Stellaris Dev Diary #364 - Sights Unseen

[pacja]

Espionage
Espionage is a related system that isn’t satisfying its promise currently, as Mr. Cosmogone reminds me during every design meeting.

It’s difficult to keep track of spy networks, is generally of low impact, and has no real counterplay. But he’s got schemes.

[...]

Pirates and Crime
Space Piracy is a popular fantasy - we touched on it a bit with the Treasure Hunters origin in Grand Archive, but they could mesh well with the Nomads idea mentioned earlier or even a factional political expansion. Crime and Deviancy aren’t terribly engaging systems at the moment either, and might benefit from wider examination.

An underrepresented sci-fi trope that might prove challenging to implement but provide content could be neutral/buffer zones with lawless planets which host fugitives, pariah, spies and smugglers. They're great source of roleplay, albeit might struggle to find a role in a strategy game.

A few starting point:
1) Neutral/lawless zones could be willingly established through diplomacy to prevent border friction at the expenses of control/situational awareness and piracy;
2) Another way to create them could be designing planets as zero upkeep "criminal dumps" rather than prisons/penal colonies, where there are no guards and criminals are abandoned there to fight each other for survival;
3) They could tie-in with underground diplomacy for betrayals (hosting secret negotiations which require the physical presence of ambassadors to avoid enemy signal intelligence), be a source of artifacts, archeology hints and special fauna trade from smugglers, offer species diversity for empires looking to adopt new pops (roleplay explanation: you give a home to an outcast pop expelled by another empire, incurring in a diplomatic penalty with the pop's empire of origin), be a hub where spies and ambassadors could hire mercenary land armies, assassins and spies.
4) Empires could infiltrate lawless systems with their own spies to ambush rival ambassadors, outbid them on bounties and similar schemes. Empires could also receive hints about goods, tech or intelligence for selling depending on how strong is their intelligence network in the system, as well as intel on other empires activities, as neutral countries have historically been a pasture of choice for operatives (think Vienna during the Cold War).

 

[Arduunos]

This dev diary asking about barren/frozen/molten worlds and the previous one asking about colonization have both been living rent-free in my mind for the past 24 hours, so have some more feedback about that:

These two things feel like currently disconnected systems that need to be developed into one interconnected system. In real life, space exploration starts with survey and study, progresses to unmanned 'colonization' with robot rovers, then habitats like the ones we've been designing for the Mars mission, and only then does terraforming become a possibility or necessity.

I challenged myself to a terraforming-oriented Sol challenge to test this and push the envelope of what the current systems allow. It felt extremely strange that I was able to colonize Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star earlier than Luna or Mars, when in real life those targets are going to be hit first. To say nothing of the fact that Humans struggle to live on planetary biomes that exist on Earth already.

I feel like Stellaris's colonization/habitability should follow this model. Everyone should be able to build infrastructure on any planet (barren or not), even if their species can't colonize it yet, with a severe penalty to habitability. Assign a governor, fill it up with useful buildings and districts, but have only limited pops. Your Empire can mitigate this with robotics, gene clinics, or cybernetics until you unlock more dramatic options like terraforming and Ascension paths. Maybe there's even a limit where you can't upgrade new colonies past the 'Colony' phase until you have the correct Habitability trait or can terraform these world types. In my ideal world, the little habitat dome on the habitability techs will be more than just art, and constructing this type of building will be important.

The best part is that most of this uses systems and techs that are already in the game, so it falls under the Custodians' scope, leaving DLC development for cool new features like gaseous species or a colony-building event story pack.

 

[Pietrooperv]

Here are some thoughts on fleets/wars for you to file away until you get around to it.

