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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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Cool new shiny thing, the game is still micromanagement hell, generic AI is still pathetic, sector AI is still broken, crisis AI is still broken, performance is still worse than it was 2 years ago, AI still can't into war, ships still clump up in the ball in combat, ugh, why am I even listing this - just read the forum.


keyword, micromanagement hell, 2.0 literally killed gameplay on a fundamental level, by making planetmanagement not only unreadable, it made it frustrating, slow, and performance killing... a shame really
 
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Can you please link the thread where devs respond to the issues people have raised here so we can all go there and not derail this happy conversation about the new shiny?
They didn’t, which is why some people found it necessary to derail the thread.

Doesn’t change the fact that not responding to this sort of negative behavior is a reasonable course of action.
 
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There's a dev post somewhere in the middle of this thread, in which it's said the QoL and micromanagement changes are coming in a future patch (so it seems it's not for this species pack), and they'll talk about it once they have something more concrete to show.
 
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then how come some random modders who can only access part of the code can do it?

modders can and want only do so much till they move on to projects that are more rewarding and fullfilling
 
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Like a dev responded to this post sayng they are working on quality of life improvements, when 99% of the posts are about AI issues.
I was mentioning some of the things that I've personally been working on. Sorry if it wasn't enough.
 
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I was mentioning some of the things that I've personally been working on. Sorry if it wasn't enough.

Appreciated, but since the big topic of the moment is the AI, a quick mention about what is going on by a dev that is working on that would be noice way to (start to) address the issue
 
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modders can and want only do so much till they move on to projects that are more rewarding and fullfilling
i was saying that if a random modder can do it why can't the people who made the game clean up their mess.
 
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I was mentioning some of the things that I've personally been working on. Sorry if it wasn't enough.
While this is all a big mess I still very much appreciate you not being afraid to stick your head out in times like these. Props to you for answering questions and addressing stuff in DDs.
 
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I was mentioning some of the things that I've personally been working on. Sorry if it wasn't enough.

If only there was a community manager who could, sometime, somewhere, post something like "hey guys we know the crisis AI hasn't been working right for years, and the fleet AI gets stuck in movement loops for the past 6 months, here's our roadmap for when we are gonna tackle and fix that" rather than leaving it to each individual dev to make cryptic comments about what they are personally working on.

I mean I appreciate you trying to do even that because we are so starved for concrete answers and communication rather than vague platitudes, where even those only start popping up again right around the time you (paradox) have something you want to sell us again.

I can't tell you how frustrating it is to have game-breaking bugs go months or even years without an acknowledgement only to have radio silence interrupted when It's that DLC time again, but of course only to talk about the specific features of that DLC and keep pretending any problems introduced by old DLCs don't exist anymore.

Again you personally are one of the few rays of communication we get, so I'm grateful for that, but talk to your bosses or the PR folks or someone and explain to them that they can't let issues fester in silence for months or years and only pop their heads up when they want our money. Even a "hey we know xyz has been messed up for a while, here's why it's taking so long to fix, hopefully in the x timeframe we'll be able to roll something out" would do wonders. They did that with performance problems when anger of those finally boiled over, I wish they would do so with some of other long term things that are sapping enjoyment from the game.
 
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Well, I hadn't played the game for months, so I was out-of-touch with everything. And now, after reading this thread, I have to say, the current situation of the game and the community is rather... interesting, isn't it?
 
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Can you please link the thread where devs respond to the issues people have raised here so we can all go there and not derail this happy conversation about the new shiny?
There isn't any. There are a few quarantine threads for the ftl rework, performance and then there is the bug report forum but you never know if anything will be done about anything that is written there. People are here because you never know if anyone reads anyting you write in any of the other places. These threads are a more direct link to the devs to hear what they have to say or to complain about the game directly.
 
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I was mentioning some of the things that I've personally been working on. Sorry if it wasn't enough.
It is very much understandable that you don't personallly talk about the AI issues. Everyone here understands that you can't just throw every team member at the AI until it works.

But somebody should adress this at some point because this thread is going nowhere and I fear if we're not going anywhere we'll still be here next dev diary.
 
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It is why I've gotten into arguments in the past, here and on some discord servers, about how this was a game released before it should have been. The thing I find hilarious is that if I said such now, people would agree with me, but like when I was saying it back with the FTL rework, then the economy rework (even if I thought it sounded better than the system at the time) that I got shouted down.

Which perhaps leaves me rather jaded to all of this and just accepting that parts of the game are clunky, and reminding myself I come more for the creation of stories aspect rather than "Hey I want to get to the endgame and crush the crisis's and be super challenged"

Oh yeah the FTL rework, I think that's the moment the decline of this game started. On the paper that was a good idea, in matter of fact I approved it with open arms, however my best guess is that the game was not designed to handle a such big change, so everything broke.
 
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Well, I hadn't played the game for months, so I was out-of-touch with everything. And now, after reading this thread, I have to say, the current situation of the game and the community is rather... interesting, isn't it?

Tbh even the devs are winding down communication since Megacorp. Players got fed up with the issues in the game and there's a point as a dev where you give up because you aren't paid to deal with salty people (and I don't blame either side tbh).
 
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Like plenty of others I actually like the idea of this dlc and would be fairly pleased to get out but.... You know the rest right? Until the base game is one I want to play again what's the point?
 
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... well, its like in most other game forums, the community-menager (if one exist) has not enough information to give a clear answer, the players just flame instead of giving constructive comments...

...if there are modders out there, who know how to fix the AI or already did it, why don't theese guys post theyr fixes to the devs, hm? ... yah
 
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... well, its like in most other game forums, the community-menager (if one exist) has not enough information to give a clear answer, the players just flame instead of giving constructive comments...

This community was constructive 1-2 years ago, but the game is in this state for a such long time that the will to be constructive is gone
 
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We are not complaining about performance, but about the lobotomized AI, wich isn't discussed by 6 months

we are complaining about all of these things, ai not being ai, micromanagement destroying gameplay, bugsbugsbugs, performance,.... all of these things AT THE SAME TIME, EVER SINCE 2.0
 
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... well, its like in most other game forums, the community-menager (if one exist) has not enough information to give a clear answer, the players just flame instead of giving constructive comments...

...if there are modders out there, who know how to fix the AI or already did it, why don't theese guys post theyr fixes to the devs, hm? ... yah
....where do I start....because modders are not developers and are modding games out of the kindness of their hearts for others to enjoy for no financial benefit....and mods like GAI and Starnet existed for years....and people told PDX to implement some of the fixes from those mods....and those mods still exist for some reason....yah

Edit: PDX once incorporated some parts of GAI into the base game except those were from the older GAI build and were tweaked to negate the benefit those fixes provided....so yah once again
 
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