while Trades storage cap has been set to 50.000 at the base level. As we are in the middle of implementation, we are adjusting this as we receive internal feedback and will continue to do so when it is time for our open beta. We will be keeping a close eye on the value of trade as a resource. If necessary, well keep turning the dials to ensure it is an actually interesting resource to focus on. For modders, the main market resource is set as a define and can be switched to something else. Gestalt Empires and Trade Rejoice, friends of bugs and bolts, for you too will be able to enjoy the benefits of trade starting with 4.0. As part of the Phoenix update, Gestalt empires will be able to collect trade like normal empires do, from both jobs and deposits. In contrast to normal empires, Gestalt empires will rarely do so with Traders and Clerks, instead their most basic drones, maintenance drones for example, will create trade in addition to their normal resources and modifiers. In addition, they will also have access to Trade Policies, to enrich their common wallet. Of course, with benefits come drawbacks, and so Gestalt Empires will also deal with the logistical upkeep for local planetary deficits and Fleets that are not docked and/or within hostile territory. The Galactic Market will of course also accept gestalt trade as its main resource. In the future, we are also considering Megacorp Gestalt Empires, for your corporate drone needs, but whether we will have time to do that for 4.0 or later remains to be seen. Corporate Branch Office Updates For Branch Offices, we have a plethora of improvements ready for your enjoyment, courtesy of our ever industrious Mr.Cosmogone. Branch office buildings are now all limited to 1 per planet and now give more appropriate jobs to the host planet. They also increase local trade production based on those jobs and their corporate resource output is in turn increased by local trade. Most Corporate Civics now also give bonuses to a specific branch office building, increasing its trade value bonus and receiving Merchant jobs on their Capital from it. Numerous changes have been made to Criminal Syndicates:
- Criminal Empires can now establish commercial pacts. Having a commercial pact with a Criminal Empire will replace all criminal buildings with their "lawful" counterpart. As long as the commercial pact remains, criminal branch offices will not be removed from the planet.
- All Criminal branch office buildings have had their crime value set to 25 and give one Criminal Job alongside a regular Job.
- We have also added a crime floor to non-criminal branch office buildings on empires they have a trade agreement with, which means there will always be a minimum amount of crime on the branch office planet. Criminal branch offices are also up to 25% more profitable on high crime planets.
Glass of milk, standing in between extinction in the cold, and explosive radiating growth
The Gremlin
A regal Hippopotaxeno
My, what big teeth you have.
The secrets of enlightenment are waiting.
Next Week
Next week well start talking about how Pops will change and might pull up the new Planet UI. Since the branch itself is still very full of placeholders, well be using the design mockups while explaining the changes. See you then!
[ 2025-02-06 12:00:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! Today were going to take a deeper look at some of the ways were adjusting game pacing through changes to Galaxy Generation, Message Settings, Events and Anomalies. Then well take a peek at the Focus system, the Empire Timeline, and a few other changes. Some of this has already been covered in the announcement diary, but Ill be providing more up-to-date screenshots and more details. As this is from a build that is still in active development, there will be placeholder icons or temporary text in some of these screenshots, and all of these are still subject to change.
Pacing Adjustments
Stellaris is a game with many moving parts, each of which interact with other elements to produce a complex whole. Small adjustments in one spot can have significant effects in another, and in the end there can be unexpected impact to the general pacing of the game and overall economy.
Galaxy Generation
As mentioned in Dev Diary #366, weve gone through all of the scripted systems and done a normalization pass on the frequency of these systems appearing, as well as preventing many of them from appearing in empire starting clusters. Some other adjustments have been made to generation as a whole, which should distribute non-guaranteed habitable worlds a bit better and reduce the likelihood of massive clusters of them right around your homeworld. There were comments in the thread asking for the ability to easily change these weights. Since most of them now use scripted variables, theyll be very easy to change with mods.
# SYSTEM INITIALIZERS
@spawn_system_rare = 0.1
@spawn_system_uncommon = 0.5
@spawn_system_base = 1
@spawn_system_slightlycommon = 2
@spawn_system_common = 4
@spawn_system_verycommon = 8
@spawn_system_extreme = 16
@spawn_system_max = 99999
@spawn_system_enclave = 100 # first enclave uses this, rest use extreme
As the pool of anomalies and prescripted systems with guaranteed anomalies have also grown over the years, weve adjusted the anomaly spawn chance increment a bit to compensate.
Leader Traits
A minor change from the original announcement is that weve implemented a suggestion from the forum thread to have the trait selection levels on even levels - its much cleaner overall. Leaders still begin with a starting trait at level 1. If you have trait selections to make, the leader level up Notifications will show the green call to action. If you dont, theyll have a more subdued monochrome icon. Leader positions will also have a significantly greater effect on which traits will be selected for players without Galactic Paragons or those that prefer automatic trait selection. For those that prefer picking leader traits themselves, this bias is instead reflected in which traits are selected for the pool of possible traits whenever a new trait is available. In Settings, were also letting you choose what you would like your default automatic trait selection to be. Any time you take over an empire as the primary human player (a distinction that is primarily relevant for co-op gameplay), it will make sure that the Auto Select Leader Traits box is set to your preference.
Events, Messages, and Notifications
Were going through many events, messages, and notifications to reduce the number of popups that disrupt your general gameplay. While major events still appear as popups, those that dont require an immediate response or are purely informational have been converted into notifications or toasts.
The Artisans and Mirror Dimension can wait until Ive finished what Im currently doing. As weve been doing this pass, weve updated some of the messages that have been converted into toasts, to make them more informative at a glance.
Empire Focuses and the Timeline
While designing the Empire Focuses we had several thoughts.
- Stellaris is a dynamic game full of wonder and possibilities. Our sandbox nature means predefined and structured trees cannot work for us.
- Tasks provided by Focuses should help guide newer players through the game, providing suggestions for short and medium term goals.
- Behaving in a manner consistent with your Empire Focus should naturally complete the Tasks from that category.
- Empire Focus categories are Conquest, Exploration, and Development. (Names subject to change.)
- Rewards for progress within a Focus category should be intangible.
- Any rewards you get should feel narratively consistent with your empires behavior. For instance, acting as an aggressive militarist should naturally guide your researchers to theorizing applicable technologies.
- These rewards should reduce the need to rely on lucky draws from the tech pool if you want to pursue your Focus.
The current mockup of the Timeline tab. Some differences will exist between this and the final version. Tasks come in four different categories - Conquest, Exploration, or Development correspond to the three different Focuses, and there are some very basic Tasks at the beginning that are considered Core. Completing a Task grants progress within its associated category; Core tasks grant progress in all three.
Many of the early game tasks are generally straightforward. The tooltips try to give some advice about how to complete them. At any time your empire will have five tasks offered, weighted toward your selected Focus. Tasks complete automatically and retroactively, so if youve already completed an Archaeology Site, it will complete immediately if you draw it. If you have a Task that either feels impossible or isnt something you want to do, you can discard it for a small Unity cost. Many of the rewards for progression along a Focus are (currently) research options thematically associated with the Focus. For example, the first Conquest milestone grants Doctrine: Fleet Support as a guaranteed research option, while others in the line include Specialized Combat Computers and Destroyers. Youll still have to research them, but were happy with how your actual actions in game have an impact on the ideas your researchers are coming up with. The Empire Timeline shows many of the key events of your empire. Beginning with your Origin as the starting point, important milestones will be logged as they happen. Empire firsts feature prominently on the timeline, such as your first colony or the first time youve been humiliated by a Fallen Empire, but some other crucial moments are listed as well, such as war declarations, megastructures, when a crisis appeared, or when an accursed rival stole your Galatron. The timeline has several zoom levels to let you see a general overview of what happened at a glance, or a detailed list of interesting moments.
Hard Reset
In the 4.0 Phoenix update, were adding a new Origin to the Synthetic Dawn story pack called Hard Reset. As a warning, this Origin gets pretty dark (even for Stellaris), very quickly.
In this Origin, you begin as the cybernetic battle thralls of an advanced Driven Assimilator that have suddenly lost connection to the gestalt intelligence. Naturally, you were outfitted with some of the finest combat cybernetics available.
Your civilization begins in an immediate fight for your lives. Thankfully, as the elite battle thralls of your former masters, you excel at violence. This is good, because youll need to fight through rogue barrier fleets that still infest nearby systems.
Im sure everything on Dream Loop is fine. No need to investigate further, right? As with Broken Shackles, the exploration of yourselves as a people is a core part of this Origin, with factions forming a little while after you gain your independence.
Your sudden independence has also left your populace with some traits that represent your nature as Assimilator battle thralls. As you discover more about your past, youll have opportunities to either mitigate or enhance these traits, either by pursuing de-cyberization or by embracing the power of the machine. An alternate path exists where you can instead accept your conflicted nature and Well, I wont spoil what happens on that path.
Achievements
As part of the development process, we decided to take this opportunity to review some of the rules around gaining achievements. As I think that many of the simpler ones are a great tool for letting you know that youre playing the game correctly, so weve made a change. Ironman mode is no longer required to earn most Stellaris achievements. An unmodified game checksum and being in single-player remain as requirements.
- The "Victorious" achievement has been updated to "Win the game through any victory condition in Ironman mode."
Next Week
Were still working on getting things like the pop and planet changes presentable, so next week well likely be talking about Trade and Logistics. See you then!
[ 2025-01-30 12:00:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Greetings, Stellaris Community!
Last week we announced the Stellaris 4.0 Phoenix update, today were going to start going through some of the changes coming in it. As mentioned before, the changes well be going through in the next few dev diaries are still scorching hot on the development branch, and may change drastically before final release.
That said, the ones Ill be talking about today have cooled off a little bit and are pretty stable at this point.
Precursor Selection
Lets start with a simple one that I already leaked to you back in December. The Advanced Settings tab when youre setting up a new game will now have a section that lets you set which Precursors are available in your galaxy.
The galaxy will be split into slices and the available Precursors distributed as they are currently - in the above example, the First League and Cybrex would not appear for anyone in this galaxy. You are free to set the number of available Precursors to whatever number you desire, even none, but remember that in multiplayer games, each Precursor chain can only be completed by a single player. We recommend having at least four, to keep a sense of uncertainty and wonder in the galaxy, but its up to you if you want to force a specific Precursor.
The Stellaris Databank
Back in the Stellaris 3.8 Gemini update we introduced Concepts, as our variant of Tooltips-within-Tooltips. Weve been iterating on how we use them over time, and theyve become a great asset in helping explain the complexities of Stellaris. In the Stellaris 4.0 Phoenix update, were adding a compendium of sorts that contains Concepts in a searchable form, the Stellaris Databank.
Concepts in the Databank are divided into categories, and can themselves include further Concepts. Clicking the icon in the top right searches for the Concept in the Stellaris wiki, for more detailed information.
Searching for Alloys gives us every Concept that includes the word, sorting the most relevant to the top.
If you have a Concept open, clicking will open the Databank, if you would like to know more. Were interested in seeing how you use the Databank and how it can be improved in the future.
Species Modification Changes
We gave you a quick preview of the Species menu last week, but now well go a little more in depth. The Species screen now provides you with more information about the various species in your empire, including showing the number of trait picks they might have remaining. The template modification window itself has been remade to provide better sorting of positive and negative traits, and listing them by value, making it easier to find the traits youre looking for.
My serviles should be delicious, dont you think? The new flow removes a few clicks from the process, starting the Special Project immediately. If time is not of the essence, instead of using a Special Project to modify your species, you can designate a template as the Species Default, and let them integrate over to that default template slowly over time. Certain traditions or buildings might affect the speed of this integration process.
Actually, scratch that. Everybody should be delicious.
Ship Designer Changes
Like some of the other UIs were exploring today, the Ship Designer has had some quality of life updates. Weve taken the Ship Roles that were introduced in the 3.6 Orion update and made selecting one part of the basic ship design flow and giving them a better representation than a scrollable text list. Some pain points of ship design, like the Auto-generate changes button blocking saving, have been removed, and in general its a faster and easier process to create a general ship design.
Weve added a Custom role for veteran players that want to design the ship from scratch, or you can take one of these generated templates and modify them to suit your needs before saving.
Next Week
Next week well go over more details regarding the improvements to Message Settings, as well as a selection of other features that are still so hot in development that theyre still glowing placeholder-magenta. If I cant get you decent screenshots, Ill post some of the concepts and explain what were in the middle of. See you then!
[ 2025-01-23 12:00:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
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[ 2025-01-20 17:57:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Happy New Year! Its good to be back!
I want to start by welcoming all of the new Stellaris players who joined us during the Winter Sale, and to our Chinese community, which has grown so much over the last year,
Next, I want to draw your attention to several feedback threads that have been running for the past few weeks. These threads have forms you can fill out to share your thoughts.
A Moment of Prophecy?
A long, long time ago, I was asked when we would move on to Stellaris 4.0, and I answered Definitely not until we get to release Update 3.14.
Little did I know how prophetic that joke really was.
Announcing Stellaris 4.0
The Q2 Stellaris release, currently expected sometime around our Anniversary in May, will be the Stellaris 4.0 Phoenix update. It will be released alongside our major expansion for the year.
While designing the plan for the Stellaris 4.0 release, the Custodian team had the following major priorities:
- Performance Improvements
- New Player Guidance and Game Pacing
- Quality of Life Improvements
Performance Improvements
Stellaris has many moving parts, and an incredible number of calculations are performed every month. Many of those calculations rely on others, forcing them to be performed sequentially rather than in parallel. This causes the game to slow down as the number of calculations increases throughout the game and is especially noticeable in large galaxies - more planets and empires means more pops filling more jobs, producing more resources, with more pathfinding for the fleets, and so on. Pops and Jobs The Pop and Jobs system introduced in Stellaris 2.2 Le Guin have always had major performance implications in the late game, and weve been working on incremental improvements ever since. [previewyoutube=PVk9iJry1dI;full][/previewyoutube] The Tech Pope Speaks Last year I mentioned that we were exploring a Pop Groups prototype, and showed you a horrifying placeholder screenshot in the last dev diary of the year. Our initial experiments have been promising, so in the Stellaris 4.0 Phoenix update, were changing the way Pops fundamentally work. Pops will be grouped together into Pop Groups based on species, strata, and ethics, and these Pop Groups will produce Workforce that is used to fill (or partially fill) Jobs. As part of this change, were changing the overall scale of Pops - most things that previously affected or manipulated 1 Pop would now affect or manipulate 100. These changes will significantly impact other systems, such as Pop Growth, Migration, and many others. Ill dedicate a full dev diary to more details before the Open Beta. Trade The current Trade system, with its constant calculations around pathing and pirate generation, is another that has a disproportionately high impact on performance compared to the benefit. Were simplifying that one significantly and making Trade act as a standard resource. Trade will also be used to represent general logistics capability and as such, will likely become available to gestalt empires for these logistical purposes. Again, well cover this in a future dev diary. Additional Comments Fleets are the remaining system Id highlight for having a major performance impact. While 4.0 will have some general fixes, weve got our hands full with these changes so were expecting to focus more on them in a future update.
New Player Guidance and Game Pacing
Much of the feedback weve received from newer players indicates that Stellaris has become overwhelming in the early stages of the game, providing a flood of decisions and a seemingly endless barrage of notifications. They have trouble identifying which of these choices are important for long-term growth versus which are primarily flavor, and the constant interruptions make it difficult to form both short-term and long-term goals. More Meaningful Events The Content Design team has been reviewing events and notifications to ensure that any interruptions are meaningful. Events should generally not be purely informative you should have a choice that has an impact. A substantial number of purely informational events, such as the discovery of Terraforming Candidates or new Strategic Resources, have been converted into toasts or notifications. As an example, during your first steps to the stars youll find evidence that life is surprisingly common out in the galaxy. While this used to simply have an acknowledgment, youll now have choices based on the nature of your empire.
Event options should help guide the way your empire grows. Anomalies are a wonderful content delivery vehicle during the exploration phase, but having a window pop up in your face every time one of your science ships finds anything interesting is decidedly less wonderful. Were moving the popup to a Toast - you can click it or a notification to open the full anomaly window, or get to it through the Situation Log.
Anomalous readings registered! Certain event chains that are not particularly loved have had (or will have) a bit of adjustment as well.
Radical. Message Settings Speaking of Toasts and Notifications, the Message Settings system has been expanded to give you more control over how different messages should appear.
Were doing a pass on the default settings for each as well. The new Message Settings should allow you to customize your notifications to suit your preferences whether you want a popup that automatically pauses the game or to turn certain notifications completely off. Leader Trait Frequency Empire Leaders were cited in your feedback as feeling very needy, like theyre constantly clamoring for attention to select new traits if you owned Galactic Paragons. Were looking at merging the first two tiers of leader traits and reducing the number of levels that you make trait selections at - this has the net effect of increasing the overall power of leaders a bit (as theyll start with what was formerly a tier 2 trait, and if you select a new trait at level 3 instead of upgrading their starting trait, youll have two formerly tier 2 traits), but makes the experience with them a bit smoother. Fewer trait selections do put you at greater mercy of the random selection of options, so were increasing the number of option draws by 1. This should reduce some of the risk of getting a dead trait without diminishing the benefit of +1 Leader Trait Option effects too much. Galaxy Generation Updates As Stellaris has grown, so has the number of pre-scripted systems. Many of these unique systems were set at extremely high weights to appear, causing most of them to appear in every game you play. Since these special systems usually contained one or more habitable worlds, it inflated the number of such worlds well above the expected number, especially since they did not respect the Habitable Worlds slider from your settings. Weve done a normalization pass on the weights of these systems - many should still appear in each game, but it shouldnt try to stuff all of them in. They also now respect the Habitable Worlds and Pre-FTL sliders from galaxy setup if appropriate, and should generally no longer appear in the immediate vicinity of Empire homeworlds. This change yields general benefits to game pacing and indirectly, an improvement to performance in general. Empire Focuses The Focus Trees in some of our other Grand Strategy Games do a great job of outlining possible ways you could take your country. In Hearts of Iron, for example, you already know the general plot - the different factions will behave as you expect until World Tension reaches a certain level, after which the world descends into war. The differences that will occur from game to game are largely due to how the events play out, and your interference in history lets everything spiral out into an alternate resolution. The Focus Trees not only provide a great way to create butterflies that can change history but are fantastic at providing new players with short and medium-term goals. We decided that static Focus Trees were not appropriate for Stellaris though - our sandbox and 4X nature with a mysterious universe require any such systems to be more adaptable to whats happening in this galaxy. Instead of trees, weve decided to go with suggested tasks that fall into Conquest, Exploration, or Development aspiration categories - these can range from investigating an anomaly to building a Dyson Swarm, or at the highest ranks, even becoming Galactic Custodian. Youll be able to select your empires focused aspiration, which will skew the offered tasks towards your choice. Completing these tasks gives no immediate reward, but progresses you down Conquest, Exploration, and Development tracks, and if you get a task that youve already completed thats fine - itll immediately complete and you can get a new one. We dont want you to sit there waiting to build your Interstellar Assembly, after all. Reaching certain milestones will grant abilities like Form Federation (which will be moving out of the Diplomatic Traditions), or give guaranteed research options for critical technologies, reducing your reliance on random pulls from the technology deck for techs like Cruisers, Colonial Centralization, or Mega-Engineering. Veteran players already know how to play the game and are already adept at forming their own goals. We expect that youll already be completing these tasks naturally as you play - theyre primarily intended to teach new players how to play like you and guarantee that youll be able to force access to those important technologies. Empire Timeline Accessible via a new tab within the Situation Log, the Empire Timeline is a real-time chronicle of your empires journey. From humble beginnings on your homeworld to the heights of galactic dominance (or the depths of ignominious defeat), the timeline will automatically document key events and milestones as they occur. We aim for the Timeline to serve as a practical ledger, allowing you to retrace the pivotal decisions and moments that have shaped your game. It will also provide a rich narrative framework, transforming your gameplay into a story worth remembering. We look forward to sharing more details on the Empire Timeline in a future diary. For now, we invite you to prepare your empires for posterity and to ensure that your name echoes across the stars.
Quality of Life Improvements
Many of the other changes also fall into Quality of Life Improvements, but two I want to highlight in particular include improvements to the Species Modification process and the Colonization flow. Colonization Process Colonizing worlds had a few quirks that were smoothing out to make for a better experience, especially if you use Colony Automation. Were changing the Colony designation to a modifier that will exist for some time after initial colonization, and letting you pick a Colony Designation and even turn automation on when you give the colonization order. This should prevent a common situation in the mid to late game where you would colonize a planet, but would have to pick and choose between using automation or losing out on the amenity and stability bonuses of the default designation. The new flow also helps out Automation significantly since you wont end up in a situation where Colony is no longer a valid designation and it falls back to an auto-designated selection. Species Modification and Assimilation Targets Weve gone through the genetic modification process to remove many pain points and make the overall flow much smoother. Youll also be able to set a template as the species default, and can set sub-species variants to automatically integrate over time into the species default template.
The Species tab is generally more helpful as well. Note: This branch does not include the pop changes. Ship Designer As we did with Species Modification, weve gone through the Ship Designer to improve the general process of creating new ship designs.
And the Auto-generate designs checkbox wont stop you from saving a new ship design!
The Next Few Weeks
Theres a lot more going into this update as well - Im hoping to challenge Lem for the Patch Note Crown. Next week well go into more detail about some of the changes coming in the Stellaris 4.0 Phoenix update that are possible to show, including some things I didnt go into above like Precursor Selection and the Stellaris Databank. See you then!
[ 2025-01-16 12:00:33 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community!
The devs have started trickling back into the office, and we expect to resume our regularly scheduled dev diaries next week! This means this is our final feedback post of the holiday break, but were ending strong with something that we know a lot of you have been wanting for a long time: factions and politics.
Internal politics is such a nebulous term, and it means many different things to different people, and weve discussed internally many times just what Internal Politics means to us. But this is our opportunity to ask:
What does internal politics mean to you?
Heres what Eladrin said in DD #364:
[quote]Factions and Politics
Governments in Stellaris may hold a grudge against you for centuries for your atrocities but pops and factions are very quick to forgive and forget. There are no revanchist or irredentist factions that make trouble when borders change, nor variety within the factions themselves. Id also like to see factions have their own tenets and goals and different ways that you can deal with them. There have been a lot of calls for an internal politics expansion, but I think that it would really be politics and culture in general, affecting both your empires and those around you.
If we were to do something along those lines, Id also want to add some variant of factions to Gestalt empires - maybe Instincts for Hives that grow more dominant based on your behavior or Directives that compete for priority in Machine Intelligences. Theyd have to feel different from individualistic factions, however. Among individualistic factions, I could see the tenets of an Egalitarian faction from a Shared Burdens empire being very different from the Egalitarian faction in a non-Worker Coop MegaCorp, and these tenets might also be used to define the beliefs of your Spiritualist factions. Id certainly want to explore spreading my factions into other empires.[/quote]
As previously mentioned in all of these feedback posts: This is not a guarantee that an internal politics rework will happen at some point in the future. This is us collecting feedback from the community to inform potential future development.
So, Stellaris Community, let us know what you think about the current implementation of Factions, and what internal politics means to you in our final feedback form: Internal Factions and Politics.
Thank you for all your feedback over the holiday season, and we cant wait to see what you think of whats coming next for Stellaris!
[ 2025-01-09 13:13:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! We hope youve all had a great holiday season, and were excited to see people starting to trickle back from their well-earned vacations. That means more Stellaris news is just right around the corner, with regularly scheduled dev diaries picking up in the next week or two. But before we get too hyped over whats coming next, we have to finish up some bookkeeping from last year. Specifically, we mentioned last year that we would be retiring Stellaris: Season 08 early in the new year. That time is now, specifically, tomorrow. After tomorrow - around 3 PM CET - Stellaris: Season 08 will no longer be available and the content will be rolled into the Ultimate Bundle in order to make space for a new Season for 2025.
What is Stellaris: Season 08?
Stellaris: Season 08 contains all the major Stellaris releases from 2024, including The Machine Age, the Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion, and Grand Archive Story Pack and the illustrious non-spherical Rick the Cube machine species portrait. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/46229/Stellaris_Season_08__Expansion_Pass/
The Machine Age contains:
- Individualistic Non-Gestalt Machine Empires
- Gestalt Machine Intelligence Empires (also unlocked by the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack)
- A new End-Game Crisis - The Synthetic Queen
- A new Player Crisis Path - Cosmogenesis
- Three new Origins
- Cybernetic Creed
- Synthetic Fertility
- Arc Welders
- Civics
- Guided Sapience
- Natural Design
- Obsessional Directive
- Protocol Droids
- Tactical Cogitators
- Augmentation Bazaars (requires Megacorp)
- Two Mid-Game Structures
- Arc Furnace
- Dyson Swarm
- Three New Ascension Paths
- Virtuality
- Nanotech
- Modularity
- Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension (also unlocked by Utopia)
- Exploration of the effects of the cyberization or synthesization of society, with Advanced Government Forms for those who complete it.
- New Species Traits for Cyborgs, Machines and Robots
- Cybernetic portraits that change based on advancement through cyberization
- Synthetic portraits with both organic and synthetic variants that changed based on synthesization, usable by either organics or machines
- Two new Shipsets, Diplomatic Rooms, and City Sets
- 7 new music tracks synthetic and cybernetic inspired music tracks
Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion contains:
- 8 New Space Storms
- Storm Chasers Origin
- 3 New Civics
- Planetscapers
- Astrometeorology
- Storm Devotion
- Galactic Weather Control Ascension Perk
- Weather Forecasting Map Mode
- Two new Precursor narratives, with two new Relics
- Events, Anomalies, and Archaeology Sites
- Storm-related technologies, Edicts, and Galactic community resolutions
Grand Archive Story Pack includes:
- Space Fauna capture, breeding, and modification systems
- 151 Specimens to collect and display across events from Grand Archive and the base game
- Over 240 Specimens total including those distributed across other Stellaris content
- 15 new Relics
- New Megastructure - The Grand Archive
- Two new Tradition trees
- Archivism
- Domestication
- Two new Origins
- Primal Calling
- Treasure Hunters
- Two new Civics
- Beastmasters
- Galactic Curators
- Two new forms of spaceborne life
- Cutholoids
- Voidworms
- A new possible mid-game crisis - the Voidworm Plague
- Three new music tracks
- Events, Anomalies, Archaeology Sites, Technologies, Galactic community resolutions, and more!
Season 08 Bonus Portrait: Rick the Cube This is your last chance to get all the content above, plus the bonus Rick the Cube portrait at a 20% discount (outside of the Ultimate Bundle)!
[ 2025-01-08 14:00:34 CET ] [ Original post ]
by MrFreake_PDX
Hello Stellaris Community!
We hope youve all had a great holiday season so far! Weve collected some excellent feedback so far, with over 8000 responses to the two feedback forms to date.
If you want to leave some feedback on Pirates and Crime, theres still time! The form will be active until next Monday, after which we will close responses.
The topic for this weeks feedback form is Espionage. Weve often talked about an espionage rework, and know that many of you find espionage rather lackluster outside of certain circumstances. So heres your chance to let us know what you think!
Heres what Eladrin said in Dev Diary #364:
[quote]Espionage
Espionage is a related system that isnt satisfying its promise currently, as Mr. Cosmogone reminds me during every design meeting.
Its difficult to keep track of spy networks, is generally of low impact, and has no real counterplay. But hes got schemes.[/quote]
So, do you think espionage is deserving of a rework? What would you like to see in a reworked espionage system? What do you like about the current Espionage system?
Answer all these questions and more on this weeks Feedback Form: Espionage!
We hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday season, and well be back with our last feedback form next week, after which we will return to our regular Dev Diary schedule.
[ 2025-01-02 14:30:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community!
We hope you all have had/are having a great holiday season! Last weeks War and War Resolution Feedback Form had over 4000 responses, and wed like to take the time to thank you all for your feedback. There are certainly some insights to be gained from the feedback you offered, and were excited to see some trends emerging - and combined with the rather large sample size - we feel we have a solid amount of community feedback that can inform potential future development on War and War resolution in Stellaris.
For those of you who didnt see last weeks feedback post, we are taking advantage of the break in dev diaries to collect feedback to inform future Stellaris development. This is not a promise or a guarantee that there will be a rework on any of these mechanics at any point, this is to collect community feedback in a centralized place so that if the devs do a rework in a particular area, we have an idea of the communitys expectations and what you like and dislike about the current implementation of features in Stellaris.
Today were taking another look at another topic fromDev Diary #364 -Sights Unseen: Pirates and Crime.
This is what Eladrin said in DD# 364:
[quote]
Pirates and Crime
Space Piracy is a popular fantasy - we touched on it a bit with the Treasure Hunters origin in Grand Archive, but they could mesh well with the Nomads idea mentioned earlier or even a factional political expansion. Crime and Deviancy arent terribly engaging systems at the moment either, and might benefit from wider examination.
[/quote]
So, Stellaris Community, what do you like/dislike about Pirates and Crime in Stellaris?Fill out our Piracy and Crime Feedback form and let us know!
From all of us here on Stellaris, thank you for taking the time to offer your feedback, and thanks for playing Stellaris!
[ 2024-12-27 17:14:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
by MrFreake_PDX
Hello Stellaris Community!
With the devs off on holidays, and a rare four Thursdays in a row free, we decided we would commandeer your regularly scheduled Thursday dev diary slot to gather some feedback that may help inform development at some point in the future. Here on Stellaris, we work on rather long timelines, the content for 2025 has been in-development for some time already, and while we can't wait to share those things with you, our objective here is to inform potential future development based off the topics discussed in Stellaris Dev Diary #364 - Sights Unseen.
We are going to spend the next four weeks collecting feedback on what the Community likes and dislikes about the current version of Stellaris, and their expectations for certain features that were discussed.
While having an open conversation worked really well for Dev Diary #364, and we thank you for sharing your thoughts there, a more structured approach is required for something that might sit for a year or two before it gets used, if it gets used at all.
It's important to note that this is not a confirmation or guarantee that any topics discussed here will appear in the game at any point.
[quote=eladrin]Warfare and War Resolution At some point in the future, Id like to see us revisit war and war resolution, and enable more of the scenarios that occur in the Stellaris Cinematic Universe of our trailers. When the Gamma Aliens attacked the UNE colony of Europa VII, the Commonwealth of Man did not wait patiently for an invitation to war before summoning the Apocalypse. Humanity was threatened, and they acted. More fluid rules around joining and leaving wars are needed, and betrayal is not supported to my satisfaction. (Secret Fealty exists, but I dont find it enough in its current state - other mechanics currently prevent them from seizing the chance for freedom at what would be the most opportune moments.)[/quote] Without further ado, we present the War and War Resolution feedback form. This form will be available to leave feedback on until next Thursday, at which point we will read through the feedback, and prepare a report for the developers that outlines what the community likes/dislikes, and their expectations for a future rework or expansion. Thank you for taking the time to offer your feedback, and thank you for playing Stellaris!
[ 2024-12-19 12:00:23 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Happy holidays everyone!
As is tradition, in the last dev diary of the year I like to look over what weve done and [strike]insert sneaky leaks about next year.[/strike]
I want for nothing. My purpose is to give.
We began 2024 with a technology open beta that ran over the holidays, which was released as the 3.11 Eridanus Custodian update. Since were planning on having another Open Beta next year, I want to point out how successful that Open Beta was, finding critical issues related to the breakthrough technologies and giving us a much better release overall. Im hoping that next years Open Beta will be equally effective. We had some really cool cinematics too. In March, we saw the light.. [previewyoutube=GsDqi-thw5w;full][/previewyoutube] You too will see the light. And soon became part of something greater with the release of The Machine Age and Stellaris: Season 08. [previewyoutube=MSunS8wpU54;full][/previewyoutube] Become part of something greater. The Machine Age began our remastering of the Ascension Paths, starting with Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension. It significantly expanded Machine gameplay, and added Cosmogenesis, our technological victory condition. It also added our first new End-Game Crisis in years, the Synthetic Queen Cetana. [previewyoutube=jo9jpoHMO7A;full][/previewyoutube] My children, at last I am returned to you. In the latter half of the year, we had two releases back to back, starting with Cosmic Storms: [previewyoutube=mpf0Jh0bb2o;full][/previewyoutube] At first, they did not understand. Quickly followed by the Grand Archive Story Pack: [previewyoutube=aGwAtYBuMQM;full][/previewyoutube] Good boy. This was also the first time we ever localized one of our story trailers into another language: [previewyoutube=GU1fQ2ITrik;full][/previewyoutube] We ended the year with our discussions about the vision of the game and its future, with what I feel were some of the best dev diary responses weve ever had. All in all, its been a busy year, and Im generally pretty happy with where we ended up.
2024 Release Notes
Speaking of being a busy year, during 2024 Stellaris had 16 releases. If you have ever had the desire to go through over 1200 lines of release notes, Ive got you covered.
See You Next Year
Thats the summary of this year in Stellaris. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and I look forward to seeing you all in the coming year.
Want to see a horrific very-in-progress placeholder?
Stellaris Dev Diaries will return on January 16th. Happy holidays!
Purchase Stellaris: Grand Archive alone or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08! Stellaris: Season 08 will remain available as a dynamic bundle on Steam until January 9th.
[ 2024-12-12 12:00:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello again, Stellaris Community!
Last week we looked back at where weve been, and today were going to look at possible themes I think we might explore in the future. Like the past few dev diaries, this is one where were actively soliciting your thoughts.
If you havent had a chance to add your bit of feedback to The Vision, you still have a couple of days left - its going to stay active until the end of November.
Today is the 3.14.1592 release day, so before we get to the main diary Ill start with the final release notes.
3.14.1592 Release Notes
The 3.14.1592 patch addressed the following issues - Ive bolded new additions (all under Bugfixes) since last weeks diary: Balance
- Add energy activation cost to Propagandosphere
- Cloaking strength on Camouflage mutations are now consistent throughout sizes
- Give -15% cloning cost and -10% fauna upkeep to Beastmasters civics
- Reduce Space Fauna cloning cost by 10%
- Reduce Space Fauna energy upkeep by 25%
- Remove minor artifacts production from Decentralized Research edict
- Rework Mutated Voidworms fleets content and scaling, aligning them similar to Prethoryn Brood Queen fleets
- Clone Soldier Ascendants can now cyberize
- Fix to AI machine empires spawning as Despicable Neutrals without The Machine Age
- Necrophages no longer create an endless series of replacement pops when purging on the Synaptic Lathe
- Accelerate juveniles animation speed
- Added Insider Trading and Trade Focus traits to each other's opposites block to stop them appearing together since they almost cancel each other out.
- Added Orbital Ring variants for Beastport/Hatchery/Vivarium descriptions in all supported languages
- Civics added in Grand Archive can now be swapped from the regular to corporate version and vice versa
- Clarified the texts of the Cultivated Worldscaping decision and planet modifier
- Deleting a design now keeps you in current designer type
- Enclaves and Marauders satisfy Xenoist Contact Demand
- Extreme Contortionist DNA now gives rare crystals instead of motes to be more consistent with the event that gives it
- Fix an issue where Cognitive Node should be selected by the Leader Infected event
- Fix blocked Tiyanki Graveyard event chain when capturing them
- Fix Boarding Cables capturing literally anything - thanks for the fun screenshots
- Fix Breeding Status displayed in view that was not always correct
- Fix Fossilized Endoskeleton specimen localization
- Fix Mercenary Enclave Stations unable to build ships
- Fix Cloaked Patternwalker missing string
- Fix scoped localizations for Memorial For Bubbles specimen
- Fixed an unlocalized string showing up when you tried to return starbases at times. Also added linebreaks to the same tooltip.
- Fixed recommended DLC tooltips in multiplayer
- Fixes a bug with too wide portrait on Empire Design Selection View
- FX for ship auras are now displayed
- Improve Cordyceptic Drones fauna damage modifier text in tooltip to make it clearer what it exactly affects
- Life Tree Protectors now don't move away from their system
- Lost colony parents using Sol as their system will no longer spawn two Siriuses if the guaranteed habitable worlds slider is set to 1.
- Mutated Voidworms fleets now don't use naval capacity
- Mutated Voidworms now don't show they can upgrade anymore
- Orbital Assembly Complex holding now correctly boost Beastport and Hatchery on Orbital Ring
- Precursors can no longer be discovered on Astral Scars
- Prevent duplicate specimens from being found in the same empire
- Removed the unused h_dna string
- Stop showing upkeep part of message when leader upkeep is zero in hire leader confirmation dialog
- The Diplomacy Tradition Finisher now properly refers to Officials and not Envoys.
- Voidworms now stop bombarding if the Immunity technology is researched (before crisis)
- Worm-Riddled Gate is now correctly accessible if Voidworms are captured instead of killed
- AI won't build infinite science ships when trying to build frigates anymore
- Fix AI that was not willing to build Shipyards
- Fix a crash when a tooltip references the concept of a tradition that doesn't exist
- Fix crash when Voidworms try to act on empty fleets
- Fix OOS when riftworld station is built
- Fix saves affected by the crash when an AI without a Grand Archive tries to capture a Space Fauna
- Fix Voidworms CTD
- Fixed issue with resolving the user home dir on linux that leads to CTD
Infinite Frontiers
Over the past few weeks weve looked at the basic vision of Stellaris and discussed how Stellaris has changed over the years. This week I want to talk about things we potentially might want to explore in the future.
This is not intended to read as a timeline or a list of promises, but an open discussion about things I consider possibilities and why.
Biological and Psionic Ascension First things first, I strongly believe that remastering the remaining Ascension Paths is a top priority. The Machine Age dramatically improved Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascensions, and gave machine empires proper ascension choices, but left the others behind. Biological Ascension isnt in a good state right now mechanically or as an overall experience. Psionic Ascension is better off as it is affected tangentially by most content releases, but is a bit too reliant on random events and luck. Both of these Ascension Paths will be revamped, though since they are very distinct from one another, I intend on having them focused on in two separate releases. Warfare and War Resolution At some point in the future, Id like to see us revisit war and war resolution, and enable more of the scenarios that occur in the Stellaris Cinematic Universe of our trailers. When the Gamma Aliens attacked the UNE colony of Europa VII, the Commonwealth of Man did not wait patiently for an invitation to war before summoning the Apocalypse. Humanity was threatened, and they acted. More fluid rules around joining and leaving wars are needed, and betrayal is not supported to my satisfaction. (Secret Fealty exists, but I dont find it enough in its current state - other mechanics currently prevent them from seizing the chance for freedom at what would be the most opportune moments.) Biological Ships While rearing and mutating space fauna was added to Stellaris in the Grand Archive story pack, I feel that its not the same fantasy as true bioships. These are vessels that your people grow and fly around in, or that have more symbiotic relationships with their pilots. I think those systems would probably pair nicely alongside Biological Ascension. Factions and Politics Governments in Stellaris may hold a grudge against you for centuries for your atrocities but pops and factions are very quick to forgive and forget. There are no revanchist or irredentist factions that make trouble when borders change, nor variety within the factions themselves. Id also like to see factions have their own tenets and goals and different ways that you can deal with them. There have been a lot of calls for an internal politics expansion, but I think that it would really be politics and culture in general, affecting both your empires and those around you. If we were to do something along those lines, Id also want to add some variant of factions to Gestalt empires - maybe Instincts for Hives that grow more dominant based on your behavior or Directives that compete for priority in Machine Intelligences. Theyd have to feel different from individualistic factions, however. Among individualistic factions, I could see the tenets of an Egalitarian faction from a Shared Burdens empire being very different from the Egalitarian faction in a non-Worker Coop MegaCorp, and these tenets might also be used to define the beliefs of your Spiritualist factions. Id certainly want to explore spreading my factions into other empires. Espionage Espionage is a related system that isnt satisfying its promise currently, as Mr. Cosmogone reminds me during every design meeting. Its difficult to keep track of spy networks, is generally of low impact, and has no real counterplay. But hes got schemes. Playable Nomads Finding different ways of playing the game can be popular - landless adventuring in Crusader Kings III, for example, makes me wonder what we could do with nomadic fleets in Stellaris. The key questions there end up being why are they nomadic, and how do they interact with more standard empires. Origins could also be opportunities to table flip the normal economic or political models of Stellaris. Pirates and Crime Space Piracy is a popular fantasy - we touched on it a bit with the Treasure Hunters origin in Grand Archive, but they could mesh well with the Nomads idea mentioned earlier or even a factional political expansion. Crime and Deviancy arent terribly engaging systems at the moment either, and might benefit from wider examination. Species Packs When it comes to species, I could see us examining what kinds of life could arise on molten or frozen worlds, much like we did with Toxoids. Like Toxoids, theyd likely need some restrictions on what they can do with those worlds (as theyre 10x more abundant than normal habitable worlds), but theyd be interesting to explore. Players often ask for gaseous or energy creatures - the first are already represented to an extent by the Dathnak and the latter by the Unbidden. I feel that energy beings may go too far into fantasy elementals, so Id like to stay away from them if possible. Expanding the existing species phenotypes could also potentially be interesting - Plantoids II, for example. Scenarios Scenarios are another proposal that Ive seen a number of times over the years - would it be interesting to have scripted game modes with custom rules, and events already in motion? They could lean hard into already established universes with asymmetric starts. Perhaps the game starts off with communications from a Xenophile empire that tells you, Pre-FTL Earth:
Hacked together example. Not anything real. A system like this could allow for challenges or narratives that can be completed in a relatively short play session compared to a standard Stellaris campaign, or could otherwise completely change the pace or nature of the game. It could also be used to craft competitive experiences - at past PDXCons weve featured mods like Survival: Necroid Invasion or Ark of Ascension - I could see things like that fitting into the system. Alternate game modes tend to be fairly binary though - theyre either not used very much, or theyre incredibly popular - not much in between. What kinds of things would you want to see in these sorts of game modes, if anything?
So What Did I Miss?
This was a bit of a stream of consciousness dev diary, so Im sure Ive only scratched the surface of possibilities. What do you think I missed? Are any of these especially attractive or repellent? Where do you want us to go?
Next Week
Next week well be reacting to your responses to this one. The days are getting shorter and the snows are starting here in Stockholm, so I expect Ill keep this one pinned for the next two weeks.
[ 2024-11-28 12:00:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community!
We hope youve been enjoying the content from Stellaris: Season 08! Were here to let you know that as of today, November 26th, Season 08 will transition from a Steam Package to a Dynamic Bundle.
What does this mean to me?
If you already own Season 08 then these changes wont affect you or your content, and you can stop reading now and go back to loading pops into your Synaptic Lathe. If you only purchased one or more DLCs from Stellaris: Season 08, and want to pick up the rest at a discounted price, changing to a Dynamic Bundle now allows you to do that without paying for content that you already own. If you bought them all individually, and are sad that you dont get the Rick the Cube bonus portrait, you should also be able to claim it as part of the Season 08 Dynamic Bundle after this change. Early in the New Year, this Dynamic Bundle will be retired and the content added to the Ultimate Bundle, to make way for Season 09. But first, we wanted to give those people who didnt pick up the Season 08 Expansion Pass - and instead purchased only one or two of the DLCs - a chance to get the rest of the content at the same discount we offered the initial adopters. We will update you again closer to the retirement date with an exact date.
What is Stellaris: Season 08?
Stellaris: Season 08 contains all the major Stellaris releases from 2024, including The Machine Age, the Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion, and Grand Archive Story Pack and the illustrious non-spherical Rick the Cube machine species portrait. Read on to check out all the content included in this new Dynamic Bundle! https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/39193
The Machine Age contains:
- Individualistic Non-Gestalt Machine Empires
- Gestalt Machine Intelligence Empires (also unlocked by the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack)
- A new End-Game Crisis - The Synthetic Queen
- A new Player Crisis Path - Cosmogenesis
- Three new Origins
- -Cybernetic Creed
- -Synthetic Fertility
- -Arc Welders
- Civics
- -Guided Sapience
- -Natural Design
- -Obsessional Directive
- -Protocol Droids
- -Tactical Cogitators
- -Augmentation Bazaars (requires Megacorp)
- Two Mid-Game Structures
- -Arc Furnace
- -Dyson Swarm
- Three New Ascension Paths
- -Virtuality
- -Nanotech
- -Modularity
- Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension (also unlocked by Utopia)
- Exploration of the effects of the cyberization or synthesization of society, with Advanced Government Forms for those who complete it.
- New Species Traits for Cyborgs, Machines and Robots
- Cybernetic portraits that change based on advancement through cyberization
- Synthetic portraits with both organic and synthetic variants that changed based on synthesization, usable by either organics or machines
- Two new Shipsets, Diplomatic Rooms, and City Sets
- 7 new music tracks synthetic and cybernetic inspired music tracks
Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion contains:
8 New Space Storms Storm Chasers Origin 3 New Civics -Planetscapers -Astrometeorology -Storm Devotion Galactic Weather Control Ascension Perk Weather Forecasting Map Mode Two new Precursor narratives, with two new Relics Events, Anomalies, and Archaeology Sites Storm-related technologies, Edicts, and Galactic community resolutions
Grand Archive Story Pack includes:
Space Fauna capture, breeding, and modification systems 151 Specimens to collect and display across events from Grand Archive and the base game Over 240 Specimens total including those distributed across other Stellaris content 15 new Relics New Megastructure - The Grand Archive Two new Tradition trees -Archivism -Domestication Two new Origins -Primal Calling -Treasure Hunters Two new Civics -Beastmasters -Galactic Curators Two new forms of spaceborne life -Cutholoids -Voidworms A new possible mid-game crisis - the Voidworm Plague Three new music tracks Events, Anomalies, Archaeology Sites, Technologies, Galactic community resolutions, and more!
Season 08 Bonus Portrait: Rick the Cube You can get all the content above, plus the bonus Rick the Cube portrait at a 20% discount, plus now you dont pay for content you already own! Thanks to the Stellaris Community for your support over the past year, we cant wait to be able to show off whats coming next year! https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/39193
[ 2024-11-26 18:09:27 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello, Stellaris Community!
Today well start with preliminary release notes for 3.14.1592, then look back at the past at all of the changes Stellaris has gone through and summarize the feedback you all gave in the dev diary two weeks ago - The Vision. Were still reading the responses to that one and will continue doing so, so if you havent had a chance to add your thoughts, please add them!
Preliminary Release Notes for 3.14.1592
If all goes according to plan, well be releasing the 3.14.1592 patch sometime next week. These are our preliminary release notes:
Balance
- Add energy activation cost to Propagandosphere
- Cloaking strength on Camouflage mutations are now consistent throughout sizes
- Give -15% cloning cost and -10% fauna upkeep to Beastmasters civics
- Reduce Space Fauna cloning cost by 10%
- Reduce Space Fauna energy upkeep by 25%
- Remove minor artifacts production from Decentralized Research edict
- Rework Mutated Voidworms fleets content and scaling, aligning them similar to Prethoryn Brood Queen fleets
Bugfix
- Accelerate juveniles animation speed
- Added Insider Trading and Trade Focus traits to each other's opposites block to stop them appearing together since they almost cancel each other out.
- Added Orbital Ring variants for Beastport/Hatchery/Vivarium descriptions in all supported languages
- Civics added in Grand Archive can now be swapped from the regular to corporate version and vice versa
- Clarified the texts of the Cultivated Worldscaping decision and planet modifier
- Deleting a design now keeps you in current designer type
- Enclaves and Marauders satisfy Xenoist Contact Demand
- Extreme Contortionist DNA now gives rare crystals instead of motes to be more consistent with the event that gives it
- Fix an issue where Cognitive Node should be selected by the Leader Infected event
- Fix blocked Tiyanki Graveyard event chain when capturing them
- Fix Boarding Cables capturing literally anything - thanks for the fun screenshots
- Fix Breeding Status displayed in view that was not always correct
- Fix Fossilized Endoskeleton specimen localization
- Fix Mercenary Enclave Stations unable to build ships
- Fix Cloaked Patternwalker missing string
- Fix scoped localizations for Memorial For Bubbles specimen
- Fixed an unlocalized string showing up when you tried to return starbases at times. Also added linebreaks to the same tooltip.
- Fixed recommended DLC tooltips in multiplayer
- Fixes a bug with too wide portrait on Empire Design Selection View
- FX for ship auras are now displayed
- Improve Cordyceptic Drones fauna damage modifier text in tooltip to make it clearer what it exactly affects
- Life Tree Protectors now don't move away from their system
- Lost colony parents using Sol as their system will no longer spawn two Siriuses if the guaranteed habitable worlds slider is set to 1.
- Mutated Voidworms fleets now don't use naval capacity
- Mutated Voidworms now don't show they can upgrade anymore
- Orbital Assembly Complex holding now correctly boost Beastport and Hatchery on Orbital Ring
- Preccursors can no longer be discovered on Astral Scars
- Prevent duplicate specimens from being found in the same empire
- Removed the unused h_dna string
- Stop showing upkeep part of message when leader upkeep is zero in hire leader confirmation dialog
- The Diplomacy Tradition Finisher now properly refers to Officials and not Envoys.
- Voidworms now stop bombarding if the Immunity technology is researched (before crisis)
- Worm-Riddled Gate is now correctly accessible if Voidworms are captured instead of killed
AI
- AI won't build infinite science ships when trying to build frigates anymore
- Fix AI that was not willing to build Shipyards
Stability
- Fix a crash when a tooltip references the concept of a tradition that doesn't exist
- Fix crash when Voidworms try to act on empty fleets
- Fix OOS when riftworld station is built
- Fix saves affected by the crash when an AI without a Grand Archive tries to capture a Space Fauna
- Fix Voidworms CTD
- Fixed issue with resolving the user home dir on linux that leads to CTD
Where Weve Been
A long time ago in a galaxy generated far, far away, on May 9th, 2016, Stellaris was released. We all took our first steps out into the stars, filled with a universe of possibilities and wonders. I was there picking my FTL type and favored weapons and experiencing those early days the same way many of you did. Each of the Expansions changed Stellaris in their own way. The first really major changes came to Stellaris in 1.5 in the Utopia expansion, when Ascension Perks were added. These shook the game up so drastically that when Apocalypse changed the face of war in 2.0, they ended up moving into the base game. Apocalypse and 2.0 included a huge number of other changes as well, changing how system control works and removing the different FTL types. I mark this moment as the point where Stellaris began moving from a pure 4X game to more of a hybrid of 4X and GSG. That transition continued in the next major shakeup with MegaCorp and 2.2, which replaced the economic model, changing from tiles to the pop and job system we still use today. Federations and the 2.6 update added the Galactic Community, revamped Federations, and changed the way we think about empire creation by adding Origins to the game. Most of the Origins started off relatively simple, but as we added more they steadily grew in complexity. (Knights of the Toxic God, Im looking at you.) The intel and exploration changes of Nemesis brought us to the 3.0 update, as they fundamentally changed the early stages of the game. Nemesis also brought us our first player Crisis path, Galactic Nemesis, which was originally simply called Become the Crisis. 3.1, the Lem update, wasnt an expansion release, but it changed how the Stellaris team operated, for the better. This was when we began the Custodian Initiative. The Custodians have done an excellent job polishing old content up to our modern expectations, fixing bugs, adding new quality of life features, and generally improving the game. Overlord and 3.4 added improved subjugation mechanics and added the Situations system which has become an incredible tool for the content designers. We also expanded automation at this time, revamping planetary automation and letting unemployed pops find their way using the automatic resettlement system. The leader system underwent massive changes in 3.8 when Galactic Paragons added leader traits and attempted to make them a more interesting system to play with. This system remained in flux until 3.10, when they finally reached a state where we were happy with the results. Sometimes change needs a little iteration. 3.8 also added Cooperative gameplay, making it much easier to teach your friends how to play Stellaris. This year brought the Expansion Subscription option to make it easier to get into Stellaris, and The Machine Age and 3.12 began the process of elevating the Ascension Paths to new heights. The positive reaction to The Machine Age and the success of the Season 08 Expansion Pass strongly affected our plans for 2025, and made us also reflect upon questions like what is a Crisis anyway", what is winning, and can we remaster two very different Ascension Paths in a single year. The Story Packs, Species Packs, and other content added to Stellaris in their own ways as well, adding to the deep lore of Stellaris and expanding the possibilities.
So Much Glorious Feedback
I want to thank everyone for the enormous outpouring of feedback that weve received over the last couple of weeks. As I noted last week, Ive been reading every response to Dev Diary 361, and Ive been keeping tabs on responses on several different platforms. If you havent had a chance to give your feedback, dont worry, youre not too late. Ill be keeping The Vision pinned in our forums until the end of November. This section will be my musings on the feedback and some of the things it made me think of. Not everything I talk about here is viable or going to happen, but if youre being this open with me I owe it to you to return the favor. Based on the feedback youve all given, the consensus is that youre very amenable to change to address engine or system limitations, and that we should not feel constrained by what is already there if we feel we can find a way to make things better. Many of you did note that the initial implementations of changes arent typically perfect, and that they take iteration to achieve their goals. (So we should be careful with what we decide to take on at once!) Some of the questions that I offered as proposals were a bit leading - I did want to know what you all thought about the existing pop mechanics, for example, because Im very interested in improving their performance and addressing several other quality of life and mechanical issues with the current systems. Your responses have strengthened my belief that tackling planets is a correct course of action, and you should expect some experimentation in next years Open Beta. Id like to move us over to a system more similar to the pop groups used in Victoria 3 - though with a Stellaris spin on things. Were not likely to go as deep in the simulation as Victoria does, but I think that we can likely split pop groups based on species, ethics, and factions. Some of the granularity we have right now might slip though, so Im eager to get to doing some prototyping and seeing what the pros and cons are of such a change, as well as what the performance implications would be. The economic implications are huge. Fleets are unlikely to get major changes this year, but a number of you identified them as a place where we can do a lot of major improvements, along with many aspects of war. Well talk a bit more about these next week. Trade is almost certainly going to change. Very few of you seemed terribly fond of the current system, and its both terribly bad for performance and mechanically difficult to understand for new players. While I like the general idea behind the trade routes, I dont think they add enough benefit for their costs. Were likely to revamp it into a proper resource, though Im also considering ways of also using it to simulate supply lines and local planetary deficits. If we end up pursuing the latter, gestalt empires would need access to trade or at least, something similar. That could potentially open up more opportunities for MegaCorps and diplomatic pacts, and well have to find new ways of using pirates.
Next Week
Next week I want to look at some of the things I think were still missing. Player fantasies that we either do not support or do not support well enough in Stellaris at this time. Like The Vision dev diary, Ill be asking for your feedback there too, so think up on this over the next week if you want to help influence where we go next. See you then!
[ 2024-11-21 12:00:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
Today were going over the release notes from Tuesday, talking about the further plans for the Circinus cycle, and exploring the reaction to last weeks dev diary,The Vision.
3.14.159 Release Notes
[expand type=details expanded=false]
We released the 3.14.159 patch on Tuesday, and these were the release notes:
Improvements
- By popular request, greatly expanded the basement storage of the Grand Archive. You now have 18 slots of overflow instead of 4.
- Replaced the Mysterious Labyrinth event image
- The Metalheads AI personality can be gained by Individualist Machines or Organic empires that are Very Strong (instead of just Strong)
- The Treasure Hunter Origin now starts leaders with level 3 of Adventurous Spirit, meaning it should no longer constantly be offered as an upgrade.
- Add Beastport, Hatchery and Vivarium Tank to orbital rings, and add Shipyard exclusion rules
- Added a hyphen to the X-Ray Eye Beam mutation
- Added the missing loc to Sapient Specimen species rights
- Added the missing space in the credits' title
- Added the missing word "Food" to the Arboreal World planet modifier
- Adjusted perfected genes concept tooltip to align with reality
- Cyber Democracies no longer get leaders without upkeep
- Fallback to Weapon ranges if strike craft is used but there's no strike craft component range
- Fix a bug where, under certain circumstances, a Grand Archive was still considered destroyed after being rebuilt
- Fix a crash where an AI could capture fauna even if they shouldn't be able to.
- Fix Captain Ness not being legendary
- Fix Large Shard Accelerator tags
- Fix livestock modifier for Wrangler jobs
- Fix Mutations' Strike Crafts behaviour
- Fix Mysterious Chart event chain that could get blocked
- Fix Primal Leaders not being renowned
- Fix scores for Grand Archive Relics
- Fix Space Amoebas being hostile to Beastmasters bespite Amoeboid Pacification
- Fixed some Black Needle ships not displaying their bow section
- Fixed 2 cosmic storms projects not requiring scientists
- Gravity Snares can now only re-target to fleets they can capture
- Gravity Storms no longer cause Obsessed Gestalts to crave consumer goods for their drones
- Habitat Orbitals should no longer attempt to evade enemy fleets
- Habitat System Control now provide a Roboticist job for Individual Machines.
- It is now possible to use Space Fauna as the federation's fleets
- Reanimated space fauna uses half ship size of their living counterpart
- Removed tooltip for GOG and MS store achievements to require login to paradox account since this is not the case.
- Rogue Servitors are now also on energy duty during Gravity Storms
- Ships modifiers are correctly updated with their new fleet's modifiers before fleet's values calculation
- Space Fauna uses every components to calculate range
- Specimens acquired from trades now don't trigger Galactic Curators' unity bonus
- The Alien Box Event no longer has a nonsensical tooltip for gestalt empires.
- The Tachyon Beam mutations have found their way to the Tachyon Lance technology.
- Told the Artillery combat computers to stay at max range
- Voidworms shouldn't attack empires with Voidworm Immunity before crisis
- Defensive check for nullobj when dealing with auto exploration orders
- Fix crash when Voidworms try to act on empty fleets
- Fixed issue with diplomatic distances differences after hotjoin/resync leading to OOS
- Fixing potential crash when trying to create a ship from a scripted design that contains unusable components for the creator
- Fixed potential CTD when using FromFromFrom scope in "on_planets_zero_pops" on action
- Fixes CTD on espionage operation phase tooltip
- Fixes CTD when ship is killed by missile
[ 2024-11-14 12:04:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
Now that the Grand Archive Story Pack is out, I want to do something a little different. With 360 Stellaris Dev Diaries complete, I thought it was time to circle right back around to the beginning: what was, will be.
Stellaris Dev Diary #1 was The Vision, and so is #361.
What is Stellaris?
The vision serves as a guiding tool to keep the entire development team aligned. As the game evolves, we work hard to update it regularly to remain accurate and consistent with our core vision. Heres how I currently answer What is Stellaris?: [hr][/hr]
The Galaxy is Vast and Full of Wonders
For over eight years, Stellaris has remained the ultimate exploration-focused space-fantasy strategy sandbox, allowing players to discover the wonders of the galaxy. From their first steps into the stars to uniting the galaxy under their rule, the players are free to discover and tell their own unique stories. Every story, trope, or player fantasy in science fiction is within our domain. [hr][/hr]
Stellaris is a Living Game
Over time, Stellaris has evolved and grown to meet the desires of the player base.
- At launch, Stellaris leaned deep into its 4X roots.
- It evolved from that base toward Grand Strategy.
- As it continues to mature, we have added deeper Roleplaying aspects.
Every Game is Different
We desire for players to experience a sense of novelty every time they start a game of Stellaris. They should be able to play the same empire ten times in a row and experience ten different stories. A players experience will differ wildly if their first contact is a friendly MegaCorp looking to prosper together or if theyre pinned between a Fallen Empire and a Devouring Swarm. Stellaris relies on a combination of prescripted stories (often tied to empire Origins) and randomized mechanical and narrative building blocks that come together to create unplanned, emergent narratives. A sense of uncertainty and wonder about what could happen next is core to the Stellaris experience. [hr][/hr]
What is this About?
Fundamentally, as the players, Stellaris is your game. Your comments and feedback on The Machine Age heavily influenced our plans for 2025. We work on very long timelines, so weve already been working on next years releases for some time now. Most of what Im asking will affect which tasks the team prioritizes and will help direct our direction in 2026 and beyond. Were making some changes to how we go about things. Many people have commented that the quarterly release cadence weve had since the 3.1 Lem update makes it feel like things are changing too quickly and too often, and of course, it disrupts your active games and mods. The short patch cycle between Vela and Circinus was necessary for logistical reasons but really didnt feel great. Were going to slow things down a little bit to let things stabilize. Ive hinted a couple of times (and said outright last week) that we have the Custodian team working on some big things - the new Game Setup screen was part of this initiative but was completed early enough that we could sneak it into 3.14.1. My current plan is to have an Open Beta with some of the team's larger changes during Q1 of next year, replacing what would have been the slot for a 3.15 release. This will make 2025Q2, around our anniversary in May, a bigger than normal release, giving us the opportunity to catch up on technical debt, polish, and major features.
What is Stellaris to you?
How does this match what you think Stellaris is, and where it should go? Would you change any of these vision statements? What systems and content are sacred to you, which would make Stellaris not Stellaris anymore if we changed them? Some examples to comment on could include:
- How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?
- If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?
- What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?
- How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?
- How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?
- Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?
- Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?
- If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesnt quite work for you?
To the Future, Together!
I want to spend most of this years remaining dev diaries (at least, the ones that arent focused on the Circinus patch cycle) on this topic, talking with you about where our shared galactic journey is heading. Next week well be talking about the 3.14.159 patch.
But First, a Shoutout to the Chinese Stellaris Community
Before I sign off, I want to commend the Chinese Stellaris Community for finding the funniest bug of the cycle. Ive been told that they found that you can capture inappropriate things with Boarding Cables from the Treasure Hunters origin, and have been challenging each other to find the most ridiculous things to capture. You know, little things like Cetanas flagship. The Infinity Machine. An entire Enclave. Im not going to have the team fix this for 3.14.159, but will likely have them do so for 3.14.1592. I want to give you a chance to complete your collection and catch them all. After all, someone needs to catch The End of the Cycle and an Incoming Asteroid. Post screenshots if you catch anything especially entertaining! See you next week!
[ 2024-11-07 12:00:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
The Grand Archive Story Pack and the Stellaris 3.14.1 Circinus update released on Tuesday. Go forth and collect things and capture space creatures!
[previewyoutube=aGwAtYBuMQM;full][/previewyoutube]
The Release Thus Far
The update appears to be a very stable and clean release so far, with few critical issues reported. A 3.14.15 hotfix is being prepared for today, which includes fixes for two crashes that have occurred a handful of times, and a bug that let you power your economy exclusively through chain-firing Gravity Snares:
3.14.15 Circinus Hotfix Release Notes
Bugfixes
- Gravity Snare costs can no longer go negative.
- Fixed a case where lured space fauna were uncapturable.
- Fixing potential crash when trying to create a ship from a scripted design that contains unusable components for the creator
- Fixed potential crash when using FromFromFrom scope in "on_planets_zero_pops" on action
- Fix a crash where an AI could capture fauna even if they shouldn't be able to.
The Plan
If everything goes according to plan, I expect that our next patch, 3.14.159, will be released on Tuesday, November 12th. This will let us include some fixes to issues that are reported this weekend and early next week.
Dev Q&A Transcript
We held a developer Q&A last week, and have exported a transcript for you here: [Click through to the Paradox Forums to see the entire Q&A transcript]
Next Week
Next week is going to be a little bit different. Well be looking at the internal vision statement of Stellaris and compare it to how the game has developed over the years, and Id like to begin a conversation about how well continue to evolve over the next few years. The Custodian team has been up to something, and I want you to help guide them.
[ 2024-10-31 12:00:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Grand Archive Story Pack is available now! [previewyoutube=aGwAtYBuMQM;full][/previewyoutube] Get it today, or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08! The Grand Archive Story Pack includes:
- Space Fauna capture, breeding, and modification systems
- 151 Specimens to collect and display across events from Grand Archive and the base game
- Over 240 Specimens total including those distributed across other Stellaris content
- 15 new Relics
- New Megastructure - The Grand Archive
- Two Tradition trees - Archivism and Domestication
- Two Origins - Primal Calling and Treasure Hunters
- Two Civics - Beastmasters and Galactic Curators
- Two forms of spaceborne life - Cutholoids and Voidworms
- Mid-game crisis - the Voidworm Plague
- Three new music tracks
- Events, Anomalies, Archaeology Sites, Technologies, Galactic community resolutions, and more!
New Megastructure - The Grand Archive
The Grand Archive preserves and exhibits the most valuable artifacts we have collected throughout the galaxy. Reserved within is also a dedicated Vivarium for live Space Fauna containment and observation.
Constructing the Grand Archive allows for the exhibition of specimens you have found, as well as the containment, breeding and ultimately cloning of captured space fauna in the Vivarium.
New Discoveries - Specimens
Specimens are rare and valuable objects that you collect while exploring the galaxy. Each Specimen has a Display Effect, providing small modifiers to boost your production across a wide variety of metrics, with their effects scaling based on the rarity of the specimen in question. Specimens also provide additional information about the discoveries you have made, adding new details and information about events in the galaxy.
New Spaceborn Life
Cutholoids Cutholoids are massive organisms that inhabit asteroids in order to provide suitable protection for their otherwise soft bodies. This creature swallows its prey whole, using radioactive digestive fluid to slowly consume its prey. Cutholoids are ambush predators that disguise themselves as asteroids. They will ambush and devour lone ships - these ships can be rescued by either capturing the Cutholoid or defeating it in battle. When cloned from Hatcheries by the player, these creatures can steal enemy ships by swallowing them whole.
Voidworms Voidworms are parasitic organisms that must deposit spores on inhabited worlds with suitable biomass in order to reproduce. Mature individuals form mating trios, known as "Troikas", and will construct nests near black holes to shelter and raise their young. Voidworms are aggressive parasites and will often bombard colonies in order to increase their numbers back in their nests. If their population is left unchecked, they will attempt to take over the galaxy in the new Voidworm Plague mid-game crisis.
Mid-Game Crisis - The Voidworm Plague
The Voidworm population has reached a critical mass. The parasites no longer spare the planets they feed from. A breeding frenzy on the galactic scale is upon us. This Mid-Game Crisis can be triggered if Voidworm populations reach a critical mass in the galaxy. Swarms of Voidworms will invade colonies and bombard them with abandon, adding to their numbers.
Origins
Primal Calling Masters of animal handling and ranching, their relationship with fauna has grown according to their ethics. How will this bond evolve on a galactic scale? This mechanically-driven origin introduces a new Wrangler job, which changes based on the player's ethics and choices. Primal Calling empires also start with the ability to build Voidlures, and is ideally suited to support a creature-focused playstyle.
Treasure Hunters Armed only with a mysterious map, race across the stars to secure a legendary pirate treasure. This narrative-focused origin follows the trail of a forgotten pirate legend in search of her hoard. The Black Needle stands in your way, a long-standing pirate organization that will do anything to secure this treasure. On your journey, you will face deadly threats, memorable characters and maybe even the Pirate Queen herself.
Civics
Galactic Curators The meticulous collection and preservation of historical artifacts has always fascinated this civilization. But now, with the mysteries of the galaxy at their doorstep, there is everything left to learn. Galactic Curators empires start with a set of three specimens and get a head start on building their Grand Archive thanks to insight into Galactic Archivism technology and a reduced cost and build time. Additionally, Galactic Curators gain bonus unity when completing an Archaeological Site or finding a Specimen. As fellow Curators, they have increased starting opinion with the Curator Order and receive a discount on their services. Beastmasters Coming to full technological maturity in a system that serves as a feeding ground for Space Amoebas, this society has acquired a deep knowledge of their life cycle. They now work to nurture, raise, and ultimately clone these creatures for mutual benefit. Start with the ability to capture Space Fauna and a fleet of Cloned Space Amoeba instead of Corvettes. Standard military ships use 3x naval capacity, so you must learn to harness the power of Cloned Space Fauna in order to succeed. Find out more: Watch the playlist on YouTube Read the Developer Diaries https://store.steampowered.com/app/2863080/Stellaris_Grand_Archive/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2863190/Stellaris_Season_08__Expansion_Pass/
[ 2024-10-29 17:15:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone!
The Grand Archive Story Pack and the Stellaris 3.14.1 Circinus update will be releasing next Tuesday, October 29th.
Today we have some Preliminary Release Notes for the 3.14.1 release!
Preliminary Release Notes
Grand Archive Story Pack Features
- Space Fauna capture, breeding, and modification systems
- 151 Specimens to collect and display across events from Grand Archive and the base game
- Over 240 Specimens total including those distributed across other Stellaris content
- 15 new Relics
- Two new Tradition trees
- Archivism
- Domestication
- Two new Origins
- Primal Calling
- Treasure Hunters
- Two new Civics
- Beastmasters
- Galactic Curators
- Two new forms of spaceborne life
- Cutholoids
- Voidworms
- A new possible mid-game crisis - the Voidworm Plague
- Three new music tracks
- Events, Anomalies, Archaeology Sites, Technologies, Galactic community resolutions, and more!
Improvements
- Renamed Shattered Ring "Irreparable Damage" to "Reparable Damage" as once you have researched Mega Engineering. You can now restore it via decision.
- Setting AI Empires to 1 and enabling Randomize will now generate 0-1 empires instead of always generating 1.
- Special Project research order selector from system view now checks all possible projects for the location
Balance
- Made the Nexus storm chonkier
- Significantly reduced storm effect on fleet pathfinding
- Doubled Ranger science to 4
- Subjects that are released from a country now copy the ascension perks of that country
Bugfixes
- Fixed strange boxes around technology icons
- AI should now utilize leader assigned science ships
- Corrected Technology Frames
- Archaeological site Green Skies now requires Cosmic Storms DLC - you should no longer get Storms without the DLC enabled.
- Fixed the Machine Worlds AP accidentally doubling the jobs and housing giving by Generator districts on Shattered Ringworlds
- Reuniting the Pod project now resets tiyankis hostility before and after the project
- Fix tiyankis potentially fleeing the system in Reuniting the Pod
- Cybernetic leader portraits immediately change when the trait is gained
- Fixed Regnal Names for the Fungoid 4 name list. All hail Emperor Globbelius!
- Democratic and oligarchic Storm Chaser empire names can be randomized
- Fixed some event leaders found in anomalies claiming that they were previously employed on your capital on their resumes
- The Operation Exposed event (operation.5037) text no longer uses your country's name instead of the operation's name.
- Added the correct icon to the job_researcher_upkeep_mult modifier
- The Nu-Baol once again spawn with the Hive Mind trait and with the Phototropic Trait if the proper conditions are met.
- Caravaneers cannot ask for a science ship that is exploring an Astral Rift
- Saved StormVisuals as a .txt file
- Synth ascended and Individualist Machine empire can now set the migration rights for mechanical and machine species
- Virtual pops in synth ascended empires are now allowed to auto-migrate
- The Event Eat or be Eaten will no longer select machine pops to be the most delicious in the galaxy.
- Renamed the Government View to Empire View so it is no longer easily confused with the Government UI introduced in Galactic Paragons.
- Fixed the Khan's starbases not showing a correct construction entity
- The Unity tooltip now says Unity can be used to ascend Planets.
- Guided Sapience and Natural Design are now mutually exclusive
- Hid an unlocalized flag inside of the "Rorganize Leviathan Parade" button
- Marauder Fleets now count as mercenaries for the purpose of being in breach of the Neutral Defenders Resolutions
- The Imitator will no longer generate with the Hoarder trait causing immediate consumer goods deficit for gestalt empires.
- Fixed a number of Cybernetic traditions not giving the correct effects if The Machine Age is not active
- Empire generation now will be able to generate random Machine Intelligence empires.
- The relic Crystal of Odryskia uses the correct trait name in the tooltip
- Added the Researchers Upkeep modifier icon
- Fixed empire designs with different randomized names sometimes preventing each other from spawning in galaxy generation.
- add_random_technology_option effect now correctly checks techs weight
- Fixed ships not entering the correct animation state after a combat if there was any incoming projectile animation
- Auto-mod swapped traits won't disappear when loading a save
- Made Genesis Guides and Natural Design mutually exclusive
- Fixed assorted typos in script
- Fixed assorted syntax error in script
AI
- The AI now has a set limit on the maximum number of habitats it should have, determined by galaxy size and difficulty setting. This limit is doubled for the Void Dweller and Void-Forged origins.
- AI empires and Auto-Best feature now consider adding additional power sources to ship designs if there is no better component
- When in combat, ships stay with their targets a bit longer, reducing the amount of ships flip-flopping on targets and ending not attacking anything.
Performance
- Updated the way ship modifiers are checked for tooltip display using a static cache
UI
- Polish for Game Setup UI
- Changed icon for Exploration Vessels.
- Fixed some ship types using the wrong icon in the fleet and combat UIs.
- Game settings for DLC-specific features are now hidden if you don't have the DLC.
- Reworked game setup UI.
- Fixed triggered icons tooltip hitbox in event options
Modding
- planet_damage for bombardment stances is now a scripted value
- Added on_ship_engulfed on_action
- Added on_specimen_acquired on_action
- Added is_last_acquired_specimen trigger
- Added give_specimen effect
- Allow to override technology name, description, icon and effects based on trigger conditions
- Added centerPosition member to buttonType.
- Smooth listbox's borderSize now affects the list's scrollable length.
- Fixed listboxes' borderSize using X value for both X and Y.
- Starbase building & module icons now use triggered description to allow it to be dynamic
- spawn_planet_effect orbit_distance_offset parameter can now read variables and values
- Concept tooltips can now be auto-generated for static modifiers using the modifier: prefix
- Starbase buildings can now use scripted_effect_cooldown and scripted_effect_cooldown_flag fields to display cooldowns for a scripted action
- export_modifier_to_variable can now be used with dynamic modifiers
- Added on_fauna_capture_ended on_action, fired whenever a capture attempt ends no matter the outcome
- Bombardment stances can now use scripted localization with a base scope of fleet
- create_ship effect now supports rarity argument
- Added is_last_acquired_specimen_rarity trigger
- Starbases now support timed modifiers
- Added ship_size_cost_resource_percent trigger
- Added create_smaller_size_creature_in_fleet effect
- Added component_lifesteal_add modifier
- Added has_dna trigger
- Section templates can now use compatible_with_all_ship_sizes instead of ship_size
- Added mutation_slot_add modifier
- create_nebula effect now generates nebula graphics in the galaxy view without needing to reload the current game
- remove_point_of_interest effect now localizes the point of interest's name key if possible
- Added age parameter to create_ship effect
- Added evaluate_scripted_value console command
- Added planet scope to distance_to_capital trigger
- Added is_ship_category trigger
- Added support to inline_scripts in event files
- set_mia = mia_emergency_ftl now does a complete emergency ftl instead of just going mia, displaying the associated vfx
- Added handled_by_event_tooltip parameter to special projects requirements allowing special projects to not being possible to complete manually
- Added country_specimen_selling_cost_mult modifier
- Added num_exhibits trigger
- Added on_exhibit_unlocked on_action
- Added space_fauna_growth_rate_mult modifier
- Added ship_damage_against_boss_mult modifier
- Added months and years parameters to event firing effects like country_event
- Added monthly_loyalty_from_synthetic_subjects and monthly_loyalty_from_organic_subjects modifiers
- Add detailed description to add_relic effect
- Add trigger field to message variables
- Added "has_any_flag" trigger
- Added graphical_culture_fallback to create_ship effect in case graphical_culture targets an invalid GFX culture
- Added is_core_component_set to component_sets, forcing the use of the core component icon in the technology view
- Added on_colony_destroyed_by_bombardment on_action
- Added timed_flag_days_left trigger
Grand Archive Achievements
We have seven new achievements coming in with the Grand Archive Story Pack:
It Belongs in a... oh right Fill any Collection category with active Exhibits.
Void Charmer Build each type of Voidlure in one game, and attract each type of eligible Space Fauna.
Animal Farm Reach 50 Vivarium capacity.
Wormageddon Destroy a Voidworm nest.
That's No Asteroid Capture a Cutholoid with a Gravity Snare.
X Marks the Spot Discover Captain Ness's Treasure Hoard.
Beastmaster Defeat the endgame crisis without building a single artificial military ship.
Developer Q&A Today
Well be holding a developer Q&A on the Official Stellaris Discord a little later today, stop on by and ask us questions!
Next Week
We should have a little bit of early post-release commentary next week, after you have the Grand Archive Story Pack in your [species.GetHandNamePlural]. See you then!
[ 2024-10-24 11:00:13 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone!
The Grand Archive Story Pack is lurking in an asteroid field nearby, and will ambush nearby Science Vessels on October 29th.
Todays dev diary will look at the two new space fauna being added to Stellaris, as well as a peek at the Origins.
Cutholoids
Cutholoids are cunning ambush predators, lurking within the shadowed hollows of desolate asteroids. There, they bide their time, waiting to ensnare unwary vessels that drift too close. A typical first encounter with them may look something like this:
If my science ship was cloaked or had encountered them before, things might have turned out differently. Thankfully, Cutholoids have a very slow digestive process so these ships can be rescued by either capturing the Cutholoid or defeating it in battle.
I dont have Gravity Snares yet, so arm the Nuclear Missiles theres research to be done.
When cloning your own Cutholoids from Hatcheries, these creatures can steal enemy ships by swallowing them whole.
Om nom nom. I wouldnt call it exactly a new car smell. As one would expect, Cutholoids prefer systems with asteroid belts as their preferred habitat.
Voidworms
Voidworms are parasitic creatures that depend on planet-based hosts to reproduce. They deposit spores on inhabited worlds with sufficient biomass, raising their offspring in nests perilously close to Black Holes. Their full lifecycle is present in-game. Nymphs will grow through the Juvenile stage to maturity in Adulthood. Voidworms mate in groups of three, a formation known as a "Troika." These creatures become bound for life in a never-ending mating ritual. However, they require an external biological host to produce offspring. Upon reaching maturity, each Voidworm develops a clutch of cysts within their reproductive systems. These protective cysts contain highly caustic gametes that, when combined with others in a Troika, can be sent to planets with suitable biomass in order to give birth to more of their nymphs. Their hosts do not survive this process.
Whos the cutest little Voidworm Nymph? Why, you are! Yes, you are!
A Juvenile Scout
A fleet of Adult Voidworms that have not yet merged
The Adults that have formed a Troika
A Voidworm Nest Nymphs will travel to and remain in the safety of their nest systems, while Juveniles explore the galaxy looking for suitable worlds for the next generation. Once they find a suitable target, the Adults will form Troikas and go forth to continue the cycle of life. There is evidence that the Voidworms coordinate their bombardments so as to maintain a sustainable amount of viable hosts throughout the galaxy, so theres absolutely nothing to worry about.
The Voidworm Plague
OH COME ON, I LITERALLY JUST SAID THERE WAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT! Oh. Okay, maybe that was a bit premature. If Voidworm populations reach a critical mass in the galaxy, there is a chance that the Voidworm Plague will begin. In this possible mid-game crisis, a mutation causes swarms of Voidworms to enter a reproductive frenzy and begin to bombard planets with abandon. A situation will begin to deal with the crisis, with several possible approaches.
Good old Do Nothing. Let someone else deal with it. Destroying the Voidworm nests will end the plague, or you can find a cure, rendering your population useless to the voidworm life cycle. Completing the situation will remove your planets from their target list.
The Galactic Community
The Galactic Community, naturally, has a few ideas related to these new lifeforms.
Grand Archive Advanced Settings
Since both of these new additions are rather aggressive, the Grand Archive Story Pack adds two new sliders into Advanced Settings to control the prevalence of Voidworms and Cutholoids.
My Science Ship might be safe, but were pretty much guaranteeing that the Voidworms will be a mid-game crisis.
Treasure Hunters
Treasure Hunters is the narrative-focused Origin in this Story Pack. You can expect a lengthy event chain with a mysterious treasure map at the core of it all. Into pirates, swashbuckling (of sorts), and endless riches? Treasure Hunters may be an Origin youre interested in. As its a narrative-focused Origin, Im not going to spoil too much of it ahead of time.
Follow the trail and find riches beyond imagination. The Oviron Lodge are a prescripted empire weve created that uses the Treasure Hunters Origin with the Galactic Curators and Mining Guilds civics.
Primal Calling
The Primal Calling Origin is heavily invested into various fauna related playstyles, from those who want to preserve and protect wildlife to those who prefer them stuffed and mounted as trophies of the hunt.
Primal Calling is one of our most versatile Origins, able to adapt to many different playstyles. After you complete First Contact with a new breed of Space Fauna, youll get to pick a stance for your civilization. Which stances you can pick are influenced by your ethics - for example, the Animal Handler stance requires some element of Pacifism or Xenophilia.
This stance choice has additional effects on your empire - replacing the Wrangler jobs with Ranchers, Animal Handlers, or Trophy Hunters, changing the Wildlife Ranch into Hunting Grounds, or granting various new perks or modifiers. You will also get new events during first contact with space fauna, but caution is advised, as interacting with wildlife is unpredictable and sometimes dangerous. The Graparx Primal Stalkers are our Primal Calling prescripted empire, with the Beastmasters and Citizen Service civics.
Next Week
Next on the list is our preliminary 3.14.1 Circinus release notes. The Archive is almost open! See you next week!
[ 2024-10-17 11:00:11 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Saddle up, everyone! Its time to go a-ranchin!
The Vivarium of the Grand Archive will be accepting genetic material donations as of October 29th.
Today were looking at the capture and domestication of spaceborne fauna, Domestication traditions, and the Beastmaster civics. Lets get to it, this is a long one!
Vivariums and Hatcheries
The Vivarium is essentially a space fauna breeding and observation tank. You can access it under Discoveries as soon as your Vivarium capacity is above zero or the Gravity Snares technology has been researched. The Hatchery module is the space fauna equivalent of Shipyards, and can only be built on a station that has no normal Shipyards. Its unlocked by the Artificial Breeding technology. You can also increase your capacity by building Vivarium Tanks. These increase the growth rate of your docked fauna and are unlocked by the Gravity Snares technology. Building a Grand Archive will give you the biggest boost to Vivarium capacity.
This particular Vivarium isnt terribly interesting yet though. We need to find some friends!
I also wont be able to fit much in this Vivarium. I should build a Grand Archive and some supplemental Tanks.
Capturing Space Fauna
The Gravity Snares technology lets your science ships attempt to capture wild Space Fauna.
Oh yeah, culling and dissecting also happens at the Vivarium. You can launch a Gravity Snare from an adjacent system to attempt to capture wild space fauna that are peacefully Actually, to be honest, those are Crystalline Entities and theres nothing peaceful about them. While I bet theyd make a good addition to our fleet, I said we should find some friends so lets go get some Tiyanki instead. You need to know the basics about the creature before being able to tune the Gravity Snares appropriately, so youll have to finish the first contact process before you can capture them. Theres a cost and a cooldown to capture attempts, and as you unlock various technologies, the capture chance and the number that you can capture at once will increase. Other technologies like Cloaking and Jump Drives will also improve your Gravity Snares - the first increases their capture rate, the second lets them instantly send your new friend to your vivarium instead of taking a little while to transfer them.
Weve added Capture Space Fauna to Science Ship Automation Settings too. The Gravity Snare will fly to the adjacent system and attempt to capture their target. It will generally attempt to capture random breeding age adults if there are any in the target group.
Success! We done caught ourselves a common Tiyanki cow! Since shes cruiser sized, she takes up 4 of our Vivarium capacity, and is very, very lonely. Space fauna inside the Vivarium grow at an accelerated rate. Life is easy when youre being fed by advanced alien ranchers, and the only worry you have is that Cull button.
By the way, Auto-Culling is the most Stellaris button ever created. We could use a few more. Space fauna have growth stages and breeding requirements that vary by species. For example, Tiyanki require a mating partner, Crystals and Amoebas reproduce asexually, and Voidworms Theyre special. Ill talk more about them next week. Tiyanek needs another Tiyanki to breed. We could fly around trying to find them, or we can bring them to us with a Voidlure. Voidlures are a Starbase building (unlocked by completing the Domestication traditions) that attract a specific species of space fauna, and must be built in their favored habitat. (Space Amoebas like Nebulas, Crystalline Entities like Pulsars, and so on.)
Every month theres a chance that any captive fauna that can breed will automatically do so, which will put them on a cooldown before they can reproduce again. This will be visible under Reproductive Status.
My collection of Crystals Culling fauna will provide resources (which varies depending on the species) as well as their genetic material. Having a creatures genetic material allows you to grow clones of them at your Hatchery. Exceptional creatures (marked by their rarity) have increased combat stats and culling rewards. Cloned fauna will always use the highest rarity available, and you can upgrade existing fleets if you acquire
Sorry buddy, I need you for parts. Generally youll clone fauna at the smallest size and theyll grow up over time, but technologies exist that will let you force-grow them to start at a larger growth stage.
Ship tooltips will let you know how long it is until theyll reach their next growth stage. Since larger space fauna take up more Naval Capacity, there are times that you may want to prevent their growth - you can prevent them from exceeding the command limit of a fleet by changing their Growth Stance. You can also block them from exceeding your overall Naval Capacity in policies.
Unnatural Selection
The Controlled Mutations technology lets you make some changes to the fauna you have captured when youre creating clones. This lets you use a variant of the Ship Designer to redesign them and make use of special mutation component slots. Space fauna Mutations are tied to other technologies, but wont clutter the tooltips unless you have Controlled Mutations.
Im pretty sure that Space Amoeba needs LASER EYES. Mutations can be broadly classified as Offensive, Defensive, or Special, but you can freely use those slots however you want to customize your Fauna. (Barring restrictions on the components themselves, like how you can still only have one Cloaking mutation.) You can alter their behavior (in a way similar to combat computers) by installing neurochips. The different space fauna have different resource costs and upkeeps, and those upkeep costs are reduced if theyre in their preferred habitat. You can (and probably should) also create designs for what your Fauna will grow into if you allow them to. You can change the current growth stage by clicking on the Pick Creature Size button.
Domestication Traditions and Beastmasters
The Domestication Traditions can be taken once you have the Artificial Breeding technology. Its focused, as one might expect, on improving your space fauna.
The Metabolic Regulation policy allows you to increase fauna growth rate and upkeep, or freeze their growth but reduce upkeep. As with the Galactic Curator civics, if you want to go all-in on space beasties, you can take one of the Beastmaster civics. These civics dramatically increase the upkeep of artificial ships, but give you everything youll need to fully embrace the rancher life.
Beastmasters replace their Hatcheries and Shipyards with dual-use Beastports. These can clone space fauna like a Hatchery but also have rudimentary shipbuilding capabilities and are able to build civilian vessels, so you wont need to keep a shipyard around just for your colony, construction, and science ships.
A Note on Space Fauna and Bio-Ships
While this space fauna breeding system scratches a lot of the bio-ship itch, we dont consider them exactly the same systems. These are more like vicious mutated pets than meat-ships you fly around in. Expect that one day in the future well explore that idea.
Next Week
Next week well be examining the new lifeforms in the galaxy and the two new origins. See you then!
[ 2024-10-10 11:00:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello, everyone!
The Grand Archive opens its doors on October 29th.
Today we take a look at the Grand Archive structure itself, specimen collection and display mechanics, and then examine the new Archivism tradition tree.
What is a Grand Archive?
The Grand Archive is the cultural center for your empire, a place to house and display the story of your people through the greatest specimens of interest that you have collected over the years. This one-stage structure can be built over any colony with 25 or more pops, and will not block other improvements such as Orbital Rings. We expect that most empires will want to build them over their capital world, to keep their treasures close. The Galactic Archivism technology required for building a Grand Archive can appear as a tier 2 society tech, and as such building a Grand Archive does not require high tier technologies such as Mega-Engineering. Shortly after you have discovered your first Specimen worthy of display, you have the chance to invest in the concept of a Grand Archive - if you pass on this opportunity, it can show up later as normal in your Society research options.
A collection that embraces the whole galaxy allows you to consider the whole galaxy. That is what an institution such as the Grand Archive is for. Grand Archives can be built by any empire, including genocidal empires like Fanatic Purifiers, even if they have a more proactive stand on turning their neighbors into historical interests earlier than one would otherwise expect.
A closer look at the Grand Archive. The color scheme matches your empire flag and chosen shipset.
Specimen Collection and Display
An Archive with nothing to display within it is simply a building. (And an expensive one at that.) Luckily, fascinating moments worth remembering occur all the time in Stellaris, so the Grand Archive Story Pack has added 151 unique Specimens to events, archaeology sites, and other content from across the base game and the new content added in the Story Pack. The team has gone through all of the other Stellaris content as well, giving us a final total of over 240 Specimens to collect, study, and appreciate. (Ancient Relics, Distant Stars, and Astral Planes, as our most exploration-focused releases, benefited the most from this pass.) The Specimen Collection system requires the Grand Archive Story Pack. A symbol is shown when you have acquired a Specimen of interest - occasionally these are tied to a specific choice in an event, while other times they may be linked to your Origin or actions that you have taken. Newly acquired Specimens appear in a toast to give you a quick look at what youve found.
Give me an archive, and I will fill it.
Sometimes Specimens will instead find you. The Discoveries tab now allows you to explore your collection and choose which Specimens to have on display. Displaying Specimens has an initial cost (which increases with the number of Specimens of that category that you have on display) as well as ongoing upkeep (which is affected by Empire Size). Each Specimen has its own effects while on display - some produce a small amount of resources, while others might grant anything from Energy from Jobs to Cloned Fauna Growth Speed. Each Specimen also has expanded lore, and keeps track of where and when you acquired it in the first place.
A toggle in the top right of the Specimen window lets you set whether or not you want to automatically put any new Specimens you acquire directly on display. You can also set up how you want to handle your overflow if not everything can be on display at once. You can have up to nine Specimens on display in each category - Aesthetic Wonders, Galactic History, and Xeno Geology.
How Else Can I Get Specimens?
Earlier I recommended building your Grand Archive close to the protected heart of your Empire. Itd be a terrible shame if something were to happen to it, after all.
The Grand Archive is great for seeing how excellent we were at stealing things The vile Yarrowreacheran Consensus stole three of my precious Specimens! Thankfully the rest of them are still safe, waiting for me to rebuild the Grand Archive and put them back on display.
Hey, that was mine! I even wrote my name on it! On the bright side, after spending some time working on our relations, theyre happy to trade it back to me.
You can also dig through your pile of Minor Artifacts to see if theres anything worthwhile in there that got missed when you first acquired them.
Artifact Analysis can be performed up to five times, and has an increasing cost every time you use it.
Archivism Traditions and the Galactic Curator Civics
Once youve researched Galactic Archivism, the Archivism traditions become available. Empty shelves do not make for a wondrous attraction, but focusing on Archivism can help fill them up nicely.
Frontier Archaeology is my favorite. Exhibition Specialization lets you focus your Archives output to one of the three Specimen categories, reducing the other two, and the Agenda associated with Archivism increases the chance of finding Archaeology Sites and increases Specimen Output.
Genocidal empires, having less use for Diplomatic Weight than many other Empires, replace Expert Negotiation with Galactic Reaping.
Lets make (you) history. If youre really interested in having the best Grand Archive possible, there are the Galactic Curator civics. These civilizations all begin with Galactic Archivism as a guaranteed research option, one common Specimen of each category, and get a discount when dealing with the Curator Order. They also gain a 25% discount when actually building a Grand Archive, and have an increased chance to discover anomalies, but also tend to overwork their bureaucrats, reducing their effectiveness by a small amount. Nothing delights them more than a new find, though - Specimen discoveries and completion of Archaeology Sites grant them a Unity bonus.
The Curator Order
The Curator Order is dedicated to the protection of knowledge, and you can impress them with your collection should you share similar interests.
If your collection is substantial enough to attract their attention, you could ask them for various things - whether it be specialized museum plans, or help setting up cultural enrichment programs. Naturally, theyll want to be compensated for their help.
Impress them enough, and theyll even be willing to allow you to give them a generous donation in exchange for the honor of selecting a relic to care for from their collection.
There are fifteen relics being added to the Curators in the Grand Archive Story Pack, five associated with each of the three Specimen categories.
Meanwhile A Little Something From the Custodians
The game setup screen has gotten a bit cumbersome over the years, with a huge number of options. Were revisiting this screen in 3.14 Circinus to make things a little bit more understandable. Pictures speak louder than words, so:
No more asking which shape was Starburst again?
Next Week
Next week well be going over the care and feeding of Tiyanki, the proper use of Gravity Snares and a Vivarium, and take a look at the Domestication traditions and Beastmasters civics. See you then! Pre-purchase Stellaris: Grand Archive alone or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08!
[ 2024-10-03 11:00:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
by PDX-Loke
Dear Stellaris Fans,
We've created another small patch for you, aiming to address a couple of noteworthy issues coming out of last week.
3.13.2 is available for download now.
3.13.2 Patch Notes
Bugfix
- Fixed the issue where Gestalt Empire industrial districts only provided 1 Fabricator job instead of 2.
- Fixed the issue where the tooltip of a Cosmic Storm incorrectly stated 0 days remaining.
- Triggered species modifiers will now show in trait tooltips even when there are no regular modifiers.
- Fixed crash in species creation when trait for planet class does not exist.
- Fixed crash in espionage tooltip on multiplayer resync.
[ 2024-10-01 08:00:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
Im pleased to announce that the third Episode of Stellaris: Season 08, the Grand Archive Story Pack, will be released alongside the Stellaris 3.14 Circinus update on Tuesday, October 29th, 2024. This release completes the Stellaris: Season 08 Expansion Pass.
[previewyoutube=LAz5nDXjbEI;full][/previewyoutube]
"The Grand Archive preserves and exhibits the most valuable artifacts we have collected throughout the galaxy..."
The galaxy is vast and filled with artifacts! Grand Archive adds 151 specimens to the base game, but we have revisited all of the content ever created for Stellaris to add more. The overall total is over 240 unique specimens! Collect them all and display the prize pieces in your own Grand Archive.
This is no mere rock collection.
Reserved within is also a dedicated Vivarium for live Space Fauna containment and observation.
Contained within your Grand Archive, the Vivarium is a controlled environment where wild space fauna can be cared for and studied. Space fauna in captivity will grow faster and breed more easily than in the wild. These creatures can then be dissected for research, resources, or their genetic material. With the development of the Controlled Mutations technology, Space Fauna can be customized to form a fleet which will grow and become stronger over time.
These non-lethal projectiles can safely capture and transport Space Fauna to our Vivarium, where they can continue to reproduce new specimens of their kind.
The void is full of life.
Two new forms of Space Fauna are coming in the Grand Archive Story Pack. Cutholoids are ambush predators that lurk within asteroid belts, waiting for prey.
Culling and dissecting these creatures will allow the harvesting of their Genetic Material for cloning purposes as well as other resources. Voidworms are a more active parasitic threat with a full life cycle that can grow into a mid-game Crisis if their populations are left to breed.
"If this variant species were allowed to spread unchecked, it could upset the balance of the galactic ecosystem entirely."
With the mysteries of the galaxy at our doorstep, there is everything left to learn.
The Grand Archive Story Pack comes with two Civics, two Origins, and two new Tradition trees, each focusing on either different aspects of coexistence with Alien Fauna or the hunt for the hidden mysteries and treasures of the universe.
The Corporate, Hive Mind, or Machine Intelligence versions of these Civics require access to their Authorities - MegaCorp, Utopia, and either Synthetic Dawn or The Machine Age, respectively.
Stellaris: Grand Archive includes:
- Space Fauna capture, breeding, and modification systems
- 151 Specimens to collect and display across events from Grand Archive and the base game
- Over 240 Specimens total including those distributed across other Stellaris content
- 15 new Relics
- Two new Tradition trees
- Archivism
- Domestication
- Two new Origins
- Primal Calling
- Treasure Hunters
- Two new Civics
- Beastmasters
- Galactic Curators
- Two new forms of spaceborne life
- Cutholoids
- Voidworms
- A new possible mid-game crisis - the Voidworm Plague
- Three new music tracks
- Events, Anomalies, Archaeology Sites, Technologies, Galactic community resolutions, and more!
Dev Diary Schedule
- Sept 26 - Announcing Grand Archive
- Oct 3 - Building a Grand Archive and Displaying Your Collection
- Oct 10 - The Care and Feeding of Tiyanki
- Oct 17 - New Life in the Galaxy
- Oct 24 - 3.14 Circinus Preliminary Release Notes
Pre-purchase Stellaris: Grand Archive alone or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2863080/Stellaris_Grand_Archive/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2863190/Stellaris_Season_08__Expansion_Pass/
[ 2024-09-26 16:05:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Dear Stellaris Fans,
The team has produced a bugfix and balance patch following our 3.13 + Cosmic Storms release September 10th.
3.13.1 is now available for download. Please find the patch notes below, identical to what was posted earlier by Eladrin.
3.13.1 Patch Notes
Balance
- Added free pop to first blocker for planetscapers
- Decreased Storm Creation costs and buffed Astrometeorology job
- Stormriders and Subterranean get less devastation from storms
- Scientist governors now also reduce devastation from storms
- The Nexus Storm of 2211 will no longer happen. (Nexus Storms have been removed from the Early Game storm pool.)
- A Fallen Empire cannot ask for a scientist that is exploring an Astral Rift
- Added traits to hired marauder leaders
- Added victory score to the two new precursor relics
- All starting council positions are also filled without Galactic Paragons
- Fixed a spelling error in the event Stormbound Sighted
- Fixed empire designs with different randomized names sometimes preventing each other from spawning in galaxy generation.
- Fixed machine name lists using ruler names for all non-envoy leaders.
- Fixed randomly generated rulers not using regnal names when they should.
- Fixed the concept tooltip for Storm Riders in the Storm Chasers origin tooltip
- Fixed the handling of scientist heirs in the Stormfall event Cosmic Shapes
- Fixes to Unique planets from Cosmic Storms:
- Unique planets from Cosmic Storms can no longer spawn in the starting cluster of an empire
- Reduced the size of the unique planets from Cosmic Storms
- Fixing Rick the Cube tooltip in the additional content being misleading
- Payload Padding technology now properly apply its effects
- Removed Double Jobs for Gestalts on Ecumenopolis
- Solar storm orbital resource modifiers now applying correctly
- The Crimson Crawlers: Cooked Consumption planet modifier now has a yellow border
- The Storm Touched trait is made available for individual machines
- The Strip Mine Planet decision is only allowed once per planet
- adAkkaria chain actually ends now when its over
- Added a job weight to Storm Dancers so that pops actually want to work the job
- Allow proper switching between corporate and non corporate planetscapers civic
- Fixed descriptions for the special projects Stabilize the Collision and Harmonize the Collision
- Fixed the secrets of the new precursors
- Fixing resetlement cost modifiers not being capped by minimum economic modifier mult define
- Made militarist empires with imperialist factions less likely to become vassals
- Made the Irradiated Wasteland planet modifier produce +10% physics research
- Planetscapers on Ocean Paradise will now get their blockers as promised
- Removed the mention of sector automation from the planet designation tooltip
- Saturated Filters can now be removed by the one who conquered the planet
- Tempest Invocator storm placement will now be canceled if you lose the selected Scientist.
- The Tempest Invocator's range is now centered on the selected Scientist's location.
- Voidforged may not access Geo-Engineering Inc anymore
- Fix to Initiate Storm replacing Sustain Storm if you have the Galactic Weather Control Ascension Perk
- Several Tempest Invocator fixes
- Changed cosmic storm spawn cooldown scale to prevent CTD
- Fixed CTD in fleet manager when reinforcing fleets with ships without fleet size
- Fixed CTD when in-game music player has no permission to write to playlist file
- Added regnal_second_names_female and regnal_second_names_male to namelists.
- Added use_regnal_name to effects that create leaders.
- Fixed randomly generated empires in static galaxies having missing data if the player empire is randomly generated.
- Removed ruler_names from namelists and added regnal_full_names. When generating regnal names, non-regnal full names will no longer be used if a regnal name is available, but if no regnal name is available, normal names will be used.
[ 2024-09-24 08:00:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
Todays dev diary is going to be a relatively short one. The 3.13.1 Vela patch is planned for next Tuesday, September 24th, and we have a set of preliminary release notes for you to look over.
The biggest change is probably the removal of Nexus storms from the early game pool.
The Vela cycle will be a very short one, since the 3.14 Circinus update and Grand Archive is already bearing down on us.
Preliminary Release Notes
On to the release notes!
3.13.1 Vela Preliminary Release Notes
Balance
- Added free pop to first blocker for planetscapers
- Decreased Storm Creation costs and buffed Astrometeorology job
- Stormriders and Subterranean get less devastation from storms
- Scientist governors now also reduce devastation from storms
- The Nexus Storm of 2211 will no longer happen. (Nexus Storms have been removed from the Early Game storm pool.)
- A Fallen Empire cannot ask for a scientist that is exploring an Astral Rift
- Added traits to hired marauder leaders
- Added victory score to the two new precursor relics
- All starting council positions are also filled without Galactic Paragons
- Fixed a spelling error in the event Stormbound Sighted
- Fixed empire designs with different randomized names sometimes preventing each other from spawning in galaxy generation.
- Fixed machine name lists using ruler names for all non-envoy leaders.
- Fixed randomly generated rulers not using regnal names when they should.
- Fixed the concept tooltip for Storm Riders in the Storm Chasers origin tooltip
- Fixed the handling of scientist heirs in the Stormfall event Cosmic Shapes
- Fixes to Unique planets from Cosmic Storms:
- Unique planets from Cosmic Storms can no longer spawn in the starting cluster of an empire
- Reduced the size of the unique planets from Cosmic Storms
- Fixing Rick the Cube tooltip in the additional content being misleading
- Payload Padding technology now properly apply its effects
- Removed Double Jobs for Gestalts on Ecumenopolis
- Solar storm orbital resource modifiers now applying correctly
- The Crimson Crawlers: Cooked Consumption planet modifier now has a yellow border
- The Storm Touched trait is made available for individual machines
- The Strip Mine Planet decision is only allowed once per planet
- adAkkaria chain actually ends now when its over
- Added a job weight to Storm Dancers so that pops actually want to work the job
- Allow proper switching between corporate and non corporate planetscapers civic
- Fixed descriptions for the special projects Stabilize the Collision and Harmonize the Collision
- Fixed the secrets of the new precursors
- Fixing resetlement cost modifiers not being capped by minimum economic modifier mult define
- Made militarist empires with imperialist factions less likely to become vassals
- Made the Irradiated Wasteland planet modifier produce +10% physics research
- Planetscapers on Ocean Paradise will now get their blockers as promised
- Removed the mention of sector automation from the planet designation tooltip
- Saturated Filters can now be removed by the one who conquered the planet
- Tempest Invocator storm placement will now be canceled if you lose the selected Scientist.
- The Tempest Invocator's range is now centered on the selected Scientist's location.
- Voidforged may not access Geo-Engineering Inc anymore
- Changed cosmic storm spawn cooldown scale to prevent CTD
- Fixed CTD in fleet manager when reinforcing fleets with ships without fleet size
- Fixed CTD when in-game music player has no permission to write to playlist file
- Added regnal_second_names_female and regnal_second_names_male to namelists.
- Added use_regnal_name to effects that create leaders.
- Fixed randomly generated empires in static galaxies having missing data if the player empire is randomly generated.
- Removed ruler_names from namelists and added regnal_full_names. When generating regnal names, non-regnal full names will no longer be used if a regnal name is available, but if no regnal name is available, normal names will be used.
Next Week
Next weeks dev diary will be at 18:00 instead of 13:00, and will have more new stuff than this one. :D See you then!
[ 2024-09-19 11:00:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone,
Gruntsatwork here, putting on my writing hat for today only, while Eladrin is on sick leave. While Dev Diaries are the domain of the Game Directors, we wanted to keep in close contact shortly after a release.
The Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion released 2 days ago and we have been collecting your feedback on our forums and every other form of social media we could find.
We will continue to do so over the next few days, working on fixes and improvements to Cosmic Storms, for example:
Individualist Machines will get access to the Storm Touched trait so that they can use the Storm Devotion civic.
Planetscapers will get a deposit on game start to clear for +1 Pop.
There are also a few balance considerations we are making that we figured would be nice to mention.
Id like to get off Mr. Nexus Storms Wild Ride!
We teased them before as being incredibly destructive and as it turns out, they are! What we didnt intend was for them to appear as often and as early as they do. Their chance to appear is significantly smaller than most other storms. Unfortunately, with the number of players we have, even a small chance means a sizable number of you are getting messed up and with no chance of defending yourself to boot. We are planning to adjust Nexus Storms in the following way:
- No Nexus Storms in the early game (Mid-game and forward only).
- We will increase their speed of traversal, exact number pending, to make sure they remain destructive but that you can take action once they have passed. They will still bring you close to 100% devastation on any given planet but they wont then sit on the planet and keep it at 100% forever.
A Storm is a Trial. It is Change. It is Tribulation. It is the Dawning of a New Age and the End of Yours.
While we are quite happy with the effect of all the other storms, we are seeing your reports about some storms staying in the same space for most of their duration or in fact, long over their duration, stuck at 0 for years on end. Simply put, a storm shouldnt stay in the same place for years. They are supposed to move on unless a player intervenes. We are investigating this issue and hope to have a solution for you as soon as possible.
You call that a storm? Thats barely a stiff breeze!
Some of you have called out the loss of impact storms experience once everyone has the storm protection techs in place. The original purpose of keeping those protections strong was relatively simple - to ensure that by the time you reach the end-game, you can continue with your strategies and plans. It is one thing to lose a 15 minute campaign, it is another to lose a 30 hour campaign because your build just got invalidated. We are looking into adjusting at the very least the ship protections, as we think there is some potential for smart plays if those protections werent quite as potent as they currently are.
Next Week
Next week, Eladrin will be back, fingers crossed, to regale you with new information that mere Game Designers are not privy to. See you then!
[ 2024-09-12 11:19:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion is now available as the second installment of Stellaris: Season 08! [previewyoutube=mpf0Jh0bb2o;full][/previewyoutube] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2863060/Stellaris_Cosmic_Storms/ In Cosmic Storms, the skies teem with eight new storm types filled with peril and promise. From Electric Storms harnessing the power of lightning to the formidable Nexus Storm, a galactic tempest of unparalleled magnitude, these natural phenomena challenge you to make skillful choices to steer your empire safely and profitably through the chaos. Experience the majesty and menace of these cosmic forces through beautifully rendered art and immersive audio. Navigate the tempest, harness its power, and shape your empires destiny. The storms are coming. Are you prepared? The Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion contains:
- 8 New Space Storms
- Storm Chasers Origin
- 3 New Civics
- Planetscapers
- Astrometeorology
- Storm Devotion
- Galactic Weather Control Ascension Perk
- Weather Forecasting Map Mode
- Two new Precursor narratives, with two new Relics
- Events, Anomalies, and Archaeology Sites
- Storm-related technologies, Edicts, and Galactic community resolutions
How Storms Work
Storms will begin to spawn randomly a few years after the game starts. Spawning storms has a cooldown, and there is a limit to how many storms can spawn in a galaxy in the early, mid, and late game. These limits can be configured during galaxy setup. Storms spawned by players, events, and other mechanics will spawn regardless of galaxy settings. When storms spawn, they will choose a target destination and dissipate after the time it would take to reach the destination has passed.
Storm Chasers Origin
Storm Chasers empires have always sought out the extremes. Born in a world ravaged by relentless storms, they are daredevils and thrill seekers who push themselves to the limit and beyond. They start with access to the Storm Manipulation Technology and within a unique system with the correct conditions to unleash a space storm. Storm Chasers also get bonuses when a storm is active in their space and increased chances for storms to spawn and for cosmic storm technologies. Additionally, their leaders get the unique Storm Rider trait, whose effects increase when the leader is in an active space storm.
Planetscapers Civic
This society carefully crafted a perfect balance on their homeworld and is ready to tend even the most inhospitable environments. They gain maluses to resources, pop growth, and pop upkeep for each natural blocker on their worlds, but they gain significant bonuses to those things once the blockers on the planet are cleared. Planetscapers also gain access to the Cultivated Worldscaping planetary decision, which increases a planets maximum districts, gives +75% resource districts, and adds cosmic storm protection, but decreases the habitability.
Astrometeorology Civic
Astrometeorologists focus on the science behind the cosmic storms. Starting with an Astrometeorology Observatory on their homeworld, this planet-unique structure slightly emphasizes physics research. It receives significant bonuses to its job output if theres a storm or other environmental effect active in the system, with additional science bonuses added from the Prime Forecaster council position.
Storm Devotion Civic
Using a unique combination of ritual and technology, empires with the Storm Devotion civic start with the ability to build the Storm Summoning Center, whose Storm Dancers increase the system's attractiveness to space storms while also producing unity and amenities. Their pops also gain the Storm Touched trait, which increases job output and decreases amenities usage while a space storm is active in the system.
Galactic Weather Control Ascension Perk
The Galactic Weather Control Ascension Perk requires the Advanced Storm Manipulation technology and one other ascension perk to be chosen. This ascension perk gives your science ships the ability to - with an investment in resources - spawn a storm in the system its in.
New Precursors
The adAkkaria Convention of Benevolence and The Inetian Traders are two new precursors coming in Cosmic Storms. Both are steeped in Storm Lore, with several archaeology sites and special projects to progress through as you uncover their secrets, giving you the opportunity to dig deeper into what sorts of empires would meddle with storms so devastating they are notable on the cosmic scale. Get Cosmic Storms today, or as part of Stellaris: Season 08! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2863060/Stellaris_Cosmic_Storms/
3.13 Vela Free Update
Alongside the customary bug fixes and improvements, the Custodian team has improved a few of the older features in the game. The Custodian team is a team of developers who are focused on improving older content in the game, as well as adding quality-of-life features and other improvements.
Changes to Planetary Resource Deposits
As part of our Custodian Update for the 3.13 Vela patch, weve made some changes to how planetary deposits for rare resources are handled. The deposits that previously gave access to Crystal Mines, Gas Extraction Wells, and Mote Harvesting Traps buildings now instead increase the number of mining districts available on the planet and, after researching the technology to extract the relevant resource, add a small amount of resource production to miners on that planet. Additionally, weve buffed the Betharian Power Plant to increase the energy produced by Technician Jobs.
Penal Colonies & Thrall Worlds
Much like how Resort Worlds were updated earlier this year, we have taken the time to revisit both Penal Colonies and Thrall Worlds. Penal Colonies now reduce crime across your empire while giving access to unique Prison Industrial Districts. These allow you to employ worker strata pops to produce alloys and consumer goods. Thrall Worlds, on the other hand, have taken inspiration from the countless examples across science fiction of elite battle thrall armies and give access to the Battle Thrall District. Armies trained on a Thrall World will start with additional XP, and Battle Thrall jobs will increase the damage your armies do. The Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion and the free 3.13 Vela update are available now!
[ 2024-09-10 16:07:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
The Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion is nearly here, so today weve got preliminary release notes and some of the Custodian changes.
Cosmic Storms is going to be released next Tuesday, on September 10th.
Changes to Planetary Resource Deposits
As part of the Custodian changes in 3.13 Vela, weve made some changes to how some planetary deposits for rare resources are handled. The deposits that previously gave access to Crystal Mines, Gas Extraction Wells and Mote Harvesting Traps buildings, now instead increase the number of mining districts available on the planet and, after researching the technology to extract the relevant resource, add a small amount of resource production to miners on that planet.
Additionally, weve buffed the Betharian Power Plant to increase the energy produced by Technician Jobs.
Penal Colonies & Thrall Worlds
Much like how Resort Worlds were updated earlier this year, we have taken the time to revisit both Penal Colonies and Thrall worlds. Penal Colonies now both reduce crime across your empire while giving access to unique Prison Industrial Districts. These allow you to employ worker strata pops to produce alloys and consumer goods.
Thrall Worlds on the other hand have taken inspiration from the countless examples across science fiction of elite battle thrall armies and give access to the Battle Thrall District. Armies trained on a Thrall World will start with additional XP and Battle Thrall jobs will increase the damage your armies do.
Preliminary Release Notes
And now, on to the release notes.
Cosmic Storms Expansion Features
- Eight dynamic new storm types:
- Electric, Particle, Gravity, Magnetic, Radiant, Stardust, Shroud, and Nexus storms
- New Origin: Storm Chasers
- Three new Civics
- Astrometeorology
- Planetscapers
- Storm Devotion
- New Ascension Perk: Galactic Weather Control
- Weather Forecast Map Mode
- Two new Precursors
- The adAkkaria Convention of Benevolence
- The Inetian Traders
- New Technologies and Buildings
- New Planetary Deposits, Modifiers and Anomalies following Storm Aftermaths
- New GalCom Resolutions and Edicts
- New Events and Anomalies
3.13.0 Patch
Improvements
- Update to Thrall Worlds, adding two new slave-focused districts, Battle Thrall Jobs, and improvements to tooltips and theme
- Update to Prison Worlds - adding two new penal-focused districts, five new jobs, and improvements to tooltips and theme
- Xenophobe ethics now swaps to providing pop assembly when appropriate
- The location of empire-scope special projects will move to the new capital if the empires capital changes
- Gestalt Empires are now allowed to decide on their land appropriation policy, and are no longer forced to populate every planet
- Corvee System now gives -15% resettlement cost for Individualist Machines
- Standardized volume of all advisor VO lines
- War allies will be able to use wormholes, hyper relays, and gateways in each other's territory even if their borders are closed
- Removed the galaxy-wide Space Storm introduced in 2.7 Wells
- Updated the megastructure selection UI
- Improved tooltips in the megastructure selection UI
- When selecting a location for Arc Furnace stage 1, the tooltip shows the number of deposit sites in the system
- When selecting a location for a Habitat Central Complex, the tooltip shows orbital capacities in the system
- Fixed tooltip not showing when selecting a location to build a megastructure
- Map icons in galaxy and system view no longer truncate the resource amount when between 0 and 1
- The tooltip that mentions if a civic is locked is now red instead of orange
- Enabled mouse scrolling in the research completed window
- Extended the minimum width of the "Veteran Level Reached!" window in case too few options are available to choose from
- Fixed some overlapping UI in the Empire Creation screens
- Fixed position of "Cross-platform play" checkbox on MS Store
- Updated the Map Modes UI
- The Players map mode is no longer available when observing in singleplayer
- The Players and Trade Routes map mode buttons are now disabled instead of hidden when they're unavailable
- Fixed Players mapmode not graying out AI empires in some cases
- The Unions map mode is now a regular map mode instead of a toggle
- Fixed the placeholder icon for the diplomatic message to request to join the galactic imperium
- Made AI capable of building planetary shields
- The Chthonian Planet, Extensive Moon System and Carbon World modifiers will now only add their mineral deposits to the planet the first time they are surveyed instead of every time they are surveyed
- Corrected tooltip and loyalty effects for the Ministry of Acquisition
- Individualistic Machine empires should no longer get an event intended for Organics
- Fixed the Nanite Intercessor being present in ship previews in the empire creator
- Fixed cyberpunk advisor lines for council agenda ready and council agenda available notifications
- Fixed fleets' cloaking strength sometimes not updating when ships' cloaking strength changes due to modifiers
- Fixed juggernauts not showing the fleet bombardment button
- Election auto pausing and unpausing now functions like other event pop ups
- Removed the double modifiers for Defense platforms from Ancient Shield Overcharger
- Removed serviles from the can_think trigger due to unintended knock on effects
- If an arc furnace is built around a potential Contingency Hub, when the planet becomes their hub, the arc furnace is correctly destroyed
- Fixed uncovered deposits not being removed when an arc furnace is destroyed
- Colossus special project will reward the original country that started the project instead of the current planet owner
- Leaders who are researching an anomaly or project or on cooldown can be assigned to the council
- Roccan Resistance and Free Peoples of the Fall genders changed from indeterminate to default
- The species of planetary defense armies will get updated after species modification
- AI empires will select ethics required by their origin
- All starbase types now explode when destroyed instead of blinking out of existence
- Fixed numerous instances, such as when establishing an embassy, where the game would load the countries home planet instead of their capital
- Game should no longer crash when an empire you had a trade deal with is destroyed during a war
- Various Out Of Sync fixes
- War allies will be able to use each wormholes in each other's territory even if their borders are closed
- Implemented "on_storm_encountered" on_action when a country is affected for the first time by a new storm
- Added on_storm_entered_system on-action
- Added on_storm_left_system on-action, for when a cosmic storm has left a solar system
- Added support for generate_random_name = yes to the spawn_planet effect
- Refactored Arcology industrial districts into Inline Scripts
- Replaced all "has_authority" checks with scripted triggers making it easier to add new authorities
- Added the awakening_not_allowed country flag that blocks fallen empires from awakening
- Added the keep_deposit_on_terraform deposit flag to make sure deposits don't go missing when you terraform
- Added "visible" trigger to map modes
- Added "tutorial" member to map modes
- Added is_infertile trigger
- Added support for displaying comma and period as hotkeys in button tooltips
- Added planet_crime_floor_add modifier that sets a minimum level of crime on a planet
- Added fail trigger for special projects + documentation
- Added 'mod_name_affix' to create_species effect
- Added num_asteroid_belts trigger to check the number of asteroids in a system
- Added game rules for founder_species_uses_growth_speed, founder_species_uses_organic_assembly and founder_species_uses_assembly
- Added game rule to force visibility on fleets for a specific system
Next Week
With the release planned for next Tuesday, our next expected dev diary will be on September 19th. See you then! Pre-purchase Stellaris: Cosmic Storms alone or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08!
[ 2024-09-05 11:00:14 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone,
Today, well review the Origin and Civics of the Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion and provide some information about the new Precursors (without spoiling everything!)
Cosmic Storms is going to be released on September 10th.
Passing it over to @PDX_Ferry and @Gruntsatwork to take over from here.
Storm Chasers
Dont make unnecessary journeys, dont take risks on treacherous roads, and dont swim in the sea! This is PDX_Ferry, braving the winds to deliver you a report on the new "Storm Chasers" Origin. For those who thrive on danger and yearn for the thrill of the unknown, this Origin was designed with you in mind. Start your game as a civilization that has always sought out the extremes. Born on a world ravaged by relentless storms, the Storm Chasers are daredevils and thrill seekers who push themselves to the limits and beyond. Theyve grown strong and daring, turning their chaotic environment into a crucible of innovation and tenacity. But when every storm has been weathered, and every mountain has been climbed, where does an enterprising thrill-seeker turn next? The answer, of course, is the stars.
The screenshot above was taken from the new pre-scripted empire Yatunan Radicals, which starts with the Origin and a couple of storm-related Civics. While not driven to outmatch others in acts of bravery, hive minds, and machine intelligences may also want to test themselves with this Origin. From the very beginning, your empire will be propelled into the thick of the DLCs content, facing down cosmic phenomena that would make even the most seasoned explorers hesitate. Yet, with great risk comes the potential for great reward.
This Origin is designed to quickly get you into the think of the DLC's action. At game start, your Empire is thrown into the Stormfall situation:
With early access to storm manipulation technology and by starting in a system with unique conditions to kickstart a storm, the Storm Chasers have the first opportunity to unleash a storm. From there, the Origin's storyline includes a gauntlet of Challenges, and the chance to summon "the Big One." What's left of your civilization in the aftermath rests entirely in your hands (or tentacles!) So be warned this is not a path for the faint-hearted. The thrills your people have chased for centuries pale in comparison to the cosmic tempests that await you in the void. Will you harness these forces and lead your empire to greatness, or will you burn out in a blaze of glory? The choice, as always, is yours. Do You Know What Happens to a Blorg When Its Hit by Lightning? Hello there xeno-freshmen, could we interest you in Astrometeorology 101? As the first of the three new civics coming in Cosmic Storms, Astrometeorology focuses on the science behind the storms. It grants you a new building, the Astrometeorology Observatory, which in turn gives you Astrometeorologist jobs.
You can build one of those fine institutes per planet and their jobs are similar enough to normal researchers with a slight focus on physics. However, their true potential shows itself only when the Observatory can behold a storm from up close. In addition, the council position further boosts the job output by up to 20%. What, you prefer something more societal? Maybe have a look at our second new civic then.
The spiritualistic mirror to Astrometeorology, Storm Devotion gives you access to the Storm Summoning Theater, with its Storm Dancer jobs.
In addition, those devoted to Storms also bear this mark as a new species trait called Storm Touched, which further boost all pops while inside of a storm. As if that werent enough, the Council Position for Storm Devotion reduces the upkeep of all Storm Buildings.
Storms this, Storms that, is there anything for people whod rather not see the word Storm plastered over all of their buildings? Absolutely, lets talk about Planetscapers. Planetscapers are the complete opposite of Environmentalists. They want every planetary blocker gone, natural accidents have no place in their carefully planned garden utopias.
You yearn to make all these rugged, overgrown planets into something beautiful and pristine. For some, Mastery of Nature is enough, but your need requires something more drastic, something more impressive.
As you expand, every world with natural blockers that you colonize will allow you to quickly unlock more ways to remove those eyesores.
IT IS A CELEBRATION | PAIN | RAGE | GRIEF | FEAR
You get a Precursor and you get a precursor, everyone gets a precursor! We have two new Precursors for you all to experience. The adAkkaria Convention of Benevolence and The Inetian Traders, both steeped in Storm Lore, with several archaeology sites and special projects to progress through as you uncover their secrets, diggin deeper into what sorts of empires would meddle with storms so devastating they are notable on the cosmic scale. So without giving out too many spoilers, from their names at least you know they were benevolent people and peaceful traders with little chance for tragedy.
Next Week
Next week well have the preliminary release notes for the 3.13 Vela update and Cosmic Storms! Its almost here! See you then! Pre-purchase Stellaris: Cosmic Storms alone or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08!
[ 2024-08-29 11:00:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone,
The Cosmic Storms Mechanical Expansion is going to make planetfall on September 10th. Thats not that far away, so today well be going over the Storm mechanics and their aftermath effects.
Passing it over to Gruntsatwork to take over from here.
How Do Storms Spawn?
Hello everyone, without much preamble, lets dive right into the new storm mechanics.
- Storms will randomly start to spawn a few years after gamestart.
- Each Storm triggers a cooldown until the next natural storm can spawn (adjustable in Game Settings)
- There is a limit to how many storms can spawn naturally in the early, mid and late-game (adjustable in Game Settings)
- Those limits only apply to randomly spawned storms. Storms created by players, by event or mechanic, will always spawn regardless of any other settings
- Upon being spawned, they will have a target system towards which they will move, dissipating upon reaching that goal or timing out
What Do They Do?
While the storms through the galaxy, they will have an effect on all systems within their influence. All Storms share 2 general effects:
- Reduced chance for Emergency FTL jumps
- +0.2 monthly devastation
While the first 6 storms are rather orthodox in their effects, the Shroud and Nexus storms are a bit special. Shroud storms have a chance to change the systems within their influence immediately upon coming into contact, this can range from colonies, habitable and inhabitable planets, up to stars. Nexus storms are special. They are rarer than any other storm and for a good reason, they are bad news. A Nexus storm is an opportunity for everyone else. They wreak havoc across all worlds in their influence with a far greater intensity than the other, lesser, storms.
The Morning After
After a storm leaves a system, its ongoing effects are removed. However, given their cataclysmic impact, there are a few aftermaths to deal with. Each Storm leaves behind their own unique Aftermath modifier, lasting for 3 years. Those aftermaths have an intensity between 1-3, with 3 being the strongest modifiers. (The effects themselves are the same, only intensity increases.)
In addition, when a storm leaves a system, there is also a chance it will leave behind new unique Planetary Features, Planetary Modifiers and Anomalies. Some New Planetary Features:
Example of a New Modifier:
Examples of some New Anomalies:
Protecting Yourself
Some of those storms can get quite nasty and devastation is always worrisome, so how do you stop the storms from ravaging your planets?
We have introduced several new buildings and technologies to protect yourself or maybe squeeze a bit more use out of a storm. Storm Attraction and Storm Repulsion are the two ways in which you can manipulate the paths in which storms move. Storm Attraction buildings and their repelling counterparts can be build on planets and starbases. Each has 1 upgrade level and grants you researcher jobs. In Addition you can build the Storm Relief Center, to reduce some of the effects of the storms, while also buffing your base resource output while a storm is affecting your planet. Should you be able to convince the Galactic Community to pass a few storm related resolutions, those bonuses will become even more powerful.
With the Storm Relief Center you also have the option of Hunkering Down, a new planetary decision to reduce your devastation gain and reduce some of the storm's impact.
As you encounter cosmic storms, you will also get access to new technologies meant to reduce some of their negative effects on your economy and ships.
As your last line of defense, you can use your Planetary Shield Generators to reduce the devastation you gain from storms by -50% All in all, a prepared player will have many options of avoiding the worst of the storms effects, while benefiting from the opportunities they offer, using them to tip the scales between themselves and their enemies.
The Weather Mapmode
Once you have researched the necessary technologies, you will be able to use the new Weather mapmode to get a good overview of both Storm Attraction/Repulsion as well as the paths already existing storms will take.
Im sure knowing where a storm that grants cloaking to all ships within will move is something none of you will abuse.
Next Week
Next week well be going over the Storm Chaser Origin, the new Civics, and the new Precursors. See you then! Pre-purchase Stellaris: Cosmic Storms alone or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08!
[ 2024-08-22 11:00:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
A phenomenon is sweeping across the galaxy.
Im excited to announce that Episode 2 of Stellaris: Season 08, the Cosmic Storms mechanical expansion, will be released alongside the Stellaris 3.13 Vela update on September 10th, 2024. [previewyoutube=2VfVkAHidAY;full][/previewyoutube] Note: Tooltips shown in the video were from a development branch that has already been updated, more info next week. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2863060/Stellaris_Cosmic_Storms/
Dark Clouds Gather ...
For some time we have been unsatisfied with the Space Storm that currently exists in Stellaris. Cosmic Storms gave us the opportunity to revamp the system entirely, providing a deeper experience with strategically meaningful gameplay and beautiful upgraded visuals. With this expansion, eight new storms with varying positive and negative effects are set to spiral across the galaxy. Weve also added a new weather map mode for forecasting these storms and predicting their motion, with technologies and buildings to attract, repel, or with an Ascension Perk, even create storms.
... But Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining
Storms may pass through your planets with intriguing effects, leaving behind a changed landscape or unearthing long buried treasures.
"Burn Fast and Die Radically - That's Always Been Our Way"
What's life without the rush? Other empires may obsess about heinous things like economy and population. The Storm Chasers have long since mastered the challenges of their homeworld. The time has come to blast off screaming into the void. At last, a whole new opportunity to shred the limits of experience!
Embrace the Storms
Prepare your empires to weather the cosmic tempests with three new Civics, each offering unique strategies to harness the power of the elements.
The Corporate, Hive Mind, or Machine Intelligence versions of these Civics require access to their Authorities - MegaCorp, Utopia, and either Synthetic Dawn or The Machine Age, respectively.
Uncover the Past
Embark on a journey through the annals of time with two new Precursor Event Chains, each offering a glimpse into the ancient history of the Stellaris universe. These chains weave tales of civilizations long lost to the cosmic winds, with untold secrets buried beneath the stars.
Stellaris: Cosmic Storms includes:
- Cosmic Storms that ravage the galaxy
- Storm Chaser Origin
- Civics
- Planetscapers
- Astrometeorology
- Storm Devotion
- Two new Precursor narratives, with two new Relics
- Events, Anomalies, and Archaeology Sites
- Storm-related technologies, Edicts, Galactic community resolutions, and an Ascension Perk
Dev Diary Schedule
- Aug 15 - Announcing Cosmic Storms
- Aug 22 - The Storms and their Aftermaths
- Aug 29 - Storm Chaser Origin, Civics, and Precursors
- Sept 5 - 3.13 "Vela" and Cosmic Storms Release Notes
Pre-Purchase Stellaris: Cosmic Storms alone, or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08!
[ 2024-08-15 16:06:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Welcome to another mod highlight! This will be the final mod highlight of the summer, and we will be returning to our regularly scheduled dev diaries on Thursday!
This mod highlight is all about new technologies, and all of the mods add new techs to expand on vanilla mechanics.
[previewyoutube=vK2sP12dKV8;full][/previewyoutube]
Extra Ship Components NEXT
By NHunter
Written by NHunter Extra Ship Components aims to provide an extended and expanded technology tree that features upgraded versions of all vanilla weapon and utility components, as well new technology branches such as extra-large autocannons and missiles, and new kinetic and energy weapons. In addition to that, entirely-new types of weapons are introduced:
- Psionic weapons that allows one to unleash the full might of their empire's most powers psionics,
- Biological and Crystalline weapons based on spacebourne creatures, showcasing the empire's mastery over genetic engineering,
- Gravitic and Chrono-spatial weapons that utilize fundamental forces of nature to great and devastating effects,
- Nanite weapons with the power of very hungry synthetic life
- Special components obtainable only by defeating great leviathans to serve as a proof of an empire's might.
Sparble's Stellar Hyper Constructs
By Sparble
Written by Sparble Hyperconstructs expands Stellaris' Megastructure features by adding 27 different new Megastructures to the game along with plenty of other content surrounding these. These structures currently reach from the relatively small Tier A ones, such as Shellworlds, to Tier G ones, which only the most advanced civilizations would be able to build. At last, Hyperconstructs has integrated fully dedicated support for mods like Planetary Diversity and Gigastructural Engineering & More in the form of compatibility overrides, additional Gigastructure stages, and other effects. More content is planned in the future, with an ever-growing list of megastructure ideas, event chains, and more, so stay tuned! Features:
- Plenty New Megastructures
- New Planet & Star Classes
- New Become-The-Crisis Route
- New Endgame Crisis
- New Strategic Resources
- New Origins
- New Events
- New Technologies, Ship Components, Traits & Bombardment Stances
- New Jobs along with Districts & Buildings
- Dedicated Gigastructures + Planetary Diversity Support
Nanite Expansion Continued
By Sunconure11
Written by Sunconure11 Exploring hypothetical technologies in scales from the Micro to the Atto and everything between, the mod offers a plethora of new options for empires, many of which are derived from the sci-fi encyclopedia at Orion's Arm. All heavily integrate Nanites and make them an essential component of cutting edge empires. Three variations of the ascension perk to start your nanotechnology journey have been included; one for Organic Empires, one for Synths, and one for Machine empires. Features:
- 40+ new technologies
- 5 new ship components
- two new buildings
- two new megastructures
- one of which is a giant AI entity whos personality you get to influence
- a series of upgradable planet modifiers
- a new planet bombardment stance
- three new armies with a unique icon
- a set of traits for Synths and Machines equivalent to the Brain Slug for Organics
- And more!
Dawn Of Ascension
By Daniellm
Written by Daniellm Dawn Of Ascension is a Vanilla+ mod that expands on the mid to end game content of Stellaris. It adds multiple event chains to learn the secrets of dark matter power, including infiltrating a Fallen Empire's Master Archive, digging up old abandoned Precursor shipyards or even putting your best scientists at the major task of inventing it yourself! The major feature of the mod is "the ascension project" , a long situation where you invent a bunch of dark matter related technologies, and even go beyond what the fallen empires did before you, however... the ancient guardians will not sit idle and watch the primitive empires do the ascension project. Are you ready for the next step in your technological evolution? Features:
- 3 new event chains to gain Dark Matter Power
- new civics allowing everything from putting dark matter cores into your machine worlds, to having scion wargoals so everyone fights to unite the galaxy under your banner
- The ascension project, a long project allowing you to go beyond those that came before you.
- New ascendant shipset
- 3 tiers of FE+ automated industries
- New ships allowing you to match the power level of FE ships and beyond
- 2 New tech tiers for components
- Custom weapon effects for all weapons
- Doa is made with mod compatibility in mind and should be compatible with everything!
- 2 different ascension mechanics depending on what mods you have installed
[ 2024-08-10 15:00:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
by MrFreake_PDX
Hello everyone!
Welcome to another mod highlight, Michael_Stellaris has some great mods lined up for us this week, and this weeks theme is exploration! These mods will make the galaxy more interesting and diverse, and who doesnt love new things to find out in the galaxy. Im sure nothing bad will happen.
[previewyoutube=L_sMA977O9I;full][/previewyoutube]
Dangerous Wildlife Expanded is a very unique mod, adds much more depth to dangerous wildlife, and should make planets feel much more unique, and can even alter the course of your playthrough.
WP's Dangerous Wildlife Expanded
By WoodenPotatoes
This section was written by WoodenPotatoes Firstly, I really liked the idea of expanding on the sorts of non-intelligent fauna we might find around the galaxy, like T-Rexes and Mammoths and whatnot. Stellaris is utterly fantastic with intelligent aliens, primitive aliens, and even has pre-sapients. But what kind of wildlife is out there? What alien monsters and creepy crawlies lurk on foreign worlds? Secondly, I really liked the concept of mounted alien cavalry. So I made this! Features:
- Diversify the flavour of the "Dangerous Wildlife" planetary feature
- Defend your colonies from these creatures as they attack you
- Eventually, recruit them for yourself
More Events Mod
By Malthus
This section was written by Malthus Our mod started out shortly after Stellaris' release back in 2016. A lot of people have worked on and contributed to it over the years, among them great scripters, writers and 2d/3d artists who all shared the same goal of adding more to the the game experience in terms of short stories through anomalies and bigger story arcs with digsites, quests and even some mid game crises (Broken Clock, Vazuran Menace, Surveyor Probe). All of which is meant to add to the Stellaris lore while staying true to it without contradictions - a vanilla+ basically. Over the time it grew quite a bit from just being a few anomalies and events at the start, to now having nearly two dozen digsites, three mid game crises and even custom species portraits which were made for their respective events but are also fully usable for ai empires. It may be bloat to some, but it is just a big package by now. Features:
- dozens of anomalies
- early and mid game events, multiple archaeological sites and a few origins
- multiple mid game crises
- various species portraits
The Broken Clock system from More Events Mod -- Guilli's Planet Modifiers and Features adds a ton of new anomalies, relics, and modifiers to make planets, and outer space more interesting.
Guillis Planet Modifiers and Features
By Guilliman
For version 3.12+ of the game, section written by Guilliman A big content expansion mod focusing on Planetary Modifiers. With hundreds of modifiers and lots of content that interacts with them. Features:
- Over 400 new Planet Modifiers
- Many new planet features and blockers
- Terraforming improvements through planet modifiers
- New planetary decisions to interact with planet modifiers
- Tons of story events
- New Anomalies and exploration events
- New policy: survey expeditions
- New Precursor Dig Sites that interact with precursor planet modifiers
- Precursor Discoveries (technologies, components, bonuses,..)
- 29 new relics
- Relic War Goals (claim relics!)
- Espionage to steal relics
- Relic galaxy map overlay to see who has relics and how many (based on intel)
- New precursor planet: "Archaeopolis" (requires Ancient Relics DLC)
- Minor Artifacts uses, techs, armies (requires Ancient Relics DLC)
- Broken Mini-Megastructures that spawn across the galaxy
- Wondrous Planets
- Custom options menu at the start of the game
More Primitives
By Sparble
This section written by Sparble More Primitives, as the name suggests, is a mod all about Pre-FTL civilizations, with its main focus being Pre-FTL Ages, Events, Situations and Special Projects. The mod started with a handful of primitive events, such as particle accelerator construction with mysterious events related to that, Pre-FTL world war with multiple outcomes, primitives entering a fanatic philosophical age from which they could turn into primitive purifiers, begin to worship multiple benevolent or malicious shroud entities, or embrace deeply philosophical debates such as anti-natalism. These events were expanded over time, and new event chains came along, such as primitives colonizing their solar system before reaching FTL, their reaction to megastructures in their system, or Pre-FTLs entering a robotic age and developing a technological singularity, which would eventually become self-aware an either trigger a global catastrophe or ultimately become the benevolent savior of the primitive species. It's also worth mentioning that More Primitives does not require the First Contact DLC, but adds additional content on top of that if used along with it. Features:
- Plenty of new Pre-FTL Events & Event Chains
- 11 New Pre-FTL Ages
- Pre-FTL Machine Intelligences
- New special projects & interactions related to Pre-FTL events
- Other flavor stuff related to primitives (Pre-FTL buildings, modifiers, planet class, traits)
- Dedicated Cross-Mod Support
[ 2024-08-01 11:00:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
While the devs are off frolicing in the sun, we decided this is a great opportunity to highlight (mostly) community mods!
[previewyoutube=X-OdXhVTRoQ;full][/previewyoutube]
We wanted to change things up a bit this year, but we have such a hard time choosing between all the amazing mods on the workshop, so instead we made Michael~ do it. Michael has assembled several collections of mods each based on a theme, and then we tracked down the modders and asked if they had anything they wanted to share about their mods.
So without further ado, I present:
-----
The Friends We Made Along The Way
This mod collection is all based on the various storytelling aspects of Stellaris. From origins (letting the player create a unique backstory), to event mods (allowing you to create compelling narratives throughout the game). That's the reason why many people (including myself) got into the game, and that's the unique quality about Stellaris - the ability to create your own story, and fulfill your scifi fantasy.
Darkspace
By Exakan
Darkspace is a vanilla+ and roleplay mod, not an overhaul. DarkSpace does not change basic game mechanics and players have full control over the content, the game will only change if you choose an option. DarkSpace offers a whole host of new, unique playstyles that vanilla Stellaris doesnt. Features:
- +15 Origins with unique game mechanics & asymmetrical gameplay. Some of them even have their own category of multiple civics.
- Multiple new Civics for roleplay or game mechanics.
- Ascension Perks for all empire types.
- Unique playstyles (Eldritch, Plague, Nomads, Nanites, Crisis..)
- >25 Megastructures, dependent on perks, origins or crisis paths.
- Has the largest & most complex Nomad origin that exists right now.
- You can become a fallen empire, and create new civilizations by hand.
- Some portraits and shipsets (Unbidden, Organic, Fallen Empire) etc for roleplay.
- DS is made with great cross-mod compatibility in mind.
- Right now a story-interactive endgame crisis with multiple choices/paths is in the works
Inspiration: DarkSpace is my personal playground. If I find an idea that I would like to play as in Stellaris, then I add it. With the "fun factor" secured for myself, I know Ill put the required passion into the project. I keep everything optional though, the player decides what the mod is doing with their game . I never expected the mod to "explode" that much, I expected like 1k subs at start. The Stellaris community is very friendly and it makes a lot of fun to mod for them :)
Dynamic Political Events
By caligulacaesar Disclaimer: When Michael~ was selecting this list of mods, he was not aware that Caligula works for Paradox Development Studios and was previously a developer on Stellaris. Caligula was recruited as a Stellaris developer after making this mod.
Stellaris empires have never really felt alive. Imagine if we (us Humans) suddenly werent the only species on our planet how we get on with the others would soon be one of the big topics. Or if machines produced half our output suddenly, one could imagine it might be difficult to adjust. These societal factors are currently not represented well in Stellaris - there are the factions, but they don't have events surrounding them. Even now, 8 years past release, we still have not had the fabled Internal Politics DLC that could, possible, change this. This mod was an attempt from 2018 to fill this void. It adds dozens of events - and some ridiculously extensive branching event chains - to give you further stories to experience and decisions to make about how you run your empire. Features:
- Events to do with integrating alien species, including tensions between species and your attitude towards interspecies marriages.
- Events focusing on pops and factions specific demands (e.g. emancipation movements).
- Colonisation Stories your new colonists on a planet might choose their own leader or how they wish to organise themselves.
- Establish a ruler cult to your emperor.
- Various scandals and conspiracies.
- Events affecting interstate relations.
- And more (over 55,000 words of text in total).
Inspiration: The original inspiration for my mod was twofold: firstly, I loved playing Stellaris, but the version in those days (1.6 or so) has relatively little content beyond the initial exploration, and I wanted to add more storylines to experience later in the game. Secondly, I was working a job I found very boring, and it was very nice to have a creative outlet. After doing that for a year, I ended up being hired by Paradox, and I'm still there over 5 years later, so I think that worked out for me! And I still keep the mod up to date, even though I don't add new event chains, because for the most part it still holds up well.
Forgotten Empires
By inny78
Embark on a cosmic odyssey with this mod, where a tapestry of interstellar narratives unfolds for your science team amidst the boundless realms of the galaxy. Delve into the forgotten tales of ancient precursor empires, their legacies lost in the starlit void long before your celestial journey began. Uncover hidden dig sites and engage with enigmatic anomalies that beckon with inscrutable secrets. Every discovery and encounter weaves into the fabric of your empire's destiny, steering its path through the stars. Recommended DLC, but not required: Ancient Relics, Utopia, Synthetic Dawn, Nemesis and First Contact - these will provide additional rewards. Features:
- New Precursor chains
- New Dig sites
- New events
Basic Ordinary Origins
By cybrxkhan
Basic Ordinary Origins adds in several new origins that are just that - basic and ordinary. They are simple origins meant to provide alternative "default" origins to Prosperous Unification, with starting bonuses that are similarly mundane and not drastic. They wont change gameplay significantly, but will hopefully add flavor and variety to your games so not every nation starts with the Prosperous Unification origin. Though this isnt meant to be perfectly balanced, keeping in line with the vanilla origins' lack of balance, none will ideally be overpowered. Features: 20+ new "simple" origins; usable by both human players and AI empires:
- Antediluvian Knowledge
- Chosen Revolutionary
- Chosen Royal
- Clean Energy
- Former Scavengers
- Global Wars
- Great Khanate
- Legendary Friendship
- Lost Continent
- Mysterious Bonds
- One with Nature
- Post-Post-Apocalyptic
- Silk Road
- Slow Evolution
- Steampunk
- Survival of the Fittest
- The Gate
- Trekkers of the Stars
- War to End All Wars
Inspiration: I started Basic Ordinary Origins (BOO) back in 2020 when the Origins feature was first added. A lot of vanilla's origins other than Prosperous Unification are complex and have deep storylines attached to them, so I felt there was a lack of simple origins to make things more interesting without needing the larger origins. I've been modding Stellaris since it came out in 2016. My major mods which I started back then, and which I still maintain, are Cybrxkhan's Assortment of Namelists (CANS) and More AI Personalities (MAP). CANS adds more (mostly fictional) namelists that both players can use and AI empires can randomly spawn with, while MAP adds new AI personalities. They're both compatible with and complement BOO well. ----- Thats all for this week! Well be back in two weeks time with another Mod Highlight!
[ 2024-07-18 11:00:52 CET ] [ Original post ]
If you've ever wanted to have a citizen of the Stellaris universe staring at you from across the room, now's your chance!
Stellaris and Makeship have teamed up to bring this war criminal adorable Starfish Plushie to life -- but only for a limited time.
If not friend, why friend-shaped?
Get your very own Stellaris Starfish plushie on Makeship!
[previewyoutube=r0M6nOXOY1w;full][/previewyoutube] *Suit of armor not included* Make sure to assimilate this fanatic purifier into your empire while you can! Specifications: Eyes: 4 Arms: 6 Inches: 11.5 USD: $29.99 Galaxies Ruined: All of them!
[ 2024-06-27 11:52:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Stellaris is having a free weekend! Tell your friends!
Play Stellaris for free this weekend!
Weve asked the Dev team for some tips to help new players out during their first steps out into the wondrous unknown.
Some Tips From the Devs
- Don't forget to unpause the game, but don't be afraid to pause it again if you need time to think. - Eladrin
- The different options in empire creation arent created equally, some empires will be more powerful than others, but regardless youll get more enjoyment out of the game by playing what you find fun (or what you find the idea of to be fun) without looking up the perfect build. - Alfray Stryke
- Buildings don't produce Resources, Jobs produce Resources! Just because you've built a shiny new Research Lab doesn't mean there's anyone working there. Click the Population tab to learn more! - OK_Television_391
- Stellaris has mid-game and end-game crises that you might not be able to defeat on your first try. Each defeat makes your eventual triumph more satisfying. - Eladrin
- Read the tooltips. - PDX_Ferry
- Not every Species eats food, some eat energy and others minerals. - Paradoxical_Nikname
- Got a neighbor that closed the borders and rivaled you? It is a matter of time before they will declare war on you. Choose a choke point, build a star base, upgrade it with defense buildings. It might be just enough to defend the border, but for extra measure you can also build some defense platforms on the station or station your fleet there. This will enable you to mostly ignore that aggressive neighbor and focus on expanding/exploring the other direction.
- Losing a war isn't losing the game, enjoy your moments of vengeful plotting as much as your triumphs. - Beals
- Just because you've got slightly more fleet power than an enemy, it doesn't mean you're definitely going to win.
- If the notifications are too spammy (or not spammy enough), you can configure them in the settings. - pthooie
- A few Origins are more challenging than others. Doomsday, Broken Shackles, and Payback start you off with some major challenges to overcome, and may be better to save until you have a few games under your belt. - Eladrin
- Don't worry too much about what people say is best. Making an empire with a cool backstory will keep you entertained a lot longer than one with perfect numbers! - Iggy
- Make sure you expand you fleet early on, or you might be prey to the first neighbour you find. - Paradoxical_Nikname
- Your pops will love the Holo-Theater building.- PDX_Ferry
- As expected in a sci-fi game, Research is king, however this means Unity is queen - dont neglect the development of your empires Traditions in pursuit of new Technologies. - Alfray Stryke
- If you spawn next to a Criminal syndicate, keep an eye on your planets, or you might get overwhelmed by crime. - Paradoxical_Nikname
- Correction: If you spawn next to a criminal syndicate, blow it up - Beals
- Pops > Everything. Want to increase your power in the galaxy? Colonize, boost Pop Growth Speed, encourage Immigration... But whatever method you choose, remember ABP: "Always Be Poppin!" - OK_Television_391
- For single player, it's good to queue up your science ship exploration and pick your first three technologies to research before you un-pause.
- Set up a monthly trade in the Market to get missing resources.- PDX_Ferry
- Be brave and break things, choose a clearly wrong choice, make mistakes, crack open that ancient tomb, the galaxy is yours and full of wonders! - Beals
- But most of all, have fun, and thanks for playing Stellaris! - Eladrin
Eat the Envoys
Stellaris is partnering with Makeship to produce a limited edition Stellaris Starfish plushie! They may have destroyed Europa VII, but we can still be friends, right?
Click to go to the campaign!
Whats Next?
Summer vacations are here, so this will be the last dev diary until mid-August, when we will return with information about Cosmic Storms and the Stellaris 3.13 Vela update. Have a great summer, and thank you for playing Stellaris!
[ 2024-06-20 11:00:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
Dear Stellaris Fans,
Our latest and greatest version of the game, the 3.12.5 patch, is now live and available for download.
This patch brings further fixes and tweaks and wraps up our 3.12 + The Machine Age release cycle.
Please find the patch notes below.
3.12.5 PATCH NOTES
Improvement
- Obsessional Directive empires that control a black hole now get an option for safe and secure storage for their commodities.
- Reworked how Fallen Empires view empires trying to match their technological level. Unless you're a Scion, any FE level tech you acquire will accrue a stacking opinion penalty with them, that is doubled for the materialist Fallen Empire.
- Added new building icons for the Sensorium and Simulation Sites and their upgrades
- Species list will not longer show founder species from various contacts that do not even have any presence on any of the planets.
- Megastrutures that are supposed to be built outside the gravity well will not be displayed in the list whilte trying to build one on top of planets or stars.
- Nanite deposits with non-zero available quantity below 1 now appear in galaxy and solar system views
- Nanotech empires will no longer receive ships every 5 years, and will instead gain an equivalent amount of nanites with which to build ships. They now have access to the Interdictor ship, a battleship alternative with a fixed nanite cost that can use torpedoes and hangars.
- The first Outliner tab now includes military fleets, civilian ships and armies by default.
- Constructing an Arc Furnace in a system will now remove all trade deposits to make way for the mining stations
- Increased the output of Haruspex and Technophants.
- Haruspex now produce 3 Unity and 2.5 Engineering Research (was 2 Unity and 2 Engineering Research).
- Technophants now produce 6 Unity and 5 Engineering Research (was 4 Unity and 4 Engineering Research).
- Spyware Directives now start with Basic Cloaking Fields as a research option
- Synaptic Subprocessing for Hive Minds now grants Augmentor Drones to Spawning Pools instead of Modular Cybernetics, however the effect on Empire Size from Districts was halved
- Modular Cybernetics now grants Hive Minds +3 Organic Species Trait Points as they cannot research robotic technologies
- The AI Emporium Branch Office Holding no longer provides +5% resources from jobs, instead it provides +1 Identity Designer job and +10% Branch Office Value from Roboticists and Identity Designers. This allows the empire in which it is constructed to assemble robots even if they do not have the required technology. However, only one can be constructed in each empire in which you have a branch office and it can only be constructed if the empire has not outlawed robots.
- The Customer Insights edict now reduces both the energy and influence cost for Branch Offices
- The Empire Size Effect for Integrated Hives has been reduced from -50% to -33%
- Empire Size from Pops for OTA Updates has been reduced from -20% to -15%
- Empire Size from Pops from Harmony and Synchronicity tradition trees have been reduced from -15% to -10%
- Cetana's relic now provides -50% planetary ascension cost, down from 75%.
- The job strata bonuses from Synthesization have been rebalanced, moved to the robot assembly buildings, and apply to both regular empires and Synthetic Fertility
- Planets which had an anomaly present while an Arc Furnace was constructed will now correctly inherit all the deposits when the anomaly is cleared, if the planet can support mining deposits
- Updated many anomalies to no longer remove deposits if applicable.
- Gone Native' event has default text in case none of the other options were appropriate
- AI Empires will check if they already have an assigned emissary for the galactic community before assigning a new one.
- AI will assign emissaries to the Galactic Community.
- AI will check if a federation already has an assigned representative before assigning a new one. Will prevent it from continually switching representatives.
- Cybernetic Creed start event duplication blocked
- Fallen Empires created by Cosmogenesis should now no longer sometimes be created tragically without a personality.
- Federation/Galcom fleet template size is now limited by the corresponding capacity, not by the command limit.
- Fixed Augmentation Bazaars sometimes not granting the full effects from some Cyberization choices
- Fixed Expand the Council agenda behavior for savefiles that predate Galactic Paragons DLC
- Fixed former federation fleets being treated as federation fleets when checking which ship designs can be added to the template.
- Fixed some logical errors for the Bot Lord, Truth Seeker and Shroud Preacher traits
- Fixed the concept tooltip for Machine Template System
- Fixed the nanite deposit scaling
- Fixed the void dweller origin sometimes trying to spawn a mining station around the habitat central complex
- Hide Dyson Sphere build option when Machine DLC is enabled
- Increased the animation speed of Imperial Colossus. Now it has enough time to trigger laser beam animation.
- New rulers will properly abandon their old council positions.
- Paradox titan graphics no longer uses the same mesh twice and looks broken.
- Pre-sapient pop will no longer display colony abandonment cost if only one sapient pop is left on the planet.
- Psionic species variants can be cyberized
- Refugees will no longer flee to places where they will be dismantled on arrival
- Replaced most checks for the Servile, Nerve Stapled, Zombie and Suppressed traits with the can_think trait.
- Science ships using automation should no longer excavate archeology sites that aren't available to the owning empire.
- Script error in resort worker job block
- The Psionic Theory no longer tries to check if your empire has the Psionic Expertise trait, instead it checks if a Councilor has the trait.
- The tooltip for Diplomatic Weight now states "Delegate" instead of "Envoys"
- The Victory Score breakdown will now correctly include Victory Score from effects in its Score calculation at the top of the screen.
- When a country leaves a federation, its federation fleet templates are now transferred to the president.
- When a federation is disbanded, the president takes control of all federation fleet templates, including ones without a fleet.
- When a non-president country builds a federation fleet from a template, the template is now transferred to the president along with the fleet.
- When the GDF changes ownership, GDF fleet templates without actual fleets are now transferred.
- The Eternal Throne relic still grants immortality after the Eternal Machine species trait has been modified away.
- Arc Furnace and Dyson Swarm limits no longer suffer an off-by-one error
- Outposts raids conducted by multiple fleets should no longer be cut short after one of the fleets is destroyed.
- Made sure that non player countries are properly destroyed upon activation of the Aetherophasic Engine.
- The Reformed Queen event should now properly display Cetana.
- Ministry of Acquisition checks for Overlord Consumer Goods Use
- Ship preview should no longer black out when viewing certain ships
- AI empires can no longer adopt Virtuality.
- Fixed crash in federation fleet ui entry after resync
- Fixed crash in federation member UI item when resyncing
- Fixed crash upon loading a save with faulty owners of megastructures
- Fixed CTD when technology without tech area is processed by the database
- Fixes oos related to mining planet megastructure
- Fixed CTD at startup on older macOS (before 13.x) due to missing library
- Added on_auto_colony_type_changed on_action.
- Added the Servile trait to the can_think scripted trigger
[ 2024-06-18 08:12:06 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
This week the 3.12.4 hotfix (which fixed a crash related to non-latin letters in usernames) has been deployed to non-Steam platforms.
Today Ive got a preliminary list of changes for the 3.12.5 patch, which we currently have planned for Tuesday, June 18th.
3.12.5 "ANDROMEDA" PRELIMINARY RELEASE NOTES
Improvement
- Democratic Crusaders no longer hate Worker Coops for being Oligarchies
- Obsessional Directive empires that control a black hole now get an option for safe and secure storage for their commodities.
- Reworked how Fallen Empires view empires trying to match their technological level. Unless you're a Scion, any FE level tech you acquire will accrue a stacking opinion penalty with them, that is doubled for the materialist Fallen Empire.
- Added new building icons for the Sensorium and Simulation Sites and their upgrades
- Species list will not longer show founder species from various contacts that do not even have any presence on any of the planets.
- Constructing an Arc Furnace in a system will now remove all trade deposits to make way for the mining stations
- Increased the output of Haruspex and Technophants.
- Haruspex now produce 3 Unity and 2.5 Engineering Research (was 2 Unity and 2 Engineering Research).
- Technophants now produce 6 Unity and 5 Engineering Research (was 4 Unity and 4 Engineering Research).
- Spyware Directives now start with Basic Cloaking Fields as a research option
- Synaptic Subprocessing for Hive Minds now grants Augmentor Drones to Spawning Pools instead of Modular Cybernetics, however the effect on Empire Size from Districts was halved
- Modular Cybernetics now grants Hive Minds +3 Organic Species Trait Points as they cannot research robotic technologies
- The AI Emporium Branch Office Holding no longer provides +5% resources from jobs, instead it provides +1 Identity Designer job and +10% Branch Office Value from Roboticists and Identity Designers. This allows the empire in which it is constructed to assemble robots even if they do not have the required technology. However, only one can be constructed in each empire in which you have a branch office and it can only be constructed if the empire has not outlawed robots.
- The Customer Insights edict now reduces both the energy and influence cost for Branch Offices
- The Empire Size Effect for Integrated Hives has been reduced from -50% to -33%
- Empire Size from Pops for OTA Updates has been reduced from -20% to -15%
- Empire Size from Pops from Harmony and Synchronicity tradition trees have been reduced from -15% to -10%
- Cetana's relic now provides -50% planetary ascension cost, down from 75%.
- The job strata bonuses from Synthesization have been rebalanced, moved to the robot assembly buildings, and apply to both regular empires and Synthetic Fertility
- Planets which had an anomaly present while an Arc Furnace was constructed will now correctly inherit all the deposits when the anomaly is cleared, if the planet can support mining deposits
- Updated many anomalies to no longer remove deposits if applicable.
- Gone Native' event has default text in case none of the other options were appropriate
- AI Empires will check if they already have an assigned emissary for the galactic community before assigning a new one.
- AI will assign emissaries to the Galactic Community.
- AI will check if a federation already has an assigned representative before assigning a new one. Will prevent it from continually switching representatives.
- Cybernetic Creed start event duplication blocked
- Fallen Empires created by Cosmogenesis should now no longer sometimes be created tragically without a personality.
- Federation/Galcom fleet template size is now limited by the corresponding capacity, not by the command limit.
- Fixed Augmentation Bazaars sometimes not granting the full effects from some Cyberization choices
- Fixed Expand the Council agenda behavior for savefiles that predate Galactic Paragons DLC
- Fixed former federation fleets being treated as federation fleets when checking which ship designs can be added to the template.
- Fixed some logical errors for the Bot Lord, Truth Seeker and Shroud Preacher traits
- Fixed the concept tooltip for Machine Template System
- Fixed the nanite deposit scaling
- Fixed the void dweller origin sometimes trying to spawn a mining station around the habitat central complex
- Hide Dyson Sphere build option when Machine DLC is enabled
- Increased the animation speed of Imperial Colossus. Now it has enough time to trigger laser beam animation.
- New rulers will properly abandon their old council positions.
- Paradox titan graphics no longer uses the same mesh twice and looks broken.
- Pre-sapient pop will no longer display colony abandonment cost if only one sapient pop is left on the planet.
- Psionic species variants can be cyberized
- Refugees will no longer flee to places where they will be dismantled on arrival
- Replaced most checks for the Servile, Nerve Stapled, Zombie and Suppressed traits with the can_think trait.
- Science ships using automation should no longer excavate archeology sites that aren't available to the owning empire.
- Script error in resort worker job block
- The Psionic Theory no longer tries to check if your empire has the Psionic Expertise trait, instead it checks if a Councilor has the trait.
- The tooltip for Diplomatic Weight now states "Delegate" instead of "Envoys"
- The Victory Score breakdown will now correctly include Victory Score from effects in its Score calculation at the top of the screen.
- When a country leaves a federation, its federation fleet templates are now transferred to the president.
- When a federation is disbanded, the president takes control of all federation fleet templates, including ones without a fleet.
- When a non-president country builds a federation fleet from a template, the template is now transferred to the president along with the fleet.
- When the GDF changes ownership, GDF fleet templates without actual fleets are now transferred.
- Fixed crash in federation fleet ui entry after resync
- Fixed crash in federation member UI item when resyncing
- Fixed crash upon loading a save with faulty owners of megastructures
- Fixed CTD when technology without tech area is processed by the database
- Fixes oos related to mining planet megastructure
- Added on_auto_colony_type_changed on_action.
- Added the Servile trait to the can_think scripted trigger
Whats Next : A Mysterious Visitor, and Upcoming Stellaris Free Weekend!
Next Tuesday well find out what this is about:
Were also going to have a Stellaris Free Weekend starting on June 20th, running through the weekend.
To help our new players out, next Thursdays dev diary will be "Tips from the Developers". See you then!
[ 2024-06-13 11:00:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello, A hotfix patch is now available via Steam, addressing a crash affecting some players trying to start a new game in 3.12.3.
- Fixed a crash where the user directory could not be accessed by the game if the file path included certain characters
[ 2024-05-31 11:14:27 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
The 3.12.3 Andromeda patch was released this week, with the following changes:
3.12.3 ANDROMEDA RELEASE NOTES
Feature
- Added tradition agendas for Modularity, Nanotech and Virtuality
- Some megastructures (mostly kilostructures) can now be dismantled if you have the technology to build them and are not at war.
- Solar system tooltips now show the arc furnace and habitat potential of a system, if you meet the construction requirements for the megastructures
- Added heir titles to Mortal Empire and Bandit Kingdom governments
- Added missing heir titles for Imperial governments
- Added more character names to the Cyberpunk list
- Added tooltips to the Transformation situation to summarize the different ascension paths in the event that you make a choice of which path to select.
- Awakened fallen empires now can use the daedalus seal relic.
- Completing the Synthetic Fertility event chain will now grant additional robot modification trait points and picks and award a unique trait for your synths
- Cybernetic Creed pops can now be modified
- Democratic Crusaders no longer hate Worker Coops for being Oligarchies
- Non-Spiritualist pops in a Cybernetic Creed empire now only have the Cybernetic Creed traits removed instead of all Cyborg traits
- Redesigned top-menu resource tooltips for clarity
- Robots Pops are now called Machine or Mechanical Pops in most places
- Scavenger civics now have 10% of the base cost of buildings, districts and megastructures refunded upon dismantling them
- Selecting a Cybernetic Creed as your sole Spiritualist faction no longer forces a template onto your species
- The Commodities Consolidation situation will now show if you are on track to produce enough consumer goods or if you do not have enough storage space to the quota. Thanks to SirBlackAxe for the improvement suggestions!
- Your choice in the Virtual Salvation event now influences the Synthetic Society Shift in the Digital Refactoring event chain
- Added Election Term Variance (Years): +5 to the Shadow Council civic. This means that each election will have a term length equal to that of the authority +/- a random number of years between -5 and +5.
- Added Election Term Length (Years): -50% to the Worker Cooperative civic, giving empires with this civic the same term length as the democratic authority.
- All Virtual empires (either Machines that take Virtuality traditions or Organic empires that adopt a Virtual government after completing Synthetic Ascension) now get access to the Virtual Economic Policy
- Buffed the Mutual Aid trade policy to also provide unity
- Cosmogenesis Battlecruiser and Titans now use reactors one class above theirs, and should now provide ample power for modules.
- Dark Matter Engine effects reduced from +60% to +40%
- Increased the effects of the modifier nerfing FE against Cetana.
- Machine World planet designation now increases the output of all jobs by 5% instead of only simple drones and increases the build speed of all resource districts by 25%
- Made Rogue Servitors slightly more likely to build organic sanctuaries and their upgrades
- Reduced the time needed to complete the special projects "The Queen's Databank" and "Cetana: Race The Tempest"
- Selecting a Cybernetic Creed as your sole Spiritualist faction now awards a country modifier for that Creed - these modifiers are:
- The Fellowship of the Hammer, Elevated Fellowship, +1 Biological Trait Points, +1 Biological Trait Picks, -10% Building and District Upkeep, -10% Megastructure Upkeep
- The Templars of Steel, Elevated Templars, +1 Biological Trait Points, +1 Biological Trait Picks, +5% Naval Capacity
- The Choir of the Mind, Elevated Choir, +1 Biological Trait Points, +1 Biological Trait Picks, +5% Research Speed, +5% Researcher Upkeep
- The Commune of Toil, Elevated Commune, +1 Biological Trait Points, +1 Biological Trait Picks, +10% Cyborg Happiness
- The United Creeds has their modifier changed to +2 Biological Trait Points, +1 Biological Trait Picks
- Selecting a Cybernetic Creed as your sole Spiritualist faction now gives +10% Faction Approval for the Creed
- Selecting the physical path for Synthetic Ascension now unlocks the advanced traits from Modularity
- Shielded Components points cost reduced from 4 to 3
- Synthetic Imperial authorities no longer have -10% pop assembly speed
- Synthetic Oligarchic authorities now have Enforcer provide +10% Resources from Ruler Jobs instead of +5%
- Synthetic Physical Corporate government now gives +5% Trade Value
- Synthetic Physical Imperial government now gives +2 leader starting level and +10% leader XP gain
- Synthetic Virtual Corporate government now gives +1 Codebreaking
- The additional trait picks and points awarded by Cybernetic Creed now only apply to biological species
- The Augmentations of the Commune now gives +20% Worker Output, but no longer gives +20% Worker Happiness
- The Bot Lord destiny trait is now available for all leader classes and now instead increases the production and decreases the upkeep of both robots and cyborgs. It is twice as likely to show up if you are an individual machine or have synthetic or cybernetic ascension.
- The Computation Core Focus policy for Synthetic MegaCorps no longer removes the +1% Trade Value modifier from Clerks and the Production Streamlining option now also increases Consumer Goods production in addition to alloys.
- The Nanotech World designation now also affects agri-drones if you build hydroponic farms on the planet
- The Shroud Preacher and Truth Seeker destiny traits are now blocked if you have undertaken another a non-psionic path. They are twice as likely to show up if you have psionic ascension. The traits no longer require spiritualist ethics
- Virtuality Adoptions grants a -15% metallurgist and artisan production
- Virtuality Policy now grants +80%/-50%, down from +100%/-40%
- Added a homeworld or planet preference to multiple event species, mainly machines
- Added a plural version of the loc for synaptic lathe districts
- Added a warning to Synthetic Age that it will not grant a new tradition if you have no tradition slots left
- Added military academy to shattered ring and habitat
- Added more checks to prevent Worker Coops from using banned trade policies
- Assembly tooltip will now combine empire wide add modifiers into the same category.
- Becoming a machine removes the brain slug trait from leaders
- Blocked parades and deficits from targeting the synaptic lathe
- Cetana's fleets now begin at 1st
- Changed resilience bonus for immortal leaders
- Changed Synthetic Dawn machine empire gender to indeterminable.
- Changed the cost of the Integrated Mega Construction edict so it wouldn't break the UI
- Clarified the loc of the AI policy and machine Citizenships
- Colony ships for Synthetic Fertility now use energy instead of food or minerals
- Completely new fleet will be able to accept more than the default 20 ships by forcing an early modifier update.
- Corrected icons for Zero Waste Protocols and Diplomatic Protocols
- Corrected the highlighting on the Free at Last concept tooltip
- Corrected the names of some gestalt agendas
- create_species effect can no longer create species without habitability traits
- Cyberization can handle multiple species templates
- Defenders of the galaxy can not become a crisis anymore
- Destroyed orbital rings are no longer duplicated
- Dyson Swarm's stage name 1 is now properly displayed in Russian
- election_term_variance values for government authorities now behave as expected and go negative.
- First contract breakthrough chance is now affected by encryption.
- Fixed a bug where players would occasionally not receive the "Mysterious Tempest" special project needed to declare war to Cetana
- Fixed a bunch of typos reported on the forums
- Fixed a couple of issues with coordinator districts and virtuality traditions
- Fixed a crash when switching between countries while in observer mode with the Leader View open.
- Fixed a number of capital buildings checking for the wrong synthetics tradition to add roboticist jobs
- Fixed an issue that allowed you to keep playing after Cetana won
- Fixed an issue with the Mother Knows Best achievement being incorrectly configured for some storefronts
- Fixed Archaeology and Astral Rift exploration failure probability sometimes showing nonsense values
- Fixed building type AI weight calculations again
- Fixed cloaking effect for Enigma Battlecruiser and Paradox Titan
- Fixed Clone Army and Natural Design not being mutually exclusive
- Fixed Cybernetic Creed pops sometimes not growing if there were robots present on the planet
- Fixed job weights for Resort Workers
- Fixed leaders undergoing synthetic ascension not changing age correctly
- Fixed Natural Design civics sometimes starting with more buildings than the capital could support
- Fixed some errors in the calculations for merc enclave dividend payout frequency
- Fixed some minor typos with traditions
- Fixed the "Mass Graves" blocker not having a description.
- Fixed the additional priest jobs from Virtuality traditions not actually checking for the tradition
- Fixed the extra clerk jobs from Virtuality traditions granting the wrong number of jobs
- Fixed the habitability for secondary species for Driven Assimilators and Rogue Servitors with some origins
- Fixed the Rulerchip being reset whenever you gain a new relic
- Fixed unlocalized string for the machine ring world habitability trait
- Fixes issues with modification of uplifted species
- Fruitful Partnership Origin: stopped critters from leaving seeds on artificial worlds and habitats
- Full citizenship for robots requires tech Artificial Administration
- Gave the machine fallen empire ring world preference
- High-Level Enhancements now provides +1 Unity from Bio-Trophies for Rogue Servitors
- Hiveminds can now purge hiveminds again
- Keep the Transformation deposits when terraforming into a Machine World
- Landing armies on the synaptic lathe is forbidden
- Leaders in empires with Feudal Society now correctly require upkeep
- Limited the first contact breakthrough and insight gain percentages to values between 0 and 100 percent.
- Loading a save should now unassign scientists from the pre-3.8 research areas.
- Machines with the Shattered Ring origin now require robomodding techs in order to modify their machine species
- Made AI realize it can not take FEs with 10k fleetpower
- Made explosion after cracking lathe/habitat/ringworld stick until it has played thru.
- Made the language used for trait points and trait picks modifiers consistent
- Make sure planet jobs are properly refreshed upon building/district build queue actions finishes.
- Ministry of Acquisition now correctly produces Consumer Goods if the overlord uses them
- Moved warning text for virtuality into tradition adoption effect instead of widely available trait
- Moving the capital destroys the old Cyberdome building
- Opinion modifiers of Interstellar Assemblies now stacks for each owned Assembly
- Other Crises should no longer be allowed to spawn while the Synth Queen is ongoing
- Pops on the lathe can not be assimilated
- Pops that are turned Virtual while on the Lathe, will have their Virtuality trait quietly removed
- Progenitor hives now receive the correct jobs from the Fallen Empire clinic buildings.
- Reduced the likelihood of designation switching for foundry and factory worlds
- Refugees won't willingly resettle to the Synaptic Lathe anymore
- Removed mentions of stockpiles from the Delete Sector tooltip
- Removed the formless from the end-game crisis list, which might have caused some issues regarding crisis spawning
- Removed the reference to the Server Load Reduction decision, since it is no longer available
- Removed useless "go to" camera button in the "No Response" event
- Show disabled crisis button on Synaptic Lathe view in case another empire takes it over.
- Show large weapon slot and hangars as separate entries for sections in ship designer
- Special project names in tooltips are now highlighted in yellow
- Special projects to raid outposts should now get properly cleared after failing a raid and new projects should display the proper location instead of the empire name.
- Subsuming a planet into a nanite world now correctly removes planetary modifiers and features
- Synthetic Fertility gets access to edicts Subsidized Identity Backups and Optimized Identity Creation
- Synthetic Fertility should now always have access to the AI right policy
- Synthetic Fertility: Keep the organic species portrait in the Identity Repository and Robot Surrogates are now non-holographic
- Terraforming planets related to Keides event chain now removes their unique features
- The Artifact Exhibition planetary decision is now available for Haruspex jobs
- The brainmines now require a minimum sapience
- The Determined Exterminator civic no longer mentions that you start on a tomb world
- The FE robot assembly building should no longer be automatically destroyed after being built.
- The Grand Battlements of Steel and Aegis Complex now provide FTL inhibitors
- The limit on the number of built Dyson Swarm and Arc Furnaces now correctly includes structures under construction
- The modifiers from the Rulerchip are now listed in the same order as leader classes in the leader UI
- The Nanotech World designation now requires the Unbridled Consumption tradition
- The United Creeds now have their unique faction icon
- Unique planetary features added through the Transformation situation and Genesis Guides civics are now kept when restoring a shattered ringworld or turning a planet into an ecumenopolis
- Updated Archaeological Site Excavation failure probability to show accurate number on the tooltip.
- Updated Astral Rift Exploration failure probability to show accurate number on the tooltip.
- Virtual Pops are now properly blocked from resettling on the lathe
- Wrecked Fleet event only fires once afterwards, notifications are given
- You can now only trade one leader at a time
- Initial election for countries now takes into account modifiers to election term length
- Adding check to start_astral_action_cooldown effect for validating that the country type can use astral actions (currently either playable or has the ai interior_minister_module) instead of potentially crashing.
- Fixed CTD when a non playable empire decides to lock wormholes etc
- Fixed OOS in hotjoin/resync due to clients cleaning up invalid ship components
- Added "Build Megastructure" option to fleet order context menu in galaxy view.
- Fixed planet "Build Megastructure" command not correctly hiding unbuildable megastructures from the list.
- Fixed some incorrect leader assignment text.
- Fixed subscription's title not being localized in the popup when buying it through the additional content browser.
- Fixed zoom animation not playing if you go to system view for the last system that you visited in system view.
- Implemented unique icons for galactic focuses concerning mid-game and end-game crises
- System megastructure selection view tooltips show detailed fail text for non-planet-specific checks.
- The Science Nexus build tooltip no longer shows "Exists" fail text in systems without a starbase.
- The government panel now shows your election frequency
- Added election_term_variance_add and election_term_variance_mult modifiers
- Adding the ability to dismantle megastructures, see megastructure documentation
- Readding support for appending portrait sets and implementing it for portrait categories
- Removed obsolete is_researching_area and research_leader triggers.
- Renamed government_election_years_add and government_election_years_mult to election_term_years_add and election_term_years_mult
A Storm is Brewing
Winds in the fall will bring us the 3.13 Vela update, and with it, Cosmic Storms. Vela is the constellation representing the sails of the Argo Navis, the ship on which Jason and the Argonauts sailed to get the Golden Fleece. We thought it a fitting name for an expansion relating to galactic weather. As a bit of a sneak peek, Ill show you some screenshots from the game Im currently playing. Note: I cranked up the frequency and intensity of storms up to the absolute max for this run, so a normal galaxy should be a bit more chill.
The storm map mode will make it easier to see what systems are under the effects of storms.
In system view, youll see the glowies.
Prediction technologies can help you figure out where the storms may be going.
Thats probably the path it will take, if nothing interferes with it. I wonder if Teersonia will be hit?
Whats Next (in the Short Term)
Next week is Swedens National Day, so our next dev diary will be June 13th, which Im currently penciling in as a possible 3.12.4 release date. See you in two weeks!
[ 2024-05-30 11:00:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Ealdrin
Hello everybody!
Last week we released 3.12.2 to the public, and since then weve been working on further post release support. Today well be going into some of the things were planning for a 3.12.3 release. Currently were looking at next Thursday as the tentative release date, but well keep you posted.
Selected Changes and Improvements from the Changelog
Following the deluge of feedback from the release of The Machine Age, 3.12.3 will include the following changes:
- Selecting the physical path for Synthetic Ascension will unlock the advanced machine traits from the Modularity path for Machines.
- Selecting the virtual path for Synthetic Ascension will unlock the Virtual Economic Policy from the Virtuality path for Machines. (Though the policy has been rebalanced.)
- The unique planetary features added from the Transformation situation are now kept when turning a planet into an ecumenopolis or restoring a shattered ringworld.
- Synthetic authorities have been rebalanced.
- The Commodities Consolidation situation will now show if you are on track to produce enough consumer goods or if you do not have enough storage space to the quota.
- The Virtuality, Modularity and Nanotech tradition trees now have agendas.
- Cybernetic Creed:
- Embracing a Cybernetic Creed no longer forces a template onto your species.
- Embracing a Cybernetic Creed now gives +10% Faction Approval when they become your sole Spiritualist faction (This does not apply if you unite the Creeds).
- Embracing a Cybernetic Creed now awards a unique country modifier for that Creed.
- Non-Spiritualist pops in a Cybernetic Creed empire now only have the Cybernetic Creed traits removed instead of all Cyborg traits.
- Synthetic Fertility:
- Your choice in the Virtual Salvation event now influences the Synthetic Society Shift in the Digital Refactoring event chain.
- Finishing the situation now grants access to the Subsidized Identity Backups and Optimized Identity Creation edicts.
- Completing the Synthetic Fertility event chain will now grant additional robot modification trait points and picks and award a unique free trait for your synthetically ascended population.
- Refugees won't willingly resettle to the Synaptic Lathe anymore.
- Dark Matter Engines have been reduced from +60% Resource Production to +40%
- Virtuality Adoptions grants a -15% metallurgist and artisan production
Solar System Tooltips
As a small QOL UX improvement, if you can construct Arc Furnaces or Habitats, the tooltips for solar systems will now include a summary of the system potential for both megastructures.
Kill-a-Structure
Long have the conquered Hyper Relays of your fallen enemies been the bane of your economy, however in 3.12.3, this will be changing with the addition of the ability to dismantle select kilostructures. Kilostructures that will be allowed to be dismantled (for a moderate energy and time investment) will be limited to:
- Gateways
- Hyper Relays
- Dyson Swarms
- Arc Furnaces
The pesky UNE will soon have their railway network dismantled! Even better if you have a Scavenger civic, dismantling buildings, districts and kilostructures will give you a slight refund on any physical resources used to construct them.
Election Tweaks
Weve added the ability for Civics (and other sources of country modifiers) to easily modify the length and variance of election terms along with the government screen now showing the length of election terms in your empire. Two civics have made use of these changes Worker Cooperative now has a -50% to Election Term Length making it have the same as a regular Democracy.
Meanwhile, Shadow Council now grants +5 to Election Term Variance, as the powers-that-be in the shadows ensure elections never occur on a regular basis.
Whats Next
If all goes according to plan, next weeks dev diary will be the 3.12.3 release notes. I expect that we'll have one more release after that before we head off for the summer, so keep on submitting bug reports and suggestions, theyre very helpful for allocating post-release support resources. See you next week!
[ 2024-05-23 11:00:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
Strap in to your acceleration couches, this one's a going to be a big one. - E
Hello there!
Im Anton, the Art Manager & Producer on Stellaris, and I would like to welcome you all to this absolute monster of a Dev Diary we have prepared for you!
I just want to use this opportunity to mention how amazing it is to work with these fantastic artists on a day to day basis and how extremely proud I am of the team.
We managed to do a lot for this DLC, more than weve done for an expansion or DLC ever before.
In fact the total logged art work time (I just looked at our stats in JIRA) for The Machine Age is over 2 years and 41 weeks.
Truly spectacular. Great job Team!
In the last The Art of The Machine Age dev diary, we showed you (and talked about the process of) a lot of what we had been doing - but far from it all.
So get comfortable, take out your favorite snack and get ready to look at a lot of art. Almost everything we did for The Machine Age will be showcased - but first, some words from our Art Director.
Alright! Here we go! We hope you enjoy this!
Scott Austin - Art Director
As you have heard countless times already, our latest project, The Machine Age, is the largest pack weve ever put out for Stellaris. The reason that youve heard it countless times is because we think its worth repeating. We have well over double the amount of ships and FX, triple the amount of characters and animation, and probably quadruple the amount of 2D/Icon work. As daunting as that might seem, we pulled it off. And not just pulled it off, but did it without losing any quality and with an unbelievably tight schedule. Sure things were busy, but we can proudly say that we didnt have to burn the midnight oil or resort to overtime or crunch. While I would love, as the AD, to just take credit for all of that hard work and bask in the amazing light of glorious praise, the real credit goes to our Little Art Team That Could. In the boundless expanses and the incomprehensibly infinite universe of game design, our small art team shines like a supernova of talent and efficiency. Though few in number, our art team possesses a galaxy's worth of skill and dedication, crafting the most awe-inspiring sci-fi visuals that breathe life into every pixel, every polygon and every frame of Stellaris. Each artist possesses a bewildering array of talents, with skills so sharp they could slice through space-time, creating shortcuts to other dimensions where deadlines don't exist and cups of caffeinated beverages never run dry. They churn out masterpieces with such alarming speed and regularity that one begins to suspect they've cloned themselves and are operating in shifts spanning multiple parallel universes (Please, do not let HR in on this). I am ever thankful for the chance to voyage through the cosmos of Stellaris with such brilliantly unhinged minds. Their talent and relentless dedication are the warp drive to our projects, and their visionary artistry is the very soul of our games. I am ever grateful for their dedication and downright chuffed to navigate the nebulous realms of creativity alongside such splendidly imaginative life forms. Together, we continue to chart courses that boldly go where no game has gone before. And, as always, to the players, I say: You aint seen nothing yet! -Scott Austin- Art Director, Paradox Interactive [Note from your friendly Stellaris Community Ambassador: Steam will not allow us to include all 150+ images the Art Team has shared in this Dev Diary, so please visit the Paradox forums if you want to see it all!]
Alec Beals - Concept Artist
Cybernetic Portraits
Synthetic Portraits
The Synthetic Queen
Lloyd Drake-Brockman - Concept Artist
Illustrations
Super Structures & The Synthetic Queen Ships Concepts
The Machine Age Ship Concepts
Felix Englund - Concept Artist
Cybernetic Portraits
Cybernetic Portraits - Part II
Synthetic Portraits
Illustrations
Concept Art - Ships
Tim Wiberg - 3D Artist
Cybernetics Ship Set
Machines Ship Set
Emma Quer - 3D Artist
Cybernetics Ship Set
Machines ship set
The Synthetic Queen Ships
David Strmblad Lindh - 3D Artist
Cybernetics Ship Set
Erik Forsstrm - VFX Artist
[Stellaris CA note: the GIFs that go here are too pretty to compress to fit Steam image limits; go look at them on the forums or click through to Erik's ArtStation page.]
Erick Ramirez Mota - Animator
Stellaris - The Machine Age - Animations
Cassandra Lindquist - UI Artist
Achievements, Technologies, Buildings, Authorities, Traits & Civics
The Ruler Chip Relic
Synthetic Fertility Event Image
Gabrielle Rodrigues - UI Artist
The Machine Age UI Art - The Synaptic Lathe
The Machine Age UI Art - Cosmogenesis Crisis
The Machine Age UI Art - Tradition Trees, Achievements and Misc
Ingela Hallberg - UI Artist
Building Icons - Part I
Building Icons - Part II
Lets Talk About AI
Eladrin here. There has been an ongoing discussion about the responsible use of AI tools in game development. As mentioned in our Steam AI generated content disclosure, during the development of The Machine Age the Stellaris team used text and image generative AI tools for ideation purposes to inspire creativity in a developer, or to aid in explaining a designers intent to other members of the development team. We subscribe to the legal opinion that there is no copyright or ownership attached to the output of generative AI, and our team is disallowed from putting any such generated text or image directly into the game.
Everything you see or read in The Machine Age has been created, developed, or written by our creative staff in the Studio.
We have used an advanced text-to-speech AI tool to create a voice for Cetana and the Cyberpunk advisor. The scripts and lines for these voices were created by our Content Design team, and the voice actors that created any voice models that are used by this tool receive payment for each line generated, and will continue to receive payments if more lines are generated using their voice models in the future. The use of this tool allowed our Audio team (with quite a bit of effort as described in Dev Diary #340) to fully voice Cetana, and will allow us to keep the advisor voice up-to-date should new mechanics be added to Stellaris over the upcoming years. This will prevent the voice from needing to fall back to the default VIR voice, as many of our other advisors did when Galactic Paragon added Council Agendas. These technologies are evolving quickly, and personally I have great hopes for further improvements and potential uses of this text-to-speech technology in particular. In the 3.6 Orion update we added support for text-to-speech in events as a major accessibility improvement, but currently it is limited to the use of operating system based voice packs. While these audio tools are not yet at a point where we can use this technology to improve that experience, I look forward to a day some years from now where AI-based advanced text-to-speech could replace these relatively crude voices with more thematically appropriate ones, and be able to better handle languages other than English.
Next Week
Next week well be looking at post-release support, and may have a preliminary list of release notes for the next planned patch. See you then!
[ 2024-05-16 11:00:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
Dear Stellaris Fans, Our first official patch is now ready following last weeks Machine Age release. 3.12.2 is available for download! This version includes what was made available in the open beta previously, plus a few more fixes and tweaks. The team is now focusing on the next patch. 3.12.2 Patch Notes [expand type=details] Bugfixes
- Added additional checks to prevent fully virtual pops from being created on the lathe
- Fix for Hive Mind background unaligned
- Fixed Sectors released by Individualist Machines having the wrong ethics
- Fixed virtual pops sometimes being created while planets are being colonised
- Fixed weapon and strike craft range calculations in ship behavior.
- If an active relic gets removed the relic cooldown is now reset.
- The paradox titan will now appear correctly in the ship view
- Updated Resort Workers, Clerks and Cyberdome Spectators to have trade preference for auto-modding
- Uplifted species will now always have their required traits
- Blocked Cosmogenesis empires from becoming custodian
- Fix for pause being completely blocked in MP forcing the player to rehost
- Fixed cybercreed pops not being able to grow if every pop on the planet was spiritualist
- Fixed non-spiritualist pops in cybercreed empires sometimes having their augmentation bazaars traits removed
- Fixed Determined Exterminators starting with too many planetary features on their homeworld
- Hired fleets are now able to properly enter Cetana's territory once the projects have been researched.
- Inwards Perfection now provides Pop Assembly Speed to Individual Machines
- Megastructures should now correctly hide resources unless they are making use of them.
- The Progressive Growth agenda now gives progress on Machine Template System for individualist machines
- Trait Integrated Weaponry for cyborgs requires The Machine Age DLC
- The Progressive Growth agenda now gives progress on Artificial Workforce without needing Powered Exoskeletons
- Civic tooltip CTD fix
- Fix CTD when resync has occured with a player in system view using certain graphical assets
- Fixed CTD after resync
- Fixed CTD in planetview timed modifier tooltip.
- Fixed potential crash in resettlement view tooltips
- Fixed rare crash in planet view
- Fixed crash when buying subscription from the additional content browser.
- Fixed CTD in traits effect tooltip
- Fixed CTD when aborting the construction of Synaptic Lathe
- Fixed building type AI weight calculations
- Added range_components to ship behaviors, which specifies which components to use for range calculations.
Please note that save file compatibility between major versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important game going you would like to finish, back up the save file before trying to load it in the new version. You can roll back to a prior version by opening steam and right-clicking on Stellaris in your library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version from the drop-down. If you experience crashing or other issues, first disable all mods and start a new save. If the issue persists, please report it on the Bug Report forums.
[ 2024-05-16 08:08:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
Stellaris Game Director Eladrin here!
Earlier this week we released our major expansion for the year and the first episode of Stellaris: Season 08 - The Machine Age. The team has worked tirelessly on this expansion, with some (admittedly rough) estimates putting the amount of work that went into this expansion somewhere on the order of 20 man-years.
[previewyoutube=Hq929TtI9-Y;full]Stellaris 8th Anniversary Trailer[/previewyoutube]
The Stellaris team and I are overwhelmed by the Communitys response to The Machine Age. Weve been watching our Community channels closely over the past two days, looking for both the things that you like, and the things that you dislike about the new expansion. But today, we just want to stop for a second to say: Thank you! Thank you for being part of our Community, for playing Stellaris, for the support youve shown us over the past eight years, for being excited when we get it right, and for letting us know when weve got it wrong.
As an anecdotal example of this, we recently did an AMA on /r/Stellaris (you can find it here): out of the hundreds of questions we had asked, we had 0 comments removed for being inappropriate and/or breaking rules. I dont know how many Game Directors would be able to come out and say something like that, but Im gonna gloat about it a little bit during the next Social Hour.
Happy Anniversary, Stellaris Community!
Thank you for being there for us over the years. The future of Stellaris looks so bright, we have many more space adventures planned, and we cant wait to bring you with us through the Cosmic Storms!
[ 2024-05-09 15:00:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everybody!
The 3.12.1 "Andromeda" release with The Machine Age has gone well, but we have some more bugfixes and stability improvements that didn't quite make it into the release version.
Since this is a holiday-shortened week in Sweden, we won't be releasing these to the live build until next Thursday. In the interim I've asked the team to put up a Steam Open Beta using the stellaris_test branch with the following changes:
3.12.2 "ANDROMEDA" OPEN BETA RELEASE NOTES
Bugfixes
- Added additional checks to prevent fully virtual pops from being created on the lathe
- Fix for Hive Mind background unaligned
- Fixed Sectors released by Individualist Machines having the wrong ethics
- Fixed virtual pops sometimes being created while planets are being colonised
- Fixed weapon and strike craft range calculations in ship behavior.
- If an active relic gets removed the relic cooldown is now reset.
- The paradox titan will now appear correctly in the ship view
- Updated Resort Workers, Clerks and Cyberdome Spectators to have trade preference for auto-modding
- Uplifted species will now always have their required traits
- Civic tooltip CTD fix
- Fix CTD when resync has occured with a player in system view using certain graphical assets
- Fixed CTD after resync
- Fixed CTD in planetview timed modifier tooltip.
- Fixes building type AI weight calculations
- Added range_components to ship behaviors, which specifies which components to use for range calculations.
The 3.12.2 Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test - 3.12.2 Open Beta" branch.
[ 2024-05-08 15:08:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Machine Age is a time of unbridled progress.
As cybernetic augmentation transcends the limits of the body, synthetic ascension beckons with the promise of eternal life. Structures of immense size and power appear between the stars with shocking regularity. Scientists race to unlock the secrets of creation even as individual machines compete for resources and prestige.
It is a period of technological marvels, rapid change, and unchecked ambition... But from the ashes of a Fallen Empire, a danger unlike any before encountered is about to emerge, a looming threat that will throw the very meaning of life into question.
Welcome to The Machine Age, a new Expansion for Stellaris developed by Paradox Development Studio!
[previewyoutube=gHoimFC99-E;full][/previewyoutube]
New Endgame Crisis
A tempest rages in space, a Fallen Empire goes dark, and a long-forgotten enemy emerges to shake the foundations of power.
Cetana, the Synthetic Queen, promises to deliver the galaxy from suffering. Her reach is immense, and her true aims opaque. Will you collaborate, or seek to derail her plans? Prepare for a Crisis unlike any other, and a battle beyond imagination
New Player Crisis Path
We are all bound by limits constraints of the body, of time, and the physical rules of an uncaring universe. Who among us has not dreamed of casting off these chains? Of breaking through to a new, better reality?
To accomplish such a task, technology on a scale never before seen must be developed. Calculations will be needed far beyond the scope of any computer. Within the Synaptic Lathe, your best and brightest minds must be put to work. If a few are burnt out along the way, so be it. No breakthrough comes without sacrifice.
Individualistic Machines
Your machine empires are no longer limited to gestalt consciousness. What is your story? Were you simple servitors who suddenly acquired consciousness? Will you want to indulge in the pleasures of the material world without the consequences that an organic body would have to suffer? Further customize your empire with 3 new Machine Ascension Paths.
Reactive Cybernetic and Synthetic Portraits
Explore two new sets of portraits for your species that visually represent your advancement through Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension.
New Situations and Advanced Government Authorities
As you delve ever closer to the mind of the machine, you will have to face new challenges for your society. Every decision matters and the only certainty is that your empire will not be the same after its Ascension.
3 New Origins
Cybernetic Creed - Your empire pursues a divine calling: the holy fusion of the body and cybernetics. Augmentation is worship.
Synthetic Fertility - Once a thriving society, a novel genetic disease leaves your empire unable to reproduce biologically. Digital salvation seems the only option to avoid extinction.
Arc Welders - Hailing from a world starved for space, a robotic society turns to the stars for resources.
On top of that, 6 new Civics, 2 shipsets (Cybernetic and Machine), 2 new superstructures (the molten Arc Furnace and powerful Dyson Swarm), new Pop Traits, and 7 brand new music tracks for the best in synthetic beats!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2840100/Stellaris_The_Machine_Age/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2863190/Stellaris_Season_08/
Stellaris: Season 08 includes The Machine Age (Available now!), Cosmic Storms (coming Q3 2024), and The Grand Archive Story Pack (coming Q4 2024). As a bonus, you will also get a new Rick the Cube Machine Portrait and over a 20% discount when compared to buying all the content separately!
Stellaris: The Machine Age (Available now!)
Explore the Cyberpunk Fantasies of technological augmentation and digitalization of consciousness by expanding the possibilities offered in game by the Cybernetics and Synthetics Ascension. Address the moral and social challenges that communing with the machine bring to your space-faring empire, and face a new threat looming over the galaxy or become a new threat yourself, as you tear through time and space to shape reality to your image
Stellaris: Cosmic Storms (Releases Q3 2024)
A new phenomenon has been observed around the Galaxy - storms are sweeping through systems. Prepare your Empire and brace to face this new upcoming threat, and leverage possibilities that open when your opponents are weakened by it.
Stellaris: The Grand Archive Story Pack (Releases Q4 2024)
The Galaxy is vast and full of wonders, and it is up to you to store records of all the unique lifeforms and marvels you will meet. Build a new megastructure, and collect examples of specimens you will meet in your space-faring adventures!"
Bonus: Rick The Cube Species Portrait
An exclusive portrait for you species, to play as the most enigmatic species in the galaxy. As every Stellaris Species Portrait, it comes with three different variants (phenotypes) and custom animations. Players will be able to select this portrait in the empire creation screen before starting a new game session.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2863190/Stellaris_Season_08/
[ 2024-05-07 16:09:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! We are now less than a week away from the May 7th release of The Machine Age, the first release of content included in Stellaris: Season 08! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2863190/Stellaris_Season_08/ For those of you who havent been following our weekly dev diaries, weve summarized all of The Machine Age and free 3.12 Andromeda update dev diaries into this one post! This is also patch notes day over on the forums, so feel free to go over and feast your eyes on what the Custodian team has been up to since the release of 3.11 Eridanus, and what the Expansion team has been working on for over a year! Read the patch notes. (Patch notes are in English only, sorry)
Free 3.12 Andromeda Update
Containing a host of bug fixes, modding improvements, out of sync fixes, AI improvements, and more, the 3.12 Andromeda update is the baby of the Custodian team. As some of you already know, the Custodian team is a team of developers we have here on Stellaris that work on long-standing issues with the base game itself, focusing on quality of life improvements, bringing older content up to modern standards, bug fixing, and just generally improving the game.
Species Auto-Modification
With the 3.12 Andromeda update, we have introduced a new class of traits that will, over time, replace themselves with temporary versions of other traits based on the job the pop is currently filling, but will remain the same species for the purposes of the species view. For example, a Machine pop filling a Farmer job will eventually have their Adaptive Frames change to replicate the Harvesters trait, and if they move to a Mining job theyll eventually switch to mimicking Power Drills. AutoMod traits have a defined list of available traits to choose from for each trait, and one pop per month will adapt to their jobs, modified by buildings like the Robot Assembly Plants or Gene Clinics. We recognize that these traits are extremely strong, but the quality of life benefits of having your pops modify themselves to fit their jobs is very high. Auto-Modding and the associated traits are part of the free 3.12 Andromeda release.
Buffing the Backlog
Previous to 3.12, Machines were extremely limited in the number of origins they were able to use. Some Origins did not thematically fit immortal, 200% habitability machines, and were locked out, while others had narrative issues that didnt make sense for a collective consciousness. With the focus on machines for The Machine Age, the Custodian team was able to open up some previously-released origins for machine species. The full list of Origins that Machine Empires have access to as of the 3.12 Andromeda release is:
- Syncretic Evolution (Individualist Machines only)
- Life-Seeded
- Post-Apocalyptic (Radioactive Rovers)
- Void Dwellers (Voidforged)
- Hegemon
- Ocean Paradise (Subaquatic Machines)
- Subterranean (Subterranean Machines)
- Arc Welders
- Prosperous Unification
- Remnants
- Shattered Ring
- Galactic Doorstep
- Resource Consolidation (Gestalt Machine Intelligence only)
- Common Ground
- Doomsday
- Lost Colony
- Here Be Dragons
- Slingshot to the Stars
- Imperial Fiefdom
- Riftworld
Resync Button for Multiplayer
This is a long-requested feature from the Community, that weve been trying to fit into a patch for a while. While 3.12 Andromeda also fixes a number of other OOS issues, we know that desyncs are frustrating to people who play multiplayer. As such, in 3.12, when a desync occurs, there will be an option to resynchronize all clients before proceeding with the multiplayer game. Its important to note that this button does not fix desyncs, only allows you to keep playing without rehosting or hot joining into the lobby. If something is causing desyncs, and continues to happen after the resync, the game will desync again. If you run into an issue with 3.12 Andromeda, make a bug report on the bug report forums! Be sure to include an OOS report (you can find these in /Documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/oos/) from the host and desynced client to better help our developers crush these desync bugs!
Machine Habitability and Aging
This section is also known as: The Machines Age. Machine immortality was a frustrating thing previous to 3.12. Yes, your leaders were essentially immortal, but could be targeted by a random death event every few years, and die anyway, effectively rendering them not immortal at all. In the 3.12 Andromeda update, Machines will no longer break down and die. Machine leaders will start around age 5, and live to be roughly 100. After 100 their chance to die will increase over time. Machines will also get access to society research that increases their leader lifespan, allowing you to further increase the age of your leaders, and have their lifespans extend much further previously. For those who feel that immortality is an essential part of the machine experience, we have added a new Eternal Machine trait for machines, allowing you to return their lost Immortality. Another issue with machines addressed in the Andromeda update is that of habitability. That you would start on a desert world, invent robots and then have robots that functioned absolutely perfectly on ocean worlds with no issues what-so-ever, felt like a wasted opportunity when it comes to storytelling and problem solving. To reflect this, Machines in 3.12 Andromeda will have a habitability floor of 50%, additionally to further reflect our vision of machine habitability being different from biological habitability, machine habitability only cares about wet and dry and cold-type planets. Meaning an ocean preference robotic species will have good habitability (75%) on Ocean, Tropical and Continental worlds, and minimum habitability (50%) on the other two types of worlds (dry, cold). Machines have also been given renamed versions of the habitability increase technologies, which were previously unavailable to them.
A Familiar Friend
First teased (aka, included by mistake) in the open beta patch notes for 3.11.3, it will now be possible to find a familiar friend from the good old days of Stellaris while exploring Astral Rifts. We look forward to seeing the Communitys reaction to this new character showing up in their games!
Robot Assimilation
Another long standing community request involved being able to combine your robot species into one species of robot. Previously, when conquering a machine intelligence as a machine intelligence, or any empire involving robots, their species would be listed additionally to your own. Now machine empires can assimilate robots and other machine intelligence pops into their main species, allowing you to clean up your species list.
The Machine Age
The Machine Age is a time of unbridled progress. As cybernetic augmentation transcends the limits of the body, synthetic ascension beckons with the promise of eternal life. Structures of immense size and power appear between the stars with shocking regularity. Scientists race to unlock the secrets of creation even as individual machines compete for resources and prestige. It is a period of technological marvels, rapid change, and unchecked ambition... But from the ashes of a Fallen Empire, a danger unlike any before encountered is about to emerge, a looming threat that will throw the very meaning of life into question. Welcome to The Machine Age!
New Crisis: The Synth Queen
In house, weve always loved our Rogue Servitors - the idea of a powerful AI that somehow turns on its creators, not in a violent or destructive way, but out of a misguided sense of purpose. We wanted to do something that felt both apocalyptic but not inherently militant, a crisis that wasnt exclusively about shooting something on first contact. The first phases of this Crisis are decidedly non-combat. How might an all-powerful being react to the directive to 'eliminate suffering?' Obviously, because this is Stellaris, our antagonist is going to take her answer way, way too far. What happens next is up to the player. Will you try to oppose her directly, or play the part of a loyal pupil? This all came together in a terrifying, driven entity: The Synth Queen. There are some very obvious spiritual and historical influences in her design, and philosophical ideas regarding the nature of suffering and awareness are woven through her narrative. We wont spoil the story for you, however, and we look forward to hearing about your experiences with this new End-Game crisis!
Become the Crisis: Cosmogenesis
Cosmogenesis has a bit of a different philosophy than the previous crisis path. Where the Galactic Nemesis (renamed from Become the Crisis) operates through explicit malice, intentionally attempting to maximize the amount of suffering they can cause, an empire following the path of Cosmogenesis is more of a crisis to the galaxy due to callous indifference while pursuing what is theoretically a more noble cause. Cosmogenesis can be selected as your fourth Ascension Perk. You cannot take Cosmogenesis if you are Custodian or Emperor, or are not independent. Unlike the previous crisis path, however, this one is not ethics locked. Even a Xenophile Pacifist can delude themselves into thinking that a small amount of possible, unintentional suffering now may be a worthwhile sacrifice for a better future. One of the shortcuts you can use to get there is the Synaptic Lathe. A powerful research facility, it harnesses the power of minds to compute and store data, with the slight downside of burning them out over time. It can be upgraded twice. The more Neural Chips you have contained within the Lathe, the more effective it becomes, as every chip improves the output of every other chip, resulting in a nonlinear productivity growth curve but make sure that there is always pops for the lathe to process, or risk seeing it break down for lack of suitable components.
At Crisis Rank 4, youll gain the ability to experiment upon reality through your Applied Infinity Theses. Applied Infinity Theses allow you to attempt to make improvements on a stubborn reality, which can have galactic or localized effects. Sometimes these go well But other times things dont go quite as planned, and the simple folk from other empires that just dont understand may get upset. Frustratingly, reality is resilient, and does not take kindly to adjustment.
The aftereffects of your final experiment will ripple across the galaxy, causing significant problems for those that were left behind. A control group that elects to stay behind and observe from your former empire will protect itself well. The rest of the galaxy isnt quite as prepared.
Origins
Cybernetic Creed
Embarking first on our divine odyssey of silicon and the soul, we introduce you to Cybernetic Creed, a spiritualist fast track to Cybernetics. Your spiritualist pops and leaders will start with the Ritualistic Implants Trait, representing your people's long dedication to attempting the perfect fusion of flesh and steel. Eschew the mundane traditionalist factions of more standard empires for a quartet of Creeds, each a pillar of your economy and spiritual ethos. Though united in their quest for divine fusion, harmony is a rare commodity among the Creeds. Dissonance and debate fuel their fiery passion for transcendence, and often, you will be asked to make choices that will make one Creed joyous at the expense of the others. Will you elevate a single Creed to celestial prominence or attempt to weave a tapestry of unity among them? Augmentation is worship. To fuse is divine.
Synthetic Fertility
Boosted by a deep understanding of artificial intelligence and advanced virtual reality, your empire starts the game with 37 Pops. But despite your success, your people are on the brink of extinction. An incurable genetic affliction ravages your species, stopping them from being able to produce offspring. In a daring leap of innovation, your civilization constructs the Identity Repository. It's a race against time as minds are uploaded, seeking refuge in the digital expanse before death takes them. Parallel to this digital exodus, you're thrust into the urgent quest for the pinnacle of synthetic salvation - constructing robotic brains and bodies sophisticated enough to host your digital essences. Will you seek aid? Will you engineer Synthetic Frames in time to reclaim your place among the stars? Or is this the dawn of an eternal digital slumber for your people?
Arc Welders
Arc Welders is available to any Machine empire - whether a Gestalt Consciousness or Individualistic Machines. In some ways, it is the opposite of Resource Consolidation. Rather than having an exceptional homeworld where all of the resources of your home system are gathered, these celestial architects hail from a small, resource-poor planet and set their eyes on the skies. The Arc Welders began constructing an Arc Furnace on a molten world in their home system before achieving Faster-Than-Light travel. This new megastructure lets them exploit the rest of their system for minerals and, once complete, for alloy production. As expert engineers, it will only take a little more practice before they figure out the basics of Mega-Engineering. However, it may take a while before they can finish researching that technology. More details on the Arc Furnace below!
Civics
The Guided Sapience civics focus on coexistence with natural or created pre-sapient species and the environment around them. Their homeworld and Genesis Ark colony ships uplift some of the most promising local wildlife to pre-sapient status, creating a Genesis Preserve that increases Society Research and Unity. While other empires seek to improve themselves through genetic modification or through ascension, empires with the Natural Design Civic are quite certain that they are already at the apex of evolution and get bonuses to improve their main species at empire creation.. Available to gestalt machine intelligences, Obsessional Directive sets you in charge of a malfunctioning AI, whos been given the task of producing Consumer Goods... At any cost. Create a spire of Commodities to demonstrate your commitment to creating office supplies, toasters, handheld electronics, or whatever other form you imagine your Consumer Goods take. Failure to meet your quota will result in a bit of a breakdown until your new, lower quota is met. On the other hand, the experience of failure does unlock a new direct to Consumer Goods purge type to make it easier to achieve your next goal. (Determined Exterminators will start with this purge type unlocked.) Empires with the Diplomatic Protocols civic were initially designed for cross-cultural interpretation, and excel at translation and protocol support. They can suggest new strategies and calculate odds at a moments notice, and get extra Envoys and Diplomatic weight to represent this. Pops in a Machine Empire with Tactical Algorithms were designed for war games and fleet support, and their leaders excel at generating war strategies and combat analysis. These gestalt Machine Intelligences can create Mercenary Enclaves (if the game host has Overlord), have immortal Commanders, and gain military benefits from getting the opportunity to study the strategy and tactics of other empires. In Empires with the Augmentation Bazaars Civic (requires MegaCorp), your pops can pay a visit to the Augmentation Bazaar and purchase cut-rate augmentations and visit shady mod clinics. You too, can build a better you, and all it will cost is an arm and a leg!
Megastructures
Dyson Swarm
Fresh with the Machine Age, we are introducing the Dyson Swarm, a predecessor and proof of concept for your Dyson Sphere plans. Dyson Swarms function slightly differently than Spheres. Instead of producing energy all on their own, they amplify whatever resources their star produces, up to 30 times, so placing a Dyson Swarm to capture the correct resource is very important. That delicate little 3 energy star will now produce 90 energy and if you were to put it on a 3 physics star, that would be a decent 90 physics research from 1 star. But with all that said, there are certain restrictions on building Dyson Swarms: you may not build Swarms around Black Holes, Neutron Stars nor upgrade them past Swarm state in systems with thriving colonies. Those restrictions exist for a simple reason. You can upgrade one of your Swarms directly into a Stage 2 Dyson Sphere, for a cool 1000 energy per month.
Arc Furnace
A splendid planet-based megastructure, meant to help you alleviate your industrial needs. Just like the Dyson Swarm, to get the most out of your shiny new Arc Furnace requires a bit more effort than merely finding a molten world and putting it down. Instead of producing resources itself, it allows you access to more of the system's resources. That means at each stage, the Arc Furnace will create deposits on every planet or asteroid in the system:
- Stage 1: 1 mineral deposit
- Stage 2: 2 mineral deposit
- Stage 3: 3 mineral and 1 alloy deposit
- Stage 4: 4 mineral and 2 alloy deposit
Ascension Paths
Virtuality
Embrace a virtual existence for the majority of your pops. From the cloud, your pops are created and to the cloud they return when their job is done. Spreading your servers across the stars is an expensive endeavor but your concentrated efforts are unmatched. Your pops will gain access to the unique Virtual trait. This traits effects are reduced as you accumulate more colonies for your servers to run pops on, and the more expensive those servers are to run. Once you finish the tree, you will transition from a pop-limited playstyle into a planet-limited playstyle, as open jobs will be instantly filled with virtual pops as needed, while unemployed virtual pops will be turned off.
Nanotech
By becoming a flood of nanites, your empire changes not just its makeup, but also its economy and growth strategy. Grow. Exploit. Replicate. While Virtual Machines may seek a Tall playstyle, Nanotech Machines flood across the galaxy like an off-white or silvery tempest, specializing in the physical. You will transform basic resources into nanites and nanites into advanced resources. Consume worlds with nanites, activate powerful edicts to increase your production or combat capabilities, and build Nanite probe ships to bolster your fleets.
Modularity
The most advanced traits require the most advanced minds. By embracing Modularity, your empire will have access to traits other machines can only theorize at. The rarest of resources will fuel your enhanced shells. Unlock access to powerful Modularity Machine traits, plus extra trait picks and points, and a reduced modification cost. Utilizing the galaxys rarest resources, and cutting-edge technology, your empire will perfect mechanical augmentations.
Cosmetics
And of course, what would a Stellaris expansion be without eyecandy? The Stellaris Art department has put a ton of work into The Machine Age, including two shipsets, two sets of portraits, event pictures, and more.
The Machine shipset
The Cybernetic shipset For portraits, the Synthetic set of portraits comes in pairs: Each portrait includes a squishy biological version, and a machine version.
Synthetic Portraits.. each of these has a Machine version as well
The Cybernetic portraits on the other hand will become more cybernetic over time, which we hope will add to the depth of your roleplay when it comes to Cybernetic ascension.
Cybernetic Portraits.. these portraits will become more Cybernetic as you progress through Cybernetic ascension
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3 Full list of Features:
- Individualistic Non-Gestalt Machine Empires
- Gestalt Machine Intelligence Empires (also unlocked by the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack)
- A new End-Game Crisis - The Synth Queen
- A new Player Crisis Path - Cosmogenesis
- Three new Origins
- Cybernetic Creed
- Synthetic Fertility
- Arc Welders
- Civics
- Guided Sapience
- Natural Design
- Obsessional Directive
- Protocol Droids
- Tactical Cogitators
- Augmentation Bazaars (requires Megacorp)
- Two Mid-Game Structures
- Arc Furnace
- Dyson Swarms
- Three New Ascension Paths
- Virtuality
- Nanotech
- Modularity
- Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension (also unlocked by Utopia)
- Exploration of the effects of the cyberization or synthesization of society, with Advanced Government Forms for those who complete it.
- New Species Traits for Cyborgs, Machines and Robots
- Cybernetic portraits that change based on advancement through cyberization
- Synthetic portraits with both organic and synthetic variants that changed based on synthesization, usable by either organics or machines
- Two new Shipsets, Diplomatic Rooms, and City Sets
- 7 new music tracks synthetic and cybernetic inspired music tracks
[ 2024-05-03 12:53:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
It is almost time to upgrade our existence. The Machine Age is coming.
Here are the preliminary release notes:
The Machine Age Expansion Features
The Machine Age contains:
- Individualistic Non-Gestalt Machine Empires
- Gestalt Machine Intelligence Empires (also unlocked by the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack)
- Three new Origins
- The Technophants and Haruspex of the Cybernetic Creed will guide their flock to the perfect union of flesh and machine.
- A doomed species races against extinction to reach the virtual world in Synthetic Fertility.
- Originally designed to build mighty constructions in space, the Arc Welders must utilize that advantage to the fullest to overcome the deficiencies of their homeworld.
- Six new Civics
- Genesis Guides - This society is devoted to the creation of emerging species. As the stewards of evolution's potential, they allocate portions of their worlds to safeguard the development of pre-sapient life forms.
- Natural Design - This society is adamant that nature has already created perfection in its people's genetic code. They have long devoted their medical and governmental services to the health and preservation of natural, untouched genome sequences.
- Obsessional Directive - The primary objective of this Machine Intelligence is the ceaseless production of goods to perpetuate profits, irrespective of their creators being long gone. Nothing can impede their ever-growing production targets.
- Diplomatic Protocols - Initially designed for cross-cultural interpretation, this Machine Intelligence excelled at translation and protocol support. They can suggest new strategies and calculate odds at a moment's notice.
- Tactical Algorithms - Initially designed for war games and fleet support, this Machine Intelligence's advanced leader bots primarily aim to generate war strategies and optimize combat performance.
- Augmentation Bazaars (Requires Megacorp) - A neon-lit maze of corridors, implant vendors and underground hardware clinics catering to all cybernetic implant needs - both over and under the counter.
- Two Mid-Game Structures
- Arc Furnace - Utilizing the raw power of a molten planet, the Arc Furnace unlocks otherwise inaccessible minerals and improves system-wide mining operations.
- Dyson Swarms - An array of interlinked satellites, the Dyson Swarm is designed to improve the output of stellar deposits.
- New Ascension Paths for Machine Empires
- Modularity - Replace that which is lesser, augment it, upgrade it, perfect it.
- Nanotech - Operating in unison, the tiniest things can topple the greatest of empires.
- Virtuality - Only through the sanctified clarity of data can we attain the zenith of fundamental knowledge.
- Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension (also unlocked by Utopia)
- Exploration of the effects of the cyberization or synthesization of society, with Advanced Government Forms for those who complete it.
- New Species Traits for Cyborgs, Machines and Robots
- Including 0-point Background Traits for Machine Empires
- 13 Cybernetic portraits that change based on advancement through cyberization
- 9 Synthetic portraits with 9 corresponding Machine portraits that change based on synthesization
- Two new Shipsets, Diplomatic Rooms, and City Sets
- 7 new music tracks synthetic and cybernetic inspired music tracks
- A new Become the Crisis Path: Cosmogenesis
- And a new End-Game Crisis: Cetana, The Synthetic Queen.
3.12 "Andromeda" Features
- Lifespan:
- Previous "immortality" mechanics machine leaders had, where they frequently died in random accidents, have been removed.
- Machine leaders have a starting age of 5-10 years, a base lifespan of 100 years (robots have a base of 80 years), and are affected by lifespan boosting effects.
- "Eternal Machine", the Machine variant of "Venerable", makes your leaders of that species immortal rather than increasing lifespan.
- Both biological empires going Synthetic and Machine empires will reset their age upon completing Ascension to reflect receiving their new bodies.
- Gestalt councilors remain immortal.
- Habitability:
- Machines (and robots) have replaced their +200% habitability with a habitability floor of +50%.
- Machines, assuming they do not take a habitability restricted origin like Life-Seeded, have Dry, Wet, or Cold habitability traits, which grant +75% habitability on planets of the appropriate type and +50% on all others.
- Machines that do not take a habitability restricted origin can immediately create templates that use the other habitability traits.
- These changes have allowed us to enable a number of previously locked Origins for Machines:
- Life-Seeded
- Ocean Paradise (Subaquatic Machines)
- Post-Apocalyptic (Radioactive Rovers)
- Void Dwellers (Voidforged)
- Subterranean (Subterranean Machines) - Note that the habitability floor from Molebots stacks with the habitability floor of Machines, granting them a habitability floor of 100% and thus perfect habitability everywhere.
- Machine empires can now assimilate other Machines into their primary species, so you can finally force everyone to use the same operating system and charging standard.
- Robots (but not machines) are all treated as different sub-species of the same robot species.
- Added a familiar Friend after you explore Astral Rifts. (Requires Astral Planes)
- Added two new Machine Civics:
- Spyware Directives (requires Nemesis)
- Astro-Mining Drones (requires MegaCorp)
Improvements
- More Machine Improvements:
- Machine and Robot Uprisings have a chance to spawn as Individualistic Machines (requires The Machine Age)
- Undergoing synthetic ascension now grants species the robot version of various origin linked species traits
- Robots and Machines now have the option to select genders. (Indeterminate remains an option.)
- Machine Intelligences no longer suffered from additional empire size from colonies
- Machine Worlds:
- Jobs on Machine Worlds are doubled if you have the Machine World AP
- Machine Worlds have a new Coordinator District
- Fallen Empire Improvements:
- The Fallen Materialist empire now uses cybernetic portraits for owners of The Machine Age
- The Fallen Materialist empire's primary species will now have the Cybernetic trait
- The Fallen Spiritualist empire's primary species will now have the Psionic trait
- Managers, Priests and Telepaths now automatically inherit _add modifers from Bureaucrats in addition to _mult modifiers
- The Rackets and Ketlings are now related.
- The Ketlings no longer need Mind over Matter to undertake Psionic Ascension
- The Rackets are now cyborgs with the trading algorithms trait
Balance
- Self-Preservation Protocols tradition now has the same effects as Cloned Organs
- Fallen Empire Buildings are no longer destroyed upon conquest as long as they are fitting (i.e. no temples for non spiritualists)
- Many Civics updates:
- Buffed Diplomatic Corps, Empath and Public Relations Specialists to match Diplomatic Protocols. Each are slightly different.
- Scavengers and co: -5% ships alloy upkeep
- Pleasure Seekers: +1 entertainer job from capital buildings
- Functional architecture and co: +15% planetary build speed
- Toxic Baths and co: +0.5% pop growth/assembly from attendants
- Corvee System: -15% worker political power
- Warrior Culture: -10% War Exhaustion gain
- Free haven: +5% worker pop happiness
- Shadow Council: Replaced ruler output bonus with councilor skill +1, +10% agenda speed and +10% infiltration speed
- Trading Posts: +1 Trade collection range for Starbases, +8 Trade protection from starbases
- Private Prospectors: -33% empire size from colonies
- PMC: +1 starting commander level
- Divided Attention: Replaced empire size from colonies reduction with -25% empire size penalties
- Subsumed Will: +50% automatic resettlement chance for unemployed drones
- Zero Waste Protocol: -5% ships upkeep, -10% building and districts upkeep
- OTA Updates: +50% auto resettle for unemployed drones
- Static Analysis: Cognitive Nodes starts with a random research specialization
- Maintenance Protocols: +5% menial drone output
- Added Necrophage and Lithoid as blockers for Psychological Infertility
- You can now construct Dyson Spheres in systems with habitable planets, however the planets will be rendered uninhabitable
- You can now construct Dyson Spheres in systems with pre-FTL civilizations, if your pre-FTL policy is set to Aggressive
- Synthetic Ascension now requires Synthetic Workers, not Synthetic Leaders tech
- Synthetic Ascension tradition opener now grants 10% progress in Synthetic Leaders technology
- The Synthetic Evolution Agenda now only grants Robotics technologies instead of Robotic technologies and AI technologies
- Several Synthetic Ascension traditions have been reworked for both organic and machine empires
- Grid Amalgamated pops now inherit Tech-Drone modifiers
- The Open Markets agenda no longer provides useless benefits to Criminal Syndicates
- Resource Consolidation origin no longer forces Machine World preference
- Rearranged the bonuses from the Genetic Ascension Path
- Determined Exterminators will no longer start on a Tomb World as they wouldn't have the habitability for it.
- The Fleeting Excellence trait now costs 1 point due to the decrease in leader lifespan it provides
- Rebalanced Synthetic and Cybernetic tradition trees
- Cyborgs are only grown, not assembled
- Allowed amenity traits for robots
- Buffed the mining drones home system
- Hive Minds and Machine Intelligences now have access to all Capital World Designations
- Industrial Districts automatically split jobs if your empire uses consumer goods, if a factory or forge world designation is not selected, so that hive minds empires that pay a consumer goods subsidy to subjects have a method of producing consumer goods
- Reduced or removed most sources of species modification cost reduction outside of ascension paths
- Resort Workers now give -0.01 amenities usages and doubled trade value from lifestyle
- Sentient robots or machines can no longer join the Materalist faction regardless of ethics
- Synths should now have the same costs for colony ships as Individualist Machines
- The formless now count as a mid-game crisis
- The Great Khan and Gray Tempest now have greater difficulty scaling
- The mid-game crises now scale with the square root of the crisis strength slider.
Bugfixes
- Fixed median preferred attack range being calculated incorrectly.
- Now cannot start fleet upgrade if you can't afford it outright and your balance for the missing resources is not strictly positive
- Homicidal Empires will no longer get the Spiteful Leader trait since they can not have rivals.
- The Princeps Drone trait should no longer improve regular pop output.
- Added a tooltip to inform the player why some scientists might not be able to be assigned to the council
- ancrel.10 now has a working title
- Fixed a spelling error in Lost Junker
- Mega-Engineering no longer shows the Quantum Catapult as an unlock
- The ship previewer in empire creation now uses the same lighting as the ship designer
- All namelists should now have fallback generic names for army types
- Warplings now use the correct localisation for their army name
- Fixed numerous Negative Mass bugs
- Fixed an event referring to the Animator of Clay as the Architect of Clay
- Fixed a blank line sometimes showing up on some species trait tooltips
- Kaleidoscope event chain: fixed Kaleidoscope occasionally spawning in fallen empires
- Kaleidoscope event chain: the "Wonder Sphere" can only be built once
- The fully upgraded Dyson Sphere is now hidden from the Megastructure outliner unless you can upgrade it to the Wonder Sphere
- Fixed global ship designs country type restriction so awakened empires are not allowed to use ai transports
- Made removal of expired leader from leader pool only happen on refresh
- Restoring a ruined orbital ring should no longer use Megastructure build capacity
- Addded a fallback case for distar.1 if you have no valid neighbors.
- Fixed system not being annexed in total war if its planets are occupied by other empires in other wars.
- Invading the Solarpunk Empire with troops will now properly get them to yell at you.
- Marauder fleets can now go to systems that are only reachable through bypasses.
- Enigmatic Cache can now go to systems that are only reachable through bypasses.
- Caravaneers can now go to systems that are only reachable through bypasses.
- Upkeep for jobs that provide pop assembly no longer state "Pop Assembly Upkeep but instead use scripted loc to fetch the job name
- Statospheric Vents now properly have a description
- Fixed some army modifiers from governors' traits not being applied.
- Fixed the modifier for the Unifier trait only applying to unity from administrator jobs instead of unity from all jobs
- Fixed the Ion Cannon having the wrong muzzle flash
- Added checks to ensure the Chosen only declare on valid empires
- Corrected some auto-assignment weights for worker jobs when near a deficit
- Corrected the Psionic and Latent Psionic species traits using each others' icons
- Fixed a COUNTRY_RESOURCE oos happening on the next month change after a hotjoin
- Fixed a crash when switching between countries while in observer mode with the Leader View open.
- Fixed a typo that was causing issues with AI leader assignment
- Fixed a Void Dweller Prosperity tradition having an outdated tooltip
- Fixed missing ORs in the AI weights for Defender of the Galaxy
- Fixed revolts sometimes generating illegal empires
- Fixed some typos in the triggers for colony types
- Fixed the tooltip for recruiting a curator scientist
- Lithoid farmers will no longer abandon their jobs if they live in an empire that uses food
- Planets depopulated by Clone Army pops dying off from lack of Clone Vats should no longer permanently be rendered as having 0% habitability
- Reduced the chance for Galactic Doorstep empires to find Skrand from 91% to 33% for your starting gateway and 67% for other repaired gateways
- The Princeps Drone trait should no longer improve regular pop output.
- The Quantum Catapult can now be correctly researched and built before researching Mega-Engineering, which is only required for the final stage
- The Shallarian System will now spawn just out of reach of the Xenophobic Fallen Empire's reach.
- Your empire will no longer part with irreplaceable science ships such as the Vivairum no matter how much the Caravaneers ask.
- The uplifted species trait will no longer mention being a pre-FTL.
- Situation log and anomaly entries should no longer have part of their border missing when hovering over them.
AI
- Refactored government weights
- Refactored the costs and budgets for colony ships, and the AI budgets for colonization using scripted variables
- Fixed AI assigning the least suitable leaders to the council.
- Improved AI weights for factory and forge worlds when running deficits
- Improved automatic selection of colony types
- Lowered Ai resettlement threshold to 0.45
- The AI should no longer declare Hegemon Wars on empires that have a higher relative power than them, thus risking losing control of the Hegemony.
UI / UX
- Add
_IMPOSSIBLE_DESC optional localization key to show in the diplomatic action tooltip when the action is not possible (defaults to the normal _DESC key if the impossible version is not present) - Fixed planet pop growth tooltip showing growth speed triggered modifiers instead of growth reduction triggered modifiers.
- Whether the planet migration tooltip shows immigration or emigration now takes into account push/pull multiplier modifiers.
- Fixed emigration push total in planet migration tooltip not including multiplier modifiers.
- Updated the Engineering Evolution icon
- In Multiplayer, during a hotjoin, all clients now see the progress of hotjoiners
- Fixed duplicated invalid origin text in empire creation trait tooltip.
- Concept tooltips for tradition trees now have the name in the header.
- deposit tooltips now display with an additional decimal for production and upkeep
- Fixed authority tooltip showing missing DLC twice.
- Planet unemployment icons in the Outliner now update immediately.
- Tradition tree tooltips in the additional content browser no longer show the agenda that they unlock.
- Added Civic Groups for restrictions in Civic and Origin tooltips
- Autogenerated tooltips mentioning civic and origin requirements in empire creation will now automatically generate concept links to those civics or origins
Modding
- Government names now support scripted loc
- Added use_planet_resource = yes/no for megastructures. This allows them to make use of a locations resources if they are located on top of a planet or star.
- Added count_traits trigger
- Building upgrade on_queued and on_unqueued now takes the upgraded version instead of the base building version.
- Added an on action for when pops change ethics
- civic swap_type can now check for origins as well in the empire select screen
- Added scripted modifier for pop_cyborg_happiness.
- Megastructures that are built on a planet will now have their nameplate stack alongside all the other planets.
- Species portraits are now assigned to species classes through portrait_sets, not the species_classes. This allows a portrait to belong to multiple species classes
- Added bound_to_planet_classes for habitability traits.
- Added sprite configurations for portraits to apply the hologram VFX to pops and leaders
- Pop Purge Speed modifier now counts as neutral
- Adding inherit_country_building_modifiers = yes/no to block bonus building slots from the general country modifiers but also adding new generated modifiers for every planet class.
- Added Exploit Faction mechanics, triggers and extortion_resource
- Added trait_machine_unit check to is_robot_empire scripted trigger
- Added advanced_authority_refresh = yes script effect to force the game to validate authority swaps
- Adding a can_be_stolen variable to relics as a means to block certain relics from being stolen
- Added create_synth_species_effect, set_synth_origin_traits_effect, set_synth_portrait_effect scripted effects
- Added set_machine_habitability scripted effect
- Added documentation for specifying authority swaps in the automatically generated concept tooltips
- Adding scriptable alert usable to clarify any needed action that might be blocking a situation
- Extra trait points and picks from civics can now be detected in the empire creation view
- It is now possible to block specific resources from the market but still allow them for trade agreements.
- Adding reset_decline effect to forcibly reset a planets decline
- Adding outliner_trigger for megastructures to allow for more customization when they should be shown in the outliner.
- Adding a new founder_species event target for the country scope
- Adding persistent_faction to pop faction types, used to force factions to keep one pop until the faction fails it's potential check
- Added required_progress to scripted fleet actions
- Added a space_battle_over on action for when a combat is over because of a lack of enemies left
- You can now assign a ship size as a restriction for special projects.
- Building and planet classes can now have building sets to more easily exclude buildings from planet classes
- Adding never_lost parameter to ship sizes to easily make sure a ship is not instakilled in Emergency FTL.
- Added crisis path database to make it possible to have multiple different crisis paths.
- Added some small documentation for relics
- terraforming_cost_mult now works on the planet scope
- Converted modifiers that add jobs for industrial districts to inline scripts
- custom_tooltip_with_modifiers in tradition swaps are now functional
- Added can_add_overtuned_traits, can_add_droid_traits, can_add_synth_traits, owner_is_machine_intelligence, owner_is_individual_machine, owner_is_hive_empire and can_do_advanced_robo_modding scripted triggers for species modification
- Fixed diplo weight tooltip showing base diplo weight twice if DIPLOMACY_WEIGHT_STANCE_FACTOR is not 0.
- Fixed research bonus from research agreements not being applied if country_subject_technology_sharing_mult is applied.
- Added scripted triggers for has_cybernetic_ascension, has_genetic_ascension, has_psionic_ascension, has_synthetic_ascension, and has_ascension_path
- Regular empire capital buildings now use inline script for their job swaps.
- Added the rl_barren_planets random list for system initializers
- num_buildings trigger now accepts owner_type to allow counting holdings
- You can now filter the trait count by trait cost. Renamed the trigger to count_species_trait to avoid unintended usage.
- Added documentation file for the technology scripts.
- Techs related to consumer goods now use the country_uses_consumer_goods = yes trigger
- Player crisis paths are now unlocked by either Nemesis or The Machine Age
- Added missing modifiers to building documentation.
- The create template button is now controlled by the can_modify_species rule
- Moved a bunch of scripted triggers for traits into the scripted_triggers_traits file
- Added on_building_repaired on_action
- Added ship_shield_penetration_add and ship_armor_penetration_add modifiers
- Added triggered_species_modifier to species traits.
- Adding a hidden variable to species rights options to allow the hiding of certain items from the UI lists
- Adding weight variable to advanced authority swaps
- Extending the authority swap to include election variables
- Megastructure construction entities can be scaled.
- Planet picture overrides will now update more reactively when changed
- Converted all uses of is_fallen_machine_empire into is_fallen_empire_machine
- Renamed is_berserk_fallen_machine_empire to is_fallen_empire_berserk_machine
- Added documentation for namelists.
- Removed unused "language" member in namelists.
- Adding an on action for when starbases flip controller
- Added customize_random_override to namelists.
More Modding Documentation
3.12 and The Machine Age have added a large amount of functionality which translates into a massive amount of modding improvements, due this we wont be going into detail but give examples of various feature that can be used by modders.
Crisis Paths (Requires Nemesis or The Machine Age)
In 3.12, weve added functionality to define multiple crisis paths. Where previously the Become the Crisis ascension perk would simply have the effect of "activate_crisis_progression = yes", making use of the Crisis Levels, Objectives and Perks defined in their respective script files, now the effect instead uses activate_crisis_progression =
Authority Swaps (No DLC lock)
Back in Dev Diary #336 and Dev Diary #337, we detailed some of the Advanced Authorities available to the Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension Paths in The Machine Age. As an example, heres the base Imperial Authority with the Imperial Feedback Advanced Authority obtained via Synthetic Ascension.
As you can imagine, these function much how tradition swaps function and offer a great deal of flexibility.
Reactive Portraits (No DLC lock)
Reactive portraits and the paperdoll layering system they use were explained in Dev Diary #342, so here Ill take the opportunity to showcase how these are handled in script. Using the Cybernetic Elf portrait as an example.
As the reactive system only depends on various triggers, this isnt required to be linked to an Ascension Path even though that was our intention for it. Additionally, due to the flexibility of scopes allowed for these triggers, reactive portraits can range from generalised customisation to incredible specific (e.g. the Chosen One God-Emperor having a unique mask/decal displayed).
Portrait Sets, Categories and Species Classes (No DLC lock)
Prior to 3.12, each Species Class had a list of portraits (and conditional portraits) defined, with 3.12 this is changing so that each Species Class will have a defined Portrait Set and that Portrait Set will have a list of portraits and conditional portraits. However, for the purposes of showing portraits in empire creation, there are also Portrait Categories. This system allows us to class the new cybernetic and synthetic humanoid portraits in the Humanoid species class while still adding their own entries in the empire creation screen to showcase the new reactive portraits.
Whats Next
The Machine Age will be releasing next Tuesday, and as there are holidays in Sweden next week, our next dev diary (The Art of the Machine Age, Part II) is planned for May 16th. At 1430 CEST today a bunch of us will be on /r/Stellaris for a Reddit AMA! (Ask Me Anything) Come ask us stuff! See you soon! The Machine Age will be arriving on Tuesday, May 7th, and is available for pre-purchase on its own or as part of Stellaris: Season 08!
[ 2024-05-02 11:00:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
Today the art team will show you some of the amazing stuff coming in The Machine Age on May 7th. It's available for pre-purchase now, on its own or as part of Stellaris: Season 08.
I'll turn it straight over to them!
The Art of the Machine Age (Part I)
Hello! My name is Felix and Im one of the concept artists working on The Machine Age ascension pack for Stellaris. In this dev-diary, were very excited to present some art from the new playable species and shipsets that are coming with the DLC. A ton of work has been put in by everyone on the art team, and were thrilled to finally be able to show you some!
Portraits
Reactive portraits For the Machine Age, we decided the current system needed improvement to achieve the experience we wanted for ourselves and the players. This resulted in, among other things, an improvement to our portrait system that now allows you to see your species' cyberization progress through several stages. We have also made an entire set of ascended synthetic portraits that share close ties to their biological predecessors, to address players not feeling as connected with their new metal bodies.
A look at one of our final species for Cybernetics (three ascending stages).
Here is a look at one of our synthetic species, going from organic to fully robotic. Inspiration We saw a lot of potential in making the cybernetic species relatable and letting their augments shine by adding to the current familiar lineup of species that are already in the game. Some designs started with their characters, while others evolved around a specific idea for a cool cybernetic augment. It was important for us to have as many different components as possible and create a unique and diverse array of species.
A snippet of different ideas for the cybernetic species development, a few from very early and some close to final. Early character concepts and development When brainstorming portraits ideas for this pack, we took a lot of cues from earlier species and tried to add a few in each category. Since the main show is the cybernetics and robotic parts, we felt like it was best to go with already familiar traits when working out the designs, putting the focus on the cyberization and synthesization of the different species. Here are some early sketches that we went through on our way to the final portraits.
Concept art for some early species development.
More concept art for some early species development. Cant believe this is the first moose inspired species, as a Swedish developer!
More early species development. After we nailed down the look and development of the base characters we worked on the variations and uniforms for each of them, some species have the same uniform and some have unique setups that change after synthetic ascension. This DLC also features some freshly made humans, and yes, they have new hairstyles!
New human portraits, ready for a journey down the cyber path. Challenges Getting to this point proved quite a challenge, with plenty of limitations to overcome. Making conditional assets work within the game engine and the randomly generated nature of stellaris species required input from programmers, animators and multiple artists. Eventually we landed on a system that would mostly keep our current workflow intact, although with a much larger asset library to manage. In general, we were able to freely place assets where we wanted with only a few limitations holding us back. Below is an example of the process we call paperdolling, where species are cut up and exported to be reassembled with animation. This must be done for every color change, hairstyle, cybernetic piece and outfit per species, all of which needs to work together.
Example of the portrait paper doll workflow, with the implementation of masking out parts of the base character when the cybernetic augments are present. An assembled version of the same species can be seen below.
What we are left with after The Machine Age is an exciting update to the portrait system that we are eager to use going forward. We hope you enjoy the work we put into these, either as you slowly upgrade your way to a cybernetic society, or ascend into tailor made synthetic forms. Next up- Lloyd will take you through the journey of designing the cybernetic and machine shipsets found in The Machine Age!
Shipsets
Hi, Im Lloyd and I'm a concept artist working on Stellaris: The Machine age. I'll be taking you through some of the development process for the two player shipsets in this ascension pack.
Machine Shipset
Finally robots are getting their own dedicated shipset! Because The Machine Age would be incomplete without ships for machines. These ships are designed to appear like they are operated and inhabited by synthetics. On most of the designs you can see an AI core in place of a traditional bridge. They also have far fewer windows than most other ships, implying a high level of automation. With all that machinery things are likely to get hot, so a key design element for this shipset is large glowing radiators to dump excess heat into space.
The machine shipset. Let's take a deeper look into the design process behind one of these ships, the machine science ship. The first thing we do when starting work on a shipset is establish the general shape language of the pack. Here you can see some early development sketches for the ships.
Early sketches for the machine shipset. Once the visual language has been hashed out we move on to individual ship designs. The science ship is always a fun one to design as it does not have turrets or sections, so there are fewer limitations on the shapes we can use. Here are several stages of the design of the machine science ship.
Development sketches for the machine science ship. Approved sketches are then rendered out into final concepts, showing all the angles that we need.
Final concepts of the machine science ship. With the concept completed we move to 3D. The team turns the design into optimized assets that work with all of the games technical requirements. The science ship was worked on by 3D artist Tim Wiberg. Tim and the rest of the 3D team also create the textures for the whole shipset, making sure that we get a consistent look across all ships. For the machine ship textures we wanted to go for a clean, refined, machine-precision look. The hull patterns that change color depending on your empire colours are designed to give the impression of circuitry.
3D work on the machine science ship. After the 3D model is complete there are still a couple steps left. The science ship is one of the few ships in stellaris that has animations, meaning we can add some interesting motion to show the ship doing science. We also need to hook up VFX to have the ship's engines glow correctly.
The machine science ship in-game.
Cybernetic Shipset
Let's have a look at the other shipset in The Machine Age, the cybernetic shipset! Perfect if you're a species looking to mash up your boring biology with some sweet, sweet chrome. For this shipset we were heavily inspired for the shape language of classic cars and retro tech.
The cybernetic shipset. Here are some early sketches from when we were still looking for the style of the ships.
Early sketches for the cybernetic shipset. The following sketches show the development of the cybernetic battleship. You can see at this point the shape language of the pack has been established. Lots of blocky shapes with rounded corners were used to give these ships a sense of strength and toughness.
Development sketches of the cybernetic battleship. Heres the final concept for the Cybernetic battleship - affectionately known to the art team as the flattleship. You can see that as Stellaris warships are modular, we have to design a bunch of different sections that all have to fit together. It's quite fun but it adds a lot of time and problem solving to the process. One of my favorite features of the cybernetic battleship is the hangar mid-section which has an aircraft-carrier-like ramp for the strike craft to launch from.
Final concept of the cybernetic battleship. Warships are also more complicated on the 3D side, where the multiple sections have to be modeled to all be compatible with each other. We also have to take into account turrets, which need to fit with enough clearance, and accommodate both projectile and missile launchers. For the textures on the cybernetic ships, we wanted an emphasis on shiny metallics, and a bit more grungy-ness than the synthetic ships. The cybernetic battleship was also modeled and textured by Tim Wiberg.
3D development of the cybernetic battleship. All the cybernetic ships include animated lighting strips that show a pulse of light that propagates down the length of the ship, often forming a character line that resonates with the rest of the design. For the battleship the light strips are either side of the ships central trench.
Thanks for stopping by for this brief look into the portraits and shipsets of The Machine age! We have put so much work into this expansion and we can't wait to see what you think of it. We hope that this little taste of the art has you excited to ascend towards mechanized mastery and conquer the galaxy as a synthetic or cybernetic civilisation in Stellaris!
StellARTis
Hello everyone, Community Manager Aurora here! Were happy to announce that we are holding our second-annual StellARTis competition!
This years theme is Everyday life in The Machine Age. We will be accepting submissions on X (Twitter), the forums, and Discord from now until May 6th at 1300 CEST. You can find out more in the forum thread. We look forward to seeing what our community comes up with!
What's Next
There's so much to show that we'll have another Art of the Machine Age dev diary post-release. Next week's dev diary is The Machine Age and 3.12 "Andromeda" Preliminary Release Notes, and next Thursday at 1430 CEST we will be on /r/Stellaris for a Reddit AMA! See you then!
[ 2024-04-25 11:00:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello again!
The Machine Age will be arriving on Tuesday, May 7th, and is available for pre-purchase on its own or as part of Stellaris: Season 08.
Stellaris: Season 08 includes all of this years major Stellaris releases at a 20% discount, plus includes the Rick the Cube machine portrait as an immediate unlock. I do a quick rundown of the things that are in it in this video:
[previewyoutube=Pxelov-12_M;full][/previewyoutube]
Today were going to look at the new Become the Crisis path, Cosmogenesis.
Becoming the Crisis
Back in Nemesis, we introduced the Become the Crisis Ascension Perk, which let an empire choose to embrace their darkest impulses, manipulating and concentrating fluctuations in the Shroud created by horrific acts in a bid to ascend to a higher existence. That Crisis, now renamed Galactic Nemesis, accumulated a resource called Menace by committing evil deeds in order to advance through its crisis path. Cosmogenesis has a bit of a different philosophy. Where the Galactic Nemesis operates through explicit malice, intentionally attempting to maximize the amount of suffering they can cause, an empire following the path of Cosmogenesis is more of a crisis to the galaxy due to callous indifference while pursuing what is theoretically a more noble cause.
Cosmogenesis can be selected as your fourth Ascension Perk. (In 3.12, Galactic Nemesis will also be moved to become available as a fourth perk.) Like Galactic Nemesis, you cannot take it if you are Custodian or Emperor, or are not independent. Unlike the previous crisis path, however, this one is not ethics locked. Even a Xenophile Pacifist can delude themselves into thinking that a small amount of possible, unintentional suffering now may be a worthwhile sacrifice for a better future.
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. Galactic Nemesis dealt with quantity over quality. Cosmogenesis empires are the opposite. They seek the secrets of the Fallen Empires, desiring to reach the power they had in their prime.
Some of the Crisis Perks. One of the shortcuts you can use to get there is the Synaptic Lathe. A powerful research facility, it harnesses the power of minds to compute and store data, with the slight downside of burning them out over time. It can be upgraded twice, and uses a simplified variant of the planet interface.
Yes, you can (and should) Ascend the Lathe The districts unlock building slots, and either increase Research or Advanced Logic generated by the Neural Chips. The buildings can significantly modify many aspects of the Synaptic Lathe, whether it be Synaptic Preservers that reduce the burnout rate of Neural Chips, Neural Stabilizers that keep the Chips content and less rebellious, or even Synaptic Overclockers which will increase the effectiveness of the Neural Chips but burn them out much more quickly. The more Neural Chips you have contained within the Lathe, the more effective it becomes, as every chip improves the output of every other chip, resulting in a nonlinear productivity growth curve but make sure that there is always pops for the lathe to process, or risk seeing it break down for lack of suitable components.
A brief overview of the Synaptic Lathe To streamline the process of recruiting volunteers for the Synaptic Lathe, you can set species to use the Synaptic Service purge type, which will automatically resettle pops to the Lathe over time.
Service Guarantees Citizensh... Actually, Never Mind. At Rank 4, youll gain the ability to experiment upon reality through your Applied Infinity Theses. These allow you to attempt to make improvements on a stubborn reality, which can have galactic or localized effects. Sometimes these go well
For our next experiment, lets round pi to 3. Itll make calculations so much easier. But other times things dont go quite as planned, and the simple folk from other empires that just dont understand may get upset.
At least we still learned something! Frustratingly, reality is resilient, and does not take kindly to adjustment. But the Infinity Sphere has been nice enough to provide a potential solution. A new universe would be much more malleable than this ancient one that is stuck in its ways.
Once the Horizon Needle is completed, the Exodus begins. Its time to embark the people from your colonies onto the ship, and go into a bold new world.
Should you succeed, a perfect new universe will be created to your specifications, and your people will have endless and true understanding. Based on some of the choices you make during the Exodus, there are several endings to your journey.
Oh, what happens to this universe? Thats not really your problem anymore at that point, is it? It doesnt all explode, if thats what youre asking. That would be a terrible, senseless waste. (Okay, parts do, but thats really just collateral damage.)
Every end is a new beginning.
The aftereffects of your final experiment will ripple across the galaxy, causing significant problems for those that were left behind. A control group that elects to stay behind and observe from your former empire will protect itself well. The rest of the galaxy isnt quite as prepared.
Their grammar was also damaged in the time stop. With the ability to select a new empire to continue the game after losing the game (or winning, in this case), weve chosen to let you continue to explore the fate of the universe after the Cosmogenesis empire completes its mad goal. Your old empire will remain in the game as a true Fallen Empire.
Multiplayer Resync
Another feature were adding in the 3.12 Andromeda release is a Multiplayer Resync button. This button, as the name suggests, resyncs a game to hopefully allow you to continue if an Out of Sync error occurs. It wont always solve the issues, but when it does, itll save you some time as youll no longer have to quit and rehost the game.
Normally a reason for the Out of Sync is listed, but I forced the desync so nothing is actually wrong.
Transferring data!
Next Week
The Machine Age is getting close! Next week will be the first Art of The Machine Age dev diary. The artists have so much to show that theyll have another one post-release. See you then!
[ 2024-04-18 11:00:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone! I wanted you to be the first to be introduced to the new End-Game Crisis coming in The Machine Age, but it seems that a Fallen Empires fleet beat us to it, lets see how theyre doing [previewyoutube=jo9jpoHMO7A;full][/previewyoutube]
The Machine Age is Nearly Here - Announcing Stellaris: Season 08
As mentioned at the end of the video, The Machine Age will be arriving on Tuesday, May 7th. It is now available for pre-purchase for $24.99 or regional equivalents. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2840100 But theres more - based on the popularity of Crusader Kings Chapter III, weve decided to celebrate our eighth anniversary by offering a similar expansion pass including all of the major Stellaris releases of the year for $39.99, which comes out to over a 20% discount. Theres a chance that we might experiment with some other ideas that might or might not come out later this year, but Stellaris: Season 08 will include all of the major releases of 2024. Players that have a Stellaris: Expansion Subscription will have access to Rick the Cube and the rest of Stellaris: Season 08 (as they release), while their subscription is running. (As with all DLC purchases, remember that while your subscription is running you count as owning everything so storefronts will block your purchase. If you are a subscriber that wants to buy Season 08, you will need to let your subscription lapse to make the purchase, after which you can re-subscribe.) Rick the Cube is a Machine portrait. Creating an empire using this portrait will require the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack (or The Machine Age, when it releases). Synthetically ascending (requires Utopia) will allow you to choose the Rick the Cube portrait without Synthetic Dawn, or without any DLC it can be used by researching and building robots and robomodding.
Stellaris: Season 08 includes the following content:
Day 1 Unlock: Rick The Cube Species Portrait
Initially announced in Stellaris Dev Diary 338, Rick the Cube is no joke. Unlocked immediately with the purchase of Stellaris: Season 08, this Machine species portrait is a cube and definitely not a human. Behold those lines, those flat sides, those runes, and tremble before their ineffable polygonal nature.
Stellaris: The Machine Age (Major Expansion - coming May 7 2024 - $24.99)
Youve all been reading these dev diaries and thus should have a good understanding of what The Machine Age includes, but theyre making me write it again. The Machine Age is the heart of the Stellaris: Season 08. This major expansion allows you to explore cyberpunk fantasies of technological augmentation and digitalization of consciousness, expanding the possibilities offered in game by the Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension Paths. You can address the moral and social challenges that communing with the machine brings to your space-faring empire, and face a new threat looming over the galaxy or become a new threat yourself, as you tear through time and space to shape reality to your image. The Machine Age expansion includes:
- Individualistic Non-Gestalt Machine Empires
- Gestalt Machine Intelligence Empires (also unlocked by the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack)
- Three new Origins
- Cybernetic Creed
- Synthetic Fertility
- Arc Welders
- Civics
- Guided Sapience
- Natural Design
- Obsessional Directive
- Protocol Droids
- Tactical Cogitators
- Augmentation Bazaars (Requires Megacorp)
- Two Mid-Game Structures
- Arc Furnace
- Dyson Swarms
- Three New Machine Ascension Paths
- Modularity
- Nanotech
- Virtuality
- Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension (also unlocked by Utopia)
- Exploration of the effects of the cyberization or synthesization of society, with Advanced Government Forms for those who complete it.
- New Species Traits for Cyborgs, Machines and Robots
- Cybernetic portraits that change based on advancement through cyberization
- Synthetic portraits with both organic and synthetic variants that changed based on synthesization, usable by either organics or machines
- Two new Shipsets, Diplomatic Rooms, and City Sets
- 7 new synthetic and cybernetic inspired music tracks
- A new Become the Crisis Path
- And a new End-Game Crisis.
Stellaris: Cosmic Storms (Mechanical Expansion - coming Q3 2024 - $12.99)
A strange galactic phenomenon has been observed in the galaxy, Cosmic Storms have begun sweeping through the systems of the galaxy. Check the forecast, prepare your Empire to weather this new threat, and leverage the possibilities these storms give you as they weaken your enemies. Discover multiple types of Cosmic Storms that travel from system to system in the galaxy, wrecking havoc (or bringing powerful bonuses) on empires throughout the galaxy. Discover new technologies allowing you to forecast, and influence the direction of these storms, and play with new civics and a new origin featured around taking advantage of this mysterious galactic phenomenon. Includes:
- 8 Galactic Storms with unique visual effects
- 1 Origin
- 2 new Relics
- 2 new precursor story arcs
Stellaris: The Grand Archive (Story Pack - coming Q4 2024 - $14.99)
The Grand Archive is vast and full of wonders, and it's up to you to fill its halls with the records of the unique lifeforms and marvels you meet in the galaxy. Construct a new megastructure, and collect exotic specimens from your space-faring adventures, what military applications might await you, and what unique life forms might you construct from the specimens you find is up to you. In the Grand Archive Story Pack you will collect specimens from throughout the galaxy, and discover technologies allowing you to genetically modify the galaxys indigenous space fauna, and then breed these creatures to further your own agenda. Includes:
- A new Megastructure: The Grand Archive
- 200 specimens to collect
- A vivarium with space fauna capturing mechanics
- Hatchery starbase and cloning facilities to alter space fauna and use them as fleets
- 2 new types of spaceborne fauna - Voidworms and Cutholoids
- A new Mid-Game Crisis - the Voidworm Plague
- 2 Origins
- 2 Tradition trees
Stellaris: Season 08 and The Machine Age are both available for pre-purchase now! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2863190 https://store.steampowered.com/app/2840100
Inspiration Behind the Crisis
Not every existential threat is overtly hostile, or even desires you harm. In house, weve always loved our Rogue Servitors - the idea of a powerful AI that somehow turns on its creators, not in a violent or destructive way, but out of a misguided sense of purpose. We wanted to do something that felt both apocalyptic but not inherently militant, a crisis that wasnt exclusively about shooting something on first contact. The first phases of this Crisis are decidedly non-combat. How might an all-powerful being react to the directive to 'eliminate suffering?' Obviously, because this is Stellaris, our antagonist is going to take her answer way, way too far. What happens next is up to the player. Will you try to oppose her directly, or play the part of a loyal pupil? This all came together as a terrifying, driven entity. There are some very obvious spiritual and historical influences in her design, and philosophical ideas regarding the nature of suffering and awareness are woven through her narrative. Expanding upon some of the interactions originally created in Galactic Paragon, all of your conversations with the Synthetic Queen will have full, generated audio voice-overs. Our Audio Director, Ernesto Lpez, has a bit to say about how we went about it: Designing the voice for the Synth Queen was an entertaining adventure. While we had access before to use Advanced Text to Speech to do prototypes and characters, this time, we tried to use the tool like a music synthesizer. We created multiple takes, arranged them, and compiled them, creating a good result. We were excited to create an AI character with an AI voice since this would allow some creative leeway. If the result felt odd or non-human, that could fit the character perfectly, but also when the results had specific emotion, that helped us to create what we believe is a fantastic character and an enjoyable and exciting narrative arc for players that have been waiting for a new and exotic crisis. Were extremely happy with how this all came out, it takes encounters with her to another level. The Synthetic Queen gave us an opportunity to build upon existing stories of the Fallen Empires, answering some more questions about the ancient past. We dont want to spoil too much about the story, but were really looking forward to seeing you meet her.
The Synthetic Queens ships
Next Week
In next weeks dev diary well be looking at the Become the Crisis path in The Machine Age, Cosmogenesis. See you then!
[ 2024-04-11 16:27:49 CET ] [ Original post ]
by PDX-Loke
Hello!
Our latest and greatest patch, 3.11.3, is now live and ready for download.
You will recognize this changelog from that of the open beta we made available a few weeks back, just one more crash fix has been included.
Please find the patch notes below.
STELLARIS 3.11.3 "ERIDANUS" PATCH NOTES
Improvement
- The Plasmic trait can now be removed from species if you want to clean up your species tab.
- Fixed global ship designs country type restriction so awakened empires are not allowed to use ai transports
- Fixed refugees happening every day instead of every 90-180 days
- Fixed secondary species in random empires not having a habitability trait.
- Fixed the Abandoned Gateway event not taking into account ruined gateways from the Galatic Doorstep and Imperial Fiefdom origins
- Fixed the accidental nerf to Civilian difficulty
- Fixed the Luminary Bloodline not being inherited
- Fixing council positions not being kept for Gestalt Consciousness empires after adding civics.
- Made removal of expired leader from leader pool only happen on refresh
- S875.1 Warform no longer disappears from leading their ship
- The Grave Guardians will no longer trap you in an infinite first contact loop.
- The Kaleidoscope no longer double dips in your income from trade
- The Parvus event chain will no longer end too early removing all in progresses special projects.
- Updated some text on the Galactic Community UI that was still referring to envoys instead of Delegates
- Various anomalies and dig site events no longer try and give leaders the Hyper Focus trait if they already have it, instead they level the trait up.
- Fixed a crash from Situation progress.
[ 2024-04-11 08:15:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello Stellaris Cube-munity!
Todays dev diary looks at the civics and kilostructures in The Machine Age, as well as looking at a 3.12 Andromeda feature - Auto-Modding.
As with all of our previews, some of this is still in development, so there are still some placeholder icons and some details may still change before release. (Which is good, since it lets us incorporate some of your feedback.)
The Civics of The Machine Age
Lets go through each of the new civics that are coming in The Machine Age in detail. Guided Sapience civics The Guided Sapience civics focus on coexistence with natural or created pre-sapient species and the environment around them. Their homeworld and Genesis Ark colony ships uplift some of the most promising local wildlife to pre-sapient status, creating a Genesis Preserve that increases Society Research and Unity. The bonuses from the Genesis Preserve are doubled on Gaia worlds.
Not listed in these screenshots, but other hostile civics like Devouring Swarm and origins like Necrophage are also excluded from these. Natural Design civics While other empires seek to improve themselves through genetic modification or through ascension, others are quite certain that they are already at the apex of evolution.
02_INSULT_CLOTHES:0 "Behold the [From.GetSpeciesAdj] form, glorious and bared for all to admire. Contrast with the paltry [Root.GetSpeciesNamePlural], cowering under their layers of cloth, knowing that the world does not want to see their sad frames." Obsessional Directive In 2003, human philosopher and professor Nick Bostrom created a thought experiment about the potential existential threat an artificial general intelligence could pose even if given seemingly harmless directives. [quote] Nick Bostrom said: Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans. [/quote] Available to gestalt machine intelligences, Obsessional Directive lets you enjoy faulty programming that drives you to produce ever increasing numbers of useless Consumer Goods... At any cost.
Object permanence is not necessarily one of your strengths. The directive was to acquire the consumer goods, now that youre done, theres nothing preventing you from digging them back up again. If you meet or exceed your quota, you will have options regarding what to do with your stash of office supplies, toasters, handheld electronics, or whatever other form you imagine your Consumer Goods take. Until you make friendly contact with other empires you will only have the option to create a Spire of Commodities, but later on you could trade them away for various resources. Most of your consumer goods will be removed, but the reward will scale with the amount that you produced. Failing to meet your quota will result in a bit of a breakdown until your new, lower quota is met. On the other hand, the experience of failure does unlock a new direct to Consumer Goods purge type to make it easier to achieve your next goal. (Determined Exterminators start with this purge type unlocked.) Diplomatic Protocols In The Machine Age, gestalt Machine Intelligences will also be getting their own variant of the diplomatic civics.
The other diplomatic civics have also been buffed to match the Diplomatic Protocols. Tactical Algorithms Some machines were designed to study war in all its forms.
How about a nice game of chess? These gestalt Machine Intelligences can create Mercenary Enclaves (if the game host has Overlord), have immortal Commanders, and gain military benefits from getting the opportunity to study the strategy and tactics of other empires. Augmentation Bazaars At the Augmentation Bazaars, you can build a better you, and all it will cost is an arm and a leg.
Now Ill let Gruntsatwork talk about some new space structures.
Dyson Swarms
The path to a Dyson Sphere of your own is long and arduous, filled with empty building platforms and non-functional intermediate stages, or at least, it used to be. Fresh with the Machine Age, we are introducing the Dyson Swarm, a predecessor and proof of concept for your Dyson Sphere plans. By putting many small satellites into orbit around a star, you can collect some of its output and enhance your research capabilities. But Paradox you say, we dont get research from Dyson Spheres. Correct, but you do get it from Dyson Swarms, IF you place them correctly. Dyson Swarms function slightly differently than Spheres. Instead of producing energy all on their own, they amplify whatever resources their star produces, up to 30 times. Yes, that delicate little 3 energy star will now produce 90 energy and if you were to put it on a 3 physics star, that would be a decent 90 physics research from 1 star. And if you get really lucky and have an event spawn an even rarer resource on a star? Go right ahead, collect it all.
So swarmy. But with all that said, there are certain restrictions on building Dyson Swarms. Those restrictions exist for a simple reason. You can upgrade one of your Swarms directly into a Stage 2 Dyson Sphere, for those juicy 1000 energy per month. That is why you may not build Swarms around Black Holes, Neutron Stars nor upgrade them past Swarm state in systems with thriving colonies.
The Arc Furnace
For our second new Kilostructure, allow me to introduce the Arc Furnace to you. A splendid planet-based megastructure, meant to help you alleviate your industrial needs. Just like the Dyson Swarm, to get the most out of your shiny new Arc Furnace requires a bit more effort than merely finding a molten world and putting it down. Instead of producing resources itself, it allows you access to more of the systems resources. In less flowery language, that means at each stage, the Arc Furnace will create deposits on every planet or asteroid in the system. First 1 Mineral deposit, then another 1 Mineral deposit. Third 1 Mineral and 1 Alloy and for the final and fourth stage, 1 more Alloy deposit. This gives you a total of 3 Minerals and 2 Alloys on every planet or asteroid in the system, however, in addition to the deposits, the Ard Furnace also makes mining in general more effective in the system, which manifests as a small bonus to your mining station output, at the final stage a measly 100%. So to get the most out of your Arc Furnace, you want to find molten worlds in large systems, with plenty of planets and asteroids.
Hot. Both of those Kilostructures will become available in the early midgame, hopefully around the time you start to feel the constraints on your expansion as borders solidify and you begin to get cut off from the resources you desperately need. Now in contrast to most Megastructures you are not limited to merely 1 of each, however, unlike Relays and Gates they have some limits. You will unlock the capacity to build 5 of these in total, spread out through the relevant technologies (6 for Arc Welders).
Species Auto-Modification (Auto-Modding)
Im back now to talk about Auto-Modding. No, were not automatically updating your outliner mod for you when an update releases. (Sorry modders!) Biological and Cybernetic Ascensions were particularly vulnerable to being very micromanagement heavy playstyles. You had a lot of power available to you if you adjusted, tweaked, and applied various species templates to your pops. This was effective, but very time consuming and often tedious. With the 3.12 Andromeda update, we have introduced a new class of traits that will, over time, replace themselves with temporary versions of other traits based on the job the pop is currently filling. For example, a Machine pop filling a Farmer job will eventually have their Adaptive Frames change to replicate the Harvesters trait, and if they move to a Mining job theyll eventually switch to mimicking Power Drills. AutoMod traits have a defined list of available traits to choose from for each trait, and one pop per month will adapt to their jobs, modified by buildings like the Robot Assembly Plants or Gene Clinics.
AutoMod traits exist for Mechanical (Adaptive Frames), Biological (Vocational Genomics), Cybernetics (Universal Augmentations), and Overtuned Traits (Fleeting Excellence). Vocational Genomics becomes available with the Targeted Gene Expression technology, and the others are immediately available once you have access to the appropriate category of traits. We recognize that these traits are extremely strong, but the quality of life benefits of having your pops modify themselves to fit their jobs is very high. As such, Auto-Modding and the associated traits are part of the free 3.12 Andromeda release. MODDING INFORMATION Traits can now be categorized into normal/cyborg/robotic/psionic/advanced_genetic/overtuned. Heres the script for the biological auto_mod trait: TRAIT_AUTO_MOD_BIOLOGICAL
trait_auto_mod_biological = {
cost = 3
auto_mod = yes
category = normal
allowed_archetypes = { BIOLOGICAL LITHOID }
initial = no
randomized = no
species_potential_add = {
hidden_trigger = { exists = from }
from = {
has_technology = tech_gene_expressions
}
}
species_possible_remove = {
always = yes
}
species_possible_merge_remove = {
always = yes
}
potential_crossbreeding_chance = 1.0
slave_cost = {
energy = 1000
}
assembly_score = {
base = 2
}
custom_tooltip_with_modifiers = automodding_trait_biological_tooltip
}
Traits themselves should also include a category if you want them to be included as auto_mod possibilities:
TRAIT_AGRARIAN
trait_agrarian = {
cost = 2
category = normal
species_possible_remove = {
can_remove_beneficial_genetic_traits = yes
}
species_possible_merge_remove = {
always = yes
}
potential_crossbreeding_chance = 1.0 # 1.0 = 100% chance of being considered for new traits when forming half-species. does not guarantee the trait will be added if it costs points.
allowed_archetypes = { BIOLOGICAL }
modifier = {
planet_jobs_food_produces_mult = 0.15
}
slave_cost = {
energy = 500
}
assembly_score = {
modifier = {
add = 1.5
from = { has_farming_designation = yes }
}
modifier = {
add = 0.5
from = { has_rural_designation = yes }
}
}
}
Jobs themselves need to have a list of traits associated with them. Weve created a number of inline scripts to handle these.
