Stellaris Dev Diary #367 - 4.0 Changes: Part 1

[small tree]

Will the Empire focus in the new version make the Human Federation / Earth United Nations have more plot? Will the human federation become stronger because of these plots? After all, the performance of the human federation in the game is too weak

 

[Gyges Skyeye]

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!

On the subject of Message Settings and potential placeholder-magenta level features;

One big pet peeve I have is that I am not offered a way to force certain decisions to be responded to in the same way, all the time.

In some instances, like the galactic community, you can eat the envoy to make them no longer notify you of galactic law breaches.

But on other things, like 'Do you want to give this planet's unemployed more consumer goods or suffer more crime?, I lack a way to specify always one or the other.
This is even the case on a planet where you might adjust one job (mostly by building new buildings) and it forgets you already answered the question for this planet already. This becomes a big drag in the late game with lots of colonies.

What I would like to see is an advanced options menu of sorts (maybe enabled by one of the galactic government techs, if we want flavor) that lets me respond to events with a repeating option. Something like a context wheel to the right of the options with the options of "Always select this option for: a) this colony/scientist/ship b) this sector/species/leader class c) for everything"
(If you need placeholder icons, a) planet = planet, b) sector = open cardboard box o' planets, c) everything = infinity sign in the cardboard box (or no box) )

That would speed up decision making in the late game tremendously and cut down on auto-pause events as well.
Further, I'd hope there is some table menu where you can edit those always response levels as well. Perhaps with the table only showing the player events they experienced, just for the sake of spoilers.

 

[Critical Ethics]

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.

It's impossible to quickly sum up what's wrong with stellaris ship design because it's a dozen things all colliding in a twelve car pile up. Very few of them are things I'd call "problems" in isolation but when they all interact they go very poorly. The core stellaris ship design framework is not inherently bad but it wasn't chosen around the rest of stellaris, and the relatively superficial tweaks that have been done to it since release just aren't addressing the core conflicts.

Increasingly comprehensive auto designers are just slapping wallpaper over a bad foundation and attributing undesired autodesigner behaviour to bad weighting is missing the forest fire for the trees.

 

[Psykhes]

I was under the impression that once a system had been surveyed whether it was by the player empire or the AI it precluded anomalies from occurring. If that has been in understood incorrectly then that's on me but if that's how it works even though AI empires can't spawn that anomaly they can preclude anomalies from occurring.

I have no info whether this is true or not, but it seems likely.
However

Which meant that if for whatever reason the whole galactic slice had their precursors established away from the player empire or failed to spawn within a certain region around the player empire what ostensively would happen is that those precursors events would be precluded from spawning at all.

This won't happen regardless if the surveying thing is true or not.

As said before, there is no "fixed" spawn location for the precursor anomalies.
What the AI surveys does not matter (*) as long as you still have systems to survey yourself. And every system you survey which has "your" precursor tag has a chance to spawn a precursor anomaly.

(* Because neither can the AI "establish" precursors nor cause them to "fail to spawn" for you. *Especially* if there is only one precursor in the whole galaxy.
The more precursors there are the smaller their slices and the higher the chance that you have bad luck and can only survey a few systems in the slice of "your" precursor.)

With other player empires it is a different story.
I have no idea what happens if 2 or more players both find the same precursor. However, that problem already exists. If players start in the same slice they can already find the same precursor.
But even then "it depends", at least for the vanilla precursors (without digsites). There are more different precursor anomalies than clues you can find. And the anomalies have no fixed order which you have to follow. So even if player empire A finds precursor anomaly 1 at the other end of the galaxy and *if* each precursor anomaly can only be found once (which I do not know if true), you won't have to research it (and cannot too, since it is not "your" anomaly"), nor will it hinder you to find anomaly 2 or 3 in your region of space.

 

[Mister X-X]

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

 

[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

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

On the subject of Message Settings and potential placeholder-magenta level features;

One big pet peeve I have is that I am not offered a way to force certain decisions to be responded to in the same way, all the time.

In some instances, like the galactic community, you can eat the envoy to make them no longer notify you of galactic law breaches.

But on other things, like 'Do you want to give this planet's unemployed more consumer goods or suffer more crime?, I lack a way to specify always one or the other.
This is even the case on a planet where you might adjust one job (mostly by building new buildings) and it forgets you already answered the question for this planet already. This becomes a big drag in the late game with lots of colonies.

This could also be seen as a design issue with the events themselves. Frequent, repetitive events that scale in quantity with empire size, especially ones where players tend to pick the same choice all the time, are not... optimal. It can even be considered micromanagement. Events should be for when something special happens, not a routine - that's the kind of thing that begs for the addition of a new policy. It can be especially eyebrow-raising when the repetitive events reflect something that is supposedly already part of an existing game feature - in this case, living standards and their treatment of unemployment.

