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

[Yagami913]

This is way too raw to my taste. With the bad planet UI and missing tooltips i have no idea what's going on or how to proceed. I think i wait for a more cooked version.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

This current change is shaping up to be a massive one, probably the biggest change in the history of Stellaris since we moved away from tiles if not bigger and fundamentally changes how virtually everything works. And this seems like I'm watching a slow motion train crash unfold, one a bunch of people are cheering one. While many of those who used to try and do something about it, have given up and left over the last 1~ year or so.

Hundred of things are being changed all at once (pops, traits, jobs, resources, buildings, districts, zones, new features, UI etc). I know sometimes you have to do that with interconnected systems but I think many of these changes could have been tried, tested and implemented more gradually in stages without as many problems or placeholders as we have now.

I'd have improved performance first to see how much room there was for new computationally expensive features after that:
1. Removing the daily calculations from trade routes would have worked as a quick little change without also having to make trade into something you can stockpile.
2. Pop-group and workforce could have been an almost invisible background change with the only difference being a small % output change.

The trade stockpile is just your old energy stockpile moved over a few spaces in the UI, and new pop numbers are litterally moving the decimal point two spaces... it's garish ornamentation to me rather than substance, but probably intended to distract by making the invisible changes tangible and impressive.

As for trade, the performance was an issue. The trade routes were pretty shitty. But it worked in a way that allowed it to be produced like other resources and then directly exchanged into other goods. I'd rather they iterate on that while fixing problems than turn it into another generic resource to be stockpiled. One that just took a huge chunk out of the purpose energy credits fulfilled.

The whole "universal currency" thing for energy credits had been mentioned time and time again by the old lead devs, that was the purpose of energy credits. Now we have food 2.0 which we don't need once we have fulfilled our upkeep. As it now doesn't serve as currency anymore.

Also, remember that ship upkeep paid via energy credits was meant to simulate logistics, repairs, etc all in one. Which is why docked ships would cost fewer energy credits and we even have a starbase structure for that purpose. Now we will effectively be paying it twice. Since I doubt that's going away.

Trade now feels odd in a few ways, from a UI perspective I keep looking to the left at energy (instead of right for trade) and remembering that energy has been neutered as a resource just like food was. I miss when food couldn't be stockpiled very high and all bonus food income was converted into pop growth.

I want mechanics like that old one to make each resource feel special in some way, worth investing entire builds into producing more of that resource. I don't want more upkeep numbers that function as a tax instead of a path to victory.

The new planet system also seems, all around worse. Building a zone is a huge investment and especially in the early game can screw you over entirely. And from what some are saying it seems once you build one/developed one. You are effectively stuck with it. Why?

I'm trying not to judge too harshly until it's actually in a working state. Currently it's all just a lot of placeholders so I'm not sure what it will actually feel like to play when it functions and has had some balancing.

But success or failure may ride on how well the following work in practice:
1. Zones+buildings shifting jobs from all attached districts in huge numbers may get crazy once we can demolish/rebuild the zones of fully developed planets (thousands of jobs open/close in a single day, all farmers become scientists, demolish a zone and thousands will take decades to become farmers so you can run out of food and consumer goods in quickly from a single click. Could be chaotic.)

2. Automation (when added) may cause huge waves of unemployment when we are able to reduce the workfore required to fill districts (unless automation and job workforce requirement reductions have strong limits like being locked behind planetary ascension levels. I like the idea of automation, just nervous about what the first draft implementation will look like)

3. Pop-growth is going to be crazy hard to balance. Populations may explode and quickly collapse if they use real animal biology equations (so job availability matters more as pops quickly grow to fill the space). I've already seen the death-spiral with an accidental monthly decline from the bugged Robotic Assembly buildings, no idea what the new carrying capacity equation is going to be, the last one looked like someone crumpled the paper the graph was on and traced over the result and used that (flat sections when the whole point was to use an S-shaped curve... I really want the UI to let me see where my population is on the curve as well)

 

[TeHb Z Shadow]

Focus from the start of the game even before first contact: get a rival

Sounds like a trap for beginners. Game should offer it after the player establishes first contact with 2-3 other nations, so he will start to make some alliance and have a choice who will be rival. Instead it game suggest to rival the first guy you see (in most games the first guy i met is my protector or buddy).
I will check more after 2-3 more updates to get a better polished version.

