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Hello everyone!

We’re back for this week’s installment of the Stellaris Dev Diary. This week we will covering a mix of paid and free features. More exactly, we’ll be talking about the Slave Market, Unity Ambitions and new Mandates. I bet I know which one you’ll want to read about first, so let’s start with that one.

Before we start I need to reiterate that this dev diary contains things that are WIP, with non-final numbers, interfaces or mechanics that might change.

The Slave Market (PAID)
To better facilitate slaver playstyles, we’ve added the Slave Market feature to MegaCorp. This will allow more easy transfer of slaves between empires. In MegaCorp, nothing can stand in the way of the pursuit of profit.

Access to the Slave Market is granted once the Galactic Market is founded. Only empires that also have access to the Galactic Market will be able to use the Slave Market. Only Pops that are currently Slaves are able to be sold on the Slave Market, but anyone can buy them (either to set them free or to put them to work). We're also considering making (non-Gestalt) robots that do not have citizen rights buyable and sellable on the market.

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To sell a slave you select one or more Pop(s) on a planet (it must be enslaved). Right now the interface shows planets as the drop-down, but we will be changing it so that you first select a species, and then the list shows the different planets. We’re tweaking the interface right now, so some things might look a bit different as the next couple of weeks pass.

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When you have decided which slaves to sell, they will be put on the market. The price of slaves is 500 ± the cost affected by traits. The traits that make them good slaves drives the price up, while things that make them bad slaves drives the price down. Many traits will not affect the cost of a slave.

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To buy a slave, you select a destination planet and then simply click the buy button. This will complete the transaction and move the pop to your selected planet.

We are considering adding a simple bidding process as an additional step, but at this time we cannot promise that we will have time to add it before the release of MegaCorp.

Unity Ambitions (FREE)
Because of the changes to the economy system, with Unity coming from multiple sources and being a more integrated resource, we wanted to make sure that Unity is always useful. Previously a paid feature in Apocalypse, Unity Ambitions have now been made a free feature in 2.2 'Le Guin'.

Mandates (FREE)
Since we've added a bunch of new mechanics with 2.2 'Le Guin', we now have a lot more things that we can hook into. As a result of that, we have reworked and added a bunch of new mandates for democratic empires. They usually go along the lines of building more districts, building more stations to gather resource, to increasing monthly income etc.

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That is what we have for this week. Next week we’ll return with a Dev Diary about what the community can expect in terms of new Modding capabilities for 2.2 (hint: It's a *lot* of new capabilities).

Don’t forget to tune into Twitch for the Dev Clash at 15:00 CET, so you can see us whack at each other with our new pointy sticks! You can also watch a summarized version on YouTube.
 
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For sure, my point being that an observation station isn't equipped to covertly perform what amounts to genocide.

Well then... just add an option > Convert to Source Station.. replaces research bonus with an event every X months generating one pop, a pop up asking where to send the new slave, if one planet or straight into the market... or maybe having a single (1) slot for pops that only grows from the primitives below that once grown into a full pop can be moved to a planet or sold at the market - and needing to be sold before a new one starts growing.

Hows that for an idea, eh?
 
Hello Paradox team,

I hope you will take your time reading my post and my ideas for this greatest strategy game.

At first I wonder why you havent implemented the Espionage yet?
That would be natural thing when you consider the new system of galactic trade and other stuff in Le Guin update.
I would like to see more information about composition of enemy empire fleets (like number of cruisers or approximate fleet power) , rather than to know only if its pathetic or overwhelming compared to yours. Or about technology and when the empire make some scientific milestone to get some message from my spies. Or that the empire started to work on Titan ...

Another thing that IMO many players would welcome is adding more victory conditions.
In the current version , everything is basicly only about controlling majority of habitable planets or complete conquest.

Victory conditions should be for example dependable on the ethics of the empire :
Militarist - certain amount of fleet power + army power
Xenophobe - extermination / enslaving of other races
Egalitarian - utopian society with highest living standards and happiness of its population
Materialist - certain monthly income of research + resources
Pacifist - unification of certain amount of galactic population under one organization (like the UN on Earth)
Authoritarian - having certain subjects or vassals
Spiritualist - religious domination and unification of galactic population to follow your spiritual beliefs
Xenophile - having every sapient species or majority living in your empire with certain amount of happiness.

Any of the ideas would be also interesting even if not connected directly to ethics.
Or maybe combinations of Pacifist + Spirtualist goals are very similar so I think there are many opportunities to make the game more challenging in terms of victory conditions.

I really hope & pray that you will think about and discuss some of these ideas wtihin your dev team.
 
Will it be possible to buy slaves for certain purposes?

E.g. I want to buy some weak slaves (as they're considered "cheap" by the market) which can fill the role of my Domestic servant class - where they wont be doing any digging.
Or some cheap nonadaptive slaves (adaptation doesnt seem to affect armies) to be put to work as battle thralls? or are slaves bought as general chattel slaves and assigned by the player/AI afterwards?

iirc they said in the planetary rework diaries that pops will automatically take jobs that they're the most suited to, including displacing other pops working those jobs if they're less suitable. So I'm assuming that buying a slave puts them into the "pop pool" for whichever planet you send them to, and from there the AI puts them into the job it thinks they're most suited to.
 
