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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.
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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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Here's the two ways i can see this whole juggernaut thing shaking out: either strike craft are fixed, or they aren't, if they are then this thing will be amazing. i love strike craft, they are my favorite weapon, i know they suck, but they are so fun to watch that i really don't care. The shipyard thing is tricky, it really depends on all the details we are missing for this whole thing. it's all up in the air at the moment and the jury is still out on whether this gigantic lump of alloys is worth it's price. i hope that there are more than two shipyards, by the time this thing is available two shipyards is meaningless, even if they are mobile. as for the repair issue, unless the devs change how repairing at captured starbases thing works the mobile repair thing is pointless. i would recommend that to fix the last issue that you change it so captured starbases have a 1-2 year cooldown until they can repair, this would give you a reasonable incentive to bring it with you into enemy territory.

apologies for the rant, but this has all been kicking around in my head since i saw the dev diary
 
Methone said:
Not that you even need that much. Just the naval cap you can get through pure anchorages is more than enough to handle anything up to, and including, the 5x crisis.
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This is super subjective. Not everyone plays that optimized; The way I play, I'm quite sure I'd get the shipyard would still be worth it over acattered starbases dedicated to ship production.
 
BlackUmbrellas said:
This is super subjective. Not everyone plays that optimized; The way I play, I'm quite sure I'd get the shipyard would still be worth it over acattered starbases dedicated to ship production.
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Trust me, you do not need a lot of optimization to do this. I'm not running '1.3 million power by 2300' games, here.
 
NguyenReich said:
Well, I'm also all for more customization of Juggernaut. Player should be able to decide if their Juggy is going to unleash a ton of strike crafts, spamming torpedoes or missiles, having a dozen big cannons, or throwing a barrage of smaller projectiles.

Also, should Juggy have FTL jamming? I think that it should to give more strategic depth.
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Completely with you on the slot customisations (same for titans).

FTL Jamming on the Juggernaut is an interesting concept, but I don’t think it works. FTL jammers prevent the enemy from passing through a system without taking control of the Jammer or disabling through bombardment.

If you have your Juggernaut playing a defensive role (yeah, I know, bear with me) it stops the enemy bypassing a strategic target (the jug). If you have the Juggernaut in an offensive role it would stop enemies moving through the system, but again their target would be in the system.

Best ship to fit an FTL jamming system to would be a militarised science vessel (as in a new military ship type with a similar size), something which could jump in, park on the edge the system and interfere with reinforcement routes or pin enemy ships and prevent escape. Obviously with an escort to make sure it survives more than five minutes.
 
DrNukeLear said:
Completely with you on the slot customisations (same for titans).
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This made me think that actual slot customization would be a simple way of improving the shipbuilding experience. So say that a non-spinal mount large section is actually 24 slots. PD is 1 slot, small weapons are 2, medium are 4 and large 8. Spinal mounts are unique sections. Hangers are large, so either 8 or even 10, and missile launchers and ammunition storage is medium (or between medium and large).

Then corvette sections have 6 slots, each destroyer section has 6 slots, a cruiser section has 12 slots and a battleship section has 24. You could slip in a battle cruiser with 18 as well. Research into non-spinal-mount weaponry could reduce the size requirements for S-M-L, so a _really_ late game kinetic artillery might take 6 slots, and you could get two medium weapons on a corvette, or an extra missile launcher on a destroyer.
 
FleetingRain said:
I thought the auras worked only on the same fleet since 2.0, while they had a "range" before that.
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Titan auras do.
But starbases provide auras to the system.
So, if the juggernaut is more akin to the starbase than the titan, then system wide bonus would be more appropriate.
 
DrNukeLear said:
FTL Jamming on the Juggernaut is an interesting concept, but I don’t think it works. FTL jammers prevent the enemy from passing through a system without taking control of the Jammer or disabling through bombardment.

If you have your Juggernaut playing a defensive role (yeah, I know, bear with me) it stops the enemy bypassing a strategic target (the jug). If you have the Juggernaut in an offensive role it would stop enemies moving through the system, but again their target would be in the system.
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Jammers also increases time to jump - so, it would make it harder to flee (either pre-combat or in-combat)
 
So my question is, will it be like the Colossus, where it cannot join a fleet and is vulnerable, or will it be able to join a fleet? Also, if it is in a fleet, will new ships produced automatically join into its fleet? Lastly, if i want heal my ships at it (docked like a starbase) or if i am building things from it, will it be able to move still? Thanks
 
hart30 said:
what i really miss with megastructures currently is the ability to ruin them. Sure - u already can destroy Habitats or ring Worlds with planet destroyer weapon, but all the other megastructures are incincible. There are times, when u dont want to steal someones megastructure (Maybe because u already have one of that Kind, or because u dont have enough influence). Then it would be really good if u would be able to make the megastructure ruined during the war. This would cause the enemy to have to spend lots of ressources to repair it and weaken it.
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Yes please, I had posted something similiar in the dev diary about the changes to MS, where they coud be attacked and destroyed leaving the owner the options to eiter repair or scuttle them. Also giving the owner themselves the option to tear them down for whatever reason they can think of.
 
