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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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  • 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:

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!
 
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"RNG'd into industry" and my focus on megastructures are both just examples. The hidden tech tree/card draw system is very vulnerable to perverse incentives and accidentally shooting your goals in the foot, and while ditching the three scientists thing is absolutely the way to go I'm worried that keeping and moving trait based tech weighting to the government level will amplify the previous problems.
All fair worries.

That said, following CK3 dev diaries over the last few weeks - where the community seemingly panics each week about how a mechanic might work in a terrible way, only for the next dev diary to be all like "don't worry, we knew doing it that way would have been bad - that's why we've done it this other way" - I'm going to go ahead and assume we'll find out more in a future DD.
 
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For the sake of all that's good and holy please please please revisit this and finally merge admirals and generals into a generic military leaders class so I can never care about armies again.
You already can afford to never care about armies again. With this patch bombing a planet into oblivion will make them srrender without any army involved.
Ok, maybe if gestalts are involved...
 
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where the community seemingly panics each week about how a mechanic might work in a terrible way

I think we should be very concerned that the Stellaris community might work that way too, which would be terrible.

We should commence panicking immediately so as to avoid the rush.
 
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So - how deep north is the arctic team located?

Regarding the planet/sector governor topic. I see it coming that players only keep one planet governor around and micromanage it hopping from planet to planet in order to get build / blocker removal cost reductions... A cooldown might be a good idea there.
I’m not sure that it seems unrealistic that a governor with a reputation for skillfully dealing with the environmental challenges of colonizing a new planet would be continually sent to the frontier of the empire, or that a governor known to be skilled at managing development would be moved to planets the empire is focused on developing. I’d go so far as to say that a governor sent to straighten out that sort of thing is a sci-fi trope, and they should just implement travel time for leaders modified by technology
 
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So gestalts get their own specific menu, but does that apply to the progenitor hive origin? Or do they have a more traditional styled council due to their uniqueness
 
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There's a lot of good stuff here, but there's also some things that are quite bad:

  • Eliminating the research area leaders strikes me as a foolish decision. It's said that it's intended to reduce the number of leaders, but the vast majority of researchers are manning science ships, not leading research. Eliminating two out of fourteen or so scientists doesn't significantly affect how much work dealing with leaders is (I'm also deeply skeptical that dealing with leaders is going to be a significant amount of work), and given that it eliminates the only significant method we have to affect tech draws I don't think it would be worth it even if it did.
  • I don't understand the point of the leader cap system. It's stated that it's supposed to counter the fact that leaders are more powerful now, but a leader cap would be most significant in the early game, when you haven't picked up all the inevitable sources of +leader cap and your leaders are all low-level and thus not particularly powerful. In the late game, on the other hand, you will have a much higher leader cap and can afford to go over your leader cap if need be, and will have access to high-level leaders who make doing so worthwhile. It seems to me that the leader cap system is going to restrain us when there's no reason to do so and fail to restrain us when there is reason to do so.
  • The specialization of scientists seems poorly thought-out. Having explorers and analysts be separate roles is a problem because all surveyors inevitably become analysts once there's nowhere left to survey. Being forced to choose whether to specialize your scientists for only one of the two tasks they're going to do isn't great.
  • Adding planetary governors as well as sector governors seems to directly contradict the idea that having lots of leaders is a problem.
  • This may be a bit of a minor issue, but that destiny trait looks really underwhelming.
All in all, I'm a lot less enthusiastic about Galactic Paragons now than I was before reading this dev diary.
 
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All fair worries.

That said, following CK3 dev diaries over the last few weeks - where the community seemingly panics each week about how a mechanic might work in a terrible way, only for the next dev diary to be all like "don't worry, we knew doing it that way would have been bad - that's why we've done it this other way" - I'm going to go ahead and assume we'll find out more in a future DD.
It already worked the terrible way, that's why I asked if it's going to stop! :)
 
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What will you do about the mutual exclusivity of the names "Council of the Imperium" in the Galactic Community and in the Empire? Will there be any special features for Galactic Community "leaders" (Emperor, Custodian)?
 
