Stellaris Dev Diary #363 - A Journey of Exploration

[Drullo321]

Balance​

• Remove minor artifacts production from Decentralized Research edict

Wow that is a really sad change for this civic. This just removes the hidden cornerstone of the entire civic and just makes it worthless in all but edge cases (like Dark Consortium plus Zroni precursor on first colonisable world).
Also it just removes a build in synergy for more specimen through minor artifact action.

Any changes to reconsider this?
If the civic itself is too powerful, may consider nerfing it in other ways, like reducing/removing specimen unity bonus

Other then that, what is left of the civic?

- The unity malus per job and the unity reward for specimen cancel each other out
- You have a one-time save of 250 alloys and 1k research for one tech
- You have 10% additional anomaly discovery chance

The research edict itself isn't that powerful without the artifacts and those artifacts there were a pretty synergy with discover more specimen. Without them you probably won't use it because there are other minor artifact actions more important (like precursor hints etc).

The curator civic is/was a way to get more guaranteed (artifact via minor artifact action provided by the edict) and random (anomaly) specimen. The removal of guaranted specimen is like to cut the civic in half (yes the artifact action is available for everyone but there isn't a reliable source for guaranted long term artifacts which you may need for other actions/ships)

 

[ItThatAltersSanity]

Some of the questions that I offered as proposals were a bit leading - I did want to know what you all thought about the existing pop mechanics, for example, because I’m very interested in improving their performance and addressing several other quality of life and mechanical issues with the current systems. Your responses have strengthened my belief that tackling planets is a correct course of action, and you should expect some experimentation in next year’s Open Beta.

I’d like to move us over to a system more similar to the pop groups used in Victoria 3 - though with a Stellaris spin on things. We’re not likely to go as deep in the simulation as Victoria does, but I think that we can likely split pop groups based on species, ethics, and factions. Some of the granularity we have right now might slip though, so I’m eager to get to doing some prototyping and seeing what the pros and cons are of such a change, as well as what the performance implications would be. The economic implications are huge.

Fleets are unlikely to get major changes this year, but a number of you identified them as a place where we can do a lot of major improvements, along with many aspects of war. We’ll talk a bit more about these next week.

Trade is almost certainly going to change. Very few of you seemed terribly fond of the current system, and it’s both terribly bad for performance and mechanically difficult to understand for new players. While I like the general idea behind the trade routes, I don’t think they add enough benefit for their costs. We’re likely to revamp it into a proper resource, though I’m also considering ways of also using it to simulate supply lines and local planetary deficits. If we end up pursuing the latter, gestalt empires would need access to trade or at least, something similar. That could potentially open up more opportunities for MegaCorps and diplomatic pacts, and we’ll have to find new ways of using pirates.

One key concern for fleets is "what's stopping me from doomstacking?" While a proper war revamp will be 2026 at earliest, an interim solution would be to make more reasons for having the fleet split. As I suggested earlier, having planetary sieges require fleets to take attrition (because planets would get the new ability to shoot back) instead of troop transports is one idea for having the fleet split. Requiring some ships to stay in domestic rear zones to prevent pirates is another - no need for trade routes eating performance to achieve this, have the ships need to be parked at space stations to suppress piracy in a zone (Fleet in Being).

Now as for the pops, here is a fantasy I want to see viable in whatever new system you cook up:

The Egalitarian Xenophiles celebrated diversity. Their planets campaigned to have a distribution of species in each important job even if some species were genetically suboptimal.

• If ethically relevant, competitive buffs for meeting diversity quotas
• Multiple species growing their populations concurrently, now that pops track how many individuals form them
• Note Vic3's endgame optimisations of merging really tiny pops into mainstream pops, except when there's active migrantion happening

As the planets grew, the people took care of growing their infrastructure on their own initiative.

• If ethically relevant, planets that are self-sufficient or allocated a budget make their own districts/buildings/(whatever makes new jobs) perfectly in line with their growing population, removing micromanagement.

The democracy discovered how to make interspecies mating viable. The hybrid offspring were accepted as one.

• If ethically relevant, pops track what fraction of their population is half-breeds. They are not separate pops, they're just another number for existing pops to record.

Then the Authoritarian Xenophobe conquerors came. The people were enslaved, their previous cushy jobs stolen from them. The emperor decreed only specific species may work in certain jobs. The rest were forcibly shipped to other planets of the empire where infrastructure for menial jobs were already built in advance. Abominable half-breeds were separated and dealt separately.

• Centralised authority: nothing gets built unless the emperor decrees it. In exchange, the emperor can plan surplus constructions ahead of time to take in a sudden influx of new pops.
• Whole species are outright banned from certain jobs across the empire.
• Now half-breeds become their own pops if genetically superior or outright culled if inferior.

