Stellaris Dev Diary #264 - Damn the Consequences

[HFY]

Probably introduced during the Detox process, to convert something bad on the planet into something somewhat less bad. It's just when the something bad ran out, they still needed to be removed.

Do the insects appear in the colony's Features list?

They really should.

 

[Pancakelord]

Neat. I wonder though if we'll see energy based lifeforms at some point,

Stares in robotic pops.

Yeah but toxic worlds aren't just 'ammonia worlds'. They span all the way to VENUS.

But not all toxic worlds are made equal - for not all are terraforming candidates. Terraformable toxic worlds... Are the least shitty toxic worlds I guess, places where organisms might conceivably survive, for a time.

Though it makes me wonder if we could see lithoid or nanite, not just biological, flavours of this for terraforming in the future.

 

[Mcgan]

No matter how I read it, it seems "Relentless Industrialists" will not have a Gestalt equivalent. Not sure about "Scavengers".
I hope this DLC will not be yet another disappointment for Gestalts.

Also I agree with others that said "Relentless Industrialists" shouldn't be exclusive to Materialists. I also don't think it should be possible to pick it with Anglers. Maybe not Idealistic Foundation either. And probably others I can't think of right now.

The new "Detox" Ascension Perk does not look great either:
- Just the ability to terraform some Toxic Worlds? (Apparently, big worlds (size 25+) will never be eligible for balance reasons)
- Terraforming them will be longer and (likely) more expensive?
Nothing else? One AP slot for that? Why not just go for Habitats instead? What makes this actually good?
Unless some of the new traits can benefit from the planet being a former toxic world, this feels underwhelming.

Finally, I don't think I'm understanding all the effects of the new traits.
Some seem to have a mix of bad and good effects, and no cost is displayed. If they are actually free, then I guess it's fine. But if they have a positive cost...

I'm just hoping for some good news at this point.

I do like that 2 of the civics have some clear downside to them. I'd like more of that.
I'm not sure the positives are always good enough to still be interesting though.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Mutagenic Spas

Our first civic that does not start you out with its special building, Mutagenic Spas, and all of its alternate versions, give you the option of boosting your pop growth on highly industrialized worlds, as your pops enjoy the fruits of your pollution.

If it launches in this state, Mutagenic Spas will probably be dead on arrival, like Idyllic Bloom.

First, the Bath Attendant jobs won't be worth working, just like Medical Workers:

The benefits are quite small, even if you can mitigate the penalties: Spas give -.5% happiness, +.5% upkeep/amenity usage, -.25% resources from jobs, and .75% pop growth per industrial district per attendant. Scale that up to a full-ish industrial planet with 20 districts (assuming you have two Bath Attendants) and you get +30% growth for -10% resources from jobs, 20% upkeep/amenities, 20% happiness, and 2 pops. They're like Medical Workers' even crappier cousins.​

Two Medical Workers give 10% growth/assembly, another 2.5% growth from habitability (and 2.5% resources from jobs and 5% reduced upkeep), plus 10 amenities. They're barely worth it on worlds with 20+ pops, and only then because their habitability bonuses make them worthwhile to keep around despite the lackluster growth bonus.​

With 20 industrial districts, two Bath Attendants give 2.4x as much growth as Medical Workers, but with all their other benefits flipped and doubled (more upkeep, more amenities needed, less output, less happiness instead of more amenities). And Medical Workers were already not worth using except on the largest planets. If you have 200 pops in your empire (150 growth required) and you ignore all the penalties except growth from habitability, a planet with Bath Attendants will take roughly 35-45 years before it has more pop-months of output than one without (assuming both are getting 4.5 growth and have no other modifiers like Rapid Breeders). That is: after 40 years, you'll have grown 4 extra pops (net 2 extra) and those extra pops will have been working long enough to finally catch up with just having the two Bath Attendants working other jobs the entire time. If you have fewer than 20 industrial districts, the time increases proportionally: with only 10 districts, it takes roughly 70 years. And this is ignoring all the other penalties (assuming you can somehow mitigate them with gaia/ecumenopolis habitability cheese, or with some new traits): with the -10% resources from jobs from habitability, you may not catch up in total output for 500 years or more.​

​

Second, and probably more importantly, any effects are going to be for a few worlds of your empire, so the average effect of the civic is going to be tiny.

