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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.

image18.png

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.

image19.png

Utopia is recommended! How surprising!

image21.png

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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LiZinckle said:
I have read through the discussion around negative traits. I would recommend have an eye on gestalts in this case, to see how we could make negative traits more impactful.

If you have experience with XCOM 2, you might have recalled how crippling negative traits can be. But in legendary ironman, players play with these traits nonetheless most of the early game, instead of build an infirmary earlier and have these soldiers rest. And if they die, then dead are they and call that a day. The thing we are acceptable with the loss and crippling negative traits, is from the fact that we can get developed soldiers along playing, and while infirmary is inefficient and makes your soldiers decommissioned for 10 days, it could be acceotable for a veteran. But we do not yet to have equivalents in stellaris yet. Hired leader are nowhere as strong, and there is no way you can do with that trait once it pops, except a miracle event that removes it and gain a large sum of experience. The very fact that you can do nothing with that except dismissing hinders the design for more damaging negative traits, from the reply they know already it would be unpleasent.

Here we have an equivalent. Gestalt Nodes do not benefit from species traits that reduces negative traits, so they, unless combining -3 negatives traits and luckiness, will eventually develop some negative traits. And it is even more impactful than normal empires, whose traits can be something like consuming consumer goods that equally only around prodution of 1 or 2 pops: All of the negative traits are global effective. And chaning nodes are very costly. So we are actually playing with these till late game, for example 2270.

But there have been little complain over that, I think only me have voiced once for the gestalt nodes before culling is introduced. It could be because of gestalts being simplified in mechanics that fewer people are playing with it, but also, could be the presense of nodes culling and bisection, two agendas that helps remove the negative traits if needed. The two agendas, for the most of the time, are ineffective. Not only you are paying the opportunity cost of runing the agenda, paying a considerate amount of experience, but also their effects will eventually run out as the negative traits will be back. But they encourage players to actually consider whether or not to remove them right now, or play with them, or in emergency condition where the bisection is also cooling down, use culling.

Then let us have a look on non-gestalts. My example is, if I were to not piling -3 or -4 max negative traits, I would run around 2 or 3 more visinaries/researchers/strategists than needed as spare. When one of these rolled, for example bureaucratic, they will be replaced. It is up to the players themselves to judge if or not this is an interaction with negative traits.

'We are the consciousness. We endure.'
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Acutally, turns out, if we develop a head meta that is barely extant in the game, and take sides around our preferences like its a team sport, negatraits on one leader are actually a big boost to all other leaders basically untouched at all. But thank goodness we don't do that, do we?
 
Is there a way for the armies that I land to benefit from the Commander that is designated in the fleet stationed on the planet instead of having said commander directly assigned to the armies? Perhaps it would be considered that common transport ships and military ships are part of the same fleet (with a limit per fleet of transport ships different from that of combat ships so that it is not harmed). In this way, fleets with incorporated armies would have the option of "landing troops" on the planets, in addition to carrying out orbital bombardment. Likewise, it would quite define the fleets with Generals of the Fleets with Admirals, since the latter would be dedicated to confronting the enemy fleets and those commanded by generals would be used to assault highly defended systems with planets to assault.
 
yurshenko said:
Is there a way for the armies that I land to benefit from the Commander that is designated in the fleet stationed on the planet instead of having said commander directly assigned to the armies? Perhaps it would be considered that common transport ships and military ships are part of the same fleet (with a limit per fleet of transport ships different from that of combat ships so that it is not harmed). In this way, fleets with incorporated armies would have the option of "landing troops" on the planets, in addition to carrying out orbital bombardment. Likewise, it would quite define the fleets with Generals of the Fleets with Admirals, since the latter would be dedicated to confronting the enemy flora and those commanded by generals would be used to assault highly defended systems with planets to assault.
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Would be great to make "invasion" module for regular ships, and admiral landing with their troops while invading planets, and etreating if either armies was destroyed or fleet was attacked.
 
