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Stellaris Dev Diary #220 - Additions to Humanoids Species Pack

Hello everyone, it is Thursday and that means it is time for your weekly dev diary. Today, we will talk a bit more in-depth about the upcoming additions to the Humanoids species pack.

First, let us take a look at the civics that will be added.

Masterful Crafters

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The Masterful Crafters Civic, previously teased in Dev Diary 214, will replace your Artisans with a new job type called Artificiers. They will fulfil the same basic production needs as Artisans, Consumer Goods that is, while also producing some extra Trade Value and Engineering Research. As you might expect, since they focus on Consumer Goods, this civic will not be available for gestalt empires.

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To facilitate you focusing your empire more on the industrial branch, this civic will also make industrial districts grant building slots.

Our hope is to allow you a bit more leeway in how you want to play your empire, whether you go hard into artificers to capitalize on their bonus production or use their superior production to cut back on how much you have to build up your consumer goods industry.

And of course, before anyone can ask, let me assure you, yes, it's dwarfs, it's most definitely dwarfs.

For the more materialistic among us, megacorporations will have their own mirror version of this civic.

Pleasure Seekers

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Now let us talk about our second new civic, Pleasure Seekers. This new civic grants you access to the Decadent Lifestyle Living Standard, which increases happiness and consumer goods upkeep for all affected pops.

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In addition, the Entertainer job will now also grant +1% pop growth and Servants jobs will produce an additional 5 Amenities.

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Quite a potent mix of happiness and the means of keeping it up. Of course, if you are interested in an experiment or two, you could fill entire worlds with entertainers for the pop growth bonus, one might call it a planet-wide shore leave on Risa.

Now with both of these civics covered, it is time to talk about our biggest addition to the Humanoids DLC, the topic of this week's spoiler tweet, and our new origin.

As with the civic above, Pleasure Seekers also have a mirror-version for megacorporations.

Clone Army

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What do you do when you outlive your usefulness/your creators? That is the question you can dive into with the Clone Army origin.

As Clone Soldiers, your empire will be perfectly suited for warfare, even though you may not currently have any enemies. Your lives and continued existence will depend on your Ancient Clone Vat buildings, which support your population.

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Did we mention that there is a limit to how many Ancient Clone Vats you can have in your empire at the same time? There is, it is 5.

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Now, you could be a good little clone-soldier and simply wage war as you were designed to, or, you could dive into the secrets of your own history, that choice will be left to you for every playthrough.

Oh, you can also combine Clone Army with both Masterful Crafters and Pleasure Seekers.

One more thing worth mentioning, all 3 of those additions are NOT portrait-locked. Some have ethic or competing civic restrictions though.

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And with that, I shall leave you be for this week and I hope to see you for the next dev diary.
 
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Would be really neat if we could get Agrarian Idyll to also grant some fractional building slots with each Agri District... the Agrarian Idyll would return in all its glory, a perfect civic for a chill game.
It already got its buff in the Catalytic Processing. Planets are limited in what resource districts you can have so having city districts isn't that big of a burden. You can even bring in Masterful Crafters as a 3rd civic and go full production.
 
This Civic pairs very well with Agrarian Idyll. Since you can't get Ecumenopoli, mixing Farms with Industrial Sectors could be an interesting mix. This would also lend itself to Catalytic Processing

This sounds like a fun combo, thanks for the suggestion for my next game.
 
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Anyone who is hoping for building slots for Agrarian Idyll (or just a version for lithoids), try my mod https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2510669821

Here's how it works (for both original and lithoid flavor):

Rural districts grant 0.5 planetary capacity and 0.25 building slots per district. The Agrarian/Lithorian Utopias technology doubles these benefits for the appropriate district type (farming or mining).
 
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I think a better buff for Argrarian Idyll would be to offer it Unity output, maybe 0.25 or 0.5 per farmer. Agriculture doesn't really lend itself to the infastructure needed for cities, but when your society elevates farming, then the more pops leading a life according to that ideal would help build Unity.
 