If 1/6 of your planets are hardcore industrial specialized, the net effect on your empire will be roughly 5% growth per planet. And that is probably a little generous. In my games, it's more like 1/12 planets (though most colonies are actually empty breeder colonies). It will be par with just the +1% pop growth per entertainer from Pleasure Seekers (which basically exists just for the memes). It will be a bonus so small that you'll never notice it.​

Even in late game, if you have a huge size 30 industrial planets and have a larger proportion of your pops working forge jobs (since you need fewer workers), you'll still not get much benefit because of the massive slowdown in growth required. "Pay 2 pops now for 45% extra growth" is a losing proposition if it takes 60 months to grow a pop, by default, instead of 33, and even more so if that 45% growth is on top of 120% because of tech (a ~33% improvement) instead of on top of 90% because of imperfect habitability (a 50% improvement).​

​

You can try to mitigate this by building industrial districts on all your worlds (and just leaving the jobs empty), possibly combining with Masterful Crafters for slots to use them as a city replacement that also boosts growth, but that will cost an enormous amount of minerals. And because you won't be able to pack as many industrial districts in (because of the actual other districts, like worker districts, taking up slots), your Bath Attendants will all be the won't-pay-for-itself-for-70-years-or-never-if-you-actually-look-at-habitability type, not the pay-for-itself-in-40-years type.​

The hive mind version is even worse: -15% habitability (-7.5% growth) for 30% assembly is barely a net positive unless you have Budding or are spamming Splinter Hives and only using this on the capital. -7.5% of 4.5 is -.3375 growth per month, and you get 2*.3=.6 growth per month in return. And you take an enormous penalty to job output/amenity usage.

The machine one might actually be usable, but only because you can cheese it so easily: you probably ought to be running minimum maintenance drones anyway, especially if you're a Rogue Servitor, so the increased amenity requirements might not affect you at all. But if you actually maintain amenities, and you have this on any planet that isn't just 5 Replicators, 2 Lubrication Terminal pops, 20 empty industrial districts, with no other pops: this will be net negative, since it will cost you so many drones. Each extra maintenance drone you need will eat into your extra pops, so that it takes you just as long to pull a profit as an organic empire. Suppose you have 20 industrial districts and you're working all of them: you have ~50 working pops and 13 maintenance drones to give them amenities. The 40% extra amenity usage means your maintenance drones are now only making 3.4 extra amenities (instead of 3.8), so you'll actually need another 2 maintenance drones to support the amenities (and extra 2 pops). So you're starting 4 pops in the hole, instead of 2, and at 150 growth required and 6 base assembly, it will take you 5 years to assemble your first full extra pop, and around 50 before you're actually caught up on pop production.

All these comparisons with growth are also tacitly assuming that resources later are worth the same as resource now, which is demonstrably not true (but it's hard to calculate the difference).

I love the idea of this civic, but it's just too weak. It's barely even useful on the few worlds where you can use it, and you only use it on a tiny portion of your empire, so it's very close to net 0. Even if you can cheese the downside with some other effects (like Nu-Baol for perfect habitability, Subterranean or Noxious for minimum habitability so the penalties don't matter, or empty planets with full industrial districts for growth without working pops impacted by penalties), its effects are so diffuse that you won't really notice that it's there.