When new players are asking whether Apocalypse is worth buying saying it looks like it adds hardly anything I usually reminded them about the Unity Ambitions. Now that those are free I would say Apocalypse is now officially Stellaris least useful DLC, and pretty easily skippable. Unless they ever go back to give Titans more customization, and make combat computers actually work so they don't charge forward an die.
 
The Slave market looks great. You know when you are so happy for such a little feature, and one like that is when you realize how much this game has change you. Slave markets, space Gulag and Caravancoinz gambles, Paradox you really like to corrupt people and i like that :)

We're also considering making (non-Gestalt) robots that do not have citizen rights buyable and sellable on the market.

If i can ask for something, once the poor robots are enslaved by filthy organics, my superior and perfect machine empire can initiate a war to liberate them and friendly integrate them on my empire drone network? Or for some other players, will they be able to liberate organics slaves through a war?

We are considering adding a simple bidding process as an additional step, but at this time we cannot promise that we will have time to add it before the release of MegaCorp.

So there is a release date. Great news, i really hope that when the content is ready Paradox be able to release it without bugs or errors like you have already done so many times :p
 
How likely will it be that AI will buy/sell slaves?
Will the AI instantly buy slaves?
Will the AI instantly sell their entire planets worth of slaves?
These are good questions. I hope they will make AI more competent at economy (which is partly solved by the new economy system already) and also at war. Would be nice if they mentioned it in one of the next diaries.
 
I've said it before, and while I understand the negativity on the subject, I also think DLC should be rolled up into the game as time passes anyways. I accept the early access model, and treating DLC as a way to expand the game and get in early on exciting features. But at some point, unlike the base game, we'll rarely, if ever, see any updates.

They end up these vestigial branches, and I'd love to see them become meaningful parts of the game. I realize that might sell less DLC, but I'm happy to see these features make it into everyone's hands.
 
I've always felt that unity ambitions belonged in the base game, but making them free (which, as an Apocalypse owner, I applaud) does make Apocalypse even lighter on content than it already is.
 
Mixed feeling, I feel like there's a risk of it becoming too micro intensive since once your planet get full you'll always want to sell some slave just to not waste the growth point of the planet. On the other hand, 600 energy is really not that much, I feel like early game it's too little to justify losing a pop and late game it's too little to bother with it. Maybe if you need energy ASAP, but selling isn't instantaneous anyway. The only reason I'd see myself using this feature would be to tweak the exact planet makeup, in effect a way to reduce population on a planet to make room for a better pop (ie all my farming job are being done by my farming pop so I want to get rid of any additional farming pop, with the money just being a nice side bonus), but I think this should be possible without having to sell them by just killing the pop.

Also this might end up making it too easy to colonize planet that you don't have access to, right now you need to either invade or uprise a pop of a different planet preference, but with this you can just buy it as soon as the market open up, in effect opening every planet for colonization much earlier.
 
Any chance of the market being somewhat autonomous as with the internal market, i.e., the ability to buy/sell slaves to/from the "private sector" at worse rates?

I realize this idea could probably very easily be overpowered for slaver empires, but as it stands I kind of feel like this mechanic will become defunct if you play a slaver empire in a galaxy with too few fellow slavers.

Basically, how much does non-slaving AI buy pops to free them? And does it keep the mechanic relevant?

You (and AI empires) can always buy slaves to work on your planets as non-slaves. (free them but not for the sake of freeing them) This means that the market is not a slaver empire only market.
 
Slaves have to be sold by a specific empire in the current implementation. We're looking into adding the ability for slaves to be sold by the market itself (for example, refugees ending up on the slave market on occasion might be one way that happens).
I beg for forgiveness if it has been already suggested but raider fleets kidnapping our pops would be great. Seeing our own population being slaves on some far away planet is a reason for war like no other. Cheers
 
Couple of questions for the developers:

1. How does an Empire's Purging policy impact its ability to sell slaves on the Slave Market? Can an empire with purging set to "None" or "Displacement Only" sell pops on the Slave Market? Or is this event a factor?

2. Have you considered allowing Machine Intelligence empires purchasing slaves from the Slave Market? A Roque Servitor empire might wish to do so to "save" these poor souls. Determined Exterminators may see the Slave Market as a way to boost their economy while Driven Assimilators could see purchasing these pops as a way to quickly expand their workforce. Maybe have a significant cost increase for these empires using the slave market for game balancing purposes.

3. Hopefully, Mandates will be updated so they are only assigned for achievable goals. Don't know how many times I have seen a new leader elected in my empire with a mandate to build orbital research stations even though there is not a single opportunity to build such a station either in or outside my empire.
 
2 pops, 450 each, estimated cost 1350... now we know how AI calculates relative power on diplomacy screen :D