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Stellaris Dev Diary #322 - 3.10.0 “Pyxis” Custodian Features

Hello everyone!

The Stellaris 3.10.0 “Pyxis” update will be released alongside the Astral Planes Narrative Expansion on Thursday, November 16th. The expansion has a 10% discount until November 27th.



Today we’ll have an extra dev diary reviewing some of the features the Custodian Team has been working on.

Preliminary release notes will be posted next Tuesday, with final release notes posted on Thursday alongside the release.

Let's get to it!

Leader Consolidation​

We introduced the idea of the Leader Consolidation back in Dev Diary #307 and then gave an update in Dev Diary #316. Today we’ll go in deeper detail regarding the changes that will be coming in 3.10.0.

To recap from DD#316, but with the new subclass effects included:

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Admirals and Generals have been merged into the Commander, the Military leader class.

Admiral and General will remain as veteran classes, with the following foci:
  • Admiral - Focuses on Fleets and general naval combat
    • Ship Weapon Damage: +5%
    • Ship Fire Rate: +5%
    • Ship Disengage Chance: +5%
  • General - Focuses on taking planets and assaulting static defenses - Armies, Planetary Bombardment, Ground Combat, and attacking defensive structures such as Starbases are the General’s forte
    • Ship Damage Against Starbases: +5%
    • Ship Orbital Bombardment Damage: +5%
    • Army Damage: +5%
  • Commissioner - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Martial Law)
    • Planet Effects:
      • +2 Soldier Jobs
    • Sector Effects:
      • +1 Soldier Jobs
  • Strategist - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Defense position
    • Military Ship Build Speed: +5%

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The old Governors and some Envoy functions have been merged into Officials, the Administrative leader class.
  • Delegate - Focuses on Federations and the Galactic Community
    • GalCom Effects: +5% Diplomatic Weight
    • Federation Effects: +0.5 Monthly Cohesion
  • Industrialist - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Industry and Development)
    • Planet Effects:
      • Resources from Specialist Jobs: +5%
      • Pop Amenities Usage: -10%
    • Sector Effects:
      • Resources from Specialist Jobs: +2.5%
      • Pop Amenities Usage: -5%
  • Ambassador - Council Focus (Diplomacy, Espionage, and First Contact), especially suited for the new Minister of State position
    • Country Trust Growth: +5%
  • Advisor - Council Focus (Economy)
    • Pop Upkeep: -5%
    • Trade Value: +5%

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Scientists remain the third, Scientific leader class.

Veteran Classes:
  • Explorer - Focuses on Surveying and Exploration
    • Survey Speed: +10%
    • Anomaly Discovery Chance: +10%
  • Academic - Focuses on Archaeology and Anomalies
    • Anomaly Research Speed: +10%
    • Archaeology Excavation Speed: +10%
    • Astral Rift Exploration Speed: +10%
  • Analyst - Focuses on Planetary Governance (Assist Research)
    • Planet Effects:
      • Research from Jobs: +10%
    • Sector Effects:
      • Research from Jobs: +5%
  • Statistician - Focuses on the Council, especially the Minister of Science position
    • Research Speed: +5%

As part of this redesign, we’ve gone through and rebalanced or replaced hundreds of leader traits. Many have changed significantly, and the overall power level has generally been decreased.

In order to ensure that leader levelling feels rewarding, regardless of owning Galactic Paragons or not, traits chosen when levelling up will now be biased towards the leader's current position.

As mentioned in the previous dev diaries, leader caps are now per-class, and exceeding one only affects that class.

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Governors​


With the removal of the “Governor” leader class, we’ve now allowed all leader classes to govern planets and sectors. Each leader class focuses on a different aspect of governance:
  • Officials are better suited to be generalists and governing your resource extraction and industrial worlds.
  • Scientists are better suited to governing research worlds, which has replaced the Assist Research functionality that the science ship formerly had.
  • Commanders are better suited to govern recently conquered worlds and those with a high level of crime.

While bringing back sector governors, we still wanted local planetary governors to be desirable in some cases. Thus, throughout the game, we’ve gone and ensured that the majority of governor-related traits and leader effects apply at full strength to the planet they are governing and at half strength to all other planets in the same sector, if they are governing the sector capital.

