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Stellaris: Console Edition Development Diary #73 - Free Patch Features

Hello everyone!

We’re now two days away from release! We know that many of you have been waiting a year for this update, and we’re excited to get you into the latest version of Console Edition!

Game Director Eladrin joined us to give us an overview of the new features coming to Console Edition, which you can watch below.


This most recent update includes most major features from Stellaris 3.6 to 3.9, making this one of the largest updates for Stellaris: Console Edition ever, and there will be many new things that we will have to cover.

Fleet Combat Rebalance

The Fleet Combat Rebalance rebalances many aspects of the aspects of Fleet Combat and ship behavior while in combat.

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Ships should now better maintain their distance while in combat, and the combat computers will now better determine ship behavior while in combat.

Large turrets will now be better against (and prefer to target) large ships, with small turrets now preferring to target small ships. Large and XL weapons now have a minimum range, and while ships are inside this minimum range, their weapons will no longer fire – meaning that fleet composition matters more now than ever before.

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Another change is that torpedoes are now G slot weapons, and are short-range weapons whose damage will scale based on the fleet cap usage of the ship they are targeting. In a nutshell, this means that torpedoes will do more damage when targeting larger ships. G slots are also now restricted to Cruisers and a new ship class - the Frigate.

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Frigates are the same size as corvettes, are slower, but can sport G-slot weapons and have an auxiliary slot that can fit a cloaking device. This allows you to sneak a fleet of frigates in behind your enemy’s mainline, and unleash a devastating barrage of torpedoes against your enemy’s capital ships (Cloaking requires First Contact), but they can also be extremely effective in taking down Starbases when they’re unlocked before cloaking is teched.

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We’ve also improved ship design, adding ship roles to the autodesigner. Ship roles will prefer different types of weapons depending on the role chosen - brawler designs will prefer short range weapons, while artillery roles will prefer longer-ranged weapons.

Orbital & Ground Combat Rebalance

This is not a ground combat rework, as a disclaimer. This being said, orbital bombardment should now behave more naturally for players. Previously, only 200 ships' damage output would count towards bombardment, so whether you were bombarding with 200 or 1000 ships, the net-result would be effectively the same. This restriction has been removed, allowing you to more easily and effectively bombard planets before taking them.

Additionally, planet density is now a factor when it comes to orbital bombardment, meaning that small densely populated planets will take more damage and have more pops killed than large, sparsely populated worlds.

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We have also added the ability for planets to surrender to orbital bombardment alone – the first time you bombard a planet, you will get the option to either allow surrender from orbital bombardment, or not. There has also been a policy added that will allow you to change this option at a later time.

It's important to note that planets will never surrender from orbital bombardment during total wars or if they would be purged after the surrender. These empire types will still have to send in the troops as usual.

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We’ve also added an army builder to starbases, which will build armies across the entire sector. We’ve also added the ability to set a transport as a rally point, which will cause created armies to marshall to that army.

Sector Changes

We’ve added the ability to shift systems from one sector to another. This should cut down on the “sector gore” and allow you to make more visually pleasing sectors.

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The sector editor still respects previous sector rules, and is designed mainly to allow you to “nudge” systems from one sector to another.

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Sector automation has been removed in favor of individual planet automation. You can restrict planet automation to handling specific aspects of the planet, and restrict it from using specific resources.

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Empire Council and Agendas

Running an intergalactic empire is hard, so we’ve added a new empire council with council positions. Assigning leaders to the empire council will provide benefits to your empire, scaling based on the the level of the leaders assigned to your council.

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Council agendas are unlocked by unlocking new traditions, and provide small bonuses while they’re being worked and larger bonuses while the agenda is active.

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Galaxy Shapes

We’ve also added new galaxy shapes to the game setup options, with some realistically shaped galaxies such as 3, 6 and barred spiral galaxies, and plus other galaxy shapes that will certainly make for interesting galaxies to conquer explore.

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Notification Settings

Reducing the cognitive load from playing the game is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. We’ve added a message notifications menu where most event types and notifications can be disabled, enabled or automatically pause the game.

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We’ve also added a new type of notification, the toast, for conveying information that isn’t important enough for a full event notification.

Performance Improvements

Improving and optimizing the game performance and optimizing memory usage has been a high priority for last-gen platforms.

  • Playstation - Updated audio system and packaging to use Sony's AT9 format saving hundreds of MB in ram and around 4GB in storage
  • Improved threading model / task system resources for improved late game performance.
  • Fixed lag from having a combination of a large number of species and a large number of colonisable planets.
  • Opening the fleet manager in the late game will now have a much-reduced impact on frame rate
  • Reduced UI frame rate lag from several sources (notably related to fleets and calculations of whether and where any reinforcements can be recruited)
  • Further improved the performance of using triggered economic category modifiers.
  • Slightly sped up the calculation of pop job weights when updating them from serial (i.e. not during the monthly batch parallel update)
  • Added caching to AI fleet power calculations.