On this note, pop-traits could certainly be trimmed down. Species and ascendancy traits are enough diversity in the game to play out fantasies. I don't want to care that these pops have farmer genes while those pops have miner genes. "They're genetically enhanced" and "they're transcendentally evolved" is enough granularity for job performance. Other traits like "small fraction less/more upkeep" are things I want on every pop or none at all. Having to track them as separate sub-species just to fit the trait budget is painful for UI and performance. Corner case would be 2 empires having the same initial species but then diverging on ascendancies.

Thinking on this more, I'm imagining each empire would have a "desired template" for all members of a particular species. Then they'd look at the reality on the ground and then gradually mold individuals into the template. So something like:

• Pop of 20 million humans records "100% have job performance genes, 100% have more upkeep genes"
• Pop gets conquered by asshole empire that wants to degrade them
• A few years later, that pop now records "30% have job performance genes, 70% have growth boost genes, 30% have more upkeep genes"
• Eventually the pop is "100% have growth boost genes"

 

[Dr. B]

Wow that is a really sad change for this civic. This just removes the hidden cornerstone of the entire civic and just makes it worthless in all but edge cases (like Dark Consortium plus Zroni precursor on first colonisable world).
Also it just removes a build in synergy for more specimen through minor artifact action.

Any changes to reconsider this?
If the civic itself is too powerful, may consider nerfing it in other ways, like reducing/removing specimen unity bonus

Other then that, what is left of the civic?

- The unity malus per job and the unity reward for specimen cancel each other out
- You have a one-time save of 250 alloys and 1k research for one tech
- You have 10% additional anomaly discovery chance

The research edict itself isn't that powerful without the artifacts and those artifacts there were a pretty synergy with discover more specimen. Without them you probably won't use it because there are other minor artifact actions more important (like precursor hints etc).

The curator civic is/was a way to get more guaranteed (artifact via minor artifact action provided by the edict) and random (anomaly) specimen. The removal of guaranted specimen is like to cut the civic in half (yes the artifact action is available for everyone but there isn't a reliable source for guaranted long term artifacts which you may need for other actions/ships)

I see nothing about removing guarandeed specimens??

If you play expansionistic, this civic is great!
More digsites, more planets to build monuments (for the council position), more space to explore and find anomalies, more research deposits to double.

And the edict, is insane when you go really wide. I had all artifact actions on cooldown and still reached the storage cap.

This civic is much worse if you turtle.

 

[konsul11]

Trade is almost certainly going to change. Very few of you seemed terribly fond of the current system, and it’s both terribly bad for performance and mechanically difficult to understand for new players. While I like the general idea behind the trade routes, I don’t think they add enough benefit for their costs. We’re likely to revamp it into a proper resource, though I’m also considering ways of also using it to simulate supply lines and local planetary deficits. If we end up pursuing the latter, gestalt empires would need access to trade or at least, something similar. That could potentially open up more opportunities for MegaCorps and diplomatic pacts, and we’ll have to find new ways of using pirates.

In the very beginning of Stellaris, I remember how each planet had to take care of its own food production. I remember how inconvenient it was and messed up the game a lot with micromanagement. And how glad I was when the update came out that made food production for the entire empire at once. Do you seriously want to go back to that kind of experience? To the extra micromanagement that is already very little (nonexistent) in this game?
Please don't go back to that hell.

 

[Dr. B]

In the very beginning of Stellaris, I remember how each planet had to take care of its own food production. I remember how inconvenient it was and messed up the game a lot with micromanagement. And how glad I was when the update came out that made food production for the entire empire at once. Do you seriously want to go back to that kind of experience? To the extra micromanagement that is already very little (nonexistent) in this game?
Please don't go back to that hell.

I still think Stellaris should just just copy the Master of Orion 2 system. Planets grow their own food, but you pay energy to ship food from planet to planet as needed (but cut the freighter production requirement, just pay credits. Less micromanagement.)

So you can still have specialized worlds, though at a cost depending on the per planet food deficit. Also, a blockade can then lead to starvation, which is a good mechanic.

 

[Kiwibaum]

Do you mean 2024 or 2025?

I like that we keep moving, but I don’t understand why this hasn’t received more attention. The whole fleet snowball gameplay loop the game revolves around makes designing meaningful mechanics nearly impossible from my perspective. As soon as you try to dig into why and how you do things, it always comes back to "more fleet power."

Anyway, I might be impatient*, but I think the system for fleets and military, especially doomstacking, is holding back the game’s potential and is subtly sabotaging roleplay and diverse playstyles.

*i am really impatient now

I think one other big problem with this tho is that there are simply no other options to influence other empires in a meaningful way. You cannot "attack" someone, except militarily. You can't influence their internal stability, supporting unappy factions. You can't influnce their economy in any meaningful way either. You can't influence someone in a meaningful way through espionage. The only way you can strongly effect another empire is war. I think this is the way bigger problem, rather than bigger fleets winning against smaller fleets tbh.

 

[Dr. B]

I think one other big problem with this tho is that there are simply no other options to influence other empires in a meaningful way. You cannot "attack" someone, except militarily. You can't influence their internal stability, supporting unappy factions. You can't influnce their economy in any meaningful way either. You can't influence someone in a meaningful way through espionage. The only way you can strongly effect another empire is war. I think this is the way bigger problem, rather than bigger fleets winning against smaller fleets tbh.