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I find this a bit too narrow in scope, there are play styles that fit the decadence theme very well, but don't use entertainers at all (anything trade based for example), so perhaps +1% growth for every 10 excess amenities would be a better fit.
You're missing the point. What kind of 'Entertainers' do you think those are?
 
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You're missing the point. What kind of 'Entertainers' do you think those are?

The exceptionally fun kind.

But more seriously, probably not specifically prostitutes. Someone like Barry White singing his lusty love songs probably increased fertility rates far more than any number of people who avoid pregnancy to stay in sex-optimal shape.
 
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My personal gripe with Pleasure Seekers is that I don't feel the living standard really makes sense. It's not a society where every member of the species basks in luxury, because the workers only get a measly 0.02 consumer goods. It's not a society where the elites live in unimaginable luxury while the others toil away, because everyone gets utopian abundance levels of happiness. By having equal happiness but unequal consumer goods upkeep, it feels to me like a weird in-between of egalitarian and elitist decadence that doesn't want to commit to either.

While I like many of the other suggestions proposed in this thread and recognize that it's definitely too late to make any huge changes, one idea I've been thinking of would be to instead give all pops that consume more than a certain level of consumer goods (e.g. 0.5x upkeep) increased happiness and decreased job output, and have the opposite occur for pops that receive fewer consumer goods. This would fit the theme of forcing the less privilaged to work harder to support the upper classes hedonism, and unlike the current civic would allow different types of decadence:
  • Xenophobe decadence, where you put your main species on a high living standard and let them lounge around and enjoy the labour of the enslaved xenos
  • Authoritarian decadence, where you put everyone on stratified economy and let the rulers lounge around and enjoy the labour of the lower classes
  • Utopian decadence, where you can let everyone lounge around with utopian abundance+ (probably because you've basically won the game already)
 
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My personal gripe with Pleasure Seekers is that I don't feel the living standard really makes sense. It's not a society where every member of the species basks in luxury, because the workers only get a measly 0.02 consumer goods. It's not a society where the elites live in unimaginable luxury while the others toil away, because everyone gets utopian abundance levels of happiness. By having equal happiness but unequal consumer goods upkeep, it feels to me like a weird in-between of egalitarian and elitist decadence that doesn't want to commit to either.

Well, you are using a Civic slot, so it should offer a decent benefit. The costs seem to be based around Decent Conditions - they are all more expensive than Decent, but the workers cost less than Social Welfare. There's also the extra 10% tax, so rulers cost 1.21, specialists cost .61, and workers cost 0.3.

There's no listed TV, so we also don't know if that increases proportionally with the extra CG cost or not, nor do we know how it affects political power.

The description also offers no benefits to slaves, which is appropriate, though its incompatibility with Slaver Guilds means that only Xenophobes will have slaves with this Civic.

It does seem a bit odd for Authoritarians, especially since the Authoritarian faction won't be happy if there aren't also Xenophobes to enables slaves, as you won't be running a Stratified Economy. However, for non-Authoritarian, non-Egalitarian civilizations, it can make perfect sense. It does seem like it should modify the Authoritarian faction so they don't gripe about the lack of stratification.
 
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I'll admit, I was hoping for at least one trait. I'm in favor of portrait-locked traits, but even if it wasn't, having an 'archetypal human(oid)' trait or two would be nice. That's what I assumed the dwarf thing would be.
 
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I really want to call the Masterful Crafters civic bad, but I honestly don't know. Most of my empires produce consumer goods solely with trade value, so I don't know how many artisans I'd otherwise be employing, and how much value I'd get out of this civic.

(As a side note, can Megacorps get a version of this civic that gives some kind of modifier to consumer goods produced by trade value instead? Maybe a slightly more efficient Consumer Benefits policy, with the extra efficiency also added to their eventual Trade League policy?)
You can't use that strategy going forward since Trade Policeis will be locked behind the new Mercantile tradition.
 
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