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

[Shark7]

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.)

OK, this I like a lot. I can now have 2 construction ships and set one on automated to build the mining/research stations and only need to concern myself with the one I'm using to claim territory. Will make the early to mid game much more enjoyable as I can concentrate on other matters rather than trying to keep up with building mining stations all over the galaxy.

Automated Exploration, honestly I've been using a mod for that so it will be nice to have it as a game feature versus having to use a mod.

 

[Bankipriel]

I have been playing since the game launched, and this was one of the more disappointing DLC drops due to the serious nature of some of the bugs, *BUT* this is the most impressive hot fix I've ever seen for any of the Paradox games that I play (and I play most of them).

This is some very thorough, very fast work, and not that my opinion on any of this really matters, but I am very impressed with the communication and turn around surrounding this DLC launch. What could have been another sticky release has instead highlighted that you guys really got your house in order last year when you split the team into two dev groups.

Thank you all for your hard work and your continual improvement of this wonderful game.

 

[esotericist]

Can you re-add the time that a fleet is expected to take to arrive to its destination? It used to be available straight in the UI, but now it’s hidden in a tooltip.

where is this hidden in tooltips? i actively tried to find this and couldn't locate it.

 

[Ferrus Animus]

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.

Today's hotfix is impressive and a much needed address of a lot of bugs that were added last week.
But I feel this is setting yourself up for a failure you should have learned from. Stellaris is 6 years old now (congrats!), but during these years has had multiple issues with bugs, tech debt and general messing up of the game. There are plenty of of stories of the community knowing year-long issues that are completely unknown to the team. This has resulted in the custodian second team.
But here you are now telling us that there will be one "urgent issues" patch a week after DLC launch and another "we'll see what we can get fixed" patch in a few weeks.
This is just not enough. There is currently a bug that makes savegames unloadable without editing the files, that has so far seen no visible acknowledgement nor seems to be part of this hotfix.

To me it seems whoever decides to limit the number of patches this much in a game that has such a convoluted development and a history of years-lasting bugs, is setting up another of these "The forums are on fire" situations. And that's before we acknowledge that some patches reintroduce bugs.
Even if it creates overhead I think we need 2-3 real patches after each DLCs release.

And given that the custodian teams seems to be as much focused on new stuff as on fixing bugs, they wont be the band-aid for DLCs leaving issues.
Stellaris is a pretty good game in many ways, but it can be even better, and given the constraints you are all working under, a little more time and more interations to address all the new dents seems like really recommendable.

 

[Ferrus Animus]

where is this hidden in tooltips? i actively tried to find this and couldn't locate it.

If you hover your mouse over the current order in the fleet window above the ship lsit, a tooltip will apear with the expected ttravel time.

 

[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.

 

[MathyM]

where is this hidden in tooltips? i actively tried to find this and couldn't locate it.

You have to hover over the name of the destination system and wait until the tooltip appears.

No idea why the devs have hidden this information. It's useful enough to justify being able to check it at a glance.

 

[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.

 

[Chuunibyou Imouto]

Why not use the shortcuts?

is there a shortcut I don't know about to find megastructures?

 

[Calvax]

The branch office situation is definitely one of those where we would like to support it better, buttaking 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

Could something like this work for the mercenary enclaves? Showing if they’re available from the trade map-mode? Having to call them one by one to see what fleets are available is a bit of a pain.

If info like price and fleet strength could appear on a cursor tooltip when hovering over a system that would be great too. Not sure if that’s easier or harder than a specific UI contacts tab for mercs.

 

[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!

 

[SirBlackAxe]

• 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).

Does the newly-independent empire have a way to quickly form an alliance before you declare war?

• 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.

Would it be possible for edicts you can't afford the upkeep of to auto-cancel before the game checks to see if you go into deficit? Or perhaps a "We're about to go into deficit!" notification that gives you like a week to cancel edicts, disable buildings, or purge pops before firing the situation?

