Stellaris Dev Diary #363 - A Journey of Exploration

[Critical Ethics]

How do you have 1 entity work jobs like each pop does now how does this interaction work, How would you have multiple species, especially if you specialize work with jobs ? Like say your a Necrophage with worker pops of a separate species but not enough working said jobs ? How does this work ? Unemployment is this even a thing any more ?

I am not saying it wouldn't work I just can't picture how it works.

Adopting Victoria 3 pops in Stellaris could, from the player side, be as simple as that when you look at the pop screen where now you see 16 pop icons in your 16 mining jobs instead you would see one "robot miner" pop icon with "8" written under it to represent 8 robot miners, one "militarist blorg miner" pop icon with "4" written under it to represent four militarist blorg pops, and one "xenophile blorg miner" pop icon with "4" written under it to represent four xenophile blorg pops.

There's a lot of back end stuff that can hang off that to massively improve game efficiency, but from the player perspective that's basically it. Instead of tracking every pop they just track every existing intersection of everything that makes a pop, including what jobs they have on what planet, and how many of each combo you have.

edit: I see they're planning to split by strata rather than job, but same dealio.

 

[Calvax]

I haven't posted in the vision thread, but the biggest "issue" I have with the planets and colonies is that they are all very "samey", no matter how, when or where the planet and solar system is located. I think there should be some noticeable difference between the first colony world colonized 100 years ago and which has never seen any hostile fleets or actions compared to a newly colonized border colony which has endured invasions, space battles and even occupations every 5-10 years. The current ability to just resettle huge number of pops to a new colony makes this worse.

Quoting my old post from 2021:

I’ve wondered before planetary if ascension would work better if it unlocked over time, rather than being a mana sync. Having worlds level up based on their length of time, productivity, or whatever could give a better sense of a living empire.

Could also be a hybrid system where planets gain XP (for lack of a better term) and at max you can pay unity to unlock the next level.

 

[TSBasilisk]

I’ve wondered before planetary if ascension would work better if it unlocked over time, rather than being a mana sync. Having worlds level up based on their length of time, productivity, or whatever could give a better sense of a living empire.

Could also be a hybrid system where planets gain XP (for lack of a better term) and at max you can pay unity to unlock the next level.

Or let them level up naturally while Unity can be used to skip the process, like resetting the relic cooldown. Add a cooldown period afterwards and slow the planet's XP generation for a while.

Personally, I'd kind of hoped for more with the Planetary Ascension. Like unlocking a certain level lets you build an infrastructure upgrade with a unique effect - say a planetary computer network that boosts research or adding gardens to boost happiness and immigration.

 

[Miuramir]

While we're talking dramatic changes to the economy and pops, seems like it's time for me to mention one of my pet peeves: Energy Credits & Generator Districts.

The whole concept is kinda silly, any society that has access to fusion power is going to have more electricity than they need.

Hard disagree. The more cool things you can do, the more power you need to do them. Planetary engineering is not cheap, and mega-engineering requires vast quantities of energy. Stellaris already has a problem with economic concepts that are too limited by modern concerns as opposed to futuristic ones, and from defaulting to planet-centric thinking. Need mass? Dismantle a gas giant or dozen, or scrap a small star you weren't using otherwise. What does it take to do that? Energy.

I do agree that planetary generator districts should be an early-game thing that becomes rapidly overshadowed by space-based power. We should be building solar plants in planetary orbit, and then solar orbit. Something like the first stage of a Dyson swarm should be what most populated systems rely on for the majority of their power through much of the game, making way to exotic forms such as micro black hole power plants and / or zero point energy extractors in the late game.

Second, storage and transport of energy is a non-trivial matter, generator districts and such imply that energy is generated, stored somehow at the point of generation, and shipped to other places to produce value. Just look at all the challenges with developing renewable power storage and transmission or better batteries that we have on Earth right now for example. It's far easier to make energy locally where it's needed than it is to make it and ship it halfway across the galaxy in some storage device that'd be it's own challenge to design and construct.

