Stellaris Dev Diary #258 - 3.4.4 ‘Cepheus’ Information

[Sutopia]

/me stares at Surviving Mars: Below and Beyond
/me shrugs



The problem isn't creating micro vassals. The problem is spamming them for the sake of abusing certain elements of the subject system. It was done mostly with Scholarium, because of the research speed increase, so they did a semi-nerf/fix to the holding, and now it's fine.

I'm more or less fine with Ministry of Truth as it is, because it is simply too trivial even if you try your very best to spam vassals for them. (And that's why I disagree with your complaint about it) 0.3 Influence per subject. 3 influence if you managed to spam 10 vassals. Wow. Game breaking. Not.

Of course, if you want to change it to make it less potent on micro vassals, I suppose they can halve the influence output, make it so that the number of Overlord Propagandist the holding generates is at 1 50 100 200 total pop in the subject empire, capping at 4 max. You'd get only 0.15 influence on micro vassals, but 0.6 on established vassals.

As for sector size, this "arbitrary" restriction actually cuts down the number of vassal you can easily spam to 1/3 or less, and that to me sounds like a solution (or part of a solution).

Finally, you starting with an empire that has only one system has absolutely nothing to do with an empire created via releasing a vassal. A vassal created from a sector is a spin-off from an established empire, while your empire is an empire that rose from discovering FTL, either on your own or with some enlightenment help. Why would the two have equal footing in terms of territory when nothing else about them is equal?

A reminder, the influence generation is considered a job and thus subject to job output modifiers. If you play on Grand Admiral (+75%) and it being a capital (+10%) (+20% high stability / governor / misc) you get at least 0.6 influence per micro vassal. People are willing to go for 10 vassals for 120% science I don't see what prevents them from doubling influence income doing the same. There weren't many means of influence gains and it's one of the most restricted resource for empire growth, you can't tell me it's not important.

 

[Finestela]

The problem with saying "Just make it so micro vassals aren't profitable!" is . . . exactly what the current problem is. Every single mechanic they introduce they have to sigh and go "Okay guys, are players going to spam 900 vassals with 1 planet to abuse this somehow?".

To be fair, by the time you can spam 900 vassals with 1 planets, you've pretty much won the game. I'm personally okay with the players doing game breaking stuff at this point.

While I agree eliminating 1 planet vassals via your proposal is an excellent idea and definitely should be part of the solution, making holdings not absurdly overpowering by sheer number is still an important thing for the Dev to consider when doing balancing. Taking into account of profitability would still be a factor even after such change you're proposing.

Ministry of Science was always ridiculous since day 1. 12% research per vassal with no upper limit is ridiculous, micro vassal or not. Having a bunch of micro vassals merely heightened the ridiculousness to a whole different level.

By contrast, Vigil Command was meh since day 1. Massing Bulwark for it so you can have a starbase with 65535 defense platforms is gimmicky at most, and I really think it would've been fine without the empire limit, but whatever.

 

[KNakamura]

If you’re not going to read what I wrote in the context it was written, don’t quote it in pieces and try to make it seem different than it is. And definitely don’t try to take a condescending tone while you do it. But sure, let’s address your points.

I am not going to respond to every point.

“Wider player base” can catch things internal tests miss. But internal play tests would have caught a lot of them. Or are you suggesting they never had battles to catch the evasion bug or status quo peace problems? Never tested mercenaries to catch the dismissal issue(caused by vassals, which is next point), admiral issues, fleet cap issues, other issues? Never tested vassals in a vassal-featured DLC to catch the vassal bugs? These and many others would’ve been obvious very quickly. They weren’t hidden in obscure events or very specific sets of circumstances. If you’re suggesting they didn’t test it, that was kind of my point so thanks for agreeing.

If you don't want condescension, I recommend not engaging in it yourself. Also, citation required on "obvious very quickly." Like, I'm not going to disagree that some of those bugs were due to last minute fixes (because they were), but I recommend looking up the concept of 'eisenbug'. In addition, when you have limited QA hours, you have to prioritize what you test and verify.

There will never ever ever be a bug-free release in any complex program.

