Stellaris Dev Diary #297 - Leaders, The Council, and Agendas

[G S Palmer]

Also happens when you kill things or a new system spawns, all your neighbors and Subjects swarm the location, often before you can get there.

It's particularly bad when you hit a Federation or Hegemon and have all three of them swarming you under.

Very annoying. There needs to be a waiting period for everyone but you.

And thanks for pointing this out, I thought I was being paranoid.

AIs scanning systems should not prevent Players from finding anomalies in those systems, just other AIs. Claiming systems, and other human players scanning, should block new scans.

Alternatively, you could make some anomalies (those where you don't go down and remove/destroy the thing you're studying) re-researchable. Just because the Gropnarf studied the carnivorous plants on Excreta IV doesn’t mean I can't study them too.

 

[Serenity84]

Sector governors apply their traits to the sector capital, while applying their skill level to all planets in the sector. Careful planning will allow you to maximise the potential of a key planet and its neighbors. If only there was a way to easier edit sectors and select sector capitals... something like a sector editor.

It would be cool if governors were more than just stat boosts though. If they felt more like real people with their own agenda and power. So messing with a popular governor (be it sector or planet) causes a stability hit on planets. If they could scheme and rebel. I know that's not the scope of this expansion, but stuff like this is what people are thinking off when they say "internal politics".

Somewhat related, I also was a bit disappointed when federations just came with levels and stat boosts rather than feeling more like group of entities that still have their own agendas.

 

[Mr. Morague]

How will civics or origins like Progenitor Hive, Aristocratic Elite, or Introspective affect the new leader system if it all?

 

[wiederwahl]

Neat dev diary, quite looking forward to it! Out of curiosity though, will we get to rename the positions on our executive council (and/or governors)?

 

[starchitect]

Any chance the new leader UI will have some indication for species traits impacting leaders on the hire screen? Noticed this a lot with broken shackles, I have to screenshot my species view and put it on my second screen to be able to hire new leades since I cannot see things like quick learner talented or enduring on leaders themselves

 

[FleetMaster]

Random thoughts on what looks like a truly gamechanging update. Thanks to everyone @ Arctic Team.

I've read somewhere that leaders retire. When they die, is there any chance of a 'State Funeral' event which would generate Unity within your Empire? Along with sadness.

It would be bonkers if Espionage could target leaders. Elimating them has already been mentioned, but what about blackmailing them? Imagine, the Head of Research in a Rival Empire giving you bonus research while his/her betrayal remains undetected.

As a fan of Sci-Fi and Spy-Fi - any chance of recruiting a counter-espionage expert as part of my Council? Not just with increased encryption but with an improved chance of rooting out spies within your empire?

I'm confused about the removal of dedicated researchers on science ships - does this mean all the current events which impacted on those researchers out in space are now null and void?

 

[Cabiell]

I don't know if it has been mentioned, but one of the perk of Progenitor Swarm origin could be that they have a "council" despite veing a hive mind. Like Overmind and Cerebrates. It might worth visiting by the Custodian team if it's too late to add this here.

 

[TranscendentalDragon]

I'm confused about the removal of dedicated researchers on science ships - does this mean all the current events which impacted on those researchers out in space are now null and void?

you misunderstood. Scientists will still be leading science ships, just not every one of the 3 fields

 

[Harkinian's Dinner]

Yes, the slots themselves have inherent bonuses that are multiplied by the leader's skill level. Ruler slots have powerful ones, and are different depending on the authority type. Quoting the dev diary above:

View attachment 973249

"Including unique Ruler bonuses depending on what kind of authority you have. For example the stronger an Imperial Ruler becomes, the more Power Projection they generate."

So it's like I said. Aside from the level, it no longer matters whatsoever who's ruling your empire. Meaning elections are also pointless since if you don't get the ruler you want, you can just put that leader in a different council slot for the same effect - and probably a better slot bonus as well, since you'll likely want your highest level leader on research.

Parts of this update just seem like a lot of unnecessary and janky changes to a system that worked perfectly fine as it was.

