Stellaris Dev Diary #273 - A Peek into the Future

[Alfray Stryke]

Good Afternoon, I’m taking over Dev Diary duties this week as Eladrin is away!

We’ve been continuing to work on the 3.6 ‘Orion’ patch, and hope to have another update for the Open Beta out next week. The feedback we’ve received has been immensely useful and I cannot thank those that have been providing it enough!

Here is a preview of some of the new UI art our artists have been working on for the new features and additions coming in 3.6 ‘Orion’ and a small selection of some of the changes we’re planning to get into the Open Beta for the next update following the feedback both on the forums and our discord.

Work in Progress UI Art for new Resolutions, Traits, and Ship Components.

Work in Progress UI Art for the Holy Covenant Federation​

Spoiler: Preview for planned changes to the Stellaris 3.6.0 ‘Orion’ open beta

• Modular Cybernetics no longer gives hive-minds +10% pop assembly, instead their Spawning Pools now gain Augmentation Drone jobs, which turn alloys into Cyborg Pop Assembly.
• The Integrated Preservation tradition for Machine Intelligences now affects Evaluators (and Chronicle Drones) not Coordinators.
• The Whisperers in the Void stability penalty has been reduced, but now imposes a small reduction in Unity production.
• Larger Unbidden ships and structures now have an Arc Defense Field to vaporize attacking strike craft and missiles.

Please note that the 3.6 "Orion" Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it.
Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test" branch.

Don't forget to turn off your mods, they will break.​

 

[Eladrin]

So are missles, torpedos and strikecraft 100% useless against those ships and structures, or is it just a special form of point defense?

It's a special form of point defense with some quirks.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Answering a few questions before I go make dinner:

Forgive me if this is actually extremely difficult for you to deal with, but will the Totalitarian faction issues with assimilation be fixed in the upcoming update?

It's making it somewhat problematic to make use of ascensions as an Authoritarian in a way that doesn't really make sense.

This is on my radar to look into.

And speaking of UI, would you consider expanding the Federation icon to include federation cohesion, as well as add an Agreements icon that shows your subject type (or overlord status) and displays your loyalty (or the loyalty of your subjects)?

View attachment 896460 View attachment 896461

It would be a real help with managing federations and subjects.

I'll suggest this to our UX team as it's a good idea, but I can't promise anything.

Is the amount of pop assembly increased from the base spawning pool?

The tradition grants Spawning Pools (and Offspring Nests for Progenitors) two Augmentation Drone jobs, which provide 1.50 cyborg assembly per month at the cost of 1 alloy each.

What does voidling do?

It's a trait gained via Genetic Ascension and harvesting genetic material from the Voidspawn. The effects are:

• Replaces Food or Mineral upkeep with Energy Upkeep.
• Habitability Floor on all planets of 20%.

@Alfray Stryke - congrats on transitioning to Designer.

Who is going to replace you as QA?

Thank you! I've been a member of the design team since around the release of Overlord, so we've had new QA join since then.

When exactly should we post in the beta feedback threads?

According to the rules we only get a single post in each so I've been holding all my thoughts, but I'm starting to get concerned I'll miss the opportunity to respond and also I'm not sure that rule is being respected or enforced so maybe it's not really a rule?

I'm happy with folks posting their thoughts and feedback and then posting further feedback if the beta is updated again. Rest assured we are reading every post in those threads.

I'm afraid I really don't understand this one. Currently Machines have a pretty tough time dealing with Deviancy, since (1) the Sentinel Posts aren't upgradable, so you can only get -40 deviancy per building slot, and (2) machine pops don't have happiness, so you can't avoid the 1 deviancy per pop. Being able to use coordinators as a substitute for the hunter drones on your unity worlds was a nice (and thematically appropriate) option; since you can only have 6 evaluators, it doesn't seem like this will be possible any more.

Hopefully there are other changes in the works that will offset the effect of this; otherwise, it seems like a relatively minor but annoying and unnecessary nerf.

As noted, this should help Rogue Servitors who can't access to Coordinator jobs, but we also made the Evaluator drones provide a higher Deviancy reduction with this tradition than Coordinators did.

About this, I think Shrouded Worlds should get at least the treatment Toxic Worlds get with KotTG, without having breached the Shroud, and after that being always considered Holy Worlds.

I'd like us to give another pass on how the "holiness" of a Holy World is decided, including making Tomb and Relic Worlds be more valuable to consecrate for Memorialist empires. Maybe one day...

 

[Eladrin]

They currently don't boost trade, so if you are running a trade build (heavily incentivized by Knights of the Toxic God because of their energy debuff), if you take these techs you gain nothing for trade, which can be a huge part of your energy and consumer goods production (Consumer Benefits or Trade League), so it creates a massive "feels bad" situation to consider these techs, knowing that a big part of your economy (trade) will get nothing but the consumer goods upkeep will also increase.

Those techs shouldn't increase the upkeep of jobs that exclusively produce non-resources. (Trade, Amenities, Stability, etc.)

 

[Eladrin]

Dunno man. Really feels like they should increase Trade. It's a resource, and some Empires are heavily structured around it. Trade is basically just energy credits you can convert to two other resources via policies.

I meant "if it's currently increasing the upkeep of Clerks and the like, that's a bug, because we changed it from job upkeep to productive job upkeep a while ago, since we didn't want it to charge you for things it wasn't improving".

 

[gabsparadox]

"Livng reactive armor" instead of "living"
....
literally unplayable!

Oh no, my tendencies to typos has been discovered