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Eladrin

Stellaris Game Director
Paradox Staff
Apr 4, 2019
1.219
40.549
www.paradoxplaza.com
Hi everyone!

I hope your summers have been going well! I got a bit sunburnt, but today we’re back and ready to talk about some of the promising experimentation we’ve been doing with the Habitat system.

We’ll be going through the entire development process in this dev diary, so there’s going to be a lot of ideas that were interesting but were subsequently discarded for various reasons.

Why Are You Looking at Habitats Again?​

The Stellaris Custodian team looks to three primary categories when deciding what to pursue:
  • Directives: Things dictated by me, the Game Director, usually for long term strategic reasons.
  • Community: Things you ask for. Pain points, quality of life improvements, bug fixing, and other good ideas from the community.
  • Passion: Things the individual developers really want to do.

Conveniently, a lot of times all of these align quite nicely.

Let’s start by looking at the history of Habitats in Stellaris.

Habitats were introduced way back in the 1.5 ‘Banks’ update in Utopia.

In 2.3 ‘Wolfe’, alongside Ancient Relics, we removed the Voidborne requirement to build Habitats, adjusted their habitability a little bit, and gave them varying districts based on what they were built over.

The 2.7 ‘Wells’ patch made the next major change to Habitats, adjusting their costs, requirements, and adding multiple tiers.

Since then, we’ve added a couple of special Habitat variants, and various other reworks have shifted their fortunes up and down in the overall balance of the game. Recently, there have been many requests from the community to review the tendency of AI empires building dozens of Habitats when they’re otherwise unable to expand.

Due to how production and population work in Stellaris, this led to an interesting quandary - it is theoretically “correct” for the AI to create many Habitats if it was blocked in, but it was tedious as a player to deal with invading up to a dozen Habitats per system. (The current interactions with population growth have also always been troublesome on the game balance side.)

Habitats were feeling far too common, were too good at certain things, and weren’t capturing the base fantasy that we were looking for. They’re the central pillar of a very popular playstyle that we wanted to preserve, though, so this made them a perfect target for “summer experimentation”.

Everything in this dev diary is considered experimental, and may or may not make it live.
All numbers are placeholders for prototyping purposes only. There is no set release date for any of these changes at this time, but we welcome community feedback.

Different Takes​

One of the most common requests from the Community was to add a Galaxy slider to restrict the use of Habitats. Options could have ranged from banning Habitats entirely, to “Nobody (except Void Dwellers) can create Habitats”, requiring the Ascension Perk to build them again, restricting only the AI, or placing (hard or soft) limits to the number of Habitats that could be built.

We also discussed “what if Habitats cost fractional Starbase Capacity to build” - with Void Dwellers and the Voidborne AP granting discounts to this value. This was more appealing, since the soft cap would control AI use of Habitats nicely without significantly hindering players that wanted to go all-in on them.

These discussions led to some questioning about whether Stellaris Habitats were satisfying the general fantasy well enough, and whether Habitats should be more “hard sci-fi”, with lower habitability bases or even ceilings for those accustomed to planetbound life, and whether we could make changes that would address balance challenges like Hive Void Dwellers.

A More Complex Take​

We made a list of some of the current challenges caused by the existing Habitat system, and this led to the idea of “what if all the Habitats in a system were linked?” We could retain the interesting expansion of Habitats across a system while reducing the burden when seizing the system, and potentially address some of the other problems introduced by an excess number of Habitats in the galaxy.

Alfray threw together an incredibly hacky and utterly unshippable version of this, and continued iterating on it during the Summer.

Under this variant, the first Habitat built within a system is the Central Habitat Complex. Additional Habitats are Support Habitats that add additional space and versatility to the Central Complex. A reminder, many values are grossly unbalanced placeholders in the following screenshots.

At this point I went on vacation, so I’ll turn this over to Alfray to talk about his investigations.

Once More Into the Alfray​

Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

Firstly, to counteract the expected changes that with minimal Support Habitats, the Central Complex would be small, cramped and overall not great to live on, I gave Void Dwellers extra districts and building slots as a unique modifier (This saw further refinement in a later prototype).

