Stellaris Dev Diary #305 - Midsummer Festivities

[Spaceception]

Benevolent rulers are my jam and PK should be the best pick for such a bubuild.

Seconded!

 

[Scorpio_Shirica]

My guess is that it's primarily due to the strength of the Colossus player fantasy, and the mechanical benefit of having a relatively easily accessible Total War. That frees up Influence for other stuff.

Who doesn't want a Death Star? Even the non-cracker ones are often a lot of fun for roleplay purposes. The hydrocentric one where we can instantly terraform worlds into new swimming pools is probably one of my favorites.

 

[FleetingRain]

I wanna ask why a massive crater makes your rockbros produce more gases but I don't care enough, a buff is a buff is a buff

 

[Dark Demise]

It's a very low priority issue, but would someone look into fixing the map border fill colors? The new colors that were added to the flag screen will leave your empire gray if you choose them for your secondary color. I want some vibrancy back in the galaxy!

 

[Troyen]

Legitimately confused why Apocalypse is so high, given the absolute F-all it comes with.

My favorite feature from Apocalypse is the Khan, which adds something to an otherwise slow and dull midgame. Of course, I enjoy the galaxy vs existential threat of the crises far more than empire vs empire gameplay.

 

[stargazersatnight]

How about a war rework, is that on the to-do list anywhere?
Not being able to finish wars because a third party invades a system is still very much stupid and in the game.

 

[fourteenfour]

To be honest Overlord did more damage than good for the game. It really came off as a DLC to push out really cool artwork that was laying around and not monetized.

That the subjugation war terms should never ever been a policy level decision and should have been made as part of the war goals impacting the cost to resolve the war. worse are the fixed costs assigned to changing the terms of subjugation which have zero relation to size and power differences of the empires involved. it was just dreadfully lazy, had a plethora of hilarious bugs (everyone is a vassal is what it felt like - and woe to anyone dumb enough to accept a bulwark subject who had any size), and took an otherwise interesting reason to go to war and made it cumbersome.

oh... and outside the list... how is espionage still so bad when a game over twenty years old (Master of Orion series) did it better?

 

[corsairmarks]

While it may be late to make wishes for tweaks in 3.9, here are some nevertheless:

• Trivial to implement, if desirable?
  • L-Gate Activation should be marked as a Dangerous technology
  • Omega Theory should be marked as a Dangerous technology
  • Racket pops should be Cybernetic instead of Psionic
  • Embassy Complex should add 1 Politician job
  • Colonist should be a Worker job
  • Atmospheric Hallucinogen should give a bonus to Unity
  • Shadow Council should add +1 Encryption (and perhaps Police State also should)
  • Isolationist diplomatic stance should add +1 Encryption -1 Codebreaking
  • Move "Bureau of Espionage" to the Subterfuge tradition tree
  • Pacifists should be able to create Trade League federations
  • Natural species traits should not affect specific ethics' attraction
  • Servant jobs from Luxury Residences
  • Moons should not get the modifier "Tidal Locked"
  • Psionics research field should be moved to Physics
  • L-Gate Insight should be moved from Engineering to Physics or Society
• Seemingly relatively easy to implement, if desirable, but could need more consideration?
  • Ruler jobs should generally produce Edict Funds instead of Unity
    • Specialist-level Unity jobs would become much more important
      • (would thereby potentially leave fewer pops for other jobs, and thus slow down traditions and the economy overall, which would be good)
    • Ruler-level jobs could more easily be made more distinct from each other
    • The ruling class would feel like it actually is a ruling class
  • Ruler leaders should be allowed to hold field positions when appropriate
  • Slavery option for Natural Servitude Only (Serviles, Zombie, Nerve Stapled, Docile Livestock)
  • Give "Defensive Wars" Influence from guarantees of independence while discouraging/blocking declarations of rivalry (both ways), and/or change "Defensive Wars" to "Restricted Wars"
  • Unyielding tradition tree: gets at least the "Defense in Depth" War Doctrine, move "Fortify the Border" here, and rename the tree with a nice noun - perhaps "Vigilance"?
  • Psionic Death Cults should have a sacrificial edict for turning pops into Zro
  • Death Cults should get a covenant sacrificial edict
  • Philosopher King should allow Dictatorial and Imperial to use otherwise blocked civics
  • Pop upkeep effects should affect job weights
  • Ascension Perk picks should never require technologies to pick

A lot of those are opinions about balance changes, rather than bugfixes.

