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Stellaris Dev Diary #40 - Heinlein Patch (part 1)

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the first in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 patch that we are currently working on. As I mentioned in last week's dev diary, Heinlein will be a patch focusing on addressing community feedback, tentatively planned for release sometime in October. As such, you can expect a large number of interface and quality of life improvement, too many for me me to list here precisely what we have planned. However, we do also have some larger changes planned, and this dev diary is here to give you an overview of what to expect.

Auto-Explore
Exploration is an important part of the Stellaris early game, but towards the mid and late game, it can get annoying to have to manage your science ships while also trying to run a sprawling interstellar empire. We've said previously that we don't want the automation fully automated away, so the compromise we've settled on is to introduce a technology that will appear after your empire grows to a certain size that allows science ships to be automated (it will also grant some other bonuses so to be useful to the AI). Though we know that there are are people who want automation options from the very start, we believe that there is always a cost involved in automating core parts of the game experience. You will of course be able to mod the game to permit you to have it enabled from the start, if you so wish.

Rally Points
One of our most requested features since release has been a better way to manage newly built ships. After discussing the various options (such as a fleet designer) we decided to settle on adding Rally Points for your fleets. In Heinlein, you will be able to mark any planet or star in the galaxy as well as any warfleet owned by you as a rally point. When a new warship is built in your empire, instead of remaining at the planet that built it, it will look first for a fleet marked as a rally point. If it finds such a fleet, it will travel to that fleet and automatically merge with it. If something happens to destroy that fleet while the ship is traveling to it, it will abort and return back to its point of origin. If you have no fleet rally points, the ship will instead use the nearest planet rally point, traveling there and merging with any fleet present around that planet. In addition to changing how newly built ships behave, rally points also alter the 'return' order given to ships - instead of returning to the nearest spaceport, they will return to the nearest spaceport marked as a rally point. If no spaceport is marked as a rally point, they go to whichever one is closest, as before.

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Expansion Planner
Another highly requested feature that will be coming in Heinlein is an expansion planner - an interface where you can see planets that are available to colonize or build resource/observation stations at. It is currently planned to be a tab in your empire screen, where you can filter by what you are looking for and easily see the best candidate planet for whatever it is you are looking to do. More details on this will come in a future DD.

Strategic Resource Rework
An area of the game that we feel didn't really work out as planned is strategic resources. They are at once too rare and too common, too varied and too bland. Most of all, we feel that they are far too fiddly to interact with, requiring you to keep track in your head of which spaceports have which particular modules. As such, we currently have the following changes in mind for strategic resources:
- Split strategic resources into strategic (living metal, lythurgic gas, etc) and local (betharian stone, alien pets, etc) resources. Local resource will only be found on colonizeable planets and will allow you to build a specific building (such as a Betharian Power Plant) only on the tile where they are present.
- Add more types of local resources to colonizeable planets, making certain planets more desirable for that powerful special building you'll be able to build on it.
- Have strategic resources have clearly defined civilian OR military use, instead of each being a mix of both.
- Make their bonuses purely global, either via the construction of unique buildings or simply by providing a passive bonus.
- Require you to have only a single unit of a strategic resource to get its full benefits, so the excess can be traded away (terraforming resources will likely be an exception here).

That's all for today. Next week we'll continue talking about the Heinlein patch, specifically about the big rework coming in it: Fleet combat overhaul and dedicated ship roles. Note that as I said, there will be a *lot* of bug fixes, UI improvements and QoL changes coming in Heinlein, so I will not be able to answer every question about which exact ones will and will not make it, but if you have something you feel should be addressed for Heinlein (and it isn't a major feature addition/overhaul), feel free to mention it here.
 
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Can you please fix the resource bar. Amount of energy credits gained gets obscured by the minerals icon when they reach 4 digits. Hopefully the changes to resources will fix the spacing of the text for the resource counter.

UI resource bar.PNG
 
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Combat speeds: In combat ships with lower range should speed forward faster. Right now range is to powerful as ships crawl forward at a snail's pace, allowing ranged enemies to blast them out of space before they can ever close the distance.

Retreat points: Allow us to set retreat points, what this would do is allow us to designate the location our ships will retreat to when using emergency retreat. Ships will continue retreating until told to stop by the player or until they reach the retreat point. While retreating they will continue fleeing from fleets trying to engage them (Think of it like shattered retreat, but the enemy ships are still able to take potshots while you're retreating). This will allow retreating fleets a chance to survive rather than having to charge emergency ftl at the start of every fight. Currently if you end up in an unfavorable engagement with your fleet you have effectively lost the game, right now unless you are a wormhole species your fleet is guaranteed dead if it has to retreat due to lack of proper control over retreats and the fact that enemies can just follow behind and engage you again, forcing you to have to charge another emergency FTL.