Shame I liked the head of the different dept. of Research.
 
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I’m not sure that it seems unrealistic that a governor with a reputation for skillfully dealing with the environmental challenges of colonizing a new planet would be continually sent to the frontier of the empire, or that a governor known to be skilled at managing development would be moved to planets the empire is focused on developing. I’d go so far as to say that a governor sent to straighten out that sort of thing is a sci-fi trope, and they should just implement travel time for leaders modified by technology
It's not about realism it's about fiddlyness. If you can get +10% production by shuffling all your governors twice a year with the only cost being your own tolerance for tedium that's not a mechanic I'm overly enthused by.
 
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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).

Bad, bad change. Unless the tech tree is reworked from the ground up, maximizing your chances to fish the actually important techs out of the sea of garbage. It will surely be fun to have to restart your game 80 years in because you just aren't able to roll a Researcher with Voidcraft expertise to move towards Mega-Engineering.

Though that won't actually happen, people will rather simply restart after 5 years if they haven't rolled Cybrex.

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.

I feel like, that from a flavour perspective, the Destiny trait of a leader should be chosen by the game (perhaps even in secret the moment the leader is recruited) in order to throw a bit of a wrench in leader grooming projects.

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,

That hasn't been viable since Libra. The units cost for 20 researchers (and the alloy cost for 20 science ships) is prohibitive. Actually, super-rushing exploration hasn't been meta ever since Planetary Survey Corps was nerfed.

Also, I'm worried about admirals. You need a lot of admirals lategame.

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.

You could already do this by editing the empires file.

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.

I literally don't see the point
 
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TWO huge questions:

1. will we be able to send some of our leaders into the federation? AKA will federations also have a council like this where the seats are given out though differnet systems and there leaders give federation boni, but you lose them for yourself? Please say yes.

2. Will we be able to send leaders to our puppets to govern them or to the galactic council for missions?
 
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Are XP gains reworked, too? Scientists tend to gain lot of XP when surveying but losing high level researcher in mid game might mean you never really replace it because everything is surveyed. Same goes for governors though with tiered planet and sector allows the player to train potential replacements bit easier.

Generals die too easily, admirals have very little ways of gaining XP outside wars etc.
 
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Eliminating the research area leaders strikes me as a foolish decision. It's said that it's intended to reduce the number of leaders, but the vast majority of researchers are manning science ships, not leading research. Eliminating two out of fourteen or so scientists doesn't significantly affect how much work dealing with leaders is (I'm also deeply skeptical that dealing with leaders is going to be a significant amount of work), and given that it eliminates the only significant method we have to affect tech draws I don't think it would be worth it even if it did.

I don't get the impression that that particular decision by the devs is about reducing the number of leaders / reducing how much work dealing with the leader is - but rather an effort to create interesting decisions about how you "staff" your Council. With limited Council slots, adding Councillors with a load of research traits comes at the expense of adding Councillors with other traits - forcing you to choose between strategic objectives when populating/hiring for you Council.

The specialization of scientists seems poorly thought-out. Having explorers and analysts be separate roles is a problem because all surveyors inevitably become analysts once there's nowhere left to survey. Being forced to choose whether to specialize your scientists for only one of the two tasks they're going to do isn't great.

But, because leaders have particular lifespans, isn't this just something you'd transition over to as you reach the point where there's fewer places/nowhere left to survey? i.e. create explorers in the early game and, as they die later in the game, if you don't need explorers anymore, then hire/specialise analysts?
 
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It will surely be fun to have to restart your game 80 years in because you just aren't able to roll a Researcher with Voidcraft expertise to move towards Mega-Engineering.

But you currently have to roll a researcher with Voidcraft expertise to move towards Mega-Engineering. Why is the new system any different on that front?
 
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I don't really get removing individual reseach positions in the same breath as you're letting us put a governor on every individual planet.
Being able to put leaders on specific science fields is a great way to customise your approach to the game progression in the same way the "natural x" species traits do, and if it's considered leader bloat and pointless extra micro then it's the least offensive case of that in the game. Really hope this change gets rethought.
 
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