However, all of that could be implemented through modding if you want. Including the new slavery type (species_rights became moddable in 3.6, I think it was).

Some things, like habitability/upkeep affecting job weights, might require some fancy footwork with a script_value but it seems doable.

 

[velles]

Like 3.1 Lem, 3.3 Libra, and 3.6 Orion, Caelum will be a Custodian update focused on revisiting old packs, catching up on technical debt, and generally improving the game.

Since origins are revisited - how about making Life-Seeded a viable tall origin? Something to compensate for the fact that (with intended playstyle, not some meme builds like slaver Gaia world empire) you're basically coffined to that one planet for quite long. Also I think that including it in primitive origin pool with First Contact update, while interesting from a variety perspective, from a balance perspective was an indirect nerf of that origin - it's one thing if you have to wage a war against empire with Life-Seeded origin in order to capture their homeworld, but when some stone age pre-FTL species spawns with Life-Seeded origin then it's basically a free size 30 Gaia planet without any of the Life-Seeded drawbacks like Gaia world preference, so now there's even less incentive to pick it.

 

[Turnil]

So what is the worsed DLC?
I think Nemesis.

 

[corsairmarks]

So what is the worsed DLC?
I think Nemesis.

I love the plantoid portraits dearly, but I think Plantoids Species Pack is still a fairly weak DLC. It's easy to skip for people just getting into the game.

 

[Rafss]

I believe you should be able to throw meteorites on enemies too, maybe with a Colossus weapon, a Meteor Shower.
Possible effect:

- Kills all organic non-Lithoid/non-Radiotrophic/non-Survivor pops and terraforms into Tomb World. If the world is depopulated, you can always colonize it with the meteorite ship.
- Using on your own world just terraforms it for free (probably with some collateral devastation damage).
-Available for every type of empire, not just Lithoids.

Since Aquatics has a proper Colossus weapon, this is quite justified for the Lithoids Pack. Plus Radio-Plantoids can get something from it, which is nice, and also Radiotrophic Hives as they can't be Relentless Industrialist.

 

[Zeta-0]

Calamitous Birth colony ship should have ability to invade any pre-FTL civiliazation planet (and also kill some pops when landing)

 

[luanmameili]

We will return with dev diaries on July 27th with Habitat discussions, and start going into detail regarding what’s planned for the 3.9 Caelum update.

Like 3.1 Lem, 3.3 Libra, and 3.6 Orion, Caelum will be a Custodian update focused on revisiting old packs, catching up on technical debt, and generally improving the game.

Spoiler: We dug up some Lithoid previews…

View attachment 998024
The newly clarified Calamitous Birth tooltip.

View attachment 998025
The home crater gets a bit of a boost.

View attachment 998026
A minor tweak to the craters makes a big difference.

View attachment 998027
What do Lithoids eat?

View attachment 998028
Pom-a-granites!

View attachment 998029
Placeholder icons on the approaches.

View attachment 998031
Once you start feasting, it's really hard to stop.
Om nom nom.​

Will these two issues be handled?

A habitat can also have lithoid crater?

It also once had two buried lithoids, I just cleared them.

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Should lithoid devouring swarms (terravore) be able terraform candidates?

