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Stellaris Dev Diary #16 - Colony Events

Events in Stellaris will not be limited to the Anomalies you find in space. Another event category that you will encounter as you play the game are colony events. Fairly self-explanatory, colony events are events that can trigger on your colonies. Our goal with these events is to provide a bit of identity to the planets you colonize, and set them further apart.

Some events will have situations that you can respond to in a number of ways, and in many cases you will have to deal with the fallout (positive or negative) of your choices in follow-up events that can fire many years later.

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Minutes from the Board of Inquiry into the loss of colony NSD-578 (New Albion)
2279.244, 14:01 hours local station time


GIDDINGS, AMANDA (Advocate General, ISFA)
State your name for the record, please.

BORLAND, S. ERIC (PN-2344-D-1)
Eric Borland.

GIDDINGS
You served as the planetary governor of NSD-578, otherwise known as ‘New Albion’ to its inhabitants, for a period of seven years. Is this correct?

BORLAND
It is.

GIDDINGS
As I’m sure you’re aware, all contact was lost with New Albion four months ago, less than a year after your governorship ended. The relief expedition, led by the cruiser Vikramaditya, found no trace of the colonists.

BORLAND
I am aware of this, yes.

SWEENEY, LEONARD (Senior Representative, RCC)
We were hoping that you would be able to shed some light on what happened, Mr. Borland. The disappearance of an entire colony with over 100,000 inhabitants is a source of… some concern to us, as I’m sure you understand.

BORLAND
As I’ve said at all the other hearings you’ve put me through, these are things that can happen when you colonize a new planet. How many times do you want me to say this? There are always risks involved, especially when a colony is young!

ISHIKAWA, MIYU (Junior Commissioner, GTSA)
Would you care to elaborate?

BORLAND
It’s very simple. We are dealing with planets that are completely alien. Their ecosystems are still being mapped, and in many cases the planets in question have been visited, or even inhabited, by other spacefaring cultures.

ISHIKAWA
I’m not sure I see how this pertains to the situ-

BORLAND
The orbital surveys our Science Ships perform only reveal the tip of the iceberg. Once your colony starts growing, and you have thousands of colonists running around in the wild building settlements, you will sometimes run into things that weren’t in the survey reports. Look at what happened on Las Veredas, for example.

SWEENEY
I’m not quite up to speed on events from that sector. What exactly happened there?

HAGNER, L. TIMOTHY (Senior Investigator, BRSF)
I believe they found an old drone on the surface.

BORLAND
Not just one - there was a whole fleet. The drones evidently thought our colony belonged to whoever had originally built them, as they began to sporadically assist our colonists by gathering minerals and terraforming uninhabitable sections of the surface.

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SWEENEY
But it sounds like that had a positive effect on the development of the Las Veredas colony. What happened on New Albion is quite the opposite.

BORLAND
Of course it is, you pompous fool! We’re dealing with the unknown here! Our colonists will sometimes find that the planet they settled is even more valuable than the initial survey indicated, like when prospectors on Acrisia unearthed an intact battleship.

HAGNER
Really now, Mr. Borland, you need to -

BORLAND
Other times, the outcome can be disastrous, like when the colonists of Xianyang activated that ancient abandoned terraforming equipment, only to discover that the aliens who built it breathed ammonia!

GIDDINGS
Sit down, Mr. Borland! Sit down, or I will have security restrain you -

BORLAND
So what do I think happened on New Albion? I haven’t the slightest idea! Maybe the colonists were enslaved and brought underground by some kind of subterranean civilization. Maybe they were all consumed by a type of predator that hadn’t been encountered before! All I know is that while you’re sitting here safe and sound on your fat asses in low Earth orbit, there are… no, get your hands off me! Let me finish! There are colonists out there who -

GIDDINGS
Remove Mr. Borland from the room! The rest of us will reconvene in ten minutes.

BORLAND
<unintelligible shouting>

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Next week Game Director Henrik "Doomdark" Fåhraeus will tell to you about War, Peace, Influence and Claims!

Because of reasons, the "War, Peace, Influence and Claims!" Dev Diary has been postponed. The next Dev Diary will be about the ship designer instead. - BjornB
 
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Now, time for PDS to make 2,000 of these so players rarely run into the same events ... or for PDS to find a way to procedurally generate a portion of them.
 
