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.
  

• 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.
  

Useful links
Official Website
Stellaris Wiki
Developer Diary Archives
Stellaris Streams archive