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

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...
#################################################################
######################### 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.

###################
New Known Issues
###################

  • 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:
  • 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.)

Automated Construction

Thanks for playing!
 
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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?

Just to quote the actual devlog where it was mentioned: #250
They are treated as a variant of Starbases, and while system control is still primarily determined by the actual Starbase of the system, the planets they surround cannot be invaded until the Orbital Ring has been disabled.
There was a report here: where it is shown, that the ring turned hostile because ownership is determined by the station. take over the station and the ring belongs to you.
the way it is written though doesnt exclude this scenario. it could be possible that you still cant invade the planet. so whatever it is, those rings are weird
 
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Is this also why Vanilla Stellaris UI is terribly optimized for high dpi screens and high resolutions? Vanilla UI is so teeny tiny compared to UI mods like UI Overhaul Dynamic and such.
Does those mods support 1280 x 720 and 1366 x 768? Because despite what one might believe, a non-negligible amount of players use these, so this is another case where mods come in great to offer a UX that's more geared towards the parameters that you play by.

The old gui system we use doesn't handle dynamic resolution scaling of UIs in many ways and since we need to support 1280 x 720 as minimum resolution, the UIs end up looking very small in resolutions above 1920 x 1080. There is an option for UI scaling in the settings menu for alleviating this problem by applying upscaling as a post processing step.
 
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Uhhhh that seems like an oversight. Brb making a post complaining about this.

edit: post made!
I don't even know if it affects other devs TBH. I have some privileges and are missing some and I suspect it's some sort of issue that's been created while my account has been migrated through the updates during the 6 years I've been here.
 
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Hello there,
Do you have any plan for Machine empire?
That feel a bit strange for a united machine consciousness to be so inferior in term of unity compared to individualistic empires (especially with factions and their free unity)
Thanks you :)
 
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With the current addition, you could order the construction ship to build the outpost and shift-click Automated Construction to queue it up afterwards.
Even better:
When the constructionship is already on Automated Construction, just add the order to build the outpost with ctrl+shift+click to the front of the queue. It will then build the outpost and directly return to the automatic mode to build up the system. I do that with special projects and the scienceships on exploration orders all the time.

"Do this first and then continue with the things you did before"
Very usefull feature I must say
 
Does those mods support 1280 x 720 and 1366 x 768? Because despite what one might believe, a non-negligible amount of players use these, so this is another case where mods come in great to offer aa UX that's more geared towards the parameters that you play by.

The old gui system we use doesn't handle dynamic resolution scaling of UIs in many ways and since we need to support 1280 x 720 as minimum resolution, the UIs end up looking very small in resolutions above 1920 x 1080. There is an option for UI scaling in the settings menu for alleviating this problem by applying upscaling as a post processing step.
Its perfectly capable of supporting multiple resolutions and not just a single resolution. This 'old gui system not handling dynamic resolution' is a cop-out, as this one mod is more than capable of handling multiple resolutions using only a single set of definitions in the one mod.


 
A temporary quality of life is that you could have one construction ship on auto construct and use a different one to build more starbases

100% sure, you need to look at the modifiers, here is the bug report, I'm trying to get a dev response so we can make starbases useful

Thread 'Stellaris - Starbase Building: "Target Uplink Computer" Bonus not being applied.'
mhh.. i tested a bit , now i know why i didn't notice the absence of the bonus in range . L weapons on DP have already enought range bonuses to engage ANY fleet that enter the system without the 50% bonus in range, so it is actualy wasted if you are using L weapons DP .

well, good to know , the bug and that.
 
[...]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.[...]
Could you explain, where the issue is, with the TinyOutliner?
If it is "acessibility", I recommend, you change the font ingame first, to better, not so blurry version. Also the UI-Scaling is kinda meh.
If it is "information detail", I don't get it. There are all informations, which are also in the normal Outliner.
If it is "aesthetic appieal" you should think about a way, to change the colors and the transparency of the complete UI, maybe. This ties also into the acessibility.
So, what is so bad about the TinyOutliner? Please clarify.
 
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Its perfectly capable of supporting multiple resolutions and not just a single resolution. This 'old gui system not handling dynamic resolution' is a cop-out, as this one mod is more than capable of handling multiple resolutions using only a single set of definitions in the one mod.


The mod you link does not support 1280 x 720 according to the documentation in the second link.
The mod author also recommends against using it for 1366 × 768 in the same post.
 
