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

[Eladrin]

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.

You can Pre-Purchase Astral Planes on Steam Now!​

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:

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%

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%

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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

​

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.

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.

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.

​

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.

Utopia is recommended! How surprising!

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

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”.

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.

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!

 

[Eladrin]

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>.

 

[Eladrin]

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:

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.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Great post!

Can we assign the "Commander" classes to defend planets in ground invasions, like with Generals? Are there many traits still affecting this?

You can still assign a Commander to defensive armies stationed on a planet.

 

[Eladrin]

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.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

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....

 

[Alfray Stryke]

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).

 

[Alfray Stryke]

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?

Nah, that's reading a bit too much.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Can leaders still be on the council while having field jobs?
Now there are like 4 different types of jobs any leader can have, so it might make sense to count the council as one aswell. Balancing this with the leader caps might require some thought though.

Could the "civillian economy" policy swap commander capacity for administrator capacity?

Reworked traditions look good. Was there any talk of officials getting a 0.1 added capacity per system? Or are we meant to keep most sectors governor less?

Between the leader caps now applying per class and the increased sources of leader capacity, you should be in a decent spot for sector governors.

There's a base capacity of 3 for each class and skimming the game files you can get another +7 or so Official capacity.

 

[Eladrin]

Can leaders still be on the council while having field jobs?
Now there are like 4 different types of jobs any leader can have, so it might make sense to count the council as one aswell. Balancing this with the leader caps might require some thought though.

Yes, they can. Though I can see reasons why you might not want them doing field work (trait possibilities will be split across Council and whatever job they're filling), so we'll discuss possible alternatives internally.

Could the "civillian economy" policy swap commander capacity for administrator capacity?

It theoretically could. Currently it does not. It's an interesting idea.

so im guessing resource related leader traits are now gone ?? as getting + 32 minerals is just insane OP and very exploitable ...
also any word on sabotage rework? .. having spies instead of envoys doing both makes a lot more sense...

Yes, the traits that produce resources out of nowhere have changed somewhat.

Espionage changes are still ongoing internally.

Could I ask about the design process behind this decision? I would have hoped that the opportunity cost alone would have been sufficient, to help generate more differences between governments even at the start. These costs seem prohibitive - I imagine the idea is to make the council feel cramped at the late game, and decisions about the positions important then. Is that correct?

Having a missing researcher provided a major penalty to research in that field pre-Galactic Paragons. We mostly started by fixing that, then decided to apply it to the others once we made them able to be swapped out.

I expect that many empires will strongly consider swapping one or two of them out for other councilors. We wanted it to be flexible, but to be a carefully considered decision rather than an obvious one.

Or are we meant to keep most sectors governor less?

Remember that Scientists and Commanders can be governors too. (Though admittedly, I don't expect Commanders to be often set as one outside of planets with unrest or slave worker planets.) I do expect a lot of Scientific governors though.

I really hope you will add some point add the option of having it be customizable tabs (like having both planets, civilian ships and factions in the same tab). And a option to switch tabs with a hotkey... cause it will be a serious pain to go to the top right of your screen whenever you wanna switch tabs to quickly check something.

These are some of the additional improvements I've already asked for.

 

[Eladrin]

Wait so diplomacy traditions still give envoys instead of Official leader capacity?

Yes, Diplomacy (and Subterfuge) still give Envoys.

The over-the-limit penalty is now extremely harsh for going over your limit by even 1. This seems like a major step back and hopefully can be modded easily.

The example up there is at double the cap, not 1 over.

 

[Eladrin]

MY GESTALTS
MY PRETTY GESTALT NODES

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO THEM?!?!

Not much, to be honest. The Gestalt council was in really good shape already.

They did change to the new classes.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Fleet Capacity = Command Limit?

Yes

Does Warrior Culture or Distinguished Admiralty provide the starting level bonus to Commanders?

Distinguished Admiralty, yes

How does the game determine whether a Commander gets an Admiral or General portrait (clothes)?

It should depend on their assignment.

Will anything be done about Talented not providing actually talented leaders, just ones that would be less flawed if they lived long enough to reach a level high enough?

