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

Hello everybody! Welcome to our first BioGenesis development diary!

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

—

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.

New shipset selector

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.

Growth Glands!


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


Growth Progress Tooltip


Growth Progress Details

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.

Mauler Growth Stages

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.

Mauler Designs


Mauler Designs

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

Corrosive Fluids


Metabolic Recycler


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

Weaver Designs


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

Weaver Support Weapons


Weaver Suppressor Weapons

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


Symbiotic Amplifiers



Developmental Pheromones


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

Harbinger Designs


Harbinger Designs


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.

Biological Strike Craft

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

Chitin Growth Regulators



Incubation Matrix


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

Stinger Designs



Stinger Designs


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

Exhaust Spiracles



Rangefinder Cluster


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.

Shipyard Headers

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.

Technology Swaps


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!​


They're made out of meat.


Meat?



Meat. They're made out of meat.



Meat?


There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat.


That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars.


They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines.


So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact.


They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.


That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat.


I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat.


Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.


Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?
 
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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.

Alfray Stryke said:
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.

View attachment 1272366
​
Click to expand...

Huh what. Why does the design screen show all three stages, if there's a stage spinner on the sidebar?
 
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FleetingRain said:
2. Is there any requirement to choosing meat ships in empire creation? Like, not being Xenophobe, or not having an early-space age civic?
Click to expand...
Alfray Stryke said:
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.
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FleetingRain said:
4. Why can we build younger ships once elder ones are unlocked? What's the tradeoff in mid/endgame?
Click to expand...
We don't know exactly.

According to the stream. Growing Organic ships increases the food upkeep of the vessels and 'some amount of time' to achieve an upgrade. It seems to be on the order of months, but I don't know the actual numbers. However, given upkeep costs, its unlikely to be equivalent to the food difference off the two versions of the same ship.

So the difference appears to be higher upfront cost to build an older ship. Or lower total cost in food, higher in time. Seems like you might want to build young ships if you don't plan--or expect--to go to war for a few years. Older ones if you need ships fast.

Second, it also appears that older ships take up more naval capacity--not fleet capacity though--than younger ones. So, you might build younger ships that don't grow if you want numbers on your side.
 
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lxlTiagolxl said:
Considering food cost and upkeep are rather high, how economically efficient is to produce food instead of alloys?

At mid to late game Ecumenopolis seem to produce alloys with more efficiency than any Agro-World or more than Hivewords.
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If you get the baol and have a very big gaia world, + all the other bonuses to food. you can produce more then a average ecumenopolis in my experience. True though that alloys are easier to get running with efficiency. You will still need some alloys anyways.
 
lxlTiagolxl said:
Considering food cost and upkeep are rather high, how economically efficient is to produce food instead of alloys?

At mid to late game Ecumenopolis seem to produce alloys with more efficiency than any Agro-World or more than Hivewords.
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There are a couple of good ways to get food. And It's been noticed that Food can be rather massively produced in in Habitats compared to Argo-Worlds. So probably not to bad all things considered.

The production of food is a limiting factor for bio-ships however, and its possibly an intended part of the balance of the ships. Which would be really interesting to think about, assuming it works out in the end: You simply can't build as many as you could metal ships.

Hive worlds are interesting though. Uncapped food districts would allow a lot of food, on the right worlds. so, its quite possibly the 'way to go' if you are min-maxing bio-ships.
 
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lxlTiagolxl said:
Personally i think bioships should be the standard shipset for hiveminds, they are simply much better producers of food and worse producers of alloys so mechanical shipsets aren't a great fit, besides bioships fit way better thematically than mechanical ships for them.
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Hives having a higher chance to have bioships when randomly generated, sure makes sense. Hives being granted or nearly so, kind of sounds boring.

Most hives will bio-ships, might be cool. That one hive with metal ships despite it not being good. Definitely cool.

Kind of agree with 'standard' but I think I'd aim for like 60%, as hives are already rarer than normal empires.
 
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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.
 
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Madwwwizard said:
Was hoping for something a bit more than "ships but they cost food".
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we get more. They have unique rolls, different ways of functioning in the combat scenario, and the mechanics of actually building fleets is different.