• There should be a way to distribute a fleet across multiple systems
• piracy should be a galaxy wide phenomenon, but depending on the strength of your fleet, laws, and general attitude towards pirates, they may be more or less prevalent in certain empires. In unclaimed space, they are extremly prevalent, requireing fleets to 'passify' neutral space (to a degree) before expansion and trade becomes safe/reliable. However, this should not be an insurmountable task, nor should it be micromanagey.
• System layout, size, and composition should make a significant difference in battle
• Battles should become lengthy affairs, more appropriatly described as 'campaigns' or 'operations'
• Fleets break apart in to sub fleets called battle groups. Individual battle groups fight one another across the entire system, rather than a single massive doomstack battle. the number and composition of the battle groups should be a significant determining factor in the outcome of the overall system-wide battle.
• You can order a fleet or all ships in a system to adopt diffrent stances or tactics on a large scale. ie, go on the offensive, or take a defensive stance. You should be able to manually priotitize controlling strategically important celestial bodies, such as those near hyperlanes or the system's star. However, the battle should be completly automated and player input should by no means be required to play optimally. This would give battles a new level of tactical depth, without requireing the micromanagement of individual battles or ships.
• all of this is simplified on the map to avoid having to draw large numbers of ships, improving performance.
• battlegroup composition affects what tactics they use in battle. A battle group composed of a carrier cruiser, two picket destroyers and five autocannon corvettes should 'feel' different than a battle group of three artillery/PD destroyers, five missile corvettes, and three torpedo frigates.
• cloaks can be used to hide ship locations throughout the system and require the oposing ships to engage in lengthy anti-cloaking tactics to clear the system. Cloaks should enable new tactics such as space submarine warfare or hit and run attacks. Cloaks need a massive refurbishment as they are sorely lacking in usefulness.
• you should be able to give fleets general orders or priorities and have them carry them out autonomously, removing a significant amount of micromanagement. Examples include a priority to destroy as many enemy ships as possible, a priority to capture certain systems, a priority to protect supply lines, a priority to provide ships to escort army transports, etc. conflicting orders should be ranked with the highest priority winning out over the others, but without completly ignoring them. ie, if you prioritize neutralizing enemy ships over protecting supply lines, the fleet will still send ships to protect your supply lines even though they could instead be used to kill more enemy ships. alerts and human intervention would only be necessary if a fleet becomes unable to carry out its priorities such as if it suffers unnaccaptable casulties or if overwhelming enemy reinforcements are detected.
• fleets ordered on 'suicide missions' (operations with a predictably high casulty rate) affect internal politics depending on empire type and attitude towards war. Honorbound warriors might be okay with it, but egalitarians probably woundn't be.
• instead of the player manually building all ships (or manually reinforcing all ships), shipyards should be set to constantly produce X ship type and class for an upkeep of alloys. Perhaps the amount of alloys helps determine speed, but with diminishing returns. Later on in the game, you can set larger shipyards to build entire battle groups continuously as a means of reducing ship production rate micromanagement, and then automatically assign those battle groups to a fleet, or send them across your empire as a form of 'soft fleet'.
• soft fleets reduce piracy, protect supply lines, and act as reserves when you take casulties, and can be summoned to provide waves of reinforcements if necessary. Soft fleets generally fill all the roles that current fleets cannot do while sitting at a shipyard for 50+ years. ie, patrolling, carrying out minor military operations, enforcing the peace, and generally projecting your power/influence.
• soft and hard fleets should be able to be converted from one another relativly easily, perhaps at some sort of cost to logistics, depending on whatever sort of logistics system ends up being created.
• because soft fleets are not directly visible on the map and are not under anyone's direct control, they open up the door for all sorts of interesting mechanics and events. Rebellions, border skirmishes, raiding, etc. Now, when a first contact event says, 'luckily we had a few warshpis concealed nearby...' it actually has a real meaning.

Here's an extra random thought I had. Add a 'gamemode' to test out ship components and fleet compositions. You go to the main menu, click the gamemode, and it takes you to the ship designer, where you can design whatever ships you want with whatever components you want. Then, you select which and how many ships you want in each fleet and pit them against each other on an empty map. This might make ship design more accessible to new players because they can freely try out whatever designs they want without worrying about what effect it will have on their overall gameplay.

Also for the love of god PLEASE improve AI ship design. At a minimum please bar them from putting autocannons on battleships. Its such a waste. Singleplayer might massivly go up in difficulty if the AI actually started usuing sensible ship designs in stead of the auto-trash its been using for years.

 

[GeneralY7]

A LOT of great suggestions and possible directions for Stellaris that I would like to see realized brought up in this dev diary!

