Stellaris Dev Diary #323 - 3.10.1 "Pyxis" Beta and Next Steps

[Pokenar]

Bummer that this is the dynamic that’s evolved, where the shrillest voices on the forums have such influence, but I can’t say I blame the dev team.

Maybe you could give the option to disable internal instability and just label it Civilian mode, like you do with AI difficulty? I have a feeling people would complain less about the challenge if their egos were on the line.

Good ideas can be ruined by expressing them with arrogance

 

[luxeritib]

• Detail-Oriented has been updated to be a Destiny trait for Scholars, instead of a Veteran trait

I don't think this is a big issue, but now spiritualist renowned paragon, Nasuz Demetor has two Destiny traits. Just checked in game, and he has both Vibrant Storyteller and Detail-Oriented.
Also, his veteran class is Explorer while both Vibrant Storyteller and Detail-Oriented are Destiny traits for Scholars.

 

[Gorehuchi]

You can no longer sell exceptional materials (astral threads and minor artifacts) to the AI.

@Eladrin Will this be a similar situation to system trading, where the feature will never return because you can’t get the AI to understand their value?

Thanks for fixing the Manifesti check, love those little weirdos. Wish they would hang around longer if you satisfy them, but that is their want.

Ctrl + key seems clunky to me, but I’ll give it a go. Can’t wait to customize it though!

Thanks for your continued support

 

[Paul93]

Maybe you could give the option to disable internal instability and just label it Civilian mode, like you do with AI difficulty? I have a feeling people would complain less about the challenge if their egos were on the line.

I think that having a separate setting for this would be perfect. Just like the autonomous construction in Vic3 or the bordergore in CK2.

There are a lot of people that simply don't care of the political management side of the game, and it's ok. I mean, it's their game too. But I would love to have a truly living empire to manage, with strife and civil wars and whatnot.

 

[PDS_Iggy]

The issue with end game event trigger crashing the game is still present

Do you have a bug report for this I could check out?

 

[Masked Ermine]

No judgement, just curious if this was at all affected by having a separate team work on the expansion, as well as if we should expect this sort of thing moving forward.

As always, thank you for your work at keeping this game we all love alive and interesting!

Moving forward? This sort of thing has been happening (though to not such an egregious and severe degree as this) for quite a while. There's a reason many of us don't buy DLC or upgrade our games with new patches until 1-3 hotfixes have gone through....

 

[Masked Ermine]

What have people done to make us deserve this? XD

Well, eventually they will just stop letting us trade with the AI.

This seems inconsistent. I could understand not letting us trade favors because the favors* are inherently worthless to the AI, because they can't use them. But 'exceptional' resources are not useless and the AI does use them...(they overuse them if anything as the AI seems absolutely drunk on building fleets of archeoweapons ships).


*Hey devs is it on purpose or just oversight that something still give us favors for the AI thinking particularly the Diplomacy tree...where one of the selections gives us a percent chance to get a favor from an empire if we have a envoy assigned to it? I find this weird because favors aren't meant to be a thing anymore...but the game still acknoweldges their presence and you can levy them against the AI in some circumstances to get them to change their mind.

 

[Masked Ermine]

We abused the ability to trade resources per month for lump sum resources to the AI. Then we abused the ability to trade favors to every AI for massive lump sums. Clearly we are not to be trusted with lopsided AI trading and brought this on ourselves.

I mean it doesn't make sense that we're exploiting them, the AI value for things like minor artifacts make sense at least from what I've seen of their ship compositions....every slot is an archeo-tech component....the bastards are hemorrhaging minor artifacts...like the British Museum's visited their archeological sites....

 

[Enailios]

Just wanted to thank you for your hard work. 2.75k hours into the game and I'm having a good time. It was unfortunate dealing with the bugs, but I knew y'all would be quick to fix your labor of love. The conceptual changes to the leaders and the expanded stories the astral rifts provided were very cool and fun. Thanks!

