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

[archej243]

Still broken for ships though.

This is really annoying that they didn't fix that.

 

[Millbot]

Still going to argue that negative traits should be reworked to do something both positive and negative, to make them interesting. Otherwise players are always going to hate to see them because a normal leader without a negative trait will always be better, assuming everything else is roughly equal. After all a level 10 leader with 3 negative traits, is still better than a level one leader with no negative traits. Only time where I've really seen negative trait not feel like this, is when I get a paragon leader because you're getting a whole package deal where they will always come with one set negative trait to somewhat balance out the other traits they have.

I'll probably shelve this game until the ship cost and build stuff is fixed because it's not playable when you have to spend full price for things that should be discounted and have to wait the full base build duration, when they should be building faster.

Also maybe can do something about how vassals get into wars with FEs, they shouldn't, if it's going to be their overlord suffering the consequences. Also either the player should be told an FE with assassinate their leader, should they surrender or that garbage design should be removed. Current setup is well dogsh*T to experience.

 

[Minisalt]

General question: If we're looking for bugs while we play, should we use the beta or is it fine to keep using current 3.10.0?

 

[malakhglitch]

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

Unfortunately those of us who use the GOG version don't have the benefit of opting into beta branches. We have ways to hold off updating to the next patch, but that's about it.

 

[ValinShadow]

General question: If we're looking for bugs while we play, should we use the beta or is it fine to keep using current 3.10.0?

Probably use the beta since that has a bunch of bugfixes already.

 

[Lenk]

Really loved the DLC, it put a nice bow on the game when it comes to a certain end game faction. Though I have to ask, is there any reason why we couldn't explore the Galactic core region more? The Crystalline empire should be still active in the area or are they being saved for down the road?

 

[blahmaster6k]

I'll probably shelve this game until the ship cost and build stuff is fixed because it's not playable when you have to spend full price for things that should be discounted and have to wait the full base build duration, when they should be building faster.

Personally I think it would be great if they just removed every discount because ship discounts break the game in half and are impossible to balance.

 

[bdolishny]

As a long time player of both Stellaris and all Paradox games as a whole, this new DLC worries me for two primary reasons.

Firstly, a lot of the new abilities and civics feel half baked. Take Sovereign Guardians; what exactly does this name mean? Surely every stellar empire is sovereign. The civic's feature seem to fit better to a pacifist society. While stacking that much pop reduction in conjunction with pacifism would be imbalanced, why did Paradox insist on calling it "guardian"? Why not call it "Spartan Society: This society believes that all of its warriors should be respectable citizens and all its citizens should be warriors. In times of peace, soldiers provide training and leadership roles, and in times of war the populace is more than willing to beat it's robo-harvesters into laserguns". It's not just that one; Hyperspace Specialty, surely every spacefaring empire wants to go fast; Dark Consortium, the flavour text makes it seem like dark matter has always been used by this society, but it's not locked at game start. The description is wrong.

But it's not just civics. The new rifts are fun, if a little wacky, but they are very similar to archeology sites. While I love that Paradox is adding more late game exploration, they don't feel all that different. The new relics are not balanced either. And the addition of Astral Threads seems wasteful, as it creates a new resources with the sole purpose of feeding the mechanics of the DLC. Which brings me to my second point...

As stated before, I am a lifetime player of Paradox games. My start was EU4, way back when westernization was a thing. I have seen plenty of DLCs come and go. What makes a bad DLC, to me, is whether of not it adds something to the game, or just sits on top. EU4, as many people will say, has a problem with DLC coming out and adding new features that bloat the game, add more stuff to click, but don't really deepen the gameplay. A recent example was all those unique units; I remember seeing in the forums many people from those cultures and countries that were getting them question why they were unique units and not just ideas for the nation. It adds stuff to do, but does not make the game better.

