Stellaris Dev Diary #229 - Aquatics Species Pack

[oreopirate]

Surface of the earth is 70% ocean.

Perhaps, within the conceptual world of Stellaris, an “ocean” world is orders of magnitude more water, and a very different evolutionary factor than our oceans.

Which is why I think aquatics should have been a COMPLETELY different and unique thing. Planet type included.

They actually define it in the empire creation screen. An Ocean world is 90%+ water. This is orders more magnitude greater.

EDIT: Actually is not magnitudes bigger, just did the math.

Give or take, only about 10% of earth's surface is above 1.5 km. So if we assume earth size... (1.5km* (0.9(Earth total surface))... 0.9 * 510,065,623 km^2= 459,059, 060.7 km^2* 1.5 km= 688,588, 591.05 more km^3 of water. Currently estimate by USGS say 1.332 billion cubic km. But this would increase the size of the oceans by half.
That said, increasing the amount of water by half is a big increase with massive ramifications for what is possible within biology as we currently understand it.
Current understanding of protein function and cell membrane integrity place the limit for multicellular life at 8500 meters deep. At that depth, life experiences ~842 atm of pressure. Various species of snailfish have been observed at 7800-8100 meters, and nearly have unique adaption to their cell membranes. But even with them, it is currently believed that is pushing their cell membrane integrity.
For the final 2km of the Oceans deepest depths, the only things that can live are small worms and invertebrate. So what increasing the water level by 1.5 km (50+%) you'd increase the inhabitable portion ofthe ocean overall, while pulling the limit of large multi-cellular life up, further away from the ocean floor.

 

[currylambchop]

Will hive worlds count as wet?

 

[TrotBot]

fanatic egalitarian xenophile pleasure seeker angler oceanic origin dolphins with utopian abundance and a deluge colossus, soooooon. can I colossus uninhabited worlds with it? like a colossus form of peaceful terraforming?

 

[Kapi96]

Looks awesome! Can't wait to try them out!

I am annoyed that the aquatic trait isn't exclusive to aquatic species though. Doubly annoyed that using a mod to fix that would lock me out of achievements too. Can we at least get an option to lock traits like those for those of us that don't want them to be available to all species?

As for the dragon, are there any plans to buff it in anyway? I mean, currently those kind of things are rediculously strong early game and then ridiculously weak late game. It would just be nice to have a few repetable techs that buff creatures. Not just for the aquatic dragon, but for the lost amoeba, L-Dragons and necro leviathans too.

 

[hart30]

Aqatic trait + hydrocentric is currently as powerful as extremely adaptive+agrarian+industrious+ingenious traits combined. Its 15% flat basic ressource bonus + 20% habitability. It would be better if this was reduced to 5% (10% with hydrocentric) as with guaranteed planets u get always at least 3 oceanic worlds at game start, while the malus is neclectable as it only counts for non-wet planets. To prevent non-wet worlds being used as popfactories i suggest also adding a pop growth malus to them.

What does "uncapped" oceanic planets from angler mean? Uncapped districts and building slots like hive and machine worlds have them? Aquatic + hydrocentric already turn oceanic planets into cheap gaialikes with all bonus ressources from stability and higher pop growth (through habitability and housing buffs). So this might be a bit too much.

 

[Incompetent]

This species pack has some good meme/RP build potential. Looking forward to playing an Aquatic Necrophage empire of creepy sea monsters. Making a megaplanet with Oceanic Paradise, Hydrocentric and Budding (the last one to actually fill the planet with pops) could also be pretty fun.

Limited to Planet type, while the other is limited to Ethic. Don't forget, Agrarian ideal also has things like housing buffs for that civic, while Angler won't get those.

I don't think they can be directly compared as much as some are doing, other then just comparing any two civics period.

Catalytic is also better with Agrarian as there is going to be much more excess food to work with. With the reduced food production per district, you may start running into issues with Angler, depending on what's available in the immediate vicinity, and your industrial districts you'd normally be able to make will end up being more Agriculture districts.

