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Stellaris Dev Diary #314 - Pi in the Sky Ideas

Hi everyone!

It’s been exactly 100 dev diaries since we introduced the Custodian initiative alongside the Lem update. With that milestone met, and 314 being funny math number, I thought it would be a good time to review what the Custodians have accomplished, some of the process they use, and where we could go from here.

To review, the original idea behind the Custodians Initiative was to do some of the following:
  • Tweaking game balance
  • Adding new content to old DLC
  • Polishing existing content
  • Bug fixes
  • Performance improvements
  • AI improvements
  • Multiplayer stability
  • UI and quality-of-life improvements

So what have they accomplished so far?​

In my view, the Custodians have been a pretty solid success.

We’ve done a few things:
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I promised bad math jokes last week: Why did the Blorg cross the Mobius Strip? To get to the same side.

So how do the Custodians work?​


Ideally, a third of their tasks are dictated by my directives, a third are taken from community requests, and the remaining third are individual developer passion projects. In reality, these segments overlap quite a bit, since we all share many of the same desires.

Before each release, we hold a “Custodian Pitch” meeting, where everybody on the team can write up proposals, give a two minute presentation on what they want to do and why they want to do it, and then a brief but spirited discussion is held debating the merits of the pitch as well as highlighting any concerns or suggestions.

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Photo from a recent Custodian Pitch Meeting

Accepted pitches go onto a team board, get prioritized, and eventually end up on the schedule. Unlike tasks slated for DLCs, Custodian tasks are intended to be able to slip to a later release if they’re deemed not ready to go live yet, and sometimes accepted pitches wait for a while before getting worked on. Rejected pitches sometimes resurface at a later date, revamped to resolve whatever problems the original pitch had.

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Part of the Custodian Team Board

As you can see, far more things get pitched and approved than we can actually do, so prioritization is extremely important. More things will move into 3.10 and 3.11 over time.

The Development Oubliette off to the side is for things that we started working on, but had to pause for various reasons.

Following Overlord, we instituted a rule that expansion work cannot absolutely depend on Custodian work, since we intentionally want Custodian work to be able to slip to a different release if necessary - the Situations system came in a little hot and that had negative effects on some of the systems we planned on using them with.

So what are some of those notes?​

From the “In Progress” section under 3.9 Caelum, we have the Diplomacy and Trust changes that we’ve mentioned a few times. We’ll have a dev diary dedicated to this next week, since these have been accelerated to be included in the 3.9.3 release.

Two weeks from now we’ll be providing more details on the Leader Consolidation that we’ve also talked about in the past. Currently these tasks are in the To Do and In Progress sections of 3.10 Pyxis, grouped by dark blue dashed lines that you can barely see in this image.

Other things on the board without planned release dates include a variety of possibilities. Some are larger scope tasks that involve a large number of Custodians, while others might be the type of thing that can be knocked out quickly.

A handful of them include:
  • Espionage enhancements
    • Make Espionage more impactful, but have systems in place to prevent “dog-piling”.
  • Continued work on concepts and nested tooltips
    • Provide information in a clearer way, avoiding walls of text.
  • Improve tutorials
    • They’re really not good at introducing the concepts new players need to learn the game.
  • Improve the outliner
    • Make the Outliner easier to use during different phases of the game.
  • Do somethingwith the Megastructures UI
    • As the number of large space constructions grows, it gets harder to find the ones you want to build.
    • It’s also very confusing to have things that require Mega-Engineering alongside constructions that don’t.
  • Continue after losing
    • Pop up the Select an Empire UI from Multiplayer if you lose a Single Player game, in case you want to continue your galaxy’s story, even if your first empire’s has ended.
  • Improve species modification
    • Address micromanagement and tedium in species modification.
  • Pop performance
    • Pops are one of the greatest sources of late game performance issues. Find ways to reduce their impact.
  • Ship performance
    • Ships (and fleets) are another performance issue to investigate.
  • Investigate number of habitable worlds (and rebalance if necessary)
    • As more scripted systems get added to the game, the habitable worlds slider becomes less accurate.
  • Make AI personalities matter more
    • Review the existing personalities, make them show up in AI weights more often, and differentiate them more.