Partial agreement here. An energy standard or energy-backed standard makes sense for advanced civilizations, because they can manufacture anything else given energy. How that is actually handled in practice is a serious question, especially when someone wants to "cash out" and actually use the energy to do something physical like terraform a planet.

A somewhat horrifying thought would be a semi-fiat galactic currency in the Bitcoin style; your economic worth is based on how much energy your society can afford to literally waste in some fiendish computation.

Then there's the economic issues that such a system would be hideously vulnerable to manipulation and hyperinflation; start making more energy than is needed and you can start crashing the value of the energy credit hard... imagine the ramifications of an oil-backed currency when the cost of crude went negative during Covid for instance. It's all just bonkers.

I don't think this happens. If you start making energy cheaper, things that were too energy-intensive to be practical suddenly become desirable. There doesn't appear to be any limitation to this until levels of prosperity well beyond what is depicted in Stellaris; individual ownership of custom-terraformed (and possibly just built from scratch) planets is something science fiction has certainly touched on, and crazier levels of energy expenditure are certainly out there. Remember, a Type III civilization more or less implies that individuals are at least at Type I levels. Stellaris already has individual leaders who demand upkeep greater than a pre-FTL planet (such as modern Earth) can produce; there's no reason a more egalitarian society might not be aiming for that level of prosperity for every individual.

As one example that readily comes to mind, partway through the Lensman books they have a handwavy energy storage / production technique that results in "balonium" that is consumed by experimental warships at a rate measured in pounds per hour; and this represents a dramatic increase in available power compared to their previous technology. A book or few later, there are fleets featuring hundreds of ships that burn at a rate of tons per second. More than eight orders of magnitude increase in energy consumption over a fraction of of a SF series.

In practice, I suspect that antimatter becomes the way energy is shipped around for a good chunk of the game; but like the modern gold market, energy is largely traded in the abstract, with occasional moves of physical antimatter reserves or commitments of production from Dyson swarms used to balance the books. Antimatter can't really be "mined", takes a ridiculous amount of energy to make, stores said energy in a very compact form, and said form is highly useful for doing things that require concentrated pulses of energy rather than steady supply, such as FTL ships and weapons.

As the technology develops, micro black holes may become an even more concentrated form of energy storage and retrieval. Most SF takes I've read on how one manufactures an industrial micro black hole involve expending multiple asteroid-sized chunks of antimatter and matter in what amounts to a shaped-charge implosion, which is a nearly inconceivable expenditure of energy by modern standards when you figure out how expensive it is to manufacture that much antimatter.

Stellaris by default seems to go to zero-point energy after antimatter, at least for compact sources such as ships, rather than black-hole. It's less based on real physics, so you can handwave it how you want. If we're talking something like a Stargate ZPM, that seems unusually convenient as a way of storing, transporting, and trading energy.

Weirdly enough, gold itself actually retains some value well into advanced technology; it's far to the right of the binding energy curve and really quite expensive to manufacture from scratch via nucleosynthesis. Most of the gold in existence is believed to come from neutron stars that crash into each other without quite forming a black hole, which is pretty large scale engineering to replicate; beyond what vanilla Stellaris generally depicts.

 

[Troyen]

Hopefully you tackle species traits at the same time you do the pop changes. I think most players generally don't run a lot of templates on their primary species, but the AI has no qualms with making a half-dozen templates (or even different AI with the same species making different templates individually), and if you have to divide pops by species traits (which I think is necessary to handle production-boosting traits), your performance gains are limited by the number of species trait combinations in existence. Already, even without xeno-compatibility, the species window can get rather full and laggy with all the different species that crop up in the galaxy.

There certainly would be improvements anyway since most empires do have a significant chunk of pops in a couple of primary species groups, but Victoria 3 does have a late-game performance issue with too many culture-religion-profession combos in the late game once the migration doors open up, and there would be something similar on Stellaris's side with species traits.

Plus it's kind of a hassle to micromanage species even if we want to with the current design, so improvements or overhauls there would be welcome.