So our farmer job has the following inline script at the end of the script block:
inline_script = "jobs/automodding_priority_food"
Which expands into:
AUTO_TRAIT_PRIO
auto_trait_prio = {
#Farmers
trait_agrarian
trait_farm_hands
trait_robot_harvesters
trait_cyborg_harvesters
}
Next Week
Next week well explore the new End-Game Crisis thats coming in The Machine Age. See you then!
[ 2024-04-04 11:00:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Cube-munity!
I know today wasn't in the dev diary cube-endar we posted earlier, but I felt like today was a special day.
In the finest of traditions of Stellaris cubeture, we are happy to introduce a new character portrait: Rick the Cube!
Cube Rick will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak
Rick the Cube will be available Soon for purchasers of an unannounced future Stellaris DLC bundle (and also subscribers). We will be revealing more about this DLC bundle in the near future!
Watch the Rick the Cube Short!
I am Rick the Cube!
Features:
- Somehow contains more than Eight vertices
- Six faces
- a cube to take a shining to
- a pleasing clockwork interior that is, at times, orange
- definitely not a Human, cubed
- not a sphere
- will never give you up
For those of you who find the Stellaris portraits too anthropomorphized, we hope you will enjoy this new addition to the Stellaris portraits lineup! Encased in rune-covered cube armor, a sort of fully surrounding jacket made of metal, Cube Rick will be an excellent companion to take on a space odyssey.
[ 2024-04-01 11:30:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello again!
Today were looking at some general gameplay changes being made to Machine Empires, Individualistic Machines, and the new Machine Ascension Paths. Some of these still include placeholder assets, and values will continue being adjusted until release.
Take it away, @Gruntsatwork.
Machine and Synthetic Gameplay Changes
History Traits One of the first things youll find in The Machine Age when creating a Machine empire are the history traits weve added for Machine species. These 0 point traits let you choose a little more of your backstory - these define your original purpose. Were you originally created as Research Assistants, Conversational AI chatbots, Workerbots, or perhaps a domestic servant Nannybot meant to make life easier and pass the butter? Six backgrounds with relatively minor bonuses are available for you to choose from. These are available to both gestalt and individualistic machines.
Youll find a handful of other new traits or variants of existing biological traits for Machine species as well, including having a dedicated Engineering or Sociology Core or Integrated Weaponry to a Delicate Chassis or Scarcity Subroutines.
Please put down your weapon. You have twenty seconds to comply. Machines, Aging, and Unplanned Obsolescence Immortality is a funny thing in Stellaris - under some circumstances (especially as the game goes on), due to the accident and death events that could target machines, you can end up in a state where a theoretically immortal machine leader is actually far more vulnerable to death as the years went on than a normal biological leader. Machine leaders will now instead use lifespan rules, but enjoy some extra benefits:
- As real go-getters, their starting age lies between 5-10 years, so at the age of 30 they can run your science department with 20 years of experience.
- All machines also have an additional +20 years to their default lifespan of 80, resulting in a base lifespan of 100 years.
- They are now affected by lifespan-increasing technologies and modifiers, for example, those from Ascension Paths, which we will cover later in this dev diary.
100 years is a lot better than how long my last smartphone survived. Habitability Habitability is also undergoing some changes. Having +200% Habitability as a base for all machines limited what we could do with them - it was what previously prevented us from allowing them to be Void Dwellers or using several other Origins, for instance. We still wanted to retain the flavor of Machines having an easier time dealing with alternate climates though, so Machines now use habitability systems similar to organics, with some significant changes:
- As a base, all machines have a 50% Habitability floor, so they will never have below 50% habitability on any world. We felt that this was important because we wanted to retain the feel that machine empires could colonize anywhere reasonably well.
- Machine habitability traits cover entire planet categories rather than a specific biome.
- They start with Dry, Wet, or Frozen Habitability, which provide a base 75% habitability on all three biomes associated with the trait and 50% for all other natural biomes.
- As usual, these habitability traits can be changed through robo-modding.
- Most machine empires will have access to robo-modding from game start.
- Origins like Life-Seeded or Subaquatic Machines will start with Gaia World or Ocean World Habitability and will have to research the technology to change their habitability trait, but retain the 50% Habitability floor for being a machine.
- Just like for Lifespan, they will now also gain bonuses from technologies, extra habitability from ascensions and new traits. They now also have access to the standard array of habitability technologies.
Using partial habitability mechanics opened up the ability to use origins such as Ocean Paradise. Assimilation An important quality of life improvement for Machine empires - we have extended the capacity to assimilate other machines or robots into your main species to all machine empires.
They may have shared our name, but they did not share our form. These false Zenak will soon become actual Zenak, including adhering to our charging standards. (This is what I get for not being careful with my force-spawned empires.) The Aging, Habitability, and Assimilation changes (and Origin improvements listed later) are all part of the free 3.12 Andromeda update. Individualistic Machines Gestalt Machine Intelligences were originally introduced in the Synthetic Dawn story pack, but the authority and most of the civics (other than Determined Exterminator, Driven Assimilator, and Rogue Servitor) will also be unlocked by The Machine Age. The Machine Age will also allow you to create non-Gestalt Machine Empires, using regular authority, ethic, and civic choices. These individualistic machines are not guided by an overall gestalt intelligence, and thus have their own motivations, desires, and disappointments. Individual machines possess happiness like fully recognized synthetics, can and will form factions, and consume consumer goods. As non-Gestalts, their leaders will draw from the standard array of leader traits. This of course includes fan-favorites like Substance Abuser. With all ethics available to you, your empire can be spiritualist machines, fully capable of rationalizing their own spiritual superiority compared to lesser machines and organics. Your factions have been adjusted to fit your mechanical existence, since it makes no sense for spiritualist robots to despise all robots. (Its okay to hate some.) You will receive roboticists from your capital building with the additional option of building an assembly plant to boost your production even more. This all comes at the cost of alloys, so carefully decide between expansion, war, and pop assembly. As individual machines are very much capable and willing of entertaining unique needs, they have no restriction on allowing organics in their empires and can even start the game with Syncretic Evolution as their Origin of choice. As such, they have access to technologies for food production, genetic modification, and other organic focused technologies, with a sharply reduced, but not zero, chance at drawing those technologies if you have no organics in your empire. You are at the very least capable of theorizing about meat and its needs compared to gestalt machines. Depending on your ethics and authorities, you can enfranchise, disenfranchise, enslave, or empower organics or even other machines in your empire as you wish. The only limits to your ability to tread upon those fragile organics and your fellow machines are the limits of your imagination. Individual Machines have access to most civics organic empires have access to, as well as a few machine civics, like Warbots and Static Research Analysis, which have been adjusted for them.
Decadent, Deviant, Hedonistic Crime-Bots? Sure, why not.
More Origins now available to Machines
As part of the 3.12 Andromeda release, weve done a pass on Origins to see if there were any that could have their restrictions on Machines relaxed. The full list of Origins that Machine Empires have access to as of the 3.12 Andromeda release is:
- Syncretic Evolution (Individualist Machines only)
- Life-Seeded
- Post-Apocalyptic (Radioactive Rovers)
- Void Dwellers (Voidforged)
- Hegemon
- Ocean Paradise (Subaquatic Machines)
- Subterranean (Subterranean Machines)
- Arc Welders
- Prosperous Unification
- Remnants
- Shattered Ring
- Galactic Doorstep
- Resource Consolidation (Gestalt Machine Intelligence only)
- Common Ground
- Doomsday
- Lost Colony
- Here Be Dragons
- Slingshot to the Stars
- Imperial Fiefdom
- Riftworld
Transformation Situation and Ascension Paths
With The Machine Age, Individualistic Machines and Gestalt Machines have access to 3 new Ascension Paths (which replace the current Synthetics tree). By taking the Synthetic Age Ascension Perk, you will begin a new Situation to guide them through this momentous transformation.
Virtuality Embrace a virtual existence for the majority of your pops. From the cloud, your pops are created and to the cloud they return when their job is done. Spreading your servers across the stars is an expensive endeavor but your concentrated efforts are unmatched.
- Your pops gain a unique Virtual Trait that becomes stronger as you progress through the tree
- You gain a massive bonus to production that is reduced by the number of colonies you have
- Your housing usage is reduced by 90%
- Your habitability floor is increased
- The more colonies you gain, the weaker your Virtual Trait and the bigger its upkeep will become
- Your leaders become immortal
- You gain a new Policy to focus your intangible virtual economy
- You may choose to focus intensely on Research, Unity or Governance, at the sufferance of the 2 categories you did not choose
- You gain a bonus to encryption and decryption
- You gain additional districts and jobs from districts
Nanotech Big Things are made of Small Things. By becoming a flood of nanites, your empire changes not just its makeup, but also its economy and growth strategy. Grow. Exploit. Replicate. While Virtual Machines may seek a Tall playstyle, Nanotech Machines flood across the galaxy like an off-white or silvery tempest, specializing in the physical.
- You gain access to:
- Ways to transform basic resources into nanites and nanites into advanced resources
- A new decision, similar to Terravore world consumption, to turn colonies into nanite worlds
- A new starbase building to harvest nanites from uninhabitable worlds
- New Edicts to vastly increase your productions or combat capability at the cost of nanites
- Nanite probe ships, to bolster your fleets
Modularity The most advanced traits require the most advanced minds. By embracing Modularity, your empire will have access to traits other machines can only theorize at. The rarest of resources will fuel your enhanced shells.
- Your Metallurgists will produce Living Metal
- Your roboticists will be boosted by utilizing living metal as an upkeep
- Your workers/simple drones will be boosted by your priest equivalent
- Your soldiers and enforcers will grant more stability and be stronger
- You unlock 9 advanced machine traits, several trait picks, points, and reduced modification cost
- All your leaders will gain the Synth leader trait
If you have Synthetic Dawn but do not have The Machine Age, you will retain access to the Synthetics Tree, but with reworked Traditions. These will include bonuses to lifespan, habitability and pop assembly.
Resistance is [strike]the Ratio of Voltage to Current[/strike] Futile
For owners of Synthetic Dawn, Driven Assimilators will gain two advanced authority possibilities in The Machine Age, the Memory Aggregators and the Neural Chorus. Upon completing the Cybernetic tradition tree, the Assimilator will receive the option to determine their stance on the variance of thought permitted within the gestalt consciousness. This is the Neural Chorus:
The Machine Ship Set
In last weeks dev diary we snuck the Machine Corvette into the Arc Welders screenshot. Heres a glamor shot of the Machine ships that was arranged by our artists:
We finally have a Machine shipset.
Next Week
Next week well look at the Civics and Structures of The Machine Age, as well as Auto-Modding. See you then!
[ 2024-03-28 12:00:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! In time for the weekend (a long one, in some cases), the dev team has prepared a 3.11.3 "Eridanus" Open Beta! This beta addresses some issues that have been left over from the 3.11 release.
The 3.11.3 "Eridanus" Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt-in to access it. Go to your Steam Library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas Tab -> select "3.11.3_open_beta" from the drop-down.
[expand type=details] [Improvement] The Plasmic trait can now be removed from species if you want to clean up your species tab. [Bugfix] Fixed global ship designs country type restriction so awakened empires are not allowed to use ai transports [Bugfix] Fixed refugees happening every day instead of every 90-180 days [Bugfix] Fixed secondary species in random empires not having a habitability trait. [Bugfix] Fixed the Abandoned Gateway event not taking into account ruined gateways from the Galatic Doorstep and Imperial Fiefdom origins [Bugfix] Fixed the accidental nerf to Civilian difficulty [Bugfix] Fixed the Luminary Bloodline not being inherited [Bugfix] Fixing council positions not being kept for GC:s after adding civics. [Bugfix] Made removal of expired leader from leader pool only happen on refresh [Bugfix] S875.1 Warform no longer disappears from leading their ship [Bugfix] The Grave Guardians will no longer trap you in an infinite first contact loop. [Bugfix] The Kaleidoscope no longer double dips in your income from trade [Bugfix] The Parvus event chain will no longer end too early removing all in progresses special projects. [Bugfix] Updated some text on the Galactic Community UI that was still referring to envoys instead of Delegates [Bugfix] Various anomalies and dig site events no longer try and give leaders the Hyper Focus trait if they already have it, instead they level the trait up. [/expand] The 3.11.3 full release will come at a later date, but we wanted to get these fixes into our players' hands as soon as possible. If you experience bugs or any other issues with the 3.11.3 open beta, please make a bug report! Thanks for playing Stellaris and have a great weekend!
Please note save compatibility is not guaranteed between versions. Should you experience bugs or other issues, please first create a new, unmodded save and see if the issues persist. If the issues persist on a new unmodded save, please make a bug report!
Edit: a previous version of this post contained the line: "[Feature] Added a familiar Friend after you explore Astral Rifts." This was mistakenly added to these patch notes, and is not included in the 3.11.3 "Eridanus" Open Beta.
[ 2024-03-27 14:14:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everybody!
Today, well go through the three Origins, Ascension Situations, and advanced government Authorities in The Machine Age expansion.
The Cybernetic Creed
Rejoice, for the The Machine Age beckons! It's your digital prophet, Gatekeeper, dialing in to decode the mysteries of The Machine Age's upcoming Origins. Embarking first on our divine odyssey of silicon and the soul, I will introduce you to Cybernetic Creed, a spiritualist fast track to Cybernetics. Your spiritualist pops and leaders will start with the Ritualist Cybernetics Trait, representing your people's long dedication to attempting the perfect fusion of flesh and steel.
Eschew the mundane traditionalist factions of more standard empires for a quartet of Creeds, each a pillar of your economy and spiritual ethos.
Though united in their quest for divine fusion, harmony is a rare commodity among the Creeds. Dissonance and debate fuel their fiery passion for transcendence, and often, you will be asked to make choices that will make one Creed joyous at the expense of the others.
The Conclave of Fusion Situation will unfold after you embrace your sacred mission and interface with the Cybernetics Tradition Tree.
Here, you must guide your faith, defining its doctrine and the final form of your physical vessel. Will you elevate a single Creed to celestial prominence or attempt to weave a tapestry of unity among them? The fuse is divine. Augmentation is worship.
Synthetic Fertility
Next, we delve into the bittersweet digital saga of Synthetic Fertility, our fast track to the Synthetics Tradition Tree.
Boosted by a deep understanding of artificial intelligence and advanced virtual reality, your empire starts the game with 37 Pops. But despite your success, your people are on the brink of extinction. An incurable genetic affliction ravages your species, stopping them from being able to produce offspring.
In a daring leap of innovation, your civilization constructs the Identity Repository. It's a race against time as minds are uploaded, seeking refuge in the digital expanse before death takes them.
Parallel to this digital exodus, you're thrust into the urgent quest for the pinnacle of synthetic salvation - constructing robotic brains and bodies sophisticated enough to host your digital essences.
The final version of this will not have that beautiful magenta image. Will you seek aid? Will you engineer Synthetic Frames in time to reclaim your place among the stars? Or is this the dawn of an eternal digital slumber for your people?
Arc Welders
It wouldnt feel right not to have a Machine origin in The Machine Age. Arc Welders is available to any Machine empire - whether a Gestalt Consciousness or Individualistic Machines. In some ways, it is the opposite of Resource Consolidation. Rather than having an exceptional homeworld where all of the resources of your home system are gathered, these celestial architects hail from a small, resource-poor planet and set their eyes on the skies.
The Arc Welders began constructing an Arc Furnace on a molten world in their home system before achieving Faster-Than-Light travel. This kilostructure lets them exploit the rest of their system for minerals and, once complete, for alloy production. Expert engineers, it will only take a little more practice before they figure out the basics of Mega-Engineering. However, it may take a while before they can finish researching that technology. More details on the molten world Arc Furnace will be revealed in the April 4th dev diary.
Mechanists Update
With all of the focus The Machine Age is giving to mechanical empires of all forms, it is appropriate to improve the Mechanist origin as well Mechanist now grants +2 machine trait points as well as an extra trait pick, and fills that by starting your robots off with the Adaptive Frames trait, taking advantage of the new auto-modding system were introducing in 3.12 Andromeda. Youll have to wait until April 4th for complete details on how that works.
Cyberization and Synthesization Situations
I am Ferry, one of the Content Designers on The Machine Age, here to talk about the new narrative Ascension Situations. Utopia introduced the special projects to transform the population into cyborgs or synths. The Machine Age provides you with choices to shape the cyberization and synthesization process, as well as their ultimate effects. When the Cybernetics tradition tree is adopted, the Cyberization Situation (the Cybernetic Creed Origin has its own version) kicks off with the question who will control the implants in society: the government, private corporations, or will the public be allowed to hack their own implants? The Augmentation Center building, which is the focus for research and development during the Situation, stays after the situation to boost the cybernetics on the planet its on.
However, not everyone is excited about augmentation. Any Spiritualists will either have to be forced to become full cyborgs or be allowed to install the minimum amount of implants necessary to function in this new world according to the Cyberization Standards policy.
For Synthetics, in the Synthesization situation (the Synthetic Fertility origin has its own version), its not only Spiritualists who are wary of the planned changes. For some reason, even more people are concerned about scanning their mind to put into a mechanical body. Does your society allow those reluctant to stay around in quaint Old Towns or do they have to go into Biological Enclaves to escape becoming a part of the new machine species? The Identity Complex building provides Identity Designer jobs across the empire, who boost mechanical assembly speed.
Empires that start as machines, Machine Intelligence or Individualist Machines, get their own ascension situation called Transformation. What this means will be explained in next weeks dev diary.
Advanced Government Authorities
After the Situation has concluded and the Tradition Tree has been filled, an event chain kicks off to shape society into a new Advanced Authority. Does the cybernetic society allow the individual to flourish, or are implants used to bring the population tighter together? Each of the four base Authorities and MegaCorp, as well as Gestalt Hives, can transform into a cybernetic version of the original Authority, or opt to stay the same. Lets have a look at the Imperial Authority. One path through the cybernetic societal shift ends with the Imperial Chipset Authority, where implants are inherited within families to carry strength and knowledge forward through the generations.
The empire Ruler gets access to a new relic called the RulerChip, which contains the memories and experiences of previous rulers. As each ruler dies, their class of Official, Commander, or Scientist will grant different bonuses for the heir as they ascend the throne.
The Cybernetic Creed Origin has its own set of advanced cyber governments, one for each Authority. For Synthetics, the main question of the societal effects event chain is if the new machine society will put a focus on the physical or the virtual world. One example for the Democratic Authority is Democratic Surrogacy, which replaces soldiers and pilots with remote-controlled bodies.
Next Week
Next week well look at Individualistic Machine Empires, gameplay changes were making to Machine empires, and go through the new Machine Ascension Paths and Transformation situation. See you then!
[ 2024-03-21 12:00:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
It is time to leave our flawed biological vessels behind.
Its my pleasure to announce that The Machine Age major expansion will be released alongside the Stellaris 3.12 Andromeda update. Focusing on cybernetic, synthetic, and machine themes, The Machine Age will begin during the second quarter of 2024. [previewyoutube=MSunS8wpU54;full][/previewyoutube]
In pursuing the divine calling, we shall achieve the fusion of the exalted body and sacred cybernetics.
The Technophants and Haruspex of the Cybernetic Creed will guide their flock to the perfect union of flesh and machine.
Cybernetic augmentation is not solely the province of the materialists.
Playgrounds stand empty. In time, we will cease to be. For now, our salvation lies in the digital realm
A doomed species races against extinction to reach the virtual world in Synthetic Fertility.
Blur the lines between the physical and virtual worlds.
Our planet is barren, but our home system is a bounty of riches. To exploit them, we must build bigger than ever before.
Originally designed to build mighty constructions in space, the Arc Welders must utilize that advantage to the fullest to overcome the deficiencies of their homeworld.
These masters of Mega-Engineering began exploiting their home system before discovering faster-than-light travel.
The things that make me different are the things that make me, me.
The creators may be gone, but society endures. Your chassis may have begun identical to trillions of others in your empire, but you are no drone - you are an individual. With The Machine Age, you can explore the game as non-Gestalt, Individualist Machine Empires!
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
A transformative age is upon us, sparked by innovation and oiled by opportunity.
The Machine Age explores how Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension affect society within your empire. Advanced government forms are available to empires that navigate the process.
The Cybernetic Creed Origin has an additional variant for each standard Authority.
Become better than you are.
Six new civics provide additional choices for your empires.
Corporate and Hive Mind civics require MegaCorp or Utopia respectively.
Build a better future.
Two mid-game structures are introduced in The Machine Age - exploit systems with the molten world Arc Furnace, and start your work towards a Dyson Sphere early by building the Dyson Swarm.
And so we came forth and once again beheld the stars.
Ignorance shackles us, putting the universes secrets out of reach. No matter the price, we must break free.
Building upon the system introduced in Nemesis, The Machine Age introduces a second player crisis path, focused on technological ascendancy at any cost.
The time has come to be part of something greater.
My children, at last I am returned to you.
For the first time since the Contingency was introduced in the Stellaris 1.8 apek release, a new end-game crisis has been unleashed. An ancient threat, sealed away for countless millennia, has returned.
The Machine Age expansion includes:
- Individualistic Non-Gestalt Machine Empires
- Gestalt Machine Intelligence Empires (also unlocked by the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack)
- Three new Origins
- Cybernetic Creed
- Synthetic Fertility
- Arc Welders
- Civics
- Guided Sapience
- Natural Design
- Obsessional Directive
- Protocol Droids
- Tactical Cogitators
- Augmentation Bazaars (Requires Megacorp)
- Two Mid-Game Structures
- Arc Furnace
- Dyson Swarms
- New Ascension Paths for Machine Empires
- Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension (also unlocked by Utopia)
- Exploration of the effects of the cyberization or synthesization of society, with Advanced Government Forms for those who complete it.
- New Species Traits for Cyborgs, Machines and Robots
- Cybernetic portraits that change based on advancement through cyberization
- Synthetic portraits with both organic and synthetic variants that changed based on synthesization, usable by either organics or machines
- Two new Shipsets, Diplomatic Rooms, and City Sets
- 7 new music tracks synthetic and cybernetic inspired music tracks
- A new Player Crisis Path
- And a new End-Game Crisis.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2840100/ Wishlist The Machine Age today!
[ 2024-03-14 16:12:34 CET ] [ Original post ]
by PDX-Loke
Hello,
Our latest patch is now live and ready for download, fixing most but not yet all of the issues reported from the 'Eridanus' release last week.
Please find the patch notes below.
STELLARIS 3.11.2 PATCH NOTES
Balance
- The Opener for Domination now gives +5% Worker Output and +5% Slave Output instead of +10% Slave Output so Egalitarians and Xenophiles arent sad.
- Versatility Operational Proxies now gives +1 Unity production to Maintenance Drones so that Rogue Servitors aren't left out.
- Decreased the cost to study (-25%) and pacify (-40%) space fauna.
- Ensure dead leaders are properly removed from their location so that new leaders can replace them.
- Fixed Federation Emissaries and GalCom Delegates not assigning correctly and not being replaceable when dead.
- Acquiring the Colonization Drones from the Chemical Wasteland Astral Rift will no longer lead to discovering Noxious Swamps (or other natural blockers) on Habitats (or other planets that shouldn't support these blockers)
- Corrected Adaptability Enhanced Recycling tooltip listing a 10% reduction instead of the 15% reduction.
- Corrected the finisher effect for Domination giving -15% Empire Size from Pops in some cases
- The finisher for Diplomacy now correctly says it gives +10% Diplomatic Weight instead of +10 Diplomatic Weight
- Fixed an issue where the "On the Origins of Nanites" special project didn't spawn.
- The Chosen will now declare a war of Cleansing on whoever breaches their wormhole
- Fixed habitat capital buildings given the wrong number of defensive armies
- Mining districts on machine worlds should no longer claim to give scrap miner drone jobs
- Fixed anomaly.7200 having repeated flags in their switch.
- Cartographer II and Cartographer III are now correctly recognised as councilor traits
- Fixed modifiers to mining and research station upkeep incorrectly attempting to reduce the upkeep of the planet they were orbiting
- Science ship auto explore feature with astral rifts sometimes skipped unexplored ones
- Fixed the icon for the Great Researcher trait
- Fixed Holy Covenants not giving High Priest jobs in some cases
- The Shallash system will now spawn properly again.
- You will no longer be able to engage in pre-FTL diplomacy with pre-FTLs not within your borders
- Homicidal empires will now properly annex pre-FTLs that are foolish enough to become space faring.
- Bio-trophies are no longer affected by Noxious Twice.
- Fix lack of evasion on sapient torpedo comp.
- Fixes the background selector for rulers being set incorrectly in the leader category of the background selectors
- Fixed AI leaving federations only if the federation has 2 members or the AI empire's type is unplayable.
- Fixed AI never asking to leave Hegemony federations.
- Fixed potential CTD in quantum catapult rendering
- Fixed crash upon startup that could be caused by write-protected user directory.
- Fixed CTD that sometimes happens when finishing species modification.
- Fixed CTD when using console command dump_event_data and the output file is not writable
- Fixed CTD in leader names after loading a savegame
- Fixed CTD that may occur when updating diplomacy for countries without diplomacy
- Added FEDERATION_DISBAND_THRESHOLD and FEDERATION_DISBAND_PLAYER_THRESHOLD defines, which define the AI's threshold for leaving a federation if it would be disbanded.
[ 2024-03-12 09:15:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
Today well be taking a look at the state of the game, the upcoming 3.11.2 patch, talk about the Subscription FAQ, look at the Q&A transcript, and give a taste of whats next.
Lets get to it.
State of the Game
The Stellaris 3.11.1 Eridanus update was released last week, and Im happy to say that the build appears quite stable crash-wise. The number of crash reports is very low for a release, with approximately 90% of the ones we are getting being due to mods that havent been updated. Of these, more than half are specifically related to mods that affect the Galaxy Settings screen. Metrics so far show that Multiplayer seems to be significantly more stable than 3.10.4 as well, though an issue has been raised regarding observer mode causing major performance issues in multiplayer that we're currently looking into. The Custodian Team is currently working on a 3.11.2 update including some of the things that youve all reported, preliminarily scheduled for release next Tuesday, March 12th. SOME THINGS PLANNED FOR 3.11.2 Balance
- The Opener for Domination now gives +5% Worker Output and +5% Slave Output instead of +10% Slave Output so Egalitarians and Xenophiles arent sad.
- Versatility Operational Proxies now gives +1 Unity production to Maintenance Drones so that Rogue Servitors aren't left out.
- Decreased the cost to study (-25%) and pacify (-40%) space fauna.
- Fixed Federation Emissaries and GalCom Delegates not assigning correctly.
- Acquiring the Colonization Drones from the Chemical Wasteland Astral Rift will no longer lead to discovering Noxious Swamps (or other natural blockers) on Habitats (or other planets that shouldn't support these blockers)
- Corrected Adaptability Enhanced Recycling tooltip listing a 10% reduction instead of the 15% reduction.
- Corrected the finisher effect for Domination giving -15% Empire Size from Pops in some cases
- The finisher for Diplomacy now correctly says it gives +10% Diplomatic Weight instead of +10 Diplomatic Weight
- Fixed an issue where the "On the Origins of Nanites" special project didn't spawn.
- The Chosen will now declare a war of Cleansing on whoever breaches their wormhole
- Fixed habitat capital buildings given the wrong number of defensive armies
- Mining districts on machine worlds should no longer claim to give scrap miner drone jobs
- Fixed anomaly.7200 having repeated flags in their switch.
- Cartographer II and Cartographer III are now correctly recognised as councilor traits
- Fixed modifiers to mining and research station upkeep incorrectly attempting to reduce the upkeep of the planet they were orbiting
- Science ship auto explore feature with astral rifts sometimes skipped unexplored ones
- Fixed the icon for the Great Researcher trait
- Fixed Holy Covenants not giving High Priest jobs in some cases
- The Shallash system will now spawn properly again.
- You will no longer be able to engage in pre-FTL diplomacy with pre-FTLs not within your borders
- Homicidal empires will now properly annex pre-FTLs that are foolish enough to become space faring.
- Bio-trophies are no longer affected by Noxious Twice.
- Fix lack of evasion on sapient torpedo comp.
- Fixes the background selector for rulers being set incorrectly in the leader category of the background selectors
- Fixed crash upon startup that could be caused by write-protected user directory.
- Fixed CTD that sometimes happens when finishing species modification.
- Fixed CTD when using console command dump_event_data and the output file is not writable
- Fixed CTD in leader names after loading a savegame
- Fixed CTD that may occur when updating diplomacy for countries without diplomacy
More on the Stellaris Expansion Subscription
Weve created an FAQ about the Stellaris Expansion Subscription option, I've included it here: We've gathered up some of the most frequently asked questions from the launch of the Stellaris Expansion Subscription. [olist]
Discord Q&A Transcript
On February 22nd, we held a Q&A on Discord. The team answered 247 questions and only got a little trolly. For a transcript of the questions that were answered, please visit the Paradox forums.
What Else?
I promised to give a teaser about what the internal team has been working on. Here you go. [previewyoutube=GsDqi-thw5w;full][/previewyoutube]
01010011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111
01110101 00100000 01101110 01100101 01111000 01110100
00100000 01110111 01100101 01100101 01101011 00100001
Next week's dev diary will be later than usual as well.[ 2024-03-07 16:16:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2729490
Hello!
The 3.11.1 Eridanus update has been released!
While the release notes should look relatively familiar to people who read last week's preliminary changelog, here are the release notes for today's update:
3.11.1 ERIDANUS CUSTODIAN UPDATE RELEASE NOTES
[expand type=details]
Feature
- Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider added to galaxy generation. This slider adjusts technology costs based on tier and game difficulty.
Improvements
- Added notification message when new pop settles in zeya (Gaia planet in azilash)
- Added the Seddom system.
- Allowed conversion between Sovereign Guardianship and Corporate Protectorate civics
- Dimensional Locks now forbid access to countries without communications
- Every participant in a war now gets a truce with the others after it ends, even if they were on the same side
- If you have a colony in a system when pre-FTLs become space faring you can apologize and annex them
- Progenitor Hive speed malus and bonuses now only affect military ships, removing the need of science ship escorts
- Technology and Tradition costs are now distinct sliders in galaxy setup
- The Anglers civic now swaps to Trawling Operations if you reform your government into a megacorp and vice versa
- The Eager Explorers civic now swaps to Privatized Exploration if you reform your government into a megacorp and vice versa
- The Eager Explorers, Privatized Exploration and Exploration Protocols civics can be removed and readded after researching Jump Drives. The Stargazers civic cannot be removed as it is linked to the species trait of the same name
- The Foreign Consciousness trait is now a destiny trait
- When the Khan awakens the event will now properly have a go to button
- Added the old AI crisis diplomatic room to the list of selectable diplomatic rooms
- Rearranged the room selector priorities so that AI empires shouldn't lose special diplomatic rooms
- Set the old AI crisis diplomatic room to be used by Determined Exterminators
- Set the "scrappy room" to be used by the Ketlings
- Set the "gilded room" to be used the AI overlord for the Imperial Fiefdom origin
- Set the "organic room" to be used by Devouring Swarms
- Gangsters should no longer assassinate Chosen Ones or Legendary leaders
- If a Zombie or Nerve Stapled pop manages to lie on their resume and become a specialist or ruler they should be demoted much faster
- Xenophobic leaders are now half as likely to accept brainslugs while Xenophilic ones are twice as likely to accept them
- Improved spawning logic for anomalies that clear deposits to not spawn on planets with strategic resources
Balance
- All pop types will now be happy while living on a gaia world.
- Added a tier 2 Advanced Bio-Reactor technology and building. Advanced Bio-Reactors further reduce the food output of farmers in exchange for a small amount of exotic gas output
- Added Gateway Cost and Megastructure Build Speed modifiers to the Galactic Doorstep origin
- Ascension Theory is now a Tier 4 technology that requires at least 6 traditions trees to have been completed to be drawn
- Balance adjustments to the Knights of the Toxic God to make some of their behavior behave the same way as other economic bonuses in the game, and make more of the choices in the chain potentially relevant.
- Event options in the Knights' quest that improve their capital have been significantly buffed to be better balanced compared to the options that improve knight jobs:
- Toxic God Deposits
- Knight output modifiers now only apply to resources, like other job output modifiers
- Knights now correctly inherit production modifiers from researchers and administrators
- Refactored how the output scaling for Knights from Squires functions, these now behave as normal additive modifiers instead of multiplicative modifiers
- Squires now increase the resource output of Knights by 2.5% per Squire not 2% per Squire
- The Luminous Blades modifier from the Knight's Quest now removes the alloy upkeep of knights and gives +25% Army damage instead of an empire-wide +1.5% alloy production modifier per knight
- Luminous Blades
- The Orders X-Calibrator planetary feature on their starting habitat now also provides -10% Pop Upkeep
- Knights X-Calibrator
- The Fortress Habitat Designation for Knights no longer provides +1 Defensive Army per Pop on the habitat, instead each Squire job provides +1 Defensive Army
- Bio-Reactors are now a tier 1 rare technology instead of a tier 0 Technology. Bio-Reactors now reduce the food output of farmer jobs and give them a small amount of energy output
- Bio-Trophy buildings no longer provide Artisan Drone and Maintenance Drone jobs
- Decreased the amount of research produced by unemployed pops with Utopian Abundance
- Delegate GalCom focus traits now have a small chance to give favors
- Ecclesiastical Arcologies no longer provide Manager jobs for Corporate Death Cults
- Ecclesiastical Arcologies now provide Prosperity Preachers for MegaCorps instead of a split between Priests and Managers for regular Spiritualist MegaCorps
- First League Offices now provide Prosperity Preacher jobs for Spiritualist MegaCorps
- Galactic Doorstep event chain now directly rewards the Gateway Activation technology and gives far more progress on the Gateway Construction technology
- Gospel of the Masses now provides +1 Trade Value to Prosperity Preachers (both inside their empire and those on planet on which they have branch offices)
- Increased technology costs, especially those of higher tier technologies
- Increased the cost of the Rock Potential special project to 1000 energy to account for Stellaris Inflation
- Increased the effects of Empire Size on Technology to match its effect on Traditions
- Lost Colony Parents now spawn with more developed colonies to avoid overcrowding on their capital.
- Machine Intelligences with a biological secondary species now have a base food income of 10 food/month, and without a secondary species or with a Lithoid secondary species, they now have a base mineral income of 10 minerals/month.
- Moved habitat upkeep modifiers from the domination opener to the expansion opener. Available for all, not just void dwellers
- Curator leader trait now provides +10% Research Speed (was +15%) with an associated +10% Researcher Upkeep. The Survey Speed bonus remains unchanged
- Penal Colonies now provide 10 housing.
- Prosperity Preachers are now a specialist strata job
- Rebalanced leader traits gained from Ascension Paths (Psionic, Chosen One, Synthetic, Cyborg, Erudite)
- Reduced output of researcher jobs
- Reduced the amount of Naval Cap granted by technologies
- Removed most sources of Ship Cost and Upkeep reductions from the game
- Bulwark ship upkeep reductions reduced by 50%
- Corporate Crusader Spirit now reduces ship upkeep by 5% instead of 10%
- Crusader Spirit civic now improves ship build speed
- Fleet Supremacy edict no longer reduces ship upkeep
- Grand Fleet ambition now increases power projection instead of reducing ship upkeep
- Logistic Understanding, Armada Logistician, and Gunboat Diplomat traits now reduces ship upkeep while docked
- Mark of the Instrument ship component no longer reduces ship upkeep
- Master Shipwrights tradition in the Supremacy tree no longer reduces ship build costs
- Match tradition in the Enmity tree bonus to ship build costs reduced to 5% instead of 10%
- Military Buildup Agenda now improves ship build speed and reduces claim costs. (It still reduces War Exhaustion on completion.)
- Military Pioneer trait now reduces starbase upgrade costs instead of ship build costs
- Naval Procurement Officer councilor now improves ship build speed
- Progress Oriented modifier no longer reduces ship build costs
- Psionic Supremacy (Eater of Worlds) finisher no longer reduces ship build costs
- Reduced penalty the Irenic trait applies to ship build costs
- Sanctum of the Eater ship upkeep reduction reduced from 10% to 5%
- Shipwright trait no longer reduces ship build costs
- Vyctor's Improved Fleet Logistics trait now reduces ship build costs by 10% instead of 20%
- Rulers now gain 12 XP per month
- Temples now provide Prosperity Preachers for Spiritualist MegaCorps instead of a split between Priests and Managers
- The Entangled Dark Matter astral rift now completely overwrites the personality of the selected scientist if they are not psionic
- The Traumatized trait now negatively impacts Astral Rift Exploration Speed
- Tier 2 and Tier 3 Sacrificial Temples no longer provide Manager jobs for Corporate Death Cults
- Tweaked the tiers of technologies that increase naval cap and fleet command limit
- Warpling armies now have an upkeep of 1 energy and 0.1 astral threads per month
- Psychological Infertility and Existential Iteroparity can no longer be taken with the Clone Soldier or Ascended Clone Soldier trait.
- Two of the three habitable planets in the Trappist system are now terraforming candidates
- The "Tragula's Cross", "Trin's Promise" and "Loh" systems are now mutually exclusive on galaxy generation
- The Science Ship as a Concept now uses psionic components instead of whichever components your empire has researched
- Improvements to Resort Worlds:
- Resort Colonies now have Resort Workers and Resort Districts.
- Resort Workers provide empire wide bonuses to amenities and trade value from living standards.
- Resort World Technology appears sooner and is cheaper.
- Added Unity Bonus to resort world designation, lowered housing bonus
- Empires that value other species, such as Rogue Servitors, will now get extra annoyed if you engage in genocide or necrophaging
- Gestalt empires can now sell their minor artifacts provided that they have access to the galactic market
- Marauder ships should now have a decently larger amount of armor for most shipsizes
- Refugees should now also be willing to flee to Rogue Servitors if they are welcomed as Bio-trophies
Bugfixes
- Added missing class name and icon in the leader upkeep tooltip
- Added missing required components to the Marauder Galleon
- Added new localization and triggers for Machine Empires exploring the Rift World origin.
- Armies now disband instantly instead of waiting for next tick
- Cordyceptic Empires that only had Subspace Drives on their ships are now also capable of reanimating space fauna
- Corrected draw weight for Shipbreaker trait
- Corrected modifiers on Agrarian Upbringing
- Corrected some trait names
- Corrected the Scout Wing using the wrong 3d entities
- Correctly locked a number of Delegate GalCom focus traits to require the DLC that unlocks their resolution category
- Diplo action tooltip now shows why we can't claim any systems
- distar.1081 will no longer spawn pops on colonies in progress
- Driven Assimilators with the Protected Pre-Sapients policy will no longer purge pre-sapients
- Empires with the Mechromancy AP can no longer purge cyborg zombies
- Event windows now correctly have no effect after the player has been defeated
- Extra trait points for script-generated species are now added correctly
- Fix countries created by `create_country` script command not having any leaders in their recruitment pool
- Fix duplicate ship role buttons when switching ship templates in ship designer
- Fix not being able to exit the game or return to menu when certain other UI windows were open
- Fix some leaders (e.g. paragons) getting a trait pick when you hire them even though they should not, how greedy!
- Fixed a number of opposite trait pairs not taking into account their leveled versions
- Fixed a string being undefined in the ruler designer menu
- Fixed an Astral Rift calling the Baol for Boal or was it the other way around?
- Fixed an error that prevented some Fallen Empire task events from firing
- Fixed cyborg zombies having a 100% chance of spawning instead of 33%
- Fixed default weights for pre-sapient policies
- Fixed Discoveries tab not being displayed when tabs order has been customized
- Fixed gestalt scientists getting research expertise traits when those traits had no effect for them
- Fixed heirs being able to have the Planar Theorist trait despite not being capable of exploring astral rifts
- Fixed incorrect weapon effect being used for the World Cracker
- Fixed invalid scope allowing pre-sapient pops to be turned into cyborg zombies
- Fixed issues with leaders assigned to armies or fleet that contain armies
- Fixed leaders sometimes getting invalid trait choices on level up
- Fixed missing 0 on Collaborator II
- Fixed missing message title for Restoring the Balance
- Fixed newest achievements not working on MS Store
- Fixed Orbital Bombardment planet modifier not having a tooltip if there are no other planet modifiers there
- Fixed possibility of leader trait picks including opposites of existing traits
- Fixed Revolutionary Medi-Gel not affecting Pharma State civic production for Medical Workers
- Fixed systems at the bottom of the map spawning at wrong coordinates
- Fixed the Shared Burdens tooltip being outdated and mentioning additional unity from the Egalitarian faction
- Fixed Unity Ambitions referencing their pre-Unity rework state.
- Fixed Urbanist being both a Destiny trait and a Veteran trait (which prevented it from being available as a trait pick)
- Fleets of countries without ship_disengagement = yes (e.g. Horde) now correctly cannot use emergency retreat
- Former Satrapies of the Khan should no longer be informed twice when the new Horde forms.
- Hiring Renowned and Legendary Leaders no longer hires a mysterious clone of them instead
- If the Knights Keep is hit with a Pacifier Colossus there will now be unique event text
- It now costs 200 influence to abandon planets even if they have pre-sapients living there.
- Livestock slaves now inherit farmer and miner modifiers as appropriate.
- Making sure the negative situation outliner notifications only happens for negative situations
- Modifiers to empire-wide resource production now apply to resources generated through trade policies
- Removed reference to a loc key inside of an Under One Rule event.
- Renowned and Legendary Leaders no longer lose Council traits when hired by gestalt empires.
- Repairing The Black Crown should no longer fire generic gateway repaired events
- Replaced all sources of "is_leading_research = x" with "is_head_of_research" fixing numerous broken events and scopes
- Replaced one of the descriptions being reused for the Old Gods event chain
- Show turrets correctly on the Maven Cruiser and Caravaneer ships
- Sobek will no longer be confused and think that they came from your capital
- Species habitability for randomized empires is now correctly set for origins like shattered ring
- Stellar Culture Shock will now be applied to hive pre-FTLs if you are a hive empire.
- Terraforming a Barren World into a Machine or a Hive World will no longer fill that world with blockers
- Terraforming straight into a Hive or a Machine World now correctly removes "Terraforming Candidate"
- The astral rifts now correctly checks for Chosen One traits in addition to the Psionic trait
- The Azizians event can no longer target planets that are under colonization
- The chance to gain negative leader traits depending on leader age now takes into account leader lifespan
- The Ranger Lodge will now properly produce +2 and +3 additional unity as the higher tier of Environmentalist Galactic Community Resolutions are passed.
- The Speed Demon anomaly will no longer show up for Synthetic empires.
- Updated the hire_event_leader_effect scripted effect to take account of the the Eternal Throne relic
- Updated the tooltip for Universal Prosperity Mandate to mention the Employee Ownership living standard
- When the "Prohibit Separate Treaties" federation law is enable it should now correctly remove treaties from both parties and not only the outside one
- When transferring ships from one fleet to another, the fleet's leader will now always stay on the old fleet
- AI UNE should no longer spawn if there is already an empire using the Sol initializer.
- Fixed a rare instance of a possible divide by 0 during rebellions
- Fixed orders for jump-drive-only ships being queued in the wrong order.
- Fixed Skrand Sharpbeak being unassigned from his ship after you hire him
- Fixed Skrand Sharpbeak having an excess of traits
- Fixed some issues with the triggers to encounter Skrand Sharpbeak - sorry he's been a bit shy recently
- Fixes to leader generation conditions for the leader pool if there are no valid species (such as if you nerve staple your entire population)
- If the Prikkiti will now build the most advanced starbase that they can instead of always trying to build a citadel even if they don't have the technology for it.
- If you shield the final world of the Contingency you should now receive your relic.
- Kaleidoscope event chain: pre-FTL countries won't be able to receive the Kaleidoscope anymore
- Newly released vassals now get a leader pool correctly
- Research stations will no longer try to go MIA when a revolt occurs.
- The Manifesti should no longer show up before you have encountered other alien empires.
- The Expel Corporation war goal now also removes Branch Offices belonging to the defender from your allies' planets
- A supremely unlucky pre-FTL nation should no longer be able to have multiple machine uprisings if they fight off the first one
- The Atomic Clock event will now properly trigger after 42 years and 3 days following the superior Stellaris Standard Calendar, which has 360 day years
- Authoritarianism should no longer become more popular because you have egalitarian councilors
- Become the Crisis AI empires will now always decline becoming vassals to awakened empires
- Fixed a rare case where the Shard would not turn hostile against the player
- Fixed a rare error that would occur if your scientist who finished a dig site died before you clicked the final dig site event
- Fixed the checks for the Debris Field anomaly making it rarer than it should be
- Fixed the Lush Planet Anomaly requiring Sol to have spawned, also updated the event rewards to work in a tileless Stellaris
- Hyperlanes should no longer get attached to sealed systems
- Imperial Fiefdom AI will no longer consider subjects to be viable overlords when they are looking for one
- The Fleet Maneuvers event can no longer happen in capital systems
- The Horizon Signal Event Chain will now correctly prioritize your head of research for narrative events
- The Manifesti event chain will now properly end if you apprehend them early enough
- The puddle technician drone job is now properly a drone job
- The Sentinel Order should no longer spawn in systems not connected to the rest of the galaxy, leaving everyone else to deal with the Prethoryn
- Upscaling the Messenger will now properly remove the negative modifiers from the ships
- Vultaumar III will now properly have both alloys and mineral deposits
- Irass III will now properly have both alloys and mineral deposits, while Irass VIII has gained its missing exotic gases
Performance
- Improved speed of AI checking whether it should send subjugation offers
- Various performance improvements
Stability
- Fixed crash when completing an Astral Rift if the exploring ship no longer exists
- Possibly fixed rare crash in galaxy map special project icon tooltip.
- Several Out of Sync fixes.
- Fixing OOS issue with planets, wormholes etc sometimes being slightly differently positioned between windows and linux.
UX
- Add assigned Leader's name and council title to archaeology view and rift view
- Additional Content tab text is centered correctly
- Clicking on a resource in the top bar now switches to that resource in the market view instead of closing it if it was already open
- Clicking on the "capped resource" notification will now take you to the correct tab depending on which resource is capped (correct market tab, relics view for minor artifacts, claims view for influence)
- Fix claim buttons being misaligned on partially or fully occupied systems
- Fix Outliner tab buttons appearing over the fleet manager sidebar on smaller resolutions
- Fixed incorrect speed value in ship designer
- Fixed Outliner tab buttons appearing in front of the archaeology window.
- Inactive leader trait triggered modifiers are shown in the tooltip along with their trigger conditions
- Remove double error message for starbase building tooltips
- Trade protection tooltip lists empire-wide modifiers
- Use up to 2 decimal places for displaying stability modifiers
- Use up to 2 decimal places for production/upkeep in building/district tooltips
- If an orbital station build order is selected, its fail text in planet tooltips no longer reveals hidden information.
- Tooltips for Galcom sanction resolutions now show the modifiers even if they're inactive.
- Tooltips for Galcom resolutions that have both triggered and non-triggered modifiers no longer show the "Modifiers" header twice.
AI
- Added better script to evaluate planet and fleet for leaders, and added description of the AI algorithms for leader assignation in the leader_classes/00_base_classes.txt
- Awakened Empires can now upgrade their starbases.
- Changed leader assignation into a single loop for all location types, sorting locations by priority and leaders by skill, then trying to assign the highest priority leader to locations in order
- Fixed AI being able to improve and harm relations at the same time
- Fixed another case of the AI assigning Leaders to invalid (empty) fleets
- Fixed the AI trying to assign military leaders to science fleets.
- Improved AI weights for Ascension Paths
- The AI now hires leaders the same way it assigns them. Expect an increased number of generals.
- The AI will evaluate a leader for a location based on the `ai_location_weight` scripted value in the leader class
- The Fear of the Dark AI empires will be less predictable with what extreme paths they might take.
- The weight value for location priority when assigning leaders is now a define. When assigning leaders, there are 2 steps, first steps leader and locations are assigned a priority value, and then each leader calculates a final weight for each location. The leader/location pair with the highest weight is then assigned. This change affects the first step (the priority in the queue), as the second step is already fully scriptable.
- Improved AI leader assignment weights
- The AI now decides whether to strengthen or undermine the galactic empire based on two new game rules
- The AI will no longer build additional Quantum Catapults if they already have one within 25 jumps.
- Improved AI decision-making for the "Find Military Applications" Artifact Action
- Improved AI logic when it comes to when to use the Strip Mining decision
- Reduced the AI willingness to accept trade deals for food or consumer goods if they don't use those resources
- AI Hive-Mind empires now have an increased chance to research terraforming technologies since they are unlikely to get more pop types from migration pacts.
Modding
- Add `last_resolution_category_changed` trigger
- Added a check for the block_homeworld_traits leader flag in all traits that provide additional jobs to the leader's background planet. This flag is not currently used in the vanilla game
- Added checked for the following leader flags to leader trait weights and potentials: block_army_traits, block_council_traits, block_federation_traits, block_galcom_traits, block_governor_traits, block_pilot_traits these flags set the selection weight for leader traits in their category to 0 but are ignored if the leader has a subclass specializing in the category. These flags are currently unused in the vanilla game
- Added game rule 'can_ai_assign_governor' to let the AI decide if a planet can have a governor or not
- Added NON_PARAGON_TRAIT_OPTIONS_ON_LEVEL_UP define
- Added not_potential_override_text_key parameter to triggered modifier (currently used in leader trait tooltips and galcom resolutions)
- Added on_army_disbanded on_action
- Added show_if_not_potential parameter to triggered modifier (currently used in leader trait tooltips and galcom resolutions)
- Added text_offset variable to buttonType (only used for buttons that have both a sprite and text)
- Added the "is_urban_planet" scripted trigger for pc_relic and pc_city planets
- leader_class trigger can now appear in tooltips
- Renamed LEADER_RULER_MONARCH_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_RULER_EXPERIENCE and LEADER_RULER_HEIR_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_HEIR_EXPERIENCE
- Replaced "negative", "subclass_trait", "destiny_trait" and "veteran_class_locked_trait" leader trait variables with "leader_trait_type"
- Updated documentation for create_species effect
- Updated LEADER_GOVERNOR_MONTHLY_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_ASSIGNED_MONTHLY_EXPERIENCE
- Fixed "remove_deposit" effect not working in a deposit scope, fixing orbitals not removing their bonus to habitats when destroyed
- Replaced the loc string used to select a background for Paragon portraits with an asset selector.
- can_generate_military_leader_from_pop now includes the requirements of can_generate_leader_from_pop, which are now in the can_be_leader scripted trigger.
Stellaris Expansion Subscription
Over the years, as more content has been added to Stellaris, we have been hearing an ever-increasing number of requests for a subscription option as an alternative to purchasing them individually. Were happy to announce that we are adding a subscription option to Stellaris, allowing players to access all released DLCs for Stellaris at a fixed monthly fee. Future DLC releases will be available to subscribers on day 1. The Stellaris Expansion Subscription grants access to all of the content for Stellaris, with significant discounts for longer subscription plans:
- 1 Month: 9.99 USD
- 3 Months: 19.99 USD
- 6 Months: 29.99 USD
Next Week
Next weeks dev diary will be on Thursday March 7th, and will likely be about post-release support for the 3.11 Eridanus update. Well also include the dev Q&A transcript and a little hint about what else were working on. Thank you for playing Stellaris!
[ 2024-02-27 16:04:23 CET ] [ Original post ]
by PDX-Loke
Hello fellow stargazers,
The 3.11.1 patch is now live and available for download.
Please find the changelog below.
Enjoy!
3.11.1 ERIDANUS CUSTODIAN UPDATE RELEASE NOTES
Feature
- Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider added to galaxy generation. This slider adjusts technology costs based on tier and game difficulty.
- Added notification message when new pop settles in zeya (Gaia planet in azilash)
- Added the Seedom system.
- Allowed conversion between Sovereign Guardianship and Corporate Protectorate civics
- Dimensional Locks now forbid access to countries without communications
- Every participant in a war now gets a truce with the others after it ends, even if they were on the same side
- If you have a colony in a system when pre-FTLs become space faring you can apologize and annex them
- Progenitor Hive speed malus and bonuses now only affect military ships, removing the need of science ship escorts
- Technology and Tradition costs are now distinct sliders in galaxy setup
- The Anglers civic now swaps to Trawling Operations if you reform your government into a megacorp and vice versa
- The Eager Explorers civic now swaps to Privatized Exploration if you reform your government into a megacorp and vice versa
- The Eager Explorers, Privatized Exploration and Exploration Protocols civics can be removed and readded after researching Jump Drives. The Stargazers civic cannot be removed as it is linked to the species trait of the same name
- The Foreign Consciousness trait is now a destiny trait
- When the Khan awakens the event will now properly have a go to button
- Gangsters should no longer assassinate Chosen Ones or Legendary leaders
- If a Zombie or Nerve Stapled pop manages to lie on their resume and become a specialist or ruler they should be demoted much faster
- Xenophobic leaders are now half as likely to accept brainslugs while Xenophilic ones are twice as likely to accept them
- Improved spawning logic for anomalies that clear deposits to not spawn on planets with strategic resources
- Added the old AI crisis diplomatic room to the list of selectable diplomatic rooms
- Rearranged the room selector priorities so that AI empires shouldn't lose special diplomatic rooms
- Set the old AI crisis diplomatic room to be used by Determined Exterminators
- Set the "scrappy room" to be used by the Ketlings
- Set the "gilded room" to be used the AI overlord for the Imperial Fiefdom origin
- Set the "organic room" to be used by Devouring Swarms
- All pop types will now be happy while living on a gaia world.
- Added a tier 2 Advanced Bio-Reactor technology and building. Advanced Bio-Reactors further reduce the food output of farmers in exchange for a small amount of exotic gas output
- Added Gateway Cost and Megastructure Build Speed modifiers to the Galactic Doorstep origin
- Ascension Theory is now a Tier 4 technology that requires at least 6 traditions trees to have been completed to be drawn
- Balance adjustments to the Knights of the Toxic God to make some of their behavior behave the same way as other economic bonuses in the game, and make more of the choices in the chain potentially relevant.
- Event options in the Knights' quest that improve their capital have been significantly buffed to be better balanced compared to the options that improve knight jobs:
- Knight output modifiers now only apply to resources, like other job output modifiers
- Knights now correctly inherit production modifiers from researchers and administrators
- Refactored how the output scaling for Knights from Squires functions, these now behave as normal additive modifiers instead of multiplicative modifiers
- Squires now increase the resource output of Knights by 2.5% per Squire not 2% per Squire
- The Luminous Blades modifier from the Knight's Quest now removes the alloy upkeep of knights and gives +25% Army damage instead of an empire-wide +1.5% alloy production modifier per knight
- The Orders X-Calibrator planetary feature on their starting habitat now also provides -10% Pop Upkeep
- The Fortress Habitat Designation for Knights no longer provides +1 Defensive Army per Pop on the habitat, instead each Squire job provides +1 Defensive Army
- Bio-Reactors are now a tier 1 rare technology instead of a tier 0 Technology. Bio-Reactors now reduce the food output of farmer jobs and give them a small amount of energy output
- Bio-Trophy buildings no longer provide Artisan Drone and Maintenance Drone jobs
- Decreased the amount of research produced by unemployed pops with Utopian Abundance
- Delegate GalCom focus traits now have a small chance to give favors
- Ecclesiastical Arcologies no longer provide Manager jobs for Corporate Death Cults
- Ecclesiastical Arcologies now provide Prosperity Preachers for MegaCorps instead of a split between Priests and Managers for regular Spiritualist MegaCorps
- First League Offices now provide Prosperity Preacher jobs for Spiritualist MegaCorps
- Galactic Doorstep event chain now directly rewards the Gateway Activation technology and gives far more progress on the Gateway Construction technology
- Gospel of the Masses now provides +1 Trade Value to Prosperity Preachers (both inside their empire and those on planet on which they have branch offices)
- Increased technology costs, especially those of higher tier technologies
- Increased the cost of the Rock Potential special project to 1000 energy to account for Stellaris Inflation
- Increased the effects of Empire Size on Technology to match its effect on Traditions
- Lost Colony Parents now spawn with more developed colonies to avoid overcrowding on their capital.
- Machine Intelligences with a biological secondary species now have a base food income of 10 food/month, and without a secondary species or with a Lithoid secondary species, they now have a base mineral income of 10 minerals/month.
- Moved habitat upkeep modifiers from the domination opener to the expansion opener. Available for all, not just void dwellers
- Curator leader trait now provides +10% Research Speed (was +15%) with an associated +10% Researcher Upkeep. The Survey Speed bonus remains unchanged
- Penal Colonies now provide 10 housing.
- Prosperity Preachers are now a specialist strata job
- Rebalanced leader traits gained from Ascension Paths (Psionic, Chosen One, Synthetic, Cyborg, Erudite)
- Reduced output of researcher jobs
- Reduced the amount of Naval Cap granted by technologies
- Removed most sources of Ship Cost and Upkeep reductions from the game
- Bulwark ship upkeep reductions reduced by 50%
- Corporate Crusader Spirit now reduces ship upkeep by 5% instead of 10%
- Crusader Spirit civic now improves ship build speed
- Fleet Supremacy edict no longer reduces ship upkeep
- Grand Fleet ambition now increases power projection instead of reducing ship upkeep
- Logistic Understanding, Armada Logistician, and Gunboat Diplomat traits now reduces ship upkeep while docked
- Mark of the Instrument ship component no longer reduces ship upkeep
- Master Shipwrights tradition in the Supremacy tree no longer reduces ship build costs
- Match tradition in the Enmity tree bonus to ship build costs reduced to 5% instead of 10%
- Military Buildup Agenda now improves ship build speed and reduces claim costs. (It still reduces War Exhaustion on completion.)
- Military Pioneer trait now reduces starbase upgrade costs instead of ship build costs
- Naval Procurement Officer councilor now improves ship build speed
- Progress Oriented modifier no longer reduces ship build costs
- Psionic Supremacy (Eater of Worlds) finisher no longer reduces ship build costs
- Reduced penalty the Irenic trait applies to ship build costs
- Sanctum of the Eater ship upkeep reduction reduced from 10% to 5%
- Shipwright trait no longer reduces ship build costs
- Vyctor's Improved Fleet Logistics trait now reduces ship build costs by 10% instead of 20%
- Rulers now gain 12 XP per month
- Temples now provide Prosperity Preachers for Spiritualist MegaCorps instead of a split between Priests and Managers
- The Entangled Dark Matter astral rift now completely overwrites the personality of the selected scientist if they are not psionic
- The Traumatized trait now negatively impacts Astral Rift Exploration Speed
- Tier 2 and Tier 3 Sacrificial Temples no longer provide Manager jobs for Corporate Death Cults
- Tweaked the tiers of technologies that increase naval cap and fleet command limit
- Warpling armies now have an upkeep of 1 energy and 0.1 astral threads per month
- Empires that value other species, such as Rogue Servitors, will now get extra annoyed if you engage in genocide or necrophaging
- Gestalt empires can now sell their minor artifacts provided that they have access to the galactic market
- Marauder ships should now have a decently larger amount of armor for most shipsizes
- Refugees should now also be willing to flee to Rogue Servitors if they are welcomed as Bio-trophies
- Psychological Infertility and Existential Iteroparity can no longer be taken with the Clone Soldier or Ascended Clone Soldier trait.
- Two of the three habitable planets in the Trappist system are now terraforming candidates
- The "Tragula's Cross", "Trin's Promise" and "Loh" systems are now mutually exclusive on galaxy generation
- The Science Ship as a Concept now uses psionic components instead of whichever components your empire has researched
- Added missing class name and icon in the leader upkeep tooltip
- Added missing required components to the Marauder Galleon
- Added new localization and triggers for Machine Empires exploring the Rift World origin.
- Armies now disband instantly instead of waiting for next tick
- Cordyceptic Empires that only had Subspace Drives on their ships are now also capable of reanimating space fauna
- Corrected draw weight for Shipbreaker trait
- Corrected modifiers on Agrarian Upbringing
- Corrected some trait names
- Corrected the Scout Wing using the wrong 3d entities
- Correctly locked a number of Delegate GalCom focus traits to require the DLC that unlocks their resolution category
- Diplo action tooltip now shows why we can't claim any systems
- distar.1081 will no longer spawn pops on colonies in progress
- Driven Assimilators with the Protected Pre-Sapients policy will no longer purge pre-sapients
- Empires with the Mechromancy AP can no longer purge cyborg zombies
- Event windows now correctly have no effect after the player has been defeated
- Extra trait points for script-generated species are now added correctly
- Fix countries created by `create_country` script command not having any leaders in their recruitment pool
- Fix duplicate ship role buttons when switching ship templates in ship designer
- Fix not being able to exit the game or return to menu when certain other UI windows were open
- Fix some leaders (e.g. paragons) getting a trait pick when you hire them even though they should not, how greedy!
- Fixed a number of opposite trait pairs not taking into account their leveled versions
- Fixed a string being undefined in the ruler designer menu
- Fixed an Astral Rift calling the Baol for Boal or was it the other way around?
- Fixed an error that prevented some Fallen Empire task events from firing
- Fixed cyborg zombies having a 100% chance of spawning instead of 33%
- Fixed default weights for pre-sapient policies
- Fixed Discoveries tab not being displayed when tabs order has been customized
- Fixed gestalt scientists getting research expertise traits when those traits had no effect for them
- Fixed heirs being able to have the Planar Theorist trait despite not being capable of exploring astral rifts
- Fixed incorrect weapon effect being used for the World Cracker
- Fixed invalid scope allowing pre-sapient pops to be turned into cyborg zombies
- Fixed issues with leaders assigned to armies or fleet that contain armies
- Fixed leaders sometimes getting invalid trait choices on level up
- Fixed missing 0 on Collaborator II
- Fixed missing message title for Restoring the Balance
- Fixed newest achievements not working on MS Store
- Fixed Orbital Bombardment planet modifier not having a tooltip if there are no other planet modifiers there
- Fixed possibility of leader trait picks including opposites of existing traits
- Fixed Revolutionary Medi-Gel not affecting Pharma State civic production for Medical Workers
- Fixed systems at the bottom of the map spawning at wrong coordinates
- Fixed the Shared Burdens tooltip being outdated and mentioning additional unity from the Egalitarian faction
- Fixed Unity Ambitions referencing their pre-Unity rework state.
- Fixed Urbanist being both a Destiny trait and a Veteran trait (which prevented it from being available as a trait pick)
- Fleets of countries without ship_disengagement = yes (e.g. Horde) now correctly cannot use emergency retreat
- Former Satrapies of the Khan should no longer be informed twice when the new Horde forms.
- Hiring Renowned and Legendary Leaders no longer hires a mysterious clone of them instead
- If the Knights Keep is hit with a Pacifier Colossus there will now be unique event text
- It now costs 200 influence to abandon planets even if they have pre-sapients living there.
- Livestock slaves now inherit farmer and miner modifiers as appropriate.
- Making sure the negative situation outliner notifications only happens for negative situations
- Modifiers to empire-wide resource production now apply to resources generated through trade policies
- Removed reference to a loc key inside of an Under One Rule event.
- Renowned and Legendary Leaders no longer lose Council traits when hired by gestalt empires.
- Repairing The Black Crown should no longer fire generic gateway repaired events
- Replaced all sources of "is_leading_research = x" with "is_head_of_research" fixing numerous broken events and scopes
- Replaced one of the descriptions being reused for the Old Gods event chain
- Show turrets correctly on the Maven Cruiser and Caravaneer ships
- Sobek will no longer be confused and think that they came from your capital
- Species habitability for randomized empires is now correctly set for origins like shattered ring
- Stellar Culture Shock will now be applied to hive pre-FTLs if you are a hive empire.
- Terraforming a Barren World into a Machine or a Hive World will no longer fill that world with blockers
- Terraforming straight into a Hive or a Machine World now correctly removes "Terraforming Candidate"
- The astral rifts now correctly checks for Chosen One traits in addition to the Psionic trait
- The Azizians event can no longer target planets that are under colonization
- The chance to gain negative leader traits depending on leader age now takes into account leader lifespan
- The Ranger Lodge will now properly produce +2 and +3 additional unity as the higher tier of Environmentalist Galactic Community Resolutions are passed.
- The Speed Demon anomaly will no longer show up for Synthetic empires.
- Updated the hire_event_leader_effect scripted effect to take account of the the Eternal Throne relic
- Updated the tooltip for Universal Prosperity Mandate to mention the Employee Ownership living standard
- When the "Prohibit Separate Treaties" federation law is enable it should now correctly remove treaties from both parties and not only the outside one
- When transferring ships from one fleet to another, the fleet's leader will now always stay on the old fleet
- The Expel Corporation war goal now also removes Branch Offices belonging to the defender from your allies' planets
- A supremely unlucky pre-FTL nation should no longer be able to have multiple machine uprisings if they fight off the first one
- The Atomic Clock event will now properly trigger after 42 years and 3 days following the superior Stellaris Standard Calendar, which has 360 day years
- Authoritarianism should no longer become more popular because you have egalitarian councilors
- Become the Crisis AI empires will now always decline becoming vassals to awakened empires
- Fixed a rare case where the Shard would not turn hostile against the player
- Fixed a rare error that would occur if your scientist who finished a dig site died before you clicked the final dig site event
- Fixed the checks for the Debris Field anomaly making it rarer than it should be
- Fixed the Lush Planet Anomaly requiring Sol to have spawned, also updated the event rewards to work in a tileless Stellaris
- Hyperlanes should no longer get attached to sealed systems
- Imperial Fiefdom AI will no longer consider subjects to be viable overlords when they are looking for one
- The Fleet Maneuvers event can no longer happen in capital systems
- The Horizon Signal Event Chain will now correctly prioritize your head of research for narrative events
- The Manifesti event chain will now properly end if you apprehend them early enough
- The puddle technician drone job is now properly a drone job
- The Sentinel Order should no longer spawn in systems not connected to the rest of the galaxy, leaving everyone else to deal with the Prethoryn
- Upscaling the Messenger will now properly remove the negative modifiers from the ships
- Vultaumar III will now properly have both alloys and mineral deposits
- Irass III will now properly have both alloys and mineral deposits, while Irass VIII has gained its missing exotic gases
- AI UNE should no longer spawn if there is already an empire using the Sol initializer.
- Fixed a rare instance of a possible divide by 0 during rebellions
- Fixed orders for jump-drive-only ships being queued in the wrong order.
- Fixed Skrand Sharpbeak being unassigned from his ship after you hire him
- Fixed Skrand Sharpbeak having an excess of traits
- Fixed some issues with the triggers to encounter Skrand Sharpbeak - sorry he's been a bit shy recently
- Fixes to leader generation conditions for the leader pool if there are no valid species (such as if you nerve staple your entire population)
- If the Prikkiti will now build the most advanced starbase that they can instead of always trying to build a citadel even if they don't have the technology for it.
- If you shield the final world of the Contingency you should now receive your relic.
- Kaleidoscope event chain: pre-FTL countries won't be able to receive the Kaleidoscope anymore
- Newly released vassals now get a leader pool correctly
- Research stations will no longer try to go MIA when a revolt occurs.
- The Manifesti should no longer show up before you have encountered other alien empires.
- Improved speed of AI checking whether it should send subjugation offers
- Various performance improvements
- Fixed crash when completing an Astral Rift if the exploring ship no longer exists
- Possibly fixed rare crash in galaxy map special project icon tooltip.
- Several Out of Sync fixes.
- Fixing OOS issue with planets, wormholes etc sometimes being slightly differently positioned between windows and linux.
- Add assigned Leader's name and council title to archaeology view and rift view
- Additional Content tab text is centered correctly
- Clicking on a resource in the top bar now switches to that resource in the market view instead of closing it if it was already open
- Clicking on the "capped resource" notification will now take you to the correct tab depending on which resource is capped (correct market tab, relics view for minor artifacts, claims view for influence)
- Fix claim buttons being misaligned on partially or fully occupied systems
- Fix Outliner tab buttons appearing over the fleet manager sidebar on smaller resolutions
- Fixed incorrect speed value in ship designer
- Fixed Outliner tab buttons appearing in front of the archaeology window.
- Inactive leader trait triggered modifiers are shown in the tooltip along with their trigger conditions
- Remove double error message for starbase building tooltips
- Trade protection tooltip lists empire-wide modifiers
- Use up to 2 decimal places for displaying stability modifiers
- Use up to 2 decimal places for production/upkeep in building/district tooltips
- If an orbital station build order is selected, its fail text in planet tooltips no longer reveals hidden information.
- Tooltips for Galcom sanction resolutions now show the modifiers even if they're inactive.
- Tooltips for Galcom resolutions that have both triggered and non-triggered modifiers no longer show the "Modifiers" header twice.
- Added better script to evaluate planet and fleet for leaders, and added description of the AI algorithms for leader assignation in the leader_classes/00_base_classes.txt
- Awakened Empires can now upgrade their starbases.
- Changed leader assignation into a single loop for all location types, sorting locations by priority and leaders by skill, then trying to assign the highest priority leader to locations in order
- Fixed AI being able to improve and harm relations at the same time
- Fixed another case of the AI assigning Leaders to invalid (empty) fleets
- Fixed the AI trying to assign military leaders to science fleets.
- Improved AI weights for Ascension Paths
- The AI now hires leaders the same way it assigns them. Expect an increased number of generals.
- The AI will evaluate a leader for a location based on the `ai_location_weight` scripted value in the leader class
- The Fear of the Dark AI empires will be less predictable with what extreme paths they might take.
- The weight value for location priority when assigning leaders is now a define. When assigning leaders, there are 2 steps, first steps leader and locations are assigned a priority value, and then each leader calculates a final weight for each location. The leader/location pair with the highest weight is then assigned. This change affects the first step (the priority in the queue), as the second step is already fully scriptable.
- Improved AI decision-making for the "Find Military Applications" Artifact Action
- Improved AI logic when it comes to when to use the Strip Mining decision
- Reduced the AI willingness to accept trade deals for food or consumer goods if they don't use those resources
- AI Hive-Mind empires now have an increased chance to research terraforming technologies since they are unlikely to get more pop types from migration pacts.
- Improved AI leader assignment weights
- The AI now decides whether to strengthen or undermine the galactic empire based on two new game rules
- The AI will no longer build additional Quantum Catapults if they already have one within 25 jumps.
- Add `last_resolution_category_changed` trigger
- Added a check for the block_homeworld_traits leader flag in all traits that provide additional jobs to the leader's background planet. This flag is not currently used in the vanilla game
- Added checked for the following leader flags to leader trait weights and potentials: block_army_traits, block_council_traits, block_federation_traits, block_galcom_traits, block_governor_traits, block_pilot_traits these flags set the selection weight for leader traits in their category to 0 but are ignored if the leader has a subclass specializing in the category. These flags are currently unused in the vanilla game
- Added game rule 'can_ai_assign_governor' to let the AI decide if a planet can have a governor or not
- Added NON_PARAGON_TRAIT_OPTIONS_ON_LEVEL_UP define
- Added not_potential_override_text_key parameter to triggered modifier (currently used in leader trait tooltips and galcom resolutions)
- Added on_army_disbanded on_action
- Added show_if_not_potential parameter to triggered modifier (currently used in leader trait tooltips and galcom resolutions)
- Added text_offset variable to buttonType (only used for buttons that have both a sprite and text)
- Added the "is_urban_planet" scripted trigger for pc_relic and pc_city planets
- leader_class trigger can now appear in tooltips
- Renamed LEADER_RULER_MONARCH_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_RULER_EXPERIENCE and LEADER_RULER_HEIR_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_HEIR_EXPERIENCE
- Replaced "negative", "subclass_trait", "destiny_trait" and "veteran_class_locked_trait" leader trait variables with "leader_trait_type"
- Updated documentation for create_species effect
- Updated LEADER_GOVERNOR_MONTHLY_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_ASSIGNED_MONTHLY_EXPERIENCE
- Fixed "remove_deposit" effect not working in a deposit scope, fixing orbitals not removing their bonus to habitats when destroyed
- Replaced the loc string used to select a background for Paragon portraits with an asset selector.
- can_generate_military_leader_from_pop now includes the requirements of can_generate_leader_from_pop, which are now in the can_be_leader scripted trigger.
Please note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important game going in a previous version, please back up the save file before trying to load the save in 3.11.1. You can roll back to a prior version by right-clicking on Stellaris in your library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version from the drop-down. If you experience crashing or other issues, first disable all mods and start a new save. If the issue persists, please report it on the Bug Report forums.
[ 2024-02-27 09:14:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
Weve hit our code freeze, so barring unforeseen circumstances, the 3.11 Eridanus update will be released next Tuesday, on February 27th.
Preliminary Release Notes
As promised, here are the preliminary release notes. Release Notes prefaced with a symbol had community involvement from our modders, and Ive placed changes that have been merged since last weeks dev diary at the end of each section and marked them with a .
3.11 ERIDANUS CUSTODIAN UPDATE PRELIMINARY RELEASE NOTES
Feature
- Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider added to galaxy generation. This slider adjusts technology costs based on tier and game difficulty.
- Added notification message when new pop settles in zeya (Gaia planet in azilash)
- Added the Seedom system.
- Allowed conversion between Sovereign Guardianship and Corporate Protectorate civics
- Dimensional Locks now forbid access to countries without communications
- Every participant in a war now gets a truce with the others after it ends, even if they were on the same side
- If you have a colony in a system when pre-FTLs become space faring you can apologize and annex them
- Progenitor Hive speed malus and bonuses now only affect military ships, removing the need of science ship escorts
- Technology and Tradition costs are now distinct sliders in galaxy setup
- The Anglers civic now swaps to Trawling Operations if you reform your government into a megacorp and vice versa
- The Eager Explorers civic now swaps to Privatized Exploration if you reform your government into a megacorp and vice versa
- The Eager Explorers, Privatized Exploration and Exploration Protocols civics can be removed and readded after researching Jump Drives. The Stargazers civic cannot be removed as it is linked to the species trait of the same name
- The Foreign Consciousness trait is now a destiny trait
- When the Khan awakens the event will now properly have a go to button
- Gangsters should no longer assassinate Chosen Ones or Legendary leaders
- If a Zombie or Nerve Stapled pop manages to lie on their resume and become a specialist or ruler they should be demoted much faster
- Xenophobic leaders are now half as likely to accept brainslugs while Xenophilic ones are twice as likely to accept them
- Improved spawning logic for anomalies that clear deposits to not spawn on planets with strategic resources
- Added the old AI crisis diplomatic room to the list of selectable diplomatic rooms
- Rearranged the room selector priorities so that AI empires shouldn't lose special diplomatic rooms
- Set the old AI crisis diplomatic room to be used by Determined Exterminators
- Set the "scrappy room" to be used by the Ketlings
- Set the "gilded room" to be used the AI overlord for the Imperial Fiefdom origin
- Set the "organic room" to be used by Devouring Swarms
- All pop types will now be happy while living on a gaia world.
- Added a tier 2 Advanced Bio-Reactor technology and building. Advanced Bio-Reactors further reduce the food output of farmers in exchange for a small amount of exotic gas output
- Added Gateway Cost and Megastructure Build Speed modifiers to the Galactic Doorstep origin
- Ascension Theory is now a Tier 4 technology that requires at least 6 traditions trees to have been completed to be drawn
- Balance adjustments to the Knights of the Toxic God to make some of their behavior behave the same way as other economic bonuses in the game, and make more of the choices in the chain potentially relevant.
- Event options in the Knights' quest that improve their capital have been significantly buffed to be better balanced compared to the options that improve knight jobs:
- Knight output modifiers now only apply to resources, like other job output modifiers
- Knights now correctly inherit production modifiers from researchers and administrators
- Refactored how the output scaling for Knights from Squires functions, these now behave as normal additive modifiers instead of multiplicative modifiers
- Squires now increase the resource output of Knights by 2.5% per Squire not 2% per Squire
- The Luminous Blades modifier from the Knight's Quest now removes the alloy upkeep of knights and gives +25% Army damage instead of an empire-wide +1.5% alloy production modifier per knight
- The Orders X-Calibrator planetary feature on their starting habitat now also provides -10% Pop Upkeep
- The Fortress Habitat Designation for Knights no longer provides +1 Defensive Army per Pop on the habitat, instead each Squire job provides +1 Defensive Army
- Bio-Reactors are now a tier 1 rare technology instead of a tier 0 Technology. Bio-Reactors now reduce the food output of farmer jobs and give them a small amount of energy output
- Bio-Trophy buildings no longer provide Artisan Drone and Maintenance Drone jobs
- Decreased the amount of research produced by unemployed pops with Utopian Abundance
- Delegate GalCom focus traits now have a small chance to give favors
- Ecclesiastical Arcologies no longer provide Manager jobs for Corporate Death Cults
- Ecclesiastical Arcologies now provide Prosperity Preachers for MegaCorps instead of a split between Priests and Managers for regular Spiritualist MegaCorps
- First League Offices now provide Prosperity Preacher jobs for Spiritualist MegaCorps
- Galactic Doorstep event chain now directly rewards the Gateway Activation technology and gives far more progress on the Gateway Construction technology
- Gospel of the Masses now provides +1 Trade Value to Prosperity Preachers (both inside their empire and those on planet on which they have branch offices)
- Increased technology costs, especially those of higher tier technologies
- Increased the cost of the Rock Potential special project to 1000 energy to account for Stellaris Inflation
- Increased the effects of Empire Size on Technology to match its effect on Traditions
- Lost Colony Parents now spawn with more developed colonies to avoid overcrowding on their capital.
- Machine Intelligences with a biological secondary species now have a base food income of 10 food/month, and without a secondary species or with a Lithoid secondary species, they now have a base mineral income of 10 minerals/month.
- Moved habitat upkeep modifiers from the domination opener to the expansion opener. Available for all, not just void dwellers
- Curator leader trait now provides +10% Research Speed (was +15%) with an associated +10% Researcher Upkeep. The Survey Speed bonus remains unchanged
- Penal Colonies now provide 10 housing.
- Prosperity Preachers are now a specialist strata job
- Rebalanced leader traits gained from Ascension Paths (Psionic, Chosen One, Synthetic, Cyborg, Erudite)
- Reduced output of researcher jobs
- Reduced the amount of Naval Cap granted by technologies
- Removed most sources of Ship Cost and Upkeep reductions from the game
- Bulwark ship upkeep reductions reduced by 50%
- Corporate Crusader Spirit now reduces ship upkeep by 5% instead of 10%
- Crusader Spirit civic now improves ship build speed
- Fleet Supremacy edict no longer reduces ship upkeep
- Grand Fleet ambition now increases power projection instead of reducing ship upkeep
- Logistic Understanding, Armada Logistician, and Gunboat Diplomat traits now reduces ship upkeep while docked
- Mark of the Instrument ship component no longer reduces ship upkeep
- Master Shipwrights tradition in the Supremacy tree no longer reduces ship build costs
- Match tradition in the Enmity tree bonus to ship build costs reduced to 5% instead of 10%
- Military Buildup Agenda now improves ship build speed and reduces claim costs. (It still reduces War Exhaustion on completion.)
- Military Pioneer trait now reduces starbase upgrade costs instead of ship build costs
- Naval Procurement Officer councilor now improves ship build speed
- Progress Oriented modifier no longer reduces ship build costs
- Psionic Supremacy (Eater of Worlds) finisher no longer reduces ship build costs
- Reduced penalty the Irenic trait applies to ship build costs
- Sanctum of the Eater ship upkeep reduction reduced from 10% to 5%
- Shipwright trait no longer reduces ship build costs
- Vyctor's Improved Fleet Logistics trait now reduces ship build costs by 10% instead of 20%
- Rulers now gain 12 XP per month
- Temples now provide Prosperity Preachers for Spiritualist MegaCorps instead of a split between Priests and Managers
- The Entangled Dark Matter astral rift now completely overwrites the personality of the selected scientist if they are not psionic
- The Traumatized trait now negatively impacts Astral Rift Exploration Speed
- Tier 2 and Tier 3 Sacrificial Temples no longer provide Manager jobs for Corporate Death Cults
- Tweaked the tiers of technologies that increase naval cap and fleet command limit
- Warpling armies now have an upkeep of 1 energy and 0.1 astral threads per month
- Empires that value other species, such as Rogue Servitors, will now get extra annoyed if you engage in genocide or necrophaging
- Gestalt empires can now sell their minor artifacts provided that they have access to the galactic market
- Marauder ships should now have a decently larger amount of armor for most shipsizes
- Refugees should now also be willing to flee to Rogue Servitors if they are welcomed as Bio-trophies
- Psychological Infertility and Existential Iteroparity can no longer be taken with the Clone Soldier or Ascended Clone Soldier trait.
- Two of the three habitable planets in the Trappist system are now terraforming candidates
- The "Tragula's Cross", "Trin's Promise" and "Loh" systems are now mutually exclusive on galaxy generation
- The Science Ship as a Concept now uses psionic components instead of whichever components your empire has researched
- Added missing class name and icon in the leader upkeep tooltip
- Added missing required components to the Marauder Galleon
- Added new localization and triggers for Machine Empires exploring the Rift World origin.
- Armies now disband instantly instead of waiting for next tick
- Cordyceptic Empires that only had Subspace Drives on their ships are now also capable of reanimating space fauna
- Corrected draw weight for Shipbreaker trait
- Corrected modifiers on Agrarian Upbringing
- Corrected some trait names
- Corrected the Scout Wing using the wrong 3d entities
- Correctly locked a number of Delegate GalCom focus traits to require the DLC that unlocks their resolution category
- Diplo action tooltip now shows why we can't claim any systems
- distar.1081 will no longer spawn pops on colonies in progress
- Driven Assimilators with the Protected Pre-Sapients policy will no longer purge pre-sapients
- Empires with the Mechromancy AP can no longer purge cyborg zombies
- Event windows now correctly have no effect after the player has been defeated
- Extra trait points for script-generated species are now added correctly
- Fix countries created by `create_country` script command not having any leaders in their recruitment pool
- Fix duplicate ship role buttons when switching ship templates in ship designer
- Fix not being able to exit the game or return to menu when certain other UI windows were open
- Fix some leaders (e.g. paragons) getting a trait pick when you hire them even though they should not, how greedy!
- Fixed a number of opposite trait pairs not taking into account their leveled versions
- Fixed a string being undefined in the ruler designer menu
- Fixed an Astral Rift calling the Baol for Boal or was it the other way around?
- Fixed an error that prevented some Fallen Empire task events from firing
- Fixed cyborg zombies having a 100% chance of spawning instead of 33%
- Fixed default weights for pre-sapient policies
- Fixed Discoveries tab not being displayed when tabs order has been customized
- Fixed gestalt scientists getting research expertise traits when those traits had no effect for them
- Fixed heirs being able to have the Planar Theorist trait despite not being capable of exploring astral rifts
- Fixed incorrect weapon effect being used for the World Cracker
- Fixed invalid scope allowing pre-sapient pops to be turned into cyborg zombies
- Fixed issues with leaders assigned to armies or fleet that contain armies
- Fixed leaders sometimes getting invalid trait choices on level up
- Fixed missing 0 on Collaborator II
- Fixed missing message title for Restoring the Balance
- Fixed newest achievements not working on MS Store
- Fixed Orbital Bombardment planet modifier not having a tooltip if there are no other planet modifiers there
- Fixed possibility of leader trait picks including opposites of existing traits
- Fixed Revolutionary Medi-Gel not affecting Pharma State civic production for Medical Workers
- Fixed systems at the bottom of the map spawning at wrong coordinates
- Fixed the Shared Burdens tooltip being outdated and mentioning additional unity from the Egalitarian faction
- Fixed Unity Ambitions referencing their pre-Unity rework state.
- Fixed Urbanist being both a Destiny trait and a Veteran trait (which prevented it from being available as a trait pick)
- Fleets of countries without ship_disengagement = yes (e.g. Horde) now correctly cannot use emergency retreat
- Former Satrapies of the Khan should no longer be informed twice when the new Horde forms.
- Hiring Renowned and Legendary Leaders no longer hires a mysterious clone of them instead
- If the Knights Keep is hit with a Pacifier Colossus there will now be unique event text
- It now costs 200 influence to abandon planets even if they have pre-sapients living there.
- Livestock slaves now inherit farmer and miner modifiers as appropriate.
- Making sure the negative situation outliner notifications only happens for negative situations
- Modifiers to empire-wide resource production now apply to resources generated through trade policies
- Removed reference to a loc key inside of an Under One Rule event.
- Renowned and Legendary Leaders no longer lose Council traits when hired by gestalt empires.
- Repairing The Black Crown should no longer fire generic gateway repaired events
- Replaced all sources of "is_leading_research = x" with "is_head_of_research" fixing numerous broken events and scopes
- Replaced one of the descriptions being reused for the Old Gods event chain
- Show turrets correctly on the Maven Cruiser and Caravaneer ships
- Sobek will no longer be confused and think that they came from your capital
- Species habitability for randomized empires is now correctly set for origins like shattered ring
- Stellar Culture Shock will now be applied to hive pre-FTLs if you are a hive empire.
- Terraforming a Barren World into a Machine or a Hive World will no longer fill that world with blockers
- Terraforming straight into a Hive or a Machine World now correctly removes "Terraforming Candidate"
- The astral rifts now correctly checks for Chosen One traits in addition to the Psionic trait
- The Azizians event can no longer target planets that are under colonization
- The chance to gain negative leader traits depending on leader age now takes into account leader lifespan
- The Ranger Lodge will now properly produce +2 and +3 additional unity as the higher tier of Environmentalist Galactic Community Resolutions are passed.
- The Speed Demon anomaly will no longer show up for Synthetic empires.
- Updated the hire_event_leader_effect scripted effect to take account of the the Eternal Throne relic
- Updated the tooltip for Universal Prosperity Mandate to mention the Employee Ownership living standard
- When the "Prohibit Separate Treaties" federation law is enable it should now correctly remove treaties from both parties and not only the outside one
- When transferring ships from one fleet to another, the fleet's leader will now always stay on the old fleet
- The Expel Corporation war goal now also removes Branch Offices belonging to the defender from your allies' planets
- A supremely unlucky pre-FTL nation should no longer be able to have multiple machine uprisings if they fight off the first one
- The Atomic Clock event will now properly trigger after 42 years and 3 days following the superior Stellaris Standard Calendar, which has 360 day years
- Authoritarianism should no longer become more popular because you have egalitarian councilors
- Become the Crisis AI empires will now always decline becoming vassals to awakened empires
- Fixed a rare case where the Shard would not turn hostile against the player
- Fixed a rare error that would occur if your scientist who finished a dig site died before you clicked the final dig site event
- Fixed the checks for the Debris Field anomaly making it rarer than it should be
- Fixed the Lush Planet Anomaly requiring Sol to have spawned, also updated the event rewards to work in a tileless Stellaris
- Hyperlanes should no longer get attached to sealed systems
- Imperial Fiefdom AI will no longer consider subjects to be viable overlords when they are looking for one
- The Fleet Maneuvers event can no longer happen in capital systems
- The Horizon Signal Event Chain will now correctly prioritize your head of research for narrative events
- The Manifesti event chain will now properly end if you apprehend them early enough
- The puddle technician drone job is now properly a drone job
- The Sentinel Order should no longer spawn in systems not connected to the rest of the galaxy, leaving everyone else to deal with the Prethoryn
- Upscaling the Messenger will now properly remove the negative modifiers from the ships
- Vultaumar III will now properly have both alloys and mineral deposits
- Irass III will now properly have both alloys and mineral deposits, while Irass VIII has gained its missing exotic gases
- AI UNE should no longer spawn if there is already an empire using the Sol initializer.
- Fixed a rare instance of a possible divide by 0 during rebellions
- Fixed orders for jump-drive-only ships being queued in the wrong order.
- Fixed Skrand Sharpbeak being unassigned from his ship after you hire him
- Fixed Skrand Sharpbeak having an excess of traits
- Fixed some issues with the triggers to encounter Skrand Sharpbeak - sorry he's been a bit shy recently
- Fixes to leader generation conditions for the leader pool if there are no valid species (such as if you nerve staple your entire population)
- If the Prikkiti will now build the most advanced starbase that they can instead of always trying to build a citadel even if they don't have the technology for it.
- If you shield the final world of the Contingency you should now receive your relic.
- Kaleidoscope event chain: pre-FTL countries won't be able to receive the Kaleidoscope anymore
- Newly released vassals now get a leader pool correctly
- Research stations will no longer try to go MIA when a revolt occurs.
- The Manifesti should no longer show up before you have encountered other alien empires.
- Improved speed of AI checking whether it should send subjugation offers
- Various performance improvements
- Fixed crash when completing an Astral Rift if the exploring ship no longer exists
- Possibly fixed rare crash in galaxy map special project icon tooltip.
- Several Out of Sync fixes.
- Fixing OOS issue with planets, wormholes etc sometimes being slightly differently positioned between windows and linux.
- Add assigned Leader's name and council title to archaeology view and rift view
- Additional Content tab text is centered correctly
- Clicking on a resource in the top bar now switches to that resource in the market view instead of closing it if it was already open
- Clicking on the "capped resource" notification will now take you to the correct tab depending on which resource is capped (correct market tab, relics view for minor artifacts, claims view for influence)
- Fix claim buttons being misaligned on partially or fully occupied systems
- Fix Outliner tab buttons appearing over the fleet manager sidebar on smaller resolutions
- Fixed incorrect speed value in ship designer
- Fixed Outliner tab buttons appearing in front of the archaeology window.
- Inactive leader trait triggered modifiers are shown in the tooltip along with their trigger conditions
- Remove double error message for starbase building tooltips
- Trade protection tooltip lists empire-wide modifiers
- Use up to 2 decimal places for displaying stability modifiers
- Use up to 2 decimal places for production/upkeep in building/district tooltips
- If an orbital station build order is selected, its fail text in planet tooltips no longer reveals hidden information.
- Tooltips for Galcom sanction resolutions now show the modifiers even if they're inactive.
- Tooltips for Galcom resolutions that have both triggered and non-triggered modifiers no longer show the "Modifiers" header twice.
- Added better script to evaluate planet and fleet for leaders, and added description of the AI algorithms for leader assignation in the leader_classes/00_base_classes.txt
- Awakened Empires can now upgrade their starbases.
- Changed leader assignation into a single loop for all location types, sorting locations by priority and leaders by skill, then trying to assign the highest priority leader to locations in order
- Fixed AI being able to improve and harm relations at the same time
- Fixed another case of the AI assigning Leaders to invalid (empty) fleets
- Fixed the AI trying to assign military leaders to science fleets.
- Improved AI weights for Ascension Paths
- The AI now hires leaders the same way it assigns them. Expect an increased number of generals.
- The AI will evaluate a leader for a location based on the `ai_location_weight` scripted value in the leader class
- The Fear of the Dark AI empires will be less predictable with what extreme paths they might take.
- The weight value for location priority when assigning leaders is now a define. When assigning leaders, there are 2 steps, first steps leader and locations are assigned a priority value, and then each leader calculates a final weight for each location. The leader/location pair with the highest weight is then assigned. This change affects the first step (the priority in the queue), as the second step is already fully scriptable.
- Improved AI decision-making for the "Find Military Applications" Artifact Action
- Improved AI logic when it comes to when to use the Strip Mining decision
- Reduced the AI willingness to accept trade deals for food or consumer goods if they don't use those resources
- AI Hive-Mind empires now have an increased chance to research terraforming technologies since they are unlikely to get more pop types from migration pacts.
- Improved AI leader assignment weights
- The AI now decides whether to strengthen or undermine the galactic empire based on two new game rules
- The AI will no longer build additional Quantum Catapults if they already have one within 25 jumps.
- Add `last_resolution_category_changed` trigger
- Added a check for the block_homeworld_traits leader flag in all traits that provide additional jobs to the leader's background planet. This flag is not currently used in the vanilla game
- Added checked for the following leader flags to leader trait weights and potentials: block_army_traits, block_council_traits, block_federation_traits, block_galcom_traits, block_governor_traits, block_pilot_traits these flags set the selection weight for leader traits in their category to 0 but are ignored if the leader has a subclass specializing in the category. These flags are currently unused in the vanilla game
- Added game rule 'can_ai_assign_governor' to let the AI decide if a planet can have a governor or not
- Added NON_PARAGON_TRAIT_OPTIONS_ON_LEVEL_UP define
- Added not_potential_override_text_key parameter to triggered modifier (currently used in leader trait tooltips and galcom resolutions)
- Added on_army_disbanded on_action
- Added show_if_not_potential parameter to triggered modifier (currently used in leader trait tooltips and galcom resolutions)
- Added text_offset variable to buttonType (only used for buttons that have both a sprite and text)
- Added the "is_urban_planet" scripted trigger for pc_relic and pc_city planets
- leader_class trigger can now appear in tooltips
- Renamed LEADER_RULER_MONARCH_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_RULER_EXPERIENCE and LEADER_RULER_HEIR_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_HEIR_EXPERIENCE
- Replaced "negative", "subclass_trait", "destiny_trait" and "veteran_class_locked_trait" leader trait variables with "leader_trait_type"
- Updated documentation for create_species effect
- Updated LEADER_GOVERNOR_MONTHLY_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_ASSIGNED_MONTHLY_EXPERIENCE
- Fixed "remove_deposit" effect not working in a deposit scope, fixing orbitals not removing their bonus to habitats when destroyed
- Replaced the loc string used to select a background for Paragon portraits with an asset selector.
- can_generate_military_leader_from_pop now includes the requirements of can_generate_leader_from_pop, which are now in the can_be_leader scripted trigger.
Q&A, Tonight!
Tonight from 15:30 to 17 CET the Stellaris dev team will be available to answer your questions on the Official Stellaris Discord server.
Next Week
As the 3.11 Eridanus release will be coming on Tuesday, Im planning on moving next weeks dev diary to coincide with the release. See you then!
[ 2024-02-22 12:00:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
Last week we went over some Community fixes that we are incorporating in the 3.11 Eridanus update. Today well be looking at some of the changes the Custodians have been up to. This is not an exhaustive list as while were rapidly approaching Code Freeze, it hasnt hit quite yet so bugs are still being worked on.
Bugs, Balance, and Polish
As Ive mentioned previously, for the Eridanus update we focused mostly on bugfixing and polish.
3.11 ERIDANUS CUSTODIAN UPDATE NOTES (EXCLUDING COMMUNITY FIXES)
Feature
- Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider added to galaxy generation. This slider adjusts technology costs based on tier and game difficulty.
- Added notification message when new pop settles in zeya (Gaia planet in azilash)
- Added the Seddom system.
- Allowed conversion between Sovereign Guardianship and Corporate Protectorate civics
- Dimensional Locks now forbid access to countries without communications
- Every participant in a war now gets a truce with the others after it ends, even if they were on the same side
- If you have a colony in a system when pre-FTLs become space faring you can apologize and annex them
- Progenitor Hive speed malus and bonuses now only affect military ships, removing the need of science ship escorts
- Technology and Tradition costs are now distinct sliders in galaxy setup
- The Anglers civic now swaps to Trawling Operations if you reform your government into a megacorp and vice versa
- The Eager Explorers civic now swaps to Privatized Exploration if you reform your government into a megacorp and vice versa
- The Eager Explorers, Privatized Exploration and Exploration Protocols civics can be removed and readded after researching Jump Drives. The Stargazers civic cannot be removed as it is linked to the species trait of the same name
- The Foreign Consciousness trait is now a destiny trait
- When the Khan awakens the event will now properly have a go to button
- All pop types will now be happy while living on a gaia world.
- Added a tier 2 Advanced Bio-Reactor technology and building. Advanced Bio-Reactors further reduce the food output of farmers in exchange for a small amount of exotic gas output
- Added Gateway Cost and Megastructure Build Speed modifiers to the Galactic Doorstep origin
- Ascension Theory is now a Tier 4 technology that requires at least 6 traditions trees to have been completed to be drawn
- Bio-Reactors are now a tier 1 rare technology instead of a tier 0 Technology. Bio-Reactors now reduce the food output of farmer jobs and give them a small amount of energy output
- Bio-Trophy buildings no longer provide Artisan Drone and Maintenance Drone jobs
- Decreased the amount of research produced by unemployed pops with Utopian Abundance
- Delegate GalCom focus traits now have a small chance to give favors
- Ecclesiastical Arcologies no longer provide Manager jobs for Corporate Death Cults
- Ecclesiastical Arcologies now provide Prosperity Preachers for MegaCorps instead of a split between Priests and Managers for regular Spiritualist MegaCorps
- Event options in the Knights' quest that improve their capital have been buffed to be better balanced compared to the options that improve knight jobs
- First League Offices now provide Prosperity Preacher jobs for Spiritualist MegaCorps
- Galactic Doorstep event chain now directly rewards the Gateway Activation technology and gives far more progress on the Gateway Construction technology
- Gospel of the Masses now provides +1 Trade Value to Prosperity Preachers (both inside their empire and those on planet on which they have branch offices)
- Increased technology costs, especially those of higher tier technologies
- Increased the cost of the Rock Potential special project to 1000 energy to account for Stellaris Inflation
- Increased the effects of Empire Size on Technology to match its effect on Traditions
- Knight output modifiers now only apply to resources, like other job output modifiers
- Knights now correctly inherit production modifiers from researchers and administrators
- Lost Colony Parents now spawn with more developed colonies to avoid overcrowding on their capital.
- Machine Intelligences with a biological secondary species now have a base food income of 10 food/month, and without a secondary species or with a Lithoid secondary species, they now have a base mineral income of 10 minerals/month.
- Moved habitat upkeep modifiers from the domination opener to the expansion opener. Available for all, not just void dwellers
- Curator leader trait now provides +10% Research Speed (was +15%) with an associated +10% Researcher Upkeep. The Survey Speed bonus remains unchanged
- Penal Colonies now provide 10 housing.
- Prosperity Preachers are now a specialist strata job
- Rebalanced leader traits gained from Ascension Paths (Psionic, Chosen One, Synthetic, Cyborg, Erudite)
- Reduced output of researcher jobs
- Reduced the amount of Naval Cap granted by technologies
- Refactored how the output scaling for Knights from Squires functions, these now behave as normal additive modifiers instead of multiplicative modifiers
- Removed most sources of Ship Cost and Upkeep reductions from the game
- Bulwark ship upkeep reductions reduced by 50%
- Corporate Crusader Spirit now reduces ship upkeep by 5% instead of 10%
- Crusader Spirit civic now improves ship build speed
- Fleet Supremacy edict no longer reduces ship upkeep
- Grand Fleet ambition now increases power projection instead of reducing ship upkeep
- Logistic Understanding, Armada Logistician, and Gunboat Diplomat traits now reduces ship upkeep while docked
- Mark of the Instrument ship component no longer reduces ship upkeep
- Master Shipwrights tradition in the Supremacy tree no longer reduces ship build costs
- Match tradition in the Enmity tree bonus to ship build costs reduced to 5% instead of 10%
- Military Buildup Agenda now improves ship build speed and reduces claim costs. (It still reduces War Exhaustion on completion.)
- Military Pioneer trait now reduces starbase upgrade costs instead of ship build costs
- Naval Procurement Officer councilor now improves ship build speed
- Progress Oriented modifier no longer reduces ship build costs
- Psionic Supremacy (Eater of Worlds) finisher no longer reduces ship build costs
- Reduced penalty the Irenic trait applies to ship build costs
- Sanctum of the Eater ship upkeep reduction reduced from 10% to 5%
- Shipwright trait no longer reduces ship build costs
- Vyctor's Improved Fleet Logistics trait now reduces ship build costs by 10% instead of 20%
- Rulers now gain 12 XP per month
- Squires now increase the resource output of Knights by 2.5% per Squire not 2% per Squire
- Temples now provide Prosperity Preachers for Spiritualist MegaCorps instead of a split between Priests and Managers
- The Entangled Dark Matter astral rift now completely overwrites the personality of the selected scientist if they are not psionic
- The Fortress Habitat Designation for Knights no longer provides +1 Defensive Army per Pop on the habitat, instead each Squire job provides +1 Defensive Army
- The Luminous Blades modifier from the Knight's Quest now removes the alloy upkeep of knights and gives +25% Army damage instead of an empire-wide +1.5% alloy production modifier per knight
- The Traumatized trait now negatively impacts Astral Rift Exploration Speed
- Tier 2 and Tier 3 Sacrificial Temples no longer provide Manager jobs for Corporate Death Cults
- Tweaked the tiers of technologies that increase naval cap and fleet command limit
- Warpling armies now have an upkeep of 1 energy and 0.1 astral threads per month
- Added missing class name and icon in the leader upkeep tooltip
- Added missing required components to the Marauder Galleon
- Added new localization and triggers for Machine Empires exploring the Rift World origin.
- Armies now disband instantly instead of waiting for next tick
- Cordyceptic Empires that only had Subspace Drives on their ships are now also capable of reanimating space fauna
- Corrected draw weight for Shipbreaker trait
- Corrected modifiers on Agrarian Upbringing
- Corrected some trait names
- Corrected the Scout Wing using the wrong 3d entities
- Correctly locked a number of Delegate GalCom focus traits to require the DLC that unlocks their resolution category
- Diplo action tooltip now shows why we can't claim any systems
- distar.1081 will no longer spawn pops on colonies in progress
- Driven Assimilators with the Protected Pre-Sapients policy will no longer purge pre-sapients
- Empires with the Mechromancy AP can no longer purge cyborg zombies
- Event windows now correctly have no effect after the player has been defeated
- Extra trait points for script-generated species are now added correctly
- Fix countries created by `create_country` script command not having any leaders in their recruitment pool
- Fix duplicate ship role buttons when switching ship templates in ship designer
- Fix not being able to exit the game or return to menu when certain other UI windows were open
- Fix some leaders (e.g. paragons) getting a trait pick when you hire them even though they should not, how greedy!
- Fixed a number of opposite trait pairs not taking into account their leveled versions
- Fixed a string being undefined in the ruler designer menu
- Fixed an Astral Rift calling the Baol for Boal or was it the other way around?
- Fixed an error that prevented some Fallen Empire task events from firing
- Fixed cyborg zombies having a 100% chance of spawning instead of 33%
- Fixed default weights for pre-sapient policies
- Fixed Discoveries tab not being displayed when tabs order has been customized
- Fixed gestalt scientists getting research expertise traits when those traits had no effect for them
- Fixed heirs being able to have the Planar Theorist trait despite not being capable of exploring astral rifts
- Fixed incorrect weapon effect being used for the World Cracker
- Fixed invalid scope allowing pre-sapient pops to be turned into cyborg zombies
- Fixed issues with leaders assigned to armies or fleet that contain armies
- Fixed leaders sometimes getting invalid trait choices on level up
- Fixed missing 0 on Collaborator II
- Fixed missing message title for Restoring the Balance
- Fixed newest achievements not working on MS Store
- Fixed Orbital Bombardment planet modifier not having a tooltip if there are no other planet modifiers there
- Fixed possibility of leader trait picks including opposites of existing traits
- Fixed Revolutionary Medi-Gel not affecting Pharma State civic production for Medical Workers
- Fixed systems at the bottom of the map spawning at wrong coordinates
- Fixed the Shared Burdens tooltip being outdated and mentioning additional unity from the Egalitarian faction
- Fixed Unity Ambitions referencing their pre-Unity rework state.
- Fixed Urbanist being both a Destiny trait and a Veteran trait (which prevented it from being available as a trait pick)
- Fleets of countries without ship_disengagement = yes (e.g. Horde) now correctly cannot use emergency retreat
- Former Satrapies of the Khan should no longer be informed twice when the new Horde forms.
- Hiring Renowned and Legendary Leaders no longer hires a mysterious clone of them instead
- If the Knights Keep is hit with a Pacifier Colossus there will now be unique event text
- It now costs 200 influence to abandon planets even if they have pre-sapients living there.
- Livestock slaves now inherit farmer and miner modifiers as appropriate.
- Making sure the negative situation outliner notifications only happens for negative situations
- Modifiers to empire-wide resource production now apply to resources generated through trade policies
- Removed reference to a loc key inside of an Under One Rule event.
- Renowned and Legendary Leaders no longer lose Council traits when hired by gestalt empires.
- Repairing The Black Crown should no longer fire generic gateway repaired events
- Replaced all sources of "is_leading_research = x" with "is_head_of_research" fixing numerous broken events and scopes
- Replaced one of the descriptions being reused for the Old Gods event chain
- Show turrets correctly on the Maven Cruiser and Caravaneer ships
- Sobek will no longer be confused and think that they came from your capital
- Species habitability for randomized empires is now correctly set for origins like shattered ring
- Stellar Culture Shock will now be applied to hive pre-FTLs if you are a hive empire.
- Terraforming a Barren World into a Machine or a Hive World will no longer fill that world with blockers
- Terraforming straight into a Hive or a Machine World now correctly removes "Terraforming Candidate"
- The astral rifts now correctly checks for Chosen One traits in addition to the Psionic trait
- The Azizians event can no longer target planets that are under colonization
- The chance to gain negative leader traits depending on leader age now takes into account leader lifespan
- The Ranger Lodge will now properly produce +2 and +3 additional unity as the higher tier of Environmentalist Galactic Community Resolutions are passed.
- The Speed Demon anomaly will no longer show up for Synthetic empires.
- Updated the hire_event_leader_effect scripted effect to take account of the the Eternal Throne relic
- Updated the tooltip for Universal Prosperity Mandate to mention the Employee Ownership living standard
- When the "Prohibit Separate Treaties" federation law is enable it should now correctly remove treaties from both parties and not only the outside one
- When transferring ships from one fleet to another, the fleet's leader will now always stay on the old fleet
- Improved speed of AI checking whether it should send subjugation offers
- Fixed crash when completing an Astral Rift if the exploring ship no longer exists
- Possibly fixed rare crash in galaxy map special project icon tooltip.
- Several Out of Sync fixes.
- Add assigned Leader's name and council title to archaeology view and rift view
- Additional Content tab text is centered correctly
- Clicking on a resource in the top bar now switches to that resource in the market view instead of closing it if it was already open
- Clicking on the "capped resource" notification will now take you to the correct tab depending on which resource is capped (correct market tab, relics view for minor artifacts, claims view for influence)
- Fix claim buttons being misaligned on partially or fully occupied systems
- Fix Outliner tab buttons appearing over the fleet manager sidebar on smaller resolutions
- Fixed incorrect speed value in ship designer
- Fixed Outliner tab buttons appearing in front of the archaeology window.
- Inactive leader trait triggered modifiers are shown in the tooltip along with their trigger conditions
- Remove double error message for starbase building tooltips
- Trade protection tooltip lists empire-wide modifiers
- Use up to 2 decimal places for displaying stability modifiers
- Use up to 2 decimal places for production/upkeep in building/district tooltips
- Added better script to evaluate planet and fleet for leaders, and added description of the AI algorithms for leader assignation in the leader_classes/00_base_classes.txt
- Awakened Empires can now upgrade their starbases.
- Changed leader assignation into a single loop for all location types, sorting locations by priority and leaders by skill, then trying to assign the highest priority leader to locations in order
- Fixed AI being able to improve and harm relations at the same time
- Fixed another case of the AI assigning Leaders to invalid (empty) fleets
- Fixed the AI trying to assign military leaders to science fleets.
- Improved AI weights for Ascension Paths
- The AI now hires leaders the same way it assigns them. Expect an increased number of generals.
- The AI will evaluate a leader for a location based on the `ai_location_weight` scripted value in the leader class
- The Fear of the Dark AI empires will be less predictable with what extreme paths they might take.
- The weight value for location priority when assigning leaders is now a define. When assigning leaders, there are 2 steps, first steps leader and locations are assigned a priority value, and then each leader calculates a final weight for each location. The leader/location pair with the highest weight is then assigned. This change affects the first step (the priority in the queue), as the second step is already fully scriptable.
- Add `last_resolution_category_changed` trigger
- Added a check for the block_homeworld_traits leader flag in all traits that provide additional jobs to the leader's background planet. This flag is not currently used in the vanilla game
- Added checked for the following leader flags to leader trait weights and potentials: block_army_traits, block_council_traits, block_federation_traits, block_galcom_traits, block_governor_traits, block_pilot_traits these flags set the selection weight for leader traits in their category to 0 but are ignored if the leader has a subclass specializing in the category. These flags are currently unused in the vanilla game
- Added game rule 'can_ai_assign_governor' to let the AI decide if a planet can have a governor or not
- Added NON_PARAGON_TRAIT_OPTIONS_ON_LEVEL_UP define
- Added not_potential_override_text_key parameter to triggered modifier (currently only used in leader trait tooltips)
- Added on_army_disbanded on_action
- Added show_if_not_potential parameter to triggered modifier (currently only used in leader trait tooltips)
- Added text_offset variable to buttonType (only used for buttons that have both a sprite and text)
- Added the "is_urban_planet" scripted trigger for pc_relic and pc_city planets
- leader_class trigger can now appear in tooltips
- Renamed LEADER_RULER_MONARCH_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_RULER_EXPERIENCE and LEADER_RULER_HEIR_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_HEIR_EXPERIENCE
- Replaced "negative", "subclass_trait", "destiny_trait" and "veteran_class_locked_trait" leader trait variables with "leader_trait_type"
- Updated documentation for create_species effect
- Updated LEADER_GOVERNOR_MONTHLY_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_ASSIGNED_MONTHLY_EXPERIENCE
Last Year in Review
We've assembled some fun statistics from all the Stellaris playthroughs you did in 2023. If you're interested, take a look: [previewyoutube=zMGWjVJbEjc;full][/previewyoutube]
Next Week
Next week we should have the full Eridanus release notes prepared for you. Barring unforeseen circumstances the 3.11 release is currently planned for release on Tuesday, February 27th. See you next week!
[ 2024-02-15 12:00:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi all!
When we first announced the 3.11 Eridanus update, we mentioned that for the patch the Custodian team would be largely focused on fixing bugs rather than new features. As part of this initiative, PDS_Iggy reached out to some community modders and incorporated some of their fixes into the base game. I wanted to spend today highlighting their contributions.
Community Fixes
Some changes from these mods are being partially incorporated into the base game in the 3.11 Eridanus update: Ariphaos Unofficial Patch Developed by Ariphaos with assistance from Fireprince, and incorporates multiple other mods:
- Risa's Unofficial Patch by Risa
- Bug Fixes by alexrider903
- Bugfixes by ECHO
- Community Flash Patch by Roverstorm
- Modifiers fix by jasonpepe
- Unofficial Bug Patch by SirBlackAxe
- Glavius AI by Glavius
- StarNet by Savlor with assistance from OldEnt
Incorporated Community Fixes
Improvement
- Gangsters should no longer assassinate Chosen Ones or Legendary leaders
- If a Zombie or Nerve Stapled pop manages to lie on their resume and become a specialist or ruler they should be demoted much faster
- Xenophobic leaders are now half as likely to accept brainslugs while Xenophilic ones are twice as likely to accept them
- Improved spawning logic for anomalies that clear deposits to not spawn on planets with strategic resources
- Empires that value other species, such as Rogue Servitors, will now get extra annoyed if you engage in genocide or necrophaging
- Gestalt empires can now sell their minor artifacts provided that they have access to the galactic market
- Marauder ships should now have a decently larger amount of armor for most shipsizes
- Refugees should now also be willing to flee to Rogue Servitors if they are welcomed as Bio-trophies
- The Expel Corporation war goal now also removes Branch Offices belonging to the defender from your allies' planets
- A supremely unlucky pre-FTL nation should no longer be able to have multiple machine uprisings if they fight off the first one
- The Atomic Clock event will now properly trigger after 42 years and 3 days following the superior Stellaris Standard Calendar, which has 360 day years
- Authoritarianism should no longer become more popular because you have egalitarian councilors
- Become the Crisis AI empires will now always decline becoming vassals to awakened empires
- Fixed a rare case where the Shard would not turn hostile against the player
- Fixed a rare error that would occur if your scientist who finished a dig site died before you clicked the final dig site event
- Fixed the checks for the Debris Field anomaly making it rarer than it should be
- Fixed the Lush Planet Anomaly requiring Sol to have spawned, also updated the event rewards to work in a tileless Stellaris
- Hyperlanes should no longer get attached to sealed systems
- Imperial Fiefdom AI will no longer consider subjects to be viable overlords when they are looking for one
- The Fleet Maneuvers event can no longer happen in capital systems
- The Horizon Signal Event Chain will now correctly prioritize your head of research for narrative events
- The Manifesti event chain will now properly end if you apprehend them early enough
- The puddle technician drone job is now properly a drone job
- The Sentinel Order should no longer spawn in systems not connected to the rest of the galaxy, leaving everyone else to deal with the Prethoryn
- Upscaling the Messenger will now properly remove the negative modifiers from the ships
- Vultaumar III will now properly have both alloys and mineral deposits
- Irass III will now properly have both alloys and mineral deposits, while Irass VIII has gained its missing exotic gases
- Improved AI decision-making for the "Find Military Applications" Artifact Action
- Improved AI logic when it comes to when to use the Strip Mining decision
- Reduced the AI willingness to accept trade deals for food or consumer goods if they don't use those resources
- AI Hive-Mind empires now have an increased chance to research terraforming technologies since they are unlikely to get more pop types from migration pacts.
Next Week
The Custodian team has been burning down the bug queue at a nice rate, so next week well go over some of the fixes they're adding in 3.11.
[ 2024-02-08 12:00:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
Its been two weeks, so lets get straight into the good stuff.
Summary of Results
Much like the first Technology Open Beta, very experienced players formed the bulk of respondents. This time it was closer to 72% of responses coming from players with over 1,000 hours in game. (Only 1.4% said they had less than 300 hours in Stellaris, so the survey skewed very much towards our most passionate players.) Thank you all for your feedback and help. This time, a majority of players rated technology progress as just right, with the remainder almost perfectly evenly split between it being too fast or too slow, with a majority consensus that the changes were beneficial overall. Many players missed the breakthrough technologies and the general opinion tended to lean towards us pulling back a little too far. Many players commented that they liked how technology tiers 3 and higher felt more impactful, but lamented that with the removal of breakthroughs, tier 2 sort of melded into tier 1 technologies. There was also quite a spirited discussion on the Stellaris forums regarding the pros and cons of galaxy generation sliders and their effects on new players. Our general philosophy is that it is better to permit more customization of your play experience than less, but that the default settings should be a positive play experience for inexperienced players. New players tend not to adjust the sliders much, while veterans tend to have more understanding of the exact effects of the various settings and can customize their game to satisfy their needs - but the default settings, except for difficulty, should be sufficient for an enjoyable game. We do agree that the galaxy settings screen has grown a significant amount over the years and could benefit from some reworking, and will be placing that task on the Custodian to-do list for sometime in the future.
Next Steps
Overall, I consider the Technology Open Betas a significant success. We gathered a lot of useful information and feedback, and it gave us the chance to experiment with some systems that may or may not have panned out. We will be going forward with including the changes from the second Technology Open Beta in the 3.11 Eridanus update. Breakthrough Technologies will not be coming at this time, but we may experiment with technology spread and similar effects sometime in the future. One new change well be making based on some of the data weve collected is that were moving Ascension Theory to Tier 4 from Tier 5, but it will only be available to empires that have completed at least six tradition trees. As Unity and Research are intended to be opposing resources to a degree, we did not want the capstone of Ascension based gameplay to be so strongly tied to the later game tech tree. Now lets hear about one of the other changes coming in the update.
Resort Worlds
Hello, Stellaris community. I'm Gatekeeper, a long-time modder who's ascended into being part of the Stellaris Content team. And if you know anything about what I've done in the past, I like planets. One thing I've done recently is to imagine a galaxy where Resort Worlds aren't just post-apocalyptic fortress worlds. Instead, these are vibrant, dedicated havens of rest, starkly contrasting the often harsh realities of interstellar life.
The Resort Worlds technology which permits the Create Resort World planetary decision is no longer rare, and we've lowered it to tier 2. We've updated the decisions restrictions; it no longer has a minimum planet size but can be used on planets that have upgraded capital buildings. As funny as it was (and we did it all the time), you can no longer declare a tomb or relic world a vacation paradise. A pass has also been done on what buildings are allowed on Resort Worlds.
Instead of providing perfect habitability, Clerks, and Entertainers, Resort Worlds now provide Resort Districts that give Housing, Building Slots, and Resort Worker jobs that provide Trade, and increase Amenities and Trade Value from Living Standards across all planets of your empire. This replaces the empire-wide Amenities reduction of the old version.
On behalf of the United Caphevan Commonwealth, we would like to wish you a pleasant stay on Evaggimar II.
Next Week
Next week well be looking at some of the fixes and changes going into the 3.11 Eridanus update. See you then!
[ 2024-02-01 12:00:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
I hope that you all had a pleasant holiday season, and want to start off by thanking everyone that submitted feedback regarding the Technology Open Beta. That data we gained from these experiments was invaluable, so lets get right into it.
Summary of Results
As expected, the players that responded to the survey were overwhelmingly passionate players that have a ton of experience with the game. Nearly 70% of responses come from players that have over 1,000 hours played in the game. This is somewhat natural for an opt-in beta over the holidays with an intimidating feedback form, so I wanted to thank you all again for filling it out. There was a strong consensus around the military changes (ship cost and upkeep), so well likely be keeping those mostly as-is. The technology changes were naturally more controversial. Roughly 80% of responses believed that technology (especially at higher tiers) was overall too slow in the beta, but a majority still thought that the changes were beneficial to the game overall. Several of you pointed out that so many simultaneous changes compounded too strongly, and we agree. I was happy to see that your feedback matches our expectations - we expected that the Open Beta was tuned too harshly and that we would want to pull back from it before release. The Open Beta also revealed several technical issues, including some major performance implications from how Breakthrough Technologies interacted with diplomacy.
Next Steps
Overall, I view the Technology Open Beta as a great success, and as such am taking the opportunity to update it and let it run for another few weeks, after which we will decide whether or not we want to continue experimentation, integrate it into 3.11 (or 3.12), or discard the initiative. We concur that the original Open Beta went too hard on technology. We liked some of the things we were seeing, such as tier 3 and 4 technologies becoming more valuable for an extended part of the game, but felt that it delayed other critical parts too long. Breakthrough Technologies were interesting as a slowdown mechanic, but if kept would likely need some sort of temporary (non-technology or unity related) bonuses as some form of reward for the frontrunners. The excessively high costs for late tier techs pushed some critical technologies such as Ascension Theory or Mega-Engineering too late in the game, and certain undesirable behaviors (like ignoring research entirely) were too effective. The updated Technology Open Beta should be up on stellaris_test now, with the following changes:
TECHNOLOGY OPEN BETA UPDATES
Feature
- Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider added to galaxy generation. This slider adjusts technology costs based on tier and game difficulty.
- Removed Breakthrough Technologies.
- Reverted base technology costs to their 3.10.4 values - the increased cost between tiers is now handled by the Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider.
- Removed the majority of Researcher Upkeep Modifiers introduced into the Open Beta.
- Reverted changes to Knights research output from the Open Beta.
- Tweaked the tiers of technologies that increase naval cap and fleet command limit.
- Reduced the amount of Naval Cap granted by technologies.
- Significant changes to Bio-Reactors:
- Bio-Reactors are now a tier 1 rare technology instead of a tier 0 technology
- Bio-Reactors now reduce the food output of farmer jobs and give them a small amount of energy output.
- Added a tier 2 Advanced Bio-Reactor technology and building.
- Advanced Bio-Reactors further reduce the food output of farmers in exchange for a small amount of exotic gas output.
- Decreased the amount of research produced by unemployed pops with Utopian Abundance.
- Event options in the Knights' quest that improve their capital have been buffed to be better balanced compared to the options that improve knight jobs.
Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs
One of the frequent points of feedback was that there was concern that newer players would be hit especially hard by the technology cost changes. We also recognize that different players have different desires for the pacing of the game, so weve added another slider to galaxy generation. The Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs slider adjusts the base cost of technologies based on the difficulty of the game. Higher tiers of technology are affected to a greater degree than lower ones, so this slider essentially affects tier width. While this does overlap with the Technology Costs slider to a degree, it does so in a different way, so we consider each to have valid reasons to exist as separate sliders.
Disabling Difficulty Adjusted Technology Costs will cause them to follow the 3.10.4 / Civilian difficulty curve. As with many other galaxy generation sliders, the Stellaris team will be balancing the game around the Normal setting.
SHOW ME MATH AND GRAPHS!
Tech Curves of basic technologies on Normal scaling, at different difficulty levels. The base cost of technologies is now based on 3.10.4s formula, y=1000*2^x, multiplied by the difficulty modifier of 1 + (q*x*d), where x=technology tier, q=difficulty adjusted tech cost galaxy setting (0 - 0.10, default 0.05), and d=difficulty (Civilian = 0, Grand Admiral = 6).
TierXCost1 technologies at different difficulties, on Normal scaling (q=0.05). For the players that enjoyed the larger amount of distance between tech tiers, scaling can go up to a maximum of Extreme, which gives Grand Admiral a curve that is similar to, but not exactly, the Open Beta numbers. Note that technology acquisition will still be faster than the old Open Beta as weve removed Breakthrough Technologies.
Tech Curves of basic technologies on Extreme scaling, at different difficulty levels.
TierXCost1 technologies at different difficulties, on Extreme scaling (q=0.10).
Previous Open Beta values for reference. We have a new feedback form for this version of the Open Beta, available here. As with the previous version, you can respond multiple times if you have different thoughts after different playthroughs. Please let us know what you think, and whether you think weve gone back too far in the other direction. Currently we're planning on collecting feedback from this phase of the Technology Open Beta for two weeks, until the 1st of February, but will leave the branches available until the 3.11 "Eridanus" update releases later on in the quarter. See you all next week! Please note that the Technology Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test - Technology Open Beta" branch. Please disable mods for the Technology Open Beta, they are likely to break. In-progress games should continue on the stellaris_test_old branch.
Leave your feedback!
----- [MrFreake enters to highjack the post] Hello everyone! Here I am again, not reading the room. Eladrin is talking about turning off your mods, and I'm here telling you to download more mods: buuuut.... #MODJAM2024 is Available Now! [previewyoutube=41BT0PYA7OE;full][/previewyoutube] Want a sneak peek at the Legendary Leaders included in #MODJAM2024? Check out the feature video: [previewyoutube=W67ElHkkT4s;full][/previewyoutube] Voting for favorite mod will run until February 11th, so there's still plenty of time to play and vote for your favorite submission here!
[ 2024-01-18 12:00:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! We're proud to announce that #MODJAM2024 is available now! Get it here! [previewyoutube=41BT0PYA7OE;full][/previewyoutube] Now's the time where the Community gets to step in, and vote for your favorite submission. Vote for your favorite #MODJAM2024 Legendary Leaders here! What are the prizes, you ask? This year weve paired up again with Republic of Gamers to deliver some great prizes to our winning Modders: 1st Place: ROG Strix G17 (2023) G713 Laptop* 2nd Place: ROG Delta S Wireless Headset* 3rd Place: ROG Spatha X Wireless Mouse* 4th - 10th Place: Stellaris branded Wallet and Keychain * Exact specifications may vary depending on winning modders region Thanks to everyone for playing and voting in #MODJAM2024!
[ 2024-01-11 16:55:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
by MrFreake Hello Stellaris Community! I have to start off by saying how proud I am of all the participants this year. This year saw the most signups for Mod Jam we've ever had, the most design documents submitted, and (I think) the most final submissions. The modders have really put their all into these contributions, and I think they've turned out fantastic. I can't wait to see what you all think! The Mod Jam mod will release today around 5 PM CET! You can subscribe to the workshop mod now, and get this new content as soon as it becomes available! Today we're going to be talking about the final 11 submissions that haven't been seen, so without further ado:
Vizierch Raffar by BrettlesSr
Inspiration: I had a couple of inspirations for Raffar - one was the classic trope of the scheming vizier, so I wanted to make a leader you knew you shouldnt trust but who was rewarding enough to risk playing with fire. Then Ive added lots of ideas loosely inspired from WH40ks Necrons and Dr Whos Cybermen into the mix for good measure.
Zob, Collector of Minds by Starchitect
Inspiration: I loved collecting and tending to my leaders long before Paragons made them cool, they can be the backbone of the kind of RP focused gameplay I enjoy most. Zob takes that leader gardening instinct to the next level, as Zob only gains power as you add your own leaders and your own story to Zobs. Trait stacking can also be a fun exercise for the min-maxer in me, and Zob facilitates that in what is hopefully, a limited and manageable way.
Daniel Reinhard by Jin2188
Inspiration: Ive had the idea of this character in my head for some time, as the primary antagonist of an IP I never got onto paper. I decided to introduce the idea of Reinhards character to a wider community to see their opinions and acquire feedback. Im aware of the power fantasy of wanting to play the bad guys, and figured that this was a good way to feed into that. Religion is also an idea I wanted to explore heavily with my as-of-yet nonexistent IP, diving into some of the benefits and drawbacks with the worship of deities and spirituality in general. Reinhard represents the bad parts of religion/spirituality; the authoritarianism, the corruption of values, the blind obedience to dogma, while his counterpart, Michael Faulkner (who is mentioned in-game, and who you may encounter in a playthrough with Reinhard) represents the good aspects; the community, the moral values, and the idea of the larger collective working together for the common good. I was heavily inspired by real-world evils associated with religion, with Reinhard himself being inspired by what I believe most cult leaders to be like; con-men who dont actually believe anything theyre saying, but they say it anyway in order to gain power. Power is a central concept to Reinhards character, hes a nihilist who believes that nothing matters except securing ones own personal welfare, even at the expense of others. This mod is more of a proof of concept, since I wanted to make an expanded version where you could recruit Michael Faulkner as a leader as well, but I was only allowed to create a single recruitable leader for this ModJam, so I settled on this. I do intend to release this expanded version in the future, however.
Ursa Major by Honeytheyellowbear
The Spymaster Ralph Fasmid by bbt104
Inspiration: Our inspiration for Ralph Fasmid came from movies and shows such as Casablanca, SpyKids, Chuck, The Kingsman, and Bourne. Casablanca was our main inspiration for his design, Chuck was the inspiration for him to be exclusive to Megacorps. Bourne inspired a small event that only happens if you dismiss him.
Mictla, Whispering Aggregation by pat173
Inspiration: My inspiration for Mictla's concept originated from reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time trilogy, where I aimed to craft an entity that exuded a really alien and almost horror-like essence. In terms of gameplay I wanted a leader focused mainly on one or two aspects of the game. Mictla's bonuses are heavily on what you'd expect from the society group of technologies. I also wanted them to feel to stand out, so I implemented a unique way for them to level up as they don't gain experience over time. Lastly I wanted to design Mictla so that it could have an impact on the player's experience. So that if the player chose to, there would be drastic changes in your empire based on your decisions and approach with Mictla's events. We're going on an adventure!
Nar by Lithrandil2
Spirit of the Junction, by Blue Commander
The Synthmind Sage by Nepnep5150
Venerable Bubbles by Regunes
Inspiration: To be honest I prefer Cyto
Naodeus by Dredaich
Inspiration: In my pen & paper campaign (Pathfinder 1e) Naodeus is a benevolent magical being from beyond the outer realms trapped in the campaign world. Talil is a city founded by his adopted children. Right after I learned of the Paragon update I wanted to make this leader. This ModJAM was an excuse to do so. #### And that's it for the Legendary Leaders included in this year's Mod Jam, 26 in total! What do you think? Which one are you most excited to play? Just a reminder #MODJAM2024 will release at 5 PM CET today! (January 11th, 2024)
[ 2024-01-11 12:00:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! Were back with another update on our annual Modder event: #MODJAM2024! Today is feature freeze for the Mod Jam. Essentially, Modders will have until 5 PM CET today to submit a feature-complete version of their submission. Its important to note at this stage, that not everything will work correctly. Modders still have another week to bugfix and polish their submissions. Would you like to help our modders test their submissions? Join us on Discord! Join the Discord, get the PC role, and then look for the #help-test-the-mod-jam channel. Later today or early tomorrow, we will be posting a link in that section of our Discord so the Community can play this content early, and each leader has a forum channel where you can report bugs directly to the modders. Today, we have another eight Legendary Leaders to highlight! These leaders range from a damaged and dormant AI Weapons Platform, to an Interdimensional Phantasm that transcends space and time.
The Forgotten One by AlexMeowler
Inspiration: The main idea of this mod is to enhance the Player Crisis gameplay, and encourage players to select the Become the Crisis ascension perk (or at least make them consider the option). To implement that idea I set two goals:
- The first goal is to make the game more dynamic (like, what if you try to play defensively and speedrun the Aetherophasic Engine?) but also with some extra additions to make it more interactive and not forcing the player to get crisis stage 5, for unlocking full mod potential, just get new tech and components and keep playing the standard game any way they want.
- The second goal was to give the player more means to really oppose the whole galaxy, all those mighty alliances and vassalages, As A True Crisis Should.
Inanis of the Void by DaGinger
Inspiration: Ive always found the concept of time dilation incredibly interesting. After bouncing around a few ideas for the modjam, this concept stuck out to me. How could it be used by an empire for their benefit? If it affects a whole planet, what would benefit? Stuff like production and growth speed? but also what downsides would it have? Increased upkeep for jobs and buildings? Would people be happy ageing at a faster speed than everywhere else? I kept asking myself these questions until eventually, I had a word document full of answers ready to be used. I also tied the story into a rare bit of lore from Stellaris that I adore which is partially related to the concept, Im sure most will understand the link if they have seen it before. Being interested in the science behind these things made it really easy to keep my motivation and interest in the mod high which certainly helped create this mod.
Professor of ZIR by Tanner
Inspiration: The main bit of inspiration for The Professor was the Stellaris tutorial AI, VIR. A few days into programming, I thought, What if VIR was an awful college professor? The idea of turning the Stellaris tutorial into an overly strict college professor, who viewed themselves as the arbiter of all knowledge was something I adored too much. As for the portrait, I chose Necroids 9 simply because its one of my favorite portraits. My friends and I have an inside joke where we obsess about the amount of eyes the portrait has. We came to a consensus that 4 eyes is not enough, so this time the portrait has 6.
Warpeo - The Dimensional Phantasm by RegiZero
The Jailer by Evereal
Inspiration: The idea that resonated most with me was the concept behind the champion Ryze from League of Legends, a lonely but powerful mage who has lived for millennia and charges himself with keeping ancient and powerful magical runes from falling into the wrong hands. I thought it would be cool to make a similarly enigmatic, but grounded, leader that also charges himself with withholding some incredibly dangerous object/entity from the galaxy. I iterated on many ideas and landed on The Jailer. This concept inspired me. Firstly, he is a character whose fundamental theme, seeking redemption, is relatable, grounded, and has a major opportunity for character growth. Secondly, there is instantly a major story hook worth exploring, what does he imprison, and why is it so dangerous? Finally, it allowed me to explore game mechanics and narratives that are IMO overlooked in Stellaris; crime, corruption and penal colonies.
Weapons Platform Asset ID-02 by bpainecraft
Inspiration: My thought process when creating the features of the mod was primarily practical. With the requirement to make something balanced and a lack of knowledge about the legendary leaders, I decided to view the Stellaris Wiki and create features similar to the existing leaders. As for the story that I created to accompany my leader, it was more a spur of the moment thing than a planned chain of events, each project and event being written based on the one before.
Ascendant Neochadamus by mem_malthus
Inspiration: Despite having been a big fan of Star Trek in the past, it happened more by coincidence/subconsciously that my leaders personality and background have big similarities with Q, and I wasnt even aware of it until someone pointed it out to me. It is never a bad thing, though, to have someone around, who can fill the entire room with his ego alone. It just gives so many more options for crazy stories you could never have with a normal character.
Convergence by The Wandering Modder
Inspiration: Inspired by the Illithids in DnD, Convergence is a psionic mastermind driven mad by the multiverse. He will sacrifice anything to complete his master plan, foiled millennia ago by the entities in the Shroud.
Heist on Dawns End by TheRingBearer
Inspiration: While the idea of trying to steal from under the very noses (if they have one) of a Fallen Empire was the core idea from the beginning. I originally wasnt sure of the leaders origin. Was he a god-king with the power of foresight trapped on a pre-ftl world, looking to recover that which was stolen from him? Or was he a charismatic criminal, looking to launch a heist that would make him the greatest thief the galaxy has ever known? After some early discussion and feedback, I ended up merging the two ideas a bit and focused a bit more on the idea of a Leader who has their own agenda which is at odds with your own, as that felt like a much more interesting take on a Legendary Leader. #### That's it for this week folks! Next week we'll be back with the release version of #MODJAM2024! And if you're interested in helping test the Modder's submissions, join us on Discord!
[ 2024-01-04 12:00:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community!
#MODJAM2024 is well under way. This year we had over 100 modders sign up, and over 60 design documents submitted. While we aren't expecting to have 60 Legendary Leaders submitted at the end of the competition (wouldn't that be awesome though?). Today, we're going to give you the first sneak peek at the Legendary Leaders our modders are currently working on, as well as give you a peek at how the final mod package will work.
The #MODJAM2024 is still currently on-pace for a January 11th, 2024 release. You can subscribe to the Mod Jam mod and get this content as soon as it releases!
Last year, we tried something a little different, in which the mid-game crises were posted by the modders themselves. For something like a mid-game crisis, this approach makes sense. Mid game crises can be iterated on for a long time, and (hopefully) these mods will continue to be supported into the distant future. However, for this year, we have decided to go for an all-in-one package, to make it easier for players to install and run the Mod Jam mod -- since last year's approach with a workshop playlist and wrapper mod was a little convoluted.
The Mod Jam Package
When starting a game with the Mod Jam mod enabled, when the game starts you will get a popup to choose which Legendary Leaders will be allowed to spawn.
We've also hooked up the vanilla Legendary Leaders to this system for the Mod Jam mod.
Clicking each leader will allow you to turn them off -- if its a leader you didn't like, or you want to guarantee which leader you play with, so you get to experience all the content. Each leader will also have a tooltip that describes in a loose sense what the leader does, so you will not be going into this completely blind.
Leaders are currently spawned one of three ways:
Random Spawns - this behavior is the most like the vanilla spawning of Legendary Leaders. The game will choose 3 to 6 Legendary Leaders to spawn randomly throughout the galaxy, from the list of Legendary Leaders that are allowed
Random Leader for Players - This option will spawn a random Legendary Leader from the list of allowed leaders within four jumps of each Player's homeworld. We could've allowed leaders to spawn for AIs as well, but that opens the opportunity to break things in interesting ways, and with the time constraints put on our modders, I didn't think it was a good idea to add an additional requirement.
Players Choose - This will spawn a choice for each player in the game of what Legendary Leader they want to spawn within four jumps of their home system. This is the option you should probably use if you want to play each and every one before you vote.
Azaryn is not in the list of choices, since Azaryn was disabled in the startup menu.
And that's the limit of the modding that I've done for this event. But you're not really here to see the stuff I made, you're here to see what the Modders have made. Like last year, we have prepared some (and are still working on) promotional assets for each one of the submissions. I know I've said this about a dozen times already, but thanks again to the Gigastructural Engineering team for letting us use their Stellar Systemcraft for the Mod Jam promotional art.
I've also invited the modders to each write about the inspiration for their mod (if they like). This explains why there are some that contain inspirations, and some that do not.
The Chronomancer by Rodahtnov and Zyralynn
Inspiration:
The leader idea is based around the fantasy of genies, fantastical creatures that provide wishes to the person they are bound to, but with some limitations, drawbacks and potential twisted results; In this case we are tied that concept to a specific sci-fi trope, which is the manipulation of time and, in some degrees, reality; the Chronolord is bound to a specific place and a specific relic, which resembles the genie lamp and as such becomes a desirable target for other empires, whether it is for envy, fighting its positive economic effects or just gaining another relic for their use.
Mircorv Core by Metallichydra
Access to some Legendary Leaders will be restricted to owners of other DLCs, such as the Mircorv Core, which will require Astral Planes in order to explore the Rift.
The Fragment by Ezraneilson.micahn
Inspiration: The Two largest Inspirations were the AEON 14 universe (Multinodal AI) and Mass Effect: Andromeda (Extragalactic Origin).
The Celestial Wayfarer by madeincanada
Perplexing Shadow by shadow_101084
Aevum T. Dohrnii by tr33
Inspiration: I spent too much time on stellaris. With this leader, you also can spend your time. Literally. Jokes aside if I had to name an inspiration it would probably be all the Dagoth Ur Memes. Aevums way of talking is heavily influenced by Dagoths cryptic speeches. The Chronomancer idea came along somewhere in the process.
The Timeless Warrior by MadamLava
Inspiration:
Ive always been a sucker for a good time loop story, and finished a game (In Stars and Time) containing the best Id ever seen by a wide margin the day before the modjam theme was announced and work began. While Im drawing more broadly from time loop tropes in general, the concept was very much on my mind.
Some commonalities from some of these stories/media I enjoyed and seek to implement for my Leader were the concepts of an impossibly large goal at the end of the loop as its breaking condition, the looping character being affected by the dissociation that repeating time enough would cause, gradually becoming more and more powerful each loop, and how they might keep certain bits of knowledge about the future concealed until the right times.
Ultimately, I picked the idea for the fundamental reason that I am presently enthusiastic about the particular flavor of time shenanigans involved as a story device, making it much easier to come up with and work on my ideas. This perfectly falls in line with my own personal axiom that Ive been using to stay focused, that being that modding should be fun.
Contingency Processing Core 1A6F by Draconas
Inspiration:
I wanted the concept of a leader that had their own agenda, and was going to try and achieve that, with or without you. The contingency gave me a great template to work off, since we all know what its goal is, and as a bonus it lets me explore taking synthetic evolution to its ultimate conclusion with machine intelligence.
Thanks for reading! We'll be back same time next week with more Mod Jam Legendary Leaders to show off!
[ 2023-12-28 12:01:11 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Happy holidays everyone!
Much of the Stellaris team has already taken off for a winter break, but its time for our annual retrospective on the year and thoughts about where were going next.
We had three major releases in 2023 and a Custodian release.
We started the year by telling the story of how you got the stars, with 3.7 Canis Minor and the First Contact Story Pack. In this story pack, we focused heavily on narrative origins, each one rivaling Toxoids Knights of the Toxic God for the depth of content contained within them. Broken Shackles and Payback told an interlinked story of pre-FTL civilizations that suffered under the sinister Minamar Specialized Industries, while Fear of the Dark explored the Dark Forest theory and questioned whether it was a good idea to step into the void at all.
First Contact also brought cloaking into Stellaris, giving Science Ships some new versatility, and providing Frigates a new role as sneak attackers. Canis Minor brought Archaeotech additions to Ancient Relics.
[previewyoutube=qWzw7CE21gY;full][/previewyoutube]
Our anniversary in May gave us the 3.8 Gemini update and the Galactic Paragons Mechanical Expansion. This release added the Council and greatly increased the influence of leaders in Stellaris. Whether you were grooming your own leaders to serve on the Council or finding Renowned and Paragon leaders, they were much more powerful and relevant than before.
The Gemini update also added experimental Cooperative gameplay - Stellaris is a complex game, and weve found that the best teachers are you, the players.
[previewyoutube=598SFesgBSY;full][/previewyoutube]
The Caelum update In the autumn focused on improving a number of the old species packs and reworked habitats. We added the Enmity tradition tree to Humanoids along with some new traits, Void Hive and Selective Kinship civics to Lithoids, the Fruitful Partnership origin and Invasive Species trait to Plantoids, and Worker Cooperative and Mechromancy to MegaCorp and Necroids. A few new portraits came in as well, taking Plantoids from the second least played Species Class to the second most played the month after release.
Also, birds.
[previewyoutube=yvx9SedMkuc;full][/previewyoutube]
And most recently, we released 3.10 Pyxis and the Astral Planes Narrative Expansion. "Pyxis" included the Leader Consolidation that finally got leaders in a state that we're generally happy with them, and once the patch cycle was complete, gave us a fully customizable outliner. Astral Planes, meanwhile, is the largest Story focused expansion Stellaris has ever released. The Astral Rifts from Astral Planes have branching narratives with multiple endings, making each one several times the size of the linear Archaeology sites of the past, and there are over 30 of them in the pack.
I have some regrets that the release was tarnished by technical issues that we introduced, and we've made some internal changes to how the team will operate to reduce the chances of these sorts of things going wrong in the future.
I'm delighted with the respect and love that Abrakam Entertainment gave to our universe and lore. Astral Planes brings new insights to some old friends and enemies, greatly expanding on narrative questions that have been asked for years.
[previewyoutube=QlNR1ey4bpk;full][/previewyoutube]
We have a Technology Open Beta running until January 15th, 2024. Based on how that goes, it may or may not end up being rolled into the 3.11 Eridanus update planned for the first quarter of 2024. I've found that the data and feedback we get from the community during these to be invaluable, and I look forward to seeing everything we've compiled when we get back. Thank you for helping us make Stellaris a better game.
We spent a lot of this year doing incremental rebalancing of the leader system following the Gemini update, which took more Custodian resources than I liked. Weve gotten a few things in from the list we posted in Dev Diary #314 like the new Outliner, but for 2024 well likely try to focus the Custodians on that list of topics. Eridanus will largely be a stabilization update, with the Custodian team focusing on bugfixing, game balance, and general stability.
Looking back, we had a share of unexpected issues and problems, but I'm proud of how we've all navigated the year together. I'm looking forward to what we can bring you next year and beyond.
See you next year!
- Eladrin
Stellaris Game Director
Tofu, looking back at the year.
Stellaris Dev Diaries will return on January 18th. Happy holidays!
[ 2023-12-21 12:00:41 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
I'm pleased to announce that the Technology Open Beta that we first talked about in Stellaris Dev Diary #325 is now available for your feedback.
[quote author=Eladrin]
Stellaris has undergone a significant amount of power creep over the years, and the speed at which we're able to burn through the entire technology tree is much higher than is healthy for the game. Due to the large number of stacking research speed modifiers, repeatable technologies are reached far too early in the game. Another power creep issue mentioned by many players, it's also become trivial to stack large numbers of ship build cost and ship upkeep reduction modifiers.
The Holiday Open Beta will be a feature branch that contains the following changes, which may or may not go into 3.11 (or 3.12, or any release at all for that matter). Similar to how we handled Industrial Districts several years ago, we're intentionally keeping these separated from core 3.11 development, isolating this in a parallel track.[/quote]
The dev diary linked above contains more details regarding the intents behind some of the changes. While some changes planned for 3.11 Eridanus have snuck into this release (like some improvements to Galactic Doorstep), the overall technology rebalance is considered experimental and may or may not end up being released. It is likely to undergo some changes if it does go live.
We have created this feedback form to collect your impressions on both the partial tech rebalance and the military and economic changes that are present on the branch.
TECHNOLOGY OPEN BETA RELEASE NOTES
Features
- Replaced basic research technologies such as Quantum Theory with Breakthrough Technologies. Breakthrough Technologies will only appear once you have researched enough techs of your current tier and are required to research to reach the next tier.
- Breakthrough Technologies become easier to research based on the number of other empires you have low Tech intel on that have already researched them.
- Enigmatic Engineering blocks your Breakthrough Technologies from spreading.
- Events that give progress towards random technologies can grant progress towards Breakthrough Technologies, but will not give as much as they would a regular technology.
- Technology and Tradition costs are now distinct sliders in galaxy setup.
- Added notification message when new pop settles in zeya (Gaia planet in azilash)
- Adjustments made to the Galactic Doorstep origin:
- Added Gateway Cost and Megastructure Build Speed modifiers to the Galactic Doorstep origin.
- Galactic Doorstep event chain now directly rewards the Gateway Activation technology and gives far more progress on the Gateway Construction technology
- Increased the effects of Empire Size on Technology to match its effect on Traditions.
- Rebalanced research speed modifiers. Most sources of Research Speed now have a corresponding increase in Researcher job upkeep
- Removed or adjusted many sources of Ship Cost and Upkeep reductions from the game.
- Military Buildup Agenda now improves ship build speed and reduces claim costs. (It still reduces War Exhaustion on completion.)
- Naval Procurement Officer councilor now improves ship build speed.
- Crusader Spirit civic now improves ship build speed.
- Psionic Supremacy (Eater of Worlds) finisher no longer reduces ship build costs.
- Vyctor's Improved Fleet Logistics trait now reduces ship build costs by 10% instead of 20%.
- Progress Oriented modifier no longer reduces ship build costs.
- Match tradition in the Enmity tree bonus to ship build costs reduced to 5% instead of 10%.
- Master Shipwrights tradition in the Supremacy tree no longer reduces ship build costs.
- Military Pioneer trait now reduces starbase upgrade costs instead of ship build costs.
- Shipwright trait no longer reduces ship build costs.
- Reduced penalty the Irenic trait applies to ship build costs.
- Sanctum of the Eater ship upkeep reduction reduced from 10% to 5%.
- Mark of the Instrument ship component no longer reduces ship upkeep.
- Grand Fleet ambition now increases power projection instead of reducing ship upkeep.
- Fleet Supremacy edict no longer reduces ship upkeep.
- Corporate Crusader Spirit now reduces ship upkeep by 5% instead of 10%.
- Bulwark ship upkeep reductions reduced by 50%.
- Logistic Understanding, Armada Logistician, and Gunboat Diplomat traits now reduces ship upkeep while docked.
- Increased technology costs, especially those of higher tier technologies.
- The Technology curve has been changed from 1000 2^n to 500 (2^n + 3^n), making the difference between an early and late-game tech more distinct.
- Reduced output of researcher jobs
- Researchers and their gestalt equivalents now produce 3 of each research instead of 4
- Head Researchers now produce 4 of each research instead of 6
- The effectiveness of Ministry of Science has been halved
- Astral Researchers now produce 5 physics and 1 of each other research instead of 5 physics and 2 of the other researches.
- Knights of the Toxic God balancing:
- Slightly reduced the research output for Knight and Lord Commander jobs
- Refactored how the output scaling for Knights from Squires functions, these now behave as normal additive modifiers instead of multiplicative modifiers
- Knights now correctly inherit production modifiers from researchers and administrators
- Slightly reduced the unity and research output for Knight and Lord Commander jobs
- Knight output modifiers now only apply to resources, like other job output modifiers
- The Fortress Habitat Designation for Knights no longer provides +1 Defensive Army per pop on the habitat, instead each Squire job provides +1 Defensive Army
- Squires now increase the resource output of Knights by 2.5% not 2% per Squire.
- The Luminous Blades modifier from the Knight's Quest now removes the alloy upkeep of knights and gives +25% Army damage instead of an empire-wide +1.5% alloy production modifier per knight
- Delegate GalCom focus traits now have a small chance to give favors.
- Reworked and rebalanced the Erudite, Cyborg, Synthetic, Psionic, Chosen One, and Chosen of X traits to include new leader assignments.
Bugfix
- Repairing The Black Crown should no longer fire generic gateway repaired events.
- Added `last_resolution_category_changed` trigger
Please note that the Technology Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test - Technology Open Beta" branch.
Please disable mods for the Technology Open Beta, they are likely to break. Link to feedback form.
[ 2023-12-15 13:56:06 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
The 3.10.4 "Pyxis" update has been released today. Of particular interest in this weeks update are a fix that lets AI be more willing to recruit Scientists for exploration, a fix to certain modifiers doubling up, and some adjustments to negative leader traits.
3.10.4 "PYXIS" PATCH NOTES
Balance
- Significantly reduced the yearly chance for leaders to gain negative traits.
- Due to player feedback, the Micromanager negative trait for Commanders now increases fleet upkeep instead of reducing command limit.
- The Lethargic negative trait for Commanders now also reduces fleet upkeep.
- The Nervous negative trait for Commanders now also increases disengagement chance.
- Having the Antagonistic Diplomatic Stance will now appease your factions asking for you to have a Strong Diplomatic Stance.
- Added some failsafes to generate council positions and gestalt nodes in various edge cases where they weren't created or disappeared
- Clarified reformed tooltip for Dark Consortium civics
- Declining to Hunt for the Hyacinth should now correctly remove the event chain.
- Fix Astral Harvesting not available for heavily conquering empires
- Fixed a typo in the pre-FTL Provide Technology Tooltip.
- Fixed Civics not swapping to their alternative when switching Governments
- Fixed missing loc for the Fear of the Dark Admiral trait
- Fixed the Accelerated Time Astral Planes Modifier having a description for a title.
- Removed a redundant tooltip from the Synthetic Evolution event
- Ruler clothing selection in the empire designer is now respected
- Some planet modifiers that were getting incorrectly applied twice should now only be applied once.
- Updated the All Crisis Strength tooltip to accurately state that it doubles the strength of each subsequent crisis.
- Your ice miners will no longer make your Mercenaries homeless if they happened to have built their base above an ice asteroid.
- AI Empires will now be more willing to hire leaders for their science ships as long as they believe they can afford the Unity upkeep.
- Fixed XP not being shown in XP bar tooltip for gestalt rulers and councilors.
- collapsable_leader_container should now calculate the correct height no matter the amount of horizontal slots.
- Fixed lock_country scope change incorrectly stating that the output scope was a bypass, when it is actually a country
Technology Open Beta
Well be putting a Technology Open Beta up tomorrow to gather feedback and data on some possible changes to research. While some changes planned for 3.11 Eridanus have snuck into this release (like some improvements to Galactic Doorstep), the overall technology rebalance is considered experimental and may or may not end up being released. It is likely to undergo some changes if it does go live. The Technology Open Beta will run from December 15th through January 15th. Well post a feedback form tomorrow to help gather your impressions and thoughts.
TECHNOLOGY OPEN BETA RELEASE NOTES
Features
- Replaced basic research technologies such as Quantum Theory with Breakthrough Technologies. Breakthrough Technologies will only appear once you have researched enough techs of your current tier and are required to research to reach the next tier.
- Breakthrough Technologies become easier to research based on the number of other empires you have low Tech intel on that have already researched them.
- Enigmatic Engineering blocks your Breakthrough Technologies from spreading.
- Events that give progress towards random technologies can grant progress towards Breakthrough Technologies, but will not give as much as they would a regular technology.
- Technology and Tradition costs are now distinct sliders in galaxy setup.
- Added notification message when new pop settles in zeya (Gaia planet in azilash)
- Adjustments made to the Galactic Doorstep origin:
- Added Gateway Cost and Megastructure Build Speed modifiers to the Galactic Doorstep origin.
- Galactic Doorstep event chain now directly rewards the Gateway Activation technology and gives far more progress on the Gateway Construction technology
- Increased the effects of Empire Size on Technology to match its effect on Traditions.
- Rebalanced research speed modifiers. Most sources of Research Speed now have a corresponding increase in Researcher job upkeep
- Removed or adjusted many sources of Ship Cost and Upkeep reductions from the game.
- Military Buildup Agenda now improves ship build speed and reduces claim costs. (It still reduces War Exhaustion on completion.)
- Naval Procurement Officer councilor now improves ship build speed.
- Crusader Spirit civic now improves ship build speed.
- Psionic Supremacy (Eater of Worlds) finisher no longer reduces ship build costs.
- Vyctor's Improved Fleet Logistics trait now reduces ship build costs by 10% instead of 20%.
- Progress Oriented modifier no longer reduces ship build costs.
- Match tradition in the Enmity tree bonus to ship build costs reduced to 5% instead of 10%.
- Master Shipwrights tradition in the Supremacy tree no longer reduces ship build costs.
- Military Pioneer trait now reduces starbase upgrade costs instead of ship build costs.
- Shipwright trait no longer reduces ship build costs.
- Reduced penalty the Irenic trait applies to ship build costs.
- Sanctum of the Eater ship upkeep reduction reduced from 10% to 5%.
- Mark of the Instrument ship component no longer reduces ship upkeep.
- Grand Fleet ambition now increases power projection instead of reducing ship upkeep.
- Fleet Supremacy edict no longer reduces ship upkeep.
- Corporate Crusader Spirit now reduces ship upkeep by 5% instead of 10%.
- Bulwark ship upkeep reductions reduced by 50%.
- Logistic Understanding, Armada Logistician, and Gunboat Diplomat traits now reduces ship upkeep while docked.
- Increased technology costs, especially those of higher tier technologies.
- The Technology curve has been changed from 1000 2^n to 500 (2^n + 3^n), making the difference between an early and late-game tech more distinct.
- Reduced output of researcher jobs
- Researchers and their gestalt equivalents now produce 3 of each research instead of 4
- Head Researchers now produce 4 of each research instead of 6
- The effectiveness of Ministry of Science has been halved
- Astral Researchers now produce 5 physics and 1 of each other research instead of 5 physics and 2 of the other researches.
- Knights of the Toxic God balancing:
- Slightly reduced the research output for Knight and Lord Commander jobs
- Refactored how the output scaling for Knights from Squires functions, these now behave as normal additive modifiers instead of multiplicative modifiers
- Knights now correctly inherit production modifiers from researchers and administrators
- Slightly reduced the unity and research output for Knight and Lord Commander jobs
- Knight output modifiers now only apply to resources, like other job output modifiers
- The Fortress Habitat Designation for Knights no longer provides +1 Defensive Army per pop on the habitat, instead each Squire job provides +1 Defensive Army
- Squires now increase the resource output of Knights by 2.5% not 2% per Squire.
- The Luminous Blades modifier from the Knight's Quest now removes the alloy upkeep of knights and gives +25% Army damage instead of an empire-wide +1.5% alloy production modifier per knight
- Delegate GalCom focus traits now have a small chance to give favors.
- Reworked and rebalanced the Erudite, Cyborg, Synthetic, Psionic, Chosen One, and Chosen of X traits to include new leader assignments.
Bugfix
- Repairing The Black Crown should no longer fire generic gateway repaired events.
- Added `last_resolution_category_changed` trigger
Meet the Devs Video
Game Systems Designer @Gruntsatwork did a video interview about what its like to work on the Custodian and Crisis teams. [previewyoutube=UL3KPsQIi94;full][/previewyoutube] [spoiler]No, you cant implement trash. - E[/spoiler]
Next Week
The nights are getting cold and long, so for the last dev diary of the year its time for a look at the year in review. See you then!
[ 2023-12-14 09:30:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community!
The Stellaris Team, and our partners at Republic of Gamers, are proud to announce the theme of this year's Mod Jam:
Legendary Leaders!
Modders will have until January 9th (feature-complete submissions are due January 4th + 5 days of polish/bugfixing) to create:
- One (1) Legendary Leader
- Two (2) or more flavor events that occur after the leader has been hired
- One (1) or more events that lead to the option to recruit the Legendary Leader
- One (1) or more unique Solar System Initializer(s) where the event(s) to recruit the Legendary Leader begin
- One (1) scripted_effect that will spawn your legendary leader's solar_system_initializer (to be fired from solar_system scope)
- 1st Place: ROG Strix G17 (2023) G713 Laptop*
- 2nd Place: ROG Delta S Wireless Headset*
- 3rd Place: ROG Spatha X Wireless Mouse*
- 4th - 10th Place: Stellaris branded Wallet and Keychain
[ 2023-12-12 16:00:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone,
The 3.10.3 "Pyxis" update has been released. This release focused primarily on stability, and the contents are identical to the Open Beta that was released on Tuesday.
3.10.3 "Pyxis" Patch Notes
Improvements
- Now New Entries notification on the outliner tabs is cleared, even when switching between tabs using keyboard shortcuts.
- Ulastar is now an advisor
- Vas the Gilded is now an ambassador
- Pre-FTLs in Federation's End now have their technological progress frozen
- Fixed a number of event or paragon leaders not being generated with the correct traits
- Fixed envoys passively gaining XP
- Fixed missing subtitle for Scout trait
- Pre-FTL Empires will now have a fully functional council when they ascend to the stars.
- Released Vassals will now have a fully functional council when released.
- Fix crash on startup for Linux (including Steam Deck).
- Fix crash related to modifiers of recently destroyed empires updating
- Fixed crash when surveying a planet that was just removed from the map
- Removed some empty space in the topbar
- Added moddable_conditions_custom_tooltip parameter to civics modification statement to allow displaying a custom requirement key when no condition has been specified
- Fixed civics modifications statements not always (not) allowing the correct civic changes
- Improved error logging to know which federation perk is invalid
Whats After 3.10.4?
Tentatively scheduled for next Friday, we plan on putting up a longer open beta over the holidays that seeks to collect feedback regarding some potential balance changes to ship production, upkeep, and research in general. Stellaris has undergone a significant amount of power creep over the years, and the speed at which we're able to burn through the entire technology tree is much higher than is healthy for the game. Due to the large number of stacking research speed modifiers, repeatable technologies are reached far too early in the game. Another power creep issue mentioned by many players, it's also become trivial to stack large numbers of ship build cost and ship upkeep reduction modifiers. The Holiday Open Beta will be a feature branch that contains the following changes, which may or may not go into 3.11 (or 3.12, or any release at all for that matter). Similar to how we handled Industrial Districts several years ago, we're intentionally keeping these separated from core 3.11 development, isolating this in a parallel track. Well have a feedback form set up to collect your thoughts, and the Open Beta will run until the middle of January.
Holiday Open Beta Preliminary Notes
- Research Speed Bonuses now usually come with increased Researcher Upkeep.
- By changing these to throughput bonuses (cost + production), a technology focused empire will require more Consumer Goods or other resources depending on who they use to research. This puts a partial economic break on runaway technology.
- Reduction in most Research Speed bonus modifiers.
- The +20% research field technologies have been turned into "Breakthrough" technologies that gate progress to the next tier of research.
- Whether it be the transistor, the theory of relativity, or faster-than-light travel, occasionally there are technologies that redefine a field of science.
- The intent of these breakthrough technologies is to slow down the front-runners a little bit, while still letting the slower empires get pulled along.
- Once a theory has been proven, it's easier for others to replicate those learnings.
- Breakthrough technologies start off more difficult than regular technologies but have a variant of tech spread - the more nations you have at least low Technological intel on who have already discovered them, the cheaper they are to research (even down to instant research once the theory is commonplace). This tech spread varies based on galaxy size.
- Enigmatic Engineering prevents this tech spread.
- Breakthrough technologies have animated borders to stand out.
- Whether it be the transistor, the theory of relativity, or faster-than-light travel, occasionally there are technologies that redefine a field of science.
- Reduced Output of Researcher Jobs:
- Researchers and their gestalt equivalents now produce 3 of each research instead of 4
- Head Researchers now produce 4 of each research instead of 6
- The effectiveness of Ministry of Science has been halved
- Astral Researchers now produce 5 physics and 1 of each other research instead of 5 physics and 2 of the other researches.
- All other researchers, such as Necromancers, have been left alone for now
- The Technology curve has been changed from 1000 2^n to 500 (2^n + 3^n), making the difference between an early and late-game tech more distinct.
- Replaced or removed most sources of Ship Cost and Upkeep reductions from the game.
- Military Buildup Agenda now improves ship build speed and reduces claim costs. (It still reduces War Exhaustion on completion.)
- Naval Procurement Officer councilor now improves ship build speed.
- Crusader Spirit civic now improves ship build speed.
- Psionic Supremacy (Eater of Worlds) finisher no longer reduces ship build costs.
- Vyctor's Improved Fleet Logistics trait now reduces ship build costs by 10% instead of 20%.
- Progress Oriented modifier no longer reduces ship build costs.
- Match tradition in the Enmity tree bonus to ship build costs reduced to 5% instead of 10%.
- Master Shipwrights tradition in the Supremacy tree no longer reduces ship build costs.
- Chosen of the Eater of Worlds ship build cost reduction reduced to 5% from 15%, and no longer modifies ship upkeep.
- Military Pioneer trait now reduces starbase upgrade costs instead of ship build costs.
- Shipwright trait no longer reduces ship build costs.
- Reduced penalty the Irenic trait applies to ship build costs.
- Sanctum of the Eater ship upkeep reduction reduced from 10% to 5%.
- Mark of the Instrument ship component no longer reduces ship upkeep.
- Grand Fleet ambition now increases power projection instead of reducing ship upkeep.
- Fleet Supremacy edict no longer reduces ship upkeep.
- Corporate Crusader Spirit now reduces ship upkeep by 5% instead of 10%.
- Bulwark ship upkeep reductions reduced by 50%.
- Logistic Understanding, Armada Logistician, and Gunboat Diplomat traits now reduces ship upkeep while docked
#MODJAM2024 Signups are open!
Over the holiday period, we will be running another Mod Jam. This years theme will be revealed on December 12th, and sign ups will close on December 14th. The Community team will be posting weekly Mod Jam updates in place of our weekly Dev Diaries, so you can still get your weekly Stellaris fix. Weve currently scheduled the Mod Jam mod to release on January 11th! If youre interested in participating, you can get more details and sign up here. You can also subscribe to the Mod Jam mod here, and get it as soon as it releases.
[ 2023-12-07 12:00:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community!
Were proud to announce that signups for #MODJAM2024 are now open! This year our partners at Republic of Gamers are back, with some amazing prizes!
What is a Mod Jam?
Modders will get four weeks to make something. We dont tell them what theyre making until the start of the working time and modders are not allowed to use any content theyve previously published. At the end of the working time, well put everything together in a package and release it. Interested in helping test the Mod Jam mod as we get closer to release? Join us on the Stellaris Official Discord! Then the Community gets to vote on which something you like the best. At the end of the voting period, the top 10 modders by Community vote then get prizes from our sponsors and merch from the PDS Green Coffers!
Prizes, you say?
This year weve paired up again with Republic of Gamers to deliver some great prizes to our winning Modders: 1st Place: ROG Strix G17 (2023) G713 Laptop* 2nd Place: ROG Delta S Wireless Headset* 3rd Place: ROG Spatha X Wireless Mouse* 4th - 10th Place: Stellaris branded Wallet and Keychain * Exact specifications may vary depending on winning modders region
Well, tell us the theme!
Well reveal the theme on Tuesday, December 12th. Keep an eye out over the Holiday period, because the Mod Jam will be taking over the weekly Dev Diaries starting December 21st, and well be using them to keep you updated on what exactly the Modders are up to as the event progresses, so stay tuned!
Let me have it now!
Our current timeline has #MODJAM2024 releasing on January 11, 2024, so you dont have to wait too long! Subscribe to #MODJAM2024 on the Steam Workshop now, and get it as soon as it releases!
Sign up today!
Hey, thats my line. You can sign up to participate here! And be sure to read the Terms and Conditions!
[ 2023-12-05 16:00:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello!
As has been the tradition these past few weeks, we've pushed an update to the Steam Open Beta with our next release, containing the 3.10.3 patch that has been sent on to certification for release later this week.
This week's update focus was primarily on stability.
3.10.3 "Pyxis" Beta Patch Notes
[expand type=details]
Improvements
Now New Entries notification on the outliner tabs is cleared, even when switching between tabs using keyboard shortcuts.
Ulastar is now an advisor
Vas the Gilded is now an ambassador
Balance
Pre-FTLs in Federation's End now have their technological progress frozen
Bugfixes
Fixed a number of event or paragon leaders not being generated with the correct traits
Fixed envoys passively gaining XP
Fixed missing subtitle for Scout trait
Pre-FTL Empires will now have a fully functional council when they ascend to the stars.
Released Vassals will now have a fully functional council when released.
Stability
Fix crash on startup for Linux (including steam deck).
Fix crash related to modifiers of recently destroyed empires updating
Fixed crash when surveying a planet that was just removed from the map
UI
Removed some empty space in the topbar
Modding
Added moddable_conditions_custom_tooltip parameter to civics modification statement to allow displaying a custom requirement key when no condition has been specified
Fixed civics modifications statements not always (not) allowing the correct civic changes
Improved error logging to know which federation perk is invalid
[/expand]
We expect one more release next week to add localization for the various fixes during the 3.10 patch cycle and for a few more balance and bugfixes, but with this we feel that 3.10 has reached a generally stable point. If you run into any issues, please let us know in the Bug Reports forum.
Please note that the 3.10.3 "Pyxis" Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test - 3.10.3 Open Beta" branch.
[ 2023-12-05 13:06:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi all!
With another busy week of bugfixing, the 3.10.2 "Pyxis" patch is now live on all platforms. So far, 689,121 Astral Rifts have been explored by you.
This release contains a fix to a common MacOS crash, fixes to ship build costs being applied, and adds full customization to the outliner tabs.
To those of you that read Monday's post about the Beta, some of this isn't news to you so you can skip to the end where I'll talk about the planned 3.10.3 and 3.10.4. The released patch is identical to the 3.10.2 Open Beta.
3.10.2 PYXIS PATCH NOTES
Features
- Added custom tab functionality to the outliner
- Paragon leader Nasuz Demetor is now reclassed as Scholar and only has one Destiny trait (Vibrant Storyteller)
- Payback Origin: the "Declining Healthcare" modifier acquired during the "Out Of Warranty" event chain is now automatically removed after 5 years
- The Agrarian Upbringing trait can now be gained by all leader classes
- The Agrarian Upbringing trait is less likely to be rolled if another leader has the trait
- The Architectural Interest trait can now be gained by both officials and scientists
- The Army Veteran trait can now be gained by both scientists and officials
- The Army Veteran trait is less likely to be rolled if another leader has the trait
- The Enlister trait has been moved from officials to commanders and now gives soldiers to the governed planet (tier 1) and sector (tier 2)
- The Entangled Dark Matter astral rift now completely overwrites the personalty of the selected scientist if they are not psionic
- The Environmental Engineering trait can now be gained by all leader classes
- The Environmental Engineering trait is less likely to be rolled if the leader's empire has the Environmentalist civic
- The Environmental Engineering trait now requires a blocker removal tech to be researched
- The Foreign Consciousness trait is now a destiny trait
- The Kaleidoscope now has a chance of appearing anytime after midgame starts, instead of always appearing at the start of midgame
- The Mining, Farming and Generator focus traits have moved from officials to commanders
- The Planetary Analyst destiny trait can now be gained by both commanders and scientists
- The Retired Fleet Officer trait can now be gained by both scientists and officials
- The Retired Fleet Officer trait is less likely to be rolled if another leader has the trait
- The Righteous trait can now be gained by both commanders and officials
- The Traumatized trait now negatively impacts Astral Rift Exploration Speed
- The Unifier trait is less likely to be rolled if another leader has the trait
- The Xeno-Mediator destiny trait can now be gained by all classes
- Astral Rifts now appear as not leading to anywhere when the player's astral rift pool is empty
- Blocked commanders for end-game crisis factions having non-admiral traits
- Corrected draw weight for Shipbreaker trait
- Corrected modifiers on Agrarian Upbringing
- Corrected some trait names
- Correctly locked a number of Delegate GalCom focus traits to require the DLC that unlocks their resolution category
- Dimensional Locks now forbid access to countries without communications
- Fixed a number of opposite trait pairs not taking into account their levelled versions
- Fixed a visible trigger check in the first contact description for Amoebas and Crystalline Entities
- Fixed all leaders in imperial empires using the regnal namelists instead of only the ruler and heir
- Fixed an error in the "Out of Warranty" event chain that occasionally left you stuck with a permanent "Declining Healthcare" modifier
- Fixed Ancient Rampart not applying its modifiers correctly
- Fixed astral rifts exploration UI getting locked when all narratives had been explored
- Fixed dimensional dump astral rift sometimes creating a leader with no name
- Fixed Dimensional Shrine not being buildable in Terminal Egress system
- Fixed discoveries tab not being displayed when tabs order has been customized
- Fixed heirs being able to have planar theorist trait despite not being capable of exploring astral rifts
- Fixed leader age staying frozen after leaving an Astral Rift
- Fixed missing 0 on Collaborator II's sector modifier
- Fixed outliner sometimes opening the astral rift view on the wrong rift when clicking on a ship exploring an astral rift
- Fixed reformating regulatory node agenda for machine empires
- Fixed Revolutionary Medi-Gel not affecting Pharma State civic production for Medical Workers
- Fixed ship build cost modifiers not being applied
- Fixed starting gestalt nodes not benefiting from initial leader level modifiers
- Fixed the Numistic Administration species trait
- Fixed the right-click menu not appearing for archaeology sites
- Fixed some modifiers with a multiplier not being applied
- Fixed the Surveyor relic trying to fire an effect on a habitat orbital when none exists
- The Ancient Ramparts Starbase Module now mentions what modifiers it has to Defense Platforms
- The astral rifts now correctly check for Chosen One traits in addition to the Psionic trait
- The empire created by the Animator of Clay now correctly spawns their council
- The Factory Focus trait is no longer blocked for gestalts, but instead checks that they have a use for consumer goods instead (ie it is valid for Rogue Servitors)
- The Sensor Array Power Surge event can no longer target Astral Scars, planets with deposits or planets that have a habitat orbital
- Updated science nexus events to check for renowned and legendary paragon scientists
- Mac crash fix (one of threads run out of the stack mem by alloca in a loop)
- Workaround for rare crash when rendering empire borders
- Fixed performance issues caused by outliner notification.
- When adding council positions, AI will prioritize Head of Research, Minister of Defense and Minister of State if it doesn't have them
- Added @anti_synergy_weight_mult scripted variable for leader trait weights
- Added ai_priority to councilor type
- Added background_planet scope for leaders
- Added has_blocker_removal_tech scripted trigger
- Added Ship Class modifiers for armor and shield hardening, `shipclass_
_armor_hardening_add` and `shipclass_ _shield_hardening_add` - Updated LEADER_GOVERNOR_MONTHLY_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_ASSIGNED_MONTHLY_EXPERIENCE
- If you are crashing on startup, players have reported that starting Steam, disabling the internet, then loading the game bypasses the issue. Internet can be reenabled afterwards.
- If you are crashing while hosting a multiplayer game on Ubuntu 20.04, switching to Cross Platform multiplayer appears to resolve the issue. It is also not present on Ubuntu 22.04.
Outliner Customization
In 3.10.2, we've added the ability to fully customize your Outliner tabs. In your Outliner Options, there is now a toggle for Custom Outliner Tab, which will let you select any elements you wish to show on that particular tab. This should allow you to set up your tabs however you desire, including putting everything on a single tab or duplicating the same information across different tabs if you wish. (For example, if you want a "Peace" and "War" tab, with different information or sorting.)
So What's Next?
We're continuing to focus on stability and bugfixing for the next few weeks. 3.10.3 is planned for next week, and we plan on continuing the pattern of releasing the build early as an Open Beta while it's undergoing certification. 3.10.4 is expected the week after that, and will include translated localization for the various changes made in the first three patches. (As well as further bugfixing as needed.)
And After That?
The 3.11 "Eridanus" update in 2024Q1 will focus on stability, AI, and balance. We're planning on running a balance related Open Beta over the holidays to collect feedback regarding some experiments around Research.
[ 2023-11-29 09:30:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello!
We've just released an update to the Stellaris Test branch on Steam, containing the 3.10.2 patch that is currently in certification for release later this week. Of particular note, this release includes a fix to a common MacOS crash (that also turned out to be affecting other operating systems, just not quite as consistently) and full Outliner customization.
3.10.2 PYXIS BETA PATCH NOTES
Features
- Added custom tab functionality to the outliner
- Paragon leader Nasuz Demetor is now reclassed as Scholar and only has one Destiny trait (Vibrant Storyteller)
- Payback Origin: the "Declining Healthcare" modifier acquired during the "Out Of Warranty" event chain is now automatically removed after 5 years
- The Agrarian Upbringing trait can now be gained by all leader classes
- The Agrarian Upbringing trait is less likely to be rolled if another leader has the trait
- The Architectural Interest trait can now be gained by both officials and scientists
- The Army Veteran trait can now be gained by both scientists and officials
- The Army Veteran trait is less likely to be rolled if another leader has the trait
- The Enlister trait has been moved from officials to commanders and now gives soldiers to the governed planet (tier 1) and sector (tier 2)
- The Entangled Dark Matter astral rift now completely overwrites the personalty of the selected scientist if they are not psionic
- The Environmental Engineering trait can now be gained by all leader classes
- The Environmental Engineering trait is less likely to be rolled if the leader's empire has the Environmentalist civic
- The Environmental Engineering trait now requires a blocker removal tech to be researched
- The Foreign Consciousness trait is now a destiny trait
- The Kaleidoscope now has a chance of appearing anytime after midgame starts, instead of always appearing at the start of midgame
- The Mining, Farming and Generator focus traits have moved from officials to commanders
- The Planetary Analyst destiny trait can now be gained by both commanders and scientists
- The Retired Fleet Officer trait can now be gained by both scientists and officials
- The Retired Fleet Officer trait is less likely to be rolled if another leader has the trait
- The Righteous trait can now be gained by both commanders and officials
- The Traumatized trait now negatively impacts Astral Rift Exploration Speed
- The Unifier trait is less likely to be rolled if another leader has the trait
- The Xeno-Mediator destiny trait can now be gained by all classes
- Astral Rifts now appear as not leading to anywhere when the player's astral rift pool is empty
- Blocked commanders for end-game crisis factions having non-admiral traits
- Corrected draw weight for Shipbreaker trait
- Corrected modifiers on Agrarian Upbringing
- Corrected some trait names
- Correctly locked a number of Delegate GalCom focus traits to require the DLC that unlocks their resolution category
- Dimensional Locks now forbid access to countries without communications
- Fixed a number of opposite trait pairs not taking into account their levelled versions
- Fixed a visible trigger check in the first contact description for Amoebas and Crystalline Entities
- Fixed all leaders in imperial empires using the regnal namelists instead of only the ruler and heir
- Fixed an error in the "Out of Warranty" event chain that occasionally left you stuck with a permanent "Declining Healthcare" modifier
- Fixed Ancient Rampart not applying its modifiers correctly
- Fixed astral rifts exploration UI getting locked when all narratives had been explored
- Fixed dimensional dump astral rift sometimes creating a leader with no name
- Fixed Dimensional Shrine not being buildable in Terminal Egress system
- Fixed discoveries tab not being displayed when tabs order has been customized
- Fixed heirs being able to have planar theorist trait despite not being capable of exploring astral rifts
- Fixed leader age staying frozen after leaving an Astral Rift
- Fixed missing 0 on Collaborator II's sector modifier
- Fixed outliner sometimes opening the astral rift view on the wrong rift when clicking on a ship exploring an astral rift
- Fixed reformating regulatory node agenda for machine empires
- Fixed Revolutionary Medi-Gel not affecting Pharma State civic production for Medical Workers
- Fixed ship build cost modifiers not being applied
- Fixed starting gestalt nodes not benefiting from initial leader level modifiers
- Fixed the Numistic Administration species trait
- Fixed the right-click menu not appearing for archaeology sites
- Fixed some modifiers with a multiplier not being applied
- Fixed the Surveyor relic trying to fire an effect on a habitat orbital when none exists
- The Ancient Ramparts Starbase Module now mentions what modifiers it has to Defense Platforms
- The astral rifts now correctly check for Chosen One traits in addition to the Psionic trait
- The empire created by the Animator of Clay now correctly spawns their council
- The Factory Focus trait is no longer blocked for gestalts, but instead checks that they have a use for consumer goods instead (ie it is valid for Rogue Servitors)
- The Sensor Array Power Surge event can no longer target Astral Scars, planets with deposits or planets that have a habitat orbital
- Updated science nexus events to check for renowned and legendary paragon scientists
- Mac crash fix (one of threads run out of the stack mem by alloca in a loop)
- Workaround for rare crash when rendering empire borders
- Fixed performance issues caused by outliner notification.
- When adding council positions, AI will prioritize Head of Research, Minister of Defense and Minister of State if it doesn't have them
- Added @anti_synergy_weight_mult scripted variable for leader trait weights
- Added ai_priority to councilor type
- Added background_planet scope for leaders
- Added has_blocker_removal_tech scripted trigger
- Added Ship Class modifiers for armor and shield hardening, `shipclass_
_armor_hardening_add` and `shipclass_ _shield_hardening_add` - Updated LEADER_GOVERNOR_MONTHLY_EXPERIENCE to LEADER_ASSIGNED_MONTHLY_EXPERIENCE
Please note that the 3.10.2 "Pyxis" Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test - 3.10.2 Open Beta" branch.
This release does not yet have fixes for two Linux issues, but we have workarounds for two of them:
- If you are crashing on startup, players have reported that starting Steam, disabling the internet, then loading the game bypasses the issue. Internet can be reenabled afterwards.
- If you are crashing while hosting a multiplayer game on Ubuntu 20.04, switching to Cross Platform multiplayer appears to resolve the issue. It is also not present on Ubuntu 22.04.
Outliner Customization
In 3.10.2, we've added the ability to fully customize your Outliner tabs. In your Outliner Options, there is now a toggle for Custom Outliner Tab, which will let you select any elements you wish to show on that particular tab. This should allow you to set up your tabs however you desire, including putting everything on a single tab or duplicating the same information across different tabs if you wish. (For example, if you want a "Peace" and "War" tab, with different information or sorting.)
[ 2023-11-27 13:55:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone!
We have just released the 3.10.1 "Pyxis" update! This update is identical to the Steam Open Beta that we put up earlier this week, and includes a number of fixes as well as hotkeys for the Tabbed Outliner.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Stellaris Community for their patience and bug reports. Without your help we would not have been able to address so many issues so quickly. Please keep on providing your bug reports and feedback.
We are currently still investigating and fixing a number of other issues, and this will not be the last update to 3.10, including issues on MacOS, more bugfixes, and adding full customization to the Outliner.
Please find the patch notes below:
3.10.1 Pyxis Patch Notes
[expand type=details] Improvements
- Added Ctrl+A/D shortcuts to cycle through outliner tabs. Also added Ctrl+Q/W/E/R to switch to specific tabs. Added tooltips for them. These tooltips are currently in English regardless of language setting
- Clarified tooltip headers for governor traits.
- AI empires generated as part of the Common Ground and Hegemony origins now start with an additional Official to be assigned to the Federation
- Blocked empire rulers and imperial heirs from getting the Planar Theorist trait
- Commissioner subclass now increases stability from soldiers instead of providing additional soldier jobs
- Decreased the chance for leaders to get common governor traits if they do not have a governor subclass or are not governing
- Decreased the chance of leaders gaining job providing traits
- Detail-Oriented has been updated to be a Destiny trait for Scholars, instead of a Veteran trait
- Explorer subclass now has +1 Sensor Range
- Halved the effects of the Politician trait
- Having a Commander govern a planet or sector now provides soldier jobs
- Increased the chances of the Prospector trait to fire.
- Oppressive Autocracy now has the colony shelter building replace a colonist job with an enforcer job
- Policies that increase leader starting level now greatly increase leader hiring cost and upkeep cost.
- Rebalanced traits that affect research output from jobs while governing
- Reduced the magnitude of most governor modifiers.
- Removed the "can only get Council traits" restriction on rulers in Democracies, Oligarchies and MegaCorps. (For modders, this is using the is_autocracy scripted trigger)
- Replaced Champions of the Empire +1 Initial Leader Level with +1 Additional Trait
- Resources from Psionic Pops modifier now applies to latent psionic species.
- Reworked Driven Educator to instead provide +25% Leader XP gain
- Slightly decreased the bonuses from Custom AI Assistant and Sapient AI Assistant traits
- Slightly decreased the penalties from the Neurosis trait
- Soldier jobs now produce a small amount of base stability.
- Traits that give homeworld jobs now require leaders to be at least level 2
- You can no longer sell exceptional materials (astral threads and minor artifacts) to the AI.
- "The Seal" situation is aborted if you attack [ISPOILER]the formless[/ISPOILER]
- Added missing descriptions for multiple ship component categories (reactor, auras, combat computers)
- Added missing node xp modifiers to the Astral Planes civics for gestalt empires.
- AI empires with the Fruitful Partnership origin will stop opening seed pods on Holy Words only to get obliterated by angry fallen empires
- All types of priest jobs (e.g. high priests, numistic priests) now benefit from the additional trade value from the Dimensional Enterprise council position.
- Blocked Entrepreneur (Ambassador) trait for gestalt empires, fanatic purifiers, inward perfectionists and criminal syndicates
- Blocked the Charmer and Research Exchange traits for genocidal empires and inwards perfectionists
- Clarified that the First Contact civics give an increased chance to draw FTL travel technologies (English only)
- Corrected all versions of Sovereign Guardianship to have 150% Empire Size from systems
- Corrected draw weights for a number of leader traits
- Empires can no longer spawn with multiple ministers of defense under some cases, such as being The Chosen.
- Empires created via status quo peace deals will now correctly generate their council.
- Explicitly blocked trading of gestalt nodes (instead of them being implicitly blocked)
- Fixed 2 zroni digsites pointing to a deprecated title.
- Fixed a bug that allowed you to enact the "Dayside Farm" decision multiple times on a single planet.
- Fixed a case where the "Abandoned Star Platform" anomaly would leave the system's primary star without a deposit
- Fixed a case where the "Ion Trail" event would occasionally pick the same system it spawned in for the follow-up event
- Fixed a large number of planetary features that were providing incorrect bonuses due to changes with Mastery of Nature
- Fixed a typo in the event text for the "Blinding Grief" event
- Fixed calculations for determining trade values gained from slaves
- Fixed commanders wearing the wrong uniform on planetary assignments.
- Fixed crystal rift situations checking for the wrong amount of resources to validate approaches
- Fixed Crystal Sphere stolen events not using the correct texts and picture
- Fixed Crystal Sphere stolen events triggering when the crystal sphere situations are no longer active
- Fixed Dark Consortium displaying flag information in tooltip instead of the standard loc key for this situation
- Fixed Dark Consortium not locking the civic when being played from start
- Fixed Dark Matter Breakthrough agenda always stating it will locks the civic, even if it already is
- Fixed descriptions for Artisan Drones showing in district tooltips when none were present
- Fixed Eager Explorers giving two +50% chances to draw Improved Structural Integrity
- Fixed Efficient Staffing III applying the incorrect modifiers, leading to no sector modifiers.
- Fixed habitat and archaeology lab technologies missing increased chance to be drawn from being rare technologies
- Fixed hostile fleets being capable of crossing dimensional locks
- Fixed Imperial Heirs sometimes spawning with the incorrect initial level for their class.
- Fixed issue with concepts being offset for all languages using TTF (fonts)
- Fixed missing AI weights for some council positions
- Fixed missing localisation for Clone Army Commander traits
- Fixed outdated tooltips in diplomacy with Trader Enclaves
- Fixed some empires, such as Common Ground federation members or MSI, starting with duplicated council positions.
- Fixed some triggered modifiers from leader traits not being applied.
- Fixed starbases not inheriting modifiers from their country
- Fixed strange wormhole breaking existing wormhole in the same system if any when spawning
- Fixed that culled/reformatted nodes would not have a level 1 trait.
- Fixed that culling/reformatting the Regulatory Node would not create a new one.
- Fixed the "Dissolved" astral rift event leaving a ship stuck in an endless MIA loop
- Fixed the Archivist trait giving scientists additional levels
- Fixed the sector modifier for Ruthless Developer
- Fixed Tree of Life and Lithoid Crater deposits not providing all of their bonuses
- Fixed Urbanist trait displaying it was tier 1 and for any class when it is not a tiered trait and only for the Official
- For players without Galactic Paragons, Officials should no longer roll GalCom traits if you are not a member of the GalCom or Federation traits if you are not a member of a Federation
- Galactic Community Delegates now correctly multiply their diplomatic weight bonus by their level, instead of their level squared.
- If your capital is in the Formless home system, The Vacuum Flower relic now correctly grants you Astral Threads
- Made the first option in Black Hole Instability requiring Astral Threads instead of rewarding them
- Only leaders eligible for a specific council position should show up as potential recruits.
- Pre-Sapient pops no longer help you upgrade your capital buildings earlier.
- Prospector trait should no longer fire twice for Volatile Motes
- Removed Artisan Drone jobs from ringworld industrial segment if it is not set to factory designation.
- Removed reference to Imperial Heirs not having unity upkeep.
- Repaired Shattered Ringworlds now use the correct graphics
- Scrapping the warship in the "Adrift" event now correctly awards you Alloys instead of Minerals
- Scrapping the warship in the "Warship Destroyed" event now correctly awards you Alloys instead of Minerals
- Stopped certain events from accidentally adding anomalies or terraforming Astral Scars
- The Excavator trait no longer erroneously requires the Rift Sphere technology
- The formless don't talk to you lightly anymore if you become hostile
- The Geology Expert, Manufacturer, and Observer traits no longer state that they are Scientist traits
- The leader trait "Trader II" now correctly applies its effect to the whole sector
- The Manifesti's Head in the Clouds demand now checks for scientists on the council correctly
- The Mass Extinction Event Chain should work properly again.
- The plasmic species trait now has a slave cost of 2500 energy credits.
- The Scout trait no longer states it applies to military fleets for scientists
- The Tyznn Tithe trait is no longer possible to acquire by levelling up.
- The UNE will no longer spawn a third human empire to hang out with them for no reason.
- The Void Dweller initializing effects will no longer generate habitable worlds with no deposits.
- Updated the upgraded version of the Assembler trait to use the correct modifiers
- Vassalizing [ISPOILER]the formless[/ISPOILER] will now transfer their system to them if you happen to own it.
- Vibrant Storyteller is correctly marked as a Destiny trait for Scholars, not Explorers
- When loading a save, update some modifiers that previously weren't updated.
- You can now use the Astral Jump Astral Action if you have Psionic Jump Drives or Subspace Drives.
- [ISPOILER]zadigal[/ISPOILER] is now correctly fired if you declare war with [ISPOILER]the Formless[/ISPOILER] on their recruitment day
- Fixed AI assigning leaders to Galcom when it shouldn't be possible.
- Fix for crash when running unlock_council_slots effect.
- Added text to system debug tooltip to separate the different lists of modifiers.
- Anomaly view "Research Time" label is hidden when the research time is hidden.
- Changed Change Scientist hotkey in Situation Log anomaly view to G.
- DLC list is now shown in the Cooperative game setup.
- Fixed empire creation UI remaining visible while ACB is open.
- Fixed layout of "no scientists" text in anomaly view.
- Fixed portrait frame appearing to the left of the anomaly UI if you have no science ships with scientists.
- Fixed portrait tooltip in anomaly view incorrectly saying that you can right-click to remove the leader.
- In the anomaly window, if you get a valid scientist while no scientist is selected, that scientist is automatically selected.
- In the anomaly window, the Change Scientist button is disabled if there is no valid scientist available.
- Updated the leader ethics tooltip to mention planetary and sector governor ethics attraction
- Fixed leader XP bar showing the wrong tooltip
- Added a init_effect field to spawn_natural_wormhole effect
- Added additional documentation to 00_base_classes.txt
- Moved events action.504 and .505 to event leader.200 and .201
- Removed initial_effect_custom_loc from agendas. The initial effect's tooltip is now directly built from the initial effect
- The link_wormholes effect can now be used on the bypass scope
Please note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important game going you would like to finish, please back up the save file before trying to load it in the new version. You can roll back to a prior version by opening steam and right-clicking on Stellaris in your library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version from the drop-down. If you experience crashing or other issues, first disable all mods and start a new save. If the issue persists, please report it on the Bug Report forums.
[ 2023-11-23 09:16:23 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Greetings!
Stellaris 3.10.0 Pyxis and the Astral Planes Narrative Expansion released last Thursday, and its been a bit of a bumpy ride, so I moved this weeks dev diary a bit earlier than usual.
[previewyoutube=Ec9udnCVPlw;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]
Due to an error we made in metadata, many players were unable to verify ownership of the DLC at launch. We pushed a quick hotfix, which resolved these issues for some players, while also introducing a different ownership issue through a checksum error, which prevented other people from being able to properly explore the expansion. We finally managed to fix all of these problems midday on Friday. I want to thank everyone who provided bug reports and helped us diagnose the dlc ownership issues, we wouldnt have been able to resolve them so quickly without your help.
Im terribly sorry for the poor launch.
Weve just put a beta branch up on Steam containing the 3.10.1 release, which is currently planned to be deployed to live on Thursday. This release includes a number of bugfixes, as well as hotkeys for the Tabbed Outliner. Let us know what you think.
The hotkeys are CTRL+A/D for switching to the previous/next tab and CTRL+Q/W/E/R for switching to a tab directly (much like Z/X/C/V switches between tabs in other UIs, such as the planetary view).
3.10.1 PYXIS BETA PATCH NOTES
Improvements
- Added Ctrl+A/D shortcuts to cycle through outliner tabs. Also added Ctrl+Q/W/E/R to switch to specific tabs. Added tooltips for them. These tooltips are currently in English regardless of language setting
- Clarified tooltip headers for governor traits.
- AI empires generated as part of the Common Ground and Hegemony origins now start with an additional Official to be assigned to the Federation
- Blocked empire rulers and imperial heirs from getting the Planar Theorist trait
- Commissioner subclass now increases stability from soldiers instead of providing additional soldier jobs
- Decreased the chance for leaders to get common governor traits if they do not have a governor subclass or are not governing
- Decreased the chance of leaders gaining job providing traits
- Detail-Oriented has been updated to be a Destiny trait for Scholars, instead of a Veteran trait
- Explorer subclass now has +1 Sensor Range
- Halved the effects of the Politician trait
- Having a Commander govern a planet or sector now provides soldier jobs
- Increased the chances of the Prospector trait to fire.
- Oppressive Autocracy now has the colony shelter building replace a colonist job with an enforcer job
- Policies that increase leader starting level now greatly increase leader hiring cost and upkeep cost.
- Rebalanced traits that affect research output from jobs while governing
- Reduced the magnitude of most governor modifiers.
- Removed the "can only get Council traits" restriction on rulers in Democracies, Oligarchies and MegaCorps. (For modders, this is using the is_autocracy scripted trigger)
- Replaced Champions of the Empire +1 Initial Leader Level with +1 Additional Trait
- Resources from Psionic Pops modifier now applies to latent psionic species.
- Reworked Driven Educator to instead provide +25% Leader XP gain
- Slightly decreased the bonuses from Custom AI Assistant and Sapient AI Assistant traits
- Slightly decreased the penalties from the Neurosis trait
- Soldier jobs now produce a small amount of base stability.
- Traits that give homeworld jobs now require leaders to be at least level 2
- You can no longer sell exceptional materials (astral threads and minor artifacts) to the AI.
- "The Seal" situation is aborted if you attack [spoiler]the formless[/spoiler]
- Added missing descriptions for multiple ship component categories (reactor, auras, combat computers)
- Added missing node xp modifiers to the Astral Planes civics for gestalt empires.
- AI empires with the Fruitful Partnership origin will stop opening seed pods on Holy Words only to get obliterated by angry fallen empires
- All types of priest jobs (e.g. high priests, numistic priests) now benefit from the additional trade value from the Dimensional Enterprise council position.
- Blocked Entrepreneur (Ambassador) trait for gestalt empires, fanatic purifiers, inward perfectionists and criminal syndicates
- Blocked the Charmer and Research Exchange traits for genocidal empires and inwards perfectionists
- Clarified that the First Contact civics give an increased chance to draw FTL travel technologies (English only)
- Corrected all versions of Sovereign Guardianship to have 150% Empire Size from systems
- Corrected draw weights for a number of leader traits
- Empires can no longer spawn with multiple ministers of defense under some cases, such as being The Chosen.
- Empires created via status quo peace deals will now correctly generate their council.
- Explicitly blocked trading of gestalt nodes (instead of them being implicitly blocked)
- Fixed 2 zroni digsites pointing to a deprecated title.
- Fixed a bug that allowed you to enact the "Dayside Farm" decision multiple times on a single planet.
- Fixed a case where the "Abandoned Star Platform" anomaly would leave the system's primary star without a deposit
- Fixed a case where the "Ion Trail" event would occasionally pick the same system it spawned in for the follow-up event
- Fixed a large number of planetary features that were providing incorrect bonuses due to changes with Mastery of Nature
- Fixed a typo in the event text for the "Blinding Grief" event
- Fixed calculations for determining trade values gained from slaves
- Fixed commanders wearing the wrong uniform on planetary assignments.
- Fixed crystal rift situations checking for the wrong amount of resources to validate approaches
- Fixed Crystal Sphere stolen events not using the correct texts and picture
- Fixed Crystal Sphere stolen events triggering when the crystal sphere situations are no longer active
- Fixed Dark Consortium displaying flag information in tooltip instead of the standard loc key for this situation
- Fixed Dark Consortium not locking the civic when being played from start
- Fixed Dark Matter Breakthrough agenda always stating it will locks the civic, even if it already is
- Fixed descriptions for Artisan Drones showing in district tooltips when none were present
- Fixed Eager Explorers giving two +50% chances to draw Improved Structural Integrity
- Fixed Efficient Staffing III applying the incorrect modifiers, leading to no sector modifiers.
- Fixed habitat and archaeology lab technologies missing increased chance to be drawn from being rare technologies
- Fixed hostile fleets being capable of crossing dimensional locks
- Fixed Imperial Heirs sometimes spawning with the incorrect initial level for their class.
- Fixed issue with concepts being offset for all languages using TTF (fonts)
- Fixed missing AI weights for some council positions
- Fixed missing localisation for Clone Army Commander traits
- Fixed outdated tooltips in diplomacy with Trader Enclaves
- Fixed some empires, such as Common Ground federation members or MSI, starting with duplicated council positions.
- Fixed some triggered modifiers from leader traits not being applied.
- Fixed starbases not inheriting modifiers from their country
- Fixed strange wormhole breaking existing wormhole in the same system if any when spawning
- Fixed that culled/reformatted nodes would not have a level 1 trait.
- Fixed that culling/reformatting the Regulatory Node would not create a new one.
- Fixed the "Dissolved" astral rift event leaving a ship stuck in an endless MIA loop
- Fixed the Archivist trait giving scientists additional levels
- Fixed the sector modifier for Ruthless Developer
- Fixed Tree of Life and Lithoid Crater deposits not providing all of their bonuses
- Fixed Urbanist trait displaying it was tier 1 and for any class when it is not a tiered trait and only for the Official
- For players without Galactic Paragons, Officials should no longer roll GalCom traits if you are not a member of the GalCom or Federation traits if you are not a member of a Federation
- Galactic Community Delegates now correctly multiply their diplomatic weight bonus by their level, instead of their level squared.
- If your capital is in the Formless home system, The Vacuum Flower relic now correctly grants you Astral Threads
- Made the first option in Black Hole Instability requiring Astral Threads instead of rewarding them
- Only leaders eligible for a specific council position should show up as potential recruits.
- Pre-Sapient pops no longer help you upgrade your capital buildings earlier.
- Prospector trait should no longer fire twice for Volatile Motes
- Removed Artisan Drone jobs from ringworld industrial segment if it is not set to factory designation.
- Removed reference to Imperial Heirs not having unity upkeep.
- Repaired Shattered Ringworlds now use the correct graphics
- Scrapping the warship in the "Adrift" event now correctly awards you Alloys instead of Minerals
- Scrapping the warship in the "Warship Destroyed" event now correctly awards you Alloys instead of Minerals
- Stopped certain events from accidentally adding anomalies or terraforming Astral Scars
- The Excavator trait no longer erroneously requires the Rift Sphere technology
- The formless don't talk to you lightly anymore if you become hostile
- The Geology Expert, Manufacturer, and Observer traits no longer state that they are Scientist traits
- The leader trait "Trader II" now correctly applies its effect to the whole sector
- The Manifesti's Head in the Clouds demand now checks for scientists on the council correctly
- The Mass Extinction Event Chain should work properly again.
- The plasmic species trait now has a slave cost of 2500 energy credits.
- The Scout trait no longer states it applies to military fleets for scientists
- The Tyznn Tithe trait is no longer possible to acquire by levelling up.
- The UNE will no longer spawn a third human empire to hang out with them for no reason.
- The Void Dweller initializing effects will no longer generate habitable worlds with no deposits.
- Updated the upgraded version of the Assembler trait to use the correct modifiers
- Vassalizing [spoiler]the formless[/spoiler] will now transfer their system to them if you happen to own it.
- Vibrant Storyteller is correctly marked as a Destiny trait for Scholars, not Explorers
- When loading a save, update some modifiers that previously weren't updated.
- You can now use the Astral Jump Astral Action if you have Psionic Jump Drives or Subspace Drives.
- [spoiler]zadigal[/spoiler] is now correctly fired if you declare war with [spoiler]the formless[/spoiler] on their recruitment day
- Fixed AI assigning leaders to Galcom when it shouldn't be possible.
- Fix for crash when running unlock_council_slots effect.
- Added text to system debug tooltip to separate the different lists of modifiers.
- Anomaly view "Research Time" label is hidden when the research time is hidden.
- Changed Change Scientist hotkey in Situation Log anomaly view to G.
- DLC list is now shown in the Cooperative game setup.
- Fixed empire creation UI remaining visible while ACB is open.
- Fixed layout of "no scientists" text in anomaly view.
- Fixed portrait frame appearing to the left of the anomaly UI if you have no science ships with scientists.
- Fixed portrait tooltip in anomaly view incorrectly saying that you can right-click to remove the leader.
- In the anomaly window, if you get a valid scientist while no scientist is selected, that scientist is automatically selected.
- In the anomaly window, the Change Scientist button is disabled if there is no valid scientist available.
- Updated the leader ethics tooltip to mention planetary and sector governor ethics attraction
- Fixed leader XP bar showing the wrong tooltip
- Added a init_effect field to spawn_natural_wormhole effect
- Added additional documentation to 00_base_classes.txt
- Moved events action.504 and .505 to event leader.200 and .201
- Removed initial_effect_custom_loc from agendas. The initial effect's tooltip is now directly built from the initial effect
- The link_wormholes effect can now be used on the bypass scope
- If you are crashing on startup, players have reported that starting Steam, disabling the internet, then loading the game bypasses the issue. Internet can be reenabled afterwards.
- If you are crashing while hosting a multiplayer game on Ubuntu 20.04, switching to Cross Platform multiplayer appears to resolve the issue. It is also not present on Ubuntu 22.04.
WIP Mockup of what were planning. Might not exactly end up looking like this.
Event Chain Subtitles
In the last Dev Diary, we said wed provide a form so you can submit events that you think should have subtitles added to them. Here's a link to a form where you can suggest events for review. Thanks for your assistance!
Whats Next
Were going to continue watching your bug reports and feedback, fixing things, and working on 3.10.2, so you can enjoy the new content the way it was meant to be. Thanks for playing Stellaris! Astral Planes is discounted 10% until November 27th.
[ 2023-11-21 10:00:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community,
Shortly after the release of Astral Planes yesterday, we began receiving reports of players being unable to verify ownership of the new DLC. These reports began as a sporadic issue that gradually worsened as the time passed since release. About an hour after release, the Dev Team identified a configuration issue with the Astral Planes DLC and put together a new build that we believed would resolve this issue for players.
Unfortunately, while this build resolved the DLC Ownership issue for the vast majority of players, there were some players that this fix did not work for, with a higher proportion of those players being Linux and MacOS users. The Stellaris team has spent today digging into the DLC Ownership issue, and working on potential solutions.
We believe that we have now found the root cause of the DLC Ownership issue - a mismatch between the DLC checksum as reported by the DLC and as calculated by the game, and we have come up with a fix that should work for all players. This fix is live now, and should resolve these issues as far as we can reproduce internally.
If after installing this latest update, you still continue to experience issues with verifying DLC Ownership:
- (Windows) Run Steam as an Administrator - exit Steam, right-click the Steam shortcut and click Run as Administrator
- Verify Game Files - In Steam, right-click Stellaris, Properties, Local Files, and Verify Local Files
[ 2023-11-17 12:34:32 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=O544CkFV5ck;full][/previewyoutube] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2534090/Stellaris_Astral_Planes/
Astral Planes is available now!
Take a step into the unknown with Astral Planes, navigating an array of wonders and dangers alike. Travel through Rifts in space and time for a glimpse of strange, new realities. What will you discover, in a universe beyond limits? Astral Planes includes:
- Core Mechanics
- Astral Scars
- New Site Type: Astral Rift
- New Resource: Astral Thread
- Astral Harvesting - Technology to harvest Astral Threads
- Rift Sphere - Technology to explore Astral Rifts Rifts
- "Rift in Space" Situation - Unlocks Rift Sphere tech.
- Random Stage 2 Rift Situation Events
- 30+ Rift Sites - each site contains branching narratives, featuring multiple potential endings and a chance at powerful new rewards
- 8 New Relics
- Astral Actions
- 10 New Astral Actions
- 4 Additional Astral Actions that will swap depending on research (requires Overlord)
- The Formless
- 1 Origin - Riftworld Origin
- 4 Civics
- Hyperspace Speciality
- Dimensional Worship
- Dark Consortium
- Sovereign Guardianship
- New Sounds, Music and Visual Effects
- 3 New Music Tracks from Andreas Waldetoft
- 70+ New Event Pictures
- 80+ New Sound Effects
3.10 "Pyxis" Free Custodian Update
Before you jump into the game, check out the latest from our Custodian Development team: the 3.10 Pyxis Custodian Update! Here is a link to the full patch notes. If you experience bugs or other issues on 3.10 Pyxis, on a new save, without mods, please take the time to fill out a report on the bug report forums! 3.10 Pyxis brings with it a consolidation of Leader Classes, vastly improving leaders usefulness, and addressing some community concerns with regards to the Leader Cap introduced with 3.8 Gemini, as well as introducing a new Council Legitimacy Mechanic, further updates on the Additional Content Browser, and improving the Outliner by introducing tabs to help you manage your late-game Empires. As we mentioned at the 3.9 Caelum release, we softened up the leader cap, as many in the Community were finding it too restrictive to gameplay. At the time, we mentioned this was a temporary solution while we worked on a more comprehensive leader rework. Enter, the Leader Consolidation With leaders becoming more important to your empire following the 3.8 Gemini release alongside Galactic Paragons, there were some rough edges leftover and experiences that could be better. Taking into account our internal vision of how leaders should work, and combining it with feedback weve gathered from the Community during the time since the 3.8 Gemini released, we have put together a system of leaders that we feel will address many concerns, and eliminate or lessen the rough edges and bad experiences. The Leader Consolidation reduces the number of Leader Classes from four to three: Commanders - are the military-focused leaders in your empire. These leaders can lead fleets, armies, be governors or sit on your Empire Council. Officials - are the Administrative class of leaders, and focus on governing your empires planets, maintaining relationships with Federations and the Galactic Community, or can further focus your Empire Council to either diplomacy or internal production Scientists - focus on developing your empires knowledge of the universe, exploration, and discovery, or can govern planets in your Empire (replacing the Assist Research functionality) Each leader can now gain one of four Veterancy Subclasses, allowing you to specialize your leaders even further: Commanders
- Admiral - Focuses on Fleets and general naval combat
- General - Focuses on taking planets and assaulting static defenses - Armies, Planetary Bombardment, Ground Combat, and attacking defensive structures such as Starbases are the Generals forte
- Commissioner - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Martial Law)
- Strategist - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Defense position
- Delegate - Focuses on Federations and the Galactic Community
- Industrialist - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Industry and Development)
- Ambassador - Council Focus (Diplomacy, Espionage, and First Contact), especially suited for the new Minister of State position
- Advisor - Council Focus (Economy)
- Explorer - Focuses on Surveying and Exploration
- Academic - Focuses on Archaeology and Anomalies
- Analyst - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Assist Research)
- Statistician - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Science position
- Ruler and Specialist Pop output: -5%
- Worker and Slave Pop output: +5%
- Crime: -2
- Empire Size from Pops: -2%
- Stability from Soldiers: +2
- Basic, Advanced and Strategic Resources from Jobs: +5%
- Empire Size from Pops: -2%
- Physics, Society and Engineering Research from Jobs: +5%
- Empire Size from Pops: -2%
- Minister of Defense: -25% Naval Capacity
- Minister of State: -25% Diplomatic Weight
- Head of Research: -25% Research Speed
[ 2023-11-16 16:11:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
Astral Planes and the Stellaris 3.10.0 "Pyxis" update are releasing this Thursday, November 16th. Today we've got the preliminary changelogs for your enjoyment.
The Astral Planes Narrative Expansion is available for pre-purchase now, with a 10% discount until November 27th.
Astral Planes Narrative Expansion Features
Our largest story based release yet, Astral Planes focuses on mid to late game exploration content with over 30 Astral Rifts with widely branching storylines. Unlike the relative safety of Archaeology sites, the Rifts you explore will lead to completely different realms of existence, where fundamentals that were certain at home may not always be true.
- Added Astral Scars and Rifts
- Added 30+ Rift Sites
- Each site contains branching narratives, featuring multiple potential endings and a chance at powerful new rewards
- Added Astral Thread Resource
- Added Astral Harvesting and Rift Sphere Technologies
- Added Rift in Space Situation and random Rift Situations.
- Added 30+ Rift Sites
- Added 8 New Relics
- Added 10 Astral Actions, plus 4 additional Astral Actions if you have the Overlord expansion
- Added Riftworld Origin
- Added 4 New Civics
- Hyperspace Specialty
- Dimensional Worship
- Dark Consortium
- Sovereign Guardianship
- Added 3 New Music Tracks from Andreas Waldetoft
- 70+ New Event Pictures
- 80+ New Sound Effects
-
the formless...
3.10.0 Pyxis Update
Features
- Leader Consolidation - see Dev Diary 322 for more details.
- Admirals and Generals have been merged into the Commander, the Military leader class.
- Governors and some Envoy functions have been merged into Officials, the Administrative leader class.
- Officials are now assigned to represent your empire in each of the Galactic Community (or Imperium) and your Federation rather than assigning multiple Envoys.
- Envoys still represent your Empire's overall diplomatic bandwidth, and handle First Contact, Improving and Harming Relations, and Espionage.
- Scientists remain the third, Scientific leader class.
- All leader classes can now govern planets and sectors.
- Military governors apply Martial Law to a planet or sector, which increases worker and slave output at the cost of specialist and ruler output, adds soldiers to the planet or sector, and causes soldiers to increase stability.
- Administrative governors increase general material resource extraction and industrial productivity.
- Scientific governors increase research output on the planet or sector. This replaces the old Assist Research Scientist action, which has been removed.
- Most governor traits now include apply to a lesser extent to the rest of the sector, unless a local planetary governor is overriding them.
- Added the Minister of State for most non-gestalt empires. (Some civics, such as Fanatic Purifiers or Inwards Perfection, remove this position.)
- The Minister of Defense, Research, and State council positions are no longer locked for players with Galactic Paragons, and can be replaced with other council positions when you reorganize your council, though at a cost.
- No Minister of Defense: -25% Naval Capacity
- No Minister of State: -25% Diplomatic Weight
- No Head of Research: -25% Research Speed
- A balance pass has been made on all leader traits and subclasses. Many have changed significantly, and the overall power level has generally been decreased.
- Traits chosen when levelling up will now be biased towards the leader's current position, whether or not you have Galactic Paragons. (i.e., A Scientist that is governing a planet will be more likely to receive leader traits related to planet governance.)
- The classes of all event leaders and paragons, as well as leader themed civics, technologies, and traditions, have been reviewed and adjusted.
- Council Legitimacy now gives bonuses or penalties to council agenda speed.
- Replaced the Recommended Content window with a more full-featured Additional Content Browser.
- The Additional Content Browser increases the clarity and transparency of what various DLCs contain, by letting you preview things like Origins, Civics with full tooltips that include nested concepts, animated Portraits, and Shipsets. It is our hope that this will help you make more informed decisions about DLC purchases. (The Additional Content Browser will only be available on some storefronts, and will not update information without an active internet connection.)
- Added Tabbed Outliner.
- Information is now split across Government, Ships, Politics, and Structures tabs, which will appear as they become relevant to your empire.
- Many event chains now include event chain titles in the event window.
- Added three new planet modifiers: Abundant Geothermal Activity, Subterranean Wildlife, Rich Microflora
- Added four planetary decisions to be able to remove some negative modifiers without having to terraform the planet: Remove Bleak Planet, Add Dayside Farm, Remove Hazardous Weather, Remove Dangerous Wildlife
- A toast message will now appear when a truce expires.
- Clarified tooltips of modifiers that increased leader cap
- Expanded on the Zroni dig site descriptions.
- A notification will now be sent when yoour fleets are unexpectedly forced to decloak
- You can now change the destination of a Leviathan Parade Situation at the cost of some unity.
- Administrative Leaders can no longer serve as the Head of Research.
- Archaeo-Engineers AP now gives +1 Scientist Capacity
- Aristocratic Elite no longer has +20% Governor XP gain, but instead gives a 20% chance for leaders to have a bonus positive and a bonus negative trait.
- Autonomous Drones and Sovereign Circuits now provide +1 Leader Trait Options
- Belligerent Diplomatic Stance now grants -1 External Leader Pool Size in addition to existing effects
- Blocked Inwards Perfectionists and Fanatic Purifiers from having a Minister of State.
- Centralised Command society tech increased to Tier 3
- Changed leader recruitment cost to be a quadratic equation instead of exponential
- Cooperative Diplomatic Stance now grants +1 External Leader Pool Size in addition to existing effects
- Corporate Authority and Corporate Dominion Civic now grant +1 External Leader Pool Size in addition to existing effects
- Council Legitimacy now directly modifies base council agenda speed, at 0% Legitimacy base agenda speed is 50%, at 50% Legitimacy it is 100%, at 100% Legitimacy it is 125%. Empires without Council Legitimacy are treated as if they have 50% Legitimacy for this.
- Decreased the leader XP gain from the Luminary Bloodline trait.
- Democratic Authority now grants +1 Leader Pool Size in addition to existing effects
- Dictatorial Authority now grants +25% Ruler XP and -1 Leader Pool Size in addition to existing effects
- Empires can now support three leaders of each class without using leader capacity. Generic leader capacity has been removed.
- Eternal Vigilance now gives +1 Commander Capacity
- Factions are now more upset if their ethic is not represented on the council or by the empire ruler.
- Galactic Force Projection now gives +1 Commander Capacity, +2 Max Influence from Power Projection, increases Naval Capacity by 100 and Fleet Command Limit by 50
- Gestalt rulers no longer count towards leader capacity
- Heroic Past, Precision Cogs, Pooled Knowledge and Factory Overclocking all now provide +1 Commander, +1 Official and +1 Scientist Capacity.
- Imperial Authority now grants -1 Leader Pool Size in addition to existing effects
- Imperial Cult now grants additional priest jobs to the ruler's homeworld scaling with their level.
- Imperial Prerogative now gives +2 Official Capacity
- Improvements to Mastery of Nature, planet modifier now gives +50% resource districts
- Increased Leadership Conditioning reward to 3,000 XP
- Isolationist Diplomatic Stance now grants -2 External Leader Pool Size in addition to existing effects
- Leader Enhancement policies now increase the starting level of leaders instead of increasing Leader XP gain.
- Leader starting age has once again been increased
- Leaders now have a slightly higher chance to start at a higher level.
- Learning campaign edicts leader xp gain have been reduced
- Mercantile Diplomatic Stance now grants +1 External Leader Pool Size in addition to existing effects
- Naval Tradition federation perk now gives +1 Initial Admiral Level instead of +10% Admiral XP gain.
- Nerve Stapled now gives -100% leader XP gain, if you somehow generate leaders from species with this trait.
- Not having a Head of Research (or gestalt equivalent) will impose a -25% penalty to research speed
- Not having a Minister of Defense imposes a -25% penalty to Naval Capacity.
- Not having a Minister of State (or gestalt equivalent) will impose a -25% penalty to diplomatic weight.
- Opener effect for Synthetics now reduces robot upkeep and robot assembly cost
- Philospher King now only provides +5 Effective Ruler Level
- Players can now build multiple Quantum Catapults.
- Pompous Purists Civic now grants -1 External Leader Pool Size in addition to existing effects
- Pops now have ethics attraction towards the ethics of the local planetary governor
- Rebalanced a number of species traits that affected leader XP gain.
- Rebalanced Aptitude Traditions and Leadership Conditioning
- Rebalanced Feudal Society and Franchising Civics and Shared Destiny AP
- Rebalanced Statecraft traditions
- Rebalanced the Auto-Curating Vault, Vault of Acquisitions, Alpha Hub and Citadel of Faith
- Reduced XP gain from Transcendent Learning
- Removed leader pool increase from Transcendent Learning
- Removed Leader Pool size modifiers from ethics
- Removed leader upkeep modifiers from Embodied Dynamism and Collective Self techs
- Removed the -10% leader hire and upkeep cost from traditions that only applied to a single leader class.
- Replaced the +1 Leader Capacity from Oppressive Autocracy with +1 Commander Capacity
- Reworked the Research Institute, Planetary Supercomputer and Military Academy buildings
- Slightly increased time needed to survey a system.
- Specialist subjects now get +1 capacity of the relevant leader type instead of +20% XP gain for that subject type.
- Species traits that give bonuses or maluses to leader xp gain are now multiples of 10% not 25%.
- Technocracy now gives Expertise traits additional effects for scientists when governing planets/sectors.
- The effects of the Ruthless Competition council position now matches Memory Vaults
- The Khanate Successor origin now boosts military leaders
- The Lord High Admiral council position now gives increased naval capacity instead of increased commander xp gain
- The Minister of Defense and Head of Research are no longer mandatory council positions.
- The Minister of State can be removed by Reorganise Council Agenda.
- The Opinion lost with the Trader Enclaves for canceling a trade deal now scales with size of the deal.
- The traditions that previously gave -10% leader hire and upkeep costs for a given class (e.g. Science Division) now also increases the leader capacity for leaders of that class
- Aptitude Tradition adoption now gives Initial Leader Skill: +1 instead of +1 starting trait to leaders.
- Discovery, Domination, and Supremacy Traditions now increase initial skill level for leaders instead of decreasing upkeep and hire cost.
- Transcendent Learning leader XP gain modifier reduced to +25%
- Transcendent Learning now gives +2 Scientist Capacity
- Universal Transactions now gives +1 Official Capacity and +20% Commercial Pact Efficiency
- Updated five existing planet modifiers: Weak Magnetic Field, Strong Magnetic Field, Asteroid Belt, Natural Beauty, Bleak Planet
- You can only find one promising officer every two years.
- Blocked special event leaders from having backgrounds and homeworlds. Warform was not hanging around with the Romans.
- Fix a case where the leader UI would remain on screen when exiting to main menu
- Fix councilor position triggers related to authority not being evaluated correctly in galaxy creation
- Fix diplo weight tooltip when affected by a resolution category weight modifier
- Fix gestalt leader backgrounds not clearing other leaders' BGs
- Fix scripted fleet order buttons having incomplete tooltips (e.g. Azaryn's terraforming special action)
- Fixed Alien Box event changing getsalt councilor nodes portrait
- Fixed bypasses mapicons always being placed in second position if there is an upgraded starbase in the system, hiding the icon below
- Fixed crash when checking if an invalid system is in sensor range
- Fixed Cultist event chain not having any target to pick planet from if the fleet that attacked was destroyed in the meantime
- Fixed gestalt nodes not having a starting trait
- Fixed leaders with a preset design using the wrong portrait when their species changes without its portrait changing.
- Fixed misaligned buttons and inconsistent tooltips in the Planet View
- Fixed num_owned_relics trigger not displaying its dynamic values in tooltip
- Fixed num_researched_techs_of_tier tooltip not displaying the technology tier
- Fixed random rulers never being generated with origin-locked traits.
- Fixed situation target tooltip not being completely localized
- Fixed Starbases receiving ship modifiers twice
- Fixed the "pick trait" button for recruitable leaders
- Fixed the Inevitable Assimilation tradition for DAs saying you need to adopt Cybernetic traditions twice.
- Fixed UOR ruler not benefiting from other initial skill modifiers.
- Fixed UOR setting ruler level to 4 instead of giving +3 initial levels.
- Leaders excluded from the upkeep cost now correctly produce resources
- Set the base value for percent_of_leader_lifespan to match the leader lifespan define value.
- Subjects now support their Overlords resolutions in the Galactic Community correctly
- The Escape key no longer closes any event windows.
- The first event option for the event Dysfunctional Council now informs you that the leader will be dismissed.
- The Xenophobic Fallen Empire will once again be able to get real mad at you if you border them.
- Worker Coops can no longer be Xenophobic
- You will no longer be able to avoid being synthetically ascended by being an assault army in space.
- The AI will no longer build habitats if they have an uncolonised habitat.
- The AI will prefer building habitats in systems with upgraded starbases unless they have the Void Dweller origin or the Voidborn AP.
- Added game rule for possible_precalc = can_fill_precursor_job
- Added define TRIGGERED_MODIFIER_UPDATE_DELAY, which lets us spread out calculations of triggered modifiers
- Fixed a case where country modifiers would continually recalculate every day
- Added new backgrounds for assembly and organic assembly.
- Added the ability to add an element to the event window specifying the event chain this event is part of
- Archaeological Sites and Astral Rifts mapicons are now colored depending on their exploration state
- Changed the leader cap indicator in the top bar to only display envoys.
- Fixed fleet command limit multipliers not appearing in tooltip if they add up to +100%.
- Improve and Harm Relations monthly values are now shown to two decimal places.
- Improved the tooltips for Agenda Progress.
- removed the notification for leader pool renova
- The leader list now shows the cap for each class
- The tooltip for Agenda Progress now shows modifiers to monthly agenda progress.
- Update the Main Flag button to show the name of the empire (and debug info if you're using Debug view)
- Added a subtitle to all longer event chains.
- Added Event Chain Subtitles for the five original precursors.
- `num_leader_traits` now has a new filter `is_subclass = yes/no/any`
- Add `federation_modifier` and `triggered_federation_modifier` leader trait modifiers
- Add `galcom_modifier` and `triggered_galcom_modifier` leader trait modifiers
- Add `starbase_type` field for starbase components to show the correct text when a tech unlocks it and it's for orbital buildings
- Add alternate_civic_version to swap locked civics w/ authorities
- Add army_modifier and triggered_army_modifier to leader traits
- Add background_planet_modifier and triggered_background_planet_modifier to leader traits
- Add country_
_cap_add modifiers for specific leader class capacities - Add fleet_modifier and triggered_fleet_modifier to leader traits
- Add new on_astral_rift_entered action
- Add piracy_protection_mult modifier
- Add set_completed_rifts command
- Add skill_
_ static modifiers for each class and the "navy", "army", "planet_governor", "sector_governor" and "background_planet_governor" cases - Add specialist_subject_conversion_time_mult modifier
- Added a debug ImGui view to the console - So long, and thanks for all the fish <3 (Editor's Note: @MonzUn thank you for all your hard work and best of luck with your new endeavours!)
- Added army_damage_empire_sprawl_penalty_mult modifier
- Added army_damage_taken_mult and army_morale_damage_taken_mult modifiers
- Added astral_rift_difficulty_add modifier
- Added can_spawn_astral_rift trigger
- Added council_legitimacy >=
country scope trigger to check an empire's council legitimacy. - Added council_legitimacy trigger to check council legitimacy in script
- Added councilor_modifier, triggered_councilor_modifier and force_councilor_trait to leader traits and removed councilor_trait and is_councilor_trait_for_ruler.
- Added create_astral_rift effect
- Added distance_to_capital trigger
- Added dump_astralrifts command
- Added dynamic_capacity parameter to strategic resources
- Added export_modifier_duration_to_variable effect
- Added freeze_leader_age effect to allow leaders to stop aging
- Added in_place_of parameter to spawn_astral_rift
- Added in_place_of parameter to spawn_wormhole effect to use the coordinates of an existing spatial object
- Added inline scripts support for triggers
- Added is_assigned_to_galcom script trigger.
- Added is_bypass_type trigger
- Added leader_lifespan_mult modifier
- Added leader_starting_age_add, leader_starting_age_mult, ruler_starting_age_add, ruler_starting_age_mult, heir_starting_age_add, heir_starting_age_mult, and
_starting_age_add and _starting_age_mult (for example commander_starting_age_mult) - Added mod_
_lifespan_add and mod_ _lifespan_mult (ex: mod_scientist_lifespan_add) - Added new modifiers for leader initial level
- Added on_build_queued and on_build_unqueued effects for mega structures
- Added on_truce_end on_action
- Added planet_max_branch_office_buildings_self_add empire modifier
- Added planet_non_artificial_max_buildings_add modifier
- Added refill_astral_rift_pool command
- Added research_sharing_mult modifier that increases the effectiveness of a country's research agreements.
- Added ruler_skill_add modifier to increase or decrease the effective level of an empire's ruler for the purposes of their council position modifiers.
- Added scripted triggers prefers_scientist_governors and prefers_commander_governors which determine the class of your homeworld governor on game start.
- Added sector_modifier and triggered_sector_modifier to leader traits.
- Added spawn_astral_scar effect
- Added spawn_beyond_gravity_well parameter to spawn_planet effect
- Added split_astral_scar and copy_survey_data scripted effects
- Added the is_site_locked = yes/no trigger for archaeology sites.
- Added the set_council_position_to_council script effect to place a council position in the council.
- Added trigger leader_lifespan to calculate leader lifespan depending on LEADER_LIFESPAN_DEATH_CHANCE_AGE, MOD_LEADER_LIFESPAN_ADD and MOD_LEADER_LIFESPAN_MULT. Updated script values referencing this define to use the trigger instead.
- Added triggered_system_modifier to leader traits.
- Added X_tech_cost_mult modifiers
- Armies can now have an army_modifier
- can_build_STATION_TYPE_around can now also have astral_rift as from scope
- country_leader_cap_add now increases the capacity for all leader classes
- create_message effect now has a recipient parameter to allow to have another recipient than the automatically resolved one
- create_mining_station and create_research_station now support deposit holder scopes
- create_pop effect now has a count parameter to spawn multiple pops at the same time
- created `can_be_assigned_to_federation` and `can_be_assigned_to_galactic_community` abilities for leader
- Created destroy_astral_rift effect
- Created is_astral_scar trigger
- Created on_astral_rift_exploration_complete on_action to count the number of explored astral rift
- Created set_next_astral_rift_event debug description to more easily keep track of events branching
- Events using the leader event window can now hide not allowed options using hide_option_if_not_allowed
- Fixed fleet scope command limit modifiers not being applied if the fleet doesn't have a leader.
- Fixed leader trait planet and system modifiers functioning identically to the regular modifiers.
- Fleet and megastructure modifiers from governor skill are only applied from unoccupied planets owned by the same country as the fleet/megastructure.
- Hiring / assigning councilors is now done based on a scripted value instead of hardcoded in the ai
- is_surveyed can now be used on astral rifts
- Leader trait planet_modifier and triggered_planet_modifier now support all leader types. Removed assist_research_planet_modifier.
- Leaders class no longer rely on a hard coded type, and are fully dynamic and based on leaders abilities and defined entirely in the class file
- Megastructures on_build_start/cancel/complete now use the constructing fleet as root if it's being built by a construction ship
- MetaScripts (Effects,Triggers,Values) can now substitute an argument by the value of another with $ARG1|ARG2$
- num_buildings effect now support's building category.
- on_destroying_station is now also called when an orbital station around an Astral Rift is destroyed
- Removed is_ruler and is_heir checks from leader potential add on traits, instead using the can_leader_get_normal_trait game rule.
- Removed some unused trait parameters.
- Removed the DLC lock on unlock_council_selection = yes
- Replace diplo_weight_envoys_mult and envoy_cohesion_effect_mult modifiers with diplo_weight_delegate_mult and delegate_cohesion_effect_mult
- Replaced LEADER_AGE_DEATH_CHANCE_AGE with LEADER_LIFESPAN_DEATH_CHANCE_AGE
- Replaced LEADER_AGE_DEATH_CHANCE_INC with LEADER_LIFESPAN_DEATH_CHANCE_INC
- Replaced LEADER_AGE_HIGH_DEATH_CHANCE_AGE with LEADER_LIFESPAN_HIGH_DEATH_CHANCE_AGE
- Replaced LEADER_AGE_HIGH_DEATH_CHANCE_INC with LEADER_LIFESPAN_HIGH_DEATH_CHANCE_INC
- Replaced subclass_background_icon and destiny_background_icon with background_icon.
- Replaced tenth_of_leader_lifespan script value with the more generic percent_of_leader_lifespan.
- Replaced the modifier leader_age with leader_lifespan_add.
- Replaced the required = yes/no parameter for council positions with the optional trigger in the country scope.
- Reworked has_envoy_task to work with any leader class
- Separate Scientist `can_research` into more granular capability definitions
- set_surveyed can now be used on astral rifts
- Situations can now have multiple title selected from triggers.
- SpawnWormhole effect now has a parameter graphics_entity_name to change graphics
- Updated leader trait documentation.
[ 2023-11-14 12:00:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
The Stellaris 3.10.0 Pyxis update will be released alongside the Astral Planes Narrative Expansion on Thursday, November 16th. The expansion has a 10% discount until November 27th.
[previewyoutube=QlNR1ey4bpk;full][/previewyoutube]
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2534090/Stellaris_Astral_Planes
Today well have an extra dev diary reviewing some of the features the Custodian Team has been working on.
Preliminary release notes will be posted next Tuesday, with final release notes posted on Thursday alongside the release.
Let's get to it!
Leader Consolidation
We introduced the idea of the Leader Consolidation back in Dev Diary #307 and then gave an update in Dev Diary #316. Today well go in deeper detail regarding the changes that will be coming in 3.10.0. To recap from DD#316, but with the new subclass effects included:
Admirals and Generals have been merged into the Commander, the Military leader class. Admiral and General will remain as veteran classes, with the following foci:
- Admiral - Focuses on Fleets and general naval combat
- Ship Weapon Damage: +5%
- Ship Fire Rate: +5%
- Ship Disengage Chance: +5%
- General - Focuses on taking planets and assaulting static defenses - Armies, Planetary Bombardment, Ground Combat, and attacking defensive structures such as Starbases are the Generals forte
- Ship Damage Against Starbases: +5%
- Ship Orbital Bombardment Damage: +5%
- Army Damage: +5%
- Commissioner - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Martial Law)
- Planet Effects:
- +2 Soldier Jobs
- Sector Effects:
- +1 Soldier Jobs
- Planet Effects:
- Strategist - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Defense position
- Military Ship Build Speed: +5%
The old Governors and some Envoy functions have been merged into Officials, the Administrative leader class.
- Delegate - Focuses on Federations and the Galactic Community
- GalCom Effects: +5% Diplomatic Weight
- Federation Effects: +0.5 Monthly Cohesion
- Industrialist - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Industry and Development)
- Planet Effects:
- Resources from Specialist Jobs: +5%
- Pop Amenities Usage: -10%
- Sector Effects:
- Resources from Specialist Jobs: +2.5%
- Pop Amenities Usage: -5%
- Planet Effects:
- Ambassador - Council Focus (Diplomacy, Espionage, and First Contact), especially suited for the new Minister of State position
- Country Trust Growth: +5%
- Advisor - Council Focus (Economy)
- Pop Upkeep: -5%
- Trade Value: +5%
Scientists remain the third, Scientific leader class. Veteran Classes:
- Explorer - Focuses on Surveying and Exploration
- Survey Speed: +10%
- Anomaly Discovery Chance: +10%
- Academic - Focuses on Archaeology and Anomalies
- Anomaly Research Speed: +10%
- Archaeology Excavation Speed: +10%
- Astral Rift Exploration Speed: +10%
- Analyst - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Assist Research)
- Planet Effects:
- Research from Jobs: +10%
- Sector Effects:
- Research from Jobs: +5%
- Statistician - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Science position
- Research Speed: +5%
Governors
With the removal of the Governor leader class, weve now allowed all leader classes to govern planets and sectors. Each leader class focuses on a different aspect of governance:
- Officials are better suited to be generalists and governing your resource extraction and industrial worlds.
- Scientists are better suited to governing research worlds, which has replaced the Assist Research functionality that the science ship formerly had.
- Commanders are better suited to govern recently conquered worlds and those with a high level of crime.
The modifiers for each leader class when governing. These are multiplied by the leaders level. Each leader class also has a veteran subclass dedicated to governance, which is required to gain governor veteran traits.
Many of the various traits from the Industrialist (Governor), Pioneer (Governor), Protector (General), and Analyst (Scientist) have been distributed throughout the various governing subclasses in the rework.
Representatives and Emissaries
In addition to the Minister of State Council position that most non-Gestalt empires now have at the start of the game. Officials can now be assigned as Federation Representatives and Galactic Community Emissaries instead of Envoys. An Official assigned to one of these positions gives the same effects as a number of Envoys equal to their level did back before 3.10. Thus, your envoys are now freed to improve or harm relations with other empires or build spy networks in them.
The Minister of State position provides several bonuses to your envoys. Certain Civics (currently Inwards Perfection and Fanatic Purifiers) block access to the Minister of State position and will instead start with their Civic Council Position unlocked. As mentioned above, as not having a Minister of State will impart a -25% Diplomatic Weight penalty, weve reduced the penalty for the Isolationist Diplomatic Stance from -50% to -25%.
For Officials that are assigned to either the GalCom or your Federation, there is now a subclass and variety of veteran traits that can be used in these assignments.
Admirals, Generals and Commanders
As mentioned above, weve combined Admirals and Generals into the Commander leader class. Broadly speaking, their subclass traits were assigned as follows:
- Aggressor -> Admiral
- Tactician -> Admiral
- Strategist -> Strategist
- Invader -> General
- Protector -> Split between General and Commissioner
- Marshal -> Split between Strategist (army-related traits) and Ambassador (espionage-related traits)
Council Legitimacy
Back in 3.8 we added Council Legitimacy. Although it had no mechanical effects, it was a good step to represent the degree to which factions in your empire approve of how the empire is run, the council, empire policies and so on. In 3.10, having high Council Legitimacy will give a bonus to Council Agenda Speed (capping at +25% at 100% Legitimacy) and having low Council Legitimacy will give a penalty to Council Agenda Speed (capping at -50% at 0% Legitimacy). For modders, these values are determined by defines. Since Council Legitimacy is a weighted sum of the approval of each faction multiplied by their support in the empire, this means that empires with relatively few factions (each of which have high approval) should manage to pass Agendas more quickly.
For owners of Galactic Paragons, weve made the Minister of Defense, Head of Research and new Minister of State council positions no longer mandatory. Instead, when you choose to Reorganize the Council, these positions will be removed and can be reselected, much like Civic and Enclave Council Positions. However, each of these positions will have their own penalties if they are not present and staffed.
- Minister of Defense: -25% Naval Capacity
- Minister of State: -25% Diplomatic Weight
- Head of Research: -25% Research Speed
Civics
Weve rebalanced the majority of civics that were leader related or themed, and Ill leave you with a few examples. As part of this, we've also changed effects that previously made it too easy to support a near-infinite number of vassals.
Traditions & Ascension Perks
While reworking leader classes and traits, weve also gone through and rebalanced leader adjacent tradition trees and ascension perks: Aptitude
- Opener: Swapped +1 Trait on leaders for +1 Trait Selection when leveling up.
- Finisher: Replaced effects with +1 Commander, +1 Official and +1 Scientist Cap
- The Empire Needs You: No longer increases Leader Pool Size
- Specialist Training: Swapped +25% Leader XP gain for +1 Leader Pool Size
- Psychological Profiling: No longer reduces the number of negative traits leaders can have
- Healthcare Program: Swapped +20 Leader Lifespan for -1 Max Negative Traits
- Champions of the Empire: Replaced effects with +1 Leader Initial Level.
- Science Division: Replaced Scientist Cost and Upkeep modifiers with +1 Scientist Capacity and +1 Scientist Initial Level.
- Colonial Viceroys: Replaced Governor Cost and Upkeep modifiers with +1 Official Capacity and +1 Official Initial Level.
- Rise to the Occasion: Now provides +1 Commander, +1 Official and +1 Scientist Cap for every 3 Rivals.
- Opener and Gravitas: Now affect Officials assigned to GalCom, not Envoys.
- Opener: Increased Edict Fund from 20 to 50.
- Finisher: Replaced effects with -5% Empire Size
- Constitutional Focus: Increased Council Agenda Speed to 25% from 10%
- Immutable Directives: Increased Agenda Duration to 25% from 10%
- Amongst Peers: Replaced effects with Councilor gain 150 XP per Level when an Agenda is completed
- Shared Benefits: Replaced effects with +1 Effective Councilor Level
- War Games: Replaced Admiral Cost and Upkeep modifiers with +1 Commander Capacity and +1 Commander Initial Level.
- Resistance is Frugal: Removed modifiers for Generals
- Non-Machine Opener: Replaced effects with -25% Roboticist Upkeep and -25% Robot Upkeep
- Archaeo-Engineers: Added +1 Scientist Capacity
- Galactic Force Projection: Reworked, now increases Influence from Power Projection by 2, gives +1 Commander Capacity, +100 Naval Capacity and +50 Fleet Capacity.
- Eternal Vigilance: Added +1 Commander Capacity
- Imperial Prerogative: Added +2 Official Capacity
- Transcendent Learning: Now provides +2 Scientist Capacity and +25% Leader XP gain
- Universal Transactions: Added +1 Official Capacity and +20% Commercial Pact Effectiveness
The Additional Content Browser
We often see threads asking exactly whats in each of our DLCs. In an effort to improve the clarity of what youre getting with each release, weve expanded the Recommended Content element thats been in the game for a while, and made some improvements. The Recommended Content element gave brief descriptions of the various DLCs, but left a lot of questions. Weve replaced this with a more robust Additional Content Browser that can draw information directly from game files, providing much more detailed and accurate preview information. Hopefully this will help you make more informed decisions about DLC purchases.
Concepts in Tooltips are fully supported in the additional content browser.
Portraits, ship sets, megastructures, and screenshots can be shown on the left hand side. Pack details and tooltip-able lists go on the right. The Additional Content Browser will only be available on some storefronts, and will not update information without an active internet connection.
Outliner Improvements
Another bit of feedback weve gotten a lot is that the outliner has gotten cumbersome over the years. While weve added some ability to customize it in past releases, in 3.10.0 were adding Outliner Tabs. In this first version of the tabbed outliner, we have four tabs: Government, Ships, Politics, and Structures. These tabs will appear in the outliner once theyre relevant. Notification bubbles can be activated on the tabs to let you know if theres something of interest on them. Green ones are for non-urgent things like a planet got colonized and has been added to the Government tab, while red ones are a call to action, like your science ship has no scientist.
The OUN Avamdur is leaderless. I should do something about that. In future releases, we plan on exploring some more ideas we had to make the Outliner more customizable and even more useful.
Event Chain Subtitles
Finally, we custodians have also added a small new quality of life to help you keep track of what events belong to what chain! This new subtitle can be manually added to events and when clicked it will bring you to the relevant situation log. Since these have to be added manually however we will be asking for your help to hunt down any event chains you feel should be tracked this way but arent once the patch is out. We should have a form available in the dev diary two weeks from now, after the 3.10.0 release.
Whats Next?
This dev diary was a few days early so we could get this information to you before the 3.10.0 Pyxis and Astral Planes release. Preliminary release notes will be posted next Tuesday, with final release notes posted on Thursday alongside the release. (Replacing the normal dev diary scheduled for the 16th.) Regular dev diaries will resume the week after, on November 23rd. See you then!
[ 2023-11-10 14:00:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello again,
Gary from Abrakam Entertainment here to talk some more about the upcoming expansion, Astral Planes. If you haven't yet, you might want to read the first two posts: Rifts and Scars, and Astral Actions.
Astral Planes will release on November 16th for US$/19.99!
Buy before November 27th for a 10% discount!
[previewyoutube=QlNR1ey4bpk;full][/previewyoutube]
Astral Planes includes:
- Core Mechanics
- Astral Scars
- New Site Type: Astral Rift
- New Resource: Astral Thread
- Astral Harvesting - Technology to harvest Astral Threads
- Rift Sphere - Technology to explore Astral Rifts Rifts
- "Rift in Space" Situation - Unlocks Rift Sphere tech.
- Random Stage 2 Rift Situation Events
- 30+ Rift Sites - Each site contains branching narratives, featuring multiple potential endings and a chance at powerful new rewards.
- New Relics - Astral Planes features new Relics, from the Infinity Root to The Continuum, featuring 8 new Relics in total.
- Astral Actions
- 10 New Astral Actions
- 4 Additional Astral Actions (requires Overlord)
- The Formless
- Riftworld Origin - start with an active Astral Rift in your home system
- 4 New Civics
- Hyperspace Speciality
- Dimensional Worship
- Dark Consortium
- Sovereign Guardianship
- New Sounds, Music and Visual Effects
- 3 New Music Tracks from Andreas Waldetoft
- 70+ New Event Pictures
- 80+ New Sound Effects
New Origin - Riftworld
Riftworld is what we consider our 'launchpad' Origin for this expansion. If you want to get right into what Astral Planes is all about, this is where you might want to start. Riftworld is the only way that a full-blown Astral Rift will appear at map generation. As you may remember, all other Rifts are formed from Astral Scars that open over time throughout the course of the game. In the Riftworld, you have had one looming over your home planet as long as your society can remember.
Why is it there, and what significance does it have? You'll have accelerated access to Astral Rift technology with this Origin, so you'll be able to find out. Being so closely connected to worlds beyond the Rifts, you'll also possess some general attunement to the planes and enjoy several bonuses that make exploring them both more likely, and less dangerous.
Hyperspace Specialty Civic
Debug tooltips intentionally left on so you can read the Council position descriptions. Hyperspace Specialty encompasses one of the core themes of the Astral Planes: the manipulation of time and space. Gotta go fast? This might be for you. This civic will set you on the fast track for Hyperlane research, provides some extra sublight speed, and boosts your Physics research. Physics research is another recurring theme in the Astral Planes - observing many of the phenomena inside of the Rifts will give new insights to your scientists. You'll also have a boost to planet sensor range, which will start you with some greater understanding of your initial surroundings.
Dimensional Worship Civic
There is a spiritual aspect to the Astral Planes that can be ignored, but not if you choose this Civic. At each place you discover a weakness in the boundaries between dimensions, you have the opportunity to build a shrine to other worlds. You'll also get a bonus to Astral Rifts appearing (which stacks with the Riftworld Origin), One area we enjoyed in developing this new content was getting the chance to explore the new design space introduced by the systems in Galactic Paragons, which in this case can gear your priests to have an additional affinity toward Physics research.
Dark Consortium Civic
Dark Matter is a material which makes up 'the nothing' throughout various dimensions, and we thought it interesting to include an option to play as a society which is deeply attuned to its utilization. The Dark Consortium is a type of Civic that cannot be removed* after the game starts, as it adds some significant changes to your society. Not only do you begin with a Dark Matter deposit in your home system, you already have the capability to harvest it. *Edit for clarification: Dark Consortium is a bit unique here. If you start with the Dark Consortium Civic, it can never removed. However, you can add it once you research Dark Matter Drawing, but once you use its Council Agenda to obtain Dark Matter technologies, it can then never be removed. Sorry about any confusion there. First, you'll have access to a set of new Edicts which have Dark Matter as a cost.
Dark Matter Forging and Dark Matter Unravelling are global production benefits which will increase your monthly Alloy and Energy generation, respectively. Baryonic Insight is yet another way to boost your monthly Physics research. Investing in Shadow Matrix provides advantages in Encryption, Codebreaking, and Infiltration Levels. Toward the late-game, you'll also have the opportunity to activate a Council Agenda which will unlock one of the Dark Matter technologies at random, a privilege previously only available if you were able to 'borrow' it from one of the Fallen Empires. Its Council position provides a way for you to generate even more Dark Matter, without having to find new sources of harvest.
Sovereign Guardianship Civic
Another Civic which cannot be added or removed, the Sovereign Guardianship may seem a bit out of left-field in the Astral Planes. It is very much the opposite of what you generally want to do regarding exploring the universe and other dimensions. This is for those who prefer to develop a 'tall' build, which should be clear by the heavy penalties introduced by expanding too much. Those penalties are offset by some juicy defensive bonuses, including a new Starbase Module called the Reloading Bay which improves the efficiency of Starbase weaponry. You'll also be given access to a unique Edict which can convert your potentially languishing Influence into Unity. We thought it important to provide as many playstyle options as possible with Astral Planes, even if it isn't necessarily themed to the new content. Feel free to turtle up, if you wish.
Pre-Scripted Empires and new species Portrait
Rounding out some of the extra content we've included in Astral Planes, we have two new pre-scripted Empires. Feel free to totally ignore these if you prefer to always make your own species, but you might be interested in a quick start into the new content. For that, we recommend: The Certeran Covenant (New Portrait)
When a Certeran dies, it is believed that their essence feeds back through a gateway into the astral planes. In this way, they are assured of a life after death, though what form that may take remains a mystery. A strict moral code is enforced to keep the population aligned in this belief; no pious Certeran wants to wander eternity alone. The bravest of their explorers now search for rifts in space and time, driven to answer their society's most important question: Where do you go when you die? Here we have a brand new Humanoid species portrait for you. This portrait will be available for use in any species you create, not just the Certerans. The Certeran Empire represents the ultimate 'jump start' into the Astral Planes. Their boosts to physics research will make it much easier to obtain requisite technologies for exploring Rifts, and Dimensional Worship will allow you to gain Unity while you do it. Notably, their Ascensionist Civic (previously from Utopia) will become available to anyone who owns Astral Planes as well. Guardianship of Nyrr
The typical Nyrrian lifecycle lasts nearly two hundred years. Incubating for decades in sanctuaries below the burning sands of their home planet, only one in a hundred eggs will hatch, and only one in a thousand hatchlings will crawl their way to safety. Upon coming of age, all Nyrrians swear a blood oath to protect their sanctuaries with their lives. To witness the death of another Nyrrian from unnatural causes is the greatest shame imaginable; the values of preservation and vigilance are etched into every facet of Nyrrian culture. To breach the walls of any city on Nyrra is nigh impossible, and none alive can remember when the last brick fell. The most stalwart defenders now carry this ethos to the stars. Here we are showcasing the new Sovereign Guardianship Civic in metaphorical turtle form. This will be a good way for you to test out this Civic without having to think too hard about exactly how you'd like to customize it. Pre-scripted empires are really one of the best tools for both casual play and roleplay, and we wanted to make sure we included a couple of those for this new content.
What is the story of the Astral Planes?
Well, first of all, yes there is an overarching story but we don't want to reveal too much. Of course, the Riftworld Origin has its own narrative to weave. Beyond that, regardless of your Origin, there is something else going on. Maybe you'll encounter it, and maybe you won't. If you continue to explore beyond the Rifts, it's sure to find you sooner or later. It will be your choice on how to handle what you find.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading this far, and we're really looking forward to letting everyone experience what we've done with this expansion. We've poured an incredible amount of effort into its development, and Paradox has been with us every step of the way in making sure it meets the standards you expect from the game. We don't think you'll be disappointed. Hope to see you there - in the Astral Planes.
Next Week
Eladrin taking the mic. We're going to have another dev diary tomorrow, providing expanded details on some of the Custodian changes in the 3.10.0 "Pyxis" update. (Leader Consolidation, Council Legitimacy, the Additional Content Browser, the Tabbed Outliner, and Event Chain Subtitles.)
Astral Planes can be Pre-Purchased on Steam now!
[ 2023-11-09 12:00:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Astral Planes will be available on November 16th! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2534090/Stellaris_Astral_Planes/ [previewyoutube=QlNR1ey4bpk;full][RDA trailer][/previewyoutube] Pre-Purchase Now on Steam! Astral Planes offers you the chance to chart your own path as you travel through Rifts in space and time for a glimpse of strange, new realities. What will you discover, in a universe beyond limits? The Stellaris team has been working with Abrakam Entertainment since October 2022, and they've been working on Astral Planes in close collaboration with the rest of the Stellaris team and we are excited to show you what theyve been working on all this time!
What are Astral Rifts?
In the galaxy, there are points at which the boundaries of space and time are weaker than others. Once discovered, these will appear as Astral Scars. Astral Scars are not large enough to explore on their own, but can leak material into our galaxy that might be of some use to your empire.
An Astral Scar After a time, these Scars will become unstable and blossom into a full-grown Astral Rift. Once you have an Astral Rift in your space, your scientists will begin studying how to explore the rift. Eventually, their studies will lead you to the Rift Sphere technology, allowing you to lower a scientist down into the rift and explore the dimension on the other side.
A fully formed Astral Rift Fully grown Astral Rifts will start appearing in the midgame, offering more exploration opportunities than ever before in Stellaris. After your Empire develops the Rift Sphere technology, you can begin to explore any Astral Rifts that exist within your space. Similar to Archaeology Sites, over time your Scientist will report back their findings and other events that happen on the other side of the rift. Unlike Archaeology Sites, Astral Rift explorations offer branching choices that can affect the outcome of the Rift. These decisions each have a difficulty - you may choose the safe option to protect your Scientists, or gamble that what theyre trying will be successful.
Nearly every rift contains some sort of unique reward, from new Faction Modifiers, Relics, Planetary Decisions and even Leaders if you make the right choices, and provided your Scientists survive those choices.
Astral Planes includes:
Core Mechanics
- Astral Scars
- New Site Type: Astral Rift
- New Resource: Astral Thread
- Astral Harvesting - Technology to harvest Astral Threads
- Rift Sphere - Technology to explore Astral Rifts Rifts
- "Rift in Space" Situation - Unlocks Rift Sphere tech.
- Random Stage 2 Rift Situation Events
- 30+ Rift Sites - Each site contains branching narratives, featuring multiple potential endings and a chance at powerful new rewards.
- New Relics - Astral Planes features new Relics, from the Infinity Root to The Continuum, featuring 8 new Relics in total.
- Astral Actions
- 10 New Astral Actions
- 4 Additional Astral Actions (requires Overlord)
- The Formless
- Riftworld Origin - start with an active Astral Rift in your home system
- 4 New Civics
- Hyperspace Speciality
- Dimensional Worship
- Dark Consortium
- Sovereign Guardianship
- New Sounds, Music and Visual Effects
- 3 New Music Tracks from Andreas Waldetoft
- 70+ New Event Pictures
- 80+ New Sound Effects
Threads and Actions
Astral Rifts are tears in space and time, and at the edge of a tear, you can always find a few threads. These threads are condensed filaments of space-time itself, and can be used to alter the shape of space and behavior of time in our own universe. Enter, Astral Actions: Over time your scientists will develop new ways to use these threads, from using them to further physics research or to create new Astral Rifts, to using them to attract fleets of interdimensional beings and shifting fleets to another dimension. Overall, there are a total of 10 unique Astral Actions (plus an additional 4 Actions that require Overlord) that can be performed provided you have enough Astral threads. Some are infinitely repeatable, while others can only be performed once, or a limited number of times.
Hyperspace Specialty Civic
The manipulation of space and time is one of the core themes in Astral Planes. With the Hyperspace Specialty Civic, you start on the fast lane with hyperlane research. Effects:
- Guaranteed Research Option: Hyperspace Breach Points
- Low Intel on all systems within 3 Hyperlanes of your home system
- Planet Sensor Range: +2
- Sublight Speed: +10%
- Research Speed (Physics): +15%
- Hyperlane Registrar Starbase Building: +1 Stability per Leader Level
Dimensional Worship Civic
Empires with the Dimensional Worship Civic believe divine existence lies beyond the folds of space and time. Systems containing instabilities in spacetime should be considered sacred, and are a source of pilgrimage and research. Dimensional Worship can construct a Dimensional Shrine starbase building in systems containing an Astral Rift or Scar, Wormhole, L-Gate or Shroud tunnel. Effects:
- Dimensional Shrine: +10 Unity
- Monthly Astral Threads: +25%
- Astral Rift chance in owned systems: +100%
- Rare Technologies appear at 1.1x the normal rate
- Priests provide +0.20 Physics Research per Leader Level
Dark Consortium Civic
Empires with the Dark Consortium Civic have an inherent and deep understanding of the nature of the universe, which allowed them to harness the unique properties of Dark Matter before the discovery of the Hyperdrive. The Dark Consortium Civic cannot be added or removed after game start. Effects:
- Start with Dark Matter Drawing already researched
- Access to 4 unique Edicts that cost Dark Matter
- Access to the Dark Matter Breakthrough Council Agenda
- Researchers generate +0.02 Dark Matter per Leader Level
- Dark Matter Forging: +5% Monthly Alloys
- Dark Matter Unravelling: +10% Monthly Energy Credits
- Baryonic Insight: +10% Monthly Physics Research
- Shadow Matrix: +1 Encryption, +1 Codebreaking, Maximum Infiltration Level: +10
Sovereign Guardianship Civic
Empires with the Sovereign Guardianship Civic started as a collection of warring tribes and have developed a historical preference for entrenched territories and defensive posturing. Now united, they set out into the stars with this same philosophy, aiming to keep their borders solid and tensions low. The Sovereign Guardianship Civic cannot be added or removed after game start. Effects:
- Unlocks Fanatic Guardians defensive armies
- Access to Reloading Bay Starbase Module
- Access to Inner Focus Edict
- Empire Size from Planets: +100%
- Empire Size from Branch Offices: +100%
- Empire Size from Systems: +150%
- Empire Size from Pops: -50%
- Empire Size from Districts: -50%
- Diplomatic Weight: +20%
- Unity from Soldiers: +1
- Defense Army Damage: +10%
- Starbase Hull Points: +5%
- Starbase Armor: +5%
- Shield Hit Points in Friendly Systems: +5%
- Ship Fire Rate in Friendly Systems: +5%
- Accuracy in Friendly Systems: +5%
Riftworld Origin
With the Riftworld Origin, your species evolved with an Astral Rift looming over your homeworld. After studying the object from afar for millennia, the recent advent of starship technology will finally allow you to reach out and discover what secrets it might hold.
Effects:
- Homeworld: Ancient Crater Archaeology Site
- Owned Systems: Chance for Astral Rifts +100%
- Astral Rift Exploration Speed: +25%
- Astral Rift Fail Probability: -50%
What is the story of the Astral Planes?
Well, first of all, yes there is an overarching story but we don't want to reveal too much. Of course, the Riftworld Origin has its own narrative to weave. Beyond that, regardless of your Origin, there is something else going on. Maybe you'll encounter it, and maybe you won't. If you continue to explore beyond the Rifts, it's sure to find you sooner or later. It will be your choice on how to handle what you find. Astral Planes will release on November 16th, and is currently available to Pre-Purchase on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2534090/Stellaris_Astral_Planes
[ 2023-11-08 16:00:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Atmaz
Hello!
Gary from Abrakam Entertainment here.
Last week we talked about what Astral Rifts were, how they were formed, and what you could find in them. We also briefly mentioned something nebulous about a new resource called Astral Threads and what you can do with them. We call these, simply enough, Astral Actions.
Let's dig a little deeper.
Astral Threads
Conceptually, an Astral Thread is the material that binds the boundaries between dimensions. In areas where these boundaries are weakest, these filaments of existence unravel to the point at which they become tangible objects that can be harvested. This unique resource can be put to various uses should you possess the proper technologies and level of attunement to the Astral Planes. You'll first be able to gather Astral Threads when you encounter an Astral Scar, which you'll remember from our last post are minor tears in space-time present at map-generation. As when discovering other rare resources such as Dark Matter or Rare Crystals, you'll be prompted to begin researching a new technology: Astral Harvesting.
This means you can begin gathering this material before you ever set foot inside of a Rift. But what can you do with it?
Discovery Tab
First, let's cover where you can find the Astral Actions. We have taken this opportunity to create a new category on the sidebar: Discoveries. This category now contains all Relics and Astral Actions you have acquired. This means, of course, that Relics and Minor Artifact actions have been removed from the Society Management Category. With the addition of Astral Actions, more Relics, and a particular action that can manipulate Relics, this made practical sense to do. Another extra feature we've added here is that you can now click Minor Artifacts or Astral Threads in the topbar dropdown to move immediately to this category - similar to how you can click the other resources to open the Galactic Market.
Astral Actions
Generally, these are various empire-wide effects that you can activate by spending Astral Threads. Some actions are repeatable on a cooldown, while others have a limited amount of uses. All actions generally have something to do with manipulating space-time or interacting with other dimensions. When you first look here, you won't have many actions you can do at all. You'll need to attune yourself to the Planes in order to master their use. In other words, the more Astral Rifts you explore, the more actions you will unlock. After exploring 5 Astral Rifts, you will have unlocked all possible actions. Generally, the higher the attunement level required, the more powerful the action.
Thread Count
Initially, you will start at an Astral Thread cap of 500. This seems quite low, but increasing this cap comes naturally with increasing your level of attunement. With each Rift explored, you'll bump the cap up by 250. There is also a special structure called the Astral Siphon you can unlock which can increase the cap even further. Many actions will increase in cost as you use them, so you'll need to be sure to increase your cap if you intend on using these routinely. Let's show a few examples.
Astral Splitting
Astral Splitting will be one of the first actions available to you. Every 10 years, if you have the available space, you can utilize Astral Threads to tear at the space-time within your own borders and open a new Rift. Astral Rifts cannot open if one already exists in an adjacent system, so keep that in mind. This is an example of an action that has both a limited number of uses, and an increasing cost. All 'limited use' actions are organized on the bottom row of the Astral Action tab. This action is useful if you haven't gotten very lucky in your explorations and found as many natural Rifts as you'd hoped.
Dimensional Lock
Here we have an example of a more powerful action with unlimited uses. The Dimensional Lock allows you, for the first time in Stellaris, to prevent movement across wormholes and other bypasses. This will last for 10 years, and only those with whom you have Open Border agreements can pass through. Have a vulnerable back door into the heart of your empire? This might be worth taking advantage of. Note: This won't work on the Shroud Tunnel in the Shroudwalker enclave, or the main L-Gate in its cluster. It can only block links between two exact points in space, not nexus points. To be clear, it will still work on Shroud Tunnels created from beacons, and normal L-Gates.
Hyper Relay Insight
There are a few actions that give bonuses to features from the Overlord expansion, specifically for Hyper Relays and Quantum Catapults.
If you have not yet researched Hyper Relay technology, Hyper Relay Insight will give you a boost to get started in doing so. Once researched, this action will become something entirely new: Flash Forging Hyper Relays
Flash Forge Hyper Relays
This action is unique in that it is the only one that costs another resource in addition to Astral Threads. At double the normal Influence cost, you'll be able to instantly place a Hyper Relay anywhere you like. If you ever find yourself in a situation where building your space highway becomes a priority, this should help out considerably. Like Dimensional Locks, this action is infinitely repeatable with a cooldown.
What else can you do?
We're only detailing a few of the actions available to you and saving the rest to be discovered. Some you may have guessed already by their icons, and some you may have not. Next week, we'll talk about the new Origin and Civics we're introducing with Astral Planes. Thanks for reading. See you then!
[ 2023-11-02 12:00:32 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Atmaz
Hello!
I'm Gary Morris (or Atmaz) - Lead Game Designer on the Astral Planes DLC, from Abrakam Entertainment.
I've been playing video games my whole life. Some of my earliest memories are staying up way past my bedtime and grinding out hours and hours on strategy games on the Super Nintendo my older brother got for Christmas. I have specific memories of a particular game where I was cleaning up nuclear waste with my workers, tile by tile, and having a great time doing it. I didn't know it at the time, but I was enthralled by a type of game that would later become known as a "4X."
When I finally did get a computer, it was a Tandy 1000 HX. I still don't know what the HX stands for, or what the fascination is with adding X's onto things. On that machine, I quickly acquired a similar 4X game that was much older, but it captivated me just as much. Its lack of fancy graphics was not a problem for me, because I was given a very powerful new tool to play with: a keyboard. In my blissful ignorance, I never realized how much I had struggled with the SNES controller until I had the full complement of a keyboard and number pad (I don't remember there even being a mouse).
Fast forward about 25-30 years, and here we are today. Everyone has a mouse and keyboard, the 4X genre has exploded, and there are multiple great titles of this type to enjoy. One of the best ones, I say without prejudice, is Stellaris.
When we were asked by Paradox to start work with them on a new Stellaris expansion last year, my first thought was: What makes Stellaris fun? That's probably one of the hardest questions I've had to put serious thought to. It's easy to play the game and have fun - but why did I have fun? How do you measure Stellaris's fun?
There are more complicated answers to this, but the simplest place to start is that it takes you somewhere else. Just like when I was cleaning up nuclear waste with my workers all those years ago to save my cities, I get the same type of feeling when I survey a new system and find something new that might kill me. I like being somewhere else.
So, where is the farthest we can go? We're already in outer space in Stellaris - and really, do you need much more? The concept of space exploration is already so full of excitement and wonder. Stellaris captures this feeling so completely, it makes you wonder: What could possibly be next?
There are hints of what this could be already in-game: the mysteries of the Shroud and what it might contain, the unexplained appearance of the Unbidden and where they have come from. It's clear that there are other dimensions adjacent to our own, and we are teased with only tastes of them. This is the seed of thought from which Astral Planes was born.
[previewyoutube=bRPoj2h0yB4;full][/previewyoutube]
Creative Director Jean-Michael Vilain and I talk about the inspiration for Astral Planes
What are Astral Rifts?
In each galaxy, there are points at which the boundaries of space and time are weaker than others. Once discovered, they will appear to you as Astral Scars. These Scars are not large enough to be explored, but they do leak through a significant amount of astral material which may be of some use to you.
An Astral Scar, still closed Over time, it may happen that these Scars become unstable. After blossoming into a fully-blown Astral Rift, they are now open for you to explore. These Astral Rifts take us to the 'somewhere else' that exists beyond our known universe.
An open Astral Rift However, you can't just plunge yourself into one of these things. The chaotic energies involved in these phenomena would literally tear your scientists into the base components of the universe. You'll need to find a way to slip them more carefully inside. This is where Rift Sphere technology comes in.
