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Stellaris Dev Diary #34 - Clarke Patch

Hello everyone! As you may have noticed, there was no Stellaris development diary this week, because the team has been extremely busy working on the first free patch for the game, which we have named Clarke. Clarke is currently undergoing internal QA testing, and we hope to have a beta version of the patch out for you before the end of the week. Therefore, we decided to do a dev diary after all, detailing some of the fixes, changes and improvements coming in the patch.

Please note that the highlights below are just highlights, NOT exhaustive patch notes!

UI IMPROVEMENTS
A major target area for Clarke was the UI, particularly in regards to sectors and diplomacy. A few highlights:

  • Sectors can now be managed directly from the outliner.
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  • Diplomatic Notifications are now much more detailed.
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  • End of Combat interface has received a major face-lift.
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  • Habitability icons/tooltips now show you more detailed information, including which worlds in a system you can currently colonize.
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AI IMPROVEMENTS
Another major target area for Clarke was to address complaints regarding the AI, particular in sectors to sectors and warfare. A few highlights:
  • Greatly improved sector AI handling of pops, buildings, spaceports and mining stations.
  • Fixes for AI in end game crises.
  • Improvements and fixes to AI handling of its fleets.
  • Less restrictions on what the AI will trade and with who, especially in regards to border access.
  • In multiplayer, empires that are player-controlled will have a 'limited' AI for a period of 10 years if the player drops. The limited AI will not make any drastic changes to the empire, such as changing sectors, disbanding ships, declaring wars, etc, allowing a player to rejoin their empire pretty much as they left it.

We've also added a new option in galaxy setup where you can set the AI's overall aggressiveness.
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EMPIRE BUILDER IMPROVEMENTS
We also took some time to add a pair of highly requested features to the empire builder. Namely, the ability to write a biography for your species and empire, and the ability to customize ruler titles. Ruler titles are customized separately by gender, and will remain even if you change government type, so long as the new government is of the same type as the previous one (so changing from a Monarchy to another Monarchy will not clear your ruler titles, while changing from a Monarchy to a Democracy will).
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BALANCE CHANGES
While balance wasn't our main priority for Clarke, we nonetheless targeted a few major balance issues. A few highlights:
  • War score costs now scale to the size of your target, so you can take more planets from large empires but can't vassalize them in a single war.
  • The ability to stack evasion on Corvettes was nerfed.
  • Strike craft had their range substantially increased.
  • Ethics were rebalanced to make Xenophile/Xenophobe stronger picks, among other changes.
  • It is no longer necessary to control planets to demand them in war, but controlling planets that are set as wargoals are now worth more warscore.
  • Technology cost is now increased both by number of planets owned and size of population, instead of just population. Accordingly, the tech increase cost from population was lowered.

BUG FIXES
In addition to all this, Clarke naturally also includes dozens of fixes for bugs large and small. A few highlights:
  • Military Station maintenance is now correctly calculated (was far too high previously).
  • Numerous fixes to events, including fixing up the Old Gods event chain.
  • Fixed 'ghost' trade deal entries and trade deals silently failing when you traded above a certain percentage of your resource stockpiles.
  • Democracies that don't allow slavery will no longer get the Slaver mandate.
  • Difficulty settings are now available in multiplayer setup.

With Clarke almost finished, we're now switching over fully to working on the Asimov patch, as outlined in last week's dev diary. Where Clarke was mainly a fix and UI improvement patch, Asimov will target the midgame with new diplomatic features and event chains. More details about Asimov will be released in development diaries over the next few weeks, but if you have any questions about the Clarke patch, feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer.
 
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Is there any plan to remove observation posts from a sector's control? it seems like that should be out of their scope.
yeah definately. Observation posts need to be under our control in all circumstances i think because sometimes you want the post to only generate society output because the primitive species is only in bronze age for example, but when they reach industrial age you want to switch it to covert mode for example and if the post is under control of the sector you are not able to change anything.
Besides, the sector cannot use research output for anything, its out of their scope, so theres not a single reason for the observation post to be in the sector.
 
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I had an issue with sectors where the AI wouldn't build buildings, and they'd place slaves/robots on energy and science resources. Also they never enslave pops on their own. Will those be fixed now?
 
When you create a sector they should gain control over space stations as well. Have ship building done like armies on planets. No longer control the station so the sector will upgrade and build modules when possible but you can still build ships out of it.
 
When I read about rework of the EMPIRE BUILDER screen, I was reminded of something that confused me.
There is a gender symbol for the leader. You can change it. But it just works for the start leader, right? I wanted to design a fanatic spiritual race where the spiritual leader is always a woman. But that doesn't work. The next leader will just be random.

