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Stellaris Dev Diary #185: Announcing Necroids

Hello everyone!

Today we bring you some exciting news about our upcoming Species Pack! We’re happy to announce that our next species pack will be themed around death and should allow you to live death to the fullest! Check out the trailer below:


Necroids will feature:
  • 15+1 new portraits (the +1 being machine)
  • 1 new Ship Set
  • 1 new City Set
  • 1 new Room background
  • 1 new Origin
  • 3 new Civics
  • 1 new pre-scripted Empire
  • 1 new Advisor Voice
We wanted to add ships that had a more sinister or evil appearance, and I’m very happy to say we’ve made something really great. We’ll go into more detail about the ships, and give you a peek into the art process, in a future dev diary.

True to the theme, we wanted the portraits to revolve around death, but not look outright undead or decaying. We never intended the Necroids to be specifically undead, but rather themed around death. Similar to the ships, we will be doing a dev diary in the future to give you a peek into the art process, and also reveal all the new portraits. Stay tuned!

Regarding the other features, we have already shown you some of them, such as the Death Cult Civic and the Memorialist Civic. The remaining features will be revealed over the next couple of weeks, and maybe you'll even get to learn about Jeff. But for now, let’s pass the Mishar Cabal into our memories.

---

General Donnten threw her bloodied axe next to Ostiir’s severed head. The others in the Leadership Council would remember this the next time they considered interrupting her in the Mishar Althing.

She pushed past the acolytes that were coming to deal with the corpse. They were annoyed - the rites were always harder if the head was removed - but they would just have to stitch it back together.

Smiling to herself, she left the arena. At least Ostiir would be an obedient little soldier now.


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My 2 cents: For me this is the right step. Ship models are always nice and I am also curios to know more about jeff.

I dont think that this DLC pulled a lot of ressources from bugfixing. I am guessing that civics can be implemented by content designers (not the base-coders) and the ship models are also done by the artist department. I would guess (and hope), from what I have seen, that they are keeping the coders out of the new DLCs so that they are able to fix the bugs. Since it has been quite a while since the last Federations patch I would also guess that the stellaris team will have something to show at some point.

Right from one point, on the other hand the coders are working very likely on the next big DLC planned for this winter instead of imroving AI
 
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Like it has been said about 17 times already, this particular DLC on its own is not the issue, the current state of the game is. And considering legit 90% of the forum is people pointing out the problems with the game to PDX and subsequently being completely ignored (what's up, Performance Reservation Megathread gang?), the backlash is fully deserved.
i didnt check the comments, i just saw it had a lot of negative things so i scrolled to the bottom to ask
 
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Well, a species pack which is primarily an art project should mean the devs have enough time to look at the broken crises AI, the Khan, etc. Right? Also, maybe rethink the population micromanagement hell that has taken over the mid to late game?
 
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Well, a species pack which is primarily an art project should mean the devs have enough time to look at the broken crises AI, the Khan, etc. Right? Also, maybe rethink the population micromanagement hell that has taken over the mid to late game?

Yeah... no. Crysis AI is broken by eons and was not fixed when other species packs came out.
 
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There is a point there.
The performance has issues. The biggest problem is the AI is fundamentally broken. Especially for the Crises. They spawn, sit around, do nothing, and die. AE aren't much better, Khan also barely expands. None of this has been addressed, and stuff has been broken for a long time now.

Then add other things such as the pop micromanagement hell the mid to late game has turned into. Where even basic convenience features are entirely missing and everything has to be pretty much handled manually. And the whole change from tiles to districts has been really painful in many ways.


Yeah... no. Crysis AI is broken by eons and was not fixed when other species packs came out.

I'm being facetious here. I have no idea how they think this is an acceptable state of things. Given they refuse to even acknowledge it, which has to be intentional.
 
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The performance has issues. The biggest problem is the AI is fundamentally broken. Especially for the Crises. They spawn, sit around, do nothing, and die. AE aren't much better, Khan also barely expands. None of this has been addressed, and stuff has been broken for a long time now.

Then add other things such as the pop micromanagement hell the mid to late game has turned into. Where even basic convenience features are entirely missing and everything has to be pretty much handled manually. And the whole change from tiles to districts has been really painful in many ways.




I'm being facetious here. I have no idea how they think this is an acceptable state of things. Given they refuse to even acknowledge it, which ihas to be intentional.

Maybe they can't even fix the game and it will be reduce to cash grab until they provide a sequel. Frankly either they assume the game is in a good state either they don't know how to fix it ( which repel them to provide piles of DLC to sell and make money).

When we look at what was done in 4 years we can, legitimaly, ask us the question.
 
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I'm being facetious here. I have no idea how they think this is an acceptable state of things. Given they refuse to even acknowledge it, which ihas to be intentional.
The fact that it has been 3 hours and no devs have yet replied to address the community issues is telling.
The fact that instead of fixing the game they decided to just quarantine every performance complain into a megathread one year ago and NEVER REPLY inside said thread should tell you what kind of strategy they are going with.
 
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Poor optics aside, I'm gonna echo what someone said earlier: "You released zombies before fish?!"
Zombies to go with dead endgame crises and mechanics so broken they should be buried. Maybe this DLC is super meta?


The fact that it has been 3 hours and no devs have yet replied to address the community issues is telling.
The fact that instead of fixing the game they decided to just quarantine every performance complain into a megathread one year ago and NEVER REPLY inside said thread should tell you what kind of strategy they are going with.

