Stellaris Dev Diary #377 - MEAT SHIPS MEAT SHIPS MEAT SHIPS

[Alfray Stryke]

Hello everybody! Welcome to our first BioGenesis development diary!

Today we will talk to about ships. That are made of meat!

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Several weeks ago, Eladrin mentioned that the ship designer changes originally planned for 4.0 "Phoenix" would not be included in the Open Beta, as they’re now needed for our upcoming Q2 DLC release. We’ve since seen a fair amount of speculation as to what we might have been cooking that’d require such changes… So please allow me to introduce our Biological Ships!

MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS!​

In BioGenesis, we are adding two distinct Biological shipsets, with unique ship classes and technology.

Our goals in adding Biological Ships to Stellaris were to ensure that they are not only different in appearance from mechanical ships (and space fauna), but also in gameplay. Thus, the key mechanical differences are:

• When using Biological Ships, Corvettes, Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers and Battleships are replaced with Maulers, Weavers, Harbingers, and Stingers, each of which have three growth stages.
• Biological Ships, including Starbases, Megastructures and Stations, have their primary construction resource converted from Alloys (or Minerals) into Food and their Energy upkeep likewise replaced with Food upkeep.
• Overwhelmingly, Biological Ship technologies fall in Society Research (Biology) instead of the familiar Engineering Research (Voidcraft).

And in classic Stellaris fashion, we’ve kept the flavor and narrative around Biological Ships intentionally vague, just enough to let you roleplay them however you like. Maybe they’re an extension of your Devouring Swarm, just another drone in space. Or maybe they’re advanced bio-machines, the pinnacle of your scientific achievement.

In order to use Biological Ships, you’ll need to select one of the shipsets during empire creation.

Different types of ships prompted our UX designer to give the Shipset selector a fresh coat of paint!​

Growth Cycles​

Similar to Space Fauna from Grand Archive, Biological Ships have growth stages, but unlike Space Fauna, they do not naturally progress through these by aging. Instead, these ships have a unique component slot for supplementary organs that can be researched. Generally speaking, the Juvenile and Mature growth stages will likely be occupied by Growth Organs that allow the ships to progress to the next stage.

The accumulated growth progress for ships is shown in both the ship’s tooltip and the ship details window.

When Biological Ships are designed (either automatically or using the ship designer), all researched Growth Stages are configured as part of a single ship design. Once a Biological Ship has acquired sufficient Growth Progress, it will automatically change to using the next Growth Stage in its design. Alternatively, Biological Ships can be constructed at a shipyard at a later Growth Stage.

The three growth stages of the Spinovore Weaver

MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS! MEAT SHIPS!

​

Although all Growth Stages of Biological Ships use the same Fleet Command Limit for their ship class, later Growth Stages use more naval capacity, with the Mature stage using 1.5× and the Elder stage using 2× the Naval Capacity of the Juvenile stage.

SHIPS MADE OF MEAT​

Maulers primarily focus on short-range combat with shield penetration and high damage to armor and shields. Equipped with melee-range mandible weapons and either short-range S-slot or PD-slot weapons, these ships will form the bulk of your navy in the early game. Their unique mandible weapons have similar damage scaling against starbases and larger ships as torpedoes.

The unique Organ components that Maulers have access to are the Corrosive Fluids and Metabolic Recycler (and their upgraded versions)

Weavers are support ships, making use of unique weapons to apply powerful buffs to their allies or debuffs to their enemies.

Weavers have unique access to an array of six support components, each with six tiers that belong in the PD-slot.

The unique Organ components that Weavers have access to are Symbiotic Amplifiers and Developmental Pheromones

Harbingers are carriers capable of deploying large amounts of strike craft and supporting them with point defense or long range missiles.

Strike craft for empires using Biological Ships are deployed in greater numbers per fighter wing, but have reduced hull points and armour instead of shields.

The unique Organ components that Harbingers have access to are Chitin Growth Regulators and the Incubation Matrix

Stingers are powerful late-game warships, equipped with multiple XL weapons or capable of unleashing heavy broadside barrages.

The unique Organ components that Stingers have access to are Exhaust Spiracles and Rangefinder Clusters.

As each of the different Growth Stages of each of the classes of Biological Ships can be built at a shipyard, we’ve taken the opportunity to implement collapsible headers when selecting which ships to build.

This works for mechanical ships and space fauna too!​

Since Biological Ships have their own weapons, armour, shield and core components, we’ve gone through and ensured that the technologies use the appropriate icons depending on if you are using a Biological shipset or not.

Modding Notes​

As part of the work required to implement Biological Ships there have been a lot of changes to how ship components are scripted. Here’s some highlights:

• class_restriction, size_restriction and slot_restriction are deprecated in favour of using the possible and potential trigger blocks instead.
• Core Components now have an upgrade_path parameter, components that have the same upgrade path are shown on the same row.
• Ship components now support the show_tech_unlock_if = { } field, like buildings.
• New targeting parameters:
  • use_ship_main_target: if yes, overrides target_type and target_focus when ship's main target is within range, default no
  • target_type (target_enemies (default) / target_allies / target_controlled / target_own)
  • target_focus (single (default) / spread)
  • target_type: only valid if component_set has affects_target_type = yes
  • target_focus: only valid if component_set has affects_target_focus = yes
• New parameters for weapons:
  • on_hit: apply effects to target on hit. Scope = ship (target), from = ship (shooter)
  • hide_damage_values_from_tooltip = yes/no # If yes, it will hide Damage and Average Damage from weapon component tooltip (default = no)

Next Week​

Next week we’ll be looking at Ascension, Traditions, and Advanced Governments. See you then!