However, a planetary governor will always supersede the sector governor, if one exists. Thus you might have an Industrialist overseeing your core sector and assign a Commissioner to a planet where that pesky Criminal Syndicate has set up shop in order to drive down crime.


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The modifiers for each leader class when governing. These are multiplied by the leader’s level.

Each leader class also has a veteran subclass dedicated to governance, which is required to gain governor veteran traits.

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Many of the various traits from the Industrialist (Governor), Pioneer (Governor), Protector (General), and Analyst (Scientist) have been distributed throughout the various governing subclasses in the rework.

Representatives and Emissaries​


In addition to the Minister of State Council position that most non-Gestalt empires now have at the start of the game. Officials can now be assigned as Federation Representatives and Galactic Community Emissaries instead of Envoys. An Official assigned to one of these positions gives the same effects as a number of Envoys equal to their level did back before 3.10. Thus, your envoys are now freed to improve or harm relations with other empires or build spy networks in them.

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The Minister of State position provides several bonuses to your envoys.

Certain Civics (currently Inwards Perfection and Fanatic Purifiers) block access to the Minister of State position and will instead start with their Civic Council Position unlocked. As mentioned above, as not having a Minister of State will impart a -25% Diplomatic Weight penalty, we’ve reduced the penalty for the Isolationist Diplomatic Stance from -50% to -25%.

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For Officials that are assigned to either the GalCom or your Federation, there is now a subclass and variety of veteran traits that can be used in these assignments.

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Admirals, Generals and Commanders​


As mentioned above, we’ve combined Admirals and Generals into the Commander leader class. Broadly speaking, their subclass traits were assigned as follows:

  • Aggressor -> Admiral
  • Tactician -> Admiral
  • Strategist -> Strategist
  • Invader -> General
  • Protector -> Split between General and Commissioner
  • Marshal -> Split between Strategist (army-related traits) and Ambassador (espionage-related traits)

Council Legitimacy​

Back in 3.8 we added Council Legitimacy. Although it had no mechanical effects, it was a good step to represent the degree to which factions in your empire approve of how the empire is run, the council, empire policies and so on. In 3.10, having high Council Legitimacy will give a bonus to Council Agenda Speed (capping at +25% at 100% Legitimacy) and having low Council Legitimacy will give a penalty to Council Agenda Speed (capping at -50% at 0% Legitimacy). For modders, these values are determined by defines.

Since Council Legitimacy is a weighted sum of the approval of each faction multiplied by their support in the empire, this means that empires with relatively few factions (each of which have high approval) should manage to pass Agendas more quickly.

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For owners of Galactic Paragons, we’ve made the Minister of Defense, Head of Research and new Minister of State council positions no longer mandatory. Instead, when you choose to Reorganize the Council, these positions will be removed and can be reselected, much like Civic and Enclave Council Positions. However, each of these positions will have their own penalties if they are not present and staffed.
  • Minister of Defense: -25% Naval Capacity
  • Minister of State: -25% Diplomatic Weight
  • Head of Research: -25% Research Speed
During the work done for the Leader Consolidation, we discussed various ideas for further improving the council mechanics and may revisit them at some point in the future.

Civics​


We’ve rebalanced the majority of civics that were leader related or themed, and I’ll leave you with a few examples. As part of this, we've also changed effects that previously made it too easy to support a near-infinite number of vassals.

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Traditions & Ascension Perks​

While reworking leader classes and traits, we’ve also gone through and rebalanced leader adjacent tradition trees and ascension perks:

Aptitude
  • Opener: Swapped +1 Trait on leaders for +1 Trait Selection when leveling up.
  • Finisher: Replaced effects with +1 Commander, +1 Official and +1 Scientist Cap
  • The Empire Needs You: No longer increases Leader Pool Size
  • Specialist Training: Swapped +25% Leader XP gain for +1 Leader Pool Size
  • Psychological Profiling: No longer reduces the number of negative traits leaders can have
  • Healthcare Program: Swapped +20 Leader Lifespan for -1 Max Negative Traits
  • Champions of the Empire: Replaced effects with +1 Leader Initial Level.

Discovery
  • Science Division: Replaced Scientist Cost and Upkeep modifiers with +1 Scientist Capacity and +1 Scientist Initial Level.