I also never said betas don’t have an overhead. I very clearly stated that him claiming the overhead costs to be not worth it was the problem. Twice, actually. “Release the product without proper testing and let the players sort it out later” is a bad release strategy. Full stop. You’re essentially advocating for all full releases to be beta tests rather than just doing an actual beta test or more thorough internal testing so that the bugs that make it into release version are minor rather than than not.

No, I'm saying that open-betas incur cost, and you may not have time on a schedule for the +2 weeks or so you're commuting to it. It also cuts short time testing on any fixes, because shocker, you've cut time out. It means you can't iterate as fast. Also, you need to designate more attention to the forums, and those are often the team members who need to be working on things, especially in Stellaris.

Making a forum post the following week(not the same week like you said) with an apology that was based on dishonesty(“a few last minute changes” could have been undone if they were what was causing all of the issues. Clearly that wasn’t the case, so it comes across more as an attempt to make excuses for a botched release than a genuine apology) is quite literally doing nothing to fix the game.

I said the patch came out the same week as the post, not that the post came out the same week as the release.

Also: How do you know it's dishonesty? Do you have access to the commits and evidence? No? Then you can't, at all, say it's dishonesty.

And I would have given them the benefit of the doubt had the hot fix actually… fixed all the things they broke. Which it didn’t, as I also addressed in my post. It was also released the next week, not the same week.

You know what, that's a point. May 16th is one week before the 23rd. So, yes, I was wrong there.

Also: hot fixes fix the most pressing issues, fixing everything would require more time.

And frankly, a rollback would be worse than rushing out first-priority fixes and taking time on fixes that take more time.

A patch that takes a month to fix some of the issues of the release means that it wasn’t ready on release date, and they shouldn’t have tried to release it before it was ready. That’s what I already said, though, so I don’t understand why you’re attempting to represent it otherwise. Fall is several months away, and 4 months minimum from release. Just because they’ve been going on hiatus for summer since 3.0 doesn’t mean that they should get a pass. They’ve also to my knowledge never released a version as messed up as they did this time, and they definitely didn’t say “we’ve done what we can for now, you’ll get another update in 3 months”. If you read some of the other posts in this thread, you’ll find people with similar concerns about issues that aren’t listed in this list of fixes. I have no issue with them taking a break. My issue lies with the fact that they released the DLC prematurely, and then care more about minimizing overhead costs related to QA than they do about ensuring a higher quality game. This is immediately after they promised to do better in the future. If you read my post again, I think you’ll notice where I said my issue was with him claiming that the costs wouldn’t be worth it. The rest of it was really just in support of that. It’s possible you missed it in the wall of text I wrote. Please read it again with that in mind.

"Please ignore your points and just read my bad points to support my bad reason" is also a bad argument.

And I did, and my caring that "person's x personal hobbyhorse fix isn't included!!!" is nil. There's always some "personal opinion bug" that never gets fixed, or bugs that are low priority that are delayed in favor of fixing higher-priority bugs. (And, regretfully, bugs simply missed.) And frankly, I'm of the school of thought that says at a certain point, you need to make deliverables, since waiting forever to get every bug done is worse than a regular bug patch schedule.

Your last attempt at a point is really kind of silly. It almost seems like you didn’t even read it, and only read the last sentence to try and find a “gotcha!” moment. It was very directly related to the costs and resources related to running betas. The process of running a beta is fundamentally the same regardless of the game. Some minor technicalities might differ, but the base is the same. The difference is in how many resources the different studios are willing to utilize in order to do it.

Nope. The process of running a beta depends on need and what you want out of the beta. And no two studios work alike. A game in Early Access has very different needs than a game that's in the long-tail support phase propped up by DLCs.

Edited to add: I should note: I think also ,that bugs being missed in a patch is OK, as long as the studio keeps patching them in their regular bugfixes. It's why I don't complain much about the two bugs that I find immensely annoying but workaroundable, for example. Some bugs not addressed by 3.4.4 in this thread are genuine bugs that I think should get addressed. I just don't feel it's a cause for concern unless there becomes a definite pattern of them not being addressed in the next QA window.)

 

[Sutopia]

To be fair, by the time you can spam 900 vassals with 1 planets, you've pretty much won the game. I'm personally okay with the players doing game breaking stuff at this point.

