Stellaris Dev Diary #367 - 4.0 Changes: Part 1

[Imp0815]

Good improvements

 

[The Founder]

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

I would remove it from the templates, keeping it purely as a pop group side thing.
It really just multiplies the number of templates by 9.

Once you have the technology, they would always try to match their current planet. "Habitability reassignment" might even be a normal part of the migration process.
You know, getting your paperwork and DNA restructuring done before you make planetfall.

Edit:
I made a post in suggestions for it.

Habitability should be a pop thing, not a template thing

You are currently reworking the trait and modification system. And I think keeping Habitability part of the template would be a mistake. It should be (mostly) a pop detail, once you have the technology to change it. You treat Habitability like it...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

 

[Rule Britannia]

There are a few things that has always annoyed me when playing Stellaris, so I thought I would take this opportunity to make a few suggestions.

1) Personally I do not like playing with my home system being off-centre, so I keep restarting until I get an acceptable starting position that is pleasing to the eye. Would it be possible to give us the option to specify where in the galaxy out home system will spawn? Alternatively, allowing us to turn the galaxy map could achieve much of the same. I do not know how easy this would be, but to me it would be a huge quality of life improvement.
2) I generally prefer to play with larger planets and dislike small planets. Would it be possible to allow us to set a maximum and minimum planet size for the galaxy in the set up? I would be happy even if this reduced the number or planets.
3) Could you allow us to specify the number of slots for each type of developments a planet has when modding a planet in the files, by that I mean the industrial, energy, mining, farming slots?
4) Currently, other empires will build habitats and other structures you cannot get rid off after conquering a system and sometimes these prevents you from getting the resources in the system. Can you please change it so that you can dismantle such structures.
5) Sometimes when you get more resources in an already owned system, you have to dismantle the space station to be able to get these new resources. Could you please fix this?

Just my 5 cents.

 

[Beauty Nova]

It is already possible to make a minimod to achieve this effect.
Step-by-step instructions for either disabling precursors for human players, or enabling them for AI players.

I play ironman with no mods. I know mods exist, I could probably figure out how to make one to alleviate at least some of my pain points, but it is rather annoying having everyone come out of the woodwork and say "just mod the game!" whenever I express any sort of annoyance with it.

 

[CycloneSP]

I don't think either interface takes up more space? The windows seem to be the same size they currently are, just using the space differently.

The species window seems better optimized too, now you get to collapse the sub-species.

in regards to the species tab, there's a lot more of what I call "wasted space"

as in, there's a lot of empty margins around the information that does little other than serving to bloat the size of the main species (the sub species does not have this issue, ironically)

again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, but I dislike that type of design, as I prefer things that are more condensed. (in fact, some websites that do this often have a "condensed" option for users)

also, another thing I dislike is the new UI for selecting perks. Was the old design perfect or optimal? no. but I dislike this new one as it shows less information on screen than the old one, and ironically makes it feel more cluttered/claustrophobic than the old one. (I also just dislike the scrolling experience in stellaris atm, as either the scrolling is too slow or, in the case of the technology tab, often hangs/stops until you jiggle your mouse or find the perfect spot to place it. So the less scrolling I have to do atm, the better.)

 

[Mike Louis]

@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.

 

[hogndog]

With the precursor selection now coming, I think it would be nice to have the same feature come to endgame crisises. Being able to pick which ones are able to spawn so that I can get rid of the contingency while keeping it on a semi-random rotation would be helpful

 

[cosmeIII]

Please remove underlining from the tooltips, just leaving the word in blue is fine, otherwise it is way too noisy and hard to read through.

 

[Darkrenown]

1) The Fleet manager was always a bit flakey when you had several designs of the same hullsize, did that ever improve?
2) Maybe for a future DD, but is there a better way to upgrade buildings and starbases? It was pretty annoying going to every planet to hit the upgrade button on each building when a new one was unlocked, and going around to rebuild or upgrade defense platforms on each starbase has long been a chore.

