Stellaris Dev Diary #374 - Announcing the 3.99.0 "Phoenix" Open Beta

[Dinkz]

Bug:
Can't do a ground invasion. I'm a regular empire and when I tried to invade using a ground army, the army lands and then resets back into space. Invading a hive mind.

 

[The Founder]

Bug:
Can't do a ground invasion. I'm a regular empire and when I tried to invade using a ground army, the army lands and then resets back into space. Invading a hive mind.

Defense armies don't spawn. If you bombard the planet they should instantly surrender.

 

[Tisifoni12]

It is hard to see, but of you hover your cursor over the left boundary of the square where the early industry zone is located with spaces for two more than you can replace the boundary changes colour and you can click on it to get the replace option.
It's also a little confusing that the the 'Replace' is above the zone rather than below, as it is for Energy, Mining and Agriculture.

Makes a dramatic difference . . .

 

[Mole204]

When I first heard of the new changes coming I was excited. Now I am horrified by the changes, looks like I won't be allowing Stellaris to update anymore and no longer buy any new DLC. These changes are disgusting.

I can't say I find it disgusting, but the menu changes were not necessary. I can't complain about it because I plan to hit the menubar modpacks as soon as they're re-enabled, like Ui Overhaul. I've been ignoring the mess they've made of the political advisor screens. The one with the three heads and some begging for attention. Don't want it, don't need, ignoring it. The changes caused by adding the 'civilian' menus is overly complicated, but if it'll stop the lategame slowdown, I'll just ignore it passively.
Someone at Paradox seems to think that Stellaris needs to be the adult equivalent of a fidget spinner made out of micromanagement menus. I just want to play a nice game of chess.

 

[exi123]

I have to admit the build is a bit rough to get a real feeling for the new system. The new big numbers feel a bit odd to play with at the beginning. I think the devs need to cook a bit more on this for more deeper testing.

 

[Tisifoni12]

Someone at Paradox seems to think that Stellaris needs to be the adult equivalent of a fidget spinner made out of micromanagement menus

Game of Spreadsheets rather than Game of Thrones

 

[Tisifoni12]

Two short runs this morning, both ending in social disorder and rebellion before my 'empire' really got started.
Both times I cleaned up my home world, got rid of the early industry, replaced with factory zone (fear of a consumer goods death spiral), once I had some mining outside of home system I converted one mining zone to city and the other to agriculture, added a unity zone.

Ended up with a unity death spiral on six leaders (1 military, 2 Admin, 3 science) and cutting a science leader wasn't enough to stave off social implosion.

Observations:

• No options for adding unity generating buildings to the unity zone ?
• Seems to be worth delaying Ascension Perks at this stage in Phoenix development to give yourself some 'growth headroom', though some of the ascension perks seem very much designed to have early game appeal

Third run and tried to leave myself headroom of 300 - 500 unity before choosing an ascendancy perk. Despite having that sort of headroom had to invest in anti-crime (cost 250 unity) and quickly developed a -9 unity per month death spiral which killed my empire before I could found a colony.

I wonder what updates to Phoenix will follow in the next few days.

 

[More2Burn]

I can't say I find it disgusting, but the menu changes were not necessary. I can't complain about it because I plan to hit the menubar modpacks as soon as they're re-enabled, like Ui Overhaul. I've been ignoring the mess they've made of the political advisor screens. The one with the three heads and some begging for attention. Don't want it, don't need, ignoring it. The changes caused by adding the 'civilian' menus is overly complicated, but if it'll stop the lategame slowdown, I'll just ignore it passively.
Someone at Paradox seems to think that Stellaris needs to be the adult equivalent of a fidget spinner made out of micromanagement menus. I just want to play a nice game of chess.

I also play with quite a few mods even add a statecraft mod that returned empire size to current over max, because I feel that change punishes you playing the game, I personally never had a problem keeping my empire size under the max in the old system, the current system just screws over the player. Theses newest changes they are wanting to implement, makes it look like to me the devs don't like that fact that not everybody plays the way *they* think we should so they are adding and changing all this crap is to cause us to play the way the devs want. For instance, the decision to lock advanced resources to a planets to mines, now literally when I play ALL of the planets I colonize end up having to be mining worlds because I don't colonize every planet in my borders only those with advanced resource deposits, maybe that's why I never had late game lag before the change to advanced resources.

 

[Blastinburn]

Put the old b-----s out to pasture and hire some new ones !