While I agree eliminating 1 planet vassals via your proposal is an excellent idea and definitely should be part of the solution, making holdings not absurdly overpowering by sheer number is still an important thing for the Dev to consider when doing balancing. Taking into account of profitability would still be a factor even after such change you're proposing.

Ministry of Science was always ridiculous since day 1. 12% research per vassal with no upper limit is ridiculous, micro vassal or not. Having a bunch of micro vassals merely heightened the ridiculousness to a whole different level.

By contrast, Vigil Command was meh since day 1. Massing Bulwark for it so you can have a starbase with 65535 defense platforms is gimmicky at most, and I really think it would've been fine without the empire limit, but whatever.

My chief complaint is that they allowed megacorp to still spam branch offices and many have empire wide modifiers. I don't really understand why subject holdings are such underdeveloped in comparison.

 

[Finestela]

A reminder, the influence generation is considered a job and thus subject to job output modifiers. If you play on Grand Admiral (+75%) and it being a capital (+10%) (+20% high stability / governor / misc) you get at least 0.6 influence per micro vassal. People are willing to go for 10 vassals for 120% science I don't see what prevents them from doubling influence income doing the same. There weren't many means of influence gains and it's one of the most restricted resource for empire growth, you can't tell me it's not important.

Subjects don't get the AI difficulty bonus, which is one of the reason why there are all the complaints about how they'd kept getting revolts and breakaways.

Also, you're ignoring the fact that having more subjects would require you expending more influence to manage in that you need to negotiate terms with every one of them. As far as I can see, it's break-even at most.

And if your subjects are stable enough, and you no long need to negotiate the contracts, you'd be overflowing with influence regardless of Ministry of Truth.

Influence at this point of the game is a resource where you either don't have enough or too much that you don't really have anywhere to spend it. Yes, you can probably claim every systems you can claim or spamming Shroudwalker lottery, but they aren't really giving you any advantage in the game. It's not like you can use influence to enact edicts back in the not-so-old days.

 

[Sutopia]

Subjects don't get the AI difficulty bonus, which is one of the reason why there are all the complaints about how they'd kept getting revolts and breakaways.

Also, you're ignoring the fact that having more subjects would require you expending more influence to manage in that you need to negotiate terms with every one of them. As far as I can see, it's break-even at most.

And if your subjects are stable enough, and you no long need to negotiate the contracts, you'd be overflowing with influence regardless of Ministry of Truth.

Influence at this point of the game is a resource where you either don't have enough or too much that you don't really have anywhere to spend it. Yes, you can probably claim every systems you can claim or spamming Shroudwalker lottery, but they aren't really giving you any advantage in the game. It's not like you can use influence to enact edicts back in the not-so-old days.

Have you played the game since update? I can't find the patch note but now AI subjects do have bonus from AI difficulty but tuned down one level, so Grand Admiral (+20 stability +100% job resource) becoming subject still keeps Admiral bonus (+15 stability +75% job resource) running.

There is no need of contract negotiation at all because released subject by default grants you at least one holdings (benevolent policy).

You don't know how broken it is unless you try it for yourself.

They give huge advantage of building more habitats for the sole purpose of pop breeding, or to influence bully other actual vassals into accepting impossible terms. (recap: declining a proposed term costs influence and you can't deny a term when you can't pay up, super easy to ask for ridiculous tax)

 

[Ethic3022]

I am not going to respond to every point.



If you don't want condescension, I recommend not engaging in it yourself. Also, citation required on "obvious very quickly." Like, I'm not going to disagree that some of those bugs were due to last minute fixes (because they were), but I recommend looking up the concept of 'eisenbug'. In addition, when you have limited QA hours, you have to prioritize what you test and verify.

There will never ever ever be a bug-free release in any complex program.




No, I'm saying that open-betas incur cost, and you may not have time on a schedule for the +2 weeks or so you're commuting to it. It also cuts short time testing on any fixes, because shocker, you've cut time out. It means you can't iterate as fast. Also, you need to designate more attention to the forums, and those are often the team members who need to be working on things, especially in Stellaris.



I said the patch came out the same week as the post, not that the post came out the same week as the release.

Also: How do you know it's dishonesty? Do you have access to the commits and evidence? No? Then you can't, at all, say it's dishonesty.