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Are you saying that more than one spacefaring faction can have a pressence on the same planet?

I Think that it sounds more like this may have once been a colony for one of the fallen empires.
 
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This means the means of declaring war right?

I can't imagine there's a dejure claims in this, except maybe on planets in the same system as your colonies (but even then I can imagine there being prerequisites to just war decing), planets or systems of religious importance, and systems in between your colonies if you use hyper lanes.

Who need a reason? Not this guy:

nvi3orskhrrxbwcyiujx.jpg


There's clearly a cover up here. Why else would they restrain Mr. Borland just as he's about to say something revealing?

This kind of guys are dangerous. Ignore him disclosing the secrets, and the next morning he will reveal that Sun is coming up.
 
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Love those little guys... I miss warhammer fatnasy battles... damn age of sigmar.
Alternate universes! The Skaven conquer the filthy manthings, they diedie and now Skaven into space! Warpstone spacespaceships!
 
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BORLAND
Other times, the outcome can be disastrous, like when the colonists of Xianyang activated that ancient abandoned terraforming equipment, only to discover that the aliens who built it breathed ammonia!

On that note, how varied are the potential physiologies of the game's species? Can you create a race capable of breathing ammonia, with a diet primarily of iron fillings and pineapple pizza, and Cabernet Sauvignon for blood (or maybe something less ridiculous, if you're into that)?
 
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Now, time for PDS to make 2,000 of these so players rarely run into the same events ... or for PDS to find a way to procedurally generate a portion of them.

I guess they will be moddable, so our modding society can add 779050625 new events to the game.

I am certainly going to add few of them.
 
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Massive underground vault, you say?
meaning-of-vault-boy-thumbs-up.jpg
We were foolish. We opened the vaults sealed for millennia, hoping to reap the knowledge of a dead civilization sealed within. From there, they surged forth, overrunning our colonial militia and our settlements. I am now trapped here, in the basement of a prefab. I hear their screams outside. Their clawing on the door. The door breaks loose. They come. Gary is love. Gary is life...
 
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I guess they will be moddable, so our modding society can add 779050625 new events to the game.

I am certainly going to add few of them.

I rarely download mods for Paradox games. I'd rather these events evolved in unexpected ways or were rare or were in an exhaustive plentitude. Otherwise, I'll just ignore the text after the first read throughs and just click on the most beneficial option. Fluff that's harmless in the first 30 campaigns becomes a frustration thereafter.

Procedural generation, rare event fires, and a deep integration between other campaign goings-on and the event could improve this. Or your choices in the events could lead to a large variety of results (without visible probabilities and visible effects before you make the choice).
 
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Who need a reason? Not this guy:

nvi3orskhrrxbwcyiujx.jpg

:D

I sincerely hope we get a (rare) event where archaeologists on a tomb world discover that the nuclear war was started by one civilization, whose mysterious leader was known only as "Ghandi".
 
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Well, would you look at that, not only do we have 40K running amok in the forum, now the fantasy Warhammer managed to sneak in. :eek:
Ofcourse. Nothing beats a Space-faring civilization of rats.
 
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Are we able to play as Subterranean species? You've kind of riled me up now.
 
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Definitely leaving that vault alone. That must have been sealed for a reason.

I'm reminded of extraterrestrials landing on an extinct planet earth and uncovering our nuclear waste deposits. Believing they'll find treasure.

If there's a power source, and the aliens have sealed it away, then that doesn't usually mean there's candy inside.
 
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I rarely download mods for Paradox games. I'd rather these events evolved in unexpected ways or were rare or were in an exhaustive plentitude. Otherwise, I'll just ignore the text after the first read throughs and just click on the most beneficial option. Fluff that's harmless in the first 30 campaigns becomes a frustration thereafter.

Procedural generation, rare event fires, and a deep integration between other campaign goings-on and the event could improve this. Or your choices in the events could lead to a large variety of results (without visible probabilities and visible effects before you make the choice).
This. I hope they have numerous branching outcomes that are only visible if you have the right race, ethos, scientists, etc, which means even if events repeat across games the outcome may not (as much).
 
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