I am worried that this DLC marks a trend in Stellaris becoming more like EU4. There's no need to introduce a whole new resources that has no hard scientific basis into the game when making the new actions scale off research or dark matter of something else would have worked fine. If the last patch was the end of Stellaris, I would have been fine, upset and sad, but the game is in a good place. I can achieve a lot of my RP fantasies as it was. The addition of this patch does not mark the game more fun, it does not create substantial new ways to play, nor does it reward long time players by providing good cost-for-value stories. I know that Paradox has people reading these forums; I hope I'm not too far down for a reply. But more importantly, I hope someone high up in Stellaris gets this message, as someone who loves what Stellaris IS and is nervous as to what it's becoming. Thank you for the work you do.

 

[yurshenko]

I would like to see the Commanders or even the Commissioners add a crime reduction for soldier work or increase the efficiency of police work instead of the above. It would make some sense to use military leaders to confront crime waves in worlds where a criminal syndicate has established a branch.
Could the Fortress world designation add some soldier jobs per promotion level?
Even increase fleet contribution or increase stability by soldier jobs. Likewise, it would be good to reduce the space occupied by each population and the use of services for the work of soldiers.
The damage reduction to defensive armies and the FTL inhibitor are not modifiers that accumulate for each fortress or stronghold, so they simply only add more soldier jobs. On the other hand, if they added some services and accommodation to support the work of soldiers provided by the planetary designation or those that they themselves provide, they would be much more useful.
The Officer Academy should be a unique building in the empire that will increase the pool of Commanders, their limit and increase the level of new commanders by +1.

 

[Galaxy42]

Greetings!

Stellaris 3.10.0 “Pyxis” and the Astral Planes Narrative Expansion released last Thursday, and it’s been a bit of a bumpy ride, so I moved this week’s dev diary a bit earlier than usual.

Due to an error we made in metadata, many players were unable to verify ownership of the DLC at launch. We pushed a quick hotfix, which resolved these issues for some players, while also introducing a different ownership issue through a checksum error, which prevented other people from being able to properly explore the expansion. We finally managed to fix all of these problems midday on Friday. I want to thank everyone who provided bug reports and helped us diagnose the dlc ownership issues, we wouldn’t have been able to resolve them so quickly without your help.

I’m terribly sorry for the poor launch.

We’ve just put a beta branch up on Steam containing the 3.10.1 release, which is currently planned to be deployed to live on Thursday. This release includes a number of bugfixes, as well as hotkeys for the Tabbed Outliner. Let us know what you think.

View attachment 1051958
The hotkeys are CTRL+A/D for switching to the previous/next tab and CTRL+Q/W/E/R for switching to a tab directly
(much like Z/X/C/V switches between tabs in other UIs, such as the planetary view).

Game Director Eladrin talks about the 3.10.1 Open Beta and Astral Planes Release​

Spoiler: 3.10.1 “Pyxis” Beta Patch Notes

Improvements

• Added Ctrl+A/D shortcuts to cycle through outliner tabs. Also added Ctrl+Q/W/E/R to switch to specific tabs. Added tooltips for them. These tooltips are currently in English regardless of language setting
• Clarified tooltip headers for governor traits.