You know what, that's a point. May 16th is one week before the 23rd. So, yes, I was wrong there.

Also: hot fixes fix the most pressing issues, fixing everything would require more time.

And frankly, a rollback would be worse than rushing out first-priority fixes and taking time on fixes that take more time.



"Please ignore your points and just read my bad points to support my bad reason" is also a bad argument.

And I did, and my caring that "person's x personal hobbyhorse fix isn't included!!!" is nil. There's always some "personal opinion bug" that never gets fixed, or bugs that are low priority that are delayed in favor of fixing higher-priority bugs. (And, regretfully, bugs simply missed.) And frankly, I'm of the school of thought that says at a certain point, you need to make deliverables, since waiting forever to get every bug done is worse than a regular bug patch schedule.



Nope. The process of running a beta depends on need and what you want out of the beta. And no two studios work alike. A game in Early Access has very different needs than a game that's in the long-tail support phase propped up by DLCs.

I said in context, which only require responding to things based on the context they were used in, not quoting every sentence to respond to.

I used no condescension in my post. Not all criticism is condescending. Criticism let’s them know where they made a mistake. Condescension was all on you.

“Prioritize what you test” is the most sloppy excuse I’ve ever heard. When the biggest bugs were all easily discoverable on a simple play test, it doesn’t even require any prioritization. Just doing the bare minimum would’ve caught them. How are you defending a lack of a play test? Even one would’ve caught a lot of them.


What? Most everything you said basically revolves around “not enough time”, which is… exactly what I said. They shouldn’t have released it, because it wasn’t ready. That means they didn’t have time to get it to the quality it needed to be. How about don’t rush the game and instead take the time needed to get it to the state it needs to be? I genuinely don’t understand why you’re acting like it’s hard to just not release the game if it’s not ready. It’s actually easier(and better on company image) to fix it internally before releasing than it is to release it broken and fix it later. This actually kills games on release sometimes. There is never a valid excuse for releasing a game before it’s ready.

It was dishonest because it framed the issues as all due to a “few last minute changes”. This was obviously not the case. If it were, they could have undone the changes and fixed it. They didn’t do that, because those changes weren’t the only problem. Every development studio uses backups and changelogs. These let them address issues just like this where a later change that breaks things can be undone until they figure out what the problem is. I’m fairly certain Paradox has done this in the past. With Stellaris, even. The DLC and corresponding update were simply not ready yet. Your own posts strongly suggest that it was because they didn’t have time. Which is what I said, so I don’t know what you’re trying to disagree with. They should have owned up to it and tried to make it right instead of providing that as the sole reason and following it up with “costs aren’t worth it”. I suppose it’s possible someone screwed up along the line and they somehow ended up with only the version they released, and no changelog. If it turns out something like this is what happened, then I’ll apologize for calling it dishonest, but I find it unlikely. The development teams at Paradox are experienced and unlikely to make such a potentially devastating mistake at multiple points in the process.

They won’t “do better in the future” as they said they wanted to in that same post if they follow the premise that QA costs aren’t worth it. They need to put more work into QA not less. That’s how they do better. Which was my primary point, but you’re ignoring that. You seem to be under the misguided notion that “just releasing the game” is always better than taking the time and effort to make sure it’s actually at the quality it needs to be.

I never once said that every single bug needs to be squashed before every release. I actually said it was my most played game before the latest DLC, and some minor bugs existed then. That means it’s not the mere presence of bugs that bothers me, but the severity and quantity in this specific release. This release is what we’re talking about, not the minor bugs that were there before.

I’m aware of what a hotfix is. And as I also said, almost everything in the hotfix should’ve been caught before release. Evasion not working? Peace deals being backwards and sideways? vassals not working even close to properly? These and more should’ve been caught internally. The second part of what I was saying is that the game wasn’t ready at release.

“Please just ignore my bad points…” Really? That’s not how you dismiss something. A more useful or effective response would be to actually provide a counterpoint.

Stellaris has very recently used a beta, for a less important update. Your argument doesn’t make sense. And their wants should always be the highest quality game possible. They showed that it wasn’t for this release. Stop trying to make excuses for them releasing a DLC update before it’s ready. My issue was with him stating it’s not worth it. After the mess up they just had, every single effort should go into fixing it and preventing it from happening again, not spending less time and resources.