A few ideas that would (I hope) make it better without changing the theme, though doing all (or even more than one) may be too much:

• Give the building some base effects: -5% habitability and +7.5% growth, even with the bath attendants absent, would make it actually usable to spam everywhere.
• Give the attendants some base effects: +5% growth and -2% happiness for regular empires, without industrial districts, would make them way more worth it on industrial worlds, and potentially usable on non-industrial worlds for someone really dedicated to the growth-at-all-costs idea that this civic implies. The base could take away some of the scaling negatives (like flat happiness penalties only, with habitability/growth being the only scaling factor).
• Just double or triple all the attendant effects: it doesn't matter that it only affects 1/10 of your planets if it has a massive +80% growth and -40% habitability on the few that it does affect. And even with the negatives amplified, the job becomes way more worth it if you're setting aside 2 pops and crippling your output for an extra pop every 3 years instead of an extra one every 10.

I so badly want this to be usable, even if you have to design an empire around it. But I don't see how it can be, as it currently stands. It's Idyllic Bloom all over again. It takes too long to be useful, and costs to much to be more than marginal benefit, even then.

 

[DeanTheDull]

A bunch of interesting ideas, team. Even if it's not meta, it's definitely among the more creative pack of perks, and not just a bunch of bland modifiers. Kudos for the creativity!


Initial Impressions / Questions


Origin: Overtuned

Definitely a potent bio-ascension origin, especially with the expansion of genetic trait perks.

By the looks of it, this will be best as a species where the main species is predominant in pops, but not the leader-caste, so more of a xenophile/egalitarian build. Doing double-down traits for maximum advantage, then trading this via bio-ascension to maximize the value of your worker pops while leaving leadership to longer-lived species, sounds promising.

Question: With bio-ascension, will you be able to put these Overtuned perks onto non-primary species?




Traits:

Incubator

Again, powerful. More pops faster is key to the snowball, especially since habitability more or less ensures other pops will come along who can get better normal growth on most planets, meaning the original population growth is transitory anyway. In that respect, this is probably very good for a stratified economy/slavery system, where your early planets grow their starting crop of future rulers/specialists who dominate the political power when growth is taken over by conquered slaves and such.

On the other hand, there's an interesting case for egalitarian/democracies here: use the +30% growth on a bad world (worth a 60-habitability difference), and then auto-migrate to your better worlds. These better worlds will lose some of their own growth, but also fill up faster overall, and eventually get the growth rate bonus to also compensate.

Question: To confirm, the incubator rate is by planetary population of all species, not just the incubator species, correct?
(IE, 25 incuabors have the same growth as 1 incubator/24 non-incubators.)



Inorganic Breath

Again, powerful. While not as OP as crystals that can boost Tiyanki/Mining Drone weapons in the very early game, gas edicts for subspace travel is considerable more reach for scouts to find stuff, and shields for early wars. Since you only need a small amount to gain access to the market, which is the point of it, this will be really good for necrophages, who will be consistently converting their prepatents and keeping the numbers low, but able to afford the edict.



Noxious

This... is an extremely nice trait for stratified economy slaver builds, especially those who can Merchant Spam. The fact that the noxious gain is higher than the happiness penalty, combined with political weighting dynamics, could makes this extremely strong for both Necrophages, Syncretic Evolution, and the Federation starts where you can very quickly get secondary species.

Question: To clarify- do the noxious pops lower happiness of other noxious pops?
(Your comment implies only the non-noxious pops, but that's not clear from the description.)




Exotic Megabolism

This one, I'm honestly not sure would ever be worth it outside of vassal farming for pops, and even then I'm not sure it'd be worth the cost.

Due to how the growth cap works, 25% growth even at the top of the S curve (4.5) is only 1.125 extra growth a month. Even if growth required in the mid-game is 'only' 120, it would be 10 years to grow an extra pop. Even if there was only 1 pop of this species that entire time, that'd be 15 exotic gas and the 150 minerals / about 480 energy upkeep that the pop has to work off. That's not nothing... but it would never be only one pop either, and by the bio-ascension mid-game you should have a lot more pops, and thus a lot more growth required.

For most empires, the best way this might be cost 'effective' is if you do a vassal farm and just give a subject the exotic gas directly for the period of time until you incorporate them. Which means you're not doing an exotic gas subsidy to balance the tribute, which undercuts the better part of the role of a subject. Ultimately, come the mid-game where this would be most in force, natural growth is least needed- most growth comes from conquest or the slave market.