P.S. Those of you unfamiliar with the Vic 3 system and have a computer which meets the requirements, you can go explore it for yourself. Victoria 3 is running a free game weekend right now.

 

[Jekson20level]

The other direction you could go is to reduce pop count and make jobs more visible, instead of being hidden in a drop-down on a secondary tab.

The relatively new Throughput modifiers already do a lot to replace more pops with better pops -- that could be expanded to give more economic dexterity to a smaller and more visible population count.

==========

One concern for the current push is that a lot of newer players never saw a reasonable colony management screen -- they came in post-2.2 and only saw the mess which hides pops, throws a huge number of pops at every colony, yet still tries to do the pre-2.2 work of emulating individuals (who are almost never visible).

For players who have never had a worthwhile user experience with individual pops, because they came in post-2.2, it's reasonable that they would not value individual pops, and view the whole pop system as a mess (which it is post-2.2).


I'd really like it if one of the betas made pops MORE visible rather than throwing them away entirely, so newer players could see a bit of what they've been missing out on, and then after seeing that they could decide if it's worth keeping from a more informed position.


And maybe it's not worth keeping. Maybe the V3 system is better. But if you've only seen a half-demolished building, it's difficult to make a fair decision about rebuilding it or finishing the demolition.

I first played a version before utopia, and I am familiar with the tile system. There was no geography, just a rectangle of 3x3, 3x4, 4x4, 4x5, 5x5 tiles, and was bonuses from neighboring locations. As if these were two factories across the street, and not 5000 square kilometer areas. And as far as I remember, you could move a POP to any tile regardless of its desire and your egalitarianism. I did not stay in the game for long. But for players who want a more superficial (in all senses) mechanics, it is really worth trying the older versions.

When districts appeared and I learned about it, I began to follow the game regularly. And the population system from Victoria really played up my fantasy. If it can be adapted to the space style, it will be more sci-fi than tiles and abstract POPs.

 

[TrueWolves]

One easily abstracted idea I had for local versus empire wide economies was a simple upkeep reduction when resources are made locally. Same sector? -20%, Same system? -40%. This would incentivize early game logistics of having food on your colonies and mineral districts/worlds near your forge districts/worlds while being gradually more ignorable as you progress.

Though there has been a lot of power/resource creep since 1.0. If overall resource production was reduced (like 4 for energy/mineral/food and 3 for consumer/alloy. Not a requirement for the idea but it help) and upkeep reduction sources across the game were reeled in or changed to +efficency instead of -upkeep (so they scale indefinitely without ever reaching 0) the home world would still be vastly self sufficient, in-sector colonies would be more easily set up, and frontier colonies would need to either import a lot of food or rely a lot on local production as soon as possible to feed pops/power buildings. It also wouldn't need to track more than per system and sector production versus upkeep to know when to cutoff the savings. Stellaris already tracks the former.

Sure, this is a very simple system, but it could lead to a lot of interesting emergent design and isn't exclusive from other trade system ideas. UI and the tutorial could mention upkeep is better when resources are sourced locally, with upkeep in yellow when out of system and red when out of sector, as a reminder to the player what's up or areas of potential improvement.

 

[Normannus]

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.

This would be awesome and, I think, relatively easy to implement. If a planet is bombarded, and has a food (or equivalent) deficit, start suffering additional mortality for pops and armies after 6 months, or a variable amount of time based on planet capital level. Storage buildings give extra time before this kicks in, but stop giving their bonus if they are damaged by bombardment.
Though I wouldn’t be opposed to this countdown beginning, maybe at half-speed, as soon as the system changes hands. If a planet isn’t itself occupied or under bombardment, but the system has been taken, they are still going to be unable to import resources, so should suffer some blockade effects, albeit more slowly.

 

[Jekson20level]

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"

Yes, yes.
Population going to jobs they are not meant for (traits), this should be a problem of egalitarian governments.
I wanted to suggest giving dictatorial governments laws that would allow them to determine what species gets what job. But that comment came before me. I'm sure such laws could be added to the current system.