 

[Masked Ermine]

And that's putting it mildly.



Sounds like a bit of a nightmare, TBF. You find one critical problem, fix it... then get confused as to how you're seeing the same thing, and maybe can't understand why, and need to really think twice more again to figure it out. Quite the challenge, both technically and operationally!

I for one see all you're doing to put things right, and it's to your credit. I don't think it'd be fair to blame you & your team for the metadata/checksum bug; who could have seen that one coming? I know what it's like to have to respond to a crisis and suddenly pull a load of late shifts, as you did on Thursday/Friday, so yah, respect there.



Hey, community, do you see this? That's an apology, that is. Take note of it!

Yes, this launch has been a right dog's breakfast. We know that, you know that - whatever. I'm certain that there has been another case of problems coming from a Thursday release, which it seems needs to be learned from again. But I've always been keen to focus on solutions, not blame (blame doesn't get anyone to resolution!).



Now THIS is a new development. I don't think we've had a Beta of a hotfix before. Two and a half working days for a hotfix release (even if in the form of a Beta)? Personally I think that's really, really good. Nice work. I hope this isn't the only time, IF we have similar buggy launches in future.

Personally I'm impressed and quite pleased with the pace and scale of resolution efforts.


There has been community speculation that the problems seen in recent Paradox launches have not been development team faults, but rather impositions from the managers, the money-men, and the marketers within PDX. If that is the case - and I know you cannot and would not say even if it were - then I do hope this gives you guys as the development team a really solid evidence base to push back to and say "Well, sir, we tried that with 3.10/AP, and it caused some chaos. We should avoid a repeat occurrence.".

I speak only for myself, but I'm sure a lot of the community would probably agree, that we would rather wait a week or two or three longer for a patch and a DLC update and have that much more level of polish and refinement, than have it sooner and have all of this kerfuffle.


Good points well presented. I have previously been a vocal proponent of the fabled 'Internal Politics' update, but for a while now I've been rowing back on that and admitting it probably isn't as much of a priority as I thought. I've noticed other users here starting to do the same thing. Besides the obvious fact that none of us can collectively agree on what we mean by such a nebulous and vast term as 'Internal politics rework/update', AND besides the valid points which you mention here, Iggy, I think the War mechanics are much more deserving of a review. Or something else, possibly Espionage. I don't really know, TBF.

I would agree that I doubt the Dev team start their day with 'how do we break this game today'. It is largely on Paradox's end though, and not on unreasonable expectations from the audience (as I've seen some people on this forum suggest). IE there needs to be a Quality control team that is the same size (and different people than) the Dev and Custodian teams. And they need a longer production window to accommodate the stress testing and unforeseen issues (bugs/exploits) caused by new code being piled on a rickety tower of 'new code piled on new code piled on new code'. IE we don't need 3-5 major revisionist patches and 1-3 major DLC and 3 or so new story packs/art packs/species extensions, such that these things come out every month and half resulting in the game only being 90% of it's full intended capacity for about two and a half days before a new patch breaks it all again.

I would rather see fewer major publications that are infinitely more stable and balanced and ostensibly not broken....with fewer major hotfix needs, than a constant stream of stuff that just....annoys me as I have upgrade and revert, upgrade and revert, upgrade and revert, every 3-6 weeks.

 

[SilverSelf]

Is it possible to get the beta patch using the GOG version?

 

[Farbros]

That is exactly what is needed to be added to the most menus, such as battle/science ships bottom left corner menu, districts/buildings on planets menu and starbases modules menu. That would make all macro in Stellaris so much faster and more enjoyable.

 

[Berenoy]

Please, the leader's Military Pioneer trait still does not have its effect of reducing ship construction costs applied.

 

[Blazoran]

No, Abrakam did great. The patch has highlighted some issues with our internal development processes and we are rectifying them as we speak. Things like harder deadlines for when features need to be merged in etc.