This is really true, and well described.

An espionage overhaul that provide espionage with some real teeth (if you specialize heavily in it) would do wonders.

 

[TSBasilisk]

In the very beginning of Stellaris, I remember how each planet had to take care of its own food production. I remember how inconvenient it was and messed up the game a lot with micromanagement. And how glad I was when the update came out that made food production for the entire empire at once. Do you seriously want to go back to that kind of experience? To the extra micromanagement that is already very little (nonexistent) in this game?
Please don't go back to that hell.

My thought would be having the revamped trade system act as a way of shipping needed materials between colonies.

So say a planet has an excess production of minerals. Those minerals get shipped out which produces Export resource. But it has a deficit of food so it imports, which produces an Import resource. Depending on your empire, you could set a tax on import, export, or both, generating Energy from the exchange.

The value of the Import/Export generated could vary based on the sector's balance, so Importing food to a sector with low supply would cost more.

 

[Imp0815]

I think one other big problem with this tho is that there are simply no other options to influence other empires in a meaningful way. You cannot "attack" someone, except militarily. You can't influence their internal stability, supporting unappy factions. You can't influnce their economy in any meaningful way either. You can't influence someone in a meaningful way through espionage. The only way you can strongly effect another empire is war. I think this is the way bigger problem, rather than bigger fleets winning against smaller fleets tbh.

An interesting approach to why we end up with such a military-heavy game. But I'm not convinced that attached systems, which invalidate the lackluster military gameplay by other means, elevate the game as a whole. I think we need to level the playing field first before we can implement impactful secondary mechanics to circumvent military focus.
For example, if espionage could disable a fleet, it would be devastating now, even for just one jump or battle. But if we had 10 to 20 fleets, we could disable two or three for one push into a system, and it would feel powerful without beeing an "I-win button."

That said, I tend to agree that all we have now is building the biggest stick to make a mark on the universe and otherwise prevent getting whacked, no matter what we set out to do. I mean, even if you don't utilize it, it's still needed for the diplomatic power impact to "peacefully" unite the galaxy as one empire.

 

[Eladrin]

In the very beginning of Stellaris, I remember how each planet had to take care of its own food production. I remember how inconvenient it was and messed up the game a lot with micromanagement. And how glad I was when the update came out that made food production for the entire empire at once. Do you seriously want to go back to that kind of experience? To the extra micromanagement that is already very little (nonexistent) in this game?
Please don't go back to that hell.

That wasn't what I was suggesting there. Your local food or mineral deficit might cost a small amount of Trade upkeep though to simulate the convoys supplying the world. You should not need to micromanage that sort of thing.

Though if the planet were being bombarded, I'd probably want to experiment with blockade effects.

I still think Stellaris should just just copy the Master of Orion 2 system. Planets grow their own food, but you pay energy to ship food from planet to planet as needed (but cut the freighter production requirement, just pay credits. Less micromanagement.)

So you can still have specialized worlds, though at a cost depending on the per planet food deficit. Also, a blockade can then lead to starvation, which is a good mechanic.

More or less that, but using trade rather than energy. Maybe storage depots prevent any negative blockade effects for a while, or cloaking techs.

Not guaranteeing we'll do this, but it's my line of thinking. I don't want to go to the detail level of tracking the locations of all resources - while that has cool potential, Stellaris isn't set up for that sort of thing. Abstraction is good enough.

 

[RoverStorm]

Can anyone explain how Victoria 3 pops work differently? I don't have that game.

"In General":

1. Performance by merging similar pops and having a "size" factor for pops.
V3 pops represent all individuals who share a location, culture, religion, and job. So all pops in London that are English, Protestant, and Farmers employed by Wheat Farms, are all merged into one pop that just has a "size" to reflect how many jobs it's simulating. Such a system massively improves performance over Stellaris's system because it's "one pop" that has all demands multiplied by it's size, instead of Stellaris's system where it repeats the process for every single pop.
In other words, it is "4 Food Output * 5" instead of "4 Food Output + 4 Food Output + 4 Food Output + 4 Food Output + 4 Food Output"

2. Happiness/Standard of Living/Wages/Private Market
Pops in Stellaris have a pre-defined and static standard of living based on policies. This policy determines their ration of consumer goods (which CG and food are paid directly from the national stockpile, to which all jobs directly pay into), political power, and happiness. Happiness is also a simple modifier that ranges from 0 to 100 and has no direct political impact on anything but crime and stability.