Balance

• AI empires generated as part of the Common Ground and Hegemony origins now start with an additional Official to be assigned to the Federation
• Blocked empire rulers and imperial heirs from getting the Planar Theorist trait
• Commissioner subclass now increases stability from soldiers instead of providing additional soldier jobs
• Decreased the chance for leaders to get common governor traits if they do not have a governor subclass or are not governing
• Decreased the chance of leaders gaining job providing traits
• Detail-Oriented has been updated to be a Destiny trait for Scholars, instead of a Veteran trait
• Explorer subclass now has +1 Sensor Range
• Halved the effects of the Politician trait
• Having a Commander govern a planet or sector now provides soldier jobs
• Increased the chances of the Prospector trait to fire.
• Oppressive Autocracy now has the colony shelter building replace a colonist job with an enforcer job
• Policies that increase leader starting level now greatly increase leader hiring cost and upkeep cost.
• Rebalanced traits that affect research output from jobs while governing
• Reduced the magnitude of most governor modifiers.
• Removed the "can only get Council traits" restriction on rulers in Democracies, Oligarchies and MegaCorps. (For modders, this is using the is_autocracy scripted trigger)
• Replaced Champions of the Empire +1 Initial Leader Level with +1 Additional Trait
• Resources from Psionic Pops modifier now applies to latent psionic species.
• Reworked Driven Educator to instead provide +25% Leader XP gain
• Slightly decreased the bonuses from Custom AI Assistant and Sapient AI Assistant traits
• Slightly decreased the penalties from the Neurosis trait
• Soldier jobs now produce a small amount of base stability.
• Traits that give homeworld jobs now require leaders to be at least level 2
• You can no longer sell exceptional materials (astral threads and minor artifacts) to the AI.

