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Stellaris Dev Diary #195: Happy Holidays & Help Stellaris

Hello everyone!

We’re approaching the end of 2020 and we in the Stellaris team wish you the happiest of holidays! This year has certainly been a challenging one for many reasons, but under the circumstances we’re still fortunate to be working in an industry that has been relatively untouched by world affairs. All we can do is be thankful for what we have, and try to help those around us.

We’re also thankful for the many fans that support us and are excited for the things that we have in store for you all. There’s still a few months of development left, and starting next year our dev diaries will be showcasing the remaining features. I hope you’ll be as excited to read them as we’ll be about talking about them!

While Federations was about cooperation and order, our next upcoming addition to Stellaris is sure to provide a different experience. The fate of the galaxy may be in your grappling appendages, and to what end will you guide it?

Although those hints may be subtle, what I can unveil is the topic of the dev diaries we’ll be starting the new year with. Many of you have astutely noticed that we have been showing clear indications of Espionage being added to the game, and that is indeed what we’ll be talking about in the beginning of 2021.

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Work in progress. Game development is fun, and sometimes during development, unintentional circumstances can occur.

I won’t reveal too much about Espionage yet, but I can say that it will tie heavily into Intel and information gathering, but also other things. Similar to how we work with a lot of other systems (like archaeology), we usually combine the new game system with fun and interesting content. We don’t want a feature where you just perform an action and wait until you get a result – we want there to be events and random occurrences along the way.

Starting in the new year we’ll be talking about all of these new features, covering everything from spy networks, to operations, assets and how they tie into Intel. We’re very excited to soon be able to share the progress our team has made.

A lot of teamwork goes into making new features for a game, and each profession contributes to different parts. We’re currently looking for a lot of talent to add to our strength, so that we can keep improving Stellaris and making more new cool content. We have great ambitions for the future, and we need to bolster our ranks!

We’re currently looking for:
Senior Producer - Do you want to help us run our game projects?
Senior Game Programmers - Do you want to help us implement cool new features in the game? Do you want to help us with performance, AI or is something else your speciality?
Mid-level Game Programmers - Do you want to help us implement cool new features in the game? Do you want to help us with performance, AI or is something else your speciality?
Lead Artists - Do you want to help us lead our artists and make sure we can deliver the right assets at the required quality?
Tech Artist - Do you want to be the interface between our artists and our programmers? Do you want to help us create the correct tools so that your colleagues have an easier time with their tasks?
Senior Concept Artists - Do you want to help us add more cool things to the game? We need more people to help us draw things like space dragons, cool new ships or JEFF.
Senior 3D Artist - Do you want to realize the concepts drawn by your colleagues, and perhaps build ships or megastructures?

If any of those roles sounds interesting and well-suited for you, or if you know someone who might be, please don’t hesitate to apply!

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Our next dev diary will be on January 14th, but until then: Happy Holidays and stay safe out there! Happy New Year, and let’s make 2021 a great year!
 
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I'm not sure how i feel about this. We saw it coming for some time and there's definitely a lot of fun stuff that we could do with espionage. At the same time there's a lot of very unfun stuff that could happen to us due to espionage. Many "interesting" espionage options would require removing some player's control over their empire if the AI was to use them (such as changing alliances or ethics) and that's definitely not something you want to do in a game.
Alternatively you could have missions that only the player can run, but that would result in making the AI even more laughable than it is (was) already so unless you really succeed in making the AI a serious threat, giving more toys to players alone is probably not such a clever move either.

Either way, it's way too soon to judge a system that was just barely hinted at, and i wish you the best success possible, honestly, but i fear you're on a dangerous path with such a feature. I've played a number of strategy games over the years and i have yet to find a single one that implements a satisfying espionage system. Let's hope Stellaris will be the one.

So I think the easiest and best way to do this would require a concurrent expansion in the factions system for internal politics. I feel like factions should have a *lot* more consequences for your play session for a given empire. An authoritarian empire with a significant egalitarian faction should be facing a lot of problems that require either dedicating significant resources to squashing/re-education or an ethics change which creates governmental chaos (perhaps through significantly reduced administrative capacity for a time). Having espionage operations accelerate conversion of your pops towards a given ethic would make that much more dynamic. It doesn't remove player control but creates an internal crisis which you may be able to detect through counterespionage. So now you have two problems: a rebellious internal faction and a rival empire engaging in hostile espionage activities which might provide causus belli.

It'd also be super cool if factions that meet a certain strength threshold provoked a crisis event chain that you could resolve in one of several ways that would be engaging. Perhaps - for less scrupulous empires - even giving you the opportunity to straight up *manufacture* a causus belli against an empire that you wanted to take out anyway but who wasn't actually responsible for the ethics shift. Use your intelligence agency during the event chain to plant evidence of foreign interference and use that as a reason for war (which could also raise the happiness of a faction that your empire *does* support).
 
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Personally, I'd really love the opportunity to engage in "war by other means". I'd like to play as a peaceful set of federation builders that manages to avoid ever firing a shot but can successfully convert rival empires into friends, marginalize the worst, manipulate wars into happening, and spread my influence across the galaxy. That is super exciting to me.
 
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Personally, I'd really love the opportunity to engage in "war by other means". I'd like to play as a peaceful set of federation builders that manages to avoid ever firing a shot but can successfully convert rival empires into friends, marginalize the worst, manipulate wars into happening, and spread my influence across the galaxy. That is super exciting to me.
We should be able to buy systems from the AI, especially allies or vassals.
 
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May 2021 be far better than 2020, bringing more awesome features, new shipsets and new species pack to our favorite game! :D
 
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I love espionage mechanics and I've been really looking forward to finding out what that tab is, so please know this is not some kneejerk reaction: Please, no sabotage.