Pre-FTL Awareness

Pre-FTL Civilizations now have awareness, and will progress more naturally through their development stages. Pre-FTL awareness will increase based on things that occur in their surrounding system and their development level.

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For instance, a renaissance age empire might not correctly attribute your orbiting observation post as evidence of extraterrestrial life, but a space age empire will notice the traffic and radio transmissions from a colony in their system, and correctly attribute that to the evidence of extraterrestrial life, and will even reach out and attempt to make contact.

Habitat Rework (requires Utopia or Federations)

Habitats are now limited to one Habitat Central Complex per system, and a number of Orbitals depending on the stars, planets, moons and asteroids present.

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In order to expand Habitats:
  • Major Orbitals are constructed around stars and planets and provide additional district slots to the Habitat Central Complex in addition to modifiers depending on the deposits present.
  • Minor Orbitals are constructed around moons and asteroids and only provide modifiers depending on the deposits present.

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Habitat Upgrade decisions increase the habitability of the habitat and provide additional branch office building slots in addition to increasing district and building slots provided by orbitals. Their cost is modified by your habitat build cost modifier.

Other New Features for pre-existing DLCs
Humanoid Species Pack
  • Added the new Enmity tradition tree focused on making and maintaining rivalries
  • Added three new species traits available to all Biological and Lithoid Species
  • Positive: Existential Iteroparity
  • Negative: Psychological Infertility
  • Negative: Jinxed
  • Added two new portraits
Lithoid Species Pack
  • Added a new Void Hive Civic for Hive Minds
  • Added the Selective Kinship Civic for regular empires
  • Supremacists now allow xeno species on the council if they have Selective Kinship civic (but only from their species class)
  • Added a new humanoid inspired portrait
  • Added the Federated Theian Preservers prescripted empire to the Lithoid DLC
Plantoids Species Pack
  • Added the Fruitful Partnership origin for Fungoid and Plantoid species
  • Added a new Invasive Species trait available for Fungoid and Plantoid species
  • Added a new dryad inspired portrait
  • Added the Blooms of Gaea prescripted empire
  • The Idyllic Bloom civic has been buffed
  • Phase 4 gaia seeders will now grant 3-5 pops the Gaia World Preference and Bloomed trait every 5 years as well as increasing the effects of this trait (and the Budding trait) by +50%.
  • The Bloomed trait gives +10% resources from jobs, +10% pop growth speed, -10% amenities and -10% housing used when the pop is on a gaia world.
Necroids Species Pack
  • Added a new Mechromancy Ascension Perk for Machine empires
  • Added the Cordyceptic Drones civic for hiveminds, allowing them to reanimate all organic space fauna
Ancient Relics Story Pack
  • Archaeotechnologies added - A new branch of society research, with new technologies revolving around the study and use of minor artifacts to create unique ship components, starbase modules and planetary buildings
  • Added the new Archaeoengineers Ascension Perk
Nemesis
  • Added the new Kaleidoscope Midgame Situation
Federations
  • Added Conclave Federation Election type
Utopia
  • Added Ascensionists Civic

These are just some of the new changes, there are many other features, bug fixes, improvements, and performance improvements coming in Stellaris: Console Edition 3.9 on November 21st!
 
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All of this sounds great (Mechnomancy! More Mass Effect Reaper roleplay!), *except* the apparently flat no-targeting restriction on Large weapons against any ship within a certain range. I get Corvettes especially getting a Chance To Evade Buff if they're withing a certain range, but the idea that even if *only* Corvettes remain out of a decimated fleet, my Large weapons will just give up and not even attempt to fire to me is one of those arbitrary restrictions. Otherwise I do look forward to the other elements of the fleet combat reworks.

Question, is there any ship type the Player Crisis can use for G-Slots?
 
All of this sounds great (Mechnomancy! More Mass Effect Reaper roleplay!), *except* the apparently flat no-targeting restriction on Large weapons against any ship within a certain range. I get Corvettes especially getting a Chance To Evade Buff if they're withing a certain range, but the idea that even if *only* Corvettes remain out of a decimated fleet, my Large weapons will just give up and not even attempt to fire to me is one of those arbitrary restrictions. Otherwise I do look forward to the other elements of the fleet combat reworks.