Domination
  • Colonial Viceroys: Replaced Governor Cost and Upkeep modifiers with +1 Official Capacity and +1 Official Initial Level.

Enmity
  • Rise to the Occasion: Now provides +1 Commander, +1 Official and +1 Scientist Cap for every 3 Rivals.

Politics:
  • Opener and Gravitas: Now affect Officials assigned to GalCom, not Envoys.

Statecraft:
  • Opener: Increased Edict Fund from 20 to 50.
  • Finisher: Replaced effects with -5% Empire Size
  • Constitutional Focus: Increased Council Agenda Speed to 25% from 10%
  • Immutable Directives: Increased Agenda Duration to 25% from 10%
  • Amongst Peers: Replaced effects with Councilor gain 150 XP per Level when an Agenda is completed
  • Shared Benefits: Replaced effects with +1 Effective Councilor Level

Supremacy
  • War Games: Replaced Admiral Cost and Upkeep modifiers with +1 Commander Capacity and +1 Commander Initial Level.

Unyielding
  • Resistance is Frugal: Removed modifiers for Generals

Synthetics
  • Non-Machine Opener: Replaced effects with -25% Roboticist Upkeep and -25% Robot Upkeep

Ascension Perks
  • Archaeo-Engineers: Added +1 Scientist Capacity
  • Galactic Force Projection: Reworked, now increases Influence from Power Projection by 2, gives +1 Commander Capacity, +100 Naval Capacity and +50 Fleet Capacity.
  • Eternal Vigilance: Added +1 Commander Capacity
  • Imperial Prerogative: Added +2 Official Capacity
  • Transcendent Learning: Now provides +2 Scientist Capacity and +25% Leader XP gain
  • Universal Transactions: Added +1 Official Capacity and +20% Commercial Pact Effectiveness

The Additional Content Browser​

We often see threads asking exactly what’s in each of our DLCs. In an effort to improve the clarity of what you’re getting with each release, we’ve expanded the Recommended Content element that’s been in the game for a while, and made some improvements.

The Recommended Content element gave brief descriptions of the various DLCs, but left a lot of questions. We’ve replaced this with a more robust Additional Content Browser that can draw information directly from game files, providing much more detailed and accurate preview information. Hopefully this will help you make more informed decisions about DLC purchases.

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Utopia is recommended! How surprising!

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Concepts in Tooltips are fully supported in the additional content browser.

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Portraits, ship sets, megastructures, and screenshots can be shown on the left hand side. Pack details and tooltip-able lists go on the right.

The Additional Content Browser will only be available on some storefronts, and will not update information without an active internet connection.

Outliner Improvements​

Another bit of feedback we’ve gotten a lot is that the outliner has gotten cumbersome over the years. While we’ve added some ability to customize it in past releases, in 3.10.0 we’re adding Outliner Tabs.

In this first version of the tabbed outliner, we have four tabs: Government, Ships, Politics, and Structures. These tabs will appear in the outliner once they’re relevant.

Notification bubbles can be activated on the tabs to let you know if there’s something of interest on them. Green ones are for non-urgent things like “a planet got colonized and has been added to the Government tab”, while red ones are a call to action, like “your science ship has no scientist”.

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The OUN Avamdur is leaderless. I should do something about that.

In future releases, we plan on exploring some more ideas we had to make the Outliner more customizable and even more useful.

Event Chain Subtitles​

Finally, we custodians have also added a small new quality of life to help you keep track of what events belong to what chain! This new subtitle can be manually added to events and when clicked it will bring you to the relevant situation log.

Since these have to be added manually however we will be asking for your help to hunt down any event chains you feel should be tracked this way but aren’t once the patch is out. We should have a form available in the dev diary two weeks from now, after the 3.10.0 release.


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The hunt for event chains is on!

What’s Next?​

This dev diary was a few days early so we could get this information to you before the 3.10.0 “Pyxis” and Astral Planes release. Preliminary release notes will be posted next Tuesday, with final release notes posted on Thursday alongside the release. (Replacing the normal dev diary scheduled for the 16th.)

Regular dev diaries will resume the week after, on November 23rd.

See you then!
 
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Since Paragons, leaders have become more important. There are posts saying how great leaders contribute to empire growth.

