Stellaris Dev Diary #361 - The Vision

[Hurimo]

Diplomatic request to enemy Empire to return all my enslaved pops they have, in case of many species in my empire, the base ones. And casus belli for the same thing too.

 

[Calvax]

We might call this Named Species Rights Packages.

Basically, for my default Full Citizens, I want one set of rights -- and if I have enough CG production later to change from Stratified -> Academic, or Decent -> Utopian, then I want that change to apply to EVERYONE with that set of rights. In the current game, I need to pause and click through the whole list of species, which can be quite long.

Likewise, if I'm playing a less-nice empire, I might want to be able to change all Displacement Purge -> Lathe Purge at some point.

It would also be great if assimilation was a separate setting and not bundled in with citizenship.

 

[HFY]

It would also be great if assimilation was a separate setting and not bundled in with citizenship.

Yeah.

Now that Auto-Mod is a thing, with its own limits and speed throttle, put Assimilation into that by default.

Then have a special Purge category which makes Assimilation happen much faster (available to most empires, like Displacement) -- so you can let it happen slowly, or you can force the process with a few human rights violations (but who's counting).

 

[HMS Enterprize]

What is Stellaris to you?​

How does this match what you think Stellaris is, and where it should go? Would you change any of these vision statements?

What systems and content are “sacred” to you, which would make Stellaris not Stellaris anymore if we changed them?

Some examples to comment on could include:

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?

I think its fine except for late game performance issues. For game performance I think you could perhaps make some small changes, eg: halve the number of garrisons, but double their effectiveness. Perhaps same for all ground forces. Anything to improve that mid/late game lag.

• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?

No more dimensional fleets for one thing. It seems cheap and lazy. Plus its kind of dumb when the AI steamrolls another AI with a 2 million fleet power dimensional fleet. Breaks the game.

I think both space & ground combat needs a massive overhaul/improvement. Its basic beyond even old paradox games like Vic 1 & HOI2.

Better explanations of ship weapon effects would be welcome. I know what the words 'shield penetration' means but I dont know why I want it - or how much. Is penetration better than damage? I dont know....

• What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?

The ability to role-play different sci-fi tropes. I usually play a human civ but Id like to be able to do borg-type stuff (partial assimilation) without going down the full machine route.

• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?

I dont find it to be a factor. Perhaps its due to mods but I can generate more than enough resources without trade. And pirates just seem to be a source of irritation.

• Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?

Its not hard per se but I think its ok. I wait till I can genetically modify my humans from continental to arid/tundra etc then go from there. I think the delay in getting to the required techs on that front is fine.

• If you could remove one game system, what would it be?

I dont think any need to be completely removed but a lot need some improvement - space & ground combat, habitats, trade.

• Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

Space & ground combat. The system needs to be more evolved. Its more basic than Vic1 or HOI2. I know this isnt a 'war game' (it kinda is) but nevertheless a bit more depth would be nice.

Generally speaking combat seems to be little more than 'my fleet power number is bigger than yours so I win'. It needs to be a bit more in depth than that.

For fleets:

Get rid of doomstacks!!!! Its annoying, cheap & lazy. Particularly for AI vs AI. I know space is big but thematically, you cant effectively fight like that without penalty. And practically, its just bad. And boring. Doomstacking was never an issue in old paradox games. No idea why it is now. And if you do doomstack, there should be consequences.

More doctrinal effects. Are you a carrier focus, fleet in being, gunship, big gun or raider?. Techs that speak to these gameplay styles.

Make raiding behind enemy lines much more impactful for example. Give raider doctrine fleets the ability to steal vast sums of resources. Cutting supply lines to planets causes unrest. Make the enemy suffer shortages to their war effort.

Bonuses from attacking from multiple star lanes. I know space is big but you can flank & encircle.

Perhaps take carrier slots out of battleships and make them their own unit type - Fleet, light & escort.

Fighters and bombers. A little expansion for flavour on carriers.


Ground combat:

Dedicated unit types for flavour would be good. Dont have to go mad, just expand a bit. Infantry, armour, mech walkers & some special flavour units, eg: Imperial guard. Robots/slaves/clones etc are all fine but perhaps limit gene wariors/clone etc to your primary species just to cut down on superfluous options. This would require a improvement in game mechanics - perhaps something ala HOI - soft attack/hard attack etc. Again, Im not asking for a full on war game here, just some improvements to make the system more worthwhile.

At the moment, ground combat is just a bit of a chore.

Tie forts to the 'fortress world' designation more. AI often spams 6+ forts on a world/habitat thats just annoying to conquer -and its not a 'fortress world' Non-fortress world forts should be limited to 1 or 2..

If you are going to make that world a fortress, add some effects to warrant that designation - decreased enemy speed in the system & adjacent systems/increased upkeep for enemy fleets etc. If you are going to sacrifice a world to be a bastion, then make the bonuses/penalties reflect that.

 

[Shat_Al]

Id like to see more interesting events for my spies and envoys in other empires. Sort of like the one event where you see where insights lead and its a bit of a gamble. More risky choices in favor of my empire but at the risk of my agents. A way to automate my fleets so I can focus on my empire during long campaigns would also be cool. Oh and a voidworm worship origin would be fun, maybe encouraging voidworms to bomb your planets.

 

[Alexandre]

How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?

I'd be fine with abstracting things a bit more, and allowing us to devote a percentage of the workforce to a given job, rather than using discrete pops.

If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?

not sure. I'm less of a militarist and more of an expansionist/colonizer, so this probably matters more to others.

I would love to see a few changes in wars, though. It seems to me that starbases should be stronger than they are - their guns should reach further, their ability to be made hard to destroy should be greater - think of guns hidden in asteroids, multiple starbases in a system, etc. On the other hand, planets should be a lot more vulnerable. Satellites should be destroyed. Planets should have KT type damage, maybe even with Deccan Traps and other similar blockers popping up. Yes, devastation should remain, but there should be more damage to the planet than just that. Buildings and districts should be destroyed, both through bombardment and in ground invasions.

What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?

a mix of species, ethics and civics - I try to think what my people are like, and play an empire that reflects that.

How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?

I set my goals at the start of the game. I only really change them if something unexpected happens, or if I find myself in a situation where I think that my people/empire would adapt


How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?

I don't really like the trade system. I'd like to have more of a way to automate piracy suppression, and probably a bit more of logistics system that can be interrupted in war. This should be balanced by allowing a more developed stockpile system, maybe per sector, and also with additional stockpiles tied to fortress worlds in siege preparation. Maybe there's a systematic stockpiling of goods over time, with some empire policies allowing you to stockpile faster, perhaps in exchange for some other debuff. Ideally, with fortress or other worlds getting stockpiled a bit faster, allowing you to prepare for war

Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?

I'd like to see some significant changes here. I'd like to see more variation in planets, ideally looking at what we are really finding in space. There should be fundamentally different colonization for worlds that are different than your home world. For example, same class worlds should be colonizable as per usual. But, ones that are more different should require habitats, and the more hostile the world, the more tech needed to create the correct habitats for that system.

For example, a desert world species would need special habitats to settle a continental world, and an even more developed habitat to colonize an ocean world. In my ideal game play, we'd continue having additional level habitats for barren or toxic worlds, without needing ascension perks.

I dislike the way gaia worlds are currently set up. There shouldn't be a world that is ideal for all species. I'd much rather see something like what you currently have for aquatics in habitats, where we can make a world better for us, and worse for species with another environment. However, in a boost to habitats, I'd make those easier to have multiple types of environments since they are contained.

Also, relic worlds should be terraformable - it just seems a bit weird that some worlds can't be terraformed because they have a lot of old buildings/abandoned technology on them.

I'd like to see separate terraforming technologies for each type of transformation, with lower tier technologies to terraform fairly similar worlds, and higher tier ones for more different worlds. There'd be different techs for making a world wetter or dryer, hotter or colder, and for at least some of them, they should be vulnerable to being damaged in war (a heat shield or a mirror to concentrate starlight, for example, could be damaged). In many cases, you'd need to tier up terraforming techs to keep moving a world towards your ideal.

As far as planets go, I'd like there to be many different axis that we would want to change, from temperature and moisture, as we currently have, to magnetospheres, atmospheres, gravity (well, you have some of that, but sort of as an afterthought), existing biospheres, etc. I'd love it if each of these axis required separate technologies, both to boost the importance of the social research tree, but also to make colonization more expensive and harder to do.