I would say, with regards to scenarios, I would like to see the devs empower the players with some kind of scenario editor or advanced start editor. I would love for there to be an editor that allows us to shape the galaxy as we wish and maybe even make it possible to share the custom starts or scenarios with the community. Ideally the more options the editor provides the better, but at least the ability to customize the nations/empires in the galaxy, their placement, worlds they control, tech level, governments, fleets, species, leaders, diplomatic status, etc. and perhaps even the ability to set them as playable or not, to allow for various possible nation starts in the same custom galaxy or allow for multiplayer play. The ability for the editor to also allow the player to regenerate the galaxy map, alter hyperlanes, change planets and modifiers, etc., would also be a major plus. Pretty much the sky is the limit here, and hopefully by virtue of it being a scenario/start editor, it leaves it open for the community to continue to iterate or update upon older creations as time goes on.

Looking forward to seeing what cool stuff comes in the future. If I had to pick just one, playable nomads sound like a cool twist on the classic formula that I'd really look forward to!

 

[Time Emperor]

I feel like Bio ships should almost have it's own phenotype portraits as well. why does energy elemental seem to fantasy while molten or frozen doesn't cross that line?

 

[Star Heintinuse Dragon]

Or perhaps Mamelian, Avian and Reptilian focused ones?

(when I say Mamelian, I'm not talking about humanoids - I need yet another cat portrait set and like.. 6 dog ones. guess we can do Elephants too while we're here).

1. I prefer to make every species pack everyone all get the equal treatment in contents and updates (both base game and other in the future if we get the change to have weird specie pack like more gaseous specie expansion dathnak [are the quest less of a joke and actually spawn them now?] and unbidden).
2. I wanted to spawn on gaseous environment with the gaseous species expansion please space is endless and vast and WEIRD. (even Earth still is)
(I'm not talking about making them overpowered and have the same mechanics but make them distinct to each other, for example only avian gets weird artillery buff, cause they are from birds so they are master at tracking enemies). I will like it even more if its not just economy or modifier boost because it will be boring, maybe special interaction with sharpbeak if youre avian species?
3. Maybe add an option to make your own custom specie pack, portrait without mods.
4. Necroids my wet dream was to make it more necromancy-like, theres a mod for this that explore these possibilities

 

[Promin]

I like the idea of reworked internal politics and would like to add that it would be cool if there was a way to change the minds of your pops to (maybe) manipulate the factions or they could just change their opinions and ethics on their own. That would be just perfect.
I would like to mension my own idea (I know that I'm a bit too late but): long before the Machine Age announcement I've had an idea of a possible origin. After the announcement I was expecting to finally see it there but after release I was surprised that it wasn't there (because this idea is on the surface lol). We have Determined Exterminator civic for machines, right? Why don't we just make the opposite for organics? The origin or a civic for organics that survived the extermination and defeated the crazy machines. And there are countless possibilities for this scenario. John Connor would be pleased by that... Oh, and while I'm righting this I've come up with an idea of rehabilitated exterminators (I know it was implemented in Cybrex but it's still a good idea).
At last I would like to say that there is still no way for machines to interact with organics unless they are exterminating them, assimilating them or serving them. How about a normal connection? And I have just thought that if Machine Intelligence has some units in other empires they may use them for more effective espionage missions or even integration with the initial empire if they get to government somehow (it could actually apply for all the others I guess). Or may not, depending on the intensions... Another opportunity to think about the ideas of xenophobes... (upd) It's another great idea for "internal politics and espionage update" (yes, these themes are intertwined IMO).
Now I think I'm out of ideas, and you can safely take these if you need. And remember: the background stars are an illusion, the Stellaris universe is a hologram, buy Energy credits. Bye!

 

[SupremeGodEmperor]

Fantastic news!

Yes, understandably, psionic and bio ascensions are a priority and need the same love as machines for the Machine Age (hopefully three offshoot ascension choices each). Also, yes, psionic relies on a lot of RNG, and without the advanced government types of machines, it's now underpowered. Hopefully we'll also get them (the two expansions) both next year instead of one and then another in 2026. If this is the case, I would then assume internal politics would be 2026... right? Or, would psionic and bio ascensions both be in the same expansion...?

I could imagine bioships being part of one (and perhaps one only) of the new bio ascension paths, so this may not necessarily be available for all bio ascensions.

Also: any news on GOG achievements?

 

[Seyfried]

(I don't have time to scour through all 12 pages of replies, so someone might have said this already, but...)
About the scenario example; they have FE buffs, what kind of fleet takes them 20 years to build!?

