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Stellaris Dev Diary #161 - Development Update

Hello everyone!

For this week’s dev diary we chose to switch the order of a couple of dev diaries to be able to give you some updates earlier rather than later.

The Stellaris brand has understandably been under more scrutiny than usual for the last few months, and we want to address situations related to work-in-progress art in Federations. As an example, we had some UI design mockups (shown during PDXCon) that contained placeholder art. We want to make clear this is not how the game will appear in its final version.

Moving on to Federations: During PDXCON 2019 we said that we would give more information on the expansion later during the year – and today we want to share some news that Federations is targeted for release in early 2020. Although we understand that some of you might be disappointed that Federations will not be released in December, we want you to know that we are taking more time to make sure that the next update is going to be amazing.

In addition, to give us the best chance of improving some of the pain points you’ve shared with us, we have assigned some of our team members to focus solely on trying to improve performance and AI. It is very important to us that 2.6 does not compound any of the current issues with the game, and that we can take the time we need to address some of the issues remaining from 2.2. It’s important to remember, however, that working on these kinds of issues is not a sprint, but a marathon – it's something that is constantly being worked on over longer periods of time.

If you want to read more about performance, and how we work to maintain it over time, we shared some more information on this topic in Dev Diary #149.

While we have been unable to give concrete information or specifics related to these issues, we can say that it is very important to us. With that said, it's important for us that you know that your feedback is not being ignored, even if we have no news to share.

We want to thank you for being such a dedicated community and helping us by providing feedback and reporting issues with the game. We appreciate this to no end and encourage you to continue voicing your thoughts to us.

From the beginning of next year, we’ll be doing a series of dev diaries dedicated entirely to answering questions related to specific topics each week. The schedule for those dev diaries will be released later in December when we’ll summarize and round up the year.

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That is it for this week! Dev diaries will resume their regular schedule, and as promised last week, next week we will be talking about some of the new things affecting diplomacy, such as Envoys.

P.S:
Since this dev diary had no pictures I felt it was necessary to add something, so here's a picture of the premade Lithoid-empire that some of you have been asking us to add to the Lithoids Species Pack! (Will also be updated with 2.6)

upload_2019-11-21_15-28-57.png
 
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The release of 2.2.0, on 6/dec 2018, was when the so-called "toxicity" began.
Jan 15 2018 - was when the "toxicity" reached so high levels that Paradox needed to make special rules for it on the forums (see special toxicity thread). So 2.2 can't exactly be called the start of that...
 
That's great to hear. Are their going to be any quality of life additions to the game, like an army manager?

They did claim to have hired someone with actual knowledge of good UI design, quite some months ago. We've heard very little about this person and his efforts since then, but as some kind of Army Manager would objectively smoothen the UI experience, presumably that's one of the things he's looking into. If he's still on their payroll.
 
I appreciate that there's work being done on long standing issues, but this is a dev diary after the filler that was last week's? This feels more like a snippet or header you put out along with something else. Or something that should have been combined with last week's dev diary filler.

This is not helping my paranoia that there is going to be almost no free diplomacy or politics update for the game outside of the origin system. Not even a whisper on changing how an empire administrates itself and deals with its colonies and sectors which could tie into diplomacy. The only other hint we have is that the Bureaucrat idea is being moved on with full steam ahead.
 
That's a big thank you from me. For communicating, acknowledgment of the performance and ai problems finally and for not releasing the expansion just before the holidays. Thanks guys. I still have hope that stellaris will continue to be the opitome of grand strategy sci fi
 
Well. That's good to read.
Hope I can finally find the reason to lauch a Stellaris game again. Please god, let it be so.
 
I'm not sure why people assume I don't think there's a problem with performance though?
Because you chalk up real and valid complaints as the mewling of a 'herd of screeching cats'. Which also crosses with calling those people a 'herd of screeching cats'.
 
