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Stellaris Dev Diary #47 - Guardians

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we'll continue talking about the Leviathans Story Pack, specifically its headline feature: the Guardians.

The Guardians (Paid Feature)
The Guardians, or Leviathans as they're also known, are space-dwelling beings of immense power. They vary a great deal in biology and composition: Some are enormous space creatures, some are technological remnants of ancient civilizations, and some are something far different altogether. How you find them also varies - some you may encounter in their home systems, jealously guarding their territory, others may be unleashed on the galaxy by exploring the wrong planet or star.

The chance of a particular Guardian being present in your game will depend on the size of your galaxy - a tiny galaxy might only have one or two, while a Huge galaxy might contain nearly all or even all of them if you explore far enough. Defeating them, or in some cases, helping them, will unlock rewards in the form of resources, empire-wide modifiers and unique technologies. Guardians vary in power, but are meant to be a serious challenge for a mid-game empire, so don't expect to be able to bring them down in the first decades of the game.

Below I am going to talk a little about a few of the Guardians. These are just a sample and not nearly all of them, but we want to avoid showing off everything there is for a player to find in the Leviathans Story Pack for those who wish to explore and find out for themselves.
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The Space Dragon
The Space Dragon is a capricious being, jealously guarding its hoard. With this particular Guardian, there is no reasoning or dialogue... it wants to be left alone, and will attack any and all trespassers in its territory. If you wish to get at its hoard, you will have to slay it, and you had best be sure to bring a large enough fleet - anger it enough, and it will not settle for simply driving you off. Should you bring it down, however, the vast mineral riches of its hoard will be yours to claim... and who knows what you might find among the treasures. Technology, artifacts... perhaps even a dragon egg?
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The Infinity Machine
The Infinity Machine, a strange metal sphere, sits at the edge of a massive black hole, unmoving. It does not attack as you approach, does not communicate, does not even react. It seems to be waiting for something. Perhaps if you find a way to speak with it, you can find out what it wants. Perhaps you can even help it? Or, if you choose, you could simply order your fleet to attack... after all, how much of a threat could a mere metal sphere be?
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Stellarite
What can live inside a star?

What sort of being can withstand, and even thrive in, such immense heat and pressure?

What could be its purpose?

... what does it eat?
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That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about changes to the graphics and sound of Stellaris coming in the Heinlein update, as well as a teaser on the more than 20 minutes of new music by Andreas Waldetoft included in the Leviathans Story Pack.
 
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I wish that I had this game. I want.
 
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Deeper we delved, into the dark and there we met the nameless fear.
 
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I guess this is moving a bit towards Lovecraftian horror than hard sci-fi - not that anything is wrong with that. Well I'm sure Guardians will be easy to disable without touching other paid features anyway
 
And if you read my post I'm saying that the "who knows what you might find" part is a must because just getting 30 energy and minerals per month by that time is next to meaningless.

And my doomstack fleet that killed that dragon is large enough to destroy all my enemies anyway. It's a nice role-playing thing but won't really have an impact on the game vs. the enemies I'm facing.

What would be 1000 times better is if the Curator had a secret way of defeating the dragon. Otherwise the dragon is so strong that even a 100K fleet has trouble. Now that baby dragon is OP to the max as your enemies must find the secret from the curator.
A 7k fleet was able to inflict 3k in damage, roughly. From the stream. Now, fun fact, the total damage output of a fleet against the dragon will basically be quadratic with fleet size if we assume the dragon is basically a normal, if extremely powerful ship. This is because it has twice the fire power, and lasts twice as long. So if you multiply the fleet by 5 fold you would probably just barely bring it down. (35k) You'd probably want closer to 50k. Regardless the more ships you bring to bear, the fewer you lose since the dragon has less time to spit out damage.