PRIME CUTS FROM ART!​

 

[Alfray Stryke]

In order to be completely clear, when designing a Biological Ship:

• Stage 1 has the components in the RED BOX
• Stage 2 has the components in the BLUE BOX
• Stage 3 has the components in the YELLOW BOX

Core components (those on the right hand side) are selected for each stage by using the stage spinner on the right hand sidebar.

​

 

[MrFreake_PDX]

So they don't have Titan/Juggernaut/Colossus counterparts ?

There are meat Titan/Juggernaut/Colossus models for each shipset.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

If you look at the images at the end, there's what I feel is a blatant Colossus, along with two juggernauts candidates. One that might be at titan too.

Biological ships get juggernauts, titans and colossi, but since they don't have growth stages, we didn't focus on them in this DD.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Can gestalt machines use bio shipsets?

Yes.

Lets hope there's offspring variants XD

Could be funny to turn the ships that are supporters already anyways into offspring >w<

Progenitor Hive gets Offspring variants of the biological ships.

@Alfray Stryke How do the biological components compare to mechanical ones? It is hard to gauge their overall balance on just icons.


I had the same misunderstanding. My first thought when I saw the Stinger was "holy smokes, that is a mighty beast!"

Generally around the same with some minor tweaks here and there, for example biological ship armour has some self-repair capabilities.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Quick question: if the cost and upkeep is said to be converted from alloys and energy to food (as per what’s written in the Diary), why the images shows costs of both food and alloys?

Primary construction costs are converted, so some stuff still remaining using the regular resources.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Does taking Biological ships lock you out of any origins/civics?
Thankfully not Progenitor Hive, but what about things like Void Dwellers or Eager Explorers/Stargazers?

From memory it'll lock you out of the Eager Explorer civics, otherwise I can't think of any others off the top of my head.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Reddit and Ep3o's video still say:

Looks like that didn't survive the copy/pasting to the forum - I've added it back to the dev diary now.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Besides allowing more components, what other effects do the different stages have, increased hulls, armor etc? Do they increase range of weapons?

Later growth stages are more expensive (in both cost and upkeep) but have more hp and different speeds and base evasion.

Balance wise, with Mauler being Corvettes and Weavers being Destroyers. Is it not an enormous disadvantage (considering that speed and range are king) for organics that they have no long range fighting capabilities until Cruisers tier? For instance, once an enemy nation has destroyers and artillery computer it could Kite Maulers considerably and get several hits on them before they get in range (which is quite short it seems)

Yes, one of the disadvantages of biological ships is in the early game they don’t have long range weapon solutions.

Weavers sound awesome! But I have a couple doubts. First, will they prioritize targets without the buffs/debuffs? Or can it happen that several weavers (or several weapons on the same weaver) target the same ships over and over instead of spreading the buffs/debuffs over the entire fleet? What if the same target is buffed at the same time, does the buff duration increase or resets?

They should prioritise targets that aren’t affected, but the buff/debuffs duration should be reset if a ship is targeted multiple times.

Weavers, balance wise, I think that for buff weapons the short range is not a huge deal, but for the debuffing ones it is. It means that our Destroyer equivalent ships are extremely short range, which can really hamper their capabilities to properly debuff the enemy.

This is one of factors we considered to try and balance them, long range weapons with debuffing capabilities were tested during development but rejected.

Are the roles for these ships set in stone or can we modify them a bit? For instance, Maulers seem to be always swarm judging by the picture, can they have other behaviours?

• Maulers can have swarm or picket computers
• Weavers can have computers to focus on buffing or debuffing
• Harbingers can have computers for either carrier or artillery (in case you want them to make better use of energy torpedoes)
• Stingers can have computers for either artillery or line behaviour.

Regarding the Juggernaut/Titans/Colossus Do they get any mechanic difference or just appearance?

The majority of their cost and upkeep is food instead of alloys and energy.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Taking a look at this pictures more I hope the auto designer is improved, because this design mixing plasma/kinetic(?) weapons and disrupters is quite bad.

IMO this is a symptom of there being way too many bypass weapons making the ship design a boring choice of going full bypass or not (and usually you want full bypass). But it’s also a trap for new people to mix them since you just end up splitting damage.

These ships weren't using the auto-designer, instead I selected a range of components to give an illustration that biological ships have equivalents for most components that regular ships have access to.

1. Shouldn't that Accelerated Gland use Exotic Gases, considering the flavor text?
2. Is there any requirement to choosing meat ships in empire creation? Like, not being Xenophobe, or not having an early-space age civic?
3. When are we changing "Food" to "Biomass"? I think it seems slightly silly to still call it food (yeah this is not really a question).
4. Why can we build younger ships once elder ones are unlocked? What's the tradeoff in mid/endgame?
5.



Huh what. Why does the design screen show all three stages, if there's a stage spinner on the sidebar?

1. Good catch, I'll investigate why it wasn't showing in the tooltip.
2. Some stuff we're adding in BioGenesis require biological ships, meanwhile the Eager Explorer civics require that you are using a regular shipset.
3. No plans to change the name of Food.
4. The younger ships are far cheaper and faster to build compared to the elder ships, on the other hand they have far less hp, weapons and defences.
5. Because we wanted players to be able to easily see the weapons and defences for all stages for the ships at once.

Was hoping for something a bit more than "ships but they cost food". Something like a devour bombardment stance where they ate everything on the surface or a bombadment stance where they assimilate the planet into their hive.

Keep an eye on the future dev diaries.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

I've always thought of it as using advanced bio-plastics in place of metals for industry.

That was my intention when I made the civic

 

[Alfray Stryke]

I posted it on discord yesterday, but in our development build I've changed the titles in the ship designer to make the growth stage sections, hope this makes things clearer!