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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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I thought sectors were one of the best features of the game when it was released, and now they're going to be even better. Thanks to all the devs for their hard work!
 
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@Wiz, can you address the issue of how AI will surrender to all your demands once you blockade all their planets and destroyed their fleet? It's a very exploity strategy, that simply makes it unnecessary to have any sort of assault armies. I could understand pacifists doing it, but when you are fighting militarists or zealots, shouldn't they be defending their worlds to the last xenos?
 
Are vassals now being included in the peace deals ?
Currently vassals of an Empire you were at war with (and thus also them) aren't hit with the peace treaty after the war ends. So you can punch in the face of an empire, just wait for your fleets to get back inside hostle territory after the peace hits and then turn around open comms with an vassal of that empire and go "Hello, I'd like to declare war on you, your overlord and any friends he has". All in less than a year.

So basically the scaling warscore doesn't really matter - any empire big enough to be affected by this will also usually have vassals. Vassal are never included in peace treaties, even from that started by then vassal being the one war was declared on. That means you can grind any empire to dust as long as it has vassals - you could just keep on declaring war after war until you've gobbled up all the planets that empire had.

This of course assumes that you managed to beat the enemy while retaining most of your fleet the first time around but you'll be able to declare war so fast your enemy won't be able to rebuilt even his shipyards - the only source of fresh hostile fleets is any neighbor feeling threathened by your rampage and joining a pact against you.
Ornlu Wolfjarl said:
@Wiz, can you address the issue of how AI will surrender to all your demands once you blockade all their planets and destroyed their fleet? It's a very exploity strategy, that simply makes it unnecessary to have any sort of assault armies. I could understand pacifists doing it, but when you are fighting militarists or zealots, shouldn't they be defending their worlds to the last xenos?
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Once you'll able to do that it can't prevent you from doing just that so the AI decides to just skip the tedious bit and gain a peace treaty straight away. Of course, see my above fro what happens if that AI has an vassal.
Also, there is actually a point where the warscore (it's warscore that decides the AI surrendering) you can gain by doing your scenario isn't actually enough to force a surrender and one has to invade. You can encounter it while doing what I describe above to an empire - I think because it doesn't have any shipyards or fleets to lose at that point in the process it doesn't the feel threat of the warscore resulting from that, so needs extra encouragement.
 
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Does this mean we'll stop seeing situations like allied AI declaring war, and then send all of their fleet to the opposite end of the galaxy from where the war is simply because I have a slightly stronger fleet over there than I do locally?
 
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Hey Wiz,

kudos to the team. Great work and thank you for your kind answers.

Three questions from my side though:

a) Any improvements to the planet overview? Arumba pointed out a few once in his Stellaris adjustments, among other players. It feels useless so far, and with the sector addition to the right bar, it feels as if you not really know what to make of it, although it fits well to many other 4X games for good reasons.

b) Is it true that the AI attacks based on attitude, opinion and fleet strength? I've discovered recently that it is easy to nerf AI into wars by playing with their opinion to me. It seems to not have long term goals like "reconquer cores" from EU4, feuds in CK2 or tension/crisis in VIC2, which basically could make the AI to jumo from a friendly opinion to hostile intentionally, or the opposite, as it happens in EU4 or VIC2 sometimes (which is more human like too). A minor, but powerful change, I assume. In Stellaris it could be sth. like -- wipe out x race or "bring democracy" (or theocracy) to the galaxy for long term goals. Or just sth. like: "Conquer or colonize planet x" due to a cultural or political reason. Would make it less predictable.

c) Could you make the right bar slightly smaller? EU4 is better at handling of it, I think, the more in the mid to late game I am. In Stellaris I find myself constantly scrolling and collapsing tabs there in the mid to late game, the bigger my empire is. I barely get time to watch the revolts or armies, i.e.
 
Has the issue with putting strategic resource buildings into sectors when the resource isn't in that sector been addressed? Sectors are basically unusable to me when I can never put a planet with a beth plant into a sector unless the beth happens to be produced in that same system. I understand the goal of not wanting sectors to build strategic resource buildings, but there has to be some consideration for buildings that already exist (especially for players like cKnoor who prefer to develop planets themselves and then put them in sectors rather than Wiz's method of letting the sector do the development).
 
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Can you fix the weather please ? Its raining all day here.
 
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There's obviously more things that need improvement, but I have no complaint with this patch whatsoever, every change sounds good, and if it all works as expected it'll greatly improve Stellaris already.

Good job, even if I wish this had been done before release ;)
 
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Very cool, a question about titles though. In the interface it says 'male' title, presumably because the starting leader is male. How would one set the female titles in this situation? Or will all rules be male (or conversely female)?
 
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REDDQ said:
No answer-o... Well, if not in this patch then maybe in the next one.
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Yeah this is my biggest problem with the game right now, allied AI refuse to fight their own wars. They declare war whenever they want, and then run over to hide in my own fleet like a kid that says they're gonna beat someone up and then runs and hides behind their big brother, expecting the big brother to do the fighting.

On top of that it doesn't respect distance either, sometimes crossing the entire galaxy to hide under my biggest fleet.
 
Thank you Paradox! We knew that your patches would be timely and you did listen to all the complaining/constructive criticism/''The world has ended. Game broken forever'' threads :)
 
Regarding improved diplomatic notifications:
Will there now be a "war ends" notification for wars the player is not participating in?
Feels weird to have a notification for starts of others' wars but not for the end. Especially since end can be more important depending on the outcome.
 
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