But once in a while, there should be leaders who cause severe impairments to their empires. I suggest digging into negative leader traits, which can be categorized in 4 groups:
  • Negative traits originate from Species traits.
  • Negative traits from Government types.
  • Stress and Corrupt related traits from Empire Size.
  • Underperformance related traits from going above Leader Cap. They replace EXP penalty.
 
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I'm not quite clear on whether the new Minister of State will take a previous free slot on the Council, or has the number of Council slots been raised to account for one more Councillor to start with?
 
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Since Paragons, leaders have become more important. There are posts saying how great leaders contribute to empire growth.

But once in a while, there should be leaders who cause severe impairments to their empires. I suggest digging into negative leader traits, which can be categorized in 4 groups:
  • Negative traits originate from Species traits.
  • Negative traits from Government types.
  • Stress and Corrupt related traits from Empire Size.
  • Underperformance related traits from going above Leader Cap. They replace EXP penalty.

It's an interesting concept, especially as we explore different ways of removing negative traits.

I'm not quite clear on whether the new Minister of State will take a previous free slot on the Council, or has the number of Council slots been raised to account for one more Councillor to start with?

The Minister of State takes a previously free slot on the Council, so standard empires are no longer behind the gestalts quite so much in the beginning. We have not increased the maximum council size, but you can now replace them with other councilors if you're willing to not have a Minister of <something>.
 
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Ok, what really blows my mind is the increadible good rework of the Feudal Society Civ. It finally has a synergy with the shared destiny AP and the bonus is just pefekt!

Question: Are there any changes planned for Diplomatic Corps? I had expected something in case of Officials and improvement rate and/or cap?
 
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Great post!

Can we assign the "Commander" classes to defend planets in ground invasions, like with Generals? Are there many traits still affecting this?
 
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I live the overall improvement to the leaders, it feels more streamlined.

Once you have a chance to play with it, I look forward to the feedback. We'll be adjusting this a bit more in the near future but it feels pretty nice. (Though somewhat less powerful than before.)

Ok, the content browser is really cool. But what really blows my mind is the increadible good rework of the Feudal Society Civ. It finally has a sinergy with the shared destiny AP and the bonus is just pefekt!

Question: Are there any changes planned for Diplomatic Corps? I had expected something in case of Officials and improvement rate and/or cap?

We'll have the release notes on Tuesday, but Diplomatic Corps is:

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Many civics that used to touch Envoys switched to Officials, but it was thematically appropriate for the Diplo Corps to remain able to run lots of First Contact or Espionage missions.
 
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Many civics that used to touch Envoys switched to Officials, but it was thematically appropriate for the Diplo Corps to remain able to run lots of First Contact or Espionage missions.
And i still like it! Im just curious if there is any option to boost your diplomatic weight in the GC. One of the main benefits later on was to use those envoys in there. Will we see something comparable (civic wise)?

We have of course the Politics tradition changes what makes that one really good now! But i'm suprised that there aren't changes to the Diplomacy tradition as well.
 
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And i still like it! Im just curious if there is any option to boost your diplomatic weight in the GC. One of the main benefits later on was to use those envoys in there. Will there be something comparable (civic vise)?

We have of course the Politics tradition changes what makes that one really good now! But i'm suprised that there aren't changes to the Diplomacy tadition.

You can assign an Official to act as an Ambassador to the GalCom or as a Representative to your Federation. They'll increase in effectiveness as they level up, and there are traits to modify their effectiveness.
 
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So many really great things here. I like how sector governors will apply a boost to all planets in a sector relevant to what they are, and the outliner changes are a pleasant surprise. It's also nice to see vassal spam getting tweaked again, though I'm curious what the practical effects are. When do vassals decide to try and rebel? I can't remember seeing a vassal rebel without a secret fealty pact. Presumably by making divided loyalties harder to overcome there will be circumstances where more vassals become disloyal, does that increase the chance that one of them will spark a rebellion including the other disloyal vassals?

For the changes to the UI have you considered:

- Any further changes to the leader UI on fleets, planets, and sectors? I don't know how many others are bothered by this (I remember there being a fair few earlier in the year) but having the black silhouettes all over the UI when we're not supposed to fill them all in gives a feeling of emptiness. The UI seems to be designed to give an impression that there's something lacking that we need to fill, when the new intention is that assigning leaders is an additive bonus.