V3 pops have a fluid "standard of living" based on wages and the market. Pops are given a wage based on their job and use this to buy the food and goods they demand from your empire's market. Buildings that make a particular goods split the money that pops spend buying that good based on how many of that good the building makes, and they use that money to pay the defined wages to the employees first and to buy ingrediants to run the building, and then the rest is profit that is split among the building's owners. Building owners are quite fluid and can be rich pops like shopkeepers or nobility, a worker coop where employees split the earnings, or even the government where YOU earn the profit and the employees are instead paid the standard government wages that you control, but then the building requires bureaucracy that is highly inefficient compared to private markets. Finally, employees under private ownership can find their wages going up quite dramatically if there is an employee shortage, as the buildings start to compete with higher wages to hire employees from each other. (This is interesting as it means buildings will quickly spend all their profit on wages instead of going into the owner's pocket, which often crashes the owner's wages and therefore their ability to purchase things, and this makes them REALLY mad and politically active).

This means that a low class Miner that is in a worker coorp or a worker shortage may actually be able to afford private airplanes (literally, NOT hyperbole) and absolutely love the current government as consequence.

3. Identitifications
Stellaris pops are currently defined by the following: Species (traits), Ethic, Faction, Job, Colony
V3 pops are defined by the following: Culture, Religion, Job, State (similar to a Colony), Size
I doubt too much will change, but as mentioned I think Size will be added to Stellaris pops.

4. Pop growth
In Stellaris it's sort of like "A colony will gain "growth points" and then pop out a new pop every so often."
In V3 it's more like "Pops provide growth points to specifically their culture and religion based on their size and standard of living. The growth points are then used to fill empty jobs and then fill the "unemployed" category.

5. Education/Qualifications
In Stellaris, pops are always qualified for every single job. This means a pop that has spent 300 years as literal livestock can immediately be put in a laboratory due to conquest or political changes and they function precisely as well as pops that have 300 years of experience in that laboratory.
Pops also throw a hissy fit if they get fired from upper or lower class jobs, even if lower class jobs offer the exact same pay and higher political power, and will refuse to work lower class jobs.
V3, pops instead have "qualifications". Different jobs have different qualifications. Farmers, shopkeepers, and upper class jobs use a pop's wealth as their primary qualifications, while middle classes tend to use literacy rates as qualifications. This means buildings cannot hire recently freed slaves as engineers since the freedmen probably have below a 20% literacy rate, which makes them unqualified.
Unlike Stellaris, higher class pops will take lower class jobs if they become unemployed. This is usually bad though, as they almost always end up with fewer wages, which means their standard of living will go down while also having extremely high political power due to all their wealth and THAT is what causes civil wars in V3.

6. Politics
Stellaris pops will usually pick an ethic at random based on their ethic attractions. The factions basically exist as a source of unity and some happiness modifiers, and the issues each faction cares about are fairly limited.
V3 pops will, due to representing lots of individuals, will directly split their political power based on their interest group attractions. But this is scaled with literacy and wealth. A poor pop with low literacy will provide almost no political support to anything.
Unlike Stellaris, V3 factions influence your ability to change anything about your government. Stellaris can switch from an aristocratic monarchy to a meritocratic democracy overnight. In V3, you are never getting rid of the Monarchy if all your politically active pops support the Landowners, Military, and Petite Bourgeoisie.

7. Genocide/Horrors
V3 does not offer a genocide button. There are still complicated ways to replicate certain real life 20'th century policies from certain parts of Europe under a certain regime that a certain dictator did intentionally to cause a famine targetting a specific ethnic group.

Stellaris allows you to click a button and turn entire species into livestock. Which doesn't turn off crossbreading with them, if you previously picked up xenocompatability.
You can also click a button and turn them all into eunuchs (this is somehow reversable btw), or put them in gulags, or try to displace them (and resorting to extermination if nobody wants them, though a bug accidentally made it so other empires don't consider this extermination atm), or just break out the extermination squads from the start.
Stellaris definitely wins the "villanous potential" competition by a landslide.


I have no clue the full extent of what's being adopted from Victoria 3, other than V3 pops almost universally represent a logical economic simulation far better than Stellaris pops.

 

[Eladrin]

I have no clue the full extent of what's being adopted from Victoria 3, other than V3 pops almost universally represent a logical economic simulation far better than Stellaris pops.

The experiments are unlikely to add the economic details their pops use - I'm thinking we stay as close to our current model as possible and break them apart by species, faction, ethics, and strata.

 

[Archael90]

Hello, Stellaris Community!

Today we’ll start with preliminary release notes for 3.14.1592, then look back at the past at all of the changes Stellaris has gone through and summarize the feedback you all gave in the dev diary two weeks ago - The Vision. We’re still reading the responses to that one and will continue doing so, so if you haven’t had a chance to add your thoughts, please add them!

Preliminary Release Notes for 3.14.1592​

If all goes according to plan, we’ll be releasing the 3.14.1592 patch sometime next week.