Just hearing about you guys having your priorities straight, have some guys on "old issues" duty and are arware that "our updates keep braking our game" is a thing, is definetely worth a dev diary to me. Also great to hear that you guys have some extra time to fix stuff.

Looking forward to federations now :)
 
Thanks, I've been postponing a few days off work to play Stellaris. I guess I'll wait till next year that way I'll be able to finish up on current work related projects
 
Hopefully there's time to address the shortcomings of Philosopher King (Which the new Premade species will have) with 2.6, as it stands it doesn't have much value when Increased Leader Level cap also affects Ruler Level cap, making direct increases to Ruler Cap somewhat redundant.

My proposed change to the civic was making it boost the effect from ruler level, meaning you are encouraged to try and get the highest level ruler possible. I think Philosopher King should be good enough to be opposing meritocracy, as they are relatively generic civics with opposing requirements. (Links to that and more in my signature)
 
Because you chalk up real and valid complaints as the mewling of a 'herd of screeching cats'. Which also crosses with calling those people a 'herd of screeching cats'.
A cat can make beautiful noises - on it's own. But, when you stand in an echo chamber, hearing a hundred cats, that noise is no longer sweet. In a similar manner, when ever other thread is about performance, some of us got really tired of it...
 
Waiting one more week in order to know more about the full-blown diplomacy rework is a small price to pay in order to have this type of reassurance from the dev team, so kudos to all of you :)

In addition to that, I am glad to see that you won't be doing any crunch time in order to rush the expansion. Slow and steady (and bug-less) wins the day in the end. We will survive. I think : P

Now my only question left is: Will we see a performance / AI patch before Federations, or will everything come at once? (DLC, performance upgrade, non-DLC changes, the whole shebang).
 
I agree the fact that you don't know a priori which techs you need to get to open X techs on the future or how to increase their probability WITHOUT going into the wiki is a problem. I hope it's a QoL update they can put in the future.
 
do not forget about ethics attraction-related bugs (making switching ethics during the game virtually impossible).
 
@grekulf and @Moah thanks for the update and your efforts. Late game speed and AI are the current bugbears, but the other problem is perception. When there is a devoted mega thread to performance and no dev interaction (yes you have more important things to do, like fixing performance and recently lithoids and federations and then there’s the new update) we get the impression that we need to buy bigger megaphones - sometimes just a message to say “Yes we’re aware of the problems, things should get better with the next update” is all we need. Recently it’s been compounded by the appearance of the new launcher, which is the responsibility of another team. This has produced a version number jump with little performance increase (if any, you’ve got the benchmarks, not me) and for some increased the number of issues we’re experiencing.

You have talented devs dedicated to the project including yourselves. Please carry on with your fantastic work. We appreciate it. The reason we’re sometimes a pain in the neck is that we are passionate about your work, something that we sometimes forget to express when frustrated by the same issues that you are trying to fix for us.
 
Waiting one more week in order to know more about the full-blown diplomacy rework is a small price to pay in order to have this type of reassurance from the dev team, so kudos to all of you :)

In addition to that, I am glad to see that you won't be doing any crunch time in order to rush the expansion. Slow and steady (and bug-less) wins the day in the end. We will survive. I think : P

Now my only question left is: Will we see a performance / AI patch before Federations, or will everything come at once? (DLC, performance upgrade, non-DLC changes, the whole shebang).
I hope a first hotfix come before in order to fix most of the critical issues.But i'm pretty sure it will not happen before the dlc anyway.
 
Demanding answers to questions that have all ready been answered, and answered recently, is a pointless nuisance.
You'd have a point if that's what was actually happening.
 
This is an excellent step in the right direction and exactly the communication that the community needed. Thank you, Paradox. That being said, I hope in the future you will decide to address large scale community concerns before they reach the point they are currently at. Should you succeed in improving late-game performance and reducing the worst of the AI oversights, I would be thrilled to invest more time and money into your otherwise excellent game. It is well worth a later release date if it means you will be able to do more right by the community.