Will bring this up when we next discuss species traits.

How long will Warrior Culture societies tolerate being led by craven rulers who hide behind desks instead of leading in battle?
(i.e. is there any chance of rulers holding field positions, under some circumstances and conditions, in a future patch? Such as letting rulers govern the capital sector, letting Warrior Culture empires be led in battle by their warrior king, or letting the Chosen One do as they please?)

Having Warrior Culture gives 20% to the election weight of Commanders in democracies.

Do I understand correctly, that a single Official can do the work of up to ten Envoys? That sounds a bit insane. Is there now a limit to how many leaders can be assigned to galcom and federations?

Yes they can count as up to 10 envoys, but you can only assign a single official to the GalCom or your Federation.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Aristocratic elite changes the base chance for the additional traits from 10% (or whatever it is now) to 20%, correct? Or is this an independent roll for further traits?

They're two independent rolls. All leaders have a 10% chance to start with an extra positive trait and a negative trait to cancel it out, Aristocratic Elite gives another roll for the same with 20% odds. These are also independent from the 7.5% chance that leaders start with +1 level and the 2.5% chance that they start with +2 levels (which are the same dice roll)

Technocracy adds a science increase to each expertise or will there be a variety of buffs?

Technocracy's additional effect for Expertise traits gives them additional bonuses when governing planets and/or sectors.

What I don't like are all the leaders starting at a higher lvl, as I want to pick all the traits myself, especially since picking vaults of knowledge+aptitude+discovery/supremacy/domination results in instant lvl 4 leaders which means I can't pick the specialisations of newly recruited leaders.

All effects that cause leaders to start at a higher level have been changed so that the additional traits from those levels are no longer automatically selected if you own Galactic Paragons.

Just to confirm, can envoys still be assigned to federations and the galactic community?

You cannot assign envoys to the GalCom or Federations in 3.10

 

[Eladrin]

Most of what I want for it is simply script triggers to check what a planet's automation settings currently are. I can write up a detailed list to post in the suggestions forum.

Posting the detailed list in suggestions would be a good idea. It won't guarantee it, but I'll have someone investigate it.

Ping me in the post.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Does "for the same" mean they effectively have a 1.00*0.10+0.90*0.20=28% chance of having one extra trait pair?
Or that there is a 2% chance of a leader getting two extra trait pairs, one from each roll?

The latter.

Full details in spoiler

Spoiler: Leader generation stuff

When a leader is created the following happens:

• Dice roll for an extra pair of traits (one positive, one negative), 10% chance of success.
• Dice roll for additional starting level, 7.5% chance for +1 level, 2.5% chance for +2 levels.
  • These also increase the leader's age by 5% of their lifespan per bonus level.
• If they're an Imperial Heir:
  • Roll 1d10, reduce their age by the amount rolled.
  • Determine their class depending on civics and traditions selected.
  • Dice roll for an extra pair of traits (one positive, one negative), 5% chance of success.
    • 0% chance of success if empire of origin has the Philosopher King civic.
• Checks depending on their empire of origin:
  • Aristocratic Elite: Dice roll for an extra pair of traits (one positive, one negative), 20% chance of success.
    • Also changes their background job to Noble
  • Technocracy: Adds a random Expertise trait if they're a scientist.
  • Crusader Sprit: Adds the Crusader trait if they're a commander.
  • Letters of Marque: Adds the Material Liberator trait if they're a commander.
• Add leader traits from species traits (Erudite, Cyborg, Synthetic, Psionic, Brainslug, Clone Admiral)
• Add leader traits from specialist subject type.
• Randomise number of negative traits.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Does this mean Gestalts have went down from 4 Nodes + Ruler to 3 Nodes + Ruler?

Still four nodes

• Legion - Commander
• Cognitive - Scientist
• Regulatory - Official
• Growth - Official

One Offiical node is an Ambassador and the other is an Advisor (for the purposes of what traits they can get).

 

[Alfray Stryke]

This could (and, IMO, SHOULD) be fixed by having leaders always start with only their initial trait(s), and then N immediate trait pick opportunities (where N is the number of levels above 1 that they start at).

This is how it works in 3.10