These are our preliminary release notes:

Spoiler: 3.14.1592 “Circinus” Preliminary Release Notes

Balance​

• Add energy activation cost to Propagandosphere
• Cloaking strength on Camouflage mutations are now consistent throughout sizes
• Give -15% cloning cost and -10% fauna upkeep to Beastmasters civics
• Reduce Space Fauna cloning cost by 10%
• Reduce Space Fauna energy upkeep by 25%
• Remove minor artifacts production from Decentralized Research edict
• Rework Mutated Voidworms fleets content and scaling, aligning them similar to Prethoryn Brood Queen fleets

Bugfix​

• Accelerate juveniles animation speed
• Added Insider Trading and Trade Focus traits to each other's opposites block to stop them appearing together since they almost cancel each other out.
• Added Orbital Ring variants for Beastport/Hatchery/Vivarium descriptions in all supported languages
• Civics added in Grand Archive can now be swapped from the regular to corporate version and vice versa
• Clarified the texts of the Cultivated Worldscaping decision and planet modifier
• Deleting a design now keeps you in current designer type
• Enclaves and Marauders satisfy Xenoist Contact Demand
• Extreme Contortionist DNA now gives rare crystals instead of motes to be more consistent with the event that gives it
• Fix an issue where Cognitive Node should be selected by the Leader Infected event
• Fix blocked Tiyanki Graveyard event chain when capturing them
• Fix Boarding Cables capturing literally anything - thanks for the fun screenshots
• Fix Breeding Status displayed in view that was not always correct
• Fix Fossilized Endoskeleton specimen localization
• Fix Mercenary Enclave Stations unable to build ships
• Fix Cloaked Patternwalker missing string
• Fix scoped localizations for Memorial For Bubbles specimen
• Fixed an unlocalized string showing up when you tried to return starbases at times. Also added linebreaks to the same tooltip.
• Fixed recommended DLC tooltips in multiplayer
• Fixes a bug with too wide portrait on Empire Design Selection View
• FX for ship auras are now displayed
• Improve Cordyceptic Drones fauna damage modifier text in tooltip to make it clearer what it exactly affects
• Life Tree Protectors now don't move away from their system
• Lost colony parents using Sol as their system will no longer spawn two Siriuses if the guaranteed habitable worlds slider is set to 1.
• Mutated Voidworms fleets now don't use naval capacity
• Mutated Voidworms now don't show they can upgrade anymore
• Orbital Assembly Complex holding now correctly boost Beastport and Hatchery on Orbital Ring
• Preccursors can no longer be discovered on Astral Scars
• Prevent duplicate specimens from being found in the same empire
• Removed the unused h_dna string
• Stop showing upkeep part of message when leader upkeep is zero in hire leader confirmation dialog
• The Diplomacy Tradition Finisher now properly refers to Officials and not Envoys.
• Voidworms now stop bombarding if the Immunity technology is researched (before crisis)
• Worm-Riddled Gate is now correctly accessible if Voidworms are captured instead of killed

AI​

• AI won't build infinite science ships when trying to build frigates anymore
• Fix AI that was not willing to build Shipyards

Stability​

• Fix a crash when a tooltip references the concept of a tradition that doesn't exist
• Fix crash when Voidworms try to act on empty fleets
• Fix OOS when riftworld station is built
• Fix saves affected by the crash when an AI without a Grand Archive tries to capture a Space Fauna
• Fix Voidworms CTD
• Fixed issue with resolving the user home dir on linux that leads to CTD

Okay, now on to the main dev diary.

Where We’ve Been​

A long time ago in a galaxy generated far, far away, on May 9th, 2016, Stellaris was released.

We all took our first steps out into the stars, filled with a universe of possibilities and wonders. I was there picking my FTL type and favored weapons and experiencing those early days the same way many of you did.

Each of the Expansions changed Stellaris in their own way.

The first really major changes came to Stellaris in 1.5 in the Utopia expansion, when Ascension Perks were added. These shook the game up so drastically that when Apocalypse changed the face of war in 2.0, they ended up moving into the base game.

Apocalypse and 2.0 included a huge number of other changes as well, changing how system control works and removing the different FTL types. I mark this moment as the point where Stellaris began moving from a pure 4X game to more of a hybrid of 4X and GSG. That transition continued in the next major shakeup with MegaCorp and 2.2, which replaced the economic model, changing from tiles to the pop and job system we still use today.

Federations and the 2.6 update added the Galactic Community, revamped Federations, and changed the way we think about empire creation by adding Origins to the game. Most of the Origins started off relatively simple, but as we added more they steadily grew in complexity. (Knights of the Toxic God, I’m looking at you.)

The intel and exploration changes of Nemesis brought us to the 3.0 update, as they fundamentally changed the early stages of the game. Nemesis also brought us our first player Crisis path, Galactic Nemesis, which was originally simply called “Become the Crisis”.

3.1, the Lem update, wasn’t an expansion release, but it changed how the Stellaris team operated, for the better. This was when we began the Custodian Initiative. The Custodians have done an excellent job polishing old content up to our modern expectations, fixing bugs, adding new quality of life features, and generally improving the game.

Overlord and 3.4 added improved subjugation mechanics and added the Situations system which has become an incredible tool for the content designers. We also expanded automation at this time, revamping planetary automation and letting unemployed pops find their way using the automatic resettlement system.

