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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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Empath hives aren't nice though? They literally just make you feel what they feel so you agree with them. Give an AI Hive Mind the Empath civic and they'll be JUST as conquest-thirsty, slavery-happy, as ever.
Any AI empire that isn't pacifist is conquest happy

And empath hiveminds don't brainwash you, they just let you see a piece of their own mind which makes them less alien and creepy - and the buffs to opinion and trust mean they will be less likely to end up in wars
 
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they stated +1000 Workforce, not 1000 :)
Ok, correction: 1001. From the stream released on the same day as this dev diary, it seems they get exactly one pop per planet, which then needs to fill all jobs for that planet, hence enough workforce for that. I suspect the new buildings will have significantly less jobs to make 1000 enough for any size of planet.
 
Goddamn I love this wilderness origin. It even looks more like a full-fledged authority type. How far we have come from the old times, back when origins and civics were a simple collection of modifiers + flavor text.

As for nice hiveminds, Stellaris seems allergic to all things noblebright in general, but it does have empath hiveminds. I just wish that those offered a far more distinct gameplay from regular hives, rather than just granting the regular diplo buffs.
 
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Goddamn I love this wilderness origin. It even looks more like a full-fledged authority type. How far we have come from the old times, back when origins and civics were a simple collection of modifiers + flavor text.

As for nice hiveminds, Stellaris seems allergic to all things noblebright in general, but it does have empath hiveminds. I just wish that those offered a far more distinct gameplay from regular hives, rather than just granting the regular diplo buffs.
On the flipside Stellaris also has nice monarchies and dictatorships
And even functional communism that would make Marx proud

It's as much an active decision to play an utopia as it is to play a dystopia and just like in real life most countries will be somewhere in between without being either
 
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Any AI empire that isn't pacifist is conquest happy
This is demonstrably false. Especially in the contrast with Hive Minds whose AI makes them MUCH more aggressive when they have no more room to expand.
And empath hiveminds don't brainwash you, they just let you see a piece of their own mind which makes them less alien and creepy - and the buffs to opinion and trust mean they will be less likely to end up in wars
That, again, does not make them nicer. They can just talk gooder. But all that 'empathing' won't stop them from keeping your pops as literal livestock.
 
To be fair, when we conquer them we just say "Whoops" and watch their drones die
Speak for yourself. I keep a sub-population unit in my empire's capital as an advisor.

Hive: "You've... you've killed us. You've killed all of us. We don't want to die - "

My Empire: "Yeah yeah, shut it drama queen, get the drones in the capital city we've got air conditioning and room service."
 
Empath hives aren't nice though? They literally just make you feel what they feel so you agree with them. Give an AI Hive Mind the Empath civic and they'll be JUST as conquest-thirsty, slavery-happy, as ever.
This is demonstrably false. Especially in the contrast with Hive Minds whose AI makes them MUCH more aggressive when they have no more room to expand.

That, again, does not make them nicer. They can just talk gooder. But all that 'empathing' won't stop them from keeping your pops as literal livestock.
This is more a fault of only having one--or two with genocidal--AI types for hive. It could easily be fixed by making a couple more and then randomizing with a touch of waiting based on civics.

Also to be fair, the only way to not kill conquered non-hive mind pops is to have the ability to assimilate pops. It goes both ways there. In one of the streams, it was said that some dev was looking to expand hive mind interactions and allowing some of their pops to survive on individual worlds. It also sounds likely that the reverse would be true if managed.

I don't know what the limitation is other than trying to untangle which hive mind is which and figuring out what needs to be different if you end up with their pops. other than just making them 'no unhappy' pops. then you have to decide what to do about leaders. and what happens if hive mind pops become the norm, and what to do about the confusing event language if a hive mind or individual pop gets targeted in the opposite empire.

actually, now that I think about it, there are a lot of things to change and update to make hives not enslave or kill your pops. And it has a real risk of being boring enough that people will ask 'why bother.'
 
This is more a fault of only having one--or two with genocidal--AI types for hive. It could easily be fixed by making a couple more and then randomizing with a touch of waiting based on civics.
Yes, it could, and they absolutely should 100% do it. But, as of now, they have not. And it's not looking like they ever will given how long 'we're planning on introducing nice hives eventually' has been around. Real emphasis on that 'eventually'.
 
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