Terraforming shouldn't just clear blockers. It's nice when it sometimes gives you bonus districts, but I think it should also have a not-insignificant chance of giving you new blockers. It would be great if you could favor some changes to the terraformed world - more agricultural districts or more energy districts, for example, even if just by creating things like hazardous weather

Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?

I'd love to have things like Necrophage and subterranean be species traits, allowing us to create more mixed/exotic species.

If you could remove one game system, what would it be?

Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion?

Planetary diversity and colonization, making it a bit less samey, and more difficult.

Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

I'd like to have less of a lockdown on the number of traits a species can have - if I want to create a species with a lot of positive and negative traits, as long as they balance out to 0 it would make the game much more interesting to me. I can understand constricting that a bit for the AI since they won't know how to handle too unbalanced a species, but it should be OK for the human player to experiment, imho

 

[japempire]

Hello! Thank you to the Paradox Team for taking the time to craft these amazing questions and putting them to the community. I want ya'll to know that we know it took a lot of effort to craft such refined questions and to put your effort on the internet asking for feedback. I appreciate the time and effort put into these questions and hope to reciprocate that time and effort with meaningful and thought out responses. Below is an attempt to answer the question, "What is Stellaris?" while diving into aspects and dimensions of the game that could be looked at for expansion, rework, or maybe a bit of both.

What is Stellaris to me? Stellaris is a strategy game that tries to bring civilization management, conflict on the Conflict Continuum (more on this in a bit.), Intelligence, Politics, Economics, space exploration, scientific progress and application, and Socio-cultural design together into a single point of experience. I think there are a few places you may want to look for ideas on how to rework and implement the design of these disciplines into the game experience.

I love Stellaris. It has taken me several years to be able to play a game that I didn't immediately get quashed in but I kept coming back. I think it is important to identify and communicate what we all come to Stellaris for and why. For me, I like empire building. I enjoy crafting a path of domination among the stars like a Galactic Empire (Star Wars), or the Imperium (40K). Still working on surviving my first successful game (I've had multiple failed games). However I play Stellaris because it lets me try to build the empires I enjoy from science fiction and history and apply what-ifs such as; what if the Roman Empire had stayed together and went to the stars? What if Skynet took over the planet and developed interstellar travel? What if we went to the stars 100K years ago and a cloning facility was abandoned as the empire collapsed? These types of roleplaying are what bring me back to play Stellaris again but the moment I leave my first system the start doesn't matter aside from what technologies it gives me. I realize the difficulty in trying to ascribe value beyond bonuses and debuffs to origins but perhaps adding new story mechanics based on origins instead. Rough Ideas that would need a lot of refinement but I hope it helps get the creative mind running.

Culture, Origins, and Societal Memory
These role-playing what-ifs are what make the game fun to start but by the end of my tech tree I'm finding myself forgetting why my starting position even mattered? Started on a doomed planet? I can terraform and colonize more. I used to be a beacon of Liberty? The Star Empire of Earth culls all xenos. (My current playthrough). Because civics change, and territory can be expanded, there needs to be something about the origin that truly stays with you. The scar of history on your empire if you will. I saw a mention and forgive me I don't recall who for crediting them, about a planetary origin and a cultural origin. I think every time you change your culture beyond the original culture origin, your empire should retain something from the previous culture. A hold over, same with planetary origins. Perhaps development on planets in the early and mid game looking like streaks across a planet because the empire was founded on a ring world and they build everything in a tall linear design to make the most of their homeworlds surface area. Ideas that can be argued about to no end but the point remains. Finding a way for your civilization origins to put a mark on your empire as our past marks us.

Diplomacy, War, Economics, and Intelligence
Now for the Conflict continuum. This is a concept from US Military Joint doctrine. The idea is conflict is not a state but a gradient of actions that can be conducted. The actions taken by your adversary determine where on the gradient you are and what other actions can be reasonably anticipated. I think all military, diplomatic, intelligence, and economic options should be available at all time between empires, for example, if you jump from good friends with economic pacts to war, there will be a steep diplomatic penalty of betrayal, just like the Soviet Union felt of late 1930s Germany in WWII. The idea being that you can take any action available to you that you think would be advantageous and so could the AI. However, every action has consequences, and just as 1939 Germany was discounted by the rest of the world as diplomatically unreliable and therefore a geopolitical wildcard that had to be dealt with, so would the empire that betrayed its ally lose all credibility and trust with everyone around them, aside from those with the same geopolitical outlook, i.e. Italy and Japan in 1939. This ability to make offers, deals, and strategic decisions that would empirically benefit both parties and having the ability to make threats, and diplomatic pressure to make more hesitant signatories cooperate instead of the imperceptible 'favors' would be a nice addition. For instance, making corporate holdings have to pay a tax or increasing trade tariffs to provide a tool of influence within the realm of diplomacy with economic and social implications.


Military
Treat the military functions as the Navy and Marines. Ships in space have to function a lot like naval ships in our current day. They can operate only as far as their supply and ports of call allow. This could be countered with technologies extending the range i.e. 3d-printing of repair parts and self contained manufacturing(food, medical supplies, fuel, maintenance fluids, etc, perhaps several support ship types to add some depth to interstellar combat operations, that can pick up supplies from the solar systems they pass through or enemy planets). There is nothing like this in Stellaris and nothing about being able to take supplies from the enemy or creating Forward Operating Bases as one invades. This would also lend itself well to a military UI display. One that allows you to give detailed orders to your fleets about attack, defend, patrol(to include areas of responsibility; assigning a fleet to a group of systems and any time piracy reaches a certain threshold going and quelling it to include search and destroy orders for pirates, kite(staying away from high power fleets), set up supply/defense bases, planetary/station invasion objectives, resupply points, and so on. The other side of this coin is naval ships are meant to have specific roles. I initially built my ships to have complimentary roles but they kept getting destroyed because the mutual support against particular threats wasn't helpful against raw firepower stacks. When I picked the highest DPS and tech level equipment regardless of type then amassed them it wiped my enemies out easy. Ships have always been high cost but powerful and unique. I think the scaling needs to be altered when it comes to ships. Their individual power needs to be increased. Having a hostile ship off the coast(in orbit) needs to feel like a problem instead of a one off because the hornet isn't with the swarm. However each ship should have its counter and need to be supported by different ship types to protect it from what it can't fight or do what it cant do. This also would allow for military play styles like hit and run, flagship duels, task forces, carrier strike groups, etc. Raw firepower is good in the early game but when tech is high and supposed combat doctrine is very advanced, one would expect interstellar empires to have an array of naval tools at their disposal instead of an up to date sledgehammer(also a strategy but right now in Stellaris its the only combat strategy that works, I as a military history nerd am dying to try different strategies on an interstellar scale).

Planetary Invasions
Secondarily, creating an interface for planetary invasions. Right now if you have 10k+ in armies its a guaranteed win. Creating depth in ground combat such as needing infantry, armored vehicles/tanks, and artillery would make it much more immersive and having to outfit certain unit types to fight on certain planets (equipment needed for an arid planet is very different than an ocean planet). Also, allowing some kind of strategy or support bonus for having fleets in orbit would be extremely nice(I am taking massive casualties on the ground despite having 400K fleet power in orbit and yet my ships can't target ground positions with accuracy yet can shoot across a solar system with pin point accuracy.).

Some may have seen this on Steam and yes I am the same person. I realized I had put this on the wrong forum and I wanted to make sure I threw my hat in the ring for input because I love Stellaris and want the soul of the game to continue with growth in areas that can be made even better. Part II to include: Intelligence, Trade routes, colonization/terraforming, and planetary management.

 

[Pietrooperv]

Hi everyone!

Now that the Grand Archive Story Pack is out, I want to do something a little different. With 360 Stellaris Dev Diaries complete, I thought it was time to circle right back around to the beginning: what was, will be.

Stellaris Dev Diary #1 was “The Vision”, and so is #361.

What is Stellaris?​

The vision serves as a guiding tool to keep the entire development team aligned. As the game evolves, we work hard to update it regularly to remain accurate and consistent with our core vision.

Here’s how I currently answer “What is Stellaris?”:

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The Galaxy is Vast and Full of Wonders​

For over eight years, Stellaris has remained the ultimate exploration-focused space-fantasy strategy sandbox, allowing players to discover the wonders of the galaxy.

From their first steps into the stars to uniting the galaxy under their rule, the players are free to discover and tell their own unique stories.