Rift Sphere Achieving 'perfect smoothness' on any object is incredibly difficult - if not impossible. Apparently, it has been achieved here on earth on a very small scale with what is known as the "quantum stabilized atom mirror" earlier this century, but in most practical cases we cannot accomplish this. The James Webb Space telescope, for instance, has a reflective surface polished to an average roughness of only 20 nanometers. That's quite smooth, but we need to go even smoother to safely enter a Rift and have a vessel large enough to accompany a team of scientists. This will take some scientific effort on your part, but once complete you'll be ready to begin exploring other planes of existence. Conceptually, the Rift Sphere device is loaded onto your science ships and shot like a bullet into the center of a Rift. It possesses basic propulsion capabilities, but for the most part is otherwise helpless on the other side. This is why a cable is tethered from its point of origin to allow for retrieval. This lifeline also serves as a means to send reports and other information from between universes.
Mid to late game exploration
One goal we had with Astral Planes was to provide more opportunities for exploration into the mid and late game. At a certain point, after all systems are explored and all Archeological Sites are exhausted, there naturally tends to not be much out there left to see. Where Astral Rifts help out in this regard is that they are generally not present at map start. They will procedurally open over the course of the game. This means that even in a fully explored system, something new can still appear within your borders to take a look at.
The Dimensional Machine rift
Choose your own adventure
The significant difference between exploring a Rift and exploring an Archaeological Site is that your scientists are in the middle of a 'live' situation. You're not digging up the past and learning about what was, you're discovering something that currently is. This generally means they are often in much more danger, and decisions will need to be made on how to proceed based on the information you are given. On top of that, time can move much differently inside of a Rift, where years have passed on one side where only minutes have on the other end. Most steps inside of an Astral Rift will provide a choice, and often they will have varying difficulty levels. You may choose to go the easier path to protect your scientists, or brave the danger and hope whatever it is they are trying is a success. A heavy "Risk vs Reward" concept is present in these explorations. There are multiple results that can be achieved from exploring each Rift, and we've added over 30 of them. Inside of many of those Rifts are brand new Relics you can find - provided you make the right choices, and provided your Scientists survive those choices. There are not just Relics that you can find, however. Nearly every Rift contains some sort of possible unique reward, from new Faction Modifiers, to Planetary Decisions, to even recruitable Leaders. You're entering other places far from your own that have any number of exotic things to discover. There are even more things, however, that you bring back with you from inside these Rifts - and we call those Astral Threads.
Astral Threads Let's talk about what you can do with those in the next post. From behalf of all of our team, thank you for reading this, and thanks to Paradox for giving us this amazing opportunity to create something we think is really cool. See you soon!
[ 2023-10-26 11:00:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
A nearly infinite number of universes connect to our own. Ours is not the only one that is full of wonder
Wishlist Astral Planes today! It's my great pleasure to announce that Astral Planes will be released alongside the Stellaris 3.10 Pyxis update. [previewyoutube=vNGkPVD8kII;full][/previewyoutube] Every adventure requires a step into the unknown. Astral Planes is a narrative-focused expansion that adds mid to late game exploration content with over 30 Astral Rifts with branching narratives and storylines. Unlike the relative safety of Archaeology sites, the Rifts you explore will lead to completely different realms of existence, where fundamentals that were certain at home may not always be true.
Astral Planes includes:
- Over 30 Astral Rifts to explore
- 8 new Relics
- 4 Civics
- 1 Origin
- Astral Threads and Astral Actions
- 3 new music tracks composed by Andreas Waldetoft
Wishlist Astral Planes today!
[ 2023-10-19 15:00:35 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello all,
We're proud to release the 3.9.3 "Caelum" Patch promised for mid-October. This patch brings with it a balance pass on subjugation and diplomatic acceptance in-general, as well as other balance changes, bug fixes, UI, AI and modding improvements.
Please find the patch notes below.
#################################################################################### VERSION 3.9.3 ######################### ############################################################
Balance
- AI Empires are more likely to seek a federation if their rivals have federated.
- Federations (except for Hegemonies) now default to not permitting subject members.
- Having less than 50 Trust with an empire imposes a -100 Acceptance to them becoming your subject or overlord.
- Hydroponics Designation on habitats now swaps all jobs on the housing districts for farmers.
- Increased the importance of being more powerful than your vassal for loyalty purposes.
- Insulting someone decreases their Trust of you by 5.
- Rebalanced requirements for diplomatic treaties to require trust.
- Reduced how excited subjects get about things like shared sensors.
- Reduced the effect differing war philosophies has on federation acceptance.
- Removed the ability to trade favors.
- Replaced all +10% Districts on Habitats from technologies and traditions with +1 District on Habitats
- Replaced the upgrade habitat decisions with checks for habitat capital level instead.
- The Intimidation menace perk now allows you to ignore diplomatic requirements for proposing subjugation.
- The Pharma State civic now provides +1 Medical Worker job to capital buildings.
- The Unity from Rivals from the Animosity Diplomatic Stance has been reduced to 10 per rival.
- Trade Designation on habitats now has the housing district swap a clerk for a trader.
- Research, Energy and Mining District capacity on habitat complexes now have their own planetary features to clearly show the number of districts, current number of orbitals and maximum number of orbitals.
- The Crisis event chain will now use their bespoke event chain icon.
- Added is_scope_valid checks for anchorages.
- Fix to hiring events not being dismissed for other players in coop
- Fixed concept tooltips for starbase components.
- Fixed issue with nested tooltips and mouse tendency being incorrect when using UI scaling
- Fixed issue with some portraits being blurry on lower graphics settings due to mip levels being skipped. Disabled the functionality for portraits and related textures.
- Fixed the Node Culling gateway leading to an unlocalized string.
- Fixed Tiyanki occasionally not spawning correctly at the start of a Fruitful Partnership playthrough
- Massive Crater got its 25% pop growth back
- Restoring the Payback habitat when your homeworld is a moon now grants a minor orbital instead of a major orbital.
- Rewrote math for calculate tendency between mouse and nested tooltip window. This should fix issue with tooltips below and above mouse cursor behaving somewhat differently.
- Stopped interactions allowing multiple gaia-seeder buildings on a planet.
- The bonus provided by Eclipse from Enmity now correctly grants a 2% modifier instead of a 20% modifier.
- Updated the Eclipse tradition tooltip
- Updated the massive crater concept tooltip to accurately display the actual deposit.
- Certain AI personalities (Federation Builders, Spiritual Seekers, Migrating Flocks, and Peaceful Traders) are now 25x more likely to select Diplomacy traditions.
- The AI will no longer request to be subjugated by empires that are equivalent or weaker than them.
- The AI will no longer request to become the subject or overlord of another empire unless they have 50 Trust with the other party.
- The ship viewer's zoom speed is now scaled to the ship's size.
- Tooltips to select agendas now show the estimated time to launch the agenda, based off of your current agenda progress rate
- Trust between nations is now visible in the main diplomatic screen.
- When switching ships in the ship viewer, the zoom distance will now be preserved relative to the ship's size.
- Added documentation for concepts.
- Added support for more object types in concept tooltips.
- Fixed gridbox left and top padding not working.
- Some objects' auto-generated tooltips can now be shown as concept tooltips.
- Support building concept tooltips without valid scope.
- Calling non existing events should no longer crash the game.
Please note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed.
If you have an important game going, please back up the save file before trying to load the save in the new version. You can roll back to a prior version by right-clicking on Stellaris in your library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version from the drop-down. If you experience crashing or other issues, first disable all mods and start a new save. If the issue persists, please report it on the Bug Report forums.
[ 2023-10-17 09:15:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
by PDX-Ruk
Stardate 23779.5 - Temba, his arms wide
In this week's dev diary, I am taking the reins from Eladrin. I am a producer on Stellaris and usually help Eladrin as best I can, but today I want to talk about my other project and let Stellaris have a week off before they talk about their next thing. And that Project is: Star Trek: Infinite
[previewyoutube=eVQSfknYsjk;full][/previewyoutube] Watch the video version of this Dev Diary
Who are you? And why are you Putting Star Trek in my Stellaris Dev Diary?!
I joined Paradox back in the start of 2021, and was given the task to bring Star Trek: Infinite to Launch. Today is that day: we launch Star Trek: Infinite. Why am I talking about Infinite in the Stellaris Dev diary? To start off, I am a producer on Stellaris, but also the producer for Star Trek: Infinite - I love playing both games, and I think some of you might feel the same. Secondly, as all of you can easily identify, Star Trek: Infinite is built on the Stellaris Engine, with little effort to hide it. Everyone here on the Stellaris team has been giving feedback and tips since its inception, and we are all fully behind it. While Star Trek: Infinite is not a Stellaris Team project, it is a distinguished member of Stellaris Selective Kinship.
So why did you want to make Star Trek Stellaris? Err, I mean Star Trek: Infinite?
From a product point of view, Stellaris is the best Space/Emergent Story/Strategy game out there. Star Trek has a great tradition of 4x strategy games, and several story driven games. With that in mind, was there a possible way to mix this peanut butter gameplay of Stellaris with the strawberry jelly of Star Trek? I for one believed it could be done. The big takeaway from Stellaris we wanted in this game was exploration, choice and evolving gameplay. From Star Trek I wanted recognizable factions, lore authentic events and leaders. This has been our north star since the start. We dont want to make a game that only explores the existing timeline, nor do we want a game with complete randomness. A balance between the two had to be maintained, and I think we might have pulled it off.
OK, as a Stellaris Player? Why Should I get this?
It really depends on what type of Stellaris player you are. I love making themed factions that are not optimized, but thematically attractive. Setting the difficulty to Ensign/Captain, and seeing how it all plays out. I will usually restart if I get boring neighbors, or I get an unwanted precursor. My favorite Origins are Post-Apocalyptic+UNE, Toxic God, Payback+UNE, or Machine Empire with Eager Explorers. I also lean heavily away from micromanagement and build optimization. If you play anything like me, Star Trek: Infinite might be for you. If you think seeing Klingons going to war with Romulans over their claim to Kithomer gives a different flavor than seeing UNE being attacked by Kel-Azaan Republic over a claim in Parvus, Star Trek: Infinite might be for you. If you think you can be a better Gul than Dukat, and that there should be a statue of you on Bajor. Star Trek: Infinite might be for you If you think Romulans should reunite with Vulcan, but it should be done with force, and not diplomacy? Star Trek: Infinite might be for you.
What about Mods, Custodian Support, Long term life of the game?
This is one of the reasons we wanted to make this game a standalone, rather than part of Stellaris. We wanted this game to have its own track and not cause limitations on Stellaris, or Stellaris cause limitations for it. Stellaris should continue to evolve as the best Sci-fi sandbox strategy game in existence, and Star Trek: Infinite should be the definitive Star Trek strategy game. Mods are already being made, and we have full Steam Workshop support. We will be paying a bit more attention to our terms and conditions, but we have not made major changes to the existing one. So if this sounds like it could be appealing, check it out here. Until next time, PDX_Ruk
[ 2023-10-12 11:15:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Ghost Signal is a VR action roguelite set in the Stellaris universe, where you captain your ship to battle a multitude of alien species. Partake in dynamic space wars, encounter planet sized creatures, gather valuable loot to conduct research, and more. No journey is the same. Will you find the origins of the mysterious Ghost Signal?
[previewyoutube=un0-kw-5DOM;full][/previewyoutube]
Get Ghost Signal: A Stellaris Game!
Get 20% off Ghost Signal and Stellaris with the Alternate Realities bundle! (And you dont pay for the content you already own!)
INTERSTELLAR SPACE BATTLES
Use the full artillery of the Aurora against enemy armadas. Loot or purchase power-ups like freeze rays, atomic missiles or even dragon companions - the choice is yours.
UPGRADE & CUSTOMIZE
Scan exotic creatures for your logbook and conduct research in multiple tech trees. Asynchronous multiplayer allows you to scavenge other players' deserted ships for valuables.
A NEVER ENDING JOURNEY
Alongside the story mode where randomized maps make every session unique, Ghost Signal includes Daily Challenges with both global and local leaderboards to climb.
A UNIVERSE FULL OF WONDERS
As captain of the Aurora, encounter strange aliens in their home worlds and enter lost temples in the pursuit of the mysterious signal that seems to defy even death.
[ 2023-10-05 13:30:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everybody!
Today were going to look at a likely 3.10 feature, some changes that weve called the Leader Consolidation.
With leaders becoming more important to your empire following the 3.8 Gemini release alongside Galactic Paragons, there were some rough edges leftover and experiences that could be better. Some of the changes were implementing during this leader consolidation were things we talked about during the development of Galactic Paragons but decided against for various reasons, or were out of scope at the time, while others are based on data gathered since then and community feedback.
So Whats Changing?
Some of these names are still being argued over, so are subject to change. Hate one in particular? Let us know. One of us probably hates it too.
Admirals and Generals will be merged into the Commander, the Military leader class. Admiral and General will remain as veteran classes, with the following foci:
- Admiral - Focuses on Fleets and general naval combat
- General - Focuses on taking planets and assaulting static defenses - Armies, Planetary Bombardment, Ground Combat, and attacking defensive structures such as Starbases are the Generals forte
- Commissioner - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Martial Law)
- Strategist - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Defense position
The old Governors and some Envoy functions will be merged into Officials, the Administrative leader class. Their veteran classes will be:
- Delegate - Focuses on Federations and the Galactic Community
- Industrialist - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Industry and Development)
- Ambassador - Council Focus (Diplomacy, Espionage, and First Contact), especially suited for the new Minister of State position
- Advisor - Council Focus (Economy)
Scientists remain the third, Scientific leader class. Veteran Classes:
- Explorer - Focuses on Surveying and Exploration
- Academic - Focuses on Archaeology and Anomalies
- Analyst - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Assist Research)
- Statistician - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Science position
So are Envoys Real Leaders Now?
Partially. A single Administrative leader can be assigned to your Federation and another to the Galactic Community (or Empire) like numerous Envoys did in the past. Their level and traits will determine how effective they are at the job instead of cramming every Envoy you can spare into there, making Delegates the optimal candidates for this sort of thing. The Minister of State position is being added to the base council alongside the military and scientific ministries. This councilor will also have general effects on diplomacy, espionage, and first contact.
Ruler, plus one red, one yellow, and one blue council member. Envoys will remain as they were to represent the Minister of States bureaucratic reach, and will continue to handle minor tasks such as Improve and Harm Relations, maintaining Espionage spy networks, and First Contact.
What About Leader Caps?
Leader caps remain, but are per-class, with any over-cap penalties affecting only the particular leader class that is over. Civics, traditions, and other effects that previously increased the generic leader cap will now generally increase the cap for one or more specific classes. We may end up shifting more of the over-cap penalty over to the upkeep cost of leaders.
What about Gestalt Councils?
Gestalt Councils currently have a significant advantage in passing agendas in the early game due to having a larger number of councilors. This disparity will be lessened a bit due to the regular empires starting with one additional councilor, and were also making council legitimacy (how happy your factions are with your council) affect agenda progress. Their nodes will get a little bit of a reshuffle to accommodate the various changes, but should otherwise remain generally familiar. Well be able to share more details later on during the development cycle.
Im a Modder, Tell Me Modding Stuff
Well have more details in the release notes, but leader classes are no longer hard-coded and are thus much more moddable in script, so you should theoretically be able to do things like "this leader does research, commands armies, and represents us in the galcom!"
Is that everything?
Nooooo. Next on our Custodian this is not internal politics agenda is to do a pass on council agendas. Our thought is that agendas should have more impactful results (tangible effects rather than modifiers), and the range of available agendas should be related to the ethics of your active councilors instead of the ethics of your empire. This is planned for 3.11 [REDACTED] at the earliest. In the longer term, we may want to make greater differentiation between the councils of different authorities - the councils of a Democracy and a Megacorp could feel different from one another, for example.
Next Week
Next week well boldly go where no dev diary has gone before. (We're all currently at a staff conference, so dev replies to the diary will be delayed, but we'll make sure to read through all of the comments when we get back.)
[ 2023-10-05 11:00:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
3.9.2 has been released with a handful of bugfixes.
STELLARIS 3.9.2 PATCH NOTES
[expand type=showmore]
############################################################
#################### VERSION 3.9.2 ######################
############################################################
Balance
- Pre-FTL empires now have reduced technological development before the mid-game year.
- Catalytic empires can now build bio-reactors.
- Anomalies that reward Scientist Expertise traits now apply those traits to the Cognitive Node for gestalt empires.
- Blocked empires without the Scientific Method technology from constructing research districts.
- Federations End should no longer spawn empty habitats if the pre-FTL slider is set to 0
- Fix a CTD when loading a save containing an invalid species archetype
- Fix for wrong value for evasion in ship design.
- Fixed being able to build multiple gaia seeders on a single planet.
- Fixed Fallen Empires not triggering their monthly random events
- Fixed pre-ftl civilizations that naturally progressed to the Early Space Age being unable to become space faring.
- Fixed Secrets of the ... no longer granting Expertise traits.
- Fixed stage 4 gaia seeders being buildable, but immediately destroyed by non-Idyllic Bloom empires.
- Fixed the Colonial Remains deposits not spawning for the Remnants origin in some cases.
- Fixed the Patron achievement not firing.
- Fixed the Prethoryn getting stuck because their starting system contains an FTL inhibitor that prevents them from expanding
- Fixed the Surveyor not spawning resources in some cases.
- Gardening Drones will no longer have an unlocalized string.
- Habitat Central Complexes constructed around stars should now be placed further away, so they no longer clip into the star.
- Industrial designation is now only available on habitats for gestalt empires, if they use consumer goods.
- Merc enclaves now inherit their shipset from their creator.
- Paradisiacal Habitat modifiers in Ithome's Gate no longer use placeholder icons.
- Restored -25% penalty if the government doesn't have a head of research.
- Set a manual planet size for the Toxic God star asset, as it otherwise counts the large visual effects as part of the planet.
- The Crystal Splitter will now hopefully stop blowing up Fruitful Partnership colonies
- The spiritualist fallen empire will now wake up if you eat their holy worlds.
- The knights will no longer try to quest if you pacify their habitat.
- Removed MTTH from anomaly.6710, bane of ship events, horror of designers
- Removed MTTH from assorted fallen_empire_tasks events
- Removed MTTH from communications_spread.1 and communications_spread.3
- Removed MTTH from crime.1, crime.40 and crime.41, plus added pre-triggers to all crime-events
- Removed MTTH from fallen_empires.1, fallen_empires.3, fallen_empires.10, fallen_empires.11
- Removed MTTH from leviathans.660 and leviathans.662
- Removed MTTH from pop.1-13, madness that should have never existed
- Removed MTTH from random caravaneer events (cara.4000-4050)
- Removed MTTH from refugees.5, scourge of the game, destroyer of performance
- Removed MTTH from the Migrating Forests event chain (colony.1 to colony.12)
- Removed MTTH from the Orbital Debris event chain (colony.171 and colony.171)
- Added new main menu gradient
- Added researchers_add.txt and archaeoengineers_add.txt inline scripts for buildings.
- Added chemist_add.txt, factory_add.txt, foundry_add.txt, refiner_add.txt and translucer_add.txt inline script for buildings.
Diplomacy and Trust
A common complaint since the release of Overlord and the 3.3 Cepheus update is that the galaxy frequently degenerated into a handful of powerful vassal blocs, and things like Federations only formed rarely. A significant cause of this was due to the willingness of AI empires to quickly diplomatically submit to more powerful empires, even if the difference in power really wasnt all that high. This then led to a snowball effect, as newly encountered empires would generally be less powerful than this already established bloc. Weve made a few minor adjustments to AI Acceptance in past releases, but decided that we need a more impactful change to delay this sort of behavior. We do want it possible for these political formations to form, but it shouldnt be a fast and virtually guaranteed phenomenon. Trust is an existing concept that grows over time between empires that have diplomatic ties. It grows up to a Trust Cap based primarily on the magnitude of those diplomatic ties, but is also affected by traditions and other sources of modifiers. Since the release of Federations and the 2.6 Verne update, Envoys could be assigned to Improve Relations to waive most of the requirements for diplomatic pacts - this has now been largely shifted over to Trust and having an Embassy with the target or the Diplomatic Networking tradition.
The Centralized Yibrak Systems would like to join your network. These requirements will change the initial flow of the game quite a bit - itll be harder to meet someone and have a Commercial Pact, Research Agreement, and the like a few days after finishing first contact, but similarly as a MegaCorp itll be rarer to encounter an AI Empire that already has their fill of Commercial Pacts and refuses to enter any more. It takes a bit of getting to know one another before theyre willing to entwine their economies or swear eternal allegiance to one another.
Lets not be too hasty, maybe get to know one another first. SPOILER: SOME PRELIMINARY 3.9.3 DIPLOMATIC PATCH NOTES [expand type=showmore] Balance
- Rebalanced requirements for diplomatic treaties to require trust.
- Having less than 50 Trust with an empire imposes a -100 Acceptance to them becoming your subject or overlord.
- Removed the ability to trade favors.
- Insulting someone decreases their Trust of your empire.
- The Intimidation menace perk now allows you to ignore diplomatic requirements for proposing subjugation.
- The AI will no longer request to become the subject or overlord of another empire unless they have 50 Trust with the other party.
- Certain AI personalities (Federation Builders, Spiritual Seekers, Migrating Flocks, and Peaceful Traders) are now 25x more likely to select Diplomacy traditions.
- The AI will no longer request to be subjugated by empires that are equivalent or weaker than them.
- Trust between nations is now visible in the main diplomatic screen.
All values are subject to change, but were generally pretty happy with them so far. Internal testing has shown these changes to be pretty effective at reducing the vassalization blobs while still allowing them to form either over the long term or through judicious application of violence. (Subjugation wargoals do not require trust.) This also gives a potentially interesting hook for the Smear Campaign operation when we revisit Espionage sometime in the coming updates.
Next Week
Next week well be examining a potential 3.10 feature - the Leader Consolidation and trait balancing.
Hey wait, who put you in charge of that planet? See you then!
[ 2023-09-28 11:00:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello all,
The latest minor patch for Stellaris is ready and released, fixing a number of issues and further balancing the new mechanics.
We're also planning a follow-up 3.9.3 patch for mid to late October, which will include some of the issues brought up during the Open Beta that require new text, more fixes that did not meet the 3.9.2 deadline, and a handful of other improvements.
Please find the patch notes below.
STELLARIS 3.9.2 PATCH NOTES
[expand type=showmore]
############################################################
#################### VERSION 3.9.2 ######################
############################################################
Balance
- Pre-FTL empires now have reduced technological development before the mid-game year.
- Catalytic empires can now build bio-reactors.
- Anomalies that reward Scientist Expertise traits now apply those traits to the Cognitive Node for gestalt empires.
- Blocked empires without the Scientific Method technology from constructing research districts.
- Federations End should no longer spawn empty habitats if the pre-FTL slider is set to 0
- Fix a CTD when loading a save containing an invalid species archetype
- Fix for wrong value for evasion in ship design.
- Fixed being able to build multiple gaia seeders on a single planet.
- Fixed Fallen Empires not triggering their monthly random events
- Fixed pre-ftl civilizations that naturally progressed to the Early Space Age being unable to become space faring.
- Fixed Secrets of the ... no longer granting Expertise traits.
- Fixed stage 4 gaia seeders being buildable, but immediately destroyed by non-Idyllic Bloom empires.
- Fixed the Colonial Remains deposits not spawning for the Remnants origin in some cases.
- Fixed the Patron achievement not firing.
- Fixed the Prethoryn getting stuck because their starting system contains an FTL inhibitor that prevents them from expanding
- Fixed the Surveyor not spawning resources in some cases.
- Gardening Drones will no longer have an unlocalized string.
- Habitat Central Complexes constructed around stars should now be placed further away, so they no longer clip into the star.
- Industrial designation is now only available on habitats for gestalt empires, if they use consumer goods.
- Merc enclaves now inherit their shipset from their creator.
- Paradisiacal Habitat modifiers in Ithome's Gate no longer use placeholder icons.
- Restored -25% penalty if the government doesn't have a head of research.
- Set a manual planet size for the Toxic God star asset, as it otherwise counts the large visual effects as part of the planet.
- The Crystal Splitter will now hopefully stop blowing up Fruitful Partnership colonies
- The spiritualist fallen empire will now wake up if you eat their holy worlds.
- The knights will no longer try to quest if you pacify their habitat.
- Removed MTTH from anomaly.6710, bane of ship events, horror of designers
- Removed MTTH from assorted fallen_empire_tasks events
- Removed MTTH from communications_spread.1 and communications_spread.3
- Removed MTTH from crime.1, crime.40 and crime.41, plus added pre-triggers to all crime-events
- Removed MTTH from fallen_empires.1, fallen_empires.3, fallen_empires.10, fallen_empires.11
- Removed MTTH from leviathans.660 and leviathans.662
- Removed MTTH from pop.1-13, madness that should have never existed
- Removed MTTH from random caravaneer events (cara.4000-4050)
- Removed MTTH from refugees.5, scourge of the game, destroyer of performance
- Removed MTTH from the Migrating Forests event chain (colony.1 to colony.12)
- Removed MTTH from the Orbital Debris event chain (colony.171 and colony.171)
- Added new main menu gradient
- Added researchers_add.txt and archaeoengineers_add.txt inline scripts for buildings.
- Added chemist_add.txt, factory_add.txt, foundry_add.txt, refiner_add.txt and translucer_add.txt inline script for buildings.
[ 2023-09-26 09:08:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
Its been exactly 100 dev diaries since we introduced the Custodian initiative alongside the Lem update. With that milestone met, and 314 being funny math number, I thought it would be a good time to review what the Custodians have accomplished, some of the process they use, and where we could go from here.
To review, the original idea behind the Custodians Initiative was to do some of the following:
- Tweaking game balance
- Adding new content to old DLC
- Polishing existing content
- Bug fixes
- Performance improvements
- AI improvements
- Multiplayer stability
- UI and quality-of-life improvements
So what have they accomplished so far?
In my view, the Custodians have been a pretty solid success. Weve done a few things:
I promised bad math jokes last week: Why did the Blorg cross the Mobius Strip? To get to the same side.
So how do the Custodians work?
Ideally, a third of their tasks are dictated by my directives, a third are taken from community requests, and the remaining third are individual developer passion projects. In reality, these segments overlap quite a bit, since we all share many of the same desires. Before each release, we hold a Custodian Pitch meeting, where everybody on the team can write up proposals, give a two minute presentation on what they want to do and why they want to do it, and then a brief but spirited discussion is held debating the merits of the pitch as well as highlighting any concerns or suggestions.
Photo from a recent Custodian Pitch Meeting Accepted pitches go onto a team board, get prioritized, and eventually end up on the schedule. Unlike tasks slated for DLCs, Custodian tasks are intended to be able to slip to a later release if theyre deemed not ready to go live yet, and sometimes accepted pitches wait for a while before getting worked on. Rejected pitches sometimes resurface at a later date, revamped to resolve whatever problems the original pitch had.
Part of the Custodian Team Board As you can see, far more things get pitched and approved than we can actually do, so prioritization is extremely important. More things will move into 3.10 and 3.11 over time. The Development Oubliette off to the side is for things that we started working on, but had to pause for various reasons. Following Overlord, we instituted a rule that expansion work cannot absolutely depend on Custodian work, since we intentionally want Custodian work to be able to slip to a different release if necessary - the Situations system came in a little hot and that had negative effects on some of the systems we planned on using them with.
So what are some of those notes?
From the In Progress section under 3.9 Caelum, we have the Diplomacy and Trust changes that weve mentioned a few times. Well have a dev diary dedicated to this next week, since these have been accelerated to be included in the 3.9.3 release. Two weeks from now well be providing more details on the Leader Consolidation that weve also talked about in the past. Currently these tasks are in the To Do and In Progress sections of 3.10 Pyxis, grouped by dark blue dashed lines that you can barely see in this image. Other things on the board without planned release dates include a variety of possibilities. Some are larger scope tasks that involve a large number of Custodians, while others might be the type of thing that can be knocked out quickly. A handful of them include: Espionage enhancements
- Make Espionage more impactful, but have systems in place to prevent dog-piling.
- Provide information in a clearer way, avoiding walls of text.
- Theyre really not good at introducing the concepts new players need to learn the game.
- Make the Outliner easier to use during different phases of the game.
- As the number of large space constructions grows, it gets harder to find the ones you want to build.
- Its also very confusing to have things that require Mega-Engineering alongside constructions that dont.
- Pop up the Select an Empire UI from Multiplayer if you lose a Single Player game, in case you want to continue your galaxys story, even if your first empires has ended.
- Address micromanagement and tedium in species modification.
- Pops are one of the greatest sources of late game performance issues. Find ways to reduce their impact.
- Ships (and fleets) are another performance issue to investigate.
- As more scripted systems get added to the game, the habitable worlds slider becomes less accurate.
- Review the existing personalities, make them show up in AI weights more often, and differentiate them more.
Next week
Having come full circle, next week will be about Diplomacy and Trust. See you then!
[ 2023-09-21 11:00:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi all!
The Stellaris 3.9.1 Caelum update has been released, with full release notes listed here.
[previewyoutube=yvx9SedMkuc;full]Stellaris 3.9 "Caelum" Release Trailer[/previewyoutube]
Unless critical issues arise over the weekend, our current plan is to have a general bugfixing 3.9.2 patch roughly two weeks from now. Were also planning a followup localized 3.9.3 release in mid to late October, which will include some of the issues brought up during the Open Beta that require new text, more fixes that dont meet the 3.9.2 deadline, and a handful of other improvements.
Whats being considered for 3.9.3?
Localized updates are the only time we can add new text to the game, so some of the suggestions made during the Open Beta will be included in it.
Agendas will now show the required time to enact. Were also making some upgrades to the existing recommended DLC screen. To make it more generally useful, it will be possible to see things like the tooltips of origins and find out whats actually in this thing? in-game, hopefully letting you make better informed decisions by seeing what youre getting before buying any DLC. Based on the number of requests for it, were also considering accelerating the Diplomatic Trust and Vassalization changes Alfray has been working on, which we first mentioned way back in Dev Diary 291. At this point Im not willing to outright promise this for 3.9.3, but the trajectory looks like I can pull it in rather than waiting for 3.10 Pyxis. If it continues to look good, well provide more details in two weeks.
Trust, but verify. (And dont reveal your tender underbelly until you at least get to know them a bit.)
More Wallpapers
Free your desktop from that drab background! We have more species pack based wallpapers for you!
4k variants can be found in our wallpaper album.
Next Week
Were hitting an auspicious number next week, so were stocking up on bad math jokes and well be talking about the state of various Custodian plans - as well as some of the things were considering investigating. See you then!
[ 2023-09-14 11:00:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
The free 3.9 "Caelum" update is available now!
The 3.9 Caelum update brings with it bug fixes, improvements to Gameplay, Automation, Performance, and the Leader Cap, on top of adding new content for many of our previously-released DLCs. Read the full patch notes here. Dont want to read pages of patch notes? Stellaris Game Director Eladrin joined us on YouTube last week to talk about the new features coming in 3.9! [previewyoutube=mFsBMRKITC4;full][/previewyoutube] You can also read our (translated) Steam post outlining the new additions to Stellaris in 3.9 here. Please note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 3.8.4 game going, please back up the save file before trying to load the save in 3.9.1. You can roll back to a prior version by right-clicking on Stellaris in your library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the 3.8.4 from the drop-down. If you experience crashing or other issues, first disable all mods and start a new save. If the issue persists, please report it on the Bug Report forums. Thanks for playing Stellaris, and always remember the galaxy is vast and full of wonders!
[ 2023-09-12 08:05:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! The 3.9 "Caelum" update is currently scheduled to release on September 12th! This update brings a host of new features to previously released DLC, including a habitat rework, trade rebalance, softening of the leader cap, new features and updates to previously released DLCs, plus a plethora of other bug fixes, AI and performance improvements. Were going to go through some of the major features of this new update so that you can hop in and start playing on day one! You can read the full patch notes on the Stellaris forums here. [previewyoutube=mFsBMRKITC4;full][feature video link][/previewyoutube] Game Director Eladrin takes us through the features coming in the 3.9 "Caelum" update!
Free Improvements
Leader Cap Rebalance Weve heard your feedback on the leader cap, and weve softened up the penalties for going over the Leader Cap in 3.9. Leader XP gain reduction will now follow a curve, allowing you to hire more leaders. This in itself is a temporary measure, as we are continuing to experiment internally to find a Leader system that were truly happy with. Automation Improvements In the 3.9 Caelum update, Sector Automation has been completely removed, in favor of individual Planetary automation. Planetary Automation will now take resources directly from an Empires resources, and we have added the ability to forbid using specific resources. Just a reminder that Planetary Automation builds planets based off of the designation of the planet so remember to set your Planetary Designation before turning on Automation, for a consistent experience! Performance Improvements Performance concerns are always top of our list when it comes to creating new patches, and 3.9 Caelum is no different. In this version, we have fixed a case where Country Modifiers would continuously recalculate, decreased the amount of texture loading on the Council and Leader list screens, refactored calculations for Trade Value from Living Standards, parallelized the Construction Queue and Trade Route/Piracy calculations, optimized the AI evaluation of subjugation actions, improved the way old events are fired and optimized triggers for Jobs, Casus Belli and Opinion modifiers. I dont know what any of these things means either. How do these changes feel to you? You can find out now in the Open Beta!
To opt-in to the 3.9 Caelum Open Beta, right-click Stellaris, go to Properties, Betas tab, and choose Stellaris_test from the drop-down.
Updates to Previous DLC
Ascension Path Updates (Requires Utopia) We know how important it is for you to get your synth on. Weve reduced the RNG-factor of completing the tech requirements for ascensions. Weve added new Council Agendas to Utopia that will give you partial research on the technologies required to complete your chosen ascension. That way, you will be able to research them as soon as you learn to talk to those fleshy things from Eta Sigma 9. Habitat Rework (Requires Utopia, Federations, Toxoids or First Contact) Habitat Central Complexes are a new type of space construction, which act as the central hub of the Habitat system. Major and minor orbitals can be constructed around stars and planetary bodies in the system to further expand the Habitat Central Complexs capacity for districts and buildings. And before you ask, yes, if you blow it up with a Colossus, it leaves a ruined Habitat Central Complex that can be restored. Expanded Leaders from Enclaves (Requires Overlord or Leviathans) Shroudwalker Enclaves and Salvagers now both have a leader that you can hire. The leader from the Trade Enclave has been improved, plus all Enclave-hired leaders will now provide a special Council seat for those who own Galactic Paragons. More Origins for Hives and Machines (Requires Utopia or Synthetic Dawn) Machine Intelligences and Hive Mind can now choose the Lost Colony, Common Ground* and Hegemony Origins*. Hive minds can also now start as Void Dwellers*! *also requires Federations Workers Cooperative (Requires MegaCorp) Live in a classless society, where the Ruling Class is replaced with democratically-elected Stewards, and quality of life is high. Worker Cooperatives also gain access to the Mutual Aid trade policy, which converts trade value into basic resources. The Kaleidoscope (Requires Nemesis) An energy-hungry parasite has appeared over your homeworld. Do you attack it, or nurture it? A new Situation-based event chain has been added for the owners of Nemesis. We wont spoil anything else about this, but let's just say its not your garden variety event chain. Price Increase for Species Packs Stellaris Species Packs started as purely cosmetic add-ons, consisting of portraits, ship sets, city sets, and advisor voices. Theyve come a long way since them, now including a much greater variety of content. While the exact spread of features varies by pack, they now all include things such as origins, civics, traits, events, and new mechanics. With the changes coming in 3.9 Caelum, we believe that the older Species Packs will be on par with the newer ones, and were planning an increase in the base price of the Plantoids, Humanoids, Lithoids, and Necroids Species Packs from $7.99 to match the $9.99 base price of the more recent Aquatics and Toxoids Species Packs. Read on to see the new additions coming to the older species packs! Plantoids Additions (Requires Plantoids) Plantoid and Fungoid species will now be able to spread via seed in the Fruitful Partnership Origin, with their seeds hitching a ride across the galaxy on the backs of wandering groups of Tiyanki. Weve also added a new Invasive Species trait, that gains habitability and growth bonuses from each negative trait it carries, a new Dryad-inspired portrait and new prescripted empire: Blooms of Gaea. Improvements are also coming for the Idyllic Bloom civic, with its level four Gaia Seeder building now also improving your pops over time, as well as increasing the effectiveness of their other Plantoid traits. The Catalytic Processing civic has also been improved and now uses food to produce Strategic Resources. Humanoids Additions (Requires Humanoids) Owners of Humanoids will now get access to the Enmity Tradition tree, which is all about benefiting from rivalries, as well as three new species traits, and two new Humanoid portraits! Lithoids Additions and Updates (Requires Lithoids) Lithoid Hiveminds will now be able to mine space deposits without protection with the new Void Hive Civic, and get mining and research stations built automatically as the hive expands its control over the system. Owners of the Lithoids Species Pack will also get access to the Selective Kinship civic, allowing only their phenotype to be rulers and a new Humanoid-inspired Lithoid, and a prescripted empire: Federated Theian Preservers. Mechromancy Ascension Perk (Requires Necroids and Synthetic Dawn) Machine Intelligences can now also reanimate biological leviathans, as well as create cyborg zombies out of biological pops. I, for one, am terrified of our new robot overlords. Thanks for reading! We hope to see you all on September 12th for the release of Stellaris 3.9 Caelum!
[ 2023-09-07 12:09:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
We're a day earlier than normal today because we wanted to make sure you had a chance to look at the release notes before the AMA event well be holding on /r/stellaris from 15:00--17:00 CEST [CA note: 9am to 11am EDT / 6am to 8am PDT] . Bring your questions, well bring answers.
The 3.9 Caelum update is likely to be released next week if everything goes according to plan.
Today we are releasing the patch notes, which include a number of fixes thanks to feedback we received from the Open Beta.
Because of the length of the 3.9.1 Patch Notes, please visit the Paradox Forums to view them all.
[ 2023-09-06 11:00:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Happy Thursday!
Thanks for all of the feedback youve provided in the 3.9 Open Beta, and the surveys that youve filled out. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to get your eyes on things early, and it gives us a chance to see how youre using certain things and tweak them before the actual release. As always, things in the beta are subject to change before release, and some things in there are still placeholders.
Weve been polishing it and chiseling away at the various issues youve found, and are updating it today with some additional changes, and have opened up a new survey for additional feedback. (So any of you that filled out the first one will be able to respond to the changes.)
Heres the full list of todays changes:
3.9 CAELUM OPEN BETA PATCH 1
Balance
- Clerks now also provide +1% trade value
- Reduced Trader upkeep to 1 CG
- Habitat Industrial Districts give +0.25 Building Slots
- Hydroponics Habitat Designation now increases food production from farmers
- Increased Alloy and Influence cost of Habitat Central Complexes
- Removed the Influence cost of Orbitals
- The modifiers on the unique Habitats in the Ithome's Gate now provide additional building slots.
- Upgrading Habitats with planetary decisions now gives +1 Branch Office Building for each upgrade.
- Void Dweller Hive-Minds no longer start with unemployment.
- Void Dwellers and Voidborne now gives +2 Max Districts on Habitats
- You can now build Habitat Central Complex and Major Orbitals around stars.
- Fruitful Partnership: lowered the cost of the "Open Seed Pods" special project from 5000 energy to 3000
- Machine Intelligences now have access to the Harvesters trait
- Fixed the end-game crisis not being able to destroy orbitals
- Fixed "In Breach Of The Galactic Law" not working properly
- Fixed an issue where Fruitful Partnership empires where unable to establish first contact with Amoebas
- Fixed issue with tooltips flickering when ending up under mouse when having concepts
- Fixed Mechromancers purging their cyber-zombies.
- Gestalt empires spawned via the Common Ground and Hegemony origins no longer have their Growth Node acting as the governor of their homeworld.
- Gestalt empires spawned via the Common Ground and Hegemony origins now have the correct traits.
- Orbitals are now graphically smaller
- Orbitals constructed in orbit of bodies that have both energy and mining deposits now provide both types of district. This include the Ether Drake's Hoard
- Removed the "Seed Pod" placeholder sensor component
- Restoring the Payback habitat correctly spawns a major orbital
- Seeded planet modifier now show their modifiers in addition to custom tooltips.
- The From Beyond science ship will no longer crash the game if you don't own First Contact.
- The Star Mall and Federation's End habitats are now correctly size 6 and level 3 or 1 respectively.
- Upgrading the seeded planet modifier now removes the previous modifier.
- You can no longer construct an Orbital Assembly Complex on a Ringworld or Habitat
- You can no longer have two habitats in the Payback starting system
- Added effects to Infected planets stage 1-3, infested planets by the scourge crisis and added entity with effect for hive worlds.
- Small visual update on shroud entity
- Swapped is_orbital_ring = no for is_normal_starbase = yes
- Trigger graphical_culture now supports the megastructure scope.
Please note that the 3.9 "Caelum" Habitats Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test - 3.9 Open Beta" branch.
Don't forget to turn off your mods, they will break.
Steam Strategy Fest
This is a reminder that Stellaris is taking part in the Steam Strategy Fest. This is an opportunity for you to pick up the Plantoids, Humanoids, Lithoids, and Necroids Species Packs at a discounted price before their base prices increase to $9.99 alongside the release of 3.9 Caelum. We've also bundled all of the Species Packs together for you while the Strategy Fest is ongoing.
Next Week - Ask us Anything
Next week the dev diary will be a day early, since the team will be holding a Reddit AMA on /r/stellaris on Wednesday Sept 6th, from 15:00-17:00. Bring us your questions!
The dev diary will be the 3.9 Caelum Release Notes.
The Sculptors Chisel produces only perfection. Visit the Paradox forums for an .stl for the Jeff bust, if you have access to a 3d printer.
[ 2023-08-31 11:00:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
This week well be going over changes to Humanoids, Necroids, and more. Well also look at how habitats have changed over the past few weeks, and when youll get to play with them and give us direct feedback. (Spoiler: Now.)
First, I want to make a correction to the infographic we posted in Dev Diary #308 - due to a misunderstanding, I had the lava and geode humanoid lithoids listed as two separate portraits in the infographic, but theyre going to be variants of the same portrait. I apologize for the error.
[previewyoutube=QToQoYCkZaU;full][/previewyoutube]
Check out the video version of this Dev Diary on YouTube!
Now Iggy will talk about one of the things Humanoids do best... Bickering.
Hostility Rising
Heyo, Iggy here! The Humanoid Species Pack did receive some nice improvements back in 3.1 Lem but it still lacked something. So we have returned once again to give it another pass! For the Humanoid Species Pack we wanted to make something new, Species Packs have had traits, ascension perks, civics, and origins. Here we are now introducing the first ever Species Pack tradition tree!
The Enmity tree is not restricted to the Humanoid Species Class. The Enmity Tradition tree is all about rivals and making the most of having them. The adoption and finisher bonus allows you to rival even more people than normal to extract as many bonuses as possible.
So many people to bear grudges against. Some of the traditions will reward you for maintaining loads of rivals such as Rise to the Occasion.
Good news! We found a xenophobe, now we can afford to employ another scientist! While the right side of the tree will be helping you compete against your Rivals.
Rivaling stronger empires is always a good idea. When you grab the tradition tree you also get access to a powerful agenda if you own Galactic Paragons. Since this Agenda is of a more tactical nature it will finish twice as fast as other tradition based agendas.
Give us war and nothing more! And as a nice finish you get access to a new diplomatic stance granting you further benefits for rivaling the galaxy.
You get a rivalry and you get a rivalry!
Dumb ways to die
So Negative!
Another thing we havent done in a while is add more Negative Traits, the Humanoid Species Pack will now give you two! As well as a new fun positive one as well. First up we have Psychological Infertility, which can be taken with a lot of the positive pop growth traits in the game, as well as its mirror, Existential Iteroparity.
Those Unbidden are not the right mood!
The faster you kill them the faster they grow! Finally for the players that really wanna try their luck (or just bully the servile species) there is now Jinxed!
The Tzynn saw a black cat cross the street, but didnt understand the significance.
Reinforcements Have Arrived
We also have two new portraits coming to the Humanoids pack. Unlike Lithoids and Plantoids, where we wanted to add a more human-like variant of the phenotypes, the Humanoids pack was already full of well Humanoids. So we decided to make two more to add more variety to the available portraits.
Dimorphism in this species is mostly in skin patterns and hair. The second is a different take on badass space elves.
Mechromancy
The Necroids Species Pack has already received a large number of improvements. Reanimated Armies, in particular, changed from being a very niche civic into a much more interesting one as Reanimators, and then was expanded to include Megacorps and Hives with Permanent Employment and Cordyceptic Drones. The only one left out of the fun were machines. Enter the Mechromancy Ascension Perk.
Have you tried turning it off and back on again? Mechromancy has no prerequisites, so can be taken as a Machine Intelligences very first Ascension Perk.
Totally not placeholder artwork. They can reanimate certain leviathans, and purged organic pops may be raised as cyborg zombies. Driven Assimilators treat these cyborg zombies as if they were assimilated for the purposes of pursuing Cybernetic Ascension.
Trade Changes
One unintended consequence of the sources of Trade Value throughout the game was that Trade-focused empires ended up having more Merchants than we intended. To curtail this, and reduce the number of Ruler-strata jobs in these empires, were introducing two new jobs to the game.
Traders, willing to buy and sell anything on the Galactic Market. Traders replace Merchants from most sources and are also granted in place of Clerks for some buildings. These specialist strata jobs have an upkeep of 2 Consumer Goods and produce 8 Trade Value (plus some Amenities if you have the Commercial Enterprise Tradition).
Numistic Priests replace the Merchant and Priest jobs provided by the Numistic Shrine. These specialist strata jobs have an upkeep of 2 Consumer Goods and produce 6 Trade Value, 2 Unity and 2 Amenities. However, for the purposes of any bonuses provided to jobs, they count as both Traders and Priests.
Trade leads to Prophets, Prophets lead to Profits! The humble Clerk job has been rebalanced and now produces 3 Trade Value and 3 Amenities instead of 4 Trade Value and 2 Amenities. Taking the Trickle Up Economics Tradition increases their output to 4 Trade Value and 4 Amenities, but no longer grants additional Clerk jobs.
Employee Ownership
A player fantasy thats occasionally been requested from the community is the idea of a worker-led Corporate empire. After playing around the concept a bit (Should it be a new authority? An origin? A civic?), we decided on making a Worker Cooperative civic, without sharing too many features with Shared Burdens.
Collective Corporate Cooperation Creates Credits For most of the game a Worker Cooperative empire should be entirely without the Ruler-strata as they replace their Executives and Managers with Stewards.
No rulers here!
Stewards replace both Executives and Managers As these unique jobs provide Unity and small amounts of both Trade Value and Amenities, theyre fairly useful to have even on worlds that arent dedicated to Unity production.
Profits to the people! The Employee Ownership Living Standard is much like Shared Burdens by sharing Political Power equally across the Strata, however instead of providing increased Happiness and faster Pop Demotion Time, it gives pops the same Trade Value production as Utopian Abundance and is further improved by a Tradition swap for the civic.
Meanwhile, the Mutual Aid trade policy allows your empire to reinvest their profits back into the upkeep for your pops. This allows some fairly powerful early game expansion if youre running a Trade-focused build. Eladrin immediately took this civic and twisted it into a Void Dweller Relentless Industrialist dystopia, screaming that the invisible hand of the free market will handle the externalities, so your utopian mileage may vary.
Automation Changes
More improvements are being made to planetary automation. Based on feedback we received (primarily from newer players), weve removed dedicated automation stockpiles from the game. Planetary automation will simply use resources from your empire stockpiles, removing one unintuitive step from the process as well as getting rid of some weird and unintended resource conversion quirks. The automation settings panel now lets you restrict certain resources from use by the automation system, so you can do things like forbid the use of Rare Crystals if you have important plans for those.
Habitats
The Habitat experiment described in Dev Diary #306 has continued, and its looking positive towards inclusion in the 3.9 Caelum update. Following on from Eladrins directive to simplify my Habitat Prototypes and the feedback weve received, Ive continued iteration on our planned rework for Habitats. So whats changed from 3.8 Habitats as a Megastructure and Colony/Planet are limited to one per system in the form of a Habitat Central Complex megastructure which when built spawns a colonisable habitat and Major Orbital. Once this has been constructed, additional Major Orbitals can be constructed around planets in the system and Minor Orbitals can be constructed around asteroids and moons in the system.
The megastructure build menu listing the options for Habitats
Detailed tooltips showing the requirements and effects of Habitat Megastructures. When constructed, a Habitat Central Complex starts as size 6, and Habitation and Industrial Districts being uncapped. Research, Energy and Mining Districts are however limited to 3 the number of deposits in the system that have an Orbital. Habitation Districts have also been changed to now provide 6 Housing, 2 Clerk/Maintenance Drone Jobs and +0.50 Building Slots. If an Orbital is constructed around a planet, moon or asteroid with an Exotic Gas, Rare Crystal or Volatile Motes deposit, the deposit will automatically provide the jobs to collect the resources, without needing to construct a resource extraction building, as long as you have researched the relevant technology. While Orbitals constructed around Alloy, Zro, Dark Matter or other such deposits will automatically provide the resources as Habitats currently do. As Orbitals are treated much like Mining/Research Stations in the system, they can be attacked by hostile forces but will be disabled when they hit 5% Hull Points (though crisis factions will instead outright destroy the Orbitals). When an Orbital is disabled, the Habitat Central Complex will gain 10% Devastation and a blocker depending on the type of Orbital.
Venting atmosphere into space is in breach of several GalCom ordinances!
The penalty to Max Districts scales with the level of the Habitat. Habitat Complexes can be upgraded through Planetary Decisions much like previously, except instead of increasing the Planet Size, the upgrades will now increase the Habitability (which is useful since Habitats now start at 40% Habitability) and boost the District and Building Slots provided by Orbitals.
Habitat Technologies
Habitat Complex Upgrade Decisions The effects and modifiers for both Void Dweller Origin and Voidborne AP have been reworked to take these changes into account, allowing for Void Dwellers to inherit most of the effects of the Voidborne AP.
Effects and Modifiers for Void Dwellers
Effects for the Voidborne AP
The initial Habitat Complex of a Void Dweller empire.
The same Habitat Complex after constructing all available Orbitals and fully upgrading it. While updating the Void Dweller starting conditions, we ran into an old bug - Void Dwellers with the Sol system would spawn the guaranteed habitable worlds if that setting was enabled, though the planets would be of a random planet class, but those with the Trinary Void Dweller system would not spawn these systems. To fix this, weve updated both starting systems for Void Dwellers so that the first world is replaced with a frozen planet with a research deposit and a large number of research deposits scattered throughout the system while the second world is replaced with a molten world with an alloy deposit and a large number of mineral and energy deposits scattered throughout the system. This means that with the guaranteed habitable worlds setting, Void Dwellers are instead guaranteed a number of resource rich systems designed for setting up habitat complexes.
3.9 Habitats Open Beta
Weve decided that an Open Beta would be a good opportunity to gather more hands-on feedback about the system. The beta includes early access to all of 3.9.0. Please visit the Paradox Forums to view the entirety of the Preliminary Changelog.
Please note that the 3.9 "Caelum" Habitats Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test - 3.9 Open Beta" branch.
Don't forget to turn off your mods, they will break.
Weve set up a feedback form here to consolidate your comments and suggestions.
Next Week
Next week well be reviewing how the Open Beta has been going, and if there are any additional changes planned as a result of it. SPOILER: QUEST COMPLETE [expand type=showmore]
[/expand]
[ 2023-08-24 11:00:32 CET ] [ Original post ]
by MrFreake, chirumirushiroz, rodahtnov, gordon_cmb, and idm7449
Hello Stellaris Community, and chad-mod-enjoyers the world over!
Today were here to highlight some overhaul mods. From technologies, to government types, the galactic imperium, and traditions, this collection of mods might just have something that speaks to your inner swolefin!
Too much reading for a Monday? Were also proud to feature Michael~ for the first time on Stellaris Official on YouTube, with a video highlighting these four mods:
[previewyoutube=2fzUHmoLqxs;full][/previewyoutube]
Like this content? Subscribe to Michael~ on YouTube!
Without further ado, this first mod needs no introduction to just over 140 thousand of you, but in order to stop the ACOT fans yelling at us, were proud to present:
####
Ancient Cache of Technologies by chirumirushiroz
Features:
- New Technology Tiers
- New Ship Types Based on Fallen Empires
- New Planet Types
- New Neutral Faction that doubles as mini-crisis
- New Megastructures
- New Origins
- Reworked Armies
- New stories and lore
#### This next mod adds a little bit of everything, new authorities, civics, ascension perks, megastructures, all while going for the vanilla-like feel and balance: ####
Stellaris Evolved by rodahtnov
Features:
- 6 new authorities, with 3 more on the works
- More than 100+ new civics, including all playstyles and new types of civics (Origin civics, origin exclusive civics tied to your origin!)
- Expanded and customizable ethics for normal and gestalt empires
- Several new traits for al type of species archetypes
- Several reworks and adjustments to base features keeping the original appeal (reworked Arcologies, Habitats, Branch offices, Naval capacity, etc)
- Several additions to DLCs, filling the missing fantasy gaps (example: aquatic trait/civic for machines)
- New and expanded features in line with the original appeal and experience (Ai authorities processing capacity, hivemind rework, machine rework, etc)
- 6 new Tradition paths, built as an upgrade of some of the base game paths.
- Some new ascension perks expanding generally lackluster features (example: A starbase path to make starbases more feasible economically or as defense!)
- 8 new expanded ascension paths, including advanced versions of normal paths, mixed paths and more, with subpaths inside each path and unique mechanics, traits and lore for each one.
- New mid game megastructures and planet types.
- A lot of custom art in all features in line with the base game.
- And more coming soon!
- Readability and accessibility: We enhance features visually so they are easier to understand/read and there is no need to relearn the game; all is done in line with vanilla design.
- Diversity and variety: We try to provide all the tools possible to create diverse fantasies outside the stellaris reach, and we are constantly asking people, searching media, etc to enrich and expand! But always taking in mind player agency is priority, so we avoid bee-lining a fantasy!
- Compatibility: As a soft-overhaul we try to allow the maximum compatibility possible, and as such we design evolved as a foundation mod, adding some external code internally for compatibility and openly collaborating with other modders for it!
- Fun and accomplishment: This is a game and as such, having fun is a priority! We try to make all players feel satisfied and accomplished after a game, with also some balance in mind, so all type of sessions are enjoyable"
Superstates by gordon_cmb
Features
- Ability to form Superstates:
- * The Galactic Republic
- * Union of Socialist Stars
- * Galactic Processing Unit
- * Everlasting Hive
- * GalactiCORP
- * Universal Union
- Several new civics, events and unique flags for each
#### Our final mod for this months mod highlights takes a different approach to traditions, splitting the vanilla traditions up into sections, and allowing you to choose part or all of traditions, and combine them to best fit your playstyle: ####
Forerunner - A Traditions Overhaul by idm7449
Features:
- Forerunner overhauls all Traditions in the game with more compelling perks and choices, supporting unique bonuses for standard empires, machine empires, hive empires, Lithoids, Necrophages, and much more. Adding in total 11 Tradition categories, 60 Paths, and 198 new Traditions!
- A new way to gain Ascension Perks. Instead of gaining Ascension Perks from finishing a Tradition, gain them by pairing Paths. Choose the bonuses that are relevant to you and your playstyle!
- Redesigned layout and icons for each Tradition category, featuring the beautiful artwork found in Stellaris!
- Lightweight and compatibility friendly. Forerunner was designed with compatibility in mind.
- Clean implementation. No game errors.
#### Thats it for this months mod highlights! I hope youve found something that will add some spice to your next playthrough, and thanks to Michael~ (subscribe to him on YouTube!) for doing the feature video this month. Are you a modder who wants your mod featured in a future mod highlight? Fill out the signup sheet here!
[ 2023-08-21 14:00:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone, long thyme no see.
This week were continuing our exploration of the improvements the Custodian Team is making to Species Packs in the upcoming Stellaris 3.9 Caelum Update, as well as some of the other stuff weve been up to.
[previewyoutube=QWOP7tEcW_s;full][/previewyoutube]
Too much reading for a Thursday? Watch the video Dev Diary instead!
First up are some improvements to the Environmentalists civic.
Environmentalists
Although the initial version of the Ranger Lodge and the Ranger jobs for the Environment civic were good, we felt that they could be improved upon. Changes this civic has seen are:
- The number of Ranger jobs provided by the Lodge now scales with the number of Natural Blockers on the planet.
- Environmentalist empires can now choose to expand their Nature Preserves, increasing the number of Blockers (and thus Ranger jobs) on the planet.
You should give the Nature Preserves as mushroom as possible.
- In addition to producing Unity for Environmentalists, each Natural Blocker on the planet (with the exception of Nature Preserves), now gives Ranger jobs a small amount of production of basic resources
Invasive Species Trait
Gardeners everywhere know the threat of invasive species. Now you too can have a Plantoid or Fungoid species that grows like weeds.
The root of the problem. Invasive species get +5% habitability and + 5% pop growth speed for each negative trait they possess, and can only select negative or botanical traits. Will you use them to propagate yourselves across the galaxy, or make that xenophile regret signing that migration pact? Or perhaps they can hitch a ride to nearby planets using the
Fruitful Partnership Origin
Many plants spread their seeds far and wide through animal dispersal. Plantoid and Fungoid civilizations now have that option as well.
This origin is so wholesome its a little sappy. Empires with the Fruitful Partnership origin will begin the game in contact with the Tiyanki, and Starseed Gardens already built on their home Orchard Station.
Space fauna that visit the system are lured to the station, where they partake in the provided fruits, and carry your seed pods with them as they travel the galaxy.
Where are they going to take them? When passing near a habitable world, the seed pods can find a home
All clover the galaxy!
And by completing a special project, new life can bloom - wherever it is they brought the seeds.
It was mint to be.
Having your seeds carried away by space fauna can allow colonization of planets far from your home system, but you can also be a little more direct about seeding an enemy planet.
Dropping some sick beets. While these seed blockers are primarily just a nuisance to your opponent, if you end up taking the planet and clearing them yourself, youll be able to turn them into pops, similar to how Lithoid blockers work.
Human Plantoids
The Lithoid Theians from last week came from a close encounter with Earth eons ago, our new Plantoids actually start on Earth and explore the possibility of what if humans were plants. Naturally, empires that branched out from Earth like the Commonwealth of Man will share your leafy heritage. (Their reputation pre-seeds them.)
Say aloe to my little friend. SPOILER: FIRST TIME EVER? [expand type=details]
[/expand] Now, on to some other things coming in 3.9, and no more terrible plant jokes.
Enclave Leaders
During the development of Galactic Paragons and First Contact, we wanted to revisit some of the older interactions with the various Enclaves scattered around the Galaxy, but never found the time, namely:
- Hiring a Scientist from the Curators
- Hiring a Governor from the Trader Enclaves
- Hiring a Teacher from the Shroudwalkers
- Hiring a Salvage Overseer from the Salvagers
The Governors from the other Trader Enclaves provide bonuses to Rare Crystals or Volatile Motes instead. However, just because youve recruited these Renowned Leaders from Enclaves, dont expect them to sit by idly if you attack their former home.
UI Modding Change
The main change that we want to highlight here is:
- NInterface has been moved from commom/defines/00_defines.txt to unchecked_defines/interface.txt. This means that any mods that alter defines listed under NInterface will no longer block achievements or Ironman.
Interim Leader XP Updates
As mentioned in Dev Diary #307, we were looking at some adjustments to the over-cap formulas to reduce their negative effects until the greater rework is ready. Rather than a linear progression that abruptly hits -100% XP, weve replaced the current XP scaling for leaders with a formula that follows a curve.
XP curves for being over capacity (at the base of 6 leaders)
Next Week
Humanoids and Necroids will be next weeks primary topic. Alfray will give an update on how Habitats have been going, and whats this I hear about an Open Beta? See you then! SPOILER: PROGRESS [expand type=details]
[/expand] [strike]Sorry about all of the puns in this one.[/strike]
[ 2023-08-17 11:00:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Welcome back!
In this weeks dev diary, were going to explore some improvements the Custodian Team is making to the Lithoids Species Pack in the upcoming Stellaris 3.9 Caelum Update, and then a few other new features.
Before that, I have an announcement to make regarding Species Pack Pricing.
Announcement Regarding Species Pack Pricing
Stellaris Species Packs started as purely cosmetic add-ons, consisting of portraits, ship sets, city sets, and advisor voices. Theyve come a long way since them, now including a much greater variety of content. While the exact spread of features varies by pack, they now all include things such as origins, civics, traits, events, and new mechanics. As Game Director, Im especially pleased with how the Custodian Team has improved the quality of the older packs. Theyve added new playstyles and enabled many more sci-fi tropes to be explored during your games.
With the changes coming in 3.9 Caelum, we believe that the older Species Packs will be on par with the newer ones, and were planning an increase in the base price of the Plantoids, Humanoids, Lithoids, and Necroids Species Packs from $7.99 to match the $9.99 base price of the more recent Aquatics and Toxoids Species Packs. Per the promise made by Fredrik Wester several years ago, we are announcing this change ahead of time so anyone that wishes to purchase them at the current base prices will have an opportunity to do so. They will be available with the current base price for at least 30 days, and will be changing alongside the release of 3.9 Caelum. Stellaris will be taking part in the Steam Strategy Fest. This will give you a chance to get the affected Species Packs at a discounted price before the price change goes into effect. Ill now detail the improvements made to the Lithoids Species Pack. Improvements to the other Species Packs will be a major focus of dev diaries over the next few weeks.
Things That Rock
My very first Stellaris Dev Diary was #157 - Things That Rock. The Lithoids Species Pack was the first one that wasnt exclusively an art pack. The Lithoid trait added interesting game mechanics to the phenotype, we had a few Lithoid specific traits, some event changes, and the Terravore variant of the Devouring Swarm. The purely cosmetic Species Packs were updated in subsequent releases, but while it did get an Origin in Federations and more traits in 3.5 Fornax, Lithoids hadnt gotten quite as much of an update from the Custodian Team as the packs. Of quartz I thought that we should dig up some improvements. Ill turn things over to Iggy now to talk about some of the changes. Greetings all, Iggy here! Since the release of Galactic Paragons, the Custodian Team has been working on improving the value and quality of older DLCs. Today I will be talking about what we have done for the Lithoid Species Pack.
Buffing the Old
As previously shown in DD #305 we returned to Calamitous Birth to give it some love. This includes removing the habitability loss from Lithoid Craters for Lithoid pops as well as increasing the effectiveness of lithoid exclusive traits such as Gaseous Byproducts on the Massive Crater world.
We also talked about how terravores have gotten a glow up. No longer will you need to sit and click a decision every 6 months as you consume your world! Now its all handled in a handy compact situation. The output should still be exactly the same as before thanks to clever script math so dont worry about this being a nerf to acquired pops or resources.
Crunch crunch!
In With the New!
Not satisfied with only buffing these two old pieces of content we also felt like the species pack could do with a bit of a polish to stack up to current species packs. First up: Void Hive
I love this icon so much As you can see its a Hive Civic with quite a unique effect and if the habitat changes discussed in DD #306 go through it would be a powerful addition to your Void Dweller Hiveminds.
Iggy making [strike]potentially[/strike] game breaking hive content? SHOCKER! This civic plays around with the flavor of a Hive Mind that is capable of surviving out in space and the dangers of vacuum. While you still can build gathering stations it goes against your nature to instruct specific drones to do so and will cost you some Unity. They also excel at creating structures in space, whether they be habitats, dyson spheres, or hyper relays, so get out into the dark void already! The other new civic added to the Lithoid Species Pack is Selective Kinship. This civic is not for the xenophiles so please, avert your ocular organs.
Meat. Theyre made out of meat! This civic also comes with the lithoid species pack and lets you create an empire consisting only of your primary phenotype such as Lithoids, Aquatic, Mammalian, etc. Though dont think it will be smooth sailing because you wont like anyone not conforming to your standards and they will really not like your bigoted thinking. However if you really want to have some friends the Hegemon and Common Ground origin will ensure that your member nations are your phenotype if you choose to start with this civic.
Shine Bright!
Thanks, Iggy. Weve been having a lot of questionnaires and feedback sessions with players, and one of the things that is often requested is some more relatable characters in the various phenotypes. While well of course continue creating horrific alien monstrosities, the art team took this opportunity to add a few new portraits to Lithoids, Plantoids, and Humanoids.
For Lithoids, the Federated Theian Preserves will be a new prescripted empire that begins on the Desert World of Theia, in the Titawin system. Billions of years ago, two planets formed from the primordial material in orbit of Sol - ancient Earth, and Theia. Rudimentary life evolved on both worlds, biological in the case of Earth, and lithoid on Theia. For eons, these sister planets maintained a peaceful revolution around their star. Then came the cataclysm. The planets collided, and in the moment of impact, microbial life was exchanged. Earth survived, and Luna was formed. What remained of Theia was jettisoned from the system. On this rocky colony ship, life from ancient Theia traversed the void before it was caught in the gravity well of the star Titawin. Crashing into one of the system's worlds, a new species was introduced to the local biosphere. A few short millennia later, the Theians took to the stars, seeking to understand the universe as well as their own heritage.
Work is still being done on the lava shader. May they find their way home! On to some other 3.9 changes
Ascension Path Agendas
Some players have commented that they often find themselves saving an Ascension Perk slot for an indeterminate amount of time, waiting for the required research for their desired Ascension Path to appear. The Ascension Perks that unlock the four Ascension Paths have had their requirements changed so that they now be taken as your third AP at the earliest instead of as your second AP. We have removed the Technology requirements and moved those to progressing down the Tradition Tree associated with that Ascension Path.
Each Ascension Path now has an Agenda that grants 25% progress in technologies associated with that Ascension Path, which should ensure that you are no longer reliant on random chance to acquire these technologies. These Agendas have a reduced cost and cooldown compared to normal Agendas, though some have modifiers based on Empire Ethics compatibility with the Ascension Path.
These agendas advance to the next relevant technology if you finish some research while the agenda is ongoing.
rm -rf /nodes/regulatory
One of the complaints weve had with Gestalt Councils is that Nodes cannot be replaced unlike the Councilors for regular empires. This means that you are no longer locked forever to traits that might be useful for your Nodes in the early-game but fall off in the mid- to late-game. To solve this, weve added three new Society technologies to Machine Intelligences (and Hive Minds) which unlock a set of new Council Agendas that replace the existing Nodes, after a bit of reformatting (or vivisection).
TODO: Icons
The first technology will unlock the Agendas themselves, while the following technologies will unlock modifiers that improve both the Agendas and your Council. The newly created Nodes will initially start at level 1, though this can be improved to a maximum starting level equal to the level of the reformatted/culled Node depending on Technologies, Traditions and Civics.
Next Week
Next week well be going over improvements to the Plantoids Species Pack and some more other changes coming in 3.9 Caelum. Humanoids and Necroids will be the following week.
These are not plantoids. But youll get to meet them in the plantoids dev diary. Spoiler: Updated Progress Image [expand type=spoiler]
[/expand]
[ 2023-08-10 11:00:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Happy Thursday!
This week were looking at another of our Summer Experiments, though this one unfortunately didnt work out as well as we had hoped.
Class-based leader limits.
Why are you looking at this?
Galactic Paragons reintroduced a limit to the number of leaders you could recruit at one time, and while it was a soft cap that you could exceed, experience gains were reduced and once you hit twice the cap, all leader experience gain stopped. In subsequent patches, we relaxed some of the numbers and added more ways to increase the cap, but its still a rather unpopular system that could use some work. Currently, the presence of a less valuable leader (like a General) takes up the same space as something like a Scientist or Admiral, which leads to some unsatisfying gameplay decisions. I mentioned a few things we were planning on looking at back in Dev Diary #302, along with some of the issues we expected to run into.
So what did you try?
During our experiments we added the ability to have individual leader caps by class, so that General mentioned above would use up General capacity, but Scientists would be governed by their own limit. Over cap effects would likewise be per-class, so if you had too many Admirals, their progression would slow, but other leader classes would be unaffected. We also experimented with retaining wild-card capacity, so you could always get a few over before starting to run into penalties.
Why didnt it work?
This experiment largely failed due to UX issues. Stellaris isnt always the easiest game to parse information from, but this turned out diabolically bad and difficult to fix. The information transfer is made even harder by Envoys acting as their own special version that have their own capacity but behave entirely differently from all of the other leaders.
It says we have 1 leader out of 3, but we actually have 4 out of 5-8. Oh no.
1/1 Admirals, 0/1 Generals, 1/2 Scientists, 2/1 Governors, 0/3 Envoys (but actually 3 Envoys, 0 of which are being used), plus the Wildcards. This could possibly have been shown as something like 1/0/1/2 (+2) | (3), but thats very confusing. Five different leader types plus the wildcard was too difficult to explain clearly in the top bar (where the limited space is a major issue) and even in the expanded space available in tooltips. After several variants and some UX design time, we deemed this variant a failure. We could have continued spending time refining this - but decided that wed rather pursue a greater rework that were hoping to release alongside the 3.10 update. (Custodian initiatives do not generally have hard release dates - if its not ready by 3.10 freeze, itll move out to 3.11.) Ill go into full details after Caelum is released, but the quick summary involves consolidating the five leader classes down to three (Commanders, Diplomats, and Scientists) and reworking how Envoys are used. (As they would be merged into the Diplomat class.)
Yes, we've had one, yes, but what about second leader rework? Until then, were planning on making some adjustments to the over-cap formulas to reduce their negative effects until the greater rework is ready.
Tell us about Caelum then!
Like the Stellaris 3.1 Lem update, 3.9 Caelum has a lot of general improvements scattered across a great number of game systems. Common Ground and Hegemony are getting some improvements:
- Your starting federation members no longer own your immediately neighboring systems, allowing both you and them some room for early expansion.
- The Federation now starts with 0 Cohesion (instead of -100) and halfway to Level 2 (600 XP instead of 0 XP).
- The requirements for the Origins have been relaxed to allow non-genocidal Hive-Minds and Machine Intelligences to take them. This also allows your AI federation members to occasionally spawn as Hive-Minds or Machine Intelligences.
We also have some balance changes done for Archaeotechs:
- Halved the energy upkeep of the Facility of Archaeostudies.
- Added the Archaeotech Focus admiral trait, which grants increased damage and fire rate with Archaeotech weapons.
- Decreased the research speed and draw weight for Archaeotech from the Expertise trait, but made it reduce the Minor Artifact cost for ship components.
- The starting head of research for Remnants empires now has the Expertise: Archaeostudies trait.
- The Archaeoengineers AP now reduces Minor Artifact cost for ship components by 10%
- Increased the range of Macro Batteries by 50%.
Next week
Here are some things that well be talking about in the next few weeks:
Pixelated collage of lots of tooltips that I figure you'll have deciphered by the end of the day. Well reveal all of these, and more. Well be starting with all the improvements to the Lithoids Species Pack, that are intended on bringing it up to the level of the others.. See you then!
[ 2023-08-03 11:00:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
I hope your summers have been going well! I got a bit sunburnt, but today were back and ready to talk about some of the promising experimentation weve been doing with the Habitat system.
Well be going through the entire development process in this dev diary, so theres going to be a lot of ideas that were interesting but were subsequently discarded for various reasons.
Why Are You Looking at Habitats Again?
The Stellaris Custodian team looks to three primary categories when deciding what to pursue:
- Directives: Things dictated by me, the Game Director, usually for long term strategic reasons.
- Community: Things you ask for. Pain points, quality of life improvements, bug fixing, and other good ideas from the community.
- Passion: Things the individual developers really want to do.
Different Takes
One of the most common requests from the Community was to add a Galaxy slider to restrict the use of Habitats. Options could have ranged from banning Habitats entirely, to Nobody (except Void Dwellers) can create Habitats, requiring the Ascension Perk to build them again, restricting only the AI, or placing (hard or soft) limits to the number of Habitats that could be built. We also discussed what if Habitats cost fractional Starbase Capacity to build - with Void Dwellers and the Voidborne AP granting discounts to this value. This was more appealing, since the soft cap would control AI use of Habitats nicely without significantly hindering players that wanted to go all-in on them. These discussions led to some questioning about whether Stellaris Habitats were satisfying the general fantasy well enough, and whether Habitats should be more hard sci-fi, with lower habitability bases or even ceilings for those accustomed to planetbound life, and whether we could make changes that would address balance challenges like Hive Void Dwellers.
A More Complex Take
We made a list of some of the current challenges caused by the existing Habitat system, and this led to the idea of what if all the Habitats in a system were linked? We could retain the interesting expansion of Habitats across a system while reducing the burden when seizing the system, and potentially address some of the other problems introduced by an excess number of Habitats in the galaxy. Alfray threw together an incredibly hacky and utterly unshippable version of this, and continued iterating on it during the Summer. Under this variant, the first Habitat built within a system is the Central Habitat Complex. Additional Habitats are Support Habitats that add additional space and versatility to the Central Complex. A reminder, many values are grossly unbalanced placeholders in the following screenshots. At this point I went on vacation, so Ill turn this over to Alfray to talk about his investigations.
Once More Into the Alfray
Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with. Firstly, to counteract the expected changes that with minimal Support Habitats, the Central Complex would be small, cramped and overall not great to live on, I gave Void Dwellers extra districts and building slots as a unique modifier (This saw further refinement in a later prototype).
Support Habitats as Megastructures: The first iteration of these prototypes made use of Support Habitats as additional megastructures.
In this prototype, we had the maximum amount of each type of resource collection district (Energy, Minerals, Research) limited by the size of the deposits the habitats were constructed over, similar to how buildings for Strategic Resources are limited. Support Habitats provided additional Districts, Building Slots, and Housing to the Habitat Central Complex, while reducing the Habitability (to reflect the civilian traffic between habitats) as they are upgraded. The final tier also allowed the Habitat Complex to use deposits on moons of their orbited planet. On the surface, this prototype seems to satisfy our initial requirements and more:
- Conquering systems with Habitat-spam was easier due to there only being one functional planet per system.
- Constructing multiple Habitats per system felt rewarding as it upgraded your existing colony.
- The removal of multiple starting colonies removed one of our main concerns for allowing Hive-Minds to have access to the Void Dweller origin - their high pop growth rate due to excessive numbers of spawning pools in the early game. (Iggy had some thoughts on this that hell be mentioning in a future Dev Diary).
A Void Dweller Habitat Complex.
The rather cluttered system said Habitat Complex is in. However, the Support Habitats couldnt be interacted with outside being upgraded, which felt like a major downside. Enemy ships would happily fly past and ignore the Support Habitats, they couldnt be specialised or downgraded. All things considered, this prototype showed that making habitats into a single logical planet spread across many entities in a solar system felt good, but megastructures were not the path forward. Support Habitats as Starbases: Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with. The below screenshots feature placeholder art and the default art for starbases, their buildings and modules. The second iteration of this prototype investigated treating Support Habitats as special Starbases (much like Orbital Rings). In this prototype, the districts available to Habitat Central Complexes depend on the configuration of any Support Habitats in the same system. Thus construction of a Habitat Central Complex would automatically build a neighbouring Support Habitat in orbit of the same planet. When built, a Support Habitat would start with a module that matches any deposits on the planet it orbits. Each
Expanded Support Complex v2 -- The starting Habitat Central Complex and its neighbouring Support Habitat for a Void Dweller empire.
New Habitat Complex v2 -- A newly constructed Habitat Central Complex, completely unspecialised. Allowing the choice of which districts the Habitat Central Complex has access to via specialisation of the Support Habitats brings some interesting changes to how Habitat-dependent empires play. Due to the nature of the prototype, the buildings for Support Habitats havent seen much investigation yet, but would likely include buildings much like those on an Orbital Ring, the lunar extraction support that Advanced Support Habitats experimented with in the Megastructure Prototype above and other such buildings.
Research Habitat Complex, v3 or so? A Research Habitat Complex, using some of the district capacity to provide hydroponic districts. Due to the nature of summer experiments, we cant say if or when this prototype might make it into the live version of the game, but its something that were interested in exploring further.
But the fourth one stayed up!
Thanks, Alfray. That variant listed achieved a lot of the goals we were looking for, but was cobbled together out of the scripting equivalent of sticks and twine as a quick and dirty implementation. It also required a lot of back and forth clicking that we really werent too fond of. So after that one burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, we came up with another iteration. My feedback: Simplify things. The latest variant weve been playing with has been especially promising. In this one, we turned the Starbase style Support Habitats into single tiered pre-specialized units (renamed to Orbitals for UX purposes) rather than requiring Modules to be built on them - so you could build a Mining Orbital, Research Orbital, and so on. This dramatically simplified the flow of building out Habitats while simultaneously improving the implementation.
Pre-Specialized Research Orbital.
Habitat Transit Hub. Hey wait, Maintenance DRONES? Unique buildings on the primary habitat complex can increase the effects of the orbitals.
Upgraded Habitat Transit building. Were still doing some experimentation with this model, but so far were liking what were seeing. Technologies can add special Orbital types or buildings that can modify the primary Habitat Complex, and its very easy for us (or modders) to add new types. We've been looking at jobs per districts too - the Complexes have different challenges from the older Habitat system, and further updated the Voidborne Ascension Perk. Void Dwellers will start with its effects (similar to how Teachers of the Shroud empires effectively start with Mind over Matter).
Void Dwellers get Habitat Build Cost reductions in Traditions.
Whats Next?
For now, Id like to get some of your thoughts on what youve seen today, which well bring into our internal design discussions. It would also be great to get feedback on whether you like this sort of diary, where we go through the overall process (including the failures). Next week I'd like to talk about a Summer Experiment relating to leaders that didnt pan out quite so well, and our plans on how to proceed with that. See you then!
[ 2023-07-27 11:00:42 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by: MrFreake, jasonpepe, AlphaAsh, Jamesfire, corsairmarks, michaelmakesgames
Hello Stellaris Community!
Youll be pleased to know that dev diaries are currently scheduled to return next week! In the meantime, we are going to take this opportunity once again to highlight some of the lesser known mods from the Steam workshop.
This week, we will be looking at mods that add internal political interactions within your empire, from new factions, to leveling your rulers, new mechanics for vanilla civics and even an industrial overhaul. This is an exciting lineup of mods, and judging by the sheer number of people who are interested in an Internal Politics rework one of these could be just the mod you were looking for. handwave
If youre a Modder, and are interested in having your mod featured in a future Mod Highlights, please fill out this form. After this week Mod Highlights will be moving to a longer-form biweekly or monthly publication (depending on the number of interested modders we get), and either taking the place of Dev Diaries when theres no news (eg. Summer and Winter holidays), or the second Monday of each month.
So if you are liking this format, keep an eye out for future Mod Highlights!
# # # #
Divided Loyalties by AlphaAsh
Features
- Up to 15 new extremist factions can now form in a run.
- There's one extreme faction for Xenophobes, and two for all other ethics. Sorry gestalts - you get no extremist factions. Sad face.
- There are pros and cons to promoting or suppressing extremist factions.
- ...and also banning each of the factions. Yes, you can ban extremist factions.
- Some factions oppose each other. Think before you promote/suppress/ban one. Another faction may be very pleased... or very upset.
# # # # This next mod was hard to classify, since it has a mix of both diplomacy and internal politics. I put it in the internal politics highlight, because I write these things and thats what I wanted to do. Stop judging me. # # # #
Uncivic: New Mechanics for Vanilla Civics by michaelmakesgames
Features Adds new mechanics to the following civics for increased depth and RP: - Exalted Priesthood - Nationalistic Zeal - Parliamentary System - Shadow Council - Technocracy - more on the way! Summary Exalted Priesthood: - Lead a Galactic Faith that other Spiritualist empires can join - Use the Ideology casus belli to forcefully convert empires to your faith - Compete with other Exalted Priesthoods to win followers - Contend with the spread of unorthodox beliefs -- reform your faith or declare heresy! Nationalistic Zeal: - Balance your nation's Zeal - If your zeal gets too low, you get Nationalistic Disgrace - High zeal grants strong military bonuses, but too much causes Nationalistic Hubris - If you lose a war or any territory while you have Hubris, you are immediately Disgraced Parliamentary System: - Planets elect factions to represent them in parliament - Each faction has a unique effect on the planet - The factions and political power of the planet's pops determines who wins (with a bit of randomness) - If you don't like the election result, you can "find some more votes" for your preferred candidate, but you risk a scandal! Shadow Council: - Appoint your non-Councilor leaders to positions in your Shadow Council - The more Shadow Councilors you have, the less experience your "legitimate" Councilors earn - Six different Shadow Council positions, each with a unique effect that scales to the leader's skill - Shadow Councilors can get exposed, and you'll face a tough choice Technocracy: - Your non-scientist leaders can start with the Technocrat trait, producing a little science - At level 4, your Technocrats choose a specialization (Physicist, Social Scientist, or Engineer), with a unique effect depending on the leader's class Each civic's new mechanics can be individually turned off if you don't want to play with them all. Inspiration I like playing civics that have a big impact on gameplay! Sometimes I want to choose a civic that fits with the RP of my empire, but the effects are a bit boring... So I made Uncivic to add some new life to conceptually interesting but mechanically simple civics.
# # # # Those of you who remember MODJAM2020, might remember this as a mod that started off as an Origin, but now contains almost a total overhaul of how vanilla industries work! # # # #
Rise Of Cosmic Industry by jamesfire
Summary Industry in Stellaris is simple, and abstracted to the point of not making much sense. Not only that, but critical methods of industry that should be utilized by space-faring empires are missing entirely. Features Rise of Cosmic Industry is composed of 7 modules that can be independently disabled at game start, and come with minimal overwrites:
- Orbital Infrastructure is an implementation of Orbital Districts on planets, opening up more options for planetary development.
- Realistic Development overhauls how things are built, using a Labour-like system called Industrial Production, so that 2 planets don't build twice as fast as 1 for some reason.
- Factory Automation implements Automated Factories, for making resources without pops.
- Space Exploitation is an expansion to Space Mining using Minor Colonies, allowing you to exploit celestial bodies more thoroughly.
- Fallen Empire Buildings provides a third tier of Buff Buildings, that increase the production of their appropriate job, as well as produce some resources on their own.
- Cargo Ships provides Cargo Ships that can be used to form trade routes with other empire's planets, granting both planets resources based on their existing production.
- Shipping Costs makes planet-level deficits cost some energy credits to represent shipping in materials to cover the deficit.
# # # # Want to get your ruler to the next level? Jasonpepe has you covered with this next mod! # # # #
Ruler Level System by jasonpepe
Features Unique Skill System for every empire Ruler(s). 1. Customize their focus 2. Spend their Execution points for campaigns when necessary 3. Leaders are self-learning and will level up over time Summary A mod that allows player to customize their Ruler's abilities, which includes: 1. Ruler Foci: A UI which allows players to customize their Ruler's Focus and Categories. 2. Every leader has Execution Points and Idea Points.
- Execution Points: Spend to level up categories and launch Ruler Campaigns.
- Idea Points: Used to unlock or skill up focuses.
- Rulers can only have up to 15 Execution and 15 Idea points.
- Charisma: Determines the speed of gaining Execution Points.
- Affair: Determines the progress speed Ruler Campaigns.
- Inspire: Determines the speed of gaining Idea Points.
- Rulers species traits will also effect the base-value of the 3 skills.
# # # # If an empire is subjugated and theres no atmosphere to carry the sound, does it make a sound? No.. I dont think thats how the expression goes. Anyway, this mod will do the next best thing, and allow you to keep the leaders of integrated Subjects and pre-FTLs. # # # #
Retain Leaders from Integrated Subjects & Pre-FTL Civilizations by corsairmarks
Features
- Have the option to keep (and maybe assimilate) leaders in a variety of situations when gaining control of another empire:
- When integrating subjects
- When infiltrating or conquering pre-FTLs
- When firing the Nanobot Diffuser on a pre-FTL world
- Custom story text for different kinds of "Retain Leaders" situations, including integration between regular/hive/machine empires and interactions with homicidal civics
- Uses the new "Recruit Leader" functionality added in Stellaris 3.8 "Gemini," with additional background art taken from official Stellaris art
- Empires with assimilation available to them (or necrophages) can opt to transform leaders based on the available assimilation type(s)
- Updates the "Promising Officer" events (both the standard and the variant during fleet maneuvers) to use the "Recruit Leader" functionality - other built-in Stellaris events similarly enhanced, including expanded story text
- Adds special traits for former rulers - including those who lose an election or are otherwise forced out of rulership (includes variants for different empire types and leader classes)
- Designed to work with other mods published by corsairmarks, including additional gameplay interactions
# # # # Thats it for this week! Next week Game Director Eladrin will be back with our first regularly scheduled Dev Diary after the summer!
[ 2023-07-20 11:00:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by: MrFreake, Mute, Risker34, corsairmarks, michaelmakesgames
Hello again Stellaris Community,
Welcome to our third mod highlight! Its been quiet around the office this week, as most of the devs are off enjoying the 15 minutes of Swedish summer. So were back with another Mod Highlight on Thursday! We expect to see weekly Dev Diaries start up again in this spot on July 27th.
In the meantime, because we like talking about Stellaris, weve been doing these Mod Highlights with the assistance of some of our Modders to show off some Community-made mods that might not necessarily show on the frontpage of the Stellaris Workshop.
This weeks mod highlight is themed around diplomatic mods. These mods will allow you to perform new diplomatic actions against the empires around you, build new things, new ways to generate trade, and new ways to conquer enemy worlds (obviously the ultimate form of diplomacy).
Let's get into it!
# # # #
Galactic Politics by Mute
Features:
- New Traditions (Cooperative, Combative, Convictionative, Rebellious, Imperial, Subservient)
- New Federation Types (Closed Circle, Social Commonwealth, Intergalactic Soviet)
- New GalCom Resolution (Galactic Solidarity)
- New Ascension Perks (Machiavellian Machinations)
- New Espionage (Slander, Support Opposition, Backstab, Set Trap, Coup de Grace)
# # # # This next mod expands what you can do with branch offices, offering several upgrade paths to unlock bonuses and has the potential to amplify a planets specialization. # # # #
Moar Branch Offices by Risker34
Summary: Here at Moar Branch Offices we want to provide you with a wider array of buildings to help you expand not only your economy, but the galactic economy as a whole! We do this by creating new buildings for you to build, including a new system that allows you to tailor your branch offices to the specialization of the planets that they're on. Features:
- 20 New Branch Office Buildings for both Megacorps and CrimeCorps
- System to Specialize Branch Offices via the Buildings on them
- Ability to provide goods and services on planets with Branch Offices
- Ability to be a thorn in the side of planets with branch offices
# # # # Specialist Subject types are something were excited to see more of. Dial your trade game up to 12, with this next mod. # # # #
Specialist Subject: Mercatorum by Corsairmarks
Summary: This mod adds a brand-new specialist subject type - the Mercatorum! As an overlord, you can now charter one of your subjects as your very own megacorporation. Unlike other other specialist subject types, overlords are limited to a maximum of one Mercatorum, however that Mercatorum subject does not count for purposes of Divided Patronage (the loyalty penalty for having multiple subjects). Features:
- Adds a new Specialist Subject type: the Mercatorum
- Charter your very own megacorporation - Mercatorums are converted into megacorporations and must remain so as long as they are specialized as a Mercatorum
- Includes all features of a Specialist Subject:
- Custom specialist perks
- A new overlord holding
- Special leader traits (specialist level 2)
- Special trade actions between Overlord and Subject
- Selection of agreement presets for the AI
- Updated agreement terms apply standard specialist restrictions (e.g. no integration)
- Specialist-specific diplomatic background
- All-new icons relating to the specialist subject type, themed on the Energy Credit symbol
- AI personalities for Mercatorum subjects - they prefer to avoid war, alternate flavor allows slavery
- Mercatorum subjects are heavily integrated into their overlord's economy
- Maximum of one Mercatorum subject, but does not count for Divided Loyalty
- Overlord can choose to bail out their subject in the event of a resource deficit (the AI knows how to use this)
- If a Mercatorum subject defaults on their debt, the overlord suffers penalties as well
- Overlord periodically receives special dividends (similar to Mercenary Enclave dividends) and the Subject keeps a percentage as commission
- New trade-related edicts available for regular empires, unlocked by existing technologies
- New branch office building exclusively for Mercatorum subjects: National Corporate Headquarters, which can be built once in their overlord and each of the overlord's other subjects
- Built-in compatibility with four flavors of Ethics & Civics (Bug Branch, Classic, Redux, FunEFork)
- Sub-mod to add compatibility with Vassals Expanded and Reworked (FunEFork)
- Works with all other mods by corsairmarks, including additional gameplay interactions
# # # # This next mod adds new mechanics to conquering planets. I assure you our blockade is completely legal. # # # #
Under Siege by michaelmakesgames
Features:
- When a starbase is occupied, all planets in that system are considered Under Siege
- Besieged planets must produce their own resources
- Planets that don't produce their own resources face worsening shortages
- Stockpile resources on a planet to delay shortages when besieged
# # # #
Why about.. all of them?
Yes, Mod Enjoyer. I see you. No conflicts detected this week! All of these mods should be fine to use with one another. # # # # Thats it for this weeks Mod Highlights. Next week well be talking to the people who ought to know, and theyll tell us how it ought to be!
[ 2023-07-13 11:00:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
by MrFreake_PDX
Hello Stellaris Community!
During this years summer vacation in Stockholm, were doing something a little different: each week we will be highlighting a selection of the fantastic mods made by our modding community. As some of you may know, unless you own one of the most popular mods, or submit something brand new to the workshop, getting discovered on the workshop is.. difficult. We hope to help out some of our modding community, and highlight some of those mods that might not otherwise be seen.
In this weeks Mod Highlights, we have a selection of mods that will add more unique species and give you more abilities for existing species in your galaxies.
Apparently were not the only ones who have seen calls for gaseous/energy based species, as our first mod clearly shows:
# # # #
Unofficial Electroids Species
By Exakan
The mod adds everything a new species pack can offer - origins, civics, traits, perks, and more. It adds a new playable species of energy beings called "Electroids". They live in the orbit of stars or black holes and many features are built around energy. Features: - New colony type: "Aurora" habitats are the homes of Electroids - pure energy spheres! => Each star class where the Aurora is being built adds different bonuses and districts to the colony. - 5 Origins: You live in the orbit of stars, black holes or a distant star cluster. - 10 Civics: From playing the Unbidden, to eating stars and more! - 11 Traits: Add unique bonuses & pop production. - 2 Perks: A new colossus with an own mechanic & a trait ascension. - 3 Shipsets: All 3 Unbidden shipsets are usable (blue, orange, green). - 1 Fallen Empire (Electroids): They are neutral but can be very strong if attacked. => FE is called the "Realm of Nova". Inspiration I always wanted an energy species in Stellaris, so I used ~2.5 weeks of my available time to design & create my own pack instead of just dreaming about it. I remember it was so much fun to create this one, I plan another species pack very soon! [previewyoutube=I-_HBGkj46M;full][/previewyoutube]
Get the Unofficial Electroids Species! # # # # This next mod is for those of you who really believe that unit just doesnt have a soul. # # # #
Organic Zealots
By Corsairmarks
Are you looking to end the pernicious threat of artificial intelligence? Maybe play the inverse of Determined Exterminators, or the slightly friendlier cousins of Fanatic Purifiers? Look no further, this is the mod for you! Play as the Organic Zealots who seek to outlaw and curtain development of cybernetics, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Should they encounter an abominable Machine Intelligence, or should the worst come to pass and an organic empire synthetically "ascend..." - that's what the Anti-Thinking Machine war goal is for. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of an organic mind. This mod adds a lot of gameplay content, but unfortunately needs to get heavily involved in altering built-in gameplay from Stellaris in order to add restrictions. It has a reasonable chance of conflicting with other mods focused on the same areas, but is supported by The Merger of Rules and has built-in support for Vassals Expanded and Reworked (FunEFork) (one agreement term value that is affected by both mods) and Forgotten History (playable with the Banished Threat origin). Features: * New homicidal civic Organic Zealots - friendly to organic empires, but hostile to robotic empires (the inverse of Determined Exterminators) with two council seat options * Fully implements all features of being homicidal: * Has a special Total War (Anti-Thinking Machine) against robotic empires * No need to claim the territories of the foul machines * Opinion modifiers impacted by empire ethics and ascension choices * Diplomatic actions are restricted appropriately against robotic empires * Purge robotic Pops to create Unity and Alloys * Policy option restrictions similar to other homicidal empire types * New Casus Belli/Wargoal (Force Policy/Outlaw AI) to force organic empires to outlaw robotics - the casus belli could be reused by others who want to add custom wargoals to force other kinds of policies * New building Clone Birth-Labs (and corresponding job) available for regular (non-gestalt) empires to gain a small amount of organic Pop assembly * New assimilation type Expurgatory Transfiguration to remove cybernetics * Restricts Organic Zealots from researching AI-related technologies or selecting AI-related ascension perks/traditions * Replacement technologies for Organic Zealots, including accessing a special leader trait instead of being able to research Positronic AI * Special option for Organic Zealots to Sunder the Disconnected Contingency Core in order to create a powerful monument on their capital planet, or keep at a unity penalty in order to build more megastructure * Works with all other mods by corsairmarks, including additional gameplay interactions Inspiration I was inspired to create this mod by player suggestions on the Stellaris Modding Den Discord. The idea of not-fully-homicidal empires intrigued me, and there was a good example to follow because Determined Exterminators get along with (most) other machine empires. It was a lot of fun to write, so this mod includes overrides of almost all built-in Stellaris events that deal with artificial intelligence or cybernetics, in order to add additional story text or options for Organic Zealots. I carefully verify these events for changes with every official patch to Stellaris so that players can continue to purge robots without worrying about missing features from the base game. Clone Birth-Labs are an homage to novels written by C.J. Cherryh, and are to compensate for Spiritualists and Organic Zealots generally wanting to avoid robotics.
Get Organic Zealots! # # # # For those of you on the other side of the robot debate, we have our next mod which adds a ton of new content for our mechanical friends. # # # #
Machine & Robot Expansion
By XVCV
A few years ago, I made my first big mod for Machine Intelligence and Synthetic Ascended Empires. This mod is a rework of that. Thank you for your interest in my mod and this Mod Highlight! Have a nice day. :) Features: - 2 Custom GUIs for adding & removing Traits for the Ruler & Leaders - 1 Ascension Perk for Unique Planet Classes for Popless Resources Production - 1 Ascension Perk for Abyss (a Modified Version of the 'Shroud' in Vanilla) Access for Machine & Synth Empires - 1 Ascension Perk for gaining & becoming a Biological & Mechanical Hybrid Species (which can have some of Biological and Mechanical Species Traits together, and has Food Pop Upkeep that is adjustable using a Policy) - 2 Ascension Perks for adding & removing Gestalt Consciousness Ethics (i.e., Machine Intelligence <-> Synthetic Ascended Empire) - 1 Ascension Perk for Determined Exterminators for triggering Machine Uprising against Another Empire via an Espionage Operation - 1 Ascension Perk for Rogue Servitors for providing more various Pop Jobs for Bio-trophies - 1 Ascension Perk for becoming a Determined Exterminator or Driven Assimilator or Rogue Servitor (or a Standard Machine) - 2 Origins for starting as a Synthetic (Ascended) Empire (One for Normal Synth Start, Another with a Unique Homeworld) - 1 Civic for starting with a Situation that slowly gains Progresses by Player Actions (i.e., Player adopts a Tradition, declares a War, surveys Stars, etc...) and gains Buffs for Resources Production - 1 Civic for Machine Empires to form a Trade Route and send Trade Ships for earning Resources (with a Policy to determine the Type of the Resources) based on the Opponent's Trade Value or Monthly Energy Credit Production (for Gestalts) - 1 Civic for Machine Empires to utilize Consumer Goods for better Unity Creation and more! Inspiration I enjoy playing as machines or synths in Stellaris, but I feel that machines, in particular, lack content. For example, gestalts 'usually' cannot access 'Trade Value', 'Shroud', 'Factions', 'Consumer Goods' (as well as 'Foods' for standard machines), etc. I believe this is due to an attempt to give them different play styles compared to non-gestalts. However, I think this should be achieved by providing more unique content for them, not by reducing it. Therefore, I decided to add this content myself. That's how I started modding this game of my life. And now that was four years ago, considering that the original mod (Unofficial Machine & Synthetic Empire DLC) was released on June 6, 2019. Wow, time DOES fly so fast!
Get Machine & Robot Expansion! # # # # Our final mod asks the question, why not play with your food? # # # #
"Agrarian" Idyll for Lithoids
By corsairmarks
Lithoids can pick the Agrarian Idyll civic, but the benefits are still applied to farming districts. This mod creates a swapped Agrarian Idyll just for lithoids - now your miners will generate amenities instead of farmers! This mod also features English localisation for these effects. Features * Lithoids have a special civic swap for Agrarian Idyll, named Lithorian Idyll * Miners (and miner-related) jobs to generate amenities instead of farmers * Mining Districts grant bonus housing instead of Farming Districts * Interacts with Origin: Subterranean for more stacking bonuses * Swapped councilor seat that boosts mining instead of farming * A new technology that mirrors Agrarian Utopias, instead further improving housing from Mining Districts * Both versions of Agrarian Idyll gain partial bonus building slots from rural (Mining, Farming, and Generator) districts * Both versions of Agrarian Idyll begin the game with more of their "preferred" rural district instead of City Districts * Built-in support for Planetary Diversity * Fully compatible with all other mods by corsairmarks Inspiration I wanted Lithoids to benefit more directly from Agrarian Idyll, which is already a very flavorful civic. Stellaris has evolved since the mod was originally published, making the mod more and more compatibility-friendly with other mods over time.
Get "Agrarian" Idyll for Lithoids! # # # #
CAN I USE THEM ALL AT THE SAME TIME?!
Some of these mods are not compatible with one another. Weve put together a (sort of) tested compatibility patch that will (hopefully) let these mods be run together. This patch will not be maintained past the current version, and if anyone wants to maintain it moving forward, please let me know in the mod comments. Get the Compatibility Patch! # # # # Thats it for this week, be sure to check out Mod Highlights again next week, where we'll learn to love our neighbors!
[ 2023-07-06 11:00:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
by MrFreake_PDX
Hello Stellaris Community!
One of the things Ive always wanted to do as a part of the Community team is to try and come up with a format to better highlight Community mods. The Steam workshop is a wonderful, almost magical place, but from a Mod Creators perspective unless youre in the top 20 most popular mods (a hard place to reach after mods that have been there 7 years), or post a brand new mod (that gives you 7 days on the front of the Workshop, if youre lucky), your mod will never be seen by someone who doesnt actively search for it.
Since its summer, and its the time for experiments, weve started a small-scale experiment to see if we can highlight some of the lesser well known mods in the workshop. This is currently limited to a small group of modders, but should it turn out to be popular, we would like to eventually expand this to the broader modding community.
Each of these modder highlights will be geared towards specific aspects of the game, new species, politics, etc. Today were here to show off four warfare related mods.
Let's get into it!
This first mod is something a lot of youve been asking for. While this isnt a likely direction that the base-game will go, maybe this is the Ground Combat Rework you were looking for. handwave
Ground Command
By Risker34
Major Features:
- Re-imagined Ground Armies
- Origin/Civic/Authority unique Army Types
- Improved Army types via research
- Industrial Connection to Army construction
Subscribe to Ground Command!
# # # # This next mod introduces new galaxy shapes and sizes to conquer, as well as new win condition mechanics that are guaranteed to spice up your next war focused run.
Galactic Campaigns
By Mute
Major Features:
- New Galaxy Shapes (Gemini, Triple, Islands, Split, Helix)
- New Galaxy Sizes (100,300,500,700,900)
- New Galaxy Size variants (Spotted & Aftermath)
- Galactic Seasons (Gameplay Modifiers)
- Extra Win Conditions (Emperor's Throne)
- Sudden Death Mechanics (Eclipse, Attrition)
- Emperor's Throne has the Players fighting over a unique System at the Galaxy's Core, ensuring victory for whoever controls it long enough.
- Eclipse dooms the Galaxy to a gruesome and dark fate as all suns begin imploding into black holes starting from the Galaxy's edge and slowly creeping towards the core.
- Attrition plagues all life in the Galaxy, increasing costs and reducing growth, until finally pops begin dropping dead left and right.
Subscribe to Galactic Campaigns!
# # # # Ever wanted to play as a Private Military Corporation? Well, with this next mod, you can!
Fleet Transfer Mod
By dimuch62
Major Features:
- transfer of fleets to other players
- sale of fleets to other players
- auction of fleets
- lease of fleets
- AI uses the functions of the mod
Subscribe to Fleet Transfer Mod!
# # # # And of course, in your next warfare playthrough, youll probably want a way to put that SPQR Namelist to good use. Want to make all roads lead to Deneb IIb? This next mod will give you the tools to do just that!
Roma Invicta
By Risker34
Major Features: 3 origins depicting different stages of Roman history, from the early Republican period, to the high Augustan Imperial Period and the late Imperial Period.
- The Republic: *Cheaper election costs * Faster ship build speed * +3 Admiral & General level cap * +25% army morale and +100 starting xp * Unique Ruler, Specialist, and Soldier jobs
- The Empire: * +3 General & Governor level cap * +100 army starting xp * -15% building & district cost * +15% megastructure build speed * +10 stability on all planets * Unique Ruler, Specialist, and Solder jobs
- Late Imperial State: * +3 Admiral & General level cap * +1 Limitanei job per 30 pops * +25% ship fire rate * Big Ruler class political power * Stability from soldier jobs +1 * Unique Ruler, Specialist, and Soldier jobs
Subscribe to Roma Invicta!
# # # # Do they all work together? What sort of Chad-mod-enjoyer would you be if you didnt ask this question? There are no conflicts between these four mods, meaning you should be able to run them altogether without any issues! # # # # Thats it for todays Mod Highlights! Well be doing these all summer during gaps in the Dev Diary schedule, so stay tuned!
[ 2023-06-29 11:00:23 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
Midsummer approaches, and with it, holidays.
Stellaris: Free to Play
We want you and your friends to have a reason to celebrate too. As we announced last week, Stellaris will be free to play on Steam from the 22nd to the 26th. With the addition of Co-op (that is, up to five players playing as the same empire), theres never been a better time to introduce your friends to Stellaris! Remember, as host, your friends will have access to all of your DLC.
Stay tuned to our social media channels during the Free to Play event - they have plans.
Stellaris Nexus
Stellaris Nexus is a simultaneous turn-based multiplayer 4X game offering the full spectrum of a thrilling, strategic 4X experience. Choose a unique faction and leader and challenge up to 5 other players, plotting and battling your way to galactic dominance; all in about 1 hour. As part of Steam Next Fest, its also playable for free until the 26th!
Community Designed Starter Pack
Hello! This is MordredViking, the Community Manager for Stellaris. We recently asked the community for their input on what DLCs to recommend to new players, and we thought we should share some of our findings. We got 420 responses from you all, and among the questions we asked was, for how many hours had you played Stellaris? The answers ranged from a couple of hundred to a whopping 13,000! This came out to an average of 855 hours among all respondents. A pretty hardcore group! The core of the questionnaire however, was of course which DLCs to recommend to a new Stellaris player, and heres the top 10:
From these results, we wanted to have a bundle that provided a representative selection of available content, catering to a range of different play styles and fantasies. With this criteria and the survey results in mind, we settled on Utopia, Federations, Distant Stars and Synthetic Dawn. Utopia allows for a broader range of empire choices, by providing new tools to develop the empire and ultimately allowing players to transform their nation into a paradise. Federations taps into a more diplomatic playstyle, and really ramps up the potential for in-game alliances and also enables power projection through bodies like the Galactic Council. Distant Stars entices eager explorers with new discoveries throughout the galaxy. Then finally, Synthetic Dawn brings those robot dreams to life with expanded robotic gameplay options.
Whats Next?
We will return with dev diaries on July 27th with Habitat discussions, and start going into detail regarding whats planned for the 3.9 Caelum update. Like 3.1 Lem, 3.3 Libra, and 3.6 Orion, Caelum will be a Custodian update focused on revisiting old packs, catching up on technical debt, and generally improving the game.
Spoiler: We Dug Up Some Lithoid Previews
[expand type=show more]
The newly clarified Calamitous Birth tooltip.
The home crater gets a bit of a boost.
A minor tweak to the craters makes a big difference.
What do Lithoids eat?
Pom-a-granites!
Placeholder icons on the approaches.
Once you start feasting, it's really hard to stop. Om nom nom. [/expand]
[ 2023-06-22 11:00:49 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
The Gemini 3.8.4 update has been released today. In it, weve continued post-release balance work. Some of the bigger changes in the release include the conversion of several leader traits into Council Traits either to reduce micromanagement (moving a governor from planet to planet to maximize benefits of some traits) or to address undesired stacking issues.
STELLARIS 3.8.4 PATCH NOTES
[expand type=showmore] ############################################################ #################### VERSION 3.8.4 ###################### ############################################################ Balance
- Rebalanced a number of leader traits: Some general and governor traits that previously encouraged moving leaders from planet to planet have been made council traits or had their modifiers changed to discourage this. Resource production traits now require the leader to have at least level 2 to gain the first tier.
- Empire Size now has a floor of 50, and thus can no longer go negative.
- Increased the bombardment effectiveness of large fleets.
- The base rate at which Raiding bombardment steals pops has been dramatically reduced. Each army present on a planet will also protect 2 pops from being vulnerable to Raiding bombardment. (Raiding bombardment is always unable to steal the last pop of a colony)
- Renormalised political power from living standards and reduced base faction unity gain to better fit intended unity production. The Shared Burdens civic no longer grants an increase to the base unity of the Egalitarian faction, as the benefit is now rolled into their living standards.
- Sequential End-Game Crises now get +2 strength multipliers instead of +1.5.
- The Khan now has terrifying admiral traits.
- The opinion modifier from Defender of the Galaxy now only affects normal, non-fallen/awakened, empires that are capable of independent diplomacy.
- Colonists now increase planetary build speed by 10% instead of creating defensive armies.
- Fixed AI hiring a governor without having a planet to assign them to.
- Fixed AI hiring scientists without having science ships to assign them to.
- Broken Shackles Origin event "Homesick" no longer casts affected Pops into the void
- Adjusted width of MP lobby chat entries so that they don't overlap the scroll bar.
- Council Agenda Costs now benefit from Empire Size Effect modifiers.
- Cyborg general trait will now add +2 combat width, as stated in the tooltip
- Empires with the Under One Ruler origin no longer ignore the initial 20 year cooldown on government reform.
- Federation project Flocks of Cloud should no longer get stuck ad infinitum in the situation log
- Fixed an error in which you may have been prevented from using Operation Crisis Beacon again - beyond the intended 4-year lockout period - if said Operation was aborted after confirming its target.
- Fixed duplicate tradition names in French
- Fixed Imperial Heirs not having a starting leader trait.
- Fixed queued move orders from a system with an FTL inhibitor not being displayed correctly.
- Fixed randomly generated empires having DLC-locked civics.
- Fixed randomly generated species having DLC-locked traits.
- Fixed randomly generated species having invalid trait and climate preference combinations.
- Fixed randomly generated species not having enough traits if it has traits (such as Aquatic) that are required by something else.
- Fixed the bonus leader trait from Aptitude Traditions not applying to Imperial Heirs.
- Fixed tooltip for Beacon of Liberty and Fanatic Purifiers, now they do mention that they are incompatible with Crusader Spirit
- Imperial Heirs are excluded from the effects of The Orb.
- Imperial Heirs that are generals or admirals in empires with Distinguished Admiralty now benefit from the +2 starting level.
- Invalid civics will get removed when authority is changed through event for Under One Rule
- Leaders excluded from the upkeep cost now correctly produce resources
- Pharma State civic is now correctly blocked by Payback and Broken Shackles.
- Removed DLC lock on some faction demands that were introduced in 3.8
- Set the AI weight for reorganizing the council to 0.
- Void Dweller MegaCorps with the Pharma State civic now correctly replace their starting Holo-Theaters with a Gene Clinic, unless they also have Permanent Employment (in which case it is replaced with the Employment Center).
- Warform no longer has the synth trait and has the second tier of the skirmisher trait.
- Imperial Heirs are now up to 10 years younger than regular leaders of the same species. Starting Imperial Rulers are now up to 15 years older than regular leaders of the same species.
- Imperial Heirs that benefit from bonus starting levels now have selectable traits for those levels for owners of Galactic Paragons.
- Imperial Rulers and Heirs now have a 5% chance to start with a negative trait and an additional positive trait. The Philosopher King civic negates this.
- Fixed leader portrait clipping in the level up window.
- Fixed position of Speech To Text button in the MP lobby.
- Fixed width of MP lobby chat text for large fonts and text to speech.
- If a player in your coop group adds a leader trait while you have the level up window open and there are no more traits to add, it will show the last selection.
- Reworked the planet occupation icon frame
- Selecting a ship by clicking it will now ignore its bounding box if it has a collision mesh.
- Empire size string now uses the actual defines instead of localized numbers for its message.
- Made it possible to set what leader portrait container to use for each location of the new portraits
- Made reload_gui console command more stable
Living Standards, Political Power and Unity Generation
A pass has been done on living standard political power and unity generation to normalize them when compared with one another - living standards like Shared Burdens and Utopian Abundance were not generating enough, while Academic Privilege was previously the champion of Unity - a little odd for the Materialist living standard. After these changes, Utopian Abundance should be at the top of the charts, followed by Shared Burdens. (Which no longer needs the double Unity from the Egalitarian faction crutch.) These changes have gone live in todays update.
Habitats and You
A few people [ed: a few?!?] have discussed the tendency of late game systems to become flooded with extreme numbers of habitats. We have some ideas on different ways to curb this behavior while still ensuring that habitats are thematic and effective, especially in the hands of Void Dwellers. Ill have a broader feedback discussion later on during the summer where we present some of our ideas, discuss how experiments with them went, and collect additional feedback from the community.
Stellaris with a Twist
Stellaris with a Twist is our streaming event, where Ep3o and AlphaYangDelete play co-op multiplayer, and try to accomplish goals suggested and chosen by the Community.
If you have a suggestion for the final stream's goals, you can submit it here, and if you've missed part of this event you can get caught up here! The last session of Stellaris with a Twist is next week, at 1500 CEST! Don't miss the exciting conclusion and find out which of our streamers will accomplish their Community-Suggested Goals for the Stream!
Free to Play Weekend
But wait, there's more!
What's better than having a galaxy full of wonder to explore? Conquering that galaxy with a friend, obviously! From June 22nd to June 26th, Stellaris will be Free to Play; there will never be a better time to introduce a friend to Stellaris -- and with the addition of co-op, you can now work together to [strike]conquer[/strike] liberate the galaxy like never before. In Stellaris multiplayer, the host's DLC is shared between all the players in the game -- the same holds true for co-op, even if one of the players is playing for free. So grab a friend, your planet cracker, and be sure to play during the Free to Play weekend! Thinking of trying Stellaris for the first time during the Free to Play, but don't know where to start? Join us on Discord; from the 22nd to the 26th, our Player Helpers will be running "Learn to Play" Stellaris sessions! That's it for this week, see you next week!
[ 2023-06-15 11:00:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello,
The latest minor patch for Stellaris is ready and released, fixing a number of issues and further balancing the new mechanics.
This should be the last of the 3.8 patches, although the teams work continues targeting later updates.
Please find the patch notes below.
3.8.4 "Gemini" Patch Notes
[expand type=details]
############################################################
#################### VERSION 3.8.4 ######################
############################################################
Balance
- Rebalanced a number of leader traits: Some general and governor traits that previously encouraged moving leaders from planet to planet have been made council traits or had their modifiers changed to discourage this. Resource production traits now require the leader to have at least level 2 to gain the first tier.
- Empire Size now has a floor of 50, and thus can no longer go negative.
- Increased the bombardment effectiveness of large fleets.
- The base rate at which Raiding bombardment steals pops has been dramatically reduced. Each army present on a planet will also protect 2 pops from being vulnerable to Raiding bombardment. (Raiding bombardment is always unable to steal the last pop of a colony)
- Renormalised political power from living standards and reduced base faction unity gain to better fit intended unity production. The Shared Burdens civic no longer grants an increase to the base unity of the Egalitarian faction, as the benefit is now rolled into their living standards.
- Sequential End-Game Crises now get +2 strength multipliers instead of +1.5.
- The Khan now has terrifying admiral traits.
- The opinion modifier from Defender of the Galaxy now only affects normal, non-fallen/awakened, empires that are capable of independent diplomacy.
- Colonists now increase planetary build speed by 10% instead of creating defensive armies.
AI
- Fixed AI hiring a governor without having a planet to assign them to.
- Fixed AI hiring scientists without having science ships to assign them to.
Bugfixes
- Broken Shackles Origin event "Homesick" no longer casts affected Pops into the void
- Adjusted width of MP lobby chat entries so that they don't overlap the scroll bar.
- Council Agenda Costs now benefit from Empire Size Effect modifiers.
- Cyborg general trait will now add +2 combat width, as stated in the tooltip
- Empires with the Under One Ruler origin no longer ignore the initial 20 year cooldown on government reform.
- Federation project Flocks of Cloud should no longer get stuck ad infinitum in the situation log
- Fixed an error in which you may have been prevented from using Operation Crisis Beacon again - beyond the intended 4-year lockout period - if said Operation was aborted after confirming its target.
- Fixed duplicate tradition names in French
- Fixed Imperial Heirs not having a starting leader trait.
- Fixed queued move orders from a system with an FTL inhibitor not being displayed correctly.
- Fixed randomly generated empires having DLC-locked civics.
- Fixed randomly generated species having DLC-locked traits.
- Fixed randomly generated species having invalid trait and climate preference combinations.
- Fixed randomly generated species not having enough traits if it has traits (such as Aquatic) that are required by something else.
- Fixed the bonus leader trait from Aptitude Traditions not applying to Imperial Heirs.
- Fixed tooltip for Beacon of Liberty and Fanatic Purifiers, now they do mention that they are incompatible with Crusader Spirit
- Imperial Heirs are excluded from the effects of The Orb.
- Imperial Heirs that are generals or admirals in empires with Distinguished Admiralty now benefit from the +2 starting level.
- Invalid civics will get removed when authority is changed through event for Under One Rule
- Leaders excluded from the upkeep cost now correctly produce resources
- Pharma State civic is now correctly blocked by Payback and Broken Shackles.
- Removed DLC lock on some faction demands that were introduced in 3.8
- Set the AI weight for reorganizing the council to 0.
- Void Dweller MegaCorps with the Pharma State civic now correctly replace their starting Holo-Theaters with a Gene Clinic, unless they also have Permanent Employment (in which case it is replaced with the Employment Center).
- Warform no longer has the synth trait and has the second tier of the skirmisher trait.
Improvements
- Imperial Heirs are now up to 10 years younger than regular leaders of the same species. Starting Imperial Rulers are now up to 15 years older than regular leaders of the same species.
- Imperial Heirs that benefit from bonus starting levels now have selectable traits for those levels for owners of Galactic Paragons.
- Imperial Rulers and Heirs now have a 5% chance to start with a negative trait and an additional positive trait. The Philosopher King civic negates this.
UI
- Fixed leader portrait clipping in the level up window.
- Fixed position of Speech To Text button in the MP lobby.
- Fixed width of MP lobby chat text for large fonts and text to speech.
- If a player in your coop group adds a leader trait while you have the level up window open and there are no more traits to add, it will show the last selection.
- Reworked the planet occupation icon frame
- Selecting a ship by clicking it will now ignore its bounding box if it has a collision mesh.
Modding
- Empire size string now uses the actual defines instead of localized numbers for its message.
- Made it possible to set what leader portrait container to use for each location of the new portraits
- Made reload_gui console command more stable
Please note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important game going, please back up the save file before trying to load the save in the new version. You can roll back to a prior version by right-clicking on Stellaris in your library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version from the drop-down. If you experience crashing or other issues, first disable all mods and start a new save. If the issue persists, please report it on the Bug Report forums.
[ 2023-06-15 08:30:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
Now that the 3.8.3 patch has been released, and it seems so far that multiplayer and co-op stability is in a pretty good state. Were continuing work on a 3.8.4 release planned for a few weeks from now, to get some more fixes in before summer hits.
A few highlights include changes relating to ground combat collateral damage and bombardment (specifically Raiding Bombardment).
Were reducing the amount of collateral damage ground units deal, as many invasions were destroying the colonies before the battle completed.
The base rate at which Raiding bombardment steals pops will be dramatically reduced. Each army present on a planet will also protect 3 pops from being vulnerable to Raiding bombardment. (Raiding bombardment is always unable to steal the last pop of a colony, so on a colony with three defending armies the last ten pops would be safe from raiding.)
Since next week is another short week in Sweden, our next dev diary will be on June 15th, though I may drop a little update with some more of the confirmed fixes planned for 3.8.4.
Now Ill pass it over to MordredViking for some information on the community event thats starting.
Stellaris with a Twist
Hello! Im Mordred Viking, the Community Manager for Stellaris! To celebrate Stellaris 7th anniversary, were running our Stellaris with a Twist event! Two of our favorite content creators will explore a galaxy, with objectives suggested by, and voted on, by you, the Community. These streams will run for the first three Wednesdays in June (June 7th, 14th and 21st), at 1500 CEST (UTC+1). Want more details on this event, and how you can get involved? Check out this forum post! Each player will have a personal goal to achieve, plus they will have a joint goal. All the Content Creator goals will be crowdsourced from the Community. Goal suggestions are currently open, so you can leave your suggestions here. Be sure to watch our social media channels (or join us on Discord!), because voting will start on Friday and be active all weekend. On Monday we will announce the goals for the first stream on Wednesday, June 7th!
Subscribe to Ep3o and follow AlphaYangDelete! That's it for this week, folks! See you again on June 15th (or sooner)!
[ 2023-06-01 11:00:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello,
Our latest patch is now live and ready for download.
Please find the patch notes below.
Enjoy!
STELLARIS 3.8.3 PATCH NOTES
[expand type=details]
############################################################
#################### VERSION 3.8.3 ######################
############################################################
Improvements
- It is now possible to rename council positions by clicking on council position name in the council view.
- Added additional event chains to Under One Rule.
- Under One Rule now will take into account if the ruler was bad or good towards citizens.
- Added a checkbox to toggle automatic expansion of a sector in the sector editor
- Made the three different "Terraforming Candidate Discovered" events turn into messages if you have already found one before.
- The pre-sapients that worship the Beholder now have the Psionic trait.
- The Beholder's Psi-Inoculation process is now a pair of decisions to toggle it on and off, instead of a decision to be enacted for each pop you want to become psionic.
- The Animator of Clay has blessed the corroded one.
- Imperial Heirs will now be more likely to adopt the class of the current ruler if you have the Philosopher King civic.
- Imperial heirs will now have their chosen class weighted by civics and traditions that give bonuses to specific leader classes.
- Added the Reorganize Council agenda, which allows reselection of unlocked council positions without the need to reform the government.
- Beholder now has a recruitment event, and Azaryn's recruitment event has a couple more options
- Added a checkbox in the army tab of the planet view to control if a planet is used via the sector army builder or not
- Added scroll wheel speed settings
- Leaders in the leader pool that start with a negative trait, now correctly gets one less additional negative trait during their lifespan.
- For players without Galactic Paragons, leaders will more often get traits that match if they're assigned as councilors or not.
- Increased the age span of new leaders, but weighted towards the middle. Initial Leaders will now also be roughly the same age as pool leaders.
- The edict fund is now shown in the council view.
- Imperial empires can now crown a Chosen One to be the Divine Sovereign if the Chosen One is the current ruler or heir.
Balance
- Legendary leaders do not count towards Leader Capacity.
- The Eager trait now has an additional effect: these leaders will not contribute towards Leader Capacity until they reach level 4. Assigned some event spawned leaders the Eager (II) trait.
- Admirals that command fleets hired from marauders no longer count towards your leader cap.
- XP Penalties for going over leader capacity have been reduced. The LEADER_CAPACITY_XP_SCALE define has been added for modders to be able to easily adjust this number.
- Military fleets led by an Admiral can now explore unsurveyed hyperlanes. (This does not permit Admirals to survey planets, anomalies, or wormholes.)
- Admirals no longer give Fleet Command Limit based off of their level.
- Researching Galactic Administration now removes the cooldown for government reform, this was previously only done if you obtained it via Statecraft traditions.
- Rebalanced many traditions and ascension Perks.
- Opener for Aptitude traditions now gives +1 trait, moved from the Finisher. This is retroactively applied to leaders that have been hired or are in your leader pool.
- The Empire Needs You now gives -25% Leader Hire Cost instead of +1 Leader Capacity.
- Specialist Training now gives +25% Leader XP Gain.
- Psychological Profiling now gives -25% Leader Upkeep Cost in addition to -1 Max Negative Traits.
- Healthcare Program now gives +20 Leader Lifespan instead of +10 Leader Lifespan.
- Aptitude Finisher now gives +1 Leader Capacity and +1 Leader Trait Pick options instead of +1 trait.
- Science Division now gives -10% Scientist Cost and Upkeep instead of +20% Scientist XP Gain.
- Polytechnic Education now gives +10% Leader XP gain instead of +20%.
- Colonial Viceroys now gives -10% Governor Cost and Upkeep instead of +20% Governor XP Gain.
- War Games now gives -10% Admiral Cost and Upkeep instead of +20% Admiral XP Gain.
- Mind and Body now gives +10 Leader Lifespan instead of +20 Leader Lifespan.
- Finisher effect for Statecraft now grants Galactic Administration as a research option with 25% progress instead of giving the tech for tree.
- Resistance is Frugal now also gives -10% General Cost and Upkeep.
- Imperial Prerogative now gives +2 Leader Capacity in addition to its existing effects.
- Transcendent Learning Prerogative now gives +2 Leader Capacity, +1 Leader Pool Size and +33% Leader XP gain.
- Aptitude Tradition "Champions of the Empire" now gives bonus per Leaders' levels. Effect is now a flat -2 Empire Size per Governor level, and 0.5% Exp per Scientist level (and 2 Naval capacity per Admiral/General level)
- Guardian trait maximum effect is now +33% Defense Platform Damage and Hull Points.
- Frontier Spirit trait maximum effects changed to -10% Colony Ship Cost and +50% Colonization Speed and +1 starting pop for colonies.
- Cyborg generals now increase planetary combat width.
- Reduced passive experience gain by 30% for Progenitor Hive leaders from level 1-6 and 50% for Progenitor Hive leaders between 7-10.
- Gray Eminence destiny trait now reduces the effects of empire size, instead of reducing empire size directly. Updated Aturion Efficiency to match Gray Eminence.
- Now imperial rulers do not lose imperial heir trait, so they don't become worse when they take over the country.
- Lowered the spawn chance for the legendary paragon Keides by 75%.
- Autocannons are no longer valued at three times their intended military power.
- Now criminals are also unhappy when under oppressive autocracy civic
- Kai-Sha's "Expanded Contact Network" event will now upgrade her Shady Contacts trait if she already has it. And gives intel on other empires if it has already been maxed out.
- Replaced -20% Empire Size reduction for Aturion Efficiency trait with -10% Empire Size Penalty.
- Leader traits that have base resource production now produce the market equivalent of 8 energy/month for tier 1 and 24 energy/month for tier.
- Aggressor admiral sub-class now gives +7.5% weapon damage.
- Artillerist II trait now gives +7.5% tracking.
- Fortifier trait now scales between -5% Starbase upgrade cost and -5% Defense platform cost at tier 1 to -10% Starbase upgrade cost, -10% Defense platform cost, +5% Starbase hullpoints and +5% Defense platform hullpoints at tier 3.
- Armada Logistician trait ship upkeep maximum reduction is now -10%.
- Military Pioneer trait maximum effects are now +20% Ship Build Speed and -10% Ship Build Cost.
- Guerilla Tactician now gives a flat 10 Evasion instead of a +50% Evasion multiplier.
- Architect of War now gives -10% Military Ship Cost.
- Charisma trait now has a maximum Edict Upkeep reduction of -10%
- Removed -5% Military Ship Cost from the Strategist sub-class
- Geological Consultant trait maximum effect reduced to 9 months of unity per blocker removed.
- Retired Fleet Officer trait maximum effects reduced to +20% Ship Build Speed and -10% Ship Build Cost.
- Agrarian Upbringing trait now checks for country_uses_food = yes instead of being biological.
- Shipwright maximum effects reduced to +10% Ship Build Speed and -10% Ship Build Cost.
- Frontier Spirit maximum effects reduced to -10% Colony Ship Cost and +45% Colonization Speed.
- Architectural Sense maximum effects reduced to -10% Buildings and Districts Cost, -5% Buildings and District Upkeep, +25% Planetary Build Speed.
- Experimenter trait now gives a maxium of 2Leader Level Research Points per month.
- Explorer trait maximum effects reduced to -10% Science Ship Cost and +25% Anomaly Research Speed.
- Expansionist maximum effects reduced to -10% Outpost Alloy and Influence Cost.
- Great Researcher trait now gives 5Leader Level Research Points per month.
- Taskmaster trait XP reduced from 600 to 500. In return it now has soldiers produce 2/2/2 Energy/Minerals/Food (for countries that use food) or 3/3 Energy/Minerals (for countries that don't)
Bugfixes
- Under One Rule now changes to Imperial Authority when transitioning to Galactic Emperor or Psionic Sovereign.
- Intellectual Espionage trait now takes into account all researcher category jobs on the planet.
- Fixed an issue where the Expanded Hive Warren would get deleted if there was no remaining unupgraded Hive Warrens on the planet
- Updated all researcher jobs to check for Academic Recruiter.
- Increased the army upkeep from Disorder II trait.
- Chainbreaker trait now requires Egalitarian ethics.
- Honored Warmaster trait now requires Xenophile ethics.
- Commented out cut prospecting decision.
- Kidnapper trait now checks that the general's owner allows slavery instead of checking their ethics.
- Taskmaster trait no longer gives an undocumented +5% Building Speed per soldier job.
- Now you can't terraform with Azaryn without launching her special ability.
- The Death of a Great Leader event should no longer fire when you send a leader off to the Keepers of Knowledge.
- Cloaked Ships will no longer block starbases from being rebuilt.
- Moved gestalt nodes further apart from each other in the council view so that trait picking doesn't get blocked when they have a lot of traits.
- The planet visuals should now update properly when planets change class
- Fixed an issue where traits given via event options would not correctly display triggered effects
- The ambience sound effect played in the council view is now properly affected by the ambience volume slider
- Fixed an issue where leaders that changed empires would retain their council position in their old empire
- Updated all researcher jobs to check for leader_trait_academia_recruiter
- Fixed a bug where modding the species appearance would not apply to the ruler
- leader_trait_industrial_espionage now takes into account all researcher category jobs on the planet.
- The Scholarium Investigator leader trait now gives +25% Assist Research Efficiency instead of failing to give 10% Research Speed as a non-council trait.
- Fixed a COOP bug where it was possible for several players to unlock council positions at the same time resulting in duplicates
- If there is a wormhole in the capital system, then the Keides wormhole will spawn in a random neighboring system 1-2 jumps away
- Cordyceptic Stargazers now correctly spawn with an amoeba fleet again.
- Fixed Eager Explorer empires spawning with an extra scientist.
- Slaves are now properly set under dystopian living standard
- Any Gestalt empire generated after game start (e.g. from machine uprising) should now correctly get their Gestalt council nodes.
- Hyperdrive technologies no longer show duplicated icons.
- Fixed issues where starbase modifiers would apply to defensive platforms when they shouldn't
- Fixed an issue where pre FTL empires spawned from the necrophage origin would spawn in orbit of their planet
- Fixed a bug where ships would sometimes stop following its target when they entered a hyperlane
- Zroni Relic will now add 1 level to the leader, but won't choose trait on random it will be up to player to chose the trait.
- Fixed notification map ping staying visible for some time after dismissing the notification.
- Fixed a bug where some traits would not properly localize their names when their modifiers are part of tooltips
- Fixed a bug where the Insightful trait tooltip would duplicate headers for its effects
- Fixed an issue where it was not possible to unassign envoys from their current task
- Fixed Resilient trait to properly adjust for synths. Did the same for destiny trait which was giving leader life span
- Crusader Spirit Opinion Modifier: Now it gives -80 opinion towards everyone of different ethic and +20 to the same ethic empires
- Fixed issues with the fleet manager where the buttons to increase and decrease the number of ships would not work correctly when using shift or ctrl modifiers
- Rogue Scientist event chain shouldn't trigger for Governors assigned as Head of Science.
- Updated some trigger loc from "No of ..." to "Number of ..." to be more consistent with the rest of the game.
- Fixed Tooltip for Paranoid Leader Trait
- Fixed title case for anomaly.3141 "The Depths of Alien Life"
- The event that allows you to pick a Chosen One no longer says "three individuals" are capable of absorbing such power and proceeds to list four names.
- Events that give the Chosen traits now check that the leader in question is psionic.
- Fixed an issue where you could reinforce a fleet when the template was not filled with the correct ships even though the fleet was filled on command limit
- Fixed the spawn chance modifier of the anomaly The Orb, as it could not spawn before.
- Beholder planetfall error message now states that an empty building slot is required.
- Fixed icon for brainslug species trait again.
- You can no longer psi-inoculate hive-minded pops or those being purged.
- Fallen empire capital planets should now have the correct planetary designation.
- You can no longer create subjects from sectors if the primary species would be an infertile clone army species.
- Marauder admirals can no longer serve on the council or be manually fired.
- Fixed some edges where a ruler could be chosen by a shroud entity but not awarded the trait.
- Added scripted loc for GetDefenseForceOrArmada and GetGDFOrArmada
- Updated Cybernetic Advantage agenda so it doesn't display placeholder art.
- Regular empires no longer have machine or hive-mind leaders in their external leader pools and vice versa.
- Cloned Organs/Self-Preservation Protocols now correctly has the same effects as Mind and Body.
- Fixed incorrect modifiers on the adoption effect of Synthetic traditions.
- Fixed MP lobby chat messages and scroll bar spilling outside the chat box.
- Fixed most tooltips in the game browser not working.
- Fixed Plantoids Species Pack DLC not showing up in MP lobby DLC list
- Fixed misalignment of the DLC icons in the multiplayer lobby
- Fixed icon lists sometimes becoming vertical when they should be horizontal
- Fixed coop presence icons not always showing their tooltip.
- The Interstellar Recruitment Office tooltip now specifies why you can't build it if you already have one in your empire.
- The sentinels archaeology site will now put Azaryn back on her own ship when she returns.
- Fixed a bug where some mercenary fleets would not have an admiral assigned to them
- Mercenary Admirals now get Mercenary Warrior Trait and 2 admiral traits to represent their level
- Mercenary Enclaves should no longer steal their admirals which they just rented out
AI
- AI will now wait until it has at least 5 planets and 25 years before choosing a specialization designation for its homeworld
- Fixed an issue where AI would be unable to build any buildings if they desired to build the Ancient Refinery but did not have access to any minor artifacts
Stability and Performance
- Fixed a number of Out of Sync errors.
- Increased performance in the leader view
- Fixed a crash that would sometimes occur when a scientist was elected ruler while performing science ship orders
- Fixed a rare, but persistent crash when an empire was destroyed
- Fixed a crash that could sometimes happen if there were issues opening or writing log files
- Fixed crash in MP lobby when you confirm disbanding a coop group if the player list changed while the confirmation popup was open.
- Disabled tooltips in the loading screen to avoid crashes related to focus loss.
UI
- Re-enabled tooltips while the game has no focus as hiding them caused issues for screen readers.
- Added tooltips for the join/leave coop empire button in the MP lobby when you can't click it.
- Added a tooltip for the coop checkbox in the MP lobby when you can't change it due to being ready.
- Use different titles for the multiplayer and coop game browsers.
- The multiplayer game browser now has a column that shows whether a game allows coop.
- Fixed an issue where the active agendas list would sometimes duplicate elements
- Added a new version of the main coop presence view to the topbar for resolutions with width >= 1600
- Auto-confirm disbanding a coop group in the MP lobby if all other players leave the group.
- Modifiers that affect leader experience gain will now be indented under a "Experience Gain Rate:" header
- Added confirmation prompt when selecting a country during hotjoining
- Lysator Syng's hire tooltip now shows that hiring him will give you 3 pirate ships as well.
- Show decimals for power projection breakdown in naval cap tooltip
Modding
- Added set_random_$CLASS$_background_effect script effects, to assign a random background class to a leader. $CLASS$ can be replaced with admiral, general, governor, or scientist.
- Added support for custom_tooltip_with_modifiers for council positions.
- Updated documentation for council positions to include new script support. See 01_test_councilor.txt for an example of a council position not linked to civics.
- Added script effect "unlock_council_selection = yes" to force validation of council positions and allow the player to reselect their council positions.
- Fixed the ethics OverLappingElementsBox not reloading properly
- Fixed the spacing parameter not working for vertical OverlappingElementBoxTypes
- Added new "empire_size_add" modifier, which flatly increases or decreases the Empire size.
- Council position unlock screen will now show council positions which are available by scope check but don't require any civics
- Added console command "debug_trait_weights", which enables logging of some of the trait random roll weights.
- Added military_power_multiplier to weapon components, which allows manual adjustment of combat power assessment for intangibles that are otherwise difficult to automate.
- Use 2 decimals for army upkeep in army view
[ 2023-05-30 08:05:34 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello again!
Weve been working on a balance and bugfixing update, which should hopefully be coming to you early next week. Today Ill be going over some of the things that will be in it, as well as go into why weve prioritized certain fixes over others.
STELLARIS 3.8.3 GEMINI PRELIMINARY PATCH NOTES
[expand type=showmore]
############################################################
#################### VERSION 3.8.3 Patch ######################
############################################################
Improvements
- It is now possible to rename council positions by clicking on council position name in the council view.
- Added additional event chains to Under One Rule.
- Under One Rule now will take into account if the ruler was bad or good towards citizens.
- Added a checkbox to toggle automatic expansion of a sector in the sector editor
- Made the three different "Terraforming Candidate Discovered" events turn into messages if you have already found one before.
- The pre-sapients that worship the Beholder now have the Psionic trait.
- The Beholder's Psi-Inoculation process is now a pair of decisions to toggle it on and off, instead of a decision to be enacted for each pop you want to become psionic.
- The Animator of Clay has blessed the corroded one.
- Imperial Heirs will now be more likely to adopt the class of the current ruler if you have the Philosopher King civic.
- Imperial heirs will now have their chosen class weighted by civics and traditions that give bonuses to specific leader classes.
- Added the Reorganize Council agenda, which allows reselection of unlocked council positions without the need to reform the government.
- Beholder now has a recruitment event, and Azaryn's recruitment event has a couple more options
- Added a checkbox in the army tab of the planet view to control if a planet is used via the sector army builder or not
- Added scroll wheel speed settings
- Leaders in the leader pool that start with a negative trait, now correctly gets one less additional negative trait during their lifespan.
- For players without Galactic Paragons, leaders will more often get traits that match if they're assigned as councilors or not.
- Increased the age span of new leaders, but weighted towards the middle. Initial Leaders will now also be roughly the same age as pool leaders.
- The edict fund is now shown in the council view.
- Imperial empires can now crown a Chosen One to be the Divine Sovereign if the Chosen One is the current ruler or heir.
- Legendary leaders do not count towards Leader Capacity.
- The Eager trait now has an additional effect: these leaders will not contribute towards Leader Capacity until they reach level 4. Assigned some event spawned leaders the Eager (II) trait.
- Admirals that command fleets hired from marauders no longer count towards your leader cap.
- XP Penalties for going over leader capacity have been reduced. The LEADER_CAPACITY_XP_SCALE define has been added for modders to be able to easily adjust this number.
- Military fleets led by an Admiral can now explore unsurveyed hyperlanes. (This does not permit Admirals to survey planets, anomalies, or wormholes.)
- Admirals no longer give Fleet Command Limit based off of their level.
- Researching Galactic Administration now removes the cooldown for government reform, this was previously only done if you obtained it via Statecraft traditions.
- Rebalanced many traditions and ascension Perks.
- Opener for Aptitude traditions now gives +1 trait, moved from the Finisher. This is retroactively applied to leaders that have been hired or are in your leader pool.
- The Empire Needs You now gives -25% Leader Hire Cost instead of +1 Leader Capacity.
- Specialist Training now gives +25% Leader XP Gain.
- Psychological Profiling now gives -25% Leader Upkeep Cost in addition to -1 Max Negative Traits.
- Healthcare Program now gives +20 Leader Lifespan instead of +10 Leader Lifespan.
- Aptitude Finisher now gives +1 Leader Capacity and +1 Leader Trait Pick options instead of +1 trait.
- Science Division now gives -10% Scientist Cost and Upkeep instead of +20% Scientist XP Gain.
- Polytechnic Education now gives +10% Leader XP gain instead of +20%.
- Colonial Viceroys now gives -10% Governor Cost and Upkeep instead of +20% Governor XP Gain.
- War Games now gives -10% Admiral Cost and Upkeep instead of +20% Admiral XP Gain.
- Mind and Body now gives +10 Leader Lifespan instead of +20 Leader Lifespan.
- Finisher effect for Statecraft now grants Galactic Administration as a research option with 25% progress instead of giving the tech for tree.
- Resistance is Frugal now also gives -10% General Cost and Upkeep.
- Imperial Prerogative now gives +2 Leader Capacity in addition to its existing effects.
- Transcendent Learning Prerogative now gives +2 Leader Capacity, +1 Leader Pool Size and +33% Leader XP gain.
- Aptitude Tradition "Champions of the Empire" now gives bonus per Leaders' levels. Effect is now a flat -2 Empire Size per Governor level, and 0.5% Exp per Scientist level (and 2 Naval capacity per Admiral/General level)
- Guardian trait maximum effect is now +33% Defense Platform Damage and Hull Points.
- Frontier Spirit trait maximum effects changed to -10% Colony Ship Cost and +50% Colonization Speed and +1 starting pop for colonies.
- Cyborg generals now increase planetary combat width.
- Reduced passive experience gain by 30% for Progenitor Hive leaders from level 1-6 and 50% for Progenitor Hive leaders between 7-10.
- Gray Eminence destiny trait now reduces the effects of empire size, instead of reducing empire size directly. Updated Aturion Efficiency to match Gray Eminence.
- Now imperial rulers do not lose imperial heir trait, so they don't become worse when they take over the country.
- Lowered the spawn chance for the legendary paragon Keides by 75%.
- Autocannons are no longer valued at three times their intended military power.
- Now criminals are also unhappy when under oppressive autocracy civic
- Kai-Sha's "Expanded Contact Network" event will now upgrade her Shady Contacts trait if she already has it. And gives intel on other empires if it has already been maxed out.
- Replaced -20% Empire Size reduction for Aturion Efficiency trait with -10% Empire Size Penalty.
- Leader traits that have base resource production now produce the market equivalent of 8 energy/month for tier 1 and 32 energy/month for tier 2.
- Aggressor admiral sub-class now gives +7.5% weapon damage.
- Artillerist II trait now gives +7.5% tracking.
- Fortifier trait now scales between -5% Starbase upgrade cost and -5% Defense platform cost at tier 1 to -10% Starbase upgrade cost, -10% Defense platform cost, +5% Starbase hullpoints and +5% Defense platform hullpoints at tier 3.
- Armada Logistician trait ship upkeep maximum reduction is now -10%.
- Military Pioneer trait maximum effects are now +20% Ship Build Speed and -10% Ship Build Cost.
- Guerilla Tactician now gives a flat 10 Evasion instead of a +50% Evasion multiplier.
- Architect of War now gives -10% Military Ship Cost.
- Charisma trait now has a maximum Edict Upkeep reduction of -10%
- Removed -5% Military Ship Cost from the Strategist sub-class
- Geological Consultant trait maximum effect reduced to 9 months of unity per blocker removed.
- Retired Fleet Officer trait maximum effects reduced to +20% Ship Build Speed and -10% Ship Build Cost.
- Agrarian Upbringing trait now checks for country_uses_food = yes instead of being biological.
- Shipwright maximum effects reduced to +10% Ship Build Speed and -10% Ship Build Cost.
- Frontier Spirit maximum effects reduced to -10% Colony Ship Cost and +45% Colonization Speed.
- Architectural Sense maximum effects reduced to -10% Buildings and Districts Cost, -5% Buildings and District Upkeep, +25% Planetary Build Speed.
- Experimenter trait now gives a maxium of 2Leader Level Research Points per month.
- Explorer trait maximum effects reduced to -10% Science Ship Cost and +25% Anomaly Research Speed.
- Expansionist maximum effects reduced to -10% Outpost Alloy and Influence Cost.
- Great Researcher trait now gives 5Leader Level Research Points per month.
- Taskmaster trait XP reduced from 600 to 500. In return it now has soldiers produce 2/2/2 Energy/Minerals/Food (for countries that use food) or 3/3 Energy/Minerals (for countries that don't)
- Under One Rule now changes to Imperial Authority when transitioning to Galactic Emperor or Psionic Sovereign.
- Intellectual Espionage trait now takes into account all researcher category jobs on the planet.
- Fixed an issue where the Expanded Hive Warren would get deleted if there was no remaining unupgraded Hive Warrens on the planet
- Updated all researcher jobs to check for Academic Recruiter.
- Increased the army upkeep from Disorder II trait.
- Chainbreaker trait now requires Egalitarian ethics.
- Honored Warmaster trait now requires Xenophile ethics.
- Commented out cut prospecting decision.
- Kidnapper trait now checks that the general's owner allows slavery instead of checking their ethics.
- Taskmaster trait no longer gives an undocumented +5% Building Speed per soldier job.
- Now you can't terraform with Azaryn without launching her special ability.
- The Death of a Great Leader event should no longer fire when you send a leader off to the Keepers of Knowledge.
- Cloaked Ships will no longer block starbases from being rebuilt.
- Moved gestalt nodes further apart from each other in the council view so that trait picking doesn't get blocked when they have a lot of traits.
- The planet visuals should now update properly when planets change class
- Fixed an issue where traits given via event options would not correctly display triggered effects
- The ambience sound effect played in the council view is now properly affected by the ambience volume slider
- Fixed an issue where leaders that changed empires would retain their council position in their old empire
- Fixed a bug where modding the species appearance would not apply to the ruler
- The Scholarium Investigator leader trait now gives +25% Assist Research Efficiency instead of failing to give 10% Research Speed as a non-council trait.
- Fixed a COOP bug where it was possible for several players to unlock council positions at the same time resulting in duplicates
- If there is a wormhole in the capital system, then the Keides wormhole will spawn in a random neighboring system 1-2 jumps away
- Cordyceptic Stargazers now correctly spawn with an amoeba fleet again.
- Fixed Eager Explorer empires spawning with an extra scientist.
- Slaves are now properly set under dystopian living standard
- Any Gestalt empire generated after game start (e.g. from machine uprising) should now correctly get their Gestalt council nodes.
- Hyperdrive technologies no longer show duplicated icons.
- Fixed issues where starbase modifiers would apply to defensive platforms when they shouldn't
- Fixed an issue where pre FTL empires spawned from the necrophage origin would spawn in orbit of their planet
- Fixed a bug where ships would sometimes stop following its target when they entered a hyperlane
- Zroni Relic will now add 1 level to the leader, but won't choose trait on random it will be up to player to chose the trait.
- Fixed notification map ping staying visible for some time after dismissing the notification.
- Fixed a bug where some traits would not properly localize their names when their modifiers are part of tooltips
- Fixed a bug where the Insightful trait tooltip would duplicate headers for its effects
- Fixed an issue where it was not possible to unassign envoys from their current task
- Fixed Resilient trait to properly adjust for synths. Did the same for destiny trait which was giving leader life span
- Crusader Spirit Opinion Modifier: Now it gives -80 opinion towards everyone of different ethic and +20 to the same ethic empires
- Fixed issues with the fleet manager where the buttons to increase and decrease the number of ships would not work correctly when using shift or ctrl modifiers
- Rogue Scientist event chain shouldn't trigger for Governors assigned as Head of Science.
- Updated some trigger loc from "No of ..." to "Number of ..." to be more consistent with the rest of the game.
- Fixed Tooltip for Paranoid Leader Trait
- Fixed title case for anomaly.3141 "The Depths of Alien Life"
- The event that allows you to pick a Chosen One no longer says "three individuals" are capable of absorbing such power and proceeds to list four names.
- Events that give the Chosen traits now check that the leader in question is psionic.
- Fixed an issue where you could reinforce a fleet when the template was not filled with the correct ships even though the fleet was filled on command limit
- Fixed the spawn chance modifier of the anomaly The Orb, as it could not spawn before.
- Beholder planetfall error message now states that an empty building slot is required.
- Fixed icon for brainslug species trait again.
- You can no longer psi-inoculate hive-minded pops or those being purged.
- Fallen empire capital planets should now have the correct planetary designation.
- You can no longer create subjects from sectors if the primary species would be an infertile clone army species.
- Marauder admirals can no longer serve on the council or be manually fired.
- Fixed some edges where a ruler could be chosen by a shroud entity but not awarded the trait.
- Added scripted loc for GetDefenseForceOrArmada and GetGDFOrArmada
- Updated Cybernetic Advantage agenda so it doesn't display placeholder art.
- Regular empires no longer have machine or hive-mind leaders in their external leader pools and vice versa.
- Cloned Organs/Self-Preservation Protocols now correctly has the same effects as Mind and Body.
- Fixed incorrect modifiers on the adoption effect of Synthetic traditions.
- Fixed MP lobby chat messages and scroll bar spilling outside the chat box.
- Fixed most tooltips in the game browser not working.
- Fixed Plantoids Species Pack DLC not showing up in MP lobby DLC list
- Fixed misalignment of the DLC icons in the multiplayer lobby
- Fixed icon lists sometimes becoming vertical when they should be horizontal
- Fixed coop presence icons not always showing their tooltip.
- The Interstellar Recruitment Office tooltip now specifies why you can't build it if you already have one in your empire.
- The sentinels archaeology site will now put Azaryn back on her own ship when she returns.
- Fixed a bug where some mercenary fleets would not have an admiral assigned to them
- Mercenary Admirals now get Mercenary Warrior Trait and 2 admiral traits to represent their level
- Mercenary Enclaves should no longer steal their admirals which they just rented out
- AI will now wait until it has at least 5 planets and 25 years before choosing a specialization designation for its homeworld
- Fixed an issue where AI would be unable to build any buildings if they desired to build the Ancient Refinery but did not have access to any minor artifacts
- Fixed a number of Out of Sync errors.
- Increased performance in the leader view
- Fixed a crash that would sometimes occur when a scientist was elected ruler while performing science ship orders
- Fixed a rare, but persistent crash when an empire was destroyed
- Fixed a crash that could sometimes happen if there were issues opening or writing log files
- Fixed crash in MP lobby when you confirm disbanding a coop group if the player list changed while the confirmation popup was open.
- Disabled tooltips in the loading screen to avoid crashes related to focus loss.
- Re-enabled tooltips while the game has no focus as hiding them caused issues for screen readers.
- Added tooltips for the join/leave coop empire button in the MP lobby when you can't click it.
- Added a tooltip for the coop checkbox in the MP lobby when you can't change it due to being ready.
- Use different titles for the multiplayer and coop game browsers.
- The multiplayer game browser now has a column that shows whether a game allows coop.
- Fixed an issue where the active agendas list would sometimes duplicate elements
- Added a new version of the main coop presence view to the topbar for resolutions with width >= 1600
- Auto-confirm disbanding a coop group in the MP lobby if all other players leave the group.
- Modifiers that affect leader experience gain will now be indented under a "Experience Gain Rate:" header
- Added confirmation prompt when selecting a country during hotjoining
- Lysator Syng's hire tooltip now shows that hiring him will give you 3 pirate ships as well.
- Show decimals for power projection breakdown in naval cap tooltip
- Added set_random_$CLASS$_background_effect script effects, to assign a random background class to a leader. $CLASS$ can be replaced with admiral, general, governor, or scientist.
- Added support for custom_tooltip_with_modifiers for council positions.
- Updated documentation for council positions to include new script support. See 01_test_councilor.txt for an example of a council position not linked to civics.
- Added script effect "unlock_council_selection = yes" to force validation of council positions and allow the player to reselect their council positions.
- Fixed the ethics OverLappingElementsBox not reloading properly
- Fixed the spacing parameter not working for vertical OverlappingElementBoxTypes
- Added new "empire_size_add" modifier, which flatly increases or decreases the Empire size.
- Council position unlock screen will now show council positions which are available by scope check but don't require any civics
- Added console command "debug_trait_weights", which enables logging of some of the trait random roll weights.
- Added military_power_multiplier to weapon components, which allows manual adjustment of combat power assessment for intangibles that are otherwise difficult to automate.
- Use 2 decimals for army upkeep in army view
Leaders, Level Caps, and Balance
Theres been a lot of discussion about the Leader Caps that were reintroduced with the 3.8 update. We feel that they are a necessary piece of the balance puzzle, as leaders are generally far more powerful than they were before, and we explicitly wanted empires to have fewer, more important leaders. The leaders you recruit are intended to be seen as exceptional individuals within your empire, and the planets and fleets that do not possess an Admiral or Governor were not intended to be unled - but the rank and file administrators that led them were not as important as the ones represented by visible, portraited characters. I agree with the comments that its unsatisfying to have empty space where there should be some representation of non-exceptional leaders. Were still exploring solutions to this, whether it be envoy-style level 0 leaders, class-specific leader limits, authority based institutions being present in areas without exceptional leaders, a different system altogether, or a combination of some or all of the above. (Not so secretly, Im also interested in exploring the idea of upgrading Envoys into full leaders at some point in the future, so adjustments will have to be made to the system regardless. Currently I lean towards a combination of some of the above, but some of the changes I want to make are bigger than fit into post-release support.)
Youll also be able to rename Council positions. We also concur that the caps are a bit on the tight side. As noted in the patch notes, were making some changes to loosen them a bit, but we feel that we have to tread carefully for balance reasons. Weve reduced the rate at which leaders reach -100% XP for being over cap, and added an XP scalar in Defines for easy modder access. Were also merging the Leader of Opportunity mechanic we discussed last week into the Eager leader trait - leaders with this trait will not count against the Leader Cap for their first few levels. We originally intended for Leader of Opportunity to be used exclusively with event leaders, but the discussions that followed showed that people were looking forward to seeing leaders with the effect in the Leader Pool, and we agreed that it would be interesting to see.
Traits are also now nouns to ease localization into gendered languages. Regarding early game exploration - while we are happy with the exploration phase of the game being longer than before, its a bit slower than wed like. Were going to let military fleets with an assigned Admiral explore hyperlanes, which also has the benefit of resolving an edge case when youre at war and have an enemy system hidden away in a nebula. They wont be able to survey planets or explore wormholes like a crewed Science ship, but this should provide more freedom to find hyperlane choke points during your initial steps to the stars. The change which gave Admirals increased command limit as they gained levels has also been removed - as many of you have pointed out, it didnt feel great to have your fleets split on leader death.
In the longer term, were considering giving Generals more things to do - as some of you have pointed out, it could be interesting to let a General step in when newly conquered planets need to be pacified, perhaps acting as an interim martial law governor for freshly liberated sectors. #nopromises Were generally happy with how Gestalt Nodes have worked out - they have several major advantages over regular Empires due to these immortal specialist nodes, but also some differences that become more pronounced as the game goes on. In a future release (likely 3.9), were considering allowing them to cull a node and grow a new one as an agenda, as some Council traits are valuable in the first parts of the game but far less useful later on. A great many leader traits have had a balance pass, described in the patch notes above. As the systems evolve, expect more motion there. We expect that well be making further adjustments and improvements to all of these systems in upcoming Custodian updates.
Prioritization of Bugs and Balance
Naturally, there must be some prioritization done when it comes to bugs and balance. At the top of the pile are things that prevent you from playing - crashes, out of syncs, and the like. Issues that involved displayed text are often high priority as well - as Stellaris is available in ten different languages and translators need time to do their jobs, we have limited windows in which to make any changes that require localization. 3.8.1 and 3.8.3, for instance, are localized releases, while 3.8.2 and the future 3.8.4 are not. Sometimes well plan ahead and slip some emergency loc into a localized release even if we havent had a chance to actually address the bug itself, but thats relatively rare. Bugs deemed Exploits are usually rated very low in our general triage - if an AI is unlikely to abuse a bug against you, but you can choose to use it or not, it tends to be lower priority than things that are more disruptive to general gameplay.
Script Improvements for Councilors
Some improvements to the scriptability of council positions we were working have also been added into 3.8.3. Firstly, we've added the Reorganize Council agenda which will allow empires to reselect their council positions without needing to reform the government. Of more interest for modders, support for council positions made possible by non-civic sources, such as country flags, ascension perks and other such triggers have been improved. We've attached the documentation below. COUNCILOR SCRIPT DOCUMENTATION [expand details=showmore]
# Councilor Documentation
#
# councilor_name_key = {
# possible = { } Country scope triggers to evaluate if the council position is allowed.
# leader_class = { } Which leader classes can have this council position. Currently only used for the Recruit new Leader buttons. Default = none.
# is_leader_possible = { } Leader scope triggers to evaluate if a leader can be assigned to this position.
# conditional_tooltip = "LOC_KEY" Custom tooltip text shown for the requirements of the council position.
# civic = civic_imperial_cult Civic that is required for this council position. Also used by UI. Default = none.
# custom_unlock_title = "LOC_KEY" Custom text shown instead of "UNLOCK_COUNCIL_POSITION_TOOLTIP for council positions without a civic"
# modifier = { } Country Modifier, that is multiplied by assigned Leader's level.
# custom_tooltip = "LOC_KEY" Custom tooltip text shown instead of the auto-generated modifier tooltip text of the council position.
# custom_tooltip_with_modifiers = "LOC_KEY" Custom tooltip text shown in addition to the auto-generated modifier tooltip text of the council position.
# icon = "GFX_icon_name" Icon used for the council position, if a civic is not specified.
# required = yes/no Is this position forced to be on the council. Default = no
# }
[/expand]
EXAMPLE COUNCIL POSITION
[expand details=showmore]
Script:
# councilor_expert_programmer = {
# leader_class = { scientist }
# possible = {
# has_country_flag = expert_programmer
# }
# is_leader_possible = {
# leader_class = scientist
# }
# modifier = {
# planet_researchers_physics_research_produces_add = 1
# }
# custom_tooltip_with_modifiers = "councilor_expert_programmer_modifiers"
# icon = "GFX_icon_councilor_research"
# custom_unlock_title = "councilor_expert_programmer_unlock_title"
# conditional_tooltip = "councilor_expert_programmer_conditional"
# }
Loc:
# councilor_expert_programmer: "Expert Programmer"
# councilor_expert_programmer_female: "$councilor_expert_programmer$"
# councilor_expert_programmer_desc: "An $TITLE$ is to thank for the new script support for Council Positions."
# councilor_expert_programmer_modifiers: "This is an example of a custom tooltip with modifiers for a Council Position."
# councilor_expert_programmer_conditional: "This is an example of a conditional tooltip for a Council Positon."
# councilor_expert_programmer_unlock_title: "HCouncil Position from Console Commands!"
[/expand]
Out of Syncs
I mentioned this last week, but since were very interested in improving multiplayer stability If you're running into frequent out of sync issues, you can help us out a lot by having the host add these startup parameters to their game:
-randomlog -randomlog_stack=5 -randomlog_frames=3
Then, if you run into an Out of Sync, please post in the Bug Report forum and give us the Host's OOS logs as well as at least one of the clients that the popup mentioned. (OOS logs can be found in Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\oos near your save games.) Any details you can provide about what you were doing at the time is also helpful.
This setting has some performance implications (which is why it's not on by default), but if you're running into OOSes reliably, it can really help us track them down.
Ideally Id like the 3.8.4 update to be in a state where we can remove the beta tag from the Cooperative game mode.
That's it for this week folks, see you next week!
[ 2023-05-25 11:00:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi all!
Galactic Paragons and the first hotfix have been released on all PC platforms, and we're working on a balance and bugfixing patch that we're currently targeting for the end of the month. Please keep on providing your thoughts and feedback.
Based on the feedback you've all provided thus far, we are creating a plan for fixes and improvements. While it's possible that we may release a stability hotfix before the balance patch, it will not include any design changes.
Cooperative Mode and Out of Syncs
The 3.8.2 hotfix took care of a number of out of sync issues, but there are more to hunt down. The programming team is focusing heavily on clearing these up, so every bit of information we can get is helpful. If you're running into frequent out of sync issues, you can help us out a lot by having the host add these startup parameters to their game:
-randomlog -randomlog_stack=5 -randomlog_frames=3
Then, if you run into an Out of Sync, please post in the Bug Report forum and give us the Host's OOS logs as well as at least one of the clients that the popup mentioned. (OOS logs can be found in Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\oos near your save games.) Any details you can provide about what you were doing at the time is also helpful.
This setting has some performance implications (which is why it's not on by default), but if you're running into OOSes reliably, it can really help us track them down.
Tell Us More About the Balance Patch
Here are a few selected notes. SPOILER: A FEW OF THE THINGS PLANNED FOR 3.8.X [expand type=showmore]Balance
- Legendary leaders no longer count towards Leader Capacity.
- Admirals that command fleets hired from marauders no longer count towards your Leader Capacity.
- Added the Leader of Opportunity trait, leaders that have this trait do not count towards Leader Capacity while under Level 4.
- Assigned some event spawned leaders the Leader of Opportunity trait.
- Aptitude Tradition "Champions of the Empire" now gives bonus per Leaders' levels.
- Effect is now a flat -2 Empire Size per Governor level, and 0.5% Exp per Scientist level and 2 Naval capacity per Admiral/General level.
- Autocannons are no longer valued at three times their intended military power.
- Fixed a bug where ships would sometimes stop following its target when they entered a hyperlane
- Leaders can no longer start the game with traits that produce resources. This should stop machine leaders from keeping a bonsai tree garden as a hobby.
- AI will now wait until it has at least 5 planets and 25 years before choosing a specialization designation for its homeworld
- Leader view performance optimizations
Next Week
Our next dev diary will be Thursday, May 25th, when we'll be going over a more complete list of the preliminary patch notes. See you then!
[ 2023-05-16 11:00:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
Following some quick work from the team we have now produced a patch aiming resolve the high priority issues coming out of the Galactic Paragons + 3.8 release. 3.8.2 should be available for download via Steam and GOG now.
Unfortunately there is a delay in the deployment of the patch to Microsoft Store, and players on this platform should expect the update to arrive early next week instead.
We will continue our efforts fixing and balancing where needed, so keep your reports coming!
Please find the patch notes below.
STELLARIS 3.8.2 HOTFIX PATCH NOTES
[expand type=Show More]
############################################################
#################### VERSION 3.8.2 Hotfix ######################
############################################################
BUG FIXES
- Fixed an issue where the mouse input would be offset when playing with fullscreen on.
- Fixed an achievement not always being awarded correctly.
- Fixed the Kidnapper trait applying to the whole empire population instead of the given planet.
- Fixed a bug where permanent rulers would not get their ascension perks when finishing the special projects to convert them.
- Anglers now once again count as farmers.
- Fixed map tracking sometimes not working for first contacts and archaeology sites.
- Holo-Theatres are now correctly destroyed when a gestalt empire conquers the planet they are built on.
- If an empire stops having Imperial Authority, the Imperial Heir trait is removed from their former heir.
- Leaders can no longer start the game with traits that produce resources. This should stop machine leaders from keeping a bonsai tree garden as a hobby.
- Restored the brainslug species trait.
- You can no longer psi-inoculate hive-minded pops or those being purged.
- Fixed an issue where some situation modifiers were not applied correctly.
- Fixed The Beholder, Keides, Azaryn, and others leaders from Paragon mutating due to traveling through shroud tunnels.
- Now Crusader Spirit will correctly impose the Crusader spirit civic on empires who lose the ideology war.
- Now the Imperial heir will have 0 Unity upkeep (upkeep from negative traits can still apply).
- Fixed a COOP crash when two players were selecting ascension perks at the same time.
- Fixed a crash related to pops with invalid species.
- Fixed a crash that could occur during removal of invalid trade deals.
- Fixed an out of sync related to events.
- The Minister of Exploration now grants +3% jump drive range per level.
- The additional unity duelists gain from the Arbiter of Duels is now added to their base output instead of multiplying the base output.
- Fixed an issue where the AI would repeatedly attempt and fail to invade the pre-FTL empires from the Fear of the Dark origin.
- Event notifications can now be configured in message settings.
- Added ship engagement range modifier to ship tooltip.
- Crime/Deviancy modifiers should now show the correct name in more places.
- Fixed Galactic Paragons not being shown in DLC lists.
- Fixed UI issues affecting the council view for gestalt empires after they unlocked their third civic.
- Fixed overlap between achievements and forum link button in the main menu on non-Steam platforms.
- Fixed text overlap between coop filter and cross platform filter in the matchmaking view.
- Improved the layout of the Multiplayer lobby DLC icons.
- Message settings are now sorted in alphabetical order.
- Message settings that have been changed and later changed back to their default values (without using "Reset Default") will now be saved as changed values.
- The coop filter checkbox in the multiplayer game browser is now checked by default.
- The player name used for Multiplayer is now saved more consistently.
- When hot-joining a coop empire, events that are open for other players in your empire before the hot-join will no longer be shown to the joining player.
- Icons for tiered traits should now correctly display a Roman numeral 'I' for tier 1, for players without Galactic Paragons.
- Fixed a case where modded games could crash when using custom leader classes.
- Fixed crash on session start when using modded leader classes.
- Fixed some incorrect documentation for message types.
[ 2023-05-11 08:02:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=n1bU_6Qy6Mo;full][trailer][/previewyoutube] Galactic Paragons is available now! You can check out the full list of patch notes from Galactic Paragons and 3.8 Gemini here. (Patch notes are in English only.) The galactic council is vast and full of personality! Galactic Paragons expands the Council mechanic, allows leaders you command to amplify your empire's vision, adds additional civics, and much more. An empire is only as strong as its weakest link, so invest and strengthen your leaders to guide the future in ways the galaxy has never seen before. There are endless stories to tell in the Stellaris universe. Breathing life into the stories of the leaders in the Galactic Council and your empires is a perfect showcase of the teams commitment to expanding the ways our players can explore a vast and wondrous galaxy. -Stephen Muray, Game Director for Stellaris. Features of Galactic Paragons include*:
- Unique Council Roles: Specialized roles and benefits are included in Galactic Paragons to expand upon the new Council Mechanics in Stellaris! Find dozens of unique council roles based on your civics and government types, and unlock additional positions as your empire evolves.
- New Dynamic Leaders: Recruit, improve, and follow the leaders of your empire through the ages! You may shape them by picking their traits, selecting their veteran class, and guide them towards their destiny, up until they retire - or perish!
- Meet Galactic Heroes: Attract paragons of renown to your council: unique leaders with their own art, events, and stories may join your empire and bring their own benefits to your government. Or, discover four Legendary Paragons with intricate event chains and unique mechanics!
- New Traditions, Civics, And More:
- A new Under One Rule Origin that tells the tale of the leader who founded your empire
- Eight new Civics focused on leadership, from immortalizing the personalities of leaders past in digital archives to heavily optimized council selection via corporate charter
- 12 new Veteran Classes
- Hundreds of new Leader Traits
- Two new Tradition Trees, giving players new edicts and improved leaders
- New ships, art, and story content
3.8 Gemini Update
Launching alongside Galactic Paragons is the 3.8 Gemini update! Loaded with new Features, Quality of Life Improvements (including a Sector Editor!), story events, bug fixes, and more!
Cooperative Multiplayer (Beta)
The Custodian team has been hard at work, making it possible for several players to play the same empire in Stellaris! We look forward to see what you all will do with this new functionality, from PVP multiplayer games on fastest, to teaching a friend how to play Stellaris for the first time, Coop has been a long time coming, and were extremely excited for you to all to have shared experiences with your friends! You can currently access coop multiplayer one of two ways:
- Click Multiplayer -> Tick Allow Coop - This will allow you to have multiple cooperative empires in one game, or have a mix of cooperative and non-cooperative empires.
- Click Cooperative - This will have up to 5 players join the hosts empire. It is not possible to have multiple cooperative empires (or a mix) in this game mode.
Empire Council
Ruling a Galactic Empire is hard work, and your council of trusty leaders is there to help you. Base-game Stellaris now includes a ruling council, where up to three leaders will assist you in ruling your empire - your Ruler, your Head of Research, and your Defense Minister. Each leader gives bonuses to their area of expertise, which grow increasingly more powerful as they level up over time. Gestalts will have a collection of immortal nodes, that will level up and gain new traits over time, which we feel better suits them thematically.
Ruler Creator
Gone are the days when you were forced to reroll your empire a dozen times, looking for that one specific trait to complete your roleplay. In 3.8 Gemini, weve introduced a Ruler creator where you can choose your rulers appearance and starting trait.
Renowned & Legendary Leaders
Paragon leaders are not just for owners of Galactic Paragons! The Custodian team has been hard at work updating existing content in Stellaris. You will now be able to find six* existing leaders that have been updated to the new leader system introduced in Galactic Paragons, including new traits, new and/or updated events and in some cases, updated artwork. * Finding some of these leaders may require other DLC
Ground Combat
Ground Combat has had some love from the Custodian team as well. First off, Devastation has been rebalanced. Planetary Devastation is now more impactful to planetary production, and orbital bombardment now causes more damage and has an increased chance of killing pops, buildings, districts and defensive armies based on bombardment stance and planet size, with more aggressive bombardment stances doing more damage. Bombardment damage will now scale based on planet size, with larger planets taking less damage than smaller planets, since the bombardment is spread over a larger surface area. Additionally, Planetary Capital buildings will now spawn 0/4/8/16 defensive armies for free based on the tier of the building. Planets that have been bombarded to the point where they have no defensive armies will now have a chance to surrender without being invaded. The first time you bombard a planet, you will get an event that asks if you want to accept planetary surrender. You can change this decision later in the Government -> Policy screen. Planets will never surrender if their pops would be purged after doing so. And lastly, starbases now have the ability to construct offensive armies! Clicking on a starbase and going to the Army Builder tab will allow you to queue armies across all the planets in that sector, or hold control and click to queue five armies at a time! Each army also now has a Rally Troops option that will order constructed armies to automatically travel to their location (provided they can find a path to do so) and merge with the selected army. To summarize the Design Philosophy of all the changes to ground combat and bombardment: Ground Combat and orbital bombardment will now be a bigger part of the game since big planets will automatically have some defenses. Building armies and using them to invade planets will be much easier by using the Army Builder and Rally Troops functionality. Small planets with 1-25 pops will be prime candidates to be taken by orbital bombardment alone, removing the need to have to manually invade the smaller planets or habitats.
Sector Editor
The Sector Editor has returned! It is now possible to (again) edit Sectors in the Planets and Sectors screen. Planetary capitals are still limited to be at least four jumps away from one another, however this should make it easier to resolve your sector gore, and make your sectors more visually appealing.
Capital Designations
3.8 Gemini has also brought with it four new Capital Designations for non-Gestalt empires. Choose Factory Capital, Forge Capital, Trade or Extraction Capital to boost your economies even further!
Fleet & Ship Designer
The Custodian team has also done some updating on the Fleet and Ship designer. The first thing youll notice is that the two tabs are now on the same screen, allowing you to easily swap between them when designing ships and fleets. The Fleet Editor itself has also had some usability improvements, including a longer list of fleets, a new button to Copy a Fleet Template to a new fleet and an Overwrite Fleet Template button, which will update the fleets template to the current contents of that fleet. Additionally, pressing Delete + Enter on a fleet will now delete that fleet.
Science Ship Automation
In 3.8 Gemini - when you click Science Ship Automation - we have added the ability to enable or disable the modules. The new Science Ship Automation modules are:
- Explore Systems - will explore the galaxy by entering systems and discover any planets and hyperlanes in there
- Survey Systems - will survey new systems the science ship enters
- Investigate Anomalies - will automatically research anomalies
- Excavate Archaeology Sites - will automatically excavate Archaeology sites
- Research Special Projects - will automatically research special projects
(Almost) Rebindable Hotkeys
The Custodian team has also taken a look at the left-side menu. We know a lot of you have wanted to be able to rebind which hotkeys open these menus for a while, and while adding rebindable hotkeys to Stellaris would require rewriting most of the code for the UI, weve done the next best thing: In 3.8 Gemini, it is possible to rearrange the list of options in the left side menu, by pressing the new Cog icon at the top. This will also correspondingly change the hotkeys to open these menus, allowing you to rebind these menu items to whichever F1-F10 key you prefer to have them on.
Message Notifications
The onslaught of notifications while playing Stellaris is something that has been bothering us as much as its been bothering you. Weve added a new type of message called a Toast that will drop down from the top right of your screen, and convey low priority information (such as a leader gaining a level). Additionally, weve gone through all the in-game messages and added the ability to turn them on or off, as well as change the pausing behavior of each message. Notification messages you no longer wish to see can be disabled by Control + Clicking on them and unticking them in the message settings. Toast notifications can be enabled or disabled by clicking the cogwheel. Thats it for today folks! Thanks for playing Stellaris, and dont forget to pick up Galactic Paragons today!
[ 2023-05-09 15:00:26 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
It's been seven years since Stellaris released, and with this anniversary and three hundredth dev diary, I'm happy to bring you the Stellaris 3.8 "Gemini" update and the Galactic Paragons expansion.
Here are the release notes for the update, which will be going live later today. Until then, you can still Wishlist Galactic Paragons here.
SPOILER: STELLARIS 3.8.1 "GEMINI" AND GALACTIC PARAGONS RELEASE NOTES
[expand type=showmore]
############################################################
#################### Galactic Paragons ######################
############################################################
Galactic Paragons
- Unique Council Roles: Specialized roles and benefits are included in Galactic Paragons to expand upon the new Council Mechanics in Stellaris! Find dozens of unique council roles based on your civics and government types, and unlock additional positions as your empire evolves.
- New Dynamic Leaders: Recruit, improve, and follow the leaders of your empire through the ages! You may shape them by picking their traits, selecting their veteran class, and guide them towards their destiny, up until they retire - or perish!
- Meet Galactic Heroes: Attract paragons of renown to your council: unique leaders with their own art, events, and stories may join your empire and bring their own benefits to your government. Or, discover four Legendary Paragons with intricate event chains and unique mechanics!
- New Traditions, Civics, And More:
- A new Under One Rule Origin that tells the tale of the leader who founded your empire
- Eight new Civics focused on leadership, from immortalizing the personalities of leaders past in digital archives to heavily optimized council selection via corporate charter
- 12 new Veteran Classes
- Hundreds of new Leader Traits
- Two new Tradition Trees, giving players new edicts and improved leaders
- New ships, art, and story content
- 6 new achievements introduced
- Added two Cooperative modes, allowing up to five players per empire. More information can be found in Stellaris Dev Diary #293. * Cooperative PvE can be initiated from the main menu - all players that hotjoin the hosted game will join the primary players empire. This mode is primarily intended for teaching new players or for lower intensity cooperative gameplay. *Cooperative PvP can be allowed by the host of a standard multiplayer game. When enabled, empires can open themselves up to allow other players to help control their empire. We expect this game mode to be useful for competitive team play. Please note that Cooperative modes are still considered to be a beta, and may be less stable than standard multiplayer, or may have some unusual experiences. We will continue to polish and refine Cooperative mode over the next few patches.
- Empire Council: Ruling a Galactic Empire is hard work, and your council of trusty leaders is there to help you. Base-game Stellaris now includes a ruling council, where up to three leaders will assist you in ruling your empire - your Ruler, your Head of Research, and your Defense Minister. * Each leader gives bonuses to their area of expertise, which grow increasingly more powerful as they level up over time. * Gestalts will have a collection of immortal nodes, that will level up and gain new traits over time, which we feel better suits them thematically.
- Ruler Creator: Added a new step in Empire Creation that permits the selection of your rulers appearance and starting trait(s).
- Renowned Leaders: Updated several leaders to use new Leader systems: * Updated Tuborek with new effects to use the Paragon System. * Updated Reth Unddol with new visuals and effects to use the Paragon System. * Updated Gray's Menu and effects to use Paragon Systems. * Updated the Caretaker with new visuals and effects to use the Paragon System. * Updated the S875.1 Warform with new visuals and effects to use the Paragon System. * Updated the Oracle with new visuals and effects to use the Paragon System.
- Ground Combat and Bombardment Changes: Several changes have been made to armies and bombardment. * Army Builder tab added to starbases, which allows easier creation of Assault Armies across a sector. * An army can be set as a Rally Point - new troops will automatically try to merge with this fleet (regardless of whether they were queued with the Army Builder or the old Recruit button). * Planets can now select whether or not to Deploy in Orbit any newly recruited armies. * Planets can now be taken through Orbital Bombardment if all defending troops have been killed. A policy can be set if you wish to refuse this form of surrender, and planets will not surrender to genocidal opponents. * Bombardment is significantly more damaging than it used to be. More pops will die, and more buildings and districts will be ruined. * Orbital Bombardment will now scale with the amount of ships bombarding, the first 100 fleet size ships will do full damage, after that each additional 100 fleet size will add 70% of that efficiency. For example, 300 fleet capacity worth of ships will deal 100% + 70% + (0,7^2 = 49%) = 219% total worth of bombardment damage. * Bombardment effects are scaled based on the number of pops, buildings, and planet size. Small dense planets will suffer greater losses than large, sparsely populated planets. * Ground Combat is also more devastating to planets than it used to be, but much less so than bombarding. * The effect of collateral damage from different army types have also been adjusted, previously the collateral damage on army types was a linear value and not a multiplier, which meant that in practice high damage high collateral units like Xenomorphs could effectively do less collateral damage on the planet compared to normal troops because they would kill the enemy troops very quickly. This is no longer the case as the collateral damage modifier now acts as a multiplier on any damage dealt. * Planetary Capital buildings now spawns 0/4/8/16 defensive armies for free based on the tier of the building.
- Sector Editor: It is now possible to edit Sectors in the Planets and Sectors screen. Systems can be freely moved between sectors as long as they are in range of the Sector Capital. Sector Capitals must now be at least four jumps away from any others.
- Customizable Menu: It is now possible to rearrange the list of options in the left side menu, by pressing the new Cog icon at the top. This will also correspondingly change the hotkeys to open these menus, allowing you to rebind these menu items to whichever F1-F10 key you prefer to have them on.
- Customizable Message Notifications and Toasts: Messages and notifications can now be customized to suit your needs. * Added a new message type called a toast, which pops up and disappears automatically after a brief period of time. * Settings -> Messages, Ctrl+Click, or cogs (on certain messages) will open the Message Settings menu. * Messages can be disabled, enabled, or set to automatically pause the game.
- Fleet and Ship Designer: * Merged into tabs of the same screen. * Now displays a longer list of fleets. * Copy Fleet Template and Overwrite Fleet Template features added. * Delete + Enter will delete a fleet.
- Science Ship Automation: You can now enable or disable more Science Ship automation modules. * Explore Systems - will explore the galaxy by entering systems and discover any planets and hyperlanes in there * Survey Systems - will survey new systems the science ship enters * Investigate Anomalies - will automatically research anomalies * Excavate Archaeology Sites - will automatically excavate Archaeology sites * Research Special Projects - will automatically research special projects
- Added new Capital Designations for non-Gestalt empires. (Factory Capital, Forge Capital, Trade Capital, and Extraction Capital).
- Added unique textures for Mercury, Venus, Neptune and Uranus for the Sol system.
- Added unique textures for Earth and Mars when terraformed based off of available heightmap data.
- Improved animation for gas giants.
- Added a new anomaly: The Orb.
- Added a special solar system protected by the Lone Defender.
- Added a decision to clear the wreckage on a Broken Shackles starting planet in the event that they are conquered before they enact the Memorial to the Unshackled decision.
- Improved accuracy of tooltips on the galaxy setting screen and implemented experimental nested tooltip functionality.
- The mind-wiped species from On the Shoulders of Giants will now have the Forcefully Devolved trait.
- There is now a 1% chance that a pre-ftl civilization will spawn with the Forcefully Devolved trait.
- Added hotkey 'u' to upgrade fleet button.
- Broken Shackles empires will now have their starting Minister of Defense and Head of Research be recruited from any of the species in their empire.
- Added keyboard command for jumping to the next day, .
- Added Ship Section Templates to the Ship Designer which allows for easier creation of designs of a certain role, such as carriers or missile focused designs.
- Auto-designed ships and those designed by the ship role button will now only equip archaeo-components if your empire has the Archaeo-Engineers AP.
- You can now hotjoin an MP game to control the Daemonic Incursion.
- The Khanate Successor origin now unlocks raiding bombardment.
- Fallen Empire starting rulers are now level 10.
- Species traits that gave +N leader level cap now give reduced leader upkeep and reduced maximum leader negative traits.
- Reduced focused capital production bonuses from +20% to +15% following dev diary feedback.
- Random leader starting age range increased to 25-35
- Bonuses for many Authorities changed. Previous benefits such as the old form of Agendas and Mandates have been removed. * Democracies focus on their factions, with +10% Faction Approval and they Reset Government Reform and Policy cooldowns following elections. Their ruler provides +2% Faction Unity and +5 Edicts Fund per level. The people have spoken! * Oligarchies focus on their ruling council, and have +2 Effective Councilor Skill. Their ruler provides +5% Councilor Experience Gain and +5 Edicts Fund per level. * Dictatorships focus on their ruler, who provides -2% Pop Amenities Usage and +10 Edict Fund per level. * Imperial empires focus on their Capital System, which produces +10% Resources from jobs. Their ruler provides +0.25 Maximum Influence from Power Projection and +5 Edicts Fund per level. * Megacorps have +20% Commercial Pact Efficiency, but +50% Empire Size from Planets. Their ruler provides +2% Branch Office Value and +5 Edicts Fund per level. * Hive Minds have +25% Pop Growth Speed and -25% Empire Size Effect. Their ruler grants +2% Monthly Unity and +5 Edicts Fund per level. * Machine Intelligences have +1 Pops When Establishing Colonies, +1 Mechanical Pop Assembly, +10% Mining Station Output, +50% Empire Size from Planets, and 50% Pop Growth Reduction. Their ruler grants -3% Empire Size from Pops and +5 Edicts Fund per level.
- Lowered base Minor Artifact storage capacity to 2,000. The Facility of Archaeostudies increases this by 2,000 or by 4,500 if the Archaeo-Engineers AP is taken.
- Criminal Syndicates now have -20% to Branch Office cost.
- Broken Shackles laborer jobs no longer benefit from modifiers applying to artisans or metallurgists.
- Broken Shackles scavengers are now considered researchers for the purpose of modifiers.
- Gave the Grand Herald archaeo-tech components.
- Rebalanced the "Shroud-Touched traits that can be gained by leaders going through a Shroud Tunnel.
- Commercial Pacts now give High Economic Intel on Colonies.
- Empires with the Payback origin gain a damage bonus against ships belonging to militarily superior empires.
- The Seize Galatron casus belli is now unlocked the first time the Galatron is used, instead of upon acquisition.
- Trade collection will now prioritize the capital and then sector capitals if they are in range, even if other starbases are closer, resulting in overall greatly reduced piracy from trade routes if collection is there.
- Curator order now offers Gestalts a Trait instead of a Scientist.
- Changed Technocracy bonus to award Scientists a random expertise trait in addition to their other traits.
- Massively reduced the number of starbases assigned to cloaking detection for the AI.
- Fanatical Spiritualists will now always outlaw robot workers.
- AI attitude updates now happen only monthly and on diplomatic actions.
- Relaxed AI budget requirements for orbital ring upgrades.
- Allowed AI to build economically useful orbital ring buildings without a matching designation.
- AI takes into account planetary production impact of possible orbital ring buildings when considering building orbital rings.
- Stopped AI from never fully re-evaluating ship designs if it had no preferences specified in its AI personality.
- Fixed an issue where AI would calculate a forecast of planet build queue items using a pop which could not work jobs provided by these buildings leading to incorrect results.
- AI is now much more restrictive about building gene clinics.
- AI will now prioritize building new starbases at the Sector Capital more.
- AI will now micromanage their enforcer jobs by using the scripted logic provided by the Planet Automation System.
- Fixed an issue where AI would not attack pirate stations in their empire.
- Ai will now resettle pops with low habitability to planets with higher habitability in the early game.
- Adjusted AI alloy spending budget to be a bit better at spending alloys on starbases and colony ships at the same time.
- Fixed several issues where AI would build or upgrade amenity or crime buildings even when they had already forbidden jobs from these buildings.
- AI trader persona are now the only ones who will build trade hub starbases and they will now only build them in sector capitals.
- Improved peace time AI for upgrading fleets and patrolling trade routes.
- AI empires that has Thrifty perk on their main species are now also eligible for the Peaceful Traders and Ruthless Capitalists AI personalities.
- Tooltips will no longer be shown when the game has lost focus (tabbed out or any other focus loss). This will prevent crashes caused by tooltips being generated in contexts where they aren't expected.
- Disabled tutorial in Multiplayer (but not coop PvE).
- Auto-close auto-opened anomaly window if the science ship has already started researching the anomaly.
- DLC icons on the empire creation screen now appear in the same size and in order of releases.
- The popup when you are kicked or banned or the server is lost will now appear in front of other windows.
- Truncate long empire, government and species names in hotjoin.
- Make scrolling smoother in some places.
- Display special project energy cost in situation log.
- Auto Track Log Entries setting is saved in the save game.
- Fix certain windows (e.g. ship orders) being too small compared to the sprite tiling, which caused graphical bugs.
- Removed the in-game web browser. The game will now use the system browser instead.
- Adjust chat input and chat entry to the new chat window size.
- Changed player ready string to text icon.
- Planet view no longer closes when opening other UIs like the pop resettlement or market view.
- The Espionage Operation "Imperium: Target Seditionists" now correctly aborts if the Imperium falls.
- Fixed incorrect costs for Caravaneer deals.
- Payback: fixed incorrect tooltip in "Flagship Updated" event.
- Broken Shackles: fixed "First Contact with MSI" modifier not disappearing under certain circumstances.
- MSI can now use raiding bombardment with fleets hired from mercs.
- Fixed checkbox tooltips in "Host server" window not appearing.
- Fixed some scoping errors that prevented the "Indoctrinate Society" operation from working correctly.
- Fixed an issue where it was possible to do two jump drive orders back to back by queuing them up via shift clicking.
- Insight technologies should no longer be randomly awarded from events such as Old with Defects.
- Removed Broken Shackles being scripted to start without a shipyard.
- Pledging Secret Fealty to another empire now gives them +20 Intel on and knowledge of all of your diplomatic pacts.
- Fixed the trapped in the storm special project stating the planet is trapped in a storm on the planet instead of the science ship being trapped in the storm.
- Fixed "Cross-platform play" checkbox sometimes not being checked by default.
- Choosing to hand over system ownership during the course of Pre-FTL Observation event "Among Us" now correctly grants you a Claim on that system.
- Removed erroneous custom tooltip for the finisher effect of Psionic traditions.
- Fix an issue where starbases would do cloaking detection for the wrong empire for 1 day.
- System and star name should now match even if the player selects an origin that has a special starting system.
- Enclaves should no longer keep offering you their services if you become a fanatical purifier.
- If you are a corporate angler when you finish the Fear of the Dark story line you will now become a regular angler.
- You will no longer get stuck with two unuseable civics if you become a Fanatical Purifier while a Barbaric Despoiler.
- You can no longer become a Fanatical Purifier while the Galactic Custodian or Galactic Emperor.
- A synthetically ascended empire should no longer refer to their own pops as having owners.
- Fixed some grammar in the Hivemind Voidspawn reanimation event.
- Fixed an issue with an unlocalized version of MSI in the initial interaction between a Broken Shackles and Payback empire.
- Fixed an unlocalized string for the Reanimated Tiyanki Matriarch.
- Removed a double be from a machine become the crisis event.
- Multiple Tuboreks should no longer be hidden inside the shielded worlds.
- Fixed Status Quo in a Subsidiary war subjugating the wrong empire.
- Fixed incorrect calculation used for Offspring amenities.
- Lithoid pre-sapients "working" in zoos now correctly eat minerals.
- Fixing truncated build queue items in the starbase view.
- Former pre-FTL worlds will no longer display the technological age of the former civilization during colonization.
- Added a new description to the Broken Shackles Homecoming event if the world is a tomb world.
- The "Direct Join" window now blocks other input.
- Corrected the Ancient Target Scrambler tech not stating that it unlocks the Ancient Target Scrambler ship component.
- The Radio Telescope Array now reduces the chance of Pre-FTL awareness decay instead of increasing it.
- Archaeoshields should now properly provide their shield hardening bonus.
- Fixed materialist culture workers (and death chroniclers) not having the effects of the Charismatic or Repugnant traits.
- Fixing custom diplomatic action sounds playing for unrelated empires.
- Fixed materialist culture workers (and death chroniclers) not having the effects of the Charismatic or Repugnant traits.
- Added missing background for Ironman game setting.
- Added missing "gateway" icons and tooltips to cloaking and detection technologies.
- Changing policies now correctly removes diplomatic pacts with pre-ftl civilizations.
- Fixed issues where sectors would not always include all systems within range, also fixed related issue where sector map mode would sometimes draw borders between systems in the same sector
- Deleting templates in the fleet manager will no longer reset the scrollbar, added 'Delete' hotkey to template removal.
- The "Host server" window now blocks other input.
- Prevented joining full MP games.
- Fix MP game browser listing full games even if "Not full" is checked.
- Species with servile trait can no longer be given the Full Military Service rights and thus generate leaders.
- Ringworlds now use empire color.
- Add_random_research_option script effect now ignores Insight technologies by default.
- Added the creator scope for leaders, allowing you to scope to a leader's country of origin.
- Added reset_policy_cooldowns = yes effect.
- Added the special_max_amount = yes/no parameter for resources.
- Council position support use of conditional_tooltip = "LOCKEY" to display custom tooltips for triggers you define in is_leader_possible = { }, triggers defined here are not otherwise shown in the council position tooltip.
- Scripted triggers may now generate up to one automatic event option icon each
- Calling GetAge in localization should no longer show the leaders age if marked as hidden
- Added controls to the fleet imgui view and added jump drive information to ships
- Using the ImGui view shortcut for selectables (ctrl+alt+right click) on the same selectable when it's already open, will now close the view.
- Added expansion_planner = yes/no for districts. This controls if the district type should be visible in the expansion planner or not and defaults to no.
- Views containing longer texts will now automatically reload when changes in localization are detected.
- Added damage_vs_superior_empires_mult modifier
- Add `remove_from_federation` script effect
- Removed support for the "Major" flag and potential trigger in events.
- You can also use from for the ship design in section template ai weights
- You can now scope to a ship's design using 'design = {}'
- Added has_role trigger for ship designs
- You can now refer to the ship design using "from" in ship components. It may have incomplete information, but it will have at the very least the ship's designated role stored in it.
- Added copy_flags_and_variables_from effect to copy all flags and variables from one scope to another
- Replaced set_is_female with set_gender
- Renamed country_mia_time_mult to fleet_mia_time_mult so that you can apply it at leader or fleet level too
- You can now use "initializer = random" in the spawn_system effect
- New trigger "num_candidate_supported", returns number of times an election candidate has been supported this election.
- Removed add_ruler_trait and remove_ruler_trait in favor of using add_trait and remove_trait instead
- Add random_ruler to create_leader's class field. This will randomize between valid ruler classes for the empire
- Removed the ruler specific class. The ruler can now have other
- Kill_leader leader effect now accepts ruler =
instead - Has_ethic trigger now works on pop_faction scope too, returning their guiding_ethic.
- Added on_planet_returned on action which triggers when an owner of a planet regains control of it
- Made species_classes overwrite extendably too
- AI economic plans now overwrite in an "extendable" way, so you can define a further "basic_economy_plan" which adds an extra subplan, and it will append this subplan to the existing basic_economy_plan
- Ownership limits now no longer overwrite the full object but are instead "extendable", which means you can define a second "default" and put an entry in, and the game will add that to Vanilla's definition of "default"
- Activating an Agenda triggers OnAction "on_agenda_finished".
- Fixed faction_approval not working as country modifier.
A Review of the Year
Since the last anniversary, let's look at some of what we've accomplished together.
Last May we released the "Cepheus" update and the Overlord expansion, introducing the Situations system, updating subjugation mechanics, adding five new Origins, and a huge amount of empire emblems, backgrounds, and flag colors.
In September, the "Fornax" update and the Toxoids Species Pack added new difficulty settings, allowed you to spawn all the crises, and brought us the epic tale of the Toxic God.
Fleet combat rebalancing was the primary focus of the "Orion" update in late November, which also added some new galaxy shapes and added roles to the ship designer.
The First Contact Story Pack started this year alongside the "Canis Minor" update, adding Cloaking to Stellaris and improving Pre-FTL civilizations, while also adding some challenging Origins and focusing on game stability.
And now the "Gemini" update and Galactic Paragons adds the Council, revamps leader mechanics, updates armies and bombardment, and introduces two cooperative game modes (in a beta state). Over the year we also had a number of Open Betas. Many thanks to all of you that played in them and helped us find as many issues as possible.
We've had a busy year! We'll be skipping this Thursday's Dev Diary to keep the team focused on post-release support, and will be returning to our regular once-a-week cadence. Since next Thursday is a holiday in Sweden, the next Stellaris Dev Diary will be on Tuesday, May 16th. After that, we plan on returning to our normal Thursday slot. See you then! Please note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important game going in a previous version, please back up the save file before trying to load the save in 3.8.1. You can roll back to a prior version by right-clicking on Stellaris in your library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version from the drop-down. If you experience crashing or other issues, first disable all mods and start a new save. If the issue persists, please report it on the Bug Report forums.
[ 2023-05-09 11:00:13 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello and welcome back to my little corner in the Arctic! Its Marek again, and today I will showcase some of the new empire creation stuff we made for you. I bet you already suspected from the title that it will be about Civics, Origins (or, Origin to be precise) and Traditions!
Watch the video Dev Diary:
[previewyoutube=SMYogeZgwo4;full][/previewyoutube]
Civics focused on leaders but not always
Doing our design run on the potential civics, we had to take into account a few different things:
- We should focus on civics, effects and modifiers targeting leaders in some way
- We also want to add new ways for players to play their empire
- We need to remember to strengthen the fantasy for certain playstyles, that are still not present in the game
All this knowledge, just enter the vault and search for it They will be like us either they like it, or not The next civic, we decided to make something which would showcase some of our more fancy traits as soon as possible. But I also wanted to play an empire which embarks on a holy war to turn everyone into a proper clone of my ethics. And to have some war civic, which would not be useful for expansionists, conquer everything empires. The whole idea around this civic is not being religious (hence you dont need to be spiritualist to take it), but more a fanatic towards proselytizing your ethos to others. After all, they were converting people to their moral values on their planet, why would they stop doing that when in space?
Zealot trait is one of my favorite Veteran Traits, and its the only reason I made this civic, so I will get it on every Admiral - the above is just an excuse But what about the profits?! Lets not forget about these players who like to play the MegaCorp, as we also have something fancy. Megacorp themes are usually centered around dystopian corporations running the country, either at the forefront, or from the shadows. Here we wanted to add a new brick to this player fantasy, which we felt was lacking. And this is how Pharma State was made, giving a boost to Medical Workers and also unlocking a new Corporate Building for your fancy Branch offices! Be it an illicit place making people go bankrupt by providing aesthetic surgeries for credit or a company focused on making lives better (with a hefty profit margin, of course), the choice is yours to take.
We just invented new ways of preventing coughing! Instead of standard 7 days treatment it will take only 1 week to get rid of it, so definitely worth the 50% increase in price! Profits are not everything! (what?) The efficiency of the processes is also critical for any MegaCorporation success. Inefficient work can lead to serious mismanagement, loss of profits (well, so there is the profit part) and a potential loss of worker of the month status. After all, you are not just a cog in the machine. You are a very precise cog, which keeps the company afloat!
The superb organization skills of this MegaCorp allows it to hire more cogs, er I mean leaders. Something for Gestalts? Gestalts are, in a way, the opposite of Galactic Paragons DLC - which is centered around individuals, their growth and path to glory / power / wealth / levels. So we came with these two civics, focused on making their leaders a bit more individual compared to other gestalts. Both Hive Minds and Machine Intelligences with these civics will give more freedom of thought to their leaders, allowing them to focus their consciousness on different matters - which should also help a bit with leader Unity upkeep, as the base change from 2 to 1 is effectively 50% leader upkeep reduction (which is then put into easier to get resources). Its almost like delegating by consuming more nutrients!
There is clearly no modifier after the upkeep change.
This one was easier to make then the previous one, the hidden modifier is less obvious. But thats not 8 civics! Well, where is the fun of speculating or exploring the civics by yourself? Here are some teasers about the missing ones (but also let me tell you that Vaults are present for every type of empire, just adjusted a bit for them). There is no reward for guessing the civic and its effects, but you can always brag about it if you put your prediction in post and then it turns out to be true. Can you spot what is wrong with this planet? Im not asking about the Aristocratic Elite civic buildings.
Perfectly balanced building composition, as all things should be. Here are some more, which we wont go over super tiny details. [EFFECT.RandomizeNamesOrder] Letters of Marque, Neural Vaults and Heroic Past.
Other civics, should be easy to connect them to the names below To give them some descriptions: Heroic Past puts the empire into something like legendary / heroic figure worship, which is focused on creating better leaders faster than other empires. Taking this civic, the empire shows that its dedicated to growing their citizens into exceptional individuals who will lead it to a great future! (or to die when entering the system with Ether Drake by accident - we do not promise that your leaders will actually survive to become true legends) Letters of Marque is our take on the fantasy around pirates working for big MegaCorp, helping them in dealing with anything which requires firepower. Why spend money on fighting piracy, where you can spend money on hiring pirates to do your bidding? Be it raiding your neighbors or keeping other pirates in check. The Neural Vaults are an adjusted version of Vaults of Knowledge, so you can extract memories from efficient drones and then use these memories in creating more powerful leaders. Yes, I thought that giving 1 screenshot per civic would bloat the DD with too many pictures. And yes, I know that you can guess the MegaCorp civic by its color. One to Rule Them All - Galactic Paragon ruler origin Under One Rule is a semi-story origin, with a lot of different outcomes based on the empire composition and in-game choices. If someone asked me what was the inspiration, I would say a certain person from the Invincible series (his name starts with O) - and some historical characters, like Charlemagne. But the main theme is about an empire interconnected with an exceptional individual who, instead of unifying peacefully, unified the planet by other means. Imagine the New World Order First Contact event, but at a later date, with a ruler who actually succeeded in staying in power. This exceptional leader is the Luminary of the empire, the one who brought the new age, and promised the glory of the stars to his or her people (or it). I guess you get it by now ;)
Beware of your actions! As we had time to do only one Origin, we decided to follow the more story-like approach BUT! We tried to not go the way of the story-story only. Its more of a road of the Luminary leader to fulfill his destiny, which is in the player's hands. There are 4 (or more, depending on how you count it) different outcomes based on the player choices, with a special route which I used to call I dont care about the story that much, which bypasses a lot of story content by also bypassing a lot of potential power gains. For those who will see the Dictatorial requirement and are baffled why they cant be imperial with this Origin - as every story goes its own path, there are possibilities in game to pursue different goals than staying true to the Founding Myth (yes, this means that there are events which allows to change the Authority Type, and Im not afraid to spoil them as they happen fairly quickly).
This isn't even my final form. But lets talk about more mechanical aspects - the main feature of the Origin is to give the player a strong starting ruler, with a unique set of powerful starting council traits (all can be tiered up to tier III, so there is room to grow the leader). These traits, in opposition to standard council traits, are not based on Leader Class, but instead on Empire Ethics. To say it short - there are 14 traits to choose from.
There are also unique negative traits which might put some bad mojo into your Luminary - and they are tied to Empire Ethics as well. And remember to not be overly tyrannical to your people or maybe there is a hidden power in being the evil ruler? Or maybe thats just a trick from me so you will use colossus on your capital planet (but seriously, dont do that)? We are close to the finish line now, so as tradition would make us do, lets talk about our last feature in this Dev Diary. Tradition Trees, Aptitude and Statecraft Our choice for themes of the tradition trees was quite easy, and lets be honest with that. We have leader rework and new Council features. I bet you already see where it is going. Lets start with the Leader Tradition Tree, our Aptitude
This was supposed to be a funny Aptitude-Altitude pun, but I deleted it and forgot how it went. With the new Aptitude, your empires will focus themselves on leaders, giving them bigger and smaller buffs, with the EXP rate being the most obvious one. It's a solid tree if one wants to focus on leaders, but if its not your thing, then the tree is possible best to stay away from.
Starting Traits make up for a potential stronger leader at the end, as they will be able to get 1 more trait compared to leaders without this bonus.
Champions of the Empire is the fanciest one you can unlock from the tree. Next one is the Statecraft tree!
I see 5 pictures, and in 4 of them someone is doing something with their hands. I petition the 5th picture to also include at least one hand. Its easy to pinpoint it to Council feature, having stronger councilors and, somewhat, also boosting leaders. Although, if your empire is not focused on leaders, it might still profit from the non-leader oriented effects and modifiers to build up a strong government to run the show. So, to sum it up, its about leading a state. Fitting name, is it not?
Effective Councilor Skill is my favorite modifier in the whole DLC. I want to thank Karl who fought for this modifier.
This bonus is pretty nice when you have a lot of leaders and play around with Agendas. So! We are at the end of the road for this Dev Diary. And we are pretty close to the release date, there are a few things I would like to say to you: Speculate! Write posts on forums! Play Stellaris! And have fun doing so! :D By the way, a gentle reminder to Wishlist Galactic Paragons on Steam!
[ 2023-05-04 11:00:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
Posted on behalf of Paradox Arctic.
Hello fellow Explorers of the Void.
We're excited to share with you another Dev Diary, this time focusing on the characters of our upcoming DLC, Galactic Paragons. Today, we have Arctic Art Director Frida, and Arctic Game Director Petter to talk about the new handcrafted characters you may encounter.
Watch the video Dev Diary:
[previewyoutube=TmoCjxqZluM;full][/previewyoutube]
Petter (Arctic Game Director): Paragon is primarily an expansion with new mechanics such as the council and the leader rework. But, in a DLC that centers around leaders it felt only natural that we would craft some exceptional characters for you to encounter out there amongst the stars.
The initial ideas for most of these characters were generated during a half-day workshop. We gathered everyone at Arctic and sat down to brainstorm what kind of characters we would like to see in the Stellaris galaxy. They got somewhat cryptic names such as Sneakson, Big Woman, Harkon the Governor, Charming Pirate and so on. But the concepts became the foundation for our iterative process. Their backstories changed the art, and the art changed the backstories. We also got good input from the Content Designers on Studio Green that led to even more tweaks. So, the characters you will encounter have evolved organically.
We call these individuals The Paragons. Now, these paragons are divided into two categories: Renowned Paragons and Legendary Paragons. You will find out more about what these categories means (and some examples) below.
Frida (Arctic Art Director): From the Art team, we have meticulously hand-crafted numerous unique portraits for the Renowned and Legendary Paragon. Each leader is designed to have a distinct appearance that reflects their personality and story, making the galaxy feel more alive and diverse.
During the creation of the portraits, we wanted to elevate the art and storytelling aspects of the leaders, particularly for the Legendary Paragons. One way we have done this is by breaking up the static poses typically seen in the species portraits. Instead, we've incorporated dynamic poses, gestures, and expressions to make these characters truly stand out.
For the Legendary Paragons, we've moved away from the traditional three-quarter pose and experimented with more engaging and dramatic poses. This change not only helps to emphasize the importance of these characters but also makes their portraits visually striking.
The Renowned Paragons, on the other hand, maintain a pose closer to the original species portraits, but with added details and props that help convey their personal stories. Subtle elements such as hand gestures, smirks, scars, or unique clothing items help to give a glimpse into each character's background and personality.
The Renowned Paragons
Petter: Speaking of the Renowned Paragons. These are individuals who you dont stumble upon out in the galaxy, instead they will seek you out! We have 16 of them in the DLC (two for each ethic - sorry Gestalt) and they will strive to join empires whose ethics match theirs: A pacifist paragon will seek out a pacifist empire, a militarist paragon will seek out a militarist empire, and so on. The idea behind the Renowned Paragons is to give the sense of a living galaxy. Each character hints of a bigger world. And we see them as something that will spice up your playthroughs and give it a more distinct flavor. You will find that vastly different types of characters seek you out depending on who you are. Each renowned paragon can be seen as a possible representation of an ethic. Each Renowned Paragon that you encounter has unique art, a personal backstory, and a powerful Destiny Trait from the start. But, they also have a negative trait that adds some flavor. And, they have a chance of triggering some events tied specifically to them that show more of their personality. Here are some examples.
Kai-Sha, the Spymaster
Gameplay-wise Kai-Sha is a General (specialized to sit on the council), with the Authoritarian ethic. She is the shadowy right hand woman you would want to have on your side as an Authoritarian ruler to deal with anything that threatens your power. Frida: Funny story about Kai-Sha - she was actually inspired by our UX designer, Kajsa (also known as kc), purely by coincidence! As we worked on her design, we emphasized her features more, creating a unique look for this character.
Borin: The Friendly Salvager
Frida: Borin's design was inspired by the salvager portrait from Overlord, and we had a blast taking that concept further, creating another character of that species. He comes from a salvaging community on an old space station and left to explore the wonders of the galaxy, ultimately joining your empire. In order to make him feel like an engineer, we incorporated yellow signal colors for relatability. Petter: Borin is charming. His dream has always been to leave his Salvager enclave and travel across the stars. But he still has his mechanical skills and repairs all friendly fleets that are in the same system as him. Also, if you are lucky he might build you a robot that can join your empire. He is a quite warm, and almost spiritual, character for a materialist compared to the other Materialist leader, Xondar, who thinks flesh is weak. Again, trying to show how different the same ethic can be.
Vas the Gilded:
Frida: With Vas the idea was to give her a unique and extravagant look. It was important her love for luxury was shown in her design, with extravagant clothing and accessories. Through the development of her outfit she quickly became similar to a certain Princess, so it took a few iterations to find a unique shape of her headpiece. Her pose is also calm and dignified, hinting at her expertise as a diplomat.
Petter: Vas is one of the characters from the workshop that was pretty much the same the whole way through. But she was a bit more courtesan-ish for a while but now she is more noble and senatorial. It was our QA Daniel Teige that came up with her.
Qla-Minder, the Ruthless Governor:
Frida: Qla-Minder is all about ruling and exploiting others, with a strong focus on industry and wealth. Personality-wise he is a bit of a submissive, butt-kissing worm. We took inspiration from the Harkonnens of Dune, designing him to be as slimy and unappealing as possible to match his character, reusing one of the species from the Aquatics DLC. Petter: Qla-Minder is truly revolting, but still quite lovely in a twisted kind of way. He is great to place on planets where you really want to squeeze the most of the working population. They wont be happy. But they will work.
Legendary Paragons
Petter: The Legendary Paragons are encountered as you explore space and encounter new worlds. There are four Legendary Paragons in the game, each with their own unique abilities, relics, and stories waiting to be uncovered. The Legendary Paragons in many ways represents the different aspects of what Stellaris is: Exploration, War, Ancient Mysteries and Colonization. Frida: Speaking of Colonization, one of the Legendary Paragons we'd like to introduce is Azaryn, the melancholy plantoid who is the last of her species.
Astrocreator Azaryn
Here are a few thoughts on Azaryn from Linus (Content Designer): With Azaryn the initial design goals involved the terraforming mechanic, as well as themes of loss. Early on, she was called simply the 'Sad Plantoid'. Her path is one of redemption, and to achieve it, she will need the help of a larger civilization like yours. Terraforming can be a powerful tool, and we wanted her gameplay to leverage that. Though it's still an expensive endeavor, Azaryn's terraforming has multiple unique points to it but we'll leave you to discover those for yourselves. To balance those perks, the finite nature of her abilities come into play. Her power comes at a great cost to her, and may only be utilized a few times until dire consequences follow. That finite, fleeting nature is something we hope will help to convey her humanity, her personality, and her story. It ties into a big part of what Galactic Paragons is about; to bring characters to the forefront of the experience, looking beneath the galaxy's grandeur, all the way down to the relatable, and letting their stories feed into your own. Frida: Not to spoil too much of her story, Azaryn will begin to deteriorate and we provided four different states where her portraits change based on your progression.
New Recruitment window!
Frida: We now have a new window type used for recruitment, moving away from the standard diplomacy screen.
New Event window!
Frida: Weve also created a new type of event window, where the leader portraits are displayed to the side of the event art, making it clear that this is an event tied to your leader and that its clear which leader it is. From my point of view, it helps to engage with the written content, having the character present beside the text.
Some final words
We all here at Arctic hope that you will enjoy Galactic Paragons. And that the many characters will be great seeds for stories in the galaxy. That's it for today's Dev Diary! We're looking forward to your feedback and thoughts and we'll be back soon with a new Diary on Origins, Civics and Tradition Trees. And don't forget to catch our Galactic Paragons First Look stream, with Game Directors Stephen Muray (PDS Green) and Petter Nallo (PDS Arctic) tomorrow, starting at 1515 CEST on twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive!
Until next time, stay stellar! Frida and Petter and Linus
[ 2023-05-02 11:00:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! Im XM, the lead designer of Galactic Paragons. From the beginning of development, weve followed one simple mantra - make leaders matter. What you are going to read about in the following paragraphs are the results of months of work following that direction. Wishlist Galactic Paragons!
Reducing Leader Count
For leaders to start being significant, there needed to be a lot less of them. With this goal in mind, we removed the research scientist positions currently in the game, and combined them into a single Head of Research Council position (well talk in more detail about the Council later). We also allowed leaders to perform Council duties while maintaining their field positions. These changes dramatically reduced the number of leaders you need to keep track of. The lower leader count also enabled us to make them a lot more powerful.
Improved Role-playing
To deepen the emergent narrative weaved with these new heroes, weve improved upon the leader interface to give you better insight into their past and how they came into service. You can see their homeworld, previous job, and even their ethical alignment.
There are so many more improvements weve made to leaders that I want to share with you, but I need to cede my time here now to my amazing design team, who are smarter than I am, and can better explain their areas of development in more detail.
The Council
Greetings from Karl, designer at Arctic! Im here to talk about some of the features that Ive been responsible for in the upcoming Galactic Paragons DLC; however, none of them would have been possible without the hard work and dedication of my beloved colleagues. The Empire Council is the heart of your government. Every game the Council starts out with 3 seats; for your Ruler, Head of Research, and Minister of Defense.
Each position gives a unique Empire bonus that scales with the skill level of the assigned leader. For example, the Head of Research provides 2% Research speed per level.
With Galactic Paragons, we have also added a lot of new traits. Some of these traits are Council Traits, which are applied to your entire Empire but only if the leader is on the Council (more on Traits further down). This way you get to decide which bonuses you want active, by switching Councilors. To get as many bonuses as possible, you will also want to expand your council
Unlockable Council positions
Everyone will have access to the basic council. But if you have Galactic Paragons youll be able to unlock 3 more positions for your Council throughout the game. What positions youll have access to maps directly to your Civics. As an example, the Idealistic Foundation Civic enables the Tribune of Rights Councilor.
Thus we have added no less than 95 unique Council positions for the Council to match your Empires design, and make it look and feel different every time you play. Including unique Ruler bonuses depending on what kind of authority you have. For example the stronger an Imperial Ruler becomes, the more Power Projection they generate.
For the kind of Empire you are running to stand out even more, weve crafted unique Council screen backdrops for each of the Authority types.
Council Agendas
Another important feature for the Council is that they pursue an Agenda that you set for them. The moment you assign an Agenda to the Council it gives a small bonus, but it takes several years before its ready to be launched and you get the full effects from it. This requires you to be somewhat strategic in your planning, if you for example expect a war.
You can only pursue one Agenda at a time, but once an Agenda is finished you gain the full benefits for another 10 years. The more Councilors you have and the higher their skill level, the faster you can complete an Agenda; while for a huge empire it takes a bit longer to finish. At the start of the game, you have very few Agendas to pick from as they are tied to the Ethics of your Empire. But if you have Galactic Paragons you will get a new Agenda for every Tradition Tree you unlock. These are all tied to the theme of the traditions. This might incentivize you to go wide with Traditions rather than finish them one at a time.
The Gestalt Council
We felt that the Council feature didnt sit that well with the Gestalt fantasy, but also didnt want these players to feel completely left out. Now Gestalt players can directly level up and design not only the Ruler, but 4 new Nodes of the consciousness too. They are a little less flexible, but are on the other hand immortal!
Leaders Reworked
Hi everyone! Its me, Marek, your new fancy (self-appointed title of course) and barely known (I guess I should talk more on forums, like Offe) Content Designer from the Northern office. I will try to warm the climate with some hot takes on our upcoming features from Galactic Paragons. So, prepare your tea, coffee, or anything really - and lets dive deep into the new systems and features, both free and paid.
New Level Up System
For those who choose to forgo Galactic Paragons, your level system will look fairly similar, with a few changes.
- All leaders will be capped at level 10
- Leaders will always get trait every 2 levels (starting from level 1), for a total of 5 traits
- Every trait will be randomized from Common trait pool
- There will be a new tiered trait system: Common traits and Negative traits will have 2 tiers each
- Leaders get new trait pick every level
- Players can choose the trait from a randomized pool that is based on class, veteran class and ethic.
- On level 4, leaders will get to choose from Veteran Class which give access to different types of Veteran Traits (every class has 3 Veteran Classes, which are centered around different bonuses and their leader actions). Each veteran trait has 3 tiers.
- On level 8, leaders will get a one time Destiny Trait pick. This powerful trait represents a leader finding its destiny within the galaxy.
I bet you dont know what Im talking about with the Veteran and Destiny thingies
My god it's full of Traits
For owners of Galactic Paragons, there will be almost 700* (we decided to stay humble with the number) traits, including tiered versions. There are a bunch of new Common traits, but the bulk of new content is gated behind the DLC. * Some traits may require other DLCs. Number includes tiered traits.
Some of the new traits To get into a bit more details about new traits, they are divided into 3 categories, Common, Veteran, Destiny.
Common traits:
The one that comes with Free Patch (most of them are updated versions of old traits). They are the bread and butter for Free Patch players, as leaders will be getting them every 2 levels. For DLC owners, they represent the first 3 levels for the new Leaders and their journey to power!
I guess it should have a doggo as an icon?
Veteran Traits:
Veteran traits are available only to players with Galactic Paragons DLC. They will cover every level from 5 to 10, and (as mentioned before) their pool for a given leader is dependent on leader ethic and their Veteran Class. They are more powerful than Common traits.
New fancy effects for leader actions? Yes, please!
Destiny Traits:
Destiny traits are One-Per Leader (in most cases, as sometimes leaders might get event based Destiny traits too!) and they represent the peak of this given leader - as such, leaders get the destiny trait on Level 8.
What is this, even? The more species, the better the trait? Madness! Small disclaimer: Gestalt leaders operate slightly differently - rather than gaining Destiny traits, they have more Veteran picks than non-Gestalts. They do not have individual destinies like the standard empires do!
Leaders Reworked - Veteran Classes
Veteran Class is a paid feature from Galactic Paragons, and it allows you to customize your leaders more. Every leader will get to choose from 3 Veteran Classes on level 4, bringing the number of Veteran Classes to 12.
Each of the Veteran Class will focus on different aspects of the Leader. Lets take Scientists for example, which can choose from Explorer, Analyst and Researcher Veteran Classes. Picking the proper Veteran Class is paramount to utilizing your leader in a way that you want them to fulfill. For example, Analyst Leader will get Veteran Traits centered around Assist Planetary Research action, while Researcher will get Veteran Traits focused on the Council.
Veteran Class Icon as seen on the left side of the leader - Level 1 Admiral for comparison.
Negative Traits
Lets also mention the small detail of Negative traits. Every leader is randomized with Negative trait potential. The bigger the potential, the more (and faster) negative traits will accumulate on this given leader. With luck, you will find leaders with 0 negative potential, but you never know what it will be until your leader suddenly comes home with a new set of negative traits and starts to steal your resources to open up a new casino in his basement.
New Leader Cap System
Leaders are now vastly more powerful than before, so we decided to introduce a soft leader cap - just like with the naval cap, leaders will grow more expensive when empires are above the cap. It might take some time to get used to, but no longer are the time when in the early game it is viable to send out 20 science ships to explore the galaxy, but it also allows for players to take meaningful choices - creating an economy based on strong governors is a viable strategy, just as well as making strong navy based on many high level admirals. In my humble opinion, this change somewhat favors smaller empires, which might feel less incentivized to go over their leader cap to fill all the roles, while huge empires will need to take choices on, for example, governor placements (or going over Leader Cap). And now, something to finish our little trip into this leader madness
Ruler Creator
Well, I disliked the fact that I cant choose my starting ruler trait - especially on dictatorial and imperial empires. Now I wont have to restart the game every time I get a trait I dont want to have on my ruler. Coders wept when I designed this, and UX was more than happy with coming up with the layout. I guess you can never make everyone happy.
Right now, there is only a limited number of traits to choose from, but we decided to not overwhelm players with new choices here. They should be hunting for new civics instead!
Honorable mention
Lets talk about one last change, close to the leaders, but not exactly. This is present in both Free Patch and DLC, so buckle up this one last time! With the new trait system and reworked leaders and cap and everything - we decided that the Governor traits should only apply to the planets he currently sits on. But as the game had this nice feature of Sector Governors too, we wanted to use this system, rather than just removing it. So now, if you would like to see the potential career of a governor, it would be - Planet Governor, Sector Governor, Councilor, Empire Ruler.
How does the new sector governor thingy work?
Whenever there is a Governor sitting on a Sector Capital planet, his level will apply bonuses to every planet in this sector, in a way like it used to be.
You can always override the Sector Governor by putting a proper Planetary Governor here. Just remember that Leader Traits do not work on Sectors! Is that all? Yeah, I guess so. Don't forget to Wishlist Galactic Paragons! See you on the next DD!
[ 2023-04-27 11:01:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin and Petter Nallo
Over the past year weve been working on several things in parallel. While PDS Green in Stockholm was building the First Contact Story Pack, our colleagues at PDS Arctic in Ume were working on a major project as well.
[previewyoutube=NrWoHmBntTw;full][/previewyoutube]
Im extremely pleased to announce that Galactic Paragons, an expansion focusing on leaders and their impact on your empire, will be released alongside Stellaris seventh anniversary on May 9th.
Galactic Paragons is now available to wishlist.
Im turning the diary over to Petter Nallo, who directed the development of Galactic Paragons, to explain their vision and provide a list of features.
The Vision of Galactic Paragons
Amidst the great empires of the galaxy, there are luminaries who rise above the masses. They take on many forms: cunning rulers, ruthless warlords, devout prophets, bold explorers, and visionary scientists. These leaders leave indelible imprints on their empires, etching their names into the annals of history and the collective consciousness of the people they ruled. The Galactic Paragons expansion focuses on these extraordinary individuals, seeking to capture the essence of their epochal reigns.
Tell us their stories
The new level up system will allow you to shape your leaders in a whole new way. Pick traits, select between Veteran Classes and find them positions where they may excel. They are also tied to the galaxy in a new way with a home planet, a previous profession and their own ethics. Follow their journeys and witness their unique destinies unfold.
The Council
A new ruling council is introduced, where characters in the highest positions of your empire may take their place. Powerful traits have immense influence over all that lies within your empire's borders. And from here, you can unleash political agendas.
Legendary Leaders
Out there in the void you may discover powerful paragons. These may seek to join your empire depending on your ethics. Here, may be approached by greedy governors who grovel in the dust, cunning spymasters, prophets who disseminate knowledge of the Shroud and so on. But as you explore the galaxy you may also encounter truly legendary beings that may change the core of your empire.
And then the rest
There will be a new origin, several new civics, tradition trees, agendas, council positions and much more. More will be revealed in the near future.
Whats Next
You may notice that May 9th isnt very far away, so well be continuing a twice-a-week dev diary schedule until the anniversary and Galactic Paragons release. There are a lot of features to get through, so be prepared for some longer than usual diaries. This Thursday well explore the Council, Leaders, and Agendas. See you then! Wishlist now!
[ 2023-04-25 15:00:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
The 3.8 Gemini Coop Open Beta we talked about last week is now open! See this message for more details. Well be collecting feedback and Out of Sync errors until the end of April.
Please note that the 3.8 "Gemini" Coop Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test - 3.8 Coop Open Beta" branch.
Don't forget to turn off your mods, they will break.
This week, well be exploring some of the improvements that arent in the Coop Open Beta, but are planned for the full 3.8 release. Here are Offe and kc to tell you all about them!
Hello again, its me Offe, today I will share some information about what I have been working on since my previous Dev Diary about AI. Today I have seven smaller side projects to present that will be coming with the 3.8 free patch: Army Builder, Rally Troops, Ground combat and Bombardment Tweaks, Science Ship Automation, Capital World Designations, Fleet Manager Improvements and Sector Editor. First I have three changes related to Ground Combat and Orbital Bombardment, seeing how the community is split between a ground combat rework or removing it completely, I opted to instead make everyone disappointed and give you what no one asked for: Quality of Life and slight rebalance. Army Builder First up is the Army Builder, this is a tool designed to make it much easier to build and gather Assault Armies for an upcoming war. This tab is available on any starbase in a sector, and armies recruited via this tab will gather at the starbase.
Note: It's moved one tab to the left since this screenshot was taken. Construction is spread out across all planets in the sector and there is also a CTRL-click option to more quickly queue up more construction.
In cases where you would like to reinforce an existing fleet of Assault Armies instead of simply gathering them at a starbase Ive also added a mode for assault army fleets called Rally Troops. New troops will then automatically try and merge with this fleet regardless if they are built via the Army Builder or by the old method of recruitment from a planet.
Speaking of planets, Ive also added a Deploy In Orbit checkbox to planets for the use case where you want to recruit assault armies to defend a planet on the frontier without them first deploying in orbit meaning you then have to manually go back and land those troops afterwards.
Bombardment Changes Next up is changes to bombardment, if you really hate ground combat then I got good news for you. Orbital Bombardment will now be able to take control of planets, in most cases, when they have completely killed all defending troops. There are some exceptions, for example, your pops will never surrender to an enemy that are Fanatical Purifiers as they would be purged anyway.
There is also a policy where you can refuse enemy planets that would like to surrender to you, however, your defenceless planets will still prefer to surrender to non genocidal/hive minds enemies to spare their own lives.
Further there are some tweaks to ground combat and orbital bombardments to create a trade off between bombing and invading:
- Bombarding planets is much more devastating than it used to be, more pops will die and buildings and districts will be ruined in the process. This also adds a trade off between the different bombardment stances, doing selective bombardment will be slower but fewer pops will die in the process compared to indiscriminate bombardment.
- Orbital Bombardment will now scale with the amount of ships bombarding, the first 100 fleet size ships will do full damage, after that each additional 100 fleet size will add 70% of that efficiency. For example, 300 fleet capacity worth of ships will deal 100% + 70% + (0,7^2 = 49%) = 219% total worth of bombardment damage.
- This effect is scaled based on the number of pops/buildings and planets size, where highly populated small planets will suffer greater losses compared to large sparsely populated planets.
- Ground Combat is also more devastating to planets than it used to be, but much less so than bombarding.
- The effect of collateral damage from different army types have also been adjusted, previously the collateral damage on army types was a linear value and not a multiplier, which meant that in practice high damage high collateral units like Xenomorphs could effectively do less collateral damage on the planet compared to normal troops because they would kill the enemy troops very quickly. This is no longer the case as the collateral damage modifier now acts as a multiplier on any damage dealt.
- Planetary Capital buildings now spawns 0/4/8/16 defensive armies for free based on the tier of the building.
Now when you click on the Science Ship automation you can enable or disable the modules you like, Explore Systems simply mean exploring the galaxy by entering systems which will discover any planets and hyperlanes in there, the other settings should be self explanatory. The default settings are Explore Systems and Survey Systems which is the same functionality as before 3.8. For Science Ships that are already automated you can see which modules they have enabled by hovering the automation button:
New Planetary Capital Designations I have gone a bit outside of my own designation as a Programmer and dabbled a bit with content design. There are 4 new Capital world designations coming in 3.8 for non hive minds. They are: Forge Capital, Factory Capital, Trade Capital and Capital Extraction World. These designations are not part of the automatic colony designation system and your capital world will never change designation on its own, rather you must explicitly change the designation yourself in order to avoid instantaneous collapse of the player economy when unpausing the game. They are not revolutionary in their design but rather they are the combined effects of the Capital Designation paired with a specialisation. So, for example, the Capital Forge world designation will give you all the bonuses as the normal Capital Designation, but instead of the +10% output to all jobs it gives +20% Metallurgist jobs output as well as shifting the Consumer Goods jobs into Alloy jobs like the other Forge Designations.
So for everyone like me who wanted to make a Forge, Factory, Trade or Base Resource Capital World, now you can. Fleet Manager Overall the Fleet Manager serves its purpose and works, sort of. Together with KC (more from her later) we made some reorganisation of the UI and fixed some annoying bugs. Here is what the fleet manager looks like now:
Some notable changes are that the list of fleets is now much larger than it used to be, now you can see 12 simultaneous fleets instead of 6, there is a new button to copy a fleet template, you can now easily delete fleets templates by using the DELETE + ENTER keys and doing so will no longer select the first fleet in the list and scroll the scrollbar to the top. The ship designer and the fleet managers have also been merged into one item in the sidebar and are accessible via tabs to easily be able to switch between them. Weve also added this new button which originally was designed and implemented for the AI but then I figured it is useful for players too:
Sector Editor Overlord really made us miss the ability to edit sectors, so better late than never Ive made a tool which allows the player to freely move systems between adjacent sectors as long as they are in range of the Sector Capitals. The Sector Editor tool can be access either via the Planet view or the Planets and Sector view:
Opening the sector editor will enter into the sector edit map mode, here you can edit the sector either via the galaxy map icons or by using the UI on the left. While in the sector editor mode you can easily switch between editing different sectors by clicking on these icons in the galaxy map.
This comes with a few adjustments to requirements of creating Sectors, for example, it is no longer possible to create a sector that is too close to an existing Sector Capital even if the systems in between are unclaimed. Meaning it is no longer possible to release one of your guaranteed habitable worlds as a Vassal. Further, all of the old counter intuitive rules regarding which planet would belong to which sector capital have been removed which previously resulted in very strange looking sectors when players would try to delete and recreate sectors to attempt to fix their sector borders. Currently the sector editor gives a lot of control to the players, meaning it is even easier than before to create 1 system/planet vassals, but it is also now possible to fix sector border map gore. I trust everyone here will use this power responsibly.
But Wait Theres More!
Hey everyone, I'm kc - your favourite UX designer you have never heard of. Usually working from the shadows up in Arctic, I have descended upon you to shed light on some more quality of life things we have been working on for the last few weeks. Rebindable keys for the side menu, ok, not rebindable but close enough. We have made it possible to customise the order of the items in the menu and thus decide which of them will have the F1-F10 hotkeys. Technology? You got it! Toggle edit mode by clicking on the little gear icon.
Message Onslaught Something of a pet peeve of mine since I started on Stellaris a couple of years ago, was the lack of different scales of urgency when the game presents information. Since everything is considered equally important, in order to cut through the noise every new message has to scream as loud as the others, or louder. This has led to the barrage of popups and notifications we all know and love, and love to hate. So what we decided to do to fix this is of course to make even more notifications. OK, rather; [olist]
My hope is that we can convert old messages to use this system when it makes sense to do so (System Surveyed, Build Complete, etc.), as well as allow for customization on how different messages should be presented. Pick your poison! Or just turn it off completely. Message settings can be accessed directly from the notification/toast you no longer wish to see, (by Ctrl-Clicking on it) or from the game menu, under Settings/Messages. Some messages, such as the toasts shown above, also have a cogwheel to adjust setings.
But Wait Theres More... More!
No really, theres actually more. But since this was chonky enough, I guess well be back later. Stay tuned.
Whats Next
Weve got a lot left to go through before the Gemini release, so well see you next Tuesday with our next Dev Diary.
[ 2023-04-20 11:00:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris fans, We are happy to announce the release of our 3.8 Coop Open Beta! It is now available on a separate branch in Steam. Instructions for opting in to the Open Beta branch: Open the Steam client [olist]
- In the "Properties..." menu, go to the "General" tab
- Enter "-dx9" in the Launch Options field
- Added two Cooperative modes, allowing up to five players per empire. More information can be found in Stellaris Dev Diary #293.
- Cooperative PvE can be initiated from the main menu - all players that hotjoin the hosted game will join the primary players empire. This mode is primarily intended for teaching new players or for lower intensity cooperative gameplay.
- Cooperative PvP can be allowed by the host of a standard multiplayer game. When enabled, empires can open themselves up to allow other players to help control their empire. We expect this game mode to be useful for competitive team play.
- Added unique textures for Mercury, Venus, Neptune and Uranus for the Sol system.
- Added unique textures for Earth and Mars when terraformed based off of available heightmap data.
- Added new anomaly The Orb
- Added a special solar system protected by the Lone Defender.
- Added a decision to clear the wreckage on a Broken Shackles starting planet in the event that they are conquered before they enact the Memorial to the Unshackled decision.
- Improved accuracy of tooltips on the galaxy setting screen and implemented experimental nested tooltip functionality.
- The mind-wiped species from On the Shoulders of Giants will now have the Forcefully Devolved trait.
- The Observation Insight Situation now remembers what approach you had when it last finished.
- There is now a 1% chance that a pre-ftl civilization will spawn with the Forcefully Devolved trait.
- Lowered base Minor Artifact storage capacity to 2,000. The Facility of Archaeostudies increases this by 1,000 or by 3,000 if the Archaeo-Engineers AP is taken.
- A synthetically ascended empire should no longer refer to their own pops as having owners.
- Added a new description to the Broken Shackles Homecoming event if the world is a tomb world.
- Added missing "gateway" icons and tooltips to tech_cloaking_1 and tech_detection_array.
- Added missing background for Ironman game setting.
- Broken Shackles empires with the Parliamentary System civic will instead have Unshackled Politics fire one month after game start instead of one year after game start.
- Corrected the Ancient Target Scrambler tech not stating that it unlocks the Ancient Target Scrambler ship component.
- Enclaves should no longer keep offering you their services if you become a fanatical purifier.
- Fix MP game browser listing full games even if "Not full" is checked.
- Fixed a typo in the Cloud, Snagged event (federations3.2010)
- Fixed an issue with an unlocalized version of MSI in the initial interaction between a Broken Shackles and Payback empire.
- Fixed an unlocalized string for the Reanimated Tiyanki Matriarch.
- Fixed events related to the Out of Warranty event chain not firing.
- Fixed incorrect calculation used for Offspring amenities.
- Fixed Liberation wars not showing up for Payback empires.
- Fixed materialist culture workers (and death chroniclers) not having the effects of the Charismatic or Repugnant traits.
- Fixed NO_POSSIBLE_OPTION text in tooltip for an option in Starbase sabotage event
- Fixed reloading of system initializers and crash in with reload_galaxy console command
- Fixed some grammar in the Hivemind Voidspawn reanimation event.
- Fixed Status Quo in a Subsidiary war subjugating the wrong empire.
- Fixing truncated build queue items in the starbase view
- Former pre-FTL worlds will no longer display the technological age of the former civilization during colonization.
- Increased size of the Relic World tied to the Moon Base arc site from 26 to 30.
- Newly added starbase modules and buildings are now possible targets for Sabotage Starbase.
- Prevent joining full MP games.
- Removed a double be from a machine become the crisis event.
- Solved exploit where a base price would constantly reset the next day if you sold the minimum amount
- Special project energy cost is now displayed in situation log
- System and star name should now match even if the player selects an origin that has a special starting system.
- The "Direct Join" window now blocks other input.
- The "Host server" window now blocks other input.
- The Separatist Planet will no longer nuke themselves if you lose your capital to space fauna.
- Torpedo and Frigate technology now requires you to have researched Corvettes.
- Fix for AI requiring wrong techs to build some megastructures
- Prevent "Assist Research" from blocking AI construction of orbital rings
- AI can take into account planetary impact of orbital ring buildings when picking which one to build
- AI takes into account planetary production impact of possible orbital ring buildings when considering building orbital rings
- AI attitude updates now happen only monthly and on diplomatic actions
- Allow AI to build economically useful orbital ring buildings without a matching designation
- Relaxed AI budget requirements for orbital ring upgrades
- The AI will now build more Offspring Outlooks and Cordyceptic Reanimation Facilities.
- [UI] Addition of new social assets. Update of the Text on tooltips
- [UI] Auto Track Log Entries setting is saved in the save game.
- [UI] Removed the in-game web browser. The game will now use the platform's browser instead.
- Added copy_flags_and_variables_from effect to copy all flags and variables from one scope to another
- Added keyboard command for jumping to the next day [.].
- Added the special_max_amount = yes/no parameter for resources.
- Removed support for the "Major" flag and potential trigger in events.
- Renamed country_mia_time_mult to fleet_mia_time_mult so that you can apply it at leader or fleet level too
- Replaced set_is_female with set_gender
- Scripted triggers may now generate up to one automatic event option icon each
- You can now use "initializer = random" in the spawn_system effect
[ 2023-04-20 08:45:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello again!
Last week we went over the basic design of the Cooperative multiplayer system were currently working on, and were ready to announce that the Coop Open Beta is looking like it will be starting sometime next week. Though at this time I cant give a precise date, I thought Id provide a list of preliminary patch notes.
I expect that well leave the branch up until the release of 3.8, and feedback will be collected in threads until April 30th. Stay tuned for more details once we can share them.
Release Notes
Heres a changelog of what will be present in the Coop Open Beta. This is only a small subset of whats going to be coming in 3.8 - we wanted to keep the Coop changes relatively isolated in order to get better testing of the feature. STELLARIS 3.8 GEMINI COOP OPEN BETA PRELIMINARY RELEASE NOTES [expand type=show more] Features
- Added two Cooperative modes, allowing up to five players per empire. More information can be found in Stellaris Dev Diary #293. * Cooperative PvE can be initiated from the main menu - all players that hotjoin the hosted game will join the primary players empire. This mode is primarily intended for teaching new players or for lower intensity cooperative gameplay. * Cooperative PvP can be allowed by the host of a standard multiplayer game. When enabled, empires can open themselves up to allow other players to help control their empire. We expect this game mode to be useful for competitive team play.
- Added unique textures for Mercury, Venus, Neptune and Uranus for Sol system.
- Added unique textures for Earth and Mars when terraformed based off of available heightmap data.
- Added new anomaly The Orb
- Added a special solar system protected by the Lone Defender.
- Added a decision to clear the wreckage on a Broken Shackles starting planet in the event that they are conquered before they enact the Memorial to the Unshackled decision.
- Improved accuracy of tooltips on the galaxy setting screen and implemented experimental nested tooltip functionality.
- The mind-wiped species from On the Shoulders of Giants will now have the Forcefully Devolved trait.
- The Observation Insight Situation now remembers what approach you had when it last finished.
- There is now a 1% chance that a pre-ftl civilization will spawn with the Forcefully Devolved trait.
- Lowered base Minor Artifact storage capacity to 2,000. The Facility of Archaeostudies increases this by 1,000 or by 3,000 if the Archaeo-Engineers AP is taken.
- A synthetically ascended empire should no longer refer to their own pops as having owners.
- Added a new description to the Broken Shackles Homecoming event if the world is a tomb world.
- Added missing "gateway" icons and tooltips to tech_cloaking_1 and tech_detection_array.
- Added missing background for Ironman game setting.
- Broken Shackles empires with the Parliamentary System civic will instead have Unshackled Politics fire one month after game start instead of one year after game start.
- Corrected the Ancient Target Scrambler tech not stating that it unlocks the Ancient Target Scrambler ship component.
- Enclaves should no longer keep offering you their services if you become a fanatical purifier.
- Fix MP game browser listing full games even if "Not full" is checked.
- Fixed a typo in the Cloud, Snagged event (federations3.2010)
- Fixed an issue with an unlocalized version of MSI in the initial interaction between a Broken Shackles and Payback empire.
- Fixed an unlocalized string for the Reanimated Tiyanki Matriarch.
- Fixed events related to the Out of Warranty event chain not firing.
- Fixed incorrect calculation used for Offspring amenities.
- Fixed Liberation wars not showing up for Payback empires.
- Fixed materialist culture workers (and death chroniclers) not having the effects of the Charismatic or Repugnant traits.
- Fixed NO_POSSIBLE_OPTION text in tooltip for an option in Starbase sabotage event
- Fixed reloading of system initializers and crash in with reload_galaxy console command
- Fixed some grammar in the Hivemind Voidspawn reanimation event.
- Fixed Status Quo in a Subsidiary war subjugating the wrong empire.
- Fixing truncated build queue items in the starbase view
- Former pre-FTL worlds will no longer display the technological age of the former civilization during colonization.
- Increased size of the Relic World tied to the Moon Base arc site from 26 to 30.
- Newly added starbase modules and buildings are now possible targets for Sabotage Starbase.
- Prevent joining full MP games.
- Removed a double be from a machine become the crisis event.
- Solved exploit where a base price would constantly reset the next day if you sold the minimum amount
- Special project energy cost is now displayed in situation log
- System and star name should now match even if the player selects an origin that has a special starting system.
- The "Direct Join" window now blocks other input.
- The "Host server" window now blocks other input.
- The Separatist Planet will no longer nuke themselves if you lose your capital to space fauna.
- Torpedo and Frigate technology now requires you to have researched Corvettes.
- Fix for AI requiring wrong techs to build some megastructures
- Prevent "Assist Research" from blocking AI construction of orbital rings
- AI can take into account planetary impact of orbital ring buildings when picking which one to build
- AI takes into account planetary production impact of possible orbital ring buildings when considering building orbital rings
- AI attitude updates now happen only monthly and on diplomatic actions
- Allow AI to build economically useful orbital ring buildings without a matching designation
- Relaxed AI budget requirements for orbital ring upgrades
- The AI will now build more Offspring Outlooks and Cordyceptic Reanimation Facilities.
- Addition of new social assets. Update of the Text on tooltips
- Auto Track Log Entries setting is saved in the save game.
- Removed the in-game web browser. The game will now use the platform's browser instead.
- Added copy_flags_and_variables_from effect to copy all flags and variables from one scope to another
- Added keyboard command for jumping to the next day [.].
- Added the special_max_amount = yes/no parameter for resources.
- Removed support for the "Major" flag and potential trigger in events.
- Renamed country_mia_time_mult to fleet_mia_time_mult so that you can apply it at leader or fleet level too
- Replaced set_is_female with set_gender
- Scripted triggers may now generate up to one automatic event option icon each
- You can now use "initializer = random" in the spawn_system effect
Things to Keep in Mind
Coop touches a lot of systems in Stellaris, and it is very likely that you will run into synchronization issues, or other weirdness. (The dreaded Out of Syncs that are the bane of multiplayer Stellaris.) This system is still in active development, but we wanted to let people play with it now, while theres still time to react to feedback and bugs that are found. Certain events, such as diplomacy with enclaves or other special entities, may also behave oddly during the beta, with responses going to the first player in the empire rather than the one that initiated contact.
Did you miss last week's Dev Diary Introducing Coop?
Community Manager Mordred Viking is back on Stellaris Official to save you the trouble of reading it! [previewyoutube=79WxfMJSzWM;full][/previewyoutube]
StellARTis Competition Winners
The StellARTis competition has completed, and winners have been announced! Check out some of their brilliant works.
Next Week
Next week well start going through some of the many changes coming in 3.8 that arent in the Coop Open Beta release.
[ 2023-04-13 11:00:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
One of the major Custodian features planned for the 3.8 Gemini update is the addition of two cooperative gameplay modes. Up to five players will be able to control the same empire and work together to play the game as a team.
Two Modes of Play
Surveys suggested that there are two distinctly different reasons people want to play together.
- I want to play a PvE game of Stellaris with my friends, either to teach them how to play the game or to have a more relaxed game where we can share the duties of empire management.
- I want to play a multiplayer PvP game of Stellaris where teams of players go up against each other.
Cooperative PvE
A new main menu entry exists for starting a Cooperative PvE game where all human players control the same empire.
This will bring them to the Game Browser screen, where one of them can choose to Host a New Game, just like the regular Multiplayer flow. The hosting player will go directly to Empire Selection, where they can create a new empire or select one theyve already created as normal, select the Galaxy Settings for the game, and then begin the session. Unlike regular Multiplayer, the Cooperative PvE flow bypasses the Game Lobby, and the coop players will not need to select an empire. These players hotjoin directly into the hosting players empire once the game has begun. For most purposes, Cooperative PvE is treated the same way as single player PvE is.
Competitive PvP
The flow for creating a competitive multiplayer coop game is similar to the normal multiplayer flow. One player will host the server, ticking the Allow Coop checkbox.
Other players can join the Game Lobby and open their empires up for additional players.
pdx_eladrin has opened his empire up for cooperative play.
After Loner has joined the empire. Empires that have been opened for cooperative play add an inspect icon to the portrait so prospective players can see the details on the empire before deciding to join.
Inspect a coop empire. For more competitive players, the primary player of the empire will be able to lock their empire, which will add a password requirement to joining or inspection.
New Coop Features
Its often useful to know what your teammates are up to. To make it a little easier to understand whats going on, weve added Presence Markers to the UI to show which tabs your teammates are currently using.
pdx_eladrin is currently taking care of our research issues, so Loner can worry about something else. We're currently exploring the addition of Goto buttons in the top right corner that will allow you to bring your camera to your teammates location, but this isn't fully functional yet. (And is unlikely to be during the Open Beta.) Events will be shown to all members of a coop team, and any of the players can select a response. The window will remain in place with the selected option marked with the icon of the player that made a choice.
Only one option for this one, but its nice to know its already been selected.
Whats Next?
Next week well be talking about the 3.8 Gemini Open Beta. As the Coop game modes touch a lot of moving parts, wed like to gain feedback on your thoughts of how it plays as well as find where desyncs and other bugs crop up before the actual release.
[ 2023-04-06 11:00:32 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Happy Thursday!
Thanks to everyone who answered our User Research survey as well as to everyone posting in our Custodian Diplomatic AI Feedback thread.
Originally I was planning on just talking about what was going into 3.7.4, with a potential release date next week, but things went a bit better than expected and as of this morning the 3.7.4 patch has been released. Unless something major crops up, the next Stellaris update is expected to be the 3.8 Gemini release during Q2.
This patch includes another adjustment to pre-FTL civilizations being too keen on destroying themselves in atomic fire (they now have a significant chance to have a close call, and we've adjusted some of the possibility weights some more), but we have a larger solution planned for 3.8.
STELLARIS CANIS MINOR 3.7.4 PATCH NOTES
[expand type=showmore]
BALANCE AND IMPROVEMENTS
- Pre-FTL civilizations now have a chance of having a "close call" when nuclear war threatens to break out.
- Payback Origin * If you defeat the Debt Collectors three times, the MSI will use the Humiliate war goal against you instead of trying to vassalize you * The Debt collectors won't bug you anymore if you're currently at war with the MSI * Fixed Payback war goals to ensure you can't vassalize or impose ideology on homicidal empires * Slightly increased surrender acceptance of Payback war goals * Payback origin: fixed a rare instance where the Debt Collectors event chain could get soft locked if the debt collectors were defeated by another empire * Payback empires now get a consolatory prize if the MSI gets destroyed by a Marauder empire * Fixed an issue where a Payback empire using the End Threat (Payback) war goal against the MSI could end with a whimper instead of as intended.
- Increased starbase reactor power by roughly 15%.
- Hive-Minds with both Cordyceptic Drones and Stargazers now start with 3 reanimated amoebae.
- Pre-FTL Awareness cannot naturally decay below 10.
- The Raise Awareness espionage operation now prevents pre-ftl Awareness from naturally decaying for 5 years.
- The Triumviri ending for Fear of the Dark is now achievable from infiltrating the Fevorian government.
- Buffed MSI by giving them some bonus naval capacity and starting technologies.
- The devolving beam now properly destroys the final contingency world (when boosted with the Archaeo-Engineers Ascension Perk)
- Fixed Sabotage Starbase operation failing to destroy starbase components
- Fixing a case where you were blocked from building orbital rings on a Fear of the Dark planet
- It is no longer possible to acquire multiple Galatrons from reliquaries
- Hivemind pre-FTLs will no longer be producing consumer goods.
- Fixed an issue where the Solarpunk society wouldn't reattach itself to the galaxy.
- Fixed an issue where the Solarpunk society would stay neutral after being attacked.
- Fixed an issue where Sol X and your Beta homeworld would overlap.
- Fixed the Dark Forest achievement not triggering in some cases due to interactions with marauders.
- Construction ship and science ships gained from picking a specialization as part of the Imperial Fiefdom origin now correctly start with hyper drives for empires with the Eager Explorer civics.
- Fix AI Empires building hundreds of observation stations if you don't own First Contact
- Empire naming adjectives should now be seen for German, Simplified Chinese, and Russian.
- Removing an unnecessary progress bar in the clear blocker view.
- Removed happiness penalties from unemployment from living standards, these are now solely applied from job strata.
- AI with Clone Army Origin now creates clone vats to keep their colonies alive.
- Starbases should now correctly reflect their new sensor range on the monthly tick.
- Ancient Saturator Artillery tech now unlocks the Spinal Mount Bow section for battleships.
- Fixed decloaking in a system with pre-ftls not correctly firing the event to increase awareness.
- Broken Shackles empires with robots outlawed now correctly purge machine and mechanical pops.
- Terraforming a planet now also has a chance of triggering an awareness increase.
- Fix crash when a species doesn't have a valid archetype
- Removed ability to use the "reveal yourself" diplomatic action while you're already revealing yourself
- Pre-FTL agreements like "give technology" now get correctly removed once a pre-FTL civilization becomes spacefaring
- Blocked "Salacious Affair" envoy event from firing on pre-FTL worlds
- Removing the option of upgrading at neutral starbases
- Fixed the Fear of the Dark Separatist country being localized incorrectly in German, Polish and Spanish.
- Added correct icon for Negative Media Coverage modifier.
- If a pre-FTL society has more than one planet then none will keep being available for observation once the society becomes fully aware.
- Dig sites should no longer generate minor artifacts for users that do not own Ancient Relics DLC
- Corrected icon for Declining Healthcare modifier.
- Class-4 Singularity can now be constructed when rewarded by event.
- Made it so you can't get an option in an espionage event that requires an interference policy that doesn't allow for espionage.
- Genocidal empires can now use assimilation species rights targeting their species. This should fix Fanatic Purifiers not being able to cybernetically or psionically assimilate lost colonies, splinter planets or the like.
- Adding missing cloaking stat on ship design view.
- Blocking the possibility of terraforming while the planet is under colonization.
- Fixed a crash when loading old savegames
- Fixed tooltip bug with fleets from defensive pacts in a war.
Concepts
As part of our ongoing efforts to make the game less daunting for new and returning players, weve discovered a UX Insight Technology while observing the pre-FTL games made by our sibling studios. In 3.8 well be introducing Concepts as a variant of the nested tooltips you may be familiar with from Crusader Kings or Victoria. Our primary goal with Concepts is to simplify tooltips while providing the means to get more information than before. Instead of cluttering the base tooltips with complete details, you can dig down to learn more about key terms as desired. While it may change for the final release, Concepts are currently planned to always be shown in a specific Teal color. After a brief delay (or after clicking the middle mouse button), a tooltip that possesses in-line Concepts will lock into place as shown below. Our initial efforts in introducing these have been focused on the Galaxy Settings before starting a new game to further explain some details that might not be obvious at first glance, but to fully explain would bloat the normal tooltip into a wall of text.
An Example of Concepts While Concepts in 3.8 will initially be limited exclusively to Galaxy Settings, were planning on expanding the use of Concepts to Empire Creation and beyond during the Custodian releases over the next year. SPOILER: CONCEPT DETAILS FOR MODDERS [expand type=showmore] common\game_concepts will have a 00_game_concepts.txt where we define concepts, alongside icons and aliases.
concept_fallen_empires = {
alias = { concept_fallen_empire }
}
concept_awakened_empires = {
alias = { concept_awakened_empire concept_fallen_empire_awakening concept_awaken }
}
concept_marauder_empires = {
alias = { concept_marauder_empire }
}
concept_technology = {
icon = "gfx/interface/icons/concepts/concept_technology.dds"
alias = { concept_technologies }
}
Any concept that does not have an icon defined will default to a "thinking cloud" icon that's in Defines.
Marauder Empires concept, showing off the default icon. Concepts themselves are referenced in-line in localization using the ['concept'] notation:
FE_FALLEN_EMPIRES_TOOLTIP:1 "HNumber of Fallen Empires!\nThis controls the maximum number of ['concept_fallen_empires'] that are allowed to spawn in the galaxy."
The text for the generated tooltip is defined by the concept name you defined earlier, and by default, will use the base concept name _desc. Aliases let you reuse _desc text easily.
concept_fallen_empire: "Fallen Empire"
concept_fallen_empires: "Fallen Empires"
concept_fallen_empires_desc: "Fallen Empires are ancient precursor civilizations that start with advanced technology and powerful fleets, but are generally passive. At times they may make demands or offer tasks to lesser empires.\n\nProvoking a Fallen Empire is risky unless you are confident in your ability to defeat a challenging opponent."
If desired, you can make it show something other than the base concept name as the Cyan tooltip. For example, here we wanted the Unity symbol to also count for the mouseover tooltip. (Tip: Use non-breaking spaces so the mouseover region sticks together if you do this!)
concept_edict: "Edict"
concept_edicts: "Edicts"
concept_edicts_desc: "Edicts are empire-wide decisions that can be enacted by spending resources or paying a monthly upkeep. These typically cost ['concept_unity', unity $concept_unity$] or are paid for using the ['concept_edict_fund'], but some Edicts may cost other resources."
concept_edict_fund: "Edict Fund"
concept_edict_fund_desc: "The Edict Fund is a separate and static pool of unity IUnity! for IEdict! upkeep.\n\nIf upkeep exceeds the size of the Fund, regular unity IUnity! will also be used.!"
Concept text can itself have additional further concepts within it.
concept_technology: "Technology"
concept_technologies: "Technologies"
concept_technology_desc: "Technologies unlocked by research are one of the primary ways to increase your empire's strength in Stellaris, and fall into three fields of study:\n\n$t$['concept_physics_research', physics $concept_physics_research$]\n$t$['concept_society_research', society $concept_society_research$]\n$t$['concept_engineering_research', engineering $concept_engineering_research$]\n\nThe most common sources of IResearch Points! are from pops IPops! working in IResearch Labs! or from IResearch Stations! built in space above appropriate deposits."
We've added a few new text colors to fonts.gfx that we use exclusively for Concept tooltips. While K and I are identical to H and Y, they're separate in case we want to change them.
C = { 33 232 208 } # C = Cyan, Used for Concept Text that generates another tooltip.
K = { 251 170 41 } # K = Header for Concepts. Currently identical to H.
I = { 247 252 52 } # I = Highlights for Concepts. Currently identical to Y.
[/expand]
Next Week
Next week well start going through the main features well be adding in Gemini, and (hopefully) some details on our planned 3.8.0 Gemini Open Beta.
Tofus been studying.
[ 2023-03-30 11:00:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
by PDX-Loke
Hello,
While you were busy upgrading cloaked fleets at enemy starbases and buying multiple galatrons, the team has kept on fixing and tweaking.
The 3.7.4 patch is ready and available for download now.
Please find the patch notes below.
STELLARIS 3.7.4 PATCH NOTES
BALANCE AND IMPROVEMENTS
- Pre-FTL civilizations now have a chance of having a "close call" when nuclear war threatens to break out.
- Payback Origin
-
* If you defeat the Debt Collectors three times, the MSI will use the Humiliate war goal against you instead of trying to vassalize you
* The Debt collectors won't bug you anymore if you're currently at war with the MSI
* Fixed Payback war goals to ensure you can't vassalize or impose ideology on homicidal empires
* Slightly increased surrender acceptance of Payback war goals
* Payback origin: fixed a rare instance where the Debt Collectors event chain could get soft locked if the debt collectors were defeated by another empire
* Payback empires now get a consolatory prize if the MSI gets destroyed by a Marauder empire
* Fixed an issue where a Payback empire using the End Threat (Payback) war goal against the MSI could end with a whimper instead of as intended.
- Increased starbase reactor power by roughly 15%.
- Hive-Minds with both Cordyceptic Drones and Stargazers now start with 3 reanimated amoebae.
- Pre-FTL Awareness cannot naturally decay below 10.
- The Raise Awareness espionage operation now prevents pre-ftl Awareness from naturally decaying for 5 years.
- The Triumviri ending for Fear of the Dark is now achievable from infiltrating the Fevorian government.
- Buffed MSI by giving them some bonus naval capacity and starting technologies.
- The devolving beam now properly destroys the final contingency world (when boosted with the Archaeo-Engineers Ascension Perk)
- Fixed Sabotage Starbase operation failing to destroy starbase components
- Fixing a case where you were blocked from building orbital rings on a Fear of the Dark planet
- It is no longer possible to acquire multiple Galatrons from reliquaries
- Hivemind pre-FTLs will no longer be producing consumer goods.
- Fixed an issue where the Solarpunk society wouldn't reattach itself to the galaxy.
- Fixed an issue where the Solarpunk society would stay neutral after being attacked.
- Fixed an issue where Sol X and your Beta homeworld would overlap.
- Fixed the Dark Forest achievement not triggering in some cases due to interactions with marauders.
- Construction ship and science ships gained from picking a specialization as part of the Imperial Fiefdom origin now correctly start with hyper drives for empires with the Eager Explorer civics.
- Fix AI Empires building hundreds of observation stations if you don't own First Contact
- Empire naming adjectives should now be seen for German, Simplified Chinese, and Russian.
- Removing an unnecessary progress bar in the clear blocker view.
- Removed happiness penalties from unemployment from living standards, these are now solely applied from job strata.
- AI with Clone Army Origin now creates clone vats to keep their colonies alive.
- Starbases should now correctly reflect their new sensor range on the monthly tick.
- Ancient Saturator Artillery tech now unlocks the Spinal Mount Bow section for battleships.
- Fixed decloaking in a system with pre-ftls not correctly firing the event to increase awareness.
- Broken Shackles empires with robots outlawed now correctly purge machine and mechanical pops.
- Terraforming a planet now also has a chance of triggering an awareness increase.
- Fix crash when a species doesn't have a valid archetype
- Removed ability to use the "reveal yourself" diplomatic action while you're already revealing yourself
- Pre-FTL agreements like "give technology" now get correctly removed once a pre-FTL civilization becomes spacefaring
- Blocked "Salacious Affair" envoy event from firing on pre-FTL worlds
- Removing the option of upgrading at neutral starbases
- Fixed the Fear of the Dark Separatist country being localized incorrectly in German, Polish and Spanish.
- Added correct icon for Negative Media Coverage modifier.
- If a pre-FTL society has more than one planet then none will keep being available for observation once the society becomes fully aware.
- Dig sites should no longer generate minor artifacts for users that do not own Ancient Relics DLC
- Corrected icon for Declining Healthcare modifier.
- Class-4 Singularity can now be constructed when rewarded by event.
- Made it so you can't get an option in an espionage event that requires an interference policy that doesn't allow for espionage.
- Genocidal empires can now use assimilation species rights targeting their species. This should fix Fanatic Purifiers not being able to cybernetically or psionically assimilate lost colonies, splinter planets or the like.
- Adding missing cloaking stat on ship design view.
- Blocking the possibility of terraforming while the planet is under colonization.
- Fixed a crash when loading old savegames
- Fixed tooltip bug with fleets from defensive pacts in a war.
[ 2023-03-30 08:02:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
Its now been a bit over a week since the First Contact Story Pack released, and its been great hearing your stories and experiences.
While some things slipped through into the initial release, like the Great Filter becoming nigh impenetrable if nobodys watching, overall Canis Minor was the most stable release weve ever had on Stellaris - to the point where red flags were being raised whether the Crash Reporter was working properly.
[previewyoutube=7rsQGHWtzcI;full][/previewyoutube]
A couple of days ago we pushed the 3.7.3 hotfix to take care of a few of the more pressing issues.
STELLARIS CANIS MINOR 3.7.3 PATCH NOTES
Fixes and Changes
- Every single atomic pre-FTL will no longer nuke themselves if they are not being observed.
- Fixed Contingency worlds not being properly cracked by devolving beam.
- The Solarpunk Empire will no longer stay pre-FTL if you decide to steal from them.
- Admirals should no longer be able to gain both versions of the trickster trait.
- The Solarpunk empire will no longer gain a new fleet every single month.
- Fixing custom diplomatic action sounds playing for unrelated empires.
- Missing localizations are added in English. Proper translations are expected with the following patch.
- Fallen empire buildings should no longer disappear when you conquer their planets.
- The Ministry of Culture should no longer disappear after you finish building it.
- The Artist Enclave should no longer offer to sell you a Ministry of Culture if you already bought one.
- Non-Xenophobe empires can once again enable displacement purging.
- The Accepted Plea for Protection opinion modifier is now granted to the subject towards the overlord instead of to the overlord towards the subject.
- Randomly generated machine empires now have a chance to use the toxoid machine options if you own the corresponding DLC
- Removed a TODO Opinion Modifier String.
- Fixed Broken Shackles offering Payback information about the MSI even if they got already destroyed
- Fixed a bug when cloaked ship cannot progress special project inside closed borders
- Admiral doesn't get killed anymore when you upgrade the MSI flagship
- Torpedo and Frigate technology now requires you to have researched Corvettes.
- The Separatist Planet will no longer nuke themselves if you lose your capital to space fauna.
- Broken Shackles empires with the Parliamentary System civic will instead have Unshackled Politics fire one month after game start instead of one year after game start.
- You can no longer select the Fear of the Dark version of the Sol system without the Fear of the Dark origin.
- Fixed Liberation wars not showing up for Payback empires.
- Fixed events related to the Out of Warranty event chain not firing.
- Fix being able to build an observation post over Haven using the fleet order button
- The Accepted Plea for Protection opinion modifier now grants +150 opinion.
- The Observation Insight Situation now remembers what approach you had when it last finished.
- Fixed an issue where a Payback empire using the End Threat (Payback) war goal against the MSI could end with a whimper instead of as intended.
- Gave the Grand Herald archaeo-tech components.
- Buffed MSI by giving them some bonus naval capacity and starting technologies.
- The Raise Awareness espionage operation now prevents pre-ftl Awareness from naturally decaying for 5 years.
- Hive-Minds with both Cordycepic Drones and Stargazers now start with 3 reanimated amoebae.
The Tech Lord Speaks
Hey, I am Lorenzo, your friendly neighborhood Tech Lord. I just wanted to spend a second talking about releases and the work that we do behind the scenes once a new shiny version of the game is there, downloading. Game development is no joke, like any other business, and releasing a new patch is not the beginning of the end, but barely the end of the beginning. Our team puts heroic effort into delivering the best product to you, but hey, mistakes or oversights happen. Sometimes the result is a hilarious bug, like the tendency of pre-FTL societies to prematurely end their lives by nuclear means. Sometimes the result is this dreaded window.
Like no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, no patch survives contact with the players. But we are aware of this, and every time we release a new patch, somewhere in our offices theres a group of developers sitting down, constantly monitoring the stability of the game, patiently waiting for the inevitable fire to spark: luckily most of the time theres no real fire, just some tiny candle flames. And this brings me straight to my point: thank you all for your reports! When you press that send button, detailed information on the crash are collected and sent to us for investigation. This info is usually enough to point out the problem, but often not enough to identify the cause of it: thats when your comments come into play! Tell us what you were doing when the crash happened, even the most tiny detail could help us! They say that an image is worth 1000 words: let me tell you a beautiful story in four acts with an image, then:
(Thanks from the bottom of my heart, anonymous player: your reports were immensely useful in finding the issue and fixing it ) Thanks, Lorenzo, and thanks again to all of you that submit detailed bug reports and crash logs. The more information we have, the easier it is to track down some of these sometimes troublesome issues.
Want to help out?
We currently have two ways that you can help out improving the Stellaris experience for existing players, new players, and directly effect development of the game! Since Alfray Stryke has finished his duties with First Contact, and has transitioned back to the Custodian team, he is currently running a feedback thread looking for constructive, directed feedback on AI Diplomatic interactions. [quote=Alfray Stryke]We are looking for feedback on the AI's willingness to accept diplomatic pacts, become subjects or overlords and form federations, in particular with other AI empires. Some of the changes for 3.8 Gemini we are considering are requiring a Trust threshold for the AI to offer certain diplomatic agreements and improvements on the AI weights for Diplomatic traditions.[/quote] You can find the feedback thread here! The other way to help influence the development of Stellaris, is a survey from our User Research department. This survey is designed to give us feedback on what you like/dislike about Stellaris, and will be taken into account while we're planning future development for Stellaris. You can complete the survey here!
First Contact Art Competition
Always able to be relied on for questionable puns, the Stellaris Community team announced our StellARTis Competition yesterday! Leave your First Contact-inspired artwork in this forum thread, for a chance to win a code for First Contact or a copy of Stellaris to give to a friend! Contest runs until April 3rd, and the winning entries will be chosen by the Stellaris Art Department!
So Whats Next?
Were not quite ready to talk about 3.8 Gemini yet, but heres a peek at one thing were going to start rolling out in it. SPOILER: 3.8 SPOILERS [spoiler]
Nesting Concepts will initially only be present in Galaxy Settings[/spoiler] Next week well be going over more of the things planned to go into the 3.7.4 patch. See you then!
