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

We also know that pop growth has been a heartfelt issue for some of you, so we wanted to take this opportunity to address some of that feedback. With that Ill hand the word over to our Game Designer Stephen to talk a bit more about pop growth in detail: "The Stellaris 3.0 Dick update had a number of changes to economic systems, including major changes to population growth. We wanted to significantly reduce the number of pops in the galaxy and decrease the disparity of number of pops between empires with mass colonization and those with fewer focused planets, allowing smaller empires to keep pace to a degree with more sprawling empires. (The eternal struggle between wide and tall play.) As part of this, we made some changes to increase economic output of individual pops or other sources through various means - some technologies were buffed, edicts were updated, and new bonuses were added to keep production up. Some secondary resources, such as Research, are intentionally more difficult to rush, since we believe that in 2.8 it was a bit too easy to reach repeatable technologies and technological dominance. We do recognize that putting limitations on the previously endless growth can feel bad, and that the large number of sudden changes can be shocking. Internally, weve been playing with the system for months, and know that while it will take a transition period to get used to some of the changes, we believe that these changes are better for improving the long-term playing experience. That said, months of internal testing pales in comparison to a week of live play, and the feedback weve received from you have been integral for us to continue to improve the playing experience and has led to some adjustments we want to make. Balancing complex systems are an ongoing process so we encourage you to continue feedbacking here on the forums as we move forward. While we were interested in having more backwater planets in proportion to highly developed planets, we've deemed it too difficult to get to the higher infrastructure tiers. As such, we're planning on reducing the number of pops necessary to upgrade capital buildings to the higher tiers. The growth on highly developed worlds also felt a little low, so we've increased the floor of how low logistic growth penalties can drop planetary growth, to make sure that these planets still produce a low but noticeable amount of growth. The effect on growth required from the number of pops in the empire was stagnating growth too early, so we're adjusting that value down as well. These should help make late game worlds like a Ring World or Ecumenopolis less difficult to populate, though you may still want to encourage your pops to resettle to them to get them going. To ensure that other special planets such as the Hive World and Machine World still feel valuable when they come online, we've added assembly jobs to the planets themselves. (The Resource Consolidation origin will begin with a blocker negating this extra job until removed.) Since colonization is taking longer than desired in the mid to late game, we've added Colony Development Speed bonuses to the civilian infrastructure technologies in addition to their Building Slots. There's been a lot of positive feedback regarding the new automatic resettlement mechanics, so we're looking at changing the functionality of the Slave Processing Plant to expand automatic resettlement to slaves on the planet at a reduced rate instead of providing production bonuses. So much paperwork. Constructobots have requested Building Slot parity with Functional Architecture, and we can yielded to their demands. The bio-trophies of the Rogue Servitors have also been shown some educational programs to help them multiply. And as a quality of life request from the Prosperously Unified, we're extending the duration of the homeworld buff to 20 years." ----- Please note that this is not a comprehensive list of all the changes were looking into for 3.0.3, but rather some of the highlights. That is all for this week folks! We hope you enjoy the game, and continue giving constructive feedback so that its easier for us to keep improving the game. Please note that this is not a comprehensive list of all the changes were looking into for 3.0.3, but rather some of the highlights. That is all for this week folks! We hope you enjoy the game, and continue giving constructive feedback so that its easier for us to keep improving the game.