They consume habitable worlds only.

forum.paradoxplaza.com

 

[Ikael]

As for things that I would like to see revisited by the custodian team at some point (because wishlists are free of charge):

Difficulty: Low

- Older origins like Life-seeded or Lost Colony
- Ethics bonuses, and the recently added boogaloo of even more penalties against fanatic ethics
- Ascension Perk balance pass
- Megastructures (related to the previous point)
- Philosopher King still sucking despite a whole leader overhaul
- Racial traits not mattering at all
- Resources generated by space sources (research stations, mining stations, etc)

Difficulty: Medium

- Lack of a starbase designer
- Faction demands
- Federations VS vassal swarms, and the obsolescence of hegemonies and all-around weakness of Federations compared to specialized vassalage
- Heck, the vassal tribute and loyalty system in its totality

Difficulty: High

- Espionage in general
- Pop growth & the economy at large
- How revolts work in general
- Pacifism still sucking

 

[Turnil]

I love the plantoid portraits dearly, but I think Plantoids Species Pack is still a fairly weak DLC. It's easy to skip for people just getting into the game.

I do think Plantoid is a good dlc compared to the other species dlc's.
The plant traits are good and using food instead of minerals for alloy production can be useful with the right civics and origins.
It's however the only species dlc without a new adivsior voice. That would be a nice addition.

 

[EnerJay]

As a person who loves playing terravore, loving the love it's getting!

 

[GalacticParagon]

This is the top ten list, anything on it is pretty high overall.

Not to be a killjoy, but this ought to be pretty concerning. There are seven major expansions (Utopia, Apocalypse, Mega Corp, Federations, Nemesis, Overlord, and Galactic Paragons). There are 5 story packs and 5 species packs. It's not surprising to see species packs left off a list of must-haves. So we can actually infer a lot from a top ten list when there's really only twelve items total.

Here's the thing I see: three of the seven expansions were less well rated than four of the five story packs. That's already pretty telling. It's not a steady decline, so we can't just say it's only people liking what they've gotten the most used to— the opposite seems to be true for Apocalypse, Mega Corp, and Federations, for example. Galactic Paragons is clearly preferred over Overlords and everything is preferred over Nemesis and First Contact.

But it's not random, either. If it was random, it might already be a little concerning to have story packs outperform major expansions but consider this: the three worst-rated expansions and the one story pack left off the list are the most recent ones.

 

[captainbeastfeast]

Thanks devs. Can you make it so that it's worthwhile eating planets for Terravores? Devouring swarms, including terravores are having a bit of a rough time balance wise and could really use a boost. For anyone that has played the Vasari in Sins of A Solar Empire, the amount of resources you get for eating worlds seems rather low (not currently worth it) in comparison. Planets are so important in Stellaris, so you need a good incentive to consider destroying them. Also, destroying a world seems like it should produce lots of resources. Maybe a giant asteroid field also after the planet breaks apart?

*Edit* also their total lack of hive worlds is a big problem late game. They need something else to make up for that. Also, devouring swarms with progenitor hive origin should be able to have vassals like regular hives. Being a swarm mind gets lonely sometimes

 

[Zeta-0]

Not to be a killjoy, but this ought to be pretty concerning. There are seven major expansions (Utopia, Apocalypse, Mega Corp, Federations, Nemesis, Overlord, and Galactic Paragons). There are 5 story packs and 5 species packs. It's not surprising to see species packs left off a list of must-haves. So we can actually infer a lot from a top ten list when there's really only twelve items total.

Here's the thing I see: three of the seven expansions were less well rated than four of the five story packs. That's already pretty telling. It's not a steady decline, so we can't just say it's only people liking what they've gotten the most used to— the opposite seems to be true for Apocalypse, Mega Corp, and Federations, for example. Galactic Paragons is clearly preferred over Overlords and everything is preferred over Nemesis and First Contact.

But it's not random, either. If it was random, it might already be a little concerning to have story packs outperform major expansions but consider this: the three worst-rated expansions and the one story pack left off the list are the most recent ones.

Biggest Issue for First Contact: I started three new games and could not find any pre-FTL planet in my potential territroy , but I also don't want to tweak the setting bar to let indigenous take over every habitable planet. Actually I pretty love FC's back story and new origins, but also sure many people like me don't have chance to touch the content after purchasing the dlc.