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Stellaris Dev Diary #163 - Juggernaut & Mega Shipyard

Hello everyone!

Today we’ll be talking about some big stuff – namely the Juggernaut and the Mega Shipyard.

Both of these new behemoths are a part of the upcoming Federations expansion.

Juggernaut
Stellaris has been in development for many years and, and if there’s something we know for sure its that big ships are cool, and bigger ships are even cooler. With this flawless logic in mind, we obviously wanted to add something even bigger than a Titan.

Mobile starbases is something that we know has been widely requested, so why not hit two avians with one lithoid?

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Visually, the Juggernaut has the shape of a giant pair of wings.
The juggernaut is as much a mobile starbase as it is a massive warship. Although the Juggernaut works like a mobile starbase in some regards, it will not project borders or control ownership or systems. A Juggernaut instead functions like a forward base of operations during offensive campaigns, a place where you can repair your ships. The Juggernaut will not have starbase modules or buildings – instead it will count as always having 2 Shipyards (which means it can build, repair and upgrade ships).

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The Juggernaut can be designed in the ship designer, and features 2 XL turrets, 6 hangar slots and 5 medium turrets.

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In addition, the Juggernaut gets access to a couple of new and unique aura components.

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The Juggernaut will be unlocked by a technology which requires Citadels and Battleships to be already researched. A Starbase will also need to have a Colossal Assembly Yard in order to be able to construct one. The Colossal Assembly Yard is required for (and unlocked by) both the Colossus and the Juggernaut.


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The Juggernaut will have an empire limit of 1.

Mega Shipyard
New Megastructures are always nice, because we all want more ways to show off the glory and magnificence of our empires. The Mega Shipyard is exactly what it is, a giant shipyard that allows you to build a lot of ships really fast.

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The Mega Shipyard will also provide ships with +100 starting XP, so that it will not matter where you build them. Generally speaking, we are trying to avoid design that creates incentives for players to engage in more micromanagement that may not be fun. We believe the choice of where to build a ship (because it would cost less, or gain more XP somewhere) is an example of micromanagement that is not very fun. The only incentive is to avoid loss aversion, which is not a good. Incentives should generally be positive.

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The Mega Shipyard is unlocked by a technology which requires Mega-Engineering (like the others). It’s found in the Society tree and belongs to the Military Theory category.

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The Mega Shipyard will have 3 stages (in addition to construction site):
Mega Shipyard Framework
- 10 Shipyards, +33% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP
Mega Shipyard Core - 20 Shipyards, +66% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP
Mega Shipyard - 30 Shipyards, +100% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP

The bonuses to Ship Build Speed will be empire-wide.

Keep in mind that these numbers are work-in-progress and may change.

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That is all for this week! Next week will be the last dev diary of the year, before the holidays, and we will be doing a round up of the year.

Also keep an eye on our social media channels, as we will be sharing some more screenshots of the Juggernaut and Mega Shipyard.
 
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Hey Paradox Dev

I probably shouldn't do this for it would be a splendid meme against my friends.

but if Juggernaut use the "regular" shipyard mechanics, it's theoricly possible to queue up many battleship, wait till it's few days before they go out, and then build another battleship in priority.

Juggernaut Drop would be a thing XD
 
New Megastructures are always nice, because we all want more ways to show off the glory and magnificence of our empires.

Any chance of Megastructure build & upgrade progress being shown in the Outliner in this update? (like we get for Terraforming for example) Please? :D

It would also be super useful if there were a list somewhere of discovered Megastructures in the galaxy, filterable by empire/un-owned. As it is I've been renaming solar systems just to keep track of where things are built ... aside from the map icon there's no way to keep track of them in game.
 
Very nice! I have 3 questions:

1) Can the Juggernaut be destroyed in battle?
2) Can the Juggernaut be destroyed in a hyperspace retreat?
3) Will a destroyed Juggernaut leave a persistent corpse like the Automated Dreadnaught? (Could be v cool if so)
 
What role would that be? Just capture a starbase and use it to build more BB's.

It'd render the juggernat inferior to starbases.

Or go full Belts and Roads and have a gateway network spanning the galaxy (not that hard to do with L-gates) and have all your reinforcements built centrally in your mega-shipyard (though even there I have questions about viability because in the lategame wars against the crises I find myself limited by alloy output, not number of shipyards)
 
the thing is if you're deep enough in enermy territory that a shipyard in enemy lines is handy, you likely already control a host of enemy shipyards.

Especially since the AI loves sticking at least 1 ship yard on every upgraded starbase

While you can use captured starbases to repair ships and shipyards to upgrade them, unless it's a Total war CB that flipped it as yours you can't *build* new ships from there; they have to come from your starbases.
 
What's "hyper jump"? I wondered if you were just renaming the hyperdrive modifiers. But only jump drives have a cooldown for jumping, so it looks like "hyper jump" a new thing.
How are psi jump drives affected?
Nicely spotted!
 
No one will ever pick anything else than 40% range, battleships alphastrike fleets are already too strong, please change that aura.
Jump cooldown or bombardment speed is better - range only matters for 1 shot, and then only if you don't jump on top of the enemy, and only when the juggernaut is on the front line.
 
the thing is if you're deep enough in enermy territory that a shipyard in enemy lines is handy, you likely already control a host of enemy shipyards.

Especially since the AI loves sticking at least 1 ship yard on every upgraded starbase

Its still a roll if the dice if the AI build a shipyard base where you want to be instead of 4 systems back.
 
What's "hyper jump"? I wondered if you were just renaming the hyperdrive modifiers. But only jump drives have a cooldown for jumping, so it looks like "hyper jump" a new thing.
How are psi jump drives affected?
Jump drive and hyper jump (according to the image) are different things... with separate cool down modifiers.

So... Hyperjump.,. What is it?
 
The Mega Shipyard will have 3 stages (in addition to construction site):
Mega Shipyard Framework
- 10 Shipyards, +33% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP
Mega Shipyard Core - 20 Shipyards, +66% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP
Mega Shipyard - 30 Shipyards, +100% Ship Build Speed, +100 Starting Ship XP

The bonuses to Ship Build Speed will be empire-wide.
Holy mother of god this thing's going to shit out ships. The corvette spam will be OVER 9000!!!