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Stellaris Dev Diary #257 - Summer is Coming...

Hello!

The team is working on the 3.4.4 patch as I write this - we should have a list of patch notes as next week’s DD. Today we’ll be discussing some less concrete things.

We often find ourselves with a bit of free time during the summer to experiment with different systems that strike our fancy. Previous such experiments yielded the Lithoid traits (which changed the way we make Species Packs forever) and the first trials of Industrial Districts. Often they don’t work out, or need a lot of iteration before turning into something usable, but that’s okay - these are intentionally framed as experiments with lower pressure.

Rather than doing a review of what did and didn’t work after the summer, I want to give a preview of some of the systems we’re looking to experiment with, but with the caveat that these experiments may or may not pan out.

None of this is guaranteed, and I’m not giving timelines for release even if they do work out!

Relic Balance​

Iggy has asked to look at relics and has written up proposals for a balance pass upon them. In his own words…

Relics are meant to be fun and game-changing. They are supposed to be powerful and unique items that can change the course of your empire. The issue, however, is that they are not all equal. So with a future update, I hope to at least narrow the gap between the relics a bit. I have mainly split the relics into three sets.
  • Event-based ones that are fine to have a niche and semi-powerful effects, think Omnicodex and Blade of the Huntress.
  • Precursor Relics should be strong and useful for every single empire. I am not promising that the Javorian Pox will be top tier for pacifists or that the Psionic Archive will be the best machine relic. But they will at least have neat effects.
  • Crisis Relics which are awarded for defeating the crisis should be a bit of a victory lap. You have won! It should not give you 30 society research.
With these in mind, I will be looking at every relic and attempting to bring them in line if needed. There will be a lot of buffs and a few nerfs, but hopefully, they will feel more rewarding!

I expect that we’ll post a list of the changes when we start the dev diaries up again after the summer for feedback.

Accessibility Improvements​

@MonzUn has been leading a drive for improved accessibility options in Stellaris. Some of the things we’re looking at include adding more functionality for mouse side buttons, possible text-to-speech for events, and functionality like hotkeys for zooming in and out.

At his suggestion, some of us have also started playing the game with various color reshaders active to simulate different color vision deficiencies, to help find the worst issues and ways to resolve them.

If you have suggestions or accessibility problems that you face while playing Stellaris, please let us know.

Traditions​

With the flexibility in how empires can choose traditions that we introduced in 3.1 "Lem", @Alfray Stryke is planning some experiments looking at introducing new tradition trees.

These are looking at how gating tradition trees behind various triggers might influence the game. There have been some ideas suggested about introducing tradition trees that are locked behind ascension perks or origins, and we're interested to see where these may lead.

Deep In the Code Mines​

@Caligula Caesar has been finding places where we could expand our uses of multithreading, and experimenting with the way modifiers are calculated, with a particular eye towards the late game.

Fleet Combat Balance​

Meanwhile, my planned experiments primarily have to do with fleet combat.

Things I’m looking forward to looking at include:
  • Providing a late game role for Destroyers and Cruisers, and providing incentives for mixed fleets.
  • Increasing the length of fleet combats, reducing the dominance of alpha strikes.
  • Experimenting with existing counters, tracking, evasion, and accuracy mechanics.
    • This may also end up providing a role for smaller weapons.
  • Improving ship behavior based on the roles assigned them by combat computers.
    • Yes, Carrier Battleship, I know you have a point defense laser and you're very proud of it. That doesn’t mean you should charge into melee to use it.
These are likely the experiments most ethereal in nature at this time and are unlikely to bear fruit in the short term.

More Achievements​

Our artists had so much fun with the Overlord achievements that they cornered us and demanded that we add some to the species packs.

These aren’t really experiments, but will go live once we figure out what they’ll do and implement them. Here are a few as previews.

Looks like a fixer-upper.
Well that's ominous.
Is that the Swolefin from the Overlord trailer?
CAN YOU SMELL WHAT THE LITHOID IS COOKING?
Om nom nom
More om nom nom. A lot of our achievements reference eating things, don't they?

And then there's this one, which we've called The Darkest Timeline.

You rolled a 1, time to eat the stick.

What's Next?​

These examples aren't comprehensive, there are many other things being worked on that aren't listed here (like previously mentioned Espionage improvements).

As mentioned earlier, next week will be the 3.4.4 patch notes, after which we’ll be going on a dev diary hiatus for the summer.

See you next week!
 
