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Stellaris Dev Diary #275 - Bless Thy Soul

Hello everyone!

It’s been a busy few weeks here on the Stellaris team, and I wanted to thank the community for helping us out so much with the 3.6 Orion Open Beta.

There was significantly more activity than anticipated - during the month of October, over 100,000 players took part in the Orion Open Beta branch - and the volume of feedback we received was incredible. The 3.6 update should be much better thanks to your involvement.

We have a few more fixes that we’d like to get into the update (such as vassals colonizing Holy Worlds), after which it’ll go through the final testing, localization, and release process. As mentioned last week, we’ll be keeping the Open Beta branch available until the live release of 3.6 Orion so you can continue your games.

I’ll now pass you over to Mr.Cosmogone, who will provide a bit of enlightenment about one of the features that has been in the Open Beta, but hasn’t gotten a proper dev diary thus far. (Now, with non-placeholder art!)

Raising Spirits

Peace be upon you, children,

Mr.Cosmogone here, to tell you about the upcoming Spiritualist Federation. I had the chance to collaborate on this with the famous Caligula who had long yearned for a way to share his spiritual convictions with his allies.

Some of you may have already had a chance to play this as part of the ongoing Open Beta, they might not find anything new here, but for the rest of the faithfuls, let me introduce to the Holy Covenant:

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Spiritualist empires will find this new federation type to be quite aligned with their gamestyle, as it will provide them with a range of bonuses about unity, priests and the spiritualist faction.

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Their level two perks will help lay strong foundations for your church:

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While the third level will help you on your way towards ascension:

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At the fourth level, priests will start appearing left and right to carry the good word.

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The fifth and last level of the federation will be a consecration for its members:

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Like all federation types, the Holy Covenant comes with a unique succession challenge, the conclave, where the most pious are assured to be rewarded. Or perhaps the most generous. Money is the root of all sins after all, so you might as well give it away.

That’s it from me this week, and remember if you want to play all the cool things we’ve talked about over the last few weeks, go play the beta!

To opt-in to the Open Beta branch, right-click Stellaris, click Properties, Betas tab, and choose “Stellaris_test” from the drop-down.
 
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Sad, but understandable. You'd be hard pressed to ignore the opinion of the guy with the biggest beating stick in the neighbourhood
Yeah, but the game doesn't offer any other kind of diplomatic power projection.
Economic ties are too simple to truely factor in. It isn't Vicky3 in which you (theoretically) can prevent a superpower from hurting you, by being a major supplier of one of their essential goods and they economically depend on you.
Stellaris doesn't have an economy deep enough to simulate that. So we'd need arbitrary modifiers to kind of pretend that is what is going on. If you are a major force in someone else's economy they will think twice about attacking you - even if they have a much larger stick than you.
 
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To be fair, in your example you have +100% fleet power weight, because you are supremacist.
Without that you would be around 50k, which is not that far away from your 37k economy and 20k technology, because i assume you also heavily invested into military when you are going supremacist - more than you would without that. So it is roughly a similar magnitude to the others if you don't go for militarily focussed empire builds.

The only issue is that you can not gather nearly as high modifiers for the other categories if you try to focus on them.
Military Power Projection is by far the easiest way to dominate the GC, which is kinda sad.
They have 1 million weight from fleet power, not 100,000. Without that +100%, they would be sitting at 500k, merely 10x their other contributions. Without any modifiers at all, they'd have only 330k, which is still 10x their other contributions (individually).

This is kinda a silly comparison, though. That fleet power comes directly from tech and economy. They wouldn't have an enormous fleet without the economy to support it, and their individual ships wouldn't be powerful without investment into tech for components or repeatable modifiers.

Edit: 660k without Supremacy, since they're additive and there are a bunch of other modifiers.
 
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The only thing that is a major part of diplomatic weight is fleet power.

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Yeah, tbh, while they do escalate with each resolution you pass, I'm not sure whether the Diplomatic Weight from Tech and Economy measure up to flat +25% voting power the Holy Covenant president gets for Divinity of Life resolutions.

Also, oddly, I don't think Trade League presidents gets any additional Diplomatic Weight from Economy specifically like Research Cooperative does for Tech? Just a flat +10% Diplomatic Weight. Although since that counts everything, it's probably better actually.
 
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They can, but they can't become the federation leader under normal circumstances. (They can if they're the only option, for example.)
Oh my beautiful church of robotology will find a way.


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With the addition of a spiritualist federation, will we be getting interstellar religion mechanics somewhere down the line, like maybe a way to lure the shroud into favoring your faith over the others? That there seems to be only one religion in Stellaris makes the spiritualist ethic seem so incomplete.
 
