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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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I think you're according too much importance to the "winning" term and taking it too literally. It's not so much about "winning" than giving players who care some sense of completion by creating a gaming context where each run can have a beginning, a development and an end, at which point they can assess their success compared to other players or arbitrary references (ala CK) - even if you end up being completely destroyed.

A score can also provide a baseline for comparison when assessing how well you did from one game to the next. It's usefulness is depends on the player; if you don't care, ignore it. If you do, it's nice to have.
 
i'm ashamed to not read all the comments and so writing something that may already been write .. but ..

may i suggest the posibility to set the difficulty only for a specific number of empire? .. like i want a "nemesis" and so put 1 IA with admiral advantage , or even be able to put this "pre-set" diffuclty while creating the race? ...

you know, when i put a race that is supposed to become the nemesis of my federation but they get destroyed before mid-game :p
 
i'm ashamed to not read all the comments and so writing something that may already been write .. but ..

may i suggest the posibility to set the difficulty only for a specific number of empire? .. like i want a "nemesis" and so put 1 IA with admiral advantage , or even be able to put this "pre-set" diffuclty while creating the race? ...

you know, when i put a race that is supposed to become the nemesis of my federation but they get destroyed before mid-game :p
I agree, a reworked possibility to set advanced starts and difficulty would be very welcome -- also alongside the new scaling option.

.. i geuss, just add a slider for the level / meaning of "advanced starts" and dieally a sepparate slider for difficulty scaling-over-time (instead of having this be a sepparate difficulty option)
 
they could simply add a section to customize behaviour of a race as AI

i saw that in galciv. you could customize ai behaviour a bit, making the ai play the race in a specific manner
it could also have a "custom difficulty" setting, e.g. setting an empire to always play dumb, and another to always be insane, no matter the settings.

that section would only apply to the race if its played by ai, and have no effect on it in player hands.

it probably also needs an information in the lobby like "custom race ai enabled / disabled" maybe
i for one would love to give some of my custom built races some personality, as some of them only exist for hosting (most namely the Vorgax Threat and Cutey Confederated Pais, which people playing often with me even treat sometimes like their own personality)
 
How you declare you "won" in a galaxy? Like, you get a lot of Book Mana and declare you won and everyone concedes?

It's even more silly in a galaxy where we have Hordes, Purifiers, Exterminators and Galactic Crises.

There is really only 2 ways to say you have "won the game": You conquered everyone or you are in a Federation with everyone that is left.

What we can do is making that empires that focus on internal development can make superweapons like colossus faster so they can Enforce their win faster in a different way.

There is only room for one species in the Galaxy!
 
Wiz, can you tell us a bit more about how you plan on reducing micromanagement? The original idea was through sectors, but that failed. They need a fair amount of micromanagement initially, and players can manually build in sectors now, and the maximum number of core systems is much higher as well.

Imo the problem with Stellaris is that the AI cannot handle global food/energy, pops on tiles with buildings, with adjacency bonuses and potentially fluctuating food and energy income.

Sorry Sectors are working fine imao! You just need to know how it works. I just wish there was a better colour distinction between sectors and the core non sector.
 
These points sound the most interesting:
- Will getting access to one or more strategic resources become more "strategic"? For example each living metal allowing you to build/restore one megastructure at the same time? Or will certain strategic resources allow you to build ships with special components? For example "dark matter" allowing to build ships with "dark matter" components?

- Will there be something like trade income similar to EU4?

- Will there be maps with disconnected regions only connected by gateways/wormholes? One could think of a "globular cluster"-map (for the astronomers) with each cluster connected to at least one cluster via a shortcut. Or will there be unstable hyperlanes aka galactic weather?

What about other galaxies - foray into the unbidden galaxy and take over.