Stellaris Dev Diary #305 - Midsummer Festivities

[Goodwood Empire]

My wishlist. I don't play with mods. And mostly role play my 80+ custom empires. I love watching them interact and seeing the stories unfold. Most of these suggestions will perfect the role playing side of Stellaris.

Fix achievements for windows store version of Stellaris! I bought everything twice just to learn achievements are unobtainable after an hour into the windows store version of stellaris.

Classic "Grey" Alien portrait please! And I'd kill for some disc like ufo shipset. (reptilian #11 doesn't count)

A more humanoid lithoid portrait.

Cat and dog portraits. (Mammalian #4 is cat like but not enough)

Robot and organic shipsets and city appearances

Access to the MSI ruler appearances for that humanoid portrait.

Allow us access to the other Diplomatic "Room" options that came with first contact dlc.

Let us name the split off empire that spawns with "Fear of the Dark" origin. And planet type would be awesome too.

A way to link some orgins with custom empires. Example if I had three empires with common ground, they'll all start as part of the same federations instead of creating three separate federations.

An option to allow every spawned race to be a species from custom empire list. Examples: Marauders/Fallen Empires/Primitives/Caravaneers/MSI will be picked from the "left overs" when starting a new match. The civics and ethics can be random, portrait and species names will be a player made custom one. (This rarely happens with Fallen Empires already, I've had it happen a few times now.)

MSI species to be chosen from custom empire species. I cannot use Payback or broken shackles until I can choose or set a empire to spawn as that scripted empire.

I don't know what update ruined custom empires from spawning consistently, but the last few months I get a huge amount of randomly generated empires, I would like it to go back to a random assortment of my empires when they're all set to force spawn.

Empire spawning toggle options on developer made empires. I want to turn them off or delete them all together.

 

[zZander56]

Do you guys plan on experimenting with Mercenaries at all over the break?

 

[R37ry]

As a subterranean terravore main who relies on nomadic, I feel personally attacked by this nerf to consume world.

 

[Nighzmarquls]

More precise: I did expected to see Nemesis in the top 10, even somewhat around the top 5. But i guess thats only my personal preference and not really objective. But thank you for the details!

So the question was 'recomended for new players' which has some effects, a lot of those packs make the game more complicated.

On the other a common thing that comes out of paradox's metrics and surveys is that there is a fairly substantial silent majority that does not fit into the more memetic idea of a stellaris player.

Pretty much if your inclined to post on the regular on the forum, make a video or do anything particularily attention grabbing, you are much more likely to be a lot more aggressive/competitive is the super broad effect.

But the people that go for more chill/friendly/less multiplayer/meta builds are actually in the majority by a good margin.

 

[Martok]

I'm trying to gift the new Starter bundle to a friend, but Steam isn't letting me since I already own all the DLC included in it. Am I missing something? Or is this one of those bundles that can't be gifted to someone else?

 

[Astax]

I am excited with lithoid changes. I suppose there is an understanding as to how pop growth is king with the game design post tiles. With tiles it mattered a bit, but you would eventually cap out on population so you could catch up, and there were more strong bonuses to pop growth.

Anyway, I am excited to do more lithoid playthroughs with changes.

 

[Idle America]

My two usual requests:

1. Base template for Fallen Empires' slaves, so we can remove the nerve-stapling without the Genetic Ascension perk
2. Nuclear War should be an event chain, instead of the RNG just going "Oop, everyone's dead now" without warning. At least some warning of rising tensions. Really, almost anything would be better.

 

[OnyxAbussos]

I'd be grateful if you'd do an experiment with converting Mega Structure construction into ongoing situations like you did with Consume World.

 

[OnyxAbussos]

I'm REALLY looking forward to playing Calamitous Birth now.

 

[Rafss]

I'd be grateful if you'd do an experiment with converting Mega Structure construction into ongoing situations like you did with Consume World.

I really wish megastructures weren't expensive button clicking, you had a nice idea!
Sure there are like a couple events with foreign engineers and the encapsulated star being special for some other empire, but a situation could bring a lot other interactions, like speeding construction for an even higher cost or slowing it in favor of some other benefit.