UPD: It was on GA, maybe on the easiest difficulties there is other Focus priority?

 

[Weyird]

I messed around in it for about 25 years. Then I noticed that the population on my colony started disappearing - specifically, right after I built a robot assembly building - until that colony decolonied because there were zero pops. Then, just to test it out, I build robot assembly on my home planet and the moment it finished building my population there started plummeting. So robot assembly eats pops, apparently.

Besides that, I was mostly enjoying it. Having a hard time figuring out amenities, but being minus a few thousand doesn't seem to hurt me so I ignored it.

Points of thought

• The 'management' tab seems to serve no real purpose except it's where you go to clear blockers.
• I went into it hoping to test the empire goals and timeline. I looked at it, did one thing to trigger a goal, thought, "neat" and then forgot about it. Timeline didn't do much in the time I played.
• I'm unsure what the difference in buildings between your city district and your zones are. I'm not sure I understand exactly what's going on there.
• Maybe a temporary bug but the consumer goods producing building was "empire limit 1", which seems unintentional. I sat with negative consumer goods my entire time.
• The new trade system with trade value is good. Honestly, I like it more than using energy. Energy for trade always felt off for me. And for those complaining about the "double trade tax" - my most common trade in the old system was to sell food or minerals for energy, then sell the energy for consumer goods. So I had double tax there, too.
• I like seeing pop growth every couple of days. It's neat, and gives me a better timeline of, "oh, i need to build a job for the upcoming pops".
• The bigger pop numbers are slightly harder on my brain than the old system. I might get used to it, I might not.

 

[Carolus Judart]

I still love the game, so I trust the developers when it comes to gameplay.
Personally, I'm worried about the "quality of life" . I hope this has been mentioned?

I really need a magnifying glass to understand what's happening on my planet. You have to enlarge the windows; there's plenty of room.
Second thing, you can't create more than two districts without having to click on them again. At the beginning, it'll be fine. But at the end of the game, with 10 or 20 planets during a war, building rural districts will be very laborious.

 

[-Marauder-]

I messed around in it for about 25 years. Then I noticed that the population on my colony started disappearing - specifically, right after I built a robot assembly building - until that colony decolonied because there were zero pops. Then, just to test it out, I build robot assembly on my home planet and the moment it finished building my population there started plummeting. So robot assembly eats pops, apparently.

Besides that, I was mostly enjoying it. Having a hard time figuring out amenities, but being minus a few thousand doesn't seem to hurt me so I ignored it.

Points of thought

• The 'management' tab seems to serve no real purpose except it's where you go to clear blockers.
• I went into it hoping to test the empire goals and timeline. I looked at it, did one thing to trigger a goal, thought, "neat" and then forgot about it. Timeline didn't do much in the time I played.
• I'm unsure what the difference in buildings between your city district and your zones are. I'm not sure I understand exactly what's going on there.
• Maybe a temporary bug but the consumer goods producing building was "empire limit 1", which seems unintentional. I sat with negative consumer goods my entire time.
• The new trade system with trade value is good. Honestly, I like it more than using energy. Energy for trade always felt off for me. And for those complaining about the "double trade tax" - my most common trade in the old system was to sell food or minerals for energy, then sell the energy for consumer goods. So I had double tax there, too.
• I like seeing pop growth every couple of days. It's neat, and gives me a better timeline of, "oh, i need to build a job for the upcoming pops".
• The bigger pop numbers are slightly harder on my brain than the old system. I might get used to it, I might not.

And now you trade energy and food for a new resource. Because now energy is in the same boat as food. Once your upkeep is covered, it becomes something to ignore. Which doesn't feel like something they factored in at all.

Energy same as food now exists solely and exclusively for upkeep. Which means you need vastly less of it. The Dyson Sphere likely just went from S Tier to basically being the equivalent of a giga structure that produces food. And you "bought" things with energy CREDITS. They were the universal currency.

