Stellaris Dev Diary #375 - Notes on the Open Beta

[Eladrin]

Hi everyone!

We’ve entered our second week of the Stellaris 3.99 ‘Phoenix’ Open Beta, and if all goes according to plan are planning another update tomorrow morning with some major changes to the starting situation of your planets. (Goodbye, primitive factory debuffs. I'd say we'll miss you, but... we won't.)

What Have We Learned So Far?​

While we recognize that the early state of the Open Beta makes it difficult to provide balancing feedback, it’s proven itself invaluable already.

The Open Beta has found several issues with growth and decline - from robots causing the inevitable decline of your empire to Fallen Empires and Pre-FTL societies being doomed due to not using standard growth models. You’ve found economic death spirals and identified needs that will help our designers produce a better balanced and fun experience in the final release.

These were precisely some of the types of things I was looking for when we decided to push the Open Beta despite the early state that it was in, and I’m thankful that we did. Thank you for all of your help so far, and I hope you’ll continue to give us your feedback as we continue to update.

We will continue the twice-weekly update cadence until the end of the month, with dev livestreams every Thursday.

Mandarin “Venerable Scientist” Advisor Voice​

Back when we released The Grand Archive, we created a version of the trailer in Mandarin, and it was really, really good.

After such a positive reception from the Chinese Stellaris community, we decided to call the same voice actor back in to record a full Advisor set. The recordings are now complete, in time to be included as part of the Stellaris 4.0 update. It should show up in one of the next few Open Beta updates.

What’s Next?​

We’ll have two dev diaries next week that will be a bit meatier than this one, to flesh out some of the other things coming in the next Quarter.

See you then!

 

[Eladrin]

Peek from tomorrow's patch notes, which I showed off during the livestream:

• Replaced the Early Industry Zone with the Urban Zone. The Urban Zone currently accepts all buildings, limitations will be added in a future update
• Default starting planets now have Basic Offices and Basic Research Labs buildings in addition to the Basic Factories
  • Basic Factories provide Laborer jobs and can be upgraded into either Alloy Foundries or Civilian Industries
  • The Primitive Factory no longer decreases the Job Efficiency of Bureaucrats, Physicists, Biologists and Engineers
  • Basic Offices provide Administrator jobs and can be upgraded into Administrative Offices or Temples
  • Basic Research Labs provide Researcher jobs and be upgraded into Research Labs. These Researchers are worse than Researchers from 3.14.

Our intention is for basic buildings for each resource to be able to be built in the government and urban zones and for those buildings to provide a flat number of jobs to cover incidental needs, while more specialized buildings will continue to require the specialized zones.

After the livestream today, I found that a couple of them (unfortunately the Holotheater is one of them) is not quite correct, but we'll fix them in the update early next week. (It's too late for tomorrow's build.)

 

[Eladrin]

Will 4.0 have a mechanic that unemployed pops migrate to planets with better conditions, even if its just for the civilian strata? So once planets are filled, automatic mechanisms ensure that pops are spread around my worlds?

Automigration is already in Stellaris, and in 4.0 we've doubled down on it as the primary way pops move between planets (and even empires in 4.0 if you have migration pacts).

Unemployed and civilians move between planets looking for open jobs, it's marked by the yellow briefcase in the outlier.

The livestream that was running when I saw your post.

They often have one on the DD days.

We're planning on having one every Thursday until release, though some might be other team members. Except I like answering questions like that in an over caffeinated frenzy so you might have to put up with me being one of the two every week.

I noticed in the stream that the Planet Summary tab is being renamed "Surface".

Any chance it could be called "Subsurface" instead for subterranean empires?

We actually talked about that right after the stream ourselves. Maybe. (Might slip to 4.0.x or 4.1 since it's cosmetic.)

The new job priority system that was shown in the live stream is very much needed.

Tbh it was needed before 4.0, it's just that the changes made to the early game in 4.0 made it even more important. Hopefully no more economy instantly imploding because I built something.

There's still a bit of risk if you open up a lot of higher strata jobs at once that you lose too many workers, but it was one of those changes that caused a "how did we play without this" moment.

 

[Eladrin]

After the livestream today, I found that a couple of them (unfortunately the Holotheater is one of them) is not quite correct, but we'll fix them in the update early next week. (It's too late for tomorrow's build.)

Looks like we'll get that fix into today's build thanks to an evening rebuild.