Stellaris Dev Diary #55 - Unity and Traditions

[Wizzington]

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we'll be talking about a new feature coming in the 1.5 'Banks' update called Traditions and Unity. As before, I can't talk about when Banks will be coming out, only that it's a while away and we have quite a few dev diaries to go through before we get there

Traditions and Unity
One thing we have mentioned as a big priority for Stellaris is adding more empire customization and more ability to roleplay diverse empires. We have also talked about our desire to allow for the existance of 'tall' empires. Traditions and Unity is a feature that aims to tackle both these topics by adding 7 new Tradition trees and a resource called Unity that is used to unlock them. Unity is an accumulative resource that increases each month, and is primarily gained through the construction of government buildings such as monuments, mausoleums and temples. Unity is spent on adopting Tradition trees and purchasing individual Traditions. Each Tradition tree has a starter bonus, five unlockable bonuses and a finisher bonus that is gained once the entire tree is filled out.

The seven Tradition trees are as follows:
Expansion: Focuses on growth through rapid colonization.
Domination: Focuses on maintaining control over your population and subjects.
Prosperity: Focuses on economic growth.
Harmony: Focuses on maintaining a happy and diverse population.
Supremacy: Focuses on growth through military conquest.
Purity: Focuses on strength through homogenity and dominion over other species.
Exploration: Focuses on exploration and scientific discovery.

The cost of unlocking a Tradition depends on the size of your empire, as well as how internally stable it is. Unhappy factions, minority species and slaves all increase the cost of adoption Traditions further, though these effects can be offset or even canceled out entirely by adopting the right Traditions for the empire you intend to build. Overall, small harmonious empires will unlock Traditions more quickly than large, expansionistic ones. Which Traditions you unlock also has a significant impact on the ethics of your population, and so can be a useful tool to either strengthen your existing empire ethics or further a planned empire-wide shift towards a different set of ethics altogether.

You may have noticed a certain part of the Traditions screen that I have not yet mentioned in this dev diary. That's because it's actually the subject of the next dev diary! However, since the Christmas holidays are coming up, most of the Stellaris team will be away, so dev diaries will be on hiatus until January 12th. Tune back in then to find out all about the Ascension Perks and how you can use them to build the empire of your dreams.

 

[grekulf]

I assume traditions will be limited by ethos? Can't really imagine xenophiles being too keen on the 'purity' traditions...

Not limited, but like you say, they will not be happy...

 

[Wizzington]

Is there a limit to the amount of tradition trees an empire can adopt?

No, but costs increase with every tradition adopted.

 

[Wizzington]

how moddable is this feature? could we add more than 7 traditions?

Completely moddable.

 

[Wizzington]

Straight up rip-off of Civ5, then? Good, I love that game.

You may be shocked to find out that there are other features in Stellaris 'ripped off' from other games, for example colony ships.

(The mechanics of Traditions differ from those of social policies, especially where Ascension Perks are involved, but I can understand thinking so from the interface)

 

[Wizzington]

Is this going to be part of the DLC or the free update?

Unless explicitly said otherwise, free update. Everything detailed in this DD is free.

 

[Wizzington]

Another hiatus?
Daaaamn, I really look forward to Thursdays because of dev diaries...

Holidays! This should be the last hiatus before Banks though.

 

[Wizzington]

Sweet! It just sounded like the sort of thing that would be part of a DLC

We're trying to avoid putting fundamental gameplay systems into the expansions. Creates too much of a headache when we want to iterate on those systems in the future. Don't worry, there will be plenty of paid stuff to talk about when we're ready to talk about it.

 

[Wizzington]

I suppose the text instead of a tree for most traditions is placeholder?

Also, I don't suppose we can get some more examples of traditions?

The tree shows up when you mouseover or unlock a tradition.

 

[Wizzington]

Wait wait, so tradition resource is gained by...waiting and mining? Shouldn't Purity be gained by purging and enslaving xenos because, that kinda what tradition means - doing something often? It's not that fun to sit for years and then instantly became fanatic purifiers overnight

There are other ways to gain unity as well, some ethos/tradition specific.

 

[Wizzington]

Another hiatus? It almost makes me want to move to Sweden.

The last one wasn't because of vacations, it was because we couldn't talk about 1.5 until 1.4 was out. It's really just unfortunate timing that you get two long hiatuses so close together.

 

[Wizzington]

The stuff in the russian translation file is WIP and was accidentally included, please do not post it here.

 

[Wizzington]

THE INFORMATION IN THE RUSSIAN LOCALISATION FILE IS FROM AN EARLY WIP VERSION AND NOT FINAL, FURTHER POSTING OF IT WILL RESULT IN INFRACTIONS.

 

[Wizzington]

Will the AI Personalities be weighted to favor certain traditions, for instance, Fanatical Purifiers will prefer Purity or Supremacy?

Yes, of course.

 

[Wizzington]

So ... what's the art department working on?

Art.

 

[Wizzington]

You're surely aware that this sort of thing is just going to guarantee an in-depth discussion of said content on Reddit and Steam, probably choc full of references to this very post and jokes about you, personally, not understanding that once a document hits the internet it can't be taken back, right?

I don't mind it being discussed (it's not like I can stop it anyway), but people have a tendency to take anything written in a DD thread as gospel and there were already arguments about details in numbers on a first iteration of a WIP feature so I don't want it discussed here.

 

[Wizzington]

January 12th? That a month off. Gee what gives in Sweden?

There are other things to life than work. Even when your job is as great as mine.

 

[Wizzington]

An early version of the Traditions was accidentally translated and included in the 1.4 Russian translation. Since nothing there is final I don't want this thread to descend into a bunch of arguments about the balance of numbers that are likely to change anyway, so I banned discussion of it here. You can look up the info on the Stellaris reddit if you want to check it out for yourself.

 

[Wizzington]

I think that's enough arguing about what I said or didn't say. People are capable of reading for themselves.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Still fanatic spiritualism plus anything should rule and it looks like you will just create slightly more variants of playing this. It gives you more options to finetune your empire, but the variety in competitive approaches still is missing.

I actually consider Fanatic Materialist / Pacifist to be the best combo in my past few games.


(Remember that I have seen things that you have not seen.)