It's all theory crafting at this stage. The real test will be to see how it plays out

The question with Agrarian + Catalytic is, why would you pick an alloy rush civic as a Pacifist?

As for industrial districts, you do save some early on by using Pearl Divers instead of Artisans+Miners. (Artisans+Miners, or maybe even Merchants + CG trade policy, will be better in the long run with enough tech, but Pearl Divers look acceptable to me in terms of early game output.)

Oceanic Paradise with Aquatic, Angler and Catalytic actually looks respectable as a 1-planet rush build, if the devs make one key change: let us designate the capital as a forge world, or at least let us shift industrial jobs on the capital to metallurgist. As things are, with "special homeworld" origins (this goes for Remnants->Ecumenopolis and Shattered Ring tech rush too), there's a rather annoying incentive to move your capital onto some random backwater, just so that you can give your most populous planet a proper designation.

 

[Critical Ethics]

An Otter isn't going to sleep in water, breathe while under water, and for the most part, isn't going to eat or breed under the water.

Sea otters sleep in the water and hold hands while they do so they don't float away. They also eat and breed exclusively in the water. Give them a few million years and they'll basically be dolphins with hair.

Dolphins can't breathe underwater either.

 

[Orinsul]

I don't think we can bring science into this, but if we do, we should have eelsoids who they themselves don't even know where eelsoids come from

 

[Onimorphus]

Well, those species packs are getting a lot more content nowadays, that's very welcome! \o/

Overall, the idea of giving more focus to planet type via specific traits/civics/origins/perks is interesting, but highlights the need to give terraforming and planetary variation some more fleshing out in the future...

Anglers Civic will be quite a combo with Catalytic Processing from first looks, it's sad that it's restricted from Agrarian Idly (no kelp ranchers enjoying the quiet reef life XD), due to the conflict of giving bonus to the replaced farmers it seems (maybe implementing some broad job 'categories' should be considered in future updates/revisions, like 'Anglers' being a type of 'Farmer' for bonus/tech purposes).

Hydrocentric Ascension Perk now that is more like what terraforming should look like, involving more elaborate gameplay (and doing some crazy stuff). I add to the questions that a loot of people already asked about the limitations on the planet size increase and the Ice collection (I would guess that we can harvest ice from any system, makes sense given the 2 frozen planets on the Ocean Paradise origin, ripe for collection).

Also the idea of starbases having more economic uses, like buffing the space resource collection on their systems, should considered for further development in the future, imagine having a dedicated mining bastion on one of those 6 asteroid rings system being one of main mineral sources of a empire for example.

Aquatic Species Trait being a 0 point cost traits with both a bonus and malus is nice, and should be the base for some new traits involving more of this trade-off choices.

And I'm very, very grateful that it is bound to the homeworld type and not to a specific portrait group, as I and quite a few others have commented back on the Plantoid dev diary (and a dedicated separate tread), locking traits behind portrait groups fells like a quite arbitrary limitation to player creativity (still sad that we can't have some radiation eating crystal people... ).
But I do agree that some form of AI limitation to the random empires generated would be welcome to maintain some form of thematic consistency between the portraits and traits (I personally don't mind the random weirdness most of the time, but it do get very silly sometimes XD), so the idea of having more categories for portrait classification as @grekulf proposed is a very good starting point for such a eventual system (and maybe some more implications to a updated gene-modding gameplay).

Ocean Paradise Origin looks good, maybe too good with a 30 size planet with buffs, may a hidden trap with the loss of the guaranteed habitable worlds, it goes down to the buff numbers in the end. It does bring to mind the situation of the Life Seeded origin, as some people have called out already.

Here Be Dragons Origin space fish-dragon looks awesome, new space fauna are always a nice addition (though I do agree that a space kraken could have been nice too), being able to name it on empire creation as suggested already would be nice too. Now to see what sort of events and results will come from having a huge neon space fish zooming around your home system... XD

Looking forward for next week to see more of the art team work \o/ (I'm still hopping for some space manatee surprise!)

 

[Ren Nobody]

1.) Find system with lots of planetary bodies.