The leader system underwent massive changes in 3.8 when Galactic Paragons added leader traits and attempted to make them a more interesting system to play with. This system remained in flux until 3.10, when they finally reached a state where we were happy with the results. Sometimes change needs a little iteration. 3.8 also added Cooperative gameplay, making it much easier to teach your friends how to play Stellaris.

This year brought the Expansion Subscription option to make it easier to get into Stellaris, and The Machine Age and 3.12 began the process of elevating the Ascension Paths to new heights. The positive reaction to The Machine Age and the success of the Season 08 Expansion Pass strongly affected our plans for 2025, and made us also reflect upon questions like “what is a Crisis anyway", “what is ‘winning’”, and “can we remaster two very different Ascension Paths in a single year”.

The Story Packs, Species Packs, and other content added to Stellaris in their own ways as well, adding to the deep lore of Stellaris and expanding the possibilities.

So Much Glorious Feedback​

I want to thank everyone for the enormous outpouring of feedback that we’ve received over the last couple of weeks. As I noted last week, I’ve been reading every response to Dev Diary 361, and I’ve been keeping tabs on responses on several different platforms. If you haven’t had a chance to give your feedback, don’t worry, you’re not too late. I’ll be keeping The Vision pinned in our forums until the end of November.

This section will be my musings on the feedback and some of the things it made me think of. Not everything I talk about here is viable or going to happen, but if you’re being this open with me I owe it to you to return the favor.

Based on the feedback you’ve all given, the consensus is that you’re very amenable to change to address engine or system limitations, and that we should not feel constrained by what is already there if we feel we can find a way to make things better. Many of you did note that the initial implementations of changes aren’t typically perfect, and that they take iteration to achieve their goals. (So we should be careful with what we decide to take on at once!)

Some of the questions that I offered as proposals were a bit leading - I did want to know what you all thought about the existing pop mechanics, for example, because I’m very interested in improving their performance and addressing several other quality of life and mechanical issues with the current systems. Your responses have strengthened my belief that tackling planets is a correct course of action, and you should expect some experimentation in next year’s Open Beta.

I’d like to move us over to a system more similar to the pop groups used in Victoria 3 - though with a Stellaris spin on things. We’re not likely to go as deep in the simulation as Victoria does, but I think that we can likely split pop groups based on species, ethics, and factions. Some of the granularity we have right now might slip though, so I’m eager to get to doing some prototyping and seeing what the pros and cons are of such a change, as well as what the performance implications would be. The economic implications are huge.

Fleets are unlikely to get major changes this year, but a number of you identified them as a place where we can do a lot of major improvements, along with many aspects of war. We’ll talk a bit more about these next week.

Trade is almost certainly going to change. Very few of you seemed terribly fond of the current system, and it’s both terribly bad for performance and mechanically difficult to understand for new players. While I like the general idea behind the trade routes, I don’t think they add enough benefit for their costs. We’re likely to revamp it into a proper resource, though I’m also considering ways of also using it to simulate supply lines and local planetary deficits. If we end up pursuing the latter, gestalt empires would need access to trade or at least, something similar. That could potentially open up more opportunities for MegaCorps and diplomatic pacts, and we’ll have to find new ways of using pirates.

Next Week​

Next week I want to look at some of the things I think we’re still missing. Player fantasies that we either do not support or do not support well enough in Stellaris at this time. Like The Vision dev diary, I’ll be asking for your feedback there too, so think up on this over the next week if you want to help influence where we go next.

See you then!

Purchase Stellaris: Grand Archive alone or with a discount as part of Stellaris: Season 08!​

"Many of you did note that the initial implementations of changes aren’t typically perfect, and that they take iteration to achieve their goals. (So we should be careful with what we decide to take on at once!)"
Yes, you see, new content looks like beta tests. So maybe You could release new content including DLCs as betas for everyone to test it out to give you feedback so You can deliver polished product on release date.

 

[Foxosaur]

"In General":

1. Performance by merging similar pops and having a "size" factor for pops.
V3 pops represent all individuals who share a location, culture, religion, and job. So all pops in London that are English, Protestant, and Farmers employed by Wheat Farms, are all merged into one pop that just has a "size" to reflect how many jobs it's simulating. Such a system massively improves performance over Stellaris's system because it's "one pop" that has all demands multiplied by it's size, instead of Stellaris's system where it repeats the process for every single pop.
In other words, it is "4 Food Output * 5" instead of "4 Food Output + 4 Food Output + 4 Food Output + 4 Food Output + 4 Food Output"

2. Happiness/Standard of Living/Wages/Private Market
Pops in Stellaris have a pre-defined and static standard of living based on policies. This policy determines their ration of consumer goods (which CG and food are paid directly from the national stockpile, to which all jobs directly pay into), political power, and happiness. Happiness is also a simple modifier that ranges from 0 to 100 and has no direct political impact on anything but crime and stability.

