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Stellaris Dev Diary #187 - Post-mortem

Zaztl’s time had come. The Ritual of Elevation was soon to begin, and as she was inching ever closer to her own final destiny, she wondered “Is this perhaps the start of a new life?”. She couldn’t help but to latch on to hope in her moment of dread, but she also knew the futility of the question.

No Jeferian would ever know the answer to that question.

Shumon ins-Beth was born, the newest individual to join the Pasharti species.


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The result of dark experimentation by the Jeferians - the former owners of the planet Taralon - the Pashartians are the ultimate parasites. Originally a semi-sapient creature dwelling in the depths of Taralon's mountains, the Jeferians uplifted and augmented them to act as a subservient slave race. However, their uplifting was rather too effective, and they unleashed a monster. Horrified at the capabilities of their creation - which included the ability to absorb other sentient species and turn them into Pashartians - the Jeferians tried to shut down the experiment. However, a small group of uplifted Pashartians escaped.

Over the years, they bided their time, managing not only to evade capture, but also gradually increase their numbers and develop a technological base to rival the Jeferians. Eventually, the Jeferians noticed that something was amiss, but by then they were powerless to resist.

Soon the Pashartians had seized control of the planet, unleashing violent pogroms on their erstwhile oppressors - all the while further increasing their numbers. Now poised to take to the stars, the Pashartians stand ready to pursue what they see as their solemn duty - the conversion of all lesser life forms to their likeness.


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Hello everyone!

Two weeks ago we announced the Necroids Species Pack, and today we’ll be giving you more information about the gameplay aspects. But first, I’ll take the opportunity to link the trailer once again, in case you missed it.


For Necroids we wanted to add some new gameplay that would be available to many more different types of empires and species. Unlike Lithoids, these Civics and Origins will not require you to use a Necroid portrait. For Lithoids we felt like it made sense, but in this case we didn’t want to impose any limitations on your imagination and creativity.

Necroids gameplay includes:
  • Necrophage (Origin)
  • Memorialist (Civic)
  • Death Cult (Civic)
  • Reanimated Armies (Civic)

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Necrophage is a new Origin that means that your primary species has a very hard time to procreate by themselves, but is instead dependent on transforming other Pops into themselves.

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Necrophage Trait - live long and consume

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Chamber of Elevation - when regular Uplifting isn’t enough

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Necrophytes - Hey, what does the necro part of my job title stand for anyway?

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In addition, there is also the Reanimated Armies civic that we showed in DD #185. This civic replaces the Military Academy with a Dread Encampment, and can recruit Undead Armies that are unaffected by morale.

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Reanimated Armies - the ultimate in recycling.

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Dread Encampment Building - wouldn’t want to get caught dead here

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Undead Army - it’s not wight how they work them to the bone, but they don’t complain

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Necromancer job - some say it’s a dead end job, but they’ve made a grave mistake
(Note: Above image includes the bonus from Ground Defense Planning)

This civic has a few restrictions - no pacifists, and it conflicts with Citizen Service since it replaces the Military Academy. Some subtle differences exist between Soldiers granted by Military Academies and the Necromancers from Dread Encampments - they’re Specialist tier and provide more defense armies, provide some research benefits, and will summon additional defense armies under Martial Law instead of increasing Stability.

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That is all for this week! Next week we’ll take a look at the art process and all the effort that goes into creating the Necroid portraits!

We’ll be eagerly reading your responses, and remember that...
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Jeff sees all
 
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Weekly reminder that a DLC -no matter how interesting in concept or well in execution- for a fundamentally broken base game is entirely pointless.

On the topic: Is there anything that stops the AI from uplifting slave species into extinction and therefore killing it's own pop growth for good?
Yes, the 3 job limit on the Chamber of Elevation, which is a planetary unique building. It takes 102 months to grow 3 new pops without any modifiers. With a 10% growth penalty, which I believe is what you get for manually selecting what species grows, it takes 114 months to grow 3 pops. The Chamber of Elevation transforms 3 pops every 120 months, so the pool of potential Necrophytes should always increase as long as you don't select species with a penalty to their fertility.

I don't know how the math works in terms of growth weights for random population growth, but my guess is that where non-Necrophage pops are less than a third of the planetary population, they will be heavily likely to be selected for growth.
 
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It's really shame that there is no official big and detailed statement from dev team about horrific current state of the game and what steps are being done to change this. It seems like management finally gave up on Stellaris and decided to just milk a little more $ from DLC and then... and then nothing, I suppose.
 
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Didn't harm the Goa'uld.
The goa'uld killed most of their own young to keep the goa'uld population low and kept most of the Unnas around as labourers. Also technically goa'uld hosts can reproduce as members of their own species though it is forbidden.
Not to mention it is implied in the extended universe material that the goa'uld were more like the tok'ra, and were symbiotic rather than parasitic, until they encountered the first sarcophagi which didn't happen until after they ventured out into space.

Oh and the Goa'uld don't need hosts to procreate, they can do that fine in the shallow waters of their homeworld.
 
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Oh well, yet another DD which has not even one line about base game.
This is more like post-mortem of the forum instead of new "NOT REQUESTED" DLC.
 