As a personal champion of internal politics having the internal stability of CK3 is a tricky business. Even in that game, there are people who despise it when they lose sections of their empire and have to integrate it back in after a messy inheritance. If your sectors started spinning off into independent nations some Stellaris players would love that while others would rage quit on the spot. Just know we are having discussions about it, but nothing is planned.


It's a limitation of our old engine. If you look at CK3 and Vicky 3 you can see that they both have support for that.

@ internal politics being a divisive topic amongst players

Ever considered using the authority types to make it partially opt in?

Democracies gets tons of it, oligarchies a fair amount, autocracies only a little, hive minds literally none.

Alternatively give the authoritarian ethic methods that allow you to shut down any interal politics and make egalitarian very limited in this regard.

Could have a civic to reintroduce it to autocracies for people who want imperial court intrigue

When stellaris was first announced, the thing that got me really excited about it was that the pops had their own ethics that did not necessarily align with your nations. Have always wanted more more mechanics to meaningfully tie into that.

 

[RangerRobAZ]

Thank you for adding in hotkeys so quickly!
The customizable outliner coming in 3.10.2 you previewed in this post also looks excellent, allowing people to put everything in 1 tab if they prefer.
I would love for the game to have hotkey remapping built in. Until then, for anyone looking to remap keys/mouse buttons, I'd recommend AutoHotKey. I run it to remap a few keys I don't like the assignment for.

 

[King Harkinian]

Bummer that this is the dynamic that’s evolved, where the shrillest voices on the forums have such influence, but I can’t say I blame the dev team.

This is unfortunately the case, and another example of what I posted in another thread where someone was complaining about negative leader traits existing:

Negative traits make the game more interesting. Bad things happening makes for good stories.

I truly loathe the fact that game developers these days - including Paradox - listen to people who whine about bad things happening in games. The Civilization series was heavily neutered by that type of design philosophy. In Civ V, the devs decided that "players don't like when bad things happen" and removed all sorts of interesting mechanics that gave previous Civ games their emergent storytelling power and made them feel like being a "real" leader of a country. Things like unhappiness, unhealthiness, corruption, random disasters, rebellions and so on - challenges the player had to react to and deal with - were stripped out and replaced with video-gamey snowball mechanics.

Stellaris has been hurt by this as well. Thanks to people like OP, the Ascension Paths are now homogenized and far less interesting. Worm forbid a player couldn't be guaranteed a Psionic ascension in the first 30 years without putting any effort into it, or that going that path could run the risk of meddling with powers too great to handle, with delightfully horrible results. Rebellions and the robot uprising are now a joke - a predictable progress bar to easily lower down to 0. It's not a good direction for a game that sold itself(at least to me) on dangerous cosmic horror and unpredictable discoveries.

 

[NorrinZelkarr]

I appreciate this, but I do want to make sure y'all know that the stability/crash issue is not just Mac/Linux users. I have a crash bug in the current release (I don't own the DLC, just updated to the most current release) that occurs 100 percent of the time on my save when it his a certain date. I'm worried that the fact that a lot of Mac users are reporting the same is drowning out the fact that it occurs on other OS. I can't play the game at all (and really don't want to invest the time in a new save until I know this isn't going to happen again and ruin the time put in)

 

[NorrinZelkarr]

FYI, this beta patch does not fix the date-certain crash bug (PC/Steam).

 

[lawsongrey]

The custom outliner coming looks amazing, I can truly make use of that as someone who plays often on the steam deck. I love this dev team. Ya'll up there with Creative Business Unit 3 from FF14 for me lately the way you engage the community, own up to issues, and so on. Great job team!

 

[pbr7994]

I absolutely love the outliner changes, personally think it's going to help a lot in keeping things more organised,
The one thing I would ask is if science ships and construction ships can be separated into separate categories from civilian?
Once the early game is done my construction ships are basically permanently left on auto and don't need to be seen much whereas science ships need to be managed more