 

[ItThatAltersSanity]

I think pop traits should stay, removing them would be net negative to me. I don't mind if pops are conglomerated like is being suggested but each species should still have defining traits. It one of the reasons the nanotech ascension confuses me, no pop trait to define them as nanomachines. Pop traits really help the roleplay aspect of stellaris I love so much.

I agree some kind of pop traits should stay, notably the flavour text. What I care little for is the pop micromanagement because there's no way to ban inefficient pops from wrong jobs. I'm also concerned for performance if sub-species were their own pops. A Blorg should have very different traits to a Human but I don't need separate pops for "Human, cold climate miner variant" and "Human, dry climate physicist variant". I feel that should be a detail tracked within a Vic 3 style pop, not separate pops.

 

[Xeridanus]

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.

I'm kinda worried that changing to this system will mean if you take over a planet from a fanatical spiritualist empire and then ship those pops to other planets to quell the brewing rebellion, then you try to move some of your main species pops off world they'll take their new found spiritualist ideas with them, all without unpausing the game. This could happen with pop strata as well. I'd like a system where worker pops lean towards egalitarian ethics while ruler pops tend towards authoritarian ethics. This abstraction sounds like it might remove the possibility for that.

 

[Critical Ethics]

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.

You could simplify this further and expand the scope if you think of trade as an outgrowth of logistics. (E: there wouldn't be an actual resource called logistics, just one called trade or maybe commerce).

Each planet (or system?) eats logistics for every deficit it has in any fungible resource. Food, energy, cg, if you make less than the planet consumes it costs a little logistics. Possibly the same for excess. Having a resource depot on the planet reduces the day to day logistics costs since more storage means more leeway.

If your empire requires a lot of logistics then it doesn't produce as much trade because most "civilian" shipping is tied up in getting your minerals to your CG factories and your CG to everywhere else. If your empire has mostly generalised planets then your civilian shipping is doing, well, whatever it wants. Mining far flung systems, forging relations with nearby empires, basically building up a rainy day fund of misc stuff that accumulates as "trade" that you can transmute into emergency items via the market.

This makes blockades relatively easy. A blockaded planet simply eats more logistics than a non-blockaded one. You're still getting everything in and out... for a while... but it's far more complicated so it eats more logistics, possibly bringing trade into a negative and eating into your trade stockpile. If a planet is blockaded for too long (or you voluntarily stop support because it's eating too many resources) then it kicks off a situation. Resource depots would help due to their logistics reduction and could also extend the time to situation. Cloaking could provide an empire-wide reduction to the blockade multiplier.

Meanwhile hive minds rename logistics to "attention" and trade to "weird stuff I found while I was bored" and the internal market to "rummaging in my junk pile for anything useful".

 

[ItThatAltersSanity]

I'm kinda worried that changing to this system will mean if you take over a planet from a fanatical spiritualist empire and then ship those pops to other planets to quell the brewing rebellion, then you try to move some of your main species pops off world they'll take their new found spiritualist ideas with them, all without unpausing the game. This could happen with pop strata as well. I'd like a system where worker pops lean towards egalitarian ethics while ruler pops tend towards authoritarian ethics. This abstraction sounds like it might remove the possibility for that.

That specific concern at least is unfounded. Vic 3 pops are extremely class conscious. You look at a Vic 3 state and it shows 3 pairs of 3D models: a typical couple in the upper/middle/lower class. You see from their poses if the lower class are starving or getting by. Given stratocracy is baked into Stellaris too, I have no worry that'll be eroded by a change to the pop system.

 

[grommile]

Given stratocracy is baked into Stellaris too,

Stratification.

(A stratocracy is a military government, the term being derived directly from Ancient Greek stratos "army", not from Latin stratum "bed; quilt, blanket, bedspread" via English stratum "layer; tier of a socioeconomic hierarchy". Of course, Stellaris has stratocracies as well as stratification )

 

[Oimes]

This would be awesome and, I think, relatively easy to implement. If a planet is bombarded, and has a food (or equivalent) deficit, start suffering additional mortality for pops and armies after 6 months, or a variable amount of time based on planet capital level. Storage buildings give extra time before this kicks in, but stop giving their bonus if they are damaged by bombardment.
Though I wouldn’t be opposed to this countdown beginning, maybe at half-speed, as soon as the system changes hands. If a planet isn’t itself occupied or under bombardment, but the system has been taken, they are still going to be unable to import resources, so should suffer some blockade effects, albeit more slowly.

