• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Stellaris Dev Diary #155 - Origins

Hello everyone!

I have just returned from a belated vacation in Japan, and although I had a great time there it is also fun to be back to work. Today I want to talk about some of the cool things happening with Stellaris this year. As many of you have probably guessed, Stellaris will announce a new expansion at PDXCon this year. This expansion will feature a lot of cool new things, most of which will be revealed at PDXCon. But I do also have something really neat that I want to share with you now!

upload_2019-9-26_13-21-43.png

Good ol’ civics. Gotta love ‘em.

Back in Utopia we introduced a lot of cool new features to improve how you could customize and specialize your empire. Civics were a great addition to the game (in fact I consider them to be one of the best), but they are also awkwardly split between “backgrounds” like Syncretic Evolution and “institutions” like Distinguished Admiralty or Imperial Cult. Civics have added a lot of really cool options to how you can play the game, and that is something I want to expand upon – this is where the Origins come in.

upload_2019-9-26_13-21-24.png

Materialistic, mechanist, mushroom madness?
Origins is a new feature that is very similar to Civics, and will now represent your empire’s background. An empire can only select one Origin, and an Origin cannot be changed. We will be adding a bunch of new Origins (some of them are really cool!) and we will also be changing some Civics into being Origins instead. Examples of Civics that will be converted into Origins are Mechanists, Post-Apocalyptic, Life-Seeded and Syncretic Evolution.

upload_2019-9-26_13-22-7.png

Life-Seeded Origin, now open to hive minds.

Certain types of empires were previously unable to access some of these backgrounds since they have their own set of Civics (Gestalts and Megacorps for example). Because some of those Civics have been turned into Origins, those backgrounds will now be available to more types of empires. This means that it should now be possible to have a hive mind with the Life-Seeded origin or a Megacorp with the Mechanists origin. We know this is something people have been asking for for a long time now, and it’s really great to be able to add Origins to the game.

Like I mentioned earlier, we will also be adding a whole lot of new Origins that will add interesting starting positions for your empire. Right now we have 16 in the current version of the game, and we will probably see a few more until it's finished. I think Origins will be a great addition to the game that will surely help to facilitate a lot more player stories and player fantasies.

We won’t be showing all of these yet, but it will probably be immensely hard for us to not tease a few every now and then ;)

upload_2019-9-26_13-24-19.png

Who isn’t curious about Remnants and Scions?

PDXCon is rapidly approaching and Stellaris fans will have a lot of cool things to look forward to! In two weeks we will be back again with another dev diary, where we’ll talk a bit more about PDXCon.
 
  • 1Love
  • 1Like
Reactions:
I started work on a civic mod that would let you start on a relic world (got it mostly done, but probably won't post it now with origins around the corner), and the way I did it was have the agriculture districts added by a tile blocker. Having said tile blocker be covering the Dense Ruins feature would help to balance it out a bit.

Might be better just to have it as a planetary feature rather than a blocker. That way an empire couldn't screw itself over by clearing it before they had access to another source of food. I can see your point about the dense ruins being a bit overpowered to start off with, but it could easily have another blocker placed over it with just a large energy cost like other relic world blockers. Besides, when you consider the max district penalty the feature gives, a 15% research boost is strong, but not any more so than the +10% happiness and +10% resource production you get from a Gaia world start.
 
I would like to see a civic or origin where you're a spiritualist cult, and hate other spiritualists, it would require the fanatic ethic obviously. I'm not sure what bonuses or effects it would have, but you'd want war to force/assimilate others into your way of thinking

I also second the motion of a machine cult origin.
 
Awesome, awesome news. This is the type of Developer Diary that I love. New stuff is always more exciting than refining old stuff, even if both things are equally needed.

That being said, this origins system, with its "where do your empire come from" is begging for adding an empire objective system in order to answer its counterpart question, "where do you want to move your empire towards".

Also, using the spyionage system in order to learn about the origins of other foreign empires, xenology-style, seems like a really cool posibility ;)
 
Would despicable neutrals be an empire that selects zero ethics at game start?

Of course. It should also remove the ethic and government requirement of civics. It would trade the ethic bonus for the option to combine civics that normally can't be combined. Exalted Priesthood + Beacon of Liberty or Imperial Cult + Inward Perfection.
 
I'd be happy just to be able to run academic privilege with spiritualists.
 
I hope distant origin is present, as well as some new events and deeper relation between empires with the same species. Perhaps even including a claim on the original planet. That would make CoM and other similar empires more interesting
 
Will this origins update premiere by itself, or will civics be rebalanced for origins/ rebalanced in general? Some civics are generally underwhelming ( looking at you shadow council;slaver guilds) and I'm curious if there may be future functionality applied to them?

Hope Barbaric Despoliation makes a feature as an origin type. Would love to roleplay as a corrupted machine intelligence gone Pirate. Maybe we could trade meatbags with fellow M.I. for processing purposes?

This opens up interesting opportunities
 
there wont be civics identical to origins obviously
Are we certain?!
Would despicable neutrals be an empire that selects zero ethics at game start?
I would have a hard time picking between that and life seeded. As long as I could add them later.
Would despicable neutrals be an empire that selects zero ethics at game start?

Of course. It should also remove the ethic and government requirement of civics. It would trade the ethic bonus for the option to combine civics that normally can't be combined. Exalted Priesthood + Beacon of Liberty or Imperial Cult + Inward Perfection.
I want life seeded, inward perfection, Exhalted priesthood, and either meritocricy or agrarian idyll without needing to be restricted to xenophobe. Specifically I want xenophile or some other thing like extreme pacifist some other ethic like egalitarian maybe. Not sure. Maybe spiritualist, pacifist, egalitarian.
 
Last edited: