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Stellaris Dev Diary #69: Beyond Utopia

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is going to briefly cover our plans for future Stellaris updates, and what you can expect from us going forward.

The Adams Update
With Utopia and Banks now out, the next thing we have planned for you is the 1.6 'Adams' update. This update, named after Douglas Adams, is going to focus completely on bug fixing and quality of life changes, with no major feature additions and no accompanying paid DLC. Work on 1.6 actually started almost immediately after Banks/Utopia went into code freeze, and it already contains hundreds of bug fixes and usability/UI additions and tweaks. A particular focus of Adams has been to work on our backlog of old issues, taking care of many of the smaller issues and annoyances that have been present in the game since release. We've also made time for some of the things that were originally planned for Banks, but had to be cut due to time constraints. While I can't give you an exact release date for Adams yet, I can say that you shouldn't have to wait too long.

Beyond Utopia
Back in Dev Diary #50, I listed a number of priorities for us going forward from Heinlein/Leviathans. A number of these things have since been added to the game, so I'm going to go ahead and list it again to give you an idea of where our focus will lie in future updates, expansions and story packs, with the items that are already completed noted with a strikethrough. The list is NOT in order of priority, and something being crossed out does NOT mean we aren't going to continue to improve on it in future updates, just that we consider it to be at a satisfactory level.

As before, THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE OR FINAL LIST, AND NOTHING BELOW IS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN (unless it already did)!
  • Ship appearance that differs for each empire, so no two empires' ships look exactly the same.
  • More potential for empire customization, ability to build competitive 'tall' empires.
  • Global food that can be shared between planets.
  • Ability to construct space habitats and ringworlds.
  • Factions that are proper interest groups with specific likes and dislikes and the potential to be a benefit to an empire instead of just being rebels.
  • Ability to set rights and obligations for particular species in your empire.
  • Deeper Federations that start out as loose alliances and can eventually be turned into single states through diplomatic manuevering.
  • Superweapons and planet killers.
  • More story events and reactive narratives that give a sense of an unfolding story as you play.
  • More interesting mechanics for pre-FTL civilizations.
  • A 'galactic community' with interstellar politics and a 'space UN'.
  • Buildable Dreadnoughts and Titans.
  • Reworking the endgame crises to be more balanced against each other and the size/state of the galaxy.
  • Reworks to war to address the 'doomstacks' issue and make the strategic and tactical layers of warfare more interesting and less micro-intensive.
  • Deeper mechanics and unique portraits for synthetics.

With Utopia and Banks, we decided that rather than divide our focus, it was better to have the update and expansion focus almost exclusively on empire customization and internal politics, and this is the policy we intend to continue with for future expansions. As always, I can't tell you specifically what the next expansion, update or story pack is going to be about, but the above list should at least give you some ideas of where you can expect Stellaris to go in the future.

That's all for today! Next week we'll start going into specifics of the 1.6 'Adams' update so until then, I leave you with this picture of some of the free graphical content coming in Adams:
2017_04_20_1.png
 
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Has any indication been given that Paradox will or will not make resolution of intra-empire ethos conflict (e.g. xenophile authoritarians, xenophobe egalitarians, militant egalitarians and militant xenophiles all being punished for engaging in activities well within the range of what is to be expected from such ethe) a feature of this patch? It seems as if it'd fall well within the purview of Quality of Life changes, especially in the wake of an expansion focusing on intra-empire issues.
 
I would really love to see scouting/spying added to this list. Even if it was initially just as simple as one of:

A scout ship which can inivisibly trespass across closed borders for a short time, and a corresponding station/platform module which instantly detects and MIAs them with diplo consequences

An intelligence option to pay energy to "reveal" a system for a short time, and a corresponding counterintelligence module which increases the cost say 10x

Edit: but yes, combat and fleet management are top priority for me
 
For the love of God, focus on bugfixing for a while!

Not just hotfixing the worst issues, but addressing the significant and ever increasing backlog of bugs such that the game doesn't feel overall buggier with each new major update and DLC. That backlog hasn't reached critical mass yet, but it is only a question of time.
 
I'd say the crises should be Higher up that "Bucket list", as I'll call it henceforth. Outside of that, I really can't wait for three things: Deeper Federations (Single superstates here we come, though I'd like to form a space HRE too), Space UN (and other diplomatic options) and Planet Killers and Superweapons (for... obvious reasons I believe).
 
Please more ship flexibility. Currently I can choose the weapons, if shield or armour and for A slots I have 3 choices - more HP, faster in combat or shield regen.
What about tech, which would really impact/counter the technology they use?
P.s:
Love the game, the expansion etc., just trying to make it deeper for us.
 
So, there will be no patch fixing the major bugs that came with Utopia until 1.6? There are still major bugs being discovered daily and all we've got was 1.5.1. People have also strongly voiced many concerns about the way some new features work, possibly due to bugs, that heavily effect Utopia and it's features. I mean Wiz, Horizon Signal doesn't even work right now because Omega Theory is missing. Currently, the only way to fully experience Stellaris fully is by using mods.

I'm not sure about others, but I am starting to worry about the quality of Paradox products again.
 
Was I really the only one who thought that DD 69 would contain... well, let's say, some "easter egg"? ;)

(And on topic, yay for galactic community and doomstack issues. So far diplomacy could have been entirely avoided)
 
The game seems to get better With each patch.
I do hope military technology is slightly better rewarded. Any chance tier 2-3-4-5 weapon types can increase linearly in effectiveness With the mineral cost?
currently I find that being behind in tech is not punishing at all, but being behind in economy and fleet capacity to be the death of my empire.

Any chance we can have a way to make biological pops into robots for a price after tier 2 of synthetic Ascension?

Any chance we can biologically modify pops by occupation (farmers,miners and so on)? I thought biological asension was about specialiseing pops, currently that is almost impossible to do right.

any chance we can set sectors to never build certain buildings? not all strategies require panetary defence buildings and the symbol of unity.
 
Id like the ability to click a solar system from galaxy view and select it as a tactical target for "fleet 1" " fleet 2" etc, so without micro managing everything inside the galaxy, the fleet will fly there and clear it out automatically. And a similar mechanic for my landing ships. This wouldnt overide the current ability to zoom in and select but make larger empires easier to manage with many fleets and targets
 
Wiz, could we get a significant weapons rework?

I'd rather have a few rare weapons trees that are competitive with the no brainers.
 
One feature I'd really love is the ability to rename species after genetic modification. I want to create a superior humanoid race and subjugate my old race. :(
 
  • Superweapons and planet killers.

Would it be possible to make this a game rule? At least, being one of those people who never enjoyed the concept of planetkillers.
 
I would really appreciate if you could rework the Trait system a bit. It has a serious flaw, which i am quite sure is not intended.

Right now, if a species has the lesser version of a trait, you cant give it the bigger version. For example, if a species is 'strong' i can not modify it to be 'very strong'. Same goes for 'intelligent' and 'erudite'. And because all of these are 'beneficial traits', you can not even remove and replace them. Ironically, the game says i can't add the 'erudite' trait because it is the "opposite" of 'intelligent'.


As it is right now, it feels seriously counterintuitive. Please either let us replace beneficial traits or even stack the advanced traits on top of them (i would actually prefer the second option because biological ascension is significantly weaker than the mechanical path right now. Letting us stack traits makes biological ascension the 'specialized' path while synths are still quite good at everything at once.)


EDIT: I just found out that this was rather a bug than a problem with the game mechanics. Please ignore post.
 
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Stellaris galaxy still seems remarkably lifeless and the economy is still rather bland. Would love to be able to SEE commerce between planets and develop semi-complex economies, maybe not on the level of Vicky, but Vicky would be a good inspiration.