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Stellaris Dev Diary #128 - Decisions and Planetary Bombardment

Hello everyone! We’re back yet again for another Stellaris development diary. Today we're going to continue talking about the 2.2 'Le Guin' update, and as promised last week, the topic will be Decisions and Planetary Bombardment.

And before we get right into it I of course have to reiterate that we're not yet ready to reveal anything about when 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ is coming out, and that screenshots may contain placeholder art, interfaces and non-final numbers.

Decisions
Planetary edicts are gone - long live Decisions! Decisions is a new feature that will replace the old Planetary Edicts. We’ve always wanted to do more with planetary edicts, and Decisions now allow us to do a lot more cool stuff. Some Decisions can be enacted on any planet (colonizable or not) in your empire’s borders. Decisions can cost any resource, and can also require a certain amount of time to pass before the effect will take place. For example, the Mastery of Nature Ascension Perk now allows you access to Land Clearance – the Decision (see image below). Some Decisions will have toggle options – like for example Martial Law. Enacting the Martial Law Decision allows you to later on Revoke Martial Law should you wish to do so.

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The system will be fully moddable and we’re looking forwards to seeing what cool stuff the community can come up with.

Planetary Bombardment & Devastation
To better fit with the new systems, bombardment has been slightly reworked.

When a planet gets bombarded it will suffer Devastation. Devastation ticks up from 0 up to 100, and is a direct penalty to your planet’s housing, amenities, trade value and pop growth. Clearing Devastation will take time and cost resources, as one would expect.

Fleets, as you know, have different Bombardment Stances – each with its own effect on how fast Devastation ticks up and how large chance there is for a Pop to be killed during bombardment. The higher the Devastation is on a planet, the higher the chance is for a Pop to be killed. When a building slot becomes invalid due to no longer having the amount of Pops required for it to operate, the building occupying it will become Ruined. A Ruined building may be repaired once the requirements of the building slot are once again met.

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For those concerned that Devastation is too punishing, rest assured that we will be looking into that. Recovering from Devastation should never feel like an impossible task.

Next week our we will continue covering the features of the 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ update with the topic of Tradition rework. Because this week’s dev diary is a bit shorter, I’ll leave a teaser for next week. Enjoy!

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+1 on every one of the 30 planets you own is a whole nother planet that doesn't give you any more planet-based penalties.

Aren't they switching planet based penalties over to district based penalties? I think the main advantage is getting the districts on already specialised planets.
 
Another great Dev Diary! I wish our ships were able to move faster between systems, so a journey from one end of the largest Galaxy to another won't take years...
 
Not to mention it would cost 3000 influence to add +30 districts to your empire. Even with max influence income including the Unity Ambition it would take 300 months to accomplish if you expended your influence on nothing else. And if your planets were all size 16 on average to begin with, thats a smidge over a 6% increase in empire-wide production. Well, it would be, if 100% of your income came from planets, though it clearly doesn't. So we'll just call it a less than 5% increase.

The cost: 300 months of all your influence income, an extremely limited Ascension perk slot (ie, the perk you could have chosen instead), and the inability during that time to maintain Production Targets/Capacity Chargers/any other edicts you might want. Or make claims. Or build new outposts. If you still want to do any of that stuff, you're looking at way more than 300 months but I don't want to do the math.

It's an interesting idea, but an Influence cost reduction has been in order for that perk for a long time. Even then I'm not certain it would be competitive for a perk slot in most builds.
 
Aren't they switching planet based penalties over to district based penalties? I think the main advantage is getting the districts on already specialised planets.
Yep.
 
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I hope they change the text on this. It just seams backwords and a regress from what we have today in our laws.
...What are you talking about?
 
goodbye infrastructure, I thought you'd be a cool mechanic.

On stream they just talked about how it didn't really work in play testing. Playtesters ended up building excess city districts on every planet to unlock building slots, leading to a unsatisfying situation where most worlds were full of empty cities.
 
On stream they just talked about how it didn't really work in play testing. Playtesters ended up building excess city districts on every planet to unlock building slots, leading to a unsatisfying situation where most worlds were full of empty cities.

It does make sense that total development of a planet, which then unlocked special buildings, should be primarily driven by the amount of people that actually live there.

Each X amount of Pops can support another specialist building. Seems good!
 
I know this isn't directly related to the dev diary. But has it been discussed yet whether the Empire strength mechanics for diplomacy will be adjusted to actually take into account Economic strength with this update? Rather than mostly only caring about Fleet capacity like it does currently?
 
Infrastructure could also be something to simply buff the planet. Better transportation, good amounts of hospitals, good power lines and high quality water filtration should improve living conditions and industrial capacities of a planet.
 
planet size is exactly limit on total number of districts you can build. while each district type (except city) have its own cap based on available deposits, total number of districts is limited by planet size.

Also, +1 size (and even +2) seems rather weak and not worth an ascension perk.
But is there still a limit on how many times it can be run per planet? It sort of sounds more like you can expand a planet as much as you like, provided you have the influence.
 
When a planet gets bombarded it will suffer Devastation. Devastation ticks up from 0 up to 100, and is a direct penalty to your planet’s housing, amenities, trade value and pop growth.
Just kidding, since we already have Devastation in Stellatis, will you also add Prosperity like in Europa Universalis IV?:p
 
Since I started my first game with "Determined Exterminators" and really loved to see those filthy fleshlings die by bombing to ashes (Tomb World), will this still be possible in the future?
I'm not sure why people keep asking this. Nothing in the diary suggests that Armageddon Bombardment will or would have to stop being a thing.

The way it works now, bombardment types have a cap to how many POPs they can kill, with Armageddon's cap being "All of them, and when you do it turns the planet into a tomb world". I see no reason not to assume the new system doesn't just do something similar.