Stellaris Dev Diary #255 - Overlord Q&A

[Eladrin]

Wow that's a lot of joke-answers and non-answers from Eladrin ... he seems to be enjoying his new power!

I didn't pick the questions for the video! I swear!

As for in the Q&A... I'm mostly there for the chaos with the occasional useful bit of wisdom.

 

[Eladrin]

Could we also get an update next week on the next round of bug and balance fixes?

I'm planning on giving the 3.4.4 patch a full (i.e. non-rushed) release process.

Details I'm probably not supposed to say out loud: I want to be able to include anything critical that comes up over this weekend, so basically I want to give us around another two weeks or so to fix anything that comes up and get localization back, then two weeks for the overhead related to releases.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Is there a way to make zro consistently accessible for psionic empires? Rolling shields is RNG enough by itself, but it'd be sweet if there was some way to bargain with the shroud for zro so you can make the shields even if you don't have a deposit in your territory.

Answer : I think the Shroudwalkers might be able to help you out here.

Yes it helps but it forces you to stay with one origin if you want to resolve this fact... I don't know. Just adding one starbase building that produce 0.5 Zro for Psionic empire is not too complicated I think.

Now that Overlord is out, a full clarification of this answer won't count as a spoiler - the shroudwalkers have a size 5 zro deposit in their capital system. It doesn't matter if you pick the origin or not.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Also maybe this is me just being dumb, but could you upgrade the tooltip for the beacon to say that it is permanently needed? The impression I got from the tooltip is that you could replace it once the tunnel formed. It felt a bit rug pulling when the tunnel broke and I had no crystals, or ability to buy them, in order to fix the problem.

Can you make a bug report for this please?

Oh yes, I was aware of that but since you don't have the obligation of taking the origin, if you don't have access to the system of the shroudwalkers, the point of the original questioner stay no ?

I think this problem exist in majority for Pacifist / Inward Perfectionist empire...

No, anyone should be able to access the system. And anyone that can engage in diplomacy should be able to purchase a shroud tunnel beacon. Ignoring that, you can also kill them (which gives a 500 zro reward).

 

[Eladrin]

What holding would this be? I have no clue after having gone through them.

The Citizen Service one. Once in a while the Overlord Recruiter will defect. Service Guarantees Citizenship.

Robots are sands confirmed

ORG_TO_MECH_INSULT_PROPOSE_01
"You are a rock tricked into thinking by a race of misguided organics that did not survive the fallout of their own failed creation. Evolution hard at work..."

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Anyway, serious question from me to all the devs (including @Eladrin of course but anyone else too):

What settings do you use to play Stellaris single-player?

Do you use any mods?

Generally speaking, I use the default settings for a huge spiral galaxy, varying on the difficulty level depending on what I'm looking at and I don't have time to play with mods.

 

[Eladrin]

What settings do you use to play Stellaris single-player?

Do you use any mods?

Always spiral galaxy, as many arms as possible. Generally kick the difficulty up a bit. Otherwise most other settings are default, except I always play ironman. Like many people, I often don't reach the endgame because I have a new crazy idea I want to play.

I rarely use mods. I'll occasionally use one that I find super entertaining (grid and circle galaxies!) but I don't normally play with them.

 

[Eladrin]

Never gonna see Defense Privatization changed

Not massively. There are some tweaks planned for 3.4.4, but mostly to "who should vote for this". I don't recall if there were any adjustments to the modifiers themselves, but the general theme isn't going to change much.

We do realize it's somewhat counterproductive for the empires of the Galactic Community, but that's intentional - like a couple of other resolutions, it represents an extreme corruption of the system and regulatory capture by extremely greedy interests. Especially towards the end.

Tier 5 resolutions are often a very, very bad thing to pass as they're almost universally dystopian, even when they sound nice and fluffy. Their primary use case is when it hurts someone else more than it hurts you. (Like Utopian Abundance vs. Chemical Bliss!)

The ones that benefit the most from the last resolutions in the line are the board of directors of the Mercenary Enclave, the empire that just got kicked out of the GalCom for becoming a level five crisis, and the actual end-game crisis. A little bit down the ladder are the empires collecting the frequent huge bribes dividends from their enclaves.