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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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Would LOVE to see a setting that completely randomizes the number of Alien races. I should not know that there are X number of races in the game. In realty, we don't know how many exist in the real universe. If I set it for "7" races for example, then I know after I find six, there is only one left.

It would be nice to be surprised and never knowing how many remain. Is there just ONE or are there 15? Keeps you guessing and it adds a layer of mystery.
 
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nyah said:
I'm not sure. It seems to me that if you have a number of systems that contain multiple planets (particularly if they're good planets) then you are at an advantage. Allowing an empire to control directly a greater number of planets would simply compound this advantage.
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Then allow single planets to be assigned to sectors, not only entire systems. Not colonizing perfectly fine worlds because the other planet in the system is a significant core world that you want to retain is irritating.
 
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Hey, are you guys aware of the armor/armor pen bug? Someone made a post about it on reddit, but I don't know if it ever got reported. Basically armor and armor pen are all kinds of fucked up. I haven't done my own testing to verify it, but seems like it's a mess.
 
serivahn said:
A planet is the same as a "Holding" in CK2. Some provinces had more holdings than others, just as some systems have more planets than others.
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A system with a good gaia planet and a small moon is currently worse to colonize then a mediocre planet that's alone... Also it makes no sense at all that terraforming a planet next to your second planet makes less sense then one far away in another system. If anything you would expand near your allready settled planets. We would also first terraform mars and not some planet lightyears away.

Also mid / late game when you are playing with sector there are enough 2 or 3 planet systems, I don't see why this would be a disadvantage in multiplayer. Maybe there more reason to go to war if there's a four planet system on your border. You'll have more tactically important systems that are really good and worth fighting over. I think that as soon as sector become important there are allready enough multi planet systems for most players. Yes maybe somebody gets lucky with a few really good systems, but things aren't always fair in this game anyway, you can have really shitty starts with no resources or a system with 12 minerals and 10 energy... You'll have to play with the cards you have, that makes it fun.


LeatherApron said:
Would LOVE to see a setting that completely randomizes the number of Alien races. I should not know that there are X number of races in the game. In realty, we don't know how many exist in the real universe. If I set it for "7" races for example, then I know after I find six, there is only one left.

It would be nice to be surprised and never knowing how many remain. Is there just ONE or are there 15? Keeps you guessing and it adds a layer of mystery.
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yes I also made a topic about this, but it went to page 3 or 4 in half an hour and was on page 17 a day later.... so it's kinda hard getting attention for this. But I would love a random opponents option...

I fixed it by letting my girlfriend fill in how many AI's I get, she uses random.org and sets the numbers so that I don't know XD Still it would be nice to have it as ingame feature.
 
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Chiron said:
I've had a primitive civ in my sights for a while, next thing I know I see a fleet of space amoebas parked in their system flagged as owned by them. It just hung around there for about 100 years.
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I had the same ^.^

Right now I have 3 crystaline elites hanging in one of my systems owned by the local primitive species.
 
Wiz said:
  • Strike craft had their range substantially increased.
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I approve, it never made sense to me that those would have the sortest range of any weapon, to me it seems they should have the longest (perhaps with the exception of missiles).
 
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Azsouth said:
@Wiz not sure if it's been asked yet but since you did tweak the custom empires a bit, can there now be "star dynasties" where the last name of the ruler will continue on past the first one rather than it getting assigned to some random character the game made up? also in the name lists it would be nice where you can actually customize the names of your empire so even if something is generate by the AI, it takes it from that list, like character names, ship names, colony names etc...

EDIT yes I'm aware you can change the name of basically everything in game once your there except your heir or whoever is elected. Would just be great to be able to list common names for heirs so you can have emperor George VI instead of just the first George you start w/ (just an example). Also if your allowed to edit the name list before entering the game it saves the player time while roleplaying or just trying to play the game from changing every name to be in line w/ whatever lore you've made up for your star empire.
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Czert said:
will be here fixed problems like that if you have mission to survey certain star, but it was already surveyed - and owned - by another empire, so you simply cant finish it (hunt for hyacint mission - where you have to survey 3 systems, i surveyed 2 but 3 was in another empire space...so it was surveyd and onquring it doesnt helped, here is no rescan/look for mission goals option), performance problems on medium and bigger maps (i was forced to play on tiny galaxy, since on medium even from start game is realy slow, and i have middle mainstream cpu and middle-high end GPU and 4GB ram) ?
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quoting myself because I feel it got buried and would like an answer as well as Czert as I personally see this as a major problem in the game atm, no civs want to trade open borders for even civilian ships and theres no incentive to trading star maps because they don't count towards the quest or whatever and you can't go back through the systems getting reveled for anomalies and rare things like the pieces of the puzzle for the first league of whatever.
 
In the improved diplomatic reports, does it now tell us what the terms were in the trade or other treaty that just expired?

Like in case I wanted to find that empire on the map again to try to renew it if it would still be good for the empire, or wonder how it affected my empire, or just want to be sure I don't care? Taking separate notes is a drag.

Thanks for the speedy hotfixes
 
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Leerdeck said:
I disabled V-Sync in the settings.txt file. My FPS has doubled with that. I run the game under Linux but maybe it gives you a performance boost under Windows too?
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No, it's not a graphics issue, it's present even when there's barely anything on the screen to speak of. It's the engine doing something crazy that seems to get exponentially worse as the galaxy gets busier.
 
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Will the ability to add descriptions to species portraits change the file structure and/or change the custom start screens, for those of us who figured out how to mod this in?
Also, I have been working on a mod that changes the default 00_portraits; will there be any changes to species clothing (to particularly increase normal and massive clothing options)?
 
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