 

[Millbot]

Yeah, wouldn't mind seeing a revamp of megastructure construction to tie into the situation mechanics. Maybe even have it so that there are some different event chains for each one and have some of that be RNG related and mutual exclusive from other events. That you have even more variation between games.

Also wouldn't mind seeing things adjusted so that they are more of tall empire thing. Used to be that tall empires would do more with megastructures because wide empires ended up preferring to burn all their influence on other things. Once the move a fair number of them over to unity costs with the exception of the ringworld, it just became a thing that wide empires could do better because they could easily produce more influence on top of the alloys. I know it might not be a popular sentiment, but ti does seem like maybe sprawl should somewhat influence the unity cost of megastructures. The more sprawl an empire has, the more likely they should run into issues where either paperwork gets lost in bureaucracy because the high sprawl or other parts of the empire make it harder to build since they either view it as a waste of resources or would rather have it in their part of the empire. At least that would be my head cannon for why a wide empire would need more unity to build a megaart museum, while a taller empire might be able to stay fairly close to the base cost.

 

[Imajicus]

Remove the leader cap!

I cannot say it often enough: Remove this illogical roleplay immersion breaking game mechanism imitation that is only in place to compensate your 'failure by design' debacle caused by the latest dlc. Thank you very much.

 

[Dark Meta]

Remove the leader cap!

I cannot say it often enough: Remove this illogical roleplay immersion breaking game mechanism imitation that is only in place to compensate your failure by design debacle caused by the latest dlc. Thank you very much.

you know people are more likely to listen to you when you do not insult them and call them and their work bad. Just a thought.

Also not everyone agrees. Yes the limit may be a little low, at least at the start, but in most of my games that forced me to really think about what kind of leader I want and how to specialize them. It also stings way harder to lose a good leader, which is good roleplaywise.

 

[Imajicus]

you know people are more likely to listen to you when you do not insult them and call them and their work bad. Just a thought.

Also not everyone agrees. Yes the limit may be a little low, at least at the start, but in most of my games that forced me to really think about what kind of leader I want and how to specialize them. It also stings way harder to lose a good leader, which is good roleplaywise.

There is no insult to Paradox in my post.

 

[Dark Meta]

There is no insult to Paradox in my post.

to compensate your failure by design debacle caused by the latest dlc

if you do not see that this language is not promoting any kind of constructive criticism or dialog, then I can not help you.

 

[Okawal]

As the Lithoid gain some more love would it possible do give them the Crystallization trait without require Plantoids. And yes i'm aware that it is a mechanic introduced by the Plantoids DLC but having no basic growth perk without an extra DLC seems a bit harsh.

 

[Imajicus]

if you do not see that this language is not promoting any kind of constructive criticism or dialog, then I can not help you.

I still see no insult in saying the work of someone is 'broken' and the reason for that is 'failure by design'. You recombine my words in that quote highlights to a different meaning. Please don't do that.

 

[Dark Meta]

I still see no insult in saying the work of someone is 'broken' and the reason for that is 'failure by design'. You recombine my words in that quote highlights to a different meaning. Please don't do that.

There is absolutely nothing recombined there. I just marked the parts I was referring to. Don't you see that you used exactly that sentence there?

(screenshot taken in case you change it afterwards to accuse me of lying)

 

[Imajicus]

View attachment 1000938
There is absolutely nothing recombined there. I just marked the parts I was referring to. Don't you see that you used exactly that sentence there?

(screenshot taken in case you change it afterwards to accuse me of lying)

You accuse me of fraudulent motives. Who is insulting whom?
This leads nowhere. Please, let's be adults and stop this, thanks.

 

[Northernwwater]

Here's the thing I see: three of the seven expansions were less well rated than four of the five story packs.

People like stories more than detailed mechanics. People like simple more that mental mechaincs.

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.

Actually it does correlate pretty close to release order.

Just because it is not exact does not disallow the conclusion that people get set in the way they play and they dopn't like change.

Release Order
---------------
Utopia
Apocalypse
MegaCorp
Federations
Nemesis
Overlord
Galactic Paragons