 

[diagrapher]

As last time- I haven't actually played Stellaris for quite a while and also ultimately expect the game will probably be best if yous make content that seems cool to yous even if it's not what we all ask for.

But anyway:

1) These all sound cool to me.

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2) As for things you missed - I mentioned some of this last time when you asked about systems that would be good bases for expansions, but I'll say that stuff again for completeness and I do have more additions given this context.

Biological weirdness

IMO weird alien biology and psychology has a lot of currently-unrealized potential to provide Stellaris with cool content. I imagine this might fit in the same expansion as a biological ascension mod, but I'd like to see some of it available on species' natural forms. For example:

• How about species with dramatic sexual dimorphism like in elephant seals, such that the males and females have different species traits and very different portraits? Or with a life cycle alternating between two phases with different traits and portraits, like jellyfish? Or which metamorphose into a very different from near the end of their life, like cicadas?
• Stellaris technically has a species that eventually grows into huge networks of fungal hyphae far too big to move between planets. But currently this has absolutely no mechanical effect, and it really feels like it should have some pretty significant ones.
• How about coral-like species that can grow living buildings from their bodies? I've seen mods that let hive minds do this, but IMO there isn't much reason to tie this to the gestalt consciousness ethic beyond cliches.
• How about species which hybernates through winter, with different leaders available in the northern and southern summers? Or species which only breed in certain years, again like cicadas, so the population grows in occasional leaps?
• How about species that can integrate genes from entirely unrelated species like the Tyrannids in Warcraft or the Asari in Mass Effect?
• How about species that float in the atmosphere of gas giants or drift between asteroids feeding on strange asteroid-dwelling flora? I realize you covered some of why this would be complicated to implement, but it sounds like you're already thinking of doing it for gaseous species and if you do manage that I want to raise the possibility of letting solid species do those things as well.
• How about species naturally adept at espionage, whether through shapeshifting abilities or just natural talent? Admittedly I'm not sure how exactly you'd represent that mechanically.
• How about species where only a minority of individuals are sapient?
• How about species that totally lack the psychological attributes that make one or another of the ethics appealing, e.g. totally lacking a capacity to care for beings who don't look like them or conversely totally lacking a tendency to favor their own species over others?
• It already seems pretty plausible that the various sapient species in stellaris differ quite a bit size, but it would be nice to have some indication of what size to imagine everyone as.

Stuff about family and parenting

My thoughts here are, I think, significantly the result of my reading sci-fi authors who are more interested in family and childraising than is typical. I imagine a biological ascension expansion might also be the place to address some of this.

• A sci-fi technology I've seen quite a few people enthusiastic about is artificial wombs, so that women can have children without enduring all the suffering and risk associated with pregnancy. Stellaris already has this in the form of clone vats- but what if we want to play a society that uses artificial wombs without also doing Brave New World style state childraising?
• For that matter, if we do want to do Brave-New-World style state childraising, shouldn't we need to hire childcare workers to do it?
• We can enable or disable population controls, but normally in Stellaris you want more, not less population growth. What about policies about whether people can be forced to have children, either out of totalitarian belief that the state should decide who reproduces or out of patriarchal belief that females' reproduction should be controlled by males?
• Of course, all this seems like its impact should vary between species. There could be egg-laying species that don't get much benefit from artificial wombs, and species with strong reproductive drives that reproduce quickly but can't be forced to reproduce faster than they do by default, and species that need minimal parenting and so can be grown with neither parenting nor dystopian childcare workers.
• For more about family structures than fits in pop growth mechanics, there could also be a little Crusader Kings style politics around royal marriages and children in Imperial countries - with a lot of room for different species to produce different family structures, possibly in addition to a bit of cultural variation within species as in Crusader Kings.

Intel, as distinct from espionage

I agree that there's a lot of room to improve the espionage system, but I also think there's separately a lot of room to improve on Intel.