 

[Mcgan]

tech_mega_engineering = {
[...]
    weight_modifier = {
        factor = 0.25
        modifier = {
            factor = 1.5
            OR = {
                research_leader = {
                    area = engineering
                    has_trait = "leader_trait_expertise_voidcraft"
                }
                research_leader = {
                    area = engineering
                    has_trait = "leader_trait_curator"
                }
                research_leader = {
                    area = engineering
                    has_trait = "leader_trait_maniacal"
                }
            }
        }

Yeah, I know. I checked before posting. I don't count that, for one simple reason: when they say the expertise trait boost the weight, I expect it to boost the weight all the time, not only if the scientist does not have some other trait too. Why would a Maniacal leader have the exact same chance to draw Mega-Engineering as a leader that is both Maniacal and a Voidcraft Expert?
Also, keep in mind that leaders will be able to have up to 5 traits without the DLC, and up to (maybe?) 11 with it (and the new "Aptitude" tradition). (Actually, 11!? There's got to be a cap.)

Here is an example of one they did properly:

tech_destroyers = {
[...]
        modifier = {
            factor = value:tech_weight_likelihood
            research_leader = {
                area = engineering
                has_trait = "leader_trait_expertise_voidcraft"
            }
        }

This one boosts the weight for the expertise trait regardless of other traits, and it is also what allows Technocracy to give Scientists "twice as high a chance to discover a technology that falls within their field of study" (although this is kinda bugged too, as it gives a 6 times higher chance instead of just double).
Which means Mega-Engineering does not get increased weight from Technocracy + a Voidcraft Expert.

 

[CptKirby]

Yes. You can groom them properly before they ascend the throne.

So will heirs still be suspiciously close in age to the current Emperor? Especially at the game start?

 

[ItThatAltersSanity]

I would not recommend going for a leader build with Overturned or Ascended Clone army.

I disagree. Those origins aren't leader friendly in the earlygame but lategame is another beast entirely. For reasons related to this:

One question about it - has the leader age been rebalanced?

Previously the "top" age of 80 and all leaders that were generated were on the average 40-50. When you picked Venerable trait (+80 years leader lifespan) the average starting age was in the 80-90 bracket.

Ngl, it was kinda infuriating.

Clone army earlygame leaders have short lifespans, so they start with very low age. Find various sources of +Lifespan mods to them, including Ascended Clones, tech and the Harmony tradition tree and those very young leaders enjoy very long careers. I had my starting Ascended Clone dictator die in year 2314 or so.

Similarly, Venerable is much more valuable to add in midgame with Engineered Evolution: ordinary (or low) starting aged leaders suddenly adding 80 years onto their lives. It fits the roleplay: leaders tend to be middle aged and a race of venerable lifespans will want leaders around 80+ years old.

Overtuned origins picking Engineered Evolution can similarly remove all the lifespan maluses on the leader species and push those lifespan shaves onto other (sub)species. There's always someone else's Serviles you can steal and clone so you never have to worry about them generating leaders.

 

[verybad]

It would be cool if a leaders faction affected that faction by the leaders level. So say a level 10 leader that wasn't your first choice in the faction the leader is in would increase that faction by 10 points...but the leader is so good at their job, so you don't want to fire them.

 

[HuntedBySpaceMcCarthyists]

Eladrin posting on behalf of the Arctic Team.

Hello everyone! I’m XM, the lead designer of Galactic Paragons. From the beginning of development, we’ve followed one simple mantra - make leaders matter. What you are going to read about in the following paragraphs are the results of months of work following that direction.

Watch the Video Dev Diary:

Wishlist Galactic Paragons now!​

Reducing Leader Count

For leaders to start being significant, there needed to be a lot less of them. With this goal in mind, we removed the research scientist positions currently in the game, and combined them into a single “Head of Research” Council position (we’ll talk in more detail about the Council later). We also allowed leaders to perform Council duties while maintaining their field positions. These changes dramatically reduced the number of leaders you need to keep track of.

The lower leader count also enabled us to make them a lot more powerful.