2.) Build Dysonsphere, freezing all the Planets.

3.) Build IceMining thingy.

4.) Profit???

 

[Nebbie Zebbie]

Anglers looks like a decent civic (agricultural districts that actually matter, nice), Aquatic looks like it'll be a pretty interesting playstyle, and overall there's a good bit of flavor here, but I have some concerns...
On balance:

• Aquatic as a free trait is probably a little bit too good, which is strange considering Phototrophic just came out and literally hurts you, but costs a point. Please consider making Phototrophic free or giving it some energy upkeep reductions based on world types.
• Ocean Paradise looks bad. Better than Life-Seeded, but probably on par with Post-Apocalyptic. Losing guaranteed habitables just probably isn't worth having what's basically a size 30 Gaia, because pop growth is king.
• Hydrocentric looks to be worse than World Shaper, which is...less than great. It really needs a little something extra. I also think the change to aquatics it does is...weird. It'd be better if instead of that, it reduced district costs on ocean worlds or something.
• Wet being now more desirable for certain species further aggravates it being a bad choice in multiplayer for the current meta builds. Sure, non-aquatic Anglers might want it, but...that's super niche.

On flavor:

• No change to room view? Come on guys, we don't need something perfect, just replace the view of a river with one of a lake floor and have some sunrays coming down in blueness, and there you go. Also, infrequent random bubbles in the room itself around the portrait might not be super realistic, but it's a good visual shorthand and we can always pretend our species farts out of its appendages or something.
• Ocean only? Earth is like three quarters water and is continental, but you're telling me dolphins couldn't form a civilization here? It's also disappointing that arctic isn't up for consideration, given it looks to be just ocean but cold. I know it'd require changing the habitability grid, but honestly, the current one sucks with how similar the "hot" and "frozen" planets are, while "wet" are easily distinguished. A potential change that could make sense is to remove desert (move arid and savannah up), put a new class "stormy" at the bottom of hot, then arrange the middle column as tropical, continental, ocean, and the right column as tundra, alpine, arctic. Aquatics could then be allowed any habitability that's ocean or only 1 type away and get bonuses for types 1 away rather than all of wet (so tropical would be sacrificed, essentially).
• Ocean being better for certain species types really implies it should be worse for others. Please consider making ocean worlds have inherently less housing (such that aquatics' bonus counteracts it).

Are there any plans to make Terraforming more interesting rather than klick the button and pay 5000 Credits?
...

The previous dev diary indicated terraforming would at least have events at the end, but I'm hoping they plan to also make it more involved, and similar to the First Contact system.

With Ocean paradise now being a better world to go full one planet challenge on, I think an appropriate buff for life seeded would be to make their guaranteed habitable planets be Gaia as well. Considering those planets already spawn (just as whatever non-gaia habitability you selected originally), it's not an increase in planets. For people using migration pacts it would only be a small buff, but for people sticking with just their main species it would make not just a world of difference, but two worlds

Life-Seeded with guaranteed gaias is interesting. I have seen it once in a modded playthrough in 2.8 and I think it actually seemed about balanced, but I suspect that now it would be a bit too good. At the very least, the devs could put in something to where your guaranteeds turn out to have abandoned terraforming equipment (like the event, but the only possible outcomes are gaias).

 

[DeanTheDull]

Aqatic trait + hydrocentric is currently as powerful as extremely adaptive+agrarian+industrious+ingenious traits combined. Its 15% flat basic ressource bonus + 20% habitability. It would be better if this was reduced to 5% (10% with hydrocentric) as with guaranteed planets u get always at least 3 oceanic worlds at game start, while the malus is neclectable as it only counts for non-wet planets. To prevent non-wet worlds being used as popfactories i suggest also adding a pop growth malus to them.

They do- a minus-20 habitability penalty is a -10% growth malus, on top of the -10% economic output.