But with the growth not worth it, what about habitability? Well, at this point you're in the bio-ascension business, which means you can just rewrite habitation preference, to get to 80, and get to 100 via techs. Or slap on Robust, for a separate 50.

Lifespan? Well, there's another trait for that... and techs.

I may be missing some play, but...




Civics



Mutagenic Spas

We need to see what the bath attendant job is to see if this is worthwhile, but unless it's a very powerful job, this looks, on the face of it, to be bad. The crux is that growth goes up while habitability- which affects both growth and output, goes down. However, the 3.0 pop meta is a pop efficiency, not pop growth, meta, and reducing the efficiency of your expensive industrial worlds for long-term growth isn't really meaningful when the mid-game growth isn't via growth, but purchase or conquest. If this civic is just a worse gene clinic in terms of pop-efficiency, there's no clear reason to do it.



Relentless Industrialists

By contrast, industrialize-into-tombworld actually looks kind of good, with some clear use cases if you build for it. This could be amazing for post-apocalyptic, subterraneans, lithoids, machine-users, or worm-followers who don't mind about the planet conversion. This could especially combo with, say, Incubator, where a few small resource worlds funnel the growth into the tombworld industrial centers. This would probably also make a powerful mid-game civic, when people have the droids enough to dedicate a few industrial worlds into devastation and high-efficiency.

It also means radiophototropic has a role outside of worm bio-ascension, which is good.


Scavengers

Calling it now, Scavengers will be the must-have that militarists have needed all this time, getting the alloy rebate needed to make early wars more profitable beyond a homeworld conquest. Teachers of the Shroud + Barbaric Despoiler + Scavenger in particular will be something to watch for, as early psionic admirals and functionally 2 extra ascension perks could allow a bit too much fun.




Ascension Perk

Detox

Question: What's the normal % of worlds in a galaxy that are normally toxic?

I'm not sure how many toxic worlds there are supposed to be in the game, so it's not at all clear how much this might help.





In review, a lot of creativity, several strong options, and possibly a few clunkers. Fitting, I suppose?

 

[OnyxAbussos]

I'm very sad that we wont be able to play a species that starts out living on Toxic worlds. I was looking forward to playing Tholians or Sheliak (except toxic instead of molten or frozen worlds).

 

[DarkSafire]

Interesting concept, but some of these features need balancing:

• Overtuned - need additional penalty pop side and/or more severe leader lifespan penalty. Even if i have to hire new leader every 5-10 years, its still massive bonus for fraction of the cost
• Incubators - make max malus mirror the bonus
• Noxious - habitability bonus dosent make senese unless it applies only to toxic worlds
• Relentless Industrialists - need additional penalty other than pop grow, otherwise you just pick Post-Apocalyptic, import pops from other worlds and its free Alloys and CG

Also i hope Scavenger effects are blocked by Enigmatic Engineering.

 

[TrotBot]

‘Sup, trash bangers?

Today we’ll be taking a look at some of the features coming in the Toxoids Species Pack. As we’re on an accelerated dev diary schedule, there’s no time to lose! Let’s jump straight into this and turn it over to @Gruntsatwork .

Overtuned​

One of our two new Origins for Toxoids, Overtuned is the grim but exalting reminder that a brief life burns the brightest. Through invasive surgery and by modifying biochemical pathways you can impart your pops with 13 new overtuned traits. Each of these traits is a mirror to an already existing, far more survivable trait.

View attachment 873720

As you can see, the overtuned traits can even be picked with their “natural” opposing traits, or stacked with their mirrors for all your double-dipping needs. There are next to no restrictions on mixing them with other traits, so feel free to create whatever biological monstrosities you can imagine.

In practice, the overtuned traits are all about as strong or slightly weaker than their mirror traits, usually cheaper in trait point cost and reduce your leader lifespan depending on their point cost.

In addition to their normal effects, the origin will also grant you access to a new edict called “Damn the Consequences”.

