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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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Is Stellaris now a pay to win game lol jk.

If you need 2+ DLCs to make Spiritualist competitive ...

Stellaris is now Pay-to-Pray.
 
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The idea is really nice.
But the decriptions read extremly "meme" to me. Not very immersive but more written for the laughs to be honest. A road Stellaris has taken to an extend for quite some time, but never was so obvious as with those describtions.

Also, as with so many "new" things, the Bonuses are extremly powerfull compared to other federation types, which have a lot of worthless bonuses on top of the lower numbers.

Hm, tell us all how you think Religion as a general concept is a joke, without telling us Religion is a joke.
 
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I still don't get why Neutron Sweep is unavailable to Spiritualists.

It's the weapon used by the Holy Guardians fallen empire. And it's a perfect weapon for "cleansing" the planets of heretics.

I mean, technically you can, you just have to unlock and research it first before you go Psionic. Which is a reeeeeeeeeeeeally painful wait unless you get lucky with your tech draws.
 
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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:


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.


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


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



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



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


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.
 
"The Shroud is our future."

Why must the Shroud be the focus of all Spiritualist things? That's like saying all religions have unleavened bread.

Honestly I agree with this. I'm kinda tired of Spiritualism being tied to Psionics and The Shroud. It honestly makes absolutely no sense for Spiritualism to work that way. What does, for example, your empire worshiping your Emperor as a Divine God have to do with the Shroud? Literally nothing. Like, if you wanted to make a Spiritualist version of UNE, where the whole world is Christian or Muslim or w/e, then wtf does Jesus or Muhammad have to do with the Shroud?

The entire concept of Spiritualism in this game feels like it was designed by atheists who wanted a "realistic" version of Spiritualism.
 
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Sounds interesting and will definitely make me try out a Spiritualist playthrough again.

Just one question: What am I supposed to do with all this unity? What is the benefit in comparison to let's say early robot workers that help me boost production? Can someone tell me how this is going to be a legit alternative game strategy?
 
I mean, technically you can, you just have to unlock and research it first before you go Psionic.
Ah, I think I misread the requirements, it's restricted if you're both Spiritualist and Psionic?

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I'm still not sure why, though. The Holy Guardians are both Psionic and Spiritualist and they use it just fine.
 
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I like it.
Next stop an actual religion mechanic.
It is nice that we are all spiritualist, but are you the right kind of spiritualist.
Remember, first you dip your left tentacle in the holy acid, THEN you swallow the 10th born of the second litter.
If you don't follow this ritual you are a heretic and deserve to be cleansed by the Holy Purifier right in your orbit
 
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Ah, I think I misread the requirements, it's restricted if you're both Spiritualist and Psionic?
Correct. Note that the "Teachers of the Shroud" Origin counts as an equivalent to "Mind over Matter" for this too.
 
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What does the Zro edict do, more specifically? Increase the output bonus of your Telepaths?
 
Honestly I agree with this. I'm kinda tired of Spiritualism being tied to Psionics and The Shroud. It honestly makes absolutely no sense for Spiritualism to work that way. What does, for example, your empire worshiping your Emperor as a Divine God have to do with the Shroud? Literally nothing. Like, if you wanted to make a Spiritualist version of UNE, where the whole world is Christian or Muslim or w/e, then wtf does Jesus or Muhammad have to do with the Shroud?

The entire concept of Spiritualism in this game feels like it was designed by atheists who wanted a "realistic" version of Spiritualism.
The story of Spiritualism, psionics, and the Shroud is a horror story.

In Stellaris, seemingly every spiritualist society eventually discovers psionics, initially sees it as confirmation of their religion, embraces it fully, and eventually ends up either completely abandoning their former beliefs or severely warping them to end up regularly sacrificing enormous swathes of psions (to backlash) in order to delve into the Shroud and make pacts with what are essentially demonic entities.

"An Asteroid, Carved" implies that this isn't actually an issue, canonically, though. Since you can get this for every empire, it implies that every empire's religion is literally the same religion, or at least, features The Benefactress (Composer? Instrument of Desire?), The Undaunted (Eater?), and The Percipient (Whispers, for sure). And that religion is explicitly based on shroud entities, already. So if you choose to interpret it that way, it's a different horror story: every religion in Stellaris is based on the Zroni's nightmare entities, and inspired by their influence. You don't devolve into human sacrifice and pacts with demonic entities: that's what your religion always was.