Every story, trope, or player fantasy in science fiction is within our domain.​

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Stellaris is a Living Game​

Over time, Stellaris has evolved and grown to meet the desires of the player base.​

• At launch, Stellaris leaned deep into its 4X roots.​
• It evolved from that base toward Grand Strategy.​
• As it continues to mature, we have added deeper Roleplaying aspects.​

All of these remain part of our DNA.

Stellaris is a 4X Grand Strategy game with Roleplaying elements that continues to evolve and redefine itself.​

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Every Game is Different​

We desire for players to experience a sense of novelty every time they start a game of Stellaris.

They should be able to play the same empire ten times in a row and experience ten different stories.
A player’s experience will differ wildly if their first contact is a friendly MegaCorp looking to prosper together or if they’re pinned between a Fallen Empire and a Devouring Swarm.

Stellaris relies on a combination of prescripted stories (often tied to empire Origins) and randomized mechanical and narrative building blocks that come together to create unplanned, emergent narratives.

A sense of uncertainty and wonder about what could happen next is core to the Stellaris experience.
​

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What is this About?​

Fundamentally, as the players, Stellaris is your game.

Your comments and feedback on The Machine Age heavily influenced our plans for 2025. We work on very long timelines, so we’ve already been working on next year’s releases for some time now. Most of what I’m asking will affect which tasks the team prioritizes and will help direct our direction in 2026 and beyond.

We’re making some changes to how we go about things. Many people have commented that the quarterly release cadence we’ve had since the 3.1 ‘Lem’ update makes it feel like things are changing too quickly and too often, and of course, it disrupts your active games and mods. The short patch cycle between Vela and Circinus was necessary for logistical reasons but really didn’t feel great.

We’re going to slow things down a little bit to let things stabilize. I’ve hinted a couple of times (and said outright last week) that we have the Custodian team working on some big things - the new Game Setup screen was part of this initiative but was completed early enough that we could sneak it into 3.14.1. My current plan is to have an Open Beta with some of the team's larger changes during Q1 of next year, replacing what would have been the slot for a 3.15 release. This will make 2025Q2, around our anniversary in May, a bigger than normal release, giving us the opportunity to catch up on technical debt, polish, and major features.

What is Stellaris to you?​

How does this match what you think Stellaris is, and where it should go? Would you change any of these vision statements?

What systems and content are “sacred” to you, which would make Stellaris not Stellaris anymore if we changed them?

Some examples to comment on could include:

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?
• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?
• What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?
• How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?
• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?
• Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?
• Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?
• If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

To the Future, Together!​

I want to spend most of this year’s remaining dev diaries (at least, the ones that aren’t focused on the Circinus patch cycle) on this topic, talking with you about where our shared galactic journey is heading.

Next week we’ll be talking about the 3.14.159 patch.

But First, a Shoutout to the Chinese Stellaris Community​

Before I sign off, I want to commend the Chinese Stellaris Community for finding the funniest bug of the cycle. I’ve been told that they found that you can capture inappropriate things with Boarding Cables from the Treasure Hunters origin, and have been challenging each other to find the most ridiculous things to capture.

You know, little things like Cetana’s flagship. The Infinity Machine. An entire Enclave.

I’m not going to have the team fix this for 3.14.159, but will likely have them do so for 3.14.1592. I want to give you a chance to complete your collection and catch them all. After all, someone needs to catch The End of the Cycle and an Incoming Asteroid. Post screenshots if you catch anything especially entertaining!

See you next week!

Stellaris: Grand Archive is now available as a standalone purchase or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08!
​

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Edit:
It's come to my attention that an Incoming Asteroid has been captured! Excellent job!

Here are some of my thoughts on diplomacy

• There should be more to diplomacy in stellaris than a simple relations modifier.
  • Population approval: How much your general population approves or disapproves of a certain empire. This is based on the population ethics of both empires, rather than governing ethics, authority, or civics. Also takes into account high profile events, such as first contact hostilities, stolen cargo, insults, policies, slavery, ‘war crimes’,etc.
  • Government approval: how well your two governments are able to work together to find common ground. Democratic crusaders wouldn’t work well with despotic slavers, but they might have a better time with a shared burdens empire. A technocratic empire wouldn’t get along well with evangelizing zealots or spiritual seekers.
  • Economic compatibility: the overall compatibility of your economic systems. Megacorps wouldn’t be able to trade well with shared burdens or gestalts, for example.
  • The above are all percentages, rather than fluctuating values that can reach unrecoverable extremes.
  • Historical relations: How have your two empires interacted throughout the game so far? Have you been allies? Enemies? Have you kept to yourselves? This should be the basis for future relations.
  • Diplomatic deals (or lack thereof), wars, closed borders, in game actions, etc should all contribute to these modifiers, which then collectively form your relations. Whether or not an empire accepts your diplomatic proposal would then be based on a weighted combination of these, depending on what the proposal is. Ie, a commercial pact would depend more heavily on economic compatibility.
• Diplomatic options
  • Cultural exchange: improves or worsens population approval for both empires. Participate in a cultural exchange between your two empires. Depending on how different your ethics are, things might go smoothly or… not smoothly. Fanatic pacifists might not benefit much from a cultural exchange with honor bound warriors. But erudite explorers and spiritual seekers who are both xenophiles might be able to put their differences aside for the sake of building new friendships.
  • Joint research endeavor: gives both empires a slight boost to a certain field of research (ie: propulsion or particles) and increases government approval. This is an expansion on research agreements. Rather than giving a large boost on technology one party or the other already has, it simply boosts an agreed upon field by a smaller amount, representing tips and tricks shared by both parties.
  • Propaganda campaign: Run an internal propaganda campaign either promoting or slandering another empire. This would either raise or lower general population approval for your empire and vice versa in the target empire. Ie, if you slander another empire with propaganda, that empire won’t be happy about it.
  • Borders: Rework general open/closed borders into two new sub actions, civilian and military. Civillian borders allow/disallow science and construction ships through while military borders allow/disallow military fleets and transport ships. The caveat to this is that an empire can actually go and ignore your closed borders, but this will come at a cost. Firstly, blatantly ignoring an empire’s closed borders will lower their population's approval of your empire. Secondly, it would open your fleets up to retaliation attacks. Allow empires whose borders you violated to fire upon your ships. That seems like a good way to spark some tension/wars. Especially if it is revealed that you’ve been sending cloaked ships through their territory undetected.
  • Pass sanctions: This could be a way to spice up the role play for ‘harm relations’. It could do meaningful, but not too significant, harm to another empire and thus lower overall relations. Maybe a xenophile empire wants to pass sanctions on a warmongering militarist who just invaded helpless primitives. Maybe a materialist empire could pass sanctions on a spiritualist empire for their mistreatment of AI. How is the empire’s government affected by your sanctions? What about their civilian population? There is immense roleplay potential here to supplement a pretty bland existing mechanic.
  • Trade agreements: improves economic compatibility the longer the deals remain in effect and the more you have. Trade agreements in general need a rework; they’re hardly ever used. So this is basically just an ‘improve relations’ equivalent to sanctions. I don’t have any concrete ideas on what exactly this would do mechanically other than boost relations. Maybe it gives both empires a small boost to a designated resource? Maybe it represents civilian companies doing business in each other’s empires? Lots of role play potential here for how different empires interact with each other economically, especially those with different economic systems or gestalt empires.
  • Joint military operation: combine forces to eliminate a common enemy, for example a pirate band operating across both borders. This would improve government approval. Pretty simple really. You don’t have to actually manually send a fleet to research a special project or anything, that would be to micro intensive.
  • Build naval base: Allows you to negotiate access to one (or more) of the other empire’s starbases, giving you control of it. This would allow you to build a shipyard, aka naval base, in another empire’s territory. The strategic possibilities here are obvious, especially if you are a tall empire trying to maintain a sphere of influence across the galaxy. OTHER THIRD PARTY EMPIRES SHOULD REACT TO THIS. If there’s a neutral empire between you and your rival and you negotiate to set up a naval base near your rival’s border, they should do something in response, perhaps escalating tensions. This could be a good way to get a war rolling without one empire or the other hitting the big red button out of the blue; give wars an in game reason to start. I suppose things like this can happen in game already, but it is very soft. It pretty much depends on the player noticing things and how they react, rather than a hard in game system.
  • Share ship schematics: Allows you to share your ship design(s) with another empire. They can then go and build that ship in their shipyards even if they don’t have the technology for all the components. Maybe there can be additional stipulations to the agreement about proprietary technology. I imagine a megacorp would be pretty upset if they lent their designs to another empire and then that empire just stole their tech and used it on their own ships. Depending on your codebreaking and their encryption, you might be able to reverse engineer some of their tech. Hopefully they don’t find out…
  • Limited defensive pact: both empires pledge to come to each other’s defense ONLY IF a certain empire attacks one of them. This is a simpler, less extensive version of the existing defensive pact. It's meant for empire’s that don’t exactly like each other, but have a common enemy. It could be a good first step towards building closer relations in the future without committing too much to the relationship right away.
  • Demand concessions: This option is meant to allow stronger empires to bully weaker empires without going to war. There are lots of potential demands you could make, ranging from policy changes, to territorial concessions, to breaking/forming diplomatic ties. The latter could be used to influence relations between two other empires, something Stellaris is in dire need of in my opinion.
  • Give/ban technology: Allows you to grant another empire a technology you have already researched. For example, say you want to give your war ally the technology to build battleships. Or your prospectorium vassal some mineral production techs. Or maybe you want the entire galaxy to have mega engineering, totally not so you can steal all their science nexuses This gives you the tools to do that. Also allows you to demand that another empire ban the use of certain technologies. Maybe you are a spiritualist empire that views any artificial celestial body scale structures as heresy and want to ban megastructure galaxy wide.Or maybe you defeated a determined exterminator and want to limit their military. Ban them from building battleships, assuming you have the military power to make them listen. If they ignore the ban (and you find out. Maybe they can hide a fleet of battleships in a nebulae) it would make other empires more likely to view them as a threat and team up against them. Or maybe you’re playing as a spiritualist empire and want to ban your heathen materialist neighbor from researching/utilizing positronic brains. This would negate the research speed boost from the tech, pissing them off, but making your population/factions happy that you limited the spread of AI.
  • Rivalry actions: add some unique flavor to rivalries. What specifically are two empire rivals over? Tech? Military power? Diplomatic influence? Economic power? Add some competitive events between rivals, like who can build the biggest, baddest warship; at the end of the event, the winner gets a powerful unique ship as a trophy. Maybe a trade war. Both empires try to gain as many new trade deals with third party empires as they can, and the empire with the most at the end of the event wins some sort of economic boost. The loser of rival events can get a modifier similar to ‘humiliated’. This would add a new way of competing with rivals without directly going to war. It would also be super cool for you and your rival to fund/supply proxy wars.
  • In game actions: This wouldn’t be a part of the diplomacy screen and is already sort of part of the gamealready, but could be considerably expanded on. Going to war and your actions during said war should affect your relations with other empires. Do you fire on escape pods? Do you allow ships to surrender? How do you treat prisoners? How do you treat occupied planets? Do you force civilians into labor camps? Do you impose martial law? Do you target civilian vessels and stations? Why did you go to war in the first place? Was it territorial expansion? Was it to stop slavery? Was it to impose your religion/spiritualist ideology? Was it to eliminate an economic rival? Different empires should view your war goals with different amounts of legitimacy. How does the outcome of the war affect other empires? If you decimate your rival’s economy through orbital bombardment, your rival’s trading partners should be economically affected by it; and they probably won’t be too happy with you. Does your rival have another rival that can now pounce on their weakened enemy? They should like you more for giving them the opportunity. There is so much role play potential through deepening galactic politics.
• Diplomacy events:
  • Cold war/arms race: Two or more empires are locked in a period of high military buildup. There is a high chance of the cold war going hot without either empire directly declaring war.
  • Galaxy War One (mid game crisis)
    • If there are two or more large alliances/federations/vassal blocks in the galaxy, set off an event chain that starts a WWI-esque conflict. Possible follow up events/wars depending on the outcome.
  • Colossus events: How does the galaxy respond to the first planet killer ship? Do they demand its decommision? Do they form an alliance to stand against it? Do they pass sanctions? Do they build their own?

