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Stellaris Dev Diary #381 - Time to Get Wild

Hello there everyone, PDS_Iggy here! We’ve had a busy week, now let's see what Eladrin wanted me to talk about… The Hive Fallen Empire and the Wilderness origin? In the same diary?


Okay… Buckle up for a Wild ride!

Hive Fallen Empire​

For the first time since Synthetic Dawn, a new ancient will join us in the galaxy: a Hive Mind, once united in purpose, now lies fragmented. Each embodiment is stuck trying to execute its own directive. Each has plans for becoming the dominating force within their former collective… and you might be able to nudge who ends up in charge.
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Stellaris supports conference calls now?

After an uncertain but definitely horrible disaster splintered their consciousness, The Hive was left in 3 fragments: Growth, War, and Control. Each one with its distinct personality, system, and tasks. Though don’t let differences fool you. They are all in a federation with each other, and declaring war on one will see you fight all three.
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So different, yet refusing to be far apart.

This Fallen Empire will spawn surrounding a central system. Each of the fragments branches off with its own unique system. They all surround the central system, Last Thought, but refuse to claim it. Curious. Like most Fallen Empires, they are content seeing the universe pass by them by… unless you do something that interests or annoys them.

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Pretty reasonable imo

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No, you really can’t refuse

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I made some of these events work on AIs. Don’t worry about the fragment’s Traits.


Each fragment has multiple tasks, and each one is quite a bit more reactive than the old “Hey, give us your scientists” events from Fallen Empires in the past. So, make friends where you can and try not to unleash something horrible on the galaxy.
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This shipset had the working name of “Antagonist” in-house.

Something that has always distinguished Fallen Empires from regular empires is that their ships are extra advanced. Well, the same is true here, but instead of using the same old technology of the other Fallen Empires, the fragments use Biological Ones! A special, older, and more intimidating version of the Spinovore shipset.

Just like all other Fallen Empires, this will be your primary source for Dark Matter technology.


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Politics is an old species game.

When the sleepers awake, one must end up on top. Absorbing the other fragments, one of three awakened empires will form, each with different goals and behaviors. Two of them will be participating in the war in heaven, the third one has other plans. Here is Control.

Wilderness​

This, without a doubt, is the most transformative Origin we have ever added to the game. The Wilderness is a Hive Mind exclusive origin, requiring you to play with Biological Ships, and leaves behind mechanical buildings and nasty things like colony ships. The experience we want to bring you here is experiencing the galaxy as a living planet.
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How do you show in a tooltip that everything is different?

As you can see in the tooltip, and what I want to emphasize is that you don’t share a single base building or district with regular empires. You do have some overlap when it comes to civics and such, but in general, you will live as a planet.

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Greetings from Tellon
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Not an asphalted road as far as the planet can feel.

The Wilderness comes with a unique City Set and Diplomatic room; any empire can play with it, but it was made for the Wilderness. The avian-eyed among you might have spotted that we have a new resource icon up there, Biomass. Biomass is gained by growing new pops and is used for developing your planets and colonizing new ones. Since you are spending Biomass to grow buildings, we won’t expect you to have enough around to work them. That is why all Wilderness pops come with a +1000 Workforce modifier. Please don’t figure out some exploit to smuggle them out of the empire.

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Everything is used and reused in the Wilderness.
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The Wilderness does not need colony ships. If they can terraform it, they can become it.

Once you have relearned how to navigate the economy as a living planet, you can spread your spores outward, terraforming a new world by using Biomass, awakening a new colony in your image.

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Plant Houston, we have liftoff!

The Wilderness Origin is compatible with most civics available to hiveminds, but I managed to satisfy an edgy little primal part of myself when I designed the automatically generated names for the Devouring Swarm variant: the Blood Forest.

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People making reaction videos to these, please read them with the intensity and melodrama they deserve.

There is so much more we could show you about the Wilderness, the tradition swaps, the altered technologies, the many unique buildings, but at this point I would like you to find it out on your own!

Next Week​

Next week, it will finally be time to reveal our most primal secrets. Join @Cosmogone as he shares all our new civics and the Behemoth Fury crisis path!

Meanwhile, I have some Hive Minds to appease.
 
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I wonder if the Fallen Hive will have a unique interaction with the Prethoryn like the Machine FE and the Contingency. One mind might see them as a rival that must be destroyed while another might be able to commune with them and decides to join forces with them to prepare for the Hunters.
Fallen Hive: "Oh sure, all hives must be related to one another, huh? Racist primitives."
 