Non Lance endgame weapons and revamped defensive techs: Its a bit silly that lances are the solution to every situation, endgame Lances should be weak to endgame shields, endgame kinetics should be weak to endgame armor, endgame missiles should be weak to endgame PD, etc. There should be defensive techs that are effective at protecting against each form of weapon. Right now this is not the case, everybody simply stacks Hull Points because they are effective vs all weapons. More variety in endgame weaponry and its counters would make the game a lot more interesting than simply "I win, I got lances and HP Plating".

Also, will the Xeno integration and vassal influence bugs be hotfixed before October? Those issues are both pretty game-breaking for pacifist liberator empires, and its honestly going to suck if we need to wait two months to have those two huge issues fixed
 
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RedGeneral said:
Can you please fix the resource bar. Amount of energy credits gained gets obscured by the minerals icon when they reach 4 digits. Hopefully the changes to resources will fix the spacing of the text for the resource counter.

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I see your sectors like to build engineering too... :mad:
 
Right now I think the most important work to do (and there is very much to do) is complete rebuild of weapons, you gave us plenty types of weapons but the strategy behind is so bad.

The combat behavior of ships is also a top priority, currently its really lame, ships computer do nothing, the ships moves straight with different speed for each hull size, nothing more.

I never see a strategy game with combats as bad as this one, they look like someone got an idea one day, try something but it didn't worked and let it go. This is not professional and the game charge me top quality price product.
 
Just can't wait to see how far Stellaris will go!
 
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Expansion planner is a great addition hopefully you can send a constructor with a single click as it is far too many to build a single new mining station at the moment especially in systems with multiple deposits.
 
RedGeneral said:
Can you please fix the resource bar. Amount of energy credits gained gets obscured by the minerals icon when they reach 4 digits. Hopefully the changes to resources will fix the spacing of the text for the resource counter.

View attachment 199364
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Thirtieth world problems. Why even care about what your income says when it's been made so irrelevant? :p
 
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Consider making the mid game crises more in the style of regular strategies -- go to planet A, bring a science vessel to investigate something that will end the Unbudden/Prethoryn/... all the while keeping enemy vessels at bay or something like that. The timing and position of the spawn could be less random.

Right now if they spread out too far you have to purge them planet by planet which takes a lot of time and gets old very fast.
 
There's an issue that myself and quite a number of people have been having where custom races spawn with randomly-generated home system and home planet names instead of the actual user-created names. It's not a huge issue but it definitely breaks immersion... here's some links of the issue so you can better know what I'm talking about:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ustom-races-not-using-homeworld-names.940668/
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-system-of-custom-empires-not-changed.941217/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/4q6yn9/homeworld_name_bug/
 
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There needs to be research to increase craft and fighter speed. You can ramp up shields and armor % and weapon speed/damage % but not flight speed or firing range.

Also more customization to leveling weapons would be nice I.E. faster torpedoes/missiles, the ability to level firing accuracy for auto cannon users, also energy weapons should get 2x if not 3x the damage boost from extra power.

It makes sense that your tachyon/laser battleship would be brimming with reactors to overcharge the beams vs pumping more juice into a launcher or machine gun which makes no sense.
 
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Tim_Ward said:
On the one had, that's an interface issue with Stellaris - it doesn't give you a screen keep track of strategic resources, just a tooltip.
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And an inaccurate one at that. If you didn't use it on a planet, it doesn't count. Until you try to use it somewhere else, in which case it does, and then you have the fun of trying to find out just where the heck it was you were using it that you don't really want anymore. But I guess it gives you something to do in the mid to late game. ;)

Seriously, though: Why isn't "making the tool tip damn well count resources used on space station modules as well" a priority? Or maybe it is, it's just among those "other things not yet mentioned that we'll talk about later."
 
Having any fighters or bombers equipped in the fleet also currently drastically changes the way the ships and point-defense engage with the enemy, and not for the better.
Try making two otherwise-identical fleets, where one has plasma cannons or something in place of the strike craft. Until that part changes, I highly suggest avoiding strike craft completely, even though stats-wise I agree they rock. They're also mostly fine when your fleets are defending, but they change the attack movement quite unpleasantly.
 
Ephafn said:
I sincerely hope that the differing species will be made more different. Just doubling all trait effects (and rebalancing them a little) will be the simplest way to do it, since I would find it unlikely that Paradox will have the dev time to do anything more indepth for 1.3.
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I'd like it more if certain traits and ethoses were more/less expensive depending on species. It might actually make me think of species as something other than "just different skins on the same thing."
 
MishaTX said:
I'd like it more if certain traits and ethoses were more/less expensive depending on species.
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Superficially appealing, but a pain in the tail to actually balance, and as an added feature rather than a from-the-start feature pisses off anyone whose preferred ethos/trait combo is no longer valid for their preferred portrait due to the portrait-based modifiers.

(Now, throwing some weighting factors into the system so that particular phenotypes or phenotype groups, when encountered as computer players, are significantly correlated with particular ethoses or traits? That could be neat.)
 
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