• How about events around cultural misunderstandings and uncovering secrets as we gain intel on other empires, e.g. stuff about a non-human Egalitarian empire encountering the concept of aristocracy for the first time? How about flavorful events triggering off of learning another empire's origin, e.g. if we discover an empire is from a ringworld and realize the ringworld's builders were contemporary with some other ancient mystery we're investigating and might have records about it?
• We already have some ability to conceal our technological, economic, and fleet power, and who our allies are, from other empires - except currently the AI makes decisions based on all that even when it's not supposed to know it.
• How about being able to conceal our policies and species rights so the AI won't judge us for them? For that matter, how about being able to see the AI's policies in case we want to judge the AI?
• How about being able to conceal our traits, so long as we don't let pops emmigrate? Necrophages in particular seem like they might want to do that.
• How about more ways to keep our secrets - e.g. secretiveness-themed civics and traditions that limit intel gain even by non-espionage methods?
• How about being able to conceal some of what's on our planets from empires that only have sensor on them and not also intel (concealing armies would probably be the most strategically relevant thing), e.g. by putting them underground or by disguising them.
• How about a civic that lets us actively give other empires false information about how our society works by maintaining an elaborate charade?

Diversity of starting technology

Currently when a civilization enters space, it has either the default set of technologies with perhaps a few changes based on origin, or the standard set minus four specific technologies. What if there were more room for this to vary? What if there could be countries that started without space mining tech, or without the logistical tech needed to maintain outposts outside the capital system? Without the technology to store food and energy long-term, or without having had the insights that let us figure out the 3D shape of the galaxy and our solar system's place in it? Without industrialized agriculture, or the printing press, or contraception, or antibiotics, or mass production? What if void dwellers could start without the tech to enter atmosphere without burning up, and hive minds could start without the concept of subterfuge?

Also, while the technologies Eager Explorers don't start with are impactful, I feel like inventing the scientific method and planetary government should do more than just unlock some buildings.

Creating Primitives

First Contact gave us most of what I'd wanted to see out of a primitives-focused expansion, but one thing I feel is missing there is a way to create primitives - that is, the common sci-fi trope of aliens who uplift species or seed planets with sapient life and then leave the resulting populations to their own devices, perhaps so as to study them. This obviously shouldn't be the default way for countries to behave but I think it would make sense as a tradition or an ascension perk.

A few other things It would be nice to have primitives wise:

• paleolithic primitives
• primitive versions of the various origins that are currently still ftl-only

Civilizational collapse

I didn't mention this last time because I was thinking of it as a potential new system rather than a potential way of expanding on an old one, but- we see ruins of old civilizations around the galaxy. But when an existing civilization is destroyed, currently it just disappears. What if, when a civilization lost its planets and colony ships, its outposts and fleets desperately tried to find some way to support themselves, either by finding another patron or by piracy or by crash landing on habitable planets and trying to survive there? What if they left behind ruined stations for other empires to scrap or reverse-engineer? What if depending on demographics and politics rebellions could sometimes end up killing enough of the literate and relevantly trained population to losing that technology got lost until a now-dead alphabet could be decoded?

Subjects

How about some way to regulate our subjects' policies like Fallen Empires do? How about having "Gestalt Consciousness that's legally a citizen, resident, or slave" as a set of subject types?

Leaders and Heroes

I see the appeal of having Hive Minds' having autonomous drones as "hero characters". But to it seems a bit weird to me for those autonomous drones to be leading the rest of the hive - shouldn't the hive mind on a planet be controlling the individual drones there and not the other way around? Shouldn't being autonomous mean a drone is less connected to every other drone on the planet? One way to solve this, I think, could be to have leaders be only a subset of hero characters rather than all of them.

Separately - I think I'd enjoy if leader ethics mattered more, and if which leaders had which council positions mattered more - What if leaders got more expensive if used in ways contrary to their ethics, e.g. by having a spiritualist commander fight a spiritualist enemy, a xenophile commander carry out armageddon bombardment, a xenophobe scientist treat anomalous alien fauna more kindly than is necessary, or a spiritualist scientist lead research into robotic workers?

The galactic core

I don't have a strong opinion on what should be done with the galactic core, but just leaving it empty feels like something's missing.

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3) Some more thoughts on the ideas you've listed here (basides "that would be cool", which I would say of all of these):

Factions and Politics

This all sounds good. Some other things I might hope to see in a politics-and-culture expansion:

• Countries not just acquiring political and cultural divisions over time but potentially having some from the start. E.g. what if part of your homeworld's population is unhappy about unification?
• Leaders participating in factions in ways beyond being backed by them in elections
• Traditions that populations will continue to practive even if conquered or integrated
• Impacts from pop ethics such as xenophobe pops making xeno pops less happy, or free xeno pops making xenophobes less happy, or pacifist pops refusing to become soldiers
• Discontented factions engaging in faction-appropriate acts of rebellion like Prosperity sabotaging warships or Xenoist smuggling slaves out of the country (although maybe this would make more sense as part of a crime expansion instead?)

