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Wizzington

Game Director (Victoria 3)
Paradox Staff
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Nov 15, 2007
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Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary will be focusing on the road ahead after Cherryh and Apocalypse, and our long-term priorities going forward.

Cherryh Post-Release Support
As mention in last week's dev diary, the immediate priority for the team is post-release support for Cherryh and Apocalypse, fixing bugs, addressing balance/feature feedback, and working on quality of life and performance improvements. We are maintaining a running 2.0.2 beta patch which we will continue to update every few days or so until we are happy with the state of the game.

The Post-Apocalypse
Apocalypse and Cherryh were an expansion/patch focused almost exclusively on war, and with it out, we are now going to be moving on to other, non-war related priorities for future updates, expansions and story packs. To give you an idea of what's coming, we're going to revisit the list of long-term goals for Stellaris I made and updated for Dev Diary #50 and Dev Diary #69. This time, we're going to organize the goals into the ones we feel have been delivered on, old goals that were added to the list before 2.0, and new goals that we have set for ourselves after 2.0 (there is no prioritization difference between goals based on when they were added or whether they are considered old or new for this particular list).

As before, the list is NOT in order of priority, and something being considered completed NOT mean we aren't going to continue to improve on it in future updates, just that we consider it to be at a satisfactory level.

As before, THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE OR FINAL LIST, NOTHING NOT ALREADY COMPLETED IS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN AND THERE ARE NO ETAS

Completed Goals
  • Ship appearance that differs for each empire, so no two empires' ships look exactly the same.
  • More potential for empire customization, ability to build competitive 'tall' empires.
  • Global food that can be shared between planets.
  • Ability to construct space habitats and ringworlds.
  • Factions that are proper interest groups with specific likes and dislikes and the potential to be a benefit to an empire instead of just being rebels.
  • Ability to set rights and obligations for particular species in your empire.
  • Buildable Dreadnoughts and Titans.
  • Deeper mechanics and unique portraits for synthetics.
  • Reworking the endgame crises to be more balanced against each other and the size/state of the galaxy.
  • Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.
  • Superweapons and planet killers.
Old Goals
  • A 'galactic community' with interstellar politics and a 'space UN'.
  • Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic manuevering.
  • More story events and reactive narratives that give a sense of an unfolding story as you play.
  • More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations.
  • 'Living systems', making empire systems feel more alive and lived in
New Goals
  • Less micromanagement and more focus on interesting choices in regards to planets, the ability to grow planets beyond current fixed size.
  • Empire trade mechanics and trade agreements.
  • A galactic market where resources and strategic resources can be imported and exported.
  • Espionage and sabotage mechanics.
  • Improved galaxy/hyperlane generation with better placed systems and dangers.
  • More anomalies and unique systems to explore.

That's all for today! Over the next few weeks, dev diaries will continue to focus on post-release support. Feature dev diaries will resume when we have new features to talk about. Finishing off this dev diary is a screenshot of how we're reworking difficulty modes in the next update to the rolling 2.0.2 beta:
2018_03_08_1.png
 
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Hey, one question. 2.0 removed several techs from Machine Empires. Leading to them losing things such as a 15% cost reduction for edicts, 5% production increase for robots etc. Is there any intention to give them their own techs to make up for this?

Also the DE tooltip says they get -25% ship costs. Code says it's still -15% which one of the two is wrong?

I'm going to add a couple society techs that give Hive Minds and Machine Empires substantial resource production boosts in the mid-game.

I believe the DE tooltip is fixed in the beta.
 
Well, we can't build dreadnoughts... :p

Titans/Colossi were actually originally called Dreadnoughts/Titans but we renamed them to avoid confusion due to Fallen Empire Titans.
 
Before anything elese: GREAT JOB with everything about 2.0, it really made Stellaris the game I wished it was when it initially launched, mainly because of how warfare now works.
New goals are all great additions, especially trade since I think it's very lacking in its current state.

But I have to say I'm sad that the old "living systems goal" (more activity in systems, perhaps even civilian shipping) was removed altogether from the list... :( I was really looking forward to that, since Distant Worlds completely spoiled me in that regard.

That goal was not meant to be removed! It's still very much a goal. I'll find out what happened to it and put it back.
 
So the Scaling AI starts as a Ensign and reach Grand Admiral or is the "maximum" lower ?

The maximum is somewhere around Admiral level (it's not the exact same bonuses).
 
Please don't. At least don't do it like these things always are done in 4x games. They're always just an extra layer of shit to worry about that swings wildly from "nuisance" to "game breaking". Either "RNG says you got +5% research into the next habitability tech" or "you sabotaged enemy fleets and they're useless for the next year".

IF you absolutely must, connect it to how much information you have to govern/war/conduct diplomacy with. Make it so we don't instantly know the species characteristics of never-before-seen aliens, their government policies etc, what tech they use, what systems they own, where their starbases are, etc. Also, if I'm running a non-democratic government, make me not know who is and isn't in the opposition factions, unless I have proper intelligence/security services. Let me send support to like-minded factions in other empires. Make openness of society have some benefits and weaknesses that make it play different from closed ones (have different accesses and needs of access to information).

We have no intention of adding espionage just to add espionage. If that's what we were going to do we'd have done so already.
 
In what situation would you want to downgrade one level lower but not all the way down to outpost? It still takes up a single starbase capacity slot.

Considering the maintenance difference is only 1 EC per level, yeah, I don't see the purpose of this at all.