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PvP isn't the only gamemode.Someone prefers 25x crisis,someone prefers 'become crisis' speedrun,And someone prefers role playing.
Alpha strikes are the main way against 25x(before 3.4).We don't want to see 10+ star-eaters fighting 25x for 10 minutes right?
Your right PvP isint the only game mode. But its the standard when it comes to whats good and what the meta is. Were talking about making changes to combat that make it more interesting, competitive and varied. Against the AI you can run any nonesense fleet design and still be successful. That doesnt mean its good. Were talking effectiveness. The game was solved ages ago. You put mega cannons and neutrons on your battleships, and you win. It doesnt matter what you face. And they will definetly beat your stareaters if you equate the resources/fleet power. Damage output wins.
 
Hello Paradox,
If you rework relics, it would good to watch bombing planet a little. Bombing in général is really slow. And javorian relic doesn't really work.

At 100k fleet power and 100% devastation, i do glabal bombing at start and switch to javorian, i kill 1pop/month at best. And with bonus on bombing from tradition and mother ship.

So it take 58 years to kill an empire with 700 pop. and that without the time for battle and moving.

have a good day.
 
Can we get a bit of an update to the anomaly system? i.e Maybe have it so that you can rescan systems once you obtain new sensor tech, discovering new anomalies. Mid to late game tends to lose a lot of flavor as everything is mostly discovered.
AGREED! (Button was not sufficient) It would be great if some anomalies unlocked with certain technologies. Basically this would represent the empire finding something interesting but not really understanding what they were looking at. Or something older model sensors were unable to pick up on.
 
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Instead of using timers as a way to keep the Galactic Community from passing everything in a single game, rely more on the controversial nature of later resolutions to prevent them from securing majorities. Instead of nearly every resolution that comes to the floor passing, I'd like to see a higher proportion of resolutions reach the floor and fail. The Senate should be a place where empires compete to pass or defeat resolutions, not a pro forma rubber stamp for resolutions that make it to the top of the queue.
I find an issue with this is that there are very few resolutions that come with a cost for their benefits. Very few give relevant penalties at all. The ecological protection resolutions have the opposite problem where they have major downsides with almost no benefit. Resolutions could be greatly improved by introducing trade-offs (between opposing ethics would be a good starting point) and linking them with faction demands (i.e., more resolutions passed aligning with a faction's ethics, the happier the faction gets).
 
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As part of the combat re-balance, I would like to see the geography of the system play a bigger role in combat. Right now, we only have about 5 or 6 environmental effects that have modifiers, and even these are somewhat rare, only affecting about 15-20% of the systems. Geography plays a big role in warfare, and can give a smaller, weaker force a big advantage if they are highly customized to their local geography.
It would be interesting to have an option where a fleet could "go dark" in a system and ambush other fleets. When considering the geography of space, you really need to consider how big it is. If someone is being careful to not emit any signals and your sensors aren't pointed exactly at their location, you will miss them. Techs like gravimetric sensors would nerf this, obviously because spatial distortions.
 
I dearly wish Paradox would put up higher res versions of achievement images somewhere, maybe to be used like the flag avatars of the forum (maybe for April Fool's day at the very least, though it's bad timing to think of that now). Many of them are great/hilarious and I wish I could see them more clearly.
 
EDIT: Here's a slightly edited suggestion you can go vote on.

A major issue with the UI both from a general UX and an accessibility point of view is how the game loves to give you all those event popups about something happening... somewhere. But you don't know where that somewhere is, and if you click the button to zoom there, it zooms on it... hiding it dead center behind the event dialogue. So you have to move aside the event dialogue to see anything. As a bonus, the button also closes the galaxy map, ensuring you have no clue where the planet that is shown is in relation to your empire and need to click an extra button to see the map. It's tiring, and all those extra clicks are bad from an ergonomy point of view.

To solve this, I see at least two options:
- Don't center event dialogues, put them on the left of the screen. This leaves screen real-estate on the right to zoom on the event target, so it's not hidden behind the dialogue.
- Keep centering the event dialogues, but shove them to the left whenever the player presses the "zoom to event" button. Use the space liberated at the right to center on the event target, so it's not hidden behind the dialogue.

Additionally, zooming to the even target on the galactic map should be more accessible, since it's the most useful action from an empire management point of view. For instance you can have two buttons, one for zooming on the planet and the other for zooming on the galactic map, or have right-click/left-click perform those two functions.

Clicking the "locate" button on event dialogue centers the object of interest... right behind the dialogue.
Suggested: move the dialog over or minimize it, and center the object in the available free space.

For traditions, look at what major traditions mods are doing. You have far more than suggestions available to peruse, you have people who already tried various approaches.

More Achievements​

Our artists had so much fun with the Overlord achievements that they cornered us and demanded that we add some to the species packs.
A... achievements? The game has those? Oh, you mean the things that require you to be in Ironman mode, ha ha ha, good one.
I'd love to care but too many of my games were saved by the console after a certain Distant Stars crisis started ruining the galaxy with overpowered fleet the AI can't deal with, and that beelined for my homeworld before I could switch my ship designs to torpedoes.
Not to mention I'd have to choose between achievements and the Unofficial Patch... hmm...