But it's not unique to spiritualists. The story of materialism, synthetics, and "minimal data loss" is extremely similar. The fact that you lose your entire species' identity (permanent losing access to traits like Thrifty, Conformists, Natural Engineers, and Nomadic which represent the way your species thinks) and the fact that it's trivially easy to transform other, completely alien-minded, pops into synthetics that are supposedly copies of the original, should tell you just how much truth there is to the idea that you're actually making a true copy of the original biological individual when you synthetically ascend.

At least the cosmic horror in e.g. Genetic Ascension is only there if you want it to be. You can choose not to add writhing tentacles to your pops (Polymelic), nerve staple your workers, or stratify your society in a dystopian way by applying specialized templates to planets. You can choose to simply make your pops generically stronger with simple improvements (like adding Resilient or Erudite).

But even the base level is somewhat horrifying. Imagine what it would mean for an individual, when the government imposes mandatory genetic alteration that does something like stripping away Intelligent from a species. "Please report to your local gene clinic to have your personal identity altered, and your mental faculties stripped away. Participation is mandatory."

I think a full religion expansion would be fun. But I don't think Spiritualism has been uniquely, unfairly misrepresented. Practically everything in this game is a horror story, if you think about it.
What does the Zro edict do, more specifically? Increase the output bonus of your Telepaths?
15% to resources from jobs, for all psionic pops. It's incredibly strong.
 
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So out of curiosity, how does this work for Gestalts that join the Federation (whether Hive Minds or that random masochistic Machine empire)?

Do they get priests? I imagine this drone standing there screeching randomly at other passing drones.
 
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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)
Psionics is an extremely rare tech. All but one time I've played the beta I've gotten synthetics first while stacking every bonus to psionics showing up I possibly can.

Synthetics IS a late ascension, but spiritualist usually is too. Arguably worse, since many of the things you do to stack the deck for psionics to show up (such as literally being spiritualist) also reduce the chance for synthetics and I still had it first.

Although, granted, once psionics is fixed in some way to not nearly require metagaming to get the tech in a reasonable timeframe/at all your statement will be accurate - synthetics did get mildly nerfed. Psionics got it BAD at first but it's mostly good now, just too dependent on a federation to compete with the other ascensions and the downsides or two of the covenants are somewhat... Extreme.
 
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View attachment 907730

So out of curiosity, how does this work for Gestalts that join the Federation (whether Hive Minds or that random masochistic Machine empire)?

Do they get priests? I imagine this drone standing there screeching randomly at other passing drones.
Alas, they do not. Gestalts seem to be unaffected (or, at least, they were when I tested it early in the beta).
 
The only thing that is a major part of diplomatic weight is fleet power.

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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.
 
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Hallowed are the Ori
Truth is the beginning of the path.
Enemies of the Ori show no mercy in their attempts to draw believers away from the path.
Fear not the Ori, fear the darkness that would conceal the knowledge of the universe. Believe in the truth of all things, and you too may find the path to enlightenment.
Glorious are the Ori, who lead us to salvation, who did fight the evil that would doom us to mortal sin. Did they defeat the old spirits and cast them out? And now, with the strength of our will, they do call upon us to prevail against the corruption of all unbelievers.
Guide us on the path so that we may triumph over the enemy of our salvation, and be with you in the end of ends on the planes of enlightenment.
The only true darkness lives in the hearts of those who do not follow the path. Otherwise, there is always some measure of light. And where there is light, the Ori see all.
...
It is we who must seek the truth of the universe in order to achieve enlightenment.
...
Blessed are the true believers, for only they shall walk the path, and they shall be welcomed unto the realm of the Ori and made as one with Them.
Make yourself one with the path, and the journey will lead you to eternity.
Ours is not to question, but to rejoice in their service, for the Ori are perfection.
...
And those who are prideful and refuse to bow down, shall be laid low and made into dust.
 
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Military Power Projection is by far the easiest way to dominate the GC, which is kinda sad.
Sad, but understandable. You'd be hard pressed to ignore the opinion of the guy with the biggest beating stick in the neighbourhood
 
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