An early version of Void Dwellers

Support Habitats as Megastructures:​


The first iteration of these prototypes made use of Support Habitats as additional megastructures.

Habitat Central Complex, v1
Support Habitat v1
Expanded Support Habitat v1
Advanced Support Habitat v1

In this prototype, we had the maximum amount of each type of resource collection district (Energy, Minerals, Research) limited by the size of the deposits the habitats were constructed over, similar to how buildings for Strategic Resources are limited.

Support Habitats provided additional Districts, Building Slots, and Housing to the Habitat Central Complex, while reducing the Habitability (to reflect the civilian traffic between habitats) as they are upgraded. The final tier also allowed the Habitat Complex to use deposits on moons of their orbited planet.

On the surface, this prototype seems to satisfy our initial requirements and more:
  • Conquering systems with Habitat-spam was easier due to there only being one functional “planet” per system.
  • Constructing multiple Habitats per system felt rewarding as it upgraded your existing colony.
  • The removal of multiple starting colonies removed one of our main concerns for allowing Hive-Minds to have access to the Void Dweller origin - their high pop growth rate due to excessive numbers of spawning pools in the early game. (Iggy had some thoughts on this that he’ll be mentioning in a future Dev Diary).

A Void Dweller Habitat Complex with way too many districts

A Void Dweller Habitat Complex.

A very cluttered system

The rather cluttered system said Habitat Complex is in.

However, the Support Habitats couldn’t be interacted with outside being upgraded, which felt like a major downside. Enemy ships would happily fly past and ignore the Support Habitats, they couldn’t be specialised or downgraded.

All things considered, this prototype showed that making habitats into a single logical planet spread across many entities in a solar system felt good, but megastructures were not the path forward.

Support Habitats as “Starbases”:​


Keep in mind that the numbers shown in the below screenshots are never intended to be the final values, but were used purely for testing purposes of how the systems felt to use and play with.

The below screenshots feature placeholder art and the default art for starbases, their buildings and modules.


The second iteration of this prototype investigated treating Support Habitats as special Starbases (much like Orbital Rings).

In this prototype, the districts available to Habitat Central Complexes depend on the configuration of any Support Habitats in the same system. Thus construction of a Habitat Central Complex would automatically build a neighbouring Support Habitat in orbit of the same planet.

When built, a Support Habitat would start with a module that matches any deposits on the planet it orbits. Each <District> Module on a Support Habitat, gives +3 Max Districts of that type to the Habitat Central Complex.

Upgrading the Support Habitats, still provides the same modifiers as shown in Megastructure Prototype. Additionally each tier of the Support Habitat allows construction of an additional Support Habitat module and the second and third tiers allow construction of a Support Habitat building.

Expanded Support Complex v2

The starting Habitat Central Complex and its neighbouring Support Habitat for a Void Dweller empire.

New Habitat Complex v2

A newly constructed Habitat Central Complex, completely unspecialised.

Allowing the choice of which districts the Habitat Central Complex has access to via specialisation of the Support Habitats brings some interesting changes to how Habitat-dependent empires play.

Due to the nature of the prototype, the buildings for Support Habitats haven’t seen much investigation yet, but would likely include buildings much like those on an Orbital Ring, the lunar extraction support that Advanced Support Habitats experimented with in the Megastructure Prototype above and other such buildings.

Research Habitat Complex, v3 or so?

A Research Habitat Complex, using some of the district capacity to provide hydroponic districts.

Due to the nature of summer experiments, we can’t say if or when this prototype might make it into the live version of the game, but it’s something that we’re interested in exploring further.

…But the fourth one stayed up!​

Thanks, Alfray.

That variant listed achieved a lot of the goals we were looking for, but was cobbled together out of the scripting equivalent of sticks and twine as a quick and dirty implementation. It also required a lot of back and forth clicking that we really weren’t too fond of. So after that one burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, we came up with another iteration.

My feedback: Simplify things.