I prefer the term pampering orifice.
How terrible, he mis-orificed you. I think we should all start announcing our preferred orifice terms next to our name so no one gets misorificed again.
 
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One significant part of that issue could be that it is too easy to get high Happiness, which in turn means high Stability.
It would be interesting to see how differently games would develop if normal Happiness was closer to 50 than 80+.
I think you've hit the nail square: happiness, amenities, and stability are so easy to get right now I only build entertainment buildings or precinct houses as an emergency measure.

I'm not saying every planet should need them no matter what, but I shouldn't have every planet at max happiness and stability so easily either.
 
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Really hopeful performance-wise. Game has been progressing for a while now. I remember when CKII had such garbage performance that no one finished games anymore and the game was dying, then the Reapers' Due expansion came with good performance fixes and it only got better from then on.
If Stellaris could run as well as CKII Holy Fury, I would be pretty happy.

right now i know how that feels. brrrr
I live in the Amazon and during winter (AKA Rain and cold season), sometimes we get so many straight overcast/cloudly/rainy days, we start feeling like the sun is a legend spoken in ancient eras.
 
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The quick and dirty way to slightly expand that mechanic would be to simply allow people to pick two different tier 1 paths. You can be your thing, or a psychic cyborg, or a genhanced psyker, but of course you'll never get a tier 2 AP.
The benefit distribution between T1 and T2 might have to be rebalanced slightly.
So you get two ascendancies but you have to choose between specialization and versatility?
That could work, similar to how the Ethics work - you have to choose between going whole-hog Fanatic on an ethic or spreading out, with different effects.

So whole-hog Synthetic Ascesion becomes robots, while mixed Biological/Synthetic crafts the perfect symbiosis of flesh and machine, and Psy/Cyborgs use technology to reinforce their connection to the Shroud and create Psionic Mind-Machine interfaces, shroud-powered cybernetics and such.
 
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As a new player that got the base game recently, what I would like to see is the ability to get specific desired relic in a long game.

I'm playing one long campaign and have not found any relics event thou I control a significant part of the map and have defeated many empires.

I read that you should supposedly have the ability to get relics from your defeated foes but have not gotten a single one. If there is a way how to loose access to an relic that spawned please add a process that guarantees you can get relics of other empires so none of them are lost over the span of the game.
 
As a new player that got the base game recently, what I would like to see is the ability to get specific desired relic in a long game.

I'm playing one long campaign and have not found any relics event thou I control a significant part of the map and have defeated many empires.

I read that you should supposedly have the ability to get relics from your defeated foes but have not gotten a single one. If there is a way how to loose access to an relic that spawned please add a process that guarantees you can get relics of other empires so none of them are lost over the span of the game.
do you have the Ancient Relics DLC?
 
I really like the idea of linking the Origins to traditions, although im not so fan of making the space battles so long, it either should stay as it is but make the battle between fleets more decisive in war (kinda like in CK). or shorter, otherwise it would make the war even more tedious and lasting.
 
I would love to see new Traditions for game-start civics as well. Bring back the Purity tree! Criminal Syndicate and Inwards Perfection could possibly use them as well to add some more fun toys. That said, I somewhat wonder if this should take a Tradition tree, or have it's own slot much like National Ideas in EU4.

Also consider adding a Vassal oriented tradition tree for everyone who's enjoying Overlord! Something to knock down the influence cost for contract negotiations maybe?
 
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No, but I thought there were at least two in the base game according to the wiki as there are no dlc requirements mentioned.

If they aren't, then my feedback would be to add a few to the base game, unless relics are a dlc only mechanic. Thou I could see the relic tab even without any dlcs which did confuse me.
oh ok. there seems to be one for each vanilla crisis, so 3. i didn't know that. so you'll have to wait until crisis time to get a chance at scoring one.
 
I really like the idea of a post game tradition tree. or ascension tree that expands the chosen ascension or allows it to take different paths.
super cyborg instead of becoming machines to those of synthetic ascension and new machine traits for those who choose to be machines.
psychics that become demonic 40k style or things like that would be interesting to see.

I don't know about the relics rebalance because I don't play much multiplayer to say about balance.

about combat maybe the most important of what we talked about. there is one thing i love that is to give back utility to the poor destroyers and cruisers as well as to the weapons that are not used like the swarm missiles and the anti air batteries. on the other hand i am worried about making the combat longer i think this would only make the war more tedious. besides i am afraid that my low resources pc will explode if the slower combat hits the performance hahahaha

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