Improved Role-playing

To deepen the emergent narrative weaved with these new heroes, we’ve improved upon the leader interface to give you better insight into their past and how they came into service. You can see their homeworld, previous job, and even their ethical alignment.

View attachment 972708​

There are so many more improvements we’ve made to leaders that I want to share with you, but I need to cede my time here now to my amazing design team, who are smarter than I am, and can better explain their areas of development in more detail.

The Council

Greetings from Karl, designer at Arctic! I’m here to talk about some of the features that I’ve been responsible for in the upcoming Galactic Paragons DLC; however, none of them would have been possible without the hard work and dedication of my beloved colleagues.

The Empire Council is the heart of your government. Every game the Council starts out with 3 seats; for your Ruler, Head of Research, and Minister of Defense.

View attachment 972722
Eladrin strongly approves of this council's species portrait.​

Each position gives a unique Empire bonus that scales with the skill level of the assigned leader. For example, the Head of Research provides 2% Research speed per level.

View attachment 972716​

With Galactic Paragons, we have also added a lot of new traits. Some of these traits are Council Traits, which are applied to your entire Empire but only if the leader is on the Council (more on Traits further down). This way you get to decide which bonuses you want active, by switching Councilors. To get as many bonuses as possible, you will also want to expand your council…

Unlockable Council positions

Everyone will have access to the basic council. But if you have Galactic Paragons you’ll be able to unlock 3 more positions for your Council throughout the game. What positions you’ll have access to maps directly to your Civics. As an example, the Idealistic Foundation Civic enables the Tribune of Rights Councilor.

View attachment 972718​

Thus we have added no less than 95 unique Council positions for the Council to match your Empire’s design, and make it look and feel different every time you play. Including unique Ruler bonuses depending on what kind of authority you have. For example the stronger an Imperial Ruler becomes, the more Power Projection they generate.

View attachment 972713​

For the kind of Empire you are running to stand out even more, we’ve crafted unique Council screen backdrops for each of the Authority types.

View attachment 972723​

Council Agendas

Another important feature for the Council is that they pursue an Agenda that you set for them. The moment you assign an Agenda to the Council it gives a small bonus, but it takes several years before it’s ready to be launched and you get the full effects from it. This requires you to be somewhat strategic in your planning, if you for example expect a war.

View attachment 972715​

You can only pursue one Agenda at a time, but once an Agenda is finished you gain the full benefits for another 10 years. The more Councilors you have and the higher their skill level, the faster you can complete an Agenda; while for a huge empire it takes a bit longer to finish.

At the start of the game, you have very few Agendas to pick from as they are tied to the Ethics of your Empire. But if you have Galactic Paragons you will get a new Agenda for every Tradition Tree you unlock. These are all tied to the theme of the traditions. This might incentivize you to go wide with Traditions rather than finish them one at a time.

View attachment 972719​

The Gestalt Council

We felt that the Council feature didn’t sit that well with the Gestalt fantasy, but also didn’t want these players to feel completely left out. Now Gestalt players can directly level up and design not only the Ruler, but 4 new Nodes of the consciousness too. They are a little less flexible, but are on the other hand immortal!

View attachment 972724​

Leaders Reworked

Hi everyone! It’s me, Marek, your new fancy (self-appointed title of course) and barely known (I guess I should talk more on forums, like Offe) Content Designer from the Northern office. I will try to warm the climate with some hot takes on our upcoming features from Galactic Paragons.

So, prepare your tea, coffee, or anything really - and let’s dive deep into the new systems and features, both free and paid.

New Level Up System

For those who choose to forgo Galactic Paragons, your level system will look fairly similar, with a few changes.

• All leaders will be capped at level 10
• Leaders will always get trait every 2 levels (starting from level 1), for a total of 5 traits
• Every trait will be randomized from Common trait pool
• There will be a new tiered trait system: Common traits and Negative traits will have 2 tiers each

As you see, the Free Patch leaders will still be more powerful than before (having a total of 5 traits), but the Galactic Paragon leaders will achieve a power level of over 9000!