Maybe you were hoping for something different, but they are defiantly more than just 'ships that cost food.' technically we already have that. catalytic processing is just ships that cost food.
 
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Akkadian said:
One of the causes of late game lag was that each pop's production is calculated individually. Now each bio ship will have it's own growth calculated individually. Is this going to be a new source of late game lag?
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The pop-based lag wasn't really about pops each producing things - that's a fundamentally *linear* cost that scales with galaxy population, which simply doesn't grow that much over the course of a game. 100x or so is fine. It was about pops *deciding what jobs to take* - every pop had to evaluate every job and see if they wanted to try and move to a different job (or displace someone already in a particular job because they can do it better). That's an N*M operation, or "quadratic", and scales much worse as both your pops increase and the number of jobs increase. If both jobs and pops go up 100x, the pop/job comparisons go up 10000x, and *that's* something you feel in the performance.

Ship growth won't be any more expensive than ship shield recovery, which is also calculated on every ship every day.
 
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user192823 said:
It would've been more coherent for bioships to have been locked behind genetic ascension, with maybe hiveminds getting some special orgin that speedruns them to genetic ascension and gives them bioships from the get go. Genetic ascension had the whole recycling space monsters and making use of their genomes as their side-gimmick, represented by some unique traits that required hunting fauna. It makes no sense for an empire to have the know-how for bioships right away.
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It makes no sense for an empire to have the know-how for spaceships, lasers and FTL right away either
 
tribnia said:
Will you make some leviathans and space faunas more "biological" than our current version?
Will biological ships be used by marauders? You know, it's quite nomadic...
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How are leviathans and space faunas not already biological? They have their own unique weapons and upgrades

Also marauders already have their own unique ship set made from asteroids and ramshackle metal parts
 
15JTaylor said:
That's a horrible idea. If you lost your fleet in the crisis it'd just be a game over. That's not fair or fun.
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I suggest you read the dev diary again on how to obtain mature or elder ships. There are 3 ways;

  1. You build juveniles with the growth organ and they grow naturally over time.
  2. You build juveniles without the growth organ and park it at a starbase with growth section and let them grow naturally over time only if they are at the starbase.
  3. You build mature/elder version directly.
Ajacoba said:
Why can we build Corvettes once destroyers and even bigger ships are unlocked? What's the trade-off in mid/endgame
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For points 1 and 2;
Pro - they will be cheaper than 3
Con - they will take time

So point 1 and 2 are good for peace time. I think you still want to do this even if you have alot of food. For point 3 is during war time or when you know a war is coming.
 
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Spaceman78 said:
I suggest you read the dev diary again on how to obtain mature or elder ships. There are 3 ways;

  1. You build juveniles with the growth organ and they grow naturally over time.
  2. You build juveniles without the growth organ and park it at a starbase with growth section and let them grow naturally over time only if they are at the starbase.
  3. You build mature/elder version directly.

For points 1 and 2;
Pro - they will be cheaper than 3
Con - they will take time

So point 1 and 2 are good for peace time. I think you still want to do this even if you have alot of food. For point 3 is during war time or when you know a war is coming.
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No offense, but maybe you should read the whole conversation?

I was just making fun of the statement that we don't need babies if we can grow adults, even though smaller ships have undeniable advantages (Cetana for example famously rips apart big ships with ease and so does literally anything with torpedoes, spamming small ships as part of a "they can't shoot all of us" strategy can work too, and when Hannibal is at the gates then getting ANY ships ready is probably preferable to waiting for the big ships to be grown)

Meanwhile the other guy was replying to someone saying that growing older stages is dumb and building baby ships should be the only option, hence the reply that if you can't grow big ships in the middle of a war or an endgame threat you are royally screwed, because just like being small can be advantageous so does being big have its own unique charm (like an increased weapons per fleet ratio)

At the end of the day all ship sizes from Corvette to Titan are valid and should be all available even into the endgame >w<
 
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Regarding the trade-off between young and old ships, if you take another look at the screenshot shown to us, you'll note that the more mature versions take a whole lot longer to gestate than neonates. So if you need ships ASAP, you'll want to grow the young ones.
 
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