DemonHunter1 said:
Yes please, I had posted something similiar in the dev diary about the changes to MS, where they coud be attacked and destroyed leaving the owner the options to eiter repair or scuttle them. Also giving the owner themselves the option to tear them down for whatever reason they can think of.
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they didn't go with this because it would be too easy to declare war on an evenly matched enemy and just try to scuttle their megastructures to ruin them. Also if this happened to you, a big bad AI came in and not only took a chunk of your territory but also removed your Dyson sphere ruining your economy, would just not be fun, and the AI doing to another AI would probably cripple it.
 
Riftwalker said:
they didn't go with this because it would be too easy to declare war on an evenly matched enemy and just try to scuttle their megastructures to ruin them. Also if this happened to you, a big bad AI came in and not only took a chunk of your territory but also removed your Dyson sphere ruining your economy, would just not be fun, and the AI doing to another AI would probably cripple it.
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Eh, I would honestly rather prefer for MS to be points of strategic Importance both for defence and offense and deal with the consequences. As they are now they only bring boni (build and forget) while in reality such structures would paint a huge target on your back for rivals. Honestly just bothering with chokepoints in a war is rather boring I also want to cripple my enemy's eco and that the same thing can happen to me if I'm not careful. Would make the wars and possibly politics more involved.

What I mean is that it would pretty much take MS out of the Galactic vacuum in wich they exist now, and make you actually care about them in a war.
Just my opinion on the matter though
 
Spaceception said:
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?
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I dont know if anyone answered you, but i remember the devs mentioning in an earlier diary that the juggernaut acts as a jump drive point for ships. whether that means it can be jumped to from anywhere in the galaxy to the system that the juggernaut is in like it is always in range of jump drives, if it means that it acts as a portable gateway, or if it means that it has an extended jump drive range for every fleet in its aura, i dont know. we'll see how it works out
 
I like the idea of portable gateways by the way. Obscenely slow portable gateways that is.

Just so that I can fly it to my ally and not wait for the AI to realise that it might be a good idea. The whole “fly the gateway with an offensive fleet” concept sounds awful though.
 
darenn said:
This made me think that actual slot customization would be a simple way of improving the shipbuilding experience. So say that a non-spinal mount large section is actually 24 slots. PD is 1 slot, small weapons are 2, medium are 4 and large 8. Spinal mounts are unique sections. Hangers are large, so either 8 or even 10, and missile launchers and ammunition storage is medium (or between medium and large).

Then corvette sections have 6 slots, each destroyer section has 6 slots, a cruiser section has 12 slots and a battleship section has 24. You could slip in a battle cruiser with 18 as well. Research into non-spinal-mount weaponry could reduce the size requirements for S-M-L, so a _really_ late game kinetic artillery might take 6 slots, and you could get two medium weapons on a corvette, or an extra missile launcher on a destroyer.
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I’d actually like to go back to before separate PD and G slots (PD and S weapons share slots as could M and G). Create a hangar launch rack (just watch babylon 5 and you’ll see what I mean) model which fits in the place of your L class turrets and you can swap L and H weapons. As well as giving players choice using L turret mounts for Hangar slots would cut down the need for H slot section models.

Having fixed slot sizes per section is fine, but don’t railroad us into 1 section choice per section slot on a given ship. The whole point of the ship designer is to let us design our ships. I’m the galactic emperor damn it, if I want to turn my Titan in a carrier, a gun platform or the worlds largest and most expensive point defence array I should be allowed! Spinal mount, yes that’s cool. But can we not just replace it with enough Missile Launchers so the each salvo can blot out the sun?

Also... Colossi. Who decided that point defence guns pushed the budget too far. “My Lord, the senate has passed a resolution. You can have 6 bazillion energy credits to build your weapon of Mass Destruction, but it’s conditional on no point defence guns?” Would giving it 4 Pd guns really be game breaking?
 
DrNukeLear said:
Also... Colossi. Who decided that point defence guns pushed the budget too far. “My Lord, the senate has passed a resolution. You can have 6 bazillion energy credits to build your weapon of Mass Destruction, but it’s conditional on no point defence guns?” Would giving it 4 Pd guns really be game breaking?
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I think the reason the Colossus doesn't have any weapons is so that the AI doesn't try to use it as a warship.
 
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