Stellaris Dev Diary #254 - 3.4.3 'Cepheus' Patch Released (Checksum 9d15)... What's Next?

[Eladrin]

Hi all!

I'm happy to announce that the 3.4.3 hotfix should now be live and available on all platforms!

On Monday I said that we were planning to address primary issues as quickly as we could and have a larger patch in a few weeks, but the team was absolutely on fire and was able to bring many of the fixes and changes that were originally scheduled for the later release into this hotfix. As a result, the 3.4.3 hotfix is significantly larger than a hotfix would usually be.

I want to stress exactly how helpful the bug reports we received were during this process - they made it possible for QA to generate a list of the biggest issues affecting the community and helped us prioritize our work, so thank you for submitting them, and please continue doing so if you run into issues.

Without further ado, here are...

Spoiler: Stellaris 3.4.3 ‘Cepheus’ Patch Notes

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######################### VERSION 3.4.3 ############################
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Revolt and Planet Stability related fixes and changes:

• When planets revolt, there is now an option to declare war on the new country immediately rather than being subjected to a 10-year truce. The revolting planet counts as the aggressor. (if the planet joins another empire, and you choose war with them, the other country is now considered the aggressor).
• Revolt Situations no longer cause escalating stability maluses, as these could make it impossible to stop a revolt. They now give a flat 10 stability malus at all stages.
• The modifier a pop gets from its faction's happiness now updates properly (so if you make a faction happier, it will correctly make its pops happier now).
• Fixed it being possible for a Revolt Situation to start and immediately cancel. (They will now only start if the planet is calculated to be currently capable of succeeding the revolt)
• Planets with Culture Shock can now only start a revolt situation after 8 years of unrest, rather than 1, as it could be quite hard to avoid a revolt on these planets. Otherwise newly-conquered planets have 4-year cooldowns.
• Improved AI decision making on Revolt Situations.
• Fixed cases where rebels and released empires would have traditions and techs they should not have had access to (e.g. if non-gestalt pops rebelled against a gestalt empire).
• Fixed cases where rebels and released empires would use their parent countries scientists for research. I.e. the researcher would be active in both countries, until one country changed their task.
• Cleaned up some unclear language in the tooltip for Revolt Situation progress (the one describing what you can do about it).
• Void Dwellers now replace the 1 Politician (or Executive) job from Habitat Administration buildings with two Colonist jobs, which should increase their overall stability in the early game.
• Doomsday origin starting planets will no longer clamor to revolt. (Revolt Situations are disabled on them.)

Deficit related fixes and changes:

• To help them to deal with unexpected deficits, Empires can now purchase basic or advanced resources (specifically food or consumer goods) from the internal market if they have expenses of that type, even if they do not produce any themselves.
• Fixed never-ending deficits - if you go into a deficit of a resource you do not produce at all, and then stop spending it (i.e. end up with both expenses and income of 0), the deficit will now resolve itself in a few months. This solves issues with machines having inexplicable food and consumer goods deficits, as well as cases where people over-spend rare resources they gained via event.
• All resources provided for deficit bailouts now scale with the game year, instead of just those for the situation that completed.
• Fixed a case where the situation approach to cut the maintenance of habitats would count double.
• Fixed stray reference to Minerals in the Consumer Goods Deficit Situation.

Subject and Agreement related fixes and changes:

• Subjects should no longer flip-flop between regular subject types and protectorate.
• Fix issue where a new subject created from a Status Quo would be made up of the wrong systems.
• Subjects can no longer sign Defensive Pacts or Guarantee Independence of other empires.
• Releasing a sector as a subject or enlightening a pre-ftl civilization now ignores the cooldown on agreement negotiation.
• Increased the effects of Relative Power on AI acceptance of agreement negotiation.
• Added base acceptance for subsidiary.
• Tweaked AI acceptance of resource contribution terms, making them more likely to accept harsher tithes/subsidies.
• AI overlords and subjects will now be more likely to accept specialist subject types that disagree with their ethics.
• Set minimum Advanced Resources tax for Prospectorium to 15% from 30%
• Fixed ACTION_DEMAND_SUBJUGATION_NOTIFICATION and ACTION_ASK_TO_BECOME_SUBJUGATED_NOTIFICATION loc keys.
• Fix for trade deals that are accepted and then canceled immediately.
• Fixed AI not taking relative power into account when considering subjugation proposals.
• You can no longer set the priority of overlord catalytic or metallurgist jobs.
• Overlord catalytic jobs no longer have the pre-3.4 penalties for food deficits.
• Corporate overlords now have access to the protectorate subject type.
• Slaves can now be "employed" as mind-thralls.
• Fixed issue when removing/replacing overlord removes the corporate holdings.
• The Divided Patronage loyalty penalty is now correctly removed from existing subjects when taking Shared Destiny, Feudal Society or Franchising.
• You can no longer immediately see the secret fealty status of sectors released as subjects.
• Rebalanced trade weights for specialist subject leaders.
• Subjects that are converting to a specialist subject can continue conversion even if they should flip to a protectorate.
• Subjects that are converting to a specialist subject cannot flip to a protectorate due to low tech level.
• Empires can no longer have negative diplomatic weight.