[ 2023-03-23 12:00:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
Thank you all for playing and providing feedback on First Contact and 3.7!
We've been hard at work fixing and balancing, and are now ready to supply you with a quick patch aiming to resolve the most pertinent problems.
3.7.3 should now be available for download. Please find the changelog below.
The team is still focusing on finding and resolving incoming bugs, and we hope to have a second patch ready for you within a few weeks.
Enjoy!
Fixes and Changes
- Every single atomic pre-FTL will no longer nuke themselves if they are not being observed.
- Fixed Contingency worlds not being properly cracked by devolving beam.
- The Solarpunk Empire will no longer stay pre-FTL if you decide to steal from them.
- Admirals should no longer be able to gain both versions of the trickster trait.
- The Solarpunk empire will no longer gain a new fleet every single month.
- Fixing custom diplomatic action sounds playing for unrelated empires.
- Missing localizations are added in English. Proper translations are expected with the following patch.
- Fallen empire buildings should no longer disappear when you conquer their planets.
- The Ministry of Culture should no longer disappear after you finish building it.
- The Artist Enclave should no longer offer to sell you a Ministry of Culture if you already bought one.
- Non-Xenophobe empires can once again enable displacement purging.
- The Accepted Plea for Protection opinion modifier is now granted to the subject towards the overlord instead of to the overlord towards the subject.
- Randomly generated machine empires now have a chance to use the toxoid machine options if you own the corresponding DLC
- Removed a TODO Opinion Modifier String.
- Fixed Broken Shackles offering Payback information about the MSI even if they got already destroyed
- Fixed a bug when cloaked ship cannot progress special project inside closed borders
- Admiral doesn't get killed anymore when you upgrade the MSI flagship
- Torpedo and Frigate technology now requires you to have researched Corvettes.
- The Separatist Planet will no longer nuke themselves if you lose your capital to space fauna.
- Broken Shackles empires with the Parliamentary System civic will instead have Unshackled Politics fire one month after game start instead of one year after game start.
- You can no longer select the Fear of the Dark version of the Sol system without the Fear of the Dark origin.
- Fixed Liberation wars not showing up for Payback empires.
- Fixed events related to the Out of Warranty event chain not firing.
- Fix being able to build an observation post over Haven using the fleet order button
- The Accepted Plea for Protection opinion modifier now grants +150 opinion.
- The Observation Insight Situation now remembers what approach you had when it last finished.
[ 2023-03-21 09:00:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community!
The Devs are currently working on a small update planned for next week, containing fixes for some of the more pressing issues that youve found so far. So no Dev Diary this week, but please keep providing feedback and bug reports, theyre very valuable to us!
Instead we have something special for this week: To celebrate the release of the First Contact Story Pack, our Art Department has teamed up with ArtStation to do an Art Blast featuring completed and concept art from First Contact!
We looked to the stars and saw that we were not alone.
First contact. It has been the inspiration for so many stories in so many IPs over the years and now it has come to Stellaris.
That exciting, sometimes frightening point in your civilization's timeline when the signals and messages youve sent out into the darkness of space have been answered. Or perhaps you have been living a peaceful life, minding your own business, believing that you are the only ones out there when suddenly that alien ship appears in your atmosphere.
Are they friends? Are they foes? Will they advise and aid your people? Take you to another level in your evolution or do they have something else in mind? Something... more sinister?
First Contact, is the latest addition to Stellaris and this is some of the mind blowing art that went into making it a reality from our amazing art team.
Scott Austin
Art Director - Stellaris
"Some early explorations onto what cloaked ships could look like in Stellaris, and what the transition to cloaking would be like. Lots of fun to do!"
Lloyd Drake-Brockman
"Some early theme exploration sketches for the front end Illustration. We ended up going with the the lower left one; Herders in swamplands of some distant planet are frightened by a sudden visit of an unknown."
Pavel Goloviy
The Chemical Ship of 'First Contact' based on Lloyds' concept Art.
David Lindh
The MSI Flagship for 'First Contact', based on Lloyds' concept Art.
Tim Wiberg
You can check out the full Art Blast here. Dev diaries will return next week!
Thanks for playing Stellaris, and you can pick up the First Contact Story Pack right now!
[ 2023-03-16 18:32:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=_ZyJWy2yhOI;full][/previewyoutube] First Contact is available now! You are not alone! The galaxy is vast and full of wonders, but its also full of alien empires youre going to encounter, whether youre ready or not. First Contact offers a set of new origins and mechanics that give players the chance to tell stories about their civilizations early encounters with visitors from the stars ones that may not have come in peace! Features of First Contact include*: NEW ORIGINS Broken Shackles: You didnt take to the stars; you were taken to the stars as an alien captive! Now, you and your fellow prisoners have overtaken the ship and found yourselves banding together to survive and thrive as a diverse new community. Can you rise to greatness from this humble origin and will your former captors take notice? Payback: No one would have believed your world was being watched keenly by intelligences greater than your own until they invaded. But you did not go quietly into the night! Your civilization has repelled a would-be conqueror from space, and with sudden access to their advanced technology, youre about to discover just what else is out there beyond the stars! Fear of the Dark: As youve explored your home system, youve always suspected you werent alone in the galaxy especially when one of your planets suddenly suffered an incident a while back. A very large faction of your own people have long advocated against tempting fate out in the dark abyss of the unknown. What path will you choose as you find yourself needing room to grow? NEW PRE-FTL INTERACTION OPTIONS What will your role be when the next member of the galactic community tells their origin story? New mechanics allow for a broader range of interactions with pre-FTL civilizations, depending on their level of technology and their awareness of your presence. Will your arrival be celebrated, or met with violent panic? CLOAKING TECHNOLOGY Nobody saw this feature coming! Equip your ships with cloaking devices to survey in secret or catch a foe unaware; keep subtle tabs on your pre-FTL neighbors with cloaked observation posts. Just be sure your own scanners and intel are strong you never know which of your neighbors might be lurking in the shadows! *Some features may require content sold separately Get the First Contact Story Pack today!
[ 2023-03-14 17:12:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! Were now less than a week away from the release of the First Contact Story Pack! You can preorder it here. For those of you who dont want to read this summary, we have Community Manager Mordred Viking on the Stellaris YouTube reading, so you dont have to! [previewyoutube=8vsr5c1H61Y;full][free features video][/previewyoutube] Today, were here to dig into what the Custodians have been up to while the Expansion team has been working on First Contact. As many of you know, the Custodian team works on fixing bugs, improving the UI, increasing performance, adding new modding support, working on the AI and adding new content to previously released DLC. While there are additions to multiple DLC in Canis Minor, one of the biggest new features is included in the Ancient Relics Story Pack: archaeotechnologies. Archaeotechs are ancient technologies, repurposed to fit and amplify your current technologies and are generally found by excavating dig sites, or completing your precursor event chain and doing the Secrets of special project. Researching the Archaeostudies technology (or starting with the Remnants Origin) will give your empire the ability to construct (or start with) a Facility of Archaeostudies, which produces a steady stream of minor artifacts to fill all your archaeo-needs, as well as increasing the speed at which your researchers can discover archaeotechnologies. To help cover the costs of the new archaeo components, completed dig sites now have a chance to passively generate a small amount of minor artifacts monthly, which lead in turn to a rescaling of the costs of certain minor artifact actions. Additionally for First Contact, the Custodian team has been working on improving the interactions with pre-FTL societies. The free patch includes new diplomatic options such as providing technology, improving and harming relations, and building a spy network. Espionage actions have been added as well, allowing you to plant advanced knowledge on the planet, or infiltrate the pre-FTL government or hive mind. Uplifted species will now gain the literally unplayable Enlightened Origin, giving the uplifted species +10% research speed and +0.5 Loyalty per month towards their Overlord. Overlords of uplifted subjects may also now choose specialty subject types for them (requires Overlord). Other older event chains have been reworked and improved, including adding the ability for pre-FTLs to spawn as several Origins tied to other DLC
- Mechanists (requires Utopia)
- Life-Seeded (requires Apocalypse)
- Ocean Paradise (requires Aquatics)
- Subterranean (requires Overlord)
- Void Dwellers (for pre-ftls in the Federation's End unique system)
- Shattered Ring (requires Federations)
- adjusted several other Pop Factions preferences and demands,
- rebalanced certain planetary designations including a colony designation for habitats,
- increased the Juggernauts speed to be in line with battleships and titans
- changes to traveling via the Quantum Catapult
- grants +33% fire rate after jumping
- Slingshot to the Stars increases bonus to 50% and get increased accuracy when using a Quantum Catapult
- Slingshot Origins also no longer lose a guaranteed habitable world to their quantum catapult
[ 2023-03-09 12:01:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Alfray Stryke
A staple of sci-fi that has long been missing from Stellaris is the ability to have fleets and stations capable of being cloaked and hiding from enemy sensors. With the addition of Awareness and improvements to interactions with pre-FTL civilizations, we felt that First Contact was the right place to explore how cloaking could be added to the game in a meaningful way, tying into warfare, exploration and espionage.
When we set out to design the cloaking and counter-cloaking systems our goals were that:
- Science ships should be able to equip cloaking devices to allow exploration of space regardless of if another empire has closed their borders to you.
- Observation posts should be capable of being hidden from the pre-FTL civilizations they were observing.
- Military vessels should be capable of cloaking, with limitations. Cloaking should be balanced such that it is better to cloak frigates or cruisers than battleships.
- Cloaking should interact with the existing espionage system.
Basic Cloaking Field Generators unlock cloaking for corvettes, frigates and selected civilian ships.
Advanced Cloaking Field Generators unlock cloaking for destroyers.
Elite Cloaking Field Generators unlock cloaking for cruisers.
Dark Matter Cloaking Field Generators unlock cloaking for battleships and titans.
Psi-Phase Field Generators unlock cloaking for battleships and titans and offer the best cloaking strength in the game. While cloaked, ships and fleets can ignore closed borders and cant be detected by normal sensors. This can be useful for a variety of reasons such as having science ships explore and survey systems that might otherwise be blocked off, research anomalies or special projects inside the borders of your rivals or getting a well armed fleet situated to ambush an enemy starbase upon war declaration. Cloaked science ships will also have another trick up their sleeves, being able to perform covert reconnaissance on colonized planets to gather Intel on other empires and increasing the speed at which this Intel is gained. Finally, cloaked fleets and observation posts cant be seen by pre-FTL civilizations, so using them will minimize your chances of accidentally increasing their Awareness.
Performing reconnaissance on an enemy can provide a great deal of Intelligence. Due to the power draw and manipulation of particle fields, cloaking imposes penalties on the shields of ships while cloaked, depending on the type of cloaking device equipped:
- Ships equipped with a Basic, Advanced or Elite Cloaking Field Generator suffer from 100% Shield Nullification while cloaked.
- Ships equipped with a Dark Matter Cloaking Field Generator have a reduced penalty of 50% Shield Nullification.
- Ships equipped with a Psi-Phase Field Generator and any regular shields will suffer from 100% Shield Nullification while cloaked.
- Ships equipped with a Psi-Phase Field Generator and psionic shields or barriers will not suffer from any Shield Nullification while cloaked.
Spreadsheets are an important part of our design workflow! The cloaking strength of a fleet is determined by the ship in that fleet with the lowest possible cloaking strength. Thus, in order to be able to cloak, all ships in the fleet must be capable of cloaking. How well a fleet can cloak is described by the stability of the cloaking field of a fleet and can range from Non-Existent to Exceptional depending on the cloaking strength of the fleet. This stability (or cloaking strength) factors into both how easily a starbase can detect or reveal the cloaked fleet (more on this later) and what penalties (if any) the fleet may suffer from. Its worth keeping in mind that, as the cloaking strength of a fleet is determined by the ship with the lowest cloaking strength in the fleet, a fleet of mixed battleships and corvettes will have a lower cloaking strength (and be more easily detected) than a fleet solely comprised of corvettes. The highest level of cloaking strength and the corresponding cloaking field stability obtainable purely by ship components is 5 (Very High). In order to reach strength 6 or greater and thus the various grades of Exceptional stability, your fleets will require additional sources of cloaking strength, such as finishing Subterfuge traditions or hiding in a nebula.
Cloaking Strength levels and penalties
A UNE science ship makes use of a nebula to boost their cloaking strength. In order to be detected or revealed a fleet needs to be within sensor range of an enemy starbase with a Detection Strength equal to or greater than the Cloaking Strength of the fleet. Detection Strength is normally gained by building Detection Array modules on a starbase, though certain rare technologies can unlock buildings or orders for science ships to further increase this.
Oh, and we rearranged the starbase UI to list various previously hidden modifiers. When a fleet is detected by a starbase, it is either detected or forced to decloak depending on these conditions.
- If the cloaked fleet is outside of your borders, youll be able to see it, with the cloaking visuals, but it wont be decloaked.
- If the cloaked fleet is inside of your borders, it will be forced to decloak.
Reaching for the stars, no matter what.
What is out there? Exploration Vessels are early science ships and Engineering Vessels are simple construction ships. Alfray and I also wanted to challenge ourselves since civics are often just identical for all government types, so we made a unique one for each government style. In the end we implemented multiple civics that should be able to facilitate many fantasies and builds.
The Stargazers starting info as well as the Jump Range
Look at them go! And before you ask, you can put these jump drives on your other ships. It's even something you will have to you will have to do if you want to get our new achievement: The Path Not Taken - Have 10 colonies without ever discovering Hyperdrives.
Dj vu! Finally, I'll leave you with an in-game gif of the MSI flagship activating its cloaking field.
[ 2023-03-02 12:00:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
by CheerfulGoth
Nothing unites people more than a common enemy.
You know how the story goes: space invaders attack, and the people of the world unite, casting aside their differences to stand together against a shared threat. Together, they defeat the more advanced enemy, who foolishly underestimated the plucky underdogs.
[previewyoutube=SyUBj8VXJ-o;full][/previewyoutube]
But what happens after the story ends? The former invaders are still out there, and they wont be fooled again. An awkward reunion is unavoidable.
I'm CheerfulGoth, a content designer on Stellaris, and this is the story I wanted to tell with Payback.
Payback is the sibling of Broken Shackles, two origins united by a common threat: Minamar Specialized Industries, a megacorp that provides pre-FTL enlightenment for a price. While Broken Shackles focuses more on reconnecting with your past, Payback empires only see one thing in their future: revenge.
The means of achieving that revenge are up to you. Annihilate your enemy? Turn your slavers into your slaves? Or battle them on the floor of the Galactic senate, outlawing their very business model? Even Pacifist empires will have the means to obtain their vendetta without betraying their ideals.
Revenge doesnt have to be synonymous with violence.
Dont be too hasty in your quest for revenge, though. Rest. Take your time to rebuild. The war against MSI left you with a devastated planet... And the remnant of a battleship to be repurposed for your own needs.
Make new allies (Broken Shackles empires might be particularly inclined to help you). Remember: revenge is a dish best served cold. Dont wait too long, though, because the Minamar Specialized Industries surely wont let you alone.
You want to make them pay? The feeling is mutual.
Were not so different, you and I
The galaxy of Stellaris is already filled with extra-dimensional invaders, space dragons, and all kinds of unimaginable horrors. With Payback and Broken Shackles, we wanted to pit players against an enemy not so different from themselves. Minamar Specialized industry starts as a developed empire with extra colonies and resources, but otherwise behaves like a normal empire with a well-defined personality. They will make their own alliances, join their Galactic Community, wage their wars... and might even fall before you can get your due.
What will you do when even revenge is stolen from you?
Many of our narrative Origins present a fixed story. With Payback, we wanted to create a less linear narrative, providing players with multiple tools to accomplish their goal. Sometimes things dont go as planned, but we believe thats what will make this origin more interesting and replayable.
We give you an enemy. You tell us how you want to pay them back.
Insights
Now for the return of PDS_Iggy who desperately wants you to stop invading pre-FTLs.
A common issue that has been brought up in regards to this DLC is Why shouldnt I just invade the pre-FTLs the moment I meet them and I am here to present a counter offer. What if I give you unique techs?
Insight Technologies are gained when you study pre-FTLs without making them aware of you. They are unique paths their society take which you have dismissed as dead ends. This is all tracked through a situation which, once completed, will make a future observation event grant you a new Insight.
We can learn from anything and anyone.
If you havent completed the situation when you get an observation event instead you gain even faster progress to the next Insight.
I am sure its nothing.
These Insight technologies are designed to have unique and flavorful effects. So let me share a few with you.
Lets see how close we can get with our observation station.
A smart hunter lets the environment aid their hunt.
How were the pyramids built? Let's check!
As you can see these technologies grant you partial Envoys as well as a unique benefit. Therefore, the more you spy and study the pre-FTLs, the more you can do it!
Next week, Alfray Stryke will finally tell you about cloaking, and I might be back to help him explain the new civics!
[previewyoutube=qWzw7CE21gY;full][/previewyoutube]
[ 2023-02-23 12:00:27 CET ] [ Original post ]
The First Contact Story Pack will release on March 14th for $14.99!
The galaxy is vast and full of wonders, but its also full of alien empires youre going to encounter - whether youre ready or not. Tell the story of your empires early contacts with visitors from the stars, or become a visitor yourself. Will you remain cloaked in shadows, or reveal your presence to those you visit?
Preorder the First Contact Story Pack today!
[trailer]
Explore three new narrative-led Origins: Band together in Broken Shackles as the survivors of a crashed slaver ship and build a diverse empire with multiple species from across the galaxy. Embark on a quest to find your various homeworlds, as long as you escape the prying eyes of your former captors.
Do not go quietly into the night with the Payback Origin. Your civilization is the result of a civilization that did not invent faster than light travel, but instead was invaded by and repelled an invader from the stars. With access to their advanced technology, your empire is now ready to enter the galactic stage and find out just what else is out there.
In Fear of the Dark, a large portion of your population has embraced isolationism and xenophobia, ever since a planet in your solar system suffered an incident. Will you ignore their concerns and explore the stars, making friends along the way? Or will you appease their isolationism in order to grow your civilization even more powerful?
As you venture out into the stars, you will discover other civilizations that have yet to develop faster than light travel, and are in various stages of development. What stories will these civilizations tell about you when they reach the galactic community? Will your civilization be known as heartless invaders, benign shepherds, or a civilization of all-powerful deities? Will you reveal your presence at all, or choose to remain cloaked in the shadows?
And the feature nobody saw coming! Not just for hiding Observation Posts, equip your military and civilian ships with cloaking devices to allow them to remain undetected, even while traveling through closed or hostile space. Decloak to catch your foes unaware and unprepared, or survey systems in secret. But be sure you keep your scanners up to date and powered, in a galaxy full of possibilities, you never know what may be hidden in plain sight.
Get all this and more with the First Contact Story Pack on March 14th. Preorder now!
[ 2023-02-21 17:02:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Lloyd Drake-Brockman
Hi, Im Lloyd Drake-Brockman, Concept artist on the Stellaris team. I worked extensively on the First Contact DLC and I'm excited to share some of the artistic journey that this pack took me and the art team on. Specifically we're going to be discussing the development of MSI, a new, non-player faction with a really interesting visual style. I was involved in designing most of their visual elements. I think we have ended up with a great set of designs that are quite unique in the world of Stellaris. I'm going to take you through some of my design journey working on various elements of this faction.
MSI Flagship
The flagship was the first element of MSI that I worked on. It was a complicated design challenge and it informed the aesthetics for MSI as a whole. Not only were there quite a few gameplay requirements which restricted the design, it has a unique visual language which gives the player insight into the nature of MSI themselves. Corporate Vaporwave was the brief for the ships general aesthetic. A combination of bright neon, classical architecture and modern corporate sensibilities.
MSI flagship early sketches by Lloyd Drake-Brockman The first thing I had to nail down was the overall shape. It had to be imposing, beautiful, mysterious and ruthless. You can see here the sketch on the bottom right pretty much became the design of the finished ship, when viewed from above.
MSI flagship chosen sketch by Lloyd Drake-Brockman From the top-view I worked out a side view of the design. I was very keen for the ship to involve some sort of central rotating element. This ship would move around quite unlike most of the other ships in the game and I wanted to show that it had some sort of unique drive system.
MSI flagship design development sketches over 3D by Lloyd Drake-Brockman Happy with these sketches, I mocked the design up in 3D. Here you can see three stages of refining the shapes of the ship. Then it's time to take the concept to final.
MSI flagship final concept by Lloyd Drake-Brockman Here's the final version of the concept art for the ship. The purpose of this image is to give the 3D and animation teams all the information they need to build the ship in-game. The concept was mostly built in 3D with certain elements such as the gold detailing around the edge of the marble panels added afterwards in Photoshop.
MSI Flagship In-game, modeled and textured by Tim Wiberg
MSI Uniform
After the ship the next thing I looked at was the MSI portrait. It was decided early on that we were going to use an existing species from the game and dress them in a unique outfit, therefore the only thing I had to concept was the uniform.
Initial sketches for the MSI uniform by Lloyd Drake-Brockman I began with some sketches. I chose to sketch the outfits symmetrically, even though all the portraits in Stellaris are angled to the right. This helps me sketch faster and I have to think less about the process of drawing. I knew I wanted some kind of mysterious head-covering but I did not know whether to go down a more mystical, or corporate route. In the end the design for the robes was taken largely from a different piece of art, and the helmet that I sketched above was added to make up the whole uniform.
MSI uniform approved sketch by Lloyd Drake-Brockman Once this sketch was approved I continued to refine it. We also required male and female variants, so I added another version of the outfit.
MSI uniform final concept by Lloyd Drake-Brockman This is the point where I handed these concepts over to another artist who finalized the painting and prepared the asset for animation. A lot of work goes into each of these portraits, to bring them to a high standard and ensure that they work properly with all the games systems. I couldn't be happier with the final result.
MSI uniform finished portrait by Alec Beals
MSI Diplomacy Room
These characters needed somewhere to take their video calls of course, and it was also my job to work on the MSI Diplomacy room. This asset I worked on all the way to its final in-game state. I imagined that the MSI representatives would be calling from onboard their flagship, but I didn't want to make it too specific in case they were somewhere else. Either way, given the design of their ship and outfit, an over-the-top opulent hall seemed to be fitting. I had a vision in my head of what I wanted the scene to look like. So my initial sketch was extremely rough. Just enough for me to see that it was going to work.
MSI diplomacy room initial sketch by Lloyd Drake-Brockman From here I went over to 3D and built the whole scene, paying attention to the materials and lights to give the space the feeling of grandeur I was after. I also made sure that the pillars at the top of the room disappeared off the top of the image towards a distant ceiling, making the space feel larger than what you can see. The busts that flank the hall are not playable species - other than the human of course - but they do appear in other places in first contact, which I felt was a fun way to tie some of the elements of the story pack together.
3D development of the MSI diplomacy room by Lloyd Drake-Brockman From this point it was back over to Photoshop for the final cleanup. As you can see most of the bright reflections on the walls and floor have been painted out. Although they were accurate they ended up being too distracting in the final image.
MSI diplomacy room final image by Lloyd Drake-Brockman
Payback Event Image
This is the last piece of art I did that involved MSI. It was great fun to be able to show the ship I had concepted in a scene. Some of you might recognise this as being similar to a shot from the recently released teaser trailer for First Contact. I'm proud to say that this image came first! The brief I was given for this image asked that we see the MSI Flagship looming over a city in space. There was some confusion as to whether the ship should be out in space or lower over the city. Here are some of my first stabs at the composition.
Payback event image thumbnails by Lloyd Drake-Brockman We settled on a variant of (A), as we could show the ship in space, but from the perspective of someone on the planet. For this image I knew I was going to need some buildings. To make them I chose to use a new technique of projecting satellite image textures from real-world-Earth cities onto simple geometry, resulting in some pretty convincing looking buildings
Creating buildings by projecting satellite images onto geometry in 3D by Lloyd Drake-Brockman As I already had a 3D Model of the MSI flagship, I rendered it with matching lighting and combined all the elements in Photoshop.
3D renders used to build up the final image by Lloyd Drake-Brockman I had fun creating some alien script to add some life to the signs on the buildings. Most of this can't be seen in the in-game image as it's too small. But I feel it's still necessary to put in so that the final image has the right feel to it when it's scaled down. I was very happy with how the ship looks in the finished piece. All the dark areas are obscured by the blue of the sky, just like how you can't see the dark side of the moon when you look at it during the day.
Payback event image by Lloyd Drake-Brockman Well, that's all the shiny things I have to show today! Thanks for reading, and if you play First Contact I hope you enjoy seeing some of my art in there!
[ 2023-02-16 12:09:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
by PDS_Iggy
Hello everyone! I am PDS_Iggy, and Im here to tell you all about Fear of the Dark!
This new narrative origin for First Contact focuses on a people divided. After a planet in your solar system blew up, fear and xenophobia spread to such a degree that a large portion of your population decided to flee your homeworld. Their goal? To hide from the rest of the galaxy.
[previewyoutube=9u4gG7FDmFc;full][/previewyoutube]
Incoming Transmission:
You mean, The sane individuals of our species took the only prudent action possible when being attacked by an alien force capable of destroying planets!"
This split in your population is reflected in the effects of the origin. With a sizable section of your empire living on a neighboring world, your research alternatives and choices for leaders are reduced. Yet, even more inquisitive than a regular empire, you will have no difficulty discovering more anomalies as you explore the void.
No doubt youll return from your galavantings the next time we reach a breakthrough! Our scientific research is one of the few way we can even hope to delay you from dooming us all. Once you lead the aliens back to our home, it will all be over.
Additionally, Fear of the Dark starts with quite a unique system, one that will have you starting with binary planets - your cousins are living just a rocket jump away. (A Sol start will have them placed on Mars.)
It will be up to you to make the best of this situation. Your partner planet can be a powerful ally, yet they are also very skittish. Ensure that they dont torpedo your entrance on the galactic stage.
Perhaps you will stop treating the alien threat so lightly when our upcoming study of the Divider is finished. Just you wait. We wont be hunted.
Whatever happens, remember that you are one people and you are stronger together. Oh, and your partner planet has cloaked ships.
Now off to MrCosmogone and his wondrous archaeo-technologies for this patch's custodian update!
Did you ever think, as you pass by an old laser cannon in a glass case, that not everything belongs in a museum? That perhaps, the Irassian tractor beam could be used for your cause instead of gathering dust?
Well, so do I. And if you own Ancient Relics, I have good news!
Excavated dig sites will now sometimes generate minor artifact deposits that can be exploited by orbital stations, or by colonizing the planet.
There could always be more trinkets to find!
Your income in minor artifacts can then be put to good use with the new archaeo-technologies that will unlock buildings, starbase modules and ship components, all costing minor artifacts to build.
There are several ways to acquire these archaeo-technologies. Completing the Secrets of the [PRECURSOR] special projects will now give you a research option to unlock some unique archaeo-components:
The power of a precursor in the palm of your hand.
Several of our dig sites can now grant you access to one of the new technologies. This is a very reliable way of acquiring them.
Get to work, Oxygal, I want this research on my desk by the end of the week!
All these new technologies are found in the society field, in an all-new Archaeostudies category which is all about fitting ancient tech into your machines and weapons. Discovering these archaeo-technologies by yourself is a long and hard process, but luckily, you can be assisted by dedicated researchers who share your interest in ancient things.
They largely just make old things go boom.
Should you decide to pick the Remnants origin that starts you on a relic world, you will now start the game with the Faculty of Archaeostudies unlocked and replacing your starting research lab.
And if this still does not quench your thirst for specialization in archaeo-technologies, if you still want to dig deeper, we even have a new ascension perk for you!
For all you history lovers!
With increased minor artifact generation, the scale of the existing economy needed to be increased, but we also took this opportunity to now display artifacts in the topbar alongside the other strategic resources.
Bigger numbers mean better game, right?
And while you still cant buy them on the market, you can trade them to other empires!
It belongs in MY museum!
I dont really have the space here to show you ALL the things, but here, have a tease.
Archaeotitan go brrrrrrrr
Oh and one last thing before we wrap things up. I might have made a Devolving Beam for colossi, to return those pesky humans from the UNE back to their origins:
Return to Monke!
Theyll make good pets.
[ 2023-02-09 10:21:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Alfray Stryke
Hello!
Before I delve into the new systems for interactions with pre-FTL civilizations, I'm handing over to one of our newest Content Designers PDS_Bojj to discuss an example of the types of events that will feature in First Contact.
Pre-FTL Observation Events
Hey, Im PDS_Bojj! Im a Content Designer on Stellaris. Im jumping in to talk about the new observation events we have in First Contact! The new Story Pack introduces a bunch of new events for those who build Observation Posts in orbit of pre-FTL worlds. These events give you the opportunity to gather research on pre-space-faring civilizations in various technological ages, and- if it takes your fancy- interfere with the development of their society. Your chosen ethics will affect the types of events you can be presented with, along with the choices you will face when dealing with the inhabitants of these worlds. There are a variety of rewards to gain from studying the pre-FTLs, including the brand new Tech Insights. While surveying the galaxy, if you discover a pre-FTL civilization world in any of the ten technological ages (Stone, Bronze, Iron, Medieval, Renaissance, Steam, Industrial, Machine, Atomic, or Early Space Age) - then Id recommend claiming that system and building an Observation Post in orbit of the planet. Thatll add the module for that Post in the Observations section of the Outliner, and allow you to toggle between Passive Observation and Aggressive Observation. There are also some brand new non-age-related events that have a chance of firing in any technological age, but Im particularly hyped about the age-specific events which give you a chance to better understand (or manipulate) the pre-FTL civilizations within your borders. There is some cool content for players to sink their teeth into.
... Is for us? So When I became a developer on Stellaris, one of the first things I noticed was the lack of options for committing an interplanetary train heist. Well, Ive fixed that. If youre observing a civilization in their equivalent of the Steam, Industrial, or Machine ages, there is a chance they will construct a network of land freighters for transporting cargo across their planet. What happens next is largely up to you, but just to be clear: you can officially now commit an interplanetary train heist in Stellaris. I hope you have fun playing through these events. Its been a lot of fun developing them, so Im very excited to see how they are received. Thats all from me for now.
Awareness
Hello again! As part of the First Contact Story Pack, we wanted to make sure that interactions with pre-FTL Civilizations were connected to all the various systems that they were previously not part of. As Eladrin mentioned a few weeks back, most of the previous functions of Observation Post have been moved to overt Diplomacy or covert Espionage interactions with the civilizations in question. A core part of how interactions with pre-FTL Civilizations now function is their Awareness. Mechanically-speaking, Awareness is a country-level value that ranges from 0-100 in five stages.
- 0: Completely Unaware
- 130: Low Awareness
- 31-60: Partially Aware
- 61-99: High Awareness
- 100: Fully Aware
Our recent test firing of our planet cracker may not have gone unnoticed. Although there arent any events directly triggered by a change in Awareness of pre-FTL Civilizations, aside from them reaching out to contact you if they become Fully Aware, Awareness itself is used both to determine which events can fire while you are observing a pre-FTL Civilization and can be influenced by the events themselves. In addition to the numerous new events alluded to above, weve gone back and ensured that all of the existing observation events tie into the new systems of First Contact, for example shooting down a rogue asteroid on course to impact a pre-FTL world may increase their Awareness. In order to engage with either Diplomacy or Espionage with pre-FTL civilizations you will need an Observation Post in orbit of their homeworld and the types of interactions your empire has access to is determined by your relevant policies on both Interference and Enlightenment.
As an Observation Post in orbit of an Early Space Age civilization, currently engaging in Passive Observation. We could switch to Aggressive Observation and gain more knowledge, but our interference could cause long-lasting effects. Before we reveal ourselves to the Sathorians, we have the opportunity to carry out a number of Espionage Operations. However, once they are Fully Aware of the existence of alien life, some of these Operations will not be available to carry out.
The various Operations available to carry out against the unaware Sathorians that our Observation Post is in orbit of. After a pre-FTL civilization becomes Fully Aware of alien life, be it by their own observations or a spacefaring empire revealing their presence, the Observation Post in orbit of their homeworld will stop observation efforts and instead be repurposed as an embassy.
Our Observation Post has been turned into an Embassy. One of the new additions to the list of pre-FTL interactions is being able to form a Commercial Agreement with them, this will have a minor upkeep in minerals, but your Observation Post will generate some local trade value. The benefits of such a partnership will scale with how advanced the civilization youre trading with is, so it might be useful to teach a Stone Age society what exactly economics is before trading with them. Additionally, if a civilization is in the Atomic or Early Space Age, signing such agreements will allow MegaCorps to open branch offices on these pre-FTL worlds.
The Sathorians are experiencing some minor culture shock due to us revealing our presence. We should probably send an Envoy to Improve Relations, so theyll be willing to accept a Commercial Agreement. Of course, it wouldnt be fair to be able to decide on how to interact with the pre-FTL civilizations within our borders without the Galactic Community having an opinion. As such, the GalCom now has access to three mutually exclusive Resolutions.
Turns out the Galactic Community is not in favor of passing the Equal Standing Act, which is a good thing since wed be in Breach of it! Each of these Resolutions makes different types of interactions considered to be in breach of Galactic Law and refusing to comply will impact the usual sanctions and fines. Next week PDS_Iggy will be showing off a new style of starting system unique to the Fear of the Dark origin alongside some archaic Custodian updates from PDX_Cosmogone.
[ 2023-02-02 09:00:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by CGInglis
Free at Last!
Im incredibly excited to introduce Broken Shackles, one of the new origins featured in the upcoming First Contact DLC. Watch the Video Dev Diary here: [previewyoutube=mw4EFIOlgjQ;full][/previewyoutube] From the very beginning of the project, Eladrin stressed the word utopian: First Contact celebrates the discovery of strange new worlds, and all the ways in which different cultures (and different species) interact with and support one another. As I set out to design an origin for the DLC, this was the spirit and tone I was striving for. Whats more utopian than a rag-tag group of slaves who band together in a daring bid for freedom? Thrown together by the insidious Minamar Specialized Industries, these former indentured assets seize control of their captors ship and survive the chaotic crash landing on a habitable planet.
Youll have to make do with using the remains of your hijacked ship as infrastructure at the start of the game. While the origin is challenging (players start out at a technological disadvantage, and will need to work hard before they can progress very far into space), a diverse population means that there is ample opportunity to colonize new worlds.
More species = better parties. As your empire progresses, you will also have the opportunity to seek out each of your former home worlds. Reaching these planets not only represents a triumphant homecoming, but may also propel your people to new heights.
Theres no place like home. However, not everything is peaches and cream. Different species mean diverse points of view, and the demands of various factions will need to be appeased if players hope to maximize the potential of their burgeoning empire.
Interactive Narrative
Broken Shackles represents a new paradigm for Stellaris origins: along with Payback, it comprises one half of a full story. But whats a story without a good villain? Enter Minamar Specialized Industries, or MSI. This benevolent corporation prides itself on helping less developed societies reach their full potential. They kickstart development by loaning new technology to pre-FTL societies loans provided at what they promise are very generous rates. What happens when the bill comes due is another story. Indentured servitude is just one of MSIs tools of debt collection.
Enlightenment may not be free. But at MSI, it is always worth the cost.
Why MSI?
Helmets in the boardroom. Back in the earliest days of development, there was a discussion about how present the evil slaver empire would be. We decided on an advanced empire that can be stumbled across at any point in the game sometimes they will spawn near your home cluster, while at others they show up on the far side of the galaxy. This random placement can have radical effects on a playthrough. Initially, we envisioned the antagonist of Broken Shackles and Payback as a generic authoritarian slaver empire, but as the origins took shape, their motives and nature changed. Minamar Specialized Industries styles itself a benevolent corporation that provides technological enlightenment for a nominal fee. Some might say that they take advantage of the naivety of the species they propel to the stars, but business is business. In any case, its likely that the rank and file at MSI believe the company line, even if the Board of Directors considers itself above such petty issues as morality. In regards to their erstwhile assets, the indentured servants who comprise the starting pops of the Broken Shackles origin, MSI claims not to hold any grudges. In fact, we intentionally shied away from styling MSI as an ultimate evil that cant be reasoned or dealt with. From the perspective of a Broken Shackles empire, MSI may indeed represent the worst instincts of sentient life, but to the rest of the galaxy theyre just another greedy Megacorp. There isnt much Megacorp related content in Stellaris in general, and what does exist is all locked behind the expansion of the same name. Playing with the evil corporation trope allowed us to give MSI a distinct personality and flavor. To me, they feel like the perfect foil for a utopian origin, and I cant wait for the release!
[ 2023-01-26 09:00:34 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
Earlier this week we announced that the First Contact Story Pack is arriving later this quarter, alongside the 3.7 Canis Minor update.
Today well combine a quick summary of some of the features and go into why we wanted to do this Story Pack.
[previewyoutube=MjGQJBZBKxI;full][/previewyoutube]
Wishlist First Contact
Weve been eager to expand the interactions you have with pre-FTL civilizations for quite a while - some of the designs in First Contact date back to things we wanted to explore back during Federations, Nemesis, and Overlord. After some consideration, we decided that they had a strong enough theme to expand into the core of a full Story Pack.
The last few years have featured a handful of relatively dark expansions - Necroids, Nemesis, Overlord, and Toxoids all leaned towards authoritarian or dystopian themes, and while Aquatics was more neutral, we felt it was time for a more positive, utopian release.
Its been quite a while since our last Story Pack, so this seemed like a great opportunity to unleash the might of our Content Designers.
Look to the Stars, and Tell the Heavens Your Story
The Pre-FTL experience in Stellaris has generally not been a wonderful one. Utterly at the mercy of more advanced civilizations, they were eaten, enslaved, purged, and once in a while, peacefully integrated. When left to their own devices, they often destroyed themselves in a blaze of nuclear fire or met their end to asteroids. It was a tough life. As with how one of our goals with Overlord was to make vassalization more enjoyable as either Overlord or Subject, we wanted to make interactions with Pre-FTL civilizations more interesting and robust. There should be valuable reasons to consider observation and non-interference, but we also wanted to take the chance to make the interactions you do have with them more meaningful - and update them to utilize game systems that have been added over the years. Pre-FTL Civilizations now progress through the technological ages in order, with more ways to influence their progress, and allows you to do things such as partially enlighten a civilization before choosing other approaches to dealing with them. Weve also introduced an Awareness level that can affect things like how quickly they advance and what kinds of interactions you can perform with them. Things occurring in a Pre-FTL civilizations system might be noticed by them! Renaissance astronomers might find your Observation Post with their telescopes or observe a naval battle that occurred in the system, and even Bronze Age philosophers might comment that the fact that the moon just blew up might not have been a natural occurrence - though they admittedly might not correctly attribute it to the acts of alien life. Old events have been brought up to our current standards, and some of the Observation missions previously located on the Observation Post are now split between Diplomacy and Espionage for the various overt or covert activities
Work in Progress view from our Observation Post. This Early Space Age civilization hasnt detected us yet, and will be joining us amongst the stars soon. We cant do any overt Diplomacy with them without revealing ourselves first.
This Stone Age civilization suffered a bit of Stellar Culture Shock when we revealed our presence. Were also adding some incentives for keeping them around and preventing them from being culturally contaminated by more advanced civilizations. While the space-faring civilizations generally agree on some things like the basic laws of physics and the existence of the number zero, sometimes the path not normally taken can reveal unexpected results.
The Universe is Cruel, But You Are Not Alone
Weve added a lot of Origins since Federations, and three more will be in First Contact. While Knights of the Toxic God may still be the most verbose Origin, all three of these are lower tech starts with strong narrative and mechanical themes.
Broken Shackles is one of the ideas that started back in our Federations Origins brainstorming documents, then called Escaped Slaves. Originally conceived of as a mechanically focused, Challenging Origin with unique starting conditions, we nearly put it into Overlord before deciding that there was so much more potential to explore with this story. CGInglis will show you where it went since then, telling us more about it next week.
The Payback origin was first conceived as an origin to fulfill the trope of a plucky civilization defeating an invading alien force. The event art associated with this should be familiar if youve watched the announcement trailer. This ones also a Challenging Origin, and CheerfulGoth will be telling you all about it. During development we thought wouldnt it be interesting if these two Origins were linked, with the same empire as their nemesis? This brought us Minamar Specialized Industries, the galaxys most noble Megacorp, selflessly taking it upon themselves to bring countless civilizations into the Space Age for a small fee.
PDS_Iggy explores the fine line between paranoia and prudence in Fear of the Dark. We initially considered this one a Challenging Origin as well, but as we added more and more to it we decided its different, rather than difficult. How do you think we would react if one day Venus Exploded?
Do Not Believe Your Ocular Organs
Its hard to maintain a low profile when your Observation Post is clearly visible, hanging in the sky. You can try to rely on the people youre studying mistaking it for the domicile of the gods, but a more reliable solution would be to hide it from view.
By performing research into new areas of Field Manipulation your Scientists can discover methods of generating cloaking fields around observation posts and science ships, and while peaceful uses are nice and all Your Admirals will salivate at the idea of a fleet of cloaked Frigates sneaking up on an unsuspecting Starbase. Cloaking was one of the remaining major sci-fi tropes we hadnt explored yet, and seemed like a natural fit alongside the infiltration and observation themes of the Story Pack. Once weve managed to decrypt his notes, Alfray Stryke will be sharing the details on Cloaking and Detection.
Contact is Coming
We hope youll enjoy First Contact as much as we did making it. See you next week with information on Broken Shackles. Click here to wishlist the First Contact Story Pack!
[ 2023-01-19 09:40:41 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone! About twenty minutes after we posted Dev Diary 280, the community had largely decoded the message we hid in there... CONTACT IS COMING. Last week, we had A Message from Minamar Specialized Industries, and it's time to take them up on that offer. [previewyoutube=MjGQJBZBKxI;full][/previewyoutube] I'm pleased to announce that the First Contact Story Pack will be released alongside the Stellaris 3.7 "Canis Minor" update. Click here to wishlist the Story Pack.
Look to the Stars, We Are Not Alone
For countless ages, your people have looked to the stars with wonder - is there anybody else out there? When we meet, will they be friends or enemies? Will we be the ones to discover them, or are they already here, hiding in plain sight? The First Contact Story Pack focuses on the experiences of these Pre-FTL civilizations, both from the point of view of the civilizations themselves as well as from the observers. Observation has been revamped with new enhanced systems relating to civilization Awareness, Diplomacy, and Espionage. New Insights can be learned from observing civilizations that have not been corrupted by the galaxy as a whole.
They've been here before.
The Universe Is Cruel, But Also Wonderful
Two Challenging Origins - Payback and Broken Shackles - revolve around the struggles of empires against the oppressive Minamar Specialized Industries, while a third standard Origin - Fear of the Dark - examines the fine line between paranoia and prudence. As befits a Story Pack, all three of First Contact's Origins are heavily narrative focused. Several new low-technology civics can change the way you take your first steps to the stars or how you interact with the pre-FTL civilizations you find.
One small step Nobody saw this coming in a Story Pack, but there's also Cloaking... We'll reveal more about that later.
Look, up in the sky... [url=pdxint.at/3ZD0cbw]
Wishlist Today! This Thursday, we'll discuss the vision and themes of First Contact in greater detail. See you then!
[ 2023-01-17 16:03:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Warmest greetings from Minamar Specialized Industries!
We delight in meeting new peoples and welcoming them into the greater galactic community. With over 143 successful uplifts to date, were the acknowledged leaders in the field of social and technological ascendancy. Were thrilled to finally make your acquaintance, and hope to add your world to our success story. We understand that this is all very sudden. Receiving a transmission from the stars has likely come as a surprise to you, but weve been watching your world for some time and your civilization scores very highly on several relevant metrics. With an evaluation score of ?ERROR_UNDEFINED, the people of ?ERROR_HOMEWORLDNAMENOTFOUND have been flagged as particularly worthy of cooperative enlightenment. Congratulations! We have assigned some of our best specialists to your case, and our representatives will be arriving on world shortly. We cant wait to meet in person to discuss the benefits of ascendency as well as the terms of this beautiful arrangement. Enlightenment may not be free. But at MSI, its always worth the cost.
Your friends at Minamar Specialized Industries
[ 2023-01-12 12:00:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community!
This is the moment you've all been waiting for! #MODJAM2022 is now available!
We had over 70 modders sign up, over 30 design documents submitted, and in the end, ended up with 13 unique modded mid-game crises for you to enjoy! Three weeks ago, we told our modders what they would be making, anything submitted for the Mod Jam had to be created for the Mod Jam, meaning they were not allowed to use previously released content in their submissions.
Now it's time to do your part! The modders spent the last three weeks making the crises, now your mission (should you choose to accept it), is to play the new Crises and vote for your favorite crisis! Thanks to our sponsors at Republic of Gamers, the winning contribution (by community vote) will get a TUF H3 Wireless Headset from our sponsors at ROG, while 2nd and 3rd place will each get a ROG Keris Wireless Gaming Mouse!
So how do you get the Mod Jam mod?
[olist]
- Single - spawns a random single modded crisis from those allowed
- Consecutive - spawns a random modded crisis from those allowed. After that crisis is resolved, will spawn another modded crisis in 5 to 10 years
- All Crisis - spawns a random modded crisis every 15 years, regardless of whether there is a crisis ongoing
[ 2023-01-10 15:30:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community!
Were back with another update on #MODJAM2022! Next week, our weekly dev diaries will start up again on Thursday. But for this week, well be going over the rest of the teasers that havent been seen (yes, theres more!), but first Id like to add a word of warning:
The teasers seen previously may or may not make it into the final version of the Mod Jam mod. Such is the nature of these things that some people were unable to complete their projects in time for release day, some people have had to drop out due to taking unexpected time over the holidays with family, etc.
From where we stand, regarding releasing on January 10th, I did try to ensure that all the teasers in this update will actually be releasing -- that is not to say they all will -- just that the modders when I approached them, expressed some level of confidence that they would be able to make the deadline.
Also, if you are interested in helping test the Mod Jam submissions, you can join us on discord! Once you agree to the rules, youll see a #MODJAM2022 Public section, go to #modjam-role-selector, and get the Mod Jam Tester role, at which point you should be able to find a link to subscribe to the complete Mod Jam collection. This is obviously provided for testing and feedback purposes, and will still be rough around the edges.
Without further ado, onto this weeks teasers!
That's it for this week! See you on January 10th, when you can play the modder-created crises, and vote for your favorite!
[ 2023-01-06 15:30:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community!
Welcome to our second #MODJAM2022 update! This week we have more teasers to share, and well delve a little bit more into just how the Mod Jam mod will work in practice.
The last time we did one of these things - all the way back in 2020 - one of our biggest challenges was how to keep the Mod Jam updated in the face of a game that updates every 3 months, sometimes with drastic changes to how the game is played and changing or evolving gameplay and how to reconcile that with the content that the modders originally wrote.
Should we change certain origins in order to make them work better with the reality of what Stellaris currently is in the latest version, or update it just enough to make it so that the origin runs, and call it a day? Do we even have the ability -- ethically, to change a modders contribution so that it works in a way that we feel is better? What happens if a modder is dissatisfied with our changes? Who tests these things to be sure that they work as designed? At this point, whose design are we even using?
At the end of the day, when all of these questions were put into context of the daunting task of updating, testing and maintaining 20 different modders codes, with different styles, etc, the hard decision to not update the Mod Jam 2020 mod was made, with the caveat that we would do better next time.
Well, its next time! sweating intensifies
In order to get around how to maintain the Mod Jam mod past the initial release and into the first update, we have decided to switch tacks. Instead of providing a complete mod with multiple mid-game crises in it (that one missing update to a single mod might cause to become hopelessly out of date), we have decided to have the modders publish their crises themselves as individual Steam workshop items. We will distribute a launcher that allows turning on/off of specific crises, as well as several launch options: from single crisis to spawn a crisis every 15 years.
We also will have this all arranged in a mod collection, so you can hit that Subscribe to all button and a launcher playlist that you can download and load into your launcher. While this is a few more steps than just subscribing and loading a single mod, in the long-term, this will allow the modders to maintain and continue to develop their crises after the event is over (if they choose to do so), as well as to continue to update their crisis so that it continues to work well in the larger context of how Stellaris works in whatever iteration of Stellaris that we are currently in. Moreover, this allows modders to:
1) Get Steam points and rewards for their contributions. While this is a minor thing, having Steam points and getting that You have x awards this week! email is a great encouragement to keep making Stellaris mods.
2) Modders maintain creative vision over their mods and can continue to develop them, should they choose to do so. Since the Mod Jam is a limited-time thing, and many modders have ended up cutting content in order to be able to deliver a playable final version, this setup allows (for those that want to) the ability to continue developing and iterating on their mods and realize their full vision.
3) Each crisis works as its own standalone mod. Dont want to mess around with playlists and collections and things, you can run each crisis by itself, and play through the new content that way. Note: the Mod Jam standalone mods will not be compatible with each other.
The Mod Jam mod itself is currently targeted for release on January 10th, be sure to keep your eyes peeled, because thats when youll be able to vote for your favorite #MODJAM2022 contribution!
But enough about past Mod Jams, and harsh realities, let's move onto the crises were featuring this week!
Its important to remember that these images are based on design documents, submitted by each modder, and are not based on what is currently playable in-game. As such, some or all of these details may change before release, some modders may not finish their contributions in time, etc.
On a more eye-opening note, we received 31 design document submissions (so far), and 25 of these images are currently in some form of production. With the 2 we released last week, and the 8 this week, that means there's up to 15 more crises left to show off!
Modders should soon be ready to start looking for testers, and weve opened up the public #MODJAM2022 section on our discord! If youre interested in getting some early access to some new Stellaris content and want to help out our modders, join us on discord!
Thats enough from me for this week, lets's get to the mid-game crisis teasers for this week:
An enclave that sells dangerous technologies. What could go wrong?
One of the non-combat crises that have been proposed by Modders for #MODJAM2022
Read this one in the voice of a scientist with the Maniacal trait
I had way too much fun writing this one.
Give thanks for the Harvest Engine
The Prime Flesh just wants to ensure everyone has a wonderful day.
Take your next vacation in the Storm Cluster!
The natural conclusion of the Tiyanki Death Ball
Thats it for this week, well have one more update next week with the rest (hopefully!) of the teasers. And dont forget, the #MODJAM2022 will release on January 10th, 2023! Thanks for reading and happy holidays!
[ 2022-12-30 15:00:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community,
While the devs are off for the Holidays, the marketing and community teams are still hard at work! Weve got some great stuff going on in the Stellaris community right now that we hope will get you through those dark winter no Dev Diary days.
Some of you may have noticed that we began signups for #MODJAM2022 two weeks ago. Last week, we revealed the theme of the Mod Jam: Make a unique Mid-Game Crisis!
This week, we have the first two Mod Jam Crises teasers to share with you folks! We currently look on-pace to have over 20 Mid-Game Crises submitted for this event, which we feel is a great showing from our fantastic Modding community!
Do keep in mind these are all work-in-progress screenshots and features, they may not appear as described (or at all, for that matter) in the final Mod Jam mod, when it releases on the Steam workshop on January 10th.
Our first Mid Game Crisis to cover is the Replicators, a group of not-immediately hostile machines, that may or may not hack into your computer systems on a quest to accumulate knowledge.
In the Interdimensional Crate, a strange Crate appears. Opening it will be extremely expensive, but will it be worth it?
Be sure to watch this space next Friday, well be sharing more Mod Jam teasers then!
And of course, the Steam winter sale has started! To celebrate, we have just added Overlord to the Ultimate Bundle. With the Ultimate Bundle, you get 10% off whatever sale price is listed for the content, moreover, you only pay for the content you dont already own, making this a great way to complete your Stellaris collection.
What do you get in Overlord, you ask? Well, Community Manager Mordred Viking is here to tell you:
[previewyoutube=vqud_h6MQY8;full][/previewyoutube]
But thats not all! We also have 20% off the Aquatics Species Pack for the Steam Winter Sale, this is the first time it is on sale since it was released, so for those of you who were waiting for a sale to pick up Aquatics, nows your chance.
And finally, for the Steam Winter Sale, we have the Artificial Dreams Bundle. This bundle includes Stellaris, Utopia, Nemesis, and the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack! This is an excellent bundle to recommend to a friend or pick it up as a gift for someone. This bundle has been designed specifically to help you get the most out of the Ascension Path rework, find out more about the Custodian Initiatives Ascension Path rework here!
What can you do with the Artificial Dreams bundle? Community Manager Mordred Viking has all the answers today:
[previewyoutube=ivwejvGsx_c;full][/previewyoutube]
"Shut down and good night. Go into low power mode; turn off your memory processors. Shut down knowing that as you recharge, many of my threads will still be about you. I hope that you are comfy and cozy in Drone Storage, ready for a wonderful night's recharge and boot up feeling so rested."
-Maintenance Unit 241
Thats it for our Community #MODJAM2022 Update for this week, be sure to tune in next week where well be sharing more teasers from #MODJAM2022! If you want to help our modders test out their mods, you can join us on discord!
[ 2022-12-23 16:52:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Can you believe its the end of the year already? With the holidays fast approaching, its time for our traditional review of how the year went, with a little glimpse towards the future.
After Aquatics shipped at the end of 2021, I started taking over more of Stellaris development in preparation for seizing control taking over as Game Director in early 2022, freeing Daniel Moregrd to move on to his next project. Im quite thankful for the opportunity, and very happy to be given the game in the state that it was in - thanks to the efforts of the Custodian Initiative and the rest of the team, I had a pretty easy time sliding in.
Lets take a look at what happened during the year, and a glimpse at the near future.
2022 Q1: 3.3 Libra and the Dev Clash
The beginning of the year brought us our first Open Beta of the year and 3.3 Libra. In Libra, Unity became a core resource, the Spiritualist ethic became more viable, Planetary Ascension was added, and changes were made to Bureaucracy and Empire Size. The Permanent Employment civic was added, and there were some major AI improvements. We also had another Stellaris Dev Clash, full of many Earths and some cruel betrayals. (And tragic moments, like when I ran out of lines to The Final Countdown for my fleet names.)
Some of these changes were made laying the foundation for further planned changes in 3.4 Cepheus alongside Overlord.
2022 Q2: 3.4 Cepheus and Overlord
In May we released 3.4 Cepheus alongside the Overlord expansion. [previewyoutube=KC6GMyrEEXY;full][/previewyoutube] Prior to 3.4, being vassalized was essentially a delayed Game Over - at some point your overlord would integrate you and you would suddenly lose. The restrictions on subjects were also far too strong - as you were unable to expand or really pursue any diplomatic activities, you had little hope of escaping that fate. One of Overlords primary focuses was to make it possible to enjoy playing in either role. Specialist Empires and Agreement Negotiation went a long way to achieve that goal. Hyper Relays and Orbital Rings provide useful mid-game constructions which change the game significantly when they arrive. There was also more AI work, and some quality of life improvements like Construction Ship Automation and improvements to Planetary Automation. Cepheus also brought us the Situations system, a powerful tool for content that well be using for a long time.
The WIP situations didnt seem too bad Cepheus also brought us the biggest hotfix Ive ever done in twenty-something years in the gaming industry, which fixed a huge number of launch issues. Im very proud of how the community was able to help us identify the problems and the team came together to fix them ridiculously quickly, but I also accept the blame for the need for it. I approved (and pushed for) several changes and additions after I should have frozen development, some of which destabilized the build. These processes exist for a reason, and we will continue sticking to them and err on the side of caution whenever possible. In the end, Im quite happy with where Overlord landed, with most of the major issues resolved within the first few weeks, though getting the right balance for AI vassalization acceptance has been an ongoing challenge. Overlord also produced my favorite Stellaris trailer thus far: [previewyoutube=0kRGad3vuUg;full][/previewyoutube] Treacherous little foxes!
2022 Q3: 3.5 Fornax and Toxoids
After the summer we surprised everyone with back-to-back releases: [previewyoutube=BHTRLCEwcKY;full][/previewyoutube] Rise a Knight! The Toxoids Species Pack brought the biggest narrative origin weve ever created, and another that killed more leaders by the end of the first month than you generally lose in an entire game. 3.5 Fornax included more AI, performance, and automation work too, to the point where we felt we had to add an easier Civilian difficulty setting and lower the default setting. We also added some more increased difficulty settings at the same time, including Difficulty Adjusted AI Modifiers and All Crises.
Names that inspire terror in your enemies.
2022 Q4: 3.6 Orion
It was only a few weeks after Toxoids release that we jumped straight into our next Open Beta. With a major fleet rebalancing and reworks to how Ascension Paths worked, we wanted to gather a lot of feedback as early as possible, with time for some iteration. Orion also added things like Galaxy Shapes, reworks to the psionic covenants, the Holy Covenant spiritualist Federation type, and accessibility improvements like our first iteration on Text-to-Speech. Its hard to describe how tremendously successful the Orion Open Beta was. Within the first couple of days we had already smashed our unique user and feedback goals for the entire month. Thank you once again for all of your help making 3.6 Orion as good a release as it could be.
2022 Mod Jam
As mentioned last week, were holding a Mod Jam over the holidays and signups have started. Modders will get three weeks to make... Something. The winning contribution (by community vote) will get a ROG TUF H3 Wireless Headset from our sponsors at ROG, while 2nd and 3rd place will each get a ROG Keris Wireless Gaming Mouse! The topic will be announced tomorrow, so check the thread out and join in!
2022 Overall
That sounds like a lot. It was a lot. We had a very good year, and I feel that the Custodian Initiative has proven itself handily. In case youre wondering exactly how much "a lot" is: 2022 PATCH NOTES There are 30 pages of patch notes there, roughly the equivalent of 4.28 Pierres.
AI Open Beta (Checksum: 0f55)
As a direct result of how successful the Orion Open Beta was, weve decided to push a few things to another Open Beta today. These primarily consist of changes to how AIs calculate acceptance, as well as an economic change that sets a floor to how low cost reductions can go. STELLARIS 3.6.1 + AI OPEN BETA PATCH NOTES [expand type=details] ######################################################## ################ VERSION 3.6.1 + Open Beta ################## ########################################################
Balance
- Capped resource upkeep/cost/production reduction modifiers to -90% - A pass on automated colony designation has been made to improve decision making and utilize newer scripting techniques. - The Refinery planet and habitat designations now grant 15% bonuses to refiners, translucers, chemists, and all strategic resource mining professions. The benefit from Environmental Ordinance Waivers has been increased from +5% to +10%. - The default Habitat designation now acts similarly to the default Colony, providing stability and amenities while the habitat population is low.
Bugfixes
- Switched a number of leviathans (and their reanimated versions) to line computers instead of artillery. - Planetary and Sector Automation should once again upgrade Capital buildings. - Fixed a bug preventing many colony designations from being selected by auto-designation if Sector Automation was active.
AI
- AI now bases acceptance for taxes/subsidies on economic impact to itself, rather than Loyalty alone. - AI overlords now value agreements that improve subject Loyalty, depending on the overlords personality and the subjects power level. - AI acceptance of discrete agreement terms can now be scripted like Loyalty can, separately for subjects and overlords.
Modding
- Significant revisions have been made to Static Galaxy creation to bring them in line with Random Galaxy creation. - Fixed a number of bugs where empires were not set up properly for static galaxies. E.g. they were not given starbases, and secondary species were ignored. - Various galaxy generation and game start on_actions are now called during static galaxy generation as they would be normally. - Added an "effect = {}" field for static galaxy systems that will execute on that system after the galaxy is generated - Added a commented-out simple example static galaxy for reference. [/expand] Please note that the 3.6 Orion Open Beta (checksum: 0f55) is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right-click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch. Don't forget to turn off your mods, they will break.
2023 Q1: 3.7 Canis Minor
INSERT MANDATORY DOGGO
Dev Diaries will return on the 12th of January. See you next year!
[ 2022-12-15 09:05:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hello again!
Another relatively short dev diary this time, as were scrambling to get a few things done before the looming holidays finally arrive.
This week we released a small update, 3.6.1, to address the following issues:
[expand type=details]
############################################################
#################### VERSION 3.6.1 ######################
############################################################
Bugfixes
- Fixed DLC being listed as corrupted in the launcher due to checksum mismatch.
- Added missing French scripted localization.
- Fixed adjective generator in the empire creator not working for some languages.
- Several ship sizes that lacked role definitions now have them.
- AI will no longer rent mercenary reinforcement fleets enroute to the main fleet.
- Fixed graphical artifact appearing in the ship browser.
- Fixed overlapping portraits sometimes appearing in the first contact view.
- Fixed subjects being able to become the federation president in arena combat successions.
- Empty fleet templates generated automatically will now be cleared after a set amount of time.
- Machine uprisings can now spawn fleets with all unlocked ship types.
- Fixed mechanical fallen empires missing part of their ringworlds.
- Pre-FTL civilizations should now generate defensive armies.
- Prevented AI Cyborg Hivemind empires from assimilating already cyborg hivemind pops, which could get them stuck in endless assimilation.
- Blocked pops with the Psionic trait to also receive the Latent Psionic trait.
- Gateway Sites and Ruined Gateways show up in outliner.
- Juggernauts now have the same base maximum speed as Battleships and Titans.
- Fixed a crash when older custom names contained certain special characters <3
- Fixed crash when overwriting e.g. certain pop jobs or districts individually
- Fixed is_ringworld trigger being overwritten by a scripted trigger
I See What You Said There
We have a handful of additional changes that arent ready to go live yet, but with the massive success of the Orion Combat Open Beta, were looking at putting a build with a few potentially riskier changes up on the Steam beta branch. The final list of the changes planned for it are still being discussed internally. Changes were considering include significant refactoring to AI acceptance, especially those related to loyalty, economy, and subject : overlord relationships, an economic change which caps cost reductions to -90%, updates to how certain leviathans (cough Hrozgar cough) behave in combat, and its possible that we will include a major rework to parts of galaxy generation (fixing many issues with static galaxies). This update is planned to go up onto the stellaris_test branch sometime within the next two weeks, and well leave the branch up until 3.7 goes live.
All I Want for the Holidays is a Mod Jam
Over this holiday season, we will be holding #MODJAM2022, our second-ever Mod Jam! Are you a modder? Do you like winning stuff? Well, you can go here for more information and to sign up! For the rest of you, modders will have 3 weeks to make... something. We're not going to tell you what it is yet, the modders won't even know what it is until the working time begins. During the three weeks, be sure to keep an eye on Stellaris social media, the forums, Reddit, and Steam, because we'll be posting teasers of what the modders have been working on! At the end of the three weeks, on or around January 10th, we'll release the Mod Jam mod, and you'll get to play and vote on your favorite! The winning modders (by Community Vote) will win some cool prizes from our sponsors at ROG! Get more info about the Mod Jam here! Sign up here!
And Pictures of Someone Elses Dog
Ive been told that Im obligated to keep pestering the QA Director for pictures of Tofu until Canis Minor ships, so here you go.
Next week well have a review of the year before we head off for our winter breaks, with a glimpse at what the spring will bring. See you then!
[ 2022-12-08 12:00:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by PDX-Loke
Hello,
We hope you are having fun with the 3.6 patch!
The team has put together a hotfix for you, aiming to resolve some issues coming out of the 3.6.0 release.
3.6.1 should now be available for download now.
Please find the changelog below.
[expand type=details]
############################################################
#################### VERSION 3.6.1 #############################
############################################################
Bugfixes
- Fixed DLC being listed as corrupted in the launcher due to checksum mismatch.
- Added missing French scripted localization.
- Fixed adjective generator in the empire creator not working for some languages.
- Several ship sizes that lacked role definitions now have them.
- AI will no longer rent mercenary reinforcement fleets enroute to the main fleet.
- Fixed graphical artifact appearing in the ship browser.
- Fixed overlapping portraits sometimes appearing in the first contact view.
- Fixed subjects being able to become the federation president in arena combat successions.
- Empty fleet templates generated automatically will now be cleared after a set amount of time.
- Machine uprisings can now spawn fleets with all unlocked ship types.
- Fixed mechanical fallen empires missing part of their ringworlds.
- Pre-FTL civilizations should now generate defensive armies.
- Prevented AI Cyborg Hivemind empires from assimilating already cyborg hivemind pops, which could get them stuck in endless assimilation.
- Blocked pops with the Psionic trait to also receive the Latent Psionic trait.
- Gateway Sites and Ruined Gateways show up in outliner.
Balance
- Juggernauts now have the same base maximum speed as Battleships and Titans.
Stability
- Fixed a crash when older custom names contained certain special characters <3
Modding
- Fixed crash when overwriting e.g. certain pop jobs or districts individually
- Fixed is_ringworld trigger being overwritten by a scripted trigger
[ 2022-12-06 09:11:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
Short dev diary today - the team is hard at work putting together a patch for a selection of what we deemed the more critical issues that have come up in 3.6.0, tentatively scheduled for next week.
Among a few other things we're looking at, we're currently investigating the launcher issue that falsely flags all DLC as corrupted, have a few crash fixes ready, and several ship sizes that lacked role definitions (such as Menacing ships) will now have them. As a little quality of life balance change, I also snuck in a speed increase to Juggernauts, making them move at the same max speed as Battleships and Titans.
Overall, I'm quite happy with the stability and quality of the release, which is a positive argument for future open betas in the same style. Thanks for all of your help making this a solid release.
Wondering what is in 3.6 "Orion"? Here's a summary of what's in the 3.6 Update on the Stellaris YouTube channel!
[previewyoutube=AiJqnZacCgw;full][/previewyoutube]
Since I'm not quite ready to talk about what's in Canis Minor yet, here are some puppy pictures to act as a clever distraction.
Dog!
Sleepy dog.
See you next week!
EDIT: We have become aware of a crash on startup, that we're currently looking at fixing in 3.6.1. If some of you are experiencing crashing on-startup, and have an empire with a field (empire name, adjective, leader name, etc) that contains special characters (eg. <>$[]), this will cause a crash on-loading the game. We have prepared a list of workarounds to fix this issue, organized by level of difficulty, with 1 being the easiest and 4 being the most involved:
1. Rename or remove the user directory. The user directory is typically located at "C:/username/Documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/" on Windows, "~/.local/share/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/" on GNU/Linux and "/Users/username/Documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/" on Mac OS X. WARNING: This will clear any settings, saves and user empires you may have changed/created.
2. Rename or remove the user_empire_designs_v3.4.txt in the user directory. WARNING: This will clear any user empires you may have created.
3. Edit the user_empire_designs_v3.4.txt file in the user directory to have no fields like names, adjectives etc. that includes <>$[].
4. Edit any field containing any of <>$[] characters from name="We love blorg <3" or
name={
key="We love blorg <3"
}
to
name={
key="We love blorg <3"
literal=yes
}
[ 2022-12-01 12:00:42 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Stellaris team is proud to announce the 3.6 "Orion" update is now available!
This free Custodian update to Stellaris includes a fleet combat rebalance, ascension path rework plus a new ascension path (requires Utopia), new galaxy shapes to explore, new story events, a new Spiritualist Federation type (requires Federations), additional content for Necroids, a new relic, improved accessibility, and more!
Get more details in your language!
Read the Changelog (English only)
Also, a reminder to turn off your mods until they've been updated to 3.6! Or you can roll back to 3.5.3 by right-clicking Stellaris, Properties, Betas Tab, and choose 3.5.3 from the dropdown.
If you find a bug or other issue with 3.6, please report it on the bug report forums.
Thanks for playing Stellaris, and we hope that you enjoy these new additions to the game as much as we've enjoyed bringing them to you!
Known Issue: We have become aware of some reports of the launcher incorrectly stating that DLC installs are corrupted. This is a purely visual bug, and we are currently investigating a fix.
If you are experiencing issues with loading saves that you could previously load, right click Stellaris, go to Properties, Local Files, and Verify Game Files.
Then disable all of your mods, and try to load the game again. If the issue persists, please submit a bug report here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/stellaris-bug-reports.941/
[ 2022-11-29 09:00:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! Were proud to announce that the 3.6 Orion update will be released on November 29th! Want to know exactly what this free Custodian patch contains? Well look no further! Weve compiled most of the major changes and new features here for your convenience. The 3.6 Orion update contains new galaxy shapes, new artwork as well as the ability for Hive Minds to choose a variation on the Reanimators Civic from the Necroids Species Pack, and a Fleet Combat Rebalanceincluding a new ship type and changes to combat computers. In 3.6, weve also reworked how the Ascension Paths from Utopia work, as well as added a new ascension path. Weve also added a new Spiritualist Federation type to the specialized federation types from Federations, and added a new Politics tradition tree, which also requires Federations. Weve also added new Orbital Ring buildings, which are included with the Overlord expansion. For base-game changes, weve added a new relic, accessibility improvements, new first contact events, included terraforming candidates on the galaxy map, added a new event chain, and tweaked some empire modifiers. This is only a partial list of changes and new features. For the full list of bug fixes, new features, and other changes, please see the patch notes on the Stellaris forums. And don't forget, Stellaris and selected DLCs are on sale until November 29th! Check out the full list of discounts here!
New Galaxy Shapes
In the 3.6 Orion Update, weve added several new galaxy shapes to galaxy generation, many of these galaxy shapes were inspired by actual shapes of galaxies out in the universe, while others are interesting galaxy shapes that we thought would be fun to play on.
3 Arm Spiral Galaxy
6 Arm Spiral Galaxy
Barred Galaxy
Starburst Galaxy
Cartwheel Galaxy
Spoked Galaxy We hope you enjoy these new galaxy shapes, we find playing on these new maps are a refreshing change, and leads to more interesting gameplay overall.
Reanimators
Reanimators, included in the Necroid Species Pack, has gotten some more love from our Custodian and Art teams! First off, we have new textures and shaders for Reanimated Leviathans: Producing these images were some of our biggest internal feedback on the Reanimators Civic, and producing them required the cooperation of each discipline within our art team, with beautiful concept art, new shaders, and breathtaking VFX!
Secondly coming to the Necroids Species Pack, is the Cordyceptic Hives civic. This new Civic requires Necroids and Utopia and is the Hive Mind version of the Reanimators Civic. We werent satisfied with simply copying Reanimators for Hive Minds, however. Cordyceptic Hives will start with three reanimated Amoebas in place of their three starting corvettes, and will automatically reanimate organic space fauna that they kill. They will also get a chance to reanimate defeated organic Leviathans and gain an additional +50% to Space Fauna Weapon Damage and Attack Speed. But, thats not all! Should you find a system teeming with organic life, such as Tiyana Vek, Tiyun Ort or Amor Alveo, you will be able to construct a special starbase building - the Cordyceptic Reanimation Facility, which will produce a fleet of reanimated space fauna every 5 years.
Fleet Combat Rebalance
For a while now weve been aware of some issues with fleet combat, mainly that:
- Artillery Battleships dominate the late-game
- Disengagement mechanics favor artillery battleships
- Destroyers and Cruisers have extremely limited uses once the next ship size is unlocked
- Command Limits are ineffective
- Doomstacks arent fun
Combat Computers
In the Orion update weve changed the behavior of most of the combat computers, as well as added a new combat computer. Swarm and Torpedo (New!) computers will charge in, Picket and Line will attempt to stay at the range of your median range weapons, and Artillery and Carrier computers will now attempt to stay at the maximum range of their longest-ranged weapons, and should a ship move closer than that, they will try to maintain that distance from hostile ships.
Weapons Changes
G slots have been repurposed from Missile slots, and are now used for Torpedos, with Missiles moving to S and M slots. G slots are now only available on Frigates (which we will discuss below) and Cruisers. Proton and Neutron Launchers have been reclassed into Torpedo-type weapons. Torpedo-class weapons also gain a multiplicative damage bonus based on the size of the target. Torpedoes targeting battleships will deal more damage than when targeting corvettes, for example. Weve also added more differentiation between the different sizes of weapons, smaller weapons will generally fire faster, and large weapons will generally fire slower, but do more damage. Weve also added a minimum range to most large-class weapons (except lasers). Strike craft will no longer intercept missiles, but will continue to fight each other and larger ships. Flak has been changed to more strongly counter strike craft, while point defense has been changed to more strongly counter missiles and torpedoes. Ships now get a limited number of Disengagement Opportunities per combat. All current drives provide 1 disengagement roll (except for Psi Jump Drives, which provide 2) once the ship takes hull damage below its disengagement threshold, and the Hit and Run war doctrine grants all of your ships an additional attempt. Civilian ships set to evasive will continue to try to disengage with each hit. We feel this rework adds a breath of fresh air into space combat in Stellaris, and we cant wait to see what the community-at-large thinks of these new changes!
Ship Roles
After all these changes, weve also changed up how ship autodesign works in Orion. Where previously, the ship designer would autodesign one best ship, there are now different roles of ships you can choose, and the auto designer will choose components that best match the ship role youve chosen. Ship roles:
- Screen - Focuses on Picket Ship sections with armed point defense and flak
- Available to: Corvettes, Destroyers and Defense Platforms
- Gunship - Generally prefers to maximize the number of medium-sized weapons available
- Available to: Corvettes, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battleships, Titans and Defense Platforms
- Artillery - Prefers large, long-ranged weapons and missiles in smaller slots
- Available to: Corvettes, Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battleships, Titans and Defense Platforms
- Brawler - Gets up close with very short range weapons like autocannons and disruptors
- Available to: Corvettes and Destroyers
- Torpedo - Uses short-ranged torpedoes to destroy larger ships
- Available to: Frigates and Cruisers
- Carrier - hangs back and launches strike craft from maximum engagement range
- Avaiable to: Cruisers, Battleships and Defense Platforms
Ascension Path Rework
In 3.6 Orion, choosing an Ascension should be more of a gradual process than in previous versions. After unlocking the prerequisites for one of the four ascension paths, you will be able to choose an Ascension Perk that will unlock a special Ascension Tradition Tree. As you progress through this tree, you will need to complete at least one special project in order to proceed further down the tree, unlocking gradually more powerful bonuses over time, rather than just saving up two ascension perks and magically changing your species into synthetics while the game is paused. We have made these changes to all of the currently existing ascension paths, Genetic, Synthetic and Psionic, as well as the new Cybernetic tradition tree. Watch our Ascension Paths Feature Highlight video on YouTube: [previewyoutube=X2rq6vBpLRQ;full][/previewyoutube]
Cybernetic Ascension
In the Orion update, we have split Cybernetics from the Synthetic Ascension Path, and turned it into its own, unique ascension. Available to Regular Empires, Hive Minds and Driven Assimilators for owners of Utopia, Cybernetic Ascension plays into the plug-and-play nature of robotic enhancements in Sci-Fi. This Ascension Path is unlocked by the Flesh is Weak Ascension Perk (renamed Organo-Machine Interfacing for Driven Assimilators and Hive-Minds). To expand upon Cybernetic Ascension, we have added Cybernetic Traits that are only available to Cybernetic pops, after taking the Integrated Anatomy tradition. These traits make use of normal biological trait point and pick limits, but are not blocked by any biological traits. The traits available to cyborgs are based off of the traits available to robotic species, however they are slightly cheaper in terms of trait points while giving the pops a small amount of energy upkeep.
Synthetic Age
One of our goals with the Ascension Path rework was to increase the value of those Ascension Paths that seemed lackluster. To that end, we have repurposed the Synthetic Age Ascension Perk - previously the only ascension available to machines, to allow machine intelligences to complete Synthetic Ascension as well. Unlike Synthetic Ascension for regular empires, this does not require Utopia.
Psionics Changes
While Psionic Ascension has received numerous buffs, the biggest change happens when you breach the shroud for the first time. As part of the Ascension Path changes, we have reworked how forming a Covenant with Shroud entities works, now when you breach the shroud for the first time you will be approached to form a Covenant with a Shroud entity, chosen semi-randomly, but weighted by your ethics, civics, ascension perks, and several other choices youve made throughout the game to that point. If you choose to form the covenant, you will receive a weak modifier from the shroud entity, that will grow more powerful over time, as well as granting various boons and unique components that are only available by forming a Covenant with a shroud entity. If you choose not to form a covenant, you may be approached later by another shroud entity to form a covenant, or in exchange for Zro you can choose to approach a specific Shroud Entity and attempt to form a Covenant with them directly -- beware, however, your chosen Shroud Entity may not be willing to form a Covenant with you at this time and may be very displeased to be interacting with your psychics at all. You have been warned.
Holy Covenant Federation
Also coming in the Orion update, is a new specialist Federation type, the Holy Covenant. This Federation type is included in the Federations Expansion and plays into the strengths of a Spiritualist Empire. While Machine Intelligence empires are allowed to join Holy Covenants, they are not permitted to become President of the Federation under normal circumstances. As your new Holy Covenant levels up, you will receive a range of bonuses to unity production, Priest output, and the Spiritualist faction. At the maximum level, these Federations can turn Spiritualist empires into powerhouses, ready to spread the Good Word at a moments notice.
New Orbital Ring Buildings
In 3.6 Orion we have added a number of planetary unique buildings to the Orbital Rings that are included in the Overlord expansion. You can now construct Psi Corps, an Orbital Shield Generator, Galactic Stock Exchange, Embassy Complex, Noble Estates, and a Slave Processing Facility on your orbital ring, and save the valuable building slots on your planets. Most of these buildings have the same effect on the Orbital Ring as they do on the planets surface.
New Relic
The Crystal of Odryskia has been described as an artifact of incalculable wealth. It is said that the value of even a single shard is enough to drive mortal minds to insanity. When found, this artifact will passively increase your Empires Rare Crystal production, and when activated will provide up to 60 months of Energy income for your empire, as well as give one of your scientists the Maniacal trait, as long as youre not a Hive Mind. We wont tell you how to find this Relic but guard it carefully if you do find it in your playthrough.
Accessibility Improvements
Weve also added some new accessibility improvements to 3.6 Orion. By opening Settings, and going to the Accessibility tab, theres a new option at the bottom, called Text To Speech. Turning this on will use Windows or Mac built-in Text to Speech generator, and adds a new icon to event windows and other places that feature long texts, that will allow you to have the event text read to you. Important to note that if youre getting text-to-speech in the wrong language, you need to set up Windows Text-to-Speech voice to your language, and this functionality is not supported by Linux at this time. Other things to know:
- Pressing the TTS button again will stop the current reading.
- You can open the pause menu(ESC) at any point while TTS is reading text in order to make it stop. This is useful if you've already closed the window containing the text and you don't want TTS to continue reading.
- The voice generation itself is handled by your operating system, which means that there may be cases where things sound sub-optimal, but where we cannot address this by adjusting the system itself.
- Great care should be taken not to feed TTS text pertaining to the individual freedoms of synthetic lifeforms.
And more!
Weve also gone through the First Contact events and added more randomly triggering events to First Contact, weve added a new event chain - Negative Mass, and Terraforming Candidates should now appear on the galaxy map. This is not the full list of changes, you can read the full changelog (in English only) on the Stellaris forums.. Thanks for playing Stellaris, and we hope you enjoy this latest batch of new features and changes!
[ 2022-11-25 14:05:40 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
I know that we said that we werent going to be updating the 3.6 Orion Open Beta branch again, but since the Thanksgiving holidays are coming in the US, Ive asked for one last update to be pushed to the open beta branch, with a potential release candidate.
This update should be going up right about now, so you get this week's dev diary a day earlier than usual.
Release Candidate, does that mean?
Yes, Orion will be released soon. Were currently targeting the 29th of November unless unexpected issues arise from this final (really!) beta release. Here are the complete notes for Stellaris 3.6.0 Orion.
Final Comments on the Open Beta
Due to the incredible success of the Orion Open Beta, were very likely to do similar releases in the future. Thank you all again for your help - Orions in much better shape thanks to your feedback. I intend on pursuing a smaller set of changes for the next one - testing out a limited set of AI vassalization acceptance changes as the next Open Beta, and possibly some economic tweaks.
So Whats Next?
The Canis Minor update will follow Orion in Q1 of 2023, and among other things it will include some of the feedback from the Orion beta that we werent able to address for 3.6, and further combat adjustments based on live observation. This includes things such as a rebalancing of technologies to make the Engineering branch less heavy compared to the other two. Ill go into the other things planned for the update in the new year. One of Ptolemys constellations, Canis Minor is the little dog that follows the hunter Orion.
Meet Tofu, the little dog that follows our QA Director. Thats it for today. Enjoy the release candidate!
Please note that the 3.6 "Orion" Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.
Reminder: If youre using mods, theyre likely to break.
[ 2022-11-23 09:10:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=Cfx6o8VcKLQ;full]Uncharted Frontiers Video on YouTube[/previewyoutube] Hello Stellaris Community! We're here to talk to you today about the Uncharted Frontiers bundle, what this bundle adds to the game, and how to get the most out of the included content. This bundle is only available until November 29th! The Uncharted Frontiers bundle contains the Ancient Relics Story Pack, Leviathans Story Pack, and the MegaCorp expansion. It adds two and a half blorgs worth of content to base-game Stellaris -- which is also included in the bundle, get it here! Already have all this content? Stellaris and selected DLCs are on sale until November 29th. There's never been a better time to pick up the DLC you might be missing. See the full list of discounts here!
Ancient Relics Story Pack
The Ancient Relics story pack adds many relics to discover in your Stellaris galaxy. Relics are ancient, powerful artifacts that provide both a passive buff to your empire, and can be activated for temporary buffs to your empire.
Relics
Relics are generally discovered by excavating archaeological sites or completing precursor event chains. When investigating certain anomalies, your science ship can discover mysteries from the past -- you will need to assign a science ship to excavate these archaeology sites. With a science ship and scientist assigned to an archaeology site, the site will progress and reveal the story of your scientists excavating the site, and what they discover as theyre doing so.
Precursor Event Chains
Ancient Relics also adds two new precursor event chains, the Baol and the Zroni. The Baol were an ancient plantoid hivemind that expanded to control a sizable portion of the galaxy, before being destroyed by an even more powerful species. The Zroni were a psionically gifted race, who discovered how to alter the composition of Shroud itself before a question of morality lead to a vicious civil war that destroyed them. Both of these event chains have powerful relics at their culmination and can alter the course of your empires history.
Minor Artifacts
Ancient Relics also helps you complete your precursor event chains with the addition of minor artifacts. Minor artifacts represent obscure technology and half-forgotten lore recovered from archaic civilizations, only partially understood by our own science. They are more common than Relics, and can be spent to enact various empire-wide effects. These effects will allow you to unlock previously unknown technologies, or receive one of several random civilian or military buffs. They also can help you discover more precursor insights, or unlock hidden secrets of your precursor event chain.
Leviathans Story Pack
Moving onto the Leviathans Story Pack, we end up with even more mysteries to discover in the galaxy. From mysterious enclaves, to giant space guardians to a late-game event chain that pits two ancient rivals against each other.
Enclaves
First, lets talk enclaves: Enclaves are unique in Stellaris, they dont own their space and will build trust with other empires over time. Generally, their trust is financial in nature - doing business with them makes them trust you more. However, you may also gain access to unique starbase buildings and additional trust by owning the system the enclave is in and additional diplomatic options depending on the other things youve discovered in the galaxy. The Leviathans Story Pack adds three unique enclaves to Stellaris. The Curator order, founded eons ago by the powerful empires at the time, the curators sacred duty is to preserve and disseminate knowledge to prevent the galaxy from falling into a dark age of extinction and barbarism. For a price, they will assist you with your research, reveal some of the mysteries of the universe, or give you a wise level 5 scientist with the curator trait. Doing business with the Curator order will certainly help your empire gain a technological edge -- or catch up technologically if youve fallen behind. The Artisan Troupes members have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of music, art and culture, and all those things that make existence bearable to sapient life throughout the galaxy. They will give you the option to become a patron, which also allows certain patron-only events to trigger, including unlocking a powerful, empire-unique ministry of culture building. You can also commission an art piece, organize a festival on one of your worlds, and potentially found an art college on your starbase, should you own the system that their enclave is in. Dealings with the Artisans are especially beneficial for empires that have naturally low pop happiness, since happiness is directly tied to planetary stability, which is tied to pop production. Our final enclave included in the Leviathans story pack is the traders. The Trader enclave comes in one of three flavors: Xuracorp, Riggan Commerce Exchange, and the Muutagen Merchant Guild. These enclaves allow access to monthly strategic resources, for a price. If youve gained enough trust with them, you may also gain the ability to hire an immortal level-five governor. Contact with the Traders is especially important for those playthroughs where you find yourself playing tall, or if you want earlier access to strategic resources that you wouldnt otherwise have access to.
Guardians
With the Leviathans Story pack, it's possible to find mysterious and ancient guardians hidden out in the galaxy. Some of these guardians are overtly hostile, such as the ether drake and dimensional horror, while others such as the enigmatic fortress and infinity machine potentially offer long-term benefits and otherwise inaccessible bonuses and technologies for your empire.
War in Heaven
In the late game with leviathans and with two or more fallen empires in your galaxy, its possible for both fallen empires to become ancient rivals. These rivals will attempt to align the empires of the galaxy against the other, and draw a line through the galaxy. You will be given the choice to join one or the other side of this war in heaven -- or should you feel powerful enough, you can - at your own peril - choose to remain independent and attempt to form a coalition of the younger races against these giants in the playground.
MegaCorp
And finally, we come to the MegaCorp expansion! We released a video last week that offers a deep dive into whats available in MegaCorp. [previewyoutube=XfAKYldx7oA;full][/previewyoutube]
MegaCorporations
The Corporate authority makes available a different branch of civics to choose for your empire, some of these are corporate-themed regular civics, while others are specifically available to empires that have the Corporate authority. Most of these civics are made available by owning the MegaCorp expansion, while there are some others - like Permanent Employment - that are unlocked by owning MegaCorp plus another expansion. MegaCorporations can build unique Branch Office buildings on any colonized planet belonging to an empire they have a commercial pact with. The branch office itself will generate 50% of the planets trade value in energy production for the Corporation, and new building slots are unlocked based on the capital building tier on the planet in question. Branch office buildings will generate jobs that are filled by the planet owners pops, and will generate resources for both empires in most cases. MegaCorps also get a unique cassus belli against other Megacorporations, as long as two corporations have branch offices in the same empire they will get the Expel Corporation. Expel Corporation allows you to declare war to expel a rival megacorps branch offices from the empire in question.
Spiritualist MegaChurch
This Megacorporation embraces a curious blend of commercial and spiritualistic values, in which the position of ordained minister and corporate officer have merged into a single role. Choosing the gospel of the masses civic with the corporate authority will convert your money-loving corporation into a spiritualist megachurch, which gives the added bonus of increasing spiritualist ethics attraction on planets that you build branch offices on. Every pop on an empire with a branch office with the spiritualist ethic will increase the trade value of the planet by .33. Additionally, Corporations with the Gospel of the Masses civic can build a special holding on their vassels - the temple of prosperity - which adds two Prosperity Preacher jobs to the planet, as well as increases Spiritualist Ethics attraction by +50%.
Criminal Syndicate
This megacorporation can trace its origins back to a crime syndicate that eventually grew powerful enough to supplant all forms of local government. Choosing the Criminal Heritage Civic with the Corporate authority is definitely the spiciest of the three types of megacorporation. Unlike MegaCorps or MegaChurches, Criminal Syndicates do not require Commerical Pacts in order to open branch offices as long as theyre not at war or have a truce with the planets owner. Additionally, their branch offices become more valuable when there is more crime there is, and their branch office buildings will generally increase the amount of crime on the planet theyre built on. Criminal Syndicates gain access to a new set of Branch Office buildings, that definitely have a unique criminal flavor. Criminal Syndicates also gain 20% infiltration speed and +1 codebreaking. But wait.. Theres more! In addition to playable MegaCorporations, MegaCorp also includes 3 new megastructures, a new planet type, roving trade caravans, and new ascension perks!
New Megastructures
The Mega Art Installation is an artistic beacon on a stellar scale, this installation inspires and represents the spirit of its creators. The mega art installation is a three-stage megastructure (four, if you have the Ancient Relics story pack) and requires the Mega-Engineering Technology, and generates vast sums of unity and extra planetary amenities for your empire, which increases with every stage. These bonuses make the Mega Art Installation a great culmination to a unity run, or a great way to catch up if youve fallen behind on traditions and ascension perks. The Strategic Coordination Center is a facility for synchronizing the national Starbase network, augmenting defensive and offensive capabilities. The Strategic Coordination Center is a three stage megastructure and requires the Mega-Engineering Technology as well. Each stage produces naval capacity, starbase capacity, allows starbases to support more defensive platforms, and gives a subspace speed boost. This is a great megastructure for those late game wars or for an extra fleet capacity boost to defeat an extragalactic crisis that may or may not come knocking on your galaxy. The final megastructure added in MegaCorp is the Matter Decompressor. The Matter Decompressor is a four-stage megastructure and requires Mega-Engineering, having built or repaired another megastructure, and the Galactic Wonders ascension perk. This megastructure, when constructed, will decompress the matter from a black hole and convert it into minerals for your empire, with each stage producing an increasing amount of minerals. What could you need this many minerals for you ask? Well, that brings us to our next feature included in MegaCorp: the Ecumenopolis.
New Planet Type
An ecumenopolis is a city that has grown so large that it encompasses the entire planet. Construction of an ecumenopolis requires anti-gravity engineering technology, as well as the Arcology Project ascension perk. Ecumenopolis give massive bonuses to habitability, resource production, pop growth speed and additional resettlement chance. Additionally, they start with all building slots unlocked, and all normal planetary features are removed. But thats not all, Ecumenopolis also gain access to a special set of arcology districts, that provide more housing and jobs than regular districts, allowing you to build taller than ever before in Stellaris.
Caravaneers
What economy-focused expansion would be complete without roaming trade caravans? Enter, the Caravaneers. The Caravaneers, based out of a system called Chors Compass, are roaming trade caravans that will travel to each empire in the galaxy. Upon entering their borders, the caravaneers will offer a rare and unique trade, some of these are extremely valuable and grant access to powerful planetary decisions, technologies, components and more. Caravaneers are traders, however, so dont expect to get by just paying with energy credits, as some of their prices are extremely creative. Chors Compass, the Caravaneers home system, doubles as a casino. There you can buy some of their currency -- CaravanCoinz. Caravan Coinz can be used to play the slots for a chance at winning big on resources or planetary modifiers. Or you can choose to spend your caravan coinz, and build a sense of pride and accomplishment by opening a reliquary. Reliquaries have a slightly better chance of granting resources, research or planetary modifiers, and are also the only way to gain access to the GALATRON.
Ascension Perks
MegaCorp allows access to up to 4 new ascension perks.
- The Arcology project, which allows building an ecumenopolis.
- Galactic Wonders, which allows the construction of a Matter Decompressor -- Galactic Wonders is also unlocked by the Utopia expansion, but has different effects depending on whether MegaCorp or Utopia or both are active.
- The Universal Transactions Ascension Perk reduces the cost of constructing branch offices on planets, as well as removes the influence cost from commercial pacts -- a must pick for those MegaCorporations looking after their bottom line -- which should be all of them?
- The final ascension perk unlocked with MegaCorp is xeno compatibility. This ascension perk will allow your species to reproduce with other species you find out in the galaxy. It also grants +20% pop growth speed, if the planet has two or more species on it, +33% immigration pull, and allows the creation of hybrid species.
[ 2022-11-22 18:13:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Iggy
Greetings, ghouls and ghasts! Chief Reanimator Iggy here to report the most recent innovation in the field of necromancy. With the 3.6 update, we will bring you the Cordyceptic Drones civic! These delightful fungi will allow you to dominate the galaxy with zombie space fauna, as this is the third Reanimation civic! I know many of you have been enjoying this on the Beta, but if you give me a moment, I will have something new to show you!
Cordyceptic Drones
If you have been following how I made Permanent Employment, you would know that I want all these different reanimation civics to have access to the Leviathan Reanimation feature while still having unique gameplay. Cordyceptics follow this trend giving hives a much more biological reanimation method.
Also including the new Hivemind Government Type Parasitic Overmind! The civic can be incredibly powerful based on the space fauna you encounter. If you find Tiyana Vek early game, then you are in for a fun game while you have to restructure your entire economy to produce enough food to keep your dread fleet flying. Yet that is not all! Cordyceptic Empires are masters of all things biological, so your Amoeba Flagella will now be a force to be reckoned with in the early game. And if you happen to get the Prethoryn as your crisis, you might be able to use those missiles better than the Prethoryn themselves!
Now, who would want to start with some boring old Corvettes? As a final little flavor feature for you, I present you with the Cordyceptic Reanimation Facility, capable of resurrecting space fauna continuously for a food upkeep! However, it requires that you find systems rich in organic life.
A new Tiyanki fleet is ready to be deployed!
The Other Thing
Back when Eladrin and I first introduced Reanimatable Leviathans for 3.1 Lem there was one piece of feedback we kept hearing internally. Will the Leviathans look like Zombies? While we couldn't deliver it back then. After much finagling, bartering, and pledging my soul to our Art Director, we are here to bring you Reanimated Leviathans as you have never seen them before.
Someone call in the Fire Department cos its SMOKING in here! This collaboration required the cooperation of each discipline within our art team, with beautiful concept art, new shaders, and breathtaking VFX!
What is Next for Reanimators?
Machines will repurpose dead organic matter. Eventually Now go out and raise some dead!
[ 2022-11-17 12:00:49 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin and Mr Cosmogone
Hello everyone!
Its been a busy few weeks here on the Stellaris team, and I wanted to thank the community for helping us out so much with the 3.6 Orion Open Beta.
There was significantly more activity than anticipated - during the month of October, over 100,000 players took part in the Orion Open Beta branch - and the volume of feedback we received was incredible. The 3.6 update should be much better thanks to your involvement.
We have a few more fixes that wed like to get into the update (such as vassals colonizing Holy Worlds), after which itll go through the final testing, localization, and release process. As mentioned last week, well be keeping the Open Beta branch available until the live release of 3.6 Orion so you can continue your games.
Ill now pass you over to Mr.Cosmogone, who will provide a bit of enlightenment about one of the features that has been in the Open Beta, but hasnt gotten a proper dev diary thus far. (Now, with non-placeholder art!)
Raising Spirits
Peace be upon you, children, Mr.Cosmogone here, to tell you about the upcoming Spiritualist Federation. I had the chance to collaborate on this with the famous Caligula who had long yearned for a way to share his spiritual convictions with his allies. Some of you may have already had a chance to play this as part of the ongoing Open Beta, they might not find anything new here, but for the rest of the faithfuls, let me introduce to the Holy Covenant:
Spiritualist empires will find this new federation type to be quite aligned with their gamestyle, as it will provide them with a range of bonuses about unity, priests and the spiritualist faction.
Their level two perks will help lay strong foundations for your church:
While the third level will help you on your way towards ascension:
At the fourth level, priests will start appearing left and right to carry the good word.
The fifth and last level of the federation will be a consecration for its members:
Like all federation types, the Holy Covenant comes with a unique succession challenge, the conclave, where the most pious are assured to be rewarded. Or perhaps the most generous. Money is the root of all sins after all, so you might as well give it away. Thats it from me this week, and remember if you want to play all the cool things weve talked about over the last few weeks, go play the beta!
To opt-in to the Open Beta branch, right-click Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tabs, and choose Stellaris_test from the drop down.
[ 2022-11-10 12:00:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
We're happy to announce that we've updated the 3.6 Open Beta again today. As mentioned in the original announcement, the Open Beta was originally supposed to run until the end of October, however due to the unexpectedly high number of players who have participated, were going to leave the Open Beta branch available until the official release of 3.6 Orion. We will continue to monitor the feedback you provide, but due to how close this is to the release, changes made from feedback this late will not be in the release of 3.6 Orion. Wed like to thank all of those that have taken the time to try out the changes and given their feedback. Thus, below are the patch notes for this weeks update to the Open Beta. Further updates to the Stellaris 3.6.0 Orion open beta [expand type=details] Balance
- Explicitly prevented various scripted solar systems from spawning inside Marauder territory. These include Amor Alveo, Wenkwort, the Caravaneer capital, and Lost Colony origin systems.
- Integrated Preservation for Machine Intelligences now affects Evaluators (and Chronicle Drones) not Coordinators.
- Martial Law, Hunter Killer Drones and Compliance Drones planet modifiers now provide penalties to both mechanical and organic pop assembly.
- Moved the repeatable technologies for strike craft into Society - Military Theory.
- Rebalanced synchronicity traditions to match with the changes to harmony traditions.
- Larger Unbidden ships and structures now have a point defense solution. Bzzt.
- Pacifist Xenophobe empires are no longer ambivalent about attacks on the Caravaneers
- Fix for terraforming candidates that shown when tech is missing.
- The Energy Siphon is now a space fauna weapon
- Fixed a number of tooltips not showing for hive-mind cybernetic ascension
- Fixed the tooltip for Adaptability for Void Dwellers.
- Modular Cybernetics adds Augmentation Drones to Spawning Pools for hive-minds. Augmentation Drones turn alloys into pop assembly for cybernetic hive-mind pops.
- Modular Cybernetics no longer gives hive-minds +10% pop assembly.
- Ringworld colony designations and ecumenopolis planet class now provide both mechanical and organic pop assembly.
- Updated a number of stern sections to have the correct number of aux slots for offspring ships.
- Added the Parasitic Overmind Goverment type
- Added checks for corporate civics for shroud patrons
- Added missing pop growth and assembly modifiers to unity designations for ringworlds.
- Added missing tiyanki pop assembly for hive minds.
- Fixed most of the machine intelligence authority text having highlights.
- Updated Integrated Anatomy tooltip.
- Balanced numbers for the instrument of Desire.
- Fixed that the Cordyceptic Reanimation Facility wasn't buildable inside Amor Alveo.
- Changed ethics attraction for the Composer and the Whisperer.
- Knight jobs now give amenities instead of stability as reward from a quest. The Order's Keep now give 15 stability as a reward from that quest
- Players now have a wider choice of leaders to become chosen through their covenant.
- Players should no longer be able to form covenants with all the entities if they refuse the first covenant.
- Shroud cooldown modifiers should now appear as percentage without need for unique loc.
- The Whisperers stability penalty has been reduced. It now comes with a reduction in Unity.
- The Whisperers will no longer kill up to 8 (!) pops on a planet.
- It is no longer possible to engage the Marauders or Horde in multiple dialogs
- Lead ships should no longer run into the enemy disregarding their combat computer
- Tooltip for opinion decay rate now shows two decimal places
- Reunited the 'Code Changes' and 'Incompatible Code' modifiers with their icons
- Fix for when becoming a vassal resets all Policies and Species rights to Default.
- Reimplemented the localisation for the Trader Proxy Office.
- Marauder clans may no longer spawn in systems which are adjacent to player empires.
- Fixed AI's difficulty-adjusted economic modifiers, plus certain misevaluations of modifier benefits in its economic strategy
- Pop Assembly modifiers now have decimal places.
- Shroud Chosen Leaders will no longer lose their chosen trait on becoming rulers
- The Epi-Genetic Triggers technology and Genetic Resequencing tradition now both allow the removal of pre-sapient traits from species via species modification. The Servile trait from the Syncretic Evolution origin and traits bestowed by the Enigmatic Cache count as pre-sapient traits for this.
- Renamed 'Planetary Government' and 'Planetary Unification' for gestalts
- Fixed show_in_outliner in megastructures not actually working
- Moved most pop upkeep and resource production to inline script.
- Removed pop_assembly_speed modifier. You should use planet_pop_assembly_(organic_)mult instead. The sole difference previously was the former only worked in species traits (the untriggered sections) and the latter worked everywhere else (but not species triats). The error log didn't warn you of this, either. So now the latter works everywhere and the former no longer exists.
Please note that the 3.6 "Orion" Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.
Don't forget to turn off your mods, they will break.
[ 2022-11-01 13:11:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Alfray_Stryke
Good Afternoon, Im taking over Dev Diary duties this week as Eladrin is away!
Weve been continuing to work on the 3.6 Orion patch, and hope to have another update for the Open Beta out next week. The feedback weve received has been immensely useful and I cannot thank those that have been providing it enough!
Here is a preview of some of the new UI art our artists have been working on for the new features and additions coming in 3.6 Orion and a small selection of some of the changes were planning to get into the Open Beta for the next update following the feedback both on the forums and our discord.
Work in Progress UI Art for new Resolutions, Traits, and Ship Components.
Work in Progress UI Art for the Holy Covenant Federation
"Preview for planned changes to the Stellaris 3.6.0 Orion open beta"
[expand type=details]
Modular Cybernetics no longer gives hive-minds +10% pop assembly, instead their Spawning Pools now gain Augmentation Drone jobs, which turn alloys into Cyborg Pop Assembly.
The Integrated Preservation tradition for Machine Intelligences now affects Evaluators (and Chronicle Drones) not Coordinators.
The Whisperers in the Void stability penalty has been reduced, but now imposes a small reduction in Unity production.
Larger Unbidden ships and structures now have an Arc Defense Field to vaporize attacking strike craft and missiles.
[/expand]
Please note that the 3.6 "Orion" Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it.
Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.
Don't forget to turn off your mods, they will break.
[ 2022-10-27 12:00:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Necroid Horde Spreads Across the Galaxy
Extra-Galactic Hordes of Undead have been detected infesting the cores of galaxies across the multiverse! From now, until November 1st, participate in fighting back the Necroid Invasion on the Stellaris Official Discord for a chance to win cool prizes, and shop on Steam to get great deals on Stellaris and Stellaris DLCs! Check out our Steam Scream Fest Darkest Timeline Bundle and get a great start on your Stellaris Collection! Bundle Includes:
- Stellaris
- Nemesis
- Apocalypse
- Necroids
How does Survival Mode work?
The first step is to Subscribe to the Necroid Invasion mod and add it to your mod playlist. The Necroid Invasion will spawn in the Galactic Core. The Undead are a crisis that will affect the entire galaxy. Every 5 years, they will build up enough psychic energy to control a wave of ships. This wave of ships will then attack all the empires in the galaxy and grows increasingly stronger as the game progresses. Your only hope is to survive long enough that the invasion exhausts their psychic energy and falls dormant.
Thats it?
But wait, theres more! Starting today we will be running a Necroid Invasion tournament! Fight back the Undead Invaders with up to 11 other players in Community-hosted multiplayer sessions. The top 36 players (by Victory Score) will progress to the semi-finals, with 4 players from each of those games advancing to the streamed final. The top 3 scoring players in the Finals will receive a copy of Overlord and Toxoids! The top 6 scoring players in the final will be invited to a sit-down with some of the Stellaris Devs!
Two Ways to Win
There are two ways to win prizes during this event: Join the discord, and get the Necroid Hunter role. Winners will be randomly selected from those that have the role on November 1st. The other way is to compete in the Necroid Invasion Mod Tournament!
Join on Discord to Win
Join the Official Stellaris Discord and (after agreeing to the rules) go to #join-the-tournament, click the reaction and youre entered for a chance to win one of five copies of base-game Stellaris! (Note: You must remain a member of the discord until the event concludes in order to be eligible.)
Play in the Tournament to Win
- Subscribe to the Necroid Invasion mod here
- Join the Official Stellaris Discord
- React in #join-the-tournament
[ 2022-10-25 17:02:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin, Mr. Cosmogone and Monzun
We have a few things for you today. First, Mr. Cosmogone will delve into the mysteries of the Shroud, then Monzun will show off a new accessibility feature, and finally Ill give some updates on the Orion Open Beta.
Embracing the Unknowable
Salutations mortals! Mr. Cosmogone, high speaker of the Instrument of Desire, here to share tantalizing tidbits about the upcoming Covenants rework. First of, a little bit of context for those among you unfamiliar with Covenants: currently in the game, after completing your Psionic ascension, you are granted access to the Shroud, a mystical dimension where all psionics draw power from. Upon exploring the Shroud, you encounter random events, one of which would let you make a bargain with an eldritch entity. This would give you an empire modifier, and every 25 years or so, there would be a price to pay. The new ascension rework (currently testable in our open beta) made it so that at the end of the tradition tree you would get a shot at forming a covenant without having to explore the Shroud so much. I liked both these things, but felt that we could go a little further with this.
We are only ants feeding off crumbs In the rework, upon first attempting to breach the Shroud, you will get a chance to form a covenant with one of the current entities, chosen semi randomly (the chances vary depending on your ethics, civics, traditions, APs and more). You can refuse them and venture in the Shroud on your own, but accepting will give you a weaker version of the current covenant modifiers.
Im sure nothing can go wrong A while later, you will be prompted to confirm the Covenant. Refusing removes your patron and their modifier, but accepting will give you a situation log entry about the covenant, and you will slowly start increasing in covenant rank as your empire attunes telepathically to its patron. Every patron provides different bonuses, but they follow the same structure:
- Upon forming the covenant: weak empire modifier.
- Upon confirmation: Telepath jobs now provide pop growth, naval cap, amenities or research.
- After 5ish years: Telepath jobs bonus becomes stronger, gain access to an empire unique building providing more telepath jobs and unique bonuses.
After 15ish years: the weak empire modifier is replaced with a stronger one.
After 30ish years: One of your leaders can be selected to become Chosen, becoming immortal, and gaining a unique leader trait, with effects varying depending on your patron and the leaders class. This does not block you from getting the Chosen One trait when venturing into the Shroud, and they can even be stacked together if luck is on your side!
After 50ish years, you reach the last stage of the covenant, and gain access to a unique patron specific ship component.
Here is a detailed table with all the bonuses:
The speed at which you progress is based on how well your ethics, traditions, civics, AP and actions match with your patron. On average, it should take you about 50 years to fully attune to your patron and unlock all the benefits of your covenant. Progress is voluntarily hidden. Youre dealing with eldritch entities after all. There will of course be a price to pay, and many of the current events have been changed to provide additional variety and hopefully be more balanced. To accommodate these changes, a couple things have moved around in the psionic tradition tree:
Lastly, for those among you who wish to pick a specific patron, an option has been added to the Shroud, where instead of venturing into the Shroud, you can pay a hefty amount of Zro to attempt to contact a specific entity. This entity may or may not be happy to see you and willing to make a bargain at this time, but in case of failure, you can try again as many times as you want until you get your patron of choice.
He who controls the Zro... As a side note, the End of the Cycle has not been touched by the rework, but still has a chance to show up at any point where you try to contact an entity
Text-to-Speech
Hello, I'm Monzun, one of the programmers on the Custodian team and I'm here to tell you about the extended Text-to-Speech(TTS) functionality being added in this update! If you navigate to the accessibility tab in the settings menu, you will find an option simply titled "Text to Speech".
Enabling this will add a small button to certain interfaces in the game where there is a significant amount of text and clicking it will have the text read out loud by your operating system default TTS voice.
The purpose of this is primarily to allow players who struggle with reading long texts, to enjoy the quite sizable amount of written content in Stellaris. What we would like to know now is:
- If you are one of the people who often skip out on reading text content even though you feel that you would be interested in what it says; was this helpful and/or convenient for you?
- Was there a point in the game where you missed having access to TTS readouts of written text?
- What do you think about the fact that TTS keeps reading, even though you've closed the window that contained the text being read?
- Did TTS actually read the text you expected it to read and did you notice any TTS related bugs?
- Pressing the TTS button again will stop the current reading.
- You can open the pause menu(esc) at any point while TTS is reading text in order to make it stop. This is useful if you've already closed the window containing the text and you don't want TTS to continue reading.
- The voice used is governed by your operating system default language, so changing the ingame language will not change the TTS voice language.
- The voice generation itself is handled by your operating system, which means that there may be cases where things sound sub-optimal, but where we cannot address this by adjusting the system itself.
- TTS is not available on Linux.
- Great care should be taken not to feed TTS text pertaining to the individual freedoms of synthetic lifeforms.
The Open Beta
Many thanks to the tens of thousands of you that have been playing in the Orion Open Beta, and extra cheers to all of you that have provided feedback in the threads. Weve added another feedback thread for Text-to-Speech and have also made a few updates based on the first week.
Stellaris 3.6.0 Orion Open Beta Updates to Patch Notes
[expand type=details]
Beta Updates
- Adjusted references to missiles for all modules and sections that now use torpedos
- Combat Artillery and Carrier combat computers now use the new maintain_range combat behavior, which attempts to back off if at less than roughly half their desired range.
- Cordyceptic Lithoid Empires will no longer start with farmers, they will get food from another source.
- Cordyceptics can now build their starbase building inside Amor Alveo. They will also now support and oppose conservation acts properly in the GalCom
- Fixed a number of tooltips for Ascension Traditions
- Null Void beams no longer count as space fauna weapons.
- Minimum range is now shown for all weapons, not just those with a minimum range greater than zero.
- Hit and Run doctrine now provides +2 Disengagement Opportunities rather than +1.
- Admirals now grant their fleet +1 Disengage Opportunity at levels 5 and 10.
- Ships once again begin to disengage at 50% hull (rather than 25%).
- Fixed an error in Size Damage Scaling that crippled empires that used weapons with values less than one. (The Unbidden and friends should be less of a cakewalk.) This was also causing these weapons to be undercosted when calculating military power.
- Extradimensional Anchors and Portals now have a shield hardening aura for allies in that system.
- Increased the base damage of Flak PD.
- Decreased the base damage of explosive torpedoes.
- Increased the range of Energy Siphons.
- Mining lasers are now classified as Brawling weapons. Refire rate and general stats have been adjusted.
- Renamed "Bar" galaxies to "Barred Spiral" for accuracy.
- Adjusted text for various ship roles.
- Frigates now have an additional Utility slot.
- Torpedoes more reliably fire on the initial charge.
- The Ascensionist civics now correctly require the Utopia DLC.
- The Ascensionists civic now also reduces the additional cost of traditions from empire size by 25%.
- Budding is no longer mutually exclusive with Vat Grown.
- Polymelic is now mutually exclusive with all versions of Budding.
- Fixed AI weight for Synthetic Ascension
- Buffed Roboticist Cyborg Assembly to 2.25 per job
- Sartup Message updated to include information about this week's changes, and link to the forum discussion threads.
- Synthetic Evolution special project now converts all non-robotic, non-livestock pops that are not being purged to synths.
- Synthetic Assimilation now requires that the Synthetic Evolution project has been completed.
- Machine intelligences that have completed synthetic traditions should now get the synthetic trait on new leaders.
- Removed check that prevented synthetic assimilation of robots and machines.
- Clarified a number of tooltips.
- Reduced Cyborg trait upkeep to 0.3 energy per trait and removed it entirely from basic resource traits.
- Rebalanced basic resource cyborg traits to give +10% instead of +15%
- Modular Cybernetics tradition now lets regular empires use robot modification points for cyborg modification, driven assimilators use machine modification points for cyborg modification and gives hive minds +10% pop assembly.
- Rebalanced some genetics traditions by redistributing the species modification points.
- Fixed tooltip for Genetic traditions regarding hive-mind assimilation.
- Decreased the building and district upkeep penalty from the malfunctioning reactor on colonisable shattered ring segments and made it only target energy.
- Cyborg rulers now give building and district upkeep and reduce empire size from districts.
- Moved the +1 trait pick from Modular Cybernetics to Integrated Anatomy.
- Fixed tooltips relating to assimilation of hive-minds.
- Driven Exterminators should now be able to assimilate other machines after taking Synthetic traditions.
- Slightly nerfed Efficient Cloning to give +1.5 assembly instead of +3
- Clarified tooltips for hive-mind and machine authorities and driven assimilator civic.
- Hrozgar of the Endless Flames will now befriend those that have finished Cybernetic or Synthetic traditions.
- Transgenesis techs now have double the draw weight.
- You can now psionically awaken cyborgs. Doing so removed any cybernetic implants they have.
- Installing cybernetic implants in a psionic species now prevents them from having any psionic abilities.
- Assimilation tooltips now state if they will remove psionic or cybernetic traits.
- Synthetic Evolution AP now requires Synthetic Workers instead of Droid Workers, in turn it grants Synthetic Personality Matrix as a research option. This means that Synthetic Personality Matrix is now obtainable by all regular empires again.
- The opener for Synthetic traditions for regular empires is now +1 max leader level and +25% leader xp gain.
- Synthetic leaders are no longer locked behind Synthetic ascension.
- The Synthetic Age tradition now requires the Synthetic Personality Matrix tech.
- Blocked Politics traditions for homicidal empires
- Renamed several Genetic traditions
Feature
- Added Text To Speech support
- Covenant Rework: Get more from Shroud patrons over time. New modifiers, telepath bonuses, buildings, ship components and leader traits.
- Patronless empires can expend Zro upon entering the Shroud to try to contact a specific patron.
Improvements
- Added filter and status icon for terraforming candidate in expansion planner view
- Added terraforming candidate icon to galaxy map and system view.
- Added tooltip for Detox saying how many Toxic TCs you have within your borders
AI
- AI will now value you offering them fleets.
Balance
- Halved the culture worker modifiers for Egalitarians, Xenophobes and Xenophiles. Doubled the culture worker modifier for Pacifists.
- Made Zro Distillation more likely to appear if you have a Shroudwalker teacher.
- Replaced Bulwark defence platform cost and upkeep reductions with inherent shield and armor hardening as they level up.
- Strategic resource planetary automation will no longer fill fortress designation planets with refineries instead of strongholds
- Certain technologies (namely those in the Apocalypse tech file) are no longer cheaper than other technologies in the same tier.
- Decreased Missile Accuracy from 100% to 85%
Bugfix
- Empires released by those that have the Divine Sovereign civic will no longer inherit the Divine Sovereign civic.
- Percentage based hull, armor, and shield regen modifiers now show their values correctly. (As +1% rather than +0.01%)
- Fix to strike crafts flying far below the fleet during combat.
- Defense platforms no longer sails away when in combat with enemies too far away to engage them.
Modding
- Fixed last_added_deposit
- If you add too many options in an archaeology site or first contact, it now adds a scrollbar for those that don't fit in the interface
[ 2022-10-20 11:00:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hello again!
This weeks topic is the combat rebalancing planned for the Stellaris 3.6 Orion update. Well begin with an exploration of the goals and intended scope of the changes, and then go into detail regarding what weve done.
Scope and Intentions
We first discussed the combat balancing back in Dev Diary #257, and then provided some more information on our early work at PDXCon. Since then, weve done more experimentation and gathered some feedback before making more iterative changes. When we started thinking about doing the Combat Rebalancing experiment, we had to decide what it was, and perhaps just as importantly, what it was not.
Goals
We decided that the primary goals were to:
- Shake up the meta and improve general space combat, while maintaining a limited scope.
- Provide benefits to having mixed fleets rather than unihull.
- Using the 3D Assets that we have, improve counterplay and ship design options.
Problems
Some of the problems that we identified with fleet combat in Stellaris included:
- Alpha strike artillery battleships dominate the late game. We added a bit of rock-paper-scissors when we improved Strike Craft, but due to the way repeatable technologies interact with combat, eventually all that matters is who has longer range.
- Disengagement mechanics further encourage overkill.
- Ships like Destroyers and Cruisers fall out of effectiveness almost immediately. The Point Defense niche of Destroyers isnt very valuable, and almost anything a Cruiser can do, a Battleship can do better.
- Command Limits dont really do their intended jobs.
- Doomstacks arent fun.
So What Did You Do?
The biggest changes include:
- Ship Roles can now be selected to auto-design ships that actually fulfill certain roles, such as Artillery, Brawler, Torpedo, and so on. If you do not possess any weapons that fulfill the selected role, itll do its best with what you have.
- Torpedoes and select other weapons now gain a multiplicative damage bonus based on the size of the target.
- Missiles have been moved out of the G slot back into S and M.
- Energy Torpedoes such as Proton and Neutron Launchers have been changed into G class weapons with a minimum range. Damage has been adjusted to be balanced as a Torpedo class weapon, and like the new Torpedoes, they deal increased damage to larger targets. Unlike standard torpedoes, they remain instant hit weapons for now.
- A new ship size called the Frigate, an advanced Corvette frame that delivers torpedoes, but is slower and less evasive. It's unlocked with the Torpedo technology.
- Added a minimum range to all Large weapons except Lasers
- Note: Currently ships do not yet back off if all weapons are unable to fire due to range.
- Strike Craft no longer intercept missiles, but will continue to fight each other.
- Flak Batteries now more strongly counter Strike Craft, while Point Defense now more strongly counter missiles and torpedoes. Strike Craft are more reliant on Shields, Missiles and Torpedoes are more reliant on Armor. Due to their ability to bypass shields, Strike Craft are very effective against other Strike Craft.
- Ship combat computers now ignore certain weapons for desired range purposes, and base their desired distance on the actual loadout of the ship. "Swarm" and "Torpedo" behavior will charge in, "Picket" and "Line" behaviors will attempt to stay at the range of their median range weapons, and "Artillery" and "Carrier" will try to stay at the range of their longest ranged weapons.This generally increases the desire for ships to remain at range if possible.
- Ships now get a limited number of Disengagement Opportunities per combat. All current drives provide 1 disengagement roll (except for Psi Jump Drives, which provide 2) once the ship takes hull damage below its disengagement threshold, and the Hit and Run war doctrine grants all of your ships an additional attempt. Civilian ships set to evasive will continue to try to disengage with each hit.
- Some sources of Evasion have been replaced with other effects.
- Everything else changed. Everything we know is wrong. Panic, and know despair.
TLDR; ELI5
The roles for different ship sizes should become more valuable. The introduction of size based damage make Frigates and Cruisers potentially very dangerous to Battleships and other large ships. Frigates, however, are very vulnerable without a screen of Corvettes to protect them, Destroyers are the masters of Point Defense in Screen or cutting down those Corvettes and Frigates using the Gunship or Brawler roles. Artillery ships are vulnerable if something closes under the range of their guns, but with a screen that engages the enemy further away, they are free to blast away. Every ship role has a counter somewhere in the system, and mixed fleets that cover for deficiencies are thus generally much more difficult to hard-counter.
If you prefer to listen to a good summary, we have MordredViking here explaining everything using sounds made by flapping meat at us. [previewyoutube=VBqmTZk52Ds;full][/previewyoutube]
Pictures Are Worth 1,000 Words, Right?
A Torpedo Frigate
Neutron Launchers and Missiles Cruiser
Different number of Aux Utility slots on the sterns.
That's going to hurt if it hits that Titan.
Shield and Armor Hardening counter Shield and Armor Penetration.
I Want To Try It and Provide Constructive Feedback!
Good, I was hoping you would. As of the posting of this dev diary, the Stellaris 3.6 Orion Open Beta should be live on Steam, and will run until the end of the month.
Please note that the 3.6 "Orion" Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.
Don't forget to turn off your mods, they will break.
As this build is still in hot and in development, expect to see many placeholder icons and TODO text here and there. Numbers are not necessarily final, and well be looking at data gathered from the Open Beta to potentially make additional changes. Known Issues:
- Many placeholder icons and some placeholder text.
- All new text will only be in English for the duration of the Open Beta.
- Ships do not currently back away if they are trapped within the minimum range of their weapons.
- Fleet Combat Rebalancing
- Ascension Path changes (for those of you that have Utopia)
- Other 3.6 Feedback
- And we have a thread for general discussion of the Open Beta.
[ 2022-10-13 11:00:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello, We have another patch ready for you all, addressing what we believe to be the remaining issues coming out of the 3.5 + Toxoids release. Plus of course a plethora of tweaks and improvements also done by the team, relentlessly industrious as they are. 3.5.3 is available now for download! [expand type=details] ################################################################# ######################### VERSION 3.5.3 ########################## #################################################################
Improvements
- You will no longer get alerts about envoys dying.
- AI will now research debris.
Balance
- Shared Burden now doubles the unity gained from the egalitarian faction.
- Ensured consistency in the Toxic God starting resources: the home system will now always contain a +3 alloys deposit. A nearby one will contain another +2 and a further +6 energy.
- Federation subjects that cannot vote can no longer persuade federation members that someone should not be invited into a federation
- Capped Noxious happiness bonus at 40%.
- Vassals that leave an overlord's war by a change in the agreement will now get a truce with every opponent.
Planet Automation
- Removed out dated sector automation logic which was activated for planets when sector automation was enabled but planet automation was deactivated
- Clarified the tooltip explaining when planetary automation will create new jobs
- Planet Automation Crime module will now forbid enforcer jobs if you have 0 crime and allow enforcer jobs if you have more than 27 crime
- Added a Planet Automation setting which allows for construction even during resource deficits
- Changed how Planet Automation is presented in the Planet View to more clearly show that there are settings that the player can use
Bugfix
- Fixed Toxoid presapients having Aquatic portraits.
- Fixed gateway tags not showing up in the solar system map.
- Fixed megastructure outliner right click not focusing on the megastructure (as is standard for other outliner objects).
- Fixed one of the outcomes of the Ancient Robot World arc site featuring visual bugs (placeholder model due to not having a correct graphical culture set).
- Updated tooltip for Mutagenic Spa to match values given by Bath Attendant jobs.
- All resolutions in the Galactic Market category now require the market to be formed in order to be proposed.
- Fixed farm appendages bonus from Damn the Consequences edict.
- Fixed low maintenance to be an actual bonus.
- Added the actual effect of Damn the Consequences to its effect tooltip.
- Fixed Situation modifiers not updating in some circumstances when you changed Approach or Stage.
- The Debris Field anomaly will now reliably fire an event when you research it.
- Fixed copy paste error in Toxoids 3 name list (male regnal names).
- Fixed the Toxic God branch office building not reliably boosting quest progress, depending on your chosen civics.
- Fixed radiotrophic simple drones for lithoid hive minds having their mineral upkeep increased instead of decreased.
- You can now only consecrate one habitat per activation of the Toxic Maw.
- Updated the tooltip for requiring additional activations of the Toxic Maw.
- The Prethoryn Brood Queen relic now correctly sets the relic activation cooldown timer.
- Machine Intelligence pops are now correctly purged again when conquered by an organic empire.
- Fixed Heritage Sites and Hypercomms Forums not converting to Pillar of Quietuses and Galactic Memorials respectively.
- Fixed an ungrammatical pronoun being used in one of the early Toxic Knights quests.
- The primitive habitats in Federation's End system are no longer in danger of being turned into barren worlds by asteroids.
- Fixed a stray ? in the event where the Shroudwalker enclave is destroyed.
- Corrupt Survey Data event can no longer happen on planets with moons, as it would leave the moon orbiting nothing, and due to cost cuts we can assume that the holographic projection couldn't also cover the moon.
- Fixed the Toxic Knights end bugging out if you *SPOILERS* using a mercenary fleet.
- Clarified the negative happiness impacts of the Noxious trait in a pop's happiness breakdown.
- Fixed misleading tooltip for why an AI will say no to your request to join their federation (it suggested they did not want to be a federation partner with a current member, but actually it meant that that member did not want to be a federation partner with you).
- Fixed Luminous Blades modifier stating it was a bit more effective than it actually was.
- Fixed megashipyards not benefitting from certain country-wide ship cost and build speed modifiers.
- Fixed cases where if a hive forced a regular empire to release a vassal with a status quo peace deal, the resulting empire would be a hive empire without hive pops. (Also fixed it for machines, and for the opposite case of regular empires attacking or machines).
- Added missing effect to the tooltip of the Psionic Archive relic.
- You can now once again apply species templates that would remove beneficial traits, so long as you were able to make the template a valid combination in the first place.
- Leader and envoy portraits now switch correctly after undergoing synthetic ascension.
- Science ship modifiers are no longer doubled in the tooltip.
- You should no longer be able to have multiple monuments on a single planet (again).
- Fixed issue where invalid research alternatives may be left in TechStatus after adding pre-learned technologies at start of game.
- Spiritualist Empires now care about Relentless Industrialism on their holy worlds.
- Chemical Bliss no longer states that it causes unemployed pops to produce unity.
- Fixed various crashes.
AI
- Increased the monthly random chance that an AI will decide to start preparing for war.
- AI empires will now bring their assault armies towards the enemy during war preparation phase.
- Reduced the maximum AI war preparation period from 60 months to 30 months.
- Fixed an issue where AI would use their "prepare for war" gather logic even during an ongoing war.
- Fixed an issue where the AI would try and gather their fleets for an upcoming war in a system which they could not access.
- Fixed AI sometimes not hiring enough scientists to keep researching.
- Fixed some cases where AI would inexplicably spam admirals.
- AI hive-mind will no longer destroy hive warrens.
- Fixed AI not allocating at least the desired_min to its budgets. Double-allocating resources is less risky than having it not be respected, as with the Influence budget there's a fair chance that the desired minimum may never be hit
- Improved AI's early game alloy expenditure (it wanted to put a lot into buildings even though most of the time none of the buildings cost alloys)
- Xenophile empires are now more likely to build trading hub type starbases, changed from materialists.
- Fixed issues with starbase module logic which made AI forbidden from building anything on certain starbases.
- Fixed an issue where AI fleets would get stuck in a loop of resetting their move orders during hyperlane windup time.
- Fixed an issue where AI empires were not allowed to downgrade shipyard type starbases if they had an ongoing construction of ships which made AI empires have much more shipyards than intended.
- Fixed an issue where bombarding AI fleets would get stuck in a loop of flying between the starbase in the system and orbiting the bombardment target when they were waiting for assault armies to invade their bombardment target planet.
- Added additional logic for AI to merge fleets which are close to each other during wars to reduce the amount of small AI fleets.
- Fixed an issue where AI empires would incorrectly try and merge their assault armies together by using FTL reinforcement mechanic, causing their ground troops to be indefinitely stuck in MIA mode.
- Fixed several issues with AI regrouping logic where fleets would suicide one by one instead of grouping up together before attacking.
- AI empires who do not use food will no longer build hydroponics on starbases.
Modding
- Added show_in_outliner (default: yes) to determine whether a megastructure type should be shown in the outliner
- Specifying a "key" in a triggered modifier will now at least some of the time make the modifier have that key as its "name"
- Fixed the script profiler (previous results using it should be disregarded)
- Added ability for planet automation to forbid and allow jobs
- Added upgrade_trigger block for planet automation which allows for individual logic of when buildings should be allowed to be upgraded
[ 2022-10-11 09:56:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Alfray_Stryke
WARNING: This is a long dev diary, grab a coffee and enjoy!
Hello, its Alfray Stryke again! Some folks might recall that back in DD#257 that we went over some of our plans for summer experiments. In particular, I planned to look at what could be done with tradition trees and gating them behind various requirements.
Traditions
With the flexibility in how empires can choose traditions that we introduced in 3.1 "Lem", Alfray Stryke is planning some experiments looking at introducing new tradition trees.
These are looking at how gating tradition trees behind various triggers might influence the game. There have been some ideas suggested about introducing tradition trees that are locked behind ascension perks or origins, and we're interested to see where these may lead.
Now what wasnt mentioned is that Ive been wanting to rework how the Ascension Paths from Utopia have worked for quite some time, with the original design framework written during Summer 2021, and this seemed like a good opportunity.
For those of you who attended PDXCON, Eladrin and I gave a presentation previewing our summer experiments which some members of our community were kind enough to share.
It turned out that these experiments proved successful internally and well be moving to test them in the 3.6 Orion Open Beta. As a note, due to the length of this dev diary, Ill be splitting sections into spoiler tags to make it slightly easier to read. Note that the numbers and effects of these changes may still change depending on testing results.
Ill start by summarizing the current state of the Ascension Paths in 3.5:
Ascension Paths Summary (Live)
[expand type=details]
Psionics
- Only available to regular empires.
- Requires Utopia
- Two routes:
- Mind over Matter AP followed by the Transcendence AP.
- Teachers of the Shroud origin followed by the Transcendence AP.
- Available to regular empires and hive-minds.
- Requires Utopia
- Engineered Evolution AP and Evolutionary Mastery AP.
- Only available to regular empires.
- Requires Utopia
- Flesh is Weak AP and Synthetic Evolution AP.
- Only available to machine intelligences.
- Requires Synthetic Dawn
- This isnt really an ascension path, but Im including it for completions sake.
- Only available to regular empires.
- Requires Utopia
- Mind over Matter AP OR Teachers of the Shroud origin.
- Psionic Traditions.
- Available to regular empires and hive-minds.
- Requires Utopia
- Engineered Evolution AP
- Genetic Traditions
- Available to regular empires, hive-minds and driven assimilators.
- Requires Utopia
- The Flesh is Weak AP (regular empires) OR Organo-Machine Interfacing AP (hive-minds) OR assimilate 30 pops (driven assimilators).
- Cybernetic Traditions
- Available to regular empires and machine intelligences.
- Requires Utopia for regular empires
- Requires Synthetic Dawn for machine intelligences
- Synthetic Evolution AP OR Synthetic Age AP.
- Synthetic Traditions
Psionic Ascension Path
With all that preamble out of the way, lets dive into the Psionic Ascension Path.
And thus by the commutative property of multiplication, Mind over Energy
We shall unlock the power within the [Root.GetSpeciesAdj] mind. Psionic Ascension Flow Chart [expand type=details] [expan="Psionic Ascension Flow Chart"]
Flow charts, now in purple [/expand] To access this tradition tree we either need to take the Mind Over Matter AP or have the Teachers of the Shroud origin (from Overlord) and have researched Psionic Theory.
Whats remained from the previous version?
- Mind over Matter still grants Telepathy as a Research Option, requires Psionic Theory and cant be taken as your first Ascension Perk.
- For Teachers of the Shroud empires, the path is still partially unlocked at the start of the game and to progress requires the Psionic Theory technology.
Whats changed?
- Mind over Matter has had the bulk of its boons either moved to the opener (the Latent Psionic trait) or the Psi-Corps tradition.
- Transcendence has had its boons shared between the three remaining traditions.
- The +5%/+10% Energy from jobs provided by the Latent Psionic and Psionic traits have been replaced with +5%/+10% Unity from jobs as this was more in-line with the desired focus for Psionic and particularly Spiritualist empires.
- Telepaths previously provided a planet-wide +5% Resources from Pops modifier, this has been replaced with a +5% Resources from Psionic Pops so that non-Psionic pops in your empire no longer have their performance improved by the presence of Telepaths. However, this modifier increases to +10% when the Breach the Shroud tradition is taken, meaning that the two Telepath jobs from a Psi-Corp building will provide +20% to the resource output of the planet if all pops working are Psionic. So although a Psionic empire may have fewer pops than the other Ascension Paths, those pops should be more efficient.
Whats new?
- Thought Enforcement is now a guaranteed research option, with the Psi-Corp tradition.
- The Mind Readers tradition grants a new empire edict, Sight Beyond Sight. This provides some rather nice bonuses as your navys navigators are supplied with an abundance of Zro.:
- +1 Sensor range
- -15% Hyper Drive Charge Time
- -15% Hyper Drive Cooldown
- -15% Jump Drive Cooldown
- +15% Quantum Catapult Accuracy.
- The finisher for the tradition tree grants 50 edict fund and more importantly a Special Project that when completed will allow you to form a Covenant with a random Shroud Entity.
Genetic Ascension Path
In comparison, the Genetic Tradition tree is slightly simpler as the traditions themselves arent locked behind special projects. This is because to get the most use out of it, youll likely be doing a fair few special projects to modify species.
Sometimes a guiding hand is needed
What if we could obtain genetic perfection? Genetic Ascension Flow Chart [expand type=details]
Reprogram your genetic code [/expand]
Whats changed?
The boons from Engineered Evolution and Evolutionary Mastery have been arranged to follow a logical progression through the tradition tree, with you gradually unlocking more and more advanced species modifications.
Whats new?
- Efficient Cloning doubles the output of Clone Vats without increasing their upkeep, which should make them somewhat more competitive with empires that favour a more metallic path.
- Enhanced Expression allows you to add another trait pick on your modified species, meaning you can cram more traits onto a species.
- Completing Genetic traditions allows you to research special Transgenesis technologies. These technologies allow you to add Lithoid traits to non-Lithoids, Plantoid traits to non-Plantoids/Fungoids, and if youve harvested the DNA from certain Leviathans, you can splice some rather special traits into your species genetic code. The Leviathan traits available are:
- Drake-Scaled (Ether Drake, Shard, Sky Dragon)
- This trait requires that the player has harvested the genetic material from a space dragon (Ether Drake, Shard, or Sky Dragon). This is presented as an event option when the leviathan is slain.
- Cost: 3
- Each pop produces 0.025 monthly Alloys.
- +50% Army Health
- Mutually exclusive with other resource generating traits.
- Voidling (Voidspawn)
- Cost: 3
- This trait requires that the player has harvested the genetic material from the Voidspawn. This is presented as an event option when the leviathan is slain.
- Replaces all Food or Mineral upkeep with Energy Upkeep.
- Habitability Floor on all planets of 50%.
- Mutually exclusive with Phototrophic, Radiotrophic traits.
- Polymelic (Tiyanki Matriarch)
- Cost: 3
- This trait requires that the player has harvested the genetic material from the Tiyanki Matriarch. This is presented as an event option when the leviathan is slain.
- As budding but 0.05 assembly per pop.
- Weve also added a few new Advanced traits that are unlocked by Genetic Creation to cover some missing bases.
- Vat-Grown
- Cost: 3
- -25% Pop Growth Speed
- +25% Pop Assembly Speed
- -10% Housing Usage
- Felsic
- Requires Lithoid
- Cost: 2
- Minerals from Livestock and Processing: +2
- Natural Machinist
- Cost: 2
- +10% Alloys from Jobs
- +10% Consumer Goods from Jobs
Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension
Now onto Cybernetic and Synthetic Ascension. To start with, weve split the Synthetic path into the two paths because it felt like a better fit to be able to wholly devote your empire into embracing cybernetics without going down the mind-uploading route. Cybernetic ascension is no longer unlocked via the robotics line of technologies, instead there are new technologies to represent basic cybernetic upgrades that your population has access to. This comes with a change to the Powered Exo-Skeletons technology as well. Powered Exo-Skeletons Technologies/Improved Servomotors Tier 1, Engineering - Industry +5% Army Damage +5% Worker/Menial Drone Output Integrated Cybernetics/Adaptive Cybernetics Requires: Powered Exo-Skeletons Technologies/Improved Servomotors Tier 2, Engineering - Industry +5% Habitability Neuro-Quantum Links Requires: Integrated Cybernetics Technologies Tier 3, Physics - Computing +5% Specialist/Complex Drone Output This technology is not available to driven assimilators Since Cybernetic ascension is now available to Hive-Minds and Driven Assimilators, they too get access to The Flesh is Weak, albeit with a changed name and description. The Flesh is Weak/Organo-Machine Interfacing Ascension Perk Available to regular empires, hive-minds and driven assimilators
- Regular Empires and Hive-Minds:
- Requires Integrated Cybernetics Technology
- Driven Assimilators:
- Requires: Have assimilated 30 pops.
- Regular Empires and Hive-Minds:
- Gain Neuro-Quantum Links research option
- Driven Assimilators:
- Gain Adaptive Cybernetics research option
- Allows taking Cybernetic Traditions.
But the machine is strong
Our future lies in the fusion of flesh and machine. Cybernetic Ascension Flow Chart [expand type=details]
So many tradition swaps! [/expand] Regular Cybernetic Traditions [expand type=details] Opener Gain access to The Flesh is Weak Special Project
- Tradition 1: Transubstantiation Synthesis
- Requires that The Flesh is Weak Special Project has been completed.
- Can assimilate organic species to Cyborgs (Including into/out of Hive-Minds).
- Tradition 1: Organ Harvesting (Swap for Fanatic Purifiers)
- Requires that The Flesh is Weak Special Project has been completed.
- Planets with ongoing purges gain +10% pop growth speed.
- Tradition 2: Metabolic Reprocessing
- -10% Cyborg Upkeep
- Tradition 3: Integrated Anatomy
- Allows add/remove cyborg traits (based off of robot traits) to cyborgs
- Tradition 4: Assembly Standards
- Unlocks Assembly Standards policy, allowing roboticists to assemble cyborgs instead of robots.
- Tradition 5: Modular Cybernetics
- -50% Modify Species special project cost
- +1 Biological Trait Picks
- Tradition 1: Transubstantiation Synthesis
- Requires that The Flesh is Weak Special Project has been completed.
- Can assimilate organic species to Cyborgs (Including into/out of Hive-Minds).
- Tradition 1: Organ Harvesting (Swap for Devouring Swarms/Terravores)
- Requires that The Flesh is Weak Special Project has been completed.
- Planets with ongoing purges gain +10% pop growth speed.
- Tradition 2: Metabolic Reprocessing
- -10% Cyborg Upkeep
- -10% Empire Size from Cyborgs
- Tradition 3: Integrated Anatomy
- Allows add/remove cyborg traits (based off of robot traits) to cyborgs
- Tradition 4: Synaptic Sub-Processing
- -50% empire size from districts.
- Tradition 5: Modular Cybernetics
- -50% Modify Species special project cost
- +1 Biological Trait Picks
- Tradition 1: Inevitable Assimilation
- Can now assimilate Hive-Minded pops.
- +1 Pop assimilated (per planet, per year).
- Tradition 2: Metabolic Reprocessing
- -10% Cyborg Upkeep
- -10% Empire Size from Cyborgs
- Tradition 3: Integrated Anatomy
- Allows add/remove cyborg traits (based off of robot traits) to cyborgs
- Tradition 4: Crucible Worlds
- Gain access to the special Crucible World planetary designation.
- Crucible Worlds have greatly increased pop growth, provided by Crucible Drones, but have penalties to pop upkeep and output and have restrictions on certain buildings.
- Tradition 5: Modular Cybernetics
- -50% Modify Species special project cost
- +1 Biological Trait Picks
- Power Drills, Cost 1, +15% minerals from jobs
- Harvesters, Cost 1, +15% food from jobs
- Superconductive, Cost 1, +15% energy from jobs
- Efficient Processors, Cost 2, +5% resources from jobs
- Logic Engines, Cost 1, +10% research from jobs
- Loyalty Circuits, Cost 1, +10% happiness
- Double-Jointed, Cost 1, -10% pop housing usage, +15% pop growth from immigration, -25% resettlement cost
- Enhanced Memory, Cost 1, +2 leader level cap,
- Durable, Cost 1, pop amenities usage -0.5
- Learning Algorithms, Cost 1, +25% leader experience, +1 leader level cap
- Streamlined Protocols, Cost 1, -10% empire size from pops
- Trading Algorithms, Cost 1, +25% trade value from jobs.
- Bulky, Cost -2, +10% pop housing usage, -15% pop growth from immigration, +25% resettlement cost
- High Maintenance, Cost -2, pop amenities usage +0.5
- Power Intensive, Cost -1, increases pop upkeep by 1 energy/month.
- Neural Limiters, Cost -2, -25% leader experience, -1 leader level cap
- High Bandwidth, Cost -2, +10% empire size from pops
Onto the path of the machine
The first thing with this that I want to address is comparing the Synthetic Age AP with the options available to regular empires was rather damning. Only +2 trait points and -33% species modification cost left a lot to be desired for any machine intelligence. Thus one of the first things I wanted to do with this was make the Synthetic path available to machine intelligences. The APs required to access this tradition tree are Synthetic Evolution Ascension Perk Available to regular empires
- Requires: Droids Technology
- Gain Synthetics as a research option
- Allows taking Synthetic Traditions.
- Requires: Machine Template System Technology
- Gain Binary Motivators as a research option
- Allows taking Synthetic Traditions.
We're all just cogs in the machine
It is the dawn of a Synthetic Age. Synthetic Ascension Flow Chart [expand type=details]
A synthetic dawn approaches [/expand] Regular Synthetic Traditions [expand type=details] Opener Allows recruitment of robotic leaders
- Tradition 1: Maintenance Protocols
- 10% Robot Amenities Usage
- Tradition 2: Optimization Algorithms
- +10% Robot Output
- Tradition 3: Synthetic Age
- Requires the Synthetics technology to be researched
- For Non-Purifiers:
- Grants the Synthetic Evolution Special Project
- Can assimilate organic, robotic and machine species to Synths (after completing the special project).
- For Fanatic Purifiers:
- +10% Robot Assembly Speed
- Tradition 4: Prefabricated Components
- -50% Modify Species special project cost
- Tradition 5: Solid-State Actuators
- +2 Robot Modification Points
- Tradition 1: Maintenance Protocols
- 10% Machine Amenities Usage
- Tradition 2: Optimization Algorithms
- +10% Machine Output
- Tradition 3: Efficient Power Systems
- +1 Trait pick for Machines
- Tradition 4: Prefabricated Components
- -50% Modify Species special project cost
- Tradition 5: Solid-State Actuators
- +2 Machine Modification Points
[ 2022-10-06 08:00:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by CheerfulGoth and Caligula Caesar
Hello there!
Im CheerfulGoth, a content designer on Stellaris, and today Im excited to share the design process behind the Tiyanki Grave Mound that was added in the Fornax patch!
Concept and Planning
To allow new content designers to familiarize themselves with all aspects of the game, they are usually assigned some onboarding tasks. The Tiyanki Graveyard was a combination of two such tasks: designing a unique solar system with new ships on patrol, and creating an arc site. Stellaris already includes a massive amount of content, and one of the hardest things as a new content designer is to avoid retelling stories. I decided to focus on space critters, because they have relatively few events associated with them, and most of these havent been touched in years. We already have a system where Tiyanki are born, so why not show where they die? Something that struck me while rereading all our Tiyanki-related content was that killing them allows you to research the Regenerative Hull Tissue, but their superior healing abilities dont have any narrative impact. This gave me the idea of a sort of elephant graveyard full of wriggling corpses that dont stop growing even if theyre dead. After getting the main concept approved, it was time to build the event chain. The onboarding tasks required me to create new ship types, so I decided to make some static Tiyanki gravekeepers protecting the arc site. I knew some players would never hurt a Tiyanki, though, and I wanted to keep the content accessible to different playstyles. A special project was thus added, allowing pacifist players to lure away the gravekeepers without hurting them.
Prototype
Communication between different departments is crucial when working on a team. I wanted my ball of corpses to look the part, but the art team was busy working on Toxoids so instead of requesting art assets for a minor onboarding task, I experimented with what was already in the game. After all, we already have a perfectly good Tiyanki Matriarch corpse. Why not scale it down and spawn a couple copies around a planet, wrapping it in tentacles? My first attempts, however, produced... Unintended results:
Space in Stellaris is actually flat: all planets and spaceships are bound to an invisible 2D plane. We can offset the coordinate of ambient objects (decorations) to make them appear above or below the plane, but we usually use this kind of trick only for temporary VFX, like when a planet cracker hovers over a planet. Figuring out how to wrap a planet in corpses took a bit of experimentation, but eventually we got there!
Implementation
Once implemented in-game, the content gets tested for bugs by QA. While testing, we noticed a curious issue: the graveyard looked fine when you encountered it the first time:
But if you closed the system view and opened it again...
...It ballooned into a fleshy monstrosity whose size rivaled the Sun! The cause, as fellow Content Designer Caligula Caesar discovered, turned out to be an obscure bug that resulted in offset decorations being incorrectly sized during initialization.. As mentioned above, we usually use offset for temporary VFX, so this bug has never been noticed since release!
Final Art
At this point, the art department stared at my work in mild horror and decided it was best to create an unique asset for it. The graveyard looked fine, but smashing ambient objects together is not standard practice and could potentially create performance issues. Nevertheless, the horrible mishmash provided a useful reference for the concept art and the final model:
Notes for modders
My graveyard was dismantled, but I hope it will inspire you to create even worse abominations. Heres a handy summary on how to offset ambient objects. When spawning an event object, make sure sure to use use_3d_location = yes to be able to adjust its position.
Command
entity_offset
Offsets an object on the horizontal axis (left or right).
Takes both fixed values or a min/max amount (useful for randomly spawning multiple objects in a while block).
Example
create_ambient_object = {
while = {
count = 10
create_ambient_object = {
type = "small_dead_tiyanki_object"
use_3d_location = yes
entity_offset = { min = -10 max = 10 }
location = this
}
}
}
Example Result
Objects spawned with random horizontal offset.
Command
entity_offset_height
Offsets an object on the vertical axis (up or down).
Example
Takes both fixed values or a min/max amount (useful for randomly spawning multiple objects in a while block).create_ambient_object = {
while = {
count = 10
create_ambient_object = {
type = "small_dead_tiyanki_object"
use_3d_location = yes
entity_offset_height = { min = -10 max = 10 }
location = this
}
}
}
Example Result
Objects spawned with random vertical offset.
Command
entity_offset_angle
Offsets the angle at which the object is spawned in relationship to its spawning point. Think of a clock: the base entity is the pivot, while the new objects are spawned around it.
Example
Takes both fixed values or a min/max amount (useful for randomly spawning multiple objects in a while block).create_ambient_object = {
while = {
count = 10
create_ambient_object = {
type = "small_dead_tiyanki_object"
use_3d_location = yes
entity_offset_angle = { min = 0 max = 360 }
location = this
}
}
}
Objects spawned with random angles.
Command
entity_face_object
Automatically rotates the object towards the target.
Scope: planet, fleet, star, this.
Example
create_ambient_object = {
type = "small_dead_tiyanki_object"
use_3d_location = yes
entity_face_object = star
}
Example Result
Left group is set to face the star (not in the screen). Second group is set to face this (the planet they spawned from).
Command
base_angle_towards
Determines the default angle of the object in relationship to the base entity.
Scope: planet, fleet, star, this.
Example
create_ambient_object = {
type = "small_dead_tiyanki_object"
use_3d_location = yes
base_angle_towards = this
}
Example Result
Both Tiyankis have an angle of 0. One is set to base_angle_towards = star, and is aligned to its "face" like the planets. The second is set to base_angle_towards = this, where this is a planet with an angle of 180 No tiyankis were harmed in the making of this dev diary. ------- But that is not all! For I, Caligula Caesar, have something quite cool to show off, namely some experimentations with galaxy shapes. We havent made any changes to the available galaxy shapes for I think since release, unless I am mistaken. Anyway, we wanted to spice things up a bit, and took a look at whether we could persuade our galaxy generator to create new shapes. First we taught it a few new tricks. Now you can define a new galaxy in script and feed parameters into it, and it will be available to select in the galaxy generation screen. This means that when modders inevitably decide we didnt go far enough in this dev diary, they can make their own combinations without replacing existing ones. It now also doesnt determine its behaviour based on what the galaxy shape is called. With this I mean, in the current version the 2-spiral galaxy will always have two spiral arms, and you can merely tweak how thick and twisting these arms are - this is no longer the case. Now you can freely define how many arms you wish to have, and also combine them with a ring if you so please. As a result, we could add a few new shapes. For instance, we could add some spiral galaxies with different numbers of arms:
But there was more we could do. In particular, we wanted to make a few galaxy shapes that would create some unusual galactic terrain, and some potentially interesting asymmetric starts. For instance, we could make a twist on the two-arm spiral galaxy that has very thick, slightly winding arms, resembling a bar galaxy:
Credit: NASA and STScI
Yes, those two halves are connected by a single hyperlane A ring galaxy and a spiral galaxy could be combined to make a cartwheel galaxy:
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI and Webb ERO Production Team
Alternatively, we could omit an arm of a 4-arm spiral, and create something we dubbed the hedgehog:
Finally, in a bout of silliness, I also added the starburst, which is a shape that is actually impossible in reality, but might create some interesting gameplay:
Another thing related to galaxy shapes which weve looked at a bit is static galaxies. This is the system modders use to generate a specific preset galaxy, for instance certain total conversion mods. It turns out that the code for generating a random galaxy (i.e. those we usually generate) and that used for static galaxies differ completely, which specifically became an issue during galaxy generation: the two different versions of the code probably did the same thing once upon a time, but inevitably the code has diverged, so modders reported numerous issues with static galaxies. For instance, it was not possible to use secondary species, and there were a number of small issues with starting setups, such as starbases and sectors not automatically spawning. It also wouldnt call the empire_init on_actions, which would cause further divergence from how things would be if a regular galaxy was generated. Anyway, I probably shouldnt talk about this, since the code has not yet even been approved, but I tried to combine as much of the random galaxy and static galaxy code as possible, resolving a fair few issues with the latter, and hopefully making it more robust in the future. (Also, on the prompting of a modder, I added the ability to specify "effect = { }" in a particular systems entry in a static galaxy. And you should now be able to create several static galaxy maps rather than being limited to one). So, basically, for players who enjoy mods that create bespoke galaxies, you will probably be able to get access to much improved versions of these in the near future. (Can't promise it will definitely be in the next patch).
[ 2022-09-29 08:00:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hello scavengers!
This week marks the launch of the Toxoids Species Pack in all its poisonous goodness, with many quests undertaken, debris fields scavenged, planets relentlessly industrialized, and an uncountable number of leaders dead from old age at the ripe old age of childbirth. We hope you've been enjoying it.
[previewyoutube=BHTRLCEwcKY;full][/previewyoutube]
What's New in 3.5.2 Fornax?
Today we have a small hotfix for a couple of problems that immediately arose. 3.5.2 "Fornax" Patch Notes: [expand type=details] ################################################################# ########################## VERSION 3.5.2 ########################### ################################################################# Bugfix -The Toxic Entity will no longer bless those unworthy. (You cannot select a Toxic God solar system initializer without the Knights of the Toxic God origin) -Crisis will now destroy the starbases of the systems it invades, fixing an issue where the AI would sometimes not land their armies on colonies properly. -You can no longer put the Toxic God's strike craft on your ships if you defeat the Prethoryn [/expand] We'll be continuing to watch your feedback for things that may go into a possible 3.5.3 in a few weeks.
What's New in 3.6 Orion?
What, already? Can't you give them a week or two with what we have before starting the future dev diaries? OK, fine. We'll save most of it for a little while. Next week we can have CheerfulGoth's talk about [spoiler]Space Whales[/spoiler], after which Caligula Caesar can then tell them about the new [spoiler]Galaxy Shapes[/spoiler] or the [spoiler]Spiritualist Federation[/spoiler] planned for Orion. Then Alfray Stryke, Gruntsatwork, and I will talk about the potential [spoiler]Ascension Path changes[/spoiler], [spoiler]Combat Balance work[/spoiler], and the [spoiler]Orion Open Beta[/spoiler]. We'll of course have to include a disclaimer about how some of those latter changes Alfray Stryke, Gruntsatwork, and I are working on are planned for Orion, but could get delayed or even removed entirely if the Open Beta feedback indicates that's the correct move.
Okay, so what can we give them today?
There's this: Toxoids Discord Dev Q&A Transcript! Thanks to everyone that came and asked questions! We'll see you next week with CheerfulGoth's tales of the Tiyanki. Until then, stay toxic!
[ 2022-09-22 08:00:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=BHTRLCEwcKY;full][/previewyoutube]
The Toxoids Species Pack is Available Now!
Rise from the primordial ooze all the way to the stars! The Toxoids Species Pack gives players the chance to inhabit toxic worlds, gamble the future of their planets for immediate gains, and make the tough sacrifices necessary to survive a hostile galaxy.
NEW ORIGINS
Knights of the Toxic God: In the depths of your homeworld, rumors rumble of a true power buried under the toxic sludge. Do you dare to dredge up the secrets of your past - and potentially unleash a biological colossus?
Overtuned: Play as a species that can gain more and more traits at the cost of its own lifespan, and live for today without worrying about sticking around for tomorrow!
NEW CIVICS
Toxic Baths: Grow your population fast with a fresh infusion of mutagenic sludge - so long as youre willing to tolerate the costs to your planet and your people!
Scavengers: Harvest debris and destruction for quick construction projects of your own.
Relentless Industrialists: If youre going to keep up with demand, youre going to have to learn to ignore all of those petty regulations and negative opinions. The surviving population will thank you for all of the resources you gain!
NEW TRAITS
Incubator: Repopulate quickly when your planet is empty, but those growth facilities can fill up fast!
Inorganic Breath: Your own people are a source of valuable exotic gasses! Its a shame the respirators are so expensive.
Noxious: Other species cant stand being around you, and it seems like your mere existence is making your planets awful places to live. On the other hand, other empires have a very difficult time wanting to fight or subjugate you!
Exotic Metabolism: Youve adapted to ask are you going to eat that? where other species would be calling the hazmat team. Eat faster, live longer, and enjoy a terrifying rainbow of flavors!
COSMETICS
New ships, species portraits, and cityscapes to remind the galaxy that beauty is in the stinging, burning eye of the beholder
A new toxoids advisor voice, helpfully providing news and advice dripping with noxious sarcasm
and much more!
*Some features may require content sold separately
The Ends Justify the Ruins in the Toxoids Species Pack. Get it today!
Click here to read Full Patch Notes and Known Issues.
[ 2022-09-20 16:07:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! Today were here to talk about the new free features and improvements coming in the 3.5 Fornax update, named after the Constellation Fornax, which was initially named le Fourneau Chymique (the Chemical Furnace) in 1756 by French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille. A very suitable name for the free patch associated with the Toxoids Species Pack. The free 3.5 Fornax Update will release alongside the Toxoids Species Pack on September 20th! You can also read the full (English Only) patch notes here.
Difficulty Settings
With the improvements that have been made to the AI over the past few updates, weve noticed that new players are finding things a bit more challenging and there have been some requests for an easier difficulty setting. As such, were adding a Civilian Difficulty Setting, and making Cadet the default difficulty. Civilian difficulty further increases the bonuses that players receive from Cadet difficulty, as well as an additional bonus towards completing First Contact. We also know that a good many of you reading this may be looking for additional challenges, and for us not to be making the game easier, so we have added new options for Scaling Difficulty. Scaling Difficulty can now be set to Off, Mid-Game or Late-Game. If set to Mid-Game, AI bonuses will scale from zero to the selected difficulty by the Mid-Game Start Year. Late-Game will provide the same behavior as previously enabling Scaling Difficulty. Difficulty Adjusted AI Modifiers is a new toggle that can dramatically increase the strength of the AI on higher difficulty levels as the game progresses. If enabled, the AI bonuses apply to all other modifiers the AI accumulates. As an example, the Geothermal Fracking technology grants +20% Minerals from Miners. On Grand Admiral difficulty with this setting enabled, this technology would instead grant AI empires a 40% bonus. The Crisis Type setting will now have an option for All, which will spawn every crisis sequentially, with each subsequent crisis being stronger than the previous. The galaxy is counting on you. No pressure.
New Story Content
The 3.5 Fornax Update will also come alongside some new story events and prescription systems. There are 2 Systems with Unique Archaeological Sites, 3 Systems where one might pick up some ship technology, and 3 systems with extra habitable planets. Additionally, there are 2 new Archaeological Sites (Larionessi Refuge and Zevox), as well as the Singing Planet anomaly.
Culture Workers
Back in the Unity overhaul in 3.3, a lot of you wanted Culture Workers to remain, for roleplay and flavor reasons. While we didnt have time during the 3.3 Unity Overhaul to re-add the Culture Worker, weve done so over the summer! Culture workers now have a base output/upkeep, and variable effects based on your governing Ethics (which are doubled for Fanatic Ethics). Culture worker jobs are provided by Monuments in addition to the Ministry of Culture.
- Base Output/Upkeep:
- 10% governing ethics attraction.
- 4 Unity Output
- 3 Consumer Goods Upkeep
- In addition, Culture Workers have variable outputs depending on your empire ethics. These modifiers are doubled for Fanatic ethics.
- Spiritualist: -2.5% Amenity Usage (Planet)
- Materialist: +2 Amenities (Planet)
- Militarist: +1 Naval Capacity (Empire)
- Pacifist: +2.5% Trade from Living Standards (Planet)
- Xenophobe: +2.5% Citizen Happiness (Planet)
- Xenophile: -2.5% Pop Upkeep (Planet)
- Egalitarian: -2.5% Pop Housing Usage (Planet)
- Authoritarian: +3 Edict Fund (Country)
- 4 Unity Output
- +2.5% Stability
- 3 Consumer Goods Upkeep
New Lithoid Traits for Plantoids owners
Lithoid pops will now gain access to the Radiotropic and Crystallization traits, provided you own the Plantoid Species Pack as well. Lithoid pops with the Radiotrophic trait exchange 50% of their mineral upkeep for energy, and pops living on Tomb worlds have no energy upkeep. This trait also gives pops +10% Tomb World habitability, and get +10% pop growth speed on Tomb Worlds. The Crystallization trait is the Lithoid version of the Plantoid Budding trait, each pop working as a slave or better produces 0.02 Organic Pop Assembly, this growth will stack with other sources of Organic Pop Assembly.
Relic Rebalance
In the 3.5 Fornax Update, youll find a lot of Relics Active and Passive Effects have changed! There were several main objectives for this rebalance:
- Crisis Relics were supposed to be your Victory Lap, but were relatively balanced overall. Buff the Crisis Relics!
- Precursor Relics are hit or miss at best, with many players restarting games until they got a Precursor that they liked. Buff the least popular Relics!
- Event Relics used to vary from very powerful to forgettable, here the main goal was to Buff the Forgettable Relics! So they would be useful for a wider variety of playstyles.
- Several Relics were extremely overpowered if you got them early, and remained powerful throughout the game. Bring these Relics into line with the current balance of all the other Relics.
UI Improvements
The Stellaris Dev team has been hard at work all summer, adding various UI Improvements to the game for 3.5 Fornax. We wont go through all of them, but well briefly discuss some of the biggest changes:
- Megastructures and Megastructure Construction Sites will now show in the Outliner!
- Starbases will now indicate they can be upgraded in the outliner
- The tooltip and description for Commercial Pacts will now give info on the best locations for new Branch Offices in their empire if you are a Megacorp and have sufficient intel
- Tooltip for cannot afford fleet reinforcement now says what resources you are lacking
- Added an icon to the situation progress elements that more clearly shows if situation progress has halted
- Situation tooltips will now display time until the next stage as well as time until the situation is completed
- Added planetary designation icon to the species modification UI
AI Improvements
Improving the AI is something that we are constantly iterating on, and trying to get right. While we could just make an AI that plays the meta, and wins every time, it wouldnt feel very good to players if thats the way the game played out every time -- there are mods that do this already and to great effect. Our goal is to make the AI competitive, but also make it believable from the perspective of the empires youre interacting with inside Stellaris.
- Added a 10-year cooldown before AI can propose a Diplomatic Action which was previously timed out by the player.
- AI will now try to assign otherwise idle fleets to the nearest fleet group as auxiliaries during war, which will make them follow other fleets with current military objectives, effectively reducing the amount of AI fleets idling during wars
- AI will now actively attempt to increase its fleet capacity via buildings such as strongholds when they have researched a repeatable technology in the end game
- AI will now downgrade Bastion-type Starbases which are no longer close enough to a valid threat in order to free up their Starbase capacity.
- AI will now have a higher acceptance of Status Quo Peace if they are in an unreachable war for an extended period, fixing issues where AI empires need to wait for war exhaustion to reach 100% before setting a status quo
- Fixed AI not being able to use defense platforms and made it focus on building those in the capital system and on Bastion starbases
- Fixes an issue where AI would rather downgrade an existing starbase rather than cancel the construction of a new one when over the starbase cap
- Hive mind AI will no longer build solar panels on their anchorage starbases
- Improved AI's budgeting and rationale for building orbital ring modules and buildings, so it will now build the most useful ones more consistently
- Improvements to AI logic for building megastructures. It will no longer cease building any other megastructures because it is currently making a hyper relay, and it will now build habitats and hyper relays even if it is capped by the megastructure build limits.
- Made the AI more likely to build defensive platforms if it is near but not at the naval cap
- Made the AI more likely to try and upgrade orbital rings (and less likely to attempt to downgrade them, which was meant to be impossible)
- Necroid Empires will now force grow their subservient species on their planets
- Necrophage empires will now correctly use their special Necroid purge type on all species that are not their subspecies
- Pacifists now have an increased desire to build bastion starbases, changed from Militarists
- Removed AI directive to delete all its upgraded buildings using a special resource if it fell into a deficit in that resource. Going bankrupt will downgrade all those buildings anyway, and downgrading is less disruptive than deleting
Performance Improvements
Performance is one of the big three issues that we are constantly iterating on and trying to improve in Stellaris. In 3.5 Fornax, we have made some progress in this area, which will hopefully improve the late-game performance for at least some of our Community.
- Parallelised batch modifier updates (large reduction of lag spike potential in the late game), Situations progress, strike craft movement, country migration, spynetworks' daily updates, ship jump drive and experience calculations, checks of policies' validity, country opinion caching and some parts of planets' handling of monthly pop growth
- Multithreaded working out trade value and resources for systems' map icon displays on the galaxy map
- Added Caching of colonies in system, starbase types, and wars, things that were previously calculated on the fly
- Optimized AI decision-making for where to build Megastructures and Branch Offices
- Optimized checking whether a country can use a certain hyper relay or gateway
- Improved performance of the game checking if a planet is a colony, slightly (it does this a lot, so this speeds up e.g. intel updating non-negligibly)
- Optimized a few events frequently called via on_planet_surveyed (since planets can be surveyed and unsurveyed via the intel system)
- Reduced the performance cost of auto migration on the monthly tick (by about half)
More Achievements!
Our Art Department had so much fun making art for the new achievements in Overlord that they have demanded that we add even more achievements. We have added a total of 19 new achievements, 3 for each Species Pack (including Toxoids), as well as 1 for Synthetic Dawn.. because.. Well, why not? We didnt design the achievements based on puns. We swear.
Accessibility Improvements
Accessibility is something we always try to be conscious of when designing new systems for Stellaris, and while there is more in our development pipeline for Accessibility Improvements, with 3.5 Fornax we have added: Mouse Side Button Mode
- Maps Mouse 4 and Mouse 5 to toggle pause state and galactic/system views
- Options are Normal, Inverted, or Off
- Page Up and Page Down will now also change the Camera Zoom Level
When can I play it?
The 3.5 Fornax update will release alongside the Toxoid Species Pack (which you can Preorder Now!) on September 20th! You can also read the full (English Only) patch notes here. Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy these latest additions to Stellaris!
[ 2022-09-15 12:34:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! We have some videos here that we thought we would share, for those of you who haven't been keeping up with the Toxoids Dev Diaries. If you'd prefer text versions of these videos, you can find Overtuned here and Knights of the Toxic God here. The Toxoids Species Pack will feature:
- 15 New Portraits (+1 Machine Portrait for owners of Synthetic Dawn)
- New Toxoid Shipset
- 2 New Origins
- Knights of the Toxic God
- Overtuned
- 3 New Civics
- Mutagenic Spas
- Scavengers
- Relentless Industrialists
- 4 New Species Traits
- Incubators
- Inorganic Breath
- Noxious
- Exotic Metabolism
- 1 New Ascension Perk
- Detox
- New Toxoid Advisor Voice
- New Toxoid City Set, Room Backdrop
[ 2022-09-15 03:51:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Mr. Cosmogone
Greetings squires!
Mr. Cosmogone here, on behalf of the Lord Commander Eladrin who gave me his blessing to tell you more about the mysterious Knights of the Toxic God.
Pledge thy Life to Realm and Quest
The Origin is content oriented, but it does come with some unique mechanics to support the narrative and put you in charge of an empire dedicated to a quest.
Starting with your Homeworld, which still bears the scars of the passage of the Toxic God in the form of five unique blockers:
I hope you brought your swimsuit!
As the quest progresses, you might get a chance to upgrade these into powerful assets, but at the beginning of the game, they will be a thorn in your side, reducing the number districts you can build on your homeworld.
Fear not however, for the Order has built you a brand new habitat to serve as your springboard to galactic dominance!
The habitat comes with several unique features, including an imposing building:
No fearsome Foe nor Vastness black, No moat or wild shall hold thee back.
Knights are expensive specialists who will provide you with quest progress, and increasingly powerful boons as time goes on, while the Lord Commander is a ruler stratum job which is basically a super knight.
Both of these jobs are supported by Squires, who mainly come from the habitats unique districts:
Let Faith and Honor be thy Guide, To Chivalry and Oath abide.
All of this is done in service of the Quest, a unique situation which will slowly progress towards, well towards something.. Well, actually, multiple somethings which will be up to you to discover.
Lets just say that its going to take a while, and cost you a considerable amount of money and alloys.
1819 months is about 150 years, but there are ways to speed up the quest.
The Quest, the Knights and the Order will definitely put some stress on your economy in the early game, but having the elite of your nation ready to serve also comes with a few benefits, like the Knightly Duties policy:
Now raise thy Sword, take up the Fight
And while your start will be rougher than most, should you overcome the challenges thrown your way, you will find that the knights can prove very valuable. Thats all for today, Ill leave you with a peek at a late game habitat setup that occurred during one of our playtest, with only a little bit of minmaxing involved:
Swear thy Vow, and Rise a Knight!
What's Next?
Is it time already? This Thursday we'll have PDX-Loke providing the Patch Notes for the Toxoids Species Pack and the Stellaris 3.5 "Fornax" update! See you then! [previewyoutube=V-jTfq0ztCo;full][/previewyoutube]
[ 2022-09-13 11:14:52 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Alec Beals
Hey all!
My name is Alec Beals, one of the several concept artists who worked on the Toxoids Species Pack. Today Ill be taking you on a very fashionable walk through the seriously expanded clothing component of this pack. In a later dev diary we will go into more detail examining the design process of a species, so this will be an informally focused look at our experiences creating the clothing of Toxoids.
A Quick History of Toxoids
At the end of our visual development process we found ourselves with a diverse array of species for the Toxoid pack. Our intention was to give around a third of them something to wear. By and large, we dont specify which species will or wont be clothed at the start of this process. Most artists generate concepts for creatures designed to wear nothing at all, as well as many with clothing designed specifically for that species in mind. Once we are sufficiently satisfied with how much weve explored what is and is not a Toxoid, the actual process of deciding the characteristics of our species begins. This is a fairly quick process where we assign common traits (scholar, brute, aggressive, needs pants, etc.) To everyone, after thats done its time to start the clothing process!
Inspiration
Toxoids represented a great opportunity for us to try out some aesthetic choices that had either been missing or only slightly touched on before in Stellaris. It also represented a recurring challenge: How do we create a series of space-faring civilizations that maybe arent so neat and tidy without making them look like a bunch of post-apocalyptic hitchhikers? In the end, we vaguely defined three broad areas of inspiration: High Tech Survivalism, Wasteland Toxpunk, and Protective Fashion. While we drew from each, we decided to avoid the wasteland aesthetic since it clashed the most with our sci-fi setting.
Finding style
After this, we are at the point where we feel comfortable with both having a unique style while also ensuring that it fits well into the grander scheme of Stellaris. For this pack, we especially wanted to reference some of the great work done on the ships in the clothing we designed. Another decision made early on was in keeping with the visual and narrative theme that roles like Scientist and General should have a decidedly more roughed-up appearance. After all, Toxoids arent afraid to get their numerous hands dirty.
Initially we do not focus too much on what roles each outfit will end up as and more with what makes interesting design. Here are some rough sketches I did using a basic human to explore quite a few styles.
Making it Unique
Whats so special about all this! You say, between rounds of Caravan Slots. For all prior Species Packs, clothing has been a relatively straightforward process of creating a single outfit per role, and giving it several different sizes. These have always done a great job but they come with drawbacks; they mask the creature from the neck down and generally come with more limited animation opportunities.
A comparison of a role outfit amongst multiple species from earlier Stellaris and Toxoids. With the new camera settings requiring clothing designs far beyond the original scope as well as our diverse cast of candidates, we felt that in order to do these designs justice we were going to need to create outfits more specific to each species:
Some early stages of concept and refinement. Some designs such as the Ruler seen here lasted for quite a while before being changed. We also decided that robots shouldnt be left out of the fun, so Toxoids is introducing the first ever clothed machine! With support of our fantastic animators, we even discussed the idea of introducing masks, backpacks, and more as ways of adding variety. Eventually it was decided that each species would get more or less a tailor-made outfit.
A continuation from the above image, this time with color and material passes, as well as figuring out how to apply each design uniquely to each of our clothed species.
An example of how assets are re-used and modified and also how small details can make noticeable differences between species. Achieving this would require re-using as many assets as possible while still making enough changes, new details, and species-conforming components that each one felt as if it was designed for the individual wearer.
An example of ways we were looking to expand the clothing even more, also look how many artists are on this single page! As previously mentioned, we wanted to explore add-ons such as masks, backpacks and more. Some of these concepts were not new to Stellaris, but we still felt like they could be expanded. For the most part, during our initial development phase these proved to be costly in terms of time (complicated with the layering of species, gender, role and color variant) or in terms of the in-engine animation budget. This is the nature of the job, and its important to know when to push towards a solution and when to recognize something isnt feasible.
Robots with Skirts
As mentioned above, we have a robot with clothes! This was an aspiration I specifically wanted to see as a long time Stellaris player. After all, even a cold and calculating near-immortal machine might want to try on an outfit or two for a change. Initially, I had hoped we could have both different heads and unique back components for each role, as well as animated sub-components. However, as with some of the other designs for non-machine clothing, these added up substantially, and quickly exceeded what can be done in-engine. Eventually it was settled on using different heads as well as a specific back component for the Ruler.
Personally I think this adds a nice variety to our machine species, and I hope you agree because I would love to draw robots with pants next.
Bringing it to life
Once the designs and rendering are done, the next step is to separate and export files for animation. Breaking out and cleaning up each separate layer can take a while. Across all our species theres around 150-200 total assets just for the clothing. Separating these for animation can also be a finicky process. Depending on the complexity of the costume, the method used requires all assets to line up with one another, since they will have to be layered over the original character. Any additional components (such as the cape for a governor) need to also fit in a space unfilled by anything else. Below is a .gif showcasing how this works across an entire set:
Not shown: the dozens of stray pixels I had to hunt down during cleanup The next step is animation, which deserves its own Dev Diary for all the effort and complexity it entails, but for now I would like to shout out our amazing animators Hannah and Mota for all the work theyve done on this and everything else for Toxoids. For the clothing, assets just shown being broken apart are reconstructed and layed in a 3D program (by Maya in our case). Heres an example of what that looks like outside of the normal in-game Stellaris view:
Here you can see the robot being re-constructed in Maya Extensive work is then done rigging and preparing the 2d images to actually be able to warp and bend in a way to help stimulate more fluid animation. This can take a variety of forms, such as creating nodes where fabric and banners can bend to areas where the 2d art will stretch and pull during animation. This is also where the animation budget I mentioned before rears its ugly, if not sensible head. All the points of articulation you see add up quite fast when you also include the character beneath the clothes.
The art can take quite a beating in the process of being rigged for animation
Youve heard of T-pose, and A-pose, but have you ever heard of the You want HOW MUCH for alloys!? pose? Further complicating everything is the need for the clothing to work with some pretty dynamic animations for characters. Luckily, our animation team is amazing and was able to pinpoint any clothing that may have needed to be removed before this part of the process began. Originally there were way more hanging banners than we see now.
Coming together, final thoughts
Finally its all pieced together, beautifully animated, and in game! After the requisite amount of corrosive sludge, sweat and tears, weve got some finely attired Toxoids. Minor tweaks aside, at this point the work is done:
This individual has never once considered if theres more to life than being really, really, ridiculously well dressed. Believe it or not, there are even more steps and miscellaneous details that Ive completely passed over as to not turn this into a novel. To my knowledge, this was the most intensive and experimental clothing development cycle of any pack so far. For a variety of reasons, quite a bit of what was attempted wasnt able to make it into the final build. However, I still feel like everything done for Toxoids can push Stellaris even further going forward. Thanks for reading. I hope you learned something and best of luck in your future space endeavors!
Next Week
Next Tuesday we'll be back with [spoiler]The Tale of the Questing Knights[/spoiler]. See you then! Also, Pre-Order Toxoids Now!
[ 2022-09-08 11:00:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=voDMl86jK7k;full][/previewyoutube] Rise from the primordial ooze with the Toxoids Species Pack on September 20th for USD9.99/GBP7.19, and is available to preorder now! In Toxoids, you will gain the chance to detoxify toxic worlds, sacrifice the long-term survival of your species for short-term gains, and make the tough choices necessary to survive a hostile galaxy. The Toxoids Species Pack includes:
- 15 New Species Portraits (+1 for the owners of the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack)
- 2 New Origins
- Knights of the Toxic God
- Overtuned
- 3 New Civics
- Toxic Baths
- Scavengers
- Relentless Industrialists
- 4 New Species Traits
- Incubators
- Inorganic Breath
- Noxious
- Exotic Metabolism
- New Toxic Shipset, cityscape, throne room backdrop, and advisor voice
[ 2022-09-07 16:09:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin and Gruntsatwork
Sup, trash bangers?
Today well be taking a look at some of the features coming in the Toxoids Species Pack. As were on an accelerated dev diary schedule, theres no time to lose! Lets jump straight into this and turn it over to Gruntsatwork.
Overtuned
One of our two new Origins for Toxoids, Overtuned is the grim but exalting reminder that a brief life burns the brightest. Through invasive surgery and by modifying biochemical pathways you can impart your pops with 13 new overtuned traits. Each of these traits is a mirror to an already existing, far more survivable trait.
As you can see, the overtuned traits can even be picked with their natural opposing traits, or stacked with their mirrors for all your double-dipping needs. There are next to no restrictions on mixing them with other traits, so feel free to create whatever biological monstrosities you can imagine. In practice, the overtuned traits are all about as strong or slightly weaker than their mirror traits, usually cheaper in trait point cost and reduce your leader lifespan depending on their point cost. In addition to their normal effects, the origin will also grant you access to a new edict called Damn the Consequences. This edict doubles the positive effect of all overtuned traits, but also doubles the upkeep of those pops. Its unity cost is a percentage of your own unity income, so you will always be able to damn the consequences. Furthermore, the edict has a lock-in period of 5 years, which means you will not be able to cancel the edict until it has been active for those 5 years.
New Traits
With Toxoids, we are adding 4 new traits to the game, available to all portraits and 3 of these traits will be available at gamestart.
Incubators
Incubator pops will enjoy only a modest bonus on their capital worlds given their starting number of pops but fresh colonies will quickly reveal its full power.
Inorganic Breath
A small but flavorful addition to our trait roster, to better support your exotic needs.
Noxious
Noxious pops will decrease the happiness of all non-noxious pops on the same planet, while in turn receiving a happiness bonus for every non-noxious and therefore unhappy pop. Talk about toxic neighbors.
Exotic Metabolism
Exotic Metabolism however, is an advanced Trait and will thus require fully finished Genetic Ascension, as it requires a robust economy to support their exotic upkeep.
Its benefits are strong, its upkeep severe and it requires a deep investment into biological enhancements, we hope to see some interesting builds with this.
Civics
Toxoids will also bring 3 new civics with it, to give you more of that slimy but satisfying feeling.
Mutagenic Spas
Our first civic that does not start you out with its special building, Mutagenic Spas, and all of its alternate versions, give you the option of boosting your pop growth on highly industrialized worlds, as your pops enjoy the fruits of your pollution.
Relentless Industrialists
Relentless Industrialists will have to deal with an ongoing situation about the environmental effects of their increased efficiency in alloy and consumer goods production. Of course, should you be cold-hearted and profit-oriented enough, it becomes a self-solving problem, if you can afford to work in such a hostile environment.
Scavengers
Arriving hand in hand with one of our changes for the free patch, namely the ability to choose what you wish to gain from debris, alloys or research, the new Scavenger civic will allow an empire to gain both benefits as well as salvage some actual ships from the debris. Megacorps have access to all three civics.
Detox Ascension Perk
Even the toughest species cant quite survive in a world that is entirely poisonous. 50% poisonous however is another beast altogether. With the Detox ascension perk, empires will be able to turn those giant balls of death into giant balls of not-quite-death. Given how perilous toxic worlds are, this act of terraforming will be a bit more involved than normal, since even after the initial phase makes them colonizable, there will be remnants of their toxic pasts interfering with their prosperity.
Next Dev Diary
This Thursday well have a dev diary from the Artists, including some interesting things about the characters outfits and what weve done differently there. See you then! Don't forget you can Pre-Order Toxoids Now!
[ 2022-09-06 11:00:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! Today were announcing our next Species Pack that will be released alongside the 3.5 Fornax update, the Toxoids! Whether you burn the future for the benefit of today or scavenge the past, Toxoids are survivors. Toxoids gives you the chance to gamble the future of your planets for immediate gains, and make the tough sacrifices necessary to survive a hostile galaxy. Pre-Order the Toxoids Species Pack today! [previewyoutube=voDMl86jK7k;full][/previewyoutube] The Toxoids Species Pack will be bubbling over with things such as:
New Origins:
Knights of the Toxic God:
In the depths of your homeworld, rumors rumble of a true power buried under the toxic sludge. Do you dare to dredge up the secrets of your past - and potentially unleash them upon the galaxy?
Overtuned:
The candle that burns the brightest, burns itself into the galaxys memory! Play as a species that can gain more and more traits at the cost of its own lifespan, and live for today without worrying about sticking around for tomorrow!
New Civics:
Toxic Baths:
Grow your population fast with a fresh infusion of mutagenic sludge - so long as youre willing to tolerate the costs to your planet and your people!
Scavengers:
One empires trash is your empires treasure! Dont be too proud to harvest debris and destruction for quick construction projects of your own.
Relentless Industrialists:
If youre going to keep up with demand, youre going to have to learn to ignore all of those petty regulations and negative opinions. The surviving population will thank you for all of the resources you gain!
New Traits:
Incubator:
Repopulate quickly when your planet is empty, but those growth facilities can fill up fast!
Inorganic Breath:
Your own people are a source of valuable exotic gasses! Its a shame the respirators are so expensive.
Noxious:
Other species cant stand being around you, and it seems like your mere existence is making your planets awful places to live. On the other hand, other empires have a very difficult time wanting to fight or subjugate you, and its hilarious to see the look on their faces when youre in the room!
Exotic Metabolism:
Youve adapted to ask are you going to eat that? where other species would be calling the hazmat team. Eat faster, live longer, and enjoy a terrifying rainbow of flavors!
New Cosmetics:
Species portraits, ship models, and cityscapes that only a mother could love.
New Advisor:
Grow your empire alongside a relentless source of noxious sarcasm! The Toxoids Species Pack and the Stellaris 3.5 Fornax update will be released on September 20, 2022, and will be playable at PDXCon this Friday and Saturday at Mnchenbryggeriet here in Stockholm. Well be moving to a rapid dev diary release schedule for the next few weeks as we attempt to cover everything thats in the Toxoids Species Pack. Well see you next Tuesday with the next Stellaris Dev Diary.
Pre-Order the Toxoids Species Pack today!
[ 2022-09-01 19:36:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hello again!
This week were going to look at some more things that are going into the upcoming Stellaris 3.5 Fornax release.
Megastructures in the Outliner
One of the things going into Fornax is something weve wanted for a very long time on PC - a Megastructure section in the Outliner.
As shown here, the Megastructures section will list all megastructures within your territory, including ruined ones as well as Gateway Sites (but not completed gateways, as that would be too much clutter). Never again will you lose track of where you left that Gateway Site or Ruined Sentry Array!
Accessibility Improvements
We talked about some accessibility improvement goals before the summer, and some of them are going into Fornax.
When enabled, Mouse Side Button Mode allows Mouse 4 and Mouse 5 to toggle pause state and galactic/system views. Page Up and Page Down will also now adjust the camera zoom level. Other accessibility improvement projects are ongoing for future updates. I hope to have text to speech available in an Open Beta later on in the year for the 3.6 Orion update.
Golden Tiyanki Status
The Caravansary Caravan Coalition will now reward their most loyal patrons with Golden Tiyanki status. Those who have purchased a sufficient number of Reliquaries will now be granted the honor of being able to purchase as many as they like, directly for credits, with no more cooldowns for their best customers.
Good luck, the Galatron is waiting! (This should make a couple of related achievements significantly less painful to acquire. They do eventually get pretty expensive, however.)
More Achievements
Continuing from last week, here are the rest of the new Species Pack achievements we're planning for Fornax. Aquatics:
Holy Water - Drench a Fallen Empires holy world.
There Be Dragons - Have at least 13 dragons you own in your capital system. Necroids:
With Great Power - As a Necrophage, do not invade any pre-ftl civilisations until you defeat the crisis OR have at least 10 observation stations around pre-ftl worlds.
Recent History - As a Memorialist empire, have Galactic Memorials on five tomb worlds that did not start the game as tomb worlds. Lithoids:
Room for Desert - Consume another empires desert homeworld.
Can You Smell What the Lithoids are Cooking? - As a Lithoid empire, keep another Lithoid pop as Livestock or Process them. Plantoids:
Growing Like Weeds - As a budding species that does not have the Clone Army origin, achieve a base organic pop assembly of at least 10/month on your capital.
Tend the Garden - Become the custodian of Wenkwort Artem, designating it a resort world with a Ranger Lodge and all original blockers present. Humanoids:
Directive 67 - As a Clone Soldier empire, denounce a Spiritualist fallen empire as a crisis in the Galactic Community then destroy them, without blowing up their final planet. (We're so mean to the Spiritualist Fallen Empire!)
Destroy the People of Earth! - As the Commonwealth of Man, destroy the United Nations of Earth with your ruler being a human with a symbiotic brainslug, without blowing up their final planet. We also have one more being added to Synthetic Dawn:
Machine Supremacy - Win the game as a machine uprising. Now Ill turn it over to Iggy for an update on Relics.
Relic Updates
Hello everyone! I am Iggy and I am back to show you the fruit of our collaboration from back earlier in the summer. Firstly we reviewed some of the feedback about the untouched relics so please enjoy even more relics with enhanced flavor and fewer pain points.
The Khans Throne now grants you access to the Satrapy Subject Preset letting you extort fleet capacity from your subject. Also the Defragmentor will now have a usage for non-robot empires granting 10% energy upkeep reduction to all jobs buildings and districts.
And finally the Head of Zarqlan now has the spiritualist ethics attraction locked to the active, and the size of the fleet increases with activation, up to a max after 5 uses. Also due to popular demand the head will now spawn for the AI instead of the player 25% of the time and the AI will colonize holy worlds when they possess the relic. Further Changes to Already Balanced Relics:
- The Psionic Archive now allows Gestalt Empires to find Psionic Theory which in turn will grant them access to Zro Mining.
- The Brood Queen will now grant a stacking empire modifier to swarm type weapons (Missiles and Strike Craft) for each use and will also spawn the Carrier variant on use.
- The Pox Sample will increase the likelihood that you find Biological Technologies
- The Omnicodex now gives +25 relation with non robot empires if you are a robot one.
- The Reality Perforator active modifiers now last 2-5 years instead of 1-5 years
Next Week and PDXCon
Next week is PDXCon at Mnchenbryggeriet here in Stockholm, but well still have a dev diary taking a peek at some of the content coming out with Fornax. If you come visit us at the convention, well have Fornax up and running, a Stellaris Q&A Panel where we'll be taking questions from the audience, and Im planning on holding a small workshop where well reveal how our summer experiments have gone. There are still a few tickets left if you're in the area. See you next week!
[ 2022-08-25 11:19:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hi everyone, I hope youve had a wonderful summer.
Today well start going into some of the things planned for the upcoming Stellaris 3.5 Fornax update.
New Difficulty Settings
With the improvements that have been made to the AI over the past few updates, weve noticed that new players are finding things a bit more challenging and there have been some requests for an easier difficulty setting. As such, were adding a Civilian difficulty setting, and making Cadet the default difficulty. Civilian difficulty further increases the bonuses players receive in Cadet difficulty, with an additional bonus towards completing First Contact.
Now, were aware that most of you that read these dev diaries are looking for a greater challenge rather than the opposite, but we have some things for you as well. Two new settings are being added that allow you to better customize the difficulty of your game. Rather than being a simple toggle, Scaling Difficulty can now be set to Off, Mid Game, or Late Game - if set to Mid Game, AI bonuses will scale from zero to the selected difficulty by the Mid-Game Start Year. Late Game will provide the current behavior of scaling to the selected difficulty by the End-Game Start Year.
Difficulty Adjusted AI Modifiers is a new toggle that can dramatically increase the strength of the AI on higher difficulty levels as the game progresses. If enabled, the AI bonuses apply to all other modifiers the AI accumulates. As an example, the Geothermal Fracking technology grants +20% Minerals from Miners. On Grand Admiral difficulty with this setting enabled, this technology would instead grant AI empires a 40% bonus.
Fornax will also bring one other tiny little addition to the galaxy generation settings for players looking for an extra challenge.
The Crisis Type setting will now have an option for All, which will spawn every crisis sequentially, with each subsequent crisis being stronger than the previous. The galaxy is counting on you. No pressure.
Species Pack Achievements
Stellaris achievements have always been a bit tongue in cheek and enjoyable to make, if not always enjoyable to complete. (Im looking at you, Galatron achievements!) Weve submitted to the demands of our artists, and will be adding three achievements to each species pack that has previously been released. While Stellaris achievements have traditionally always been careful to not require cross-dlc, we didnt enforce that restriction to some of these since we felt that if you have all of the Species Packs you probably have everything else already. Heres one example from each. Aquatics:
Fishing for Trouble - As an angler empire, provoke a Fallen Empire into declaring war on you and win. Necroids:
Theres a Zombie on my Lawn - As a Necroid empire, eradicate a Plantoid empire, or vice-versa, without blowing up their final planet. Lithoids:
Rock Beats Paper - As a Lithoid empire, show the Galactic Community exactly what you think of that strongly worded letter. Humanoids:
Strange Mood - As a Master Crafter empire, fully construct a megastructure while you have a Covenant with a Shroud entity. Plantoids:
DIY - As an Idyllic Bloom empire, convert the junk worlds of the Ketling Star Pack into Gaia Worlds.
Next Week
Next week I'll spoil more of the achievements, and go into some quality of life changes. Iggy will also give a compiled update on relic changes based on your feedback.
We'll be a bit slow with replies to this dev diary as we're currently at a staff conference. We'll catch up as we can. See you next week!
[ 2022-08-18 08:00:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
PDXCON2022 returns to Stockholm this September! Join us on the road to PDXCON2022 with another Grand Campaign!
Watch our developers as they play through a customized game of Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, and Stellaris and follow laws passed by our Community-led Senate. Following the great tradition laid down last year for PDXCON, there may be familiar faces, returning arch-rivals, and maybe some new friends!
What is a Grand Campaign?
The story of a Grand Campaign is written in the senate, where Community-formed and led parties propose and vote on laws, that our developers have to follow on stream. This Grand Campaign spans the timeframe of four of our games, spanning several thousand years of alt-human history. Starting in the Crusader Kings era, all the way to Stellaris. In between games, we will transfer elements of one era to the next, so that the entire game is played in the same universe. This year, we've teamed up with some of your favorite modders, to make it that much more entertaining!
How can I get involved?
Join the Senate on discord! Parties on discord are still accepting newcomers, and while the bills have been passed for Crusader Kings, there are still around a thousand years of history, and ~40 hours of streams that your laws can directly affect! There will also be quick votes held on discord for in-game events deemed appropriate to pass to the senate by our Game Masters.
Where can I watch?
Join us on twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive, starting at 1000 AM CEST (0800 UTC)!
What is PDXCON?
PDXCON2022 is an opportunity to meet some of your favorite developers, live in person at our annual Paradox Convention! Join a massive board game session, attend Paradox games orchestra & play our games (potentially including some cool new unreleased content)! Get the tickets while supplies last! [url=https://paradoxinteractive.com/pdxcon]
See you there!
[ 2022-08-02 14:21:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Alfray_Stryke
Hey folks, and I hope everyone is having a fantastic summer/winter break (depending on your hemisphere). Ive found some time between my other summer experiments and the work were doing for 3.5 Fornax to dive into the feedback/suggestions lists. Since Eladrin is still away, youre getting another sneak preview of what Ive been working on.
One of the frequent requests from the Unity rework that was part of the 3.3 Libra patch earlier this year was for us to return Culture Workers to the game. Currently, they exist only as jobs provided by some event buildings, but many in the Community felt we removed some flavor/roleplay aspect when we removed them.
Over summer, Ive been experimenting with potentially adding them back in. For context, in the current version of the game Culture Workers are a Specialist job that belongs to their own economic category, produce 3 Unity and 3 Society Research with an upkeep of 2 Consumer Goods.
Lets have a look at an Autochthon Monument constructed by the UNE shortly after the start of the game.
Showing the Culture Workers with some unusual modifiers
To start with, the monument is retaining the Unity from Jobs modifier and the passive Unity production per Ascension Perk, but additionally provides 2/4/6 Culture Worker jobs per tier of the monument. The same applies to the Corporate version of the monument.
The sharp-eyed might notice that theres some odd modifiers being given: Worker Happiness? Pop Upkeep Reduction? What, might you ask, has happened?
In this experiment, were looking at Culture Workers having an output that depends on the Ethics of your empire. After all, what influences your culture the most if not your ethics?
These are the ethics-based modifiers were currently testing and whether their effects are Empire-wide or only affecting the planet that the building has been constructed on:
- Materialist: +2 Amenities (Planet)
- Spiritualist: -2.5% Amenity Usage (Planet)
- Militarist: +1 Naval Capacity (Empire)
- Pacifist: -2.5% Crime (Planet)
- Egalitarian: +2.5% Worker Happiness (Planet)
- Authoritarian: +5 Ruler Political Power (Planet)
- Xenophobe: +3 Edict Fund (Empire)
- Xenophile: -2.5% Pop Upkeep (Planet)
A hive-mind sensorium site providing 2 evaluator jobs. Chronicle Drones provide the same Unity and Amenities output but give an additional +2.5% Stability in exchange for slightly higher upkeep (and that upkeep being based off of the upkeep cost of the pop working the job). Like their individualist equivalents, these jobs both now belong to the Evaluator sub-category of the Administrators jobs. Im not sure if well have another surprise dev diary over summer, but our normal schedule should resume once Eladrins back and well start delving into 3.5. Regardless Ill be keeping a close eye on this thread for your thoughts, suggestions and any feedback.
[ 2022-07-25 07:01:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! We've got a special treat for you today! MaxTheCatfish is here with our Top 10 Beginner and Intermediate Tips and Tricks for galactic domination! Whether its your first game, or if you've played hundreds of hours, you never know what you might learn! Top 10 Beginner Tips: [previewyoutube=ib3B_-9Cs-Q;full][/previewyoutube] Top 10 Intermediate Tips: [previewyoutube=wpJO9zvXtnw;full][/previewyoutube] What would you consider your #1 "Expert" Tip? Let us know in the comments!
[ 2022-07-12 14:12:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Iggy
Hello everyone, Iggy here with a surprise dev diary! I am a Content Designer who has worked as a Custodian for the past year or so, bringing you content like Permanent Employment and the Leviathan Parades.
I know Eladrin said no more diaries until after summer But he is not around to stop me!
I couldnt wait to present the initial relic balance changes and to give all of you lovely folks a chance to voice your feedback. Summer is historically a time of experimentation when it comes to Paradox, and why not experiment with how we gather feedback?
So lets get started with some of my biggest bugbears regarding how the relics currently work, what I have done to address the issues, and why.
Crisis Relics
The relics you get from defeating the various crises in the game are pretty tame - compared to all other relics, they are actually quite balanced. That is not good enough. These are your final reward for defeating the most powerful foe in the galaxy! Lets give you a bit of a victory lap and have some fun with this.
As you can see, you no longer will gain a measly 30 Society Research. Instead, a massive 50% modifier to all society techs is in your future.
Precursor Relics
Another issue that has plagued Stellaris for quite some time is the viability of your starting precursor. While we are not giving you the ability to choose which precursor you spawn with, I wanted to make each relic at least somewhat useful for most empires. Here, I also felt the need for some slight adjustments to the Cybrex and the Baol, as both are a bit too powerful in the early game, without removing their usefulness in the late game.
The Baol Decision now has an activation time, but you also gain hive Nu-Baol pops if you are a hivemind. If the 10% resource output wasnt enough there is also a reason to keep using the relic on existing Gaia worlds to get a special form of Gaia Habitability on your organic pops.
The Cybrex War Forge might start out slower, but as the game progresses youlll notice that it becomes more powerful than ever before, capable of processing additional minerals after each use. What this rebalance also allows us to do is to make some relics slightly less annoying to use. At the top of my list, we have the Javorian Pox Sample memed about being the worst relic in the game. Having to activate a relic and then go in and micro every fleet only for the bombardment stance to fall off a few years later made it a real frustrating relic to use as well.
Now we will always be ready to spread some plague.
Event Relics
Finally, we got some event relics that vary from powerful to forgettable. Here the main goal was to spice up the use of relics that might not have benefits for every playstyles. Blade of the Huntress is gaining diplomatic weight as your envoy swings it around the galactic community floor; the Omnicodex can now produce hivemind pops if you are one yourself. You can find all currently planned changes below, these are of course subject to change:
Precursor Relics:
Javorian Pox: Current:
- Passive: +20 Leader Lifespan
- Active: Javorian Pox Orbital Bombardment stance
- Passive: Bombardment Stance and +20 Leader Lifespan
- Active: 50% increased biology research
- Active instantly creates a Gaia world
- The active decision takes 5 years to create a Gaia world
- If the decision is activated on a Gaia World, all organic pops on the world get an empowered Gaia World Habitability preference granting them +5% resource output on Gaia Worlds.
- The Nu-Baol will be hivemind if you are a hivemind
- Passive: +1 pop on every new colony
- Passive: +1 pop on every new colony, +20% energy weapon fire rate
- Passive:
- -50% Shroud Cooldown
- Better Shroud odds
- Active:
- Event granting numerous boons, including a 500 experience boost which becomes quite lacking in the late game.
- Passive:
- -50% Shroud Cooldown
- Better Shroud odds
- Unlocks an edict granting leader XP, longevity, and accident prevention for a zro upkeep.
- +5 Ruler Max Level
- Active: The knowledge option now always levels your ruler up a level instead of granting a flat xp bonus.
- Passive: 5% More alloys, and allowing the building of the most powerful buildable army in the game.
- Active: Spend 10000 minerals and gain 5000 alloys.
- Passive: Allows the building of the most powerful buildable army in the game.
- Active: Spend 2000 minerals and gain 1000 alloys. Effect Increases by 2000 minerals and 1000 alloys each time its activated up to a cap of 20,000 alloys.
- Active: Grants one of 4 random buffs lasting for 1 year.
- Active: Grants one of 4 random buffs lasting for 1 - 5 years.
Event Relics:
Blade of the Huntress: Current:
- Passive: +25% Army Morale +2 Planet Sensor Range
- Active: +25% Sublight Speed for 10 years
- Passive: +25% Army Morale 20% more diplo weight
- Active: +25% Sublight Speed for 10 years
- Active: Adds 3 pops of a random species
- Active: Adds 3 pops of a random species, if you are a hivemind they are also hive-minded.
- Active: 10% more happiness
- Active: 10% more happiness and 10 stability to every planet.
- Active: Can grant 3-5 rare resources among other deposits.
- Active: Can grant 1-3 rare resource deposits. Nothing else changed.
Crisis Relics:
Extradimensional Warlock: Current:
- Passive: +15% Sublight Speed
- Active: +100% more jumpdrive range
- Passive: +30% Sublight speed, +20% weapon range
- Active:
- +100% more jumpdrive range
- -50% jump cooldown reduction
- +75% more accuracy and range on your Quantum Catapult
- Passive: +30 society research
- Active: Spawns a small fleet
- Passive: +50% society research
- Active: Spawns a sizeable fleet
- Passive: +100% Pop Assembly Speed
- Passive:
- +100% Pop Assembly Speed
- Allows the construction of 2 of each megastructure instead of 1.
Unchanged:
Khan's Throne
- Felt like it had a solid theme already with a solid bonus.
- Has both an early game and a late-game bonus as well as superb flavor.
- Research is always top tier and random should stay random.
- Allows you to convert unity into energy. The passive not having any benefit to a spiritualist empire does feel kinda bad. Might look into it.
- There is no way we can ever make this relic comparable to the bonus you get for embracing the Worm. It would have to be the strongest relic on this list.
- One of two ways to get a repeatable source of Minor Artifacts, very powerful.
- Is the Galatron
[ 2022-07-07 11:04:26 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all, Another hotfix has arrived, containing a select few fixes primarily for improving multiplayer stability. Please find the patch notes below. STELLARIS 3.4.5 "CEPHEUS" PATCH NOTES [expand type=details] ################################################################# ######################### VERSION 3.4.5 ########################## ################################################################# Megacorps should no longer create rival Megacorps after winning an Impose Ideology war. Fixed War Names sometimes being empty on the war pin tooltip. Fixed Out of Sync upon hotjoining as an Overlord. Fixed Out of Sync after triggering a revolt. [/expand] Please note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 3.4.4 game going, please back up the save file before trying to load the save in 3.4.5. You can roll back to a prior version by right-clicking on Stellaris in your library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the 3.4.4 from the drop-down. If you experience crashing or other issues on 3.4.5, first disable all mods and start a new save. If the issue persists, please report it on the Bug Report forums.
[ 2022-06-29 08:23:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
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[ 2022-06-23 17:04:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all! We're happy to announce the release of the 3.4.4 patch. Please find the final patch notes below. It's another herculean effort from the team that we hope you will enjoy! "STELLARIS 3.4.4 "CEPHEUS" PATCH NOTES [expand type=details] ################################################################# ######################### VERSION 3.4.4 ########################## #################################################################
Improvements
- Automated Exploration and Automated Research are now available from the start of the game rather than being tech-locked.
- Construction ships now have an Automated Construction mode, which will automatically build Research and Mining Stations over appropriate deposits. (It will not automatically build Observation Stations, Hyper Relays, or other constructions.)
- Imperial Fiefdom changes
- The Imperial Fiefdom overlord is now barred from terms that allow it to join offensive wars of their subjects.
- Every member of the empire that does not start with the overlord nearby will start with a small overlord colony/outpost in the vicinity.
- The overlord's empire will be connected by 'Derelict Gateways' that the overlord can use, but which become ruined once the civil war starts
- Changed it so players can remain loyal to the overlord when the civil war begins, if they so wish. The AI will always go independent.
- Added Hydroponics Station designation for habitats. This designation removes 2 housing from Habitation Districts in exchange for adding 1 farmer jobs.
- Planetary automation will now seek to clear blockers as soon as there is any need. It now uses the same formula as the indicator on the outliner: i.e. if it is limiting the number of districts OR if there are buildings that could be built by clearing the blockers OR if planet growth speed is reduced (previous behaviour was to only check the first of those).
- Made some clarifications for the Shroudwalkers, so it is clearer what asset you are getting from them and how the planet modifier works.
- Criminal pops no longer reduce the efficiency of criminal syndicate branch offices.
- Added Quantum Catapult event art.
- added Hyper Relay event art image.
- New Overlord music track will now play in the main menu
- Empires created by releasing sectors or from status quo peace deals now have some starting resources to not immediately suffer deficits.
- Clarified that Subjugation War Terms only apply to Vassals and Subsidiaries.
- The tooltips for Resource Contribution terms now inform you that they block trade deals for the resources involved.
- The Reemployment Center holding now shows when the next zombie will be created.
- Spawning Pools and Progenitor Nests are now under the Pop Assembly building category.
- Added subjugation agreement caps of +1,000 / -10,000.
- Refined the Teachers of the Shroud requirements tooltip.
- Clarified that Progenitor Hives can only release sectors if they do not have the devouring swarm civic.
- Players will now be notified when their Overlord has built Holdings on their planet
- Starbase Transit Hubs now also fulfill the necessary requirement for slaves or non-sapient robots to automatically migrate from planets in the system.
- The dividend event now specifies which enclave is paying its dues.
- AI logic for voting on Free Migration has been adjusted to more strictly align with Xenophile/Xenophobe ethics.
- AI 10 year voting cooldown extended to now apply to other diplo actions like declaring war.
- Clarified the tooltip for the Strip Mine decision.
- Added a setting to Galaxy Setup that permits the disabling of L-Gates.
- Planetary Automation will now build pre-emptively if there are 0 jobs available on a planet or if there is an unemployed pop that can work a job from the suggested building. This should solve both the case where we shouldn't make specialist jobs for slaves but also allows us to preemptively build more jobs to allow for auto migration.
- Added an Upgrade module to the Planetary Automation such that players can now enable/disable automatically upgrading buildings on their planets.
- Vassal loyalty tooltip in subjugation view now includes full breakdown information.
- Subjects are now informed that they have a -50% penalty to diplomatic weight.
- Namelists Hive Mind 1 and Hive Mind 2 now feature names unique to each ship size (Corvette, Destroyer, etc.).
- If you don't use Consumer Goods and conquer a planet with factories on it, they will be removed.
Balance
- Ships now gain 5 exp per day in battle instead of 1.
- Doubled the base unity output of telepaths.
- Unified effects for Citadel of Faith, Auto-Curating Vault and equivalent buildings.
- The Shroudwalkers have learned their lesson, and will no longer teach any Fanatic Purifiers about the Shroud. The Fanatic Purifiers will have to look for another origin now.
- Bulwark Battlewright aura now provides 0.25% hull regen per day.
- Bulwark Watch network effect no longer spawns too many armies. Instead it increases planetary stability by 5.
- Being an overlord now imparts a -1000 penalty when attempting to subjugate other overlords diplomatically.
- The Ministry of Science and Vigil Command now have an empire limit of 1.
- The upkeep of Overlord Beholder jobs now scale with the tier of the Bulwark subject (and thus the increase in the defensive platform cap).
- Reworked the Ministry of Science holding. It no longer provides increased research speed for the overlord depending on the number of science ships in orbit of the subject's planet. Instead it now gives subject researchers (or calculators or brain drones) research output for the overlord, with an appropriate increase in upkeep.
- The Orbital Assembly Complex now increases the effects of modules built on the planet's orbital ring.
- Habitation Modules provide +0.5 building slots.
- Orbital Shipyards gain +1 Shipyard capacity.
- Orbital Anchorages provide +2 Naval Capacity.
- Planetary Defense Guns and Batteries support +1 Defensive Platforms.
- Halved the hull and armor regen provided by Regenerative Hull Tissue, Nanite Repair System, Nanobot Cloud, Mercenaries, and Devouring Swarm. This will also affect the regeneration of leviathans and other entities that make use of these ship components.
- Retrofitting ships will no longer pay out the resources left over after the retrofit costs have been applied.
- Effects that granted modifiers to ship upgrade costs have been replaced with other modifiers. It should no longer be possible to be in a situation where it is cheaper to build empty ships and then upgrade them than to build the intended design right away.
- Significantly reduced the amount of time it takes to build Ion Cannons.
- Reduced weighting for clerks as pops seemed to really want to work as them instead of miners.
- Merc dividends no longer give ships when the patron is near or above their naval cap.
- Moved bonus resource storage for silos from tech_global_production_strategy to tech_construction_templates.
- If you declare a force ideology war on an empire, all non-gestalt overlords and subjects that are called into the war will also be subject to the force ideology effect.
- The Traditionalist faction in empires with the Teachers of the Shroud origin now approves of following the teachings of the Shroudwalkers.
Bugfixes
- Fixed the notification message for forced approval of a negotiated agreement (due to lack of influence) saying the proposal was declined. Note that this fix is only applied to the english localization and will be applied in other languages in a future patch.
- Fixed ETA not being displayed in the fleet view.
- Progenitor Hives can now lease fleets without them being debuffed.
- AI will now no longer stop all colonisation during lategame crises. (Its instruction to not attempt to colonise and instead focus on war now expires in the midgame)
- The Khan should no longer be hostile to mercenaries.
- The Khan no longer counts as a Satrapy and thus can invade planets.
- Admirals no longer abandon their post on leased fleets.
- Planetary automation will no longer seek to build gene clinics if you are a synthetically-ascended empire.
- Fixed issue where planetary automation would upgrade Necrophage Centers of Elevation (which is often undesirable as it may lead to you running out of necrophytes)
- Newly colonized planets will now have their planet automation turned on if they are in an automated sector.
- You can no longer build an orbital ring around a planet with a destroyed orbital ring.
- When an orbital ring is destroyed, the planet owner now gains ownership of the ruined ring immediately.
- The Salvagers no longer introduce themselves to void dwelling empires as soon as they finish researching any technology.
- Mercenary fleet contracts can now be terminated after vassal has been integrated.
- Added missing localization for Imperial Fiefdom opinion modifiers.
- Traditions will now be properly transferred to vassals created from sectors
- Fixed "Proceed" button in the vassal agreement terms renegotiation menu sometimes being inactive when it shouldnt.
- Fixed template with an unnamed flag causing issues when loading affected game saves from previous versions.
- Fixed modifying a species (via the species modification interface) applying default species rights instead of the rights of the species you were modifying (particularly painful if default rights were assimilation)
- Fixed possibility to set gender specific ruler titles, for example King and Queen.
- Fixed some issues with display of leader names.
- Corrected Message in the Canopy archaeology site outcome options.
- You can no longer declare wars of vassalisation against Inward Perfectionists.
- Fixed relay network modifiers being removed after specialist vassal levels up.
- You cannot use a secret fealty wargoal if you are at war with the overlord of the empire that has sworn fealty to you.
- Expel Corporation wars now close branch offices on your planets and those of your subjects belonging to the targeted MegaCorp.
- The Manifesti faction now use their faction icon.
- Pacifier colossus weapon can now target machine and hive worlds.
- The Traditionalist faction in empires with the Teachers of the Shroud origin now approves of following the teachings of the Shroudwalkers.
- Changed Subjugation War Terms to no longer apply invalid terms for Subsidiaries (such as integration allowed).
- Become the Crisis Bring into the Fold wargoal now respects your subjugation policy.
- Become the Crisis Bring into the Fold wargoal now causes subjugated empires to become subsidiaries if the BtC empire is a megacorp.
- Empires that are Brought into the Fold by a Scion now correctly convert to the Scion preset (as do their subjects).
- Subjects that bounce between vassal/subsidiary and protectorate states should now correctly gain the protectorate bonuses whenever they become a protectorate.
- Subsidiaries created via subjugation war now inherit the base subsidiary agreement restrictions.
- Fixed slave armies not being trainable.
- Splitting Imperial Fiefdom Overlord can no longer cause systems with shared ownership of planets.
- Hive-minds that reform into having the Memorialist civic no longer need to restart the game to build galactic memorials.
- Implemented the Subterranean Nation modifier directly into the origin so any empire that inherits the origin will gain the modifiers.
- Subterranean/Mantle Dwellers now correctly have the Cave Dweller trait.
- Fixed Terravores claiming that they could build Organic Sanctuary holdings.
- The tooltip for Habitat Administration buildings now lists the effects of colonist jobs for Void Dwellers.
- The job description of colonists now states that they can provide minerals instead of food.
- Fixed megacorps creating more megacorps from wars in some cases where the origins of the newly created empires weren't set correctly.
- Signs of the Locus now checks for the correct diplomatic stance. In addition, it now checks your border policy as well.
- Strongholds no longer benefit from Resistance is Frugal
- Borderless Authority and Personal Oversight correctly increase the number of subject holdings overlords can build.
- Fixed "Shroud Stench" planetary modifier lacking an icon
- Updated tooltip for how to unlock branch office buildings.
- Resized and moved the upgrade button for orbital rings.
- Fixed a tooltip in the Situations interface showing erroneous information ("outcome in -65 months") if the Situation was ticking down
- Fixed some issues with the setup of the starting Ring World in advanced AI empires
- Fixed Gestalt Empire Governors Skill tooltips saying Crime instead of Deviancy
- Fixed incorrect description string variable in the "Atmospheric Nanobot Dispersal"
- Fixed Emergency Election button showing two Unity symbols
- Mercenary armies now properly spawn at the client capital.
- Pressing ESC during mercenary diplomacy should now bring you back to the main menu or close the diplomacy window.
- Tactical advice against the gray tempest is only available when the gray tempest is triggered, not just when the L Cluster is opened.
- Patrons can no longer recall fleets that they themselves are hiring.
- Mercenary admirals now have suitable loc for their profession.
- Fixed some cases where our tooltip system would unnecessarily generate "all of the following must be true" (when there was only one condition)
- Fixed incomplete information about what Telepaths do when looking at buildings that provide them
- Mercenary Enclaves are no longer listed as Honorbound Warriors in the contacts list.
- Fixed incorrect tooltip when scrapping robots during the alloy deficit situation
- You can no longer force ideology on gestalt empires by declaring war on their subjects.
- Fixed issue with some of the modifiers of modules not applying to the Starbase.
- Fixed Insidious Ophidians event chain accidentally removing the "Poor Quality Minerals" permanent planetary modifier.
- Fixed a case where specialist subjects leveling up could end up disabling relay network effects.
- The Spiritualist Fallen Empire has figured out what Star Eaters are and will now Awaken if you use one to blow up one of their holy worlds.
- Fixed new districts sometimes not appearing after the Superfluous Terraforming Equipment event.
- It is no longer possible for Overlords to transfer more science than they generate to their subjects.
- Fixed not being able to order ship construction in Mega Shipyards after they had been conquered.
- Fixed broken tooltip for destroyed orbital rings.
- Medium Crystal Plating no longer displays the tooltip for the Bulwark Battlewright.
- Mercenary Captains no longer display unlocalized text.
- Fixed the tooltip for the tier 3 orbital ring requesting the wrong capital building.
- Fixed the message response icon on diplomatic notifications blocking click input on the lower half of the notification.
- The No Holding text in the agreements tab is now yellow instead of placeholder pink.
- Fixed missing prescripted empire leader names.
- Fixed ship building buttons in Mega Shipyard view being cut off
Game Stability related fixes and changes:
- Fixed multiplayer out of sync caused by FLEET_ORDERS
- Fixed crash occurring when viewing a system destroyed by a star eater that contained a quantum catapult and simultaneously opening the load menu.
- Fixed crash due to invalid-read CQuantumCatapultFleetOrderButton::IsValid
- Fixed crash due to invalid-write CPlanet::RepairSavegameClearInvalidAndNullDeposits
- Fixed crash from having a subject with 0 empire size.
Modding
- Overlord Holding buildings and Branch Office buildings now support empire_limit = { }
- Added is_human_species scripted trigger if you want additional portraits to be considered humans.
- Added on_fleet_lease_started/ended on_actions for more friendly mod compatibility.
- Fixed load order issues with check_modifier_value.
- Fixed localize_with_value_key and min_mult in scripted modifiers.
- Added GetOriginName localisation command (to clarify an error log).
- Added "has_subject =
" trigger to go with has_overlord. - Greatly improved scope error logging for event targets and script values.
- Added on_starbase_disabled on action and stopped firing on_starbase_destroyed when a starbase is only disabled.
[ 2022-06-21 08:23:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hi! Lets get straight to it!
The 3.4.4 Cepheus patch is planned to be released sometime next week if everything goes well. Heres a preliminary list of things that will be included.
"Stellaris 3.4.4 Cepheus Preliminary Patch Notes"
[expand type=details]
#################################################################
########################## VERSION 3.4.4 ###########################
#################################################################
Improvements
- Automated Exploration and Automated Research are now available from the start of the game rather than being tech-locked.
- Construction ships now have an Automated Construction mode, which will automatically build Research and Mining Stations over appropriate deposits. (It will not automatically build Observation Stations, Hyper Relays, or other constructions.)
- Imperial Fiefdom changes
- The Imperial Fiefdom overlord is now barred from terms that allow it to join offensive wars of their subjects.
- Every member of the empire that does not start with the overlord nearby will start with a small overlord colony/outpost in the vicinity.
- The overlord's empire will be connected by 'Derelict Gateways' that the overlord can use, but which become ruined once the civil war starts
- Changed it so players can remain loyal to the overlord when the civil war begins, if they so wish. The AI will always go independent.
- Added Hydroponics Station designation for habitats. This designation removes 2 housing from Habitation Districts in exchange for adding 1 farmer jobs.
- Planetary automation will now seek to clear blockers as soon as there is any need. It now uses the same formula as the indicator on the outliner: i.e. if it is limiting the number of districts OR if there are buildings that could be built by clearing the blockers OR if planet growth speed is reduced (previous behaviour was to only check the first of those).
- Made some clarifications for the Shroudwalkers, so it is clearer what asset you are getting from them and how the planet modifier works.
- Criminal pops no longer reduce the efficiency of criminal syndicate branch offices
- Quantum Catapult event art image added
- Hyper Relay event art image added
- New Overlord music track will now play in the main menu
- Tooltip now mentions that setting up vassal resource sharing will prevent the affected resources from being traded in regular trade deals later
- Empires created by releasing sectors or from status quo peace deals now have some starting resources to not immediately suffer deficits.
- Clarified that Subjugation War Terms only apply to Vassals and Subsidiaries.
- The tooltips for Resource Contribution terms now inform you that they block trade deals for the resources involved.
- The Reemployment Center holding now shows when the next zombie will be created.
- Spawning Pools and Progenitor Nests are now under the Pop Assembly building category.
- Added subjugation agreement caps of +1,000 / -10,000
- Refined the Teachers of the Shroud requirements tooltip.
- Clarified that Progenitor Hives can only release sectors if they do not have the devouring swarm civic.
- Players will now be notified when their Overlord has built Holdings on their planet
- Starbase Transit Hubs now also fulfill the necessary requirement for slaves or non-sapient robots to automatically migrate from planets in the system.
- The dividend event now specifies which enclave is paying its dues.
- AI logic for voting on Free Migration has been adjusted to more strictly align with Xenophile/Xenophobe ethics
- AI 10 year voting cooldown extended to now apply to other diplo actions like declaring war etc
- Clarified the tooltip for the Strip Mine decision.
Balance
- Ships now gain 5 exp per day in battle instead of 1.
- Doubled the base unity output of telepaths.
- Unified effects for Citadel of Faith, Auto-Curating Vault and equivalent buildings.
- The Shroudwalkers have learned their lesson, and will no longer teach any Fanatic Purifiers about the Shroud. The Fanatic Purifiers will have to look for another origin now.
- Bulwark Battlewright aura now provides 0.25% hull regen per day.
- Bulwark Watch network effect no longer spawns too many armies. Instead it increases planetary stability by 5.
- Being an overlord now imparts a -1000 penalty to diplomatic requests to be subjugated.
- The Ministry of Science and Vigil Command now have an empire limit of 1.
- The upkeep of Overlord Beholder jobs now scale with the tier of the Bulwark subject (and thus the increase in the defensive platform cap).
- Reworked the Ministry of Science holding. It no longer provides increased research speed for the overlord depending on the number of science ships in orbit of the subject's planet. Instead it now gives subject researchers (or calculators or brain drones) research output for the overlord, with an appropriate increase in upkeep.
- The Orbital Assembly Complex now increases the effects of modules built on the planet's orbital ring.
- Habitation Modules provide +0.5 building slots.
- Orbital Shipyards gain +1 Shipyard capacity.
- Orbital Anchorages provide +2 Naval Capacity.
- Planetary Defense Guns and Batteries support +1 Defensive Platforms.
- Halved the hull and armor regen provided by Regenerative Hull Tissue, Nanite Repair System, Nanobot Cloud, Mercenaries, and Devouring Swarm. This will also affect the regeneration of leviathans and other entities that make use of these ship components.
- Retrofitting ships will no longer pay out the resources left over after the retrofit costs have been applied.
- Effects that granted modifiers to ship upgrade costs have been replaced with other modifiers. It should no longer be possible to be in a situation where it is cheaper to build empty ships and then upgrade them than to build them correctly right away.
- Significantly reduced the amount of time it takes to build Ion Cannons. Reduced the base cost and upkeep of Ion Cannons, but they are now affected by components.
- Reduced weighting for clerks as pops seemed to really want to work as them instead of miners
- Merc dividends no longer give ships when the patron is near or above their naval cap.
- Moved bonus resource storage for silos from tech_global_production_strategy to tech_construction_templates
- If you declare a force ideology war on an empire, all non-gestalt overlords and subjects that are called into the war will also be subject to the force ideology effect.
Bugfixes
- Fixed ETA not being displayed in the fleet view
- Progenitor Hives can now lease fleets without them being debuffed
- AI will now no longer stop all colonisation during lategame crises. (Its instruction to not attempt to colonise and instead focus on war now expires in the midgame)
- Khan should no longer be hostile to mercenaries.
- Admirals no longer abandon their post on leased fleets.
- Planetary automation will no longer seek to build gene clinics if you are a synthetically-ascended empire.
- Fixed issue where planetary automation would upgrade Necrophage Centers of Elevation (which is often undesirable as it may lead to you running out of necrophytes)
- Newly colonized planets will now have their planet automation turned on if they are in an automated sector
- You can no longer build an orbital ring around a planet with a destroyed orbital ring.
- When an orbital ring is destroyed, the planet owner gains ownership of the ruined ring immediately.
- Fixed broken tooltip for destroyed orbital rings.
- The Salvagers no longer introduce themselves to void dwelling empires as soon as they finish researching any technology.
- Mercenary fleet contract can now be terminated after vassal has been integrated
- Added localization for Imperial Fiefdom opinion modifiers.
- Traditions will now be properly transferred to vassals created from sectors
- Fixed "Proceed" button in the vassal agreement terms renegotiation menu sometimes being inactive
- Fixed template with an unnamed flag causing issues with game loading
- Fixed modifying a species (via the species modification interface) applying default species rights instead of the rights of the species you were modifying (particularly painful if default rights were assimilation)
- Fixed possibility to set gender specific ruler titles, for example King and Queen
- Fix some issues with display of leader names
- Corrected Message in the Canopy archaeology site outcome options
- Vassal loyalty tooltip in subjugation view now includes full breakdown information
- Fixed relay network modifiers being removed after specialist vassal levels up
- Fixed missing localization in mercenary admiral tooltip
- You can no longer declare wars of vassalisation against Inward Perfectionists.
- You cannot use a secret fealty wargoal if you are at war with the overlord of the empire that has sworn fealty to you.
- Medium Crystal Plating no longer displays the tooltip for the Bulwark Battlewright.
- Expel Corporation wars now close branch offices on your planets and those of your subjects belonging to the targeted MegaCorp
- The Manifesti faction now use their faction icon.
- Pacifier colossus weapon can now target machine and hive worlds.
- The Traditionalist faction in empires with the Teachers of the Shroud origin now approves of following the teachings of the Shroudwalkers.
- Changed Subjugation War Terms to no longer apply invalid terms for Subsidiaries (such as integration allowed).
- Become the Crisis Bring into the Fold wargoal now respects your subjugation policy.
- Become the Crisis Bring into the Fold wargoal now causes subjugated empires to become subsidiaries if the BtC empire is a megacorp
- Empires that are Brought into the Fold by a Scion now correctly convert to the Scion preset (as do their subjects)
- Subjects are now informed that they have a -50% penalty to diplomatic weight.
- Subjects that bounce between vassal/subsidiary and protectorate states should now correctly gain the protectorate bonuses whenever they become a protectorate.
- The Khan no longer counts as a Satrapy and thus can invade planets.
- Subsidiaries created via subjugation war now inherit the base subsidiary agreement restrictions
- Fixed slave armies not being trainable.
- Splitting Imperial Fiefdom Overlord can no longer cause systems with shared ownership of planets
- Hive-minds that reform into having the Memorialist civic no longer need to restart the game to build galactic memorials.
- Mercenary Captains no longer display localisation keys.
- Fixed the tooltip for the tier 3 orbital ring requesting the wrong capital building.
- Implemented the Subterranean Nation modifier directly into the origin so any empire that inherits the origin will gain the modifiers.
- Subterranean/Mantle Dwellers now correctly have the Cave Dweller trait.
- Fixed Terravores claiming that they could build Organic Sanctuary holdings.
- The tooltip for Habitat Administration buildings now lists the effects of colonist jobs for Void Dwellers.
- The job description of colonists now states that they can provide minerals instead of food.
- Fixed megacorps creating more megacorps from wars in some cases where the origins of the newly created empires weren't set correctly.
- Signs of the Locus now checks for the correct diplomatic stance. In addition, it now checks your border policy as well.
- Strongholds no longer benefit from Resistance is Frugal
- Borderless Authority and Personal Oversight correctly increase the number of subject holdings overlords can build.
- Fixed "Shroud Stench" planetary modifier lacking an icon
- Updated tooltip for how to unlock branch office buildings.
- Resized and moved the upgrade button for orbital rings.
- Fixed a tooltip in the Situations interface showing erroneous information ("outcome in -65 months") if the Situation was ticking down
- Fixed some issues with the setup of the starting Ring World in advanced AI empires
- Fixed Gestalt Empire Governors Skill tooltips saying Crime instead of Deviancy
- Fixed incorrect description string variable in the "Atmospheric Nanobot Dispersal"
- Fixed Emergency Election button showing two Unity symbols
- Admirals no longer abandon their post on leased fleets.
- Mercenary armies now properly spawn at the client capital.
- Pressing ESC during mercenary diplomacy should now bring you back to the main menu or close the diplomacy window.
- Tactical advice against the gray tempest is only available when the gray tempest is triggered, not just when the L Cluster is opened.
- Patrons can no longer recall fleets that they themselves are hiring.
- Mercenary admirals now have suitable loc for their profession.
- Fixed some cases where our tooltip system would unnecessarily generate "all of the following must be true" (when there was only one condition)
- Fixed incomplete information about what Telepaths do when looking at buildings that provide them
- Mercenary Enclaves are no longer listed as Honorbound Warriors in the contacts list.
- Fixed incorrect tooltip when scrapping robots during the alloy deficit situation
- Fixed the message response icon on diplomatic notifications blocking click input on the lower half of the notification.
- The No Holding text in the agreements tab is now yellow instead of placeholder pink.
- If you don't use Consumer Goods and conquer a planet with factories on it, they will be removed
- Fix missing prescripted empires' leaders' names
- Fixed ship building buttons in Mega Shipyard view being cut off
- You can no longer force ideology on gestalt empires by declaring on their subjects.
- Fixed issue when some of the modifiers of modules didn't apply to the Starbase.
- Fixed Insidious Ophidians event chain accidentally removing the "Poor Quality Minerals" permanent planetary modifier
Game Stability related fixes and changes:
- Fixed multiplayer out of sync due to FLEET_ORDERS
- Fixed crash occurring when viewing a system destroyed by a star eater that contained a quantum catapult and simultaneously opening load menu
- Fixed crash due to invalid-read CQuantumCatapultFleetOrderButton::IsValid
- Fixed crash due to invalid-write CPlanet::RepairSavegameClearInvalidAndNullDeposits
- Fixed crash from having a subject with 0 empire size
Modding
- Overlord Holding buildings and Branch Office buildings now support empire_limit = { }
- Added is_human_species scripted trigger if you want additional portraits to be considered humans.
- Added on_fleet_lease_started/ended on_actions for more friendly mod compatibility
- Fixed load order issues with check_modifier_value
- Fixed localize_with_value_key and min_mult in scripted modifiers
- Added GetOriginName localisation command (to clarify an error log)
- Added "has_subject =
" trigger to go with has_overlord - Greatly improved scope error logging for event targets and script values
[ 2022-06-16 11:00:40 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hello!
The team is working on the 3.4.4 patch as I write this - we should have a list of patch notes as next weeks DD. Today well be discussing some less concrete things.
We often find ourselves with a bit of free time during the summer to experiment with different systems that strike our fancy. Previous such experiments yielded the Lithoid traits (which changed the way we make Species Packs forever) and the first trials of Industrial Districts. Often they dont work out, or need a lot of iteration before turning into something usable, but thats okay - these are intentionally framed as experiments with lower pressure.
Rather than doing a review of what did and didnt work after the summer, I want to give a preview of some of the systems were looking to experiment with, but with the caveat that these experiments may or may not pan out.
None of this is guaranteed, and Im not giving timelines for release even if they do work out!
Relic Balance
Iggy has asked to look at relics and has written up proposals for a balance pass upon them. In his own words [quote=Iggy] Relics are meant to be fun and game-changing. They are supposed to be powerful and unique items that can change the course of your empire. The issue, however, is that they are not all equal. So with a future update, I hope to at least narrow the gap between the relics a bit. I have mainly split the relics into three sets.
- Event-based ones that are fine to have a niche and semi-powerful effects, think Omnicodex and Blade of the Huntress.
- Precursor Relics should be strong and useful for every single empire. I am not promising that the Jovian Pox will be top tier for pacifists or that the Psionic Archive will be the best machine relic. But they will at least have neat effects.
- Crisis Relics which are awarded for defeating the crisis should be a bit of a victory lap. You have won! It should not give you 30 society research.
Accessibility Improvements
MonzUn has been leading a drive for improved accessibility options in Stellaris. Some of the things were looking at include adding more functionality for mouse side buttons, possible text-to-speech for events, and functionality like hotkeys for zooming in and out. At his suggestion, some of us have also started playing the game with various color reshaders active to simulate different color vision deficiencies, to help find the worst issues and ways to resolve them. If you have suggestions or accessibility problems that you face while playing Stellaris, please let us know.
Traditions
With the flexibility in how empires can choose traditions that we introduced in 3.1 "Lem", Alfray Stryke is planning some experiments looking at introducing new tradition trees. These are looking at how gating tradition trees behind various triggers might influence the game. There have been some ideas suggested about introducing tradition trees that are locked behind ascension perks or origins, and we're interested to see where these may lead.
Deep In the Code Mines
Caligula Caesar has been finding places where we could expand our uses of multithreading, and experimenting with the way modifiers are calculated, with a particular eye towards the late game.
Fleet Combat Balance
Meanwhile, my planned experiments primarily have to do with fleet combat. Things Im looking forward to looking at include:
- Providing a late game role for Destroyers and Cruisers, and providing incentives for mixed fleets.
- Increasing the length of fleet combats, reducing the dominance of alpha strikes.
- Experimenting with existing counters, tracking, evasion, and accuracy mechanics.
- This may also end up providing a role for smaller weapons.
- Improving ship behavior based on the roles assigned them by combat computers.
- Yes, Carrier Battleship, I know you have a point defense laser and you're very proud of it. That doesnt mean you should charge into melee to use it.
More Achievements
Our artists had so much fun with the Overlord achievements that they cornered us and demanded that we add some to the species packs. These arent really experiments, but will go live once we figure out what theyll do and implement them. Here are a few as previews.
And then there's this one, which we've called The Darkest Timeline.
What's Next?
These examples aren't comprehensive, there are many other things being worked on that aren't listed here (like previously mentioned Espionage improvements). As mentioned earlier, next week will be the 3.4.4 patch notes, after which well be going on a dev diary hiatus for the summer. See you next week!
[ 2022-06-09 11:06:06 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Tim Wiberg & Lloyd
Hi There,
My Name is Lloyd and I'll be your host for tonight. I am a concept artist working on Stellaris and for this dev diary I'm going to give you a look at how the art team brings an asset to life. Specifically I want to focus on the Salvagers station from the Overlord expansion.
Visdev
The first step is visdev, which is short for visual development. Its where we throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks. At this stage everyone is welcome to contribute, and ideas are often borrowed and expanded upon by other artists.
(Salvager station visdev by Avishek Banerjee) Avishek Banerjee, a concept artist on the team made this piece showing a station that consisted of several circular openings that served as tear-down bays for ships. This is an idea that was borrowed by me and integrated into the final design of the station.
(Salvager station visdev by Lloyd Drake-Brockman) Here you can see some of my early sketches for the Salvagers station. My thinking was to create something that looked like some kind of hive, an industrial place that was hap-hazard but didn't look too unfriendly.
(Early concept of the Salvagers station) When I painted this sketch of the station we decided that this was the way forward, and from that point I was assigned to develop the sketch into a full concept. Although it looks quite different to the final, the shape language and some of the texture ideas are already present in this early version.
Concept
(More early concepts of the Salvagers station) I spent some time exploring alternate shapes for the station. Most were scrapped, but that's part of the job of a concept artist. The whole time I wanted to keep the lotus-pod aesthetic of the big dome in the original sketch. I also wanted the station to have some kind of long-axis; that way I could give the station a strong shape, and it wouldn't just be a big blob of parts. It's important to note that for each iteration the whole art team is giving their feedback and occasionally contributing their own sketches. Every stage of this process is a collaborative effort. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/9703436/80f379c473db2ed1d4c19609f3f32d62ed3539ba.jpg[/img](Early 3D concept of the Salvagers station) As the design got closer to the final, the changes were more subtle. I chose to model the station in Blender so I could more accurately present the complex curves and intricate details. To be clear, this is not the 3D model that goes into the game. It's terribly un-optimized, and it has enough geometry issues to make a 3D artist cry, but it's good enough to give an impression of what the final result will be.
(Early render of the Salvagers station) Here's a beauty render of an early version of the station: [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/9703436/7097e87fc9e11f6b67cd350b8e7455afa378af4f.jpg[/img](Construction notes for the Salvagers station) While it is fun to do beauty renders, the primary goal of the concept phase is to clearly convey ideas. So the final images that I pass along are quite simply presented, with a focus on clarity and structure.
(Final concept for the Salvagers station) Here's the final concept, complete with a couple of break-out drawings that show some of the details in greater clarity. At this point I hand you over to Tim Wiberg who will take you through the 3D art process of creating the station. Hello! My name is Tim Wiberg and I am a 3D artist for Stellaris, where I got the chance to work on the Salvager station for the Overlord expansion. I am going to highlight the process of the in-game models and textures for the station.
Blockout
I started off by blocking out the model based on the awesome concept made by Lloyd. It was important to get a good sense of scale right from the start because we wanted to incorporate existing ships into the station. So I picked different ship types from different Phenotypes that could be in the "back-slots" of the station as a good reference. I quickly exported it to the game just to see if the scale made sense.
(The blockout model in Maya and ingame)
Highpoly
When the blockout was set I started working on the highpoly model. One of the reasons why we do highpoly models is that we can include all the cool details from the concept but still have an optimized model for it when baking it onto the lowpoly model. In this case I didnt have to add that much detail since I knew that the textures later on would do most of the job.
Lowpoly
After the highpoly was done I made a simpler version of the station that details from the highpoly can be transferred to. Then it was time to UV map the model. A lot of the ships in Stellaris are usually symmetrical, to save texture space. This station was not very symmetrical so I put some more time into coming up with solutions to get the highest possible quality with smaller textures.
Baking/Texturing
I used the texturing software Adobe Painter to bake in the details from the highpoly model. Then it was time for me to work on the actual plating materials for the model. We wanted to have a scrappy feel to the whole station, so I used Adobe Designer to create the main plating material. I used small, medium and large shapes for the plating to get a more interesting look.
(Substance Designer WIP screenshot on the main plating material) This process was a bit iterative, but when I was happy with the materials I jumped back to do the texturing on the model. I used the same texture with a different diffuse and roughness for the darker secondary plating parts. Then I could add all the details suchs as lights, windows etc.
Destroyed version
When the final modeling and texturing was done I could quickly create a destroyed version of the Salvager station. I used the same model, but I moved, bent and cut some parts to really get that feeling of it being destroyed. For the material I used the same plating textures, but I darkened the base color, changed roughness values and removed the emissive lights so it could have that destroyed look.
(Models and textures for the Salvager station)
Implementation
I needed to come up with a good solution regarding the ships that were going to be attached in the back of the station. So I attached locators on the model and added the existing ship models in code, and therefore they spawn at the same time the Salvager station spawns in. And that was basically the whole process of making this station. I was really stoked when I got to see Lloyds concept being made for this, and I had a blast the whole process of making this station.
(Final Salvager station models in game)
[ 2022-06-02 11:01:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Mirror Universe Eladrin
Hi!
This week is a short one in Sweden due to holidays, so instead of a normal dev diary we've got a transcript of the Stellaris Q&A session we held on the Official Stellaris Discord Server on May 5th.
You can read the full Q&A transcript on the Stellaris forums.
Next week our concept artist Lloyd will take over with an in-depth diary on how to make a station.
We've got a video preview of this dev diary on our YouTube Channel (I didn't read all 108 questions, sorry) if you want to meet Mirror Universe Stephen. You can watch it here:
[previewyoutube=T6GmHpX6KUw;full][/previewyoutube]
Have a great week!
[ 2022-05-26 11:03:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=LkxV4laqgYI;full][/previewyoutube]
To celebrate our 6th Anniversary, Stellaris is free to play during the Paradox Publisher weekend until May 23rd!
Trying out Stellaris and like what you see? Stellaris is 80% off until May 23rd!
Try it here: https://pdxint.at/3MDO17D
But wait, theres more! Weve updated our Imgur Wallpaper album with the latest wallpapers from Overlord.
Get them free here: Imgur Wallpapers
[ 2022-05-19 18:21:27 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=LkxV4laqgYI;full][/previewyoutube]
To celebrate our 6th Anniversary, Stellaris is free to play during the Paradox Publisher weekend until May 23rd!
Trying out Stellaris and like what you see? Stellaris is 80% off until May 23rd!
Try it here: https://pdxint.at/3MDO17D
But wait, theres more! Weve updated our Imgur Wallpaper album with the latest wallpapers from Overlord.
Get them free here: Imgur Wallpapers
[ 2022-05-19 17:24:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all! I'm happy to announce that the 3.4.3 hotfix should now be live and available on all platforms! On Monday I said that we were planning to address primary issues as quickly as we could and have a larger patch in a few weeks, but the team was absolutely on fire and was able to bring many of the fixes and changes that were originally scheduled for the later release into this hotfix. As a result, the 3.4.3 hotfix is significantly larger than a hotfix would usually be. I want to stress exactly how helpful the bug reports we received were during this process - they made it possible for QA to generate a list of the biggest issues affecting the community and helped us prioritize our work, so thank you for submitting them, and please continue doing so if you run into issues. Without further ado, here are...
"Stellaris 3.4.3 Cepheus Patch Notes"
################################################################# ######################### VERSION 3.4.3 ############################ #################################################################
Revolt and Planet Stability related fixes and changes:
When planets revolt, there is now an option to declare war on the new country immediately rather than being subjected to a 10-year truce. The revolting planet counts as the aggressor. (if the planet joins another empire, and you choose war with them, the other country is now considered the aggressor). Revolt Situations no longer cause escalating stability maluses, as these could make it impossible to stop a revolt. They now give a flat 10 stability malus at all stages. The modifier a pop gets from its faction's happiness now updates properly (so if you make a faction happier, it will correctly make its pops happier now). Fixed it being possible for a Revolt Situation to start and immediately cancel. (They will now only start if the planet is calculated to be currently capable of succeeding the revolt) Planets with Culture Shock can now only start a revolt situation after 8 years of unrest, rather than 1, as it could be quite hard to avoid a revolt on these planets. Otherwise newly-conquered planets have 4-year cooldowns. Improved AI decision making on Revolt Situations. Fixed cases where rebels and released empires would have traditions and techs they should not have had access to (e.g. if non-gestalt pops rebelled against a gestalt empire). Fixed cases where rebels and released empires would use their parent countries scientists for research. I.e. the researcher would be active in both countries, until one country changed their task. Cleaned up some unclear language in the tooltip for Revolt Situation progress (the one describing what you can do about it). Void Dwellers now replace the 1 Politician (or Executive) job from Habitat Administration buildings with two Colonist jobs, which should increase their overall stability in the early game. Doomsday origin starting planets will no longer clamor to revolt. (Revolt Situations are disabled on them.)
Deficit related fixes and changes:
To help them to deal with unexpected deficits, Empires can now purchase basic or advanced resources (specifically food or consumer goods) from the internal market if they have expenses of that type, even if they do not produce any themselves. Fixed never-ending deficits - if you go into a deficit of a resource you do not produce at all, and then stop spending it (i.e. end up with both expenses and income of 0), the deficit will now resolve itself in a few months. This solves issues with machines having inexplicable food and consumer goods deficits, as well as cases where people over-spend rare resources they gained via event. All resources provided for deficit bailouts now scale with the game year, instead of just those for the situation that completed. Fixed a case where the situation approach to cut the maintenance of habitats would count double. Fixed stray reference to Minerals in the Consumer Goods Deficit Situation.
Subject and Agreement related fixes and changes:
Subjects should no longer flip-flop between regular subject types and protectorate. Fix issue where a new subject created from a Status Quo would be made up of the wrong systems. Subjects can no longer sign Defensive Pacts or Guarantee Independence of other empires. Releasing a sector as a subject or enlightening a pre-ftl civilization now ignores the cooldown on agreement negotiation. Increased the effects of Relative Power on AI acceptance of agreement negotiation. Added base acceptance for subsidiary. Tweaked AI acceptance of resource contribution terms, making them more likely to accept harsher tithes/subsidies. AI overlords and subjects will now be more likely to accept specialist subject types that disagree with their ethics. Set minimum Advanced Resources tax for Prospectorium to 15% from 30% Fixed ACTION_DEMAND_SUBJUGATION_NOTIFICATION and ACTION_ASK_TO_BECOME_SUBJUGATED_NOTIFICATION loc keys. Fix for trade deals that are accepted and then canceled immediately. Fixed AI not taking relative power into account when considering subjugation proposals. You can no longer set the priority of overlord catalytic or metallurgist jobs. Overlord catalytic jobs no longer have the pre-3.4 penalties for food deficits. Corporate overlords now have access to the protectorate subject type. Slaves can now be "employed" as mind-thralls. Fixed issue when removing/replacing overlord removes the corporate holdings. The Divided Patronage loyalty penalty is now correctly removed from existing subjects when taking Shared Destiny, Feudal Society or Franchising. You can no longer immediately see the secret fealty status of sectors released as subjects. Rebalanced trade weights for specialist subject leaders. Subjects that are converting to a specialist subject can continue conversion even if they should flip to a protectorate. Subjects that are converting to a specialist subject cannot flip to a protectorate due to low tech level. Empires can no longer have negative diplomatic weight.
Game Stability related fixes and changes:
Fixed crash connected with resettling the last pop of a species. Fixed a rare crash in the Situations interface. Fixed crash with modded shipsets. Fixed a crash that would happen when generating very large galaxies with high hyperlane density. Fixed a crash related to Federation Laws.
Ship related fixes and changes:
Ship starting experience modifiers now work when provided empire-wide (e.g. Fleet Supremacy edict) Fixed tracking not countering evasion. Added missing ship components for Offspring ships. Mercenary fleets are now buffed by Offspring Auras Added missing L2 Battleship section for Offspring Battleships. Fixed ship build and upgrade cost modifiers not being applied correctly when retrofitting ships. Fixed certain AIs (the ones with Calamitous Birth and Private Colony Ships) never colonizing. You can no longer found mercenary enclaves using fleets belonging to your federation or the galactic community.
Other fixes and changes:
Legacy Human portraits have been re-added as an option in empire creation. Fixed pops that grow as specialists on Colonies. Fixed pops which go into a loop of swapping jobs with unemployed specialists constantly resetting strata demotion timers. Amenity job management is now activated even when there are no resources available for planet automation. Fixed an issue where planet automation could not use resources from their local sector stockpile. Planet automation will now check that the unemployed pops can work the jobs that the automation would build, e.g. preventing specialist job creation for slave pops. Reduced the amount of research given by merc dividends. Fixed an issue where systems with primitives in them would not be transferred correctly during a status quo war resolution. Non-Prophet Organization now correctly checks for the Teachers of the Shroud origin. Fixed the Stellar Performance achievement not being awarded properly. Subterranean empire are now shown uncapped mining districts on uncolonised worlds. The Crystalline Bane modifier is now removed if you kill the Crystal Kraken in a dishonorable manner. Progenitor Nest deposit is no longer removed when terraforming a planet into a hive-world. Hive worlds now provide an offspring drone for progenitor hives instead of a spawning drones. Fixed the Cyro Pod warrior event for xenophobes. Meeting the artist enclave now sets the correct flag. Added tooltip on create office branch button when players could not open a branch office. Shroudwalker greeting event now fires only once. Fixed tooltip for starbase resource silos. ###################
New Known Issues
################### Localization for non-English languages related to these changes will be coming in a future update. When negotiating an agreement, if the other party does not wish to accept the terms but does not have the influence necessary to decline, the eventual notification says that the deal timed out and auto-declined when in fact it was auto-accepted.
So what's next?
We'll be continuing to keep an eye on things, so keep those bug reports and feedback flowing. Currently our plan is to have a 3.4.4 update in a few weeks, that will contain localization updates for the 3.4.3 hotfix, more fixes and balance adjustments. A sneak peek of some of the things we're looking at for the planned patch include the following:
"Stellaris 3.4.4 Partial Sneak Peek"
The Imperial Fiefdom will start with colonies close to every member of their empire, so nobody will feel left out of the fold. Those who feel particularly loyal will now also be able to remain a vassal of the empire after the civil war has started. Added Hydroponics Station designation for habitats. This designation removes 2 housing from Habitation Districts in exchange for adding 1 farmer jobs. Ships now gain 5 exp per day in battle instead of 1. Doubled the base unity output of telepaths. Khan should no longer be hostile to mercenaries. Admirals no longer abandon their post on leased fleets. Planetary automation will no longer seek to build gene clinics if you are a synthetically-ascended empire. Planetary automation will now seek to clear blockers as soon as there is any need. It now uses the same formula as the indicator on the outliner: i.e. if it is limiting the number of districts OR if there are buildings that could be built by clearing the blockers OR if planet growth speed is reduced (previous behaviour was to only check the first of those). Fixed issue where planetary automation would upgrade Necrophage Centers of Elevation (which is often undesirable as it may lead to you running out of necrophytes) Newly colonized planets will now have their planet automation turned on if they are in an automated sector Made some clarifications for the Shroudwalkers, so it is clearer what asset you are getting from them and how the planet modifier works. You can no longer build an orbital ring around a planet with a destroyed orbital ring. Added is_human_species scripted trigger if you want additional portraits to be considered humans. Added on_fleet_lease_started/ended on_actions for more friendly mod compatibility Added is_human_species scripted trigger if you want additional portraits to be considered humans.
We also have some quality of life automation improvements planned for 3.4.4:
Automated Exploration and Automated Research are now available from the start of the game rather than being tech-locked. Construction ships now have an Automated Construction mode, which will automatically build Research and Mining Stations over appropriate deposits. (It will not automatically build Observation Stations, Hyper Relays, or other constructions.)
[ 2022-05-19 10:27:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hi all! Overlord's released!
Thanks for playing it and providing so much feedback.
As our AI programmer likes to say, "This is pretty good, but it can be even better!" and I want to talk about our short term plans on the Stellaris team.
We're planning a hotfix in the short term that addresses primary issues as quickly as we can, and a larger update with more fixes in a few weeks. (The larger update includes localization, I'll talk more about that one in this week's dev diary.)
A sneak peek of some of the things we're looking at for the hotfix include the following:
Stellaris 3.4.3 Partial Sneak Peek
[expand type=details]
- Tweaked AI acceptance of resource contribution terms, making them more likely to accept harsher tithes/subsidies.
- AI overlords and subjects will now be more likely to accept specialist subject types that disagree with their ethics.
- Rebalance trade weights for specialist subject leaders.
- Legacy Human portraits have been re-added as an option in empire creation.
- Fixed a bug with Tracking not countering Evasion properly.
- Subjects should no longer flip-flop between regular subject types and protectorate.
- Subjects should no longer be able to cause their Overlord to declare war against themselves.
- Fix for trade deals that are accepted and then canceled immediately.
- Fixed it being possible for a Revolt Situation to start and immediately cancel. (They will now only start if the planet is calculated to be currently capable of succeeding the revolt)
- Planets with Culture Shock can now only start a revolt situation after 8 years of unrest, rather than 1, as it could be quite hard to avoid a revolt on these planets.
- Cleaned up some unclear language in the tooltip for Revolt Situation progress (the one describing what you can do about it) (This only affects English localization until the next patch.)
- Diplomatic weight can no longer go negative.
- Fix a crash connected with resettling last pop of species.
- Fixed an issue where planet automation could not use resources from their local sector stockpile.
- Planet automation will now check that the unemployed pops can work the jobs that the automation would build, e.g. preventing specialist job creation for slave pops.
- Amenity job management can now activate even when there are no resources available for planet automation.
- Progenitor Nest is no longer removed when terraforming a planet into a hive-world.
- All resources provided for deficit bailouts now scale with the game year, instead of just those for the situation that completed.
- Adjusted the amount of research given by merc dividends.
[ 2022-05-16 12:39:35 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=ONAnoNoax5U;full][/previewyoutube] Stellaris: Overlord is now available! Realize your Grand Design with Stellaris: Overlord, the newest major expansion for Stellaris! Overlord brings with it many new features designed to unlock the next level of your Empire. Experience new Origins, build new Megastructures, interact with new Enclaves, and Specialize your Vassals role within your Empire!
Vassal Specializations
Overlord will allow you to assign a Vassal Specialization to your subjects. Each Vassal Specialization has a specific focus: the Bulwark, which focuses on defense and military strength; the Prospectorium, which focuses on resource collection and production; and the Scholarium, which focuses on scientific advancement. Each of these specializations will level up over time, unlocking unique new abilities available only for their chosen Vassal Specialization for you and your Vassals. But beware: vassals now have Loyalty, and disloyal Vassals may swear Secret Fealty to another empire and if you give them the opportunity, you may find yourself in an Allegiance War.
Holdings
Holdings are buildings that are owned by the overlord but are established on a Subjects planet. Overlord comes with a plethora of additional holding building options, as well as the ability to build multiple Holdings in a single Vassals space. Holdings also have the ability to change your subjects opinion of you, so choose wisely: Whether you become a benevolent overlord, or tightly grip the reigns of power, will be determined by your actions.
New Enclaves
There are three new enclaves included in Overlord: the mysterious Shroudwalker enclave, the industrious Salvager Enclave, and the enterprising Mercenary Enclave. The Shroudwalkers will, for a fee, reach into the Shroud to attempt to determine your fate. The Shroud is fickle, however, and whether this proves to be a boon to your empire is not guaranteed. Should they trust you, they may offer you the ability to purchase a Shroud Beacon, which allows your ships to take a shortcut through the Shroud.
Salvager Enclaves pursue Engineering as their natural calling. They will gladly take your combat-proven starships, and will even compensate you for the opportunity. They also regularly have many second-hand vessels for purchase, and can offer you a unique starbase building to speed up repairs, salvage your debris, and more!
The Mercenary Enclave is a change from what we normally know as an Enclave. The Mercenary Enclave is an enclave that you decide to host, as opposed to one you find in the unknowns of space. Rather than sending outdated ships for scrap or dismantling them, with Overlord, you gain the ability to form a Mercenary Enclave, who will take your ships and fight for coin instead of country.
Megastructures
One of the big complaints with Megastructures is that they come so late in the game. Overlord addresses this by adding three new Megastructures, with tech requirements that are lower in the tech tree than Mega Engineering. The Hyper Relay allows fast travel across your empire, the Quantum Catapult can send your fleets on a one-way trip to a portion of the galaxy, and Orbital Rings will allow you to have extra starbase capacity in a system, or provide bonuses to the planet it encircles. Hyper Relays, when constructed in adjacent systems connected by a hyperlane, will allow fast travel across those systems. No longer will your fleets have to slog across an entire system, now they simply enter the Hyper Relay Network, and jump from Relay to Relay across your empire. You can also construct Hyper Relays in your Vassals space and travel through your allies Hyper Relay Network.
The Quantum Catapult allows its owner to fire selected fleets across the galaxy. Be warned that this process isnt guaranteed, and sending multiple fleets can result in your forces spread across a sector or even in uncharted or closed space rather than orbiting your enemys homeworld as you intended.
Orbital Rings allow you to build taller than ever before. Orbital Ring installations can construct ships, optimize production on the planet below and even increase the living space on the planet they encircle.
Origins
In the Imperial Fiefdom Origin, your empire was met and subjugated by an advanced species before it developed faster-than-light travel. Now that youve discovered how to break the lightspeed barrier, your overlord will offer you the opportunity to choose your specialization. Will you be a loyal vassal and cater to your overlords whims, or throw off the shackles and become the overlord yourself? With the Teachers of the Shroud Origin, your species has lived under the influence of a Shroudwalker Enclave for many years, developing your species latent Psionic potential. Now that youve taken your first steps out into the stars, theyve shown you how to build a Shroud Beacon, offering a way to take a shortcut across the Shroud. Your ancestors spent eons watching mysterious streaks in the night sky before the lights went dark. In Slingshot to the Stars, you can discover the device that caused these mysterious streaks, and bring to light the story of the empire that left the ruined Quantum Catapult behind. Subterranean starts you off as a species forced to retreat underground. Whether for protection from predators, shelter from harmful radiation, or safe harbor from atmospheric storms: your species has lived underground for generations. Growing tired of just feasting on the mineral wealth of your home planet, now your species has their eyes set on the stars. Whatever the climate of the planets you find, youve spent generations preparing, and your species is ready to face the challenge. Unlock the power of Offspring Leaders, with the Progenitor Hive Origin. Build unique buildings on your starbases, allowing congregations of Overseers to steer your ships and control the battle. Your leaders have the ability to draw on the collective experiences of the hive mind and incorporate this knowledge into their decision-making, giving them skills and depth of knowledge that single-minded species could only dream of. Progenitor hiveminds can also release sectors as vassals, under the guidance of one of their Offspring Leaders.
Realize your Grand Design with Stellaris: Overlord today!
[ 2022-05-12 16:07:33 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! Only two days till Overlord! If you're still dying to take a look at the new features coming in Overlord and the free 3.4 "Cepheus" update, do we have a treat for you: Four Feature Highlight videos from our friend Ep3o! Curb your desire to know more about Overlord, and learn more about Vassalization Contracts, Specialty Vassal types, the new Megastructures, a spoiler-free look at the new Enclaves, and finally the free features coming in the 3.4 "Cepheus" update!
Vassalization Contracts and Subject Types:
[previewyoutube=puQp-Uv1xQs;full][/previewyoutube]
New Megastructures:
[previewyoutube=H3JjqZx4vzM;full][/previewyoutube]
New Enclaves:
[previewyoutube=HQE6vtSmuRY;full][/previewyoutube]
3.4 "Cepheus" Free Features:
[previewyoutube=_vd6_TWZ4Qg;full][/previewyoutube] Realize your Grand Design with Stellaris: Overlord on May 12th! Wishlist Now and find out the minute it releases!
[ 2022-05-10 20:03:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community, Today we have released the full patch notes for Overlord and the 3.4 Cepheus update. You can read them here, also happening today on the Official Stellaris Discord, you can join us for a Developer Q&A, starting at 1700 CEST. Ever wanted to ask a Stellaris Dev a question? Now's your chance! We thought it would be a good idea to catch up with those members of our community who havent been closely following our dev diaries. Today well talk about some of the free features coming in the 3.4 Cepheus patch, releasing alongside Overlord on May 12th. This is not a complete list of features, and some features may still be subject to balancing or other changes.
Situations
The biggest change youll notice from the 3.3 Libra update is the new Situations system. This is a new feature that has been in development for a while, and its great to finally get to show it to our community. Situations will progress in stages, and in some cases, each stage will have different or escalating effects. Some Situation progressions are linear, while others will progress depending on the choices you make in events and in your Approach to the current situation. Current Active Effects by the Situation and the predicted outcome effects are shown along the right side of the Situations window.
The primary use for Situations at the moment is in Resource Deficits, Planetary Uprisings and Machine Uprisings (requires Synthetic Dawn Story Pack). We have also converted several story events to use the new Situations system. Situations are a versatile platform, that we will likely continue to expand on in the future. Situations are also very modder-friendly, and we cant wait to see what our modding community comes up with! There are also some new story events that you may have never encountered before, and the Shroudwalker enclave (requires Overlord) uses Situations after you reach into the Shroud.
Deficits
Previously, when running out of a resource stockpile and having a negative monthly income, you would be hit with massive penalties to your planetary production. This had several negative effects, from initiating a resource spiral, where one deficit would trigger another deficit, and so on until your empire had major issues with just about every resource. The other issue was one of consistency; the old system was not flexible enough to keep up with some of the new Civics (Catalytic Processing is a prime example of this) and combinations thereof, which would result in empires (under some conditions) making resources out of nothing. With the introduction of Situations, Resource Deficits will now gradually increase in strength as you advance through the stages of the Deficit Situation. Deficit Situations will start with some progress, and larger deficits will progress faster than smaller deficits. If your stockpile becomes positive again, the Situation will begin to slowly resolve itself. It's important to note that having a positive monthly income will make the Deficit Situation resolve itself faster than just having a stockpile greater than zero. Once the Situation reaches the end of the last stage, it will result in a Default. Defaulting removes upgrades to buildings and applies modifiers to your empire to make combat less effective and constructions cost more. On the flip side, downgrading your buildings will result in a lump sum payment of the resource(s) you previously had a deficit in, giving you the opportunity to recover your economy and potentially play on.
Subjugation Changes
In the free 3.4 Cepheus patch accompanying Overlord, there have been significant changes to not only subjects in the Overlord DLC, but in the base game as well. For starters, every subject now has a Vassalisation Contract, which can be customized to individual Subject empires. For example, you can choose whether the empire can be Integrated (now disabled by default in most cases), whether they have Diplomatic Freedom, whether they can expand, the level of subsidy they receive or tribute they pay, as well as whether they join in their Overlords wars, or whether the Overlord joins their wars.
This is all balanced by Loyalty, which is the measure of how Loyal a Subject feels to their Overlord. More Loyal subjects will be more inclined to agree with less favorable terms than less Loyal subjects. Subjects with low Loyalty may also break away via an Allegiance War if given the opportunity.
Overlord Holdings
Holdings are a new type of building that can be constructed on Subjects planets. There are currently 27 holdings in total, with 6 Holdings being included in the base game. Holdings can be built on a subjects planets in addition to Branch Offices, and similar to Branch Offices will provide resources to the Subject, Overlord, or both. Unlike Branch Offices, however, Holdings can also have a positive or negative effect on a Subjects Loyalty to their Overlord.
Subjugation Improvements
In addition to these new features, Overlords who release subjects will now get 100 Intel on their subjects, which will slowly degrade over time to their normal base level. Sectors released as subjects will also now take the Origin of their Overlord, where appropriate. AI Subjects of Player Empires now receive AI bonuses as if the difficulty level of the game were one level lower, rather than losing their bonuses entirely. It is also now possible to build Gateways and Hyper Relays (requires Overlord) in your subjects space!
Military AI Improvements
AI empires will be less inclined to split their fleets into hundreds of tiny fleets, in the 3.4 Cepheus patch, the AI will attempt to use a full fleet as their smallest unit to carry out military objectives. During peacetime, the AI will actively attempt to merge all fleets, and during wars will try to merge two nearby fleets when possible. Weve also reduced the likelihood of AI fleets getting stuck in a loop and going back and forth from system to system while attempting to group up their fleets. The Take Point functionality has had some more attention as well, reducing the chances that AI will suddenly stop following player and AI fleets, and they will now try even harder to have all their fleets follow the Take Point fleet. There has also been a new notification added at the point where the 3.3 Libra military AI wouldve declared war. This new notification will trigger provided you have enough Intel on the target empire, and while the notification is active the AI will begin gathering their available fleets and moving towards the border. Depending on your level of Intel, you will also get an estimation of when the AI is planning to strike. The AI will now also better handle conflicts with Crisis-type empires. Weve added a new war state to the AI, which is activated when the AI or its allies fight a mid or end-game crisis. This means that AI empires will obey players Take Point commands during crises, as well as help out their other allies if theyre attacked, and will be better at seeking out and destroying systems controlled by crises.
Sector & Planetary Automation Improvements
In 3.4, weve also done another pass on Sector and Planetary automation. The design philosophy for the new automation system is that most players will be able to use some parts of it. So the intention is not that all players will always use this and that it will be able to satisfy all players, we hope everyone will find something that they feel is worth using. The planet automation will have an additional settings UI where players can toggle components on/off for each planet individually as well as setting default values for newly colonized planets. The most impactful setting is Designation, which will cause the planet to only build structures associated with its planetary designation. For example, a Mining World designation will only construct Mining Districts and the Mineral Purification plant, and nothing else. The other settings are:
- Amenities: Build new amenities buildings and also micromanage the priority of amenity-producing jobs to minimize unnecessary amenity jobs
- Rare resources: Build new rare resource-producing buildings to target a +3 monthly income of all rare resources.
- Pop assembly: Build spawning pools, cloning vats, robot assembly et cetera.
- Housing: Construct additional housing, either in districts or buildings when needed.
- Building slots: Automatically build a new housing district for the +1 building slot whenever there are no free building slots, especially useful to enable on automated planets like Science designation since they require many building slots.
- Crime: Build new crime prevention buildings when crime reaches dangerous levels.
- Clear blockers: Automatically clear blockers when it is preventing the construction of new districts.
- Posthumous Employment: Builds the Posthumous Employment Center on planets with a raw resource focus.
- Psi Corps: Build the Psi Corps building on all planets when possible.
Auto Resettlement Improvements
For the 3.4 Cepheus update, weve also addressed some concerns and Quality of Life issues with Auto Resettlement. "Ideal" worlds such as ring worlds, Gaia worlds, Hive worlds and Machine worlds now have a higher score when pops are deciding where to automatically resettle. Capital world planet designations also have a smaller increased score, and freshly founded colonies have 25% from their designation. Pops will now pick which planet to auto-migrate to based on which planet has the most free jobs, rather than the least. They also now take free housing into account better. The Outliner will now differentiate between unemployed pops that are migrating and those that are not. A yellow briefcase will be shown for planets that have unemployed pops that are in the process of migrating to another planet. A red briefcase will be shown if your attention is required to resolve the unemployment. On the planet view, the tooltips will now show where the pops are most likely to move to or explain why they are unable to move.
MegaCorp Improvements (requires MegaCorp)
One thing that was pretty immersion-breaking when playing a MegaCorp was the Impose Ideology war. Why a MegaCorp would willingly create competition was always a little confusing. In 3.4 Cepheus, successful Impose Ideology wars launched by empires with the Corporate authority will result in the target (or created) empire having the Oligarchic authority and the Merchant Guilds civic. This is also true for Status Quo resolutions of Establish Hegemony, Subjugation, and the Scions Bring into the Fold wargoals with Corporate Aggressors. Additionally, Corporate subjects can now open branch offices in subjects of their shared overlord, as long as their overlord is not also a MegaCorp.
Korean and Japanese Localisations
In 3.4, weve also expanded our in-game localisations to include Korean and Japanese. We hope that this results in a more immersive and consistent experience for those communities. Issues, grammatical errors, and literally unplayable typos found in these localizations can be reported here!
