Stellaris Dev Diary #165 - Ready for 2020!

[Duuk]

Ooh. Possibly tie it to Aristocratic Elite, or even its own civic (although I think making AE the Authoritarian counterpart of Technocracy sounds fine).

Unlocks living standard: Landed Gentry

• Pops cannot take Worker or most Specialist jobs (leave access to Researchers and maybe a few others like Priest/Culture Worker; plenty of old famous scientists were nobility).

Split Specialist into 2 categories: High Specialist and Low Specialist. Low specialist is allowed for slave/menial specialists, high specialists can be filled by rulers (first priority) and other specialists (second priority)

Living Standard: Landed Gentry: All Pops of this race are Ruler Class. Unemployed Workers are given the Job "Idle Riche".

Edit: High Specialist would also solve the minor annoying problem of ruler pops migrating and becoming randomly unemployed and unhappy until they devolve. You'd just build a research lab or temple for them to work in. It's a stealth buff to Spiritualists that they'd gain an extra few High Specialist slots.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

Any plans to improve the A.I.s ship designs? They seem to prefer point defense corvettes over interceptors and missile boats, resulting in a third of their weapons rarely being useful in combat.

PD can shoot at other ships/stations when there are no PD targets available. They are weak against armor but not bad otherwise; their base damage is high enough to be quite comparable to short-range railguns (they actually out-DPS small rails against hull). Their range sucks but Corvette computers always rush to range 30 anyhow, so all ot means is a slight delay in when they start firing.

No, the MUCH bigger problems in AI ship designs are things like the mixing of disruptors with non-penetrating weapons, the use of the Picket Bow on main-line destroyers, the use of totally imbalanced and trivially-countered weapon mixes (100% lasers WHAAAAT?!?), insufficient respect for the overpowered Proton/Neutron Launchers, the thing where the AI will sometimes build ships with X slots and then put nothing in them, the over-stacking of evasion (even by mid-game, corvettes don't need and shouldn't have Swarm computer plus afterburner plus high-end engine; swap out the computer at minimum), etc.

So yes, please do make the AI less brain-dead when it comes to ship designs, but using picket corvettes is far from the biggest problem.

 

[Matt Herald]

PD can shoot at other ships/stations when there are no PD targets available. They are weak against armor but not bad otherwise; their base damage is high enough to be quite comparable to short-range railguns (they actually out-DPS small rails against hull). Their range sucks but Corvette computers always rush to range 30 anyhow, so all ot means is a slight delay in when they start firing.

No, the MUCH bigger problems in AI ship designs are things like the mixing of disruptors with non-penetrating weapons, the use of the Picket Bow on main-line destroyers, the use of totally imbalanced and trivially-countered weapon mixes (100% lasers WHAAAAT?!?), insufficient respect for the overpowered Proton/Neutron Launchers, the thing where the AI will sometimes build ships with X slots and then put nothing in them, the over-stacking of evasion (even by mid-game, corvettes don't need and shouldn't have Swarm computer plus afterburner plus high-end engine; swap out the computer at minimum), etc.

So yes, please do make the AI less brain-dead when it comes to ship designs, but using picket corvettes is far from the biggest problem.

I guess I mainly find it annoying that it seems they are always running pd corvettes. It would be nice to see a little more variety between empires and in an ai empire's own fleets.
I agree though that there are more important things to deal with in general and ship design specifically. It was one of the first things that came to mind because I had recently been reminded of it on my current game.

 

[kpipersburg]

The Battlepope and I moved to Stellaris in December, you must have missed the memes on Twitter .

All hail the battlepope! truly an inspiration in all of christendom!

 

[Elfwind]

Glad we are adding the modern version of slavery into the game! =p

 

[Unendingfear]

Now that we can enslave specialists, can we also get a species living standard that restricts them to just ruler tier, and grants a unemployed job like utopian abundance for just them?

I don’t want any member of my fanatic authoritarian race to ever do lesser work.

It seems like having access to something similar to the Fallen Empire's Hedonist job could be a pretty reasonable option.

 

[Monturiol]

End game crisis will finally be made work properly with the new systems? Amazing. This is what I've been waiting for since 2.0.

I've been waiting for it since 1.0, *COUGH*immobilePrethoryns*COUGH*

I have a question about planetary diversity, do you plan to add different types of planets later ?, something to make our empires and species take even greater differences from each other. In addition to obviously giving us more playable possibilities of exploration and variety when entering in unknown space.

I don't really see how that would help. We have 9 kinds of basic habitable planets already and none of them make empires and species feel different - when was the last time your game experience felt different because you were playing Ocean habitability rather than Tundra habitability? NEVER, that's when. So I don't see why you think adding on more would improve matters.