Game Stability related fixes and changes:

• Fixed crash connected with resettling the last pop of a species.
• Fixed a rare crash in the Situations interface.
• Fixed crash with modded shipsets.
• Fixed a crash that would happen when generating very large galaxies with high hyperlane density.
• Fixed a crash related to Federation Laws.

Ship related fixes and changes:

• Ship starting experience modifiers now work when provided empire-wide (e.g. Fleet Supremacy edict)
• Fixed tracking not countering evasion.
• Added missing ship components for Offspring ships.
• Mercenary fleets are now buffed by Offspring Auras
• Added missing L2 Battleship section for Offspring Battleships.
• Fixed ship build and upgrade cost modifiers not being applied correctly when retrofitting ships.
• Fixed certain AIs (the ones with Calamitous Birth and Private Colony Ships) never colonizing.
• You can no longer found mercenary enclaves using fleets belonging to your federation or the galactic community.

Other fixes and changes:

• Legacy Human portraits have been re-added as an option in empire creation.
• Fixed pops that grow as specialists on Colonies.
• Fixed pops which go into a loop of swapping jobs with unemployed specialists constantly resetting strata demotion timers.
• Amenity job management is now activated even when there are no resources available for planet automation.
• Fixed an issue where planet automation could not use resources from their local sector stockpile.
• Planet automation will now check that the unemployed pops can work the jobs that the automation would build, e.g. preventing specialist job creation for slave pops.
• Reduced the amount of research given by merc dividends.
• Fixed an issue where systems with primitives in them would not be transferred correctly during a status quo war resolution.
• Non-Prophet Organization now correctly checks for the Teachers of the Shroud origin.
• Fixed the Stellar Performance achievement not being awarded properly.
• Subterranean empire are now shown uncapped mining districts on uncolonised worlds.
• The Crystalline Bane modifier is now removed if you kill the Crystal Kraken in a dishonorable manner.
• Progenitor Nest deposit is no longer removed when terraforming a planet into a hive-world.
• Hive worlds now provide an offspring drone for progenitor hives instead of a spawning drones.
• Fixed the Cyro Pod warrior event for xenophobes.
• Meeting the artist enclave now sets the correct flag.
• Added tooltip on create office branch button when players could not open a branch office.
• Shroudwalker greeting event now fires only once.
• Fixed tooltip for starbase resource silos.

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New Known Issues
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• Localization for non-English languages related to these changes will be coming in a future update.
• When negotiating an agreement, if the other party does not wish to accept the terms but does not have the influence necessary to decline, the eventual notification says that the deal timed out and auto-declined when in fact it was auto-accepted.

So what's next?

We'll be continuing to keep an eye on things, so keep those bug reports and feedback flowing. Currently our plan is to have a 3.4.4 update in a few weeks, that will contain localization updates for the 3.4.3 hotfix, more fixes and balance adjustments.

A sneak peek of some of the things we're looking at for the planned patch include the following:

Spoiler: Stellaris 3.4.4 Partial Sneak Peek

• The Imperial Fiefdom will start with colonies close to every member of their empire, so nobody will feel left out of the fold. Those who feel particularly loyal will now also be able to remain a vassal of the empire after the civil war has started.
• Added Hydroponics Station designation for habitats. This designation removes 2 housing from Habitation Districts in exchange for adding 1 farmer jobs.
• Ships now gain 5 exp per day in battle instead of 1.
• Doubled the base unity output of telepaths.
• Khan should no longer be hostile to mercenaries.
• Admirals no longer abandon their post on leased fleets.
• Planetary automation will no longer seek to build gene clinics if you are a synthetically-ascended empire.
• Planetary automation will now seek to clear blockers as soon as there is any need. It now uses the same formula as the indicator on the outliner: i.e. if it is limiting the number of districts OR if there are buildings that could be built by clearing the blockers OR if planet growth speed is reduced (previous behaviour was to only check the first of those).
• Fixed issue where planetary automation would upgrade Necrophage Centers of Elevation (which is often undesirable as it may lead to you running out of necrophytes)
• Newly colonized planets will now have their planet automation turned on if they are in an automated sector
• Made some clarifications for the Shroudwalkers, so it is clearer what asset you are getting from them and how the planet modifier works.
• You can no longer build an orbital ring around a planet with a destroyed orbital ring.
• Added is_human_species scripted trigger if you want additional portraits to be considered humans.
• Added on_fleet_lease_started/ended on_actions for more friendly mod compatibility
• Added is_human_species scripted trigger if you want additional portraits to be considered humans.

We also have some quality of life automation improvements planned for 3.4.4:

• Automated Exploration and Automated Research are now available from the start of the game rather than being tech-locked.
• Construction ships now have an Automated Construction mode, which will automatically build Research and Mining Stations over appropriate deposits. (It will not automatically build Observation Stations, Hyper Relays, or other constructions.)

Thanks for playing!

 

[Eladrin]

Doomsday origin has starting planets?

There can be multiple Doomsday homeworlds, like if everyone picks it in multiplayer.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

This attention to details !

Note that this won’t earn you the achievement though.

 

[Eladrin]

Please note that there's a chance that some of these changes may not affect existing saves. (Like preventing your vassals from forming defensive pacts with your rivals might not undo already existing pacts.)

 

[Eladrin]

when they described it , they need to get defeated before any army can drop on the planet .... so the fact that you take the starbase of the system should not switch theyr controll , defeating them with your fleet is neccesary .

If it happens , there is a good chance that it was not intended and is a bug?

Correct. During war, an orbital ring should require being defeated before switching control. (Outside of war, it should flip with the planet.)

 

[MonzUn]

Thanks for these fixes.
Any word on the tech UI problems? Even when told to use a scrollbar, the descriptions won't use them so it looks quite hardcoded. And the more years pass, the more spreaded vertically the techs are, as horizontal bars appear randomly and are wider and wider.

Could you DM me an example of this? I'm not sure what bars you're talking about.

That UI should never use a scroll bar, because then we have scrollsbars within scroll bars which is quite bad from a UX perspective (how do you know which one should scroll? Scrolling the outer one will get you stuck scrolling the inner ones)

What we've done in 3.4 is to have the entry scale depending on the content of the unlocks.
The background doesn't scale with it though, but that's something I have on my list to fix.

 

[Enfield_PDX]

I can’t express how disappointed I am that the issue with being unable to dismiss mercenary fleets gained from annexing a vassal hasn’t been fixed. This is utterly game-breaking. If you annex a vassal you have to permanently pay for a gigantic fleet.

This is a huge let-down and I really counted on it being fixed by the weekend.

Yep, this is another pretty major issue that was ignored.

Nothing was "Ignored"

We simply had limited time to get the Hotfix out and prioritised. As Eladrin has mentioned there will be a follow on patch to address lingering issues.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Does this mean that the Overlord's territory will be discontinuous? If you try to force several empires into the origin they end up spread throughout the galaxy. From this it seems like the solution will be to have the overlord own random systems across the galaxy which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

They'll have a couple of gateways linking their territory together.

 

[MonzUn]

On the topic of new QoL changes for 3.4.4, are there any plans for allowing us to merge various robot species and adding megastructures to the outliner?
These two suggestions have remained the most popular suggestions on the suggestion forum for quite some time now and I don't know if there's ever been any official word on whether they're planned or not.

I personally don't know anything about the merging of robot pops, but the Megastructure outliner and fleet outliner reordering have been on my table for quite some time already. It has just been pushed around several times due to putting priority on the 3.4 free update and the assigned UX designer moving teams.

I would like to try and address the fact that the outliner has grown a bit out of control for the space allocated to it as we've added more and more features into the game and making these changes before we do that work would lead to some double work, which isn't efficient use of our time and that's also lead to that work being delayed.