Espionage

I've seen a whole lot of good-sounding ideas for stuff that could be added to the espionage system. I assume you have too and have a better idea than me of what actually works. I figure for now I'll just list the things I've thought of that I don't remember anyone else saying:

• Maybe spy networks could be able to ally with discontented factions?
• Maybe there's room for event-generated spy operations like data on some specific anomaly in the other empire to progress an event chain?
• Maybe there's room to interfere with primitives in another empire's space?

 

[Critical Ethics]

This dev diary asking about barren/frozen/molten worlds and the previous one asking about colonization have both been living rent-free in my mind for the past 24 hours, so have some more feedback about that:

These two things feel like currently disconnected systems that need to be developed into one interconnected system. In real life, space exploration starts with survey and study, progresses to unmanned 'colonization' with robot rovers, then habitats like the ones we've been designing for the Mars mission, and only then does terraforming become a possibility or necessity.

I challenged myself to a terraforming-oriented Sol challenge to test this and push the envelope of what the current systems allow. It felt extremely strange that I was able to colonize Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star earlier than Luna or Mars, when in real life those targets are going to be hit first. To say nothing of the fact that Humans struggle to live on planetary biomes that exist on Earth already.

I feel like Stellaris's colonization/habitability should follow this model. Everyone should be able to build infrastructure on any planet (barren or not), even if their species can't colonize it yet, with a severe penalty to habitability. Assign a governor, fill it up with useful buildings and districts, but have only limited pops. Your Empire can mitigate this with robotics, gene clinics, or cybernetics until you unlock more dramatic options like terraforming and Ascension paths. Maybe there's even a limit where you can't upgrade new colonies past the 'Colony' phase until you have the correct Habitability trait or can terraform these world types. In my ideal world, the little habitat dome on the habitability techs will be more than just art, and constructing this type of building will be important.

The best part is that most of this uses systems and techs that are already in the game, so it falls under the Custodians' scope, leaving DLC development for cool new features like gaseous species or a colony-building event story pack.

A (very surmountable) issue here is that having hundreds of tiny one-pop planets would be an absolute nightmare. I say very surmountable because you could just make them work like habitats do now. Building a dome colony or gas giant aerostat just adds districts and resources to a single, system-wide "minor colonies" administrative unit. Promoting a colony to a "real" colony removes those resources from the supracolony (and increases sprawl) but gives it its own habitability rating and building slots and what have you.

This would also potentially allow the reverse - choosing to subsume all habitats, dome colonies, and habitable planets in a low-priority system into one administrative unit to reduce sprawl at the cost of some potential optimisations.

 

[ryan7550]

Hello!

Thought I might chip in with the ideas being thrown around as of late.
- Remove forced peace
- Remove war cool down
- Remove forced Introductions
- Assignable faction leader to ships (same as the Khan)
- Dismantle ANY megastructure (sentry array and synaptic lathe to be specific)
- Cosmic storms severity level (Seasons?)
- Selectable voice ques on/off (new research specifically)
- Future Shroud focused DLC (Shroud breeding?)
- Persecutions
- Drugs (opium wars style)
- More secret fealty
- More trade options (ships, armies, pops?)
- True Closed Space (I know you can attack them regardless)
- Dealing with crime from encouraging it to the extreme
- Select All option species menu

Espionage:
- Assassinations
- Bribery
- Crime
- Corruption
- Cyber attacks

- Leader pets
- Mobilization Council agenda
- King lists
- Royal Marriages with or without strings attached
- New notification menu? (Sims 4)
- Imperial coronation
- Imperial Family (Extra positive/negative traits, Similar to Government Council focused on succession and failsafes)

 

[Archael90]

You know what is quite weird? That to use your ascension path on your whole empire, you need to keep purity of your empire (organic vs machine):
Machine pops have no benefits from psionic, bio, cyber ascensions.
Bio pops have no benefits from modularity, and virtuality.
The only two ascensions that benefits "both" types of pops are:
Synth that makes everyone synth.
Nanite that do nothing to pops.
You know what would be fun?
If ascensions work on your whole empires:
Psionic powers in machine (this is doable, since machines have minds and should manifests through mind, not vague and abstract "soul".
Bio allows for bio/machine integration granting ability to modify machines with advanced bio traits (and overtuned traits).
Cyber allows for applying cyber traits for machines.
Modularity allow also for organic/machine integration, but by replacing some organic parts with modular traits.
Virtuality allows for uploading organic minds.