• Fix issue where a new subject created from a Status Quo would be made up of the wrong systems.

Do you know if this was causing the bug I've seen a couple people mention about losing wars on a status quo?

• Subjects can no longer sign Defensive Pacts or Guarantee Independence of other empires.

Would it be possible to allow subjects to sign defensive pacts with other subjects of the same overlord?

• Fixed crash connected with resettling the last pop of a species.

This is what was causing this bug, correct? (If that's a different bug, I'll need to return it to unfixed on my list).

• Ship starting experience modifiers now work when provided empire-wide (e.g. Fleet Supremacy edict)

Oh nice, that's one I've been waiting for.

• Fixed an issue where systems with primitives in them would not be transferred correctly during a status quo war resolution.

Does this also fix them not counting as fully occupied?

• 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.

Do they use L-Gate style gateways so that they aren't closed during a war against a rebelling subject?

I'm still hoping that mine will be.

I'd really like a way build up more building slots at specific habitats to dedicate them to say, refineries, as well as administrative habitat districts.

I think I've come up with a good way to make something like this work by making a UI change to remove the limitation on district types for artificial worlds:

Build habitat districts slot-by-slot like buildings to allow more district types

Since habitats can only have a maximum of 8 districts, there's room in the UI to have one slot per district like buildings or modules instead of having a single row of district types with a bunch of little squares under them. The benefit of this...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

 

[Mr. Morague]

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

Maybe linking them via wormholes, giving the overlord wormhole stabilization, and giving fiefdom vassals easier access/higher chance to roll wormhole stabilization would be a better option? I don't know, it feels like going Galactic Doorstep or a high-tech empire near an early gateway only to discover that the first one you open is guaranteed to lead to most likely closed borders and/or a hostile empire would be unsatisfying.

 

[Calvax]

Maybe linking them via wormholes, giving the overlord wormhole stabilization, and giving fiefdom vassals easier access/higher chance to roll wormhole stabilization would be a better option? I don't know, it feels like going Galactic Doorstep or a high-tech empire near an early gateway only to discover that the first one you open is guaranteed to lead to most likely closed borders and/or a hostile empire would be unsatisfying.

The cool thing about having wormholes is the story potential. Even if the overlord falls they/their territory is still valuable for its connection to distant places.

 

[Shark7]

On the robot species issue:

Would it be possible to simply make a global "robot" species and have each empires robot designs fall under that category as a sub-species? Then if you happen to get 3 robots from species A and 2 from species B, you could merge them into your own subspecies simply by using the "apply modification" function we already have in game.

It's not that the current way isn't working, but it sure does look messy in the UI to have multiple main species of robots.

And lets face it, if you play a large game with 20+ empires by end game you don't dare open the the tab to see all species in the galaxy, it's gonna take a while. It really is a nightmare with the way the AI goes over-board on creating new sub-species.

 

[HFY]

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!

It's not just the overlap -- sometimes they also disappear! (That's harder to show in a single screenshot though... )

E.g. if you have a starbase, a digsite, and a wormhole all in the same system, you will see two icons (not always the same two, either).

 

[WeeBigTerd101]

• 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.

I think this is big. Now an empire can plop down advanced research labs and get the ball rolling before they have the gas techs. I think this buffs megacorps because they'll be rolling in energy credits and can buy more advanced resources. thus more research.

 

[Rhel]

Is there any chance of the buggy map colors being fixed next patch=

 

[Miranda996]

Are you guys aware of the starbase building Target Uplink Computer not applying it's 50% range modifier to starbases or defense platforms? I'm sure this is down in the priority list, and i appreciate how amazing the custodian team is being and putting so many bug fixes already!! Keep up the good work!!!!

 

[SephirothWS]

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.

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.

Example:

Look at how tiny this window is compared to my actual resolution. Seems like everything is designed for half of a 1440p monitor these days.