But rest assured that as soon as I have a UX designer by my side in this task, I will push for making it happen!
I also want to stress that we do read the suggestions forum, so keep posting and voting in there

 

[Enfield_PDX]

Good work, but i hope you incidentally didnt let some hot-code laying around, since your team was, well - "absolutely on fire".

Any chance we could get weekly and incremental patches instead of one big month or so down the line?

Every fix was checked before and after merging. So we should be good We put in a lot of extra effort to that end.


Weekly patches are a no go, too much overhead and possible disruption to everything else we've got going on unfortunately. 3.4.4 won't be a month out but after that the next release will be the next custodian patch.

 

[Enfield_PDX]

It a similar feeling with bug reports. Of the past 25 bug reports I've made for example only 3 were "confirmed" or had a response, the rest didn't get any indication they had been read. Only one of those actually asked for any follow-up information when they struggled to replicate the issue. I wish they'd ask for more information. If you sort by newest you have to go past page after page of bugs to find some responses or confirmed tags. So if you report a bug again and again each version of the game with no response it can feel a bit miserable (like when someone mentioned the marauder+FTL inhibitor bug before, and QA had never heard of it despite bugs being reported on each game version for litterally years and it being something I've personally noticed in every single game I have played since FTL inhibition was added).

Unfortunately there's far too many reports to ever maintain a "clean" sheet. We can only spend so much time on each issue and prioritise accordingly. There's no responses in the past day or so too, because I've given my team a break from trawling the forum and will revisit once a weekend has passed of play with 3.4.3 to see what issues rise to the top to be dealt with.

 

[Eladrin]

I would have understood if the reason behind this change was to nerf Void Dwellers but it instead seems the goal is help Void Dwellers with stability.
Like Nevars said colonist are practicaly useless and the gain in stability is not worth the lost of 4 working Pop at the start of the game.

Void Dwellers started with negative amenities on their two side habitats, but were also starting with way too much unity compared to other origins.

The change was primarily intended to help them deal with that early game amenity issue while having minimal effects on them long term (since they're going to upgrade that capital building ASAP anyway).

 

[Eladrin]

Could you elaborate what the automate stations feature means?

If you click the Automate Construction button, that Construction Ship will build the nearest mining or research station, then repeat until it runs out of possible mining or research stations to build. Then it'll sit there waiting patiently. If a new opportunity to build a mining or research station appears (for example, if you researched a technology that gave you access to a strategic resource, discovered a new deposit, or conquered or expanded into a system), it will go there and start building.

It does not build anything other than the basic mining or research stations.

 

[Eladrin]

Can you talk more about the decision to make this change? I know in the past there were concerns about pacing and allowing players to optimize out of a core part of the early game. I'm curious to know what led to this change?

For the record, I'm not opposed to the change, but I'm a bit on the fence. I found the old concerns valid enough to accept the system as it was. On the other hand, more player options always seem like a good thing.

Since we've been working on improving things like planetary and sector automation, and a player can delegate critical tasks like ship designs, planetary districts and buildings to the AI, it felt odd that we wouldn't also let you delegate other tasks.

Manual exploration will very likely be more effective, but I felt that we should allow you to make the choice yourself.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

If the issue with VDs is politicians, why not make a VD-exclusive alternative?

It’s a common sci-fi trope for spaceships and stations to be managed by all-powerful lead engineers. If you ever played Outer Worlds, the Groundbreaker was managed by their head of engineering. Why not something like that where politicians on VD habitats are replaced by lead engineers or overseers or something thematically similar to that?

As much as I'd like to do that, it was completely out of scope for a hotfix patch.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

This looks great! I wanted to know, does the new stellar devourer operation count for the ten required for tinker, tailor, soldier, blorg? Or does it suffer from the same problems arm privateers does? Would love to get a confirmation on the fixing of this achievement before I attempt it again.

Arm Privateers not counting sounds like a bug, can you make a report please.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

@Alfray Stryke is it a known issue if some [] commands are not working right?

E.g. ['country_scope'.GetAdj] ['country_scope'.GetAdjective] are returning GetName (where 'country_scope' is This, Root, From, etc, as applicable)

I've changed the text to work around this, but the below string underlined in red (via a country-scoped event) was "[Root.GetAdj] Imperial Throne,"

• giving "[Terran Imperium] Imperial Throne"
• when that [command] should have returned "[Terran] Imperial Throne".