The trade-off with Aquatic is that you'll get three stronger core worlds, but the rest of your colonial empire will be substantially weaker until you terraform it. Moreover, the Homeworld is actually the least able to benefit from the Aquatic buff, because you don't want to be using it for worker-tier resources since you can't get the 25% colony designation bonus, and want to be using your homeworld for science/industry isntead. Since Aquatic isn't boosting those, the Aquatic boost just means two stronger resource colonies for your guaranteed worlds, but substantially weaker outer-colonies bar pop-acquisition strategies.

At which point, it's galaxy setup RNG. You have a 1-in-9 for any given planet to be good, a 6-in-9 for them to be very bad, and a 2-in-9 for a draw. In aggregate, you will lose out on both resources and pop-growth unless/until you acquire other biome pops, but the tradeoff is a stronger start.

What does "uncapped" oceanic planets from angler mean? Uncapped districts and building slots like hive and machine worlds have them? Aquatic + hydrocentric already turn oceanic planets into cheap gaialikes with all bonus ressources from stability and higher pop growth (through habitability and housing buffs). So this might be a bit too much.

It means your farm-districts are limited by planet size, not district RNG, just like urban/industrial districts. A size 19 planet can have 19 farm districts, not however many deposits there are.

As the resources are food and CG, both of which are upkeep resources, it's nice but not overwhelming. The CG economy is a net-positive compared to mining and industrial districts, but the farming output is only a merit if you take the opportunity-cost of the Catalytic Converters and Bio-Ascension routes. Catalytic remains banned for 0-food exploits in many a multiplayer, and Bio-Ascension, while nice, is not the strongest.

If you don't take these, the food output becomes ineffecient excess, while the Pearl Divers- while handy early game- will lose out to a proper trade build in a Trade Federation.

 

[majikero]

The trade-off with Aquatic is that you'll get three stronger core worlds, but the rest of your colonial empire will be substantially weaker until you terraform it. Moreover, the Homeworld is actually the least able to benefit from the Aquatic buff, because you don't want to be using it for worker-tier resources since you can't get the 25% colony designation bonus, and want to be using your homeworld for science/industry isntead. Since Aquatic isn't boosting those, the Aquatic boost just means two stronger resource colonies for your guaranteed worlds, but substantially weaker outer-colonies bar pop-acquisition strategies.

Angler lets you do that easily since it lets you fund your specialist directly with a worker tier job. Ocean farms are going to be uncapped so its only going to have housing for building slots and researchers. Then the two guaranteed planets can pick up the slack with alloy designation. Non-wet worlds can take merchants, bureaucrats, soldiers and get resources with robots. The habitability and housing penalty isn't that important anyways since growth is mainly going to be robots there which only use 50% housing.

You get really strong on ocean, no bonuses on wet worlds, and extra penalties on planets you get penalties on anyways.

 

[FranklyJustNess]

The issue is that makes ocean worlds strictly better than any other basic type. As far as I know the best used to be tropical worlds simply because they had a higher chance of being fertile (I think), but it was so minor there wasn't really a point in min maxing so much, but now that we know many aliens we will meet will want ocean worlds it becomes too much of a no-brainer decision to always pick that.

Maybe as a solution the generation should only make a species aquatic if it rolled for ocean world, so no more than 1/9 of empires have that and add some civics to other planet types to balance it out; like bonuses to mountainous for living underground and something to do with sun energy on hot ones.

 

[DeanTheDull]

This species pack has some good meme/RP build potential. Looking forward to playing an Aquatic Necrophage empire of creepy sea monsters. Making a megaplanet with Oceanic Paradise, Hydrocentric and Budding (the last one to actually fill the planet with pops) could also be pretty fun.



The question with Agrarian + Catalytic is, why would you pick an alloy rush civic as a Pacifist?

For the Habitat spam. (Or provoking wars to peacefully expand/ beat the AI up for influence.)

If you start with Unyielding as your first tradition, Unyielding starbases with hydroponics bay pay themselves off alloy-wise in about 5 years. If you expand to only about 10 systems to get base 4 starbases + unyielding 4 + the first +2 starbase tech, 10 starbases with 10 hydroponics bays will support 10 catalytic converters. That's 30+ alloys a month at that point, 25 of whichcovers your alloy cost for a Habitat every 5 years. 2.5 influence a month is also a Habitat every 5 years. You could easily double those to 50 alloys and 5 influence a month, to basically be building 2 Habitats every 5 years non-stop.