Next week​

Having come full circle, next week will be about Diplomacy and Trust.

See you then!
 
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1. Simply increase outliner scroll speed (or give a slider option in settings)—in the lategame you have to click and drag the scroll bar; scrolling with the mouse wheel is too slow.
Already there, if my simple brain understands correctly. It was added, maybe, two updates ago? It was kinda hidden in the patch notes though. Odd for such a big addition tbh.

Settings>Gameplay>Mouse Wheel Speed + Mouse Wheel Acceleration


It's a global effect too (empire selection screen, species tab, outliner, etc.)
 
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A small change I would like to see is to change how the popups for research shows up, at least for automated research. I would much rather have it on the side where it tells you what happens like when a leader gains a negative trait or something like cybernetic. Or at least have an option where you can choose where it goes.

I would also like a similar change, or at least the ability to change where it shows (and it would be even better if you could do it per empire) when other empires interact with each other.
 
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I hope the fleet performance works can kill two birds with one stone.
  1. Make fleets more performant by making them smaller (Less ships overall on the map)
  2. Make each ship class and load-out matter more, specially "flagships" such as battleships. I would imagine just having less ships would already go a long way to helping making this real.
  3. (Bonus) Lean more into Fleet Role, instead of just ship role. Where a combination of ships work together to achieve something that is specialized at the fleet level. Cloaking, in concept, would fit into this as a cloaking specialized fleet wants an particular combination of ships.
 
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I hope the fleet performance works can kill two birds with one stone.
  1. Make fleets more performant by making them smaller (Less ships overall on the map)
  2. Make each ship class and load-out matter more, specially "flagships" such as battleships. I would imagine just having less ships would already go a long way to helping making this real.
  3. (Bonus) Lean more into Fleet Role, instead of just ship role. Where a combination of ships work together to achieve something that is specialized at the fleet level. Cloaking, in concept, would fit into this as a cloaking specialized fleet wants an particular combination of ships.

I really like this... I don't give ship designer enough attention for its rock-paper-scissors antics but it might draw me more, if there was more elements too it, like the above.
 
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Hi everyone!

It’s been exactly 100 dev diaries since we introduced the Custodian initiative alongside the Lem update. With that milestone met, and 314 being funny math number, I thought it would be a good time to review what the Custodians have accomplished, some of the process they use, and where we could go from here.

To review, the original idea behind the Custodians Initiative was to do some of the following:
  • Tweaking game balance
  • Adding new content to old DLC
  • Polishing existing content
  • Bug fixes
  • Performance improvements
  • AI improvements
  • Multiplayer stability
  • UI and quality-of-life improvements

So what have they accomplished so far?​

In my view, the Custodians have been a pretty solid success.

We’ve done a few things:
View attachment 1023799
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View attachment 1023801
View attachment 1023802
View attachment 1023803
View attachment 1023804
View attachment 1023805
View attachment 1023806
View attachment 1023807
I promised bad math jokes last week: Why did the Blorg cross the Mobius Strip? To get to the same side.

So how do the Custodians work?​


Ideally, a third of their tasks are dictated by my directives, a third are taken from community requests, and the remaining third are individual developer passion projects. In reality, these segments overlap quite a bit, since we all share many of the same desires.

Before each release, we hold a “Custodian Pitch” meeting, where everybody on the team can write up proposals, give a two minute presentation on what they want to do and why they want to do it, and then a brief but spirited discussion is held debating the merits of the pitch as well as highlighting any concerns or suggestions.

View attachment 1023808
Photo from a recent Custodian Pitch Meeting

Accepted pitches go onto a team board, get prioritized, and eventually end up on the schedule. Unlike tasks slated for DLCs, Custodian tasks are intended to be able to slip to a later release if they’re deemed not ready to go live yet, and sometimes accepted pitches wait for a while before getting worked on. Rejected pitches sometimes resurface at a later date, revamped to resolve whatever problems the original pitch had.