They’ve never messed up as badly as they did this time. Nobody is perfect, and people make mistakes. Overall, they’ve made a fun game, but if we don’t point out when they make a mistake, then they’re at risk of making it again. Asking them to put more time into QA in the future doesn’t change that. It means I care enough about the game to write a long post because I don’t believe the approach they are wanting to take is the best way to bring the game up to its potential.

 

[KNakamura]

Stellaris has very recently used a beta, for a less important update. Your argument doesn’t make sense. And their wants should always be the highest quality game possible. They showed that it wasn’t. Stop trying to make excuses for them cutting corners on quality to release a DLC update before it’s ready.

They did! Because there was changes they wanted feedback on, which is not the same scope, flatly, as bug fixes.

. You seem to be under the misguided notion that “just releasing the game” is always better than taking the time and effort to make sure it’s actually at the quality it needs to be.

No, I seem to be understand the notion that you need to release, and good enough is good enough. In the case of 3.4, it wasn't. But I'm objecting to your general drift here, not the specifics that this update needed more time. At some point, you have to release. A delayed game can be too late. It's why I can agree that it likely needed more time while disagreeing that they should have taken that time.

t’s actually easier(and better on company image) to fix it internally before releasing than it is to release it broken and fix it later. This actually kills games on release sometimes. There is never a valid excuse for releasing a game before it’s ready.

It was dishonest because it framed the issues as all due to a “few last minute changes”. This was obviously not the case. If it were, they could have undone the changes and fixed it. They didn’t do that, because those changes weren’t the only problem. Every development studio uses backups and changelogs. These let them address issues just like this where a later change that breaks things can be undone until they figure out what the problem is

I mean, yes, but No Man's Sky and Final Fantasy 14 are counterexamples to how studio can gain cred by fixing their issues. Secondly, no, faulty assumption: not every time is reversing the commits going to fix your issue.

Honestly, that seems to be the issue here. You seem to be operating on assumptions that drive your conclusions, without taking the time to analyze the assumptions. It' been very consistent that Stellaris (esp since 2.7) seems to prefer fixing the issues rather than reverting the code.

I used no condescension in my post. Not all criticism is condescending. Criticism let’s them know where they made a mistake. Condescension was all on you.

Uh huh. I think, personally, any discussions are just a distraction from this thread and will further derail. So I'm going to wish you a good night and drop this discussion.

 

[Chuunibyou Imouto]

Can the wall of text people take their 1 vs 1 debate elsewhere, kthanks

Subjects don't get the AI difficulty bonus, which is one of the reason why there are all the complaints about how they'd kept getting revolts and breakaways.

They do get their bonus, minus one stage. The issue with vassal rebellions is like three fold

1. They lose 1 stage of their difficulty bonus, and part of that bonus is stability. So their stability goes down a bit instantly even in a perfect situation
2. Usually the player is levying taxes against them too, which will further lower their resources. And I am 99.99% sure those are the gross resources produced before accounting for what they are consuming, so they might be making 1900 energy, but were only actually getting like 500 per month after all their expenses. Suddenly the player comes in and takes 60% of that 1900 and tanks their economy, AND their economy also goes down one stage too because of the difficulty bonus going down
3. The AI is still bad at managing their worlds, but most especially Primitive Planets. They invade primitive planets which then are hit by stellar shock, and the AI can barely manage to hold on to those in the absolute best of times. Then suddenly a player comes in and repeatedly kicks the AI in the testicles while they are on the ground, and the primitive planet / habitat (which they are also A W F U L at managing) starts to rebel and the AI can't stabilize it while their entire economy is on fire

And that's not even mentioning the devastation their planets probably have after the player beat the crap out of them and subjugated them a lot of the time.



The third point especially is what leads to a ton of chaos. There were stories in the first week before the hotfix where a single primitive planet would rebel against an AI, rebel against itself after it was freed from the AI, rebel against a player who took it, rebel against itself AGAIN, rebel against the original AI when they took it back, etc. They turn into black holes of rebellions because of the nonstop devastation and stellar shock and opposing ethics each time someone new takes it etc.