That's a bit of a delay when it comes to normal Void Dwellers, and requires a Habitat bee-line if a gravity-dweller, but it does enable a radical expansion of a relatively tall experience.

As for industrial districts, you do save some early on by using Pearl Divers instead of Artisans+Miners. (Artisans+Miners, or maybe even Merchants + CG trade policy, will be better in the long run with enough tech, but Pearl Divers look acceptable to me in terms of early game output.)

Probably mid-game as well. Pearl Divers are absolutely competitive with homeworld/split Industrial Districts on the CG front, in terms of upkeep required to make 12 CG (net cost of 1 admin sprawl, but saving about 9 energy from a miner/artisan), but that's just half of the calculation. The Angler-half matters as well, especially the potential combo with Catalytic.

Catalytic's biggest turn-off for some people is that later game it doesn't scale as well in the resource conversion equation. Early game can make up for that, but it's the 1-to-1 worker-to-specialist role that people look at and catalytic raises the resource-to-alloy threshold from 6 to 9. Angler going to a flat 8 is more competitive on a per-job level than a miner's base 4-to-6, although at a cost of some admin sprawl inefficiency. But in the mid-game, when you're using Industrial worlds instead of your capital, there's a different dynamic. For mineral-alloys, the cost goes from 6 to 4.8- still .8 above the base 4 minerals per miner that doesn't get any bonuses. But for catalytic-alloys, a forge world is 7.2-per-alloy, .8 resource below the base angler output before any modifiers.

This has a couple practical implications, but one of them is that if you keep Anglers, you may well never need a real CG industrial world, or even CG-focused industrial district. Early game, you can just build an alloy building instead of district, and use the pearl divers for all your CG. Mid-game, you'd keep the Anglers around for your alloy efficiency. You might set up other jobs for the Pearl Divers themselves, maybe, but the Civic could still be worth it.

The bigger drawback- minor now but potentially major if the Species pack drops with the Admin rework- is that Angler is probably a bit inefficient in terms of admin sprawl.

Oceanic Paradise with Aquatic, Angler and Catalytic actually looks respectable as a 1-planet rush build, if the devs make one key change: let us designate the capital as a forge world, or at least let us shift industrial jobs on the capital to metallurgist. As things are, with "special homeworld" origins (this goes for Remnants->Ecumenopolis and Shattered Ring tech rush too), there's a rather annoying incentive to move your capital onto some random backwater, just so that you can give your most populous planet a proper designation.

Agreed.

 

[DeanTheDull]

The issue is that makes ocean worlds strictly better than any other basic type. As far as I know the best used to be tropical worlds simply because they had a higher chance of being fertile (I think), but it was so minor there wasn't really a point in min maxing so much, but now that we know many aliens we will meet will want ocean worlds it becomes too much of a no-brainer decision to always pick that.

Maybe as a solution the generation should only make a species aquatic if it rolled for ocean world, so no more than 1/9 of empires have that and add some civics to other planet types to balance it out; like bonuses to mountainous for living underground and something to do with sun energy on hot ones.

The general wet/cold/dry food/mineral/energy weighting that allegedly exists still applies. Giving 1/9th of wet worlds more farm districts doesn't change the need for mineral or energy districts themselves. It's your other civics that adjust that, and Farming was already the easiest job to scale up by far thanks to farm-buildings.

Statistically, just keeping the planeary preference RNG is already better than a 1-in-9 habitability rule, thanks to the Habitat and Gaia-world preferences.

 

[DeanTheDull]

Angler lets you do that easily since it lets you fund your specialist directly with a worker tier job. Ocean farms are going to be uncapped so its only going to have housing for building slots and researchers. Then the two guaranteed planets can pick up the slack with alloy designation. Non-wet worlds can take merchants, bureaucrats, soldiers and get resources with robots. The habitability and housing penalty isn't that important anyways since growth is mainly going to be robots there which only use 50% housing.