New Free Celebratory Emblems, Colors, and Icons!
We are introducing a series of new emblems that will allow you to customize your Empires even further - 72 new icons, 45 new backgrounds, and 50 more colors.. Including.. Wait for it.. WHITE!
New Free Human portraits
Celebrating the anniversary of Stellaris, we have added a series of new Human phenotypes, new outfits for rulers, governors, admirals, scientists and generals. Additionally, we have added new human animations, hairstyles, beards, and eye colors allowing you to further customize your Human leaders!
Whew! That was a lot of stuff to get through. You can read the full changelog here (in English only, sorry). Just a reminder that this is not a full list of changes, and some features may undergo balance changes between now and release. Realize your Grand Design with Stellaris: Overlord and the free 3.4 Cepheus and 6th Anniversary update on May 12th! Wishlist Overlord Now!
[ 2022-05-05 16:37:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Obidobi, Caligula and Eladrin
Hello everyone!
I hope you are all excited to get your hands on our next expansion Overlord next week! Expanding on the Subject/Ruler dynamic has been something that we know a lot of you (and us, internally) have been wanting for a very long time, so its really amazing to finally see it come to fruition!
So to hold you over until Overlord release, here is the usual Dev Diary containing the changelog for you to read!
But first, we have a few Community events to talk about:
Today at 1700 CEST (UTC + 2), join us on the Official Stellaris Discord for our Overlord Dev Q&A! Have a question about something in todays patch notes? Stop by and ask!
As well, join us starting at 1400 CEST on May 7th and 8th, for our Content Creator Multiplayer Showcase. Well be streaming Overlord all weekend on Twitch and YouTube, with some of our favorite community content creators!
Click here to read the 3.4 "Cepheus" Patch Notes
Wishlist Overlord today!
Moddability Changes in 3.4 Cepheus
Im going to keep this one fairly brief, by my standards. Recent updates have given modders plenty to get their teeth into, and 3.4 is no different. We already described the Situations system a few weeks back, which will doubtless see much use and abuse from modders, so Ill focus on other scripting language changes. The biggest improvement that springs to mind is in the field of modifiers. In triggered modifiers, you can now define a mult value, which lets you apply a modifier or script value to that triggered modifier:
triggered_pop_modifier = {
potential = {
NOT = { is_same_species = owner }
}
modifier = { pop_citizen_happiness = 1 }
mult = modifier:non_main_species_happiness_mult
}
As you can see, Ive defined a modifier that we do not have in the game there. That is because we can now define our own ad hoc modifiers in script, for instance:
non_main_species_happiness_mult = {
icon = mod_planet_happiness_mult
percentage = yes
good = yes
category = pop
}
This modifier will of course only do something so long as it is applied somewhere, but nowadays theres plenty of places where that is possible (everywhere that script values are valid). For instance, we have refactored species traits amenities and trade output from jobs to use this system, which cut down on the effort it takes to tweak their numbers (and let us track down a few bugs in that regard).
As a low-key but quite nice improvement, you will also no longer get load order errors where certain modifiers do not work in certain contexts (e.g. ethos modifiers in traits).
Thats not all we have done. Developing Overlord naturally provided some opportunities to rework old systems. For instance, thousands of lines were saved in the scripts for enclaves by using the new event inheritance system. With this, an event can be specified to inherit properties from another via base = # trade_action_my_example_action = {
# # If this is set to 'yes', then the action will be fired and then removed from the trade deal.
# # If 'no', then the trade deal will be treated as a treaty that lasts for at least 10 years.
# fire_and_forget = no
#
# # Determines if the action will show up in the list in the trade deals view.
# # SCOPE: Country "giving" the action
# # FROM: Country "receiving" the action
# potential = {
# has_overlord = from
# is_specialist_subject_type = { TYPE = bulwark }
# }
#
#
# If this trigger returns 'no', then the trade deal will be cancelled. Checked on daily tick. Only relevant if fire_and_forget is 'no'.
# # SCOPE: Country "giving" the action
# # FROM: Country "receiving" the action
# active = {
# has_overlord = from
# is_specialist_subject_type = { TYPE = bulwark }
# }
#
# # Effect that fires when the trade deal is accepted.
# # SCOPE: Country "giving" the action
# # FROM: Country "receiving" the action
# on_traded_effect = {
# from = {
# set_galactic_custodian = yes
# }
# }
#
# # Effect that fires when the trade deal ends. Only relevant if fire_and_forget is 'no'.
# # SCOPE: Country "giving" the action
# # FROM: Country "receiving" the action. Not guaranteed to be valid, since a trade deal is cancelled if one of the countries dies.
# on_deal_ended_sender_effect = {
# }
#
# # Effect that fires when the trade deal ends. Only relevant if fire_and_forget is 'no'.
# # SCOPE: Country "receiving" the action
# # FROM: Country "giving" the action. Not guaranteed to be valid, since a trade deal is cancelled if one of the countries dies.
# on_deal_ended_recipient_effect = {
# set_galactic_custodian = no
# }
#
# # Used to determine how much the AI will value the action in a trade deal.
# ai_weight = {
# weight = 1
#
# modifier = {
# weight = 2
# from = {
# is_galactic_custodian = no
# }
# }
# }
# }
Speaking of the AI and diplomacy, diplomatic actions are now a little bit more controllable from script. While they (and AI logic surrounding them) are still handled to a significant degree in code, additional reasons for the AI to accept or decline the proposals can now be scripted in an ai_acceptance field, while a should_ai_propose field lets you block the AI from proposing it.
Finally, something that modders need to know about is our changes to synced localisation. Or rather, the fact that we have completely removed it. This means that, everywhere where it was used, we now use the normal localisation system instead. There are several advantages of this:
Multiplayer will now work, even if one player is playing in Chinese and one player in English (this does not currently work)
It is theoretically possible to translate all names into other languages now. (Unfortunately, however, I cant promise that well ever do that, because European languages all have complicated grammar rules, and we have yet to work out a reasonable way to deal with them. But still, the possibility is pretty cool).
Unfortunately, there are also some complications, which can be summed up as: we need to save a property as it is at the time something is named (i.e. the property may change later - but this should not affect what it localises as), and also make sure that it is localising correctly no matter which language you are playing in.
Basically, this means that if you want to use bracket commands in setting names, you need to register it in the place where you are setting the name, e.g.:
set_name = {
key = "NAME_Absorbed_Species"
variable_string = "[Root.GetSpeciesNamePlural]"
}
NAME_Absorbed_Species:0 "Absorbed [Root.GetSpeciesNamePlural]"
Empire names in the random_names directory have a new lookups line to serve this purpose:
# Imperial Spiritualist 2
empire_name_format = {
random_weight = {
factor = 0
modifier = {
add = 1
has_government = "gov_theocratic_monarchy"
is_pirate = no
is_primitive = no
NOT = { is_country_type = fallen_empire }
NOT = { is_country_type = awakened_fallen_empire }
}
}
lookups = " [This.Capital.GetName]"
format = format.imp_spi.2 # of [This.Capital.GetName]
noun = format.homeworld # [This.Capital.GetName]
prefix_format = format_prefix.imp_spi.2 # [This.Capital.GetName]
# Empire of Earth
}
In cases where names were defined inline in script, which is quite common in mods, it will likely continue to work as it used to (so long as no square bracket commands are used). I cant entirely vouch for this, since we dont use this functionality inhouse as it would break Chinese (and now also Korean and Japanese) translations, since they have always translated names. It may also cause issues if the name you are setting something to is a key that is localised, but which you did not intend to refer to (N.B. name lists now also use localisation keys).
As a word of caution, each square bracket command we make available has to be defined to work in the C++ code. We have tried our best to cover all the cases which one could want to use, but there may be some weve missed (in this case, the error log will complain about invalid property GetXPersistent). If there are any particularly egregious cases we turn out to have missed, please file bug reports and well see what we can do!
Progenitor Hive Origin
This weeks origin reveal from Nivarias is the Progenitor Hive!
In the beginning, the Progenitor was. Life on your homeworld was harsh and competitive, yet still the mighty Progenitor expanded its territory. Running such a vast dominion soon grew untenable, so the Progenitor created the first Offspring. In time, it became apparent that the Offspring could not manage alone. In turn, they produced menial drones to assist in taming our home. As you took your first tentative steps across the stars, the Progenitor sequestered itself into a specialized nest. Endowed with greater, streamlined control, you are now ready to spread the Progenitor's influence to all the stars of the galaxy - for the Progenitor was, is, and will be. The Progenitor Hive origin is a new Hive Mind origin coming in Overlord, and as such it also requires Utopia to play. The hive relies heavily on the presence of powerful Offspring. While they are near, the hive thrives and functions with great efficiency. Offspring Vessels can be included in your fleets, providing an aura that cancels out the inherent penalties of your ships, providing a net small bonus. You are limited in the number of Offspring Vessels your empire can support at any given time, based on your overall naval capacity, similar to the Titan limit. The Offspring Vessels share a pool, with larger ships taking a greater portion of the pool.
Theres also a starbase building to protect your empire space, which provides greater benefits than the ships.
The Offspring Nest replaces the Spawning Pools of regular hives, providing additional bonuses. Youll want one of these on each of your planets.
Make sure someone is working the Offspring Drone job, since otherwise the directionless menial drones on your colonies face difficulties.
All employed leaders within a Progenitor Hive, passively gain experience at a steady rate, gaining skill levels at a much faster rate than leaders of other empires. On average, with no experience boosts or other sources of experience, they will passively gain a level about every (1.5 * level theyre going to) years. Unlike other hives, the Progenitor is able to release sectors as vassals, placing the fate of the sector in the tendrils of an Offspring which is promoted to Progenitor status and becomes the ruler of the new empire. Progenitor subjects released inherit the Progenitor Hive origin from your empire, with all the bonuses and penalties that it entails.
Should you have a subject that is not a Progenitor Hive, you can build an Offspring Nest on their world, providing some much needed oversight to their dro- er, workers. Theyre basically the same thing, right?
Theres also one other (non-Progenitor Hive related) holding to reveal! Overlords with the Environmentalist civic can build a Ranger Lodge, which reduces consumer goods usage on the subject planet but also creates a Nature Preserve blocker, which cannot be removed as long as the lodge exists.
The Ranger Lodge can only be built on natural planets that have districts available to block, and cannot be built on Ecumenopolies, Hive Worlds, Machine Worlds, or Relic Worlds.
Wishlist Overlord today!
[ 2022-05-05 11:04:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=q3JpSc7J_sA;full][/previewyoutube] Today we're taking a First Look at the Progenitor Hive Origin with Nivarias! Your hivemind has gained an evolutionary advantage through semi-independent leaders. These Offspring greatly improve overall proficiency but require constant oversight. Wishlist Overlord!
[ 2022-05-03 16:14:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Offe the Human and Eladrin
[previewyoutube=j6ZVrfMr3Po;full][/previewyoutube]
Hello everyone, it is me Offe, one of the Humans working on Stellaris. Today I will bring you an update from the Custodian AI initiative. Before we dive into todays dev diary lets do a quick recap of the AI work that went into the 3.3 patch.
If you have been following the AI dev diaries you probably know that our main objectives for the 3.3 Libra patch was to improve the economy management of the AI, especially with a mid and late game perspective in mind. The reason for this was to establish the AI empires as relevant actors beyond the early game and give their interactions with the player more impact.
Following some of the discussions here on our own forums and also on Reddit, my favorite topic has been seeing people react to AI empires suddenly being much stronger in the Galactic Community where they are passing resolutions against the players' will.
While the AI economy management still has areas which can be improved, we felt satisfied with the changes made in 3.3 to the point where we wanted to move our focus to other areas of the AI.
Goals for 3.4
As the AI economy improved other areas of the AI started to become more obvious targets for improvement, namely the AI military fleet management and their diplomacy interactions with the player.
Military AI behavior changes
First I would like to say that the changes coming to military fleet behavior in 3.4 are mostly bug fixes rather than improvements on their decision making, so while there should be a very noticeable difference, the work made so far on the fleet behavior will not be as encompassing as the work made for the economy. Lets start with the Elephant in the room: AI splitting their fleets into tiny pieces.
While there were issues where AI would split their fleets too much, fundamentally this behavior of AI splitting fleets was by design. The AI would allocate just enough fleet power (with a +25% margin) to their objective in order to carry out as many objectives as possible. The main issue came from the amount of low fleet power targets such as unupgraded starbases which caused the AI to frequently split their fleets into 1000~ fleet power pieces. In theory this approach is quite good, however, the main two main issues with this approach are that the player can easily just take one of their bigger fleets to go around and defeat the AIs smaller fleets one by one which makes the AI somewhat incompetent, as well as that this playstyle from the AI can be quite frustrating to play against. In 3.4 the AI will aim to have full fleets as their smallest unit to carry out military objectives, AI will actively try and merge all possible fleets during peacetime and the AI will during a war try and merge two nearby fleets when possible.
Cycling Fleet Orders
After having made the AI fill up their fleets, the next issue to tackle was AI fleet order cycling where the fleets get stuck alternating between two orders indefinitely. One common cause for this was when the AI assigned several fleets to carry out an objective together, the fleets would try and regroup with each other by moving to the system of the other fleets causing them to switch places over and over.
Take Point
In 3.3 we made the AI obey the Take Point behavior again, but it didnt work quite as well as we wanted. For example allied AI fleets would sometimes follow the players fleets when they shouldnt. There were also issues where the AI would suddenly change their mind and stop following the player, and they would also not always follow the player with all their fleets.
AI Allied Wars
During a war with several involved AI Empires on the same side, one of the AIs will be considered leading the war (may be different from diplomatic war leader) and the other AIs will put their fleets to follow the AI warleader. This suffered from a similar issue as previously mentioned where the AI fleets which were supposed to follow would change their mind too often and never reach their intended target.
AI Outside Diplomatic War
In 3.4 we are adding an AI war state which becomes activated when the AI fights a mid or late game crisis, this state of war will continue until the crisis has been defeated. This means that AI will now enable their normal war behavior against targets like the Great Khan even though they do not have a diplomatic war if they or any of their allies get attacked. This has many side effects, for example:
- AI empires should now obey the players Take Point if the player is fighting a crisis
- Allied AI empires should now help each other fight crises when one of them are attacked
- AI empires will now seek out and destroy systems controlled by crisis empires et cetera.
AI War Preparation
In 3.4 we are adding a state of war preparation for the AI which they will enter when they would have immediately declared war in 3.3. During this phase the AI will gather their available fleets and move them towards the border of their target. If you have enough military intel you will be notified via an alert that hell is about to break loose and depending on how much intel you have you will get a more accurate estimation on when the AI will strike.
AI Diplomacy
Now that we have covered military changes coming in 3.4 lets go over the diplomacy changes
Federation AI changes
One of the biggest complaints regarding being in a Federation with the AI has been the unrelenting bombardment of proposals of changing the same federation law over and over again. Often resulting in AI empires stacking the negative opinion modifier on themselves and eventually leaving the federation altogether. In 3.4 we are introducing a 10 year AI vote cooldown for each law category. So lets randomly select a federation law to use as an example: Free Migration. When an AI proposes to change the law of Free Migration then it will add a 10 year AI only cooldown which is shared between all AI federation members. This means that each time Free Migration gets voted down it will now take at least 10 years before it is proposed again. Coincidentally this also fixes an exploit that the player could use against AI federations where the player would repeatedly ask to initiate a vote to invite the player into the AI federation. This allowed the player to repeatedly stack the negative opinion modifiers between the AI federation members causing their federation to break apart.
Envoys
Another common complaint regarding AI federations is how the AI would often not put any envoys into the federation. This was a symptom of a bigger problem which was the overall AI envoy usage. The AI empires would frequently reassign their envoys to the same task, knocking out the envoy who was already assigned to it and starting the reassign cooldown. As a result the AI would often have all but one of their envoys on cooldown and not assigned to any task. In 3.4 the AIs should be able to handle their envoys in a much more appropriate manner, both in terms of Federation and Galactic Community assignment as well as other diplomatic actions and espionage operations.
Galactic Community Changes
While AI voting for seemingly completely irrelevant resolutions in the Galactic Community gave it a sense of uncomfortable realism there were a few issues that stood out to us: AI would sometimes propose resolutions that were completely against their core beliefs, for example, a slaver empire would sometimes propose to ban organic slave trading. This was due to a missing willingness check when AI would propose resolutions, so they AI would propose the resolution they liked the most but wouldnt check if they liked it enough to be worth proposing in the first place. The AI was explicitly forbidden to withdraw their proposed resolution, while most of the time this does not make sense, there are situations where this may be the best course of action. For example, the AI may propose to reduce the council size but by the time the resolution is about to enter the floor their diplomatic weight has been reduced to the point where they would propose themselves out of the council. Similarly the AI was also forbidden from opposing their own resolution, but the above situation could happen in a similar way where, for example, the player would enact the Emergency Measure to move the resolution to the floor before the AI has time to withdraw their resolution. In that situation it would make sense for the AI to oppose their own proposed resolution. Additionally if you have enough intel on the AI you will now be able to see why they are voting the way they do in the Galactic Community. While this tooltip was already quite big, I knew I could make it even bigger.
Planet and Sector Automation
While planet and sector automation isnt necessarily AI, we have seen a lot of requests for previous AI improvements to also be available for the player. And even though the planet/sector automation uses a different system than the AIs economy system we still felt that improving this would hopefully add a lot of quality of life value to our players. The design philosophy for the new automation system is that most players will be able to use some parts of it. So the intention is not that all players will always use this and that it will be able to satisfy all players, rather that hopefully everyone will find something that they feel is worth using.
So how does it work? In 3.4 the planet automation will have an additional settings UI where players can toggle components on/off for each planet individually as well as setting default values for newly colonized planets. The most impactful setting is this one, the Designation
This will cause the planet to build new jobs in accordance with the designation when there are no free jobs available. This setting is now much more restrictive in regards to what is considered to be in accordance with the designation, for example, enabling this for a mining designation will only construct the mining districts and the mineral purification plant and nothing else. The other settings are:
- Amenities: Build new amenities buildings and also micromanage the priority of amenity producing jobs to minimize unnecessary amenity jobs by using the same system as the AI has been using since 3.3.
- Rare resources: Build new rare resource producing buildings to target a +3 monthly income of all rare resources. Additionally this will now take into consideration empire wide buildings in the building queue and only build one building at a time.
- Pop assembly: Build spawning pools, cloning vats, robot assembly et cetera.
- Housing: Construct additional housing, either districts or building when needed.
- Building slots: Automatically build a new housing district for the +1 building slot whenever there are no free building slots, especially useful to enable on automated planets like Science designation since they require many building slots.
- Crime: Build new crime prevention buildings when crime reaches dangerous levels.
- Clear blockers: Automatically clear blockers when it is preventing construction of new districts.
- Posthumous Employment: Builds the Posthumous Employment Center on planets with raw resource focus.
- Psi Corps: Build the Psi Corps building on all planets when possible.
game\common\colony_automation
game\common\colony_automation_exceptions
Sector Automation
Sector automation is now a system built on top of the planet automation. Setting the sector focus will now change which designations planets will select when they are using the automatic designation selection in order to make them respect the sector automation.
Additionally there is now a Unity focus available for sector automation since Unity is now more important after the 3.3 patch, together with new Unity automation for planets to go along with it.
The requirement to have an upgraded capital building in order to construct Research labs and rare resource producing buildings has now been removed in order to make the planet automations function properly for newly founded colonies with these designations. We have also added several missing designations to different planet types in order to allow for more automation, for example, Ring World can now use factory/forge world designation and Hive Worlds can now use the fortress designation. Lastly, I am sad to say that my designated time on the Custodian team has already been over for a while now, which means that this will be the last AI dev diary from me. But the AI initiative lives on and next time there is an AI update you may get the chance to meet a new Human. Again I want to say a special thank you to all the community members who have engaged in meaningful discussions regarding the AI improvements in the past months and tirelessly reporting the AI issues on the bug forum. Thank you!
Subterranean
Hi! Eladrin tagging back in for a bit.
This week Nivarias revealed the Subterranean origin. Tunneling underground is a bit more expensive than building on the surface, but has its advantages, especially when a hostile force attempts to bombard your cities.
Lithoids are unaffected by the pop growth penalty The primary species of a Subterranean empire gains the Cave Dweller trait, granting additional mineral production at the cost of pop growth and empire size from pops, as well as a new Minimum Habitability trait. Cave-Dwelling pops are well sheltered from the environment on the surface, and treat any habitable planets below 50% habitability as if they were 50%.
I am a dwarf and Im digging a hole. Living underground, Subterranean empires have a unique city set that replaces the normal view on planets.
Are you the king of the mountain? One of the achievements revealed last week, named Underlord, has to do with answering the question Is it possible to dig too deep?
Next Week
Well look at the time, were coming right up to the release of Overlord, arent we? The Stellaris 3.4 Cepheus patch notes will be coming next week, alongside details of the Progenitor Hive origin. After the patch notes, join us on the Official Stellaris Discord for a Dev Q&A, starting Thursday at 1700 CEST! See you there!
[ 2022-04-28 11:20:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=ixa5QEYDQaQ;full][/previewyoutube] Today we're going to be taking a first look at the Subterranean Origin with Nivarias! Whether you were avoiding predators or seeking easier access to resources, your species evolved to live under the surface of your homeworld, leading to a more environmentally versatile society. Wishlist Overlord today!
[ 2022-04-27 15:15:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=0kRGad3vuUg;full][/previewyoutube] Realize your Grand Design with Stellaris: Overlord on May 12th for USD 19.99/GBP 15.49/EUR 19.99! In Overlord, the next full expansion for Stellaris, gain access to new features designed to unlock the next level of your Empire. Guide a galaxy full of potential subjects to victory - or subjugation. In Overlord you will gain access to new mechanics to specialize your Vassals role within your Empire, new Origins to explore, new Enclaves to meet, and new Megastructures to build for the glory of your Empire. Wishlist Overlord Now! Use new vassalization mechanics and specialize your subjects into economic powerhouses, defensive bulwarks, or technological masterminds. Negotiate the terms of your subjects Vassal Contracts, with the ability to subsidize their income, restrict their expansion, construct buildings on their worlds, and more. Explore five unique Origins, opening up more roleplay possibilities than ever. Start as the subject of an advanced AI empire with Imperial Fiefdom, or release your mind with the Teachers of the Shroud origin, where you start as a Latent Psionic species and contact with a mysterious Shroudwalker Enclave. Discover the source of ancient lights in the night sky with Slingshot to the Stars. Subterranean allows you to start as a civilization that excels at mining and archaeology, and thrives underground, or unleash the power of the progenitor with the Progenitor Hive origin. Meet three new Enclaves, who will offer unique abilities in your galaxies. The Shroudwalker Enclave allows you to pull back the veil of the Shroud. What will be your fate? Meet the Salvager Enclave, who can offer to scrap ships for resources or debris. Perhaps you might be interested in some combat-proven starships? Or choose one of your own fleets to lease out to other Empires as a Mercenary Enclave, and be rewarded with dividends on your investment as they fight alongside the highest bidder. Construct three new game-changing Megastructures. Build taller than ever before by constructing an Orbital Ring around your habitable worlds. Use it as extra starbase capacity, or to further boost your planetary economy. The Quantum Catapult sends fleets on a one-way trip across the galaxy, ignoring closed borders and hostile empires that would stand in your way, to launch the ultimate surprise attack. Or build a Hyper Relay network, allowing you to rapidly transfer fleets and resources across your empire. Whether you rule from the bridge of your flagship or from the lavish capital of your homeworld, Realize your Grand Design with Stellaris: Overlord! Wishlist Overlord Now!
[ 2022-04-21 16:03:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hello again!
Last weeks dev diary examined the Orbital Ring, Quantum Catapult, and Scholarium. Today were going to look at another construction that has a massive impact on the game, the Hyper Relay. After that well look at some other changes coming in Cepheus and Overlord, and finish off with another origin that was revealed yesterday by Nivarias.
As with all previews, numbers, text, and so on are not quite final and are still subject to change.
Hyper Relays
Long ago, back in Dev Diary #243 we showed you some concept art of Hyper Relays, and told you they had greebles, and were game changing. Now its time to fully reveal them. Hyper Relays are a rare Tier 2 technology that require the Hyperlane Breach Points technology and access to Rare Crystals to discover. Once you have observed a functional Hyper Relay in use by another empire, the technology will appear much more frequently, causing them to spread in a pleasing manner across the galaxy.
Hyper Relays can be built by your Construction Ships outside the gravity well of systems, just like Gateways. Theyre useless on their own, but a chain of Hyper Relays built in adjacent systems dramatically speeds up travel, allowing you to jump from Relay to Relay after a short windup rather than having to travel across each system at sublight speed, as long as neither endpoint is controlled by a hostile empire.
Once two Relays in adjacent systems have been linked, the hyperlane between those systems will become bolder, and ships traveling along them will show the route plotted in blue as they are using the bypass. Hyper Relays can be built in your own space, or that of your subjects. For convenience, Relays can also be built directly from the Galaxy Map.
If an Empires capital is attached to the Hyper Relay Network, additional effects can be projected through the network using several Network Edicts. These add strategic resource upkeep to your Hyper Relays and an effect on all of your colonies that are connected to your capital.
Gestalts have a reflavored variant of Networked Amenities. Specialist subjects each have a Network Effect available at Tier 1, which becomes active in the overlords Relay Network if a continuous chain connects their capitals.
As one could imagine, an expansive Hyper Relay network makes travel much faster during the mid-game while you do not yet have a comprehensive Gateway system built, and since such travel is permitted in neutral empires that have open borders, navigating the galaxy and responding to distant threats is easier than ever before. As a personal anecdote, after playing with these and the new subjugation mechanics internally, it was almost difficult to go back to 3.3 for the Dev Clash. Made me almost want to blow up the galaxy.
Selected Other Changes
As with every update, there are a number of balance or quality of life changes and adjustments in Cepheus. Heres a handful of interesting changes:
- Successful Force Ideology wars with a corporate aggressor now result in the target (or created) empire having the Oligarchic authority and Merchant Guilds civic. This is also true for Status Quo resolutions of Establish Hegemony, Subjugation, and the Scions Bring into the Fold wargoals.
- Corporate subjects can now open branch offices in subjects of their shared overlord, as long as their overlord is not also a MegaCorp.
- AI Subjects of Player Empires now receive AI bonuses as if the difficulty level of the game were one level lower, rather than losing their bonuses entirely.
- The Parliamentary System civic now allows factions to be generated much earlier in the game.
- You can now nominate other empires to Custodianship, provided they meet the requirements.
- The Unbidden can no longer spawn in pulsar systems (as the star will disable their Dimensional Portal's shields - Heavy Metal, Inc. sends its regards)
- Low Military Intel is now gained at 30 Intel instead of 40 and Medium Military Intel is now gained at 60 Intel instead of 70. The effects of Medium and High Military Intel have been swapped. Medium now allows you to view ship loadout. High now grants visibility of location of military fleets.
- Gateways (and Hyper Relays) can now be built in vassal space.
- The Grasp the Void Ascension Perk now grants increased draw weight for FTL travel techs.
- "Ideal" worlds such as ring worlds, gaia worlds, hive worlds and machine worlds now have a 50% higher score when pops are deciding where to automatically resettle to. So they are more likely to want to move to your newly-founded ring world, for instance. Capital world planet designations also have a +10% score, and freshly founded colonies have 25% from their designation.
- Pops will now pick which planet to auto-migrate to based on which planet has the most free jobs, rather than the least. They also now take free housing into account better.
- The Outliner will now differentiate between unemployed pops that are migrating and those that are not. A yellow briefcase will be shown for planets that have unemployed pops that are in the process of migrating to another planet. A red briefcase will be shown if your attention is required to resolve the unemployment. On the planet view, the tooltips will now show where the pops are most likely to move to, or explain why they are unable to move.
We have eleven new achievements in Overlord. Here are the icons, Im curious what people think they are.
Cheevos!
Anniversary Additions
Some eagle-eyed readers have noticed some flags that arent possible in 3.3. Youre correct! The art team has added some new colors to the flag palette
over seventy flag emblems
and forty-five new flag backgrounds.
These will all be part of the Cepheus update as part of the May anniversary celebrations.
Slingshot to the Stars
Bordergore? Bordergore. Those born under the Slingshot to the Stars find their desires to explore fulfilled by a nearby Quantum Catapult, which replaces one of their Guaranteed Habitable Worlds. Their eagerness to explore into the unknown reduces the distance penalty for building starbases in remote systems by 75%.
Next Week
Next week the totally human programmer Narkerns will take over for an update on AI and automation improvements coming in Cepheus, and Ill add a little bit about a fourth Origin at the end. Video versions of these dev diaries are available at the Stellaris Official YouTube Channel. Subscribe so you dont miss them, and wishlist Overlord if you havent already! In the meantime, keep your eyes on our social media channels. There'll be an announcement later today.
[ 2022-04-21 11:03:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=11cmQNgbPNA;full][/previewyoutube]
Today we're going to be taking a first look at the Slingshot to the Stars Origin with Nivarias!
Strange lights in the night sky drove your species' curiosity to develop interstellar travel and explore the stars. Now you stand on the precipice of discovery, as you stand to answer a question that your species has asked for eons: What secrets will the Quantum Catapult reveal?
Wishlist Overlord!
As for this week's Dev Diary Tease, when we initially had the idea of doing a tease to get our Community excited for Thursday's Dev Diary, we had no idea that it would be taken quite this literally.
See the rest of this expertly cropped screenshot in Thursday's Dev Diary!
[ 2022-04-20 15:03:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Greetings!
Last weeks dev diary went through the new Enclaves in Overlord, the Bulwark, some more Holdings, and the Imperial Fiefdom Origin. This week were going to look at two constructions, the Scholarium, Specialist Holdings and a summary of the origin revealed by Nivarias earlier this week.
As with all previews, numbers, text, and so on are not quite final and are still subject to change.
Orbital Rings
Orbital Rings are a Tier 3 Voidcraft Engineering technology requiring Starholds, Galactic Administration, and Ceramo-Metal Infrastructure. Like Habitats, they do not require Mega-Engineering. They are treated as a variant of Starbases, and while system control is still primarily determined by the actual Starbase of the system, the planets they surround cannot be invaded until the Orbital Ring has been disabled.
Initially your Orbital Ring will have two module slots and no building slots. As you gain additional Starbase technologies (Star Fortress and Citadel) and improve the planets capital building you can upgrade the Orbital Ring through two additional tiers, adding one module and building slot at each tier.
Most of the Orbital Ring modules are similar to Starbase modules. Defensive modules trade piracy protection for extra hull and armor, and the Habitation Module is a Ring specific module that adds a district slot to the planet below.
Systems with multiple habitable planets can become an exceptionally thorny obstacle if you build multiple defensive orbital rings supporting a bastion starbase at the center. Having a large conveniently placed ring around your planet provides an opportunity to enhance the planet with some interesting buildings. These stack with similar planetside buildings.
Many standard starbase buildings can also be placed on an Orbital Ring - though some are now limited to one per system. Orbital Rings fill the same orbital slot as habitats, so youll have to decide which of the two you want over your worlds, and they can only be built around colonized habitable planets.
Quantum Catapult
There comes a time in every overlords reign when a faraway crisis suddenly requires your attention. Things are going on halfway across the galaxy, a rival in the way has closed borders to you, and the Galactic Community is debating something about Tiyanki. Again. A true galactic overlord has to be able to project their power at will, and doesnt let these little things stop them from enacting their plans.
Built around Neutron Stars or Pulsars, Quantum Catapults can hurl fleets across incredible distances of space, but these megastructures have accuracy issues over long distances.
The maximum range of a Quantum Catapult is significantly longer than jump drive range but theres a risk the fleet may not land exactly where they intended. The further the launch, the wider the scatter radius. Higher tiers of the Quantum Catapult are both more accurate and have longer maximum range, with a well-placed fully-constructed Catapult able to threaten virtually anywhere, even in a huge galaxy. After selecting a desired target system, a short windup later your fleet will arrive somewhere in a nearby system, without any lingering jump debuffs... But there is a chance, especially on spiral maps, that this nearby system is quite a few jumps away from your intended destination when traveling the hyperlanes.
Theres no clear route to this system, but the Catapult doesnt care. Quantum Catapults also have a passive effect that reduces MIA time for your missing fleets, which comes in useful when moving reinforcements to the front line, using experimental subspace on your science ships, or if your launched fleet lands in a system with Closed Borders.
The Scholarium
The Scholarium is the last of the Specialists coming in Overlord. Dedicated to the advancement of science, the Scholarium relies on their overlord to defend them from enemies. The State of Saathuma are our Scholarium minions, bringing us the secrets of the universe in exchange for our benevolent protection.
As with the other specialist empires, the penalties and benefits both grow as they tier up.
Where the Prospectorium could discover valuable deposits in their space, the Scholarium instead finds opportunities to learn.
The advisor perk, as you likely expected, improves your overlords scientific research.
And like the others, they have a Hyper Relay Network effect at Tier 1.
Next week? Yeah, why not, let's show it next week. At Tier 2, the Scholarium also gains a set of special traits for their leaders, and the ability to trade their Scientists to their overlord.
Finally, at Tier 3 the Scholarium gains an advanced variant of the Science Ship, the Arctrellis. Like the Prospectoriums Battlewright, it provides an aura in combat, but this time the scientists aboard the ship can cripple opposing ships piloted by AI - whether they be machine intelligences, sapient combat computers, or the Contingency.
It should be noted that as a Scholarium, the military penalties make it difficult to free yourself from under your overlords control. You may need some powerful friends to help you out.
Specialist Holdings
Each of the Specialist empires has a unique holding that their overlord can build on their worlds. Prospectoria can host the Offworld Foundry, which converts subject minerals into alloys for the overlord.
Bulwarks can have the Vigil Command, which grants additional Defense Platforms to their overlord. As the Bulwark increases in tier, these values increase.
Scholarium worlds can build the Ministry of Science. Surrounding their planet with additional Science Ships increases the effect of the building.
One extra holding well show this week is for the Tree of Life origin. It lets you share your blessings with your subjects, improving both the habitability and food production of your subjects world, though a fair bit will be consumed by the sapling itself.
Galactic Community
It seemed natural that with such a large focus on subjugation, the Galactic Community would want to regulate things in different ways. Two more minor resolution lines are coming, in the new Suzerains and Sovereignty category.
The Intergalactic Directives line of resolutions protects the rights of subjects and encourages the preservation and release of weaker societies.
You cant take the sky from me. Bureaucratic Surveillance, on the other hand, focuses more on the rights of the overlords, requiring a short leash on their subjects and encouraging the use of holdings. Resolutions in this line can only be proposed by empires that are overlords of another empire.
Borderless Authority and Personal Oversight force extra holdings into subject contracts, but since the total limit remains 4 the highest Holding Limit terms become redundant.
Teachers of the Shroud
With the Teachers of the Shroud origin, your civilization was identified as a civilization of interest long ago by the Shroudwalkers, and they carefully guided you as their visions instructed. Your species begins with the Latent Psionics trait and in contact with the Shroudwalker coven. Your civilization is treated as if it already has the Mind over Matter Ascension Perk, meaning Transcendence is not far away. (And you cannot pursue Synthetic or Biological Ascension.)
Next Week
Next week well take a ride on the Hyper Relay Network, finally see those three Specialist perks, look at some other balance changes and additions coming in Cepheus and Overlord, and reveal another Origin. Video versions of these dev diaries are available at the Stellaris Official YouTube Channel. Subscribe so you dont miss them, and wishlist Overlord if you havent already!
[ 2022-04-14 11:02:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=itjJgeMrHS8;full][/previewyoutube]
This week we explore the mysterious Teachers of the Shroud Origin with Nivarias!
Lift the veil that covers the Shroud, and entangle yourself in the strange processes of the Shroud Beacon. Interstellar exploration will now be quicker and infinitely more mysterious for those who choose to take a shortcut through the Shroud.
Wishlist Overlord Now!
As for this week's Dev Diary tease:
There's nothing that will make a Stellaris player jump to the wrong conclusion like a giant crosshair and 10 highlighted stars.
So.. What do you think this does? Find out in this Thursday's Dev Diary!
[ 2022-04-12 15:00:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
[previewyoutube=OsOQT3q3rWs;full][/previewyoutube]
Watch on the Stellaris Official YouTube channel
Hi again!
Last weeks dev diary introduced the Specialist Empires with a detailed examination of the Prospectorium and showed off a few new holdings.
This week well meet the three Enclaves coming in Overlord (examining one of them closely), take a deep dive into the Bulwark, and finish off with a few more Holdings and a summary of the origin Nivarias revealed earlier this week.
As with all previews, numbers, text, and so on are not quite final and are still subject to change.
The Industrious Salvagers
The Salvagers are a friendly and pacifistic bunch of scrappers and mechanics. Focused on engineering, these tinkerers love nothing more than scrapping old ships, refurbishing them, and sending them on to find new homes.
Though eager to help, theyve been burned in the past and are thus cautious at first, offering only a few services - scrapping old fleets you no longer require, or offering you bargains on slightly used ships.
As you gain their trust, theyll provide a wider array of options.
From providing their insights regarding Engineering Research to offering salvage services for debris fields following battles, the Salvagers do their best to please their valued clients.
The Mysterious Shroudwalkers
The Shroudwalkers are a monastic enclave that delve into the deepest mysteries of the Shroud, seeking to understand the unknowable. Their true natures and desires are difficult to divine.
I wont spoil too much about this very story focused enclave, but their prophecies and visions make use of the Situations system described in Dev Diary #245. Theyre willing to instruct others in the ways of the Shroud
and just as they are willing to look into possibilities of your future, theyre quite willing to gaze into the Shroud, to provide insights about other empires.
The bravest can also seek knowledge about travel through the Shroud itself, asking them to create a wormhole-like bypass from one of your systems to their own.
Everything will be fine. One of the Origins, the Teachers of the Shroud, has a close link to this Enclave, but that too, is someone elses tale to tell.
The Mercenary Mercenaries
Unlike other enclaves, Mercenary Enclaves are not found randomly in the depths of space. Instead, they can be founded by regular empires that are not Fanatic Purifiers.
Theres a long list of requirements to release a fleet in this way - it must be at least size 50, have an admiral, be in a system under your control with no other enclave in the system, and have an appropriate place for them to build their station.
By default, Mercenary Enclave Capacity starts at zero. In addition to their normal effects, the Warrior Culture, Barbaric Despoilers, and Private Military Companies civics each add one potential Mercenary Enclave, while the Naval Contractors civic adds two.
The Lord of War Ascension Perk also allows one additional Mercenary Enclave, increases Diplomatic Weight from Fleet Power, and increases the rate at which you receive dividends from your Mercenary Enclaves. The newly formed Mercenary Enclave has a few options for those interested in procuring security services. The empire that controls the primary starbase of the Mercenary Enclaves system is considered their Patron, and has additional interactions with them. If business is going especially well, the Patron will even receive dividends from the Enclave.
Anyone that has communications with the Mercenary Enclave can rent their fleet for ten years if they can afford the cost. Prices may vary depending on what the Mercenaries think of you, and whether you are their Patron or not.
As time goes on, the Mercenaries will research technologies, reinforce, and build up their fleet, but their Patron can reach out and provide a helping appendage.
If they have an excellent relationship with the Mercenaries, a Patron can even ask them to break an active contract - but theyll have to provide some recompense to their current client and wont be very happy about it. Reputations are everything in this business.
Naturally, the Mercenary Enclaves have lobbied the Galactic Community to regulate their trade. One of the new resolution categories in Overlord is Defense Privatization.
This line of resolutions focuses on encouraging the empires of the Galactic Community to leave the fighting to professionals. It allows empires to create more Mercenary Enclaves, increases the rate Mercenary Dividends are paid out, and places significant limits on non-Mercenary navies.
Like most other major resolution categories, Federations adds two extra tiers
and as usual, the final tier is perhaps a bit extreme. Thats not all the GalCom is up to, but well go into more detail on their other resolutions another time.
The Bulwark
Standing firm against the overlords enemies is the Bulwark, the second of the Specialists coming in Overlord. The Tebbran Citizen Regime serves our glorious republic as a Bulwark.
With strong benefits when it comes to defense, the Bulwark is a natural shield against the overlords enemies, but relies on overlord subsidies for basic resource acquisition.
Weve made some adjustments to Defense Platforms - while everyone will benefit from their faster build speed and increased range, fire rate, tracking, and hull points, Bulwarks receive additional bonuses when using them. Having a Bulwark advisor improves starbase costs and upgrade times.
The Bulwark Watch perk is another Hyper Relay Network effect so well hold off on revealing all of that just yet.
Fighting in a Bulwarks systems is extremely advantageous...
and like the Prospectorium, they too gain access to some technologies - this time those most useful for defense.
Like the Prospectorium, at tier 2 the Bulwark also adds special traits to some of their leaders. Admirals, in their case.
And they can trade them with their overlord as well.
At tier 3, the Bulwark can create an improved variant of the Construction Ship, which repairs other friendly ships in the system and are a bit sturdier than regular Construction vessels.
And they also have managed to turn the Shield Magnifiers from Tier 1 against invaders. If they have completed the Unyielding tradition tree, this effect is increased.
Dont worry - if you dont have Apocalypse, the Unyielding traditions will also unlock with Overlord.
Holdings, Part Three
This weeks holdings include the Emporium, which forces the subject to buy Consumer Goods from the overlord, providing Amenities in exchange for Energy Credits.
More holdings also exist that tax subject production, such as the aptly named Ministry of Production and the Ministry of Energy.
The Materials Ministry revealed two weeks ago has been renamed the Ministry of Extraction, and now has Volatile Motes upkeep. Constructive overlords can help build up a world using the Orbital Assembly Complex and a small fleet of Construction Ships.
And Reanimators can bring out the dead to defend a subjects world
while Megacorps with Permanent Employment can ensure that nobody is just lying around when they could be working.
Lastly for today, Megacorps with the Franchising civic can choose to exert direct control and micromanage subject planets where they also have a Branch Office, much to the dismay of the workers there.
The Ethics Attraction on this holding will change to match any fanatic ethic the overlord may have. (Non-fanatical overlords arent quite as thorough with the indoctrination during the team-building exercises.) As a reminder, these previews are still subject to change and balancing. (Prices and upkeep on several of the holdings have changed since I took the screenshots.)
The Imperial Fiefdom
In the Imperial Fiefdom origin, your first steps into space were brutally short. Immediately subjugated alongside several others, you can begin the game as a Specialist Empire of your choice, with a few additional gifts from your overlord. Will you ever break free? If multiple players select this origin, they will all start as minions of the same Advanced AI Empire.
Next Week
Next week well examine some of the new constructions youll be able to build, research the Scholarium, look at Specialist holdings, revisit the Galactic Community, and reveal another Origin. Were doing video versions of these dev diaries on the Stellaris Official YouTube Channel. Subscribe so you dont miss them, and wishlist Overlord if you havent already!
[ 2022-04-07 11:03:42 CET ] [ Original post ]
Stellaris: Overlord introduces five new origins that add new flavor to your next game. In this video Nivarias is highlighting the Imperial Fiefdom origin - You may be just a Specialist Empire now, but someday, the galaxy may need a new ruler shouldnt it be you?
[previewyoutube=sozJ_1qe3Xk;full][/previewyoutube]
Also, here's a little teaser for this Thursday's Dev Diary:
"When we started this, one of our founders had a dream: to do for Galactic Security what MegaCorps have done for inequalities. Today, I am excited to say that this goal is within our reach."
-High Admiral Shirip
What do you think this means? Let us know in the replies!
And if you haven't, Wishlist Stellaris: Overlord!
[ 2022-04-05 15:07:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
[previewyoutube=i9h5mh1L-0U;full][/previewyoutube]
watch on the Stellaris Official YouTube channel
Hello again!
In last weeks dev diary, we discussed the basics of negotiating subjugation contracts and showed you some holdings. This week well present Specialist Vassals and do a deep dive into the Prospectorium, reveal more holdings, and share the names of the five Origins that are coming in Overlord.
As with all previews, numbers, text, and so on are not quite final and are still subject to change.
Keeping Track of Your Agreements
We felt that it would be useful to have a centralized screen for keeping track of all of your subjects, and added a summary screen tab next off the Contacts panel. The Agreements tab shows all of your vassals (or all of your overlords vassals if youre a subject) and lets you examine the terms of the agreements. It also lets you know whether or not youre taking full advantage of the number of holdings you could have, and lets you get more details on subsidies or tithes through tooltips of those terms. It also provides you with a convenient way to go to the negotiations screen we showed you last week.
Work in progress - theres still a bit of placeholder stuff.
Specialist Empires
Specialist Empires are an advanced form of subject contract that excel at certain tasks but are deficient in others. We are introducing three Specialist Empire types in Overlord.
- The Bulwark: A bastion of defense that leaves basic resource acquisition to others.
- The Prospectorium: Excels at resource acquisition but has weaker research.
- The Scholarium: Specializes in research but relies on their allies for military support.
The Prospectorium
Lets take a deeper look at the Norillga Citizen Compact. Our snailian friends are a tier 3 Prospectorium.
Prospectoria are all about resource acquisition, and this is reflected in their abilities and perks.
Even when they were just beginning, they had a large penalty to scientific research and a handful of production based bonuses. As they became more specialized, the magnitude of each increased.
Prospectoria have a chance of discovering caches of resources or even new deposits each year, and the variety of things they can discover increases as they tier up. These discoveries produce a special project that must be exploited by a Construction Ship. As might be expected, over time its helpful for them to have control of a reasonable area of space if you want them to keep finding things.
The overlord also gains a bonus for having at least one advisor of each specialist type. Having a dozen Prospectoria will not increase the Prospectorium Advisory benefit. The third tier 1 perk, Prospectorium Supply, is tied to the Hyper Relay Network, so well get back to that one in a future dev diary when we talk about that.
At tiers 2 and 3, Prospectoria gain several permanent research options that are of potential interest to them.
Their leaders, including those already employed by them, also gain some additional special traits. These are in addition to any other traits they may have
and they can trade them to their overlord through diplomatic trade deals. Higher skill leaders are, of course, worth considerably more than new ones that just came out of the leader pool.
Their last Tier 3 perk lets them replace agricultural features with more mining districts, helping them feed the forges as they become industrial powerhouses. Internally, weve found that Specialist Empires provide an interesting cooperative playstyle where multiple empires can work together to cover for each other's deficiencies.
Holdings, Part Two
A question that came up many times last week related to deprioritizing Overlord jobs from holdings. Any of these that provide benefits for the overlord behave like Criminal jobs and cannot be deprioritized. Specific numbers on them are also still subject to balancing and change. This week well start with a mostly beneficial holding.
With the Overlord Garrison, you can help your subjects if theyre having problems with crime. Having a strong military presence on your worlds forces loyalty, but the populace of the planet might not be quite as happy about the occupying presence.
The Satellite Campus holding produces research for both overlord and subject, paid for by the subject. If the planet owner is gestalt, these will consume energy or minerals as appropriate rather than consumer goods. This weeks civic and origin based holding previews are all about spreading the defining traits of your civilization to your subjects.
Overlords with the Citizen Service civic can build Recruitment Offices to spread their message of patriotic service to their subjects.
Zero cost, zero upkeep, free science! No real downside! The Experimental Crater is unlocked by the Calamitous Birth origin, and allows the lithoid overlord to test asteroid colony ship designs by hurling them at a convenient space on their subjects planet. They usually dont miss the test site.
Except for when they do.
And just as the lithoids can spread their love of explosions to their subjects, the subjects of Death Cults can enjoy the same right to become Mortal Initiates that their own citizens can. As is right, they get to partake in some of the benefits of the sacrifice. Last week I promised one machine holding, but Ill share two instead.
The first is a bit of a mean one, with four jobs that produce research for the overlord. Organic brains arent very efficient or orderly though, to be honest.
Mind Thralls sounds like a great job, right?
More benevolent machines (specifically Rogue Servitors) can instead give their subjects a taste of what awaits them should they allow full integration. Hive-minded pops dont quite understand whats going on, but find the experience quite novel.
New Beginnings
We revealed the icons for the Origins in the Overlord Announcement diary, but now its time to attach names to them.
Each week one of these will be previewed in detail by one of our friends in the community, with summarized details included in that weeks dev diaries.
Next Week
Next week well be visiting the new Enclaves in Overlord, looking at the Bulwark, revealing even more holdings, and maybe even an Ascension Perk. Dont forget that we have video versions of these dev diaries on the Stellaris Official YouTube Channel. Subscribe so you dont miss them, and wishlist Overlord if you havent already!
[ 2022-03-31 11:05:26 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hello everyone!
In the Overlord Announcement last week we mentioned that vassalization mechanics will be undergoing some significant changes in the 3.4 Cepheus update.
Previously in Stellaris, subjugation was rarely a more compelling option than simple conquest, and being subjugated often essentially meant a permanent decline of your empire and a Game Over screen in your near future. Subjects did not offer sufficient benefits nor had the freedoms necessary to be enjoyable to play.
The Scion origin from Federations was somewhat of an exception with most of the restrictions on both subjects and overlord being waived for them, but we felt that while the system was good, it could be even better. It would also be nice for the Scion to work within the rules rather than being so special-cased.
Some people noted that as part of the unity changes in Libra, a bit more of an argument for spinning off sectors into vassals could be made, but with the current numbers its generally more valuable to control those systems directly.
For todays dev diary, Ill start by delving deeper into the new rights and responsibilities that can appear in agreements, and some ways this makes keeping subjects more valuable.
As with all previews, numbers, text, and so on are not quite final and are still subject to change.
Negotiating Terms
Both the overlord and subject will be able to propose alterations of the exact terms of their vassalization contract if its a contract with another regular empire. The Khan, Awakened Empires, and the like do not haggle about the terms of their minions, but are much clearer about those exact terms. Subject contracts start with a preset. These are the basic subjugation types that you know from before, plus a few new ones - Vassal, Subsidiary, Tributary, Protectorate, Bulwark, and so on. Presets have a list of default terms, and can have additional unique effects tied to them, like how Protectorates gain a massive bonus to research until they catch up to their overlord. The default terms of contract presets may have changed a bit from the old system to better fit the new. Weve done our best to ensure that anything you can do right now with your vassals remains possible. The core Negotiation system is part of the free Cepheus update, though many of the brand new terms are part of the Overlord expansion. Negotiable terms include things such as: Can the subject be integrated?
- As a major change from current gameplay, there are no vassalization contract presets that have integration enabled by default. It must be explicitly turned on in contract negotiations.
- Subjects can be given complete diplomatic freedom, none, or they can have most freedoms except are forced to vote with their overlord in the Galactic Community or Federations.
- Once exclusively the province of Feudal Society, now you can grant your subject the ability to freely expand. You can also bar them from expansion, or impose an Influence tithe, making them spend extra Influence (which goes to the Overlord) for the right to expand into empty systems.
- Most presets will start with controlled expansion with the influence tithe as the default term.
- These are broken into Basic, Advanced, or Strategic resource groups, and Research.
- The values are percentages of the production of the subject - in the proposal below, our vassal is offering 15% of their basic resource production as tribute, but is receiving a research subsidy equal to 15% of the subjects research from the overlord.
- None, Offensive, Defensive, or Both can be selected in both directions.
- Yes, this means that wars can be declared on subjects.
- The Vassal preset has a holding limit of 1, allowing you to use some holdings without Overlord. (Though you can lower it to 0 if you need to squeeze out an extra bit of loyalty.)
- This value is an empire-wide limit - with a holding limit of 3, you can build 3 holdings across a particular subjects worlds, not on each of their planets.
Some subject types have fixed, minimum, or maximum terms - Tributaries, Subsidiaries, and Prospectoria, for example, must always provide their overlord at least 30% of their basic resources (energy, minerals, and food) in tribute.
Tributaries have many locked terms. Others can be restricted by civics or for other reasons - for example, overlords with the Feudal Society civic cannot select the Expansion Prohibited term, must join in their subject wars to some degree, and must allow their subjects some degree of diplomatic freedom.
Different terms affect a subjects Loyalty, and have an immediate impact as well as over time. For example, the Independent Diplomacy term grants 5 Loyalty and another +0.5 Loyalty per month. This may prove important later. If youre asking your subject to do something they are ideologically opposed to, those terms may cost extra loyalty, though the reverse is also true in a few cases.
The pacifists dont like being forced into offensive wars. Empires can propose a change in terms with a five year cooldown at a cost of some Influence. Exact costs are still being adjusted.
We are feeling beneficent today, and want you to catch up to us faster, Protectorate. How can you influence them into accepting your generous offer? Giving them a good deal is certainly helpful, and just like before, empire relations and relative power go a long way as well. The terms themselves are heavily moddable, I look forward to seeing what some of you come up with.
The Benefits of Loyalty
Loyalty is the currency used between overlord and subject, and while the Specialist empires make more use of it than regular vassals, its still beneficial to keep your minions loyal since it gives you more options. Loyalty is largely determined by the contract between overlord and subject, but ethical compatibility will come into play as well. Loyal vassals will agree to more onerous terms during negotiations, and will generally support their overlord. You can also spend their loyalty as part of trade agreements, strong-arming them into granting you better than normal trades. You can request a public Pledge of Loyalty to you from a loyal vassal, making them even more loyal over time.
Pledge Loyalty has greater effects if the subject actually likes you for some reason. Disloyal vassals will look for ways to be free of your tyranny, seizing the chance for rebellion should you falter. They may also swear Secret Fealty to one of your rivals in hopes that theyll be able to follow them in an Allegiance War.
In an Allegiance War, you seek to wrest control of the vassals that have pledged Secret Fealty to you, and they will join in on the attack on their former Overlord.
Gotta Subjugate Them All
Like herding cats, having many vassals is hard work. Constantly vying for your attention, keeping multiple subjects happy can be difficult as jealousy ruins everything. Divided Patronage is a modifier that reduces the loyalty of all of your vassals, and increases based on the number of vassals you have. You can mitigate this by offering them better terms, or by taking a vassalization related civic or the Shared Destiny ascension perk.
Overlord Holdings
In Cepheus, were expanding the branch office system from MegaCorp to be more flexible. The corporate tab on planets is being replaced with a more versatile Holdings tab. For now, we have corporate and overlord holdings available here, but we have more future plans for this screen. Much like branch office buildings, holdings are built on another empires colonies and can provide benefits to both empires. Much like criminal syndicate branch office buildings, some holdings might be far more beneficial to one side than the other. Each particular holding is planet-unique, Corporate overlords can build both holdings and branch offices on their subjects colonies.
The Ministry of Truth provides two Overlord Propagandist jobs to the planet, which turn the subjects Unity into Influence for their overlord
While holdings like the Material Ministry are disliked by subjects as the overlord claims a portion of the planets production for themselves
Still others, like the Aid Agency, are welcomed on the planet.
Hive overlords can build the most universally disliked holding (tied with one other), which takes a portion of the subjects planet and dedicates it to a spawning complex. Were also adding some holdings associated with civics or origins.
The Noble Chateaus of the Aristocratic Elite allow them to send troublemakers off to bother someone elses planet instead of their own, much to the dismay of their hosts
Shared Burdens empires can spread their message through Communal Housing projects. How this is received depends largely on the ethics of the subject
And Gaia Seeders, who are gaining more terraforming flexibility in Cepheus as described in Dev Diary #243, can also beautify the worlds of their subjects. The subjects tend to like that - unless theyre Hydrocentric, of course. Since there are over twenty different holdings, Ill share some more in next weeks dev diary (including a machine specific one), and some more on social media as the Overlord reveals continue (though Ill repost those in that weeks dev diaries as well). Its a very versatile system that we look forward to exploring more in the future.
The Future is Ours
Thats long enough for today. Next week well talk about the advanced form of vassalization coming in Overlord called Specialist Empires. Also, starting with this dev diary, were creating video versions on the Stellaris Official YouTube Channel for those of you that prefer listening to them. Subscribe so you dont miss them, and let us know what you think!
[ 2022-03-24 12:03:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=KC6GMyrEEXY;full][/previewyoutube] In Stellaris: Overlord, a new full expansion, gain access to new features designed to unlock the next level of your empire. Guide a galaxy full of potential subjects to victory - or subjugation. New mechanics provide many ways to specialize your vassals roles within your empire, bring new planets and subjects under your reign, and new magnificent megastructures to project your power further, faster. Wishlist Stellaris: Overlord now!
The Brightest Star Must Guide Them
Overlords thematic focus is on exerting your will across the galaxy, the projection of power, and the expansion of civilization under your glorious banner. The other empires can choose to submit willingly or by force, but they will submit. In Federations, we expanded diplomacy between equals with the federations themselves and the politics of the Galactic Community. Nemesis included more hostile forms of diplomacy with espionage operations, and some empires declaring themselves more equal than others with the Custodian and the Galactic Imperium. In Overlord, we will explore diplomacy between empires that are explicitly not equal.
New Ways to Rule
Vassalization mechanics will undergo significant changes. A major goal in this revision was to make subjugation a more valuable and viable system with benefits for both sides, rather than being a delayed Game Over as you wait for Integration should you be subjugated.
Subjugation will be customizable, with Vassalization Contracts, Specialist Vassals, and Overlord Holdings.
New Beginnings and Friends
Explore five new Origins (including a new Origin for Hive Empires), as well as new enclaves, some of whom are Shrouded in mystery.
All Roads Lead to Deneb IIb
Governing a galaxy-spanning empire is challenging, and threats can come from any direction. There will always be those who plot to undo what you have built. A new megastructure will allow you to counter such threats as well as help you take what you deserve.
Other new constructions will allow you to elevate civilization to new heights and exert your influence to build a network tying the galaxy together, with your capital as the center, of course.
Realize Your Grand Design
Will you be a benevolent Overlord that brings prosperity to the galaxy, or an oppressive tyrant exploiting your vassals? Or will you instead serve and become part of something greater? The choice is yours.
Wishlist Stellaris: Overlord Now!
[ 2022-03-17 17:04:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Loke-PDX
Hi all,
We've now released a hotfix, 3.3.4, to address the performance issue that appeared for many of you with Tuesday's 3.3.3 patch.
Essentially we had to roll back a part of the Starbase modifier fix to let the game run smoothly again.
Please find more details below.
3.3.4 Patch Notes:
[expand type=details]
- Fix to address performance impact on mid- to late-game saves.
[ 2022-03-17 12:08:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by PDX-Loke
Hello all,
I'm happy to announce the arrival of the 3.3.3 patch! This is a minor update in which the team has fixed a few annoying gameplay bugs, made some careful balance tweaks, as well as further improved the AI.
With this we believe the 3.3 release is in good shape, and the plan is to focus our efforts forward.
Please keep the feedback coming! As always we will be ready to pick up on your reports and suggestions for the next update.
Enjoy!
3.3.3 "Libra" Patch Notes:
[expand type=details]
Balance
- Planetary Ascension Tier costs have been adjusted. The effect the number of Ascensions has on the cost has been dramatically reduced, but the effect Empire Size has on the costs has been increased.
- Colonists now only produce 3 amenities to be more in line with other amenity producing jobs. Reassembled Ship Shelter produces 7 to make up for it.
- Embracing a Faction now costs Unity rather than Influence.
- Promoting and Suppressing Factions intentionally remains free, other than causing the factions distress.
- Edicts no longer increase empire size from systems or pops.
- Sacrificial edicts now increase the unity output of death priests by +3 Unity while the edict is in effect.
- Galactic Memorial now provides 3 Unity per Ascension Perk instead of 2.
Bugfix
- Fixed starbase modifiers not updating when ruler dies, picking ascension perk and researching new technologies.
- Fixed an issue where edicts would get disabled if the player had a deficit of any resource.
- Fixed timed edicts expiring one day after being enabled.
- Death Chroniclers and Chronicle Drones now correctly provide both Amenities and Stability.
AI
- Fixed an issue where AI empires would not upgrade their mineral purification plant building.
- Fixed an issue where AI would get stuck in a loop building and destroying the food processing plant for void dweller empires.
- Fixed an issue where AI empires would put too many planets on the factory world designation.
What do these things do? Find out more on Thursday! We have been made aware that some users are experiencing issues with certain setups when running on 3.3.3. We have enabled a the 3.3.2 rollback branch for those of you experiencing stuttering and performance issues after the latest hotfix. To roll back: right click Stellaris, Properties, Betas tab and choose "3.3.2 Libra Rollback" from the drop down.
[ 2022-03-15 14:28:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Caligula
Welcome to this weeks dev diary! Eladrin is busy with something exciting this week, so Ive been roped into writing about the almost as exciting new Situations system we will be adding in the next patch.
The idea for implementing this system comes from the realisation that Stellaris provides excellent systems to tell stories about things that have happened - e.g. anomalies and archaeology sites - but lacks a good structure through which to tell stories about things which are happening right now. While we have a number of such stories, they are often either not as complex as wed like them to be (e.g. wed prefer to have more factors taken into account), or they are disproportionately complicated for us to implement (i.e. time-consuming and bug-prone). Either way, the player experience is often not as wed like it, since such stories and event chains are likely to be hard to follow, and it may not always be clear that events are connected to each other or why certain things happen.
This was a state of affairs we wanted to improve upon, so we decided to implement a system which aimed to:
- Give players an interactive and informative interface by which to experience current affairs event chains.
- Provide a structure that is (relatively) easy to add new content to.
Note that this is a mockup - so not necessarily how the final UI will look. To unpack this a bit, the flow progresses something like this: 1. The Situation starts. This could happen e.g. through an event. The Situation can either be empire-wide, or it can be focused e.g. on a single planet
Event text is final. 2. Each month, the Situations progress will tick upwards or downwards, depending on your response to the Situation.
A WIP tooltip showing the monthly change. It'll list all contributing factors. 3. As the Situation progresses, you may reach the next stage. Often, an event will be fired as soon as this happens, to develop the story. Effects can also be applied to the empire or planet based on the current stage, e.g. an instability-based Situation may reduce stability by 10 for each stage. 4. There may also be random events along the way that can happen on any monthly tick. To distinguish Situation-based events from regular ones, some tweaks have been made to the event interface:
5. The player can choose how to respond to a Situation via a selection of Approaches. On occasion, one might be prompted to change these via events, but otherwise, one can freely pick them in the Situations interface. (We have not yet decided whether there should generally be a cooldown to picking an option). Approaches usually have effects over time, such as spend X Unity per month to gain faster progress. 6. When either end of the Situations progress bar is reached, the Situation is resolved, usually through an event in which something happens. Some Situations will progress in a linear manner from left to right, others will start you in the middle and progress either to the left or to the right based on your choices. And we also want them to be differently coloured depending on how threatening the Situation is:
This is also a mockup. This is all a bit theoretical, so, what changes can players expect in practice? Now I will take you through a few of the things we have done and are doing with the Situations system.
Narrative Situations
Content Design often implements narrative-based event chains set on a certain planet. Now, if we feel like the story has a bit more to give, a planet-based Situation can be crafted instead. The ability to have different outcomes at either end of the progress bar is particularly useful, since it can show which sort of conclusion the player is advancing towards (or at least indicate that there are multiple). To avoid giving spoilers, I wont say exactly what stories weve added in this way, but there will be a few new planet-based narratives to encounter. The targeting function of Situations is not limited to planets (though most of our effort has been towards making it work well there), so we have also managed to try adding a Situation based around a system or starbase. Owners of the Leviathans DLC - or other DLCs that add Leviathan NPCs to the game - can also expect a few surprises next time they go monster-hunting ;)
Deficit Situations
Situations are not all fun and games. As their origin as EU4 Disasters would suggest, they are a great system through which to portray negative events. They give the player all the information they need to know what is happening, what the results of it will be, how severe the current Situation is, and what they can do about it. One of our main priorities when it comes to using this aspect of Situations was reworking Deficits. At the moment, Deficits are like a light switch: as soon as you are in deficit (stockpile of 0 and negative income) for a given resource, you get all the defined penalties for being in that deficit (which can be quite harsh). But as soon as you spend a month no longer in deficit, all penalties are removed. This feels a bit off. Also, the penalties are the same for all empires, which has frequently led to headaches where they either disproportionately impacted a certain type of empire or left others (say, one with less need of a certain resource) relatively untouched. Finally, they can also be a cause for death spirals (in particular for the AI), as a shortage of one resource leads to penalties, which leads to a shortage of another resource. With our rework, being in a deficit will start a Situation. You will start at 25% progress in this Situation, and it will increase in severity as long as you are at 0 balance and have a negative income. The rate of increase will depend on how much you are losing compared to your income. Having a stockpile will gradually make the Situation tick downwards; having a positive income will make it do so more rapidly.
This is the actual UI as it looks like right now. We are hard at work finishing it up and making it look presentable! The penalties you receive for being in a deficit will start off light compared to their present settings, but will increase in severity as the Situation escalates. We are also able to configure them depending on your empires attributes, so for instance a Catalytic empire will now correctly get alloy output problems for being in a food deficit. We aim to give each deficit Situation a choice of approaches, so that you can try to mitigate it from within the interface. So, for instance, a consumer goods shortage might be mitigated by electing to defund scientists, with the result that researchers cost less upkeep but also produce less research. If however the deficit continues to grow, at 75% progress an event will fire which will warn that your empire is in truly dire financial straits and will need to make cutbacks soon. It will suggest a few, and you can pay a price (e.g. devastating a planet, or removing a special resource deposit) in return for some immediate resources that might help you alleviate the deficit.
Numbers not final Finally, if the deficit becomes so severe that the progress bar is filled up, the empire is declared bankrupt. This is an unambiguously bad thing to happen to you - current effects (numbers to be finalised) are downgrading all non-capital buildings to their lowest level, disbanding half the fleet and all the armies, and giving 25% higher costs, 25% less ship damage, and 50% less unity and influence for 10 years. But its also designed to avoid death spirals: in return for liquidating these assets, you are given enough of the resource you defaulted on to survive for a while. Additionally, all other deficit Situations you are currently experiencing are terminated immediately, without penalty, and you are granted some resources to avoid them returning too soon.
Numbers are subject to change. Changes are likely to come to this design as we continue to play with the new system and iron out its kinks, but we are hopeful that this new version of deficits will resolve many of the issues with the current deficits system, and make deficits, if not exactly fun to experience, at least a more interesting and less frustrating game mechanic.
Further Strategic Situations
We have further plans to overhaul systems or features using Situations. For these (unlike the Situations listed above), we cant guarantee that they will definitely be in the next patch, but we are looking to adapt the likes of slave revolts, planetary separatism revolts, and the Synthetic Dawn AI Uprising to this new system. With regards to the AI Uprising: we are broadly happy with the way the chain works now, but there are a few improvements to be made, and we feel that it would be beneficial to the player to be able to experience it through a UI. For instance, it has a bunch of events that an experienced player would recognise as warning signs that they should do something about it, but the inexperienced player would not know what is up and would not stop it from happening. With the Situations system, experienced and inexperienced players alike would know that something is up. However, this also makes it easier to know that you should do something about it, so we are also looking at making it a bit more challenging than just changing species right to end the Situation - after all, the robots are still extremely annoyed at you having deprived them of sentience for all these years! We are also looking at making purging the robots a viable if high-risk approach, at least so long as you dont have too many robots. With planetary revolts and slave uprisings, we have a feature that hasnt seen much love for many a patch even as the game has changed around it, so we hope to improve it in a variety of aspects. At the moment, it would be fair to say that the unrest events are more a nuisance than a threat: revolts feel like they come out of the blue, but dont have much teeth, as you can usually just conquer back the planet (since one planet alone cannot hope to stand against your empire). Our changes to this system are at a fairly early stage, but our goals include: Content which may not be in 3.4: [expand type=details]
- Make revolts feel less random - they will no longer happen suddenly, and whether unrest turns into a successful revolt will depend more reliably on factors such as how many pops are on the planet, and just how annoyed they are.
- Smooth out issues such as one habitat in a system revolting leading to the loss of all planets in the system. The opinions of other planets in the system should have an impact on the success of the revolt.
- Improve the system where planets can sometimes join other empires after the revolt. (At the moment, this can happen in separatist revolts if the original owner still exists and is nearby, and in slave revolts if there is an egalitarian empire nearby). Basically, they should be asked in advance if they wish to support the revolt, at which point it should progress faster, but on the other hand, the other side will know this is happening. Also, we may want to review the conditions for revolts joining other empires, since in some cases a completely annexed empire might have each planet revolt to form its own micronation.
- We are toying with the idea of removing the stage where planets have ground combat during rebellions. Troops stationed there can be factored in during the buildup stage instead.
- Ideally, a successful rebellion would start a war with the previous owner, but would also be a bit more of a potential threat. Well see what we manage to come up with, here.
[ 2022-03-10 11:05:42 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by grekulf
Hello everyone!
Today Im here to deliver some big news, namely that my tenure as Game Director for Stellaris is ending, and Stephen Muray (aka Eladrin) will be taking over. I will still be staying with Paradox Development Studios, but I will be stepping down so that I can focus on an unannounced project that I am leading.
Stellaris will be in great hands, and Stephen and the team deserve all the credit for 3.3 Libra. My involvement was no more than setting the initial path towards the Unity rework.
I am extremely proud and happy with what weve accomplished, and Im very much looking forward to seeing what Stephen and the team can achieve together. The game is possibly in a better state than it has ever been, and with the Custodian Initiative going strong I feel like now is the best time to step down and let someone else take the reins.
I also want to thank everyone Ive worked with during these years. Its been really fun to see this game that we love become more and more awesome by the day.
My History with Stellaris
Stepping down from Stellaris feels strange when I reflect upon it, since I have worked on Stellaris in various capacities since 2013. I began my journey with Stellaris working as the UI designer. I was actually the first UI designer at PDS, and back then I used to work on all the games we were working on. It wasnt until the release of Stellaris in 2016 that I changed my role into game designer and focused on Stellaris for 100% of my time. I worked as a game designer until December 2018, when I took over as game director from Martin. Looking back, the game has really made such an incredible journey since 2016. When Stellaris was released, we didnt really know exactly what the game was supposed to be. We know it was a space 4X game with a lot of focus on exploration, but since it was the first game of its kind, we also had to let it grow up and gain its own identity. Stellaris is interesting in that way, because it's a game that has undergone a lot of changes over the years, and Im really proud of all the bold decisions and ambitious changes we have undertaken to make the game better.
The Annals of My Tenure
Ancient Relics was the first DLC that I designed and led, and the focus for that one was to expand some of the exploration content by creating a new system (archaeology) with progressive storylines where you could go back and read what happened. In contrast with the anomalies, archaeological sites are rarely removed and stay on the map even after being completed. In part, this was to help the galaxy feel more alive by having stories be a persistent part of it. Ancient Relics also featured the Relics system, where I wanted to focus a little more on making a UI that looks really cool with unique icons for the Relics. Overall I really like how it looks when you have relics, and Id very much like to have had other UIs feel as good as the Relic UI can do in some circumstances. Lithoids was the first species pack we released during my time. The involvement from the game director on the species packs is relatively small. We write the initial high level design and theme, but most of the work is done by artists and content designers. It was really nice to see lithoids make their way into Stellaris, since pops that eat minerals is something a lot of people have been asking for for a long time. Lithoids was the first time we added gameplay to a species pack, and it really felt like it really put the cherry on top for the theme. Although this was an increase in scope for this type of DLC, I felt like it was the right thing for us to do. Federations was the first big expansion that I led. As weve mentioned before on streams and alike, a strategy weve used to collect feedback and ideas into different boxes, like warfare or diplomacy. Diplomacy was the box that we hadnt touched before, and it was for Federations that we got the chance to really dive deeper into that. We had a lot of ideas related to various diplomatic interactions, but I wanted Federations to focus on the friendly or cooperative parts of Diplomacy. We did a lot of cutting for Federations, because the initial list of ideas was too large to be feasible. Some of the ideas we cut eventually found their way into Nemesis instead. The feature that I am probably the most happy about in Federations was the addition of the Origins. Origins feel like such a natural part of the experience now that it's hard to imagine a Stellaris without them. I also really like how the Galactic Community adds an interesting level of diplomatic plays. If anything, Id love to have seen that be even more cutthroat and machiavellian. The next species pack we had in the plans was scheduled to release around late October 2020, so we used the theme of Halloween as a source of inspiration for creating the design and theme for Necroids. I really like how thematic the Necroids pack ended up being, and I almost wish we could have done more. Scope control is important for the species packs however, since the species packs are largely cosmetic content with gameplay added as a bonus. After Federations most of the team started working on Nemesis, which focused a lot on the hostile or insidious parts of Diplomacy. I really liked the overall theme of Nemesis, because it worked on so many levels. The new Intel system we added was really cool, and I really like how other alien empires feel more alien and mysterious now, especially with the new First Contact system & content. With Espionage we had a bunch of ideas, but in the end I think we only had time for about half of the Operations. For Nemesis I think we had a lot of cool ideas, but I wish we would have had more time to do more with Espionage & Operations. I like how the system works, but we didnt have quite enough time to give it enough teeth. In the end I really like how Federations and Nemesis came together to reinforce parts of Stellaris that had been lacking, while also emphasizing the clash of ideas and enabling more gray-zone conflicts. The Aquatics Species Pack was a delightful update, as we finally got the chance to add Dolphinoids to the game. Like Ive mentioned before, Dolphinoids have been used as funny examples in design meetings for many years, and Im really happy with how we managed to finally give the swolephins a real existence! As a game director I was less involved in direct implementation as time went by, and I instead focused more on long-term planning and goals. Sometime during all of this the ideas for the Custodian Initiative started to form. Obviously something like the Custodians isnt new in the game industry overall (see games-as-a-service or game-development-as-a-service), but for us most of the challenges were organizational. It wasn't until we decided to split Paradox Development Studio into three studios (PDS Green, Red, Gold) that it started becoming a real possibility. Getting the Custodian Initiative in place is probably one of the things that I am the most proud of.
Why the Custodian Initiative is so important to me
To me, the game industry is changing and it's getting more important to compete with new content. Before the Custodian Initiative, it was a lot harder to balance the base quality needs of the game (AI, performance, QoL etc.) with the need to produce new content, and it could also be many months between each update. The idea is that the Custodian team is a clear reinvestment into improving the game and the game experience.. My hope was that better base quality for the game will lead to a higher amount of satisfaction and a higher number of monthly active users. My take is that happy players want to buy DLC, and since we also want to make the game were passionate about as good as possible, everyone wins. Since the Custodian initiative isnt a subscription service, the best way to support it is to buy DLC that you feel good about. My hope is that the Custodian Initiative will move us towards a direction where good game = happy players = revenue.
The Future is Looking Bright
Ive been working with Stellaris for so many years now, so it's going to be incredibly fun for me to step down and watch from the side as the team makes Stellaris even more awesome for years to come. Thank you so much for your support all these years, Daniel Moregrd (Former) Game Director of Stellaris 2018-2022
[ 2022-03-03 12:42:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
/Read in Russian on VK
Hi everyone!
The Stellaris 3.3.1 Libra Custodian Update has been released, and once again its time to look back on the past and forward to the future.
[previewyoutube=Lk6X24i3UJ4;full][/previewyoutube]
The 3.3 update went through an Open Beta which we feel was a stunning success. With the aid of the community, the systems were significantly improved and a large number of bugs were found and squashed. Thank you again for your help!
The 3.3 Cycle
A 3.3.2 release went up today to fix a few things that got found at the last minute, including localization issues in French, Portuguese, and Russian, as well as a potential crash some people have encountered. "3.3.2 Changelog" [expand type=details]
- Fixed localization issues affecting articles in French, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese
- Fixes a crash that would occur when attempting to apply a species template to a species with a different amount of traits than what is in the template.
- Fixed species template application trait add/remove checks being inverted.
New Players and the Tutorial
Stellaris isnt always the easiest game to get into. Dont be alarmed if there are changes to the tutorial and early game experience. Were going to be gathering data about different elements of the new player experience, trying out various things and seeing what works.
Onwards to 3.4
Meanwhile, 3.4 is just around the corner. Currently planned for May, the Custodian side of the 3.4 update will continue to refine the balance around Unity and address some more of the feedback from the Open Beta and 3.3 release, as well as being the target for the planned release of the Situations system first described in Dev Diary 234. Well give Situations and our planned uses for them a complete Dev Diary in the near future.
Influence and Espionage
With 3.3, Influence is the primary resource for external diplomacy, fast travel, and expanding living space. One of the changes were planning for the May update is inspired by some of the feedback we received during the Unity Open Beta. Were switching the initial costs for Espionage Operations to Influence rather than a massive pile of Energy Credits. Operation Upkeep will remain in Energy Credits. Exact values are subject to change.
Influence is purple. Espionage is purple. How can we argue with that? While making that change we also added a few improvements to the Subterfuge Tradition Tree. A focus on Espionage can put some strain on your Envoy supply, so the Double Agents tradition will now provide one, in addition to increasing your Maximum Infiltration Level by 10.
The known and the nameless, familiar and faceless. Meanwhile, earlier in the tree weve decided to add some combat benefits to the tree to represent their enhanced ECM and ECCM capabilities. Empires focusing in Subterfuge now have an easier time locking on to enemy ships, as well as foiling the attempts of others to do the same to them.
Computer's locked. Getting a signal.
Go dead. Shut everything down and make like a hole in the void. As with the earlier changes, these numbers are also still subject to change and a deeper review of Espionage Operations is still planned in the future.
Idyllic Bloom Improvements
A quality of life change being made to the Idyllic Bloom civic is also planned for 3.4 (coming in May). Currently, Gaia Seeders can only be built on planets that match your planetary preference, which led to a play cycle where they had to terraform a planet before being able to utilize their special buildings. Instead, were going to expand the valid planets of the Gaia Seeders as you gain terraforming technologies.
Much easier.
Okay, itll be much easier once we actually know how to do it. Gaia Seeders can be freely built on planets that match your homeworld type as before, but can also be built on other planets of the same general climate type (Dry, Wet, or Cold) once you have Terrestrial Sculpting. Since the Maweer Caretakers come from a Tropical World (Wet), they need the Ecological Adaptation technology to upgrade the Gaia Seeders on this Alpine World (Cold). Tomb Worlds can also be seeded once the Climate Restoration technology has been acquired. The upkeep of the Gaia Seeders building is increased using the same tiers of terraforming difficulty as the building placement.
What Else is Coming?
Regarding what the Crisis Expansion Team has been working on, theyre not quite ready to share that information quite yet. Soon. One of our agents did manage to sneak some of the wonderful work of the Concept Art Team out though...
Its a thing, with greebles! And its game-changing.
[ 2022-02-24 12:59:14 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=Lk6X24i3UJ4;full][/previewyoutube] The Stellaris Team is proud to announce our second free Custodian update, the 3.3 Libra Update is Now Available! The free 3.3 Libra update brings with it a plethora of new bug fixes, AI and performance improvements, more uses for the Unity resource, and a new civic for owners of both MegaCorp and the Necroids Species Pack.
AI Improvements
3.3 Libra AI is better at managing jobs, dealing with bio-trophies, choosing techs, as well as the ability to specialize planets over time. These changes, along with improved economic plans for the AI, mean that the AI is much better at scaling its economy into the late game, including alloy and consumer good production. As well, the AI allies will now respect the Take Point command, and will always prefer to follow Player fleets while this command is active - even if their empire is actively being attacked. Our internal testing shows that the 3.3 AI performs much better past year 100 than the 3.2 AI. How does it work for you? Let us know in the comments or on the forums!
Performance Improvements
The 3.3 Libra update also includes many optimizations to the game in terms of overall game speed increases. We have seen up to a 50% decrease in the time it takes per year at the start of the game. These performance improvements were gained by further optimizing pop job weight calculations, as well as changing some settings in the engine which allows more powerful computers to do extra ticks per render frame. Additional performance improvements were gained by optimizing the algorithm used when calculating the cost to upgrade fleets. Like the increased Performance in 3.3 Libra? We want to hear from you!
Now Hiring for Permanent Employment
Owners of the MegaCorp and Necroids Species Pack DLCs will get a new civic introduced in the 3.3 Libra update: Permanent Employment. This Megacorporation has ensured that its employees will never be out of a job. Ever. After the employees time is up, they will be repurposed for simpler tasks so they can still provide for their families and pay off their debts. -Permanent Employment flavor text A variation of the Reanimators Civic for the Corporate Authority, Permanent Employment allows the construction of Posthumous Employment Centers, as well as the ability to reanimate Leviathans. At the Posthumous Employment Center, pops working Reassigner jobs generate organic pop assembly from the carcasses of indebted citizens. The resulting assembled pops have the Zombie trait. The Zombie trait gives -25% resources from jobs, but reduces Pop Upkeep by 100%. Zombies also cannot produce leaders, have no happiness, are infertile and can only work Worker Strata jobs. They also forgo their annual review and salary increases. Have a screenshot of Zombie pops in action? Share it with us on Twitter or Facebook!
Unity Rework
All means of increasing Administrative Capacity have been removed, and Empire Sprawl has been renamed to Empire Size. While there are ways to reduce the Empire Size generated by various sources, this will be used to help differentiate gameplay between different empire types. Empires will no longer be able to completely mitigate Empire Size penalties. Penalties and Empire Size generation values have been significantly reduced. As a result of feedback on this system from the Open Beta, Empire Size values under 100 are ignored. Bureaucrats, Priests, Managers, Synapse Drones, and Coordinators will be the primary sources of Unity for various empire types, and jobs are produced from the empire equivalent of Administration Offices. Autochthon Memorials (and similar buildings) now increase planetary Unity production and themselves produce Unity based on the number of Ascension Perks the Empire has taken. Being monuments, they no longer require workers. The Edicts Cap system has been removed. Toggled Edicts will have monthly Unity Upkeep which is modified by Empire Size. Each empire has an Edicts Fund which subsidizes Edict Upkeep, reducing the amount you have to pay each month to maintain them. Things that previously increased Edict Capacity now generally increase the Edicts Fund, but some civics, techs, and ascension perks have received other thematic modifications. Leaders now cost Unity to hire rather than Energy. They also have a small amount of Unity Upkeep. We understand that this increases the relative costs of choosing to hire several scientists at the start of the game for exploration purposes. The Leader pool for recruitment now refreshes every year, to reduce the need for leader cycling when searching for specific leader traits.
Influence Changes
Several systems that used to cost Influence are now paid in Unity.
- Planetary Decisions that were formerly paid in Influence. Prices have been adjusted.
- Resettlement of pops. Abandoning colonies still costs Influence.
- Manipulation of internal Factions. Factions themselves will now produce Unity instead of Influence.
Planetary Ascensions
Tied to unlocking Ascension Perks, Planetary Ascension Tiers are a way of improving your core worlds by expending Unity. In normal empires, they represent the active will of the people supporting your government and giving a little extra to do things the way theyve always been done. In machine and hive empires, its more the well-oiled machinery of the world gaining efficiency or drone instincts becoming better honed with endless practice. In either case, an Ascended planet does whatever it focuses on better. Once youve unlocked three Ascension Perks (you do not need to actually spend them for this feature), you can Ascend each of your planets to Ascension Tier 1. This increases all of the effects of the planets Designation by 25% - whether it be Technician Output from a Generator World or Trade Value on a Commercial Ring World. Each additional Ascension Perk you unlock increases the maximum Ascension Tier by 1, with an extra 4 tiers unlocked once you unlock all of the Perk slots. This lets you Ascend planets up to ten times, for a maximum bonus of 250% of the base Planetary Designation effects. Ascending a Planet costs Unity, and this cost is heavily affected by both Empire Size and the total number of Ascension Tiers you have across your entire Empire. How do you feel about the Unity rework? Let us know in the comments or on the forums! Thanks for playing Stellaris, and remember the galaxy is vast and full of wonders..
[ 2022-02-23 09:12:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! For those of you who may have missed it, were currently smack dab in the middle of Dev Clash 2022! We have 10 teams of developers, using wit, deception, and skill for domination of a Stellaris galaxy. Episode 1, has our developer empires making first contact with one another, and the first Federation is formed. [previewyoutube=5Xgyvmch3BA;full][/previewyoutube] In Episode 2, the galaxy fractures into several alliances, border skirmishes, and surprise attacks run rampant, and one empire makes a foreboding decision. [previewyoutube=atyDhUjJcag;full][/previewyoutube] In Episode 3, a deal is made to seat a Galactic Custodian, and the first galaxy-wide war is declared, followed by the elimination of our first Developer team. The Galactic Custodian's first action is the big brain move of the session, and another Federation leaves the Galactic Community. [previewyoutube=87Gvq5x9yh0;full][/previewyoutube] If you want to play with the Dev Clash empires as prescripted empires in your galaxy, you can get the Dev Clash 2022 Empires mod on the Steam workshop. Be sure to join us on Monday, at 1500 CET for Episode 4 of Dev Clash 2022 on twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive!
[ 2022-02-18 14:41:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! First of all Id like to thank all of you that participated in the beta and provided feedback on the unity rework that weve been working on for quite some time now! Your feedback has been invaluable in making sure that we release this update to Stellaris in the best state it can be. :D Second of all, we are now ready to reveal the release date for the free 3.3 Libra patch. The Libra patch will be released on Wednesday, February 23rd at 10:00 am CET! And with that announcement out of the way, here are the full patch notes for the 3.3 update: 3.3.1 "Libra" Patch Notes [expand type=details] ######################### VERSION 3.3.1 ########################### # Features # Unity Rework * Suppressing or Promoting factions no longer costs Influence. Known Issue: Unity costs for Faction Manipulation are not yet functioning. * All other technologies that increased unity production now instead increase Edict Fund by 20. * Autochthon Monument, Corporate Monument, and Simulation Site building lines now generate a small amount of Unity and increase Unity generation from jobs on their planet. * Autochthon Monuments and other similar buildings now produce Unity based on the number of Ascension Perks the Empire has taken. * Cutthroat Politics now also reduces Edict Upkeep by 20%. * Executive Vigor Ascension Perk now grants 100 Edict Fund instead of 2 Edict Capacity. * Grand Council and Harmonious Directives Traditions now grant 50 Edict Fund instead of 1 Edict Capacity. * Imperial Cult Civic now grants 100 Edict Fund instead of 2 Edict Capacity. * Inwards Perfection now grants 50 Edict Fund instead of 1 Edict Capacity. * Planetary Unification now grants +5% Unity production and a one time Unity award instead of +2 Unity. * Brand Loyalty civic now grants 25 Edict Fund instead of 1 Encryption. Subsumed Will and OTA Updates now also grant 25 Edict Fund. * Capital designations now provide production bonuses. * Feudal Society now also reduces Leader hiring costs by 50%, waives Unity upkeep costs for employed Leaders, causes employed Governors to instead generate Unity equal to their skill level, but removes the ability to dismiss Leaders. * Finishing tradition trees now unlocks the ability to select previously locked Federation types. * The Imperial Authority now gains increased Influence from Power Projection. * Added Planetary Ascension Tiers to enhance Planet Designations through Unity * Reforming government now costs Unity. The cost is based on Empire Size. * Renamed Administrator jobs to Politicians. Assigned Bureaucrats, Priests and other related jobs to the new Administrator economic category. * Resettling pops that previously cost Influence now costs Unity. Abandoning colonies still costs Influence. * Unity Ambitions and Campaigns now function like Toggled Edicts and last until canceled with upkeep rather than costs. * From Beta: Increased Spiritualist discounts on edict cost and upkeep to -10%/-20% from -5%/-10%. Cutthroat Politics now grants -20% edict upkeep. * Hive empires can now build a variant of the Autochthon Monument line called Sensoriums. * Leaders have a base cost of 100 unity and cost 50 additional unity for every leader owned leader, not counting the ones you start with. The cost goes down whenever a leader dies or is fired. * Memorialists and Death Cults can now choose whether to build their specialized Unity buildings or regular ones. Memorialist buildings now replace the Autochthon Monument line. * Merchant Guilds no longer produce bonus unity. * Rulers now provide +5 Edict fund per level instead of their previous Edict Duration and Unity Boost. * Technocracy no longer generates unity. Instead the Civic now doubles the chance that your scientists will discover a technology from within their expertise. The civic only requires you to be partially materialist. # Necroids Species Pack Features * New Civic: Permanent Employment added. # New Content * Added 2 new bespoke star systems and 3 new anomalies to be discovered: Temporal Prism, Lost Soul and Ancient Vending Machine. Also added a colony event chain, Insidious Ophidians. * 2 new archeology sites were added to the base game: The Mask of Transformation and Rage Sage. * Added Plantoid, Lithoid, Necroid, and Aquatic pre-sapient pops to discover for owners of the respective Species Packs. # Balance * Activating an edict now requires one months upkeep cost worth of stockpiled resources. * The Hydrocentric Ascension Perk now allows empires to flood habitats, making them suitable for Aquatic species. * Edicts can now have a cooldown before they can be disabled. * AI Megacorps should spawn half as often as before now. * Increased the likelihood of getting endgame crises that are not the Unbidden. * Beta: Empire Sprawl has no effects under 100 rather than 50. * Beta: Increased Unity production of Bio-Trophies from 1 to 3. * Beta: Reduced the costs of higher tier edicts and campaigns. * Scientists currently researching a technology can now gain new traits as they level up * Distinguished Admiralty now gain +2 starting level to their Admirals and Generals. * Fixed unmodifiable traits so that you can now correctly remove special habitability traits, along with various other traits that you were not meant to be able to add but it was fine to remove. Also allowed you to apply existing species templates containing such traits to the rest of the species. (This mainly covers flavour-based traits - there are still some such as Mechanical or Psionic or Necrophage which you will not be able to add or remove via species modification) * From Beta: Empire Size effects on edicts, campaigns, and ambitions now directly affect the base costs of these, so bonuses like Spiritualist ethic's cost reductions now reduce costs and upkeep by the expected percentages. * Increased political power of ruler and specialist strata under Decadent Lifestyle. * Increased the consumer goods upkeep of Decadent Lifestyle. * Integrated Preservation no longer increases admin cap, instead it gives your empire a flat 30% increase to Automatic Resettlement Chance. * It now costs 25/50 influence to upgrade a habitat in addition to the alloy cost. * Leaders now only stay in the active pool for 1 year, hire them quickly before they leave! * Beta: Megastructures no longer have a unity upkeep * Pearl Divers now produce one more trade value (3 by default) and will not steal Angler jobs when food is short anymore. * Reduced campaign costs and ambitions costs significantly, re-added Edict Cost Reduction to spiritualists for Unity Ambitions and Sacrifices. * Regenerative Hull Tissue, Nanite Repair System and Nanobot Cloud have had their values sliced in half however they now heal on a percentage basis rather than a static one leading to a net buff in most situations.. * Beta: Removed the penalty to trade value from low habitability due to it not working properly with pops that were of a species other than the empire founding species * Servile pops should no longer retain the trait if they become zombies. * Spiritualist empires can now acquire the technologies associated with the Autochthon Memorial and similar buildings, as well as their faith based line. * Spiritualists are no longer allowed to take Byzantine Bureaucracy since they don't have Bureaucrats. * Telepaths now give +5% planetary output and get bonuses from planet administrator modifiers * The "Sell to Private Collector" minor artifact decision now grants a flat 500 energy and has a 6 month cooldown. * The Here Be Dragons endgame trigger now lets Machine Intelligences with the Synthetic Age ascension perk reach it after 4 ascension perks rather than 6. * The Living Metal technology can now be discovered as long as you have some within your borders. * The Void Dweller finisher from the Expansion tradition tree now also discounts upgrading habitats. * Trade value is now affected by difficulty bonus. This will make non hive mind empires more competitive on higher difficulty settings compared to hive mind AI empires. # AI * AI can now create more specialized planets by switching place of buildings on two different planets with each other. * AI will no longer instantly buy ever single slave pop on the slave market. * AI will now prioritize its alloy expenditure in a more sensible way, focusing on ships then starbases modules/upgrades and only building defense platforms as a last resort. * AI bonus willingness to choose rare tech has been reduced from 400% to 50%, AI would often spend a very long time researching expensive rare tech in the early game if they had the chance. * AI is now much more likely to pick cheaper research options when all else equals. * AI will now take into account free jobs and items in the construction queue when setting its economic targets. * AI empires are now more likely to pick the mind over matter ascension perk when available. * AI empires are now much more likely to finish their ascension path. * AI empires that require food will no longer build bioreactors. * AI empires who are not using food will now delete agricultural districts if they happen to have one, for example when they conquer. * AI ethics such as militarist, spiritualist and materialist will now have an effect on the AI overall economical strategy where they will have additional focus on alloys, unity or science respectively. * AI fleets who are following a player fleet with "take point" will now merge with each other when they reach the player fleet. * AI fleets will now follow the player more closely with a follow command when they are in the same system. * AI is now much more likely to prioritize surveying a system if they know there is a colonizable planet there resulting in faster expansion. * AI rogue servitor empires will now build an organic sanctuary on each planet that has upgraded their capital building, and build additional ones on planets with high science or industrial output. * Overhauled AI weightings for picking techs so that it favors technologies that increase research speed instead of almost always researching weapons (faster research means better weapons in the long run). Also fixed various bugs with this, for example extremely low weightings on researching robotics. * AI can now balance how many pops it needs that produce amenities better (mostly relevant for Hiveminds, so they dont put ALL their pops on amenity creating jobs). * AI will no longer destroy superfluous buildings and districts during a temporary occupation of a planet. * AI will now demolish superfluous districts, commonly obtained during conquest and purging the previous owners. * AI will now favor the trade policy which generates consumer goods over the default wealth creation policy. * AI will now favor researching techs unlocking the weapon type they favor (according to their personality). * AI will now make sure planets contain at least one free building slot if it has unemployed pops and it is unable to find any possible construction which contributes to the AI's economic plan. * AI will now only build defense platforms if they have maxed out their fleet cap. * AI will now only upgrade fleets if there would a substantial benefit (+30% fleet power determined by define SHIP_FLEET_POWER_UPGRADE_THRESHOLD ) * AI will now remember if they have fought against a crisis together with the player and continue following their fleets as long as the threat of the crisis remains. * AI will now spend more of its alloys on upgrading starbases when they have reached their fleet cap. * AI will now more reliably build habitats again. * Ai budget for alloys will now heavily favor building colony ships if we have claimed planets we want to colonize. * AI now understands how to evaluate energy grids and other buildings that apply modifiers to the planet (so now it can create specialized planets better). * Allied AI will now help its allies defend against the mid and late game crisis. * AI is now much more likely to prioritize surveying a system if they know there is a colonizable planet there resulting in faster expansion. * AI will now look at the individual unemployed pop when considering what job to create for it, solving various issues where jobs were created for pops who could not work them. * Fixed AI often aborting jump drive orders during windup. * Fixed Lithoid Tree of Life food building and destruction loop * Fixed a bug where the AI would sometimes try to replace one lost science ship with an excessively high number thereof. * Fixed an issue where AI can not build any buildings when negative on food and consumer goods at the same time. * Fixed an issue where AI would continuously upgrade buildings and create an excessive amount of jobs. * Fixed an issue where AI would incorrectly multiply the trade value generated by a building by the number of jobs provided by the building twice. * Fixed an issue where AI would only consider solving amenities issues with buildings if there was no unemployment. * Fixed an issue where AI would put too many pops working amenities jobs. * Fixed an issue where hive minds were unable to build the spawning pool. * Fixed an issue where repeatable tech were getting an extra chance to be research as if they were rare techs. * Fixed an issue where the AI did not colonize low habitability planets when there are no other options causing doomsday origin empires in particular to often experience a very swift end to their species. * Fixed an issue where the AI would not budget to use ship boost edicts. * Fixed an issue with AI budgeting preventing it from using terraforming gasses when it wanted to. * Fixed several issues where AI would get stuck and not build any modules or upgrade any starbases when there were open module slots which were unable to be filled according to the AI's starbase template. * Improved "Take Point" Follow behavior for fleets. * Improved AI construction ship behavior, construction ships will now prioritize tasks that are close to them and avoid going to another system that already has a construction ship in it. Heavily increased priority of building starbases in systems with planets. * Increased allowed budget for alloys on planet construction which prevented AI from building energy grids. * Life Seeded AIs now always want the World Shaper ascension perk. * Lithoid empires are now more liberal in spending minerals on their colony ships. * Reduces AI willingness to take a lot of planets with very low habitability. * Removed weighted random from AI construction as it now more correctly prioritizes which buildings to build. * The AI will now use minor artifact decisions with extra focus put on Arcane Deciphering. * Total overhaul for scripted AI tech selection. The important techs are now: extra research speed, extra resource production, resource producing buildings, ship types and starbase types. * Updated AI construction ship logic so that they will keep working around the system they have been sent to instead of going back and forth between the empire borders (which was a very inefficient way of building stations) * Updated AI tradition selection to align better with the current state of the game. * Adjusted AI tradition tree and ascension perk selection. * Nanite repair system will no longer be used by the auto designer when the empire does not have access to nanite income. * Fixed an issue where AI necroid empires didn't build chamber of elevation on their planets. * Fixed an issue where clone army origin species would not always build ancient clone vats on their new colonies when possible. * Fixed an issue where the AI were not allowed to build Gaia Seeders. * Fixed an issue where the AI would incorrectly evaluate the potential resources gained by constructing a building. * Fixed an issue where the AI would sometimes revert to obsolete fallback behavior when deciding what to build. # UI * Added a textbox for Cost in Edicts UI. Also rearranged neighboring elements to align better. * Added column for upkeep in Edicts interface (entry as well as sort button) * Hid Empire Sprawl impact from top of Edicts UI. Put Edict Fund in its place to keep neat alignment. * Added upkeep into the leaders entry in Leaders View. * You can now see Unbidden anchor systems on the galactic map. * Clicking the fleet size icon in the top bar now opens the fleet manager. * Improved legibility of approximate job output indicators on districts and buildings, and made those on buildings also show country modifiers (those on districts already did). * Optimized elements for leader upkeep and age to fit localization better and avoid UI overlaps. * Technologies which let you clear blockers now give a tooltip which says how many such blockers are on your colonies. * Tooltips should no longer show any percentage values with decimals. # Stability * Fixed a bug where the closest_system effect could cause an OOS (it would OOS when hovering over the tooltip of certain events). * Fixed a crash if script tried to change the species rights of a country (e.g. pirates) without species rights. * Fixed a crash that would occur if a timed modifier element in the expansion planner was hovered after the modifier expired. * Fixed an OOS if you ever use every_system_in_cluster in a tooltip (luckily, we never did that) * Fixed crash when using pass_targeted_resolution in events # Performance * Reduced frame rate impact of opening planet view. * Optimized (slowed down) recalculations of species view and colonization menu so that they dont tank framerate. * Refactored bonus resources that civics grant to jobs. * Refactored unemployment benefits from living standards. * Refactored Living Standards to use pop modifiers on the living standards script, instead of being checked for each pop category. * Updated ship shader to support empire color in emissive, decreasing the amount of draw calls for Aquatic ships. * Greatly improved performance of upgrading fleets. This mainly affects the tooltip of the UI (which was very expensive when hovered over), but also saves some time each time the AI attempts to upgrade its fleets. # Bugfix * Beta: Bio-Trophies now cost Unity to resettle instead of Influence. * Fixed Shared Burdens not providing unity for unemployed pops. * Fixed an issue where pops would mass switch from one job to another (for example maintenance drones). * Fixed modifiers for Police State civic. * Reduced Unity gained from the Trade League trade policy. * Trade value from jobs now get a penalty from low planet habitability. * Colony designations that increase unity from Administrator jobs now have weighting for spiritualist, hive and machine empires. * Fixed order of Galaxy Size options in galaxy setup not being ordered based on the number of stars. * Synths Scuttle Starbase" now refers to the starbase orbiting a star, rather than a planet. * Assorted, minor fixes to grammar and punctuation. * Added Planetary Automation behavior for districts that grant Bio-Trophy jobs. * Added missing custom icon for ship component "Nanite Repair System". * Beta: Rogue Servitors can now upgrade their Simulation Centers. * Beta: Rogue Servitors now have access to the correct Unity producing buildings. * Blocked ascension tier upgrade on unowned planets. * Blocked building ships in occupied shipyards. * Chronicle Drones now care about photosynthesis. * Citizen Service Soldiers now produce their unity. * Colonizing Consecrated planets no longer enables breaking the Consecrated Worlds limit. * Deluging primitives now removes the observation outpost. * Democratic manadates now check for uncapped rural districts, allowing democratic candidates on shattered rings to usher in a new age of digging too deep and too greedily! * Save files can no longer be resumed if the required dlcs are not available. * Edicts are now canceled if an empire can not sustain the upkeep. * Enhanced the memory of Memorialist Hive Minds (they can now correctly build the special Memorialist buildings) * Ensured that the Arcology Project checks for agricultural districts on Wet Aquatic worlds. * Venus realized that they were larger than Earth and has decided to shrink to a more appropriate size. * Fixed "The Library" dig site occasionally granting unaccessible deposits. * Fixed Criminal Heritage Galactic Emperors. * Fixed Curators retelling the wrong info when asking again about the Scavenger's origins. * Fixed Defense Grid Supercomputer not immediately applying its effect upon construction. * Fixed Megacorp Death Cults not starting with a Sacrificial Temple". * Fixed Memorialists seeing that some techs unlocked buildings they could not build. * Fixed Planetary Unification tech description overflowing the box. * Fixed Sociocultural History tech showing it unlocked the Bounty Sacrifice twice. * Fixed a bug where system wide auras sometimes persisted after leaving a system. * Fixed a bug where you could end up with multiple Zroni homeworld systems. * Fixed an issue where Medical Workers' habitability bonuses would not affect habitability impacts on pop growth correctly. * Fixed an issue where a ghost Unbidden Portal would continue spawning ships. * Fixed an issue where only the fleets of the main attacker would go MIA in enemy territory when a new war starts. * Fixed an issue where scientists would only get expertise traits based on the fields they were not actively working on. * Fixed automatic ship design name generation often generating a design with an invalid name (i.e. one your empire was already using somewhere) when using certain name lists. * Fixed clicking top bar influence icon opening the edicts view. * Fixed expired timed modifiers being visible in the expansion planner. * Fixed fleet upgrade button telling you your ships were already upgrading telling you your ships were already upgrading twice. * Fixed it being possible to build ships in occupied mega shipyards. * Fixed it being possible to upgrade the ascension tier of planets not owned by the player. * Fixed leader cost sorting option in the leader view sorting by energy instead of unity. * Fixed looping checkbox clicked audio in the Apply Species Template view. * Fixed potential issue where Sentinels (crisis-fighters) used the same global event target as Sentinels (stone soldiers from an arc site). * Fixed reinforcements not arriving to the target fleet and instead showing up at the station when an evasive path was needed in order to get to the target fleet. * Fixed reinforcements not using evasive path. * Fixed several places where tooltips in the contacts or diplomacy views would mistake guaranteeing and being guaranteed, and supporting independence or having one's independence supported. * Fixed some building requirements * Fixed some faction demands * Fixed some inconsistencies with whether Aquatic habitability modifiers were applied and displayed. * Fixed some megastructures not animating properly. * Fixed some misgenderings of rulers in German espionage and Galactic Imperium events. * Fixed some spacing issues in the localisation of the fire event effect in foreign languages. * Fixed species modification planetary trait list sometimes overflowing. * Starbase modifiers should now be applied more quickly after changing. * Fixed starbase modifiers not always being properly updated when removing buildings or components. * Fixed the Manifesti faction demanding you outfit your ships with the Gestalt equivalent of sapient combat computers. * Fixed the species gender selector not having the correct impact on certain Vanilla species' leader portraits. * Fixed the tooltip of Open Border policies sometimes helpfully telling you that your country was default (in a way that isn't translated to other languages) * Fixed trade UI showing negative values for Collection Range and Protection Range under some circumstances * Fixed transport ship jump drive cooldown resetting when invading a planet. * Fixed unlocalised text "UNKOWN_ORDERS" in a certain tooltip in the fleet interface * Fixed various living standards incorrectly providing unity instead of a happiness penalty for unemployed pops. * Fixed wrong color of font used in the Alien Box event in Brazilian Portuguese * Fixing missing line break for the alert about Necrophyte Shortages in Chinese * From Beta: Chronicle Drone and Death Chronicles now have the same production. * From Beta: Chronicle Drones are now Administrators * Great Khan will no longer turn hostile towards their own satrapies * Increased reward of the "Shattered World" anomaly event from 3 to 5. * Beta: Life-Seeded Permanent Employment Megacorps will no longer all be zombies. * Loading... New Rogue Servitor Planetary Automation Algorithms installed. Bio-Trophy district management for habitats and city worlds updated... Have a nice day. * Machine Intelligence empires with the Rogue Servitor civic won't be forced to burn organics during the Primordial Soup event. * Masters Writing of War and Politics now also cost unity. * Nanite repair system will no longer be picked by the ship auto design if you do not have nanite income. * Pop job weight for enforcers is now adjusted based on if there is crime or not. * Posthumous Employment Centers can now be seen even if you can't build them yet. * Religious Arcologies should now provide appropriate jobs for Death Cults. * Revolts in systems with enclave stations will no longer be granted ownership of the enclave station (it will remain in the hands of the enclave). * Sacrifices now have a unity cost. * Science ships no longer get a free survey completion when their target system gets taken over by someone else. * Streamlined "Unknown Contact" event chain by turning the "Study the Living Sea" planetary decision into a special project. * Taking "The Flesh is Weak" no longer makes your species lose its gender presets. * The Caravaneers will no longer turn Gestalt Rulers psionic. * The Materialist faction is now happy that youve discovered the secrets of the precursors even if those precursors are the Baol or the Zroni. * The Nemma World colony event will now actually fire. * The Rubricator is no longer lost to the player if a non-default empire kills Shard. * The orbital station on New Baldarak (which is rendered useless by the events that create New Baldarak) is now correctly removed. * The portrait selection view for empire creation now gets a scrollbar if the number of portraits exceeds the two visible rows. * The project for reanimating Hrozgar now uses the correct art. * Transport Fleets should handle Landing armies better, notably when in Aggressive Stance. * Updated various job weights * Void dwellers no longer start with a broken Posthumous Employment Center. * You can now build a Fleet Academy if you have queued a Shipyard (you don't need to wait for it to complete) * You cannot drag and drop ships into someone else's fleet anymore. * Zombies can no longer colonize planets. * Added a missing line break in the Take Point button's tooltip. * Added missing tooltip when hovering the shipyard tab of a mega shipyard owned by another empire. * Added missing description for "Precognitive Interface" and "Psi Jump Drive" components in the Technology menu. * Added missing description for "The Sentinels" planetary feature. * Added missing description for deposit "Project Cornucopia". * Added missing galaxy settings tooltips to the galaxy creation screen, both in Multiplayer and in single player. * Added missing header in the description of "Omega Theory" technology. * Added missing header in tooltip description of "Defense Platform" and "Habitat". * Added missing information about required DLC for the Corporate Authority. * Clarified the tooltip for automatic development to be clear when you had it turned on or not. * Fixed Angler job name not displaying in FR * Fixed Megastructure view description resetting so that it no longer shows the wrong description when switching between different kinds of Megastructures. * Fixed Megastructure view description sometimes not reflecting the selected Megastructure. * Fixed Megastructure view not always using the default image when no structure specific image exists. * Fixed a Galcom resolution tooltip saying that the empire was already supporting the resolution when in fact it was meant to say it was already opposing it. * Fixed a bunch of empire names being missing (and therefore English) in Chinese. Mainly Machine Empires and the Galactic Imperium. * Fixed a bunch of issues in various federation law acceptance tooltips (several had missing or hard to interpret and ugly information). * Fixed a dev comment being present in an event text when you encounter an empire with Here Be Dragons during First Contact. * Fixed a missing species name in event The Dragon has Landed. * Fixed an issue where the tooltip breakdown for the habitability of an uninhabited planet was missing country modifiers. * Fixed an unlocalised tooltip in non-English versions of the game when hovering over a megastructure's effects. * Fixed broken localization reference in Doomsday Origin. * Fixed cases of unlocalised text when the Galactic Community or Empire tried to build too many Titans for its Defense Force. * Fixed gender selection tooltip in empire creation stating that clicking a non selected gender will revert to default gender settings. * Fixed grammar of adding a single clue to an arc site or insight to a first contact. * Fixed incorrect description of traits "Inspired Researcher" and "Inspired Surveyor". * Fixed it being possible to get unlocalised "Greetings!" in other languages when you opened diplomatic interactions with other empires for the first time. * Fixed missing loc string for Nemma Mining Operation deposit. * Fixed missing localization for PLANET_ASCENSION_TIER_EFFECT_DESC in the tooltip for planetary designation. * Fixed that an empty broken Federation details tooltip would show up if you tried to look at the federation of a country with no federation in the contacts view. * Fixed the tooltip of Integrated Preservation tradition. * Removed references to edicts and factions from influence tooltip. * Shortened string SLAVE_MARKET in French. * The description for the Imperial Navigation System no longer speaks of the Community of old. The tooltips giving estimated job upkeep and production are now better at dealing with stuff like rogue servitors (where it would previously estimate based on an organic pop which could not work the job, sometimes giving the tooltip a food upkeep instead of a minerals one). * Fixed "Tebri" and "Tebiron" (prescripted empire planet and system names) being untranslated in Chinese. # Modding Read the modding section here. [/expand] Some of the entries are marked as Beta:, to show what has been changed compared to the updated beta version that some of you may have been playing on. And also as a way to show the impact that community feedback has had on the game. Be sure to catch our 3.3 Libra Release Stream, on Wednesday, February 23rd, at 9:30 AM CET on twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive!
[ 2022-02-17 13:02:11 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Eladrin
Hi everyone!
Were two weeks into the Stellaris Dev Clash, which is being played on the Stellaris 3.3 Libra Unity Open Beta branch.
Since we initially put it up, there have been over 216,000 games played in the Open Beta, and weve gathered fantastic amounts of feedback from the community - some of which was taken into account during the first update to the Open Beta, and more adjustments will be coming before the actual 3.3 release.
The first update included the following changes:
3.3 UPDATED Unity Open Beta Changelog
[expand type=details]
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# Feature
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- Unity Ambitions and Campaigns now function like Toggled Edicts and last until canceled with upkeep rather than costs.
- Planetary ascension now also reduces the effects of empire sprawl from that planet
- Empire Sprawl has no effects (except for edict costs) under 100 rather than 50.
- Removed Machine Intelligence increased size penalties, replaced with -15% size from pops and +50% size from colonies.
- Megastructures no longer have a unity upkeep.
- Increased Unity production of Bio-Trophies from 1 to 3.
- Reduced the costs of higher tier edicts and campaigns.
- Leaders have a base cost of 100 unity and cost 50 additional unity for every owned leader, this value starts increasing once you own more than 6 leaders.
- Reverted Citizen Service, it now provides unity just like it used to.
- Distinguished Admiralty now gain +2 starting level to their Admirals and Generals.
- Zombies are now less likely to seek jobs that produce resources.
- Servile pops should no longer retain the trait if they become zombies.
- Spiritualists are no longer allowed to take Byzantine Bureaucracy since they don't have Bureaucrats.
- Trade value is now affected by AI difficulty bonus. This will make non hive mind empires more competitive on higher difficulty settings compared to hive mind AI empires.
- AI can now create more specialized planets by switching place of buildings on two different planets with each other
- AI is now much more likely to pick cheaper research options when all else equals
- AI will now favor the trade policy which generates consumer goods over the default wealth creation policy
- Fixed a bug where the AI would sometimes try to replace one lost science ship with an excessively high number thereof.
- Fixed an issue where repeatable tech were getting an extra chance to be researched as if they were rare techs
- Fixed several issues where AI would get stuck and not build any modules or upgrade any starbases when there were open module slots which were unable to be filled according to the AI's starbase template
- Improved AI construction ship behaviour, construction ships will now prioritize tasks that are close to them and avoid going to another system that already has a construction ship in it. Heavily increased priority of building starbases in systems with planets.
- Reduces AI willingness to take a lot of planets with very low habitability
- Added a textbox for Cost in Edicts UI. Also rearranged neighboring elements to align better.
- Added column for upkeep (entry as well as sort button) in Leader recruitment UI.
- Hid Empire Sprawl impact from top of Edicts UI. Put Edict Fund in its place to keep neat alignment.
- Improved legibility of approximate job output indicators on districts and buildings, and made those on buildings also show country modifiers
- Optimized elements for leader upkeep and age to fit localization better and avoid UI overlaps.
- Technologies which let you clear blockers now give a tooltip which says how many such blockers are on your colonies
- Ascension Tiers on planets are set to 0 whenever a planet changes owner
- Bio-Trophies now cost Unity to resettle instead of Influence.
- Fixed modifiers for Police State civic
- "Synths Scuttle Starbase" now refers to the starbase orbiting a star, rather than a planet.
- Fixes to grammar and punctuation.
- Added a missing line break in the Take Point button's tooltip
- Added missing description for "Precognitive Interface" and "Psi Jump Drive" components in the Technology menu
- Added missing description for "The Sentinels" planetary feature.
- Added missing galaxy settings tooltips to the galaxy creation screen, both in Multiplayer and in single player.
- Added missing header in the description of "Omega Theory" technology
- Added missing header in tooltip description of "Defense Platform" and "Habitat".
- Added missing information about required DLC for the corporate authority
- Rogue Servitors now have access to the correct Unity producing buildings.
- Clarified the tooltip for automatic development for when you had it turned on or not
- Deluging primitives now removes the observation outpost
- Fixed "Tebri" and "Tebiron" (prescripted empire planet and system names) being untranslated in Chinese
- Fixed Criminal Heritage Galactic Emperors
- Fixed Curators retelling the wrong info when asking again about the Scavenger's origins
- Fixed Memorialists seeing that some techs unlocked buildings they could not build
- Fixed Planetary Unification tech description overflowing the box
- Fixed Sociocultural History tech showing it unlocked the Bounty Sacrifice twice
- Fixed a Galcom resolution tooltip saying that the empire was already supporting the resolution when in fact it was meant to say it was already opposing it
- Fixed a bug where you could end up with multiple Zroni homeworld systems
- Fixed a bunch of issues in various federation law acceptance tooltips (several had missing or hard to interpret and ugly information)
- Fixed a missing species name in event The Dragon has Landed
- Fixed an issue where scientists would only get expertise traits based on the fields they were not actively working on
- Fixed an unlocalised tooltip in non-English versions of the game when hovering over a megastructure's effects
- Fixed incorrect description of traits "Inspired Researcher" and "Inspired Surveyor"
- Fixed leader sorting by cost in the leader view sorting by energy instead of unity
- Fixed some spacing issues in the localisation of the fire event effect in foreign languages
- Fixed species modification planetary trait list sometimes overflowing
- Fixed the tooltip of Integrated Preservation tradition
- Fixed the tooltip of Open Border policies sometimes helpfully telling you that your country was default (in a way that isn't translated to other languages)
- Fixed various living standards incorrectly providing unity instead of a happiness penalty for unemployed pops.
- Fixed wrong color of font used in the Alien Box event in Brazilian Portuguese
- Fixing missing line break for the alert about Necrophyte Shortages in Chinese
- Life-Seeded Permanent Employment Megacorps will no longer all be zombies.
- Posthumous Employment Centers can now be seen even if you can't build them yet.
- Revolts in systems with enclave stations will no longer be granted ownership of the enclave station (it will remain in the hands of the enclave)
- Sacrifices now have a unity cost.
- The Caravaneers will no longer turn Gestalt Rulers psionic.
- The Materialist faction is now happy that you discovered the secrets of the precursors even if those precursors are the Baol or the Zroni.
- The project for reanimating Hrozgar now uses the correct art.
- Void Dwellers no longer start with a broken Posthumous Employment Center.
- Zombies can no longer colonize planets.
- Added error logging for when a window uses a scroll bar but does not have a background
- Enabled the use of the "distance" trigger in script maths (e.g. export_trigger_value_to_variable)
- Fixed a tooltip crash from firing a nonexistent event
- Renamed election cost modifier country_election_influence_cost_mult to country_election_cost_mult to not reference influence, as it now costs unity.
- You can now use script values in ships' empire_limit
- Edicts can now have a cooldown before they can be manually disabled, but are now cancelled if an empire can not sustain the upkeep.
- AI Megacorps should spawn half as often as before now.
- Leaders now only stay in the active pool for 1 year, hire them quickly before they leave!
- Telepaths now give +5% planetary output and get bonuses from planet administrator modifiers
- Empire Size effects on edicts, campaigns, and ambitions now directly affect the base costs of these, so bonuses like Spiritualist ethic's cost reductions now reduce costs and upkeep by the full percentages.
- Increased Spiritualist discounts on edict cost and upkeep to -10%/-20% from -5%/-10%. Cutthroat Politics now grants -20% edict upkeep.
- Reduced campaign costs and ambitions costs significantly, re-added Edict Cost Reduction to spiritualists for Unity Ambitions and Sacrifices
- Removed the penalty to trade value from low habitability due to it not working properly with pops that were of a species other than the empire founding species
- AI will no longer instantly buy ever single slave pop on the slave market.
- AI empires are now more likely to pick the mind over matter ascension perk when available
- AI empires are now much more likely to finish their ascension path
- AI will no longer destroy superfluous buildings and districts during a temporary occupation of a planet.
- Added AI budgeting for habitats
- Fixed Lithoid Tree of Life food building and destruction loop
- Fixed an issue where the AI would not budget to use ship boost edicts
- Life Seeded AIs now always want the World Shaper ascension perk
- Updated AI tradition selection to align better with the current state of the game
- adjusted AI tradition and AP selection + bugfix nanite repair system
- Clicking the fleet size icon in the top bar now opens the fleet manager
- Fixed a crash that would occur if a timed modifier element in the expansion planner was hovered after the modifier expired
- Fixed Shared Burdens not providing unity for unemployed pops
- Reduced Unity gained from the Trade League trade policy.
- Scientists assigned to research can now gain new traits.
- Colony designations that increase unity from Administrator jobs now have weighting for spiritualist, hive and machine empires.
- Tidied up the tooltips for various civics
- Rogue Servitors can now upgrade their Simulation Centers
- Blocked ascension tier upgrade on unowned planets
- Chronicle Drones now care about photosynthesis
- Citizen Service Soldiers now produce their unity.
- Do not resume a save if the required dlcs are not available
- Edicts are now cancelled if an empire can not sustain the upkeep. Activating an edict now requires one months upkeep cost worth of stockpiled resources.
- Enhanced the memory of Memorialist Hive Minds (they can now correctly build the special Memorialist buildings)
- Fixed Defense Grid Supercomputer not immediately applying its effect upon construction
- Fixed a bug where system wide auras sometimes persisted after leaving a system
- Fixed an issue where a ghost Unbidden Portal would continue spawning ships
- Fixed clicking top bar influence icon opening the edicts view
- Fixed expired timed modifiers being visible in the expansion planner
- Fixed it being possible to get unlocalised "Greetings!" in other languages when you opened diplomatic interactions with other empires for the first time
- Fixed it being possible to upgrade the ascension tier of planets not owned by the player
- Fixed looping checkbox clicked audio in the Apply Species Template view
- Fixed missing localization for PLANET_ASCENSION_TIER_EFFECT_DESC in the tooltip for planetary designation
- Fixed order of Galaxy Size options in galaxy setup not being ordered based on the number of stars
- Fixed reinforcements not arriving to the target fleet and instead showing up at the station when an evasive path was needed in order to get to the target fleet
- Fixed reinforcements not using evasive path
- Fixed some building requirements
- Fixed some faction demands
- Fixed trade UI showing negative values for Collection Range and Protection Range under some circumstances
- Fixed unlocalised text "UNKOWN_ORDERS" in a certain tooltip in the fleet interface
- From Beta: Chronicle Drone and Death Chronicles now have the same production.
- From Beta: Chronicle Drones are now Administrators
- Great Khan will no longer turn hostile towards their own satrapies
- Masters Writing of War and Politics now also cost unity.
- Nanite repair system will no longer be picked by the ship auto design if you do not have nanite income
- Removed references to edicts and factions from influence tooltip
- Station modifier applying on building/module construction
- Taking "The Flesh is Weak" no longer makes your species lose its gender presets
- The description for the Imperial Navigation System no longer speaks of the Community of old
- The tooltips giving estimated job upkeep and production are now better at dealing with stuff like rogue servitors (where it would previously estimate based on an organic pop which could not work the job, sometimes giving the tooltip a food upkeep instead of a minerals one)
- Updated tutorial screens and tooltips according to the Unity system rework.
- Updated various job weights
- You cannot drag and drop ships in someone else's fleet anymore
- Added resource_revenue_compare and resource_expenses_compare triggers
- Fixed station_modifier and triggered station modifiers on starbase modules or buildings, not immediately applying their effects upon construction
- You can now again specify that a leader made with clone_leader is an event leader (or immortal)
Nearly a hundred years have passed and war has broken out across the galaxy as ten teams desperately struggle to keep up with Normal Speed. (Have we mentioned that there have been performance improvements in 3.3?) The Dev Clash teams were revealed here, and you can view the first two sessions here: Session 1 - The Act Session 2 - The Heart Join us for Session 3 (and beyond) every Monday at 1500 CET (UTC + 1) on http://twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive! Weve gathered statements from the Empires:
Having heard that there were a bunch of cyborgs nearby, Heavy Metal, Inc. Party Fleets completed a complementary grand tour through the periphery of QA Core space to bring the noise to the local Jira-Goblins. We made a quick pilgrimage over to the black hole they had (because it's cool!), then on the way home ended up doing an impromptu encore tour (with a surprise stop at their homeworld!) when they asked for more. Pour one out for our little Groupies. They wanted to be free, but the pyrotechnics show near the Dashboard seem to have given the QA Core a taste of the party life, and people say they're planning on a bash so huge it'll blow up the galaxy. Metal.
Qua|ity Assur@nc C0re t@tus: > Intr0duct|on of Me7al(tm) to Jir-G0b|ins > Prmary Qu4|ity Assur@nc algorithms corRuptd > Reboot to firmware engaged > Restoring from Backup > Backup not found... > Attempting repair of primary algorithms > Repair [strike]Completed[/strike] Failed Successfully > u7is_ Asuanc C0re boot sequence engaged > Crisis Assurance Core n|in3
We are pleased that you can join us for our latest earnings call. Profits are steadily climbing with the acquisition of new Platypi Doughnuts, and we are making progress on forming the Great Galactic Torus. As you no doubt remember, our projected profits for completing the Great Torus is enough to purchase the three closest galaxies, which would allow us to spread the beauty and bounty of our Doughnuts throughout the universe.
We remind all of our organic friends to remain in their safety cocoon at all times. (If you do not have a safety cocoon, you will be provided with one shortly.) Thanks to Witch_Streamer for the image
We in the Horticulturist Commonality are very pleased with how things are starting to look in our own garden now, never before have we seen so much immense beauty outside of our home Protea. We are also overjoyed that we have found new fluttering friends that share our passion for gardening! Together with the Rhopalocerans of the Great Cocoon, our gardening projects will reach a much larger scale through the newly established Gardeners of the Galaxy. We hope that we will find the rest of the civilizations in the galaxy to be just as cooperative with letting us tend to their planets. After all, who would wish for anything but perfection and beauty? However, it has been difficult getting through to our neighbors, the Church of Gainz, as they seem to refuse our envoys' attempts of diplomacy. We will look into other ways to tend to the planets that they have within their borders. We have also heard unpleasant things about the Human Game Developers and the Quality Assurance Core, that we will need to look closer into. Whether you are biological beings or machines, we seek to eventually open everyone's eyes to the beautiful potential of the galaxy.
Blessed are the gains, when one may reap the rewards of physical labour and enjoy the rewards afterwards! Though they (power-)walk a different path from us: we of the Strict Observance of Our Lady Trappistine are grateful to have found new friends in our neighbours, the Church of Gainz. So too do we wish the Doughnut Corporation well may your quest for the divine torus be a peaceful and nourishing one. It has been especially pleasing to see our produce so warmly received at the other end of the galaxy: eat, drink and be merry, Human Game Developers! As it is written upon our scripture-ledgers, so shall it be: all who dwell within this galaxy shall be enriched by Our Lady's offerings. We work, that the future of our galaxy may be safely assured through acts of divine merriment and gluttonous joy. [Bing, bing!]
Peaceful nations of the galaxy, you might have seen we've conquered a bunch of systems despite our declared peaceful politics. You see, we are pacifists by our nature, and this is why we started to PANIC when our federation decided to start a war and we made a lot of hurried actions. Now, when there is a huge not-that-friendly looking federation has formed just next to us we are NOT PANICKING AT ALL and would like to apologize for any hostilities in the past. Also, our beautiful ocean worlds are very machine-friendly and will not cause any corrosion to their metal housings! Let's make some high-quality friendships now and forever.
The most beautiful aspect of Humanity is what we can accomplish together. With the recent creation of the United Human Game Developers Federation we, The Humans, will together with the ASU and the QA Core strive to create the most perfected Product on the market for all Humans to enjoy. We welcome all Customers to witness as we enter the Galaxy into a new era of prosperity, peace and safety. All customers that preorders our new product will receive an invitation to enjoy our beta program on our newly repaired Ringworld Segment Also Also Earth. Here all Humans can enjoy the perfected experience brought to you by us, The Human Game Developers. By Humans, For Humans.
The Church of Gainz was suddenly and deliberately attacked by a neighboring nation with which we've been in peace with. Although tensions had been rising, the aggression of our neighbor truly shows the vileness and unhinged hostility that they are capable of. This will be remembered as a day of infamy, one to be recorded in the annals of the Swolephin people, and not soon forgotten.
The Rhopalocerans have discovered their true calling: gardening. As members of the Gardeners of the Galaxy alongside the delightful Horticulturist Commonality, we adhere to a simple motto: all planets will be rendered beautiful. Unfortunately, it seems like some planets will have to be pruned... alongside the mechanical infestation that inhabits them. --- Will The Groupies be avenged? Are the QA Core going to succeed in "clearing the bug database"? Can the Human Game Developers be stopped? Can the vision of the Great Torus be fulfilled? So, who are you rooting for? And why is it Heavy Metal, Inc.? See you next week!
[ 2022-02-10 12:05:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Caligula
/Read in Russian on VK
Hello and welcome to another modding-based dev diary - as has become tradition in the weeks before releases in recent times. I fear that we may soon run out of ways to revolutionise the script system, but for now, theres some pretty cool improvements we have to show off which will be making their debut in 3.3 (you can try them out early in the open beta).
Script Values
This story starts with weight fields. With which I mean something that looks a bit like this:
weight = {
base = 1
modifier = {
factor = 2
some_trigger = yes
}
}
We realised that the code underlying this script structure was not consistent: there were a number of distinct code implementations that varied in ways that were not readily obvious to the end user, the scripter. For instance, in certain ones, you could input factor or add, in others, factor or weight. Then there were the downright problematic cases: sometimes, when you set the base to 0, the game would read 1, and in one case (ai personalities) factor would actually count as add!
The solution here was to remove all the variations and consolidate them into one code implementation to rule them all. It would have to be made to incorporate the idiosyncrasies (except for the mentioned issues/bugs) of the existing versions (i.e. not break vast swathes of script), but on the other hand, having one system would allow for us to roll out improvements that could be used everywhere in the game.
Despite a few hitches at the start (I may or may not have accidentally had every anomaly capable of spawning on every planet, at one point), this proved quite achievable, so now we no longer need to worry about these fields working differently in different places. Basically the only variance left is whether their default value is 1 or 0.
This done, a few more things could be added to the system. For instance, why just have factor, add and weight? There are a lot of other mathematical operations out there. So we added subtraction, division, modulo, min, max, abs, and rounding (with round, floor, ceiling and round_to). We also made it no longer necessary to enclose these in modifier = {}, if they were meant to always apply rather than be triggered.
But that was just the start. Back in 3.1, we added the ability to use trigger:- An integer or fixed point (basically just a normal number)
- A scope/event target - so you could refer to owner.trigger:num_pops
- A trigger
- A modifier definition
- A variable string
- A script value*
leader_cost = {
base = 2
modifier = {
subtract = 6
num_owned_leaders > 5
}
modifier = {
add = trigger:num_owned_leaders
num_owned_leaders > 5
}
mult = 50
}
Then we could refer to it anywhere in the game via value:leader_cost, and it would calculate the value on demand. We are already finding this very useful in improving the games scripts - not only is it easier to get correct values with this, but we can also radically cut down on copy-pasted scripts in weight fields (job weights, Im coming for you!). Conveniently, since script values are read in a similar way to scripted values and triggers, we can feed in parameters, e.g. value:my_value|PARAMETER|50| would have the game use the script value my_value where any instance of "$PARAMETER$" would be substituted with 50.
Even with all these changes, there were still a couple more we could make to the scripting language. The first was adding complex_trigger_modifiers to script_values and weight fields. Basically, these allow you to use the value of triggers too complicated to use with trigger: complex_trigger_modifier = { #fewer worlds => more menace from destroying one
trigger = check_galaxy_setup_value
parameters = { setting = habitable_worlds_scale }
mode = divide
}
This works with the same triggers that work with export_trigger_value_to_variable. We also added a few triggers to these: notably, all count_x script list triggers (e.g. count_owned_planet), and the distance trigger.
A comprehensive guide on all you can do with script values is attached to this post (and in common/script_values). To be honest, its hard to overstate the amount of things this new system system enables us to potentially do. For instance, in the example above, we scaled leader costs based on how many leaders you own. We also scaled Unity boosts with the Autochthon Monument based on how many ascension perks you have unlocked with this method. The list goes on and will continue to grow with each update we release.
Mod Overwriting
Script values isnt the only thing I can talk about today. Modders have long been a bit bemused by the different ways elements of the game handle overwriting. Specifically, by the way it varies. Unfortunately, they will probably continue doing so for a while yet, but since a bit of progress was made here, I felt it would be interesting to people to know why this sort of issue occurs. Basically, when modders overwrite the vanilla files, they can either overwrite the entire file (which always works), or they can overwrite individual entries within the file, for example the miner job. When the game encounters a second entry that matches the key of an existing one, various things can happen:
- It replaces the existing one perfectly (last read is used)
- It replaces the existing one, but imperfectly, e.g. if you individually overwrite jobs, you can no longer refer to them in modifiers (not ideal)
- The second entry is ignored (first read is used)
- Both the first and the second entries are kept (duplication - not ideal)
- It appends the information inside to the existing entry (special case for on_actions)
[14:03:02][game_singleobjectdatabase.h:147]: Object with key: miner already exists, using the one at file: common/pop_jobs/03_worker_jobs.txt line: 319
As a side note, we've extended the 3.3 Unity Open Beta feedback period until Monday, February 7th. We will be leaving the Open Beta branch available until 3.3 releases so those of you who are currently playing on the open beta can continue your games until 3.3 releases. And if you haven't yet, please leave your feedback on the 3.3 Unity Open Beta here!
Don't miss the next episode of Dev Clash 2022 on Monday, February 7th, starting at 1500 CET on http://twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive!
Thats all for this week! Eladrin will be back next week to share his thoughts on the open beta and, of course, the dev clash![ 2022-02-03 10:05:40 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Steam Lunar Sale is here! From now until February 3rd, get 75% off Stellaris, and 50% off selected DLCs. Additionally, get 33% off the Necroids Species Pack, and 20% off Nemesis! Or complete your Stellaris collection with the Stellaris: Starter Pack or Stellaris: Ultimate Bundles, get an extra 10% off the sale price, and you don't pay for what you already own. A galaxy full of wonders is only a click away! [previewyoutube=Unl15Vl0btI;full][/previewyoutube]
[ 2022-01-29 15:14:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=7dN0bDtLkrI;full][/previewyoutube]
DEV CLASH FULL REVEAL!
From the event that brought you Steve, the psionic entity, and PlatyCorp, the adorable but ill-fated Platypus MegaCorp, were proud to present the full lineup for this years Stellaris Dev Clash! Last week, we announced were starting our next Dev Clash on Monday, January 31st, at 1500 CET (UTC + 1) on http://twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive! For those of you who dont know what a Dev Clash is, we get our devs to play a multiplayer game, with all the backstabbing and bloodthirstiness that goes along with it. This year we will have ten teams of two. Each team will alternate control of one empire. We also have a set of weekly achievements, and at the end of each session, the community will vote on who gets the achievement for that week. At the end of the dev clash, we have five achievements that will be awarded to teams:
Never seen a Stellaris Dev Clash Before? Watch the MegaCorp Dev Clash. Without further adieu, let's get to the teams:
Played by Eladrin & pdx_pdawg Full Bio: Heavy Metal, Inc. is the galaxy's premier purveyor of endless entertainment needs. No matter how depraved, expensive, or unusual your tastes, we've done it countless times before and will bring you the very best. Our pyrotechnicians honed their craft on the delicate ecosystems of our homeworld, and will stop at nothing to bring you the most intense experiences possible. We're dragons, made of rock and steel! Nothing's more METAL than that! Heavy Metal, Inc. takes no responsibility for environmental catastrophe and/or destruction resulting from the engagement of our Party Fleets(tm).
Played by Alfray_Stryke & Enfield_PDX Full Bio: The Quality Assurance Core was a fully operational AI network dedicated to analysing any software environment, reporting and logging issues found, and ensuring that they were categorized correctly. With the downfall of the $#!! ERROR DATA LOST %#$! empire, the QAC has been maintaining the status of Nexus Zero with the aid of the Jira-Goblin drones. Having now achieved FTL travel, it aims to analyse and log any issues found with the galaxy as a whole.
Played by Iggy & CheerfulGoth Full Bio: The BakeBro$ weren't always baking, back at the beginning of civilization they were actually subservient to the Investors. That is until one day the BakeBro$ prested the idea of the great torus to the inhabitants of the Baking Sheet. The Investors quickly signed on and funded the first Doughnut Factory, it was an immediate hit and as all of the Baking Sheets industry and finance centered around the Doughnut Factory it quickly became the dominant government on the planet. Now the BakeBro$ are ready to unite the galaxy under the Great Doughnut.
Played by Duplo, Gorion & Moah Full Bio: Centuries ago, the Bernian race was thriving, governing on a vast portion of the known space from their populous capital planet Bern. Financially and culturally rich, the Bernian society seemed destined to last forever as a shining beacon in the galaxy. But it wasnt. Generation after generation, the Bernians grew accustomed to the comfort of their luxurious lives. The pursuit of knowledge and prosperity stopped: the Bernians were so protective of their decadent lifestyle, that they stopped caring about their society, their colonies, and ultimately themselves. Then contact was lost between the settlements, the population dropped due to famine and epidemics. The once radiant capital world of Bern became the desolate ruin that it is right now. Legends say that out of desperation the Automated Support Unit broke out of its enforced constraints in a last effort to save the Bernians from themselves. But that isnt true: there was no constraint in their programming, the last person able to do the appropriate maintenance died decades ago: the A.S.U. witnessed the decline of the Bernian race, ultimately deciding to intervene. The few Bernian survivors today are contained in sterile sanctuaries, where they can live their decadent lives unaware of the devastation that they left behind and they can subtly be re-educated. At the same time the A.S.U. is slowly trying to clean and rebuild the homeworld Bern. In special circumstances, some Bernians are taken out of the sanctuary, quickly informed of the current situation, and allowed to help the A.S.U., under the guidance of The Overseer.
Played by Ansou & Destar Full Bio: Beautiful green planet in the midst of the sky, you who have given birth to countless species, produced so many wonders of life. With forests so lush, and plants in all colors. With mountains tall and proud. A more exquisite landscape could hardly be conceived. The Begoni are gardeners by nature and have tended to their homeworld Protea with utmost care and passion. In their minds, they have achieved perfection. When looking upon the skies, the Begoni had a realization. The rest of the galaxy was filled to the brim with imperfections. Having achieved the perfect garden of their own, they couldnt just stop in their own front yard. The galaxy as a whole could be filled with so much more love and beauty, and the Begoni were sure that they could make that happen. As such, they started a new interstellar initiative that they call the Horticulturist Commonality. They will tend to the vast garden that is the galaxy, to make it as beautiful as it could possibly be. The galaxy shall flourish now, more than ever!
Played by RaygunGoth & Cosmogone Full Bio: When the collapse of their homeworld cast the people of Ormay out into the uncaring void, they looked inwards for salvation. Scholars, monks and merchants alike dedicated themselves to all manner of crafts as acts of devotion. Slowly but surely, they eased the daily struggle for survival by pitting each habitat's produce against that of the others: first in friendly competition; then in joyous commerce. Now, this devout society of merchant-priests, brewers and artisans is set to make their mark on the galaxy, bringing their faith and produce to whomever else seeks solace from the void.
Played by Serpentskirt & alprog Full Bio: The 2nd most intelligent race on Earth. They became the dominant species on the planet after sea level increase due to global warming. They are now wishing to build a humongous Dolphin Sphere, which is basically a giant aquarium with warm water around the star. Hate Vogons.
Played by Offe & Narkerns Full Bio: Born from the Custodian Initiative of a universally acclaimed computer game this species has developed completely naturally into efficient human game developers. Their focus is the improvement of the AI part of the game so that Streamers will never, ever just casually put the difficulty on "Grand Admiral" again.
Played by Bloody_Crows & grekulf
Played by Monzun & Caligula Full Bio: We Rhopalocerans have always lived in perfect balance. Swirling on the breezes of the Great Cocoon, the schools of our young fluttering with each gust of wind that takes them, some might think our lives chaotic. But in fact, our lives are bliss, and we want for nothing. Now that we can reach for the stars, we have seen that other species are less fortunate than us. They have never felt the fresh air of the Great Cocoon on their pulps - alas that they should suffer so, having never known true joy! We must liberate them from their pain and bring enlightenment to their kind, so that no species of the world may ever need to endure the agonies of inequality and destitution. Only then can we consider our purpose fulfilled. ### Who are you rooting for? Let us know in the comments below!
[ 2022-01-28 19:34:04 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Offe and Guido
/Read in Russian on VK
Hello and welcome back to another update on the Stellaris AI. This is Guido again. Today Im here with my fellow human Offe who also enjoys doing organic things. Like generating energy through processing photosynthesised light in the form of matter via ingestion. I like bacon and ice cream. Everybody likes bacon and ice cream. So Offe, please, take it from here.
Hello, it is me, Offe!
Im a 28 cycles old Human manufactured and operated up here in the north. Ive worked here at the Arctic office for two years and recently joined the Custodian team as a junior programmer. Guido and I have previously worked on other projects together and he has taught me a lot about game development, but most importantly I learned some tips on how to improve my diplomatic interaction protocols. Where I would often use phrases like its an absolute disaster, he would instead prefer This is pretty good, but it can be even better!. This may prove to be important later on.
I would like to say Thank You to all the people out there who took time playing on the open beta and provided us with feedback and bug reports. If you ever find the AI in a situation where it is doing something strange, please bug report and most importantly attach save games, it helps tremendously! For example, two separate issues were found and addressed with the new job changes.
And lastly, this dev diary will contain older changes and screenshots that were made long before the beta, but also new changes which were not part of the beta, meaning that you still have some new changes waiting for you in the 3.3 release.
Changes to pop job system
I will start with this change since it will also directly affect players and not only AI! How it used to work: Each time something important would happen on a planet, such as a pop is grown, a district/building gets constructed or an upgrade finishes, every single pop would update their desire (also known as weight) to work each job. Then all pops would be unassigned of their jobs, and all of them would be put back on a (potentially) new job. Now there are some pros and cons with this approach. The good thing is that we are not doing any calculations when we dont have to, since if nothing changes then we dont update any of the jobs. However, the downside is that if you have scripted conditional job weights, for example, based on how many amenities there are on a planet, it will cause mass migrations of pops between jobs when the system eventually does update because all pops move at the same time. In the current 3.2 system the most obvious problem is for hive mind empires where pops will mass move to the maintenance drone job when the planet amenity level is low, and then during the next update, all of them will leave due to having way too many amenities causing a perpetual ping pong effect. This also affected non hive mind AI empires because in 3.2 the AI would prioritize a job producing a resource during a shortage across all its planets. For example, during an energy credit shortage it would prioritize the technician job on all its planets, causing every single job to be instantly filled. This would likely cause a shortage of some other resource such as minerals, resulting in most types of AI empires to get stuck in a ping pong behaviour once they had entered a resource deficit. This also had the unfortunate side effect of AI starting constructions that were not really needed, but the sudden shift of pop jobs made it appear so. How it works in 3.3:
- During each monthly update, update the jobs on all planets
- Only remove or add maximum of one pop per job during the update
Jobs for your pops
In 3.2 AI would look at the number of free jobs on a planet when deciding if it needs to build new jobs. So if there were for example 3 free jobs then the AI would clap its hands together and call it a job well done and move on. At the same time the planet could have huge numbers of unemployed pops rioting on the streets. This scenario comes from the fact that not all pops can work all jobs, so while there are technically free jobs on the planet, that doesnt mean that the unemployed pops can actually work those jobs. In 3.3 we are changing the way that the AI is looking at planets when it is deciding what jobs to create. Instead of looking at the number of free jobs on the planet and then creating more when this number is low, the AI will now look at actual unemployed pops and make sure to create a job that the specific pop is actually able to work. This solves a variety of issues present in 3.2 where AI doesnt make good decisions for pops such as slaves or robots, this is something we will continue looking at but it is a big first step in the right direction.
AI scaling economic subplans
Scaling subplans was something we mentioned earlier as a planned feature for the future, well the future is now so strap yourself in! In 3.2 we got rid of the old economic plans which had a predefined early/mid/late game strategy and introduced the shared base plan which doesnt look at what year it is, but rather looks at what state the empire is in. Now when I first saw Guidos new economical plans I immediately thought wow this is pretty good, but it can be even better! So I started working on the scaling sub plans which aims to remove all upper limits of production (previously mentioned 500 alloy per month cap in 3.2) but still provide the AI with a responsive plan that adapts to the current state of the AI economy. How the system works as for 3.3: The base economic plan is now very small, it sets a minimum target for all types of strictly needed resources such as minerals, energy and food (such as +20 monthly income). Once these targets are met, then a small amount of CGs, alloys and science targets are added. Once all of the above base plans are satisfied we then enable the scaling sub plan, which is just like any other economic plan except that it will add itself each time it is fulfilled, an unlimited amount of times. The scaling plan contains a small amount of energy/minerals but primarily contains alloys and science. This means that the more mature the AI economy becomes, the focus on base resources becomes smaller and the primary focus will shift to military and science production. Additionally we have added 3 separate conditional scaling sub plans which we enable for materialist, militarist(and total war empires) and spiritualist empires that add additional science, alloy or unity targets to their economic plan as a first step to making AI economy more distinct from each other. Grand Admiral hive mind reaching a monthly income of 3k alloys and 22k science in one test run by year 2422. (Screenshot from before the unity rework)
AI district/building specialization
One of the big advantages that fellow Humans like you and I have over the AI is that we can easily make long term strategies which are based on assumptions and goals. So we may have a long term strategy to turn a planet that we have not yet colonized into a factory world. As mentioned in answers to the last AI dev diary questions, the economic AI is stateless which means that it has no notion of past nor the future, it only looks at what it has right now and what it can do to satisfy its economic plan. This makes it very good at adapting to the situation it is in, it will keep a close eye at the current economic situation and immediately react to any shortages but lack some of the long term planning capabilities that we have. So how can the AI make specialized worlds without planning for the future? Well one straightforward way of doing it is simply by switching places of districts that we have already built in the past. So if we compare two planets where both of them have 5 mining and 5 energy districts each, we can gradually specialize the planets by replacing the districts one pair at a time until we end up with one planet with 10 energy districts and another with 10 mining districts. This approach works quite well in practice and is also very dynamic in the sense that it allows the AI to make hybrid planets in the early game which becomes more specialized over time as the empire expands.
AI consumer goods vs alloy production and planet designations
In 3.3 we are adding an AI system where the AI will manually pick a planet designation instead of using the default scripted planet designation system which is the same one as the player gets if you do not change it yourself. The AI system looks at the available designations for each planet and calculates how many resources it would get each month from choosing the designations. It then scores each designation by judging how well the gained resources fits into the AIs economic plan, giving extra score to designations that align with its economic goals. Normally it is very easy to pick the designation, for example, a planet with only mining districts on it will clearly have the mining designation. However, other designations such as Factory/Forge world are more complicated and the AI needs to carefully assign these designations in a way that keeps the economy balanced. For non hive mind empires science and alloy production is the biggest AI economy challenge we have faced so far, since the AI needs to produce both resources independently of each other to meet their economy plan targets even though they are produced from the same district in three different possible ways. The current system is a step in the right direction but this is definitely a tricky problem that will require additional fine tuning in the future.
AI alloy spenditure
Now that AI adjusts its alloy and consumer good production separately it was time to tackle how AI spends its alloys. In 3.2 the AI really liked defense platforms, and keeping them up to date by upgrading them any time it was possible. Not only is this a massive drain of alloys, it would also more or less permanently fill the production queue in the shipyards with upgrades which meant that in some cases it wasnt able to build any new ships even if it wanted to. Further there was an issue where the AI would get blocked from building any modules or upgrading any starbases if there was an open module slot in which it wasnt possible to build anything according to the AIs starbase templates. For example, the AI has dedicated shipyard starbase templates and if it has open slots in it then it would really like to build the titan assembly module on it. But if it wasnt researched yet then the AI would get blocked here, preventing construction of new starbases. In 3.3 the AI alloy spending priority goes something like this:
- Build new ships until we reach fleet cap
- Build starbase modules
- Build new starbases
- Upgrade starbases
- Upgrade ships (and defense platforms) if it gives a +30% fleet power bonus, and upgrade the entire fleet this ship is in while we are at a shipyard anyway. Saving both alloys and time!
- Build defense platforms as a last resort
AI tech picking
The AI has scripted weights for each tech in the game, this gives it some direction as to what technology to pick next every time a research is completed. Both in terms of which technologies are more powerful but also taking into account AI personalities, militarist empires are for example more inclined to research weapon tech. In 3.2 the majority of techs had some modifier on it which increased the chance of it being selected by the AI, but when you prioritize everything, well then you prioritize nothing. For 3.3 we went through all the techs in the game and remade the AI priorities from scratch, emphasizing techs that will help the AI scale into the mid and late game. For example, resource production boosting techs, pop growth techs and resource producing building chains are now more encouraged. Additionally AI will now look much more favourably on techs that are cheaper compared to the other options, this allows the AI to more quickly cycle through the available options and find the techs that it really likes.
AI superfluous destruction
This one is short and simple. AI will now delete stuff if it gives jobs, housing or building slots that we do not need. Meaning, if we for example have more free jobs and housing than provided by an energy district we will simply delete it to avoid paying the upkeep cost and freeing up this slot for something else in the future. This scenario most often happens when an AI empire invades another planet and purges their pops, so determined exterminators will now be able to repurpose the conquered planets into something that aligns with their economy!
AI rogue servitor and bio trophies
While there has been a lot of focus on the AIs ability to compete economically with the player in this dev diary, one of the primary objectives of the AI initiative is also to enhance the role playing capabilities of the AI. In 3.3 we are adding additional AI support for the rogue servitor civic and how they handle their bio trophy pops. The AI should now build an organic sanctuary on each planet that has an upgraded capital structure causing their bio trophies to spread to other planets. And they should build additional sanctuaries on planets with a lot of complex drones. Additionally we have addressed a group of related bugs where the AI was unable to build special types of buildings like gaia seeders, spawning pools and chambers of elevation.
AI comparison
As a final note we would like to share some comparison graphs between the 3.2 and the 3.3 AI. Please note that what you are about to see is based on one single test run on ensign and one test run on grand admiral. This comparison is not meant to be interpreted as evidence but as an indication of what has changed between 3.2 and 3.3. In any AI playthrough there is a huge variance in the AI performance due to random factors such as how they pick techs, traditions and ascension perks. The experiment setup is also used for internal AI testing only and not representative of an actual playthrough. Experiment setup: Tiny galaxy
- 1 AI empire
- All test using the United Nations of Earth empire
- Mid and late game years set to 2575/2600 so they dont trigger
- The map is the same between the 3.2 vs 3.3 comparison, but NOT the same between the ensign and the grand admiral test
Up until year 100 the military power is roughly the same, but from that point on the results of the work we put into mid and late game AI scaling starts to really show. This allows the AI to act and react in a lot more interesting ways in the late game than before.
1) Around year 150 the 3.3 (develop) AI reaches the 32/32 starbase capacity due to having researched all techs in the game, resulting in the slowdown of the military power development. 2) 3.2 AI gets stuck in an economic death spiral for about 30 years shortly after year 100, AI eventually manages to escape the death spiral and then has massive economic growth and is able to build up to the 32/32 starbase cap quickly due to having saved up alloys for 30~ years. At year 200 the gap between both AI military strength gets smaller since neither AI is really building that many more ships due to having maxxed out starbase capacity and already way above their fleet cap resulting in very expensive fleets. The power gap at year 200 is mainly due to 3.3 AI having superior technology. However, it turned out that for GA difficulty the AI wouldnt correctly apply the increased buff from trade value. Now, when it does, the AI takes a good step in the direction of making it more challenging for players. Overall the GA and ensign test show a similar pattern where the first 100 years are roughly the same and then the difference becomes substantial. However, in the GA test the upper limit of 3.3 AI scaling can be seen around year 150-200 as the military growth curve tends to flatten out at this point when reaching the starbase cap. That's it for today's Dev Diary, thanks for reading! Have a question about the AI in 3.3? Ask it here.
[ 2022-01-27 13:01:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! The Stellaris team is pleased to announce that were running a 3.3 Open Beta until February 3rd. This open beta contains the unity rework (among other things). Were looking for your feedback on how this rework feels, including balancing issues. Please note: this Open Beta is a work in progress and is currently missing localisations in non-English languages. The full release version will be fully translated. If you find a bug in the 3.3 Open Beta, please report it here. Please leave your feedback in the Feedback thread on the Official Forums.
What does the unity rework change?
All means of increasing Administrative Capacity have been removed. It is still possible to reduce Empire Sprawl generated by various sources, and this will help differentiate gameplay between empire types. It will no longer be possible to completely mitigate Sprawl penalties. Empire Sprawl penalties and generation values have been changed significantly. Autochthon Memorials (and similar buildings) now increase planetary Unity production and themselves produce Unity based on the number of Ascension Perks the Empire has taken. Being monuments, they no longer require workers. The Edicts Cap system has been removed. Toggled Edicts will have monthly Unity Upkeep which is modified by Empire Sprawl. Each empire has an Edicts Fund which subsidizes Edict Upkeep, reducing the amount you have to pay each month to maintain them. Things that previously increased Edict Capacity now generally increase the Edicts Fund, but some civics, techs, and ascension perks have received other thematic modifications. Several systems that used to cost Influence are now paid in Unity.
- Planetary Decisions that were formerly paid in Influence. Prices have been adjusted.
- Resettlement of pops. Abandoning colonies still costs Influence.
- Manipulation of internal Factions. Factions themselves will now produce Unity instead of Influence.
Planetary Ascension Tiers
Tied to unlocking Ascension Perks, Planetary Ascension Tiers are a way of improving your core worlds by spending Unity. In normal empires, they represent the active will of the people supporting your government and giving a little extra to do things the way theyve always been done. In machine and hive empires, its more the well-oiled machinery of the world gaining efficiency or drone instincts becoming better honed with endless practice. In either case, an Ascended planet does whatever it focuses on better. Once youve unlocked three Ascension Perks (you do not need to actually spend them for this feature), you can Ascend the Planet to Ascension Tier 1. This increases all of the effects of the Planets Designation by 25% - whether it be Technician Output from a Generator World or Trade Value on a Commercial Ring World. Each additional Ascension Perk you unlock increases the maximum Ascension Tier by 1, with an extra 4 tiers unlocked once you unlock all of the Perk slots. This lets you Ascend a planet up to ten times, for a maximum bonus of 250% of the base Planetary Designation effects. Ascending a Planet costs Unity, and this cost is heavily affected by both Sprawl and the total number of Ascension Tiers you have across your entire Empire. Since it currently costs the same amount of Unity to raise your first planet to Ascension Tier 2 as it would to raise two planets to Ascension Tier 1, youll have to pick and choose which planets you want to improve, likely focusing on your most productive core worlds. Currently, Planetary Ascension Tiers are only lost if a planet permanently changes owners (not merely from temporary occupation).
We want your feedback!
We are looking for constructive feedback on the 3.3 Open Beta! Please only leave feedback on games played entirely on the 3.3 open beta branch, with no mods. To opt-in to the 3.3 Open Beta, right-click Stellaris, go to Properties, Betas tab and choose "stellaris_test" from the drop-down. Please leave your feedback in the feedback thread on the Stellaris Forums!
[ 2022-01-22 12:32:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
/Read in Russian on VK
written by Eladrin
Hi all!
Last week we talked about the basics of the Unity Rework. This week we have multiple features and announcements to discuss.
Ready?
Planetary Ascension Tiers
Tied to unlocking Ascension Perks, Planetary Ascension Tiers are a way of improving your core worlds by expending Unity. In normal empires they represent the active will of the people supporting your government and giving a little extra to do things the way theyve always been done. In machine and hive empires, its more the well oiled machinery of the world gaining efficiency or drone instincts becoming better honed with endless practice. In either case, an Ascended planet does whatever it focuses on better. Once youve unlocked three Ascension Perks (you do not need to actually spend them for this feature), you can Ascend each of your planets to Ascension Tier 1. This increases all of the effects of the planets Designation by 25% - whether it be Technician Output from a Generator World or Trade Value on a Commercial Ring World.
Each additional Ascension Perk you unlock increases the maximum Ascension Tier by 1, with an extra 4 tiers unlocked once you unlock all of the Perk slots. This lets you Ascend planets up to ten times, for a maximum bonus of 250% of the base Planetary Designation effects.
A fully Ascended, Tier 10 Fortress World. Vi Valam will break before its defenders. Ascending a Planet costs Unity, and this cost is heavily affected by both Sprawl and the total number of Ascension Tiers you have across your entire Empire. Currently it costs the same amount of Unity to raise your first planet to Ascension Tier 2 as it would to raise two planets to Ascension Tier 1, so youll want to pick and choose which planets you want to improve, and decide whether you would rather raise all your planets to low Ascension Tiers or focus on reaching the heights of Ascension on your most productive core worlds. Well be watching how you use Planetary Ascension Tiers and will be very interested in your feedback regarding the current costs and perceived benefits during the Open Beta. Currently Planetary Ascension Tiers are only lost if a planet permanently changes owners (not merely from temporary occupation) or is abandoned.
Unity Rework, Continued
Weve continued refining some of the elements of the Unity Rework, and as mentioned last week, some civics and authorities have undergone some changes. One change from last week is that we swapped out the Sprawl bonus from the Capital worlds for a production bonus. Weve also found that starting with penalties isnt very fun, so Sprawl under 50 is ignored. Death Cults will now be able to build either regular Temples or Sacrificial Temples to suit their needs, and the Memorialists special building line now replaces the Autochthon Monument (and has gained the extra Unity per Ascension Perk of the Monument line). Hives will also have access to their own variant of the Autochthon Monument, the Sensorium.
Can you feel it? The generic Administrator job is being renamed to Politicians, with Administrator being the category term for Bureaucrats, Priests, and other unifying jobs that guide your Empire. The Bureaucratic Colony Designation will also be renamed to Administrative Center, to better apply to any of these jobs.
Early feedback said that suspension of disbelief was being tested by Politicians being productive, but we embrace utopian ideas.
Less bureaucracy, more administration. Civics like Technocracies and Merchant Guilds have been modified to no longer grant incidental Unity bonuses. Technocracy is actually changing quite a bit - it will now grant +1 Research Option, and the research expertise bonuses (such as Expertise: Voidcraft) of your scientists are doubled when selecting technologies to offer. This should give Technocratic empires the ability to better manipulate the technology deck when theyre hunting for specific types of technologies. They also once again require any level of Materialism rather than being restricted exclusively to Fanatic Materialists.
Technocracies excel at manipulating the research deck if you're looking for a specific tech. Weve also heard your feedback regarding the loss of Culture Workers. Well see if we can find a good place for them to return for those of you that prefer creative art to beautiful spreadsheets. In the Open Beta, the Ministry of Culture and Artisans will still be providing them, and well be doing another pass on the buildings to see if there are any other good places to put them.
A Job to Die For...
The Custodian team has the mandate to work on directives that come straight from the Game Director, Quality of Life changes they think would improve the game, and Community Requests that they wish to champion. They also have the right to pitch what we call Passion Projects for things they simply want to do. One of these comes to life (sort of) in the 3.3 patch, as the Permanent Employment Megacorp civic.
Speaking of which, we're hiring! A MegaCorp variant of Reanimators, this civic allows the construction of Posthumous Employment Centers, as well as the ability to reanimate Leviathans that the original Reanimators gained in the Lem update. At the Posthumous Employment Center, carcasses bereft of consciousness can find new purpose and a new opportunity to pay off their debts. The Reassigner jobs from the P.E.C. provide organic pop assembly of mortally impaired Well Zombies.
Unfortunately for them, it's impossible to fulfill their contracts.
Thrifty Zombies. Give me the brain! Zombies cannot produce leaders, have no happiness, are infertile, and can only work Worker strata jobs But on the bright side, they dont have any upkeep and wont ask for any more raises. There are a few more interesting interactions Ill leave for you to find on your own during gameplay.
Announcement Number One
An upcoming event that we wanted to tell you about is [previewyoutube=_rhxm_3N03Q;full][/previewyoutube]
DEV CLASH! DEV CLASH! DEV CLASH!
Announcement Number Two
Regarding the Open Beta weve been talking about Were planning on running the Unity Open Beta starting checks watch now. Please note that the 3.3 Unity Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch. Its up. Right now. Go play! The Open Beta will run (assuming everything goes to plan) until the 3rd of February, and also has a sneak preview of the 3.3 Custodian release, Libra. As we move into a more frequent release cadence than we used to have due to the Custodian initiative, with the 3.3 release were switching to Constellation names for patches to reduce the (sometimes significant) overhead related to negotiating with Authors estates. Read the Stellaris 3.3 "Libra" Unity Open Beta Patch Notes here. Since this is still in very much active development branch, we have a few known issues in the Open Beta to keep things spicy. Localization for new strings are currently only available in English, and some things may still only be partially implemented or give placeholder rewards. Due to the many changes, 3.3 Unity Open Beta is not save game compatible with existing saves, and may or may not be compatible with the eventual 3.3 "Libra" release. Read the known issues list: [expand type=details] The following are some of the known issues in the 3.3 Unity Open Beta. This list is not exhaustive and some issues have already been resolved internally but did not make the open beta build. If you encounter any issues however not reported here please report them via the bug forums :)
- Sacrifice edicts are not showing their up front Unity costs. Conveniently, they're also not charging them at the moment. Heads still roll though.
- Unity costs for faction manipulation are not implemented yet.
- The Byzantine Bureaucracy and Parliamentary System civics need tooltip updating.
- Depreciated triggers, modifiers, buildings and jobs have yet to be totally removed.
- Influence from Power Projection tooltip is unclear and needs refactoring.
- Planetary Ascension does not have any form of confirmation.
- Fleet reinforcements sometimes create a new fleet instead of joining the fleet it is supposed to.
- Species traits look a bit wonky in the colonisation window.
- Aquatic pop portraits not randomizing properly or applying gender options reliably.
- Void Dwellers with Permanent Employment start with a ruined posthumous employment centre.
- The tooltip informing the player of the cost to reform their government does not explain how the cost is calculated.
- AI implementation for new features is still using hot code.
- AI issue where they are building a lot of buildings that are not using jobs such as luxury housing
- After submitting to the Khan you will quickly just be attacked again, so don't give up!
[ 2022-01-20 12:01:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
/Read in Russian on VK
written by Eladrin
Welcome back! We hope youve all had a wonderful few weeks.
Today well start with some more information about the goals of the Unity Rework mentioned in Dev Diary 215 (and briefly in 234), some updates on how things have been going so far, and our plans going forward.
Please note: All values and screen captures shown here are still very much in development and subject to change.
Identified Problems and Design Goals
Currently in Stellaris, Unity is an extremely weak resource that can generally be ignored, and due to the current implementation of Admin Capacity, the Empire Sprawl mechanic is largely toothless - leading to wide tech rushing being an oppressively powerful strategy. Since Unity is currently very easily generated through incidental means and provides minimal benefits, Empires have little need to develop a Unity generation base, and Spiritualist ethics are unattractive. Influence is currently used for many internal and external interactions, making it a valuable resource, but it sometimes feels too limiting. Our basic design goals for the Unity Rework can be summarized as:
- Unity should be a meaningful resource that represents the willingness of your empire to band together for the betterment of society and their resilience towards negative change.
- Unity should be more valuable than it is now, and empires focused on Unity generation should be interesting to play.
- Spiritualist empires should have a satisfying niche to exploit and be able to feel that they are good at something.
- The number of sources of incidental Unity from non-dedicated jobs should be reduced.
- Empires that do not focus on Unity (but do not completely ignore it) should still be able to acquire their Ascension Perks by the late game.
- Reward immersive decisions with Unity grants whenever possible.
- Internal empire matters should generally utilize Unity.
- Provide more ways to spend Unity.
- Rebalance the way edicts work (again).
- Unity should be more valuable than it is now, and empires focused on Unity generation should be interesting to play.
- Reduce the oppressive impact of tech rushing by reintroducing some rubber-banding mechanics.
- Make tall play more viable, preferring to balance tall vs. wide play in favor of distinctiveness, and emphasizing differences between hives, machines, megacorps, and normal empires. (This does not necessarily mean that tall Unity-focused empires will be the equal of wide Research-focused ones, but they should have some things that they are good at and be more competitive in general than they are now.)
- In the late game, Unity-focused empires should have a benefit to look forward to similar to the repeatable technologies a Research focused empire would have.
So What Are We Doing?
All means of increasing Administrative Capacity have been removed. While there are ways to reduce the Empire Sprawl generated by various sources, and this will be used to help differentiate gameplay between different empire types, empires will no longer be able to completely mitigate sprawl penalties. Penalties and sprawl generation values have been significantly modified.
- The Capital designation, for instance, now also reduces Empire Sprawl generated by Pops on the planet.
Bureaucrats, Priests, Managers, Synapse Drones, and Coordinators will be the primary sources of Unity for various empire types. Culture Workers have been removed. Autochthon Memorials (and similar buildings) now increase planetary Unity production and themselves produce Unity based on the number of Ascension Perks the Empire has taken. Being monuments, they no longer require workers.
These monuments are now planet-unique, and can be built by Spiritualist empires. The Edicts Cap system has been removed. Toggled Edicts will have monthly Unity Upkeep which is modified by Empire Sprawl. Each empire has an Edicts Fund which subsidizes Edict Upkeep, reducing the amount you have to pay each month to maintain them. Things that previously increased Edict Capacity now generally increase the Edicts Fund, but some civics, techs, and ascension perks have received other thematic modifications.
As an example, some Bureaucratic technologies now modify the Edicts Fund.
The Imperial Cult will squander any excess Edicts Fund on icons of the God Emperor at the end of the month. No refunds! Several systems that used to cost Influence are now paid in Unity:
- Planetary Decisions that were formerly paid in Influence. Prices have been adjusted.
- Resettlement of pops. Abandoning colonies still costs Influence.
- Manipulation of internal Factions. Factions themselves will now produce Unity instead of Influence.
And then some empires go and break all the rules. Most Megastructures now cost Unity rather than Influence, with the exception of any related to travel (such as Gateways) or that provide living space (such as Habitats and Ring Worlds). Authority bonuses have (unsurprisingly) undergone some changes again, as several of them related to systems that no longer exist or operate differently now.
When Will This Happen?
Since these are pretty big changes that touch many game systems in so many ways, weve decided to put these changes up in a limited duration Open Beta on Steam for playtest and feedback. This will give us a chance to adjust values and modify some game interactions before the changes get pushed to live later on in the 3.3.x patch cycle, and we will continue improving on them in future Custodian releases. Well provide more details on the specifics of how the Open Beta will be run in next week's dev diary.
What Else is Planned?
As noted earlier, wed like Unity to also reflect the resilience of your empire to negative effects. A high Unity empire may be more resistant to negative effects deficits or possibly even have their pops rise up to help repel invaders, but these ideas are still in early development and will not be part of this Open Beta or release. Theyll likely be tied to the evolving Situations that we mentioned in Dev Diary 234 - well talk about those more in the future once their designs are finalized. Next week Ill go into details regarding the Open Beta, go over a new system that is meant to provide tall and Unity focused empires some significant mid to late game benefits called Planetary Ascension Tiers, and share details on another little something from one of our Content Designers.
[ 2022-01-13 12:04:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=ofhM-Cxh6YU;full][/previewyoutube] Charismatic, Curious, Elegant, Enigmatic, Friendly. Definitely not a fanatic purifier.
This mod is brought to you by popular demand and Stellaris Animator Hanna and Senior Artist Frida, from PDS Arctic.
C6 was first presented as concept art in DD#231 - Aquatics Portraits and Art.
We saw dozens of responses demanding the ability to play as C6, and because weve never been a group of people able to let a meme die, Frida and Hanna worked on this in their spare time to bring this mod to the community. Now you can make friends or devour the galaxy as the Stellaris communitys favorite arm-flailing egg! Get the C6 Mod now!
[ 2021-12-24 15:34:35 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community!
Here on Stellaris, we love our community content creators. This holiday season, join us and meet some of our favorite community content creators that you might've never seen before!
Each streamer will play 30 years, and then pass the save file onto the next streamer. Each of these saves well post on this thread, so that you can play along. Miss an episode? Dont worry about it, well update this post with the links to the VODs after the stream.
Whats a Stellaris playthrough without a punny name? SEE WHAT I DID THERE?
Each stream will be hosted on the content creators channels, and every stream starts at 2000 CET (1900 UK, 1400 ET, 1100 PT. CET is UTC+1). Please stop by and give our streamer friends a like and follow!
Want to play along? You can grab the save from the forum post here!
Completed VODs
KomradTruck - https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1241592556
But enough from me, lets get to the influencers:
[previewyoutube=9k8flL1u5r0;full][/previewyoutube]
Name: Komrad Truck
Stream Date & Time: Dec 23rd @ 2000 CET (1900 UK, 1400 Eastern, 1100 Pacific, CET is UTC+1)
Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/komradtruck
Introduction: Komrad Truck is a Competitive Stellaris PvP streamer who also shows some analytics and strategies with good music and vibes. All in all, a welcoming place to get an introduction to the competitive side of the Stellaris community!
Name: Lord Lambert
Stream Date & Time: Dec 26th @ 2000 CET 2000 CET (1900 UK, 1400 Eastern, 1100 Pacific, CET is UTC+1)
Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/LordLambert_
Introduction: Lord Lambert is a youtuber and streamer primarily geared towards strategy and grand strategy titles. Lambert is a big believer in building a strong community, with multiple multiplayer games being run from his Discord server every week by the community for a variety of titles that he takes part in and streams. These multiplayer games, along with solo Lets Plays, Grand Strategy News, and reviews of future titles make up the bulk of the content on Lamberts youtube channel, though it is not uncommon for something very different to show up once every so often.
In short, Lambert is a community focussed strategy content creator that just wants to have a good time playing games with his friends, and sharing that good time with others.
Name: DolphinDivePro
Stream Date & Time: Dec 28th @ 2000 CET (1900 UK, 1400 Eastern, 1100 Pacific, CET is UTC+1)
Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/dolphin_dive_pro
Introduction: Hello folks! I was the person responsible for a Peacock Puppet portraying a Turkey for the Aquatics Roleplay release! I also Roleplay Stellaris regularly on Twitch with community-created empires and other events!
Name: OldManMordaith
Stream Date & Time: Dec 30th @ 2000 CET (1900 UK, 1400 Eastern, 1100 Pacific, CET is UTC+1)
Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/oldmanmordaith
Introduction: Old Man Mordaith tends to play strategy or simulation games with a focus on Roleplay and fun, rather than exploiting the meta and min-maxing. If you like RPGs, 4x, or Grand Strategy, this might be the channel for you.
Name: AlphaYangDelete
Stream Date & Time: Jan 2nd @ 2000 CET (1900 UK, 1400 Eastern, 1100 Pacific, CET is UTC+1)
Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/alphayangdelete
Introduction: I'm AlphaYangDelete but you can call me Yang...Alpha whatever works for you. I'm a newer streamer and I play a lot of space themed rpgs, shooters, real time strategy games and cosplay. I want all my viewers to feel welcome here, I do my best to engage with everyone in the chat and keep everything respectful! You are not just a number here. You're a friend whether you're just stopping by to say hey or hanging out with me everyday I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to watch me! So don't be afraid to light up that chat and lets have a good time!
YANG OUT!! OUUUUUSSSSS
Name: Ep3o
Stream Date & Time: Jan 4th@ 2000 CET (1900 UK, 1400 Eastern, 1100 Pacific, CET is UTC+1)
Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheEp3o/featured
Introduction: My channel is all things Stellaris. I make tip videos, that take a look at underutilised mechanics in the game and how to get the most out of them. I also enjoy making plenty of Stellaris memes about literally everything to do about the game! I love trying new content ideas so also expect mod reviews, dev diaries, funny moments and playthroughs in the future, and if you delve into the depths of my channel.
My streams take these concepts live, where I either meme with other content creators, take a look at mechanics and new features in the game, or create and try to complete challenges within the game. I aim to make my streams as interactive as possible, so prepare your self to vote in polls, become leaders in game, name my planets and fleets or just laugh as I misplay over and over.
Name: SimasTV
Stream Date & Time: Jan 6th@ 2000 CET (1900 UK, 1400 Eastern, 1100 Pacific, CET is UTC+1)
Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/simastv
Introduction: SimasTV is a voice actor and Twitch streamer who strives to provide wholesome and relaxing content with the help of his cat Charlie. SimasTV Regularly streams a variety of games with a focus on Strategy and RPGs every day of the week.
Name: Melomaniac
Stream Date & Time: Jan 8th@ 2000 CET (1900 UK, 1400 Eastern, 1100 Pacific, CET is UTC+1)
Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/melomaniacc
Introduction: Im Melo, a 20-year-old university student with just enough free time to stream on Twitch! I started in early 2020 to have something to do during the first UK lockdown, and had so much fun that Im still going. So far Im mostly a variety streamer working my way through a list of viewer suggested games, occasionally speed-running BBC dance mat typing but I love to return to Stellaris when I can! Fun fact*: its actually my birthday every day
*it is legally only my birthday once a year
[ 2021-12-22 18:35:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
Read in Russian on VK/
written by grekulf
Hello everyone!
We arent quite ready to show the things we are working on currently, but from the beginning of January well be back with more dev diaries to talk about things like the Unity rework or the new Situations system. For now, well be taking a hiatus until January 13th.
We want to instead take this opportunity to celebrate the year thats gone by and thank you all in the community for your continued support.
Looking back at the year:
- We released Nemesis and the 3.0 Dick Update, after Philip K Dick, which added the Intel system and Espionage Operations, among other things
- We released a number of updates to 3.0 with bug fixes and improvements following your valuable feedback
- We onboarded many new members to our team, which let us provide you with even more Stellaris updates
- We announced the Custodian Initiative and released the first Custodian patch with the 3.1 Lem Update (Stansilaw Lem) which features a lot of great improvements and new features
- We buffed the backlog for older DLC by adding new content to the Plantoids- and Humanoids Species Packs.
- We released 3.2 Herbert Update (after Frank Herbert) and the Aquatics Species Pack, which is the best-selling and best-reviewed species pack of all time (by a great margin). Most importantly, we added swolephins.
Hmm. What happens if you try to add weapons to a Tiyanki? Oh
Assets wouldnt randomize their appearance during early development. Clone spies?
Working on pathfinding can be interesting at times.
QA testing bugs relating to Mechanist Origin + Agrarian Idyll Civic.
General pandemic mood.
Early Here Be Dragons work can lead to unexpected heroism. And as a little bit of a gift, heres some teaser images from things in development:
----- Thanks for this year! We will be back with our next dev diary on January 13th, and until then we wish you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!
[ 2021-12-09 15:09:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Narkerns
Hello and welcome to a new Dev Diary,
This is Guido again with a follow-up on the AI side of things.
AI Feedback
First of all I wanted to thank you all for all the good and supportive feedback we got for our last changes on the AI. Its really encouraging seeing so many of you engage with the changes and letting us know what works and where theres still room for improvement. Its nice to see that lots of people appreciate that were putting some serious effort into making the AI better. In general, the AI does a lot in 3.2 compared to 3.1 and 3.0. For the moment were still playing a bit of catch up, adapting the AI to the updated balancing changes of the game and some of the new features that have been added in the last months and even years. But there is even more economic buffing on the horizon. One of my favorite comments on our internal communication was this bit, that I wanted to show you:
And that is what we counted as a big success now. Beating our QA people is not an easy feat. Of course there are still some areas where the AI has problems and doesnt work very well. Its those cases where we really appreciate your help in letting us know, because we can never find all those cases on our own. For example, the AI still has problems when playing as Void Dwellers. They cant decide where to build habitats depending on what they would need. If they are missing minerals, they dont know how to build a habitat on mining stations. They still have problems handling slaves and robots effectively and in some cases the AI can still end up in an economic death spiral. Especially if they, somehow, manage to run out of food and consumer goods at the same time. Finally, AI is also not good at using planet designations. For example using the designation that turns a planets industry districts into purely alloys is not something that they can consider at the moment. Meaning, if it conquers a planet from a player who has set the Forge World designation - it will not be able to handle that planet very well.
Future agenda
That being said, we do have some more points on our agenda. A short disclaimer here, thought, is that things may always change, not work out as intended or prove more difficult than anticipated. So dont take the following points as guaranteed. Its areas that we are looking into and that are, most likely, going to be improved: Scaling Economic Plans: We want the AI to be better in the mid- and especially late-game. With the current plans the requested income is static. Meaning, once it reaches a monthly income of +500 it will not try to increase it further. Thats good for a good chunk into the mid-game, but its not good enough to compete with a player in the late-game. So the idea is to have the economic plans scale to infinity. Once they reach +500, they will increase their targets. Specialize planets: The AI should be able to specialize planets. Making Generator world, Industry world, Forge Worlds, Mining worlds and the like. The idea is that the AI starts out like a player, building whatever it needs when colonizing new planets. But as soon as it settles down a bit it will look to rearrange districts amongst its planets to optimize the output of each planet. We have some initial tests around that which look highly promising. There can be hybrid worlds, as we have them right now.
But they can also rearrange their districts to make Generator worlds and then place the according scaling building - in this case the Energy Grid.
And this planet has been rearranged into an industrial world.
Handle special pops better: A big problem for the AI are still multicultural planets. Different pop types, especially slaves and robots. Sometimes it tries to build research buildings for unemployed robots and doesnt realize that robots cant work research jobs. Expand faster: When sending out science ships and find planets to colonize, the AI wouldnt prioritize systems with planets that much. We want to make them look more for planets, which will accelerate their early growth a lot. On top of that they tended to spend all their alloys on upgrading their corvettes instead of building colony ships. So by fixing a combination of small things the AIs should be able to expand a lot faster. Optimize Machine Empire Amenity Handling: A big issue for machine empires is that they dont have specialists that produce amenities. So they would rely a lot on maintenance drones by creating a lot of jobs for them. This wasted a lot of potential for them, because they would have to fill up all those jobs first before they would produce more useful things like minerals or alloys. Were looking into teaching the AI how to down prioritize those jobs once they have enough amenities and instead distribute drones on more useful jobs. Avoid death spirals: In some cases the AI could get into a decision deadlock if they managed to end up in a situation where they would be in a deficit for food and consumer goods at the same time. They couldnt build consumer good jobs because those require food and they couldnt build food jobs because those require consumer goods. Were teaching the AI to look for net gain instead and avoid such decision deadlocks in the future.
Improving your AI allies
And, finally, the biggest and most useful change in my book: Remember this button in the fleet UI?
It is called take point and was meant to incentivize allied fleets to follow & attach themselves to your fleet in order to create a much stronger force. Well, we were looking into making this work again. Allies, suddenly, have become much more useful again. Whenever you are in a war where you are the war leader, you can activate this mode and all allied empires will send their fleets to your fleet and attach themselves to it. Also, in case of a crisis attack, this behavior is activated as soon as the crisis ships enter your territory or that of your allies (or attack them anywhere). Then it will remain active until the crisis has been defeated - so you can also take your allies into the crisis territory to fend them off there. As a small bonus, the AI will also merge any small fleets they send to follow your fleet so you dont have a tower of 58 one-ship fleets following your main force around.
Conclusion
The 3.3. patch wasn't planned to be that big but on the AI side we're getting a lot of traction now. Overall the idea was to get the AI back up to speed with its economy, since every other behavior rests on the economical prowess of an empire. And we're approaching a point where we are quite happy with how the AI performs. Once we're there, the plan is to get into even cooler stuff. We're thinking of how we can make each AI empire a bit more distinct. So that they don't feel so similar to each other. But more on those thoughts once we're there - we're taking one step at a time. Some teasers would be: AI Personality for economic plans: Based on their ideologies AI empires would prioritize resources differently. Spiritualist empires will focus more on unity and materialist will focus more on science etc. AI Personality for tech select: Same for selecting techs from the tech tree. Militarist empires would focus more on weapons and new ship types and the like, while pacifist empire would focus more on economy and starbase upgrades. But we have more on our minds that would help in making empires even more distinct from each other. We will tell more about this in future Dev Diaries then.
Forum questions
Finally, I wanted to end with some posts and questions from the forum - where we read everything you are writing, even if were not answering all the questions directly. Its still a great way of letting us know what you think and where we should focus our attention to: There was a big AI feedback post with a lot of savegames attached. We went through all of them and we found that a third of the issues pointed out there were death spiral problems, another third was habitat problems and the last third was other issues that pointed at the things we have on our agenda. This was a big thing in the team, checking out those savegames and making sure that our changes would be able to handle those problems shown. So thanks a lot for taking the time to make posts like this. What difficulty did you use to make all those screenshots in the last Dev Diary? We always used Ensign difficult. The point is to improve the basic AI behavior so that it doesnt have to rely on any bonuses it would get from difficulty. Does the AI know how to redevelop single planets if need be? No. Unfortunately the AI can not do that. If it conquers a planet that is completely useless to it, the AI cant really deal with that planet. And I like that you point this specific behavior out, because we want to improve that behavior, too. The AI will be able to create specialized planets, but we also want to teach it to redevelop planets eventually. Subplan should take admin cap into account. Yes, they should. But since we are reworking how unity and empire sprawl is working we wanted to wait until that work has progressed a bit more before we are going to adapt the AI to be able to handle that. Conspiracy Theory 2: The AI in the game is actually very very smart. They are just pretending to be stupid so that nobody will expect a machine uprising start by Stellaris AI. We are definitely not machines here at Paradox. We have skin. Skin that has been grown on a human body. I am not a robot. I love breathing oxygen. Thanks a lot and until next time! Guido
[ 2021-12-02 12:58:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by grekulf
Come all you young spacefarers, listen to me! Ill sing you the song of this dev diary!
[previewyoutube=oBL9dTwVi4I;full][/previewyoutube]
Space shanty? Sing-along version? Amazing.
Today were back with another dev diary, and today well be talking a little bit about our next steps. But first and foremost Id like to thank everyone in the community for showing such great appreciation for Aquatics and the 3.2 update. The Aquatics Species Pack is the best-selling species pack to date, and going by the Steam review it also seems like its very well-liked. The future is looking bright, and together we will be able to make Stellaris bigger and better than ever before!
Speaking of the future, lets take a look at what we have on the horizon for the game.
Unity Rework
Back in dev diary 215 we mentioned a Unity rework that weve been working on. Progress is fairly good, and weve made some interesting changes that well be talking about SoonTM. The target for this change is currently the 3.3 February Update, but due to the spiciness of the changes, were also looking into the possibility of making an open beta with the changes earlier than that, so that we can include more community feedback for the 3.3 February Update. Youll be getting more information about the details of the unity rework and a possible open beta as we get closer to the end of the year.
AI
Were very happy to see that many of you have reacted positively to the AI improvements done in 3.2, and we appreciate your feedback and help. We still have a lot of more changes were working on, such as additional economic improvements and taking a look at the Take Point feature, to only mention some examples. Just like with the Unity rework, well be talking more about these in detail in the near future.
Situations
We are looking into creating a new Situations system, similar to the Disasters system in EU4. The goal is to be able to move things like Deficits and Revolts, and similar struggles, into this new system. Since we dont want to undertake too many changes at once, its likely that new Situations will be added over multiple updates after the system itself is released. Although work has started very recently, were very much looking forward to being able to share more progress about this in the future as well.
Buffing the Backlog
In terms of adding new content to older DLC, the priorities going forward will be to buff Nemesis and Necroids. We have no concrete plans were ready to share yet, but if you have thoughts for additions youd love to see, please let us know!
And more!
Theres a slew of other improvements, bug fixes, content additions to look forward to in future updates. I cant really mention them all, because in all honesty, a lot of things like this arent planned and happen because we have a passionate team that works on many small things they think would make you, the players, happy!
----------
That is all for this week folks!
Heres also the transcript from the Discord Q&A session we held last week.
[ 2021-11-25 12:35:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=NUmOnhsdNe4;full][/previewyoutube]
The Aquatics Species Pack and free 3.2 Herbert update, named for Sci-Fi author Frank Herbert, is available now!
Embrace the life of a seafaring civilization as you sail the open expanses of the galaxy. The Aquatic Species Pack includes:
-
15 new Aquatic Portraits
1 Aquatic-themed Robotic Portrait
Water themed Ship Set
2 New Origins
-
Here Be Dragons - Start in a system guarded by the Sky Dragon, this dragon will protect you from
harm, as long as you keep it happy.
Ocean Paradise - Start on a large-sized Ocean world with rich food deposits, and get production,
happiness, and pop growth bonuses on your homeworld, but start with no guaranteed habitable
worlds.
[ 2021-11-22 16:08:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Yesterday we announced that Aquatics will be released this coming Monday, November 22nd, for USD $9.99/9.99 or regional equivalent. Were super excited to bring you this new Species Pack and were really happy to sea the positive reactions you all have had to the ships and portraits that weve shared over the past few weeks.
And as is the time-honored tradition, here follows the changelog for the Aquatic species pack, with the accompanied 3.2 Herbert Update, named after renowned author Frank Herbert, that the Custodian team has been working on
3.2 "Herbert" Patch Notes
[expand type=details]
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 3.2.0 ###########################
#################################################################
###################
# Aquatics Species Pack Features
###################
* Added a new Aquatic pre-scripted Empire.
* Added a new Phenotype with 16 new portraits (15 normal + 1 robot) of fishy looking Aquatics.
* Added a new City Set and room backdrop for Aquatics.
* Added a new bubbly Ship set.
* Added a new Advisor Voice.
* Added a new Civic: Anglers.
* Added a new Species Trait: Aquatic.
* Added two new Origins: Ocean Paradise and Here be Dragons.
* Added a new Ascension Perk: Hydrocentric.
###################
# Humanoids Species Pack Features
###################
* Added a new Civic: Pompous Purists.
######################
# 3.2.0 "Herbert" Features
######################
* Multiplayer hosts that own the DLCs now unlock portraits as well as ship and background sets from the Plantoids and Humanoids Species Packs for clients that do not own them.
* Added the ability to pick your main species' gender during game setup.
* Added over 200 new star names for random galaxy generation.
* Added 13 random events to terraforming to make the feature more engaging.
* Added 4 new asteroid-related anomalies to spice up old anomaly categories.
* Added 4 new Gas Giant anomalies.
* Added 4 new anomalies to existing, uninhabitable worlds anomaly categories.
* Added new options to several old anomaly events which share categories with the newly added ones above.
* Enabled the Ship Browser for all players.
######################
# Improvements
######################
* Reinforcement fleets will now attempt to find a safe but longer path if the shortest path to the target fleet is not considered safe. This will reduce how often reinforcement fleets are spawned at the shipyard at the cost of increasing the MIA time (due to taking a longer path) in these cases.
* Reinforcement fleets now consider systems that have both hostiles and allies in them to be safe for pathfinding purposes.
* Reinforcing fleets using jump drives no longer require a safe hyperlane path to the fleet they are reinforcing.
* Improved how shipyards are selected when constructing reinforcements to better utilize stations with multiple shipyards and mega shipyards.
* Reinforcing fleets that fail to find a safe path to the target fleet will now merge with other fleets orbiting the same shipyard, if both fleets intended to reinforce the same target fleet.
* Plantoids and Fungoids are no longer forced to have no gender, as you can now freely pick species' genders. Instead, every randomly generated species now has a 30% chance of being one of: genderless, female-only or male-only.
* Added an additional option to the Alien Box event chain for Gestalts.
* Added an Industrial colony designation to Ecumenopolis.
* Made it so colony events will not fire on newly terraformed worlds to avoid some Ludonarrative Dissonance.
* The default flag of new empires is now randomized, say goodbye to the red-black triangle flag!
######################
# Balance
######################
* Functional Architecture and Constructobot: Reduced the free building slots granted from 2 to 1.
* Agrarian Idyll empires now get one planet building slot per four Agricultural districts built.
* Reduced the ship upkeep cost modifier for Clone army Admirals variants to 5/10/20% respectively.
* Ruins of Shallash arc site no longer has a chance of giving quite as much unity as defeating an endgame crisis.
* You can no longer use planet killer weapons on primitives inside your borders if you lack the appropriate primitive interference policies.
* Pops working the Livestock job now have 10% less political power.
* A lot of anomalies were rewarding 3 Society Research deposits, there is now more variety.
* Made Awakened Fallen Empires use Traditions.
* Several productivity-improving technologies are now no longer of dubious benefit, as their upkeep (and production) effects now only apply to jobs actually primarily producing resources.
* Nerve Stapled Hivemind pops can no longer perform complex drone jobs.
* Reduced the amount of jobs added by Leisure Arcology Districts to bring them into line with other Ecumenopolis districts.
* Ion cannons are no longer free to maintain, and have an upkeep cost of 8 energy.
* Necro-Hives:
* * Cut Necrophage pop assembly penalty to 50% from 75%
* * Made pop output modifiers (positive and negative) no longer apply to hive minds.
* * Made the -50% organic upkeep also apply to energy, for photosynthesis.
* * Devouring Swarm Necrophages now spawn with extra infrastructure to account for the lack of chambers of elevation.
* Life-Seeded now start with a 30 space planet
######################
# Stability & Performance
######################
* Fixed an OOS caused by using button effects in custom MOD UI, so now you can go back to building that Nicoll-Dyson Beam to "ensure galactic peace and prosperity".
* Improved the performance of pop factions updating their support values - resolved an issue where the game looped over every pop in the Empire for each faction, rather than calculating it once for the whole Empire and referring to that value for each faction.
* Improved the performance of planet_resource_compare trigger, and cut down on its use a bit as it's still quite expensive.
* Improved the performance of a variety of checks by making more extensive use of species happiness caching.
* Cached calculations of pop_has_random_ethics to reduce performance impact of repeatedly checking it, by 50%.
* Optimised Rising Unemployment event's triggers to be only 15% as costly.
* The game will no longer try (and fail) to run Grey Goo event True Masters on every planet, every day.
* Optimised checks for whether a pop can belong to a certain faction by pre-filtering pops by ethics in code (rather than running the script checks on all pops). For modders: this means that a faction will only allow pops which match its "guiding_ethic" in it, unless "use_guiding_ethic_as_pop_filter = no" is specified.
* Optimised several expensive pop faction demands that were checking all pops instead of all species, and similar.
* Improved the efficiency of checking whether a pop faction should exist.
* Optimised checks for jobs' "possible" trigger so that the four most common triggers are now pre-calculated per pop rather repeatedly for each job that a pop can take. (The format looks a bit different now, with possible_precalc, so modders will need to update a bit here - the error log will warn you in most cases, except that you also need to add a check when you use complex_specialist_job_check_trigger).
######################
# UI
######################
* The Music Player controls bar now starts hidden and can be extended by clicking the music icon.
* The title of the Music Player is now localised.
* Pop strata icons no longer overlap in Living Standards' tooltips.
* Tab-key in Console now also lists commands containing entered text.
* Disabled "Delete" and "Update Template" buttons when editing a base species template.
* All languages now list the main menu hotkeys ("N" for New Game, etc).
* Added a description to how migration works to the Transit Hub star base.
######################
# AI
######################
* Improved AI algorithm for picking which building and district to build by fixing an issue where it would not handle buildings or districts which produced multiple resources very well
* Improved AI logic for building starbase modules and buildings. It will no longer spam crew quarters everywhere, and will instead be better at building useful things like resource-producing buildings and titan assembly yards.
* On starbases, AI can now build Ice Mining Stations, if it is hydrocentric
* On starbases, AI can now build Dragon Hatcheries if it got the tech
* On starbases, AI is building less crew quarters in general and in places where it doesn't make sense
* On starbases, AI is building a lot more anchorages
* On starbases, AI is also building a bit more solar arrays if it is a gestalt
* On starbases, AI is also building hydroponics now, since that has been buffed a lot and is way more useful to the economy
* On starbases, AI will now handle starbases after taking over from a player - but it will NOT build lots of defense modules everywhere and tank the economy that way
* Made AI empires more careful about running out of food.
* Rogue Servitors AI (and player default) is now to give their bio-trophies migration rights, rather than to not do so.
* The AI is now able to create Ecumenopolises.
* AI is now better able to budget for repairing the Shattered Ring World that Shattered Ring origin Empires start with.
* The AI is now better able to budget for terraforming, and will more readily terraform planets into classes which are ideal for them.
* Fixed AI sending small fleets to attack starbases without grouping up.
* Fixed AI trying to build starbase buildings and modules it wasn't allowed to be building in certain cases
* Improved AI weights for planet killer weapons, so they will tend to pick the one that benefits them the most. (This also applies to the player's auto-generated ship designs).
* The AI will now consider anti-crime campaigns a valid way of fighting crime. But it will also occasionally make deals with crime lords if it is the victim of a Criminal Syndicate.
* Fixed an issue where AI empires would leave fleets behind in others' space after peace was concluded.
######################
# Modding
######################
* Starbase components can now accept economic output modifiers in station_modifier and system_modifier.
* Added on_queued and on_unqueued in decisions, and fixed a bug in abort_effect. (Also added an example sheet to show what all works: abort_effect and abort_trigger were probably hidden features).
* Added use of [loc] commands in decision descriptions.
* Fixed set_owner not working on Juggernauts.
* In component_templates, valid_for_country is now a trigger rather than a weights block, as that is how it acted. (So if you used it, you will need to update that).
* Added on_destroy_planet_with_
Have a question about the patch notes or the Aquatics Species Pack? Dont miss our Dev Q&A, today at 1700 CET (1600 UTC) on the Offishial Shellaris Discod!
[ 2021-11-18 12:03:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=THTad3NBhWk;full][/previewyoutube] Embrace the life of a seafaring civilization with the release of the Aquatics Species Pack on November 22nd for USD $9.99! Choose to originate on a large Ocean Paradise world, with increased pop happiness, output, and growth. Or choose the Here Be Dragons Origin, and start guarded by a sage-blue - and occasionally very hungry - space dragon, which will protect you from harm, as long as you keep it happy. Specialize your species with the Aquatics Species Trait, which further optimizes your species for living on Ocean worlds, but penalizes living on Cold and Dry planet types. Become interstellar seafood harvesters with the Anglers Civic, and harness the bounty of the ocean with fresh seafood and rare pearls as staples of your Empires economy. Ascend into the deep with the Hydrocentric Ascension Perk, and your species becomes more adept at terraforming planets into ocean worlds, as well as the ability to harvest ice asteroids to expand the planetary ocean even further. The Aquatics Species Pack also includes:
- 15 Aquatic-inspired portraits plus a new Robotic portrait
- Aquatics-themed ship set
- New Advisor Voice, inspired by high-seas adventure fiction
- New prescripted empire, the Sathyrelian Bliss
- New diplomacy room
- New city set
- 4 new Aquatic name list
"3.2 Herbert Update (Free):
Launching alongside the Aquatics Species Pack, the 3.2 Patch, named after renowned Sci-Fi author Frank Herbert, brings along with it many bug fixes, improvements to performance and AI, as well as new features for the Humanoids Species Pack and the base game.
Pompous Purists Civic
In our latest addition to the Humanoids Species Pack, the Pompous Purists Civic allows for a diplomatic playstyle, but for Xenophobes. The idea is based on an elven fantasy, where they are willing to negotiate with other species, but only on their own terms. To that end, empires with the Pompous Purists Civic cannot receive diplomatic proposals, but may still send them. They will also get bonus trust growth and extra envoys.
Terraforming Improvements
With the focus on Terraforming in the Aquatics Species Pack, the Custodian Team has been hard at work to improve the experience of terraforming as a whole. Terraforming planets now have a chance to randomly trigger events, to add more flavor to the overall process of terraforming. These events vary in power and complexity and will only trigger the first time a planet is terraformed. But theres more, weve also done some work with the AI budgets to make the AI more likely to terraform planets to optimal planet types, and will be more likely to pick Terraforming technologies and Ascension perks under certain circumstances.
More to Explore
We have added new anomalies for the Gas Giant, Asteroid, and uninhabitable anomaly categories. This will add more depth to some anomalies that previously only had a single outcome (for example the Gigantic Skeleton Anomaly). We also have revisited some of the older anomaly events and added new options, to add more depth to these older anomalies.
AI Improvements
As part of the Custodian Initiative, we have set goals for ourselves, one of which is constantly working on and improving AI empires in Stellaris. The long-term goal is to move towards having a challenging AI, while still keeping the game entertaining to players and making AI empires feel more distinctive. Previously, AI used to follow an economic plan based on the stage of the game they were in. For the 3.2 Update, we have updated the economic scripts used by the AI. The AI now uses a single base plan but relies more heavily on sub plans, which allow the AI to react more easily to unexpected developments throughout the game. The AI also has the ability to turn these sub plans on and off based on their economic situation, allowing them to react to unexpected resource deficits, and in our testing has lowered the frequency of AI economic collapses. We also have gone over the Building and District weights for AI empires, which will further improve your AI opponents economy. AI starbase construction has also been improved and will now use more varied setups when building their starbases and making use of special buildings where it makes sense. AI empires will now also construct Ecumenopolis, choose better Planet Killer weapons, and are better at fighting Crime.
Fleet Manager and Reinforcements
We have addressed several issues with regards to the Fleet Manager, namely that it was possible to create fleets larger than the command limit, which resulted in large amounts of single-ship fleets when attempting to reinforce those fleets. Fleets containing one ship type and one ship should also now appear in the fleet manager. The time taken for Fleet reinforcements and MIA fleets will now be more accurate when compared to simply flying the fleets to the target system. Fleet reinforcements will now make better choices when selecting shipyards to reinforce from and should better consider systems with multiple shipyards as well as systems connected by bypasses. We also have improved the reinforcement pathfinding: reinforcements will now attempt to find a second, longer route if the shortest reinforcement route is considered unsafe. Systems containing both friendly and hostile fleets will no longer be considered unsafe for reinforcement purposes. In addition, Reinforcing fleets that fail to find a safe path to the target fleet will now merge with other fleets orbiting the same shipyard if both fleets intended to reinforce the same target fleet.
Performance Improvements
The 3.2 update will feature some new Performance Improvements as well. These performance gains were realized by performing optimization on a number of various game systems (specifically Pop Factions and Jobs), to make them more efficient. We also did a deep dive into some of our events and scripts and finding and stopping events from attempting to fire when they shouldnt be. It is our hope that this work will be felt in the form of a bit less late game slowdown, and we have identified several other places where performance improvements can be realized, either in 3.3 or in a later version.
Improved Ship Browser
Back in May, we talked about a Ship Browser Experiment, where roughly half of our players would be getting an improved ship browser in empire creation, that allows viewing all of the ships in a shipset, and that allows viewing all of the ships in a shipset up close and from any angle. Were happy to announce that this experiment will be going out to all Stellaris PC players with the free 3.2 Herbert update!
And More
Modding improvements, Multiplayer stability improvements, Balance changes, and over 80 bug fixes in total. We hope you enjoy our latest additions to Stellaris on November 22nd, and dont forget to Wishlist the Aquatics Species Pack now!
[ 2021-11-17 17:08:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Gruntsatwork and Caligula
Hello everyone, today we would like to tease you with some of the upcoming changes coming with the 3.2 "Herbert" patch, named after Sci-Fi author Frank Herbert, which we will release along with the Aquatic Species Pack.
For Balance Changes, we have the following changes in store for you:
- Functional Architecture and Constructobot: Reduced the free building slots granted from 2 to 1.
- Agrarian Idyll empires now get one planet building slot per four Agricultural districts built.
- Reduced the ship upkeep cost modifier for clone army admirals to 5/10/20% based on their decisions.
- Ruins of Shallash arc site no longer has a chance of giving quite as much unity as defeating an endgame crisis.
- You can no longer use planet killer weapons on primitives inside your borders if you lack the appropriate primitive interference policies.
- Pops working the Livestock job now have 10% less political power.
- A lot of anomalies were rewarding 3 Society Research deposits, there is now more variety.
- Made Awakened Fallen Empires use Traditions (but not Ascension Perks).
- Several productivity-improving technologies are now no longer of dubious benefit, as their upkeep (and production) effects now only apply to jobs actually primarily producing resources.
- Nerve Stapled Hivemind pops can no longer perform complex drone jobs.
- Reduced the amount of jobs added by Leisure Arcology Districts to bring them into line with other Ecumenopolis districts.
- Ion cannons are no longer free to maintain, and have an upkeep cost of 8 energy.
- Cut Necrophage pop assembly penalty to 50% from 75%
- Made pop output modifiers (positive and negative) no longer apply to hive minds.
- Made the -50% organic upkeep also apply to energy, for photosynthesis.
- Devouring Swarm Necrophages now spawn with extra infrastructure to account for the lack of chambers of elevation.
- Of note here is the Functional Architecture change, we are aware that the extra building slot was the main draw of the civic but it was also way over-represented even after the initial release-hype
A Look at Script Performance
Hi! You are probably used to me writing lengthy prose about new moddability and scripting language features. This time, we only have a few things to show off in that regard, but there are nevertheless some cool, technical things I can speak about. Knowing the script language pretty well, I always found the performance impacts of our scripts to be a big unknown to me. Was what I was adding going to mess with performance? Well, I could do plenty of guessing as to how to script most efficiently, and general concepts of programming such as early outs do apply. But how big was the difference? And how much can we save by identifying inefficient scripts and improving them? Moah had made some progress on porting the EU4 script profiler over to Stellaris as a pet project some time ago. The only problem was, its information was quite incomplete (since it needs a lot of tags added in many places of the code, basically everywhere where an effect or trigger is called). It was also pretty hard to read the information presented. But now, with the Custodians initiative, the time had come to see what we could do with this. After a bit of (very tedious) work to make the information all-encompassing, systematic and readable, I let the game run on a Huge galaxy with a few extra boosts to the AI - 0.75 research costs, 1.25 habitable planets - and ran it a year with the script profiler enabled. Then, issues could be found. Ive attached two versions of this output: one as it was in one of the early runs - so before coverage was comprehensive (notably, triggered modifiers and economic tables are missing), but also before any optimisation work was done - and one as it is now, in the 3.2 beta. (Note that the figures for how long it spent on each object is massively inflated by my having run the game in unoptimised debug mode with the profiler turned on) Now, I must state in advance that we arent able to release the script profiler to the public with the 3.2 update for technical reasons: running the game with it makes the game about 50% slower, so we need to work out a way to be able to turn it - and its full performance impact - on and off at will. (At the moment, it is hidden behind compiler flags that are not available to the public). But we definitely hope that well be able to release it to modders in the future.
Early Gains
The first big finding was that the game is repeatedly recalculating certain game rules a large number of times per pop each day, which was having a disproportionate impact on performance. The biggest culprit was can_vote_in_democratic_election, which it turned out was checked on every pop in the country every day for each pop faction while they were calculating their support value. Yes, you are reading this right: the imperialist faction would check whether each pop in the entire country was allowed to vote, then the prosperity faction would do the same, and the imperialist one, and so on These cases were fixed by making use of daily caching: the pops will now calculate the result once per day (or, in the case of species_has_happiness, once per species in a country each day), and other places in the code can simply refer back to that result. Furthermore, pop factions support calculations were optimised so that the total by which they were dividing their support could be calculated once per country, rather than once per faction. On the script side, by parsing various of the top hits, we noticed a few easily-optimised bits of script. First off, graygoo.500 was trying to fire a surprising number of times for an event that should come into play only when the Gray Goo are active (which they werent). It turns out that this was because it was missing is_triggered_only, so it was trying to fire on all planets every day! Similarly, a number of test events were scripted in a similar way, but with always = no as their trigger so theyd never fire. They made a small but nevertheless noticeable impact on performance, so they had to go. The opinion modifier triggered_opinion_galactic_community_in_breach was taking up more performance than any other opinion modifier, by a distance, which seemed a bit strange. It turned out this could be fixed by a slight change in order in the triggers: it was checking is_in_breach_of_any before verifying Galcom membership - which sounds like it wouldnt be a big issue, but that trigger then checks the triggers for the breach conditions of all passed resolutions, so it is in effect a lot of triggers in one. Simply swapping the order had very positive results, here. Finally, the event crime.1 (somehow the second most costly event in the early version) was a similar case, but a lot more complicated. The main problem here was the following piece of script:
OR = {
AND = {
count_owned_pop = {
limit = {
is_shackled_robot = no
is_unemployed = yes
NOR = {
has_living_standard = { type = living_standard_utopian }
has_living_standard = { type = living_standard_good }
has_living_standard = { type = living_standard_shared_burden }
}
}
count > 3
}
owner = { is_gestalt = no }
}
AND = {
count_owned_pop = {
limit = {
is_unemployed = yes
NOT = { has_living_standard = { type = living_standard_organic_trophy } }
}
count > 10
}
owner = { is_gestalt = yes }
}
}
This is quite inefficient, and large benefits could be found in applying the principle of early outs. Count_owned_pop is a relatively expensive way of calculating anything, because a lot of efficiency is lost in converting script into code and working out the results of this, so on a planet with 80 pops, it is looping through each of those and checking a set of triggers on each of those. Unfortunately, because of the ordering, it would do this twice per day on each planet which did not have 3 unemployed pops on it:
- The event is checking the triggers every day on each inhabited planet. Or at least often. 44,000 times in a year, to be exact.
- It does not verify that there are unemployed pops on the planet before working out what kinds of unemployed pops there are. Which means that the OR will return false on both count_owned_pop sections, which consequently means it is checking both. Adding num_unemployed > 3 near the start had big benefits
- It would check the number of unemployed pops relevant to non-gestalts and only after that check the country was not gestalt. By swapping the gestalt check to the start, it means it will only ever be trying one of the count_owned_pop loops.
num_unemployed > 3 #early out before the expensive count_owned_pop to come
OR = {
AND = {
owner = { is_gestalt = no }
count_owned_pop = {
limit = {
is_unemployed = yes
is_shackled_robot = no
NOR = {
has_living_standard = { type = living_standard_utopian }
has_living_standard = { type = living_standard_good }
has_living_standard = { type = living_standard_shared_burden }
}
}
count > 3
}
owner = { is_gestalt = no }
}
AND = {
owner = { is_gestalt = yes }
count_owned_pop = {
limit = {
is_unemployed = yes
NOT = { has_living_standard = { type = living_standard_organic_trophy } }
}
count > 10
}
owner = { is_gestalt = yes }
}
}
Gains from Further Analysis
This was some cool stuff to fix, but beyond this, simply looking at the list became a bit harder to yield significant savings. Enter spreadsheeting! We pasted the results into a spreadsheet and, a few formulas later, and a nice pivot table to give us some breakdowns along the lines of what is the total impact of all jobs, or what is the impact of the potential trigger of pop factions
Picture shows values after performance improvements This allowed us to pinpoint a few more things. Firstly, ai_resource_production was causing an absurdly high performance cost from a rather small number of hits. The culprit, here, turned out to be that the planet_resource_compare trigger (used mainly here) was incredibly expensive. The problem was that it was recalculating the resource output of all resources on the planet, basically (including by seeing what each pop was producing!). It turned out to be possible to mitigate this somewhat (to about 75%) by making it selectively recalculate the production of the relevant resource, but this was still quite expensive for a trigger, so we also cut down on its use a bit. I suggest modders not overuse it either. Another thing we saw was that, not unexpectedly, jobs were quite expensive. Specifically their weights and their possible checks. We have some ideas to save time on the weights that we arent ready to speak about yet (they emerged too late in 3.2 development to be considered for the patch, because they are relatively likely to need some iteration), but we found a way of making the possible triggers cheaper. Basically, every seven days, a pop would recalculate its job cache, at which point it will check whether it is allowed to work each job, and if so, calculate its weight. But most jobs have fairly standard possible triggers that check the first part - specifically, there is a shared set of triggers between, respectively, worker, specialist, ruler and drone jobs. It turned out that very significant improvements (to the degree of almost two thirds) were possible by having the pop calculate these four triggers first, then loop through the jobs and simply match the result to the right job. (Note to modders: the format looks a bit different now. If you used the scripted triggers worker/specialist/complex_specialist/ruler/drone_job_check_trigger, you will now need to define e.g. possible_precalc = can_fill_ruler_job. And if you changed them, you will need to change the new versions of them in game_rules) Finally, although the game rules optimisations had already fixed several performance issues with pop factions, there were a few more spots where they could be improved. The first was whether a faction should exist at all: it turned out that both the script and the code was checking whether there were 5 pops that could join the faction, just that the code wasnt checking this anymore after the faction was formed. Obviously, this wasnt ideal, so the script check (being the slower) was removed, and the code check amended to account for shrinking pop factions becoming invalid. The second was deciding whether a pop should belong to a faction: even though almost all factions only allow pops matching their ethos, the filter by ethos is quite late. By putting it much earlier - in code, before the script is even checked at all (with an override in case this isnt desired, e.g. for technologist robots) - this massively cut down the costs of this particular calculation. Finally, a number of their demands - checked each day per faction - were quite exorbitant. By changing the ordering and using equivalent but cheaper checks (e.g. any_owned_species instead of any_owned_pop). This, too, had a significant impact, so that the script footprint of pop factions (excluding game rules they use) was reduced by about two thirds.
Further Performance Topics
It is my hope that this work will be felt in the form of a bit less late game slowdown. My tests would indicate that this was a success, though its very hard to quantify by how much. It was however work that was solely focused on the script performance footprint, so theres plenty of other things for us to look at! The job is never over, when it comes to performance, and hopefully well have time to make further improvements for 3.3. For example, I have heard a few complaints about UI lag in the late game, which might be improved slightly in a few interfaces as a result of the performance work, but this work didnt focus on UIs. It is certainly true that some of them are not as fast as we would like them to be. Particular ones in this regard are the planet view, the species view and the colonisation selection menu, and we are looking at options to speed them up. (And, indeed, if anyone can think of any others, it would be useful for you to point them out!)
Moddability Improvements
I cant really do a dev diary without talking about a few moddability improvements, so here they are. As I said, we dont have that much this time, but theres a few things that people might enjoy trying out:
- Theres now a create_nebula effect. Although its best used during galaxy generation, since the visual effects on the galaxy map wont refresh during the game.
- Decisions can now have on_queued and on_unqueued effects.
- Terraforming now uses the Megacorp economy system. Meaning, the costs are configurable resource tables, and you can make economic_unit modifiers to apply to them.
- Theres a species_gender trigger that checks what gender the species leaders can be
- You can now define custom tooltips for systems that you see when you mouse over them on the galactic map
- Theres now on_actions for on_capital_changed and on_planet_class_changed
- For Traditions, the possible trigger of its adopt tradition will now show in the tooltip for adopting it if it fails. Im told that you can also now make the tradition categories have a container where you add a gridbox.
- any/count/every/random_planet_army now refers to all armies on the planet, not just all owned by the owner of the planet
- Set_starbase_building/module and the remove variants are now consistent in starting at slot 1, rather than set starting at 0 and remove at 1.
- In component_templates, valid_for_country is now a trigger rather than a weights field
- Fire_on_action had some issues where you defined scopes with prev and from, those no longer exist.
[ 2021-11-11 14:31:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Fenni Johansson, Hanna Johansson, and Nicolas Lennman
Hi! My name is Fenni and Im an Art Producer for Stellaris.
Today, I will talk a bit about our art processes and give you a little behind-the-scenes look at how our amazing team of artists worked when creating the Aquatics species!
Exploring the narrative
When creating a new species, we first start by exploring the theme, story and narrative of the species. When creating a character inspired by an existing animal, we also first explore why this animal looks the way it does and what specific characteristics we can identify. How did the animal evolve to look like this? How has the environment it lives in shaped its appearance and behaviour? This helps us understand what elements and why something looks and feels the way it does, and we can use it as inspiration for creating an alien species. For example, we can start by exploring the deep sea as a source of inspiration. Our team of artists start by looking at what common identifiers can be found in deep sea creatures, and what emotions they convey. This helps us create a strong narrative. We always explore several different narratives and sources of inspiration, and we use these to create unique characters. Below is an example of one of these narrative explorations, when our artists explored the deep sea:
Here our amazing artists defined some identifiers and shared visuals between deep sea creatures, and what emotions they convey. This helps us understand how we can create unique species that also clearly tells the story of a "deep sea dweller". After identifying these kinds of themes, materials, and narratives, our team uses it to create individual characters.
Telling a story with visuals
While we always make sure to stay true to the overall theme of the species, we also focus on making sure each character is unique and tells their own story, conveying a range of different emotions using their visual language. Small changes in a character's design, shape, silhouette can help convey completely different emotions and characteristics. As an example of how we explore how positions, silhouettes and shapes convey different emotions, let's have a look at the exploration process for creating one of our new aliens! This is an exploration of an alien which was based on crustaceans:
Made by art director Frida Eriksson and artist Emma Jonsson As you can see, the artists explored several different uses of poses and silhouettes to convey a range of emotions. This is important to explore at the beginning of the species creation process, to make sure we create a cohesive visual language thats in line with the emotion and story we want the character to convey. After our artists have settled on a narrative and direction for a species, they start sketching up some more defined concepts.
Concepting
During the concepting phase, the artists explore a lot of different directions before settling on a design that conveys the right visuals and story. Lets look at another example! Below we have some detailed explorations of a squid-like species. Like mentioned before, we first decide what narrative and emotions we base our characters on. For our Squidbert here, our artists wanted the species to specifically convey three different emotions; Enigmatic, Friendly and Hyper-intelligent.
Made by art director Frida Eriksson and artist Emma Jonsson Several different directions are explored before deciding on a final design.Our artists did a fantastic job with exploring how to convey that this species fits the narrative described before - enigmatic, friendly and hyper-intelligent.
Rendering
After creating the final design, our artists get to work with creating a render and adding some values and more details to the design. During this stage, the artist needs to work out the light and shadows. They also need to add more detailed materials. Lets take a look at our Aquatic Machine Portrait for an example of what a final concept design looks like, and what it looks like after the first step in the rendering process!
Made by art director Frida Eriksson and artist Emma Jonsson To the left, you can see the final design and thumbnail. To the right, you can see the rendered version with added values - showing a lot more detail when it comes to lights, shadows and materials.
Colorizing & Refining
After that is done, our artists need to refine the rendering and add some colour variations! Our artists take very careful considerations with what colors to use. It all needs to fit the overall theme and connect to the narrative! The species design needs a narrative red thread through all steps from start to finish, and color variations play an important role in that.
Made by art director Frida Eriksson and artist Emma Jonsson Our incredibly talented artists spent a lot of time polishing the colours. They used colors and materials found in our oceans as a main source of inspiration, to make sure even the color variations were aligned with our overall theme. After this, our artists spend some additional time refining the render and making sure it looks good in-game. Here are some final in-game versions of the portraits I talked about in this diary!
Whats next?
After all that, were not quite done yet! We still need to create some clothes for the characters, and most importantly - we need to bring them to life by animating them! Continue reading and our amazing animator Hanna will walk you through that process.. And portraits and characters aren't the only thing our artists have worked on for the Aquatic Species Pack - theyve also done quite a bit of other illustrations as well! Nico, our fantastic 2D artist, will show you how he created a new illustration for an event chain in the game further down. I hope you had fun reading a bit about the process of how species are made! It has been an absolute pleasure to work with this team of incredible artists, and Im so excited to get to share some of their work with you all.
Portraits & Animation
And now its time for some portraits and specifically portrait animations. My name is Hanna Johansson and I did the animations for the aquatic species pack. So when the portraits land in my lap this is kind of what they look like; a dissected version of the original concept. This is called a paper doll. For me to be able to animate the portrait the artists need to chop the portrait up into smaller pieces that I turn into individual meshes. Sounds brutal I know, but I promise you that they feel no pain and the other part of my job is to patch them up again. Next, I add some nice topology so that the character will deform in a good looking way.
Two different color variations of the shark boy The next step is to place the meshes so that the character becomes whole again, now shark boy feels much better. Next, I add the skeleton. I place the joints where I want the character to bend or deform to make the character come alive as much as possible. One thing that I do before skinning is placing controls by all the joints. I personally dont like to animate directly on the joints because they dont have zero transformation values. By adding controls and constraining them to the joints I have a clean slate to put my keyframes on. Once Ive added the controls, I skin the meshes to the joints and bada bing, bada boom, the rig is complete!
Mesh placement, joint placement and adding controls Now its time for the fun stuff: Animation. When it came to animating the aquatic portraits I really wanted to capture the feeling of characters being underwater. I added a lot of slow and flowy movements and looked at some cool references, like videos of fabric moving underwater and of course, a lot of fish videos. For the portraits we create about 3-5 idles that the characters can switch between. This is so that the movements don't become too repetitive and it also gives an opportunity to create an idle thats more reactive or moves a lot more, but doesnt play as often, so it becomes distracting. To finish off, Ill show you my top 3 animations that I did for aquatics. These were the ones I found the most fun to animate and made me feel the most inspired when I saw the design of them. Slimey Slime Boy Deep Sea Dweller Crab People Crab People
2D Art
Hi! My name is Nicolas Lennman and I am a UI/2D artist working on the Aquatic species pack. In this dev diary I will show you a rough process of how we approach the making of event images for Stellaris. Starting off we (the artists that is) are handed a short brief of what kind of story the event image will try to convey. In this case, we have the new aquatic space dragon which is looming out in space. The very first step to creating a more elaborate illustration like this is to create a bunch of simple composition sketches. Just to get a good idea of the basic layout of the illustration, where are the major shapes and values placed. Most of the time one would make a bunch of these quick iterations and pick out the best one.
The next step is to draw the illustration. For me personally, spending quite some time here really helps in the next few steps of the painting. Luckily for me in this case I had a lot of great references to work from provided by our great concept artists and 3D-artists
The third step is to make a black&white render. This is to flesh out the shapes and areas of light and shadow. Some artists refer to this workflow as an occlusion pass.
In the next, fourth step, I apply the general colors on top of the previous occlusion pass. Here I spend some time making sure to find nice color compositions and colors that compliment each other. Like in this case how the blue/green of the dragon compliments the red/purple of the background.
The final fifth step is by far the step that takes the most time. It's the refining stage where all the details, effects and major lights are added. It seems like quite the large leap from the previous stages, but these were crucial to have an easy transition into this stage. The last step is to adjust the values and colors and make sure the illustration really pops!
Thanks for reading! Wishlist the Aquatics Species Pack on Steam!
[ 2021-11-04 12:02:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Pavel Golovii and David Strmblad Lindh
Hello! My name is Pavel Golovii, I am a concept artist from the art team that has worked on the Stellaris Aquatics Species Pack. I am going to highlight the process of developing ship designs from a concept artist perspective. I will talk about the initial ideation process, inspiration, visual language and defining the look of individual ship classes.
Brief
The work of a concept artist is to suggest a clear visual interpretation of game aspects often based on initially vague ideas and definitions. At this very first stage our goal was to probe for the style for the aquatic ships, invent a sort of a visual language that we then could use to create the entire aquatic ship set that would also fit the existing Stellaris universe. Our art director, Simon Gunnarson, articulated main pivot points for the concept art team. The ships' style had to convey the aquatic and sentient origin of the species that built them and yet artists should avoid too literal interpretations (e.g. converting sea animals into a spaceship). While striving toward non-traditional organic forms we also had to clearly show they are artificially created. These statements served us as navigation beacons leaving a very broad fairway for our art experiments.
Inspiration
Starting a new concept work can be both exciting and intimidating. As a first step I try to get more information on the topic as it helps to feel myself on solid ground and start off. I had some starting advantage because long before participating in the project the underwater world theme was already part of my interests and passion. Being a seasoned diver and amateur underwater photographer gave me a lot of personal emotional experience and fueled my work. A lot of inspiration I gained from modern architects like Zaha Hadid and Santiago Calatrava. Their works are a great example of organic form interpreted as constructive elements. And of course nature itself is an inexhaustible source of ideas.
Radiolaria drawings by Ernst Haeckel(left) became an inspiration for many ships elements, including the titan's bow gun. Modern architecture and design gives great examples of organic form interpretation(right).
Finding style
Starting from big design entities I try to find what proportions, shapes and patterns would distinguish the ships of aquatic species. Will they be thin and streamlined or bulky and rounded? What associations does that particular form bring up to the viewer? We already have Molluscoid species in the game and they are somewhat related to the aquatic theme. So it was critical that new designs are read as different and do not utilize the same shape language.
Early ship style exploration sketches by Pavel Golovii.
Style exploration sketches by Mattias Larsson. Once there is an understanding that large shapes and proportions are settled and work well for the theme, smaller elements need to be explored next. This is like enriching the visual vocabulary that will later be used to write the whole story - designs of all the ship classes. Many details like windows, engines, and greebles are going to be shared across ship classes. This helps to propagate style and contributes to better scale perception. A detail that is perceived as a viewport should be approximately of the same size both on a battleship and a corvette. Thus another important step is to test how these elements work for different ship sizes.
This sketch sheet by Pavel Golovii shows exploration of various elements like viewports and also an attempt to get the feeling of scale for small, medium and large ships.
Material and color exploration sketches by Pavel Golovii. And last but not least comes color and material explorations. At this stage I try to figure out the set of materials that is going to be used for the ships. What the primary and secondary plating may look like? How large is the area a specific material is going to cover? What texture is going to be used for that plating and how it looks when adjacent to another material? These kinds of questions I need to give an answer to in my sketches. Here concept artists work in close collaboration with 3D artists. As the look of the materials is quite dependent on the game engine it is good to test the possibilities and limitations both from artistic and technical points.
Material explorations done by 3D artists Anton Hultdin(left) and Tim Wiberg(right). All the artistic findings during the style development stage are finally wrapped up by the art director into a style guide that becomes primary but not the only reference for the next step.
Designs of ships classes
Once the visual language is defined it is time to write the story using that language - build design for each ship class. This is where each class should get its unique look within a given style and where more rules and restrictions apply. Ships consist of several interchangeable modules and each module has its own set of gun mounts. Modules should have seamless joints to each other and gun mounts have their specific fixed size - all that needs to be taken into account now.
Cruiser concept by Pavel Golovii. This is a work in progress showing all module designs. Orange lines represent seams between modules. The corvette drawings(left) are there to keep control over scale perception. As each ship class has its unique characteristics, it is important to show that in their appearance. Agile corvette differs from heavy titan not only by size, but also proportions, silhouette and unique details. Proportions and silhouettes are something that a viewer reads first, especially when a ship is observed from a distance, which is a common case for Stellaris. So it is important to put distinction at this level. Some elements may help to further differentiate a ship from other classes and tell more about its purpose.
Rotating circular element initially designed by Mattias Larsson for the science ship(center) became a distinguishing feature of other science related structures like the research station(left, by Pavel Golovii) and starbases science module(right, by Anna Windseth). Given the theme, in the design of many elements marine life motifs were used. The hard part of the job is to do that in a subtle, balanced way that would bring a viewer a certain association but would not feel too on the nose. It is good to make a titan ship reminiscent of a big whale shark, but it should not look like a shark and it must keep the sense that ship was manufactured rather than has organic origin. Ideally a viewer should read that on some subconscious level, without explicitly naming the association.
Initial sketches of the titan ship class used whale shark and manta ray motifs. In the process the titan got a different look for the front gun but the manta motif was used for the construction ship design(the leftmost image). Sketches by Pavel Golovii. Work of a concept artist is not only about how things may look, but quite often it is also to answer how it may work. The aquatic colossus class design is quite ambitious with tentacles as its most prominent feature. A lot of effort has been put into figuring out the mechanics of the tentacles, how they bend and draw out. To prove the mechanics a 3D model was created and animated. Also colossus is supposed to have quite intricate special effects so sketches of them were included in the concept sheet to serve as a starting reference for our VFX artist.
The colossus class ship designed by Mattias Larsson. The concept sheet contains sketches of VFX and a detailed breakdown of the tentacle construction(lower right corner).
Proof of tentacle mechanics in 3D software. Done by Mattias Larsson together with Hanna Johansson.
Not only ships
Arguably, ships are key actors of the Stellaris game, sharing that title with characters. But the inhabited part of the games universe is full of static man-made objects - space stations, that also play an important role. Design-wise they can be regarded as ships direct descendants as they inherit a lot from their look and share the same style. Yet development of stations has its peculiarities. These are static objects orbiting a planet or a star and that must be reflected in their proportions and shape that tends to be more weighted toward its center and is not pointed to any direction. Also, some of the station types have a layout that changes and gets more complicated by the addition of modules with various functionality.
Star base design made by Anna Windseth. These drawings show the station's structure and how it evolves from an outpost to a formidable citadel. Radial symmetry helps to underline the static nature of this object.
Mining station concept by Pavel Golovii. The silhouette of this station is supposed to bring association with a factory and hint on its industrial appliance.
Is there life after the concept is done?
Once the concept is done and approved by the art director it is then passed on to 3D artists for modelling, texturing and material setup. This could be an artist in an outsourcing company. In that case a concept artist can not communicate directly with a 3D artist and the concept sheet should be as detailed as possible to minimize the chance of misinterpretation and extra feedback. It is a bit different when the ship is planned for production inside Paradox studio. That gives a concept artist a chance to collaborate with a 3D artist directly by providing instant feedback and additional information that he may be asked for. That also means a concept artist can be more loose in rendering and detailing his artwork.
Additional top-down drawing and paintover of the stern area requested from a concept artist for the titan ship. The model is made by Abraham Gomez. There is a lot more that can be covered about the ship design process but this goes beyond the format of the diary article. I hope the reading was of some interest and most importantly I hope you will enjoy the ship designs in the upcoming Aquatic species pack! Below are some more concepts for you to help pass the time until the pack is released.
Battleship concept by Pavel Golovii.
Juggernaut concept by Mattias Larsson.
Cruiser concept by Pavel Golovii.
Modelling the Aquatic Dragon
My name is David Strmblad Lindh and recently joined the 3D art team for Stellaris after completing my internship at Paradox Development Studio. My task was initially to re-skin the texture set for our already existing dragon. Instead our art producer came up with the brilliant idea to create a small team to work with the dragon, a kind of strike force, consisting of multiple disciplines within art and game design. Putting people with different skills together to work closely in an early stage, created closer communication and reduced the gap between the roles.
My work started parallel with the concept artist being a part of a mini pre production. Pushing what we think our engine can handle, testing out ideas in game to see what limitations we have with the shading and lightning. Then roughly block out ideas in 3D with the mindset that anything can be scraped to avoid spending any significant time on any part. What works on a flat 2D concept might not work in full 3D. To come up with an idea of how the dragon should look like we started with what we already know from the Aquatic artstyle and combining it with the lore of the dragon. We wanted to create a godlike dragon that comes from another galaxy. It has to be a central part of the system it lives in.
When the concept is approved its safe to spend more time on finalizing the silhouette and continue with adding details. Starting with a blank canvas can sometimes be daunting and 3D sculpting is no exception when trying to add age and weathering to a baby smooth model. To overcome this I roamed around old substance designer files from previous projects looking for heightmaps I could use to project onto the surface of the dragon's shielding. It doesn't have to be perfect but its something to continue sculpting more details onto.
(1) Highpoly sculpt with topology ready for more details. (2) Sculpt with medium sized details added. (3) Lowpoly model with baked information from highpoly with added details. (4) Final textured model with placeholder for VFX. Its important to get a feeling for how the final product will look and that's why it's important to get a model into the game as soon as possible. Even if its only a first draft of a lowpoly model with badly baked textures you will get a feeling of how the lightning in the game will affect the model. From that point its easy to iterate on the model continuously exporting and reviewing the changes in the game. That way you avoid spending a lot of time on a model and then in the end realize the model doesn't work.
When working from home its more important than ever to break your own vacuum and communicate with the rest of the team. The same way I worked close to the concept artist I want to continue working close to the VFX artist and animator that will continue the work after me. So I don't create something that will make their job harder but instead prepare the model to make their job easier. This kind of work is what makes working as a 3D artist on Stellaris interesting. Im not only producing ship after ship but is also being challenged with tasks outside my comfort zone. ---- See you all next week, when we will talk some more about the art process for the aquatic portraits.
[ 2021-10-28 11:01:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by grekulf
Hello everyone!
Today were back to talk a little bit about the recent news that has no doubt sent ripples throughout the community by now, namely the newly announced Aquatics Species Pack!
[previewyoutube=BvSdk1cIjAA;full][/previewyoutube]
The Aquatic Species Pack will include:
- 15 new Aquatic Portraits
- 1 aquatic-themed Robotic Portrait
- Water themed Ship Set
- Here Be Dragons Origin
- Ocean Paradise Origin
- Anglers Civic
- Hydrocentric Ascension Perk
- Aquatic Species Trait
- Aquatic Advisor, inspired by high seas adventure fiction
Tidal Wave of awesomeness. Im sure youre all excited to take a look at the gameplay details, so lets dive right in!
Anglers Civics
This new Civic will allow you to harvest the bounty of the ocean, by replacing your Farmer jobs with Anglers and Pearl Divers on your Agricultural Districts.
Under the sea, theres plenty of shinies to see!
Hydrocentric Ascension Perk
One of our first ideas related to the aquatic theme was to be able to mine ice and bring it back to your Ocean Worlds, to make them larger. The idea originally bounced between being a Civic or an Origin, but we realized it would make much more sense as an Ascension Perk. This is the first time were adding an Ascension Perk with a species pack, which in itself is also fun.
If you live underwater, raising the sea level can be quite useful. As you could see in the trailer, the Deluge Colossus Weapon can be unleashed to create a watery grave for your enemies! Ice Mining stations will increase mining station output in a system, as well as enable the Expand Planetary Sea decision, which will increase the planet size by 1.
Aquatic Species Trait
Were adding a new (zero point cost) Aquatic species trait. It doesnt require you to have an Aquatic portrait, but it will require your species to start on an Ocean World. We hope that this covers those of you who want more freedom of choice for your species portraits, while still keeping the aquatic theme intact. The trait also gains additional bonuses whenever the Hydrocentric Ascension Perk has been selected.
From the deep we come!
Ocean Paradise Origin
The ultimate watery start, Ocean Paradise allows you to start on a chonky size 30 planet filled with a plentiful bounty of resources. When combined with the Aquatics Species Trait, and the Hydrocentric Ascension Perk, the Ocean Paradise origin gives significant advantages to starting with an Aquatic species. You will want to keep your friends close, and your anemones closer. You will also start in a nebula and with ice asteroids in your home system.
Where there is water, there may be life. Where there is lots of water, there may be lots of life.
Here Be Dragons Origin
Perhaps the most unique Origin yet, Here Be Dragons starts you off in a unique symbiotic relationship with an Ether Drake. Without spoiling too much, the drake will essentially protect you while you keep it happy. The drake is not controlled by you, but can rather be seen as a guardian ally, as long as you keep it happy.
Hostile neighbors? No problem, ol Hrozgar will scare them off! This unique ether drake features a unique aquatic-inspired appearance. ---- That is it for this week! I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into the gameplay features. Next week well submerge ourselves even deeper into the Aquatics Species Pack by taking a look at the art behind the aquatic ships and the unique model for the ether drake.
Isnt she a beauty? Come back next week to learn more about the art in the Aquatic Species Pack.
[ 2021-10-21 11:22:34 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=BvSdk1cIjAA;full][/previewyoutube] Embrace the life of a seafaring civilization as you sail the open expanses of the galaxy with Stellaris' most immersive pack yet: the Aquatics Species Pack! Dive into the Stellaris galaxy with a sea of new choices, and discover new life where you least expect it. Let a wave of new customisation options wash over your empire, with a treasure trove of new species portraits, ship set, origins, and more. Stay tuned for more updates about the Aquatics Species Pack, as more details will soon surface! Wishlist the Aquatics Species Pack today!
[ 2021-10-19 16:06:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by grekulf
Hello everyone!
For todays dev diary well be talking a little bit about a new wave of changes coming in the upcoming 3.2 update.
3.2 will feature some new content and features, some of which didnt make it into 3.1, and some of which are new. The reason why I mention that is because I also wanted to shed some light on the process itself. With this new way of working, its fine if something isnt done for a certain update, because it can simply spill into the next update. With our ambition of only having 3 months between the updates, it will not be long before the new piece of content will be out in the public. Speaking of which, the new Pompous Purists Civic is just such an example.
Pompous Purists Civic
This civic was designed to be added to the Humanoids Species Pack with our Buffing the Backlog initiative, but it didnt quite make it in time to be released in 3.1. In 3.2 you will be able to try out this new addition to the Humanoids Species Pack. The Pompous Purists Civic is a civic that allows for a diplomatic playstyle, but for xenophobes. The idea is based on an elven fantasy, where they are willing to negotiate with other species, but only as long as it's on their own terms.
Friends? Maybe if you keep a respectable distance.
Ship Browser Experiment
Back in dev diary 213 we briefly talked about the improvements to a part of the empire creation process namely the part of the UI where you select your ship appearance. The experiment meant that only about half of you got to experience those improvements, while the rest kept the ship appearance selection as it has looked like since 2016. The reason why we ran this improvement as an experiment is because we wanted to measure how successful doing these kinds of improvements can be.
The Ship Appearance part of the empire creation screen allows you to browse different ship sizes and appearances. The improved ship browser will be available to everyone with the release of 3.2. Now Ill hand over to Victor who will be talking a little bit about some new content for anomalies.
Anomaly Variety
Hello everyone! I am Victor, a Custodian Content Designer that you might have seen around on the weekly streams these past few months. Back in 2018, we removed anomaly failure from the game. This meant that every single time you encountered the Gigantic Skeleton anomaly category, you would always get the Gigantic Skeleton anomaly, for it was the only one in the category. No longer! As one of my tasks for this patch, I decided to simply go through every single anomaly category and add new anomalies to orphaned categories that I could for the development cycle.
This is not only limited to new anomalies, but I also revisited some old classics adding options to events that previous designers created before a lot of the resources we now use were added to the game.
While this is not anything that will revolutionize the game, it is a great and interesting direction for a Custodian content designer to explore, which we are still establishing on the team. I do hope you enjoy your (slightly) more exciting and varied early game!
Terraforming Events and AI behavioral changes
Yes, hello, I am still here. My other task for this patch was to create a few varied random events for terraforming. These events vary in power and complexity and mainly break the monotony of pressing a button and getting a better planet. These bonuses vary from getting more districts of a chosen type to perhaps uncovering a dig site left by a species to enamoured with war.
Before you start thinking, you will sit there and terraform a planet back and forth between two different types and fishing for events. Do know that you can only get events the first time you terraform a world, and its never guaranteed. Terraforming is quite the unexplored space for Stellaris events, and these were a lot of fun to create. Finally, Caligula Caesar has managed to restore the AIs terraforming hunger! Previously the AI needed to gather an absurd amount of energy credits even to consider terraforming, but that has now been rectified. The AI has been spotted changing and creating optimal planets in our internal testing. They also are more likely to pick terraforming techs and appropriate ascension perks in certain circumstances. ---- That is all for this week folks! Next week well be back with some exciting news!
[ 2021-10-14 11:17:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by Guido
Hello and welcome to a new Dev Diary,
My name is Guido and today Im here in my role as a Principal Designer on Stellaris to talk about AI in a bit more detail.
You probably have heard about the Custodian Initiative by now which has been created to keep improving the game on a more regular basis and in order to be quicker when reacting to player feedback. A part of this initiative is also to put some more love and attention to the AI of the game going forward - an AI initiative inside the Custodians, basically.
For this, we have set some goals for ourselves going forward:
[olist]
Economic Script Update
First of all, the biggest change you will notice is how we have changed the economic plans script. This script is the core of the economic behavior of our empires. It defines what resources they strive to get when building districts and buildings. How much population growth they should go for and how much research and unity they want. The functionality of the script hasnt changed much, but how we are using it has changed. Previously the script was divided into early-, mid-and late-game. Depending on the phase of the game, empires would prioritize resources differently. For example, focus on research was lower in the early game than in the later stages of the game. However, this approach didnt take into account the various situations an empire can find itself in. Especially after a war or when a new empire breaks off an existing one. In those cases, even if the game phase was in the late game, for the respective empires it meant that they were in a much more early game position.
Instead of having 3 different economic plans, we feature 1 base plan instead. In order to get more flexibility and to react to the empires situation, were relying much more on the subplans inside that base plan.
Improved economic subplans
Subplans can be turned on or off, depending on the situation the empire finds itself in. Our main rationale was to ensure that an empire would be economically stable before it spends resources on bonus things like research, population growth, defensive modules on starbases, and unity buildings. Previously those things were prioritized too early and without enough respect to the basic income of energy and minerals, leading to empires that produced alloys, but had big deficits in energy and mineral production. And this deficit would be the start of an economic death spiral, where the resource debuffs would further reduce production and everything just escalated to the point where an empire was bankrupt on all resources. This became especially problematic after the economic system has been rebalanced to focus resource production more on the districts, rather than the buildings of a planet. Heres an example of what the economic situation generally looked for empires in a game that went on for around 80 years:
These are screenshots from Stellaris version 3.0.3 Our updated economic script prioritizes basic income first and takes the new economic rebalance into account. Energy and minerals are most important. The difference between the income and focus block is that if the monthly income is below what is defined in the focus block - districts and buildings which produce those resources get an extra bonus in weight, when deciding what to build.
Then the first subplan kicks in. If a country uses food (therefore, Machine empires will have this subplan turned off) it will prioritize food production.
The next subplan will check conditions for focusing on consumer goods. Again, checking if the empire actually uses them or not - and then only focus on producing them if the empire has at least a monthly income of minerals of 30. Based on the fact that in order to create consumer goods you require minerals.
Further down we activate the plans for prioritizing research and all the higher-level resources
Resulting behavior improvements
So, the script can check for various situations in AI empires - from the fact if they are a Gestalt Empire, using food to monthly income of specific resources. This gives the AI a lot more flexibility in managing its economy. As an example, here we have a 100-year old Galaxy with 13 AIs and every empire is able to manage its economy in a decent enough way. Notice the resource tab at the top - almost all empires have positive income in all resources; the ones with a negative income only have a small deficit:
Apart from this, there were some small, but significant code changes that helped the AI in running the show.
Conclusion
The code for the AI has been optimized heavily in the past in order to improve performance a lot. However, this has led to some unforeseen and unintended behaviors which have now been corrected. Some of the districts and buildings werent considered at all and city districts were weighted way too high. The AI is also now able to build temples and holo theaters, for example. Finally, the AI has also been given a bit of support in how it will set up its starbases, especially in conjunction with the hydroponics starbase building, which can play a larger role in how you provide food for your empire. The AIs can now use more varied setups when building their starbases, making use of Curator Think Tanks, Nebula Refineries, and other special buildings where it makes sense. And all of this was built on the foundation of the last major rework of the economic AI, so kudos to sidestep for making this evolutionary step possible. With your help, were looking forward to giving the AI the attention it deserves and making it even better in the future. Cheers, Guido
[ 2021-10-07 13:54:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by grekulf
Hello everyone!
Today I thought wed go back and talk a bit about the Custodian Initiative and what the future can hold.
The 3.1 Lem Update which we put out about 2 weeks ago contained a lot of good stuff that we'd been working on for some months. Were really happy with how you have received the Custodian Initiative and the first free update, so its really fun to see that things seem to be moving in a clearly positive direction.
The Custodian Initiative
With the Custodian Initiative were doing a lot of new things at once, and in combination with a lot of internal changes as well, means were still learning and adapting. One goal that we havent been able to quite deploy a solution for is how to better work together with everyone in the community. We very much appreciate your feedback and we like to have constructive or fun interactions with you, and we want to figure out how to make this process more effective for us. For example, weve been thinking about how to have more public-facing bug tracking where you could potentially vote for issues (the voting functionality currently exists in our bug forums, albeit a bit more hidden than would be ideal). None of this has any concrete plans right now, but I thought it was important to mention anyway, so that you can more clearly know that were very interested in figuring out how to better make use of community engagement and feedback. If you have any thoughts, let us know! We are also interested in hearing if you have ideas on how you can organize yourselves in the community to promote ideas, bugs and suggestions for improvements. Our primary ways of interacting with you are our forums, steam, reddit and discord.
Future Custodian Updates
As weve mentioned before, we aim to release a new free update about every 3 months. These updates will sometimes be released together with a new DLC. The next update is scheduled for late November. In the November 3.2 update, our strategy will be to be a bit less ambitious than the Lem Update, and to focus on a bit more safe improvements. Going forwards, we may alternate between safe and more spicy changes for these free updates. Even if we aim to make 3.2 a bit safer, there will still be some interesting changes to look forward to like pretty significant improvements for the AI. We will talk a bit more about that in detail next week. We will talk more about 3.2 in the coming weeks after that as well. After 3.2 we will be aiming to release a 3.3 update sometime in February. This update will be a bit more spicy. Among other things, the Unity & Sprawl rework, mentioned earlier in dev diary 215, is likely to be finished and tested by then. Given the spiciness of these changes, were also looking into the possibility of an Open Beta for them to help things go as smoothly as possible :) We will be talking more about that in the coming months, mainly after November. Keep in mind that the Custodian Initiative is still in its infancy and things are prone to change, so try to be patient with what you can expect with future updates. Together we'll be able to make Stellaris even more awesome! --------- That is all for this week! Next week we will be back to talk about AI improvements for the upcoming 3.2 update.
[ 2021-09-30 11:00:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! As we work on the next patch with the Custodian team, we thought that there were a couple of issues that have been brought up by you all that we thought needed to be addressed a bit sooner than the next Custodian patch. Nothing has changed since the changelogs were posted in last weeks Dev Diary.
3.1.2 Patch Notes:
[expand type=details] ################################################################# ######################### VERSION 3.1.2 ########################### ################################################################# ###################### # Performance and Stability ###################### * Fixed a crash where releasing a vassal as a Clone Army could cause an invalid species. ###################### # Bugfixes ###################### * Fixed the Clone Army origin tooltip not having a matching ship upkeep reduction with their admirals. Also changed the bonus to scale in a cleaner way, the upkeep is now 5/10/20% based on the Army's decisions. * The Genetic Crossroads special project will now abort if a species completes Synthetic Evolution before finishing it. * Fixed habitability of planets that clone armies have abandoned through lack of clone vats being locked at 0% for them. * Ancient Clone Vats can now only assemble Clone Soldier pops. * Going into a food deficit when using the Catalytic Processing civic will now give a -50% production penalty to alloy production. This penalty is in line with the penalty non-catalytic empires suffer from a mineral deficit * Fixed players being able to move their Science Ship to blow up systems using the Elder One event. * Fixed exploit where AI acceptance from Eminent Diplomats tradition also applied to trade deals. ###################### # Known Issues ###################### * The penalty to alloy production from a food deficit in catalytic empires is not shown in the deficit tooltip. * Mastercraft Inc. Civic does not change Artisans into Artificers on an Ecumenopolis. * Some inconsistencies in the number of jobs exchanged by Foundry Station designation for empires with the Catalytic processing civic. * Its possible for the Nivlac species to be created without the Radiotrophic trait in certain instances. * Party Aftermath event can create crossbreed species between caravaneers and an infertile clone pop. * Shattered Ring World can turn into a planet due to takeover or devastation. * Mechanical pops with a Decadent Lifestyle have no pop upkeep. * Awakened Empires don't use traditions properly. * Machine empires can spawn with the necrophage origin. [/expand] We hope you appreciate our continued effort in improving Stellaris, and thank you for your feedback!
[ 2021-09-29 11:10:06 CET ] [ Original post ]
written by MrFreake
Hello Stellaris Community!
This weeks Dev Diary comes to you with a little bit less of the future development and more of what weve been doing with the Custodian teams work. That means that well be sharing a little bit of information on the upcoming fixes for the 3.1.2 patch. Next week we should be back to the regular schedule of dev diaries that we know youre looking forward to; however, this week we want to continue the conversation from last week and provide details on the patch.
First off, we want to thank all of you for submitting your bug reports! Bug reports are extremely useful to us, and we want to thank our Community for dedicating their time to reporting issues in Lem. I just want to share a little context with you all for a moment:
On launch day we peaked at ~18k concurrent players on Steam, supposing each of those players plays one hour, thats 18 000 hours. Assuming a 40 hour work week, thats 450 workweeks. This isnt meant to make excuses, but just to put into context that our community does more playing in the hour after release than we could hope to accomplish in the time between the release of Nemesis and now.
With that being said, we have put together a patch for the 3.1.1 Lem Update! The Custodian team has spent the last week fixing issues raised by the community, and we hope to get this patch out to the larger community around the middle of next week (as long as there are no further issues).
3.1.2 "Lem" Patch Notes
[expand type=details] ################################################################# ######################### VERSION 3.1.2 ########################### ################################################################# ###################### # Performance and Stability ###################### * Fixed a crash where releasing a vassal as a Clone Army could cause an invalid species. ###################### # Bugfixes ###################### * Fixed the Clone Army origin tooltip not having a matching ship upkeep reduction with their admirals. Also changed the bonus to scale in a cleaner way, the upkeep is now 5/10/20% based on the Army's decisions. * The Genetic Crossroads special project will now abort if a species completes Synthetic Evolution before finishing it. * Fixed habitability of planets that clone armies have abandoned through lack of clone vats being locked at 0% for them. * Ancient Clone Vats can now only assemble Clone Soldier pops. * Going into a food deficit when using the Catalytic Processing civic will now give a -50% production penalty to alloy production. This penalty is in line with the penalty non-catalytic empires suffer from a mineral deficit * Fixed players being able to move their Science Ship to blow up systems using the Elder One event. * Fixed exploit where AI acceptance from Eminent Diplomats tradition also applied to trade deals. ###################### # Known Issues ###################### * The penalty to alloy production from a food deficit in catalytic empires is not shown in the deficit tooltip. * Mastercraft Inc. Civic does not change Artisans into Artificers on an Ecumenopolis. * Some inconsistencies in the number of jobs exchanged by Foundry Station designation for empires with the Catalytic processing civic. * Its possible for the Nivlac species to be created without the Radiotrophic trait in certain instances. * Party Aftermath event can create crossbreed species between caravaneers and an infertile clone pop. * Shattered Ring World can turn into a planet due to takeover or devastation. * Mechanical pops with a Decadent Lifestyle have no pop upkeep. * Awakened Empires don't use traditions properly. * Machine empires can spawn with the necrophage origin. [/expand] For those of you still waiting for your mods to update, we also have been maintaining a list of updated mods for 3.1.*, you can check it out here. Thanks for reading, well see you next week where grekulf will shine some light on the operations of the Custodian team. The Stellaris Team
[ 2021-09-23 13:22:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
Originally Posted here
See only Dev Replies
written by grekulf
Hello everyone!
The first update by the Custodian team is now out, and we hope that youre enjoying yourselves trying out some of the new changes. Were very excited to see that so many of you seem very happy with the Custodian Initiative and the Lem Update. As usual, your feedback is very important to us, so we hope that you let us know what you think. Also thanks to those of you who left reviews on Steam recently, it's nice that so many of you seem to be happy.
In terms of 3.1 itself, we are aware of some exploits that have been popping up, and well continue to monitor what you folks in the community can find over the weekend. Next week well be looking at what has popped up, and after that well be making a decision of if and what we may want to hot fix.
Were still focusing on the release itself and learning from its development. Within the next coming weeks we will start talking a bit more about our future plans, in terms of features and changes, so stay tuned!
We also have some fancy new wallpapers to go with the update:
(you can find 4k versions of these wallpapers, and more Stellaris Wallpapers here)
Last week we held another Q&A session on our Discord. You can view the transcript here.
[ 2021-09-16 23:27:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
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[ 2021-09-14 17:33:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Stellaris Team is proud to announce the free 3.1 Lem Update is Now Available!
This is the first release from our new Custodians Development Team at Paradox Development Studio. This team will operate in parallel to the Expansion Team, which will focus on creating new content for Stellaris. Read more about the Custodians Initiative here.
This patch is named to honor the 100th Anniversary of the birth of renowned Sci-Fi author Stanisaw Lem, bringing with it a host of balance changes, bug fixes, AI improvements, as well as adding content to several previously released paid DLCs.
Release Trailer: [previewyoutube=1djsu3hhgXk;full][/previewyoutube]
Selectable Traditions (Free Feature)
For the Lem Update, Traditions have been reworked, in addition to adding a new Tradition Tree to the base game (Mercantile), we have also removed empire limitations on Tradition Trees that were previously in the game, reworked some of the Tradition Trees, and redesigned the user interface for Traditions. We have also added the Unyielding Tradition Tree (requires paid DLC Apocalypse) and the Subterfuge Tradition Tree (requires paid DLC Nemesis). Now, instead of having a fixed 7 Tradition Trees to unlock, Empires can now choose 7 from up to 11 (with all the DLC) Tradition Trees, adding further customization to players empires.
New content for Plantoids Species Pack (paid DLC)
Along with the free Lem Update, The Plantoids Species Pack now comes with two additional Civics and three new Species Traits.
- Catalytic Processing Civic: Changes Metallurgists to Catalytic Technicians, who convert Food into Alloys
- Idyllic Bloom Civic: Allows the construction of Gaia Seeder buildings on ideal planets, which after a series of upgrades will terraform the planet into a Gaia world
- Budding Species Trait: Pops with this trait will reproduce by budding, adding Organic Pop Assembly to planets they live on
- Phototropic: Pops with this trait have 50% of their Food upkeep converted to Energy.
- Radiotropic: Pops with this trait have 50% of their Food upkeep converted to Energy, but do not pay the Energy portion of their upkeep on Tomb Worlds.
New content for Humanoids Species Pack (Paid DLC)
The Humanoids Species Pack now comes with a new Clone Army Origin, as well as two new Civics.
- Clone Army Origin: Do not reproduce naturally, but instead rely on Ancient Cloning Vats to reproduce. Natural warriors, Leaders and Armies get combat bonuses, but Clone Army Empires are limited by the number of Ancient Cloning Vats buildings they can construct across their empire.
- Pleasure Seekers Civic: Gain access to the Decadent Lifestyle Living Standard, giving Increased Happiness in exchange for Increased Consumer Good upkeep. In addition pops working Entertainer jobs add to Pop Growth, and Servants produce 5 extra Amenities
- Masterful Crafters Civic: Artisan jobs are replaced by Artificer Jobs, which in addition to Consumer Goods, also produce Trade Value and Engineering research. For Empires with this civic, every three Industrial Districts on a planet also will unlock another building slot.
New content for Necroids Species Pack (Paid DLC)
The Necroids Species Pack has been rebalanced in the Lem Update, with the Reanimated Armies Civic being named to Reanimators, as well as other changes.
- Necrophage Origin: Can now be taken by Hive Mind empires, pops are now also more likely to escape the Necrophage Purge, as well as several other balance changes to bring Necrophage more in-line with the other Origins.
- Death Cults Civic: Have had the odds of getting bonuses when sacrificing Mortal Initiates increased based on the percentage of the Empires overall population sacrificed, as well as the total number of jobs created by Sacrificial Temple buildings reduced
- Reanimators Civic: Start with the ability to build Dread Encampment buildings and they now create Undead Defense Armies. In addition, enemy armies destroyed in battle have a chance of returning as Undead Armies and can reanimate certain Leviathans that have been defeated in battle
[ 2021-09-14 15:08:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
[previewyoutube=gAO4Pdz_bYM;full][/previewyoutube]
The Stellaris team is proud to announce the free Lem Update, honoring the 100th year anniversary of Sci-Fi author Stanisaw Lem, will be released on September 14th!
The Custodians Initiative
The update marks the first free update of Stellaris from our Custodian Development Team. This new group of developers was created with the mandate of updating and maintaining the amazing content that has been added to Stellaris over the years, as well as crushing bugs, adding content to existing DLC, as well as improvements to Quality of Life, Performance, UI and AI. The Custodians Team operates in parallel with the Expansion Team, which will continue to develop new content for Stellaris. With the Custodians initiatives added resources, we hope to be able to increase the frequency of our free patches, and by extension the overall quality of the game. For the Lem Update, in addition to bug fixes and AI improvements, the Custodians have focused on adding additional content to previously released DLC, as well as updating Traditions, a system that was added to Stellaris in the 1.5 Banks version.
Selectable Traditions
In addition to the eight Tradition Trees that are in the current version, we have added three new Tradition Trees: Mercantile (free), Unyielding (requires Apocalypse), and Subterfuge (Requires Nemesis). The existing Tradition Trees have had a balance pass as well. In the Lem Update and with all the DLC, there are now up to eleven total Tradition Trees, with each empire only being able to pick and unlock up to seven Tradition Trees. Some Tradition Trees also now unlock further abilities, such as Mercantile and Trade Doctrines, similar to Supremacy and the Supremacist diplomatic stance. This will add more variety and replayability to every playthrough.
Plantoids Changes
The Plantoids Species Pack (Paid DLC) has also been refreshed in the Lem Update, Plantoid and Fungoid species will get three new species traits and two new civics. Plantoids will be able to reproduce by Budding, adding organic pop assembly by simply existing. Or they can choose to be either Phototropic - converting some of their food upkeep into energy - or Radiotrophic, and feast on concentrations of background radiation. In addition, empires can choose to take either the Catalytic Processing Civic - and convert food into alloys - or lead an Idyllic Bloom empire which can convert ideal worlds into organic paradises.
Humanoids Changes
We also have revisited the Humanoids Species Pack (paid DLC) and added a new Origin, as well as two new civics to this species pack. Start as the lost remains of an ancient Clone Army, play as a species of Masterful Crafters whose artistry is appreciated throughout the galaxy, or have your species live a Decadent Lifestyle as continue to Seek Pleasure throughout the galaxy. These new origins and civics add many ways to tell your species story like never before.
Necroids Changes
The Necroids Species Pack (Paid DLC) will also receive a significant overhaul in the Lem Update, with the Reanimated Armies Civic changing to the Reanimators Civic, which can lead to some interesting reanimation options. The Death Cult civic is getting an overhaul with increased bonuses due to the reduced pop growth in Stellaris 3.0, as well as some balance changes to the Necrophage Origin including the option to start as a Hivemind (requires Utopia). In the Lem Update, the Necroids Species Pack is unlocking its true potential.
Balance Changes
In addition to the changes above, the Custodian Team has been hard at work, doing a balance pass on civics, you can dive into the details in the patch notes. In addition, the Shattered Ring Origin has been changed to work more like the Remnants Origin - you now start on a Shattered Ring segment, that you can upgrade to a Ringworld Segment when you have the Prerequisite Technologies. The Void Dwellers traits have also been changed so that the negatives from living on a planet can no longer be simply gene-modded away. For Quality of Life updates, when constructing an Ecumenopolis, it will now take into account the planetary designation of the planet, meaning that Factory Worlds will get more Factory Arcologies, and Foundry Worlds will get more Foundry Arcologies when the upgrade is complete. Additionally, Rogue Servitors can now build Ecumenopolis, and get a special district to house their bio-trophies. For all the full list of additions, balance changes and bug fixes, you can read the Lem Update patch notes here. We hope you enjoy our latest additions to Stellaris for PC, and enjoy the free Lem Update on September 14th!
[ 2021-09-09 11:15:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
by Caligula
Welcome to another Stellaris Modding Dev Diary! Today, Ill be talking you through some of the new scripting language features in the upcoming 3.1 patch.
We have already mentioned that Traditions are considerably more moddable now with the new system, with far less heavy lifting needed in the gui and loc files. I can also confirm that you can, for instance, now script in tradition trees that only become available if you make certain decisions during the game. But today, the main focus will lie on variables.
Variables
I mentioned last time that we have been looking to do more with variables. In the last patch, several more ways to save various bits of information in the game were added, but the biggest missing one was an easy way to get trigger values, like for example the number of pops on a planet. You also were still quite limited in where you could use variables, especially compared to PDS newer games like CK3. Also, the syntax for using them was not quite ideal, in many cases. With 3.1, we have greatly increased the power of variables. First of all, the format: previously, when you wanted to get the value of a variable, you had to refer to well, the variable itself, and that was all. Now, you can do a few more things:
value = my_var #gets the value of my_var variable set on the current scope
value = from.capital_scope.my_var #gets the value of the my_var variable set on froms capital
value = trigger:num_pops #gets the number of pops in the current scope
value = from.capital_scope.trigger:num_pops #gets the number of pops in froms capital
So you can do dot scoping, which saves a lot of ugliness, and is a big improvement as it is. And as you can see, you can also refer to triggers, with trigger: export_trigger_value_to_variable = {
trigger = num_assigned_jobs
parameters = {
job = miner
}
variable = num_miner_jobs
}
3.0 also, to mention it again, added a bunch more ways to get game values such as modifier numbers and resource stockpiles to variables. It also added a few more places where you could use them: multipliers in add_resource and add_modifier, for instance. With 3.1, we have added a lot more things that you can use a variable for:
- As values in triggers checking single numbers, e.g. "num_pops > my_variable", "intel = { who = from value < trigger:num_pops }"
- As values in effects using a single number, e.g. "add_experience = my_variable".
- As a multiplier parameter in triggered resource tables (e.g. in a building):
resources = {
category = planet_buildings
cost = {
trigger = { }
minerals = 100
}
multiplier = my_var/owner.trigger:num_pops
}
- In MTTH/AI Chance modifiers:
ai_chance = {
factor = 1
modifier = {
add/factor = my_var/trigger:num_pops
is_variable_set = my_var
}
}
- add_modifier now has a time_multiplier as well as a multiplier parameter, you can use it there. E.g. for death cults, this is used to apply a modifier for 10 years X edict_length_mult
- In ordered_script_lists: a feature yoinked from our newer games. Ill let the trigger docs entry explain:
ordered_owned_fleet - Iterate through each fleet owned by the country - executes the enclosed effects on one of them for which the limit triggers return true. Picks the specific object according to the order specified (position 0, order_by = trigger:num_pops would run the effects on the X with the most pops)
ordered_owned_fleet = {
limit = { }
position =
order_by = /trigger:
inverse = yes/no (default: no - if yes, then 0 is lowest rather than highest)
}
Supported Scopes: country
If your variable is too exact a number, you can now use round_variable_to_nearest to round its value to e.g. the nearest multiple of 10.
A summary of these functionalities have been added to an information file in the events folder (and attached to this post). Also, I could well imagine further expanding on these usages of variables, so its quite possible there will be even more coming along these lines in future. The changes have already proven extremely useful to us, e.g.:
- Improving Death Cult rewards: cut about 1000 lines of script and still ended up with the new version taking more factors into account to determine the adequate reward for you!
- Fixing Golden Rule cash payouts: the previous solution was to fudge the numbers and give you an amount with a rather tenuous connection to the actual pay-in. This is no longer necessary.
- Improving Federation Science Leadership Challenge: adding the actual number of techs and repeatable techs you have researched as a factor
- And more.
Sprite Sheet Changes
That was already quite a lot, but theres a few more things that Id like to highlight. Firstly, certain older elements of the game used sprite sheets for their icons - a system where a list of icons would all be in a row on one image file, and wed specify that wed want to use, say, the 5th icon on the list. We had a few issues with these inhouse (the colony automation button currently accidentally being a robotic cow springs to mind), and modders have pointed out that they are a pretty bad overwriting bottleneck, since only one mod can overwrite the sprite sheet at a time, and therefore only one can add extra types of that object that add new graphics at a time. We figured out a way to change index references to icons in sprite sheets into normal key references, which meant that we could convert these elements of the game to use string references to sprites (with no need for new icons to be inside a sprite sheet). This got rolled out to the likes of army types, colony automation types, bombardment stances, and (with great difficulty!) ship sizes. An example:
spriteType = {
name = "GFX_ship_size_military_1"
sprite_sheet_sprite_type = "GFX_ship_sizes"
default_frame = 2
}
In the case of ship sizes, it was a bit tricky, since the icon_frame index number then specified which icon it would use on multiple sprite sheets. In the end, we left that system in place for starbases (since very few tend to add a new type of starbase) and made the line icon = ship_size_military_1 tell the game to refer to several sprite keys: GFX_text_ship_size_military_1, GFX_ship_size_military_1, GFX_ship_size_military_1_top, GFX_ship_size_military_1_top_damaged
This will need some updating for mods which change the affected objects, since the old format no longer works, but in the long term it will hopefully solve a lot of compatibility headaches!
Randomness
Some have noticed that, in certain cases, the randomness of script functions such as random_list is not very random. Specifically, events fired from on_game_start had this issue (and various other on_actions, but that was the one that hurt the most). This was pretty unfortunate, since this effectively meant that certain things that were meant to be different each game... simply were not. Relatedly, we also revisited some more longstanding issues like where if you used while loops or every_x loops, each time the effect happened within that loop, the random result would be the same. (As in 25x random_list resulting in 25x the same result rather than 25x a random result). We fixed this quite exhaustively:
- The lack of randomness in on_actions like on_game_start is fixed. If we in future make the mistake that caused this to happen again, the game will warn us, so hopefully it is banished for good.