Also, each type of trait should have separate trait picks and points pools, and all advanced traits should be gone when pop is assimilated to different ascension empire.
Psionic trait
Synth trait
Cyber traits
Adv bio and overtune traits
Modular traits
(I don't really know how virtuality works tbh :X)

 

[diagrapher]

Something I'd like to see expanded on that I forgot to mention in my response yesterday (although I did mention it last month)-

Anomalies

Currently, the way anomalies work is generally - your science ship finds something weird and interesting. They study it a while, either right then or later when they have time, and you learn more about it and get a one-off reward. Then it disappears and you never hear about it again. With Grand Archives, you sometimes also get a specimen to remember it by, which I haven't played with yet but expect is an improvement.

Still - While I do enjoy the current anomaly system, I think I'd enjoy it if the asteroid life and alien amusement parks and so on we find actually remained present on the map.

 

[daniel060]

Scenarios
“Scenarios” are another proposal that I’ve seen a number of times over the years - would it be interesting to have scripted game modes with custom rules, and events already in motion?

. . . What kinds of things would you want to see in these sorts of game modes, if anything?

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: I would LOVE to see a scenario based on John Scalzi's Interdependency Series. That universe imagines a network of one-way hyperlanes that start collapsing and reforming, threatening the existence of an empire built around interstellar trade among hyper-specialized space habitats. There is only one habitable world (named "End") in the empire, and a ticking clock to get as may people (pops) to it as possible, while dealing with rebellions and attempted coups.

I could imagine repurposing "colony" ships into "evacuation" ships to try and transport pops to End while still maintaining enough production in the habitats to keep actually doing research and building stuff. Perhaps there could be a side quest of making the habitats more self-sufficient, because End simply can't support as many pops are currently living in the empire.

And who knows? Mr. Scalzi might even be willing to write some content for you on commission. It wouldn't be a bad thing to have a NY Times-bestselling, Hugo-award-winning SF author writing content for your game. If it's successful, it could be a model to use with other SF authors . . . just sayin'.

 

[oreopirate]

Rather than species, you could do environment packs, that add portraits in all categories, but add events for specific groups of planets ( cold, temperate, Hot), or even adds more types, while focusing on more planetary modifiers and more environmental events for colonies, or great biological or geological discoveries from planets, etc.

 

[Extrym]

The future changes look really promising even if it's years away from consoles, the only thing I wanted besides the proposed would be to rework some of the lore, some I never use like adaptability and some I never miss like domination so a rebalance would be great by forcing me to choose like the ascencion perks.

 

[marmottchen]

One concept I havent seen getting mentioned, but would love to see in game is playing as a ship building empire, manufacturing fleets for the rest of the galaxy.
So sort of like a playable scrappers enclave. Fleets can already be borrowed to vassals, but it would be cool to sell them to anyone. Sort of like a galactic arms dealer >: )

In a similar direction it would be cool to play as a mercenary culture, where you can sell armies.

To some extend these fantasies are fulfilled by mercenary enclaves, but I would love to get the support in the senate I need from selling a strong fleet to the losing side in a conflict. Or help the revolting vassal of a rival with a small well armed present.
Meddling with the military might of empires while staying neutral.

 

[Displacement]

I would really like there to be psionic ascension for hives. Like, all of them ascending as one Overmind, and communicating as one entity via the Shroud. Seems like it would be very flavorful.

 

[small tree]

This is really cool, but for "When theGamma Aliens attacked the UNE colony of Europa VII, the Commonwealth of Man did not wait patiently for an invitation to warbefore summoning the Apocalypse." Humanity was threatened, and they acted. "I have a little question. Has the Earth Federation not avenged Gamma Aliens until the Human Federation has summoned Apocalypse? Do you basically pay no attention to the Europa 7 incident? Or did the Alliance not have the ability to defeat Gamma Aliens on its own at that time and needed the help of its allies?