Hey, on the positive side the community seems to have improved. My signature is a quote from a time when a lot of people were still zealously defending them.
 
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I'm being facetious here. I have no idea how they think this is an acceptable state of things. Given they refuse to even acknowledge it, which ihas to be intentional.

Many people that are too blinded by their simp side so that they keep buyng stuff. However, there are also many others who buy a DLC, play one or few games, build their cool space empire and leave waiting for the next DLC.
Our only hope is that all the unrest caused in this forum will eventually attire the attention of game journalists, like happened with performance (I remember articles about that).
 
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The fact that war AI has been allowed to remain in its current state where it gets stuck in movement loops for months and crisis AI has been allowed to remain in its state where it just stops expanding for years is unacceptable. I'm not interested in any more fluff features until the broken basics are finally fixed.

Enough is enough is enough.

As far as I’m aware, the Crisis AI isn’t really broken, aside from some questionable priorities with its construction ships (forcing them to travel from one end of controlled space to the other), the biggest problem is that it takes them so goddamn long to reach their destination while the fleet that took out the system just sits there.

I’d personally have the strongest Crisis fleets act solely as hunters while a weaker fleet comes up to hold the systems to help fix this, in addition to fixing how the AI chooses which construction ships to use. Or just have outposts automatically appear and otherwise keep things as they are.
 
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As far as I’m aware, the Crisis AI isn’t really broken, aside from some questionable priorities with its construction ships (forcing them to travel from one end of controlled space to the other), the biggest problem is that it takes them so goddamn long to reach their destination while the fleet that took out the system just sits there.

I’d personally have the strongest Crisis fleets act solely as hunters while a weaker fleet comes up to hold the systems to help fix this, in addition to fixing how the AI chooses which construction ships to use. Or just have outposts automatically appear and otherwise keep things as they are.
The Crisis AI expands very slowly and has all the flaws of the "reworked" military AI to boot (like pointlessly going to and fro). What you describe is what people consider "broken". I'd say that while it's not utterly broken, it's close to this stage (90% broken?) and it's inexcusable that it remained as such for years.
 
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Necroids - a species with basically no Pop growth, which has to rely on wars. Fun for Players, but the AI will totally fail to Play this.

Regarding the heavy AI fix demand discussion. Due the relative slow AI improvement process (and no improvement regarding sectors and fleet Manager) since 2.0 and the devs going silent for months between the last Patches many Players lost their Patience. They feel left alone and many are at the border to leave the game instead of trying another singleplayer game, which Ends up frustrating.
I am an Optimist, there are good signs, that the next patch will contain bigger fixes. The devs going silent probably means that they were working on a lot of stuff, which cannot be shown in dev diaries and a mere species pack is simply to small for all that time which past since the last patch. Also the devs are probably Aware of the Frustration in the playerbase. So i expect at least a bigger improvement patch accompanied by that dlc.

The alternative would be, that during corona noone actually worked at stellaris or they worked on another game. But Sweden had no Lockdowns and i heavy doubt they would do that to their playerbase. As i said - i look very optimistic to the future.
 
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Regarding the heavy AI fix demand discussion. Due the relative slow AI improvement process (and no improvement regarding sectors and fleet Manager) since 2.0 and the devs going silent for months between the last Patches many Players lost their Patience. They feel left alone and many are at the border to leave the game instead of trying another singleplayer game, which Ends up frustrating.
The game is still playable, but the experience is significantly damaged due to issues.
 
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I am glad to see this. I don't like zombies/undead, but i do like death-related factions idea. I just can never decide if i want everyone to be part of the hive mind or invidual beings, hive minds tend to lack personalities for obvious reason, while food invidual minds are breeding ground for heretics that must be purged. Which would be interesting, but very heretical and less tasty... decisions decisions...

EDIT: Would be even nicer to see more stuff that i can use to make my faction/species more unique once the game has already started. Like gene modification but more or less new gameplay mechanic and not just changing what i already chose.
 
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As far as I’m aware, the Crisis AI isn’t really broken, aside from some questionable priorities with its construction ships (forcing them to travel from one end of controlled space to the other), the biggest problem is that it takes them so goddamn long to reach their destination while the fleet that took out the system just sits there.

I’d personally have the strongest Crisis fleets act solely as hunters while a weaker fleet comes up to hold the systems to help fix this, in addition to fixing how the AI chooses which construction ships to use. Or just have outposts automatically appear and otherwise keep things as they are.
The crisis Ai barely expands, it spends a lot of time completely inactive, sends fleets back and forth, etc. People tested it out in observer. One player spawned ALL THREE crises at 25x strength. Then left the game running. The Ai expanded a tiny bit, then pretty much stagnated before the Ai empires slowly whittled it down/defeated it.
 
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Not gonna lie, while I'm extensively excited for this, I can't help but notice the fact that this first page is predominantly negative posts and that the dev post announcing it is only *marginally* having positive reacts beating out negative ones.

I am fully aware that not everyone who plays the game is liable to be on the forum and posting, but surely the Devs are taking note of this yes?
 
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I love how basically everyone doesn't understand that patches can do more than one thing, and are trying to derail the dev diary.

The issues will be talked about when they have something to say about it. This isn't hard to understand.

Hey look, the diary announcing something the artists have been working on! Gotta hammer those devs about completely unrelated things! Gotta make them regret communicating.

That's all derailing the thread does, regardless of how "deserved" any of it is.

Edit: Would you prefer they just stop with the diaries, saying absolutely nothing, until they have something to say about your pet issues?
 
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