View attachment 1023809
Part of the Custodian Team Board

As you can see, far more things get pitched and approved than we can actually do, so prioritization is extremely important. More things will move into 3.10 and 3.11 over time.

The Development Oubliette off to the side is for things that we started working on, but had to pause for various reasons.

Following Overlord, we instituted a rule that expansion work cannot absolutely depend on Custodian work, since we intentionally want Custodian work to be able to slip to a different release if necessary - the Situations system came in a little hot and that had negative effects on some of the systems we planned on using them with.

So what are some of those notes?​

From the “In Progress” section under 3.9 Caelum, we have the Diplomacy and Trust changes that we’ve mentioned a few times. We’ll have a dev diary dedicated to this next week, since these have been accelerated to be included in the 3.9.3 release.

Two weeks from now we’ll be providing more details on the Leader Consolidation that we’ve also talked about in the past. Currently these tasks are in the To Do and In Progress sections of 3.10 Pyxis, grouped by dark blue dashed lines that you can barely see in this image.

Other things on the board without planned release dates include a variety of possibilities. Some are larger scope tasks that involve a large number of Custodians, while others might be the type of thing that can be knocked out quickly.

A handful of them include:
  • Espionage enhancements
    • Make Espionage more impactful, but have systems in place to prevent “dog-piling”.
  • Continued work on concepts and nested tooltips
    • Provide information in a clearer way, avoiding walls of text.
  • Improve tutorials
    • They’re really not good at introducing the concepts new players need to learn the game.
  • Improve the outliner
    • Make the Outliner easier to use during different phases of the game.
  • Do somethingwith the Megastructures UI
    • As the number of large space constructions grows, it gets harder to find the ones you want to build.
    • It’s also very confusing to have things that require Mega-Engineering alongside constructions that don’t.
  • Continue after losing
    • Pop up the Select an Empire UI from Multiplayer if you lose a Single Player game, in case you want to continue your galaxy’s story, even if your first empire’s has ended.
  • Improve species modification
    • Address micromanagement and tedium in species modification.
  • Pop performance
    • Pops are one of the greatest sources of late game performance issues. Find ways to reduce their impact.
  • Ship performance
    • Ships (and fleets) are another performance issue to investigate.
  • Investigate number of habitable worlds (and rebalance if necessary)
    • As more scripted systems get added to the game, the habitable worlds slider becomes less accurate.
  • Make AI personalities matter more
    • Review the existing personalities, make them show up in AI weights more often, and differentiate them more.

Next week​

Having come full circle, next week will be about Diplomacy and Trust.

See you then!
What about
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I love that the outliner and species modification micromanagement are getting some work!

I suggest two things that I’ve wanted for years, since these topics are on the table:

1. Simply increase outliner scroll speed (or give a slider option in settings)—in the lategame you have to click and drag the scroll bar; scrolling with the mouse wheel is too slow.
This one already exists! (kind of) You can control mouse wheel speed in the Settings Menu, under Gameplay. It takes a little to get accustomed to, since it used to scroll so slow before, but wow, does it make a difference! :D

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Espionage enhancements
  • Make Espionage more impactful, but have systems in place to prevent “dog-piling”.
I would very much appreciate an operation to establish and expand an "Underground Railroad" to help pops escape slavery and purging.
 
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I know it's kinda the opposite of what you're looking into with 'ship performance' but I'd like to see weapon slot target prioritization, so we stop getting X (and G) weapons targetting corvettes when there are Stations and other Capital ships to target instead....
 
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when you gene mod pops you want them to swap jobs for what is better for them.
Well, that comes under 'unless something happens.' I'm saying there must be a way for the game to stop tracking pops without interfering with player agency. I appreciate it's a tough one.
 