In my opinion, singular planets should not request exceptions from established policy (living standards) like this. It would be better if sufficient "pressure" instead makes factions call for policy changes, and get angry if they are ignored. For instance, with sufficient unemployment there could be calls for empire-wide adoption of living standards with unemployment benefits.

 

[Calvax]

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

Are there plans to look at the weights for components? I know big military changes are beyond the scope of phoenix but there are some oddities in how ships are auto designed.

I’m no min maxer so I’m sure others with a stronger grasp on the military stuff can offer better feedback. But even stuff like preventing the auto designer mixing bypass and non bypass would be good. That’s a very common tip for new starters since mixing them splits damage.

As a personal preference I think there’s too many bypass weapons (would be nice to run missiles, lasers, and kinetics for the flavour and not be losing out because of it) but that might just be me.

 

[Harkinian's Dinner]

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.

Stellaris Legacy, the board game, does this. Or will do this, if it ever releases, since its developers are totally incompetent and have overshot their release window by several years with no end in sight.

 

[NilsFabian]

All empires have the option of smashing all robots into 0 species. That's even less robot clutter in the species list.

Not really if you like robots. I would have to completly change multiple laws before I can do this, but yeah thats why I mostly don't play with permitted robots and decide to send them to the scrapper all the time

 

[The Founder]

But on other things, like 'Do you want to give this planet's unemployed more consumer goods or suffer more crime?, I lack a way to specify always one or the other.
This is even the case on a planet where you might adjust one job (mostly by building new buildings) and it forgets you already answered the question for this planet already. This becomes a big drag in the late game with lots of colonies.

That specific example should go away/need a massive rework with the planned changes to Population and Crime anyway.

 

[Immortal Zeki]

If precursors are changing, does that mean that mods that allow you to get all of them will no longer work, or they will just have to do it a new way?

 

[The Founder]

If precursors are changing, does that mean that mods that allow you to get all of them will no longer work, or they will just have to do it a new way?

They will probably have to rework the mods. But I wager it is "only" modifying the event files. Or even just some specific triggers.

 

[OluapPlayer]

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

Boooo. This is something I've been wanting since I started playing. Let me roleplay my galaxy with the elder races of my choosing!

 

[Archael90]

Give the slice based mechanics, 1) doesn't work. The surveyables that can start a precursor are determined on galaxy gen. If 2 players spawn in the same cybrex spot, all that happens is whoever is first to survey gets cybrex. The second player would get nothing.

2) select per player forces duplicates and competition unless you enable 3 anyway, and besides....

3) This would break any form of game rp, not just competitive. Assume for example, everyone chose Baol (not going to happen, but illustrating it to make the case). How many "last baol" are there before it gets ridiculous? Or multiple cybrex alphas? Or the Javorian Pox sample, which is super isolated because it's dangerous, is now just in multiple systems spread across the galaxy?

There's no way I could logically accept 3 even if it would be "nice" for the player, as its inconsistent with the precursors stories.

I made a suggestion some time ago that everyone can survey the same precursor anomalies and gather it's clues, but precursor system spawns within borders of first empire that gather all the clues. Others can still find those clues and get special project and wormhole to precursor system and also empire modifier and special project. Empire who claim system as first gets the relic.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

I haven't commented much as it all sounds like general movement in the right direction with little to pick apart or to brainstorm.

I just wanted to say that the addition of Precursor specimens and extra secrets of the precursor rewards has really helped me feel less frustrated rolling an unwanted precursor, at least I get something interesting even if the specific relic/system seems useless to me. But I'll still be happy to be able to turn off getting Boal all the time... I find free Gaia worlds either incompatible with my strategy or actively undermine my build and roleplay.

Although, talking about specimens, I would suggest lowering the rarity of boring generic +flat science output specimens a step or two towards common (they are worth ~0.5-1 pop) and increase the rarity of +amenities specimens towards epic to reflect how powerful free amenities can be (worth x pops, where x = number of colonies... that's probably a bit strong, worth a look if you're going to rebalance the entire pop system). And it's slightly silly that my Flawless Display tradition wants me to sell the very best specimens, things so powerful and beloved they make everyone in the empire happy to be living on a devastated tomb world with no entertainment, just at the mere thought they exist on a plinth back in the Grand Archive. Also I'd replace some +minerals from jobs with +mining station output so there's something useful to find for all builds.

Oh and +5 Fleet Command Limit that fluctuates with the Astute Observation +15% Specimens output agenda turning on and off is quite annoyingly designed... a balance pass of that DLC content wouldn't hurt.