Another issue I've personally found when inspecting my vassal worlds that keep rebelling, is the AI has WAY too many pops that are unemployed and nothing to do with them. They will have 40+ pops sitting there not working, with all the districts and building slots maxed out / no money to build new stuff, and then the planet rebels. My vassal last game had literally like 8 or 9 rebellions in a single game, because of over population. I eventually just took their planet and rebuilt it from the ground up to not be hot garbage and then gave it back so they would stop dragging me into wars against the rebels every 10 years


I'm quite sad that the patch doesn't add any new tools for Overlords to help their vassals stabilize their empires. We really, really need a panel that lets us see that our vassals are having major stability / economy issues so we can build a holding that helps or lighten their taxes etc

 

[Soranya]

I was hoping for release today or even beta. Oh well!

Great changes, especially the automatic survey and construction.

Beta would have been a great idea tbh.

 

[Eladrin]

Is there any plans to fix the whole -1000 malus to vassalization when they are in a federation . . . if it's YOUR federation? They should be *more* willing to join you if anything, especially when you are the leader of the hegemony they are in and they are essentially already vassals to you

This is not considered a bug. You're asking them to go from being considered your equals to being significantly less than that. (Even in a Hegemony, the others have more sovereignty than an overlord:subject relationship.)

They did! Because there was changes they wanted feedback on, which is not the same scope, flatly, as bug fixes.

As I mentioned before, Open Betas carry significant overhead, and will generally only be used when we're looking for targeted feedback. If the summer experiments on combat are fruitful, that's the sort of thing we may run an Open Beta for, but not for general releases.

 

[zZander56]

This is not considered a bug. You're asking them to go from being considered your equals to being significantly less than that. (Even in a Hegemony, the others have more sovereignty than an overlord:subject relationship.)

The subject/overlord dynamic isn't exactly what it once was. With the right subsidies and tax terms, one side might give just as much as the other. It would make sense for subjugation to be able to be proposed in something like a Hegemony, which can ride the line between an equal and unequal relationship just as much.

(Ideally though, the contract system would be expanded to Feds. It seems like something that could be applied to any close cooperating states, not just subjects and overlords.)

 

[Mímisbrunnr]

This is not considered a bug. You're asking them to go from being considered your equals to being significantly less than that. (Even in a Hegemony, the others have more sovereignty than an overlord:subject relationship.)



As I mentioned before, Open Betas carry significant overhead, and will generally only be used when we're looking for targeted feedback. If the summer experiments on combat are fruitful, that's the sort of thing we may run an Open Beta for, but not for general releases.

EDIT, 6/20: Also, it seems like I might have misunderstood some of the other reports - it may be that Federation Fleets were fine all along and it was GDF at fault. My sincerest apologies if this is the case.

On a different note, seeing that you're around and awake, evidently, could you please, PLEASE, make it a priority to fix the federation fleet/GDF/Imperial Armada bug before you release 3.4.4 and break for the summer?

Currently, as many bug reports and forum posts have already noted, these are broken in that they all now consume your own naval capacity as the player in addition to the federation/GDF's naval cap, when they are specifically not supposed to do this. This heavily undermines a key element of the federation and GDF - especially problematic for federations, as you give up naval cap in the first place to have a federation fleet, and this bug now causes you to then have to have a worse than duplicated 2nd payment of your naval cap for the full ship of that which remains. The federation fleet ships aren't supposed to use national naval caps beyond the existing % contrition, but are taking the president's leftover national naval cap too, undermining their use

As this is not listed in the changeling, I am strongly concerned that if this is not fixed that federations will be broken all summer. Please, please, don't release 3.4.4 without fixing this.

EDIT: This is also an issue because federation fleets are already kind of a bad deal in many cases, because often you end up growing large enough that the naval capacity you give up as the player could cover the 600 naval cap limit all on its own [especially with Entente Coordination, etc.], and your extra naval cap paid to it is already wasted to begin with under normal, non-bugged circumstances. But now this is an extra kick against federations because even after paying all that naval cap to your federation as the tax to have a federation fleet, well whoops, due to the bug you need to pay the entire federation's naval cap again, leaving you FAR less to cover your national fleet than you are supposed to. This extra payment that deprives you of national naval cap you shouldn't be losing hits the Galactic Defense Force and Imperial Armada too due to the current bug, though for them you didn't pay your naval cap as tax to get those [you're paying a % of your alloys instead].