This actually has a ton of bandwagon issues I'm not sure people have really thought about yet. From the Caraveneers to everyone else energy credits should now be replaced with "TV" since energy credit lost their role as universal credits and there's not really much of a reason to produce them beyond the exact amount you need.

 

[Edorath]

while the early beta IS appreciated, this is... probably wayy to early to give to players to test lmao
i'd love to actually write meaningful feedback, the game is nowhere near functional enough to actually, properly test
i'll probably give it a spin anyways but this is too barebones to say anything productive yet, this feels more like a proof of concept than a beta proper

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

Adding meat to our Spaceship of Theseus.

Biological ships confirmed?

If so:
Any chance of Stellaris finally getting a meat planet, with potato-shaped moons,
where a sample brought back for scientific analysis can get eaten if a leader has the Corrupt trait?

 

[Znikii]

Played for a bit, so those are just some first impressions:

-Pop growth trait Rapid breeders don't seem to work or it might just be a tooltip problem.
-A lot of UI work is needed. The two most egregious problems I had with UI are a) no clear, easy-to-read pop growth indicators (tiny numbers going ''invisible'' up has a very bad for presentation of any planetary demographics planning b) how zones, buildings,... and the rest relate, interact and interplay.
-Economy production seems overtuned
-what's up with culture jobs? where are they?
-oh, and please make auto trait pick disabled by default

 

[NoXeno]

Building block info and zone building block limit will be overwhelming, like what can it build and how many jobs or how will it change the district. Some utility building can be built everywhere still needed.

Mess up a world leads to depopulation? Or just pops get suck into some non-exist crime job or some immigration bug.

 

[Ilab]

I have continued with my games, today. I want to conclude that, IMO, this beta has no real use. It is almost impossible to give 'effective' feedback because it is soo incomplete that it is impossible to know if something is a bug, not added or just a change we do not know how to act with.

I have played this game for years and are extremely confused at several things.

On the top of my head:
1. Leader changes, as I had expected, are horrible. No need to reduce the trait selection to some levels only. Builds that don't focus on leaders wont have them leveling up as often, and those that do won't really care much. But, if the reason is to reduce interruption, then better notification settings and the Auto trait by default already do that. I am very dissapointed that leaders get this treatment. I hated when some traits where removed from the worst leader type after galactic paragons (kidnapper and the one that took resources) they made the class interesting RP and mechanics wise, a balance would have been good. Now leaders are even more lame, for no reason, at least before every level up felt interesting. Great, lets see what i can pick. Now only the 'magic' levels matter. Please reconsider doing this to leaders, as someone (of many ofc) that bought and loved Galactic Paragons because of their love for leaders (mechanics and RP wise) this is extremely sad. That dev time would have been better balancing the traits that are horrendous instead.
2. The planet UI is horrible, so much space waste in things that don't give useful information, as said by others, management tab is kinda crap, same with population. Not having certain information available at the summary is bad and a regression (we need to see number of blockers/features at a glance when quickly moving through colonies with Tab for instance, same with planet class and building queue). The building queue specially needs to be more visible when 'dancing' through planets. The amount of pops portraits is sickening 'spammy' and we can't really do much with them (maybe it is just unimplemented stuff)
3. Dubitative on trade, need to try it more. However, we could use better display of the costs and similar. Would like to know if there are plans on some mechanic to simulate piracy suppression exp for admirals and ships, those where useful.
4. Lack of fine control over pops in a planet feels very bad, again, unsure if it is something that is pending implementation.

All in all, it is hard to know what things are bugs and which are just missing. But again, please, reconsider the leaders thing. There is no real reason to do that. Better notification settings and auto trait can solve all the 'annoyance' problems without gutting what so many people love.

 

[klopkr]

This planet UI is really as confusing and bad as I thought.

Why is it laid out like that? Why so much wasted space?

I wish it was more of a list view.

Testing how max pop growth max empires max planets max pre-ftls does to the game.

 

[goldennick94]

So far, it's been interesting trying out the open beta. I know it's a bit early but I'd like to give a few first impressions with what I found to work.