It can be difficult to afford three scientists, two admins and one military in the early stages.

Create a unity zone, but it isn't clear the cost / benefit of further boosting the unity zone.

I had 2 scientists and 1 governor (+ruler, not sure if that counts), admiral had the decency to get eaten by space fauna so I was running the default number of leaders. If I fired them I would need to hire new ones at some point for 100 unity, which is a lot when you're not making any because your leaders are too expensive.

I need my capital to produce consumer goods to actually afford the unity jobs, adding the unity zone for more jobs to my capitol would mean every time I add city districts would add more consumer goods cost than it produces, so I need another planet for either unity or consumer goods just so I can separately balance production to upkeep.

The fact your consumer goods, science, unity, and alloy jobs are all bound to a single district depending on what zones you built makes balancing your production to your upkeep a nightmare. These resources should not all share the same construction pool.

 

[Blastinburn]

Scrap that early factory. It is a -50% to Bureaucrats and all Scientists.
With that you would hit 300/600.
That you are lower means you have some Job Efficiency penalty on those pops too.

Amazing, demolishing the one building instantly fixed every problem, nearly doubling the output of my entire empire except consumer goods where I now have an extremely minor deficit that will be easily fixable with the market short-term and with a new zone long-term.

That's absolutely abhorrent, that the one building just cripples your entire empire. Who thought a 50% penalty to critical resources on a default building was a good idea?

Normally I would have worked my way backwards through production to find this cause by checking the tooltips but those are all broken.

For the job efficiency, apparently they changed weak from a worker penalty to a "job efficiency penalty" which is orders of magnitude worse. That's not an acceptable change nor a usable trait anymore.

Thank you so much for finding the root cause of the problem.

 

[Newbee53]

The fact your consumer goods, science, unity, and alloy jobs are all bound to a single district depending on what zones you built makes balancing your production to your upkeep a nightmare. These resources should not all share the same construction pool.

This is becoming a much bigger problem than I expected, Hopefully some modifications to what the buildings do will help. But I half doubt it, I suspect we will need to decouple the zone job production from the cities in some fashion. Depressing, because otherwise it is fairly interesting to build up my planets right now.

That's absolutely abhorrent, that the one building just cripples your entire empire. Who thought a 50% penalty to critical resources on a default building was a good idea?

While 50% seems dangerously high. The design idea was that you'd remove it pretty quickly. I think the idea is to wait until your first colony is a decent size, but there is nothing explaining the problem. And I don't think there is even a focus to replace your early space industry. Which would be useful.

I like the idea of starting with poor infrastructure, but the balance is bad. I'd like to see the malus reduce considerably or only applied to the zone in question. or something to make it less of a problem.

 

[The Founder]

Amazing, demolishing the one building instantly fixed every problem, nearly doubling the output of my entire empire except consumer goods where I now have an extremely minor deficit that will be easily fixable with the market short-term and with a new zone long-term.

That's absolutely abhorrent, that the one building just cripples your entire empire. Who thought a 50% penalty to critical resources on a default building was a good idea?

I think taht one was a patch to deal with early CG issues?
When you could just fix that by buying them.

I do run into it when starting games myself.

Normally I would have worked my way backwards through production to find this cause by checking the tooltips but those are all broken.

It is a bit too early to work on details like Tooltips. They are more worried about basic concepts. .00 had a bug where everyone was purging, once you had robots on the planet.
And I found plenty of Pop group and resettlement issues in .01 myself.

Those are their worries right now.

 

[Tisifoni12]

Scrapping the old industries factory (why does it look like some Renaissance Castle, or is that just me . . . ) seems the thing to do. Maybe not immediately, but at years 20 or some such ?
The obvious further stage is to replace the early factory zone' with factory zone or unity zone, but whatever I do I end up with "Scum and Villainy"

 

[The Founder]

Scrapping the old industries factory (why does it look like some Renaissance Castle, or is that just me . . . ) seems the thing to do. Maybe not immediately, but at years 20 or some such ?
The obvious further stage is to replace the early factory zone' with factory zone or unity zone, but whatever I do I end up with "Sum and Villainy"

I just disable or scrap it and buy the CG's on the market, until I can get production going.