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Archael90 said:
Would be great to make "invasion" module for regular ships, and admiral landing with their troops while invading planets, and etreating if either armies was destroyed or fleet was attacked.
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There is a mod with a similar mechanic, except for the point where the Commander goes down to the planet. But I don't think it's a fair mechanic because as soon as you add invasion modules to your ships, you will never have to produce armies manually again and therefore the losses of said armies would be automatically replaced and at no cost, in addition to eliminating maintenance. of the armies themselves and their increase in seniority.
Instead, the invasion fleets would always be escorted (as they should be) and the army builder option that was added to the star bases could even be added to the fleets, making it even easier to replace those lost during an invasion.
 
DLC looks exciting, thanks for bringing more storylines, new events and relics into the game. I also appreciate the discount for early buyers who pre-purchase, thanks for all the hard work!
 
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sandro chronicler said:
No offence, but Leader Consolidation is not just questionable decision, but it's following leader expansion seems just plain dumb...
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Expansion of what they do. Consolidation of their classes to... actually just remove General as a dedicated leader type, because they were worthless before and completely unused now.

Although, I won't lie, it would also have been interesting to keep the four types so generals would be used, having their own cap. But keeping that would mean anything giving general capacity would be useless if you didn't intend to use any, which most people still wouldn't.
 
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Thiend said:
Expansion of what they do. Consolidation of their classes to... actually just remove General as a dedicated leader type, because they were worthless before and completely unused now.

Although, I won't lie, it would also have been interesting to keep the four types so generals would be used, having their own cap. But keeping that would mean anything giving general capacity would be useless if you didn't intend to use any, which most people still wouldn't.
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That part of a big problem with this game (underutilised ground combat), which should have been fixed long ago. Instead this will only make things worse.
 
Hi guys,

After my first sessions some initial feedback:
  • Outliner rework - call me old-fashioned but I prefer my information on screen on first sight, not in tabs. It sounded like a potential QoL change but in the current version it's not really providing me with any major improvements. I like that Factions are now in a separate tab, but I'd rather have my fleets in the first tab - maybe that's the best solution for the future to offer a fully customizable set of tabs - so you can add anything to Tab 1 instead of restricting it to "Government"-related things.
  • Leader Consolidation - providing my feedback in the related thread but overall I feel that the system is stuck in a weird spot in between going for empire-wide focus while maintaining the old individual skill leader aspects, making choices more frustrating than exciting with too much influence of RNG.
  • Astral rifts are great and fun! Please more of this and increase limits of astral rifts than can be created or increase spawn rate - but overall effects & edicts are interesting! I hope there will be more content around this resource.
Bugs - probably the one of the buggiest releases in a while for me, ranging from DLC not being recognized, not working traditions and perks to an "infinitely for free" ship-producing enemy star base I conquered that wouldn't allow me to build ships but built his ships for me for no alloy costs (but also no way to stop it until I fully destroyed his empire). It can happen and I'm happy to be able to play this earlier than expected but a bit more polishing would've been great, same seems to apply to leader traits balancing.
 
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The trait picks on level up seem to be completely randomized now. Before if you had a level 1 admiral with unyielding I, then you would always have unyielding II as a choice when got to level 2. That is no longer the case. So it's not even enough to restart until you get commanders and scientist who are actually trained to do those jobs because they may still only have governor traits to pick from on level up. We need more trait pics on level up so that we can focus these leaders on a job, not build a stable full of jack of all trades. I want scientists to be scientists, they are only ever going to govern science worlds. I want commanders to be commanders, since they basically institute martial law as a governor whether you like it or not, I will only ever use them for that job in rare cases anyways.
 
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Any updates or timeline regarding bugs introduced by this version? I have moved back to previous version but it seems like reverting version bugged my previous saves. I can load games from 3.9.3 version but then, I can't load newer saves.
 
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