No plans on making something like this possible? :D
 
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Please for the love of god and all that is good in this world,

make double clicking a civilian ship on the outliner center on the ship in the GALAXY MAP and not open the system where the ship is.

Just this little change would improve the game incredibly for me. Right clicking the ship could still open the system where the ship is.
 
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Hi guys!!! Great game!! Ive been watching and waiting since before the Blorg stream. Bought it the day it came out and been playing it non stop. I have one suggestion so far, I havent read through this whole thread so not sure if someone brought it up.

Can we please have some kind of indication the type of colony ship you are looking at when working with multi races. I find i build a colony ship for an ocean world then quit for the day, come back to game and have no idea what colony ships go for what planet.

Thanks!!
 
When I read about rework of the EMPIRE BUILDER screen, I was reminded of something that confused me.
There is a gender symbol for the leader. You can change it. But it just works for the start leader, right? I wanted to design a fanatic spiritual race where the spiritual leader is always a woman. But that doesn't work. The next leader will just be random.

No plans on making something like this possible? :D
I think it depends. Either on purpose or a bug (but a nice bug in this case).

I made a spritualist-collectivist empire, with the divine mandate (and the non advanced equivalent before that). The initial ruler was female, because I didn't change the gender. All ruler after her were female. Not a single male, on like 10-15rulers. Which wasn't a bad thing, since they were insect aliens, so it was like the Queen of the hive or something, made sense to have a matriarchal society.
 
Hi guys!!! Great game!! Ive been watching and waiting since before the Blorg stream. Bought it the day it came out and been playing it non stop. I have one suggestion so far, I havent read through this whole thread so not sure if someone brought it up.

Can we please have some kind of indication the type of colony ship you are looking at when working with multi races. I find i build a colony ship for an ocean world then quit for the day, come back to game and have no idea what colony ships go for what planet.

Thanks!!
You can work around that for now by clicking on the planet, then the colonize button to bring up the list of ships. The pops are on there.
 
Hi. I like the game a lot. Will we be able to rename our armies and not just the transports (which lose the name after landing anyway) soon or ever? It's kindof an impossible feat late game but at start I feel like it would be really cool. Thank you.
 
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When I read about rework of the EMPIRE BUILDER screen, I was reminded of something that confused me.
There is a gender symbol for the leader. You can change it. But it just works for the start leader, right? I wanted to design a fanatic spiritual race where the spiritual leader is always a woman. But that doesn't work. The next leader will just be random.

No plans on making something like this possible? :D
That's actually already dueable. Just takes me 15 minutes of modding to remove all men from their race.
 
So, the unbidden have invaded my galaxy right. but I can't get all of my allies together and destroy the portal. will I be able to do that now?
I believe PARADOX thinks you must be Commander Shepard adn save the galaxy. Just that you're alone this time, can't invite other aliens to make the alliance. IT's funny because even so they don't let you join forces against the unbidden, we can actually defeat them alone fairly easy considering this would be probably meant to be a galaxy-wide event.
It would be nice if the unbidden got even stronger but then we could get help from allies and even enemies to joint forces against a superfunckingpowerful enemy otherwise everyone is doomed. The way it is it seems more like: "oh, now comes that cancer to ruin my game"
AI empires should actually react to them, invite you to help them getting rid of unbidden ships which are invading their borders; enemies could make diplomatic offers to go against the unbidden, on the other hand, the unbidden could go full strenght on a random empire to actually "prey" instead of infecting the borders of all the galaxy without nobody doing anything
 
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When you create a sector they should gain control over space stations as well. Have ship building done like armies on planets. No longer control the station so the sector will upgrade and build modules when possible but you can still build ships out of it.

I am finding sector governors already improve space stations when they have ample resources.

Please for the love of god and all that is good in this world,

make double clicking a civilian ship on the outliner center on the ship in the GALAXY MAP and not open the system where the ship is.

Just this little change would improve the game incredibly for me. Right clicking the ship could still open the system where the ship is.

Have asked for much the same. I'm happier with the approach relyiing on mouseover to ping/cifcle location on the galaxy map. Selecting to find out where a ship is and forgetting to deselect and reselect can be a disaster if a ship is already running through a long queue.
 
One thing that really irks me, planet summary screen with the governor, doesn't show governors XP or traits. Highly irritating. Plenty of space under the portrait.
 
Really hope the leader portraits resetting to default values on loading a save bug got fixed. Not exactly game breaking but still definitely weakens immersion.
 
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Pause at the end of the study the study is why sometimes missing a decent time on the fast game speed,that's what's missing in all other games in the paradox and adjustment for window sobsey
 
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