 

[Cry_Havok]

I don't have one offhand, but long story short: psionic feels fine to play because it's relatively feature-rich, but compared to the Machine Age ascensions it's awful, and it's really about the same as Genetic. Genetic feels bad because it doesn't have feature-depth AND is bad, Psionic is just bad so given most people CAN win on their settings without ascending at all you won't notice as much that it's bad.

Zroni fixes the problem that shroud delves are random and may never actually give you anything relevant, between that and the failure rate. It also guarantees access to the zro required to actually use half of the ascension features or specifically try for a Covenant, a mercy mechanic they added that only works if you have Zroni. It has a lot of other problems anyway, but those are the ones Zroni solves.

They needed to fix all of that in Psionic itself and put it in Zroni instead, much like they did with the edict granted by Holy Covenants. It's QoL problems mostly, but its QoL problems that are entirely RNG so you don't notice every time. If you happen to get the Psionic RNG stuff early (or don't know it's missing) it won't feel that bad to play, if you sit there a hundred years later with basically nothing from your ascension it kinda ruins the game.

The general problem is that because some empire+precursor combinations are so strong, you kinda have to be able to rig it. If you get Zroni with your settings proper for your skill level without it, it ends up being easy and you have to restart. Conversely, if you get Baol and aren't a food-using xenophobe, synthetic ascended, or a necrophage, you get very little - so you can't count on it and make the settings harder. The two Cosmic Storms precursors are also basically useless (but for everyone, not certain empires).

And, as a final note that was already a problem just when Baol and Zroni were added but got worse with even more precursors, it's content we paid for. That sounds absurd because all content is, but precursors specifically are actually featured pretty prominently in DLC marketing such as the store page on Steam, and other rare events you might not get often (if you ever even have gotten them all) aren't.

I would add that Psionics has a very specific flavor that you /have to/ play with or you are getting nerfed in some pretty serious ways. You loose a whole civic slot if you don't change your government to F-Spiritualist + Authoritarian, unless you have really strong ethics you will be stuck with a Spiritualist faction which is the undisputed worst faction in the game for its combination of stickiness and unreasonable demands, and almost all the benefits are locked behind choosing a demon lord, which are all 40k rip offs and only one of them doesn't come with catastrophic downsides (not-slanesh is the only one that doesn't kill leaders/pops/entire planets, and also comes with the best buffs. You also can't get it if you are egalitarian, which is one of the few ethics powerful enough to crush spiritualist)

You never want to play the map into psionics, you go psionic if you want to play 40k

 

[Thiend]

I would add that Psionics has a very specific flavor that you /have to/ play with or you are getting nerfed in some pretty serious ways. You loose a whole civic slot if you don't change your government to F-Spiritualist + Authoritarian, unless you have really strong ethics you will be stuck with a Spiritualist faction which is the undisputed worst faction in the game for its combination of stickiness and unreasonable demands, and almost all the benefits are locked behind choosing a demon lord, which are all 40k rip offs and only one of them doesn't come with catastrophic downsides (not-slanesh is the only one that doesn't kill leaders/pops/entire planets, and also comes with the best buffs. You also can't get it if you are egalitarian, which is one of the few ethics powerful enough to crush spiritualist)

You never want to play the map into psionics, you go psionic if you want to play 40k

That's non-Zroni related, but yes, the problems with current Psionics go way beyond that post. For a single example and probably one of the most egregious, the God-Emperor event cannot trigger for megacorps and, when it triggers, it removes all locked civics that aren't compatible with a Fanatic Authoritarian Spiritualist Imperium so you can't get them back.

 

[The Founder]

If precursors are changing, does that mean that mods that allow you to get all of them will no longer work, or they will just have to do it a new way?

I wager this trigger is also used to lock out getting multiple Precursors:

# Country scope
has_precursor_intro = {
    OR = {
        has_country_flag = vultaum_intro
        has_country_flag = yuht_intro
        has_country_flag = first_league_intro
        has_country_flag = irassian_intro
        has_country_flag = cybrex_intro
        has_country_flag = zroni_intro
        has_country_flag = baol_intro
        has_country_flag = inetian_intro
        has_country_flag = adakkaria_intro
        # Still in the early stages of 'On the Shoulders of Giants'
        AND = {
            has_origin = origin_shoulders_of_giants
            NOT = { has_country_flag = origin_shoulders_closure }
        }
    }
}

Once you have one intro, you don't get any more so none of the others can start.
The temporary lockout for Shoulders of Giants is notable.

If so, it is easily changed to always return false. Or add a closure flag for each