Stellaris Dev Diary #304 - 3.8.4 Released, What’s Next?

[Alfray Stryke]

Anyone knows when "summer experiements" are usually revealed? We're mid-June already, I guess it shouldn't be too long.

When the experiments are revealed depends on the experiments and the results. As a couple of examples, the combat changes and ascension path changes that were in 3.6 were both summer experiments from 2022, while the industrial districts added in 3.0 were from summer 2020.

Generally speaking, summer experiments are done in the period of late-June to early-August for those of us who are working during that period and have the time available/free of other higher priority tasks.

Does Philosopher King only negate the possibility of having an additional starting negative trait and positive trait, or does it negate the additional negative trait while leaving the positive trait alone?

The second possibility seems like an interesting buff to the civic.

Also, isn't 50 a bit too high for minimum Empire Size? If I remember correctly, with a few bonuses/starting option, a starting Empire could easily fall below that threshold, only to be forced up, even without any particularly egregious min-maxing.

Currently Philosopher King behaves in the first case, though the second (granting a bonus positive trait while not getting the negative) would indeed be a nice buff - we'll discuss it.

Regarding empire size, it shouldn't provide any negative effects until it exceeds 100, so having a minimum of 50 makes no real difference from a minimum of 100.

Very curious about which things they will be experimenting with during the Summer. Habitats seem like a good starting point, but I do hope that they also give a look at leader cap, pop growth, and the economy at some point.

No changes addressing leader cap. A little disappointing.

Any plans to nerf AI willingnes to be vassalized in patch 3.9

I'm looking at some changes for AI diplomacy as part of my summer projects, but no promises on if they'll survive.

Likewise, leader cap (and other leader concerns that the community have raised that Eladrin covered in a previous dev diary) are part of on-going discussions internally.

Unfortunately, regarding all three of these (habitats, diplomacy, leaders), there's nothing concrete we can discuss at the moment, but stay tuned for future dev diaries.

 

[Eladrin]

I'm dissapointed in all of this. I was expecting more changes and at least some discussion and collaboration with the community on future features and perhaps even some early reveals. Now you'll just experiment untill the summer brake and we'll see you again in September, for something that may come out past October... Yawn...

But that's exactly what I said we're going to do?

I’ll have a broader feedback discussion later on during the summer where we present some of our ideas, discuss how experiments with them went, and collect additional feedback from the community.

I want to have some tangible stuff prepared before going too deep into it, and do some internal experiments on the ideas we've been tossing around. I'm planning on keeping the dev diaries continuing through the summer (though possibly on a once every two week schedule), with the exception of the couple of weeks I'm out during July.

No changes addressing leader cap. A little disappointing.

Changes were made in this update to some of the leader traits that created excessive micromanagement or stacking issues.

We feel that it should be in a reasonable state after these changes. More comprehensive updates to the leader system are in the plan, but will be on a longer timeframe.

Any plans to nerf AI willingnes to be vassalized in patch 3.9

We'll likely have a dev diary on diplomacy updates sometime during the summer.