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Fallen Hive: "Oh sure, all hives must be related to one another, huh? Racist primitives."
Also Hives: Can literally sustain the agents of other hives.
 
So I got a couple of fun goofy questions. Like these are not mechanical questions but like more 'in universe' questions.

How does the planet vote in the Galactic Community?
How do things work when said planet is elected as custodian?
How would planet custodian defend other empires? (I am just picturing the Green Lantern Mogo showing up)
Are like the meetings on the custodian itself?
What happens when it becomes emperor? Does it actually need a palace?
How fanatic purifiers view the planet? Like do they just see it as some wildlife preserve or something to colonize? Can just imagine sapient Catachan
If they go down the path of cosmogenesis, does the planet board the Needle?
 
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So I got a couple of fun goofy questions. Like these are not mechanical questions but like more 'in universe' questions.

How does the planet vote in the Galactic Community?
How do things work when said planet is elected as custodian?
How would planet custodian defend other empires? (I am just picturing the Green Lantern Mogo showing up)
Are like the meetings on the custodian itself?
What happens when it becomes emperor? Does it actually need a palace?
How fanatic purifiers view the planet? Like do they just see it as some wildlife preserve or something to colonize? Can just imagine sapient Catachan
If they go down the path of cosmogenesis, does the planet board the Needle?
1) With a very big voting slip.
2) It works like a regular custodian, just bigger.
3) It would body block attacks. Also propbably cause titdal waves.
4) Stepping on the custodian? How outrageous. Rather its the custodian that sets foot on your world.
5) It get covered in a very big cloak.
6) A very big target
7) Probably cramms a bunch of its biomass in there to take root in the new universe.
 
The new traits are stronger than the old ones though
So you just lose out on variety and don't have leaders anymore that specialize into EVERYTHING and leave you wondering what the heck they actually do as you carefully try to read their 20 traits
But they will still be as strong as they currently are
Having less diverse military leaders might also motivate you to try out new ship designs to use the cool traits the gacha gave you
Incorrect though. Traits 'seem' better. There is one single moment where the new system has an advantage, at level 3. Why? Because at level 3 in 3.14 you got a total of 3 traits levels (in whatever combination) while in 4.0 you have a total of 3 or 4, as you would either have a level 3 trait or 2 level2 traits. But traits BEFORE level for are the ones you care the least usually. The ones you want are the ones that come after the class selection and this lvl 4. And at that point it is the same.

For example you can get a trait at level 6 worth 2 levels (a lvl2 trait) while I could get that trait at level 5 and upgrade it at level 6, so we both have a level2 trait now, except that I got it first.

And, a KEY DETAIL, most lvl 2 traits ARE NOT twice as powerful. Most of them are just 50% more powerful, just some examples:
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Etc.

There are others, however, that are more than twice in its effect, as an example:
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BTW, do you know which traits are ALWAYS much "stronger" at level 2? This ones:
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That is right, the ones that are USUALLY more than twice 'stronger' at level 2 are the bad ones.

So, as explained, you don't actually have traits that are DOUBLE the current ones, some are, many of them are just a 50% improvement etc. And again, only at level 3 does 4.0 has an advantage over the current system. While on each level after 4 the current system is better. Feels better. Is less RNGlike and makes sense. The 'empty' levels are also very weird.

And all this is just but one point in the grand scheme of things, like I said, I have explained in several DDs other issues, this is just one of them.
 
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Maybe it's because I have not played it, but I don't understand this "biomass" thing

Fundamentally isn't this similar to selling everything for energy, and then using energy to buy the things you need to build?

Also I think this "biomass" how nanite worlds should have worked ...
 
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Maybe it's because I have not played it, but I don't understand this "biomass" thing

Fundamentally isn't this similar to selling everything for energy, and then using energy to buy the things you need to build?

Also I think this "biomass" how nanite worlds should have worked ...
Biomass represents the resource used in growing parts of yourself like districts, colonizing, building specialized buildings. The wilderness is a super organism.

I do think Nanite ascension should work more like this..
 
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Biomass represents the resource used in growing parts of yourself like districts, colonizing, building specialized buildings. The wilderness is a super organism.

I do think Nanite ascension should work more like this..
I can get behind that. Nanite ascension really feels undercooked compared to the other two. In no way do you feel like a nanite swarm. This could be a good way to do that. Just replace Biomass with Nanites.
 