Bugfixes

• "The Seal" situation is aborted if you attack the formless
• Added missing descriptions for multiple ship component categories (reactor, auras, combat computers)
• Added missing node xp modifiers to the Astral Planes civics for gestalt empires.
• AI empires with the Fruitful Partnership origin will stop opening seed pods on Holy Words only to get obliterated by angry fallen empires
• All types of priest jobs (e.g. high priests, numistic priests) now benefit from the additional trade value from the Dimensional Enterprise council position.
• Blocked Entrepreneur (Ambassador) trait for gestalt empires, fanatic purifiers, inward perfectionists and criminal syndicates
• Blocked the Charmer and Research Exchange traits for genocidal empires and inwards perfectionists
• Clarified that the First Contact civics give an increased chance to draw FTL travel technologies (English only)
• Corrected all versions of Sovereign Guardianship to have 150% Empire Size from systems
• Corrected draw weights for a number of leader traits
• Empires can no longer spawn with multiple ministers of defense under some cases, such as being The Chosen.
• Empires created via status quo peace deals will now correctly generate their council.
• Explicitly blocked trading of gestalt nodes (instead of them being implicitly blocked)
• Fixed 2 zroni digsites pointing to a deprecated title.
• Fixed a bug that allowed you to enact the "Dayside Farm" decision multiple times on a single planet.
• Fixed a case where the "Abandoned Star Platform" anomaly would leave the system's primary star without a deposit
• Fixed a case where the "Ion Trail" event would occasionally pick the same system it spawned in for the follow-up event
• Fixed a large number of planetary features that were providing incorrect bonuses due to changes with Mastery of Nature
• Fixed a typo in the event text for the "Blinding Grief" event
• Fixed calculations for determining trade values gained from slaves
• Fixed commanders wearing the wrong uniform on planetary assignments.
• Fixed crystal rift situations checking for the wrong amount of resources to validate approaches
• Fixed Crystal Sphere stolen events not using the correct texts and picture
• Fixed Crystal Sphere stolen events triggering when the crystal sphere situations are no longer active
• Fixed Dark Consortium displaying flag information in tooltip instead of the standard loc key for this situation
• Fixed Dark Consortium not locking the civic when being played from start
• Fixed Dark Matter Breakthrough agenda always stating it will locks the civic, even if it already is
• Fixed descriptions for Artisan Drones showing in district tooltips when none were present
• Fixed Eager Explorers giving two +50% chances to draw Improved Structural Integrity
• Fixed Efficient Staffing III applying the incorrect modifiers, leading to no sector modifiers.
• Fixed habitat and archaeology lab technologies missing increased chance to be drawn from being rare technologies
• Fixed hostile fleets being capable of crossing dimensional locks
• Fixed Imperial Heirs sometimes spawning with the incorrect initial level for their class.
• Fixed issue with concepts being offset for all languages using TTF (fonts)
• Fixed missing AI weights for some council positions
• Fixed missing localisation for Clone Army Commander traits
• Fixed outdated tooltips in diplomacy with Trader Enclaves
• Fixed some empires, such as Common Ground federation members or MSI, starting with duplicated council positions.
• Fixed some triggered modifiers from leader traits not being applied.
• Fixed starbases not inheriting modifiers from their country
• Fixed strange wormhole breaking existing wormhole in the same system if any when spawning
• Fixed that culled/reformatted nodes would not have a level 1 trait.
• Fixed that culling/reformatting the Regulatory Node would not create a new one.
• Fixed the "Dissolved" astral rift event leaving a ship stuck in an endless MIA loop
• Fixed the Archivist trait giving scientists additional levels
• Fixed the sector modifier for Ruthless Developer
• Fixed Tree of Life and Lithoid Crater deposits not providing all of their bonuses
• Fixed Urbanist trait displaying it was tier 1 and for any class when it is not a tiered trait and only for the Official
• For players without Galactic Paragons, Officials should no longer roll GalCom traits if you are not a member of the GalCom or Federation traits if you are not a member of a Federation
• Galactic Community Delegates now correctly multiply their diplomatic weight bonus by their level, instead of their level squared.
• If your capital is in the Formless home system, The Vacuum Flower relic now correctly grants you Astral Threads
• Made the first option in Black Hole Instability requiring Astral Threads instead of rewarding them
• Only leaders eligible for a specific council position should show up as potential recruits.
• Pre-Sapient pops no longer help you upgrade your capital buildings earlier.
• Prospector trait should no longer fire twice for Volatile Motes
• Removed Artisan Drone jobs from ringworld industrial segment if it is not set to factory designation.
• Removed reference to Imperial Heirs not having unity upkeep.
• Repaired Shattered Ringworlds now use the correct graphics
• Scrapping the warship in the "Adrift" event now correctly awards you Alloys instead of Minerals
• Scrapping the warship in the "Warship Destroyed" event now correctly awards you Alloys instead of Minerals
• Stopped certain events from accidentally adding anomalies or terraforming Astral Scars
• The Excavator trait no longer erroneously requires the Rift Sphere technology
• The formless don't talk to you lightly anymore if you become hostile
• The Geology Expert, Manufacturer, and Observer traits no longer state that they are Scientist traits
• The leader trait "Trader II" now correctly applies its effect to the whole sector
• The Manifesti's Head in the Clouds demand now checks for scientists on the council correctly
• The Mass Extinction Event Chain should work properly again.
• The plasmic species trait now has a slave cost of 2500 energy credits.
• The Scout trait no longer states it applies to military fleets for scientists
• The Tyznn Tithe trait is no longer possible to acquire by levelling up.
• The UNE will no longer spawn a third human empire to hang out with them for no reason.
• The Void Dweller initializing effects will no longer generate habitable worlds with no deposits.
• Updated the upgraded version of the Assembler trait to use the correct modifiers
• Vassalizing the formless will now transfer their system to them if you happen to own it.
• Vibrant Storyteller is correctly marked as a Destiny trait for Scholars, not Explorers
• When loading a save, update some modifiers that previously weren't updated.
• You can now use the Astral Jump Astral Action if you have Psionic Jump Drives or Subspace Drives.
• zadigal is now correctly fired if you declare war with the Formless on their recruitment day

AI

• Fixed AI assigning leaders to Galcom when it shouldn't be possible.

Stability

• Fix for crash when running unlock_council_slots effect.