The latest variant we’ve been playing with has been especially promising. In this one, we turned the “Starbase” style Support Habitats into single tiered “pre-specialized” units (renamed to “Orbitals” for UX purposes) rather than requiring Modules to be built on them - so you could build a Mining Orbital, Research Orbital, and so on.

This dramatically simplified the flow of building out Habitats while simultaneously improving the implementation.

It's an Orbital!

Pre-Specialized Research Orbital.

Habitat Transit Hub. Hey wait, Maintenance DRONES?

Unique buildings on the primary habitat complex can increase the effects of the orbitals.

Upgraded Habitat Transit building.

We’re still doing some experimentation with this model, but so far we’re liking what we’re seeing. Technologies can add special Orbital types or buildings that can modify the primary Habitat Complex, and it’s very easy for us (or modders) to add new types.

We've been looking at jobs per districts too - the Complexes have different challenges from the older Habitat system, and further updated the Voidborne Ascension Perk. Void Dwellers will start with its effects (similar to how Teachers of the Shroud empires effectively start with Mind over Matter).

Void Dwellers Final Text
Voidborne Ascension Perk v3.final.final(2)

Void Dwellers get Habitat Build Cost reductions in Traditions.

What’s Next?​

For now, I’d like to get some of your thoughts on what you’ve seen today, which we’ll bring into our internal design discussions. It would also be great to get feedback on whether you like this sort of diary, where we go through the overall process (including the failures).

Next week I'd like to talk about a Summer Experiment relating to leaders that didn’t pan out quite so well, and our plans on how to proceed with that.

See you then!
 
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I really love that we will finally be getting building slots from habitat districts, I've been suggesting that for a while now. ❤️

Currently we've only got this for Void Dwellers and empires that take the Voidborn AP, so if you don't specialise into using habitats, you can't reap the full benefits.

I posted this back in June, within a thread discussing AI Habitat spam:

"I can imagine a system where you can upgrade a starbase into a system Habitat and add district types and cap to it via Habitation Modules orbiting planets."

Did you have time to try it with Starbases?

All experiments sound great though, very happy to see things going in this direction!

At one point with the "Habitats as Starbases" prototype I tried "what if the central habitat had to be built by the star", but that didn't feel right so it was scrapped after around 30 minutes or so.

Unifying all habitats in one system is very good idea, but maybe instead of building seperate orbitals, the type and quantity of additional districts could depend on orbital deposits in system?

E.g., if a system has 3 mineral deposits, habitat gets 3 to max districts and can build up to 3 mining districts.

We still want the player/AI to need to invest something in making use of the deposits for jobs, hence the orbitals. Having tried the "max district amount is linked to deposit size" it got pretty frustrating when you couldn't find a system with large enough deposits. Currently we have the max district amount = 2 + (NUM_HABITAT_ORBITALS × CAPITAL_BUILDING_TIER).

How about introducing a habitabilty module to increase habitability for a specific kind of habitabilty type, e.g. continental. I remember that there is s similar thing for oceanic pops.

I like this idea! Will investigate it and see how tricky it is to communicate to the player.

Also, I don't see this in the diary, but orbitals could grant jobs to the hub. So research orbitals could (in addition to granting the ability of constricting research districts) grant some amount of research jobs.

One example of an idea we've got on the drawing board are Hydroponic Orbitals that add additional jobs to Food Processing Facilities.

Fascinating read. Please do keep this going.

I actually liked the first approach, but the last one seems to make things easier.


What I would love to see is the possibility to dismantle habitats especially as a Conqueror.:)

In the final prototype, Orbitals can be attacked by fleets and will be disabled at 5% HP, when disabled they no longer provide their benefits to the Central Complex. This can lead to districts being destroyed, buildings being ruined and more!

The owner of Orbitals can freely choose to dismantle them, much like any other orbital station, but the Central Complex can only be destroyed by a Colossus.

Once again the Dev team and myself were thinking on the same lines, albeit this time I've been beaten to the punch. xD

A few thoughts. First, to smooth creation of the support habitats and to enhance the flavor of space boonies mining and research stations eventually developing into major population centers, could a button be added to stations to give them the option to 'upgrade' to the support complexes?