You get really strong on ocean, no bonuses on wet worlds, and extra penalties on planets you get penalties on anyways.

Besides growth, but we all know that's a dump-stat anyway.

But really, I think you're overlooking the resource crunch dynamic you'll be facing- the shortage will be in specialized worlds that are efficient in the early/mid-game. Robot factories are a medium-term investment that won't pay themselves off until well after year 50, but it's the resource economy within the 50 years that shape the game most. Aquatics are either going to face a painfully restricted resource economy or a painfully inefficient alloy economy.

Your homeworld- by lack of designation- still isn't where you want to be keeping energy districts or mines or anything, and if you're using farming districts for CGs you don't want to be building industrial districts there as well because you won't have the minerals for it the actual-Industrial District upkeep. Angler farm districts are only a resource savings if you're not using industrial districts for CG anyway, but with split inudstiral districts that's implicit unless you dedicate an off-world planet as your alloy world. This amounts to +1 to your number of needed early-game worlds compared to most empires, who would ditch the farm districts on the homeworld in favor of industrial districts.

But this is where the good-habitability planet shortage kicks in. You could set up an alloy world on one of your guaranteed worlds, and reap that 100% alloy production efficiency from habitability, but Aquatic doesn't boost specialist production. Further, if you're doing alloys on a world you're not doing the alloy-upkeep resource, either minerals or food, which is what Aquatics actually excel in. And if you're using one of two guarantee worlds for alloys, you can only specialize the other in food, minerals, or energy, pick one because you're not getting 25% efficiency on the rest.

At which point, you're still going to need to get 2 basic worker resources from other worlds, at which point you're most likely going to have a 10% output penalty over what you'd already be facing in order to support your early-economy alloys. Long before you have robots to be workers, you're going to need energy and minerals to afford the alloys to build them (and yes, you will need energy districts to be efficient in energy upkeep).

Or, alternatively, you could keep your guaranteed worlds as resource colonies, and move the Alloy factory to one of these off worlds- at which point you're looking at a job robots won't be able to fill early on, filled more slowly by growth penalties, and with a significant output penalty. Setting how long it realistically takes you to establish the third colony, you are going to be tight on alloys as a matter of pop-growth throttling throughput.

Angler will let you have strong food and CG production, but one way or another your alloy production is going to be weak unless you commit to Catalytic Converters- even weaker as you invest in robots, who take 2-3 growth cycles to cover their own upkeep, and another few decades to pay off the energy/alloy cost it took to create them.

 

[Me_]

The issue is that makes ocean worlds strictly better than any other basic type. As far as I know the best used to be tropical worlds simply because they had a higher chance of being fertile (I think), but it was so minor there wasn't really a point in min maxing so much, but now that we know many aliens we will meet will want ocean worlds it becomes too much of a no-brainer decision to always pick that.

Maybe as a solution the generation should only make a species aquatic if it rolled for ocean world, so no more than 1/9 of empires have that and add some civics to other planet types to balance it out; like bonuses to mountainous for living underground and something to do with sun energy on hot ones.

Rather than ensuring equal blandness to satisfy pedantic min-maxing, it would be better to one-by-one add unique element to every world type. Obviously, this needs to start somewhere.

 

[majikero]

But really, I think you're overlooking the resource crunch dynamic you'll be facing- the shortage will be in specialized worlds that are efficient in the early/mid-game.

What resource shortage? You'll be hiting a pop shortage long before you hit resource shortage. Trade is pretty good here since the CG from farm district means you can stay on full energy trade which means you'll easily run a surplus of energy and just buy the minerals you need to build anything. You can keep non-wet planets with good farm districts as pure farms to pump up alloy production.

 

[DahndI]

Ice Mining stations will increase mining station output in a system, as well as enable the Expand Planetary Sea decision, which will increase the planet size by 1.

What are the limitations? Can I take Ice from anywhere in the galaxy and dump it on my starting planet or is it limited to in-system? How many times can this be done on a planet?