Stellaris Dev Diary #367 - 4.0 Changes: Part 1

[Eladrin]

Greetings, Stellaris Community!

Last week we announced the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, today we’re going to start going through some of the changes coming in it. As mentioned before, the changes we’ll be going through in the next few dev diaries are still scorching hot on the development branch, and may change drastically before final release.

That said, the ones I’ll be talking about today have cooled off a little bit and are pretty stable at this point.

Precursor Selection​

Let’s start with a simple one that I already leaked to you back in December.

The Advanced Settings tab when you’re setting up a new game will now have a section that lets you set which Precursors are available in your galaxy.

The galaxy will be split into slices and the available Precursors distributed as they are currently - in the above example, the First League and Cybrex would not appear for anyone in this galaxy.

You are free to set the number of available Precursors to whatever number you desire, even none, but remember that in multiplayer games, each Precursor chain can only be completed by a single player. We recommend having at least four, to keep a sense of uncertainty and wonder in the galaxy, but it’s up to you if you want to force a specific Precursor.

The Stellaris Databank​

Back in the Stellaris 3.8 ‘Gemini’ update we introduced ‘Concepts’, as our variant of Tooltips-within-Tooltips. We’ve been iterating on how we use them over time, and they’ve become a great asset in helping explain the complexities of Stellaris.

In the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, we’re adding a compendium of sorts that contains Concepts in a searchable form, the Stellaris Databank.

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Concepts in the Databank are divided into categories, and can themselves include further Concepts. Clicking the icon in the top right searches for the Concept in the Stellaris wiki, for more detailed information.

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Searching for “Alloys” gives us every Concept that includes the word, sorting the most relevant to the top.

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If you have a Concept open, clicking will open the Databank, if you would like to know more.

We’re interested in seeing how you use the Databank and how it can be improved in the future.

Species Modification Changes​

We gave you a quick preview of the Species menu last week, but now we’ll go a little more in depth. The Species screen now provides you with more information about the various species in your empire, including showing the number of trait picks they might have remaining.

The template modification window itself has been remade to provide better sorting of positive and negative traits, and listing them by value, making it easier to find the traits you’re looking for.

My serviles should be delicious, don’t you think?​

The new flow removes a few clicks from the process, starting the Special Project immediately.

If time is not of the essence, instead of using a Special Project to modify your species, you can designate a template as the Species Default, and let them integrate over to that default template slowly over time. Certain traditions or buildings might affect the speed of this integration process.

Actually, scratch that. Everybody should be delicious.
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Ship Designer Changes​

Like some of the other UIs we’re exploring today, the Ship Designer has had some quality of life updates.

We’ve taken the Ship Roles that were introduced in the 3.6 ‘Orion’ update and made selecting one part of the basic ship design flow and giving them a better representation than a scrollable text list. Some pain points of ship design, like the Auto-generate changes button blocking saving, have been removed, and in general it’s a faster and easier process to create a general ship design.

We’ve added a “Custom” role for veteran players that want to design the ship from scratch, or you can take one of these generated templates and modify them to suit your needs before saving.

Next Week​

Next week we’ll go over more details regarding the improvements to Message Settings, as well as a selection of other features that are still so hot in development that they’re still glowing placeholder-magenta. If I can’t get you decent screenshots, I’ll post some of the concepts and explain what we’re in the middle of.

See you then!

 

[Eladrin]

The Databank is something that I will likely be using more than I'd care to admit. I'm assuming that there won't be anything lore-related in there?

We're still experimenting with exactly how we want to use it, but generally it's expected to be a repository of Concepts to help you get information inside of the game itself whenever possible.

So, its like, 6am here, so apologies if this is a dumb question with an obvious answer, but is this confirmation that during singleplayer games, I can complete multiple precursor chains?

We have not changed the "one precursor per empire" rule.

Is it correct to say that the galaxy is split into a number of slices equal to the number of precursors? So if we only have one it doesn’t matter where you spawn, you’ll get it? And if you have two the galaxy is 50/50? Also will the AI get precursors or did that not survive testing?

That's currently accurate. We'll continue playtesting it and see if we want to have a minimum number of slices, since I generally feel that it's better for a single Precursor to be localized to a portion of space rather than literally everywhere. (Some of the events imply that they were local powers rather than galaxy dominating behemoths.)

The recommendation of 4+ Precursors started with that in mind, but currently we do not create "empty slices".

The AI does not get precursors currently. It kind of ended up making the player get all of them, while also introducing a "feels bad" moment if they beat you to yours.

Re: Habitability, sounds like something a biologically ascending empire would be interested in making smoother.

 

[CGInglis]

If every gaming company was like this my wallet would be in the ICU.

Like a benevolent rogue servitor, we live to serve.

 

[Eladrin]

and when will you tell us about the change in the growth of the Population?

As they become more settled and concrete.

I expect to show the initial pop systems and planet changes a few weeks from now, possibly around 4.0 Changes: Part 4.

@Eladrin I was wondering with the upcoming update, would it be possible for players to be able to create both custom fallen empires and marauders on the Empire Creation screen? It would improve the role playing and storytelling aspect of Stellaris.

We do not have plans to add customizable marauders or fallen empires in the 4.0 'Phoenix' update.

In the long term, I'd love to have some version of optional persistence between games, maybe where you could export your empire after you won a game and have it show up as a Fallen Empire in your next one.

Looking through the entire graphic, it seems to be using too many energy weapons.

It's possible they didn't have good kinetic weapons unlocked for that example (it's not start of game because it's plasma, and it's not consoled in all tech because it's T1).

It may also be set up to favor energy weapons early, which would be correct because hull is a larger percentage of health and shields are much lower with low tech. It's hard to really say for sure, but I'd like to see a version with T4/5 and T2/3 components (IE midgamish) and probably T5 and T3 too, to see what it does - and if it's really overweighting energy, that's probably not that hard to fix.

The empire I used had a pretty random assortment of early technologies - auto-research turned on with finish_research run a couple of dozen times. We haven't made changes to how the autodesigner works, just worked on the general flow of creating ships.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

We haven't made changes to how the autodesigner works, just worked on the general flow of creating ships.

To add to this, last I checked, the generic "automatically generated" ship designs attempt to maximise fleet power, whereas the ship role selector chooses whichever ship components have the highest weight (and the weights for components that match the selected role are massively boosted).

Spoiler: Further backend stuff for those interested

The role system uses ai_tags in the script (and thus is easily moddable.

Say you selected the "Torpedo (Stealth)" role for a Cruiser.

• The Torpedo Bow, Torpedo Core and Gunship Stern¹ are all tagged to be selected for the Torpedo (Stealth) role.
• Both regular torpedoes and energy torpedoes have the same base weight, but due to the bias from the role torpedoes will be selected for the G slots.
• Shields and armour have the same base weight, but shields are configured to have their weight set to 0 for any "(Stealth)" role - so the utility slots have armour.
• A "(Stealth)" role was selected, so one of the aux slots will have a cloaking component.
• The torpedo tactics computers are tagged with the "Torpedo" and "Torpedo (Stealth)" roles - so one of those will be picked.
• That's everything that I can think of that explicitly is tagged as the role I used for the example.
• Finally, all of this is done while checking that your empire has a positive income for any strategic or rare resources required. If you don't have the exotic gas income for a cloaking component, it won't be equipped.

1) This is because it has an extra aux slot