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The mod you link does not support 1280 x 720 according to the documentation in the second link.
The mod author also recommends against using it for 1366 × 768 in the same post.
Again, I'm not arguing about the lower resolutions. I'm arguing that is IS possible for your UI spaghetti code to actually support multiple resolutions without needing to resort to the rather hacky scale option that requires a GAME RESTART to adjust, and because of the game restart to adjust problem, Trying to find a scaling option that both looks good and isn't super blurry as a result of whatever methods you are using to scale ... is a major pain in the booty. That's another gripe I have with the game is most if not all modern games that have come out in the past however many years ... supports dynamically changing the game's resolution, windowed mode, and so on ... without needing to completely quit out of the game you're in, and relaunch completely.

This mod properly resizes your windows to better utilize the screen real-estate on larger resolutions without needing a specific mod for one resolution, and it can do this dynamically, where you claimed the ui code is incapable of doing.
 
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mhh.. i tested a bit , now i know why i didn't notice the absence of the bonus in range . L weapons on DP have already enought range bonuses to engage ANY fleet that enter the system without the 50% bonus in range, so it is actualy wasted if you are using L weapons DP .

well, good to know , the bug and that.
I'm not sure how your playing the game, il explain the current meta, but weapons range is king. You want to alpha strike as hard as possible from as far as possible to demolish enemy fleets before they can shoot back. Currently, you get weapons range for fleets as follows, Admiral +20%, Rapid Deployment War Doctrine +10%, AI Combat Computer for Artillery +20%. This gives your battleships a very standard and easy to achieve +50% fire range. The meta is Giga Canons X slot and Neutron Launchers. Giga Canons base range of 150 + 50% weapons range is 225, and Neutrons is 130 + 50% weapons range is 195. Defense Platforms can only mount large weapons slots, so you put neutron Launchers, however currently Defense platforms have a base range of +30% range, with rapid Deployment you get an additional 10% totalling 40% (assuming you finished supremacy and since you want strong starbase you probably took unyielding instead). So you have 40% on defense platforms, neutrons 130 + 40% weapons range is 182 range on your defense platforms at best. Furthermore the defense platforms defensive stats are worthless against giga cannons and neutrons, the damage output is too high. 50% or more of your defense platforms are deleted before they even have a chance to fire. They get focused over the starbase. And the starbase is worthless cuz you can't control what it mounts and it puts medium slot on it and the base range is 20% instead of 30% that defense platforms have. To surmise, fleets obliterate starbases, giving them uplink target computer would solve this by giving you 90% fire range and then it would actually be a challenge to assault a proper bastion. currently it's a joke.
 
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I'm not sure how your playing the game, il explain the current meta, but weapons range is king. You want to alpha strike as hard as possible from as far as possible to demolish enemy fleets before they can shoot back. Currently, you get weapons range for fleets as follows, Admiral +20%, Rapid Deployment War Doctrine +10%, AI Combat Computer for Artillery +20%. This gives your battleships a very standard and easy to achieve +50% fire range. The meta is Giga Canons X slot and Neutron Launchers. Giga Canons base range of 150 + 50% weapons range is 225, and Neutrons is 130 + 50% weapons range is 195. Defense Platforms can only mount large weapons slots, so you put neutron Launchers, however currently Defense platforms have a base range of +30% range, with rapid Deployment you get an additional 10% totalling 40% (assuming you finished supremacy and since you want strong starbase you probably took unyielding instead). So you have 40% on defense platforms, neutrons 130 + 40% weapons range is 182 range on your defense platforms at best. Furthermore the defense platforms defensive stats are worthless against giga cannons and neutrons, the damage output is too high. 50% or more of your defense platforms are deleted before they even have a chance to fire. They get focused over the starbase. And the starbase is worthless cuz you can't control what it mounts and it puts medium slot on it and the base range is 20% instead of 30% that defense platforms have. To surmise, fleets obliterate starbases, giving them uplink target computer would solve this by giving you 90% fire range and then it would actually be a challenge to assault a proper bastion. currently it's a joke.
I didn't even bother mentioning juggernauts aura that includes an additional 40% Weapons range, at that point starbases are even more irrelevant because your fleet power should be insane
 
Just to explain my precedent post :
Classical Gestalt, in term of unity, only have 2 jobs : Synapse Drones/Coordinators and Hunter seeker with a base of 4 and 1 unity.
For the Rogues we have Biotrophy with a base of 3 (3.3 because I think Traditionalist is a must have) and that's all.
Coordinator.png
Hive.png
Biotrophy.png


For Assimilators we have assimilation, Exterminator, extermination,...