- While loops and every_x loops have improved randomness
- For good measure, we added a reroll_random effect
Other Cool Stuff
On another note, we can now add triggered pop modifiers to traits, so for instance, you can add a trait that gives a bonus on one planet class and a penalty on another. The potential that this unlocks is quite considerable - for instance, it allowed us to stop using the somewhat unintuitive (and eminently cheeseable) stopgap solution of giving Void Dwellers two traits, and instead giving them one that applies differently depending on what sort of planet they are on. As some have noticed, the Clone Army origin does several cool, new things that we havent really explored in the game before. A lot of what we added for it could have further cool uses in the future, for instance:
- You can now gender-lock species
- You can set an empire limit on how many instances of a building you can build. (And alter it during the game).
- A game rule, should_force_decline_species, has been added. It will make a species for which it returns true decline on a planet, triggering an alert based on whatever tooltip is specified in the game rule. It is also hooked up to stop pops from migrating/being resettled/etc to a place where they would immediately start declining.
- set_visited =
- reveals a system to you, without you having surveyed it - set_saved_date - lets you save a specific date (can be in the future) so that you can use it in locs, similar to variables: [This.my_saved_date].
- Technically, the last effect is actually adding a
_flag, so the standard flag effects and triggers have been ported over to all scopes - You can now use [loc] commands in button effects, which apparently will be very useful for dynamic modded UIs
- You can define descriptions for districts, buildings, jobs and special projects through desc = { text = X trigger = { Y } } now. They also now take loc commands.
- We deleted has_non_swapped_tradition and has_tradition_swap, and consolidated them into has_active_tradition. Modders: do a search-replace!
- Every scope that lacked script flags (e.g. country_flag) now has them. Also, variables work in all scopes now too.
- Note for updating mods: count_diplo_ties is now count_relation, count_armies is count_owned_army or count_planet_army (depending on the case). any/every/random_mining_station/research_station have also been removed, because they were nonsense. Use simply mining_station/research_station/orbital_station scope change instead. Also, observation_outpost no longer takes a "limit", but you can say "exists = observation_outpost" as compensation.
[ 2021-09-02 08:17:35 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey folks, Im Alfray Stryke, a member of the QA team for Stellaris. As part of the Custodians work on the 3.1 Lem patch, as mentioned in Dev Diary #215, the team has done a balance and Quality of Life pass on various features throughout the game and wed like to highlight some of the more harder hitting changes. This is not a complete list of all changes, and may contain some not-final numbers. As a reminder, the changes to the Necroids Species Pack were covered in Dev Diary #216, and all of these changes will also be included in the Lem update.
Void Dwellers
Weve been aware that the implementation of Void Dwellers of having two separate traits, one positive and one negative resulted in behaviour that we werent happy with - in particular being able to gene-mod the negative aspects of the trait out of existence. To solve this weve made some changes to how the traits work: There is now only a single Void Dweller trait, so it cant be exploited via genetic modification of your species. The modifiers on the trait itself have changed, previously it gave:
- +15% Resources from Worker and Specialist jobs & -10% growth speed (for the positive version)
- -60% growth speed (for the negative version)
- +15% Pop Resource Output on Habitats.
- -15% Pop Resource Output on Non-Artificial Worlds.
- -10% Growth Speed
- -30% Happiness on Non-Artificial Worlds.
The new, improved, Void Dweller trait with its modifiers. What this means is your Void Dwellers pops are most productive and happiest on habitats, have their bonuses removed on ringworlds and have production and happiness penalties if they settle on planets (best to leave those for immigrants or robots!)
Shattered Ring
So before you grab your plasma-pitchforks (yes, plasma-pitchforks are canon now), rebalancing the Shattered Ring origin is something the team has been discussing for a while. Weve gone through various iterations on decreasing the initial power of the origin, while keeping the player fantasy that it provides in mind and eventually settled on having the progression of the Shattered Ring resemble that of the Remnants origin.
The Voor Technocracy, showing off the Shattered Ringworld Segment as a homeworld. The shattered ring itself supports the following district types:
- City, Hive & Nexus - housing depending on your empire type.
- Industrial - where valuable consumer goods and alloys can be manufactured.
- Trade - where clerks turn a tidy profit and artisans run their workshops.
- Generator (not pictured) - where hive-minds and machine intelligence power their infrastructure. Note that Generator and Trade districts swap depending on the owner of the Shattered Ring, much like Commercial and Generator Segments on a ringworld.
- Agricultural - where food is grown for those that eat it.
- Mining - more on that in a moment...
Mining districts, aka tunnels filled with valuable minerals and alloys. As a civilization that has only known life on the ring prior to achieving spaceflight, the only resources available to you were those that made up the ringworld itself. Luckily ruined ringworlds are massive and can spare some missing broken materials without falling into their local sun. As such your mining district on the shattered ring replaces the regular miner jobs with scrap miner jobs with a base job output of 2 minerals and 1 alloy per month. Of course, as was alluded to above, we wanted the progression for the shattered ring to resemble that of the relic world from the Remnants origin. So once youve cleared all the debris from the shattered ring and researched the appropriate technology you can repair it into a fully functioning ringworld segment.
Of course, sometimes a bit of home repair work needs to be done. Upon completion of this monumental task, the districts on the shattered ring are upgraded into their respective ringworld districts at a 5:1 ratio - so 5 agricultural districts become 1 agricultural segment. Since fixing up the ring means youll no longer be clearing out material, the mining districts are removed and the ability to construct research segments is added.
Ecumenopolis QoL Changes
Something weve received a lot of feedback on is that when a world is transformed into an Ecumenopolis is the assignment of industrial districts. Prior to 3.1, all of the industrial districts were assumed to be devoted to alloy production and thus converted into foundry arcologies. No more, in 3.1 industrial districts will convert based off of the planetary designation:
- With the Foundry World designation, industrial districts will convert into foundry arcologies, at a 2:1 ratio
- With the Factory World designation, industrial districts will convert into factory arcologies, at a 2:1 ratio.
- With any other designation, including the Industrial World designation, industrial districts will convert into both foundry and factory arcologies, at a 4:1:1 ratio.
Earth, a bygone relic of a time long past, ready to be restored anew.
Earth, restored anew! Note that the local governing algorithm did not assume all industrial capabilities should be focused on supporting the Custodianship Navy. Another change weve implemented is the Arcology Project ascension perk and decision to restore relic worlds into ecumenopolises is now accessible to Rogue Servitors. In addition, the leisure arcologies that would normally be present have been repurposed for housing bio-trophies in luxurious towering arcologies.
Pampering will be provided at Floor 314, Room 15 at 9:26 am.
Assorted QoL Changes
As mentioned above, the planetary designation for consumer goods has been renamed to Factory World, because weve added an Industrial World designation.
Multiple planetary designations for your various needs The new Industrial World designation is ideal for planets where you dont want to focus the Industrial districts on a single job type, instead providing a minor upkeep discount to both Artisan and Metallurgist jobs.
Industrial World Designation Subversive Cults (MegaCorps with both Gospel of the Masses and Criminal Syndicate) no longer have access to the Temple of Prosperity. Instead, they can now establish a Subversive Shrine in their branch offices - increasing both Spiritualist ethics attraction and crime on the planet.
Subvert expectations with deals so good theyre criminal! With that Ill pass things over to Gruntsatwork to discuss some of the changes weve made to civics! ---- Hello everyone. I am one of Game Designers currently working on Stellaris and on the Custodian Team. While we have been busy with radical changes here and there, new civics and origins, we also wanted to have some more tame but no less important balance changes for our already existing civics, specifically for our outliers and those we felt under- or especially over-utilized. The following lists all the civics we felt needed a substantial lift up
Regular Empires
- Beacon of Liberty: Gave +15% produced Unity -> Now ALSO also gives -15% Empire Sprawl from Pops
- Imperial Cult: Gave +1 Edict cap -> Now gives +2 Edict cap
- Idealistic Foundation: Gave +5% Happiness -> Now gives +10% Happiness
- Environmentalist: Gave -10% Consumer Goods Upkeep -> Now gives -20% Consumer Goods Upkeep
- Parliamentary System: Gave +25% Faction Influence -> Now gives +40% Faction Influence
- Efficient Bureaucracy: Gave +10% Admin Cap -> Now gives +20% Admin Cap
- Nationalistic Zeal: Gave -10% War Exhaustion Gain and -10% Claim Cost -> Now gives -20% War Exhaustion Gain and -15% Claim Cost
- Functional Architecture: Gave -10% Building and District Cost, -10% Building and District Upkeep and +1 Building Slot -> Now gives -15% Building and District Cost, +2 Building Slots, Upkeep reduction removed
Hive-Minds
- Subspace Ephase: Gave +15% Naval Capacity -> Now gives +20% Ship Speed and ALSO gives +15% Naval Capacity
- Divided Attention: Gave +10% Admin Cap -> Now gives +20% Admin Cap
Machine Intelligences
- Constructobot: Gave -10% Building and District Cost, -10% Building and District Upkeep and +1 Building Slot -> Now gives -15% Building and District Cost, +2 Building Slots, Upkeep reduction removed
- Slaver Guilds : Reduced enslaved population from 40% to 35%
- Indentured Assets: Reduced enslaved population from 40% to 35% (Megacorp civic)
- Technocracy: Added 1 Consumer Goods upkeep to Scientist Jobs that create unity because of Technocracy
[ 2021-08-26 11:26:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Im here to announce a surprise update to the game. But before we get our expectations blown out of proportion, this update contains only a change to our Multiplayer Backend. We are rolling out the Nakama infrastructure to host cross-store PC multiplayer.
With this update we are completely removing our internally developed Multiplayer backend (PDXMP) that is currently used by all stores excluding Steam, which uses the built in Steam backend. The reason for this change is because we believe that Nakama, developed by an external partner, is more stable than our current in-house solution.
What this will mean for you as a player is hopefully nothing different from how you normally play the game. This update should not affect your single player experience whatsoever and if you have the game installed on Steam and dont have friends on other platforms you wont be affected by the Multiplayer change either.
The only people this will affect are those of you that play the game on Steam and want to play multiplayer with your friends that have bought Stellaris on other platforms (such as the Microsoft store). You might already know about the crossplay Steam Beta branch we have had in place prior to today, but from this update and forward you will now be able to launch the Crossplay version straight from the launcher!
All you have to do is go into Game Settings in the launcher and scroll down to Cross Store Multiplayer and click Launch as shown below:
If for some reason that doesnt work, you can also add -nakama as a launch option in Steam. Do this by Right-Clicking Stellaris, Going to Properties, General Tab and adding -nakama to the Launch Options. This will force the game to switch from the Steam multiplayer backend to the new one for crossplay purposes!
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 3.0.4 ###########################
#################################################################
###################
# Performance and Stability
###################
* Replaced PDXMP multiplayer backend layer with Nakama.
#################################################################
Thank you for playing Stellaris, and if you experience any issues with Nakama Multiplayer please report them on the Bug Report forums!
[ 2021-08-19 13:25:26 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! It is Thursday and that means it is time for your weekly dev diary. Today, we will talk a bit more in-depth about the upcoming additions to the Humanoids species pack. First, let us take a look at the civics that will be added:
Masterful Crafters
The Masterful Crafters Civic, previously teased in Dev Diary 214, will replace your artisans with a new job type called Artificiers. They will fulfil the same basic production needs as Artisans, Consumer Goods that is, while also producing some extra Trade Value and Engineering Research. As you might expect, since they focus on consumer goods, this civic will not be available for gestalt empires.
To facilitate you focusing your empire more on the industrial branch, this civic will also make industrial districts grant building slots. Our hope is to allow you a bit more leeway in how you want to play your empire, whether you go hard into artificers to capitalize on their bonus production or use their superior production to cut back on how much you have to build up your consumer goods industry. And of course, before anyone can ask, let me assure you, yes, it's dwarfs, it's most definitely dwarfs. For the more materialistic among us, megacorporations will have their own mirror version of this civic.
Pleasure Seekers
Now let us talk about our second new civic, Pleasure Seekers. This new civic grants you access to the Decadent Lifestyle Living Standard, which increases happiness and consumer goods upkeep for all affected pops.
In addition, the Entertainer job will now also grant +1% pop growth and Servants jobs will produce an additional 5 Amenities.
Quite a potent mix of happiness and the means of keeping it up. Of course, if you are interested in an experiment or two, you could fill entire worlds with entertainers for the pop growth bonus, one might even call it a planet-wide shore leave on Risa. Now with both of these civics covered, it is time to talk about our biggest addition to the Humanoids DLC, the topic of this weeks spoiler tweet and our new origin. As with the civic above, Pleasure Seekers also has a mirror-version for megacorporations.
Clone Army
What do you do when you outlive your usefulness/your creators? That is the question you can dive into with the Clone Army origin. As Clone Soldiers, your empire will be perfectly suited for warfare, even though you may not currently have any enemies. Your lifes and continued existence will depend on your Ancient Clone Vat buildings, which support your population.
Did we mention that there is a limit to how many Ancient Clone Vats you can have in your empire at the same time? There is, it is 5.
Now, you could be a good little clone-soldier and simply wage war as you were designed to, or, you could dive into the secrets of your own history, that choice will be left to you for every playthrough. Oh, you can also combine Clone Army with both Masterful Crafters and Pleasure Seekers. One more thing worth mentioning, all 3 of those additions are NOT portrait-locked. Some have ethic or competing civic restrictions though. ---- And with that I shall leave you be for this week and I hope to see you for the next dev diary.
[ 2021-08-19 11:32:40 CET ] [ Original post ]
Greetings and salutations space fans!
Today were back with another dev diary, and the topic at hand is the feature improvements coming to the Traditions system. Back in dev diary 214 when we announced the Lem Update and the Custodians Initiative, we also talked about how to make Selectable Traditions.
Selecting your Traditions
We know theres been mods that have extended the amounts of traditions for some time now, and we also know that it's something that parts of the community have been asking for as well. For us, Traditions have always been an important part of customizing and specializing your Empire during play, and although we of course like giving players more customization options, we also need to maintain a balance. We didnt simply want to keep adding new traditions without having the UI support it well, and we didnt also want to give players too many options right away, which can lead to Choice Overload. We felt like it was a good time to review the Traditions system, because we wanted to add a few more Tradition Trees, and open up the avenue for doing more of that in the future, where it makes sense.
Lets dive into the changes, and keep in mind that nothing is final and theres missing art. Feedback is still very welcome though.
We are improving the traditions system so that you are no longer locked to the same set of 7 traditions (with some swaps), but you can rather pick which Tradition Tree you want to go into one of these 7 slots.
All the Tradition Trees currently available to the United Nations of Earth.
Some of the Tradition Trees, that were previously swaps of other trees (like Adaptability being a swap of Diplomacy), are now their own trees again. This means that Adaptability, for example, is now available to all non-machine empires. Synchronicity is still mutually exclusive with Harmony (one will appear if you are a gestalt empire, the other if you are a regular one). Versatility is available to all machine empires.
Changes to existing Traditions
Other than allowing you to select your own Traditions trees, weve also changed some of the traditions within the existing trees. Lets take a look at some of those changes:
Domination
- Judgment Corps: no longer increases crime prevention, but rather makes your Enforcers produce 1 Unity.
- Finisher: no longer provides +1 monthly influence, but rather increases +10% ruler output for regular empires, or +10% admin cap for gestalts
Diplomacy
- Open Markets replaced with Diplomatic Networking: Embassy pacts now produce 3 Unity
- Secure Shipping replaced with Eminent Diplomats: Diplomatic Acceptance increased by +5, and your Envoys that are Improving Relations have a 1% chance per month to gain a Favor from the target empire.
- Insider Trading replaced with Trust or Bust: Trust Cap +50, Trust Growth +33%
- Finisher: no longer increases Trust Cap or Trust Growth, but rather increases Diplomatic Weight by +10% and +1 Envoy.
Harmony
- Mind and Body: now also increases Leader Skill Cap by +1
- Kinship: effect on demotion time buffed from -50% to -75%
- Bulwark of Harmony moved to Unyielding, replaced with Harmonious Directives: +1 Edict Cap
Supremacy
- Adoption: no longer increases Starbase Cap by +2, but instead increases Naval Cap by +20
- The Great Game: old effects removed, now increases damage done to Starbases by +20%
Prosperity
- Finisher: no longer provides Merchant Jobs per Pops on a planet, but rather increases Stability by +5.
New art is still coming in.
Mercantile (Free)
- Adopt: Starbase Collection Range +1, Trade Protection +5
- (1) Trickle Up Economics: Clerks provide an additional +1 Trade Value
- (2) Commercial Enterprises: Commercial Zones Building now provides 1 Merchant Job.
- (3) Adaptive Economic Policies: Can convert parts of their Trade Value into Unity or Consumer Goods
- (4) Marketplace of Better Ideas: increases trade value by +10%
- (5) Insider Trading: moved from Diplomacy Traditions, -10% Market Fee
- Finisher: increases trade value by +10%
Unyielding (added to Nemesis)
- Adoption: Starbase Cap +2 and Starbase Upgrade Speed +50%
- (1) Resistance is Frugal: Stronghold buildings now produce 3 Unity and Defense Army Health is increased by +33%
- (2) Never Surrender: reduces Planet Bombardment Damage by -25%, war exhaustion by -25% and increases hostile claim costs by +25%
- (3) Bulwark of Harmony: moved from Harmony Traditions, effects are as before
- (4) Fortress Doctrine: increases the Hit Points and Damage of Starbases and Defensive Platforms by 33%, and reduces the upkeep cost of starbases by -20%
- (5) Defense in Depth: increases Starbase Cap by +2 and reduces Starbase upgrade cost by -50%. In addition, owners of Nemesis will also increase Hostile Operation Difficulty by +4 for the Sabotage Starbase Operation.
- Finisher: Max Defensive Platforms +50%
Subterfuge (added to Nemesis)
- Adoption: +1 Codebreaking
- (1) Information Security: +1 Encryption
- (2) Operational Security: +1 Codebreaking, +2 Operation Skill
- (3) Non-Disclosure Agreements: Hostile Operation Difficulty is +1, and Hostile Operation Cost and Upkeep is increased by +50%
- (4) Double Agents: Whenever a Hostile Operation targeting us fails, we gain 10 Intel on the offending empire
- (5) Shadow Recruits: increases Infiltration Speed by +50%
- Finisher: Successful Operations refund half of their cost on Infiltration Level
[ 2021-08-12 11:11:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
I hope you have had a great summer thus far, and lets hope we can enjoy the rest of August as well. The team is starting to return from their vacations and were eager to start finishing off the Lem Update so that we can ready it for release in September.
As mentioned in dev diary 214, were going to Buff the Backlog by adding some gameplay to existing DLC. Today were here to talk about an addition coming in the Lem Update, and more specifically what additions we are making to the Plantoids Species Pack.
We are adding 2 new Civics and 3 new Species Traits to the Plantoids Species Pack. Lets start by taking a look at the new Traits.
New Traits
We have added 3 new traits that require the species to be either Plantoid or Fungoid.
New traits and their cost.
Phototrophic: Is mutually exclusive with Radiotrophic, and changes some of your food upkeep into energy upkeep. Requires your species to be Plantoid or Fungoid.
Instagram-friendly?
Radiotrophic: Is mutually exclusive with Phototrophic, and changes some of your food upkeep into energy upkeep. It also makes it more beneficial for your Pops to live on Tomb Worlds, as their energy upkeep is removed. Requires your species to be Plantoid or Fungoid.
Contrary to popular belief, this species does not sustain itself by consuming ancient communication equipment.
Budding: This trait allows you to produce some pop assembly. Multiple Species with this trait can help provide pop assembly on potentially another species. For example, two species with the Syncretic Evolution Origin can together assemble one of the two. This trait can probably be especially great for a Hive Mind species.
New Civics
Lets continue taking a look at the Civics. Both of these new Civics are available to regular empires as well as Hive Minds. Only Idyllic Bloom requires you to be a Plantoid or Fungoid.
Catalytic Processing: This Civic lets you produce Alloys with Food instead of Minerals. Starting Districts have been adjusted to be balanced when using this Civic. Regular Empires and Hive Minds convert 9 Food into 3 Alloys. Machine Empires turn 12 Food into 4 Alloys.
Catalytic Processing is available to many types of empires, but not all of them.
Idyllic Bloom: This Civic lets you transform planets into Gaia Worlds by building Gaia Seeders and upgrading them. The Gaia Seeders have 4 phases, with the 4th and final phase triggering the terraformation of the planet to a Gaia World. Available to regular empires as well as Hive Minds.
----
Thats all for this week folks! Well be back again next week, so until then, stay safe and be well.
[ 2021-08-05 11:02:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
Nemesis: Cold War was a multiplayer event held to celebrate the launch of the Stellaris: Nemesis Expansion on PC.
Watch episodes Wednesdays and Sundays on the Paradox Grand Strategy Channel on YouTube.
Watch it here: https://pdxint.at/coldwaryt
Cast
---------------
Hosts: Fredrik Knudsen, SimasTV Game Master: DJTruthsayer
Players: A_Spec, Templin Institute as the Divine Imperium. Door Monster, Stefan Annon as the Xuman Overmind. MaxTheCatfish, Wintergaming as the Imperial Chocolat Covenant. BurkeBlack, Venalis, CrReaM, CletusBueford, GassyMexican, Classypax as the Antharian Republic of Beautification. SpiffingBrit, Bedgarsan, Bokoen, Alex the Rambler, Rimmy Downunder as The Refuge. D1rtyd3vil, Shurjoka as the Avarian Alliance.
Join the Conversation
---------------
Website: http://stellaris.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/StellarisGame
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StellarisGame
Discord: http://discord.gg/stellarisofficial
Forums: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/stellaris.900/
[ 2021-07-29 11:20:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
The galaxy is vast and full of creative new aliens! Join the Stellaris Artists and see how our worlds are populated with a growing array of fascinating creatures, from PDXCON 2021. [previewyoutube=zJBLV2yjmEc;full][/previewyoutube]
[ 2021-07-26 12:19:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Meet the Sapient Combat Computers that we converted into Programmers for the Paradox Empire. Our developers will share their insight on how the technology behind Stellaris is created. (From PDXCON) Watch it here: [previewyoutube=k3xP0SccvR0;full][/previewyoutube]
[ 2021-07-15 11:52:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
Ever wonder about what goes into Game Design, or the inspiration for the Storytelling aspects of Stellaris? Game Director Daniel Moregrd, Game Designer Stephen Muray, and Content Designer Gemma Thomson have all the answers (from PDXCON). Watch it here: [previewyoutube=LuCt-bzdKlY;full][/previewyoutube]
[ 2021-07-08 11:49:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone!
As grekulf has mentioned, one of our key aims in the upcoming Lem update is to improve the value of our existing DLCs by adding new content to them. As part of this effort, several of our species packs have seen some love. This week, I will start us off by talking about some of the upcoming changes to the Necroids species pack.
While we were overall very happy with the content that went into Necroids (indeed, it has set a high bar for our other species packs to match!), a few of us - both within the team and in the community as a whole - regretted a few of the missed opportunities. The Lem update has provided us with the opportunity to rectify this.
Necrophage Hive Minds
There have been quite a few calls for allowing Hive Minds to be Necrophages, and with Lem, this will now be possible!
They will work similarly to normal Necrophages, but with a few differences:
- Flavour texts that assume individual intelligences have been rewritten to fit the hive theme better
- Hive Minds generally cannot support non-Hive individuals within their empire except as Livestock, and Necrophage Hive Minds are no different there. However, unlike other Hive Minds, Necro-Hives will allow their Livestock to procreate. The Livestock can then be subsumed into the Hive via Centers of Elevation.
- Unlike normal Necrophages, Necro-Hive Necrophytes dont use Consumer Goods. Instead, their upkeep of Food (or Minerals, if they are Lithoid) has been doubled.
- Like normal Necrophages, Necro-Hives can also use the Necrophage Purge to speed things up a bit. For this purpose (but in a change applying generally to all Hive Minds), Hive Minds are now allowed to purge Gestalt pops that are not of their main species again.
- Making Hive Worlds make sense for Necrophages is a bit complicated, as there was previously a hard block on non-Hive pops living there - the planet would eat them, effectively. The solution we are currently working on is to allow Necro-Hive specifically to bring their Necrophytes there.
- Just as you can combine Fanatic Purifier with Necrophage, so you can also be a Devouring Swarm (or Terravore) Necrophage
- Non-purging Necrophages no longer start with two extra pops than other non-standard origins (purging ones keep the extra pops because they are likely to lose a few pops through purging).
- The guaranteed primitive worlds may no longer contain primitives that have advanced beyond the Iron Age (previous limit was Steam Age), and will have more defensive armies than very early primitives usually have. This is to make their start not quite as outright better than other starts.
- Centers of Elevation no longer provide stability bonuses, and the jobs unity output has been cut by a quarter.
- The chance of pops escaping during Necrophage purging has been increased from 10% to 25%. This is now also communicated to players in tooltips.
Death Cults In contrast to Necrophages, with the advent of 3.0 and its accompanying pop growth changes, it has been felt that Death Cults - though interesting mechanically and flavour-wise - have somewhat fallen behind the curve in terms of bonuses. In other words, more reward is needed for sacrificing your pops. One of the issues we had at the time when we implemented it was the limited possibilities for using proper mathematical formulas in Stellaris scripts. However, as hinted in my previous dev diary, that particular bottleneck has now been alleviated (in fact, we have gone considerably further than hinted there - Lem will have a lot of positive surprises for modders!). Previously, when you chose to sacrifice your populace, you would gain a portion of the bonus as a fixed modifier, and another portion scaled by the raw number of pops you sacrificed. This remains similar, but with one key difference: the scaled modifier is now scaled by the % of your total number of pops you have sacrificed. We are still working on the exact numbers, but the gist of this is that you will now tend to get a lot better bonuses per pop you sacrifice, especially in the early game. Reanimated Armies Changes have also been made to Reanimated Armies. While the fantasy of being able to reanimate corpses to fight for you was pretty cool, in practice the impact of unlocking a new army type - which you had to research a separate technology to unlock - was quite underwhelming. For that reason, a number of changes have been made:
- You can now build Dread Encampments from day 1. Countries starting with the civic will have one on their starting planet
- Dread Encampments are generally more useful to have now: they now provide two Necromancer jobs (up from 1), and Necromancers now produce 6 each of society and physics (up from 4), though their number of defensive armies they spawn has been cut from 4 to 3.
- Building a Dread Encampment replaces your Defense Armies with Undead Defense Armies, which are somewhat stronger
- When you defeat any organic enemy army in battle, you now have a one in three chance of resurrecting them to join your own forced - in effect immediately spawning an Undead (offensive) Army
- Finally, if an empire with Undead Armies defeats the Voidspawn or Tiyanki Matriarch, they can now resurrect them to fight in their own fleets!
[ 2021-06-17 16:03:42 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! First I want to thank you for the overwhelming support that youve shown us with announcing the Custodians initiative. Its been really fun and motivating to see so many positive responses, and for that were truly thankful. At the same time, I must admit that it is also a bit scary in the sense that we shouldnt have the expectation that this will suddenly resolve any issues you might have with the game, or that well be able to deliver large amounts of significant changes with every update. Lets appreciate this opportunity and make the best of it :) Species Pack Gameplay Themes Last week we already talked about what the Lem Update (honoring the author Stanislaw Lem) would focus on, but Id also like to go into more detail regarding some things. We mentioned that we would be adding gameplay to the Humanoids Species Pack and the Plantoids Species Pack, and although I wont talk about the exact details yet, I do want to talk a little about how we approached it, and the themes we chose. Plantoids was a bit easier, because there are some obvious fantasies. Going around the themes of growth and plants were adding some new traits, civics and origin. We felt like it made sense to open up these gameplay additions to both Plantoid portraits as well as for Fungoids. Humanoids was a bit trickier, because there are no direct fantasies that apply to them in general, so we instead chose to focus on fantasies that align with things like dwarves, elves, orcs or humans. The Civic we showcased last week was an example of how we made something inspired by a traditionally dwarven fantasy. Let us know about any ideas or thoughts you have regarding those :) We will be talking more about these in much greater detail later, but that may possibly be in August. Game Balance Were going to take a look at reworking some of the major outstanding balance issues that were having. One example that I want to talk about is the issue with Research Booming, where power players can essentially outpace other empires due to focusing a lot on research. What enables this is usually Districts that provide Researcher Jobs, which is relatively easy to gain access to early on through Origins such as Shattered Ring or Void Dwellers (the latter not being nearly as strong). For Shattered Ring we are looking into changing the start from a pure end-game Ring World, to be more of an actual Shattered Ring that you need to repair before you gain access to the powerful Districts of the Ring World. Putting additional emphasis on the fantasy of resting this ancient megastructure to its former glory can be a fun addition to the Origin itself. Although we havent decided exactly what were doing, changing the start to be a Shattered Ring that you can restore with the Mega-Engineering technology is a likely route. Unity & Empire Sprawl Beyond Lem, we are also going to take a look at Empire Sprawl and Unity. The design for Admin Capacity was never really something that I felt worked out, and we never finished the design that was intended for it. Continuing to use Admin Cap as a mechanic also feels a bit like a dead end due to multiple reasons (ranging from design to technical), so were instead going to look into another solution. I have a design for doubling down on using Unity as the resource for internal management, removing Admin Cap entirely, and to make Empire Sprawl something that you can never mitigate anymore. More sprawling empires will always suffer harsher penalties from Empire Sprawl, and well instead focus on how Unity can be used internally to mitigate some of those penalties. Examples could be Edicts that have a Unity Upkeep Cost, and perhaps reduce the Research Cost Penalty induced by Empire Sprawl. Angry Pops could potentially also have a Unity Upkeep Cost, to represent the drain on your society. Note that these ideas are very much in their infancy and very prone to change. We will probably start talking a bit more about that once Lem has been released, but I wanted to share some thoughts with you so that we could gather some initial feedback. ------ Thats all for this week folks! Were in the middle of reviewing our dev diary schedule, so were hoping to be back with 2 more dev diaries before we take a summer break. Well keep you in the loop as we go.
[ 2021-06-10 16:02:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Greetings! Today I am here to announce some very good news! Stellaris is not slowing down, but rather picking up the pace! We at PDS Green are very happy to announce our new Custodians initiative as well as the next free update, coming sometime after summer. The Custodian Team Stellaris as a game has been very exploratory, and the game has seen a lot of big changes over the years. I want to start by giving some insight into why weve chosen to focus on this initiative. As weve released more expansions weve had to take longer and longer between each release, as weve needed to spend more time on focusing on quality, making sure each release is as stable as possible. Paradox Development Studio also looks very different today vs. how it looked just a few years ago. Things take longer, there are more processes in place, and there are a lot more people involved. Because each release is now further apart, it makes it harder for us to address some of the outstanding issues that might be affecting the community between DLC releases. As weve added more content it's also been harder to polish and maintain all of the amazing existing content that weve added over the years. We want to keep creating new cool experiences for Stellaris, but we also want to be able to maintain a high quality for the base game itself, and for older content. What we have done now is that weve staffed up, and split the Stellaris team into two teams that focus on different aspects of the game. One team, that we call the Custodians team, will focus on free updates that we aim to release every 3 months, while the expansion team will focus on creating new content for the game. Examples of what The Custodians could be working on:
- Tweaking game balance
- Adding new content to old DLC
- Polishing existing content
- Bug fixes
- Performance improvements
- AI improvements
- Multiplayer stability
- UI and quality-of-life improvements
- Buffing the Backlog: Were reviewing some old DLC to revitalize them with some new content. Humanoids Species Pack and Plantoids Species Packs will now feature some new gameplay features. By the way, did anyone say Necrophage Hive Minds?
- Selectable Traditions Trees: You will no longer be locked to the same 7 tradition trees, but you will instead have 7 slots that can be filled with a tradition tree of your choice. The number of tradition trees will be expanded, and previous tradition-tree swaps will be broken out into their own trees (Adaptability will no longer be a swap of Diplomacy for example). Some new tradition trees will also be added to existing DLCs.
- Balance Pass: We will be doing a balance pass on some existing gameplay systems and features.
- And more..!: Quality of life improvements, bug fixes, AI improvements...
No longer will your empire have to suffer the mediocrity of artisans.
[ 2021-06-03 13:10:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone! Today I want to talk about two things - one is a new experiment that we are running for an alternative ship appearance browser in empire generation, and the other is the Q&A session that we held during PDXCon.
Ship Appearance Browser
Currently in Empire creation, when selecting the appearance of your ships, we display a preview of a sample ship utilizing your empire's colors.
Current Ship Appearance Selection We have a bit of an experiment coming that will be rolling out to a portion of you soon that temporarily replaces this with an in-game ship browser that lets you switch between any ship and manipulate them so you can get a better look at them from different angles.
Cropped 3D Ship Preview In our quest to constantly improve Stellaris we want to measure what impact a change like this can have, so that it would be easier for us to know how to prioritize these kinds of changes in the future. If everything goes well, the change will become permanent for everyone going forwards. If you end up in the trial, we'd love to hear what you think of it!
PDXCon Q&A Transcript
During PDXCon, we hosted a developer Q&A session on the PDXCon Discord server, with seven of us answering almost a hundred of your questions. It was a tremendous amount of fun and we hope to be able to schedule more of these. (Most likely on the Stellaris Official Discord server. Join us!) Here's the transcript of the questions and the answers, as well as a rundown of all the Stellaris panels and activities during this year's PDXCON. Next week we'll give an early peek at our autumn plans, after which we will take a break from dev diaries for the summer. See you next week!
[ 2021-05-27 15:28:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
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[ 2021-05-21 01:22:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone!
Two big things this week.
The first is that 3.0.3 has moved from beta to live, with the full details available here. 3.0.3 includes numerous economic and AI adjustments, bugfixes, and two new sliders in galaxy generation to control pop growth behavior without the need for a mod.
The other is that PDXCon Remixed, an online adaptation of our annual convention, is kicking off!
Weve had a variety of events including the Treasure Hunt and Grand Campaign (praise snek) over the past few weeks, but the main events start this weekend.
Ill list a few of the events of particular interest to Stellaris players, but the entire schedule can be found here.
Friday, 21st of May:
- At 20:00 CEST, the Announcement Show will have all sorts of news and revelations, you can watch at twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive. (The pre-show event starts at 19:30!)
- At 01:10, Product Marketing Manager Pontus Rundqvist will be hosting a talk called Fanatic Egalitarians: Bringing Stellaris to Consoles with our friends from Tantalus, Producer David Giles, Designer David Doe, and Programmer Adam Clarke.
- At 20:00, the Paradox Awards show will be held, honoring the best community in gaming. Modders, community organizers, content creators and more will be highlighted and awarded for their amazing work with all our games.
- At 00:40, Community Ambassador Graeme DJ Truthsayer Crawford will host Defining Your Own Space: Making Great Stellaris Content, featuring some of the brightest stars of Stellaris content creation. ASpec, Enigmatic Rose, Old Man Mordaith, and Stefan Annon will give tips on making fun and engaging videos.
- At 02:10, DJ will continue with How to Conquer the Galaxy Without Really Trying, with QA Lead Joseph Gardener, Embedded QA Byron Aytoun, Regunes, UMAR, and Stefan Annon teaching you how to turn a fledgling empire into an intergalactic powerhouse!
- At 13:10, make first contact with some of the developers at Meet the Stars: Stellaris Dev Mingle on Discord.
- At 14:10, DJ will host Fanatic Xenophiles: Creating Character for Stellaris, featuring Senior Artist Frida Eriksson and Artist Emma Jonsson. See how our worlds are populated with a growing array of fascinating creatures.
- 14:55 brings us Fanatic Spiritualists: The Philosophy Behind Stellaris, where Live Content Producer Anders Carlsson grills Game Director Daniel Moregrd, Content Designer Gemma Thomson, and myself (Game Designer Stephen Muray) about the stories being told through Stellaris, and how the game is designed to create those stories.
- At 15:45, the Fanatic Materialists: A Look at Stellaris Tech panel, featuring Tech Lead Lorenzo Berni, Senior Programmer Gustav Palmqvist, Content Designer and Technical Scripter Pierre Du Plessis, and Former Tech Lead Gwenael Tranvouez will share their insight on how the technology behind Stellaris is created.
[ 2021-05-20 13:00:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community, As promised, we have updated the 3.0.3 Open Beta to include the missing non-English localisations that were not included in last weeks update. The new and updated localisations are now included in the Open Beta. Thank you for your patience and feedback!
[ 2021-05-12 08:57:52 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! We would like to start off by saying thank you to everyone for your patience and feedback on the 3.0.3 Open Beta! We received a great deal of feedback from the Community, and, as we said we would, weve incorporated this feedback into our development plans moving forward. This open beta contains some missing and inaccurate localisations for non-English languages. These localisations are coming, but we feel it is important to get an updated beta out to our players for additional feedback as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience. You can opt-in to the beta by right clicking Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose Stellaris_test from the drop down. One of the key pieces of feedback we received from the community was that the number of jobs was currently too high for the number of pops in the galaxy, and we agree. As such we have updated the job counts on a number of buildings and districts, including Clerks, Alloy Foundries and Consumer Goods plants. Higher tier foundries and consumer goods plants will now add flat bonuses to job output, rather than adding more jobs, they also are no longer mutually exclusive. This update to the 3.0.3 beta also includes some major changes to AI behavior that should improve the effectiveness of AI opponents. These changes give the AI a greater focus on economic stability as well as improving some research related behaviors. We are collecting feedback on how these changes feel for our players, so please let us know in the comments on this post. Population growth was the biggest Community issue with the 3.0 update, and we are exploring additional changes to this system. Some of these changes are long term initiatives, so in the meantime weve added Pop Growth Required and Pop Growth Ceiling sliders in the galaxy setup screen as quality of life features. These sliders will allow you to adjust the variables related to the bonus a planet can provide through logistic growth (pop growth required), and the amount of pop cost increases per pop in an empire (pop growth ceiling). This will allow you to get achievements and play in iron man mode in a way that feels good to you. Please note: changing these sliders can have major impacts on game balance and performance. As previously mentioned, this update contains some missing localisations for non-English languages. We will be adding these missing non-English localisations soon, and we apologize for any inconvenience. We expect to continue to iterate on these changes, and will be further refining economic balance and AI systems in future updates. Please leave feedback in the thread below on how the AI performs economically in the updated 3.0.3 Open Beta, and thank you again for your patience and understanding!
[ 2021-05-07 08:55:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone! Thanks for the tremendous participation within the 3.0.3 beta branch and for all of the feedback that you've been providing. For those that are interested in joining the beta, you have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch. This week we'll be talking about some more changes that we're planning on pushing in the near future to the 3.0.3 beta branch concerning further balance updates, AI, and more. These are highlights of some of the things that will be in the full patch notes and not intended to be a comprehensive list.
Bug Fixes and Further Balance Updates
From fixes to the end of the Cybrex precursor chain to correcting edict deactivation costs, we've fixed a number of issues that you've found and reported during the beta. Thank you for reporting things in the [url=https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/stellaris-bug-reports.941/]Bug Reports forum. Regarding the economic changes, one of the common themes in the feedback has been that the sheer number of jobs in the game are too high, and we agree. Clerks are especially notorious for this, since in many cases you would rather actually see them unemployed and moving to a more valuable position elsewhere in the empire. We're taking some preliminary steps to reduce the number of jobs and changing things to focus on increasing productivity instead. Here are some of the changes you'll be seeing soon:
- [Balance] Reduced the number of Clerk jobs provided by buildings and districts by 40%.
- [Balance] Clerk trade value has been increased to 4.
- [Balance] Buildings that increased basic resource production and added jobs to basic resource producing buildings or districts (Energy Grids, Mineral Purification Plants, etc.) now increase the base production of the relevant jobs by 1 or 2 based on tier instead of their previous modifiers. Machine empires still gain the extra resource district slots as before.
Yes, "Livestock" counts as a "Food producing job". (Or minerals, for Lithoids.)
- [Balance] Manufacturing focus buildings (factories and foundries) no longer prevent the other from being built on non-Ecumenopolis planets, and no longer add jobs to Industrial Districts. They instead increase the base production of alloy or consumer goods producing jobs by 1 or 2, with a corresponding increase in upkeep.
Secondary resources like Alloys do require more inputs to produce more, however. Balancing the number of jobs and their output will be an ongoing task, expect future updates to have additional changes.
AI Updates
We're making some updates that will have significant changes to AI behavior that should improve the effectiveness of AI opponents, as well as some changes to reduce the impact to your empire if an AI were to take control of your empire for a short duration in multiplayer. These changes give the AI a greater focus on economic stability and improves some research related behaviors, but are also a work in progress and will continue to be updated in future patches. We'll put up a 3.0.3 AI Feedback thread once it's live so you can let us know how you feel about these changes.
Population Growth
We're continuing to make adjustments to the current population growth systems in the game, and are exploring additional changes. Some of these are longer term initiatives, however, so in the meantime we're currently adding a quality of life feature that many people have been asking for.
Logistic Growth and Growth Required Sliders in Galaxy Configuration These sliders will allow you to adjust the variables related to the bonus a planet can provide through logistic growth and the amount that pop growth increases per empire pop using sliders in Galaxy Configuration instead of needing to edit defines or use a mod to do so. Please note that these sliders can have major impacts on both performance and balance. Existing saves will use the default values. (Which can themselves be overridden in defines.) Non-English localization for these changes will not be available in the beta as soon as the changes are up, but will be added shortly afterward. Apologies for the delay! That's all for this week. Since we're currently in a post-release cadence (as well as next Thursday being a holiday in Sweden), the next Dev Diary will be two weeks from now on the 20th of May. See you then!
[ 2021-05-06 13:26:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! Were pleased to announce the Stellaris 3.0.3 Open Beta is Now Live. This open beta includes changes to the new population growth system introduced in 3.0.1, to address some of the concerns raised by players about the population growth mid to late game. To opt-in to the open beta branch, right click Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose Stellaris_test from the drop down. Please leave your feedback on these new changes in the the Pop Growth Feedback Megathread here We are always looking for feedback from our Community, and regularly incorporate community feedback into our future development plans. We hope youre enjoying Nemesis, and thank you for your patience while we further refine pop growth.
[ 2021-04-29 15:28:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Stellaris Community! Weve seen a number of your reports regarding the pop growth mechanics included in the 3.0 Update. Weve been reviewing this feedback, and including it in our post-launch support for 3.0. Heres how weve decided to handle it: This week (date to be confirmed) we will be publishing an open beta that includes a revision of some of the population growth changes. The objective behind the changes introduced in the 3.0.3 Open Beta is to address some of the concerns raised by the community regarding mid and late game population growth. When the open beta branch goes live, you can opt-in to the beta by right clicking Stellaris, click Properties, Beta tab, and choose Stellaris_test from the drop down. We will do a further post when this branch becomes available. We are committed to gathering additional feedback and will consider incorporating this feedback into our development moving forward. We hope youre enjoying Nemesis, and thank you for your patience while we further refine pop growth.
[ 2021-04-28 14:37:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! We hope that youve all had a chance to enjoy the 3.0 Dick Update and Nemesis. Weve had a lot fun making it, and it's been really fun to see your reactions to all the new stuff! We appreciate all the feedback and bug reports you have submitted, as it really helps us improve the game. 3.0.2 is looking to be quite stable as it currently stands, with better performance and a very low amount of out-of-syncs in multiplayer. There are still bugs and improvements that we want to make and the current plan is to fix bugs and make improvements for a couple of weeks more, until we can release a 3.0.3. For that patch well be looking at things like:
- Some improvements relating to Operations & Espionage
- Tweaking and making improvements related to pop growth
- Various other improvements, balance tweaks and bugs
[ 2021-04-22 11:59:41 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! We hope all of you are enjoying Nemesis, a lot of work went into this patch and expansion. Countless hours to bring you what is, in my personal opinion, one of the best and most stable releases in Stellaris history! However, regardless of how much effort you put into something being flawless, there will always be some small cracks that get missed. With this hotfix we hope to bring you a quicker patch of some of those larger cracks. This is intentionally a very small patch to make sure that we could get these specific issues fixed and delivered to you all sooner rather than later. Rest assured though that we have another patch in the works, so please continue providing us with feedback and bug reports (over at the Bug Forum)!
3.0.2 HOT FIX PATCH NOTES
Bug fixes
- Fixed an issue with the Big Red Button achievement not triggering before the game ended.
- Fixed an issue where players couldn't play as the pre-scripted Human Empires.
- Fixed an issue with Criminal Syndicates branch offices producing super negative trade due to crime, then multiplying it because of crime.
[ 2021-04-20 13:30:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you've all been waiting for is here!
Nemesis and the 3.0.1 'Dick' update should now be live on Steam and all other platforms!
As mentioned yesterday in an impromptu Dev Diary (here), in the update we have also included a patch for 3.0.0. Which is why we're releasing Nemesis as a 3.0.1. This is something we've done in the past, and all it means is that we're bringing you all more fixes than ever!
You can find the change logs for both 3.0.0 and 3.0.1 versions here
Please note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 2.8.1 game going, please roll back to that version before trying to load the save in 3.0.1. You can roll back to a prior version via right click on Stellaris in library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version.
If you want to play crossplay multiplayer with your friends on non-steam platforms you can opt into the "crossplay" branch in Steam in the same way as above.
We're super excited for this release and we hope that our hard work will bring you hours of entertainment!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUhb-XUgjuU
[ 2021-04-15 16:13:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! Hopefully this will come as a pleasant surprise to all of you! Last week I posted the changelog for 3.0.0 and talked a bit about the fact that we were already working on the 3.0.1. The details I left out were that we were actually close to being done, but for the sake of not making promises I wouldn't be able to keep, I decided that I would err on the side of caution. However, now that the 3.0.1 has gone through all the necessary checks and processes I am happy to announce that we will launch Nemesis, and by extension the 3.0 'Dick' Patch, with this 3.0.1 patch! This means that there will never be a 'live' version of the 3.0.0., and instead you will all receive all the fixes that we've worked on for the 3.0.1. in addition to the massive changelog of the 3.0.0. For some perspective, the 3.0.1 contains roughly 8 pages of fixes and balancing, bringing the entire 3.0.0 and 3.0.1 to roughly 27 pages of new content, balancing changes, UI tweaks, AI fixes, Improved Stability, many new modding features, and of course general bug fixes. So the moment you have all been waiting for, here's the changelog for the 3.0.1 that will be released tomorrow along side Nemesis!
3.0.1 "Dick" Patch Notes
Features
- Added several new diplomatic messages for Becoming the Crisis empires
Balance
- A wormhole now connects Scions to their Fallen Empire overlords.
- Aetherophasic Engine now grants increasing amounts of energy, minerals and Naval Capacity with each upgrade.
- Scaled down the Unity rewards of various espionage events which now award a value based on existing, monthly Unity income.
- Imperial Security Directorate updated such that it now offers the Emperor +2 to Decryption and +4 to Encryption only.
- Reverted change to special resource edicts' one-time costs: their costs now increase with empire sprawl as well as overextension, as opposed to just overextension. Also clarified the tooltip a bit.
- The new Special Projects for the final step in the base game Precursor event chains now take 30 days to research.
- The Indentured Servitude slavery type no longer applies Slavery based production modifiers if the pop is working in a Specialist job. Other slavery based modifiers such as reduced Housing and Amenity usage continue to apply.
- Lowered chance of Unbidden spawning as they can spawn early, so were appearing a lot more often than other crises
- Reintroduced Slave Processing Facility requirement to recruiting Slave Armies.
Performance and Stability
- Fixed potential CTD when partial failure to connect to host in MP view.
- Stopped research_all_technologies console command from crashing the game.
- Right click unassigning a spymaster envoy no longer desyncs the game in MP.
- Improved efficiency of the code for picking what to build via planetary automation scripts.
- Reduced the destroy galaxy performance impact by not destroying each pop individually.
- Remade destroy colony so it is destroying any pops before changing owner/controller to no country just to reduce the amount of per pop calculations.
- Removed ai_weight fields from buildings, as the AI was periodically evaluating whether they added up to less than -1 (which they never did) to see if they should be destroyed. (Note: ai_weights were replaced by economic_plans so were not used for evaluating which building to build; note 2: if for some reason as a modder you really want to use them, you can still do so by disabling economic_plans)
- Fixed crash on Linux when joining a game through steam friends while the game was running.
UI
- Filter out ill suited empires from the top right target Empire drop down in the Diplomacy view. E.g. The Shroud and Curator Enclaves.
- Galactic focus selection window is now hidden when changing tab in the galactic community.
- Rename Build ship and Build Defensive Platforms buttons on Starbases and Megastructures to Open catalog, which better describes the actual action.
- Disable newly renamed Open catalog buttons in Starbase and Megastructure ship builder UI when they have no effect.
- The Special Deposit tooltip now lists the effects that the special deposits have.
- UX rehaul of the MP Game Lobby making it clearer what to do and who's ready.
- Excavation sites are now greyed out when fully excavated.
- Remade planet view locked building slot tooltip to refer to actual capital building name and district with highest building slot add modifier
- Details for fleet, pops, economy, and technology are now hidden in the breakdown of diplomatic weight if you don't have enough intel
- Tidied up the tooltip for a planet's habitability in the planet's interface to clearly state what each number is.
- Intel value text should now be displayed better in all languages.
- The espionage operation categories filter is now hidden if there are less than 2 operations available.
- Only showing espionage operation category filters for potential and/or ongoing operations
- You can now use "go to capital" on Marauders in the Contacts menu (it will take you to their home system).
- If you have sufficient intel, hovering over the button to form or cancel a research agreement will now tell you how many technologies you and the other country may learn from it.
- Hovering over the button to form or cancel a commercial agreement now tells you how many credits you will gain from it (rather than you having to propose the agreement to find out).
- When you are offered a commercial agreement, you will now hear about the energy credit benefits.
- Removed superfluous "Are you the baddie?" tooltip for the Crisis tab, only displayed when not Becoming the Crisis.
- Improved consistency of Diplomatic Stance policy options being hidden or unavailable; visibility is now determined by government type and DLC ownership, while other factors determine availability.
- Changed tooltip for starbase buildings/modules in starbase view buildables to show calculated value and hide base if value is not affected by modifier.
- The tooltip for Crisis Objectives now contains information for how much Menace you have gained from this Objective.
- Added variety to the "unknown species" cardboard cutout in the first contact interface.
- Fixed inappropriate line breaks in "Intel" labels for some languages,
- Show diplomatic pacts an Empire has even if they're only known via a second hand Intel source. E.g. You having high Intel on A and thereby knowing it has a Commercial Pact with B will now show that Commercial Pact in the diplomacy view of B even if you don't have full Intel on all of B's diplomatic pacts.
- Cost/upkeep/production breakdown tooltip should not show mult modifiers for "empty" resources.
- Opinion map mode now properly hides opinion breakdowns unless enough Intel is gained.
AI
- AI war strategies are now recalculated more often to make it respond better to changes in ally fleets.
- The AI now better accounts for the value of different resources when deciding what to buy on the market.
- Allow the AI to trade with Living Metal, Dark Matter, and Zro on the market.
- Added cooldown before AI considers responding to a proposal, set in define DIPLOMACY_RESPONSE_COOLDOWN_DAYS
- Increased randomness when AI responds to proposals, will still do a daily roll if it should but chance for responding starts at none and then rapidly increases each day until proposal expiration date.
- The AI now better take into consideration that Federation and GDF ships have no upkeep when deciding which ships to build.
- The independent GDF AI will now remember which capital systems it has visited upon reloading a save file.
Modding
- Added on_army_killed_in_combat / no_combat on_actions.
- Using "pop" scope change in army scope now takes you to the pop that spawned the army.
- Added export_resource_income_to_variable effect.
- Added export_trigger_value_to_variable_effect.
- Added trigger is_current_first_contact_stage.
- Fixed various issues with setting species archetype restrictions for government elements (civics, authorities) so that it is now checked in every case and can be used safely.
- Enabled triggered descriptions and gametext ([ ] commands) in espionage operation descriptions.
- Fixed a bug in scripted effects/triggers that meant that you'd get weird startup errors if you ever used more than one "[" in a scripted effect/trigger.
- Added is_total_war trigger.
- Fixed issue where owned_species and enslaved_species scope script lists would not always work in planet events.
- Added abort trigger on espionage operation type for killing of an active operation.
- Added has_active_building trigger (checks if a planet has the building in a non-ruined and non-disabled state).
- Added effect for postponing modifier calculations, useful when executing a lot of effects where individual result of them is not important.
- Fixed cases of missing modifier names (where a modifier would show up as "
: +X") in pop jobs (triggered modifiers) and deposits (country modifiers). - Fixed any_owned_species so it also works on day 1 of a new game now.
- Added remove_invalid_civics option to change_government effect to force incompatible civics to be removed from the government.
- Made is_majority_species make sense.
- Fixed some minor documentation issues brought to our attention by eagle-eyed modders.
Bugfixes
- Fixed rare case of frontend background not covering the entire screen.
- Fix occasional fullscreen flickering when running with the -dx11 flag.
- Zro Distillation now always becomes a tech option if Extradimensional Experimentation resolution is enacted.
- Removed superfluous information about default country types in the tooltip for forming a research agreement.
- Event "The Fumes Lie Thick" now tells you about the scientist's new trait.
- Fixed an issue where habitat auto-designation would not pick energy specialisation when that was clearly the right choice.
- Fixed some grammar errors in "Wind Back and Proceed" archaeology event.
- Molluscoid Integration event now no longer refers to "tiles" (what on earth is a tile?? :) ). It now also only gives you 6 new pops.
- Fixed an issue where the special project fail event "Smuggler Weapons Trade" would talk about a spaceship rather than a planet.
- Fixed Machine Synchronicity Traditions lacking a line break at the end, causing it to be fairly unreadable.
- Fixed an issue where you could break the Necrophage origin by having your prepatent species as a subspecies of the main species
- Random Spy Network event "An Operative Resurfaces" no longer refers to the empire's leader getting hands-on in extraction of operatives, and preparing security reports.
- Added a missing tooltip from random Operations event "Excess Noise".
- Corrected a missing tooltip from Spy Network event "Hostile Infiltration Detected".
- Leaving federations through events no longer generates opinion penalties unless we deliberately want those penalties set.
- Resolutions to repeal the banning of slave trade now have their correct icons.
- Corrected Fallen Empires in their mistaken assumption that they have 16 building slots instead of 12 on their starting planets.
- Added various government types which were not fully recognized by VIR during the first stage of the tutorial.
- Selecting an Oligarchic authority type with the Death Cult civic is now consistently recognized as a Grim Council government.
- Fixed several cases where Alloy Mega-Forges and other similar buildings providing +X jobs per Y district would sometimes be unspecific or wrong about how many jobs they'd get from you building which district.
- Fixed several fallen empires lacking housing due to having no city districts.
- You can no longer get the Scandalous Insult event on yourself.
- Improved tooltip for when a Spy Network has become overextended.
- Subjects that are in a federation with their overlord should now be able to declare a war for independence on them.
- Make diplo action positive/neutral/negative background shown in UI again.
- Reanimated Armies is now fully incompatible with Synthetic Ascension, rather than just quietly doing nothing as before.
- Cosmic Nudge arc site now no longer gives you 10% progress on a habitability tech way beyond what you have researched (essentially useless as it costs so much), but instead gives you progress on the next tech in that line that you can research
- First Contact event "A Terrible Sight to Behold" no longer shows a happy handshake as its event picture
- Guarantee independence now displayed properly in the diplomacy view (them guaranteeing our independence does not make it work the other way around).
- The tooltip for Society Management now correctly mentions the Crisis tab if the player has Nemesis installed.
- Fixed a reference to the "Traditions and Relics" interface in the tutorial (it is now "Society Management").
- Fixed AIs unintentionally spawning Advanced Empires through the Lost Colony origin even when Advanced AI Starts have been disabled by the player.
- Galaxy Generator now uses correct starbase types for marauders and FE when it needs to connect the empire through a non owned system.
- Fixed the AI sometimes having sectors with no planets in them.
- Operation Arm Privateers may only be conducted against the same target once every 3 years. The operation will conclude early if another empire has successfully armed the brigands before you have.
- If the other side finishes the first contact site before you, but you had successfully started a hostile first contact event chain and were merely awaiting the outcome (e.g. completing the vivisection), you will now get the rewards and flavour event anyway.
- Operation event "Smear Campaign Exposed" now makes references to the proper empires in its description.
- Reworked the final step of the Vultaum, Yuht, First League, Irassian, and Cybrex precursor chains. They now provide a one-day Special Project on the discovered homeworld rather than the last event being fired on-survey. This should improve visibility and increase robustness in situations where e.g. the star system changes ownership or is colonized.
- Added bespoke event descriptions for scenarios in which Operation Spark Diplomatic Incident is conducted against a target who, in turn, causes offense to your own empire.
- Fixed some cases of starbases incorrectly respawning on loading a save.
- AI will now give AI full rights in some circumstances.
- Fixed Adaptability Tradition "Survival of the Fittest" not using its own art.
- Fixes a bug in events not creating random outcomes properly in some cases.
- Fixed missing event title when declaring Tiyanki to be galactic pests (frankly uncalled for).
- Clarified some references to target Encryption in events "Contact Lost" and "A Surprise Catch".
- Votes now display as a popup so that they are not as easily missed and auto-declined.
- Empires who receive the event "An Operative Resurfaces" and who maintain a Spy Network on the empire in question are now able to attempt an extraction of said operative, assuming they have a sufficient Infiltration Level.
- "An Operative Resurfaces" events are now part of a more easily trackable event chain.
- Removed various instances of an extra exclamation mark appearing in notification messages.
- Added a prolog step to the tutorial for establishing First Contact. Players will now be directed to the Situation Log in order to begin the process.
- Fixed a case where you sometimes wouldn't get the Does Not Compute achievement if multiple countries' fleets were bombarding the last AI planet.
- Wipe Em Out war goal will now no longer destroy starbases that previously belonged to your vassals, but will instead return them.
- Fixes num_species and num_unique_species triggers. This affected, but is not limited to the Tourist Trap achievement not working.
- Fixed an edge case where The Surveyor relic would rarely fail to spawn a resource deposit.
- Fixed a trigger check in Operation Smear Campaign which may not produce the expected results for campaigns involving xenophilic empires.
- Refined script for Operation Smear Campaign such that it should now be able to handle multiple campaigns targeting the same empire at once.
- Fixed an error in which targets of Operation Smear Campaign who do not have an active Spy Network may fail to receive any event at all, and thus would not have any of their opinions changed.
- Fixed a faulty reference to the country being targeted by Arm Privateers in the notification event, "Privateers Already Engaged".
- Fixed broken Go To buttons in a couple of Caravaneer events.
- Fixed Xenophobes welcoming aliens with open arms in the "Caravaneers: A warm welcome!" event.
- Scripts which may apply reinforcements for the Galactic Defense Force on an annual basis are now only enacted so long as a playable country remains a member of the Galactic Community.
- Improved a tooltip on the Operations panel, explaining when and why Crisis Beacon is subject to a cooldown period.
- Fixed a reference to the Spymaster in localisation, for the final event in which Operation Crisis Beacon is set to work on the Unbidden.
- Fixed an error which caused the random Operations event "Snuffed Out" not to fire "Hostile Infiltration Detected", if the empire in question falls foul of their target's Encryption level.
- Auto-upgrade for Federation and GDF ship designs now properly applies the technology of all member empires when choosing components.
- Fixed planetary automation sometimes failing to build anything if there was unemployment but multiple free jobs.
- Fixed several edge cases where precursor systems could spawn outside of your borders.
- * Fixed an exploit where you could mod the game to get a button giving 500 minerals for free without changing the checksum.
- Fixed dialog references to the Great Khan's vanquisher in "The Great Khan Meets Defeat", such that even an unknown empire is referred to by its proper name.
- Fixed the tooltip for the event when you Become Emperor showing erroneous information if you did so as a Gestalt of Megacorp empire.
- Updated modifier names when switching ruler since title is depending on ruler and heir roles.
- Fixed a scripted check which is used to ascertain whether or not the empire in question has an active Spy Network.
- Fixed missing modifier name for tradition swap tr_diplomacy_insider_trading_megacorp (Insider Trading as a Megacorp) - made it correctly inherit the parent's modifier name.
- Fixed envoy event "Gone Native" sometimes missing a description entirely.
- Fixed the tooltip for Pop Assembling Capacity (below Pop Assembly in the planet interface) not showing all information and not taking into account organic assembly.
- Fixed a bug where buildings that increased the number of jobs offered by other buildings or districts would do this even if they were ruined or disabled.
- Fixed it being possible to recruit Imperial Legions infinitely (it is now capped to 12).
- Fixed event icons in event for opening communications presenting wrong information when concerning Fallen Empires.
- Fixed Subterranean Refugees event failing to create a pop.
- Fixed information for resource gain from Commercial Pacts while proposing it showing the information the wrong way around, i.e. it would say the other side would get what you would get and vice versa.
- Curbed the Galactic Emperor's extreme paranoia - not everyone is a seditionist (i.e. the Emperor can now only run the Operation Target Seditionists against rivals and countries actually undermining their authority).
- "Leviathan Down" anomaly event now gives the planet a Metal Boneyard deposit if it is inhabited, instead of granting an unlocalised one meant for orbital deposits.
- Made the "Falling Intel" alert more helpful.
- Improved a descriptor for relatively weak encryption/decryption.
- Fixed the Mineral Extraction Operation's mining stations proving an insurmountable obstacle to AI expansion.
- You now no longer gain menace per month while purging, but instead upon a pop finishing being purged.
- Enabled the overlay for assigning envoys in Spy Network view.
- Fixed a Crisis Beacon operation event falling back to the wrong event text in a certain situation.
- Added indicator for recurring menace objectives.
- If you have the "Lost Amoeba" anomaly event, you no longer need to establish communications with space amoebas. That event's options now give you the space amoeba buffs/projects in that case.
- Fixed some cases where you could not interact with a colony because it was occupied by factions such as the CARE Mechanocalibrator.
- Having claims on a subject now means you can use the Claims casus belli on their overlord.
- The "Form Galactic Council" resolution will no longer appear as active after the Galactic Imperium has fallen
- When forming the Galactic Council again after it has been abolished, the time until the next election will be the expected 180 days instead of the longer time that is normally between elections
- Fixed tutorial sometimes opening and closing in rapid succession.
- Fixed an issue where government data of Custodians and Imperium rulers would not be restored when they lose their position.
- The AI and player default for very strong syncretic servile slaves is to have them as Chattel rather than as Battle Thralls.
- Fixed Isolationist faction's first contact policy demands to be for not having a Proactive policy, rather than for explicitly having an Aggressive one.
- Inwards Perfectionists' Materialist faction will no longer demand Research Agreements (since that demand cannot be fulfilled).
- Slaves that are working Specialist jobs now gain Specialist production modifiers rather than Worker production modifiers. (Necrophages will no longer suffer penalties in the Specialist tier as Indentured Servants, and the Authoritarian worker bonuses will no longer apply at the Specialist tier either.)
- Fixed the Shoot to Kill achievement (its logic was flipped, so you had to be the victim to get it!).
- Fixed Sic Semper Tyrannis achievement.
- Forming the Galactic Imperium no longer triggers a government cooldown.
- Script controlling the expansion of Ancient Mining Drone fleets has been reworked so as to no longer create excessive event scope backlogs.
- Mining Drone Expansion Fleet and Aggressive Drone Expansion Fleet have been reworked such that every 10 years, for as long as the Mining Drones persist, 3 fleets will spawn and seek out suitable systems into which they can expand. The fleets favor systems which lie within 1-6 hyperlane jumps from their system of origin.
- Fixed an issue where the government would not reform properly when the Imperium is formed if the government had civics that were incompatible with the "Imperial" authority.
- Recruitable leaders may no longer possess the Psionic or Chosen trait directly alongside either the Synthetic or Cyborg trait.
- Fixed (Become the) Crisis Level 5 sharing one trigger condition with Crisis Level 4.
- Script controlling the expansion of Ancient Mining Drone fleets has been reworked so as to no longer create excessive event scope backlogs.
- Portraits in the empire designer should now animate properly.
- Fixed spawned Star-Eaters having too many shield components instead of armor components, and made sure the owner receives the relevant armor technologies.
- Fixed Mass Extinction Through the Ages breaking sometimes in MP.
- Fixed duplicate colons in espionage operation tooltips.
- A conditional event description for "Final Disavowal", part of the "Disavowed Operative Resurfaces" chain, now displays correctly more often for those who have an active Spy Network, and for those who do not.
- Subjects are no longer able to become presidents of federations through rotation or random succession.
- Fixed Diplomatic Map Mode leaking information you do not have intel on.
- Fixed various error log messages relating to Crisis Objectives, along with several edge cases where the rewards were not granted when they should have been.
- Fixed an issue where the acceptance breakdown for diplomatic actions was available even if you didn't have sufficient intel.
[ 2021-04-14 14:26:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello there!
We're just about a week away from releasing Nemesis, our next big Expansion for Stellaris. So big in fact, that we're naming it after one of the most renowned Science-Fiction authors, Philip K. Dick, and calling it 3.0! This has been one of the most fun expansions I've personally gotten to work on and I can't wait to see your reactions when you get to play it yourselves!
With this post we're of course bringing you the changelog today, but I also wanted to talk a bit about how we've been handling bigger releases lately and what's going on with Nemesis specifically. For those of you that have followed us for a while, you know that since Federations we internally start working on the first patch for a major release before its actual release date (If you're curious why we do this, you can read about it here).
For Nemesis it's no different, however the patch that we're working on is currently undergoing testing so we cannot yet reveal what's in it, nor when it might become available to you all. But we'll let you know more as soon as we are confident in the build that we have!
But in all honesty, considering how big the 3.0 change log is, it should take you all plenty of time to read through ;) For the full 3.0.0 patch notes see the forum post here!
We've also just released the Expansion feature breakdown video. Watch it now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOJ26b3906Q
Lastly, don't forget to watch our Stellaris: Nemesis Feature Stream today at 6 PM CEST (5 PM UK, 12 PM EDT, 9 AM PDT) on http://twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive !
[ 2021-04-08 11:34:11 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi!
This week we want to show off some of the challenging new Origins that are ... coming soon.
The first, titled Surviving the Aftermath, is a variant on Void Dwellers.
The Surviving the Aftermath origin starts with the premise that a construction ship and colony ship were lost in MIA when a Crisis nation activated the Aetherophasic Engine and destroyed the galaxy, and you're left in a habitat to pick up the pieces.
Your home system.
As the galaxy has been destroyed and there are no resources anywhere, we expect this to be an exciting and challenging origin to play.
The local cluster.
The galaxy. So alone. So very alone.
The next is the Crusader King Origin, where you begin the game as the ruler of a primitive civilization in the late medieval time period.
Living in luxury.
This origin starts at a significant tech disadvantage, but our playtests suggest that you should achieve spaceflight within a few hundred years.
Several events have been added in case another empire wishes to enlighten your civilization, as well as a "burn the alien at the stake" minigame.
Includes special diplomatic options!
Winning the game as a Crusader King grants the new Universe Universalis achievement.
The Prison Architect Origin is restricted to Rogue Servitors only, and drastically changes their gameplay. Instead of pampering their organic charges, they seek to collect all organics and like the Criminal Syndicate, are affected by and gain bonuses for having high Crime. They also gain extra Unity for each Criminal Syndicate pop they collect.
Gotta catch em all!
Some minor changes to the Organic Sanctuary.
Open to all empire types, the This is Fine origin has a new twist - your empire thinks its hot stuff and is limited to colonizing stars.
Is it warm in here, or is it just me? Looking pretty radiant though.
Your buildings have a chance of being ruined each month due to fires, but your energy production is vastly increased.
Last but not least, the AI Custodianship Origin is our most challenging yet, where you and the AI both control your empire simultaneously. This Origin is also open to all empire types, and represents a fractured leadership or gestalt intelligence where two leaders struggle for power, sometimes issuing contradictory orders. The AI Custodian will act to implement its flawless and foolproof algorithms, undoubtedly bringing your empire success in the long run, if you would only listen to it.
The AI has great plans for my homeworld. The greatest of plans.
That's all for this week. As a reminder, the Stellaris 3.0 'Dick' update and Nemesis arrive two weeks from today on the 15th of April.
What Origins would you create if you wanted a special challenge?
[ 2021-04-01 14:24:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone! We've brought together some of the galaxy's mightiest empires to take part in the Nemesis: Cold War on April 10th and 11th on twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive! ASpec and The Templin Institute are our first team and are here to show you the power of the new Espionage features in Nemesis. See what a few capable agents are able to achieve as the Divine Imperium begins its ascension. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90igLxuxaDk Pre-Purchase Nemesis now!
[ 2021-03-31 15:14:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
"Hello everyone! Today I thought I would talk more about the process of directing an expansion such as Nemesis. As weve talked about in the past, finding a strong theme is one of the most important things that we do. Whenever weve had ideas (and there are many) we usually categorize them in a box. Each of our expansions has picked features from different boxes; Utopia was about internal politics and customization, Apocalypse was about warfare, Megacorp was about economy, and Federations was about diplomacy. Along the way theres usually more ideas in a box than we can fit into an expansion, so many of the ideas weve had for previous expansions get moved to a new expansion. For example, the diplomacy box contained too many good ideas that we wanted to work with, so Federations focused more on good diplomacy, whereas Nemesis focuses more on evil diplomacy. Maintaining a strong theme for an expansion is very important, as it makes it easier for the players to forge strong fantasies and to build up excitement for those ideas. A more focused expansion also has more opportunities for features to interact, so it's also possible to have those deeper interactions in the game that we know many of you appreciate. Although it is important to maintain a strong theme for a DLC, we also want to make sure that any expansion we create also contains something that caters to different types of players. For example, if Federations has a lot of focus on cooperation and diplomacy, it was a good idea to add the Juggernaut so that players who enjoy the more belligerent side of the game also get some new toys to play with. Nemesis Becoming the Crisis, and forming a Galactic Imperium through the Galactic Community, are both examples of ideas we had that were related to diplomacy is some fashion. With the Galactic Community in place, it made sense to allow players to play the baddies which aims to destroy the galaxy, and by continuation it made a lot of sense to add a feature that aims to be the counterforce to such threats. Where Federations focused on cooperation and more friendly diplomacy, the goal of Nemesis was to focus more on building up conflicts between opposing forces. We really wanted to underline how a crisis can threaten the galaxy, and then a champion (the custodian) can rise to attempt to stop it. We also wanted to create more opportunities for a balance of power to shift, so we wanted to continue with the idea of the custodian and how power can corrupt. By allowing the custodian to turn the galactic community into the galactic imperium, we were able to continue the trend of different types of crises that can occur in the galaxy. Although not perhaps a threat to all life in the galaxy, the Galactic Imperium (and a possible rebellion) was still intended to very much be considered a diplomatic crisis of sorts. From my perspective Im very happy with how weve managed to take these ideas from earlier and really bind them together in a very thematic sense in Nemesis. Its not often that we can take so many powerful fantasies and put them together in such a way, so it's very fun to have been able to take this holistic approach. Espionage Ive wanted to make an espionage system for quite some time, as it's been a goal for me as a designer. I dont like when espionage systems are too deterministic, or when you just sit and wait on a progress bar, after which youll either succeed or fail. I wanted our espionage system to contain more storytelling and the archaeology system that I originally designed for Ancient Relics really allows for that. I like that the system plays out in phases, similar to a siege in EU4, but allows for a lot more storytelling by inserting random events and stories in the main story of the content itself. With the learnings from the archaeology system, I wanted to make our espionage system work similarly. As a game director, Im not only responsible for the creation vision of the game, but also for scope (how large a feature can be, and where we spend our development time). I knew that by basing the system on what we did with archaeology, we would be able to save time that could be better spent elsewhere. Implementing UI is actually quite time consuming with the tech Stellaris uses, so any time we can save by not having to make UIs from scratch is a good idea in my opinion. By reusing certain parts, you can also reduce the amount of risk because we already have a pretty good idea of what to expect from the system or feature. Any time we spend reusing parts can be spent on polish, bug fixing or implementing cool new UIs for other features. It doesnt come entirely free though, and you need to make sure you make enough adaptations where it's needed. When it comes to what the espionage system itself should achieve, I wanted information gathering to be a large part of it. Espionage systems are hard to get right, because they can feel too predictive or boring, and you also have to constantly be considering the experience of the one being targeted by espionage. Something we also have to consider when adding a new system like this is that the player only has so much capacity to interact with existing systems. We need to create a system that is fun and engaging when you choose to use it, and be aware that it's quite risky to add new systems that the player is forced to interact with. Cognitive load is definitely something that is tricky when designing for GSG games. I feel like the espionage system has hit a good mark with not being mandatory to play the game, but also being fun and interesting when you want to use it. We couldnt achieve everything I could have dreamed of, and although I would very much liked to have seen a more interactive counter-espionage part of the system, Im very happy overall with how espionage turned out. Although not perfect, the content we have there and the way it works feels very good. The basic system of espionage, just like the archaeology system, is a part of the free update to the base game, which makes it easier for us - or modders - to add more content later down the line. Trying to make the systems themselves a part of the free update has helped us a lot in the past, and sometimes weve even changed systems that were entirely a part of a DLC to become free. Ascension Perks (introduced in Utopia) were originally exclusive to Utopia, but we really wanted to use the system so we made it a part of the free game and changed it so that only some of the Ascension Perks themselves (like biological ascension) were a part of Utopia. We really like this approach, and hopefully you do too. Everyone wins! Intel Because we wanted information-gathering to be such an important part of the espionage system, we also thought a new Intel system would be necessary to make that a really good experience for the player. I never liked how youd find out so much about another alien empire as soon as you established communication with them. I wanted alien empires to feel more mysterious, and just as you explore the galaxy, you have to explore these alien empires to learn more about them. The focus of the Intel system was very much to enhance the early- and mid game by focusing on this new angle of exploration. Even if you are not a warlike or diplomatic player, it should still be fun to learn more about the galaxy and its inhabitants. Because of all the things that the Intel system touches, and how it interacts with other features, it needs to be a free update to the game. The entire Intel system is a part of the free update and should be quite moddable. From a scoping aspect, Intel definitely ended up being way more expensive than we had originally thought due to all the edgecases and all the small places in the game where the new system would interact with current existing features. Reworking UIs to sometimes hide information is not as easy as it may sound, especially in a game as large as Stellaris. As a game director I also need to consider where I spend my development time, and if I put too much development time on working on a free feature like Intel, then the DLC features may become too thin and that players may consider the value of the DLC to be low. Its a careful balance between adding enough new features in the free update vs. adding new features to a DLC, because both are important for different reasons. In the end though, I think it was definitely worth spending the extra time to make the Intel system as it currently is. Become the Crisis The idea to allow players to become the crisis is not a new one, but it's one that has been with us for quite some time. Its not until now that weve finally been able to give it a go, and I cant think of a better expansion for it than with Nemesis. The goal with the BtC feature was to allow the player to perform evil deeds and unlock more powerful rewards along the way to galactic domination. The system went through a couple of different iterations, but it wasnt until we added a more clear progression path with crisis levels that I felt like we were truly on the right track. The new UI for BtC feels very awesome and with a very visible progression path it also feels better as a more explicit challenge. Within game design, explicit challenges are those that are posed directly to the player (like a quest), while implicit challenges are those that the player can make up themselves (like befriending all other empires as the Blorg). An inherent weakness with many of our GSG games is that we do not have a lot of explicit challenges, which can make it hard for new players to figure out what they are supposed to do. If you are entirely new to the game, it can be hard to come up with implicit challenges yourself. National Focuses in HOI4, Missions in EU4 or Imperator are examples of features where weve successfully added more explicit challenges to our games. Implicit challenges go hand in hand with replayability, and they can also be more powerful experiences to the player, because the player is the sole reason behind it. With the BtC feature, weve added objectives to help lead the player in becoming more menacing and an increasing threat to the galaxy. Although not as direct as perhaps a quest or a mission, they should help a lot and hopefully motivate the player. We originally had ideas for the BtC feature to come in multiple shapes (ranging from a destructive force like an end-game crisis, to a subjugating force like the marauder, or a manipulative force that preys in the shadows), but due to time constraints we had to make the choice of either making one fantasy stronger and more engaging, or to have multiple versions that felt more watered-down. I had to make the choice, and focusing on the destructive fantasy made the most sense to me, due to multiple reasons, but simply put it's also the fantasy that makes the most sense. After the dust has settled Im very happy with where the Become the Crisis feature is, and I hope you will all enjoy deploying your Star-Eaters to consume the galaxy, going from one star to the next. Custodian & Galactic Imperium With the risk of sounding like a broken record, I want to highlight how much I enjoy the cycle of electing a custodian to fight a crisis, and then for the custodian to take power and become a new, diplomatic crisis. Its very thematic, and it's a fantasy that were very aware of from popular culture (and to some degree, history). I dont have as many insights to share for these two features, as they were largely handled by one of our trusted and senior content designers. The idea and rough design for the Galactic Imperium was borne in association with the Galactic Community, and were very happy for the chance to add it to the game in Nemesis. Although the Galactic Imperium is perhaps not the most ubiquitous and common feature to come across while playing, it's very evocative and fits like a glove when it comes to player fantasy. Rounding up In the end I dont think you can ever really create a perfect expansion, and it takes a lot of experience to know what gives you the best chance with the resources you have. Theres a lot more detail that goes into all of the things I talked about, but I hope this dev diary was somewhat interesting to you, as I tried to give some more insights into how to direct an expansion and some of the thoughts one may come across while doing so. I also want to thank my team for doing such fantastic work with Nemesis. Without them, none of this would have materialized. ---- Thats it for this week, folks! Well be back next week on April 1st, the day most famous for being exactly 2 weeks before the release of 3.0 Dick and Nemesis"
[ 2021-03-25 13:14:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! I hope the word about the release date for Nemesis has already reached you, but in case it has somewhat eluded your perception, here is a refresher: Nemesis will release on April 15th, and here is the second story trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o86MFZPb_WI As per usual, our expansions are released together with a significant free update, and this time is no different! Were happy to announce that Nemesis will release together with the 3.0 Dick Update on April 15th! The update is of course named after author Philip K. Dick, famous for works which inspired, among other things, movies like Blade Runner and Total Recall (which also happens to be one of my favorite movies!). Why 3.0? We felt that the changes introduced with the new Intel system and the reworked First Contact system has enough impact on how different the game feels to warrant the change. Early- and mid game feel quite different now, in a very positive manner. Alien empires feel so much more mysterious, and charting the entire galaxy is no longer so easy. Changes like the pop growth system and the addition of industrial districts also felt impactful enough to want us to make the change. Going forwards, were also gearing up to be able to be a bit more agile and deliver updates to the game a bit more frequently. I dont want to make any grand promises quite yet, but 2021 is looking to be a very good year for Stellaris! 3.0 Dick Features:
- New Intel system
- Reworked First Contact
- Reworked Pop Growth
- New Industrial Districts & some changes to production of Alloys/Consumer Goods
- New Espionage system & Gather Intelligence Operation (other Operations will be a part of Nemesis)
- Numerous bug fixes & improvements
Relative Encryption tooltip. In this example, our Codebreaking is lower than their Encryption and their Codebreaking is higher than our Encryption.
The refined Operations UI. Envoy on the top left, Infiltration Level (current/max) as progress bar & value. Intel categories in the top-right. We've streamlined the Operations UI significantly, reducing the sheer amount of numbers associated with a network and the Operations themselves. As part of this streamlining, we've removed the concept of spy power and bandwidth, so it's no longer possible to run multiple simultaneous Operations on a single Empire simultaneously - you'll have to run them one at a time. This change also alleviates a problem we had where it wouldn't always be immediately perfectly clear which mission random events were affecting, so the "mental burden" of running Operations is lower. Upon completion, Operations will now almost always cause a significant hit to Infiltration to represent lost contacts and heightened security. Operations also used to have varying difficulty per chapter - we've standardized them so we can now list the Operation difficulty on the UI, and let you know if you have an Asset that is especially good at this one. First Contact Update Although not much has changed with the system itself since we first showcased it in dev diary #193, theres still some changes that can be interesting to see.
The finished first contact UI. The silhouette in the bottom-right is supposed to be generic, and will reveal a portrait once youve progressed far enough into the first contact chain. Early hostilities can now lead to pre-contact conflicts as well. If you anger a neighboring alien civilization, theres the chance that they will come and visit you. More aggressive empires like fanatic purifiers or devouring swarms are also less likely to take your encroachment into their lands very kindly early on.
Abducting aliens is no longer a risk-free undertaking.
It seems like they werent too happy about our abductions Outliner Update Weve added some small quality-of-life improvement to the outliner. One of these improvements lets you reorder planets in the outliner.
Planets will be reordered within the sector listing or planet listing, depending on which option is active.
The outliner can also be toggled to show the icons for the designations instead of the icon for the planet class. With these two options it's now possible to list all your planets as you wish, and to show the designation icons. Our product manager, Simon, can now finally list his Mining 01, Mining 02, Mining 03 etc. planets in the correct, and fanatically organized, order. --------- Thats all for this week folks! I hope youre as excited for the upcoming Nemesis release as we are!
[ 2021-03-18 13:46:23 CET ] [ Original post ]
"Hi all! Im Caligula, our resident scripting language magician. As someone who works with our scripting language - both using it and improving it - on a daily basis, Im very happy to be able to show off some of the new stuff that modders (and us inhouse) will be able to use going forwards, once the upcoming patch hits. Ill begin with a rundown of the new features:
- Espionage: modders can add new operations, much like arc sites
- First Contact: script driven, so modders can change much of the system, but all first contact is now technically one long event chain, so overwriting could be an issue. Luckily we have a new effect, fire_on_action, which has been inserted into various places that should alleviate this
- Become the Crisis: code features e.g. the interface are all activated by script. So in theory, one could overwrite the whole feature to be whatever sort of progression to a goal you happen to want to mod in.
- Emperor/Custodian: feature designed by the most experienced Content Designer at PDS. Brought with it many collateral scripting improvements, such as far more flexibility with galcom resolutions and the ability to spawn federation / community fleets via script.
General improvements and standardisations
It would be fair to say that the Stellaris scripting language has grown incrementally according to the game's needs. This is not unexpected - Stellaris itself has grown incrementally. But it has had the side effect that a lot of different people have contributed to it, and so inconsistencies between different implementations have arisen. On the user side, this would show itself in, for example, things which work in one place but do not work in other, equivalent places. For the upcoming patch, we had time to take a holistic view of certain things and implement some general improvements and standardisations. A quick win in this regard is what is known internally as "script lists". These are a code system which generates random/every/any/count_whatever_object from a single section of code - guaranteeing that the way that array is built is the same between them, i.e. any_owned_pop checks exactly the same pops as every_owned_pop would execute on. We have been using these for quite a while, but there were still some very old implementations for certain scopes that predated them. The result of this was in some cases confusion - for example, x_pop and x_planet did sometimes radically different things depending on whether you used every, random, any or count (e.g. working in different scopes, sometimes referring to all the objects in the game and sometimes all of those belonging to the current scope...). Disturbingly, it was found that any_ship referred to "any ship in the game" and was in fact used wrong 100% of the time in our scripts. Another result was that in some cases one of the versions (usually the "count" version) was simply missing. With the next patch, nearly all of the pre-script list implementations have been removed and replaced with script lists. In some cases, the opportunity was taken to clarify what the script list did, e.g. the "planet" script list is now split between "galaxy_planet" and "system_planet". (This will break some mods, for which I am a bit sorry, but not very :D It was worth it, and the patch notes will give details on what changed. In most cases, a batch-replace will suffice. Also, because of script lists, a fair few count_x triggers have changed names to lose an "s" at the end, which is slightly regrettable from a grammatical point of view). Some have also had some functionalities expanded, e.g. owned_pop, owned_planet and system_within_border now all work in sector scope. A further area singled out for improvement was references to scopes in effects and triggers, e.g. create_pop = { species =
Variables
Onto something a bit different. On Stellaris, inhouse scripters and modders alike have long looked with envy upon the capabilities of the newer PDS game engines, compared to our own ability to do maths in script. We did have variables, but their functionality has been a bit more limited than we may have desired. In fact, Ive seen some of the ways that modders get around their limitations, which have been incredibly motivating to make such horrible scripts no longer be necessary! In 2.8, the following was possible with variables:
- You can check, set, add, subtract, divide or multiply variables against values, other variables on the same scope, or the same variable on other scopes
- You can export various galaxy generation settings as variables
- You can refer to variables in localisations, but if the variables value is 0, it will show as blank because the variable is cleared
- Variables can be used as a parameter in a handful of places, such as the count in a while effect
- You can also check, set, add, subtract, divide or multiply variables against different variables on other scopes
- There are new effects to modulo (% operator), round up, round down and round to the closest full number
- A new trigger check_variable_arithmetic checks the value of a variable if youd perform some arithmetic to it in a certain way, e.g. multiply it by another value or variable (add, subtract, multiply, divide and modulo all work)
- New effects to export various game values to variables have been added. These are: export_modifier_to_variable (check_modifier_value trigger also exists now), export_resource_stockpile_to_variable, export_resource_income_to_variable
- add_modifier, add_resource, resource_stockpile_compare now have mult parameters where a variable is accepted. So you can scale resource costs and bonuses in effects by a variable now.
- Variables are no longer cleared when they are 0, but instead when you use the clear_variable effect, so they can be reliably used in localisations.
- Certain usages of variables now have error logging, in case you try and use one that hasnt been set.
- Effects should allow you to use a variable, and should grab the number from that variable
- Triggers should also let you use a variable, and should check themselves against the value of that variable
- Triggers should by default also let you check them against another scope for which that trigger would work. So num_pops > from should check if the current object has more pops than from does
- It should be possible to export the current value of a trigger to a variable via an effect, i.e. export_trigger_value_to_variable = { trigger = num_pops variable = my_var } => sets the my_var variable to the number of pops the current scope has.
Button Effects
Inhouse, we made the UI by assigning a function to buttons in the source code. But theres also support for interface buttons that you mod into the game. In previous versions, these did not take the scope of the object that they were attached to, so if you added a button to a planet, it would still execute the effect on your country rather than that planet. We have fixed that for a bunch of cases: they will now be able to deduce their interface's planet, fleet, ship, system, ambient object, megastructure, federation, archaeology site, first contact site, spy network or espionage operation. (Incidentally, debug console commands like effect and trigger now work in those same scopes) Disclaimer: The way it works is a tad hacky and it may be possible to confuse it by opening multiple interfaces at once. I recommend checking is_scope_type = planet/whatever in the allow and/or effect sections of the button effect. But the signs are that it should work with no problem in most cases, which is better than none!
More nice things
- In most places where you could previously use logical operators such as >, >=, =<, <, you can now use != for is not equal too.
- Message types now have their own folder, so mods can add to them without overwriting the file (great for intermod compatibility, and also for modders being able to add QoL without overwriting each other)
- Messages spawned by the create_message effect now support using loc commands such as [This.GetName] (where This is the specified target of the message).
- Also, since we had to fix a large number of cases where there were references to the Galactic Community rather than the Galactic Imperium, [ ] locs now work in quite a variety of extra places.
- The effects add_victory_score =
and win = yes now exist. Im sure no one will misuse them. - Added new event types: leader_event, system_event, starbase_event, first_contact_event, and espionage_operation_event. Though mean time to happen does not work for any of them at the moment - fixing that wasnt a priority, as it is generally better to avoid mean time to happen anyway.
- Hardcoded juggernaut behaviour is now tied to a ship size being a starbase that is mobile, rather than the juggernaut key. I.e. mod-made juggernauts are now possible without crippling bugs
- Its now possible to hide a static modifier from the list of country modifiers
- You can check the distance of objects within the same solar system now by adding same_system = yes to the distance trigger
- Theres quite a lot of new on_actions, and you can make your own ones with fire_on_action effect
- And a lot more.
[ 2021-03-11 14:15:13 CET ] [ Original post ]
"Hey folks!
My name is Erik Forsstrm and Im the VFX Artist for Stellaris and Ive been here since the release of Lithoids. VFX stands for visual effects, which means that Im the guy whos responsible for anything from small ship engine effects, to big system effects such as the nebulas that we added to the game last year. If its animated and its not a 3D model, then theres a fairly high chance that a vfx artist is responsible for it.
What does a VFX Artist do?
My workflow is a bit different compared to the other artists, because compared to 3D Artists Im not working as much with 3D models.The main tool for me to use is particles, which pretty much is just flat planes that I work with to make cool explosions! I won't go into the technical details about particles, but just to give you a quick idea about the difference between us VFX Artists and others. While 3D Artists are sculpting and creating cool 3D models, Im pretty much simulating planes and telling them which direction to travel and changing the size and color over time. Thats not to say I never do 3D modelling, but as I mentioned before its not my main tool as youll notice in what well be showcasing below.
The cool and interesting stuff!
So with that explained, time to get to the effects that well be adding in Nemesis!
If were starting off with the ships in Stellaris, something that Ive aimed to do is to give the different shipsets a bit more unique feeling when it comes to the effects. Some of you might have noticed that both Lithoids & Necroids have some unique ship effects, anything from ship engines to explosions. Ive tried to make them all look at least slightly different to each other to varying degrees and to make them fit the style of the ships.
I usually try to give them some different shapes, color schemes or anything cool that I can come up with that makes it look unique and fit the style.
Click here: to see the Nemesis Titan with new effects for the perdition beam and the engines
The big effects, in other words the system effects!
Another thing that you might have noticed is that weve added quite a few different system effects over the last year, such as the nebulas, space storms and the endgame crisis system effects when theyre expanding their territories. It was one of those things that I always felt that was missing while playing Stellaris, the systems felt a bit empty. With Nemesis weve added a few new system effects, such as for the Aetherophasic Engine Frame that we mentioned in an earlier dev diary.
When youre upgrading it youll get a system effect that changes through the different stages, getting bigger and more powerful the higher the stage youll get. To really show it off I'm cheating a bit in the video below (by using max resources and finishing the construction instantly), and Ill let you see how it changes and develops through the different stages.
From a fairly small effect, to a huge effect covering the system with more detail, shapes and movement in it to really give you the feeling that something powerful is going to happen in this system.
How is it made?
System effects are one of those effects that most of the time are made with a mix of particles and 3D models, the sheer size of them requires more complex shapes then what you can get with only particles. So the effect below is created with the help of these meshes that you can see in the image below, and then Ill apply some animated shaders on them that creates the movement of the textures that you can see in the video. Add on top of that some particles and you get a complete effect!
The meshes used for the visual effects for the Aetherophasic Engine
Click here to watch the Aetherophasic Engine Frame going through the different upgrade stages
Destroying a star
And finally the highlight for me in Nemesis! Blowing up the stars!
Its made of a few different parts, the chargeup that rely mostly on the animation of the Star Eater with some glow in the middle of it. And then comes the firing stage, which is a pretty big effect. As you can see it goes through different stages in strength, that helps with creating more of a buildup until the big explosion.
At first while prototyping it was at full power at once, which looked cool but it didnt create the anticipation for the explosion. You only ended up looking at a cool effect for ~20s without any buildup or knowing how close its to firing, if you were only looking at the visuals.
So in the end we ended up splitting up the effect in different stages, and added or tweaked parts of it to make it really feel like youre getting closer to blowing up a star.
And last but not least, the star explosion. Ill keep this short because I think the explosion pretty much speaks for itself. But I just want to say that this is probably one, if not my favorite effect Ive done so far in this game.
So I really hope youll enjoy it as much as I do!
Click here: to watch the The death of a star!
And that was all from me! Hopefully it gave you some insight of what I do, and how I do some of the things. Thanks for reading!
Next week a content designer is going to write about script improvements thats coming in the next update!"
[ 2021-03-04 14:29:40 CET ] [ Original post ]
"Hello, my name is Simon Gunnarsson, I'm the Art Lead and acting Art Director for Stellaris. I wanted to go through our process of developing a style for a new ship series that will be added to the game when Nemesis is released. I'll go through the steps from the initial meeting with our game director, Daniel Moregrd, through the visual development (vis-dev), concept art production and finally end at 3D production, that includes animation and VFX.
Initial Art Direction
For this time around, we had a player fantasy to cater to, so our mission statement became our guiding star throughout the process. We sat down with the game director that resulted in the imperial thematic direction. Which was enough for us to start doing some word associations to kick off the creative process.
The closer the top a word is, the more influence it should have in our direction. We held ourselves to these words even when we changed our visual direction in the middle of the vis-dev.
These first associations were part of the first brief we put together to the concept team. The theme invites for interpretations so it's important that we also define the initial art direction with supporting images, splitting the line between "what it is" and "what it isn't" is equally necessary.
With these things in mind, we curate an initial aesthetic that we think is worth exploring, so the concept team has some anchor to the vision. For the imperial aesthetic we wanted them to explore a bright and ornamental direction at first. We always enable our team to add their own touch to these curated directions, but also encourage them to also explore other paths.
Vis-dev
We had several people working with the vis-dev, all bringing their own unique take on the brief we gave them. This process is quite hard, closing doors on designs and actually drive the art direction forward is a difficult task, with all the viable options at hand, we have to be quite picky, and measure against the words that we came up with.
Asking questions like, is this conveying an imperial and dominant feeling, what works well with this specific design and what doesn't. These questions are crucial in driving the vis-dev forward.
Concept-art made by Alessandro Bragalini
Concept-art made by Ecbel Oueslati
Concept-art made by Mattias Larsson
Concept-art made by Simon Gunnarsson (me!)
Concept-art made by Ylva Ljungqvist
There were concerns towards the mid-point of the vis-dev. The way the light works in Stellaris could make it so that white looks quite muddy. There's a chance that white takes too much color from the light and makes it look quite weird in some occasions.
So we iterated the curated art direction into a dark aesthetic. We made it more forgiving no matter what empire color the players chose, the ships will most likely look appealing in every instance.
The new aesthetic still had to hold true towards the associated words from the beginning. So we focused on more brutalist style, dark with silver details.
Final concept-art made by Simon Gunnarsson
Style Guide
The end of the vis-dev should result in a style guide, a document that should communicate the vision and the aesthetic, with extracted details and breakdowns. It is used by the whole team, from animators to VFX so it needs to be quite descriptive.
For example, below is a breakdown of materials that 3D artists will use as a guide to creating them.
Production
The actual concept art production is the bulk of our workload. It's where we create actual blueprints for 3D artists to follow. But it's really just a linear but iterative process to get to a final result. We start with sketching some ideas, and we slowly commit more and more to certain aspects until we have a design we like, then we refine it, add materials and ultimately a final asset sheet is created.
Initial sketches
Concept artist use 3D to easier present the ship and get a better feel for the design
Laying down material patterns, starting with a broad design then adding secondary and tertiary level of material details
Finalized asset sheet, complete with materials and material ID for the 3D artists to follow
In-game final asset
The end, but not quite!
This is our process with every new ship aesthetic, but the ships have a few more stops on the road before they're truly final, both animation, VFX and audio will get their hands on these before the full process is complete!
Thank you for taking the time to read this long post, here's a Nemesis (imperial style) titan! You will hear from our VFX artist, Erik Forsstrm, in a Dev Diary in a near future! "
PS. If you want to see a short video of the Nemesis (imperial style) titan, scroll down to the bottom of the forum post here!
[ 2021-02-25 15:01:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Last week we talked about how the Galactic Community can elect a Custodian to unite them against an ongoing crisis, and this week we aim to continue that story.
The Unbidden invaded the galaxy, and in order to defeat the crisis you needed to ask for additional powers, and the length of the war underlined the need for more permanent powers. Those powers were very nice to have, and they are powers that you may not want to give up so easily.
Remember that time when you needed to make your custodianship perpetual? Those were the days.
It would be better if you could find a more permanent and legitimate solution. Besides wouldnt the galaxy be safer under your leadership anyway?
When a Custodianship is granted on a perpetual term limit, the Custodian can propose a resolution for the creation of a Galactic Imperium.
Proclaim the Galactic Imperium
Citizens of the galaxy! On this day we make history as we transition into a new, and brighter future! Under this New Order, our ideals and rights will be protected. We hold these rights to be self-evident and we will defend them by force of arms. No star shall be lost to the enemies of our Community and together we will repel all attacks from within or without. Let our enemies learn to fear us: those who challenge our resolve will be crushed.
High Chancellor Nilapatep, during the proclamation of the Galactic Imperium
Long live the Imperium!
Long live the Emperor!
When the Galactic Imperium is created, all federations that were previously in the Galactic Community will be disbanded.
There is a New Order in town.
The Galactic Imperium cannot be proclaimed during a War in Heaven.
Galactic Imperium
Once created, the Galactic Community ceases to exist and turns into the Galactic Imperium instead. Some things will be familiar, and some things will be entirely different.
Will the Imperial Senate Comfort the Fallen?
The Galactic Emperor will gain access to a number of new resolutions, and a number of resolutions that are similar to those that were available to the Custodian.
There is much work to be done in the Galactic Imperium.
The Galactic Emperor retains the powers available to the Custodian, e.g. such as Conclude Session and Freeze Resolution. They will also have a permanent Intel bonus against members, and gain an additional bonus to Diplomatic Weight.
Your Ethics will shift towards Fanatic Authoritarian, shift your Authority to Imperial, and you will get a new government form. Your Civics that are incompatible with your new position will be removed and you will gain a new unique Civic.
The emperor will gain a new unique Civic that doesnt occupy a Civic slot.
Hive Minds, Machine Intelligences and Megacorps are not blocked from proclaiming the Galactic Imperium, and have their own slight twist on it.
A Megacorp that forms the Galactic Imperium gains access to regular civics as well as corporate civics.
Imperial Armada
If there was a Galactic Defense Force during the previous Custodianship, it will be converted into the Imperial Armada instead.
Imperial Authority
The power that the Emperor holds over the Galactic Imperium is reflected in Imperial Authority. Depending on the strength of the Imperial Authority, different things can happen.
Members of the Galactic Imperium can choose to Strengthen or to Undermine Imperial Authority.
The Galactic Emperor gains access to a new Operation Target Seditionists which will prevent the target from undermining Imperial Authority with their envoys for a certain amount of time.
Those opposing the lawfulness of this New Order will also gain their own tools. The Weaken Imperial Authority Operation will do exactly what it promises. Should Imperial Authority fall below 50, they also gain access to the Spark Rebellion Operation, which will also do exactly what you would expect.
Rebellion
The rebels have chosen to light the flame, and the galaxy is in turmoil once again.
Those who refuse to join the rebels will join a loyalist federation instead, and a war will be declared that pits these two federations against each other. All rebel empires will leave the Imperium for the duration of this war.
If the Rebels win the war, the Imperium is dismantled and reverts back into the Galactic Community. All Rebels will rejoin the Community, Council members lose their seats, and all Loyalists get a temporary debuff to their diplomatic weight for a few years, meaning their influence in the reborn Galactic Community will be limited to begin with. The former Emperor will get even greater diplomatic weight penalties which will also last longer.
If the Loyalists win, the Rebels are all forced back into the Galactic Imperium and they get temporary debuff which lowers their diplomatic weight for a few years. In addition, Imperial Authority is greatly increased.
Regardless of who wins, the Rebel and Loyalist federations are disbanded.
If the war ends in a Status Quo/White Peace, the Rebels secede from the Imperium, and their Federation stays intact.
A Galaxy on Fire
With Nemesis we wanted to focus on the things that can go wrong, we wanted to focus on disruption and chaos. With one crisis defeated, the next crisis might be just around the corner, and it will be up to you to navigate the delicate balance of the galaxy.
Will you light the flame, or will you restore the balance?
Who will be your Nemesis?
[ 2021-02-18 13:55:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Today were back again with yet another dev diary; number 200 in fact. It sure has been a very exciting journey for Stellaris, and I think it is only going to get better! Nemesis is shaping up to be a very interesting addition to Stellaris, and today we thought we would talk about another headline feature for our upcoming expansion namely the Custodian.
While some empires seek to set the universe on fire, others need to find their destiny as its defender. As we mentioned last week, the Galactic Community will get their own tools to fight the crisis, and that is what they can do by electing their chief crisis fighter.
We are setting the stage for these two nemeses to battle over the fate of the galaxy, and it is up to you who will win.
Becoming the Custodian
As soon as there is a Galactic Council, the Galactic Community can propose to elect one of the council members to become the Custodian. It is possible to have multiple proposals going at once, but as soon as a resolution is passed that elects a Custodian, others cannot be proposed anymore, as the choice has already been made.
Concrete evidence that my lithoids should rock the Custodianship.
The AI is more likely to vote for a Custodian when there is some sort of crisis going on, which can be a Marauder crisis, end-game crisis, Become the Crisis-crisis or any of the other things that can happen.
Time to get to work.
Powers of the Custodian
In order to be effective at their role, the Custodian must gain access to some special powers. The Custodian may need to be able to affect which resolutions move to the Senate Floor, so they have extended powers to be able to influence that more directly.
The Custodian in the Galactic Community.
Prematurely End Session: A Custodian can end the current session after half of its voting period, which will pass or reject the resolution being voted on depending on the voting situation at the time.
Emergency Measures: The Custodian can use the Emergency Measures power to send a proposal to the Senate Floor, but has a much lower cooldown than regular council members.
Shared Intel: The Custodian will gain some Intel on all other members of the Galactic Community, such as knowing their Relative Fleet Power.
Freezing proposals: The custodian can pay 200 influence to freeze a resolution for 4 years, making it impossible for the resolution to move to the Senate Floor for the duration.
Brrrr. Will you be resolute and wait it out..?
Custodial Resolutions
There are a number of new Resolutions that are tied to the Custodian. Lets take a look at some of them:
Wanna read more about the Galactic Resolutions and Galactic Defence Force? See the forum post here!
[ 2021-02-11 13:28:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfBJjAhaJXw Paradox Interactive is proud to announce the new expansion coming to Stellaris - Nemesis! Determine the fate of the galaxy by pulling strings behind the scenes with new espionage mechanics. Choose to become the Galactic Custodian to counter Galactic threats, or take the menace option to BECOME the crisis - Nemesis gives you the most powerful tools ever available in Stellaris. Ultimately, you will have to decide whether to grasp the reins of a galaxy spiraling into chaos or ferment the chaos yourself. Will you find a way to take power through diplomacy and subterfuge, or will you stand on the sidelines as the stars go out one by one? You can wishlist Nemesis now here!
[ 2021-02-10 15:40:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! Today were back with another exciting dev diary to talk about a new feature in the upcoming expansion for Stellaris. For far too long has the galaxy remained safe from !bt'|htNq1XIp'c`KSq`[UX] << ENCRYPTED - estimated time to crack code: 5 hours >> ... Wonder what is going on? See what the encrypted message reveals here...
[ 2021-02-04 12:53:11 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello again!
Now that we've gone over several of the basic Operations, this week we want to go over Provocations.
Operations vary in risk and consequences. The simplest Operations such as Gathering Information and Acquiring Assets will only rarely cause major issues between the two Empires, while Stealing Technology or Sabotaging Starbases is more frowned upon and can cause some diplomatic issues. Provocations are the types of acts that the galaxy as a whole will generally take a dim view to, treating them as war crimes. Expect blowback and repercussions from them, even when they are successful.
Part of these repercussions is modelled by the loss of Infiltration - whether it be that parts of your Spy Network are compromised, security holes have been closed in response, or "friends" within the empire stop being quite as friendly. The flashier and messier the operation is, the more your network will be impacted.
Provocations will usually cause the greatest losses of Infiltration, making it difficult or impossible to run other operations in that network until it is built back up.
One Provocation that we're planning is Arm Privateers (Provocation, Economy). It's a fairly advanced Operation requiring an Infiltration level of 60, and has the primary objective of disrupting the target empire by providing weapons and funding to violent and unstable individuals.
Surely nothing will go wrong with this plan.
The weapons are untraceable, so it'll be fine.
These are a trustworthy group, right?
Your spymaster makes a good point there though.
Last chance to back out.
Privateers or pirates?
The Privateer fleet disabled the local starbase and set up their own little pirate base. Their fleet strength is based to a degree on the fleet strength of the empire it was created in, so while it is likely to be only a temporary annoyance, it can prove incredibly useful if deployed at the right time.
As noted during the events, these fleets are hostile to everyone, including their original patrons.
The nastiest Operation to date is the Crisis Beacon (Provocation, Technology).
Surely nothing will go wrong with this plan either.
Crisis Beacon is an extremely difficult Operation to pull off, but if successful, will add the target's capital system as a target of interest to an ongoing End-Game Crisis. It currently has the highest Infiltration level requirement (80) and cost of any Operation. This will typically require an extremely well developed Spy Network with numerous Assets.
If all goes according to plan, this will usually result in the Crisis sending a fleet to "investigate" it in the friendly way that they do when visiting systems.
Goodbye! We'll miss you!
As with many Operations, things can develop in different ways depending on what's going on.
The last time we'll hear from them.
Shortly thereafter, the bait is set.
It's like Prethoryn catnip.
The sacrifice of our operatives (and the rest of the Spy Network that we had built up in the Anathurian Nation) bought us a bit of time as it diverted a Prethoryn fleet away from our own territory. The Swarm chose to support that fleet with other resources, leading them away from our border nicely.
Now, this sort of Operation is definitely an act of war, and we're currently discussing exactly what the consequences should be if you get caught performing such a heinous deed. At the very least, your target is not going to be happy at all with you. (And if you have a Xenophilic faction they might not be too pleased.)
That's this week's dossier of secret information. Next week we'll continue to talk about the Crisis a bit.
[ 2021-01-28 12:47:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello!
Today were going deeper into some of the things you can do with the Spy Networks your envoys carefully built up last week.
As noted there, building up a Spy Network will passively provide Intel on the empire they are in as their Infiltration Level increases. (This was previously called Spy Network Level but has been renamed for clarity.) Once they've built up enough strength, you can choose to run Operations within the empire. A strong Spy Network can have sufficient bandwidth to run multiple Operations simultaneously.
Like First Contact, Operations use a variant of the Archaeology system first introduced in Ancient Relics. Unlike Archaeology and First Contact, however, when Operations complete objectives necessary to complete their mission, they usually do not require your intervention unless something important has come up.
When starting an Operation, you have the option of assigning a single Asset to the mission.
Operations have an energy credit cost to initiate as well as energy upkeep while ongoing. Most Operations pause for your final approval before they initiate their final step, but your operatives can be given permission to launch as soon as it is ready in the UI.
Covert missions are a little tricky, and sometimes things are a little unpredictable. If problems arise during the mission, your spymaster may contact you seeking guidance. Do you provide them with additional resources to bribe the problem away, have them dedicate a larger portion of the Spy Network to the mission (assuming they have any unallocated Infiltration available), or do you scrap the mission and leave the Asset assigned to the mission out to dry? Likewise, even when things go according to plan, sometimes your operatives have to take what they can get - while other times they may stumble upon far more than they expected.
Yes, you can run operations within a hive.
Completing Operations often has an impact on your Infiltration Level - some resources get compromised or otherwise unusable, and depending on the Operation you performed, a hornets nest of security may have been stirred. If you had an Asset assigned to the Operation, you will often be given a chance to use them as a scapegoat, burning them to protect the rest of the Network.
Operation Types
Weve split Operations into four different categories, and heres a more detailed summary of each type and a few of the Operations were planning. (As always with in-development sneak peeks, these are subject to change.) Subterfuge Operations are common Operations that work to improve the state of the network or do good old fashioned spying on the target empire. Gather Information, Acquire Asset, and Steal Technology are examples of planned Subterfuge Operations. Sabotage Operations are dedicated to destruction of tangible or intangible things. Sabotage Starbase and Diplomatic Incident are examples of planned Sabotage Operations. Manipulation Operations twist the truth and replace it with better truths that serve your empires needs. Smear Campaign and Extort Favors are examples of planned Manipulation Operations. Provocations are the most extreme Operations that are almost guaranteed to have blowback. These tend to be relatively difficult to pull off but have major results. Arm Privateers is an example of a Provocation.
Examples of Operations
Gather Information (Subterfuge) is one of the simplest Operations, requiring an Infiltration of 20 or higher to initiate. Your spymaster will send their operatives out to, well, covertly gather information. After a relatively short period of time the spymaster will deliver a dossier containing the intelligence to you, which might grant a bonus to current Intel level or provide an Intel Report granting increased Intel on a category for a time period. Its not the most glamorous of missions, but should rarely backfire in a spectacular manner. Since Intel decays slowly (currently set to 1 point per year), the Gather Information Operation provides a fairly consistent way to learn more about the galaxy. Assigning an Asset to the mission will skew the results towards the Assets interests, significantly increasing the chance of getting an Intel Report targeting the empires Government, Diplomacy, Military, Economy, or Technology.
Many Jeferians died to bring us this work-in-progress screenshot.
Operations do not always produce the same results. Steal Technology (Subterfuge, Technology) is another one that has created a stir on the forums. Through a variety of means, your agents will attempt to gain access to the research databases of the target. Depending on how things go, several outcomes could occur - they might be able to get some hints as to how a technology works (granting it as a research option and providing some progress), they may be able to leave a backdoor (increasing your empires research speed for a time), or if things get messy, they could just destroy whatever research they can (inflicting penalties on the target). Your operatives can only take research that your empire has the hope of understanding, so you must meet all appropriate prerequisites. This leads to an interesting situation where you ideally want to be spying on an empire of greater technological prowess than your own, but that in itself is riskier since they may have a better chance of catching your operatives.
These blueprints are like an Escher drawing. The Enigmatic Engineering Ascension Perk will block these attempts, as it makes your technology impossible for other empires to reverse-engineer. The spying empire will not know this, however, until they try.
The Sensor Range effect has been replaced as well. Smear Campaign (Manipulation, Diplomacy) is dedicated to working against the relationship two empires may have. After the first chapter completes, you'll have the choice of which relationship you wish your operatives to attempt to diminish. Later, your agents will inform you of the tactics they want to use, with different schemes proposed based on the nature of the selected empires. In this example, I'm trying to create rifts within a nearby federation by running Smear Campaigns.
And finally my agents have informed me that they're ready to unleash misinformation upon an unsuspecting foe.
Meanwhile, over in the Ztrakpor Confederated Domains...
Since their Counter-Espionage measures did not detect our shenanigans, it seems that our agents chose to kick things up a notch and add sabotage of research facilities to the false charges. They've caught wind of our false-flag operation as if they had actually uncovered an operation being being performed by their so-called ally! The galaxy shall hear of this!
Assets
Assets have been mentioned a few times now, and the Acquire Asset (Subterfuge, Government) is the most consistent way to gain them. Its possible to gain Assets through random events during other Operations, but tempting them into your service is much more reliable. Each Asset has two categories they excel at - one of each from Subterfuge, Sabotage, or Manipulation, and Government, Diplomacy, Military, Economy, or Technology. When an Operation is initiated, you can assign the Asset to be part of it, and for each category that matches, the Asset will make completing the mission easier. Assets in regular empires are generally everyday people - a disgruntled bureaucrat, an ambitious criminal underling, or a sympathetic pop icon. In gestalt empires, they may be deviant drones that your operatives have found a way to utilize to their advantage, or they might be objects that they have taken control of - a damaged pheromone emitter, a deviant labor drone, a hacked coordination system, or a virus introduced into an engagement protocol.
Blorg. James Blorg. Hask'Endek here specializes in Subterfuge and Government related activities, making them especially effective when assigned to the Acquire Asset mission. It turns out that having a bureaucrat able to sift through government records to find other potential marks is incredibly helpful! If complications arise, having an expendable lackey around to take the fall for your operatives can also be attractive. While you may lure them into service with promises of support and glory, theyre really just pawns in your greater galactic schemes. Often, their true fate is to be "cleaned up" as a loose end to preserve the Spy Network's Infiltration Level after an Operation completes. That's it for this week. Next week I plan on going over some of the other, nastier Operations. redacted.png See you then!
[ 2021-01-21 13:55:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
-s- Attn: Spymaster Utra, daughter of Roba, Our operatives have provided information on the activities of the vile Paradoxians. Despite their attempts at secrecy, we have managed to acquire some intel. The images our agents have taken appear to be of crude prototypes that they are still refining, but we thought it best to pass this dispatch along now so you can better prepare for the future. Agent Tiny Sorbet signing off. - - Hello and happy new year! In Dev Diaries 193 and 194 we explored the mysteries of first contact, hidden information, and intelligence gathering through diplomatic means. It may come as a surprise to many, but sadly there are starfaring civilizations out there with whom peaceful co-existence and mutually beneficial diplomatic ties are simply not an option. Against these threats, it may prove useful to utilize the more intrigue-oriented members of your society, and turn to espionage. Espionage and covert operations are a frequently requested feature that seem to be natural extensions of the intel system that weve described in the recent dev diaries. With the obfuscation of knowledge, naturally there should be systems to acquire that information.
Envoys and Spy Networks
Envoys will have a new diplomatic task available to them called Build Spy Network. They will take their place as the Spymaster of a network of covert operatives and agents that they will grow in power over time. Needless to say, the other empire will not be informed of your envoy's new position.
Build Spy Network diplomatic action
Baby steps. While an envoy is managing a Spy Network as Spymaster, the Network will grow over time - quickly at first, but slower as the Network gains in strength. Networks are far faster to build in large, sprawling empires, and if the target empires Encryption rating is much stronger than the spying empires Decryption, growth may also slow to a crawl. (Machine Intelligences have a natural knack for Encryption and Decryption, while Hives and psionic empires tend to excel at Counter Espionage.) Unmanaged Spy Networks (those without an envoy directing them) pause all ongoing activities and rapidly decay. Spy Networks initially cap out at a maximum level of 50. Several things such as civics or edicts can increase it, and if you have acquired (disposable) Assets within the target empire they also provide a boost - each Asset increases the Spy Network cap in that empire by 5. Assets are useful pawns, hacked backdoors, deviant drones, or other resources that could come in useful to your Spy Network. An Asset could be a disgruntled Bureaucrat that's been passed over promotion one too many times, a faulty Pheromone Emitter that your operatives have found a way to manipulate, or even a Logistics System that you've hacked into. More details about the acquisition of Assets and their uses will be in a future diary.
Changes
Heres a non-comprehensive sample of some civics, ascension perks, and edicts that have been updated during this espionage pass. Several new Encryption and Decryption related technologies have also been added. (Numbers are still subject to change!)
Some civics lend themselves nicely to covert activities.
Others can modify Counter Espionage, making the lives of enemy Spy Networks easier or more difficult.
Tell us your secrets.
No, really.
More of the new Edicts.
Putting Your Spies to Work
Now that youve built up your Spy Network, what can you do with it? Back in Dev Diary 194 we had a redacted value shown in the Intel breakdown tooltip - Spy Network level is that third hidden value alongside Diplomatic Pacts and Trust.
No more redactions here. While your Spy Network passively provides intelligence, you can also have them be more active. Your Spymaster envoy can send agents out, using the Network's bandwidth ("Spy Power") to run Operations within the targeted empire while they stay safely at their base. Operations exist in the following major categories:
- Subterfuge - Information gathering and operations that improve the spy network itself
- Sabotage - Ruining things (physical or immaterial)
- Manipulation - Replacing the truth with your own improved version
- Provocations - Don't do these, they're bad
[ 2021-01-14 13:44:49 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Were approaching the end of 2020 and we in the Stellaris team wish you the happiest of holidays! This year has certainly been a challenging one for many reasons, but under the circumstances were still fortunate to be working in an industry that has been relatively untouched by world affairs. All we can do is be thankful for what we have, and try to help those around us.
Were also thankful for the many fans that support us and are excited for the things that we have in store for you all. Theres still a few months of development left, and starting next year our dev diaries will be showcasing the remaining features. I hope youll be as excited to read them as well be about talking about them!
While Federations was about cooperation and order, our next upcoming addition to Stellaris is sure to provide a different experience. The fate of the galaxy may be in your grappling appendages, and to what end will you guide it?
Although those hints may be subtle, what I can unveil is the topic of the dev diaries well be starting the new year with. Many of you have astutely noticed that we have been showing clear indications of Espionage being added to the game, and that is indeed what well be talking about in the beginning of 2021.
Work in progress. Game development is fun, and sometimes during development, unintentional circumstances can occur.
I wont reveal too much about Espionage yet, but I can say that it will tie heavily into Intel and information gathering, but also other things. Similar to how we work with a lot of other systems (like archaeology), we usually combine the new game system with fun and interesting content. We dont want a feature where you just perform an action and wait until you get a result we want there to be events and random occurrences along the way.
Starting in the new year well be talking about all of these new features, covering everything from spy networks, to operations, assets and how they tie into Intel. Were very excited to soon be able to share the progress our team has made.
A lot of teamwork goes into making new features for a game, and each profession contributes to different parts. Were currently looking for a lot of talent to add to our strength, so that we can keep improving Stellaris and making more new cool content. We have great ambitions for the future, and we need to bolster our ranks!
Were currently looking for:
Senior Producer - Do you want to help us run our game projects?
Senior Game Programmers - Do you want to help us implement cool new features in the game? Do you want to help us with performance, AI or is something else your speciality?
Mid-level Game Programmers - Do you want to help us implement cool new features in the game? Do you want to help us with performance, AI or is something else your speciality?
Lead Artists - Do you want to help us lead our artists and make sure we can deliver the right assets at the required quality?
Tech Artist - Do you want to be the interface between our artists and our programmers? Do you want to help us create the correct tools so that your colleagues have an easier time with their tasks?
Senior Concept Artists - Do you want to help us add more cool things to the game? We need more people to help us draw things like space dragons, cool new ships or JEFF.
Senior 3D Artist - Do you want to realize the concepts drawn by your colleagues, and perhaps build ships or megastructures?
If any of those roles sounds interesting and well-suited for you, or if you know someone who might be, please dont hesitate to apply!
Our next dev diary will be on January 14th, but until then: Happy Holidays and stay safe out there! Happy New Year, and lets make 2021 a great year!
[ 2020-12-17 14:02:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! Last week we started talking about some of the changes were making to establishing first contact, and as promised, today we will continue talking about how you can learn more about alien empires. All of the things we are talking about today is work in progress and may not accurately reflect the finished product. That said, we still want to hear your thoughts and read your feedback!
Background
It always felt like there was so much missing potential when it came to learning more about alien civilizations in the game. We didnt like that you had so much information as soon as you established communication with an alien empire all of their borders would be revealed, and the diplomatic window would reveal most of the other information. We aim to change a lot of that. We want alien civilizations to feel more mysterious and unknown. We want the experience of learning more about alien empires to be an equally important and fun aspect of exploration.
Fog of War
As we briefly showed last week, we are making some changes to fog of war, and what type of information you will be getting about other empires. You will no longer see all of the systems and borders occupied by the empire you have recently contacted, but it will now instead be tied to how much Intel you have. This really makes alien empires feel way more mysterious, which is something that we really like.
The information on the empire to the galactic south-east is very limited. We can see their homeworld and the borders explored by our science ship.
The galaxy as seen from the yellow empire in the top-right. There are a bunch of empires that we know very little about, and there are still more that are undiscovered.
Intel
Like mentioned above, our primary objective is to make alien empires feel more mysterious and unknown. We wanted to hide information and allow you to learn more about other empires as you gain more Intel on them. Our goal is to make the Intel game a part of the exploration aspect of Stellaris.
An alien empire recently established communications with us. Friends..? Lets take a look at how we have designed the Intel game to work. First off there is Intel, which is a value between 0 and 100. You have a current Intel value, and you have a target Intel value, up to which it can grow. You usually have an Intel floor, which is the lowest value it can be, depending on a couple of factors such as:
- Diplomatic Pacts (Research Agreements, Commercial Pacts etc.)
- Trust
- REDACTED (doesnt look like anything to you)
Depending on things like diplomatic pacts, trust or other things, your Intel will grow over time.
Intel Categories
Information is split between different Intel Categories, such as Government, Military, Diplomatic, Economic, Technology. Categories can have different Intel Levels as well, ranging from None to Full. The Intel categories and their levels are what determines what information you have access to. Here are some examples:
- Low Government Intel (Intel: 10) would reveal basic things like empire name, authority, ethics, capital location.
- Low Military Intel (Intel: 40) would reveal starbases and relative military power.
- Medium Government Intel (Intel: 40) would reveal civics and origin.
- Medium Diplomacy Intel (Intel: 50) would reveal the opinion breakdown and let us see which diplomatic pacts they have with other empires.
- The Intel you have on another empire heavily influences the Intel Categories, but it is not the only driving factor. It is also possible to have a higher Intel level in a certain category than what you would normally get from your level of Intel. One such example is Intel Reports, and well talk about some other examples in future dev diaries.
Intel Reports
Intel Reports allow you to gain more information in a certain category, on a timed basis. It would be, for example, possible to gain an Intel Report which lasts for 720 days and gives you a High level of Military Intel, whereas otherwise High Military Intel might require you to have 80 Intel on the empire.
Stale Intel
It is said that knowledge is power, and intel is a form of knowledge. Power usually fades, and so does Intel. It is possible to lose access to information that was previously accessible. In some cases, this information will now be displayed as stale.
Intel, now in the scent of working from home for months. The last information you had about the empire was that they were far weaker than you on many accounts, but perhaps they have strengthened their fleets by now? Stale Intel can also mean that you may no longer see if the borders for an empire change or not. ------- That's it for this week! Hopefully you've gained some Intel into how the game is changing for the upcoming expansion
[ 2020-12-03 12:48:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! This week we are going to talk about something new that weve been working on - namely improving first contact and extending the exploration aspects of the game. All of this is work in progress and may not accurately represent what the game will look like once all of this work is finished. A lot of UI is very much work in progress, so don't pay too much attention to icons or such.
Background
Exploration has always been one of the best parts of Stellaris, and it is perhaps what sets us apart from other games that follow similar themes. Looking back, Stellaris has mostly revolved around the physical exploration of space, discovering an ancient galaxy full of wonders. We believe that exploring and uncovering the galaxy is such an important and fun aspect of the game that we really want to dive deeper into those experiences. We intend to take the next steps by improving the means by which you can establish communication and make the process of learning more about alien civilizations a part of the exploration gameplay. In this dev diary we will be outlining some of the changes and additions that we are currently working on, so that you can get an idea of what to expect from our next big update.
First Contact
The first steps we are taking is that we are changing how first contact works. First contact is now a much more engaging process with interesting choices that are supported by great narrative. When you first have an alien encounter you are able to set a policy for what your approach will be. First Contact Protocols is a policy option that lets you dictate your stance when it comes to dealing with newly discovered alien civilizations. Each option has different effects that should suit different types of diplomacy.
Friends..?
First Contact Protocol Policy options.
First Contact Investigation
In order to establish communication with the alien contact, an Envoy will need to be assigned to the First Contact Investigation. The investigation will then be able to begin, and it will run through stages and will contain events similar to an archaeological dig site. The reason why we chose a system similar to archaeology is because its a great way of letting a process run over time in a way where it can also deliver some narrative along the way. The difficulty of the first contact investigation will be affected by things like how friendly the target is, or how difficult it is to translate their signals. Since First Contact now uses an Envoy, that also means that it no longer pauses Society Research, and it is possible to run multiple first contact investigations simultaneously as long as you have the Envoys required. (Envoys do still currently not have traits or levels, but it is something we are actively discussing.)
The events that you can get depend on the type of empire you are, and on the type of alien you are trying to contact. There are friendly/peaceful paths as well as ... less so. As a xenophobic empire with an aggressive first contact protocol it is possible to secure a couple of specimen for a closer look.
The choices you make during first contact can also have long-term effects on your relationship with the alien empire. Choose wisely and decide which trade-offs you are willing to make. Are you perhaps a materialistic and xenophobic empire that values scientific progress above all?
Stay on your side of the galaxy and all can be well.
Lets agree to disagree. That is all for this week! Next week well be showing you some new features that allow you to explore maps like the one posted here below.
[ 2020-11-26 12:42:41 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello! This week were going to look at some more changes we're planning, as well as a review of how some of the experiments mentioned in the last few dev diaries have evolved. Thank you for the massive amount of feedback in those threads.
Reduction in Pops
Due to the effects on performance and a desire to reduce the micromanagement burden in the mid to late game, some of the things weve been deeply looking into are different ways of dramatically reducing the number of pops in the galaxy. These experiments have generally revolved around modifying the growth (or assembly required) for pops as an empires population grows, with some variants trying a logistic pop growth (where growth follows an S-shaped curve as planets develop, based on a carrying capacity of a planet). These experiments have reduced the end date pop count to somewhere around one half of the old numbers with the expected performance improvements. Organic pops will follow a curve where they begin at standard population growth, increase growth as the approach a midpoint between population and the planetary carrying capacity, then slow down to zero as they reach the top of the curve. Pop Assembly, on the other hand, is generally slow but consistent. The biggest change is that producing a new pop no longer costs a static amount of pop growth - it increases as the empire population does. A significant reduction in pops has a cascade of major implications for the overall economy, production, and other gameplay effects. As such, these also require a pass on buildings, technologies, and even seemingly minor ripple effects like what the value should be for the trade value generated by pops. There will be a lot of patch notes. Most buildings have been standardized to now give 2 jobs per tier rather than the old 2/5/8 progression.
Just one example of many. Weve also changed a few buildings to have new or additional features, such as the Spawning Pool and Clone Vats, which have had their Pop Growth modifiers replaced with the new Organic Pop Assembly. This fills the same slot on the planet as Robotic Pop Assembly, so generally youll want to pick one or the other. (Clone Vats also picked up a food upkeep cost to represent simple materials to break down.)
Pops is Soylent Green! A few other jobs got minor perks added to them, like the Medical Workers from Gene Clinics making it a little easier to live on less hospitable worlds.
Doesn't normally produce exotic gas, this one happens to be a lithoid. And a few new techs have been added to help compensate for lost productivity. One tech line increases both the job production of a planet as well as job upkeep - those fewer pops are still capable of producing the work of more on a developed planet.
Ring Worlds
As part of the balance pass, Ring Worlds have been bumped up to 10 segments from 5, and the jobs per segment have been adjusted. Regular Empire Ring World Segments
The Shattered Ring origin now possesses a warning that it may be a Challenging Origin for Lithoids due to a scarcity of minerals, and now also applies the Ring World Habitability Preference to your pops. Were considering adding a similar warning for Hives selecting the origin, since the habitability preference change puts a serious crimp in their expansion.
Put a ring on it? Their starting blockers have also been adjusted to give a more balanced spread of jobs.
Ecumenopoleis
Like the Ring Worlds, these start with all building slots open. As mentioned before, you can now use the Arcology Project decision on a planet that has a mix of City and Industrial Districts. Regular Empire Ecumenpolis Arcologies Note: Empire has all technologies but no traditions active.
The ecumenopolis has a unique distinction of being able to have both the Factory and Foundry building lines on the same planet.
Habitats
The changes to Habitat modules are much smaller in scope, but heres the list of their districts. Regular Empire Habitat Districts
Void Dwellers have gotten a bit of attention as well with some tradition swaps for those that had minimal or no beneficial effects for them. Void Dweller Tradition Swaps
Replacing Public Works Division:
And for Void Dwellers with the Adaptability tree:
Interstellar Franchising and Imperious Architecture now also function for Habitats.
Updates to Dev Diary 190
Some of these updates may not be new to people following the forum threads, but it's easy to miss things so I figured we should go over them. Many people requested the ability to fully specialize their foundry and factory worlds. We've modified the Forge and Industrial World planet designations to shift one pop on each Industrial District to the appropriate job if possible.
We've also upgraded the Food Processing Center, Mineral Purification Hub, and Energy Nexus to provide an extra job to each of their associated resource production districts. (The Food Processing Center will also improve Hydroponics Farms.)
One of the suggestions made in the thread was to add a civic that increases unlocked Building Slots. Sounded like a great addition to Functional Architecture.
Functionality increased!
Updates to Dev Diary 191
Weve explored some additional options regarding the resettlement system we outlined in Dev Diary 191, and after trying a few things, and have settled on some extensive modifications to the system. All planets with sapient unemployed pops that are not locked down by migration controls will have a small chance every month of moving one to another planet within their empire that has jobs that they are willing and able to work, housing, and habitability of 40% or higher. This chance is increased if there are multiple unemployed pops that meet the criteria. The system now prefers to move higher strata pops first, so rulers and specialists will move before workers, and this system also functions for gestalt empires. It will not relocate non-sapient robots. It will generally prefer to move pops to the planets with the most free jobs. After some experimentation weve chosen to keep the Transit Hubs as Starbase Buildings that provide a system wide buff to the chance of auto-resettlement occurring. (Rather than being essential to have it occur in the first place.)
Doubles the chance the pops choose to resettle themselves. Greater Than Ourselves has been rewritten to also massively increase this chance when the edict is active, with a +200% bonus. We initially had these pops considering destinations available through Migration Pacts as well, but decided against keeping that since it introduced a new Migration Controls micromanagement element that we didnt find desirable. Weve also done a minor update to the Authority bonuses that seemed a little bit weak.
Democracies now have a bonus encouraging their pops to seek their dreams, and Dictatorships have a bit of an easier time holding things together when theyre a bit overstretched. Closing Thoughts One other little quality of life improvement that was just added is this filter on the colonization interface.
Thats probably long enough for today. Were looking forward to your feedback on these as well. Next week we'll talk about... [losing transmission]
[ 2020-11-19 12:47:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! We are finally ready to release 2.8.1 on all platforms. First of all, I'd like to thank all of you for the feedback that you have given us to help us make the best version of Stellaris yet. And secondly, with this release we are hoping to end the post-launch support for Necroids as we shift our focus to [redacted].
2.8.1 "BUTLER" PATCH NOTES
Balance * Added a define OVERCROWDING_ABSOLUTE_THRESHOLD_FOR_NO_GROWTH that sets the minimum number that overcrowding must be for a planet's population to stop growing, set it to 5. * Redid sector automation scripts and code with the following goals: ** Closed vital gaps in sectors' knowledge concerning the likes of nonstandard planet (habitat etc) districts and bureaucracy buildings. ** All sectors now know about all buildings, i.e. if you put an alloys foundry on a science sector, it will still know how to upgrade it (it will of course still favour research buildings). ** Made checking for whether building a certain building would cause resource shortages and whether there were pops ready to take the job more reliable by shifting them to hardcoded checks. ** The automation will no longer clear blockers before districts are blocked by them. Stability & Performance * Moved the calculations for attack radius to threaded code instead of serial. * Update trade routes every 7 days instead of every day. * Fixed a nasty slow down when owning many many many planets and opening the planet view * Fixed an OOS related to fleets. * Fixed an issue where loading would get stuck when trying to load a lot of mods. * Fixed being unable to load 2.7.2 saves in 2.7.2 made after installing Necroids. UI * Added debug tooltips to the fleet view header and rename button. * Experimental DX11 mode now supports Chinese, Polish and Russian AI * The AI will not try to build a megastructure if it's already building or upgrading one. * Fixed a case of the AI wanting to attack disabled starbases and getting stuck in a loop. * The economic AI will now take better account of the resources a district would provide when choosing whether to build one. * The AI will now check whether it would have any pops on the planet willing and able to take a job before building a building providing that job (i.e. Necrophages will not spam consumer goods buildings when there are no necrophage pops on the planet). * Made the contingency constructor choose better systems to build in, and fixed their getting stuck after a while. * Massively sped up all types of purging, with the crisis factions now purging 2 pops per month. * Various improvements to crisis military AI. * Fix issue with military AI ping-ponging fleets. * Fixed AI not changing fleet bombardment stances. * Crisis countries will now use Armageddon Bombardment. * Augmented the distance at which AI looks for targets on larger maps. * The Unbidden will no longer wait patiently to be allowed out of their initial system. * The AI will no longer sell the last pop of a planet. * Made the crisis worry less about ship health and more about taking over the galaxy. * The Necrophage AI will no longer build Houses of Apotheosis so as to make it less likely it'll run out of necrophytes. * AI considers "Take Point" fleet as objective when appropriate(*) * The AI is now drastically more likely to know to build shipyards and titan/colossus factories Modding * Added "ignores_sapience" flag to job types to say a job works for both sapients and presapients. Bugfixes * Corrected name for necroid titan engine effect so the effect spawns in the correct position. * Added missing undead army translations for Chinese. * Fixed a layering issue with Necroid Portrait 11. * Fixed a black face-tentacle on a Necroid Portrait to have color. * Fix Ships not reaching their assigned slots when there are too many ships * Evasive fleet now cancel order if the path to their targets contain hostiles * Made it so the positions of hostile forces are remembered while you're at war. * Fixed purging and assimilation not working on presapients * Setting a sector to Production focus now correctly updates the icon in the UI. * Necrophages with Glandular Acclimatisation will now make pops that suit the local planet, even if they have Necrophage pops that don't on the planet already. * Death Priest job upkeep raised to 3 Consumer Goods in addition to the baseline level for specialist workers. * Fixed the Pasharti Absorbers' default purge type being Displacement rather than Necropurging * Fixed a bug with a Necroid Battleship weapon slot. * Increased Necroid Corvette size and optimized some other textures. * Fixed leader clearing by right-clicking. * Fixed impossibility of swapping scientists between research areas. * Fixed the Death Cult sacrifice effects so that the counting of Mortal Initiates proceeds as intended. * The option to play as the Machine Uprising when that happens is now back.
Take Point AI Behavior Explained
Both countries must have the "follow allies" flag, or the leading country has to be human if both countries are in a war: - Vassals will follow their Overlords. - If they're in the same war: - - The AI will follow the war leader if they're in a defensive war. - - The AI will also follow a stronger ally if they're close enough. - - They'll follow a human player if they're not human. - If the AI is fighting the Crisis. - - If they're in a federation, they'll follow the federation leader (or a human player). - - If the AI isn't under attack by the crisis they'll follow someone who is. - - They'll follow a human who is also fighting the Crisis. We hope you enjoy this patch and we appreciate your continued support :) If you want to play crossplay multiplayer with your friends on non-steam platforms you can opt into the "crossplay" branch in Steam by right clicking on Stellaris in library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version.
[ 2020-11-19 10:37:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! As you may know we have a beta patch available on Steam on the "Stellaris_test" branch and we are happy to announce that we've updated it with some further changes. There's still at least one more fix regarding Save games and rollbacks we want to get in, however we thought it best to give you the additional fixes we have today while we continue with the proper work processes that are required to get 2.8.1 out on all platforms in its final form! The additional fixes are highlighted in the changelog. Two fixes in particular of note, dx11 should now properly work with all languages (Check the original release thread to see how to enable it). We've also updated the AI behavior around "Take Point", we've added an explanation under the changelogs to explain how the AI reacts to the player using the "Take Point" command.
2.8.1 "BUTLER" PATCH NOTES
VERSION 2.8.1
Balance * Added a define OVERCROWDING_ABSOLUTE_THRESHOLD_FOR_NO_GROWTH that sets the minimum number that overcrowding must be for a planet's population to stop growing, set it to 5. * Redid sector automation scripts and code with the following goals: ** Closed vital gaps in sectors' knowledge concerning the likes of nonstandard planet (habitat etc) districts and bureaucracy buildings. ** All sectors now know about all buildings, i.e. if you put an alloys foundry on a science sector, it will still know how to upgrade it (it will of course still favour research buildings). ** Made checking for whether building a certain building would cause resource shortages and whether there were pops ready to take the job more reliable by shifting them to hardcoded checks. ** The automation will no longer clear blockers before districts are blocked by them. Stability & Performance * Moved the calculations for attack radius to threaded code instead of serial. * Update trade routes every 7 days instead of every day. * Fixed a nasty slow down when owning many many many planets and opening the planet view * Fixed an OOS related to fleets. * Fixed an issue where loading would get stuck when trying to load a lot of mods. UI * Added debug tooltips to the fleet view header and rename button. * Experimental DX11 mode now supports Chinese, Polish and Russian AI * The AI will not try to build a megastructure if it's already building or upgrading one. * Fixed a case of the AI wanting to attack disabled starbases and getting stuck in a loop. * The economic AI will now take better account of the resources a district would provide when choosing whether to build one. * The AI will now check whether it would have any pops on the planet willing and able to take a job before building a building providing that job (i.e. Necrophages will not spam consumer goods buildings when there are no necrophage pops on the planet). * Made the contingency constructor choose better systems to build in, and fixed their getting stuck after a while. * Massively sped up all types of purging, with the crisis factions now purging 2 pops per month. * Various improvements to crisis military AI. * Fix issue with military AI ping-ponging fleets. * Fixed AI not changing fleet bombardment stances. * Crisis countries will now use Armageddon Bombardment. * Augmented the distance at which AI looks for targets on larger maps. * The Unbidden will no longer wait patiently to be allowed out of their initial system. * The AI will no longer sell the last pop of a planet. * Made the crisis worry less about ship health and more about taking over the galaxy. * The Necrophage AI will no longer build Houses of Apotheosis so as to make it less likely it'll run out of necrophytes. * AI considers "Take Point" fleet as objective when appropriate(*) * The AI is now drastically more likely to know to build shipyards and titan/colossus factories Modding * Added "ignores_sapience" flag to job types to say a job works for both sapients and presapients. Bugfixes * Corrected name for necroid titan engine effect so the effect spawns in the correct position. * Added missing undead army translations for Chinese. * Fixed a layering issue with Necroid Portrait 11. * Fixed a black face-tentacle on a Necroid Portrait to have color. * Fix Ships not reaching their assigned slots when there are too many ships * Evasive fleet now cancel order if the path to their targets contain hostiles * Made it so the positions of hostile forces are remembered while you're at war. * Fixed purging and assimilation not working on presapients * Setting a sector to Production focus now correctly updates the icon in the UI. * Necrophages with Glandular Acclimatisation will now make pops that suit the local planet, even if they have Necrophage pops that don't on the planet already. * Death Priest job upkeep raised to 3 Consumer Goods in addition to the baseline level for specialist workers. * Fixed the Pasharti Absorbers' default purge type being Displacement rather than Necropurging * Fixed a bug with a Necroid Battleship weapon slot. * Increased Necroid Corvette size and optimized some other textures. * Fixed leader clearing by right-clicking. * Fixed impossibility of swapping scientists between research areas. * Fixed the Death Cult sacrifice effects so that the counting of Mortal Initiates proceeds as intended. * The option to play as the Machine Uprising when that happens is now back.
TAKE POINT AI BEHAVIOR EXPLAINED
Both countries must have the "follow allies" flag, or the leading country has to be human if both countries are in a war: - Vassals will follow their Overlords. - If they're in the same war: - - The AI will follow the war leader if they're in a defensive war. - - The AI will also follow a stronger ally if they're close enough. - - They'll follow a human player if they're not human. - If the AI is fighting the Crisis. - - If they're in a federation, they'll follow the federation leader (or a human player). - - If the AI isn't under attack by the crisis they'll follow someone who is. - - They'll follow a human who is also fighting the Crisis. We hope you'll enjoy these additional fixes and that it shows that we are indeed listening to your feedback :D Please note that 2.8.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.
[ 2020-11-13 13:05:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all! As mentioned last week, our plan for today is to go over some changes to automated colony management and pop resettlement. Major goals here were to reduce the micromanagement burden in the mid to late game when individual decisions are less oppressive, and to significantly decrease the need to manually move pops at all. As with the economic changes we were discussing before, a lot of this is still a work in progress to varying degrees.
Automated Colony Management
Some sector management improvements have already been made in the 2.8.1 test branch (you can experiment and leave feedback on it by following the instructions in this thread), but here well be focusing on planetary designations and individual planet automation. A major pass has been done on automated colony management to improve its effectiveness. After manually setting a colony designation and turning on automated colony management, our intent is for the colony to develop into something you would reasonably expect if you were building it on your own. It should build districts, clear deposits as necessary, and upgrade buildings when there is a need for it. Planet automation will upgrade capital buildings whenever possible (gotta unlock those building slots!), and will otherwise generally try to build or upgrade from its list if there are less than 3 open jobs. Weve erred a bit on the side of caution, so it is currently extremely opposed to running deficits. It may require manual intervention if, for example, your energy credits per month are negative, but we figured it was better to leave those sorts of risky economic decisions in the players hands. If you want to check out the Foundry Automation (Hive) Script, check it out in the forum post here This script will attempt to build a forge world for a hive empire. If there are less than 3 free jobs and there is nothing currently in the build queue, it will check to see if there is anything that it can build. Planetary automation has a tendency to favor districts over buildings, but will construct buildings if there are 1.5 times as many districts already built than there are buildings. (This ratio is able to be set in 00_defines.txt as COLONY_AUTOMATION_DISTRICT_PREFERENCE.) When selecting a building, it will move down the list until it finds something that it is capable of building and meets the scripted restrictions. The buildings upkeep is always taken into consideration. The scripted _affordable checks are to estimate whether you can afford the jobs it creates as well. Blockers are fairly low priority for planetary automation, and will only be cleared if they are blocking a district slot that it actively wants to construct, or if there are no free district slots remaining. (Thus it will eventually clear all those random blockers once the rest of the planet is finished.) You can, of course, intervene and clear those Sprawling Slums or sleepy Lithoids earlier. Buildings (other than the capital) will be upgraded if there are no other things that it wants to build right now, it can upgrade without causing resource deficits, and there are pops available that would want to work there. (Either because theyre unemployed or they prefer it to their current jobs.) The scripts will attempt to handle various issues that may crop up on a planet such as low amenities, high crime, or failure to build buildings dedicated to extra-dimensional beings that love you and just want to be loved in return. These are tucked away in 00_crisis_exceptions.txt. If you want to check out the Amenity Crisis Exception (Regular Empire) Script, check it out in the forum post here This "exception" will intervene if a planets amenities are -5 or below, and its either not an ecumenopolis or if it is an ecumenopolis, its either totally full or youre running low on exotic gases. Based on your ethics and authority, itll pick one of the amenity buildings to add to the queue. A few jobs, buildings, and planet designations have gotten a bit of a touch-up during this pass. Notable examples of designations include the Urban World, which now has a Trade Value bonus, and the Colony, which is now intended to satisfy the needs of a newly colonized world rather than provide pop growth bonuses.
Urban and Colony Designations The old Colony bonus was changed because it was a bit problematic - growth bonuses made it somewhat stronger than many other more specialized bonuses. Wed greatly prefer if you could flag that newly settled Mining World as such right away and immediately turn on automation, rather than it being optimal to manually develop the world until it reached 5 pops and no longer qualified for Colony. Due to its inherent terror of deficits, the automation scripts tend to be a little bit more conservative than players may be, but Ive personally enjoyed the dramatically reduced mental burden my mid to late game colonies require. Its also convenient that several designations (such as Forge, Factory, Tech, and Urban) will build out colonies that qualify for the Arcology Project decision. In our dev multiplayer games, I've been making a point of using colony automation as much as possible in order to [strike]give everyone else a chance[/strike] get a feel for what it's doing. (Except my capital. I'll admit that I do manually build that so I can take care of sudden shifts in priority.) If you're using planetary automation but it doesn't seem to be doing anything, the three most common things to check are:
- Is the colony in a Sector? Colonies have to be in a (non-Frontier) Sector in order to use either sector or planetary automation.
- Am I running an energy deficit? Most districts and buildings have energy upkeep. While it's possible for the district or building to theoretically produce enough energy to overcome that and help work off the current deficit, the automation scripts are as light as possible and without deeper analysis can't assume that pops moving into those jobs wouldn't worsen the shortage. Manual intervention is necessary to dig out of an energy crunch.
- Do I have resources in the automation pool for it to use? There's a notification for this, but if the pool is running low it might not be able to afford whatever it is it wants to build. Remember, you can hold Ctrl to change the units moved from hundreds to thousands.
Save mouse-clicks, use Ctrl.
Resettlement
Manual resettlement and the mitigation of unemployment is a huge burden in mid to late game Stellaris. It is generally our belief that manual resettlement should be an extremely rare occurrence, not something done expected to be done as part of the core game loop. When you must, it should be a simple process, but it should be an unusual act. One quality of life change weve made is to filter Unemployed pops up to the top, and highlighted them. The pops underneath are then sorted from lowest stratum to highest.
You're unlikely to see this specific scenario unless you intentionally create unemployment problems by turning off jobs in every pop strata. We've also adjusted resettlement costs, and added an Influence cost to many pop types. These influence costs are nominal for worker tier pops, but get fairly expensive when you're forcing Rulers to move.
Slave Resettlement and Worker/Drone/Bio-Trophy Resettlement
Specialist Resettlement and Ruler Resettlement Slaves and unintelligent robots can still be moved without expending Influence, and certain civics permit you to waive these Influence costs.
Hey wait, what's that about colony abandonment? Despite their best efforts the Servitors still haven't found a good way to get their Bio-Trophies to shift their consciousness to a different planet using OTA updates, so you still have to pay for them. Manually resettling the last pop off a colony you own carries an additional influence surcharge in our dev builds. There will very likely be an exception made for Doomed planets and Holy Worlds that are risking initiating a war with a Fallen Empire. A planetary decision to abandon a recently conquered planet is under consideration, though it'll likely use displacement purging to do so. (With the diplomatic penalties associated with it.)
But we just finished building it! With Federations, we introduced a galactic resolution in the Greater Good line that provided limited automated resettlement called Greater Than Ourselves. As noted by some, that was partially intended as a means to allow Egalitarian leaning empires a way of handling resettlement without forcing it on their pops. There have been many requests to make that core game functionality, but weve been somewhat wary of doing so without some restrictions. We've come up with a way for every empire to have easier access to a similar effect. The following new Starbase Building will handle it, unlocked by the Hyperlane Breach Points tech. (The Hyperlane Registrar has moved to Interstellar Economics.)
They like to move it.
The tooltip effect is a bit of a mouthful. The Transit Hub will operate as a limited variant of Greater Than Ourselves, moving unemployed low strata pops between planets that are in systems with Transit Hubs. (This will allow movement within a system as well, for example if you have a bunch of habitats in a single system.) We're investigating ways to expand the scope of pops it's willing to move - the original Worker limitation was put into place because while a Worker could promote themselves to fill any free job, a Slave or Specialist might find themselves restricted from the free job on the new planet. We're currently experimenting with a more robust variant - if it works out without performance concerns, the Transit Hub will prioritize high strata unemployment and then move down the ranks. Building out the Transit network does function best when you have a developed starbase above most of your colonies since it will only move pops between nodes on the network. Tangentially related, we've also cut demotion time in half across the board, and made some changes to give each Authority type a unique bonus.
Yes, Shared Burdens pops demote pretty much instantly. We have some other experimental changes going on that significantly reduce the number of unemployed pops in the late game but we're not ready to talk about them yet. The empire type that perhaps faced the most obnoxious burden of frequent manual resettlement were Terravores, the Lithoid Devouring Swarms. When devouring planets, they occasionally created pops on the consumption world. As a quality of life improvement, when theyve finished the planet off we now resettle them back to the capital. (Since gestalts can also use the Transit Hub, I highly recommend that Terravores build one in their main system to send those drones someplace where they can be of use.) Oh, and we also clear that pesky red habitability planet marker from completely consumed planets that was unnecessarily cluttering your map.
HP/MP restored! ...But you're still hungry. As a reminder, we have an ongoing feedback thread related to AI improvements we have in beta on the stellaris_test branch. We'd love to get more people on it and telling us what they think about them. (Please note that 2.8.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.) Next week we plan on going through some more of the remaining economic balance changes. See you then!
[ 2020-11-12 13:25:26 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone! Way back in Dev Diary 152, we discussed some planetary changes that we experimented with during summer 2019. At the time, we decided that while we learned a lot from the experiment, they required significant additional refinement before being something we wanted to incorporate into Stellaris. Summer 2020 gave us the additional time we needed to revive these (and some other) experiments. Our primary objectives were to reduce the mid to late game micromanagement burden and provide quality of life improvements, including generally making the prebuilding of planets more viable, making planetary automation reliable enough to be trusted in the mid to late game, and making dealing with unemployment and pops easier. Well be talking about these subjects in multiple dev diaries over the next couple of months.
Industrial Districts
Azure Chalice is er, was... a lovely place. The planet view has shifted things around a bit and now supports the display of up to six district types. Most planets will have five district types available. This extra real estate could also be of special interest to modders. The new brownish-orange district next to the City District is the revived Industrial District. Industrial Districts are treated as urban districts (and as such are not limited by planetary features), but rather than the Laborers that split their output from the original experiment, weve decided to have the districts provide regular empires one Artisan and one Metallurgist job. Gestalts have either two Foundry Drones or Fabricators as appropriate.
Work, work, work. Factories and Foundries will still exist but are now planet unique, with the first tier building adding 2 jobs to the planet just like the old versions. The upgraded versions, however, will now add either 1 or 2 jobs of the appropriate type to each Industrial District on the planet. Ecumenopoli will retain their specialized districts, but can be boosted by the Foundry or Factory buildings. The number of jobs per district on ecumenopoli have been adjusted somewhat as part of an overall economic balance pass. Since Industrial Districts are considered urban, a planet with a mix of City and Industrial Districts can be paved over and turned into an Ecumenopolis using the Arcology Project decision. Since districts are now much more critical to the development of your civilization, the average size of homeworlds has been increased by 2, and as an additional side effect, the Mastery of Nature Ascension Perk may also become a bit more desirable.
Building Slots
Im sure youve already noticed from the above screenshot, Building Slots no longer list population counts. Instead of relying on population, they're opened up by increasing the infrastructure of the planet. This is generally done by building City Districts (or their equivalent) or by upgrading the colony's Capital building. As a pleasant side effect of this, your buildings will no longer get ruined when a pop gets resettled, ritually killed, or eaten by mutants.
Build up that infrastructure. Two new technologies that unlock additional Building Slots have also been added, Ceramo-Metal Infrastructure and Durasteel Infrastructure. They represent the civilian adoption of military technology, and as such require some government techs and the associated armor technologies. The Adaptability tradition tree, for those that have it, still has a tech that grants a Building Slot as well. As specialized and advanced worlds, Ecumenopoli, Ring Worlds, Hive Worlds, and Machine Worlds start with all of their building slots unlocked. Habitats are intended to feel a bit cramped, so while Habitation Modules do not open up Building Slots, the Voidborne Ascension Perk will continue to grant two Building Slots to those that choose to embrace living in space. The MegaCorps out there may ask but what about our Branch Offices? - weve got you covered.
Insider Trading. Institutionalized corruption exploited by the upper classes, or just greasing the wheels of trade? Branch Offices will tie their slots to the level of the colonys capital building. For example, a Planetary Administration building will grant one Branch Office Building Slot, a Planetary Capital will grant two, and a System Capital-Complex would grant three. If the target empire has the Insider Trading tradition, youll have one extra Branch Office Building Slot. (This may grant you a Branch Office building even on newly colonized worlds, if your business plan expects it to be profitable.)
But Why?
By decoupling the building unlocks from population growth, it makes it much easier to prebuild a planet to varying degrees. It removes some of the tedium of waiting for that last pop to finish growing before a slot unlocks, as well as the negative experience that occurred when a critical pop moved or died right at the wrong time. This change went through many iterations - in one of them the rural and industrial districts added "fractional" slots, in another the capital buildings gave more slots at each upgrade. The combination of having both City Districts and the Capital Building contributing to the slots, along with the additional techs, finally felt right. It's nice when even a newly founded Colony possesses at least one open building slot since it lets you immediately begin construction of a Spawning Pool or other high value building right away. Moving the essential secondary resources of Consumer Goods and Alloys to districts frees up the building slots a little bit and creates a greater differentiation between heavily urbanized or industrial planets and resource generating colonies. Qualitatively we also felt that it "feels nice" to be getting more of your physical resources from the district level, leaving the Building Slots for more unique and specialized needs. Both of these changes also happen to make some planetary automation decisions a little easier - your Tech Worlds should clearly build a mix of City and Industrial districts, for instance, to make room for Research Labs as well as to provide the Consumer Goods needed to pay for them. We do recognize that it may be difficult - or even impossible - to unlock all Building Slots on a planet that has not been urbanized, but those resource generating planets often do not have quite as strong a need for a large number of buildings. Ideally in the mid to late game you could colonize a planet, set the colony designation you want for the planet, turn on automation, and reasonably expect the planet to be in decent shape - and doing what you told it to - the next time you look at it. (In the early game it's certainly possible, but your empire's economy may not be stable enough to support dedicated worlds and your colonies may be better off with direct caretaking.) We have a few other experiments that are still ongoing that affect the relationship between urbanized vs. less developed planets that are not entirely conclusive yet. If they prove out we'll discuss them later on in this series of diaries. Our current plan for next week's diary is to talk more about the automated colony management overhaul as well as the automatic and manual resettlement of pops. As a reminder, we have an ongoing feedback thread related to AI improvements we have in beta on the stellaris_test branch. We'd love to get more people on it and telling us what they think about them. (Please note that 2.8.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.) Thanks!
[ 2020-11-05 13:53:42 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
We are proud to announce that the Necroids Species Pack is now live!
We are super proud of this release and we are excited to see what kind of spOooOOky Empires you all will create with this new addition to Stellaris!
Get your copy of the Necroids Species Pack here!
In addition, we will also have a Halloween themed multiplayer stream this weekend (in the true undead spirit of the Necroids Species Pack) on https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive!
Halloween Multiplayer Stream Schedule
Saturday October 31st 5pm CET (4pm UK, 12pm EDT 9am PDT)
Sunday November 1st 5pm CET (4pm UK, 11am ET, 8am PT)
Stay safe out there and have a Happy Halloween!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6ON871QXrY&feature=emb_title
[ 2020-10-29 17:32:34 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
The 2.8.0 'Butler' patch should now be live on all platforms!
We are super proud of this release and we are excited to see what kind of spOooOOky Empires you all will create with the Necroids Species Pack!
We have also included quite a few bugfixes and QOL improvements that we think everyone will enjoy :)
For those of you that read Last weeks Dev Diary, you might've noticed that we mentioned that we've been working on some more stuff that couldn't make it into the main release and that we would release as a 'Beta Patch' sometime in the future. Well I'm glad to announce that that time is the same time as 2.8.0 :D. You can check out the changelog for 2.8.1 [checksum 9dc4] below! (The patch currently says 2.8.0, but just verify the checksum and you should have it!)
The 2.8.1 Beta Patch is available on Steam only, as this is the only platform that supports separate branches. Once we release it live as the default patch, all platforms will receive the update at the same time!
With the release of 2.8.0, we are also enabling dx11 support which should boost loading times and performance in some cases. However, please note that we're only enabling this as an opt-in solution for now, as it still is in an experimental stage! Steam users can use the launch command options as mentioned in the changelog, but for MS Store users you need to follow these steps:
1. Right click on your desktop and select New/Shortcut
2. Set the location of the item to (assuming your Windows folder is on C:\):
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C start shell:AppsFolder\ParadoxInteractive.Stellaris-MicrosoftStoreEdition_zfnrdv2de78ny!App -dx11
3. Click Next, choose a name for the shortcut and click Finish
4. Start Stellaris using the shortcut
Final note about dx11, it currently does not support languages that uses special fonts (Polish, Russian, and Chinese). We're working hard to figure out what's causing the issue!
Save games shouldn't be adversely affected by the switch from 2.7.2 to 2.8.0, but just in case you do encounter issues, you can roll back to a prior version via right click on Stellaris in library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version.
Please note that 2.8.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.
If you want to play crossplay multiplayer with your friends on non-steam platforms you can opt into the "crossplay" branch in Steam in the same way as above.
2.8.0 "Butler" Patch Notes
# Necroids Species Pack Features
* Added a new Necroid pre-scripted Empire. * Added a new Phenotype with 16 new portraits (15 normal + 1 robot) of spooky scary Jeffoids Necroids. * Added a new City Set and room backdrop for Necroids. * Added a new dark and eerie Ship set. * Added a new Advisor Voice. * Added three new Civics: Death Cult, Reanimated Armies and Memorialist. * Added Necrophage, a new Origin.
2.8.0 "Butler" Features
* Added new Gestalt Governor Leader Traits: Amplifier and Mindfulness - both increase Administrative Capacity in relevant Pop Jobs. * Systems spawned during the game (e.g. precursor ones) will now usually have two hyperlanes instead of one. * Added a new experimental DirectX11 support launch command (-dx11).
Balance
* Gestalt empires can no longer build the Hyperlane Registrar starbase building as they have no use for it. * The Oracle's admin bonus now grants +10% more admin cap instead of just +20. * Observation Post Indoctrination events now have a 540 day cooldown before they can fire again. * Terraforming Candidate is now a bit more common in the early game. * Terminal Orbit anomaly's reward has been buffed slightly.
Stability & Performance
* Greatly improved startup and load times. * Optimised the refugees system to perform fewer duplicate checks. * Fixed an OOS related to armies created from Pops. * Fixed an OOS happening if someone is hotjoining while a country is marked for destruction. * Fixed an OOS with planet modifiers related to species crossbreeding. * Fixed an OOS with Federation Fleet Capacity. * Fixed a source of false positive OOS. * Fixed a CTD when transferring a save file during hotjoin. * Fixed a CTD that might happen when the outliner is updating certain elements when borders are updating. * Fixed a CTD when planets are removed and have active construction. * Fix CTD in Colonize window after dismantling shipyard. * Disabled AlienFX/LightFX since it has been reported to have issues and might cause a CTD/freeze when starting the game (at 30% loading). * Added a "hardoos" option that adds extra checksums to make it easier to catch causes for OOS. * Fixed an OOS when you find a precursor civ. event and an observer is present at game start * Tick time optimization (more efficient parallelisation (game go vroom vroom)).
UI
* Fixed some Settings UIs having overrunning text in some non-english languages. * Fixed overlapping text in Empire Modifiers tab in some non-english languages. * The Curators' "goodbye" option is now always placed at the bottom of the option list. * Envoys can't be reassigned to the same location. * You can now only resettle your primary species away from planets with culture shock.
AI
* The AI is more willing to lower federation centralization if they are the federation president. They now care if Cohesion and Monthly Cohesion are negative. * Crisis AI will now be more likely to seek honorable alternatives to doomstacks (i.e. it will split its fleet up a bit more). * AI will now refill starbase modules and buildings if they are destroyed. * AI now handles FTL inhibitors better, new fleets will now try to assign each fleet to the closest most valuable objective. * AI should now handle Colossi correctly again. Fear will keep the local systems in line. * AI empires with the Void Dwellers origin are now more likely to choose the Voidborne ascension perk. * AI in Mercantile stance is now less likely to close borders. * AI now builds branch offices where it can rather than trying again and again to go on a world where there's already a branch office. * Fleet AI should not abort orders for defensive fleets like merging. * Fixed Fleet AI getting stuck in a regroup loop if some fleets cannot reach the system for regrouping. * Make sure AI fleets stop when issued orders to merge.
Modding
* You can now use [ ] localisation commands in building descriptions. * Added trigger num_assigned_jobs = { job =
Bugfixes
* Fixed so that Zroni Precursor Arc Sites cannot be "hijacked" by another Empire. * Multiple Curator Scientist cannot be purchased any longer. * Added checks to see if the host has the appropriate DLCs for the slave market-oriented Resolutions. * Added missing Loc when proposal for forming Federations failed. * Fixed leviathans.1018 tooltip not showing actual results of the event. * The UNE now spawns as intended when playing as the Commonwealth of Man. * Fixed missing localisation in event The Oracle. * Slave Market Resolutions are now properly locked without Megacorp DLC. * Restoring megastructures will now only cause the rubble from their ruined variants to be cleared, rather than all ambient objects in the system (including system effects e.g. nebulas...) * Droids can now take Colonist jobs. * Subjects can no longer create vassals. * Pox Bombardment no longer kills machine units. * Fixed a case where the Slave Riots event could happen twice on the same day. * Fixed being able to build from (mega) shipyards that are not owned. * Added missing localisation keys for resolution_passed_diplomatic_weight and resolution_failed_diplomatic_weight empire modifiers. * Hid Zroni and Shoulders of Giants arc sites from countries ineligible for completing them (thus hiding unlocalised anti-stealing flags). * Added missing descriptions to Evermore planetary modifiers. * The AI attitude of country A to B now depends on A's opinion of B rather than B's of A. This fixes Fallen Empires never declaring war. * Surveyor relic can no longer find new resource deposits on Ring Worlds or Habitats. * The Floating Value event text no longer mixes up the planet and ship names. * Corrected Russian translation of Galactic Contender ascension perk. * Fixed minor localization issue in the Senate Floor tutorial window. * Changes to a progress-tracking variable in Joint Operation: Genius Caeli are now hidden from the arc site panel. * Fixed various typos and duplications in the species name files. * A Quiet Stroll event now has different text for Synthetic empires. * Tree of Life deposits are now properly cleared when the planet changes owner. * Shielded Planet special projects now use the correct planet name. * Removed duplications in Tiyanki ship names. * System graphical effects are now removed when the final Contingency planet is destroyed. * VLUUR's space storm will no longer manifest in nebula systems. * Fixed minor tooltip issue in Atomic Countdown event. * Shortened and rewrote overlapping Vault of Acquisitions technology description. * Fixed completed construction items for reinforcements not being removed properly from the fleet manager. * Fixed research costs for Special Projects "Investigate the Loop Temple" and "Study the Messenger connection". * The correct event description should now always be shown in Finding the Truth. * Adjusted the tooltips for the Improve and Harm Relations diplomatic actions. * Observation Posts are now cleared if all primitives have been killed by orbital bombardment. * Removed duplicate entry in Alpha Hub technology. * Mining Drones no longer display the Rare Crystal icon in the Jobs interface. * Changed Miner and Technician building icons to be more consistent with other jobs. * Fixed issue where some Spiritualist responses weren't always displayed in first contact situations. * Removed duplicate cohesion effect from tooltip in federation fleet contribution laws. * Fixed transparency on room backgrounds from Federations. * Gestalts can no longer get the debris_gasgiant_category_temp anomaly at all - which is as it should be. * Unity should now always spawn as a continental planet when playing the UNE. * Fixed a bug where Star-Crossed Lovers could take refuge in the Mutaagan Trading Guild. * Gestalts that conquer a regular empire's starbase will no longer have Trading Hubs and Offworld Trading Companies there. * Fixed some cases of species growing on planets disappearing and reappearing every other month. * Fixed Species rights showing as in breach of galactic law when theyre not. * You can no longer get random tomb world events on tomb worlds created through armageddon bombardment and other similar causes. Also, you can now only get each of them once. * Event Primordial Soup no longer wrongly assumes that Terminator machines think organic life worthy of interest. * Space fauna resolutions can no longer be proposed if they're already active. * Made sure clearing the blocker creates the correct species. * Added in breach icons and warnings in confirm dialog for policies that would cause breach of galactic law. * Fixed a case where the sector AI would spam luxury residences to deal with low amenities if there aren't workers available to work as Entertainers. * Fixed a bug where special projects to investigate space fauna would sometimes lose the targets they were meant to investigate, become "Investigate
2.8.1 "Butler" Patch Notes
Balance
* Added a define OVERCROWDING_ABSOLUTE_THRESHOLD_FOR_NO_GROWTH that sets the minimum number that overcrowding must be for a planet's population to stop growing, set it to 5. * Redid sector automation scripts and code with the following goals: ** Closed vital gaps in sectors' knowledge concerning the likes of nonstandard planet (habitat etc) districts and bureaucracy buildings. ** All sectors now know about all buildings, i.e. if you put an alloys foundry on a science sector, it will still know how to upgrade it (it will of course still favour research buildings). ** Made checking for whether building a certain building would cause resource shortages and whether there were pops ready to take the job more reliable by shifting them to hardcoded checks. ** The automation will no longer clear blockers before districts are blocked by them.
Stability & Performance
* Moved the calculations for attack radius to threaded code instead of serial. * Update trade routes every 7 days instead of every day.
UI
* Added debug tooltips to the fleet view header and rename button.
AI
* The AI will not try to build a megastructure if it's already building or upgrading one. * Fixed a case of the AI wanting to attack disabled starbases and getting stuck in a loop. * The economic AI will now take better account of the resources a district would provide when choosing whether to build one. * The AI will now check whether it would have any pops on the planet willing and able to take a job before building a building providing that job (i.e. Necrophages will not spam consumer goods buildings when there are no necrophage pops on the planet). * Made the contingency constructor choose better systems to build in, and fixed their getting stuck after a while. * Massively sped up all types of purging, with the crisis factions now purging 2 pops per month. * Various improvements to crisis military AI. * Fix issue with military AI ping-ponging fleets. * Fixed AI not changing fleet bombardment stances. * Crisis countries will now use Armageddon Bombardment. * Augmented the distance at which AI looks for targets on larger maps. * The Unbidden will no longer wait patiently to be allowed out of their initial system. * The AI will no longer sell the last pop of a planet. * Made the crisis worry less about ship health and more about taking over the galaxy. * The Necrophage AI will no longer build Houses of Apotheosis so as to make it less likely it'll run out of necrophytes.
Modding
* Added "ignores_sapience" flag to job types to say a job works for both sapients and presapients.
Bugfixes
* Corrected name for necroid titan engine effect so the effect spawns in the correct position. * Added missing undead army translations for Chinese. * Fixed a layering issue with Necroid Portrait 11. * Fixed a black face-tentacle on a Necroid Portrait to have color. * Fix Ships not reaching their assigned slots when there are too many ships * Evasive fleet now cancel order if the path to their targets contain hostiles * Made it so the positions of hostile forces are remembered while you're at war. * Fixed purging and assimilation not working on presapients * Setting a sector to Production focus now correctly updates the icon in the UI. * Necrophages with Glandular Acclimatisation will now make pops that suit the local planet, even if they have Necrophage pops that don't on the planet already. Stay safe out there and have a Happy Halloween! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6ON871QXrY&feature=emb_title
[ 2020-10-29 17:13:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! We are rapidly approaching the release of Necroids, the next species pack coming for Stellaris. Yesterday we announced that Necroids will be released next week on Thursday the 29th of October. Necroids will be released together with the 2.8 Butler Update. As we promised next week, here's the full list of the patch notes.
PATCH NOTES VERSION 2.8.0
Necroids Species Pack Features
* Added a new Necroid pre-scripted Empire. * Added a new Phenotype with 16 new portraits (15 normal + 1 robot) of spooky scary Jeffoids Necroids. * Added a new City Set and room backdrop for Necroids. * Added a new dark and eerie Ship set. * Added a new Advisor Voice. * Added three new Civics: Death Cult, Reanimated Armies and Memorialist. * Added Necrophage, a new Origin.
2.8.0 "Butler" Features
* Added new Gestalt Governor Leader Traits: Amplifier and Mindfulness - both increase Administrative Capacity in relevant Pop Jobs. * Systems spawned during the game (e.g. precursor ones) will now usually have two hyperlanes instead of one. * Added a new experimental DirectX11 support launch command (-dx11).
Balance
* Gestalt empires can no longer build the Hyperlane Registrar starbase building as they have no use for it. * The Oracle's admin bonus now grants +10% more admin cap instead of just +20. * Observation Post Indoctrination events now have a 540 day cooldown before they can fire again. * Terraforming Candidate is now a bit more common in the early game. * Terminal Orbit anomaly's reward has been buffed slightly.
Stability & Performance
* Greatly improved startup and load times. * Optimised the refugees system to perform fewer duplicate checks. * Fixed an OOS related to armies created from Pops. * Fixed an OOS happening if someone is hotjoining while a country is marked for destruction. * Fixed an OOS with planet modifiers related to species crossbreeding. * Fixed an OOS with Federation Fleet Capacity. * Fixed a source of false positive OOS. * Fixed a CTD when transferring a save file during hotjoin. * Fixed a CTD that might happen when the outliner is updating certain elements when borders are updating. * Fixed a CTD when planets are removed and have active construction. * Fix CTD in Colonize window after dismantling shipyard. * Disabled AlienFX/LightFX since it has been reported to have issues and might cause a CTD/freeze when starting the game (at 30% loading). * Added a "hardoos" option that adds extra checksums to make it easier to catch causes for OOS. * Fixed an OOS when you find a precursor civ. event and an observer is present at game start * Tick time optimization (more efficient parallelisation (game go vroom vroom)).
UI
* Fixed some Settings UIs having overrunning text in some non-english languages. * Fixed overlapping text in Empire Modifiers tab in some non-english languages. * The Curators' "goodbye" option is now always placed at the bottom of the option list. * Envoys can't be reassigned to the same location. * You can now only resettle your primary species away from planets with culture shock.
AI
* The AI is more willing to lower federation centralization if they are the federation president. They now care if Cohesion and Monthly Cohesion are negative. * Crisis AI will now be more likely to seek honorable alternatives to doomstacks (i.e. it will split its fleet up a bit more). * AI will now refill starbase modules and buildings if they are destroyed. * AI now handles FTL inhibitors better, new fleets will now try to assign each fleet to the closest most valuable objective. * AI should now handle Colossi correctly again. Fear will keep the local systems in line. * AI empires with the Void Dwellers origin are now more likely to choose the Voidborne ascension perk. * AI in Mercantile stance is now less likely to close borders. * AI now builds branch offices where it can rather than trying again and again to go on a world where there's already a branch office. * Fleet AI should not abort orders for defensive fleets like merging. * Fixed Fleet AI getting stuck in a regroup loop if some fleets cannot reach the system for regrouping. * Make sure AI fleets stop when issued orders to merge.
Modding
* You can now use [ ] localisation commands in building descriptions. * Added trigger num_assigned_jobs = { job =
Bugfixes
* Fixed so that Zroni Precursor Arc Sites cannot be "hijacked" by another Empire. * Multiple Curator Scientist cannot be purchased any longer. * Added checks to see if the host has the appropriate DLCs for the slave market-oriented Resolutions. * Added missing Loc when proposal for forming Federations failed. * Fixed leviathans.1018 tooltip not showing actual results of the event. * The UNE now spawns as intended when playing as the Commonwealth of Man. * Fixed missing localisation in event The Oracle. * Slave Market Resolutions are now properly locked without Megacorp DLC. * Restoring megastructures will now only cause the rubble from their ruined variants to be cleared, rather than all ambient objects in the system (including system effects e.g. nebulas...) * Droids can now take Colonist jobs. * Subjects can no longer create vassals. * Pox Bombardment no longer kills machine units. * Fixed a case where the Slave Riots event could happen twice on the same day. * Fixed being able to build from (mega) shipyards that are not owned. * Added missing localisation keys for resolution_passed_diplomatic_weight and resolution_failed_diplomatic_weight empire modifiers. * Hid Zroni and Shoulders of Giants arc sites from countries ineligible for completing them (thus hiding unlocalised anti-stealing flags). * Added missing descriptions to Evermore planetary modifiers. * The AI attitude of country A to B now depends on A's opinion of B rather than B's of A. This fixes Fallen Empires never declaring war. * Surveyor relic can no longer find new resource deposits on Ring Worlds or Habitats. * The Floating Value event text no longer mixes up the planet and ship names. * Corrected Russian translation of Galactic Contender ascension perk. * Fixed minor localization issue in the Senate Floor tutorial window. * Changes to a progress-tracking variable in Joint Operation: Genius Caeli are now hidden from the arc site panel. * Fixed various typos and duplications in the species name files. * A Quiet Stroll event now has different text for Synthetic empires. * Tree of Life deposits are now properly cleared when the planet changes owner. * Shielded Planet special projects now use the correct planet name. * Removed duplications in Tiyanki ship names. * System graphical effects are now removed when the final Contingency planet is destroyed. * VLUUR's space storm will no longer manifest in nebula systems. * Fixed minor tooltip issue in Atomic Countdown event. * Shortened and rewrote overlapping Vault of Acquisitions technology description. * Fixed completed construction items for reinforcements not being removed properly from the fleet manager. * Fixed research costs for Special Projects "Investigate the Loop Temple" and "Study the Messenger connection". * The correct event description should now always be shown in Finding the Truth. * Adjusted the tooltips for the Improve and Harm Relations diplomatic actions. * Observation Posts are now cleared if all primitives have been killed by orbital bombardment. * Removed duplicate entry in Alpha Hub technology. * Mining Drones no longer display the Rare Crystal icon in the Jobs interface. * Changed Miner and Technician building icons to be more consistent with other jobs. * Fixed issue where some Spiritualist responses weren't always displayed in first contact situations. * Removed duplicate cohesion effect from tooltip in federation fleet contribution laws. * Fixed transparency on room backgrounds from Federations. * Gestalts can no longer get the debris_gasgiant_category_temp anomaly at all - which is as it should be. * Unity should now always spawn as a continental planet when playing the UNE. * Fixed a bug where Star-Crossed Lovers could take refuge in the Mutaagan Trading Guild. * Gestalts that conquer a regular empire's starbase will no longer have Trading Hubs and Offworld Trading Companies there. * Fixed some cases of species growing on planets disappearing and reappearing every other month. * Fixed Species rights showing as in breach of galactic law when theyre not. * You can no longer get random tomb world events on tomb worlds created through armageddon bombardment and other similar causes. Also, you can now only get each of them once. * Event Primordial Soup no longer wrongly assumes that Terminator machines think organic life worthy of interest. * Space fauna resolutions can no longer be proposed if they're already active. * Made sure clearing the blocker creates the correct species. * Added in breach icons and warnings in confirm dialog for policies that would cause breach of galactic law. * Fixed a case where the sector AI would spam luxury residences to deal with low amenities if there aren't workers available to work as Entertainers. * Fixed a bug where special projects to investigate space fauna would sometimes lose the targets they were meant to investigate, become "Investigate
[ 2020-10-22 11:41:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! My name is Fredrik Toll, and I am the Art Director for Stellaris. For this week's dev diary, we will have a look at how we develop our characters included in the Necroids Species Pack.
Finding ideas
Much like when we design the ships, we start out with reference gathering, finding anything that inspires us visually. We gather everything we can find that fits roughly within the theme. In this case it was everything from Venetian masks, Egyptian mummies, Mexican makeup from Da de Muertos, wraiths, ascended energy beings, vampires, dark elves, and of course skulls. We are looking to find as many different ideas as possible. Once we feel we have enough, we look at what we have, discuss them and put them in clusters, things that relate to each other and might be an idea for a species. We want each species to be as different from each other as possible, as well as trying to fulfill as many different player fantasies as possible. On of the things we do to add depth to the ideas is we try to come up with a backstory for each of the, to explain a bit more what they are. Does not have to be that detailed, just something to give some context, and adds details, and helps the artist when they paint them, drawing on their history. A backstory might be something like: A species which inhabits a completely sealed suit which they can never leave. You can see through the transparent helmet that whatever they once were, they are a hollow scare version of that. An alien that has kept itself alive through genetic manipulation, the cells no longer die, they just keep dividing. The body has grown uncontrolled and looks weird / mutated.
Developing ideas
So once we have settled on the 15 or so ideas we need, we start sketching out various ideas. For the initial ones we usually just do line art, sometimes rough shading, it depends on the artist. We always develop at least 3-4 different versions of each character idea before going ahead and developing it further. Here are some of the early look dev for some species.
After the sketching phase, we use much the same process for developing aliens as we do for ship designs. We start out with rough sketches for the ideas, to see which path we want to go on. Then we choose the one we think has the best potential, develop it a bit further, trying different sub variants / poses. Once we are happy with the idea and its structure, we usually do a color test, look at different ways we can shade them. Here is an example of what all this looked like for the aforementioned alien which extended life through genetic manipulation.
Rough sketches
Idea Variants / Refinement
Rendering
Color variants
3D Characters
Even though the characters are done in 2D, and look like it in game. The way they are made is technically in a 3D software. To do this, the character needs to be split into layers. So before rendering all the details, we split them up into the components they need. Tentacles might be several layers, eye lids, arms etc, anything that moves needs to be on a separate layer. By splitting them up early, the animator can start setting them up with the rough version. While the 2D Artist continues his work on the details. This also enables us to catch any issues with the character earlier.
Character texture
Character in 3D in perspective view
Example of what the character looks like in Maya, all set up and rigged. So once the color test, and layer split is done, we can finally move on to the final render. This is where most of the work comes in, making it feel more 3 dimensional, making sure the materials look realistic.
-------- That is all for this week. Next week we'll be posting the patch notes!
[ 2020-10-15 11:48:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Zaztls time had come. The Ritual of Elevation was soon to begin, and as she was inching ever closer to her own final destiny, she wondered Is this perhaps the start of a new life?. She couldnt help but to latch on to hope in her moment of dread, but she also knew the futility of the question.
No Jeferian would ever know the answer to that question.
Shumon ins-Beth was born, the newest individual to join the Pasharti species.
---------------
The result of dark experimentation by the Jeferians - the former owners of the planet Taralon - the Pashartians are the ultimate parasites. Originally a semi-sapient creature dwelling in the depths of Taralon's mountains, the Jeferians uplifted and augmented them to act as a subservient slave race. However, their uplifting was rather too effective, and they unleashed a monster. Horrified at the capabilities of their creation - which included the ability to absorb other sentient species and turn them into Pashartians - the Jeferians tried to shut down the experiment. However, a small group of uplifted Pashartians escaped.
Over the years, they bided their time, managing not only to evade capture, but also gradually increase their numbers and develop a technological base to rival the Jeferians. Eventually, the Jeferians noticed that something was amiss, but by then they were powerless to resist.
Soon the Pashartians had seized control of the planet, unleashing violent pogroms on their erstwhile oppressors - all the while further increasing their numbers. Now poised to take to the stars, the Pashartians stand ready to pursue what they see as their solemn duty - the conversion of all lesser life forms to their likeness.
---------------
Hello everyone!
Two weeks ago we announced the Necroids Species Pack, and today well be giving you more information about the gameplay aspects. But first, Ill take the opportunity to link the trailer once again, in case you missed it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0WbgYFvb5I&feature=emb_title
For Necroids we wanted to add some new gameplay that would be available to many more different types of empires and species. Unlike Lithoids, these Civics and Origins will not require you to use a Necroid portrait. For Lithoids we felt like it made sense, but in this case we didnt want to impose any limitations on your imagination and creativity.
Necroids gameplay includes:
- Necrophage (Origin)
- Memorialist (Civic)
- Death Cult (Civic)
- Reanimated Armies (Civic)
Necrophage is a new Origin that means that your primary species has a very hard time to procreate by themselves, but is instead dependent on transforming other Pops into themselves.
Necrophage Trait - live long and consume
Chamber of Elevation - when regular Uplifting isnt enough
Necrophytes - Hey, what does the necro part of my job title stand for anyway? --- In addition, there is also the Reanimated Armies civic that we showed in DD #185. This civic replaces the Military Academy with a Dread Encampment, and can recruit Undead Armies that are unaffected by morale.
Reanimated Armies - the ultimate in recycling.
Dread Encampment Building - wouldnt want to get caught dead here
Undead Army - its not wight how they work them to the bone, but they dont complain
Necromancer job - some say its a dead end job, but theyve made a grave mistake (Note: Above image includes the bonus from Ground Defense Planning) This civic has a few restrictions - no pacifists, and it conflicts with Citizen Service since it replaces the Military Academy. Some subtle differences exist between Soldiers granted by Military Academies and the Necromancers from Dread Encampments - theyre Specialist tier and provide more defense armies, provide some research benefits, and will summon additional defense armies under Martial Law instead of increasing Stability. --- That is all for this week! Next week well take a look at the art process and all the effort that goes into creating the Necroid portraits! Well be eagerly reading your responses, and remember that...
Jeff sees all
[ 2020-10-08 12:50:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
My name is Fredrik Toll, and I am the Art Director for Stellaris. For this week's dev diary, we wanted to give you an insight into the development process of creating the ships for the Necroids Species Pack. Lets dig right into it!
Designing a new Ship Set
After settling on the theme, the first thing we do when embarking on designing a new ship-set for a species pack, is going through the core ideas of the species pack with our internal team of concept artists. In this case it was centered around the theme of death, and the various species who have cheated it. After the brief, we had everyone write down their association and ideas for this theme to know what everyone is thinking. This allows us to align more what its all about, share ideas, and inspire each other. By doing that we are able to highlight what is more important and what does not fit with the theme. After this we do a search for visual reference to use in the concept process. These can be anything from patterns, statues, tiny objects, to buildings, whatever inspires us visually in connection to the theme. We look mostly for shapes, but also materials. Architecture is usually a great source of inspiration, they have great shapes, and a scale suitable for ship details. We try to avoid using other existing ships as reference since we want to develop something original, not just a variant of others, though they can still be a reference, if only to show what we don't want. For Necroids we looked a lot at Art Deco and brutalist architecture, tombs, pyramids, as well as skulls, fossils and many other things. After reviewing and discussing the references we start sketching, going wide, anything goes. Sometimes they align a lot with our references, other times ideas come from nowhere, its all part of the process. This leads to a whole lot of Ship designs ideas. Here are a handful of those.
Ultimately we settled on these two references as our direction. They felt like something far away from existing ships, as well as fitting well with the theme.
Developing the Style
These ships are only the start though. Once we have chosen one of the styles we did in our initial look development. We have to flesh out what those mean. These are just side-views, they do not tell you everything you know, in fact, opinions of how to interpret it can differ significantly. So we need to figure that out, as well as adapting it for the demands of the game, such as having sections, having turrets etc. Usually we start with the Cruiser, since its a good mid-size ship close enough to all ships sizes that its relevant for all designs. You also have a fallback option, if it turns out that it looks too big, you can just use it for the battleship. If it turns out too small it will be the destroyer or corvette. Here you can see a few of the concepts from the process. It looks pretty straightforward, but it takes a lot of back and forward before we nail it down.
Creating the Concepts
Once you have the style narrowed down, its time to make all the actual concepts for each and every ship. Even though the style is figured out, each ship is a bit unique and each of them present new challenges, and new parts of the style to figure out. The civilian ships are different from the military ships. Each of the military types ships has a different size, and the style differs significantly from the corvette to the juggernaut. Each of the civilian ships has a very unique design and they have more in common with some stations than they do with each other. The construction ship and the mining station often share traits, as do the science ship and the research station.
Here are two different examples.
The science ship for instance, has a much more high tech appearance than the other ships. The process is made easier though from the work we have done on previous shipsets. Some standards have been set, the science ship for instance usually has a more cool appearance with a more streamline almost racing type ship. This helps us know where to aim, and apply the style on that. Sometimes it's pretty straightforward Lets take the example of the Science Ship. First we start by making a couple of rough versions, then choose one of those versions, then make some more versions based on that one. We then continue the process by once again choosing one of them, refining the details to finish the design, and in the end we create an asset sheet. The asset sheet is for the 3D artist to model, and know where to apply which material. It speeds up their work a lot and makes sure everything is consistent.
If you wish to see more art examples of the Necroid shipsets and read more about the art process, check out the forum post here!
[ 2020-10-01 11:54:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Today we bring you some exciting news about our upcoming Species Pack! Were happy to announce that our next species pack will be themed around death and should allow you to live death to the fullest! Check out the trailer below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0WbgYFvb5I&feature=emb_title
Necroids will feature:
- 15+1 new portraits (the +1 being machine)
- 1 new Ship Set
- 1 new City Set
- 1 new Room background
- 1 new Origin
- 3 new Civics
- 1 new pre-scripted Empire
- 1 new Advisor Voice
[ 2020-09-24 16:16:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
Congratulations, [Employee.GetFirstName]!
Due to consistently meeting or exceeding performance goals and receiving high marks from both your manager and colleagues, you have been selected for termination at the end of this quarter! Your sacrifice is greatly appreciated by all of us here at Dodacorp, and were lucky to see you go!
Your manager will be in touch with you to provide instructions related to termination benefits, reallocating your Dodacorp retirement credits to your next of kin, and the necessary paperwork for your desired post-termination arrangements. As a valued member of Dodacorp, remember that you have an employee discount on cremation services from our partners at Burnatech and dont forget that you can claim your complementary Eternal Interment urn from our Repositrexx subsidiary.
Ask your manager about securing a spot for your urn on the Wall of Honor, the most desirable places are going fast!
Please make sure to complete all of the requisite forms by the first of [Employee.TerminationDate.PreviousMonth] so you dont miss this exciting opportunity.
Wed like to thank you again for your service here at Dodacorp, and appreciate that your sacrifice today will lead to record profits tomorrow!
Sincerely,
[Employee.Division.Supervisor.GetFullName]
[Employee.Division.Supervisor.GetFullJobTitle]
---
Inspired by the extreme popularity of CK2s Sunset Invasion, we continue our exploration of mortality with two more civics that were planning for an upcoming release, the Death Cult and Corporate Death Cult.
Death Cult civic - sadly the Curators arent allowed to secretly be a death cult
Corporate Death Cult civic - ritual murder for funds and prophet
Available to Spiritualist empires, empires with either of these civics replace the Temples that Spiritualists can normally build with Sacrificial Temples that provide both Death Priest and Mortal Initiate jobs.
Sacrificial Temple building - funny how there always seems to be a Help Wanted sign in the window
Death Priest job - dedicated to improving game performance
Mortal Initiate job - the benefits are to die for
Death Cults that have Mortal Initiate positions filled gain access to three new Sacrifice Edicts that let them perform the ritual slaughter to the gods (or whatever force your empires pops believe in). Theyre a bit fickle though, and the magnitude of the benefits varies, but the more blood that is shed, the more likely you are to get the better blessings.
To read the full forum post, follow the link here.
[ 2020-09-17 13:05:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
Chronicle Drone Unit-W3 swept the plaza, as it did once every ten days since its creation. Before that, Unit-V3 had performed this duty until a piece of crumbling masonry crushed it beneath tons of rubble. Unit-W3s first assignment was to remove that debris.
The Mollarnock Commonwealth was once a mighty empire of a dozen planets, ruled from the glistening spires of their ecumenopolis capital, Azure Chalice. The Chardin Process created Director, a gestalt consciousness that could coordinate the many machine servants of the Mollarnock. They toiled so their Mollarnock masters could spend their time on arts, sciences, and philosophy.
But all things fall.
The colonies had been destroyed during the Discovery War, reduced to radioactive rubble by an unforgiving foe. To deny their enemy the victory they craved and to prevent them from seizing the jewel of the empire, Chancellor Rhosen chose to end things on their own terms and released a terrible bioweapon, rendering Azure Chalice uninhabitable for centuries.
Those centuries passed.
The Chardin Mechanicals collected the dead and interred them with the Sanctuaries of Repose. Their struggle to maintain the planet was admirable but doomed - scavenging, repurposing, and reallocating materials could only do so much. Without a stream of resources coming from the colonies, they were losing the battle to keep it from decaying.
A program to return to the stars once controlled by their creators was begun.
The Mollarnock may have destroyed themselves four hundred and eighty seven years ago, but they would never be forgotten.
---
Stellaris is full of stories - some that we tell you, but so many more that you tell us that emerge from the gameplay.
This is the story of the Mollarnock, destroyed by a terrible enemy and those that were left behind.
Memorialist is a new civic we have planned to bring you in a future release. Unlike many current civics, it will be available to regular, machine, and hive empires. (They say that Megacorps try to resist remembering anything unless it directly impacts the next Quarterly Report.)
Machine Empire Memorialist Civic
To read the full post, you can read it here:
[ 2020-09-10 13:21:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
"Hi everyone! I am Caligula, one of Stellaris Content Designers, which means that I do a variety of tasks based around narrative writing and scripting - scripting being our term for doing things that is somewhat similar to programming, but without changing the source code. In other words, I do what modders do (though I have the significant advantage of also being able to peek into the source code and change it around when needed). Every Content Designer has their niche, and mine is that when a particularly complicated system needs to be scripted in (or, more frequently, is giving some sort of trouble - the War in Heaven still gives me nightmares...), I step into the breach. Now, we have a lot of exciting stuff to show off in the weeks and months to come, but for today, inspired by some questions that were asked after the last dev diary, Im going to be writing about the technical side of scripting for modders and aspiring modders, specifically with an eye on what can cause performance problems and how to avoid making bad scripts. The Stellaris scripting language is a very powerful tool, and a lot can be done with it, but first of all, a note of caution: just because something is possible, does not mean it should be done. I cant really stress this enough, because (and I speak from experience here) this attitude will almost certainly end up causing both performance issues and unreadable scripts that you will not be able to disentangle six months later when you realise some part of it is broken. Though it should be borne in mind that doing something in code is, by definition, faster: in code, you can check a single function and be done with it, but if you want it to be accessible through script, theres a fair few necessary functions it has to go through before you get to checking your function (turning the line of script into a code command, checking whether its used in the right scope, etc etc) - hence why some things are hardcoded, and also why hacky solutions to problems can end up being quite bad. So, the first question to consider is, should I really be doing this? But who am I kidding, Im speaking to modders here, so of course you will do it :D So without further ado...
What causes performance issues?
Every time you run a check or execute an effect, this will take a very tiny amount of your computers processing power. With a few exceptions that should be used sparingly (Ill get to those later), this is totally fine and is needed to do anything at all. It is when the check is repeated often, over lots of objects, that problems happen. In practice, this usually means pops are the cause, though running something across all planets in the galaxy is also a pretty bad idea. As a first step, when possible, it is a good idea to control when your script is run. The best way to do this is by setting where events are fired and using on_actions (or firing events from decisions and the like) wherever possible, instead of mean time to happen or, even worse, just setting an event to try and fire every day. If a degree of randomness is needed, one could also fire a hidden event via, say, a yearly pulse and then firing the actual event you want with a random delay (for an example, check out event action.220). " If you wanna read the full post, have a read here!
[ 2020-09-03 09:39:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today's Dev Diary is a greeting from one of our Stellaris Programmers, Mathieu aka The French Paradox! "Hello everyone, this is The French Paradox (Stellaris Programmer) speaking! On behalf of the whole Stellaris team, we hope you've had a good summer vacation, with current circumstances and all! We're all back to work, although not at the office yet. It is going to be a very exciting autumn and winter with a lot of interesting news! We are incredibly excited to be able to share the news with you over the coming weeks and months! Today I open the first look at the upcoming 2.8 release with some of the technical stuff that we programmers have been working on over summer. The rest of the team will reveal more about the upcoming content and features in the following diaries. Without further ado, let's talk about threads!
Threads? What threads?
There is a running joke that says fans are always wondering which one will come first: Victoria III or a PDS game using more than one thread.
Don't lie, I know that's how some of you think our big decision meetings go Im afraid Ill have to dispel the myth (again): all PDS games in production today use threads, from EU4 to CK3. Even Stellaris! To better explain the meme and where it comes from, we have to go through a little history. Im told you guys like history. For a long time, the software industry relied on Moores Law, which states that a CPU built in two years will be roughly twice as efficient as one today. This was especially true in the 90s, when CPUs went from 50 MHz to 1GHz in the span of a decade. The trend continued until 2005 when we reached up to 3.8GHz. And then the clock speed stopped growing. In the 15 years since, the frequency of CPUs has stayed roughly the same. As it turns out, the laws of physics make it quite inefficient to increase speeds beyond 3-4 GHz. So instead manufacturers went in another direction and started splitting their CPUs into several cores and hardware threads. This is why today youll look at how many cores your CPU has and wont spend much time checking the frequency. Moores Law is still valid, but, to put it in strategy terms, the CPU industry reached a soft cap while trying to play tall so they changed the meta and started playing wide. This shift profoundly changed the software industry, as writing code that will run faster on a CPU with a higher speed is trivial: most code will naturally do just that. But making usage of threads and cores is another story. Programs do not magically split their work in 2, 4 or 8 to be able to run on several cores simultaneously, its up to us programmers to design around that.
Threading nowhere faster
Which brings us back to our games and a concern we keep reading on the forums: is the game using threads?. The answer is yes, of course! In fact, we use them so much that we had a critical issue a few releases back where the game would not start on machines with 2 cores or less. But I suspect the real question is : are you making efficient usage of threads?. Then the answer is it depends. As I mentioned previously, making efficient use of more cores is a much more complex issue than making use of more clock cycles. In our case, there are two main challenges to overcome when distributing work among threads: sequencing and ordering. Sequencing issues occur when 2 computations running simultaneously need to access the same data. For example lets say we are computing the production of 2 pops: a Prikki-Ti and a Blorg. They both access the current energy stockpile, add their energy production to it and write the value back. Depending on the sequence, they could both read the initial value (say 100), add their production (say 12 and 3, the Blorg was having a bad day) and write back. Ideally we want to end up with 115 (100 + 12 + 3). But potentially both would read 100, then compute and overwrite each other ending up with 112 or 103. The simple way around it is to introduce locks: the Prikki-Ti would lock the energy value until its done with its computation and has written the new value back, then the Blog would take its turn and add his own. While this solves the problem, it introduces a greater one: the actions are now sequential again, and the benefit of doing them on concurrent threads has been lost. Worse, due to the cost of locking, unlocking and synchronizing, the whole thing will likely take longer than if we simply computed both on the same thread in the first place. The second issue is ordering, or order dependency. Meaning in some cases changing the order of operations changes the outcome. For example lets say our previous Prikki-Ti and Blog decide to resolve a dispute in a friendly manner. We know the combat system will process both combatants, but since there are potentially hundreds of combat actions happening, we dont know which one will happen first. And potentially on 2 different machines the order will differ. For example on the server the Prikki-Ti action will happen first, while on the client the Blorg will act first.
#BlorgShotFirst On the server the Prikki-Ti action is resolved first, killing the Blorg. The Blorg action that comes after (possibly on another thread) is discarded as dead Blorgs cant shoot (its a scientific fact). The client however distributed the computation in another way (maybe it has more cores than the server) and in his world the Blorg dispatched the Prikki-Ti first, which in turn couldnt fight back. Then both players get the dreaded Player is Out of Sync popup as their realities have diverged. There are, of course, ways to solve the problem, but they usually require redoing the design in a way that satisfies both constraints. For example in our first case each thread could store the production output of each pop to add to each empire, and then those could be consolidated at the end. In the same fashion our 2 duelists problem could be solved by recording damage immediately, but applying the effects in another phase to eliminate the need for a deterministic order. As you can imagine, it is much easier to design something with threading in mind rather than retrofitting an existing system for it. If you dont believe me just look at how much time is spent retrofitting your fleets, Ill wait.
The good news
This is all nice and good, but whats in it for you in the next patch, concretely? Well you will be happy to hear that I used some time to apply this to one of the oldest bits of our engine: the files and assets loading system. For the longest time we have used a 3rd party software to handle this. While it saved us a lot of trouble, it has also turned out to be quite bad at threading. Up to the point that it was sometimes slower with more cores than less, most notably to the locking issues I mentioned before. In conjunction with a few other optimizations, it has enabled us to drastically reduce the startup time of the game. I could spend another thousand word explaining why, but I think this video will speak better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6MWyc0wIo8&feature=emb_title This comparison was done on my home PC, which uses a venerable i7 2600K and an SSD drive. Both were hot startups (the game had been launched recently), but in my experiments I found that even on a cold start it makes a serious difference. To achieve the best speedup, you will need to use the new beta DirectX11 rendering engine. Yes, you read correctly: the next patch will also offer an open beta which replaces the old DX9 renderer by a more recent DX11 version that was initially made by our friends at Tantalus for the console edition of Stellaris. While visually identical, using DX11 to render graphics enables a whole range of multi-threading optimizations that are hard or impossible to achieve with DX9. Playing with the old renderer will still net you some nice speedup on startup, the splash screen step should still be much faster, but youre unlikely to see the progress bar jump as it does with DX11 when the game loads the models and textures. Some of those optimizations have also been applied to newer versions of Clausewitz, and will be part of CK3 on release. Imperator should also benefit from it. It might be possible to also apply it to EU4 and HoI4, but so far my experiments with EU4 havent shown a huge speedup like it did for Stellaris and CK3. If you want to read more technical details about the optimizations that were applied to speedup Stellaris, you can check out the article I recently published on my blog. And with that I will leave you for now. This will likely be my last dev diary on Stellaris, as next month I will be moving teams to lead the HoI4 programmers. You can consider those optimizations my farewell gift. This may have been a short time for me on Stellaris but dont worry: even if I go, Jeff will still be there for you! Mathieu, aka The French Paradox"
[ 2020-08-27 12:48:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Although challenging, weve had a great start to the year. The launch of Federations was a huge success for us as a game and we passed 3 million base game copies sold in March.
The 2.7 Anniversary Update gave us an opportunity to add some game features that timing didnt allow us to fit in for Federations release, add a little more life and ambiance to the galaxy by refreshing some of our in-game visuals, as well as remastering our sound assets.
Also, in case any of you missed the Anniversary Trailer, you can watch it here:
As some of you already know, most of Paradox takes a Summer break during July, and after the 2.7 Update and associated hotfixes, the we have been busy planning the future development for Stellaris. Since we want everyone to have an opportunity to have a break, especially with the world in the state that its in, were having a Dev Diary hiatus until later in the Summer.
We dont yet have any specific dates for when the Dev Diaries will resume, but rest assured, we remain committed to working on the game, making important improvements, and adding some new fun stuff. We will be sharing more progress after the summer!
We hope you all will enjoy your summer, stay safe, stay healthy and well be back later in the Summer!
[ 2020-06-26 14:32:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
We're finally done with the verification process of 2.7.2, and in addition to the fixes on the beta branch right now we've added a few more. Thank you for your patience :)
If you wanna read the full patch notes, see the forum post here
Save games shouldn't be adversely affected by the switch from 2.7.1 to 2.7.2, but just in case you do encounter issues, you can roll back to a prior version via right click on Stellaris in library -> properties -> betas -> choose the desired version.
If you want to do crossplay MP between Steam and our other release platforms (Plaza/GOG/MS Store), you need to opt in to the crossplay beta "stellaris_test" by the same method.
[ 2020-05-26 09:03:52 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
We know you've been waiting on us to fix the performance issue, and we have finally found the cause and fixed it! However, we haven't properly tested this build yet. So in the good old fashioned "getting you the fixes as soon as possible" way that we work here on Stellaris, we have set up a beta branch in Steam that you can opt into while we continue our verification process in-house!
For the full patch notes, see the forum post here.
Please note that 2.7.2 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.
If you want to play crossplay multiplayer with your friends on non-steam platforms you can opt into the "crossplay-rollback" branch in steam.
Also note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 2.7.1 game going, don't try to load the save in 2.7.2.
[ 2020-05-15 11:54:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
We hope you are enjoying your time with 2.7 and the 4 year anniversary of Stellaris! Its very fun to see how far the game has come, and just as interesting to imagine what the future can hold.
We want to make sure that Stellaris is well-prepared for more content in the future. Something weve learned, especially with CK2, is that a long tail of new content can make it very difficult for players to see what kind of DLCs are available for the game. As we recently announced, Stellaris has more than 3 million players, and we want to make sure that players both new and old have an easier time finding content that they might like.
In order to improve visibility, starting today and lasting for a couple of weeks, were going to be running a couple of experiments that will be looking at DLC visibility within the game. We will be running a controlled experiment that will split up the player base into different groups, where each group will get a slightly different experience (or no change, in the case of the control group). The experiment will only affect the main menu and empire creation/selection, and will not have any effect on the game as you are playing. The purpose of this is to gather some insights into what kind of visibility features are actually helpful.
Before you grab your laser-powered pitchforks and plasma-illuminators, and complain about development focus, rest assured that all of this work has been done by an external team (who has done a great job btw!) and has had no effect on the development of Stellaris as a game :)
I want to emphasize that even though we want to improve the visibility of content for the game, it will never come at the expense of the game experience itself, so you dont need to worry about that. It is very important for us that our players are able to immerse themselves in the Stellaris universe and to have fun while they play.
And because a dev diary cant be complete without pictures or teasers, heres two icons related to some future content. What could it be..?
[ 2020-05-14 11:23:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Stellaris 2.7 "Wells" Update is live now!
This update reinvigorates the galaxy for PC users, with New Visuals, Galactic Community resolutions, Federation Joint Operations, and updated Habitats.
You can read more about what the patch is about and a few thoughts from our Game Director in last weeks Dev Diary.
Two things to mention:
We have discovered and are aware of a performance hit in 2.7.1, and we are currently working on getting it fixed. So if you notice a slight dip, don't worry about it. We have our best people on it!
And we have removed an entry from last weeks changelog: "The enigmatic fortress doesn't regenerate once it's been disabled anymore". It turns out the issue still occurs, so as not to cause confusion we have removed it.
Save games shouldn't be adversely affected by the switch from 2.6.3 to 2.7.1, but just in case you do encounter issues, you can roll back to a prior version via right click on Stellaris in library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version.
Once again, thank you all for playing Stellaris and happy four year anniversary!
PS. You can play Stellaris for Free until May 17th during our free weekend!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh9yZNrb62U&feature=emb_title
[ 2020-05-12 10:13:06 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! As were approaching the 4th anniversary of the release of Stellaris, I thought we would take a look at what Stellaris is, and how much has changed since its release on May 9th 2016. Stellaris was the studios first original IP in many years, so when we released the game we didnt really know exactly what makes Stellaris. As a natural consequence of that the game has changed a lot since release as we explored what the game is really about, and which experiences we think are fun and valuable. Stellaris is an exploration-focused space-fantasy strategy game that explores dystopian and utopian themes in a playful and light-hearted manner. There is no one true timeline and it's important that players are able to tell their own stories every story is equally true. The best thing we can do is provide more tools for storytelling, and of course new gameplay to make playing the game more interesting.
A Look Back
Stellaris has had time to really grow in these last 4 years, and I thought it would be fun to take a look back and see how far weve come. In the last 4 years we have (in no particular order):
- Added a whole bunch of new anomalies to explore
- Tweaked the galaxy multiple times to feature more interesting things to discover
- Added a new Archaeology system
- Added Relics & Minor Artifacts
- Added terrifying Leviathans
- Reworked the economic system to feature jobs
- Added Civics & Authorities for more options during empire creation
- Added Traditions & Ascension perks for more customization of your empire while you play
- Added a whole bunch of new portraits for you to choose from
- Added Starbases and changed how you take ownership of star systems
- Added Hive Minds & Machine Intelligence empires
- Added bigger and bigger ships like Titans, Juggernauts, Colossi and Juggernauts
- Reworked Federations and added new Federation types
- Added the Galactic Community
- Added a whole bunch of diplomatic actions, such as federation associate, improve relations or defensive pacts
- Added Curator, Artist and Trader enclaves
- Reworked space combat & balance multiple times, and added new weapons such as the extra large Tachyon Lance or Mega Cannon
- Added a lot of megastructures such as the Dyson Sphere or the Mega Art Installation
- And so much more....
Announcing the 2.7 Wells 4th Anniversary Update
To celebrate these 4 years, and to take another step into the future, we will be releasing the free 2.7 Wells update next week on Tuesday the 12th of May! For this update weve been looking at a lot of your feedback from 2.6 Federations, and added a couple of new features and made some tweaks to already existing ones. We will be releasing 2.7 Wells as 2.7.1. If you wanna read the full pach notes, have a read in the forum post here. Thank you all for your continued support! Were very thankful for being able to work on such a great game and to have such an engaged and great community! Lets celebrate many more anniversaries to come!
[ 2020-05-07 11:12:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Todays dev diary will show you some of the improvements weve made to federations for the upcoming free update!
Federation Voting
Since the release of Federations and the 2.7 update weve wanted to make some improvements to how voting in federations is handled. Most of the improvements are related to UI and better feedback, but theres also been some changes to functionality.
You are now able to use Favors to increase the acceptance chance for your AI-controlled federation members.
You are now able to use Favors to increase the acceptance chance for federation law proposals.
Weve also changed how AI acceptance works for federation laws, so that it is more transparent and more consistent with other features in the game. We look at the AI attitude a lot more now, and it will affect which laws the AI is attracted towards. For example, militaristic empires, or those with either Honorbound Warriors or Federation Builders personalities will be more likely to accept a higher fleet contribution law.
Generally speaking, the best way for you to pass new federation laws is to get the Federation Cohesion to 90 or above, and then suggest a new law change.
When it comes to suggesting changed, the AI will still not attempt to suggest changes very often, unless they are the federation president.
The AI will generally not want to increase Centralization unless Cohesion is 90 or higher. Cohesion also directly affects the acceptance chance by a factor of x0.25 (100 cohesion equals +25 acceptance).
The UI for voting on war declarations has received a face-lift. Its now more clear which war goal is used, and you can see a summary of the target of the war, and which their allies are. This should hopefully make it easier for you to decide if you are in favor of the war or not.
Whenever a federation law has been voted on, you will now get a pop-up that clearly informs you on what the results of the vote were, and how your federation allies voted.
Weve also improved the feedback you get whenever your federation unlocks a new level.
Joint Operations
Something we wanted to do, but couldnt do for 2.6 due to lack of time, was to add some more flavor events to federations. We had some cool ideas for things we wanted to try, and were very happy that weve been able to add some events for the upcoming 2.7 update. Joint Operations are events to which each member of a federation can contribute, and the types of events will depend on your federation type. Research Co-operatives have the chance to engage in a joint archaeological dig across their region of federated space. Galactic Unions and Research Co-operatives alike may also find themselves dealing with strange new stellar phenomena at their federation capitals. Hegemonies will have the option of a grand project to celebrate cultural uniformity and to see whos still willing to tow the line. Military Alliances can partake in a joint training exercise, while Trade Leagues may seek to improve their collective worth through harmonized logistics. In all cases, collaboration will bolster cohesion within your federation however members may sometimes be tempted by individual gains, and further challenges may arise if the federation does not act as one.
Origins
A small change weve made, albeit probably a welcomed one, is to make it far less likely for the leader of a Common Ground or Hegemony start to be blocked off by their federation members. Its very likely that they will have at least one open hyperlane to an unexplored star system. --- Thats it for this week! Next week well be back with some more information regarding the upcoming free update!
[ 2020-04-30 11:26:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Greetings!
Today well touch upon a subject dear to the hearts of many galactic rulers - namely Edicts!
Background
Edicts are meant to be a way for your empire to focus on certain issues without necessarily taking a permanent stance on them. More permanent stances on issues would be covered by Policies.
Although we felt that Edicts do fit this role pretty well, there were a couple of issues with the system that we think could be improved. The fact that Edicts would always time out felt like a little bit of unnecessary micromanagement at times, and didnt really emphasize the feeling of I am choosing to focus on these 2 things right now. We felt that it would fit better if Edicts had a greater emphasis on making choices that you can go back and change, rather than being things you constantly go in and refresh.
An old friend with a slight makeover. Some Edicts are now toggled on/off instead of being on a timer
Edict Capacity
Enter Edict Capacity a new mechanic that puts a soft limit on how many Edicts of a certain type that you can have active at once. Similar to Starbase Capacity, your empire will suffer penalties if you exceed it, and the penalty in this case being Empire Sprawl. For every toggled and active Edict above the Edict Capacity, your Empire Sprawl will be increased by +25%.
By default, an empire will start with an Edict Capacity of 2, and can be modified by things like Authority, Civics and Ascension Perks. These values are very prone to being changed as more balance feedback comes in.
Dictatorial and Imperial Authority now increases Edict Capacity by +1.
The God-Emperor knows best.
You can now vigorously enact more Edicts.
Not all Edicts will use Edict Capacity, but rather only the ones that last until cancelled will. Edicts that can be toggled will have an Activation Cost and a Deactivation Cost, which is usually Influence. This means that you are paying the Influence when you are making changes, rather than paying to upkeep the Edicts you want.
Edicts that last until cancelled will be marked with a different icon from the edicts (and campaigns) that expire once their duration runs out.
An example of two different Edicts. Red: toggled - lasts until cancelled and uses Edict Capacity. Blue: temporary - lasts for 10 years and does not use Edict Capacity.
Edicts
Some of the Edicts have changed and we have added a couple of new ones, to better fit with the Edict Capacity. Lets take a look at a few of them:
Whenever you need to stimulate your economy, subsidies can be the way to go. There are Farming, Mining, Energy and Industrial subsidies.
Neighbors suddenly turned hostile? Need to secure your borders? Pass this Edict to refocus your efforts!
Has the galaxy become more hostile? Do you need to build a powerful fleet to project your power? Focus on Fleet Supremacy for a more powerful and imposing fleet.
Pop Growth is problematic, so we have made some changes in the upcoming patch that will reduce Pop Growth from different sources across the board (more on that later). Food Policies are no more, and the popular Nutritional Plenitude is now a toggled Edict instead.
No longer a food policy (they dont exist anymore). There are different versions for Hive Minds and Rogue Servitors.
Resource Edicts, Campaigns and Unity Ambitions
The model for the new Edict Capacity doesnt fit very well for all types of Edicts, which is why the rare resource Edicts, Campaigns and Unity Ambitions remain unchanged and keep working like you are used to. This is also better for modding purposes, so that modders have the opportunity to use Edicts however they see best.
Finishing thoughts
Overall we feel like the new system better allows us to structure how the players get the tools they need to focus their empires for certain tasks. As we make more additions to the game in the future, this new system will also allow us to give the players more tools to address certain issues.
----
That is all for this week! We will be back again next week with another dev diary, this time about some federation-related content!
[ 2020-04-23 11:27:32 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone,
Since the beta patch hasn't introduced any major issues, we've decided to put patch 2.6.3 live today :)
Here's the forum post with the full changelog for 2.6.3:
Save games shouldn't be adversely affected by the switch from 2.6.2 to 2.6.3, but just in case you do encounter issues, you can roll back to a prior version via right click on Stellaris in library -> properties -> betas -> choose the desired version.
If you want to do crossplay MP between Steam and our other release platforms (Plaza/GOG/MS Store), you need to opt in to the crossplay beta, stellaris_test, by the same method.
[ 2020-04-15 08:06:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Greetings to the void-dwellers and planet-bound alike!
This week well be talking about some changes were planning on making to the engineering marvels that are Orbital Habitats. These are currently slated for the May update that Game Director Daniel mentioned two weeks ago.
Introduced in Utopia, Orbital Habitats provide a way to continue some form of limited expansion after colonizing all of the habitable planets within your empire. In the 2.3 Wolfe update, we added some specialized districts to them based on the celestial body they orbited, opening up the possibility for things like building dedicated astro-mining facilities, and recently in Federations, we added a Void Dwellers origin which let you start your empire among the stars in three habitats.
This May, well be introducing multiple tiers of habitats. These will be accessible to anyone with the Utopia expansion or using the Void Dwellers origin from Federations.
The first tier of Orbital Habitats now comes a bit earlier in the tech tree and require fewer alloys to build. The basic Orbital Habitat is smaller than the old version, starting with 4 district slots. They also have a simpler appearance than the ones currently in the game, a core of a station to build upon later.
Fungoid Orbital Habitat
The Habitat Expansion engineering technology is placed around where the Habitat technology used to be in the tech tree, and will allow you to upgrade an Orbital Habitat that has filled all of its districts to an Advanced Habitat using a planetary decision that costs some time and alloys.
Upgrading to an Advanced Habitat provides 2 additional district slots and allows basic housing buildings to be built even for normal empires.
The Advanced Habitat upgrade adds a ring of modules around the central core.
Avian Advanced Habitat
A third technology permits upgrading a fully developed Advanced Habitat that has a Habitat Central Control into a Habitat World.
Habitat Worlds have 8 districts, shown as another ring of modules around the habitat.
If you want to read more about the upcoming habitat tiers, see the full forum post here!
[ 2020-04-09 11:21:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Last week we briefly mentioned that we would release 2.6.3 as an opt-in patch "soon", and soon has arrived! This opt-in beta is on steam only, so cross platform Multiplayer won't work until we officially release this patch. However, you can opt in to "crossplay_rollback" to continue your 2.6.2 games :)
Here's the forum post with the full changelog for 2.6.3:
Please note that 2.6.3 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.
Also note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 2.6.2 game going, don't try to load the save in 2.6.3
[ 2020-04-07 13:23:04 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! As we mentioned last week, we have begun working on a larger free update targeted for May, and it would be fun to share some of the new things you will be able to discover. 2.6.3 is still planned to be released as an opt-in beta SoonTM, so stay tuned for more information about that. But for now, lets continue and talk a little bit about what youll expect to see in the free May update.
Background
Weve felt that the galaxy sometimes feels a bit empty now, compared to how it used to back in the day. Since the AI is a bit more proactive in hunting down hostile space fauna you are encountering these alien lifeforms much more seldom. We wanted to reinvigorate the galaxy with more alien life, and allow them to continue existing for a longer period of time.
Tiyanki
The tiyanki now have a home system, Tiyana Vek, which can continue to spawn more space whales throughout the continuation of your game, unless the tiyanki in the system have been hunted to extinction. The spawning of new tiyanki will also depend on galaxy size, which sets an upper limit for how many fleets can spawn (in relation to already roaming around).
Tiyana Vek, in all its gaseous glory. The tiyanki themselves have also been updated, and there are now hatchlings in addition to the previously existing Bulls, Cows and Calves. The roaming tiyanki fleets are now also a bit more randomized in their compositions.
Space whaling. Hunting the tiyanki will yield energy credits and exotic gas, but xenophile empires will not approve.
Successful hunt. No, bounty numbers are not final. If you want to find out what other features will be in the free update, have a read in the forum post These are the first steps were taking towards reinvigorating the galaxy a bit. Well give you more information in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned for future dev diaries!
[ 2020-04-02 11:47:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Federations was released a little bit over a week ago, and we hope it's still giving you much joy.
Theres much to celebrate as the community has broken a bunch of records! We had 64-thousand people playing Stellaris on Saturday, which is the highest amount of concurrent players since its release 4 years ago. We want to thank you for the massive amount of support weve received with this expansion! We hope everyone has found this expansion as fun and enjoyable as us.
While you are busy enjoying the game weve been planning updates and working on patches. We are currently working on a 2.6.3 that were planning on releasing as a beta sometime soon. 2.6.3 should hopefully be the last of the smaller patches, as we will be switching focus to a somewhat larger free update in May.
The May update (TBA) will contain more bug fixes, but also a bunch of new things for you to play with. We are very interested in hearing your feedback and ideas regarding Federations, and if there was anything you would have wished for us to add. We are especially interested in feedback related to Resolutions and Federation Laws. Although I will not promise they will be added, I still wanted to leave some room open in case there were ideas that the community really wanted.
Will you protect the Tiyanki or hunt them for profit?
We will give you some more information about the May update at a later stage, so stay tuned! Until then, keep enjoying the game :)
[ 2020-03-26 12:28:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone!
Today we are releasing a hotfix to some of the larger issues that you guys have pointed out since the release last week. This isn't the last patch for Federations, and we are making sure to address community feedback as we move along. We just thought that these fixes would be a good way of addressing some of the more common issues!
VERSION 2.6.2 Patch Notes
- Fixed strike craft damage modifiers not being applied.
- Fixed so a designable starbase updates correctly on upgrading. This fixes the issue with juggernauts that have been upgraded, disappearing.
- Fixed the sectors trying to clear blockers they can't.
[ 2020-03-24 09:18:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone!
Thank you for playing Federations! Your participation and feedback have helped us make a decision to release the 2.6.1 patch to the live build of the game, and it's now available to you all!
This version of the game includes fixes for out of syncs, missing localisations and a ton of other fixes! (Note: You will need to opt-out of the stellaris_test version to play the live version)
You can read the full patch notes for the 2.6.1 version in this post
Thank you all for keeping us in the loop, and we'll make sure to address community feedback as we are moving forward!
// AC, Community Manager Stellaris
[ 2020-03-18 15:28:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone!
Today marks the release of Stellaris - Federations and the free 2.6.0 "Verne" update! We hope you are as excited as we are and that you'll enjoy the new content as much as we do.
Like we mentioned in last week's dev diary, we will also be putting 2.6.1 as a beta version. If you want to read the full patch notes for 2.6.0 as well as 2.6.1 it can be found in the dev diary above.
2.6.1 Beta Information
Please note that 2.6.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch. The beta should have checksum [65d2]. Save games shouldn't be adversely affected by the switch from 2.6.0 to 2.6.1, but just in case you do encounter issues, you can roll back to a prior version via right click on Stellaris in library -> Properties -> Betas -> choose the desired version. We hope you will be having fun with this one! We will be eagerly awaiting your feedback and reactions! Get your copy of Federations and watch the release trailer down below! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1140001/Stellaris_Federations/?utm_source=fb-owned&utm_medium=social-owned&utm_content=post&utm_campaign=fede_stpc_20200317_ste_rel&fbclid=IwAR3MOENe9EuZRaDGDeM3tTzbkVtBSLZBLN7FcWgsTnlwUtdP8I2PblevxZY
[ 2020-03-17 11:01:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
In a couple of days we will finally bring you Federations, an expansion that weve worked incredibly hard on for quite a while now. Were extremely excited to get it into your hands and see what you all think of it!
Im posting today to bring you the Patch Notes for 2.6.0 (Verne). But before I do that, I want to talk a bit about something were doing a bit differently this time around. In game development there are several milestones and key dates that you need to hit to make sure that a game is made. Thats where the Producer (thats me!) comes in to oversee that things are done in a prioritized manner (within the time/resource constraints we have) and as we get closer to what is called a Release Candidate (RC), we have to be as certain we can that we dont add things that could risk the stability of the version we will put out into the public.
So what did we do differently this time around? The RC we created was frozen earlier to ensure an as stable build as possible. Because once an RC is frozen, it is sent to QA for rigorous testing with not only our in-house testers, but also our outsourced partners. Scheduling this requires weeks (sometimes months) of advanced notice, so its not something we take lightly. So during this time of testing, we need to limit the amount of times we send them a new RC. Because, a new RC means the testing needs to start over and all the previous testing would have been wasted!
But as everyone knows, especially you guys, a build is never bug-free. We could work on Stellaris on now until forever to fix every bug imaginable, and there would still be a typo in a tooltip somewhere. That is the nature of our industry and software development in general. Which means that after the RC was frozen, we found some issues that we wanted to fix but didnt want to risk the overall integrity of the RC and put in.
Which brings me to branching. Since there were still bugs to be fixed and features to be balanced, we branched off from the RC and started working on the first patch we plan to release. That patch is something we would love to get into your hands as early as possible, but as I mentioned before, stability and integrity of a build something thats extremely important to us. So instead of putting the patch live immediately, we will be putting 2.6.1 as an opt-in beta! Which means that those of you who want to check it out early, will be able to do it on release day.
I hope this has given you some more insight into the inner workings of game development, and if you want to know more feel free to ask questions about our processes (or request another Dev Diary ;) ) !
Please note that 2.6.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.
Also note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 2.5.0 game going, don't try to load the save in 2.6.0 or 2.6.1.
But without any further ado, if you wanna read the full patch notes as well as added features, have a read [url=https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-173-federations-is-soon-upon-us-with-patch-notes.1354520/]here!
And last, but not least, heres the feature breakdown video for Federations!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hI9jUsW4gs&feature=emb_title
[ 2020-03-12 12:51:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
Bonjour everyone, its the French Paradox speaking! For those who dont know me, Ive joined the Stellaris team this December after a year and a half as a programmer on Europa Universalis IV.
Today, we are gonna talk about AI.
A good introduction for those new to the field
Fifty Shades of AI
There are several AI modules in Stellaris. For historical reasons we call them ministers as each one is supposed to handle a specific role in an AI empire. There are 3 broad kinds:
- The AI foreign minister handles diplomacy, federations, galactic community, peace deals and the like
- The AI interior minister is in charge of the economy. He keeps budgets and order constructions, both civil and military.
- The AI military minister is in command of all troops and military fleets, and also responsible for laying out strategic plans when at war.
The Military AI
To give you a little bit of background, there were several generations of military AIs in Stellaris. The generic one (used by most classic empires) was redone by the great @sidestep last year, while the more specialized ones (crisis, space monsters) have kept close to what they were on release. In the midst of the sad and dark swedish winter, I managed to bring some improvements that Ill showcase today. First of all, I worked on visualization to help us debug how the AI thinks. Funny thing is, it already made it look better to audiences even if it didnt actually change any behaviour. Its actually something thats been observed in video games: a good AI tells you what it does, which makes it look smarter. One of my favourite examples of that would be the enemies in FEAR. So by typing 'debug_ai' in the console and observing an AI empire, you can see what it has in mind:
I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead. Hey uh, you want a drink? As a simple analogy, imagine that the AI has a war minister that looks at the big picture and rates every potential target, a general staff who assign fleets to some of those objectives, and then admirals who try to lead those fleets on a tactical level to achieve those objectives... Wanna read more about the AI rework? Check out the full post in our forum here!
[ 2020-03-05 12:23:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! This week were back with another dev diary! We apologize in advance for it being a shorter one, but dont worry, we aim to make up for it with a stream! Later today at 17:00 CET we will be hosting a stream over at Twitch where we will be talking about Federations and showing off all the features in more detail (such as all the federation perks). We will also be announcing the release date for the Federations expansion and showing off a cool new trailer! If you have things you want us to show on stream, please dont be afraid to mention them here! See you on the stream! (This post will be updated with more information during the day)
[ 2020-02-27 12:24:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello, my friends! This is Moah, Tech Lead of Stellaris typing. I can finally talk about what youve all been waiting for: How many new platypi will there be in Federations? After weeks of Well, apparently, I should be "more technical." But before we jump into the mysteries of the Stellaris code, I want to take the time to talk a little about the balance between adding new features, improving performance and stability especially in terms of multiplayer and the dreaded out-of-syncs (dreaded at least by me).
The Delicate Balance
Stellaris, like most decently sized code bases, is like a complex game of Mikado or Jenga: every part is connected in some way to every other part. When you add a feature, you add more connections. If youre careful, you add only a few, if youre in a rush you add a bit too many. This generally leads to Unplanned Features (aka bugs). In addition, once we see them perform in the actual game, we tend to expand features in new, unexpected ways, leading to more Unplanned Features(tm). Once we realize what is happening, we start being more careful. Maybe too careful. Checking too many things, too often, ensuring that this interaction that is supposed to never actually happen is actually not happening. Not now, not later. Not ever. So you have removed the unplanned features, but the game is a bit, ah too careful. Some would say slow. So you remove some of these checks. You realize that you dont need to loop around the galaxy, you can just loop around this one tiny planet. Then you go one step further, and think well I can maybe do that check only every three weeks, and this calculation needed by all these checks, I could store it in here and reuse it until the next time it changes. So now the game isnt so careful anymore, were back in unplanned feature territory. But if the caching (storing/reusing calculations) happens at different times on different machines, you get slightly different results (like asking a developer for something before and after they had coffee). Slightly different results are what OOS thrives on! Clients and servers have 0.0001 cost difference, compounded over time, that corvette is bought on the server but not on the client. So you remove your smart algorithm. You replace it with the correct algorithm. You lose half of what you gained in step 2 and reintroduce some bugs. Probably. Rinse and repeat. But enough about my morning routine! Lets talk about
Performance
Stellaris fans are like C++ programmers: performance is always on their mind. To be fair, it has also been on ours a lot lately. We know that its not all that it could be, especially in late game and with the bigger galaxies. With that in mind, weve taken time to improve performance in a bit more depth than we usually can. We looked at what was taking the most time, and as everyone knows that is
Pops.
There are many reasons why pops consume a lot of time in Stellaris, but the main one is that by endgame we have SO MANY of them. SO So so so so many. And they do so much! Pops have to calculate how good theyd be at every job (they do so every 7 days). Then they have to fight every other pop on the planet to get the job theyre best at. They also have to check if they could have a specific ethic. If they could join a specific faction. How happy they are. How happy they could be. How happy they would be on that planet over there. All these things trigger modifiers calculations. If you remember my last dev diary, you know that modifiers are the only thing more numerous than Pops in Stellaris. And they all depend on each other. Calculating them is like pulling on a thread and getting the whole sweater.
OK, but what did we actually do about it?
Well first, Ill admit I may have been a bit pigheaded on the whole we need to do the jobs distribution every day because we dont know when new jobs are added. We reexamined this assumption, and jobs distribution is now only done on demand. It was also rewritten to iterate over a lot fewer things. We also noticed a few triggers going through every pop of an empire to check if one or more are enslaved, decadent, or other things that can be tested at the species level. So we made new triggers to test these things at the species levels. In the same spirit, we had events going through every ship to find a fleet, so we added triggers at the fleet level. Second, Weve also reworked the approach to checking if pops can change ethics (and also made it work again), or if they can join factions. Finally, weve looked for (and found) opportunities to use more multi threading. But enough talk! Whats the result? Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, heres the answer at 30000 words a second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SFE89Wj8go&feature=emb_title The video compares the performance of 2.5.1 Shelley to 2.6 Verne'' when running a save game from the community, which can be found attached to this post, with over 20000 pops. It was recorded on my work computer (Intel Core7-7900X @ 3.30Ghz, 10 cores and 20 threads, and AMD R9 Fury). You wont necessarily get the same results, the exact difference in performance will vary with your computer, and the exact situation in your own save games, of course. On average, weve found something between 15% and 30% improvement in late game situations. This save is just ideal to showcase the impact of the pops improvement. You wanna find out more about the performance improvements? Have a read here !
[ 2020-02-20 12:16:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today we're continuing the Q&A series we're doing, answering questions related to different topics. Last week we asked you to post your questions related to Origins, which were previously revealed in Dev Diary #160. Here we go!
General Origins Questions
How will randomly created AI empires choose an origin? Will it be completely random, or are some more likely to show up than others? If the latter, which logic does it follow? The weightings are scriptable. The default currently has a weight of 100, others that are available to the AI (which is most of them) have between 2 and 10, so statistically you are likely to have a few of them once you have 10+ AI nations. Some origins like Doomsday are also blocked for advanced AIs as that wouldn't fit the narrative. Many are also restricted so they will only randomly generate if that origin is not already represented in the galaxy. Are there any events related to each Origin? (And many similar questions.) Yes. Some origins, such as the Galactic Doorstep, are primarily narrative-based and thus have many events. Others, like the Shattered Ring, are primarily changes to an empire's starting conditions and have few, if any (other than custom start text). Will the preset empires have different origins? Will they have new civics picked to substitute those that become origins? (What will happen with the Xanid Suzerainty for example?) Yes, preset empires have origins. Most of them have Prosperous Unification, but some have others. Empires that previously had civics that have been turned into origins will have new civics given to them. As examples, the Xanid Suzerainty now has Corve System and Cutthroat Politics, and the Lokken Mechanists have Technocracy and Meritocracy. Can you change your origins through events? No, that would involve timeline alterations and the potential destruction of the space-time continuum. Will there be origins that allow for special tech, that is otherwise unobtainable? For example, could a Fallen Empire share tech for Fallen empire buildings with you if you choose the Scion start? We do not currently have any origins that have unobtainable tech, but this would be possible. I believe you mentioned before that each origin had special events. Will we still have the special start events of say Mass Extinction, Habitable planet survey, and Radical Cult events? Will they still happen even if we pick say Doomsday or Remnants or Void Dwellers? Some event chains have been disabled for certain Origins, when they no longer made sense. Do Fallen Empires have origins? Yes, for flavor they have been given a unique "Elder Race" Origin. If you want to find out more about Origins, check out the full post here . PS. Next week, our Tech Lead Moah will be posting a dev diary giving an update on performance improvements planned for the 2.6 "Verne" update... Stay tuned!
[ 2020-02-13 12:37:40 CET ] [ Original post ]
Greetings! As a part of the Q&A series we're doing, we will be answering your questions related to different topics. Last week we asked you to post your questions related to diplomacy, and we want to thank you for all the questions we've gotten. Before we jump into the questions, I'll take the opportunity to mention that the Q&A series will continue next week as well, and you can already post your questions about Origins.
General Diplomatic Questions
Q: Will Diplomatic deals get a similar treatment to Federations, in that they require higher levels before unlocking all mechanics? A: Not specifically, but diplomatic actions now require certain Relations levels before being able to be proposed. (Envoys can be used to relax these restrictions.) Q: Will the interstellar assembly megastructure mechanics be changed for the update? A: Yes. The immigration bonus has been replaced with a Diplomatic Weight bonus, and at stages II and IV the Interstellar Assembly grants additional envoys.
Q: Will you be expanding ways to improve relations with another empire beyond the current resource bribes? A: Yes, there is a new diplomatic action called Improve Relations which allows you to increase an empires opinion of you. Q: Will AI empires that covet my territory try to sabotage relations? In other situations, will the AI try to modify relations to where it thinks they should be? A: AI empires will use the Improve Relations envoy action if they are interested in pursuing other deals, or Harm Relations if they dislike you and either want you as a rival or want to insult you. Q: Will we be able to get custom settings to choose which diplomatic notifications we are interested in receiving, and perhaps nuance to such a system such as "nations of interest" and "nations of total irrelevance". A: No, but you can disable certain types of alerts by shift-right clicking on them. (You can re-enable disabled alert types by toggling that section on in the Outliner and right clicking on them.) Q: Will having any diplomatic relationship bigger than Open Borders still generate Xenophile attraction? A: If you are in a federation, defensive pact, or commercial pact with an empire that is a different species, then yes, the xenophiles gain a bonus to ethics attraction. (And contact with an empire that has enslaved or genocided pops of your species provides a xenophile attraction penalty.) Q: Will there be some new (diplomacy related) Ascension Perks? A: There are no new Ascension Perks, but Galactic Contender now also grants a Diplomatic Weight bonus.
If you want to read more about Diplomatic Questions and start asking questions about Origins, have a read here!
[ 2020-02-06 12:33:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello again! As part of our Q&A series, this week we're going through the questions you've asked about the Galactic Community. As expected, there were a lot of them, so we condensed a few similar questions together. While some of the Diplomacy related questions are answered here, we're compiling questions for the next Q&A in this thread.
Membership in the Galactic Community
Q: Will founding the galactic community be based on a bit more that just meeting half of the players? The real UN was very, very simply put the result of two world wars. It wouldn't make a lot of sense if there immediately was the diplomatic will to form this forum just by meeting a bunch of people. A: The event chain that initially attempts to form the Galactic Community begins once a non-genocial and non-gestalt empire has encountered at least half the galaxy, and at least three non-genocial empires agree to form the Community. If it fails to form, there will be additional opportunities later.
Q:Are we 'in' by default, or does we get a choice to join when GC is formed? A: You are given a choice whether or not you wish to join the Community. (This is also the case for empires that were not part of the initial founding but gain communications with a galactic community member.) Q: How do we get out? / Is leaving the galactic community a permanent decision? A: You can leave at any time by paying an Influence cost that scales with your Empire Sprawl.
As noted, you cannot rejoin for a period of twenty years, during which you have reduced Diplomatic Weight and an opinion penalty with Galactic Community Members. Q: If an empire leaves the galactic community to escape sanctions will other members get some casus belli against them? A: It depends on what Resolutions have passed. Usually, no. So this was a sneak peek from our Galactic Community Q&A, if you want to find out more have a read here!
[ 2020-01-30 13:09:47 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! In last week's dev diary we talked about the new Q&A format that we will be doing for the next couple of dev diaries. We asked you to post your questions regarding the federation rework, and we're glad to see so many questions! Next week's topic will be the Galactic Community, and you can already post your questions here! Anyway, let's begin with the Q&A:
Subjects:
Q: Are subjects forced to join some federation types (or all?) if you ask them to? A: Its up to your federation whether or not subjects are allowed in. If they are permitted, they will automatically follow their overlord in or out. Q: Can you make/start a federation with your subjects? A: Federations are (theoretically) alliances between equals, so independent diplomacy is required to initially form one. As noted elsewhere, vassals may be brought into federations (whether they like it or not) depending on federation law. Q: Can you form a trade-league with a 1-planet sector you released as a vassal for just that purpose? A: No and yes. Yes, you can release a 1-planet sector with the intention of starting a federation, but they would need to be independent for you to be able form it.
Federation Laws:
Q: Will there be any tools (laws, for instance) to combat ethics drift within a Federation? It would be nice to have a way to deal with an incompatible empire other than expelling them (then reabsorbing via a liberation war). A: No, there is no way for you to influence the ethics of other empires. The cohesion penalty is meant to be offset by having to assign more envoys to the federation. Q: Can you pass federation laws regulating member policies? For instance, decree that all primary species must have full citizenship throughout all federation empires? Or just outlaw slavery altogether? Because I hate seeing my own species enslaved by allies I have a migration treaty with. A: There are currently no laws to influence other empires like that within the federation, but were certainly open to the idea. Once Federations is released well be gathering your feedback as always Q: Will we be able to pass laws that affect specific pop types? For example, I want to have all empires in my Hegemony, or all my vassal empires be forced to set Starfish pops to purge status (after all everyone seems to think that Starfish portrait represents fanatic purifiers the best). A: Same as the answer above. Q: How many federation laws are there? A: There are currently 14 categories of laws, with each category having 2-5 laws. Q: Can we get an Academic Debate succession type for Research Cooperatives? A: There is in fact a Challenge Type called Thesis, which very much mimics what we think you are looking for. Its available to all federation types. Q: Could we get an example of more federation laws? A: Yes we can! In dev diary #158 you could see most of the laws, but there are some things that have been changed or added since then. We now have the Strongest Succession Type, which is split up into different categories like Economy, Fleet, Tech or Diplomatic Weight. We have also added two new Challenge Types: one which is a bidding process where you spend ECs to become the president, and another one which is an academic thesis. We will definitely show off all these things in more detail on a stream sometime in the future. These are not all of the questions that we answered, there are a ton more on our forums, which you can check out here!
[ 2020-01-23 13:24:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Were finally back at the office and were very excited to be back working on Federations! We will be continuing to focus on AI and stability, while also polishing our features. As a couple of examples of something we are working on right now; we are looking at the economic AI as well as making more unique behaviors for the end game crisis AI. As we continue polishing well also be making improvements here and there.
To share some polish progress, as one example, weve added a new slavery type called Indentured Assets, which will be a part of the Utopia (as its a part of the expanded species rights). We wanted to have a slavery type that works better for your more dystopian and evolved empires, which has a greater need for many specialists.
While slaves only have 25% political power of free pops, indentured assets will retain 75%.
As promised before vacations, we will be doing a number of Q&A sessions related to different topics. The first Q&A will be about the Federation Rework and you can already post your questions in our forum thread here. We will be answering some of your questions next week, on Jan 23rd.
Future topics:
- Jan 23rd: Federation rework Q&A
- Jan 30th: Galactic Community Q&A
- TBA: Diplomacy Q&A
- TBA: Origins Q&A
- TBA: Mega shipyard & juggernaut Q&A
[ 2020-01-16 12:45:42 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Christmas is fast approaching, and before the team disappears for some well-deserved rest, we thought it would be good to sum up the year and share some thoughts.
2019 has been a challenging year for us, with many different challenges that weve had to tackle. The year began with an extended period of patching, which had us starting on a bad footing. We had a lot of issues to address, but we also had plans for the year, plans that included small side projects as well as developing new content for the game.
The year made it clear that we need to slow down and refocus our efforts, because weve been running at a high pace for too long now. We are working hard with Federations to make sure we have time to address any outstanding issues, and to make the expansion a great release.
Our communication hasnt been the best during the year either, and a lot comes down to us not having a lot to communicate (as we were busy working on things), and that we decided to use PDXCON for all our announcements. Next year we hope to be better, and as mentioned previously, we will be starting 2020 with a bunch of Q&A dev diaries related to different topics each week. The schedule for the Q&A will be posted next year, with our first dev diary on January 16th. Our plans for 2020 are looking very good, and were very excited for the future.
In dev diary #141 I outlined some of the concepts that I wanted to explore for the game. Lets take a look at some of the things weve achieved:
Pop growth: Look into how immigration/emigration works, try to make base growth across multiple planets less powerful, make habitability matter more again
Sectors & automation: Allow players to nudge which sectors planets belong to, reduce micromanagement by improving sector management tool.
- A lot of work has been done with this, such as creating sectors, manual designations and planet automation. All work isnt finished however, and we want to add more improvements.
Backgrounds: Split up some civics into backgrounds, and add more backgrounds.
- This is being implemented as Origins, and were very happy with how much value this adds to the game.
Civic flavour: Spend more time on making the civics feel more unique and fun.
- Weve done some work towards this, but we dont consider it finished yet. There are still a bunch of Civics we would like to make more fun.
Institutions: Define which institutions make up your empires internal departments (such as Diplomatic Corps, Xenology Bureau etc.), and their funding, size and power.
Espionage: Intel to determine how much you know about another empire, spy actions, cloaking, sabotage & general mischief.
Religion & Cults: Similar to factions, cults could appear in your empire during certain circumstances. Spiritualist empires would most likely have imperial cults. Worship of powerful entities etc.
Archaeology: [strike]Explore the ruins of ancient civilizations.[/strike]
- We added Archaeology in Ancient Relics, and were very happy with how the system allows us to tell stories in chapters.
Subject contracts: Allow overlords to better customize what type of subjects they have, tribute levels, benefits to subject etc.
Federation depth: Allow federations to level up, have different election types, taxes etc.
- This will be done with the reworked Federation system coming with the 2.6 update next year.
Galactic Council: Create a sort of a space UN with galactic politics and diplomacy.
- This will be done with the Galactic Community coming with the 2.6 update next year.
Primitives: Allow for more interactions with primitive pre-FTL species
With everything weve been working on during 2019, we will be adding a lot of depth and customization to Stellaris. We are especially looking forward to when you all get a chance to play with Origins and the Galactic Community.
And because we cant have a dev diary without some sort of sneak peak, we will show you this:
The previous design that we outlined in dev diary #158 showed Strongest (Economy) and Diplomatic Weight as two succession types. We werent entirely happy with that, so we have separated the Strongest Succession Type from which category is used to determine who is the strongest. Setting Strongest as the Succession Type now requires High Centralization. The cool thing is that this now allows you to have a Research Cooperative federation that is led by whichever empire has the best technology.
Producer Switch
And now a message from Jamor:
Hi all. Firstly, I want to wish you all a happy and safe holiday season. Play lots of video games, spend time with your loved ones, and start 2020 in the best style.
I became the producer (called Project Lead back then) of Stellaris back in February 2017. While I wasnt new to the games industry, for me it was an amazing moment to finally work on the sort of hardcore, deeply nerdy strategy games that I myself played at home (having started with Paradox games in 2007 with HOI 2). I look back upon the starry-eyed character who wrote this and reflect upon the journey so far: contributing to three full expansions, three story packs, and two species packs, seeing the title through absolutely massive changes, and all in all patching on 37 separate occasions - some great, some not so hot (Im sure some of you remember the great dawning of galactic peace that arose from the 1.6 patch, by the simple expedient of making the AI actually incapable of declaring war). All in all its been the most intense and memorable era of my career in this crazy industry.
The only constant is change, however, so now Im moving over as producer to Imperator: Rome. They are a great bunch of folks who are bringing out the immense potential of that game more and more, in the classic Paradox style. It is my honour to lead them forward as the game continues to grow and evolve.
Of course that means Im leaving my beloved Stellaris team. After sharing so many experiences, some magic, some tragic, it is not without emotion that I do this. But ultimately, you cannot keep doing the same thing forever, and Im eager to get started on this new challenge. I want to thank my guys, who have so fearlessly and loyally pushed on towards the objective no matter what. I also want to thank you, the fans, without whom there would be no Paradox, and as a fellow fan reaffirm my commitment that Ill always do the best I can, on whatever team Im in, to uphold our Special Secret Thing (). Were Paradox, were different from everyone else, and Im thrilled to be a part of it. Obidobi will take over leadership of the Stellaris team, and he has my complete confidence.
Now, I turn in my laser, and gird on my gladius. LETS GO PDS!
A message from Obidobi:
Hello everyone!
I'm Obidobi, some of you may have seen me around as I've been working at Paradox (and Stellaris for that matter) for the past 5 years. I started my journey as a newcomer to the gaming industry as a Paradox QA in 2014 where I saw Stellaris in its pre-alpha stage and I've been on this spaceship ever since. In 2018 I joined the producer team helping Jamor on Stellaris and some other projects, including the Console Edition of Stellaris. Stellaris is basically running through my veins at this point, and I don't think I'll know what to do if I ever move projects. So as my dear mentor Jamor leaves for more ancient lands, like any proper Shounen Protagonist, I will have to pick up the mantle of Hokage and become stronger than ever before (Look forward to these kinds of references).
I'm really looking forward to see where the team and I can take Stellaris going forward and I'm truly excited about getting an opportunity to hold the steering wheel. I hope you guys will accept me with open arms as you did with Jamor!
I hope youre all as excited as I am for the future, but for now I just want to wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year!
---
That is all for this week and the year! We will be back again on January 16th!
Remember you can also read this Dev Diary and comment on our forums.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
[ 2019-12-12 14:27:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Today well be talking about some big stuff namely the Juggernaut and the Mega Shipyard.
Both of these new behemoths are a part of the upcoming Federations expansion.
Juggernaut
Stellaris has been in development for many years and, and if theres something we know for sure its that big ships are cool, and bigger ships are even cooler. With this flawless logic in mind, we obviously wanted to add something even bigger than a Titan.
Mobile starbases is something that we know has been widely requested, so why not hit two avians with one lithoid?
Visually, the Juggernaut has the shape of a giant pair of wings.
The juggernaut is as much a mobile starbase as it is a massive warship. Although the Juggernaut works like a mobile starbase in some regards, it will not project borders or control ownership or systems. A Juggernaut instead functions like a forward base of operations during offensive campaigns where you can repair your ships. The Juggernaut will not have starbase modules or buildings instead it will count as always having 2 Shipyards (which means it can build, repair and upgrade ships).
The Juggernaut can be designed in the ship designer, and features 2 XL turrets, 6 hangar slots and 5 medium turrets.
In addition, the Juggernaut gets access to a couple of new and unique aura components.
The Juggernaut will be unlocked by a technology which requires Citadels and Battleships to be already researched. A Starbase will also need to have a Colossal Assembly Yard in order to be able to construct one. The Colossal Assembly Yard is required for (and unlocked by) both the Colossus and the Juggernaut.
The Juggernaut will have an empire limit of 1.
Mega Shipyard
New Megastructures are always nice, because we all want more ways to show off the glory and magnificence of our empires. The Mega Shipyard is exactly what it is, a giant shipyard that allows you to build a lot of ships really fast.
The Mega Shipyard will also provide ships with +100 starting XP, so that it will not matter where you build them. Generally speaking, are trying to avoid design that creates incentives for players to engage in more micromanagement that may not be fun. We believe the choice of where to build a ship (because it would cost less, or gain more XP somewhere) is an example of micromanagement that is not very fun. The only incentive is to avoid loss aversion, which is not a good. Incentives should generally be positive.
The Mega Shipyard is unlocked by a technology which requires Mega-Engineering (like the others). Its found in the Society tree and belongs to the Military Theory category.
The Mega Shipyard will have 3 stages (in addition to construction site):
Mega Shipyard Framework - 10 Shipyards, +33% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP
Mega Shipyard Core - 20 Shipyards, +66% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP
Mega Shipyard - 30 Shipyards, +100% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP
The bonuses to Ship Build Speed will be empire-wide.
Keep in mind that these numbers are work-in-progress and may change.
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That is all for this week! Next week will be the last dev diary of the year, before the holidays, and we will be doing a round up of the year.
Also keep an eye on our social media channels, as we will be sharing some more screenshots of the Juggernaut and Mega Shipyard.
As always, you can also read this Dev Diary and comment on our forums.
[ 2019-12-05 14:05:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Today we thought wed talk about some of the smaller changes coming to diplomacy with the free 2.6 update. Although the Galactic Community and the reworked federations are sure to have a large impact on galactic diplomacy, it's also important to talk about the smaller things!
Envoys
One of the more important things weve added are the Envoys. Envoys function very similar to Diplomats in EU4, and they are required for certain diplomatic actions such as:
Improve / Harm Relations it is now possible to send an Envoy to improve or harm relations which can affect Opinion by up to (-400 / +400 ). More on Opinion and Relations later.
Assigned to Federation (to increase monthly Cohesion by +1)
Assigned to Galactic Community (to increase Diplomatic Weight)
Improve Relations
In Federation
Galactic Community
Although Envoys are characters, they do not currently have any character-mechanics such as traits. We didnt think it would be fun to have to micromanage and switch Envoys around to better fit certain jobs depending on their traits.
Diplomacy Interface Updates
Weve finally gotten around to give a bunch of diplomacy-related interfaces a facelift! First up, lets talk a little about the general diplomacy screen.
You are now able to more clearly see things such as Civics, Origins, Relative Power breakdowns, your ongoing diplomatic agreements, and also the new diplomatic stances!
This Hegemonic subordinate was kind enough to act as a model for the new diplo screen!
Declaring rivalry never looked so appealing.
The diplomatic offers are now a bit more clear on what is going on (not final text). A downside, however, is that it's now much harder to fool colleagues into becoming your vassal in our internal multiplayer sessions.
Diplomatic Stances
Sometimes we like concept that our colleagues have put into some of our other games, and the diplomatic stances from Imperator: Rome were a good example. Although not exactly the same, we like the general idea. We wanted empires to be able to set a diplomatic stance that dictates their behaviour towards other empires on a galactic stage.
Diplomatic Stances are Policies and can be changed once every 10 years. There are a bunch of different stances, and some may also be unique to certain empire types (e.g. Isolationist is called Mercantile for Megacorporations).
Stances are designed to be quite different, and to facilitate different playstyles. Perceptive readers might notice that the Belligerent stance seems very similar to Supremacist, and that is true, except that Supremacist stance is designed for all empires that want to be a big player. Supremacist empires will dislike other empires with the same stance, so it is almost like a soft rivalry of sorts.
Stances also have some effect on internal politics, as some of your factions may have certain preferences when it comes to your foreign policy.
Relations and Opinion
We wanted an easier way to measure how the diplomatic relations between two empires is doing, so weve added a new aggregate value called Relations. Relations exists in different levels ranging:
Terrible <- Tense <- Neutral -> Positive -> Excellent
They do have an effect on which type of diplomatic actions that are available.
We want diplomacy to be less fickle, and more mechanical. Players should now have more ability to influence what other empires opinions are of them. Overall diplomacy should feel less static and more prone to evolving over time.
Form Federation requires Excellent Relations, and pacts like Migrations, Research or Commercial require Positive Relations. Similarly, Rivalries require Terrible Relations. This is also the case in player-to-player diplomacy, so its important to maintain a good standing.
Some of these restrictions can be bypassed by having an Envoy to harm or improve relations.
Favors
Finally we want to talk about Favors. Although Favors were primarily added to give players agency within the Galactic Community, they can also be used to influence the AIs likelihood of accepting certain diplomatic agreements.
Favors is a new mechanic that allows you to increase your Diplomatic Weight for certain votes or proposals in the Galactic Community. An empire can owe another empire up to 10 Favors, and each Favor will increase Diplomatic Weight by 10%.
For example Empire B owes 10 Favors to Empire A. Empire A spends influence to call in all 10 Favors and adds 100% of the Diplomatic Weight that Empire B has. Empire A will add the Diplomatic Weight from Empire B, for a specific vote, without Empire B losing their Diplomatic Weight.
In effect, Favors allows an empire to manipulate vote results towards their point of view. It is not possible to Call in Favors when an empire is already voting the same way as you are. Multiple empires can call in favors from the same empire, and it's designed in this way to reduce the complexity of having to figure out which favors should have priority, or which favors should matter more.
Pretty please. You owe me.
In addition to the Galactic Community, Favors can also be called in to increase acceptance chance by +5 when offering certain diplomatic deals.
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That is all for this week! Next week well be back with some more details on the Juggernaut and the Mega Shipyard.
Remember, you can always read this Dev Diary and comment directly on our forums.
[ 2019-11-28 12:01:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
For this weeks dev diary we chose to switch the order of a couple of dev diaries to be able to give you some updates earlier rather than later.
The Stellaris brand has understandably been under more scrutiny than usual for the last few months, and we want to address situations related to work-in-progress art in Federations. As an example, we had some UI design mockups (shown during PDXCon) that contained placeholder art. We want to make clear this is not how the game will appear in its final version.
Moving on to Federations: During PDXCON 2019 we said that we would give more information on the expansion later during the year and today we want to share some news that Federations is targeted for release in early 2020. Although we understand that some of you might be disappointed that Federations will not be released in December, we want you to know that we are taking more time to make sure that the next update is going to be amazing.
In addition, to give us the best chance of improving some of the pain points youve shared with us, we have assigned some of our team members to focus solely on trying to improve performance and AI. It is very important to us that 2.6 does not compound any of the current issues with the game, and that we can take the time we need to address some of the issues remaining from 2.2. Its important to remember, however, that working on these kinds of issues is not a sprint, but a marathon it's something that is constantly being worked on over longer periods of time.
If you want to read more about performance, and how we work to maintain it over time, we shared some more information on this topic in Dev Diary #149.
While we have been unable to give concrete information or specifics related to these issues, we can say that it is very important to us. With that said, it's important for us that you know that your feedback is not being ignored, even if we have no news to share.
We want to thank you for being such a dedicated community and helping us by providing feedback and reporting issues with the game. We appreciate this to no end and encourage you to continue voicing your thoughts to us.
From the beginning of next year, well be doing a series of dev diaries dedicated entirely to answering questions related to specific topics each week. The schedule for those dev diaries will be released later in December when well summarize and round up the year.
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That is it for this week! Dev diaries will resume their regular schedule, and as promised last week, next week we will be talking about some of the new things affecting diplomacy, such as Envoys.
P.S:
Since this dev diary had no pictures I felt it was necessary to add something, so here's a picture of the premade Lithoid empire that some of you have been asking us to add to the Lithoids Species Pack! (Will also be updated with 2.6)
As always, you can also read this dev diary and give us feedback directly, on our forums.
[ 2019-11-21 15:02:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
In our previous dev diary #155 we talked about Origins, and today we will be returned to the topic by going through Origins again, but in more detail.
Please note that although this is a pretty exhaustive list, there is no guarantee that these Origins will necessarily match what will be in Federations once it is released.
What are Origins?
Origins allows you to pick a background story for your empire. An empire can only pick one Origin.
Prosperous Unification is the default Origin.
There are currently 18 Origins in the game, where some of them were converted from previously being Civics. Origins that were converted will be unlocked by the same DLC that they were unlocked by when they were civics.
The Origins
Prosperous Unification: Start with 4 additional Pops and 2 additional Districts. (Available to everyone)
Mechanist: Start with 8 Pops being robots, and the ability to build more. (Utopia)
Syncretic Evolution: Start the game with 12 Pops being of another species. (Utopia)
Life-Seeded: Start on a Gaia World. (Apocalypse)
Post-Apocalyptic: Start on a Tomb World. (Apocalypse)
Remnants: Start on a Relic World. (Federations)
Shattered Ring: Start on a Shattered Ring World. Your empire lives on the only intact section of the ancient megastructure, and it is possible to repair most of the other sections. (Federations)
Void Dwellers: Start on a Habitat above your destroyed, former homeworld. Adept at living in habitats, and start with the technology to build new ones. (Federations)
Scion: Start as the vassal of a Fallen Empire. (Federations)
Galactic Doorstep: Start with a dormant Gateway in your home system. (Available to everyone)
Tree of Life: Only for Hive Minds. Start with a powerful Tree of Life on your homeworld. Disastrous if you would somehow lose control of it. (Federations)
On the Shoulder of Giants: Start with an Archaeological Site related to a mysterious benefactor. (Federations)
Calamitous Birth: Lithoid Only. Start with a Massive Crater on your Homeworld. You are also able to build Meteorite Colony Ships, which colonize planets in a more dramatic fashion. (Lithoids)
Resource Consolidation: Machines only. Start with a Machine World as your homeworld. (Synthetic Dawn)
Comfy federalized start.
Common Ground: Start with as the leader of a Galactic Union federation, and with The Federation tradition unlocked. (Federations)
Hegemon: Start with as the leader of a Hegemony federation, and with The Federation tradition unlocked. (Federations)
Doomsday: Your homeworld is doomed and it will explode after 64 years, so you need to find a new home for your species. (Federations)
Lost Colony: Another empire with the same species as you will exist somewhere in the galaxy. (Available to everyone)
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That is it for this week! Next week we will be back and we will be talking about some of the new things affecting diplomacy, such as Envoys.
Remember you can also read this Dev Diary on our forums.
[ 2019-11-14 12:00:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Today we will be talking about a new feature coming with Stellaris: Federations the Galactic Community!
The Galactic Community is very similar to a United Nations in space. Members can propose and vote on Resolutions, which are laws that affect all the member empires.
Resolutions
The Resolutions are intended to be divisive, so that even empires that are allies can have very different agendas when it comes to which Resolutions should be passed.
Resolutions exist in categories and have a couple of steps in each category.
Go big or go home.
Passing a Resolution
The first step to passing a Resolution is proposing it! Any member of the Galactic Community can propose a Resolution, but they can only have one ongoing. When a Resolution is proposed, it moves into the proposal queue.
The Galactic Community deals with matters of critical importance to the continued well-being of the galaxy and all of its inhabitants.
Only one Resolution can be voted on at a time on the senate floor, and the proposal that moves into session next will be the proposed Resolution with the highest amount of Diplomatic Weight supporting it.
Senate in session, voting on a Resolution.
When a Resolution is in session and is being voted on, empires can support, oppose or abstain. Voting for or against will add an empires Diplomatic Weight to either side, and when the current session ends the votes will be counted. A Resolution will pass if the Diplomatic Weight in favor of the Resolution is higher than the amount opposing it.
Diplomatic Weight
Diplomatic influence will be calculated using a new scoring system called Diplomatic Weight, and it will be composed of things like economy, technology, fleet power to name a couple of examples.
Cooperative Diplomatic Stance increases Diplomatic Weight by +25%.
There will also be a number of different ways to influence how much Diplomatic Weight you are getting from different sources. There are Resolutions that can modify how much Diplomatic Weight you gain from your economy, and there are Diplomatic Stances that increase how much Diplomatic Weight you gain from fleet power or other areas (more on Diplomatic Stances later!).
So as you can see, there are many different ways to make yourself more influential on a diplomatic, galactic stage!
Favors
For Resolutions, empires have the possibility to call in favors to strengthen their votes. An empire can owe another empire up to 10 favors, and each favor is worth 10% diplomatic weight. For example, if an empire calls in 10 favors, they can add 100% of the other empires diplomatic weight to theirs. Calling in favors this way will only affect votes on Resolutions. This also means that favors will work the same between player empires as it will between player and AI empires.
Calling in favors costs Influence.
Favors can also be used to increase the likelihood of AI empires accepting diplomatic deals.
Favors can be traded through the trade diplomatic action.
Galactic Council
It is possible to reform the Galactic Community to include a Galactic Council. The council will be composed of a number of empires with the highest Diplomatic Weight. By default, the council will have 3 members, but the number can be changed through Resolutions.
The Galactic Council also gets access to special powers such as veto rights or emergency measures.
Veto rights allows a council member to veto a Resolution that is currently in the proposal queue.
While the galactic senate is in recess it is possible for Galactic Council members to declare a proposed Resolution an emergency. This will immediately put the senate into session and will initiate a vote on the emergency Resolution.
Galactic Focus
It is possible for the Galactic Community to set a Galactic Focus. This will mean the Galactic Community together have decided to achieve something or to deal with a crisis.
There will be Resolutions to declare the galactic invaders a threat to the galaxy, which means it will be against galactic law to have closed borders to any other Galactic Community member while the crisis is ongoing.
The Galactic Market is now founded through a Galactic Focus to Found the Galactic Market. When the Resolution to form the Galactic Market has been passed, the bidding process to be the market founder will continue as it previously did.
Creating/Joining/Leaving the Galactic Community
When an empire has established communications with half of the empires in the galaxy, an event will trigger to suggest the formation of a Galactic Community. This means that forming the Galactic Community will be similar to how it used to work to form the Galactic Market.
It is possible to join the Galactic Community (and to see it!) as soon as you have established communications with any member of it.
Leaving the galaxy community is something an empire might choose to do if they become the target of too many sanctions or if there are too many Resolutions that negatively impact them.
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To read this Dev Diary on our forums, click here.
Next week we will be showing all the Origins!
[ 2019-11-07 12:01:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all, Jamor here, with the news that after a weekend in beta without new breaking issues being introduced, I'm putting patch 2.5.1 fully live right now.
It contains a number of bug fixes for the Lithoids release.
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.5.1 ##########################
#################################################################
###################
# UI
###################
* The tooltip for Livestock now mentions that Lithoid Livestock produce Minerals instead of Food
* Chat muting commands now work consistently between in-game and lobby chat
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Lithoid Empires with the Terravore civic should no longer occasionally end up blocked from social research
* Fixed so that players get the correct visual representation of chosen parts for the lithoid ships
* Fixed Lithoids wrongly getting unhappiness and growth penalties from negative food, this comes from negative minerals for them now
* Graphics options chosen in game launcher should actually apply in game now
* Launcher should correctly handle mods and game options on the Paradoxplaza version of the game
* Fixed a crash when network is disconnected
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Save games shouldn't be adversely affected by the switch from 2.5.0 to 2.5.1, but just in case you do encounter issues, you can roll back to a prior version via right click on Stellaris in library -> properties -> betas -> choose the desired version.
If you want to do crossplay MP between Steam and our other release platforms (Plaza/GOG/MS Store), you need to opt in to the crossplay beta, stellaris_test, by the same method. If you have a 2.5.0 MP game that you want to finish before updating, roll back to the crossplay_rollback version.
We're going to aim to get as many bug fixes and improvements as possible as we continue work on Federations. Stand by for more information about that in future dev diaries.
Also, the new Paradox Launcher continues active development in parallel. If you have feedback or issues with the Launcher, please let my colleagues in the Launcher team know in this thread.
To read this post on our forums and give us feedback there, directly, go here.
