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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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For what it's worth, one of the things that would go a long way in reducing micro is the ability to pay for a building to be upgraded fully. Maybe you could ctrl when clicking on the upgrade button and then it will allocate resources for all possible upgrades.
 
An option to upgrade all the buildings on a planet and to upgrade all specific types of buildings on a planet would be very welcome. I hate it when i'm upgrading mines/power planets to level 4-5 that i need to click each one individually.
 
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.

Implying we will not get a Galactic Federation => Galactic Republic => Galactic Empire? :(
 
What about war exhaustion and forced status quo? Will it ever return? Will there be serious penalities semiforcing ai/players into peace?

After 2.0 i dont ever want to have every war total war again.

I think that's what the beta's are for. Wiz from another thread about WE and forced SQ

We're going to review feedback and have another look at it soon. Trying to give it some time between changes so the feedback we're getting isn't just knee-jerk reactions.
 
Agree completely; would be cool to have some more flavors to leaders; as well as a historical record of your rulers and their accomplishments / failures, etc.

I agree with this. One of my favourite things on CK2 is exploring the family tree.

Some obvious small improvements would be notifications (perhaps with empire effects) when you first elect a ruler from a species other than your starting one, first elect a synth, etc, etc. I normally only play as democracies but I'm sure there's equivalents for all the other govs.
 
Thats the problem. Wiz wants to give some time for feedback so the reactions are not knee-jerk. But the reaction from wiz/devs from 2.0.to 2.02 already *was* knee-jerked. 180 degree flip.

It's not as if they closed down the old build. 2.0.2 is a beta, running concurrently with 2.0. It makes perfect sense to open it as soon as possible; it doesn't mean they're committing to all the changes. They'll get extended feedback on both systems.
 
I would love to see a space UN. Civilization 5 felt so much more alive because of the constant politicking within the UN and my biggest disappointment with Civ 6 is that it doesn't have a UN.



Glad to see Gestalts are getting some love. Hopefuly these coming changes will bring them up to the level of non-gestalt empires.



While I find it incredibly annoying that you can only build/upgrade one megastructure at a time, it at least has a plausible explanation as to why it is this way. Even if an empire has the RESOURCES to build multiple megastructures that doesn't mean it has the MANPOWER to build them more than one at a time. Think about the astronomical size of a Dyson Sphere or Ringworld. It's no joke.





While I agree that AEs should affect a supposed space UN, I don't think they should be the trigger for its formation. That would mean that the space UN could not form before the the 2400 mark, which means it would not be present for most of the game. A space UN forming during the mid-game would make more sense.



There are few things more satisfying to me in 2.0 than Jump Drive style ambushes. Wiped out about 7 fleets from a large federation all at once last night because of this. They were playing this annoying game of cat-and-mouse but then I was all like "Surprise!" Good times.





I would love to seem some more meaningful interaction between empires in this game and between gestalts and non-gestalts in particular. A real life hive-mind would be so alien and wholly "other" to us as humans that we wouldn't be able to fully understand each other. This has the potential for some great role play.



Yeah, I've seen scaling difficultly done really poorly before. Like in Oblivion where, once you reached a certain level, every ****ing bandit had full daedric armor and was an even match for even a dremora lord.



I didn't know you could do that! You are my new favorite person!
I understand for larger megastructures building one at a time, but I feel gates, like habitats aren't in the same league. Maybe theirs a balance reason why you can't build multiple at once that I'm missing.
 
Maybe you could ctrl when clicking on the upgrade button and then it will allocate resources for all possible upgrades.
Try shift-clicking the upgrade button.
 
Just to point out that there is almost no game with AI that has any type of challenge if its not given buffs against the player.
Okay I agree and play most games on max difficulty, got annoyed with how easy that was, and then started modding AI in some games such as Distant Worlds to try to improve it with the limited modding capability available. What you are saying is a totally different point to the one I made.
 
The list isn't referring to 2.0, but to Stellaris in general.

I meant that I feel tall is pretty broken in 2.0. Claiming systems is important (as so many have research etc) and unity costs quickly spiral to crazy levels etc.

In 1.9 if you stay small you can out tech people, in 2.0 it's much much harder to do so.

I put about 40 hours into 2.0/2.0.1 since the update, and ~700 in total. I've kind of given up on Stellaris now, I'm waiting for Surviving Mars and might come back to Stellaris when it changes format again.