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Uh. This isn't gonna work out very well with the current system. You can only 'grow' one pop at a time in the game right now. So how's that supposed to work with Necrophage? In the early game, you'll have the issue of maintaining alien pops vs Necrphage with a lot of micro. In the late game, you'll never realistically be able to convert even a fraction of all the pops you'll lord over. It might be slightly better if you could 'build' Necrophages and still have regular pops 'grow' on the side...

Seems very meh.
it will be once every 10 years, 3 Xeno pops will be converted.
with 3 pop growth, you will get around 4 pops every 10 years.

So no micro needed.
Also, your main species are lords and not workers. So you need a Xeno underclass.
 
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More like "Let's not make promises and then disappoint." :)
While that's in theory fair. That's also incredibly not reassuring. Half of the points made are pretty much game-breaking bugs, especially the AI stuff. Having "Greater than ourselves" or something along those lines baseline, which should not be that hard to do would cut down on the micromanagement hell we're currently left with to an extreme degree.

Sure, other stuff like capturing Relics is more of a "nice to have" and "fun addition". So not addressing that if you don't know yet is fair. But the former two, including automatic population growth stop/resuming, are things that absolutely need to be addressed. Disappointing on those would mean leaving the mid/late game broken, no?
 
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It's really shame that there is no official big and detailed statement from dev team about horrific current state of the game and what steps are being done to change this. It seems like management finally gave up on Stellaris and decided to just milk a little more $ from DLC and then... and then nothing, I suppose.
That's kind of the thing. At this point it feels like the question of whether there's even a dev team worth speaking of is left at all seems like a legitimate question. Because the only real work and progress seem to come from the art team and those who implement the changes needed for new DLC.

We already HAVE ways to address some of the worst micro. They are IN THE GAME. It should not be that hard to enable for example "Greater than ourselves" for everyone, from the start of the game. And remove it from the resolution.
 
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I really like the new mechanic.

In a vacuum.

Introduce the fact that the AI wont be able to handle it (or anything else) and i'd play maybe 30 minutes, realise it was micro hell, and uninstall again for another 6 months.

no thanks
 
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I'll just paste my response from the last Dev Diary into here:

Species packs, content packs, any other form of DLC..

I will not be investing another penny into the game, no matter how attractive they look, until the fundamentals of this game that have been mentioned a thousand times already are addressed.

I haven't played Stellaris for around 6 months, and yet I check each week for the dev diaries, in the hope that this week is the week I see some progress being made. I do this because I am desperate to play the game again. But I simply refuse to load it up again while it is in its current state.

It's a real shame, because a working Stellaris is easily one of my favourite games of all time.

It's just a big shame really.
 
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So, are you guys going to address:

- Broken Crises AIs.
- Broken AE AIs.
- Broken AIs in general, where FTL Inhibitors seem to be one of the main causes.
- Absurd Micromanagement of planets being required. Which could be partly resolved by making "Greater Than Ourselves" a baseline edict?
- Pops growing endlessly, where one has to manually stop growth. Rather than having a way to limit them to "a bit over jobs/housing" and automatically resume growth after they move out.
- Performance drops even on high-end PCs, where further upgrades become pointless as it's the engine that can't cope anymore.
- Performance likely partly being due to pops growing endlessly. As AI Empires end up with absurd numbers of unemployed pops. Synth ascended Empires for example will never stop growing pops on their planets.
- Etc.

Or just, advertise new DLCs?

Edit, you guys also once talked about a "Capture/Steal Relic" war goal if enough interest existed. That thread alone showed enough interest, it would especially give a goal in the mid-game. What happened to that?

AI is completely borked, you can use mods to make it better, and even challenging with the right mods. but at times the core pdx AI stills makes itself known
For less micro you can set planets to be rarer like at .5 or .25 or use the "automated pop migration" mod (f***ing love that mod)
There is a capture galatron wargoal but thats the only one for stealing relics. I would love to see more. maybe one for each, or just the certain ones like rubricator and precursor relics

smaller galaxy size and .5/.25 planets mean less pops and calculations based on those pops will make the lag happen later. If you don't enjoy lower planet spawns then perhaps (exterminatus) planet crackers/shielding worlds work well for reducing late game performance issues. only reducing, its still gets pretty bad.

Performance issues are also due to stellaris being horribly optimized and only using one core for almost everything. it did use to be worse so an attempt was made, sadly it was not as successful as we would have liked it to be.

So mostly no, pdx doesn't care about improving their game as long as they can add new bugs- I mean "content" that people will buy
 
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I like the rp potential, but I feel that Necrophage would be better as a Civic or even simply a race/species trait rather than an origin. I think this only because the way the origin is worded and abilities seems quite similar to the Lithoid Trait.
The reason it's an Origin is that it's a variant on the Syncretic Evolution Origin - your homeworld starts with another species on your planet.
 
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Or you know, he’s answering what he can/is allowed to answer.

I very much doubt that they are not allowed to say something like "we can't tell you specifics but we are looking at some of the issues". Anything else just makes it look like that they are not even interested in it. Mind you, I highly doubt that this is the case, its just that their communication efforts are very lacking right now.

But I guess there is no need to repeat the same mantra that dozens have done before me any further.
 
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