In other words, "[Root.GetAdjective] Imperial Throne," and "[Root.GetName] Imperial Throne," were returning the same things.

The Country's name was "Terran Imperium" whilst its adjective, as set in empire creation, was "Terran".
View attachment 841188
Running 3.4.3 - this is a modded event, havent had a chance to check if vanilla events also suffering from this.

Not something that rings a bell to me, but a bug report if this is happening in vanilla would be great.

 

[MonzUn]

I hope when you can work on the outliner you consider adding options similar to the different TinyOutliner mods to fit far more items on the screen at the same time, especially now that Orbital Rings flood the outliner (and are hard to tell apart and navigate from ring to ring without lots of clicks) and the new situations take up room at the top of the outliner... personally I just find it irritating to have several idle ships that have been ignored just because the outliner isn't concise enough to show the required information without scrolling a lot. (For megastructures I've taken to leaving construction ships at important locations as living bookmarks).

Vanilla Stellaris UI need to hit a balance between aesthetic appeal, information detail and acessibility so we are never going to end up with something like TinyOutliner.
IMO, being able to shift that balance around is one of the biggest strengths with UI modding and what makes them great

Also I think that the lack of a single suggestion in the "Implemented" tab of the Suggestions sub-forum makes people feel ignored. But that's probably more an issue with the implemented filter never being used since the forum has been reworked a few times and changes get made that reset the view figures for older items to 0 making them look ignored when the forum incorrectly says they haven't been viewed much.

There's also a quirk where I as a developer can't change those tags, so when I pull some small thing from there I can't tag it as done. It will just show up in the patch notes.

Also, since you said you don't know about robotic pops there are several issues I can think of that it could be about:
1. Machine empires capture Robots from normal empires but can't really do anything with them making them a drain on your economy (Robots lack machine traits and trait points, can't be modded into your machine race, can't be purged) and these end up cluttering your species list.
2. Normal empiores capture Robots and each empire's Robots count as a seperate species. As they can all be modded to have identical traits they should be able to be coded as sub-templates of a single master template to reduce some clutter and micromanagement. I want to eventually have 1 pop template with a set of traits, but end up with 7+ pop templates with the same traits that can never be merged and need to be modified individually which isn't really worth doing for a couple of pops so it's just a big cluttered list of pops I've picked up.... more irritating and confusing than harmful.

Thanks for the explanation
What I should have said is that I'm aware that there are QoL issues with managing all the species that get created, but that I haven't been part of any discussions for solving that problem so I can't say much about it.

 

[MonzUn]

To me, it looks like in general PDX for some reason tries to avoid adding complicated UI elements like windows when possible. Eg. the merc enclaves use standard enclave diplomatic screens, new features like holdings (and branch offices earlier) are added to the UI in what to me looks minimum viable effort (new tab in the planet screen). I don't know the reason, but I am probably talking out of my .... but I guess designing UI for Stellaris requires comparatively lot more resources/time than many other aspects of the game.

There's twomain components here I'd say.
1. The percieved complexity of the UI turns new players away from the game. The more we reuse, the faster new players can start to feel that they recognize the UIs and start to intuit how they work.

2. Stellaris is a fairly old game at this point and it's using an old UI system. This system is quite verbose and requires a lot of code, which translates into UI development taking up a lot of time. Time that could be spent on making the game better in other aspects. To give you an idea of the scale: I spent about a month worth of time on facilitating the Situations feature in all UIs and refitting the situation log to the larger size.

The branch office situation is definitely one of those where we would like to support it better, but taking the time to make the UI for it is hard to motivate with all the other important work that needs to be done. I did read a nice suggestion of displaying an icon in the trade map mode for planets where you can build branch offices. Haven't looked into how viable that is, but it sounds like a relatively quick solution that would at least alleviate the problem of having to click through them all and checking manually.

 

[MonzUn]

With the new BUILD HYPE addition the galaxy's UI is just getting more crowded, and it doesn't handle this crowding well.

I feel like those icons shouldn't overlap like that but resort to only showing a few of them, but anyway!
I tried my hand at restructuring the UI to be able to show more of them. There are so many icons that can be shown for a system though so it was hard making something that never overlapped and still looked OK. I gave me some newfound respect for our UX designers

But yeah, this is also an issue that I would like to try to convince a UX designer to collaborate with me on.
If we can find a way to show all of that information without making a mess of the galaxy view, it's certainly something I want to do!