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I wonder if the Fallen Hive will have a unique interaction with the Prethoryn like the Machine FE and the Contingency. One mind might see them as a rival that must be destroyed while another might be able to commune with them and decides to join forces with them to prepare for the Hunters.
Oh, it's not that they might be able to talk with the prethoryn
ALL hiveminds are psionic and can talk with them

However, being able to talk with them doesn't really do anything, given that there can never be a peaceful solution with a crisis, it's either you or them

But hey, fallen empires always had crisis interaction, so at the very least the hive might declare itself defender of the galaxy
 
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No, no, it would clearly be a giant meatball.
A giant meatball swallowing the Sun? I dunno, putting the Flying Spaghetti Monster into the game might be seen as pretty controversial.

But if you're a Devouring Swarm with bioships, then maybe an anglerfish? The star is the lurelight, and the fish, transparent to the point of almost invisible, is lurking beneath the solar system, looking up, it's mouth wide open... Any ship that's destroyed in this system doesn't explode but spirals down, down, down the gullet...
 
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I dunno. Control, at the very least, seems too grouchy to do that. And Stellaris has been notoriously allergic to having nice-hives actually in the game.
We have empath hives though? And machine hives have their silly rogue servitors even, the machine fallen empire is also awfully nice

The fact that the hives will join the galactic community also means that they're fully willing to cooperate with us primitives

I, for one, welcome our new hive overlords and would like to remind them that as a member of the council I can help them round up others to support their side in a war in heaven

One final note, put on "Crisis: All" and the hive will die on its own anyways, pretty sad
 
question How will this work with traits that add workforce multipliers? will things like intelligent add a extra 110 workforce ((100+1000)*1.1)=1210 or will it go (100* 1.1) +1000 =1110

I'm inclined to believe that instead of a flat bonus of +1000 workforce per 100, it's in fact a '*11', given the by previous mentions about how Workforce would mechanically work (#370 and #372) that just about everything would become multiplicative bonuses (... which is the meaning of the word 'multipliers') ... the implied flat increase was 'simply' used for basic clarity, instead of having to do a long diversion into why it would be *11

So it would be 100 * 11 * 1.1 = 1210 ... and effectively, but not actually, the same as your first one
 
I'm inclined to believe that instead of a flat bonus of +1000 workforce per 100, it's in fact a '*11', given the by previous mentions about how Workforce would mechanically work (#370 and #372) that just about everything would become multiplicative bonuses (... which is the meaning of the word 'multipliers') ... the implied flat increase was 'simply' used for basic clarity, instead of having to do a long diversion into why it would be *11

So it would be 100 * 11 * 1.1 = 1210 ... and effectively, but not actually, the same as your first one
It's 1000 workforce for a single pop.
 
So I got a couple of fun goofy questions. Like these are not mechanical questions but like more 'in universe' questions.

How does the planet vote in the Galactic Community?
How do things work when said planet is elected as custodian?
How would planet custodian defend other empires? (I am just picturing the Green Lantern Mogo showing up)
Are like the meetings on the custodian itself?
What happens when it becomes emperor? Does it actually need a palace?
How fanatic purifiers view the planet? Like do they just see it as some wildlife preserve or something to colonize? Can just imagine sapient Catachan
If they go down the path of cosmogenesis, does the planet board the Needle?

I love the sci fi weirdness of a planetary galactic emperor.
 
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they stated +1000 Workforce, not 1000 :)
But they did not state +1000 relative to what.
The Wilderness comes with a unique City Set and Diplomatic room; any empire can play with it, but it was made for the Wilderness. The avian-eyed among you might have spotted that we have a new resource icon up there, Biomass. Biomass is gained by growing new pops and is used for developing your planets and colonizing new ones. Since you are spending Biomass to grow buildings, we won’t expect you to have enough around to work them. That is why all Wilderness pops come with a +1000 Workforce modifier. Please don’t figure out some exploit to smuggle them out of the empire.

If regular pops have a workforce modifier of +100, and Wilderness pops instead get +1000, it would mean x10.

Wilderness pops getting 1000 workforce instead of 100 seems like the more intuitive expectation, since the developers are (posing as) humans and humans are fond of round numbers. Picking the less round number of 1100 workforce/pop, over the nearly equivalent but more round number of 1000, would seem out of character and would be considered sus.
 
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