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I for one cannot wait for the improved species modifications. Its fun the first few times you do it in a games, but then it just becomes tedious.
The worst is when you didn't modify an entire species, and then one unmodified pop wanders into your empire

edit- maybe we could have an option in the species menu for sub-species to automatically modify into a selected sub-species (similar to assimilation)
For the latter idea, it would be nice if it just costed some society research per pop while they’re assimilating, rather than having to tediously make a special project for one pop.
 
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This one already exists! (kind of) You can control mouse wheel speed in the Settings Menu, under Gameplay. It takes a little to get accustomed to, since it used to scroll so slow before, but wow, does it make a difference! :D

View attachment 1024531
WOW this is amazing. This is like getting a haircut after having annoyingly long hair, taking a shower for the first time in two days, and I imagine how women feel after removing their bras after a long day, all combined. Thank you!
 
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Performance should be the focus. Stellaris is very fun, but the game is hold back by performance. It's either vassals or federations, never both. Imho it is reasonable to expect players to keep upgrading hardware to a degree but a lot of variety is locked behind large and many AI galaxies being not viable in single player.

The debates around tall vs wide are this communities' worst idea. More pops = more gdp and if those are very productive pops ofc a tall wide empire will wipe the floor with lesser contenders *as it should*. If anything the economics of this game are too additive already not rewarding scale enough. What should get larger empires, particularly before the advent of jump gates, are dfactionalization, internal discontent and the vast distances. Think of a small empire taking on a bigger empire thanks to local superiority before the larger one can move its fleets to the area which then makes it vulnerable to incursions elsewhere - think of what happened to the romans and Chinese. But there absolutely is nothing inherent to tiny empire which makes them better at technology or the economy than bigger empires, if anything it's the other way around, bigger is of course better.

I think it's fantastic that Stellaris instead relies on crisis factions to make the life of big empires hell because artificial anti blobbing mechanics are very gamey and come from a wrong notion of balance to the detriment of the space empire feelings.

All in all I think the Custodians have done a great job at keeping the game up to date.
 
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If anything the economics of this game are too additive already not rewarding scale enough. What should get larger empires, particularly before the advent of jump gates, are dfactionalization, internal discontent and the vast distances.
I disagree that larger scale is not rewarding enough. It is always better to go big from an economic perspective. Colonize everything, grab as much as you can and build a much bigger fleet. From there on it's a snowball.

But i strongly agree with large empires having to face internal, political issues. That would be a major boon to the game.
  • Things that could be mitigated by utilising governors for your sectors, but the more you go over bounds the more likely it is for fringe sectors (and especially sector-free regions) to want to split off.
  • In the same way, shortening distances to the capital via gateways and hyper relays would be a really good thing to take into account when evaluating political instability. That would mean that larger empires are incentivised to invest into infrastructure instead of military with their alloys to avoid constantly having to fight their own military. This would reduce the immense power gap between small and large empires a little.
  • Another thing that should be considered is the relative prosperity of worlds and sectors and potential disparities thereof. If your capital sector is pathetically weak compared to another sector, you might get strife there. If fringe worlds are too weak and unsupported they might jump on any anti-establishment band wagon there is, meaning you are fighting a war on all fronts, with all your border systems.
  • Systems that get occupied in wars frequently will also be politically discontent, because they are obviously not well protected by the government and will want indepence or at the very least a government that cares.
  • In addition to a multitude of (political) situations that are easier to deal with for smaller empires, because of stronger cohesion. While, i don't think the game should necessarily go as far as Vic3 is planning to go with political movements, but a step in that direction, especially in regards to sprawling empires falling apart, will be a massive improvement.
Things like that could balance tall v wide in a more immersive way. Obviously there are multiple balancing and mental load issues to resolve, as well as the question of how to deal with gestalts in that regard. A simple +x% deviancy per pop per jump distance from the capital to simulate distance being a problem for a gestalt consciousness to maintain cohesion and coherence, might be an idea, but that just feels kinda wrong, because non-gestalts get complex politics and gestalts just a modifier.
 
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