For those who choose to embrace the Galactic Paragons, the leveling system will give far more flexibility:

• Leaders get new trait pick every level
• Players can choose the trait from a randomized pool that is based on class, veteran class and ethic.

View attachment 972710​

• On level 4, leaders will get to choose from Veteran Class which give access to different types of Veteran Traits (every class has 3 Veteran Classes, which are centered around different bonuses and their leader actions). Each veteran trait has 3 tiers.
• On level 8, leaders will get a one time Destiny Trait pick. This powerful trait represents a leader finding its destiny within the galaxy.

Potential level 10 leader with Galactic Paragons:

View attachment 972712
I bet you don’t know what I’m talking about with the Veteran and Destiny thingies…​

My god it's full of… Traits

For owners of Galactic Paragons, there will be almost 700* (we decided to stay humble with the number) traits, including tiered versions. There are a bunch of new free Common traits, but the bulk of new content is gated behind the DLC.

* Some traits may require other DLCs. Number includes tiered traits.

View attachment 972717
Some of the new traits​

To get into a bit more details about new traits, they are divided into 3 categories, Common, Veteran, Destiny.

Common traits:

The one that comes with Free Patch (most of them are updated versions of old traits). They are the “bread and butter” for Free Patch players, as leaders will be getting them every 2 levels. For DLC owners, they represent the first 3 levels for the new Leaders and their journey to power!

View attachment 972709
I guess it should have a doggo as an icon?​

Veteran Traits:

Veteran traits are available only to players with Galactic Paragons DLC. They will cover every level from 5 to 10, and (as mentioned before) their pool for a given leader is dependent on leader ethic and their Veteran Class. They are more powerful than Common traits.

View attachment 972714
New fancy effects for leader actions? Yes, please!​

Destiny Traits:

Destiny traits are One-Per Leader (in most cases, as sometimes leaders might get event based Destiny traits too!) and they represent the peak of this given leader - as such, leaders get the destiny trait on Level 8.

View attachment 972711
What is this, even? The more species, the better the trait? Madness!​

Small disclaimer: Gestalt leaders operate slightly differently - rather than gaining Destiny traits, they have more Veteran picks than non-Gestalts. They do not have individual destinies like the standard empires do!

Leaders Reworked - Veteran Classes

Veteran Class is a paid feature from Galactic Paragons, and it allows you to customize your leaders more. Every leader will get to choose from 3 Veteran Classes on level 4, bringing the number of Veteran Classes to 12.

View attachment 972721​

Each of the Veteran Class will focus on different aspects of the Leader. Let’s take Scientists for example, which can choose from Explorer, Analyst and Researcher Veteran Classes. Picking the proper Veteran Class is paramount to utilizing your leader in a way that you want them to fulfill. For example, Analyst Leader will get Veteran Traits centered around Assist Planetary Research action, while Researcher will get Veteran Traits focused on the Council.

View attachment 972726
Veteran Class Icon as seen on the left side of the leader - Level 1 Admiral for comparison.​

Negative Traits

Let’s also mention the small detail of Negative traits. Every leader is randomized with Negative trait potential. The bigger the potential, the more (and faster) negative traits will accumulate on this given leader. With luck, you will find leaders with 0 negative potential, but you never know what it will be until your leader suddenly comes home with a new set of negative traits and starts to steal your resources to open up a new casino in his basement.

New Leader Cap System

Leaders are now vastly more powerful than before, so we decided to introduce a soft leader cap - just like with the naval cap, leaders will grow more expensive when empires are above the cap. It might take some time to get used to, but no longer are the time when in the early game it is viable to send out 20 science ships to explore the galaxy, but it also allows for players to take meaningful choices - creating an economy based on strong governors is a viable strategy, just as well as making strong navy based on many high level admirals.

In my humble opinion, this change somewhat favors smaller empires, which might feel less incentivized to go over their leader cap to fill all the roles, while huge empires will need to take choices on, for example, governor placements (or going over Leader Cap).

And now, something to finish our little trip into this leader madness…

Ruler Creator

Well, I disliked the fact that I can’t choose my starting ruler trait - especially on dictatorial and imperial empires. Now I won’t have to restart the game every time I get a trait I don’t want to have on my ruler. Coders wept when I designed this, and UX was more than happy with coming up with the layout. I guess you can never make everyone happy.