This edict doubles the positive effect of all overtuned traits, but also doubles the upkeep of those pops. Its unity cost is a percentage of your own unity income, so you will always be able to damn the consequences. Furthermore, the edict has a lock-in period of 5 years, which means you will not be able to cancel the edict until it has been active for those 5 years.

New Traits​

With Toxoids, we are adding 4 new traits to the game, available to all portraits and 3 of these traits will be available at gamestart.

Incubators
View attachment 873721
Incubator pops will enjoy only a modest bonus on their capital worlds given their starting number of pops but fresh colonies will quickly reveal its full power.

Inorganic Breath
View attachment 873722
A small but flavorful addition to our trait roster, to better support your exotic needs.

Noxious
View attachment 873723
Noxious pops will decrease the happiness of all non-noxious pops on the same planet, while in turn receiving a happiness bonus for every non-noxious and therefore unhappy pop. Talk about toxic neighbors.

Exotic Metabolism however, is an advanced Trait and will thus require fully finished Genetic Ascension, as it requires a robust economy to support their exotic upkeep.
View attachment 873724
Its benefits are strong, its upkeep severe and it requires a deep investment into biological enhancements, we hope to see some interesting builds with this.

Civics​

Toxoids will also bring 3 new civics with it, to give you more of that slimy but satisfying feeling.

Mutagenic Spas
View attachment 873725
Our first civic that does not start you out with its special building, Mutagenic Spas, and all of its alternate versions, give you the option of boosting your pop growth on highly industrialized worlds, as your pops enjoy the fruits of your pollution.

Relentless Industrialists
View attachment 873726
Relentless Industrialists will have to deal with an ongoing situation about the environmental effects of their increased efficiency in alloy and consumer goods production. Of course, should you be cold-hearted and profit-oriented enough, it becomes a self-solving problem, if you can afford to work in such a hostile environment.

Scavengers
View attachment 873727
Arriving hand in hand with one of our changes for the free patch, namely the ability to choose what you wish to gain from debris, alloys or research, the new Scavenger civic will allow an empire to gain both benefits as well as salvage some actual ships from the debris.

Megacorps have access to all three civics.

Detox Ascension Perk​

View attachment 873730
View attachment 873728
Even the toughest species can’t quite survive in a world that is entirely poisonous.

50% poisonous however is another beast altogether.

With the Detox ascension perk, empires will be able to turn those giant balls of death into giant balls of not-quite-death.

Given how perilous toxic worlds are, this act of terraforming will be a bit more involved than normal, since even after the initial phase makes them colonizable, there will be remnants of their toxic pasts interfering with their prosperity.

View attachment 873731

Next Dev Diary​

This Thursday we’ll have a dev diary from the Artists, including some interesting things about the character’s outfits and what we’ve done differently there.

See you then! Don't forget you can Pre-Order Toxoids Now!

This is all so very exciting! Can I combine with pleasure seekers for crazy stacks of pop growth?

 

[Idle America]

It would be interesting if a toxoid species could wipe itself out if its rate of reproduction can't keep up with the reduced lifespans. A brief life burns the brightest... so why not apply that to the entire empire?

Also, with the new genetic traits, I would like to request that "Nerve Stapled" be reclassified as a negative trait, so we don't have to take that ascension path to free them. It may be beneficial to their overlords, but the trait classification should be based on how it affects the species itself.

 

[DeanTheDull]

This is all so very exciting! Can I combine with pleasure seekers for crazy stacks of pop growth?

Pleasure seekers is pretty bad at stacking for pop growth, so it's more like you can throw pleasure seekers in the stack of available growth modifiers and not know the difference. Incubators alone can be worth 30 pleasure-seeker entertainers on new worlds, and civic-wise both Corvee System and Free Haven can generate more pop growth from immigration than you're liable to get from entertainers for most of the early game.