- Will we be able to reorganise fleets in the outliner the same way we can shuffle planets up and down? Having it be random can be a real pain both visually and in terms of organising fleets into easy groups (I know we can use command groups but seeing arrangements like "First Fleet, Third Fleet, 1st Federation Fleet, Bubbles, Fourth Fleet, GDF, 2nd Federation fleet...." adds to the clutter).
 
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Great list of improvements - thanks again Custodians!

Especially glad to see an Envoy rework - now they're not all packed into federations and the galcom, having them freed up means espionage might become more used (although I do still think the Influence costs for operations are way too high).
 
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It would be great if Archaeo-Engineers gave not as now +2 to areheo researchers, namely +3. The fact is that this laboratory has no improvements. And only 3 and 5 maximum researchers are very few. As a compromise, it would be great to have 6 of them after taking Archaeo-Engineers. In general, the changes look very balanced so far. We need to look at the perception.
 
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And i still like it! Im just curious if there is any option to boost your diplomatic weight in the GC. One of the main benefits later on was to use those envoys in there. Will we see something comparable (civic vise)?

We have of course the Politics tradition changes what makes that one really good now! But i'm suprised that there aren't changes to the Diplomacy tradition as well.

You could give your GalCom representative some traits to boost your diplo weight, either generally or in some specific matters....



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traits to modify their effectiveness

You could give your GalCom representative some traits to boost your diplo weight, either generally or in some specific matters....

ah i forgot about traits here :). Thanks for the answers! Speaking of taits, one last question:

Kai-Sha (and auth generals over all) got the Shadowbroker trait for espionage. Is this now a trait for officials and will Kai-Sha switch her role from General to Official?
 
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Oh nice! I love the changes, especially the Tooltip one.

I do have three questions. You explained what Resistance is Frugal does, but it still doesn't feel clear enough for me. Does it mean that attacking armies don't get bonuses provided by the Generals? Or that maluses given by Commissioner is not applied to these planets?

Another one is related to Delegate job. Since they add Cohesion to federation with each level (and also got some traits for that) does that mean you have also tweaked the numbers for levelling the factions? Or have you left them as it is and now you can only have 1 high level Delegate for a big faction and will get high level quickly?

And third question is related to the "Recommended Content" tab. Does it also means that you will revisit the Store page for some of the older DLCs? I admit I haven't checked them in a long time (so it might be already resolved), but last time I did it still implied some of the now outdated info like "Ascension Perks are made available with Utopia DLC" rather than "some of them" etc.
 

Civics​


We’ve rebalanced the majority of civics that were leader related or themed, and I’ll leave you with a few examples. As part of this, we've also changed effects that previously made it too easy to support a near-infinite number of vassals.

Does the "Subjects Exempt From Divided Patronage" bonus from Feudal Society also replace the "No Loyalty loss from multiple subjects" bonus for Franchising and Shared Destiny?
 
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ah i forgot about traits here :). Thanks for the answers! Speaking of taits, one last question:

Kai-Sha (and auth generals over all) got the Shadowbroker trait for espionage. Is this now a trait for officials and will Kai-Sha switch her role from General to Official?

Espionage related traits were moved over to the Official, yes. We've done a pass on trait and class assignment for Paragons, which means that Kai-Sha is now an Official.

Another one is related to Delegate job. Since they add Cohesion to federation with each level (and also got some traits for that) does that mean you have also tweaked the numbers for levelling the factions? Or have you left them as it is and now you can only have 1 high level Delegate for a big faction and will get high level quickly?

XP required to level Federations hasn't been changed in this patch, so Federations should level up a bit faster - it's easier to assign one level 5 Official than 5 Envoys.

Does the "Subjects Exempt From Divided Patronage" bonus from Feudal Society also replace the "No Loyalty loss from multiple subjects" bonus for Franchising and Shared Destiny?

Yes, the same modifier applies to both of those (and they stack).
 
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XP required to level Federations hasn't been changed in this patch, so Federations should level up a bit faster - it's easier to assign one level 5 Official than 5 Envoys.

Judging by the wording, can I deduce that it isn't intended and you had no time to change it and decided to leave it be? Or maybe does that mean that you think about making some changes to Federations in the (possibly near) future first?