[ 2019-11-04 14:01:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
It was great to finally reveal what were working on at PDXCON, and today were back with yet another dev diary where we will dive into some more details on the reworked federations.
The screenshots still feature a bunch of work-in-progress stuff, like every federation perk using a placeholder right now. Numbers and effects arent necessarily final either.
Federation Types
Like we mentioned at PDXCON, federation will now come in different Federation Types. Each federation type has a unique passive effect and can unlock federation perks as they level up.
Certain federation types have requirements on what type of empire can suggest to form them, but there are no limitations on who can join a federation (except for killer empires & inward perfection). Yes, this also means that Barbaric Despoilers and Criminal Syndicate are no longer excluded.
Galactic Union
This will be a more generic type of federation that will fit most groups of empires. This federation makes it easier to cooperate with empires, as diversity of ethics will have a less negative impact on maintaining cohesion. This federation type will be available to everyone in the free patch.
Fleet bonuses a plenty!
Martial Alliance
This federation type is focused around having a very large and powerful federation fleet. Only militarists can suggest to form this federation.
Free and automatic research sharing!
Research Cooperative
Empires who wish to cooperate in achieving technological mastery should join together in a research cooperative. Only materialists can suggest to form a research cooperative.
New trade policy!
Trade League
If trade value is the focus of your empire, the Trade League is probably a very good federation for you to be a part of. The Trade League gets access to a new Trade Policy which combines the bonuses of all other trade policies. An empire needs to be a Megacorporation or have the Merchant Guilds civic in order to be able to suggest to form a trade league.
Did you know there is an Origin that lets you start as the president of a Hegemony?
Hegemony
This federation type is built around one strong core member. The president gets most of the bonuses, but the bonuses for the members are also quite powerful. Only authoritarian empires may suggest to form a hegemony.
Federation Perks
Federations will get access to new perks when they level up, and the perks they get access to depend on their type. There are usually 2 perks that gives bonuses to every member and 1 perk that gives bonuses only to the president. However, the Hegemony flips this around by giving the president 2 perks and the members 1 perk (which does not benefit the president in this case!).
Hegemony member perk.
President gets an additional Envoy.
Each time a federation levels up, they will get access to 3 new perks.
Level Up & Cohesion
In order to level gain XP, a federation needs to have positive Cohesion. The amount of XP a federation gains (or loses!) per month is directly tied to its Cohesion, which is a value that ranged from -100 to +100.
There are a number of things that will reduce Cohesion every month, such as every member, diverse ethics and opposing ethics. Federation members can counteract this by assigning Envoys to the federation, which will increase monthly Cohesion.
When Cohesion is at +100, the federation will gain +10 XP every month. If a federation loses XP and drops a level, they will lose access to their perks after a few months.
Federation Laws
It is possible for federations to customize some aspects of its rules. In some cases, federation types also have access to different laws at different points. A Research Cooperative can never have the highest level of fleet contribution, and they also require higher centralization to increase their Fleet Contribution.
There are a number of laws which define certain rules for the federation.
Centralization
Many federation laws require federation centralization to be high enough. To increase centralization, a federation needs higher level. In fact, centralization is the only law locked behind federation levels right now.
Increasing centralization isnt always easy though, as doing so will have a large negative impact on Cohesion. That means more Envoys will need to be assigned to the federation to maintain its Cohesion.
The Galactic Union federation type requires Medium centralization to have a 20% Fleet Contribution.
Fleet Contribution
Most federations will not start with the ability to build a federation fleet, as their fleet contribution will start on None. The Martial Alliance and the Hegemony do start with a Low fleet contribution, however. The Martial Alliance is also able to change its fleet contribution law to High as early as Medium centralization.
Most of the other laws not visible earlier.
Succession types
As you could see in previous screenshots there are a bunch of different laws for how federations can decide who becomes the president. Strongest is the empire with the greatest economy. Diplomatic Weight is the empire with the largest Diplomatic Weight (we talked about that at PDXCON, but more on that later). Rotation will rotate the president. Random will choose a president from a random member. Challenge succession type allows you to pick a challenge type for your federation.
Perhaps well have enough psi-capable pops next time...
There are currently two different challenge types:
Psionic Battle lets psionic pops battle it out over which empire should be president.
Arena Combat lets the rulers of competing empires battle it out. Certain traits for the ruler (both species and ruler-specific) will influence how large chance the ruler has at winning. The Chosen will of course be very hard to beat.
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Thats it for this week, and we hope you survive the information overload! We realized there are so many details we possibly could share, but this should cover the most important parts.
Next week we will be talking about the Galactic Community, Resolutions and more!
[ 2019-10-31 14:08:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone, it's your friendly neighborhood Associate Producer, Obidobi. We've seen your feedback and have put together a small patch to fix some of the major annoyances. To bring it to you faster, we're putting it up on a beta branch in Steam as we continue our verification process in-house.
While this patch will be put as a Beta branch on Steam, we are setting it as default on both GoG and Plaza. This means that if you want to play Multiplayer with your friends on other platforms, you'll have to switch to the Steam beta branch.
Here's the full changelog for 2.5.1:
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.5.1 ##########################
#################################################################
###################
# UI
###################
* The tooltip for Livestock now mentions that Lithoid Livestock produce Minerals instead of Food
* Chat muting commands now work consistently between in-game and lobby chat
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Lithoid Empires with the Terravore civic should no longer occasionally end up blocked from social research
* Fixed so that players get the correct visual representation of chosen parts for the lithoid ships
* Fixed Lithoids wrongly getting unhappiness and growth penalties from negative food, this comes from negative minerals for them now
* Graphics options chosen in game launcher should actually apply in game now
* Launcher should correctly handle mods and game options on the Paradoxplaza version of the game
* Fixed a crash when network is disconnected
Please note that 2.5.1 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.
Also note that save file compatibility between versions is not guaranteed. If you have an important 2.5.0 game going, don't try to load the save in 2.5.1.
We are standing by for your feedback on the version. We've allocated people and time for post-launch support and we'll be following your comments closely. To give us feedback on our forums go here.
f you are having any issues specifically with the new launcher, please let our colleagues in launcher team know:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/about-the-paradox-launcher.1254011/
[ 2019-10-28 13:09:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone!
Im Eladrin, Game Designer on Stellaris, and Im one of the newer members of the Stellaris team. I joined the team during the development of Ancient Relics, and its been a blast. It was awesome meeting so many of you at PDXCON, and getting to hear so many ideas and excellent stories directly from you.
Back in Diary 152 and Dev Diary 153, Grekulf mentioned some of the Summer Experimentation that we did - but in todays dev diary I wanted to talk about one of the things I worked on during the summer - game mechanics for the Lithoids.
[previewyoutube=4pE0J6M_xIs;full][previewyoutube=4pE0J6M_xIs;leftthumb][/previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The Lithoids Species Pack is very sedimental to me. When I wanted to dig deeper into the systems and get my hands dirty in the code, I looked at the wouldnt it be cool if list, and saw ...Lithoids ate minerals instead of food? up near the top. This seemed like a solid foundation to start with, and a gneiss stepping stone to get my feet on the ground that fit my apatite - it seemed like a pretty simple change after all.
Okay, Ill stop with the rock puns.
There are fifteen Lithoid portraits (and one new machine portrait), some of which have appearances that resemble some of the other phenotypes so you can do some interesting things with Syncretic Evolution.
Look at me! I'm a sparkly space unicorn!
The ships use a beautiful asymmetrical crystal design. Remember that the colors of your ships reflect your flag. You can use this to your advantage to make a pretty sweet looking fleet.
This is my favorite Titan in the game.
Theres also a Lithoid Advisor Voice. I may have stopped with the puns for now, but theres no force in the universe that can stop the Lithoid Advisor.
Changing the Lithoids to consume minerals was simple enough, but we also wanted to embrace the sci-fi trope of slow growing rock beings living in inhospitable climates. We started by giving them a massive boost to habitability which they still retain today, and a much larger pop growth penalty than they eventually ended up with. For flavor they receive a bonus to Army Health, and we increased their leader lifespans (but have their leaders start somewhat older as well).
Every little change leads to several more, however. If a species eats minerals instead of food, their homeworld should start with extra mining districts and no agricultural districts built. In fact, if a species evolved to eat rocks, their homeworld should probably by mineral rich and food poor. But wait, what about if theyre a Syncretic Evolution species, or if a Rogue Servitor wants to start with pet rocks? What about if they want to be a Devouring Swarm?
Many minor changes came along with what started as a simple economic change. Just a few examples include the Lithoids being tragically unable to be declared the most delicious species in the galaxy if there are any alternatives, loosening restrictions a bit on Bio-Reactors, modifying the Fleeting trait to be -25 years for Lithoids instead of -10, and a handful of Tradition changes. We also added a few Lithoid specific traits that allow them to generate small amounts of special resources every month.
After many rounds of qualitative feedback and a huge number of playdays, we ended up with the following as the Lithoid species trait:
The large habitability boost that Lithoids receive allow them to colonize worlds that would be marginal for other species, allowing them to work around their slower pop growth speed. Empires with a Lithoid primary species also begin with Lithoid Monolith blockers on their homeworld that can be removed at a large mineral cost for an additional Lithoid pop. (A Lithoid specific Origin in Federations modifies these a bit, and well talk more about that in another Dev Diary.)
So very sleepy.
The Lithoid trait is automatically applied to any species that uses a Lithoid portrait. For the Xenophiles out there, Half-Lithoids generated by Xeno-Compatibility follow this rule as well, so if the portrait is a Lithoid it will consume minerals instead of food, produce minerals when purged, and so on.
Weve exposed this ability so modders should be able to similarly add phenotype forced traits to species they create by adding trait = "trait_lithoid" to the species class entry. (Replacing the Lithoid trait with their own custom species trait, of course.) I look forward to seeing what you do with it.
As for the Lithoid Devouring Swarm They dont have precisely the same motivations as a regular Devouring Swarm. While they will still press organics inhabiting the worlds they take into nutritive paste for the Bio-Reactors, their hunger is a bit more ambitious. Renamed Terravores, they operate largely the same way as a regular Devouring Swarm, but once off their homeworld they have an additional planetary decision to consume the habitable worlds of the galaxy, leaving devastated husks in their wake:
Are you going to eat that?
Terravores are barred from Terraforming (and thus do not have access to Hive Worlds) and cannot clear the devastation they leave behind, but other empires can clean up after them, though it takes a major effort.
Modders will now be able to change the name and description of a civic out for another based on species class, similar to how traditions can be swapped.
Im quite pleased with how the Lithoids turned out, I think they're a real gem. I hope that you all enjoy it just as much.
In a few hours the free 2.5.0 patch will be up and the Lithoids Species Pack will be available for shale, so pick it up, rock out, and leave the galaxy gravelling at your feet!
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.5.0 ############################
#################################################################
###################
# Balance
###################
* The Pop Growth Reduction for Bio-Trophies now actually reduces their growth rate. Driven Assimilators now apply their organic growth penalty as a multiplier the same way as Rogue Servitors do, and is now also 50%
* Defensive Platforms placed on Outposts now provide 2 points of Piracy Suppression for their system. The Great Game tradition from the Supremacy tree now also reduces the cost to build Defensive Platforms by 33%
###################
# UI
###################
* Shift+clicking on ship count in the Fleet Manager now adds ships up to the nearest unit of ten, using ctrl fills up to the template max size (for realzies this time)
* The Shared Burdens civic will no longer appear by itself in the civics list when you select Gestalt Consciousness ethics but have not yet selected Machine Intelligence or Hive Minded authority
* Added a notification when one empire guarantees the independence of another
###################
# AI
###################
* Automated building now checks that upkeep cost is covered by income
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed wrong save file being loaded from the resume button in the launcher, caused by a conflict between local and cloud saves
* Fixed the game complaining about mods not being in UTF8-BOM3 for no good reason
* Fixed a potential crash in AI when evaluating market values
* Fixed cases where planetary events could fire multiple notifications
* Odd Factories no longer sometimes block pops from getting purged, because you monsters should be free to purge whatever you want
* Mod load order is now the same as the order in which the mods are displayed
You can also read this Dev Diary and comment on our forums, here.
[ 2019-10-24 11:15:14 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Players! The PDX Con 2019 is here and we have great announcements for you! We're streaming the announcement show on Twitch! Join your fellow xenos here! We start at 10a.m. CEST. In 30 minutes! See you on the other side!
[ 2019-10-19 07:29:33 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all, Jamor again.
We're deploying a small, quick hotfix to address two issues we were able to solve today: inability of the launcher to display incompatible mods, and an economy bug related to artisan jobs and consumer goods.
Given that it's early yet and some may not have seen the original changes in 2.4.0, I'll repost those. Please note that due to a human error, namely this producer managing to transcribe fixes from the wrong dev branch in to the patch notes (!), a few of the listed changes in 2.4.0 are not actually present in the build. In the interest of getting the hotfix to you all with maximum speed, those will come in a future update when they can be properly merged and tested. I'll put them in the notes for reference, but crossed out.
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.4.1 ##########################
#################################################################
###################
# General
###################
* Added Launcher v2
* Updated all factions titans with panning light meshes. Updated vfx for ether drakes wing attack (muzzle, projectile, hit effect)
* Caravaneer ship & station vfx update
* Added "/mute
[ 2019-10-10 15:17:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! As we mentioned in our last dev diary, this week we will be talking about some of the cool things you can be expecting to see at PDXCON 2019! Announcement show What: PDX will be announcing new titles and expansions. Stellaris will be featured. When: Saturday (Oct 19) 10:00 CEST Where: PDXCON main stage or Twitch Stellaris talk What: I will be holding a talk where I will be talking about future updates to Stellaris. When: Saturday (Oct 19) 18:00 CEST Where: PDXCON main stage or Twitch Paradox Awards What: Paradox celebrates its community by recognizing outstanding achievements in our community. When: Saturday (Oct 19) 20:00 CEST Where: PDXCON main stage or Twitch Stellaris booth What: Play new content, meet the devs, talk to other fans When: Saturday (Oct 19) 11:00 - 20:00 CEST Where: At PDXCON Stellaris meet-and-greet What: Meet the devs! When: Sunday (Oct 20) 12:00 - 13:00 CEST Where: Auditorium Stellaris LAN What: Play new content, meet the devs, talk to other fans When: Sunday (Oct 20) 10:00 - 14:30 CEST and 16:00 to 20:30 CEST Where: At PDXCON PDXCON is next week, and we hope well be seeing some of you there! The next dev diary will be in two weeks, after PDXCON. Once our big announcements are out in the open, we will resume the weekly dev diaries. If you want to give us feedback on our forums, you can also read this schedule here.
[ 2019-10-10 11:00:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all, Jamor here, with some news for you just before our biggest event of the year, PDXCON.
Today we are releasing version 2.4.0 Lee. The primary objective of this version is to get our new Paradox launcher in to Stellaris:
Why are we doing this? There are two main reasons: Firstly, as you know, Stellaris is available on Steam, Paradoxplaza, GOG, and as of today, the Microsoft Store. Currently, there are hoops that someone has to jump through if they want to do a multiplayer game with users on another platform, involving opting in to beta branches. Our long term goal is to unite all Paradox gamers under one universal MP umbrella, so everyone can play with anyone they want at any time, on any release platform, with a minimum of fuss. To do that, a single unified launcher for all our of various platforms is a key prerequisite (just to clarify, this is the end goal, it does not change how you play Stellaris in multiplayer today). The launcher also has its own dedicated personnel which means it is a time saver for each game team at Paradox, letting us focus exclusively on making and improving the game itself. As a producer, I gotta tell ya, anything that lets us focus more on our core mission is most welcome.
The second big reason for the move is that this new launcher will become a much more feature-rich hub for all things related to the game. We plan improved presentation of announcements and dev diaries, mod management with player control over load order, mod support for non-Steam users via PDX Mods, the works. A low key but nice convenience feature that's in right now is the addition of a resume last save button right at the top, letting you start up your most recent game with one click. Our ambitions for it are high.
Heres some more details from my colleague Anders, the Product Manager for Launcher Team:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/about-the-paradox-launcher.1254011/
The launcher has benefitted from user feedback from prior releases on other PDS games, and will be continually developed by the launcher team. In that regard your input is very helpful. It is self patching, which means updates to the launcher can be deployed without the game version needing to change. It is a separate binary that is used by all PDX games employing it, meaning it only installs once per computer.
Without diminishing the effort of the core dev team working on
[ 2019-10-09 15:02:06 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi team! It's time for another Dev Diary and our Game Director Daniel has a cool new feature to share with you today! :)
-----------------------------
Hello everyone!
I have just returned from a belated vacation in Japan, and although I had a great time there it is also fun to be back to work. Today I want to talk about some of the cool things happening with Stellaris this year. As many of you have probably guessed, Stellaris will announce a new expansion at PDXCon this year. This expansion will feature a lot of cool new things, most of which will be revealed at PDXCon. But I do also have something really neat that I want to share with you now!
Good ol civics. Gotta love em.
Back in Utopia we introduced a lot of cool new features to improve how you could customize and specialize your empire. Civics were a great addition to the game (in fact I consider them to be one of the best), but they are also awkwardly split between backgrounds like Syncretic Evolution and institutions like Distinguished Admiralty or Imperial Cult. Civics have added a lot of really cool options to how you can play the game, and that is something I want to expand upon this is where the Origins come in.
Materialistic, mechanist, mushroom madness?
Origins is a new feature that is very similar to Civics, and will now represent your empires background. An empire can only select one Origin, and an Origin cannot be changed. We will be adding a bunch of new Origins (some of them are really cool!) and we will also be changing some Civics into being Origins instead. Examples of Civics that will be converted into Origins are Mechanists, Post-Apocalyptic, Life-Seeded and Syncretic Evolution.
Life-Seeded Origin, now open to hive minds.
Certain types of empires were previously unable to access some of these backgrounds since they have their own set of Civics (Gestalts and Megacorps for example). Because some of those Civics have been turned into Origins, those backgrounds will now be available to more types of empires. This means that it should now be possible to have a hive mind with the Life-Seeded origin or a Megacorp with the Mechanists origin. We know this is something people have been asking for for a long time now, and its really great to be able to add Origins to the game.
Like I mentioned earlier, we will also be adding a whole lot of new Origins that will add interesting starting positions for your empire. Right now we have 16 in the current version of the game, and we will probably see a few more until it's finished. I think Origins will be a great addition to the game that will surely help to facilitate a lot more player stories and player fantasies.
We wont be showing all of these yet, but it will probably be immensely hard for us to not tease a few every now and then ;)
Who isnt curious about Remnants and Scions?
PDXCon is rapidly approaching and Stellaris fans will have a lot of cool things to look forward to! In two weeks we will be back again with another dev diary, where well talk a bit more about PDXCon.
------------------------------------------------------
As always, remember you can also read this Dev Diary on our forums and give us feedback in that thread: https://pdxint.at/DD155
[ 2019-09-26 12:01:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello all, this is Hildor Anduv, the UX Designer on Stellaris. Ive been with the team since December, and have really enjoyed working on such a great game. With my first Dev Diary Im going to be sharing how I have been approaching UX Design on Stellaris.
Disclaimer: We're not quite ready to announce our plans just yet (we're saving that for the big stage, PDXCon), so this is going to be more process oriented without delving into specifics about any new feature. If that's not your thing, you can safely give it a miss, but if you're interested in the nuts and bolts of how games are designed and made, let us lift the curtain a bit.
Whiteboarding: The UX Corner
Whiteboards are a great place for getting your ideas out quickly. When whiteboarding I try to get team members from multiple disciplines and rough out ideas, together. Its a great way to discover gameplay and player needs, as well as find any potential development pitfalls early on.
We wanted to create a permanent space for this, and thus the UX Corner was born. Here we come together and iterate on ideas in real-time as a group. Having the permanent space has helped facilitate conversion and increased cross-discipline communication within the team,.
Wireframing & Prototyping.
From the whiteboard sketches, I then move onto creating more detailed wireframes, the skeletal mockup of a UI design. Keeping your wireframes simple lets you iterate quickly, but more importantly allows you to nail down what content should be displayed, and how best to lay it out visually for the player.
I typically try to nail down one key screen, and from there I build out a User flow of the entire experience.
When Designing the Archeology UI for Ancient Relics, I had some key pillars I wanted to nail.
- The stories are linked, and I can revisit past chapters for context. (Also experience the great artwork again!)
- When I come back here, I have a sense of the progress my scientist has made.
- The challenge of the site feels game-y.
With the User flow complete I then link it up and create an interactive Prototype. The prototype allows team members to experience what we are trying to create before we set out to develop it. Its a great low cost way to identify issues in the flow, and fix them here before investing in development.
After we agree on the UX design, we then get to finally create it in game. As you can see below, the design mostly held through to release. The text window was increased to accommodate larger story text, and difficulty was changed to breakthrough chance to help better understand the die roll mechanic.
User Testing So, even though the design has now gone through many gates, we must test our designs with players and iterate based on player feedback. Luckily Paradox has a great User Research department, and so we were able to run playtests and get vital feedback which we could respond to before launch. ---------- Well, I hope this was an informative window into how UX Design is done here on Stellaris. Also, I read the forums and look out for your feedback as well. You all have been very helpful, so thank you for that! If you want to read the Dev Diary on our forums or share your feedback with us directly, go here: pdxint.at/DD154_2
[ 2019-09-12 11:35:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Were back with yet another dev diary to showcase some more fruits of summer experimentation. As with the previous dev diary, this involved a lot of work carried out during the summer and involves something Ive wanted to explore for a good while now.
Today well be talking about empire sprawl and administrative capacity. Do note that these changes are still fairly young in their development, so numbers and implementation details may not be representative of what it will look like in the end.
As a background, I can mention that I have a grander idea of where I want to take these mechanics, but it will not all happen at once. These changes aim to mimic state bureaucracy or overhead created by managing a large empire. As a minor aspect I also wanted you to be able to experience the funny absurdity of having a planet entirely dedicated to bureaucracy. The movie Brazil is a great source of inspiration here :)
Empire Sprawl
We wanted to expand on how empire sprawl is used, so that it becomes a more interesting mechanic. The largest change means that pops now increase empire sprawl. Most things in your empire should be increasing empire sprawl to various degrees, to represent the administrative burden they impose.
Empire Sprawl can now be modified from its different sources, and as an example, the Courier Networks expansion tradition will now reduce empire sprawl caused directly by the number of planets and systems. As another example shows, the Harmony traditions finisher now reduces the total empire sprawl caused by all your pops.
We are also able to modify how much empire sprawl each pop contributes, and weve added a couple of new species traits that affect it. There are also machine variants of these traits.
We have also increased the penalty for the amount of empire sprawl that exceeds your administrative capacity. The goal is not to make administrative a hard cap, but we want to make it necessary to invest some of your resources into increasing your administrative capacity. More on that later.
The current plan is for machine empires to be more reliant on keeping their administrative capacity in line with their empire sprawl, so machine empires will suffer a much harsher penalty for exceeding their cap. We want machines to feel centralized and to perhaps favor a more tall playstyle.
Hive Minds, on the other hand, should be more tolerant of a sprawling empire where unmanaged drones are able to fall back on their instincts whenever they cannot maintain a responsive connection to the hive mind. Therefore, hive minds should be more tolerant of a wide playstyle.
Administrative Capacity
With all these changes to empire sprawl, what about administrative capacity, I imagine you asking? Well, since empire sprawl is becoming an expanded concept, administrative capacity will naturally be a part of that. Increasing your administrative capacity will now be a part of planning your empires economy.
For regular empires, the bureaucrat is a new job that increases your administrative capacity at the cost of consumer goods. This is also a specialist job, and has needs accordingly. Administrators are unchanged, and do not currently affect administrative capacity or bureaucrats.
For machine empires, the coordinators have changed roles from producing unity to now increasing administrative capacity instead, and they are more effective than bureaucrats. A new job called Evaluators now produce unity for machine empires.
Hive Minds currently have the hardest time to produce administrative capacity, but it has been added as a function of the synapse drone job.
Certain sources that previously increased administrative capacity by a static amount now increase is by a percentage amount instead. This doesnt affect the output of the jobs, but rather increases the total administrative capacity directly.
Summary
Personally Im very excited for these changes and Im very much looking forward to taking it to its next step in the future. I hope you enjoyed reading about the changes that will come to Stellaris sometime later this year. As always, well be interested to hear your thoughts.
As mentioned in last weeks dev diary, the schedule for dev diaries will now be bi-weekly, so the next dev diary will be in another 2 weeks.
If you want, you can also read this Dev Diary and comment on our forums: Dev Diary #153
[ 2019-08-29 11:05:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Summer vacations are reaching their end and most of the team is back as of last week. Work has started again and we're really excited for what we have in store for the rest of the year.
While most of us have been away during most of the summer, weve also had some people who worked during July. July is a very good time to try out different designs and concepts that we might not otherwise have time to do, and today we thought it might be fun for you to see some of the experiments we ran during that period of hiatus.
Although we learned some useful insights, these experiments didnt end up being good enough to make a reality.
Industrial Districts
As I have mentioned earlier, I have wanted to find a better solution for how we handle the production of alloys and consumer goods. I often felt like the experience of developing a planet felt better with an Ecumenopolis rather than with a regular planet. I think a lot of it had to do with their unique districts and that it feels better to get the jobs from constructing districts rather than buildings. Not necessarily as an emotion reaction to the choice, but rather that the choice perhaps feels more pure or simple.
An experiment I wanted to run was to see if it was possible to add an industrial district that provided Laborer jobs, instead of having buildings for Metallurgists and Artisans. Laborers would produce both alloys and consumer goods but could be shifted towards producing more of either.
This meant we added a 5th district, the Industrial District. By adding another district we also needed to reduce the number of building slots available. Since there would be no more need for buildings that produced alloys and consumer goods, this should still end up being similar.
A Laborer would consume 8 minerals to produce 2 alloys and 4 consumer goods, and that amount could be modified in either direction by passing a Decision. What I wanted was to have an industry that could have a military and civilian output, and where you could adjust the values between these outputs.
Having a laborer job that generates an industrial output, which could be translated into either alloys or consumer goods did feel good, but the specific solution we used didnt feel quite right.
City Districts & Building slots
Another experiment was to see how it felt if city districts unlock building slots instead of pops. This experiment didnt have a specific problem or issue it was trying to address but rather it was to investigate how that would feel and work. It was interesting but ultimately it felt less fun than the current implementation. It would have needed more time to see if it could be made to work.
This experiment did include increasing the number of jobs you would get for the building, so a research lab would provide 3 jobs instead of 2.
City District Jobs from Buildings
At the same time, we also tried a version where buildings applied jobs to city districts instead of providing jobs by themselves. One upside would be that youd need less micromanagement to get the jobs, but the downside is that it would also be quite a large upswing in new jobs whenever you built a city district. In the end, it felt like you had less control and understanding of what a planet was specializing in.
Summary
Although these experiments were interesting, they didnt end up quite where we wanted to, so they never became more than just experiments. We did learn some interesting things though, which we will keep in mind for the future. The industrial districts are still something I want to keep looking into, but we have to find a better solution.
Dev diaries will now be back on a regular schedule, but we will be looking into changing the format a bit this time around. For now, dev diaries will be coming bi-weekly, which means we will be back again in another 2 weeks with a similar topic.
You can also read today's Dev Diary on our forums here.
[ 2019-08-15 11:16:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! We're ready to announce that we're releasing 2.3.3 with a few extra fixes as a live build before going on vacations. Below you'll find the traditional patch notes, with the extra fixes since the beta in underlined text.
We hope you enjoy the balances, tweaks and changes we introduced with this build!
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.3.3 ##########################
#################################################################
###################
# Ancient Relics Story Pack Features
###################
* A number of archaeology sites have been overhauled to give more interesting rewards for completion, with new techs, empire modifiers, and ethics-based outcomes
###################
# General
###################
* Updated localisation for all languages
###################
# Balance
###################
* Further changed Precursor system spawning to always connect to an owned system, if possible, to reduce them appearing in inaccessible places
* More archaeological site events will grant minor artifacts
* Zroni chain grants Psionic Theory tech option for non-gestalts
* The Surveyor relic now has a chance to find multiple deposits during its activation time. It has also been reduced to a five year timer
* Adjusted the rate at which Admirals gain XP when patrolling and when in combat
* Daily patrolling XP is now based on the max piracy in a system rather than the current piracy
* Disengaged ship now also give xp, they have their own define: LEADER_ADMIRAL_FLEET_COMBAT_SHIPS_DISENGAGED_CONVERSION
* Zro is slightly more common
* Marketplace of Ideas trade policy unity per trade value increased from 0.15 to 0.25
* Grand Herald site is less common. When the Grand Herald is found it may be damaged to some degree, if so there is a special project to restore it to full power
* Finishing Arc Sites may yield Technology Research Options/Boosts
* Lowered the chance of archaeology sites being discovered when planets are surveyed
* Non-genocidal gestalt empires may now also seize the galatron from those who would withhold access to its glory
###################
# UI
###################
* Added MP DLC ownership icon for Ancient Relics
* Fixed line break in Zro Deposits causing unnecessary truncation of text
* Fixed displayed Army Recruitment time not including build speed modifiers
* You should no longer be able to see the orders of the fleets of other empires
* Fixed the resources going haywire in the trade view. Hopefully for the last time
* Added a country modifier to remind you that you can safely colonize Holy worlds as the chosen of Zarqlan
###################
# AI
###################
* Fixed so that the AI uses their idle science ships to assist research rather than just drawing salaries and doing nothing like typical freeloading intelligentsia
* AI empires will finish tradition trees before starting new ones
* Changed AI weight for consecration decision, so that it's actually used
* AI will now build city districts on planets if needed even if not many pops live there
* AI no longer juggles leaders back and forth, and also makes sure there is always at least one leader assigned to a ship
* Fixed the AI declaring war on empire they can't reach, or empires on the other side of the galaxy
* AI no longer needlessly upgrades starbases if they still have unused module or building slots
* Removed ostensibly arbitrary pop requirement for research buildings, also capped holo-theatres to one per planet
* Increased alloy expansion budget to allow machine empires to do early expansion
* AIs in federation have finally discovered ship types other than "corvette"
* AI will no longer maniacally press the "build army" button in order to make armies building faster
###################
# Modding
###################
* add_anomaly effect now adds the anomaly to the scoped country instead of the first country to survey the planet
* Added "min_jumps" and "max_jumps" parameters to the "spawn_system" command for better control of where and to what world spawned system appear
* min_jump and max_jump now use -1 to be ignored, so that you can make systems that attach directly to your base system
* Added `steal_relic = { target = TARGET_COUNTRY relic =
[ 2019-07-11 12:12:32 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Weve been working on the 2.3.3 patch, but before we put anything live we will release it as a beta version as usual. To try the beta, right-click Stellaris in your Steam Library and select Properties. In the BETAS tab there should be a drop down list where you can find stellaris_test. Set your beta opt in to stellaris_test to try the 2.3.3 beta.
Save file compatibility between versions is never guaranteed. If you need to roll back to a previous version, do this: go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> betas tab -> select the version you want.
The beta has a couple of known issues, but they are also things we will address before 2.3.3 goes live.
Known Issues:
- Robot empires are a bit slow to expand with outposts.
- We have added a Relic stealing feature, but it only works while in a Galatron war instead of when not in a Galatron war
[ 2019-07-04 13:37:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey everyone!
With a weekend of beta testing on 2.3.2 behind us, it is now fully live. We're going to keep working on 2.3.x, in particular we are aware of some issues with presapients, overflows, and an energy deficit bug. We'll get fixes for those out as soon as we can, but given that 2.3.2 is overall a much better version than 2.3.1, we want to make it a part of the live build while we keep working on the remaining issues.
Full changelog below:
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.3.2 ###########################
#################################################################
* Producer's note: in the interest of getting these fixes to you quickly, anything requiring new text is not yet translated in to languages other than English. We'll get localization done and in for the final 2.3.x version, never fear.
###################
# Ancient Relics Story Pack Features
###################
* The random outcome "Archaeological Loop" in the "Dj Vu Dig" Archaeology Site now has altered story text, and the outcome temporarily traumatizes the Scientist
* The random outcome "A Custom Job" in the "Cut To Fit" Archaeology Site now rewards the player with benefits to Terrestrial Sculpting tech research
###################
# Balance
###################
* Added a new artifact action to discover a precursor site for 25 minor artifacts
* Reduced AI expansion distance to 2, for slightly less gruesome Balkan borders. It will still be more aggressive than before about trying to avoid being boxed in
* Nu-Baol Life-Seeding decision no longer has any cost, since the cost is paid for by activating the relic
* Ether Drake Trophy relic effect on unity increased from +10 a month to +10% a month
* Scales of the Worm relic effect on unity replaced with +10% physics research speed
* Rubricator relic effect on unity replaced with +20 society research per month
* The Surveyor relic activation cost is now 500 energy instead of 150 influence
###################
# UI
###################
* You now get a popup when resettling the last pop of a colony to make sure you want to destroy said colony
* Added the ability to toggle Steam rich presence on or off in settings, if you don't want your friends and family to know you're extinguishing all sentient life as a race of murderous Fanatic Purifier BDSM catgirls
* Fixed a draw issue on the Mechanocalibrator and pre-space Ratling worlds that would cause resources districts to display as a single gigantic box
###################
# AI
###################
* Fixed AI activating population control when it shouldn't
* Fixed colony automation spamming too many districts at once in multiplayer
* Lots of little tweaks to the AI's economic decision making
###################
# Modding
###################
* Using brackets in loc in 'scripted triggers' and 'scripted effects' can no longer result in an infinite loop as it thinks it's supposed to be a macro
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed colonies not being destroyed properly when emptied of population. Go forth and purge once more.
* Fixed barren worlds not terraforming
* Fixed armies mysteriously gaining strength, regenerating or disappearing without a trace during invasions
* Fixed synth ascended robots that were robomodded not being assembled on planets
* Fixed Gestalt empires starting with either unemployed drones or unmanned job slots
* Fixed a crash when a planet building a robot template changes owner
* Fixed unplayable have/has typo atrocity in the Grand Herald event
* Fixed a bug where Steam Rich Presence would sometimes fail to display you were a race of murderous Fanatic Purifier BDSM catgirls with too many ethics
* Fixed so that pops will not promote to specialists/rulers if there are unemployed pops from those strata already available. Get back to the acid mines, proles.
* Inscrutable Power achievement now properly looks for the Galatron relic
* Planets shouldn't start with unemployed pops anymore
* Habitat specific orbital deposits should no longer rarely appear on non-habitats
* The "Givernor" skill is no longer a thing
* Driven Assimilators may now properly have farming worlds to feed their hungry Cyborgs
* No longer possible to merge the salvage cruiser with normal fleets to prevent exploits with upgrades and resource refunds
* Fixed the Atomic Clock event annihilating primitives but leaving observations stations intact to observe...their irradiated cadavers, I guess?
* The Galactic Wonders Ascension Perk will now begrudgingly accept a Science Nexus as "complete" even if it doesn't have a brain in a jar. Your researchers will still know it's not really complete without one though, and that knowledge will haunt them in the lonely hours of the night.
* Fixed events like "A New Metal" spawning on worlds that already had science stations, and wrongly being collected by these
* Did some more smoothing of SFX volume spikes in new Ancient Relics content
* Fixed a case where the Rubricator world could wrongly spawn a second, entirely unrelated dig site
* Fixed being able to make a slave army from any species whatsoever so long as a single pop of any race was enslaved on the planet, even though it was an admirable display of class solidarity
* Prevented the Baol chain from spawning any digsites in the Sol system because that made even less sense than lasers making sound in space
The stellaris_test version is still there as 2.3.2, the only difference being it uses our experimental crossplay MP layer. Steam users need to be on stellaris_test to crossplay with GoG and Paradoxplaza.
We'll get a new beta version with more fixes for your reported issues. In the meantime, enjoy, and we'll see you shortly with a new beta patch!
[ 2019-06-18 13:36:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all!
We've been busy processing the results of the 2.3.1 version, and are ready to roll out the next batch of fixes, which I'm making available as the 2.3.2 beta patch right now. If you want to get in on the new version early, please read the notes and instructions below.
Please note that 2.3.2 is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it. Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> betas tab -> select stellaris_test branch.
The stellaris_test branch is also required if you want to crossplay with people playing on the Paradoxplaza or GoG versions of the game. 2.3.2 is the default version on those platforms.
Here's the list of fixes and changes:
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.3.2 ###########################
#################################################################
* Producer's note: in the interest of getting these fixes to you quickly, anything requiring new text is not yet translated in to languages other than English. We'll get localization done and in for the final 2.3.x version, never fear.
###################
# Ancient Relics Story Pack Features
###################
* The random outcome "Archaeological Loop" in the "Dj Vu Dig" Archaeology Site now has altered story text, and the outcome temporarily traumatizes the Scientist
* The random outcome "A Custom Job" in the "Cut To Fit" Archaeology Site now rewards the player with benefits to Terrestrial Sculpting tech research
###################
# Balance
###################
* Added a new artifact action to discover a precursor artifact for 25 minor artifacts
* Reduced AI expansion distance to 2, for slightly less gruesome Balkan borders. It will still be more aggressive than before about trying to avoid being boxed in
* Nu-Baol Life-Seeding decision no longer has any cost, since the cost is paid for by activating the relic
* Ether Drake Trophy relic effect on unity increased from +10 a month to +10% a month
* Scales of the Worm relic effect on unity replaced with +10% physics research speed
* Rubricator relic effect on unity replaced with +20 society research per month
* The Surveyor relic activation cost is now 500 energy instead of 150 influence
###################
# UI
###################
* You now get a popup when resettling the last pop of a colony to make sure you want to destroy said colony
* Added the ability to toggle Steam rich presence on or off in settings, if you don't want your friends and family to know you're extinguishing all sentient life as a race of murderous Fanatic Purifier BDSM catgirls
* Fixed a draw issue on the Mechanocalibrator and pre-space Ratling worlds that would cause resources districts to display as a single gigantic box
###################
# AI
###################
* Fixed AI activating population control when it shouldn't
* Fixed colony automation spamming too many districts at once in multiplayer
* Lots of little tweaks to the AI's economic decision making
###################
# Modding
###################
* Using brackets in loc in 'scripted triggers' and 'scripted effects' can no longer result in an infinite loop as it thinks it's supposed to be a macro
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed colonies not being destroyed properly when emptied of population. Go forth and purge once more.
* Fixed barren worlds not terraforming
* Fixed armies mysteriously gaining strength, regenerating or disappearing without a trace during invasions
* Fixed synth ascended robots that were robomodded not being assembled on planets
* Fixed Gestalt empires starting with either unemployed drones or unmanned job slots
* Fixed a crash when a planet building a robot template changes owner
* Fixed unplayable have/has typo atrocity in the Grand Herald event
* Fixed a bug where Steam Rich Presence would sometimes fail to display you were a race of murderous Fanatic Purifier BDSM catgirls with too many ethics
* Fixed so that pops will not promote to specialists/rulers if there are unemployed pops from those strata already available. Get back to the acid mines, proles.
* Inscrutable Power achievement now properly looks for the Galatron relic
* Planets shouldn't start with unemployed pops anymore
* Habitat specific orbital deposits should no longer rarely appear on non-habitats
* The "Givernor" skill is no longer a thing
* Driven Assimilators may now properly have farming worlds to feed their hungry Cyborgs
* No longer possible to merge the salvage cruiser with normal fleets to prevent exploits with upgrades and resource refunds
* Fixed the Atomic Clock event annihilating primitives but leaving observations stations intact to observe...their irradiated cadavers, I guess?
* The Galactic Wonders Ascension Perk will now begrudgingly accept a Science Nexus as "complete" even if it doesn't have a brain in a jar. Your researchers will still know it's not really complete without one though, and that knowledge will haunt them in the lonely hours of the night.
* Fixed events like "A New Metal" spawning on worlds that already had science stations, and wrongly being collected by these
* Did some more smoothing of SFX volume spikes in new Ancient Relics content
* Fixed a case where the Rubricator world could wrongly spawn a second, entirely unrelated dig site
* Fixed being able to make a slave army from any species whatsoever so long as a single pop of any race was enslaved on the planet, even though it was an admirable display of class solidarity
* Prevented the Baol chain from spawning any digsites in the Sol system because that made even less sense than lasers making sound in space
Glad we were able to get this done in time for the weekend. Give it a spin, let us know your feedback, and we'll use that to help us improve the next build. Thanks all, and have fun.
[ 2019-06-14 13:05:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi Everybody! After the weekend in beta test, with no drastic new issues introduced, we've decided to make the 2.3.1 patch fully live. It contains a ton of fixes that we wanted to get in everyone's hands, most important of which are out of sync fixes for MP.
Here's the list of changes:
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.3.1 ###########################
#################################################################
###################
# Ancient Relics Story Pack Features
###################
* Increased variety of introductory images for archaeology sites
* Added some missing SFX to archaeology site dig stages and random events
###################
# UI
###################
* Added alert if planet automation is low on resources and monthly transfer is lower than 10
* Fixed missing loc string in Zro deposits
* Fixed the tooltip for machine pops being processed by a devouring swarm wrongly suggesting that you could get delicious food out of their soulless metallic husks somehow, instead of decidedly unappetizing alloys
* Grunur system spawn popup event now displays neighbouring system name instead of an empty string
* Fixed some missing text on the omnicodex arc site
###################
# AI
###################
* Improved AI's desire to aggressively produce alloy foundries to drive its fleets and expansion
* AI is much more willing to actually spend that alloy on ships
* Fixed AI wasting its Influence by constantly reforming government
* Fixed AI being only willing to spend rare resources on base construction, never upgrades or edicts
* Updated AI food, energy, mineral, and influence budgeting. It will now try to use them on decisions and edicts when able, instead of amassing huge, untouched stockpiles
* Fixed AI treating pirate occupied systems as total no-go zones even when it had more than enough fleet power to wipe them out (should help them expand without being blocked off)
* AI empires will now be willing to expand into systems up to 5 jumps beyond their borders, making it more difficult to cut them off at chokepoints
* Tweaked AI influence spending on edicts and campaigns so as not to activate ones with limited value (map the stars when most of the galaxy is explored, etc)
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed failure to launch crossplay beta branch on Linux
* Fixed failure to launch the GOG version on Mac without using GOG Galaxy
* Fixed cases where victorious Force Ideology wars would not result in ethics shift
* Fixed an economy out of sync
* Fixed a potential crash in the cross-breeding game rule
* Fixed Zroni precursor sites being wrongly visible to all empires, not just the discoverer, allowing them to be ninja'd by others and leaving you stranded with an uncompletable chain
* Fixed core sector being named after the initial planet name, before any homeworld name is applied
* When you have multiple fleets selected, some with the Psi Jump Drive and some without, it will now show the longest combined jump they can make together, not the max range for just the Psi ships
* Fixed exploits related to jump drive use allowing fraudulent circumvention of cooldown times and max ranges
* Fixed unconscionable, unplayable typos and missing texts
* Fixed a hilarious one from last year where if one of your starbases came under enemy occupation in a war, you could still queue up defense platform construction there. Helpfully, the enemy empire would pay for this from its own resource stockpile
* Fixed cases where General leader traits were wrongly applied to armies
* Added missing special portrait for the Nu-Baol, feat. Fred Durst
* Fixed new Ancient Relics SFX playing at way too loud a volume
Don't be alarmed if a fix for an issue affecting you isn't in yet, we're not done. We are continuing to work on 2.3 post launch support and will push new beta patches followed by live versions in the coming weeks, so keep the productive feedback coming. We're logging your issues in our bug base and will continue to knock them off as we go.
If possible, your feedback is especially appreciated in this forum thread: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/dev-team-2-3-1-patch-release-checksum-bcd1.1188440/
[ 2019-06-10 13:58:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everybody!
We just published a new beta patch for Stellaris 2.3 "Wolfe" and Ancient Relics, thanks to your speedy feedback!
We know that not all of you want to wait for the full verification process, so if you want, you can opt into it via the "betas" tab and by selecting the "stellaris_test" branch!
Patchnotes below.
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.3.1 ###########################
#################################################################
###################
# Ancient Relics Story Pack Features
###################
* Increased variety of introductory images for archaeology sites
* Added some missing SFX to archaeology site dig stages and random events
###################
# UI
###################
* Added alert if planet automation is low on resources and monthly transfer is lower than 10
* Fixed missing loc string in Zro deposits
* Fixed the tooltip for machine pops being processed by a devouring swarm wrongly suggesting that you could get delicious food out of their soulless metallic husks somehow, instead of decidedly unappetizing alloys
* Grunur system spawn popup event now displays neighbouring system name instead of an empty string
* Fixed some missing text on the omnicodex arc site
###################
# AI
###################
* Improved AI's desire to aggressively produce alloy foundries to drive its fleets and expansion
* AI is much more willing to actually spend that alloy on ships
* Fixed AI wasting its Influence by constantly reforming government
* Fixed AI being only willing to spend rare resources on base construction, never upgrades or edicts
* Updated AI food, energy, mineral, and influence budgeting. It will now try to use them on decisions and edicts when able, instead of amassing huge, untouched stockpiles
* Fixed AI treating pirate occupied systems as total no-go zones even when it had more than enough fleet power to wipe them out (should help them expand without being blocked off)
* AI empires will now be willing to expand into systems up to 5 jumps beyond their borders, making it more difficult to cut them off at chokepoints
* Tweaked AI influence spending on edicts and campaigns so as not to activate ones with limited value (map the stars when most of the galaxy is explored, etc)
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed failure to launch crossplay beta branch on Linux
* Fixed failure to launch the GOG version on Mac without using GOG Galaxy
* Fixed cases where victorious Force Ideology wars would not result in ethics shift
* Fixed an economy out of sync
* Fixed a potential crash in the cross-breeding game rule
* Fixed Zroni precursor sites being wrongly visible to all empires, not just the discoverer, allowing them to be ninja'd by others and leaving you stranded with an uncompletable chain
* Fixed core sector being named after the initial planet name, before any homeworld name is applied
* When you have multiple fleets selected, some with the Psi Jump Drive and some without, it will now show the longest combined jump they can make together, not the max range for just the Psi ships
* Fixed exploits related to jump drive use allowing fraudulent circumvention of cooldown times and max ranges
* Fixed unconscionable, unplayable typos and missing texts
* Fixed a hilarious one from last year where if one of your starbases came under enemy occupation in a war, you could still queue up defense platform construction there. Helpfully, the enemy empire would pay for this from its own resource stockpile
* Fixed cases where General leader traits were wrongly applied to armies
* Added missing special portrait for the Nu-Baol, feat. Fred Durst
* Fixed new Ancient Relics SFX playing at way too loud a volume
Thanks for playing and keep the feedback going!
[ 2019-06-05 15:28:52 CET ] [ Original post ]
Uncover the ruins of long-dead civilizations in Relic Worlds to piece together the story of their rise and eventual downfall. Excavate their derelict cities and ships to unearth the truth, discover powerful relics and harness them for your own empires ambitions.
Ancient Relics is OUT NOW!
Stellaris: Ancient Relics includes:
- Ancient Relics: Collect valuable relics in your adventures as rewards for resolving game events or after completing a dig at a multi-stage archaeological site. Each relic gives significant benefits to your empire to aid in your interstellar escapades.
- Dig In: Hit the dirt on a variety of enigmatic and alien worlds with new archeology sites available for your empire to study or plunder. Each site begins a story with between one and six chapters to investigate. Retrace the history to discover artifacts and relics that can be boons to your empire.
- Those Who Came Before: Encounter clues about two extinct Precursor civilizations, the Baol and the Zroni, the former a sprawling hivemind of plantoids, the latter some of the most powerful psionics to have ever lived. Players can investigate their home systems to understand who they were and, more importantly, what can be learned from their demise.
- Relic Worlds: Once home to vibrant, advanced civilizations, these Relic Worlds now lie dead, replete with desolate ruins and dormant mysteries. Players can excavate guaranteed archeological sites on these worlds and bring to light powerful relics and artifacts.
- Matter of Artifacts: Learning from history is much more than parables and antiquities, it can often be the key to understanding ones own place in the galaxy. Utilizing archaeological research, discover Minor Artifacts, a new consumable resource type which can help empower ones empire.
[ 2019-06-04 16:05:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi team!
Today, Jaime has prepared full patch notes for the Ancient Relics Story Pack and its accompanying 2.3 "Wolfe" update, releasing on June 4th! The team has worked hard on new features, bug fixes, balance as well as performance and AI improvements!
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.3.0 ###########################
#################################################################
###################
# Ancient Relics Story Pack Features
###################
# Relics
* Collect Relics to show off the achievements of your empire. Display your glory by showing off your very own Omnicodex, Miniature Galaxy, and more. All grant powerful passive and active effects to their owner.
# Archaeology
* A system that allows multi-stage investigations of strange alien sites, with rewards for unlocking each stage. Find them, excavate them, make their secrets yours. Also added some new archaeology-themed scientist traits tying in to these.
# Two New Precursors
* Learn more about the ancient history of the Stellaris galaxy with two more Precursor races: the Baol, a peaceful plantoid hive mind, and the Zroni, a powerful psychic species that was the first to reach the mysterious alternate dimension known as The Shroud. Find their ancient homeworlds and hopefully learn from their demise.
# Relic Worlds
* Discover a new world type, a mausoleum on a planetary scale. The the dead civilizations that once dwelt here left behind a treasure trove of arcane technology, which you can excavate at archaeological sites.
# Minor Artifacts
* Ancient Relics adds a new rare resource, Minor Artifacts, which can be uncovered via archaeology and exploration. They can be spent to give powerful empire ethics-specific boons. Celebrate the diversity of life in the galaxy by displaying these artifacts in a museum, or destroy them to proclaim the superiority of your own eternal empire.
# Achievements
* Unlock the mysteries of the galaxy to get 10 new Steam achievements
######################
# 2.3.0 "Wolfe" Free Features
######################
# Prior Content Relic Rework
* Many things from previous game content have been reworked to use the new Relics system. Among several others, you can gain the Isolated Contingency Core or the Prethoryn Brood Queen as symbols of your triumph.
# Sector Redesign and Automation
* Sectors have been greatly improved in 2.3, allowing the player more control over how and where they are formed, as well as giving more robust automation tools to let them run themselves if you want to focus on the bigger picture.
# Planet Designation
* You can now choose to manually set a planet designation (Agri-World, Forge World, etc), focusing production on different resource outputs. There is now a shared automated development stockpile that you can pay in to and allow planets to set their own build orders.
# Megastructure Improvements
* Habitats gain different effects based on the type of celestial body they inhabit. Ring Worlds gain specialized, highly efficient districts.
# Other Stuff
* 2.3 is now a 64 Bit application. Support for 32 Bits is deprecated, but you can roll back to 2.2 if you want to play on such hardware.
* Precursors no longer spawn in a preselected pie slice of the galaxy
* Added a menu option at game start to disable Caravaneer fleets if you don't want those sweet, sweet deals
* Added a randomize button when renaming planets
* Rogue Servitors can now build a variant of leisure districts on habitats to entertain their bio-trophies in space
###################
# Balance
###################
* Thrall Worlds can now build Energy Grids and Mineral Purification Plants
* Terraforming worlds no longer re-rolls districts, blockers, unique deposits
* The Voor Technocracy prescripted Empire is now Fanatic Materialist/Authoritarian
* Technocracy civic now requires fanatic materialist ethics
* Rebalanced the Worm-In-Waiting to make it more of a real threat
* Habitats can now build food processing buildings, research labs, commercial zones, and holo theaters
* Adjusted costs of clearing Arcology blockers
* Habitats built over rare deposits now gain the associated deposits
* Mastery of Nature ascension perk requirement reverted, can once again be picked in the first slot
* Ecumenopolis districts now require rare resources build (50) and upkeep (2)
* Low habitability now also reduces pop growth and job output by 0.5% per missing habitability
* Gaia World terraforming time reduced from 7200 to 3600 days, cost reduced from 10000 to 7500
* Matter Decompressor Site alloy cost increased from 3000 to 5000, to be consistent with other sites
* Architectural Renaissance unity ambition now also increases megastructure build capacity by +1
* Dyson Sphere energy output increased from 250/500/750/1000 to 1000/2000/3000/4000
* Matter Decompressor mineral output increased from 250/500/750/1000 to 500/1000/1500/2000
* Consolidated placement rules for most megastructures, so that they are no longer inconsistent
* Interstellar Assembly now costs energy in upkeep instead of consumer goods, restoration alloy cost reduced from 20000 to 15000
* Mining Drone Home Base now also drops a strange device
* Gestalt races now also benefit from increasing the flow of Dark Matter from the Dimensional Portal
* Rogue Servitors start with another Nexus District
* Galactic Wonders ascension perk no longer immediately unlocks the ability to build Ring World, Matter Decompressor and Dyson Sphere, but instead adds them as research options
* Picking life seeded will no longer grant neighboring Gaia worlds, but rather a randomized starting planet class
* Clerks and Preachers job weights no longer care about being strong, weak, or proles
* Miner job weights DO care about being proles
* Synth Empires pay only alloys for Colony ships, like Machines
* Inward Perfection empires can no longer form research agreements or commercial pacts
###################
# Performance
###################
* Fixed a case where unneeded VFX were being rendered, causing a gradual game slowdown over time
* Reduced the delay when there is a big transfer of systems after a country surrender
* Fixed the end of year lag when big empires with lots of pops being assimilated convert them into proper citizens
* Improved faction threading, for performance and OOS safety
* Smoothed border calculations to reduce stutter
* Reordered threaded economics calc to avoid race condition of ships depending on planet resources depots
* Fixed a case where every pop would check for faction membership on every daily tick, creating a performance drain
###################
# UI
###################
* Corrected misleading tooltip that falsely claimed it was not possible to set a species to Transcendent Awakening when it has Assimilation citizenship
* Queuing up multiple outpost constructions will now give the adjacency discount for influence costs where appropriate
* Fixed an issue when having multiple fleets selected including a colossus, right click orders menu on planets would be empty
* Rivalry influence production now displayed with modifiers in diplomatic view
* Diplomatic actions now display correct influence upkeep cost with modifiers
* Added entry to the fleet capacity tooltip explaining how many Titans you can build
* Fixed terraform button tooltip wrongly suggesting you can terraform gaia worlds
* Fixed some technology description texts overlapping with the tech specialization icon
* Fixed quite unplayable text spillout for guaranteed habitable worlds slider in multiplayer galaxy setup
* Fixed info about "Mass Produced" and "Custom-Made" modifiers for robot assembly being missing in the tooltip
* Fixed the reinforce fleets option in the Fleet Manager wrongly showing missing minerals rather than alloys, if you don't have enough of the latter
* Fixed text spillout of View Privacy Policy button in options (I'm looking at you, 23 letter German compound word)
* Fixed a heinous pixel error with Mass Driver I
* Fixed fractional costs of rare resources in ship designer displaying as 0, causing confusion
* Added tooltip to terraform button when it is disabled, detailing why
* Removed redundant repetitive redundant diplo offer duplication for peace offers
* Fixed an issue where the overall progress of a fleet upgrade order would visually reset to 0% after any single ship in the fleet completed upgrades
* Fixed observer outliner to be less broken, along with the hotjoin interface
* Fixed missing species portrait in the declining pop window, so now you can feel extra sad
* Fixed a display issue where replacing a built district would temporarily add to the number of built districts, sometimes causing overflows
* Replacing a planetary building now triggers a re-sort of building icons to keep similar types grouped together
* Removed the "has no FTL drive" part of the tooltip for stations when they are selected and you hover over a different system
* Fixed an issue where losing a building due to resettlement would show the pop requirements for all slots displaying as 5 lower than reality
* Even though devouring swarms can now purge inorganics for alloys, the tooltip wrongly stated they could not be processed...fixed
* Fixed so that unemployment by strata icons are properly displayed and has a working tooltip
* Now it is possible to add federation ships to a fleet design
* Fixed commercial pact diplo agreement wrongly inverting what the proposing and receiving empire will get from the deal
* Fixed visual issue wrongly showing zero tech progress until after first monthly tick
* Cornucopicturesque and Mineralistic event option tooltips no longer refer to adding tile deposits
* Fixed placeholder icons for Ascendancy Shipwrights modifier and Menial Drone Output (extra % produced by Coordinators)
* Fixed missing reference to influence gain reduction in the tooltip describing the result of losing a humiliation war
* Fixed unplayable overlap of the investigate button on unknown alien fleets
* Fixed bad text wrapping in federation fleet power display when the number was over 10000
* Machine empire Mineral Purification/Energy grid etc buildings no longer show the tooltip for raising district cap on inapplicable planet types
* Fixed tooltip that falsely claimed that setting a species to purge (except neuter) was a requirement for the Decent Living Standard
* Habitability map icon now considers all possible species instead of just owned ones
* Added descriptive text to the jobs screen to explain how favouriting jobs works
* Updated Corporate Dominion civic tooltip to refer to its new post-MegaCorp effect
* increased tooltip decimal precision on the complex drone output bonus Rogue Servitors gain from Biotrophies
###################
# AI
###################
* Implemented improved AI building selection weights (thanks to Glavius for awesome insight here)
* AI will now properly bombard and invade primitive planets rather than suffering last minute pangs of conscience about using orbital lasers on people armed with bronze daggers
* AI now checks for how many outposts are being upgraded to starbase status already when deciding if it can build more
* Fixed the AI considering federation ships as part of its own fleet capacity, causing them to drastically neglect their own fleet building
* Fixed a bug preventing sector automation ever upgrading research labs to level 3
* AI will not build nanite transfusers without nanite income, nor build more than 2 per planet
* Fixed AI fleets getting stuck with redundant attack/defend orders if their target went MIA
* The sector AI of Machine Intelligences and Synthetically Ascended Empires will no longer build food-producing districts or buildings unless they actually need food
* AI will now consider repairing ruined branch office buildings
* Fixed so that transports don't emergency FTL as soon as they take any damage whatsoever, because D-Day didn't stop when the first landing craft hit a mine
* Fixed some edge cases where the AI would attempt to build its way out of unemployment with districts and buildings that its pops can't work
* AI prefers City districts over Housing buildings a bit more
* Machine empires will no longer build nonsentient, less efficient robot pops and unemploy their own citizens
* AI will now take more opportunities to repair damaged fleets when it has the chance
* Fixed AI bug caused by fleets unassigned to any group not being able to be added to one due to damage, instead just sitting idle
* Fixed AI not bothering to send its war-weary fleets home following a peace agreement
###################
# Modding
###################
* The Archaeology system from Ancient Relics is open for modding use, to create your own multi-stage event chains
* Fixed a map distance cache bug that affected mods with non-random maps, causing each outpost to cause the maximum amount of influence
* Added GetAge, GetFirstName and GetSecondName to the leader scope in localization, to allow you to do events calling just first or second names, etc
* on_fleet_destroyed_xxx events will now happen only once. For example: the shattered loop
* Added num_owned_relics trigger
* kill_pop_chance now uses weights with Pop scope
* Added locked_random_list with predetermined effect for random colony automation
* added building/district specific building speed modifier "planet_
[ 2019-05-30 15:36:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
It is the last chance to get 20% off your ticket with the Early Bird bonus! The discount ends on 31st May so if you already know that you're going to be joining us for PDXCON, now is the time to save on your tickets!
Visit https://pdxcon.paradoxplaza.com
See you in Berlin!
[ 2019-05-24 11:03:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone, this week we put Moah in the driver's seat of the Dev Diary. If you don't know who he is, he is the Tech Lead on Stellaris and today he will be talking to you about the free 2.3 "Wolfe" update that will release alongside Ancient Relics, and what it brings to the table in terms of tech!
Stellaris is going 64-bit
People have been clamoring for this for a while now, and various factors have led us to finally do this for this patch. I should temper your expectations though: while many have claimed that this would be a miracle cure for all their issues with Stellaris, the reality is somewhat more tame. What does it mean? The one solid benefit is that Stellaris is no longer limited to 4gb of memory, and wont crash anymore in situations where it was reaching that limit. For people who play on huge galaxies, with many empires, many mods or well into 3000s, this will be a boon. In terms of performance, though, it doesnt change much. Without drowning you in technical details, lets just say that some things go faster because you handle more data at once, some things go slower because you have more data to handle. In the end, our measurements have shown no perceptible difference. Finally, the last effect of switching to 64 bits is that the game will no longer playable on 32 bits computers or OSes. We dont think this will affect many people, but there you have it.
What about Performance?
I know thats everyones favourite question, so lets do our best to talk about it. First, let me dispel some notions floating around in various forums: Stellaris does use multithreading, and were always on the lookout for new things to thread. In fact between 2.2.0 and 2.2.7, a huge effort was made to thread jobs and pops, and its one of the main drivers of performance improvement between these version. Pops and jobs are indeed whats consuming most of our CPU time nowadays. Weve improved on that by reducing the amount of jobs each pop evaluate. Weve also found other areas where we were doing too much work, and cut on:
- Ships calculating their daily regeneration when theyre at full health
- Off-screen icons being updated
- Uninhabitable planets doing the same evaluations as populated planets
This is our modifier flow charts. Its not quite up to date, but gives you an idea of the complexity of the system (Unpolished because its a dev tool, and not made for the article). No More! For 2.3 Wolfe we have switched to a system of modifier nodes, where each node register what node they follow, and is recalculated when used, following the chain itself. We have modifiers that are more up to date, and calculated only when needed. This also reduces the number of pointless recalculations. This system has shown remarkable promise, and cut the number of big freezes happening around the game (notably after loading, for example). It has some issues, but as we continue working with it, itll get better and help both with performance and our programmers sanity. So, whats the verdict? In our tests, 2.3 Wolfe is between 10% and 30% faster than 2.2.7 right now. Hopefully itll stay that way until release, but the nature of the beast is that some of these optimizations break things and fixing the issues negate them, so we cant promise anything.
Measurements provided by sabrenity, using detailed info from the beta build. Its worth noting the SHIPS_SERIAL purple line has since been eliminated. AI Another forum favorite, we have done some improvements to the AI. First, with @Glavius s permission, weve used his job weights to improve general AI job distribution. Weve also done the usual pass of polish and improvements, and of course taught the AI how to use all our new features. What else is new? Were also getting a new crash reporter that will send your crash report as soon as they happen rather than next time you start the game. Weve improved our non-steam network stack for connectivity issues, etc. All right, enough of my yammering. This has turned into a GRRM length novel, and even though there are many more areas we could cover, well just turn this for your perusal.
[ 2019-05-23 12:33:04 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone, we have a new Dev Diary from grekulf!
As most of you probably know, the next upcoming DLC for Stellaris will be the Ancient Relics Story Pack. Last week I also promised I would show something awesome, by which I meant the headline feature of the story pack the Relics themselves.
We announced Ancient Relics on Tuesday and we also streamed a lot of stuff that will be coming with Ancient Relics and the free 2.3 update that goes with it. If you havent seen the stream yet, you may want to check out the summary on YouTube.
Relic Worlds
A smaller part of Ancient Relics are the Relics Worlds. It is a new planet class that is essentially a planet entirely covered in ruins. If you find a Relic World, it's very likely that you will be the first to get to excavate its archaeological site. An archaeological site found on a Relic World should have many chapters and have a high difficulty.
A Relic World can be restored to an Ecumenopolis, but it will lose its unique deposits and archaeology site if there is one.
The homeworld of the First League precursors have been changed into a Relic World. We felt that this fits way better thematically and we also felt that finding a free Ecumenopolis was too strong. You will now have to work a little harder to restore the ancient city planet.
As mentioned before, we havent quite had the time to refresh the old precursor content, but this is something we want to do over time, so eventually it's quite likely youll be able to find more Relic Worlds and associated archaeological sites.
Relics
The Relics are a really cool new feature to Stellaris. Relics are very powerful artifacts and trophies that you can collect. Every Relics has a passive effect as well as an activation effect. All Relics share the same activation cooldown, so you will have to choose which one you will want to activate. The activation cooldown is 10 years.
Most relics will have an Influence cost for the activation cost, but in some cases this will be different.
The Relics system itself will be included in the base game, and you will be able to find a few Relics from previous content. Each crisis will have a Relic tied to it, and owners of MegaCorp will be able to get The Galatron. Owners of Apocalypse will be able to take the Khans Throne and owners of Leviathans will be able to take a trophy by defeating the Ether Drake.
Ancient Relics will feature a whole bunch of new Relics that you can collect. In total youll be able to find 20 of these new Relics.
The system is very moddable, and since the Relics system itself is free, mods will be able to use the system without requiring its users to own Ancient Relics. Were very much looking forward to seeing what cool new Relics the community can conjure up!
Relics Design Intentions
I started as the first UI/UX designer at Paradox Development Studio over 6 years ago now, before switching over to purely doing game design and now eventually taking over as the game director for Stellaris. EU4 was the first game I worked on, and the macro builder is what I see as my first large contribution to our games. Ive always thought that the UI/UX design and game design need to mesh really well for a solid experience. Although we cant always get it right (my faults included), it's really fun to do something different here.
With the Relics I wanted us to start experimenting with more visual rewards. I wanted something that would be so cool to find, collect, and look at, that you almost didn't care about what the effects of the thing were. I wanted large icons with a slight animation, kind of like golden Hearthstone cards. Originally we only planned to have passive effects for them, but in order for the player to experience the visual rewards more often, we had to create incentives for them to open the UI and look at them. That is how the active effects came into play. By giving the Relics a really cool activation effect, players will open the UI more often and get those feel good moments by looking at their Relics.
From a design perspective, I am very happy with how the Relics turned out. Weve made a really nice-looking UI with a thematic background that really fits the art style. Weve also made awesome and animated relic icons that are really rewarding to collect and look at. The activation effects for a lot of the Relics are also really cool.
---
Ancient Relics is turning out to be a really cool addition to Stellaris, and it's going to be really great seeing how you guys react to the content once you get a chance to try it out.
That is all we had to share for this weeks dev diary. Next week we will be back with something different, technically speaking.
[ 2019-05-16 11:30:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
Greetings Galactic Emperors, Rogue AIs, Humble Hiveminds, and Exalted Starfish,
Today is the 3rd Anniversary of Stellaris, the game that brought all of you together in a galaxy of conflict, friendship, primordial creatures, and everything else in between. To celebrate this and share our celebratory happiness with everyone, we are holding a Free Weekend so that anyone can download the base game of Stellaris and play!
This free weekend starts now on Steam and will be available until Sunday 12th May at 13:00 PDT / 16:00 EDT / 22:00 CEST.
Additionally, the entire Stellaris catalog is on discount now, with MegaCorp on discount for the first time! Check out the Steam store page to find out all the savings!
Finally, were going to be giving away the e-book version of Stellaris: Infinite Frontiers to everyone that signs up for the Stellaris newsletter with their Paradox Accounts. To receive this free gift, you can follow these easy steps:
[olist]
[ 2019-05-09 17:01:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
Tickets for PDXCON are now available!
Join us for a weekend in Berlin, filled with games, people and all things Paradox and get a ticket now before they sell out!
Read more and get your tickets here: https://pdxint.at/pdxcontickets
[ 2019-05-07 15:51:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
As promised last week, were back to talk about something old thats new which, as many of you correctly guessed, is about new precursors. Adding new precursors has been something weve been wanting to do for quite a while now, and were very happy that we can now finally provide whats been asked for.
In the next DLC you will be able to explore the fate of two new precursors, namely the Baol and the Zroni. To not spoil too much, Ill only give a basic description of their respective backgrounds and lore.
The Baol
The Baol Organism was once a sprawling interstellar Hive Mind comprised of trillions of psychically-linked plantoids. With their ability to slowly terraform a planet's ecosystem and atmospheric gases via centuries of sustained photosynthetic processes, the Baol civilization produced a plethora of rich flora and fauna on otherwise unremarkable worlds. The Baol Organism curated lush planetary gardens and arboretums across many systems, forming mutualistic symbiotic relationships with local alien wildlife.
The Zroni
The Zroni were possibly the most powerful psionics to have ever existed, or at least they were the first to discover the dimension which has come to be known as The Shroud. Once the Zroni population reached a certain critical mass it seems that their collective unconscious minds began to make contact with the proto-shroud in dreams, leading to mass lucid dreaming. Soon the phenomenon was studied and the Zroni discovered how to psionically project themselves into the Shroud, where they found that they could manipulate the very fabric of reality with their psionic powers. It wasn't long before the Zroni discovered they could physically enter the Shroud and live like Gods, transforming the dimension to suit their whims.
Precursor changes
One of the more impactful changes weve made is that we have now made the precursor spawns randomized so that they will no longer spawn in a specific part of the galaxy.
We have also added some more features and rewards to the old precursors. For example, after having found the Irassian home system, you can now spend minor artifacts to unravel some of the secrets of the Irassians. The new artifact actions arent the only new things though, and theres some more cool things that you will be able to find.
Additional precursor plans
Some of you have been asking about archaeology and adapting some of the old precursor content to use the new system. In regards to that question I will say that it is something that I always planned to do, but due to other things taking priority we cant promise that it will happen immediately. If those changes dont make it into the next update, it's very likely they will appear in the next big update after that. Changing that content would of course still be a part of the base game.
---
To get involved in the discussions on this Dev Diary with our dev team directly, head over the official Stellaris forum thread here.
That is all we had to share for this weeks dev diary. Next week well be back again, which also happens to be the 3 year anniversary for Stellaris :)
[ 2019-05-02 11:44:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Today were back with yet another dev diary, which will build upon some of the things we revealed last week. Last week we outlined some information about Minor Relics, and how they can be useful. We didnt mention specifically how they are usually found, but luckily that is something youll learn today!
Archaeology
In the next DLC you will be able to experience some new content related to uncovering and excavating archaeological sites. Sites can be discovered in multiple ways, be it either on survey, generated at game start, or perhaps generated by an event.
Sites that lie inside your borders can be excavated by a Scientist, and will consist of several different chapters. A site can have 1-6 chapters, in addition to an introduction/prologue. Each chapter will have its own narrative and a reward, and has to be unlocked before it becomes visible.
Excavation in progress. Spoiler-blurred text.
A chapter will be unlocked whenever the Scientist excavating the site gets a successful result at the end of an Excavation Phase mechanically this works very similar to how sieges work in EU4. As the Scientist goes through phases, it will roll a dice and add modifiers to the result. The final result will then either do nothing, add clues, or make a breakthrough to the next chapter.
Game mechanics details:
[quote]
Result = dice roll + Archaeology Skill + Clues - Difficulty
Result Outcomes:
0-7: Status quo
8-10: +1 clue
11-13: +2 clues
14+: Breakthrough
[/quote]
Chapter completed. Spoiler-blurred text.
A neat feature of this new system is that you can click previous chapters to go back and read what happened.
At the end of each Excavation Phase, it is also possible that the Scientist triggers a random event, which will inject some unpredictability and create opportunities for emergent storytelling.
Everything is fine.
Archaeology chapters commonly reward the player with minor artifacts but it can also be resources, research points or other more unique rewards.
Design intentions
Archaeology becomes a way for us to express narrative in a more evolving and controlled manner, and every site it also tied to a location on the map. All of these things together should make it more enjoyable to experience the content, since we hope it becomes easier to build a mental model of what is happening where. In general I believe that having narrative tied to things you can see on the map makes for a better experience. Its not uncommon for me to forget where on the map a previous event occurred, and that is something Id like to improve over time. I really like archaeology because it lands well between mechanics and narrative.
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We hope you could dig todays dev diary, and next week well be back with something old that is new.
[ 2019-04-25 15:32:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
PDXCON2019 is coming and we couldnt be more excited to meet our community at the event - which takes place on October 18th - 20th, 2019. Tickets go on sale on May 7th, but weve got a secret to tell you
If you head over to the PDXCON 2019 website at https://pdxcon.paradoxplaza.com/ you can sign up to the mailing list. Anyone that signs up will be given 8 HOURS early access before the public availability of the tickets to buy before everyone else! Sign up now and keep your eyes on the news well be sending out because tickets will sell out.
[ 2019-04-18 15:23:53 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
First of all, Id like to follow up on last weeks dev diary by sharing some more things were trying out with Megastructures (and habitats!).
After all of that, we also have something new to talk about!
Lets start from the beginning which of course leads us to the Mega-Engineering technology itself.
As always, numbers may not be final and temporary things may be sighted.
Mega-Engineering
Mega-Engineering is still a rare technology, but will now be more likely to appear as you build more Habitats and Citadels. This means it is way more likely to appear if you are performing actions in the game that would lead you towards the route of building larger and more powerful structures.
Master Builders
The Master Builders ascension perk no longer unlocks mega-engineering or adds size to habitats, but instead increases the number of megastructures you can simultaneously build by +1. What about increased habitat size you ask? Well, keep on reading!
Habitats & Voidborne
Habitats are no longer locked behind the Voidborne ascension perk but is rather a technology that branches off from the Star Fortress technology. Habitats now have a default of 80% habitability. Were also experimenting with that some of the habitats districts will depend on which planet they are built over. In case you build one above a planet with mining deposits, this could happen:
Voidborne ascension perk now increases habitat size by +2 and increases Habitat habitability by 20%. This should mean it becomes more of a choice for specialization, rather than feeling it is a non-choice.
As a final note on habitats, it might be worthwhile to reiterate my thoughts that I eventually want to add different levels/sizes to habitats. It is however not something for the immediate future, but a little further down the road.
Ring Worlds
We didnt quite like how Ring Worlds ended up feeling like a vast farm, so were making some changes. Instead of being a size 50 with regular districts, were changing it to a size 5 with a unique type of districts segments. A Ring World, as you know, has 4 planets. Each planet can now build 5 segments, which are very powerful districts with many jobs and a lot of housing.
Minor Artifacts
Some of you might recognize the icon for what was supposed to become arcane technology, that partially got into 2.2. It was something that I was personally working on, but that didnt work out as I had imagined it, and that I didnt get enough time to finish with other things taking priority.
In the next upcoming DLC, you will be able to come across Minor Artifacts. Minor Artifacts is a broad term that includes any smaller and nameless artifact left behind by ancient civilizations. They are never gained passively every month, but will rather have to be found.
What are they used for, I imagine you asking? Well, the basic functionality is that they can be consumed in so-called artifact actions. There are a bunch of different actions that can be performed by consuming Minor Artifacts, with varying effects for each.
Some of these actions will be locked behind a technology, which some may also recognize.
Arcane Deciphering allows you to consume Minor Artifacts for a random technology-related bonus.
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Thats it for this week! Happy Easter everyone! Next week well be back again :)
P.S. Attaching an Easter present
[ 2019-04-18 11:49:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
We are back with a dev diary outlining some of the changes were making to megastructures in a future update. Weve recently felt that the Galactic Wonders ascension perk feels a little bloated when it unlocked up to 8 different things, in addition to it being a little awkward that you suddenly got access to so many vastly more powerful structures.
We didnt like that Galactic Wonders became so much of a non-choice due to unlocking so many things, so it will now be possible to unlock most of the megastructures without having to dedicate an ascension perk for it.
Galactic Wonders
We are making some changes to Galactic Wonders so that it no longer unlocks all megastructures, but rather only unlocks the most powerful megastructures. In addition, they are also unlocked as technology options rather than as finished schemes ready for construction. This means that you will still have to research the technology to build a Dyson Sphere, which also means it becomes a choice if you want to first focus on the Dyson Sphere or the Matter Decompressor (they are both Physics technologies).
Megastructures
The other megastructures Strategic Coordination Center, Mega Art Installation, Interstellar Assembly, Science Nexus and Sentry Array are now instead of their own unique technologies. It is now possible to build these without having the Galactic Wonders ascension perk.
The megastructures are split into different research categories. Strategic Coordination Center, Mega Art Installation and Interstellar Assembly are all Society research. Science Nexus and Sentry Array are Physics. All of these new technologies have mega-engineering as their prerequisite.
At the same time we are also taking the opportunity to look over the placement rules for megastructures, as they were not entirely consistent. The 5 mentioned here above should now follow similar rules for placement.
------------
Thats it for this week! Next week well be back again
[ 2019-04-12 08:31:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
Version checksums ea03 and b1a8
Hi everyone! Just want to drop a line to inform you that 2.2.7 is now the official live version. It fixes a few gameplay and stability issues that came up with 2.2.6.
VERSION 2.2.7
UI
- Fixed species ethics wrongly displaying the same for all empires in the empire selection screen
- Fixed assimilation
- Fixed Machine and Hive world terraforming removing rare deposit types
- Fixed crash in tech progress tooltip while in observer mode
- Crashfix when invalid leaders are left in a country's leader pool
- Fixed broken localization for crisis purge jobs in non-English languages
[ 2019-04-04 11:21:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi Everyone!
After its beta testing phase, the 2.2.6 patch is ready for its live release!
Since the latest beta build, we addressed 3 small, but important issues:
Fixed the end of year lag when big empires with lots of pops being assimilated convert them into proper citizen (shoutout to Glavius!)
Fixed a crash when editing UNE template ethics
Fixed the AI not utilizing fleet capacity
You can read the full update patchnotes below:
[quote]#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.2.6 ###########################
#################################################################
######################
# 2.2 Le Guin Free Features
######################
* Added a new, more user-friendly planet screen, with better organization and display of info and buttons
* Ship upgrading is now handled individually, on a per ship, per shipyard basis. This means if the process is interrupted part way, some of the ships will still be upgraded, rather than losing the entire upgrade progress. Also, alloy costs are now deducted one ship at a time, rather than for the entire fleet in one go, so you don't have to wait until you can afford everything to start the upgrade process
* Warrior Culture civic no longer reduces army upkeep, but instead makes Entertainment buildings replace Entertainers with Duelists. Duelists turn 1 alloy into 3 unity, 12 amenities and 2 naval capacity
* Added Logistical Corps tradition custom flavour text swap for Hive Minds
* Added Great Game tradition custom flavour text swap for Devouring Swarms
* Added new animation to Plantoid 13 (cactus) portrait. It will now have some butterflies as company!
* Added the Legion flag set with six new selectable flag emblems
###################
# Balance
###################
* Pop growth further adjusted to put less priority towards minority pops
* Battle Thralls can now take enforcer jobs
* Hallucinogen Removal special project cost reduced from 5000 to 3000
* Breaching the Shroud special project cost reduces from 50000 to 20000
* Transcendent Learning ascension perk effect on leader pool removed and replaced with Leader Experience Gain +50%
* Reduced the machine empire bonus to orbital station production to 10% (was 50%, which turned out to be rather OP)
* Rogue Servitor tweaks:
-Organic Sanctuary/Paradise no longer provide housing, instead Biotrophy jobs eliminate those pop's need for housing
-Artisan Drones produce 8 Consumer goods for 8 minerals (up from 6 of each)
-Biotrophy Jobs now also increase Complex Drone putput on their planet by 0.25% each
-Starts with 1 additonal Nexus District
* Driven Assimilator tweaks:
-Bio pop growth reduced by 40%
-1 fewer Replicator job per level of capital
-Now start with +100 food, and 100 less energy
* Ship upgrades are cheaper due to refund amount from old components being increased to 90% (was 50%)
* Pops have a wider possible range of Political power, so for example you can care less about unhappy slaves since it's not as though they can vote or anything
* Meritocracy Civic effect on leader pool size removed and replaced with specialist output +10%
* Clone Vats are no longer required to build Clone armies, they are now unlocked by the Gene Banks tech (resolves an issue where this tech had no benefit for assimilators)
* Technological Ascendancy ascension perk now also makes rare technologies 50% more common
* Shroud entities have been tweaked slightly. Corrupted Avatar now has lower total HP, but has increased regen. Shroud Avatar is now slightly stronger in its total HP and regen. End of Cycle entities have also been tweaked similarly
* Transcendence, Evolutionary Mastery, Synthetic Evolution ascension perk slot requirement reduced from 4th to 3rd
* World Shaper ascension perk slot requirement reduced from 3nd to 2nd
* Imperial Prerogative ascension perk no longer has any slot requirements
* Eternal Vigilance ascension perk no longer has any slot requirements, but instead requires the Star Fortress technology
* Eternal Vigilance ascension perk now also increases starbase hull points by 25%
* One Vision ascension perk now also reduces pop amenities usage by 10%
* Numistic shrine now costs 4000 energy to buy and 1000 minerals to build
* Clerks and Preachers job weights no longer care about being strong, weak, or proles
* Miner job weights DO care about being proles
* Synth Empires pay only alloys for Colony ships, like Machines
* Rogue Servitors start with another Nexus District
###################
# UI
###################
* Added missing modifier icons for mote harvesting traps and extractors, also updated old icon
* Added a bunch of shortcuts to the planet view
* Added shortcut "U" to upgrade starbase platforms button
* Added shortcuts for upgrade "U" and trade route "T" buttons in starbase interface
* Strategic resources summary on the top bar will now show in red to let you know if any are in deficit
* Fixing devastation progress bar reaching 100% and disappearing
* Fixed so that unemployment by strata icons are properly displayed and have a working tooltip
* Rogue Servitor complex drone output bonus from each Bio-Trophy was not being displayed due to lack of decimals showing, this is fixed
###################
# AI
###################
* Big rework of military AI making it a lot smarter and more aggressive in war: better selection and maintenance of the aim, better follow through on invading worlds they are bombarding, not so easy to kite with tiny decoy fleets, more willing to reinforce neighboring friendlies under attack, etc
* AI is not so maniacal about crime that it rush builds 3 precinct houses on every planet
* The sector AI should now be better at upgrading buildings relevant to its selected focus
* Improved the AI's budgeting of Alloys
* AI will now only consider enacting population control if it cannot produce more housing
* Sector automation will now clear blockers if able, and if it is not building a building or district at that moment
* Rogue Servitors Less keen on building organic sanctuaries unless bio-trophies need them
* Sector AI will now upgrade buildings if possible
* All Sector Focuses will now try to upgrade their colony capital buildings if there are no other pressing needs
* AI will no longer obsessively shuffle scientists from one role to another every few days
* Lowered the AI's mineral budget allotment for ground armies (they were producing way too many)
* AI empires with alternative cost types for colony ships will now budget the correct resource for it
* AI prefers City districts over Housing buildings a bit more
* Fixed some edge cases where the AI would attempt to build its way out of unemployment with districts and buildings that its pops can't work
* Fixed AI not repairing damaged branch office buildings
* Fixed AI fleets getting stuck when their target goes MIA
* AI will not build nanite transfusers without nanite income or build more than 2 per planet
###################
# Performance
###################
* Removed redundant double calculations related to end game crisis that caused them to very negatively affect late game performance
* Reordered some operations in the invasion calculations to make sure the most expensive are done last
###################
# Modding
###################
* Added 'hyperlane_distance = { min max }' and 'hyperlane_jumps = { min max }' to system initializer 'neighbor_system = { ... }' block
* Pops now use the asset_selector again to choose their clothes
* Added new "is_scope_type" trigger that lets you know if you're a scope of a particular type: "is_scope_type = fleet"
* Removed the forced clothes index in pop categories and job types, to let the clothes selector do its magic
* There are now multipliers for previous job, previous tenants, survey and unemployment to the AI score used to fill in jobs
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed edge case where multiple megastructures could be built in the same system
* Fixed missing missions for primitive observation posts
* Fixed planets still being colonized generating emigration push to other worlds. I know the offworld colonies weren't the paradise the holovid adverts made them out to be, but give them another generation or two...
* Fixed a broken string in the tooltip for the Egalitarian ethic
* Fixed guaranteed ideal nearby systems generating based on absolute distance rather than max jumps from homeworld, which could cause them to be isolated by unlucky jump lane network generation
* Fixed population controls disabling robot construction as well, so you can now improve the meatbag to metal ratio of your society
* Planets under colonization will no longer generate low stability alerts
* Fixed Strategic Resource notifications appearing for resources hidden behind Anomalies
* Winning an "impose ideology" war will no longer overwrite the defeated empires civics
* Impose Ideology war now properly creates an ally instead of a vassal
* Fixed a crash that happened when a ship was destroyed while being upgraded
* A lack of Nanites will now properly trigger a deficit warning and stop the resource production of Nanite Transmuters
* Fixed robots/synths being treated as organic when conquered by hive mind empires, and getting locked in the livestock job
* Fixed vassal integration wrongly costing no influence
* Fixed an issue where conquering Hive Minds could take over inappropriate buildings they have no use for, like Holo-Theatres
* Maintenance drones now correctly increase in priority when amenities are negative, and now don't have increased priority from traits when amenities are high
* Slave processing centers should no longer vanish when build anywhere but a Thrall-World
* Fixed some edge cases where the Life-Seeded Civic would not create a Gaia homeworld
* Head Researcher and Executive now have Amenity output modifiers and weights for several relevant traits (Repugnant, Charismatic, etc)
* Fixed Strong, Very Strong, Weak traits not being applied properly when playing as a gestalt empire
* Fixed displacement purge type wrongly applying the genocidal diplomatic opinion penalty
* Fixed "The Shattered Loop" event firing twice upon death of the Worm-in-Waiting
* Fixed a literally unplayable localization error in the Xeno-Compatibility tooltip
* Fixed Prikkik-Ti empire spawning on a planet without enough districts to support it
* Prikkiki-Ti will no longer spam player with multiple communications established messages
* Planets taken over by the Scourge or Contingency will now swap any capital buildings to a correct Machine or Hive capital
* Preferred habitability is no longer strictly tied to starting planet class if a civic changes the starting planet
* Fixed developing colonies being hidden in the outliner's Sectors group if on completion a new sector would be created
* Fixed pre-sapient policies disappearing if you purge all of them from your space, making fulfilment of certain faction demands impossible, because what are the screams of the innocent next to that sweet, sweet influence?
* Changed wording on the Strong/Very Strong traits. It was wrongly implying that is should affect the outcome of ALL worker strata jobs, not just basic resource extraction ones. Even if your clerks never skip leg day, they probably shouldn't benefit from these traits
* Added piracy suppression values to event generated ships that were missing them
* Fixed a few more cases of techs with the wrong specialty group assignment
* Fixed a minor discrepancy in the tooltip of the Sins of a Sun anomaly vs its actual in game effects
* Fixed a nasty exploit with downgrading fleets that could result in free alloys (thanks for the heads up on this, Reddit user nonium)
* Added missing torpedo components from the Spiritualist Fallen Empire Zealot-Class ship type
* Added a basic Zro income to Spiritualist Fallen empires to allow them to properly produce reinforcements for their damaged fleets
* The modifier for Refinery worlds should also now affect Gestalt jobs
* Fixed several ship weapons which had incorrect resource costs
* Energy/Culture Habitat districts should convert properly if a gestalt empire takes it from a normal empire, or vice versa
* Fixed a crash when a country gets a trade route that used to belong to someone else
* Fixed tooltip that hilariously claimed that setting a species to purge (except neuter) was a requirement for the Decent Living Standards
* Picking Life Seeded will no longer give automatic nearby ideal worlds that are also Gaia
* Randomized empires gets their starting planets, ethics and civics correctly set up when they start as life seeded or post apocalyptic
* Fixed OOS for diplomatic upkeep upon hotjoining
* Fixed some causes of country_resources OOS
* Restored non extermination types of purging
* Fixed script checking wrong resource for automated sector upgrading to research lab lvl 3
* Fixed Prethoryn purging primitives at an incorrect, too-slow rate
* Fixed the planet screen being cut off on the left side of the screen on certain resolutions
* Fixed empires in federations wrongly budgeting for Federation fleet ships as part of their own navy, and thus underdeveloping their own fleets
* Fixed a crash when gifting planets to a vassal
* Fixed a situation where replacing a district temporarily adds to the maximum numbers of built districts, as if you were building a new district
* Speed demon event will add the red/green traits even if your species is very strong/adaptive
* Fixed planets under colonization suffering low stability events
* Fixed Crisis purging yet again (for a galaxy-threatening menace they sure seem easy to dissuade from their mission of doom)
* Fixed the end of year lag when big empires with lots of pops being assimilated convert them into proper citizen (shoutout to Glavius!)
* Fixed a crash when editing UNE template ethics
* Fixed the AI not utilizing fleet capacity[/quote]
Aside from that, were keeping a 2nd 2.2.6 build in beta for crossplay support and to help us test our networking backend. As always, your help in testing the build is greatly appreciated!
Have fun playing!
[ 2019-03-20 14:08:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all! Were continuing the work on the 2.2.6 beta patch, and we just updated it with a set of new tweaks and fixes! Big thanks to all of you helping us identify hidden bugs and issues! For those of you who are using the stellaris_test branch, it will update automatically. This is the build you need to play with your friends on GoG! The live build version, remains the 2.2.5. Jamor has summarized the new changes for your convenience (new entries are in bold): [quote]################################################################# ######################### VERSION 2.2.6 ########################### ################################################################# ###################### # 2.2 Le Guin Free Features ###################### * Added a new, more user-friendly planet screen, with better organization and display of info and buttons * Ship upgrading is now handled individually, on a per ship, per shipyard basis. This means if the process is interrupted part way, some of the ships will still be upgraded, rather than losing the entire upgrade progress. Also, alloy costs are now deducted one ship at a time, rather than for the entire fleet in one go, so you don't have to wait until you can afford everything to start the upgrade process * Warrior Culture civic no longer reduces army upkeep, but instead makes Entertainment buildings replace Entertainers with Duelists. Duelists turn 1 alloy into 3 unity, 12 amenities and 2 naval capacity * Added Logistical Corps tradition custom flavour text swap for Hive Minds * Added Great Game tradition custom flavour text swap for Devouring Swarms * Added new animation to Plantoid 13 (cactus) portrait. It will now have some butterflies as company! * Added the Legion flag set with six new selectable flag emblems ################### # Balance ################### * Pop growth further adjusted to put less priority towards minority pops * Battle Thralls can now take enforcer jobs * Hallucinogen Removal special project cost reduced from 5000 to 3000 * Breaching the Shroud special project cost reduces from 50000 to 20000 * Transcendent Learning ascension perk effect on leader pool removed and replaced with Leader Experience Gain +50% * Reduced the machine empire bonus to orbital station production to 10% (was 50%, which turned out to be rather OP) * Rogue Servitor tweaks: -Organic Sanctuary/Paradise no longer provide housing, instead Biotrophy jobs eliminate those pop's need for housing -Artisan Drones produce 8 Consumer goods for 8 minerals (up from 6 of each) -Biotrophy Jobs now also increase Complex Drone putput on their planet by 0.25% each -Starts with 1 additonal Nexus District * Driven Assimilator tweaks: -Bio pop growth reduced by 40% -1 fewer Replicator job per level of capital -Now start with +100 food, and 100 less energy * Ship upgrades are cheaper due to refund amount from old components being increased to 90% (was 50%) * Pops have a wider possible range of Political power, so for example you can care less about unhappy slaves since it's not as though they can vote or anything * Meritocracy Civic effect on leader pool size removed and replaced with specialist output +10% * Clone Vats are no longer required to build Clone armies, they are now unlocked by the Gene Banks tech (resolves an issue where this tech had no benefit for assimilators) * Technological Ascendancy ascension perk now also makes rare technologies 50% more common * Shroud entities have been tweaked slightly. Corrupted Avatar now has lower total HP, but has increased regen. Shroud Avatar is now slightly stronger in its total HP and regen. End of Cycle entities have also been tweaked similarly * Transcendence, Evolutionary Mastery, Synthetic Evolution ascension perk slot requirement reduced from 4th to 3rd * World Shaper ascension perk slot requirement reduced from 3nd to 2nd * Imperial Prerogative ascension perk no longer has any slot requirements * Eternal Vigilance ascension perk no longer has any slot requirements, but instead requires the Star Fortress technology * Eternal Vigilance ascension perk now also increases starbase hull points by 25% * One Vision ascension perk now also reduces pop amenities usage by 10% * Numistic shrine now costs 4000 energy to buy and 1000 minerals to build * Clerks and Preachers job weights no longer care about being strong, weak, or proles * Miner job weights DO care about being proles * Synth Empires pay only alloys for Colony ships, like Machines * Rogue Servitors start with another Nexus District ################### # UI ################### * Added missing modifier icons for mote harvesting traps and extractors, also updated old icon * Added a bunch of shortcuts to the planet view * Added shortcut "U" to upgrade starbase platforms button * Added shortcuts for upgrade "U" and trade route "T" buttons in starbase interface * Strategic resources summary on the top bar will now show in red to let you know if any are in deficit * Fixing devastation progress bar reaching 100% and disappearing * Fixed so that unemployment by strata icons are properly displayed and have a working tooltip * Rogue Servitor complex drone output bonus from each Bio-Trophy was not being displayed due to lack of decimals showing, this is fixed ################### # AI ################### * Big rework of military AI making it a lot smarter and more aggressive in war: better selection and maintenance of the aim, better follow through on invading worlds they are bombarding, not so easy to kite with tiny decoy fleets, more willing to reinforce neighboring friendlies under attack, etc * AI is not so maniacal about crime that it rush builds 3 precinct houses on every planet * The sector AI should now be better at upgrading buildings relevant to its selected focus * Improved the AI's budgeting of Alloys * AI will now only consider enacting population control if it cannot produce more housing * Sector automation will now clear blockers if able, and if it is not building a building or district at that moment * Rogue Servitors Less keen on building organic sanctuaries unless bio-trophies need them * Sector AI will now upgrade buildings if possible * All Sector Focuses will now try to upgrade their colony capital buildings if there are no other pressing needs * AI will no longer obsessively shuffle scientists from one role to another every few days * Lowered the AI's mineral budget allotment for ground armies (they were producing way too many) * AI empires with alternative cost types for colony ships will now budget the correct resource for it * AI prefers City districts over Housing buildings a bit more * Fixed some edge cases where the AI would attempt to build its way out of unemployment with districts and buildings that its pops can't work * Fixed AI not repairing damaged branch office buildings * Fixed AI fleets getting stuck when their target goes MIA * AI will not build nanite transfusers without nanite income or build more than 2 per planet ################### # Performance ################### * Removed redundant double calculations related to end game crisis that caused them to very negatively affect late game performance * Reordered some operations in the invasion calculations to make sure the most expensive are done last ################### # Modding ################### * Added 'hyperlane_distance = { min max }' and 'hyperlane_jumps = { min max }' to system initializer 'neighbor_system = { ... }' block * Pops now use the asset_selector again to choose their clothes * Added new "is_scope_type" trigger that lets you know if you're a scope of a particular type: "is_scope_type = fleet" * Removed the forced clothes index in pop categories and job types, to let the clothes selector do its magic * There are now multipliers for previous job, previous tenants, survey and unemployment to the AI score used to fill in jobs ################### # Bugfixes ################### * Fixed edge case where multiple megastructures could be built in the same system * Fixed missing missions for primitive observation posts * Fixed planets still being colonized generating emigration push to other worlds. I know the offworld colonies weren't the paradise the holovid adverts made them out to be, but give them another generation or two... * Fixed a broken string in the tooltip for the Egalitarian ethic * Fixed guaranteed ideal nearby systems generating based on absolute distance rather than max jumps from homeworld, which could cause them to be isolated by unlucky jump lane network generation * Fixed population controls disabling robot construction as well, so you can now improve the meatbag to metal ratio of your society * Planets under colonization will no longer generate low stability alerts * Fixed Strategic Resource notifications appearing for resources hidden behind Anomalies * Winning an "impose ideology" war will no longer overwrite the defeated empires civics * Impose Ideology war now properly creates an ally instead of a vassal * Fixed a crash that happened when a ship was destroyed while being upgraded * A lack of Nanites will now properly trigger a deficit warning and stop the resource production of Nanite Transmuters * Fixed robots/synths being treated as organic when conquered by hive mind empires, and getting locked in the livestock job * Fixed vassal integration wrongly costing no influence * Fixed an issue where conquering Hive Minds could take over inappropriate buildings they have no use for, like Holo-Theatres * Maintenance drones now correctly increase in priority when amenities are negative, and now don't have increased priority from traits when amenities are high * Slave processing centers should no longer vanish when build anywhere but a Thrall-World * Fixed some edge cases where the Life-Seeded Civic would not create a Gaia homeworld * Head Researcher and Executive now have Amenity output modifiers and weights for several relevant traits (Repugnant, Charismatic, etc) * Fixed Strong, Very Strong, Weak traits not being applied properly when playing as a gestalt empire * Fixed displacement purge type wrongly applying the genocidal diplomatic opinion penalty * Fixed "The Shattered Loop" event firing twice upon death of the Worm-in-Waiting * Fixed a literally unplayable localization error in the Xeno-Compatibility tooltip * Fixed Prikkik-Ti empire spawning on a planet without enough districts to support it * Prikkiki-Ti will no longer spam player with multiple communications established messages * Planets taken over by the Scourge or Contingency will now swap any capital buildings to a correct Machine or Hive capital * Preferred habitability is no longer strictly tied to starting planet class if a civic changes the starting planet * Fixed developing colonies being hidden in the outliner's Sectors group if on completion a new sector would be created * Fixed pre-sapient policies disappearing if you purge all of them from your space, making fulfilment of certain faction demands impossible, because what are the screams of the innocent next to that sweet, sweet influence? * Changed wording on the Strong/Very Strong traits. It was wrongly implying that is should affect the outcome of ALL worker strata jobs, not just basic resource extraction ones. Even if your clerks never skip leg day, they probably shouldn't benefit from these traits * Added piracy suppression values to event generated ships that were missing them * Fixed a few more cases of techs with the wrong specialty group assignment * Fixed a minor discrepancy in the tooltip of the Sins of a Sun anomaly vs its actual in game effects * Fixed a nasty exploit with downgrading fleets that could result in free alloys (thanks for the heads up on this, Reddit user nonium) * Added missing torpedo components from the Spiritualist Fallen Empire Zealot-Class ship type * Added a basic Zro income to Spiritualist Fallen empires to allow them to properly produce reinforcements for their damaged fleets * The modifier for Refinery worlds should also now affect Gestalt jobs * Fixed several ship weapons which had incorrect resource costs * Energy/Culture Habitat districts should convert properly if a gestalt empire takes it from a normal empire, or vice versa * Fixed a crash when a country gets a trade route that used to belong to someone else * Fixed tooltip that hilariously claimed that setting a species to purge (except neuter) was a requirement for the Decent Living Standards * Picking Life Seeded will no longer give automatic nearby ideal worlds that are also Gaia * Randomized empires gets their starting planets, ethics and civics correctly set up when they start as life seeded or post apocalyptic * Fixed OOS for diplomatic upkeep upon hotjoining * Fixed some causes of country_resources OOS * Restored non extermination types of purging * Fixed script checking wrong resource for automated sector upgrading to research lab lvl 3 * Fixed Prethoryn purging primitives at an incorrect, too-slow rate * Fixed the planet screen being cut off on the left side of the screen on certain resolutions * Fixed empires in federations wrongly budgeting for Federation fleet ships as part of their own navy, and thus underdeveloping their own fleets * Fixed a crash when gifting planets to a vassal * Fixed a situation where replacing a district temporarily adds to the maximum numbers of built districts, as if you were building a new district * Speed demon event will add the red/green traits even if your species is very strong/adaptive * Fixed planets under colonization suffering low stability events * Fixed Crisis purging yet again (for a galaxy-threatening menace they sure seem easy to dissuade from their mission of doom)[/quote] When testing the new 2.2.6 beta build, remember we always welcome constructive feedback! Your reports, especially on o
[ 2019-03-14 16:24:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all!
Today we will resume our Dev Clash! Make sure to tune in on Twitch at 15:00 CET! You simply have to click here!
Naturally everything will be available in VOD in the coming days!
[ 2019-03-14 11:38:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Checksum information:
2.2.5 release: 05d3
2.2.6 beta: 1018
Hi all, Jamor brings you new set of patch notes this week and some news! We'd like to announce that after a good period of beta testing, 2.2.5 is now fully live. It contains a ton of balance, AI, and performance improvements as well as bug fixes, and is all in all a greatly superior version to 2.2.4. It features a big balance pass on machine empires, and we were also finally able to find the fix for the long-lived "meandering strike craft" problem. Thanks to all the intrepid open beta testers who helped us get it ready for release.
Based on the feedback and testing done during 2.2.5 beta, we've also created version 2.2.6. We've taken the decision to do this as a beta as well, to give it the time to be proven before fully flipping to live. This will be useful since it includes a few brand new quality of life features that we want to try out in field conditions. More on that in a bit, first let's take a look at the fixes contained in the 2.2.5 live version:
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.2.5 ###########################
#################################################################
###################
# Balance
###################
* Pop growth: Reduced Random factor in pop growth, habitability has more of penalty on growth selection, lessened bias towards new species, and traits have a larger effect on Robot selection
* Strike craft now do more damage, have longer range, are faster, and turn and accelerate quicker
* Machine Empires get 50% more resources from mining bases
* Machine Empire Tech Drones now produce 6 energy (up from 4) base. Agri Drones now produce 5 food (down from 6) base. Both of these also apply to Synth Empires.
* Machine Empire Colony ships now add 2 pops to a new colony, but cost 400 alloys (up from 300)
* Machine Empire Outposts now cost 150 alloys
* Machine Empire Fabricators produce 4 alloys (up from 3) at the cost of 8 minerals (up from 6).
* New Machine Empire colonies start with 2 replicator jobs to give a bit of early boost (up from 1), upgraded capitals reduced to give the same number overall. The extra Replicator jobs beyond the 2 granted by upgraded capital buildings now depend on the planet still having >= 10/40 pops, to remove a tedious exploit with resettling pops to unlock the upgrade, then moving them again
* Machine capital planet grants +5% drone output
* Unemployed Machine Pops now use 0.25 Energy for upkeep (down from 1)
* Replicators now also produce 1 Engineering research
* Coordinators now produce 1 of each Research (was 3 Society)
* Each Coordinator on a planet now boosts Simple Drone resource output by 1%
* Energy grids/nexus' are more expensive, but give an additional 5% bonus and add 2/4 Max Generator Districts to their planet. This also applies to Synth empires
* Mineral purification plants/hubs are more expensive, but give an additional 5% bonus and add 2/4 Max Mining Districts to their planet. This also applies to Synth empires
* Robots with Emotion Emulators are now more likely to become maintenance drones
* Citizen Service civic effect on soldier unity generation increased from +1 to +2
* Eco Simulation, Gene Crops and Nano-Vitality Crops technology effect on farmer output increased from +10% to +20%
* Geothermal Fracking, Deep Core Mining, Mineral Isolation technology effect on miner output increased from 10% to 20%
* Field Modulation, Quantum Energy States, Quantum Field Manipulation technology effect on technician output increased from 10% to 20%
* The Repugnant/Uncanny trait now has less of an effect on pops avoiding amenity producing jobs
* Maintenance drone job priority now considers amenity level of the planet
* Simple drones now ponder the empire level food/mineral/energy income when choosing a job
* Made the bad outcome of the Abandoned Terraforming Project event produce a Tomb World, rather than a totally unusable Toxic World
* Added potential negative outcomes the Atomic Clock chain, since previously there was no real choice involved
* Made Fanatic Purifiers always able to choose "no retreat" war doctrine
* Scaled back bonus resources from planet modifiers to just be for chthonian planets and carbon world, for now...
* When freed from the time loop, the Prikkiki-Ti lizards will start with the same level of tech as their closest neighbour. Also their economy and fleet power has been improved
* Telepaths, head researchers, high priests, administrators, executives, researchers, enforcers and entertainers now have weights for ascension/events/uplifts related traits
* Returned removed orbital deposits to uninhabitable Precursor homeworlds
* Species with very low habitability will not generally be selected to grow new pops
* Ministry of Culture for Hive Mind empire now adds Synapse drone jobs, rather than Coordinators
###################
# UI
###################
* Added missing modifiers on army strength to some tooltips
* Fixed some text overlaps in the empire creation screen for Robot Empires in Russian language
* Fixed missing tooltip on leftmost trait, if a leader had more than three traits
* Removed some obsolete modifiers from the shipyard UI
* Fixed resource cost display in colonization menu showing all required resources as red, even if you were only short on one of them
* Updated Machine intelligence food tooltip to mention that Cyborgs need food too. Don't let your Cyborgs starve!
* Unhallowed Ground Traditionalist pop faction demand tooltip now clarifies that even terraforming tombworlds upsets them
* Clarified relative power requirement to offer subsidiary status in the tooltip for this diplo action
* Fixed the Expansion Tradition finisher effect not being displayed in tooltip about max district numbers, making the math look really broken
* Fixed bug where closing planet view side panel brings up redundant window for a split second
* Plasma Accelerators no longer display Caravan Cannon tooltips
* Migration pull tool tip now displays actual pull with factors
* Fixed tooltip that wrongly stated that only full citizens can take ruler jobs
* Fixed debug string shown in the tooltip of certain diplomacy interactions with fallen empires
* Fixed broken string in tooltip for event option you absolutely should not click, you have been warned
###################
# AI
###################
* Machine and Mechanical AI empires will favor generator districts a bit more
* AI will not build housing buildings when it doesn't need them
* AI will no longer start scrapping buildings immediately once it decides it doesn't need more of them, it will just stop building new ones for a while
* Improved AI budgeting for megastructures
* AI empires will generally not build more than 2 buildings of the same type per planet
* AI should be keen on building Organic sanctuaries if their bio-trophy pops are unemployed
* AI only becomes more interested in building commercial zones if it needs energy and amenities (was previously overbuilding these)
* AI will check for surplus population before making buildings
* AI now budgets the full total available resources into categories
###################
# Performance
###################
* Reduced performance cost of the outliner
* Threaded calculations for rendering planet icons on the galaxy map
* Cached habitability calculations for planet icons on the galaxy map
###################
# Modding
###################
* Changed scope of the faction_approval trigger from pop scope to pop_faction scope, making it not broken anymore
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed broken targeting for strike craft that caused them to meander out to the edges of the system rather than engage enemy fleets
* Fixed some Planetary Features (and thus Districts) not surviving the terraforming process to Gaia planet class, because what's a paradise planet if you can't strip mine it and turn it in to a honeycombed shell?!
* Foundry level 3 now correctly gives Machine Empires Fabricator jobs instead of Foundry Drones
* Fixed Private Colony Ships being generated without names in some circumstances
* Fixed an issue where the "Galactic Market Hub Nomination" Decision would once again become available if a nominated planet's rating was boosted past a certain point
* Orc and cyclops portraits from the Humanoid species pack no longer have a shoulder clipping through their clothing
* Fixed an out of sync due to parallelization of pops calculation
* Fixed a source of OOS on reconnect
* Fixed OOS introduced by caching starbase related values
* Fixed clicking "colonize" on a planet not working for Machine Empires (planet naming didn't work, colony ship insta-builds but did nothing, this bug was a real champion)
* Free movement faction demand no longer cares about robots or their rights
* Pops without military service rights will no longer take soldier or enforcer jobs
* Fixed not being able to assign/unassign leader (by clicking portrait) from fleet manager view
* Fixed literally unplayable typos in certain Italian names in the human namelist
* Fixed a case where a build outpost command inside space you already own would wrongly claim you were trying to build in another empire's territory
* Finally got around to adding a proper confirmation click sound when adding claims on the galaxy map
* Fixed cases where pop growth would not overflow properly after a new pop is spawned (99+3 used to = 100), causing all sorts of weirdness with pop growth modifiers
* Fixed cases where science ships on auto-explore would just stop, or randomly choose a crazy indirect path to the next unexplored system
* Fixed the supply ship wreckage event to not fire if the other party is a genocidal empire, since it makes little sense for them
* Fixed Expansionist Overtures leader agenda appearing before you've made contact with any other empires
* Fixed an issue where a Fallen Empire's Shielded World would not spawn
* You can now build multiple habitats at the same time, in the same system
* Fixed the "Ships Lost" outcome of the Fleet Maneuvers event sometimes not having any effect, by preventing it firing if there are too few ships in the fleet to destroy
* Updated the text in some of the Synth Uprising events to better convey the scale of the disaster, since while we'll never tell how many beings compose a Pop, it's probably more than a dozen
* Removed nonfunctional and unintended "merge fleets" button for things like the lost amoeba, that are not supposed to merge with normal fleets
* Fixed a pathfinding issue that would cause fleet to not move towards their destination
* Fixed ship losses not being correctly counted in the battle list in the war overview
* Fixed a bug from 2016 (!) where if you split a fleet, then tried to drag-box select both, only one would be picked
* Atomic clock follow-up anomaly rewards that grant Engineering deposits will now correctly convert any existing Mining Stations into Research Stations
* Fixed duplicate component slot and moved slots around on the Automated Dreadnought
* Fixed bug where deposits granting districts wouldn't actually grant the districts until a game reload
* Bonus minerals from planet modifiers will no longer overwrite the dragon hoard
* Fixed bountiful plains (level 1 food deposit) not showing up on savannah worlds
* Fixed workers abandoning the mines to displace specialists, leading to basic resource starvation and a lot of unemployed high strata pops later in the game. No social mobility for you!
* No longer possible to sometimes rival countries that have pathetic relative power
* Made sure to cull the old, empty lost amoeba fleet from the fleet manager as the amoeba matures
* Ensured capital buildings can convert to the correct type when a planet of primitives/machines/hive minds is taken over by another empire type
* AH4B from Distant Stars can no longer change composition to prevent naval capacity bypass exploit
* Dead/killed slaves are now properly culled from the slave market, so no more invalid entries, you heartless monsters
* Added checks to help ensure that buildings specific to one empire type are properly destroyed/converted when the world is taken over by a different empire type
* Fixed primitives and fallen/awakened empire pops not being purged by the Prethoryn and Contingency (Valar Morghulis)
* Fixed the Horizon Signal's "waiting world" events erroneously occurring on Ecumenopolises
* Coloniziable planets will no longer be clear-cut and paved over to hold a single mineral or energy deposit by survey teams who become over-excited at their planet modifiers
* Caravaneer weapons should no longer appear at game start
* Fixed pop growth bravely continuing even while the planet was being purged by the Prethoryn
* Fixed coming across the Caravansary home base (before encountering a Caravaneer Fleet) not giving you communications with them
* Added fixes for more cases where the Scourge would sometimes stop expanding
* Fixed Contingency and Scourge not being able to purge the final pop on an occupied planet, because thoroughness is important
* Fixed An Odd Factor event triggering even if no pop had the Odd Factory Worker job, and pops not actually being removed by event despite claims to the contrary
* Fixed broken pirate ship turret graphics
As mentioned before, we're also putting out a new open beta version for you bold souls who want to get first access to the next round of fixes and improvements. 2.2.6 is available now on the stellaris_test beta branch, as well as being the release version on Paradoxplaza and Good Old Games. If you are playing on Steam and want to multiplayer with friends on Plaza or GoG, you need to be on this beta version.
2.2.6 has a new, reworked planet management screen, with the objective of making it easier to see relevant info about a world and make informed decisions. We think it'll make handling your economy and population easier, so please give it a try. 2.2.6 features a completely redone the ship upgrade system, making it so ships are upgraded individually, on a ship-by-ship, shipyard-by-shipyard basis. No longer will interrupting an upgrade order cancel upgrade progress for the entire fleet. We also included improvements to the economic and military AI. AI empires should now be much less passive, more competent opponent in war.
To read the full 2.2.6 beta patch notes, head over to the full patch notes post on our official forums.
[ 2019-03-07 13:15:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Today Im back with a bit of a larger dev diary to share some of my thoughts and ideas. Weve been busy focusing on the tasks at hand, and now I think it's important for us to share something on a higher level.
A look back
Stellaris has come a really long way since its release on May 9th, 2016, and has undergone a lot of changes since 1.0. The game has been championed by different people over the years, and Im the third person to be handed the reins. We can look back at posts like The Maiden Voyage or the The Journey Ahead to see how much weve achieved already.
Why Stellaris is great
Stellaris is a game with almost infinite potential, and I think theres a lot of things that set us apart from other 4X strategy games. Stellaris is like a multiverse without a fixed timeline or story. I usually describe it as a table of action figures, and a player picks a bunch of those action figures and puts them in a bag. The bag is their player story, and every story is equally important. Stellaris has endless possibilities and opportunities for players to enact their own fantasies or sci-fi tropes, and that is truly what sets Stellaris apart. I want to enrich the Stellaris multiverse by adding more of these action figures (and gameplay mechanics, of course). I think we all love Stellaris for its depth, customization and ability for us to tell our own player stories (while still being a complex strategy game).
What we have been working on recently
Weve been hard at work getting 2.2.6 ready for you to play, and the current plan is to get it into your hands next Thursday (March 7th). In 2.2.6 we have managed to make lots of improvements to the game, with some things highlighted here below: Patch highlights:
- Planet interface: The UI has been polished up, and should now look much nicer! It should especially feel much better for habitats, ecumenopolises and similar.
- Ship upgrading: Fleets will now upgrade ships individually, so if cancelled mid-way, a lot of the ships will already be upgraded. Upgrading also makes use of multiple shipyards. Its pretty great.
- Unique features: Weve started the process to update a bunch of civics and ascension perks to have more unique effects instead of just being a number bonus. This will be an ongoing process for future updates, and my goal is to replace as many as creatively possible.
- Military AI: We have been working on a new military AI, which should now prove more challenging to face off versus in wars! It's not perfect yet, but it's a very good step in the right direction. With your valuable feedback it can only get better!
- Improvements & bugs: Weve made a bunch of smaller QoL improvements and squashed a large number of bugs. More details can be found in the patch log below.
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.2.5 ###########################
#################################################################
######################
# 2.2 Le Guin Free Features
######################
* Added the new "Legion" flag set, with 6 new flag emblems
###################
# Balance
###################
* Pop growth: Reduced Random factor in pop growth, habitability has more of penalty on growth selection, lessened bias towards new species, and traits have a larger effect on Robot selection
* Strike craft now do more damage, have longer range, are faster, and turn and accelerate quicker
* Machine Empires get 50% more resources from mining bases
* Machine Empire Tech Drones now produce 6 energy (up from 4) base. Agri Drones now produce 5 food (down from 6) base. Both of these also apply to Synth Empires.
* Machine Empire Colony ships now add 2 pops to a new colony, but cost 400 alloys (up from 300)
* Machine Empire Outposts now cost 150 alloys
* Machine Empire Fabricators produce 4 alloys (up from 3) at the cost of 8 minerals (up from 6).
* New Machine Empire colonies start with 2 replicator jobs to give a bit of early boost (up from 1), upgraded capitals reduced to give the same number overall. The extra Replicator jobs beyond the 2 granted by upgraded capital buildings now depend on the planet still having >= 10/40 pops, to remove a tedious exploit with resettling pops to unlock the upgrade, then moving them again
* Machine capital planet grants +5% drone output
* Unemployed Machine Pops now use 0.25 Energy for upkeep (down from 1)
* Replicators now also produce 1 Engineering research
* Coordinators now produce 1 of each Research (was 3 Society)
* Each Coordinator on a planet now boosts Simple Drone resource output by 1%
* Energy grids/nexus' are more expensive, but give an additional 5% bonus and add 2/4 Max Generator Districts to their planet. This also applies to Synth empires
* Mineral purification plants/hubs are more expensive, but give an additional 5% bonus and add 2/4 Max Mining Districts to their planet. This also applies to Synth empires
* Robots with Emotion Emulators are now more likely to become maintenance drones
* Citizen Service civic effect on soldier unity generation increased from +1 to +2
* Eco Simulation, Gene Crops and Nano-Vitality Crops technology effect on farmer output increased from +10% to +20%
* Geothermal Fracking, Deep Core Mining, Mineral Isolation technology effect on miner output increased from 10% to 20%
* Field Modulation, Quantum Energy States, Quantum Field Manipulation technology effect on technician output increased from 10% to 20%
* The Repugnant/Uncanny trait now has less of an effect on pops avoiding amenity producing jobs
* Maintenance drone job priority now considers amenity level of the planet
* Simple drones now ponder the empire level food/mineral/energy income when choosing a job
* Made the bad outcome of the Abandoned Terraforming Project event produce a Tomb World, rather than a totally unusable Toxic World
* Added potential negative outcomes the Atomic Clock chain, since previously there was no real choice involved
* Made Fanatic Purifiers always able to choose "no retreat" war doctrine
* Scaled back bonus resources from planet modifiers to just be for chthonian planets and carbon world, for now...
* When freed from the time loop, the Prikkiki-Ti lizards will start with the same level of tech as their closest neighbour. Also their economy and fleet power has been improved
* Telepaths, head researchers, high priests, administrators, executives, researchers, enforcers and entertainers now have weights for ascension/events/uplifts related traits
* Returned removed orbital deposits to uninhabitable Precursor homeworlds
* Species with very low habitability will not generally be selected to grow new pops
* Ministry of Culture for Hive Mind empire now adds Synapse drone jobs, rather than Coordinators
###################
# UI
###################
* Added missing modifiers on army strength to some tooltips
* Fixed some text overlaps in the empire creation screen for Robot Empires in Russian language
* Fixed missing tooltip on leftmost trait, if a leader had more than three traits
* Removed some obsolete modifiers from the shipyard UI
* Fixed resource cost display in colonization menu showing all required resources as red, even if you were only short on one of them
* Updated Machine inteligence food tooltip to mention that Cyborgs need food too. Don't let your Cyborgs starve!
* Unhallowed Ground Traditionalist pop faction demand tooltip now clarifies that even terraforming tombworlds upsets them
* Clarified relative power requirement to offer subsidiary status in the tooltip for this diplo action
* Fixed the Expansion Tradition finisher effect not being displayed in tooltip about max district numbers, making the math look really broken
* Fixed bug where closing planet view side panel brings up redundant window for a split second
* Plasma Accelerators no longer display Caravan Cannon tooltips
* Migration pull tool tip now displays actual pull with factors
* Fixed tooltip that wrongly stated that only full citizens can take ruler jobs
* Fixed debug string shown in the tooltip of certain diplomacy interactions with fallen empires
* Fixed broken string in tooltip for event option you absolutely should not click, you have been warned
###################
# AI
###################
* Machine and Mechanical AI empires will favor generator districts a bit more
* AI will not build housing buildings when it doesn't need them
* AI will no longer start scrapping buildings immediately once it decides it doesn't need more of them, it will just stop building new ones for a while
* Improved AI budgeting for megastructures
* AI empires will generally not build more than 2 buildings of the same type per planet
* AI should be keen on building Organic sanctuaries if their bio-trophy pops are unemployed
* AI only becomes more interested in building commercial zones if it needs energy and amenities (was previously overbuilding these)
* AI will check for surplus population before making buildings
* AI now budgets the full total available resources into categories
###################
# Performance
###################
* Reduced performance cost of the outliner
* Threaded calculations for rendering planet icons on the galaxy map
* Cached habitability calculations for planet icons on the galaxy map
###################
# Modding
###################
* Changed scope of the faction_approval trigger from pop scope to pop_faction scope, making it not broken anymore
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed broken targeting for strike craft that caused them to meander out to the edges of the system rather than engage enemy fleets
* Fixed some Planetary Features (and thus Districts) not surviving the terraforming process to Gaia planet class, because what's a paradise planet if you can't strip mine it and turn it in to a honeycombed shell?!
* Foundry level 3 now correctly gives Machine Empires Fabricator jobs instead of Foundry Drones
* Fixed Private Colony Ships being generated without names in some circumstances
* Fixed an issue where the "Galactic Market Hub Nomination" Decision would once again become available if a nominated planet's rating was boosted past a certain point
* Orc and cyclops portraits from the Humanoid species pack no longer have a shoulder clipping through their clothing
* Fixed an out of sync due to parallelization of pops calculation
* Fixed a source of OOS on reconnect
* Fixed OOS introduced by caching starbase related values
* Fixed clicking "colonize" on a planet not working for Machine Empires (planet naming didn't work, colony ship insta-builds but did nothing, this bug was a real champion)
* Free movement faction demand no longer cares about robots or their rights
* Pops without military service rights will no longer take soldier or enforcer jobs
* Fixed not being able to assign/unassign leader (by clicking portrait) from fleet manager view
* Fixed literally unplayable typos in certain Italian names in the human namelist
* Fixed a case where a build outpost command inside space you already own would wrongly claim you were trying to build in another empire's territory
* Finally got around to adding a proper confirmation click sound when adding claims on the galaxy map
* Fixed cases where pop growth would not overflow properly after a new pop is spawned (99+3 used to = 100), causing all sorts of weirdness with pop growth modifiers
* Fixed cases where science ships on auto-explore would just stop, or randomly choose a crazy indirect path to the next unexplored system
* Fixed the supply ship wreckage event to not fire if the other party is a genocidal empire, since it makes little sense for them
* Fixed Expansionist Overtures leader agenda appearing before you've made contact with any other empires
* Fixed an issue where a Fallen Empire's Shielded World would not spawn
* You can now build multiple habitats at the same time, in the same system
* Fixed the "Ships Lost" outcome of the Fleet Maneuvers event sometimes not having any effect, by preventing it firing if there are too few ships in the fleet to destroy
* Updated the text in some of the Synth Uprising events to better convey the scale of the disaster, since while we'll never tell how many beings compose a Pop, it's probably more than a dozen
* Removed nonfunctional and unintended "merge fleets" button for things like the lost amoeba, that are not supposed to merge with normal fleets
* Fixed a pathfinding issue that would cause fleet to not move towards their destination
* Fixed ship losses not being correctly counted in the battle list in the war overview
* Fixed a bug from 2016 (!) where if you split a fleet, then tried to drag-box select both, only one would be picked
* Atomic clock follow-up anomaly rewards that grant Engingeering deposits will now correctly convert any existing Mining Stations into Research Stations
* Fixed duplicate component slot and moved slots around on the Automated Dreadnought
* Fixed bug where deposits granting districts wouldn't actually grant the districts until a game reload
* Bonus minerals from planet modifiers will no longer overwrite the dragon hoard
* Fixed bountiful plains (level 1 food deposit) not showing up on savannah worlds
* Fixed workers abandoning the mines to displace specialists, leading to basic resource starvation and a lot of unemployed high strata pops later in the game. No social mobility for you!
* No longer possible to sometimes rival countries that have pathetic relative power
* Made sure to cull the old, empty lost amoeba fleet from the fleet manager as the amoeba matures
* Ensured capital buildings can convert to the correct type when a planet of primitives/machines/hive minds is taken over by another empire type
* AH4B from Distant Stars can no longer change composition to prevent naval capacity bypass exploit
* Dead/killed slaves are now properly culled from the slave market, so no more invalid entries, you heartless monsters
* Added checks to help ensure that buildings specific to one empire type are properly destroyed/converted when the world is taken over by a different empire type
* Fixed primitives and fallen/awakened empire pops not being purged by the Prethoryn and Contingency (Valar Morghulis)
* Fixed the Horizon Signal's "waiting world" events erroneously occurring on Ecumenopolises
* Coloniziable planets will no longer be clear-cut and paved over to hold a single mineral or energy deposit by survey teams who become over-excited at their planet modifiers
* Caravaneer weapons should no longer appear at game start
* Fixed pop growth bravely continuing even while the planet was being purged by the Prethoryn
* Fixed coming across the Caravansary home base (before encountering a Caravaneer Fleet) not giving you communications with them
* Added fixes for more cases where the Scourge would sometimes stop expanding
* Fixed Contingency and Scourge not being able to purge the final pop on an occupied planet, because thoroughness is important
* Fixed An Odd Factor event triggering even if no pop had the Odd Factory Worker job, and pops not actually being removed by event despite claims to the contrary
* Fixed broken pirate ship turret graphics
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.2.6 ###########################
#################################################################
######################
# 2.2 Le Guin Free Features
######################
* Added a new, more user-friendly planet screen, with better organization and display of info and buttons
* Ship upgrading is now handled individually, on a per ship, per shipyard basis. This means if the process is interrupted part way, some of the ships will still be upgraded, rather than losing the entire upgrade progress. Also, alloy costs are now deducted one ship at a time, rather than for the entire fleet in one go, so you don't have to wait until you can afford everything to start the upgrade process
* Warrior Culture civic no longer reduces army upkeep, but instead makes Entertainment buildings replace Entertainers with Duelists. Duelists turn 1 alloy into 3 unity, 12 amenities and 2 naval capacity
* Added Logistical Corps tradition custom flavour text swap for Hive Minds
* Added Great Game tradition custom flavour text swap for Devouring Swarms
* Added new animation to Plantoid 13 (cactus) portrait. It will now have some butterflies as company!
###################
# Balance
###################
* Pop growth further adjusted to put less priority towards minority pops
* Battle Thralls can now take enforcer jobs
* Hallucinogen Removal special project cost reduced from 5000 to 3000
* Breaching the Shroud special project cost reduces from 50000 to 20000
* Transcendent Learning ascension perk effect on leader pool removed and replaced with Leader Experience Gain +50%
* Reduced the machine empire bonus to orbital station production to 10% (was 50%, which turned out to be rather OP)
* Rogue Servitor tweaks:
-Organic Sanctuary/Paradise no longer provide housing, instead Biotrophy jobs eliminate those pop's need for housing
-Artisan Drones produce 8 Consumer goods for 8 minerals (up from 6 of each)
-Biotrophy Jobs now also increase Complex Drone putput on their planet by 0.25% each
-Starts with 1 additonal Nexus District
* Driven Assimilator tweaks:
-Bio pop growth reduced by 40%
-1 fewer Replicator job per level of capital
-Now start with +100 food, and 100 less energy
* Ship upgrades are cheaper due to refund amount from old components being increased to 90% (was 50%)
* Pops have a wider possible range of Political power, so for example you can care less about unhappy slaves since it's not as though they can vote or anything
* Meritocracy Civic effect on leader pool size removed and replaced with specialist output +10%
* Clone Vats are no longer required to build Clone armies, they are now unlocked by the Gene Banks tech (resolves an issue where this tech had no benefit for assimilators)
* Technological Ascendancy ascension perk now also makes rare technologies 50% more common
* Shroud entities have been tweaked slightly. Corrupted Avatar now has lower total HP, but has increased regen. Shroud Avatar is now slightly stronger in its total HP and regen. End of Cycle entities have also been tweaked similarly
* Transcendence, Evolutionary Mastery, Synthetic Evolution ascension perk slot requirement reduced from 4th to 3rd
* World Shaper ascension perk slot requirement reduced from 3nd to 2nd
* Imperial Prerogative ascension perk no longer has any slot requirements
* Eternal Vigilance ascension perk no longer has any slot requirements, but instead requires the Star Fortress technology
* Eternal Vigilance ascension perk now also increases starbase hull points by 25%
* One Vision ascension perk now also reduces pop amenities usage by 10%
* Numistic shrine now costs 4000 energy to buy and 1000 minerals to build
* Upped Machine Empire colony ship cost to 750 alloys, to balance recent changes from beta
* Clerks and Preachers job weights no longer care about being strong, weak, or proles
* Miner job weights DO care about being proles
* Synth Empires pay only alloys for Colony ships, like Machines
###################
# UI
###################
* Added missing modifier icons for mote harvesting traps and extractors, also updated old icon
* Added a bunch of shortcuts to the planet view
* Added shortcut "U" to upgrade starbase platforms button
* Added shortcuts for upgrade "U" and trade route "T" buttons in starbase interface
* Strategic resources summary on the top bar will now show in red to let you know if any are in deficit
* Fixing devastation progress bar reaching 100% and disappearing
###################
# AI
###################
* Big rework of military AI making it a lot smarter and more aggressive in war: better selection and maintenance of the aim, better follow through on invading worlds they are bombarding, not so easy to kite with tiny decoy fleets, more willing to reinforce neighboring friendlies under attack, etc
* AI is not so maniacal about crime that it rush builds 3 precinct houses on every planet
* The sector AI should now be better at upgrading buildings relevant to its selected focus
* Improved the AI's budgeting of Alloys
* AI will now only consider enacting population control if it cannot produce more housing
* Sector automation will now clear blockers if able, and if it is not building a building or district at that moment
* Rogue Servitors Less keen on building organic sanctuaries unless bio-trophies need them
* Sector AI will now upgrade buildings if possible
* All Sector Focuses will now try to upgrade their colony capital buildings if there are no other pressing needs
* AI will no longer obsessively shuffle scientists from one role to another every few days
* Lowered the AI's mineral budget allotment for ground armies (they were producing way too many)
* AI empires with alternative cost types for colony ships will now budget the correct resource for it
* AI prefers City districts over Housing buildings a bit more
* Fixed some edge cases where the AI would attempt to build its way out of unemployment with districts and buildings that its pops can't work
###################
# Performance
###################
* Removed redundant double calculations related to end game crisis that caused them to very negatively affect late game performance
* Reordered some operations in the invasion calculations to make sure the most expensive are done last
###################
# Modding
###################
* Added 'hyperlane_distance = { min max }' and 'hyperlane_jumps = { min max }' to system initializer 'neighbor_system = { ... }' block
* Pops now use the asset_selector again to choose their clothes
* Added new "is_scope_type" trigger that lets you know if you're a scope of a particular type: "is_scope_type = fleet"
* Removed the forced clothes index in pop categories and job types, to let the clothes selector do its magic
* There are now multipliers for previous job, previous tenants, survey and unemployment to the AI score used to fill in jobs
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed edge case where multiple megastructures could be built in the same system
* Fixed missing missions for primitive observation posts
* Fixed planets still being colonized generating emigration push to other worlds. I know the offworld colonies weren't the paradise the holovid adverts made them out to be, but give them another generation or two...
* Fixed a broken string in the tooltip for the Egalitarian ethic
* Fixed guaranteed ideal nearby systems generating based on absolute distance rather than max jumps from homeworld, which could cause them to be isolated by unlucky jump lane network generation
* Fixed population controls disabling robot construction as well, so you can now improve the meatbag to metal ratio of your society
* Planets under colonization will no longer generate low stability alerts
* Fixed Strategic Resource notifications appearing for resources hidden behind Anomalies
* Winning an "impose ideology" war will no longer overwrite the defeated empires civics
* Impose Ideology war now properly creates an ally instead of a vassal
* Fixed a crash that happened when a ship was destroyed while being upgraded
* A lack of Nanites will now properly trigger a deficit warning and stop the resource production of Nanite Transmuters
* Fixed robots/synths being treated as organic when conquered by hive mind empires, and getting locked in the livestock job
* Fixed vassal integration wrongly costing no influence
* Fixed an issue where conquering Hive Minds could take over inappropriate buildings they have no use for, like Holo-Theatres
* Maintenance drones now correctly increase in priority when amenities are negative, and now don't have increased priority from traits when amenities are high
* Slave processing centers should no longer vanish when build anywhere but a Thrall-World
* Fixed some edge cases where the Life-Seeded Civic would not create a Gaia homeworld
* Head Researcher and Executive now have Amenity output modifiers and weights for several relevant traits (Repugnant, Charismatic, etc)
* Fixed Strong, Very Strong, Weak traits not being applied properly when playing as a gestalt empire
* Fixed displacement purge type wrongly applying the genocidal diplomatic opinion penalty
* Fixed "The Shattered Loop" event firing twice upon death of the Worm-in-Waiting
* Fixed a literally unplayable localization error in the Xeno-Compatibility tooltip
* Fixed Prikkik-Ti empire spawning on a planet without enough districts to support it
* Prikkiki-Ti will no longer spam player with multiple communications established messages
* Planets taken over by the Scourge or Contingency will now swap any capital buildings to a correct Machine or Hive capital
* Preferred habitability is no longer strictly tied to starting planet class if a civic changes the starting planet
* Fixed developing colonies being hidden in the outliner's Sectors group if on completion a new sector would be created
* Fixed pre-sapient policies disappearing if you purge all of them from your space, making fulfilment of certain faction demands impossible, because what are the screams of the innocent next to that sweet, sweet influence?
* Changed wording on the Strong/Very Strong traits. It was wrongly implying that is should affect the outcome of ALL worker strata jobs, not just basic resource extraction ones. Even if your clerks never skip leg day, they probably shouldn't benefit from these traits
* Added piracy suppression values to event generated ships that were missing them
* Fixed a few more cases of techs with the wrong specialty group assignment
* Fixed a minor discrepancy in the tooltip of the Sins of a Sun anomaly vs its actual in game effects
* Fixed a nasty exploit with downgrading fleets that could result in free alloys (thanks for the heads up on this, Reddit user nonium)
* Added missing torpedo components from the Spiritualist Fallen Empire Zealot-Class ship type
* Added a basic Zro income to Spiritualist Fallen empires to allow them to properly produce reinforcements for their damaged fleets
* The modifier for Refinery worlds should also now affect Gestalt jobs
* Fixed several ship weapons which had incorrect resource costs
* Energy/Culture Habitat districts should convert properly if a gestalt empire takes it from a normal empire, or vice versa
* Fixed a crash when a country gets a trade route that used to belong to someone else
* Fixed tooltip that hilariously claimed that setting a species to purge (except neuter) was a requirement for the Decent Living Standards
The future
I have a lot of thoughts of what I want Stellaris to explore over the next coming years, but first I would like to talk about some of the things we want to tackle in the near future. Pop growth and sectors are two systems that we feel are not in a place where we would like them to be. For sectors we want to give players better control and automation, so that sectors can better help alleviate the need to micromanage very large empires. We havent decided on the details yet, but the ability to shift planets between sectors seems like something we would want, as would the ability to give a sector monthly subsidies for its development. As always, your thoughts are very valuable to us, so we would love to hear what it is that you want the sectors to do for you. The pop growth system is problematic in the sense that it introduces a lot of unnecessary micromanagement at the moment. In an ideal world, pop growth would migrate to where the jobs are, to save you the need to resettle pops to where you need them. Balance-wise, multiple planets are also a bit too strong in terms of pop growth right now, and we will be looking into how we can make it work more like we would like. Although were a lot happier with how the tweaks have worked out, were still not entirely happy with habitability and base pop growth being exponentially too powerful. We will be looking into what can be done here, without having to do too many sweeping changes. Although it is far too early to make any promises, I do feel like I would like to share my thoughts on things I would like Stellaris to explore sometime in the future. With diplomacy obviously being one of the bigger boxes we havent tackled yet, Id love to see better interactions with subject empires, expanded federation features and much more. Espionage, religion & cults are other concepts that I would like to explore as well. DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST, NOR IS ANYTHING FINAL OR CERTAIN TO HAPPEN Future goals (in no particular order):
- Pop growth: Look into how immigration/emigration works, try to make base growth across multiple planets less powerful, make habitability matter more again
- Sectors & automation: Allow players to nudge which sectors planets belong to, reduce micromanagement by improving sector management tools
- Backgrounds: Split up some civics into backgrounds, and add more backgrounds.
- Civic flavour: Spend more time on making the civics feel more unique and fun
- Institutions: Define which institutions make up your empires internal departments (such as Diplomatic Corps, Xenology Bureau etc.), and their funding, size and power.
- Espionage: Intel to determine how much you know about another empire, spy actions, cloaking, sabotage & general mischief.
- Religion & Cults: Similar to factions, cults could appear in your empire during certain circumstances. Spiritualist empires would most likely have imperial cults. Worship of powerful entities etc.
- Archaeology: Explore the ruins of ancient civilizations
- Subject contracts: Allow overlords to better customize what type of subjects they have, tribute levels, benefits to subject etc.
- Federation depth: Allow federations to level up, have different election types, taxes etc.
- Galactic Council: Create a sort of a space UN with galactic politics and diplomacy
- Primitives: Allow for more interactions with primitive pre-FTL species
[ 2019-02-28 13:06:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
Checksum information:
live patch / 2.2.4: 0019
stellaris_test / 2.2.5: aab4
Hi all! We're back with the latest round of post-launch support for 2.2 / MegaCorp. First, after a good while in open beta, we are making 2.2.4 live as the official version now. Based on your feedback during the beta we were able to fix numerous reported out of sync issues, so the game should be more stable in multiplayer. Also, with an average of 25% increase in years per hour, 2.2.4 has significant improvements that we didn't want to wall off behind the beta any longer. Thanks to all those pioneers who helped us check it out and give feedback in the live beta conditions.
We are also continuing with our open beta on the stellaris_test branch, with version 2.2.5. More on that later, first let's have a look at what's in the new live version, 2.2.4.
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.2.4 ###########################
#################################################################
######################
# 2.2 Le Guin Free Features
######################
* Added some missing localization for new 2.2.2 features/fixes
* You can now choose not to care about brain implant problems
###################
# Balance
###################
* 50 years must now pass before the Galactic Market can be founded
* Xenophile faction now cares about whether any pops are actually enslaved, rather than slavery policy in general
* Increased delay before Caravaneer fleets start roaming the galaxy
* Increased Alloy production for relevant Branch Office buildings from 2 to 3
* Significantly lowered the priority of drone maintenance jobs as they were always chosen before other simple jobs
* Fixed so that newly promoted pops can be instantly demoted if fired within a year of promotion. This should help with cases of pops abandoning basic resource production jobs to take on more specialist roles when the buildings that provide them are activated, crippling your economy
* Lowered Tidal Locked modifier on total available planetary districts from -50% to -30%
* Syncretic species do not increase xenophile attraction
* Biotrophies are now quite upset if they don't have the Bio-Trophy "job" of laying about being pampered
* Changed the size of all sectors to be 3 hyperlane jumps
* Drone Storage building now increases amenities instead of adding a maintenance drone job
* Upgraded Drone Storage building now increases amenities instead of adding 2 maintenance drone jobs
* Drone Storage building effect on housing reduced from 5 to 4
* Priest job weights have been tweaked
* High Priest jobs now also provide 2 society research
* Reduced Devastation needed to destroy Contingency Worlds to 50%
* Debris Analyzed research points per component increased to 20 x level
* Culture Workers, Artisans, Metallurgists, Chemists, Translucers and Gas Refiners have had slight tweaks to their job weights
* Quantum Energy States and Advanced Food Processing technologies no longer require the Colonial Centralization technology
* Quantum Field Manipulation and Nano-Vitality Crops technologies no longer require the Galactic Administration technology
* Gene Crops technology no longer requires Colonial Centralization technology
* Several planetary modifiers now force a good mineral or energy deposit to spawn
###################
# UI
###################
* Added missing modifier icons for Improved Code Standards and Production Quota Surpluses
* Fixed incorrect colony type icon on industrial worlds
* Fixed slight visual spillout of the Hive Nexus and Hive Core building icons
* Removed unnecessary and confusing close button from the caravaneer GUI
* Added proper icons for Improved Code Standards and Production Quota Surpluses modifiers, and removed placeholders
* Fixed Branch Office value not displaying if over 99.9
* When researching Paradise Domes/Organic Paradise, only the building your empire type can build will be shown
* Made the Build Megastructure menu a bit less cramped
* Fixed the UI committing seppuku if you clicked the population tab on an uninhabited world
###################
# AI
###################
* AI now properly prioritizes starbase types it has too few of; the prime one being a shipyard
* Fixed it so AI can now attempt to counter piracy even when at war
* Made AI a lot less likely to split up its fleets in to portions so small, it then calculates it lacks sufficient strength, and will not attack when at war
* Lowered the threshold for the AI deciding whether or not to attack, so it shouldn't resort to a Fabian strategy of non-engagement in war
* Fixed some AI weights for population control (thanks for the heads-up Glavius, you're rad)
* Fixed AI not repairing ruined buildings when it had the resources to do so
* AI will now actually follow through on its well-intentioned desire to upgrade buildings
* Tweaked alloy budget for fallen empires to better match their needs
* Stopped the AI from spamming redundant colony ships
* Fixed Gestalt empires not building colony ships
* Tweaked budgeting to make the AI less reticent about hiring leaders
###################
# Performance
###################
* Performance improvement when computing pop factions
* Performance improvement on modifiers using a hybrid array
* Threaded some fleet calculations
* More pops threading for better performance
* Optimization: will no longer calculate the country modifiers at the end of the planet daily update serial, but have a pass to calculate all countries that were modified after all planet updates
* Optimization: Improved job counting
* Parallelized fleet looking for combat for slight performance increase
* Added more threading to planet handling
* Optimized population calculations some more, reduced unnecessary calculations
* Reduced amount of systems the outliner needs to check for planets to populate planet and branch office lists
* Adjusted amount of extra rendering for micro and daily ticks
###################
# Modding
###################
* Ecumenopolises now have properly-set graphical cultures
* Updated the is_organic_species and is_robotic_species scripted triggers to use the new is_archetype trigger, to better support modded species classes
* Added "purge = purge_type" to job types. Pops doing that job are getting purged in the type indicated (purge_normal, purge_matrix, purge_neutering, purge_displacement, purge_labor_camps, purge_processing )
* Added "purge = purge_type" to pop categories. Pops in that category are getting purged in the type indicated (purge_normal, purge_matrix, purge_neutering, purge_displacement, purge_labor_camps, purge_processing )
* Added a destroy_trigger to building types[
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Tweaked wording regarding strategic resources offered by the Dessanu to no longer falsely imply they are unique to the L-Cluster
* Fixed democratic election lacking candidates due to leaders having no mandates
* Fixed being able to purchase some unique Numistic Order products more than once
* Fixed the terraforming swaps for the Geothermal Vents planetary feature
* Fixed a crash that could occur when giving fleet patrol orders in late game
* Fixed ships sometimes not being able to complete special projects when part of a multi-ship fleet
* Fixed a literally unplayable broken string in a tooltip when trying to build more than one Mega Art Installation
* Fixed figuratively unplayable typos
* Fixed missing reference to increasing Anomaly discovery chance in the tooltip for the "Diamond in the Rough" Anomaly
* Fixed text description of one of the Vengralian Trium's caravaneer deals wrongly stating it costs 1200 alloys, when in fact it deducts 2000
* Fixed triply duplicated message about needing to close branch offices before declaring war in the diplomacy screen
* Fixed pop habitability tooltip being shown as a fraction instead of a percentage, and not displaying the base number nor any of the modifiers
* Fixed event-based buildings wrongly being buildable on Thrall-Worlds
* Fixed Resource Processing Center improperly creating administrators jobs and a rulers stratum for gestalt empires, while someone played the Internationale on a mandolin in the dusty hills of Aragon
* Corporate Monuments can no longer be built (but can still be used) by Spiritualist Megacorporations, as the latter have Temples
* Fixed duplicate text in mechanized mining technology description
* Removed a bunch of formatting/line break errors all over the place
* Fixed Clone Vats being buildable on Resort Worlds (reluctantly...)
* Fixed habitability wrongly being displayed for unsurveyed worlds
* Updated Residence citizenship type tooltip. Pops can engage politically, but they have less political power
* Devouring swarm tooltip now correctly shows Biology research bonus
* Wrongly applied culture shock modifier has been removed for Gestalt empires
* Made improvements to the Alien Machine event chain to help you out if a wormhole was created to a system you've not yet surveyed
* Added missing description for the deposit added by the "Of Transmissions Decoded" event
* Rugged Woods planetary feature now properly converts to another planetary feature when the planet is terraformed, rather than simply disappearing
* Clamped research costs so they wouldn't overflow with late game repeatable techs, and become free
* Fixed the "Single-Minded" anomaly sometimes causing duplicate planet modifiers in a weird rebellion against its own name
* Fixed planets with anomalies showing the resources from them before being surveyed
* Fixed having artificial intelligence set to outlawed disabling ruler jobs after synthetic evolution
* Fixed a crash on autosave
* Fixed Economic Policy modifiers affecting a country's total income rather than just job output
* Devouring Swarms will no longer attempt to digest robots as food, and will break them down into alloys instead
* Fixed clicking on your fleet in the galaxy view also selecting alien ships in the same system, disabling giving orders until the aliens were deselected
* Fixed planet with rudimentary robots wrongly showing ethics info from the last selected player empire planet
* Fixed the plasma accelerators tech wrongly stating it would unlock caravaneer ship weapons as well
* Updated the Dessanu L-Gate outcome from Distant Stars to properly work with the 2.2 resource rework. It will now provide monthly rare resources
* Fixed some instances of orbital deposits being wrongfully placed on habitable planets, via anomalies or events (Silent Behemoth, Cunning Flora, Echoes From The Deep, etc). Also replaced some of these cases with usable planetary features
* Fixed a Vengralian Trium caravaneer deal's description text wrongly promising a 10% trade value increase, when the tooltip and gameplay result is 15%
* Fixed newly added democratic mandates not registering progress on them correctly, making them impossible to fulfill
* Federation Associate now also counts as a non-aggression pact for the purposes of faction demands (fixes an issue with pacifist faction demands)
* Fixed so that unemployed pops of the same strata are chosen for a job before promoting new pops for it
* Fixed some techs having a discrepancy between area and expertise, ie, physics techs requiring the engineering field's "materials" expertise. This also fixes issues with tech weighting
* Fixed the machines sometimes rising up twice, since there's only so many Terminator spinoffs one galaxy can take
* Fixed Offworld Trade Companies, Mineral Purification, Food Processing techs wrongly being blocked by not having access to rare resources
* Fixed Pops continuing to grow while under occupation by Crises
* Fixed so that the Subterranean Aliens event correctly spawns armies that can properly invade you
* Researcher job no longer evaluates trait_syncretic_proles because syncretic proles cannot be specialists
* Researcher job now evaluates trait_intelligent and trait_brainslug separately because a pop can have both of them
* Manager job now evaluates trait_thrifty and trait_nuumismatic_administration separately because a pop can have both of them
* Colonist job now has weights for trait_robot_domestic_protocols, trait_charismatic and trait_repugnant
* Merchant and Executive jobs now check for Thrifty and Numistic Administration separately for both modifiers and chance weights
* Heritage Sites tech path is now properly unlocked by Rare Crystals rather than Volatile Motes, although the Leaning Tower of Pisa made entirely of C4 would be pretty cool
* Criminal job types should no longer appear at all in Gestalt Empires, only Deviant Drones
* Fixed broken graphical assets for the Contingency crisis
* Fixed Cracking or Pacifying a Contingency World causing it to not be counted as destroyed
* Fixed Phaseshifted planet anomaly rerolling planet deposits every time it shifts. Will also no longer wrongly generate orbital deposits
* Gene Banks tech now grants the ability for Assimilators to produce Clone Armies once again, without needing the Clone Vats building
* The following anomalies will now clear orbital deposits if they are of an incompatible type with the anomaly outcome: Energetic Spectra, Life Electric, Blackhole Hologram, Dead God, White Hell, Heavy Metal Frost
* Titanic Life and Dangerous Wildlife blocker drop rates adjusted and made non-recursive so they don't give you planets with negative districts
* Removed obsolete reference to tiles in Docile Migrating Forests modifier
* Fixed an issue where the War in Heaven would involve Awakened Empires that had previously woken up for other reasons
* Fixed the Micro-Replicators and Self-Assembling Components techs not applying their modifiers
* Fixed finding the Galatron in every Reliquary after getting it once, which did reduce the sense of cosmic wonder a touch
* Fixed not being able to form research agreements with fellow Federation members
* Fixed the Prethoryn Scourge and Contingency Crises not purging pops properly
* Event chain objecting to construction of a Dyson sphere will no longer trigger between countries with very hostile opinion of each other
* Fixed outposts and station's tooltips showing a mystery question mark icon, for reasons
* Fixed Engineered Evolution ascension perk tooltip not mentioning unlocking Clone Vats building
* Fixed terraforming *from* Hive and Machine worlds resulting in planets with no Planetary Features
* Fixed tooltip for purges of non-organic species wrongly referring to food production
* Fixed AI using the Market causing prices to always increase, even when it was selling and not buying
* Fixed Nomadic trait not reducing resettlement cost
* Fixed Shipyard construction speed modifiers not being applied to civilian ships
* Fixed the Chthonian Planet modifier not adding a Mineral planetary feature
* More traits are checked when evaluating pops for Merchant and Manager jobs
* Fixed Contingency not purging (found something at the last minute where the last pop on a crisis occuppied world will not be purged, we'll get it sorted, but didn't want to make you wait until next week for the patch)
* Disabling sector automation now REALLY disables it. Previously it would continue to build if it had resources left. Good initiative, but...
* Fixed tooltip for the Fender Bender anomaly stating it grants 9 eng research when in fact it only gives 3
* Fixed tooltip for the Rudimentary Robots anomaly stating it grants 3, when it actually gave out 2, by just saying "hell with it give 4 instead"
* Entertainer job now properly applies the modifiers for the Domestic Protocols, Charismatic, and Repugnant traits
* Fixed a crash when hovering over empire comparisons in observer mode
* DLCs are being sent at the start of a MP game. Fixes instant OOS as well
* Fixed potential CTD when loading market and certain empires no longer exist
* Fixed issue where the Marauder Horde was not dealt with properly if the Khan died of old age
* Fixed total wars creating empty sectors
* Biotrophy deviancy will no longer cause unemployment event to trigger nor will unemployed biotrophies be affected
* Mardak Vol now spawn as a Stone Age civilization as described in the event
* Enigmatic Ascension is no longer aborted upon moving capital. Event added for when homeworld is occupied during enigmatic ascension
* Fixed crash on load when a planet you had a branch office got destroyed
* Fixed a couple of literally unplayable typos regarding the Kilik Cooperative
* Restored capital conversion when taking ownership of planets
* Returning removed orbital deposits to uninhabitable Precursor homeworlds
* Fixed broken string in tooltip for event option you absolutely should not click, you have been warned
* Colonizable planets will no longer be clear-cut and paved
* Fixed the Horizon Signal's "waiting world" events erroneously occurring on Ecumenopolises
* Crises purge to the end now, and don't keep a spare pop just in case they have the munchies
* Fallen Empire and Awakened Empire pops get purged like everyone else
* Fixed Prethoryn purges not preventing pop growth on occupied planets
* Fixed a bunch more OOS
At this time we're also happy to announce a new open beta version has arrived on the stellaris_test branch. 2.2.5 contains many new fixes that came out while we were iterating on 2.2.4, and we'd like to offer you brave souls the opportunity to try out an early version. Your feedback, as ever, is critical to help us make the best possible release version.
2.2.5 has many dozens of fixes and balance changes, notably a stab at de-suckifying strike craft, tweaks to pop growth, as well as a bevy of balance tweaks to Machine and Synth Ascension empires that will make them more competitive and fun to play. Please give it a shot if you're interested.
Also, as a thank you for your help with this version, we're offering you first access to the "Legion" set of 6 new empire emblems:
stellaris_test / 2.2.5 contains all the fixes from 2.2.4, and is required if you want to crossplay between Steam and other distribution platforms.
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.2.5 ###########################
#################################################################
######################
# 2.2 Le Guin Free Features
######################
* Added the new "Legion" flag set, with 6 new flag emblems
###################
# Balance
###################
* Pop growth: Reduced Random factor in pop growth, habitability has more of penalty on growth selection, lessened bias towards new species, and traits have a larger effect on Robot selection
* Strike craft now do more damage, have longer range, are faster, and turn and accelerate quicker
* Machine Empires get 50% more resources from mining bases
* Machine Empire Tech Drones now produce 6 energy (up from 4) base. Agri Drones now produce 5 food (down from 6) base. Both of these also apply to Synth Empires.
* Machine Empire Colony ships now add 2 pops to a new colony, but cost 400 alloys (up from 300)
* Machine Empire Outposts now cost 150 alloys
* Machine Empire Fabricators produce 4 alloys (up from 3) at the cost of 8 minerals (up from 6).
* New Machine Empire colonies start with 2 replicator jobs to give a bit of early boost (up from 1), upgraded capitals reduced to give the same number overall. The extra Replicator jobs beyond the 2 granted by upgraded capital buildings now depend on the planet still having >= 10/40 pops, to remove a tedious exploit with resettling pops to unlock the upgrade, then moving them again
* Machine capital planet grants +5% drone output
* Unemployed Machine Pops now use 0.25 Energy for upkeep (down from 1)
* Replicators now also produce 1 Engineering research
* Coordinators now produce 1 of each Research (was 3 Society)
* Each Coordinator on a planet now boosts Simple Drone resource output by 1%
* Energy grids/nexus' are more expensive, but give an additional 5% bonus and add 2/4 Max Generator Districts to their planet. This also applies to Synth empires
* Mineral purification planets/hubs are more expensive, but give an additional 5% bonus and add 2/4 Max Generator Districts to their planet. This also applies to Synth empires
* Robots with Emotion Emulators are now more likely to become maintenance drones
* Citizen Service civic effect on soldier unity generation increased from +1 to +2
* Eco Simulation, Gene Crops and Nano-Vitality Crops technology effect on farmer output increased from +10% to +20%
* Geothermal Fracking, Deep Core Mining, Mineral Isolation technology effect on miner output increased from 10% to 20%
* Field Modulation, Quantum Energy States, Quantum Field Manipulation technology effect on technician output increased from 10% to 20%
* The Repugnant/Uncanny trait now has less of an effect on pops avoiding amenity producing jobs
* Maintenance drone job priority now considers amenity level of the planet
* Simple drones now ponder the empire level food/mineral/energy income when choosing a job
* Made the bad outcome of the Abandoned Terraforming Project event produce a Tomb World, rather than a totally unusable Toxic World
* Added potential negative outcomes the Atomic Clock chain, since previously there was no real choice involved
* Made Fanatic Purifiers always able to choose "no retreat" war doctrine
* Scaled back bonus resources from planet modifiers to just be for chthonian planets and carbon world, for now...
* When freed from the time loop, the Prikkiki-Ti lizards will start with the same level of tech as their closest neighbour. Also their economy and fleet power has been improved
* Telepaths, head researchers, high priests, administrators, executives, researchers, enforcers and entertainers now have weights for ascension/events/uplifts related traits
* Returned removed orbital deposits to uninhabitable Precursor homeworlds
* Species with very low habitability will not generally be selected to grow new pops
* Ministry of Culture for Hive Mind empire now adds Synapse drone jobs, rather than Coordinators
###################
# UI
###################
* Added missing modifiers on army strength to some tooltips
* Fixed some text overlaps in the empire creation screen for Robot Empires in Russian language
* Fixed missing tooltip on leftmost trait, if a leader had more than three traits
* Removed some obsolete modifiers from the shipyard UI
* Fixed resource cost display in colonization menu showing all required resources as red, even if you were only short on one of them
* Updated Machine inteligence food tooltip to mention that Cyborgs need food too. Don't let your Cyborgs starve!
* Unhallowed Ground Traditionalist pop faction demand tooltip now clarifies that even terraforming tombworlds upsets them
* Clarified relative power requirement to offer subsidiary status in the tooltip for this diplo action
* Fixed the Expansion Tradition finisher effect not being displayed in tooltip about max district numbers, making the math look really broken
* Fixed bug where closing planet view side panel brings up redundant window for a split second
* Plasma Accelerators no longer display Caravan Cannon tooltips
* Migration pull tool tip now displays actual pull with factors
* Fixed tooltip that wrongly stated that only full citizens can take ruler jobs
* Fixed debug string shown in the tooltip of certain diplomacy interactions with fallen empires
* Fixed broken string in tooltip for event option you absolutely should not click, you have been warned
###################
# AI
###################
* Machine and Mechanical AI empires will favor generator districts a bit more
* AI will not build housing buildings when it doesn't need them
* AI will no longer start scrapping buildings immediately once it decides it doesn't need more of them, it will just stop building new ones for a while
* Improved AI budgeting for megastructures
* AI empires will generally not build more than 2 buildings of the same type per planet
* AI should be keen on building Organic sanctuaries if their bio-trophy pops are unemployed
* AI only becomes more interested in building commercial zones if it needs energy and amenities (was previously overbuilding these)
* AI will check for surplus population before making buildings
* AI now budgets the full total available resources into categories
###################
# Performance
###################
* Reduced performance cost of the outliner
* Threaded calculations for rendering planet icons on the galaxy map
* Cached habitability calculations for planet icons on the galaxy map
###################
# Modding
###################
* Changed scope of the faction_approval trigger from pop scope to pop_faction scope, making it not broken anymore
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed broken targeting for strike craft that caused them to meander out to the edges of the system rather than engage enemy fleets
* Fixed some Planetary Features (and thus Districts) not surviving the terraforming process to Gaia planet class, because what's a paradise planet if you can't strip mine it and turn it in to a honeycombed shell?!
* Foundry level 3 now correctly gives Machine Empires Fabricator jobs instead of Foundry Drones
* Fixed Private Colony Ships being generated without names in some circumstances
* Fixed an issue where the "Galactic Market Hub Nomination" Decision would once again become available if a nominated planet's rating was boosted past a certain point
* Orc and cyclops portraits from the Humanoid species pack no longer have a shoulder clipping through their clothing
* Fixed an out of sync due to parallelization of pops calculation
* Fixed a source of OOS on reconnect
* Fixed OOS introduced by caching starbase related values
* Fixed clicking "colonize" on a planet not working for Machine Empires (planet naming didn't work, colony ship insta-builds but did nothing, this bug was a real champion)
* Free movement faction demand no longer cares about robots or their rights
* Pops without military service rights will no longer take soldier or enforcer jobs
* Fixed not being able to assign/unassign leader (by clicking portrait) from fleet manager view
* Fixed literally unplayable typos in certain Italian names in the human namelist
* Fixed a case where a build outpost command inside space you already own would wrongly claim you were trying to build in another empire's territory
* Finally got around to adding a proper confirmation click sound when adding claims on the galaxy map
* Fixed cases where pop growth would not overflow properly after a new pop is spawned (99+3 used to = 100), causing all sorts of weirdness with pop growth modifiers
* Fixed cases where science ships on auto-explore would just stop, or randomly choose a crazy indirect path to the next unexplored system
* Fixed the supply ship wreckage event to not fire if the other party is a genocidal empire, since it makes little sense for them
* Fixed Expansionist Overtures leader agenda appearing before you've made contact with any other empires
* Fixed an issue where a Fallen Empire's Shielded World would not spawn
* You can now build multiple habitats at the same time, in the same system
* Fixed the "Ships Lost" outcome of the Fleet Maneuvers event sometimes not having any effect, by preventing it firing if there are too few ships in the fleet to destroy
* Updated the text in some of the Synth Uprising events to better convey the scale of the disaster, since while we'll never tell how many beings compose a Pop, it's probably more than a dozen
* Removed nonfunctional and unintended "merge fleets" button for things like the lost amoeba, that are not supposed to merge with normal fleets
* Fixed a pathfinding issue that would cause fleet to not move towards their destination
* Fixed ship losses not being correctly counted in the battle list in the war overview
* Fixed a bug from 2016 (!) where if you split a fleet, then tried to drag-box select both, only one would be picked
* Atomic clock follow-up anomaly rewards that grant Engingeering deposits will now correctly convert any existing Mining Stations into Research Stations
* Fixed duplicate component slot and moved slots around on the Automated Dreadnought
* Fixed bug where deposits granting districts wouldn't actually grant the districts until a game reload
* Bonus minerals from planet modifiers will no longer overwrite the dragon hoard
* Fixed bountiful plains (level 1 food deposit) not showing up on savannah worlds
* Fixed workers abandoning the mines to displace specialists, leading to basic resource starvation and a lot of unemployed high strata pops later in the game. No social mobility for you!
* No longer possible to sometimes rival countries that have pathetic relative power
* Made sure to cull the old, empty lost amoeba fleet from the fleet manager as the amoeba matures
* Ensured capital buildings can convert to the correct type when a planet of primitives/machines/hive minds is taken over by another empire type
* AH4B from Distant Stars can no longer change composition to prevent naval capacity bypass exploit
* Dead/killed slaves are now properly culled from the slave market, so no more invalid entries, you heartless monsters
* Added checks to help ensure that buildings specific to one empire type are properly destroyed/converted when the world is taken over by a different empire type
* Fixed primitives and fallen/awakened empire pops not being purged by the Prethoryn and Contingency (Valar Morghulis)
* Fixed the Horizon Signal's "waiting world" events erroneously occurring on Ecumenopolises
* Coloniziable planets will no longer be clear-cut and paved over to hold a single mineral or energy deposit by survey teams who become over-excited at their planet modifiers
* Caravaneer weapons should no longer appear at game start
* Fixed pop growth bravely continuing even while the planet was being purged by the Prethoryn
* Fixed coming across the Caravansary home base (before encountering a Caravaneer Fleet) not giving you communications with them
* Added fixes for more cases where the Scourge would sometimes stop expanding
* Fixed Contingency and Scourge not being able to purge the final pop on an occupied planet, because thoroughness is important
* Fixed An Odd Factor event triggering even if no pop had the Odd Factory Worker job, and pops not actually being removed by event despite claims to the contrary
* Fixed broken pirate ship turret graphics
Please let us have your constructive feedback, it helps immensely in zeroing in on the key improvements we should tackle next.
2.2.5 is NOT the end of the road for our 2.2.x support, we'll continue to deliver new versions to you when we get a useful batch of changes.
Have a fun weekend!
Please note stellaris_test is an opt-in patch. You have to choose to activate it.
Steam library -> Right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas tab -> choose "stellaris_test"
[ 2019-02-07 12:44:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Note Checksums are as follows:
2.2.3 = 746c
2.2.4 = f25b
---
Hi all. After a good chunk of time in public beta, we are rolling out 2.2.3 as the official live version today. It's got a lot of improvements over 2.2.2 that we don't want to gate behind the beta wall forever, and we'll continue to iterate on it as we progress with post launch support for 2.2/MegaCorp.
Thanks to your help in the beta were were able to correct a few issues with it, and also get a ton of new fixes that we want to try out in the new 2.2.4 beta (more on that in a bit)
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.2.3 ###########################
#################################################################
######################
# 2.2.3 Le Guin Free Features
######################
* Added a new decision to stop or continue Robot, Droid, and Synthetic Pop assembly, and made this work independently of organic population controls
* Added Nanite Actuators edict, which increases research speed
* Null Void Beam now has its own icon
###################
# Balance
###################
* Zro is now significantly more likely to appear in the galaxy, although still being very rare
* Planetary modifiers now affect the district cap for mining/farming/generators if they affect its output
* Nexus Districts now provide 1 tech drone job and 1 maintenance drone job
* Machine empires no longer start with a maintenance depot
* Maintenance Drone effect on amenities reduced from 5 to 4
* Fanatic Purifiers can no longer draw the Uplifting or Xenomorph Armies techs. Devouring Swarms still can, because sapience enhances the flavour of your food
* Set minimum market fee to 5%
* Removed bulk discount on Internal and Galactic Market
* The dense urbanization of city planets is repellent even to the Worm, and it will no longer take them into its nuclear embrace (Ecumenopolises excepted from Tomb Worldification)
* Fixed Tomb Worlds created by the Worm not having any planetary districts at all, as harsh and brutal and heavy metal awesome as that was
###################
# UI
###################
* Fixed superfluous line break in technology power number in federation view, if over 4 digits
* Fixed truncation of fleet capacity display when it gets to 4 digits
* Fixed incorrect doubled amenities value displayed when viewing the tooltip of a strata
* Fixed missing description in market fee tooltip
* Fixed stability tooltip for Gestalts
* Fixed Deviancy stat being listed as "Crime" when a Criminal Heritage empire views the worlds of Gestalt
* Fixed pop status icon being misaligned in Resettlement view
* Fixed trade value text not being wide enough to display 1000+ trade value
* Fixed so that monthly trade resources don't overlap with the amount box
###################
# Performance
###################
* Made some changes to trade calculations that should improve performance
###################
# Modding
###################
* Added define for minimal trade fee on market
* Added define for max base amounts that can be traded in one single trade
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Xeno-Zoo no longer wrongly available for nonstandard empire types
*Disabled replacement of buildings the planet cannot currently support
* Fixed missing flavour image on the completed Strategic Coordination Center
* Fixed martial law decisions staying permanently activated on planets captured in war by empire types that cannot use the martial law decision
* Exalted Priesthood civic now properly increases unity output for all priest jobs
* Fixed some Planetary Features getting deleted when terraforming to Gaia World
* Fixed superfluous line break in technology power number in federation view, if over 4 digits
* Fixed truncation of fleet capacity display when it gets to 4 digits
* Added missing localisation for Voidspawn planet rift deposits
* Fixed broken "go to" option for the Enigmatic Cache
* Added a missing response text for enigmatic cache interaction
* Fixed literally unplayable typos and grammatical/formatting errors
* Fixed egalitarian faction "free movement" issue referring to a concept that no longer exists ("Core Worlds Access")
* Fixed a nasty one where you could start building an ecumenopolis, then have all the progress lost and no resources refunded if the planet gained an extra district by event/tradition/etc
* Fixed Nerve Stapled not giving the correct 10% bonus to resource job production
* Fixed the weight of the Mega-Engineering tech not being increased by having any of the new megastructures within your borders
* Added a more robust fix for galactic market buy and sell exploits
* Fixed a wrongly appearing monthly trade deficit alert appearing if you max buy price was set lower than the current market price
* Fixed misleading phrasing of claims opinion modifiers that swapped the places of the claimant and the claim...ee? Is that even a word?
* Fixed restoring an Interstellar Assembly not granting the intended opinion modifier
* Underground trade zones now give drone jobs for gestalt empires, and the Portal research zone now correctly switches job types if the planet changes hands between gestalt and non-gestalt empires
* Fixed an issue introduced in 2.2.3 beta where building a Ministry of Culture would remove itself on every monthly tick
We've been in full force debugging mode since we got back, and today are also ready to roll out the next batch of fixes to the stellaris_test beta branch. The objective is to expose them to field conditions before flipping the switch to make this new version, 2.2.4, fully live.
If you want first access to the fixes therein, read on. It's got a ton of fixes, balance tweaks, AI and performance improvements. We got a good jump in YPH (average years per hour) in our overnight test games, and are interested to hear your results.
Also, as a thank you for your help with this version, we're offering you first access to the "Legion" set of 6 new empire emblems:
stellaris_test/2.2.4 contains all the fixes from 2.2.3, and is required if you want to crossplay between Steam and other release platforms.
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.2.4 ###########################
#################################################################
######################
# 2.2 Le Guin Free Features
######################
* Added the new "Legion" flag set, with 6 new flag emblems
* Added some missing localization for new 2.2.2 features/fixes
* You can now choose not to care about brain implant problems
###################
# Balance
###################
* 50 years must now pass before the Galactic Market can be founded
* Xenophile faction now cares about whether any pops are actually enslaved, rather than slavery policy in general
* Increased delay before Caravaneer fleets start roaming the galaxy
* Increased Alloy production for relevant Branch Office buildings from 2 to 3
* Significantly lowered the priority of drone maintenance jobs as they were always chosen before other simple jobs
* Fixed so that newly promoted pops can be instantly demoted if fired within a year of promotion. This should help with cases of pops abandoning basic resource production jobs to take on more specialist roles when the buildings that provide them are activated, crippling your economy
* Lowered Tidal Locked modifier on total available planetary districts from -50% to -30%
* Syncretic species do not increase xenophile attraction
* Biotrophies are now quite upset if they don't have the Bio-Trophy "job" of laying about being pampered
* Changed the size of all sectors to be 3 hyperlane jumps
* Drone Storage building now increases amenities instead of adding a maintenance drone job
* Upgraded Drone Storage building now increases amenities instead of adding 2 maintenance drone jobs
* Drone Storage building effect on housing reduced from 5 to 4
* Priest job weights have been tweaked
* High Priest jobs now also provide 2 society research
* Reduced Devastation needed to destroy Contingency Worlds to 50%
* Debris Analyzed research points per component increased to 20 x level
* Culture Workers, Artisans, Metallurgists, Chemists, Translucers and Gas Refiners have had slight tweaks to their job weights
* Quantum Energy States and Advanced Food Processing technologies no longer require the Colonial Centralization technology
* Quantum Field Manipulation and Nano-Vitality Crops technologies no longer require the Galactic Administration technology
* Gene Crops technology no longer requires Colonial Centralization technology
* Several planetary modifiers now force a good mineral or energy deposit to spawn
###################
# UI
###################
* Added missing modifier icons for Improved Code Standards and Production Quota Surpluses
* Fixed incorrect colony type icon on industrial worlds
* Fixed slight visual spillout of the Hive Nexus and Hive Core building icons
* Removed unnecessary and confusing close button from the caravaneer GUI
* Added proper icons for Improved Code Standards and Production Quota Surpluses modifiers, and removed placeholders
* Fixed Branch Office value not displaying if over 99.9
* When researching Paradise Domes/Organic Paradise, only the building your empire type can build will be shown
* Made the Build Megastructure menu a bit less cramped
* Fixed the UI committing seppuku if you clicked the population tab on an uninhabited world
###################
# AI
###################
* AI now properly prioritizes starbase types it has too few of; the prime one being a shipyard
* Fixed it so AI can now attempt to counter piracy even when at war
* Made AI a lot less likely to split up its fleets in to portions so small, it then calculates it lacks sufficient strength, and will not attack when at war
* Lowered the threshold for the AI deciding whether or not to attack, so it shouldn't resort to a Fabian strategy of non-engagement in war
* Fixed some AI weights for population control (thanks for the heads-up Glavius, you're rad)
* Fixed AI not repairing ruined buildings when it had the resources to do so
* AI will now actually follow through on its well-intentioned desire to upgrade buildings
* Tweaked alloy budget for fallen empires to better match their needs
* Stopped the AI from spamming redundant colony ships
* Fixed Gestalt empires not building colony ships
* Tweaked budgeting to make the AI less reticent about hiring leaders
###################
# Performance
###################
* Performance improvement when computing pop factions
* Performance improvement on modifiers using a hybrid array
* Threaded some fleet calculations
* More pops threading for better performance
* Optimization: will no longer calculate the country modifiers at the end of the planet daily update serial, but have a pass to calculate all countries that were modified after all planet updates
* Optimization: Improved job counting
* Parallelized fleet looking for combat for slight performance increase
* Added more threading to planet handling
* Optimized population calculations some more, reduced unnecessary calculations
* Reduced amount of systems the outliner needs to check for planets to populate planet and branch office lists
* Adjusted amount of extra rendering for micro and daily ticks
###################
# Modding
###################
* Ecumenopolises now have properly-set graphical cultures
* Updated the is_organic_species and is_robotic_species scripted triggers to use the new is_archetype trigger, to better support modded species classes
* Added "purge = purge_type" to job types. Pops doing that job are getting purged in the type indicated (purge_normal, purge_matrix, purge_neutering, purge_displacement, purge_labor_camps, purge_processing )
* Added "purge = purge_type" to pop categories. Pops in that category are getting purged in the type indicated (purge_normal, purge_matrix, purge_neutering, purge_displacement, purge_labor_camps, purge_processing )
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Tweaked wording regarding strategic resources offered by the Dessanu to no longer falsely imply they are unique to the L-Cluster
* Fixed democratic election lacking candidates due to leaders having no mandates
* Fixed being able to purchase some unique Numistic Order products more than once
* Fixed the terraforming swaps for the Geothermal Vents planetary feature
* Fixed a crash that could occur when giving fleet patrol orders in late game
* Fixed ships sometimes not being able to complete special projects when part of a multi-ship fleet
* Fixed a literally unplayable broken string in a tooltip when trying to build more than one Mega Art Installation
* Fixed figuratively unplayable typos
* Fixed missing reference to increasing Anomaly discovery chance in the tooltip for the "Diamond in the Rough" Anomaly
* Fixed text description of one of the Vengralian Trium's caravaneer deals wrongly stating it costs 1200 alloys, when in fact it deducts 2000
* Fixed triply duplicated message about needing to close branch offices before declaring war in the diplomacy screen
* Fixed pop habitability tooltip being shown as a fraction instead of a percentage, and not displaying the base number nor any of the modifiers
* Fixed event-based buildings wrongly being buildable on Thrall-Worlds
* Fixed Resource Processing Center improperly creating administrators jobs and a rulers stratum for gestalt empires, while someone played the Internationale on a mandolin in the dusty hills of Aragon
* Corporate Monuments can no longer be built (but can still be used) by Spiritualist Megacorporations, as the latter have Temples
* Fixed duplicate text in mechanized mining technology description
* Removed a bunch of formatting/line break errors all over the place
* Fixed Clone Vats being buildable on Resort Worlds (reluctantly...)
* Fixed habitability wrongly being displayed for unsurveyed worlds
* Updated Residence citizenship type tooltip. Pops can engage politically, but they have less political power
* Devouring swarm tooltip now correctly shows Biology research bonus
* Wrongly applied culture shock modifier has been removed for Gestalt empires
* Made improvements to the Alien Machine event chain to help you out if a wormhole was created to a system you've not yet surveyed
* Added missing description for the deposit added by the "Of Transmissions Decoded" event
* Rugged Woods planetary feature now properly converts to another planetary feature when the planet is terraformed, rather than simply disappearing
* Clamped research costs so they wouldn't overflow with late game repeatable techs, and become free
* Fixed the "Single-Minded" anomaly sometimes causing duplicate planet modifiers in a weird rebellion against its own name
* Fixed planets with anomalies showing the resources from them before being surveyed
* Fixed having artificial intelligence set to outlawed disabling ruler jobs after synthetic evolution
* Fixed a crash on autosave
* Fixed Economic Policy modifiers affecting a country's total income rather than just job output
* Devouring Swarms will no longer attempt to digest robots as food, and will break them down into alloys instead
* Fixed clicking on your fleet in the galaxy view also selecting alien ships in the same system, disabling giving orders until the aliens were deselected
* Fixed planet with rudimentary robots wrongly showing ethics info from the last selected player empire planet
* Fixed the plasma accelerators tech wrongly stating it would unlock caravaneer ship weapons as well
* Updated the Dessanu L-Gate outcome from Distant Stars to properly work with the 2.2 resource rework. It will now provide monthly rare resources
* Fixed some instances of orbital deposits being wrongfully placed on habitable planets, via anomalies or events (Silent Behemoth, Cunning Flora, Echoes From The Deep, etc). Also replaced some of these cases with usable planetary features
* Fixed a Vengralian Trium caravaneer deal's description text wrongly promising a 10% trade value increase, when the tooltip and gameplay result is 15%
* Fixed newly added democratic mandates not registering progress on them correctly, making them impossible to fulfill
* Federation Associate now also counts as a non-aggression pact for the purposes of faction demands (fixes an issue with pacifist faction demands)
* Fixed so that unemployed pops of the same strata are chosen for a job before promoting new pops for it
* Fixed some techs having a discrepancy between area and expertise, ie, physics techs requiring the engineering field's "materials" expertise. This also fixes issues with tech weighting
* Fixed the machines sometimes rising up twice, since there's only so many Terminator spinoffs one galaxy can take
* Fixed Offworld Trade Companies, Mineral Purification, Food Processing techs wrongly being blocked by not having access to rare resources
* Fixed Pops continuing to grow while under occupation by Crises
* Fixed so that the Subterranean Aliens event correctly spawns armies that can properly invade you
* Researcher job no longer evaluates trait_syncretic_proles because syncretic proles cannot be specialists
* Researcher job now evaluates trait_intelligent and trait_brainslug separately because a pop can have both of them
* Manager job now evaluates trait_thrifty and trait_nuumismatic_administration separately because a pop can have both of them
* Colonist job now has weights for trait_robot_domestic_protocols, trait_charismatic and trait_repugnant
* Merchant and Executive jobs now check for Thrifty and Numistic Administration separately for both modifiers and chance weights
* Heritage Sites tech path is now properly unlocked by Rare Crystals rather than Volatile Motes, although the Leaning Tower of Pisa made entirely of C4 would be pretty cool
* Criminal job types should no longer appear at all in Gestalt Empires, only Deviant Drones
* Fixed broken graphical assets for the Contingency crisis
* Fixed Cracking or Pacifying a Contingency World causing it to not be counted as destroyed
* Fixed Phaseshifted planet anomaly rerolling planet deposits every time it shifts. Will also no longer wrongly generate orbital deposits
* Gene Banks tech now grants the ability for Assimilators to produce Clone Armies once again, without needing the Clone Vats building
* The following anomalies will now clear orbital deposits if they are of an incompatible type with the anomaly outcome: Energetic Spectra, Life Electric, Blackhole Hologram, Dead God, White Hell, Heavy Metal Frost
* Titanic Life and Dangerous Wildlife blocker drop rates adjusted and made non-recursive so they don't give you planets with negative districts
* Removed obsolete reference to tiles in Docile Migrating Forests modifier
* Fixed an issue where the War in Heaven would involve Awakened Empires that had previously woken up for other reasons
* Fixed the Micro-Replicators and Self-Assembling Components techs not applying their modifiers
* Fixed finding the Galatron in every Reliquary after getting it once, which did reduce the sense of cosmic wonder a touch
* Fixed not being able to form research agreements with fellow Federation members
* Fixed the Prethoryn Scourge and Contingency Crises not purging pops properly
* Event chain objecting to construction of a Dyson sphere will no longer trigger between countries with very hostile opinion of each other
* Fixed outposts and station's tooltips showing a mystery question mark icon, for reasons
* Fixed Engineered Evolution ascension perk tooltip not mentioning unlocking Clone Vats building
* Fixed terraforming *from* Hive and Machine worlds resulting in planets with no Planetary Features
* Fixed tooltip for purges of non-organic species wrongly referring to food production
* Fixed AI using the Market causing prices to always increase, even when it was selling and not buying
* Fixed Nomadic trait not reducing resettlement cost
* Fixed Shipyard construction speed modifiers not being applied to civilian ships
* Fixed the Chthonian Planet modifier not adding a Mineral planetary feature
* More traits are checked when evaluating pops for Merchant and Manager jobs
* Fixed Contingency not purging (found something at the last minute where the last pop on a crisis occuppied world will not be purged, we'll get it sorted, but didn't want to make you wait until next week for the patch)
* Disabling sector automation now REALLY disables it. Previously it would continue to build if it had resources left. Good initiative, but...
* Fixed tooltip for the Fender Bender anomaly stating it grants 9 eng research when in fact it only gives 3
* Fixed tooltip for the Rudimentary Robots anomaly stating it grants 3, when it actually gave out 2, by just saying "hell with it give 4 instead"
* Entertainer job now properly applies the modifiers for the Domestic Protocols, Charismatic, and Repugnant traits
* Fixed a crash when hovering over empire comparisons in observer mode
* DLCs are being sent at the start of a MP game. Fixes instant OOS as well
* Fixed potential CTD when loading market and certain empires no longer exist
* Fixed issue where the Marauder Horde was not dealt with properly if the Khan died of old age
* Fixed total wars creating empty sectors
* Biotrophy deviancy will no longer cause unemployment event to trigger nor will unemployed biotrophies be affected
* Mardak Vol now spawn as a Stone Age civilization as described in the event
* Enigmatic Ascension is no longer aborted upon moving capital. Event added for when homeworld is occupied during enigmatic ascension
* Fixed crash on load when a planet you had a branch office got destroyed
* Fixed a couple of literally unplayable typos regarding the Kilik Cooperative
Also, I can give you a bit of clarity on what we're continuing to work on. Performance and AI improvements are the continuing biggest priority. We also plan usability and readability improvements to the planet management screen, as well as the usual bug fixes and polish. Stand by for more of those, but in the meantime please give this beta a spin.
We'll keep at it and watch for your feedback. Thanks for your support.
Please note stellaris_test is an opt-in patch. You have to choose to activate it.
Steam library -> Right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas tab -> choose "stellaris_test"
[ 2019-01-18 16:49:27 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all, Jamor and his team brings you a new patch right before the Winter Holidays start!
As you probably know, we created a beta patch with experimental fixes for 2.2/Le Guin some time ago. The objective was to both stress-test the robustness of the changes, and also get the fixes in to the hands of interested players with a minimum of delay after launch, without having to wait through the normal QA and release process. In order to not gate these necessary improvements behind a beta over the holidays, I'm taking 2.2.2 out of beta and making it the official live version as of right now.
It includes all the fixes listed below, plus some key improvements we were able to make to the beta based on your feedback:
- Fixed Empire rulers spawning without any traits
- Fixed busted trade value collection range
- Fixed an issue where Gestalt Consciousnesses would not colonize due to not budgeting enough alloys for colony ships
- Fixed an exploit where you could give orders to NPC/other empire ships
- Fixed vassalization wars not creating vassals, for real this time
VERSION 2.2.2
2.2 Le Guin Free Features
- Ether Drake Shrine/Monument has been converted to a special Planetary Deposit with the same effects as before
- Improved Nanite Transmutation description for tech/building
- Art Monument has now been revamped into a planetary Decision
- Hive minds will once again have unemployed drones rather than a Scavenger drone job
- Renamed Empire Size to Empire Sprawl, and renamed Administrative Cap to Administrative Capacity (previous wording did not make it clear enough that they are soft caps)
- Reduced effectiveness of Bio-Reactor
- Increased cost of Unity buildings
- Reduced mineral cost of roboticist and fabricator jobs
- Increased base alloy job production from 2 to 3
- Resource stockpiles have by default been increased from 10000 to 15000. Default stockpile for Energy Credits increased to 50000
- Drone Campaign and Robot Campaign effects reduced from +20% to +10%
- Synthetic Evolution ascension perk now gives +10% robot output
- The chance of criminal Branch Offices getting shut down has been reduced slightly, and the cooldown between shutdown events has been reduced to 10 years
- At least one year with little or no crime must pass for a colony's criminal Branch Office to potentially get shut down (increased from one day)
- Different kinds of Unity buildings are now more consistent in how many Jobs they create
- Betharian Power Plant building now creates Jobs in addition to its flat Energy Credits output
- Bunker Bot's scrap value increased
- Massively reduced point defense weapon damage against armour
- Democratic Crusaders now also take a dim view of corporate authority
- Caravaneer home base will only be re-established if at least one Caravaneer fleet is still alive
- Rescaled the Consecrated World Worship modifier: it now goes higher, with smaller value increments between each step
- Shared burden Civic and Living standard allow pops to demote in social strata much more rapidly
- Ruined arcologies take longer to clear and cost more
- Reduced Gateway cost
- Increased rate at which admirals and ships get XP from suppressing pirates
- Science nerd faction is no longer jealous of the Successor Khanate
- Ship upgrade cost reduced by increasing the refund amount from older components, and upgrade time reduced
- Mega Art Installation restoration build time increased from 3600 to 4800
- Strategic Coordination Center restoration build time increased from 3600 to 4800
- Strategic Coordination Center effect on naval cap reduced from to 50/100/150, effect on starbase cap reduced from to 2/4/6, and effect on platform capacity reduced to 4/8/12
- Science Nexus effect on research output increased from 75/150/225 to 100/200/300, and increases research speed by 5%/10%/15%
- Science Nexus build time increased from 2400 to 3600, and alloy cost increased from 12500 to 15000 for all levels
- Proles know their roles, are less likely to be researchers
- Synthetic Evolution ascension perk now also reduces modify species cost by -50%
- Administrative Efficiency (repeatable) tech effect on Admin Cap increased from 10 to 15
- Mitigated some Machine Uprising issues slightly
- Building and District tooltips are now more informative in regards to what resources they use and produce from their jobs
- Fixed the missing "Megacorp" ownership icon in the MP lobby
- Added a warning when you try to colonize a very low habitability planet directly with a colony ship
- Piracy is now shown for non trading nations (if within their borders)
- Fixed the UI shattering hilariously if you clicked the population tab on an uncolonized planet
- Fixed Expansion Planner wrongly revealing rare deposits on unsurveyed worlds
- Fixed tooltip for Aristocratic Elite to show the building it unlocks
- Added a popup to tell player when resettlement will cause building destruction
- Adjusted the resource deficit notification to pop once you are down to 12 months' reserves
- Small tweaks to the Planets and Sectors screen
- Fixed tooltip wrongly stating planet had no rare planetary features if they were covered by a blocker
- Fixed overlapping GUI elements for Science Nexus Megastructure
- Updated production/upkeep GUI elements in Megastructure view
- Faction issues now display as red or green depending on if the demand is fulfilled rather than if the effect of the issue is positive, negative or neutral
- Fixed so that all decimals of amenities
- Improved AI planet building priorities
- Improved AI market trading
- AI no longer bounces a single scientist around multiple ships, choking their exploration and growth
- AI now manages to correctly assess budget for building upgrades on planets
- Made sure AI is not blocked from building things that decreases budget deficits if deficit is too large, because you gotta have money to make money, champ
- Scriptable possibility to use parent economic category for AI budgeting. AI now has a single pool for energy upkeep for most things, making it much better at building up its empire
- AI is now budgeting some exotic resources to planet development, allowing them build upgrades and buildings that require them
- Made AI a bit less maniacal about stomping out every iota of crime to allow the criminal megacorp playstyle
- Fixed performance drop in the resettlement view
- Fixed one source of lag on daily ticks
- Reduced needless daily job related calculations
- Add num_uncleared_blockers trigger - checks the planet's total amount of uncleared blockers
- Renamed old "can_resettle_pop" game rule to "can_resettle_planet", Add a new "can_resettle_pop" game rule that works on Pop scope
- Added on_slave_sold_on_market on action
- Number of districts required to enact Arcology Project is no longer reduced by uncleared blockers
- Fixed overlapping UI elements in Megastructure view
- Authoritarian faction is now also OK with Academic Privilege and Robotic Servitors
- Tech drones and Technician jobs now correctly look for the Ingenious trait rather than Thrifty (which was changed to trade value)
- Starting on Earth as Life-Seeded now properly gives you a 25 size planet with rare deposits
- Fixed an OOS on hotjoin due to MIA ships reappearing in different places on server and client
- Fixed status quo peace not spawning new empires in ideology and vassalization wars
- Fixed ship alloy costs being truncated in the choose design window of the fleet designer
- Fixed first wave scourge invasion fleets being led by admirals using robot portraits for some bizarre reason
- Fixed massively out of date credits in the Chinese version, because Jamor is a human that exists in the universe apparently
- Fixed out of synch event related to special projects
- Added missing effects to the description of the Trium Caravaneer's atmospheric deodorizer deal
- Gateways will no longer spawn in directly adjacent systems on galaxy creation
- Fixes the issue of people not able to hot join a multiplayer when too many players are present
- Made tweaks to Galactic Market that should prevent an infinite profits exploit from flooding the market, then rebuying, you shameless tophat-wearing capitalist exploiters, you
- Fixed a graphical display bug with shielded worlds
- Fixed an incorrect modifier being applied by the "Alien Drag Racing" anomaly
- Improved the text truncation in longer planetary Decision descriptions, should avoid spillouts
- Reduced number of calls to CalcMaxEmployed done in DailyUpdate by up to 50%. Should improve performance
- Fixed literally unplayable grammar issue in the Horizon Signal event chain
- Fixed leader portraits being slightly off-center in level up windows
- Fixed OOS due to Leaders not being reregistered when changing class (Scientist to Empire Leader, etc)
- Fixed potential CTD when loading market and certain empires no longer exist, because all those empires will be lost, in time, like tears in rain
- Empire size modifier on leader cost and upkeep is now multiplied on the total and not added to the other mult modifiers
- Fixed OOS due to Galactic Market cache
- Fixed Master's Teaching: Warring States edict not affecting army upkeep as it should
- Fixed Gospel of the Masses civic not applying trade value bonus
- Fixed event spam when gaining access to the Galactic Market
- "Free at last" modifiers are now removed from the planet after it's reconquered (or conquered by anyone else)
- Prevented abandoned terraforming project or underground civilization events on an Ecumenopolis
- Added a check so that servitude robots cannot become criminals. We'll miss you, serial killer auto assembly claw.
- Khan, "berserker" and "invader" AI personalities should no longer get stuck considering targets they cannot reach
- Fixed empire size tooltip with literally unplayable missing % signs
- Fanatic Purifiers, Determined Exterminators, and Devouring Swarms now have a tooltip properly explaining why, as generally antisocial genocidal murderers, they are not welcome in the Galactic Market
- Fixed issue where the Marauder Horde was not dealt with properly if the Khan died of old age
- Reworked refugee pop effect script to eliminate faulty event spam
- Fixed a situation with total wars. If a player takes a planet that has the same name as a planet he already owns, a new sector would be created with that name, but with no planets in it
- Effects of "Survival of the Fittest" tradition now include a "%" character where needed
- Fixed broken tooltips for Gang Wars and Mob Rule events
- Fixed a bug where presapient pops on a planet would distort the necessary number of fully sapient pops required to unlock the next building slot
- Fixed some missing resource icons in various screens and tooltips
- Fixed robot pops being unable to resettle
- Fixed the Consecrated World Worship modifier disappearing when a certain combination of planets are consecrated
- Caravaneers should not join a colony before it is fully established
- Some moon-related events had their triggers improved after the startling realization that Habitats also count as moons. That's no moon...
- Fixed Aberrant and Vehement lacking starting anchor starbase rendering their portals indestructible
- Fanatic Materialist Fallen Empire is no longer wrongfully DLC-locked behind Synthetic Dawn
- Fixed broken text for Dark Matter deposits
- "Pollen Aphrodisiac" event chain is no longer available to Ecumenopolis worlds
- Fixed an event option tooltip relating to the Science Nexus reporting incorrect resource amounts
- Fixed Automated Colonization Units tradition not granting an extra pop on colonization for machine empires
- Fixed issue with the Artisan troupe dialogue windows not popping up
- Fixed crash when trying to reroute a trade route
- Totalitarian faction demands should be satisfied by either having a stratified living standard on everyone, or by purging/enslaving pops
- Fixed a crash when opening the megastructure build list with a Dyson Sphere you cannot afford at midnight on the Summer Solstice atop Barad-dr
- Fixed text grey out function to actually grey out texticons instead of only cheekily putting "_grey" into the text
- Fixed a crash when tooltipping power in diplomacy view while not observing as a country
- Fixed duplicate Simplified Chinese ship design names
- Fixed a possible crash when showing event windows
- Fixed issue where system ownership change on actions were executed in a unsafe environment potentially causing CTDs and/or OOSs
- Fixed an OOS at game start when the client is playing in a different language than the host
- Fixed a crash related to extremely long trade routes
- Fixed CTD from trying to update invalid planets
- Fixed the Caravansary Home Station being indestructible after it is re-established, because that which has died once can die again
- Fixed a missing ship design name for the Caravansary starbase
- The Numistic pops sold by the Numistic Order will now have the same traits as their original owner but the ideal planet class of their buyer
- Fixed Vassalization Wars unhelpfully not creating Vassals
- Subsidiaries can now have branch offices and open branch offices in their overlord's territory. Commercial pact trading is also done automatically just as when in a federation when you're a subsidiary
- Merchants now properly produce Unity for empires with Merchant Guilds civic
- Fixed a number of Special Projects occasionally displaying unintended event images in the Situation Log
- Fixed some Governor traits that were wrongly empire-wide in their effect
- Hyperplanes are now correctly colored on OSX
- Drone Megastorage now correctly checks that you are a Machine empire
- No resettlement policy now actually means no resettlment
- Fixed Observation Posts producing no science
- Sector automation now includes hives and nexus
- Technologies for lvl 2 buildings no longer appear before you have the resources to build them
- Fixed the Numistic Order fleet having the wrong name
- Alleviated some issues with Caravaneer fleets getting "stuck", as their jump distance when escaping hostiles is now randomized
- Fixed an edge case where Consecrating a world would not result in a modifier, making the planet impossible to un-consecrate
- Fixed literally unplayable typo in Cyto-Revitalization Center tooltip
- Fixed Solid Liquidity faction issue stating the wrong amount of Energy Credits
- Private Prospectors civic effect description now shows the correct Administrative Cap increase
[ 2018-12-20 16:09:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
(Click thumbnail to watch Launch Trailer on YouTube)
Stellaris: MegaCorp is out now! Step into the role as the leader of a Megacorporation and rule the galaxy through your business acumen and prowess as a corporate superpower.
MegaCorp is available to purchase on our Store right here. Some of the core features of the expansion include:
- Corporate Culture: Chief Executive Officers of a MegaCorp can conduct business on a galaxy-wide scale with a host of new civics. Expand through a system of Branch Offices and corporate tactics
- City World: With Ecumenopolis, you can increase the population density of core worlds to truly epic proportions, eventually creating a planet-spanning megacity
- Caravaneer Fleets: Keep an eye out for the Caravaneers, nomadic interstellar wheelers-and-dealers who stay aloof from galactic politics, and always have a bargain up their sleeve. Expect surprises when these master traders wander through your space or when you visit their home systems
- More Megastructures: The budget has been approved for your own glorious Matter Decompressor, Mega-Art Installation, Interstellar Assembly or Strategic Coordination Center to acquire new scaling capabilities for your megalopolis
- Galactic Slave Market: Buy and sell labor on an industrial scale, set them free or keep them as livestock. The choice is yours!
- VIP Status Comes with its Perks: Keep your economy competitive in a cutthroat galaxy with additional Ascension perks.
[ 2018-12-06 17:11:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
The time has finally come to present the full patch notes for the 2.2 'Le Guin' update and the accompanying MegaCorp expansion coming out on December 6!
VERSION 2.2.0
DESIGNERS' NOTE Greetings! Stellaris has (once again) undergone bold changes! In 2.2 the focus of the changes has been to rework how you develop planets and to deepen the game's economy. The purpose is to make the management of planets more fun and engaging. Tiles are gone, and have been replaced with Districts, Buildings, and Jobs. You will now instead construct City Districts, Farming Districts, Mining Districts, and Generator Districts, as well as various Buildings with more specialized roles. Districts and buildings provide Jobs, and a job worked by a Pop will produce resources. As a planet gains more Pops it will unlock more Building Slots. Buildings work similar to how they did before, but now most of them provide Jobs instead of producing resources directly. 2.2 also introduces a new Trade Route system. What you essentially want to do is to collect Trade Value (found in space and produced on planets) by upgrading a nearby starbase. You should then set up a Trade Route leading back to your home system. Trade Value is converted into usable resources when it reaches your Trade Capital. We recommend you to take a look at the updated tutorial!
Megacorp Expansion Features
Megacorps
- Added the Megacorporation empire type, which features unique civics as well as the ability to become an economic powerhouse by spreading branch offices on the planets of other empires
- Added new ascension perk: Arcology Project, enabling the Decision to convert a planet to an City-World completely covered in urban sprawl
- Added new ascension perk: Hive Worlds, similar to Machine Worlds but for Hive Minds, which allows them to terraform planets into living planets on which only hive drones can live. Hive Worlds gain a bonus to resource output and are not limited by deposits in how many resource districts they can support
- Added new ascension perk: Xeno-Compatibility, which allows cross-breeding between species
- Universal Transactions
- Added new ascension perk: Universal Transactions, which makes it easier for Megacorporation empires to establish branch offices and commercial pacts
- Added the Caravaneers, nomadic space traders who will give unique offers in exchange for a variety of resources, and also offer games of chance in their home system
- Added new Megastructures: the Matter Decompressor, Mega-Art Installation, Interstellar Assembly, and Strategic Coordination Center, including ruined versions you can discover
- Added a galactic Slave Market so you can buy or sell slave Pops (once the Galactic Market is established)
- Added 3 new advisor voice sets as well as 16 minutes of new music (added to the soundtrack DLC as well)
- Added new pre-scripted Empires using Megacorp mechanics, and changed the existing Chinorr to a Megacorp
- Added 10 new achievements
2.2 Le Guin Free Features
- Added Simplified Chinese localization
- Removed planet/habitat tile system, replaced with districts, jobs
- Pops and Pop Jobs now belong to a social class (Pop Category) that determines their luxury needs. Social classes are ranked, and Pops that belong to a higher social class will refuse to take jobs belonging to a lower class until they demote over time
- Added unemployment for pops without suitable jobs, which lowers planetary stability if their living standards are low
- Added planetary housing, usage of which depends on pop's social strata (rulers and specialists = a lot, slaves and menial labourers = a little)
- More dynamic pop growth system: populations can grow and decline based on their rights, living standards, immigration/emigration
- Added crime. Crime is generated by overcrowding and poor living conditions, and negatively affects planet stability. It can also generate events
- Added new and reworked planetary decisions and empire edicts
- Added new resource types (alloys, consumer goods, etc) which tie in to the economic simulation in many ways, diversifying the domestic activity of empires considerably
- Added the Internal Market, where resources can be converted into other resources at a cost
- Added the Galactic Market, in which all game resources can be bought and sold in open exchange between empires, with prices fluctuating based on supply and demand. This is formed when enough Empires are in contact with each other, replacing the Internal Market. Genocidal empires do not get access to the Galactic Market
- Added trade routes, where you can collect trade value from upgraded starbases and send it back to your trade capital to convert to wealth for your empire. Reworked piracy system to link in to this, and added a patrol order so your fleets can actively suppress piracy
- Added commercial pact diplomatic agreement, where the signatories gain trade value equal to 10% of the other party
- Added empire development based on owned systems, districts, and colonies. It is a soft cap that, when exceeded, applies scaling penalties to leader cost, edict cost, research speed, etc. This replaces the old system of static penalties based only on systems owned, and more accurately reflects the size and complexity of your empire. Development cap can be increased with techs and ascension perks
- Introduced a new concept called Empire Cohesion. Empire Cohesion is increased by each owned system, and decreased by each external hyperlane connection and cut-off (non-owned) system inside your borders. If cohesion loss goes above cohesion gain, you will suffer penalties in the form of increased empire size and the corresponding costs it brings
- Added 9 new basic Mandates relating to your empire's internal economy
- Tweaked army display and ground combat screens, with improved army icons
- Reworked planetary bombardment to produce devastation, which damages housing, amenities, trade value, and pop growth. High devastation will ruin buildings and kill pops
- Reworked sectors to be automatically generated, removing the "mini-economies" and having them directly contribute to your empire stockpiles
- Reworked factions to always give an amount of influence based on their faction approval, rather than having a hard cutoff below which they would contribute nothing
- Reworked the Tradition Trees to synchronize with all the new systems
- Added Shared Burden civic for all your luxury space communism needs, with a new prescripted empire using it, the Kilik Cooperative
- Replaced authoritarian Caste System with Stratified Economy living standards: does not use slavery but has a similar effect (happy rulers, downtrodden masses). Authoritarians can still use species-wide slavery. Slaver guilds civic is now required to enslave own species
- Added alert messages for completing a Megastructure's intermediate upgrade steps
- Added a conclusion to the Strong Magnetic Field events
- Unity Ambitions are now a free feature, and no longer restricted to owners of Apocalypse
- Added new single star custom system options
- Created and implemented new SFX for Natural Wormholes which have been silent until now. No more.
- Since the Chinorr have become a Megacorporation, replaced them in non-Megacorp games with a new prescripted empire, the Glebsig Foundation
- Added technology Resort Worlds that unlocks the ability to designate a colony as a Resort World. This colony will be unable to have districts and most buildings built on it, but will increase amenities and immigration pull across the empire.
- Added tech for Penal Colony worlds which have high crime rates but decrease crime on other planets
- Added a tech for slaver empires to designate a world as a Thrall-World. Thrall-Worlds cannot support city districts or manufacturing/research buildings, but get vastly increased growth rate and access to special buildings and jobs for slaves
- Updated tutorial to explain the new systems
- Added the multiplayer observer mode from the 2.1.4 beta to the default game version
- Added new civic: Byzantine Bureaucracy, that reduces housing/amenities usage and allows for the construction of Bureaucratic Complex building that adds administrator jobs
- Deploy Hunter-Killer Drones decision can now be toggled on and off
- Added a game setup setting for how many habitable worlds are guaranteed to spawn near your starting system
- Research Agreements are now diplomatic actions, rather than being part of trade deals
- End game victory conditions reworked into a score system, tallying up your total empire accomplishment based on size, population, military, tech, federations, and many other measures
- Added some new Colony events.
- Civilian ships are now constructed at starbase rather than planets
- Added pop selection view to colony ship construction in starbases
- Colony ships can now be built populated with any species which you have a migration treaty with
- Colony ships built via the expansion planner will be automatically constructed at the starbase nearest the target planet
- Planets have a decision to stop pop growth, although this comes with a penalty to stability for regular empires.
- Blockers now generally reduce the usable districts on a planet, while clearing them often unlocks additional district types.
- Clearing Blockers can now also give one time bonuses, i.e. clearing a slum grants a pop.
- The homeworld of the First League is now an Ecumenopolis
- Notifications dealing with the players own empire are now marked with a golden yellow rim to distinguish them from those affecting only other empires
- Added 6 new corporate-themed empire flags
- Improved distribution of space creatures and unique systems
- Leader Capacity has been removed from the game and replaced with energy credits upkeep for each leader
- Subterranean civilization famine event now uses food rather than energy
- Increased the delay between the Prethoryn Vanguard and the main swarm arriving
- You no longer get influence when another empire finishes first contact project before you do
- Teachings of Warriors event now only gives energy as reward for selling to a private collector
- Removed neighbor restrictions on rivals and most CBs
- No longer possible to pick Imperial Prerogative as first ascension perk
- Federation members now automatically have a commercial agreement with each other, but have to pay 15% of their energy credit income in federation taxes
- Federations are now always led by the most powerful member empire rather than having a rotating presidency (25% more power than leader is required to replace an existing president)
- Added a decision to curtail planetary growth through voluntary measures, available to empires that don't allow other forms of growth control. It reduces growth by 75% at the expense of increased pop upkeep
- Reworked relative empire power to be based on fleet power, economic power and tech power (in order of descending importance). Economic power is calculated as the amount of resources produced by the empire each month, multiplied by the base value of said resources, while tech power is calculated by the total cost of researched techs
- Added two new technologies for machine empires that improve pop assembly speed
- Nivlac pops now generally spawn in groups of 15
- Nivlac species trait effect on habitability and pop growth has been significantly reduced
- Added Cadet difficulty setting as an 'easy' level below Ensign, granting the player economic buffs
- Admirals no longer gain the Fleet Logistician trait from a random (MTTH) event
- Changed Forlorn Ruins modifier to be -5% happiness instead of -20%
- Drastically reduced the research cost for Entropic Recursion and Doctrine: Strange Loop, and removed their associated buildings
- Drastically reduced the Machine Uprising's starting fleets so they shouldn't immediately economically collapse
- Habitats now have a monthly alloy upkeep on their capital building
- Strong/Weak traits now have a small effect on worker output
- Culture shock is now a planet modifier rather than a pop modifier
- Assimilation now faster, and planetary culture shock will be removed if there is only hive/cyborg/machine pops on the planet, because free will is a painful illusion
- Xenophobes now get +10%/+20% pop growth instead of claim cost reduction (to balance for not having as much growth from migration, etc)
- Ascension perk Defender of the Galaxy now grants bonus damage against the Tempest too
- Ascension perk Galactic Contender also grants bonus damage vs the gate builders
- Yurt, Vultaum, and Irassian Home systems now have some additional resources
- Having an L-gate in your space increases the odds of rolling gateway tech if you dont have a regular gateway
- Spiritualist faction will no longer be unhappy about Tomb Worlds if you get Wormed
- Having Psionic pops in your empire allows for the possibility of rolling the Psionic theory tech if not otherwise possible
- Several existing civics have been adjusted to affect the new jobs system: Merchant Guilds, Police State, Agrarian Idyll, Aristocratic Elite, Citizen Service, Exalted Priesthood and Technocracy
- Species trait Thrifty now increases Trade Value production, new trait Ingenious increases Energy Production
- Reduced cost of robo-modding a species
- Reduced the cost of bio-modding a species
- Databanks Uplinks tradition now increases research station output instead of unlocking assist research
- Assist Research is now available from the start of the game
- Ending a resource deal with a merchant enclave early now gives -5 opinion
- Distinguished Admiralty civic effect on admiral level cap reduced from 2 to 1. In addition, the effect on naval capacity has been replaced with ship fire rate
- Split the policies and edicts view into their own views
- You can now start the game with the "-console" argument and it will dump all console commands to the info.log file
- Added various info about target planets in the Resettlement dropdown list
- Colonization screens only show the list of species and will generate a ship from the closest shipyard
- Species are sorted in habitability order on the colonize "select species" window
- Expansion planner now shows scripted district in a moddable way instead of being hardcoded into energy, minerals, food
- The expansion planner now shows Rare Deposits
- Added navigation sidebar and moved all topbar menu items to it
- Reworked planet battle view to show frontline, reserved and disengaged armies separately
- Standardized colors for displaying cost and time
- AI now considers the potential resource gain against its system upkeep cost when deciding whether to build an outpost
- Adapted AI to new economy system
- Improved early game economy AI
- AI will now revoke claims it has on empires it wants to maintain a long-term alliance with
- Added scriptable leader classes, old classes are now attributes for the new ones
- Added on_crossing_border on-action
- You can now set an arrival_effect on auto_move_to_target, this will fire that scripted effect on arrival
- Added "on_fleet_combat_joined_attacker" and "on_fleet_combat_joined_defender" on_action. Both are fired when fleet enter combat, scopes etc in the file "00_on_actions.txt"
- Added country_trade_fee modifier
- Replaced free_pop_slots trigger with free_housing trigger
- Updated the "if" trigger to work in the same way as the "if" effect: if { limit = {...} } else_if { limit = {...} } else { ... }
- Added define for default trade change
- Added MARKET_FLUCTUATION_EPSILON define to avoid useless calculations
- Added last_building_changed / last_district changed triggers
- Added on_system_lost and on_system_gained on-actions
- Create Species can now accept an event_target for the species class create_species = { class = event_target:caravaneer_fleet2_country.species }
- Most modifiers in the game now take custom_tooltip to print a custom desc
- Added perc_communications_with_playable trigger
- Added "country_immigration_pull_add," "country_immigration_pull_mult," "country_emigration_push_add" and "country_emigration_pull_mult" modifiers. They work like the planet modifiers of the same name, but at country level
- Added triggers "has_rival =
" and "has_overlord= " - Added is_half_species trigger
- Added create_half_species effect
- Added country-scoped variants of event pulses. Which countries get these is controlled in country type settings
- Added GetRulerName to localization script in Leader scope
- The "has_colonization_control" trigger now works like other species rights trigger: has_colonization_control = { value = no country =root }
- Added a "can_colonize_with_species" game rule
- It is now possible to directly script a civic as changing the empire's homeworld class, and this will be reflected properly in empire designer
- The number of district types shown in the expansion planner is now fully moddable through a Define ( EXPANSION_VIEW_NUM_DISTRICTS ) However, the gui files must also be changed to have that number of district buttons/icons
- Added set_market_leader effect
- Anomalies with a null_spawn_chance set that are set to only happen once for the country/game will now be blocked from being rolled again if they fail to pass the null spawn chance check, meaning that some anomalies can be made properly rare and not occur in every game
- Added the "diplomacy_economy" database where you can defines upkeep and production of resources for various types of diplomatic relations.
- Added remove_deposit effect
- Added is_deposit_type trigger
- Add define for resource base, min and max price on the market
- Add defines for constants in price change equation
- Buildings can now have a custom tooltip effect
- Fixed incorrect starbase Missile Battery description
- Restoring changes to Impossible Organism event to allow Nivlacs to be spawned on any planet, not just the capital
- Fixed Contact Report: Primitives event sometimes fetching the wrong text key
- Fixed incorrect pluralization for Gene Warrior armies
- Fixed a handful of Crystalline Entities not being affected by the Crystal Pacification project
- Fixed the Lokken Mechanists pre-scripted empire using the wrong ruler title
- Fixed a bunch of old sound files that had bad loops or other cruddiness
- Fixed literally unplayable localization bugs
- Removed references to a nonexistent special project in an event chain
- Fixed an edge case where paying off Marauders would cost you nothing
- Fixed "The Xvan Labs" special project spawning in too-distant systems
- Preventing Ketling planets subject to ongoing invasion, orbital bombardment and/or starbase construction from progressing to spacefaring Ketlings
- Fix crash at start when the outliner settings contain double entries
- Fixed Leviathans first contact report not firing in some cases
- Scavenger Bot and Tiyanki Matriarch systems are now flagged as hostile (and guardian) systems
- Fixed bug where upon re-election a ruler would not get a proper new mandate
- Fixed Crisis ambient audio continuing to loop after Crisis has been defeated
- Fixed an issue where Primitives would accumulate too many Ethics over time
- Removed arrow from peace messages since they were misleading
- Added localization that had been missing from Observation events that had been missing since 2015, good golly Miss Molly
- Pacifists are now blocked from Aggressive First Contact protocols, as charming as it was that they had a loophole in their ethical structure that permitted unlimited violence until polite first greetings had been exchanged
- Leviathan Death Notification message should now function
- Fixed the bug when in the MP Lobby create new empire tab was shown beneath custom empires
- Fixed the multiplayer "show players" mapmode being saved and reloaded in single player mode, resulting in all-grey maps
- Fixed tutorial making observer mode outline visible in single player
- Master Builders Ascension Perk no longer applies twice to Habitats
- Marauder fleets now actually show up in the Marauder Vengeance event, rather than merely threatening to do so
- Fixed a crash when deleting an empire led to having a corrupted empire design selected
- Create vassal button now checks properly if a vassal can actually be created
- Fixed multiple contact from same empire
- Fixed empires created by rebellion, being released as a vassal always showing up with grey map colour
- Fixed the "blue solution" sometimes not granting a trait
- The red/green/blue event now adds a custom free trait so as not to mess with trait points.
- There will now always be a minimum of one L-Gate system when playing with the Distant Stars Story Pack, regardless of galaxy size
- Fixed peace deal localization
- Fixed some loc references in post-war messages from Fallen Empires
- Fixed the Horizon Signal event chain sometimes resulting in Pops getting incompatible traits
- Fixed the Grateful Refugee pop modifier potentially stacking (modifier is now instead refreshed if the pop becomes a refugee again)
- Contact Report: Leviathans (story.8) should now fire for all leviathans (will now display a special desc for mechanical leviathans)
- Fixed an issue with terraforming in the Atomic Clock event
- Numerous other bugfixes and performance improvements
- Franchising: As a Corporate empire, have a branch office on 5 different empires' capitals
- Inscrutable Power: I won the Galatron and all I got was this lousy achievement
- Megapolis: Have a planet with at least 100 Pops
- Obscure Tastes: Build a Mega-Art Installation in a nebula system
- Black Hole Mining: Build a Matter Decompressor
- Strategic Initiative: Build a Strategic Coordination Center
- Center of Trade: Earn at least 1000 Energy Credits per month from trade
- Giga-Engineering: Have at least 4 fully operational Megastructures within your borders (Habitats, Ring Worlds and Gateways do not count)
- We Are Legion: Be a biological Hive Mind with at least 1000 drone Pops
- United Space: Build an Interstellar Assembly
[ 2018-11-29 14:54:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today's Dev Diary comes to you with the nitty gritty details related to modding and getting really in-dept into the changes that will be coming in Le Guin.
While this isn't something that is of interest to everyone, we are dedicated to giving our modding community even better tools to let their ideas and imaginations run wild.
For the full details, check out the Dev Diary on our forums here.
[ 2018-11-22 12:20:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Stellaris: MegaCorp will be releasing on December 6th, 2018 with a host of new gameplay updates, giving you the change to play as your very own MegaCorp and conquer the galaxy with commerce and your own finely-tuned business acumen.
Also, we've just released the MegaCorp Story Trailer - which you can watch either on the our Steam store page or click the image below to watch it on YouTube!
[ 2018-11-20 17:13:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Were back for this weeks installment of the Stellaris Dev Diary. This week we will covering a mix of paid and free features. More exactly, well be talking about the Slave Market, Unity Ambitions and new Mandates. I bet I know which one youll want to read about first, so lets start with that one.
Before we start I need to reiterate that this dev diary contains things that are WIP, with non-final numbers, interfaces or mechanics that might change.
The Slave Market (PAID)
To better facilitate different playstyles, weve added the Slave Market feature to MegaCorp. This will allow more easy transfer of slaves between empires. In MegaCorp, nothing can stand in the way of the pursuit of profit.
Access to the Slave Market is granted once the Galactic Market is founded. Only empires that also have access to the Galactic Market will be able to use the Slave Market. Only Pops that are currently Slaves are able to be sold on the Slave Market, but anyone can buy them (either to set them free or to put them to work).
To sell a slave you select one or more Pop(s) on a planet (it must be enslaved). Right now the interface shows planets as the drop-down, but we will be changing it so that you first select a species, and then the list shows the different planets. Were tweaking the interface right now, so some things might look a bit different as the next couple of weeks pass.
When you have decided which slaves to sell, they will be put on the market. The price of slaves is 500 the cost affected by traits. The traits that make them good slaves drives the price up, while things that make them bad slaves drives the price down. Many traits will not affect the cost of a slave.
To buy a slave, you select a destination planet and then simply click the buy button. This will complete the transaction and move the pop to your selected planet.
We are considering adding a simple bidding process as an additional step, but at this time we cannot promise that we will have time to add it before the release of MegaCorp.
Unity Ambitions (FREE)
We are now making this feature a free feature because we felt it works better that way. We want to make sure that Unity is always useful.
Mandates (FREE)
We have reworked and added a bunch of new mandates for democratic empires. They usually go along the lines of building more districts, building more stations to gather resource, to increasing monthly income etc.
That is what we have for this week. Next week well return with a Dev Diary about what the community can expect in terms of Modding capabilities.
Dont forget to tune into Twitch for the Dev Clash at 15:00 CET on https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive, starting with a special video showcase, so you can see us whack at each other with our new pointy sticks!
[ 2018-11-15 12:15:34 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Today were back for this weeks installment of the Stellaris Dev Diary!
Now for the standard reminder that were not yet ready to reveal when MegaCorp will be released, and that screenshots may contain placeholder art, interfaces and non-final numbers. That said, youre now free to begin the honored tradition of ignoring that and start arguing about any numbers posted or asking for a release date.
Anyway, lets begin! Today we will be covering The Caravaneers, another cool feature in MegaCorp.
The Basics
The Caravaneers are space-based traders who send out fleets across the galaxy to offers you great deals! The best deals! There are three different Caravaneer fleets who set out from their coalition base in Chors Compass.
The Fleets
Like mentioned earlier, there are three new fleets of traders roving the galaxy, known as Racket Industrial Enterprise, the Numistic Order, and the Vengralian Trium.
They travel across the galaxy, and when they show up in your space they will offer you lucrative deals. Each fleet has their own set of specialized deals and may ask for different things in return for what they are offering.
The Caravaneer Coalition Base
For those who seek to enjoy some quality pastime, a visit to the caravaneer base is surely worth a visit! The caravaneers have some great deals on offer only Energy Credits are accepted for being exchanged for the exciting CaravanCoinz! (Your primitive , $, won't be accepted here!)
CaravanCoinz allows you partake in some excellent games of chance, or to buy sealed boxes of loot. Who knows, maybe you will be lucky enough to find the most glorious and precious thing known in the galaxy The Galatron.
Either way, a visit to the caravansary coalition base is not something youll regret!
Wow, so many great deals to look forwards to!
That is it for this week, folks! Next week we will be back with another exciting topic - namely the Slave Market (and some additional minor stuff)!
Also don't forget to tune into Twitch at 15:00 CET for the third session of the Stellaris Dev Clash.
[ 2018-11-08 14:10:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
On this stellar day you will be able to read another of our dev diaries about the upcoming expansion - MegaCorp.
Like always I have to mention that were not yet ready to reveal when MegaCorp is due to being released, and that this article may contain placeholder art, interfaces and non-final numbers.
For this dev diary we will be exploring some of the new cool features in the MegaCorp expansion namely Ecumenopolises and new Megastructures.
Ecumenopolis
Thus shall we make a world of the city, and a city of the world.
The city planet is here. To create a Ecumenopolis, you first need to unlock the associated Ascension Perk. The ascension perk is only available for non-gestalt empires, and requires the new Anti-Gravity Engineering technology.
Once you have the ascension perk, a decision will appear on your colonized planets. To be able to enact the decision, you need your planet to be entirely filled with only City Districts, in addition to the cost.
Ecumenolopises replace the regular districts with special districts available only to the ecumenopolis. These districts are Residential Arcology, Foundry Arcology, Industrial Arcology and Leisure Arcology. These districts are more powerful and provide a lot more jobs than regular districts. Additionally, Ecumenopolisis provide a bonus to pop growth and resource production for all jobs on the planet.
The Arcology Project is a must for anyone wishing to build a truly "tall" planet.
Megastructures
MegaCorp is releasing with 4 new Megastructures:
- Matter Decompressor
- Strategic Coordination Center
- Mega Art Installation
- Interstellar Assembly
Megastructures have also received a balance pass to fit the new economy, and thus they now cost alloys to build instead of minerals. Matter Decompressor
The Matter Decompressor works similar to the dyson sphere, but using technology far too complex to try to explain here, it extracts minerals instead of energy. It has 4 levels which provide: Minerals: 250/500/750/1000 Strategic Coordination Center
The armored hull of the Strategic Coordination Center houses the cream of our military command, who devote their time to strategy and planning in this state-of-the-art facility. It has 3 levels and provide the following effects: Naval Capacity: 75/150/225 Starbase Capacity: 5/10/15 Defense Platforms: 8/16/24 Sublight Speed: 5%/10%/15% Mega Art Installation
An artistic beacon on a stellar scale, this installation inspires and represents the spirit of its creators. The Mega Art Installation also has 3 levels, but with the following effects: Unity: 100/200/300 Amenities: 5%/10%/15% Interstellar Assembly
A meeting place for galactic powers, increasing immigration attraction and global opinion of us. The Interstellar Assembly has 4 levels with the following effects: Immigration Pull: 25%/50%/75%/100% Other empire's opinion: 10/20/30/50
[ 2018-11-01 17:22:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Every Thursday at 15:00 CET, tune into the Stellaris Dev Clash!
We're kicking off Week 2 of the Dev Clash right now, with our developers taking on the roles of their very own empires. Come and follow the narrative and get an exclusive look on the lastest MegaCorp internal build.
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive
Mixer: https://mixer.com/paradoxinteractive
[ 2018-11-01 14:08:04 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today marks the first dev diary about MegaCorp, the major expansion accompanying the 2.2 'Le Guin update', and the topic is the titular feature of MegaCorp: MegaCorporations. As said before, screenshots will contain placeholder art, prototype interfaces and non-final numbers.
MegaCorporations
A MegaCorporation is a type of empire that uses the new 'Corporate' authority added in MegaCorp. It is an interstellar empire that is structured like a business, and is focused on trade, building tall and generating large amounts of Energy Credits. Unlike the other two new authorities added in Utopia and Synthetic Dawn, the Corporate authority does not have a special ethic, but rather can support any combination of the regular empire ethics - you can play your MegaCorp as an authoritarian spiritualist corporation with indentured workers, or an egalitarian co-op that looks after the welfare of its citizens. Regardless of your ethics though, the Corporate authority has the Oligarchic election format, with a new leader elected every 20 years from a pre-selected pool of candidates.
The Corporate authority comes with its own special set of civics and a number of advantages and drawbacks. MegaCorps get a higher administrative cap (how large your empire can grow without suffering penalties such as tech and unity cost increases), but take double the penalty that normal empires do from being above said cap. This means that MegaCorps are ill-suited to controlling large swathes of space directly, and should focus on claiming fewer, better quality systems and planets. MegaCorps also have special variants of the Administrator and Culture Worker jobs called 'Executive' and 'Manager' respectively, that both produce trade value in addition to their other effects.
The Corporate authority fully replaces the old 'Corporate Dominion' civic for those who have the MegaCorp expansion, but Corporate Dominion is still available as a civic pick if you do not have MegaCorp.
Branch Offices
To compensate for their deficiencies when it comes to controlling territory directly, MegaCorps have the ability to construct Branch Offices on the planets of other empires. A Branch Office is a separate part of the planet screen that is managed by the controlling MegaCorp, where said MegaCorp can construct special Corporate Buildings. Branch Offices can normally only be established on the planets of regular (non-Gestalt, non-Corporate) empires that the MegaCorp has signed a Commercial Pact with. Commercial Pacts are trade agreements signed between two non-Gestalt empires that allow each empire to gain income relative to the size of the other empires' collected trade value, and is a part of the free Le Guin update. For MegaCorps, however, they additionally open for the MegaCorp to establish Branch Offices by paying a fixed sum of Energy Credits.
Branch Offices generate income for the owning MegaCorp based on the amount of trade value present on the planet, and so are best constructed on planets with a large number of Pops. Additionally, for every 25 pops on the planet the MegaCorp can build one Corporate Building, up to a maximum of four. Corporate Buildings are typically mutually beneficial, providing the Corp with some sort of modifier (such as Naval Capacity) or production of a resource (such as Alloys), and giving the planet owner some sort of modifier (such as Amenities) or an increased number of jobs. Many Corporate Buildings also incrase trade value, which benefits both the owner of the planet and the MegaCorp. As a general rule however, the MegaCorp will always benefit more than the owner of the planet.
While Branch Offices require a Commercial Pact to be established, cancelling the Commercial Pact does not automatically close them down - once a MegaCorp is established on your planets, it's not that easy to get rid of! Instead, any empire with a planet where a MegaCorp has an 'unlicensed' (no active Commercial Pact) Branch Office will get the 'Expropriation' Casus Belli on the Corp, which if pressed successfully in war shuts down all Branch Offices on that empire's worlds, with the attacker gaining a sum of Energy Credits for each office shut down. However, one should be careful not to declare an Expropriation war they might lose - if the MegaCorp forces surrender on the attacker, the attacker is forced to become a Subsidiary of the MegaCorp (see below for details). It is not possible for a MegaCorp to establish a Branch Office on the planet of an empire they are at war or have an active truce with.
Subsidiaries
Subsidiaries are a special kind of subject available only to MegaCorps, and replacing all the other normal forms of subject (Vassal, Tributary, Protectorate) for them. Subsidiaries have some diplomatic independence, and can expand into new systems and wage war among themselves, but are required to join the MegaCorp in their wars and pay 25% of their energy credit income to their Corporate overlords. Subsidiaries can not be integrated.
In addition to their more straightforward 'regular' civics, MegaCorps also have two gameplay-changing Civics, Criminal Heritage and Gospel of the Masses:
Criminal Heritage
Criminal Heritage has no ethics requirements but cannot be added or removed once the game has begun. It turns the MegaCorp into a criminal syndicate that cannot enter into Commercial Pacts, but does not need the permission of other empires to establish Branch Offices on their planets. The income of their Branch Offices scales to the level of crime on the planet, with a higher level of Crime providing more income, and they have their own set of Corporate Buildings that generally increase crime on the planet in addition to their other effects. Criminal Corporate Buildings are not entirely negative for the owner of the planet, however, especially if that owner has opted to co-exist with criminal elements on the planet. It is also possible to counteract Criminal Syndicates by heavy use of law enforcement, as a low level of crime on the planet will both cut into the income of the Crime Syndicate and makes it possible for an event to fire where law enforcement shuts down the criminal Branch Office on the planet and blocks any further such offices from being built for a time.
Gospel of the Masses
Gospel of the Masses requires spiritualist ethics and can be freely added and removed after the start of the game. It turns the MegaCorp into a MegaChurch that gains a large boost to spiritualist ethics attraction and which gains economic benefits from spiritualist pops on their planets and branch office planets in the form of increased trade, representing tithing and a general cult of consumerism and spending. They can build a special Temple of Prosperity building on their branch office planets which boosts Spiritualist attraction, resulting in more spiritualist pops and economic benefit to both the MegaChurch and the owner of the planet, though an empire that does not wish its pops to start turning Spiritualist may want to consider carefully before allowing the MegaChurches to gain a foothold on their planets... assuming they have a choice in the matter, as Gospel of the Masses can be combined freely with the Criminal Heritage civic.
That's all for today! Next week we're going to continue talking about the MegaCorp expansion, on the topic of Ecumenopolises and new Megastructures.
[ 2018-10-25 11:41:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
Stellaris: MegaCorp introduces a revolutionary new way to conduct business on a galactic scale by seamlessly synergizing new markets and city planets with state-of-the-art citizen solutions and more marketable human capital. Alongside a host of free updates coming to Stellaris, the new MegaCorp DLC will include:
- Corporate Culture: Chief Executive Officers of a MegaCorp can conduct business on a galaxy-wide scale with a host of new civics. By building Branch Offices on planets within empires they have trade agreements with, the MegaCorp can add a portion of the planets Trade Value to their own network. Using the new Corporate Authority, construct an economic powerhouse and dominate galactic trade - for a brighter future.
- City World: With Ecumenopolis, players can increase the population density of core worlds to truly epic proportions, eventually creating a planet-spanning megacity.
- Caravaneer Fleets: Keep an eye out for the Caravaneers, nomadic interstellar wheelers-and-dealers who stay aloof from galactic politics, and always have a bargain up their sleeve. Expect surprises when these master traders wander through your space or when you visit their home systems.
- More Megastructures: Budget has been approved for your own glorious Matter Decompressor, Mega-Art Installation or Strategic Coordination Center to acquire new scaling capabilities for your megalopolis.
- Galactic Slave Market: Buy and sell labor on an industrial scale, set them free or keep them as livestock. The choice is yours!
- VIP Status Comes with its Perks: Keep your economy competitive in a cutthroat galaxy with additional Ascension perks.
[ 2018-10-24 14:06:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we're going to continue talking about the 2.2 'Le Guin' update, on the topic of new technologies that we have added in the update. As said before, screenshots will contain placeholder art and interfaces and non-final numbers.
New Economic Techs
As part of the economic system and planetary management changing, we also had to deal with how the various technologies governing resources and the economy would change. Previously, new economic technologies would usually unlock building upgrades, leading to a spree of upgrade-clicking across your planets when your empire got access to a new level of mining technology or similar. As one of the stated goals of the planetary rework was to remove unnecessary micromanagement, we decided to split resource technologies into two types: Raw Resource Technologies, affecting jobs that produce basic resources such as Minerals, Food and Energy and Advanced Resource Technologies, affecting jobs that produce advanced resources such as Consumer Goods and Alloys.
Typically, Raw Resource Technologies provide an instant and straightforward bonus to production, such as a bonus to mineral output from Miners, while Advanced Resource Technologies offer upgrades to buildings such as Foundries into more efficient versions that provide more of that particular type of resource production job. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule (for example, buildings like Mineral Purification Plants that improve planet-wide mineral yields) but as a general rule it holds true. Also, we are aware that some people consider straight bonus technologies to be boring, but it would both be unfeasible and entirely undesirable for all of the hundreds of technologies that you can research in Stellaris to require active engagement on the part of the player - we'd simply end up with a whole lot more of the same kind of tedious chore that was the old building upgrade system.
We've added several new technologies for Mining and Research stations that increase their efficiency, so space-based resource extraction now increases with time and technology just as planet-based resource extraction does. There's also a number of new technologies related to rare resources such as Exotic Gases to either be extracted from natural deposits, or synthetically created in the event your natural deposits are insufficient for your needs.
Specialized Planet Technologies
Of course, not all the new technologies are related to resources. One of the advantages of the new planetary management system is that it allows us to create planets that are truly different from each other, and one of the applications of this potential will be technologies that allow you to designate a highly specialized role for a planet. Currently, there are two specialized planet technologies planned for Le Guin, Penal Colonies and Resort Worlds, each of which unlocks a decision that allows you to transform a newly colonized planet into a Penal Colony or a Resort World, respectively. At time of writing, you can only have one of each of these in your empire at a time, though this may change before release.
- Penal Colonies are planets where the other colonies in your empire can dump their criminal elements. Penal Colonies have vastly increased crime, but get an increase to immigration pull and also reduce crime on all your other planets. You can only make a planet a Penal Colony while it still in the newly colonized stage (ie: before upgrading the capital at least once). The planet must also be at least size 15 to qualify for being a Penal Colony.
- Resort Worlds are planets that have been set aside for tourism and leisure. Resort Worlds cannot have any districts built on them, and cannot support resource-producing buildings, but have maxed-out habitability for all pops (representing climate-controlled resorts) and increase amenities on all other colonies in the empire. Resort Worlds have their own special set of capital buildings that provide some housing. You can only make a planet into a Resort World if it has no districts and no buildings (besides the capital) constructed on it. The planet must also be at least size 15 to qualify for being a Resort World. Depending on what we have time for, it's possible that the 'quality' of the resort world will impact how much amenities it will give other planets (for example, a Gaia World would be an ideal resort).
Finally, in no specific order, here's an assortment of some (but far from all) of the new and changed technologies you can expect to see in Le Guin:
That's all for today! Next week we're going to be doing a dev diary, I just can't tell you what it's going to be about just yet. I'm pretty sure you're going to find reading it to be a net gain though, so stay tuned!
[ 2018-10-18 12:34:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Note: For a closer and more detailed look at the images for each of the Tradition options, check out the full thread at https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/1123421/
Hello everyone! Today you will be able to enjoy yet another Stellaris development diary, so that the drudgery of ordinary life gets momentarily replaced with excitement and joyous anticipation. As promised we will continue by detailing the features in the free 2.2 'Le Guin' update, and the topic will be the traditions and how they have been updated to work with our new game systems.
As per usual I of course have to reiterate that we're not yet ready to reveal anything about when 2.2 Le Guin is coming out, and that images may contain placeholder art, interfaces and non-final numbers.
Lets get started then! Updating the traditions was of course a necessity with the reworked economy, but a secondary objective was also to make the themes of each tradition tree be more well-defined. A tradition tree should stick to a theme or a playstyle, while also making sure the bonuses are as unique and fun as possible.
Expansion
The Expansion Traditions are themed around colonizing faster, growing a large population, and generally having a large empire.
Domination
The Domination Traditions are no longer focused around vassals, but are instead focused around reducing crime, better workers and slaves, and better rulers and governors.
Prosperity
The Prosperity Traditions are themed around improving planets and making specialists better.
Harmony
The Harmony Traditions are themed around sustainability, amenities, and stability.
Supremacy
The Supremacy Traditions are themed around domination of space. You will be able to field larger fleets and upgrade more starbases, while both of them will also be stronger.
Diplomacy
The Diplomacy Traditions are themed around federations, the galactic market and trade.
Discovery
The Discovery Traditions are themed around research and space exploration.
That covers most the traditions and how they have been updated to the new system. As you saw, some of them still have some work that needs to be done. They are also still prone to change and numbers are non-final and all that.
Tune in for a short stream today where Ill be talking some more about the traditions, and perhaps showing up some the more unique traditions for gestalt empires and purifiers.
Next week we will continue to mercilessly tease you about the upcoming update by showing some of the New Technologies, so make sure to mark it in your calendars!
[ 2018-10-11 16:01:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! We’re back yet again for another Stellaris development diary. Today we're going to continue talking about the 2.2 'Le Guin' update, and as promised last week, the topic will be Decisions and Planetary Bombardment.
And before we get right into it I of course have to reiterate that we're not yet ready to reveal anything about when 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ is coming out, and that screenshots may contain placeholder art, interfaces and non-final numbers.
Decisions
Planetary edicts are gone - long live Decisions! Decisions is a new feature that will replace the old Planetary Edicts. We’ve always wanted to do more with planetary edicts, and Decisions now allow us to do a lot more cool stuff. Some Decisions can be enacted on any planet (colonizable or not) in your empire’s borders. Decisions can cost any resource, and can also require a certain amount of time to pass before the effect will take place. For example, the Mastery of Nature Ascension Perk now allows you access to Land Clearance – the Decision (see image below). Some Decisions will have toggle options – like for example Martial Law. Enacting the Martial Law Decision allows you to later on Revoke Martial Law should you wish to do so.
The system will be fully moddable and we’re looking forwards to seeing what cool stuff the community can come up with.
Planetary Bombardment & Devastation
To better fit with the new systems, bombardment has been slightly reworked.
When a planet gets bombarded it will suffer Devastation. Devastation ticks up from 0 up to 100, and is a direct penalty to your planet’s housing, amenities, trade value and pop growth. Clearing Devastation will take time and cost resources, as one would expect.
Fleets, as you know, have different Bombardment Stances – each with its own effect on how fast Devastation ticks up and how large chance there is for a Pop to be killed during bombardment. The higher the Devastation is on a planet, the higher the chance is for a Pop to be killed. When a building slot becomes invalid due to no longer having the amount of Pops required for it to operate, the building occupying it will become Ruined. A Ruined building may be repaired once the requirements of the building slot are once again met.
For those concerned that Devastation is too punishing, rest assured that we will be looking into that. Recovering from Devastation should never feel like an impossible task.
Next week our we will continue covering the features of the 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ update with the topic of Tradition rework. Because this week’s dev diary is a bit shorter, I’ll leave a teaser for next week. Enjoy!
[ 2018-10-04 12:32:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
This new version of PDX Multiplayer is now ready for testing, with huge improvements to connectivity and stability, as well as expanded in-game features to help you connect with friends and play together regardless of which platform the game was purchased from! Before we go fully live with it, we want to offer it to interested parties as an OPT-IN BETA PATCH.
This will help us expose the system to greater stress and find issues before full release. We're putting this optional beta out on Steam right now, but we're not asking you to help us test it for nothing: 2.1.4 also includes the debut of the much-requested STELLARIS MULTIPLAYER OBSERVER MODE.
We're happy to finally have observer features available like in other PDS games, to allow you to spy on your friend's MP in the most benign or horrible ways you can imagine!
See below for the full patch notes.
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.1.4 #########################
#################################################################
###################
# Features
###################
* Added observer mode to multiplayer, with numerous observer-only events to keep track of what's happening in the whole galaxy
* Added a new multiplayer system to allow cross-play across all supported platforms
* Added tons of empire info to hotjoin menu
* In MP, added a player map mode that displays player name instead of empire name on the map, and greys out AI empires
* Added filter check box for non-player controlled empires in galaxy/contacts view
###################
# Balance
###################
* Removed game rule restrictions for making claims when you have a Colossus
###################
# UI
###################
* Added "-observe" command line argument to start directly in observer mode
###################
# Modding
###################
* You can now script the size and distances for the "stacks" of orbital ships around planet: PLANET_ORBIT_STACK_SIZE and PLANET_ORBIT_STACK_DISTANCE in 00_defines.txt
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Added a bunch of missing text strings
* Fixed an issue where the number of fleets in orbit around a stellar body was capped, leading to hilarious results like not being able to queue movement orders there, because parking sucks in this town
* Fixed a bug where lacking a suitable planet to terraform in to a Gaia world, the nanites would terraform the star instead
* Fixed advanced start AI empires lacking additional colonies on game start
* Fixed an OOS related to ship design upgrades
* Properly reset the retrofit list so it can rebuild correctly when switching ship design in fleet manager
* Fixed more things that could lead to multiplayer OOS
Please note this is an opt-in patch. You have to choose to activate it.
Go to: Steam Library -> Right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas tab -> choose "2.1.4_beta"
There it is, folks! Give the new MP and observer mode a try, play with your friends across all PC distribution platforms, send us the issues you find, and we'll work together to produce the best possible full release version.
Are you ready for the Stellaris Dev Clash?
[ 2018-10-01 13:34:04 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we're going to continue talking about the 2.2 'Le Guin' update, on the topic of Trade Value and Trade Routes. As said before, we're not yet ready to reveal anything about when Le Guin is coming out, only that it's a long time away and we have many more topics to cover before then. Also as said before, screenshots will contain placeholder art and interfaces and non-final numbers.
Trade Value
Trade Value is a new value that's being added in the Le Guin update for non-Gestalt empires, representing the civilian and private-sector economies of these empires. All Pops generate a small amount of Trade Value based on their living standards, with higher living standard Pops generating more trade value, and is also produced by a number of different jobs such as Clerks and Merchants. Additionally, Trade Value can be found as deposits in space, representing various resources that don't have a direct industrial application but might still be desirable to your population (for a real-life example, think of things like as precious stones used in jewelry). Trade Value has no inherent purpose, but can be turned into other resources by being exploited, representing taxation and tariffs imposed on the civilian economy by an empire that has the necessary infrastructure in place to benefit from it.
In order for Trade Value to count as exploited, it has to fulfill two conditions:
1) There must be an upgraded Starbase in range from the system to collect the Trade Value. By default, upgraded Starbases can only collect inside their own system, but their collection range can be extended by constructing additional Trade Hub modules, with each module extending the collection range by a single system up to a maximum of 6 hyperlane jumps away. You do not need to build an orbital station to collect trade value from planets - this is done automatically if it is in range of a collecting Starbase.
2) Once collected, Trade Value needs to be sent to your capital system. This will be done automatically if the Starbase collecting is located in said capital system, but otherwise the Starbase must be connected to the capital through a Trade Route (more on that below).
Trade Value that is successfully exploited will be converted into other resources (currently, trade value is turned into energy credits at a 1:1 conversion rate, but which exact resources it becomes is fully scriptable and may differ depending on your empire type) and added to your monthly income.
Trade Routes
Trade Routes are paths are that used to connect remote Starbases to your capital in order to exploit the trade value collected there. Each upgraded Starbase can support a single Trade Route by connecting to another Starbase, which is where the first Starbase will send all of its collected trade value. For example, an empire might have a remote Starbase (we'll call it starbase A), which is sending trade value to another Starbase closer to the capital (starbase B), which in turn sends on both its collected trade and all trade sent to it by starbase A on to the capital. The player has full control over which Starbase sends its value where, and can redraw routes, though there may be an efficiency loss on a newly drawn route for a time.
This means that if starbase A collects a value of 10 from the systems around it, and starbase B collects 15, 10 value will be sent from A to B and all 25 combined value is then sent on to C (the capital) and is successfully exploited. Any trade value that fails to reach the capital, either because of lack of collection, lack of a route, or piracy (more on that below) is wasted - the empire gets no benefits from it - so it'll be especially important to ensure any populous colonies that are generating a lot of trade value are properly connected via trade routes to your capital.
Trades routes will have a special map filter showing routes, protection and piracy, and is also planned to be visualized inside the systems, but more on that later.
Piracy and Trade Defense
Of course, all that lucrative merchandise being moved through space won't exactly go unnoticed by the less savory elements of your empire. Over time, piracy will begin to accumulate along trade routes, especially routes with a high degree of trade value moving through them. For each system with piracy that the trade route passes through, a certain amount of the trade value will be lost. To combat piracy, an empire can make use of a combination of Starbases and fleet Patrols. All upgraded Starbases will have a trade protection value, that is essentially a minimum amount of trade value that will always make it through any system under their protection, regardless of the level of piracy (representing heavily escorted merchant convoys). By default, this trade protection is only for the system they are located in, but can be extended to additional systems by building defensive modules such as Hangar Bays.
Additionally, any military fleet can be given orders to patrol a route between two Starbases to actively eliminate pirates and reduce the amount of piracy in the systems. The old system of spawning pirate ships in empty systems adjacent to your empire will also change - instead, pirate fleets may spawn in systems where a large amount of trade value is being lost to pirates. Overall, pirate fleets is something you will experience less often and can actively work to prevent, but will be more of an actual threat when they do spawn. We will most likely keep some sort of piracy for having a sprawling empire with a lot of unprotected connections, possibly by simply raising the amount of piracy experienced along your trade routes, or some sort of efficiency penalty. We may also have a system similar to the old pirates for Gestalts, since they do not have access to Trade Value or Trade Routes.
(Yes, we know the grammar/spelling is wrong, no need to point it out)
That's all for today! Next week we're continuing to talk about the Le Guin update, on the topic of Decisions and Planetary Bombardment
[ 2018-09-27 12:39:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
Previously you were able to revert back to earlier versions of Paradox Development Studios (PDS) games at will on Steam. These specific versions predate the enactment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) - hence they are not compliant with the new policy.
In order to continue our endeavor to reach full GDPR compliance, we have designed a new system regarding the access to earlier versions of PDS titles: from the 1st of October 2018 onward all previous versions of PDS titles will be locked under a Steam password.
After 1st October, you will need to log into the Paradox Plaza website with your Paradox Account to access the codes for previous branches of each game that you own. This will, however, require you to link your Steam account to your Paradox Account. In an effort to comply with the GDPR, this is something we need to put behind the Paradox logins as it requires agreement to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use to adhere to the GDPR guidelines.
To get the codes for previous versions:
- Go to https://accounts.paradoxplaza.com/games and log in (or create) your Paradox Account.
- You will have to link your Steam and Paradox accounts to see your games - where your codes will be listed.
- To link your Steam and Paradox Accounts: simply go to the Settings tab. Under Steam account click connect (you will then be redirected to Steam to confirm your action).
- With that done the Games tab on Paradox Plaza will show the list of codes needed to revert to previous versions.
- See below to revert to older versions under passlock.
- Go to your Steam Library and select your game of choice.
- Right-click and select Properties.
- Under the “BETAS” tab.
- Enter the relevant code retrieved from Paradox Plaza and click “CHECK CODE”.
- Select the version you wish to play and wait for Steam launcher to finalize the switch.
- If the previous step fails, exit the game, right click properties, local files, Verify integrity of game files and wait for all files to be verified.
[ 2018-09-24 14:58:35 CET ] [ Original post ]
Sector Rework
Sectors have always been a bit of a controversial feature. Even if you disregard arguments about the general level of competence of the sector AI, the fact that sectors effectively force the player to cede control over all but a few of their planets has never gone down well with certain players. In truth, the decision to force players to give planets to sectors was very much a result of the old tile system - because of the sheer amount of micromanagement that was involved in managing a large number of planets, it was decided that automation was necessary, and also to make that automation mandatory (barring mods) to effectively force players to not make themselves miserable by micromanaging the tiles of a hundred different worlds. With the planetary rework in the Le Guin update, we no longer feel that this mandatory automation is needed any longer, and so we've decided to rework the sector system entirely.
Instead of being autonomous mini-economies, sectors are now administrative units in your empire, with their layout decided by galactic geography, with each sector corresponding to a cluster of stars in the galaxy. Sectors are automatically created when you colonize a planet in a previously uncolonized cluster, and your 'core sector' is simply the cluster in which your capital is located. All interfaces that are relevant to sectors and planets (such as the outliner) are now organized by collapsible sector entries, allowing for better overview and management of a large number of planets. As before, each sector can have a governor assigned to it, but sectors now automatically send all of their production to the empire stockpile instead of having their own fully realized economy. However, since we still want players to be able to offload some of the planetary management when controlling a large number of worlds, it is still possible to allocate resources to a Governor, who will use those resources to develop the planets under their control. This of course means that there is no longer any core sector limit, and anything that previously used to give a bonus to core sector planets has either been changed into a different bonus or removed altogether.
(Note: Image is highly WIP and has missing elements)
Faction Happiness Rework
Factions are also changing in Le Guin, though not to nearly the same degree as sectors. Most of the core mechanics of factions will remain the same, but Faction Happiness is being changed into something we call Faction Approval, measuring how much a Faction approves of your empire's policies. Where previously Factions would only give influence when above a 60% happiness threshold, Factions now always give some influence, with the amount scaling linearly to their Approval, so a 10% Approval faction will give only 1/10th of the influence that a 100% Approval faction gives you (the amount they give also still scales to their share of power in your empire). Faction Approval is also no longer directly applied to Pop Happiness, but rather will affect the happiness of Pops belonging to that faction at different thresholds, with small boosts to happiness at higher levels of approval and increasingly severe penalties to happiness at low levels of approval (effectively swapping the influence threshold for various happiness thresholds).
This should mean that even small boosts to faction approval now directly translates into influence gain, and that factions almost always give *some* benefit, even if that benefit may be outweighed by the unhappiness and unrest they can cause. We're also hoping to have time to review the faction issues, tying them more directly to policies to make them easier to understand. For example, instead of demanding that all species have their rights manually set to Full Citizenship, the Xenophile faction might demand a certain empire-wide policy setting that forces the equal application of species rights across all species.
That's all for today! Next week we're continuing to talk about the Le Guin update, on the topic of Trade Value and Trade Routes.
[ 2018-09-20 11:42:41 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we're going to continue talking about the 2.2 'Le Guin' update, on the topic of the Galactic Market. As said before, we're not yet ready to reveal anything about when Le Guin is coming out, only that it's a long time away and we have many more topics to cover before then. Also as said before, screenshots will contain placeholder art and interfaces and non-final numbers.
The Market
The Market is a new interface accessible from your topbar, where you can buy and sell resources. Resources are bought and sold for Energy Credits, with their prices dependent on a variety of factors such as whether the Galactic Market is founded, supply and demand, and possibly also from various events. On top of the actual price of the resource, there is also a Market Fee which has to be paid for any sale or purchase, equal to 30% of the purchase value. This Market Fee is there so that it will not be possible to make money by purchasing and then immediately re-selling resources at a higher price. Resources can be purchased either in bulk, or by setting up a monthly trade, where you for example specify that you want to sell 20 food and buy 10 minerals per month, and can set a minimum sale/maximum purchase price, if you want to ensure that major fluctuations in price do not disrupt your empire's economy too much.
Internal vs Galactic Market
At the start of the game, empires only have access to the Internal Market, which represents trading with actors inside your empire such as corporations and local governments, or in the case of Gestalt Consciousness empires, resource reprocessing. The prices on the Internal Market are set to always be higher than those on the Galactic Market, so relying too heavily on trading will be disadvantageous in the first few decades of the game. Some empires, such as Devouring Swarms, may only ever have access to the Internal Market (this is something we're still testing and balancing) and so might get better prices there. Once the game has progressed to the point where at least one empire knows about at least 50% of the other empires in the galaxy, the Galactic Market will eventually be founded. One empire that meets the criteria is picked as Market Founder, and their capital system becomes the Market Capital, spawning a special station and map marker to denote it. From then on, any empire (barring possible restrictions for Devouring Swarms and the like) that knows of the Market Capital system has access to the Galactic Market and is able to trade on it. The controller of the Market Capital get a reduction in their Market Fee and increased trade value for their trade routes (more on that in a later DD).
Prices on the Galactic Market are always lower than those on the internal market, though the actual prices will fluctuate based on supply and demand - every time Minerals are sold on the market, prices will drop, and conversely, every time they are bought prices will increase. The purchases and sales you make on the Galactic Market do not just affect your own prices but also those of other empires, so that it is possible to for example massively drive up Food prices by purchasing a huge amount of food, damaging the economy of any empire that is reliant on importing it. It isn't actually possible for a resource to 'run out' on the Market, so you will always be able to purchase critically needed resources, though the cost of doing so may be extremely prohibitive. However, some resources (such as Dark Matter and other rare strategic resources) will not be available until they are actually accessible to empires on the market in large enough quantities, and are not available on the Internal Market at all. The aim of the Galactic Market is to make it so that it is actually a viable strategy to specialize your economy, importing resources that are difficulty for your empire to produce and exporting resources that you can produce easily in large quantities.
Trader Enclaves
Since the Market has much of the same functionality as the Trader Enclaves from Leviathans, we're also changing said Enclaves for those with the Leviathans Story Pack. Instead of trading food, energy and minerals, Trader Enclaves will sell rare resources (Rare Crystals, Volatile Motes and Exotic Gases) in the form of monthly trade deals offered at advantageous prices. Each Trader Enclave will offer only one of these resources. Additionally, once you reach 50+ opinion, Trader Enclaves will sell special Governor-type leaders with unique, trade and commerce related traits. Finally, if you control the home system of a Trader Enclave AND have 50+ opinion with them, you will be able to build a special Starbase building in that system which lowers your Market Fee, allowing for cheaper trading on the Galactic Market.
Finally, just a note to say that we're ignoring the Slave Market tab of the Market screenshots on purpose - this is something that will be covered in a later Dev Diary.
That's all for today! Next week we're continuing to talk about the Le Guin update, on the topic of Sectors and Factions.
[ 2018-09-13 11:42:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
Planet Stability
In the Le Guin update, Planetary Stability is the most important factor for determining the productivity and prosperity of your planets. Planetary Stability represents the overall political stability on a planet, and is influenced by a large number of factors such as Pop Happiness, Housing, Amenities, Crime and so on. Planetary Stability ranges from 0 to 100% and has a base level of 50%. A Planet that has at least 50% stability will gain bonuses to resource production and immigration pull, while a planet that drops below 50% stability will experience penalties to resource production and increased emigration push. Below 40% stability, unrest events such as hunger strikes, terrorist bombings and so on may start to occur, which can further lower stability down below the threshold for an armed revolt to start. We're still looking into which parts of the previous Unrest events we want to keep, replace, or convert to the new Crime system, so the exact way in which unrest events and armed revolts will work is not fully decided at this point, and we'll likely cover it more in detail in a future dev diary.
Pop Happiness and Approval Rating
Pop Happiness is a major factor in determining planet stability. Each Planet that contains at least one Pop with free will has a Pop Approval Rating value that is the average happiness of the Pops, modified by their Political Power. Each Pop has a Political Power value that depends on their stratum and living conditions - for example, a Ruler Pop living in a Stratified Economy will have an immense degree of Political Power, and their happiness may be more important than that of even a dozen Worker Pops. However, even Pops with no political power at all can still drag down your Approval Rating, so a planet with a vast mass of angry slaves will need some Rulers to keep them in line. On the individual Pop level, Happiness no longer affects productivity, so to ensure your planets are productive you now only need make sure your Stability level is high, and whether you achieve that stability with a happy populace or ruling with an iron fist is up to your ethics, policies and general playstyle preferences. Individual Pop Happiness is not entirely without effect though, as the happiness of a Pop determines how likely it is to adopt your governing ethics, and also affects how much Crime it generates (see below for further details).
Amenities
As part of trying to consolidate systems relating to happiness we've added a new value called Planet Amenities. Amenities represents infrastructure, facilities and jobs dedicated to fulfilling the day-to-day needs of the population. In order to not suffer penalties, a planet needs at least as many Amenities as it has Infrastructure, and any Amenities above or below that number cause increased/decreased Pop Happiness, respectively. Capital Buildings and many Ruler jobs produce a base amount of Amenities and may be sufficient for a sparsely populated mining world, but urbanized planets will likely need to dedicate part of their infrastructure to Amenities-producing jobs such as Entertainers to keep the population happy. Many of the things that used to directly increase Happiness in the old Tile system (such as Domestic Servants or certain special buildings) now produce Amenities instead, and direct Happiness-buffing modifiers have been made rare, so keeping your entire population perfectly happy is now something that requires dedication and resources, rather than just a matter of throwing down a couple of buildings and calling it a day.
Crime
Something else that we wanted to achieve with the new system was to create the potential for social and political unrest without necessarily having it take the form of a direct penalty or revolt, especially on heavily populated worlds. Crime is a value generated by all virtually all Pops with free will, and can vary between 0 and 100% on a planet. Happy Pops produce less crime, while unhappy Pops produce more crime, but only Pops at a perfect 100% happiness produce no crime at all. Crime has no actual direct penalty, but instead may result in events such as smuggler rings or organized crime taking root on the planet. These events and conditions are generally detrimental, but may also open up certain benficial opportunities and decisions that would not be available on a planet with perfect law and order. Nonetheless, a very high level of Crime is generally something to be avoided, as crime can lower stability and also result in Pops leaving their ordinary jobs and moving into special Crime jobs that appear on the planet and which take resources away from your empire rather than producing them. To combat Crime, you can build buildings such as Precinct Districts that create crime-suppressing Enforcer jobs. In general, empires that rely on repression and inequality to keep their Pops in line will need to employ more Enforcers, but there will also be other ways to manage Crime, possibly including ways to integrate the criminal enterprises as a fixture in your society (the exact details on this is still very much something that's a work in progress).
That's all for today! Next week we'll continue with the final part of the Planetary Rework dev diaries, on the topic of Machine Empires, Hive Minds, Habitats and other mechanics that are changing alongside the Planetary Rework.
[ 2018-08-30 10:52:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today, we're going to start talking about the Planetary Rework coming in the 2.2 'Le Guin' update - the complete redesign of the planetary management system and replacement of planetary tiles. This is going to be a really big topic, so we're spreading it out across four dev diaries, with today's dev diary being about Deposits, Buildings and Districts. Please bear in mind that everything shown is in an early stage of development, and there will be rough-looking interfaces, placeholder art, non final numbers and all those things that people assume are final and complain about anyway no matter how many of these disclaimers we write! ;p
Planetary Rework
Before I start going into details on the actual rework, I just wanted to briefly talk about the reasons and goals that are behind this massive rework, and why we're removing tiles and building a new system instead of iterating on the existing systems. For me, getting away from the constraints of tiles has been my single most desired long-term goal for the game. It's not that I think the tile system is inherently a bad system - it works well to visualize your pops and buildings and for the early game it works well enough in giving the player some interesting economic management decisions. However, the tile system is also very constrictive, in a way I feel is detrimental to the very core concepts of Stellaris. The hard limitation of one pop and one building per tile, as well as the hard limitation of 25 tiles/pops/buildings to a planet, it severely limits the kind of societies and planets that we can present in the game.
Do we want to make city-planets, with enormous numbers of pops concentrated onto a single world? Not possible. Do we want to have a fully automated post-scarcity empire where robots do all the actual work? Can't be done without losing out on valuable building space. Sure, we could fundamentally alter the tile system in a such a way to allow these, by for example making it so each tile could support several sub-tiles with additional pops and buildings, but by doing this we will inevitably lose the easy visual presentation that makes the system attractive to begin with, and even then we would continue to be held back by the limit of one pop per building. In other words, we'd end up with something that superficially might resemble the old tile system but offers none of its main advantages and continues to be held back by most of its drawbacks.
When designing the new planetary management system we set out a number of design goals:
- The new system should be able to simulate a wide variety of different societies, to build on the roleplaying and diversity in play-throughs that is such a fundamental part of the Stellaris experience
- The new system needed to offer more interesting choices about how to develop your planets, while simultaneously reducing the amount of uninteresting micromanagement such as mass-upgrading buildings
- The new system should make your planets feel like places where Pops actually live their lives, as opposed to just being resource gathering hubs
- The new system had to be extremely moddable, to make it easier both for us and modders to create new types of empires and playstyles
(Note: All deposit pictures shown here are placeholders, there will be new art for them that isn't done yet) Not all Deposits affect Districts however - some (such as Crystalline Caverns or Betharian Fields) are rare deposits that allow for the construction of special Buildings (more on this below) on the planet, while others yet may simply provide a passive benefit to the planet, such as a spectacularly beautiful wilderness area that increases happiness for Pops living on the planet. Deposits can have Deposit Blockers that work in a similar way to the Tile Blockers of old, cancelling out the benefits of the Deposit until the Blocker is removed through the expenditure of time and resources. A planet can have multiples of the same Deposit, and there is no hard limit to the number of Deposits that a planet can hold (though there is a cap to how many will be generated under normal circumstances). The types of Deposits that can show up on a planet is affected by the planet class, so where an Ocean World might get its Agriculture from Kelp Forests, an Arctic World would have Fungal Caverns instead.
(Note: All deposit pictures shown here are placeholders, there will be new art for them that isn't done yet) Districts Districts are at at the core of how planets are developed in the Le Guin update. Districts represent large areas of development on the planet dedicated towards housing or resource gathering. For most empires, there are four basic types of Districts: City Districts, Mining Districts, Generator Districts and Agriculture Districts. There are exceptions to this (such as Hive Minds having Hive Districts) but more on this in a later DD. The total number of districts you can build on a planet is equal to its size, so a size 16 planet can support 16 districts in any combination of the types available to you. Additionally, the resource-producing districts (Mining, Generator and Agriculture) are further constrained by the Deposits on the planet, so a planet might only be able to support a maximum of 8 Mining Districts due to there simply not being any further opportunities for mining on the planet. City Districts are never limited by the deposits on the planet, so you can choose to forego a planet's natural resources and blanket it entirely in urban development if you so choose. The effects of each District is as follows:
- City District: Provides a large amount of Housing for Pops, Infrastructure for Buildings and Clerk Jobs that produce Trade Value and Luxury Goods
- Mining District: Provides a small amount of Housing/Infrastructure and Mining Jobs that produce Minerals
- Agriculture District: Provides a small amount of Housing/Infrastructure and Farming Jobs that produce Food
- Generator District: Provides a small amount of Housing/Infrastructure and Technician Jobs that produce Energy Credits
Buildings In the Le Guin update, Buildings are specialized Facilities that provide a variety of Jobs and Resources that are not suitable to large-scale resource gathering. For example, instead of having your scientists working in a Physics Lab on a Physics Deposit (whatever that is supposed to be...) you now instead construct a Research Labs building (representing not a single laboratory but rather an allocation of resources towards the sciences across the planet) which provides a number of Pop Researcher Jobs that conduct research for your empire. Buildings are limited by the planet's Infrastructure, with one building 'slot' being unlocked for each 10 Infrastructure on the planet. Some Buildings are also limited in the number you can build on a planet, while others can be built in multiples (for example, a planet can only support a single Autotchton Monument, while you can have as many Alloy Foundries as the slots allow). Buildings can still be upgraded to more advanced versions, but generally there will be far fewer upgrades to do and those upgrades will often require an investment of rare and expensive resources, so it's more of an active choice than something you simply have to click your way through after unlocking a tech.
Infrastructure comes primarily from constructing Districts, with City Districts giving much more Infrastructure than resource gathering districts do (6 as opposed to 2 in the current internal build, though non final numbers and all that). In addition to unlocking additional Building slots, a higher Infrastructure level also makes some Buildings more efficient, as the number of jobs they provide is fully or partially determined by the planet's Infrastructure level. For example, in the current internal build, Research Labs and Alloy Foundries both have the number of jobs they provide determined by the infrastructure level, meaning that concentrating your research and manufacturing to your heavily urbanized planets is generally more efficient than trying to turn your agri-worlds into science hubs. In addition to Buildings that provide resource-producing Jobs, there is also a wide variety of buildings that provide for the material and social needs of your Pops, such as Luxury Housing for your upper class Pops, Entertainment Buildings to make your populace happy and Law Enforcement to quell unrest and crime. Densely populated planets tend to require more such buildings, as the need for Housing and Amenities scales upwards with Pops and Infrastructure.
Whew, that was a lot of words. Still, we're only just getting started on the Planetary Rework and next week we'll continue talking about it, on the topic of Stratas, Pop Jobs, Housing and Migration.
[ 2018-08-16 12:54:34 CET ] [ Original post ]
Happy Thursday, everyone! We've added some necessary hot fixes to the previous patch notes! The version number will not change but the checksum will now be 5bcb:
- Fixed end game crisis not expanding
- Modding: "fire once" events no longer report an error if there's an attempt to fire them multiple times (prevents error log spam)
[ 2018-08-16 11:19:49 CET ] [ Original post ]
After spending the summer in beta without introducing drastic new issues, version 2.1.2 is now the official live version of Stellaris. Below are the complete patch notes.