What should interest you is the very nice fanatic egalitarian synergy with Incubators. Shared Burdens is typically bad in the early game both because of the worker malus and the worse-than-average habitability scaling. The ability to get 60-habitability-worth of growth scaling, and then auto-resettle pops with democracy to higher-habitability worlds, will support rapid build-ups of infrastructure on your best worlds in a way that will gain the benefits of things like Shared Burdens.

 

[Numkelis]

Woohoo!

Finally, I can voluntarily make tomb worlds from my planets and can make the most out of my post-apocalyptic, radiotrophic death cultist veggies. This is the best news I got this week.

Keep up the awesome work, guys!

Cheers~

 

[Eladrin]

Can I combine with pleasure seekers for crazy stacks of pop growth?

Sure.

Do the insects appear in the colony's Features list?

They're one of the blockers that can generate, and can be removed.

Instead of removing these obstacles it would be more original to be able to convert them into something useful

Sounds like something the Knights of the Toxic God would say.

 

[-Herek-]

Did you change the Noxious trait? I thought it was supposed to make other empires reluctant to fight you?

From the previous diary:
Noxious: Other species can’t stand being around you, and it seems like your mere existence is making your planets awful places to live. On the other hand, other empires have a very difficult time wanting to fight or subjugate you, and it’s hilarious to see the look on their faces when you’re in the room!

 

[Zoomy]

Glad to see we're finally getting a way to terraform planets into Tomb Worlds, even if it's gradual and non-standard. Now options like Memorialists and the Radiotropic trait might actually be playable at full strength.

 

[indalecio248]

I still think relentless industrialists shouldn't require materialism. Simple lack of interest in long-term sustainability is sufficient.
Even the less materialist countries (in terms of the stellaris ethic) are very, very enviromentally destructive often times. The USA has significantly higher religiousity than most industrialised countries, but it is certainly not incentivising them to implement large scale enviromental protections. Especially the main party appealing to the major religious groups (especially the fundamentalists) is the one more opposed to such protections. Similar pattern with German major parties of explicitly religious origin (it's in the name).
This is just to illustrate that those do not need to go together.

I think it has more to do with the description. This kind of thinking is indicated by a belief that there's no hope for anything after death, therefore you need to get as much fun and pleasure -NOW-, or you're going to be missing out. This is a very materialistic outlook.

Spoiler

EDIT:
A Spiritualist is unlikely to build a 'Coordinated Fulfillment Center'. Its not that Spiritualist won't pollute, its that he's not going to try squeezing everything out of life now, because he fears that there's nothing afterwards

 

[Mcgan]

Glad to see we're finally getting a way to terraform planets into Tomb Worlds, even if it's gradual and non-standard. Now options like Memorialists and the Radiotropic trait might actually be playable at full strength.

I thought the same, but Memorialists is apparently not compatible with Relentless Industrialists, so can't have both at the same time.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Sounds like something the Knights of the Toxic God would say.

Ni!

 

[MicroBlogganism]

Lots of neat ideas! Looking forward to playing around with them. Although I am a bit surprised that the Tree of Life origin doesn't show up in any of the restrictions, like Life Seeded does. Kind of seems like needing/wanting to keep a giant tree alive and destroying the environment shouldn't mix lol

 

[Turnil]

Mutagenic Spas

We need to see what the bath attendant job is to see if this is worthwhile, but unless it's a very powerful job, this looks, on the face of it, to be bad. The crux is that growth goes up while habitability- which affects both growth and output, goes down. However, the 3.0 pop meta is a pop efficiency, not pop growth, meta, and reducing the efficiency of your expensive industrial worlds for long-term growth isn't really meaningful when the mid-game growth isn't via growth, but purchase or conquest. If this civic is just a worse gene clinic in terms of pop-efficiency, there's no clear reason to do it.

1. capital world has enough habitability to make it worthwhile. (and a happiness boost)
2. lithoid can use it on all their "80%" habitability planets. 80 + 50 = 130. so 30 industrial districts before it gets below 100.
3 special worlds like Gaia and hive worlds will always be at 100% habitability.

 

[Soup4ever]

4 new Toxoid traits available to all portraits? They should do that with the Lithoid trait