V3 pops have a fluid "standard of living" based on wages and the market. Pops are given a wage based on their job and use this to buy the food and goods they demand from your empire's market. Buildings that make a particular goods split the money that pops spend buying that good based on how many of that good the building makes, and they use that money to pay the defined wages to the employees first and to buy ingrediants to run the building, and then the rest is profit that is split among the building's owners. Building owners are quite fluid and can be rich pops like shopkeepers or nobility, a worker coop where employees split the earnings, or even the government where YOU earn the profit and the employees are instead paid the standard government wages that you control, but then the building requires bureaucracy that is highly inefficient compared to private markets. Finally, employees under private ownership can find their wages going up quite dramatically if there is an employee shortage, as the buildings start to compete with higher wages to hire employees from each other. (This is interesting as it means buildings will quickly spend all their profit on wages instead of going into the owner's pocket, which often crashes the owner's wages and therefore their ability to purchase things, and this makes them REALLY mad and politically active).

This means that a low class Miner that is in a worker coorp or a worker shortage may actually be able to afford private airplanes (literally, NOT hyperbole) and absolutely love the current government as consequence.

3. Identitifications
Stellaris pops are currently defined by the following: Species (traits), Ethic, Faction, Job, Colony
V3 pops are defined by the following: Culture, Religion, Job, State (similar to a Colony), Size
I doubt too much will change, but as mentioned I think Size will be added to Stellaris pops.

4. Pop growth
In Stellaris it's sort of like "A colony will gain "growth points" and then pop out a new pop every so often."
In V3 it's more like "Pops provide growth points to specifically their culture and religion based on their size and standard of living. The growth points are then used to fill empty jobs and then fill the "unemployed" category.

5. Education/Qualifications
In Stellaris, pops are always qualified for every single job. This means a pop that has spent 300 years as literal livestock can immediately be put in a laboratory due to conquest or political changes and they function precisely as well as pops that have 300 years of experience in that laboratory.
Pops also throw a hissy fit if they get fired from upper or lower class jobs, even if lower class jobs offer the exact same pay and higher political power, and will refuse to work lower class jobs.
V3, pops instead have "qualifications". Different jobs have different qualifications. Farmers, shopkeepers, and upper class jobs use a pop's wealth as their primary qualifications, while middle classes tend to use literacy rates as qualifications. This means buildings cannot hire recently freed slaves as engineers since the freedmen probably have below a 20% literacy rate, which makes them unqualified.
Unlike Stellaris, higher class pops will take lower class jobs if they become unemployed. This is usually bad though, as they almost always end up with fewer wages, which means their standard of living will go down while also having extremely high political power due to all their wealth and THAT is what causes civil wars in V3.

6. Politics
Stellaris pops will usually pick an ethic at random based on their ethic attractions. The factions basically exist as a source of unity and some happiness modifiers, and the issues each faction cares about are fairly limited.
V3 pops will, due to representing lots of individuals, will directly split their political power based on their interest group attractions. But this is scaled with literacy and wealth. A poor pop with low literacy will provide almost no political support to anything.
Unlike Stellaris, V3 factions influence your ability to change anything about your government. Stellaris can switch from an aristocratic monarchy to a meritocratic democracy overnight. In V3, you are never getting rid of the Monarchy if all your politically active pops support the Landowners, Military, and Petite Bourgeoisie.

7. Genocide/Horrors
V3 does not offer a genocide button. There are still complicated ways to replicate certain real life 20'th century policies from certain parts of Europe under a certain regime that a certain dictator did intentionally to cause a famine targetting a specific ethnic group.

Stellaris allows you to click a button and turn entire species into livestock. Which doesn't turn off crossbreading with them, if you previously picked up xenocompatability.
You can also click a button and turn them all into eunuchs (this is somehow reversable btw), or put them in gulags, or try to displace them (and resorting to extermination if nobody wants them, though a bug accidentally made it so other empires don't consider this extermination atm), or just break out the extermination squads from the start.
Stellaris definitely wins the "villanous potential" competition by a landslide.


I have no clue the full extent of what's being adopted from Victoria 3, other than V3 pops almost universally represent a logical economic simulation far better than Stellaris pops.

Honestly, thank you for such a verbose answer really helpful. To me, it reads like good idea as it will be % and fractions of a overall population that fill job capacities to get full efficiency based on all manner of factors. This could be really interesting and I think has the power to enable deeper meaning to governments. It sounds like it will be really helpful with large campaigns and performance in general.

 

[RoverStorm]

That wasn't what I was suggesting there. Your local food or mineral deficit might cost a small amount of Trade upkeep though to simulate the convoys supplying the world. You should not need to micromanage that sort of thing.

Though if the planet were being bombarded, I'd probably want to experiment with blockade effects.



More or less that, but using trade rather than energy. Maybe storage depots prevent any negative blockade effects for a while, or cloaking techs.

Not guaranteeing we'll do this, but it's my line of thinking. I don't want to go to the detail level of tracking the locations of all resources - while that has cool potential, Stellaris isn't set up for that sort of thing. Abstraction is good enough.