 

[Critical Ethics]

I really just want you to get rid of fleet commanders and planet governors. All empire bonuses (at least in the case of democracies) should just be empire wide bonuses. I have neither the time nor the inclination to min max every single world. I dont even use sectors unless things get really big, and even then I dont care to pay much attention to their leaders and bonuses.

I could technically "fix this" by just making a mod where it removes planet, and commander bonuses and just buffs the council to high heaven, and honestly Ill probably end up doing this shortly. I think this type of system is a much better way to go. Your choices would have much more impact there, and its easier to see everything at a glance. There comes a point where I simply do not care what the perks are on every single leader, nor do I care to check what they are!

Im sure it needs a lot more thought and consideration put into it (I cant mod the systems I want to in the way I want, so I didnt think tooooo hard about it), but Im really not happy with the current implementation. Im curious as to what about the current system people actually enjoy.

This is one of the scaling out systems that almost work. If you have 10 planets and 10 free leaders you can have 10 governors. If you have 100 planets and 10 free leaders you can you have 10 sector governors. The problem zone is if you have 20 planets and 10 free leaders so you put two into sector governors and now you have 8 leaders to split among 18 planets.

There need to be more non-planet fire and forget leader sinks for governors.

 

[Furmanbp]

Hi everyone!

Now that the Grand Archive Story Pack is out, I want to do something a little different. With 360 Stellaris Dev Diaries complete, I thought it was time to circle right back around to the beginning: what was, will be.

Stellaris Dev Diary #1 was “The Vision”, and so is #361.

What is Stellaris?​

The vision serves as a guiding tool to keep the entire development team aligned. As the game evolves, we work hard to update it regularly to remain accurate and consistent with our core vision.

Here’s how I currently answer “What is Stellaris?”:

---

The Galaxy is Vast and Full of Wonders​

For over eight years, Stellaris has remained the ultimate exploration-focused space-fantasy strategy sandbox, allowing players to discover the wonders of the galaxy.

From their first steps into the stars to uniting the galaxy under their rule, the players are free to discover and tell their own unique stories.

Every story, trope, or player fantasy in science fiction is within our domain.​

---

Stellaris is a Living Game​

Over time, Stellaris has evolved and grown to meet the desires of the player base.​

• At launch, Stellaris leaned deep into its 4X roots.​
• It evolved from that base toward Grand Strategy.​
• As it continues to mature, we have added deeper Roleplaying aspects.​

All of these remain part of our DNA.

Stellaris is a 4X Grand Strategy game with Roleplaying elements that continues to evolve and redefine itself.​

---

Every Game is Different​

We desire for players to experience a sense of novelty every time they start a game of Stellaris.

They should be able to play the same empire ten times in a row and experience ten different stories.
A player’s experience will differ wildly if their first contact is a friendly MegaCorp looking to prosper together or if they’re pinned between a Fallen Empire and a Devouring Swarm.

Stellaris relies on a combination of prescripted stories (often tied to empire Origins) and randomized mechanical and narrative building blocks that come together to create unplanned, emergent narratives.

A sense of uncertainty and wonder about what could happen next is core to the Stellaris experience.
​

---

What is this About?​

Fundamentally, as the players, Stellaris is your game.

Your comments and feedback on The Machine Age heavily influenced our plans for 2025. We work on very long timelines, so we’ve already been working on next year’s releases for some time now. Most of what I’m asking will affect which tasks the team prioritizes and will help direct our direction in 2026 and beyond.

We’re making some changes to how we go about things. Many people have commented that the quarterly release cadence we’ve had since the 3.1 ‘Lem’ update makes it feel like things are changing too quickly and too often, and of course, it disrupts your active games and mods. The short patch cycle between Vela and Circinus was necessary for logistical reasons but really didn’t feel great.

We’re going to slow things down a little bit to let things stabilize. I’ve hinted a couple of times (and said outright last week) that we have the Custodian team working on some big things - the new Game Setup screen was part of this initiative but was completed early enough that we could sneak it into 3.14.1. My current plan is to have an Open Beta with some of the team's larger changes during Q1 of next year, replacing what would have been the slot for a 3.15 release. This will make 2025Q2, around our anniversary in May, a bigger than normal release, giving us the opportunity to catch up on technical debt, polish, and major features.

What is Stellaris to you?​

How does this match what you think Stellaris is, and where it should go? Would you change any of these vision statements?

What systems and content are “sacred” to you, which would make Stellaris not Stellaris anymore if we changed them?

