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Stellaris Dev Diary #46 - Enclaves

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This development diary will cover Leviathans, the recently announced DLC that will be accompanying the 1.3 'Heinlein' update. As previously mentioned, Leviathans is not an expansion but rather something we call a 'Story Pack', a collection of mostly scripted content that is larger than an event pack but smaller than a full expansion. Originally, Heinlein was supposed to be an update accompanying a full-fledged expansion, but we chose instead to do a Story Pack so that the Stellaris programmers would be able to focus on bug fixing, UI improvements and improving/reworking features in the free update.

The Heinlein update has already been covered in several development diaries, but I still thought I should take the time to remind everyone of what it contains. Note that this is NOT an exhaustive list:
  • Awakened Fallen Empires
  • Fallen Empire quests, tasks and general improvements
  • Fleet Roles and new XL weapons
  • Weapon Balance rework
  • Federation Victory Condition
  • Strategic Resource Rework
  • Auto-Exploration
  • Rally Points
  • Expansion Planner
  • Habitability System Rework
  • Federation/Alliance Rework
  • Federation Association Status
  • Better control over sectors
  • 4 new portraits (NOT the 'cuties')
  • Major sound and graphics improvements
  • Space Creature rework, including new art and encounters
  • Loads of bug fixes, AI improvements and UI improvements
The Leviathans Story Pack, meanwhile, will contain the following. This IS an exhaustive list:
  • Guardians feature
  • Enclaves feature
  • War in Heaven feature
  • 5 new portraits ('cuties')
  • 20+ minutes of new music by Andreas Waldetoft

With that out of the way, on to today's topic! Today we'll be talking about Enclaves, one of the above listed paid features. Enclaves are a new type of precursors those with the Leviathans Story Pack will encounter while exploring the galaxy. Instead of living on planets and controlling an empire, they are neutral traders, artists and scholars who reside in ancient space stations and who will offer their services to anyone who is willing to pay.
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There are three types of Enclaves, each with their own range of interactions:
  • Traders allow you to exchange minerals for energy and vice versa.
  • Artists allow you to commission a piece of art that can be placed on one of your planets as a building, or become their patron to support more advanced works.
  • Curators allow you to purchase star charts, enlist their aid in furthering your research, or purchase information about the different Guardians and their weaknesses.
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In addition to these basic interactions, each type of Enclave also has an 'advanced' interaction. This interaction is not immediately available, but must be earned by building up that Enclave's opinion of your empire. This is done by utilizing their basic interactions, so for example a Trader Enclave's opinion of you will increase every time you trade minerals and energy with them. An Enclave that is located inside of your borders will also have its opinion of you slowly increase over time. The advanced interactions are as follows:
  • Traders will sell you a unique strategic resource accessible only to them.
  • Artists can be asked to organize a festival across your worlds, improving happiness across your entire empire.
  • Curators will allow you to recruit one of their researchers, who provides access to unique technologies not otherwise researchable.
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Of course, if your empire leans more towards the Fanatical Purifier type of thinking, you can also choose to simply attack an Enclave. Their space stations are powerful, but not invincible, and you may just find valuable salvage and technologies among the wreckage.

That's all for today! Next time we'll be talking about the headline feature of the Leviathans Story Pack, the Guardians, so stay tuned! In the meanwhile, here's a little teaser of what to expect...
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Lothmar said:
Would you suggest starting over a new game for this stuff after H and its release and update?
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Always start a new game after a patch that accompanies a gameplay DLC.

Always. Even in cases where it might theoretically be compatible, in practice bizarre crap will happen (assuming your old save even loads in the new version).
 
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Really looking forward to the DLC and update. Lots of cool goodies, and I think it is a great approach to make the mid game more dynamic before adding more events (which I am also super keen for).

I especially like the emphasis on making the mid game more interesting by utilizing interaction with the fallen empires. Great stuff!

The question around all this really is: are we nearing a solid release date yet? :p
 
Pchang said:
It takes me less than 1 month to finish a game, so I will continue new games until the beginning of October.
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It's not finishing the game I'm worried about: I find myself wanting the planned improvements desperately, like that yawning gap you feel when you lose a tooth.
 
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Would really love if every 6 months you get an event regarding the status of your empire. Something like "Galaxy News".
 
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Satou said:
Would really love if every 6 months you get an event regarding the status of your empire. Something like "Galaxy News".
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I really like the idea. Such "news" could include some atmospheric reports on major achievements and failures of the empire as well as some random advises ("burning social problems") on dealing with unhappiness and opposing factions. Further, complying with these advises would grant the empire with additional temporary happiness boosts, divergence reduction or faction weakening. Such an event should not occur so often though.
 