UI

• Added text to system debug tooltip to separate the different lists of modifiers.
• Anomaly view "Research Time" label is hidden when the research time is hidden.
• Changed Change Scientist hotkey in Situation Log anomaly view to G.
• DLC list is now shown in the Cooperative game setup.
• Fixed empire creation UI remaining visible while ACB is open.
• Fixed layout of "no scientists" text in anomaly view.
• Fixed portrait frame appearing to the left of the anomaly UI if you have no science ships with scientists.
• Fixed portrait tooltip in anomaly view incorrectly saying that you can right-click to remove the leader.
• In the anomaly window, if you get a valid scientist while no scientist is selected, that scientist is automatically selected.
• In the anomaly window, the Change Scientist button is disabled if there is no valid scientist available.
• Updated the leader ethics tooltip to mention planetary and sector governor ethics attraction
• Fixed leader XP bar showing the wrong tooltip

Modding

• Added a init_effect field to spawn_natural_wormhole effect
• Added additional documentation to 00_base_classes.txt
• Moved events action.504 and .505 to event leader.200 and .201
• Removed initial_effect_custom_loc from agendas. The initial effect's tooltip is now directly built from the initial effect
• The link_wormholes effect can now be used on the bypass scope

Please note that the 3.10.1 "Pyxis" Open Beta is an optional beta patch. You have to manually opt in to access it.
Go to your Steam library, right click on Stellaris -> Properties -> betas tab -> select "stellaris_test - 3.10.1 Open Beta" branch.​

Some notes for Linux users that are encountering crashes - we have potential workarounds for two of them:

• If you are crashing on startup, players have reported that starting Steam, disabling the internet, then loading the game bypasses the issue. Internet can be reenabled afterwards.
• If you are crashing while hosting a multiplayer game on Ubuntu 20.04, switching to Cross Platform multiplayer appears to resolve the issue. It is also not present on Ubuntu 22.04.

At this time we are still tracking down Mac stability issues.

3.10.2 is already in progress, in which we are continuing to hunt down stability problems (especially for Linux and Mac users), fixing more bugs, and adding more customization to the Tabbed Outliner.

Spoiler: Outliner Customization

View attachment 1051959
WIP Mockup of what we’re planning. Might not exactly end up looking like this.​

Event Chain Subtitles​

In the last Dev Diary, we said we’d provide a form so you can submit events that you think should have subtitles added to them.

Here's a link to a form where you can suggest events for review.

Thanks for your assistance!

What’s Next​

We’re going to continue watching your bug reports and feedback, fixing things, and working on 3.10.2, so you can enjoy the new content the way it was meant to be.

Thanks for playing Stellaris!

Astral Planes is discounted 10% until November 27th.​

Just installed the beta and can confirm the starbase platform caps are working again. Thanks for the fast work near the holidays

 

[Lorenerd11]

Thanks for the quick update. I hope with the outliner customisation we’ll be able to reorder our fleets too. That would be a nice QoL feature for the late game.

The Outliner tabs provide a good opportunity for that.

On the Government tab, the "reorder" button lets us reorganize planets; and on the Fleets tab, it would let us reorganize fleets.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

Martial Law could perhaps add Crime reduction to Soldier jobs?
Perhaps +1 from the planetary modifier and +1 per Enforcer in the colony?

The military should normally not be used for crime-fighting, since it would be like swatting at flies with a hammer - but sufficiently big flies may warrant a hammer.

Maybe a "Military Police" trait/policy/edict (or Domination tradition) that adds crime reduction to soldiers?

 

[SirBlackAxe]

I think a Domination tradition effect would be the best option among those.
Though I would prefer if the effect was part of the Martial Law planetary decision.

The Martial Law decision was removed, though.

I suppose that maybe you could add it back as crime triggered decision, as an alternative to an Anti-Crime Campaign or Crime Lord deal?

 

[Seaghauwn]

I have a question.

A lot of people in the community noticed that the last 2 DLCs had large powercreeps.

Things like advisors giving a huge, flat amount of + resources in Paragons. And now in Astral Rifts the ethernal throne from the formless giving a 40 size gaia world or doubling physics research. *And* it makes leaders immortal, *and* that paves over a lot of limitations, *and* worst of all, you can now combine it with the Overtuned trait (better leaders at the cost of - lifespan which is now set to immortal).

Will the developers keep a sharper eye on powercreep and be more intentional on toning down rewards in new DLCs?

I assume the people noticing are the ones who like to play the game using strictly the meta?