 

[Newbee53]

Scrapping the old industries factory (why does it look like some Renaissance Castle, or is that just me . . . ) seems the thing to do. Maybe not immediately, but at years 20 or some such ?
The obvious further stage is to replace the early factory zone' with factory zone or unity zone, but whatever I do I end up with "Scum and Villainy"

if you are having amenity problems a short term solution is the luxury apartments. they have something like 2.5k amenities. Good for early builds.

 

[maustin92]

I will fully admit that my struggles with this beta might be a skill issue as I've only had time to give it a short test run. However, my first experience with the new job/pop system was very frustrating.

I started with a basic Prosperous Unification civ I have with a focus on leadership. Things were business as usual for the first few years, no major issues. However, as my leaders leveled up, my Unity gain stalled entirely, with only one extra leader recruited in total. I'd built a Research Zone on my homeworld as I tend to tech rush, and then a Factory Zone to offset the consumer good issues.

So I understand that the ability to swap zones is still in development, but this inability to remove the starter zone on my homeworld put me in a bad situation almost immediately. I was stuck at base Alloy gain, and no way to get further Unity as my leaders kept leveling and eventually I hit deficits.

I attempted to colonize two planets to fix this problem. I set a Forge Zone and a Unity Zone on each, and added buildings to upgrade them. No output for either resource was added, and I eventually hit a point where the Unity deficit hit stability on all my planets. None of my colonization or investments did anything to fix my problems, unlike in prior versions where there was an ROI on new jobs being added.

It could be that due to the primitive UI I can't find the ability to manually work priorities but it's not a great feeling to dump minerals and time into trying to fix your economy only for there to be seemingly no payoff. If it was a case of the planet needing more population to create the want for those jobs to be filled, why allow the setting of a zone on initial colonization? I could not tell why there was no impact on my economy or what I was doing wrong.

I think this new system has potential but I've spent a long time with this game (player since 1.0) and this is the first time I've felt like it was beyond me what was happening and why my efforts to fix things weren't working, and I've played in previous betas to test overhauls before. For a long time player that is not a promising first impression and as this develops I hope that this gets smoothed out.

 

[Tisifoni12]

Some of the buildings that were previously available and could be potentially sources of unity seem absent; temples (could be monasteries), noble estates, others (?)
Or perhaps they and other cultural buildings like the Autochthon Monument will be subsumed into more 'generic' unity generating institutional organisations / structures in the 'zone'.

The Beta I suspect has been released 'early' with some of the details of how it will function not fully developed.

 

[Ilab]

Quick question, since lots of UI elements are being worked on, what about an enormous QoL change in the leader assignment window, this one:
View attachment 1264109

In the red box, we can click to collapse the 'owned' leaders. But it would be awesome if we could do as in the leader view and filter by leader class. This is at game start, so no big deal, but later on with lots of leaders finding the one you want is annoying as you have many and in planets you can assign all kinds of leaders, so you end with an enormous list.

Allowing the same filtering that is done in the leader view here would be awesome, same with council, as some positions can hold various 'kinds' of leaders.

I just want to SHAMELESSLY bump this up. Pretty please with that tiny detail

 

[Blastinburn]

This is becoming a much bigger problem than I expected, Hopefully some modifications to what the buildings do will help. But I half doubt it, I suspect we will need to decouple the zone job production from the cities in some fashion. Depressing, because otherwise it is fairly interesting to build up my planets right now.

While 50% seems dangerously high. The design idea was that you'd remove it pretty quickly. I think the idea is to wait until your first colony is a decent size, but there is nothing explaining the problem. And I don't think there is even a focus to replace your early space industry. Which would be useful.

I like the idea of starting with poor infrastructure, but the balance is bad. I'd like to see the malus reduce considerably or only applied to the zone in question. or something to make it less of a problem.

Starting with poor infrastructure is an interesting idea, the problem is primarily that it affects a resource that is used for upkeep so producing less is crippling. If leaders didn't use unity for upkeep so the resources didn't need to keep up with a source of drain it could work, you'd just be slowed instead of having your empire implode until you updated the infrastructure.

Maybe have a guaranteed focus task to replace early industry would also help.

 

[Blastinburn]

It is a bit too early to work on details like Tooltips. They are more worried about basic concepts.

I understand where you're coming from, but to engage with the basic concepts in a way that can gather meaningful and useful feedback we need to be able to roughly play the game, and Stellaris as it is now requires tooltips to understand anything that is happening. They don't need to be nicely localized, just dumping the raw variables so something can be tracked down or so you know it's doing something would be a big help.