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Sotnik said:
I really like the idea. Such "news" could include some atmospheric reports on major achievements and failures of the empire as well as some random advises ("burning social problems") on dealing with unhappiness and opposing factions. Further, complying with these advises would grant the empire with additional temporary happiness boosts, divergence reduction or faction weakening. Such an event should not occur so often though.
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I don't like it simply because you can play with ethos and policies that limit or abolish the free press so effectively either what you hear in the news is out of contest or what you hear is propaganda and so not helpful at all.
 
Malecord said:
I don't like it simply because you can play with ethos and policies that limit or abolish the free press so effectively either what you hear in the news is out of contest or what you hear is propaganda and so not helpful at all.
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So what? Victoria 2 HoD has a newspaper feature; it also allows you to censor the press, which changes the nature of the articles in the newspaper (e.g. if you have a censored press, your military defeats don't get reported).
 
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Sotnik said:
I really like the idea. Such "news" could include some atmospheric reports on major achievements and failures of the empire as well as some random advises ("burning social problems") on dealing with unhappiness and opposing factions. Further, complying with these advises would grant the empire with additional temporary happiness boosts, divergence reduction or faction weakening. Such an event should not occur so often though.
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I think it could be okay if they would implement something like the twitter-thingy in Cities: Skylines. But an event-like newspaper popping up every few months sounds rather annoying to me.
 
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grommile said:
So what? Victoria 2 HoD has a newspaper feature; it also allows you to censor the press, which changes the nature of the articles in the newspaper (e.g. if you have a censored press, your military defeats don't get reported).
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So basically it tells you nothing useful at best and at worse it breaks the immersion.

It's just my opinion of course and other people can feel differently, but I like to "learn Stellaris story" from the protagonists perspective, that is through confidential reports and officier's logs as it happens right now. Bringing up censored tv newscast or newspapers (assuming they still exist) adds no depth for me. Victoria at least (like all historical games by extension) has this "theme" of "rewriting history" so having "rewritten newspapers" fits.
 
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milamber81 said:
Not sure what to think about those enclaves. They remind me a lot to Civ V Citystates... And I didn't like those. Feeled every time to much like a game mechanic thing and disturbed immersion for me. Guess Ill have to wait and see. On the other hand, there's the heaven's war and I'm really looking forward to that feature...
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Agreed on Civ V citystate breaking immersion and if same thing happens in Stellaris with Enclave I will exterminate every last of Enclave for immersion sake alone.
Extermination is always Fun. (plus Enslavement)
 
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Borgrabbit said:
Agreed on Civ V citystate breaking immersion and if same thing happens in Stellaris with Enclave I will exterminate every last of Enclave for immersion sake alone.
Extermination is always Fun. (plus Enslavement)
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I don't think I'll be exterminating enclaves. I tried to exterminate Nomads, and it felt awful: "why am I doing ths? They weren't even bothering me...".
Its one thing to purge traitorous xenos who form factions and rebel, but if they keep to themselves, don't cause any troubles, and aren't even taking up valuable space on your planets? Now that's just feels wrong.
 
I'm afraid Enclaves won't be expanded on in the future after this DLC has hit the game. New features are fun, and there's so much potential in Enclaves... it would be sad to see it not get some love in the future too. I guess mods will help a little, but still.
 
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People want to not think they're playing a game while they're playing a game?

Paradox, when will you add occulus rift support and "true" real time technology that lets us live out actual years in game? /s

I personally don't think Enclaves are especially gamey. In general, I really like all of these changes!
 
Birdy123 said:
I'm afraid Enclaves won't be expanded on in the future after this DLC has hit the game. New features are fun, and there's so much potential in Enclaves... it would be sad to see it not get some love in the future too. I guess mods will help a little, but still.
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DLC features are expanded in future either via free patches (like several CK2 patches did) or by another DLC (which also unlocks the feature like an older one). So if PDS feels like an old DLC feature can be expanded upon, it will be.
 
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@Wiz since you mentioned Jump drives in another question... ;) Are you fixing Jump drives so that they can jump over hostile territories like wormholes? (I mention this issue in passing in the thread here) A recent play through got a 30k fleet stuck behind enemy lines behind the borders of a fanatical purifier and a fallen empire when clearing out the unbidden remnants after closing the portal. There was still neutral space between the two empires so a non-linear path would have worked too. Also, is there any planned way to allow the removal of all wormhole stations once jump or psi jump drives are available? Moving to all jump drives and having to manually remove 350 or so wormhole stations for the energy is a huge task.
 
So are you still planning to add in some control over ship formation and it just wasn't included in the list(afterall is says it's not exhaustive)? I hope so, because it's a real pain micromanaging 200 ships to be in the right order the current way, and we didn't really see any mention of it in the ship roles DD. Also, with the way the new combat roles work, will ships now have more complex targeting methods(maybe customizable) beyond "shoot at the nearest target"? It would be pretty dumb if my destroyers focused fire on a battleship just because they see it first while the enemy corvettes rush my capitals.
 
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