Some examples to comment on could include:

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?
• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?
• What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?
• How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?
• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?
• Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?
• Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?
• If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

To the Future, Together!​

I want to spend most of this year’s remaining dev diaries (at least, the ones that aren’t focused on the Circinus patch cycle) on this topic, talking with you about where our shared galactic journey is heading.

Next week we’ll be talking about the 3.14.159 patch.

But First, a Shoutout to the Chinese Stellaris Community​

Before I sign off, I want to commend the Chinese Stellaris Community for finding the funniest bug of the cycle. I’ve been told that they found that you can capture inappropriate things with Boarding Cables from the Treasure Hunters origin, and have been challenging each other to find the most ridiculous things to capture.

You know, little things like Cetana’s flagship. The Infinity Machine. An entire Enclave.

I’m not going to have the team fix this for 3.14.159, but will likely have them do so for 3.14.1592. I want to give you a chance to complete your collection and catch them all. After all, someone needs to catch The End of the Cycle and an Incoming Asteroid. Post screenshots if you catch anything espe
See you next week!

Stellaris: Grand Archive is now available as a standalone purchase or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08!
​

---

Edit:
It's come to my attention that an Incoming Asteroid has been captured! Excellent job!

 

[Furmanbp]

I would like one thing in all your future games. Higher difficulty, though I know you don't like when AI is cheating, I love that in you, but maybe it is time for "real AI" to be our opponent? Yeah, the "real AI" that is the way forward!

 

[p0990]

What is Stellaris to you?​

I bought stellaris on day 1 hoping it would be crusader kings in space and I'm still looking for the right set of mods to scratch that itch.

The only system I consider sacred is war score/war exhaustion. By that I mean stellaris should keep the system but expand on what contributes to war exhaustion. That includes sabotaging starbases, raiding/armageddon bombardment, and blowing up planets with a colossus. Why wasn't that a thing from the beginning? The other system are half-baked and don't interact with eachother often. I usually wait a long time to buy the DLCs and when i do they seem tacked on. So far haven't seen anything like way of life + conclave in ck2 where the mechanics from different dlcs interact in fun ways.

Some examples to comment on could include:

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?
  • I really don't dig too deep into this, I prefer to automate my planets. I do think the grid from the early versions of the game could be more fun if you have to think about adjacency bonuses. Either way theres not much right now that makes my planets feel unique.
• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?
  • I don't really care what you do with fleets, although I will say Im mostly using corvette spam just so my fleets don't take a whole in game year to get to the front lines. There are mods that give certain empire unique shiptypes and or signature weapons and I think that would be cool to have as official content.
• What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?
  • Diverse playstyles, civics with unique gameplay mechanics, genetic traits that impact more than just one stat, aliens that actually look and act like aliens instead of reskinned humans (right now I main commonwealth of man and haven't been interested in exploring much else because it doesn't impact the game much)
• How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?
  • I focus on emergent story telling. Mostly I want to play as humans and grow them into a legit threat to the galaxy. recently I've been trying to play tall so I can tech up to megastructures but I always end up with too much empire size because the game really wants you to paint the map. Unfortunately most of my games end up slow and stagnant, especially if I have an advanced start or FE neighbor.
• 
  
• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?
  
  • I haven't really noticed the impact at all. I wish it could get fleshed out and impact other gameplay mechanics (including diplomacy and war score) but when I need more credits I just build a dyson swarm. Heres some ideas that could make it more fun:
    
    • In general, trade should be a way to gain leverage over other empires without going to war instead of just generating some extra credits.
    • Trade routes through wormholes, gateways and one-way trade through the quantum catapult.
    • Shipyards in inhabited systems should have their production speed increased based on the trade value of the colonies in that system.
    • in addition to the local trade routes between every starbase there should be arterial routes connecting the highest-trade value world in each empire. These could serve as a kind of economic chokepoint.
    • Any kind of trade disruption should lead to war exhaustion. Trade-focused empires should have the option to blockade enemy planets instead of bombarding them, doing no damage but reducing trade value and amenities.
    • resort worlds should have increased trade value (think tourism revenue and luxury goods) instead of just migration attraction. Certain types of planets and stars should also be tourist attractions with increased trade value. Having open borders with other empires should impact this depending on the number of citizen pops in the other empire.
    • There should be trade routes between empires that share borders and international trade should generate favors.
    • Planets that aren't connected to your capital by a trade route should have increased ethics drift and be more likely to rebel.
    • Instead of spawning a pirate base, the arm privateers operation should redirect a target empire's trade revenue to you. There should also be a trade war cassus belli that does something similar and is available with any war philosophy. Randomly spawned pirate bases should be replaced with a sector malus that can be removed by increasing trade route protection.
    • Strongholds should provide trade route protection and spawn strike craft even without the hangar technology. This would also have the added benefit of freeing up a starbase slot for a trade module while you rely on planetside defenses.
    • Instead of random dividend events, mercenary enclaves should provide bonuses to trade and trade route protection. Fanatic pacifists should be able to create caravan enclaves instead of mercenary enclaves and these would provide random dividends.
    • There should be an additional purge type that automatically puts undesireables on the slave market.
    • Instead of a galactic market the galaxy should be divided into regional markets like eve online. the regions would probably be defined during mapgen so that each region contains roughly the same amount of homeworlds (this could also help the empire decide what systems to claim instead of just going after random border systems.) Different regions could have different distributions of strategic resources for a little extra chaos.
    • Awakened xenonophile empires should want to trade.
    • Trade routes should reduce megastructure maintenance and build times.
    • Trade value and trade routes should be a lot more visible on the map and have more of an impact on what systems the AI claims. hopefully this will make them want to control chokepoints as well.
    • Combine offworld trading company and transit hub into one starbase module.
    • some kind of outsourcing mechanic that lets your pops take jobs from other empires if the right conditions are met. The other empire will still get the resources and pay the maintenance (maybe less maintenance) but they'll have to find a solution for the unemployment.
    • Ethics drift travels along trade routes along with crime, automatic migration and maybe a few other things
    • new "become the crisis" perk for megacorps (or pacifist or xenophile empires) where you peacefully bring the galactic economy to its knees.

• Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?
  • Colonization and terraforming both arent very interesting at the moment and for a lot of the same reasons. Colonizing just feels like a time sink before you can actually start growing your planet's population and developing your world. If just setting up a colony on a 90% habitable world is going to take years then there should be multiple events/player choices you can make during that time to make each of your planets more interesting. Terraforming also needs to be massively fleshed out then just just spending a bunch of energy and waiting ten years. You don't even see what's being done to the planet, you just wait ten years and suddenly it's your preferred biome and maybe you get some extra districts from an event. I'd rather colonize the planet with airtight buildings first, build climate control structures, carefully balance a planet's nitrogen/oxygen/water levels for the duration of the project, deal with all the logistical challenges of terraforming an exoplanet (this is one place fleshing out trade could come into play.) Plus I'd really like a way to colonize mars, titan, europa, ect before expanding outside the solar system.
• Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?
  • I think rogue servitors and catalytic processing should be origins. I also think there should be events that allow you to take purifiers/devouring swarm/extermiator civics mid game if you meet the requirements. Something like a rival empire commits an atrocity and your population goes ballistic.

• If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?
  • I think the two systems I'd remove are
    • precursor sites because they give the player too much of an advantage and I don't want to be the special snowflake civilization every game
    • I would remove the galactic community and use its mechanics to flesh out federations. If the galactic community stays is should be really late game, have fewer resolutions but make these resolutions more significant to member nations, and the AI should be more willing to leave if they are chafing under galactic law.
  • If you read nothing else read this: I think that the number one thing stellaris needs is internal politics, both as an anti-snowball mechanic (it could replace empire size penalties with something a lot more fun and meaningful) and also a way to make the pre-crisis galaxy less stagnant. This would mean a bunch of currently separate gameplay mechanics like factions, espionage, rebellions, and leaders interacting with eachother a lot more.
    
