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!