We have a system that is perfect for this and which the creators said they wanted to use more of.
Situations!
This would allow for the use of rationing food or taking other steps under siege.

 

[rubert]

I’ve wondered before planetary if ascension would work better if it unlocked over time, rather than being a mana sync. Having worlds level up based on their length of time, productivity, or whatever could give a better sense of a living empire.

Could also be a hybrid system where planets gain XP (for lack of a better term) and at max you can pay unity to unlock the next level.

That's one way to go for it, but whole "Planetary Ascension" sounds and feels very "gamified" - even more so than many other mechanics in Stellaris. In one of the earlier posts I made (but wasn't able to find it now) I had suggested something similar as ascension but instead of just being mana sink like now the bonus would change over time based on time, events, any major changes to planet buildings/districts, wars and battles in the system or near it etc.

 

[cryptkeeper]

Adopting Victoria 3 pops in Stellaris could, from the player side, be as simple as that when you look at the pop screen where now you see 16 pop icons in your 16 mining jobs instead you would see one "robot miner" pop icon with "8" written under it to represent 8 robot miners, one "militarist blorg miner" pop icon with "4" written under it to represent four militarist blorg pops, and one "xenophile blorg miner" pop icon with "4" written under it to represent four xenophile blorg pops.

There's a lot of back end stuff that can hang off that to massively improve game efficiency, but from the player perspective that's basically it. Instead of tracking every pop they just track every existing intersection of everything that makes a pop, including what jobs they have on what planet, and how many of each combo you have.

edit: I see they're planning to split by strata rather than job, but same dealio.

I wonder Will this system allow us to set the rights of our different species, perhaps even our various political groups/factions. I wonder if this would make easier or harder to modify our pops. Obviously this would also effect how production will be calculated though, so pop traits might need tweaking ?

 

[ItThatAltersSanity]

I wonder Will this system allow us to set the rights of our different species, perhaps even our various political groups/factions.

In Vic 3, this is bread & butter basics of the pop system. On release, the pops powered internal factions (interest groups) which honestly didn't have much teeth back then. As the expansions add up, they've been getting teeth.

• "Hey, we're giving you powerful buffs because we're happy so far. We want you to pass Law X which benefits us. If you refuse, you don't get those buffs which you're dependent on."
• "We used to be rich. Now we're not. Make us great again or else we're throwing you out for a better leader. Oh by the way our clout is based in the states where the arms industry is. If we start a civil war, we'll have the guns, not you."
• "That country rubs us the wrong way. Formally disrespect them. Otherwise we'll find other ways to express our hate."

Still, there's clearly a need for players to talk about what they want out of whatever new system is coming. Instead of guessing what the future features will be, the productive thing we can do is state what fantasies we want kept or improved. I've started a separate thread for this to be organised:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/player-fantasies-for-pops-jobs-in-2026-stellaris.1716982/

 

[Mech_infect]

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!​

"We’re not likely to go as deep in the simulation as Victoria does,"

Honestly - why not do it deep?
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External crises are a common thing and generally simple. When you become a mega empire like the 1st league - there are not enough internal crises based on the preferences of the people, internal battles of oligarchs and powerful leaders. (Political intrigues and a serious challenge to save your space "Roman empire")

So the deeper, the more interesting and the greater the potential for creating moments that arouse interest
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The main thing is that the new one takes into account the genes of the races and that they influence your empire's work.
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A new system, when specific races with specific genes go to the work you need, and not just anyhow?

 

[Cassilda]

I'm really really happy to know that the pops system will be moving towards a more Victoria-like system. It's the best way to improve it, in my opinion; and the fact that performance will also considered is even better.