Now let's talk about Non-Gestalt empires (without psi asc) :
Rulers (Politician, High priest, Nobles and executives) have a base of 6
Specialist with bureaucrats/managers/priests (base 4), Entertainers/duelists (base 1/2),... and I don't talk about specials jobs with civics
Then we could use Trade value for unity.
Oh and factions with a base 0.5/pops without modifiers.
And don't talk about the amount of modifiers with techs, traits, civics, traditions...

So I'm not a game designer so I'm not qualified to propose true solutions but maybe some ideas :
- Create a building (some kind of node) with a huge upkeep which emulate faction unity output (0.5/pop basis)
- Technologies to have a base unity input maybe
- A tradition tree for gestalt based on unity
-...

Thanks you for reading :)
 
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With the current addition, you could order the construction ship to build the outpost and shift-click Automated Construction to queue it up afterwards.

Yeah, it's a help to be sure, but most likely I will want to then take the next empty system so I'd have to catch the now-automated constructor before it decides to run off to the other side of my empire to build a low-value deposit I skipped.

Unless queuing a move command would disable the automation building in one system?
 
I don't even know if it affects other devs TBH. I have some privileges and are missing some and I suspect it's some sort of issue that's been created while my account has been migrated through the updates during the 6 years I've been here.
Well, either it effects more than just you, or not a single other dev uses the tag system in the suggestions sub forum. And as someone who posts a LOT of stuff there (see signature), either of those is a shame.
 
Arm Privateers not counting sounds like a bug, can you make a report please.
This is a report about the issue I've read. I don't think it has gained any traction. Would be very grateful to get this fixed!


Here's the most recent adjacent bug report I could find.
 
Again, I'm not arguing about the lower resolutions. I'm arguing that is IS possible for your UI spaghetti code to actually support multiple resolutions without needing to resort to the rather hacky scale option that requires a GAME RESTART to adjust, and because of the game restart to adjust problem, Trying to find a scaling option that both looks good and isn't super blurry as a result of whatever methods you are using to scale ... is a major pain in the booty. That's another gripe I have with the game is most if not all modern games that have come out in the past however many years ... supports dynamically changing the game's resolution, windowed mode, and so on ... without needing to completely quit out of the game you're in, and relaunch completely.

This mod properly resizes your windows to better utilize the screen real-estate on larger resolutions without needing a specific mod for one resolution, and it can do this dynamically, where you claimed the ui code is incapable of doing.

I would presume, just as a thing, that when a programmer says "we can't do this" you should suspect the mod does something else than alter the UI code.

(also UI code is a nightmare, have you ever *tried* to write it?)
 
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@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.

Here is a bug report with an example using a vanilla situation text block:

 
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Again, I'm not arguing about the lower resolutions. I'm arguing that is IS possible for your UI spaghetti code to actually support multiple resolutions without needing to resort to the rather hacky scale option that requires a GAME RESTART to adjust, and because of the game restart to adjust problem, Trying to find a scaling option that both looks good and isn't super blurry as a result of whatever methods you are using to scale ... is a major pain in the booty. That's another gripe I have with the game is most if not all modern games that have come out in the past however many years ... supports dynamically changing the game's resolution, windowed mode, and so on ... without needing to completely quit out of the game you're in, and relaunch completely.

This mod properly resizes your windows to better utilize the screen real-estate on larger resolutions without needing a specific mod for one resolution, and it can do this dynamically, where you claimed the ui code is incapable of doing.
this argument would be a lot stronger if the mod successfully handled the lower resolutions at the same time as it handles higher resolutions. it does not. i personally ran into it struggling to work correctly on my laptop, and i didn't actually realize until this very thread that the base game is meant to handle the resolution i'm dealing with. so before i load up the game next time i'm going to have to look into ui mods that support the content features i have from my gameplay mods without requiring a higher resolution.

edit: i'm reaching the unfortunate conclusion there may not be any currently-working mods for increased listed district types that functions sanely at 1440x720. the idea of having to make my own fills me with dread.
 
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this argument would be a lot stronger if the mod successfully handled the lower resolutions at the same time as it handles higher resolutions.

The game knows what resolution it will use before it runs. The mod cannot know that -- the mod is loaded after the game's code loads it, which is after the game's own code (for obvious reasons).

It's not reasonable to demand that a mod should cover all resolutions.

It is reasonable to demand that the game -- which has control of more, and has earlier control, than any mod -- could load a different UI at different resolutions.