On an unrelated note, I might have missed it, but I didn't see anything in the changeling either about Commercial Pacts quoting the wrong income for you [namely, swapping who gets what incorrectly in the statement it gives you].

 

[DarkSafire]

Barring unforeseen exceptional circumstances, our next update is planned to be the 3.5 ‘Fornax’ update in the fall.

Good job on patch, but this...

3.4.4 will be second update after major release and you are already cuting off short-time updates and QOL, opting to go for next content development. Again.

Game has more bugs to fix than patch does, like GDF fleet taking up player fleet cap (its not even mentioned, and things like that need to be fixes ASAP not 2-3 months later, maybe, with next big release). Not to mention need for polish and QOL.

Honestly i dont see the point of two teams working on develoment if at least one of them isnt working on current issues an releasing updates regulary (few weeks to month max).

Anyway, have nice holidays and enjoy summer.

 

[Starfury]

Good job on patch, but this...

3.4.4 will be second update after major release and you are already cuting off short-time updates and QOL, opting to go for next content development. Again.

Game has more bugs to fix than patch does, like GDF fleet taking up player fleet cap (its not even mentioned, and things like that need to be fixes ASAP not 2-3 months later, maybe, with next big release). Not to mention need for polish and QOL.

Honestly i dont see the point of two teams working on develoment if at least one of them isnt working on current issues an releasing updates regulary (few weeks to month max).

Anyway, have nice holidays and enjoy summer.

The Custodians are working on current issues. 3.5 (which will probably be out in August) is very likely going to be like 3.3 and 3.1, just a larger patch without a corresponding DLC release.

Expecting regular updates every few weeks is just not realistic, especially if you also complain that they don't test their releases enough.

 

[Harkinian's Dinner]

Good job on patch, but this...

3.4.4 will be second update after major release and you are already cuting off short-time updates and QOL, opting to go for next content development. Again.

Game has more bugs to fix than patch does, like GDF fleet taking up player fleet cap (its not even mentioned, and things like that need to be fixes ASAP not 2-3 months later, maybe, with next big release). Not to mention need for polish and QOL.

Honestly i dont see the point of two teams working on develoment if at least one of them isnt working on current issues an releasing updates regulary (few weeks to month max).

Anyway, have nice holidays and enjoy summer.

The next patch is a Custodian patch which means it will indeed be focused on quality of life and general improvements. But what you're saying is true - it's not a good look to leave the game for several months with some pretty major, presumably easily fixed glaring bugs like the one you mentioned. This patch fixes a ton of niche bugs, but leaves som big, immediately apparent ones intact. See also: The Hyper Relay bug where fleets refuse to use regular hyperlanes even when it's faster or when you want to escape a hostile fleet and directly order your fleets to use the regular hyperlane.

 

[DarkSafire]

The Custodians are working on current issues. 3.5 (which will probably be out in August) is very likely going to be like 3.3 and 3.1, just a larger patch without a corresponding DLC release.

Expecting regular updates every few weeks is just not realistic, especially if you also complain that they don't test their releases enough.

The Custodian team was specifically created to polish/improve existing content.

Stellaris Dev Diary #214: Announcing “The Custodians” initiative and the free Lem Update

Greetings! Today I am here to announce some very good news! Stellaris is not slowing down, but rather picking up the pace! We at PDS Green are very happy to announce our new “Custodians” initiative as well as the next free update, coming...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Resolving current issues esp. bugs are job for "core" team. Also hotfix for Overlord was released in 1-1,5 week time, so they are capable to do regular updates. They either dont want to do it or higher-ups see this as waste of time.

 

[Starfury]

The Custodian team was specifically created to polish/improve existing content.

And that's what they've been doing for over a year now. And you've been getting the results of their work in three month intervals since 3.1

Resolving current issues esp. bugs are job for "core" team. Also hotfix for Overlord was released in 1-1,5 week time, so they are capable to do regular updates. They either dont want to do it or higher-ups see this as waste of time.