• Granular pop growth is pretty cool. Seeing it go up bit by bit really gives the feeling that pops are always growing into larger numbers rather than feeling like pops just have really long gestation periods.
• I'm a little bit divided on the much larger housing and amenities amounts. On one hand, it matches with the pops feeling much larger than before. On the other hand, it's a bit of a shock to see the amenities drift up and down 500+ amounts. It kind of makes it hard to conceptualize what's a lot and little on that scale. I think if the UI displayed a kilo- or mega- notation it might be a lot more easier to process. e.g. Instead of 2254 Housing, it would be 2.2k Housing.
• Trade so far in the limited case I've used it in is functional. I think I would like to see it double-dip into both being stored and giving resources per trade policies (if it doesn't already). To clarify, I think it would be great if 1 TV went into stockpiles as 1 TV and also converted into it's appropriate trade resource at the same time. I'd think this would also enhance the benefit of the Mercantile tradition tree.
• Empire focus has so far been a very solid experience. Minus a few weird ones (like build an industrial district, which no longer exists), I've been constantly going to the screen and trying to check off as many as I can when it seems convenient. I think it would be nice if it was made more clear what you're getting when you've collected 100 points of the categories.
• The little touches on some early game events that I used to click the button as soon as I saw the box appear has made me appreciate them more. I like that they require choices now, since that makes you have to spend at least a little time considering the options.

 

[Lorenerd11]

So, are different-tiered versions of the same buildings just completely different bonuses now? It feels weird, that they aesthetically look like each others' "upgrades", but in reality are just different buildings altogether.

 

[vulcan7200]

Just played for a few more hours. While I agree with a lot of people saying it's difficult to test anything due to how early this build is I think it's important to talk about the new District/Zone/Building mechanics and why at the moment they simply will not work well in the game. I will note that the game is so early in development that the following may be unintentional, so maybe it will end up feeling better at the end.

Currently Districts and Buildings serve a very similar function in Stellaris. A somewhat limited "resource" on a planet, that (usually) add jobs and/or housing. 4.0 looks to change that system, and from my understanding from the Dev Diaries were going to work a bit like a nesting doll in terms of how they were going to work. Districts gave you some houses and base jobs, you then use Zones to change/add jobs in the District, and then you use Buildings to further enhance those Zones/Districts. I really liked this idea when I first heard it. The idea of the main City District having three Zones, each with three Building Slots (Unless you duplicated Zones) felt like there was a lot of ways to customize your City Districts to do what you want them to do.

After playing for a few hours, in practice, it's incredibly rigid and offers little to no customization. This is largely due to things either being Planet Limit 1 (Like the Automation Building), or many Buildings simply being unable to be built in certain Zones. If you build a Factory Zone, it looks like the only buildings you can build are the Factory Buildings, and Strategic Resource buildings. What this means in practice is, you have almost zero Building Slots available for many of your other buildings. Your Capital Zone gets only two Building Slots, which means you only have those two Building Slots for any "non-resource" buildings. Autochthon Monument, Robot Assembly Plant, Gene Clinics, Clone Vats, Precinct Houses. All of these can be important buildings to people, and yet many of your planets will simply not be able to utilize them. Some may be available in other Zones (I haven't checked them all) but that doesn't change the issue that if you make an "Industrial World" with a Factory, Foundry, and Industrial Zone you only have two building slots for anything not related to those resources. This also means your Zones feel very limited. If you have a Factory Zone, the only things you can build are Factory and Strategic Resource Buildings, meaning those Building Slots are less about customizing how you want those Zones/Districts to be and more just waiting for the tech to arrive to give you the few buildings you can slap in there.

The entire structure of 4.0 feels very much like the Developers either handholding or railroading how you play. If you want a really specialized Foundry World, where you ignore the Energy/Mineral/Food Districts and only build Foundry Zones, you have a whopping 5 Building Slots to play with, and three of them don't even have any meaningful choice behind it as it's just buildings that increase the Foundry output. If you want to not specialize your planet and build Energy/Mineral/Food Districts along with your City Districts, and pick three unique Zones in the City for maximum Building Slots you're STILL limited by what the Developers tell you can go into those slots. 9 of the 20 Building Slots available are tied to your Basic Resource Districts. This is a two fold problem: The first is that Basic Resources are not necessarily where you get bottlenecked in the game. Sometimes you might, but you're usually not sitting there wishing you had more Food (And Energy will be in that same boat now as you no longer use it as money). The second is that, as stated above, you are incredibly limited by what you can put into these Building Slots anyways. So even if you wanted to maximize how many Building Slots you have, it's pointless as nearly half of those slots are restricted to only building the buildings that increase your Basic Resource output. Ontop of all of this, Zones for the Basic Resources truly do not matter. Yes they unlock the building slots, but you're not making any decisions there. At least the City District you're picking what to add to the District's job pool. Zones for the Basic Resources feels like an after thought as there would be no difference between what we have now, and simply having the three building slots unlocked by default for these Districts.