Now, if they made existing planets more distinctive - maybe by having useful technologies which are only accessible to Empires who start on a specific planet type (your ships can Use Bubblebeam: It's Super Effective as a weapons module if you're an Ocean start?) then maybe we'd be getting somewhere. But just adding more cosmetic-difference-only planet classes I feel is... perhaps not literally a waste of time, but a diversion of resources from Extra Content That Will Make The Game More Enjoyable to Extra Content That Won't Make The Game More Enjoyable.

 

[Kairos Val]

Minor legibility quibble with the tool-tip for Indentured Servitude from a transparency perspective: Now that I've read the whole post, I understand that the +50% is relative to the base political power of slaves. But that wasn't obvious in the tool-tip. It would have been better for the tool-tip to give the final political power - 75% - rather than the modifier. It was a little confusing on first pass.

Otherwise, very exciting news!

 

[Makcum]

It's interesting thing about new type of slaves but i think that for increasing authoritarian empire specific you should decrease effectiveness of slave-specialist because slaves never be effective tool for high-quality work. Also i think that it would be good thing if citizen model on slave guilds will makes possible to have a choice to have 40%-slaved of race or full free because this model have good bonus for slaves and at start you haven't slaves of other races but when your empire stay bigger and stronger with many other races i really want to have my native race free for more specialists and just for feel of dominance of my race but now it's impossible to have full free native race and civil bonus to effectiveness of slaves at the same time.

 

[MatRopert]

Will you all be posting a Dev Diary (or two) detailing the suspected root causes of performance problems and their proposed fixes? As a programmer myself, I am very interested in the cause and solutions to these problems that you all find. Additionally, have you all considered converting the game engine to use some form of light SQL database to store game data, events, and other information rather than relying on text files? I do a lot of work with SQL databases so I am biased, but curious about this from a game development solution.

If you're interested in that stuff sure we could see if there's a slot for a DD on tech debt and other fun.
As for SQL (or another format) vs text, the biggest reason we go for text is that it's fairly easy for our content designers and modders to edit compared to an actual relational DB.

Does that mean a fix is imminent? honestly the game is unplayable due to this and it has been for over a year, I can't imagine waiting any longer when it's been over 365 days. to put that into perspective that's 8,760 hours, 525,600 minutes, 31,536,000 seconds. there really is no excuse for this being still in the game... and please don't remove my post telling me to be constructive as I have asked a question, *is* a fix coming soon or not? lol

The free update that comes with Federation will include all those performance enhancements and other tweaks the team has made.

This belong in stellaris memes

You have our blessing to forward it there

 

[AlphaAsh]

If you're interested in that stuff sure we could see if there's a slot for a DD on tech debt and other fun.

Yes please. Definitely interested.

 

[James Mullarkey]

Any console news?

 

[Abominus]

They are defined, but you cant add new types. Tried it several times, not possible...

As I asked before: will it now finally be possible to add new living standards by modding the files?

 

[DanielPrates]

Crap. Internal institutions/politics has been left out yet again.

 

[Gilad Pellaeon]

Will Federations finally allow me to lift population/settlement controls off of my free, and fully integrated artificial pops so that the Egalitarian Factions stops giving me shade about a setting I'm literally not able to touch?

On that note: Will factions get an overhaul about what they want/desire so that they stop desire things I'm simply unable to give them? Like: "Make new contacts" is something that shouldn't be giving you a negative after you met everyone alive.

The same with Democratic Mandates: The game should realize when it's impossible to fulfill a particular mandate without senselessly tearing down and rebuilding mining stations, districts, whatever...

 

[Darkspysrival]

Will the new update finally fix the launcher so that mod authors like me can update our mods on Steam?

 

[Methone]

Like: "Make new contacts" is something that shouldn't be giving you a negative after you met everyone alive.

Pretty sure it doesn't...

 

[Gilbert95]

Any console news?

I recommend the console sub-forum:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?forums/stellaris-console-edition.1018/

 

[laptor]

@grekulf what's about neutered pops, do they still not make their contribution (because marked as "purged" not allowed to work till the species went extinct)?!?!?!?

 

[AlphaAsh]

Will the new update finally fix the launcher so that mod authors like me can update our mods on Steam?

Same question. Until the launcher and its mod management and workshop integration is as operable as the previous launcher, I won't be updating any mod. This one I will wave a pitchfork for, because it's unbelievable how the team dedicated to it have managed to devastate mod submissions and use, and have yet to fix it.