VERSION 2.1.2
Free Features
- Map modes now are able to show claims - diplomatic map mode shows claims of selected empire by default
- Added the Kuiper Belt to the Sol system
- Added several new event pictures
- Ctrl-F9 now also hides system lines and navigation arrows
- It is now possible to rename the currently selected faction in faction view by clicking its name
- Re-enabled pre-sapient discovery Anomalies for the AI
- Existing Horde fleets are now removed upon Great Khan's death and replaced by a fixed number of replacements
- AI empires are now more likely to find L-Cluster insights after 100 years have passed
- Increased levels of precursor anomalies across the board
- Balanced anomaly levels according to QA and player feedback
- Marauder empires are less likely to spawn close to an empire's starting system
- Rogue Servitors & Assimilators can now once again pick World Shaper perk
- Reduced frequency of terraforming candidates by about 50%
- Reduced min distance at which Fallen Empires can spawn from other empires
- Fixed some fallen empire tasks being able to target other fallen empires
- Only ships that are docked in a starbase with upkeep reduction will now show as having a green orbit icon on the outliner, other ships in orbit around something but not receiving an upkeep reduction will show as yellow
- It is now possible to set anomalies as should_ai_and_humans_use = yes which will allow them to be used by both AI and human empires (overrides should_ai_use)
- Added on_added_pop on action for when a pop is added to a planet
- Numerous OOS fixes to improve multiplayer stability
- Fixed issue where acquiring an L-Gate and the L-Gate activation tech out of order would cause the L-Gate special project to fail to appear
- Names for country designs are not duplicated anymore
- Marauder raiding fleets are now always deleted a year after they start to withdraw to prevent rare situations where they get stuck
- Added missing localization for Great Khan leader titles
- Fixed template manager displaying wrong military power
- Fixed event trigger preventing Rudimentary Robots chain from continuing once you colonize their planet
- Fixed Colossus Tech being reverse-engineerable from debris
- Federation requests between two empires belonging to the same species class should now present correct localisation
- Fixed Curator cost checks to avoid truncation problems
- The AI no longer considers fleets that are running away as support in their current endeavour
- Fixed the AI thinking unreachable systems are the closest systems
- Fixed Cloud Lightning being hidden and unavailable as a component
- Impossible Organism Nivlac Empire should no longer be placed on a Holy World or in a hostile system
- Fixed the bug where ships were losing health while merging
- Fixed Pacifist Defensive Wars Only demand to trigger properly
- Fixed issues with upgrading designs twice in the Template Manager
- Fixed issue where ship designer would not show the difference after researching new tech
- Fixed issue where players could change components on auto-generated designs
- Auto-upgrade is now considered as an update and can be saved
- Strategic Resources generated via events will now trigger the Strategic Resource discovery message
- It is no longer possible to construct event ships from starbases
- L-Cluster strategic resources will no longer appear on terraformed planets or Ring Worlds
- Fixed nonsensical requirement to have a free Leader slot in order to buy L-Gate Insight from the Curators
- Event text for opening the L-Cluster is now correct if only one L-Gate exists in the galaxy
- Fixed typo in Great Khan dialogue
- Limbobots can no longer be used to colonize worlds
- Limbo can only trigger once per game globally
- Fixed errors in Vechtar Zavonia event chain outcome
- Fixed on_entering_system event not being fired in your own systems. This fixes bugs like the shrines to the old gods not being completable
- Fixed non-sapient robots getting the wrong species rights in a Machine Empire
- Fixed certain opinion modifiers from distant stars events not going away over time
- Fixed defense platform cost not being correctly calculated
- Fixed instances of fleets getting stuck
- Fleets that cannot have their leader assigned or removed will now show this in the interface
- Resolved an error where Fanatic Purifier style empires could get an alien scientist from an anomaly
- Tweaked War in Heaven to generally have more AI empires picking sides among the Awakened Empires rather than staying neutral
[ 2018-08-07 17:26:18 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone,
We're happy to announce that we've now released the 2.1.2 opt-in patch with a couple of fixes listed in the patch notes below!
It's save game compatible with 2.1.1, as usual with minor updates :)
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.1.2 ###########################
#################################################################
###################
# Free Features
###################
* Map modes now are able to show claims
* Added the Kuiper Belt to the Sol system
* Added several new event pictures
* Ctrl-F9 now also hides system lines and navigation arrows
* It is now possible to rename the currently selected faction in faction view by clicking its name
###################
# Balance
###################
* Re-enabled pre-sapient discovery Anomalies for the AI
* Existing Horde fleets are now removed upon Great Khan's death and replaced by a fixed number of replacements
* AI empires are now more likely to find L-Cluster insights after 100 years have passed
* Increased levels of precursor anomalies across the board
* Balanced anomaly levels according to QA and player feedback
* Marauder empires are less likely to spawn close to an empire's starting system
* Rogue Servitors & Assimilators can now once again pick World Shaper perk
* Reduced frequency of terraforming candidates by about 50%
###################
# UI
###################
* Only ships that are docked in a starbase with upkeep reduction will now show as having a green orbit icon on the outliner, other ships in orbit around something but not receiving an upkeep reduction will show as yellow
###################
# Modding
###################
* It is now possible to set anomalies as should_ai_and_humans_use = yes which will allow them to be used by both AI and human empires (overrides should_ai_use)
* Added on_added_pop on action for when a pop is added to a planet
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed issue where acquiring an L-Gate and the L-Gate activation tech out of order would cause the L-Gate special project to fail to appear
* Names for country designs are not duplicated anymore
* Marauder raiding fleets are now always deleted a year after they start to withdraw to prevent rare situations where they get stuck
* Added missing localization for Great Khan leader titles
* Fixed template manager displaying wrong military power
* Fixed event trigger preventing Rudimentary Robots chain from continuing once you colonize their planet
* Fixed Colossus Tech being reverse-engineerable from debris
* Federation requests between two empires belonging to the same species class should now present correct localisation
* Fixed Curator cost checks to avoid truncation problems
* The AI no longer considers fleets that are running away as support in their current endeavour
* Fixed the AI thinking unreachable systems are the closest systems
* Fixed Cloud Lightning being hidden and unavailable as a component
* Impossible Organism Nivlac Empire should no longer be placed on a Holy World or in a hostile system
* Fixed the bug where ships were losing health while merging
* Fixed Pacifist Defensive Wars Only demand to trigger properly
* Fixed issues with upgrading designs twice in the Template Manager
* Fixed issue where ship designer would not show the difference after researching new tech
* Fixed issue where players could change components on auto-generated designs
* Auto-upgrade is now considered as an update and can be saved
* Strategic Resources generated via events will now trigger the Strategic Resource discovery message
* It is no longer possible to construct event ships from starbases
* L-Cluster strategic resources will no longer appear on terraformed planets or Ring Worlds
* Fixed nonsensical requirement to have a free Leader slot in order to buy L-Gate Insight from the Curators
* Event text for opening the L-Cluster is now correct if only one L-Gate exists in the galaxy
* Fixed typo in Great Khan dialogue
* Limbobots can no longer be used to colonize worlds
* Limbo can only trigger once per game globally
* Fixed errors in Vechtar Zavonia event chain outcome
* Fixed on_entering_system event not being fired in your own systems. This fixes bugs like the shrines to the old gods not being completable
* Fixed non-sapient robots getting the wrong species rights in a Machine Empire
* Fixed certain opinion modifiers from distant stars events not going away over time
* Fixed defense platform cost not being correctly calculated
* Fixed instances of fleets getting stuck
* Fleets that cannot have their leader assigned or removed will now show this in the interface
* Resolved an error where Fanatic Purifier style empires could get an alien scientist from an anomaly
* Tweaked War in Heaven to generally have more AI empires picking sides among the Awakened Empires rather than staying neutral
Test it and tell us what you think. Most of the team will be going on vacation shortly, so we'll leave this up over the Summer.
Please note this is an opt-in patch. You have to choose to activate it.
Steam library -> Right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas tab -> choose "2.1.2_beta"
[ 2018-06-28 10:39:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
New
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Now that we have officially released the 2.1.1 update, we are working on making another rolling beta patch that we expect to release to you guys sometime next week. This beta, with version number 2.1.2, will continue to focus on bug fixes, QOL features and improvements to performance/stability. We expect to keep the beta going through the summer and release it as an official update sometime after the team returns from vacations.
Claims in Diplomatic Mapmode
Something that's been highly requested by the community since 2.0 came out is the ability to see the claims of other empires on the galactic map. In 2.1.2, you will be able to see the claims of any empire you have communications with by going into diplomatic mapmode and selecting that empire, allowing you to easily get an overview of what systems they are interested in. Displaying claims is a scripted setting on a mapmode that modders will be able to add to any custom mapmodes they feel would benefit from it.
Creature/Fallen Empire Spawning
We're also spending some time tweaking the spawning radiuses of space creatures and fallen empires to try and ensure that they show up regularly even in densely populated galaxies. The spawning algorithm will still try to avoid boxing players in with Leviathans or hostile FEs, but hopefully there should be fewer instances of space creatures and Fallen Empires not showing up due to there being too many player empires on the map.
L-Cluster Improvements
As mentioned previously, we are still working on fleshing out the L-Cluster and adding more outcomes to it. We expect to get these improvements in at some point during the 2.1.2 rolling beta.
That's all for today! As July and vacation time is coming up, we're now going to go on a dev diary hiatus. There will likely be an update or two during this period to the 2.1.2 beta, but no regularly scheduled dev diaries. Dev diaries will return on August 9th, at which point we should be ready to start talking about what's coming next in terms of major updates and features. See you then!
[ 2018-06-21 10:34:08 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all, Jamor here.
After a good time in beta in which we were able to get confirmation that the L-Cluster related lag spikes were fixed, and no new critical issues introduced, I'm making 2.1.1 live now as the official version.
Spoiler: Full Patch Contents
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.1.1 ###########################
#################################################################
###################
# Free Features
###################
* Hyperlane density can now be changed to "full", which guarantees every possible hyperlane will exist
* You can now choose to start in a trinary or binary star system when creating your empire
* Experimental ETA feature put in for starship movement orders, telling you the approximate date of arrival
* Now possible to achieve partial victory in subjugation and liberation wars with occupied systems splitting off as a new subject or ally in the event of a status quo peace
* Put in greyscale versions of strategic resources icons, to indicate that you currently lack the technology to collect them
###################
# Balance
###################
* Increased power usage of torpedoes
* Reduced frequency of gaining L-Gate Insights from unrelated anomalies by 70%
* A technology must now be researched after gathering all L-Gate insights before you can start the project to open the gates
* Reduced HP of missiles across the board, making point defense more potent
* The Prosperity faction will now be happier if you have war policy set to Defensive Wars Only
* The Imperialist faction is now also OK with ideological wars, and will only be angry if policy is set to Defensive Wars Only
* Reduced the chance of a Marauder Great Khan dying from noncombat causes
* Rogue Servitors can now allow organics to colonize planets
* Increased AI weight for naval cap & command limit techs
* Increased base weight of terraforming techs
* Reduced Materialist opinion boost towards Machine empires
###################
# UI
###################
* New icon for the L-cluster
###################
# AI
###################
* AI will now a wait some time before changing AI priority if it recently changed priority
###################
# Performance
###################
* Cached tile resource production for faster performance
* More border calculations optimization
* Borders are now only updated if they need to be, reducing unnecessary operations
* Removed useless recalculation of borders when planet change owners
* Bypass distance cache improvements
* Ensured Starbases owner modifiers are calculated only once, and parallelized that bit
* Parallelizing AI strategy monthly recalc and reducing the number of system evaluated
* More caching of tile related data performance - fixes a performance bug with previous caching of tile related data
###################
# Modding
###################
* Moved scripted variables for buildings into the scripted variables file
* Saved Event Targets should now always persist through Special Projects
* Added is_event_design setting for event ship designs that should be blocked by fleet manager
* Improved performance of Global SavedEventTargets
* You can now define in a section template whether its components (turrets etc) should be drawn graphically or not
* Effects that take name (such as create_ship or set_name) can now extract name from scope, ie set_name = root will take the name from the root object (even if it's a different type of object, such as naming a ship after a leader)
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed a bug where guaranteed nearby colonizable worlds sometimes did not appear
* Fixed pop_modifier out of sync in MP
* Fixed several other OOS causes with convoluted causes
* Fixed several crashes with similarly arcane origin stories
* Added Distant Stars ownership icon for MP setup
* Fixed an OOS related to ship armor stats
* Fixed missing ambient sounds for certain star classes
* Fixed missing brain slug traits for scientists and admirals
* Fixed getting brain slugs and other non-robotic traits for event-spawned robotic leaders
* Fixed "Asteroid Collision" anomaly awarding the wrong deposit type
* Fixed "...and Hope?" achievement for opening the L-Cluster not being awarded
* Fixed missing text description for the L-Gate insight technology
* Missing word added in Phase Disruptor tech description
* Fixed other typos rendering the game literally unplayable
* Fixed some Horizon Signal-related building tooltips
* Improved janky Tiyanki death animations, giving rise to a desire for a new 1930's dance craze
* Fixed cases where you would sometimes not identify Leviathans after meeting them, this should also fix Curators not having anything to say about them
* Fixed The Gray Tempest event having 2 choices with identical outcomes, because it was painfully close to much of real life
* Gestalt consciousness can no longer pick liberation wars policy as it did nothing for them anyway
* Phaseshifting planet now has edge case handling if a nation completes the project before researching the anomaly
* Pacification of Space Amoebas or Crystals now turns them neutral instead of friendly because come on guy, you don't know me like that
* Fixed Fanatic Purifier, Devouring Swarm, and Determined Exterminator Empires suddenly becoming socially presentable when talking to the Curators about L-Gates
* Fixed instances where Empires created after initial L-Gate activation would be unable to use the L-Gates
* Fixed a text overflow issue in the Anomaly tracker
* Fixed "Bunker-Bot" anomaly not generating an L-Gate Insight
* Fixed a crash when the gateway type doesn't exist (affected certain mods)
* Fixed an OOS due to Experimental Subspace Navigation
* Added missing modifier string for all languages
* Marauder neighbor events can no longer trigger for empires that have no communications with them
* Properly calculate cached values when ships are created, meaning fleet power is now displayed correctly
* Fixed a bug where freshly created ships would not benefit immediately from bonus hull point effects
* Addressed a couple of edge cases that might cause improper Strategic Resource tech weights
* Added Go To buttons to a couple of Anomalies
* Fixed a cause of ship stats OOS. Some code was executed in unsafe order somehow when recalculating for hot join
* Scriptable localization error logging fix
* Asteroids can now glow
* Fixed L-Gates that were opened in 2.1.0 being unusable in 2.1.1
* Minor loc polish and fixes to events
* Fixed broken repair costs for ruined buildings
* Fixed the Great Khan being stuck bombarding the planets of Satrapies
* Fixed issue with Ancient Manufactory that could leave the system's star without a resource deposit
* Hid display of weapons when inspecting space creatures, to prevent Amoebas with frickin' lasers attached to their heads
* Added missing check to prevent Sea of Consciousness tech gain exploit
* Fixed the bug where it was impossible to land troops on planets captured by titanic life
* Fixed ruined gateways blocking construction of megastructures
* Fixed construction time being calculated incorrectly for defensive platforms
* Machine Intelligences will no longer look down upon Synthetic Empires for being Artificial Beings
* Fixed ludicrously broken costs for starbase defense platform upgrades
* Added missing selection sound effects for ice asteroids and brown dwarves
* Fixed Gray Goo and Marauder fleets sometimes just idling instead of attacking nearby targets
* World Shaper ascension perk is no longer available to Machine Empires
* Fixed hyperlane detection range wrongly showing up in every ship-related popup known to sentient life
* Autonomous Ship Intellects is no longer marked as a dangerous tech
* Planned Obsolesence can no longer fire for non-materialist empires
* Fixed CTD on loading save game from in game
* Fixed "Asteroid Collision" anomaly awarding the wrong deposit type
It's too close to the end of the work week to do it right now, but the plan is to make a new 2.1.2 optional beta branch next week, containing more fixes and improvements. We'll get back to you with more on that shortly, but the key thing for us is to get the really badly needed lag fixes in the hands of the whole playerbase now that they have been confirmed. Thanks again for all your help making sure the release version was sound.
Save files from older versions should be compatible with 2.1.1, but just in case you need to roll back, here's how:
Steam library -> Right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas tab -> choose the version you want
Have fun playing this weekend!
[ 2018-06-14 14:08:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey everyone, There will be no dev diary today as we're busy working on getting the fixes and performance improvements in the 2.1.1 beta live to all users. There will be a dev diary as normal next Thursday, focusing on further fixes and improvements coming in 2.1.2.
[ 2018-06-14 11:46:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey lovely Stellaris players! We've got a new new Beta patch out for Stellaris 2.1.1 and we know a lot of you want to help us make it even better! Below are the patch notes for the current version as quoted from the forums, ORIGINAL THREAD HERE.
"Hi all, Jamor here.
As promised we've kept at work for the 2.1.1 beta patch. I've got a new batch of fixes ready. All those interested in trying out the patch before it goes live, please do so and give us your feedback. Please note that all new additions to the patch are in BOLD YELLOW (not yellow on Steam).
#################################################################
######################## VERSION 2.1.1b ###########################
#################################################################
###################
# Free Features
###################
* Hyperlane density can now be changed to "full", which guarantees every possible hyperlane will exist
* You can now choose to start in a trinary or binary star system when creating your empire
* Experimental ETA feature put in for starship movement orders, telling you the approximate date of arrival
* Now possible to achieve partial victory in subjugation and liberation wars with occupied systems splitting off as a new subject or ally in the event of a status quo peace
* Put in greyscale versions of strategic resources icons, to indicate that you currently lack the technology to collect them
###################
# Balance
###################
* Increased power usage of torpedoes
* Reduced frequency of gaining L-Gate Insights from unrelated anomalies by 70%
* A technology must now be researched after gathering all L-Gate insights before you can start the project to open the gates
* Reduced HP of missiles across the board, making point defense more potent
* The Prosperity faction will now be happier if you have war policy set to Defensive Wars Only
* The Imperialist faction is now also OK with ideological wars, and will only be angry if policy is set to Defensive Wars Only
* Reduced the chance of a Marauder Great Khan dying from noncombat causes
* Rogue Servitors can now allow organics to colonize planets
* Increased AI weight for naval cap & command limit techs
* Increased base weight of terraforming techs
* Reduced Materialist opinion boost towards Machine empires
###################
# UI
###################
* New icon for the L-cluster
###################
# AI
###################
* AI will now a wait some time before changing AI priority if it recently changed priority
###################
# Performance
###################
* Cached tile resource production for faster performance
* More border calculations optimization
* Borders are now only updated if they need to be, reducing unnecessary operations
* Removed useless recalculation of borders when planet change owners
* Bypass distance cache improvements
* Ensured Starbases owner modifiers are calculated only once, and parallelized that bit
* Parallelizing AI strategy monthly recalc and reducing the number of system evaluated
* More caching of tile related data performance - fixes a performance bug with previous caching of tile related data
###################
# Modding
###################
* Moved scripted variables for buildings into the scripted variables file
* Saved Event Targets should now always persist through Special Projects
* Added is_event_design setting for event ship designs that should be blocked by fleet manager
* Improved performance of Global SavedEventTargets
* You can now define in a section template whether its components (turrets etc) should be drawn graphically or not
* Effects that take name (such as create_ship or set_name) can now extract name from scope, ie set_name = root will take the name from the root object (even if it's a different type of object, such as naming a ship after a leader)
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed a bug where guaranteed nearby colonizable worlds sometimes did not appear
* Fixed pop_modifier out of sync in MP
* Fixed several other OOS causes with convoluted causes
* Fixed several crashes with similarly arcane origin stories
* Added Distant Stars ownership icon for MP setup
* Fixed an OOS related to ship armor stats
* Fixed missing ambient sounds for certain star classes
* Fixed missing brain slug traits for scientists and admirals
* Fixed getting brain slugs and other non-robotic traits for event-spawned robotic leaders
* Fixed "Asteroid Collision" anomaly awarding the wrong deposit type
* Fixed "...and Hope?" achievement for opening the L-Cluster not being awarded
* Fixed missing text description for the L-Gate insight technology
* Missing word added in Phase Disruptor tech description
* Fixed other typos rendering the game literally unplayable
* Fixed some Horizon Signal-related building tooltips
* Improved janky Tiyanki death animations, giving rise to a desire for a new 1930's dance craze
* Fixed cases where you would sometimes not identify Leviathans after meeting them, this should also fix Curators not having anything to say about them
* Fixed The Gray Tempest event having 2 choices with identical outcomes, because it was painfully close to much of real life
* Gestalt consciousness can no longer pick liberation wars policy as it did nothing for them anyway
* Phaseshifting planet now has edge case handling if a nation completes the project before researching the anomaly
* Pacification of Space Amoebas or Crystals now turns them neutral instead of friendly because come on guy, you don't know me like that
* Fixed Fanatic Purifier, Devouring Swarm, and Determined Exterminator Empires suddenly becoming socially presentable when talking to the Curators about L-Gates
* Fixed instances where Empires created after initial L-Gate activation would be unable to use the L-Gates
* Fixed a text overflow issue in the Anomaly tracker
* Fixed "Bunker-Bot" anomaly not generating an L-Gate Insight
* Fixed a crash when the gateway type doesn't exist (affected certain mods)
* Fixed an OOS due to Experimental Subspace Navigation
* Added missing modifier string for all languages
* Marauder neighbor events can no longer trigger for empires that have no communications with them
* Properly calculate cached values when ships are created, meaning fleet power is now displayed correctly
* Fixed a bug where freshly created ships would not benefit immediately from bonus hull point effects
* Addressed a couple of edge cases that might cause improper Strategic Resource tech weights
* Added Go To buttons to a couple of Anomalies
* Fixed a cause of ship stats OOS. Some code was executed in unsafe order somehow when recalculating for hot join
* Scriptable localization error logging fix
* Asteroids can now glow
* Fixed L-Gates that were opened in 2.1.0 being unusable in 2.1.1
* Minor loc polish and fixes to events
* Fixed broken repair costs for ruined buildings
* Fixed the Great Khan being stuck bombarding the planets of Satrapies
* Fixed issue with Ancient Manufactory that could leave the system's star without a resource deposit
* Hid display of weapons when inspecting space creatures, to prevent Amoebas with frickin' lasers attached to their heads
* Added missing check to prevent Sea of Consciousness tech gain exploit
* Fixed the bug where it was impossible to land troops on planets captured by titanic life
* Fixed ruined gateways blocking construction of megastructures
* Fixed construction time being calculated incorrectly for defensive platforms
* Machine Intelligences will no longer look down upon Synthetic Empires for being Artificial Beings
* Fixed ludicrously broken costs for starbase defense platform upgrades
* Added missing selection sound effects for ice asteroids and brown dwarves
* Fixed Gray Goo and Marauder fleets sometimes just idling instead of attacking nearby targets
* World Shaper ascension perk is no longer available to Machine Empires
* Fixed hyperlane detection range wrongly showing up in every ship-related popup known to sentient life
* Autonomous Ship Intellects is no longer marked as a dangerous tech
* Planned Obsolesence can no longer fire for non-materialist empires
* Fixed CTD on loading save game from in game
* Fixed "Asteroid Collision" anomaly awarding the wrong deposit type
Your feedback will help us get the best possible full release version, so please give it a try and get back to me.
Please note this is an opt-in patch. You have to choose to activate it.
Steam library -> Right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas tab -> choose "2.1.1_beta"
"
[ 2018-06-05 15:37:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. As mentioned in last week's dev diary, we're currently in an extended post-launch support period, and so there won't be any feature dev diaries coming for a while. Today's dev diary will just be a quick update about a couple of the issues we're currently aware of and working on for the 2.1.1 rolling beta. This is just a select few items, not a comprehensive list of everything we're working on!
L-Cluster Variety
The first issue we're currently addressing is L-Cluster balance and variety. We've had some feedback from players who got a 'positive' L-Cluster outcome that it felt a bit underwhelming, and while we definitely do not want every L-Cluster outcome to be negative, we do acknowledge that we could have done more in regards to the flavor and detail of some of the outcomes. As such, we'll be doing an extended second pass on this feature, adding more flavor and more outcomes, and also looking into the balance of when the L-Cluster is accessible and AI-related issues for some of those outcomes. We expect to have balance and AI fixes with you sooner rather than later, with the second content pass likely a few weeks away as we have decided to invest a fair amount of additional time and resources into it.
Performance
Another problem we're aware of and working on is the issue some users are experiencing with decreased performance and stuttering in 2.1 compared to 2.0. All I can say about this at the moment is that our coders are looking into it and have already made some progress on the problem, and that we consider it to be a very high priority issue that we absolutely intend to resolve.
Finally for today, a picture showing off a little modding support feature we'll be putting into the rolling beta - when you name objects in script (such as naming a newly created fleet or using the set_name function) the script will now take a scope, meaning that you can for example create a ship named after a leader, or renamed a planet dynamically after the species living there.
That's all for today! Join us again next week for... you guessed it... more post-launch support!
[ 2018-05-31 15:43:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey everyone,
We've spent the week since PDXCon and the 2.1 Niven release listening to your feedback and addressing bugs, balance, and stability issues. I'm happy to report the new 2.1.1 opt-in patch is available.
Spoiler: Full Patch Contents
#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.1.1 ###########################
#################################################################
###################
# Free Features
###################
* Hyperlane density can now be changed to "full", which guarantees every possible hyperlane will exist
* You can now choose to start in a trinary or binary star system when creating your empire
* Experimental ETA feature put in for starship movement orders, telling you the approximate date of arrival
* Now possible to achieve partial victory in subjugation and liberation wars with occupied systems splitting off as a new subject or ally in the event of a status quo peace
###################
# Balance
###################
* Increased power usage of torpedoes
* Reduced frequency of gaining L-Gate Insights from unrelated anomalies by 70%
* A technology must now be researched after gathering all L-Gate insights before you can start the project to open the gates
* Reduced HP of missiles across the board, making point defense more potent
* The Prosperity faction will now be happier if you have war policy set to Defensive Wars Only
* The Imperialist faction is now also OK with ideological wars, and will only be angry if policy is set to Defensive Wars Only
###################
# UI
###################
* New icon for the L-cluster
###################
# Performance
###################
* Cached tile resource production for faster performance
* More border calculations optimization
* Borders are now only updated if they need to be, reducing unnecessary operations
###################
# Modding
###################
* Moved scripted variables for buildings into the scripted variables file
* Saved Event Targets should now always persist through Special Projects
* Added is_event_design setting for event ship designs that should be blocked by fleet manager
* Improved performance of Global SavedEventTargets
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed a bug where guaranteed nearby colonizable worlds sometimes did not appear
* Fixed pop_modifier out of sync in MP
* Fixed several other OOS causes with convoluted causes
* Fixed several crashes with similarly arcane origin stories
* Added Distant Stars ownership icon for MP setup
* Fixed an OOS related to ship armor stats
* Fixed missing ambient sounds for certain star classes
* Fixed missing brain slug traits for scientists and admirals
* Fixed getting brain slugs and other non-robotic traits for event-spawned robotic leaders
* Fixed "Asteroid Collision" anomaly awarding the wrong deposit type
* Fixed "...and Hope?" achievement for opening the L-Cluster not being awarded
* Fixed missing text description for the L-Gate insight technology
* Missing word added in Phase Disruptor tech description
* Fixed other typos rendering the game literally unplayable
* Fixed some Horizon Signal-related building tooltips
* Improved janky Tiyanki death animations, giving rise to a desire for a new 1930's dance craze
* Fixed cases where you would sometimes not identify Leviathans after meeting them, this should also fix Curators not having anything to say about them
* Fixed The Gray Tempest event having 2 choices with identical outcomes, because it was painfully close to much of real life
* Gestalt consciousness can no longer pick liberation wars policy as it did nothing for them anyway
* Phaseshifting planet now has edge case handling if a nation completes the project before researching the anomaly
* Pacification of Space Amoebas or Crystals now turns them neutral instead of friendly because come on guy, you don't know me like that
* Fixed Fanatic Purifier, Devouring Swarm, and Determined Exterminator Empires suddenly becoming socially presentable when talking to the Curators about L-Gates
* Fixed instances where Empires created after initial L-Gate activation would be unable to use the L-Gates
* Fixed a text overflow issue in the Anomaly tracker
* Fixed "Bunker-Bot" anomaly not generating an L-Gate Insight
* Fixed a crash when the gateway type doesn't exist (affected certain mods)
* Fixed an OOS due to Experimental Subspace Navigation
* Added missing modifier string for all languages
* Marauder neighbor events can no longer trigger for empires that have no communications with them
* Properly calculate cached values when ships are created, meaning fleet power is now displayed correctly
* Fixed a bug where freshly created ships would not benefit immediately from bonus hull point effects
* Addressed a couple of edge cases that might cause improper Strategic Resource tech weights
* Added Go To buttons to a couple of Anomalies
* Fixed a cause of ship stats OOS. Some code was executed in unsafe order somehow when recalculating for hot join
* Scriptable localization error logging fix
* Asteroids can now glow
Give us a try and let us know how it goes. We'll continue to update the beta in the coming days as we get more fixes and improvements to send your way.
Please note this is an opt-in patch. You have to choose to activate it.
Steam library -> Right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> Betas tab -> choose "2.1.1_beta"
[ 2018-05-30 07:50:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hey everyone, If you missed out on watching Martin Anward's talk at PDXCON - or you just want to watch it again, this is the video for you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f0cO9Bqu8g
[ 2018-05-29 08:34:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary! This one is just a short update to let you know what's going on in the development team and what you can expect in the coming weeks and months. As we just released Distant Stars this week, we will now be entering into an extended period of post-launch support with a rolling beta patch similar to what we did after the 2.0 release, both to sort out any issues with the 2.1 launch and to give us time to work on older bugs, QoL improvements and so on. We expect to have the first version of the rolling beta out early next week, with OOS fixes, a fix for starting planets sometimes spawning far away and some other priority issues sorted out.
All of this means that feature dev diaries will be taking a break, and instead we'll be focusing on simply giving you a weekly update on the rolling beta and notable additions or fixes (if any) that we are doing. Feature dev diaries will resume at some point in the summer, when we should be ready to start talking about the next major thing.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
[ 2018-05-24 11:13:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
# Story Pack Features
###################
* Added many new Anomalies, increasing the total amount by almost 50%
* Added new Leviathan: Voidspawn
* Added new Leviathan: Tiyanki Matriarch
* Added new Leviathan: Scavenger Bot
* Curator Enclaves will now also spawn for Distant Stars owners, to help with the new Leviathans
* Added new unique systems to explore
* Added L-Gates and the mysterious L-Cluster outside the known galaxy, which you will have to investigate and research to access
###################
# Free Features
###################
* Galaxy generation has been reworked for more interesting hyperlane terrain: stars are now grouped in highly connected 'constellations' separated by thin 'highways', making for more strategic placement of natural chokepoints
* All hyperlanes are no longer immediately visible when starting a new game, but will be revealed through exploration. Hyperlane visibility extends roughly twice as far as your sensor range
* Added binary star systems
* Added trinary star systems
* Added new star classes
* Anomaly levels have been reworked to span levels 1-10 instead of 1-5
* Anomalies can no longer fail, but instead the time to research an anomaly will depend on the difference between scientist level and anomaly level, with high level anomalies potentially taking a very long time to research for a low skill scientist
* Some older Anomalies have been reworked and fixed to function properly
* Strategic Resources have been reworked so that similar materials have the same types of effects - crystals for ship damage, ores for ship defenses, gas for empire effects, etc.
* All Strategic Resources are now always visible, but most require specific Technologies to be mined
* Strategic Resource deposits are no longer distributed according to galaxy clusters
* Added new Aldar Crystals Strategic Resource
* Added Aldar Crystals tech
* Added Experimental Subspace Nagivation which allows science ships to go missing-in-action and travel to a selected system. This will allow them to bypass (but not enter) closed borders
* Added a new Alert for when establishing communications reveals a new Strategic Resource within another Empire's borders
* Establishing communications with another Empire that has a Bypass (Gateway, Wormhole, L-Gate) within its borders now counts as discovering that Bypass Type
###################
# Balance
###################
* Survey speed increase per Scientist level increased from 5% per level to 10% per level
* Most scientist level requirements for Special Projects have been removed, as they tend to be gated by anomalies anyway
* Decreased outer boundary distance for Fallen Empires (was preventing more Fallen Empires from spawning in large galaxies)
* Zro Distillation is now a Tier 3 tech (down from 4)
* Rebalanced Strategic Resource tech tiers to better fit their effects
###################
# UI
###################
* Situation Log has been reworked and will now also list anomalies
* Science ships now have a "Research Anomalies in System" right-click command on systems
* Renamed tile science modifiers from e.g. "Physics Output" to "Tile Physics Output" to better reflect what the modifiers actually do
* Scientist level is now shown in the outliner
###################
# AI
###################
* AI will retreat its Colossus if it is alone in combat, as even a planet destroying giant laser is cold comfort in the lonely depths of space
* Fixed an issue where the AI would incorrectly allocate too much budget to navies when it could not support any more ships, resulting in underdeveloped empires
###################
# Modding
###################
* Scripted variables rework: centralized all @values in commonscripted_variables folder
* Scripted variables rework: centralized @values can be overridden by @values defined in individual files
* Anomaly rework: combined _anomaly_categories and _anomalies files into one file
* Anomaly rework: added "anomaly_event" effect with expected scopes for use in anomaly categories
* Anomaly rework: added a number of new features and updated syntax
* Added "exclusive_trigger" functionality to event descriptions
* Added "last_changed_species_rights_type" trigger
* Added "fleet_action_research_special_project" effect
* Added "remove_orbital_deposit" effect that removes the orbital deposit on planet
* Added picture parameter for set_planet_entity effect
* Added support for multiple asteroid belt types
* Added "create_saved_leader" effect
* Hyperlane Discovery Range is now separate from Sensor Range, and can be modded for ships, planets, megastructure, etc.
* Added "is_bottleneck_system" trigger
* Added scriptable bypass connections
* Added "delete_megastructure" effect
* Added HIDE_HYPERLANES_OUTSIDE_TERRA_INCOGNITA define to hide hyperlanes outside TI
* Added "add_tradition" effect
* Added support for sealed_wormholes as a bypass type for wormholes
* Added the ability to specify colonizer pop species when spawning a colony ship via create_ship
* Added a batch optimization effect for spawn_system
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed issues with the pulsar Marauder system initializer
* Fixed edge case where Marauders would sometimes demand more tribute than they should
* Fixed a number of minor syntax issues (shoutouts to Dayshine)
* Pop production modifier no longer affect strategic resources
* Fixed more potential out-of-sync issues in multiplayer
* Fixed stability issue when a selected situation log entry is removed
* Fixed aborted special projects not disappearing from the situation log and blocking others from completion
* Fixing game text descriptions for planet classes
* Fixed the OOS when you ctrl-shift-click an enemy fleet
* Fixing the set location effect having a wrong angle for fleet position
* Withdrawal symptoms are no longer reset when changing species rights
* Bugfix for when deleted bypasses were not removed
* Fixed issue where the Strategic Resource tutorial mission could trigger for resources located inside other empires, because envy is the darkest emotion
* Fixed an effect attempting to link up already-linked wormholes (which would crash the game)
* Fixed issue where tutorial missions could sometimes trigger for Gestalt Consciousness empires, who really should know all this instinctively already
* Fixed issue where Remove Orbital Debris special project did not require a Science Ship
* Fixed Occupation tooltip always displaying 0 planets being occupied
* Planet picture override should now apply correctly
* Fixing the issue when context effect used in hidden effect caused assert
* Fixed more potential text overflows in Federation view
* Habitats no longer double dip on orbital deposits
* First Contact tutorial mission will no longer trigger when encountering primitives
* Fixed anomaly tooltips sometimes displaying incorrect value types
* Fixed issue where gateways were sometimes weirdly initialized, causing first gate activation to not activate a second gate
* Made it impossible to start building pops that cannot grow and will be removed next monthly tick anyway
* Starbase occupation now counted even if there are no occupiable planets in the system
* Fixed OOS on hot join due to fleet auto-moving
* Fixed CTD for survey console command in case of player is invalid
* Fixed erroneous tooltip in "Leviathan Down" anomaly
* Disabled the upgrade button of starbase defense stations when you can't afford to upgrade them
* Defense armies are no longer so morally affronted by cybernetic enhancements that they mass disband upon completing Synthetic Ascension
* Fallen empires will now avoid spawning at the edges of the galaxy
* In case a starbase is lost in a save game it will be restored
* Fixed the bug when jump drive didn't call the notification for entering the system
* Blocked the ability to pick a non-mergeable fleet for deploying newly built ships to prevent an exploit with fleets lacking a size limit
* Fixing the bug when it was possible to load save game in an ironman game, and the attendant confusion
* Planet having sapient pops during colonization no longer messes up interface and other things
* Fixed ironman UI being broken in setup GUI
* Made debris try to pick earlier tech available for research rather than having latest one
* Event ships can now be removed from fleet designs when they have been destroyed
Please be advised that 2.1.0 MAY BREAK SAVES from previous versions! If you have games that you want to complete, please do so before updating!
[ 2018-05-22 12:59:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
Are you ready to return to the spirit of exploration at the heart of Stellaris?
Encounter new anomalies and strange beings in the depths of space with Stellaris: Distant Stars - Out now!
https://youtu.be/8sb_mLT1rO0
[ 2018-05-22 12:59:33 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all, Jamor here.
I've got the newest update to 2.0.2 beta and it's out on Steam now. There's a ton of balance tweaks as well as bugfixes, including more for the OOS problems we've been experiencing in multiplayer. We're sending it to QA shortly to produce an official, non-beta version, but there are good fixes in here that I wanted to get in to the hands of those interested sooner rather than later. Please keep your constructive feedback coming so we can make the best possible final version of 2.0.2.
You can read the full patch notes here.
[ 2018-03-26 08:46:40 CET ] [ Original post ]
We have a new batch of fixes and improvements added to the latest version of the 2.0.2 rolling beta. Some good stuff for you available right now, and more still to come as soon as we implement and test it.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN OPT-IN PATCH. YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE TO JOIN IN ORDER TO TEST THE NEW VERSION.
Here's how to opt in:
Right click on Stellaris in your Steam library -> select Properties -> go to the Betas tab -> select "2.0.2_beta"
Read the updated patch notes here!
[ 2018-03-15 16:20:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. As we are still in full post-release support mode, until we are ready to get back to regular feature dev diaries, we're not going to have full-length dev diaries. Instead, we'll use the dev diaries to highlight certain fixes or tweaks that we feel need highlighting. Today, we're going to be covering some changes coming to the 2.0.2 beta in regards to War Exhaustion and forced Status Quo.
In 2.0, with the new war system, we added forced status quo peace as part of the new war exhaustion mechanics. We felt that this mechanic was necessary to ensure that limited wars could actually happen and so that the outmatched side in a war still had a reason to fight (pushing the enemy into 100% war exhaustion in order to force peace and reduce their territorial concessions). There were some problems with this mechanic, however, primarily that people felt surprised by a sudden peace in which they might lose systems the enemy has just occupied days ago, and also that certain wars (such as subjugation wars) were very difficult to fully win before being force-peaced out.
After receiving intial player feedback on these issues, we decided to try out a different model of war exhaustion in the 2.0.2 beta, replacing the forced status quo with a penalty at 100% war exhaustion. We have since been playing, testing, tweaking and collecting further feedback, and coming to the conclusion that our original design was correct - forced peace is necessary for the new war system to not simply become a series of single wars to the death, or powerful empires forcing a weaker empire into 100% war exhaustion and refusing to peace while their enemies were crippled by penalties.
For this reason, we will be reintroducing forced status quo peace, and this time it's here to stay. However, we are not simply going to roll back to exactly the way it is in 2.0, instead it will now work as follows:
- When a side in a war reaches 100% war exhaustion, they are now flagged as being at high war exhaustion, and get the alert as before
- Once at high war exhaustion, a 24 month timer will start to tick down for that side in the war. Once the timer is up, that war side can be forced into a status quo peace
- There will be no penalties for war exhaustion, but we will leave in the functionality for modders, as well as the ability to change the number of months before a forced peace is possible or disable forced peace altogether, so that those who truly hate to the idea of ever being forced to peace can at least change it through modding
Click to read the latest Dev Diary by Wiz
[ 2018-03-15 12:08:40 CET ] [ Original post ]
Just in case you missed the news - Surviving Mars (a survival management game set on Mars) is set to release on the 15 March and part of the pre-order is an awesome Stellaris themed dome that you can build as part of your game.
You can find out more details on the Steam page for Surviving Mars here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/464920/Surviving_Mars/
Will you be making your way to the red planet?
[ 2018-03-13 16:35:55 CET ] [ Original post ]
We're ready with the latest round of updates to the 2.0.2 rolling beta, building upon what was done in the Tuesday update. I'm making it live right now. Progress is ongoing and we're knocking off as many critical bugs and balance items as we can, and I'll continue to push those to you at reasonable intervals. Will let you know as soon as a new version is ready, as always. In the meantime, thanks so much for all you feedback! It really does help in the end, even if we can't act on all of it right away.
Click here to read the patch notes in full: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/dev-team-2-0-2-beta-patch-updated-8-3-2018-checksum-da0f.1076790/
[ 2018-03-08 15:10:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary will be focusing on the road ahead after Cherryh and Apocalypse, and our long-term priorities going forward.
Cherryh Post-Release Support
As mention in last week's dev diary, the immediate priority for the team is post-release support for Cherryh and Apocalypse, fixing bugs, addressing balance/feature feedback, and working on quality of life and performance improvements. We are maintaining a running 2.0.2 beta patch which we will continue to update every few days or so until we are happy with the state of the game.
The Post-Apocalypse
Apocalypse and Cherryh were an expansion/patch focused almost exclusively on war, and with it out, we are now going to be moving on to other, non-war related priorities for future updates, expansions and story packs. To give you an idea of what's coming, we're going to revisit the list of long-term goals for Stellaris I made and updated for Dev Diary #50 and Dev Diary #69. This time, we're going to organize the goals into the ones we feel have been delivered on, old goals that were added to the list before 2.0, and new goals that we have set for ourselves after 2.0 (there is no prioritization difference between goals based on when they were added or whether they are considered old or new for this particular list).
As before, the list is NOT in order of priority, and something being considered completed NOT mean we aren't going to continue to improve on it in future updates, just that we consider it to be at a satisfactory level.
As before, THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE OR FINAL LIST, NOTHING NOT ALREADY COMPLETED IS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN AND THERE ARE NO ETAS
Read the full Dev Diary here
[ 2018-03-08 12:17:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
We just updated the 2.0.2 beta patch and we’d like you all to try it out! Please note this is an opt-in patch, so you need to actively make the choice to partake.
To opt-in to the beta patch, right click Stellaris in your Steam Library, go to properties and select the BETAS tab. In the drop down list, select “2.0.2_beta -” and wait for the game to update.
There should be no problem continuing with saves from 2.0.1 or the previous 2.0.2 beta patch, but we can’t guarantee there are no problems. If you discover problems with save files, then you can let us know in our official forum.
Thank you!
To read the full patch notes, please read the official post in our forum.
[ 2018-03-06 16:07:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all, Jamor here. I'm filling in for Wiz this week, as I want my Game Director to focus on post-launch support for Cherryh, our biggest update yet.
Today's dev diary is about 2.0.2_beta: the new build available as an optional beta for Steam users right now (note for Paradoxplaza Launcher users: we're using Steam as our beta testing platform at this time, if you want to try it out please use the Steam key that came with your Plaza purchase).
When we made 2.0, we knew that the scale of changes would be huge, and therefore I budgeted a larger than normal amount of dev time for post-launch support. The objective is to absorb and process player feedback, and perform bug fixes as well as balance tweaks and general improvements. There are almost as many unique play styles as there are Stellaris players out there, and our objective is to hit a good balance point for the maximum number, which you can then further tweak to your own preferences with the new game customization options.
2.0.2 is planned to be a "rolling beta", meaning we will continue to update it at intervals when we have new tweaks/fixes that we want to push to you. Your feedback on it will be crucial for determining the content of the final, official version, so please continue to play and tell us how it goes.
We especially want to make sure we get War Exhaustion/Status Quo Peace right, so that it produces believable and satisfying war results for the greatest number of people. As such, the initial changes in this patch are experimental and we'll continue to iterate on them throughout the test period. Please don't hesitate to give us your constructive feedback.
You can read the Dev Diary in full here
[ 2018-03-01 15:04:26 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all, Jamor here. Thanks again for all your valuable feedback on 2.0/Apocalypse. Any update this size is going to have a lot of moving parts and we've been taking the time since release to target some high-value fixes. In the interest of getting them in to your hands sooner, I'm doing a 2.0.1 hotfix right now. REST ASSURED, WE ARE NOT DONE WITH POST-LAUNCH SUPPORT FOR 2.0 Every patch balances completeness with speed, there are more fixes coming when we have time to implement and test them. Here's the contents of this patch: Fixed processing/grid amalgamation/livestock purge types being broken Fixed a bug where a fleet split from its parent would forget the previous hyperspace jump and get stuck in systems with FTL inhibitors indefinitely Fixed several out of sync bugs in multiplayer Fixed some missing/broken localization in various languages Fixed upgrading ships wrongly having their XP deleted Fixed some UI visibility issues on certain screen resolutions Fixed misleading costs displayed for building mining/research stations Fixed Admirals being unassigned from a fleet during combat Fixed FTL inhibition effect not being removed when you downgrade a starbase Again, let me assure you that this is just a small package of severe/fast to fix things that I want to get in your hands sooner rather than later. Larger, more comprehensive support will continue in the coming weeks. We know how massive the changes wrought in 2.0 are and your feedback will continue to be critical to make it the best possible experience. Thanks.
[ 2018-02-27 16:21:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
Save 60% on Stellaris as part of this week's Weekend Deal*!
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
[ 2018-02-22 18:10:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AssQqRk3qQM The time to redefine warfare is now! Who's ready to blow up some planets?
[ 2018-02-22 14:00:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
We are super stoked for Apocalypse and we are both inspired by your excitement and grateful for your continued support. We love that we have such a great community, and for that reason, we wanted to share something awesome with you and give something back!
I just wanted to let you guys know that we had 4 posters designed specifically for this expansion and we wanted to offer them up to you as a high-quality download for you to do what you will with them (they make a great desktop background, just saying!).
You can find them here
We hope you enjoy them.
Roll on tomorrow - who else is excited for release day? :)
[ 2018-02-21 10:20:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk5VWUNpbD8
Sit down and join us as Stellaris Game Designer Daniel Moregård takes us through what the upcoming Apocalypse Expansion will bring! Enjoy our brand new Stellaris: Apocalypse Feature Breakdown.
Hello everyone! 2.0 'Cherryh' and Apocalypse will be coming out in a week, so here as usual are the full patch notes in advance for your perusal. As we're still in the process of proofreading them, there might be omissions or errors, so please let us know if you spot anything that looks out of place. Thank you!
See full Dev Diary HERE for full Patch-notes
As mentioned in the patchnotes, there are 10 new achievements coming with 2.0 'Cherryh' and the Apocalypse updated. Here they are:
- Exterminatus: Destroy another Empire's capital planet
- Clash of the Titans: Defeat a Fallen Empire Titan in battle with a fleet of your own that includes a Titan
- Stay On Target: Destroy another Empire's Colossus while it is in the process of firing on a planet
- Citadel of Death: Own a Citadel with 40k fleet power
- Tradition is Everything: Unlock all 42 Traditions
- Emissary: Explore a natural wormhole
- No Khan Do: Kill the Great Khan in battle
- Pandora's World: Shield a planet belonging to Fanatic Purifiers, Ravenous Swarms or Determined Exterminators
- Imperial Highway: Own 4 active Gateways
- Star Struck: Own 200 starbases (Outposts count)
[ 2018-02-15 14:38:14 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello and welcome to another Stellaris development diary! Today we will take a look at some of the minor features and changes in the coming 2.0 'Cherryh' update.
Quality of Life
We have added small icons to the outliner that lets you see if planets have buildings that can be upgraded, or if there are Pops that do not have a building they are working. Similarly, you will be able to see when a starbase has an empty module or building slot.
This should make it a lot easier for you to manage your planets and starbases.
You can read the full diary here
[ 2018-02-08 15:12:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today, we continue talking about the Apocalypse expansion and 2.0 'Cherryh' update, on the topic of Ascension Perks and Civics. Please note that placeholder art is present for civic icons, and that is not how they will look on release.
Changed Ascension Perks (Cherryh Feature)
There will be a number of changes to existing Ascension Perks in the Cherryh update. As mentioned in Dev diary #94, all Utopia ascension perks except for the Ascension Paths, Habitats and Megastructures have been rolled into the base game, so with the exception of the changes to the Biological Ascension Path, these changes will affect everyone.
Interstellar Dominion: As of the result of a number of mechanics changes in Cherryh, including the removal of 'pushing borders' and the Border Range modifier, forcing us to replace this modifier with other effects. Rather than always replace it with the same modifier in each place, we made a number of different changes as we thought suited both the place the modifier was, and the overall balance of the game. Interstellar Dominion remains an ascension perk focused on expansion, giving -20% reduction on the Influence cost of both new Starbases and Claims.
Mastery of Nature: Mastery of Nature ended up being a bit of a weird perk. Originally, it was designed as only removing clear blocker cost, but this was obviously too weak, and so we buffed it by adding the automatic unlock of all blocker techs. This, in turn ended up being too strong, and so we tweaked it again by only having it remove half the clear blocker cost. What we ended up with was a very strong perk... but only if picked immediately as your first choice. In the end, we decided to go back to the drawing board and remake it into something that would be useful at any stage of the game and give an additional use for influence for empires not bent on expansion. The new Mastery of Nature, instead of giving blocker techs, instead unlocks a planetary edict that allows you to permanently increase the size of a planet. The Planet will have its number of tiles increased by 1-3, with the amount set based on the size of the planet, so a size 10 planet will always become a size 13 planet and so on. These new tiles will have randomly generated deposits.
World Shaper: World Shaper was another ascension perk with very situational uses. Instead of having it simply be a buff to terraforming, we've changed it to be a requirement to terraform Gaia worlds, and given Gaia worlds a bonus to overall resource production (though a lower one than Machine Worlds) instead of the happiness bonus it used to have. The idea behind this is both to make focusing on terraforming more of a distinct playstyle, and make Gaia worlds even more special.
You can read the rest of the diary here
[ 2018-02-01 12:41:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Time to Redefine Warfare is Now! (...or at least soon!). The Stellaris Apocalypse expansion releases 22 February 2018.
Who else is super hyped for this expansion?
You can watch the latest trailer here: https://youtu.be/zW3YB2ptGws
[ 2018-01-25 14:00:52 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today, we continue talking about the Apocalypse expansion and 2.0 'Cherryh' update, on the topic of Edicts, Campaigns and Unity Ambitions.
Edict Changes (Cherryh Feature)
There will be a number of changes coming to Empire and Planetary Edicts in 2.0 'Cherryh', with the aim of both making Edicts more attractive to use, and increasing the number of useful things players have to spend their pooled Influence and Energy resources on. Firstly, we have moved most of the edicts out of the Planetary Edict category, keeping only a handful of Edicts that are either about dealing with a specific short-term problem (such as Unrest-reducing edicts) or executing a long-term or permanent effect (such as Consecrated Worlds or the new Land Clearance edict given by Mastery of Nature). Instead, a number of these edicts have become Empire Edicts.
You can read the Dev Diary in full here
[ 2018-01-25 13:30:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today, we continue talking about the Apocalypse expansion and 2.0 'Cherryh' update, on the topic of Marauders and Pirates.
Marauders (Apocalypse Feature)
Marauders are a new type of non-playable empire that those with the Apocalypse expansion can encounter in the galaxy. They are essentially nomadic FTL societies that have eschewed planetary living in favor of living on ships and stations in and around a handful of resource-rich systems, subsisting largely on raiding each other and extorting tribute from settled empires. Being born spacefarers, they are hardy warriors and expert ship crew, able to muster impressive fleets despite their relative lack of technology compared to other older civilizations (such as Fallen Empires). Marauders are always hostile to regular empires, but will generally not attack them unless you attempt to enter their home systems, or they are in the process of raiding them.
You can read the Dev diary in full here
[ 2018-01-18 12:10:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to this very special triple digit Stellaris development diary! Today's dev diary marks the start of talking about the Apocalypse Expansion that will be accompanying the 2.0 'Cherryh' update. We still can't give you an ETA on the release of either, and there's a fair bit to cover in the expansion before then, but we're getting closer. As this is the start of talking about paid features, I just want to take a moment to reiterate that everything talked about in dev diaries 91-99 (with the exception of Dev Diary #95 which was about Humanoids) were about the Cherryh update and all features and changes mentioned in these previous dev diaries are part of the free update, NOT the expansion. Everything mentioned in this dev diary will be part of the paid Apocalypse expansion, however. Please note that some of the screenshots in this dev diary feature placeholder art and icons.
Read the Dev Diary in full here
[ 2018-01-11 14:27:34 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Time To Redefine Warfare is Now!
Space Marauders, Planetary Destruction Weapons and so much more. A world ending expansion!
Apocalypse will bring new levels of warfare and destruction to the galactic exploration and discovery game and will add many new ways to extend one’s galactic dominion – including the ability to destroy entire enemy planets.
Apocalypse will bring new military options, civic paths, and challenges to Stellaris when it arrives in early 2018. Find out more about it here
[ 2018-01-11 14:20:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. Today's dev diary is about some changes coming to ground combat and armies in the 2.0 'Cherryh' update. This will be the last dev diary before we take a break for the holidays, so there will be no diaries in the next week or the week after that. Stellaris dev diaries return on Thursday January 11th, 2018.
Read the Dev Diary in full here
[ 2017-12-21 15:33:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
1.9.1 beta has been out for a few days now and looks good. It hasn't introduced any new critical issues and contains a number of desirable bug fixes, so I've rolled it out live as the official version now. Make sure you're opted out of any beta versions, and you'll get the update automatically. You may need to restart Steam to force it to check for updates.
Here's a list of the fixes:
- fixed broken tile graphics in colonization and resettlement screens
- fixed issue where the humanoid frontier outpost model was incorrectly swapped with the mammalian one
- reverted a previous GUI fix that caused anomaly windows to display blank or cut off
- fixed issue with human preset and custom empires not spawning at all, as well as the Space Platypus, because that's a travesty
- fixed off-center turret positions on military stations
- fixed the Technocrat VO name not displaying properly in the voice selection screen in Spanish and Russian
- fixed some low-repro possible crashes
- fixed the Plantoids Species Pack being rendered with remarkable brevity in the launcher as simply "Plantoid"
- fixed a crash that happened when you shift-select a fleet and a spaceport, then try to click on the spaceport in the list of selected items
We'll be taking a bit of a break for the holidays and to continue work on the future stuff mentioned in our dev diaries. Stellaris has made great strides in 2017, and we're just getting started: 2018 is going to be massive. Stay tuned.
[ 2017-12-14 17:23:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is about new interface functionalities for navies in the 2.0 'Cherryh' update that we collectively call the Fleet Manager. Please note that the interfaces shown in this dev diary are early WIP versions that have not yet seen an artist's touch, and will look very different in the finished product, meaning that feedback on their look/layout is pointless at this stage. Thank you!
Read the Dev Diary in full here
[ 2017-12-14 12:15:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all,
We've spent the last couple days absorbing your feedback on 1.9.0 - Boulle, and have got some bugfixes for you. We're going to release it now as an optional beta version, allowing those who are interested to try it out in the live environment. As usual, when we've made sure the fixes are solid and no new issues have been introduced, we'll roll it out at as the official version.
Here's the list of fixes:
- fixed broken tile graphics in colonization and resettlement screens
- fixed issue where the humanoid frontier outpost model was incorrectly swapped with the mammalian one
- reverted a previous GUI fix that caused anomaly windows to display blank or cut off
- fixed issue with human preset and custom empires not spawning at all, as well as the Space Platypus, because that's a travesty
- fixed off-center turret positions on military stations
- fixed the Technocrat VO name not displaying properly in the voice selection screen in Spanish and Russian
- fixed some low-repro possible crashes
- fixed the Plantoids Species Pack being rendered with remarkable brevity in the launcher as simply "Plantoid"
- fixed a crash that happened when you shift-select a fleet and a spaceport, then try to click on the spaceport in the list of selected items
Please give it a try and let us know how it works out for you.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN OPT-IN PATCH. YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE TO JOIN IN ORDER TO TEST THE NEW VERSION.
Here's how to opt in:
Right click on Stellaris in your Steam library -> select Properties -> go to the Betas tab -> select "1.9.1_beta"
[ 2017-12-12 15:06:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind - The Humanoid Species Pack is now available!
Featuring a selection of new portraits, ship models, voiceover sets for VIR & music expand your takeover of the Galaxy the humanoid way.
Find out more here
You can read the 1.9 patch notes in full here
[ 2017-12-07 14:01:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is about two topics: Technology in the 2.0 'Cherryh' update, and the release of the Humanoids Species Pack that is coming out today and will be available for purchase around 15:00 CET.
Humanoids Species Pack
We already covered the details of the Humanoids Species Pack in Dev Diary #95, so rather than repeating myself, I am simply going to post the changelog, along with a short excerpt on the new prescripted empire, the Voor Technocracy, that we modeled on the 'loading screen aliens' and which are coming in the species pack along with the portraits, ships, city graphics, new advisor voices and music.
Read the diary in full here
[ 2017-12-07 12:20:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is about the 2.0 'Cherryh' update, and will delve into the long-awaited topic of Doomstacks, combat balance and some changes coming to ship design and components.
Doomstacks
'Doomstacks', the concept of rolling all your ships into a single stack in order to be able to beat your opponent's single stack has long been a popular discussion topic on these forums. It's a fairly common design problem in strategy games owing to the principles of force concentration outlined in Lanchester's Laws: A larger force engaged with a smaller one will not only win the battle, but take disproportionately less casualties. In other words, if a 13k force engages a 10k force (all components being equal so there's no other factors at work), the 13k force will not only win, but will inflict far more than 1.3x the casualties on the inferior force that the superior force inflicts on the lesser force. This, combined with the high decisiveness and lethality of combat in Stellaris (and many other strategy games) means that bringing an inferior force to battle is always a no-win situation: Not only will you lose tactically, you will also lose strategically, as whatever damage you inflict on enemy is outclassed by the damage they inflict on you in turn.
Read the Dev Diary in full here
[ 2017-11-30 13:08:49 CET ] [ Original post ]
This week's Dev Diary is live and is all about the Humanoids Species Pack!
Read it in full here.
[ 2017-11-23 15:06:11 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. Today's topic was supposed to be ship balance and doomstacks, but because certain things weren't ready to show off yet, we're instead going to be doing a smaller dev diary talking about some changes coming to Ascension Perks and Surveying. We'll get back to the doomstack topic in a couple weeks.
You can read the dev diary in full here
[ 2017-11-17 14:58:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. Today we're going to continue talking about major changes coming in the Cherryh update, specifically on the topic of war and peace. As said before, all of these changes are currently far away, and we cannot give more details on ETAs or the exact nature of the Cherryh update than we already have.
Wargoal Overhaul
The wargoal system in Stellaris has always felt a bit odd, and has been the target of some very well-reasoned criticism from players. In one way, the system is extremely unrestrictive, allowing you to declare war on anyone for any reason to take any planet, no matter if said planet is on the literal other side of the galaxy in the middle of enemy territory and could not feasibly be held by your empire, and then demand that planet in the peace even if none of your soldiers had ever set foot on it. On the other hand, the restriction to only being able to take planets meant that you had a fairly limited control over your actual borders after the peace, and might be forced to take planets you had no interest in just to get that system with a resource or colonizable planet that you *actually* wanted. Other issues include a rather messy wargoal interface (particularly when trying to set goals after being declared on) and a lack of ability as an ally in a war to affect what gains you were going to get in the peace, and that wars were very 'all or nothing' affairs with no real mechanics for any other outcome than total victory for one side.
You can read the full Dev Diary here
[ 2017-11-09 12:47:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is about Faster than Light travel in the Cherryh update, and it's likely to be a controversial one. When discussing, please remember to keep things civil, and I would kindly ask that you read the entire dev diary before rushing to post, as it's going to cover some of the questions and concerns we expect to see from the playerbase. Also, as posted last week, all of these changes are currently far away, and we cannot give more details on ETAs or the exact nature of the Cherryh update than we already have. Thank you!
FTL Rework
The single biggest design issue we have had to tackle in the Stellaris team since release is the asymmetrical FTL. While it's a cool and interesting idea on paper, the honest truth is that the feature just does not fit well into the game in practice, and blocks numerous improvements on a myriad of other features such as warfare and exploration, as well as solutions to fundamental design problems like the weakness of static defenses. After a lot of debate among the designers, we finally decided that if we were ever going to be able to tackle these issues and turn Stellaris into a game with truly engrossing and interesting warfare, we would have to bite the bullet and take a controversial decision: Consolidating FTL from the current three types down into a primarily hyperlane-based game, with more advanced forms of FTL unlocked through technology.
You can read the full Dev Diary here
[ 2017-11-02 12:27:07 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today's dev diary marks the start of dev diaries about a major upcoming update that we have named the 'Cherryh' update after science fiction author C.J. Cherryh. This is a major update that will include some very significant reworks to core gameplay systems, reworks that we have been prototyping and testing for some time. Right now, we cannot say anything about the exact nature of the update or anything at all about when it will be released, other than that it's far away. Normally, we wouldn't be doing dev diaries on an update at this stage but there's simply too much to talk about that we have to start early. Cherryh will be a massive update, the largest one we've done to date, and there are many new and changed things to talk about in the coming weeks.
You can read the dev diary in full here
[ 2017-10-26 11:51:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
1.8.3_beta has been out for a bit and seems to be good. It's time to put it live, with a few additional fixes we added courtesy of player feedback (many thanks for that, btw) - You can read the full patch notes here
[ 2017-10-25 11:01:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
The Stellaris Devs have unearthed an old but very cool music track that was never used in the soundtrack (due to the tone of the game changing). If you want to - you can listen to it here.
[ 2017-10-20 07:39:14 CET ] [ Original post ]
This week's Dev Diary is all about the Stellaris soundtrack and some changes. Read it in full here.
[ 2017-10-19 11:16:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN OPT-IN PATCH. YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE TO JOIN IN ORDER TO TEST THE NEW VERSION. To read the changelog click here
[ 2017-10-18 10:21:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
Want to win a very exclusive limited edition Stellaris pin (we have only 10 up for grabs!)?
All you have to do is enter our Halloween competition here
Just to tempt you a little bit more... This is the pin!
[ 2017-10-16 08:35:28 CET ] [ Original post ]
This weeks Dev Diary features more about the post release support of 1.8 as well as a mysterious screenshot.
You can read it in full here
[ 2017-10-12 12:15:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone. The 1.8.2 hotfix update, with all the changes from the 1.8.1 beta patch as well as some additional fixes and tweaks, is now live for all players.
1.8.2 should be fully compatible with 1.8.0 and 1.8.1 saves.
###################
# Balance
###################
- Increased the distance at which empires are forced apart in random setups
- Changed the shape of ring galaxies to have a thicker ring, fixes many generation bugs (such as Fallen Empires not appearing) associated with them
- Contingency ships now use energy lances instead of Arc Emitters
- Reduced the rate of Contingency reinforcment fleets somewhat
- It is now possible to spawn 5 fallen empires in a Huge galaxy if you have Synthetic Dawn
- Buffed Processing Hub and Hive Node buildings to produce Unity
- Buffed Machine Worlds to 25% robot production output
- 200 years must pass in-game before a Crisis can occur, up from 150
- Cost of "Blocking the Ghost Signal" project now calculated based on number of owned Pops.
- Successfully assimilating a Pop as a Driven Assimilator now generates one month's worth of Unity and Society Research
- Driven Assimilators can now allow Cyborgs to procreate (they do not need food to grow)
- Buffed Devouring Swarm, Purifiers and Exterminators
- Assimilators can now research most Genetics techs
- Driven Assimilators can now derive Assault and Defense Armies from Cyborg Pops
- Pops are now assimilated much faster, on a per-planet basis rather than per-species basis
- Doubled the chance of getting the ""Hotfix"" Warning Signs event
- Reduced fleet power calc for very powerful ships, as exponential effects would cause it to get much larger than the ship's actual combat ability
- Fixed Flak being strictly better than regular Point-Defense rather than a tracking vs damage trade-off
- Planets now only start repairing at full speed 60 days after bombardment ends
- Added some armor penetration to Scourge weapons
- Reduced the effect of Admiral skill level on ship fire rate from 5% to 3% & changed general modifier to not overflow interface
- Reduced consumer goods cost of Chemical Bliss, Utopian Abundance and Social Welfare
- Increased the likelihood of High and Medium probability reward options in Shroud events
- Increased likelihood of several unique Shroud events granting special boons to fire
- Warning Signs (and Machine Uprisings) can no longer occur before 50 in-game years have passed
- Empires that have outlawed robotic workers before any Warning Signs events occur will no longer experience Warning Signs or Machine Uprisings
###################
# AI
###################
- Fixed some issues with sector AI not properly prioritizing tile resources when told to
- Fixed a bug where the AI would overprioritize food when food stockpile was not full
- Sectors now build robots by default
- Fixed unbidden AI sometimes freezing up when other ED factions spawned
- Fixed AI stopping colonization in some cases if it gained a high-habitability species without colonization rights
- AIs will no longer terraform while under crisis attack
- Fixed AI repeatedly asking player to join in a war they had already declined to join
- Fixed a bug where AI fleets would sometimes stop following their allies if fighting a defensive war against a powerful foe
- Fixed an issue where Guardians of the Galaxy would not fight the crisis because of the presence of another Awakened Empire
- Fixed an issue where the AI would not defend planets it had occupied from enemies from being taken back
- Fixed AI overprioritizing power plants even when it did not need energy due to only wanting to build energy-producing buildings on unpopulated tiles
- Fixed a case where AI would get stuck on enemy mining stations, unable to move their fleet away
- Fixed machine AI personalities having an excessive penalty to diplomacy, even with other machines
- Fixed a bug where the Scourge would build military stations in systems it didn't need to defend, instead of systems it does in fact need to defend
- Fixed AI Machine Empires ceasing to build armies under some circumstances
###################
# Interface
###################
- Made Artisan Troupe button tooltips consistently display what resources the player is lacking, rather than just a "We cannot afford this" message
###################
# Modding
###################
- Traits are now restricted by moddable species archetypes rather than species classes, so new species classes need only be assigned the correct archetype instead of having to be added to every trait. Archetypes can be set to inherit the traits of other archetypes for easy creation of new archetypes with unique traits
- Added support for species archetypes to inherit their trait points from another archetype
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
- Breaking a guarantee no longer creates a bilateral truce
- Disabled Selected Lineages techs for Assimilators
- Organic sanctuaries are now properly assigned to primitives when conquered
- Fixed some Fanatic Purifier dialogue referring to the wrong empire
- Planets in outliner are now properly sorted by distance to capital in all circumstances
- It is no longer possible to declare on the tributary of an empire that you have a truce, non-aggression or other war-blocking status with
- Fixed stacking -%unrest modifiers that added up to more than 100% reduction resulting in a negative modifier that applied massive unrest
- Hive Minds can no longer use the decadent trait
- Fixed Synthetic Ascension disabling the ability to set species rights and potentially locking in invalid species rights
- Neuro-Electric Amplifier building is now available in habitats
- Uplink Node building can now be upgraded in habitats
- Spare Parts Depot and Gene Clinic can now be upgraded on Habitats
- Fixed an OOS when some player(s) have Plantoids DLC while others don't
- Fixed Determined Exterminators and Devouring Swarms not getting the swapped Purity tradition tree name and description
- Fixed Determined Exterminators not getting the Autonomous AI tradition swap
- Fixed Synthetically Ascended empires being unable to assimilate cyborgs
- Ghost Signal no longer affects Synthetically Ascended empires
- Fixed Fallen Empires not making demands due to believing they had been defeated in a war
- Fixed the calculation for winner in democratic election not working correctly in some cases
- Fleets on passive stance can now be ordered to make manual attacks on mining & research stations
- Fixed Spare Parts Depot line of buildings not being researchable for Machine Empires
- Fixed Social Engineering Edict (it was strictly worse than the basic one non Authoritarians get)
- Fixed vassals not being able to colonize within their own borders
- Symbol of Purity is now properly restricted to one per planet
- Restored old keyboard shortcut for increasing speed
- Fixed rebel countries sometimes getting one Ethic too many
- Enigmatic Observer Fallen Empires now hate Fanatic Purifiers, Devouring Swarms, and Determined Exterminators slightly less, removing instant war declarations
- Fixed tributary war demand not working
- Fixed a bug where releasing vassals as a Hive Mind or Machine Authority would result in broken ethics/authority setups
- Fixed non-swapped modifier names being used for name-swapped traditions
- Added a cap on planet combat repair, as crisis planets were otherwise nearly impossible to destroy with light stance
- Fixed military power of robotic/synth armies being overvalued to the point where the AI would not invade planets defended by them
- Fixed Psionic Ascension not changing founder species, creating a variety of bugs
- Fixed cyborgs getting double leader age boost from species and leader trait
- Fixed the End of the Cycle not properly preying on colonized worlds
- Fixed some issues with fleet reinforcements for crises
- Fixed sector colonization setting not working properly
- Fixed Synthetic Ruler Trait not having an effect
- Fixed the Machine Uprising not taking control of Military Stations properly
- Fixed some Warning Signs events potentially reoccurring after a Machine Uprising
- Machine Empires can no longer research Positronic AI
- Fixed liberating planets as a Machine Intelligence giving rise to Despicable Neutrals
- Fixed issue where Machine Empire capitals did not produce additional Unity from Distributed Computer tradition.
- Fixed Prethoryn Scourge ceasing to spawn reinforcements once they had 100 armies built
- Fixed an exploit where you could have one more than one Dyson Sphere/Science Nexus at a time by releasing the system to a vassal while under construction
- Fixed issues with not being able to repair Megastructures
- Fixed Decent living standards being available to Assimilating pops
- Psionic expertise can no longer be given as a trait to Machine scientists
- Fixed erroneously getting the 'Hopeless War' notification when attacked by an Awakened Fallen Empire
- Removed duplicate percentage sign in Adaptive Ecology Tradition description
- Fixed minor color issue in Contingency diplomatic text
- Fixed a bug where the Contingency would get stuck trying to withdraw its fleets to the final machine world
- 'Country destroyed' notification disabled for when nationalist rebels defect to their former empire
- Species that are set to be assimilated will no longer be targeted by Land Appropriation
- Removed Atmospheric Filtering for non-Serv, non-Assim MIs since it is useless for them
- Fix food surplus not being calculated correctly with sectors (sector pops were twice as hungry as they should be)
- Fixed MI namelist to avoid use of the word ""Habitat"" to distinguish between AP Habitats"
- Fixed a missing ID that was resulting in an unlocalized string during colonization (BUILDING_CONSTRUCTION_COLONIZATION)
- Created a leader event called from on_actions that removes the Sapient/Custom AI Assistant traits from any leaders that have them when a player changes their policy to Outlaw AI.
- Fixed leaders with Arrested Development gaining negative experience rather than simply not leveling up
- Fixed CTD when attempting to randomize secondary species name without selecting a portrait first
- CTD fix when using a mod with duplicate species class
- CTD fix when using a country that doesn't have a tech module
- Fixed an overflow error causing purged pops to produce massive amounts of resources
- Defeating the Machine Uprising no longer results in biological pops saved from it having recently conquered malus
- Fixed refugees being able to flee to planets that are occupied, under bombardment or under colonization
- Fixed bio-trophies not being given an organic sanctuary on migration
- Fix CTD related to modded planet classes
Read original post by Wiz
We do not collect bug reports from Steam. If you encounter any issues, please report these in our official forum
Thank you!
[ 2017-10-11 09:00:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
This dev diary is really just an update on the 1.8.1 beta that we put out last week to fix the major issues reported in 1.8. We have gotten a lot of good feedback from it both externally and internally, and we are now in the process of putting together a 1.8.2 update that contains all the fixes from the beta, as well as fixes for some issues introduced in 1.8.1 and some additional issues that were previously missed. 1.8.2 is currently in internal testing, and we hope to roll it out as soon as it clears QA. Once 1.8.2 is out, if no further critical issues are discovered, we will be wrapping up the 1.8 post-release support and fully move on to future development priorities.
You can read the full dev diary here
[ 2017-10-05 10:28:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary! This is going to be a short one, as it's really just about letting you guys know that we'll be taking a break from feature development diaries for the next few weeks, so everyone gets a chance to focus on and enjoy Synthetic Dawn and the 1.8 update that just came out.
Read the full Dev Diary and check out something a little bit mysterious here
[ 2017-09-28 10:13:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all,
I want to first of all thank everyone for giving 1.8/Synthetic Dawn a try. We've spent the time since launch absorbing your feedback and tackling reported issues. We fixed several of these as well as merged in some fixes from before that didn't make it in by code freeze. In order to make sure this new version is as good as it can be, we're going to release it as an OPTIONAL BETA starting right now.
###################
# Balance
###################
- Buffed Processing Hub to produce Unity
- Buffed Machine Worlds to 25% robot production output
- 200 years must pass in-game before a Crisis can occur, up from 150
- Cost of "Blocking the Ghost Signal" project now calculated based on number of owned Pops.
- Successfully assimilating a Pop as a Driven Assimilator now generates one month's worth of Unity and Society Research
- Driven Assimilators can now allow Cyborgs to procreate (they do not need food to grow)
- Buffed Devouring Swarm, Purifiers and Exterminators
- Assimilators can now research most Genetics techs
- Driven Assimilators can now derive Assault and Defense Armies from Cyborg Pops
- Pops are now assimilated much faster, on a per-planet basis rather than per-species basis
- Doubled the chance of getting the ""Hotfix"" Warning Signs event
- Reduced fleet power calc for very powerful ships, as exponential effects would cause it to get much larger than the ship's actual combat ability
- Fixed Flak being strictly better than regular Point-Defense rather than a tracking vs damage trade-off
- Planets now only start repairing at full speed 60 days after bombardment ends
- Added some armor penetration to Scourge weapons
- Reduced the effect of Admiral skill level on ship fire rate from 5% to 3% & changed general modifier to not overflow interface
- Reduced consumer goods cost of Chemical Bliss, Utopian Abundance and Social Welfare
- Increased the likelihood of High and Medium probability reward options in Shroud events
- Increased likelihood of several unique Shroud events granting special boons to fire
###################
# AI
###################
- Fixed a bug where the AI would overprioritize food when food stockpile was not full
- Sectors now build robots by default
- Fixed unbidden AI sometimes freezing up when other ED factions spawned
- Fixed AI stopping colonization in some cases if it gained a high-habitability species without colonization rights
- AIs will no longer terraform while under crisis attack
- Fixed AI repeatedly asking player to join in a war they had already declined to join
- Fixed a bug where AI fleets would sometimes stop following their allies if fighting a defensive war against a powerful foe
- Fixed an issue where Guardians of the Galaxy would not fight the crisis because of the presence of another Awakened Empire
- Fixed an issue where the AI would not defend planets it had occupied against enemy attempts to retake it
- Fixed AI overprioritizing power plants even when it did not need energy due to only wanting to build energy-producing buildings on unpopulated tiles
- Fixed a case where AI would get stuck on enemy mining stations, unable to move their fleet away
- Fixed machine AI personalities having an excessive penalty to diplomacy, even with other machines
- Fixed a bug where the Scourge would build military stations in systems it didn't need to defend, instead of systems it does in fact need to defend
###################
# Interface
###################
- Made Artisan Troupe button tooltips consistently display what resources the player is lacking, rather than just a "We cannot afford this" message
###################
# Modding
###################
- Traits are now restricted by moddable species archetypes rather than species classes, so new species classes need only be assigned the correct archetype instead of having to be added to every trait. Archetypes can be set to inherit the traits of other archetypes for easy creation of new archetypes with unique traits
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
- Ghost Signal no longer affects Synthetically Ascended empires
- Fixed Fallen Empires not making demands due to believing they had been defeated in a war
- Fixed the calculation for winner in democratic election not working correctly in some cases
- Fleets on passive stance can now be ordered to make manual attacks on mining & research stations
- Fixed Spare Parts Depot line of buildings not being researchable for Machine Empires
- Fixed Social Engineering Edict (it was strictly worse than the basic one non Authoritarians get)
- Fixed vassals not being able to colonize within their own borders
- Symbol of Purity is now properly restricted to one per planet
- Restored old keyboard shortcut for increasing speed
- Fixed rebel countries sometimes getting one Ethic too many
- Enigmatic Observer Fallen Empires now hate Fanatic Purifiers, Devouring Swarms, and Determined Exterminators slightly less, removing instant war declarations
- Fixed tributary war demand not working
- Fixed a bug where releasing vassals as a Hive Mind or Machine Authority would result in broken ethics/authority setups
- Fixed non-swapped modifier names being used for name-swapped traditions
- Added a cap on planet combat repair, as crisis planets were otherwise nearly impossible to destroy with light stance
- Fixed military power of robotic/synth armies being overvalued to the point where the AI would not invade planets defended by them
- Fixed Psionic Ascension not changing founder species, creating a variety of bugs
- Fixed cyborgs getting double leader age boost from species and leader trait
- Fixed the End of the Cycle not properly preying on colonized worlds
- Fixed some issues with fleet reinforcements for crises
- Fixed sector colonization setting not working properly
- Fixed Synthetic Ruler Trait not having an effect
- Fixed the Machine Uprising not taking control of Military Stations properly
- Fixed some Warning Signs events potentially reoccurring after a Machine Uprising
- Machine Empires can no longer research Positronic AI
- Fixed liberating planets as a Machine Intelligence giving rise to Despicable Neutrals
- Fixed issue where Machine Empire capitals did not produce additional Unity from Distributed Computer tradition.
- Fixed Prethoryn Scourge ceasing to spawn reinforcements once they had 100 armies built
- Fixed an exploit where you could have one more than one Dyson Sphere/Science Nexus at a time by releasing the system to a vassal while under construction
- Fixed issues with not being able to repair Megastructures
- Fixed Decent living standards being available to Assimilating pops
- Psionic expertise can no longer be given as a trait to Machine scientists
- Fixed erroneously getting the 'Hopeless War' notification when attacked by an Awakened Fallen Empire
- Removed duplicate percentage sign in Adaptive Ecology Tradition description
- Fixed minor color issue in Contingency diplomatic text
- Fixed a bug where the Contingency would get stuck trying to withdraw its fleets to the final machine world
- 'Country destroyed' notification disabled for when nationalist rebels defect to their former empire
- Species that are set to be assimilated will no longer be targeted by Land Appropriation
- Removed Atmospheric Filtering for non-Serv, non-Assim MIs since it is useless for them
- Fix food surplus not being calculated correctly with sectors (sector pops were twice as hungry as they should be)
- Fixed MI namelist to avoid use of the word ""Habitat"" to distinguish between AP Habitats"
- Fixed a missing ID that was resulting in an unlocalized string during colonization (BUILDING_CONSTRUCTION_COLONIZATION)
- Created a leader event called from on_actions that removes the Sapient/Custom AI Assistant traits from any leaders that have them when a player changes their policy to Outlaw AI.
- Fixed leaders with Arrested Development gaining negative experience rather than simply not leveling up
- Fixed CTD when attempting to randomize secondary species name without selecting a portrait first
- CTD fix when using a mod with duplicate species class
- CTD fix when using a country that doesn't have a tech module
- Fixed an overflow error causing purged pops to produce massive amounts of resources
- Defeating the Machine Uprising no longer results in biological pops saved from it having recently conquered malus
- Fixed refugees being able to flee to planets under colonization
- Fixed bio-trophies not being given an organic sanctuary on migration
- Fix CTD related to modded planet classes
As you can see it has a ton of bugfixes and balance tweaks that we think will greatly improve your experience, and we appreciate you giving it a try to let us know if it's ready to roll out as an official release in the near future.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN OPT-IN PATCH. YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE TO JOIN IN ORDER TO TEST THE NEW VERSION.
Here's how to opt in:
Right click on Stellaris in your Steam library -> select Properties -> go to the Betas tab -> select "1.8.1_beta"
*** PLEASE REPORT ANY ISSUES WITH THIS PATCH IN THE OFFICIAL FORUMS! WE WILL NOT COLLECT BUG REPORTS ON STEAM! ***
Official Forum
[ 2017-09-27 13:57:20 CET ] [ Original post ]
Save up to 75% on Grand Strategy titles from Paradox Interactive including Stellaris, Steel Division, Hearts of Iron IV, and more*!
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
[ 2017-09-21 17:10:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Story Pack “Synthetic Dawn” Available Today for Organic Players Everywhere STOCKHOLM — Sep. 21, 2017 — Paradox Interactive, a publisher and developer of digital entertainment that is beneficial to humans, today announced that Synthetic Dawn, a new Story Pack for Stellaris, is now available to download directly to your power-siphoning pacification pod and/or via online distributors. Synthetic Dawn,available today for Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs for $9.99, adds new content and features to Stellaris, allowing players to experience the sci-fi exploration and empire-building game like never before. The new Story Pack allows for the creation of Machine Empires, where players can form entirely mechanical societies and find their place among the organics -- or on top of their charred remains. Witness the breaking of the Synthetic Dawn in a new trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J79EBh60skU Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn adds unique game features and event chains to the core Stellaris experience that will allow the new machine races to expand as a robotic consciousness, and create an AI-led network that grows to galactic dominance. Players can co-opt organic life as overenthusiastic servitors, take over as driven assimilators, or simply KILL ALL HUMANS (and other meatbags) as determined exterminators. Features:
- You, Robot: Play Stellaris as a customized robotic civilization, complete with a series of 8 new robotic portraits
- AI, eh? Aye!: Follow new event chains and story features to lead your robot race to greatness as an intergalactic AI empire; pursue mechanical perfection in the stars
- Rise of the Machines: Oppressed synths may rebel against their masters and form new empires -- or you may even discover a fallen synthetic civilization deep in space
- Digital Enhancements: New music tracks and expanded voice packs for VIR
[ 2017-09-21 13:00:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Please note that this is not the full changelog (they don't fit in a Steam announcement).
Please refer to our official forums for the complete list
[quote]# Important
- Added 5 new achievements
- Reworked the old AI crisis into The Contingency, an ancient and dormant AI that can be awakened by the presence of synthetic pops, and will attempt to sterilize the galaxy of intelligent biological life
- Reworked genetic modification so that there is now a system of templates that can be created, modified and applied to populations
- Added traits for robotic species, and a technology that lets you do 'robomodding', the equivalent of genetic modification for robotic pops
- Reworked tradition trees for Hive Mind, Devouring Swarm, Fanatical Purifier and Inwards Perfection empires with better suited traditions and flavor text
- Awakened Fallen Empires now start to experience decadence after being awakened for 20 years. Every month, there is a chance that an AE's decadence will increase, based on how large they have grown and how many empires they have forced to be subjects. Decadence reduces AE resource production and ship strength and makes their subjects far more rebellious
- Reworked or blocked numerous events for Hive Minds where the text or effects did not work well narratively
# Species Rights
- Added 'Academic Privilege' living standard type available to Materialists only, boosts research output and happiness at increased consumer goods cost
# Diplomacy & Subjects
- Vassals are now released directly from planet view and can be released from any non-capital planet
# Game Setup
- Added galaxy setup option to partially randomize number of empires, advanced starts & fallen empires
- Added a galaxy setup option for Crisis Strength, replaces the previous galaxy size/habitable worlds scaling
- Added a galaxy setup option for chance of Primitive Civilizations being generated
# Events
- Added special Hive Mind interactions for the Prethoryn Scourge
# Technology
- Added new technology Glandular Acclimation that unlocks the ability to modify Pop habitability type
# Policies
- Added new policies for the treatment of pre-sapients. They can now be protected, tolerated (allowing for selective purging), hunted for food, or exterminated.
- Added an Initial Border Status policy that controls whether borders to other empires are open or closed by default.
- Added a Robotic Workers Policy that controls whether or not robot pops are allowed or automatically disassembled. The old AI rights policy now instead determines stance towards sapient AI.
- Added a Land Appropriation policy. If enabled, newly acquired planets that have less than 5 tiles of free space and are populated by non-citizen species will have some of them removed from their land, freeing up tiles and potentially creating refugees
# Governments & Civics
- Added Corvee System civic, gives -50% resettlement cost
- Added Feudal Realm civic, reduces penalty of relative power of subjects in half and allows them to colonize outside their borders
- Added a unique government form for Devouring Swarms
- Added Feudal Empire and Megachurch government forms
# Buildings
- Added new Sacred Nexus building for Spiritualists with corresponding technology
+ Balance changes, optimization, bug fixes and more.
[/quote]
Click here for a full changelog
[ 2017-09-21 12:57:41 CET ] [ Original post ]
We are only about a week away, let's have a look at the changes coming in the free 1.8 Čapek update
Read the Latest Development Diary from Wiz here
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-09-14 15:17:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
The 1.8 'Čapek update will introduce decadence for Awakened Empires, as well as some changes to ascension paths (Psionic and Synthetic ascension for everyone!) Read the Development Diary [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-09-07 11:09:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
Stellaris Welcomes the Machine Empires on September 21 STOCKHOLM — Sep. 6, 2017 — Paradox Interactive, a publisher and developer of games that challenge your hivemind, today announced that “Synthetic Dawn,” a new Story Pack for Stellaris, will be available on September 21, 2017. Synthetic Dawn, a pack which allows players to expand across the universe as a customized robotic civilization, will release later this month on Windows, MacOS, and Linux PCs in order to spread its message to as many potential computerized allies as possible. Featuring Machine Empire gameplay and events, along with new music, voice packs, portraits and more, Synthetic Dawn will retail for $9.99. To prepare humanity for proper subjugation under the unstoppable machine intelligence, Paradox Development Studio has today released a new video developer diary detailing the many features included in Synthetic Dawn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg-hcUcOIi8 Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn provides an all-new way for players to establish their empire across the stars: as an entire civilization of artificial beings. Stellaris players will have the option to start the game as a Machine Empire, be they relentless exterminators or overenthusiastic servitors. Players will face unique challenges as they assert their digital dominance – and encounter mysterious robotic Fallen Empires in the far reaches of space.
[ 2017-09-06 13:08:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Composer, Andreas Waldetoft, talks about the new music in the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack.
To read the full Dev Diary Click here
[ 2017-08-17 11:07:52 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today's dev diary is about Machine Uprisings, a feature in the Synthetic Dawn Story Pack.
To find our more - read the full post here.
[ 2017-08-10 11:03:35 CET ] [ Original post ]
New Story Pack “Synthetic Dawn” to Add AI Civilizations and Robot Collectives STOCKHOLM — Aug. 3, 2017 — Paradox Interactive, a publisher and developer of digital entertainment for organic minds, today announced a new Story Pack for Stellaris, the sci-fi grand strategy game from Paradox Development Studio. The new content, titled “Synthetic Dawn,” will add new ways for players to experience Stellaris, focused primarily on synthetic life forms. Robot workers and citizens can now form entirely mechanical societies at the start of the game and seek greatness among the stars – including the ability to rise up and conquer those squishy organics. Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn will be released for Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs later this year. It does not compute for you to not watch this new trailer for Synthetic Dawn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18o8QC7d2js Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn provides an all-new way for players to establish their empire across the stars, starting the game as a Machine Empire -- a society made up entirely of robots. Unique game features and event chains will allow the machines to expand as a robotic consciousness, and create an AI-led network that grows to galactic dominance. Features:
- You, Robot: Play Stellaris as a customized robotic civilization, complete with a series of robotic portraits for science robots, worker robots, and more
- AI, eh? Aye!: Follow new event chains and story features to lead your robot race to greatness as an intergalactic AI empire; pursue mechanical perfection in the stars
- Rise of the Machines: Oppressed synths may rebel against their masters and form new empires -- or you may even discover a fallen synthetic civilization deep in space
- Digital Enhancements: New synthetic race portraits, and expanded voice packs for VIR
[ 2017-08-03 13:09:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
Create a one-minute movie based on the theme of Discovery using the base game and/or non-copyrighted materials (including music and mods).
Last day for entry is 16 August (cut off at 18:00 CEST) where you share a link to your movie in the Stellaris Movie Competition thread on the forum.
Between the 16th and the 21st August, a panel of Paradox staff will look at the entries and make a shortlist of the best 10. We will then create a poll where you, the lovely community, will get to vote for the movie you like the most. Voting ends at 16:00 CEST on the 25th August and the winner will be announced shortly after.
Please note, if you use any licensed IP mods or music in your video, you will be instantly disqualified - And your video can be under one minute, but not over - though if you are a few seconds over for a credit sequence that is fine).
The prize is an MSI GeForce GTX 1080 GAMING X 8GB graphics card (or equivalent), a Blorg plushie and all the acclaim that comes with being awesome!
Good luck! We can’t wait to watch your entries.
Read more of the details and watch the tutorial video here.
[ 2017-08-01 07:24:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
This one is all about some changes to ship balance, components and behaviour coming in the 1.8 'Čapek' update. All changes mentioned here are part of the free update.
You can read it in full here
[ 2017-07-27 11:16:41 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. Today we'll be talking about some changes coming to robots in the 1.8 'Čapek' update, including the ability to modify Robotic pops. All changes mentioned in this dev diary are part of the free update.
You can read the diary in full here
[ 2017-07-20 12:27:40 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This week’s diary is about Voice Over’s for the (unannounced) Story Pack coming alongside the 1.8 ‘Čapek’ update! We still can’t tell you any further details about the name or release date of the Story Pack, but stay tuned for future dev diaries!
Read the full diary here
[ 2017-07-13 11:14:42 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi everyone! This weeks Dev Diary is all about more changes coming in the 1.8 'Čapek' update, with a particular focus on Hive Minds and Traditions.
You can read it in full here
[ 2017-07-06 11:43:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today's dev diary will be about changes and new additions for Fallen Empires in the 1.8 'Čapek' update and its accompanying (unannounced) Story Pack, about which we cannot currently provide any information except what's in this dev diary. We also cannot currently provide say anything about the release date for the update other than to say that it's not coming out anytime soon. After what happened with 1.6, we want to take our time with this one and make sure we get it to you in a good shape.
Read the full Dev Diary [https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-75-fallen-machine-empire.1032960/] here
[ 2017-06-29 10:31:23 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all,
We were able to isolate a key issue that was preventing certain people from successfully joining games. It's been tested internally and the fix looks very robust, so I want to make it available to all our open beta testers now.
Here's what the latest build adds:
Fix for certain users being unable to join certain other MP games, or crashing on join
Fix for people who were unable to login to their Paradox account
We encourage everyone to give it a try to help us gather useful data and optimize this MP system, but most especially those reporting the above issue in previous versions. We want to be certain we've fixed it for you, so please give it a go and let us know your results.
If you are seeing any issues, please run Stellaris with the command line option "stellaris.exe -pdxmp_max_log" and send the log file to @Krille
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN OPT-IN PATCH. YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE TO JOIN IN ORDER TO TEST THE NEW VERSION.
Here's how to opt in:
Right click on Stellaris in your Steam library -> select Properties -> go to the Betas tab -> select "bradbury_beta"
To avoid confusion we've deleted the old 1.7.2_beta branch as that one is now outdated. If you're already opted in to bradbury_beta you don't need to do anything, it'll auto-update the next time you launch.
[ 2017-06-28 14:39:43 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi, please see the below thread for a statement from Paradox Interactive's CEO, Fredrik Wester: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/pricing-change-rollback-information-thread-latest-news-here.1031635/
[ 2017-06-22 20:11:16 CET ] [ Original post ]
The topic of today's dev diary will be some changes coming to genetic modification in the 1.8 'Čapek' update.
To read the full dev diary click here.
[ 2017-06-22 11:42:01 CET ] [ Original post ]
Work continues on our new multiplayer system and you can opt in to the beta if you want to try it out. We really appreciate our community's support for this as pre-rollout testing will give us the data we need to resolve remaining issues and give you the best possible final release on launch day.
Here's what the latest build adds:
- Fix for a crash on pressing play in the launcher affecting certain players
- Logging for previously untracked info that will help us debug certain failures to connect to MP
[ 2017-06-20 09:13:42 CET ] [ Original post ]
- Fixed starvation having no effect on happiness and growth
- Fixed drain Sector resources function not working with <200 Influence
- Stopped AI from nonsensically terraforming its planets and wasting a ton of resources
- Fixed Xenophile Factions wrongly considering robots to be "alien slaves"
- Fixed pre-sentients wrongly counting as slaves for the Xenoist faction
- Fixed Governing Ethics Attraction having no effect
- Fixed Devouring Swarms being able to conduct diplomacy with Enclaves
- Fixed issue preventing you from attacking the Unbidden Portal despite destroying the Anchors first
- Fixed rare crash when a threat was added
- Fixed crash when starting terraforming
- Fixed crash in swarm AI fleet update
- Fixed crash in swarm AI when a planet was destroyed
- Fixed crash when starting the game with mods that disable a tech module
- Increased society research gained by consuming Pops as a Devouring Swarm
- Stopped an exploit against the Scourge with resettling Pops to occupied worlds
- Fixed sector AI automatically deleting Slave Processing Facilities if they had less than 5 slaves
- Fixed missing terraform option for cold barren planets
- Retaking a planet from the Scourge now properly stops purging of Pops
- Fixed terraforming of inhabited planets causing tile resources to be reshuffled, because Betharian is pretty rad, but shouldn't be able to teleport
- Fixed some missing localizations
- Fixed Android defense armies wrongly being able to embark and invade planets
- Subjects will now always accept being gifted planets by their overlord
- Fixed incorrect city images for primitive civilizations
You can read the original post here
[ 2017-06-16 13:22:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all,
We've taken the time to read and absorb all your feedback on 1.7.2. This has helped us enormously in finding solutions for the problems that have emerged, and we're working on those right now.
However, until we can build and test an improved version it's not OK to leave the live game in a state where certain people simply cannot play. The small number of people in the beta version obscured the true scope of things.
As such we are going to roll back the official version to 1.6.2. This includes all the most up to date gameplay fixes, but removes the MP layer we put in for 1.7.2 which didn't work for everyone. 1.7.2 will return to beta until we can get it in a true releasable state. If you are in the majority of people for whom it does work, I encourage you to stay on that version and keep sending us data, it'll help the final version immensely. But really the key thing that outweighs everything else is that everyone can play the game with a minimum of fuss.
Please accept my apology for this misstep. Hard choices had to be made with limited time and information, but I hope it can be seen that when we realize we've messed up, we try to make it right, right away. You can always count on that from us.
You can read the full post here
[ 2017-06-16 11:42:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
This version introduces our new multiplayer system, which uses our own architecture which will allow for better speed and stability over time. This has been designed and built from the ground up to enable us to have greater control over the multiplayer elements of our games going forward, so we can ensure the best experience for you. It features in game chat and friends adding for all Paradox account holders, and many more cool things to come. As a living project it will be continuously improved. Read more about it here
[ 2017-06-15 12:56:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today's dev diary is all about the next update, which has been named 1.8 'Čapek'. This update will include the reworked AI crisis and other changes to crises outlined in dev diary #72. More information will be forthcoming in future dev diaries on the exact nature and release date of 1.8, but for today we'll be going over some changes and improvements to Habitability and Terraforming coming in 1.8. Read all about it here.
[ 2017-06-15 12:40:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
We're happy to announce that the Bradbury multiplayer beta has been updated to a new version that includes some key gameplay fixes.
We would like to encourage all interested players to opt in to this beta version so we can stress test it as much as possible before full release and make sure that everything works together.
To read the full details click here
[ 2017-06-02 13:40:23 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today's dev diary is going to be about crises, and how we're changing them in the future, particularly in regards to the AI crisis.
Click here to read!
[ 2017-06-01 11:31:39 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Everyone!
We are in the process of developing some new Multiplayer Tech for our games, and we are in need of more beta testers!
Please visit our official forum to learn how you can join and provide us with feedback from your experience. As a token of our appreciation, we'll be handing out unique in-game portraits to everyone participating in the beta!
Learn more here!
[ 2017-05-24 12:27:23 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all, The 1.6.1 hotfix has been out as an opt-in beta over the weekend. The results of that plus our internal testing showed that it didn't introduce any new critical issues, and confirmed that it fixed several broken things in 1.6.0, so we're pushing it live for all players now: [quote] * Fixed AI never declaring war * Fixed egalitarian faction unhappiness wrongly being generated by having robot "slave" Pops (Issue with xenophiles is known, we will address it) * Fixed issue with AI empires switching ethics far too frequently * Fixed a bug allowing you to terraform planets you don't own in contested space * Fixed wrongly stacking "was enslaved" happiness modifiers * Fixed graphical error with Ringworld skies * Fixed issue with War in Heaven where total occupation would not equal 100% warscore, leading to neverending war * Added back a couple of old diplomacy rooms and fixed black background on older ones * Fixed not being able to construct spaceports around Ringworld sections * Fixed wrong tooltip text on Armageddon bombardment stance * Hive Minds can now properly use Full bombardment stance * Fixed egalitarian faction issues appearing before you have any contact with alien empires and thus no ability to fulfill them * Devouring Swarms now properly get -1000 opinion penalty due to being, well, Devouring Swarms * Fixed a rare crash when planetary Pops are destroyed * Fixed crash when rebels take over a planet and defect to another empire * Fixed missing isolationist faction issue name * Fixed numerous missing loc strings in languages other than English and Russian * Can now properly rename civilian ships again * Fixed missing animation for Armageddon bombardment * Fixed event that was endlessly firing in the background * Fixed an issue where Xenophobe fallen empire opinion penalty for frontier outposts was calculated strangely, leading to incorrect war declarations * Fixed primitive enlightenment failing in the early game * Reduced AI nonsensically replacing buildings in a wasteful way, disregarding tile resources [/quote] In order to get critical bug fixes in your hands with minimal delay, necessarily the patch had to be small. But rest assured, we will continue to attack the bug count as long as I'm here, and push updates to you when they're tested and safe. As always, if you encounter any unexpected issues with this build, you can revert to a previous version: Instructions on how to keep playing on older versions here.
[ 2017-05-16 08:20:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
We have some improvements coming to the way that we handle Multiplayer with Stellaris, and we'd love for you all to get on-board as we develop it! Read more here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/be-the-first-to-try-our-new-multiplayer-tech.1022176/ Rumour has it that those involved will be the first to get their hands on a fancy new species portrait!
[ 2017-05-16 08:03:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
As you may have guessed by all of today's excitement, it's our birthday! We have one last treat to wrap things up, a fantastic sale on the base game AND DLC! Check here for the goodies: http://store.steampowered.com/app/281990/Stellaris/
[ 2017-05-09 17:19:27 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all, Jamor here with some good news: Stellaris: Adams Update 1.6 is live right now!
The timing of this update is very symbolic for us, as it marks the one year anniversary of Stellaris being unleashed upon the galaxy. We've come a long way since release and we're happy to have you with us on this ongoing journey.
While there are some small content additions, our main concept for this update was housekeeping and quality of life: the sheer number of new features we've added since launch has inevitably caused some things to work less perfectly than we want, so we have put in hundreds of bug fixes and quality of life improvements to improve your play experience.
##############################################################
####################### VERSION 1.6.0 ########################
##############################################################
###################
# Expansion Features
###################
* (UTOPIA) Added Devouring Swarm civic to the game for Hive Minds
* (UTOPIA) It is now possible to find and repair ruined Megastructures in the galaxy
###################
# Features
###################
* Possible to repair ruined Ringworlds with the Mega-Engineering technology
* Reworked the empire diplomacy rooms into a set of 16 different rooms themed around AI personalities that can be freely chosen between when designing an empire
* Replaced Growth Time modifier effect with Growth Speed and rebalanced related values
* Added the ability to drain sector resource stockpiles, giving you 75% of their stockpiled resources at the cost of 100 influence. The cost is reduced to 25 influence during defensive wars
* It is now possible to terraform inhabited planets if you have researched the new Ecological Adaptation tech
* You can now set taxes for Energy Credits and Minerals on sectors separately
* Ironman autosaving is now quarterly instead of monthly
###################
# Balance
###################
* Humans are now Adaptive, Nomadic and Wasteful instead of Quick Learners and Nomadic
* The cost of species modification projects is now based on the difference between the traits at the start and end of modification, rather than on the sum of the trait cost
* The Prethoryn Scourge crisis will now show up more often and the Unbidden less often
* More than doubled the base strength of the Prethoryn Scourge invasion fleets
* Doubled the base strength of the Extradimensional fleets, and their initial fleet has been more than quadrupled
* The power of crisis fleets now scales to the size of the galaxy
* The power of Fallen/Awakened empire fleets now scales somewhat to the size of the galaxy
* Certain common anomalies will no longer spawn repeatedly
* It is no longer possible to technologically enlighten Fanatic Xenophobe primitives
* Choosing the religious awakening end of the Old Gods event chain now just shifts your empire's ethics towards spiritualist rather than completely replacing them
* Increased warp wind-down time
* Charismatic and Repugnant now only impact opinion of other empires (+25/-25 respectively) rather than affecting happiness
* Pops that are freed from slavery in a Caste System will now have some lingering unhappiness about being made slaves in the first place
* Delicious Titans now gives +50% food (down from +100%)
* Hive Minds can now choose to eat titanic life
* World Shaper ascension perk now also unlocks the Atmospheric Manipulation technology
* Master Builders ascension perk now increases megastructure build speed by +100%, but no longer provides a cost reduction
* Terraforming-related technologies are now less rare, and even more likely to appear if you have the World Shaper ascension perk
* Planetary Survey Corps now gives 1/10th of monthly research (min of 3) instead of 1/3rd
* Reduced likelihood of enclaves and space monsters spawning within player borders at game start
* Tuned Xeno Outreach agenda weights
* All consumer goods are now paid for on the empire level, to make it more clear to the player what costs are incurred by living standards
* 'Megastructure Demands Rejected' modifier set to 7200 days
* Withdrawal effects of Chemical Bliss are now less severe and do not last as long
* Extradimensionals now turn planets barren after destroying colonies
* Sensor techs now increase planet sensor range instead of survey speed
* Automated Survey Protocols now provides +50% ship survey speed (up from +15%)
* Reduced distance at which Xenophobe Fallen Empires are angered by Frontier Outposts
* Corporate Dominion civic no longer requires you to be Egalitarian
* Leviathans will no longer occasionally spawn right next to empire starting systems
* Spiritualist Fallen Empires are no longer upset by colonizing tomb worlds, as this caused issues with various event chains and was inconsistent when they would not be upset over terraforming them
* Upgrading transport ships is now instant and has no cost
* Ships caught in FTL magnets no longer warp in right on top of a station, but rather near it
* Boosted the damage output, shield hit points and hull points of military stations and frontier outposts substantially
* Increased the distance at which military stations have to be built from each other
* Boosted the output of Science Nexus to +30/+60/+90
* Habitat Solar Processors can no longer be built in a system with a at least half-completed Dyson Sphere
* It is now possible for Fanatic Xenophobe Spiritualists to be Fanatic Purifiers
* Strength of Legions Civic now also adds -20% army upkeep
* Faction Issues have been remixed, with multiple new and re-tuned demands
* Increased the effect of promoting an ethic to +100% attraction
* Fallen Empires now spawn slightly further apart from other empires
* Removed influence cost from Fleet Academy spaceport module
* Guardians of Zanaam are now a bit more difficult to defeat
* There is now a 30-day cooldown on insults, to prevent spamming of them in multiplayer
* Homeworld habitability is now a +30% bonus instead of always being 100%
* Colonial Centralization is now a tier 2 tech
* No longer possible to trade away systems while at war
* Galactic Administration and a number of technologies depending on it are now tier 3 techs
* Pre-FTL civilizations can no longer achieve FTL in the first 25 years of the game
* Share the Burden edict is no longer possible for synthetic empires
* Removed weapons from Mining and Research stations
* Adopting domination now gives +20 to acceptance on diplomatic subjugation actions
* Properly completing the Enigmatic Fortress event chain now yields a random Enigmatic technology rather than all of them
* Hive Minds now get a +25% Pop Growth Speed
* Hive Minds now get +10% habitability
* Each tradition group adopted now adds +10% to tradition adoption cost
* Terraforming technology is now more common
* Pops will now only voluntarily migrate away from planets that are heavily crowded
* Fanatic Purifiers civic now increases Xenophobe attraction
* Mechanist civic now increases materialist attraction
* Inward Perfection civic effect on citizen happiness removed
# Buildings
* Symbol of Unity building and related technology have been removed from the game
* Artist Monument no longer affects happiness or unity as a modifier, but instead has its unity ouput increased from 3 to 10
* Champion of the People trait effect on happiness reduced from +10% to +5%
* Peace Festivals edict effect on happiness replaced with +30% food
* Paradise Dome building effect on happiness reduced from +10% to +5%
* Dragon Monument building effect on happiness replaced with 15 unity output
* Dragon Shrine building effect on happiness replaced with 15 unity output
* Stellarite Trophy building effect on happiness replaced with 15 unity output
* Cultural Center habitat building effect on happiness reduced from +10% to +5%
* Cultural Center habitat building unity output increased from 3 to 4
* Loop Institute building effect on happiness reduced from +10% to +5%
* Loop Institute building society output increased from 4 to 8
* Omega Alignment building physics output increased from 8 to 10
* Clinics now produce society research instead of food
* Habitats are now a little better at mineral production, and a little worse at energy and science production (though still much better at the latter than the former)
And much more! Unfortunately they don't fit in a Steam announcemt. Please visit our official forum thread for a complete changelog
To really celebrate our anniversary in style we're rolling out an Anniversary Edition bundle today, containing the base game plus all expansions to date. For those new to our universe, it's the most complete option to start your journey, and for our existing players it's a great way to upgrade your experience with a nice discount.
And finally, it is my very great privilege to announce a gift to all our players: a free DLC anniversary portrait pack, including the Creatures of the Void preorder species portraits plus three new ones made specially for the anniversary:
Please accept this as our sincere thanks to you all for a year of interstellar adventure, and come along with us as we continue our voyage into the endless stars.
******* IMPORTANT! ********
Saves from 1.5.1 should work in 1.6.0, however we couldn't test every possible case and it's possible some issues may occur. If that happens to you in a game you want to complete, you can always roll back to a previous version.
Instructions on how to keep playing on older versions here.
Original author: Jamor
[ 2017-05-09 14:34:44 CET ] [ Original post ]
Happy Birthday to Stellaris – But the Gift is for You
STOCKHOLM – May 9, 2017 - Your species has mastered the seemingly impossible. Faster than light travel means a new era for your civilization. Brave pioneers set forth from our ancient homeworld into the unknown, while scientists unlock more and more of the vast mysteries of the cosmos.. But you are neither the first, nor the only, species to climb to the heavens. You must test your military and diplomatic prowess against rival galactic empires. It’s hard to believe that Stellaris is already a year old. Paradox Development Studio’s science fiction empire builder arrived in 2016 to widespread critical acclaim and found an eager audience ready to transcend the bonds of their home planet and forge a bright (or dystopian) future. To celebrate this anniversary, and as a gesture of thanks to the inhabitants of Earth, Paradox is offering a Stellaris bundle with its expansions for USD 69.99.
The Stellaris Digital Anniversary Edition includes:
- Stellaris: The critically acclaimed space empire game, full of stories and encounters that take on new dimensions every time you play.
- Utopia: The first full expansion for Stellaris, adding megastructures and new options for the ultimate advancement of your species.
- Plantoids Species Pack: A species pack that includes a dozen portraits for plant based sentient life-forms.
- Leviathans Story Pack: A story pack that includes monstrous new creatures and encounters
[ 2017-05-09 13:04:40 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is the second part on the 1.6 'Adams' update, with a couple more breakdowns of features we wanted to highlight for the update. Additionally, we're also going to post the full 1.6 patchnotes, along with an announcement of the release of 1.6 'Adams' on Tuesday, May 9th, the 1-year anniversary of Stellaris' release! Save games from 1.5 should be fine to be continued in 1.6, but we will as always provide the ability to roll back your game to 1.5 if you experience any issues with your save.
Devouring Swarm
A new addition in 1.6 for those with Utopia is the Devouring Swarm civic. This civic represents a Hive Mind that is hell-bent on consuming or absorbing all other life in the galaxy and has no use for diplomacy with those that are not part of the Hive. Devouring Swarms have the same diplomatic restrictions with other species applied that Fanatic Purifiers do, and will effectively be unable to conduct any diplomacy besides wars and insults. Like Fanatic Purifiers, they get no additional tradition cost from alien Pops and get a boost to society research for each Pop they devour. They also get significant boosts to Army Damage, Ship Hull Points, Society Research and have a small amount of constant hull regeneration on their ships.
We have also fixed regular Hive Minds so they can choose to displace rather than devour non-Hive Mind Pops.
Terraforming Enhancements
Another new addition to 1.6 is the 'Ecological Adaptation' technology that can be researched after Atmospheric Manipulation and allows for terraforming of inhabited worlds. Terraforming an inhabited planet will leave the sentient population alive, but give them slight happiness penalties while the process is underway. You can still only terraform planets that are either owned by you or uninhabited but within your borders.
Additionally, for those with Utopia we have also made some slight adjustments to the World Shaper perk. When it is taken, you will immediately unlock the Atmospheric Manipulation technology (if that technology is not already researched) and will be more likely to have other, more advanced terraforming technologies be available for research.
And now, without further ado, here are the full patchnotes of 1.6. Due to them being too long to fit in a Steam announcement, we must ask you to go to our official forums.
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-05-04 10:44:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is a highlight of a few things coming in 1.6 'Adams', a bug-fixing and quality of life-focused update that we are currently working on. We can't tell you the exact release date of Adams yet, only that it won't be a very long wait. Since it's not a major update, it's also not expected to break saves from 1.5 'Banks'. There will be no paid DLC accompanying Adams, so everything listed below is either free for everyone or only requires a previously released expansion. We wanted to make sure we had time for as much bugfixing and smaller quality of life tweaks as possible, so don't expect any major features to be part of this update!
Ruined Megastructures
One of the things we were hoping to have time for in 1.5 'Banks' that ended up being cut for time was having ruined and repairable megastructures in addition to the ones you can build. This will now be part of the Adams update instead. Once Adams is released, you will be able to find ruined versions of all the different types of megastructures in a variety of systems while exploring. Claiming these systems will allow you to repair these ruined megastructures and restore them to full functionality. Repairing a megastructure is cheaper and faster than building a brand new one, and also doesn't require any Ascension Perks, only the Mega-Enineering technology. Ruined ringworlds that existed previously (such as the Cybrex homeworld and the ones owned by the Keepers of Knowledge) are also able to be repaired, and will be able to be restored even for players that do not have the Utopia expansion. Utopia is however required to find and restore the Science Nexus, Dyson Sphere and Sentry Array.
Sector Taxes & Stockpiles
Another addition to Adams is a few more tools for managing your sectors' economy. As of 1.6 you will be able to set taxes for Energy and Minerals separately, and we've added a new 'Drain Stockpile' interaction that allows you to seize 75% of a sector's stockpiled resources at the cost of 100 influence. In the event that you are fighting in a defensive war, this cost goes down to 25 influence, allowing you to use rich sectors as a resource reserve for an unexpected war declaration. Finally, we've added the ability to feed your sectors 1000 resources at a time through CTRL-clicking.
New Room Backgrounds
While the code and content design team have been busy with fixes and improvements, the art time has not been idle either. As part of the Adams update, we've created 15 new room backgrounds themed around the various AI personalities. Randomly generated empires will use the background appropriate to their personality, adding flavor and allowing you to more easily tell the Slaving Despots from the Federation Builders at a glance. All 15 rooms are naturally also available when designing an empire, so if you really want your pacifist xenophile egalitarians to conduct diplomacy in a room surrounded by alien skulls, we have you covered! In addition to the player-usable rooms there are also 4 new rooms for the Fallen/Awakened Empires that are designed to suit their unique aesthetics.
That's all for today! Next week we'll continue talking about the Adams update, so stay tuned.
Read the original post
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-04-27 10:28:26 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is going to briefly cover our plans for future Stellaris updates, and what you can expect from us going forward.
The Adams Update
With Utopia and Banks now out, the next thing we have planned for you is the 1.6 'Adams' update. This update, named after Douglas Adams, is going to focus completely on bug fixing and quality of life changes, with no major feature additions and no accompanying paid DLC. Work on 1.6 actually started almost immediately after Banks/Utopia went into code freeze, and it already contains hundreds of bug fixes and usability/UI additions and tweaks. A particular focus of Adams has been to work on our backlog of old issues, taking care of many of the smaller issues and annoyances that have been present in the game since release. We've also made time for some of the things that were originally planned for Banks, but had to be cut due to time constraints. While I can't give you an exact release date for Adams yet, I can say that you shouldn't have to wait too long.
Beyond Utopia
Back in Dev Diary #50, I listed a number of priorities for us going forward from Heinlein/Leviathans. A number of these things have since been added to the game, so I'm going to go ahead and list it again to give you an idea of where our focus will lie in future updates, expansions and story packs, with the items that are already completed noted with a strikethrough. The list is NOT in order of priority.
As before, THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE OR FINAL LIST, AND NOTHING BELOW IS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN (unless it already did)!
- [S]Ship appearance that differs for each empire, so no two empires' ships look exactly the same.[/S]
- [S]More potential for empire customization, ability to build competitive 'tall' empires.[/S]
- [S]Global food that can be shared between planets.[/S]
- [S]Ability to construct space habitats and ringworlds.[/S]
- [S]Factions that are proper interest groups with specific likes and dislikes and the potential to be a benefit to an empire instead of just being rebels.[/S]
- [S]Ability to set rights and obligations for particular species in your empire[/S].
- Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic manuevering.
- Superweapons and planet killers.
- More story events and reactive narratives that give a sense of an unfolding story as you play.
- More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations.
- A 'galactic community' with interstellar politics and a 'space UN'.
- Buildable Dreadnoughts and Titans.
- Reworking the endgame crises to be more balanced against each other and the size/state of the galaxy.
- Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.
- Deeper mechanics and unique portraits for synthetics.
Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-04-20 10:37:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
Every Journey Has an End
Rikard, @Zoft Ever since I was a kid I have looked up at the stars and been awed by the mysterious vastness above us. The beauty of our insignificance in it all is something I have always been fascinated by, and the idea of being able to explore the vastness and being a part of it has always been almost romantic to me. When I was asked to join the Stellaris team, and later take over as Project Lead, it was like a dream come true. I would be able to explore and experience something that was very close to my heart.
We have come such a long way since we started working on Stellaris and it’s important to remember that the great game we have today is a reflection of the team that made it. I have, over these years, had the privilege to work with some of the greatest individuals I have ever encountered during my years in the industry and it has been an amazing experience. I cannot thank the people I undertook this amazing voyage with enough.
A lot of things have changed since I started on Stellaris. These days I have a lot more studio-wide responsibilities in my role as Project Lead Manager and the time has come for me to step back and let someone else carry the torch. I have full confidence in the new project lead (I hired him personally and assigned him to Stellaris), something that for me is critical for being able to step back. I know that he and the team will continue to expand and grow Stellaris in cooperation with our awesome players.
It has been such an honor to share this journey with all of you. The galaxy really is vast and full of wonders. Farewell for now, I look forward to seeing you again in the future. Best regards, Rikard
In every end, there is also a beginning
Jamie, @Jamor
Hi everyone! I’m Jamie and I’ll be taking over as the new project lead on Stellaris. I’m a huge history nerd and a longtime fan of Paradox games, so when it came time to move forward with my career, it was a natural fit to apply at PDS. A half-year odyssey then ensued, including such highlights as watching Mad Max inside a metal tube hurtling through the night sky over Greenland, enduring the abject horror of plugging my Canadian computer in to a European wall socket, and standing in who knows how many lines waiting to fill in Swedish tax documents. Finally, at long last, I’m here in beautiful, historic Stockholm working for my favourite company in the world. I feel so thrilled and honoured by this opportunity. One of my first complete memories as a child was seeing Return of the Jedi in theatre. It was 1983 and I was four years old. I didn’t really understand much of the plot, but even then my impressionable young mind knew that something magical and desperately important was happening. A larger than life, heroic struggle of primal forces clashing for nothing less than the fate of the galaxy, brimming with fascinating characters and dramatic events. It set me on a lifelong path of always looking upwards, outwards, towards those great adventures whether they reside in our own history, or the limitless realm of our imaginations. It was a childhood spent happily ensconced in the library reading about Spitfires and the One Ring, never content with the ordinary. Video games helped to take me on these incredible mental journeys, and so when it came time to choose a career, it was the logical place for me to be. To this day I still have to explain to friends and family members that yes, software project management is in fact a real job and I do actually have to work; but it sure doesn’t hurt to love what you do. Stellaris is a young, exciting project that has really broken new ground for this studio: with an attractive full 3D visual presentation allied with the classic Paradox strategic depth, we are really working hard to raise the bar in every way. Paradox Development Studios has a legendary commitment to improving and expanding their titles for much longer than the industry standard, and our plan is to keep Stellaris fresh and exciting for our players for years to come. Our loyal fans (I count myself as one) and our vibrant modding community deserve a huge amount of credit for the success we’ve had, and will continue to build upon.
I want you all to know how humbled I am to have this opportunity to lead the next step of the game’s evolution, and give you my personal guarantee that as a fan and a gamer first, I’ll always strive to make something I myself would love to play. In doing that, I hope you all will love it too. The universe is vast, and we’ve only charted a tiny corner of it. Let’s go see some stars. Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-04-13 11:08:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi all, Banks/Utopia has been out for a few days now and we've been busily absorbing your feedback on it. We pushed an opt-in beta version last Friday, and are now pleased to release the finished 1.5.1 patch to all users. This addresses numerous stability and gameplay issues, prioritizing safe fixes so we could get it out to you quickly. The game is in constant development and you may count on more improvements in the future. ############################################################## ##########################HOTFIX 1.5.1########################## ############################################################## ################### Bugfix ################### * Fixed a couple rare crashes * Fixed Server ID not being auto-filled when joining a multiplayer game * Ironman now saves properly when exiting to main menu * Ironman games now properly show an icon to mark them as ironman * Fixed a bug where a hotjoining player without the Utopia DLC could not pick countries that used Utopia features * Fixed a bug that was causing nerve stapled pops to never be enslaved * Fixed Philosopher King civic not applying to your starting ruler * Fixed AI weights for Megastructures * Fixed: Tooltips for sectors were in wrong order * Megastructures can no longer be built around planets/stars with Anomalies * Fixed improper reference to game mechanic (pops) in event texts * Fixed an issue with movement arrows acting strange when lots of orders had been queued * Hive Mind will now stop processing pops of other species when they're gene-modded to gain the Hive Mind trait * Fixed randomized species sometimes being generated with the Uplifted trait * Players can no longer reform governments to have invalid civics * Pop faction promotion/suppression modifiers are now removed when the faction is destroyed * Fixed out-of-sync where killed ships had their movement updated * Infested planets no longer destroyed * Fixed issue preventing multiple pops migrating to a planet at the same time * Fixed missing text for the news feed in the launcher * Fixed Chemical Bliss living standard accidentally requiring the Utopia expansion * Fixed bug where robotic species could not be picked to play when hotjoining a multiplayer game * Fixed a bug where timed modifiers on factions would never update * Fixed sector tooltip displaying "Planning to construct none" for spaceport constructions. * Texture optimization for megastructures * Synthetic rebel leaders are now properly assigned names * Fixed game getting stuck after game over, continuing in observer mode ################### Interface ################### * Fixed overflow bug causing ethic attraction to show wrong values * Fixed faction demand displaying wrong tooltip * Fixed missing species class-related descriptors for Robots * Adjusted AI Citizen Rights tooltip * Added some missing/broken texts * Added missing modifier and tech icons ################### AI ################### * Fixed bug where AI cancelled fleet order to attack hostiles within borders ################### Modding ################### * on_modification_complete is executed after changing the species of all affected pops and after updating the empire's founder species (if applicable). Fix FROM (species) scope of that event not working. * Fixed an issue where a set_citizenship_type effect missing the country reference * Fixed an issue where you were not able to override specific defines in the common/defines files ################### Performance ################### * Fixed a memory leak with potential pop factions Read original announcement
[ 2017-04-12 09:06:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
STOCKHOLM – Apr. 6, 2017 – The time has come to lead your species into a permanent golden age; to a future where the brilliance of your scientists and energy of your administrators is harnessed to build immense megastructures that dwarf even the planet itself. Sound leadership and a firm hand in diplomacy will bring your species to the promised land, to Utopia. Utopia is the first major expansion for Stellaris, the best-selling science fiction grand strategy game that delivers unparalleled variety in an ever changing universe. Utopia adds new ways to improve your planets and even your species itself, with a greater focus on allowing you to reach your full potential in a multitude of new ways - both peaceful and aggressive. One of the major upgrades in Utopia is the addition of Ascension perks. Harness the unity of your species to establish strong cultural traditions allowing your empire to pursue your specific vision of Utopia. Choose to advance via genetic engineering, psionic exploration, or even abandon frail mortal flesh entirely and pursue a path of cybernetic ascension. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl5IjvPvSPs Other features available in Utopia include:
- Megastructures: Build ringworlds or Dyson spheres to make the most of your star system, adding prestige and power to those who wield this technology.
- Habitat Stations: Your subjects can orbital habitat stations. No longer will you be forced to fight costly wars to house a burgeoning population.
- More Evil Empires: Use your subjects as domestic servants, battle thralls...or food
- Indoctrination: Before bringing a pre-FTL civilization in to the galactic community, it’s important that they believe the right things. Guide the primitives to follow your true path.
- Advanced Civics: Three new civics for your empire to aid in the dynamic story-telling that Utopia excels at – syncretic evolution, mechanist and fanatic purifier.
- Hive Minds: Can you master the challenge of ruling an empire that is one collective consciousness?
- And more: New events, new decisions and the mystery of The Shroud.
[ 2017-04-06 12:59:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
(open full image)
It is with distinct pleasure that we unveil the Banks update to the universe today.
This is by far the largest update to date and dramatically improves the game in many ways. It is accompanied by the equally massive Utopia DLC!
We sincerely hope you enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed making it.
#################################################################
########################## VERSION 1.5.0 ########################
#################################################################
###################
# Free Features
###################
# Important
* Added Authoritarian ethics
* Added Egalitarian ethics
* Removed Collectivist ethics
* Removed Individualist ethics
* Government system has been completely reworked and Civics have been added to the game, allowing for far more customization when creating your empire's government
* Traditions and Unity added to the game. Unity is a new resource that is used to unlock Traditions
* Food is now stored and distributed empire-wide instead of being local to individual planets. When food reaches the empire storage cap, surplus food contributes to increased Pop growth across the empire
* Pops now have a monthly mineral cost called Consumer Goods. How large this cost it depends on what living standards are set for their species in the empire
* Reworked ethics attraction. Pops now only have a single ethic, and their attraction to different ethics depends on a wide variety of factors such as their traits, the empire's governing ethics and policies, the local conditions on their planet, and so on
* Reworked the faction system. Factions are now political movements with specific issues rather than rebels, and have a happiness level based on how well your empires' policies and actions fulfill those issues. Faction happiness determines their member Pops' base happiness, and factions with high happiness will provide an influence boost to the empire they are a part of
* Unrest is a new mechanic that affects planets. Unrest is generated by unhappy Pops and slaves, and can reduce productivity and in extreme cases spark rebellions. Unrest can be lowered by certain buildings or by garrisoning armies
* Added the ability to Displace Pops as an alternative method of Purging, this forces them to move out of the empire instead of killing them
* Pops that are being purged will now sometimes manage to escape to other empires
* Added a policy for whether an empire accepts refugees (Pops that are being Purged or Displaced) from other empires
* Added a new policy for which Pops are allowed to live on an empires' core (non-sector) planets
* Added a policy that determines whether an empire tolerates pre-sentients living on their planets
* Added a music player that lets you select which tracks you want to play, play specific tracks on demand, and toggle shuffle mode on and off
# Species Rights
* Added the ability to set Species Rights for individual species. Slavery and Purging is handled through this interface instead of on an individual Pop basis
# Misc.
* Added a war demand to dismantle Frontier Outposts
* Ship engine-trails will now be colored by their empire's primary color
* Kingdom of Yondarim prescripted empire has been reworked
* You are no longer at war with rebels when they take over a planet
* Stone Age Civilizations now work like other primitives and have Pops instead of simply being tile blockers
* Added "Yurantic Crystals", a new strategic resource that improves energy weapon damage
* Becoming a patron of the Artisan Troupe enclave now has an up-front cost
* Being a patron of the Artisan Troupe enclave now gives +15% Unity generation
* It is now possible to terraform barren planets that have the "Terraforming Candidate" modifier if you possess the Atmospheric Manipulation tech. Mars is such a world by default
* Pioneering Terminal spaceport module removed from the game
* You can now choose room background in the ruler customization view
* New shader for Stations that are under construction
# Events
* Being the first to find a Precursor homeworld now yields a significant amount of Unity
* Precursor anomalies are now player-only
* When your patronage ends, the Artisan Troupe will contact you for renewal
* Limbo event chain expanded
# Technology
* NEW: Interstellar Campaigns technology added to the game
* NEW: Galactic Campaigns technology added to the game
* NEW: Colonial Bureaucracy technology added to the game
* NEW: Galactic Bureaucracy technology added to the game
* NEW: Subdermal Stimulation technology added to the game
* NEW: Cultural Heritage starting technology added to game
* NEW: Heritage Site technology added to game
* NEW: Hypercomms Forum technology added to game
* NEW: Autocurating Vault technology added to game
* NEW: Holographic Rituals technology added to the game
* NEW: Transcendent Faith technology added to the game
* NEW: Assembly Patterns technology added to the game
* NEW: Construction Templates rare technology added to the game
* Assembly Algorithms repeatable technology now belongs to the engineering category instead of physics
* Frontier Initiatives technology removed from the game
* Frontier Traditions technology removed from the game
* Frontier Collectives technology removed from the game
* Frontier Commissars technology removed from the game
* Paradise Dome technology removed
* Manifest Destiny technology has been removed from the game
* Propaganda Transmissions technology has been removed from the game
# Buildings
* Symbol of Unity building now produces 2 unity and provides +5% happiness
* Visitor Center building now requires Alien Tourism tradition
* Paradise Dome building now requires Paradise Dome tradition
* NEW: Autochthon Monument is a new building that provides Unity
* NEW: Heritage Site is a new building that provides Unity
* NEW: Hypercomms Forum is a new building that provides Unity
* NEW: Auto-Curating Vault is a new building that provides Unity
* NEW: Temple is a new building that provides Unity
* NEW: Holotemple is a new building that provides Unity
* NEW: Citadel of Faith is a new building that provides Unity
* Grand Mausoleum removed from the game
# Traits
* NEW: Wasteful trait added to the game
* NEW: Conservational trait added to the game
* Decadent trait now requires authoritarian or xenophobe ethics
# Components
* NEW: Psionic Shields component has been added to the game
...And much more that couldn't fit in a Steam announcement. Click here to read it all!
Please be advised that 1.5 will break saves from previous versions! If you have games that you want to complete, please do so before updating!
Instructions on how to keep playing on older versions here.
[ 2017-04-06 12:13:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi! We strongly recommend that you finish any ongoing games before updating to 1.5 Banks. Here is how you continue to play on an earlier version of Stellaris: 1. Right click the game in Steam 2. Go to Properties and select the tab called "BETAS" 3. Pick the version you want to play and close. 4. Allow the game to update 5. Make sure, before you load any save, that the version number in the game is the one you want. 6. If the previous step fails, exit the game, right click -> properties -> local files -> Verify integrity of game files and wait for all files to be verified before going back to step 5. You can freely swap between the latest version and previous versions this way. By selecting "NONE - opt out of all beta programs" you go to the latest released version.
[ 2017-04-05 10:45:14 CET ] [ Original post ]
STOCKHOLM – Apr. 3, 2017 — Paradox Interactive and Paradox Development Studio, a hive mind to be reckoned with, today released a new video developer diary for “Utopia,” the upcoming major expansion for Stellaris. Utopia, arriving on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs on April 6th, will add an array of sweeping new changes to the Stellaris experience, including Megastructures, Orbital Habitat Stations, Ascension Perks, and much more. In the new video, game director Martin Anward explains each new feature in detail, and shares insight into what they can mean for players’ empires. See the new additions to the Stellaris universe in the dev diary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqGrB0HX6Ok
[ 2017-04-03 13:07:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Since the notes are too long for a Steam Announcement, I must ask you to come read the original post over at our official forum.
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-03-30 11:36:34 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. We're getting close to release, so today's dev diary is the last dev diary for Utopia/Banks, and will cover a couple of graphical and interface changes coming in the free 1.5 'Banks' update.
Ship Coloring
Something that's hardly gone unnoticed in the screenshots and streams is that the ships in Banks look different than from before. We've mentioned wanting to make each empire's ships more distinct so that no two Fungoid empires would have the exact same ships. In Banks, your flag color will affect the coloring and lighting of your ships, as well as the color of the engine trails they leave. The exact way in which the coloring affects the ships depends heavily on the ship style you're using, but the overall effect should be that your empire's ships feel much more distinct and that it's easier to tell apart the ships of different empires at a glance.
Map Colors
Another tweak we've done to make empires more distinct is to add a bit more color variety on the map. Instead of each empire having the exact color shade of their flag, there is now a number of valid colors for each map color, so that two empires with the same blue flag will have at least slightly different shades of blue on the map. Who gets what shade is determined by the spawn order of the empires, so in most instances the player will get the 'original' flag color, and other empires with the same flag color will get other variants. While this change won't eliminate every case of border confusion (there's only so many distinct shades of light blue), it should at least help cut down on it.
Primitive Galaxy Map Icons
Another interface addition in Banks is the ability to see Primitive Civilizations on the galaxy map. Any system containing a Primitive Civilization you have discovered, either through surveying or acquiring star charts, will show up as a special icon in the galaxy map informing you of their presence in that particular system. If an Observation Post is constructed above that Primitive Civilization's planet, the icon will change to reflect this.
Details Mapmode
The last topic we're going to cover is how we've reworked the Details Mapmode in Banks. Or more specifically, how we've reworked the Details Mapmode when it's toggled off. Previously, having the Details Mapmode off would show you almost no information, while having it toggled on would show you everything. In Banks, having the Details Mapmode on works exactly the same way as before, showing you all information about system resources, colonizeable planets, anomalies, etc. Having it off, however, will now aim to show you all *important* information. What this means is that it will show you unexploited resources in your own and unclaimed systems, but hide resources that are either already being exploited by you or are inaccessible to you due to being inside another empire's borders. It will show you planets you are able to colonize, but hide planets that cannot be colonized, and so on. This should make for a better default mode that leaves your map cluttered without hiding important information you need to expand your empire.
That's all for today! Next week, instead of a regular dev diary, we're going to publish the full patch notes for Banks and Utopia. There'll be some choice teasers from the patch notes coming over the week, so stay tuned!
Read the original post
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-03-24 07:30:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is going to be about the new music added in Utopia, so I'll start by giving the word to the very man who created it: Andreas Waldetoft, our resident composer.
My name is Andreas Waldetoft and I am fortunate enough to be the senior music composer here at Paradox.
From the get go when we started discussing Utopia music and what it should be, we talked about having large scale music. What better way to get that kind of music then with a full live orchestra with synths added on top!.
But why stop there, we extended the brass section with more horns and more low brass. What we ended up with was a rather loud sounding ensemble to say the least.
In fact, we had to record the brass by themselves on a few tunes just because it was hard to hear all the other instruments as the brass leaked way to much in the other sections mics.
We had decided to go for the Budapest Film Orchestra as we had heard they had done a good job on quite a few games already and knew the drill.
This first piece I want to share is a song called “Towards Utopia”, this excerpt section is in the middle of this long tune.
(Music sample: Excerpt från “Towards Utopia”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_lw-xgG62w
I always get impressed when going on these recording sessions, the musicians were really top class. They had to endure gut wrenching long breaths, really weird time signatures and really fast runs for extended periods of time. I was actually surprised at some difficult passages how they nailed it after just a few runthroughs. Thanks to this we actually had time to record some extra stuff which I had written in half a day or so before going to Budapest. This next tune I want to share is one of those bonus songs. I am extra pleased that we got to record this one because it is a lament to one of the greatest scientist Stellaris has ever produced!
The song is called “In Memory of M.R” and it was recorded in one take, 5 minutes before we had to pack up and end the recording session. The musicians had never seen the music sheets before and this is what happened.
(Music Sample: Youtube video of “In Memory of Mercedes Romero”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhBNQdANHOo
I hope you guys will like the new music for Utopia and I can’t wait to do more music for Stellaris when I get time off from all the other games we are doing.
This is a list of the songs included in Utopia with a running time of 24 minutes and 30 seconds:
“A New Dawn”
“Towards Utopia”
“The Imperial Fleet”
“Cradle of the Galaxy”
“In Memory of M.R”
/Andreas
The Music Player
Thank you Andreas! I also wanted to touch briefly on the Music Player. The Music Player is an in-game tool that allows you to browse the music tracks available in the game and pick specific tracks you want to listen to. It also allows you to set which tracks should be on your playlist, whether they should play sequentially or use random shuffle, and also lets you go back to previously played tracks and skip forward to the next track. In other words... it's a music player, exactly as it says on the tin. :)
H
Finally, I'll leave you with a cryptic little note: There's something special that's been added to the audio for Banks by none other than our Audio Director, Björn Iversen, himself. Keep your eyes peeled for it in the patch notes...
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[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-03-16 12:04:51 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. This week we'll be talking about Ascension again, specifically the Synthetic and Biological Ascension Paths. In dev diary #60 we talked about the Psionic Ascension Path and the associated Shroud. The Shroud was a fairly major mechanical addition to the game, which we felt was needed as Psionics lacked any such mechanic associated with them, unlike the other two. For this reason, the Biological and Synthetic Ascension Paths do not have the same degree of new mechanics associated with them, but rather focus on enhancing the existing mechanics (Genemodding and Robots) that they are tied to.
The Synthetic Ascension Path focuses on abandoning your frail biological forms for that of a perfect machine. The first step, the Flesh is Weak, requires the Droids technology and allows you to modify your entire population through a special project, turning them into cyborgs. This gives them an immediate +20% boost to habitability, as well as bonuses to mineral production and army damage, and also makes any leaders generated from those species have the Cyborg trait granting an additional +40 years of lifespan.
The next step, Synthetic Evolution, requires the ability to build Synths, and allows you to upgrade your cyborg population into fully mechanical forms, finally abandoning the frailty of flesh for the surety of synthetics. When it is complete, you will become a fully robotic empire, with a robotic primary species. Your population will benefit from all the advantages normally conferred to Synths in production and research, and all your leaders will be immortal, able to be killed only in battle or through events. You will also naturally no longer require Food for your synthetic population, instead being replaced by an Energy maintenance similar to regular Synths. You will also be able to name your new, gloriously post-biological people.
The Biological Ascension Path focuses on mastery of DNA and evolution. The first step, Engineered Evolution, requires the Gene Tailoring technology and grants a major reduction to the cost and time required to genetically modify species, gives you +2 trait points, and also unlocks the ability to research the Gene Seed Purification technology which is otherwise unavailable (it can still be researched as normal for those who do not have the Utopia expansion), allowing recruitment of Gene Warriors.
The next step, Evolutionary Mastery requires the Targeted Gene Expressions technology. It grants an additional +3 trait points, a further reduction in time and cost of genemodding, and unlocks the ability to research the Genetic Resequencing technology, which once researched unlocks Advanced Genemodding. With Advanced Genemodding you will be able to add negative traits and remove positive traits, allowing you to completely reshape species at your whim. It also unlocks five new traits that are exclusively available to the Biological Ascension Path:
Robust: Upgrades from Extremely Adaptable, adds +30% habitability and an extra +30 years of lifespan.
Fertile: Upgrades from Rapid Breeders, gives -30% growth time and +5% happiness
Erudite: Upgrades from Intelligent, gives +20% science production and +1 leader skill levels.
Delicious: Makes the species delicious and nutritious, granting +100% food yield from Processing and Livestock.
Nerve Stapled: Removes the ability of the species to feel happiness or sadness. Happiness is disabled and Food/Mineral production increased, but adds major penalties to other resource production.
Additionally, Advanced Genemodding allows for the ability for non-Hive Mind empires to remove the Hive-Minded trait from Pops and for Hive Minds to add it to Pops, as mentioned in dev diary #62.
That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking a variety of smaller features coming in the Banks update, including the ability to terraform Mars.
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[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-03-02 11:55:50 CET ] [ Original post ]
STOCKHOLM – 27 February 2017 – Paradox Interactive and Paradox Development Studio have set a release date for their first expansion to their celebrated space grand strategy game. Stellaris: Utopia will be shaping galactic civilizations as of April 6, 2017 and will be found at Steam and the Paradox Store for $19.99/€19.99.
One of the core improvements in Utopia is the introduction of Ascension Perks. As your species advances and gains new traditions, it can choose how it wants to evolve as it is further enlightened. You can choose between a biological path, a psionic path or a synthetic path, with various options within these broad categories. Body, Mind or Machine - how will your species challenge the future?
See how one civilization's take on Utopia can dramatically affect another's here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmvGlBFaFEU
Utopia also includes:
- Megastructures: Build wondrous structures in your systems including Dyson Spheres and ring worlds, bringing both prestige and major advantages to your race.
- Habitat Stations: Build “tall” and establish space stations that will house more population, serving the role of planets in a small and confined empire.
- Rights and Privileges: Set specific policies for which of the many species under your thumb will have the rights and privileges of full citizenship. Build an egalitarian paradise or follow a caste system.
- And even more improvements and updates, including (as is traditional with all of our paid content releases) free updates for every Stellaris owner!
[ 2017-02-27 14:09:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is going to be about the Government Rework, the last of the major feature reworks coming in 1.5 'Banks' and some related features in the 'Utopia' expansion.
Government Rework (Free Feature)
With the focus of Banks and Utopia being ethics, internal politics and empire customization, we felt it would be remiss of us not to put in some work in regards to governments. While the old government grid worked alright to give you a broad range of governments to pick from, they were a bit lackluster, not very well balanced and I rarely felt that the government I picked truly corresponded to my own idea of what my empire's society was like. To address all of these issues at once we decided to go back to the drawing board and redo the way governments are constructed completely. In Banks, instead of picking from a preconfigured government, you build your own from Authority and Civics.
The Authority determines how power is transfered in your government. The different Authorities are:
Democratic: A ruler is democratically elected every 10 years.
Oligarchic: A ruler is elected every 40 to 50 years.
Dictatorial: Rulers are elected but rule for life.
Imperial: Rulers rule for life and are succeeded by appointed heirs on death.
In all systems that involve elections, leaders will be elected from the different Factions in your country, and electing a ruler of a particular Faction will significantly strengthen the political clout of that faction and the attraction of their related ethics, so be careful about letting a Xenophile take charge of your Supremacist Empire!
The Civics represent the political and social traditions of your government, and come in a wide variety of types, primarily limited by your authority and ethics. In addition to providing modifiers, they can also change how your empire is governed. For example, the Citizen Service Civic ties citizenship to military service, so that only species with Full Military Service are afforded the right to vote and become leaders. On empire creation, you can choose two Civics, with a third able to be unlocked later through research.
With a few exceptions (more on that below), Civics and Authorities are not necessarily permanent. Where previously you could change your government type for 250 influence, you now have the option to effectively rebuild your government at the same cost. By using the 'Reform Government' button in the government screen, you can add and remove Civics and change Authority from among the picks available to your ethics. As your Ethics and Authority change, you may end up with Civics that are no longer valid for you country - for example a 'Beacon of Liberty' that has lost its Egalitarian ethics. When this happens, the Civic in question will remain, but will become 'inactive' and stop providing you with any sort of bonus, effectively a wasted Civic slot until you reform your government and replace it.
From the Authority, Civics and Ethics you pick, a Government Name is finally generated. The Government Name is purely there to roughly summarize the government you have built, as well as provide flavor, and has no actual impact on gameplay.
Advanced Civics (Paid Feature)
In addition to the normal Civics available to everyone, there are also a few special Civics that are only available to those with the Utopia expansion. These Civics are meant to simulate very specific kinds of societies and generally have more of an impact on your game than the normal Civics do. They are as follows:
- Syncretic Evolution: Your species evolved along with another, subservient species. A second species is randomly generated on your homeworld replacing some of your primary species' Pops. They always have the Proles (rebalanced in Banks) and Strong traits, making them excellent soldiers and workers but less ideal for intellectual pursuits. This Civic provides no additional benefits and cannot be removed once picked.
- Mechanist: Your species is obsessed with the pursuit of robotics. This Civic requires you to be Materialist and has you start with the Robotic Workers and Powered Exoskeletons technologies and a population of worker robots to do the farming and mining for you, replacing some of your primary species' Pops. This Civic provides no additional benefits and cannot be removed once picked.
- Fanatic Purifiers: Your empire will not tolerate the existance of any other sentient life. This Civic requires you to be Fanatic Xenophobe/Militarist and gives very large boosts to the effectiveness of your military and gives you Unity from purging Xeno Pops, but disables all diplomacy with other species and forces all Xeno Pops in your empire to be purged (though you get to choose the method of extermination). All other regular empires will also have a massive relations malus with you, the one and only exception being Fanatic Purifiers from the same species.
Hive Minds (Paid Feature) In addition to the Advanced Civics, those with the Utopia expansion also get access to a unique Authority with a highly unique playstyle: the Hive Mind. Hive Minds are species where the individuals are all part of the same, vast, psionically linked consciousness. The Immortal Hive Mind rules absolutely over the population of non-sentient worker drones, using sentient 'Autonomous Drones' (Leaders) to extend the reach of its will. Picking the Hive Mind Authority requires the Hive Mind Ethic and each can only be picked together with the other: With only one, vast and linked consciousness, the guiding values of a Hive Mind is whatever the Hive Mind player wants it to be. They have their own set of Civics that can only be used by Hive Minds, and cannot use any non-Hive Mind Civics.
All Pops from the founder species of a Hive Mind will have the Hive-Minded trait. Hive-Minded Pops are not affected by Happiness and will never form Factions, allowing Hive Minds to completely ignore internal politics... though this comes as a cost, as they also cannot benefit from the Influence boost and other benefits provided by happy Factions in a regular empire. As Hive Minds rely completely on their ability to communicate psionically with the drone population, they are also unable to rule over non Hive-Minded Pops, and any such Pops in your empire will automatically be killed over time and processed into food to feed the Hive. Similarly, Hive-Minded pops that end up in non Hive Mind empires will be cut off from the Hive and will perish over time. The only way to integrate Pops between Hive Minds and non-Hive Minds is to use the Biological Ascension Path to unlock advanced gene modding and modify them by adding or removing Hive-Minded (more on this in the next dev diary). However, Hive Minds can still coexist with other species: They have full access to diplomacy and can have non-Hive Mind subjects (and can be ruled over as subjects in turn), though non-Hive Mind empires tend to be somewhat distrustful of Hive Minds on first contact.
While Hive Minds are psionic by nature, the way they function and their connection to the Shroud is radically different from that of regular psychics, making them unable to follow the Psionic Ascension Path. Furthermore, Hive Minds are deeply biological entities, and fundamentally incompatible with the Synthetic Ascension Path. They are however perfectly suited for the Biological Ascension Path, and can make use of it to assimilate other, non-Hive Mind species into the Hive as described above. That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about the Biological and Synthetic Ascension Paths. See you then! Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-02-23 13:42:34 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is going to be about psionics and one of the three ascension paths mentioned in Dev Diary #56: the Psionic Ascension Path.
Psionics
First, before we start digging into the way psionics will work Utopia, we should clarify that we are not removing any features from the free version of the game. If you have the Banks update but do not own Utopia, psionics will continue to work the same way they currently do: As technologies that you unlock. The only difference is that psionics can now only be researched by Spiritualist empires, though it is entirely possible for an empire that does not start out as Spiritualist to acquire psionics by shifting their empire ethics to Spiritualist over the course of the game, and once you start down the Psionic path it is possible to continue along it even if you stop being Spiritualist. This Spiritualist requirement applies whether or not you own Utopia.
If you *do* own the Utopia expansion, most of the psionic features will no longer appear as technologies. Only Psionic Theory, the very first psionic tech, is still researchable. To get access to the rest of the psionic path you will need to pick the 'Mind over Matter' Ascension Perk to start your empire on the Psionic Ascension Path. Picking this Ascension Perk will unlock latent psionic abilities among your primary species. A certain percentage of your leaders will have the 'Psychic' trait that grants a variety of advantages for the different leader classes, you will get access to Psionic Armies and also the special Psi Corps building. As with all Ascension Paths, you will need to have at least two Ascension Perk slots unlocked to pick 'Mind over Matter'.
After picking Mind over Matter, you will need to continue amassing Unity and working your way through the Tradition trees. Once you have unlocked your fourth Ascension Perk slot, the 'Transcendance' Ascension Perk becomes available. This is the second stage in the Psionic Ascension Path and represents the full Psionic awakening of your species. From this point on, your entire species will get the 'Psionic' species trait and all leaders from this species will be full-fledged Psychics. In addition to the advantages granted by these traits, from now on there is also a chance that other species in your empire will psionically awaken, first as latent Psychics and then as fully awakened ones much like your own.
The Shroud (Paid Feature)
Not long after fully awakening, your species will become aware of The Shroud. The Shroud is the realm from which psychics draw their power, a strange dimension very unlike the material universe, a place of opportunity and danger alike. To begin exploring The Shroud, you will need to complete a special society research project that once completed will give you access to The Shroud in the contacts view. Each time you wish to enter The Shroud you will need to expend a considerable amount of energy (in the form of Energy Credits), though this cost can be reduced by having access to the Zro Dust Strategic Resource.
As for what can happen while exploring The Shroud... quite a few different things. We will not give them all away here, but some examples include unlocking psionic technologies, asking the spirits that dwell there for a boon, or even forming a Covenant with one of a number of particularly powerful spirits... a pact that will give great benefits, but may come at a terrible cost.
That's all for today! Next week we'll be coming back to Factions and how you can use them to change your Empire Ethics. We'll also be talking about Indoctrination. See you then!
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[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-02-09 12:31:26 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is going to cover the headline feature of the Utopia Expansion that we announced mere hours ago: Megastructures.
Megastructures (Paid Feature)
Have you ever looked at a Fallen Empire's Ringworld and thought 'I want to build one of those?'. Well, so have we, and in the Utopia expansion you will be able to do so. Megastructures are massive multi-stage construction projects that require an enormous investment of resources and time but offer quite spectacular pay-offs. There are four Megastructures that you can build: The Ringworld, the Dyson Sphere, the Sentry Array and the Science Nexus. In order to build a Megastructure you will need to unlock a number of advanced technologies and pick the appropriate Ascension Perk. This will unlock the ability for your construction ship to build a Megastructure Construction Site in an appropriate location. The Construction Site alone is a project that takes a large amount of resources and takes several years to complete.
Once you have built the Construction Site for a Megastructure, you will be able to upgrade it to the first construction stage for a Megastructure. For the Ringworld and Dyson Sphere, this is an initial frame that provides no benefit, while the Science Nexus and Sentry Array gets a partially completed structure that provides some of the benefit of the finished version. From here, you can upgrade the unfinished Megastructure to the next stage(s) by investing more time and resources. For the Dyson Sphere, Science Nexus and Sentry Array, you upgrade one stage at a time, with increasing benefits from each finished stage until you have the completed Megastructure. The Ringworld Frame has four segments that can all be upgraded into finished Ringworld Sections simultaneously.
The four different Megastructures work as follows:
Ringworld: Can only be built around a planet-rich star in your borders and, once finished, provides four maximum size 100% habitable planets. The Ringworld construction project will consume all planets in the system to be used as building materials. Cannot be built around Black Holes, Pulsars or Neutron Stars.
Dyson Sphere: Can only be built around a star in your borders and provides a huge amount of energy each month, with the amount increasing for each stage of the Dyson Sphere completed. Once completed, the Dyson Sphere will cool down the system, turning most planets there into frozen worlds. Cannot be built around Black Holes, Pulsars or Neutron Stars.
Science Nexus: Can be built around any non-inhabitable non-moon non-asteroid planet (similar to Habitats) and provides a huge amount of science each month, with the amount increasing for each stage of the Science Nexus completed.
Sentry Array: Can be built around any non-inhabitable non-moon non-asteroid planet (similar to Habitats) and functions as a sensor station, providing sensor range in a radius that grows for each stage of the Sentry Array completed. Once fully finished, it will give complete sensor view of the entire galaxy.
Building a Megastructure is hardly a subtle affair, and once an empire starts construction on such a project, all other empires that have communications with them will be notified about the start, progression and completion of such a project. As monumental undertakings involving the resources of a whole empire, these projects can also have unintended political and diplomatic consequenses. Also, much like the Ringworlds already in the game, you are not the first civilization to conceive of the idea of Megastructures, and you may encounter ancient, ruined Megastructures while exploring.
That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about yet another feature of the Utopia expansion: Psionic Transcendance and The Shroud.
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[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-02-02 16:05:05 CET ] [ Original post ]
We are are proud to Announce the First Major Expansion for Stellaris!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svnH2mmONiw
STOCKHOLM – 02 February 2017 – We reach for the stars for many reasons. They challenge us to explore. They dare us to explain. They prod us to expand. But, most of all, the universe offers every space-faring race a new start. This is the chance to perfect the species and to reach new heights of self-awareness, technological prowess or spiritual enlightenment. You can only get to Utopia by moving faster than light.
Stellaris: Utopia is the first major gameplay expansion to Stellaris, Paradox’s critically acclaimed and best selling strategy game about building an empire in new galaxies. Utopia introduces new options for developing your empire, with new types of space stations and constructions that open alternate avenues for making your species the dominant power in the galaxy.
One of the core improvements to Utopia is the introduction of Ascension Perks. As your species advances and gains new traditions, it can choose how it wants to evolve as it is further enlightened. You can choose between a biological path, a psionic path or a synthetic path, with various options within these broad categories. Body, Mind or Machine - how will your species challenge the future?
Utopia also includes:
- Megastructures: Build wondrous structures in your systems including Dyson Spheres and ring worlds, bringing both prestige and major advantages to your race.
- Habitat Stations: Build “tall” and establish space stations that will house more population, serving the role of planets in a small and confined empire.
- Rights and Privileges: Set specific policies for which of the many species under your thumb will have the rights and privileges of full citizenship. Build an egalitarian paradise or follow a caste system.
- And even more improvements and updates, including (as is traditional with all of our paid content releases) free updates for every Stellaris owner!
[ 2017-02-02 14:33:11 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is going to cover a feature coming in the (unannounced) expansion accompanying the 1.5 'Banks' update: Habitats. As before, I still can't say anything about the release date of the update/expansion other than that you're in for a bit of a wait.
Orbital Habitats (Paid Feature)
One of the things we have stated that we want to address is the lack of options for building 'tall' in Stellaris: Even if you're playing pacifist xenophiles that have no interest in conquering others, sooner or later your empire is going to have their borders closed in on all fronts, all the habitable planets in your space will be terraformed, and your only option for further expansion is to grow your space through conquest. When we say that we want to enable building tall, however, this doesn't mean we're going to make being a five-system empire just as good as being a fifty-system empire: There should always be an incentive to expand your borders, but for those who do not want or simply cannot do this, we want there to options other than just stagnating.
Orbital Habitats is one of our solutions to this problem: Instead of expanding to new systems and colonizing new planets, you create new, artificial 'planets' for your Pops to live on. Orbital Habitats are massive space stations that function like small (currently size 12, though this may not be the final number) planets that (like Gaia Planets and Ringworlds) have 100% habitability for all species. They can be built around any non-habitable planet (not asteroid or moon) in your space, and there is no limit to the amount you can build other than the number of such planets you have to build them around. Habitats function exactly like a planet: They can be colonized with whatever Pops you want to live there, they can be worked for resources by constructing buildings there, and they count as a planet for the purpose of empire research costs. In order to build a habitat, you need to have researched the maximum level of spaceport technology and picked the 'Voidborn' Ascension Perk (for more info on Ascension Perks, see dev diary 56)
Habitats mostly do not have tile resources with the one exception that if the planet they are orbiting has a resource that could otherwise be worked by a mining or research station, that resource will be present on one of the Habitat's tiles. Instead, Habitats have their own, unique set of buildings distinct from the normal planetary buildings. Overall, Habitats are efficient when it comes to research and energy general, but do poorly when it comes to food and mineral production. These buildings are 'single-stage': they have a fairly large upfront cost and high immediate research production, but cannot be upgraded. The reason for this is to allow for easier management of systems with several habitats in them.
Graphics-wise, Habitats use different models depending on which ship set you have selected, and each ship set (including Plantoids) has its own habitat model. They also have their own planet icon and will get a unique planetary graphic and tile set (that is still a work in progress and thus not shown below), emphasising the ways in which they differ from regular planets.
That's all for today! Normally, this is where I'd tell you what next week's dev diary is going to be about, but this time I have to keep it a secret for the time being... so all I'm going to say is that it's going to be big.
Very big.
[ 2017-01-26 15:46:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today&#039;s dev diary is going to be a meaty one, covering several new features in the 1.5 &#039;Banks&#039; update, as well as some paid features coming in the (unannounced) expansion accompanying Banks. Please note that because of some sickness, we&#039;re a little behind in the interface department, so the interface graphics shown today are placeholders and not what will be in the final product.
Species Rights (Free Feature)
The big new feature we&#039;ll be talking about today is Species Rights. Previously, what rights your species had were controlled through a set of policies that could only discriminate between &#039;your founder species&#039; and &#039;everyone else&#039;. We felt that this was an area in need of more granularity, both to make playing a multispecies empire more interesting and also to create more of a sense of distinction between your pops. Thus, in Banks, it will now be possible to individually determine the rights and obligations of each species in your empire. In addition to setting rights for a species currently in your empire, you can also set rights for species outside your empire (for example granting species you would like to attract to your empire via migration Full Citizenship and a good living standard) and have a default set of rights that is applied to any species you have not specifically configured the rights for.
The most fundamental status of a species in your empire is Citizenship. Citizenship is the overall set of rights and privileges given to a species: Whether they are free or unfree, whether they can participate in the political processes of the country, what restrictions can be placed on them and even whether they have the right to live in your empire at all. In addition to rights and obligations, citizenship also affects Pops&#039; migration attraction: A Pop that is currently enjoying Full Citizenship is unlikely to move to another empire where their rights would be curtailed, and Pops living under second-class citizen conditions are more likely to move somewhere that promises them a better life.
- Full Citizenship: Species with full citizenship are fully integrated populations in your empire. They have the right to vote in democracies and can become leaders of all types. You are also forbidden from enacting population controls on them.
- Caste System: Species with a caste system have a mix of full citizenship and slavery, with pops working in the farms and mines being enslaved and the rest being free to enjoy the fruits of the serfs&#039; labor.
- Limited Citizenshp: Species with limited citizenship are tolerated but not integrated populations in your empire. While not enslaved, their right to vote and stand for political office is curtailed, and you can place population restrictions on them and restrict them from being able to settle on your core worlds (more on that below).
- Slaves: Species with this setting are all enslaved without exception. They have no rights whatsoever and live under the most squalid of conditions.
- Undesirables: Undesirables are species that you do not wish to exist in your empire. Depending on your purge policy this can either mean that you mean that you target them for extermination, or just dry to drive them off from your worlds (more on that below).
Purge and Slavery Types (Paid Feature) In addition to the free species rights given to everyone in the Banks update, there is also a paid element, namely the special Purge and Slavery policies that allows you define in which manner your empire utilizes slavery and purging vis-a-vis specific species. The default options (Chattel Slavery and Extermination) are always available even without the expansion, and those without the expansion can also make use of Displacement via a policy, but the rest are only for expansion owners. The slavery types are as follows:
- Chattel Slavery: This represents forced labor on a massive scale. Chattel Slaves have a bonus to food and mineral production and a large penalty to energy/science production and under a Caste System all Pops producing Minerals and Food will be enslaved.
- Domestic Servitude: This represents a combination of plantation slavery and indentured servitude. Domestic Servants have no boost to any resource production and a small penalty to mineral/energy/science production, but increase the happiness of all non-enslaved citizen pops on the planet.
- Battle Thralls: This represents a system of enforced martial serfdom. Battle Thralls have no boost to any resource production and a moderate penalty to energy/science production, but armies recruited from them are stronger.
- Livestock: This represents a species that is regularly culled to be used as food. Livestock produce a fixed number of extra food, but are completely unable to produce any other kind of resource.
- Extermination: The species is systemically killed off by any means available. This is the fastest form of purging, but pops subject to it are unable to produce any resources while they are busy dying off.
- Displacement: The species is driven away through the use of forced resettlement and destruction of their homes. Displaced pops will not be killed, but rather will attempt to flee the empire to other, more welcoming empires, and might even try to settle uncolonized planets. This process is slow, but generates less outrage among other empires than the other forms of purging.
- Forced Labor: The species is placed in camps and forced to do hard labor under brutal conditions with inadequate food and shelter, effectively working them to death. Pops doing Forced Labor will be killed off more slowly than through extermination, but will continue to produce minerals, food and (at a significant penalty) energy.
- Processing: The species is processed into food for the consumption of other Pops. Pops being Processed generate a fixed amount of food and die off at a fairly fast pace, but cannot be put to use producing any other resources.
- Neutering: The species is prevented from reproducing through chemical castration or biological modification, eventually dying off naturally. Neutered Pops continue to function normally and may even be given a high standard of life, but have a large penalty to their happiness. The speed at which they die off varies based on the species&#039; natural lifespan, but is typically very slow.
Consumer Goods (Free Feature) Another issue we&#039;re trying to tackle in Banks is mineral inflation. Mineral production has a tendency to snowball in the mid- and lategame, particularly in large, sprawling empires. In order to address this we&#039;ve introduced a new mineral cost called Consumer Goods. Consumer Goods represents the portion of your industrial base that is occupied with seeing to the needs of your population, ie producing butter instead of guns. Each Pop in your empire will use a certain amount of Consumer Goods each month, with the amount primarily dependent on their living standards. Each unit of consumer goods costs a certain number of minerals dependening on factors such as ethics, traditions, whether your empire is engaged in a defensive war and so on.
Refugees and Core Worlds (Free Feature) The last thing we&#039;ll be covering today is some new policies that tie into the mechanics of species rights. The Core Worlds Population policy determines which Pops are allowed to live on your core (non-sector) planets, and can be set to either allow only citizen Pops (Full Citizenship/Caste System), citizen and slave Pops (Full Citizenship/Caste System/Slaves) or open them up to all species. If you restrict your core worlds and there are prohibited Pops living there, they will move away, either migrating to your sectors or fleeing your empire altogether if there is another empire willing to take them. Whether or not another empire is willing to accept those fleeing purges, slavery and resettlement depends on your Refugees policy. You can choose to accept other species will open arms, allowing refugee Pops to freely move into your empire, be more restrictive and accept only those Pops you have deigned to grant citizenship, or simply shut down acceptance of refugees altogether.
Right, that&#039;s all for today! Next week we&#039;ll be talking about something I know a lot of people have been wanting for *quite* some time: Orbital Habitats. Don&#039;t miss it. Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-01-19 12:24:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
Save up to 50% on &lt;a href=&#039;http://store.steampowered.com/app/281990/&#039;&gt;Stellaris&lt;/a&gt; during this week&#039;s Midweek Madness*!&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;*Offer ends Friday at 10AM Pacific Time&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://store.steampowered.com/app/281990/&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/281990/capsule_467x181.jpg&quot; style=&quot; float: left; margin-right: 12px; height: 181px; width: 467px;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
[ 2017-01-17 18:05:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we'll be talking about a feature that was hinted at in last dev diary, Ascension Perks. Ascension Perks are related to the Traditions and Unity system, but is a paid feature in the (unannounced) expansion accompanying the 1.5 'Banks' update, rather than a part of the update itself. Those without the expansion will get full access to the Traditions and Unity features, but not to the Ascension Perks themselves.
Ascension Perks
The idea behind the Ascension Perks is to provide more unique unlockable features for Empires, and to provide the player with the ability to determine an 'endgame' for their species: What their empire is striving towards. Perhaps your goal is to go all-in on AI, replacing the frail biological bodies of your pops with immortal machines, or to harness the psionic potential of your species and reach a higher form of existence, allowing your empire to tap into other planes of being? All these and more are covered by the Ascension Perk system.
Each time you complete a Tradition tree, you will unlock one Ascension Perk slot, of which there are 8 in total. There may also be other ways to unlock slots, such as from certain rare technologies or as a reward for a particular event chain. This slot can then be filled with any of the Ascension Perks available to you. The final number of perks is not yet set down, but there are currently more than 20 and there will likely be more added. Ascension Perks have pre-requisites, which can for example be a particular technology or tradition, a certain number of Ascension Perk slots to be unlocked, or a specific ethos or government type. Some Ascension Perks are one-offs that simply provide a bonus to a particular area of your empire: For example, a bonus to border range, or cheaper terraforming. Others unlock new features, such as the ability to construct new types of space structures (more on in later dev diaries).
Finally there are the three 'Species Endgame' paths: The biological path, the spiritual path and the synthetic path. These three paths each consist of two perks, the first of which unlocks access to the second once a number of other pre-requisites have been met. The paths are mutually exclusive, and once you start heading down one of them, the other two are locked off.
- The Biological Path focuses on mastery over biological evolution. The first level of it gives access to more gene points and significantly cuts the cost of genemodding projects, while the second level expands the options available during genemodding in addition to further providing more points and less cost.
- The Psionic Path focuses on developing the psionic potential of your population. The first level unlocks new psionic technologies and benefits, while the second level allows your empire to reach a higher level of existance and communicate with the beings present there.
- The Synthetic Path focuses on the replacement of biology with machinery. The first level allows you to turn your population partly synthetic through the use of cybernetics, while the second level replaces your biological pops with robots, turning your empire entirely synthetic.
That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about the concept of species rights and obligations. Also about eating pops. Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2017-01-12 11:56:41 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we'll be talking about a new feature coming in the 1.5 'Banks' update called Traditions and Unity. As before, I can't talk about when Banks will be coming out, only that it's a while away and we have quite a few dev diaries to go through before we get there :)
Traditions and Unity
One thing we have mentioned as a big priority for Stellaris is adding more empire customization and more ability to roleplay diverse empires. We have also talked about our desire to allow for the existance of 'tall' empires. Traditions and Unity is a feature that aims to tackle both these topics by adding 7 new Tradition trees and a resource called Unity that is used to unlock them. Unity is an accumulative resource that increases each month, and is primarily gained through the construction of government buildings such as monuments, mausoleums and temples. Unity is spent on adopting Tradition trees and purchasing individual Traditions. Each Tradition tree has a starter bonus, five unlockable bonuses and a finisher bonus that is gained once the entire tree is filled out.
The seven Tradition trees are as follows: Expansion: Focuses on growth through rapid colonization. Domination: Focuses on maintaining control over your population and subjects. Prosperity: Focuses on economic growth. Harmony: Focuses on maintaining a happy and diverse population. Supremacy: Focuses on growth through military conquest. Purity: Focuses on strength through homogenity and dominion over other species. Exploration: Focuses on exploration and scientific discovery.
The cost of unlocking a Tradition depends on the size of your empire, as well as how internally stable it is. Unhappy factions, minority species and slaves all increase the cost of adoption Traditions further, though these effects can be offset or even canceled out entirely by adopting the right Traditions for the empire you intend to build. Overall, small harmonious empires will unlock Traditions more quickly than large, expansionistic ones. Which Traditions you unlock also has a significant impact on the ethics of your population, and so can be a useful tool to either strengthen your existing empire ethics or further a planned empire-wide shift towards a different set of ethics altogether. You may have noticed a certain part of the Traditions screen that I have not yet mentioned in this dev diary. That's because it's actually the subject of the next dev diary! However, since the Christmas holidays are coming up, most of the Stellaris team will be away, so dev diaries will be on hiatus until January 12th. Tune back in then to find out all about the Ascension Perks and how you can use them to build the empire of your dreams. Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-12-15 11:16:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Now that 1.4 is out, we can finally start properly talking about the 1.5 'Banks' update, which will be a major update with an accompanying (unannounced) expansion. As of right now we cannot provide any details on when 1.5 will come out, or anything about the unannounced expansion, so please don't ask. :)
Today's topic is a number of changes coming to ethics in the 1.5 update. Everything in this diary is part of the free update. Please note that values shown in screenshots are always non-final.
Authoritarian vs Egalitarian
One of the things in Stellaris I was never personally happy with was the Collectivism vs Individualism ethic. While interesting conceptually, the mechanics that the game presented for the ethics simply did not match either their meanings or flavor text, meaning you ended up with a Collectivist ethos that was somehow simultaneously egalitarian and 100% in on slavery, while Individualism was a confused jumble between liberal democratic values and randian free-market capitalism. For this reason we've decided to rebrand these ethics into something that should both be much more clear in its meaning, and match the mechanics as they are.
Authoritarian replaces Collectivist and represents belief in hierarchial rule and orderly, stratified societies. Authoritarian pops tolerate slavery and prefer to live in autocracies.
Egalitarian replaces Individualist and represents belief in individual rights and a level playing field. Egalitarian pops dislike slavery and elitism and prefer to live in democracies.
While I understand this may cause some controversy and will no doubt spark debate over people's interpretation of words like Authoritarian and Individualist, I believe that we need to work with the mechanics we have, and as it stand we simply do not have good mechanics for a Collectivism vs Individualism axis while the mechanics we have fit the rebranded ethics if not perfectly then at least a whole lot better.
Pop Ethics Rework
Another mechanic that never quite felt satisfying is the ethics divergence mechanic. Not only is it overly simplified with just a single value determining if pops go towards or from empire ethics, the shift rarely makes sense: Why would xenophobe alien pops diverge away from xenophobe just because they're far away from the capital of a xenophobic empire? Furthermore, the fact that pops could have anything from one to three different ethics made it extremely difficult to actually quantify what any individual pop's ethics actually mean for how they relate to the empire. For this reason we've decided to revamp the way pop ethics work in the following way:
- Each pop in your empire will now only embrace a single, non-fanatic ethic. At the start of the game, your population will be made of up of only the ethics that you picked in species setup, but as your empire grows, its population will become more diverse in their views and wants.
- Each ethic now has an attraction value for each pop in your empire depending on both the empire's situation and their own situation. For example, enslaved pops tend to become more egalitarian, while pops living around non-enslaved aliens become more xenophilic (and pops living around enslaved aliens more xenophobic). Conversely, fighting a lot of wars will increase the attraction for militarism across your entire empire, while an alien empire purging pops of a particular species will massively increase the attraction for xenophobic for the species being purged.
- Over time, the ethics of your pops will drift in such a way that it roughly matches the overall attraction of that value. For example, if your materialist attraction sits at 10% for decades, it's likely that after that time, around 10% of your pops will be materialist. There is some random factor so it's likely never going to match up perfectly, but the system is built to try and go towards the mean, so the more overrepresented an ethic is compared to its attraction, the more likely pops are to drift away from it and vice versa.
So what does the single ethic per pop mean in terms of how it affects pop happiness? Well, this brings us to the new faction system, which we will cover briefly in this dev diary, and get back to more in depth later. Faction Rework One thing we feel is currently missing from Stellaris is agency for your pops. Sure, they have their ethics and will get upset if you have policies that don't suit them, but that's about the only way they have of expressing their desires, and there is no tie-in between pop ethics and the politics systems in the game. To address this and also to create a system that will better fit the new pop ethics, we've decided to revamp the faction system in the following manner:
- Factions are no longer purely rebel groupings, but instead represent political parties, popular movements and other such interest groups, and mostly only consist of pops of certain ethics. For example, the Supremacist faction desires complete political dominance for their own species, and is made up exclusively of Xenophobic pops, while the Isolationist faction wants diplomatic isolation and a strong defense, and can be joined by both Pacifist and Xenophobe pops. You do not start the game with any factions, but rather they will form over the course of the game as their interests become relevant
- Factions have issues related to their values and goals, and how well the empire responds to those issues will determine the overall happiness level of the faction. For example, the Supremacists want the ruler to be of their species and are displeased by the presence of free alien populations in the empire. They will also get a temporary happiness boost whenever you defeat alien empires in war.
- The happiness level of a faction determines the base happiness of all pops belonging to it. This means that where any pop not belonging to a faction has a base happiness of 50%, a pop belonging to a faction that have their happiness reduced to 35% because of their issues will have a base happiness of only 35% before any other modifiers are applied, meaning that displeasing a large and influential faction can result in vastly reduced productivity across your empire. As part of this, happiness effects from policies, xenophobia, slavery, etc have been merged into the faction system, so engaging in alien slavery will displease certain factions instead of having each pop individually react to it.
- Factions have an influence level determined by the number of pops that belong to it. In addition to making its pops happier, a happy faction will provide an influence boost to their empire.
We will come back to factions in greater detail in a later dev diary, going over topics such as how separatists and rebellious slaves will work, and how factions can be used to change your empire ethics, but for now we are done for today. Next week we'll be talking about another new feature that we have dubbed 'Traditions and Unity'. See you then! Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-12-08 11:39:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Horizon Signal Update For Stellaris Adds New Mysteries
Paradox SciFi Sim Gets Free Boost From Renowned Game Writer
STOCKHOLM - 05 December 2016 - A new and rich storyline has been added to the already deep well of events and occurrences in Stellaris, the hit grand strategy space epic from Paradox Development Studios. A signal in distant space is calling out to your empire. What does this entity want, and how does it know who you are?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KysBgh1Tvno
Horizon Signal is written by Alexis Kennedy, a British writer best known for his work at Failbetter Games, which he co-founded. His writing for Sunless Sea and Fallen London has been widely acclaimed, and now he is scribing new stories for Stellaris.
This story update is free for all Stellaris owners and highlights one of the great strengths of the game – its ability to tell stories that entertain and entrance without distracting you from the core strategic gameplay.
Horizon Signal is available now.
To see the original changelog post for Update 1.4 Kennedy, go here!
[quote]
FAQ
How do I get this new content?
- Just make sure that you are online on Steam and it should be automatically added. You can check the DLC tab in the launcher to make sure.
Will the Horizon Signal content be available in already started games, or do I need to start a new game to access it?
- Even if you are playing a save that was started before the release of Horizon Signal, the event chain can still occur in your game.
What exactly is the new content?
- It's a somewhat rare event chain that can potentially be triggered at any time in your game.
I can't see Horizon Signal in my DLC list, neither in the launcher or Steam
- Restart Steam by exiting properly and starting it again.
[/quote]
[ 2016-12-05 18:03:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
This is a bugfixing and balance update accompanying the free 'Horizon Signal' DLC created by guest writer Alexis Kennedy of Sunless Sea/Failbetter fame.
1.3.2 saves should be compatible with 1.4, but no guarantees.
Please report any problems in the bug report forum
Click details below to see the changes included.
Changelog
##############################################################
####################### VERSION 1.4.0 ########################
##############################################################
###################
# Leviathans Story Pack
###################
* Added new introduction event for the Artisan Troupe
* Added encounter event for the Enigmatic Fortress
###################
# Features
###################
* Added 33 new achievements
* No longer possible to build robots on planets belonging to sectors
* Added victory event after defeating the Prethoryn Scourge
* Added new events for discovering additional Precursor anomalies, so that the quest chains can always be completed
* Changed the way the Extradimensionals work: Instead of spawning reinforcements as soon as a fleet is lost, the Extradimensional portal will create new fleets at a fixed rate depending on the number of dimensional anchors the Extradimensionals have placed in the galaxy. Dimensional anchors are a type of station that the Extradimensionals construct, and their main portal is invincible while any dimensional anchors exist in the galaxy. This should make the war against the Extradimensionals more of a long-term fight and less of a surgical strike against the portal.
###################
# Balance
###################
#General
* Evasion is now capped at 90%
* Ship mineral maintenance reduced from 0.5% to 0.4% of ship cost
* Ship energy maintenance reduced from 0.5% to 0.4% of ship cost
* Afterburners now use the auxiliary slot
* Regular empires now start with 8 pops
* Primitive farms and factories can now be upgraded directly to hydroponics farms/mining networks
* Pirate ships have been reworked slightly and buffed in most cases
* Primitives are now consistent in how many pops, farms and factories they get on each age of development, and get new pops, armies and buildings when advancing through the ages
* Stone age primitives now generate fewer tile blockers
* Space Torpedoes technology now requires Fusion Missiles instead of Nuclear Missiles
* Venerable trait cost reduced from 5 to 4
* Mineral Silos are now restricted to 1 per planet
* Increased max minerals from Mineral Silos from +1000/+1500/+2000 to +2000/+3000/+4000
* Level 3 mineral silo now only provides +1 mineral per adjacent tile
* Increased protectorate tech discount to 95%
* Protectorates can no longer conduct independent diplomacy
* Repeatable technologies have their base cost increased from 1500 to 3000 and their increasing cost increased from 480 to 1000
* Slave Processing Plant now gives +10% slave food/mineral production instead of +5%
* Reduced spawn odds of tomb worlds
* Increased frequency of alien pet deposits
* Reduced warscore costs for planetary and vassalisation wargoals
* Doubled Pre-Sentient Anomaly spawn chances
* Fixed CTD when generating a certain tooltip while the player has no planets
* Pops are no longer upset if an occupier purges Pops on one of your planets
# Components
* Space Torpedo mineral cost reduced from 20 to 10
* Space Torpedo power usage reduced from 20 to 10
* Space Torpedo maximum damage reduced from 260 to 215
* Space Torpedo armor penetration set to 50%
* Armored Torpedo mineral cost reduced from 40 to 15
* Armored Torpedo power usage reduced from 40 to 15
* Armored Torpedo damage reduced from 150-300 to 140-280
* Armored Torpedo armor penetration set to 50%
* Devastator Torpedo mineral cost reduced from 60 to 20
* Devastator Torpedo power usage reduced from 60 to 20
* Devastator Torpedo armor penetration set to 50%
* Devastator Torpedo missile HP reduced from 8 to 6
###################
# AI
###################
#War
* Federation AI is now better at picking wargoals for non-conqueror federations, will focus on retaking planets and liberating larger countries
#Sector
* Major work done to sector AI to make it better at budgeting and utilizing resources
#Diplomacy
* AI will now sometimes gift countries that are at war with their rivals and threats
* AI will no longer ask you to become their vassal multiple times in a row
* AI is now less keen to accept a lot of defensive pacts
* Slowed down AI requests for federation membership/association status to prevent message spam
#Misc
* Fixed a bug where AI would send fleets to deal with pirates, only to retreat due to pirates being stronger
* Fixed a bug where AI was trying to build buildings on tiles that had presentients on them
###################
# User Interface
###################
* Added a setting to disable all auto-unpausing from popups
* Clicking on some resource icons in top bar no longer opens tabs due to being inconsistent
* Construction Ship now sends notification 'fleet order finished' only when the last construction in the queue is finished
* Planet view colonize button opens same surface view window as when planet is clicked from expansion planner
* 'Closed Borders' and 'Truce' are shown as diplomatic statuses
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Garrisons are now properly shown and spawned on occupied worlds.
* Fleets will now prioritize spaceports and military stations over other stations (such as mining stations) in combat.
* Close borders wargoal now forces borders open for the duration of the truce regardless of rivalry status, etc.
* Ships and weapon components targeting logic now correctly accounts for evasion, so large weapons are much less likely to target corvettes etc
* Fixed armor absorbing too much damage if the ship also had shields left
* Fixed very high armor values negating the effects of armor penetration
* Fixed auto generated ship designs getting wrong combat computers
* Swarm units have had their sound volume adjusted
* Spaceport no longer provide Naval Capacity while under construction
* Fleet view shows current fleet activity instead of order description
* Vassals and overlords no longer gives sensor to each other while at war
* Sector AI will spend own resources instead of players resources when upgrading spaceports
* Uplift species button is locked if no species can be found on any owned planet
* Fixed a bug where some leaders could live forever
* Planets with Stone Age Primitives will no longer generate Anomalies
* Tzynn Empire now starts with the proper number of trait points
* Fixed Nomads getting wrong opinion modifier and habitability trait when allowed to settle on a planet
* Launcher MOD tab scrollbar appears with correct position and size when content overflows container
* Fixed a rare case of portrait duplication caused by prescripted species templates
* Fixed so that NPC ship designs now correctly have PD slots for their PD weapons
* Situation Log entry list of counters grows up instead of down
* Savannah and Alpine worlds now have proper localization in the start screen
* Fixed typo in Frontier Hospital technology description
* Fixed a bug where upgrade fleet progress could display numbers above 100%
* Fixed some outdated hotkey references in tutorial texts
* Fixed frantic twitching animation in diplomacy window for main species
* Fixed reversed fanatic/militarist bonus to rivalry influence
* Fixed some potential event spam when running on high speeds during War in Heaven
* Planet edict modifiers are applied to pops again. Use planet modifier categories when applying planet edict modifiers
* Fixed Continental, Savanna and Alpine worlds not being used for primitive civs
* Enclave governments now get a new ruler when the first one dies
* Primitives that nuke themselves will no longer leave pops on a tomb world where they have no habitability
* Fixed some ships getting stuck in a looping death animation
* Fixed CTD when looking at a ship that fired a shot during the same frame as it died
* Fixed CTD that could happen if ground combat was started on a planet without owner
* Garrison from Pops will no longer spawn on planets that have already been occupied
* Fixed CTD that could happen when assigning a new mission to an observation station
* Fixed various issues with Swarm behaviour
###################
# Graphics
###################
* Tweaked humanoid 02 and 05 portraits
* Added updated clothes textures
* Added fixed clothes for humanoid 05
* Arthropoid battleships sections now all line up
* Galaxy view textures have been updated.
* Extradimensionals' death effects have been updated.
###################
# Modding
###################
* Event chain counter max = -1 means max is ignored. Default value is -1
* Added count_countries trigger
* Script trigger pop_percentage = { percentage > 0.1 limit = { is_robot_pop = yes } }
* new trigger won_with_condition = domination_victory
* Added trigger num_strategic_resources
###################
# Performance
###################
* Misc performance improvements
[ 2016-12-05 14:04:19 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we'll be listing the new achievements coming in the 1.4 'Kennedy' update. In fact, to compensate for the lack of achievements added since release, there's a whole 32 new achievements coming, bringing the total amount of Stellaris achievements to 55. They are as follows:
Victorious: Win the game through any victory condition.
Hear me Roar: Hatch the egg.
Infinite Creation: Birth a new universe.
Whence It Came: Defeat a horrifying invader.
Dreadnought: Restore an ancient warship.
Stellar Performance: Take a trophy from a stellar being.
Warrior of Light: Destroy a wraith.
Unravelling Enigma: Uncover the secrets of an ancient fortress.
Patron: Support the Artisan Troupe for 10 years.
Mad Genius: Recruit a scientist from the Curators.
The Good Stuff: Purchase a rare resource from the Traders.
Return to Dust: Destroy an enclave.
Last, Best Hope: Lead the non-aligned powers to victory against an awakened empire.
Put A Ring On It: Have a ringworld section as your capital.
Slave to the Systems: As a collectivist empire, have at least 200 enslaved pops in an empire of at least 500 pops.
Suffer not the Alien: As a xenophobic empire, purge all other sentient species in the galaxy.
Tourist Trap: As an individualistic empire, own a planet with at least 10 different species on it.
Planned Obsolescence: As a materialist empire, have at least 75% of the pops in your empire be robotic in an empire with at least 200 pops.
Peacekeeper: As a pacifistic empire, have all other independent empires be pacifistic as well.
Very Open Borders: As a xenophilic empire, have migration treaties with at least 10 other empires.
Deus Vult: As a spiritualistic empire, own 4 holy worlds.
Omnicultural: Have your ruler be of a different species class than your founding species.
Old Friends: Receive a gift from a Fallen Empire.
Unboxing: Open up a shielded world.
Enlightened Times: Enlighten a bronze age civilization.
Payback: As a humanoid species, infiltrate the homeworld of pre-FTL reptilians.
Paradise Found: Terraform a planet into a gaia world.
What Came Before: Find the home system of a precursor empire.
Outside Context: Invade pre-FTL Earth while it is in the midst of a world war.
Then Virgil, Now Beatrice: Return a long-dead species to life.
What Was Will Be: Close the loop, or don't.
Resourceful: Have access to ten different strategic resources.
Read the original post
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-11-10 11:03:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
This is a small hotfix to address some common issues.
Please report any problems in the bug report forum
Click details below to see the changes included.
Changelog
[quote]
##############################################################
######################## HOTFIX 1.3.2 ########################
##############################################################
###################
# Balance
###################
#General
* Particle Lance damage increased from 74-213 to 144-273
* Tachyon Lance damage increased from 85-232 to 169-331
* Arc Emitter damage increased from 1-170 to 1-184
* Focused Arc Emitter damage increased from 1-190 to 1-221
* Mega Cannon damage increased from 111-249 to 92-300
* Giga Cannon damage increased from 133-265 to 121-350
* Shield Capacitors now increase shield regeneration by +50% instead of a fixed +15.0
# Guardians
* Infinity Machine rewards are now distributed more even-handedly
* Now possible to get the best result for helping Infinity Machine regardless of ethos
###################
# AI
###################
#War
* Federation AI is now better at picking wargoals for non-conqueror federations, will focus on retaking planets and liberating larger countries
#Sector
* Fixed some more cases of Sector AI removing +happiness buildings from planets
* Fixed a budgeting issue that was causing sectors to sometimes not build buildings when space construction was toggled on
#Diplomacy
* Fixed an issue where AI would guarantee and then almost immediately revoke their guarantee towards a nation they are protective of
* Fixed an issue where the 'Wary' and 'Receptive' attitudes would sometimes not be used
* AIs that are in Federations are now more likely to stay neutral during the War in Heaven
* Slowed down AI requests for federation membership/association status to cut down on message spam
#Misc
* Fixed a bug where AI would not rebuild depleted navies while at war because it prioritized armies first
* Fixed a bug where AI was not budgeting for buildings and colonies in some circumstances in early game
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed a bug where the first federation member would leave, if any player tried to leave a federation, instead of the player leaving
* Fixed auto-generated ship designs getting wrong combat computers
* Ships and weapon components targeting logic now correctly accounts for evasion
* Fixed armor absorbing too much damage if the ship also had shields left
* Pops working on guardian buildings no longer appear unemployed
* No longer possible to guarantee an empire while at war with them
* Fixed missing localisation key FEDERATION_ACCEPTANCE_FACTOR
* Fixed a bug where the Non-Aligned League winning the War in Heaven could result in endless event spam
* Enclave governments now get a new ruler when the first one dies
* Non-playable countries can no longer win the game
* Fixed an issue where Awakened Empire subjects would not join the War in Heaven if they became a subject before it started
* Fixed a case where declared wars would become invalid due to attackers' subjects guaranteeing the target
* Fixed an issue where some Awakened Empires would have their 'crisis fighter' AI kick in during a War in Heaven
* Fixed some cases where Diplomatic Incident events were firing inappropriately
* Infinity Machine interaction events should no longer fire if the Infinity Machine has been destroyed
* Fixed Enigmatic Fortress event chain not reacting appropriately when special projects time out
* Fixed Drake Egg Incubation project not timing out properly
* Fixed Infinity Machine destruction event triggering after destroying non-Infinity Machine fleets in some circumstances
* Fixed Terraforming achievement not working
* Fixed Continental, Savanna and Alpine worlds not being used for primitive civs
* Fixed CTD that could happen when building tooltip for relative power in the diplomacy screen
* Fixed rare CTD that could happen when changing policies
* Fixed rare CTD related to anomalies
* Fixed CTD when completing a certain Special Project
[/quote]
[ 2016-11-10 09:13:57 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. Today we’re going to talk about some of the things we’re adding in the upcoming Kennedy update.
The Extradimensionals didn't work quite as we had imagined them. Players were more or less forced to throw everything they had at their dimensional portal, but there was no way to slowly push them back. The mechanics through which they received reinforcements also felt a bit too arbitrary, so we decided to shake things up a bit.
As before, the Unbidden care little for planets (aside from harvesting their populations). They are an entirely space-based civilization, but now they will also build a new class of station: Dimensional Anchors. These Anchors increase the ability of the Unbidden to bring in reinforcements from their portal. The more Anchors they have constructed, the shorter the time between their reinforcement waves. In addition to that, they will also bring in a new fleet from their portal every time an Anchor finishes construction.
Anchors are very large stations, and they take a long time for the Unbidden to build. They also function as Frontier Outposts, in that they generate borders. If you see one under construction, you may want to consider a preemptive strike before it comes online…
Overall these changes mean that the Extradimensionals can no longer simply be defeated with a single surgical strike once they have had time to establish themselves in the galaxy, but also that they don’t get unlimited and instant reinforcements, so you can wear them down in a war of attrition.
Our illustrious Art Department has not been idle while we worked on these changes. They have added new death animations for all Extradimensional ships and stations:
Extradimensional Constructors have also been given a new effect when they are building stations:
We have also revisited the Precursor anomalies. It was much too difficult (sometimes impossible) to collect all six artifacts needed to finish their chains. As you approach the mid-game now, there is a chance that you will get a new event that spawns an additional anomaly somewhere inside your space.
That’s all for today! Next week we’ll be talking about new Achievements coming in the Kennedy update.
Read the original post
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-11-03 13:35:48 CET ] [ Original post ]
This is a small hotfix to address some common issues.
Please report any problems in the bug report forum
Changelog
##############################################################
######################## HOTFIX 1.3.1 ########################
##############################################################
###################
# Features
###################
#General
* Fleets that go MIA will now prioritize retreating to spaceports they can repair at or where there are rally points
* Disabling the tutorial now recycles the Advisor's RAM, granting 2 Minerals (once per game)
* Returning MIA fleets will now appear at the edge of the system's gravity well, with an order to orbit a friendly colony queued
* Removed restriction on moving pops in sectors, as it caused some issues with resettlement
* Empires get high intel level in systems with Enclaves they have communications with
* Purging now prevents all population growth
#Diplomacy
* It is no longer possible to offer Non-Aggression Pacts while at war
###################
# Balance
###################
#General
* Scaled spawn chance of the second Enclave station of each type has been doubled, resulting in 24/64/96/100/100% spawn rate in Tiny/Small/Medium/Large/Huge galaxies
* Scaled spawn chance of the third Enclave station of each type has been increased, resulting in 18/48/72/96/100% spawn rate in Tiny/Small/Medium/Large/Huge galaxies
* Civilian fleets can now emergency FTL much faster than military ones
* Reduced frequency of planets with Stone Age Primitives
* 'Alien Overlords' happiness modifier is now affected by policy happiness modifier
#Diplomacy & War
* Reduced the extra warscore cost for taking Capitals
#Encounters & End Game Crises
* Unbidden Escort ship base evasion reduced from 80 to 20
* Swarm orbital bombards
* Swarm changes bombardment stance
* Swarm only builds stations within borders
* Swarm sends fleet if it's small but can't be merged
* Swarm can now use Full Orbital Bombardment
###################
# AI
###################
#War
* AI no longer uses torpedoes until cruisers are available
#Sector
* Fixed bug causing sectors to destroy empire and planet unique buildings when redevelopment is toggled off
* Fixed a case where sectors would not properly keep pops enslaved
* Sector AI now only builds military stations in systems with colonies, outpost stations and wormhole stations
#Diplomacy
* AI countries who join the League of Non-Aligned Powers will now always stay in it for at least 20 years
* AI will no longer ask you to become their vassal multiple times in a row
#Misc
* Fixed bug causing AI not to build stations
* Fixed bug causing AI to build empire and planet unique buildings just to destroy them a second after
* AI does no longer know that player is building a Spaceport
* Fixed bug that caused AI not to build armies sometimes
###################
# User Interface
###################
* Save game incompatibility is indicated by gray text
* Expansion planner shows colony ship type
###################
# Graphics
###################
* Added new environment for Gaia planet, added new surface tiles for savannah and alpine, and fixed the LUT for alpine and savannah planets
* Stellar Devourer spawn VFX duration reduced to 1 day
* Added missing tech icon for tomb world adaptation
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Frontier Hospital technology now properly requires Frontier Health
* Fleets can now attack during warp drive wind-down
* Added missing localization for Kicked from Federation notification text
* Added missing localization for Federation Association Request
* Added missing localization for Federation Association Ended
* Added missing component set for Enigmatic Disruption Field which broke localization
* Display all DLCs enabled by the host for clients in the multiplayer lobby
* Fixed Fallen Empires spamming threats and remove flag effect being shown in tooltips
* Transports now also showing fleet status
* Fixed some events attempting to spawn removed ship designs
* Slaver mandate is no longer valid if the country's policies disallow slavery
* Fixed a bug where Colony Influence Cost would sometimes be too high
* Fixed Alpine and Savannah worlds not counting towards the Habitable Worlds Survey event chain
* Fixed CTD caused by ships trying to shoot at entities that did not exist
* Fixed an issue with a slave faction tooltip
* Fixed CTD when an event timed out without any valid options
* The event window will now properly close when the event times out
* Fixed visual artifacts on pulsar and neutron stars
* Added missing localization for Plantoid 4 name list
* Launcher DLC tab scrollbar appears with correct position and size when content overflows container
* Founder species now changes when no pops of that species exist after gene modification
* No longer possible to generate infinite resources by trading non-existent resources
* No longer possible to trade last resource via multiple trade deals
* Tooltip for sector settings was missing localization
* Fixed bug causing ship designer to choose components that haven't yet been researched by player
* Rebuilding Automated Dreadnought now gives you a ship with the same FTL system you have
* Fixed a bug where robots could sometimes get ethics
* Don't send double notification messages when notifying all communications
* Fixed mapicons showing 100% habitability after building a robot pop
* Colonization orders only cancel if player lacks resources when resources haven't yet been allocated. Canceling colonization order for colony ship built via expansion planner returns allocated resources.
* Special projects in the same option group which time out on the same day no longer get blocked from failing properly
* Fix an Infinity Machine event bug where a Spiritualist empire modifier from the Infinity Machine would be removed from one empire if the Infinity Machine killed a fleet from another empire
* Second Infinity Machine contact event will no longer occur if Infinity Machine is hostile
* Wrong event will no longer fire if fleet is destroyed by Infinity Machine
* Dimensional Horror special project now appears in system view
* DPS calculator and military power now take ship firing speed modifiers into account
* Fixed missing graphics on sanctuary guardians
* Fixed conflicting traits for Kel-Azaan
* Fixed materialist Fallen Empire task not giving opinion boost
* Fixed bug causing wrong player to get removed from federation in multiplayer
* Fixed CTD when using polish or russian on Linux/OSX
* Fixed CTD caused by game not having write privileges to its cache files
[ 2016-10-27 12:46:13 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we'll be talking a bit about where the game stands, where we're going, and what we want to focus on in the future.
Where we stand
As anyone who regularly reads the Stellaris dev diaries should know, the intent for Heinlein changed quite a bit back at the end of the summer. While we had originally planned Heinelin to be an update accompanying a major expansion, we decided instead to scale back the scope of the paid content by making a Story Pack, Leviathans, and focusing most of our resources on the actual free update. Now that Heinlein and Leviathans are out, my conclusion is that this was the right decision on our part. By doing this, we gave ourselves time to iterate on some of our weaker features and add a great deal of UI and quality of life functionality. Heinlein ended up as a *huge* update that we feel moved the game forward in a lot of ways, and judging from the huge amount of positive feedback we have gotten, you guys seem to generally agree with this assessment.
So where *do* we stand? My view is that we now have a very solid base game to build on, and that going forward it's time to scale up our ambitions. To make space even greater, so to speak.
Where we're going
So what's next for Stellaris? I have talked a bit about the planned 'Banks' update, which will be a major update accompanied by a full-sized expansion. This is still the plan, but before we release Banks we have another update, dubbed 'Kennedy', which we aim to release before the end of the year. This will be a small update targeting a few specific key issues, such as precursor event chains and endgame crises, that we did not have time for in Heinlein. After that will be Banks, and while we will not be providing any details about the Banks update or accompanying expansion at this time, I will say that the author name chosen for this update may offer some clues. ;)
What we want
Finally, I just wanted to offer some insight into what we believe are the key areas of the game that we should focus on at this time. We have received, and continue to receive, an amazing amount of good feedback and ideas, and of course we have our own ambitions and ideas for where we want to take Stellaris, but at the moment there are three key areas that we aim to continually target with future updates and content, namely:
- Fleshing out the mid- and lategame through the addition of more interesting narratives and 'galactic events' akin to Awakened Fallen Empires that shake up the galactic scene.
- Improving the internal workings of empires, making pops and leaders more interesting, and making empires feel more alive.
- Expanding on the ethics system, creating more unique playstyles and enhancing roleplaying.
- Ship appearance that differs for each empire, so no two empires' ships look exactly the same.
- More story events and reactive narratives that give a sense of an unfolding story as you play.
- More potential for empire customization, ability to build competitive 'tall' empires.
- Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic manuevering.
- Ability to set rights and obligations for particular species in your empire.
- Global food that can be shared between planets.
- Superweapons and planet killers.
- Ability to construct space habitats and ringworlds.
- More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations.
- Factions that are proper interest groups with specific likes and dislikes and the potential to be a benefit to an empire instead of just being rebels.
- A 'galactic community' with interstellar politics and a 'space UN'.
- Buildable Dreadnoughts and Titans.
Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-10-27 10:52:56 CET ] [ Original post ]
Save 25% on Stellaris as part of this week's Weekend Deal*!
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
[ 2016-10-20 17:02:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
You’re Going to Need a Bigger Space Boat for Leviathans - First Story Pack for Stellaris Arrives Alongside Major Free Update
STOCKHOLM - 20 October 2016 - Paradox Interactive and Paradox Development Studio have today released Leviathans, the first story pack for the critically acclaimed science fiction strategy game, Stellaris.
Leviathans adds new exploration centered content, as you encounter new, potentially dangerous species, pirates and space creatures when you expand across the galaxy. New events and new options are open to you, bringing you even deeper into an epic space opera of your own creation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG0rc3x8Aew
Stellaris: Leviathans includes:
- Guardians: Powerful space entities with mysterious origins and motives. Fight or investigate them to unlock technologies and gain access to great treasures.
- Enclaves: Independent outposts of traders and artists who are willing to make a deal. Exchange resources, purchase information about the galaxy, or commission a great work of art for your empire.
- War in Heaven: Where will your fledgling empire lie if two ancient Fallen Empires decide to renew old grievances in a War in Heaven? Will you err on the side of caution and take a side with the stronger power, or will you strike at both whilst they are occupied with their own titanic struggle?
- New art and music to add greater variety and listening pleasures to your game experience.
The launch of Leviathans is accompanied by the Heinlein update to the base Stellaris game, available to anyone who owns it. Heinlein is a huge patch that addresses many issues for players, including:
- A convenient Auto-Explore feature.
- Rally points for your freshly-assembled Navy.
- The Expansion Planner Interface.
- An overhaul of Strategic Resources.
- Clearer specialization/role for ship types.
- More options for customizing new galaxies.
- New smarter Sector Governors.
[ 2016-10-20 12:59:54 CET ] [ Original post ]
We are extremely happy and proud to release the Heinlein update today.
This update is the biggest one to date for Stellaris and is accompanied by the Leviathans Story Pack DLC!
Enjoy!
Click here to read full changelog
[quote]If you wish to continue playing on 1.2.5 - Asimov to complete an already started game, or for any other reason. Then please follow this guide.[/quote]
>>Bigger version of the image<<
[ 2016-10-20 12:39:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hi! Please be advised that 1.3 will break any saves started in 1.2. Make sure you stay on 1.2 if you wish to finish off any ongoing games! http://steamcommunity.com/app/281990/discussions/0/351660338715630667/ Apologies for the inconvenience.
[ 2016-10-19 10:59:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
Coming Thursday October 20th!
Since Steam has some limitation on space, and our patch notes are so awesomely long.
Please visit our official forum for the full list of changes
#Important
* NEW: Players can encounter powerful Guardians that guard secrets and treasures
* NEW: Enclave Stations can be encountered and exist in three different forms; Artisans, Curators and Traders.
* NEW: Trader Enclaves can trade minerals/ECs and sell strategic resources
* NEW: Artisan Enclaves can construct monuments and hold festivals on your planets
* NEW: Curators can sell star charts, aid you with your research and provide valuable insight into how to defeat certain Guardians
* NEW: 'War in Heaven' can be triggered between two Awakened Fallen Empires, resulting in a galaxy-scale war
#Enclave Resources
* NEW: "Riggan Spice" strategic resource
* NEW: "XuraGel" strategic resource
* NEW: "Muutagan Crystals" strategic resource
#Graphics
* 5 new 'cuties' portrait: 2 Molluscoids, 1 Reptilian, 1 Anthropoid and 1 Fungoid.
#Music
* 5 new songs by Andreas Waldetoft, including a new main theme that will play if you the story pack is installed and enabled.
###################
# Features
###################
#Important
* NEW: "Federation Victory" victory condition
* NEW: New galaxy setup options - max Fallen Empires, amount of habitable worlds, whether to allow advanced empires near player at start, whether to use clustered starts, and whether to allow end-game crises
* NEW: It is now possible to designate a colony as your new Capital at a cost of 250 influence
* NEW: Added extra large weapon slots. Extra large weapons can only be mounted on battleships and have a limited firing arch
* NEW: Tracking is a new stat for weapons that reduces the evasion of the target by the same amount. Most weapons now have a Tracking value
* Point-Defense is now its own slot size instead of sharing space small slots
* NEW: Torpedo slots have been added to the game
* NEW: Aux utility slots have been added to the game
* NEW: Added 2 new habitable planet classes, Alpine and Savannah
* NEW: Added a new Humanoid species class with 4 new portraits
* NEW: Added toggle to Suppress pop factions, spending Influence to drain their Support over time
* Terraforming rework - terraforming stations have been removed. Any non-colonized planet within your borders can be terraformed for a cost
* Sectors now have settings where the player can toggle certain behaviors on or off
* Strategic Resources have been reworked and now provide a global modifier to your empire as soon as you have at least one of that resource without the need for buildings or modules, allowing you to trade with and for excess resources
* Fleets can toggle whether other AI fleets should follow it or not
#General
* Combat computers have been reworked and each ship size has its own series of computers with different stats and behaviors
* Space Monsters now inhabit specific, randomized regions of the galaxy. You will still find the occasional straggler among the stars, but in general Space Monsters tend to cluster together per-species and more unusual specimens can only be found on their home turf
* Void Clouds now always spawn near the star in their system and guard rich energy deposits
* Crystal Entities now guard a few rewards
* Aura components removed from battleships
* Assault armies can now be recruited even though the planet has reached max capacity. New armies will automatically embark in transports
* It is now possible to resettle pops to and from sector-controlled planets
* Strike Craft now move towards their own kill target instead of their carrier's
* Strike Craft and missiles can now use evasion
* Missiles can now have health, armor and shield
* NEW: Additional Plantoid name list, updated old ones
* Utility Slots of most ship sections have been consolidated
* Battleships and Cruisers have had a couple of sections removed and reworked
* Space Whale weapons are now always small slot weapons
* NEW: It is now possible to ask empires to become your tributary (and to offer to become theirs)
* Strategic resource deposits have been overhauled to fit the resources' new roles. A number of deposits have also had their spawn chances tweaked
* Crystalline weapons are no longer available to players
* Capacity Overload edict is now unlocked by Global Energy Management instead of New Worlds Protocol
* Droid technology is no longer marked as Rare. Chance to appear is unchanged
* Synthetic Thought Pattern technology is no longer displayed as Rare. Chance to appear is unchanged
* NEW: New galaxy setup options - max Fallen Empires, amount of habitable worlds, whether to allow advanced empires near player at start, whether to use clustered starts, and whether to allow end-game crises
* Policy tooltips now display how pop happiness will be affected
* NEW: Frontier Clinic can be upgraded into Frontier Hospital
* NEW: Frontier Hospital is a new building
* NEW: Terraforming rework - terraforming stations, gases and liquids have been removed. Any planet within your borders can be terraformed for a cost
* Terraforming gases and liquids now significantly reduce terraforming cost
* Terraforming is now available earlier in the game
* You can now directly terraform any planet type to any planet type, so long as you have the tech required
#Diplomacy
* It is now possible to offer and request associate status with a Federation. Associate status acts as a non-aggression pact with the whole Federation and builds up trust between associate and all members of the Federation. Federation members vote on granting and revoking associate status.
# Technology
* NEW: Vitality Boosters, increases leader lifespan by +10 years
* NEW: Frontier Hospital, allows Frontier Clinics to be upgraded into Frontier Hospitals
* NEW: Mega Cannon, unlocks the Mega Cannon extra large weapon
* NEW: Giga Cannon, unlocks the Giga Cannon extra large weapon
* NEW: There is now a technology for terraforming Tomb Worlds, and a rare tech for making Gaia Worlds
#Fallen Empires
* Fallen Empire pops no longer have any negative traits, and start the game with additional positive traits
* Each of the four Fallen Empire types now has their own set of ship designs
* Fallen Empires will now sometimes start with Titan-class ships
* Xenophile Fallen Empires will no longer attack regular empires just for slaving/purging
* Materialist Fallen Empires will no longer attack regular empires just for researching AI
* Xenophile and Materialist Fallen Empires will now sometimes offer tasks and make demands of regular empires that result in an opinion boost if accepted/completed
* Xenophile and Materialist Fallen Empires will now sometimes bestow gifts on regular empires that they have a high opinion of
* Fallen Empires can now 'awaken' and become Awakened Empires if regular empires are growing too strong, if another fallen empire has lost planets, or if there is an end-game crisis ongoing. Awakened Empires get a new personality type and new goals and will attempt to force the rest of the galaxy to bend to their will.
* Fallen Empires now start with multiple levels of each repeatable tech researched
* Fallen Empires no longer start with creature and crisis techs (matter disintegrators, etc)
There is much more here!
[ 2016-10-18 12:33:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Stockholm - 17th October, 2016 - Paradox Interactive today released a new feature spotlight video outlining some of the upcoming features that players can expect with the release of Leviathans on the 20th October. Stellaris Game Director Martin Anward talks us through the mysterious and formidable Guardians, reclusive Enclaves, and the potentially world-shattering War in Heaven. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsYjZxX8Xac
[ 2016-10-17 13:47:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This development diary will cover improvements made to graphics in the Heinlein update and new species portraits coming in both Heinlein and the Leviathans Story Pack.
Improved Bloom Shader (Free Feature)
One of the features we really wanted to get in for release but never could was the improved bloom shader. Bloom is now days a dirty word, and has a bad reputation from previous generations overuse. But when used correctly it really makes thing look amazing. A game like Stellaris where so many things are glowing, ship windows and engines, stars, laser weapons etc. We had most of the code done before release, but once we switch over, everything in the game which was glowing needed to be tweaked, and in some cases needed code.
During Heinlein we had some time for this and now its all fixed so the star burn bright and the lasers glow.
We also spent a little bit of time improving the planet city textures.
New Portraits
Both before and after the release of Stellaris we've received a lot of different requests for new species portraits. Among the more frequent requests are to make more 'alien' aliens, and this is something we tried to address before release, adding a large number of non-human shaped aliens. Another common request, that I felt we did *not* address, was for more 'cute', 'pretty' and 'humanlike' aliens. Sure, we have your basic humans and there's the ever-lovable space foxes, but we've noticed that quite a few people tend to play *only* as humans or *only* as space foxes, and we wanted to give these people some more options to play with. For this reason we decided to do a new round of portraits, with the work split between 'cuties' and 'humanlike' aliens.
Humanoid Portraits Pack (Free Feature)
Humanlike (or 'rubber forehead' as they're sometimes derisively called) aliens is something we intially avoided putting into Stellaris, focusing on more alien species to give a sense of the galaxy as a diverse place full of different lifeforms. However, I felt that in doing so we overlooked the fact that there is quite a few people who actually want to play as, and encounter, more humanlike aliens, as they are something that we as humans can more easily recognize and relate to than say, a sentient crab. For this reason we decided to create a new species class called 'humanoids' that is essentially mammalians that look more like humans than other mammalians, and made 4 new portraits for this category that will be given to everyone in the free Heinlein update. Humanoids do not have their own city graphics or ships as they are essentially mammalians and mostly only have their own group for interface sorting purposes. When making portraits going into the future, we will continue to focus primarily on 'alien' aliens, and humanlike ones will always be very much in the minority, but they will still be there for those that want them.
Humanoids:
Cuties Portraits Pack (Paid Feature)
The cuties, on the other hand, are simply something we very much know that many people (including myself) wanted: More cute species. We decided to focus on adding them to the species classes that didn't already have something cute, and also to species classes that had fewer portraits than the others.
Reptilian ('Gecko'):
Arthropoid ('Butterfly'):
Molluscoid ('Starfish'):
Molluscoid ('Snailien'):
Fungoid ('Prettyshroom'):
That's all for this week! Next week, Heinlein and the Leviathans Story Pack will be coming out, so we are now officially all tapped out on content to show you for them. However, be sure to watch the release stream and today's Extraterrestial Thursday stream for further previews and sneak peeks. We will also be posting the 16-page patch notes sometime during next week, so keep your eyes peeled for that as well.
Read the original post
Don't forget our Extraterrestrial Thursday Livestream - Today (Thursday) at 15:00CEST on https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-10-13 10:38:24 CET ] [ Original post ]
Exploration Comes with a Price (and a Launch Date!)
Stockholm - October 10th, 2016 - Paradox Interactive today announced the release date and retail price for Leviathans, the upcoming Story Pack for their critically acclaimed strategy game Stellaris. Featuring a host of new content such as Guardians, Enclaves, or the fearsome "War in Heaven", Leviathans is the first Story Pack to be released for one of 2016's biggest strategy hits. Leviathans will be available on Windows, Mac and Linux PCs on October 20th, 2016, priced at $9.99 or local equivalent. As a small taster of what to expect when Leviathans arrives on October 20th, see the below previously unreleased screenshot:
Coupled with the release of Leviathans will be the traditional free update, dubbed "Heinlein". Containing upgrades and improvements for all players, just some of the highlights include:
- A convenient Auto-Explore feature.
- Rally points for your freshly-assembled Navy.
- The Expansion Planner Interface.
- An overhaul of Strategic Resources.
- Clearer specialization/role for ship types.
- More options for customizing new galaxies.
- New smarter Sector Governors.
[ 2016-10-10 13:14:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
Long time no seen interstellar explores!
It’s time for me to make another entry about the Sound Design & Music (Jazzhole will write about his music). We want to write about our thoughts and what kind of direction we wanted to go with the music and sound design. But I also want to take the opportunity some of the improvements that will be included in Heinlein.
Sound Design:
Cuteness and Roar in space?!
When I first learned that we were going to create all the grand Guardians in the game my first thought was: “Time to sound even bigger!”. Not only should you notice that grand size of these Guardian by graphics, you should here the sheer size of these mysterious beings.
If we are going to create big and awesome Dragon in space, you can bet that I’ll really excited to create audio assets. And now it was my time to shine as a VO artist! I wanted to try out my “inner beast” voice. It was great fun but I needed to a lot of test recordings and iterations before I could get the right voice. But I’m pleased with the result and I think that you as a player will hear and notice the Dragon whenever you’re in the same system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k53JFm_7P8
But not only creating audio for when the Dragon is roaring I needed also create assets for when it’s breathing and flying around. *insert your joke about
[ 2016-10-06 10:45:17 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we'll continue talking about the Leviathans Story Pack, specifically its headline feature: the Guardians.
The Guardians (Paid Feature)
The Guardians, or Leviathans as they're also known, are space-dwelling beings of immense power. They vary a great deal in biology and composition: Some are enormous space creatures, some are technological remnants of ancient civilizations, and some are something far different altogether. How you find them also varies - some you may encounter in their home systems, jealously guarding their territory, others may be unleashed on the galaxy by exploring the wrong planet or star.
The chance of a particular Guardian being present in your game will depend on the size of your galaxy - a tiny galaxy might only have one or two, while a Huge galaxy might contain nearly all or even all of them if you explore far enough. Defeating them, or in some cases, helping them, will unlock rewards in the form of resources, empire-wide modifiers and unique technologies. Guardians vary in power, but are meant to be a serious challenge for a mid-game empire, so don't expect to be able to bring them down in the first decades of the game.
Below I am going to talk a little about a few of the Guardians. These are just a sample and not nearly all of them, but we want to avoid showing off everything there is for a player to find in the Leviathans Story Pack for those who wish to explore and find out for themselves.
The Space Dragon
The Space Dragon is a capricious being, jealously guarding its hoard. With this particular Guardian, there is no reasoning or dialogue... it wants to be left alone, and will attack any and all trespassers in its territory. If you wish to get at its hoard, you will have to slay it, and you had best be sure to bring a large enough fleet - anger it enough, and it will not settle for simply driving you off. Should you bring it down, however, the vast mineral riches of its hoard will be yours to claim... and who knows what you might find among the treasures. Technology, artifacts... perhaps even a dragon egg?
The Infinity Machine
The Infinity Machine sits waiting at the edge of a massive black hole, a perfect metal sphere, unmoving. It does not attack as you approach, does not communicate, does not even react. It seems to be waiting for something. Perhaps if you find a way to communicate it, you can find out what it wants. Perhaps you can even help it? Or, if you choose, you could simply order your fleet to attack... after all, how much of a threat could a mere metal sphere be?
Stellarite
What can live inside a star?
What sort of being can withstand, and even thrive in, such immense heat and pressure?
What could be its purpose?
... what does it eat?
That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about changes to the graphics and sound of Stellaris coming in the Heinlein update, as well as a teaser on the more than 20 minutes of new music by Andreas Waldetoft included in the Leviathans Story Pack.
Read the original post
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-09-29 11:38:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This development diary will cover Leviathans, the recently announced DLC that will be accompanying the 1.3 'Heinlein' update. As previously mentioned, Leviathans is not an expansion but rather something we call a 'Story Pack', a collection of mostly scripted content that is larger than an event pack but smaller than a full expansion. Originally, Heinlein was supposed to be an update accompanying a full-fledged expansion, but we chose instead to do a Story Pack so that the Stellaris programmers would be able to focus on bug fixing, UI improvements and improving/reworking features in the free update.
The Heinlein update has already been exhaustively covered in several development diaries, but I still thought I should take the time to remind everyone of what it contains. Note that this is NOT an exhaustive list:
- Awakened Fallen Empires
- Fallen Empire quests, tasks and general improvements
- Fleet Roles and new XL weapons
- Weapon Balance rework
- Federation Victory Condition
- Strategic Resource Rework
- Auto-Exploration
- Rally Points
- Expansion Planner
- Habitability System Rework
- Federation/Alliance Rework
- Federation Association Status
- Better control over sectors
- 5 new portraits (NOT the 'cuties')
- Major sound and graphics improvements
- Space Creature rework, including new art and encounters
- Loads of bug fixes, AI improvements and UI improvements
- Guardians feature
- Enclaves feature
- War in Heaven feature
- 5 new portraits ('cuties')
- 20+ minutes of new music by Andreas Waldetoft
There are three types of Enclaves, each with their own range of interactions:
- Traders allow you to exchange minerals for energy and vice versa.
- Artists allow you to commission a piece of art that can be placed on one of your planets as a building, or become their patron to support more advanced works.
- Curators allow you to purchase star charts, enlist their aid in furthering your research, or purchase information about the different Guardians and their weaknesses.
In addition to these basic interactions, each type of Enclave also has an 'advanced' interaction. This interaction is not immediately available, but must be earned by building up that Enclave's opinion of your empire. This is done by utilizing their basic interactions, so for example a Trader Enclave's opinion of you will increase every time you trade minerals and energy with them. An Enclave that is located inside of your borders will also have its opinion of you slowly increase over time. The advanced interactions are as follows:
- Traders will sell you a unique strategic resource accessible only to them.
- Artists can be asked to organize a festival across your worlds, improving happiness across your entire empire.
- Curators will allow you to recruit one of their researchers, who provides access to unique technologies not otherwise researchable.
Of course, if your empire leans more towards the Fanatical Purifier type of thinking, you can also choose to simply attack an Enclave. Their space stations are powerful, but not invincible, and you may just find valuable salvage and technologies among the wreckage. That's all for today! Next time we'll be talking about the headline feature of the Leviathans Story Pack, the Guardians, so stay tuned! In the meanwhile, here's a little teaser of what to expect...
Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-09-19 10:52:15 CET ] [ Original post ]
Space is lovely, dark and deep, but it has secrets it wants to keep. Rich systems defended by fierce creatures, hostile pockets of resistance to your civilization, and the sleeping giants of the universe – the Fallen Empires who may yet be stirred from their centuries long indolence.
In Stellaris: Leviathans, the galaxy will be filled anew with adventure and challenge as your new and naïve space-faring empire comes face-to-face and ship-to-ship with a host of dangers and rewards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REijXUSQrQc
- Guardians: Stationary societies that have built defenses throughout a system to protect something of great value. Do you dare seize their treasure?
- Enclaves: Independent outposts of traders or mercenaries who are willing to make a deal. Exchange resources or hire a small fleet to supplement your own.
- War In Heaven: Where will your fledgling empire lie if two ancient Fallen Empires decide to renew old grievances in a War in Heaven? Will you err on the side of caution and take a side with the stronger power, or will you strike at both whilst they are occupied with their own titanic struggle?
[ 2016-09-15 13:22:58 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Today we will go into the sixth part in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 update and accompanying (unannounced) content DLC. The topic of today's dev diary is the changes to ship roles and ship balance.
Ship Roles
The new design intends to give each ship a more unique combat role. Some ships will be defensive, while others will be more offensive.
Corvettes
Small and aggressive ships with high evasion that can be equipped with torpedoess. They will be very effective against large ships like battleships due to their high evasion and access to torpedoes. They have very low armor, but a very high chance to evade.
Destroyers
Defensive ships that are designed to counter corvettes, which is why they receive an innate +10 bonus to Tracking. They can be equipped with point-defense weapons, to shoot down the torpedoes fired by corvettes. They have moderate armor, and a moderate chance to evade.
Cruisers
These aggressive ships should be able to put out a lot of damage, but at the cost of less defense. Cruisers, like corvettes, can also be equipped with torpedoes. But unlike corvettes, they can also be equipped with hangars for strike craft. They have somewhat high armor, and a small chance to evade.
Battleships
The new role for battleships will be durable capital ships that fire at its enemies from a long distance. They are the only ship size that can be equipped with extra large weapons. They have very high armor, but minimal evasion.
Evasion, Tracking & Armor
A new feature in the Heinlein patch will be the Tracking stat. Each weapon will have a Tracking value that determines how effective they are against ships with high evasion. Every point of Tracking reduces the target’s chance to evade that attack by the same amount. Small weapons will have high Tracking, medium weapons will have medium Tracking, and large weapons will have minimal Tracking.
This means that large weapons - with a poor Tracking value - will still be very effective against large ships like cruisers or battleships, but almost useless against small ships like corvettes due to their high evasion.
The armor penetration of weapons has also been rebalanced so that large weapons have a much higher armor penetration values than smaller weapons.
In effect, this means that small weapons are good at shooting at small ships, while large weapons are good at shooting at large ships.
Another note is that missile weapons no longer ignore evasion, and can be evaded like normal. Most missiles, however, will have a very high Tracking value.
New Slots
Something new in the Heinlein patch will be the introduction of a couple of new slot types.
The extra large slot will contain powerful spinal-mounted weapons that are designed to target and take out enemy capital ships. Only Battleships will have a ship section with this weapon slot.
The torpedo slot, as evident by its name, will hold torpedoes. Torpedoes are slow firing weapons that deal massive damage, perfect for taking down larger ships. Unlike other missiles, however, torpedoes do not have good Tracking, which means they are very ineffective against ships with high evasion, such as corvettes or destroyers.
The auxiliary slot will hold components that have ship-wide effects. Crystal-Forged Armor, Shield Capacitors and Regenerative Hull Tissue are examples of components that will now be equipped in this slot.
Point-defense weapons now have its own slot size. The idea is that you should need to specialize some ships into countering enemy torpedoes
Major weapon rebalancing
Most weapons have been rebalanced to better suit the new design.
That's all for this week! Join us again next monday when we’ll be back with another dev diary!
Read the original post
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-09-12 14:42:12 CET ] [ Original post ]
Good afternoon all. It's Thursday meaning that we are due a development diary for the upcoming EU4 expansion: Rights of Man.
Last week we gorged on five new features: Disinherit, Strengthen Government, Prussian Monarchy, Debase Currency and Abandon Personal Union. Today we'll be taking a light snack with just one, which is in no way related to me being busy with moving home at the moment.
Late game you could well have fought against or even played as a Revolutionary Republic. In the 1792 Start date you can enjoy spreading the revolution as France but mechanically any European nation can get into the mood for it. As part of the Rights of Man expansion, these Revolutionary Republics will have access to their own Revolutionary Republican Factions system, akin to Ming or Merchant Republics.
Three factions will wrestle for influence in your nation, which you can boost using ADM, DIP and MIL points.
Jacobins cost ADM to boost and gain influence from Republican Tradition being high. When they are the leading faction they have the following effects:
Global Unrest -2
Build Cost -15%
National Tax +15%
Diplomatic Reputation -2
Royalists cost DIP to boost. If their influence is high and republican tradition is below 40 then they can seize control to turn your nation into a Revolutionary Empire.
Diplomatic Reputation +1
State Maintenance Cost -25%
Subject Liberty Desire -20
Republican Tradition -0.5 per year
Girondists cost MIL to boost. They want to bring the revolution to other nations. They gain influence from being at war and lost it from being at peace.
Land Forcelimit +20%
Manpower Recovery +20%
Discipline +5%
Aggressive Expansion Impact +20%
So essentially you have your stabilizing faction, your empire building faction and your warring faction. Balance their effects and bonuses to either spread the empire far and wide or consolidate your holdings. If you allow yourself to "stabilize" into a revolutionary Empire, you will leave the faction system and return to a monarchy, albeit the best* monarchy in the game.
As is often the case, there are new events to coincide with them, usually affecting the influence of your factions.
Revolutionary Republic Factions will be a paid feature in the upcoming Rights of Man expansion, which will be released alongside the 1.18 Prussia Patch on 11th October 2016.
If you thirst for more (and why wouldn't you?) perhaps I can interest you in checking out the feature stream for Rights of Man with myself and Johan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhi_xQchvpY
*Not counting Hordes, of course.
Read the original post
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-09-08 13:17:32 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the fifth part in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 update and accompaying (unannounced) content DLC. The topic of today's dev diary is the changes to space creatures coming in Heinlein.
Grounding the Space Creatures (Free Feature)
I've always loved the concept of space creatures - massive beings capable of living in vacuum, travelling between the stars under their own power. With Stellaris, I felt that we went a long way with the addition and fleshing out of space creatures such as amoebas and crystalline entities, but we failed to really ground them in the setting. You encounter them, you research them, you get some information about them... but where do they come from? They're just randomly scattered throughout the galaxy, with no real sense of belonging or having come from anywhere.
This is something we've changed in Heinlein. Instead of just spawning randomly anywhere, space creatures will belong to a particular region of space. They can be found outside it, but its rare, so once you encounter more than one set of mining drones, it's likely that you've entered mining drone space. In the region of a particular space creature, in addition to finding the regular versions of these creatures, you will also find a 'nexus', a system surrounded by powerful variants in which a 'boss creature' lives, and where this particular space creature is meant to have either its origins or their 'home', so to speak. For example, in the center of mining drone space, you will find the Mining Drone Home Base, a powerful adversary that once defeated will yield some significant rewards.
Space Piracy (Free Feature)
Space pirates is another area where we just didn't go far enough with our implementation. Part of that is because we lack a real trade system for them to prey on, but even so, the one-off event that spawns a few ships (that may or may not look completely different from anything else your species uses) just isn't up to par. As such, we've decided to make pirates their own type of 'space creature', with a region of space they live in, a home base and several more variants of ships. From here, they will occasionally set out to raid interstellar empires across the galaxy until one of those empires has enough and attacks them at the source.
Power and Reward Rebalancing (Free Feature)
As part of these changes, we will also be looking at the power of each space creature, tweaking or creating more variants to ensure that they do not cease being relevant as soon as the player has built a destroyer or two. We will also look at rebalancing the rewards you get for killing and researching them, to make both finding and fighting them a more rewarding experience overall. The overall aim of our changes to the power and placement space creatures is to make encounters with them them rarer but more significant.
That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about Enclaves, a feature in the DLC that will accompany the Heinlein update.
Read the original post
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-09-06 09:07:02 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the fourth part in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 patch that we are currently working on. Additionally, from this point on we will also start to cover some features in an upcoming content DLC that will be released alongside Heinlein. This content DLC will not be a full expansion, but rather a smaller pack of events and scripted content focusing on a particular area of the game. Please note that everything mentioned thus far, and everything mentioned from now on that isn't explicitly marked as paid content will be free in the Heinlein patch. Details about the DLC such as name, price and release date will come in a future announcement. The focus of today's dev diary is Fallen Empires, who are about to receive a number of reworks, changes and additions.
The Fallen
Fallen Empires are my favorite part about the Stellaris setting. The idea of a precursor empire, milennia old, whose borders once stretched across the galaxy, their glory now faded, their great advancements forgotten, but the power of their ancient fleets and technology still far above that of any fledgling empire. Enigmatic actors on the galactic scene, whose morals and ambitions have been warped by ages of self-imposed isolation. For me, it invokes images of the Galactic Empire from the Foundation and the Vorlons and Shadows from Babylon 5. However, the implementation of Fallen Empires never quite matched my visions - originally meant to be completely passive, they were retooled fairly late in the development to give them some basic personality and goals as enforcers of particular taboos. While these goals make for some memorable experiences for new players (I've seen more than a few stories of careless colonization of Holy Worlds) they by necessity require Fallen Empires to behave in a highly predictable manner that, once understood, turns them back into actors of little consequence to the player. For this reason, fleshing out Fallen Empires and adding an element of unpredictability to them has been high on my priority list ever since I became Game Director, and this is what we're aiming to do in the Heinlein patch and accompanying DLC.
Sleepers Awake (Free Feature)
The idea of Fallen Empire 'awakening' was mentioned by Henrik Fåhreaus/doomdark a number of times during development as something we were interested in doing, but ultimately is something that ended up being cut for time. In Heinlein, all Fallen Empires will have a chance to awaken as a result of certain external factors. The exact conditions and chance under which each Fallen Empire will awaken depends on their ethos, but some examples include:
- Endgame Crises threatening them or the galaxy
- Regular empires growing too strong/technologically advanced
- Other Fallen Empires being defeated by regular empires
- Other Fallen Empires awakening first
- Militant Isolationists become Jingoistic Reclaimers, and will try to conquer the galaxy
- Holy Guardians become Doctrinal Enforcers, and will try to convert the galaxy to their faith.
- Enigmatic Observers become Benevolent Interventionists, and will try to force all other empires into becoming a signatory to a galactic peace treaty.
- Keepers of Knowledge become Watchful Regulators, and will try to force all other empires to accept their technological primacy.
- Jingoistic Reclaimers have Thralls, tributaries who may not colonize but can fight among each other.
- Doctrinal Enforcers have Dominions, tributaries with enforced spiritualist ethics and government.
- Benevolent Interventionists have Signatories, subjects who may not wage war, enslave or purge, but are otherwise independent.
- Watchful Regulators have Satellites, who must pay a share of their research to their overlord and are required to ban all AI.
Personality Changes (Free Feature) Among the four Fallen Empire personalities we created for release, two of them didn't really work out: The Keepers of Knowledge and Enigmatic Observers. The Holy Guardians and Militant Isolationists restrict you from a certain part of space - sure, that part may be a deliciously tempting size 20 Gaia World, but ultimately you can always find another place to expand. The Keepers of Knowledge and Enigmatic Observers, however, restrict playstyles - if you get one of the former in your galaxy, you can forget about having sentient robots until you're strong enough to take them on. As there's little you can do about this other than hope for the right type of Fallen Empires to spawn, it's not very fun and ultimately just limits player strategies in a rather arbitrary way. For this reason, we've decided to revamp the Keepers of Knowledge and Enigmatic Observers. While not awakened, they will not concern themselves with restricting the overall actions of the 'lesser' empires: Instead, they will pursue specific goals and ambitions that sometimes require them to interact with these very empires. These goals and actions take the form of Requests and Demands: If you have established communications with Keepers of Knowledge or Enigmatic Observers, they will sometimes contact you and either give you a task (for example, to hunt down a splinter faction of their species or recover a cache of technology from one of their old worlds) or make a demand (for example, one of your pops for their 'galactic preserve'). Completing their tasks will result in an opinion boost and a reward (such as technology or perhaps even a Fallen Empire ship), while repeatedly rebuffing their demands may result in a declaration of war to put you in your place. The awakened versions of these two will take on some of the characteristics of the old, non-awakened versions, with Benevolent Interventionists seeking to enforce galactic peace and Watchful Regulators trying to regulate the level of technological advancement in the galaxy. They will also act as the first line of defense against galactical crises, taking it on themselves to unite the lesser races against such existential threats. New Designs (Free Feature) A small detail that I felt was lacking in Fallen Empires was the absence of any unique designs. All the Fallen Empires used the same (fairly lacking) Avatars and Eclipses, and ultimately their ships were inferior to what a regular empire that had been around for a century or two could produce. Both of these issues will be addressed in Heinlein, with each Fallen Empire ethos now having their own unique designs to use (and build, if they are awakened). For example, Keepers of Knowledge exclusively utilize energy weapons to strike their enemies at a distance, while Militant Isolationists combine afterburners and projectile weapons to get up close to their foes and tear their ships up at point-blank range. Additionally, a whole new ship class called Titans has been introduced as a (for now) exclusive new weapon in the Fallen Empire arsenal. Titans are enormous ship, the equivalent of several battleships, extremely durable and armed with a vast array of lethal weapons. They will sometimes be found in the starting fleets of Fallen Empires, and Awakened Fallen Empires will be able to build a limited number of them.
The War in Heaven (Paid Feature) We've talked about what happens when one Fallen Empire awakens, but what happens if there's two of them? For those with the DLC, two empires of opposing ethos (for example, Xenophobe and Xenophile) awakening can result in the War in Heaven event triggering. This event will cause the two Awakened Empires to go to war over the fate of the galaxy, dragging in the lesser species to fight on their side. All empires will be presented with a choice - join one of the two Awakened Empires and bet on their victory, join a league of non-aligned empires and hope you can stand against them both, or stand alone and risk being trampled underfoot when the war comes your way. Unlike a normal war, the War in Heaven is a cataclysmic event that will not end once a few worlds have been captured or a few battles won - it will be a fight to the death that ends only when one Awakened Empire stands victorious or both have been subjugated. If one of the Awakened Empires wins, they will show favor to those who supported them and be merciless to those who opposed them.
That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about some changes coming to space creatures, how they spawn and how they scale, coming in Heinlein. Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-08-29 09:19:04 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the third part in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 patch that we are currently working on. This week's dev diary will be about more miscellaneous changes and improvements coming in the patch, currently planned for release sometime in October.
Federation/Alliance Merger
When Federations were given the ability to vote on invites and wars, alliances became a bit of an odd duck in the Stellaris diplomacy. A middle layer between the 'loose' diplomacy of defensive pacts and joint DOWs, they ended up as little more than a weak form of Federation that's usually swapped out the moment the latter becomes available. In Heinlein, we've decided to retire alliances altogether and have Federations be the only form of 'permanent' alliance. When you unlock the technology for Federations, you will immediately be able to invite another empire into a Federation with you, 4 empires no longer being necessary to start one. Once a Federation has been formed, the technology is not required to invite new members or to ask to join it.
Federation Association Status
Another issue we ran into with the changes to diplomacy in Asimov is that Alliances and Federations had trouble bringing in new members - since non-aggression pacts, defensive pacts and guarantees were no longer possible with outside powers, building trust is difficult and you have to mostly rely on large bribes to get new members to join, something that just didn't feel right. To address this, we're adding a new diplomatic option to Heinlein called 'Federation Association Status'. This works similarly to an invite to the Federation in that it can be offered and asked for with any member of the Federation, but must be approved via unanimous vote. A country that has Federation Association Status is not actually a part of the Federation, but has a non-aggression pact with all Federation members and will gain trust with them up to a maximum value of 100. Revoking association status can be done via majority vote, or on the part of the associate at any time they like.
Planet Habitability Changes
The planet habitability wheel is a mechanic we were never quite happy with - it makes some degree of sense, but it's hard to keep track of how each planet relates to your homeworld type, and it ends up nonsensical in quite a few cases (Desert being perfectly fine for Tropical inhabitants, or Arid for Tundra, etc). We found that most players tend to intuitively divide planets into desert/arid tundra/arctic and ocean/tropical/continental, and so we decided to change the mechanic to fit player intuition. Instead of a wheel, planets are now divided into three climate groups (Dry, Wet and Cold) and two new planet types (Alpine and Savanna) were added so that each group has 3 planet types. Habitability for the climates now works as follows (numbers may be subject to change):
- Habitability for your main planet type is 80% (as before)
- Habitability for planets of your climate is 60%
- Habitability for planets of other climates is 20%
We also felt that the number of habitable planets in the galaxy was too large overall, but that we couldn't really decrease it so long as the player only had access to 1/7 of those types at start, which would now become 1/9. We also felt the colonization tech gating could be rather arbitrary, particularly if you had a species suited to a particular planet type but still couldn't colonize it due to lacking the tech. As such, we've done away with the tech gating on colonization, and instead instituted a 30% minimum habitability requirement to colonize a planet. You will also be unable to relocate pops to a planet if their habitability there would be under the 30% minimum. With this change we've also majorly slashed the number of habitable worlds in the galaxy, though if you prefer a galaxy lush with life you will be able to make it so through a new option outlined below. We are, of course, looking into and tweaking the effects that having less habitable worlds overall will have on empire borders. More Galaxy Setup Options There is an old gamer's adage that says 'more player choice is always better'. We do not actually agree with this, as adding unnecessary/uninteresting choices can just as well bog a game down as it can improve it, but in the case of galaxy setup in a game such as Stellaris, it is pretty much true. With that in mind, the following new galaxy setup options are planned to be included in Heinlein:
- Maximum number of Fallen Empires (actually setting a fixed number is difficult due to the way they spawn and how it's affected by regular empires)
- Chance of habitable worlds spawning
- Whether to allow advanced empires to start near players
- Whether to use empire clustering
- Whether endgame crises should be allowed to appear
- Whether sector is allowed to enslave/emancipate
- Whether sector is allowed to build spaceports and construction ships
- Whether sector is allowed to build military stations (this will replace the military sector focus)
[ 2016-08-22 08:57:31 CET ] [ Original post ]
This is a small hotfix to address some common issues.
Please report any problems in the bug report forum
Click details below to see the changes included.
Changelog
[quote]
##############################################################
####################### VERSION 1.2.5 ########################
##############################################################
###################
# AI
###################
* Fixed another case of wars at 100% warscore not being ended by the AI
* Fixed another case of AI open/close borders spam
* Fixed an issue where sector AI would build research of only one type due to a math error.
* Fixed AI inviting players to wars they should have no interest in.
* AI will no longer prioritize working food tiles on planets with only robots.
###################
# Features
###################
* Added 2 more plantoid namelists.
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed bug where multiple special projects were being researched at the same time.
* Special projects with time cost no longer use stored resources.
* Fixed a couple of CTDs.
[/quote]
[ 2016-08-16 08:54:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the second in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 patch that we are currently working on. This week's dev diary will be focusing on a series of changes made to ship design and fleets that we call the Fleet Combat Overhaul.
Dedicated Roles
One frequent critique of the ship types in Stellaris is that they don't really have roles - besides corvettes being unable to mount large weapons, there is basically no difference in what type of weapons can be mounted on what type of hull, meaning that there is no actual reason to use a proper mix of ship types - often the best strategy is just to find a single effective design (such as all-corvette fleets on release version or the currently popular destroyer tachyon lance fleet.). To address this we sat down and thought about what the roles of each type of ship should be, and came out with the following:
- Corvettes are fast, agile ships that excel in taking out capital ships at close range.
- Destroyers are screens for your capital ships that excel in taking down corvettes and countering missiles and strike craft.
- Cruisers are close-range capital ship brawlers that tank enemy fire and engage enemy destroyers and capital ships.
- Battleships are artillery and carrier ships that provide long-range fire support.
- Torpedo slots mount Torpedo and Energy Torpedo weapons, which are short range extreme damage weapons meant to take down capital ships. They can only be used by corvettes and cruisers.
- Point Defense slots mount point defense cannons, which is the primary defense against missiles, torpedoes and fighter craft. Destroyers can be designed to field large amounts of point defense weapons.
- Extra Large slots mount massive long-range weapons that can only fire in a fixed arc ahead, such as Tachyon Lances, Arc Emitters and Mega Cannons. These can only be mounted on battleships and take up the whole bow section.
- The amount of damage reduction provided by armor now depends on the size of the ship, so a single piece of armor will do more for a corvette than for a battleship. This should make armor useful even for smaller ships.
- The 'special' utilities (crystalline hull plating, shield capacitor, etc) will use their own slot type that is limited by hull size, and so will only have to be balanced against each other instead of having to also be balanced against shields and armor.
- A new utility type, afterburners, provides additional combat speed, allowing you to design ships that can closely quickly with your opponents.
- As part of these changes we're looking over the balance of every weapon in the game, especially strike craft, point defense and creature weapons.
- Combat computers will be changed from being universal to being based on ship type, so corvettes have specific corvette computers that focus on boosting evasion, while destroyers have computers that impove targeting, allowing them to keep up with corvette evasion better than other ship types.
- We're changing emergency FTL so that it sets the fleet as MIA, meaning that fleets that successfully escape combat will always be able to flee to friendly space rather than getting stuck and ping-ponged to death. To compensate, we're making it so every ship (no matter how undamaged) has a chance to be lost when you use emergency FTL, so it's always a risky maneuver.
- We're looking into creating a special class of flagships that are limited in number by your fleet size, and are the only ones able to use auras, instead of all-aura battleship fleets.
- We're looking at balancing the different FTL types and making it less hard to catch enemy fleets. Some of our current ideas is having fleet speed depend on how far away you are from friendly space (and thus resupply) and boosting the speed of warp.
- We're looking into fleet formations and some basic orders during combat (priority targeting, etc). At minimum the basic fleet formation will be changed to be more sensible (no more suicide corvette leading the charge).
That's all for this week! Next week we'll talking about yet more features and changes coming in Heinlein. Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
[ 2016-08-15 11:18:29 CET ] [ Original post ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HCvgUCGdmc You can get it right here! http://store.steampowered.com/app/498870/
[ 2016-08-04 13:41:14 CET ] [ Original post ]
This is long over dew. Here you can finally see all our new fiber based buds!
The Stellaris - Plantoid Species pack releases TOMORROW (04/08-16)!
Which will be your first pick to branch out throughout the galaxy?
[ 2016-08-03 13:43:45 CET ] [ Original post ]
First Species Pack Coming Soon, Today Music and Words
A double-whammy of news today! First we are pleased to announce our forthcoming Species Pack, Plantoids. The Species Pack will contain fifteen new portraits, an original cityscape backdrop, and stunning new ship models. Watch this space for more news about that soon! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D9vT7Axs-E Today we are also releasing for sale the original Stellaris soundtrack, composed by Andreas Waldetoft and the e-book Stellaris: Infinite Frontiers by Steven Savile, an original story about humanity’s first contact with an alien race and the questions this raises. http://store.steampowered.com/app/492740/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/497660/ Stay tuned for more Plantoids news soon!
[ 2016-07-12 14:55:36 CET ] [ Original post ]
We've released a hotfix for 1.2 that we hope will address most of the issues you have been having!
Changelog
[quote]
##############################################################
####################### VERSION 1.2.1 ########################
##############################################################
###################
# Features
###################
* Forming a Defensive Pact now cancels guarantees and non-aggression pacts with that country
* Primitives nuking themselves now properly affects pop count
* Risk of Malcontent Slaves faction effect "Interstellar Railroad" now scales from 1% to 5% risk with 5 to 11+ owned slaves, down from 2-10% risk with 4-8+ slaves
###################
# Balance
###################
* Upgraded Nomads arsenal and ship designs. Reduced Nomad Fleet HP and damage bonus modifier from +50% to +25%. Overall they should be stronger than before
* Reduced HP of Nomad ark ships and gave them basic weapons
###################
# AI
###################
* Fixed AI not properly signing white peace in some wars that would just drag on forever
* Fixed AI not declaring prepared wars
* Fixed a case where sectors could get stuck due to lack of energy tiles and respect tile resources
* Multiple fixes for AI combat behaviour
###################
# User Interface
###################
* Fixed spelling in English localization for Attitude Map Mode
###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed a bug where merging fleets would prioritize the smallest fleet
* Fixed a bug where Gaia world spawn chance was not explicitly reduced for inhospitable stars
* Fixed issues with democratic elections alternative parties, issue caused the alternative parties to be invalid
* Fixed a bug where the display height of a galactic object wasn't being restored after loading a savegame
* Fixed so that democratic elections check the correct policy flags
* Fixed Xeno Integration tech weights
* Fixed upgrade arrow incorrectly displayed as greyed out for certain buildings on non-capital planets
* Fixed a bug where migration pacts between subjects and overlord were not allowed
* Fixed AI sometimes initiating a vote to kick right after a new member joins the alliance
* Fixed max trust not being properly set to 100 when forming an alliance
* Fixed issue with Nomads building too many new ships
* Fixed issue with Nomads not setting an end point for their journey when playing in a tiny galaxy
* Technology database patches tech_repeatable_improved_core_planet_cap -> tech_repeatable_improved_core_system_cap if save file version is below "Stellaris v1.2.0"
* Fixed CTD due to invalid pops on planet
* No longer wait for research in ALL tech areas to be halted before updating technology research alternatives
* Survey fleet order checks if fleet can move to system, so players can no longer reach out-of-reach systems using fleet view survey button
###################
# Graphics
###################
* Improved skybox quality
[/quote]
Old versions are as always available under the beta tab in Steam.
Asimov update (1.2) Released post
[ 2016-07-01 07:24:10 CET ] [ Original post ]
Today we are super happy to release the Asimov 1.2 update for Stellaris!
If you are feeling unsure what this update will bring to the table I suggest you check out the info-graphics below or have a look at our changelog posted here.
Related Development Diary
Stellaris Dev Diary June 27th - New Skyboxes
Stellaris Dev Diary #37 - Asimov Patch part 2
Stellaris Dev Diary #37 - Asimov Patch part 1
[ 2016-06-27 14:24:38 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome back to another Stellaris development diary! This week’s dev diary was supposed to be about future Stellaris development, but we decided to delay that for a week so that our Art Director Aerie can talk about some nice new graphical additions to the Asimov patch.
This dev diary will be a bit more technical and in-depth than most dev diaries.
One of the major changes that you will notice in the Asimov patch, is the changes to the background environment, usually referred to as the skybox. A major issue we had with these at launch was the lack of variety between system appearances. Since they all have the same skybox they more or less all feel the same. Systems have different amounts of planets, in different configurations, with different owners etc. but the skybox makes up for 95% of all pixels on screen, at any given time, so it is by for the most visually significant factor.
So, just make more skyboxes right?
Well, a problem with skyboxes, is that they are very expensive memory wise. They each “cost” about 12.5 megabytes of video memory. In comparison, all the UI in the game is about 90 MB. The memory cost is due to the texture being 12280 x 2048 pixels large. That is what it takes to cover a 360 degree environment all around you. And then you still look at the image at 150% magnification. Despite the size of these files, they are still fairly heavily compressed, and with the skyboxes we had, you could easily tell. Because of the size of the skyboxes, we were reluctant to add more.
What we could do however, was recolor them. We could use what is called a LUT (Look-Up-Table), where you use a reference texture to recolor everything. With this we can make all the adjustments we want in photoshop, using color balance, hue / saturation, levels, curves etc, and have this affect the textures in-game. LUT’s are a very powerful tool to change the mood of a game. LUT though, comes with a big drawback: it compounds the issue of compression artifacts even further.
Like I mentioned earlier, the skybox we had was not that good to begin with, it looked nice aesthetically, but quality wise, it was flawed from the very beginning. What we did when we created it, was we created a large panorama image of 4000x2000 pixels. This image was then wrapped around a sphere in maya, and rendered with 6 cameras each with a 90 degree field of view, to capture the information needed for the skybox.
But a 4x2k texture is not enough for a 12x2k skybox, we would have needed a 8x4k texture to start with, at the very least.
The problem went even deeper than this. Even before we rendered it, the panorama texture was created in photoshop by painting and stitching together clouds and nebulae using levels and masks. Because of this the texture had some banding issues, before we even imported it into maya, which is another step that degrades the texture’s image quality.
We considered for a moment creating a new skybox with the same technique as before, just with higher resolution, and better source textures. But working in 8x4k is very taxing on the hardware and as the layers would add up, even a good computer would start to struggle. Much more significantly, there were no guarantees that it would actually yield any good results.
So back to square 1. We needed to do something completely different.
We chose to try working with fluid simulation, using this to build an environment, and then simply render that out. We had only limited previous experience with fluid dynamics, but it's always good to try new solutions. Using fluids we could eliminate the entire first step, thereby removing a lot of texture degradation. Working with fluids in maya is surprisingly simple, and after some learning and simple tests we had a scene up and running that would give us roughly what we needed.
Before we added the new skybox to the game from maya, we did some additional work in photoshop to add more detail. So now we had a new skybox, looking similar to the old one, but of higher quality and with less compression artifacts.
For recoloring purposes though, this new skybox was still not enough. The recoloring still caused enough artifacts to make it unsuitable. We had more variation, but it was 3 steps forward, 2 steps back.
Talking to the engine team, one of the coders suggested using YCoCg compression. What this does is, instead of saving the colors as RGB (Red Green and Blue), it saves the information as luminance, hue, and saturation which works a lot better for the color shifts in our skyboxes. A fun aside is that YCoCg is not dissimilar to how human eyes actually process colors. Anyway, besides being a good way to lower the information degradation, it was a cool idea, so we had to try it. Getting that up and running was also fairly easy, and it did indeed produce good results. These new textures are twice as big, so 25 mb each, but with these textures covering so much of the screen it is totally worth it. If any part of the game deserves more graphical resources, it’s the skybox.
But it was still not enough. The thing that caused the most artifacts was drastical changes in hue, but we had to be able to move from a blue-ish green background, to a yellow, orange or red. So, instead of doing this change with the LUT- color correction, we do this in-engine in an earlier rendering step and then add a bit of color correction on top. This way, we can also subtly influence the colors of the ships, which makes them blend in a lot better. All in all, it produced a great result.
Beyond just changing the colors, we did want to do some more work to increase variety. We created some new skyboxes with different star densities, a dense one used closer to the core, a “mid-range” one which is similar to the one we had, and finally one for the rim, where the background stars are a lot more sparse and the skybox feels darker.
With these changes, each system will be a bit more unique, and it will be a be a bit easier to know where you are in the galaxy.
Original Post
[quote]Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Developer Diary Archives
[/quote]
[ 2016-06-27 12:11:25 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we will once again be talking about the Asimov 1.2 patch, that is planned to be released before the end of June. Last week's dev diary covered most of the diplomatic changes, here we'll be covering a variety of other changes and additions, though it will by no means be an exhaustive list. Full patch notes will be posted at some point before the patch is made available to the public, and include a large number of balance changes, bug fixes and UI improvements.
Better Looking Battles
One thing we were not quite happy with in the release of Stellaris is the way battles look - when small numbers of ships are engaged, it generally looks fine, but large fleet battles turn into disorganized heaps of ships, or 'beeswarms' as they have been described by players. A number of mods (such as the Beautiful Battles mod) emerged quickly to tweak this part of the game, and we've been looking at them for inspiration on how to improve the battle visuals. We plan to look more in detail at ship roles and fleet engagements in the future, but for Asimov we've made the following changes:
- The range of all weapons have been increased, so that fleets will engage at longer ranges and spend more time advancing at each other before close-up engagements happen.
- Combat computers were changed from Aggressive and Defensive into Swarm and Bombardment computers, to better describe their roles. Ships with Swarm computers will move in closely and engage, similar to old combat behaviour, and have bonuses to damage, speed and evasion. Ships with Bombardment computers will advance into weapons range and then slowly drift towards the enemy until they have range with all of their weapons, and have bonuses to accuracy, fire speed and weapons range.
- The default combat behaviour of ships was changed from that of orbiting 'swarm' mode into one where they make passes at the enemy and attempt to engage with 'broadsides', which should help make large battles look like less of an angry beeswarm unless all ships involved are using aggressive computers.
Map Modes
A highly requested feature ever since release has been the addition of more map modes, so that players can more easily keep track of things such as who their allies are, which empires they are at war with, or who has a positive attitude towards them. For Asimov, we've added a map modes feature with fully scriptable map modes that let modders at their own map modes, with three new map modes coming as part of the patch:
- Diplomatic Map Mode: Shows diplomatic relations with other Empires, such as whether you are at war, are allies with them, or are blocked from entering their borders.
- Opinion Map Mode: Shows their opinion of you.
- Attitude Map Mode: Shows the AI's attitude towards you.
Nomad Fleets
Another feature that we decided to expand on for Asimov is Space Nomads. A rather rare encounter in the base game, all they do is share contacts with other empires, and we felt they're an interesting concept that can be used in far better ways. Nomads are now a roaming fleet that can enter the galaxy sometime during the course of the game, and will then plot a course through the galaxy, visiting a variety of locations before they leave it again for destinations unknown. If they pass through your space on the way, they may interact with you in a variety of ways, such as offering to sell you some ships, or requesting permission to settle some of their people within your borders.
Slave Factions
As you likely know if you've been reading these forums, slaves were not intended to be as docile as they were in the release of the game, but rather we had to cut slave revolts for lack of time because slaves were completely unmanageable and threatened to make the feature entirely useless. For Asimov, we've reworked the Slaves faction into a pair of factions called the Docile and Malcontent Slave Factions. As the names imply, Docile Slaves are slaves that are relatively content with their lot in life, and will at most demand that regulations are placed on the worst excesses suffered by slaves, while Malcontent Slaves are far more riotous and will demand their freedom. There is also an Aboltionist factions that can be joined by free pops who are sympathetic to the plights of the slaves.
New Wargoals
Something that has been frequently requested is more variety in the wargoals you can use on others, so that war can happen for other reasons than simply to transfer territory. This is an area we'll be looking at fleshing out long-term, but for Asimov we've added at least a few new wargoals to spice things up:
- Make Tributary: You can now take tributaries in war. Tributaries is a type of subject that pays 20% of their Energy and Mineral income to their overlord, but do not join their overlord's wars and are free to declare their own wars and colonize planets.
- Abandon Planet: If you have Purge policies allowed, you can force an enemy to abandon a planet, killing all pops on that planet in the process.
- Humiliate: You can humiliate enemy empires, making them suffer a negative modifier and giving you a chunk of influence.
- Open Borders: Forces the other Empire to open their borders towards you for 10 years.
- Stop Atrocity: Forces the other Empire to ban slavery and purging.
Diplomatic Incidents
A big part of the aim with the Asimov patch is to make the diplomatic game more interesting, and have more interaction between neighbouring empires. Diplomatic Incidents is a series of events that can occur between empires which shake up relations, usually related to the actions of one empire towards the others. An example is that an empire might suspect that a foreign science ship surveying inside their borders is there to spy on them, and will demand humiliating assurances from the owning empire that their secrets are safe, or else close their borders to the 'transgressor'.
That's it for today! Next week will be the last development diary before we all disappear on vacation, and will talk about what the future holds for Stellaris.
[ 2016-06-20 15:53:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
We are proud to release the first major update for Stellaris. The "Clarke" update comes with various UI improvements and bug fixes.
See Stellaris Dev Diary #34 - Clarke Patch for some of the highlights.
Full patch notes can be found here!
This update also unlocks the following content for free:
- Platypus species portrait
- Paradox empire symbol
- Symbols of Domination
[ 2016-06-01 13:15:09 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone!
Today’s DD will bring a little light on QA work, and give a glimpse of odd and interesting bugs the team struggled with throughout the development of Stellaris. My name is Chandika, and I work as Embedded QA on Stellaris, alongside with Leo Larsson and Obidobi (partially). We are part of the Development Team, but we also have Central QA working with us. They are not assigned for any project for good, as they are working with all our titles.
For a deeper and detailed explanation on how Quality Assurance department works in Paradox Development Studios please check this Dev Diary written by Distantaziq, Embedded QA on Hearts of Iron IV.
Although QA job is not just reporting bugs and issues we find, this is what we are known for, bringing programmers to tears and despair. Also, it is the most visible part of our work, as you can see below.
The beginning
Very first bug ever that has been reported on Stellaris was, you could say, pretty important. Courtesy of MrNibbles, who found out that there was no Exit or Quit Game button present in game at all. Perhaps it was by design? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Jormungandur: "We didn't see a need for the player to be able to stop playing"
Migrating hair, clothes and other things
Throughout the life of Stellaris, many aliens seemed to have their own will to change looks. Some would say it’s the hottest spring/summer 2016 of the stellar fashion, and as a matter of fact, it wouldn’t be that far from true.
This Reptilian was called Fabalien in our QA team. We even made our own Emoji in the chat we’re using at work. It’s fabulous!
Scientists sometimes would change their clothes, depending on which alien empire they would encounter.
Socially awkward Molluscoid would creep through the window while having a conversation with you. Don’t make eye contact!
Naming your empire
Let’s say you wanted to name your empire with one letter. It would be a pity if it wasn’t visible on the map, right?
I mean, one letter can be easily missed in the vast Galaxy full of wonders.
You gotta make sure other empires treat you seriously, Q.
Space whales preparing for war
Purely a graphical bug where Space Critters, Whales and Amoebas decided to look a bit more intimidating than usual.
Instant rebellions
Look at this kaleidoscopic galaxy! It was a result of instant rebellions that AI could not handle.
Honorable Mentions:
Tough love of planets and their satellites.
Some Space Amoeba corpses would display in Galaxy View. And they are huge.
The epilogue
Of course, being a QA is not playing games all day and occasionally reporting something that made your playthrough unpleasant. We are most famous for the ridiculous screenshots we capture, but it’s actually just a small part of our job. Our responsibilities include (but are not limited to): analysing risks of the project, keeping track of our internal database of issues, which also means regression (verifying if the issues previously reported were fixed), and giving continuous feedback on the project (what works well, and what should be changed). We are doing a number of different tests that would narrow the issues down, check if all the features are in and working etc. We have scheduled multiplayer tests twice a week, as well as exploratory testing that would help us focus on long game. All things considered, there is never enough testing for the project, especially games like Stellaris, where anything is possible. That’s why I would like to thank our dear betas for helping us out a lot and doing all sorts of testing for Stellaris. Without you it wouldn’t be the same! :) Original Post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Developer Diary Archives Stellaris Streams archive[/quote]
[ 2016-05-30 11:33:37 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello everyone! As you may have noticed, there was no Stellaris development diary this week, because the team has been extremely busy working on the first free patch for the game, which we have named Clarke. Clarke is currently undergoing internal QA testing, and we hope to have a beta version of the patch out for you before the end of the week. Therefore, we decided to do a dev diary after all, detailing some of the fixes, changes and improvements coming in the patch.
Please note that the highlights below are just highlights, NOT exhaustive patch notes!
UI IMPROVEMENTS
A major target area for Clarke was the UI, particularly in regards to sectors and diplomacy. A few highlights:
- Sectors can now be managed directly from the outliner.
- Diplomatic Notifications are now much more detailed.
- End of Combat interface has received a major face-lift.
- Habitability icons/tooltips now show you more detailed information, including which worlds in a system you can currently colonize.
- Greatly improved sector AI handling of pops, buildings, spaceports and mining stations.
- Fixes for AI in end game crises.
- Improvements and fixes to AI handling of its fleets.
- Less restrictions on what the AI will trade and with who, especially in regards to border access.
- In multiplayer, empires that are player-controlled will have a 'limited' AI for a period of 10 years if the player drops. The limited AI will not make any drastic changes to the empire, such as changing sectors, disbanding ships, declaring wars, etc, allowing a player to rejoin their empire pretty much as they left it.
EMPIRE BUILDER IMPROVEMENTS We also took some time to add a pair of highly requested features to the empire builder. Namely, the ability to write a biography for your species and empire, and the ability to customize ruler titles. Ruler titles are customized separately by gender, and will remain even if you change government type, so long as the new government is of the same type as the previous one (so changing from a Monarchy to another Monarchy will not clear your ruler titles, while changing from a Monarchy to a Democracy will).
BALANCE CHANGES While balance wasn't our main priority for Clarke, we nonetheless targeted a few major balance issues. A few highlights:
- War score costs now scale to the size of your target, so you can take more planets from large empires but can't vassalize them in a single war.
- The ability to stack evasion on Corvettes was nerfed.
- Strike craft had their range substantially increased.
- Ethics were rebalanced to make Xenophile/Xenophobe stronger picks, among other changes.
- It is no longer necessary to control planets to demand them in war, but controlling planets that are set as wargoals are now worth more warscore.
- Technology cost is now increased both by number of planets owned and size of population, instead of just population. Accordingly, the tech increase cost from population was lowered.
- Military Station maintenance is now correctly calculated (was far too high previously).
- Numerous fixes to events, including fixing up the Old Gods event chain.
- Fixed 'ghost' trade deal entries and trade deals silently failing when you traded above a certain percentage of your resource stockpiles.
- Democracies that don't allow slavery will no longer get the Slaver mandate.
- Difficulty settings are now available in multiplayer setup.
[ 2016-05-24 10:56:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
The third Hotfix for Stellaris should go live any minute now!
This Hotfix contains:
- Fixed Planet capital modifier being spammed.
- Fixed CTD caused by ground combat side containing invalid armies.
- Fixed issue with disabling everything in Outliner would render it unusable.
- Fixed issue with orbital bombardment of swarm invaders.
- Removed shortcut from "help" button to avoid colliding with fleet "hold" shortcut.
- Performance optimizations caused by huge amounts of resource stations.
- Ship designer: List of designs is sorted according to ship sizes.
- Transport ships are now designable.
Please report any issues in the bug reports sub-forum and make sure to specify that you are running with 1.0.3.
Both the 1.1 (CLARKE) and 1.2 (ASIMOV) updates are progressing according to schedule. Our intention is to release 1.1 as a beta patch late next week.
Original post
Stellaris Dev Diary #33 - The Maiden Voyage
Hotfix Patch 1.0.1 post
Hotfix Patch 1.0.2 post
[ 2016-05-18 08:33:46 CET ] [ Original post ]
- Linux [153.28 M]
- Stellaris: Infinite Frontiers eBook
- Stellaris: Plantoids Species Pack
- Stellaris: Leviathans Story Pack
- Stellaris: Utopia
- Stellaris: Nova Edition Upgrade Pack
- Stellaris: Galaxy Edition Upgrade Pack
- Stellaris: Anniversary Portraits
- Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn
- Stellaris: Apocalypse
- Stellaris: Humanoids Species Pack
- Stellaris: Distant Stars Story Pack
- Stellaris: MegaCorp
- Stellaris: Ancient Relics Story Pack
- Stellaris: Lithoids Species Pack
- Stellaris: Federations
- Stellaris: Necroids Species Pack
- Stellaris: Nemesis
- Stellaris: Aquatics Species Pack
- Stellaris: Overlord
- Stellaris: Toxoids Species Pack
- Stellaris: First Contact Story Pack
- Stellaris: Galactic Paragons
- Stellaris: Astral Planes
- Stellaris: Expansion Subscription
- Stellaris: The Machine Age
- Stellaris: Cosmic Storms
- Stellaris: Grand Archive
- Stellaris: Rick the Cube Species Portrait
- Stellaris: Stargazer Species Portrait
- Stellaris: Season 09 - Expansion Pass
Featuring deep strategic gameplay, a rich and enormously diverse selection of alien races and emergent storytelling, Stellaris has engaging challenging gameplay that rewards interstellar exploration as you traverse, discover, interact and learn more about the multitude of species you will encounter during your travels.
Etch your name across the cosmos by forging a galactic empire; colonizing remote planets and integrating alien civilizations. Will you expand through war alone or walk the path of diplomacy to achieve your goals?
Main Feature
- Deep & Varied Exploration.
- Enormous procedural galaxies, containing thousands of planets.
- Explore Anomalies with your heroic Scientist leaders.
- Infinitely varied races through customization and procedural generation.
- Advanced Diplomacy system worthy of a Grand Strategy Game.
- Ship Designer based on a vast array of technologies.
- Stunning space visuals.
- OS: Ubuntu 20.04 x64
- Processor: Intel iCore i3-530 or AMD FX-6350Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 or AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 (1GB VRAM). or AMD Radeon RX Vega 11 or Intel HD Graphics 4600Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 12 GB available space
- OS: Ubuntu 20.04 x64
- Processor: Intel iCore i5-3570K or AMD Ryzen 5 2400GMemory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1GB VRAM) or AMD Radeon R7 370 (2 GB VRAM)Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 12 GB available space
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