This is not a small problem. I say this as someone with nearly 1,600 hours in Stellaris, have played since release, and was super excited by what I was hearing for 4.0. I don't think I would play this game if this system is implemented as is. And I don't mean "In this Open Beta state". Even if all of the bugs were fixed, all of the tool tips were filled in, ect I don't know how much time I would continue to put into the game.

What I would do to make this new system feel like it was advertised, is open some of the buildings for the various Zones, as well as have them change the District (Like Zones do) instead of giving flat buffs. If you build a Luxury Housing Building, that District should produce more Housing and Luxuries instead of the Building giving just +X Houses/Amenities. If you build a Precinct House, that District should start producing a small amount of Enforcer jobs. If I'm playing Oppressive Autocracy and am making a Rural World, I should be able to put a Precinct House in every Basic Resource District so that they all produce a small amount of Enforcers to keep the people in check. If I want every Zone to have an Automation Building (I'm actually not even sure if they're working as intended yet) why can't I? Why would I only automate my Energy District but not my Mineral and Food Districts?

I have no idea if the developers will read all of the feedback given, and it might be too far into development to change what they're doing already as it seems like they wanted it to be released in May. The ideas behind this system are great, but it needs a massive overhaul.

 

[Nelliel]

Building the Robot factory kills your pops off just watched as my homeworld with 7000 on it droped to 2232 after haveing a robot factory on it for about 4 years and it stoped once i got rid of the building

 

[Tseudonym]

Finally had time to play it myself. After about three hours, here's what I noticed:

• The building restrictions for amenity zones, combined with the current balancing of amenities, means they're basically the "make three of your building slots completely useless" zone.
• The automation building doesn't seem to actually do anything yet.
• The logic behind civilians automatically resettling to newly colonized planets doesn't quite seem to be working right.
• The Logic behind pops moving to prioritized jobs is definitely borked. I had prioritized engineers and they only wanted to be physicists. And they utterly refused to work in the Odd Factory. (Until they suddenly didn't. I don't know why they changed their mind.)
• The lack of science and industry in the early game makes research and expansion rather slow. In fact, I found my expansion to be limited by alloys rather than influence. Though part of this may just be because I need to relearn how to develop planets.
• The timeline once gave me a focus to build an Industrial District. As in, the Industrial District that was also removed in the very same open beta.
• When there aren't any employed pops in a strata, that strata is just straight up not shown in the UI. I had a planet that only had research jobs being worked, and it looked like the planet had failed to spawn the Colonist jobs. In reality, there was a small handful of unemployed workers and elites that weren't being displayed at all.
• Changing living standards had no effect whatsoever on any pops, including non-civilians.
• Other people have already pointed this out, but planetary deficits vomit up Trade Value instead of eating it.
• You can build strategic resource gathering buildings (mote/gas/crystal mines) from the start of the game, and they give you the resource even if you haven't discovered it yet.
• My pops decided it is immoral to murder the poor, innocent, defenseless apples, and have learned to subsist entirely off of air. Or maybe the Shroud.

Overall, it's not done cooking, but it sure smells good.

 

[IPWIW]

is beta limited in any kind(region etc)because i only see rollbacks

 

[Nakkivene]

So if you run oppressive autocracy that maybe deals with the amenities issue and some trade build would maybe get you the ability to buy alloys. Or arc welders perhaps?

 

[Zappor]

Yikes, that was VERY raw! Just unplayable and broken in almost every way... ?

How would you even build a capital planet that produces lots of alloys and consumer goods?

I think having decent colony automation is a must, do you have time to build and test that for this new system?