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

General Necrophage Changes It has not escaped notice that Necrophages are quite strong. A lot of the things that make them cool and fun to play also make them very powerful, so its a fine line to tread on. However, we have managed to come up with a set of changes that bring them a bit more in line with other starts while maintaining the spirit of the Origin:

• 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!

Thats all for today. Stay tuned to hear more about our plans for the Lem update!