    • Leaders should have relationships with eachother, either by tracking their opinions of other leaders like CK2 or just having random events when you have leaders of different ethics on your council.
    • there should be espionage operations to boost support for certain factions and ruler candidates, and maybe one to start a rebellion in a target empire's sector (like HOI4)
    • unhappy factions and leaders should rebel instead of rebellion just being a situation with a slider. That way you have to pay attention to individual faction demands a lot more (I've prevented civil wars in CK3 just by inviting the faction members to a feast)
    • empire ethics should change more often (which would lead to changes in relationships)
    • Smear campaigns should actually have a chance to break up power blocs instead of just lowering federation cohesion)
    • Favors should be used for more than just diplomatic weight in the galactic community, I'd rather use them like hooks in CK3.
    • And of course planets that aren't connected by trade routes to your capital should want to become independent (especially if your territory just got bisected in a war)
    • Sabotage starbase (and any other military operations added by mods) should progress way faster when you're at war with the target empire. In addition, sabotaging a starbase should debuff it (your choice of fire rate, shields, or trade) instead of destroying a random module and you should be able to burn an asset to delay the sabotage until your fleet enters the enemy system.
    • In addition to the crisis beacon operation there should be a leviathan beacon if you have a curator enclave and paid the curators to tell you how to defeat that specific leviathan. It also has to live within range of your target.

 

[Pietrooperv]

A late reply, but I hope someone sees this (because this is late, please let me know if you have seen this).

I have some ideas (along with general requests, which you might have seen elsewhere, but I thought I'd add them, anyway), in no particular order:

• More map options, such as star placements and empire placements. Allow us to choose which empires get advanced starts; this is good, as it allows us to give exterminator A.I empires a head start, making them THE bad guy to deal with, as otherwise, sometimes exterminator empires get eliminated early on.

• A scenario creator and editor

• Get rid of the pop system and have statistics, similar to Victoria 3.

• Get rid of habitats as they currently exist and merge them into starbases – less micromanagement

• Reduce the micromanagement needed in the late game by being able to control sectors as a whole rather than planets. I am not talking about automation here. You would need to completely rework the system for this to work, so this is a tricky one. It’s too much having to handle anything over 50 planets, and normally I have to play with over 150 (including habitats), as I play wide (and we should be able to play wide).

• Have roaming/nomad empires (megacorps, for example). Megacorps could live within the systems of other empires, extracting their resources in return for providing other resources; both “empires” can benefit, but there can also be downsides. There might be a “balance” feature, where you may benefit more than the megacorp or vice versa.

• Internal politics and ethics rework, with religions. More ethics options, which should be slider-based. It’s silly for an empire to only focus on, say, militarist and spiritual ethics and not to have environmental vs industrial as well. You should also be able to have the option to go for the middle of the slider, where there are no benefits or negatives. You need to bring back individualism vs collectivism. It’s also silly having “egalitarian”, where you have the beacon of liberty and shared burdens civics being part of it.

• Merge the origins and have different options, like three or four different options: 1: Planet type (Gaia/life seeded, normal, etc.); 2: Story type (On the Shoulders of Giants, Galactic Doorstep, etc.); 3: Species alterations (clone army, necrophage, etc.); note, this is a MERGER of origins, not double origins, but naturally, some origin picks would not be compatible with other origin picks.

• As for a civics rework, well, that would depend on what you do with the merging of origins.

• Create a Fallen Empire and mid-game crisis difficulty slider (like how the End-game crisis has a difficulty slider).

• Allow us to customize the empires that come with common ground and hegemon starts. Of course, allow for “random” as well. Customize fallen empires, too. Pre FTL as well.

• Ascension theory should be a permanent research option after you finish all the traditions.

• You can choose your precursor. If anyone thinks that this would mean that everyone would choose “Cybrex”, this is not the case. But assuming that were the case, then it would be a simple matter of buffing the other precursors.

• Demonoids or Eldritchoids

• Eldrich crisis / demon crisis

• Necro crisis (zombie apocalypse)

• Plague/disease crisis

• A scenario where the centre of the galaxy becomes an option to traverse through. This might not involve a “crisis”, but what could happen is that some unknown force exists there and they are hard to penetrate and conquer. They never expand outwards (so your normal systems will never come under attack), but even if you claim the inner systems, they (the inner systems) will constantly be under attack, so you have to weigh up your options if you wish to spend resources in order to constantly protect the inner systems.

• Religion DLC (perhaps this can go into internal politics)

• Better espionage; internal terrorism, etc. Irregular and proxy wars.

• Potentially giga structures…

• Bioships

• Achievements for GOG

• Spectator view replay; that is, other people can watch a stream and look at what’s going on themselves while watching the stream (big ask, so probably only for Stellaris 2).

I love the idea of merging planets into sectors and managing the entire sector through one UI. One of the big problems stellaris has, imo, is that mechanics don't scale well with quantity. Up to 10 planes is fine to manage. 10-30 is doable, but micro intensive. Any more than that is cumbersome.

This sort of system, where you can merge planets into a single UI could lay the groundwork for even more 'scaling'. Maybe we could have a pre FTL phase of the game where you Colonize your starting system with primitive habitats, which then get bundled into your homeworld when you discover FTL.

 

[Pietrooperv]

Yes, for now colonization is a purely mechanical event that does not bring any discoveries or adventures. I would really like to see colonization revealed, with some events or mechanics that would allow the colonization of planets to become an individual story. As for habitability, now it is just set of different pictures that do not make sense -- if at very early game you choose which planets to colonize, then very quickly this ceases to be important. And there is no need for terraforming because of this. By the way, terraforming is also very boring now. I like how it is implemented in the Real Terraforming mod, but this does not mean that it cannot be done better.



I really want to enjoy the planetary combat system, the invasions could be a very interesting part with strategic choices and decisions. It doesn't matter how it will be done, by some events or mechanics, but it seems obvious to me that it should be made deeper. It's a pity that many commentators suggest to abandon planetary invasion altogether - it would be a terrible mistake. Even the current bleak system is better than nothing.


The trading system seems to me to be not clear and transparent enough and I avoid it. I don't think the system of piracy and trade on the routes is obvious and clearly shown, I don't really understand how to influence it correctly and what the results are from my various attempts to do this

I think planetary combat should fit into a general planet rework. Maybe invading armies have to fight for control of major cities/strategic objectives, with those being located on certain planetary features. Some sort of map fitting together all the geographical features of the planet would be really cool and could provide a good framework for a ground combat overhaul.

 

[Pietrooperv]

Hi everyone!

Now that the Grand Archive Story Pack is out, I want to do something a little different. With 360 Stellaris Dev Diaries complete, I thought it was time to circle right back around to the beginning: what was, will be.

Stellaris Dev Diary #1 was “The Vision”, and so is #361.

What is Stellaris?​

The vision serves as a guiding tool to keep the entire development team aligned. As the game evolves, we work hard to update it regularly to remain accurate and consistent with our core vision.

Here’s how I currently answer “What is Stellaris?”:

---

The Galaxy is Vast and Full of Wonders​

For over eight years, Stellaris has remained the ultimate exploration-focused space-fantasy strategy sandbox, allowing players to discover the wonders of the galaxy.

From their first steps into the stars to uniting the galaxy under their rule, the players are free to discover and tell their own unique stories.

Every story, trope, or player fantasy in science fiction is within our domain.​

---

Stellaris is a Living Game​

Over time, Stellaris has evolved and grown to meet the desires of the player base.​

• At launch, Stellaris leaned deep into its 4X roots.​
• It evolved from that base toward Grand Strategy.​
• As it continues to mature, we have added deeper Roleplaying aspects.​

All of these remain part of our DNA.

Stellaris is a 4X Grand Strategy game with Roleplaying elements that continues to evolve and redefine itself.​

---

Every Game is Different​

We desire for players to experience a sense of novelty every time they start a game of Stellaris.

They should be able to play the same empire ten times in a row and experience ten different stories.
A player’s experience will differ wildly if their first contact is a friendly MegaCorp looking to prosper together or if they’re pinned between a Fallen Empire and a Devouring Swarm.

Stellaris relies on a combination of prescripted stories (often tied to empire Origins) and randomized mechanical and narrative building blocks that come together to create unplanned, emergent narratives.

A sense of uncertainty and wonder about what could happen next is core to the Stellaris experience.
​

---

What is this About?​

Fundamentally, as the players, Stellaris is your game.

Your comments and feedback on The Machine Age heavily influenced our plans for 2025. We work on very long timelines, so we’ve already been working on next year’s releases for some time now. Most of what I’m asking will affect which tasks the team prioritizes and will help direct our direction in 2026 and beyond.

We’re making some changes to how we go about things. Many people have commented that the quarterly release cadence we’ve had since the 3.1 ‘Lem’ update makes it feel like things are changing too quickly and too often, and of course, it disrupts your active games and mods. The short patch cycle between Vela and Circinus was necessary for logistical reasons but really didn’t feel great.