Now, if there is just 30 minerals+30 energy that's nice. Its about on par with a smallish, free world. But no tech price increase. However you probably get to loot the debris. That could make a major difference. Hell, even right now when I had an early event chain that led to me getting an early particle lance it was a huge game changer.

Also just because you have the biggest fleet doesn't mean you can just go conquer everyone. If the next two biggest people have defense pacts? Not so much. Now you need to decide when you want to kill the dragon since it will wreck some ships. Which could kick you out of your top fleet status. But if you wait too long someone else could take the guardian. Also if Paradox is mean they'll vary the strength of the dragon so attacking it is risky.

tl;dr: Debris can drop crazy good stuff, and things interact in complicated ways in actual games. Let's wait for it to come out first.
 
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Will the Heinlein patch be savegame compatible? (In other words, should I disable updates until I finish my current - really nice - game, or will it be no problem if Stellaris updates?)


Wiz has mentioned a few times that the new patch will completely change things in the game and will not be save game compatible
 
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Whenever I run into the space dragon, I just want a sound clip of Jason Carter saying "There's always the threat of an attack by, say, a giant space dragon—the kind that eats the sun every 30 days? It's a nuisance, but what can you expect from reptiles?" :D
 
20 minutes of new music, fantastic. It's included in the main story DLC right? Hopefully not in some overpriced content pack.
... more than 20 minutes of new music by Andreas Waldetoft included in the Leviathans Story Pack.
IIRC, the Story pack won't be accompanied by further DLCs at release and everything should be included in the one main pack [DD#14].
 
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It was never hard sci fi.It was space opera from the start.

Yeah. It's not science fantasy in that we don't just have space magic, but Stellaris has always been way more Consider Phlebas than Rendezvous with Rama.
 
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IIRC, the Story pack won't be accompanied by further DLCs at release and everything should be included in the one main pack [DD#14].

Correct, there's just the Story Pack, no accompanying DLC.
 
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Dangit, talk of space magic made me want an Occult Cultural start whose bonus is they start with psionics and can choose Psi warriors as a troop choice off the get go. *chuckle*
That and imagining a Tk mage Covenant of dozens or hundreds of mages (depenedent on size of vessel) making hard light construct ships like a lantern core would be Awesome visuals.
 
Dangit, talk of space magic made me want an Occult Cultural start whose bonus is they start with psionics and can choose Psi warriors as a troop choice off the get go. *chuckle*
That and imagining a Tk mage Covenant of dozens or hundreds of mages (depenedent on size of vessel) making hard light construct ships like a lantern core would be Awesome visuals.

*makes notes* Uh huh. Hmmm. Carry on.
 
They look great, but still think its odd to have payed content this early when the game is still such a mess. The mid/end game is super dull, so now we have to pay to make it somewhat interesting. I know this has been said to death, but still think this should have been free or released once we have had some actually updates.
Any word on price ? Looking at the content I am guessing £5 max, anymore than that will be a bit of slap in the face.

You're so incredibly off-base and completely short-sighted. The game isn't a mess at all. For the depth and variety of features and playability compared to any other space 4X on the market, it's massive and stable. If you paid any attention at all you'd see this DLC and the Heinlein update are going to fix the very things you're complaining about (which after 550+ hours of playtime I haven't personally had a single issue with.) Paid content is a reality for a company that has employees to pay. They make this game content for us, which takes more work than you seem to realize, and the way they pay continued costs for this development is to charge a small amount for it. I'd easily pay $10-15 for the DLC and the Heinlein patch alone is going to add so much more. I expect I'll get well over 1,000 hours out of this game, possibly much more. I can't say that about any game comparable in genre or in price. Seriously, put your expectations in perspective and be thankful we have Paradox making this game and not EA or Hello Games who'd simply kick it out bare-bones and forget it.
 
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Cheers for the DD Wiz, sounds great :D. Particularly like that it's targeted at the mid-game, the best place to target imo. Looking forward to bumping into (being bumped by?) some strange and mysterious Guardians :).
 
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