Is there any potential of some kind of blockade as an alternative to planetary bombardment? Sometimes when I conquer a new world I wish there was a way convince planets to surrender without shattering the infrastructure, especially if the planet has zero local food growth.

I'm also curious if there will be planetary accessability? I could easily see a system where a planet has accessibility from infrastructure and other sources, and if the "shipping demand" is higher than accessibility, it consumes trade to make up the difference. With shipping demand looking at how many resources are produced and demanded while subtracting any resource that is both produced and consumed locally. It would open up a new stat for planetary modifiers to adjust. High and Low gravity could have an impact on accessability, and habitats could naturally have extremely high accessability.

What would Trade as a "normal resource" look like as well? How would Megacorps be able to base economies around trade?

Would anything change with the galactic/internal market? I know a lot of players find the unlimited nature of the market to trivialize the game sometimes.

 

[RoverStorm]

The experiments are unlikely to add the economic details their pops use - I'm thinking we stay as close to our current model as possible and break them apart by species, faction, ethics, and strata.

Ok, so focusing on the performance of merging pops, I think everyone will like that.

 

[RoverStorm]

Honestly, thank you for such a verbose answer really helpful. To me, it reads like good idea as it will be % and fractions of a overall population that fill job capacities to get full efficiency based on all manner of factors. This could be really interesting and I think has the power to enable deeper meaning to governments. It sounds like it will be really helpful with large campaigns and performance in general.

Though it sounds like they will focus on the pop merging aspects and not the economic differences, this is still a significant performance change.

Based on Eladrin's explanation, I believe what is likely to happen is that while pops being split on ethic/factions will remain, pops within a stratum that share a species and ethic will be merged. So at the start of the game, I could easily see starting with just 6 pops: two per stratum to reflect the two starting ethics. Not all pops will be the same size, as there are far more worker jobs than ruler jobs at the start.

I'm VERY curious how workforce is assigned, considering species traits are a factor. That said, I could very easily see a complete overhaul to the way pop traits and pop modification works.

 

[ItThatAltersSanity]

I think one other big problem with this tho is that there are simply no other options to influence other empires in a meaningful way. You cannot "attack" someone, except militarily. You can't influence their internal stability, supporting unappy factions. You can't influnce their economy in any meaningful way either. You can't influence someone in a meaningful way through espionage. The only way you can strongly effect another empire is war. I think this is the way bigger problem, rather than bigger fleets winning against smaller fleets tbh.

An interesting approach to why we end up with such a military-heavy game. But I'm not convinced that attached systems, which invalidate the lackluster military gameplay by other means, elevate the game as a whole.

That said, I tend to agree that all we have now is building the biggest stick to make a mark on the universe and otherwise prevent getting whacked, no matter what we set out to do. I mean, even if you don't utilize it, it's still needed for the diplomatic power impact to "peacefully" unite the galaxy as one empire.

Magic the Gathering has the concept of the "red fun police". A deck build that cares for nothing except winning as fast as possible. No matter what other systems are added to Stellaris, there will always be some fraction of players who only care about one thing: having the biggest stick and watching things blow up when they swing with it. Vic 3 had a controversial start because it didn't appeal to this "pure warrior" psychograph. Ok, Vic 3 had a bunch of other things that made it controversial on release (and they still have a long list to keep working on - good ambition) but my point is, the military system is really important to get right. I'm sure we'll talk more on this in next week's diary.

As for the other systems, agreed on the caveat that those alternate routes of "attack" should still indirectly cripple the target militarily. A sabotaged economy means less ships. A compromised command chain means bad, misdirected or turncoat ships. A diplomatic scandal means a coalition of empires rising up to dogpile, as if the galactic community had passed a resolution that X is a galactic crisis that everyone needs to cooperate to put down. In other words, these auxiliary avenues should let a small fleet beat a big fleet. They should not let a no-fleet empire stop a belligerant unless you're in some defensive alliance where others bring the stick.

 

[konsul11]

That wasn't what I was suggesting there. Your local food or mineral deficit might cost a small amount of Trade upkeep though to simulate the convoys supplying the world. You should not need to micromanage that sort of thing.

Though if the planet were being bombarded, I'd probably want to experiment with blockade effects.

It turns out that, among other things, you want to introduce trading or similar mechanics for gestalts to..... just increase their upkeep? Because players won't end up balancing food and minerals on the planet, they'll just accept the increased upkeep. That's exactly what happens in game practice, unless of course scarcity becomes too expensive in upkeep. Does that make any sense? Just add upkeep to specialized worlds and that's it.

 

[cryptkeeper]

The experiments are unlikely to add the economic details their pops use - I'm thinking we stay as close to our current model as possible and break them apart by species, faction, ethics, and strata.

How would this effect districts, I main worry is moving away from one of my favorite bits of stellaris. I don't play vic 3 so I don't know how their job system works.

Also the auto mod traits...