We’re going to slow things down a little bit to let things stabilize. I’ve hinted a couple of times (and said outright last week) that we have the Custodian team working on some big things - the new Game Setup screen was part of this initiative but was completed early enough that we could sneak it into 3.14.1. My current plan is to have an Open Beta with some of the team's larger changes during Q1 of next year, replacing what would have been the slot for a 3.15 release. This will make 2025Q2, around our anniversary in May, a bigger than normal release, giving us the opportunity to catch up on technical debt, polish, and major features.

What is Stellaris to you?​

How does this match what you think Stellaris is, and where it should go? Would you change any of these vision statements?

What systems and content are “sacred” to you, which would make Stellaris not Stellaris anymore if we changed them?

Some examples to comment on could include:

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?
• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?
• What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?
• How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?
• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?
• Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?
• Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?
• If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

To the Future, Together!​

I want to spend most of this year’s remaining dev diaries (at least, the ones that aren’t focused on the Circinus patch cycle) on this topic, talking with you about where our shared galactic journey is heading.

Next week we’ll be talking about the 3.14.159 patch.

But First, a Shoutout to the Chinese Stellaris Community​

Before I sign off, I want to commend the Chinese Stellaris Community for finding the funniest bug of the cycle. I’ve been told that they found that you can capture inappropriate things with Boarding Cables from the Treasure Hunters origin, and have been challenging each other to find the most ridiculous things to capture.

You know, little things like Cetana’s flagship. The Infinity Machine. An entire Enclave.

I’m not going to have the team fix this for 3.14.159, but will likely have them do so for 3.14.1592. I want to give you a chance to complete your collection and catch them all. After all, someone needs to catch The End of the Cycle and an Incoming Asteroid. Post screenshots if you catch anything especially entertaining!

See you next week!

Stellaris: Grand Archive is now available as a standalone purchase or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08!
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Edit:
It's come to my attention that an Incoming Asteroid has been captured! Excellent job!

• Here are my general thoughts/ideas for a war/fleet overhaul
  • We need a logistics/supply lines system. It should be worked into an overall trade/internal logistics system.
  • Systems become a sort of battle map. An invading fleet needs to secure every fortified celestial body in order to safely proceed to the next system or risk letting the defenders have free reign over their supply lines.
  • This would add a deep layer to ‘galactic geography’ ripe for potential combat mechanics. Combat around a gas giant with half a dozen moons could be different from combat around an inhabited planet, could be different from combat in an asteroid belt, could be different from combat around the star(s), could be different from combat in a nebulae system, could be different from… get my point? The layout of the system would make each battle feel unique. fleet combat in a nebulae system resembling WWII submarine warfare would be kind of neat. ie, very limited sensor range forcing you to fly around looking for enemy ships to engage.
  • Building off of the previous bullet point, combat should always be system wide, across the whole system map. Multiple battles should be happening simultaneously between smaller sub fleets or battle groups. System wide battle should not be a single decisive doomstack match up. They should be more strategic and take longer to resolve.
  • Planets/celestial bodies can be fortified by the defender, or an occupying invader, to provide defensive/offensive buffs/make it harder to capture the system. This doesn’t just have to be defensive platforms. Maybe ships can hide in a gas giant’s atmosphere or asteroid belt until its all clear, and then go and attack the enemy’s supply lines.
  • Mechanics for how battle groups are organized and deployed as well as how large they are, tying in with a logistics system. How exactly the player does this should be unique every game, depending on how they design their ships and build their fleets.
  • Fleets shouldn’t be under direct player control anymore. Instead it's a more soft type of control. Maybe the player designates a ‘front’ on the galaxy map similar to HOI4, or maybe it's automatic. Regardless of how it's implemented, there shouldn’t be extensive micromanagement that will inevitably snowball out of control as the game progresses and wars are fought on larger scales.
  • There should be new tactics and weapons. Currently, fleet combat is very WWII style. It doesn’t make use of futuristic or even modern technologies like electronic warfare, much less whatever technologies exist in your space age stellaris empire. Here’t a list of some ideas in that regard.
    • Electronic warfare, as I’ve already mentioned. It would be super cool to be able to disable your opponent’s weapons or engines, for example. Or see through their cloak, or infect their ship with malware reducing overall effectiveness, etc.
    • Drone swarms. Have you ever read Chrysalis by u/Beaverfur on r/HFY? It has got to be the absolute BEST determined exterminator lore in existence. I highly recommend you give it a read. Basically, ‘The Terran’ utilizes a massive drone swarm and the ‘Galactic Federal Council’ uses electronic warfare to neutralize it.
    • Boarding. It's a classic sci fi trope so I challenge you to make it happen.
    • In combat cloaking. Again, classic scifi trope. Just give it a role in battles, like sneaking behind enemy lines to target their logistics.
    • Suicide attacks. A genocidal or fanatic militarist empire might be willing to kamikaze their ships.
    • Minefields
    • Overall, more asymmetric or unique weapons, tactics, and means of killing the enemy.
  • A more in depth peace deal system
    • Actually negotiate with the enemy to decide the terms of ending the war
    • Negotiating the peace deal should depend on a range of factors including
      • Who currently has the upper hand in the war
      • Overall military strength
      • Damage done to both empires’ economies
      • Both empires’ willingness to continue the war if an agreement can’t be reached. Conversely, their willingness to end the war, even on unfavorable terms.
      • What the actual demands are. A few border systems aren’t a big deal, but a core world?
    • Does one side have to pay reparations?
    • How will conquered populations be treated? Maybe an egalitarian empire would rather continue the war rather than let their citizens be enslaved.
    • Are there any disarmament stipulations?
    • Was the aggressor provoked to war by the defender? What was the issue and how was it resolved? Wars should feel less generic and have unique causes and resolutions.
    • How does your population feel about the resolution of the war? Ar they satisfied? Was the war worth it? Are there feelings of resentment that could lead to another war later on?
    • Give the peace treaty a name and have the empire leaders sign it. Make it feel historic. That would help shape the history of the galaxy and help wars feel less generic, as I’ve already said is a problem.

 

[Queen Claire]

• How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?
  it could use some work. the current system relies heavily on micromanagement, this makes it much harder in late game especially when you run into pop issues and having to manually build every single planet.
  
  
• Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?
  yes absolutely. but, not so much that its unforgiving when you expand to other classes of planets. another thing. planetary features should matter more all a round. it was a great idea to rework the rare features for strategic resources, but all of them could use a rework.
  
  
• If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?
  Change away. so many things could be done to make fleets and military much more impactful. Things like fleet power should better reflect the actual strength of a empire rather than total power of ships
  
  
• What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?
  Origins and Civics. Its your empires backstory, it starts and ends your civilizations adventure throughout the galaxy. With all the new story driven content. Origins like the Subterranean and Aquatic home world are being separated from ones like synthetic fertility and cybernetic creed.
  
  
• Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?
  I want to build off of the previous one and say yes. we are getting to a point where some origins don't feel like they should be origins anymore.
  Examples are all of the planetary origins. With origins all the new story origins the planet specific ones are left behind.
  I wouldn't go as far to say they should be civics, but there should be a different category where empires can set the "foundation" or "start point" of their civilization. the scale of unique empire stories and roleplay would benefit greatly from having a Story Origin + Civics + Empire Foundation(Planet specific origins)
• How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?
  All the time, from beginning to end. Frequently. one of the nice things about Stellaris is that you never know what's ahead you have to adapt as you go
• How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?
  It severely needs a rework. one possibility could be reworking the strategic resource trading, galactic market location, piracy, hyper relays, transit hubs, hyperlane registrars and more into the connections between yourself and other empires. it should be both rewarding and punishing for those connected to many and those connected to none. The closer your connections to the galactic market should help decide fees etc. The galaxy trade resource should be dependent on connections between your worlds and other empires.
• If you could remove one game system, what would it be? Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion? Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?
  
  I wouldn't remove a specific game system, however, Fleet, Military and Star bases should be redesigned.
  