Using spy networks to find out information about other empires sounds fun as hell. Using spies to copy tech advances from other empires, hell yeah. Using spies to influence other empires' attitudes to each other: personally I like it, other people may not. But please, I'm begging you, no "An enemy empire blew up your factories!" or "Spies are siphoning your energy income!" or "The enemy has sabotaged your science progress!". I've played a lot of games where espionage boils down to my stuff exploding because I didn't spend enough points on spy mana; I've never found that fun and from the talk on another forum I post on I'm far from alone. I'm not saying I could never enjoy confrontational espionage; agent provocateurs influencing faction attraction could, if done well, be really cool, as could long, involved quest chains with plenty of interaction events for both sides and a suitably impressive payoff. But please, please, please, nothing that boils down to once-a-month popups of "This building exploded! Click the button and spend some resources OK thanks by".

I know this can be cool, and I love all the stuff already posted, please don't aheheheheh sabotage my fun aheheheheheh (seriously though)

In the game Haegemonia; Legions of Iron, the espionage system lets you do several different types of missions, like counter-espionage, assassinations, technology/money theft, propaganda, etc.
 
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What's interesting is that I don't really follow the dev diaries much, but a thought just came to me this early morning about the civil war system from Hearts of Iron 4 as I am watching Star Wars the Clone Wars. I believe you should extend on the Rebellion System a lil more where it can be a bit more political like HoI4, but with other implications along with it. Like the CIS in The Clone Wars wanting to separate from the Republic. Something along those lines plus a lil more to make it interesting (Spanish Civil War style maybe or they want to change a Government to their liking ie: communist revolution). Thank you for reading this and have a good day! (Yes I know there are mods that improve the rebellions, but why not just develop into it at some point?)
 
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Any chance you'd be interested in a very low level programmer who is willing to learn and try hard and knows how to google for minimum wage or so? Pls pls consider. I desire to assist.
You missed the Content Designer opening a couple weeks ago!
 
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So bugs can't move out on their own, eh?)
Yeah, Bugs have 200% habitability in all biomes and weird extra game mechanics, so you have to run the Debugging purge type.

Which occasionally reveals that half a dozen of your other pops were secretly Bugs, you just didn't notice because of the one you'd already spotted.
 
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Yeah, Bugs have 200% habitability in all biomes and weird extra game mechanics, so you have to run the Debugging purge type.

Which occasionally reveals that half a dozen of your other pops were secretly Bugs, you just didn't notice because of the one you'd already spotted.
And all others, when you start Profiling purge.
 
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Hopefully your new programmer hires are deployed fixing the many bugs this game has...
 
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So I think the easiest and best way to do this would require a concurrent expansion in the factions system for internal politics. I feel like factions should have a *lot* more consequences for your play session for a given empire. An authoritarian empire with a significant egalitarian faction should be facing a lot of problems that require either dedicating significant resources to squashing/re-education or an ethics change which creates governmental chaos (perhaps through significantly reduced administrative capacity for a time). Having espionage operations accelerate conversion of your pops towards a given ethic would make that much more dynamic. It doesn't remove player control but creates an internal crisis which you may be able to detect through counterespionage. So now you have two problems: a rebellious internal faction and a rival empire engaging in hostile espionage activities which might provide causus belli.

It'd also be super cool if factions that meet a certain strength threshold provoked a crisis event chain that you could resolve in one of several ways that would be engaging. Perhaps - for less scrupulous empires - even giving you the opportunity to straight up *manufacture* a causus belli against an empire that you wanted to take out anyway but who wasn't actually responsible for the ethics shift. Use your intelligence agency during the event chain to plant evidence of foreign interference and use that as a reason for war (which could also raise the happiness of a faction that your empire *does* support).

While it's very tempting to make espionage do all kinds of impactful things I'm going to argue against this. I do this because I've never seen a good espionage mechanic in any strategy game, it almost always ends up being super powerful and an easy way to trick the ai. I agree that factions need a lot more attention but I don't think espionage should have a lot or any real effect on the majority of pops in an empire. I think changes in which factions get ahead over others should be primarily based on the actions the player takes. If the whole faction system is too susceptible to outside influence it would only be very annoying to the player. I think espionage should stay close to just intel gathering, currently the game gives you massive amounts of information (although a lot of times spread across multiple menu's) for free. In Master of Orion 1 for example espionage is mostly about gathering intel ie what are the traits of the alien leader has and what kind of tech they have. Only in rare occasions do you have an opportunity to have a chance at stealing something.

Maybe in Stellaris positions of docked fleets could be added to information that you can gather. Once those fleets start moving the fleet icon could become transparent and the tooltip could say how old the report is of those ships being there. Casus belli are too easy to obtain already in all modern paradox games, because of this wars have lost most of their puspose and are dumbed down to only be about expansion. In Eu3 casus belli were harder to get so once you had one you were often not in the position to immediately act on it because it wasn't completely predictable when you would get one. At that moment you are forced to make a strategic decision, for example you could act on the casus belli and not waste a chance to expand or not risk to change the status quo because you can't predict which allies will join you and which won't.
 
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Really excited that espionage will finally be realised. If it's even half as good as it is in the star trek new horizons mod, I'll be happy indeed
 
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Happy New Year to the dev team of the best -for me- Paradox Game, and keep up the good work!
 
*two hours later*

Lol the AI just sold me the galaxy for 30 energy and a favor #brokengame!

If i remember correctly it was possible to trade systems in an earlier version, but it got removed because of abuse. I heard stories of people trading planets with hivemind drones to the ai, which in return got a huge negative opinion towards everyone, cause the hive drones got autopurged outside of the hive.
 
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