Second, while habitats are finally getting a much deserved overwork ever since they got butchered, could there be some work to making habitats above your colonies have some affects upon one another? Or at least 'feel' like they're an extension of one another?

Finally, can we get Orbital Rings and Habitats over the same planet to tie into the above? Its a bit weird that being an Empire with massive orbital infrastructure... prevents you from having a massive population occupying that infrastructure.

(Also, there is a thought that to further go along that direction, Population could be tracked upon a System scale instead of a planet scale...)

I'll have a chat with our UX designers about the flow for building Orbitals and see what they think of the idea of "upgrading mining stations".

Will bring up habitats/planets/orbital rings in the same system affecting each other to the other designers.

(Tracking population on a system scale sounds like a massive rework, but an interesting idea)

This is so much better than I expected. I agree that something needs to change with habitats, but I wasn't a fan of the community suggestions I saw. Good job, guys. You're definitely on the right track.

One suggestion: instead of decreasing habitability, adding more habitats to a system should increase pop upkeep. I know decreasing habitability does that, but it seems weird to me that the adaptive trait would somehow counteract the logistical inefficiency of constantly transporting people and materials across the system.

You're right that decreasing habitability was a shorthand of increasing upkeep and decreasing productivity and that traits overcoming it was odd. Gonna see what I can do to amend that.

This a very nice insight into the development an thought process and I also like the results. Please move on with this ideas, this could be a great rework and a nice chance to bring life to systems with no planets at all with getting it to complex or overpowered.

I appreciate the look behind the scenes!

Thanks! We were worried there might be a reaction of "WHY DID YOU CUT X, IT LOOKS GREAT", but wanted to give the community another opportunity to have a peek behind the curtain.
 
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Also, you mention that Void dwellers will start with the Voidborne AP effects. does that mean that, that origin will be getting those buffs and then also be able to stack them with the AP's buffs? OR is it more of a teachers of the shroud situation where the AP is basically already applied to the origin and thus getting a "Free" 9th AP?
The latter.

This sort of thing (e.g. having the then-analogues of starbases be destroyed etc.) was how things used to work in very old Stellaris, or so perusing the forums and old dev diaries suggested (I was never playing then). The remarks at the time also suggested that it ended up being pretty much universally reviled as miserable to deal with the aftermath of reconstructing everything after each war, being why today many things are (for no reason that makes "sense" other than to avoid gameplay misery) not "destructable" by an opponent.
It was pretty miserable.

In our current internal iteration, Support Orbitals can be attacked and disabled much like Starbases, and will repair themselves on a monthly tick if there are no hostiles in the system. We're still experimenting with what will happen to the main habitat when they get disabled.

The concern about planetary designations appears valid to me. It would be great to hear from the development side what considerations are being made as far as how designations will work for habitats now...
In the initial iteration, habitats will retain their current designations. We do acknowledge that mixed-purpose stations will likely become more common after these changes, so we'll keep an eye on this and see if changes need to be made to them.

I love this style of dev diary! I generally try not to complain too much about videogames anyway, but this sort of in-depth look helped heaps in being able to understand why y'all make certain decisions, and why """easy alternatives""" or "cool ideas" might be worse in ways we can't really see. I really appreciate y'all trusting us with this.
This seems to be the general consensus so I'll continue with these. We were a bit worried that people might get extremely attached to some of the early ideas that we decided weren't feasible for various reasons, but I figured that the amount of valuable feedback we would receive would be worth that risk.

And it was! Thank you, everyone.
 
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To showcase some further iteration that we've been working on - we're exploring Orbitals that give additional jobs to the Transit Hub/Interchange buildings.

1690800491517.png


1690800571057.png
 
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These are just ideas, you have every opportunity to help shape them more to your liking and so for that reason, it's important to remain constructive. Maybe you can suggest an alternative.

This is very true, the primary reason we're sharing this early on in development is to get constructive feedback from our players.
 
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