  Right now the way its designed is the more ships you have the better off you are. Each class of ship should be designed to fit the role they are designed to play. there shouldn't be a jack of all trades ship type for any of the classes.
  Corvettes - Should be extremely agile ships capable of covert operations, hit and run tactics, system overwhelming.
  Frigates - Should be your Support ships. not meant to decide the fate of a battle alone but provide Tactical and Supportive benefits to fleets that use them
  Destroyers - a step up from corvettes, these ships should offer more specializations in terms of the things Corvettes can do while losing some of the bonus of smaller size and agility.
  Cruisers - your main battle ship. able to multirole but should succeed in carrying the fire power and defense needed for larger scale battles
  Battleships - A step up from cruisers, Defense and Firepower Matter, They're strong and are a force to be reckon with. They are the ones that command the direction of the battle in fleets but suffer fatal losses without support.
  Titans - Colossal ships designed to carry the firepower of many battleships in one. they should be the sole leader of each fleet. the command center.
  
  everyone of the classes of ships should have a purpose that they excel at. compositions should matter.
  
  Military needs reworked entirely. Planetary bombardment, armies, defensive armies, planetary defences all should make a bigger difference when it comes to taking on the enemy.
  
  Space stations should have more impact when strategically placed through out your empire. as it stands now a space station fully set on defense can be easily overwhelmed by fleets of even a third of the power of stations.

 

[Pietrooperv]

I will leave here what I wrote on reddit:

"I see they laying the ground work to remove ground combat. No pun intended.

I would prefer smaller fleets and a bigger focus on ground combat, unless having deathstacks running amok, but it seems soon this won't be the game for me."

To add before people drop with the exaggerations:
It does not need to be HoI.
Make Armies more valuable to capture stations and defending stations, or just have a setting to blow them up with your ships.

Same with planetary shields and fortresses. Landing an army to defeat defenders.

Have ships with troop modules instead of the following caravan. Make choices matter on fleet composition.

Having to capture individual stations in a system is a good idea. Depends on how it's implemented though. It really needs to be automatic. The micro would very quickly grow out of control otherwise.

 

[Confused_Us]

Broadly, my biggest "problem" with Stellaris is that it doesn't scale. The scope of your actions never changes over time. You perform the same tasks 200 years into the game that you do on day 1. You go to a planet. You build a thing. You pick a science ship. You tell it to do a thing. An event occurs. A tech completes. You pick a new one. As the game goes on, you make the same decisions, over and over. The frequency you must make those decisions increases, but the mechanical outcome of each decision decreases over time.

Much of this can be automated, sure, but ultimately those actions are what the game is, mechanically. However, the outcome of each individual choice is less and less meaningful as time goes by. Because there's no change of scope, the player's choices individually become less and less meaningful as time goes by. Players have emotional reactions to that type of change. For some it becomes tedious. For others, overwhelming. Some may not even recognize they're having that reaction, and simply move on to another game.

Let's visualize the number of clicks vs the mechanical effect of each click, over time:

With some analytics, I'm sure you could actually figure out where the lines cross, but cross they do.

That is the inflection point where the scope and scale of the game should change. Ideally, the blue line never crosses the red, or not for long. Shift the game's scale or scope to keep actions meaningful. You can reduce clicks, increase outcomes of clicks, or both. Lots of story-based ways to do that. Move to sector-based administration, rather than planet-based. Build squadrons of ships instead of individual ones. Dedicate a scientist to a particular branch of the tech tree while another continues work on breakthroughs.

The actual solutions are up to you!

Stellaris is one of my favorite games of all time. I really hope you can solve this!

 

[GamerTechChub]

Me and a good friend of mine have recently become obsessed with Stellaris. We have finished five or so long games on standard difficulty over the past few weeks, so I'm happy to answer those dev questions from a new player's perspective.

How important to you are the current systems that use individual Pops and Jobs in the planetary simulation?

We love having little guys running around our planets. From a storytelling casual perspective, it's quite fun to be able to do things like my friend's "creepy spider planet" where she dumped all the spider refugees she took in one time. I like the that job system means that you can synergize buildings. Since they create jobs instead of directly requiring resources, you can stack buffs to a specific job type which can work with many different buildings.

If we made significant changes to fleets, how much could we alter before it no longer felt like the game you love?

It might be because we are new, but we are not attached to the fleet building right now. I think we both set ships to auto design, and while my fleets tends to be full of many smaller ships and hers tend to be as many big ships as she can afford, we both end up performing about the same in the end.

What aspects are most important in defining your civilization?

Origins, Civics, and Species. We really like the origins and civics that change how something works, like Organic Reprocessing changing how you handle food, Subterranean changing how you handle housing, or Void Dwellers changing how you handle colonization. We mostly pick our species, ethics, and government traits around meeting the requirements for our desired Civics and Origins. After that we use any remaining points for flavor or synergy.

How do you set goals for yourself during gameplay? When do you set them, and how often do they change as you play?

I find that I kind of play in phases, and as I play more I know I need to start multitasking these better, but Stellaris is a lot so I often let some things slip to focus on my current phase goals.

• Expand to choke points, claim in bursts from choke point to choke point so that my empire is defendable from a few key gateway systems instead of floundering my early claims and being pressed from too many points of entry.
• Being colonization and defense building. Get those planets settled and those choke points defended.
• Interconnect the choke points and planets with support structures and starbases, begin focusing on research and trade, build my first large scale fleets,
• Finally, once I'm stable and running, I can look outward to neighbors, the galactic community, federations, etc.
• Enter the end game, prepare for the crisis, get mega structures going, etc.

How important is the current Trade system, with routes collecting back to your Capital?

We honestly found dealing with trade routes and trade value to be one of the things we had to google so we could understand what it was and how it worked. Even when I played a mega corporation, the actual trade collection routes thing took a back seat to installing branch offices. Replacing it with a logistics system for moving various resources between planets might be fun.

Is colonization too easy? Should habitability and planet climate matter more?

I don't think colonization is too easy, more like it's too bland. What I would love to see is colonization events that create those rare features or otherwise change how the colonized planet will be.

Are there any Origins that should be Civics, or Civics that should be Origins?

I don't think we have enough experience to make a call here.

If you could remove one game system, what would it be?

Ground wars. Currently ground wars are a second type of war you have to fight after you do your space war. I think I would like to see both kinds of war combined in some way, make armies a part of fleets so you don't need to maintain two types of unconnected military forces for the two types of war.

Which system would you make the central focus of an expansion?

The Crises! Once you get your empire stabilized and the galactic community going, the end game seems to be weathering the mid game and end game crises, but there are only a handful of types right now. I'd love to see more diverse crises with varying victory conditions.

Is there a feature you want to enjoy, but feel the current implementation doesn’t quite work for you?

War. I never really want to go to war unless I plan on destroying my enemy completely, since the way war works means that negotiations are basically nonexistent. On a related note, I really wish the AI would handle trading systems with a little more nuance. It should be possible to trade that random system that doesn't connect to the rest of the AI's empire and that's behind my choke point for a large sum of resources the AI needs.

 

[Pietrooperv]

Broadly, my biggest "problem" with Stellaris is that it doesn't scale. The scope of your actions never changes over time. You perform the same tasks 200 years into the game that you do on day 1. You go to a planet. You build a thing. You pick a science ship. You tell it to do a thing. An event occurs. A tech completes. You pick a new one. As the game goes on, you make the same decisions, over and over. The frequency you must make those decisions increases, but the mechanical outcome of each decision decreases over time.

Much of this can be automated, sure, but ultimately those actions are what the game is, mechanically. However, the outcome of each individual choice is less and less meaningful as time goes by. Because there's no change of scope, the player's choices individually become less and less meaningful as time goes by. Players have emotional reactions to that type of change. For some it becomes tedious. For others, overwhelming. Some may not even recognize they're having that reaction, and simply move on to another game.

Let's visualize the number of clicks vs the mechanical effect of each click, over time:

View attachment 1219032

With some analytics, I'm sure you could actually figure out where the lines cross, but cross they do.

That is the inflection point where the scope and scale of the game should change. Ideally, the blue line never crosses the red, or not for long. Shift the game's scale or scope to keep actions meaningful. You can reduce clicks, increase outcomes of clicks, or both. Lots of story-based ways to do that. Move to sector-based administration, rather than planet-based. Build squadrons of ships instead of individual ones. Dedicate a scientist to a particular branch of the tech tree while another continues work on breakthroughs.

The actual solutions are up to you!

Stellaris is one of my favorite games of all time. I really hope you can solve this!

Devs, please listen to this guy. This is the core problem with several aspects of the game, and he articulated it so well. Whatever you end up doing, please take this into account.