Question, is there any ship type the Player Crisis can use for G-Slots?
And another thing with the flat no-targeting rule is that that presumably applies to Juggernauts as well, right? If that thing somehow got within range (ignoring that it's ship computer would compel it not to, just hear me out), your *XL* weapons simply wouldn't be able to hit the exact type of ship they're designed for. Just doesn't make sense
 
It's finally here, all the improvements look really cool especially the change in combat and bombardment but I still have a doubt if at some point the galaxies are going to be bigger.
 
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What about nested tooltips and coop?
I'm not sure about nested tooltips, I think because of the nature of console they weren't possible.

And due to technical limitations, coop was also not possible for Console Edition.
 
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Can you destroy habitats yet? Havent played in a while.
Yes, using a colossus on a habitat will leave a ruined habitat in the version releasing on Thursday.
 
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As it was, so it is! the game has optimization problems since 2300, and what happens later is a joke. I play on PS5... every month the game stops for two seconds, and on random days it can also freeze for a second. Such stutters have been happening for over a year in this game, that's why I didn't play, I was hoping that maybe this time something would improve. It is true, however, that hope dies last. 2500h spent with this beautiful game and unfortunately I won't be able to play like that.
 
can someone explain to me how is this possible? i played on ps4 about 2 to 3 years ago, i had a fleet of 1.5 million and everything worked smoothly... on ps4!!! now i play on ps5 and i lead battles in 2300 with a fleet of 20,000 and the game stutters incredibly. WTF Paradox!!!
 
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can someone explain to me how is this possible? i played on ps4 about 2 to 3 years ago, i had a fleet of 1.5 million and everything worked smoothly... on ps4!!! now i play on ps5 and i lead battles in 2300 with a fleet of 20,000 and the game stutters incredibly. WTF Paradox!!!
This. This so much. Lag and stutter can start as early as 2260. By 2320ish it will become so bad that I have no interest in playing anymore. They said they fixed performance but I dont see that. I'll probably do a bug report later on but I would like a reply by a dev or moderator of some sort.
 
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I've played the game this weekend and enjoy changes, however I would really like sector automation back, it's incredibly mind numbing having to individually do each planet. Especially when you've conquered a load planets, or colonised a load of planets and just want them to do their own thing. I only focus on maintaining my capital, ring worlds and other special worlds.
 
I never thought I'd ask for this but maybe lock the fps to 30 and lower the resolution to full HD. Maybe that will help and stop the game from stuttering. Or at least add such a mode in the game menu optionally... The CPU is definitely too busy in consoles. The game is completely unplayable.
 
I never thought I'd ask for this but maybe lock the fps to 30 and lower the resolution to full HD. Maybe that will help and stop the game from stuttering. Or at least add such a mode in the game menu optionally... The CPU is definitely too busy in consoles. The game is completely unplayable.
I submitted a bug report and hopefully, with a bit of luck, it will get fixed before Christmas. We really need a next gen upgrade on this title. Crusader Kings 3 is a next gen only game and it runs so smooth now. Legit cant play on the highest speed or I'll miss some critical event. Though CK3 might be less CPU intensive than Stellaris.
 
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The truth is that I've had enough... I've waited almost a year, and in total probably a year and a half, for me to be able to play the game I paid for!!!!!! and I can't because it doesn't work!!!! I write comments on YouTube... zero replies, I write comments on the forum... silence. The developers are perfectly aware of the general state of the game, that's why they keep quiet. The important thing is that the DLCs are sold and the money is correct. Did you seriously work for a year on such a state of the game?!! Some kind of petition among players leading to refunds for the game and all DLCs would be useful, because when I bought the previous DLCs, the product was still playable. Currently, it is impossible, so my previous purchase was taken away from me, so I feel robbed.
 
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The truth is that I've had enough... I've waited almost a year, and in total probably a year and a half, for me to be able to play the game I paid for!!!!!! and I can't because it doesn't work!!!! I write comments on YouTube... zero replies, I write comments on the forum... silence. The developers are perfectly aware of the general state of the game, that's why they keep quiet. The important thing is that the DLCs are sold and the money is correct. Did you seriously work for a year on such a state of the game?!! Some kind of petition among players leading to refunds for the game and all DLCs would be useful, because when I bought the previous DLCs, the product was still playable. Currently, it is impossible, so my previous purchase was taken away from me, so I feel robbed.
Understandable. Game is in a rough state right now. I can tolerate some bugs but not this decrease in performance. The game could run a 1000 times better if it was ported to next gen only.

@MrFreake_PDX It is probably too early to talk about the next patch but if and when you have something about it, please, let us know. Even if it is something along the lines: "Guys, next patch is 4 weeks out" or "No release date yet". Every bit of communication helps, a lot.
 
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