 

[Troyen]

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.

Anomalies can still spawn when surveying objects that have already been surveyed by other empires. The same anomaly can't spawn twice, but since the AI can't get precursor anomalies, that doesn't impact this situation.

 

[Jay Sherman]

Hot take, getting a precursor should be just like any other event chain and players shouldn't feel entitled to one, much less so a specific one.

Random events happening during play are not part of your build.

 

[Critical Ethics]

I would remove it from the templates, keeping it purely as a pop group side thing.
It really just multiplies the number of templates by 9.

Once you have the technology, they would always try to match their current planet. "Habitability reassignment" might even be a normal part of the migration process.
You know, getting your paperwork and DNA restructuring done before you make planetfall.

Oh, oh, I like this a lot.

Individual Pops and templates no longer have habitability as a trait. Instead habitability ratings for different planets is stored on the species (clade?) level. Selecting tropical habitability at game start sets your species' starting habitabilities to the same as the current tropical setup, but once you research the habitability mod tech you can initiate green research special projects to "upgrade" your species' individual planet habitability ratings to 80% on a per species, per planet type basis. The in-universe logic is that once you research how to let Blorg go live on a desert planet then yeah you'll just apply that as a matter of course, but you need to put the legwork in first and it doesn't really tell you anything about how to make Humans that can live on desert planets or Blorg that can live on arctic planets.

This removes the need for per-planet habitability templates but there's still a strategic decision and cost around deciding what species/planet pairs it's worth investing time and research into. A single-species Xenophobe empire will see huge returns from upgrading every habitability for their main species (while still wanting to do so in the most efficient and profitable order), while a Xenophile would find it completely impractical to upgrade every species to live on every planet but will have enough friends that they probably don't need to do much upgrading at all.

 

[Thiend]

Hot take, getting a precursor should be just like any other event chain and players shouldn't feel entitled to one, much less so a specific one.

Random events happening during play are not part of your build.

In theory, yes.

In practice, they locked part of the balance for Psionic behind one particular precursor and then thought it was fine for years. That ship sailed.

 

[MarkDey]

Anomalies can still spawn when surveying objects that have already been surveyed by other empires. The same anomaly can't spawn twice, but since the AI can't get precursor anomalies, that doesn't impact this situation.

Really? I haven’t experienced that, and I recall there being a survey race in past versions. How do you know?

 

[Jay Sherman]

In practice, they locked part of the balance for Psionic behind one particular precursor and then thought it was fine for years. That ship sailed.

Is it really that bad? I'm not denying it, I've read that before but I have not done any analysis myself so no idea. But I play psionic ascension without Zronis all the time (figuratively) and I don't feel it completely needs it.

I'd appreciate if you can point me to a thread with discussion or analysis about this.

 

[Thiend]

Is it really that bad? I'm not denying it, I've read that before but I have not done any analysis myself so no idea. But I play psionic ascension without Zronis all the time (figuratively) and I don't feel it completely needs it.

I'd appreciate if you can point me to a thread with discussion or analysis about this.

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.

 

[Aura Guardian]

I looked at what the new ship designer did for autodesigning the L/M Destroyer: double plasma.

I think I'll stick to using Custom at all times.

 

[Thiend]

I looked at what the new ship designer did for autodesigning the L/M Destroyer: double plasma.

I think I'll stick to using Custom at all times.

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.

 

[Alfha_Robby]

now that we got Precursor Option during game set up, can we get Fallen Empire Option as well, i'd really like to choose which Fallen Empire should spawn and disable it since i like playing on smaller map with only 1 or 2 Fallen Empire could spawn up at the same time instead of keep random, sometime i want to play as Fanatic Spiritualist yet there's no Holy World to Consecrate or set up the Contingency as Crisis only for Ancient Caretaker never show up and being force to restart the game over and over until you get it.

 

[gamerk2]

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.

Thank you thank you thanks you; tired of getting the First League in a genocide run.