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If a varied and dynamic religions system was added so there were heretics and heathens and varied religion on planets that would lead to stability decline on planets wooooooweee that'd be fun. religious map mode, Buddhism sweeps the galaxy from the UNE
 
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If a varied and dynamic religions system was added so there were heretics and heathens and varied religion on planets that would lead to stability decline on planets wooooooweee that'd be fun. religious map mode, Buddhism sweeps the galaxy from the UNE

Having a whole new set of traits ("Religion Traits") to optimize might actually give Spiritualists a tool to stand on when facing up vs. Materialists.

Having a whole new set of traits to manage for regular empires might make diplomacy / migration / trade more complicated (and fun).

Yeah I'd love to see a comprehensive, deep religion system.
 
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Having a whole new set of traits ("Religion Traits") to optimize might actually give Spiritualists a tool to stand on when facing up vs. Materialists.

Having a whole new set of traits to manage for regular empires might make diplomacy / migration / trade more complicated (and fun).

Yeah I'd love to see a comprehensive, deep religion system.
I also feel the spread of religion could be done through a similar tab as megacorps, where it is AI controlled in nonspiritualist states, and the constructions have various effects on spread of the religion and on pops of that religion along with pops who are not that religion. Intertwining religious spread with trade routes would also be quite interesting. Also allow for reforms to a religion, but each reform increases the risk of a schism, and the schisms affects would vary in severity from not much in a materialist empire to full out civil war in a max spiritualist build.
 
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To be fair, in your example you have +100% fleet power weight, because you are supremacist.
Without that you would be around 50k, which is not that far away from your 37k economy and 20k technology, because i assume you also heavily invested into military when you are going supremacist - more than you would without that. So it is roughly a similar magnitude to the others if you don't go for militarily focussed empire builds.

The only issue is that you can not gather nearly as high modifiers for the other categories if you try to focus on them.
Military Power Projection is by far the easiest way to dominate the GC, which is kinda sad.
Actually you're missing an order of magnitude for the fleet power contribution, plus the game has a display bug where it only shows the tier 1 effect of the mutual defence resolutions, so the total bonus is +235%, but for me usually playing as megacorp it's easy to get this and more for economy just from corporate embassies, but using the fleet offers a much stronger base, even if I barely use all my fleets at once as moving to many fleets away from my starbases upkeep reduction does unfun things to my economy.
 
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Synthetic Ascending got quite a nerf in 3.6 beta 2nd version, now it is the slowest path since you have to learn Synthetics(tier 4) to get hands on it. You get zero advantages until you learn tier 4 engineering tech, and even then, you have to finish Synthetics tradition to get its full benefits.

Yeah, Synthetics pay off is still strong, but now it takes ages to get that pay off. (Cyborg - tier2, Psionics theory - tier3, Genetics - tier3, Synthetics - tier4)
And I still consistently got synthetic before psionic theory in all my play through unless I use teacher of shroud origin.

That's how bad psionic is currently.
 
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And I still consistently got synthetic before psionic theory in all my play through unless I use teacher of shroud origin.

That's how bad psionic is currently.
You have to learn at least 6 tier3 engineering tech to get Synthetics. You can aim for psionic theory after researching 6 tier2 society tech, and thats a big difference.

Some might argue that psionic theory is a rare tech and it's hard to get, but that's same for synthetics, actually even worse. Psionic theory weight is 32.5, Synthetics theory is 20(this gets even worse if you're spiritualist, x0.5).

If you are going for psionics, you can increase the odd by using maniac scientists(x2), fanatic spiritualist ethic(x2), technological ascendancy AP(x1.5) and so on. After researching 6 tier2 society tech, you can re-roll it by researching tier1 techs.

If you're consistently getting synthetics before psionic theory, check your empire's ethic.
 
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You have to learn at least 6 tier3 engineering tech to get Synthetics. You can aim for psionic theory after researching 6 tier2 society tech, and thats a big difference.

Some might argue that psionic theory is a rare tech and it's hard to get, but that's same for synthetics, actually even worse. Psionic theory weight is 32.5, Synthetics theory is 20(this gets even worse if you're spiritualist, x0.5).

If you are going for psionics, you can increase the odd by using maniac scientists(x2), fanatic spiritualist ethic(x2), technological ascendancy AP(x1.5) and so on. After researching 6 tier2 society tech, you can re-roll it by researching tier1 techs.

If you're consistently getting synthetics before psionic theory, check your empire's ethic.
Don't need to lectured me on how to get psionic theory.

I already did all those thing, that's like elementary for anyone who want to play psionic.

And I still consistently got synthetic before psionic theory as a fcking fanatic spiritualist.
 
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Don't need to lectured me on how to get psionic theory.

I already did all those thing, that's like elementary for anyone who want to play psionic.

And I still consistently got synthetic before psionic theory as a fcking fanatic spiritualist.
I can only tell you that you have bad luck, then. I generally get psionic theory even before getting gene modding, unfortunately (or at least it feels like it).

The math says that if you generally get synths first, you're either doing something wrong, or getting some crazy luck. Psionic theory has higher weight, comes a full tier earlier, and doesn't have strict prerequesites that must be researched first.
 
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