 

[yurshenko]

The Martial Law decision was removed, though.

I suppose that maybe you could add it back as crime triggered decision, as an alternative to an Anti-Crime Campaign or Crime Lord deal?

I believe that martial law refers to the effects of appointing a military leader as governor. Adding crime reduction to soldiers would make them too strong, but it could definitely increase the crime reduction that enforcers provide. Perhaps it could be a modifier of the Commissioner subclass so that it is not too strong.

 

[Badboy1155]

So what about the false information about civic franchising?

Here the civic, out the wiki website

the 5. and 7. effects

 

[biship]

Does the 3.10.2 outliner let us show everything on one long tab?

 

[Millbot]

Personally I think it would be great if they just removed every discount because ship discounts break the game in half and are impossible to balance.

Honestly, I could live with that approach, assuming they rebalance everything to account for the change.

The game is essentially unplayable once you get to the midgame crises because there is a base level of ship cost reduction and build time that people can get without traditions, civics, leader traits or APs, that isn't being applied. Also I would not be surprised if some of the balance is still built on the idea that people are taking supremacy tradition. It certainly, is likely assuming we have some council traits that reduce both of those.

Not sure it's likely to happen, given that they do want military stuff to have some differences from non-military stuff and the same bonuses of range, fire rate, damage, shield hp, armor hp, hull hp, upkeep reduction, speed and disengagement, while a fair number, can start to get stale if they are seen enough.

On a side note, I do want to say the weapon type specialization seems new. I don't recall that from when I last played, which was mostly during Paragons for a about month, until I got sick and tired of not being able to form a federation, thanks to all AI empires being in a vassal swarm by like year 30ish of the game (I"m being a bit hyperbolic here, but I remember getting pretty incensed in one game where I was planning to form a federation with my neighbor, only to have them become a vassal in like you twenty of the game). Anyways, if these are new traits for 3.10, can I suggest we get more of that because it's a good way to add more choices, that force players to weight their options given that a fleet speced into throwing missiles everywhere, might run into issues once they go up against fleets that are built to counter that. It could still be an interesting way to add variety with future civics and APs, which I suspect the archaeotech was going for.

It does feel like sovereign guardianship has breath some new life into some options that were falling by the wayside. Still think life seeded needs something, but the tall civic probably makes it more valuable since that works better with really big planets and comes with bonuses where having less worlds isn't an issue. Same deal with mastery of nature, hydrocentric and world shaper, as other things that have good synergy with the tall civic. I just don't think an origin, AP or tradition should be hinging on a singular civic. So either we need more tall civics that get that synergy or some of these need a bit more fine tuning. Personally, I vote for more tall civics because I don't want to be forced into a military ethic for all my tall builds.

Finally,it feels like federations are going to become rarer because the new stuff does make other trees more viable or actually good in certain setups. So devs might want to really consider decoupling federations from being locked behidn a tradition. They can be good, but I'd argue things are increasingly moving to a point where diplomacy tree is having a hard time jsutifying it's existence. Going to advocate diplomacy tree should go all in on diplomatic actions that aren't tied to federations, while we're given a tradition tree that is all about making it more beneficial to be in a federation. I mean would put more pressure on rethinking how the galactic imperium and federation interact, but I'd argue the current setup biases things in favor of just being an overlord with vassals.

 

[Seaghauwn]

So what about the false information about civic franchising?

Here the civic, out the wiki website

the 5. and 7. effects

View attachment 1053002

Could have been fixed in the patch:

Edit: Now I am confused

What does Max holdings mean? cause it doesn't mean what I thought it meant.

Does it allow +1 max holding for each empire?
Nope: it's not fixed

 

[malakhglitch]

So what about the false information about civic franchising?

Here the civic, out the wiki website

the 5. and 7. effects

View attachment 1053002

The wiki does not usually get updated with everything until things settle down. It also has its own thread for reporting missing items and errors. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/stellaris-wiki.875979/