View attachment 972725
Right now, there is only a limited number of traits to choose from, but we decided to not overwhelm players with new choices here. They should be hunting for new civics instead! ​

Honorable mention

Let’s talk about one last change, close to the leaders, but not exactly. This is present in both Free Patch and DLC, so buckle up this one last time!

With the new trait system and reworked leaders and cap and everything - we decided that the Governor traits should only apply to the planets he currently “sits” on.
But as the game had this nice feature of Sector Governors too, we wanted to use this system, rather than just removing it.

So now, if you would like to see the potential career of a governor, it would be - Planet Governor, Sector Governor, Councilor, Empire Ruler.

How does the new sector governor thingy work?

Whenever there is a Governor sitting on a Sector Capital planet, his level will apply bonuses to every planet in this sector, in a way like it used to be.

View attachment 972727
View attachment 972720​

You can always override the “Sector Governor” by putting a proper Planetary Governor here. Just remember that Leader Traits do not work on Sectors!

Is that all? Yeah, I guess so. Don’t forget to Wishlist Galactic Paragons! See you on the next DD!

question: will leader ethics differentiate between fanatic and moderate ethics? would be cool to have a fanatic egalitarian leader in my shared burdens society

 

[Frakel]

Excited to see some new ground being broken here. Nice with some new opportunities for immersion with regards to leaders. I also love the council as a concept, with specific civics giving variety to the extra council positions.

However...

I am a bit concerned about loosing the three scientist positions for research tree management. I can understand the idea to reduce the number of leaders, but this seems a bit unnecessary to me. The system works very well as it is.

As a hivemind focused player I feel a bit let down.
- Will hiveminds also get variable council positions depending on their choice of civics?
- Ordinary empires gets additional agendas for each tradition tree they unlock. Is something similar implemented for hives?
- The abstract node system UI is a bit of a turn off for me - I like to gaze at the portraits of my leaders. Will it be possible to mod Hiveminds to also use portraits and named leaders as their "nodes"? After all, the hive mind rulers have a portrait and a name - and they are considered to be the immortal nexus of the hive.
- Or lets say that I disagree with your interpretation of hiveminds - will it be possible to mod hiveminds to use a system similar to the regular council?

Just for some context: It is possible to mod the current game to allow hiveminds to have "elections" as well as mortal rulers with random traits. I am currently having a blast playing a hivemind with mortal rulers. I interpret is as if the current ruler serves as a kind of avatar for the collective mind. The mind is eternal but the physical shell of the avatar is not. I would love to see the possibility for modders to tweak these new systems to allow even more variety and replayability for Stellaris.

Thank you for an awesome game and a really interesting DLC

 

[Elfwind]

Can we have a spymaster council position or can modders add more council positions?

 

[Ironking]

Very nice update!
It would be cool when doing diplomacy with other races we could see the other council member on the diplomacy screen as well. Sort of standing slightly behind the leader if you know what i mean.
That way it would feel more like we are dealing with an entire government body rather than an individual.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

You know, I think there's a very important question that no one has asked: Is Bubbles going to be a Legendary Paragon?

 

[fusei]

How will leader traits from events (e.g. Dragonslayer) and leader traits from the underlying pop template (e.g. Erudite) work under the new system? Will they just be extra traits or take up "space" in some form, like they do now?

 

[BingRazer]

With the implementation of Councilor traits, there simply isn't any need for them anymore. If your wish is to manipulate the odds of getting tech, you could theoretically have a Council of mostly scientists (pick your civics well, for example, Technocracy adds a Scientist position), each with the same expertise trait to mess with the odds. Getting the exact expertise trait might take a little time, but do-able with the DLC. I'm sure someone will figure it out.

So basically you've removed a feature from the base game, but don't worry as we'll be able to get some ineffective facsimile of it if we toss money at Paradox. Also even if we do this we'll have to forgo most of the non-tech bonuses to pull it off.