Yes, 3.4.3 was released after a week. And - being a hotfix - it circumvented many of their usual deployment processes (for example there was no localization for any of the changes in the hotfix). They did it that way, because there were gamebreaking issues that needed to be fixed quickly. Luckily, 3.4.3 didn't introduce any new problems despite that rushed release, probably due to a combination of them mainly focussing on the issues that were easier to fix and a bit of the luck of the Swedish.

The bigger the problem, the quicker you want to fix it. The quicker you try to fix it, the more shortcuts you need to take compared to the usual processes. The more shortcuts you take, the higher the risk of unintended consequences. That's part of what happened with the rushed 3.4.2 day 0 patch.

You can't run a project the size of Stellaris in a constant state of emergency. And that's what releasing every few weeks would be.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Regarding auto-tech research, will it exclude dangerous tech? Also, what logic does it follow? I've only tried it when on repeatables, and find it just goes for the same repeat tech everytime (say Army Damage) but doesn't do the others at anypoint.

Auto-research follows the same logic as the research choices AI empires make - but it shouldn't be spamming the same repeatable tech every time. Mind giving a bug report with a save?

However, I would like to propose one more change.
Considering that starbases are unable to custom-designed - rather randomly fitted in the player's view - and all the problems are caused by the annoying A slot in the starbase, could you consider that REMOVE all the A slots form the starbases, and give some BASIC IN-COMBAT REGENERATION for some feasible rate for the all starbases? Maybe that could be done by ship_size modifier or something, easy at the dev's end.
That will make starbases much more stronger and make all the problems with randomly-combat-repairing-starbase problems.

I'm gonna have a look at experimenting with this as part of our summer combat experiments.

Can you move all Unity buildings under the Unity category buildings too, please?

Setting myself a reminder to get this done when I have some free time.

Not really - since the scholarium special holding building doesnt grant a percentage bonus anymore and instead improves the scholariums researchers, so the subject produces more science (therefore indirectly pays the overlord more research). And if you have one planet scholariums they wont have a dedicated tech planet, therefore not pay much research tribute to the overlord and the holding cannot change much, if there arent a lot of pops with science jobs anyway.
Basically - one system scholariums become entirely pointless.

Last time I checked, the relay network bonus (+10% from scientist output) still stacked, so there might still be some benefit.

These seem like two seperate ways to address the same issue (The patch nots also have a few more duplicates).

Can you ensure not both solutions are applied nerfing the holding more than necessary?


Also because I just had a freind fall into this issue again:

Stellaris - Ministry of Culture can be built only once per empire, despite being limited to 1 per planet

Description Ministry of Culture can be built only once per empire, despite being limited to 1 per planet Game Version 3.4.3 What version do you use? Steam What expansions do you have installed? Do you have mods enabled? No...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Worth keeping in mind, that the holding still gives +3% research speed buff.

I think that is likely. Their new release schedule seems to be custodian -> species pack -> custodian -> major dlc -> repeat

Plus,

Almost certainly. The previous dev diary said the developers are encouraged to experiment with their own ideas during their summer break, and there is a long list of existing features that they've said they want to take another look at.

Keep in mind that we're not expecting every experiment to be successful.

 

[Pancakelord]

• The Manifesti faction now use their faction icon.

Nice, looks like this bug got fixed.

Are custom / modded / non-vanilla Pop factions still causing CTDs in 3.4.4's internal build?
Deets in below thread

Has anyone been able to spawn a custom pop_faction in 3.4 without a CTD?

Title. I've been trying to implement a custom faction, which was not a problem to do prior to overlord/3.4. However, i've been running in to constant CTDs trying to get any extra factions working. I tried a ton of different combinations, like...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

I got the impression this was linked to recent Loc string changes, and would be too big a task to fix inthe initial 3.4 hotfix. Wondering where it's at now?
(and other loc related bugs like this: )

Stellaris - 3.4.3 - GetAdj/GetAdjective does not work, is returning GetName

Description 3.4.3 - GetAdj/GetAdjective does not work, is returning GetName Game Version 3.4.3 What version do you use? Steam What expansions do you have installed? Do you have mods enabled? No Please explain your issue is in...

forum.paradoxplaza.com